A number of times I've come across the question of Easter Island: Who cut down the last tree? Didn't they see that deforesting their island would ruin their lives?
Most likely no one cut down the last tree. They cut them down till there were not enough left to be self sustaining and then decided to implement strict conserveration measures.
isn't the day-to-day pollution from a nuclear plant going to be far less than that of other non-renewable energy sources?
Yes and no. It depends on what you look at.
In terms of CO2, this is very true -- coal increases the net levels of CO2 in the atmosphere, nuclear doesn't; so from a global climate change perspective this is good.
Same for particulate emmisions -- coal burning produces a lot of particulates, nuclear doesn't; so from an air quality perspective nuclear is better.
However, the hot outflows from the water used to cool the reactors generally causes issues in the rivers -- including increased biological activity that can consume the oxygen in the water in some spots, reducing fish life. Use of a large enough body of water with good design and water flow should take care of that. -- so nuclear is at best a neutral in terms of water quality in the immediate locality.
The big area were nuclear causes problems is what to do with the spent fuel. Getting rid of something that is dangerous for thousands of years in a way that doesn't come back to bite you later is challenging, all the more so because who wants to live near the stuff even if the chances that anything goes wrong are tiny. And the dangers of transporting it from the reactor to the disposal site are also an issue.
But personally, I think the biggest problem with nuclear in the US is the way it's done. In France, they have a single reactor design with 3 size varients. The design gets steady small improvements but was based on a better design than US reactors to start with. In the US, every reactor is different, with no standardization at all, and the US built reactors that are capable of meltdowns -- it is possible to design a reactor that is incapable of accidental meltdown.
Also, as it's been pointed out in other posts, nuclear will free us from our dependence on coal and natural gas for electric generation, but not on oil. We use oil for heating and automobiles, not for electric generation.
Yes, any of those things can happen, at which point your insurance company will immediately respond. "Sorry, electroction/drugs/anything less than a stubbed toe is not covered, as per clause 383.28.1.482 of your contract. Oh, you don't agree? Well go ahead and sue us."
This happened to me with car insurance. I was paying $3k/year to insure a sports car, which was damaged by vandalism. The insurance company refused to have it fixed until it was garaged in a different location, because "it would just get vandalised again".
Too much money can lead to throwing more resources at a problem -- usually in the form of buying products or adding more engineers. Bought products rarely just drop right in to what you've been building, so often much time is lost learning the product and adapting it to the rest of your system. More engineers increases communication burdens. Worse still, these engineers are often hired quickly, so they aren't as carefully screened for compatibility with the rest of the team and they aren't easily aculturated to the team's way of doing things.
On the other hand, when you can't just throw tons of resources at the project, you have to apply serious creativity to solving the problem in a way that doesn't cost too much. Some really great software gets built that way.
Of course, too small a budget is a problem too. But the defense against that is fairly straightforward. As a PM, make it clear that the project can't be done without at least X resources. The too many resources problem is harder to see happening, because you are spending all your time managing them.
It doesn't take up an extra slot, it takes up the 8x AGP slot that would be used by the FX5200 or Radeon 9600. And this nonsense of what is stock or not is just that. Nonsense. You have to go through the BTO screen to adjust your purchase options when you buy from the Apple store anyway, so who cares what the default item is (well, other than the added money that the 9800 costs, which is well worth it IMO).
You are confusing correlation with causation. The statisical correlation between low death rates and negative population growth only suggests that the two may be related in some way. It doesn't mean that one causes the other.
Demographers will tell you that what happens is something called a "Demographic Transition", where better medical care and living conditions (ie: less poverty) leads people to live longer, and fewer of their children to die, so they feel safe having fewer children. Also, a lot of poverty is also associated with rural living conditions (ie, poor farming villages), where having a lot of kids means lots of free labor to help the family survive by farming. Finally there is the lottery effect, were in a large family one kid might make it into the city and get a job that will support the whole rural family. All of these factors combine to create pressure on impoverished people to have larger families. In developed populations, the few people who have large families do it for other reasons.
If you look at demographic trends in developed countries over time, you see that death rates dropped first, while birth rates stayed high for a generation or so, then birth rates dropped. You will also see that this caused population booms.
As far as reducing population growth, the most effective way (aside from perhaps draconian laws) is to educate and provide work opportunities for improverished women. This gives them options and many of them will choose to do other things than fill their houses with babies.
Net Sprocket has been Open Sourced and merged with OpenPlay. It is currently a mature and working product for Mac OS 9, OS X, Win32, and Linux. The Posix version could probably be built on just about any Posix OS.
Among other things, this would allow products like TIVO to legally defeat encryption to access HDTV. Currently it is unlikely the TIVO will ever work with HDTV because it is illegal for them to reverse engineer the encryption that protects the digital data stream from an HDTV receiver. The companies that make HDTV sets will undoubtedly include their own lame TIVO imitations so they can up the prices of their sets, but it won't be the same.
After downloading the package and looking at their current feature set, it seems like they've addressed most of my security concerns since the last time I'd looked at it.
I've looked at the torque network layer while it was still part of the torque engine. It's well suited for developers who want a small scale (32 players or so) network game, particularly if its a first person shooter.
I wouldn't even consider it for a mid-size or larger multiplayer game, as it lacks important security features and IMO doesn't give enough control over the actual network protocol due to the emphasis on RMI.
EA.com is the games channel for AOL. I wonder if this means Microsoft would buy them out of their contract? I guess they could continue to operate it, but since Microsoft and EA are huge competitors in the gaming, it's hard to imagine such a uneasy union lasting very long.
Having been involved in a number of MMOGs, the goals of a MMOG and Gov are (should be?) very different.
1) MMOGs design and admin can't please everyone. The good one's accept that, and design around a creative vision that will appeal to some people and not to others. The others will just play some other game, or not play at all. Government, on the other hand, does not have that option. It can't create a paradise for 5% of its users while pissing off the rest (or maybe it can, but it shouldn't be able to).
2) MMOG administration is usually based on the premise of "get rid of the griefers as quick as possible, they cost us money". In Gov, getting rid of the griefers usually involves feeding and clothing them and paying for their guards, so it actually costs more money (or at least until Patriot Act VII allowings police yank your license to live for terriorist acts of drunk driving).
Your comparisions overlook a lot of critical details. For example:
You define deforestation as cutting of old trees and encouraging growth of new ones, then imply this is little different than the whole area being wiped out by a forest fire. There are many misconceptions in that opinion.
1) This is the US model of "deforestation", whereas most deforestation happens in rainforests where the forest is clear cut and burned to ash, and the ash then provides nutrients for crops to grow. If this is just a small patch in the middle of a thriving rainforest, no problem -- when the ash is exhausted and the nutrient poor soil won't grow crops, it is abandoned and the rainforest regrows quickly. But most of the time it is massive deforestation instead.
2) Forest fires in nature don't "wipe out a whole area" because they naturally happen frequently enough that you don't get the enormous quantities of brush and dead matter that you find in out managed forests. This is the stuff that burns much more quickly and easily than an old growth tree. Mature trees typically survive forest fires, whereas saplings and brush are consumed. So cutting down the old trees to encourage growth of young ones is just the opposite of what you need to prevent unnaturally intense forest fires.
3) In most cases, when a national or old-growth forest is logged, the variety of species that grow there are replaced by a much smaller number, so the genetic diversity of that forest is reduced, increasing the likelihood that a parasite or pest can inflict irreversable damage on that forest.
Next, you also argue that extinction of species has been happening for a long time and that makes it normal, natural and okay. This overlooks the key issues of rates of extinction. Until the 1900s, extinction happened at a very low rate. A lot of extinction even before then is blamed on human activity (fosil evidence suggests the Polynesians caused extinction of about 50 of the 98 species of birds in Hawaii in the 1200 years before European contact in 1778, for example). Nevertheless, the rates of extinction today are far greater. 34 species went extinct in the US alone over the past decade, for example.
Finally, there's your delightful argument that [waste] "came out of the Earth in the first place. There's no reason why it can't just go back". This completely ignores the fact that one of the major results of industrialization is the concentration of wastes and the creation of entirely new forms of waste. Examples:
1) Mercury is a neurotoxin that has been known to cause damage through skin contact and inhalation of fumes (the phrase "mad as a hatter" refers to the effects of long term use of mercury for producing felt. Mercury is not found in concentrated liquid form ever in nature, it is extracted from cinnabar, a red rock.
2) Petroleum products. Plastic is made from oil extracted from far underground, yet much of it ends up in shallow landfills. Gasoline doesn't occur in nature and it's combustion produces things such as ozone that are otherwise found in much lower concentrations in the lower atmosphere.
3) Fusion by-products. Enriched uranium and it's ilk are not found in nature.
This are just obvious examples of things that aren't just "put back", and can't be.
I do agree though that we are learning more about dealing with our wastes. Unfortunately, we aren't applying that learning in most cases. And of course, we shout down as "eco-freaks" those who have the temerity to suggest that technologies that produce less wastes are better than technologies to clean up waste.
I may be misremembering, but I thought this portable came out even before the Osborne. It had a multi-line LCD display, ran off 4 "AA" batteries. They are so durable that many are still in use, and it weighed just a few pounds.
Better served by a standard *nix shell
on
Microsoft's new CLI
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
Microsoft is the only major OS that doesn't have a standard *nix style shell. The popularity of cygwin for Windows developers shows that there's significant demand for it. Imagine how much nicer it would be if instead of trying to "leep frog"[sic] the Unix shell they just adopted cygwin.
I mostly play first person shooters and strategy games (both real time and turn based). FPS are lousy on a console because a mouse and keyboard are much better for quickly turning and aiming while moving. And strategy games are practically non-existant on consoles.
As for using the Mac for gaming, it also depends on what you want to do. If you want to play the same games your friends are playing, forget it. But if you want to play great games that were popular on the PC 6 months to a year earlier, then it's not a big deal, most of them are ported.
I've had my dual processor G5 for more than 10 days. The packing list shows that it shipped on the 9/17/03. Got it 3 days after that (would have been two if it weren't for Isabel). I don't have a 3.2 GHz PC to compare it to, but it's plenty fast. I've been getting 3:12 average CPU time on SETI@home. You can see my stats here
I'm writing in response to your recent article "Mass. Taxpayers Hurt by Proposed Software Monopoly".
I must disagree strongly with the Council for Citizens Against Government Waste's (CCAGW) characterization of Mr. Quinn's plan to move to all open source operating systems as a "boondoggle". Let's look at your points one by one.
1. You state: "Proprietary vendors will be effectively barred from competing for state contracts, limiting competition and raising costs."
"Proprietary vendors" have many options that will allow them to bid for state contracts. One way is offer their products as open source, and make money off support contracts. Another is to win bids for contracts to write open source software needed by the state.
2. You argue: "People mistakenly refer to Linux as 'free' software because it can be freely altered and distributed. Yet while the software itself is free, the cost to maintain and upgrade it can become very expensive."
"Free" refers correctly to freedom. The freedom to alter and re-distribute software insures against forced obsolescence when a company drops support for a product or goes out of business. It can be expensive to maintain and upgrade software, but more so with proprietary software. Not only do you need to pay for the man-hours to do the work, but you have to pay the upgrade fees. And why was the upgrade necessary? Often because the software vendor decided to stop supporting the prior version, not because you need the new features. This cannot happen with open source software, because you always have the option to hire an engineer to support it for you.
3. You say: "Like all procurement decisions, the best policy on the use of software is to place all products on equal footing. It is critical that taxpayers receive the best quality programs at the least cost."
All software is on equal footing. It must meet the requirements. One of those requirements is that the software must be open source. How is this different than any other requirements found in government contracts? You know, the ones that say the vendor must have at least $10 million in annual revenue, or not be foreign owned, or have been in business for at least 10 years, etc.., etc... All these requirements limit competition, and they all do so to help ensure that the vendor can actually fulfill the contract or to protect other key public interests.
4. You claim: "It is ironic that Massachusetts , as the only state remaining in the lawsuit accusing Microsoft of antitrust violations, is creating its own state-imposed monopoly on software. Under the state's proposed "Freeware Initiative," there would be no exceptions to the rule permitting only open source/Linux software. The old Soviet Union could not have done this any better"
monopoly n. pl. monopolies
Exclusive control by one group of the means of producing or selling
a commodity or service
(source: American Heritage(R) Dictionary of the English Language)
So where is the monopoly? Are you defining the monopolist group to be "everyone"? The GNU Public License makes it quite clear that everyone has complete freedom to alter and redistribute the software as long as they give those same rights to others. That's about as far from a monopoly as you can get.
The Soviet Union reference is absurd. The Soviet Union was a centrally controlled economy where the government planners dictated exactly what was to be produced and where. It also restricted the availability of information to the populace. Massachusetts is only dictating what they will buy, not what must be produced. Free market economics gives every consumer the freedom to decide what to buy and under what terms. By only using open source software, Massachusetts is also promoting availability of information.
5. You continue: "While the initial open source software may be "free," most studies conclude that acquisition costs represent
I've used Codewarrior Pro 4 and Pro 5 extensively to do cross platform development (MacOS & Windows). The cross compilation works well, and the cross debugging is even better. This is the best way, IMHO, to get ANSI C++ compliance on Windows (Visual C++ certainly doesn't cut it). It also does Java and Pascal within the same IDE. However, while I've installed and admired the IDE on Linux, I've never tried to cross compile with it. Be aware that CW on Linux is still on version Pro 4, whereas Pro 5 is the most recent version on Mac and PC. Solaris support is also at Pro 4. Another caveat is that the Linux version uses gcc as the compiler, so you will have to deal with the differences between gcc and the Codewarrior compiler if you recompile under the Windows version. At the moment, the Codewarrior Pro 5 compiler appears to be more ANSI C++ compliant than gcc, but the differences are fairly minor.
Slashdot Mirror
I didn't see much about what it would actually consist of. Does anyone have links to such info?
Will this include glibc standardization?
A number of times I've come across the question of Easter Island: Who cut down the last tree? Didn't they see that deforesting their island would ruin their lives?
Most likely no one cut down the last tree. They cut them down till there were not enough left to be self sustaining and then decided to implement strict conserveration measures.
And what's the energy output of the sun
isn't the day-to-day pollution from a nuclear plant going to be far less than that of other non-renewable energy sources?
Yes and no. It depends on what you look at.
In terms of CO2, this is very true -- coal increases the net levels of CO2 in the atmosphere, nuclear doesn't; so from a global climate change perspective this is good.
Same for particulate emmisions -- coal burning produces a lot of particulates, nuclear doesn't; so from an air quality perspective nuclear is better.
However, the hot outflows from the water used to cool the reactors generally causes issues in the rivers -- including increased biological activity that can consume the oxygen in the water in some spots, reducing fish life. Use of a large enough body of water with good design and water flow should take care of that. -- so nuclear is at best a neutral in terms of water quality in the immediate locality.
The big area were nuclear causes problems is what to do with the spent fuel. Getting rid of something that is dangerous for thousands of years in a way that doesn't come back to bite you later is challenging, all the more so because who wants to live near the stuff even if the chances that anything goes wrong are tiny. And the dangers of transporting it from the reactor to the disposal site are also an issue.
But personally, I think the biggest problem with nuclear in the US is the way it's done. In France, they have a single reactor design with 3 size varients. The design gets steady small improvements but was based on a better design than US reactors to start with. In the US, every reactor is different, with no standardization at all, and the US built reactors that are capable of meltdowns -- it is possible to design a reactor that is incapable of accidental meltdown.
Also, as it's been pointed out in other posts, nuclear will free us from our dependence on coal and natural gas for electric generation, but not on oil. We use oil for heating and automobiles, not for electric generation.
Yes, any of those things can happen, at which point your insurance company will immediately respond. "Sorry, electroction/drugs/anything less than a stubbed toe is not covered, as per clause 383.28.1.482 of your contract. Oh, you don't agree? Well go ahead and sue us."
This happened to me with car insurance. I was paying $3k/year to insure a sports car, which was damaged by vandalism. The insurance company refused to have it fixed until it was garaged in a different location, because "it would just get vandalised again".
I just need to add myself to the list of "killer email addresses".
BBC News: Panic at Nigrian "Killer Calls"
How many days were they "absent".
I bet it was a lot fewer than 9, especially if most of those "absences" were because of viruses.
I would have to disagree.
Too much money can lead to throwing more resources at a problem -- usually in the form of buying products or adding more engineers. Bought products rarely just drop right in to what you've been building, so often much time is lost learning the product and adapting it to the rest of your system. More engineers increases communication burdens. Worse still, these engineers are often hired quickly, so they aren't as carefully screened for compatibility with the rest of the team and they aren't easily aculturated to the team's way of doing things.
On the other hand, when you can't just throw tons of resources at the project, you have to apply serious creativity to solving the problem in a way that doesn't cost too much. Some really great software gets built that way.
Of course, too small a budget is a problem too. But the defense against that is fairly straightforward. As a PM, make it clear that the project can't be done without at least X resources. The too many resources problem is harder to see happening, because you are spending all your time managing them.
It doesn't take up an extra slot, it takes up the 8x AGP slot that would be used by the FX5200 or Radeon 9600. And this nonsense of what is stock or not is just that. Nonsense. You have to go through the BTO screen to adjust your purchase options when you buy from the Apple store anyway, so who cares what the default item is (well, other than the added money that the 9800 costs, which is well worth it IMO).
You are confusing correlation with causation. The statisical correlation between low death rates and negative population growth only suggests that the two may be related in some way. It doesn't mean that one causes the other.
Demographers will tell you that what happens is something called a "Demographic Transition", where better medical care and living conditions (ie: less poverty) leads people to live longer, and fewer of their children to die, so they feel safe having fewer children. Also, a lot of poverty is also associated with rural living conditions (ie, poor farming villages), where having a lot of kids means lots of free labor to help the family survive by farming. Finally there is the lottery effect, were in a large family one kid might make it into the city and get a job that will support the whole rural family. All of these factors combine to create pressure on impoverished people to have larger families. In developed populations, the few people who have large families do it for other reasons.
If you look at demographic trends in developed countries over time, you see that death rates dropped first, while birth rates stayed high for a generation or so, then birth rates dropped. You will also see that this caused population booms.
As far as reducing population growth, the most effective way (aside from perhaps draconian laws) is to educate and provide work opportunities for improverished women. This gives them options and many of them will choose to do other things than fill their houses with babies.
Net Sprocket has been Open Sourced and merged with OpenPlay. It is currently a mature and working product for Mac OS 9, OS X, Win32, and Linux. The Posix version could probably be built on just about any Posix OS.
Apple's OpenPlay site
OpenPlay on SourceForge
Among other things, this would allow products like TIVO to legally defeat encryption to access HDTV. Currently it is unlikely the TIVO will ever work with HDTV because it is illegal for them to reverse engineer the encryption that protects the digital data stream from an HDTV receiver. The companies that make HDTV sets will undoubtedly include their own lame TIVO imitations so they can up the prices of their sets, but it won't be the same.
1 07 :
Here's the bill:
http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/query/z?c108:H.R.
There's a site where you can send an email to your congressperson asking them to support the bill.
http://www.protectfairuse.org/
After downloading the package and looking at their current feature set, it seems like they've addressed most of my security concerns since the last time I'd looked at it.
Overall I'd say the libray looks pretty good.
Hmm... I guess I really should have hit preview.
I meant to say:
Other network layers to look at are OpenPlay and SDL net, both of which are also also free and OpenSource.
I've looked at the torque network layer while it was still part of the torque engine. It's well suited for developers who want a small scale (32 players or so) network game, particularly if its a first person shooter.
I wouldn't even consider it for a mid-size or larger multiplayer game, as it lacks important security features and IMO doesn't give enough control over the actual network protocol due to the emphasis on RMI.
Other network layers to look at are OpenPlay and , both of which are also also free and OpenSource.
Disclaimer -- I contribute to OpenPlay.
Good, but you forgot to drop packets at .... and especially any big ones.
EA.com is the games channel for AOL. I wonder if this means Microsoft would buy them out of their contract? I guess they could continue to operate it, but since Microsoft and EA are huge competitors in the gaming, it's hard to imagine such a uneasy union lasting very long.
Having been involved in a number of MMOGs, the goals of a MMOG and Gov are (should be?) very different.
1) MMOGs design and admin can't please everyone. The good one's accept that, and design around a creative vision that will appeal to some people and not to others. The others will just play some other game, or not play at all. Government, on the other hand, does not have that option. It can't create a paradise for 5% of its users while pissing off the rest (or maybe it can, but it shouldn't be able to).
2) MMOG administration is usually based on the premise of "get rid of the griefers as quick as possible, they cost us money". In Gov, getting rid of the griefers usually involves feeding and clothing them and paying for their guards, so it actually costs more money (or at least until Patriot Act VII allowings police yank your license to live for terriorist acts of drunk driving).
Your comparisions overlook a lot of critical details. For example:
You define deforestation as cutting of old trees and encouraging growth of new ones, then imply this is little different than the whole area being wiped out by a forest fire. There are many misconceptions in that opinion.
1) This is the US model of "deforestation", whereas most deforestation happens in rainforests where the forest is clear cut and burned to ash, and the ash then provides nutrients for crops to grow. If this is just a small patch in the middle of a thriving rainforest, no problem -- when the ash is exhausted and the nutrient poor soil won't grow crops, it is abandoned and the rainforest regrows quickly. But most of the time it is massive deforestation instead.
2) Forest fires in nature don't "wipe out a whole area" because they naturally happen frequently enough that you don't get the enormous quantities of brush and dead matter that you find in out managed forests. This is the stuff that burns much more quickly and easily than an old growth tree. Mature trees typically survive forest fires, whereas saplings and brush are consumed. So cutting down the old trees to encourage growth of young ones is just the opposite of what you need to prevent unnaturally intense forest fires.
3) In most cases, when a national or old-growth forest is logged, the variety of species that grow there are replaced by a much smaller number, so the genetic diversity of that forest is reduced, increasing the likelihood that a parasite or pest can inflict irreversable damage on that forest.
Next, you also argue that extinction of species has been happening for a long time and that makes it normal, natural and okay. This overlooks the key issues of rates of extinction. Until the 1900s, extinction happened at a very low rate. A lot of extinction even before then is blamed on human activity (fosil evidence suggests the Polynesians caused extinction of about 50 of the 98 species of birds in Hawaii in the 1200 years before European contact in 1778, for example). Nevertheless, the rates of extinction today are far greater. 34 species went extinct in the US alone over the past decade, for example.
Finally, there's your delightful argument that [waste] "came out of the Earth in the first place. There's no reason why it can't just go back". This completely ignores the fact that one of the major results of industrialization is the concentration of wastes and the creation of entirely new forms of waste. Examples:
1) Mercury is a neurotoxin that has been known to cause damage through skin contact and inhalation of fumes (the phrase "mad as a hatter" refers to the effects of long term use of mercury for producing felt. Mercury is not found in concentrated liquid form ever in nature, it is extracted from cinnabar, a red rock.
2) Petroleum products. Plastic is made from oil extracted from far underground, yet much of it ends up in shallow landfills. Gasoline doesn't occur in nature and it's combustion produces things such as ozone that are otherwise found in much lower concentrations in the lower atmosphere.
3) Fusion by-products. Enriched uranium and it's ilk are not found in nature.
This are just obvious examples of things that aren't just "put back", and can't be.
I do agree though that we are learning more about dealing with our wastes. Unfortunately, we aren't applying that learning in most cases. And of course, we shout down as "eco-freaks" those who have the temerity to suggest that technologies that produce less wastes are better than technologies to clean up waste.
I may be misremembering, but I thought this portable came out even before the Osborne. It had a multi-line LCD display, ran off 4 "AA" batteries. They are so durable that many are still in use, and it weighed just a few pounds.
Microsoft is the only major OS that doesn't have a standard *nix style shell. The popularity of cygwin for Windows developers shows that there's significant demand for it. Imagine how much nicer it would be if instead of trying to "leep frog"[sic] the Unix shell they just adopted cygwin.
I mostly play first person shooters and strategy games (both real time and turn based). FPS are lousy on a console because a mouse and keyboard are much better for quickly turning and aiming while moving. And strategy games are practically non-existant on consoles.
As for using the Mac for gaming, it also depends on what you want to do. If you want to play the same games your friends are playing, forget it. But if you want to play great games that were popular on the PC 6 months to a year earlier, then it's not a big deal, most of them are ported.
I've had my dual processor G5 for more than 10 days. The packing list shows that it shipped on the 9/17/03. Got it 3 days after that (would have been two if it weren't for Isabel). I don't have a 3.2 GHz PC to compare it to, but it's plenty fast. I've been getting 3:12 average CPU time on SETI@home. You can see my stats here
Massachusetts Open Source is a Smart Decision
Dear Editors,
I'm writing in response to your recent article "Mass. Taxpayers Hurt by Proposed Software Monopoly".
I must disagree strongly with the Council for Citizens Against Government Waste's (CCAGW) characterization of Mr. Quinn's plan to move to all open source operating systems as a "boondoggle". Let's look at your points one by one.
1. You state: "Proprietary vendors will be effectively barred from competing for state contracts, limiting competition and raising costs."
"Proprietary vendors" have many options that will allow them to bid for state contracts. One way is offer their products as open source, and make money off support contracts. Another is to win bids for contracts to write open source software needed by the state.
2. You argue: "People mistakenly refer to Linux as 'free' software because it can be freely altered and distributed. Yet while the software itself is free, the cost to maintain and upgrade it can become very expensive."
"Free" refers correctly to freedom. The freedom to alter and re-distribute software insures against forced obsolescence when a company drops support for a product or goes out of business. It can be expensive to maintain and upgrade software, but more so with proprietary software. Not only do you need to pay for the man-hours to do the work, but you have to pay the upgrade fees. And why was the upgrade necessary? Often because the software vendor decided to stop supporting the prior version, not because you need the new features. This cannot happen with open source software, because you always have the option to hire an engineer to support it for you.
3. You say: "Like all procurement decisions, the best policy on the use of software is to place all products on equal footing. It is critical that taxpayers receive the best quality programs at the least cost."
All software is on equal footing. It must meet the requirements. One of those requirements is that the software must be open source. How is this different than any other requirements found in government contracts? You know, the ones that say the vendor must have at least $10 million in annual revenue, or not be foreign owned, or have been in business for at least 10 years, etc.., etc... All these requirements limit competition, and they all do so to help ensure that the vendor can actually fulfill the contract or to protect other key public interests.
4. You claim: "It is ironic that Massachusetts , as the only state remaining in the lawsuit accusing Microsoft of antitrust violations, is creating its own state-imposed monopoly on software. Under the state's proposed "Freeware Initiative," there would be no exceptions to the rule permitting only open source/Linux software. The old Soviet Union could not have done this any better"
monopoly n. pl. monopolies
Exclusive control by one group of the means of producing or selling
a commodity or service
(source: American Heritage(R) Dictionary of the English Language)
So where is the monopoly? Are you defining the monopolist group to be "everyone"? The GNU Public License makes it quite clear that everyone has complete freedom to alter and redistribute the software as long as they give those same rights to others. That's about as far from a monopoly as you can get.
The Soviet Union reference is absurd. The Soviet Union was a centrally controlled economy where the government planners dictated exactly what was to be produced and where. It also restricted the availability of information to the populace. Massachusetts is only dictating what they will buy, not what must be produced. Free market economics gives every consumer the freedom to decide what to buy and under what terms. By only using open source software, Massachusetts is also promoting availability of information.
5. You continue: "While the initial open source software may be "free," most studies conclude that acquisition costs represent
I've used Codewarrior Pro 4 and Pro 5 extensively to do cross platform development (MacOS & Windows). The cross compilation works well, and the cross debugging is even better. This is the best way, IMHO, to get ANSI C++ compliance on Windows (Visual C++ certainly doesn't cut it). It also does Java and Pascal within the same IDE. However, while I've installed and admired the IDE on Linux, I've never tried to cross compile with it. Be aware that CW on Linux is still on version Pro 4, whereas Pro 5 is the most recent version on Mac and PC. Solaris support is also at Pro 4. Another caveat is that the Linux version uses gcc as the compiler, so you will have to deal with the differences between gcc and the Codewarrior compiler if you recompile under the Windows version. At the moment, the Codewarrior Pro 5 compiler appears to be more ANSI C++ compliant than gcc, but the differences are fairly minor.