Of course science and religion can mix and they should!
Let me quote Abdulbaha, son of the founder of the Bahai religion, a growing religious and social movement with more than six million followers:
If religious beliefs and opinions are found contrary to the standards of science, they are mere superstitions and imaginations; for the antithesis of knowledge is ignorance, and the child of ignorance is superstition. Unquestionably there must be agreement between true religion and science. If a question be found contrary to reason, faith and belief in it are impossible, and there is no outcome but wavering and vacillation.
Quite a strong statement for being from a major religious leader a hundred years ago. Also:
This gift [intelligence and reasoning] giveth man the power to discern the truth in all things, leadeth him to that which is right, and helpeth him to discover the secrets of creation
Finally:
Religion and science are the two wings upon which man's intelligence can soar into the heights, with which the human soul can progress. It is not possible to fly with one wing alone! Should a man try to fly with the wing of religion alone he would quickly fall into the quagmire of superstition, whilst on the other hand, with the wing of science alone he would also make no progress, but fall into the despairing slough of materialism.
The only reason that science and religion doesn't seem to mix is that too many religious leaders stick to their dogmas and traditions even in face of human and scientific progress. Religions role in this world is to develop and foster spirituality, morality and selflessness so we can create a fair and just society and it can only do so if it keeps evolving and improving with new knowledge and understandings. Christianity developed and changed a lot in the first few hundred years after Jesus with doctrines and writings being added and removed at a high pace. Why are so many churches of today so hellbent on sticking exactly to the way things earlier were? It's simply not healthy.
Ps. I'm not officially a Bahai, but I consider myself a "friend of the faith".
Hm, 60 PS3s chrunching away at 4 million passwords per second each. Giving a total of 240 million passwords tested each second.
My TrueCrypt volume has a 19 character alphanumerical password, not truly random but nothing you can use a dictionary against. Only lowercase + numbers but still more than 30 characters to choose from.
Given that they knew all this and tried to brute force my password using their PS3s it would still take them more than 1535 billion years...
I think they need to up their game or go a totally different route if they ever want to be able to look inside my harddrive and prosecute me for any of its content before I'm burried in a chest...
Personally I loved the first few versions of Mandrake, but then it started to go south for me...
Each following version I found more bloated and had new weird half-baked configuration tools and broke more easily than the previous version. It was also much harder to find packages of more unusual software for Mandrake than Red Hat due to the smaller community.
At around version 8 I switched back to Red Hat, went from there to Ubuntu and haven't looked back since. To me Mandrake had become the distro that just threw in all the latest stuff with not enough work to get everything to integrate nicely and get stable. I'm a bit surprised to hear others here praise its polish and stability throughout the years...
Today I see no reason for me to switch back to Mandriva although I understand the distro has come far since then. Ubuntu has the largest and most active community, the biggest software repositories and for me (I'm a Gnome user) one of the most polished and well working environments. It also tends to stay stable over time and has a regular 6 months upgrade cycle.
However, I'll be happy to take Mandriva for a spin again when I can find the time and wish them all the best. They are still one of the half-a-dozen desktop distros that I strongly hope survives and stays relevant in the long run and I think they do a great job for being an independent small company with such a small community.
While I would be willing to lay my hand in the fire for Linux on the server, I would not touch a fire with a ten foot pole for Linux on the desktop.
Three years ago I completely gave up on Linux on the Desktop. I decided to focus on Apple, and Microsoft. I have to be frank in that I have not looked back AT ALL...
Let me see if I get this right? You haven't even touched desktop Linux at all over the last three years and still you are able to make judgements of it's usability?
I've been using Linux exclusively as my desktop OS for a few years now and let me tell you, the last year (ever since Ubuntu 8.04 came out) has been a really pleasant ride for me. Your mileage might vary depending on your needs and preferences though.
The first steps are fine, but I would not recommend you to take the option step of blowinging the whistle unless you really feel strongly about the site or people you "victimize" and see it as you moral responsibility.
If you accept the job and then turn around and blows the whistle you have acted maliciously against your employer. They may have questionable morality but the fact is that you have agreed to work for and being loyal to them, don't sink to their level. They might even have legal grounds to sue you if they find out since you clearly have willingly sabotaged their business.
The only way to take the moral high ground here is to first try to make them change their mind and if that doesn't work refuse to take part in the scheme or at least demand in writing that management take full responsibility. Yes, that could have very bad consequences too. I don't envy your situation, I've been there myself a few times and have not always made decisions that were smart or made me feel good in the long run...
Of course, if things went far enough I would blow the whistle, but I don't get the impression this is one of those cases. It would be a totally different matter though if you weren't working for them or in any other way had promised your loyalty. In that case I would recommend you to blow the whistle as a concerned citizen.
Without knowing too much details about the alternatives it seems to me that Sweden would fit your bill nicely for the following reasons:
* Large IT-sector which regularly accepts English-speaking foreign labor in their workforce with no demands for knowing any Swedish. * English is the second language and is spoken more or less fluently among most of the population (especially the younger one), more so than in Germany, France or Finland. * Safe, generally non-violent place with all kinds of security nets if things would go wrong, like (almost) free hospitals. * 25 days of vacation per year guaranteed by law. Most people have 4 weeks of continuous vacation during the summer which is a great time to travel around the rest of Europe.
Only thing speaking against Sweden as far as I can see is that it might not be exotic enough for your taste since it both culturally and geographically is quite close to your neighbor in north, Canada.
As far as I'm concerned the author totally misses the point with the GPL.
I don't care about "my code being free" the way he expresses it. What I care about is to create a level playing field between free and proprietary software and nurture the existence and proliferation of free software. With BSD-style licenses the proprietary software developers always have an upper hand in the race for consumer mindshare and userbase since they can take any BSD code but doesn't need to (and most often doesn't) contribute anything back. They can always stand on our shoulders but we can't stand on theirs so they will always be a head higher.
For free software to proliferate, which is a personal goal for me for many good reasons (freedom to tinker, freedom and savings for enduser, privacy protection, establishing of standards, sharing of wealth, better for developing nations, faster inovation etc) we need a bigger userbase which currently is occupied by proprietary software.
We will not achieve that by remaining upstream providers for proprietary projects, which BSD-licensed projects often become.
The BSD-licenses have their place in certain projects where it is more important to advance the technical field for both proprietary and free software than advancing the marketshare of free software.
Without marketshare we are always bound to play catch-up with standards, hardware support etc. and as a community remain marginalized. The GPL, with it's restrictions against inclusion in closed projects, helps us to gain marketshare.
They never left, They just made two distinct products so people wouldn't have brand confusion. But what they did just caused more brand confusion. The very fact that you have to make the above statement on Slashdot is proof of that.
They could have separated the products without abandoning the name Red Hat, like calling it "Red Hat Free Desktop" or something. Totally removing their name from the product gives a very clear signal that they want to distance themselves from the product.
One reason to not have more than a 16-bit wide bus is that you don't want too thick cables going to the drive. For every bit you need one separate, isolated connection in the cable.
Thick cables are clumsy, more expensive to make and break more easily.
Of course, you could have a wider interface and multiplex the signal in the cable, but that wouldn't give any performance gains.
Iceland was named Iceland for reasons that I don't know but my guess is the glaciers.
Greenland on the other hand was named Greenland by an entrepreneurial viking who first explored the coastline of Greenland and then started a colony on the west coast. Calling it Greenland was simply marketing to get more people to join the effort to colonize the land.
It did succeed, the colony was established and existed until climate changes caused hardship and forced them to leave.
The Greenland colony was by the way home of the Vikings who discovered North America and temporarily established a small colony there, until they some time later were chased away by the locals.
Let's go through your points from your experience with Fedora about a year ago and see how they relate to the latest Ubuntu release (that's what I'm used to and recommend, can't compare to new Fedora since I haven't tried it):
*** It's what I'm used to.
Sure, always more convenient to stick around with what you are used to. You need to be prepared to invest some time and energy into switching.
*** I have a lot invested in Windows software that isn't available natively on Linux. (Yes, some of it could run under Wine)
Granted, that is a valid point. Very individual depending on what you use on your computer but for many people a very valid point.
*** Graphics drivers. I installed Fedora about a year ago and installing their graphics drivers felt like I was hacking my own computer. Maybe that's part of the fun of Linux (heck, of course it is!), but for a wide base of consumers it's also part of the fear.
No problem for me to get the latest NVIDIA drivers installed quickly and nicely. Graphical tool for that included in Ubuntu, just click yes a few times and it is installed.
*** Installing software. There's so many distro's of linux and seemingly packages built for individual flavors, installing new software "feels" risky, and running into package conflicts is a bit nasty. Do I trust the people who seem to build and redistribute packages on random websites? I don't know. There's a bit of a difference between commercial vendors and some guy with a popular FTP repository. I also downloaded and compiled some apps myself because I couldn't find packages for certain things for the version of Fedora I was using. Are regular consumers expected to do this?
In Ubuntu I install all software using Synaptics. Thousands of software packages to choose from covering basically everything. Just select what you want from a list and have them automatically downloaded and installed on your computer. Much quicker and easier than having to hunt them down one by one from webpages, making sure I get the right version and install them manually using a wizard.
Updates are just as dead simple using Synaptics. I get all the software on my computer updated to the latest version available from the repositories with just a few clicks. So far it has never failed me or left me with a broken program.
*** Accessing my Windows files was a bit of a PITA. I had to install an NTFS driver manually, which meant editing some conf files to auto-mount partitions. Again, that ought to have been automatic to make switching OS's easier. Maybe it's included in more recent distros?
Yes, it is included now, at least in Ubuntu. No problem there now...
*** Back to the nVidia graphics drivers: I quickly discovered that something like gEdit was very simple to use, much like Notepad. Then I tried editing some conf files from the shell. With vi. Enough said.
I hate VI too, nuff said...;) But that's no problem you can edit any file from the command line using gedit as well, just substitute vi with gedit in the command...
*** I had a nice soundcard (Creative Audigy 2), and when I installed Linux some of it's advanced features were not working (e.g. CMSS), and the mixer application showed dozens of sliders to set the volume, some of which I couldn't even identify. Then there is the whole issue of using two separate sound architectures.
Sound is unfortunately one area that hasn't improved so much since your experience. I'm still having problems with games and odd programs where the sound doesn't work for me due to all different sound architectures and conflicts there inbetween.
*** Which desktop environment do I want to use? I have no clue. Am I supposed to get familiar with one for a while, then try the other, then finally decide?
GNOME is the standard environment in Ubuntu so it's easiest to try that first. It also happens to be my personal favorite, although KDE is better in some ways. If you don't like GNOME or just want to give KDE a shot, it
After having employed a programmer coming from a two year specialized game education I have the following experience:
The person knew a lot of special game-development related tricks and how to write vertex shaders, but was seriously lacking in basic programming knowledge. Turned out they had been working a lot in small groups making small computer games and demos under deadline to try out the techniques they were taught in the classes, indirectly encouraging sloppy coding and dirty hacks since their code never was reviewed by the teachers!
The result was very frustrating, although we were developing games we could never use the person for anything more complex than isolated tasks and often the result was a lot of goey code with a defective design, leading to all kinds of bugs. At the same time the person did not understand our needs and felt that he didn't get to do any fun development or use any of his fantastic tricks.
This might have been an isolated incident, but I've heard a few things from around the industry echoing the same problem, they learn fancy game-specific tricks and techniques but don't get enough of the basics.
Knowing all the people who were involved in making Futurama The Game (PS2 & XBOX), I just know that all of them would have loved to put Matt as the final boss in that game and shoot him into pieces...;)
For those who wants to know, he basically refused taking part in the project until the eleventh hour when he suddenly demanded to change EVERYTHING, causing delays and all kinds of havoc for all people involved (all vacations canceled, many suffered burnouts etc) and partly being to blame for the production company shortly thereafter going belly up. Suffice to say that a lot of people had their lives abruptly changed in the aftermath...
Doesn't seem too bad, but if it gets ugly I guess we will only start to use browser side scripting to create some random behavior in the background while we are reading. Some random noise would easily drown out our real browsing behavior (oh, he opened all these 10 articles at the same time, wonder which one he actually read?).
There is always a shakeout between game companies at the beginning of each new generation. A few things combine to make this happen every time:
1. Many people stop buying games for the old system since they already have decided to buy the new system... as soon as it falls a bit more in price. This makes a gap in the market until the next generation has moved enough units. Many developers and publishers don't have enough cash to survive this.
2. Timing is hard. When should you stop developing for the old system and start developing for the new? With 18-24 months time-to-market it's hard to know if your new game should be made for the old or new generation. Make the wrong choice and you might find yourself move as much as two years too early or late.
3. Every new generation has so far demanded higher budgets and larger teams. Many companies that are too small will fail to make the switch.
4. It takes time and costs money to learn a new system and you will also need to develop new tools and engines. Either you will have to invest extra heavily in your first title for the new platform or settle for lower quality, which is likely to give you less sales...
I've been working in the industry for almost ten years (not anymore now though) and I'm surprised that everyone seems to be caught off-guard every time it happens....
Unfortunatelly this joke doesn't translate so well from a numerical password (as in spaceballs) to a name (as in this case). If you trulyu did have "sigge" as your password it would have been a million times harder to crack your briefcase than this account (well up until now) since a) your name most likely isn't sigge, b) aren't a native Swedish speaker and therefore the word sigge would mean nothing to you.
But you got moderated 5 for funny anyway, guess Slashdot moderators aren't as picky as me;)
If I'm not incorrectly informed, the boat hulls of those old warships were painted with olive oil in order to cause less friction against the water and thus achieve greater speeds.
Since olive oil has a far lower ignition temperature than wood, this would have helped Archimedes tremendously and made up for a lot of other possible shortcomings in quality of mirrors, precision of aiming etc.
Doesn't seem like either the Mythbusters or these guys knew about this very crucial piece of information...:(
Nintendo is not a division of an extremely successful multinational corporation: it is a multinational corporation. There is nothing to support it if it fails to show a profit.
WRONG, that doesn't affect anything. Although they don't have any other divisions to rely on, they have owners, probably mostly institutional investors where they are part of a portfolio. The chances that a company will keep on feeding a currently loosing division in hopes about it turning a profit later on is about the same as long-term investor keep feeding a currently loosing company in their portfolio. It's exactly the same kind of risk/gain calculations behind the decision in both cases. Besides, I'm sure Nintendo have savings to keep them going for quite a while without a profit anyway.
In fact, I would say that Nintendo is better of than Microsoft's X-Box Division in this case since Nintendo is concentrating on one thing and has a track-record of succeeding in their business over and over again. Their shareholders believe in Nintendo as a game company and have invested in them as such.
Microsoft on the other hand has so far only lost money in the gameconsole arena and because of their widely diversified business areas, they likely have many shareholders who rather would have them scrap the X-Box division and focus more energy on other areas which they believe in.
Isn't anybody here considering that this subpoena might just be a technicality?
Like Intel, having some proof which might help IBM, but is under NDA and can't release it without being in breach unless the court specificaly orders them to?...
"Um, the people who have the patents are the ones that made the standard."
Exactly, the people who "made the standard", not the people who "invented the algorithms".
For those who have not read all the individual patents they have on mp3 encoding, I can tell you that they specify very precisely the process of mp3 encoding/decoding and not a more general, inventive method or mathematical/technical solution for sound compression. Indeed, many of the patents are so precise that you wouldn't infringe them if you used any number of subbands in the frequency allocation except 32, which is used by mp3 encoding. Increase the number to 33 and at least half of the patents goes away, but your encoder wouldn't be compatible with the mp3 format.
This raises the question, is is correct to grant patents on standards? If I "invent" a new fileformat by simply applying a number of odd compression/encryption methods (can be very stupid and inefficient ones) onto the raw data output, can I then be granted a patent on the process of coding/decoding the file and thus sue anybody who tries to make a compatible product? Today that answer is obviously yes, as long as you use the right words in the application...
Simply because there is no room for more than about a dozen core developers on a project like this. Add more coders and you just get a lot of useless overhead and/or a fractured design.
Of course, there would be place for more people to do ancilary work such as porting/writing applications and drivers, but you typically don't get them until the base has matured sufficiently. Syllable is just about reaching that point and that's why their team is making all this noise about this release, it's time to get some more peole onboard!
Also, you do the misstake of thinking that the non-Windows-non-Linux crowd all have the same vision and focus of a future OS, they don't. Getting them all to build the same OS together would be like getting Ferrari, Porsche and Lamborghini to abandon their own sportscars and build one design together which probably would be a mishmash of all ideas, not better than any of the individual cars.
It has seldom been pointed out, but there is a good advantage coming with this slowness:
Files can easily live on the net without anyone having the entire file on their harddrive!
Many odd and unusual files can be retrievable for years after anybody stopped keeping a share of them. As long as at least 10-20 people are trying to download it, there is a fair chance that they together have all the needed parts and they will stay on long enough for new people to join in and start downloading so no part of the file disappears completely.
Sure, this is true for any smart P2P network that can start sharing before download completes, but with faster networks such as BitTorrent you much easier get incomplete files since everybody is downloading/sharing it for a much shorter time, decreasing the likelihood that the downloads overlap sufficiently to keep the file alive.
That isn't to say that eMule doesn't have incomplete files, but they are usually the result of the original provider having taken them away too soon, before all the parts of the file had spread enough.
The trick in using eDonkey efficiently is normally to start several downloads at once and let them all trickle down bit by bit at the same time. In the long run I get about as much content as I would with any other P2P client, although every individual download takes much longer to complete.
Try to think a bit ahead about what movies you wanna see next weekend and start the download a few days ahead.
Also, downloads are usually dead slow in the beginning and it might take many hours before they even start, but they pick up pace along the way. You see, your place in the upload queue is valued by each other peer by how much you have given them and in the beginning you often find yourself far down the line and just progressing slowly. Once you have say 10% of the file and can start sharing this with other downloaders who have another 10% you will quickly earn points with them and given priority.
I've been running eMule for quite a while now and I normally get about 50-80% back of what I upload on any given day. A good thing is that you don't need to have a "share" lying on your harddrive either since you automatically are sharing parts of what you are downloading and thus always have the most valuable "currency" for those you need favors from. Having a large share seldom helps you, having your client on for tens of hours in a row and maximizing your upload bandwidth usually helps a lot.
Although I like the idea of installfests, I usually get a shiver down my spine when I hear about them.
Pictures of naive users who brings their Windows PCs in to have everything on their harddrives wiped out and replaced with a system that will solve all their problems leaps to my mind.
Without some basic training on how to use a Linux system, pointers to good documentation and reasonable expectations, they will likely just get a frustrating experience and get disgruntled, telling everybody else what a terrible system Linux is and have somebody reinstall Windows.
What measures did you take to avoid this situation on your installfests and do you have any plans on how to follow up on the installfest with some more events that can help these newbie users on their way? Also, do you have any recommendations for other LUGs arranging installfests?
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Of course science and religion can mix and they should!
Let me quote Abdulbaha, son of the founder of the Bahai religion, a growing religious and social movement with more than six million followers:
If religious beliefs and opinions are found contrary to the standards of science, they are mere superstitions and imaginations; for the antithesis of knowledge is ignorance, and the child of ignorance is superstition. Unquestionably there must be agreement between true religion and science. If a question be found contrary to reason, faith and belief in it are impossible, and there is no outcome but wavering and vacillation.
Quite a strong statement for being from a major religious leader a hundred years ago. Also:
This gift [intelligence and reasoning] giveth man the power to discern the truth in all things, leadeth him to that which is right, and helpeth him to discover the secrets of creation
Finally:
Religion and science are the two wings upon which man's intelligence can soar into the heights, with which the human soul can progress. It is not possible to fly with one wing alone! Should a man try to fly with the wing of religion alone he would quickly fall into the quagmire of superstition, whilst on the other hand, with the wing of science alone he would also make no progress, but fall into the despairing slough of materialism.
The only reason that science and religion doesn't seem to mix is that too many religious leaders stick to their dogmas and traditions even in face of human and scientific progress. Religions role in this world is to develop and foster spirituality, morality and selflessness so we can create a fair and just society and it can only do so if it keeps evolving and improving with new knowledge and understandings. Christianity developed and changed a lot in the first few hundred years after Jesus with doctrines and writings being added and removed at a high pace. Why are so many churches of today so hellbent on sticking exactly to the way things earlier were? It's simply not healthy.
Ps. I'm not officially a Bahai, but I consider myself a "friend of the faith".
Hm, 60 PS3s chrunching away at 4 million passwords per second each. Giving a total of 240 million passwords tested each second.
My TrueCrypt volume has a 19 character alphanumerical password, not truly random but nothing you can use a dictionary against. Only lowercase + numbers but still more than 30 characters to choose from.
Given that they knew all this and tried to brute force my password using their PS3s it would still take them more than 1535 billion years...
I think they need to up their game or go a totally different route if they ever want to be able to look inside my harddrive and prosecute me for any of its content before I'm burried in a chest...
Personally I loved the first few versions of Mandrake, but then it started to go south for me...
Each following version I found more bloated and had new weird half-baked configuration tools and broke more easily than the previous version. It was also much harder to find packages of more unusual software for Mandrake than Red Hat due to the smaller community.
At around version 8 I switched back to Red Hat, went from there to Ubuntu and haven't looked back since. To me Mandrake had become the distro that just threw in all the latest stuff with not enough work to get everything to integrate nicely and get stable. I'm a bit surprised to hear others here praise its polish and stability throughout the years...
Today I see no reason for me to switch back to Mandriva although I understand the distro has come far since then. Ubuntu has the largest and most active community, the biggest software repositories and for me (I'm a Gnome user) one of the most polished and well working environments. It also tends to stay stable over time and has a regular 6 months upgrade cycle.
However, I'll be happy to take Mandriva for a spin again when I can find the time and wish them all the best. They are still one of the half-a-dozen desktop distros that I strongly hope survives and stays relevant in the long run and I think they do a great job for being an independent small company with such a small community.
While I would be willing to lay my hand in the fire for Linux on the server, I would not touch a fire with a ten foot pole for Linux on the desktop.
Three years ago I completely gave up on Linux on the Desktop. I decided to focus on Apple, and Microsoft. I have to be frank in that I have not looked back AT ALL...
Let me see if I get this right? You haven't even touched desktop Linux at all over the last three years and still you are able to make judgements of it's usability?
I've been using Linux exclusively as my desktop OS for a few years now and let me tell you, the last year (ever since Ubuntu 8.04 came out) has been a really pleasant ride for me. Your mileage might vary depending on your needs and preferences though.
The first steps are fine, but I would not recommend you to take the option step of blowinging the whistle unless you really feel strongly about the site or people you "victimize" and see it as you moral responsibility.
If you accept the job and then turn around and blows the whistle you have acted maliciously against your employer. They may have questionable morality but the fact is that you have agreed to work for and being loyal to them, don't sink to their level. They might even have legal grounds to sue you if they find out since you clearly have willingly sabotaged their business.
The only way to take the moral high ground here is to first try to make them change their mind and if that doesn't work refuse to take part in the scheme or at least demand in writing that management take full responsibility. Yes, that could have very bad consequences too. I don't envy your situation, I've been there myself a few times and have not always made decisions that were smart or made me feel good in the long run...
Of course, if things went far enough I would blow the whistle, but I don't get the impression this is one of those cases. It would be a totally different matter though if you weren't working for them or in any other way had promised your loyalty. In that case I would recommend you to blow the whistle as a concerned citizen.
Without knowing too much details about the alternatives it seems to me that Sweden would fit your bill nicely for the following reasons:
* Large IT-sector which regularly accepts English-speaking foreign labor in their workforce with no demands for knowing any Swedish.
* English is the second language and is spoken more or less fluently among most of the population (especially the younger one), more so than in Germany, France or Finland.
* Safe, generally non-violent place with all kinds of security nets if things would go wrong, like (almost) free hospitals.
* 25 days of vacation per year guaranteed by law. Most people have 4 weeks of continuous vacation during the summer which is a great time to travel around the rest of Europe.
Only thing speaking against Sweden as far as I can see is that it might not be exotic enough for your taste since it both culturally and geographically is quite close to your neighbor in north, Canada.
Most of my domestic traffic crosses the borders. I use gmail for my e-mail so every single e-mail to/from me passes the border.
All sites and forums I regularly visit passes all information across the border (writing this on Slashdot for example).
Etc. etc.
As far as I'm concerned the author totally misses the point with the GPL.
I don't care about "my code being free" the way he expresses it. What I care about is to create a level playing field between free and proprietary software and nurture the existence and proliferation of free software. With BSD-style licenses the proprietary software developers always have an upper hand in the race for consumer mindshare and userbase since they can take any BSD code but doesn't need to (and most often doesn't) contribute anything back. They can always stand on our shoulders but we can't stand on theirs so they will always be a head higher.
For free software to proliferate, which is a personal goal for me for many good reasons (freedom to tinker, freedom and savings for enduser, privacy protection, establishing of standards, sharing of wealth, better for developing nations, faster inovation etc) we need a bigger userbase which currently is occupied by proprietary software.
We will not achieve that by remaining upstream providers for proprietary projects, which BSD-licensed projects often become.
The BSD-licenses have their place in certain projects where it is more important to advance the technical field for both proprietary and free software than advancing the marketshare of free software.
Without marketshare we are always bound to play catch-up with standards, hardware support etc. and as a community remain marginalized. The GPL, with it's restrictions against inclusion in closed projects, helps us to gain marketshare.
They could have separated the products without abandoning the name Red Hat, like calling it "Red Hat Free Desktop" or something. Totally removing their name from the product gives a very clear signal that they want to distance themselves from the product.
One reason to not have more than a 16-bit wide bus is that you don't want too thick cables going to the drive. For every bit you need one separate, isolated connection in the cable.
Thick cables are clumsy, more expensive to make and break more easily.
Of course, you could have a wider interface and multiplex the signal in the cable, but that wouldn't give any performance gains.
Well, kind of...
Iceland was named Iceland for reasons that I don't know but my guess is the glaciers.
Greenland on the other hand was named Greenland by an entrepreneurial viking who first explored the coastline of Greenland and then started a colony on the west coast. Calling it Greenland was simply marketing to get more people to join the effort to colonize the land.
It did succeed, the colony was established and existed until climate changes caused hardship and forced them to leave.
The Greenland colony was by the way home of the Vikings who discovered North America and temporarily established a small colony there, until they some time later were chased away by the locals.
Let's go through your points from your experience with Fedora about a year ago and see how they relate to the latest Ubuntu release (that's what I'm used to and recommend, can't compare to new Fedora since I haven't tried it):
;) But that's no problem you can edit any file from the command line using gedit as well, just substitute vi with gedit in the command...
*** It's what I'm used to.
Sure, always more convenient to stick around with what you are used to. You need to be prepared to invest some time and energy into switching.
*** I have a lot invested in Windows software that isn't available natively on Linux. (Yes, some of it could run under Wine)
Granted, that is a valid point. Very individual depending on what you use on your computer but for many people a very valid point.
*** Graphics drivers. I installed Fedora about a year ago and installing their graphics drivers felt like I was hacking my own computer. Maybe that's part of the fun of Linux (heck, of course it is!), but for a wide base of consumers it's also part of the fear.
No problem for me to get the latest NVIDIA drivers installed quickly and nicely. Graphical tool for that included in Ubuntu, just click yes a few times and it is installed.
*** Installing software. There's so many distro's of linux and seemingly packages built for individual flavors, installing new software "feels" risky, and running into package conflicts is a bit nasty. Do I trust the people who seem to build and redistribute packages on random websites? I don't know. There's a bit of a difference between commercial vendors and some guy with a popular FTP repository. I also downloaded and compiled some apps myself because I couldn't find packages for certain things for the version of Fedora I was using. Are regular consumers expected to do this?
In Ubuntu I install all software using Synaptics. Thousands of software packages to choose from covering basically everything. Just select what you want from a list and have them automatically downloaded and installed on your computer. Much quicker and easier than having to hunt them down one by one from webpages, making sure I get the right version and install them manually using a wizard.
Updates are just as dead simple using Synaptics. I get all the software on my computer updated to the latest version available from the repositories with just a few clicks. So far it has never failed me or left me with a broken program.
*** Accessing my Windows files was a bit of a PITA. I had to install an NTFS driver manually, which meant editing some conf files to auto-mount partitions. Again, that ought to have been automatic to make switching OS's easier. Maybe it's included in more recent distros?
Yes, it is included now, at least in Ubuntu. No problem there now...
*** Back to the nVidia graphics drivers: I quickly discovered that something like gEdit was very simple to use, much like Notepad. Then I tried editing some conf files from the shell. With vi. Enough said.
I hate VI too, nuff said...
*** I had a nice soundcard (Creative Audigy 2), and when I installed Linux some of it's advanced features were not working (e.g. CMSS), and the mixer application showed dozens of sliders to set the volume, some of which I couldn't even identify. Then there is the whole issue of using two separate sound architectures.
Sound is unfortunately one area that hasn't improved so much since your experience. I'm still having problems with games and odd programs where the sound doesn't work for me due to all different sound architectures and conflicts there inbetween.
*** Which desktop environment do I want to use? I have no clue. Am I supposed to get familiar with one for a while, then try the other, then finally decide?
GNOME is the standard environment in Ubuntu so it's easiest to try that first. It also happens to be my personal favorite, although KDE is better in some ways. If you don't like GNOME or just want to give KDE a shot, it
After having employed a programmer coming from a two year specialized game education I have the following experience:
The person knew a lot of special game-development related tricks and how to write vertex shaders, but was seriously lacking in basic programming knowledge. Turned out they had been working a lot in small groups making small computer games and demos under deadline to try out the techniques they were taught in the classes, indirectly encouraging sloppy coding and dirty hacks since their code never was reviewed by the teachers!
The result was very frustrating, although we were developing games we could never use the person for anything more complex than isolated tasks and often the result was a lot of goey code with a defective design, leading to all kinds of bugs. At the same time the person did not understand our needs and felt that he didn't get to do any fun development or use any of his fantastic tricks.
This might have been an isolated incident, but I've heard a few things from around the industry echoing the same problem, they learn fancy game-specific tricks and techniques but don't get enough of the basics.
Knowing all the people who were involved in making Futurama The Game (PS2 & XBOX), I just know that all of them would have loved to put Matt as the final boss in that game and shoot him into pieces...;)
For those who wants to know, he basically refused taking part in the project until the eleventh hour when he suddenly demanded to change EVERYTHING, causing delays and all kinds of havoc for all people involved (all vacations canceled, many suffered burnouts etc) and partly being to blame for the production company shortly thereafter going belly up. Suffice to say that a lot of people had their lives abruptly changed in the aftermath...
Doesn't seem too bad, but if it gets ugly I guess we will only start to use browser side scripting to create some random behavior in the background while we are reading. Some random noise would easily drown out our real browsing behavior (oh, he opened all these 10 articles at the same time, wonder which one he actually read?).
There is always a shakeout between game companies at the beginning of each new generation. A few things combine to make this happen every time:
1. Many people stop buying games for the old system since they already have decided to buy the new system... as soon as it falls a bit more in price. This makes a gap in the market until the next generation has moved enough units. Many developers and publishers don't have enough cash to survive this.
2. Timing is hard. When should you stop developing for the old system and start developing for the new? With 18-24 months time-to-market it's hard to know if your new game should be made for the old or new generation. Make the wrong choice and you might find yourself move as much as two years too early or late.
3. Every new generation has so far demanded higher budgets and larger teams. Many companies that are too small will fail to make the switch.
4. It takes time and costs money to learn a new system and you will also need to develop new tools and engines. Either you will have to invest extra heavily in your first title for the new platform or settle for lower quality, which is likely to give you less sales...
I've been working in the industry for almost ten years (not anymore now though) and I'm surprised that everyone seems to be caught off-guard every time it happens....
I've got the same password on my briefcase!
;)
Unfortunatelly this joke doesn't translate so well from a numerical password (as in spaceballs) to a name (as in this case). If you trulyu did have "sigge" as your password it would have been a million times harder to crack your briefcase than this account (well up until now) since a) your name most likely isn't sigge, b) aren't a native Swedish speaker and therefore the word sigge would mean nothing to you.
But you got moderated 5 for funny anyway, guess Slashdot moderators aren't as picky as me
If I'm not incorrectly informed, the boat hulls of those old warships were painted with olive oil in order to cause less friction against the water and thus achieve greater speeds.
:(
Since olive oil has a far lower ignition temperature than wood, this would have helped Archimedes tremendously and made up for a lot of other possible shortcomings in quality of mirrors, precision of aiming etc.
Doesn't seem like either the Mythbusters or these guys knew about this very crucial piece of information...
Nintendo is not a division of an extremely successful multinational corporation: it is a multinational corporation. There is nothing to support it if it fails to show a profit.
WRONG, that doesn't affect anything. Although they don't have any other divisions to rely on, they have owners, probably mostly institutional investors where they are part of a portfolio. The chances that a company will keep on feeding a currently loosing division in hopes about it turning a profit later on is about the same as long-term investor keep feeding a currently loosing company in their portfolio. It's exactly the same kind of risk/gain calculations behind the decision in both cases. Besides, I'm sure Nintendo have savings to keep them going for quite a while without a profit anyway.
In fact, I would say that Nintendo is better of than Microsoft's X-Box Division in this case since Nintendo is concentrating on one thing and has a track-record of succeeding in their business over and over again. Their shareholders believe in Nintendo as a game company and have invested in them as such.
Microsoft on the other hand has so far only lost money in the gameconsole arena and because of their widely diversified business areas, they likely have many shareholders who rather would have them scrap the X-Box division and focus more energy on other areas which they believe in.
Isn't anybody here considering that this subpoena might just be a technicality?
Like Intel, having some proof which might help IBM, but is under NDA and can't release it without being in breach unless the court specificaly orders them to?...
Exactly, the people who "made the standard", not the people who "invented the algorithms".
For those who have not read all the individual patents they have on mp3 encoding, I can tell you that they specify very precisely the process of mp3 encoding/decoding and not a more general, inventive method or mathematical/technical solution for sound compression. Indeed, many of the patents are so precise that you wouldn't infringe them if you used any number of subbands in the frequency allocation except 32, which is used by mp3 encoding. Increase the number to 33 and at least half of the patents goes away, but your encoder wouldn't be compatible with the mp3 format.
This raises the question, is is correct to grant patents on standards?
If I "invent" a new fileformat by simply applying a number of odd compression/encryption methods (can be very stupid and inefficient ones) onto the raw data output, can I then be granted a patent on the process of coding/decoding the file and thus sue anybody who tries to make a compatible product? Today that answer is obviously yes, as long as you use the right words in the application...
Simply because there is no room for more than about a dozen core developers on a project like this. Add more coders and you just get a lot of useless overhead and/or a fractured design.
Of course, there would be place for more people to do ancilary work such as porting/writing applications and drivers, but you typically don't get them until the base has matured sufficiently. Syllable is just about reaching that point and that's why their team is making all this noise about this release, it's time to get some more peole onboard!
Also, you do the misstake of thinking that the non-Windows-non-Linux crowd all have the same vision and focus of a future OS, they don't. Getting them all to build the same OS together would be like getting Ferrari, Porsche and Lamborghini to abandon their own sportscars and build one design together which probably would be a mishmash of all ideas, not better than any of the individual cars.
It has seldom been pointed out, but there is a good advantage coming with this slowness:
Files can easily live on the net without anyone having the entire file on their harddrive!
Many odd and unusual files can be retrievable for years after anybody stopped keeping a share of them. As long as at least 10-20 people are trying to download it, there is a fair chance that they together have all the needed parts and they will stay on long enough for new people to join in and start downloading so no part of the file disappears completely.
Sure, this is true for any smart P2P network that can start sharing before download completes, but with faster networks such as BitTorrent you much easier get incomplete files since everybody is downloading/sharing it for a much shorter time, decreasing the likelihood that the downloads overlap sufficiently to keep the file alive.
That isn't to say that eMule doesn't have incomplete files, but they are usually the result of the original provider having taken them away too soon, before all the parts of the file had spread enough.
The trick in using eDonkey efficiently is normally to start several downloads at once and let them all trickle down bit by bit at the same time. In the long run I get about as much content as I would with any other P2P client, although every individual download takes much longer to complete.
Try to think a bit ahead about what movies you wanna see next weekend and start the download a few days ahead.
Also, downloads are usually dead slow in the beginning and it might take many hours before they even start, but they pick up pace along the way. You see, your place in the upload queue is valued by each other peer by how much you have given them and in the beginning you often find yourself far down the line and just progressing slowly. Once you have say 10% of the file and can start sharing this with other downloaders who have another 10% you will quickly earn points with them and given priority.
I've been running eMule for quite a while now and I normally get about 50-80% back of what I upload on any given day. A good thing is that you don't need to have a "share" lying on your harddrive either since you automatically are sharing parts of what you are downloading and thus always have the most valuable "currency" for those you need favors from. Having a large share seldom helps you, having your client on for tens of hours in a row and maximizing your upload bandwidth usually helps a lot.
Although I like the idea of installfests, I usually get a shiver down my spine when I hear about them.
Pictures of naive users who brings their Windows PCs in to have everything on their harddrives wiped out and replaced with a system that will solve all their problems leaps to my mind.
Without some basic training on how to use a Linux system, pointers to good documentation and reasonable expectations, they will likely just get a frustrating experience and get disgruntled, telling everybody else what a terrible system Linux is and have somebody reinstall Windows.
What measures did you take to avoid this situation on your installfests and do you have any plans on how to follow up on the installfest with some more events that can help these newbie users on their way? Also, do you have any recommendations for other LUGs arranging installfests?