I used to work in company that produced wireless routers (for our internal usage only; unfortunately we never reached the stage to sell them). They were based on Linux. In propriatery world, we would have to buy licence for OS. Then, we would be limited in changes we could made to them. And many many related things (no documentation, no source of drivers...). Company with 3 developers would have no chance to make anything similar.
I am not sure that a company that never got a product to market is the best example of the superority of the open source model.
Re:And let's not forget who is funding a lot of th
on
New and Improved SETI
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· Score: 1
Personally, I think you should criticize specific actions rather than the people themselves. Instead of saying "Paul Allen is bad, categorically" why not say "Paul Allen profited from Microsoft's unfair business practices" when the topic is relevent, and "Paul Allen is now doing some good and interesting things with his money."
I agree that critizing actions is more productive than critizing people. But the grandparent poster was suggesting that it was wrong to critize (Boo and Hiss) Microsoft because Paul Allen did something good, which is just plain silly. As you rightly point out, all people do some good and some bad. One example of good does not cancel out all the bad.
If Paul Allen really did want to cancel out all the bad, he should donate all the money he made to charity and keep only enough to buy a $250,000 dollar house and a used Honda, and maybe a small savings for retirement. He should also make all the donations completely anonymous, since he doens't deserve credit for donating stolen money. Until he does this, I will consider him more bad than good.
I mean, if he's just so awful he could just hoard his money and do nothing useful with it all.
I don't understand why people make this argument so often. Do we say "If Stalin* was so awful, he would have killed everyone. We should be glad that he only killed some people"? Of course not. Why do we make this excuse for rich people then?
*Evil dictator carefully chosen to avoid invoking Godwins Law.
Re:And let's not forget who is funding a lot of th
on
New and Improved SETI
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· Score: 1
None other than Paul Allen. Yep, of Microsoft fame. Boo, hiss, where are the groups of objectors now?
Well, considering that he made his money through illegial exploitation of a monopoly (which set the computer industry back approximately 10 years), I feel perfectly comfortable booing and hissing him.
Consider this anaologous situation: Saul Ballen spends 20 years robbing middle class households by breaking in windows and stealing money out of wallets. He invests the money he steals, and at the end of the 20 years he has amassed quite a fortune. He gives a small amount of that fortune to some good causes, such as SETI, and keeps most of it for himself.
Do you think that it is wrong to criticize Saul Ballen simply because he gave some of the money to good causes? What Saul and Paul did are different in structure, but nearly identical in effect. As a society, we treat the two cases differently, but this is mostly due to the influence corporations have in our justice system. In terms of morals, Paul and Saul are equally bad.
I wasn't aware that a blog needed to be two sided. I think you're the one that's delusional.
I never said that a blog needs to be two-sided, and if you think I did, you are the delusional one.
I did imply that good bloggers use logic and reason rather than judging everything with regards to their predetermined biases. For instance, the second article on LGF right now (King County) is about how it appears that there might have been democratic voter fraud in Washington. Compare that to about a month ago, when nearly every other headline on LGF was something to the effect of Idiotic Liberal Moonbats are crying about Election Fraud even though there is Absolutely No Possible Way that It Happened. Back in reality, we know there is a good possibility that some election fraud did happen. I wouldn't put it past the Dems or the Repubs to do whatever it takes to win.
Bask to the issue of one-sidedness: there is a big difference in quality between a one-sided blog, such as LGF, and an intelligent, thoughtful blog, such as AndrewSullivan's. All blogs take a side on an issue, but the good ones are consistent and insightful, whereas the bad ones are reactionary and partisan. I have absolutely no qualms about classifying LGF and Powerline in the second catagory.
Moreover, just becase the blogs don't fit YOUR BIAS, doesn't mean they're crap.
Those blogs (LGF, Powerline) are crap, and it has nothing to do with my biases. They post completely one-sided information mixed with delusional rantings. Just because a I don't agree with a blog, doesnt mean I lose the right to judge it objectively. As I mentioned above, Atrios agrees with my political biases, but I consider his blog crap too.
I agree with you that it is good to have blogs with their biases upfront. The point in my previous post was that even one-sided, conspiratorial blogs could do a better job at presenting truth to the public then our current media.
There is a fascinating aspect to the whole Rathergate story that doesn't seem to get mentioned:
The blogs that broke the Rathergate story are all biased, frothing pieces of crap. And yet, they still broke what may be the most important story of the year.
There are very very few blogs that are actually intelligent. And those tend to be run by people who do real reporting as their day job. But the blogs that broke Rathergate (Powerline, LGF...) were not the good ones. They are, to be frank, pretty crappy blogs. (For those of you on the right who disagree, LGF and Powerline are about the equivalent of Atrios in terms of intelligent insight - which is very near zero.)
Yet, even though these blogs are crappy, or maybe because of it, they managed to show how utterly incompetent our Big Media and Semi-Big Media are. I think the most important moral of this story is that engagement and argument is intrinsically good for democracy, even if the arguments are flawed and illogical.
I read it again. You want a new tab button on the left of the tab bar in windows. The extension I pointed you to (which is the same one being used in that screenshot someone else posted) provides this, no matter what OS you are using.
If this isn't what you want, explain why. It sounds like it is exactly what you asked for originally.
As a side note, I switched to firefox from mozilla about a month ago. I was immediately annoyed by the lack of a new-tab button. Before I found the extension, I added a new-tab button just to the left of the address bar (close to how it is in that screenshot). It turns out that it is a much more convenient place then on the left of the tab bar. Once I click the new-tab button, I either open a bookmark, or type (or paste) a url into the address bar. Having the new-tab button right by the address bar makes both of those more convenient. Even though I have a new-tab button on my tab bar, I don't use it anymore.
Re:How to write poorly, brought to you by Slashdot
on
Mathematics and Sex
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
You are an idiot. The paragraph you quoted made perfect sense. You desperate attempts to pick it apart seem deranged, like the submitter is your lifelong enemy and you are desperate to show the world that you are smarter than him. I don't feel like going through all of your stupidity, so lets just take one example:
Submitter: In particular this chapter includes a nice discussion of how sex itself can evolve. (It seems paradoxical that the question of how sex itself can evolve is not yet resolved.)
You: There's no paradox here - having a discussion about something that may not yet be resolved is, well, normal. Seems the author just wanted to use the word "paradoxical".
It is a paradox because sex is an essential element of reproduction, and hence darwinian selection, and so it seem obvious that our solid understanding of darwinian selection implies a good understanding of sexual evolution; yet we don't have a good understanding of sexual evolution.
You assertion that there is no paradox because it is normal to discuss unresolved issues is nonsensical. The submitter did not assert that it was a paradox because it was being discussed, and I don't know why you would think that.
However, being fair, other features of OOo are clearly superior than those in MS Office, like the equations editor.
True, but why did OOo invent a new equation format? Why couldn't they have just used the latex format? It is a great format, and would have made compability with latex documents very simple. Instead, they created a new format which isn't any better, and further fragmented the word processing market.
There is at least one gnu/linux distro that does not have any sort of DLL hell: G***oo. (I have obscured the name because I don't want the point of this comment to get lost in distro-flames.)
In the distro mentioned above, the package manager keeps track of what programs depend on what libraries, and can keep multiple versions of a library around if different programs depend on different versions. I don't claim to understand how it works exactly, but it is transparent to the user.
The only issue with this solution is that any program to be installed must be specifically packaged by the distro. If you want a Windows like install system, where the installer is basically independent of the OS, then you have two options:
(1) Put up with DLL Hell.
(2) Have each program include it's libraries with it so that DLLs are only used for very standard components.
Windows has progressed from (1) to (2) over the past 10 years or so. And with the hard drive space we have today, I don't really see this as a problem.
How could it work for linux though? First of all, gnome and kde would have to promise backward compability. Then any {gnome,kde} program could safely assume that all the {gnome,kde} base libraries would be installed. Anything else that the program required would be statically linked by the program, rather than dyncamically.
The package manager doing all the work seems like a decent temporary solution, but as the marketshare starts growing, a less managed solution will be necessary. I think that as gnome and kde mature, backwards compatibility will become more of an issue naturally. This will automatically help some.
What ignorance? Is calling something stupid automatically ignorant? Is this like moral relativism, where I am no longer allowed to make a value judgement about anything?
Whether or not you enjoy it (I personally find NASCAR boring except for road racing) does not dictate how dumb it is. A good driver is a good driver. There's no doubt that NASCAR has top engineers working on its cars. What exactly is "dumb" about those people?
Yes, the people involved in NASCAR are probably all (or at least mostly) very smart. The marketing people are geniuses. But the "sport" itself is dumb, and therefore, the people who watch it are dumb. Why is the sport dumb? Because the rules constantly change to make sure that the races are close. It would be like if a soccer league decided midseason that first place team had to play a man down for the rest of the season to keep the games exciting. Furthermore, the races themselves are semi-fixed. There is almost a guarantee that about 7 laps from the finish, there will be a caution flag, so that all the cars will get bunched up for a close finish.
Of all the sports and kinda-sports out there, NASCAR is one of the stupidest. If I am not allowed to point that out (bluntly), there there is no more room for any sort of intelligent discussion. We might as well just wake up every morning any prey to the Gods of Political Correctness (or would that be the Higher Beings of Policital Correctness?) to keep our mouths shut so that we don't say anything that could be considered offensive by anyone. When it comes down to it, the very fate of our very civilization hinges on my right to call NASCAR stupid.
Well, that might be a little extreme. Maybe just the fate of Western Civilization.
For a long time, everyone made fun of the "NASCAR families" for being a bunch of dumb hicks. I'll bet this is very similar to the sorts of things they do.
Guess you have to be a little smarter than the average bear to race a car around in circles after all.
You "bet" that they do the same thing in NASCAR, and then you conclude, based on your bet, that NASCAR people are as smart as formula one people. If that is the kind of logic NASCAR people use, I can assure you that NASCAR people are, in fact, stupid.
Not that I expect the yuppies will give up their sense of superiority (yea, golf takes brains) to admit that.
If giving up my sense of superority means making stupid arguments like yours, you can bet I am going to hold on to mine.
Now, to your actual logical leap: in NASCAR, they are constantly changing the rules so that the races are always close, even to the point of specifically penalizing a team if they have any advantage. To a certain extent, F1 follows a similar procedure, but it is much less agressive, and acts over longer periods of time. Therefore the technological advantage to be gained in NASCAR is much less - if you do something ingenous that helps you win races, you will just be punished for it to keep the races close.
Of course there are advantages to this - it makes the sport more exciting (for sufficiently weak defintions of exciting), and it makes it more about personalities than about technology.
Bottom Line: all car racing is boring. At least in Formula 1, the technology is interesting. And NASCAR people are dumb.
Wow, I want to live in your world. Marketing folks are honest, but naive, and the dirty engineers are always lying to them. It is like bizarro-slashdot.
If RH drops their prices they'll look even MORE like M$
You mean like a smart business? Is there some sort of suicide pact that all honerable businesses take that ensures they will never lower prices in response to market pressures?
One of the reasons Microsoft got to where they are is that they were willing to slash prices to beat their competitors. RedHat is going to have to compete with them on price if they want to start winning back MS customers.
Maybe if you spent a little less time reading blogs and submitting stories to Slashdot and a little more time doing... oh... I don't know... something with Linux... you'd know that.
I don't think a person named "The Mad Poster" has the right to tell people they spend too much time on slashdot.
That statement could be interperted to mean that I actually invented the apple pie. But you would have to be a moron to think that was actually what I meant.
Clearly, the intent of the statement was to claim that I had made a specific apple pie. Or, more specifically, I had initiated the creation of the apple pie - maybe by paying someone to make it, or by telling someone about my ideas, or just as a cheerleader.
Gore was claiming to have played a key role in the creation of the internet. There is nothing in his statement that implies he had anything do with with the technical aspects of its creation, nor is there anything in the statement that implies that he came up with the idea. All the statement says is that he "took the initiative" in "creating the internet" - not "invented the internet"
Slashdot Mirror
I used to work in company that produced wireless routers (for our internal usage only; unfortunately we never reached the stage to sell them). They were based on Linux. In propriatery world, we would have to buy licence for OS. Then, we would be limited in changes we could made to them. And many many related things (no documentation, no source of drivers...). Company with 3 developers would have no chance to make anything similar.
I am not sure that a company that never got a product to market is the best example of the superority of the open source model.
Personally, I think you should criticize specific actions rather than the people themselves. Instead of saying "Paul Allen is bad, categorically" why not say "Paul Allen profited from Microsoft's unfair business practices" when the topic is relevent, and "Paul Allen is now doing some good and interesting things with his money."
I agree that critizing actions is more productive than critizing people. But the grandparent poster was suggesting that it was wrong to critize (Boo and Hiss) Microsoft because Paul Allen did something good, which is just plain silly. As you rightly point out, all people do some good and some bad. One example of good does not cancel out all the bad.
If Paul Allen really did want to cancel out all the bad, he should donate all the money he made to charity and keep only enough to buy a $250,000 dollar house and a used Honda, and maybe a small savings for retirement. He should also make all the donations completely anonymous, since he doens't deserve credit for donating stolen money. Until he does this, I will consider him more bad than good.
I mean, if he's just so awful he could just hoard his money and do nothing useful with it all.
I don't understand why people make this argument so often. Do we say "If Stalin* was so awful, he would have killed everyone. We should be glad that he only killed some people"? Of course not. Why do we make this excuse for rich people then?
*Evil dictator carefully chosen to avoid invoking Godwins Law.
None other than Paul Allen. Yep, of Microsoft fame. Boo, hiss, where are the groups of objectors now?
Well, considering that he made his money through illegial exploitation of a monopoly (which set the computer industry back approximately 10 years), I feel perfectly comfortable booing and hissing him.
Consider this anaologous situation: Saul Ballen spends 20 years robbing middle class households by breaking in windows and stealing money out of wallets. He invests the money he steals, and at the end of the 20 years he has amassed quite a fortune. He gives a small amount of that fortune to some good causes, such as SETI, and keeps most of it for himself.
Do you think that it is wrong to criticize Saul Ballen simply because he gave some of the money to good causes? What Saul and Paul did are different in structure, but nearly identical in effect. As a society, we treat the two cases differently, but this is mostly due to the influence corporations have in our justice system. In terms of morals, Paul and Saul are equally bad.
If you spend your saturday nights posting to slashdot, you forfeit your right to complain about others reinforcing negative geek sterotypes.
Details, please. How did you get caught? What was the punishment?
I wasn't aware that a blog needed to be two sided. I think you're the one that's delusional.
I never said that a blog needs to be two-sided, and if you think I did, you are the delusional one.
I did imply that good bloggers use logic and reason rather than judging everything with regards to their predetermined biases. For instance, the second article on LGF right now (King County) is about how it appears that there might have been democratic voter fraud in Washington. Compare that to about a month ago, when nearly every other headline on LGF was something to the effect of Idiotic Liberal Moonbats are crying about Election Fraud even though there is Absolutely No Possible Way that It Happened. Back in reality, we know there is a good possibility that some election fraud did happen. I wouldn't put it past the Dems or the Repubs to do whatever it takes to win.
Bask to the issue of one-sidedness: there is a big difference in quality between a one-sided blog, such as LGF, and an intelligent, thoughtful blog, such as AndrewSullivan's. All blogs take a side on an issue, but the good ones are consistent and insightful, whereas the bad ones are reactionary and partisan. I have absolutely no qualms about classifying LGF and Powerline in the second catagory.
Moreover, just becase the blogs don't fit YOUR BIAS, doesn't mean they're crap.
Those blogs (LGF, Powerline) are crap, and it has nothing to do with my biases. They post completely one-sided information mixed with delusional rantings. Just because a I don't agree with a blog, doesnt mean I lose the right to judge it objectively. As I mentioned above, Atrios agrees with my political biases, but I consider his blog crap too.
I agree with you that it is good to have blogs with their biases upfront. The point in my previous post was that even one-sided, conspiratorial blogs could do a better job at presenting truth to the public then our current media.
There is a fascinating aspect to the whole Rathergate story that doesn't seem to get mentioned: The blogs that broke the Rathergate story are all biased, frothing pieces of crap. And yet, they still broke what may be the most important story of the year.
...) were not the good ones. They are, to be frank, pretty crappy blogs. (For those of you on the right who disagree, LGF and Powerline are about the equivalent of Atrios in terms of intelligent insight - which is very near zero.)
There are very very few blogs that are actually intelligent. And those tend to be run by people who do real reporting as their day job. But the blogs that broke Rathergate (Powerline, LGF
Yet, even though these blogs are crappy, or maybe because of it, they managed to show how utterly incompetent our Big Media and Semi-Big Media are. I think the most important moral of this story is that engagement and argument is intrinsically good for democracy, even if the arguments are flawed and illogical.
Dad? What are you doing on slashdot?
I read it again. You want a new tab button on the left of the tab bar in windows. The extension I pointed you to (which is the same one being used in that screenshot someone else posted) provides this, no matter what OS you are using.
If this isn't what you want, explain why. It sounds like it is exactly what you asked for originally.
As a side note, I switched to firefox from mozilla about a month ago. I was immediately annoyed by the lack of a new-tab button. Before I found the extension, I added a new-tab button just to the left of the address bar (close to how it is in that screenshot). It turns out that it is a much more convenient place then on the left of the tab bar. Once I click the new-tab button, I either open a bookmark, or type (or paste) a url into the address bar. Having the new-tab button right by the address bar makes both of those more convenient. Even though I have a new-tab button on my tab bar, I don't use it anymore.
It is an extension. It works on all OS's. Get it here: tab extensions
Or if that doesnt work, just go to the firefox extensions place and look for it.
And please stop being so fucking annoying.
Wow, are you an artist?
You are an idiot. The paragraph you quoted made perfect sense. You desperate attempts to pick it apart seem deranged, like the submitter is your lifelong enemy and you are desperate to show the world that you are smarter than him. I don't feel like going through all of your stupidity, so lets just take one example:
Submitter: In particular this chapter includes a nice discussion of how sex itself can evolve. (It seems paradoxical that the question of how sex itself can evolve is not yet resolved.)
You: There's no paradox here - having a discussion about something that may not yet be resolved is, well, normal. Seems the author just wanted to use the word "paradoxical".
It is a paradox because sex is an essential element of reproduction, and hence darwinian selection, and so it seem obvious that our solid understanding of darwinian selection implies a good understanding of sexual evolution; yet we don't have a good understanding of sexual evolution.
You assertion that there is no paradox because it is normal to discuss unresolved issues is nonsensical. The submitter did not assert that it was a paradox because it was being discussed, and I don't know why you would think that.
but first, multiply by beta*u*pi. (write it out if you dont get it).
However, being fair, other features of OOo are clearly superior than those in MS Office, like the equations editor.
True, but why did OOo invent a new equation format? Why couldn't they have just used the latex format? It is a great format, and would have made compability with latex documents very simple. Instead, they created a new format which isn't any better, and further fragmented the word processing market.
There is at least one gnu/linux distro that does not have any sort of DLL hell: G***oo. (I have obscured the name because I don't want the point of this comment to get lost in distro-flames.)
In the distro mentioned above, the package manager keeps track of what programs depend on what libraries, and can keep multiple versions of a library around if different programs depend on different versions. I don't claim to understand how it works exactly, but it is transparent to the user.
The only issue with this solution is that any program to be installed must be specifically packaged by the distro. If you want a Windows like install system, where the installer is basically independent of the OS, then you have two options:
(1) Put up with DLL Hell.
(2) Have each program include it's libraries with it so that DLLs are only used for very standard components.
Windows has progressed from (1) to (2) over the past 10 years or so. And with the hard drive space we have today, I don't really see this as a problem.
How could it work for linux though? First of all, gnome and kde would have to promise backward compability. Then any {gnome,kde} program could safely assume that all the {gnome,kde} base libraries would be installed. Anything else that the program required would be statically linked by the program, rather than dyncamically.
The package manager doing all the work seems like a decent temporary solution, but as the marketshare starts growing, a less managed solution will be necessary. I think that as gnome and kde mature, backwards compatibility will become more of an issue naturally. This will automatically help some.
Nice ignorance.
What ignorance? Is calling something stupid automatically ignorant? Is this like moral relativism, where I am no longer allowed to make a value judgement about anything?
Whether or not you enjoy it (I personally find NASCAR boring except for road racing) does not dictate how dumb it is. A good driver is a good driver. There's no doubt that NASCAR has top engineers working on its cars. What exactly is "dumb" about those people?
Yes, the people involved in NASCAR are probably all (or at least mostly) very smart. The marketing people are geniuses. But the "sport" itself is dumb, and therefore, the people who watch it are dumb. Why is the sport dumb? Because the rules constantly change to make sure that the races are close. It would be like if a soccer league decided midseason that first place team had to play a man down for the rest of the season to keep the games exciting. Furthermore, the races themselves are semi-fixed. There is almost a guarantee that about 7 laps from the finish, there will be a caution flag, so that all the cars will get bunched up for a close finish.
Of all the sports and kinda-sports out there, NASCAR is one of the stupidest. If I am not allowed to point that out (bluntly), there there is no more room for any sort of intelligent discussion. We might as well just wake up every morning any prey to the Gods of Political Correctness (or would that be the Higher Beings of Policital Correctness?) to keep our mouths shut so that we don't say anything that could be considered offensive by anyone. When it comes down to it, the very fate of our very civilization hinges on my right to call NASCAR stupid.
Well, that might be a little extreme. Maybe just the fate of Western Civilization.
For a long time, everyone made fun of the "NASCAR families" for being a bunch of dumb hicks. I'll bet this is very similar to the sorts of things they do.
Guess you have to be a little smarter than the average bear to race a car around in circles after all.
You "bet" that they do the same thing in NASCAR, and then you conclude, based on your bet, that NASCAR people are as smart as formula one people. If that is the kind of logic NASCAR people use, I can assure you that NASCAR people are, in fact, stupid.
Not that I expect the yuppies will give up their sense of superiority (yea, golf takes brains) to admit that.
If giving up my sense of superority means making stupid arguments like yours, you can bet I am going to hold on to mine.
Now, to your actual logical leap: in NASCAR, they are constantly changing the rules so that the races are always close, even to the point of specifically penalizing a team if they have any advantage. To a certain extent, F1 follows a similar procedure, but it is much less agressive, and acts over longer periods of time. Therefore the technological advantage to be gained in NASCAR is much less - if you do something ingenous that helps you win races, you will just be punished for it to keep the races close.
Of course there are advantages to this - it makes the sport more exciting (for sufficiently weak defintions of exciting), and it makes it more about personalities than about technology.
Bottom Line: all car racing is boring. At least in Formula 1, the technology is interesting. And NASCAR people are dumb.
Wow, I want to live in your world. Marketing folks are honest, but naive, and the dirty engineers are always lying to them. It is like bizarro-slashdot.
If RH drops their prices they'll look even MORE like M$
You mean like a smart business? Is there some sort of suicide pact that all honerable businesses take that ensures they will never lower prices in response to market pressures?
One of the reasons Microsoft got to where they are is that they were willing to slash prices to beat their competitors. RedHat is going to have to compete with them on price if they want to start winning back MS customers.
Maybe if you spent a little less time reading blogs and submitting stories to Slashdot and a little more time doing... oh... I don't know... something with Linux... you'd know that.
I don't think a person named "The Mad Poster" has the right to tell people they spend too much time on slashdot.
So he created ...
NO NO NO !!!
Where did he claim that he created anything?
at least slashdot kept up on a story for once.
yea, like that SCO story. slashdot really dropped the ball on that one.
"I took the initiative in creating the apple pie"
That statement could be interperted to mean that I actually invented the apple pie. But you would have to be a moron to think that was actually what I meant.
Clearly, the intent of the statement was to claim that I had made a specific apple pie. Or, more specifically, I had initiated the creation of the apple pie - maybe by paying someone to make it, or by telling someone about my ideas, or just as a cheerleader.
Gore was claiming to have played a key role in the creation of the internet. There is nothing in his statement that implies he had anything do with with the technical aspects of its creation, nor is there anything in the statement that implies that he came up with the idea. All the statement says is that he "took the initiative" in "creating the internet" - not "invented the internet"
Wow, you posted the same thing twice, and got +5 for both of them. Okay, here goes nothing...