The real toughie is whether Apple will permit OS X to run virtualized on other hardware. The usual technical excuses for why Apple isn't shipping OS X for other hardware don't hold then.
You can have all the creativity you want - but without proper leadership, all that effort and talent goes wasted.
That's total BS. Shuttleworth's developers were doing exactly the right thing--according to their own objectives. They needed to get marketable technologies and software skills onto their resumes and they wanted to be on a big project, so they developed a complex, reusable, cross-platform Java solution.
These people didn't need better leadership, they needed the right kinds of incentives. Incentivize them to deliver something quickly and cheaply and they'll figure it out. For example (this doesn't really work, but it illustrates the point), you might say "The total budget for this project is $2M; we pay your salaries from that. If you're done earlier, you get whatever is left as a bonus." That would provide a strong incentive for people to produce the quick-and-dirty PHP solution, as opposed to the complicated J2EE solution.
This sort of thing is a general problems with developers, and how it manifests itself depends on the environment.
In fact, it tends to be more a problem with closed source projects in large companies (as well as with lavishly funded open source projects). Why? Because the developers in large companies are well funded, they can go on forever doing their pet things, and upper management is often easily fooled about what's going on. The only reason Shuttleworth caught this is because he has a clue. Arguably, most of Vista is like that, although there the problem isn't that Microsoft management doesn't understand what their engineers are doing, it's that Microsoft management has the same set of warped gearhead goals as their engineers. It's also the reason why the Java enterprise platform is getting ever more bloated and unwieldy, while most real people write stuff in PHP.
In contrast, many open source projects, as Shuttleworth observes, are projects that have "an itch to scratch"; the code may not be pretty, but it helps get the primary jobs of the people who are developing it done--and their primary job is not to create complex software systems or re-invent XUL.
It's not reasonable to blame developers for it--after all, they aren't generally paid to make customers happy, they don't benefit from happy customers, so why should they care? Developers have to worry about making the resume look good, and a bigger, more complex project using the latest technology looks better than pushing a small VB or PHP app out the door.
So, if you're funding open source projects, make sure that you're getting your money's worth and keep in touch with the engineers you're paying. And if you're a manager in a big corporation with a large software development staff and you actually care about delivering good software, you have your choice of jumping off a roof or changing jobs.
no physical phenomenon can operate only for masses travelling above a fixed speed like that because such a phenomenon would violate Lorentz invariance.
The "0.577 c" threshold seems to be the relative velocity of the two masses, which makes sense for this kind of effect if you think about it.
That means he's made up some new physics, something completely untested, and is therefore a crackpot.
I like that definition, because it supports my long-held assertion that most mainstream physicists are, in fact, crackpots as well.
Why? For rotating masses, you get frame dragging (experimentally verified), so for masses moving linearly, it seems like you ought to get something. Whether his particular solution is correct remains to be verified.
Re:How does it handle values outside the range?
on
More iTunes Math
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Carbon applications are usually written in Objective C.
Carbon applications are usually written in languages other than Objective-C. Carbon is the old Macintosh APIs adapted to OS X.
Cocoa applications are usually written in Objective-C. Cocoa is derived from the NeXTStep libraries.
Felber's research shows that any mass moving faster than 57.7 percent of the speed of light will gravitationally repel other masses lying within a narrow 'antigravity beam' in front of it. [...] In the 'antigravity beam' of a speeding star, a payload would draw its energy from the antigravity force of the much more massive star.
So, in order to accelerate close to the speed of light, you just need to accelerate "a massive star" to more than 57.7% of the speed of light? Well, that sure makes things easier.
Seriously, effects like this have been known for a while, but it's unlikely that they help getting close to the speed of light for practical reasons.
I think for this sort of thing to work, Gmail needs to support IMAP.
Also, they need to make clear and specific commitments to data retention guidelines. It may or may not be a problem for you that your E-mail in your Gmail account could hang around forever, but for businesses, that is an unacceptable risk. E-mail data (like other business records) needs to be retained for a specific amount of time, no more and no less.
I love debugging a C++ callstack that goes in and out of an interpreter a few times. It's bad enough having ten programmers with different approaches to programming without mixing langauges.
Well, you can think of anything that goes into the interpreter as something that takes you out of the prison of C or C++. I mean, for the brief, glorious times that you actually are in the interpreter, you are free of pointer bugs, arrays without bounds, and other problems.
Too many cooks spoiling the broth IS what causes it, but why make the dig at big companies?
Because those kinds of projects are commonplace at big companies, while they are the exception for open source projects: most open source projects simply don't have the resources to support lots of mediocre engineers that aren't really interested in the product.
However, I'm not even sure that gcc and XFree86 are good examples of FOSS development problems. The reason gcc and XFree86 have become so big and messy is precisly because they have had so much corporate support. And I think gcc has managed the complexity fairly well--doing a multi-language multi-target compiler completely in C is a really tough task. As for XFree86, its license notwithstanding, it had started to acquire corporate-like structures, and the X.org fork was the answer and the solution.
OOo is at the same stage as Mozilla was: a functional but bloated and messy codebase and system. Unfortunately, that's what big companies tend to produce (I think it's a consequence of having too many engineers, many of which are mediocre).
What needs to happen to it is what happened to Firefox: the thing needs to be split up, the GUI and cross platform toolkit need to be overhauled (or even replaced with Gtk+), and Java needs to be exorcised from it.
And, yes, severing the connection with Sun would be a good thing for OOo, and ultimately for Sun as well.
Sun would cut off the proverbial nose to spite their face. Their proprietary control of Java and their failure to standardize Java through an open process has hurt them big time. They missed the boat with NeWS as well by keeping it proprietary. And they're going to retain control of OpenOffice and annoy people until that, too, will have been replaced by something else.
Sun is cleverly attempting to drive themselves out of business, and they are doing it ever so gently, gradually, and persistently.
I think what will be more important than XGL will be the Windows and OS X versions; the currently available free X11 servers on those platforms tend to be slow and feature-limited. Apple's X11, for example, doesn't handle international keyboard input correctly, doesn't implement RANDR, and doesn't adapt to changes in screen resolution correctly.
Implicit argument from authority. Can you say logical fallacy?
An argument from authority isn't a logical fallacy.
If you really want to prove this point, come up with some statistics showing that you're right,
I disagree with your premise that it requires "statistics". A major example is sufficient: look at the IEEE copyright assignment form (search on Google). IEEE is the major publisher for technology, engineering, and CS content.
contrary evidence [arxiv.org]
I have put stuff into Arxiv, in clear violation of IEEE copyright policy. So, the existence of Arxiv fails to be evidence for your contention that people do not need to assign copyright and that people do not flaunt copyright assignments.
Not really. The journal market is very small. A journal can hope for 20,000 institutional subscriptions if they're very successful. This is very low volume, which drives up the cost of publishing. Many journals also use archival quality paper and good ink.
Then on-line publication of journals should be nearly free, but it isn't. In fact, it often costs the same as paper publishing, or can't be separated from a paper subscription.
Academics are not "flaunting" copyrights when they publish their articles on the web. They're embracing them. Journals are not usually given exclusive distribution rights.
You haven't published a lot yet, have you.
Journals are extremely inexpensive considering that a subscription for a library only costs about twice as much as a personal subscription.
That's not the point. The point is that even the personal subscriptions are way too expensive.
That's why so many PhD places in scientific fields are funded by industrial grants
Ph.D.'s in scientific fields have become increasingly funded through industrial grants because companies are scared that they can't get graduates otherwise.
and indeed why so much leading edge research in, say, IT, comes out of the R&D labs of major corporations rather than universities.
Actually, there hasn't been a lot of "leading edge research" in IT at all, and what has been there has mostly come out of universities.
Of course it was. That's why most of the useful and/or entertaining web sites I visit carry ads and/or offer subscription options.
As I was saying, the technologies that those sites are based on has been largely developed with public funding.
Remember, there is no such thing as public money. There is only money the government takes from its population through taxes, and redistributes as it sees fit with or without the population's support.
Yes, that is the primary purpose of government: to fund public goods. And arts and scientific research are textbook examples of public goods. Trying to privatize them is a relatively recent phenomenon and has been largely (and predictably) a failure.
Just how many Africans owned ships capable of transporting slaves across the pond to the Americas?
Blacks in Africa enslaved other blacks in Africa. Blacks in Africa sent off (=shipped) blacks to the US as slaves. Europeans sent off white Europeans to the US as slaves. Slavery was acceptable to many people back then, of all colors and all ethnicities. This was not an evil-white vs. good-African kind of thing. (Also, African slave traders apparently were often quite rich; I see no reason why they shouldn't have owned slave ships, not that it matters.)
It was an atrocity, and one that plagues race relations to this very day, though some people seem to think the whole matter ought to be ignored in favor of a happy "we're all equals now" mantra.
The simple fact is that none of my ancestors ever did anything to your ancestors, going back at least four centuries, and the same thing is true for many millions of other white-skinned Americans (not to mention, hundreds of millions of white-skinned Europeans). Furthermore, chances are that you yourself are far more closely related to Southern slave owners than to Africans, even if your skin is dark. I'm sorry this is still an issue for you, but that is ultimately your own problem and nobody else's. I don't owe you anything for the things some of your ancestors did to others of your ancestors just because I happen to have a melanin deficiency.
But I will say that I think academic publishers have it right (except for a few obnoxious exceptions). Academic journals are expensive, but publishers tend to give very good deals to libraries for the expressed purpose of disseminating the information therein. There's no '500 seat license' or any silliness like that. And they actually respect 'fair use'.
You must be kidding. First of all, academic publishers do essentially no work for the money they get paid anymore: all the editing and reviewing is unpaid volunteer labor, and even the typesetting has become trivial. Second, the enormous cost of academic journals is a huge problem for university libraries. Third, "500 seat licenses" is exactly what academic publishers are moving to with their on-line distributions.
The degree to which publishers give "discounts" is simply to do differential pricing to extract the maximum amount of information from every university library they can.
I suspect this is because the writers and editors of most academic journals love the field in which they work.
No, it's because they don't have a choice. If you want to rise in academics, you must write, publish, and become an editor at a prestigious journal, and those journals milk their brand name for every dollar they can.
Fortunately, academics are increasingly flaunting copyrights and putting their papers on the web. And academic journals can't really do much about it because if they start heavy-handed enforcement, people are going to publish elsewhere. So, we can cross our fingers and hope that the folly of the current system of academic publishers will slowly but surely come to an end.
Straw man arguement. These advances are protected by patents.
No, scientific advances are not protected by patents, and neither are many engineering advances.
One anecdotal example does not prove you case.
The US computer industry isn't "anecdotal", it's a well-understood, widely studied, and hugely important part of the economy. Given that such a big part of the US economy managed to become so important and dominant so quickly without patents, the ball is in your court to prove your case.
Things changed with the industrial revolution. C'mon, this is basic history.
Yes, things changed with the industrial revolution: patronage has become democratized in the form of not-for-profit institutions and public funding for research and the arts. Almost all the important science, medical research, engineering, and art is funded that way, even today.
Your argument doesn't work. For example, Microsoft didn't get big through patronage, and they didn't have the benefit of patent or significant copyright protection when they started out. Neither did Disney (in fact, Disney has built their company by copying and recycling other people's ideas). And as someone who creates new inventions and writes a lot, I can tell you personally: patents and copyrights do not reward me for my work in any way.
As for patronage, it still exists and it is far more generous than it has ever been. It's called public research funding. And it works. Almost everything you use on the Internet was funded that way, directly or indirectly.
Slashdot Mirror
The real toughie is whether Apple will permit OS X to run virtualized on other hardware. The usual technical excuses for why Apple isn't shipping OS X for other hardware don't hold then.
You can have all the creativity you want - but without proper leadership, all that effort and talent goes wasted.
That's total BS. Shuttleworth's developers were doing exactly the right thing--according to their own objectives. They needed to get marketable technologies and software skills onto their resumes and they wanted to be on a big project, so they developed a complex, reusable, cross-platform Java solution.
These people didn't need better leadership, they needed the right kinds of incentives. Incentivize them to deliver something quickly and cheaply and they'll figure it out. For example (this doesn't really work, but it illustrates the point), you might say "The total budget for this project is $2M; we pay your salaries from that. If you're done earlier, you get whatever is left as a bonus." That would provide a strong incentive for people to produce the quick-and-dirty PHP solution, as opposed to the complicated J2EE solution.
This sort of thing is a general problems with developers, and how it manifests itself depends on the environment.
In fact, it tends to be more a problem with closed source projects in large companies (as well as with lavishly funded open source projects). Why? Because the developers in large companies are well funded, they can go on forever doing their pet things, and upper management is often easily fooled about what's going on. The only reason Shuttleworth caught this is because he has a clue. Arguably, most of Vista is like that, although there the problem isn't that Microsoft management doesn't understand what their engineers are doing, it's that Microsoft management has the same set of warped gearhead goals as their engineers. It's also the reason why the Java enterprise platform is getting ever more bloated and unwieldy, while most real people write stuff in PHP.
In contrast, many open source projects, as Shuttleworth observes, are projects that have "an itch to scratch"; the code may not be pretty, but it helps get the primary jobs of the people who are developing it done--and their primary job is not to create complex software systems or re-invent XUL.
It's not reasonable to blame developers for it--after all, they aren't generally paid to make customers happy, they don't benefit from happy customers, so why should they care? Developers have to worry about making the resume look good, and a bigger, more complex project using the latest technology looks better than pushing a small VB or PHP app out the door.
So, if you're funding open source projects, make sure that you're getting your money's worth and keep in touch with the engineers you're paying. And if you're a manager in a big corporation with a large software development staff and you actually care about delivering good software, you have your choice of jumping off a roof or changing jobs.
Pussy, not pussy, you schmuck.
You just gave us another example why sex ed is so important!
no physical phenomenon can operate only for masses travelling above a fixed speed like that because such a phenomenon would violate Lorentz invariance.
The "0.577 c" threshold seems to be the relative velocity of the two masses, which makes sense for this kind of effect if you think about it.
That means he's made up some new physics, something completely untested, and is therefore a crackpot.
I like that definition, because it supports my long-held assertion that most mainstream physicists are, in fact, crackpots as well.
Personally I'm a bit skeptical about his claims,
Why? For rotating masses, you get frame dragging (experimentally verified), so for masses moving linearly, it seems like you ought to get something. Whether his particular solution is correct remains to be verified.
Carbon applications are usually written in Objective C.
Carbon applications are usually written in languages other than Objective-C. Carbon is the old Macintosh APIs adapted to OS X.
Cocoa applications are usually written in Objective-C. Cocoa is derived from the NeXTStep libraries.
Felber's research shows that any mass moving faster than 57.7 percent of the speed of light will gravitationally repel other masses lying within a narrow 'antigravity beam' in front of it. [...] In the 'antigravity beam' of a speeding star, a payload would draw its energy from the antigravity force of the much more massive star.
So, in order to accelerate close to the speed of light, you just need to accelerate "a massive star" to more than 57.7% of the speed of light? Well, that sure makes things easier.
Seriously, effects like this have been known for a while, but it's unlikely that they help getting close to the speed of light for practical reasons.
I think for this sort of thing to work, Gmail needs to support IMAP.
Also, they need to make clear and specific commitments to data retention guidelines. It may or may not be a problem for you that your E-mail in your Gmail account could hang around forever, but for businesses, that is an unacceptable risk. E-mail data (like other business records) needs to be retained for a specific amount of time, no more and no less.
I love debugging a C++ callstack that goes in and out of an interpreter a few times. It's bad enough having ten programmers with different approaches to programming without mixing langauges.
Well, you can think of anything that goes into the interpreter as something that takes you out of the prison of C or C++. I mean, for the brief, glorious times that you actually are in the interpreter, you are free of pointer bugs, arrays without bounds, and other problems.
Even when string theory was new, it was hardly "revolutionary". It was more like SP17 for an already aging and proplematic physical theory.
That's easy. It's all about corporate hatred and biting the hand that feeds you.
I think he is saying that OOo would actually benefit from a little less feeding because it is rather obese already.
Too many cooks spoiling the broth IS what causes it, but why make the dig at big companies?
Because those kinds of projects are commonplace at big companies, while they are the exception for open source projects: most open source projects simply don't have the resources to support lots of mediocre engineers that aren't really interested in the product.
However, I'm not even sure that gcc and XFree86 are good examples of FOSS development problems. The reason gcc and XFree86 have become so big and messy is precisly because they have had so much corporate support. And I think gcc has managed the complexity fairly well--doing a multi-language multi-target compiler completely in C is a really tough task. As for XFree86, its license notwithstanding, it had started to acquire corporate-like structures, and the X.org fork was the answer and the solution.
OOo is at the same stage as Mozilla was: a functional but bloated and messy codebase and system. Unfortunately, that's what big companies tend to produce (I think it's a consequence of having too many engineers, many of which are mediocre).
What needs to happen to it is what happened to Firefox: the thing needs to be split up, the GUI and cross platform toolkit need to be overhauled (or even replaced with Gtk+), and Java needs to be exorcised from it.
And, yes, severing the connection with Sun would be a good thing for OOo, and ultimately for Sun as well.
Sun would cut off the proverbial nose to spite their face. Their proprietary control of Java and their failure to standardize Java through an open process has hurt them big time. They missed the boat with NeWS as well by keeping it proprietary. And they're going to retain control of OpenOffice and annoy people until that, too, will have been replaced by something else.
Sun is cleverly attempting to drive themselves out of business, and they are doing it ever so gently, gradually, and persistently.
I think what will be more important than XGL will be the Windows and OS X versions; the currently available free X11 servers on those platforms tend to be slow and feature-limited. Apple's X11, for example, doesn't handle international keyboard input correctly, doesn't implement RANDR, and doesn't adapt to changes in screen resolution correctly.
Implicit argument from authority. Can you say logical fallacy?
An argument from authority isn't a logical fallacy.
If you really want to prove this point, come up with some statistics showing that you're right,
I disagree with your premise that it requires "statistics". A major example is sufficient: look at the IEEE copyright assignment form (search on Google). IEEE is the major publisher for technology, engineering, and CS content.
contrary evidence [arxiv.org]
I have put stuff into Arxiv, in clear violation of IEEE copyright policy. So, the existence of Arxiv fails to be evidence for your contention that people do not need to assign copyright and that people do not flaunt copyright assignments.
Not really. The journal market is very small. A journal can hope for 20,000 institutional subscriptions if they're very successful. This is very low volume, which drives up the cost of publishing. Many journals also use archival quality paper and good ink.
Then on-line publication of journals should be nearly free, but it isn't. In fact, it often costs the same as paper publishing, or can't be separated from a paper subscription.
Academics are not "flaunting" copyrights when they publish their articles on the web. They're embracing them. Journals are not usually given exclusive distribution rights.
You haven't published a lot yet, have you.
Journals are extremely inexpensive considering that a subscription for a library only costs about twice as much as a personal subscription.
That's not the point. The point is that even the personal subscriptions are way too expensive.
That's why so many PhD places in scientific fields are funded by industrial grants
Ph.D.'s in scientific fields have become increasingly funded through industrial grants because companies are scared that they can't get graduates otherwise.
and indeed why so much leading edge research in, say, IT, comes out of the R&D labs of major corporations rather than universities.
Actually, there hasn't been a lot of "leading edge research" in IT at all, and what has been there has mostly come out of universities.
Of course it was. That's why most of the useful and/or entertaining web sites I visit carry ads and/or offer subscription options.
As I was saying, the technologies that those sites are based on has been largely developed with public funding.
Remember, there is no such thing as public money. There is only money the government takes from its population through taxes, and redistributes as it sees fit with or without the population's support.
Yes, that is the primary purpose of government: to fund public goods. And arts and scientific research are textbook examples of public goods. Trying to privatize them is a relatively recent phenomenon and has been largely (and predictably) a failure.
Just how many Africans owned ships capable of transporting slaves across the pond to the Americas?
Blacks in Africa enslaved other blacks in Africa. Blacks in Africa sent off (=shipped) blacks to the US as slaves. Europeans sent off white Europeans to the US as slaves. Slavery was acceptable to many people back then, of all colors and all ethnicities. This was not an evil-white vs. good-African kind of thing. (Also, African slave traders apparently were often quite rich; I see no reason why they shouldn't have owned slave ships, not that it matters.)
It was an atrocity, and one that plagues race relations to this very day, though some people seem to think the whole matter ought to be ignored in favor of a happy "we're all equals now" mantra.
The simple fact is that none of my ancestors ever did anything to your ancestors, going back at least four centuries, and the same thing is true for many millions of other white-skinned Americans (not to mention, hundreds of millions of white-skinned Europeans). Furthermore, chances are that you yourself are far more closely related to Southern slave owners than to Africans, even if your skin is dark. I'm sorry this is still an issue for you, but that is ultimately your own problem and nobody else's. I don't owe you anything for the things some of your ancestors did to others of your ancestors just because I happen to have a melanin deficiency.
But I will say that I think academic publishers have it right (except for a few obnoxious exceptions). Academic journals are expensive, but publishers tend to give very good deals to libraries for the expressed purpose of disseminating the information therein. There's no '500 seat license' or any silliness like that. And they actually respect 'fair use'.
You must be kidding. First of all, academic publishers do essentially no work for the money they get paid anymore: all the editing and reviewing is unpaid volunteer labor, and even the typesetting has become trivial. Second, the enormous cost of academic journals is a huge problem for university libraries. Third, "500 seat licenses" is exactly what academic publishers are moving to with their on-line distributions.
The degree to which publishers give "discounts" is simply to do differential pricing to extract the maximum amount of information from every university library they can.
I suspect this is because the writers and editors of most academic journals love the field in which they work.
No, it's because they don't have a choice. If you want to rise in academics, you must write, publish, and become an editor at a prestigious journal, and those journals milk their brand name for every dollar they can.
Fortunately, academics are increasingly flaunting copyrights and putting their papers on the web. And academic journals can't really do much about it because if they start heavy-handed enforcement, people are going to publish elsewhere. So, we can cross our fingers and hope that the folly of the current system of academic publishers will slowly but surely come to an end.
Straw man arguement. These advances are protected by patents.
No, scientific advances are not protected by patents, and neither are many engineering advances.
One anecdotal example does not prove you case.
The US computer industry isn't "anecdotal", it's a well-understood, widely studied, and hugely important part of the economy. Given that such a big part of the US economy managed to become so important and dominant so quickly without patents, the ball is in your court to prove your case.
Copyright laws were introduced shortly after the invention of the printing press; but thanks for proving his point for him.
That's a snappy retort, which, however, oversimplifies the history of copyrights and their enforcement to the point of absurdity.
Things changed with the industrial revolution. C'mon, this is basic history.
Yes, things changed with the industrial revolution: patronage has become democratized in the form of not-for-profit institutions and public funding for research and the arts. Almost all the important science, medical research, engineering, and art is funded that way, even today.
Your argument doesn't work. For example, Microsoft didn't get big through patronage, and they didn't have the benefit of patent or significant copyright protection when they started out. Neither did Disney (in fact, Disney has built their company by copying and recycling other people's ideas). And as someone who creates new inventions and writes a lot, I can tell you personally: patents and copyrights do not reward me for my work in any way.
As for patronage, it still exists and it is far more generous than it has ever been. It's called public research funding. And it works. Almost everything you use on the Internet was funded that way, directly or indirectly.