There are some reasons why MS would want an announcement stating that MS Office is being ported to Linux.
StarOffice.
It's out there.
It's free.
It's being GPLed
Sun owns and supports it.
This is big. I have heard from friends that the companies that they work for are seriously considering switching over, and some of these companies are REALLY big. By allowing the rumor mill to start up about porting over to Linux and UNIX, MS is hoping to stall this decision.
If a home user is considering moving over to Linux and hears a rumor that MS is porting Office over to Linux then there is the chance that the home user will wait until that port is finished. If the rumor is unfounded then the person may wait long enough for MS to charge them for another version of Windows.
4% of the market share of sold licenses and growing. That isn't all that small, and with Office costing as much as it does they could make a lot of money.
The DOJ. Two possibilities:
They get broken up It then becomes useful for the division in charge of Office to port to other OSes, more $$$.
They don't get broken up. They could use the rumor to show support of a competing OS. This could help them win the lawsuite.
Get it ported and ready for release for if/when it becomes advantagous to have Office on Linux.
There are others. Having the rumor mill is just as good FUD as that which they create.
NT is stable, to the first approx. at least. Compaired to the Win9xs it is hands down a better, more stable product, but I have little faith in MS for good reasons.
Last year I was using an NT machine at school to write a paper using MS Word and had a PowerPoint presentation on that which I was writing the paper. Word crashed on the 3 times in five minutes, the first two times slowed the performance noticably and the third time took down NT.
I have also had NT up for a week on my home machine, had it crash after dealing with Mathematica and found out my c: drive was corrupted and NT had to be reinstalled.
I also have done some QA testing on a network appliance. Of the clients that I used, roughly 50% were NT with service pack 4, of those when the network appliance went down so did 1/4 to 1/2 of the them. Meanwhile the Solaris 2.6, SunOS 4.1, SCO, and RedHat boxes were always fine.
I have had my Debian box up for 3 week streches without a hitch. It has never corrupted my hard drive, and never had an application take the entire system down.
On the other hand I do know quite a few people who have never had a problem with their NT box.
It is true that a 5 qubit quantum computer is useless against a 40 bit key, but if they every get the stabilization problem fixed we won't be dealing with 5 or 7 qbit machines because they will scale the things rather quickly. You can only scale so high with the standard mathematical encryption algorithms.
Don't brush quantum computing aside because it will come to nip you in the butt before you know it.
Someone already caught my mistake. Thank you though.
As I explained to the other person I slipped up because we tend to use simulated pion events along with simulated electron events for out work with the detectors. Pion events tend to create fairly useful, easy to interpret information when dealing with detector resolution simulations.
The engineers proof that all odd numbers are prime.
1 is prime and odd, 3 is prime and odd, 5 is, 7 is, 9 isn't but that's probably just statisical error, 11 is, 13 is, well that's good enough for me.
The computer scientists proof that all odd numbers are prime.
1 is prime and odd, 3 is, 5 is, 7 is, 7 is, 7 is, 7 is...
MSs proof that all odd numbers are prime.
1 is prime and odd, 3 is, 5 is, 7 is, [BSOD!]
Well it was holding true up until it crashed so it must be true.
Yes, the pions are mesons, composed of two quarks. When running simulations we tend to use both electrons and pions for detector simulations. The simulated data from pions tends to be very easy to compile and use to check whether one detector is better than another. I slipped up because I had been using pion simulationed events in my last project.
Part of the reason for the slow crawl from 2 to 5 to 7 qbits is a stability issue. Right now quantum computers have a lifespan of a mere fraction of a second. The ability to keep the qbits in a stable enough configuration such that they can be used for long periods of time has not been found yet. Once they find out how to stablize it then the scaling becomes relatively easy, so long as they can keep it cooled properly (and for those who don't know were talking liquid helium temperatures ie under 10 Kelvin).
Well then, i guess we'll just have to start generating 40960 bit long keys in order to stay ahead of "them".
You don't seem to get it. A quantum computer in effect "knows" the answer right at the beginning and it just takes a little bit of time to display it. If quantum computers were to ever become stable enough to have the ability to run something like linux at the speed of a Pentium, your 40960 bit long key would be rendered useless in minutes if not seconds.
A very simplistic way to look at it is you have a room with n switches, where n is the number of bits in you encryption, and some lights connected to those switches. In order to have all of the lights on you need to have those switches in a specific order. A regular computer flips the first switch, turns around and checks to see if the lights are on, if not moves on in a binary fassion (there are better ways of doing it but this is just a simplification). It will go through all of the combinations until it hits the correct answer. A quantum computer has the equivelent to a cheat sheet with the answer on it already and it only takes enough time to flip the switches in the correct order.
Standard cryptography today is useless against quantum factorization. Luckly, right now there is no way to keep the particles in a stable configuration. If you think that large bit encryption will keep you safe from quantum computers, when they finally become viable, then you are asking for you messages to be broken.
Remember some of the basic rules of quantum mechanics? That because of the act of observation that the observed changes? Again, a clear sign that something, somewhere is screwed up so completely, but nothing is ever done. Nobody ever stops and says, maybe we need to rethink everything up to this point, because this just shouldn't be happening.
Although one could say that the problem must stem from the Schrodinger Equation, which is one of the four fundamental equations like F=ma, and therefore it must be changed, it also seems to be inexplicably correct. People have stopped and said, maybe we need to rethink everything up to this point, because this just shouldn't be happening. Einstein did, he questioned quantum mechanics until he died. Every question he threw at it, everytime he tried to throw a wrench in the gears, he failed. Some of his questions have only been answered in the past 20 years, but they have been answered.
Quantum mechanics has been poked, prodded, attacked, and verbally abused and yet it keeps on showing us that it is correct. All of the scientific data taken to try and disprove things like the Uncertainty Principle has failed. We cannot do any better than hbar. We have to deal with the duality of waves and particles. All of the evidence shows that it is correct.
Sure there are holes, the standard model for particles is full of them. People are trying their hardest to patch them, a good example is question #4. Supersymmetry was theorized as a fix for the standard model, and it wasn't the first, there were others with funny names like Technicolor.
Einstein placed the cosmological constant into his relativity equation because he wanted the universe to be static rather than expanding or collapsing. Now there is talk of re-introducing the cosmological constant, in a slightly different form, but never less it has been talked about to try and explain some of the holes.
Superstring theory is just another patch, a way of trying to understand the universe. Other theories don't cut it, they have gapping holes. Superstring theory surfaced because something wasn't quite right and someone tried to fix it.
Most of the physics done today is patch work. Something isn't working right so we need to find out why.
Question #4 discusses Supersymmetry. The lab group that I am part of is working with simulating supersymmetry, if you want more information on supersymmetry then go to the University of Colorado NLC group site.
We only hope that the NLC, or Tesla, is built. Right now particle physicists around the world are trying to scrape up the ~$9 billion that it would require to build one of them.
I know that some of you will say, "We already have particle accelerators that can reach TeV (Tera Electron Volts), why do we need the NLC?" The particle accelarators today that can reach TeV, like the Tevatron at Fermilabs, accelerate Hadrons like protons. Although the physics gained from accelerating Hadrons is very useful, it cannot give us the information necessary for supersymmetry. Hadrons are composed of three quarks, and therefore when they collide not all six quarks are hitting at the same time, generally only one quark hits one quark. These kind of reactions are useful but not what we need. We need a particle accelerator that can accelarate leptons, like electrons and pions, to the TeV scale. When electrons hit we are getting the entire center of mass energy at one point at one time. This allows for physics that is extremely useful to supersymmetry.
I am just an undergrad so my understanding of this next aspect is kind of shakey. From what I have been able to understand, hadron colliders are really good for understanding the forces between particles, whereas lepton colliders are really good for discovering new particles. In order to prove, or disprove, supersymmetry we need to see if sparticles (supersymmetric particles) exist, therefore we need lepton colliders. Today the most powerful lepton collider in the US is SLAC (Stanford Linear Accelerator).
It seems that everyone has been asking "Why Gnome?" The only people who can really answer that are those who sat in on the meetings between IBM, Sun, HP, and Compaq, all of the rest of us are just spouting unfounded theories. I have my own theories, they are just theories.
This is a conserted effort amont four companies. When groups get together compromises occur, sometimes they are good and sometimes they seem odd (see politics).
The license on the Qt libraries probably had something to do with this. For the past few years the major UNICES like Sun, HP, DEC/Compaq, and IBM have been pretty much forced into licensing CDE from the owner to the UNIX trademark (OpenGroup?). The chance, however small, that Troll Tech may restrict their license even more and then reaming the big four for money probably came into consideration.
I don't know if KDE uses this or has something similar, but some of the network extras like CORBA probably influenced their decision. For Sun, the network is the computer.
Publicity. Those of us in the US know that Gnome is getting a heck of a lot more attention then KDE. People I know who have heard very little about Linux and find out I use tend to ask me about what RedHat and Gnome are. Marketing is very crucial for a product (see Microsoft) and sense Gnome has a very vocal advocacy group in the US they tend to get a lot of notice.
I don't know about the other groups but I hear that Sun will give the option between starting CDE or Gnome. Since KDE's original graphical interface was designed to look and feel like CDE, although it has grown to be much more, perhaps the idea of having two primary GUIs that look very similar was unappealing. Kind of like offering Afterstep or Windowmaker, both act fairly differently and are very different, they look very similar to the average user.
I have heard a rumor that in a companion freeware CD, that Sun will release during Solaris 8 update in the fall, KDE and Gnome will both be on it. Just because when you first start up Solaris and it only gives you choices between CDE and Gnome doesn't mean that you cannot use something else.
I personally use Gnome. Why? Because I use debian and try to keep my sources.list file to sites that debian has listed as official debian distributer sites. If debian breaks the non-free away then I will stop this practice, but right now I can get a fully functional and powerful system from official debian sites.
That and I have grown to really appreciate the expanded desktops and the gnome pager. One of my complaints about CDE, and from what I can tell KDE has the same problem, is that although you can have multiple desktops, they are still just 1x1. I use all of my 2x3x3 desktops and the gnome pager has a very clean way of displaying them in a way that I find visually pleasing.
True, a sparc station is more expensive than x86 or Alpha but that doesn't mean that it isn't a viable solution for some.
First of all the Ultra3 should be coming out this year, which will scale up to 1024 SMP, no x86 or Alpha solution are even close to that sort of SMP.
Second, compairing a UltraSPARC to a x86 PC is like compairing a Dodge Ram to a BMW Z3. The Z3 is damn fast, and looks really cool, but if you are doing a job that requires the hauling capasity of a Ram then you definately do not want to use the Z3 to do that job.
Also, I never said that supporting Linux means selling Ultras with Linux on them. I just implied that supporting Linux may mean selling more of their systems. If you need a machine that has 16 or more processors you have to go to one of the major UNIX providors.
Sun seems to be moving towards big servers in the background anyway, don't believe me then just look at the SunRays. Although they won't kill the desktop anytime soon they seem to be more in the range of, Linux and MS cannot handle the load and you don't want to sell your soul for an IBM machine.
Sure Sun may want to sell more workstations if they can, but if they can remove MS from the arena and placing large Sun servers in the background through the use of Linux then they will.
1) Is this the death knell of KDE?
2) Is this a move by the big corporate tech companies to 'Bogart' the Linux marketplace?
3) Is this really good for the open-source movement?
I don't think that this is a death kneel for KDE. Will it mean that more and more standard installations will have Gnome as the primary desktop? Maybe. Just because several major companies have said that they are adopting Gnome as their standard does not necessarly mean that it will happen. First, we have to see Gnome distributed as a standard. Second, see Gnome actually implemented on those distributions. If those two things actually occur, then there is a higher chance for Gnome to take a more high profile existance in the different Linux distros. But just because the major UNICES are using it doesn't not necessarly imply that the other Linux distros will.
Are the big corps trying to 'Bogard' the Linux marketplace? I'd say no. All of the companies listed above realize that UNIX is not ready for the home user. They also seem to understand that they have a worse chance of taking on MS in the low-mid size server market that Linux now has 24% in. By supporting a common user interface between the different UNICES and Linux they stand to gain in many ways, all of which include keeping Linux.
Linux is starting to eat away at MS's marketshare. By supporting a common GUI between Linux and UNIX, there becomes more incentive for a corperation to use Linux on their workstations and have their huge UNIX box in the background with seamless connectivity, no more WinFrame. As people get used to Linux, it will gain more market share in the home market, people don't like to learn more than one system. By making MS not the standard they can sell more of their product.
Are these companies after Linux's marketshare? Not really. The big corps listed in the article know that their product is not a good product for home use. In some of cases it is TOO powerful for workstation use, which is where Linux comes in. Linux can scale downwards very easily, which is something the brand name UNICES cannot do. At the same time the big corps are not worried about Linux taking their market share either, they know that Linux does not scale upwards at the level any of the brand name UNICES can (we all know that it is true, deal with it). Anyway, companies like Sun are more conserned with selling hardware and services anyway, why do you think they released Solaris 8 for free (8 processors or less). In the case of Sun, if pushing Linux means selling more hardware then they are all for it.
This is good for the open-source movement. The support of those big corps will only give more good press to Linux, which can only serve to increase the user base. A large user base means more testers and more programmers. It means that more programs will be written for Linux. This is a good thing for Linux.
From what I can tell, Sun seems to think of Linux as the home desktop and workstation OS. Sun makes more of their money off of selling hardware and services than they ever did selling Solaris.
By supporting Linux, and other Open Source alternatives, and by creating a single user interface between Solaris and OSS solutions they stand to gain on several grounds.
Solaris isn't a good home machine, Sun knows that. Put Linux on the home machine, oust MS, Sun wins.
Companies that have a Linux solution for the workstations are more likely to have a Sun solution for their heavy duty servers that need the ability to scale (Linux is to Solaris as Solaris is to AIX for scaleability right now, deal with it, don't flame).
Linux works on UltraSPARCs, and there could be a huge market for it.
etc...
Sun may not be openly saying this, but considering Solaris 8 is now free (8 or less processors), has GPL'ed StarOffice, and has now openly adopted Gnome, I'll let you connect the dots to see what you see.
The boundary of understanding of physics from at least the perspective of string theory is a relatively well-funded endeavor in the world today.
(begin rant)
Research on string theory itself may be a well funded but some of the aspects that are required to show proof that it is a viable theory are not. Going back to high energy physics, quite a few of the string theories out there (there is more than one), including the one that is considered most likely, require that aspects of particle physics like supersymmetry be true. Unfortunately, the funding of high energy physics fell through the floor after the Superconducting Super Collider project was kill ~$5 billion, out of $20 billion, into the project. Right now the high energy physicists are trying to scrape up ~$9 billion from the US, EU, and Japan in order to build either the NLC (US design) or Tesla (German design). The physicists hope that one of these will be built, but aren't sure if they will get the funding. The two designs allow for colliding leptons at the TeV range, the TeVatron at Fermilabs collides Barions which give different results. If something of this scale is not built then theories like supersymmetry cannot be proven. If supersymmetry cannot be proven then we lose the ability to test the robustness of some of these string theories.
Nuclear physics is a dieing field in the US. Unless you want to work on weapon research you are poorly funded. Other than the new laser over at Lawrence Livermoore Labs, what news have you heard about the advancement of non-weapon nuclear technology?
(end rant)
It seems to me that Katz's main complaint is that many scientists become pawns of corporations. But why is this bad
Scientists in corporations are not necessarily bad. IBM owns the Watts (sp?) lab, which has done wonders to push the technology that we have forward. Corporate sponsorship of science becomes bad for society when that is the only science that occurs. If governments, and the general populous, decide that all science can be handled by corporations, then we will lose a lot of the science conducted for the sake of science.
Although Katz's article seems to take the 'The sky is falling' approach it does bring up some interesting points. Should we allow corporations to fund scientific research conducted in public institutions? Should we allow corporations to dictate what research should be done in public institutions? Can we control/stop it? I believe that this phenominon needs to be looked into to see how it is effecting not just scientific research, but who is going into those fields where corporations are funding the research, and why.
I recently found a quote that fits all too well for this discussion.
It is folly to use as one's guide in the selection of fundamental science the criterion of utility. Not because (scientists)... despise utility. But because... useful outcomes are best identified after the making of discoveries, rather than before.
John C. Polanyi. Excerpt from the keynote address to the Canadian Society for the Weizmann Institute of Science, Toronto June 2, 1996.
It is the research for the sake of science, not technology, that pushes uncharted boundries that has the potential to return with the largest benifits to society. By standing on the basic building blocks of the universe we live, in we can see and understand more of that universe. The pure research that is conducted to create solid foundations of understanding ultimately leads to building of that which is most benifitial to society. As a concrete foundation is to a building, pure scientific research for the sake of science is to practical scientific research.
Here is a good example:
Understanding in quantum mechanics allowed for the creation of instruments like electron microscopes and other high precision instruments. These intruments allowed for the discovery of DNA. The understanding of genetics allowed us to modify plasmids in bacteria to produce human insulin, which allows diabetics to live more normal lives. Technologies due to understanding in quantum mechanics also include televisions, computers, cat scans, etc... They are also leading to things like nano-technology.
There is research being conducted today that has the potential to revolutionize our society. Fields like high energy physics have great potential that hardly anyone sees. Through the understanding of the basic particles that make up all matter, and the fundemental forces that bind everything the ability to do great things for society arise. Discoveries in particle physics help out with research in fusion. With a better understanding of gravity we may be able to achieve interstellar space travel. The dicoveries made at high energies allow for a better understanding of how the universe was when it began.
Research in practical areas is good but I believe that Academia should spend more time working on that which could have the greatest impact, ie science for the sake of science.
Most of the other comments on this thread have mentioned how I feel about this stance, as for books, there is some interesting stuff going on with copyrights and books. If a book goes out of print for a certain amount of time, then even if the publishing company still owns the copyright at that time, the writer is given a legal ability to publish the book without the consent of the publishing company. Or something like that.
If the company is not producing or supporting a product and does not pursue illegal reproduction of said product then it might as well be legal. He is different than a regular pirate because his act of piracy does not cost the company that he is pirating the software from any money. He is providing a service that people want and the legitimate companies don't wish to do.
Sun is tired of all of Intels whining and wants to stabe a sharp stick in their eye. For the past year Intel has been whining to the press that Sun isn't backing the IA-64 processor as their primary processor, and that because of that they aren't living up to their agreements. Sun had one of the first working ports on the IA-64, and sees IA-64 as secondary to their UltraSPARC line for Solaris.
Some of the high ranking people in Sun have gotten so fed up with Intels whining that they have gone so far as to say that they may not even release Solaris for IA-64. They are supporting AMD just to piss off Intel.
From what I have been told by people who have used Posix on NT 4.0 there is one "thread" in NT that deals with the Posix commands. If if crashes NT is fine but if you want to use Posix you have to reboot. I personally haven't used the posix capabilities within NT so I am just going off of what I have been told.
The ability to evolve and survive is indeed one of the strongest features of and *NIX system, but there comes a time where rigid standards and enfored policies in the forground are necessary.
For instance OpenGroup has required CDE as part of a distribution in order for it to be called UNIX. Although I personally do not like CDE, the use of a standardized window manager that allows for multiple flavors of UNIX to look and feel similar is a necessity for its survival. It allows for application developers to hit a target that is not moving, they may have to deal with some library issues but they don't have to deal with customizing the UI to several different standards too.
At the same time we do need to keep the flexability that *NIX enjoys. That is one of the reasons why I switched to Linux. But I have quite a few friends who want to switch to Linux and just want a standard GUI. They don't want to deal with which window manager, which application manager, etc... They have enough problems deciding what distro to pick. They don't want to take sides in the geek religious wars that are being waged, they just want it to work and consistantly.
Linux needs more standards, especially in the GUI arena. I say keep the religious wars in the background, but allow them to be accessable to those who want to participate. Decide on standards and then send them to the forefront. This will make companies trying to support Linux happier, it will allow for easier customer support, and will draw in a larger group of users.
I agree with you, but it isn't just GNOME that has this problem. There are other programs that have just as many funky dependencies.
This is one of the reasons why I have choosen debian over all the other distributions. I type "apt-get -i program" and I let it deal with figuring out all of the dependencies and conflicts. It sends on stdout what is going on, what it needs to download, and if it will break something it asks if I want to proceed, unless it knows what it needs to download to fix it, in which case it adds that to the list of things to download. After the download it installs and sets it up for me. Quick and easy.
You are correct though, generally it is a pain in the *ss. If the average joe needs to have to deal with all of that, which in most cases they do, then a lot of the inexperienced users will leave.
Posix was a term generated by the government in order to get around some restrictions. Basically, when the government is trying to set standards for what they will purchase and not purchase they cannot use trademarked names, ie they cannot say "We want a system that is UNIX complient." because UNIX is trademarked. What they can say is "We want a system that follows certain guidelines descriped in the Posix standard." and then make the Posix standard restrictive enough to limit the scope of what they buy to UNIX.
Posix is not the generic term for UNIX because even NT is Posix complient (barely, but it is) and we all know that NT is not UNIX.
As someone already mentioned in this thread, the UNIX trademark was sold by AT&T after the anti-trust ruling, AT&T had some major restrictions on anything not related to long distance communications. AT&T sold it to Novell, who sold it to SCO. From what I have been told SCO gave that trademark to some non-profit standards orginization, or something along those lines.
UNIX is not just a trademark but a standardization. In order for a product to legitamitly called UNIX it must follow certain conventions.
A more generic term is *nix, which refers to UNIX like. It covers UNIX, Linux, Minix, and several others.
Never can tell if people are seriously asking questions here or just making statements alluding to things but I will try to answer seriously so please yell at me about how you weren't being serious.
If you look at the growth/decline of other groups what you will see is that Linux is taking some of its market share of the other UNICES, Novell, and what is left of OS/2. SCO used to have the largest *NIX install base on the x86 platform (maybe it still does, don't have exact numbers), now they have just been bought by Caldera (except tarantella).
Another thing one should look at is that the market is growing very rapidly. Theoretically everyone could be growing in a growing market but if one or two companies are growing more rapidly than the others then their market share will increase. Microsoft is growing steadily, but if you look at the numbers roughly 3 years ago you would see that MS had nearly 95% of the market whereas now they have ~87%. They are growing but Linux and especially Apple are directly eating into their marketshare.
Actually I would much rather it stay like this until Linux has a much bigger share of the market. By standing as one platform it give the impression that we stand as one instead as several major groups each with multiple splinter groups.
These numbers are used by marketing groups to decide whether it would be worth while to support an OS. By having the numbers for Linux be Linux and not RedHat, Debian, Caldera, SuSE, etc... there is a better chance that after seeing 4.1% of market and growing at extemely high rates, combined with OSS being a buzz word these days, companies may consider porting their products.
There have been surveys that have been conducted to see which is the most used Linux distribution. I cannot remember where I saw it but if my memory serves me correctly Debian was the most widely used.
Slashdot Mirror
Although at first glance I didn't see Linux either it is mentioned. Then I did a find and it is in fact mentioned.
MainWin is Mainsoft?s Windows platform for UNIX systems including Linux.
The ? is theirs.
This is big. I have heard from friends that the companies that they work for are seriously considering switching over, and some of these companies are REALLY big. By allowing the rumor mill to start up about porting over to Linux and UNIX, MS is hoping to stall this decision.
There are others. Having the rumor mill is just as good FUD as that which they create.
NT is stable, to the first approx. at least. Compaired to the Win9xs it is hands down a better, more stable product, but I have little faith in MS for good reasons.
Last year I was using an NT machine at school to write a paper using MS Word and had a PowerPoint presentation on that which I was writing the paper. Word crashed on the 3 times in five minutes, the first two times slowed the performance noticably and the third time took down NT.
I have also had NT up for a week on my home machine, had it crash after dealing with Mathematica and found out my c: drive was corrupted and NT had to be reinstalled.
I also have done some QA testing on a network appliance. Of the clients that I used, roughly 50% were NT with service pack 4, of those when the network appliance went down so did 1/4 to 1/2 of the them. Meanwhile the Solaris 2.6, SunOS 4.1, SCO, and RedHat boxes were always fine.
I have had my Debian box up for 3 week streches without a hitch. It has never corrupted my hard drive, and never had an application take the entire system down.
On the other hand I do know quite a few people who have never had a problem with their NT box.
It is true that a 5 qubit quantum computer is useless against a 40 bit key, but if they every get the stabilization problem fixed we won't be dealing with 5 or 7 qbit machines because they will scale the things rather quickly. You can only scale so high with the standard mathematical encryption algorithms.
Don't brush quantum computing aside because it will come to nip you in the butt before you know it.
Someone already caught my mistake. Thank you though.
As I explained to the other person I slipped up because we tend to use simulated pion events along with simulated electron events for out work with the detectors. Pion events tend to create fairly useful, easy to interpret information when dealing with detector resolution simulations.
The engineers proof that all odd numbers are prime.
...
1 is prime and odd, 3 is prime and odd, 5 is, 7 is, 9 isn't but that's probably just statisical error, 11 is, 13 is, well that's good enough for me.
The computer scientists proof that all odd numbers are prime.
1 is prime and odd, 3 is, 5 is, 7 is, 7 is, 7 is, 7 is
MSs proof that all odd numbers are prime.
1 is prime and odd, 3 is, 5 is, 7 is, [BSOD!]
Well it was holding true up until it crashed so it must be true.
Sorry my slip up.
Yes, the pions are mesons, composed of two quarks. When running simulations we tend to use both electrons and pions for detector simulations. The simulated data from pions tends to be very easy to compile and use to check whether one detector is better than another. I slipped up because I had been using pion simulationed events in my last project.
Part of the reason for the slow crawl from 2 to 5 to 7 qbits is a stability issue. Right now quantum computers have a lifespan of a mere fraction of a second. The ability to keep the qbits in a stable enough configuration such that they can be used for long periods of time has not been found yet. Once they find out how to stablize it then the scaling becomes relatively easy, so long as they can keep it cooled properly (and for those who don't know were talking liquid helium temperatures ie under 10 Kelvin).
Well then, i guess we'll just have to start generating 40960 bit long keys in order to stay ahead of "them".
You don't seem to get it. A quantum computer in effect "knows" the answer right at the beginning and it just takes a little bit of time to display it. If quantum computers were to ever become stable enough to have the ability to run something like linux at the speed of a Pentium, your 40960 bit long key would be rendered useless in minutes if not seconds.
A very simplistic way to look at it is you have a room with n switches, where n is the number of bits in you encryption, and some lights connected to those switches. In order to have all of the lights on you need to have those switches in a specific order. A regular computer flips the first switch, turns around and checks to see if the lights are on, if not moves on in a binary fassion (there are better ways of doing it but this is just a simplification). It will go through all of the combinations until it hits the correct answer. A quantum computer has the equivelent to a cheat sheet with the answer on it already and it only takes enough time to flip the switches in the correct order.
Standard cryptography today is useless against quantum factorization. Luckly, right now there is no way to keep the particles in a stable configuration. If you think that large bit encryption will keep you safe from quantum computers, when they finally become viable, then you are asking for you messages to be broken.
Remember some of the basic rules of quantum mechanics? That because of the act of observation that the observed changes? Again, a clear sign that something, somewhere is screwed up so completely, but nothing is ever done. Nobody ever stops and says, maybe we need to rethink everything up to this point, because this just shouldn't be happening.
Although one could say that the problem must stem from the Schrodinger Equation, which is one of the four fundamental equations like F=ma, and therefore it must be changed, it also seems to be inexplicably correct. People have stopped and said, maybe we need to rethink everything up to this point, because this just shouldn't be happening. Einstein did, he questioned quantum mechanics until he died. Every question he threw at it, everytime he tried to throw a wrench in the gears, he failed. Some of his questions have only been answered in the past 20 years, but they have been answered.
Quantum mechanics has been poked, prodded, attacked, and verbally abused and yet it keeps on showing us that it is correct. All of the scientific data taken to try and disprove things like the Uncertainty Principle has failed. We cannot do any better than hbar. We have to deal with the duality of waves and particles. All of the evidence shows that it is correct.
Sure there are holes, the standard model for particles is full of them. People are trying their hardest to patch them, a good example is question #4. Supersymmetry was theorized as a fix for the standard model, and it wasn't the first, there were others with funny names like Technicolor.
Einstein placed the cosmological constant into his relativity equation because he wanted the universe to be static rather than expanding or collapsing. Now there is talk of re-introducing the cosmological constant, in a slightly different form, but never less it has been talked about to try and explain some of the holes.
Superstring theory is just another patch, a way of trying to understand the universe. Other theories don't cut it, they have gapping holes. Superstring theory surfaced because something wasn't quite right and someone tried to fix it.
Most of the physics done today is patch work. Something isn't working right so we need to find out why.
Question #4 discusses Supersymmetry. The lab group that I am part of is working with simulating supersymmetry, if you want more information on supersymmetry then go to the University of Colorado NLC group site.
We only hope that the NLC, or Tesla, is built. Right now particle physicists around the world are trying to scrape up the ~$9 billion that it would require to build one of them.
I know that some of you will say, "We already have particle accelerators that can reach TeV (Tera Electron Volts), why do we need the NLC?" The particle accelarators today that can reach TeV, like the Tevatron at Fermilabs, accelerate Hadrons like protons. Although the physics gained from accelerating Hadrons is very useful, it cannot give us the information necessary for supersymmetry. Hadrons are composed of three quarks, and therefore when they collide not all six quarks are hitting at the same time, generally only one quark hits one quark. These kind of reactions are useful but not what we need. We need a particle accelerator that can accelarate leptons, like electrons and pions, to the TeV scale. When electrons hit we are getting the entire center of mass energy at one point at one time. This allows for physics that is extremely useful to supersymmetry.
I am just an undergrad so my understanding of this next aspect is kind of shakey. From what I have been able to understand, hadron colliders are really good for understanding the forces between particles, whereas lepton colliders are really good for discovering new particles. In order to prove, or disprove, supersymmetry we need to see if sparticles (supersymmetric particles) exist, therefore we need lepton colliders. Today the most powerful lepton collider in the US is SLAC (Stanford Linear Accelerator).
I have heard a rumor that in a companion freeware CD, that Sun will release during Solaris 8 update in the fall, KDE and Gnome will both be on it. Just because when you first start up Solaris and it only gives you choices between CDE and Gnome doesn't mean that you cannot use something else.
I personally use Gnome. Why? Because I use debian and try to keep my sources.list file to sites that debian has listed as official debian distributer sites. If debian breaks the non-free away then I will stop this practice, but right now I can get a fully functional and powerful system from official debian sites.
That and I have grown to really appreciate the expanded desktops and the gnome pager. One of my complaints about CDE, and from what I can tell KDE has the same problem, is that although you can have multiple desktops, they are still just 1x1. I use all of my 2x3x3 desktops and the gnome pager has a very clean way of displaying them in a way that I find visually pleasing.
True, a sparc station is more expensive than x86 or Alpha but that doesn't mean that it isn't a viable solution for some.
First of all the Ultra3 should be coming out this year, which will scale up to 1024 SMP, no x86 or Alpha solution are even close to that sort of SMP.
Second, compairing a UltraSPARC to a x86 PC is like compairing a Dodge Ram to a BMW Z3. The Z3 is damn fast, and looks really cool, but if you are doing a job that requires the hauling capasity of a Ram then you definately do not want to use the Z3 to do that job.
Also, I never said that supporting Linux means selling Ultras with Linux on them. I just implied that supporting Linux may mean selling more of their systems. If you need a machine that has 16 or more processors you have to go to one of the major UNIX providors.
Sun seems to be moving towards big servers in the background anyway, don't believe me then just look at the SunRays. Although they won't kill the desktop anytime soon they seem to be more in the range of, Linux and MS cannot handle the load and you don't want to sell your soul for an IBM machine.
Sure Sun may want to sell more workstations if they can, but if they can remove MS from the arena and placing large Sun servers in the background through the use of Linux then they will.
I don't think that this is a death kneel for KDE. Will it mean that more and more standard installations will have Gnome as the primary desktop? Maybe. Just because several major companies have said that they are adopting Gnome as their standard does not necessarly mean that it will happen. First, we have to see Gnome distributed as a standard. Second, see Gnome actually implemented on those distributions. If those two things actually occur, then there is a higher chance for Gnome to take a more high profile existance in the different Linux distros. But just because the major UNICES are using it doesn't not necessarly imply that the other Linux distros will.
Are the big corps trying to 'Bogard' the Linux marketplace? I'd say no. All of the companies listed above realize that UNIX is not ready for the home user. They also seem to understand that they have a worse chance of taking on MS in the low-mid size server market that Linux now has 24% in. By supporting a common user interface between the different UNICES and Linux they stand to gain in many ways, all of which include keeping Linux.
Linux is starting to eat away at MS's marketshare. By supporting a common GUI between Linux and UNIX, there becomes more incentive for a corperation to use Linux on their workstations and have their huge UNIX box in the background with seamless connectivity, no more WinFrame. As people get used to Linux, it will gain more market share in the home market, people don't like to learn more than one system. By making MS not the standard they can sell more of their product.
Are these companies after Linux's marketshare? Not really. The big corps listed in the article know that their product is not a good product for home use. In some of cases it is TOO powerful for workstation use, which is where Linux comes in. Linux can scale downwards very easily, which is something the brand name UNICES cannot do. At the same time the big corps are not worried about Linux taking their market share either, they know that Linux does not scale upwards at the level any of the brand name UNICES can (we all know that it is true, deal with it). Anyway, companies like Sun are more conserned with selling hardware and services anyway, why do you think they released Solaris 8 for free (8 processors or less). In the case of Sun, if pushing Linux means selling more hardware then they are all for it.
This is good for the open-source movement. The support of those big corps will only give more good press to Linux, which can only serve to increase the user base. A large user base means more testers and more programmers. It means that more programs will be written for Linux. This is a good thing for Linux.
By supporting Linux, and other Open Source alternatives, and by creating a single user interface between Solaris and OSS solutions they stand to gain on several grounds.
Sun may not be openly saying this, but considering Solaris 8 is now free (8 or less processors), has GPL'ed StarOffice, and has now openly adopted Gnome, I'll let you connect the dots to see what you see.
The boundary of understanding of physics from at least the perspective of string theory is a relatively well-funded endeavor in the world today.
(begin rant)
Research on string theory itself may be a well funded but some of the aspects that are required to show proof that it is a viable theory are not. Going back to high energy physics, quite a few of the string theories out there (there is more than one), including the one that is considered most likely, require that aspects of particle physics like supersymmetry be true. Unfortunately, the funding of high energy physics fell through the floor after the Superconducting Super Collider project was kill ~$5 billion, out of $20 billion, into the project. Right now the high energy physicists are trying to scrape up ~$9 billion from the US, EU, and Japan in order to build either the NLC (US design) or Tesla (German design). The physicists hope that one of these will be built, but aren't sure if they will get the funding. The two designs allow for colliding leptons at the TeV range, the TeVatron at Fermilabs collides Barions which give different results. If something of this scale is not built then theories like supersymmetry cannot be proven. If supersymmetry cannot be proven then we lose the ability to test the robustness of some of these string theories.
Nuclear physics is a dieing field in the US. Unless you want to work on weapon research you are poorly funded. Other than the new laser over at Lawrence Livermoore Labs, what news have you heard about the advancement of non-weapon nuclear technology?
(end rant)
It seems to me that Katz's main complaint is that many scientists become pawns of corporations. But why is this bad
Scientists in corporations are not necessarily bad. IBM owns the Watts (sp?) lab, which has done wonders to push the technology that we have forward. Corporate sponsorship of science becomes bad for society when that is the only science that occurs. If governments, and the general populous, decide that all science can be handled by corporations, then we will lose a lot of the science conducted for the sake of science.
Although Katz's article seems to take the 'The sky is falling' approach it does bring up some interesting points. Should we allow corporations to fund scientific research conducted in public institutions? Should we allow corporations to dictate what research should be done in public institutions? Can we control/stop it? I believe that this phenominon needs to be looked into to see how it is effecting not just scientific research, but who is going into those fields where corporations are funding the research, and why.
John C. Polanyi. Excerpt from the keynote address to the Canadian Society for the Weizmann Institute of Science, Toronto June 2, 1996.
It is the research for the sake of science, not technology, that pushes uncharted boundries that has the potential to return with the largest benifits to society. By standing on the basic building blocks of the universe we live, in we can see and understand more of that universe. The pure research that is conducted to create solid foundations of understanding ultimately leads to building of that which is most benifitial to society. As a concrete foundation is to a building, pure scientific research for the sake of science is to practical scientific research.
Here is a good example:
Understanding in quantum mechanics allowed for the creation of instruments like electron microscopes and other high precision instruments. These intruments allowed for the discovery of DNA. The understanding of genetics allowed us to modify plasmids in bacteria to produce human insulin, which allows diabetics to live more normal lives. Technologies due to understanding in quantum mechanics also include televisions, computers, cat scans, etc... They are also leading to things like nano-technology.
There is research being conducted today that has the potential to revolutionize our society. Fields like high energy physics have great potential that hardly anyone sees. Through the understanding of the basic particles that make up all matter, and the fundemental forces that bind everything the ability to do great things for society arise. Discoveries in particle physics help out with research in fusion. With a better understanding of gravity we may be able to achieve interstellar space travel. The dicoveries made at high energies allow for a better understanding of how the universe was when it began.
Research in practical areas is good but I believe that Academia should spend more time working on that which could have the greatest impact, ie science for the sake of science.
Most of the other comments on this thread have mentioned how I feel about this stance, as for books, there is some interesting stuff going on with copyrights and books. If a book goes out of print for a certain amount of time, then even if the publishing company still owns the copyright at that time, the writer is given a legal ability to publish the book without the consent of the publishing company. Or something like that.
If the company is not producing or supporting a product and does not pursue illegal reproduction of said product then it might as well be legal. He is different than a regular pirate because his act of piracy does not cost the company that he is pirating the software from any money. He is providing a service that people want and the legitimate companies don't wish to do.
Sun is tired of all of Intels whining and wants to stabe a sharp stick in their eye. For the past year Intel has been whining to the press that Sun isn't backing the IA-64 processor as their primary processor, and that because of that they aren't living up to their agreements. Sun had one of the first working ports on the IA-64, and sees IA-64 as secondary to their UltraSPARC line for Solaris.
Some of the high ranking people in Sun have gotten so fed up with Intels whining that they have gone so far as to say that they may not even release Solaris for IA-64. They are supporting AMD just to piss off Intel.
From what I have been told by people who have used Posix on NT 4.0 there is one "thread" in NT that deals with the Posix commands. If if crashes NT is fine but if you want to use Posix you have to reboot. I personally haven't used the posix capabilities within NT so I am just going off of what I have been told.
The ability to evolve and survive is indeed one of the strongest features of and *NIX system, but there comes a time where rigid standards and enfored policies in the forground are necessary.
For instance OpenGroup has required CDE as part of a distribution in order for it to be called UNIX. Although I personally do not like CDE, the use of a standardized window manager that allows for multiple flavors of UNIX to look and feel similar is a necessity for its survival. It allows for application developers to hit a target that is not moving, they may have to deal with some library issues but they don't have to deal with customizing the UI to several different standards too.
At the same time we do need to keep the flexability that *NIX enjoys. That is one of the reasons why I switched to Linux. But I have quite a few friends who want to switch to Linux and just want a standard GUI. They don't want to deal with which window manager, which application manager, etc... They have enough problems deciding what distro to pick. They don't want to take sides in the geek religious wars that are being waged, they just want it to work and consistantly.
Linux needs more standards, especially in the GUI arena. I say keep the religious wars in the background, but allow them to be accessable to those who want to participate. Decide on standards and then send them to the forefront. This will make companies trying to support Linux happier, it will allow for easier customer support, and will draw in a larger group of users.
I agree with you, but it isn't just GNOME that has this problem. There are other programs that have just as many funky dependencies.
This is one of the reasons why I have choosen debian over all the other distributions. I type "apt-get -i program" and I let it deal with figuring out all of the dependencies and conflicts. It sends on stdout what is going on, what it needs to download, and if it will break something it asks if I want to proceed, unless it knows what it needs to download to fix it, in which case it adds that to the list of things to download. After the download it installs and sets it up for me. Quick and easy.
You are correct though, generally it is a pain in the *ss. If the average joe needs to have to deal with all of that, which in most cases they do, then a lot of the inexperienced users will leave.
Posix was a term generated by the government in order to get around some restrictions. Basically, when the government is trying to set standards for what they will purchase and not purchase they cannot use trademarked names, ie they cannot say "We want a system that is UNIX complient." because UNIX is trademarked. What they can say is "We want a system that follows certain guidelines descriped in the Posix standard." and then make the Posix standard restrictive enough to limit the scope of what they buy to UNIX.
Posix is not the generic term for UNIX because even NT is Posix complient (barely, but it is) and we all know that NT is not UNIX.
As someone already mentioned in this thread, the UNIX trademark was sold by AT&T after the anti-trust ruling, AT&T had some major restrictions on anything not related to long distance communications. AT&T sold it to Novell, who sold it to SCO. From what I have been told SCO gave that trademark to some non-profit standards orginization, or something along those lines.
UNIX is not just a trademark but a standardization. In order for a product to legitamitly called UNIX it must follow certain conventions.
A more generic term is *nix, which refers to UNIX like. It covers UNIX, Linux, Minix, and several others.
Never can tell if people are seriously asking questions here or just making statements alluding to things but I will try to answer seriously so please yell at me about how you weren't being serious.
If you look at the growth/decline of other groups what you will see is that Linux is taking some of its market share of the other UNICES, Novell, and what is left of OS/2. SCO used to have the largest *NIX install base on the x86 platform (maybe it still does, don't have exact numbers), now they have just been bought by Caldera (except tarantella).
Another thing one should look at is that the market is growing very rapidly. Theoretically everyone could be growing in a growing market but if one or two companies are growing more rapidly than the others then their market share will increase. Microsoft is growing steadily, but if you look at the numbers roughly 3 years ago you would see that MS had nearly 95% of the market whereas now they have ~87%. They are growing but Linux and especially Apple are directly eating into their marketshare.
Actually I would much rather it stay like this until Linux has a much bigger share of the market. By standing as one platform it give the impression that we stand as one instead as several major groups each with multiple splinter groups.
These numbers are used by marketing groups to decide whether it would be worth while to support an OS. By having the numbers for Linux be Linux and not RedHat, Debian, Caldera, SuSE, etc... there is a better chance that after seeing 4.1% of market and growing at extemely high rates, combined with OSS being a buzz word these days, companies may consider porting their products.
There have been surveys that have been conducted to see which is the most used Linux distribution. I cannot remember where I saw it but if my memory serves me correctly Debian was the most widely used.