The simple fact is that proprietary systems gradually grow old, flaky, clunky, bloated and support is withdrawn from them (just witness the EOLs of various versions of Windows and Red Hat Linux we hear about here now and then).
No, the simple fact is that all systems gradually grow old, flaky, chunky, bloated and finally no one is around who can figure out what's happening. I've seen enough examples of companies buying a customized software solution (with source and everything) and years afterwards having to give it up since the original guys who wrote it have gone bust a long time ago and no one has any idea how to fix the problems any more. Think COBOL, stuff running on VAXen and other horrors.
Open source software, on the other hand, can be hacked upon by anyone who wants to use it, any new functionality can be grafted on or removed, and the result can be redistributed for nothing? How can proprietary software complete?
This however is rarely useful when dealing with complicated business and government information systems. If it takes months of consultance to even figure out where the problem is, let alone fix it it's usually just cheaper to switch to another system than pay for someone to "hack the OSS solution".
[Unlawful combatant status] only applies to the guys at Gitmo.
That's right, all those evil farm workers who happened to work for ObL or got imprisoned by Dostum's army of torturers and murderers who conveniently decided to cash in by selling their victims to the Americans as "Al Qaeda terrorists".
Yes, but we don't need that many books in the first place. If the authors adopt the open source model and allow others to contribute to or take what they need from their work, then the same book won't have to be rewritten from scratch by a thousand different authors.
Yeah, just like open source software removes the necessity of many teams writing the same type of software over and over again.
Seriously, different authors often try different pedagogical approaches to writing books. Or maybe they liked some book that's no longer available and now write their own in similar style. Maybe they're in it for the money. The problem is not really the multitude of different textbooks (after all supply should lower the overall prices) but the bloatedness and uselessness of the average textbook.
I'd bet the average college freshman would balk at a 100-page real analysis textbook that has nothing but theorem/proof/corollary after another. So instead they get a 1000-page calculus bible with color pictures, useless thought experiments and a $100 pricetag. Publishers simply offer what they think the schools want.
I understand RedHat wants to make money off this deal, and $5 doesn't sound like too much when you factor in that you get support with it, but my two issues are.
1. Redhat takes free software and makes it easy to install, and work with and then charges close to what Microsoft does. I am sorry but how many developers does Redhat have on staff?
Market demand decides the price. Corporations see quality support as something worth paying for and will never choose the "we'll get it for free and if something breaks, we'll get a high-school kid to fiddle with the code".
2. They want you to basically lease the software from them. That sucks. One good thing with Microsoft windows versions less than XP was that if your company hit hard times you could wait a year or two before an upgrade. Now you will have a fixed cost to Redhat every month.
Business economy 101: Corporations want to always have predictable cash flow. That means that in theory it's much safer to make long-term contracts where the cost is divide over a longer period, because you get rid of the uncertainty over possible major upgrades in the future. Many many companies are moving from buying software to buying services, i.e. "leased software" just because it makes financial sense.
Red Hat is actually making a good move getting into the "leasing free software" business, but they should throw in the hardware as well. OK, they're too small to be another Sun or IBM. But if Sun wants to survive, it's time to say bye-bye Solaris.
It appears to me that the bean counters are in charge at RedHat, and they are totally focused on what will make them the most amount of money.
Rubbish. No business that values its bottom line prices itself like you claim.
Not that this is all bad, but they appear to be doing this at the "cost" of their customers. They kinda seem like another software company I know of.
The usual problem with MS pricing is that while they can target some of their customers with better pricing deals, this will inevitable be worse off for some other customer segment. It's a case of damned if you do, damned if you don't.
Redhat, this is what I want.
1. A downloadable ISO version of your enterprise server software, that I can work with but get no support on. I should be able to load this on as many machines as I want to. If I EVER need support on these systems OR want to use up2date on them, then I should have to pay.
Maybe RedHat are afraid of looking bad if your supportless platform runs into trouble you can't fix?
Because the driver sits on the left hand side of the car there is slightly less centrifugal force trying to pull the car off the road when making left turns. This is due to the weight being more towards the center of the pivot rather than the outside edge.
NASCAR stock cars are heavily weighted to the left for better turning anyway so whatever mass the driver has doesn't matter much at that point. But it might also be a safety issue - if the car darts into the outside wall, do you want the driver's side to hit first?
What are you smoking?Assault rifle rounds might penetrate 2 feet of earth (depending on the type of earth we're talking about) but thick trees and concrete walls?
Funny... that's I was taught in the military. Maybe not your puny 5.45s but those Iraqis use AK-47s with 7.62 rounds, which will go through 2 inches of concrete or a tree more than a foot thick.
Sims work! With the amount of hour spend playing Medal of Honor and Call of Duty, I can say for certain that I'm tatically ready for battle in the real world.
I suppose this is a joke.
1. Never..EVER stand in the middle of an open field without cover. You will get your sniped.
Yeah, sure. Just make sure you have cover, not "cover". Assault rifle/machine gun rounds travel through thick trees, concrete walls and two feet of ground. Suddenly you don't have all that cover that games make you think you have.
What are you plans for fighting in the middle of a desert?
2. Always reload when availble...and NOT in combat.
I suppose "reload" means "switch clips".
3. Team work...use team work.
Care to elaborate? There's tons of field manuals written about the subject.
why can't the US Army put up a mock up of Babhdad and let the grunts try it out for REAL.
Wasn't there a report of US military gathering volunteer Iraqi-Americans to act as civilians for reserve training of soldiers in crowd-control and civilian interaction situations? Maybe they even created a mock Iraqi suburb, who knows.
The Library of Congress recordings were made by Alan Lomax (another great american folk singer), somewhere around 1940
1940?!? I wonder what they were recorded on - acetate? There's much better quality recordings done in the 1920's that have been remastered using technology we've had for years.
Or maybe the LOC hasn't stored these records properly?
I mean come on. Every two years we ship one million euros of tax-payers money abroad and get what in return? It's just stupid.
Who says it's tax-payer money? From their website:
The Finnish Technology Award Foundation is an independent fund established in 2002 by eight Finnish organisations that support technological development and innovation.
Founding Organizations
The Confederation of Finnish Industry and Employers - TT
The Finnish Academies of Technology - FACTE
The Finnish Academy of Technology - TTA
The Finnish Assosiation of Graduated Engineers - TEK
The Foundation of Technology - TES
Foundation of Finnish Inventions
The Swedish Academy of Engineering in Finland - STV
Walter Ahlström Foundation
The usual idea behind foundations is that you have a body that gathers money from donations from corporations are individuals - then uses the interest and profits from investments to fund charitable causes. I don't really see why they would be directly giving away "tax-payer money" as such.
If Chess has these implications, imagine what a good match of GO will do for you! Both man and computer alike! Simple to learn, arcane to master offering a lifetime of fulfillment.
Great, Go-zealots. I've nothing against the game itself but some of these people are more predictable than the Gentoo/Debian trolls.
I've read that while computers can offer a credible competition to even a Chessmater, there is no current "go" program that can challenge a true master of that game.
I have no idea what a "Chessmater" is but most of the performance by Chess-playing software is due to blatantly mimicking moves and strategies known to work that have been developed by humans. If a computer programmed by a human can mimick playing Chess almost as well as humans, does that mean computers are more intelligent? A doorstop can be used to keep a door open better than by having a person hold the door open, so are doorstops more intelligent than humans?
For example, let's see Deep Blue or Deep Fritz or whatever play without 1) opening books 2) end-game databases. A mediocre player can figure out how to mate with only a knight and a bishop but no computer will ever be able to do this without help of pre-calculated tables of moves to follow.
Like in Go, a Chess-playing program will never implement anything that you could call a strategy. It will try to achieve superior material, calculate short-term tactical attacks, improve position when deeming it safe and try to win the game by exploiting blunders by the human player. This means it will take a pawn even if taking that pawn weakens its position so that after 20 moves it loses the game.
In Go this problem is enhanced since playing long-term strategies is more important and the human player has fewer chances to fall into short-term traps or blunder away his material.
Simple. The student should know the value of pi to a certain number of significant figures.
Why? Einstein was once asked how many digits of Pi he could remember. He replied "maybe three or four". The interviewer then exclaimed: "But Sir, some people have memorized hundreds of digits!" Einstein's reply was: "Ah, but I know where to look them up if I need them."
With a calculator, they're just typing in 3*pi and getting an answer with 8+ significant digits. Without a calculator, they're actually calculating the answer as close as they can based on how many significant digits they know.
Wrong, wrong, wrong. If the answer to some problem is 9 Pi then the answer to that problem is 9 Pi, not 28.274333882308139146163790449516.
That's a better test of who's mastering mathematics.
Memorizing Pi and doing multiplication on paper has almost no relevance at all to "mastering mathematics".
It comes as no surprise that Russian teams did especially well considering most of the problems relied heavily on mathematical understanding. It's perhaps the one country in the world where logic and math have been given their rightful place and respect in education.
In a region where artificial scarcity of AIDS drugs (patents) kills--any sort of stand against "intellectual property" is a good thing.
It's intellectual dishonesty to claim that Africa's AIDS problem is due to intellectual property rights.
Lack of education, lack of free contraceptives and lack of a properly managed international effort to organize these things are what's causing the problem. And the US policy of only supporting programs that preach abstinence isn't helping either.
Re:In the UN's hands, what could possibly go wrong
on
ICANN Meets Annan
·
· Score: 1
Wow, an op-ed piece by Nixon's speechwriter. In the New York Times. Exposing the "truth" about the UN and France. Suddenly makes Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz seem like beacons of truth and honesty.
For all those not initiated to deeper mathematics, there's a simpler online proof that uses the heat equation instead to prove the Atiyah-Singer Index Theorem.
Of course, the first chapter alone is over 80 pages of functional analysis, but still...
You should never assume that you have privacy on equipment you do not own.
OK, then I suppose you'd be fine with a clothing store videoing their customers in the changing room and selling the tapes on the Internet. After all, those people have no expectation of privacy since they don't own the store.
Similarly, an ISP would be permitted to decrypt the passwords of their clients, rummage through the data stored on their servers and see if there's anything useful or naughty in there.
We must concede that the question of privacy is not a line drawn in sand but rather one drawn in water, so making blanket statements like yours is not a sensible approach to the issue. Each case must be considered on an individual basis.
Slashdot Mirror
I also look at my task manager now, which got corrupted and has no title bar at all. No window frame either.
Try double-clicking on the frame.
I think the rest of your comment can be evaluated in light of your magnificient grasp of the task manager window.
The simple fact is that proprietary systems gradually grow old, flaky, clunky, bloated and support is withdrawn from them (just witness the EOLs of various versions of Windows and Red Hat Linux we hear about here now and then).
No, the simple fact is that all systems gradually grow old, flaky, chunky, bloated and finally no one is around who can figure out what's happening. I've seen enough examples of companies buying a customized software solution (with source and everything) and years afterwards having to give it up since the original guys who wrote it have gone bust a long time ago and no one has any idea how to fix the problems any more. Think COBOL, stuff running on VAXen and other horrors.
Open source software, on the other hand, can be hacked upon by anyone who wants to use it, any new functionality can be grafted on or removed, and the result can be redistributed for nothing? How can proprietary software complete?
This however is rarely useful when dealing with complicated business and government information systems. If it takes months of consultance to even figure out where the problem is, let alone fix it it's usually just cheaper to switch to another system than pay for someone to "hack the OSS solution".
It's just that simple.
Unfortunately it's not.
What I've never heard of is someone buying the source code to, say, Windows.
Shared source licensing.
witness sites like MyWebOS (no longer existing)
Well doesn't that make it kind of hard to witness it?
About 5.4 million people come to this "Channel 2" each month
Make that 5.4 million minus one.
[Unlawful combatant status] only applies to the guys at Gitmo.
That's right, all those evil farm workers who happened to work for ObL or got imprisoned by Dostum's army of torturers and murderers who conveniently decided to cash in by selling their victims to the Americans as "Al Qaeda terrorists".
Yes, but we don't need that many books in the first place. If the authors adopt the open source model and allow others to contribute to or take what they need from their work, then the same book won't have to be rewritten from scratch by a thousand different authors.
Yeah, just like open source software removes the necessity of many teams writing the same type of software over and over again.
Seriously, different authors often try different pedagogical approaches to writing books. Or maybe they liked some book that's no longer available and now write their own in similar style. Maybe they're in it for the money. The problem is not really the multitude of different textbooks (after all supply should lower the overall prices) but the bloatedness and uselessness of the average textbook.
I'd bet the average college freshman would balk at a 100-page real analysis textbook that has nothing but theorem/proof/corollary after another. So instead they get a 1000-page calculus bible with color pictures, useless thought experiments and a $100 pricetag. Publishers simply offer what they think the schools want.
I understand RedHat wants to make money off this deal, and $5 doesn't sound like too much when you factor in that you get support with it, but my two issues are.
1. Redhat takes free software and makes it easy to install, and work with and then charges close to what Microsoft does. I am sorry but how many developers does Redhat have on staff?
Market demand decides the price. Corporations see quality support as something worth paying for and will never choose the "we'll get it for free and if something breaks, we'll get a high-school kid to fiddle with the code".
2. They want you to basically lease the software from them. That sucks. One good thing with Microsoft windows versions less than XP was that if your company hit hard times you could wait a year or two before an upgrade. Now you will have a fixed cost to Redhat every month.
Business economy 101: Corporations want to always have predictable cash flow. That means that in theory it's much safer to make long-term contracts where the cost is divide over a longer period, because you get rid of the uncertainty over possible major upgrades in the future. Many many companies are moving from buying software to buying services, i.e. "leased software" just because it makes financial sense.
Red Hat is actually making a good move getting into the "leasing free software" business, but they should throw in the hardware as well. OK, they're too small to be another Sun or IBM. But if Sun wants to survive, it's time to say bye-bye Solaris.
It appears to me that the bean counters are in charge at RedHat, and they are totally focused on what will make them the most amount of money.
Rubbish. No business that values its bottom line prices itself like you claim.
Not that this is all bad, but they appear to be doing this at the "cost" of their customers. They kinda seem like another software company I know of.
The usual problem with MS pricing is that while they can target some of their customers with better pricing deals, this will inevitable be worse off for some other customer segment. It's a case of damned if you do, damned if you don't.
Redhat, this is what I want. 1. A downloadable ISO version of your enterprise server software, that I can work with but get no support on. I should be able to load this on as many machines as I want to. If I EVER need support on these systems OR want to use up2date on them, then I should have to pay.
Maybe RedHat are afraid of looking bad if your supportless platform runs into trouble you can't fix?
As the result of a comment with the subject "Linux is DYING" being moderated to "+5, Insightful", Slashdot will now spontaneously implode.
Thank you for your time.
Because the driver sits on the left hand side of the car there is slightly less centrifugal force trying to pull the car off the road when making left turns. This is due to the weight being more towards the center of the pivot rather than the outside edge.
NASCAR stock cars are heavily weighted to the left for better turning anyway so whatever mass the driver has doesn't matter much at that point. But it might also be a safety issue - if the car darts into the outside wall, do you want the driver's side to hit first?
The real answer is of course: "tradishun".
What are you smoking?Assault rifle rounds might penetrate 2 feet of earth (depending on the type of earth we're talking about) but thick trees and concrete walls?
Funny... that's I was taught in the military. Maybe not your puny 5.45s but those Iraqis use AK-47s with 7.62 rounds, which will go through 2 inches of concrete or a tree more than a foot thick.
Sims work! With the amount of hour spend playing Medal of Honor and Call of Duty, I can say for certain that I'm tatically ready for battle in the real world.
I suppose this is a joke.
1. Never..EVER stand in the middle of an open field without cover. You will get your sniped.
Yeah, sure. Just make sure you have cover, not "cover". Assault rifle/machine gun rounds travel through thick trees, concrete walls and two feet of ground. Suddenly you don't have all that cover that games make you think you have.
What are you plans for fighting in the middle of a desert?
2. Always reload when availble...and NOT in combat.
I suppose "reload" means "switch clips".
3. Team work...use team work.
Care to elaborate? There's tons of field manuals written about the subject.
4. Stay low, and quite.
What if you have to attack?
why can't the US Army put up a mock up of Babhdad and let the grunts try it out for REAL.
Wasn't there a report of US military gathering volunteer Iraqi-Americans to act as civilians for reserve training of soldiers in crowd-control and civilian interaction situations? Maybe they even created a mock Iraqi suburb, who knows.
The Library of Congress recordings were made by Alan Lomax (another great american folk singer), somewhere around 1940
1940?!? I wonder what they were recorded on - acetate? There's much better quality recordings done in the 1920's that have been remastered using technology we've had for years.
Or maybe the LOC hasn't stored these records properly?
Can you imagine Windows BSoDing on one of these things, and causing a gun to fire?
"Command link severed. Default setting: Crush, Kill, Destroy."
I mean come on. Every two years we ship one million euros of tax-payers money abroad and get what in return? It's just stupid.
Who says it's tax-payer money? From their website:
The Finnish Technology Award Foundation is an independent fund established in 2002 by eight Finnish organisations that support technological development and innovation.
Founding Organizations
The Confederation of Finnish Industry and Employers - TT
The Finnish Academies of Technology - FACTE
The Finnish Academy of Technology - TTA
The Finnish Assosiation of Graduated Engineers - TEK
The Foundation of Technology - TES
Foundation of Finnish Inventions
The Swedish Academy of Engineering in Finland - STV
Walter Ahlström Foundation
The usual idea behind foundations is that you have a body that gathers money from donations from corporations are individuals - then uses the interest and profits from investments to fund charitable causes. I don't really see why they would be directly giving away "tax-payer money" as such.
If Chess has these implications, imagine what a good match of GO will do for you! Both man and computer alike! Simple to learn, arcane to master offering a lifetime of fulfillment.
Great, Go-zealots. I've nothing against the game itself but some of these people are more predictable than the Gentoo/Debian trolls.
I've read that while computers can offer a credible competition to even a Chessmater, there is no current "go" program that can challenge a true master of that game.
I have no idea what a "Chessmater" is but most of the performance by Chess-playing software is due to blatantly mimicking moves and strategies known to work that have been developed by humans. If a computer programmed by a human can mimick playing Chess almost as well as humans, does that mean computers are more intelligent? A doorstop can be used to keep a door open better than by having a person hold the door open, so are doorstops more intelligent than humans?
For example, let's see Deep Blue or Deep Fritz or whatever play without 1) opening books 2) end-game databases. A mediocre player can figure out how to mate with only a knight and a bishop but no computer will ever be able to do this without help of pre-calculated tables of moves to follow.
Like in Go, a Chess-playing program will never implement anything that you could call a strategy. It will try to achieve superior material, calculate short-term tactical attacks, improve position when deeming it safe and try to win the game by exploiting blunders by the human player. This means it will take a pawn even if taking that pawn weakens its position so that after 20 moves it loses the game.
In Go this problem is enhanced since playing long-term strategies is more important and the human player has fewer chances to fall into short-term traps or blunder away his material.
Simple. The student should know the value of pi to a certain number of significant figures.
Why? Einstein was once asked how many digits of Pi he could remember. He replied "maybe three or four". The interviewer then exclaimed: "But Sir, some people have memorized hundreds of digits!" Einstein's reply was: "Ah, but I know where to look them up if I need them."
With a calculator, they're just typing in 3*pi and getting an answer with 8+ significant digits. Without a calculator, they're actually calculating the answer as close as they can based on how many significant digits they know.
Wrong, wrong, wrong. If the answer to some problem is 9 Pi then the answer to that problem is 9 Pi, not 28.274333882308139146163790449516.
That's a better test of who's mastering mathematics.
Memorizing Pi and doing multiplication on paper has almost no relevance at all to "mastering mathematics".
The day that people get their software from a physical vending machine is the day we've officially given up on the Internet.
It comes as no surprise that Russian teams did especially well considering most of the problems relied heavily on mathematical understanding. It's perhaps the one country in the world where logic and math have been given their rightful place and respect in education.
In a region where artificial scarcity of AIDS drugs (patents) kills--any sort of stand against "intellectual property" is a good thing.
It's intellectual dishonesty to claim that Africa's AIDS problem is due to intellectual property rights.
Lack of education, lack of free contraceptives and lack of a properly managed international effort to organize these things are what's causing the problem. And the US policy of only supporting programs that preach abstinence isn't helping either.
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/03/29/opinion/29SAFI.h tml?th
Wow, an op-ed piece by Nixon's speechwriter. In the New York Times. Exposing the "truth" about the UN and France. Suddenly makes Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz seem like beacons of truth and honesty.
Good news: There'll be broadband Internet for everyone.
Bad news: There won't be any porn or P2P.
For all those not initiated to deeper mathematics, there's a simpler online proof that uses the heat equation instead to prove the Atiyah-Singer Index Theorem.
Of course, the first chapter alone is over 80 pages of functional analysis, but still...
You should never assume that you have privacy on equipment you do not own.
OK, then I suppose you'd be fine with a clothing store videoing their customers in the changing room and selling the tapes on the Internet. After all, those people have no expectation of privacy since they don't own the store.
Similarly, an ISP would be permitted to decrypt the passwords of their clients, rummage through the data stored on their servers and see if there's anything useful or naughty in there.
We must concede that the question of privacy is not a line drawn in sand but rather one drawn in water, so making blanket statements like yours is not a sensible approach to the issue. Each case must be considered on an individual basis.