I'm not betting against Microsoft, but I disagree with all of your reasons.
1. microsoft is continuing to develop it's products - it's not standing still, so oss will always play catchup.
They are not adding functionality for the average user. That's the whole point - the average user can't cope with all the bloat already. They may continue to add a few ridiculous extensions, but face it, all that work that went into OLE years ago, and have you ever once seen a real business document with a live link? I haven't.
2. free != free: there's still support. who do you call when you can't get staroffice to stop crashing? microsoft will always have much better (and more expenseive, but that's their game) support than some oss alternative
Yes, there needs to be support, but much less support per unit of function (owing to cleaner code), and the work is more rewarding(owing to cleaner code). Even if the user is confused, the platform doesn't have to be.
Support people will accept less pay for better working conditions. Hence a lower effective cost of support.
It's more pleasant and functional software to begin with. The opportunity to study the source offers more opportunity for professional growth in the support person's career. This means all else equal people prefer to support open source. Some of that added value of doing the support work goes back to the customer.
3. most importantly: microsoft office stuff will not be unthroned simply because too many people rely on it. people at my office have been dumbed down to the point where they send email with.doc attachments, but _everybody_ does it. given that, unless the open alternative is 100% compatible, no chance of them crushing microsoft office.
This is nonsense. The people who write email in Word aren't the (very few) who are using features that Star Office can't import without any sign of a hitch or a glitch.
The main advantage that Microsoft has is installation costs. As long as no one ships cheap boxes with Linux already on them and MS missing, the mass market will not adopt Linux. As soon as someone has the nerve to jump ship, they will make a real dent in the market.
They better have a plan to ramp up production, too, in case I'm right.
Outside of macros, Star Office is as compatible with most Office files as various Office versions are cross-compatible with each other.
The number of Office documents vastly exceeds the number of macros. Most offices have the sense to disable macros on files created at other sites anyway. Office compatibility is a non-issue in most parts of the real world.
Like most complaints about Linux alternatives, there's nothing substantive here.
As I've said on/. before, the killer app for desktop Linux is a Quickbooks equivalent. Linux will enter the business world from the low end, where MS pricing and the awkwardness of support really hurts, not from the corporate side. Every small business runs Quickbooks (or MYOB on Macs) or such and won't switch until there's a credible alternative.
The other thing that needs to happen is commodity hardware that ships with Linux on it. Among the innumerable lock-in practices that our friends in Redmond indulge in, the gentle persuasion of manufacturers not to ship installed Linux boxes is one of the most important and effective.
Small businesses do not install operating systems. If they can avoid it, they don't install anything after the initial purchase.
Those are the only two things stopping desktop Linux from making a real impact in the small office/home office market:
1) Quickbooks equivalent
2) low end commodity boxes
Maybe I should say this more often. There's a huge population of underserved end users who don't give a shit about KDE or Gnome, Simian or JXTA, and are waiting for someone to offer them an alternative to Microsoft.
This is not an ease of use issue! This is an ease of installation issue, plus a critical missing product.
I demand that my networked computer behave like a crude television, constantly interrupting what I want to do with crude advertisments.
I demand that any request that is ill-formed for any reason, be it typographical error or expired link, be immediately directed to a site where my OS provider will try to sell me expensive subscription services.
I demand the obligation to yield any and all observation and control of my workspace and how I use it to a for-profit third party at their convenience, and am pleased that they have no current plans to misuse that information.
I demand a work environment that is patronizing and obfuscated. I demand that worthless features be prominent and things I generally need be deeply hidden in multiple misnamed submenus.
I demand that all products be integrated into a single executable and that the principle of modularity be adventurously neglected.
I demand that obscure dependencies in that executable make it so difficult to develop for that environment that developers get locked in by their sunk cost of training.
I demand a work environment that requires professional support. I demand that the support strategies change so quickly that the vendor of the operating system maintain the only valid training facilities for such support techniques.
I demand a licensing structure of constantly increasing costs and constantly declining control of my hardware and software.
I demand the right to pay those bastards who have my nuts in a vise not to squeeze any harder.
Who is trying to prevent me from having access to these great new features? I say let the free market decide.
This is relevant to a more serious idea I had that also addresses IP abuse in the music industry.
There have to be an enormous number of melodies in the public domain. These should be collected into a database. (There's already a crude website that tries to do this, but I'm talking about something more elaborate.)
Ideally, one could replay music into this system (it is not used for distributing music, merely for collecting it) and it would compare against any known music in the public domain. At first, you'd have to manually enter or scan a score.
I'll bet except for some mighty wierd edgy stuff just about everything with a standard scale is already in the public domain. Would it be worthwhile to build a tool to prove it?
The pattern matching might need to get pretty clever, but the database would be large but tractable (something like MIDI, I guess). Suppose there are a million folk tunes and hymns and out-of-copyright jazz lines out there. A couple of Kbytes each.
Then start doing something like regexp parsing with a couple of simple modulations and mode changes, and I'd be surprised if you couldn't bury the copyright of just about anything.
This probably wouldn't work in any other copyright domain, but I wonder if it wouldn't effectively kill copyright on any music that uses the conventional scale.
I thought the Wired article was silly. The Linux desktop is almost mature. Most users don't use most features of Office, so playing catch-up is beside the point.
What Linux needs is (1) a widely used and highly reputed small business accounting package that integrates with spreadsheets better than Quickbooks does (2) a manufacturer selling commodity boxes for under $1000 with linux installed and (3) a plug-n-play small network with NAT with a menu selection for widely used DSL and cable modems.
None of these things seems difficult, but as far as I can tell no one has the nerve to do #2.
I don't think Linux can or should "seek" to do anything. If some commodity PC manufacturer being squeezed out of the Wintel market takes on #2, the rest will probably just happen of its own accord.
Desktop Linux has a much better shot at very small businesses (some of which will grow eventually) than at corporations with a substantial existing investment in MS stuff. However, every small business runs a small business accounting package, almost always Quickbooks.
Quickbooks does not play well with other tools, either. A tool built on SQL with a GUI front end is what is needed.
I'm interested in either finding or developing an OS small business accounting package. There are a few efforts out there but they don't seem to have achieved critical mass.
I can't understand this blind spot that seems to occur in all these Linux on the desktop discussions. Star Office resolves ~ 75 % of very-small business computer use. There is no clear substitute for Quickbooks, which would resolve almost all the rest.
Very-small-business is the ideal market for desktop Linux. They own a lot of non-current hardware, are under pressure to clean up their licensing, and can't afford the endless upgrades. Unlike non-profits, MS can't be stealing them away with well-timed "donations", and unlike corporations, MS can't hold onto them with huge sunk costs.
Interesting questions, and relevant to the whole mindset of various self-identified ethnic and religious communities in general, the Jewish community in particular, and eventually to the whole conundrum we find ourselves in.
In the case at hand, though, I identify myself as both Jewish and Canadian, in order to emphasize to the recipient that I can be considered part of their consituency. This is in the same spirit as writing your elected representative and identifying that you live in their district.
I was born at the Jewish General in Montreal, for what it's worth, and was Bar Mitzvah in Cote St Luc.
I'm deeply disturbed at the news I'm reading on the tech websites that B'Nai Brith Canada is treating a single
incident of exagerrated speech as a call to terrorism, and in turn accusing the website where such speech occurred
as itself encouraging terrorism and thus liable to hate speech controls.
As an avid internet user for the past ten years, I have grown used to childish excesses of speech. These are a small cost
to pay for genuine free exchange of ideas. Any effort to require editorial control of public exchanges on the internet
is tantamount to the elimination of the new freedom that the internet affords every individual, to be a publisher as
well as a consumer of information. No one can police any facility that allows people to say what they will - there
are too many people.
In these grim times, it is good to remember that there are good people and bad people in every community. I don't
want all Jews to have to shut up because one Jew may say something offensive, however offensive it may be. I
can't see how we can rightfully do anything but extend the same right to every other community.
The internet allows people to contact people, to break out of the narrow constraints of the mass media. If we are
to ever learn to live together in peace, there is hardly a better tool. The new freedom of speech that the internet
affords has its costs, but its potential is enormous. This is a delicate time in the history of the internet, as many people are focussing on the
difficulties and ignoring the immense potential.
The tragic events of the last year and especially the last week result from too little communication, not too much.
Please don't join the forces that want to limit communication to the few and the powerful.
sincerely
Michael Tobis, Ph.D.
Re:a must read, forward to friends
on
More On Tragedy
·
· Score: 2, Informative
sigh, this is about 25 or 30 years old at this point. I think I first read it in the Nixon era.
The Tri-Star and DC10 airplanes mentioned as pinnacles of US technology date from 1968.
This "recent" article is getting, ahem, a little tired.
Obviously, regardless how the current situation was created, recent events pass any test of requiring a military response, a response neither of revenge nor of deterrence but of necessary and total elimination. This is nothing to be happy or enthusiastic about. It's like chemotherapy. It hurts the patient but if it kills the cancer, it's worth it.
Spouting tired jingoism is neither helpful nor appropriate. Spouting jingoism that is *this* tired isn't particularly impressive either.
"C++ in 21 Days" is a typical example of why I default to O'Reilly when possible. I'm not sure why I would want a book that was written in 21 days.
Other tech book publishers than O'Reilly often produce "books" that are little more than the notes that a particular person took learning a particular technology for their own purposes. There is little attention paid to the needs or experience level of the reader. One can usually (not always - their MySQL book is almost worthless imho for example) rely on O'Reilly without getting a specific recommendation from someone.
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O'Reilly indeed has a nice introductory C++ text: "Practical C++ Programming" by Oualline.
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The best introductory unix books are still "The Unix Programming Environment" by Kernighan and Pike, and "Unix for the Impatient", (actually has an animal on the cover, but not an O'Reilly book) by Abrahams & Larson. Both classics. I still use them daily.
<P>
I don't recommend C++ either as a first language or as a first OO language, if you can avoid it. If want to learn to think in objects and you have the choice of language, I *strongly* recommend Peter van den Linden's "Just Java", the book that got your correspondent over the hump in understanding object thinking.
<P>
If there are objective criteria used and published, and Microsoft apps were as likely to be banned as any other for violating the criteria, I don't think it would be a problem. While this does move us closer to the non-personal computer (centralized service), as Macneally and Ellison have long argued, that may be the right approach for the mass market.
If the criteria are not published, though, one may reasonably presume that the criteria are not objective. Even barring malicious intent, subjective criteria would be bent to Microsoft's convenience. This is for the same reason that science uses double-blind experiments when possible. People always are biased in favor of judgements that favor their own interests. In the absence of an objective specification, I believe this no-run list would be a clear violation of monopoly power even if it were not so intended.
As I understand the matter, Sklyarov is not accused of violating US law while in US jurisdiction.
Because any acts purportedly illegal under US law performed by Mr Sklyarov occurred in a foreign country, the US has no jurisdiction. If use of his product is illegal in the US then legal exposure should be limited to those who used it in the US.
Any other interpretation is enormously risky to Americans who travel abroad, as behaviors considered innocent in the US may be illegal elsewhere. The present interpretation opens such Americans to prosecution by foreign courts for acts committed in the US.
I said bad things about the Soviet Union back in the communist era, and subsequently visited that country. My speech was illegal under the rules of the USSR. Is it the US position that the USSR would have had the right to incarcerate me for such speech, even if uttered within the US?
Furthermore, the excessive nature of the punishment damages the credibility of the US as a champion of justice and human rights in the world at large.
In short, this episode strikes me as putting matters considerably more important than intellectual property at clear risk. Why? For at best a marginally justifiable enforcement of at best a marginally justifiable case of at best a marginally justifiable criminalization of an at worst marginally damaging violation of intellectual property? At this point I think "cruel and unusual punishment" is a relevant phrase.
When I was younger, the star-trek propoganda in me had me convinced that someday we would
have a quote "world government" unquote. Nowadays, I'm beginning to realize how undesirable that
really is...
It's too late, like it or not. The choice is between world government by corporate oligarchy alone (the dominant current trend) or world government that includes other sources of power.
I have never understood why IBM conceded the desktop to MS in the first place - when OS/2 was still viable IBM's commodity hardware was almost universally shipped with MSWindows.
IBM's commitment to Linux goes no further - their laptops start at $999, but their Linux laptops start at around $3400. Hmmm, does a Linux license cost $2401, or what?
There must be some reason that no major commodity hardware vendor is willing to ship a low-cost MS free system. After all, it would be MS they are undercutting, not themselves. Hmmmm. Hmmmmmm.
There's an interesting article in today's New York Times, indicating that there's a reluctance to sue MS over its abuse of monopoly power, err, because it's a bad idea to offend the monopoly power... Do you think...?
Well lah-dee-dah you had a Ph.D in climatology, yet you can't tell me the weather next week, nor can you tell
me why it was so cold last year.
Where? Globally last year did not set a record, but it was much warmer than the mean for the past century.
So let me get this straight...the earth has gone through profound temperature shifts throughout recorded
history (and apparently before). You measured that over the past 120 years, the temperature has "changed"
(oh dear, did you trip over the obvious?), note there is a lot of CO2 in the air and say:
" Ah Ha! I've discovered a cause and effect here".
No. Whatever gave you that idea? The physics of the greenhouse effect goes back to the 1840s, and the estimate of its magnitude due to CO2 to the 1890s, all based in solid physics.
Good god. Back in the day, you had to have a certain degree of critical thinking to get a Bachelor degree.
Now they hand out Ph.D's to whoever goes along with the latest trendy science.
A Ph.D. doesn't prove anything except that you've thought about the material. I didn't mean to short circuit discussion, just to assert that I'm not totally ignorant about such things.
I got the Ph.D. because I succesfully replicated the fluid dynamics of the deep ocean on a network of parallel processors, and used that simulation to verify the utility of a modest but novel piece of mathematical dynamics. In case that matters. It doesn't really amount to conformity though.
Just a couple of things to think about:
1) Until recently, (late 70's), scientists were convinced global cooling was taking place.
I have heard that one before. The difference was that in the 1970s a few scientists were stating a suspicion in a qualitative way, whereas now you have the bulk of a rigorous quantitative field making quantitative predictions.
2) You can't wave away obvious data by saying "the details are complicated". That's sloppy science and
dishonest intellectually.
If you recall, I said exactly that.
3) You are such a conformist that you never ask the bigger questions. Until you do, you'll come to the
conclusions everyone else is. Might as well start "Baaaaah"ing now and get it over with.
Heh. No one has ever accused me of being a conformist before. I did drop out after the Ph.D., by the way, because I didn't like all the claims that modeling should be supported because "further research on the policy question is needed".
No further research is needed to support a policy at least as vigorous as Kyoto. And it's unlikely that bigger machines will produce better models any time soon. That's a big part of why I'm writing cgi's for commercial applications now.
3. The land measurement records show a warmer earth now than 120 years ago... but most of the warming
took place prior to 1940.
A lot of libertarians are victims of this sort of propaganda, and of course, a lot of/.ers are libertarians, so this is the sort of thing one might expect. This particular piece of nonsense was a constant in the coal company litany for years, though it's no longer true. 1940 is chosen because it was an unusually warm year - that spike was chosen not because 1940 is a round number but because it was the warmest year in the 20 years on either side of it. So there's a basic dishonesty there which has taken many people in. What's more, it is no longer true. Though 1940 over the 1890 baseline was over half the warming through the early 1990s, the warming has accelerated over the past decade (as expected and as predicted by theory and model).
The rest of the points are less egregiously misleading, but are the sort of carefully selected fact-wielding that junk scientists on both sides of any issue wield. The preponderance of the evidence supports the simple physics - carbon is being released into the active atmosphere/biosphere system, resulting in a residual buildup of CO2, which is a greenhouse gas, resulting in warming.
Climatology is a complicated science, but the basic facts of the matter are simple, and nothing in the complicated science shows any signs of contradicting the simple analysis. Exponentially increasing world fossil fuel consumption means exponentially more CO2 in the air above baseline means accelerating temperature increases. Period. The details are complicated, but those basic facts are not disputable any more except by people who are selective with their evidence.
As a matter of fact, I do have a Ph.D. in climatology, thanks.
MS is definitely giving away a lot of software to non-profits - my business occasionally consults with non-profits and I have noticed that many of them are running donated MS bloatware.
MS must have concluded that since there are no dollar sales to be had in that market it's best to cut off that direction of exposing well-intentioned non-money-hungry people to competent free software.
This is irritating but consistent. Non-profits have to choose their battles carefully. Why stick your neck out in a battle that isn't yours? Can the open source world have a "policy" of giving away free software that competes with MS? With installation and support?
It's time people stopped arguing that open source stuff is harder to use than Windows - it just isn't. The barriers are all monopolistic
1) familiarity in the marketplace and switchover costs (overrated in the office end-user environment but that overrating is part of problem 2)
2) FUD
3) installation costs.
I think 3 is underrated. If I *give* you a box running obscure OS A (imagine you know nothing about these OSes) and a disk that purports to be able to get B running on the box, will you risk trying to install B?
A big part of the defense against open source has to be maintaining advantage 3. When MS foists their drivel on a nonprofit, they are redirecting volunteer energies away from point 3, keeping the experience base down, and hence the installation costs of competitors up. This is good in the short run for non-profits since they don't waste their energies on peripheral concerns. It's bad for everyone in the long run because, well, because of what we all know about MS.
And it's basically unfair, because MS software is no easier to install than any other OS - it's just that the OEM does all the work.
My question to you was
So when was adult ADD first "defined and diagnosed"? You claim it was "decades before... the information age" whatever that means. Can you offer any evidence for your broad assertions?
I specified adult ADD, because that is what we are talking about here. The information you throw at me like a weapon appears in Sudderth & Kandel "Adult ADD, the Complete Handbook" Prima Press, 1997. It is immediately followed by
Over the last three decades, various journal articles have suggested that some of the symptoms seen in children with attention deficit disorder persist well into adulthood.
Yet it was not until 1978, in Scottsdale, Arizona, that a conference on the subject was held...
Let's see, you have gratuitously insulted Katz for a comment you disagreed with, you used a Hollywood movie to back up your argument, you made an unwarranted and demonstrably false broad generalization, when I found a counterexample you discounted it, and now you throw irrelevant facts at me.
But you're getting moderated up and I'm not. A sorry situation. I wonder what proportion of the people who modded you up are the proud owners of a Ritalin 'scrip.
The question as to how much adult ADD is overdiagnosed to the extent of being medically sanctioned drug dependency is not the topic at hand, though. The topic is whether the "ADD" behavior cluster is promoted by modern life and whether the diagnosis would have been taken seriously in the past. As far as I can tell, Katz is right on the money, and nothing you've said constitutes a sound (never mind polite) argument to the contrary.
More dubious logic. Have you read every word written on the subject? It took me two minutes on Google to find a counterxample.
Look up Scattered: How Attention Deficit Disorder Originates And What You Can Do About It on Amazon. You'll find the following:
Attention Deficit Disorder (ADD) has quickly become a controversial topic in recent years. Whereas other books on the subject describe the condition as inherited, Dr. Gabor Mate believes that our social and emotional environments play a key role in both the cause of and cure for thiscondition. In Scattered, he describes the painful realities of ADD and its effect on children as well as on career and social paths in adults.While acknowledging that genetics may indeed play a part in predisposing a person toward ADD, Dr. Mate moves beyond that to focus on thethings we can control: changes in environment, family dynamics, and parenting choices. He draws heavily on his own experience with the disorder, as both an ADD sufferer and the parent of three diagnosed children. Providing a thorough overview of ADD and its treatments, Scattered is essential and life-changing reading for the millions of ADD sufferers in North America today.
So when was adult ADD first "defined and diagnosed"? You claim it was "decades before... the information age" whatever that means. Can you offer any evidence for your broad assertions?
It happens I agree with Katz - ADD would never have been taken seriously as a diagnosis until recently, whether or not that should have been the case. What's more, its occurrence as a syndrome is probably more common nowadays than previously, and contrary to your sweeping assertion, at least one MD expert in the field also believes that.
Slashdot Mirror
1. microsoft is continuing to develop it's products - it's not standing still, so oss will always play catchup.
They are not adding functionality for the average user. That's the whole point - the average user can't cope with all the bloat already. They may continue to add a few ridiculous extensions, but face it, all that work that went into OLE years ago, and have you ever once seen a real business document with a live link? I haven't.
2. free != free: there's still support. who do you call when you can't get staroffice to stop crashing? microsoft will always have much better (and more expenseive, but that's their game) support than some oss alternative
Yes, there needs to be support, but much less support per unit of function (owing to cleaner code), and the work is more rewarding(owing to cleaner code). Even if the user is confused, the platform doesn't have to be.
Support people will accept less pay for better working conditions. Hence a lower effective cost of support.
It's more pleasant and functional software to begin with. The opportunity to study the source offers more opportunity for professional growth in the support person's career. This means all else equal people prefer to support open source. Some of that added value of doing the support work goes back to the customer.
3. most importantly: microsoft office stuff will not be unthroned simply because too many people rely on it. people at my office have been dumbed down to the point where they send email with .doc attachments, but _everybody_ does it. given that, unless the open alternative is 100% compatible, no chance of them crushing microsoft office.
This is nonsense. The people who write email in Word aren't the (very few) who are using features that Star Office can't import without any sign of a hitch or a glitch.
The main advantage that Microsoft has is installation costs. As long as no one ships cheap boxes with Linux already on them and MS missing, the mass market will not adopt Linux. As soon as someone has the nerve to jump ship, they will make a real dent in the market.
They better have a plan to ramp up production, too, in case I'm right.
Outside of macros, Star Office is as compatible with most Office files as various Office versions are cross-compatible with each other.
/. before, the killer app for desktop Linux is a Quickbooks equivalent. Linux will enter the business world from the low end, where MS pricing and the awkwardness of support really hurts, not from the corporate side. Every small business runs Quickbooks (or MYOB on Macs) or such and won't switch until there's a credible alternative.
The number of Office documents vastly exceeds the number of macros. Most offices have the sense to disable macros on files created at other sites anyway. Office compatibility is a non-issue in most parts of the real world.
Like most complaints about Linux alternatives, there's nothing substantive here.
As I've said on
The other thing that needs to happen is commodity hardware that ships with Linux on it. Among the innumerable lock-in practices that our friends in Redmond indulge in, the gentle persuasion of manufacturers not to ship installed Linux boxes is one of the most important and effective.
Small businesses do not install operating systems. If they can avoid it, they don't install anything after the initial purchase.
Those are the only two things stopping desktop Linux from making a real impact in the small office/home office market:
1) Quickbooks equivalent
2) low end commodity boxes
Maybe I should say this more often. There's a huge population of underserved end users who don't give a shit about KDE or Gnome, Simian or JXTA, and are waiting for someone to offer them an alternative to Microsoft.
This is not an ease of use issue! This is an ease of installation issue, plus a critical missing product.
Hey, folks. Revenue model here. Hello?
I demand that my networked computer behave like a crude television, constantly interrupting what I want to do with crude advertisments.
I demand that any request that is ill-formed for any reason, be it typographical error or expired link, be immediately directed to a site where my OS provider will try to sell me expensive subscription services.
I demand the obligation to yield any and all observation and control of my workspace and how I use it to a for-profit third party at their convenience, and am pleased that they have no current plans to misuse that information.
I demand a work environment that is patronizing and obfuscated. I demand that worthless features be prominent and things I generally need be deeply hidden in multiple misnamed submenus.
I demand that all products be integrated into a single executable and that the principle of modularity be adventurously neglected.
I demand that obscure dependencies in that executable make it so difficult to develop for that environment that developers get locked in by their sunk cost of training.
I demand a work environment that requires professional support. I demand that the support strategies change so quickly that the vendor of the operating system maintain the only valid training facilities for such support techniques.
I demand a licensing structure of constantly increasing costs and constantly declining control of my hardware and software.
I demand the right to pay those bastards who have my nuts in a vise not to squeeze any harder.
Who is trying to prevent me from having access to these great new features? I say let the free market decide.
This is relevant to a more serious idea I had that also addresses IP abuse in the music industry.
There have to be an enormous number of melodies in the public domain. These should be collected into a database. (There's already a crude website that tries to do this, but I'm talking about something more elaborate.)
Ideally, one could replay music into this system (it is not used for distributing music, merely for collecting it) and it would compare against any known music in the public domain. At first, you'd have to manually enter or scan a score.
I'll bet except for some mighty wierd edgy stuff just about everything with a standard scale is already in the public domain. Would it be worthwhile to build a tool to prove it?
The pattern matching might need to get pretty clever, but the database would be large but tractable (something like MIDI, I guess). Suppose there are a million folk tunes and hymns and out-of-copyright jazz lines out there. A couple of Kbytes each.
Then start doing something like regexp parsing with a couple of simple modulations and mode changes, and I'd be surprised if you couldn't bury the copyright of just about anything.
This probably wouldn't work in any other copyright domain, but I wonder if it wouldn't effectively kill copyright on any music that uses the conventional scale.
Yes! Exactly the great flaw in the standard libertarian position. Precisely.
(yes, redundant posting, I know, but...)
... what he said. It's important.
Micropayments.
(I tried saying that fifteen times, but it got auto-filtered out. Bah.)
Just repeat after me. Micropayments, micropayments, micropayments...
If you don't think the climate and the scenery's gonna change by 2150, think again.
What Linux needs is (1) a widely used and highly reputed small business accounting package that integrates with spreadsheets better than Quickbooks does (2) a manufacturer selling commodity boxes for under $1000 with linux installed and (3) a plug-n-play small network with NAT with a menu selection for widely used DSL and cable modems.
None of these things seems difficult, but as far as I can tell no one has the nerve to do #2.
I don't think Linux can or should "seek" to do anything. If some commodity PC manufacturer being squeezed out of the Wintel market takes on #2, the rest will probably just happen of its own accord.
Quickbooks does not play well with other tools, either. A tool built on SQL with a GUI front end is what is needed.
I'm interested in either finding or developing an OS small business accounting package. There are a few efforts out there but they don't seem to have achieved critical mass.
I can't understand this blind spot that seems to occur in all these Linux on the desktop discussions. Star Office resolves ~ 75 % of very-small business computer use. There is no clear substitute for Quickbooks, which would resolve almost all the rest.
Very-small-business is the ideal market for desktop Linux. They own a lot of non-current hardware, are under pressure to clean up their licensing, and can't afford the endless upgrades. Unlike non-profits, MS can't be stealing them away with well-timed "donations", and unlike corporations, MS can't hold onto them with huge sunk costs.
Interesting questions, and relevant to the whole mindset of various self-identified ethnic and religious communities in general, the Jewish community in particular, and eventually to the whole conundrum we find ourselves in.
In the case at hand, though, I identify myself as both Jewish and Canadian, in order to emphasize to the recipient that I can be considered part of their consituency. This is in the same spirit as writing your elected representative and identifying that you live in their district.
I'm deeply disturbed at the news I'm reading on the tech websites that B'Nai Brith Canada is treating a single incident of exagerrated speech as a call to terrorism, and in turn accusing the website where such speech occurred as itself encouraging terrorism and thus liable to hate speech controls.
As an avid internet user for the past ten years, I have grown used to childish excesses of speech. These are a small cost to pay for genuine free exchange of ideas. Any effort to require editorial control of public exchanges on the internet is tantamount to the elimination of the new freedom that the internet affords every individual, to be a publisher as well as a consumer of information. No one can police any facility that allows people to say what they will - there are too many people.
In these grim times, it is good to remember that there are good people and bad people in every community. I don't want all Jews to have to shut up because one Jew may say something offensive, however offensive it may be. I can't see how we can rightfully do anything but extend the same right to every other community.
The internet allows people to contact people, to break out of the narrow constraints of the mass media. If we are to ever learn to live together in peace, there is hardly a better tool. The new freedom of speech that the internet affords has its costs, but its potential is enormous. This is a delicate time in the history of the internet, as many people are focussing on the difficulties and ignoring the immense potential.
The tragic events of the last year and especially the last week result from too little communication, not too much. Please don't join the forces that want to limit communication to the few and the powerful.
sincerely
Michael Tobis, Ph.D.
Gordon Sinclair died in 1984.
The Tri-Star and DC10 airplanes mentioned as pinnacles of US technology date from 1968.
This "recent" article is getting, ahem, a little tired.
Obviously, regardless how the current situation was created, recent events pass any test of requiring a military response, a response neither of revenge nor of deterrence but of necessary and total elimination. This is nothing to be happy or enthusiastic about. It's like chemotherapy. It hurts the patient but if it kills the cancer, it's worth it.
Spouting tired jingoism is neither helpful nor appropriate. Spouting jingoism that is *this* tired isn't particularly impressive either.
As long as you can read what I can write and vice versa, the net will never be television, no matter how much Time and Microsoft want it to be.
"C++ in 21 Days" is a typical example of why I default to O'Reilly when possible. I'm not sure why I would want a book that was written in 21 days.
Other tech book publishers than O'Reilly often produce "books" that are little more than the notes that a particular person took learning a particular technology for their own purposes. There is little attention paid to the needs or experience level of the reader. One can usually (not always - their MySQL book is almost worthless imho for example) rely on O'Reilly without getting a specific recommendation from someone.
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O'Reilly indeed has a nice introductory C++ text: "Practical C++ Programming" by Oualline.
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The best introductory unix books are still "The Unix Programming Environment" by Kernighan and Pike, and "Unix for the Impatient", (actually has an animal on the cover, but not an O'Reilly book) by Abrahams & Larson. Both classics. I still use them daily.
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I don't recommend C++ either as a first language or as a first OO language, if you can avoid it. If want to learn to think in objects and you have the choice of language, I *strongly* recommend Peter van den Linden's "Just Java", the book that got your correspondent over the hump in understanding object thinking.
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what is that book with the camel on the jacket doing right by your mousepad?
If the criteria are not published, though, one may reasonably presume that the criteria are not objective. Even barring malicious intent, subjective criteria would be bent to Microsoft's convenience. This is for the same reason that science uses double-blind experiments when possible. People always are biased in favor of judgements that favor their own interests. In the absence of an objective specification, I believe this no-run list would be a clear violation of monopoly power even if it were not so intended.
Because any acts purportedly illegal under US law performed by Mr Sklyarov occurred in a foreign country, the US has no jurisdiction. If use of his product is illegal in the US then legal exposure should be limited to those who used it in the US.
Any other interpretation is enormously risky to Americans who travel abroad, as behaviors considered innocent in the US may be illegal elsewhere. The present interpretation opens such Americans to prosecution by foreign courts for acts committed in the US.
I said bad things about the Soviet Union back in the communist era, and subsequently visited that country. My speech was illegal under the rules of the USSR. Is it the US position that the USSR would have had the right to incarcerate me for such speech, even if uttered within the US?
Furthermore, the excessive nature of the punishment damages the credibility of the US as a champion of justice and human rights in the world at large.
In short, this episode strikes me as putting matters considerably more important than intellectual property at clear risk. Why? For at best a marginally justifiable enforcement of at best a marginally justifiable case of at best a marginally justifiable criminalization of an at worst marginally damaging violation of intellectual property? At this point I think "cruel and unusual punishment" is a relevant phrase.
It's too late, like it or not. The choice is between world government by corporate oligarchy alone (the dominant current trend) or world government that includes other sources of power.
IBM's commitment to Linux goes no further - their laptops start at $999, but their Linux laptops start at around $3400. Hmmm, does a Linux license cost $2401, or what?
There must be some reason that no major commodity hardware vendor is willing to ship a low-cost MS free system. After all, it would be MS they are undercutting, not themselves. Hmmmm. Hmmmmmm.
There's an interesting article in today's New York Times, indicating that there's a reluctance to sue MS over its abuse of monopoly power, err, because it's a bad idea to offend the monopoly power... Do you think...?
Where? Globally last year did not set a record, but it was much warmer than the mean for the past century.
So let me get this straight...the earth has gone through profound temperature shifts throughout recorded history (and apparently before). You measured that over the past 120 years, the temperature has "changed" (oh dear, did you trip over the obvious?), note there is a lot of CO2 in the air and say: " Ah Ha! I've discovered a cause and effect here".
No. Whatever gave you that idea? The physics of the greenhouse effect goes back to the 1840s, and the estimate of its magnitude due to CO2 to the 1890s, all based in solid physics.
Good god. Back in the day, you had to have a certain degree of critical thinking to get a Bachelor degree. Now they hand out Ph.D's to whoever goes along with the latest trendy science.
A Ph.D. doesn't prove anything except that you've thought about the material. I didn't mean to short circuit discussion, just to assert that I'm not totally ignorant about such things.
I got the Ph.D. because I succesfully replicated the fluid dynamics of the deep ocean on a network of parallel processors, and used that simulation to verify the utility of a modest but novel piece of mathematical dynamics. In case that matters. It doesn't really amount to conformity though.
Just a couple of things to think about: 1) Until recently, (late 70's), scientists were convinced global cooling was taking place.
I have heard that one before. The difference was that in the 1970s a few scientists were stating a suspicion in a qualitative way, whereas now you have the bulk of a rigorous quantitative field making quantitative predictions.
2) You can't wave away obvious data by saying "the details are complicated". That's sloppy science and dishonest intellectually.
If you recall, I said exactly that.
3) You are such a conformist that you never ask the bigger questions. Until you do, you'll come to the conclusions everyone else is. Might as well start "Baaaaah"ing now and get it over with.
Heh. No one has ever accused me of being a conformist before. I did drop out after the Ph.D., by the way, because I didn't like all the claims that modeling should be supported because "further research on the policy question is needed".
No further research is needed to support a policy at least as vigorous as Kyoto. And it's unlikely that bigger machines will produce better models any time soon. That's a big part of why I'm writing cgi's for commercial applications now.
Yours conformingly
If the weatherman can't predict tomorrow, how can he predict that Christmas will be colder than the fourth of July, for that matter?
A lot of libertarians are victims of this sort of propaganda, and of course, a lot of /.ers are libertarians, so this is the sort of thing one might expect. This particular piece of nonsense was a constant in the coal company litany for years, though it's no longer true. 1940 is chosen because it was an unusually warm year - that spike was chosen not because 1940 is a round number but because it was the warmest year in the 20 years on either side of it. So there's a basic dishonesty there which has taken many people in. What's more, it is no longer true. Though 1940 over the 1890 baseline was over half the warming through the early 1990s, the warming has accelerated over the past decade (as expected and as predicted by theory and model).
The rest of the points are less egregiously misleading, but are the sort of carefully selected fact-wielding that junk scientists on both sides of any issue wield. The preponderance of the evidence supports the simple physics - carbon is being released into the active atmosphere/biosphere system, resulting in a residual buildup of CO2, which is a greenhouse gas, resulting in warming.
Climatology is a complicated science, but the basic facts of the matter are simple, and nothing in the complicated science shows any signs of contradicting the simple analysis. Exponentially increasing world fossil fuel consumption means exponentially more CO2 in the air above baseline means accelerating temperature increases. Period. The details are complicated, but those basic facts are not disputable any more except by people who are selective with their evidence.
As a matter of fact, I do have a Ph.D. in climatology, thanks.
MS must have concluded that since there are no dollar sales to be had in that market it's best to cut off that direction of exposing well-intentioned non-money-hungry people to competent free software.
This is irritating but consistent. Non-profits have to choose their battles carefully. Why stick your neck out in a battle that isn't yours? Can the open source world have a "policy" of giving away free software that competes with MS? With installation and support?
It's time people stopped arguing that open source stuff is harder to use than Windows - it just isn't. The barriers are all monopolistic
- 1) familiarity in the marketplace and switchover costs (overrated in the office end-user environment but that overrating is part of problem 2)
- 2) FUD
- 3) installation costs.
I think 3 is underrated. If I *give* you a box running obscure OS A (imagine you know nothing about these OSes) and a disk that purports to be able to get B running on the box, will you risk trying to install B?A big part of the defense against open source has to be maintaining advantage 3. When MS foists their drivel on a nonprofit, they are redirecting volunteer energies away from point 3, keeping the experience base down, and hence the installation costs of competitors up. This is good in the short run for non-profits since they don't waste their energies on peripheral concerns. It's bad for everyone in the long run because, well, because of what we all know about MS.
And it's basically unfair, because MS software is no easier to install than any other OS - it's just that the OEM does all the work.
I specified adult ADD, because that is what we are talking about here. The information you throw at me like a weapon appears in Sudderth & Kandel "Adult ADD, the Complete Handbook" Prima Press, 1997. It is immediately followed by
Let's see, you have gratuitously insulted Katz for a comment you disagreed with, you used a Hollywood movie to back up your argument, you made an unwarranted and demonstrably false broad generalization, when I found a counterexample you discounted it, and now you throw irrelevant facts at me.
But you're getting moderated up and I'm not. A sorry situation. I wonder what proportion of the people who modded you up are the proud owners of a Ritalin 'scrip.
The question as to how much adult ADD is overdiagnosed to the extent of being medically sanctioned drug dependency is not the topic at hand, though. The topic is whether the "ADD" behavior cluster is promoted by modern life and whether the diagnosis would have been taken seriously in the past. As far as I can tell, Katz is right on the money, and nothing you've said constitutes a sound (never mind polite) argument to the contrary.
More dubious logic. Have you read every word written on the subject? It took me two minutes on Google to find a counterxample.
Look up Scattered: How Attention Deficit Disorder Originates And What You Can Do About It on Amazon. You'll find the following:
So when was adult ADD first "defined and diagnosed"? You claim it was "decades beforeIt happens I agree with Katz - ADD would never have been taken seriously as a diagnosis until recently, whether or not that should have been the case. What's more, its occurrence as a syndrome is probably more common nowadays than previously, and contrary to your sweeping assertion, at least one MD expert in the field also believes that.