These were all the rage in the late '70s and early 80s:
A chip puller (looked like an oversized tweezer with prongs bent inward)
A chip setter. Get the complete set that would handle small, medium and large chips (8, 16, and 32 leg chips)
The classic memory testing tools: a hair dryer with the nozzle stepped down with duct tape and cardboard so you could reliably heat just one chip at a time, and a can of freon spray with the long tube so you could cool the chip you just brought to failure temperature before moving to the next one
The assortment of hemostats, forceps, scalpels and other surgical paraphenalia that we used to use to clear tractorfeed jams and snarled ribbons [So I don't count so good any more... Four is close enough to three when you consider very small values of the larger integer...]
In the mid 80s, tennis balls with strings attached were added to the Compleat Geek's toolkit. These were used when installing cheapernet cable in false ceilings.
But I would say most if not all features in MS office are there because someone, somewhere needs those features on a regular basis.
You do Bill Gates and Company a great disservice in not recognizing the entrepreneural spirit that has guided their endeavors. And in fact you confuse it with altruistic motivations, which most assuredly are not present at the higher levels of Redmond's hierarchy (wrt corporate operations-- the motiviation for individual charities is a separate issue).
Most if not all features in MS Office are there because they helped sell the software to someone, somewhere, at some point in time. Many can be traced directly to marketing campaigns targeting Lotus, Quattro Pro, WordPerfect, and WordStar. Several have never been developed beyond the capabilities needed to provide a credible sales demo to a corporate client.
Please avoid confusing altruism with good entrepreneurism. It makes you look silly, and it annoys the pig.
Among the features that MS introduced into WinWord in the early 1990s were "revision marks" (which parent post refers to) and "master documents". Both got a lot of hoopla at the time they were introduced, as ways in which WinWord was superior to WordPerfect (then the market leader), or WordStar (which still had a big slice of the market).
However both these features were developed only to the point where they looked good in the sales demos. Professional offices and small businesses that switched from Word Perfect to MS Word found that their office workers couldn't learn to use these new tools properly. They consistently put the blame on internal resistance to change and difficulty in finding and affording suitable training for their secretarial and administrative personnel. MS kept mum about the other problems with these advanced word processing capabilities.
We now know that MS's approach to both document versioning and master documents has some fatal technical weaknesses. WRT to "revision marks", the parser is too weak to handle more than a few cycles of revision-- if a document needs to be sent to a dozen people for revision, an experienced Admin Assistant knows that it will get garbaged somewhere in the process if they have to use the "revision marks" technology; if the document is a policy or procedure that will need to be revised every few months to stay current, you've got the same situation. The point of failure is usually at the AA's desk, and this peon usually doesn't know why the document failed and often still thinks its because they screwed it up somehow. Usually they reconstruct the thing by hand editing all this stuff that was supposed to happen automagically, often working from hardcopy printouts of emails, etc. In an ideal world of working contemporary office technologies there would never be a need to be print and store these draft documents; in the current world of MS Office technologies, experienced AAs do keep hardcopy and disk backups of all the intermediate drafts because that has often saved their bacon.
Both "revision marks" and "master documents" are great ideas, but MS has not fulfilled their implementation. Both need to be made less brittle and more robust, and both need better metamanagement tools (governing who can contribute, in what ways, etc) and decent training in appropriate usage.
if Microsoft don't implement ODF they are rejecting open standards. If they do, they're embracing and extending.
They can't win, can they?
Microsoft has spent more than 25 years developing its reputation as the business partner who will steal your ideas then stab you in the back and dump your carcass in the ditch as they continue their triumphant shamble down the Information Highway.
Microsoft has put more time, money, and effort into developing this reputation than they have put into developing any of their own home-grown, built from scratch, products. They fully deserve this reputation; they have truly earned it. Don't you dare water down their achievement with an indirect excuse.
These are not the poor little adorable kittens you would like us to think they are.
It [any Ajax based office suite] may work for purely network-based apps such as email/IM, but falls apart very quickly for UI-intensive apps.
Why do you say this? I don't understand. This msg is not a troll.
The user interface on an Ajax app can be completely encapsulated by the client's browser and local programming-- there is nothing in the (G)UI that requires the client to contact the server. My understanding is that this is the way it is normally done. Typical office apps-- word processing, spreadsheets, presentation development software, etc-- maintain all data storage locally during use, so once a user has chosen the data and module they want to work with, the UI and everything else runs independently of the server.
So is parent an ineffective piece of FUD? Or is there a hole in my understanding of Ajax?
Exposure to low levels of radiation increases the rate of mutation of viruses. Migratory birds passing through the Chernobyl region expose any avian influenza virus they carry for a significant period of time, while the virus is actively reproducing under ideal conditions in their bodies. Many of these birds are headed to high latitude Summer nesting areas, where they hob-nob with other birds who come in from all over the northern hemisphere, and then disperse again in the Fall.
From post-Soviet Russia, diseases from Chernobyl come to visit YOU!
The wording of their TOS has made me realize that my understanding of "use of service" wrt web pages is ambiguous.
I am certainly using my web host's service when I change something on my web site. Obviously their TOS applies.
But am I using any web host's services when I am browsing sites published by others? I don't think so. It seems to me that there is a parallel here to billboards: passers-by who read the billboard are not in any kind of service contract relationship with the owner of the billboard or the advertiser who put up the content. There is no TOS for the reader of the billboard or of the web page. And if there were, the TOS would have to be presented on every web page that a casual browser might encounter for it to be binding, and that is certainly absurd.
the idea of Microsoft being "doomed" as the Slashdot article states is patently absurd. Microsoft is such a massive empire; their fall would take decades...
That's the traditional logic for large companies that are being run according to traditions of sound business practice. However Microsoft failed to make the transition from the small business entrepreneural mindset to the kind of stable broad pyramid of investments that characterize a solid multinational business concern. MS's revenue base is extremely narrow for its size; it has way too much in liquid and near liquid assets that should be in long term investments; etc, etc. There really is no way to predict MS's future performance since it is a one-of-a-kind business. It might be able to weather massive storms; it also might crumple like IT&T did, rapidly deflate like the Trump Empire did, or collapse from invisible internal rot like Enron did. There just is no way to know. We're talking Microsoft here, not a traditionally solid concern like IBM, Intel, AMD, etc.
...and a long and consistant string of terrible screw-ups.
There is a lot of evidence in support of an argument that Microsoft has been making a long and consistent string of terrible screw-ups since Win98 and Office 97... both in coding and in the courts. If Microsoft had played its cards better, it could be a much more solid and influential company than it is now.
I find it quite ambiguous when people debate whether Linux is "desktop ready" or not. What does that mean?
It means that too many people have figured out that "Total Cost of Ownership" is a pile of bullFUD, and it is time for the astroturfers and 'Doze fanbois to move on to some other grand sound bite.
On almost any other topic, this here post would be flamebait. But the topic is Windows vs Linux, so the only thing that this post will generate is maybe some heat and smoke (no bright light of actual flame, no not any more)
Since a fair wodge of Novell's money comes from selling Windows software, I comfortably predict that this won't happen any time soon.
Since Novell has a fair wodge of business savvy, I agree. The Windows licenses are sunk costs and removing Windows completely would only add more cost to that, with no measurable benefit. So long as the Windows partitions don't get in the way of doing work, it would be a bad business decision to get rid of them.
TFA is pure FUD. It might be useful to know how many Novell employees still mostly use Windows, but there is no value in knowing how many have dual boot capability.
Oh wait... a lot of businesses making the switch to Linux will be dual booting for some time. Looks like Novell is well positioned to provide them with experienced technical support. I wonder if that is accidental or deliberate <sg>?
A good office chair cost $350 13 years ago, when I got mine. So perhaps $700 today. It will have a multitude of flight controls that are so easy to microadjust that you will have no trouble getting into the habit of changing height, tilt, etc just a little bit once an hour or so. Those minor changes in posture and pressure points make a huge difference in comfort during long sessions. They also make a huge difference in productivity-- people who don't get physically stressed and tired don't make as many goofs.
The computer desk doesn't matter so long as the keyboard and monitor are at the right heights. See if you can trade the engineer's desk in on a really good chair and a particle board desk that fits.
The engineer's desk probably has a very smooth drawing surface of high grade clear grain hardwood-- and perhaps somebody in the Graphics Department would appreciate it.
...a person may believe in an authority where the empirical method cannot be applied and is not applicable, and still be a true scientist. Indeed, there are many such.
Science is a religion because science is done with the faith that knowing more about the world will make humanity better...
IMO you are confusing science with that particular kind of optimistic technology that led to the fantastic slogan of "better living through chemistry", among other things.
The remainder of your comments might apply, more or less, to the educators, technicians, and engineers who work with technology (which is often derived from knowledge gained through scientific inquiry). But it is important to make a distinction between these technologists and scientists, since the mind set of the technologist is very different from that of the scientist. It is especially important right now, because a lot of technologists seem to be under the impression that what they do is science.
It is as if a lot of violinists began to think that they were actually instrument craftsmen. Yet no amount of practicing the fingerings and bowings is going to give a musician any skill at all with woodcarving tools.
The primary article of faith of the true believers in science is that science can discover everything that matters. Or to put it another way, that if something cannot be studied via the scientific method, it either isn't important or doesn't exist.
This is actually an excellent litmus test that distinguishes those technicians, engineers, and educators who believe in a Supreme Scientific Authority from the true scientists. True scientists are persons 1) who do not believe in any authority at all but require that the empirical method be applied (and continually reapplied) to everything whereever it can be applied; and 2) who recognize that the most important questions any of us ever face cannot be addressed by the scientific method.
In short, the true scientist recognizes that although he can apply the scientific method to many things, he cannot successfully apply it to his own life.
One way of stating the Copenhagen interpretation is to say that human perception and cognition is such that there is no possible way we can comprehend the universe; the most we can do is build models that are somewhat useful in certain limited ways. This strongly implies that the scientist must learn to live with the discomfort of always being surrounded by impenetrable mysteries.
It's being done. I volunteered at Free Geek for a while, and followed along on the discussions about how to spec out bundles of refurbished computer equipment destined for foreign schools. It is a headache assuring that you aren't going to spend money on shipping stuff that becomes junk soon after arrival. That what you ship is repairable or replaceable in the field. That what you ship is going to be reasonably immune to temperature variations and dirty power. Etc.
More of this should be done. But recognize that a computer with a 250+ watt power supply isn't going to be useable where a $100 laptop running on pedal power will work just fine.
I could go on, but I'll just summarize: in the last 5 years, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has given more than $600 million to an assortment of AIDS research and prevention projects. It is pretty damn clear that Gates would gladly have given more, if the research and prevention programs could have absorbed any more.
Compare this to the $29 million being devoted to developing an education instrument. The cost of the $100 laptop is a pittance compared to the costs of fighting AIDS or the other major problems of our times. Yet this $29 million, small as it is, could be of critical importance in helping the children who have been orphaned by AIDS to grow up to be literate, educated contributors to their societies and cultures.
Both Gates and Negroponte have earned high honors for their charitable works. Each is contributing from his unique strengths to making this world a better place. Neither would be able to do what the other one is doing: it is simply not in their natures. We should honor them both.
And I think we in turn should be charitable, and not pay too much attention to the all too human verbal sniping that is going on between these persons.
If this were done (using quasar emissions as a random number source for encryption), what would prevent a third party from surreptitiously generating pseudonoise locally that would mask the quasar emissions? I.e.:
Assume a spy Alice and her controller Bob are both based in the city Xerces, and are using quasar emission encryption [QEE] (I'm copyrighting that acronym-- you have a non-exlcusive license to use it in any way you want). If Xercians broadcast an apparently random stream that drowned out the quasar emissions that Alice and Bob were using, they could break the QEE if they could also learn the method of synchronization that was being used. Even if they were unable to break the QEE, they could assure that QEE messages failed by broadcasting their own "noise" over just Bob's area or just Alice's area (so Alice and Bob would not be receiving the same QEE code).
I do think the idea of having a universally available true random number generator is fantastic! (That would be a QTRNG-- copyright by author, all rights hereby released under non-exclusive license to everybody.) Building a radio receiver tuned to a quasar wouldn't add much to the cost of a PC and having true randomness on tap on desktop machines would open up a lot of new possibilities for Monte Carlo simulations, games, etc. Coupled with access to a third party clock, it would be possible for multiple computers to be using the same random number stream, which could lead to some very interesting things. This is all very good, and I want to see it happen.
(BTW, these methods cannot be patented since as you read this, the above paragraph becomes prior art in the public domain.)
I think that QTRNG could lead to some really interesting applications where the security of the random number stream isn't a big concern, but I don't see how an effective QEE could be developed.
Can you briefly (like 100 words or less, without technobabble) say why the Apache project has been such a quiet success and would you please do that, if you can? And if that doesn't seem possible, could you briefly say why?
I'm looking for a couple of things: first, you are an expert in FOSS and your opinion about whether managing communications was more significant than managing bugs, etc, would be of great personal interest. But I'm also hoping for something pithy that can be used at a college Board of Directors meeting to guide the focus of discussions about FOSS adoption to more useful areas than the FUD FUD FUD of ToC arguments.
Bugs are caused by developers. Period. To say anything else is just passing the buck.
That perspective is way too simplistic.
Developers write buggy code and developers will always write buggy code. That is an inherent weakness of wet processors. Bug reduction is obtained by managing the code production in ways that promote early diagnosis and intervention of bugs.
Microsoft has always sucked at this. Microsoft's code management has always been driven by marketing, and not by engineering.
Nuclear energy... can go head to head with oil and natural gas for cost effective power plants.
This is only true if you use accounting systems rooted in early 20th century manufacturing models, that don't look at the costs of handling long term waste.
The costs of Yucca Mountain are known and could be factored in-- except that YM will only store a fraction of the LTW that is already in temporary storage. Considering the difficulty in finding the YM site, all that can be said right now is that burying LTW is going to be so expensive that it probably will never be used for all the currently existing LTW, let alone future needs.
Other LTW solutions are blue sky at this point. Nobody knows the engineering for vitrification with deep ocean storage and no sane person would even consider using our current state of rocket science to move this stuff off earth.
To use an apt pseudo-accounting phrase that Microsoft introduced a while back, the Total Cost of Ownership of fission power technology is astronomical, with post production costs many times greater than production and distribution costs.
While fission power appears to be the only viable short term answer, it is not going to be a good solution and it will generate long term waste storage problems that are in many ways much worse than global warming.
Get in touch with
Free Geek of
Portland, Oregon. They've been doing this kind of thing for years.
The Free Geek model is to acquire older computers by donation, many from corporations, city governments and so forth, then refurbish them. The donators can claim a tax credit and have the assurance that no data will survive the hard disk wiping, reformatting, and testing process. Volunteers are used in stripping the incoming machines down to the component level, testing all the boards, CPUs, etc separately, then building up refurbished computers from the the pieces that survive the testing process. The computers are loaded with Linux and whatever FOSS they can handle. Some go out as "grant boxes" to other non-profits that need them; many are given as rewards to the volunteers (general volunteers earn a box after 20 hours of service; those in the Build program get to keep the 6th system they put together). There is a Computers For Kids program that might be of particular interest to you.
Components that fail the testing are recycled. Cases are smashed and sold as scrap metal, CPUs and the fingers cut from circuit boards are tossed in a bin and eventually sold for the gold content; etc. All this requires quite a bit of volunteer labor. Young people provide a lot of that labor.
Without Linux, this approach wouldn't be workable. Fortunately for Free Geek, Linux is a lot less demanding of system resources than Windows, and you can build up a very nice Debian with all the office and student basics from healthy components that simply don't meet the latest Windows requirements.
Well, science defines reality as the set of observables.
You have just asserted one helluva big assumption, and one that is clearly false.
Look into the Copenhagen Interpretation that has been a major influence on basic physics and cosmology for about 75 years. Heres teh wpedia:
Wikipedia on CI. Or just adopt Paul Dirac's dictum for a successful career in physics: "Shut up and calculate!"
A loose phrasing of the core of CI is that human limitations in observations are such that the universe cannot be understood; physics and cosmology can at best develop models that approximate the real world. But the real processes are forever hidden by observational limitations like the Heisenberg principle and the mysteries behind the values of Plancks constant and even Pi.
To paraphrase someone (Feynman?), the CI means that not only is reality more complex than we think it is, it is more complex than we can possibly ever understand.
To put this in context, it means that science recognizes that it has nothing whatever to say about reality; science is an endeavor to develop a more elegant model of a largish cluster of blackbox phenomena.
Slashdot Mirror
These were all the rage in the late '70s and early 80s:
In the mid 80s, tennis balls with strings attached were added to the Compleat Geek's toolkit. These were used when installing cheapernet cable in false ceilings.
But I would say most if not all features in MS office are there because someone, somewhere needs those features on a regular basis.
You do Bill Gates and Company a great disservice in not recognizing the entrepreneural spirit that has guided their endeavors. And in fact you confuse it with altruistic motivations, which most assuredly are not present at the higher levels of Redmond's hierarchy (wrt corporate operations-- the motiviation for individual charities is a separate issue).
Most if not all features in MS Office are there because they helped sell the software to someone, somewhere, at some point in time. Many can be traced directly to marketing campaigns targeting Lotus, Quattro Pro, WordPerfect, and WordStar. Several have never been developed beyond the capabilities needed to provide a credible sales demo to a corporate client.
Please avoid confusing altruism with good entrepreneurism. It makes you look silly, and it annoys the pig.
Among the features that MS introduced into WinWord in the early 1990s were "revision marks" (which parent post refers to) and "master documents". Both got a lot of hoopla at the time they were introduced, as ways in which WinWord was superior to WordPerfect (then the market leader), or WordStar (which still had a big slice of the market).
However both these features were developed only to the point where they looked good in the sales demos. Professional offices and small businesses that switched from Word Perfect to MS Word found that their office workers couldn't learn to use these new tools properly. They consistently put the blame on internal resistance to change and difficulty in finding and affording suitable training for their secretarial and administrative personnel. MS kept mum about the other problems with these advanced word processing capabilities.
We now know that MS's approach to both document versioning and master documents has some fatal technical weaknesses. WRT to "revision marks", the parser is too weak to handle more than a few cycles of revision-- if a document needs to be sent to a dozen people for revision, an experienced Admin Assistant knows that it will get garbaged somewhere in the process if they have to use the "revision marks" technology; if the document is a policy or procedure that will need to be revised every few months to stay current, you've got the same situation. The point of failure is usually at the AA's desk, and this peon usually doesn't know why the document failed and often still thinks its because they screwed it up somehow. Usually they reconstruct the thing by hand editing all this stuff that was supposed to happen automagically, often working from hardcopy printouts of emails, etc. In an ideal world of working contemporary office technologies there would never be a need to be print and store these draft documents; in the current world of MS Office technologies, experienced AAs do keep hardcopy and disk backups of all the intermediate drafts because that has often saved their bacon.
Both "revision marks" and "master documents" are great ideas, but MS has not fulfilled their implementation. Both need to be made less brittle and more robust, and both need better metamanagement tools (governing who can contribute, in what ways, etc) and decent training in appropriate usage.
if Microsoft don't implement ODF they are rejecting open standards. If they do, they're embracing and extending.
They can't win, can they?
Microsoft has spent more than 25 years developing its reputation as the business partner who will steal your ideas then stab you in the back and dump your carcass in the ditch as they continue their triumphant shamble down the Information Highway.
Microsoft has put more time, money, and effort into developing this reputation than they have put into developing any of their own home-grown, built from scratch, products. They fully deserve this reputation; they have truly earned it. Don't you dare water down their achievement with an indirect excuse.
These are not the poor little adorable kittens you would like us to think they are.
It [any Ajax based office suite] may work for purely network-based apps such as email/IM, but falls apart very quickly for UI-intensive apps.
Why do you say this? I don't understand. This msg is not a troll.
The user interface on an Ajax app can be completely encapsulated by the client's browser and local programming-- there is nothing in the (G)UI that requires the client to contact the server. My understanding is that this is the way it is normally done. Typical office apps-- word processing, spreadsheets, presentation development software, etc-- maintain all data storage locally during use, so once a user has chosen the data and module they want to work with, the UI and everything else runs independently of the server.
So is parent an ineffective piece of FUD? Or is there a hole in my understanding of Ajax?
Exposure to low levels of radiation increases the rate of mutation of viruses. Migratory birds passing through the Chernobyl region expose any avian influenza virus they carry for a significant period of time, while the virus is actively reproducing under ideal conditions in their bodies. Many of these birds are headed to high latitude Summer nesting areas, where they hob-nob with other birds who come in from all over the northern hemisphere, and then disperse again in the Fall.
From post-Soviet Russia, diseases from Chernobyl come to visit YOU!
The wording of their TOS has made me realize that my understanding of "use of service" wrt web pages is ambiguous.
I am certainly using my web host's service when I change something on my web site. Obviously their TOS applies.
But am I using any web host's services when I am browsing sites published by others? I don't think so. It seems to me that there is a parallel here to billboards: passers-by who read the billboard are not in any kind of service contract relationship with the owner of the billboard or the advertiser who put up the content. There is no TOS for the reader of the billboard or of the web page. And if there were, the TOS would have to be presented on every web page that a casual browser might encounter for it to be binding, and that is certainly absurd.
the idea of Microsoft being "doomed" as the Slashdot article states is patently absurd. Microsoft is such a massive empire; their fall would take decades...
That's the traditional logic for large companies that are being run according to traditions of sound business practice. However Microsoft failed to make the transition from the small business entrepreneural mindset to the kind of stable broad pyramid of investments that characterize a solid multinational business concern. MS's revenue base is extremely narrow for its size; it has way too much in liquid and near liquid assets that should be in long term investments; etc, etc. There really is no way to predict MS's future performance since it is a one-of-a-kind business. It might be able to weather massive storms; it also might crumple like IT&T did, rapidly deflate like the Trump Empire did, or collapse from invisible internal rot like Enron did. There just is no way to know. We're talking Microsoft here, not a traditionally solid concern like IBM, Intel, AMD, etc.
There is a lot of evidence in support of an argument that Microsoft has been making a long and consistent string of terrible screw-ups since Win98 and Office 97... both in coding and in the courts. If Microsoft had played its cards better, it could be a much more solid and influential company than it is now.
Optimist: The thumb drive is half empty! Pessimist: The thumb drive is half full...
addition to sig:
Auditor: You've bought a thumbdrive that is twice as big as what you need...
I find it quite ambiguous when people debate whether Linux is "desktop ready" or not. What does that mean?
It means that too many people have figured out that "Total Cost of Ownership" is a pile of bullFUD, and it is time for the astroturfers and 'Doze fanbois to move on to some other grand sound bite.
On almost any other topic, this here post would be flamebait. But the topic is Windows vs Linux, so the only thing that this post will generate is maybe some heat and smoke (no bright light of actual flame, no not any more)
This is only another proof that successful companies don't waste money on removing facilities that are no longer useful but don't get in the way.
An emerging migration strategy from Windows to Linux is
Oh wait... you know that. You're only trolling, right?
[too early-- need more coffee...]
Since a fair wodge of Novell's money comes from selling Windows software, I comfortably predict that this won't happen any time soon.
Since Novell has a fair wodge of business savvy, I agree. The Windows licenses are sunk costs and removing Windows completely would only add more cost to that, with no measurable benefit. So long as the Windows partitions don't get in the way of doing work, it would be a bad business decision to get rid of them.
TFA is pure FUD. It might be useful to know how many Novell employees still mostly use Windows, but there is no value in knowing how many have dual boot capability.
Oh wait... a lot of businesses making the switch to Linux will be dual booting for some time. Looks like Novell is well positioned to provide them with experienced technical support. I wonder if that is accidental or deliberate <sg>?
The chair. Seriously.
Agree completely.
A good office chair cost $350 13 years ago, when I got mine. So perhaps $700 today. It will have a multitude of flight controls that are so easy to microadjust that you will have no trouble getting into the habit of changing height, tilt, etc just a little bit once an hour or so. Those minor changes in posture and pressure points make a huge difference in comfort during long sessions. They also make a huge difference in productivity-- people who don't get physically stressed and tired don't make as many goofs.
The computer desk doesn't matter so long as the keyboard and monitor are at the right heights. See if you can trade the engineer's desk in on a really good chair and a particle board desk that fits.
The engineer's desk probably has a very smooth drawing surface of high grade clear grain hardwood-- and perhaps somebody in the Graphics Department would appreciate it.
Outside of the Utilitarian-Narcissistic Church, do parent's assertions and postulates have any meaning?
I think not.
Yes, that needs to be added to the credo.
Science is a religion because science is done with the faith that knowing more about the world will make humanity better...
IMO you are confusing science with that particular kind of optimistic technology that led to the fantastic slogan of "better living through chemistry", among other things.
The remainder of your comments might apply, more or less, to the educators, technicians, and engineers who work with technology (which is often derived from knowledge gained through scientific inquiry). But it is important to make a distinction between these technologists and scientists, since the mind set of the technologist is very different from that of the scientist. It is especially important right now, because a lot of technologists seem to be under the impression that what they do is science.
It is as if a lot of violinists began to think that they were actually instrument craftsmen. Yet no amount of practicing the fingerings and bowings is going to give a musician any skill at all with woodcarving tools.
The primary article of faith of the true believers in science is that science can discover everything that matters. Or to put it another way, that if something cannot be studied via the scientific method, it either isn't important or doesn't exist.
This is actually an excellent litmus test that distinguishes those technicians, engineers, and educators who believe in a Supreme Scientific Authority from the true scientists. True scientists are persons 1) who do not believe in any authority at all but require that the empirical method be applied (and continually reapplied) to everything whereever it can be applied; and 2) who recognize that the most important questions any of us ever face cannot be addressed by the scientific method.
In short, the true scientist recognizes that although he can apply the scientific method to many things, he cannot successfully apply it to his own life.
One way of stating the Copenhagen interpretation is to say that human perception and cognition is such that there is no possible way we can comprehend the universe; the most we can do is build models that are somewhat useful in certain limited ways. This strongly implies that the scientist must learn to live with the discomfort of always being surrounded by impenetrable mysteries.
What about shipping your old stuff overseas?
It's being done. I volunteered at Free Geek for a while, and followed along on the discussions about how to spec out bundles of refurbished computer equipment destined for foreign schools. It is a headache assuring that you aren't going to spend money on shipping stuff that becomes junk soon after arrival. That what you ship is repairable or replaceable in the field. That what you ship is going to be reasonably immune to temperature variations and dirty power. Etc.
More of this should be done. But recognize that a computer with a 250+ watt power supply isn't going to be useable where a $100 laptop running on pedal power will work just fine.
Five years ago, the Gates foundation recieved accolades for donating $100 million to AIDS prevention and research.
Four years ago, the Gates foundation pledged another $100 million to the fight against AIDS through an entirely different agency.
Two years ago, the Gates foundation put up an additional $50 million.
I could go on, but I'll just summarize: in the last 5 years, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has given more than $600 million to an assortment of AIDS research and prevention projects. It is pretty damn clear that Gates would gladly have given more, if the research and prevention programs could have absorbed any more.
Compare this to the $29 million being devoted to developing an education instrument. The cost of the $100 laptop is a pittance compared to the costs of fighting AIDS or the other major problems of our times. Yet this $29 million, small as it is, could be of critical importance in helping the children who have been orphaned by AIDS to grow up to be literate, educated contributors to their societies and cultures.
Both Gates and Negroponte have earned high honors for their charitable works. Each is contributing from his unique strengths to making this world a better place. Neither would be able to do what the other one is doing: it is simply not in their natures. We should honor them both.
And I think we in turn should be charitable, and not pay too much attention to the all too human verbal sniping that is going on between these persons.
If this were done (using quasar emissions as a random number source for encryption), what would prevent a third party from surreptitiously generating pseudonoise locally that would mask the quasar emissions? I.e.:
Assume a spy Alice and her controller Bob are both based in the city Xerces, and are using quasar emission encryption [QEE] (I'm copyrighting that acronym-- you have a non-exlcusive license to use it in any way you want). If Xercians broadcast an apparently random stream that drowned out the quasar emissions that Alice and Bob were using, they could break the QEE if they could also learn the method of synchronization that was being used. Even if they were unable to break the QEE, they could assure that QEE messages failed by broadcasting their own "noise" over just Bob's area or just Alice's area (so Alice and Bob would not be receiving the same QEE code).
I do think the idea of having a universally available true random number generator is fantastic! (That would be a QTRNG-- copyright by author, all rights hereby released under non-exclusive license to everybody.) Building a radio receiver tuned to a quasar wouldn't add much to the cost of a PC and having true randomness on tap on desktop machines would open up a lot of new possibilities for Monte Carlo simulations, games, etc. Coupled with access to a third party clock, it would be possible for multiple computers to be using the same random number stream, which could lead to some very interesting things. This is all very good, and I want to see it happen.
(BTW, these methods cannot be patented since as you read this, the above paragraph becomes prior art in the public domain.)
I think that QTRNG could lead to some really interesting applications where the security of the random number stream isn't a big concern, but I don't see how an effective QEE could be developed.
Can you briefly (like 100 words or less, without technobabble) say why the Apache project has been such a quiet success and would you please do that, if you can? And if that doesn't seem possible, could you briefly say why?
I'm looking for a couple of things: first, you are an expert in FOSS and your opinion about whether managing communications was more significant than managing bugs, etc, would be of great personal interest. But I'm also hoping for something pithy that can be used at a college Board of Directors meeting to guide the focus of discussions about FOSS adoption to more useful areas than the FUD FUD FUD of ToC arguments.
Bugs are caused by developers. Period. To say anything else is just passing the buck.
That perspective is way too simplistic.
Developers write buggy code and developers will always write buggy code. That is an inherent weakness of wet processors. Bug reduction is obtained by managing the code production in ways that promote early diagnosis and intervention of bugs.
Microsoft has always sucked at this. Microsoft's code management has always been driven by marketing, and not by engineering.
Nuclear energy... can go head to head with oil and natural gas for cost effective power plants.
This is only true if you use accounting systems rooted in early 20th century manufacturing models, that don't look at the costs of handling long term waste.
The costs of Yucca Mountain are known and could be factored in-- except that YM will only store a fraction of the LTW that is already in temporary storage. Considering the difficulty in finding the YM site, all that can be said right now is that burying LTW is going to be so expensive that it probably will never be used for all the currently existing LTW, let alone future needs.
Other LTW solutions are blue sky at this point. Nobody knows the engineering for vitrification with deep ocean storage and no sane person would even consider using our current state of rocket science to move this stuff off earth.
To use an apt pseudo-accounting phrase that Microsoft introduced a while back, the Total Cost of Ownership of fission power technology is astronomical, with post production costs many times greater than production and distribution costs.
While fission power appears to be the only viable short term answer, it is not going to be a good solution and it will generate long term waste storage problems that are in many ways much worse than global warming.
Get in touch with Free Geek of Portland, Oregon. They've been doing this kind of thing for years.
The Free Geek model is to acquire older computers by donation, many from corporations, city governments and so forth, then refurbish them. The donators can claim a tax credit and have the assurance that no data will survive the hard disk wiping, reformatting, and testing process. Volunteers are used in stripping the incoming machines down to the component level, testing all the boards, CPUs, etc separately, then building up refurbished computers from the the pieces that survive the testing process. The computers are loaded with Linux and whatever FOSS they can handle. Some go out as "grant boxes" to other non-profits that need them; many are given as rewards to the volunteers (general volunteers earn a box after 20 hours of service; those in the Build program get to keep the 6th system they put together). There is a Computers For Kids program that might be of particular interest to you.
Components that fail the testing are recycled. Cases are smashed and sold as scrap metal, CPUs and the fingers cut from circuit boards are tossed in a bin and eventually sold for the gold content; etc. All this requires quite a bit of volunteer labor. Young people provide a lot of that labor.
Without Linux, this approach wouldn't be workable. Fortunately for Free Geek, Linux is a lot less demanding of system resources than Windows, and you can build up a very nice Debian with all the office and student basics from healthy components that simply don't meet the latest Windows requirements.
Well, science defines reality as the set of observables.
You have just asserted one helluva big assumption, and one that is clearly false.
Look into the Copenhagen Interpretation that has been a major influence on basic physics and cosmology for about 75 years. Heres teh wpedia: Wikipedia on CI. Or just adopt Paul Dirac's dictum for a successful career in physics: "Shut up and calculate!"
A loose phrasing of the core of CI is that human limitations in observations are such that the universe cannot be understood; physics and cosmology can at best develop models that approximate the real world. But the real processes are forever hidden by observational limitations like the Heisenberg principle and the mysteries behind the values of Plancks constant and even Pi.
To paraphrase someone (Feynman?), the CI means that not only is reality more complex than we think it is, it is more complex than we can possibly ever understand.
To put this in context, it means that science recognizes that it has nothing whatever to say about reality; science is an endeavor to develop a more elegant model of a largish cluster of blackbox phenomena.