If there is any kind of property, it is quite within the bounds of capitalism for the owner to choose to relinquish control only when someone pays a price they set.
The so-called "intellectual property" is 100% immaterial -as such, it is not real property in the sense of the property of a car or a land acre. It is called and treated as such in the last centuries, but this doesn't mean we aren't dealing with fundamentally different things, so categories like "capitalism" or "communism" don't apply well here.
Well, what's your solution to this? It's free market, face it.
Note that I don't like that, but I can't see how can I think to step on the basic right to anyone to buy a domain for any purpose and do what they like with that domain.
I can't believe people is here believing that the fact people are profiting from "www.microsofft.com" or "www.googlee.com" is something bad. It will be my brain hardwired to exact string checking, but the string "microsofft" IS NOT the string "microsoft". For what damn reason can the owner of the string "microsoft" go and sue the owner of the string "microsofft"? On one side, people should learn to type properly -if they don't, their fault. On another, how far goes it? Cover all 1-letter deltas from "microsoft" is OK, but 2-letter deltas? 3? Should we count delta/word length ratio? Vicinance of letters on the QWERTY keyboard? Or what else?
I support all these "cybersquatters". They are harming no one, and they just do a bit of profit from people mistyping. Not moral hard-earned hard work, sure, but surely less evil than suing them.
Not gonna happen. Not in a million, billion, trillion years.
Well, I've already seen a few hardware pieces sold with a penguin sticker on it to tell this is compatible with Linux. I can't see why Dell shouldn't use an analogous sticker just to say "hey, I'm compatible with Linux". As for support, it's another story. Dell could preload and support the distribution it will choose, and could 1)try to support other as far as they can, when differences between Dell Distro and the user distro arise, the support says "sorry, you are using an unsupported Linux distro" 2)fallback on third-party support services for the main distributions (assuming Dell Distro=Ubuntu, I'd support Suse, Fedora, Linspire).
OpenOffice is freely available to anyone with an internet connection, and Dell simply doesn't see the business case for distributing and supporting it.
Yes, but how many know about it? As for the marketing, why shouldn't a "Complete office suite included -for only 5$ more!" work? They would even profit from it if they charge a minimal amount.
Because they want most people to pay and be sure they pay. They prefer piracy to free software for the people who would never, ever pay in first instance.
I tried wikipedia but I found their presentation of concepts a bit too abstract and examples too concise for me. I could probably figure out them if I look at them with patience, but I hoped for a nice CS book that covered these kind of subjects well explained.
Well, I wanted to be a scientist since I was 5 years old. I once wanted to be a physicist or an astronomer (like many science-geek children). I also loved programming in BASIC on my dad's Vic-20. What killed my interest in computers was Microsoft. Under MS-DOS and then Windows I had no idea on how to code (except QuickBasic) and no relative/parent/neighbour/friend knew anything about C or the like. My dad knew a bit of assembler, but not x86 assembler, so I lost interest in computing. I also had no internet until 1998.
In the meantime in the high school I felt math was quite too hard for me. In truth I just had a really bad teacher, but I was unsure, so I choose Biotechnology as a university degree. It was just gaining momentum here in Italy and it looked like something worthwile. Then I found Linux and free software on one side (getting back fun in computing), and bioinformatics on the other. A professor asked me if I wanted to join his biophysics lab (protein structure and AFM, basically) as an undergraduate, and that's it. If I come back, I'd probably do physics now, I feel more confident in myself. But oh well, that's life.
Plusnet a while back had an issue with a few users who were using the system literally 100% and they were told they could leave or reduce their usage. It makes sense, if you want cheap connections then expect not to use it as if you were the only user. Plusnet, incidentally has a 'fair use' policy where you can download 100% between the hours of midnight and 4pm, but at peak time.. expect to be monitored.
No, it doesn't make sense. How can make sense having a defined quota, but being bullied away if I'm using it?
If you tell me, say, my quota is X megs/day, if I download X-1 bit megs/day all days I am below the quota, and the telco should just shut up and leave me download. It's them that proposed the contract, it's them that know how their infrastructure works, so it's them that must improve their service if they have troubles in maintaining that quota for all users, or think before proposing quotas that they cannot meet.
It's like saying that if an email provider gives me 1 gigabyte of free space and I use 990 megabyte, my email should be shutted off. Just makes no sense.
Surely computing is much more accessible, and there is a hella lot more ready-to-go software and libraries compared to what was there 10 years ago, but this means nothing. New applications will always be needed/invented, and someone will need to code them. And even with the latest and easiest programming languages, doing things well needs some kind of education.
I am a biophysics Ph.D. student. I have never had a formal CS education nor I am a code geek (although I like to code), and just building a relatively little data analysis application with plugin support in Python is making me smash my nose against things that would make my code much better, that probably are trivial for people with a CS education (what's currying? what is a closure? how do I implement design patterns? etc.) but that for me are new and quite hard (btw: a good book about all these concepts and much more?): so I understand why CS is of fundamental importance.
You are right, but Gentoo makes it easy. It has the best package management system ever done -even better than apt-get IMHO and surely at least on par with it.
Having the easiness of a great package manager with included ability to fine tune your packages is the strength of Gentoo.
Religious types would explain its all about not wasting sources because it is a self-evidently pointless search. I would have to suspect there is an element of not-wanting-to-know because ignorance will make religious dogma true in some magical way.
Huh? I'm blissfully unaware of religious opposition to searching extraterrestrial life (probably because I am not religious). What kind of opposition there is? On what grounds? Does it come from creationist wackos or also from other camps? I am really interested.
* Silicon chains are more unstable than carbon chains.
* AFAIK, there are no known complex prebiotic precursors for a potential silicon based life (I admit research on it is surely more scarce, however)
* Most importantly, we don't know what to look for in the case of it.
So it's a nice theory, albeit chemically more improbable than carbon-based life, but we don't have the slightest idea on how silicon-based life could look like chemically, so chemical tests for it would be a bit hard. The idea of the original article would work probably -detecting abundance of only one enantiomer of a complex silicon-based asymmetric molecule would be a good indicator of something alive. But we are talking of unknown molecules, so building a detector for them would be quite hard.
Yes, but you have to bet. And TFA refers mostly to aminoacids, and IMHO it is a good bet. Non-biogenic aminoacids are known to form in meteorites and are among the most common organic molecules that build up in prebiotic conditions. Aminoacid chirality is a strong indicator of life: having to deal with both chiral forms of a molecule would require to have a set of enzymes for each enantiomer (A non-specific enzyme wouldn't probably work, in particular for building a polymer like proteins or DNA: ordered structures like proteins are much easier to build by using only one enantiomer of a chiral building block.). From an evolutive point of view, choice of chirality just makes sense.
Of course it is possible that anything weird happens over there, but we have to bet and check for what we look plausible first.
90% of the time when I'm making a graph (actually, perhaps much more than 90% of the time), it's a one-off graph derived from ad-hoc analysis, for my eyes only. I graph not to present or share information, but to help me understand problems, especially when understand can only be gleaned by inputting large amounts of seemingly random data into my brain and finding patterns.
Yes, I understood that. This doesn't change my point, however.
Ad-hoc analysis in terms of log/trace/etc extraction and so-forth is trivial for someone like me who counts shell, sed, grep, uniq and sort among his closest friends (and has done so for nigh on two decades).
While it is certainly possible for me to learn a dedicated graphing package, or even something like matlab to graph this data... It REALLY is easier to use excel to just snake the data in from a CSV or (column-width file, or space-delimited file...), highlight the rows and generate six or eight different views in about a minute, including the possibility of best-fit lines, log axes, etc.
Yes, but (for my point of view) it would become even more trivial to pipe that column width file etc. in a custom script that generates the wanted graph. Or, even better, having the script that uses sed-grep-uniq etc. like you would do to automatize graph generation. If you tell me it's not more trivial, I believe you, of course, it was just an idea.
So -- I'm definately no MS fan boy -- but Excel really is a pretty good package
Surely Excel is among the best spreadsheets around. Free spreadsheets most probably than not rank behind Excel, but are not THAT bad, expecially given their price. That is the only thing I'd like to pin-point.
The fact that politics is always viewed from the left-right bipolarism is one of the most disgustingly imbecile things of politics. I of course know of 2-D/multi-D views (hell, I don't know where to stay at all), but official politics somehow always disregards this. It's always Us or Them; Kodos or Kang. This makes voting always painful. People seem to think of bipolar systems as good, while I see them as democracy went sick: "you can vote anything you like, provided it's A or B" - in which sense this is practically much better than dictatorship?
You are quite wrong. Radical right movements are the most active proponents of an "ethical State" in the Platonic sense (even if they probably don't always know it). Extreme right-wing political philosophers however directly made reference to Plato's ethical "Republic" in their writings (F.G.Freda comes to mind). The fact the extreme right ethos is not what we (me too) would call a good ethos by XXI-century standards is another affair.
I fully agree. I started to use AdSense, and I feel it's quite nice -it's unobtrusive but not deceiving, and integrates nicely with the page. I'm happy with it because I know I don't feel bad when looking at other sites using AdSense. OTOH, any kind of advertisers using flashy irritating popup should just die without a chance. They are not doing advertising, they are blocking me from the content with their advertising. I just don't understand how can people want to buy something advertised by an idiotic Flash-based popup. But oh well, spam somehow works too, so...
but I can tell you that business users are not going to be willing to use Gnumeric to graph the data they already have in their spreadsheets.
Apart from the fact that Gnumeric is a spreadsheet, so they could build and graph the spreadsheet all in once, I was talking about an admin plotting data from server logs, as the parent seemed to imply, not business users.
I and my collegues did a research on the relationship between two distant methods of protein function regulation. We thought it was pretty nice, so we sent it to a bunch of very high-impact journals. Most of them sent it back even without giving it to referees. The only one that did refused us because we had a bad referee, and refused to even read our (long and detailed) response to his/her comments. So, less than year ago, we ultimately settled for a good but not top-most journal, where it was warmly accepted.
A couple of months ago my group leader talked at a conference in USA where he talked also about the research in that article. An editor of one of the journals we tried to publish that more than a year ago came to my boss and said "Really nice and hot work, why don't you publish it for us?" The answer: "Because you didn't want it a year ago, and now it's already done."
Why this sudden change? Because our proposed mechanism was not even a blip on the radar when we did it. In the meantime a recognized leader of the field published on Science a work that independently hinted in the same direction (even if in a very different and even less interesting way), and only because Mr.Guru created the buzzword now we are beginning to be taken seriously. Really sad.
Slashdot Mirror
If there is any kind of property, it is quite within the bounds of capitalism for the owner to choose to relinquish control only when someone pays a price they set.
The so-called "intellectual property" is 100% immaterial -as such, it is not real property in the sense of the property of a car or a land acre. It is called and treated as such in the last centuries, but this doesn't mean we aren't dealing with fundamentally different things, so categories like "capitalism" or "communism" don't apply well here.
Well, what's your solution to this? It's free market, face it.
Note that I don't like that, but I can't see how can I think to step on the basic right to anyone to buy a domain for any purpose and do what they like with that domain.
I fully agree.
I can't believe people is here believing that the fact people are profiting from "www.microsofft.com" or "www.googlee.com" is something bad. It will be my brain hardwired to exact string checking, but the string "microsofft" IS NOT the string "microsoft". For what damn reason can the owner of the string "microsoft" go and sue the owner of the string "microsofft"? On one side, people should learn to type properly -if they don't, their fault. On another, how far goes it? Cover all 1-letter deltas from "microsoft" is OK, but 2-letter deltas? 3? Should we count delta/word length ratio? Vicinance of letters on the QWERTY keyboard? Or what else?
I support all these "cybersquatters". They are harming no one, and they just do a bit of profit from people mistyping. Not moral hard-earned hard work, sure, but surely less evil than suing them.
Thanks for advice. Just downloaded it, looks very promising.
Not gonna happen. Not in a million, billion, trillion years.
Well, I've already seen a few hardware pieces sold with a penguin sticker on it to tell this is compatible with Linux. I can't see why Dell shouldn't use an analogous sticker just to say "hey, I'm compatible with Linux". As for support, it's another story. Dell could preload and support the distribution it will choose, and could 1)try to support other as far as they can, when differences between Dell Distro and the user distro arise, the support says "sorry, you are using an unsupported Linux distro" 2)fallback on third-party support services for the main distributions (assuming Dell Distro=Ubuntu, I'd support Suse, Fedora, Linspire).
OpenOffice is freely available to anyone with an internet connection, and Dell simply doesn't see the business case for distributing and supporting it.
Yes, but how many know about it? As for the marketing, why shouldn't a "Complete office suite included -for only 5$ more!" work? They would even profit from it if they charge a minimal amount.
Are you sure you aren't confusing "dictating" with "understanding" or "advising"?
Because they want most people to pay and be sure they pay. They prefer piracy to free software for the people who would never, ever pay in first instance.
I tried wikipedia but I found their presentation of concepts a bit too abstract and examples too concise for me. I could probably figure out them if I look at them with patience, but I hoped for a nice CS book that covered these kind of subjects well explained.
Well, I wanted to be a scientist since I was 5 years old. I once wanted to be a physicist or an astronomer (like many science-geek children). I also loved programming in BASIC on my dad's Vic-20. What killed my interest in computers was Microsoft. Under MS-DOS and then Windows I had no idea on how to code (except QuickBasic) and no relative/parent/neighbour/friend knew anything about C or the like. My dad knew a bit of assembler, but not x86 assembler, so I lost interest in computing. I also had no internet until 1998.
In the meantime in the high school I felt math was quite too hard for me. In truth I just had a really bad teacher, but I was unsure, so I choose Biotechnology as a university degree. It was just gaining momentum here in Italy and it looked like something worthwile. Then I found Linux and free software on one side (getting back fun in computing), and bioinformatics on the other. A professor asked me if I wanted to join his biophysics lab (protein structure and AFM, basically) as an undergraduate, and that's it. If I come back, I'd probably do physics now, I feel more confident in myself. But oh well, that's life.
Thanks for the interest in my biography. :)
Plusnet a while back had an issue with a few users who were using the system literally 100% and they were told they could leave or reduce their usage. It makes sense, if you want cheap connections then expect not to use it as if you were the only user. Plusnet, incidentally has a 'fair use' policy where you can download 100% between the hours of midnight and 4pm, but at peak time.. expect to be monitored.
No, it doesn't make sense. How can make sense having a defined quota, but being bullied away if I'm using it?
If you tell me, say, my quota is X megs/day, if I download X-1 bit megs/day all days I am below the quota, and the telco should just shut up and leave me download. It's them that proposed the contract, it's them that know how their infrastructure works, so it's them that must improve their service if they have troubles in maintaining that quota for all users, or think before proposing quotas that they cannot meet.
It's like saying that if an email provider gives me 1 gigabyte of free space and I use 990 megabyte, my email should be shutted off. Just makes no sense.
This doesn't mean CS is dead.
Surely computing is much more accessible, and there is a hella lot more ready-to-go software and libraries compared to what was there 10 years ago, but this means nothing. New applications will always be needed/invented, and someone will need to code them. And even with the latest and easiest programming languages, doing things well needs some kind of education.
I am a biophysics Ph.D. student. I have never had a formal CS education nor I am a code geek (although I like to code), and just building a relatively little data analysis application with plugin support in Python is making me smash my nose against things that would make my code much better, that probably are trivial for people with a CS education (what's currying? what is a closure? how do I implement design patterns? etc.) but that for me are new and quite hard (btw: a good book about all these concepts and much more?): so I understand why CS is of fundamental importance.
You are right, but Gentoo makes it easy. It has the best package management system ever done -even better than apt-get IMHO and surely at least on par with it.
Having the easiness of a great package manager with included ability to fine tune your packages is the strength of Gentoo.
Why? What are the fundamental differences? Support? You can buy support from Canonical, AFAIK.
Religious types would explain its all about not wasting sources because it is a self-evidently pointless search. I would have to suspect there is an element of not-wanting-to-know because ignorance will make religious dogma true in some magical way.
Huh? I'm blissfully unaware of religious opposition to searching extraterrestrial life (probably because I am not religious). What kind of opposition there is? On what grounds? Does it come from creationist wackos or also from other camps? I am really interested.
The problems with silicon based life are:
* Silicon chains are more unstable than carbon chains.
* AFAIK, there are no known complex prebiotic precursors for a potential silicon based life (I admit research on it is surely more scarce, however)
* Most importantly, we don't know what to look for in the case of it.
So it's a nice theory, albeit chemically more improbable than carbon-based life, but we don't have the slightest idea on how silicon-based life could look like chemically, so chemical tests for it would be a bit hard. The idea of the original article would work probably -detecting abundance of only one enantiomer of a complex silicon-based asymmetric molecule would be a good indicator of something alive. But we are talking of unknown molecules, so building a detector for them would be quite hard.
Yes, but you have to bet. And TFA refers mostly to aminoacids, and IMHO it is a good bet. Non-biogenic aminoacids are known to form in meteorites and are among the most common organic molecules that build up in prebiotic conditions. Aminoacid chirality is a strong indicator of life: having to deal with both chiral forms of a molecule would require to have a set of enzymes for each enantiomer (A non-specific enzyme wouldn't probably work, in particular for building a polymer like proteins or DNA: ordered structures like proteins are much easier to build by using only one enantiomer of a chiral building block.). From an evolutive point of view, choice of chirality just makes sense.
Of course it is possible that anything weird happens over there, but we have to bet and check for what we look plausible first.
90% of the time when I'm making a graph (actually, perhaps much more than 90% of the time), it's a one-off graph derived from ad-hoc analysis, for my eyes only. I graph not to present or share information, but to help me understand problems, especially when understand can only be gleaned by inputting large amounts of seemingly random data into my brain and finding patterns.
Yes, I understood that. This doesn't change my point, however.
Ad-hoc analysis in terms of log/trace/etc extraction and so-forth is trivial for someone like me who counts shell, sed, grep, uniq and sort among his closest friends (and has done so for nigh on two decades).
While it is certainly possible for me to learn a dedicated graphing package, or even something like matlab to graph this data... It REALLY is easier to use excel to just snake the data in from a CSV or (column-width file, or space-delimited file...), highlight the rows and generate six or eight different views in about a minute, including the possibility of best-fit lines, log axes, etc.
Yes, but (for my point of view) it would become even more trivial to pipe that column width file etc. in a custom script that generates the wanted graph. Or, even better, having the script that uses sed-grep-uniq etc. like you would do to automatize graph generation. If you tell me it's not more trivial, I believe you, of course, it was just an idea.
So -- I'm definately no MS fan boy -- but Excel really is a pretty good package
Surely Excel is among the best spreadsheets around. Free spreadsheets most probably than not rank behind Excel, but are not THAT bad, expecially given their price. That is the only thing I'd like to pin-point.
The fact that politics is always viewed from the left-right bipolarism is one of the most disgustingly imbecile things of politics. I of course know of 2-D/multi-D views (hell, I don't know where to stay at all), but official politics somehow always disregards this. It's always Us or Them; Kodos or Kang. This makes voting always painful. People seem to think of bipolar systems as good, while I see them as democracy went sick: "you can vote anything you like, provided it's A or B" - in which sense this is practically much better than dictatorship?
You are quite wrong. Radical right movements are the most active proponents of an "ethical State" in the Platonic sense (even if they probably don't always know it). Extreme right-wing political philosophers however directly made reference to Plato's ethical "Republic" in their writings (F.G.Freda comes to mind). The fact the extreme right ethos is not what we (me too) would call a good ethos by XXI-century standards is another affair.
I fully agree. I started to use AdSense, and I feel it's quite nice -it's unobtrusive but not deceiving, and integrates nicely with the page. I'm happy with it because I know I don't feel bad when looking at other sites using AdSense. OTOH, any kind of advertisers using flashy irritating popup should just die without a chance. They are not doing advertising, they are blocking me from the content with their advertising. I just don't understand how can people want to buy something advertised by an idiotic Flash-based popup. But oh well, spam somehow works too, so...
but I can tell you that business users are not going to be willing to use Gnumeric to graph the data they already have in their spreadsheets.
Apart from the fact that Gnumeric is a spreadsheet, so they could build and graph the spreadsheet all in once, I was talking about an admin plotting data from server logs, as the parent seemed to imply, not business users.
BIF. (Because It's Fun)
Hey, your Tiny Neuron Bears theory could fit well in the Flying Spaghetti Monster paradigm!
I can't but agree.
I and my collegues did a research on the relationship between two distant methods of protein function regulation. We thought it was pretty nice, so we sent it to a bunch of very high-impact journals. Most of them sent it back even without giving it to referees. The only one that did refused us because we had a bad referee, and refused to even read our (long and detailed) response to his/her comments. So, less than year ago, we ultimately settled for a good but not top-most journal, where it was warmly accepted.
A couple of months ago my group leader talked at a conference in USA where he talked also about the research in that article. An editor of one of the journals we tried to publish that more than a year ago came to my boss and said "Really nice and hot work, why don't you publish it for us?" The answer: "Because you didn't want it a year ago, and now it's already done."
Why this sudden change? Because our proposed mechanism was not even a blip on the radar when we did it. In the meantime a recognized leader of the field published on Science a work that independently hinted in the same direction (even if in a very different and even less interesting way), and only because Mr.Guru created the buzzword now we are beginning to be taken seriously. Really sad.