This whole story looks like a thinly veiled ad for a startup. Their main product isn't the overall reporting of test coverage and other metrics, their main product is an automated test case generation tool (one that seems to generate oodles of data, just no anything that looks very useful).
Should you collect statistics on your project, bugs, test coverage, and all that? By all means. And there are lots of tools to do that, free and commercial.
I want a calendar that I can maintain on my own, yet, allow for a dynamic overlay of a subset of this calendar to be viewed and/or maintained in other user calendars.
You mean like Yahoo! Calendar, Outlook, and just about every other kind of groupware offers?
I need to write stuff, browse the web, make phone calls, send IM, add to my blog, collaborate on an application with someone over the net, etc. I can do all of that very well with the tools I already have.
I don't see how a "seamless 3D environment" makes that any easier. If anything, I want less clutter and less glitz on my desktop, not omre.
that the contents so protected never make it into the public domain because there are no copies that can fall into the public domain. The publisher, on the other hand, can reissue the same content with a new copyright over and over again.
This may well violate the Constitution, since it really is contradicts the "for a limited time" clause.
It gets progressively more difficult to create seamless solutions when there are nearly infinite possibilities for customization and tweaking of settings. There's a basic tension in principle that can never be completely resolved.
Sure, it can be resolved: through proper modular architecture. The UNIX shell and its associated commands have such an architecture.
Mozilla and all the other Windows refugees, on the other hand, don't. The fault isn't Microsoft's or Netscape's, though: their programmers are just victims of a bad education. They actually think that building huge object-oriented architectures in which thousands of classes live all within the same address space is a good idea. That sort of silliness started with Smalltalk, which taught a generation of programmers that putting thousands of classes together and coupling them as closely as possible is a good thing.
There is a non-bloated, good, modular architecture for GUIs out there somewhere, but someone yet needs to find it. Perhaps the first step is for people to start realizing that it is worth looking for it and that the kind of bloat represented by Mozilla, MS Office, and OpenOffice is not inevitable.
You two are talking about different senses of the word "standard": one is the sense of "something that a lot of people use", the other is the sense of "a protocol or API that a lot of people code to". Among standards, we distinguish "de facto standards" and "official standards", where it is generally understood that something is an official standard unless you qualify it explicitly (just like it is usually understood that birds can fly unless you specifically talk about flightless birds).
Exchange is a "de facto standard" in the sense that it's a product a lot of people use. But it isn't a "standard" in the sense of being something that has been defined in writing that people can write interoperable products for.
Now, Win32 and Java are "de facto standard" in the sense of being something well-defined. One may or may not choose to re-implement or interoperate with them, but at least that is something one can talk about. For Exchange, there simply is nothing one can target, it is just a proprietary piece of software.
So, harping on the fact that Exchange is a "de-facto standard" is useless in the context of this discussion: the fact that lots of people use it is not relevant to the question of what kinds of protocols FOSS groupware should use since we can't use Exchange's protocols.
What FOSS can and should do is make FOSS alternatives to Exchange and Outlook look and feel as close as possible to Microsoft products so that administrators and users will accept it more easily, and that interoperate as much as possible with existing Exchange servers and Outlook clients. And that's exactly what they are doing. So, the fact that Exchange is a "de facto standard" isn't big "terrible" news to Slashdotters, it is something that has already been incorporated into FOSS plans for Exchange alternatives to the degree technically possible.
Perhaps the most amazing find is the bacteria staying in a dormant state inside liquid inclusions in salt crystals for 250 million years (BBC story).
In fact, that finding by Vreeland and Rosenzweig is apparently not the first one of bacteria that are alive after hundreds of millions of years in a dormant state, but it has caught the attention of other researchers because they seem to have been particularly careful to avoid contamination.
Nevertheless, until those findings are more widely accepted, they will need to get replicated a lot more by many more groups, and the sequence data will have to be examined very carefully.
However, between all these findings, it seems pretty much clear that bacteria can stay dormant for a long, long time. One implication of that is panspermia, namely that life didn't evolve on earth but arrived here from space in the form of microbes, perhaps even traveling interstellar distances.
Anybody who has to mention "innovation" repeatedly in their press releases, and even put it in italics, probably doesn't have much of it. Companies that actually do innovate just advertise with their product features, and the innovation is self-explanatory.
heh. I insist that you acknowledge me as being a Penguin. (arguments don't work by insisting, they work by convincing.)
It just shows how absurd Searle's point is: even if he were having a conversation with a computer, a conversation about philosophy, life, love, and all that, he'd not admit that the computer is intelligent just because it is made out of the wrong stuff.
Thats a cheap shot. Searle spent years discussing his argument before he published, and years afterwards addressing objections.
Many philosophers spend years on creating stupid, non-sensical arguments before publishing. It seems to be a professional affliction of that particular discipline.
You are right: this software does not understand language; it works out statistical correspondences, but it has no understanding of the physical correlates of words. That also means that it has intrinsic limitations.
Note also that such statistical approaches are nothing new, it's just that computers are finally getting powerful enough that people can use them.
None of that has anything to do with Searle. Searle wouldn't admit that the system understands language even if it knew things about the real world. Searle's argument is arbitrary and ad hoc. You are free to believe in it if you like, but sooner or later, you will have to defend your position against a computer that will insist that if you don't admit the possibility that it is self-aware and intelligent, well, it is just going to assert that you aren't either.
What more I want is the reliability and customer support of an Apple, rather than the post-point-of-sale neglect that Archos offers.
I'm not impressed with Apple quality over the last few years: I have had two top-of-the-line ($4000) Titanium powerbooks break within a few weeks after getting them, and WiFi reception on my iBook is awful. That's not surprising, given that Apple uses the same contract manufacturers as everybody else.
Buy Archos at your own risk. If it breaks, you're going to be SOL.
Ditto for Apple. It's all a game of chance, and any advantage that Apple used to have in this area seems to have disappeared as far as I can tell.
I know this is hard to understand for some, but eye candy isn't the primary purpose of a desktop, usability is. A desktop using just black-and-white pixels can be far more usable than one with shadows, transparency, and all those other features.
Also, people should remember that neither Apple nor Rasterman invented features such as the use of translucency, blurring, shadows, etc.--they go back many years in the academic literature as visual clues.
Furthermore, support for translucency itself has been discussed in the X community pretty much since the day X11 was released, and the reason for not adding it has been a high cost/benefit ratio. It's only now that hardware has gotten cheap and good enough that many people can use this, and that toolkits are starting to use it, and that people have the software engineering side under control that people are getting around to adding this feature to X11. From a practical point of view, that's probably about the right time.
It was easy to disprove the existence of aether with the Michelson-Morley experiment
Like interpretations of so many classic physics experiments taught in high school and college, that interpretation is somewhat simplistic. The Michelson-Morley experiment showed that the observed speed of light did not depend on the state of motion of the observer.
That does exclude simple models in which light propagates exactly analogous to sound. But it excludes few other models. In particular, there are models of an "aether" that can account for those observations, and Lorentz actually believed in those when he developed the equations that form the basis of Einstein's theory of special relativity. People just didn't adopt that view because Einstein's explanation seemed simpler.
No, that's not an option. Anything we would call a "star" emits light like any other hot body, and that necessarily includes lots of detectable light, at least at IR wavelengths.
Have a look a the Archos PMA 400. It's a 30M disk-based player with a 320x240 screen, a long battery life, and the ability to record audio and video. It has USB device and master connectivity and WiFi. And it runs Linux and has lots of software available for it. What more do you want?
That's true for any standard. Nobody can protect you from patent claims against a standard. Also note that anybody can make patent claims against a standard. Microsoft can make patent claims against Java, and Sun against Mono, and both against Python or anything else. There are no guarantees.
The problem is more a political one. On Mono, future language extensions are dictated by Microsoft. The Mono developers could of course extend their VM in any way they want. But they would loose compatibility with Windows.
Yes, and that's a good choice: it's the way, C, C++, and lots of other languages have evolved. If Microsoft does a good job with evolving the language (they have so far), people will follow it, and if they don't, people jump ship.
On Java everyone can join the Java Community Process (JCP). Membership is free and every member is entitled to vote and can even run for election.
In order to become a member of the JCP, you have to sign a contractual agreement with Sun Microsystems. As a result, you invest lots of work, and in the end, the fruits of your labor are owned by Sun. That's a bad choice. In fact, I'd call it a scam.
Furthermore, because of Sun's draconian compatibility requirements, you are not free to change the language or libraries any way you like, even in your own implementation. That's, among other things, why Java has stagnated technically.
That sort of defeats the point of.NET/Mono as a platform-independent development system, doesn't it?
Unlike Java, neither.NET nor Mono are religiously cross-platform.
Both.NET and Mono give you cross-platform capabilities if you want them (like, for example, C++ with wxWidgets). And Mono gives you multiple choices for cross-platform applications: Mono/.NET, Mono/Gtk# (which has a Win32 port), Mono/wxWidgets, and Mono/Qt# (and probably more).
I have no problem with Mono if they're just trying to implement the language/runtime, but they shouldn't bill it as.NET compatible if it's not.
Mono offers both cross-platform compatibility and.NET compatibility, and you can choose to use one without the other if you like. So, the "billing" is accurate.
Stop spreading this rubbish that ECMA == Open, it does not.
I said no such thing. ECMA standards can be patent encumbered. This particular ECMA standard, however, anybody can implement.
That's why I said "That is what an open standard is: something that is published by a recognized standards body AND that anybody is free to implement."
I was merely commenting on the the larger issue touched on by the great grandparent which is the possibility of MS trying to damage Mono somehow (by using an IP / patent club in my example).
The set of things that Microsoft can and cannot do is well understood. There is a small possibility that Microsoft's.NET patent allows them to exert pressure on Mono with regard to the.NET portions of Mono. But as these numerous examples of applications show, those portions aren't important for open source development.
Who is to say that MS won't at some later date apply for a patent to some core part of.NET and come after Mono / Novell / Gnome for using it?
You can't get a valid patent on technology that is already published. The set of patents and patent applications that can read on Mono and.NET is fixed and you can dig up Microsoft's any anybody else's patent applications and patents on the USPTO web site.
But if that is a serious worry for you, then every platform is subject to that concern. If that approach really worked, Microsoft could take out patents on Java, Linux, Python, Mozilla, etc. and shut all those projects down. But the fact is that that approach doesn't work.
Depending on the good graces of someone who will go to great lengths to stop Linux is something we ought to consider *very carefully* before embracing Mono with both arms.
"We" did. People thought about this more carefully for Mono than for any other platform.
Note that Mono very openly encourages and advertises Mono's support for these questionable portions of.NET. Also, ASP and ADO aren't exactly some dusty corner of.NET spec which we can safely assume will infrequently be used.
Yes, and that's because ASP.NET and ADO.NET are Novell's business model: that's why they are investing so much money in Mono. The thinking is that they allow people to use Mono to deploy software developed with ASP.NET on cheap Linux servers. It's a good business model. It's risky because it competes with Microsoft head-on, but you don't have to worry about that risk: just don't use the.NET APIs and you'll be fine.
I'm not sure why you're trying to paint this as a non-issue when all sides have agreed that it is an issue worthy of discussion.
I'm sorry if you have been living under a rock on a desert island for the last several years, but the issue has been discussed and debated to death. There is nothing more to discuss. There is a small patent-related risk if you use the proprietary.NET APIs that aren't part of the ECMA standard. For anything else, Mono is at least as safe a bet as any other open, free, and open source platform.
There is currently no alternative to Mono: there is no platform that combines the runtime safety, efficiency, open standard, and open implementation of Mono. The real problem is that people with an agenda (which sounds like what you are) are trying to use the patent issue to spread fear, uncertainty, and doubt over Mono, usually out of a desire to get people to adopt their pet proprietary platform.
Quick, the Internet is destroying our business model--let's lobby Congress to make this illegal.
I hope the Netflix pioneers are going to be more reasonable. Netflix has had a good run, but it was obvious from the start that their current business, sending little shiny discs around, was only going to be short lived.
Slashdot Mirror
This whole story looks like a thinly veiled ad for a startup. Their main product isn't the overall reporting of test coverage and other metrics, their main product is an automated test case generation tool (one that seems to generate oodles of data, just no anything that looks very useful).
Should you collect statistics on your project, bugs, test coverage, and all that? By all means. And there are lots of tools to do that, free and commercial.
I want a calendar that I can maintain on my own, yet, allow for a dynamic overlay of a subset of this calendar to be viewed and/or maintained in other user calendars.
You mean like Yahoo! Calendar, Outlook, and just about every other kind of groupware offers?
I need to write stuff, browse the web, make phone calls, send IM, add to my blog, collaborate on an application with someone over the net, etc. I can do all of that very well with the tools I already have.
I don't see how a "seamless 3D environment" makes that any easier. If anything, I want less clutter and less glitz on my desktop, not omre.
, but not typically used in the context of time.
They are commonly used for durations, for example, of musical pieces (duh).
that the contents so protected never make it into the public domain because there are no copies that can fall into the public domain. The publisher, on the other hand, can reissue the same content with a new copyright over and over again.
This may well violate the Constitution, since it really is contradicts the "for a limited time" clause.
Why do I come here anymore?
Yes, why do you?
It gets progressively more difficult to create seamless solutions when there are nearly infinite possibilities for customization and tweaking of settings. There's a basic tension in principle that can never be completely resolved.
Sure, it can be resolved: through proper modular architecture. The UNIX shell and its associated commands have such an architecture.
Mozilla and all the other Windows refugees, on the other hand, don't. The fault isn't Microsoft's or Netscape's, though: their programmers are just victims of a bad education. They actually think that building huge object-oriented architectures in which thousands of classes live all within the same address space is a good idea. That sort of silliness started with Smalltalk, which taught a generation of programmers that putting thousands of classes together and coupling them as closely as possible is a good thing.
There is a non-bloated, good, modular architecture for GUIs out there somewhere, but someone yet needs to find it. Perhaps the first step is for people to start realizing that it is worth looking for it and that the kind of bloat represented by Mozilla, MS Office, and OpenOffice is not inevitable.
You two are talking about different senses of the word "standard": one is the sense of "something that a lot of people use", the other is the sense of "a protocol or API that a lot of people code to". Among standards, we distinguish "de facto standards" and "official standards", where it is generally understood that something is an official standard unless you qualify it explicitly (just like it is usually understood that birds can fly unless you specifically talk about flightless birds).
Exchange is a "de facto standard" in the sense that it's a product a lot of people use. But it isn't a "standard" in the sense of being something that has been defined in writing that people can write interoperable products for.
Now, Win32 and Java are "de facto standard" in the sense of being something well-defined. One may or may not choose to re-implement or interoperate with them, but at least that is something one can talk about. For Exchange, there simply is nothing one can target, it is just a proprietary piece of software.
So, harping on the fact that Exchange is a "de-facto standard" is useless in the context of this discussion: the fact that lots of people use it is not relevant to the question of what kinds of protocols FOSS groupware should use since we can't use Exchange's protocols.
What FOSS can and should do is make FOSS alternatives to Exchange and Outlook look and feel as close as possible to Microsoft products so that administrators and users will accept it more easily, and that interoperate as much as possible with existing Exchange servers and Outlook clients. And that's exactly what they are doing. So, the fact that Exchange is a "de facto standard" isn't big "terrible" news to Slashdotters, it is something that has already been incorporated into FOSS plans for Exchange alternatives to the degree technically possible.
Perhaps the most amazing find is the bacteria staying in a dormant state inside liquid inclusions in salt crystals for 250 million years (BBC story).
In fact, that finding by Vreeland and Rosenzweig is apparently not the first one of bacteria that are alive after hundreds of millions of years in a dormant state, but it has caught the attention of other researchers because they seem to have been particularly careful to avoid contamination.
Nevertheless, until those findings are more widely accepted, they will need to get replicated a lot more by many more groups, and the sequence data will have to be examined very carefully.
However, between all these findings, it seems pretty much clear that bacteria can stay dormant for a long, long time. One implication of that is panspermia, namely that life didn't evolve on earth but arrived here from space in the form of microbes, perhaps even traveling interstellar distances.
Anybody who has to mention "innovation" repeatedly in their press releases, and even put it in italics, probably doesn't have much of it. Companies that actually do innovate just advertise with their product features, and the innovation is self-explanatory.
heh. I insist that you acknowledge me as being a Penguin. (arguments don't work by insisting, they work by convincing.)
It just shows how absurd Searle's point is: even if he were having a conversation with a computer, a conversation about philosophy, life, love, and all that, he'd not admit that the computer is intelligent just because it is made out of the wrong stuff.
Thats a cheap shot. Searle spent years discussing his argument before he published, and years afterwards addressing objections.
Many philosophers spend years on creating stupid, non-sensical arguments before publishing. It seems to be a professional affliction of that particular discipline.
You are right: this software does not understand language; it works out statistical correspondences, but it has no understanding of the physical correlates of words. That also means that it has intrinsic limitations.
Note also that such statistical approaches are nothing new, it's just that computers are finally getting powerful enough that people can use them.
None of that has anything to do with Searle. Searle wouldn't admit that the system understands language even if it knew things about the real world. Searle's argument is arbitrary and ad hoc. You are free to believe in it if you like, but sooner or later, you will have to defend your position against a computer that will insist that if you don't admit the possibility that it is self-aware and intelligent, well, it is just going to assert that you aren't either.
What more I want is the reliability and customer support of an Apple, rather than the post-point-of-sale neglect that Archos offers.
I'm not impressed with Apple quality over the last few years: I have had two top-of-the-line ($4000) Titanium powerbooks break within a few weeks after getting them, and WiFi reception on my iBook is awful. That's not surprising, given that Apple uses the same contract manufacturers as everybody else.
Buy Archos at your own risk. If it breaks, you're going to be SOL.
Ditto for Apple. It's all a game of chance, and any advantage that Apple used to have in this area seems to have disappeared as far as I can tell.
I know this is hard to understand for some, but eye candy isn't the primary purpose of a desktop, usability is. A desktop using just black-and-white pixels can be far more usable than one with shadows, transparency, and all those other features.
Also, people should remember that neither Apple nor Rasterman invented features such as the use of translucency, blurring, shadows, etc.--they go back many years in the academic literature as visual clues.
Furthermore, support for translucency itself has been discussed in the X community pretty much since the day X11 was released, and the reason for not adding it has been a high cost/benefit ratio. It's only now that hardware has gotten cheap and good enough that many people can use this, and that toolkits are starting to use it, and that people have the software engineering side under control that people are getting around to adding this feature to X11. From a practical point of view, that's probably about the right time.
It was easy to disprove the existence of aether with the Michelson-Morley experiment
Like interpretations of so many classic physics experiments taught in high school and college, that interpretation is somewhat simplistic. The Michelson-Morley experiment showed that the observed speed of light did not depend on the state of motion of the observer.
That does exclude simple models in which light propagates exactly analogous to sound. But it excludes few other models. In particular, there are models of an "aether" that can account for those observations, and Lorentz actually believed in those when he developed the equations that form the basis of Einstein's theory of special relativity. People just didn't adopt that view because Einstein's explanation seemed simpler.
It's a 30 Gigabyte harddisk player. Sorry for the typo.
No, that's not an option. Anything we would call a "star" emits light like any other hot body, and that necessarily includes lots of detectable light, at least at IR wavelengths.
Have a look a the Archos PMA 400. It's a 30M disk-based player with a 320x240 screen, a long battery life, and the ability to record audio and video. It has USB device and master connectivity and WiFi. And it runs Linux and has lots of software available for it. What more do you want?
That's true for any standard. Nobody can protect you from patent claims against a standard. Also note that anybody can make patent claims against a standard. Microsoft can make patent claims against Java, and Sun against Mono, and both against Python or anything else. There are no guarantees.
The problem is more a political one. On Mono, future language extensions are dictated by Microsoft. The Mono developers could of course extend their VM in any way they want. But they would loose compatibility with Windows.
Yes, and that's a good choice: it's the way, C, C++, and lots of other languages have evolved. If Microsoft does a good job with evolving the language (they have so far), people will follow it, and if they don't, people jump ship.
On Java everyone can join the Java Community Process (JCP). Membership is free and every member is entitled to vote and can even run for election.
In order to become a member of the JCP, you have to sign a contractual agreement with Sun Microsystems. As a result, you invest lots of work, and in the end, the fruits of your labor are owned by Sun. That's a bad choice. In fact, I'd call it a scam.
Furthermore, because of Sun's draconian compatibility requirements, you are not free to change the language or libraries any way you like, even in your own implementation. That's, among other things, why Java has stagnated technically.
That sort of defeats the point of .NET/Mono as a platform-independent development system, doesn't it?
.NET nor Mono are religiously cross-platform.
.NET and Mono give you cross-platform capabilities if you want them (like, for example, C++ with wxWidgets). And Mono gives you multiple choices for cross-platform applications: Mono/.NET, Mono/Gtk# (which has a Win32 port), Mono/wxWidgets, and Mono/Qt# (and probably more).
.NET compatible if it's not.
.NET compatibility, and you can choose to use one without the other if you like. So, the "billing" is accurate.
Unlike Java, neither
Both
I have no problem with Mono if they're just trying to implement the language/runtime, but they shouldn't bill it as
Mono offers both cross-platform compatibility and
Stop spreading this rubbish that ECMA == Open, it does not.
I said no such thing. ECMA standards can be patent encumbered. This particular ECMA standard, however, anybody can implement.
That's why I said "That is what an open standard is: something that is published by a recognized standards body AND that anybody is free to implement."
I was merely commenting on the the larger issue touched on by the great grandparent which is the possibility of MS trying to damage Mono somehow (by using an IP / patent club in my example).
.NET patent allows them to exert pressure on Mono with regard to the .NET portions of Mono. But as these numerous examples of applications show, those portions aren't important for open source development.
.NET and come after Mono / Novell / Gnome for using it?
.NET is fixed and you can dig up Microsoft's any anybody else's patent applications and patents on the USPTO web site.
.NET. Also, ASP and ADO aren't exactly some dusty corner of .NET spec which we can safely assume will infrequently be used.
.NET APIs and you'll be fine.
.NET APIs that aren't part of the ECMA standard. For anything else, Mono is at least as safe a bet as any other open, free, and open source platform.
The set of things that Microsoft can and cannot do is well understood. There is a small possibility that Microsoft's
Who is to say that MS won't at some later date apply for a patent to some core part of
You can't get a valid patent on technology that is already published. The set of patents and patent applications that can read on Mono and
But if that is a serious worry for you, then every platform is subject to that concern. If that approach really worked, Microsoft could take out patents on Java, Linux, Python, Mozilla, etc. and shut all those projects down. But the fact is that that approach doesn't work.
Depending on the good graces of someone who will go to great lengths to stop Linux is something we ought to consider *very carefully* before embracing Mono with both arms.
"We" did. People thought about this more carefully for Mono than for any other platform.
Note that Mono very openly encourages and advertises Mono's support for these questionable portions of
Yes, and that's because ASP.NET and ADO.NET are Novell's business model: that's why they are investing so much money in Mono. The thinking is that they allow people to use Mono to deploy software developed with ASP.NET on cheap Linux servers. It's a good business model. It's risky because it competes with Microsoft head-on, but you don't have to worry about that risk: just don't use the
I'm not sure why you're trying to paint this as a non-issue when all sides have agreed that it is an issue worthy of discussion.
I'm sorry if you have been living under a rock on a desert island for the last several years, but the issue has been discussed and debated to death. There is nothing more to discuss. There is a small patent-related risk if you use the proprietary
There is currently no alternative to Mono: there is no platform that combines the runtime safety, efficiency, open standard, and open implementation of Mono. The real problem is that people with an agenda (which sounds like what you are) are trying to use the patent issue to spread fear, uncertainty, and doubt over Mono, usually out of a desire to get people to adopt their pet proprietary platform.
Quick, the Internet is destroying our business model--let's lobby Congress to make this illegal.
I hope the Netflix pioneers are going to be more reasonable. Netflix has had a good run, but it was obvious from the start that their current business, sending little shiny discs around, was only going to be short lived.
Green gasoline--it's PEOPLE.