I just dont see what the LF does for the community.
Well, they formed from the merger of the OSDL and the Free Standards Group. So they do everything those two thing groups did, including pay Linus to hack on the kernel.
Looking at their about pahge, they also provide legal services, work to promote standards, and provide a neutral forum for debate. The also run sites like LinuxPrinting.org (as it used to be called).
How much of that is truly useful is perhaps open to question. One of the legal services for instance is protecting the Linux trademark, which hasn't proved the most popular activity in the open source milieu. I've also seen concerns voiced about the joining procedure (you buy your way in) and the fact that the board seemed overly staffed with corporate types, with actual developers being a bit thin on the ground.
I think the big trouble is that everyone knew who the OSDL were. This new entity is going to take a bit of getting used to. That said, they seem to be doing good things, so more power to 'em.
The thing is, that's chump change to the RIAA. It's probably easily worth it to them to risk the $$ for the slightest chance they will prevail in appeals court.
mmmm... now multiply it by the number of court cases they have outstanding. And the number they intend to bring in the future.
A precedent like could get expensive very quickly, even by recording industry standards.
[Novell] are constantly harassed by not being a "pure" open source company
I don't think I've seen anyone attack them for not being a "pure" open source company.
A lot of Free Software developers did get upset at Novell's attempts to circumvent the clear intent
of the GPL. And when those developers objected, Novell's response was was essentially
"it's legal and you can't stop us - so nyah!".
This in turn led to a lot of people questioning Novell#s trustworthiness.
bad enough that they demonstrate such contempt for the developers whose
hard work had created Novell's principal product. But they did this in the
process of snuggling up to Microsoft - a company that
has proven consistently hostile to open source in the past.
None of this has anything to do with Novell not being "pure".
There are however issues of respect and trust that have yet
to be resolved to everyone's satisfaction.
I'm not referring to Slashdot, or even to Groklaw (I think she's done some pretty amazing stuff,
but I never mistook her or her site for reliable, unbiased sources of data).
If by "unbiased" you mean impartial, then no PJ isn't, and nor should she be. She founded
Groklaw to help defend the Linux kernel from what she rightly saw as a predatory corporation.
Impartiality would be a bit stupid under the circumstances.
If on the other hand you're trying to suggest that she deliberately misrepresents the facts
then do please provide some specifics. About the legal details if you please - I'm not talking about her
opinion pieces.
Evey Groklaw topic has a thread for corrections. The site strives to be accurate.
If you don't think it is, I'd love to know why.
It wasn't a matter of "intuitively" obvious. OS experts said right from the beginning that SCO's claims were rubbish.
Yes, they did. And other experts, let us not forget, testified the opposite. Now to an industry insider, it's fairly obvious that Brian Kernighan's opinion is going to carry more weight than Jeffery Leitzinger's does (at least when it comes to computing). The trouble is that
the courts don't know that, and cannot assume that one side's witness is better than that of the other.
Look, I really don't want to fight with you about this. If you're arguing that the US legal system is broken because it allowed
BSF to file a gazillion timewasting motions and counter motions, then I think you may well be right. If you're arguing that Judge Kimball
is broken, having allowed things to drag on so long, than I think you're probably not.
In any case, I don't have any great emotional investment in the issue. I'm not a US citizen, whatever problems may exist, they're not mine to solve. I'm just reporting what I've gleaned by lurking on Groklaw for the duration.
No one can tell me that it should have taken four years to determine that SCO was full of shit.
I'm not even going to try. But I do think that some things that are intuitively obvious can
be the very devil to prove - ask any mathematician!
And most mathematicians don't have Boies, Schiller & Flexner filing counter claims on each and every lemma. I won't argue that the
court system is perfect in the US, but I think this one worked out about right.
Ding! That 'lil company in Washington has already abandoned SCO. It got what it wanted: FUD.
Now its out making more FUD,
I think that they wanted much more than FUD. Ideally they wanted to consolidate most of the rights to Linux, and to as much free software as possible in corporate hands where it could be neutralised using the same techniques MS have used to crush any number of would be competitors. The fact that this aspect failed dismally doesn't mean it wasn't a hoped for outcome.
There was some hope among the anti-free software crowd that SCO might break the GPL in the courtroom. That too looks unlikely now, but it had to be on the objective list.
They also, I believe wanted to give IBM a poke in the eye for daring to market Linux, and this they did. It remains to be seen if IBM will go on to poke back after the dust settles.
And lastly, as you point out, there was FUD. This they got in copious amounts.
MS got pretty much a worst case outcome out of the SCO fiasco, but that doesn't mean they didn't set their sights much higher.
The general feeling on Groklaw seemed to be that, while SCO and BSF undoubtedly dragged their feet as long as they could, Judge Kimball (and to a lesser extend IBM) were happy to give them enough rope, simply to stop SCO from finding grounds for an appeal, and kicking the whole sordid mess off afresh again in size months time.
As it is, because SCO were given every possible chance to make their case, they are going to
find it very difficult to go running to a higher court wailing "it's not fa-a-air!"
Of course, if I was really paranoid, I'd wonder how long you had that typed up so you try to sidetrack the discussion with some first post flamebait about what is and is not a proper for a slashdot post.
So, bravo, slashdot - not only for what you have accomplished for political discussion in the past, but for the discussion you are about to have. It is exactly this kind of level-headed discussion that keeps people coming back for evenly balanced news and careful interpretation on nearly any topic.
Don't feel you have to hang around if we're boring you that badly. You go on ahead; we'll catch you up.
He believes that the best technical solution will win out, and he's doing his best to provide that best solution.
He's wrong. Look around.
I don't think we have the final results in for that question. In any case, it's still a political position. Just because you don't agree with his stance, that doesn't mean he's "burying his head in the sand". It just means he doesn't agree with you, which is allowed, I believe.
He believes in share and share alike.
He just doesn't believe in defending it.
Really? How do you figure that, then? He likes the GPLv2 because it encourages people to share their source code.
He believes in striking a balance between commercial and technical issues.
I didn't know the two were in conflict.
Tell you what - boot up a windows machine sometime and look at all the stupid design decisions that have been made because MS let their marketing department make technical decisions. Then come back and tell me the same thing, if you can do it with straight face.
These are all political positions.
Uhhh.. no. They're not. At all
So for something to be a political opinion, you have to believe in it first? You don't think you're being just the teensiest bit dogmatic and inflexible here?
They're all "I don't think I have the right to tell other people to do the right thing" attitudes.
Better "I don't have the right to tell you what to do" than "I have the right to tell you what do, and I'm always right".
It's like people who say "I have no interest in politics, I just want to [do whatever]". In Linus' case it is "write software".
I suppose that's always been the FSF view if Linus. I don't think it's particularly fair, myself. Linus's attitude has never really been one of disinterest. He believes that the best technical solution will win out, and he's doing his best to provide that best solution. He believes in share and share alike. He believes that manufacturers' abuse of DRM technology is a problem but the thinks that changing the licence is a poor way to address that problem. He believes in striking a balance between commercial and technical issues, (as he says in TFA).
[But is this any different] from buying services (a gift certificate or classes or something) from a brick-and-mortar store that then closes?
Yes, I think it is. Customer expectations are different when they buy a film; they expect it to be like a video or DVD where they get ongoing access. Personally, I think that's a legitimate expectation.
Now you can argue that expectations are going to have to change if you want. But that isn't going to help if no one buys DRM content
because they've not received the value they expected for their transaction.
So in other words, since the global climate is so complex, science cannot
sufficiently explain past global climate phenomena, nor can it predict
future patterns?
Well, it's a matter of degree and accuracy, isn't it? If you have a
range of hills or mountains, the get more rainfall on the side facing
the prevailing winds. Reason is that air rises to pass over them, and
in rising cools, and in cooling, becomes able to hold less in the way
of water vapour. That's a global weather pattern, and science explains
it quite nicely.
Complexity isn't a barrier to our making useful predictions; consider a
car that loses control at high speed. That's an unimaginably complex
system if you think about it. Each component of the vehicle is a
collection of atoms, held together by electrostatic forces. Each atom has
a half-life and may decay into some other element at any time; the atoms
themselves have a complex inner structure and all of their components
are subject to dimly understood quantum effects. That's before
we factor in external influences like the friction between tires and
tarmac, or the crash barrier separating the two lanes.
And yet, armed with little more than Newton's laws of motion, we can
make a wide range of useful predictions about what is going to happen.
Just so long as we stay within the limits of accuracy of the model.
There's no reason why science shouldn't draw make useful predictions
about long term climate trends. We just need the right model based on
the right assumptions.
Why would you need to do this? Why not just rely on random, fortunate happenstance to create life?
Well, we don't have any hard data on the probability of life arising or one thing. So we wouldn't know how many planets we'd need to get our test sample. Also, I'm trying not to waste too much time here. The Big Crunch could be as little as 43 billion years away.
Also, it might increase the accuracy and validity of your experiment if you place your planets next to stars that have cyclical energy output.
No. the test is designed to see if industrialised civilisations have an effect on global climate. Adding a second variable into the
experiment is only going to confuse the issue. I suppose that, if it should transpire that industrialisation was affecting planetary
temperatures, we could always monitor the debate to find out how many cultures tried to place the blame on an hitherto unnoticed variation in solar output. That would be a side experiment that wouldn't affect the main results at all.
Then, be sure to employ a large group of politically-motivated elitists to gather your data for you.
I know the debate is generating an awful lot of hot air, but I doubt that it's enough to affect global temperatures. Still, feel free to run your own study.
Just some suggestions. Of course, you run your experiment the way you want to.
Anecdotal evidence is hardly an appropriate substitute for reliable, reproducable scientific analysis.
Of course, you're quite right. What we really need to do is create a hundred or so planets, seed them with single, cell life, wait a three to four billion years for a tool using species to evolve and develop an heavily industrialised global economy, and then compare the climate of these planets against a hundred or so controls that have not life at all. Ideally we should also have a hundred with life, but no industry.
And then we need to do it all again, two or three times, just to be sure the results are repeatable. Of course, if the climate change theorists are correct then it'll be long past the time when we might have been able to do anything about it, but at least we'll be able to settle an argument that by that time will have been raging for ten billion years or so.
Although, as I'm sure someone's about to point point out, four hundred planets isn't might not be a large enough sample to be statistically significant. So we might wind up having to do the whole thing over again...
The kind of "security" M$ has to offer is little more than inconvenience designed to make the user think everything is their fault.
It is their fault, isn't it? It's their box, they chose it, they did whatever they did that resulted in being owned, why the fsck does anybody care about avoiding blame?
I think he meant "...designed to make the user think everything is the user's own fault".
A bit like the new Vista security. They have to realise that something as intrusive as that is going to get turned off
pretty damn quick on most people's machines. Buy as an exercise in CYA, it's fantastic. Any security flaw is now the fault
of ignorant users turning off the security, just like any software error is the result of bad device drivers. Nothing is ever going to be Microsoft's fault, ever again.
And oddly enough, I think I agree with them on that one, even if I'd phrase it a bit differently: if you're using Microsoft
software, you've only yourself to blame:)
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And it's something that LUGs, advocates, and others in the FOSS movement have been trying to convince the world of since at least 1998, which is when I became aware of it.
Well, it's not one I've see presented in the five years or so since I've been using Linux. Perhaps the idea isn't as widely disseminated as you think?
Maybe we could ask Mac users for tips--they've been making that same argument for about twice as long.
Indeed. It seems to be the basis of those "I'm a Mac; I'm a PC" adverts. Actually, they seem to be doing rather well,
now that you mention it...
Those "grumpy, old ladies" could be running their knitting/sewing machines hooked up to their computer.
They could indeed. Probably not those particular ones however. The show is callled
Grumpy Old Women and takes a handful of the BBC's more curmudgeonly female celebs and gives them free rein to gripe about
the things that wind them up. Not as good as Grumpy Old Men (IMHO) but that could be down to gender bias on my part.
The "silent majority" however (and no, it's not my choice of phrase, either) don't on the whole do such things.
Most of the non geeks I've spoken to use their computer for surfing, p2p, messaging, email or WP. That's not generally
a controversial opinion, even among the Redmond faithful.
And trying to address the deficiencies of Linux by saying "but they'll never do that" is just plain ignorance.
If that was what I was doing, (and I don't accept that Linux is deficient in comparison to Windows) then I'd be
more likely to use the term "disingenuous". But you know, saying that Windows is better because it has software which
little old ladies may someday want to use to program their knitting machines.. well that's like saying Linux is
better because they may someday decide to learn C and write their own device drivers. I suppose each argument has
merit to the extent that the relevant scenario is possible; I just don't think either probability to be particularly high,
which renders the arguments rather less than compelling.
On the other hand, sooner or later someone is going to write a Linux package to drive those knitting machines.
Of course windows may get less annoying in the same time frame. But there are people who don't have knitting machines
who might prefer not to wait for either occurrence.
Re:"The silent majority" is uninformed.
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None of those things are with Windows itself though.
No, but they are Microsoft though - which is what I said in the first place.
Annoyances.org isn't the collection of old ladies you discussed
You're right, I just used it as a loose example. I'd be more specific about the complaints,
but I wasn't expecting a test, and I forgot to make notes. All I can do is report what I remember
from the show.
I'm willing to be quite a bit of/.ers post over there, so I doubt its unbiased.
meh. It's a support forum, not an advocacy site. It's not so much "Microsoft sucks" as
"what do I do when when the registry fills up?". You don't get a lot of penguin heads there because...
well, because we all use Linux and it's a windows support forum.
Annoying things are hardly a reason to HATE MS though.
Hatred isn't a rational act, though, is it? I mean, most people don't
wake up in the morning and say "now who shall I hate today? Who is the most
rational target for my hatred?". It's not like that. On the other hand, there's no shortage of people who think "if that computer
crashes and loses my document one more time today, it's going through that window..."
My point is that a lot of the things I heard cited as inspiring this hatred were
typical MS grumbling points.
And if it's a good enough reason to hate computers, it's good enough to hate Microsoft.
It's just a question of education;)
I'd also have to think that the group would find a whole new slew of anoyances with Linux as well.
Oh quite possibly, although the latest Ubuntu is getting very good in that respect.
But they'd be spared the malware, and the viruses and the worms... which is the
starting point for this discussion.
(does YouTube work w/Linux?).
Yes, perfectly. At least since flash 9 was released for Linux.
Re:"The silent majority" is uninformed.
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Soylent gre^W^W Strategies is people!
And all of them so very tast^Wdifferent, too!:)
Convincer strategies was something they told us about on a training
course I went on a while back. A convincer strategy is what has to
happen inside someone's head before they accept a given proposition
as being true.
So, one person's convincer strategy might be that he needs to hear
it a certain number of times (and all you need to do is keep on at them)
while someone else might need to try it for themselves. Some people
need to hear it from someone they consider an authority, and... well
you get the idea. I'm told this is something that good salesmen are
very aware of.
So, in the context of switching away from Microsoft, some people out there
are going to (say) need 99 virus infestations before they say "enough!",
and some of them are currently on number 98. Some of them are going to need to
have four or five friends switch first before they consider it seriously;
some of them are going need their fave tech blogger to switch and write it all
up... to suggest that everyone who is going to switch has already switched... is
wishful thinking at best.
Sorry to follow up a joke post with a serious one - it just occurred to me that
I hadn't explained that part at all.
Re:"The silent majority" is uninformed.
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Such as what?
The usual stuff. Clippy, Outlook, "you appear to be writing a letter", Word's grammar checker... that sort of thing. Nip over to annoyances.org and you'll find a hundred or so examples.
And alternatives that don't run the software people want won't function as alternatives.
Oh do behave. That argument might fly for specialist drafting or accountancy software, but not here. For the market segment
under discussion, all people want is a browser, a word processor, something to check their email. Maybe an instant messenger
if they're a bit advanced.
And something like Ubuntu can do all that quite nicely, thank you.
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No. "The silent majority" believe that this is the way computers just "work".
More accurate, perhaps, to say that they think this is just the way computers don't work.
There was a program on last week where they had a collection of self proclaimed grumpy old women
listing things they hated about computers - and you know what? Every single complaint was not
about computers per se, but about Microsoft software.
There's got to be an opportunity in there somewhere for the FOSS movement. Imagine if we could convince the
"I hate computers" brigade that what they mainly hate is Microsoft...
With all the past outbreaks on Windows machines, anyone who wanted to migrate has already started their migration. This won't change anything for anyone else.
That's just silly. People have different convincer strategies. If nothing else, there are people out there who still
haven't heard that there's an alternative. There's a lot of meat left on that bone.
The whole point of the industrial revolution was to reduce the proportion
of people needded to work the land.
It's not just about harvesting. Ever tried hand-thrashing grain with a flail?
Actually, that's exactly backwards. The
came first.
There were four main changes that raised the amount of food produced to
a level the could support urban populations. Crop rotation involved growing
clover one year in four so the field could get some nitrates back into the
soil; selective breeding improved the helth and quality of livestock;
mechanisation didn't instantly start with the steam engine, but used
horse drawn devices that could be made by a decent blacksmith.
The biggie though was enclosures. This basically meant abolishing the old
system where each serf had his own strip to farm. Lots of little strips and
lots of hedgerows limited the amount you could grow. Turn them all into one
big field and tend it using horses, and economies of scale come into
practice.
The other effect of enclosures was that England suddenly had a large
population of displaced peasants who could no longer support themselves by
farming their strips and who gravitated to the cities, looking for work.
Thus we have the birth of high density urban populations at the same time
as we have farms efficient enought to support them.
Then, since the labour was available, that was when the factories started
being built.
Was this guy hired to experiment with alternative operating systems on company time? Because from TFA, it looks like he's not one of the I/T guys.
The guy in TFA would be Mike Kravis. There's a link from TFA to his bio
which gives his job description as "enterprise architect".
So unless he designs buildings for a living, I think he probably IS employed to experiment with alternative operating systems on company time.
Let the IT guys work out which OS you can use.
I am an IT guy, thank you. I think you'll find a disproportionate number of Slashdotters are.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, they formed from the merger of the OSDL and the Free Standards Group. So they do everything those two thing groups did, including pay Linus to hack on the kernel.
Looking at their about pahge, they also provide legal services, work to promote standards, and provide a neutral forum for debate. The also run sites like LinuxPrinting.org (as it used to be called).
How much of that is truly useful is perhaps open to question. One of the legal services for instance is protecting the Linux trademark, which hasn't proved the most popular activity in the open source milieu. I've also seen concerns voiced about the joining procedure (you buy your way in) and the fact that the board seemed overly staffed with corporate types, with actual developers being a bit thin on the ground.
I think the big trouble is that everyone knew who the OSDL were. This new entity is going to take a bit of getting used to. That said, they seem to be doing good things, so more power to 'em.
mmmm... now multiply it by the number of court cases they have outstanding. And the number they intend to bring in the future.
A precedent like could get expensive very quickly, even by recording industry standards.
I don't think I've seen anyone attack them for not being a "pure" open source company.
A lot of Free Software developers did get upset at Novell's attempts to circumvent the clear intent of the GPL. And when those developers objected, Novell's response was was essentially "it's legal and you can't stop us - so nyah!".
This in turn led to a lot of people questioning Novell#s trustworthiness. bad enough that they demonstrate such contempt for the developers whose hard work had created Novell's principal product. But they did this in the process of snuggling up to Microsoft - a company that has proven consistently hostile to open source in the past.
None of this has anything to do with Novell not being "pure". There are however issues of respect and trust that have yet to be resolved to everyone's satisfaction.
If by "unbiased" you mean impartial, then no PJ isn't, and nor should she be. She founded Groklaw to help defend the Linux kernel from what she rightly saw as a predatory corporation. Impartiality would be a bit stupid under the circumstances.
If on the other hand you're trying to suggest that she deliberately misrepresents the facts then do please provide some specifics. About the legal details if you please - I'm not talking about her opinion pieces.
Evey Groklaw topic has a thread for corrections. The site strives to be accurate. If you don't think it is, I'd love to know why.
Yes, they did. And other experts, let us not forget, testified the opposite. Now to an industry insider, it's fairly obvious that Brian Kernighan's opinion is going to carry more weight than Jeffery Leitzinger's does (at least when it comes to computing). The trouble is that the courts don't know that, and cannot assume that one side's witness is better than that of the other.
Look, I really don't want to fight with you about this. If you're arguing that the US legal system is broken because it allowed BSF to file a gazillion timewasting motions and counter motions, then I think you may well be right. If you're arguing that Judge Kimball is broken, having allowed things to drag on so long, than I think you're probably not.
In any case, I don't have any great emotional investment in the issue. I'm not a US citizen, whatever problems may exist, they're not mine to solve. I'm just reporting what I've gleaned by lurking on Groklaw for the duration.
I'm not even going to try. But I do think that some things that are intuitively obvious can be the very devil to prove - ask any mathematician!
And most mathematicians don't have Boies, Schiller & Flexner filing counter claims on each and every lemma. I won't argue that the court system is perfect in the US, but I think this one worked out about right.
I think that they wanted much more than FUD. Ideally they wanted to consolidate most of the rights to Linux, and to as much free software as possible in corporate hands where it could be neutralised using the same techniques MS have used to crush any number of would be competitors. The fact that this aspect failed dismally doesn't mean it wasn't a hoped for outcome.
There was some hope among the anti-free software crowd that SCO might break the GPL in the courtroom. That too looks unlikely now, but it had to be on the objective list.
They also, I believe wanted to give IBM a poke in the eye for daring to market Linux, and this they did. It remains to be seen if IBM will go on to poke back after the dust settles.
And lastly, as you point out, there was FUD. This they got in copious amounts.
MS got pretty much a worst case outcome out of the SCO fiasco, but that doesn't mean they didn't set their sights much higher.
The general feeling on Groklaw seemed to be that, while SCO and BSF undoubtedly dragged their feet as long as they could, Judge Kimball (and to a lesser extend IBM) were happy to give them enough rope, simply to stop SCO from finding grounds for an appeal, and kicking the whole sordid mess off afresh again in size months time.
As it is, because SCO were given every possible chance to make their case, they are going to find it very difficult to go running to a higher court wailing "it's not fa-a-air!"
And that, I think, has to be a good thing.
Oh, is that what it it means? Good job I'm not paranoid then :D
Still, nothing lost by trying, eh?
Of course, if I was really paranoid, I'd wonder how long you had that typed up so you try to sidetrack the discussion with some first post flamebait about what is and is not a proper for a slashdot post.
Don't feel you have to hang around if we're boring you that badly. You go on ahead; we'll catch you up.
I don't think we have the final results in for that question. In any case, it's still a political position. Just because you don't agree with his stance, that doesn't mean he's "burying his head in the sand". It just means he doesn't agree with you, which is allowed, I believe.
Really? How do you figure that, then? He likes the GPLv2 because it encourages people to share their source code.
Tell you what - boot up a windows machine sometime and look at all the stupid design decisions that have been made because MS let their marketing department make technical decisions. Then come back and tell me the same thing, if you can do it with straight face.
So for something to be a political opinion, you have to believe in it first? You don't think you're being just the teensiest bit dogmatic and inflexible here?
I suppose that's always been the FSF view if Linus. I don't think it's particularly fair, myself. Linus's attitude has never really been one of disinterest. He believes that the best technical solution will win out, and he's doing his best to provide that best solution. He believes in share and share alike. He believes that manufacturers' abuse of DRM technology is a problem but the thinks that changing the licence is a poor way to address that problem. He believes in striking a balance between commercial and technical issues, (as he says in TFA).
These are all political positions.
Yes, I think it is. Customer expectations are different when they buy a film; they expect it to be like a video or DVD where they get ongoing access. Personally, I think that's a legitimate expectation.
Now you can argue that expectations are going to have to change if you want. But that isn't going to help if no one buys DRM content because they've not received the value they expected for their transaction.
Well, it's a matter of degree and accuracy, isn't it? If you have a range of hills or mountains, the get more rainfall on the side facing the prevailing winds. Reason is that air rises to pass over them, and in rising cools, and in cooling, becomes able to hold less in the way of water vapour. That's a global weather pattern, and science explains it quite nicely.
Complexity isn't a barrier to our making useful predictions; consider a car that loses control at high speed. That's an unimaginably complex system if you think about it. Each component of the vehicle is a collection of atoms, held together by electrostatic forces. Each atom has a half-life and may decay into some other element at any time; the atoms themselves have a complex inner structure and all of their components are subject to dimly understood quantum effects. That's before we factor in external influences like the friction between tires and tarmac, or the crash barrier separating the two lanes.
And yet, armed with little more than Newton's laws of motion, we can make a wide range of useful predictions about what is going to happen. Just so long as we stay within the limits of accuracy of the model.
There's no reason why science shouldn't draw make useful predictions about long term climate trends. We just need the right model based on the right assumptions.
Well, we don't have any hard data on the probability of life arising or one thing. So we wouldn't know how many planets we'd need to get our test sample. Also, I'm trying not to waste too much time here. The Big Crunch could be as little as 43 billion years away.
No. the test is designed to see if industrialised civilisations have an effect on global climate. Adding a second variable into the experiment is only going to confuse the issue. I suppose that, if it should transpire that industrialisation was affecting planetary temperatures, we could always monitor the debate to find out how many cultures tried to place the blame on an hitherto unnoticed variation in solar output. That would be a side experiment that wouldn't affect the main results at all.
I know the debate is generating an awful lot of hot air, but I doubt that it's enough to affect global temperatures. Still, feel free to run your own study.
I will, thank you. Now, about funding... :D
Of course, you're quite right. What we really need to do is create a hundred or so planets, seed them with single, cell life, wait a three to four billion years for a tool using species to evolve and develop an heavily industrialised global economy, and then compare the climate of these planets against a hundred or so controls that have not life at all. Ideally we should also have a hundred with life, but no industry.
And then we need to do it all again, two or three times, just to be sure the results are repeatable. Of course, if the climate change theorists are correct then it'll be long past the time when we might have been able to do anything about it, but at least we'll be able to settle an argument that by that time will have been raging for ten billion years or so.
Although, as I'm sure someone's about to point point out, four hundred planets isn't might not be a large enough sample to be statistically significant. So we might wind up having to do the whole thing over again...
I think he meant "...designed to make the user think everything is the user's own fault".
A bit like the new Vista security. They have to realise that something as intrusive as that is going to get turned off pretty damn quick on most people's machines. Buy as an exercise in CYA, it's fantastic. Any security flaw is now the fault of ignorant users turning off the security, just like any software error is the result of bad device drivers. Nothing is ever going to be Microsoft's fault, ever again.
And oddly enough, I think I agree with them on that one, even if I'd phrase it a bit differently: if you're using Microsoft software, you've only yourself to blame :)
Well, it's not one I've see presented in the five years or so since I've been using Linux. Perhaps the idea isn't as widely disseminated as you think?
Indeed. It seems to be the basis of those "I'm a Mac; I'm a PC" adverts. Actually, they seem to be doing rather well, now that you mention it...
They could indeed. Probably not those particular ones however. The show is callled Grumpy Old Women and takes a handful of the BBC's more curmudgeonly female celebs and gives them free rein to gripe about the things that wind them up. Not as good as Grumpy Old Men (IMHO) but that could be down to gender bias on my part.
The "silent majority" however (and no, it's not my choice of phrase, either) don't on the whole do such things. Most of the non geeks I've spoken to use their computer for surfing, p2p, messaging, email or WP. That's not generally a controversial opinion, even among the Redmond faithful.
If that was what I was doing, (and I don't accept that Linux is deficient in comparison to Windows) then I'd be more likely to use the term "disingenuous". But you know, saying that Windows is better because it has software which little old ladies may someday want to use to program their knitting machines.. well that's like saying Linux is better because they may someday decide to learn C and write their own device drivers. I suppose each argument has merit to the extent that the relevant scenario is possible; I just don't think either probability to be particularly high, which renders the arguments rather less than compelling.
On the other hand, sooner or later someone is going to write a Linux package to drive those knitting machines. Of course windows may get less annoying in the same time frame. But there are people who don't have knitting machines who might prefer not to wait for either occurrence.
No, but they are Microsoft though - which is what I said in the first place.
You're right, I just used it as a loose example. I'd be more specific about the complaints, but I wasn't expecting a test, and I forgot to make notes. All I can do is report what I remember from the show.
meh. It's a support forum, not an advocacy site. It's not so much "Microsoft sucks" as "what do I do when when the registry fills up?". You don't get a lot of penguin heads there because... well, because we all use Linux and it's a windows support forum.
Hatred isn't a rational act, though, is it? I mean, most people don't wake up in the morning and say "now who shall I hate today? Who is the most rational target for my hatred?". It's not like that. On the other hand, there's no shortage of people who think "if that computer crashes and loses my document one more time today, it's going through that window..." My point is that a lot of the things I heard cited as inspiring this hatred were typical MS grumbling points.
And if it's a good enough reason to hate computers, it's good enough to hate Microsoft. It's just a question of education ;)
Oh quite possibly, although the latest Ubuntu is getting very good in that respect. But they'd be spared the malware, and the viruses and the worms... which is the starting point for this discussion.
Yes, perfectly. At least since flash 9 was released for Linux.
And all of them so very tast^Wdifferent, too! :)
Convincer strategies was something they told us about on a training course I went on a while back. A convincer strategy is what has to happen inside someone's head before they accept a given proposition as being true.
So, one person's convincer strategy might be that he needs to hear it a certain number of times (and all you need to do is keep on at them) while someone else might need to try it for themselves. Some people need to hear it from someone they consider an authority, and ... well
you get the idea. I'm told this is something that good salesmen are
very aware of.
So, in the context of switching away from Microsoft, some people out there are going to (say) need 99 virus infestations before they say "enough!", and some of them are currently on number 98. Some of them are going to need to have four or five friends switch first before they consider it seriously; some of them are going need their fave tech blogger to switch and write it all up... to suggest that everyone who is going to switch has already switched ... is
wishful thinking at best.
Sorry to follow up a joke post with a serious one - it just occurred to me that I hadn't explained that part at all.
The usual stuff. Clippy, Outlook, "you appear to be writing a letter", Word's grammar checker... that sort of thing. Nip over to annoyances.org and you'll find a hundred or so examples.
Oh do behave. That argument might fly for specialist drafting or accountancy software, but not here. For the market segment under discussion, all people want is a browser, a word processor, something to check their email. Maybe an instant messenger if they're a bit advanced.
And something like Ubuntu can do all that quite nicely, thank you.
More accurate, perhaps, to say that they think this is just the way computers don't work.
There was a program on last week where they had a collection of self proclaimed grumpy old women listing things they hated about computers - and you know what? Every single complaint was not about computers per se, but about Microsoft software.
There's got to be an opportunity in there somewhere for the FOSS movement. Imagine if we could convince the "I hate computers" brigade that what they mainly hate is Microsoft ...
That's just silly. People have different convincer strategies. If nothing else, there are people out there who still haven't heard that there's an alternative. There's a lot of meat left on that bone.
Actually, that's exactly backwards. The came first.
There were four main changes that raised the amount of food produced to a level the could support urban populations. Crop rotation involved growing clover one year in four so the field could get some nitrates back into the soil; selective breeding improved the helth and quality of livestock; mechanisation didn't instantly start with the steam engine, but used horse drawn devices that could be made by a decent blacksmith.
The biggie though was enclosures. This basically meant abolishing the old system where each serf had his own strip to farm. Lots of little strips and lots of hedgerows limited the amount you could grow. Turn them all into one big field and tend it using horses, and economies of scale come into practice.
The other effect of enclosures was that England suddenly had a large population of displaced peasants who could no longer support themselves by farming their strips and who gravitated to the cities, looking for work. Thus we have the birth of high density urban populations at the same time as we have farms efficient enought to support them.
Then, since the labour was available, that was when the factories started being built.
The guy in TFA would be Mike Kravis. There's a link from TFA to his bio which gives his job description as "enterprise architect". So unless he designs buildings for a living, I think he probably IS employed to experiment with alternative operating systems on company time.
I am an IT guy, thank you. I think you'll find a disproportionate number of Slashdotters are.