Yeah, you know how likely it is that SUSE will switch to the Debian packaging system... There's no way to get around it: I know for a fact that they've designed them in this way because developers like being able to get wide collaboration and benefiting the most amount of people.
You quite palpably haven't read the article, or seen the screencast. USB images are not new at all. This is about a new user being able to easily roll any image (USB, VMware, installable live CD) with all the packages that they want (from any repositories) and all the configurations/files they want, all conveniently from a web interface. It's quite innovative and revolutionary.
Indeed, it is actually designed to be friendly for other distributions as well. Both the build service and KIWI (both GPL) intentionally have generic designs so that you can both build packages for other distributions, and build customisable versions of other distributions, too.
It's a really nice thing: when a distribution goes out of their way to ensure that others can benefit from the tools as well.
Well, it has many improvements not only for new users, but for experienced users too:
Installation happens in 24 minutes now. In fact, on my computer it only took 18 minutes. This was not easy, it required a lot of work: switching to LZMA, creating images for the base patterns, and the new SAT solver (which benefit general package management too)
Installer is less hassle. You only need something like 6 clicks for the full installation. Say what you want, but we were constantly getting abused about the "long" and many clicks required for the installation in public reviews.
Installer is more pleasing to the eye. It's the first thing users see. Many new users were erroneously reaching the conclusion that "nothing changed" in openSUSE because we kept the installer the same. You would be very surprised about the psychological effect this had on users.
Installation is indeed run once, but it also provides a make-or-break situation for users. If there was a part they couldn't do they're probably not going to be hanging around to work it out, they'll just try something else.
So, while there is evidently a lot more to it than just the change in aesthetic appeal, aesthetics are incredibly important in their own right, as well.
It is the first beta; for the next beta this issue will likely be resolved. There was quite a big rush to get features in, and pretty much all the time from now will be spent on bug-fixing.
You cannot discard of such a large Philosophical problem so easily. For one, believe it or not we all assume that we have free moral agency -- our entire judicial system is based upon the presumption that someone can be morally blameworthy. Other arguments suggest that denying ethics is self-contradictory.
Secondly, Dawkins never suggests that he denies the existence of free will at all -- most Philosophers do not, as well (even if they are naturalists), so your point not only doesn't have any substantiation, but would still be incredibly contentious.
A god which periodically suspends or alters the natural order is quite clearly not just a matter of philosophy. On the contrary, if a being hypothetically "alters the natural order" or is said to bring about Scientific impossibilities then science, by definition, cannot answer such a question. Scientific laws are based on perceived regularities, not some rules of logic. A statement on the possibility or impossibility of scientific impossibilities occurring is not a Scientific question, but a Philosophical one.
It's incorrect to say that Dawkins only criticises Religion on Scientific grounds and not Philosophical ones -- many of his arguments are Philosophical by nature (floating tea-cup, etc.).
You might also say that something like morality is a philosophical and sociological matter. But in fact an evolutionary biologist still has much to contribute to that conversation I have no problem with that. But note still that Science cannot answer meta-ethical questions of justification of ethics -- this is beyond its scope, again, see GE Moore and Hume. It can however help explain some things about particular moral traits or behaviour. You have to be very careful to not impose some sort of anthropocentrism or personal element to Evolution, because this commits the naturalistic fallacy.
And again, Darwin is still not an authority in Science, though it's again obvious he likes to imply this idea.
I think it's forgivable seeing as his background is not in philosophy. What makes it less forgivable is that this is not something he would consent to. The existence of a Supreme Being is a Philosophical question, and that's precisely the area he only talks about. The only exception is when he speaks about belief, which is arguably a psychological or sociological question as well. He is not an expert in either area, so he should not really be treated as an authority (constantly happens) on Philosophical issues, and yet to "atheism for the masses" he's pretty much seen as a prophet.
You're right, it was a 15 minute interview and so neither of them could expand on arguments. You're really abusing the term when you suggest that he was at any point "defining God into existence" -- again, this would come from an Ontological argument which isn't raised. Cosmological arguments call the "first mover" "God"; contentious again, but not defining him into existence (they just need to substantiate the properties that they then attribute to this being).
The context in which free will was brought up was anything but irrelevant -- free moral agency can be a serious problem for naturalism, and he brought it up in the section of providing arguments for theism. Even if you disagree with determinism, you don't automatically get free will (randomness or indeterminism don't help free will much). Anyway, determinism on the macro-scale is precisely what is presumed in Science. That determinism and free will are incompatible is also another contentious Philosophical position.
I'm not asking you to care about objective morality so I have no idea where you got that from. He only raised the fact that there's an argument from Ethics for the existence of God. This is also another problem for naturalism (I'm not saying it's solved by introducing God), see G.E. Moore, David Hume, etc. The problem is not answered by Dawkins in the interview as well, but he of course introduces the strawman of all religious people saying you cannot be moral without religion.
My problem is that (i) there nothing original to the guy, (ii) completely evades big issues (free will) and fails to acknowledge them as huge Philosophical issues, (iii) lies about attributing atrocities to religion instead of humanity, (iv) persistent strawmen, (v) preaching, among other things. I don't think Dawkins knows the first thing about logic, so yes.
Not a single thing about God of the Gaps in there from him (an argument that naturalism cannot provide a solution is not an argument alluding to Gap theory -- very different), and not a single Ontological argument either, so I'm really wondering if you clicked on the same link. Notable arguments that he does raise:
Free will: Dawkins refuses to even talk about it, saying "it's not a big issue". Erm, it's one of the biggest issues in Philosophy.
Attributing horrible events of humanity to religion, and then compiling lists of religious vs. secular (he really does always do this
Completely not understanding the scope of science
Countless strawmen, like the idea that all Christians are evolutionists. I think in Catholicism the Pope says it's the best theory of explanation
The point I want to stress here is not, at all, that I'm going to defend the arguments of Quinn. The point is that Dawkins doesn't give an even remotely reasonable answer to the points the guy has put forward; it doesn't take a debate genius to know how badly Dawkins is evading, etc. If people want to commend Dawkins for being great at selling books then I'm not going to argue with them, what I do disagree with is that the guy has any Philosophical merit. He's an emotive preacher. Great for popular literature (apparently), useless in Philosophy.
And no, I'm a final year student finishing in two months. I also specialise in Philosophy of Religion.
I'm not Catholic, so no. It's very hard to take him seriously, pretty much all the material he produces I'd classify as preaching/emotive language for the masses (to be honest: I think he's in it only for the money), with little or no substantiation (similar to a lot of theists). Any points that he actually raises of value are direct copies from Bertrand Russell, but lacking Russell's eloquence somewhat.
As a Philosophy undergrad, I find Dawkins pretty irritating. There is one nice podcast that pretty much summarises a lot of my problems with Dawkins, it's a podcast between him and David Quinn, and it's pretty much the first time I've seen Dawkins talk to anyone who even knows a little Philosophy.
"To be fair to one company, Google, we were incorrectly counting their representation, keeping Andrew Morton in the "Linux Foundation" bucket instead of the "Google" bucket. That will change the list of top companies placing Google somewhere between 10 and 13, I haven't re-run the numbers yet to get the exact placement."
Ubuntu is mainly a packaging and marketing distribution (packaging Debian's package snapshots), and not really a big contributor to new technologies or upstream free software so much like Red Hat or SUSE. So I don't think they employ any kernel developers at all. And no, it's not like Ubuntu has many desktop developers rather than low-level developers (as the comments below suggest) -- I think they only employ three desktop developers (who mainly work on packaging anyway as I recall), in contrast to SUSE's very many desktop developers in OO.o (something like 15 there alone), KDE, GNOME, etc.
In fact, the reality is also that Canonical's only other big flagship product, Launchpad, is completely proprietary.
Actually, Novell reported huge increases quarter-over-quarter growth in their Linux business. Something like 200% year-over-year in the SUSE Linux part. Even if some other parts of their business are doing badly, it's pretty clear that their Linux business is on the rise and has been for some time. Which is great for Novell and great for free software (as they have hundreds of engineers working upstream).
the samba team isn't sitting on an ECMA or ECMA-like committee. that's the source of all this bruhaha. I haven't seen anyone saying they'd be happy with GNOME implementing OOXML support while not sitting on the ECMA. Even so, there's no extra use of logic in either. If a company or person is going to make a completely unsubstantiated claim from one, they can just as easily make the unsubstantiated claim from the other.
i disagree that it's an emphatically good thing (there are other ways of achieving what they need to, btw, that don't come with the baggage). What do you have in mind? Implementing something so large is not an easy process. Without milking out all the extra details to make life easier for the developers this kind of job would be a very long, very annoying pain in the neck. We really shouldn't be in positions where we put our volunteers in tight spots because we're afraid "of what they might say". Someone doing 2 minutes of actual research on Google can find out what is actually the case.
i also think that it's a self-evident fact that they are playing the communications game very poorly right now. this article and many others just like it are the proof. =/ Agreed; the statement from GNOME took -- as far as I can see -- unnecessarily long. A rumour given time spreads quickly. That said, it did come after all, and squashed any rational fears one might have.
What an utterly malicious accusation. "Poisonous" was well-defined in this case, Roy. Did you check the video? The point of the statement is to be factual in correspondence with that description, nothing more.
Over the years I have fought/against/ flamewars and/against/ FUD. You've stirred up so much FUD with regard to Novell/SUSE, and now GNOME, that it's just impossible for me to reach any other conclusion.
Why shoot the messenger? A messenger merely reports a given source, or relays information. You go further than this in interpreting sources, providing your analysis, your future predictions, and speculations. The term "messenger" is not applicable to someone matching that description, by any means.
Perhaps they vocally state they don't support it, but they ARE helping it. By giving MS arguments of it being "supported" by Novell and Gnome. Novell's fork for windows of OpenOffice and GNOME actively helping them in the standardization process of optionally-open XML specifically mean they are supporting it, regardless of how they tell us that they don't want to. By implementing support for it so that it's a realistic option for people coming from Windows? Migrates from Windows are a huge chunk of Linux's potential market. We should make it as easy as possible; we should also promote free, open standards. ODF commitment here is clear; OOXML support is a stepping stone.
Congratulations since Novell is the one pushing Optionally-open XML on OpenOffice and would fork it with a windows only version if necessary... Do you have any evidence for this statement? I can't think of anything wilder, to be honest. It's pretty clear that Novell have grounded their whole future in Linux. See, for example, SUSE Linux Enterprise (the only serious desktop enterprise solution), or moving Netware all over to Open Enterprise Server. Not really what you would do if you think you might have a future with Windows, is it?
Strawman much? How curious. Which part of that is a strawman? My point was that KDE or Koffice are not "making a stand against OOXML" in any way that GNOME haven't, really. The statement from the Koffice developers basically said that they didn't have time or resources. In GNOME, a volunteer has agreed to do it. If they weren't doing it there, they'd be just like the Koffice developers probably.
Don't kill them messenger, I am seeing it is getting common to blame Roy of being poisonous, when he mostly just posts links to articles and statements from Novell I think I've read more articles from Roy than 99.9% of others out there, so please don't try to tell me something I know to be evidently untrue from experience -- that he "just posts links". He draws ridiculous conclusions from many links, speculates wildly in the negative extreme, or often posts ridiculous unsubstantiated articles/links.
Do you want one example? Roy once made a post suggesting that Novell was using "sex to sell" and claiming that "Linux was a slut" because they used a woman in this video. Is that a rational conclusion? There are hundreds of other examples, but that one sticks out most in my mind. If there's one thing that Roy doesn't "just do" it's post links.
> the difference is that the samba project is not taking a position that can be perceived as promoting those technologies as a formal international standard. and that is why, in a nutshell, there isn't the bruhaha over samba, but there is over this OOXML stuff.
On the exact same grounding and as little logic I can argue that the existence of Samba can be seen as promoting those proprietary technologies. What we should be doing in this case is not attacking them for doing something which is emphatically a good thing, but rather just get the truth out and not let FUD like this spread.
I'm getting pretty tired of this ongoing OOXML issue; the FUD surrounding it is astounding. The article on itwire hasn't helped anyone since it's pretty clueless, looking for buzzwords and then reaching bizarre conclusions. Let's get a few facts down here:
GNOME (and Novell) do not support the standardisation of OOXML. They are both members of the ODF alliance, both use it as the default file format, and if it was even remotely realistic to have a decent office product without OOXML support (where the Windows desktop is unfortunately in such an insane over-dominance currently), then they would of course be all for it.
The implementation of OOXML is all about interoperability. I don't see anyone (wrongly) trashing Samba as a project, and yet its existence and the effort to implement OOXML support is virtually identical in terms of free software.
You like software freedom and hate the software patent system? Great, so do I. Free implementations of proprietary solutions, though, are a good thing; not a single one of my friends are going to be using Linux if they can't submit their assignments to their lecturers. We need interoperability, to ease the transition for people coming from the proprietary world.
The KDE/Koffice developers issued a statement basically saying they didn't have the resources or the time to implement OOXML, and suddenly a lot of silly talk gets thrown at GNOME. If I volunteered to implement OOXML support in Koffice I doubt (i) that they would object, and for sure that (ii) any distribution would not include it.
Even if you dislike Jeff Waugh, it's pretty tough to find a rational basis for criticising him based on the podcast or his approach to the problem other than (i) not getting the GNOME statement (again, which you really can't fault) out soon enough, or (ii) giving Roy the publicity he wants.
The itwire article plays Roy as some sort of victim in the podcast talk. That is ridiculous. Unfortunately -- and to the detriment of the FLOSS community -- Roy is an incredibly prolific, poisonous person willing to do or say anything that might cook up some self-publicity, and with an irrational hatred of Novell. And in fact on the contrary, Roy skipped around every question that was directly asked to him; instead opting to just give background on Microsoft's "evil" nature and talking about how bad OOXML is (both of which we palpably know).
Finally, even if you decide to ignore all the other above facts, please tell me why you're not also staging wide protests against OpenOffice.org or your distribution for including OOXML support, as well.
To save any comments of bias, I'm an ardent KDE aficionado.
Figures on what? In terms of contribution to the Linux desktop? I'm not sure there is any competition. While Red Hat is fully pushing the server into new avenues everywhere (which is of course great), SUSE are doing this on the server and the desktop. They have actively pursued the Linux desktop and have taken it very seriously, as you can see by their acquisitions of Ximian and SUSE. There is simply no other company that even really competes with the same level of consistent contribution throughout the whole desktop.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, you know how likely it is that SUSE will switch to the Debian packaging system... There's no way to get around it: I know for a fact that they've designed them in this way because developers like being able to get wide collaboration and benefiting the most amount of people.
You quite palpably haven't read the article, or seen the screencast. USB images are not new at all. This is about a new user being able to easily roll any image (USB, VMware, installable live CD) with all the packages that they want (from any repositories) and all the configurations/files they want, all conveniently from a web interface. It's quite innovative and revolutionary.
Indeed, it is actually designed to be friendly for other distributions as well. Both the build service and KIWI (both GPL) intentionally have generic designs so that you can both build packages for other distributions, and build customisable versions of other distributions, too. It's a really nice thing: when a distribution goes out of their way to ensure that others can benefit from the tools as well.
- Installation happens in 24 minutes now. In fact, on my computer it only took 18 minutes. This was not easy, it required a lot of work: switching to LZMA, creating images for the base patterns, and the new SAT solver (which benefit general package management too)
- Installer is less hassle. You only need something like 6 clicks for the full installation. Say what you want, but we were constantly getting abused about the "long" and many clicks required for the installation in public reviews.
- Installer is more pleasing to the eye. It's the first thing users see. Many new users were erroneously reaching the conclusion that "nothing changed" in openSUSE because we kept the installer the same. You would be very surprised about the psychological effect this had on users.
- Installation is indeed run once, but it also provides a make-or-break situation for users. If there was a part they couldn't do they're probably not going to be hanging around to work it out, they'll just try something else.
So, while there is evidently a lot more to it than just the change in aesthetic appeal, aesthetics are incredibly important in their own right, as well.It is the first beta; for the next beta this issue will likely be resolved. There was quite a big rush to get features in, and pretty much all the time from now will be spent on bug-fixing.
You cannot discard of such a large Philosophical problem so easily. For one, believe it or not we all assume that we have free moral agency -- our entire judicial system is based upon the presumption that someone can be morally blameworthy. Other arguments suggest that denying ethics is self-contradictory.
Secondly, Dawkins never suggests that he denies the existence of free will at all -- most Philosophers do not, as well (even if they are naturalists), so your point not only doesn't have any substantiation, but would still be incredibly contentious.
Sorry, I meant to say "Dawkin" not "Darwin" who was very much an authority on Biology. :-)
It's incorrect to say that Dawkins only criticises Religion on Scientific grounds and not Philosophical ones -- many of his arguments are Philosophical by nature (floating tea-cup, etc.). You might also say that something like morality is a philosophical and sociological matter. But in fact an evolutionary biologist still has much to contribute to that conversation I have no problem with that. But note still that Science cannot answer meta-ethical questions of justification of ethics -- this is beyond its scope, again, see GE Moore and Hume. It can however help explain some things about particular moral traits or behaviour. You have to be very careful to not impose some sort of anthropocentrism or personal element to Evolution, because this commits the naturalistic fallacy.
And again, Darwin is still not an authority in Science, though it's again obvious he likes to imply this idea.
Fortunately it's a joint-honours course with Mathematics, so I haven't completely majored in unemployment ;-)
You're right, it was a 15 minute interview and so neither of them could expand on arguments. You're really abusing the term when you suggest that he was at any point "defining God into existence" -- again, this would come from an Ontological argument which isn't raised. Cosmological arguments call the "first mover" "God"; contentious again, but not defining him into existence (they just need to substantiate the properties that they then attribute to this being).
The context in which free will was brought up was anything but irrelevant -- free moral agency can be a serious problem for naturalism, and he brought it up in the section of providing arguments for theism. Even if you disagree with determinism, you don't automatically get free will (randomness or indeterminism don't help free will much). Anyway, determinism on the macro-scale is precisely what is presumed in Science. That determinism and free will are incompatible is also another contentious Philosophical position.
I'm not asking you to care about objective morality so I have no idea where you got that from. He only raised the fact that there's an argument from Ethics for the existence of God. This is also another problem for naturalism (I'm not saying it's solved by introducing God), see G.E. Moore, David Hume, etc. The problem is not answered by Dawkins in the interview as well, but he of course introduces the strawman of all religious people saying you cannot be moral without religion.
My problem is that (i) there nothing original to the guy, (ii) completely evades big issues (free will) and fails to acknowledge them as huge Philosophical issues, (iii) lies about attributing atrocities to religion instead of humanity, (iv) persistent strawmen, (v) preaching, among other things. I don't think Dawkins knows the first thing about logic, so yes.
- Free will: Dawkins refuses to even talk about it, saying "it's not a big issue". Erm, it's one of the biggest issues in Philosophy.
- Attributing horrible events of humanity to religion, and then compiling lists of religious vs. secular (he really does always do this
- Completely not understanding the scope of science
- Countless strawmen, like the idea that all Christians are evolutionists. I think in Catholicism the Pope says it's the best theory of explanation
The point I want to stress here is not, at all, that I'm going to defend the arguments of Quinn. The point is that Dawkins doesn't give an even remotely reasonable answer to the points the guy has put forward; it doesn't take a debate genius to know how badly Dawkins is evading, etc. If people want to commend Dawkins for being great at selling books then I'm not going to argue with them, what I do disagree with is that the guy has any Philosophical merit. He's an emotive preacher. Great for popular literature (apparently), useless in Philosophy.And no, I'm a final year student finishing in two months. I also specialise in Philosophy of Religion.
I'm not Catholic, so no. It's very hard to take him seriously, pretty much all the material he produces I'd classify as preaching/emotive language for the masses (to be honest: I think he's in it only for the money), with little or no substantiation (similar to a lot of theists). Any points that he actually raises of value are direct copies from Bertrand Russell, but lacking Russell's eloquence somewhat.
As a Philosophy undergrad, I find Dawkins pretty irritating. There is one nice podcast that pretty much summarises a lot of my problems with Dawkins, it's a podcast between him and David Quinn, and it's pretty much the first time I've seen Dawkins talk to anyone who even knows a little Philosophy.
Check out Greg KH's blog:
"To be fair to one company, Google, we were incorrectly counting their representation, keeping Andrew Morton in the "Linux Foundation" bucket instead of the "Google" bucket. That will change the list of top companies placing Google somewhere between 10 and 13, I haven't re-run the numbers yet to get the exact placement."
Ubuntu is mainly a packaging and marketing distribution (packaging Debian's package snapshots), and not really a big contributor to new technologies or upstream free software so much like Red Hat or SUSE. So I don't think they employ any kernel developers at all. And no, it's not like Ubuntu has many desktop developers rather than low-level developers (as the comments below suggest) -- I think they only employ three desktop developers (who mainly work on packaging anyway as I recall), in contrast to SUSE's very many desktop developers in OO.o (something like 15 there alone), KDE, GNOME, etc.
In fact, the reality is also that Canonical's only other big flagship product, Launchpad, is completely proprietary.
Actually, Novell reported huge increases quarter-over-quarter growth in their Linux business. Something like 200% year-over-year in the SUSE Linux part. Even if some other parts of their business are doing badly, it's pretty clear that their Linux business is on the rise and has been for some time. Which is great for Novell and great for free software (as they have hundreds of engineers working upstream).
Which part of them making huge profits with Linux, supporting the FOSS community more and more by the day (like this story), lead you to think that?
Do you want one example? Roy once made a post suggesting that Novell was using "sex to sell" and claiming that "Linux was a slut" because they used a woman in this video. Is that a rational conclusion? There are hundreds of other examples, but that one sticks out most in my mind. If there's one thing that Roy doesn't "just do" it's post links.
> the difference is that the samba project is not taking a position that can be perceived as promoting those technologies as a formal international standard. and that is why, in a nutshell, there isn't the bruhaha over samba, but there is over this OOXML stuff.
On the exact same grounding and as little logic I can argue that the existence of Samba can be seen as promoting those proprietary technologies. What we should be doing in this case is not attacking them for doing something which is emphatically a good thing, but rather just get the truth out and not let FUD like this spread.
- GNOME (and Novell) do not support the standardisation of OOXML. They are both members of the ODF alliance, both use it as the default file format, and if it was even remotely realistic to have a decent office product without OOXML support (where the Windows desktop is unfortunately in such an insane over-dominance currently), then they would of course be all for it.
- The implementation of OOXML is all about interoperability. I don't see anyone (wrongly) trashing Samba as a project, and yet its existence and the effort to implement OOXML support is virtually identical in terms of free software.
- You like software freedom and hate the software patent system? Great, so do I. Free implementations of proprietary solutions, though, are a good thing; not a single one of my friends are going to be using Linux if they can't submit their assignments to their lecturers. We need interoperability, to ease the transition for people coming from the proprietary world.
- The KDE/Koffice developers issued a statement basically saying they didn't have the resources or the time to implement OOXML, and suddenly a lot of silly talk gets thrown at GNOME. If I volunteered to implement OOXML support in Koffice I doubt (i) that they would object, and for sure that (ii) any distribution would not include it.
- Even if you dislike Jeff Waugh, it's pretty tough to find a rational basis for criticising him based on the podcast or his approach to the problem other than (i) not getting the GNOME statement (again, which you really can't fault) out soon enough, or (ii) giving Roy the publicity he wants.
- The itwire article plays Roy as some sort of victim in the podcast talk. That is ridiculous. Unfortunately -- and to the detriment of the FLOSS community -- Roy is an incredibly prolific, poisonous person willing to do or say anything that might cook up some self-publicity, and with an irrational hatred of Novell. And in fact on the contrary, Roy skipped around every question that was directly asked to him; instead opting to just give background on Microsoft's "evil" nature and talking about how bad OOXML is (both of which we palpably know).
- Finally, even if you decide to ignore all the other above facts, please tell me why you're not also staging wide protests against OpenOffice.org or your distribution for including OOXML support, as well.
To save any comments of bias, I'm an ardent KDE aficionado.Figures on what? In terms of contribution to the Linux desktop? I'm not sure there is any competition. While Red Hat is fully pushing the server into new avenues everywhere (which is of course great), SUSE are doing this on the server and the desktop. They have actively pursued the Linux desktop and have taken it very seriously, as you can see by their acquisitions of Ximian and SUSE. There is simply no other company that even really competes with the same level of consistent contribution throughout the whole desktop.