I'm not saying that Stallman is or isn't a socialist; he says he isn't. He wrote the GNU manifesto and we know he advocates freedom and sharing. The web is full of discussion about whether Stallman is socialist or anti-capitalist - to find it, google for gnu stallman socialist. In my parent note, I was asking readers to put aside this question, in order to get to my point about sharing the cost of software design and recognizing its very low cost of reproduction, compared, say, to the cost of designing and reproducing cars.
Set aside for a moment Stallman's "socialist" arguments. Set aside "software wants to be free." Set aside your disdain of certain companies and their software.
Even since the days before Stallman, the reason people shared software (that is, they gave it away for free), is because it is practically cost-free to reproduce. A community of hackers use the same OS and tools. In my life, it's been DEC TOPS-10, then UNIX, then Linux, but no matter. We all run into the same bugs. Better for one of us to fix and share, than for each of us to find and fix the same bug. Better for each of us to write a tool and share with all, than for each of us to have to write the same tool, most of us doing it poorly. It seems so obvious.
Why did Bill Gates become fabulously wealthy? Because he produces a great product? I think not. Because he produces (and markets) an ok product that he can reproduce for pennies and sell for hundreds of dollars each. And he has managed to lock people into using his products.
The point is that economically speaking, there is a strong argument for sharing (and thereby dividing up) the cost of production of tools if you can reproduce the tools for no cost and with no restrictions. Microsoft may not like this, but a developing nation should understand the point.
how many people are sitting at computers that have mics and cameras trained on them that may be remotely controlled? how many have telephones in their homes and offices with speakerphone mics that may be remotely controlled? how many are using networks where every transaction is logged? how many have tracking systems in their cars? welcome to
OnStar. at least when Google takes street view pictures, they publicize them and share them.
I think the majority of the computing world could survive quite nicely without commercial software. Home users don't care at all about operating systems, they care only about applications. Operating systems are interchangeable commodities. Web browser, mailer, word processor, spreadsheet, or music player on Win/Mac/Unix/Linux. What's the difference? Not much. What do most users really gain from running their commercial (MS) OS?
Back in the mid 1980s when Microsoft blew past the Unix folks and Apple, they did it with better sales and marketing, not with a technically superior product, and not because they were commercial rather than FOSS.
AOL was the Microsoft of ISPs. Eventually the consumer masses realized that they didn't need AOL to connect to the Internet. Eventually they will realize that they don't need Microsoft to browse the web, edit a document, or watch a video clip.
I'm inclined to believe that eventually people will prefer the free (as in beer) FOSS beer to the expensive encumbered commercial beer.
I agree that the story is silly and that he's smelling outgassing of some material. It's also silly to say that this is what space smells like. OK, professor, what does Earth smell like? Roses? Armpit? Garlic sauteed in butter?
I'm an old school UNIX hacker, I worked at Bell Labs in the '70's. These days I hack software that controls robots used for rehab of stroke patients. It's not exactly embedded, since the code runs on an Ubuntu/Xenomai COTS PC, but it's similar in nature to embedded hacking.
The relevant question is, how many embedded-system hackers are needed? If only.1% of job opportunities are for embedded-system hackers, then there really isn't much incentive for people to learn to hack embedded systems. If embedded hacking is a lucrative field with attractive opportunities, then hackers will follow. We saw it happen with other forms of hacking, we even saw it happen with web-page hacking. If there is a need for embedded hackers, it will be filled (guided by Adam Smith's Invisible Hand).
both the arpanet (essential predecessor to the internet) and bsd unix (essential predecessor to linux) were open source projects funded in large part by darpa, which is the american military. so saying that the military doesn't embrace open source seems kind of wrong.
i agree that deleting attachments would be useful. that, combined with a search operator to find messages based on their size. they already have has:attachment, but an operator to look for messages larger than a size would help too. if i couldn't delete just the attachments, i'd settle for deleting the whole messages, if only i could find them.
Another myth is that the Muslim world rejects new technology. It does not. In earlier times, the orthodoxy had resisted new inventions such as the printing press, loudspeaker, and penicillin, but such rejection has all but vanished.
The author harks back to the golden age of Islam (essentially, before 1500) and claims that Islam no longer rejects technology. The fallacy here is that Islam did reject technology like the printing press until very recently. It is not a surprise that Islamic culture did not keep up with the west when they ignored such technology for 400 years. It is true that cultures with complex writing systems, like Japan and others, also were slowed by difficulties with mechanized printing, but they have been able to assimilate western technology sooner than the Muslim cultures have.
Muslim countries that are less entrenched in fundamentalist belief are more culturally and technically advanced. The rich oil countries have science as an effect of their wealth, not as a cause of it. Southeast Asians are geographically adjacent to high tech territories, with a different culture than the north African Arabs and other Muslims in Africa and West Asia. The lack of science in those countries probably has more to do with poverty and oppression than Islam.
To state an obvious point, modern Islamic culture does embrace technology when it suits them - they adapt violent practices from the west when they feel it helps them to advance their goals.
Has this ever happened to anybody here (while in their home country)? It's something you hear about, and it's something I could imagine happening, but I ride in cabs fairly regularly, and I've never had a cab driver try to do this to me...
I've had it happen to me at home. Not always willful ripoff on the part of the cabbie, sometimes just incompetence. Note that the fare these days is about $2/mile in NYC, and $2.40/mile where I live, in Boston. At least in Manhattan, the meat of the borough is a rectangular grid. In Boston, take one wroong turn and you're stuck in a wormhole tangle of one-way streets, and it takes you a mile or two to get back on track, and $5.00 has ticked off the meter. I've also had cabbies take an extra lap around the airport, easy if you miss the one possibility to exit from the loop. Oops! There goes another $5.00.
it says 100% email, 80% fixed-line phone, 76% cell phone. That adds up to 156% phone, or probably at least 100% or so. and as for the advantages of email vs phone, both have their grace. email is easier to manage and save. but if you're going to have a conversation involving give and take, face to face is better than phone, which is better than email.
Oops, well, yes. tfa says: "Both the websites' vote-swapping mechanisms and the communication and vote swaps that they enabled were...constitutionally protected." They could have made it clearer in the article, though.
Speaking of correlation, if I were at Duke, before blaming Apple or Cisco, I'd ask myself the question - is this problem happening anywhere else? If not, why not? Then how likely is it that the problem is with my basic system rather than with the way I've configured it?
it would be interesting to load time-synched copies of the same mono recording from a stylus transcription and an optical transcription into a stereo mp3, so you could listen to the differences by playing with the balance.
i could do it with audacity, but i think it would be useful to have on their web site - i didn't notice such a file there.
Gizmodo defiantly does not represent the community. Once I saw them call themselves the slashdot for people who actually have touched a woman or something like that.
I guess that explains their enthusiasm about being able to use more than one finger at a time.
Slashdot Mirror
Now I can edit my cache of ascii art!
I'm not saying that Stallman is or isn't a socialist; he says he isn't. He wrote the GNU manifesto and we know he advocates freedom and sharing. The web is full of discussion about whether Stallman is socialist or anti-capitalist - to find it, google for gnu stallman socialist. In my parent note, I was asking readers to put aside this question, in order to get to my point about sharing the cost of software design and recognizing its very low cost of reproduction, compared, say, to the cost of designing and reproducing cars.
Even since the days before Stallman, the reason people shared software (that is, they gave it away for free), is because it is practically cost-free to reproduce. A community of hackers use the same OS and tools. In my life, it's been DEC TOPS-10, then UNIX, then Linux, but no matter. We all run into the same bugs. Better for one of us to fix and share, than for each of us to find and fix the same bug. Better for each of us to write a tool and share with all, than for each of us to have to write the same tool, most of us doing it poorly. It seems so obvious.
Why did Bill Gates become fabulously wealthy? Because he produces a great product? I think not. Because he produces (and markets) an ok product that he can reproduce for pennies and sell for hundreds of dollars each. And he has managed to lock people into using his products.
The point is that economically speaking, there is a strong argument for sharing (and thereby dividing up) the cost of production of tools if you can reproduce the tools for no cost and with no restrictions. Microsoft may not like this, but a developing nation should understand the point.
how many people are sitting at computers that have mics and cameras trained on them that may be remotely controlled? how many have telephones in their homes and offices with speakerphone mics that may be remotely controlled? how many are using networks where every transaction is logged? how many have tracking systems in their cars? welcome to OnStar. at least when Google takes street view pictures, they publicize them and share them.
Back in the mid 1980s when Microsoft blew past the Unix folks and Apple, they did it with better sales and marketing, not with a technically superior product, and not because they were commercial rather than FOSS.
AOL was the Microsoft of ISPs. Eventually the consumer masses realized that they didn't need AOL to connect to the Internet. Eventually they will realize that they don't need Microsoft to browse the web, edit a document, or watch a video clip.
I'm inclined to believe that eventually people will prefer the free (as in beer) FOSS beer to the expensive encumbered commercial beer.
When people call theories facts, they are saying "I know" when they should be saying "I think, maybe I believe, but I don't know."
I agree that the story is silly and that he's smelling outgassing of some material. It's also silly to say that this is what space smells like. OK, professor, what does Earth smell like? Roses? Armpit? Garlic sauteed in butter?
The relevant question is, how many embedded-system hackers are needed? If only .1% of job opportunities are for embedded-system hackers, then there really isn't much incentive for people to learn to hack embedded systems. If embedded hacking is a lucrative field with attractive opportunities, then hackers will follow. We saw it happen with other forms of hacking, we even saw it happen with web-page hacking. If there is a need for embedded hackers, it will be filled (guided by Adam Smith's Invisible Hand).
have you ever looked at your google web history? yikes.
both the arpanet (essential predecessor to the internet) and bsd unix (essential predecessor to linux) were open source projects funded in large part by darpa, which is the american military. so saying that the military doesn't embrace open source seems kind of wrong.
this thread is useless without pics.
Only peripherally relevant, but any chance to post links to the amazing Y0UNG-HAE CHANG HEAVY INDUSTRIES.
http://yhchang.com/SAMSUNG_ENGLISH.html
http://yhchang.com/SAMSUNG_MEANS_TO_COME.html
http://yhchang.com/
They gave me express written consent, but it's in this document that I can't read any more.
J Geils and his band were nerds, they got together at Worcester Tech in the late 60's.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_J._Geils_Band
These days, Geils lives outside Boston and plays occasional jazz gigs.
And the late, great Erland Van Lidth de Jeude was a hacker at MIT, an opera singer, an Olympic wrestler, and a film actor.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erland_Van_Lidth_De_Jeude
Home-made Sputnik, I Laika!
I ran a gamma and white point correction on a scan of the Mona Lisa too, but I wasn't clever enough to issue a press release.
i agree that deleting attachments would be useful. that, combined with a search operator to find messages based on their size. they already have has:attachment, but an operator to look for messages larger than a size would help too. if i couldn't delete just the attachments, i'd settle for deleting the whole messages, if only i could find them.
The author harks back to the golden age of Islam (essentially, before 1500) and claims that Islam no longer rejects technology. The fallacy here is that Islam did reject technology like the printing press until very recently. It is not a surprise that Islamic culture did not keep up with the west when they ignored such technology for 400 years. It is true that cultures with complex writing systems, like Japan and others, also were slowed by difficulties with mechanized printing, but they have been able to assimilate western technology sooner than the Muslim cultures have.
Muslim countries that are less entrenched in fundamentalist belief are more culturally and technically advanced. The rich oil countries have science as an effect of their wealth, not as a cause of it. Southeast Asians are geographically adjacent to high tech territories, with a different culture than the north African Arabs and other Muslims in Africa and West Asia. The lack of science in those countries probably has more to do with poverty and oppression than Islam.
To state an obvious point, modern Islamic culture does embrace technology when it suits them - they adapt violent practices from the west when they feel it helps them to advance their goals.
it says 100% email, 80% fixed-line phone, 76% cell phone. That adds up to 156% phone, or probably at least 100% or so. and as for the advantages of email vs phone, both have their grace. email is easier to manage and save. but if you're going to have a conversation involving give and take, face to face is better than phone, which is better than email.
Oops, well, yes. tfa says: "Both the websites' vote-swapping mechanisms and the communication and vote swaps that they enabled were...constitutionally protected." They could have made it clearer in the article, though.
The ruling says that vote swapping web sites are legal. I don't see it saying anything about whether vote swapping is legal.
Speaking of correlation, if I were at Duke, before blaming Apple or Cisco, I'd ask myself the question - is this problem happening anywhere else? If not, why not? Then how likely is it that the problem is with my basic system rather than with the way I've configured it?
i could do it with audacity, but i think it would be useful to have on their web site - i didn't notice such a file there.