The first thing that jumps out at me is the coding style. Very junior programmer-ish. College student maybe? The style has that "everything crammed together" very diffcult to read feel.
The first thing that jumps out at me about your post is that you make snap judgements about people's experience and background based on how much whitespace they use. Very junior programmer-ish of you. Are you a college student, maybe?
This makes a nice demo of augmented reality. But it is and remains pretty much useless until the price of VR glasses drops dramatically, their quality increases greatly, and an application like this has a significant benefit compared to just lookint at an image on-screen or on a Tablet PC.
Are you trying to claim that "administrators are getting most of the tax money"? If so, you should be aware that administrative overhead in public schools is fairly small, somewhere in the neighborhood of 5-10%.
If you want better public education, it would probably be good to spend more money on administrators so that teachers can focus on teaching. What may need some adjustment is the relationship between teachers and administrators: the teachers should be in control and the purpose of administrators should be to assist them.
It's not a "source", it's a quick overview of topics done in a (for scientists) sensationalized format.
Realistically, no scientific journal is much better--every scientist tries to present their data in a sensationalized format, and the vast majority of published papers are irrelevant nonsense. In journals like Nature or Science, people just hide it a little better.
I believe most of the money that you are talking about ("all resources don't remotely add up to our tax dollars") goes to administration. You know, the people that don't belong there.
And how do you suppose the administrative work is going to get done? You know: parents want reports on their child's performance, politicians want reports on school performance, health departments want reports, students want test scores, etc. Schools need to do budgeting, hiring and firing, human resources, etc.
Teaching is hard enough without also having to work yourself as a part-time administrator and keep track of mountains of paper.
If anything, public schools don't have enough administrators.
There is no 'market check', if you want to call it that and no competition for funds. Not that I'm for starving bad schools to death, but it makes you wonder. There is no incentive to actually make the schools better.
So in addition to the burdens of teaching and administration, you also now want to add even more job uncertainty, public relations, marketing, and all those other costs that come with free market competition to teaching. And apparently all without giving the schools staff to do it.
It basically says the failure of the public schools in general is based in the founding years and how they were formed after mental asylums and prison...
You apparently think that the US is the only country in the world in which public education exists and that the US invented it all. Both views are wrong. Public education goes back long before the founding of the US. And it works well all over the world. In fact, it works pretty well in the US, too.
I wouldn't start relying on special compilers; once you go down that road, you start putting processor-dependent features into your code, you start battling with compatibility issues, your code becomes less usable by others, and you have less choice in software from others that you can use; it all becomes a huge waste of time.
Instead, check for yourself which system (not processor, but system) gives you the most bang for the buck using the most standard compiler you can find. If you use gcc, I believe systems based on AMD's 64bit chips still win.
And, realistically, 10-20% differences are not worth investing a lot of time or energy in anyway; that corresponds to a few months of progress in processor and systems development.
Re:We WANT high labor costs! It's a Good Thing!
on
The Jobs Crunch
·
· Score: 1
All of my posts in this thread pretty much speak directly to this issue. What I am doing here is helping to create that will. Actually, I am helping people to see what is going on. At least I hope so.
What is going on is simple. Primarily, Americans are living beyond their means. Secondarily, distribution of income and wealth within the US is highly unequal.
Now, the second fact would allow the US to compensate a little for the consequences of the first: if the US has the political will to go back to more a more progressive tax system, the economic impact of facing the first fact could be lessened (but not eliminated) for the majority of Americans.
NO, very recently, the elite have gotten away with some shenanigans, especially in Germany. They will be put in their place shortly.
Germany went from having some of the highest taxes to roughly the European average; I don't see how that represents "shenanigans". Furthermore, all those reforms were carried out under a center-left government, so there isn't anybody left in Germany to "put [the elite] in their place".
What are you talking about is mainly relevent with respect to trade policy. However, the productive capacity of the US was developed independently of what you are talking about.
But "productive capacity" isn't useful economically if production costs are higher in the US than elsewhere. And production costs in the US are higher.
I _do_ think the US needs to learn to deal with _much_ more expensive imports-and pass the full cost of maintaining these trade routes onto the public.
If the US started to make imports more expensive by imposing tariffs or taxes on imports, other nations would retaliate, and they would have every right to. The effects on the US economy would be devastating, because, while the US trade deficit is huge, it's still only a fraction of total US trade.
The only way the US could make imports more expensive without starting a trade war would be by devaluating the dollar. The US trade deficit, in fact, demands it. Of course, rich Americans would lose a lot of money and poor Americans would still lose export jobs.
Either way, US living standards would drop considerably. The US is living beyond its means, and there is no way of coming face to face with that fact sooner or later.
It basically has been patented (US 5,339,390). And it's being used in Apple's user switching. And no matter who uses it, it still is no more than a frill.
Except that that wasn't the first time. This kind of visualization comes from Xerox PARC and is called "perspective wall". The idea is that the tilted views off to the side give you some context without taking up too much space.
Looks like Apple is still getting their ideas from Xerox PARC, even 20 years after the "original" Macintosh.
That's just history repeating itself. Look at Germany in the 1930's. Who got the extreme right wing into power? Two groups. On the one hand were corporations, who believed they could profit handsomely, on the other hand were the out-of-work, who were lured in by notions of "national pride", history, family values, Christian heritage, tariffs, promises of jobs, etc. The US isn't quite as extreme (yet?), but the psychology and social dynamics are analogous.
Re:low unemployment compared to europe
on
The Jobs Crunch
·
· Score: 1
Which unfortunately contributes to joblessness. Good arguments can be made to have unemployment programs, but the more you increase the coverage period and the better the benefits, the higher jobless rates will go.
And the problem is what exactly?
If people are happy to be unemployed and live off unemployment benefits, and if the society can afford it, it seems like a perfectly valid choice.
In different words, I prefer a society in which 10% unemployed living reasonably happily than a society in which 5% are unemployed and live in abject poverty.
Re:We WANT high labor costs! It's a Good Thing!
on
The Jobs Crunch
·
· Score: 1
The reason many of the countries in NW Europe have the highest quality of life is because they have the HIGHEST COST OF LABOR. And it aint no accident. The two concepts are DIRECTLY RELATED.
Well, but it's not quite that simple. You don't just get to set your labor costs: you are competing internationally. And you don't just get to set tariffs unilaterally: tariffs and trade relations are negotiated bilaterally and if others don't feel treated fairly, they'll refuse to let US products into their countries.
Europeans accept higher unemployment, lower consumption of consumer goods, they maintain a highly educated workforce, and they have legislated a redistribution of wealth. And they still have had to accept scaling back their benefits. Does the political and social will and ability exist in the US to do the same?
If US corporations don't outsource, those people in those nations will be doing the same jobs for foreign corporations. If US corporations outsource to them, at least some of the money comes back to the US.
Such estimates have lots of problems. For example, they probably neither count the prison population nor the homeless anywhere near accurately.
Re:Tariffs make things BETTER, not worse
on
The Jobs Crunch
·
· Score: 1
We Americans have a right to protect our jobs.
The US is already getting a disproportionate share of world economic activity, courtesy of the US government and its international dealings. I'm sorry if that's not enough for you, but it's naive to think that the US can get even more.
Tariffs do make things worse, but only for the upper income group. For the average working person, tariffs are good.
How exactly do you think it is "good" for "the average working person" if US goods can't be exported to the rest of the world anymore? You know, things like Pentiums, Windows, Ford automobiles, IBM mainframes, Hollywood movies, etc.? Because that would be the immediate consequence if the US imposed tariffs unilaterally.
For many, many years, the only two IPC mechanisms in UNIX have been pipes and the file system. Neither has required any libraries or APIs other than dealing with file I/O. People have stuck to that even if they thought it sucked. For better or for worse, the UNIX way eschews component architectures or complex IPC APIs. KParts and DCOP are very non-UNIX like.
The UNIX IPC approach to building a desktop under X11 would have been to rely on X11's IPC mechanism: atoms. Unfortunately, neither Gnome nor KDE do that consistently, and that has all sorts of really bad consequences for both of them. So, architecturally, neither desktop is very "UNIXy".
I think the wealth the US achieved in the last century was a temporary windfall from the aftermath of WWII and the turmoil the rest of the world found itself in. Today, Europe, China, India, and Japan have recovered, and they represent modern, highly competitive nations.
In the long run, I see no reason to expect that the US should be doing economically better than those other nations. Nor, frankly, do I see much justification.
Immigration and free trade, on the other hand, are unlikely to have much to do with America's economic issues. The net effect of curbing immigration would be to make the US even less competitive, and the net effect of curtailing free trade would be retaliatory actions by other nations and an even larger foreign trade deficit.
So, I think Americans better get used to the idea of decreasing standards of living because it seems pretty much inevitable at this point. And there is nobody to blame for that either.
However, serious social problems are not a necessary consequence of that. Just like the Europeans used their period of economic boom for building up an unsustainable social welfare system, the US used its period of economic boom for building up an unsustainable elite class of fabulously wealthy individuals. Both represent excesses that one can afford only if there is plenty to go around; but when money gets tighter, people have to make hard political choices, on both sides of the Atlantic.
Open source projects are often very volatile, with non-backwards-compatible changes occurring frequently
Do you have any evidence to back the claim that OS projects change any more rapidly and/or incompatibly than comparably mature commercial software?
In any case, assuming for the sake of argument it's true, so what? Open source projects change at the rate their user community wants them to change. And if there are two different user communities that have different needs in terms of rate of change, the open source project splits to serve the two communities. Usually, such a split doesn't even lead to a fork--the two paths continue side-by-side and are integrated as needed.
Let's look at what Sun has done instead with Java: Java's rate of change is too slow for many users, but Sun just doesn't give a damn because it meets the needs of their paying customers. With Sun's model, the rate of change is determined by the market that the company that happens to own the platform serves. That's also why Java still sucks so badly for desktop apps or for Linux: Sun doesn't care, and they don't have to. It's also why Sun fears open sourcing Java: they know they are out of step with the community, and if they open sourced it, it would not only split, it would fork.
I think Schwartz has been consistent in his preference for open standard as being more useful than simply open source.
I'm all for open standards and I agree that they are more useful than open source.
The problem is that Schwartz has been trying to redefine the meaning of the term "open standard" as well. Sun keeps referring to Java as "open", but it is one of the most proprietary systems in existence: you can get specifications only under license, if you contribute APIs to the platform, you end up transfering ownership to Sun, and Sun has also locked up the platform with many patents and trademarks. Furthermore, even if there were no legal problems surrounding the specifications, the fact is that the specifications even as they are seem to be in a form that nobody has succeeded yet in creating an independent implementation.
So, with the legal issues surrouding it, Java isn't even an open standard in theory, and until there is a free and clear, full, fully independent implementation, Java isn't an open standard in practice even if there were no legal issues.
Even if Sun had done a lot of good things for FOSS, it doesn't matter: Sun is a corporation, not a person. Applying concepts like "has done a lt for" or "is a friend of" don't make sense when applied to corporations. Sun optimizes, and has always optimized, their profit, nothing else. When FOSS has helped them, they have supported it. But today, FOSS is clearly hurting them, so they are fighting it. All this "we like FOSS" is just PR, nothing more.
Now, what about your claims of support? Sun did not release NFS until many years after they created it and it looked like SMB was making it irrelevant. Sun probably released Tcl because they couldn't figure out anything else to do with it (and it didn't come from Sun originally anyway, as I recall). Furthermore, many people would consider NFS, RPC, and Tcl as attempts to sabotage FOSS--they are so poorly designed.
Sun repeated their pattern with Java: they released it free when they thought the project was a failure. They promised to make it an open sta
Schwartz and other top Sun employees have been badmouthing non-Sun open source efforts for years. They have claimed that open source cannot be trusted to deliver a standardized platform. They have also implied that Gnome is "open source crap" that requires effort from Sun to turn into a usable GUI (the last claim is amusing, given that the GUIs Sun has produced by themselves have been abysmal failures).
All this would just be mildly amusing if it weren't for two things. First, Schwartz has been busy trying to redefine the meaning of "open" (which cleverly starts with "I can't define terms, but here is what the term 'open' should mean"), both in "open standards" and in "open source". In his definition of "open", apparently, proprietary software can be "open").
The second, more dangerous effort is to misrepresent Java as an "open standard", as something that the industry should standardize on. Everybody should carefully read the legal verbiage at the beginning of Sun's Java specifications and search for Sun's patents at the USPTO; Sun's efforts are subtle, but they own and control the Java platform, specification, technology, patents. This is particularly worrisome given that Sun is having increasing problems staying afloat--dying companies can do real damage if they own widely used standards.
Here is another choice comment from Johnathan's Blog:
It's tough to compete against a social movement. Especially one in which you're a believer. That's what Sun's been facing for the past few years when it comes to Linux. Linux represents all the ideals we've espoused for decades: openness, freedom, innovation,
even open source (remember, Sun was started with open source).
This claim is disingenuous; yes, Sun was started with open source, but Sun made a business out of making open source software proprietary and then adding more proprietary extensions. Sun tried to control window systems with proprietary systems (NeWS) and failed. They generally released software only when it looked like a business failure (Tcl/Tk) and created open standards only when competition forced them to.
Overall, the message is: don't trust Sun. When they release open source software, thank them for it, after checking the license carefully. A open source release like OpenOffice may have been self-serving, but it is still useful. But just because a company releases some open source software doesn't mean that their goals and interests are aligned with open source efforts. Ultimately, Sun is on a collision course with open source, they know it, and sooner or later, there will be a showdown.
Yes, it's obvious we aren't getting anywhere. You, unfortunately, have failed to provide any evidence for your assertions of technical superiority or better performance of OS X. You also seem to be using unstated definitions of "open" and "non-proprietary" that make no sense to me.
As for why I'm running Mac OS X... originally, because Apple promised that it was a good alternative to UNIX and Linux systems. Nowadays, I mainly deal with it when porting software to it.
Overall, OS X was a huge disappointment. I wouldn't recommend it to either novices or experts anymore. For now, OS X is still technically slightly better than Windows, but that doesn't make up for its price or much more limited software. And I think the future looks bleak for OS X: Apple has no discernible long-term direction, and their technologies are outdated compared to what Windows and Linux are offering.
So... Gnome is for people who love Unix, and KDE is for people who hate Windows? (Sorry. Couldn't resist.)
Yes, and that's not as ridiculous as it sounds:-) Hating Windows doesn't mean that people want to move to a totally alien environment, they may want something that is like Windows but with many of the problems fixed. And, yes, Gnome has plenty of room to improve if it were to start catering specifically to the preferences of more traditional UNIX users.
Octave differs substantially from Matlab and lacks a lot of functionality (in particular, a lot of the toolboxes). Octave is used for teaching, but most people who do serious work in Matlab use the real thing.
In contrast, R is very close to Splus and comes with an extensive array of statistical toolboxes. Many professional users use, and even prefer, R for their day-to-day work.
If you are doing anything with statistics, graphs of real-world data, or bioinformatics, R is the package to use.
If you are doing other kind of numerical work, things are less clear. Matlab is widely used, but it is hugely expensive and the language is pretty limited. Octave is the obvious open source choice, but there aren't many packages for it, and Matlab software requires some amount of porting if you want to use it with Octave. Numerical Python is technically far better than either Matlab or Octave, and it has a lot of packages and features that neither offer, but it (obviously) isn't Matlab compatible, so you can't just load existing Matlab packages into it.
Slashdot Mirror
The first thing that jumps out at me is the coding style. Very junior programmer-ish. College student maybe? The style has that "everything crammed together" very diffcult to read feel.
The first thing that jumps out at me about your post is that you make snap judgements about people's experience and background based on how much whitespace they use. Very junior programmer-ish of you. Are you a college student, maybe?
This makes a nice demo of augmented reality. But it is and remains pretty much useless until the price of VR glasses drops dramatically, their quality increases greatly, and an application like this has a significant benefit compared to just lookint at an image on-screen or on a Tablet PC.
Are you trying to claim that "administrators are getting most of the tax money"? If so, you should be aware that administrative overhead in public schools is fairly small, somewhere in the neighborhood of 5-10%.
If you want better public education, it would probably be good to spend more money on administrators so that teachers can focus on teaching. What may need some adjustment is the relationship between teachers and administrators: the teachers should be in control and the purpose of administrators should be to assist them.
It's not a "source", it's a quick overview of topics done in a (for scientists) sensationalized format.
Realistically, no scientific journal is much better--every scientist tries to present their data in a sensationalized format, and the vast majority of published papers are irrelevant nonsense. In journals like Nature or Science, people just hide it a little better.
I believe most of the money that you are talking about ("all resources don't remotely add up to our tax dollars") goes to administration. You know, the people that don't belong there.
And how do you suppose the administrative work is going to get done? You know: parents want reports on their child's performance, politicians want reports on school performance, health departments want reports, students want test scores, etc. Schools need to do budgeting, hiring and firing, human resources, etc.
Teaching is hard enough without also having to work yourself as a part-time administrator and keep track of mountains of paper.
If anything, public schools don't have enough administrators.
There is no 'market check', if you want to call it that and no competition for funds. Not that I'm for starving bad schools to death, but it makes you wonder. There is no incentive to actually make the schools better.
So in addition to the burdens of teaching and administration, you also now want to add even more job uncertainty, public relations, marketing, and all those other costs that come with free market competition to teaching. And apparently all without giving the schools staff to do it.
It basically says the failure of the public schools in general is based in the founding years and how they were formed after mental asylums and prison...
You apparently think that the US is the only country in the world in which public education exists and that the US invented it all. Both views are wrong. Public education goes back long before the founding of the US. And it works well all over the world. In fact, it works pretty well in the US, too.
I wouldn't start relying on special compilers; once you go down that road, you start putting processor-dependent features into your code, you start battling with compatibility issues, your code becomes less usable by others, and you have less choice in software from others that you can use; it all becomes a huge waste of time.
Instead, check for yourself which system (not processor, but system) gives you the most bang for the buck using the most standard compiler you can find. If you use gcc, I believe systems based on AMD's 64bit chips still win.
And, realistically, 10-20% differences are not worth investing a lot of time or energy in anyway; that corresponds to a few months of progress in processor and systems development.
All of my posts in this thread pretty much speak directly to this issue. What I am doing here is helping to create that will. Actually, I am helping people to see what is going on. At least I hope so.
What is going on is simple. Primarily, Americans are living beyond their means. Secondarily, distribution of income and wealth within the US is highly unequal.
Now, the second fact would allow the US to compensate a little for the consequences of the first: if the US has the political will to go back to more a more progressive tax system, the economic impact of facing the first fact could be lessened (but not eliminated) for the majority of Americans.
NO, very recently, the elite have gotten away with some shenanigans, especially in Germany. They will be put in their place shortly.
Germany went from having some of the highest taxes to roughly the European average; I don't see how that represents "shenanigans". Furthermore, all those reforms were carried out under a center-left government, so there isn't anybody left in Germany to "put [the elite] in their place".
What are you talking about is mainly relevent with respect to trade policy. However, the productive capacity of the US was developed independently of what you are talking about.
But "productive capacity" isn't useful economically if production costs are higher in the US than elsewhere. And production costs in the US are higher.
I _do_ think the US needs to learn to deal with _much_ more expensive imports-and pass the full cost of maintaining these trade routes onto the public.
If the US started to make imports more expensive by imposing tariffs or taxes on imports, other nations would retaliate, and they would have every right to. The effects on the US economy would be devastating, because, while the US trade deficit is huge, it's still only a fraction of total US trade.
The only way the US could make imports more expensive without starting a trade war would be by devaluating the dollar. The US trade deficit, in fact, demands it. Of course, rich Americans would lose a lot of money and poor Americans would still lose export jobs.
Either way, US living standards would drop considerably. The US is living beyond its means, and there is no way of coming face to face with that fact sooner or later.
It basically has been patented (US 5,339,390). And it's being used in Apple's user switching. And no matter who uses it, it still is no more than a frill.
Except that that wasn't the first time. This kind of visualization comes from Xerox PARC and is called "perspective wall". The idea is that the tilted views off to the side give you some context without taking up too much space.
Looks like Apple is still getting their ideas from Xerox PARC, even 20 years after the "original" Macintosh.
That's just history repeating itself. Look at Germany in the 1930's. Who got the extreme right wing into power? Two groups. On the one hand were corporations, who believed they could profit handsomely, on the other hand were the out-of-work, who were lured in by notions of "national pride", history, family values, Christian heritage, tariffs, promises of jobs, etc. The US isn't quite as extreme (yet?), but the psychology and social dynamics are analogous.
Which unfortunately contributes to joblessness. Good arguments can be made to have unemployment programs, but the more you increase the coverage period and the better the benefits, the higher jobless rates will go.
And the problem is what exactly?
If people are happy to be unemployed and live off unemployment benefits, and if the society can afford it, it seems like a perfectly valid choice.
In different words, I prefer a society in which 10% unemployed living reasonably happily than a society in which 5% are unemployed and live in abject poverty.
The reason many of the countries in NW Europe have the highest quality of life is because they have the HIGHEST COST OF LABOR. And it aint no accident. The two concepts are DIRECTLY RELATED.
Well, but it's not quite that simple. You don't just get to set your labor costs: you are competing internationally. And you don't just get to set tariffs unilaterally: tariffs and trade relations are negotiated bilaterally and if others don't feel treated fairly, they'll refuse to let US products into their countries.
Europeans accept higher unemployment, lower consumption of consumer goods, they maintain a highly educated workforce, and they have legislated a redistribution of wealth. And they still have had to accept scaling back their benefits. Does the political and social will and ability exist in the US to do the same?
If US corporations don't outsource, those people in those nations will be doing the same jobs for foreign corporations. If US corporations outsource to them, at least some of the money comes back to the US.
Such estimates have lots of problems. For example, they probably neither count the prison population nor the homeless anywhere near accurately.
We Americans have a right to protect our jobs.
The US is already getting a disproportionate share of world economic activity, courtesy of the US government and its international dealings. I'm sorry if that's not enough for you, but it's naive to think that the US can get even more.
Tariffs do make things worse, but only for the upper income group. For the average working person, tariffs are good.
How exactly do you think it is "good" for "the average working person" if US goods can't be exported to the rest of the world anymore? You know, things like Pentiums, Windows, Ford automobiles, IBM mainframes, Hollywood movies, etc.? Because that would be the immediate consequence if the US imposed tariffs unilaterally.
For many, many years, the only two IPC mechanisms in UNIX have been pipes and the file system. Neither has required any libraries or APIs other than dealing with file I/O. People have stuck to that even if they thought it sucked. For better or for worse, the UNIX way eschews component architectures or complex IPC APIs. KParts and DCOP are very non-UNIX like.
The UNIX IPC approach to building a desktop under X11 would have been to rely on X11's IPC mechanism: atoms. Unfortunately, neither Gnome nor KDE do that consistently, and that has all sorts of really bad consequences for both of them. So, architecturally, neither desktop is very "UNIXy".
I think the wealth the US achieved in the last century was a temporary windfall from the aftermath of WWII and the turmoil the rest of the world found itself in. Today, Europe, China, India, and Japan have recovered, and they represent modern, highly competitive nations.
In the long run, I see no reason to expect that the US should be doing economically better than those other nations. Nor, frankly, do I see much justification.
Immigration and free trade, on the other hand, are unlikely to have much to do with America's economic issues. The net effect of curbing immigration would be to make the US even less competitive, and the net effect of curtailing free trade would be retaliatory actions by other nations and an even larger foreign trade deficit.
So, I think Americans better get used to the idea of decreasing standards of living because it seems pretty much inevitable at this point. And there is nobody to blame for that either.
However, serious social problems are not a necessary consequence of that. Just like the Europeans used their period of economic boom for building up an unsustainable social welfare system, the US used its period of economic boom for building up an unsustainable elite class of fabulously wealthy individuals. Both represent excesses that one can afford only if there is plenty to go around; but when money gets tighter, people have to make hard political choices, on both sides of the Atlantic.
Open source projects are often very volatile, with non-backwards-compatible changes occurring frequently
Do you have any evidence to back the claim that OS projects change any more rapidly and/or incompatibly than comparably mature commercial software?
In any case, assuming for the sake of argument it's true, so what? Open source projects change at the rate their user community wants them to change. And if there are two different user communities that have different needs in terms of rate of change, the open source project splits to serve the two communities. Usually, such a split doesn't even lead to a fork--the two paths continue side-by-side and are integrated as needed.
Let's look at what Sun has done instead with Java: Java's rate of change is too slow for many users, but Sun just doesn't give a damn because it meets the needs of their paying customers. With Sun's model, the rate of change is determined by the market that the company that happens to own the platform serves. That's also why Java still sucks so badly for desktop apps or for Linux: Sun doesn't care, and they don't have to. It's also why Sun fears open sourcing Java: they know they are out of step with the community, and if they open sourced it, it would not only split, it would fork.
I think Schwartz has been consistent in his preference for open standard as being more useful than simply open source.
I'm all for open standards and I agree that they are more useful than open source.
The problem is that Schwartz has been trying to redefine the meaning of the term "open standard" as well. Sun keeps referring to Java as "open", but it is one of the most proprietary systems in existence: you can get specifications only under license, if you contribute APIs to the platform, you end up transfering ownership to Sun, and Sun has also locked up the platform with many patents and trademarks. Furthermore, even if there were no legal problems surrounding the specifications, the fact is that the specifications even as they are seem to be in a form that nobody has succeeded yet in creating an independent implementation.
So, with the legal issues surrouding it, Java isn't even an open standard in theory, and until there is a free and clear, full, fully independent implementation, Java isn't an open standard in practice even if there were no legal issues.
Even if Sun had done a lot of good things for FOSS, it doesn't matter: Sun is a corporation, not a person. Applying concepts like "has done a lt for" or "is a friend of" don't make sense when applied to corporations. Sun optimizes, and has always optimized, their profit, nothing else. When FOSS has helped them, they have supported it. But today, FOSS is clearly hurting them, so they are fighting it. All this "we like FOSS" is just PR, nothing more.
Now, what about your claims of support? Sun did not release NFS until many years after they created it and it looked like SMB was making it irrelevant. Sun probably released Tcl because they couldn't figure out anything else to do with it (and it didn't come from Sun originally anyway, as I recall). Furthermore, many people would consider NFS, RPC, and Tcl as attempts to sabotage FOSS--they are so poorly designed.
Sun repeated their pattern with Java: they released it free when they thought the project was a failure. They promised to make it an open sta
All this would just be mildly amusing if it weren't for two things. First, Schwartz has been busy trying to redefine the meaning of "open" (which cleverly starts with "I can't define terms, but here is what the term 'open' should mean"), both in "open standards" and in "open source". In his definition of "open", apparently, proprietary software can be "open").
The second, more dangerous effort is to misrepresent Java as an "open standard", as something that the industry should standardize on. Everybody should carefully read the legal verbiage at the beginning of Sun's Java specifications and search for Sun's patents at the USPTO; Sun's efforts are subtle, but they own and control the Java platform, specification, technology, patents. This is particularly worrisome given that Sun is having increasing problems staying afloat--dying companies can do real damage if they own widely used standards.
Here is another choice comment from Johnathan's Blog: This claim is disingenuous; yes, Sun was started with open source, but Sun made a business out of making open source software proprietary and then adding more proprietary extensions. Sun tried to control window systems with proprietary systems (NeWS) and failed. They generally released software only when it looked like a business failure (Tcl/Tk) and created open standards only when competition forced them to.
Overall, the message is: don't trust Sun. When they release open source software, thank them for it, after checking the license carefully. A open source release like OpenOffice may have been self-serving, but it is still useful. But just because a company releases some open source software doesn't mean that their goals and interests are aligned with open source efforts. Ultimately, Sun is on a collision course with open source, they know it, and sooner or later, there will be a showdown.
Yes, it's obvious we aren't getting anywhere. You, unfortunately, have failed to provide any evidence for your assertions of technical superiority or better performance of OS X. You also seem to be using unstated definitions of "open" and "non-proprietary" that make no sense to me.
As for why I'm running Mac OS X... originally, because Apple promised that it was a good alternative to UNIX and Linux systems. Nowadays, I mainly deal with it when porting software to it.
Overall, OS X was a huge disappointment. I wouldn't recommend it to either novices or experts anymore. For now, OS X is still technically slightly better than Windows, but that doesn't make up for its price or much more limited software. And I think the future looks bleak for OS X: Apple has no discernible long-term direction, and their technologies are outdated compared to what Windows and Linux are offering.
My desktops of choice are Gnome and KDE on Linux.
That's why the first pointer was to Postscript, which you can then convert to JPEG (with gs or with ImageMagick).
So... Gnome is for people who love Unix, and KDE is for people who hate Windows? (Sorry. Couldn't resist.)
:-) Hating Windows doesn't mean that people want to move to a totally alien environment, they may want something that is like Windows but with many of the problems fixed. And, yes, Gnome has plenty of room to improve if it were to start catering specifically to the preferences of more traditional UNIX users.
Yes, and that's not as ridiculous as it sounds
Octave differs substantially from Matlab and lacks a lot of functionality (in particular, a lot of the toolboxes). Octave is used for teaching, but most people who do serious work in Matlab use the real thing.
In contrast, R is very close to Splus and comes with an extensive array of statistical toolboxes. Many professional users use, and even prefer, R for their day-to-day work.
If you are doing anything with statistics, graphs of real-world data, or bioinformatics, R is the package to use.
If you are doing other kind of numerical work, things are less clear. Matlab is widely used, but it is hugely expensive and the language is pretty limited. Octave is the obvious open source choice, but there aren't many packages for it, and Matlab software requires some amount of porting if you want to use it with Octave. Numerical Python is technically far better than either Matlab or Octave, and it has a lot of packages and features that neither offer, but it (obviously) isn't Matlab compatible, so you can't just load existing Matlab packages into it.