You have a good point but I think that the situation is complicated in this case. For the simpler applications some users can port open source. Most users never port anything and don't know how. For the more complex and highly optimized applications even the few users who do know how to port would be sol and would have to wait for the dedicated few to do it. The situation with OS X is sort of an in between case. The kernal and the UNIX layer is largely open source and a ton of applications are open source and most of it should just recompile in a "no-brainer" fashion. On top of that it seems that many applications will run without even a recompile but with a speed hit. This latter benefit is not generally the case with open source unless someone gets the urge to start a new open source project to do the translator. It would a little while for the open source community to generate a useable version of that.
Last time I checked Apple has less 3.5% of the market. Maybe. So what effing "war" are they talking about ? Does Microsoft have megascale paranoia that it needs to be at war with a flea. Is that all they have left to generate enthusiasm for their product. The "war" if there ever was one was over long ago. The chevy cavalier of computing won so now we have to listen to endless puke about how its really better than anything else (especially when its just been reinstalled). So get outta my face with this stupid "war" shite. If the rest of the world wants to use PC's I could care less as long as I can still buy and use a decent computer.
This has been a lifelong battle for Bill Gates. His war with the "free"software community and their bad attitude towards his stuff goes all the way back to his beginnings. His first or one of his first products was a BASIC interpreter.
At the time there was a "free" interpreter called Tiny Basic and when Gates started selling his BASIC people started sharing their copies of his BASIC as though it deserved the same treatment as Tiny Basic. Bill got on the stump and accused a lot of people of being thieves. The "free" software community is a lifetime recurring lifetime nightmare for him. Can you picture him screaming in his sleep when IBM first announced support for Linux.
Who knows maybe the center of thought isn't the mind.
Many people think that most men use other body parts
to think. So here's a way to supplement tin foil lined hats.
http://www.lessemf.com/personal.html
I think that Microsofts solution it to require their
employees to wear these foil lined hats.
http://zapatopi.net/afdb.html
The only problem I see is that while it does
shield the employees thoughts it also
shuts out Microsoft mind control.
Its a real dilemma
'As good as Apple may be, I don't believe the success of the iPod is sustainable in the long run.'
DUH, so, uh, like you mean the Ipod won't be around forever. Jeeeepers. You just can't count on anything these days. I better go dig up those 250 Ipods I buried in my back yard for safe keeping and sell them now.
This article ignores the gorrilla in the roorm.
Dependence on vendors is the number one problem largely because there is essentially only one commercial operating system left, Windows. The success of open source and "free" software is intimately tied to this fact of life. If there were several viable competing commercial operating systems then dependence on vendors would be less of an issue and so would cost of ownership, the use of open standards and the slow pace of real innovation. Competition would make it so. As things stand Microsoft with its monoply is in a position to force upgrades through incompatibility with previous proprietary versions of interfaces and formats. Ironically their monoply came into being largely because they successfully marketed the emotional security blankets of "compatibility" and "standards".
Why isn't she complaining about Microsoft's monoply?
Why isn't everyone ?
Move toward the light
on
Gates on Google
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
Because so much computer functionality can be enhanced through intelligent search and because intelligent search and interfacing to intelligent search offer endless opportunity for innovation this issue has the potential to become a real problem for Microsoft. If the pace of innovation is fast and sustained then Microsoft's only option for maintaining control will be litigation. Apparently Google and Apple have decided that relentless innovation is the route to survival. If all of the other non-Microsoft players adopt that posture then its going to be a fun time for computing enthusiasts.
Its the search thing the he wants credit for
on
Gates on Google
·
· Score: 1
Google did it right first on the Web and Apple did right first on an OS. As with 99.999% of the significant software innovations Microsoft will implement it last and probably with the poorest implementation. I would guess that it will take Microsoft 5 - 10 years to get within 10% of the quality of search functionality of the other players at that point in time. At that point the overall quality will start to decline because Microsoft will have removed all financial incentive for anyone else to keep improving it and Microsoft only improves their stuff as long as Microsoft thinks that someone else might get credit or money for it. After all the competition is effectively dead Microsoft software moves into the bug-pit feature-rich functionality-decline stage. Features are added to compete with the only remaining competitor and the only remaining competitor is Microsoft's last version of the same thing. This competition between the new version and the old version drives the need to dismantle compatibility between versions so that people are forced to pay for something. By that stage of the process almost no one (less than 5%) will notice that Microsoft has the most incompatible, geekiest, most user hostile, malware friendly, pocket pickinest, idiosycratic, unreliable, proprietary implementation. At this point some users will actually refer to it as more "open" than the competitors products because Microsoft has effectively limited the functionality of competing products on the Windows platform. In cases where IT departments don't turn off Microsoft's brave new technology because it is too insecure and unmaintainable users will be grateful for the limited and abusive technology that they still get to use.
Please feel free to believe that Angels push the planets around the sky, that the earth is flat, that there are secret messages encoded in the Bible and that biological organisms were designed from the top down. Why not just believe that God inteligently designed the laws of physics and the rest followed including evolution. The latter story is actually simpler and more intelligible. Only problem with it is you do have to learn something and have an open mind to understand it. All of the laws of physics boil to a few lines of text patterns. Pretty amazing or even miraculous considering the number of things that are accurately described by those few patterns. Contrast that with the so called "intelligent design" scenario which boils down to an encyclopedic list top level designs, one for each life form and human identifiable thing in the universe. Only a child, or an uneducated adult who had been implicitly threatened from childhood by religious authority would find this kind of explanation satisfactory. Its not bigotry that you feel its pity.
If I reach into a grab-bag with 10^100 distinct marbles and draw one out then the probability of drawing that particular one is 1 in 10^100. There is no sigificance to that fact that a particular marble was drawn. You are saying that intelligent design is responsible for the fact that that particular marble was drawn.
This blog-marketing and the recent Longhorn media blitz is in response to the release of OS X Tiger, a platform that has maybe 3% of the market. Can anyone make sense of this paranoic response ? A few people are switching to Macs but it isn't because of Tiger so Microsoft needs to calm down and concentrate on making a decent product if that is possible for them. I can't speak for XP because I haven't used it enough. NT 4.0 was an OK product but Win 98 should have been the basis for a class action law suit. So I switched. SUSE 9.2 on my cluster, OS X on desktops and laptops, Win XP chained in the corner for dire emergencies.
1. There is no longer natural selection for increased intelligence.
2. Just about anyone above the right age gets to vote.
3. Just about anyone who reaches maturity gets to reproduce.
In summary :
You are directing your stream of urine upwind in a hurricane and natural selection has not resulted in a bladder of sufficient strength for you to avoid urinating on yourself under these particular circumstances.
If one were looking for intelligent design then the place to look is at the intelligent design of the laws of physics. Presumably the laws of chemistry and ultimately biology can be derived from the laws of physics. So God made the laws of physics so that biology would be what it is and evolution would work the way it does.
Of course the laws of physics are just a theory that is used to organized our observations and guide us in the next round of measurment and theoretical speculation. To go further, physical theories use mathematical descriptions which are strings of symbols arranged in patterns. All this would suggest that God is some kind of Scrabble freak. Is not this fun.
The unprovability of physical theories is not a new or even a philosophical idea hence the title "Worth repeating". Its more of a logical fact. If you want to understand what scientists and statisticians say about this point then Google "Null Hypothesis" and keep going from there. Its not uncommon for scientists to talk about proof but what they mean is that the data supports rather than disproves their theory and/or that they can prove that their theory is logically self consistent. Its impossible to test every implication of a theory and/or to test it in every instance where there is or will be a testable implication. Using a theory as though it were true in order to predict what will happen involves belief. It is uncomfortable for most of us to deal with everything that way so we don't usually talk about it that way. The Quantum theory makes this situation even more explicit because its predictions are explicitly statistical predictions.
Mathematical theorems can be proven and thats about it. Newtonian physics is flawed but still very useful. It was replaced by the theory of General Relativity which is better but doesn't encompass or full under Quantum Theory.
If you believe that you can prove something about the real world then that is a religious belief.
Like every other theory about the real world the theory of evolution can not be proven. Mathematical theorems can be proven but the relationship of mathematical theories to the real world cannot be proven. The usefullness of a theory may be obvious but that usefullness never constitutes proof. When scientist start talking about proving their theories or about understanding the "true" nature of the real world then they have wandered into the domain of religion. This is exactly the problem that Gallileo had with the pope. The pope told Gallileo to shut up about "proof" and Gallileo refused. Gallileo refused to distinguish between the simplicity and usefullness of his theory, and the proof of his theory. On the other hand, when theologians attempt to rationalize or prove things about the physical world they are in the domain of science.
Slashdot Mirror
You have a good point but I think that the situation is complicated in this case. For the simpler applications some users can port open source. Most users never port anything and don't know how. For the more complex and highly optimized applications even the few users who do know how to port would be sol and would have to wait for the dedicated few to do it. The situation with OS X is sort of an in between case. The kernal and the UNIX layer is largely open source and a ton of applications are open source and most of it should just recompile in a "no-brainer" fashion. On top of that it seems that many applications will run without even a recompile but with a speed hit. This latter benefit is not generally the case with open source unless someone gets the urge to start a new open source project to do the translator. It would a little while for the open source community to generate a useable version of that.
Thats right, we aren't in Kansas anymore.
exactamundo. They should call you dead eye dan.
One is for homophobes and the other is for people who don't relate the use of a computer to the use of their sex organs.
Last time I checked Apple has less 3.5% of the market. Maybe. So what effing "war" are they talking about ? Does Microsoft have megascale paranoia that it needs to be at war with a flea. Is that all they have left to generate enthusiasm for their product. The "war" if there ever was one was over long ago. The chevy cavalier of computing won so now we have to listen to endless puke about how its really better than anything else (especially when its just been reinstalled). So get outta my face with this stupid "war" shite. If the rest of the world wants to use PC's I could care less as long as I can still buy and use a decent computer.
This has been a lifelong battle for Bill Gates. His war with the "free"software community and their bad attitude towards his stuff goes all the way back to his beginnings. His first or one of his first products was a BASIC interpreter. At the time there was a "free" interpreter called Tiny Basic and when Gates started selling his BASIC people started sharing their copies of his BASIC as though it deserved the same treatment as Tiny Basic. Bill got on the stump and accused a lot of people of being thieves. The "free" software community is a lifetime recurring lifetime nightmare for him. Can you picture him screaming in his sleep when IBM first announced support for Linux.
Who knows maybe the center of thought isn't the mind. Many people think that most men use other body parts to think. So here's a way to supplement tin foil lined hats. http://www.lessemf.com/personal.html
I think that Microsofts solution it to require their employees to wear these foil lined hats. http://zapatopi.net/afdb.html The only problem I see is that while it does shield the employees thoughts it also shuts out Microsoft mind control. Its a real dilemma
Everybody knows thats the solution.
You know like on the South Park episode where people pushed food up their shoots and the poo came out of their mouths. Kinda like this pronouncment.
'As good as Apple may be, I don't believe the success of the iPod is sustainable in the long run.' DUH, so, uh, like you mean the Ipod won't be around forever. Jeeeepers. You just can't count on anything these days. I better go dig up those 250 Ipods I buried in my back yard for safe keeping and sell them now.
This article ignores the gorrilla in the roorm. Dependence on vendors is the number one problem largely because there is essentially only one commercial operating system left, Windows. The success of open source and "free" software is intimately tied to this fact of life. If there were several viable competing commercial operating systems then dependence on vendors would be less of an issue and so would cost of ownership, the use of open standards and the slow pace of real innovation. Competition would make it so. As things stand Microsoft with its monoply is in a position to force upgrades through incompatibility with previous proprietary versions of interfaces and formats. Ironically their monoply came into being largely because they successfully marketed the emotional security blankets of "compatibility" and "standards".
who believes that she has a friend
Why isn't she complaining about Microsoft's monoply? Why isn't everyone ?
Because so much computer functionality can be enhanced through intelligent search and because intelligent search and interfacing to intelligent search offer endless opportunity for innovation this issue has the potential to become a real problem for Microsoft. If the pace of innovation is fast and sustained then Microsoft's only option for maintaining control will be litigation. Apparently Google and Apple have decided that relentless innovation is the route to survival. If all of the other non-Microsoft players adopt that posture then its going to be a fun time for computing enthusiasts.
Google did it right first on the Web and Apple did right first on an OS. As with 99.999% of the significant software innovations Microsoft will implement it last and probably with the poorest implementation. I would guess that it will take Microsoft 5 - 10 years to get within 10% of the quality of search functionality of the other players at that point in time. At that point the overall quality will start to decline because Microsoft will have removed all financial incentive for anyone else to keep improving it and Microsoft only improves their stuff as long as Microsoft thinks that someone else might get credit or money for it. After all the competition is effectively dead Microsoft software moves into the bug-pit feature-rich functionality-decline stage. Features are added to compete with the only remaining competitor and the only remaining competitor is Microsoft's last version of the same thing. This competition between the new version and the old version drives the need to dismantle compatibility between versions so that people are forced to pay for something. By that stage of the process almost no one (less than 5%) will notice that Microsoft has the most incompatible, geekiest, most user hostile, malware friendly, pocket pickinest, idiosycratic, unreliable, proprietary implementation. At this point some users will actually refer to it as more "open" than the competitors products because Microsoft has effectively limited the functionality of competing products on the Windows platform. In cases where IT departments don't turn off Microsoft's brave new technology because it is too insecure and unmaintainable users will be grateful for the limited and abusive technology that they still get to use.
Please feel free to believe that Angels push the planets around the sky, that the earth is flat, that there are secret messages encoded in the Bible and that biological organisms were designed from the top down. Why not just believe that God inteligently designed the laws of physics and the rest followed including evolution. The latter story is actually simpler and more intelligible. Only problem with it is you do have to learn something and have an open mind to understand it. All of the laws of physics boil to a few lines of text patterns. Pretty amazing or even miraculous considering the number of things that are accurately described by those few patterns. Contrast that with the so called "intelligent design" scenario which boils down to an encyclopedic list top level designs, one for each life form and human identifiable thing in the universe. Only a child, or an uneducated adult who had been implicitly threatened from childhood by religious authority would find this kind of explanation satisfactory. Its not bigotry that you feel its pity.
If I reach into a grab-bag with 10^100 distinct marbles and draw one out then the probability of drawing that particular one is 1 in 10^100. There is no sigificance to that fact that a particular marble was drawn. You are saying that intelligent design is responsible for the fact that that particular marble was drawn.
This blog-marketing and the recent Longhorn media blitz is in response to the release of OS X Tiger, a platform that has maybe 3% of the market. Can anyone make sense of this paranoic response ? A few people are switching to Macs but it isn't because of Tiger so Microsoft needs to calm down and concentrate on making a decent product if that is possible for them. I can't speak for XP because I haven't used it enough. NT 4.0 was an OK product but Win 98 should have been the basis for a class action law suit. So I switched. SUSE 9.2 on my cluster, OS X on desktops and laptops, Win XP chained in the corner for dire emergencies.
1. There is no longer natural selection for increased intelligence. 2. Just about anyone above the right age gets to vote. 3. Just about anyone who reaches maturity gets to reproduce. In summary : You are directing your stream of urine upwind in a hurricane and natural selection has not resulted in a bladder of sufficient strength for you to avoid urinating on yourself under these particular circumstances.
If one were looking for intelligent design then the place to look is at the intelligent design of the laws of physics. Presumably the laws of chemistry and ultimately biology can be derived from the laws of physics. So God made the laws of physics so that biology would be what it is and evolution would work the way it does. Of course the laws of physics are just a theory that is used to organized our observations and guide us in the next round of measurment and theoretical speculation. To go further, physical theories use mathematical descriptions which are strings of symbols arranged in patterns. All this would suggest that God is some kind of Scrabble freak. Is not this fun.
The unprovability of physical theories is not a new or even a philosophical idea hence the title "Worth repeating". Its more of a logical fact. If you want to understand what scientists and statisticians say about this point then Google "Null Hypothesis" and keep going from there. Its not uncommon for scientists to talk about proof but what they mean is that the data supports rather than disproves their theory and/or that they can prove that their theory is logically self consistent. Its impossible to test every implication of a theory and/or to test it in every instance where there is or will be a testable implication. Using a theory as though it were true in order to predict what will happen involves belief. It is uncomfortable for most of us to deal with everything that way so we don't usually talk about it that way. The Quantum theory makes this situation even more explicit because its predictions are explicitly statistical predictions.
No. Some religious feel absolutely sure that they are right but being religious doesn't require that feeling.
Mathematical theorems can be proven and thats about it. Newtonian physics is flawed but still very useful. It was replaced by the theory of General Relativity which is better but doesn't encompass or full under Quantum Theory. If you believe that you can prove something about the real world then that is a religious belief.
Like every other theory about the real world the theory of evolution can not be proven. Mathematical theorems can be proven but the relationship of mathematical theories to the real world cannot be proven. The usefullness of a theory may be obvious but that usefullness never constitutes proof. When scientist start talking about proving their theories or about understanding the "true" nature of the real world then they have wandered into the domain of religion. This is exactly the problem that Gallileo had with the pope. The pope told Gallileo to shut up about "proof" and Gallileo refused. Gallileo refused to distinguish between the simplicity and usefullness of his theory, and the proof of his theory. On the other hand, when theologians attempt to rationalize or prove things about the physical world they are in the domain of science.