I'm not so sure it actually worked. This sort of thing may have worked in the short term, but times and attitudes are changing. These days, if you have had a university, foundation, or charity named after you in return for money, your motives are automatically in question. True philanthropy should not put the donor in the center, and best be anonymous.
Note that lots of people we now dislike used to engage in plenty of "charitable" efforts: various kings, merchants, and potentates. After a few hundred years, philanthropy is rarely historically significant.
In evaluating what his contributions mean, we have to take into consideration (1) whether he actually owns what he is giving, (2) what his motivation is for giving, (3) whether he has previously behaved morally, (4) whether the contributions actually mean a personal sacrifice for him, and (5) whether the contributions are actually doing some good. The absolute amount, in the end, doesn't matter compared to those factors.
So, why are people criticizing him and not "giving him a break"? Simple: many people doubt that he actually has a moral claim to the money he is donating (since they believe it was acquired through illegal means and hurt the economy and progress many times over), that he is donating out of a desire to repair his tainted image, that he has a history of ruthless behavior that calls into question his motives, and that his contributions don't represent any kind of sacrifice for him. And whether his contributions are doing any good or were chosen for their PR value is also debatable.
It's perfectly fine for you to have a different view of the man, but you should understand and respect that other people interpret his actions as I outlined above. If you want to change the opinion other people have of him, then you need to address points (1-5) above. Merely pointing out that Gates has donated a lot of money in absolute terms isn't going to sway a lot of people.
But imagine, if you will, a civilization that is only 2000+ years more advanced that us.
Can you infect Egyptian papyrus rolls with a computer virus?
We can't know because it's beyond even our wildest imagination.
Of course, we can know: whether you can attack a computer system through a particular choice of input data is a mathematical problem; if it's not possible, it's simply not possible.
Richard Carrigan, a particle physicist at the US Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in Illinois
The notion that a SETI signal needs to be "decontaminated" is plausible only to people who watch too much Independence Day or Star Trek(where the most implausible feature, contrary to popular opinion, is not FTL travel, but the fact that all the computer systems in the galaxy seem to be more or less compatible).
To put it bluntly: there is no way in hell that a SETI signal is going to infect anything.
Even if it did, what would it do? Transfer thousands of dollars to Alpha Centauri? Dial galactic 1-900 numbers? Cause vacation snapshots to be transmitted via Arecibo into space? Cause Windows machines to reboot all over the nation? Kill us all by finally revealing in public Monty Python's killer joke?
What I can't figure out is whether Carrigan is merely incredibly stupid, or whether he knows that his statements are nonsense and is opportunistic. Is he perhaps annoyed at the success of efforts like SETI and wants to create FUD? Is he trying to kill funding for other branches of physics? Or is he trying to get funding for his own pet project? My money is still on "stupid and arrogant", but I'm willing to be convinced of the other possibility.
Yeah thats really smart. Make gas $6 a gallon so people already hurt by the poor economy the US is experiencing can be hurt even more.
Or maybe they'll get new and better jobs from all the high-mileage cars, energy conserving factories and homes, and public transit that would have to be be built in response.
In any case, the economy won't be hurt as badly as global warming will hurt it.
For the record, I am very environmentally minded, but the fact is that people will drive no matter what the price is. We pay around $2.50 avg around the country (not an exact figure, just estimating for sake of argument) and no one takes the bus to work.
Obviously, at $1000/gallon, people couldn't afford to drive, so there must be some point in between when they stop driving. Furthermore, it's a non-linear response and it has a built-in hysteresis, so the fact that currently, changes in price seem to influence behavior fairly little doesn't mean it's difficult to influence behavior that way. At European price levels, SUVs definitely become unattractive and people don't buy them.
Of course, there are other things one can do to get people to switch: reduce parking in the cities, make roads smaller, and collect more highway tolls. Those steps make driving less attractive, public transit more attractive, and cause people to buy smaller cars if they do drive.
Incidentally, the climate is also non-linear and with a built-in hysteresis: at some point, only adding a little more CO2 to the atmosphere may cause rapid and strong global climate changes, and they may not be reversible by reducing CO2 (quite apart from the fact that it takes centuries to reduce atmospheric CO2 appreciably since it has a long half-life).
So, both on the economy and on the climate, people like you are making the wrong assumptions: you think it has a linear, continuous response, and that you can simply extrapolate from current observations, but the fact is: you can't.
And besides, we're going to run out of oil in the next 100 years anyway, and the earth will balance itself out and go back to equilibrium, and everyone will be happy (except for the oil companaies).
More likely, half the people will be dead, the economy will be in ruins, there will be billions of refugees, and coastal cities will be flooded.
You really don't grasp the seriousness of the situation. If we convert all the fossil fuel into atmospheric CO2, really bad things will happen.
(Just in case you are serious...) Dude, you're confused about what a democracy and a free market is. Of course, Microsoft is going to try to get away with whatever sleazy and underhanded tactics they can, but in our society, it is the legitimate function of the people and government to oppose Microsoft in this every step that they can. That isn't socialism, it's democracy and a free market. What you are asking for is called totalitarianism, in which government and corporations gang up on the people.
Microsoft's patents on the C#/.NET APIs have already greatly stifled progress. If Microsoft didn't have those patents, Mono would likely be far more widely used on Linux. It has taken a lot of work to determine that those patents are likely not relevant or enforceable, and nevertheless they still have a bad PR effect for Mono.
In general, merely having a patent stifles progress and is an anti-competitive practice because it forces competitors to work around it, in particular given that Microsoft has threatened to enforce its portfolio and clearly has the means to do it.
Microsoft also uses its patent portfolio to negotiate patent cross licensing agreements and they use patents in the negotiation of individual business deals. And Microsoft uses patents to threaten countersuits when they are threatened with a legitimate patent lawsuit, usually resulting in a cross licensing deal and settlement.
You sound like another unreasonable OSS evangelist.
You bet.
Linux and anti-tobacco are also comparable in that they are led by insecure and petty people who want to tell others what to do.
I don't care about what you do: you can nurture your lung cancer and rot in Microsoft hell for all I care. When your behavior starts harming other people, however, you bet people like me will tell you what to do, and we're winning because your position is just unreasonable.
Anti-tobacco outspends tobacco by quite a bit. I wonder how much longer it will be before Linux is the new corporate whore little guy with billions behind it.
Without the careful editorial control, proof reading, and story selection found on Slashdot, Digg will be swamped with duplicates, misspelling, and partisan postings.
The people who work for Microsoft aren't evil monsters -- they're engineers and designers doing their best to do their job. Their UI people know what they're doing.
The truth is somewhere in between. Of course, MS developers want to deliver a good UI. But, of course, they are also pursuing specific business goals, like keeping competitors from entering the market.
OO is no threat in their core business -- no company that represents a real market for MS is going to give up Office for OO.
Well, obviously, Microsoft's technical and business staff doesn't believe they are capable of competing with OpenOffice on merit, quality, and functionality, because if they did, they would use a free and open document format, unencumbered by patents or license requirements. The fact that Microsoft is playing hardball again over these issues shows that they are deeply worried about the competition and know very well that OpenOffice can kill one of their cash cows.
(I won't even bother answering your technical points; they mostly demonstrate that you are ignorant of OpenOffice and its functionality.)
Bullshit. Sun, IBM, and Novel are marketing Linux to the very high end of the spectrum. If you want pro-Linux studies, do a Google search.
OK, now which of those would you like to discuss? Which of those do you want to claim show bias because of financial ties to a sponsoring institution? All of them? A small fraction of them? And why were they created? So far, you haven't been able to put together an argument.
You seem to think that just because there are two sides to an argument, we need to treat them equivalently, and that is bullshit. For Microsoft's studies, the suspicion of bias is justified by the way they were created and paid for, not because of their results. If you want to make equivalent claims about studies supporting the opposing point of view, you have to actually look at them and how they were created and make an argument. Until then, the obvious conclusion is that Microsoft's studies are biased because of their sponsoring relationship, while the Linux studies are factual, because we have no evidence to the contrary.
Linux is a grassroot effort like the anti-tobacco movement -- both are backed by many millions of dollars.
That analogy is excellent. Like the anti-tobacco movement, Linux is trying to keep people from using a harmful product. And like the anti-tobacco movement, adoption of Linux is backed by millions of dollars, going up against corporate giants spending billions of dollars on marketing--a very uneven fight. And like the anti-tobacco movement, it seems like reason is slowly prevailing in the fight against closed source software. Thank you for pointing this out.
Thank you, Microsoft, for doing your part helping to defeat DRM controls on HDTV content. I mean, what could be a better contribution to that goal than to make that content available under Windows?
So, playing games shares some physiological properties with taking drugs. But so do probably lots of other activities, like playing a musical instrument, watching television, having sex, participating in sports, running a startup company, etc. I think in order to decide whether we want to call this activity an "addiction", we need a lot more data and we ultimately need to make a judgement that goes beyond just similarity of physiological responses.
As with MP3, I envision that each file type would be associated with a given set of tags appropriate to its nature
All major file types already have means of incorporating metadata: JPEG, MP3, TIFF, MS Office, OpenOffice, mail, RPM, XPI, DEB,...
The concept needs careful thinking, of course, but it's an idea worth considering, don't you think?
Sounds like you think you are the first person to discover sex. The major difference between sex and metadata is that everybody has sex and nobody likes to actually create metadata.
I, for one would welcome a world where my downloaded files of all types would be automatically sorted because millions of people would have taken the few minutes needed to metatag them correctly at creation time. Why limit this to MP3?
Who is "limiting" anything? All major content types have provisions for metadata, and there are lots of tools for dealing with it. But the fact is: people aren't using those facilities or tools. So, what the hell are you complaining about? When was the last time you took the time to add metadata to an image or an office file?
How is a file path different than "music/albums/Irresistable Bliss" or "C:\My Documents\Soul Coughing\Irresistable Bliss\"? They're both descriptions on how to locate a series of files,
Paths have a lot more semantics than that. For example, there are operations like "move C:\My Documents\Soul Coughing\Irresistable Bliss\ D:\foobar" that simply don't exist for tags and don't even have well-defined semantics.
A "path" is a digraph that has only one node without a parent.
Suppose that I replace the fine filesystem you usually use with one single lookup table, and a relational database that maps the old file path to the entry in the lookup table. Now, the file path is just metadata.
Yes, and it doesn't behave like a pathname anymore.
From the user's perspective, nothing has changed in how they use the system at all, but that path is now very clearly metadata.
From the user's perspective, a lot has changed: the path isn't associated with location on a device, their standard GUIs don't work on it anymore. In order to make all of that work, you need a lot of additional code. That's why pathnames are not just metadata.
Well, if you can point to "pro-Linux studies", we can discuss them.
In any case, Linux isn't being adopted based on marketing, it's being adopted because of a genuine grassroots movement among technical personnell. Windows is being adopted because it's being marketed to the "decision makers"--high level managerial types who are swayed by white papers and studies. So, even if you can scrounge up some Linux studies, and even if it turned out that their methodology was flawed, the significance would be entirely different.
The only difference between a file path and, say, keywords is that the former is thinking in terms of the computer (sort of like C), whereas the latter is thinking in terms of the data (sort of like Java).
That's wrong. Paths are not just metadata, they have specific semantics associated with them that, say, tags don't. Furthermore, paths have semantics that users grasp easily and that they rely on.
Now, people have been attempting tag-based, non-hierarchical, database-based and other file management and navigation strategies since the 1960's. UNIX itself used to be graph-based, not path-based. All such attempts have been failures. Paths seem to combine power, usability, and correct semantics in a way that no other system has managed to do to date. There are specific applications (like MP3 jukeboxes) where other approaches are better, but for organizing all the stuff on a computer as a whole, sooner or later, you end up with paths and path semantics again.
bottom line is, until microsoft can build this OS to be HUGELY FASTER than linux, there's no reason to pay extra for something that doesn't have any speed advantages.
They can't. Linux is so widely used and so heavily tuned that it's pretty close to hardware speeds in most areas that matter to current software.
There are some obscure features where Linux doesn't perform well, but as soon as they stop being obscure (i.e., as soon as people start using those features widely), their performance will be improved.
i've never heard of the supercomputing crowd complaining about ease of use,
Among other things, that's because most supercomputers come with a naturally intelligent, voice operated management interface.
So there is growing interest in the notion of "time to solution" as a combination of ease of programming for, ease of using, and of course running a data set on the machine.
Ease of use on the admin side is achieved by hiring someone fulltime to maintain the machines; when you pay $1m+ for a supercomputer, you can afford to do that. So, even if Windows clusters or supercomputers were easier to administer (which they are not), that simply isn't an issue.
For programming, most of the work goes into figuring out what you want to do and how to parallelize and distribute it; there is little that Microsoft can do to help with that, and, in any case, UNIX and Linux have the most advanced and mature tools in that area anyway.
You must be kidding calling "tagging" a "technology". Tagging is as ancient as the Chinese and Egyptians and has been used on computers as long as there have been computers.
The problem with tagging is that it's about as much fun as sorting a dropped deck of punchcards; people just don't do it unless they are getting paid for it or have absolutely no choice. For example, professional photographers tag because they lose lots of sales otherwise.
And before anyone files the obvious patent, automatic tagging has also been attempted; that is, tagging where the tags are generated by some automated procedure (rule-based, AI, machine learning,...) that analyzes text, images, sound, and relationships among objects, determines appropriate tags, and assigns them. The problem with automatic tagging is that it doesn't work well yet.
Well, name one. I have tried iWork (no spreadsheet, primitive presentation program), NeoOffice/J (not quite native, not fully functional), OpenOffice 2.0 (not at all native, not fully functional), and AppleWorks (outdated, Carbon API, limited functionality). What other free fully functional office suite in the same class as MS Office or OpenOffice is there?
WTF are you talking about? It comes with iMovie, iPhoto and iDVD, and you can install GIMP if you want to.
iMovie and iPhoto are toys. iPhoto doesn't even let you edit images, only crop and adjust, and it slows to a crawl with more than a few thousand images (a day's worth of shooting). iMovie is slow and riddled with format restrictions; it may be enough for a video blog, but not much more. The Gimp is not native and definitely works a lot better under Linux.
Don't get me wrong: Final Cut Pro on a high-end dual processor Macintosh is a nice, polished environment. That kind of setup is probably the right solution for "artistic types" with lots of money. But the tools you get on Linux, for free even, are heavy-duty and used in lots of professional applications.
Well, there is no equivalent of iMovie or iDVD in the easy media creation department. Strange that you think it's the Mac which is lacking in this department.
I think Kino is the rough equivalent of iMovie, and it's only one of many tools like that.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm not so sure it actually worked. This sort of thing may have worked in the short term, but times and attitudes are changing. These days, if you have had a university, foundation, or charity named after you in return for money, your motives are automatically in question. True philanthropy should not put the donor in the center, and best be anonymous.
Note that lots of people we now dislike used to engage in plenty of "charitable" efforts: various kings, merchants, and potentates. After a few hundred years, philanthropy is rarely historically significant.
In evaluating what his contributions mean, we have to take into consideration (1) whether he actually owns what he is giving, (2) what his motivation is for giving, (3) whether he has previously behaved morally, (4) whether the contributions actually mean a personal sacrifice for him, and (5) whether the contributions are actually doing some good. The absolute amount, in the end, doesn't matter compared to those factors.
So, why are people criticizing him and not "giving him a break"? Simple: many people doubt that he actually has a moral claim to the money he is donating (since they believe it was acquired through illegal means and hurt the economy and progress many times over), that he is donating out of a desire to repair his tainted image, that he has a history of ruthless behavior that calls into question his motives, and that his contributions don't represent any kind of sacrifice for him. And whether his contributions are doing any good or were chosen for their PR value is also debatable.
It's perfectly fine for you to have a different view of the man, but you should understand and respect that other people interpret his actions as I outlined above. If you want to change the opinion other people have of him, then you need to address points (1-5) above. Merely pointing out that Gates has donated a lot of money in absolute terms isn't going to sway a lot of people.
But imagine, if you will, a civilization that is only 2000+ years more advanced that us.
Can you infect Egyptian papyrus rolls with a computer virus?
We can't know because it's beyond even our wildest imagination.
Of course, we can know: whether you can attack a computer system through a particular choice of input data is a mathematical problem; if it's not possible, it's simply not possible.
Richard Carrigan, a particle physicist at the US Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in Illinois
The notion that a SETI signal needs to be "decontaminated" is plausible only to people who watch too much Independence Day or Star Trek(where the most implausible feature, contrary to popular opinion, is not FTL travel, but the fact that all the computer systems in the galaxy seem to be more or less compatible).
To put it bluntly: there is no way in hell that a SETI signal is going to infect anything.
Even if it did, what would it do? Transfer thousands of dollars to Alpha Centauri? Dial galactic 1-900 numbers? Cause vacation snapshots to be transmitted via Arecibo into space? Cause Windows machines to reboot all over the nation? Kill us all by finally revealing in public Monty Python's killer joke?
What I can't figure out is whether Carrigan is merely incredibly stupid, or whether he knows that his statements are nonsense and is opportunistic. Is he perhaps annoyed at the success of efforts like SETI and wants to create FUD? Is he trying to kill funding for other branches of physics? Or is he trying to get funding for his own pet project? My money is still on "stupid and arrogant", but I'm willing to be convinced of the other possibility.
Yeah thats really smart. Make gas $6 a gallon so people already hurt by the poor economy the US is experiencing can be hurt even more.
Or maybe they'll get new and better jobs from all the high-mileage cars, energy conserving factories and homes, and public transit that would have to be be built in response.
In any case, the economy won't be hurt as badly as global warming will hurt it.
For the record, I am very environmentally minded, but the fact is that people will drive no matter what the price is. We pay around $2.50 avg around the country (not an exact figure, just estimating for sake of argument) and no one takes the bus to work.
Obviously, at $1000/gallon, people couldn't afford to drive, so there must be some point in between when they stop driving. Furthermore, it's a non-linear response and it has a built-in hysteresis, so the fact that currently, changes in price seem to influence behavior fairly little doesn't mean it's difficult to influence behavior that way. At European price levels, SUVs definitely become unattractive and people don't buy them.
Of course, there are other things one can do to get people to switch: reduce parking in the cities, make roads smaller, and collect more highway tolls. Those steps make driving less attractive, public transit more attractive, and cause people to buy smaller cars if they do drive.
Incidentally, the climate is also non-linear and with a built-in hysteresis: at some point, only adding a little more CO2 to the atmosphere may cause rapid and strong global climate changes, and they may not be reversible by reducing CO2 (quite apart from the fact that it takes centuries to reduce atmospheric CO2 appreciably since it has a long half-life).
So, both on the economy and on the climate, people like you are making the wrong assumptions: you think it has a linear, continuous response, and that you can simply extrapolate from current observations, but the fact is: you can't.
And besides, we're going to run out of oil in the next 100 years anyway, and the earth will balance itself out and go back to equilibrium, and everyone will be happy (except for the oil companaies).
More likely, half the people will be dead, the economy will be in ruins, there will be billions of refugees, and coastal cities will be flooded.
You really don't grasp the seriousness of the situation. If we convert all the fossil fuel into atmospheric CO2, really bad things will happen.
(Just in case you are serious...) Dude, you're confused about what a democracy and a free market is. Of course, Microsoft is going to try to get away with whatever sleazy and underhanded tactics they can, but in our society, it is the legitimate function of the people and government to oppose Microsoft in this every step that they can. That isn't socialism, it's democracy and a free market. What you are asking for is called totalitarianism, in which government and corporations gang up on the people.
Microsoft's patents on the C#/.NET APIs have already greatly stifled progress. If Microsoft didn't have those patents, Mono would likely be far more widely used on Linux. It has taken a lot of work to determine that those patents are likely not relevant or enforceable, and nevertheless they still have a bad PR effect for Mono.
In general, merely having a patent stifles progress and is an anti-competitive practice because it forces competitors to work around it, in particular given that Microsoft has threatened to enforce its portfolio and clearly has the means to do it.
Microsoft also uses its patent portfolio to negotiate patent cross licensing agreements and they use patents in the negotiation of individual business deals. And Microsoft uses patents to threaten countersuits when they are threatened with a legitimate patent lawsuit, usually resulting in a cross licensing deal and settlement.
You sound like another unreasonable OSS evangelist.
You bet.
Linux and anti-tobacco are also comparable in that they are led by insecure and petty people who want to tell others what to do.
I don't care about what you do: you can nurture your lung cancer and rot in Microsoft hell for all I care. When your behavior starts harming other people, however, you bet people like me will tell you what to do, and we're winning because your position is just unreasonable.
Anti-tobacco outspends tobacco by quite a bit. I wonder how much longer it will be before Linux is the new corporate whore little guy with billions behind it.
The sooner the better.
Without the careful editorial control, proof reading, and story selection found on Slashdot, Digg will be swamped with duplicates, misspelling, and partisan postings.
[;-]
If on the other hand, at file-save- / -creation-time, multiple tags could be associated with it
You can: office documents, images, sound, video, and other major file formats give you that option already.
and this stored in a (relational) database, then finding like-files would be a database search...much quicker.
Quicker than what? The problem isn't that metadata is slow to search through, the problem is that people don't bother to add it.
The people who work for Microsoft aren't evil monsters -- they're engineers and designers doing their best to do their job. Their UI people know what they're doing.
The truth is somewhere in between. Of course, MS developers want to deliver a good UI. But, of course, they are also pursuing specific business goals, like keeping competitors from entering the market.
OO is no threat in their core business -- no company that represents a real market for MS is going to give up Office for OO.
Well, obviously, Microsoft's technical and business staff doesn't believe they are capable of competing with OpenOffice on merit, quality, and functionality, because if they did, they would use a free and open document format, unencumbered by patents or license requirements. The fact that Microsoft is playing hardball again over these issues shows that they are deeply worried about the competition and know very well that OpenOffice can kill one of their cash cows.
(I won't even bother answering your technical points; they mostly demonstrate that you are ignorant of OpenOffice and its functionality.)
Bullshit. Sun, IBM, and Novel are marketing Linux to the very high end of the spectrum. If you want pro-Linux studies, do a Google search.
OK, now which of those would you like to discuss? Which of those do you want to claim show bias because of financial ties to a sponsoring institution? All of them? A small fraction of them? And why were they created? So far, you haven't been able to put together an argument.
You seem to think that just because there are two sides to an argument, we need to treat them equivalently, and that is bullshit. For Microsoft's studies, the suspicion of bias is justified by the way they were created and paid for, not because of their results. If you want to make equivalent claims about studies supporting the opposing point of view, you have to actually look at them and how they were created and make an argument. Until then, the obvious conclusion is that Microsoft's studies are biased because of their sponsoring relationship, while the Linux studies are factual, because we have no evidence to the contrary.
Linux is a grassroot effort like the anti-tobacco movement -- both are backed by many millions of dollars.
That analogy is excellent. Like the anti-tobacco movement, Linux is trying to keep people from using a harmful product. And like the anti-tobacco movement, adoption of Linux is backed by millions of dollars, going up against corporate giants spending billions of dollars on marketing--a very uneven fight. And like the anti-tobacco movement, it seems like reason is slowly prevailing in the fight against closed source software. Thank you for pointing this out.
Thank you, Microsoft, for doing your part helping to defeat DRM controls on HDTV content. I mean, what could be a better contribution to that goal than to make that content available under Windows?
So, playing games shares some physiological properties with taking drugs. But so do probably lots of other activities, like playing a musical instrument, watching television, having sex, participating in sports, running a startup company, etc. I think in order to decide whether we want to call this activity an "addiction", we need a lot more data and we ultimately need to make a judgement that goes beyond just similarity of physiological responses.
As with MP3, I envision that each file type would be associated with a given set of tags appropriate to its nature
...
All major file types already have means of incorporating metadata: JPEG, MP3, TIFF, MS Office, OpenOffice, mail, RPM, XPI, DEB,
The concept needs careful thinking, of course, but it's an idea worth considering, don't you think?
Sounds like you think you are the first person to discover sex. The major difference between sex and metadata is that everybody has sex and nobody likes to actually create metadata.
I, for one would welcome a world where my downloaded files of all types would be automatically sorted because millions of people would have taken the few minutes needed to metatag them correctly at creation time. Why limit this to MP3?
Who is "limiting" anything? All major content types have provisions for metadata, and there are lots of tools for dealing with it. But the fact is: people aren't using those facilities or tools. So, what the hell are you complaining about? When was the last time you took the time to add metadata to an image or an office file?
How is a file path different than "music/albums/Irresistable Bliss" or "C:\My Documents\Soul Coughing\Irresistable Bliss\"? They're both descriptions on how to locate a series of files,
Paths have a lot more semantics than that. For example, there are operations like "move C:\My Documents\Soul Coughing\Irresistable Bliss\ D:\foobar" that simply don't exist for tags and don't even have well-defined semantics.
A "path" is a digraph that has only one node without a parent.
I think you should look up that word.
Suppose that I replace the fine filesystem you usually use with one single lookup table, and a relational database that maps the old file path to the entry in the lookup table. Now, the file path is just metadata.
Yes, and it doesn't behave like a pathname anymore.
From the user's perspective, nothing has changed in how they use the system at all, but that path is now very clearly metadata.
From the user's perspective, a lot has changed: the path isn't associated with location on a device, their standard GUIs don't work on it anymore. In order to make all of that work, you need a lot of additional code. That's why pathnames are not just metadata.
Well, if you can point to "pro-Linux studies", we can discuss them.
In any case, Linux isn't being adopted based on marketing, it's being adopted because of a genuine grassroots movement among technical personnell. Windows is being adopted because it's being marketed to the "decision makers"--high level managerial types who are swayed by white papers and studies. So, even if you can scrounge up some Linux studies, and even if it turned out that their methodology was flawed, the significance would be entirely different.
The only difference between a file path and, say, keywords is that the former is thinking in terms of the computer (sort of like C), whereas the latter is thinking in terms of the data (sort of like Java).
That's wrong. Paths are not just metadata, they have specific semantics associated with them that, say, tags don't. Furthermore, paths have semantics that users grasp easily and that they rely on.
Now, people have been attempting tag-based, non-hierarchical, database-based and other file management and navigation strategies since the 1960's. UNIX itself used to be graph-based, not path-based. All such attempts have been failures. Paths seem to combine power, usability, and correct semantics in a way that no other system has managed to do to date. There are specific applications (like MP3 jukeboxes) where other approaches are better, but for organizing all the stuff on a computer as a whole, sooner or later, you end up with paths and path semantics again.
bottom line is, until microsoft can build this OS to be HUGELY FASTER than linux, there's no reason to pay extra for something that doesn't have any speed advantages.
They can't. Linux is so widely used and so heavily tuned that it's pretty close to hardware speeds in most areas that matter to current software.
There are some obscure features where Linux doesn't perform well, but as soon as they stop being obscure (i.e., as soon as people start using those features widely), their performance will be improved.
i've never heard of the supercomputing crowd complaining about ease of use,
Among other things, that's because most supercomputers come with a naturally intelligent, voice operated management interface.
So there is growing interest in the notion of "time to solution" as a combination of ease of programming for, ease of using, and of course running a data set on the machine.
Ease of use on the admin side is achieved by hiring someone fulltime to maintain the machines; when you pay $1m+ for a supercomputer, you can afford to do that. So, even if Windows clusters or supercomputers were easier to administer (which they are not), that simply isn't an issue.
For programming, most of the work goes into figuring out what you want to do and how to parallelize and distribute it; there is little that Microsoft can do to help with that, and, in any case, UNIX and Linux have the most advanced and mature tools in that area anyway.
You must be kidding calling "tagging" a "technology". Tagging is as ancient as the Chinese and Egyptians and has been used on computers as long as there have been computers.
...) that analyzes text, images, sound, and relationships among objects, determines appropriate tags, and assigns them. The problem with automatic tagging is that it doesn't work well yet.
The problem with tagging is that it's about as much fun as sorting a dropped deck of punchcards; people just don't do it unless they are getting paid for it or have absolutely no choice. For example, professional photographers tag because they lose lots of sales otherwise.
And before anyone files the obvious patent, automatic tagging has also been attempted; that is, tagging where the tags are generated by some automated procedure (rule-based, AI, machine learning,
With this sort of BS happening here, I'm moving to Canada. No, wait...
That's simply not true
Well, name one. I have tried iWork (no spreadsheet, primitive presentation program), NeoOffice/J (not quite native, not fully functional), OpenOffice 2.0 (not at all native, not fully functional), and AppleWorks (outdated, Carbon API, limited functionality). What other free fully functional office suite in the same class as MS Office or OpenOffice is there?
WTF are you talking about? It comes with iMovie, iPhoto and iDVD, and you can install GIMP if you want to.
iMovie and iPhoto are toys. iPhoto doesn't even let you edit images, only crop and adjust, and it slows to a crawl with more than a few thousand images (a day's worth of shooting). iMovie is slow and riddled with format restrictions; it may be enough for a video blog, but not much more. The Gimp is not native and definitely works a lot better under Linux.
Don't get me wrong: Final Cut Pro on a high-end dual processor Macintosh is a nice, polished environment. That kind of setup is probably the right solution for "artistic types" with lots of money. But the tools you get on Linux, for free even, are heavy-duty and used in lots of professional applications.
Well, there is no equivalent of iMovie or iDVD in the easy media creation department. Strange that you think it's the Mac which is lacking in this department.
I think Kino is the rough equivalent of iMovie, and it's only one of many tools like that.