Not really, it would only have helped this time. Now Gates and Ballmer have learned the new trick of stacking standards committees to push through Microsoft Open Standards TM. Expect to have several more of these standards shoved down PHB throats.
There isn't any Unix code in Linux, that's what SCO has so far failed to show in the IBM case. The Novell case was about copyrights and a few other issues re Unix code. It isn't clear who even owns those copyrights except that the judge has determined it is not SCOX. The Berkeley case couldn't even decide those copyrights.
"a lot of scientific research is pointless and doesn't help anybody"
Bingo, that kind of attitude would have prevented Einstein from getting funding today for "gravity studies". He and many others started quantum theory, they had no application they could point to. Biology is replete with these examples; modern drugs would be impossible without the previous theoretical work that was "pointless", not to mention all the advances in other disciplines that no one in those disciplines had any idea would be of use in the technology behind biology or medicine.
And you are right, many scientists do spend 40-50% of their time on begging for money, I and my fellow scientists here do as well. It's an insane way to fund scientists. I'm good at doing science, not writing goddamn grant proposals for some business school product to wonder about. I mostly do logic and math, try making a claim for money without tying it to some feature (security, reliability, etc.) that not only pollutes the grant proposal, but will waste gobs of my time both in feeding some application I was pushed into supporting and making it hard to do because I haven't the time to get the theory correct before I must somehow apply it.
Also, science progresses as much by its failures as its successes. In an atmosphere that only rewards applications, by definition it pisses on anything that might fail. The consequence is that scientists are pushed into small incremental steps that only extend established theory in a minor way rather than thinking far outside the box. Thinking outside the box can be abused, but so too can forcing us to only think inside the box.
In addition to those problems, science these days is funded by business school product who have understanding of science and don't ever expect to. They won't fund anything unless you can point to an application. That means pure research isn't being funded. The result, as the article points out, is that we are leveling off in publications. No pure research is being done at the high end and hence it never gets developed into the mid and low end where the applications are. To put it another way, the mid and low end are simply rearranging the pure research deck chairs handed to us by previous generations.
It isn't just business school product that have this attitude towards pure research. A fair number of slash bots also have it. One gets the feeling they believe research is something written up in books and there isn't any reason to write any new books.
"If Redmond catches a cold, the entire economy would feel it."
Bullshit, M$ isn't the economy, they hold a vanishingly small piece of it. If they ceased to exist tomorrow, hundreds of companies would do whatever you wanted to keep their crapware working.
"They included language in the new GPLv3 license that specifically forbids participating in the freedoms the GPL protects if a novell style deal is made and covers something the GPLv3 covers. Once this is in place and in wide use, as it is currently worded in the final draft, all MS has to do is craft a deal that places people in violation of the clause and in essence make them mini Novells who cannot contribute, release or take advantage of any of the freedoms the GPLv3 is trying to protect."
All they did was make explicit what GPL v2 has implicit. Since open source based companies will tend to know the GPL quite well, why would they shoot themselves in the foot? Novell had the project Mono to protect and figured it would be favored in the marketplace because of some voodoo M$ promises. We'll see how well that holds up. Novell was sinking before their deal and they are sinking now. Per seat licensing is going downhill. M$ probably won't buy an OSS company because their source software (fi they have any) is already out there in the wild. They could only buy an OSS service company, but M$ isn't going to service OSS software. They might buy a company to kill it, but that's a losing proposition in the long run.
The rest of your argument is predicated on M$ wasting the landscape of open source companies by doing deals with them. With every deal, the value of the deal diminishes because M$ doesn't have enough IP for these companies to differentiate each from the others. What deal does M$ strike to rape OpenOffice? Personally I think OO is a piece of trash trying to mimic Office Malware, but some people find it useful. It is becoming clear M$ is only doing deals selling snake oil, not many companies will see the value and all they need to is look at M$'s record to be scared off.
Errr...you do understand the justice department is not under the legistlative, right? M$ bought a piece of the executive branch, the buyouts of the legistlative branch come under a completely different slush fund.
My experience with Sun software is they have a big machine mentality. So they will happily multithread everything whether it needs it or not simply because it wouldn't occur to them to optimize a single thread. That leads to slow software that screws up rewrites. I don't think they have ever understood the monitor and all the subsystems serving it represent a shared resource.
GE 1:3-5 On the first day, God created light, then separated light and darkness.
GE 1:14-19 The sun (which separates night and day) wasn't created until the fourth day.
It only gets worse once you start to dig. Inconsistencies will yield several more. Most of these are technical, says one thing here, another thing there. There are host of philosophical contradictions too.
Technically, Goedel's theory says that there are true statements in a mathematical system of sufficient power (arithmetic) that cannot be proven WITHIN the system. One can always jump to a meta-system and possibly show the statement in question is in fact true. Of course, the same argument then applies to the meta-system, it too will have true but unprovable (within the metasystem) statements.
So, proof of these unprovable statements is sometimes at hand, just not within the system you started with.
Errr..you do realize the New Testament was written at least one and in some cases two or three generations after JC's death. The capabilities of humans to embroider stories is known, the propensity is often overlooked. You cannot *know* anything about the truth of what JC was saying. You can believe, you can have faith, you can blow your horn as loud as you want about it, but you cannot know it.
Truth is a slippery concept when conjoined with the concept of knowledge. What Christians, Muslisms, etc. postuate as truth is usually merely vociferous belief. Truth, in the abstract, is a bit useless and quite sterile or non-subjective in a mathematics sense. Proof, on the other hand, is quite useful as a way of justifying that something is true and hence can become knowledge. How are we to prove to ourselves what you believe is truth? By which procedures? Is it repeatable?
Science works with proof, it aims at truth, but it rarely claims absolute truth. It merely indicates that something holds as true to within some percent, GIVEN the hypotheses hold. Belief can get along quite nicely without proof. It always amazed me how the Creationists and other True Believers always seem to be grasping at proving things are the way they say they are and not being honsest enough to simply say, you should have faith. It makes one think they have no faith themselves when they grasp at straws to prove to themselves, and anyone who'll listen, they are not mistaken.
The problem is that IT has been taken over by Business School Product. They have no grasp of science, no feel for aesthetics, they only have feel for next quarters numbers and covering their ass. This is what Business School teaches. One needn't know anything about an industry in order to manage it, Business Schools build this into their Product. They will never, ever learn a new skill unless it is something useful for climbing the corporate ladder. The best thing IT can learn is to weed Business School Product out. Dilbert's boss is hiding in every last one of them.
You are entirely full of shit. Many scientific theories were not testable when they were first proposed. It was only later that they became testable. By whose criteria will you use to claim a theory is not testable. Atoms were first proposed long before it was clear it was a testable hypothesis. In fact, many early physicists rejected the atomic theory on the grounds they believed it to be untestable.
Think of matter as a politician and antimatter as truth. A politician cannot hold truth without being totally annihilated in a orgasm of Klieg lights and profuse sweating.
How blind can you be. The only people who lived in peace under Saddam were his tribal Sunni cronies. If you were a Kurd or a Shi'ite, you could be killed for no good reason. You didn't hear about it much was because it was a cause the western press could get behind. Oh, but let those naughty Americans call Saddam on it and then the Americans are terrorists.
Slashdot Mirror
Not really, it would only have helped this time. Now Gates and Ballmer have learned the new trick of stacking standards committees to push through Microsoft Open Standards TM. Expect to have several more of these standards shoved down PHB throats.
Gerry
MonkeyBoy!! You should post more often, we just love to hear those "Get the Facts" arguments.
Gerry
There isn't any Unix code in Linux, that's what SCO has so far failed to show in the IBM case. The Novell case was about copyrights and a few other issues re Unix code. It isn't clear who even owns those copyrights except that the judge has determined it is not SCOX. The Berkeley case couldn't even decide those copyrights.
Gerry
"instead of what made them big, which was getting things done the hard way consistently"
Huh? M$ got where they are by good solid crookery, honest hard work had nothing to do with it.
Wow, now I can tell all my friends I read this really neat AC on Slashdot that explained the TT fall. Are you an engineer from the future?
Yeah, probably 100,000 Dells. Now if they'd buy some mainframes, then...M$ Malware doesn't run on mainframes.
"a lot of scientific research is pointless and doesn't help anybody"
Bingo, that kind of attitude would have prevented Einstein from getting funding today for "gravity studies". He and many others started quantum theory, they had no application they could point to. Biology is replete with these examples; modern drugs would be impossible without the previous theoretical work that was "pointless", not to mention all the advances in other disciplines that no one in those disciplines had any idea would be of use in the technology behind biology or medicine.
And you are right, many scientists do spend 40-50% of their time on begging for money, I and my fellow scientists here do as well. It's an insane way to fund scientists. I'm good at doing science, not writing goddamn grant proposals for some business school product to wonder about. I mostly do logic and math, try making a claim for money without tying it to some feature (security, reliability, etc.) that not only pollutes the grant proposal, but will waste gobs of my time both in feeding some application I was pushed into supporting and making it hard to do because I haven't the time to get the theory correct before I must somehow apply it.
Also, science progresses as much by its failures as its successes. In an atmosphere that only rewards applications, by definition it pisses on anything that might fail. The consequence is that scientists are pushed into small incremental steps that only extend established theory in a minor way rather than thinking far outside the box. Thinking outside the box can be abused, but so too can forcing us to only think inside the box.
Gerry
In addition to those problems, science these days is funded by business school product who have understanding of science and don't ever expect to. They won't fund anything unless you can point to an application. That means pure research isn't being funded. The result, as the article points out, is that we are leveling off in publications. No pure research is being done at the high end and hence it never gets developed into the mid and low end where the applications are. To put it another way, the mid and low end are simply rearranging the pure research deck chairs handed to us by previous generations.
It isn't just business school product that have this attitude towards pure research. A fair number of slash bots also have it. One gets the feeling they believe research is something written up in books and there isn't any reason to write any new books.
Gerry
So you think you are going to sue M$ and they'll simply fall over for your peanut company?
You got that right!
"If Redmond catches a cold, the entire economy would feel it."
Bullshit, M$ isn't the economy, they hold a vanishingly small piece of it. If they ceased to exist tomorrow, hundreds of companies would do whatever you wanted to keep their crapware working.
"They included language in the new GPLv3 license that specifically forbids participating in the freedoms the GPL protects if a novell style deal is made and covers something the GPLv3 covers. Once this is in place and in wide use, as it is currently worded in the final draft, all MS has to do is craft a deal that places people in violation of the clause and in essence make them mini Novells who cannot contribute, release or take advantage of any of the freedoms the GPLv3 is trying to protect."
All they did was make explicit what GPL v2 has implicit. Since open source based companies will tend to know the GPL quite well, why would they shoot themselves in the foot? Novell had the project Mono to protect and figured it would be favored in the marketplace because of some voodoo M$ promises. We'll see how well that holds up. Novell was sinking before their deal and they are sinking now. Per seat licensing is going downhill. M$ probably won't buy an OSS company because their source software (fi they have any) is already out there in the wild. They could only buy an OSS service company, but M$ isn't going to service OSS software. They might buy a company to kill it, but that's a losing proposition in the long run.
The rest of your argument is predicated on M$ wasting the landscape of open source companies by doing deals with them. With every deal, the value of the deal diminishes because M$ doesn't have enough IP for these companies to differentiate each from the others. What deal does M$ strike to rape OpenOffice? Personally I think OO is a piece of trash trying to mimic Office Malware, but some people find it useful. It is becoming clear M$ is only doing deals selling snake oil, not many companies will see the value and all they need to is look at M$'s record to be scared off.
Gerry
Errr...you do understand the justice department is not under the legistlative, right? M$ bought a piece of the executive branch, the buyouts of the legistlative branch come under a completely different slush fund.
Gerry
My experience with Sun software is they have a big machine mentality. So they will happily multithread everything whether it needs it or not simply because it wouldn't occur to them to optimize a single thread. That leads to slow software that screws up rewrites. I don't think they have ever understood the monitor and all the subsystems serving it represent a shared resource.
Gerry
Sure:
GE 1:3-5 On the first day, God created light, then separated light and darkness.
GE 1:14-19 The sun (which separates night and day) wasn't created until the fourth day.
It only gets worse once you start to dig. Inconsistencies will yield several more. Most of these are technical, says one thing here, another thing there. There are host of philosophical contradictions too.
Gerry
Uh, just a point, an ABM system typically doesn't use ICBMs, it used against them.
Technically, Goedel's theory says that there are true statements in a mathematical system of sufficient power (arithmetic) that cannot be proven WITHIN the system. One can always jump to a meta-system and possibly show the statement in question is in fact true. Of course, the same argument then applies to the meta-system, it too will have true but unprovable (within the metasystem) statements.
So, proof of these unprovable statements is sometimes at hand, just not within the system you started with.
Gerry
does the word "wookie" mean anything to you?
Errr..you do realize the New Testament was written at least one and in some cases two or three generations after JC's death. The capabilities of humans to embroider stories is known, the propensity is often overlooked. You cannot *know* anything about the truth of what JC was saying. You can believe, you can have faith, you can blow your horn as loud as you want about it, but you cannot know it.
Truth is a slippery concept when conjoined with the concept of knowledge. What Christians, Muslisms, etc. postuate as truth is usually merely vociferous belief. Truth, in the abstract, is a bit useless and quite sterile or non-subjective in a mathematics sense. Proof, on the other hand, is quite useful as a way of justifying that something is true and hence can become knowledge. How are we to prove to ourselves what you believe is truth? By which procedures? Is it repeatable?
Science works with proof, it aims at truth, but it rarely claims absolute truth. It merely indicates that something holds as true to within some percent, GIVEN the hypotheses hold. Belief can get along quite nicely without proof. It always amazed me how the Creationists and other True Believers always seem to be grasping at proving things are the way they say they are and not being honsest enough to simply say, you should have faith. It makes one think they have no faith themselves when they grasp at straws to prove to themselves, and anyone who'll listen, they are not mistaken.
Gerry
Yeah, your right. We regularly move our building around about every six months just to confuse the terrorists.
The problem is that IT has been taken over by Business School Product. They have no grasp of science, no feel for aesthetics, they only have feel for next quarters numbers and covering their ass. This is what Business School teaches. One needn't know anything about an industry in order to manage it, Business Schools build this into their Product. They will never, ever learn a new skill unless it is something useful for climbing the corporate ladder. The best thing IT can learn is to weed Business School Product out. Dilbert's boss is hiding in every last one of them.
well, brain damaged al Qaeda operatives...
You are entirely full of shit. Many scientific theories were not testable when they were first proposed. It was only later that they became testable. By whose criteria will you use to claim a theory is not testable. Atoms were first proposed long before it was clear it was a testable hypothesis. In fact, many early physicists rejected the atomic theory on the grounds they believed it to be untestable.
Think of matter as a politician and antimatter as truth. A politician cannot hold truth without being totally annihilated in a orgasm of Klieg lights and profuse sweating.
Gerry
How blind can you be. The only people who lived in peace under Saddam were his tribal Sunni cronies. If you were a Kurd or a Shi'ite, you could be killed for no good reason. You didn't hear about it much was because it was a cause the western press could get behind. Oh, but let those naughty Americans call Saddam on it and then the Americans are terrorists.