Although you have good points for number of machines running Brand Y OS, it is fairly hard to count multiple installs off of one license, or downloads from sites that don't publish the information.
Also by discussing the number of licenses sold they can address the issue of how each platform has, is essence, cashed in on the growth of the market, along with keeping track of how the market grows. The figures that they are stating are extremely intertwined with measurable growth of the market. These numbers are very important for the market and its trends.
Once again, Linux doesn't fit into the normal boxes used to judge these things
Linux isn't the only one, if you go to Sun Microsystems web site you can see the statistics for the number of Solaris 8 downloads, which is over 700,000 right now, and you can install it on multiple clients. Also, other than really big companies, not many places follow the actual licenses given them by MS and will install the product on several machines.
These numbers ARE a very good guestimate of where the market is right now. Frankly, I am very glad to see MS drop below the 90% control range.
you enjoy arguing with yourself. You have a thread that is composed of you responding to your own comments that goes four deep. I don't know about anyone else, but that seems a bit strange.
As has been mentioned by a previous post, you can always get the latest and greatest things through the unstable version.
Sure I have been waiting sense March for potato to be released as stable, but I am willing to wait the extra amount of time because I know that it takes that extra time to make sure that the distribution is in fact what they claim it to be, ie stable. When you rely on the bleeding edge technology you can get cut really badly, and the rigorous testing that Debian does to make sure that there are no show stopping bugs when they release their next stable product.
I agree that some of the other distros carry newer code in their official release versions already. Will I use those distros? No, because I understand that it takes a lot of time to go through a proper QA cycle. From what I have been able to tell only Debian takes the time and effert to do that.
Their "lateness" is considered elegant because they are willing to wait to make sure that their product is of the highest quality.
I use Debian because I do not need the bleeding edge technology. I need something that works, well. I enjoy the ability to type apt-get update, and apt-get dist-upgrade and know that I can trust that which I am getting is not going to break on me.
Frankly, I won't even consider buying it unless it uses RPN. Not only do I believe that it is faster than other methods out there but I love being able to say that my calculator does math like Yoda speaks.
<Yoda_Accent>One Two plus, hmm.</Yoda_Accent>
I have a real problem with languages that try to handle garbage collection for me.
Sure if you are a good programmer and actually do garbage collection. As a physics major doing research using computer programs written by decent programmers who don't do their own garbage collection, I become very glad when I see a program written in Java because it has garbage collection. There is one program that the group that I am in uses, after a couple of hours it has leaked over a gig of memory. Trust me, it is no fun when several of the more powerful machines in the lab are down because there is a desparite rush for another large set of the events that this program simulates. Sure it is possible to create memory leaks in Java, but it isn't as easy to do on accedent.
To each his own. I do agree that for an object oriented language, the idea of having everything in one file is a bit screwy.
I have yet to work with Win NT 5.0 err 2000, but NT 3.51 was actually a properly designed OS. It was stable and a fairly decent OS. Why does NT 4.0 suck then, because consumers wanted speed, which is one thing that 3.51 was not good at. Make the lines between the layers a bit fuzzy, ok a lot fuzzy, for improved performance and look at what happened.
The original design for NT was done right. Marketing stepped in and it went down the toilet. I feel sorry for Mr. Cutler for having to watch the marketroids mutate his product into the freakish monstrosity it is today.
Yes... cheap missions that fail is a bad thing and expensive missions that succeed is a good thing.
...
I think it's good that things are being taken more seriously, and we should slow down and do things right the first time.
Been there, done that. The public is impatient, and if they don't see NASA releasing things at a steady pace they get bored and cut their funding. That is the reason why the moved to the faster/better/cheaper approach. NASA is in a bind, if they take too long to send out a mission the public loses interest and cuts their funding, on the other hand if their mission fails then the public gets mad and cuts their funding. Fun little game isn't it.
NASA went to the "better, faster, cheaper" approach after they were threatened with cuts. Basically the public is impatient and therefore wants NASA to do stuff NOW. Due to this pressure NASA moved from building huge monolithic projects that had a very high chance of success but launched very rarely, to smaller cheaper projects with a smaller chance of success and launched more often.
Although I agree that it is a better idea to be somewhere in the middle, we shall see what the general public thinks. They are in sort of a bind here, if they take too long between missions then the public gets bored and cuts their funding, but if their mission fails then the public get angry and their funding gets cut.
<rant>
Until the public realizes the importance of the space program reason has not won. There is even a split in the slashdot readers over whether it should be publicly or privately funded. I personally believe that the government should fund pure scientific research for the sake of science, and that if we leave it up to private organizations we will lose the research that is conducted for the sake of science and only get science for the sake of profit.
If NASA were to receive more money so that it could hire more scientists and engineers, especially in the QA side, we would be able to pull off faster/better instead of faster/cheaper.
</rant>
I have been following the computer industry very carefully. How about you? If take care to notice, in the past three years MS went from ~95% of the market share in the home user market to >90%, and is shrinking rapidly. Apple has retrieved most of the market it has lost, I believe that it is standing at ~6-8% and Linux has ~4%. As for server markets, although NT is the largest for the small servers Linux grew 700% last year, in case you didn't notice, and is expect to continue with extremely hight growth (not 700% but more than double) and NT/2000 are expect to stay relatively stangenet. Meanwhile in the mid-large size market NT made a brief appearence until it people found out that it couldn't take the load and went back to their 10 year old machines that were reliable (there is a reason why Sun still supports SunOS 4.*).
Yes there is a backlash, especially in the younger generations. I am in college and a lot of the people I know are planning on not upgrading any more MS products. In fact a good portion have either switched to Linux or Mac or are seriously thinking about it. Why? The answer I get the most is that they DO NOT TRUST MS to build a good product. As the younger generations start to buy more computers for themselves we will see a swing away from MS.
not to increase their 99.999% marketshare.
I'm curious where you managed to pick up that number. Just because 99% of the major companies use some MS products does NOT mean that they own 99% of the market. Just because the marketing department needs PowerPoint and Word does NOT mean that the rest of the company uses MS.
They are shoting themselves in the foot. If you would wake up and look you would see that there are quite a few dissatisfied people out there.
The only place that religion has in public schools today is history classes. I agree that there should be none of this equal time (even if the Chuch of the Sub-Genius gets to place "Fsck 'em if they can't take a joke" next to the ten commandments) or school prayer.
Time to play devils advocate.
Evolution is a confirmed, Objective fact. Religion, and creation "science" is pure fantasy.
Evolution is only confirmed for as long as there has been written history discussing populations of either humans, animals, plants etc.... Before that it is a logical conclusion though induction that it existed before we recorded the documents need to show that it exists. Proofs through induction are not "objective fact" they are truths for all intensive purposes but we cannot truely PROVE them with the tools we have today.
Before people start babbling on about how we have the theory of gravity, that is fact up until now. That theory, the inverse square law, may not work at distances smaller than 1cm (generally at those distances the electromagnetic force starts to interfere too much, and there are theories about extra dimentions etc...). Even the strongest theories may have holes in areas that we have not reached.
creationism, although mathematically and physically highly inprobable, nearly impossible, is still a theory.
Religion, the crutch that it is, has no place in public life, mine or anyone elses.
Do I believe religion is a crutch, yes. Do you, yes. Do my friends, yes. I also believe that society today cannot exist without some sort of religious crutch, whether it be Christianity, Islam, Wica, Paganism, etc.... There are too many people out there that I believe do not have the ability to hand existance without belief in some sort of divine influence. The feeble minded and weak willed are two that without some sort of crutch would not be able to stand. Some might argue that society would be better if we just removed them, but at this point it is not our decision to weed from the gene pool unnaturally. It is a defence mechanism to prevent insanity, most people don't like, or unable to handle, the consept of mortality. We have to deal with this crutch until the humanity is able to handle enlightenment (not the window manager).
Just to pull out a quote that I am sure that everyone has heard (warning I may not have the wording exact). "I may not agree with what you say but I will die defending your right to say it." That is roughly my stance on religion, I don't agree but will support their ability to believe.
MS has been getting some really bad publicity, and the people are starting to get angry at them. As people hit the liscensing problems and have to deal with MS tech support I have a feeling that there will be a huge backlash on MS.
It would be smart of MS to try and bury this before more people encounter it. The long they wait the more the public will turn against them. MS is fighting an OS war from two sides. Their power users are moving to Linux and their beginers are moving to Apple. Moves like this one, that are obviously just greedy, will only cause more people to switch over to other solutions. If they were smart they would concentrate on keeping the market share that they have instead of trying to scam a buck off of their users.
Oh well, I shed no tears when MS loses market share. If they want to shoot themselves in the foot they are more that welcome to in my book.
I think that as StarOffice gets more publicity, and now that it is owned by a company that virtually everyone knows about, more IT managers will think of that kind of solution (at least I hope).
I have a feeling that this will turn out like the Office 97 fiasco. The first copies sold could only save as an Office 97 file, this caused a large enough outcry to cause MS to add the ability to save as older documents. As the IT managers start hitting the liscensing problem they will first complain, and if that doesn't help, switch to another solution.
MS is going to need to wisen up or lose out on the market.
can't believe how obsessively Slashdot and the over-zealous Linux bigots delight in legal issues and Microsoft.
If you look at the title for Slashdot you will see that it says "News for Nerds. Stuff that matters." Considering that MS has control of >80% of the consumer market, when legal action, especially anti-competitive legal action, is used to threaten MSs hold the general nerd/geek population DOES care, it is the stuff that matters.
I personally do care about what the EU/DOJ is considering when it comes to legal action against MS because the implications are huge. Although I have some petty hopes about MS getting a huge slap in the face, there is more to it than that. If the EU imposes a huge tariff, or if it is broken up by the DOJ, then I want to know. There is a lot a stake here and if something big goes down.
It may have missed everyones attention here but 99% of all major companies USE Microsoft products.
True, but 99% of all "major" companies use UNIX too, including MS. Why, because it is a tried and true system that is known to be the best for larger systems, whether it be a server, database or whatever. Last I checked MS HotMail ran a BSD firewall and a Solaris box in the background. This is because NT CANNOT handle the load nor is it secure enough. There is a good reason why MS doesn't have a presence in the Mid-Large scale servers, and it isn't because people haven't tried using them, its because they cannot do what is needed. Even the mindspring results showed that MS cannot compete in the larger server market, x86 Solaris served three times as many pages as NT.
Although some companies are not planning a on deploying Linux right away, 90% of the undergraduate computer science majors that I know use Linux on their home machines. The UGrad computer lab for computer science majors at my college is 50% Linux and 50% Solaris 8. A good number of the physics, math, and engineering undergraduates that I know have switched, or are planning on switching, to Linux, and the trend is increasing at alarming rates. Most of these people will not switch back to Windows if they can avoid it because they just don't TRUST MS products.
Sure the average user does not have Linux skills, but when the majority of the technical intellectuals are beginning to being raised on *NIX you can expect a swing to occur soon. People have the ability to adapt, if Linux or Mac or whatever takes over, they will learn how to use it.
I have been unable to get koi8 to work properly, and it has been a while sence my last class so bear with me, if possible. Eezvenitya pozhalusta. No, kogda ya slishal ob MIR, ya slisha shta eto ne-robotat oochen hrasho. Ya ne buil ne ckazal y americantsui yest MIR, no kogda ruskiye kosmonotui ili americantsui avstronutui eedyot v Mirye, ya dumal shta MIR ochen stari, chyetirnadtsyet lyet, ee kogda budit chelovyeki ymet (to die?)? Russki engeneri eto ochen hrasho ee MIR buil hrasho. Rossiya, net, mir nuzhnal MIR. MIR ochen stari, kogda budit chelovyeki ymet?
I don't know if that is readable. I attempted to make it some what phonetic. Sorry if it is unreadble, and I know my grammer and use of declentions are both poor.
What ever happened to MIR's 5 year lifespan? The thing is 14 years old, and MIRcorp wants to start sending people up in 2003. I understand that it is an engineering masterpiece, and that it is a piece of space history but why can't it be donated to some country in the same way that SkyLab was donated to Australia, ie as flamming space junk falling from the sky.
Every time I start to get SOME semblence of hope that it will burn up and fall to earth something like this pops up. It has done a great job for the many years that we have used it but it became a death trap a couple years ago. How long till someone dies up there? Perhaps we should conduct a slashdot pole, or take bets, on when we will have the first death on spacestation MIR. We should not be risking the lives of the scientists with aluminum wires, or duct tape, or whatever they happen to use. I am all for science for the sake of science, but if we lose someone up there because of arogance that will bring huge negative press and the space program will lose money. I don't want that to happen.
Perhaps it is time I dropped studying particle physics and go into optics. Then maybe I can construct a high powered ground based laser cannon like the one in Arizona and give it a final farewell. It has served us well but it is time for us to let it rest in peace.
One reason is that there are minor differences in the different distributions. These differences are at times large enough to cause a product to act erractically on one distro, while working perfectly on another.
Companies find that it is easier to test the product using only one distribution and then release it saying it works using that distribution. By doing this, if they say that it works on Distro A and then someone using Distro B comes along saying that it doesn't work the company can tell them that they didn't test it, which is why they didn't say it would work with Distro B.
Today the Linux distribution that has the spotlight is RedHat, so companies use it to test with.
I have heard many a great thing about IE, how it is faster and more stable etc... and I am sure that it is, but I have several major problems with it.
The first is that I find that it, and its mail program, are major security hazzards. I know that I can turn the stuff off, not use outlook, but I cannot trust MS to make a secure program anymore. I don't want to have to worry about some vengeful ActiveX programer screwing with my computer, or having to download a patch to fix some gapping security hole all the time.
The second is that "blowing your whole leg off" problem. I would much rather have an application die a peaceful death, not take out NT or my window manager, frequently then to crash rarely but have it be a major screw up and take down my system. I have had too many problems with corrupted data on my disk from programs taking down the OS.
Although I am sure that IE is more stable and more powerful than Netscape I have had very little to no problems with it sense I upgraded to Communicator 4.72 (and yes I do run with Java Script and Java ON). I regularly run it with more than 6 windows open, all symultaniously downloading and rendering pages, and I haven't had it crash on me sense I upgraded. On the Ultra 1 that I use at work, I have only had it crash on me once in two months, which I immediately reopened and went on with my business.
As for it being old technology, so what, it does what I need it to do. I want programs that are set up properly, ie run in the correct level that they should. I don't want some extremely fast and powerful browser, or office suite for that matter, that runs in rung zero and takes down my computer if it has a problem. That is why I use Netscape and Corel, if they but my computer doesn't go with them.
I'm not saying that everyone should be using Netscape, just that there are some of us who use it for good reason.
Basically, neutrinos are believed to be either RH or LH (depending on whether it is a baryon or anti-baryon), but not "mixed".
I thought neutrinos couldn't be LH.
I also must admit that I am somewhat biased, considering I am doing some research with SUSY and the NLC. You are right, massive neutrinos are not the death of the SM, there are other things that are a problem, like the Higgs Boson's mass diverging. Also, with quite a few theorists today believing in Unified Field Theory, a new fudge factor needs to be entered because the Higgs Boson does not unite all of the forces at one energy.
I have a feeling that fermilabs was uneffected by the slashdot effect. Any scientific data that they need to retrieve from other sources are likely going to be on Internet 2 like they are. They have a seperate network backbone to where they need to go, and massive computers.
The tau neutrino is PREDICTED by the SM! So how it's detection break it? Also, massive neutrinos are easily accomadated by the SM too, so that's a non-issue.
The tau-neutrino is predicted by the standard model but massive neutrinos are not. In fact, the standard model cannot predict, or account for, mass without the Higgs Field Particle, which has not been observed yet. Masses to neutrinos is not part of the basic SM, the different theories are additions to the SM, or in geek speak, modules. There are two discussions one whether neutrinos have masses, there is the massive neutrino theory and the light neutrino theory. Neither have been fully accepted into the SM.
The SM has been broken for quite some time anyway, every sense the introduction of the Higgs Field particle. There have been numerous attempts to remove the SM because of its flaws. The only reason we haven't thrown it out yet is that there is nothing else that everyone can agree on as being a better truth. Whether it be Technicolor, SUSY, mSUGRA, SUSY with mSUGRA, etc...
The whole mass issue has been a problem with the standard model, that and unification theory. First it didn't predict/account for masses. The fudge factor that was introduced, the Higgs Field particle, which eliviate that problem had a diverging predicted mass for itself. Now most people agree that neutrinos have mass, but are they light or massive. Even with the Higgs boson all of the forces do not unite at a given energy, which is another problem.
(begin rant) The Standard Model is broken, it has been broken, and as it stands it will always be broken. It's time to get a new model. Whoops the government probably won't support the NLC because the amount of money that the US would have to contribute in this multinational effert is equal to 2-3% of the our militaries budget. Now what? (end rant)
First, neutrinos can interact with matter. They happen to be inert and therefore will not go out of their way to but they do have energy, and therefore can effect/interact with matter. People build detectors for neutrinos deep in the earth because it has a better chance of not interacting with anything. Assuming it is massless then only the weak and the strong nuclear forces can effect the neutrino, and considering the distances required for interaction are on such a small scale.
Photons interacts more readly partially because they are the electro-magnetic force particle. It also generally contains more energy and therefore its interactions are more pronounced, IE the transfering of an electron from one energy level to the next.
As for the theory that the "lack" of matter being explained by neutrinos having mass had been dropped last I checked. There are other discussions on where the dark matter is, the machos and the wimps.
This is great news for particle physics. Hopefully the discovery of predicted tau neutrino will show Congress that particle physics is still making discoveries, and therefore fund it.
As for the comment on the standard model breaking down, it broke down when Feinman was still alive and doing major work. The introduction of the Higgs Field heralded this breaking.
One problem with the standard model is that it doesn't account for the masses of the particles by itself. A graduate student, Higgs, predicted that there was a particle that emenated a "mass field", this was dubbed the Higgs Field particle. This fixed up many of the complications mathematically, but created its own problems. If one uses the standard model to predict the mass of the Higgs Field particle it diverges (heads towards infinity) which is unphysical. There are theories like supersymmetry that are being introduced to fix these problems with the standard model.
Other interesting things that can occur now that the Tau Neutrino has been discovered more research on figuring out whether or not neutrinos have mass will become easier. The basic premis behind the test is that the group over at Fermilab will send mu-neutrinos, or now tau-neutrinos, down a long tunnel. If the the mu-neutrinos, or tau-neutrinos, deteriorate into electron-neutrinos or change polarization, then we know that they have mass. Knowing whether neutrinos have mass is VERY important to knowing which new model is correct.
Slashdot Mirror
Ahh, but the number does give us some information about the problem. It gives us a rough minimum number of machines with Linux on them.
Although you have good points for number of machines running Brand Y OS, it is fairly hard to count multiple installs off of one license, or downloads from sites that don't publish the information.
Also by discussing the number of licenses sold they can address the issue of how each platform has, is essence, cashed in on the growth of the market, along with keeping track of how the market grows. The figures that they are stating are extremely intertwined with measurable growth of the market. These numbers are very important for the market and its trends.
Once again, Linux doesn't fit into the normal boxes used to judge these things
Linux isn't the only one, if you go to Sun Microsystems web site you can see the statistics for the number of Solaris 8 downloads, which is over 700,000 right now, and you can install it on multiple clients. Also, other than really big companies, not many places follow the actual licenses given them by MS and will install the product on several machines.
These numbers ARE a very good guestimate of where the market is right now. Frankly, I am very glad to see MS drop below the 90% control range.
you enjoy arguing with yourself. You have a thread that is composed of you responding to your own comments that goes four deep. I don't know about anyone else, but that seems a bit strange.
I know it was offtopic but it seems a bit odd.
As has been mentioned by a previous post, you can always get the latest and greatest things through the unstable version.
Sure I have been waiting sense March for potato to be released as stable, but I am willing to wait the extra amount of time because I know that it takes that extra time to make sure that the distribution is in fact what they claim it to be, ie stable. When you rely on the bleeding edge technology you can get cut really badly, and the rigorous testing that Debian does to make sure that there are no show stopping bugs when they release their next stable product.
I agree that some of the other distros carry newer code in their official release versions already. Will I use those distros? No, because I understand that it takes a lot of time to go through a proper QA cycle. From what I have been able to tell only Debian takes the time and effert to do that.
Their "lateness" is considered elegant because they are willing to wait to make sure that their product is of the highest quality.
I use Debian because I do not need the bleeding edge technology. I need something that works, well. I enjoy the ability to type apt-get update, and apt-get dist-upgrade and know that I can trust that which I am getting is not going to break on me.
Frankly, I won't even consider buying it unless it uses RPN. Not only do I believe that it is faster than other methods out there but I love being able to say that my calculator does math like Yoda speaks.
<Yoda_Accent>One Two plus, hmm.</Yoda_Accent>
I have a real problem with languages that try to handle garbage collection for me.
Sure if you are a good programmer and actually do garbage collection. As a physics major doing research using computer programs written by decent programmers who don't do their own garbage collection, I become very glad when I see a program written in Java because it has garbage collection. There is one program that the group that I am in uses, after a couple of hours it has leaked over a gig of memory. Trust me, it is no fun when several of the more powerful machines in the lab are down because there is a desparite rush for another large set of the events that this program simulates. Sure it is possible to create memory leaks in Java, but it isn't as easy to do on accedent.
To each his own. I do agree that for an object oriented language, the idea of having everything in one file is a bit screwy.
I have yet to work with Win NT 5.0 err 2000, but NT 3.51 was actually a properly designed OS. It was stable and a fairly decent OS. Why does NT 4.0 suck then, because consumers wanted speed, which is one thing that 3.51 was not good at. Make the lines between the layers a bit fuzzy, ok a lot fuzzy, for improved performance and look at what happened.
The original design for NT was done right. Marketing stepped in and it went down the toilet. I feel sorry for Mr. Cutler for having to watch the marketroids mutate his product into the freakish monstrosity it is today.
Moody wrote the ABC article that is the subject of this rebuttal posted today.
Here is the slashdot article on Moody's editorial.
Yes... cheap missions that fail is a bad thing and expensive missions that succeed is a good thing.
...
I think it's good that things are being taken more seriously, and we should slow down and do things right the first time.
Been there, done that. The public is impatient, and if they don't see NASA releasing things at a steady pace they get bored and cut their funding. That is the reason why the moved to the faster/better/cheaper approach. NASA is in a bind, if they take too long to send out a mission the public loses interest and cuts their funding, on the other hand if their mission fails then the public gets mad and cuts their funding. Fun little game isn't it.
NASA went to the "better, faster, cheaper" approach after they were threatened with cuts. Basically the public is impatient and therefore wants NASA to do stuff NOW. Due to this pressure NASA moved from building huge monolithic projects that had a very high chance of success but launched very rarely, to smaller cheaper projects with a smaller chance of success and launched more often.
Although I agree that it is a better idea to be somewhere in the middle, we shall see what the general public thinks. They are in sort of a bind here, if they take too long between missions then the public gets bored and cuts their funding, but if their mission fails then the public get angry and their funding gets cut.
<rant>
Until the public realizes the importance of the space program reason has not won. There is even a split in the slashdot readers over whether it should be publicly or privately funded. I personally believe that the government should fund pure scientific research for the sake of science, and that if we leave it up to private organizations we will lose the research that is conducted for the sake of science and only get science for the sake of profit.
If NASA were to receive more money so that it could hire more scientists and engineers, especially in the QA side, we would be able to pull off faster/better instead of faster/cheaper.
</rant>
Dude.. where have you been for the past 10 years?
I have been following the computer industry very carefully. How about you? If take care to notice, in the past three years MS went from ~95% of the market share in the home user market to >90%, and is shrinking rapidly. Apple has retrieved most of the market it has lost, I believe that it is standing at ~6-8% and Linux has ~4%. As for server markets, although NT is the largest for the small servers Linux grew 700% last year, in case you didn't notice, and is expect to continue with extremely hight growth (not 700% but more than double) and NT/2000 are expect to stay relatively stangenet. Meanwhile in the mid-large size market NT made a brief appearence until it people found out that it couldn't take the load and went back to their 10 year old machines that were reliable (there is a reason why Sun still supports SunOS 4.*).
Yes there is a backlash, especially in the younger generations. I am in college and a lot of the people I know are planning on not upgrading any more MS products. In fact a good portion have either switched to Linux or Mac or are seriously thinking about it. Why? The answer I get the most is that they DO NOT TRUST MS to build a good product. As the younger generations start to buy more computers for themselves we will see a swing away from MS.
not to increase their 99.999% marketshare.
I'm curious where you managed to pick up that number. Just because 99% of the major companies use some MS products does NOT mean that they own 99% of the market. Just because the marketing department needs PowerPoint and Word does NOT mean that the rest of the company uses MS.
They are shoting themselves in the foot. If you would wake up and look you would see that there are quite a few dissatisfied people out there.
The only place that religion has in public schools today is history classes. I agree that there should be none of this equal time (even if the Chuch of the Sub-Genius gets to place "Fsck 'em if they can't take a joke" next to the ten commandments) or school prayer.
Time to play devils advocate.
Evolution is a confirmed, Objective fact. Religion, and creation "science" is pure fantasy.
Evolution is only confirmed for as long as there has been written history discussing populations of either humans, animals, plants etc.... Before that it is a logical conclusion though induction that it existed before we recorded the documents need to show that it exists. Proofs through induction are not "objective fact" they are truths for all intensive purposes but we cannot truely PROVE them with the tools we have today.
Before people start babbling on about how we have the theory of gravity, that is fact up until now. That theory, the inverse square law, may not work at distances smaller than 1cm (generally at those distances the electromagnetic force starts to interfere too much, and there are theories about extra dimentions etc...). Even the strongest theories may have holes in areas that we have not reached.
creationism, although mathematically and physically highly inprobable, nearly impossible, is still a theory.
Religion, the crutch that it is, has no place in public life, mine or anyone elses.
Do I believe religion is a crutch, yes. Do you, yes. Do my friends, yes. I also believe that society today cannot exist without some sort of religious crutch, whether it be Christianity, Islam, Wica, Paganism, etc.... There are too many people out there that I believe do not have the ability to hand existance without belief in some sort of divine influence. The feeble minded and weak willed are two that without some sort of crutch would not be able to stand. Some might argue that society would be better if we just removed them, but at this point it is not our decision to weed from the gene pool unnaturally. It is a defence mechanism to prevent insanity, most people don't like, or unable to handle, the consept of mortality. We have to deal with this crutch until the humanity is able to handle enlightenment (not the window manager).
Just to pull out a quote that I am sure that everyone has heard (warning I may not have the wording exact). "I may not agree with what you say but I will die defending your right to say it." That is roughly my stance on religion, I don't agree but will support their ability to believe.
One last thing.
Religion should not be in school!
MS has been getting some really bad publicity, and the people are starting to get angry at them. As people hit the liscensing problems and have to deal with MS tech support I have a feeling that there will be a huge backlash on MS.
It would be smart of MS to try and bury this before more people encounter it. The long they wait the more the public will turn against them. MS is fighting an OS war from two sides. Their power users are moving to Linux and their beginers are moving to Apple. Moves like this one, that are obviously just greedy, will only cause more people to switch over to other solutions. If they were smart they would concentrate on keeping the market share that they have instead of trying to scam a buck off of their users.
Oh well, I shed no tears when MS loses market share. If they want to shoot themselves in the foot they are more that welcome to in my book.
I think that as StarOffice gets more publicity, and now that it is owned by a company that virtually everyone knows about, more IT managers will think of that kind of solution (at least I hope).
I have a feeling that this will turn out like the Office 97 fiasco. The first copies sold could only save as an Office 97 file, this caused a large enough outcry to cause MS to add the ability to save as older documents. As the IT managers start hitting the liscensing problem they will first complain, and if that doesn't help, switch to another solution.
MS is going to need to wisen up or lose out on the market.
can't believe how obsessively Slashdot and the over-zealous Linux bigots delight in legal issues and Microsoft.
If you look at the title for Slashdot you will see that it says "News for Nerds. Stuff that matters." Considering that MS has control of >80% of the consumer market, when legal action, especially anti-competitive legal action, is used to threaten MSs hold the general nerd/geek population DOES care, it is the stuff that matters.
I personally do care about what the EU/DOJ is considering when it comes to legal action against MS because the implications are huge. Although I have some petty hopes about MS getting a huge slap in the face, there is more to it than that. If the EU imposes a huge tariff, or if it is broken up by the DOJ, then I want to know. There is a lot a stake here and if something big goes down.
It may have missed everyones attention here but 99% of all major companies USE Microsoft products.
True, but 99% of all "major" companies use UNIX too, including MS. Why, because it is a tried and true system that is known to be the best for larger systems, whether it be a server, database or whatever. Last I checked MS HotMail ran a BSD firewall and a Solaris box in the background. This is because NT CANNOT handle the load nor is it secure enough. There is a good reason why MS doesn't have a presence in the Mid-Large scale servers, and it isn't because people haven't tried using them, its because they cannot do what is needed. Even the mindspring results showed that MS cannot compete in the larger server market, x86 Solaris served three times as many pages as NT.
Although some companies are not planning a on deploying Linux right away, 90% of the undergraduate computer science majors that I know use Linux on their home machines. The UGrad computer lab for computer science majors at my college is 50% Linux and 50% Solaris 8. A good number of the physics, math, and engineering undergraduates that I know have switched, or are planning on switching, to Linux, and the trend is increasing at alarming rates. Most of these people will not switch back to Windows if they can avoid it because they just don't TRUST MS products.
Sure the average user does not have Linux skills, but when the majority of the technical intellectuals are beginning to being raised on *NIX you can expect a swing to occur soon. People have the ability to adapt, if Linux or Mac or whatever takes over, they will learn how to use it.
I have been unable to get koi8 to work properly, and it has been a while sence my last class so bear with me, if possible.
Eezvenitya pozhalusta. No, kogda ya slishal ob MIR, ya slisha shta eto ne-robotat oochen hrasho. Ya ne buil ne ckazal y americantsui yest MIR, no kogda ruskiye kosmonotui ili americantsui avstronutui eedyot v Mirye, ya dumal shta MIR ochen stari, chyetirnadtsyet lyet, ee kogda budit chelovyeki ymet (to die?)?
Russki engeneri eto ochen hrasho ee MIR buil hrasho. Rossiya, net, mir nuzhnal MIR. MIR ochen stari, kogda budit chelovyeki ymet?
I don't know if that is readable. I attempted to make it some what phonetic. Sorry if it is unreadble, and I know my grammer and use of declentions are both poor.
What ever happened to MIR's 5 year lifespan? The thing is 14 years old, and MIRcorp wants to start sending people up in 2003. I understand that it is an engineering masterpiece, and that it is a piece of space history but why can't it be donated to some country in the same way that SkyLab was donated to Australia, ie as flamming space junk falling from the sky.
Every time I start to get SOME semblence of hope that it will burn up and fall to earth something like this pops up. It has done a great job for the many years that we have used it but it became a death trap a couple years ago. How long till someone dies up there? Perhaps we should conduct a slashdot pole, or take bets, on when we will have the first death on spacestation MIR. We should not be risking the lives of the scientists with aluminum wires, or duct tape, or whatever they happen to use. I am all for science for the sake of science, but if we lose someone up there because of arogance that will bring huge negative press and the space program will lose money. I don't want that to happen.
Perhaps it is time I dropped studying particle physics and go into optics. Then maybe I can construct a high powered ground based laser cannon like the one in Arizona and give it a final farewell. It has served us well but it is time for us to let it rest in peace.
One reason is that there are minor differences in the different distributions. These differences are at times large enough to cause a product to act erractically on one distro, while working perfectly on another.
Companies find that it is easier to test the product using only one distribution and then release it saying it works using that distribution. By doing this, if they say that it works on Distro A and then someone using Distro B comes along saying that it doesn't work the company can tell them that they didn't test it, which is why they didn't say it would work with Distro B.
Today the Linux distribution that has the spotlight is RedHat, so companies use it to test with.
I have heard many a great thing about IE, how it is faster and more stable etc... and I am sure that it is, but I have several major problems with it.
The first is that I find that it, and its mail program, are major security hazzards. I know that I can turn the stuff off, not use outlook, but I cannot trust MS to make a secure program anymore. I don't want to have to worry about some vengeful ActiveX programer screwing with my computer, or having to download a patch to fix some gapping security hole all the time.
The second is that "blowing your whole leg off" problem. I would much rather have an application die a peaceful death, not take out NT or my window manager, frequently then to crash rarely but have it be a major screw up and take down my system. I have had too many problems with corrupted data on my disk from programs taking down the OS.
Although I am sure that IE is more stable and more powerful than Netscape I have had very little to no problems with it sense I upgraded to Communicator 4.72 (and yes I do run with Java Script and Java ON). I regularly run it with more than 6 windows open, all symultaniously downloading and rendering pages, and I haven't had it crash on me sense I upgraded. On the Ultra 1 that I use at work, I have only had it crash on me once in two months, which I immediately reopened and went on with my business.
As for it being old technology, so what, it does what I need it to do. I want programs that are set up properly, ie run in the correct level that they should. I don't want some extremely fast and powerful browser, or office suite for that matter, that runs in rung zero and takes down my computer if it has a problem. That is why I use Netscape and Corel, if they but my computer doesn't go with them.
I'm not saying that everyone should be using Netscape, just that there are some of us who use it for good reason.
Is this so that Lucky Charms can have their url contain purple horseshoes, blue diamonds, green clovers, etc...
Basically, neutrinos are believed to be either RH or LH (depending on whether it is a baryon or anti-baryon), but not "mixed".
I thought neutrinos couldn't be LH.
I also must admit that I am somewhat biased, considering I am doing some research with SUSY and the NLC. You are right, massive neutrinos are not the death of the SM, there are other things that are a problem, like the Higgs Boson's mass diverging. Also, with quite a few theorists today believing in Unified Field Theory, a new fudge factor needs to be entered because the Higgs Boson does not unite all of the forces at one energy.
I have a feeling that fermilabs was uneffected by the slashdot effect. Any scientific data that they need to retrieve from other sources are likely going to be on Internet 2 like they are. They have a seperate network backbone to where they need to go, and massive computers.
The tau-neutrino is predicted by the standard model but massive neutrinos are not. In fact, the standard model cannot predict, or account for, mass without the Higgs Field Particle, which has not been observed yet. Masses to neutrinos is not part of the basic SM, the different theories are additions to the SM, or in geek speak, modules. There are two discussions one whether neutrinos have masses, there is the massive neutrino theory and the light neutrino theory. Neither have been fully accepted into the SM.
The SM has been broken for quite some time anyway, every sense the introduction of the Higgs Field particle. There have been numerous attempts to remove the SM because of its flaws. The only reason we haven't thrown it out yet is that there is nothing else that everyone can agree on as being a better truth. Whether it be Technicolor, SUSY, mSUGRA, SUSY with mSUGRA, etc...
The whole mass issue has been a problem with the standard model, that and unification theory. First it didn't predict/account for masses. The fudge factor that was introduced, the Higgs Field particle, which eliviate that problem had a diverging predicted mass for itself. Now most people agree that neutrinos have mass, but are they light or massive. Even with the Higgs boson all of the forces do not unite at a given energy, which is another problem.
(begin rant)
The Standard Model is broken, it has been broken, and as it stands it will always be broken. It's time to get a new model. Whoops the government probably won't support the NLC because the amount of money that the US would have to contribute in this multinational effert is equal to 2-3% of the our militaries budget. Now what?
(end rant)
Few small problems (I'm sure mine does too).
First, neutrinos can interact with matter. They happen to be inert and therefore will not go out of their way to but they do have energy, and therefore can effect/interact with matter. People build detectors for neutrinos deep in the earth because it has a better chance of not interacting with anything. Assuming it is massless then only the weak and the strong nuclear forces can effect the neutrino, and considering the distances required for interaction are on such a small scale.
Photons interacts more readly partially because they are the electro-magnetic force particle. It also generally contains more energy and therefore its interactions are more pronounced, IE the transfering of an electron from one energy level to the next.
As for the theory that the "lack" of matter being explained by neutrinos having mass had been dropped last I checked. There are other discussions on where the dark matter is, the machos and the wimps.
This is great news for particle physics. Hopefully the discovery of predicted tau neutrino will show Congress that particle physics is still making discoveries, and therefore fund it.
As for the comment on the standard model breaking down, it broke down when Feinman was still alive and doing major work. The introduction of the Higgs Field heralded this breaking.
One problem with the standard model is that it doesn't account for the masses of the particles by itself. A graduate student, Higgs, predicted that there was a particle that emenated a "mass field", this was dubbed the Higgs Field particle. This fixed up many of the complications mathematically, but created its own problems. If one uses the standard model to predict the mass of the Higgs Field particle it diverges (heads towards infinity) which is unphysical. There are theories like supersymmetry that are being introduced to fix these problems with the standard model.
Other interesting things that can occur now that the Tau Neutrino has been discovered more research on figuring out whether or not neutrinos have mass will become easier. The basic premis behind the test is that the group over at Fermilab will send mu-neutrinos, or now tau-neutrinos, down a long tunnel. If the the mu-neutrinos, or tau-neutrinos, deteriorate into electron-neutrinos or change polarization, then we know that they have mass. Knowing whether neutrinos have mass is VERY important to knowing which new model is correct.