You may be right about people needing a new heart *right now*. But in the long run, and for all the future heart implantees (is that a word?), it's probably a whole lot better to force the development of a better system by discarding this one. Given the time it takes to recover from that kind of heavy surgery, just a few months of survival after it may not be really worth the trouble and pain... Anyway, only the devices that are proven to have a clear medical benefit can be approved. That's just the way it is, and I think it's fortunate enough. Think of the massacre if anything could be sold as a medical device without any form of approval...
The only way anything can be a threat to Linux is if it is better.
And even so, this is no threat whatsoever - mereley an incentive to get better. Isn't it time we stopped seeing "better than me" things as a threat, and started seeing those as an opportunity to improve?
DOS is not a CLI. DOS is a crude operating system which happens to have a CLI as its main user interface. Pretty different.
Contrary to a popular opinion, Windows 9x was not a pretty interface sitting on top of DOS. It was a real, 32-bit OS (even if not the best...) You'd have to go back to Windows 1.0 for something that just "sits on top of" DOS.
A CLI (or also called a shell) is pretty useful for development and administration tasks. Again, it's just a way of interacting with the OS. Until now, the CLI available on Windows was really, really lame. Barely usable.
Incidentally, there are a few alternative solutions for a decent shell on Windows. The fact that MS is choosing to get its own, freely available one is not very good news for the editors of those shells. Seems like once again, MS is trying to kill all competition, like it did with IE (until Firefox took off).
That's very true. Europe in general (but not quite all of it) and France in particular, is obsessed with government-enforced regulations. Putting the "common good above the health of its corporations" may seem like a "nice" idea (nice as in "nice guy" stuff, if you see what I mean...), but it can't work in the long run. Ultimately, who is paying? Who is creating wealth that the "common good" can live on?
That said, promoting OSS may be seen not as an antithesis of the free market, but on the contrary: helping the market to free itself more than it is now. Of course, this promoting should be only temporary, to get the ball rolling, so to speak. Long-term promoting of OSS would, in turn, result in the collapse of the free market. This is why "helping" in general should never be anything else than temporary. Short-term helping is productive; long-term helping is destructive.
All in all, this is all summed up in the "Teach them to fish, instead of giving them the fish" saying.
Nope, I think it's once a month, at most. And it's not particularly the kernel that gets patched, but various components. I believe the kernel itself is hardly ever modified...
Of course, this is just an example. There are many. 90% was just an estimated figure - of course no one has the real figure, and all the more because of the inherently decentralized nature of Bittorrent. All I know is, contrary to what it was a couple years ago (when Bittorrent was actually mostly used for distributing Open Source software), most people who turn to Bittorrent do so for their "general purpose P2P needs". Which doesn't mean sharing their last vacation's pictures...;-) Again, I'm not blaming the tool itself - which is merely a tool. But the idea of advertising on top of it? A very, very bad idea in my opinion. To me, P2P remains ok as long as it doesn't involve any commercial activity. P2P is just that: peer-to-peer. There is no room for "meddlers". Or else we just stop calling it P2P and give it another name. Shared storage for instance...
advertising-supported piracy. Sounds sweet. Don't get me wrong; I'm not saying that P2P is in itself bad or anything. I'm not saying that P2P *is* piracy. What I'm saying, though, is that probably 90% of all users will be searching for pirated stuff (software, movies...). And if the searching is advertising-supported, it all becomes extremely rotten - that's what it seems to me.
In extreme scenarii, we could even envision people looking for a pirated Photoshop version while looking at an Adobe advertisement banner. Pretty funky if you ask me.;-)
"Bookmarking" is a highly personal thing - just like tastes in general. Sharing your tastes with a few selected people is ok, but sharing them with just anyone on the planet doesn't make any sense. If I'm interested in a particular person's interests, I'll ask them, or I'll visit their web site if they have one. But I have absolutely no interest in knowing the interests and tastes of someone I don't know - or a bunch of them. To me, this is a very specific form of voyeurism. And heaven knows there is already plenty of that on the internet.
What should I say? "Lol", maybe. The ultimate fact is that Microsoft is never going to send anyone any patch via e-mail. Period. So anyone should know this is not the "real thing". The concern here is not with MS, it's with people not even knowing the tools they are using, as well as some basic good sense. Most often, they won't even have figured that the e-mail address they got this from, they never gave it to MS to begin with. But hey, what the heck. That would ask of them to actually use their brain...
There is no way you can boot Windows 2003 in under 30 seconds anyway - maybe 25 if you're lucky. This is not specially due to SCSI. That said, even 30 seconds is an awful lot compared to the couple seconds it will take to restart a service on Linux. Besides, your reasoning is totally stupid: when you have to reboot, *all* of the services will be down for at least 30 seconds. Ok. Now if you only have to restart the patched services on Linux, not only will it not take more than 1-2 seconds in most cases, but all of the services that were not patched are still running the whole time. Big difference. Windows users tend to see an OS as an essentially mono-user, "mono-task" thing. Even now in 2005.
Let's take an example scenario. You're upgrading apache on a Linux server. Restarting apache once upgraded will take exactly 1 second on my P3/800 box - I bet it would be even faster than that on any recent machine. Meanwhile, any user connected to a database, using ftp or I don't know what else, will have experienced exactly *no* downtime, not even 1 second.
Try that on Windows. You said it is "faster to just reboot". Not so. Not at all. Truth is, you really meant it is easier. "I'm lazy, so rebooting is easier". Not to mention that even Windows advocates tend to not trust Windows a whole lot; often by lack of knowing it very well; there is always a certain amount of uncertainty, so a lot of users (and even admins, I've seen that!) will think that it is just "safer" to reboot the box. One never knows... an attitude in itself that would freak out most Un*x administrators...
doesn't usually make much sense, yet it's one of the primary arguments when it comes to fighting it.
The only thing the growing of pirated software can teach us is that there is an increasing proportion of people using pirated software over legit versions. That doesn't directly equate to revenue loss. Look at how many people use a pirated version of Photoshop, for instance (let's face it, we all know there are very many!). Do you sincerely think those would have shed out a thousand bucks to buy a license? Come on... On the other hand, as with Windows, it increases the user base, and thus is actually a good marketing thing. I'm not advocating piracy, I'm just saying that the "bad" consequences are pretty hard to put figures on, and the "good" consequences may actually be easier to quantify.
I think the real problem is not a so-called revenue loss. Not yet anyway. To me, the real concern in the long run is about making people realize that purely digital (that is, immaterial) products are actually products worth buying... and it won't happen until intelligence is valued over brute force. Right now, brute force tends to win, so the only way to fight piracy is by legal means (DRM and software "locks" don't work, it has been proven over and over...) When people are ready to acknowledge "mind products", then purely technological solutions will have a chance to work... right now, the only way to deal with piracy is either to use brute force (legal enforcement with harsh penalties) or ignore it altogether.
Once again, they at Microsoft are confusing predicting the future with stating their own goals.
What they are really saying here is that one of their goals for the next 5 years is to promote their own search engine technologies and kill Google. They are just telling us what their intentions are, and try to make it sound like an inevitable market trend.
It's a bit like Nostradamus poisoning important people after predicting they would die unexpectedly. Very insightful indeed.;-)
I think you're right. Something that gets almost completely overlooked nowadays, and especially as a result of a very fast-paced technological progress, is the "time" factor. We tend to forget that evolution takes sometimes hundreds of thousands of years before the genetic changes in a species are remarkable enough. On the other hand, some genes mutations can happen in a pretty short time span, but are usually not significant in terms of the species itself. Some people could argue that we are drifting away from the natural selection process, but this is not quite true. As long as we rely on sexual reproduction, the evolutionary process will remain essentially the same. It will probably take tens of thousands of years from now to see any remarkable change in our species - and probably in a magnitude order more than that to see any kind of forking. This is not going to happen overnight. Even if we got rid of the sexual reproduction altogether, this wouldn't guarantee that the natural selection would be over. Our cells would probably change in a way that mutations can happen very fast (such as in some insects) to overcome the lack of diversity that the lack of sexual reproduction would imply. We sure are creating part of what we are, but on a deep level, aren't all living being doing the exact same? We seem to think we are "all that" because we can temper with our genome (and even that is not going to really have an impact any time soon), but many species on Earth can also modify their own genomes in ways that we don't totally understand yet... sure it doesn't look like Science or intelligence to us, but it does work. Are we that different in the end?
as of late, any endeavor related to anti-terrorism and that looks remotely "intelligent" has a good chance of getting funded by the US government. I think that's as simple as that. Also, you wouldn't believe how many "anti-terrorism" devices and concepts have been granted a US patent the last 4 years.
Well, I guess it could be debatable. But then again, if MS thinks a web browser, a multimedia player, and so forth, are part of Windows, then an antivirus program should definitely be part of it too...
Oh, because you really think MS is so fair and ethical that they would have waited for Wine to get a very solid lawyers team on its side to begin suing it? You must be kidding, right?;-)
Well, I have a friend who has a Dell PDA running Win CE as well. It *does* need rebooting several times a day, because the whole thing freezes every once in a while. It's not lame MS bashing, it's simply the naked reality.
Not sure why you would talk about Gandhi here, but two things to remember: Gandhi was not considered a true buddhist, nor quite a hindu. His conceptions of life were only his. Second, buddhism is not a religion. At least, that's not how it considers itself.
Back to buddhism and Gandhi: actually, most true buddhists wouldn't go as far as total non-violence and starving themselves. This wouldn't quite match the buddhism philosophy, at least, as far as I know it.
All in all, a philosophy cannot tell you what to do with your sperm. It just doesn't make sense. Your sperm, like your saliva, urine and excrements, are yours only. It needs the authority of a religion to go as far as claiming to tell you what to do with your sperm.
One person here made a comment about people using Asperger's as some kind of excuse for something, like sometimes people claim dyslexia if they can't read well.
Good point, and something clearly worth saying. Conversely, some people use the "Genius = Asperger's" as an excuse not to be able to be as focused and creative than others. It's like their reasoning is "ok, I can't be that good anyway because I don't have Asperger's".
I also think there are a lot of bad diagnoses here. Even amongst people who have worked on the subject for many years, some are still not sure there is such a thing as an Asperger's Syndrome. Just because someone has some difficulties in dealing with others doesn't automatically mean they have any kind of "syndrome". The fact that a lot of the once diagnosed "AS" succeed in overcoming the difficulties and lead a fulfilling life could tend to prove that they actually didn't quite qualify has having any kind of "medical" syndrome, such as "real" autism. (Getting a "true" autist to even talk about their own problems would be a tremendous victory.)
And finally, it seems like some countries are more inclined to diagnose youngsters with AS than others. The US is one of them. In Europe, even though we hear about it, it seems like AS is not as "popular". I wonder if, as you said, what we call AS is not more like a social syndrome than a psychiatric disorder?
Few indeed, and in my case, all due to a bad device driver in one case, and a faulty PSU in the other case. Then again, I never leave any workstation on for more than a day, maybe two at times. I'm willing to bet that fuckups would occur if I gave Windows more time to screw up.;-)
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You may be right about people needing a new heart *right now*. But in the long run, and for all the future heart implantees (is that a word?), it's probably a whole lot better to force the development of a better system by discarding this one. Given the time it takes to recover from that kind of heavy surgery, just a few months of survival after it may not be really worth the trouble and pain... Anyway, only the devices that are proven to have a clear medical benefit can be approved. That's just the way it is, and I think it's fortunate enough. Think of the massacre if anything could be sold as a medical device without any form of approval...
And even so, this is no threat whatsoever - mereley an incentive to get better. Isn't it time we stopped seeing "better than me" things as a threat, and started seeing those as an opportunity to improve?
I don't get it. Even a single developer could do it in much less than that...
DOS is not a CLI. DOS is a crude operating system which happens to have a CLI as its main user interface. Pretty different.
Contrary to a popular opinion, Windows 9x was not a pretty interface sitting on top of DOS. It was a real, 32-bit OS (even if not the best...) You'd have to go back to Windows 1.0 for something that just "sits on top of" DOS.
A CLI (or also called a shell) is pretty useful for development and administration tasks. Again, it's just a way of interacting with the OS. Until now, the CLI available on Windows was really, really lame. Barely usable.
Incidentally, there are a few alternative solutions for a decent shell on Windows. The fact that MS is choosing to get its own, freely available one is not very good news for the editors of those shells. Seems like once again, MS is trying to kill all competition, like it did with IE (until Firefox took off).
Well, your girlfriend must have been feeling pretty special after you bought her that. ;-)
That's very true. Europe in general (but not quite all of it) and France in particular, is obsessed with government-enforced regulations. Putting the "common good above the health of its corporations" may seem like a "nice" idea (nice as in "nice guy" stuff, if you see what I mean...), but it can't work in the long run. Ultimately, who is paying? Who is creating wealth that the "common good" can live on?
That said, promoting OSS may be seen not as an antithesis of the free market, but on the contrary: helping the market to free itself more than it is now. Of course, this promoting should be only temporary, to get the ball rolling, so to speak. Long-term promoting of OSS would, in turn, result in the collapse of the free market. This is why "helping" in general should never be anything else than temporary. Short-term helping is productive; long-term helping is destructive.
All in all, this is all summed up in the "Teach them to fish, instead of giving them the fish" saying.
Nope, I think it's once a month, at most. And it's not particularly the kernel that gets patched, but various components. I believe the kernel itself is hardly ever modified...
2 years may be extremely old for the Linux kernel, but it's like brand new for any Windows kernel...
Uh huh, take a look at this: http://story.news.yahoo.com/s/nm/media_starwars_pi racy_dc
Of course, this is just an example. There are many. 90% was just an estimated figure - of course no one has the real figure, and all the more because of the inherently decentralized nature of Bittorrent. All I know is, contrary to what it was a couple years ago (when Bittorrent was actually mostly used for distributing Open Source software), most people who turn to Bittorrent do so for their "general purpose P2P needs". Which doesn't mean sharing their last vacation's pictures... ;-) Again, I'm not blaming the tool itself - which is merely a tool. But the idea of advertising on top of it? A very, very bad idea in my opinion. To me, P2P remains ok as long as it doesn't involve any commercial activity. P2P is just that: peer-to-peer. There is no room for "meddlers". Or else we just stop calling it P2P and give it another name. Shared storage for instance...
advertising-supported piracy. Sounds sweet. Don't get me wrong; I'm not saying that P2P is in itself bad or anything. I'm not saying that P2P *is* piracy. What I'm saying, though, is that probably 90% of all users will be searching for pirated stuff (software, movies...). And if the searching is advertising-supported, it all becomes extremely rotten - that's what it seems to me.
In extreme scenarii, we could even envision people looking for a pirated Photoshop version while looking at an Adobe advertisement banner. Pretty funky if you ask me. ;-)
"Bookmarking" is a highly personal thing - just like tastes in general. Sharing your tastes with a few selected people is ok, but sharing them with just anyone on the planet doesn't make any sense. If I'm interested in a particular person's interests, I'll ask them, or I'll visit their web site if they have one. But I have absolutely no interest in knowing the interests and tastes of someone I don't know - or a bunch of them. To me, this is a very specific form of voyeurism. And heaven knows there is already plenty of that on the internet.
What should I say? "Lol", maybe. The ultimate fact is that Microsoft is never going to send anyone any patch via e-mail. Period. So anyone should know this is not the "real thing". The concern here is not with MS, it's with people not even knowing the tools they are using, as well as some basic good sense. Most often, they won't even have figured that the e-mail address they got this from, they never gave it to MS to begin with. But hey, what the heck. That would ask of them to actually use their brain...
a dictatorship? Some topics are forbidden in universities?
There is no way you can boot Windows 2003 in under 30 seconds anyway - maybe 25 if you're lucky. This is not specially due to SCSI. That said, even 30 seconds is an awful lot compared to the couple seconds it will take to restart a service on Linux. Besides, your reasoning is totally stupid: when you have to reboot, *all* of the services will be down for at least 30 seconds. Ok. Now if you only have to restart the patched services on Linux, not only will it not take more than 1-2 seconds in most cases, but all of the services that were not patched are still running the whole time. Big difference. Windows users tend to see an OS as an essentially mono-user, "mono-task" thing. Even now in 2005.
Let's take an example scenario. You're upgrading apache on a Linux server. Restarting apache once upgraded will take exactly 1 second on my P3/800 box - I bet it would be even faster than that on any recent machine. Meanwhile, any user connected to a database, using ftp or I don't know what else, will have experienced exactly *no* downtime, not even 1 second.
Try that on Windows. You said it is "faster to just reboot". Not so. Not at all. Truth is, you really meant it is easier. "I'm lazy, so rebooting is easier". Not to mention that even Windows advocates tend to not trust Windows a whole lot; often by lack of knowing it very well; there is always a certain amount of uncertainty, so a lot of users (and even admins, I've seen that!) will think that it is just "safer" to reboot the box. One never knows... an attitude in itself that would freak out most Un*x administrators...
doesn't usually make much sense, yet it's one of the primary arguments when it comes to fighting it.
The only thing the growing of pirated software can teach us is that there is an increasing proportion of people using pirated software over legit versions. That doesn't directly equate to revenue loss. Look at how many people use a pirated version of Photoshop, for instance (let's face it, we all know there are very many!). Do you sincerely think those would have shed out a thousand bucks to buy a license? Come on... On the other hand, as with Windows, it increases the user base, and thus is actually a good marketing thing. I'm not advocating piracy, I'm just saying that the "bad" consequences are pretty hard to put figures on, and the "good" consequences may actually be easier to quantify.
I think the real problem is not a so-called revenue loss. Not yet anyway. To me, the real concern in the long run is about making people realize that purely digital (that is, immaterial) products are actually products worth buying... and it won't happen until intelligence is valued over brute force. Right now, brute force tends to win, so the only way to fight piracy is by legal means (DRM and software "locks" don't work, it has been proven over and over...) When people are ready to acknowledge "mind products", then purely technological solutions will have a chance to work... right now, the only way to deal with piracy is either to use brute force (legal enforcement with harsh penalties) or ignore it altogether.
Once again, they at Microsoft are confusing predicting the future with stating their own goals.
What they are really saying here is that one of their goals for the next 5 years is to promote their own search engine technologies and kill Google. They are just telling us what their intentions are, and try to make it sound like an inevitable market trend.
It's a bit like Nostradamus poisoning important people after predicting they would die unexpectedly. Very insightful indeed. ;-)
I think you're right. Something that gets almost completely overlooked nowadays, and especially as a result of a very fast-paced technological progress, is the "time" factor. We tend to forget that evolution takes sometimes hundreds of thousands of years before the genetic changes in a species are remarkable enough. On the other hand, some genes mutations can happen in a pretty short time span, but are usually not significant in terms of the species itself. Some people could argue that we are drifting away from the natural selection process, but this is not quite true. As long as we rely on sexual reproduction, the evolutionary process will remain essentially the same. It will probably take tens of thousands of years from now to see any remarkable change in our species - and probably in a magnitude order more than that to see any kind of forking. This is not going to happen overnight. Even if we got rid of the sexual reproduction altogether, this wouldn't guarantee that the natural selection would be over. Our cells would probably change in a way that mutations can happen very fast (such as in some insects) to overcome the lack of diversity that the lack of sexual reproduction would imply. We sure are creating part of what we are, but on a deep level, aren't all living being doing the exact same? We seem to think we are "all that" because we can temper with our genome (and even that is not going to really have an impact any time soon), but many species on Earth can also modify their own genomes in ways that we don't totally understand yet... sure it doesn't look like Science or intelligence to us, but it does work. Are we that different in the end?
as of late, any endeavor related to anti-terrorism and that looks remotely "intelligent" has a good chance of getting funded by the US government. I think that's as simple as that. Also, you wouldn't believe how many "anti-terrorism" devices and concepts have been granted a US patent the last 4 years.
I believe MSN was once run on Un*x servers. They didn't switch to Windows servers until a lot later, if memory serves well.
Well, I guess it could be debatable. But then again, if MS thinks a web browser, a multimedia player, and so forth, are part of Windows, then an antivirus program should definitely be part of it too...
Oh, because you really think MS is so fair and ethical that they would have waited for Wine to get a very solid lawyers team on its side to begin suing it? You must be kidding, right? ;-)
Well, I have a friend who has a Dell PDA running Win CE as well. It *does* need rebooting several times a day, because the whole thing freezes every once in a while. It's not lame MS bashing, it's simply the naked reality.
Not sure why you would talk about Gandhi here, but two things to remember: Gandhi was not considered a true buddhist, nor quite a hindu. His conceptions of life were only his. Second, buddhism is not a religion. At least, that's not how it considers itself.
Back to buddhism and Gandhi: actually, most true buddhists wouldn't go as far as total non-violence and starving themselves. This wouldn't quite match the buddhism philosophy, at least, as far as I know it.
All in all, a philosophy cannot tell you what to do with your sperm. It just doesn't make sense. Your sperm, like your saliva, urine and excrements, are yours only. It needs the authority of a religion to go as far as claiming to tell you what to do with your sperm.
Good point, and something clearly worth saying. Conversely, some people use the "Genius = Asperger's" as an excuse not to be able to be as focused and creative than others. It's like their reasoning is "ok, I can't be that good anyway because I don't have Asperger's".
I also think there are a lot of bad diagnoses here. Even amongst people who have worked on the subject for many years, some are still not sure there is such a thing as an Asperger's Syndrome. Just because someone has some difficulties in dealing with others doesn't automatically mean they have any kind of "syndrome". The fact that a lot of the once diagnosed "AS" succeed in overcoming the difficulties and lead a fulfilling life could tend to prove that they actually didn't quite qualify has having any kind of "medical" syndrome, such as "real" autism. (Getting a "true" autist to even talk about their own problems would be a tremendous victory.)
And finally, it seems like some countries are more inclined to diagnose youngsters with AS than others. The US is one of them. In Europe, even though we hear about it, it seems like AS is not as "popular". I wonder if, as you said, what we call AS is not more like a social syndrome than a psychiatric disorder?
Few indeed, and in my case, all due to a bad device driver in one case, and a faulty PSU in the other case. Then again, I never leave any workstation on for more than a day, maybe two at times. I'm willing to bet that fuckups would occur if I gave Windows more time to screw up. ;-)