I hold out the apple, open my fingers, the apple falls. Ergo, gravity exists, by definition.
huh? you define gravity as the singular instance of an apple falling? It seems perhaps you're using a definition of the word that doesn't correspond to common usage. Most people consider gravity to be a universal force that causes each particle of matter to attract every other particle of matter in a relationship corresponding to the mass of the particles and the inverse square of the distance between them. According to Newtonian physics, which was where the concept was originally formulated, this would result in an Apple falling, roughly, from your hand towards the earth, given that the Earth is the most massive and closest body around.
However, a singular instance of an apple traveling toward the earth, or even a thousand instances, is insufficient demonstration that "gravity exists".
It was easy to disprove the existence of aether with the Michelson-Morley experiment.
I'm not sure that's the right way of saying it. Ether is a very old idea intended to deal with a couple questions. For example, what is there in "empty space". It's sometimes used as a term in natural philosophy and is actually not necessarily intended, in concept, to be a physical material in the sense that we think of "matter", but has been supposed to be a whole lot of different things.
That having been said, there was a time when people tried to use the concept of ether to explain the behavior of light. They supposed that light was nothing other than waves passing through this "ether", which they believed was some sort of a physical material. This idea had many problems, but one of the benefits of this explanation was that it would explain why light traveled at a constant speed. Imagining light as wave in a medium was also useful in understanding many behaviors of light, including refraction, reflection, and the famous double-slit experiment.
OK, so it was supposed that light's constant speed was a result of passing through ether that was stationary, and the speed that a wave travels can be determined through certain aspects of the medium, including rigidity of the particles and distance between particles and such. So if ether was the medium of light, and therefore the speed of light was constant through the medium (relative to the medium), then we would be able to determine how fast we're moving, relative to the motion of the medium, by careful measurements of the speed of light. This was the intention of the Michelson-Morely experiment.
However, what the Michellson-Morley experiment demonstrated was that light's constant speed was constant *regardless* of the context of the observer. In essence, the medium would need to be stationary to everyone all the time, no matter what their velocity was. What this proved was not that "there was no ether", but that explaining light as waves in ether was *insufficient* to explain the consistency of the speed of light.
Most appropriately, "dark matter" should be thought of as a place holder, which is to say it's a term physicists use when they are talking about gravitational forces that seem to indicate matter where there is no detected matter. This should not be confused with a positive claim that there is, in actuality, "dark matter".
Now, real physicists, good physicists, will acknowledge (at least if you back them into a corner) that "dark matter" is not a concept of a real, existent *thing*. As in, we don't really have reason to believe in a magical material called "dark matter". The statement that "scientists have discovered a galaxy of dark matter" is kind of a wrong way of talking about it. Scientists have discovered that there equations don't work out quite right unless they suppose there's matter where they aren't detecting matter. So, if they assume that there's other undetectable matter somewhere in the area, doing certain things, our model works better.
However, poor physicists and science media people pick up on this and start imagining invisible planets populated by invisible people, and we get stories like, "scientists discover DARK MATTER!" You gotta love how these things are always phrased like that, too. It's never, "this particular scientist, Dr. Whateverhisnameis, has made certain readings and theorized bla-bla-bla." It's always "scientists" as a whole have "discovered" bla-bla-bla. Apparently, all scientists everywhere agree. "THEY" have "PROVED" bla-bla-bla as soon as someone somewhere makes some other reading that comes *close* to a value expected by the bla-bla-bla theory. So yadda-yadda-yadda, now geeks are standing around the water cooler trying to sound smart by talking about the invisible dark-matter planets.
Re:In other words indeed
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Blink, Take 2
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I know what you mean. On the other hand, when you said, "what they say and what I say seem almost entirely identical," it occurs to me that it might be those slight changes that make your statements more clear. Sometimes the difference between clear and obscure is very fine.
The book is extremely ambiguous, not very helpful, and basically words things most people already know in ways that make it seem like it's new and insightful.
So you've taken a criticism of that book that we've all heard before, reworded it, and gotten modded +5 insightful. Oh, how the irony gods smile on you.
On a more serious note, sometimes being insightful is just that: rewording a common conception into a clearer form. In another sense, insight might be said to be the taking of an idea that we all know and take for granted, an idea that's grown stale from being said too many times in tired colloquialisms, and making it fresh again.
And stranger yet, one man's insight is another mans obfuscation.
So, what, you're saying that history is a sixth sense?
Interesting interpretation. By what sense do we "remember". It's like hearing, seeing, smelling, touching, but when you remember a sight, it's not the same as seeing. Is memory a sixth sense?
I know this isn't terrifically on-topic, but human perception is quite complex. Each of your senses, in a certain way of looking at them, come down to being "touch". Nerves in your eyes "feel" the effects of your retina being struck by light. Nerves in your tongue feel the effect of the chemical reactions in your mouth. The division into "5 senses" is a bit of a convention, and I'm not sure we shouldn't acknowledge more/others. However, this isn't the same as saying that aborigines are psychic.
However the use of the term "sixth sense" implies a paranormal explanation, when in fact you can pretty much bet that the true explanation, whatever it turns out to be, is going to be quite logical and rational.
Sometimes the distinction between "paranormal" and science is a bit like the distinction between magic and technology-- which is to say, it's the not-understood version. Take any given "paranormal" phenomenon, prove it exists, and make up terminology with official-sounding latin roots, and suddenly it's science. Take a well-known scientific phenomenon, talk about it in metaphorical terms, and it's paranormal pseudo-science again.
I'm not saying you're wrong about the/. summary being overly-sensationalistic and misleading, though. Many claims to "paranormal" phenomena have no truth to them whatsoever. I guess the distinction I'm shooting for is, that there are lots of phonies playing psychic who have been proven to be scam artists doesn't mean we've "proven" there's no such thing as a "sixth sense". It just means we should be dubious of claims put forward.
(I guess I'm arguing with the implication that entertaining the possibility of a "sixth sense" is equivalent to a "creeping away from rational thinking")
I was by no means trying to paint a bleak picture for IBM. However, I believe they are quite concerned for the future of Linux and view the success of Linux being entangled with their own success. I don't mean this in terms of, "If Linux dies, IBM goes out of business," but if Linux were to fail, IBM [possibly] would have wasted quite a lot of investment and missed out on some opportunities.
One reason is that some business view IBM building their services on an open platform as a selling point, since they have less worry of vendor lock-in or dropped support. It probably goes without saying in this crowd that IBM can have more flexibility building services on Linux than a closed 3rd party OS (Windows, for example).
Another peripheral benefit IBM could see from Linux making it on the desktop would be an increased likelihood of selling PowerPC-based desktops. Granted, the XBox 2 bodes well for the possibility of a version of Windows supporting PPC, but that's purely speculative. We do know, however, that a lot of major Linux distros have been stepping up support of PPC recently, and with the good price/performance of the G5 and the speculative numbers on Cell, IBM has an opportunity to break into that desktop processor market if they can convince people to go with Linux.
So all I'm saying is, yes IBM would survive fine if Linux disappeared, but companies like that aren't just looking to survive. They're looking to be wildly successful, and they seem to view Linux as a great opportunity, and that's why they're pouring money into its development.
There's some truth to what you say. However, there are some differences. First, Mozilla isn't so integrated into the OS so as to give it ridiculous magic OS-destroying powers when not-run as root. Second, most distros don't run as root by default, and many of them give stern warnings not to run as root. (I remember when I was first learning to operate Linux, Redhat used to pop up with a warning every time you ran X Windows as root, pretty much saying "DON'T DO THIS!", and there was no obvious way to disable that warning. I don't know if distros currently do this, however, since I haven't tried running Gnome as root in years.) Ubuntu and OSX, on the other hand, sort-of disable root by default, and everything needs to be done with sudo (I don't think 'su' is even enabled in their default user setup).
Anyway, Windows doesn't currently take these precautions. I'm don't think I'm too much of a knee-jerk Windows basher, but purely as a matter of fact, Windows installs by default run as admin.
I have another problem with the Windows re-install, and though best solution is a little uncertain, the symptoms are clear enough to me.
I feel the problem comes about because the separation between the OS, the programs, and the user files isn't terrifically clear. It's not all Microsoft's fault. Occasional lazy/stupid/ignorant developers are still writing programs in such a way that they keep user settings somewhere in the "Program Files" directory. Programs use shared libraries in such a way that they copy DLL files all over the place. Some files that are considered "part of the OS" are kept in "Program Files" and sometimes files used by programs (and not the OS) are kept in "WINNT". The result of this mixing is, if I delete the Windows directory and reinstall, many of my programs won't work. I have to reinstall my programs and drivers, which means I really need to wipe the disk and start over.
So, while I am not a huge expert on OS design, I've had to do these sorts of reinstalls often enough to see that it's a problem, and it seems like it could be handled better. I'd like to see a breakup along these lines:
There should be a division between the OS and everything else. The OS stays in it's own directory pretty much as-is from when it's installed. If some patch really needs to be installed directly to the OS, you should have to jump through all sorts of hoops. The instances where things write to the OS should be very limited as much as possible. Hell, stick it on another drive and give it a hardware read-only switch that can only be accessed by opening the case.
Applications should be independent from the OS and from each other. I'm thinking like old-style MacOS programs, where an install means you drag it to the disk. I want the computer to work in such a way that, if I erase the OS but keep only my applications folder, and reinstall the OS, all my applications should still run. However, none of these applications should run "at startup".
And then you have the user profiles. Most users should only ever need write access to their own profile, and nothing done in the user profile should be able to harm the OS layer or application layer.
Patches, updates, and plug-ins to the OS should not alter the OS directly unless absolutely necessary. They should work out of a separate area, so that if I wipe-out this "OS plug-in/patches" directory, I get back my vanilla install of the OS without disturbing either my apps or my user files.
I'm not saying we need exactly this separation, but I believe some similar sort of modularization would both increase security abilities and aid in diagnosis and repair. I mean, imagine everything breaks into these four categories:
Instead of the Windows "safe mode", you can run the vanilla OS, no plug-ins. The security scheme would be such that no programs and nothing in the user profile could run automatically at startup, plus, nothing would really have the ability to alter your vanilla OS, so if you disable the "plugins" your safe-mode is pretty much fool-proof. However, if your problems persist, then you know it's a problem with your OS or hardware. Reinstalling the OS won't harm anything else, since no settings or upgrades are housed there. If the OS is uncorrupted, re-installing will get you the exact same thing. So if you reinstall your OS and safe-mode still doesn't work, you know it's hardware.
Since, in theory, spyware and such could only live in the plug-ins area (imagine you have a hardware switch on the OS or it's a WORM media) the worst-case scenario is that you'll have to wipe out your plug-ins and reinstall. Since these "plug-ins" are separate from your applications, wiping them out generally shouldn't keep your applications from running, and so the damage should be minimal. (instead of dealing with a situation where you delete a corrupted shared library and suddenly 5 different application stop working) Even if you need to wipe out your plug-ins and a
SmartLink was intended to replace existing tags with links to places MS wanted you to go, and to add links that would only work if you happened to be running Windows.
I think you hit on the key thing here: Microsoft was integrating this technology into the OS in a way that was going to ship in the OS, and it would end up being always on and not removable. From the way it was being implemented, its purpose was not really to make it easier to find what the user is looking for, but a way for Microsoft to insert advertisements into your everyday tasks (since, IIRC, the links were going to link to Microsoft "partners" who were paying Microsoft for the privilege). While Google seems to be trying to provide something people want (since people have to choose to use it, either they want it or this thing will be a bust), and Microsoft was talking about implementing something we, today, would consider adware *into the operating system* at a low level, it seems quite a bit different.
hmmm.... I guess I'd agree that it is more difficult to install drivers not included in the distro. Actually, I would include that in part of a larger complaint, that it's (in general) harder to install anything not included in the distro. Of course, people are trying to deal with that problem by creating large online repositories of software per-distribution (yum, apt-get, portage, whatever). It seems to work out well, but you still have the problem, I suppose, that it's hard to install things which are neither in the distro or the repositories.
Still, I don't think the trouble your cousin had is inherently a "problem with Linux". You have a piece of hardware that isn't supported by Linux (or maybe that distro), and there are no drivers. Well, ok. But try installing a piece of hardware that's not supported by Windows on a Windows machine, and I think you'll run into the same problem. So that's a problem with hardware being rare or crappy, or the hardware vendors not working to make their products Linux compatible, or whatever... but it doesn't mean that Linux developers are going about things the wrong way.
Granted, hardware vendors are generally more focussed on supporting Windows, and so you're more likely to find hardware that runs with Windows but not Linux than the other way around. However, I wouldn't say it's at all rare to find a computer that FC3 will find every piece of hardware. I've tried it on a number of different models from Dell, HP/Compaq, IBM, and custom built machines without any real problem.
Why do they need to do that when there already are easy-to-install distros that work with most common hardware? Fedora/Redhat, Mandrake, and Novell are probably the major ones, all easy to install, and all of them, if you stick the CD in a given Dell or HP or whatever, there's a good chance everything will work.
You mention OSX, but the reason OSX doesn't ever lack hardware support is that Apple controls the hardware. How is IBM going to control the hardware that Dell and HP use?
Plus, IBM has said they don't want to develop their own OS, but they'd rather partner with other companies (like Redhat and Novell) and help them to develop Linux. Their stated reasoning being (or so I've read somewhere), if they develop their own distro, then there's internal pressure to use it on all IBM products, whether it's a good fit or not. If they partner with Novell, and Novell's Linux isn't good for what they're doing, than maybe they've wasted money working with Novell, but they can still go with Redhat for their installs.
Those instructions *mostly* work if you have hardware that was extremely common when the OS was first distributed. However, it's not at all uncommon to have to search for the disks that came with your hardware or hunt down the drivers on the internet. Every machine I have, Windows fails to detect at least 1 thing.
Now, compare that to a Fedora Core 3 installation. The Fedora installation is just as easy (I think easier), but, in many cases, it will actually find your hardware without any driver hunting.
If you think it's hard to install Linux, you haven't tried in a while. Or have you been doing stage-1 Gentoo installs?
Except Lotus isn't nearly as important for IBM's long-term strategic goals as Linux is. IBM's big cash cows are hardware (big iron) and services (not software, but setting up software, building custom apps, etc). Truth is, it might be just as good or better for IBM to have a FOSS groupware package that they can be paid to set up and configure on their systems than to actually sell the software.
In fact, I wouldn't be totally surprised if in 5 years, IBM isn't really selling Lotus anymore, but pushes some open-sourced groupware package from Novel or something (Hula?).
I also hope that, when IBM starts making money with Linux, that some moral compass directs them to give something back.
I think you're missing the point. They don't need to have a "moral compass" directing them to give something back. IBM and Novell are both betting their business plans on the success of Linux, so the desire to make their business succeed and the desire to profit will direct them to use their time/money/resources to make Linux a success.
Or, more properly speaking, we should not be using the future tense. IBM and Novell are making money with Linux, and they have been "giving back". The good news is not "IBM is being nice and making a large charitable contribution towards Linux development". The story here is, "IBM views Linux as a necessary component for their success, and they are [currently] putting a lot of resources into helping Linux grow."
Do you think India's caste system is good? Those poor children born into the lower castes with no hope of ever being more than servant; well life's just tough right?
Life's just tough. I'm not saying India's caste system is good, but you thinking it's not good doesn't keep life from being "just tough". Even abolishing all caste systems wouldn't keep there from being poor, ignorant servants with tough lives, it just might manage to switch-around who's stuck in that role.
All sorts of things might limit a person's options. Paris Hilton does not really seem to have the option of being a brilliant physicist. Perhaps that door was *never* open to her. I never had the opportunity to be a 12-year-old Chinese prostitute living in Russia during the 16th century. Who's responsibility is it to make those things possible and easy? Should we even be worried about making these things possible?
No. To some extent, we are what we are, and our lives are our lives. Life is hard. Every second you live, options and possibilities are cut off from you. It's not my responsibility to magically make everything possible for all people. It's not anyone's responsibility to make life not-hard. What *is* everyone's responsibility is to choose for themselves, with whatever comes, how they are going to deal with it.
I'm not saying there aren't plenty of good reasons to want to diminish the effects of poverty and ignorance. However, don't tell me that I *need* to make everyone's life easy.
In truth, though, the missing element of personal responsibility has allowed everyone to blame everyone else for their predicament.
I'd like to point out something going unrecognized here... On the one hand, when someone denies his personal responsibility it enables him to say, "It's not my fault, it's society which made me what I am! Since you're a part of that society, it's YOUR fault I did these horrible things, so who are you to complain?! You should feel responsible for me!"
However, on the other hand, embracing personal responsibility forces me to look at that same guy and say, "It's not completely your fault. You grew up in a society that made you what you are. Since I'm part of that society, it's partially my fault that you've done these horrible things, so how do we change things for the better?"
I mean, notice the people who are complaining about "our society" lacking a sense of personal responsibility. That complaint first, by implying that the reason individuals lack this sense is that "the society" lacks it, acknowledges that there is a causative relationship between "society" and "personal behavior". Second, the fact that this complaint is aimed at changing the viewpoint of society, and therefore changing the behavior of individuals, shows that those doing the complaining also believe that it is somehow their responsibility to correct other's behavior.
What I'm getting at is, the disagreement isn't over "how things work". I think we all acknowledge that this thing we call "society" influences the thoughts and behavior of individuals, and that individuals can exercise influence over society. I think the real disagreement is over whether responsibility for others is something to be taken by people or if it is to be pushed on people.
But what they do with their lives, as adults, is their choice. Being born into poverty isn't a blank check to screw up and blame everyone else for the rest of your life. Having a hard life is often a contributing factor in "bad behavior", but it's not really determinitive,
He's doing dangerous stuff, but it sounds fun. It actually reminds be of a lot of crazy old science experiments. If you read reports from a lot of early studies into chemistry and fluid dynamics, for example, boy those guys loved playing with mercury! Huge tubs of the stuff, scientists submerging half their bodies in it. Or the way people used to play with radium.
Or, have you ever read about the early experiments in electricity? They didn't really have effective units of measure yet, so when they were talking about how much electricity you'd need to create the desired effect, it would be in terms of "you must use a sufficient amount of electricity so that, if passed through the head of a cat, it would kill it," or "enough electricity to send a man flying across the room and leave him stunned for several minutes." No kidding. Funny to imagine some scientist on the other side of the world reading those notes and knowing from experience "how much electricity" that is.
Ah, I don't really have a point, but a whole lot of neat science is pretty dangerous.
But just to clarify, they have revealed his second head in the trailer, but it's hidden most of the time. Therefore, the reason for the one-headed Zaphod was not that the CGI hadn't been finished yet, but because his second head is under his first head, and therefore hidden by his shirt.
In this sense, when asked, "Where the hell is Zaphod's second head????", the answer, "I think Zaphod's second head is inside his nostril, or something like that," is true enough. His head isn't hidden in his nostril, but it's "something like that". In other words, yes, Zaphod has a second head, but no, it's not visible under most circumstances.
Slashdot Mirror
huh? you define gravity as the singular instance of an apple falling? It seems perhaps you're using a definition of the word that doesn't correspond to common usage. Most people consider gravity to be a universal force that causes each particle of matter to attract every other particle of matter in a relationship corresponding to the mass of the particles and the inverse square of the distance between them. According to Newtonian physics, which was where the concept was originally formulated, this would result in an Apple falling, roughly, from your hand towards the earth, given that the Earth is the most massive and closest body around.
However, a singular instance of an apple traveling toward the earth, or even a thousand instances, is insufficient demonstration that "gravity exists".
I'm not sure that's the right way of saying it. Ether is a very old idea intended to deal with a couple questions. For example, what is there in "empty space". It's sometimes used as a term in natural philosophy and is actually not necessarily intended, in concept, to be a physical material in the sense that we think of "matter", but has been supposed to be a whole lot of different things.
That having been said, there was a time when people tried to use the concept of ether to explain the behavior of light. They supposed that light was nothing other than waves passing through this "ether", which they believed was some sort of a physical material. This idea had many problems, but one of the benefits of this explanation was that it would explain why light traveled at a constant speed. Imagining light as wave in a medium was also useful in understanding many behaviors of light, including refraction, reflection, and the famous double-slit experiment.
OK, so it was supposed that light's constant speed was a result of passing through ether that was stationary, and the speed that a wave travels can be determined through certain aspects of the medium, including rigidity of the particles and distance between particles and such. So if ether was the medium of light, and therefore the speed of light was constant through the medium (relative to the medium), then we would be able to determine how fast we're moving, relative to the motion of the medium, by careful measurements of the speed of light. This was the intention of the Michelson-Morely experiment.
However, what the Michellson-Morley experiment demonstrated was that light's constant speed was constant *regardless* of the context of the observer. In essence, the medium would need to be stationary to everyone all the time, no matter what their velocity was. What this proved was not that "there was no ether", but that explaining light as waves in ether was *insufficient* to explain the consistency of the speed of light.
Now, real physicists, good physicists, will acknowledge (at least if you back them into a corner) that "dark matter" is not a concept of a real, existent *thing*. As in, we don't really have reason to believe in a magical material called "dark matter". The statement that "scientists have discovered a galaxy of dark matter" is kind of a wrong way of talking about it. Scientists have discovered that there equations don't work out quite right unless they suppose there's matter where they aren't detecting matter. So, if they assume that there's other undetectable matter somewhere in the area, doing certain things, our model works better.
However, poor physicists and science media people pick up on this and start imagining invisible planets populated by invisible people, and we get stories like, "scientists discover DARK MATTER!" You gotta love how these things are always phrased like that, too. It's never, "this particular scientist, Dr. Whateverhisnameis, has made certain readings and theorized bla-bla-bla." It's always "scientists" as a whole have "discovered" bla-bla-bla. Apparently, all scientists everywhere agree. "THEY" have "PROVED" bla-bla-bla as soon as someone somewhere makes some other reading that comes *close* to a value expected by the bla-bla-bla theory. So yadda-yadda-yadda, now geeks are standing around the water cooler trying to sound smart by talking about the invisible dark-matter planets.
I know what you mean. On the other hand, when you said, "what they say and what I say seem almost entirely identical," it occurs to me that it might be those slight changes that make your statements more clear. Sometimes the difference between clear and obscure is very fine.
So you've taken a criticism of that book that we've all heard before, reworded it, and gotten modded +5 insightful. Oh, how the irony gods smile on you.
On a more serious note, sometimes being insightful is just that: rewording a common conception into a clearer form. In another sense, insight might be said to be the taking of an idea that we all know and take for granted, an idea that's grown stale from being said too many times in tired colloquialisms, and making it fresh again.
And stranger yet, one man's insight is another mans obfuscation.
no... not challenging. I wasn't arguing with or making fun of the guy in any way. Just thought it would be a funny...
Interesting interpretation. By what sense do we "remember". It's like hearing, seeing, smelling, touching, but when you remember a sight, it's not the same as seeing. Is memory a sixth sense?
I know this isn't terrifically on-topic, but human perception is quite complex. Each of your senses, in a certain way of looking at them, come down to being "touch". Nerves in your eyes "feel" the effects of your retina being struck by light. Nerves in your tongue feel the effect of the chemical reactions in your mouth. The division into "5 senses" is a bit of a convention, and I'm not sure we shouldn't acknowledge more/others. However, this isn't the same as saying that aborigines are psychic.
Sometimes the distinction between "paranormal" and science is a bit like the distinction between magic and technology-- which is to say, it's the not-understood version. Take any given "paranormal" phenomenon, prove it exists, and make up terminology with official-sounding latin roots, and suddenly it's science. Take a well-known scientific phenomenon, talk about it in metaphorical terms, and it's paranormal pseudo-science again.
I'm not saying you're wrong about the /. summary being overly-sensationalistic and misleading, though. Many claims to "paranormal" phenomena have no truth to them whatsoever. I guess the distinction I'm shooting for is, that there are lots of phonies playing psychic who have been proven to be scam artists doesn't mean we've "proven" there's no such thing as a "sixth sense". It just means we should be dubious of claims put forward.
(I guess I'm arguing with the implication that entertaining the possibility of a "sixth sense" is equivalent to a "creeping away from rational thinking")
Yeah? Well how many abidiginals do you see modeling?
/thinks there's more to life than being reall really incredibly good-looking...
One reason is that some business view IBM building their services on an open platform as a selling point, since they have less worry of vendor lock-in or dropped support. It probably goes without saying in this crowd that IBM can have more flexibility building services on Linux than a closed 3rd party OS (Windows, for example).
Another peripheral benefit IBM could see from Linux making it on the desktop would be an increased likelihood of selling PowerPC-based desktops. Granted, the XBox 2 bodes well for the possibility of a version of Windows supporting PPC, but that's purely speculative. We do know, however, that a lot of major Linux distros have been stepping up support of PPC recently, and with the good price/performance of the G5 and the speculative numbers on Cell, IBM has an opportunity to break into that desktop processor market if they can convince people to go with Linux.
So all I'm saying is, yes IBM would survive fine if Linux disappeared, but companies like that aren't just looking to survive. They're looking to be wildly successful, and they seem to view Linux as a great opportunity, and that's why they're pouring money into its development.
Anyway, Windows doesn't currently take these precautions. I'm don't think I'm too much of a knee-jerk Windows basher, but purely as a matter of fact, Windows installs by default run as admin.
I feel the problem comes about because the separation between the OS, the programs, and the user files isn't terrifically clear. It's not all Microsoft's fault. Occasional lazy/stupid/ignorant developers are still writing programs in such a way that they keep user settings somewhere in the "Program Files" directory. Programs use shared libraries in such a way that they copy DLL files all over the place. Some files that are considered "part of the OS" are kept in "Program Files" and sometimes files used by programs (and not the OS) are kept in "WINNT". The result of this mixing is, if I delete the Windows directory and reinstall, many of my programs won't work. I have to reinstall my programs and drivers, which means I really need to wipe the disk and start over.
So, while I am not a huge expert on OS design, I've had to do these sorts of reinstalls often enough to see that it's a problem, and it seems like it could be handled better. I'd like to see a breakup along these lines:
I'm not saying we need exactly this separation, but I believe some similar sort of modularization would both increase security abilities and aid in diagnosis and repair. I mean, imagine everything breaks into these four categories:
Since, in theory, spyware and such could only live in the plug-ins area (imagine you have a hardware switch on the OS or it's a WORM media) the worst-case scenario is that you'll have to wipe out your plug-ins and reinstall. Since these "plug-ins" are separate from your applications, wiping them out generally shouldn't keep your applications from running, and so the damage should be minimal. (instead of dealing with a situation where you delete a corrupted shared library and suddenly 5 different application stop working) Even if you need to wipe out your plug-ins and a
Yeah, but who runs Mozilla as root?
I think you hit on the key thing here: Microsoft was integrating this technology into the OS in a way that was going to ship in the OS, and it would end up being always on and not removable. From the way it was being implemented, its purpose was not really to make it easier to find what the user is looking for, but a way for Microsoft to insert advertisements into your everyday tasks (since, IIRC, the links were going to link to Microsoft "partners" who were paying Microsoft for the privilege). While Google seems to be trying to provide something people want (since people have to choose to use it, either they want it or this thing will be a bust), and Microsoft was talking about implementing something we, today, would consider adware *into the operating system* at a low level, it seems quite a bit different.
/I know, not saying anything anyone else hasn't said. -5 Redundant
Still, I don't think the trouble your cousin had is inherently a "problem with Linux". You have a piece of hardware that isn't supported by Linux (or maybe that distro), and there are no drivers. Well, ok. But try installing a piece of hardware that's not supported by Windows on a Windows machine, and I think you'll run into the same problem. So that's a problem with hardware being rare or crappy, or the hardware vendors not working to make their products Linux compatible, or whatever... but it doesn't mean that Linux developers are going about things the wrong way.
Granted, hardware vendors are generally more focussed on supporting Windows, and so you're more likely to find hardware that runs with Windows but not Linux than the other way around. However, I wouldn't say it's at all rare to find a computer that FC3 will find every piece of hardware. I've tried it on a number of different models from Dell, HP/Compaq, IBM, and custom built machines without any real problem.
You mention OSX, but the reason OSX doesn't ever lack hardware support is that Apple controls the hardware. How is IBM going to control the hardware that Dell and HP use?
Plus, IBM has said they don't want to develop their own OS, but they'd rather partner with other companies (like Redhat and Novell) and help them to develop Linux. Their stated reasoning being (or so I've read somewhere), if they develop their own distro, then there's internal pressure to use it on all IBM products, whether it's a good fit or not. If they partner with Novell, and Novell's Linux isn't good for what they're doing, than maybe they've wasted money working with Novell, but they can still go with Redhat for their installs.
Now, compare that to a Fedora Core 3 installation. The Fedora installation is just as easy (I think easier), but, in many cases, it will actually find your hardware without any driver hunting.
If you think it's hard to install Linux, you haven't tried in a while. Or have you been doing stage-1 Gentoo installs?
In fact, I wouldn't be totally surprised if in 5 years, IBM isn't really selling Lotus anymore, but pushes some open-sourced groupware package from Novel or something (Hula?).
I think you're missing the point. They don't need to have a "moral compass" directing them to give something back. IBM and Novell are both betting their business plans on the success of Linux, so the desire to make their business succeed and the desire to profit will direct them to use their time/money/resources to make Linux a success.
Or, more properly speaking, we should not be using the future tense. IBM and Novell are making money with Linux, and they have been "giving back". The good news is not "IBM is being nice and making a large charitable contribution towards Linux development". The story here is, "IBM views Linux as a necessary component for their success, and they are [currently] putting a lot of resources into helping Linux grow."
Life's just tough. I'm not saying India's caste system is good, but you thinking it's not good doesn't keep life from being "just tough". Even abolishing all caste systems wouldn't keep there from being poor, ignorant servants with tough lives, it just might manage to switch-around who's stuck in that role.
No. To some extent, we are what we are, and our lives are our lives. Life is hard. Every second you live, options and possibilities are cut off from you. It's not my responsibility to magically make everything possible for all people. It's not anyone's responsibility to make life not-hard. What *is* everyone's responsibility is to choose for themselves, with whatever comes, how they are going to deal with it.
I'm not saying there aren't plenty of good reasons to want to diminish the effects of poverty and ignorance. However, don't tell me that I *need* to make everyone's life easy.
I'd like to point out something going unrecognized here... On the one hand, when someone denies his personal responsibility it enables him to say, "It's not my fault, it's society which made me what I am! Since you're a part of that society, it's YOUR fault I did these horrible things, so who are you to complain?! You should feel responsible for me!"
However, on the other hand, embracing personal responsibility forces me to look at that same guy and say, "It's not completely your fault. You grew up in a society that made you what you are. Since I'm part of that society, it's partially my fault that you've done these horrible things, so how do we change things for the better?"
I mean, notice the people who are complaining about "our society" lacking a sense of personal responsibility. That complaint first, by implying that the reason individuals lack this sense is that "the society" lacks it, acknowledges that there is a causative relationship between "society" and "personal behavior". Second, the fact that this complaint is aimed at changing the viewpoint of society, and therefore changing the behavior of individuals, shows that those doing the complaining also believe that it is somehow their responsibility to correct other's behavior.
What I'm getting at is, the disagreement isn't over "how things work". I think we all acknowledge that this thing we call "society" influences the thoughts and behavior of individuals, and that individuals can exercise influence over society. I think the real disagreement is over whether responsibility for others is something to be taken by people or if it is to be pushed on people.
But what they do with their lives, as adults, is their choice. Being born into poverty isn't a blank check to screw up and blame everyone else for the rest of your life. Having a hard life is often a contributing factor in "bad behavior", but it's not really determinitive,
Or, have you ever read about the early experiments in electricity? They didn't really have effective units of measure yet, so when they were talking about how much electricity you'd need to create the desired effect, it would be in terms of "you must use a sufficient amount of electricity so that, if passed through the head of a cat, it would kill it," or "enough electricity to send a man flying across the room and leave him stunned for several minutes." No kidding. Funny to imagine some scientist on the other side of the world reading those notes and knowing from experience "how much electricity" that is.
Ah, I don't really have a point, but a whole lot of neat science is pretty dangerous.
In this sense, when asked, "Where the hell is Zaphod's second head????", the answer, "I think Zaphod's second head is inside his nostril, or something like that," is true enough. His head isn't hidden in his nostril, but it's "something like that". In other words, yes, Zaphod has a second head, but no, it's not visible under most circumstances.