Not having read the fine article (of course!), do they say somewhere that the code they released is not covered by any patents or other kind of ethereous `IP' and so on?
They may send a printout of the code to everyone on earth and and the same time it may be damning to another project to include code from people that have seen it. That's why `visible source' (for lack of a better word) is not the same thing as open source.
That they have not sued does not mean that they cannot scare people. Most of the FUD they've spread around all these years was mostly baseless. That was no obstacle to its being somewhat effective... Same idea.
Well, I was commenting on the format structure of your argument: my point is, if you are required to say what something is best for, I see no reason why you should not be able to be required to say what something is good for. Your reply may be cogent or not, I really do not have a strong opinion. I was only pointing that you may want to find a stronger argumentation.
Torvalds usually doesnt care about something being the best. Its supposed to be good enough.
Using the word best requires you to say for what, otherwise you might as well use a word such as coolest, most geeky, most whatsoever.
So one is required to say for what something is best for, but not for what something is good for?
Once again, the open source movement leads the way in product innovation.
(I'll get modded as troll for this, of course).
Well, if you keep in mind the context of the present/. post, it is clear that it is quite innovative to come up with an open iPhone clone. It has clearly not occurred to Apple or, at least, the appeal of the idea has not been seen by Apple.
So are music recordings. And we all know how well that's worked out, right?
Hmm, how? Have all artists starved to death, production and distribution companies collapsed, and is music no longer being created and played because the economic incentive has disappeared?
I am using the word 'orthgonal' in the same way as I am using the word 'trivial': in the way a mathematician, talking informally, would use it (I am a mathematician writing informally, after all). Complexity and difficulty are correlated in the informal sense that in most people find complex things difficult and the things they find difficult tend to be complex. They are independent (orthogonal, in lunch-time-at-a-math-department lingo) notions, though.
`Intrinsics of language'... I'll be giggling about that on my way home. You missed using the word `paradigm'...
Complexity and difficulty are orthogonal concepts.
Uncorrelated.
Actually, they are not uncorrelated. They are independent (which is what orthogonal means, precisely).
because it's truth is apparent at once if one knows the meanings of the terms involved,... glorious triviality...
Which only emphasizes that each and every concept's classification into any scheme of categories is dependent on the chosen/acquired/experienced frame of reference. And as 'yoga' is mentioned, it gets tough indeed when it comes to phenomena which, though (maybe) observable on an individual basis, are not easily (if at all) to be communicated. It starts with the seemingly neither difficult, complicated nor complex concept of, say, the colour 'blue'.
I have no idea what you mean here. I can tell you are extrapolating from what I said about math and the way mathematicians look at certain things to a much more general context.
Anyone who thinks that 'blue' is a simple, or easy, or uncomplicated concept needs to think a bit more about the question. In any case, that's rather unrelated to my post, so...
Something is `trivial' in math-speak when there isn't anything deep in it, and it follows basically from the definitions of the terms involved (so, in a way, it's like an analytical proposition) For example, the example in the Wikipedia page for Trivial about the `theorem' that the integral of a function in a zero-length `interval' vanishes is trivial because it's truth is apparent at once if one knows the meanings of the terms involved. Likewise, you can climb all the way to the heights of EGA and find lots and lots of trivialities (for a certain subset of these trivialities, Grothendieck and his school used the term `yoga'...) which, despite being trivial, require years of study in order to be appreciated in their glorious triviality. On the other hand, what Wikipedia calls the Fundamental Theorem of Calculus or most of the elementary theorems of analysis require both an insight and quite a lot of technical tools in order to be proved---what a mathematician would call `an idea'.
Complexity and difficulty are orthogonal concepts.
In this respect, X only provides a general purpose interprocess communication mechanism (using what's known as X atoms). A separate (considerably later) specification, the ICCCM (google can find it for you), specifies (among many other things, like a simpler interprocess protocol called `cut-buffers' which is not used these days, someconventions about session management, etc) a specific protocol using that mechanism, the so called `selections' protocol, which among other things, involves three selections, the primary one, the secondary one and the clipboard; it described more or less (more less than more, really) how applications gain control of selections and so on---since the ICCCM is pretty bad in this part, much divergence has been seen in the implementation of this protocol, but there is now a certain consensus which is expressed in the current freedesktop.org `standard' about selections. The three selections have different semantics: the primary selection contains whatever is `currently' selected (this is the one you get by middle-clicking on supporting apps), the clipboard selection contains the last explicitly copied selection, and the secondary one is, well, secondary, and is not used by anything nowadays, so I'lljust refer you to the ICCCM for a description. Finally, applications are the ones that implement the selection protocol, usually not directly but by using a toolkit, as GTK or QTK. If you feelmasochistic enough, you can, though, write an X app using using nothing more than plain Xlib and then have oodles of fun doing the implementation yourself. X will not do that for you. Indeed, X does not do anything for you: it provides "mechanisms, not policy"
thats the baby boomer's Modus operandi. The younger generations are going to have to fight this one all the way. Whether it be in the office where they still force 10,000 pieces of paper down your throat or when you try and catch the latest film on YOUR home equipment, there will be a baby boomer there trying to make the process inefficient and money lined for HIS interests.
Hm, as opposed to which later generation?
Re:%75 as effective as a prescription 3% the price
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Science vs. Homeopathy
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You should probably do some research on how research in medicine is funded...
Re:%75 as effective as a prescription 3% the price
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Science vs. Homeopathy
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Well apparently they aren't well-suited for scientific study, because no one's bothering to do it.
You're living in a theoretical world; I live in the real world, and in this world, science only studies things that are highly profitable. Viagra isn't very useful to the millions of people suffering from chronic diseases.
Well, as a pure mathematician who happens to be quite-well financed to do very pure mathematics which would make G. H. Hardy proud for its distance to `real world', profitable applications, I have a different view of things, I guess...
Politics has nothing to do with it; only money does. Phizer isn't ignoring various diseases because of their political affiliations. They're ignoring them because they're not profitable enough for them.
You somehow seem to believe that politics is a thing disjoint from money. I hope you do not take offense if I say that that is quite a naive position.
Politics, understood as the human activity which has as an end the determination of collective decisions which, once taken, involve the whole of society, very much includes dealing with the problem of assigning money to do scientific research on `non-profitable deseases'.
In any case, all the things you mention are absolutely unrelated to the statement I hinted, that there is nothing (which actually exists, in an observable way) which is not well-suited to scientific study. You are mixing the well-suitedness of something for scientific scrutiny to the problem that the political and historical conditions required for such scientific scrutiny to actually occur. Mixing things rarely helps...
Re:%75 as effective as a prescription 3% the price
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Science vs. Homeopathy
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· Score: 1
You are talking about the politics of research funding. That's a completely separate issue. On the other hand, Lupus or CFS are perfectly well-suited for scientific study. That was my point.
Re:%75 as effective as a prescription 3% the price
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Science vs. Homeopathy
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· Score: 1
If (the existence of) something has observable consequences, then it is well-suited to scientific studied; it does not even have to be reproducible. On the other hand, if something does not have observable consequences, its very existence is nothing but a petition of principle. Usually, when people refer to `anything methaphysical', they have in mind this very peculiar kind of `things'... It is not a great loss that they are outside of the realm of scientific study, since they do not exist, for all practical purposes.
As for philosophy: if philosophy cannot be studied in a methodologically consistent way in which the criteria for the validity of the statements in question are firmly based upon well-established grounds, then there is nothing to be studied. A huge lot of what passes as philosophy is nothing more than mostly bad literature.
The fact that science be expensive, hard, and so on, and that it does not provide yet (or ever!) explanations for specific phenomena (gravity, Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, the placebo effect, etc) is completely irrelevant when discussing the applicability of the scientific method and the suitedness of these subjects to scientific study.
Science is fine, but it's rigorous and expensive, and requires someone to pony up the money and effort to do it. There's still tons of things that are not well understood by science, or even at all, such as the mechanisms by which many drugs work, or even how gravity works (no one has any clue how gravity works; there are multiple contradictory theories but that's it), so sometimes people have to do something different instead of waiting around for science to come up with an answer and a solution.
(Notice that the different theories of how gravity works do not have observable differences (so far), so the fact that they exst in multitudes is essentially irrelevant) What exactly do people do instead of waiting for science? Either they just use the scientific method (which is a way of coming up with answers from the available information; it does not at all require full understanding and complete information to proceeed) or they... do what, exactly? Invoke the Gods?
Slashdot Mirror
What is whitespace sensitive (at least by default) is the patch itself.
You've never tried to submit a patch, ever. That's quite clear.
...not the same as free software, I'd add.
Not having read the fine article (of course!), do they say somewhere that the code they released is not covered by any patents or other kind of ethereous `IP' and so on?
They may send a printout of the code to everyone on earth and and the same time it may be damning to another project to include code from people that have seen it. That's why `visible source' (for lack of a better word) is not the same thing as open source.
That they have not sued does not mean that they cannot scare people. Most of the FUD they've spread around all these years was mostly baseless. That was no obstacle to its being somewhat effective... Same idea.
Well, I was commenting on the format structure of your argument: my point is, if you are required to say what something is best for, I see no reason why you should not be able to be required to say what something is good for. Your reply may be cogent or not, I really do not have a strong opinion. I was only pointing that you may want to find a stronger argumentation.
Using the word best requires you to say for what, otherwise you might as well use a word such as coolest, most geeky, most whatsoever.
So one is required to say for what something is best for, but not for what something is good for?
Maybe you want to think about this a bit more?
I guess you voted for Bush. Two times.
(I'll get modded as troll for this, of course).
Well, if you keep in mind the context of the present /. post, it is clear that it is quite innovative to come up with an open iPhone clone. It has clearly not occurred to Apple or, at least, the appeal of the idea has not been seen by Apple.
What's taught in graduate school is now the US's intellectual property?
So are music recordings. And we all know how well that's worked out, right?
Hmm, how? Have all artists starved to death, production and distribution companies collapsed, and is music no longer being created and played because the economic incentive has disappeared?
Yeah. That works too ;-)
I am using the word 'orthgonal' in the same way as I am using the word 'trivial': in the way a mathematician, talking informally, would use it (I am a mathematician writing informally, after all). Complexity and difficulty are correlated in the informal sense that in most people find complex things difficult and the things they find difficult tend to be complex. They are independent (orthogonal, in lunch-time-at-a-math-department lingo) notions, though.
`Intrinsics of language'... I'll be giggling about that on my way home. You missed using the word `paradigm'...
Uncorrelated.
Actually, they are not uncorrelated. They are independent (which is what orthogonal means, precisely).
because it's truth is apparent at once if one knows the meanings of the terms involved,Which only emphasizes that each and every concept's classification into any scheme of categories is dependent on the chosen/acquired/experienced frame of reference. And as 'yoga' is mentioned, it gets tough indeed when it comes to phenomena which, though (maybe) observable on an individual basis, are not easily (if at all) to be communicated. It starts with the seemingly neither difficult, complicated nor complex concept of, say, the colour 'blue'.
I have no idea what you mean here. I can tell you are extrapolating from what I said about math and the way mathematicians look at certain things to a much more general context.
Anyone who thinks that 'blue' is a simple, or easy, or uncomplicated concept needs to think a bit more about the question. In any case, that's rather unrelated to my post, so...
Something is `trivial' in math-speak when there isn't anything deep in it, and it follows basically from the definitions of the terms involved (so, in a way, it's like an analytical proposition) For example, the example in the Wikipedia page for Trivial about the `theorem' that the integral of a function in a zero-length `interval' vanishes is trivial because it's truth is apparent at once if one knows the meanings of the terms involved. Likewise, you can climb all the way to the heights of EGA and find lots and lots of trivialities (for a certain subset of these trivialities, Grothendieck and his school used the term `yoga'...) which, despite being trivial, require years of study in order to be appreciated in their glorious triviality. On the other hand, what Wikipedia calls the Fundamental Theorem of Calculus or most of the elementary theorems of analysis require both an insight and quite a lot of technical tools in order to be proved---what a mathematician would call `an idea'.
Complexity and difficulty are orthogonal concepts.
You either sue for GPL infringment (which no law supports)
or you sue for copyright infringement.
Please, inform yourself before commenting on matters you clearly have absolutely no grasp on.
Imagine the ODF spec within comments of the schema... or the OOXML one, if you are into S&M.
Principles. Principles. It is not that hard...
That's not true.
In this respect, X only provides a general purpose interprocess communication mechanism (using what's known as X atoms). A separate (considerably later) specification, the ICCCM (google can find it for you), specifies (among many other things, like a simpler interprocess protocol called `cut-buffers' which is not used these days, someconventions about session management, etc) a specific protocol using that mechanism, the so called `selections' protocol, which among other things, involves three selections, the primary one, the secondary one and the clipboard; it described more or less (more less than more, really) how applications gain control of selections and so on---since the ICCCM is pretty bad in this part, much divergence has been seen in the implementation of this protocol, but there is now a certain consensus which is expressed in the current freedesktop.org `standard' about selections. The three selections have different semantics: the primary selection contains whatever is `currently' selected (this is the one you get by middle-clicking on supporting apps), the clipboard selection contains the last explicitly copied selection, and the secondary one is, well, secondary, and is not used by anything nowadays, so I'lljust refer you to the ICCCM for a description. Finally, applications are the ones that implement the selection protocol, usually not directly but by using a toolkit, as GTK or QTK. If you feelmasochistic enough, you can, though, write an X app using using nothing more than plain Xlib and then have oodles of fun doing the implementation yourself. X will not do that for you. Indeed, X does not do anything for you: it provides "mechanisms, not policy"
Doesn't that alone hint that it may well be a completely useless metric?
Showing interest in indicating intelligence to MENSA is a clear sign of lack of intelligence.
Hm, as opposed to which later generation?
You should probably do some research on how research in medicine is funded...
You're living in a theoretical world; I live in the real world, and in this world, science only studies things that are highly profitable. Viagra isn't very useful to the millions of people suffering from chronic diseases.
Well, as a pure mathematician who happens to be quite-well financed to do very pure mathematics which would make G. H. Hardy proud for its distance to `real world', profitable applications, I have a different view of things, I guess...
Politics has nothing to do with it; only money does. Phizer isn't ignoring various diseases because of their political affiliations. They're ignoring them because they're not profitable enough for them.You somehow seem to believe that politics is a thing disjoint from money. I hope you do not take offense if I say that that is quite a naive position.
Politics, understood as the human activity which has as an end the determination of collective decisions which, once taken, involve the whole of society, very much includes dealing with the problem of assigning money to do scientific research on `non-profitable deseases'.
In any case, all the things you mention are absolutely unrelated to the statement I hinted, that there is nothing (which actually exists, in an observable way) which is not well-suited to scientific study. You are mixing the well-suitedness of something for scientific scrutiny to the problem that the political and historical conditions required for such scientific scrutiny to actually occur. Mixing things rarely helps...
You are talking about the politics of research funding. That's a completely separate issue. On the other hand, Lupus or CFS are perfectly well-suited for scientific study. That was my point.
If (the existence of) something has observable consequences, then it is well-suited to scientific studied; it does not even have to be reproducible. On the other hand, if something does not have observable consequences, its very existence is nothing but a petition of principle. Usually, when people refer to `anything methaphysical', they have in mind this very peculiar kind of `things'... It is not a great loss that they are outside of the realm of scientific study, since they do not exist, for all practical purposes.
As for philosophy: if philosophy cannot be studied in a methodologically consistent way in which the criteria for the validity of the statements in question are firmly based upon well-established grounds, then there is nothing to be studied. A huge lot of what passes as philosophy is nothing more than mostly bad literature.
The fact that science be expensive, hard, and so on, and that it does not provide yet (or ever!) explanations for specific phenomena (gravity, Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, the placebo effect, etc) is completely irrelevant when discussing the applicability of the scientific method and the suitedness of these subjects to scientific study.
Science is fine, but it's rigorous and expensive, and requires someone to pony up the money and effort to do it. There's still tons of things that are not well understood by science, or even at all, such as the mechanisms by which many drugs work, or even how gravity works (no one has any clue how gravity works; there are multiple contradictory theories but that's it), so sometimes people have to do something different instead of waiting around for science to come up with an answer and a solution.(Notice that the different theories of how gravity works do not have observable differences (so far), so the fact that they exst in multitudes is essentially irrelevant) What exactly do people do instead of waiting for science? Either they just use the scientific method (which is a way of coming up with answers from the available information; it does not at all require full understanding and complete information to proceeed) or they... do what, exactly? Invoke the Gods?