Here here!! I only wish there were more people that were interested in their rights over the illusion of safety.
DING! As soon as a shred of evidence is provided that I am even slightly more safe I will consider relinquishing some of rights. Instead I'm presented with constant barrage of articles telling me how muh less safe all the tax dollars we pour into the Departmet of False Sense of Security are making me. I say f*ck the all the sheeple out there willing to sacrifice our rights so they can feel safe. If they are stupid enough to buy into all the fear mongering and propaganda then the deserve what they get. I personally used to enjoy flying, now I do it as little as possible after back-to-back-to-back horribly irritating experiences at various ariports. How f'ed up is it that I have to be carefull what I say, how I say it, how I present myself, how I dress... Just for the privilege to pay $1 a mile to sit cramped-ass little seat and have my drawers sniffed by some stranger dressed like mall security!? Of course now that I have to pay $3 a gallon for gas I may be financially forced to start flying again. Where is Mr. Garrison when you need him?
Does anyone, even in Congress, seriously believe that this will change anything at all? I seem to remember that CAN-SPAM was just so effective in reducing the number of spam messages I get each and every day...
I really don't get it. These kinds of bills are only passed so that during Representative Knumbskull's re-election campaign, he can state that he 'helped protect Americans from evil computer programs that attack their privacy'. What a waste of our taxpayer dollars!!!
How dare you imply that our congress would use meanlingless legislation as nothing more than a tool to leverage votes during their next re-election campaign! This congress has a proud tradition of meaningful laws that benefit everyone, like the Schiavo Measure or important legislation that protects us from the dangers of stem cell research.
The notion of self replication always depends on how far you want to parse the "input". Biological molecules really aren't "self replicating" so much as they are being manufatured. There are, as far as I know, no biological molecules that will self replicate without the participation of many other molecules... Very large molecules too; often far larger and more complex than the "replicating" part. You can certainly make the case that cell division is self replication, but the cell cannot divide until all the parts have been made. Granted the raw materials are much smaller, but fundamentally these little cube-robots really are no different. I don't think that this sort of "replication" fundamentally differs than any chemical reaction. Macroscopically CO2 replicates as fire burns, but of course we view that as O2 and a carbon source being "converted" to CO2. Perhaps crystalization could be considered self replication... That only really requires one component and a seed crystal will grow and shed more seed crystals that then go on to make zillions of identical crystals that grow and shed more seeds... Anyway, point is "self replication" is a misleading and ill defined label.
The point is I strongly believe it's wrong for a Linux distro to have so much (if any!) bundled applications.
Now that is what makes Linux better than Windows. I agree with you, so I run Gentoo. However, when I want to toss a distro on a work computer (in a work environment where people still call hard drives CPUs and tell me they have 3 GHz of RAM) that does everything Windows does... And more... I throw Fedora at it and everyone is happy right out of the box.
Windows could come in different flavors with different pre-installed software, rather than the "Home" and "Pro" versions that won't even network to each other properly, but the MS philosophy has always seemed to be "computers should be easy to use" which is my biggest complaint because it leads down that slippery slope of "user friendliness" and the next thing you know paper cips are insisting that the word oxygen can't be pluralized. I mean, it takes me as much time to turn off all the BS (like desktop cleanup wizards, stupid tours, and freaking 'update me' pop-ups) in Windows as it does to configure all my hardware in a fresh Linux install... And don't get me started on administering a mutli-user Windows box... Chmod let me count he ways I love you. Oh/home directory it's ok; I have enough love to go around.
I'm still confused, but I suppose that is related to the fact that I have never taken a CS class...
KFG - Your fury and bitterness surrounding this subject mirrors my feelings about the state of science education in general. Perhaps we're just suffering a systemic problem as the 21st century progresses and we realize that no one is impressed by automobiles anymore. Our funding is cut left and right and we have to rely more and more on grants from the DOD (which come with many, many strings attached). University admission standards are, ironically, slipping in the face of a tidal wave of unemployable college graduates. Grade inflation has spun so far out of control that undergrads are simply bitching their way to a 4.0. The quality of graduate students worries profs old and young (except those cheery glass is half full people I want to smack); at least in the physical sciences. It has gotten so bad that to get a PhD you basically just have to show up for enough years that the department gets tired of you. When someone applies for a job with a BS in chemistry it is assumed that they simply couldn't get into med school... I suppose the difference between a pre-med chemsitry major and the real kind is a good analogy for the computer nerd gone CS major and the ones whose computers I was fixing in college.
Quite frankly, the one thing we're up to arses in is apps programers, and, ironically, the one thing in the computer field we're desperately short of right now is computer scientists.
Ok, I've always been confused about this. Now, I'm a computer nerd to be sure, but 100% self taught. I'm a chemist (the non-math kind) by trade, but in high school and college I was a free lance computer guy. I wound up scraping viruses off of more than one CS major's HD and on occasion chatted with them about computers. It became immediately apparent to me that they had no interest in computers whatsoever and their degree, to me, looked like nothing more than a Java programming course... This was in the late 90's when pronouncing the word comptuer correctly could get you a job, so it made sense to me that so many people would want to learn how to program, but what about the nerds? Who was taking care of the nerds?
I simply could not, and still cannot, understand how someone could major in computer science and seemingly know nothing about either computers or science. Ok so maybe you don't have to have a pin-up of your favorite mobo, but you should at least know what the FSB on your current mobo is... Right? And I've met a grip of people with degrees in CS that are mystified by the fact that I run Linux on my laptop. Shouldn't someone in CS at least be familiar with all flavors of OSes? It's not like there are that many...
A friend of mine who went into CS because he loved computers, came out as a software engineer; self admitedly... But Science and engineering are completely different disciplines. Chemistry and chemical engineering are not even in the same building... Can someone explain to me what the deal with computer education is? Is software engineering something that computer scientists do? Is there a software engineering school? Beyond crazy math stuff, what to computer scientists do? I've heard it described as "crazy algorythms and things", but that seems like software development..?
I'm sure the industry would LOVE it if everyone had to pay a monthly fee in order for their portable media player to function! Listening to music could be like using a pay phone; insert $0.35 to listen to your playlist for 20 minutes.
The problem I have with on-demand music (the "celestial jukebox") is that you can only listen to what they decide to host. If it isn't cost effective to host Muddy Waters because the target demographic consists mainly of teenagers, then they'll stop hosting it. So if you have, say taste in music, and don't want to listen to the latest crap some corporate spokes-bimbo is churning out you're thrown to the wolves and forced to comb those space filling anachronisms we call "record stores" for decent music.
Unfortunately any centralized for-profit digital media dissemination will lead to the same sort of marginalization you see in big-budget Hollywood productions. The "celesial jukebox" would have to be the worst though because they can't rotate their selection without effectively un-selling you the songs. At least under the iTunes model they can host a small collection of obscure music that rotates. That way crank-pots like me can buy them when they pop up.
In Happy Land there would be no need for DRM because we'd just use PayPal to kick down cash to the artists we like and everyone on Earth would share their music collections with each other freely. In Reality Land there is a paradigm shift in media dissemination that is, in a beutifully Darwinian fashion, going to un-do the last two decades of media consolodation that has led to a culture in which movies make it into the black from marketing before even being released. Artists have become products of corporations that own them from their cameo on the Mickey Mouse Club all the way down to the cross-marketing with their subsidiaries. All this DRM crap is just the industry scrambling to retain the technological strangle hold they've had for decades. They freaked out when the record was invented, claiming that the radio business would fold if people could just buy the music and listen at home. They brougth a case all the way to the supreme court when the VCR was invented, claiming the movie industry would collapse if people could just keep copies of them at home. Now they're passing legislation to crimminalize file swapping and suing 12 year olds, claiming that the Internet is going to cause the recording industry to collapse... And when Yahoo offers us heavily encrypted music in a proprietary (and very Linux un-friendly thank you very much Mr. Bill) format for $5 a month we're supposed to stop downloading unencrypted music in high quality open source formats... Ok, ok, it is a step in the right direction. $5 a month is really cheap:)
"They" will allow non-DRM formats when people stop sharing them with a few million of their closest friends. That's pretty much the only reason that Joe User would want a non-DRM solution. And yahoo would find it quite difficult to make people delete all of their music after unsubscribing from their service using the "honor system" alone.
Then there are those of us who are pissed off at having to purchase our entire music collections over again every 15 years when the medium changes. DRM just ensures that after WMA (or Microsoft) goes the way of the Dodo you'll have to buy all your music again in whatever flavor-of-the-month CODEC/DRM combo is considered uncrackable by the industry. When DRM goes hardware you're double screwed 'cause in 10 years when your DRM capable media player craps out on you and you can't find it in eBay... Guess what? Time to buy all your f*cking music AGAIN and you get to buy a brand-new media player while you're at it! Yaaaaaayyyy.
I won't make the kind of statement like "The US is turning into Nazi Germany !" But I will point out that it is the worst sort of naivete to believe that because it's a black woman she couldn't possibly be a fascist, or because it's a Latino official he couldn't possibly be a supporter of torture and assassination.
The US is now ruled by a corporate plutocracy with no intention of ever letting go of the control of a machine that makes vast profits for them through the waging of war. When the war profiteers run the government, exactly what kind of society do you think will result ? And why in the world would those who profit so much from this war (and those already being planned) want to end this profitable state of affairs ? Most USians are now just fools with a level of ignorance equal to the German populace in the 1930s. Read Shirer, and fear for this nation and its people.
Btw, the US people are not represented by the Senate at all. Senators represent large corporate interests who pay them to vote for corporate interests. There isn't a single populist Senator in the Congress, and their despite for the common man is evident. They are the same kind of men and women who would have willingly followed Hitler to Hell if it meant the possibility of increasing their personal profits. Conscience is dead in Congress, and it's been buried for a long time now
I don't agree that we're completely lost... yet. There are still some populist lobbiest groups that influence congress. But you're right, we're fighting a propaganda war that is turning the weak-minded into a zombie army for the fascist right.
What isn't sitting right with me is the question "where is the corporate benefit from national IDs". Pretty much every piece of legislation passed since 9/11 has been a thinly veiled corporate giveaway... Even bills that are suppost to be for us get mangled by lobbiest influences- in much the same way a movie script gets chewed to pieces by focus groups- and turn into a waste of tax payer money, like the "enhanced airport security" which is nothing more than an expensive false sense of security... Not that homeland security hasn't provided some sweet government contracts for "Bush friendly" businesses...
Anyway, where is corporate angle here? Is this just an excuse for the government to foot the bill for data collection so Choice Point can more effectively have that information stolen then not tell us about it until California passes law to make them do so..? I hope so because the only other reason they'd have such a stick up their butts about this (remember this provision was "promised to be attached to a must-pass bill" last year) is to control to public more-so. You take the PATRIOT act, PATRIOT act II, take away the filibuster, pack the appeals court with activist right-wing judges that won't allow cases to reach the Supremem Court... Suddenly we've nullified the whole freedom/liberty/right-to-privacy/equal-protection part of the constitution without ever having to pass an amendment... What is their (the GOP) angle here? Is that a tin foil hat I'm wearing?
Goes to show that none of 'em have the balls to stand up for what they believe in, let alone for what's best for their constituents.
If their beliefs are anything like "make as much money and gain as much power as possible, throwing a bone to the public during election years to stay in office" then they have brass balls.
"If that sort of argument can win an election, it sounds like the people got the quality of representation they deserve."
Thanks a lot. You are, of course, presuming that the 2004 national election was any less "rigged" than the 2000 national election.
While it does seem to be true that any challenger to an RNC funded candidate needs a super majority to win, you have to admit that to get eough votes to cheat their way over the top, a whole lot of real dumb and/or uninformed and/or misinformed people had to vote for GW... The "he voted before the war before he voted against it" line was just one in a long list of insulting sound bites. I think my favorite was "well there hasn't been another terrorist attack since 9/11". It reminds me of the Bear Patrol episode of the The Simpsons in which Lisa claims a rock can keep tigers away. When Homer asks her how it works, she says "it doesn't, but I don't see any tigers around" and Homer replies "Lisa, I'd like to buy your rock". It seems that the paper tiger that is "terrorism" has lobotomized nearly 1/2 of the US electorate to near Homer Simpson level cognitive ability. I mean most of Bush's re-election stump speeches (that is, when he wasn't mangling the English language in soon-to-air-on-Jon-Stewart semi-sentances) involved just repeating "Iraq... 9/11, 9/11, 9/11... Terrorists... JESUS! JESUS! JESUS!... Saddam..." until the audience was actually blinking in unison while chanting "party of god, party of god..." and burning effigies of "bible-banning" (another favorite GOP phrase) democrats.
What I find really alarming is how we're letting the administration put out propaganda (like those fake news broadcasts or the back-room press conferences in which officials cannot be quoted) and deny citizens access to the president's public addresses because of bumper stickers or tee-shirts, then sitting on our hands while the senate votes 100-0 to force a national ID system on us... Uhm, hasn't anyone read 1984? Or a freaking history book? The German government accused the Bush administration of using "Nazi-like tactics" for crying out loud... This, after we watched them pass a bakruptsy bill that reads "screw you American public", and a "Family Entertainment and Copyright Act" that ammends title 17 (that's the copyright one, right?) to protect the strangle hold the 5 corporations that make up the RIAA have on media distribution. Then they turn around and say "we have to drill in ANWR or the terrorists win"... And people swallow this crap and keep voting for upstanding repulicans like Rick Santorum who brought a dead fetus home and made his children kiss it!
Does bringing 64 bit support to the desktop not count for anything? Many distros (Gentoo in my case) have been busting their humps to get a stable 64 bit version out and I assume that involves a lot of work from a lot of different software projects. I don't know enough about software development to know how big a deal this is, but I do know that after trying WinXP Pro 64bit RC2 I have no intention of purchasing anything 64 bit by MS anytime in the near future. So this might be a red herring, but my framerates in Doom3 (native 32 bit Linux binaries) are significantly higher in 64bit Gentoo than 64 or 32 bit WinXP... I consider that a major feature:)
Seriously though, anti-bloat is an issue to consider. With all trends pointing to stagnation in CPU development, GPU manufacturers scrapping (the frequency of) incremental upgrades, and MS promising feature and feature in Longhorn, might Linux's big "feature" be efficiency? I mean, if Longhorn is delayed years and years and when people finally get a taste of it, it grinds your 64 bit Athlon FX-whatever to a hault, the ability to run Fluxbox side-by-side with KDE (KDE4 by then?) might be considered an 'eclipsing feature' despite the fact that it is nothing new...
What would Canadians and Americans think if they have to learn Chinese to use the Internet? That's what Chinese people (and all other people) have to do, i.e. learning English, to go online.
While I have absolutely no problem whatsoever wth Chinese URLs/webpages, whatever, you have to know that this is a specious argument. The Internet was developed in English, therefore people who wanted to partake had to learn English. Now China is addressing that problem by creating Chinese URLs. When China creates the next big global technology (as I'm sure they will in the not-too-distant future) they can make it Chinese-only and the shoe will be on the other foot.
...In my humple opinion, only then can society reap the benefits the information age has to offer.
Uhm, would you settle for better limits on copyright laws? If I understand correctly, you want to toss IP laws out the window because of draconian measures like the DMCA. That is sort of the definition of throwing the baby out with the bathwater. I mean, patents, copyrights, trade secrets and the like are meant to allow people to protect their IP for a short time before it becomes public property. In my line of work, I'm basically paid for my ideas and I think I have a right to make a living at it, which wouldn't be possible if I weren't able to protect my ideas from being spun-off after I do all the hard work (too bad I can't get paid for run-on sentances and poor spelling).
Let's say we had no IP laws. In our capitalist society there would be an entire industry created around snatching up the work of others and profiting on it. Imagine a company that scours the country for inventions that are just about to make it to market - but have no IP protection. They then swoop in at the last minute and bring the product to market, while I've invested all this capital inventing, testing, streamlining, etc. The same applies to copyrights... One could wander around compiling hit-songs by simply recording live performances and selling them before the artist can even make enough money to buy a CD burner... Moreover the level of secrecy that would have to be maintained in order to prevent the poaching of your ideas would stiffle progress and creativitiy as it would rob us of the right to "stand on the shoulders of giants" as it were.
Now in the real world, copyright laws have gone too far. Companies do wander around finding the next greatest hit, but they sign artists into shit-end-of-the-stick contracts (sometimes going as far as "purchasing" the IP from the artist), lobby the government to extend copyrights indefinitely, and sue people who don't adhere to their square-peg-in-a-round-hole business model. Disney has managed to extend the copyright on Mickey for how long..? Drug companies are able to weasle out of patent restrictions through a myriad of poorly thought out laws (often drafted by the very lobbiest that represent said drug companies) and when that doesn't work they just ban re-importation from countries that don't respect those poorly written laws.
Look at it this way; I should have the right to make a career out of creating things. If those thigns happen to be ideas, I should still be able to make a living at it. What if, at the end of the month, everyone's paychecks were dropped from an airplane and the first person to the bank had the right to cash them? Would that be fair?
I'm not sure what the beef here is... I happen to run Gentoo and love having the ability to easily add/remove/modularize (is that even a word?) drivers from the kernel... And it is rock stable even on an amd64... I can streamline the kernel (becuse it makes me feel better) and ditch things I don't want (like hiding certain hardware or compiling 3rd party drivers in their place). Just giving the kernel what I know it needs does cut down on boot times because of hardware auto-detection, but of course you can just edit init scripts to get the same effect... I'm pretty sure you don't need the entire ~100 MB source to compile drivers either. Fedora stopped including the kernel-source RPMs a while ago and I have had no trouble compiling custom drivers.
Isn't this the great thing about Linux though? I can re-compile the kernel to my heart's content under Gentoo and pretend it makes my computer faster. If I want to slap Linux on a computer and just have everything work, I can go Fedora, SuSE, whatever, and have everything built in and well tested. My choices with Mac OS or Windows basically boil down to "should I go with the latest version, or stick with what I have?". But hey, whatever changes are coming down the pipe for device drivers is fine by me as long as it doesn't rob me of any choices or flexibility.
I am one of those weird liberals who like Walmart. If you are poor in America, Walmart is your best friend (ok, maybe unless you work for them?) If you think that Walmart should sell fewer Chinese products, then convince your Congress critters to set trade quotas. If you think that Walmart should pay its workers more, increase the minimum wage. If you think that Walmart should provide free health insurance to its workers, either mandate that all employers offer free health insurance, or create a Universal health insurance program. Why should Walmart not follow supply and demand in its business dealings? Why should Walmart be forced to sell more expensive (domestic) goods Target, or pay its employees more than Target? Walmart is a corporation that should strive to maximize shareholder value. The Government should create regulations to protect workers and citizens. I don't blame Walm
At the risk of starting a big off-topic rant, I just have to respond to this... If you are poor in America WallMart is great; until they squeeze out local business and hike their prices back up. That is what happened in my tiny freeway exit of a town in Oregon. WallMart moved in and shut down every single local business one by one. That giant red white and blue Borg cube opened a tire center, video rental, grocery section... They put the locally owned video store, grocery store, farmers' market, hardware store, tire shop; everything out of business. Now my little town is dpenednat on WallMart and guess what? They hiked their prices right back up one by one as they shut down each of the small businesses.
Conginve your congress? What country do you live in? Our congress just tried to stick a feeding tube back in a vegitable despite polls ranging from 75-85% public opposition. Yeah, I'm sure if I walk up to congress and say "please stop taking lobbying dollars from WallMart and pass laws to make them play nice" they'll call a special session and Bush will rush back from his ranch to sign the bill! Hillary Clinton used to sit on the freaking WalMart board of directors for crying out loud.
Just increase the minimum wage? Ok, I'll go back to 2000 and un-rig the election 'cause GW ain't gonna do it.
Universial health care? Go back to Canada hippie.. . Here in American we like our poor to suffer! In fact, we seem to enjoy raising taxes on students so we can give $24 billion in substidies to the coal, oil, and gas industries and can drill in ANWR despite overwhelming public opposition. Oh, I know, we'll just force WallMart to unionize. You know, those communist labor unions seem to jive with the neoconservative faith based policy makers. I'm sure they can work something out.
I think it would be a start to get WallMart to obey the law as written. You know, like hiring US citizens and NOT locking them in the store overnight. Perhaps a little less discrimination, and I'm pretty sure mandatory daily propaganda viewing isn't on the up-and-up.
FYI congress is trying to levy something like a 27% terrif on all Chinese imports, so when our economy crumbles after China dumps all it's US T-Bonds in retaliation, WallMart will get what's coming to it!
Hmmm, I've had a completely different experience with 64 bit Gentoo... I'm currently running 64 bit Gentoo Linux on an FX-55 chip. I dual booted into WinXP 64 bit for a little while, but found the lack of native 64 bit applications (and especially drivers) to be irritating (I'm not a big fan of Windows to begin with either). I've found the biggest speed increases have nothing to do with 64 bit code though. In fact memory access seems to be way, way, way faster. There is also no more "bigmem" option, which was required to address more than 768MB of RAM in 32 bit Linux (at the expense of performance). Ok, so some apps seem to have benefited, and there is a lot of 64 bit optimized code for Linux, but man, applications (32 bit or 64 bit) launch faster, the OS boots faster... I'm really happy with the 64 bit switch. My experience with 64 bit WinXP was much more similar to what you describe with 64 bit Gentoo actually... No drivers, no 64 bit binaries, nothing ran correctly. The few 64 bit drivers that were out there (nVidia mostly) were stripped down versions of the 32 bit software; no supporting apps/control panels. Sound was all FUBAR too (not to imply that 64 bit ALSA was easy to get working). This all seemed to be related to the inability to install non "64 bit Windows Certified" drivers.
The browser thing (32 bit plugins don't work) was annoying at first... Then I just installed adblock and told it to strip out all flash content. I don't even miss it:) You can use Konqueror with 32 bit plugins, but c'mon, who wants to have to run two web browsers just to see flash ads?
For me, the real frustrating parts of running a 64 bit OS right now are two fold. One, all the closed-source CODECs are still 32 bit only which means a side-by-side install of 32 bit media players is required to say, play WM files in Linux. That side-by-side install is the other pain. Though Gentoo has done a good job of it, I have two of every library installed; one 32 bit and one 64 bit. Some apps have to be compiled 32 bit, which GCC does a good job of, but if it gets linked to a 64 bit library or gets pissy about a 64 bit dependancy, you're sunk.
All-in-all I've seen no reason whatsoever (for ME) to run 64 bit Windows when the open source community has been working so hard to churn out a butt-load of 64 bit apps (the 64 bit Gentoo Portage tree is almost as large as the 32 bit tree now). The big irony is that I've been chomping at the bit for a 64 bit Windows release to spur the authoring of 64 bit drivers, CODECs, and games. So bigs thumbs up here for 64 bit Windows even though I have no plans to run it.
I'm going to go ahead and say it though; 64 bit Windows XP PRO RC2 (the latest 64bit Win I ran) can't hold a candel to 64 bit Gentoo Linux. That said, I did spend a lot of time reading up on 64 bit Linux and waited until nVidia released 64 bit drivers, then bought an nVidia mobo/GPU. I would have been really mad if I had to load 2D-only drivers on my 6800 Ultra, but then I wouldn't drop $500 on a graphics card until I made sure that it supported by the OS I intended to run. I'm also not going to let my horrible experience with 64 bit Windows sour me on the OS forever; I'll simply try again down the road when it is more "main stream". If MS makes a better 64 bit OS than Linux - I'll switch.
Given than patent fees start at $10,000 (at least the patents we file) and average $30,000 the "who files it first" idea will simply allow people (or companies) with deep pockets to steal others' ideas... There are ways to protect your invention (sort of a placeholder) for a year or so before filing a patent, but if you were unable to raise the funds to file a patent in time, then you'd be SOL, no?
The quality of the PICTURE isn't so much the issue with TV, it's the quality of the PROGRAMMING.
Give me something worth watching first, then worry about improving the definition.
"Survivor", "Joey", and "American Idol" in 1080i are still crap, they're just crap in high resolution.
PBS was the first station to go HD in my area. I'm thinking "wow, how cool is that? The first station to go HD carries great shows like Nova." Then the irony wagon pulled up in front of my house... PBS went HD, but forgot to get HD programming. They just ran the same IMAX-style panning shots of the nature I should be hiking through rather than watching it on TV, over and over. Now all the other stations are HD, but PBS still doesn't broadcast regular programming on the HD station. I have to tune to the low-def (but still digital) channel to get quality PBS programming. The HDTV channel is usefull only to show off my HDTV to friends:)
It is if IBM, Novell et.al are pushing it. Your idea of this really kewl guerilla OS sticking it to the man is gone.
Hmmm... You seem to have missed the point entirely. It matters not that companies are pushing Linux, because it always remain open source. In fact, Novell and IBM are, in part, responsible for the Linux-awakening of the 21st century. Besides which, (if you read my post) I contend that Linux is the flagship of a larger movement towards a sea change in the philosophy surrounding software. That is, the old MS paradigm that closed-source software is better (it is more secure, stable, or there is no business model than can support OSS, etc) is being challenged. But hey, I'm not a computer professional. I'm not in the industry. I can barely string two Python scripts. I am just in love with the idea that OSS software is flattening out the world as it were. I can't wrap my brain around how amazing some of the OSS projects out there are. Bittorrent now accounts for (so they say) 1/3 of all Internet traffic... Wow!
for our current technology as academia and governement.
"As I see it, the transistor was invented in academia, the internet in government labs and academia; both free-and-open-information-sharing friendly (well not always with the government). "
Then you need to check your eyes. The transitor was invented by Bell Labs, part of the AT&T monopoly. Unix was also invented there.
Ethernet, the core technology behind the internet was invented by Xerox (funded by very valuable patents) and made a standard by Xerox, HP, and DEC.
Academia and governments have played a role too, but it's just not accurate to suggest that corporations haven't played a key role in the advancement of technology
Oops... My bad! Sometimes I get confused with the Bell labs guys that went on to academia 'cause that's where I meet them (or their academic offspring in the case of the transistor). Of course your're right, but it is true that academia and the gov'ment were major contributors to the transistor and the internet. Not just in developing the framework on which the technology was eventually built either. I'm just trying to point out that there is a tug-of-war between industry and academic research and that MS is tugging the direction that is unfavorable for us the citizen-at-large. Sometimes I get carried away wth my pro-academia propaganda, but yes, of course, you're 100% right that the industry is an essential part of technological progress.
What you say about Linux is true from a user point of view, but from the MS point of view, it's another competitor and thus they will treat it as one. They'll dump on it when they feel it suites them and they will acknowledge it when they feel it suites them. It's not "news" everytime they do it, because it's has been happening, and will continue to happen, all of the time. It reminds of the quarterly Dell considers AMD, Dell sticks with Intel stories that we see.
My point is that I think readers would be much better served if Slashdot posted stories on other topics. Hundreds of cool Linux related things happen every day, why focus so much attention on stories like these? They happen daily. There isn't a day when MS doesn't bash Linux, and there isn't a day when they don't acknowledge it in some manner.
I see your point; you'd like/. to cherry pick more specific, more substantive Linux related article submissions, right? I agree with you to some extent, but sometimes people just need an excuse to vent our frustrations and this article in particular exemplifies MS's begrudging acceptance of Linux as a real competator (rather than some fly-by-night commie operation)... Plus the Bill Gates borg icon never stops being funny.
The difference is that Linux is not just another competitor like Apple, Sun, Adobe, whatever. Linux is not another company, it represents and entirely new (re-hashed?) philosophy surrounding computer technology. As I see it, the transistor was invented in academia, the internet in government labs and academia; both free-and-open-information-sharing friendly (well not always with the government). Then corporate America swoops in, like always, and takes these concepts to market. And life is good? Sure, why not, companies move in to innovate and compete, Apple is born, Microsoft is born, and everthing is good? Well, no, not this time. Microsoft, through their tremendous monopolistic power, begins to shape our philosophies surrounding software and how it should be implemented. There is a lot of history around UNIX, Novell, Microsoft, etc. that some of the older computer-folks could do a much better job of explaining...
Fast-forward to the 90's. Suddenly the WWW enters public awareness. Suddenly computers become like American politics; you get two choices and both suck. (I'm sorry, but early Macs sucked - I love new Macs though.) Then I learn about this thing called Linux. I wander over to the CS library and grab Red Hat 2. Huh? The library? Free software? How good can this be?
Fast forward to 2005. Windows XP is now asking me to "validate my genuine microsoft product" before downloading the latest security update in a tidle wave of security fixes that can only be released by Microsoft because the source is guarded like the recipe for Coke. In the other room a native 64 bit Linux OS compiled from scratch (I love you too Gentoo) is humming away will oodles of software written by people from former Soviet Satellite countries, India, China, South America, Europe, Mexico... Meanwhile I'm being forced to run Winblows inside a virtual machine (VMWare really is a nice program) because the American Chemical Soceity and Cambridge Soft have succombed to the power of the Gates and gone out of their way to write software that won't even work with WINE. Then they require me to submit to their journals using said Microsoft-only software. They actually have the stones to charge $1200 per license for this software, in what is essentially a scam to pirate grant money. That just isn't right!
Linux is really the flagship for the battle between freedom of information and big-business' inability to cope with change. Open source software has problems yes, but it sets up a playing field where 16 year olds from Turkmenistan can compete with one of the largest corporations in the world. There is a sea change in that is flattening out the World thanks to the wonders of the computer age. The Army of Penguins is ready to leave fipper-shaped welts on the backsides of the mighty Empire and Slashdot readers want to be on the front lines, ears to the ground, sharpening our beaks, er swords, er motherboards..?
Oh, and you know they're running scared when they trot out the old "socialism is communism" argument. Pfff, by their definition labor unions and organized sports are communist.
Re:really a superconductor?
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The other classic use case is for MRI scanners, which (when I worked on them a few years ago, at least) used helium-cooled ceramic superconductors, and had the magnets switched on at the factory. the idea was that they wouldn't need re-energising over their lifetime. Unfortunately they were big and heavy enough that they had to build special lorries for them just to get them to the install site.
We use MRI in scienceland all the time, but we call it NMR (nuclear magnetic resonance) spectroscopy instead of MRI (magnetic resonance imaging). The dropped the word "nuclear" because it scared patienst. Seriously:) Anyway, that is still true today. We have an 800 MHz magnet that is 2 stories tall. They don't energize ours at the factory though becuase of some differences (the field for one) in the magnets. I think though that organic superconductors aren't viable for "heavy lifting" applications like this because of the very low current carrying capacity. Doped polyacetylene (an organic 'metal'), for example, cannot be used to drive electric motors because although the conductivity is very high, current densities are too low to create an appreciable magnetic/electric field. The same is (probably) true of CNTs.
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DING! As soon as a shred of evidence is provided that I am even slightly more safe I will consider relinquishing some of rights. Instead I'm presented with constant barrage of articles telling me how muh less safe all the tax dollars we pour into the Departmet of False Sense of Security are making me. I say f*ck the all the sheeple out there willing to sacrifice our rights so they can feel safe. If they are stupid enough to buy into all the fear mongering and propaganda then the deserve what they get. I personally used to enjoy flying, now I do it as little as possible after back-to-back-to-back horribly irritating experiences at various ariports. How f'ed up is it that I have to be carefull what I say, how I say it, how I present myself, how I dress... Just for the privilege to pay $1 a mile to sit cramped-ass little seat and have my drawers sniffed by some stranger dressed like mall security!? Of course now that I have to pay $3 a gallon for gas I may be financially forced to start flying again. Where is Mr. Garrison when you need him?
How dare you imply that our congress would use meanlingless legislation as nothing more than a tool to leverage votes during their next re-election campaign! This congress has a proud tradition of meaningful laws that benefit everyone, like the Schiavo Measure or important legislation that protects us from the dangers of stem cell research.
The notion of self replication always depends on how far you want to parse the "input". Biological molecules really aren't "self replicating" so much as they are being manufatured. There are, as far as I know, no biological molecules that will self replicate without the participation of many other molecules... Very large molecules too; often far larger and more complex than the "replicating" part. You can certainly make the case that cell division is self replication, but the cell cannot divide until all the parts have been made. Granted the raw materials are much smaller, but fundamentally these little cube-robots really are no different. I don't think that this sort of "replication" fundamentally differs than any chemical reaction. Macroscopically CO2 replicates as fire burns, but of course we view that as O2 and a carbon source being "converted" to CO2. Perhaps crystalization could be considered self replication... That only really requires one component and a seed crystal will grow and shed more seed crystals that then go on to make zillions of identical crystals that grow and shed more seeds... Anyway, point is "self replication" is a misleading and ill defined label.
Now that is what makes Linux better than Windows. I agree with you, so I run Gentoo. However, when I want to toss a distro on a work computer (in a work environment where people still call hard drives CPUs and tell me they have 3 GHz of RAM) that does everything Windows does... And more... I throw Fedora at it and everyone is happy right out of the box.
Windows could come in different flavors with different pre-installed software, rather than the "Home" and "Pro" versions that won't even network to each other properly, but the MS philosophy has always seemed to be "computers should be easy to use" which is my biggest complaint because it leads down that slippery slope of "user friendliness" and the next thing you know paper cips are insisting that the word oxygen can't be pluralized. I mean, it takes me as much time to turn off all the BS (like desktop cleanup wizards, stupid tours, and freaking 'update me' pop-ups) in Windows as it does to configure all my hardware in a fresh Linux install... And don't get me started on administering a mutli-user Windows box... Chmod let me count he ways I love you. Oh /home directory it's ok; I have enough love to go around.
I'm still confused, but I suppose that is related to the fact that I have never taken a CS class...
KFG - Your fury and bitterness surrounding this subject mirrors my feelings about the state of science education in general. Perhaps we're just suffering a systemic problem as the 21st century progresses and we realize that no one is impressed by automobiles anymore. Our funding is cut left and right and we have to rely more and more on grants from the DOD (which come with many, many strings attached). University admission standards are, ironically, slipping in the face of a tidal wave of unemployable college graduates. Grade inflation has spun so far out of control that undergrads are simply bitching their way to a 4.0. The quality of graduate students worries profs old and young (except those cheery glass is half full people I want to smack); at least in the physical sciences. It has gotten so bad that to get a PhD you basically just have to show up for enough years that the department gets tired of you. When someone applies for a job with a BS in chemistry it is assumed that they simply couldn't get into med school... I suppose the difference between a pre-med chemsitry major and the real kind is a good analogy for the computer nerd gone CS major and the ones whose computers I was fixing in college.
They do crazy stuff with atoms too.
Hey, that's what I do : )
Ok, I've always been confused about this. Now, I'm a computer nerd to be sure, but 100% self taught. I'm a chemist (the non-math kind) by trade, but in high school and college I was a free lance computer guy. I wound up scraping viruses off of more than one CS major's HD and on occasion chatted with them about computers. It became immediately apparent to me that they had no interest in computers whatsoever and their degree, to me, looked like nothing more than a Java programming course... This was in the late 90's when pronouncing the word comptuer correctly could get you a job, so it made sense to me that so many people would want to learn how to program, but what about the nerds? Who was taking care of the nerds?
I simply could not, and still cannot, understand how someone could major in computer science and seemingly know nothing about either computers or science. Ok so maybe you don't have to have a pin-up of your favorite mobo, but you should at least know what the FSB on your current mobo is... Right? And I've met a grip of people with degrees in CS that are mystified by the fact that I run Linux on my laptop. Shouldn't someone in CS at least be familiar with all flavors of OSes? It's not like there are that many...
A friend of mine who went into CS because he loved computers, came out as a software engineer; self admitedly... But Science and engineering are completely different disciplines. Chemistry and chemical engineering are not even in the same building... Can someone explain to me what the deal with computer education is? Is software engineering something that computer scientists do? Is there a software engineering school? Beyond crazy math stuff, what to computer scientists do? I've heard it described as "crazy algorythms and things", but that seems like software development..?
I'm sure the industry would LOVE it if everyone had to pay a monthly fee in order for their portable media player to function! Listening to music could be like using a pay phone; insert $0.35 to listen to your playlist for 20 minutes.
The problem I have with on-demand music (the "celestial jukebox") is that you can only listen to what they decide to host. If it isn't cost effective to host Muddy Waters because the target demographic consists mainly of teenagers, then they'll stop hosting it. So if you have, say taste in music, and don't want to listen to the latest crap some corporate spokes-bimbo is churning out you're thrown to the wolves and forced to comb those space filling anachronisms we call "record stores" for decent music.
Unfortunately any centralized for-profit digital media dissemination will lead to the same sort of marginalization you see in big-budget Hollywood productions. The "celesial jukebox" would have to be the worst though because they can't rotate their selection without effectively un-selling you the songs. At least under the iTunes model they can host a small collection of obscure music that rotates. That way crank-pots like me can buy them when they pop up.
In Happy Land there would be no need for DRM because we'd just use PayPal to kick down cash to the artists we like and everyone on Earth would share their music collections with each other freely. In Reality Land there is a paradigm shift in media dissemination that is, in a beutifully Darwinian fashion, going to un-do the last two decades of media consolodation that has led to a culture in which movies make it into the black from marketing before even being released. Artists have become products of corporations that own them from their cameo on the Mickey Mouse Club all the way down to the cross-marketing with their subsidiaries. All this DRM crap is just the industry scrambling to retain the technological strangle hold they've had for decades. They freaked out when the record was invented, claiming that the radio business would fold if people could just buy the music and listen at home. They brougth a case all the way to the supreme court when the VCR was invented, claiming the movie industry would collapse if people could just keep copies of them at home. Now they're passing legislation to crimminalize file swapping and suing 12 year olds, claiming that the Internet is going to cause the recording industry to collapse... And when Yahoo offers us heavily encrypted music in a proprietary (and very Linux un-friendly thank you very much Mr. Bill) format for $5 a month we're supposed to stop downloading unencrypted music in high quality open source formats... Ok, ok, it is a step in the right direction. $5 a month is really cheap :)
Then there are those of us who are pissed off at having to purchase our entire music collections over again every 15 years when the medium changes. DRM just ensures that after WMA (or Microsoft) goes the way of the Dodo you'll have to buy all your music again in whatever flavor-of-the-month CODEC/DRM combo is considered uncrackable by the industry. When DRM goes hardware you're double screwed 'cause in 10 years when your DRM capable media player craps out on you and you can't find it in eBay... Guess what? Time to buy all your f*cking music AGAIN and you get to buy a brand-new media player while you're at it! Yaaaaaayyyy.
I don't agree that we're completely lost... yet. There are still some populist lobbiest groups that influence congress. But you're right, we're fighting a propaganda war that is turning the weak-minded into a zombie army for the fascist right.
What isn't sitting right with me is the question "where is the corporate benefit from national IDs". Pretty much every piece of legislation passed since 9/11 has been a thinly veiled corporate giveaway... Even bills that are suppost to be for us get mangled by lobbiest influences- in much the same way a movie script gets chewed to pieces by focus groups- and turn into a waste of tax payer money, like the "enhanced airport security" which is nothing more than an expensive false sense of security... Not that homeland security hasn't provided some sweet government contracts for "Bush friendly" businesses...
Anyway, where is corporate angle here? Is this just an excuse for the government to foot the bill for data collection so Choice Point can more effectively have that information stolen then not tell us about it until California passes law to make them do so..? I hope so because the only other reason they'd have such a stick up their butts about this (remember this provision was "promised to be attached to a must-pass bill" last year) is to control to public more-so. You take the PATRIOT act, PATRIOT act II, take away the filibuster, pack the appeals court with activist right-wing judges that won't allow cases to reach the Supremem Court... Suddenly we've nullified the whole freedom/liberty/right-to-privacy/equal-protection part of the constitution without ever having to pass an amendment... What is their (the GOP) angle here? Is that a tin foil hat I'm wearing?
If their beliefs are anything like "make as much money and gain as much power as possible, throwing a bone to the public during election years to stay in office" then they have brass balls.
While it does seem to be true that any challenger to an RNC funded candidate needs a super majority to win, you have to admit that to get eough votes to cheat their way over the top, a whole lot of real dumb and/or uninformed and/or misinformed people had to vote for GW... The "he voted before the war before he voted against it" line was just one in a long list of insulting sound bites. I think my favorite was "well there hasn't been another terrorist attack since 9/11". It reminds me of the Bear Patrol episode of the The Simpsons in which Lisa claims a rock can keep tigers away. When Homer asks her how it works, she says "it doesn't, but I don't see any tigers around" and Homer replies "Lisa, I'd like to buy your rock". It seems that the paper tiger that is "terrorism" has lobotomized nearly 1/2 of the US electorate to near Homer Simpson level cognitive ability. I mean most of Bush's re-election stump speeches (that is, when he wasn't mangling the English language in soon-to-air-on-Jon-Stewart semi-sentances) involved just repeating "Iraq... 9/11, 9/11, 9/11... Terrorists... JESUS! JESUS! JESUS!... Saddam..." until the audience was actually blinking in unison while chanting "party of god, party of god..." and burning effigies of "bible-banning" (another favorite GOP phrase) democrats.
What I find really alarming is how we're letting the administration put out propaganda (like those fake news broadcasts or the back-room press conferences in which officials cannot be quoted) and deny citizens access to the president's public addresses because of bumper stickers or tee-shirts, then sitting on our hands while the senate votes 100-0 to force a national ID system on us... Uhm, hasn't anyone read 1984? Or a freaking history book? The German government accused the Bush administration of using "Nazi-like tactics" for crying out loud... This, after we watched them pass a bakruptsy bill that reads "screw you American public", and a "Family Entertainment and Copyright Act" that ammends title 17 (that's the copyright one, right?) to protect the strangle hold the 5 corporations that make up the RIAA have on media distribution. Then they turn around and say "we have to drill in ANWR or the terrorists win"... And people swallow this crap and keep voting for upstanding repulicans like Rick Santorum who brought a dead fetus home and made his children kiss it!
Does bringing 64 bit support to the desktop not count for anything? Many distros (Gentoo in my case) have been busting their humps to get a stable 64 bit version out and I assume that involves a lot of work from a lot of different software projects. I don't know enough about software development to know how big a deal this is, but I do know that after trying WinXP Pro 64bit RC2 I have no intention of purchasing anything 64 bit by MS anytime in the near future. So this might be a red herring, but my framerates in Doom3 (native 32 bit Linux binaries) are significantly higher in 64bit Gentoo than 64 or 32 bit WinXP... I consider that a major feature :)
Seriously though, anti-bloat is an issue to consider. With all trends pointing to stagnation in CPU development, GPU manufacturers scrapping (the frequency of) incremental upgrades, and MS promising feature and feature in Longhorn, might Linux's big "feature" be efficiency? I mean, if Longhorn is delayed years and years and when people finally get a taste of it, it grinds your 64 bit Athlon FX-whatever to a hault, the ability to run Fluxbox side-by-side with KDE (KDE4 by then?) might be considered an 'eclipsing feature' despite the fact that it is nothing new...
While I have absolutely no problem whatsoever wth Chinese URLs/webpages, whatever, you have to know that this is a specious argument. The Internet was developed in English, therefore people who wanted to partake had to learn English. Now China is addressing that problem by creating Chinese URLs. When China creates the next big global technology (as I'm sure they will in the not-too-distant future) they can make it Chinese-only and the shoe will be on the other foot.
Uhm, would you settle for better limits on copyright laws? If I understand correctly, you want to toss IP laws out the window because of draconian measures like the DMCA. That is sort of the definition of throwing the baby out with the bathwater. I mean, patents, copyrights, trade secrets and the like are meant to allow people to protect their IP for a short time before it becomes public property. In my line of work, I'm basically paid for my ideas and I think I have a right to make a living at it, which wouldn't be possible if I weren't able to protect my ideas from being spun-off after I do all the hard work (too bad I can't get paid for run-on sentances and poor spelling).
Let's say we had no IP laws. In our capitalist society there would be an entire industry created around snatching up the work of others and profiting on it. Imagine a company that scours the country for inventions that are just about to make it to market - but have no IP protection. They then swoop in at the last minute and bring the product to market, while I've invested all this capital inventing, testing, streamlining, etc. The same applies to copyrights... One could wander around compiling hit-songs by simply recording live performances and selling them before the artist can even make enough money to buy a CD burner... Moreover the level of secrecy that would have to be maintained in order to prevent the poaching of your ideas would stiffle progress and creativitiy as it would rob us of the right to "stand on the shoulders of giants" as it were.
Now in the real world, copyright laws have gone too far. Companies do wander around finding the next greatest hit, but they sign artists into shit-end-of-the-stick contracts (sometimes going as far as "purchasing" the IP from the artist), lobby the government to extend copyrights indefinitely, and sue people who don't adhere to their square-peg-in-a-round-hole business model. Disney has managed to extend the copyright on Mickey for how long..? Drug companies are able to weasle out of patent restrictions through a myriad of poorly thought out laws (often drafted by the very lobbiest that represent said drug companies) and when that doesn't work they just ban re-importation from countries that don't respect those poorly written laws.
Look at it this way; I should have the right to make a career out of creating things. If those thigns happen to be ideas, I should still be able to make a living at it. What if, at the end of the month, everyone's paychecks were dropped from an airplane and the first person to the bank had the right to cash them? Would that be fair?
I'm not sure what the beef here is... I happen to run Gentoo and love having the ability to easily add/remove/modularize (is that even a word?) drivers from the kernel... And it is rock stable even on an amd64... I can streamline the kernel (becuse it makes me feel better) and ditch things I don't want (like hiding certain hardware or compiling 3rd party drivers in their place). Just giving the kernel what I know it needs does cut down on boot times because of hardware auto-detection, but of course you can just edit init scripts to get the same effect... I'm pretty sure you don't need the entire ~100 MB source to compile drivers either. Fedora stopped including the kernel-source RPMs a while ago and I have had no trouble compiling custom drivers.
Isn't this the great thing about Linux though? I can re-compile the kernel to my heart's content under Gentoo and pretend it makes my computer faster. If I want to slap Linux on a computer and just have everything work, I can go Fedora, SuSE, whatever, and have everything built in and well tested. My choices with Mac OS or Windows basically boil down to "should I go with the latest version, or stick with what I have?". But hey, whatever changes are coming down the pipe for device drivers is fine by me as long as it doesn't rob me of any choices or flexibility.
Except of course unions are not communist, they tend to be quite socialist - but not by design.
I know, I come from a union household (IBEW baby), but my... Uhm... More "Bush-leaning" friends like to call them communist.
Of course anything in the US that trys to have people looking out for one another and takes power away from corporates is "communist", isn't it?
That's what I've been told by people who didn't grow up in a union household :)
At the risk of starting a big off-topic rant, I just have to respond to this... If you are poor in America WallMart is great; until they squeeze out local business and hike their prices back up. That is what happened in my tiny freeway exit of a town in Oregon. WallMart moved in and shut down every single local business one by one. That giant red white and blue Borg cube opened a tire center, video rental, grocery section... They put the locally owned video store, grocery store, farmers' market, hardware store, tire shop; everything out of business. Now my little town is dpenednat on WallMart and guess what? They hiked their prices right back up one by one as they shut down each of the small businesses.
Conginve your congress? What country do you live in? Our congress just tried to stick a feeding tube back in a vegitable despite polls ranging from 75-85% public opposition. Yeah, I'm sure if I walk up to congress and say "please stop taking lobbying dollars from WallMart and pass laws to make them play nice" they'll call a special session and Bush will rush back from his ranch to sign the bill! Hillary Clinton used to sit on the freaking WalMart board of directors for crying out loud.
Just increase the minimum wage? Ok, I'll go back to 2000 and un-rig the election 'cause GW ain't gonna do it.
Universial health care? Go back to Canada hippie.. . Here in American we like our poor to suffer! In fact, we seem to enjoy raising taxes on students so we can give $24 billion in substidies to the coal, oil, and gas industries and can drill in ANWR despite overwhelming public opposition. Oh, I know, we'll just force WallMart to unionize. You know, those communist labor unions seem to jive with the neoconservative faith based policy makers. I'm sure they can work something out.
I think it would be a start to get WallMart to obey the law as written. You know, like hiring US citizens and NOT locking them in the store overnight. Perhaps a little less discrimination, and I'm pretty sure mandatory daily propaganda viewing isn't on the up-and-up.
FYI congress is trying to levy something like a 27% terrif on all Chinese imports, so when our economy crumbles after China dumps all it's US T-Bonds in retaliation, WallMart will get what's coming to it!
Hmmm, I've had a completely different experience with 64 bit Gentoo... I'm currently running 64 bit Gentoo Linux on an FX-55 chip. I dual booted into WinXP 64 bit for a little while, but found the lack of native 64 bit applications (and especially drivers) to be irritating (I'm not a big fan of Windows to begin with either). I've found the biggest speed increases have nothing to do with 64 bit code though. In fact memory access seems to be way, way, way faster. There is also no more "bigmem" option, which was required to address more than 768MB of RAM in 32 bit Linux (at the expense of performance). Ok, so some apps seem to have benefited, and there is a lot of 64 bit optimized code for Linux, but man, applications (32 bit or 64 bit) launch faster, the OS boots faster... I'm really happy with the 64 bit switch. My experience with 64 bit WinXP was much more similar to what you describe with 64 bit Gentoo actually... No drivers, no 64 bit binaries, nothing ran correctly. The few 64 bit drivers that were out there (nVidia mostly) were stripped down versions of the 32 bit software; no supporting apps/control panels. Sound was all FUBAR too (not to imply that 64 bit ALSA was easy to get working). This all seemed to be related to the inability to install non "64 bit Windows Certified" drivers.
The browser thing (32 bit plugins don't work) was annoying at first... Then I just installed adblock and told it to strip out all flash content. I don't even miss it :) You can use Konqueror with 32 bit plugins, but c'mon, who wants to have to run two web browsers just to see flash ads?
For me, the real frustrating parts of running a 64 bit OS right now are two fold. One, all the closed-source CODECs are still 32 bit only which means a side-by-side install of 32 bit media players is required to say, play WM files in Linux. That side-by-side install is the other pain. Though Gentoo has done a good job of it, I have two of every library installed; one 32 bit and one 64 bit. Some apps have to be compiled 32 bit, which GCC does a good job of, but if it gets linked to a 64 bit library or gets pissy about a 64 bit dependancy, you're sunk.
All-in-all I've seen no reason whatsoever (for ME) to run 64 bit Windows when the open source community has been working so hard to churn out a butt-load of 64 bit apps (the 64 bit Gentoo Portage tree is almost as large as the 32 bit tree now). The big irony is that I've been chomping at the bit for a 64 bit Windows release to spur the authoring of 64 bit drivers, CODECs, and games. So bigs thumbs up here for 64 bit Windows even though I have no plans to run it.
I'm going to go ahead and say it though; 64 bit Windows XP PRO RC2 (the latest 64bit Win I ran) can't hold a candel to 64 bit Gentoo Linux. That said, I did spend a lot of time reading up on 64 bit Linux and waited until nVidia released 64 bit drivers, then bought an nVidia mobo/GPU. I would have been really mad if I had to load 2D-only drivers on my 6800 Ultra, but then I wouldn't drop $500 on a graphics card until I made sure that it supported by the OS I intended to run. I'm also not going to let my horrible experience with 64 bit Windows sour me on the OS forever; I'll simply try again down the road when it is more "main stream". If MS makes a better 64 bit OS than Linux - I'll switch.
Given than patent fees start at $10,000 (at least the patents we file) and average $30,000 the "who files it first" idea will simply allow people (or companies) with deep pockets to steal others' ideas... There are ways to protect your invention (sort of a placeholder) for a year or so before filing a patent, but if you were unable to raise the funds to file a patent in time, then you'd be SOL, no?
PBS was the first station to go HD in my area. I'm thinking "wow, how cool is that? The first station to go HD carries great shows like Nova." Then the irony wagon pulled up in front of my house... PBS went HD, but forgot to get HD programming. They just ran the same IMAX-style panning shots of the nature I should be hiking through rather than watching it on TV, over and over. Now all the other stations are HD, but PBS still doesn't broadcast regular programming on the HD station. I have to tune to the low-def (but still digital) channel to get quality PBS programming. The HDTV channel is usefull only to show off my HDTV to friends :)
Hmmm... You seem to have missed the point entirely. It matters not that companies are pushing Linux, because it always remain open source. In fact, Novell and IBM are, in part, responsible for the Linux-awakening of the 21st century. Besides which, (if you read my post) I contend that Linux is the flagship of a larger movement towards a sea change in the philosophy surrounding software. That is, the old MS paradigm that closed-source software is better (it is more secure, stable, or there is no business model than can support OSS, etc) is being challenged. But hey, I'm not a computer professional. I'm not in the industry. I can barely string two Python scripts. I am just in love with the idea that OSS software is flattening out the world as it were. I can't wrap my brain around how amazing some of the OSS projects out there are. Bittorrent now accounts for (so they say) 1/3 of all Internet traffic... Wow!
Oops... My bad! Sometimes I get confused with the Bell labs guys that went on to academia 'cause that's where I meet them (or their academic offspring in the case of the transistor). Of course your're right, but it is true that academia and the gov'ment were major contributors to the transistor and the internet. Not just in developing the framework on which the technology was eventually built either. I'm just trying to point out that there is a tug-of-war between industry and academic research and that MS is tugging the direction that is unfavorable for us the citizen-at-large. Sometimes I get carried away wth my pro-academia propaganda, but yes, of course, you're 100% right that the industry is an essential part of technological progress.
I see your point; you'd like /. to cherry pick more specific, more substantive Linux related article submissions, right? I agree with you to some extent, but sometimes people just need an excuse to vent our frustrations and this article in particular exemplifies MS's begrudging acceptance of Linux as a real competator (rather than some fly-by-night commie operation)... Plus the Bill Gates borg icon never stops being funny.
The difference is that Linux is not just another competitor like Apple, Sun, Adobe, whatever. Linux is not another company, it represents and entirely new (re-hashed?) philosophy surrounding computer technology. As I see it, the transistor was invented in academia, the internet in government labs and academia; both free-and-open-information-sharing friendly (well not always with the government). Then corporate America swoops in, like always, and takes these concepts to market. And life is good? Sure, why not, companies move in to innovate and compete, Apple is born, Microsoft is born, and everthing is good? Well, no, not this time. Microsoft, through their tremendous monopolistic power, begins to shape our philosophies surrounding software and how it should be implemented. There is a lot of history around UNIX, Novell, Microsoft, etc. that some of the older computer-folks could do a much better job of explaining...
Fast-forward to the 90's. Suddenly the WWW enters public awareness. Suddenly computers become like American politics; you get two choices and both suck. (I'm sorry, but early Macs sucked - I love new Macs though.) Then I learn about this thing called Linux. I wander over to the CS library and grab Red Hat 2. Huh? The library? Free software? How good can this be?
Fast forward to 2005. Windows XP is now asking me to "validate my genuine microsoft product" before downloading the latest security update in a tidle wave of security fixes that can only be released by Microsoft because the source is guarded like the recipe for Coke. In the other room a native 64 bit Linux OS compiled from scratch (I love you too Gentoo) is humming away will oodles of software written by people from former Soviet Satellite countries, India, China, South America, Europe, Mexico... Meanwhile I'm being forced to run Winblows inside a virtual machine (VMWare really is a nice program) because the American Chemical Soceity and Cambridge Soft have succombed to the power of the Gates and gone out of their way to write software that won't even work with WINE. Then they require me to submit to their journals using said Microsoft-only software. They actually have the stones to charge $1200 per license for this software, in what is essentially a scam to pirate grant money. That just isn't right!
Linux is really the flagship for the battle between freedom of information and big-business' inability to cope with change. Open source software has problems yes, but it sets up a playing field where 16 year olds from Turkmenistan can compete with one of the largest corporations in the world. There is a sea change in that is flattening out the World thanks to the wonders of the computer age. The Army of Penguins is ready to leave fipper-shaped welts on the backsides of the mighty Empire and Slashdot readers want to be on the front lines, ears to the ground, sharpening our beaks, er swords, er motherboards..?
Oh, and you know they're running scared when they trot out the old "socialism is communism" argument. Pfff, by their definition labor unions and organized sports are communist.
We use MRI in scienceland all the time, but we call it NMR (nuclear magnetic resonance) spectroscopy instead of MRI (magnetic resonance imaging). The dropped the word "nuclear" because it scared patienst. Seriously :) Anyway, that is still true today. We have an 800 MHz magnet that is 2 stories tall. They don't energize ours at the factory though becuase of some differences (the field for one) in the magnets. I think though that organic superconductors aren't viable for "heavy lifting" applications like this because of the very low current carrying capacity. Doped polyacetylene (an organic 'metal'), for example, cannot be used to drive electric motors because although the conductivity is very high, current densities are too low to create an appreciable magnetic/electric field. The same is (probably) true of CNTs.