I should imagine that there would be a vibrant open-source community designing all sorts of weird and wonderful things which you could download and "print". The potential of such a technology is enormous. There will be all sorts of issues to consider though. How do you prevent people from "printing" hand grenades and machine guns or Sarin?
If you can 'print' guns, poisons and bombs, then you can also 'print' food, clothes, clean water and antibiotics. And if you can print those at little or no cost, I don't think anyone shall ever again want to use weapons. Except the truly insane, maybe.
This is exactly what Mr Ballmer said would happen and is the best weapon Microsoft can use in pushing their "Linux infringes patents" attack. Obviously if they were to bring any cases themselves they would be swamped under a wave of counterclaims from Linux friendly companies such as IBM and Novell so this way they have a proxy which cannot be stopped in such fashion and which on the face of it has nothing to do with Microsoft should there be any negative repercussions from the action. I'd expect to see a lot more of this sort thing from now on.
Maybe a good way to counter this sort of proxy tactic would be an announcement from IBM or the OIN that they were going to go after MS with their patent portfolios, no matter what was the actual name of the company bringing the suit against Redhat or any other pure FLOSS company. Acacia sues RH, IBM goes after MS. IP Innovation LLC sues Ubuntu, IBM goes after MS. They don't have to show any logic, but simply announce their intentions. I think we might see some quick results if they do that.
Tolkien's world is famous because of its immense depth and detail. Lord of the Rings is good writing because while you get a sense of all the depth and detail, its history, and its complexity. Very little of it is actually in the book; you know its there because you can see its 'edges'; but Tolkien didn't try to tell EVERYBODY'S story. He knew better.
Erich Auerbach, one of the most respected critics of literature in the 20th century, talks about this difference in his book Mimesis. There is the Homeric style of writing, in which the author pursues every narrative strand to its utmost, and leaves nothing in the background. And then there is the Hebraic style of writing, best exemplified in the Old Testament, which works through hints and suggestions, and whose very reticence creates a sense of depth of the world being described.
So what you're saying is Jordan uses the Homeric style, while Tolkien was more Hebraic. I don't completely agree with that, but even if it were wholly true, neither style is inferior to the other, just different. Or rather, they are both good in different ways. For what it's worth, let me add here that I consider the first half dozen books in the WoT series to be at least as good as the LOTR trilogy.
So you don't need a LUG -- you can get all help you need online.
It follows that there is at least one technical situation where you'd need help from a LUG -- when you can't set up your net connection on Linux:-)
Seriously, though, technical utility isn't the only reason for the existence of LUGs.
My LUG gives me a sense of community and belonging. Nowadays I go there more to chat with like-minded folks and to exchange anecdotes over coffee than to get any real technical help. It's a form of socialising that I can't get elsewhere.
But I may be an exception in that I'm a Linux enthusiast (not in the sense of being a fanatic), and not a professional. Computer professionals may have no use for LUGs because they can get all the Linux help they need (if any) in their professional environment or online, and they have so much talk about it at work that they don't want to talk about it at other times. But how many LUG members are Linux professionals? Or even computer professionals?
I don't know. Seems to me that in my area (Kolkata, India) at least, LUGgers are a pretty heterogeneous cross section of society, most of them not in computer-centred professions. And yes, we have a need for LUGs. It gives us a warm, fuzzy feeling to be part of a community oriented around a (relatively) obscure operating system. Of course, it isn't as warm or as fuzzy any more as it was in 1995, when very few people had even heard of Linux. But it's still a good feeling.
I predict that the LUG will truly vanish when (if ever) GNU/Linux becomes mainstream on the desktop.
For some strange reason, many non-Indians seem to think the name is "Ghandi". It is not. I have seen this mistake many times. The name is "Gandhi". That's how most people having that name spell it in English, and that is how MK Gandhi himself used to spell it.
The answer is, he is not coerced. There is no force. He is free to starve. Just because men must provide for their own survival does not enslave them. If that were the case, using that definition, under no circumstances could a man *not* be a slave. And in which case, all men are slaves and then there's no such thing as slavery.
slavery to nature and slavery to other human beings are two different things. of course every person is a slave to nature because they must eat, sleep and defecate. but capitalism is different. it entails slavery to other human beings -- those who own capital. the worker owns labour, the capitalist owns land and capital. production is not possible without either side. yet the capitalist gets the best of the deal, while the worker is free either to sell his labour cheaply (that is, according to the terms set by the capitalist) or to starve. naturally (because it is the instinct of every living being to preserve its own life), the worker is forced to give in. and that is why there is most definitely a force, a coercion involved in the capitalist process.
a car crash that happened on the turnpike and was, therefore, property of the turnpike.
What happened on the turnpike was the accident. So they can keep their accident, which is their property. They can sue anyone who attempts to distribute the accident without their permission.
The video, however, is a different thing altogether.
That roughly translates to "It's so easy, an Estonian can do it".
and "so cheap/trivial that he can do it with linux". really, will any degree of technical superiority ever hammer it into the heads of these PHB types that FLOSS!=cheap/trivial?
That being said, as someone else put it, the performace of current generation AMD chips (and even the projected next gen performaces for AMD and Intel), does not provide a compelling case for a switch. Then again, the performance generation of Intel chips vs. PPC chips when Apple was official about the switch, did not make a compelling case either.
Performance-wise, AMD and Intel are close enough so that that won't really matter to Apple if they really switch over. That wouldn't be their reason, if they did. Their reason might be integration. Apple is typically a company that wants to fuse hardware and software together and brand the result as a unified product. They don't want customers to think along hardware/software lines. They had some bad experiences with IBM providing their hardware, so they switched to the Intel architecture.
It is possible that they shall now want to bring the hardware side of the Mac totally under their own control. I can very much see Steve Jobs wanting to do that. But as an astute businessman, he wouldn't take the double risk of changing the architecture and sinking a lot of money into acquiring a chip manufacturing company simultaneously, in case the move failed. Naturally, he would first switch to the new architecture and then, if that succeeded, proceed to buy out a manufacturer.
And what better target than AMD does he have?
I don't know if it will be good or bad, if this happens. I guess all depends on whether Apple will then sell processors separately, or subsume AMD's total productions into Macs. Because then Intel will be virtually without a competitor, and that can't be good.
Humans have been circumventing Darwin for centuries. The only thing left we don't control are viruses and cancer. And it's not like it's such a bad thing, with the exception of stupid people living so long. Modern society, with it's welfare, social security, laws, birth control, medicine, and safety regulations all fly in the face of natural selection. If you're stupid, we have all these laws and people looking out for you to keep you from doing something stupid and killing youself. If you're lazy, we'll make sure someone gets you food so you don't starve. If you're not a dominant member of the herd, we'll try to make sure those that are treat you fairly.
Once again, those aren't by any means bad things (unless Idiocracy was a doumentary), just saying we've been immune to most aspects of natural selection for a long time now.
i'll bite.
why is human culture not a product of nature? after all, we achieved it with our intelligence and other faculties, which we acquired through adaptation. when chimps use tools, we do not readily differentiate it from nature. isn't the difference between chimp technology and ours only a matter of scale? termites build cities too, though you could argue that that is hardwired into them. but who can tell what is hardwired into whom, and how much of our sense of free will is illusory?
seriously, find a crime the usa does, and tell me the majority of other countries in the world aren't guilty of the same thing
Okay, how about using nuclear weapons in a war? Name another country that did it.
Also, name another modern country that has bombed more than twenty other countries since the end of the second world war, as the USA has done.
And guess which is the only country yet to have used all three kinds of WMD-s in wars (nuclear, chemical, biological)? Yes, the one that's so busy now bombing even more countries for the alleged possession of the same.
When North Korea conducted an a-bomb test a few months ago and the US government denied that it had happened, seismic data from the the USGS website embarrassed the government's stance by clearly showing the blast. Someone even pointed it out on slashdot. I wonder if the present censorship has anything to do with that.
Some of the points he is making are BS. They are not good `Unix habits` they are simply hacks that marginally reduce the workload but (arguably) increase complexity.
Ie there is NOTHING bad about piping cats. While you might indeed get a ~30% performance increase if you skip the cat, the complexity increases. We often sacrifice performance in order to increase abstraction and understanding.
What makes unix so powerful is its modularity, the fact that you can pipe any output from any application to any applications stdin. This makes it possible to use common tools app1 | app2, app1longoutput | grep thingsIwant. The possibility to mix and match common elements that (arguably) makes unix powerful.
Advice that says "stop piping cats" is akin to "stop using helper functions, they overload the stack, instead do everything in one function"
but he never said you should stop using pipes. he is talking only about a specific situation -- cat-ing a file and then piping it to grep. surely that is a good point he is making, because grep already takes filenames as an argument?
that the state of West Bengal will follow suit soon. Kerala and West Bengal are ruled by the same party's government, and a decision of this level usually comes from their central politburo.
I don't want to detract from the seriousness of the argument, but it wasn't Julius, it was Augustus Caesar. The triumvirate was after the death of Julius.
However, that is beside the point. I entirely agree with your analogy. And this is a trend nt only in the US, but all over the world. In my country, India, the government recently significantly weakened the RTI Act, which used to uphold the citizens' right to know about the internal workings of the govt. And that was a few days after the Mumbai blasts. The 9/11 bug is spreading:-(
Slashdot Mirror
If you can 'print' guns, poisons and bombs, then you can also 'print' food, clothes, clean water and antibiotics. And if you can print those at little or no cost, I don't think anyone shall ever again want to use weapons. Except the truly insane, maybe.
Maybe a good way to counter this sort of proxy tactic would be an announcement from IBM or the OIN that they were going to go after MS with their patent portfolios, no matter what was the actual name of the company bringing the suit against Redhat or any other pure FLOSS company. Acacia sues RH, IBM goes after MS. IP Innovation LLC sues Ubuntu, IBM goes after MS. They don't have to show any logic, but simply announce their intentions. I think we might see some quick results if they do that.
Disclaimer: haven't read TFA.
Erich Auerbach, one of the most respected critics of literature in the 20th century, talks about this difference in his book Mimesis. There is the Homeric style of writing, in which the author pursues every narrative strand to its utmost, and leaves nothing in the background. And then there is the Hebraic style of writing, best exemplified in the Old Testament, which works through hints and suggestions, and whose very reticence creates a sense of depth of the world being described.
Seehttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erich_Auerbach#Mimesis:_The_Representation_of_Reality_in_Western_Literature for more detailed discussion.
So what you're saying is Jordan uses the Homeric style, while Tolkien was more Hebraic. I don't completely agree with that, but even if it were wholly true, neither style is inferior to the other, just different. Or rather, they are both good in different ways. For what it's worth, let me add here that I consider the first half dozen books in the WoT series to be at least as good as the LOTR trilogy.
Really? That's where I'm sending my kids, then :-)
So you don't need a LUG -- you can get all help you need online.
It follows that there is at least one technical situation where you'd need help from a LUG -- when you can't set up your net connection on Linux :-)
Seriously, though, technical utility isn't the only reason for the existence of LUGs.My LUG gives me a sense of community and belonging. Nowadays I go there more to chat with like-minded folks and to exchange anecdotes over coffee than to get any real technical help. It's a form of socialising that I can't get elsewhere.
But I may be an exception in that I'm a Linux enthusiast (not in the sense of being a fanatic), and not a professional. Computer professionals may have no use for LUGs because they can get all the Linux help they need (if any) in their professional environment or online, and they have so much talk about it at work that they don't want to talk about it at other times. But how many LUG members are Linux professionals? Or even computer professionals?
I don't know. Seems to me that in my area (Kolkata, India) at least, LUGgers are a pretty heterogeneous cross section of society, most of them not in computer-centred professions. And yes, we have a need for LUGs. It gives us a warm, fuzzy feeling to be part of a community oriented around a (relatively) obscure operating system. Of course, it isn't as warm or as fuzzy any more as it was in 1995, when very few people had even heard of Linux. But it's still a good feeling.
I predict that the LUG will truly vanish when (if ever) GNU/Linux becomes mainstream on the desktop.
For some strange reason, many non-Indians seem to think the name is "Ghandi". It is not. I have seen this mistake many times. The name is "Gandhi". That's how most people having that name spell it in English, and that is how MK Gandhi himself used to spell it.
What is 'Indian'?
that's right. if you must mock the outcome of future events, at least select those that have already happened. :-)
slavery to nature and slavery to other human beings are two different things. of course every person is a slave to nature because they must eat, sleep and defecate. but capitalism is different. it entails slavery to other human beings -- those who own capital. the worker owns labour, the capitalist owns land and capital. production is not possible without either side. yet the capitalist gets the best of the deal, while the worker is free either to sell his labour cheaply (that is, according to the terms set by the capitalist) or to starve. naturally (because it is the instinct of every living being to preserve its own life), the worker is forced to give in. and that is why there is most definitely a force, a coercion involved in the capitalist process.
What happened on the turnpike was the accident. So they can keep their accident, which is their property. They can sue anyone who attempts to distribute the accident without their permission.
The video, however, is a different thing altogether.
and "so cheap/trivial that he can do it with linux". really, will any degree of technical superiority ever hammer it into the heads of these PHB types that FLOSS!=cheap/trivial?
fine development; perhaps this will make micro$oft and others realise the full implications of supporting DRM and DMCA.
Performance-wise, AMD and Intel are close enough so that that won't really matter to Apple if they really switch over. That wouldn't be their reason, if they did. Their reason might be integration. Apple is typically a company that wants to fuse hardware and software together and brand the result as a unified product. They don't want customers to think along hardware/software lines. They had some bad experiences with IBM providing their hardware, so they switched to the Intel architecture.
It is possible that they shall now want to bring the hardware side of the Mac totally under their own control. I can very much see Steve Jobs wanting to do that. But as an astute businessman, he wouldn't take the double risk of changing the architecture and sinking a lot of money into acquiring a chip manufacturing company simultaneously, in case the move failed. Naturally, he would first switch to the new architecture and then, if that succeeded, proceed to buy out a manufacturer.And what better target than AMD does he have?
I don't know if it will be good or bad, if this happens. I guess all depends on whether Apple will then sell processors separately, or subsume AMD's total productions into Macs. Because then Intel will be virtually without a competitor, and that can't be good.Okay, how about using nuclear weapons in a war? Name another country that did it.
Also, name another modern country that has bombed more than twenty other countries since the end of the second world war, as the USA has done.
And guess which is the only country yet to have used all three kinds of WMD-s in wars (nuclear, chemical, biological)? Yes, the one that's so busy now bombing even more countries for the alleged possession of the same.
Mod parent down, I say.
When North Korea conducted an a-bomb test a few months ago and the US government denied that it had happened, seismic data from the the USGS website embarrassed the government's stance by clearly showing the blast. Someone even pointed it out on slashdot. I wonder if the present censorship has anything to do with that.
but he never said you should stop using pipes. he is talking only about a specific situation -- cat-ing a file and then piping it to grep. surely that is a good point he is making, because grep already takes filenames as an argument?
Hmmm. What about Iraq, Afghanistan, Chechnya?
that the state of West Bengal will follow suit soon. Kerala and West Bengal are ruled by the same party's government, and a decision of this level usually comes from their central politburo.
Where should I send to get icann.org for 100 years???
Idea for business startup: antiantivirus for religious groups :-)
I don't want to detract from the seriousness of the argument, but it wasn't Julius, it was Augustus Caesar. The triumvirate was after the death of Julius. However, that is beside the point. I entirely agree with your analogy. And this is a trend nt only in the US, but all over the world. In my country, India, the government recently significantly weakened the RTI Act, which used to uphold the citizens' right to know about the internal workings of the govt. And that was a few days after the Mumbai blasts. The 9/11 bug is spreading :-(