Keeping the same desktop on each system is a smart thing, each system will be standardized, each system will be like the others, so that each employee can use whatever computer, even if they're not at "their" system
Yes, yes, yes. All true. However, is this choice the choice the vendor should be making? Say you run a business, and you need a certain set of features for your users and Gnome doesn't cut it. Does UserLinux penetrate your business? Nope. You'd be a fucking idiot to hire UserLinux when you know it won't do what you need, or that you'd have to install a bunch of extra shit that falls outside of any support contract you might have gotten.
Who should be making the desktop choice, exactly? Well, I tend to think the IT guys that have to build and support the things should make the choice. Management gives them a spec and they pick the environment that'll give them the easiest setup and support that meets the spec. The biggest problem with Windows is that the vendor has already made all the decisions you face for you, and they haven't made them all the same way you need them to be made. You're stuck with that. How is UserLinux going to distinguish itself, now? By making all those same decisions for you, regardless of how you actually needed them to be made?
So, yeah. The vendor does need to provide choice, even if the choice they provide isn't so obvious. Choosing to include Gnome and exclude KDE libraries has taken away choices from the businesses, choices they will likely want back. What makes UserLinux better than any of the commercial offerings, then? Lindows already has the draconian Microsoft-like setup where all the decisions have already been made for you, like it or not. Mandrake has the complete opposite approach and tries to give you every choice you could possibly have. They also, coincidentally, have their entire source tree available so you can easily customize the installer itself. Damn. Talk about choice! They give you everything, man. You can let them make all of your decisions for you (default install), or you can make all of the decisions you want to make (default install + tweaks), or you can make all the decisions and still be completely compatible with Mandrake (custom install). If you don't want to screw with the source tree, you can save the list of packages you want installed on every machine and use that same list for every new installation. (Yeah, they could do more in this area to make it easier to install thousands of machines)
Taking away business decisions from the business is one of the most compelling parts of any LInux-related value proposition, and UserLinux is removing that from their own value proposition. I think Queen said it best when they said "ANother one bites the dust";)
First off, contrary to its name, UserLInux is supposed to target businesses.:) Enterprise is the buzzword being dropped in relation to UserLinux...
Now this approach is far too restrictive for people like you or I. We're quite happy to poke around, getting things just right. If we were inclined, we could argue that its one of our fundamental human rights...
As much as I disagree with Perens's decision here, I think that his decision does command a certain amount of respect. He chose to draw a line in the sand in one of the biggest open-source/Free Software flame wars ever (bigger, even, then RMS vs LInus on GNU/Linux). The one thing everybody uses is the interface, and it's the single-most widely held emotional aspect of any OS. It's the reason Mac users love macs and hate Windows, and it's the reason Windows users love Windows (because they live in a cave and have never seen a decent OS, of course;) ).
That said, I felt that Perens's rebuttal came off as sounding more like him trying to justify a bad decision than him trying to explain a good decision. KDE has more penetration in the markets he wants to penetrate. RedHat is the distro that pushes LInux that farthest in the US, but RedHat is a server OS. At least, that's how they're portrayed, and that's how they're branded. Europe and the rest of the world use KDE, and that's where all the KDE penetration occurs. Using GNOME is going to give UserLinux an uphill battle where they could've used KDE to even the playing field. "Look here, my prospect. KDE is used and supported by the German government. The reason our PIM software has gotten so good recently is because the German government paid the KDE boys to do it for us. (more of the same)" Compare that to "Look here, my prospect. I realize that Gnome's user base is largely home users in the US, but it is good. Give it a shot, you'll find it has plenty to offer." What can Gnome show us besides the "Made in America" sticker that we americans are so fanatical about?
From my point of view, though, UserLinux is pointlessly redundant. If you're running a business and you want a reliable server + desktop combination, you already have three choices, each with commercial support attached. RedHat, Mandrake, and SuSE (now Novell). You used to have Caldera, but we all know where they've gone. RedHat has already determined that pushing for home adoption isn't in their business plan, but that doesn't mean that RedHat isn't pushing the desktop market. THey're focusing on the Enterprise, where Kirk would just love to have a red fedora on his tablet pc that the hot yeoman just brought him. Erm. Anyway...
If you run a business, and you want strong commercial support for your KDE desktop, you've got Mandrake and SuSE to pick already. If you want branding, strong commercial support, and you don't give a shit about your desktop, you've got RedHat to pick. All three offer server packages that kick the ass out of Microsoft. Additionally, RedHat has IBM and (last time I checked) Sun as partners to give them a boot up for servers. For desktop? Well, normally you want to pick something that doesn't require an awful lot of administrative overhead and also increases user productivity. You'd probably pick the same vendor as your server vendor, right?
THe other thing Perens has really missed the boat on, here, is the fact that the "Enterprise" market has Humans and Vulcans on board. That means the doctor has to be able to treat them both. In-house developers that have to deal with users in both Windows and UserLinux want something cross-platform, and GTK isn't cross-platform. Ever use the Windows port of GTK? It's maintained by one guy, in his spare time, for fun. Sure, you could pick wxWindows, but wxWindows doesn't have Gnome integration, so there's no huge benefit to picking it for in-house development.
Qt, anybody? Pay the license and get something that just fucking works. You can sto
Being a good example of a business model doesn't make an argument for choosing it as a foundation of a distro. It's Trolltech's business model, and a good one I admit (it's a great thing they abandoned their old Evil license), but why should UserLinux give Trolltech a free gift of larger userbase?
Quite the contrary. The fact that there is a commerical company with a successful business model based on Qt and the fact that there are so many commercial apps that use Qt make it a particularly nice selling point for UserLinux. Have you read GTK docs? Have you read Qt docs? There's a world of difference between the two.
Imagine, if you will:) , telling your prospect this about your os:
We bundled the popular GTK+ widget set so you can use this free tool to do all the things you want to do. Sure, we made the choice that you won't have commercial support for the toolkit and that you'll have to depend on us for that kind of support, but you're better for it! There's plenty of email lists and web resources devoted to GTK. Granted, there is very little consistency between GTK applications, so you can expect your users to spend twice as long learning how to use them as anything else...
Qt + KDE is another matter entirely. There is commercial support for Qt, and there are well-defined standards for how to build a UI in KDE. Sure, some people still ignore them, but most Qt developers follow them. That's why almost every Qt app you use on Linux has a predictable and discoverable interface. GTK apps are a world apart (and behind) from KDE-based apps. Gnome has their own initiative to deal with this in the Gnome environment, but GTK predates Gnome by so long and is used by other desktops (Ice?) that gtk developers don't give a shit about UI conventions.
Granted, I prefer KDE over Gnome, but I also think that KDE is a better choice for a business desktop than Gnome. Gnome might one day catch up, but I doubt that.:)
Personally, I think the way to address the toolkit issue in the long-term is for someone to port wxWindows to KDE and build a Gnome port based on the GTK port. In doing so, it might be entirely possible to make a wxWindows app that behaves on KDE and Gnome the way you'd expect native apps to do so. Then you have the greatest benefits of all to offer developers with wxWindows. Not only will your apps run natively in KDE and Gnome, but they'll also run natively on Mac and Windows. All you have to do is compile them for each platform. (Yeah, theoretically, but wxWindows gets closer to that goal than anybody else)
Hm, I forgot to mention that I think the single most useful technology that might come out of the X-prize will be semi-ballistic travel. If the Doom guy manages to make his spaceship into something that can carry 100+ people from NY to Auckland, then there's a real possibility of making intercontinental travel fast enough and cheap enough that it will be worth doing more, and it's already fast and cheap enough that a new technology here will have to be damn competitive.
Hey, Mr. Rocket Science Guy. So an ion drive works by using some sort of electrical device to lob ions out of the fuel supply and then sucks the ions out with a magnet. The sucking part is what makes the thrust, right?
So how do you get the ions off the fuel supply in the first place? I mean, the actual "how", if you know, not some theoretical "Well, it works like this". Specs, if you got 'em. I've scoured the internet looking, and haven't found anything more than cursory descriptions of the technology.
I'll tell you why.:) Space tourism based on X-prize technology will get you on a pretty neat craft and then take you 100km up, and then bring you back. If you're lucky, the other tourist on the plane will cancel and you'll have a place to carry your camera.
Roller-coaster rides sell because they're cheap. Even then, many coasters still have to have at least 1/4th attendance to make money on a specific run. The only immediate result of the X-prize in this ambiguous "Space Tourism" industry amounts to a very expensive roller-coaster ride with a nice view of the earth at the top. Bragging rights are about all you get out of it, until lots of people have taken the same ride. Then your bragging rights aren't anything special.
Space tourism is not a self-sustainable industry. In fact, tourism is not self-sustainable and rides on the backs of other industries. Whoever heard of going to Alamogordo, NM just to look at the International Space Hall of Fame and take a gander at the Clyde W. Tombaugh Planetarium while you're there? No-fucking-body. You go there to visit your family, or ski, or something, and the other tourist traps in the other are just part of the package. In Space Tourism that results from the X-prize contest, you don't have a complete package. You have a thrill-ride.
To my thinking, there is no single industry that will sustain commercial space flight. Several industries will be required, depending on a few factors. First, we need to have a reason to get there. The moon is the most obvious place to go next and put people, living and breathing. To do that, we need agriculture on the moon, as well as power. Assume that atmosphere will be taken care of by either/both of those two. But those are just industries that would be local to the moon. If we could beam power back from the moon, there's one possible industry. Fission reactors on the moon where a melt-down won't mutate an entire generation of kids.
Other possibilites are industries that pollute. If managed well, they could do their polluting on the moon. I'm not saying I favor that idea, because pollution is generally something to avoid. But if Heinlein had his catapult figured out right (an idea that has been presented in other places besides sci-fi), shipping from the Moon would be pretty cheap. The only issue is whether or not the materials to sustain the industry can otherwise be found on the moon, because shipping them up from Earth would make it prohibitively expensive.
Other manufacturing possibilities exist, and all revolve around what minerals and metals and stuff are to be found on the moon. Perhaps some lunar geologist can chime in with more information here.
Communication is a possibility, I think. Although it may not be a huge possibility, considering the monthly cycles of the moon and even the daily cycle.
The obvious industry for the moon is ship-building, but that implies that we have other places in the solar system to go that require mass production of ships on the moon.
Militarily, the moon holds more possibility. But as a world we have a certain common interest in preventing any single military from monopolizing the moon. If we could build military air-craft that didn't depend on atmosphere or gravity, then the moon would offer itself for R&D. For that matter, the moon is a vast resource for R&D of most kinds, so long as it isn't atmosphere or gravity dependent.
Personally, I think that all the space-faring nations of the world have screwed up as far as the moon is concerned, the US more than the rest (since we've already been there). There should already be at least one observatory and a lab & research complex that requires thousands of workers already in place on the moon. That would require a shipping infrastructure, mostly earth->moon, post mail, communication, and other stuff. It would also require the standard set of professions for maintaining a research facility, as well as a few moon-specific professions. With such a facility already in place it would be a lot easier to comb through everything that is known about the moon to find commercially feasible businesses to pursue on the moon.
Whitehead was a joke, and nothing but a two-bit con-man. Read this
Also read this for a thorough debunking of most of the other competitive claims. There is also a special section for Santos Dumont, the infamous Brazilian.
The closest to beating the Wrights were Samuel Langley and Charles Manly, working with government funding over the Potomac. It is a popular opinion among aeronautic historians that if the Wrights hadn't succeeded in 1903, Langley and Manly would have been first, possibly that same year. Coincidentally, there was a bit of collaboration between the Wrights and L & M.
But Whitehead was definitely a joke.:) A pretty funny one, too. I'm reminded of the Music Man whenever I hear about Whitehead. He was just selling boy's bands.
Those two guys invented the idea of aeronautical engineering and figured it all out.
Well, let's see. They sure in the hell weren't the only group trying to achieve manned, controlled, and motorized flight. However, the three basic concepts involved in flight were actually pioneered by Sir George Cayley:
It wasn't until the turn of the nineteenth century that an English baronet from the gloomy moors of Yorkshire conceived a flying machine with fixed wings, a propulsion system, and movable control surfaces. This was the fundamental concept of the airplane. Sir George Cayley also built the first true airplane -- a kite mounted on a stick with a movable tail. It was crude, but it proved his idea worked, and from that first humble glider evolved the amazing machines that have taken us to the edge of space at speeds faster than sound.
So, what exactly do you mean by "aeronautical engineering"? Especially considering that the Wright Brothers only built and flew the first model that was truly successful. They didn't actually dream up anything new, they just proved existing theories...
Yeah there are considerably better claims to the title of "First in flight" than the Wright Brothers. Unfortunately we are stuck with an inaccurate account of history as usual. It just goes to show that history is written by the victors...
Every motorized flight that happened before the Wright Brothers was uncontrolled, and most of them crashed. It is true that the Wright Brothers didn't have the "first" motorized flight, but that's not even their record. The Wright Brothers had the first controlled, manned, and motorized flight. They combined the 3 principles of flight into one vehicle, and their model of flight is still used today. None of the other guys for whom history is being revised had either the accomplishment or the effect on the technology that the Wright Brothers had. They deserve their place in history exactly as it is.
The problem is that people read "first controlled motorized flight" and think "First flight", which is inaccurate. You, however, have helped to contribute to this inaccuracy with your revisionist history. Our account is accurate, it's the idiots reading the account that keep trying to screw it up.
Calling Burt Rutan and the Scaled Composites team "home builders" is a pretty big insult. These guys do the engineering behind lots of home-built planes (e.g. Vari-Ez) making them work well and safely and built the first plane to fly around the world on one tank of gas. Small, yes. Small budget, yes. Unprofessional? NO
One of the issues we're up against as Free SOftware developers is the idea that "Home built" == unprofessional. It doesn't. So this guy saying that SC are a bunch of "home builders" is actually a compliment, if he fits a particular personality archetype that typically reads slashdot...
Sure the technology is different, but playing with small internal combustion engines in 1903 WAS rocket science.
Um, the Wright brother's didn't exactly "play" with small internal combustion engines. They played with gliders, and ultimately just gave specs to an engine builder they knew. They focussed on making a heavier-than-air craft that flew under its own power while the human operator remained in control.
I thought they had until the end of 2004 to claim the prize? I mean, really, Armadillo Aerospace has been planning on launching something in January for testing to compete for the X-prize. Why would they still be planning on competing for the X-prize if launching a test in January would already be too late? (I also remember reading it, but I checked the X-prize site and couldn't find it, other than a reference in the FAQ to the fact that they think it is likely someone will do it before January '05)
Mandrake took redhat and tweaked it so much that it lost a lot of it's compatibility
Mandrake forked RedHat. Sooner or later your forks become incompatible unless you merge one into the other. Since Mandrake and RedHat are competitors, there's no real reason to expect them to merge their distributions back together. Instead, in order to achieve compatibility, they both sign up with LSB.:)
God's wrath, eternal flames that don't go out, you on fire, in pain, from the everlasting burnings, held wrath forever...
These sound like big enough sticks to you?
Peace, love, goodwill, a clean conscience, amity, mercy, forgiveness, friendship, everlasting life, the joy of really being beyong reproachable, of no misdeeds.
These nice enough carrots for you?
Who told you? Where exactly did you get this information? Did God tell you himself? Is it in all His marketing brochures? Do you really believe in truth in advertising?
Tell me something. Are you going to take sides in a war of the scale to which the bible claims is going on without hearing what the other side has to say? Have you ever heard the other side?
Since we've been under 2000 years of Christian oppression, I doubt it. Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition, except that it was an institution under direct control of the Spanish crown, which was in turn given the right to rule by God. Right?
It's surprisingly easy to reject the Bible after you understand a few marketing basics. Simple. First, always make your product appear to be the best product. Second, lie about your competition, but don't get caught. Take another pass through the Bible with those two rules in mind and tell me what you come up with.
All you have to do, and all you can do, is believe on Jesus. Do it while you still have life - you could be dead in an instant and after that is the judgement.
Jesus comes my way, I'm gonna go medieval on that cocksucker. I've got no love for that piece of shit. I've picked my side of this particular "war".
I can't believe you read my entire post and still came up with this:
Shut up. I'm cloning you, and having that clone claim your property, citizenship, and legal rights, so you no longer have the write to speak. Hmm... perhaps I'll just make a billion clone slaves of myself, and force them to vote me in to office and take away your rights. Nah, what I really want to do is make clones that I can legally kill at will to harvest their body parts to keep me alive well past you. Hmm... maybe I'll just clone a brain so I can harvest cells for my own brain in the event that I start becoming senile. Hmm...
Every single thing you cited is an application of cloning technology. Try again. Why is cloning research bad?
In what way does that not make it a tool? As you just said, Science is a tool for exploring the observable world.
Process != tool. Science is a process, or a method if you prefer. And a discipline. But it's not a tool the way a wrench or a screwdriver might be considered tools. We did not construct science to build or fix things. Engineering, maybe. Not science. Don't mistake one for the other.
A lot of the debate is focused there, but a lot of it is focused on whether certain kinds of research are "ok" from an moral, ethical and religious standpoint, and rightly so. Particularly in the are of medical research there has ALWAYS been a huge amount of guidance on how the process is done such that it conform to moral, ethical and/or religious standards. You wonder why drugs are so expensive in the US? If you cut out the moral, ethical and religious constraints which make the development of new drugs an incredibly expensive process, they'd be much cheaper. Of course, the downside would be that the next time you take some meds you'd be more likely to die than not, and you could be unwittingly in a drug dosage study.;-)
*sigh* Commercial drug development isn't science, it's engineering. Different ball game. Sure, research is involved in both places. The purpose of commercial drug development is to develop a drug that can be sold to treat a condition or cause a reaction or whatever. Medical research frequently includes researching drugs and the effects of drugs, but the purpose of medical research isn't to manufacture a product that will make money. It's to expand the depth of human knowledge. The purpose of commercial drug development is to develop a product that will be manufactured, marketed, and sold to make money.
I agree that there are certain limits to how scientific research should be conducted, but that's totally different than whether or not the knowledge gleaned from the research is bad.
Say this with me: if any part of knowledge is bad, you need a new government. Censorship is evil no matter where it's applied, and this is a very real censorship issue. The purpose of censorship is to prevent people from knowing, and Bush and Co. are trying to prevent people from knowing.
Dude, all I said was that law didn't require morality or ethics. That doesn't mean it doesn't benefit by either/both. Personally, I don't think an implementation of law should ignore morality or ethics, but it should shy away from such as much as possible for the simple fact that morality and ethics are a variable.
However, determining the consequences of disobeying a law can also be done purely pragmatically. The simple question to answer is "Can this person ultimately contribute to society?" The answer doesn't depend on morality, but if you want to assert that it'd be very difficult to answer it without a sense or morality, I will agree. But I won't agree that the answer depends on morality. The death penalty is simple, from a pragmatic point of view. "This person will not ever contribute anything beneficial, and will continue to cause harm." In this case, "beneficial" and "harm" are both terms to be defined by law.
The thing is, I think we'd be better off pushing law in a direction that abstracts morality into something practical. Start by defining the goals as law, and defining in a pragmatic sense what they are. Move on to taking terms that are usually tied up in morality and provide to them pragmatic definitions, so that in law when you refer to "value of human life" you will have a nonambiguous definition to which you can refer. Much of the existing ambiguity of law revolves around the variances in individual morality.
Consider the numerous laws that have been passed for the purpose of making morality into law. Witchcraft laws, sodomy laws, numerous others. Many of which haven't been repealed across the board in spite of the fact that nobody morally believes in the laws any more, whether they morally believe in the rules themselves.
I have built up my own "sense of morality" by using freedom as a starting point. That is at least somewhat in defiance of the idea that morality requires religion. Would you assert that you must have religion to have morals? If not, what is your own foundation for morality?
I'd further qualify that as "fundamentalist religion". There are some folks that are religious but don't have a bit of problem with stem cell research.
I wouldn't. While we are talking specifically about stem cell research, that doesn't mean that "less fundamentalists" won't draw the line somewhere. My personal experience tells me that religionists of all shapes, sizes, colors, and whatever else will always draw the line somewhere. Scientific research has its limits, under religionist rule.
Now, that's not to say that I don't draw the line either. I figure that as long as the research doesn't hurt someone else without consent (like the Nazi research), then anything goes. I further think that if, through an unstoppable set of circumstances, we were to come upon knowledge that was gained in that fashion, we should still use it for the benefit it provides. But that's a conversation for a different day. I just figure that as long as scientists are free to research without hurting other people, then they shouldn't be held back.
Not at all. Morality need never come into it. Here's the reason:
Morality is a system of rules that a person uses to make personal choices. Ethics is a system of behavior that a person uses to interact with other people. Unethical is not an absolute certainty any more than immoral is. However:
However, you must admit that "a way for people of disparate backgrounds, moral ideologies, religion, and so forth to live beside one another in peace, harmony, and prosperity. That is the sole purpose of law." requires moral choices in itself.
It is not a "moral" choice for a group of people to decide to create laws to accomplish the goals I gave under the conditions I cited. It's simply a pragmatic choice. Morality is a very personal thing and by its very nature can only dictate what one person does, the person who has the morality. A group of people working together to create law need not be motivated by morality, although I will concede that it is likely that some/all of the individuals in the group will be motivated by morality.
The point is, law doesn't require morality to operate. I think that ethics affect law far more than morality, since ethics define how you should behave towards other people and interact with the world around you. But ethics is still not required for law. Law, morality, and ethics are three separate, but related concepts that are neither mutually exclusive nor dependent on one another.
People, all too often, decide to use the word "believe" in order to force other people to respect everything that follows. Example:
I don't believe in modern technology.
I don't believe in smacking babies.
I don't believe in masturbation.
Problem is, belief is what you have when you think that something is true without fact. So, using the word "believe" in that context is poor english.;)
I realize you said that english isn't your first language, but this is a lesson that transcends language. Consider the meaning of the English word "believe" in your own language. Would you still say "I don't believe in politics."?
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Keeping the same desktop on each system is a smart thing, each system will be standardized, each system will be like the others, so that each employee can use whatever computer, even if they're not at "their" system
Yes, yes, yes. All true. However, is this choice the choice the vendor should be making? Say you run a business, and you need a certain set of features for your users and Gnome doesn't cut it. Does UserLinux penetrate your business? Nope. You'd be a fucking idiot to hire UserLinux when you know it won't do what you need, or that you'd have to install a bunch of extra shit that falls outside of any support contract you might have gotten.
Who should be making the desktop choice, exactly? Well, I tend to think the IT guys that have to build and support the things should make the choice. Management gives them a spec and they pick the environment that'll give them the easiest setup and support that meets the spec. The biggest problem with Windows is that the vendor has already made all the decisions you face for you, and they haven't made them all the same way you need them to be made. You're stuck with that. How is UserLinux going to distinguish itself, now? By making all those same decisions for you, regardless of how you actually needed them to be made?
So, yeah. The vendor does need to provide choice, even if the choice they provide isn't so obvious. Choosing to include Gnome and exclude KDE libraries has taken away choices from the businesses, choices they will likely want back. What makes UserLinux better than any of the commercial offerings, then? Lindows already has the draconian Microsoft-like setup where all the decisions have already been made for you, like it or not. Mandrake has the complete opposite approach and tries to give you every choice you could possibly have. They also, coincidentally, have their entire source tree available so you can easily customize the installer itself. Damn. Talk about choice! They give you everything, man. You can let them make all of your decisions for you (default install), or you can make all of the decisions you want to make (default install + tweaks), or you can make all the decisions and still be completely compatible with Mandrake (custom install). If you don't want to screw with the source tree, you can save the list of packages you want installed on every machine and use that same list for every new installation. (Yeah, they could do more in this area to make it easier to install thousands of machines)
Taking away business decisions from the business is one of the most compelling parts of any LInux-related value proposition, and UserLinux is removing that from their own value proposition. I think Queen said it best when they said "ANother one bites the dust" ;)
First off, contrary to its name, UserLInux is supposed to target businesses. :) Enterprise is the buzzword being dropped in relation to UserLinux...
Now this approach is far too restrictive for people like you or I. We're quite happy to poke around, getting things just right. If we were inclined, we could argue that its one of our fundamental human rights...
As much as I disagree with Perens's decision here, I think that his decision does command a certain amount of respect. He chose to draw a line in the sand in one of the biggest open-source/Free Software flame wars ever (bigger, even, then RMS vs LInus on GNU/Linux). The one thing everybody uses is the interface, and it's the single-most widely held emotional aspect of any OS. It's the reason Mac users love macs and hate Windows, and it's the reason Windows users love Windows (because they live in a cave and have never seen a decent OS, of course ;) ).
That said, I felt that Perens's rebuttal came off as sounding more like him trying to justify a bad decision than him trying to explain a good decision. KDE has more penetration in the markets he wants to penetrate. RedHat is the distro that pushes LInux that farthest in the US, but RedHat is a server OS. At least, that's how they're portrayed, and that's how they're branded. Europe and the rest of the world use KDE, and that's where all the KDE penetration occurs. Using GNOME is going to give UserLinux an uphill battle where they could've used KDE to even the playing field. "Look here, my prospect. KDE is used and supported by the German government. The reason our PIM software has gotten so good recently is because the German government paid the KDE boys to do it for us. (more of the same)" Compare that to "Look here, my prospect. I realize that Gnome's user base is largely home users in the US, but it is good. Give it a shot, you'll find it has plenty to offer." What can Gnome show us besides the "Made in America" sticker that we americans are so fanatical about?
From my point of view, though, UserLinux is pointlessly redundant. If you're running a business and you want a reliable server + desktop combination, you already have three choices, each with commercial support attached. RedHat, Mandrake, and SuSE (now Novell). You used to have Caldera, but we all know where they've gone. RedHat has already determined that pushing for home adoption isn't in their business plan, but that doesn't mean that RedHat isn't pushing the desktop market. THey're focusing on the Enterprise, where Kirk would just love to have a red fedora on his tablet pc that the hot yeoman just brought him. Erm. Anyway...
If you run a business, and you want strong commercial support for your KDE desktop, you've got Mandrake and SuSE to pick already. If you want branding, strong commercial support, and you don't give a shit about your desktop, you've got RedHat to pick. All three offer server packages that kick the ass out of Microsoft. Additionally, RedHat has IBM and (last time I checked) Sun as partners to give them a boot up for servers. For desktop? Well, normally you want to pick something that doesn't require an awful lot of administrative overhead and also increases user productivity. You'd probably pick the same vendor as your server vendor, right?
THe other thing Perens has really missed the boat on, here, is the fact that the "Enterprise" market has Humans and Vulcans on board. That means the doctor has to be able to treat them both. In-house developers that have to deal with users in both Windows and UserLinux want something cross-platform, and GTK isn't cross-platform. Ever use the Windows port of GTK? It's maintained by one guy, in his spare time, for fun. Sure, you could pick wxWindows, but wxWindows doesn't have Gnome integration, so there's no huge benefit to picking it for in-house development.
Qt, anybody? Pay the license and get something that just fucking works. You can sto
Being a good example of a business model doesn't make an argument for choosing it as a foundation of a distro. It's Trolltech's business model, and a good one I admit (it's a great thing they abandoned their old Evil license), but why should UserLinux give Trolltech a free gift of larger userbase?
Quite the contrary. The fact that there is a commerical company with a successful business model based on Qt and the fact that there are so many commercial apps that use Qt make it a particularly nice selling point for UserLinux. Have you read GTK docs? Have you read Qt docs? There's a world of difference between the two.
Imagine, if you will :) , telling your prospect this about your os:
Qt + KDE is another matter entirely. There is commercial support for Qt, and there are well-defined standards for how to build a UI in KDE. Sure, some people still ignore them, but most Qt developers follow them. That's why almost every Qt app you use on Linux has a predictable and discoverable interface. GTK apps are a world apart (and behind) from KDE-based apps. Gnome has their own initiative to deal with this in the Gnome environment, but GTK predates Gnome by so long and is used by other desktops (Ice?) that gtk developers don't give a shit about UI conventions.
Granted, I prefer KDE over Gnome, but I also think that KDE is a better choice for a business desktop than Gnome. Gnome might one day catch up, but I doubt that. :)
Personally, I think the way to address the toolkit issue in the long-term is for someone to port wxWindows to KDE and build a Gnome port based on the GTK port. In doing so, it might be entirely possible to make a wxWindows app that behaves on KDE and Gnome the way you'd expect native apps to do so. Then you have the greatest benefits of all to offer developers with wxWindows. Not only will your apps run natively in KDE and Gnome, but they'll also run natively on Mac and Windows. All you have to do is compile them for each platform. (Yeah, theoretically, but wxWindows gets closer to that goal than anybody else)
Q was right! Just change the gravitation constant of the universe! Wow! Trek science at work, here.
Hm, I forgot to mention that I think the single most useful technology that might come out of the X-prize will be semi-ballistic travel. If the Doom guy manages to make his spaceship into something that can carry 100+ people from NY to Auckland, then there's a real possibility of making intercontinental travel fast enough and cheap enough that it will be worth doing more, and it's already fast and cheap enough that a new technology here will have to be damn competitive.
Hey, Mr. Rocket Science Guy. So an ion drive works by using some sort of electrical device to lob ions out of the fuel supply and then sucks the ions out with a magnet. The sucking part is what makes the thrust, right?
So how do you get the ions off the fuel supply in the first place? I mean, the actual "how", if you know, not some theoretical "Well, it works like this". Specs, if you got 'em. I've scoured the internet looking, and haven't found anything more than cursory descriptions of the technology.
Is space tourism a sufficient driving force?
No.
I'll tell you why. :) Space tourism based on X-prize technology will get you on a pretty neat craft and then take you 100km up, and then bring you back. If you're lucky, the other tourist on the plane will cancel and you'll have a place to carry your camera.
Roller-coaster rides sell because they're cheap. Even then, many coasters still have to have at least 1/4th attendance to make money on a specific run. The only immediate result of the X-prize in this ambiguous "Space Tourism" industry amounts to a very expensive roller-coaster ride with a nice view of the earth at the top. Bragging rights are about all you get out of it, until lots of people have taken the same ride. Then your bragging rights aren't anything special.
Space tourism is not a self-sustainable industry. In fact, tourism is not self-sustainable and rides on the backs of other industries. Whoever heard of going to Alamogordo, NM just to look at the International Space Hall of Fame and take a gander at the Clyde W. Tombaugh Planetarium while you're there? No-fucking-body. You go there to visit your family, or ski, or something, and the other tourist traps in the other are just part of the package. In Space Tourism that results from the X-prize contest, you don't have a complete package. You have a thrill-ride.
To my thinking, there is no single industry that will sustain commercial space flight. Several industries will be required, depending on a few factors. First, we need to have a reason to get there. The moon is the most obvious place to go next and put people, living and breathing. To do that, we need agriculture on the moon, as well as power. Assume that atmosphere will be taken care of by either/both of those two. But those are just industries that would be local to the moon. If we could beam power back from the moon, there's one possible industry. Fission reactors on the moon where a melt-down won't mutate an entire generation of kids.
Other possibilites are industries that pollute. If managed well, they could do their polluting on the moon. I'm not saying I favor that idea, because pollution is generally something to avoid. But if Heinlein had his catapult figured out right (an idea that has been presented in other places besides sci-fi), shipping from the Moon would be pretty cheap. The only issue is whether or not the materials to sustain the industry can otherwise be found on the moon, because shipping them up from Earth would make it prohibitively expensive.
Other manufacturing possibilities exist, and all revolve around what minerals and metals and stuff are to be found on the moon. Perhaps some lunar geologist can chime in with more information here.
Communication is a possibility, I think. Although it may not be a huge possibility, considering the monthly cycles of the moon and even the daily cycle.
The obvious industry for the moon is ship-building, but that implies that we have other places in the solar system to go that require mass production of ships on the moon.
Militarily, the moon holds more possibility. But as a world we have a certain common interest in preventing any single military from monopolizing the moon. If we could build military air-craft that didn't depend on atmosphere or gravity, then the moon would offer itself for R&D. For that matter, the moon is a vast resource for R&D of most kinds, so long as it isn't atmosphere or gravity dependent.
Personally, I think that all the space-faring nations of the world have screwed up as far as the moon is concerned, the US more than the rest (since we've already been there). There should already be at least one observatory and a lab & research complex that requires thousands of workers already in place on the moon. That would require a shipping infrastructure, mostly earth->moon, post mail, communication, and other stuff. It would also require the standard set of professions for maintaining a research facility, as well as a few moon-specific professions. With such a facility already in place it would be a lot easier to comb through everything that is known about the moon to find commercially feasible businesses to pursue on the moon.
Whitehead was a joke, and nothing but a two-bit con-man. Read this
Also read this for a thorough debunking of most of the other competitive claims. There is also a special section for Santos Dumont, the infamous Brazilian.
The closest to beating the Wrights were Samuel Langley and Charles Manly, working with government funding over the Potomac. It is a popular opinion among aeronautic historians that if the Wrights hadn't succeeded in 1903, Langley and Manly would have been first, possibly that same year. Coincidentally, there was a bit of collaboration between the Wrights and L & M.
But Whitehead was definitely a joke. :) A pretty funny one, too. I'm reminded of the Music Man whenever I hear about Whitehead. He was just selling boy's bands.
Those two guys invented the idea of aeronautical engineering and figured it all out.
Well, let's see. They sure in the hell weren't the only group trying to achieve manned, controlled, and motorized flight. However, the three basic concepts involved in flight were actually pioneered by Sir George Cayley:
more here
So, what exactly do you mean by "aeronautical engineering"? Especially considering that the Wright Brothers only built and flew the first model that was truly successful. They didn't actually dream up anything new, they just proved existing theories...
Yeah there are considerably better claims to the title of "First in flight" than the Wright Brothers. Unfortunately we are stuck with an inaccurate account of history as usual. It just goes to show that history is written by the victors...
Every motorized flight that happened before the Wright Brothers was uncontrolled, and most of them crashed. It is true that the Wright Brothers didn't have the "first" motorized flight, but that's not even their record. The Wright Brothers had the first controlled, manned, and motorized flight. They combined the 3 principles of flight into one vehicle, and their model of flight is still used today. None of the other guys for whom history is being revised had either the accomplishment or the effect on the technology that the Wright Brothers had. They deserve their place in history exactly as it is.
The problem is that people read "first controlled motorized flight" and think "First flight", which is inaccurate. You, however, have helped to contribute to this inaccuracy with your revisionist history. Our account is accurate, it's the idiots reading the account that keep trying to screw it up.
Calling Burt Rutan and the Scaled Composites team "home builders" is a pretty big insult. These guys do the engineering behind lots of home-built planes (e.g. Vari-Ez) making them work well and safely and built the first plane to fly around the world on one tank of gas. Small, yes. Small budget, yes. Unprofessional? NO
One of the issues we're up against as Free SOftware developers is the idea that "Home built" == unprofessional. It doesn't. So this guy saying that SC are a bunch of "home builders" is actually a compliment, if he fits a particular personality archetype that typically reads slashdot...
Sure the technology is different, but playing with small internal combustion engines in 1903 WAS rocket science.
Um, the Wright brother's didn't exactly "play" with small internal combustion engines. They played with gliders, and ultimately just gave specs to an engine builder they knew. They focussed on making a heavier-than-air craft that flew under its own power while the human operator remained in control.
Not to put to fine a point on it, that is...
I disagree, I'm all about fact retention.
I think you're all about anal retention. Give me my penis back!
I thought they had until the end of 2004 to claim the prize? I mean, really, Armadillo Aerospace has been planning on launching something in January for testing to compete for the X-prize. Why would they still be planning on competing for the X-prize if launching a test in January would already be too late? (I also remember reading it, but I checked the X-prize site and couldn't find it, other than a reference in the FAQ to the fact that they think it is likely someone will do it before January '05)
Well, I, for one, welcome our new rich tourist overlords.
Mandrake took redhat and tweaked it so much that it lost a lot of it's compatibility
Mandrake forked RedHat. Sooner or later your forks become incompatible unless you merge one into the other. Since Mandrake and RedHat are competitors, there's no real reason to expect them to merge their distributions back together. Instead, in order to achieve compatibility, they both sign up with LSB. :)
starting blankly at a Rubik's Cube.
Dude, where's my car?
Open a history book that goes back more than three years.
Make it 70 years, so we can be sure to cover our American oppression and dominance and manipulation in the Middle East as completely as possible.
God's wrath, eternal flames that don't go out, you on fire, in pain, from the everlasting burnings, held wrath forever... These sound like big enough sticks to you?
Peace, love, goodwill, a clean conscience, amity, mercy, forgiveness, friendship, everlasting life, the joy of really being beyong reproachable, of no misdeeds. These nice enough carrots for you?
Who told you? Where exactly did you get this information? Did God tell you himself? Is it in all His marketing brochures? Do you really believe in truth in advertising?
Tell me something. Are you going to take sides in a war of the scale to which the bible claims is going on without hearing what the other side has to say? Have you ever heard the other side?
Since we've been under 2000 years of Christian oppression, I doubt it. Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition, except that it was an institution under direct control of the Spanish crown, which was in turn given the right to rule by God. Right?
It's surprisingly easy to reject the Bible after you understand a few marketing basics. Simple. First, always make your product appear to be the best product. Second, lie about your competition, but don't get caught. Take another pass through the Bible with those two rules in mind and tell me what you come up with.
All you have to do, and all you can do, is believe on Jesus. Do it while you still have life - you could be dead in an instant and after that is the judgement.
Jesus comes my way, I'm gonna go medieval on that cocksucker. I've got no love for that piece of shit. I've picked my side of this particular "war".
I can't believe you read my entire post and still came up with this:
Shut up. I'm cloning you, and having that clone claim your property, citizenship, and legal rights, so you no longer have the write to speak. Hmm... perhaps I'll just make a billion clone slaves of myself, and force them to vote me in to office and take away your rights. Nah, what I really want to do is make clones that I can legally kill at will to harvest their body parts to keep me alive well past you. Hmm... maybe I'll just clone a brain so I can harvest cells for my own brain in the event that I start becoming senile. Hmm...
Every single thing you cited is an application of cloning technology. Try again. Why is cloning research bad?
In what way does that not make it a tool? As you just said, Science is a tool for exploring the observable world.
Process != tool. Science is a process, or a method if you prefer. And a discipline. But it's not a tool the way a wrench or a screwdriver might be considered tools. We did not construct science to build or fix things. Engineering, maybe. Not science. Don't mistake one for the other.
A lot of the debate is focused there, but a lot of it is focused on whether certain kinds of research are "ok" from an moral, ethical and religious standpoint, and rightly so. Particularly in the are of medical research there has ALWAYS been a huge amount of guidance on how the process is done such that it conform to moral, ethical and/or religious standards. You wonder why drugs are so expensive in the US? If you cut out the moral, ethical and religious constraints which make the development of new drugs an incredibly expensive process, they'd be much cheaper. Of course, the downside would be that the next time you take some meds you'd be more likely to die than not, and you could be unwittingly in a drug dosage study. ;-)
*sigh* Commercial drug development isn't science, it's engineering. Different ball game. Sure, research is involved in both places. The purpose of commercial drug development is to develop a drug that can be sold to treat a condition or cause a reaction or whatever. Medical research frequently includes researching drugs and the effects of drugs, but the purpose of medical research isn't to manufacture a product that will make money. It's to expand the depth of human knowledge. The purpose of commercial drug development is to develop a product that will be manufactured, marketed, and sold to make money.
I agree that there are certain limits to how scientific research should be conducted, but that's totally different than whether or not the knowledge gleaned from the research is bad.
Say this with me: if any part of knowledge is bad, you need a new government. Censorship is evil no matter where it's applied, and this is a very real censorship issue. The purpose of censorship is to prevent people from knowing, and Bush and Co. are trying to prevent people from knowing.
Dude, all I said was that law didn't require morality or ethics. That doesn't mean it doesn't benefit by either/both. Personally, I don't think an implementation of law should ignore morality or ethics, but it should shy away from such as much as possible for the simple fact that morality and ethics are a variable.
However, determining the consequences of disobeying a law can also be done purely pragmatically. The simple question to answer is "Can this person ultimately contribute to society?" The answer doesn't depend on morality, but if you want to assert that it'd be very difficult to answer it without a sense or morality, I will agree. But I won't agree that the answer depends on morality. The death penalty is simple, from a pragmatic point of view. "This person will not ever contribute anything beneficial, and will continue to cause harm." In this case, "beneficial" and "harm" are both terms to be defined by law.
The thing is, I think we'd be better off pushing law in a direction that abstracts morality into something practical. Start by defining the goals as law, and defining in a pragmatic sense what they are. Move on to taking terms that are usually tied up in morality and provide to them pragmatic definitions, so that in law when you refer to "value of human life" you will have a nonambiguous definition to which you can refer. Much of the existing ambiguity of law revolves around the variances in individual morality.
Consider the numerous laws that have been passed for the purpose of making morality into law. Witchcraft laws, sodomy laws, numerous others. Many of which haven't been repealed across the board in spite of the fact that nobody morally believes in the laws any more, whether they morally believe in the rules themselves.
I have built up my own "sense of morality" by using freedom as a starting point. That is at least somewhat in defiance of the idea that morality requires religion. Would you assert that you must have religion to have morals? If not, what is your own foundation for morality?
I'd further qualify that as "fundamentalist religion". There are some folks that are religious but don't have a bit of problem with stem cell research.
I wouldn't. While we are talking specifically about stem cell research, that doesn't mean that "less fundamentalists" won't draw the line somewhere. My personal experience tells me that religionists of all shapes, sizes, colors, and whatever else will always draw the line somewhere. Scientific research has its limits, under religionist rule.
Now, that's not to say that I don't draw the line either. I figure that as long as the research doesn't hurt someone else without consent (like the Nazi research), then anything goes. I further think that if, through an unstoppable set of circumstances, we were to come upon knowledge that was gained in that fashion, we should still use it for the benefit it provides. But that's a conversation for a different day. I just figure that as long as scientists are free to research without hurting other people, then they shouldn't be held back.
Not at all. Morality need never come into it. Here's the reason:
Morality is a system of rules that a person uses to make personal choices. Ethics is a system of behavior that a person uses to interact with other people. Unethical is not an absolute certainty any more than immoral is. However:
However, you must admit that "a way for people of disparate backgrounds, moral ideologies, religion, and so forth to live beside one another in peace, harmony, and prosperity. That is the sole purpose of law." requires moral choices in itself.
It is not a "moral" choice for a group of people to decide to create laws to accomplish the goals I gave under the conditions I cited. It's simply a pragmatic choice. Morality is a very personal thing and by its very nature can only dictate what one person does, the person who has the morality. A group of people working together to create law need not be motivated by morality, although I will concede that it is likely that some/all of the individuals in the group will be motivated by morality.
The point is, law doesn't require morality to operate. I think that ethics affect law far more than morality, since ethics define how you should behave towards other people and interact with the world around you. But ethics is still not required for law. Law, morality, and ethics are three separate, but related concepts that are neither mutually exclusive nor dependent on one another.
It was a kindof joke, I suppose. :)
People, all too often, decide to use the word "believe" in order to force other people to respect everything that follows. Example:
I don't believe in modern technology.
I don't believe in smacking babies.
I don't believe in masturbation.
Problem is, belief is what you have when you think that something is true without fact. So, using the word "believe" in that context is poor english. ;)
I realize you said that english isn't your first language, but this is a lesson that transcends language. Consider the meaning of the English word "believe" in your own language. Would you still say "I don't believe in politics."?