Unfortunately, lots of *expensive* scientific instruments such as GC's come with their own software that tends to lock your data up in proprietary formats (*cough* Agilent *cough*).
Too bad there isn't a fiscal conservative, socially liberal person to vote for.
Give up the dream of a socially liberal and fiscally conservative policy. Such a policy can't exist because it requires contradictory axioms.
Socially liberal means a lot of things that each take real money to accomplish: decent public primary and secondary schools, decent public universities, money for research even into things with no immediate commercial benefit, workplace safety, unemployment insurance, social security insurance, food stamps, environmental regulations enforcement, and enforcement of civil rights at the federal level, to name just a few liberal programs that distinguish today's America from America circa 1890. This is the stuff that a fiscal conservative is willing to eliminate first in order to keep funding military spending. But without full support of all of this you don't get a social liberal in office, you get someone who is sad that life isn't fair for the bottom 95% of the population but has no money with which to improve things. In other words, you get a "compassionate conservative".
It is indeed IBM's codebase, but it started out as Sun's JDK and periodically is refreshed with new code from Sun, so it is in fact a derivative implementation. (Disclaimer: I used to work for IBM and Hursley's JDK was always about a year behind Sun's, but it was often more stable on Linux and Windows and of course it was the only decent one for AIX.)
The closest independent Java implementation out there is GNU Classpath combined with one of the various JVM's, but AFAIK it still hasn't passed the Java certification.
Even if this were the United States, you'd still be horribly wrong. With very very few exceptions, nothing in the Constitution has any jurisdiction over private organizations. I direct you to the first words of the First Amendment as an example: Congress shall enact no law...
If your private property is open to the public (e.g. it's not a members-only club), you cannot legally bar blacks or women from entering and making use of your services. In fact, the general umbrella of civil liberties operates *extensively* throughout the private sector and it is absurdly easy to get sued (and lose) if it can be proven that your private business discriminates against various protected classes of workers and customers.
Now you did say "Constitution", so maybe you want to reduce government authority to only those things enumerated in the Constitution. If so, I welcome you to a world without the interstate highway system, federal funding for science, the FCC, the FDA, the FTC, OSHA, the SEC, and many others. Please get off this unConstitutional Internet and instead report tomorrow morning to your new job on the factory floor, your shift is 6am-8pm and you'll get every sixth Sunday off.
That's only vaguely true, and not even vaguely relevant. The owners of private property have every right, legally and ethically, to require visitors to that property to agree to (practically) any terms they want.
This is in the UK, but if it were happening in the US you would be very wrong. It is already the case in the US that nearly every private business that allows the general public to enter its property cannot discriminate based on race, gender, etc. The GP is correct (for US law): just because it is private property doesn't allow it to trump general civil liberties.
The only question here is whether or not the confiscation of communications devices counts as a civil liberties issue. I lean towards saying it does, since the only things that private businesses with public entrances tend to ban are drugs (legal and otherwise), firearms, and lack of clothing, and all of those items are banned under a general concept of promoting public safety. Removing PDAs doesn't seem to promote public safety to me.
Y'all are having an interesting conversation, but it seems that y'all are talking a bit past each other. I'd like to highlight this point:
The more that you can with natural language, the more description you'll have to give because you have to be more precise about which task exactly you want the computer to do.
I think the GP is arguing that the future of computers will be to know on their own what you mean when you use natural language, so that you WON'T have to be more precise. In my problem domain, I could ask something like "Could we handle the flow rate if there were 21 trays instead of 23, all else being equal?" and that would start a very long and convoluted sequence of computations that would lead to a simple yes or no answer with a known uncertainty. In the future, perhaps computers WILL be able to do that. OTOH, I could just as easily ask to the see the tower design and make small changes on my own and then ask for the resulting flow rates, which would be better with a clean GUI.
I agree with the points both of you are making. Imagine this scene between a photoshop artist and their super-advanced computer:
----
Artist: Computer, bring up image #53 from the California trip family vacation pictures.
Computer: On screen.
A: OK, take out the red eye, brighten 20%, and zoom in 5x on leftmost figure face.
C: Done.
A: Let's replace the background with an American flag. Show me a few popular flag images from Flickr.
C: Flag images on screen.
A: Use the flag from second row, third from right. Put that in the background. Assume the flag itself is three feet tall.
C: Done.
A: Shrink the flag 30%.
C: Done.
A: Manual mode. (Does a minute or so of tweaking within a GUI.) Apply those changes.
C: Manual changes applied.
A: Show me what this will look like on paper.
C: Printout ready.
A: Send this to marketing, begin attached note. Quote: I want to use this for the national parks newsletter. Respond by 3pm please. Unquote.
C: Email sent.
----
Doing all of those steps by hand could still take a experienced photoshopper dozens of minutes, but the conversation with the computer could be accomplished in less than ten minutes. This is where (I think) the GP is trying to go, and the "manual mode" step above is what (I think) you are trying to say. In other words, both CLI (the conversation parts) and GUI elements are present in this very quick workflow.
Hmm. Won't argue with your larger point, but your apps list looks very weird to me, a Ubuntu and Mac user. Here is how it compares to me:
Outlook 2007 and/or
Kmail and Mail.app . And my mail stays in mbox format for easy backups and shifting between programs.
Office 2007
Office 2008 for Mac (VERY slow and barely usable, but quite pretty), OOo for Linux, and sometimes Office 97 under Parallels or on the dual-boot Windows side of the Linux box. But LaTeX for anything more complicated than a basic letter.
Money 2008 Quickbooks
My wife does our finances, but most of the time the web interfaces to our various banks, credit cards, investments, etc. are quite good enough on their own. She could probably save a half hour every week *if* she fully trusted the integration of Quickbooks/Money with all of those financial institutions, but more likely she would update with Quickbooks and then log in to the web sites to double-check if she needs to reconcile anyway, making a net loss of time.
Turbo Tax
We use the online H&R Block app once a year for $30 or so. Installing a full program seems needless to me for a once/year use.
Rome Total War Call of Duty 4
I don't play much games, I just don't have much time. But the occasional game can be played in Parallels on Mac or on a Windows dual-boot on the Linux box.
Picasa2
iPhoto.
Music IP Mixer
I've never even heard of this. Presumably it's for MP3 playing? If so, iTunes is fine with us. For ripping CDs I have a simple Linux app, and for extracting sound samples as phone ringtones I use Audacity.
Cyberlink Power DVD
Mac DVD player isn't bad (but the 10.4 version doesn't have slider bar which is stupid). Kaffeine in Linux is better though -- I can easily adjust brightness, contrast, and A/V sync in Kaffeine, AND I can skip right to the damn DVD menu instead of waiting for the FBI warnings. For long-running DVDs, we have a television + player.
Azeureus
Probably a bad example as Azureus is also on Linux and I use it frequently. But I also use Transmission on Mac occasionally.
AI Roboform
What is this for? Firefox 2.x on Mac works OK for us.
Now on MY list you are missing a few things:
Emacs -- The MacPorts and Linux versions work and look great, the Windows version is butt ugly no matter what I try.
HandBrake -- The most convenient way to rip MP4 files ever, costs $0, and works great on Mac. Kinda sucks on Windows though, and every comparable Windows app costs real money.
MacTheRipper -- The fastest way I've found to get a DVD to hard disk.
Development tools -- I won't outline them all, but the Unix command line tools + Emacs is the right fit for me and the languages/environments I tend to use. Nothing on the Windows side even comes close to the basic functionality. OK, I will mention some stuff: Common Lisp, C++ with STL and Boost, C, QT4, Octave, and Maple.
On the Windows side:
DVDShrink -- There is no comparable way to get a 9GB movie to a 4.5GB disk that costs $0 on OSX or Linux, and DVDShrink is quite user friendly too.
Obviously we have different needs, I tend to spend a large part of my time converting my DVDs and CDs, write longer documents, and develop code sometimes. For those purposes I find Mac and Linux very easy to use.
Funny, I didn't know SELinux user-space utilites were part of the GNU project.
It doesn't have to be owned by GNU to modify the GNU operating system. Next you'll tell me that the userspace component of a Windows driver isn't really a Windows program unless it's owned by Microsoft.
The Unix-like OS that features the Linux kernel built by the GNU compiler running hundreds of GNU programs (via the GNU dynamic linker) that all communicate with the kernel through GNU libc is GNU/Linux. When the majority of Slackware, Sabayon, Debian, (k)Ubuntu, Centos/RedHat, SuSE, and Gentoo stop shipping a system with a kernel built by the GNU compiler that requires the GNU libc to do anything useful then I'll be happy to call what we normally mean by "general-purpose computer running Linux" something else, just as I'm happy calling the Debian distribution of the BSD kernel with the GNU userland the GNU/kFreeBSD OS.
If you are talking about a Gaussian normal distribution -- which is a typical one for truly random variables -- then the US income distribution looks nothing like it.
Will you respect my right to want no part of this?
Of course you have the right to want no part of it, but you'll only get my respect when you voluntarily pass up all of the other benefits you might receive under "socialized" ideas.
Stay out of public libraries, stay off the public highways, don't take any unemployment insurance, don't ever enroll your young children in WIC, don't go to a state university (or if you already have, donate the state-supported portion of your tuition back to the school), don't use federal loan guarantees to get through school or purchase a house, don't deduct your house or school loan interest payments on your income tax, and lobby any church you my go to to pay full income taxes like all other businesses do.
Do all of that, and you'll have a lot of my respect.
I know wood is pretty and all, but really why should we kill that many more trees just to walk over inside our offices? Maybe we could keep the cheap polyester materials in the office, build some park trails into some greenery right next to the building, and encourage employees to take periodic breaks outside.
I also think the guys working on the new martian probes, work in a pretty cool place, too.
Do you mean at the JSC in Clear Lake? Definitely a cool machining shop in that giant building whose number I can't remember, and the Robonauts lab is pretty neat too. But damn if the whole JSC is depressing in a "we don't have nearly as much money as we used to and sadly no one cares about spaceflight anyway" kind of way.
I've seen a couple threads in various places complaining that with Java 6 is only on the 64-bit Intel Leopard somehow Java is still not a great platform for Macs. But I've got Java 1.4 and 1.5 on my 32-bit Mac Mini and Java apps run fine. What features are in Java 1.6 that are so critical? I heard something about applet loading being a bit more intelligent, that might be nice for client-side web apps, but is there anything else?
Every 'social' program we have has been a disaster
Really? Every one of them? Would you like to return to the USA before the days of Social Security, unemployment insurance, OSHA, the FDA, the SEC, public schools, public libraries, public parks, state universities, Pell Grants, Stafford Loans, and the GI Bill? It seems to me that without those programs the American Dream would be entirely out of reach for the bottom 95% of the population.
Hey I've got an idea: maybe YOU should head to a country with a really low income tax rate and no social services.
Plus then you are closer to the distro that is actually doing all the work,
Woah there cowboy. I use Debian exclusively, but I know that many of Ubuntu's contributions filter "up" to me and I benefit. Both distros have different focuses and so far both seem to filling in the gaps between each other quite well.
Not at all. There is actually nothing in gNewSense that disallows the installation of non-free software, I'm not quite sure why you think this. They call him a hypocrite because he has recommended certain distributions that recommend or give instructions to install non-free software (which gNewSense is guilty of by giving instructions on how to add Ubuntu's main and universe repositories).
I only read about half the thread or so, but could you point to where gNewSense points users to Ubuntu's repositories (or the message that says so)? The gNewSense web site I saw explicitly lists differences between their main/universe and Ubuntu's main/universe.
Also, RMS acknowledged in several of the messages I did see that users can ultimately do whatever they want with *any* OS, including running non-free stuff. It seemed that his only gripe was that the OpenBSD ports included non-free packages. I suppose the only way for that kind of port system to meet RMS's ethical standard (which BTW he noted was his and no one else's) would be to completely fork the non-free packages into a separate distro. Which sounds exactly like a mirror image of what happened with gNewSense: gNewSense is the only-free subset of Ubuntu.
RMS popped in to say in essence that he will not recommend users use OpenBSD (based on the presence of non-free software in their ports collection). Then he got flamed by a bunch of people claiming all sorts of things he didn't say, to which he responded one by one and was quite polite during most of the 30-odd messages I saw.
He said explicitly (multiple times) that he respects the *choice* of end users to use whatever they want to on their own systems. He tried (and apparently failed based on the reaction in the thread) to outline his reasoning with a few analogies, and he politely acknowledged that the stock Linux kernel also fails to meet his definition of free software. In the end, he says his only real power is to not recommend something when people ask, but he respects the right of every project to choose their own ends and means.
How in the world can you see that as hypocritical behavior?
(Switch careers) Here's what I learned and did...
on
Disillusioned With IT?
·
· Score: 1
I was a hard-core nerd all through school and got a Comp Sci degree and went to work for IBM circa 2000 -- it was a good to place to be during the dot-bomb. After 3 years I decided that I was going the wrong direction returned to school and will graduate in two weeks (!) at age 31 with a MS in Chemical Engineering. I learned three important lessons during this process:
1) You are only as old as you want to be. Seriously, taking organic chemistry 2 *seven years* after organic chemistry 1 and still getting a B- shows that my brain even approaching 30 was fine at learning "hard" things. Since then I've had to pick up fluids, heat transfer, quantum chemistry, and many other things that I once thought would be impossible to learn, but with the support of my awesome wife it's not really that bad. You *can* pick it up, and with your experience you can be much faster at the homework than your young college peers.
2) Almost *anything* can be made fun once you put in the time to get good at it. What I wanted was a job that was fun but not my whole identity, yet still paid well enough to support a family. Chemical engineering was a really good fit for me: the pay is really good (my entry-level offer was within 1% of IBM's parting salary), but it's a manufacturing process where I *can't* do work when I am not physically on the plant. So after 5pm I get to go home and enjoy the rest of my life. Also, many chemical plants are located in smaller (cheaper) towns, yet the plants still have to pay competitively nationally to get the students to hire on, so you get to live in a cheap town yet enjoy expensive town salary.
3) Most interesting: the value-add of non-programming technical skills to a programming position is not nearly as great as the value-add of programming skills to a non-programming technical position. In other words, engineers of all stripes can become far more effective engineers if they pick up good programming skills: they can automate everything from complex calculations to routine data gathering to minor workflow improvements. But programmers with engineering skills only gain in the area of modeling their domain, they still spend most of their time in the writing/testing/debugging of the code rather than in the derivation of the formulas that the code must embody. (Also: both programmers and engineers gain greatly from technical writing and personal communications skills, but they seem to both gain about the same amount of value.) So if you are an engineer who has a vast toolset at your disposal from your previous career, you can leverage that into a real advantage at your new job; of course, you'd still be an engineer so you'd only code occasionally, but each little program finished would add more time every week for your real job, so it would still feel a lot like hobby coding rather than full-time-grind coding.
Well, I'd better get back to my last couple homework assignments.:)
Or they think that you won't be able to relate to either side. What proportion of people do you think have multiple masters and own their own business?
Slashdot Mirror
parents ask for a new one because the roommate's facebook page makes them worry the kid might be gay.
So Facebook is helping (potentially) gay students avoid having to room with bigots? Wonderful!
I think Linux is a good idea, but I think it has as many fundamental design flaws as Windows.
You think wrong.
Unfortunately, lots of *expensive* scientific instruments such as GC's come with their own software that tends to lock your data up in proprietary formats (*cough* Agilent *cough*).
Too bad there isn't a fiscal conservative, socially liberal person to vote for.
Give up the dream of a socially liberal and fiscally conservative policy. Such a policy can't exist because it requires contradictory axioms.
Socially liberal means a lot of things that each take real money to accomplish: decent public primary and secondary schools, decent public universities, money for research even into things with no immediate commercial benefit, workplace safety, unemployment insurance, social security insurance, food stamps, environmental regulations enforcement, and enforcement of civil rights at the federal level, to name just a few liberal programs that distinguish today's America from America circa 1890. This is the stuff that a fiscal conservative is willing to eliminate first in order to keep funding military spending. But without full support of all of this you don't get a social liberal in office, you get someone who is sad that life isn't fair for the bottom 95% of the population but has no money with which to improve things. In other words, you get a "compassionate conservative".
IBM's JDK (which is their own codebase).
It is indeed IBM's codebase, but it started out as Sun's JDK and periodically is refreshed with new code from Sun, so it is in fact a derivative implementation. (Disclaimer: I used to work for IBM and Hursley's JDK was always about a year behind Sun's, but it was often more stable on Linux and Windows and of course it was the only decent one for AIX.)
The closest independent Java implementation out there is GNU Classpath combined with one of the various JVM's, but AFAIK it still hasn't passed the Java certification.
Even if this were the United States, you'd still be horribly wrong. With very very few exceptions, nothing in the Constitution has any jurisdiction over private organizations. I direct you to the first words of the First Amendment as an example: Congress shall enact no law...
If your private property is open to the public (e.g. it's not a members-only club), you cannot legally bar blacks or women from entering and making use of your services. In fact, the general umbrella of civil liberties operates *extensively* throughout the private sector and it is absurdly easy to get sued (and lose) if it can be proven that your private business discriminates against various protected classes of workers and customers.
Now you did say "Constitution", so maybe you want to reduce government authority to only those things enumerated in the Constitution. If so, I welcome you to a world without the interstate highway system, federal funding for science, the FCC, the FDA, the FTC, OSHA, the SEC, and many others. Please get off this unConstitutional Internet and instead report tomorrow morning to your new job on the factory floor, your shift is 6am-8pm and you'll get every sixth Sunday off.
That's only vaguely true, and not even vaguely relevant. The owners of private property have every right, legally and ethically, to require visitors to that property to agree to (practically) any terms they want.
This is in the UK, but if it were happening in the US you would be very wrong. It is already the case in the US that nearly every private business that allows the general public to enter its property cannot discriminate based on race, gender, etc. The GP is correct (for US law): just because it is private property doesn't allow it to trump general civil liberties.
The only question here is whether or not the confiscation of communications devices counts as a civil liberties issue. I lean towards saying it does, since the only things that private businesses with public entrances tend to ban are drugs (legal and otherwise), firearms, and lack of clothing, and all of those items are banned under a general concept of promoting public safety. Removing PDAs doesn't seem to promote public safety to me.
Agree 100%.
Y'all are having an interesting conversation, but it seems that y'all are talking a bit past each other. I'd like to highlight this point:
The more that you can with natural language, the more description you'll have to give because you have to be more precise about which task exactly you want the computer to do.
I think the GP is arguing that the future of computers will be to know on their own what you mean when you use natural language, so that you WON'T have to be more precise. In my problem domain, I could ask something like "Could we handle the flow rate if there were 21 trays instead of 23, all else being equal?" and that would start a very long and convoluted sequence of computations that would lead to a simple yes or no answer with a known uncertainty. In the future, perhaps computers WILL be able to do that. OTOH, I could just as easily ask to the see the tower design and make small changes on my own and then ask for the resulting flow rates, which would be better with a clean GUI.
I agree with the points both of you are making. Imagine this scene between a photoshop artist and their super-advanced computer:
----
Artist: Computer, bring up image #53 from the California trip family vacation pictures.
Computer: On screen.
A: OK, take out the red eye, brighten 20%, and zoom in 5x on leftmost figure face.
C: Done.
A: Let's replace the background with an American flag. Show me a few popular flag images from Flickr.
C: Flag images on screen.
A: Use the flag from second row, third from right. Put that in the background. Assume the flag itself is three feet tall.
C: Done.
A: Shrink the flag 30%.
C: Done.
A: Manual mode. (Does a minute or so of tweaking within a GUI.) Apply those changes.
C: Manual changes applied.
A: Show me what this will look like on paper.
C: Printout ready.
A: Send this to marketing, begin attached note. Quote: I want to use this for the national parks newsletter. Respond by 3pm please. Unquote.
C: Email sent.
----
Doing all of those steps by hand could still take a experienced photoshopper dozens of minutes, but the conversation with the computer could be accomplished in less than ten minutes. This is where (I think) the GP is trying to go, and the "manual mode" step above is what (I think) you are trying to say. In other words, both CLI (the conversation parts) and GUI elements are present in this very quick workflow.
Hmm. Won't argue with your larger point, but your apps list looks very weird to me, a Ubuntu and Mac user. Here is how it compares to me:
Outlook 2007 and/or
Kmail and Mail.app . And my mail stays in mbox format for easy backups and shifting between programs.
Office 2007
Office 2008 for Mac (VERY slow and barely usable, but quite pretty), OOo for Linux, and sometimes Office 97 under Parallels or on the dual-boot Windows side of the Linux box. But LaTeX for anything more complicated than a basic letter.
Money 2008
Quickbooks
My wife does our finances, but most of the time the web interfaces to our various banks, credit cards, investments, etc. are quite good enough on their own. She could probably save a half hour every week *if* she fully trusted the integration of Quickbooks/Money with all of those financial institutions, but more likely she would update with Quickbooks and then log in to the web sites to double-check if she needs to reconcile anyway, making a net loss of time.
Turbo Tax
We use the online H&R Block app once a year for $30 or so. Installing a full program seems needless to me for a once/year use.
Rome Total War
Call of Duty 4
I don't play much games, I just don't have much time. But the occasional game can be played in Parallels on Mac or on a Windows dual-boot on the Linux box.
Picasa2
iPhoto.
Music IP Mixer
I've never even heard of this. Presumably it's for MP3 playing? If so, iTunes is fine with us. For ripping CDs I have a simple Linux app, and for extracting sound samples as phone ringtones I use Audacity.
Cyberlink Power DVD
Mac DVD player isn't bad (but the 10.4 version doesn't have slider bar which is stupid). Kaffeine in Linux is better though -- I can easily adjust brightness, contrast, and A/V sync in Kaffeine, AND I can skip right to the damn DVD menu instead of waiting for the FBI warnings. For long-running DVDs, we have a television + player.
Azeureus
Probably a bad example as Azureus is also on Linux and I use it frequently. But I also use Transmission on Mac occasionally.
AI Roboform
What is this for? Firefox 2.x on Mac works OK for us.
Now on MY list you are missing a few things:
Emacs -- The MacPorts and Linux versions work and look great, the Windows version is butt ugly no matter what I try.
HandBrake -- The most convenient way to rip MP4 files ever, costs $0, and works great on Mac. Kinda sucks on Windows though, and every comparable Windows app costs real money.
MacTheRipper -- The fastest way I've found to get a DVD to hard disk.
Development tools -- I won't outline them all, but the Unix command line tools + Emacs is the right fit for me and the languages/environments I tend to use. Nothing on the Windows side even comes close to the basic functionality. OK, I will mention some stuff: Common Lisp, C++ with STL and Boost, C, QT4, Octave, and Maple.
On the Windows side:
DVDShrink -- There is no comparable way to get a 9GB movie to a 4.5GB disk that costs $0 on OSX or Linux, and DVDShrink is quite user friendly too.
Obviously we have different needs, I tend to spend a large part of my time converting my DVDs and CDs, write longer documents, and develop code sometimes. For those purposes I find Mac and Linux very easy to use.
Income != net worth
Absolutely right. And if you had read the site, you would have seen their claim that the L curve for net worth is even steeper.
I haven't found the distribution of the top 5% online, but I have done the math with the IRS numbers before and it agrees with the chart on the site.
Funny, I didn't know SELinux user-space utilites were part of the GNU project.
It doesn't have to be owned by GNU to modify the GNU operating system. Next you'll tell me that the userspace component of a Windows driver isn't really a Windows program unless it's owned by Microsoft.
The Unix-like OS that features the Linux kernel built by the GNU compiler running hundreds of GNU programs (via the GNU dynamic linker) that all communicate with the kernel through GNU libc is GNU/Linux. When the majority of Slackware, Sabayon, Debian, (k)Ubuntu, Centos/RedHat, SuSE, and Gentoo stop shipping a system with a kernel built by the GNU compiler that requires the GNU libc to do anything useful then I'll be happy to call what we normally mean by "general-purpose computer running Linux" something else, just as I'm happy calling the Debian distribution of the BSD kernel with the GNU userland the GNU/kFreeBSD OS.
The simple fact of the matter is that things like income are statistically distributed.
Only if the income distribution you are using is an incredibly steep exponential function.
If you are talking about a Gaussian normal distribution -- which is a typical one for truly random variables -- then the US income distribution looks nothing like it.
Will you respect my right to want no part of this?
Of course you have the right to want no part of it, but you'll only get my respect when you voluntarily pass up all of the other benefits you might receive under "socialized" ideas.
Stay out of public libraries, stay off the public highways, don't take any unemployment insurance, don't ever enroll your young children in WIC, don't go to a state university (or if you already have, donate the state-supported portion of your tuition back to the school), don't use federal loan guarantees to get through school or purchase a house, don't deduct your house or school loan interest payments on your income tax, and lobby any church you my go to to pay full income taxes like all other businesses do.
Do all of that, and you'll have a lot of my respect.
SELinux has a userspace component, so it adds to both the "Linux kernel" AND the "GNU/Linux operating system".
I know wood is pretty and all, but really why should we kill that many more trees just to walk over inside our offices? Maybe we could keep the cheap polyester materials in the office, build some park trails into some greenery right next to the building, and encourage employees to take periodic breaks outside.
I also think the guys working on the new martian probes, work in a pretty cool place, too.
Do you mean at the JSC in Clear Lake? Definitely a cool machining shop in that giant building whose number I can't remember, and the Robonauts lab is pretty neat too. But damn if the whole JSC is depressing in a "we don't have nearly as much money as we used to and sadly no one cares about spaceflight anyway" kind of way.
Pre-emptive multitasking was still 2 years away.
Unless you ran Linux (Slackware).
I've seen a couple threads in various places complaining that with Java 6 is only on the 64-bit Intel Leopard somehow Java is still not a great platform for Macs. But I've got Java 1.4 and 1.5 on my 32-bit Mac Mini and Java apps run fine. What features are in Java 1.6 that are so critical? I heard something about applet loading being a bit more intelligent, that might be nice for client-side web apps, but is there anything else?
Every 'social' program we have has been a disaster
Really? Every one of them? Would you like to return to the USA before the days of Social Security, unemployment insurance, OSHA, the FDA, the SEC, public schools, public libraries, public parks, state universities, Pell Grants, Stafford Loans, and the GI Bill? It seems to me that without those programs the American Dream would be entirely out of reach for the bottom 95% of the population.
Hey I've got an idea: maybe YOU should head to a country with a really low income tax rate and no social services.
Plus then you are closer to the distro that is actually doing all the work,
Woah there cowboy. I use Debian exclusively, but I know that many of Ubuntu's contributions filter "up" to me and I benefit. Both distros have different focuses and so far both seem to filling in the gaps between each other quite well.
Not at all. There is actually nothing in gNewSense that disallows the installation of non-free software, I'm not quite sure why you think this. They call him a hypocrite because he has recommended certain distributions that recommend or give instructions to install non-free software (which gNewSense is guilty of by giving instructions on how to add Ubuntu's main and universe repositories).
I only read about half the thread or so, but could you point to where gNewSense points users to Ubuntu's repositories (or the message that says so)? The gNewSense web site I saw explicitly lists differences between their main/universe and Ubuntu's main/universe.
Also, RMS acknowledged in several of the messages I did see that users can ultimately do whatever they want with *any* OS, including running non-free stuff. It seemed that his only gripe was that the OpenBSD ports included non-free packages. I suppose the only way for that kind of port system to meet RMS's ethical standard (which BTW he noted was his and no one else's) would be to completely fork the non-free packages into a separate distro. Which sounds exactly like a mirror image of what happened with gNewSense: gNewSense is the only-free subset of Ubuntu.
Wow, did you read the same thread I did?
RMS popped in to say in essence that he will not recommend users use OpenBSD (based on the presence of non-free software in their ports collection). Then he got flamed by a bunch of people claiming all sorts of things he didn't say, to which he responded one by one and was quite polite during most of the 30-odd messages I saw.
He said explicitly (multiple times) that he respects the *choice* of end users to use whatever they want to on their own systems. He tried (and apparently failed based on the reaction in the thread) to outline his reasoning with a few analogies, and he politely acknowledged that the stock Linux kernel also fails to meet his definition of free software. In the end, he says his only real power is to not recommend something when people ask, but he respects the right of every project to choose their own ends and means.
How in the world can you see that as hypocritical behavior?
I was a hard-core nerd all through school and got a Comp Sci degree and went to work for IBM circa 2000 -- it was a good to place to be during the dot-bomb. After 3 years I decided that I was going the wrong direction returned to school and will graduate in two weeks (!) at age 31 with a MS in Chemical Engineering. I learned three important lessons during this process:
:)
1) You are only as old as you want to be. Seriously, taking organic chemistry 2 *seven years* after organic chemistry 1 and still getting a B- shows that my brain even approaching 30 was fine at learning "hard" things. Since then I've had to pick up fluids, heat transfer, quantum chemistry, and many other things that I once thought would be impossible to learn, but with the support of my awesome wife it's not really that bad. You *can* pick it up, and with your experience you can be much faster at the homework than your young college peers.
2) Almost *anything* can be made fun once you put in the time to get good at it. What I wanted was a job that was fun but not my whole identity, yet still paid well enough to support a family. Chemical engineering was a really good fit for me: the pay is really good (my entry-level offer was within 1% of IBM's parting salary), but it's a manufacturing process where I *can't* do work when I am not physically on the plant. So after 5pm I get to go home and enjoy the rest of my life. Also, many chemical plants are located in smaller (cheaper) towns, yet the plants still have to pay competitively nationally to get the students to hire on, so you get to live in a cheap town yet enjoy expensive town salary.
3) Most interesting: the value-add of non-programming technical skills to a programming position is not nearly as great as the value-add of programming skills to a non-programming technical position. In other words, engineers of all stripes can become far more effective engineers if they pick up good programming skills: they can automate everything from complex calculations to routine data gathering to minor workflow improvements. But programmers with engineering skills only gain in the area of modeling their domain, they still spend most of their time in the writing/testing/debugging of the code rather than in the derivation of the formulas that the code must embody. (Also: both programmers and engineers gain greatly from technical writing and personal communications skills, but they seem to both gain about the same amount of value.) So if you are an engineer who has a vast toolset at your disposal from your previous career, you can leverage that into a real advantage at your new job; of course, you'd still be an engineer so you'd only code occasionally, but each little program finished would add more time every week for your real job, so it would still feel a lot like hobby coding rather than full-time-grind coding.
Well, I'd better get back to my last couple homework assignments.
Or they think that you won't be able to relate to either side. What proportion of people do you think have multiple masters and own their own business?