An AC did a rather terse explanation, but basically it works like this. The "laws" of physics are really no different than somebody saying "What goes up must come down" or "E=mc^2". A law comes into existence when somebody says it. It's simply a description. Nowadays, they are highly codified, complx, mathematical descriptions, but descriptions nonetheless. They aren't a magical substance or process that creates or generates they universe; they are just a bunch of people's descriptions of how things are working.
One interpretation of the "laws" of physics are that they are just a description of the happenings of the universe. They don't exist "out there". They didn't exist 'before' the universe, and they didn't cause, create, or generate the universe. The laws are description or models, not the actual stuff that generates the universe itself.
It would be like if you built a really nice, accurate, scale model of the Eiffel tower. It didn't exist before the Eiffel tower, it didn't cause or create it, it's just a damn good model.
The problem with that is you are putting a new selective pressure into the species. If a plant is more likely to be pollinated by pollen with terminator genes, then it is less likely to have reproductive success. The likelihood of getting pollinated by terminator pollen is probably linked with other traits, you are also introducing selection on other traits by introducing terminator pollen into the wild.
Actually, it looks more like a worn-down astronaut or space-marine helmet. Do you see the connectors for the oxygen tubes on the sides? Tantalizing! Tell me, mister scientist, exactly what natural process puts eye-holes and oxygen-tube connectors in helmets?:)
With the rovers, people are finding skulls and lots of other doodads. Hey, that's pretty cool. It seems like that's pretty convincing evidence of life on Mars.
And so what? Is all of this really so important? I find it fascinating that so many people on so many sites care more about their "reputations" than what they post. Personally, I like having the karma system at slashdot, so I don't have to wade through endless FP! GNAA! GOATSE! to get to the decent commentary. There are plenty of trolls and vandals out there, and a reputation system would automatically filter their junk out.
Does it? Sometimes I don't WANT my "good" reputation to follow me. I like acting like a goon on something awful and like a lolcat-loving ding-dong on fark and like a...well...never-you-mind-like-what on consumptionjunction and 4chan. So have one username for one site, and other username where you do your GNAA postings.
That's a good anecdote, but I think wikipedia has a policy against 'independent research'. That means that you can't put original information or ideas on wikipedia; you can only summarize other information. So your information doesn't belong on wikipedia. Doesn't mean you needed to get flamed, though.
I don't know, maybe you could put up a page explaining the illogicality of this 'evidence', and then cite it. I don't know about wikipedia's policy about validity of references.
I remember you well. I'm not pulling the friend bit. But, do me the favor of checking before you say something like "You have no understanding of what you just said" to me in the future. When you're wrong saying that, you rub people very, very hard the wrong way.
First, let me apologize for using inflammatory language with you. I got caught up in an emotional response and I acted wrongly. I appreciate you taking the time to inform me and the slashdot community of factual history. I will try to be more civil in the future, and not repsond hastily in an inflammatory, emotional manner.
I got frustrated because I felt that the people replying to my threads were missing my larger point by concentrating on details. Let me try to restate my position in a more friendly manner.
Imagine it's 1975 and we're talking about Swiss particle physics lab. If you were to guess what might come out of it that would benefit the world, science, and knowledge in general, you might guess that they would publish some really great data on particles and physics. If I asked you what they would contribute to our knowledge or use of computers, you might say that they would develop great ways to process particle-smashing data, and they might share it with other labs or the world in general. If I told you that someone there might develop a general communications method for any kind of digital information that would, along with email, be the basis for a global computer communications network, you might say "Great! That's not what a physics lab is really about, but it sure could happen. And if they let everyone use it for free, even better!" So it's not what you're really expecting from a physics lab, but it's within the realm of possibility. Their main thrust would be scientific work about particle physics, but if they happened to make something that is generally useful to the whole world, that would be a wonderful bonus, or side-effect of their work. They could have concentrated on their own, internal communications system, or if they did make a more general program, they need never have let anyone use it, much less for free.
On the other hand, say it's 1975 and we're talking about a yet unfounded company called Microsoft, that would go on to develop the most-used operating system, run on 90% of the personal computers around the world. They have thousands of programmers devoting millions of man-hours to nothing but developing general computer systems. What contributions would they make to the world, and computing in general? You might think they would do a great deal to promote computing in general, even as a side-effect of their profit-making programming. that's a reasonable expectation from their 20+ years of existence. But instead, most of what they have introduced to their users was copies of existing ideas, or ideas from small developers that they bought out. They really haven't *originated* much themselves. They did a good job of integrating and delivering existing ideas, but not so much for originating new ideas, which arguably is what really drives the field in general.
However, that's not quite what happened. Most of the advances in computer science and their practical applications have come from relatively small operations, compared to the hours and resources devoted by MS, IBM, Sun, Oracle, etc. The advances have from from Universities, small start-ups, independent developers in the free software movement, the US military, and places like that.
I think the cultural model people believed in the 20th century is that it's business and industry that drives innovation. But in the computing world, the opposite has happened. It was much smaller organization, relatively unorganized and independent, or the R&D parts of industry ( such as Bell labs developing Unix inside of Bell -- it wasn't management that drove the development of Unix; it seems to have been the researchers doing Comp Sci research under their own discretion -- perhaps you can correct me on this ).
I think Wikipedia is a site that really needs to somehow integrate the reputation of it's contributors into the articles. I haven't kept up with the structural changes they've made in the past couple years, but a lot of the editing work seems to be undoing trolling and vandalism, and also participating in edit and revision wars. I could be wrong at this point.
But if wikipedia had a reputation system ( other than just being banned or allowed ), they might automate contributions from reputable authors ( and check on the actual contributions later), while authors who are less reputable may have their contributions queued for review before they are published.
Furthermore, a casual user would be able to have a more savvy understanding of the reputability of any article or section of an article if it is tagged with the reputation of its' author.
Reputable authors might be able to also tag the contributions of others, such that the text or information itself gets a reputation. That would help users make a judgement about the validity of information on Wikipedia.
Instead of pushing the mechanics of the actual editing of articles behind the scenes, and just presenting a 'final' article to the end-user, let's formalize the process and enfranchise users into the process of judging the validity of articles.
some folk in the heartland will be skeptical of this. Yeah, and some tribe in the middle of the amazon might not understand or care about it at all! Who the fuck cares?
It seems like what you are implying is that 'any form of violence' == War? Or 'any violence against people peacefully working towards greater justice' == War?
The grandparent didn't say that the movements were without violence, but the people instigating them didn't really launch an all out war, did they? And the violence they encountered, does it really rise of the level of war? Or can we just call it violent?
So because your software vendor couldn't get his shit together Windows is a bad platform? That's silly. And if you'd downloaded Debian and burned install CDs and forgot 1 at home, would that have meant that Debian + Apache was a bad platform because you were delayed a day due to a person's incompetence? That's extremely silly. I don't think it's silly. It's all about availability and making sure your in compliance with a license. If we want to get up and running with a server, we can slap Linux on any old box they have running, and have all the tools at hand to do server email, ftp, web, database connections, and do backups, without purchasing additional licenses from anybody.
I was in the same situation a few years ago at an office a few years ago where CDW couldn't get us an Exchange license they sold us for a month. Eventually my sales guy escalated me to an MS rep where they tried to sell me on the MS software assurance service (or whatever it was called) and MS small business server. I was pissed. Can you imagine me telling my boss we need to buy something else to get what we already paid for? Finally they shipped me the disks. I had to pass on to my boss for an entire month whatever BS reason CDW gave me for why they sold us a product they didn't have in stock. I don't need vendors making me look incompetent. With Linux, I download it, install it, it's up and running, and I look good, competent, and productive.
I didn't need to burn any CDs at home. I just turned around to another XP box at the office, downloaded the isos and burned them. With debian, I just downloaded the first CD to install the base. I didn't install any other packages from the CD; I just did an apt-get for all the software I needed and they downloaded and installed automatically from mirror sites.
We've got plenty of boxes. Most places I've worked at have plenty of machines. If we want to put a service on another machine, we don't have to worry about buying another license or purchasing a site license.
I've never developed in C# or asp.net. It's probably great. I'm weary of getting locked in to MS, though. If we have a problem, what other OS vendor can we turn to without ditching all of our code? Is somebody going to call the Piracy hotline on us because we have an office install that was not licensed? Will they audit all of our computers? Sounds risky to me.
PHP documentation can be shoddy in places, I guess. I've never had a problem. There's plenty of freely available, working code out there in packages such as discussion boards that you can examine and reuse. I've never had a problem with PHP, either understanding it or finding the knowledge that I need. I'll take the rest of your commentary at face value.
I think your proposal is much more palatable to free-market fiscal conservatives who would be against any law barring you from selling in a given time period. Way to go!
Is the US military a software development organization? Is email the result of thousands on man-hours on their part? No. Email was developed by a small group of Unix developers inside the US military.
Is the Swiss particle physics laboratory a software development lab? No, they're a particle lab. Http was developed by one man, Tim Berners Lee, working at the Swiss partical physics lab. How much smaller of a Unix development 'team' can you get?
I don't know the history of FTP. Maybe you can fill me in -- how big was the team of guys that worked on it? How many years or man hours did they devote to it?
By contrast, look how much time, money and development MS has put into their product line, and also note how little it has benefited anybody but them.
Mono and Samba come to mind... The point you've missed *again* is that Mono and Samba are not technologies that MS gave us. Mono and Samba are gifts from the open source community created with little to no help from MS, amidst some ambiguous legalistic threats from MS. MS technologies unwittingly became a 'standard' when the open source community reverse engineered them, against the wishes of MS.
Again, so far, nothing from MS has advanced computing in general, other than to support other MS products and the Windows monopoly.
Mono and Samba come to mind, as well as the many clones of the Windows interface available as X desktop environments/window managers. Mono is not complete yet, and Samba is simply there to allow Windows/Unix interaction. I don't think it's too popular for filesharing in a fully Linux environment.
As far as Gnome or KDE 'copying' Windows interface, everything that MS introduced in Windows was either done in Mac or X first. So again, MS really hasn't brought anything new to the table. Active Directory might be a good candidate for an MS technology that 'escaped' to another platform. Let's see if it happens.
My point about Apache is that it runs on both Unix and Windows. Again, it's a technology that was developed in Unix and is available on Windows. IIS is a good webserver, but it doesn't run on Unix. MS probably never would have written IIS if they weren't facing competition in the server arena from Apache running on Unix. MS has borrowed and copied a lot from Unix and Open Source, but they really haven't given anything back. MS only helps themselves, not computing in general. I'm not saying that's bad -- MS is just a corporation, and their only goal is to make money. But they don't have *my* best interests in mind. I've gotten much more benefit, as far as the software available to me, from the open source community, and the kick in the butt they've given MS.
Again, I'm not saying that MS doesn't make good software, or that their tools aren't great to use. What MS is good at is copying other's technologies, integrating it into their products, and delivering it to the market. Linux and open source still suck at that. I agree that you can make powerful software on MS systems, but my point is it's vertical, and it's a vendor lock-in. If I develop an application or system on Solaris, and I decide I don't like Sun for whatever reason, I can move to Linux, BSD, or OSX with little cost. If you've developed this great Windows system, and you decide you don't want to deal with MS for whatever reason, MS still has you by the short hairs. You can't move without abandoning all the work you've done.
Still, the point isn't bragging rights about who "invented the interwebs" or which platform's dad can beat up the other platform's dad. No, that's exactly the point I'm making. I don't understand why you're always trying to avoid the point. I don't care about 'bragging rights'; I care that the open source community *actually gave us* the internet. That's right -- if it were up to Bill Gates, we'd still be getting CDROMs of MS Encarta in the mail. MS hasn't done anything for me, or to introduce new technology to computing in general; they've only helped themselves. They have no incentive to produce new technologies if they weren't facing competition from open source and Mac.
Why should the Congress apologize when Bush fed them faulty intelligence? The Congress doesn't have it's own intel program. Any intelligence they get comes from the Executive branch.
The quotes you take from Liberal senators was from 2002. The war in Iraq didn't start until March 20th 2003. They just were repeating the false intelligence and horror stories the Bush administration had fed them in private security briefings. We didn't find out about the WMD lies until well after the war was over.
Whey are you concentrating on the bad intel Liberal Senators got from the Bush administration and repeated? Why don't you hold Bush and Company accountable? Why don't you hold conservative, Republican senators accountable. Some of them claim that there *were* weapons, we just haven't found them yet. They're in Syria or something. Some of them are even claiming that we *did* find weapons! It's funny how you've taken a Republican, Neo-con fraud and use it to make liberal Democrats look bad.
How does the stereotypical broad, flattish nose of Africans give them an advantage for their environment? Damn interesting, I'd say. There were a study about nose shapes and sizes and climate.
In a humid, warm, jungle environment, the air is pretty much perfect for your warm, humid lungs, so you don't want too much nose structure constricting your oxygen/carbon dioxide exchange. A short nose with wide nostrils helps air exchange. If you look at our great ape relatives who live in the jungle, such as the gorilla or chimp, they have almost no 'nose' at all -- just flat nostrils stuck on their face.
Our basic anatomical structure probably evolved on the plains of Africa, which get pretty dry. That's probably where our tubular nose developed. This site says that Homo erectus was the first hominid to have a protruding nose. His fossils are found in Asia and Africa. A long, thin nose humidifies the air more before it goes into the lungs. People in dry climates and cold climates ( cold air is dry ) have longer, thinner noses. This is why you see long, thin noses in desert climates, and in cold, arctic regions. Small nostrils reduce the surface area exposed to the cold, so you don't lose as much heat to the outside air.
Of course, there isn't a perfect correlation. And human beings really like to mate with whomever they can find, so you find a broad spectrum of features in almost any environment.
Seriously, if you think Sun (or IBM, or any of the other "born again open sourcers" have different motivations than Microsoft, you're either very idealistic, or very naive. They're not "embracing" you, they're using you to further their business. I never claimed that Sun was all "peace, Linux, and sharing". I'm well aware that they could care less about Open Source if it didn't help them. If it's the open source community's interests against Sun, I think the open source folks were able to get what they wanted from Sun. Java is GPL now. They won out against Sun's interest. Have they ever been able to do that with Microsoft?
You are just so ridiculously, ludicrously wrong I literally don't know where to begin. I may not have made my point precisely enough.
What I'm saying is that there isn't much that was developed for use in Windows that has really migrated out to other platforms. Plenty of open source stuff has started in Unix and then also got onto Windows, but there aren't many examples of the other way around. So the open source software community has provided benefit to both Windows and non-Windows users, while MS has only benefited Windows users. MS and Windows are far and away vertical platforms.
by 'home grown', I don't mean applications that were developed by companies. I'm aware that Oracle runs on Unix and Windows. There are plenty of non-MS apps that run on Windows. But how much software was developed on Windows, for Windows, that found it's way to other platforms and architectures? Not much.
There's a better way. We just haven't thought of it yet. Well, the simplest solution for our current system would be rules and regulations that require you to hold stocks for long periods of time, say months, or even a year or two, before you can sell. That would encourage investors to look at the long-term health and planning of a company, instead of short-term profit.
In an anthropology class, we learned that people with European backgrounds have an adaptation to the cold that those of African descent do not.
When 'white' people get cold, the circulatory system goes through cycles of vasodilation that temporarily increase bloodflow to the skin, warming your body and face. IIRC, they happen about every 40 minutes to an hour.
Blacks also radiate more heat through the skin and respiratory system, which means they also get colder more quickly. A long nose with small nostrils warms the air better when it enters the nose, and also prevents heat loss as the air leaves the nose.
This was discovered when the US army was doing cold training exercises in the 50s, I think in Alaska. This was in preparation with war with Russia. The white soldiers lasted longer in the cold than did black soldiers on the whole. Of course, there was a lot of mixing of different genomes -- a lot of blacks in the US has some European ancestry -- so it's not like it's 'black and white' so to speak. I'm not aware of any testing on other racial groups.
I've never been able to confirm this story on the internet, so new research may have disproved it;)
I didn't say that MS doesn't make good tools, but my point they are totally a vertical platform. Once your are in MS land, it is very expensive to get out. You would have to abandon everything you've developed and start from scratch.
Apparently if you don't invent a protocol, you're not a contributor! I hope all the hobbyist devs who wasted time on small sourceforge projects didn't read that. That's right. I've the great stuff you've made only works on your system, and doesn't interoperate with other systems, you've only helped yourself and your systems, not any body else. Can you name a MS solution, application, protocol, or anything of significance that has left the Windows platform and found it's way to Unix or OSX? Or something that runs on mainframes or non-Windows clusters?
There are plenty of open source applications that are similarly dead ends, vertical platforms, and single problem solutions. However, there are a great many things, such as Apache and Postgres, that work on any flavor of Unix, uncluding Solaris, BSD, OSX, and Linux, and also Windows.
I'm in a situation that's a case in point. I have an 8 week contract at a local University to get a web database system up and running. We're putting Apache, PHP and Postgres on a Win2k3 server. Last week we began the install of the Win2k3 server, but our license code the vendor emailed us was not valid, for whatever reason. We just got the valid code now. We would have been a week behind had I not put Debian + Apache, PHP and Postgres on the server and began development. Now if we had been waiting on our MS license, we would have been behind a whole week on an 8-week project. I would have been twiddling my thumbs for a week.
If we ever have problems with our Win2k3 server, it's nice to know that Tux is waiting there in the background, ready to pick up the slack.
As far as I understand, he developed his product using the full version, which allows the development of extensions. He didn't use the Express version, so he didn't violate any limitations; technical, license, or otherwise.
The problem for Microsoft is that when an *Express user*, which Jamie is not, uses TestDriven.net, the *Express user* gets access to the extensions feature, which wasn't completely disabled in the Express version. So it seems to me that the user who uses TestDriven.net in Express is violating the license of Express, but Jamie has not.
Microsoft might think that Jamie developed TestDriven.net at least partially in Express, to see that it would get around the limitation, but he's claiming he did not. He just developed an app in the full version that, unbeknownst to him, gets around a limitation in *another program* with *another license*.
Slashdot Mirror
An AC did a rather terse explanation, but basically it works like this. The "laws" of physics are really no different than somebody saying "What goes up must come down" or "E=mc^2". A law comes into existence when somebody says it. It's simply a description. Nowadays, they are highly codified, complx, mathematical descriptions, but descriptions nonetheless. They aren't a magical substance or process that creates or generates they universe; they are just a bunch of people's descriptions of how things are working.
One interpretation of the "laws" of physics are that they are just a description of the happenings of the universe. They don't exist "out there". They didn't exist 'before' the universe, and they didn't cause, create, or generate the universe. The laws are description or models, not the actual stuff that generates the universe itself.
It would be like if you built a really nice, accurate, scale model of the Eiffel tower. It didn't exist before the Eiffel tower, it didn't cause or create it, it's just a damn good model.
The problem with that is you are putting a new selective pressure into the species. If a plant is more likely to be pollinated by pollen with terminator genes, then it is less likely to have reproductive success. The likelihood of getting pollinated by terminator pollen is probably linked with other traits, you are also introducing selection on other traits by introducing terminator pollen into the wild.
I was joking. I left out a sarcasm tag ;)
:)
Actually, it looks more like a worn-down astronaut or space-marine helmet. Do you see the connectors for the oxygen tubes on the sides? Tantalizing! Tell me, mister scientist, exactly what natural process puts eye-holes and oxygen-tube connectors in helmets?
That's a good anecdote, but I think wikipedia has a policy against 'independent research'. That means that you can't put original information or ideas on wikipedia; you can only summarize other information. So your information doesn't belong on wikipedia. Doesn't mean you needed to get flamed, though.
I don't know, maybe you could put up a page explaining the illogicality of this 'evidence', and then cite it. I don't know about wikipedia's policy about validity of references.
I remember you well. I'm not pulling the friend bit. But, do me the favor of checking before you say something like "You have no understanding of what you just said" to me in the future. When you're wrong saying that, you rub people very, very hard the wrong way.
First, let me apologize for using inflammatory language with you. I got caught up in an emotional response and I acted wrongly. I appreciate you taking the time to inform me and the slashdot community of factual history. I will try to be more civil in the future, and not repsond hastily in an inflammatory, emotional manner.
I got frustrated because I felt that the people replying to my threads were missing my larger point by concentrating on details. Let me try to restate my position in a more friendly manner.
Imagine it's 1975 and we're talking about Swiss particle physics lab. If you were to guess what might come out of it that would benefit the world, science, and knowledge in general, you might guess that they would publish some really great data on particles and physics. If I asked you what they would contribute to our knowledge or use of computers, you might say that they would develop great ways to process particle-smashing data, and they might share it with other labs or the world in general. If I told you that someone there might develop a general communications method for any kind of digital information that would, along with email, be the basis for a global computer communications network, you might say "Great! That's not what a physics lab is really about, but it sure could happen. And if they let everyone use it for free, even better!" So it's not what you're really expecting from a physics lab, but it's within the realm of possibility. Their main thrust would be scientific work about particle physics, but if they happened to make something that is generally useful to the whole world, that would be a wonderful bonus, or side-effect of their work. They could have concentrated on their own, internal communications system, or if they did make a more general program, they need never have let anyone use it, much less for free.
On the other hand, say it's 1975 and we're talking about a yet unfounded company called Microsoft, that would go on to develop the most-used operating system, run on 90% of the personal computers around the world. They have thousands of programmers devoting millions of man-hours to nothing but developing general computer systems. What contributions would they make to the world, and computing in general? You might think they would do a great deal to promote computing in general, even as a side-effect of their profit-making programming. that's a reasonable expectation from their 20+ years of existence. But instead, most of what they have introduced to their users was copies of existing ideas, or ideas from small developers that they bought out. They really haven't *originated* much themselves. They did a good job of integrating and delivering existing ideas, but not so much for originating new ideas, which arguably is what really drives the field in general.
However, that's not quite what happened. Most of the advances in computer science and their practical applications have come from relatively small operations, compared to the hours and resources devoted by MS, IBM, Sun, Oracle, etc. The advances have from from Universities, small start-ups, independent developers in the free software movement, the US military, and places like that.
I think the cultural model people believed in the 20th century is that it's business and industry that drives innovation. But in the computing world, the opposite has happened. It was much smaller organization, relatively unorganized and independent, or the R&D parts of industry ( such as Bell labs developing Unix inside of Bell -- it wasn't management that drove the development of Unix; it seems to have been the researchers doing Comp Sci research under their own discretion -- perhaps you can correct me on this ).
I think Wikipedia is a site that really needs to somehow integrate the reputation of it's contributors into the articles. I haven't kept up with the structural changes they've made in the past couple years, but a lot of the editing work seems to be undoing trolling and vandalism, and also participating in edit and revision wars. I could be wrong at this point.
But if wikipedia had a reputation system ( other than just being banned or allowed ), they might automate contributions from reputable authors ( and check on the actual contributions later), while authors who are less reputable may have their contributions queued for review before they are published.
Furthermore, a casual user would be able to have a more savvy understanding of the reputability of any article or section of an article if it is tagged with the reputation of its' author.
Reputable authors might be able to also tag the contributions of others, such that the text or information itself gets a reputation. That would help users make a judgement about the validity of information on Wikipedia.
Instead of pushing the mechanics of the actual editing of articles behind the scenes, and just presenting a 'final' article to the end-user, let's formalize the process and enfranchise users into the process of judging the validity of articles.
It seems like what you are implying is that 'any form of violence' == War? Or 'any violence against people peacefully working towards greater justice' == War?
The grandparent didn't say that the movements were without violence, but the people instigating them didn't really launch an all out war, did they? And the violence they encountered, does it really rise of the level of war? Or can we just call it violent?
Thank you, I was surprised!
I was in the same situation a few years ago at an office a few years ago where CDW couldn't get us an Exchange license they sold us for a month. Eventually my sales guy escalated me to an MS rep where they tried to sell me on the MS software assurance service (or whatever it was called) and MS small business server. I was pissed. Can you imagine me telling my boss we need to buy something else to get what we already paid for? Finally they shipped me the disks. I had to pass on to my boss for an entire month whatever BS reason CDW gave me for why they sold us a product they didn't have in stock. I don't need vendors making me look incompetent. With Linux, I download it, install it, it's up and running, and I look good, competent, and productive.
I didn't need to burn any CDs at home. I just turned around to another XP box at the office, downloaded the isos and burned them. With debian, I just downloaded the first CD to install the base. I didn't install any other packages from the CD; I just did an apt-get for all the software I needed and they downloaded and installed automatically from mirror sites.
We've got plenty of boxes. Most places I've worked at have plenty of machines. If we want to put a service on another machine, we don't have to worry about buying another license or purchasing a site license.
I've never developed in C# or asp.net. It's probably great. I'm weary of getting locked in to MS, though. If we have a problem, what other OS vendor can we turn to without ditching all of our code? Is somebody going to call the Piracy hotline on us because we have an office install that was not licensed? Will they audit all of our computers? Sounds risky to me.
PHP documentation can be shoddy in places, I guess. I've never had a problem. There's plenty of freely available, working code out there in packages such as discussion boards that you can examine and reuse. I've never had a problem with PHP, either understanding it or finding the knowledge that I need. I'll take the rest of your commentary at face value.
I think your proposal is much more palatable to free-market fiscal conservatives who would be against any law barring you from selling in a given time period. Way to go!
You have no understanding of what you just said.
Is the US military a software development organization? Is email the result of thousands on man-hours on their part? No. Email was developed by a small group of Unix developers inside the US military.
Is the Swiss particle physics laboratory a software development lab? No, they're a particle lab. Http was developed by one man, Tim Berners Lee, working at the Swiss partical physics lab. How much smaller of a Unix development 'team' can you get?
I don't know the history of FTP. Maybe you can fill me in -- how big was the team of guys that worked on it? How many years or man hours did they devote to it?
By contrast, look how much time, money and development MS has put into their product line, and also note how little it has benefited anybody but them.
Again, so far, nothing from MS has advanced computing in general, other than to support other MS products and the Windows monopoly.
As far as Gnome or KDE 'copying' Windows interface, everything that MS introduced in Windows was either done in Mac or X first. So again, MS really hasn't brought anything new to the table. Active Directory might be a good candidate for an MS technology that 'escaped' to another platform. Let's see if it happens.
My point about Apache is that it runs on both Unix and Windows. Again, it's a technology that was developed in Unix and is available on Windows. IIS is a good webserver, but it doesn't run on Unix. MS probably never would have written IIS if they weren't facing competition in the server arena from Apache running on Unix. MS has borrowed and copied a lot from Unix and Open Source, but they really haven't given anything back. MS only helps themselves, not computing in general. I'm not saying that's bad -- MS is just a corporation, and their only goal is to make money. But they don't have *my* best interests in mind. I've gotten much more benefit, as far as the software available to me, from the open source community, and the kick in the butt they've given MS.
Again, I'm not saying that MS doesn't make good software, or that their tools aren't great to use. What MS is good at is copying other's technologies, integrating it into their products, and delivering it to the market. Linux and open source still suck at that. I agree that you can make powerful software on MS systems, but my point is it's vertical, and it's a vendor lock-in. If I develop an application or system on Solaris, and I decide I don't like Sun for whatever reason, I can move to Linux, BSD, or OSX with little cost. If you've developed this great Windows system, and you decide you don't want to deal with MS for whatever reason, MS still has you by the short hairs. You can't move without abandoning all the work you've done. Still, the point isn't bragging rights about who "invented the interwebs" or which platform's dad can beat up the other platform's dad. No, that's exactly the point I'm making. I don't understand why you're always trying to avoid the point. I don't care about 'bragging rights'; I care that the open source community *actually gave us* the internet. That's right -- if it were up to Bill Gates, we'd still be getting CDROMs of MS Encarta in the mail. MS hasn't done anything for me, or to introduce new technology to computing in general; they've only helped themselves. They have no incentive to produce new technologies if they weren't facing competition from open source and Mac.
I think they're claiming that more testosterone = better math skills. Math is not the end all and be all of brain activity.
Why should the Congress apologize when Bush fed them faulty intelligence? The Congress doesn't have it's own intel program. Any intelligence they get comes from the Executive branch. The quotes you take from Liberal senators was from 2002. The war in Iraq didn't start until March 20th 2003. They just were repeating the false intelligence and horror stories the Bush administration had fed them in private security briefings. We didn't find out about the WMD lies until well after the war was over.
Whey are you concentrating on the bad intel Liberal Senators got from the Bush administration and repeated? Why don't you hold Bush and Company accountable? Why don't you hold conservative, Republican senators accountable. Some of them claim that there *were* weapons, we just haven't found them yet. They're in Syria or something. Some of them are even claiming that we *did* find weapons! It's funny how you've taken a Republican, Neo-con fraud and use it to make liberal Democrats look bad.
In a humid, warm, jungle environment, the air is pretty much perfect for your warm, humid lungs, so you don't want too much nose structure constricting your oxygen/carbon dioxide exchange. A short nose with wide nostrils helps air exchange. If you look at our great ape relatives who live in the jungle, such as the gorilla or chimp, they have almost no 'nose' at all -- just flat nostrils stuck on their face.
Our basic anatomical structure probably evolved on the plains of Africa, which get pretty dry. That's probably where our tubular nose developed. This site says that Homo erectus was the first hominid to have a protruding nose. His fossils are found in Asia and Africa. A long, thin nose humidifies the air more before it goes into the lungs. People in dry climates and cold climates ( cold air is dry ) have longer, thinner noses. This is why you see long, thin noses in desert climates, and in cold, arctic regions. Small nostrils reduce the surface area exposed to the cold, so you don't lose as much heat to the outside air.
Of course, there isn't a perfect correlation. And human beings really like to mate with whomever they can find, so you find a broad spectrum of features in almost any environment.
What I'm saying is that there isn't much that was developed for use in Windows that has really migrated out to other platforms. Plenty of open source stuff has started in Unix and then also got onto Windows, but there aren't many examples of the other way around. So the open source software community has provided benefit to both Windows and non-Windows users, while MS has only benefited Windows users. MS and Windows are far and away vertical platforms. by 'home grown', I don't mean applications that were developed by companies. I'm aware that Oracle runs on Unix and Windows. There are plenty of non-MS apps that run on Windows. But how much software was developed on Windows, for Windows, that found it's way to other platforms and architectures? Not much.
In an anthropology class, we learned that people with European backgrounds have an adaptation to the cold that those of African descent do not.
;)
When 'white' people get cold, the circulatory system goes through cycles of vasodilation that temporarily increase bloodflow to the skin, warming your body and face. IIRC, they happen about every 40 minutes to an hour.
Blacks also radiate more heat through the skin and respiratory system, which means they also get colder more quickly. A long nose with small nostrils warms the air better when it enters the nose, and also prevents heat loss as the air leaves the nose.
This was discovered when the US army was doing cold training exercises in the 50s, I think in Alaska. This was in preparation with war with Russia. The white soldiers lasted longer in the cold than did black soldiers on the whole. Of course, there was a lot of mixing of different genomes -- a lot of blacks in the US has some European ancestry -- so it's not like it's 'black and white' so to speak. I'm not aware of any testing on other racial groups.
I've never been able to confirm this story on the internet, so new research may have disproved it
There are plenty of open source applications that are similarly dead ends, vertical platforms, and single problem solutions. However, there are a great many things, such as Apache and Postgres, that work on any flavor of Unix, uncluding Solaris, BSD, OSX, and Linux, and also Windows.
I'm in a situation that's a case in point. I have an 8 week contract at a local University to get a web database system up and running. We're putting Apache, PHP and Postgres on a Win2k3 server. Last week we began the install of the Win2k3 server, but our license code the vendor emailed us was not valid, for whatever reason. We just got the valid code now. We would have been a week behind had I not put Debian + Apache, PHP and Postgres on the server and began development. Now if we had been waiting on our MS license, we would have been behind a whole week on an 8-week project. I would have been twiddling my thumbs for a week.
If we ever have problems with our Win2k3 server, it's nice to know that Tux is waiting there in the background, ready to pick up the slack.
As far as I understand, he developed his product using the full version, which allows the development of extensions. He didn't use the Express version, so he didn't violate any limitations; technical, license, or otherwise.
The problem for Microsoft is that when an *Express user*, which Jamie is not, uses TestDriven.net, the *Express user* gets access to the extensions feature, which wasn't completely disabled in the Express version. So it seems to me that the user who uses TestDriven.net in Express is violating the license of Express, but Jamie has not.
Microsoft might think that Jamie developed TestDriven.net at least partially in Express, to see that it would get around the limitation, but he's claiming he did not. He just developed an app in the full version that, unbeknownst to him, gets around a limitation in *another program* with *another license*.