if we pull out of funding the world's research, that research just isn't going to get done.
You've swallowed the drug companies' propaganda hook, line and sinker.
Most medical research is done in universities, and most of that (not all) is publicly funded.
Drug companies pay to get drugs FDA certified. That is indeed expensive, but the money is not spent where we need it, it's spent on certifying minor improvements in highly-profitable areas. For example, there's more profit in a drug to treat diseases due to obesity (mostly self-inflicted) than in a drug to treat a disease that kills millions of people who haven't enough money ever to become obese.
Personally I don't care for Firefox as the rest of the web doesn't really support it
The percentage of all web sites that are designed for Internet Explorer's bugs is tiny and shrinking. Serious companies that depend on their websites for business (banks, Amazon, online stockbrokers) got the message long ago; I haven't found a website that I need that I can't use with Mozilla or Firefox, in quite a long time.
Cutting-edge web designers, like Eric Meyer, have been leading the way to standards-based pages for years.
He says he's a go-it-alone commercial developer and he hasn't a merketing plan? Well, he won't make that mistake again.
He says he's "nearing completion of development and testing", and he hasn't got any help files compiled yet? Sounds like he's not ready to start final testing.
It's so easy for somebody to write some code and kid himself he's starting a viable business. Probably happens somewhere every week. I don't know why/. eds though it was worth a story, though.
On the contrary, it's very hard to reach a target that is 16 miles off the ground. Most small surface-to-air missiles can't reach that altitude. It's high enough that to most people, it will not be visible to the naked eye from ground level at all.
Steel with 6.67% bw Carbon is Iron Carbide, a ceramic
Rubbish. Iron carbide is a ceramic, but steel contains not more than 2% carbon. Thus, steel is a mixture of a ceramic and a metal, with most of its properties determined by the metal.
There is more detail about this here than you want to know, unless of course you are a taking a materials science class, and are confused about what exactly steel is.
Suppose you're a keen young programmer and you've figured out a keen new algorithm for securing a communications channel or crash-proofing a database or animating an MMPORG monster.
He goes on to suggest "well, why not" a patent.
He expects us to believe that he doesn't realize that "a keen young programmer" hasn't got the tens of K dollars to get a patent, and certainly hasn't got the millions of dollars needed to defend a patent against wilful infringers.
I think the article is probably just astroturf; after all, Bray is now a Sun employee and the Sun's line is that software patents are a Good Thing.
In all this, there's been just one post that asked "does it run Linux" and it seemed to be intended as a joke.
I'm not just a drooling consumer, I expect to be able to write code for any computing device I buy. The question, "Does it run free software?" is not a joke, it's important to me. If it isn't important to Slashdot editors, I respectfully suggest that Slashdot's byline be changed. "News for Consumers. Stuff for yuppies." would seem to be more accurate than what it currently says.
This article just seems like a bunch of open source NewSpeak,
You're right, there is no information in the article. It doesn't even tell us what Hibernate is. The blather is also peppered with undefined acronyms - ORM, POJO, HQL.
And some idiot moderator modded parent down as a troll. Sigh. It's not a troll, it's a valid and accurate criticism of a really crap article. Crap is, unfortunately, becoming the Slashdot-article standard.
varargs is *not* an enhancement
on
Java 1.5 vs C#
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
5. Varargs (C# 1.0's params construct, ellipsis construct in C++)
As Stroustrup says of the ellipsis construct in C++, "The most common use of the ellipsis is to specify an interface to C library functions that were defined before C++ provided alternatives", and gives an example of the "extra work that face[s] the programmer once type checking has been suppressed using the ellipsis." Using the ellipsis construct, other than where it has to be used to access some legacy C library, is definitely very poor style in C++.
You omit his greatest contribution to science, which was establishing that the laws of nature are universal. He saw that the force of gravity which makes things fall to the ground is exactly the same force, obeying the same law, as the force of gravity between celestial bodies. It seems obvious today, but it was not at all obvious in the seventeenth century. Most people took it for granted that the celestial bodies were ruled by quite different laws from those we experienced in our daily lives.
As much as Slashdot readers name-call world leaders (and world-leader-wannabes) that they disagree with, there's outcry over an average joe getting insulted?
Someone who chooses to become a public figure - politician, screen actor, etc - consciously accepts the near-certainty that he/she will attract public criticism. cf "If you can't take the heat, get out of the kitchen" and "if you throw your hat into the ring, don't whinge when it gets trodden on". These people seek publicity and must take the bad side with the good.
An "average joe" has made no such choice. So, yes: it is acceptable to call the President of the United States (or his opponent) a moron in a published article, but completely unacceptable to do the same thing to an average joe who has never sought publicity.
Sorry, but Kitty Hawk was a stunt, nothing more. etc (parody of a comment on SpaceShipOne)
The Kitty Hawk technology was scalable. It needed more efficient engines, better control mechanisms, and so on - all changes which could be made gradually. The airplane in which Alcock and Brown first crossed the Atlantic is a recognisable descendant of Kitty Hawk. An airplane needs to be able to take off, fly, turn under control, and land. Kitty Hawk could do all those things.
A space ship needs to be able to reach orbital velocity (about Mach 30), and it needs to be able to withstand re-entry into the atmosphere at a speed of about Mach 25. SpaceShipOne can do neither of these things.
SpaceShipOne can reach about Mach 3. To reach Mach 3 requires about 1% of the energy required to reach Mach 30, since kinetic energy is proportional to the square of the velocity.
So SpaceShipOne has got 1% of the way toward meeting half of the key goals of a true space ship.
The question is how many people are going to be fooled that this is really space travel.
Most Slashdot readers, judging by the posts.
You're right, of course. Personally, I'd go further. I don't regard dinking about in low Earth orbit as "space travel". "Travel" implies going somewhere. A trip round the Moon would qualify as space travel (not necessarily landing). A trip to a stable space habitat, for example at L5, would qualify (the space station is not a stable habitat, its orbit will decay if it's not boosted occasionally).
Why not just go to a country where it's fully legal? Instead of paying $200,000 for 5 minutes in space, you can take a week's vacation in Holland, Germany, or Switzerland for under $2000, including hotel. Really nice brothels in Zurich charge about $175 for half an hour.
IMHO this is a service industry which you want to be regulated by the government, as long as the govt is not in the hands of a bunch of bigoted puritans, like the US.
This is a masterstroke by Sun, aimed at the heart of free software.
Linux was a serious threat to Sun. Migration from Solaris to GNU/Linux is straightforward for many companies, and can be done gradually - by running free software on top of Solaris.
The Kodak patent, on the face of it, applies not only to Java, but also to CORBA. Free implementations of CORBA will become impossible. That will lock Linux out of enterprise computing.
As a direct result of this litigation, I will never again purchase another Kodak product
That's silly. Kodak is just responding to the incentives in the patent laws.
Unlike SCO, their claims have legal merit.
Unlike Disney, they didn't bribe Congress to pass these laws.
Companies are supposed to respond to incentives in the legal system. There are tax laws designed to encourage firms to invest. There are laws to encourage companies to pollute less. Etcetera.
If you don't like what the legal system is encouraging, then lobby against software patents. Support the EFF, which is lobbying against software patents. Don't blame a company which is just trying to turn an honest buck (well, billion bucks).
Microsoft is a smart company.... But, aside from legislation, there's nothing they could really do anymore to lock out free software
Not clear. They're going to try pretty damn hard to lock it out by means of software patents. It's possible they will succeed.
the hue and cry if they tried would be vast.
The hue and cry will be about the same size, from mostly the same people, as the hue and cry that opposed DMCA. So I'd expect it to have the same effect, i.e. none.
The UN... can't get anything useful done about the darkly rising tide of stateless terror and military adventurism
I'm more concerned about acts of terror committed by states than about stateless terror. Non-state terror, like the attack on the WTC, rarely takes many lives. The WTC attack killed about 3000, but it's a once-in-a-lifetime event. The US attack on Iraq, on the other hand, has killed about 10,000 people already, almost all of them either civilians, or people just trying to defend their country. Unlike the WTC, this is not a once-in-a-lifetime event. Increasingly, it's seen as the kind of thing a US President can do to increase his approval ratings.
Bill Gates' comments as reported are insightful. He may be a bad person, but he is certainly not a stupid person.
He understands the history of Unix better than most Unix companies did, and the anti-Linux strategy he describes makes business sense. (Of course, he also has anti-Linux strategies based on barratry, manipulation of legislatures by thinly-concealed bribery, etc but you can't blame him for not discussing those.)
One thing that worries me about the Linux vs Windows scene today is that there are too many Linux cheerleaders who loudly proclaim that Linux' victory is inevitable. Gates is smart enough to take the threat seriously, and his team may be smart enough to beat it. He's certainly one hell of a lot smarter than the Linux cheerleaders.
A good start for Linux advocates would be to do what Gates has clearly done: understand the opponent's strategy.
There is no such right. There cannot be, because it is impossible to provide it, as long as people continue to meet each other. At some point you have to trust your neighbor not to try to kill you; in part, you rely on people being mostly reasonable, and in part, you earn the trust by behaving in a reasonable manner towards your neighbor.
Slashdot Mirror
"Stuff that matters?"
If you're right, it's a shocking indictment of CS departments. If everything is "windows based", then it's not education, it's vocational training.
Don't you mean "itanic is sinking into ..."? Oh, never mind.
You've swallowed the drug companies' propaganda hook, line and sinker.
Most medical research is done in universities, and most of that (not all) is publicly funded.
Drug companies pay to get drugs FDA certified. That is indeed expensive, but the money is not spent where we need it, it's spent on certifying minor improvements in highly-profitable areas. For example, there's more profit in a drug to treat diseases due to obesity (mostly self-inflicted) than in a drug to treat a disease that kills millions of people who haven't enough money ever to become obese.
The percentage of all web sites that are designed for Internet Explorer's bugs is tiny and shrinking. Serious companies that depend on their websites for business (banks, Amazon, online stockbrokers) got the message long ago; I haven't found a website that I need that I can't use with Mozilla or Firefox, in quite a long time.
Cutting-edge web designers, like Eric Meyer, have been leading the way to standards-based pages for years.
He says he's a go-it-alone commercial developer and he hasn't a merketing plan? Well, he won't make that mistake again.
He says he's "nearing completion of development and testing", and he hasn't got any help files compiled yet? Sounds like he's not ready to start final testing.
It's so easy for somebody to write some code and kid himself he's starting a viable business. Probably happens somewhere every week. I don't know why /. eds though it was worth a story, though.
On the contrary, it's very hard to reach a target that is 16 miles off the ground. Most small surface-to-air missiles can't reach that altitude. It's high enough that to most people, it will not be visible to the naked eye from ground level at all.
Rubbish. Iron carbide is a ceramic, but steel contains not more than 2% carbon. Thus, steel is a mixture of a ceramic and a metal, with most of its properties determined by the metal.
There is more detail about this here than you want to know, unless of course you are a taking a materials science class, and are confused about what exactly steel is.
Suppose you're a keen young programmer and you've figured out a keen new algorithm for securing a communications channel or crash-proofing a database or animating an MMPORG monster.
He goes on to suggest "well, why not" a patent.
He expects us to believe that he doesn't realize that "a keen young programmer" hasn't got the tens of K dollars to get a patent, and certainly hasn't got the millions of dollars needed to defend a patent against wilful infringers.
I think the article is probably just astroturf; after all, Bray is now a Sun employee and the Sun's line is that software patents are a Good Thing.
I'm not just a drooling consumer, I expect to be able to write code for any computing device I buy. The question, "Does it run free software?" is not a joke, it's important to me. If it isn't important to Slashdot editors, I respectfully suggest that Slashdot's byline be changed. "News for Consumers. Stuff for yuppies." would seem to be more accurate than what it currently says.
This is stupid. Jam the things completely. If you're on-call, you've no business in a movie theater or concert hall.
You're right, there is no information in the article. It doesn't even tell us what Hibernate is. The blather is also peppered with undefined acronyms - ORM, POJO, HQL.
And some idiot moderator modded parent down as a troll. Sigh. It's not a troll, it's a valid and accurate criticism of a really crap article. Crap is, unfortunately, becoming the Slashdot-article standard.
As Stroustrup says of the ellipsis construct in C++, "The most common use of the ellipsis is to specify an interface to C library functions that were defined before C++ provided alternatives", and gives an example of the "extra work that face[s] the programmer once type checking has been suppressed using the ellipsis." Using the ellipsis construct, other than where it has to be used to access some legacy C library, is definitely very poor style in C++.
You omit his greatest contribution to science, which was establishing that the laws of nature are universal. He saw that the force of gravity which makes things fall to the ground is exactly the same force, obeying the same law, as the force of gravity between celestial bodies. It seems obvious today, but it was not at all obvious in the seventeenth century. Most people took it for granted that the celestial bodies were ruled by quite different laws from those we experienced in our daily lives.
Someone who chooses to become a public figure - politician, screen actor, etc - consciously accepts the near-certainty that he/she will attract public criticism. cf "If you can't take the heat, get out of the kitchen" and "if you throw your hat into the ring, don't whinge when it gets trodden on". These people seek publicity and must take the bad side with the good.
An "average joe" has made no such choice. So, yes: it is acceptable to call the President of the United States (or his opponent) a moron in a published article, but completely unacceptable to do the same thing to an average joe who has never sought publicity.
The Kitty Hawk technology was scalable. It needed more efficient engines, better control mechanisms, and so on - all changes which could be made gradually. The airplane in which Alcock and Brown first crossed the Atlantic is a recognisable descendant of Kitty Hawk. An airplane needs to be able to take off, fly, turn under control, and land. Kitty Hawk could do all those things.
A space ship needs to be able to reach orbital velocity (about Mach 30), and it needs to be able to withstand re-entry into the atmosphere at a speed of about Mach 25. SpaceShipOne can do neither of these things.
SpaceShipOne can reach about Mach 3. To reach Mach 3 requires about 1% of the energy required to reach Mach 30, since kinetic energy is proportional to the square of the velocity.
So SpaceShipOne has got 1% of the way toward meeting half of the key goals of a true space ship.
Most Slashdot readers, judging by the posts.
You're right, of course. Personally, I'd go further. I don't regard dinking about in low Earth orbit as "space travel". "Travel" implies going somewhere. A trip round the Moon would qualify as space travel (not necessarily landing). A trip to a stable space habitat, for example at L5, would qualify (the space station is not a stable habitat, its orbit will decay if it's not boosted occasionally).
Why not just go to a country where it's fully legal? Instead of paying $200,000 for 5 minutes in space, you can take a week's vacation in Holland, Germany, or Switzerland for under $2000, including hotel. Really nice brothels in Zurich charge about $175 for half an hour.
IMHO this is a service industry which you want to be regulated by the government, as long as the govt is not in the hands of a bunch of bigoted puritans, like the US.
Linux was a serious threat to Sun. Migration from Solaris to GNU/Linux is straightforward for many companies, and can be done gradually - by running free software on top of Solaris.
The Kodak patent, on the face of it, applies not only to Java, but also to CORBA. Free implementations of CORBA will become impossible. That will lock Linux out of enterprise computing.
In short: we have a serious problem.
That's silly. Kodak is just responding to the incentives in the patent laws.
Unlike SCO, their claims have legal merit.
Unlike Disney, they didn't bribe Congress to pass these laws.
Companies are supposed to respond to incentives in the legal system. There are tax laws designed to encourage firms to invest. There are laws to encourage companies to pollute less. Etcetera.
If you don't like what the legal system is encouraging, then lobby against software patents. Support the EFF, which is lobbying against software patents. Don't blame a company which is just trying to turn an honest buck (well, billion bucks).
You mean most USA-made dictionaries. In most American countries, Spanish is the national language.
Not clear. They're going to try pretty damn hard to lock it out by means of software patents. It's possible they will succeed.
the hue and cry if they tried would be vast.
The hue and cry will be about the same size, from mostly the same people, as the hue and cry that opposed DMCA. So I'd expect it to have the same effect, i.e. none.I'm more concerned about acts of terror committed by states than about stateless terror. Non-state terror, like the attack on the WTC, rarely takes many lives. The WTC attack killed about 3000, but it's a once-in-a-lifetime event. The US attack on Iraq, on the other hand, has killed about 10,000 people already, almost all of them either civilians, or people just trying to defend their country. Unlike the WTC, this is not a once-in-a-lifetime event. Increasingly, it's seen as the kind of thing a US President can do to increase his approval ratings.
He understands the history of Unix better than most Unix companies did, and the anti-Linux strategy he describes makes business sense. (Of course, he also has anti-Linux strategies based on barratry, manipulation of legislatures by thinly-concealed bribery, etc but you can't blame him for not discussing those.)
One thing that worries me about the Linux vs Windows scene today is that there are too many Linux cheerleaders who loudly proclaim that Linux' victory is inevitable. Gates is smart enough to take the threat seriously, and his team may be smart enough to beat it. He's certainly one hell of a lot smarter than the Linux cheerleaders.
A good start for Linux advocates would be to do what Gates has clearly done: understand the opponent's strategy.
There is no such right. There cannot be, because it is impossible to provide it, as long as people continue to meet each other. At some point you have to trust your neighbor not to try to kill you; in part, you rely on people being mostly reasonable, and in part, you earn the trust by behaving in a reasonable manner towards your neighbor.