My question is, do you believe the War on Drugs has been an unqualified success, and if not, what would you change about it if elected president?
Gore: Illicit drugs are associated with a whole lot of bad things in our society, and we need to work on reducing those bad things on all ends. We need to attack the supply of drugs, which we have been doing, but we also need to ensure that a person who would like help can get help. I remember getting such help back when I was smoking marijuana in college, and I think everyone should be able to get such help.
Bush: We will, if I am elected president, end the scourge of drugs on our society. I will press for execution standards to be lowered so much that if some young cokehead son of a congressman is caught, he will be hung from the highest yardarm.
Why give a tax cut?
Gore: We have a surplus, and it is only natural that some of that would be returned to the people, to help the middle class. However, I would not give 50% of the tax cut to the wealthiest 1% of Americans.
Bush: Because it is not the government's money. I think people should decide what to do with their money, not the government.
Some people, especially those that favor '3-rd' party candidates, have called for the ending of the electoral college system to be replaced by a simple purely popular vote, or at least allowing for splitting the electoral votes by each state.
Gore: The system we have in place has been a resounding success for hundreds of years.
Bush: I am opposed to a change in the election system. Where else can a drunk loser C student executioner be favored for the presidency ?
Do you feel that out current system of intellectual property is a good one? Which parts of it (e.g. trademarks, patents, copyrights) do you feel are well suited to the world of the Internet and which do you think need to be changed (and, if changes are needed, what changes are needed)?
Bush: Absolutely. The intellectual property laws help business in the US. And without business, my campaign wouldn't have any money. So I would have to say I am beholden to the intellectual property laws.
Gore: It is becoming clear that intellectual property in the US is undergoing quite a strain. On one side we have peer to peer sharing of copyrighted material, and on the other we have simple business method patents applied to the Internet. We really need to have a thorough overview on intellectual property issues before we ultimately do nothing about it. I remember back when I invented the internet, we never could have imagined the way it would transform the landscape of IP in the US.
[Disclaimer: I already voted, and it wasn't for one of these two]
This is the release of a packaging tool. From the linked URL
protopkg - Slackware.tgz Packaging Tool
========================================
This directory includes all the necessary source to put together "protopkg".
Protopkg will read prototype files to generate packages that can be
installed using the standard Slackware packaging tools. The *.template
files explain how the system works.
...
George Bush used to stick firecrackers in frogs, light them, and throw the frog in the air. So did Beavis.:)
This could provide a watermark for challenging EULAs. After all, publishing your own benchmark is akin to "fair use" of copyrighted materials. It is truly remarkable that companies like M$ and Oracle place draconian restrictions in their EULAs that prohibit things that are ABSOLUTELY guaranteed to someone under copyright law, such as prohibitions on reverse engineering and fair use commentary in the form of published benchmarks.
Myriam Miedzian, who has published a book on boys and violence, recently wrote a column in the Baltimore Sun in which she reported that as a kid George W. Bush used to kill frogs by putting firecrackers into them, tossing them in the air, and watching them blow up.
The device is kinda neat. It is 40 microns thick and consists of solar cells (miniature) connected to stimulating electrodes.
Perhaps it is cooler that someone is simply attempting to cure blindness in such a way. The sensory periphery for audition and vision is amenable to implants - in vision, for example, the retina holds about a million nerve cells arranged in a nice topographic array. In the cochlea there are a few tens of thousands of hair cells in a nice spiral array. A company spawned from the Otolaryngology labs at UCSF makes the only US designed cochlear implants (Advanced Bionics).
Of course, the optobionics device will be out of focus since the eye focusses light on the retina and not on the silicon chip. But hey - it'd be amazing if they could simply get enough current out of their device to stimulate a neuron. You'd need at least 10 microamps. The upside is that you do not need a power supply or wire lead into the retina - a tricky engineering feat for other retinal implant designs.
They didn't report if any of their patients implanted in late June had any vision yet. Guess what - they would be seeing by now if the implant worked. So my guess is that the device is a bust. And unfortunately, you don't really get that many clinical trials to fail in your device, no matter how well capitalized you are.
The other difficult thing about retinal implants is the number of stimulating sites required. You can hear speech with 8 stimulating electrodes and very good temporal fidelity. For vision - temporal fidelity is not so stringent, but you need at least 100 stimulating electrodes, each capable of pushing 10 microamps (AC, for a brief brief period). The problem is that you need to power the chip, and to do that you need a cable running into the eye. That probably necessitates the cutting or at least paralysis of the eye muscles, and a very tricky connection through the cornea. So you can see the allure of the optobionics device.
These guys are, however, great at marketing and fundraising. There will be a flurry of such press releases and fund raising bouts, for optobionics and other retinal stimulation companies. The presidents of the companies will get rich. I just hope one of them recruits a decent engineer so that someone gets to see again too. It doesn't seem like their approach is hopeless - but it certainly needs modification.
Yes, I know you can charge for "free software". I also know that you cannot prevent the buyer from making as many copies as he wants, which severely limits your ability to sell lots of copies (unless the product is so large that it is more convenient to buy a CD from a vendor, such as is the case with a complete linux distribution)
So the market is reversed. You make money based on how much easier your software makes life for someone.
Some people take linux and place all security risk deamons/programs into wrappers, and sell the resulting product. Bastille linux.
Some people take linux and make it Japanese. Or German. Or French...
Some people take GNOME and make it work with your distribution. Helixcode, for example.
There are just lots and lots of ways to provide service by differentiating your wrapping of linux from someone else's. Bastille linux will have return customers if their systems stay secure. So will OpenBSD, for that matter.
Redhat will keep customers coming back if their distro is easily installed/upgraded, and functions to their ease of use.
A company could write tax software. The changes in the tax code are relatively fast compared to the time to wrap a new product, so having it open source would allow rapid fixing of bugs, without yielding a competitive edge.
I could go on, but I think it is obvious that not maintaining that source code is intellectual property, but service, still allows for a whole lot of money to be made by the programmers. If you write good code fast it is your market today.
However, it does not allow room for companies like Microsoft whose entire portfolio is based on intellectual property copyright value.
As Bob Young of Redhat used to claim - the goal is not to compete with IP copyright companies at their own game - the goal is to change the game. The new game has service as the primary value of software, not intellectual property. The last 20 years of software development has been pretty perverse wrt intellectual property, and it is primarily the corporations not the programmers that are making the money.
Last time I checked a seasoned 3l337 h4x0r was making 6 figures in Northern California - hardly starving. And that is largely independent of the type of hacking being done.
Can someone please explain what his motives are? He is espousing free, but non-open source software.
Well, he backs free software as defined by the freedoms listed at gnu.org - the freedom to run the program for any purpose, the freedom to study how the program works and adapt it to your needs, the freedom to redistribute your changes to help your neighbor, the freedom to release your changes to the public.
Back in the day, Stallman was burned by a proprietary vendor that refused him the source code for their buggy driver. He could fix the driver, but was not allowed to do so by software writers. He found this infuriating. He bought a piece of hardware, but he was not allowed to improve it for his own use, or to help others improve it for their use. Imagine this in a car. You buy a car, and can fix some nasty bug in the car. Under non-free software analogies, the manufacturer would not allow you to fix the bug, would force you to sign an agreement that you would not even try to fix the bug, and would strictly prohibit you from fixing the car of your neighbor in the same way.
Stallman's views on software are not so different from most of our views on property. When I buy something, I want to be able to fix it (should I have the capability and need). I want to be able to share this knowledge with others, and even make it public. These freedoms are common with most properties, including houses and cars.
So under this setup, programmers and developers should perform complicated feats of software engineering (which things like Mac and Windows ARE, whether you like/use them or not), but then give it away for free. What are these programmers supposed to live on? Do they eat floppy disks and old toner cartridges? Sleep under their desks?
There are many programmers making lots of money writing free software. Some are paid by corporations to improve free software, like kernel hackers. Some are paid by distributions. Some are paid by GNU. Some of them provide support for their software. Just because your model of how software works is not supported by GNU philosophy is no reason to presume that no one could make a living doing it.
In a very real sense, software is support. You make it easy for someone to get some function out of their hardware. That has value.
Stallman seems to advocate a sort of software Marxism - "from each according to his ability, but to each according to his need".
This is the most FUD tactic thrown at Free Software. Calling Stallman a Marxist. Top Free Software hackers are highly sought after - and make a good living at it. If you want to install GNU/Linux, you can do it from floppies via Debian for free. You can pay for Debian's CD and install floppies and documentation - that is more service, and costs a little. You can buy a slick distribution with a wicked installed for yet more money. The cost is basically reflecting how easy the distribution has made it for you - basically, how much service you get with your software. GNU philosophy actually makes few statements about making money. As long as freedom is preserved, money is not so relevant.
Stallman urges people to preserve freedoms. He feels it is in the consumer's best interests, and would love to see consumers have more power, and software copyright to carry less. In a very real way software copyrights have completely perverted the copyright system. Now, software, protected by copyright, can actually forbid reverse engineering in the US using DMCA by proclaiming something to be copyright protection. Reverse engineering is only protected against by patents in the US - until now.
It is becoming time in the US for consumers to stop corporations from rewriting copyright laws to take more basic freedoms away from consumers. Without those freedoms, we are all lemmings headed to sea.
If someone went to Harvard, Yale, or Princeton, and got good grades, you would be assured he was intelligent.
Perhaps. You're just as likely to get someone who communicated like this:
How are auditory stimuli influenced by contextual cues such as other stimuli ?
Good point. But in considering communication one should consider one's target audience. My brief home page is certainly not written for/.
Our educational system serves more to enforce the division of social classes than it does to help humanity. Which is why people with degrees are so insistent that they are smarter than everyone else, and always are the first to defend the status quo.
No one was discussing the issue of intelligence for someone without a degree. Record in school cannot be used as an indication of intelligence for someone that did not attend school, obviously. But it can be used to compare people who went through similar educational experiences at similar times in life, like Bush, Gore, and Nader. At least one of those did well as an undergraduate, and it wasn't Bush or Gore.
If his Father really did have to save his biscuits repeatedly in the past, though, that worries me. I want a President who can stand on his own merits.
A reasonable attacking site is
http://www.realchange.org/bushjr.htm
I also don't give one tenth of one shit about someone's grades in school. I had lousy grades, but I consider myself to be a pretty sharp individual. So why would I care if Gore graduated at all? I didn't.
First of all, I would claim it is obvious you want someone reasonably intelligent in the White House.
Grades can be a good predictor of someone's intelligence. If someone went to Harvard, Yale, or Princeton, and got good grades, you would be assured he was intelligent. If someone went to Harvard, Yale, or Princeton, and was a C student, you can be pretty sure that person either did not care about grades, or was not highly intelligent. In any case, the person was not highly attentive to his coursework. Anyone with the background of Bush or Gore was easily capable of being a B student if he applied himself. A C student was simply overmatched at the Ivy League, or didn't give a shit about academics. I am not certain I want either of those in the White House.
Besides, what is the assurance that someone who did poorly in school, poorly in industry, was bailed out by Daddy time and time again, and drank his life away for forty years, would not just turn and collapse at some inopportune moment ? Come on, I've known alcoholics, and sometimes they just go back on the bottle. Is that really what you want when some terrorist drives plastic explosives into an american destroyer in Yemen ? Sorry general, but the president is drunk again. We are trying hard to sober him up right now. We'll get back to you.
He attended private schools and graduated cum laude from Harvard University.
http://www.uwire.com/content/topnews032100001.ht ml
According to the Post, Gore earned "one D, one C-minus, two C's, two C-pluses, and one B-minus," during his sophomore year at Harvard. His classmates remember him that year as spending a lot of time "shooting pool, watching television, eating hamburgers, and occasionally smoking marijuana."
However, his junior year, he earned a B, B-plus and A-minus in three government courses.
His strong senior thesis on the impact of television on the presidency allowed him to graduate cum laude.
Like many Freshmen, BushBaby ended his first semester at Yale with a whopping 75 average. But he learned his lesson, and during the Spring of 1965 he put in grueling hours at the library bringing his GPA up by almost a full point -- for a an impressive 75.8!
The american politics site actually has an image of Bush's graduation transcript.
Nader's parents were Lebanese immigrants, not Congressmen or Senators. He got into and graduated from Princeton. From there he got into and graduated from Harvard Law. You can do the math on how smart that makes him - someone without connections ascending through the finest programs in the US. Or course, even then, Nader was a rabble rouser, trying to get Princeton to ban DDT because dead birds were on campus, and rallying against hot dog packaging plans. You can note both of these efforts later proved spot on accurate, although they were not necessarily supported at the time. Heck, DDT nearly wiped out bald eagles in the lower 48.
How did they do this you might ask?
Bush's college/graduate school record is much better than Gore's. In fact, Gore never graduated from Vanderbilt.
In fact, Gore graduated from Harvard, not Vanderbilt. In fact, Gore was Cum Laude. In fact, Gore had pretty crappy grades and a very powerful senior thesis in part because he had access to Washington insiders for interviews on his topic - how television changes the presidency. Gore likely would have had been considered a low B student other than his thesis.
In fact, Bush graduated from Yale with a 76 average. Bush was in general a loser and alcoholic for the vast majority of his life - in school and in business. This turned around when he found Christ and dropped his bourbon glass about 10 years ago. You gotta worry about someone who drove his life into the ground for so many years, but is now looking to take over the most powerful nation on the planet. Proof, as Bush likes to claim, that life can begin at 40.
Nedit is a wonderful program. It does an incredible job of maintaining consistency with common Mac/Windoze keybindings, while offering incredible power to the power geek. We have quite a few users in our center.
Part of the reasons for its being low profile were the lack of perfect functionality with lesstif. This meant the quality version was staticly linked with Motif, and that many linux distributions would not ship it for licensing reasons.
It is really good to see that is over with, and it is similarly easy to predict a rapid increase in its use on free unices as the GPL version (with lesstif) gets shipped with all new linux distros.
My question: do you feel licensing issues can inadverdently affect acceptance of quality software, and how do you feel the Nedit team could have handled its licensing to avoid being left out of common linux distributions ?
Ralph,
I saw an interview with you in which you basically stated that your personal motivation for seeking the presidency comes from the your inability to remain an effective consumer advocate. Basically, you said that corporations have the legistative process so tied up that lobbying for non-profit consumer advocacy is like talking to a closed door. Can you expound on this and give examples ??
Of all places, the interview was on the Daily Show with Jon Stewart.
First, although it is often quoted that people hear sounds up to 20 kHz, they don't. Most people hear up to about 15 kHz. Typical listeners lose 5 dB in threshold between 5 and 10 kHz, and another 10 dB between 10 and 15 kHz. The thresholds are so high around 15 kHz that you cannot ever hear such frequencies with normal sound equipment. For almost any recordings knocking off all frequencies above 12 kHz won't change perception during playback.
Second, almost all speakers drop off severely above 20 kHz. There is no easy way to play such sounds unless you get a speaker designed to keep gophers away (they, like many mammals, hear above 20 kHz).
Third, you cannot reconstruct accurately sound frequencies above 10 kHz with standard CD encoding anyway. 16bit sampling is simply not enough. I've spent some time reverse engineering 20 millisecond sound samples, and I can tell you from experience that with limited sampling bits you are better off doubling the Nyquist. And the Nyquist theorem doesn't guarantee such reconstruction anyway with 16 bit sampling.
SONY is pulling a marketing ploy - redesigning sound recordings to try to give people a little extra - well, I'll tell you what, I'll bring my dog along. At least he has a chance of hearing the differences. Because I sure don't.
On grad schools. Most European nations do not have a substantial classroom contribution to PhDs. Thus, a PhD is much faster in Europe and the doctoral candidate has had about 2 years less class work than his US counterpart.
On college. I find no reason to think there is substantial difference.
On high school. US students get the short end of the stick. High schools elsewhere are more rigorous, and do not promote students on the basis of age nearly as easily.
On research. Researchers in most of the world are absolutely starved for resources compared to the US. Of course, this is overly general, and researchers in Scandinavia and Japan also do quite well. But when I talk with foreign researchers, I find they spend much more time planning experiments because resources are so tight. We will do 3-4 experiments for every one that they do.
The real difference, as you can see, comes in grad school. The US trained student gets 2 years more classwork and several times the resources for the PhD. This of course attracts a large number of high quality foreign students to get their PhDs in the US.
I speak from my experience in biomedical sciences.
[using rpm --nodeps] Huh. I never need them on my Red Hat system either. Wonder why???
Tell you what. Install redhat 4.2. Then upgrade one rpm command at a time to redhat 5.0, 5.1, 5.2, 6.0, 6.2, and then 7.0. And see how many times you need to use the --nodeps option.
The incidence is dramatically lower for debian debs. It is not the deb format. Rpm has all the same capabilities. It is the care that goes into packaging, highlighted by the packaging guides. Try to find something more comprehensive at the web site of a linux distribution.
This same problem in Debian wouldn't be posted here in 20 years. Unless you think Debian doesn't have any bugs...
That is because apt-get's functionality has been thoroughly tested for quite some time.
It is actually kinda nice to see other distributions catching up.
Of course, auto-update will be pretty broken with the care that goes into packaging RH RPMS. Have you ever tried to upgrade a RH distribution manually ? It is a broken mess of irrelevant and missed dependencies. Debian does this seamlessly.
What RH really needs is a thorough packaging policy, like this and this. Only with a thorough packaging policy can upgrades and auto-upgrades be useful.
Mainly, I hate using rpm --nodeps --force. On my debian system I never need those --nodeps options. Wonder why ???
Just so it's clear though, Titanium has some good points. Manufacturers seem to be able to build bikes out of it fairly easily. [snip]Much like Aluminum, it occurs in common alloys like 6-4 (6% Al 4% Vanadium) and in alpha and beta anneal forms, which can have pretty different properties.
The pure metal is actually fairly easy to machine - I made my wedding ring from titanium bar stock. You can bet I didn't choose 6/4 ELI titanium for that.
The titanium alloys are very difficult metals to machine. They have very high yield strength combined with a much lower elastic modulus than steel. This combination makes cutting titanium similar to trying to cut a hard rubber. It gives, but it doesn't want to yield. It grabs the bit.
Also, titanium literally eats taps and dies for the same reason. It can get exspensive to work fast.
However, I'd be interested in seeing another round of benchmarks, especially between Linux 2.4.0 (preferably whenever it's officially released) and Windows 2000.
On identical hardware, linux 2.4 with Tux web server beats the crap out of Windows 2000 with IIS Click here for result and don't forget to click here also for comparisons with different numbers of CPUs/NICs.
For file system spec test, it isn't pretty. Reiserfs home pages list comparisons against ext2 - they are quite comparable. NTFS hardly wins ANY performance test against any file systems.
Hopfield's experiment is going to be a sanity check against this kind of work - a kind of experimental control. Here's a situation where somebody does know the answer and work can be checked. A neural net involving only a few hundred neurons. If researchers are unable to reverse engineer this then should they really have jobs supposedly reverse engineering animal or even human brains?
Hopfield is a well respected theoretician. He is not in the business of reverse engineering animal or human brains. The fact is most of the physiologists that do reverse engineer sensory systems (in a manner of speaking) would not prioritize Hopfield's game very high.
The likely result is that lots of theoreticians will engage in his game, and maybe there will be some fun in it for them. Most of the physiologists will be busy engaging in the game for a living. It may very well result in a science of reverse engineering neural systems evolving to describe what successful physiolgists do - in the same manner that Kuhn described how science progesses in his career.
But don't kid yourself that this is a sanity check on people who do this for a living. That is not Hopfield's contribution to neuroscience.
Slashdot Mirror
My question is, do you believe the War on Drugs has been an unqualified success, and if not, what would you change about it if elected president?
Gore: Illicit drugs are associated with a whole lot of bad things in our society, and we need to work on reducing those bad things on all ends. We need to attack the supply of drugs, which we have been doing, but we also need to ensure that a person who would like help can get help. I remember getting such help back when I was smoking marijuana in college, and I think everyone should be able to get such help.
Bush: We will, if I am elected president, end the scourge of drugs on our society. I will press for execution standards to be lowered so much that if some young cokehead son of a congressman is caught, he will be hung from the highest yardarm.
Why give a tax cut?
Gore: We have a surplus, and it is only natural that some of that would be returned to the people, to help the middle class. However, I would not give 50% of the tax cut to the wealthiest 1% of Americans.
Bush: Because it is not the government's money. I think people should decide what to do with their money, not the government.
Some people, especially those that favor '3-rd' party candidates, have called for the ending of the electoral college system to be replaced by a simple purely popular vote, or at least allowing for splitting the electoral votes by each state.
Gore: The system we have in place has been a resounding success for hundreds of years.
Bush: I am opposed to a change in the election system. Where else can a drunk loser C student executioner be favored for the presidency ?
Do you feel that out current system of intellectual property is a good one? Which parts of it (e.g. trademarks, patents, copyrights) do you feel are well suited to the world of the Internet and which do you think need to be changed (and, if changes are needed, what changes are needed)?
Bush: Absolutely. The intellectual property laws help business in the US. And without business, my campaign wouldn't have any money. So I would have to say I am beholden to the intellectual property laws.
Gore: It is becoming clear that intellectual property in the US is undergoing quite a strain. On one side we have peer to peer sharing of copyrighted material, and on the other we have simple business method patents applied to the Internet. We really need to have a thorough overview on intellectual property issues before we ultimately do nothing about it. I remember back when I invented the internet, we never could have imagined the way it would transform the landscape of IP in the US.
[Disclaimer: I already voted, and it wasn't for one of these two]
This is the release of a packaging tool. From the linked URL
.tgz Packaging Tool
:)
protopkg - Slackware
========================================
This directory includes all the necessary source to put together "protopkg".
Protopkg will read prototype files to generate packages that can be
installed using the standard Slackware packaging tools. The *.template
files explain how the system works.
...
George Bush used to stick firecrackers in frogs, light them, and throw the frog in the air. So did Beavis.
This could provide a watermark for challenging EULAs. After all, publishing your own benchmark is akin to "fair use" of copyrighted materials. It is truly remarkable that companies like M$ and Oracle place draconian restrictions in their EULAs that prohibit things that are ABSOLUTELY guaranteed to someone under copyright law, such as prohibitions on reverse engineering and fair use commentary in the form of published benchmarks.
Myriam Miedzian, who has published a book on boys and violence, recently wrote a column in the Baltimore Sun in which she reported that as a kid George W. Bush used to kill frogs by putting firecrackers into them, tossing them in the air, and watching them blow up.
The device is kinda neat. It is 40 microns thick and consists of solar cells (miniature) connected to stimulating electrodes.
Perhaps it is cooler that someone is simply attempting to cure blindness in such a way. The sensory periphery for audition and vision is amenable to implants - in vision, for example, the retina holds about a million nerve cells arranged in a nice topographic array. In the cochlea there are a few tens of thousands of hair cells in a nice spiral array. A company spawned from the Otolaryngology labs at UCSF makes the only US designed cochlear implants (Advanced Bionics).
Of course, the optobionics device will be out of focus since the eye focusses light on the retina and not on the silicon chip. But hey - it'd be amazing if they could simply get enough current out of their device to stimulate a neuron. You'd need at least 10 microamps. The upside is that you do not need a power supply or wire lead into the retina - a tricky engineering feat for other retinal implant designs.
They didn't report if any of their patients implanted in late June had any vision yet. Guess what - they would be seeing by now if the implant worked. So my guess is that the device is a bust. And unfortunately, you don't really get that many clinical trials to fail in your device, no matter how well capitalized you are.
The other difficult thing about retinal implants is the number of stimulating sites required. You can hear speech with 8 stimulating electrodes and very good temporal fidelity. For vision - temporal fidelity is not so stringent, but you need at least 100 stimulating electrodes, each capable of pushing 10 microamps (AC, for a brief brief period). The problem is that you need to power the chip, and to do that you need a cable running into the eye. That probably necessitates the cutting or at least paralysis of the eye muscles, and a very tricky connection through the cornea. So you can see the allure of the optobionics device.
These guys are, however, great at marketing and fundraising. There will be a flurry of such press releases and fund raising bouts, for optobionics and other retinal stimulation companies. The presidents of the companies will get rich. I just hope one of them recruits a decent engineer so that someone gets to see again too. It doesn't seem like their approach is hopeless - but it certainly needs modification.
Yes, I know you can charge for "free software". I also know that you cannot prevent the buyer from making as many copies as he wants, which severely limits your ability to sell lots of copies (unless the product is so large that it is more convenient to buy a CD from a vendor, such as is the case with a complete linux distribution)
So the market is reversed. You make money based on how much easier your software makes life for someone.
Some people take linux and place all security risk deamons/programs into wrappers, and sell the resulting product. Bastille linux.
Some people take linux and make it Japanese. Or German. Or French...
Some people take GNOME and make it work with your distribution. Helixcode, for example.
There are just lots and lots of ways to provide service by differentiating your wrapping of linux from someone else's. Bastille linux will have return customers if their systems stay secure. So will OpenBSD, for that matter.
Redhat will keep customers coming back if their distro is easily installed/upgraded, and functions to their ease of use.
A company could write tax software. The changes in the tax code are relatively fast compared to the time to wrap a new product, so having it open source would allow rapid fixing of bugs, without yielding a competitive edge.
I could go on, but I think it is obvious that not maintaining that source code is intellectual property, but service, still allows for a whole lot of money to be made by the programmers. If you write good code fast it is your market today.
However, it does not allow room for companies like Microsoft whose entire portfolio is based on intellectual property copyright value.
As Bob Young of Redhat used to claim - the goal is not to compete with IP copyright companies at their own game - the goal is to change the game. The new game has service as the primary value of software, not intellectual property. The last 20 years of software development has been pretty perverse wrt intellectual property, and it is primarily the corporations not the programmers that are making the money.
Last time I checked a seasoned 3l337 h4x0r was making 6 figures in Northern California - hardly starving. And that is largely independent of the type of hacking being done.
Can someone please explain what his motives are? He is espousing free, but non-open source software.
Well, he backs free software as defined by the freedoms listed at gnu.org - the freedom to run the program for any purpose, the freedom to study how the program works and adapt it to your needs, the freedom to redistribute your changes to help your neighbor, the freedom to release your changes to the public.
Back in the day, Stallman was burned by a proprietary vendor that refused him the source code for their buggy driver. He could fix the driver, but was not allowed to do so by software writers. He found this infuriating. He bought a piece of hardware, but he was not allowed to improve it for his own use, or to help others improve it for their use. Imagine this in a car. You buy a car, and can fix some nasty bug in the car. Under non-free software analogies, the manufacturer would not allow you to fix the bug, would force you to sign an agreement that you would not even try to fix the bug, and would strictly prohibit you from fixing the car of your neighbor in the same way.
Stallman's views on software are not so different from most of our views on property. When I buy something, I want to be able to fix it (should I have the capability and need). I want to be able to share this knowledge with others, and even make it public. These freedoms are common with most properties, including houses and cars.
So under this setup, programmers and developers should perform complicated feats of software engineering (which things like Mac and Windows ARE, whether you like/use them or not), but then give it away for free. What are these programmers supposed to live on? Do they eat floppy disks and old toner cartridges? Sleep under their desks?
There are many programmers making lots of money writing free software. Some are paid by corporations to improve free software, like kernel hackers. Some are paid by distributions. Some are paid by GNU. Some of them provide support for their software. Just because your model of how software works is not supported by GNU philosophy is no reason to presume that no one could make a living doing it.
In a very real sense, software is support. You make it easy for someone to get some function out of their hardware. That has value.
Stallman seems to advocate a sort of software Marxism - "from each according to his ability, but to each according to his need".
This is the most FUD tactic thrown at Free Software. Calling Stallman a Marxist. Top Free Software hackers are highly sought after - and make a good living at it. If you want to install GNU/Linux, you can do it from floppies via Debian for free. You can pay for Debian's CD and install floppies and documentation - that is more service, and costs a little. You can buy a slick distribution with a wicked installed for yet more money. The cost is basically reflecting how easy the distribution has made it for you - basically, how much service you get with your software. GNU philosophy actually makes few statements about making money. As long as freedom is preserved, money is not so relevant.
Stallman urges people to preserve freedoms. He feels it is in the consumer's best interests, and would love to see consumers have more power, and software copyright to carry less. In a very real way software copyrights have completely perverted the copyright system. Now, software, protected by copyright, can actually forbid reverse engineering in the US using DMCA by proclaiming something to be copyright protection. Reverse engineering is only protected against by patents in the US - until now.
It is becoming time in the US for consumers to stop corporations from rewriting copyright laws to take more basic freedoms away from consumers. Without those freedoms, we are all lemmings headed to sea.
If someone went to Harvard, Yale, or Princeton, and got good grades, you would be assured he was intelligent.
/.
Perhaps. You're just as likely to get someone who communicated like this:
How are auditory stimuli influenced by contextual cues such as other stimuli ?
Good point. But in considering communication one should consider one's target audience. My brief home page is certainly not written for
Our educational system serves more to enforce the division of social classes than it does to help humanity. Which is why people with degrees are so insistent that they are smarter than everyone else, and always are the first to defend the status quo.
No one was discussing the issue of intelligence for someone without a degree. Record in school cannot be used as an indication of intelligence for someone that did not attend school, obviously. But it can be used to compare people who went through similar educational experiences at similar times in life, like Bush, Gore, and Nader. At least one of those did well as an undergraduate, and it wasn't Bush or Gore.
If his Father really did have to save his biscuits repeatedly in the past, though, that worries me. I want a President who can stand on his own merits.
A reasonable attacking site is
http://www.realchange.org/bushjr.htm
I also don't give one tenth of one shit about someone's grades in school. I had lousy grades, but I consider myself to be a pretty sharp individual. So why would I care if Gore graduated at all? I didn't.
First of all, I would claim it is obvious you want someone reasonably intelligent in the White House.
Grades can be a good predictor of someone's intelligence. If someone went to Harvard, Yale, or Princeton, and got good grades, you would be assured he was intelligent. If someone went to Harvard, Yale, or Princeton, and was a C student, you can be pretty sure that person either did not care about grades, or was not highly intelligent. In any case, the person was not highly attentive to his coursework. Anyone with the background of Bush or Gore was easily capable of being a B student if he applied himself. A C student was simply overmatched at the Ivy League, or didn't give a shit about academics. I am not certain I want either of those in the White House.
Besides, what is the assurance that someone who did poorly in school, poorly in industry, was bailed out by Daddy time and time again, and drank his life away for forty years, would not just turn and collapse at some inopportune moment ? Come on, I've known alcoholics, and sometimes they just go back on the bottle. Is that really what you want when some terrorist drives plastic explosives into an american destroyer in Yemen ? Sorry general, but the president is drunk again. We are trying hard to sober him up right now. We'll get back to you.
On Gore:
0 08/18/000818dem_kgore.html
t ml
w /45811.htm
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http://www.courier-journal.com/localnews/2000/0
He attended private schools and graduated cum laude from Harvard University.
http://www.uwire.com/content/topnews032100001.h
According to the Post, Gore earned "one D, one C-minus, two C's, two C-pluses, and one B-minus," during his sophomore year at Harvard. His classmates remember him that year as spending a lot of time "shooting pool, watching television, eating hamburgers, and occasionally smoking marijuana."
However, his junior year, he earned a B, B-plus and A-minus in three government courses.
His strong senior thesis on the impact of television on the presidency allowed him to graduate cum laude.
On Bush
http://www.sltrib.com/1999/nov/11101999/nation_
http://www.american-politics.com/111399MacArthu
Like many Freshmen, BushBaby ended his first semester at Yale with a whopping 75 average. But he learned his lesson, and during the Spring of 1965 he put in grueling hours at the library bringing his GPA up by almost a full point -- for a an impressive 75.8!
The american politics site actually has an image of Bush's graduation transcript.
Nader's parents were Lebanese immigrants, not Congressmen or Senators. He got into and graduated from Princeton. From there he got into and graduated from Harvard Law. You can do the math on how smart that makes him - someone without connections ascending through the finest programs in the US. Or course, even then, Nader was a rabble rouser, trying to get Princeton to ban DDT because dead birds were on campus, and rallying against hot dog packaging plans. You can note both of these efforts later proved spot on accurate, although they were not necessarily supported at the time. Heck, DDT nearly wiped out bald eagles in the lower 48.
How did they do this you might ask?
Bush's college/graduate school record is much better than Gore's. In fact, Gore never graduated from Vanderbilt.
In fact, Gore graduated from Harvard, not Vanderbilt. In fact, Gore was Cum Laude. In fact, Gore had pretty crappy grades and a very powerful senior thesis in part because he had access to Washington insiders for interviews on his topic - how television changes the presidency. Gore likely would have had been considered a low B student other than his thesis.
In fact, Bush graduated from Yale with a 76 average. Bush was in general a loser and alcoholic for the vast majority of his life - in school and in business. This turned around when he found Christ and dropped his bourbon glass about 10 years ago. You gotta worry about someone who drove his life into the ground for so many years, but is now looking to take over the most powerful nation on the planet. Proof, as Bush likes to claim, that life can begin at 40.
Nader, OTOH, was actually a good student.
Nedit is a wonderful program. It does an incredible job of maintaining consistency with common Mac/Windoze keybindings, while offering incredible power to the power geek. We have quite a few users in our center.
Part of the reasons for its being low profile were the lack of perfect functionality with lesstif. This meant the quality version was staticly linked with Motif, and that many linux distributions would not ship it for licensing reasons.
It is really good to see that is over with, and it is similarly easy to predict a rapid increase in its use on free unices as the GPL version (with lesstif) gets shipped with all new linux distros.
My question: do you feel licensing issues can inadverdently affect acceptance of quality software, and how do you feel the Nedit team could have handled its licensing to avoid being left out of common linux distributions ?
Hmm...
Labelled a troll for pointing out accurate areas in which RH and Mandrake distributions look like they were rolled by rookies.
Ralph,
I saw an interview with you in which you basically stated that your personal motivation for seeking the presidency comes from the your inability to remain an effective consumer advocate. Basically, you said that corporations have the legistative process so tied up that lobbying for non-profit consumer advocacy is like talking to a closed door. Can you expound on this and give examples ??
Of all places, the interview was on the Daily Show with Jon Stewart.
-Dave Blake
First, although it is often quoted that people hear sounds up to 20 kHz, they don't. Most people hear up to about 15 kHz. Typical listeners lose 5 dB in threshold between 5 and 10 kHz, and another 10 dB between 10 and 15 kHz. The thresholds are so high around 15 kHz that you cannot ever hear such frequencies with normal sound equipment. For almost any recordings knocking off all frequencies above 12 kHz won't change perception during playback.
Second, almost all speakers drop off severely above 20 kHz. There is no easy way to play such sounds unless you get a speaker designed to keep gophers away (they, like many mammals, hear above 20 kHz).
Third, you cannot reconstruct accurately sound frequencies above 10 kHz with standard CD encoding anyway. 16bit sampling is simply not enough. I've spent some time reverse engineering 20 millisecond sound samples, and I can tell you from experience that with limited sampling bits you are better off doubling the Nyquist. And the Nyquist theorem doesn't guarantee such reconstruction anyway with 16 bit sampling.
SONY is pulling a marketing ploy - redesigning sound recordings to try to give people a little extra - well, I'll tell you what, I'll bring my dog along. At least he has a chance of hearing the differences. Because I sure don't.
On grad schools. Most European nations do not have a substantial classroom contribution to PhDs. Thus, a PhD is much faster in Europe and the doctoral candidate has had about 2 years less class work than his US counterpart.
On college. I find no reason to think there is substantial difference.
On high school. US students get the short end of the stick. High schools elsewhere are more rigorous, and do not promote students on the basis of age nearly as easily.
On research. Researchers in most of the world are absolutely starved for resources compared to the US. Of course, this is overly general, and researchers in Scandinavia and Japan also do quite well. But when I talk with foreign researchers, I find they spend much more time planning experiments because resources are so tight. We will do 3-4 experiments for every one that they do.
The real difference, as you can see, comes in grad school. The US trained student gets 2 years more classwork and several times the resources for the PhD. This of course attracts a large number of high quality foreign students to get their PhDs in the US.
I speak from my experience in biomedical sciences.
[using rpm --nodeps]
Huh. I never need them on my Red Hat system either. Wonder why???
Tell you what. Install redhat 4.2. Then upgrade one rpm command at a time to redhat 5.0, 5.1, 5.2, 6.0, 6.2, and then 7.0. And see how many times you need to use the --nodeps option.
The incidence is dramatically lower for debian debs. It is not the deb format. Rpm has all the same capabilities. It is the care that goes into packaging, highlighted by the packaging guides. Try to find something more comprehensive at the web site of a linux distribution.
There ought to be limits to freedom. - GWB
Let's take a look at those numbers
50% faster
10 W vs 15-22 W
Since 15W = 50% greater than 10W, the Crusoe
technology has a really meager effect.
It seems the speed penalty is too great for the power savings. 50% less speed, and 50% less power consumption !!
This same problem in Debian wouldn't be posted here in 20 years. Unless you think Debian doesn't have any bugs...
That is because apt-get's functionality has been thoroughly tested for quite some time.
It is actually kinda nice to see other distributions catching up.
Of course, auto-update will be pretty broken with the care that goes into packaging RH RPMS. Have you ever tried to upgrade a RH distribution manually ? It is a broken mess of irrelevant and missed dependencies. Debian does this seamlessly.
What RH really needs is a thorough packaging policy, like this and this. Only with a thorough packaging policy can upgrades and auto-upgrades be useful.
Mainly, I hate using rpm --nodeps --force. On my debian system I never need those --nodeps options. Wonder why ???
This is just the tip of the iceberg. see Ralph Nader for more.
Please, the results on this page are from machines not even running the same hardware!!!
How is this a valid test?
Please check both the links.
I don't do custom orders, although I do make some for friends.
There are titanium wedding ring places online from which you can order. One-off titanium in New England is such a place.
Just so it's clear though, Titanium has some good points. Manufacturers seem to be able to build bikes out of it fairly easily. [snip]Much like Aluminum, it occurs in common alloys like 6-4 (6% Al 4% Vanadium) and in alpha and beta anneal forms, which can have pretty different properties.
The pure metal is actually fairly easy to machine - I made my wedding ring from titanium bar stock. You can bet I didn't choose 6/4 ELI titanium for that.
The titanium alloys are very difficult metals to machine. They have very high yield strength combined with a much lower elastic modulus than steel. This combination makes cutting titanium similar to trying to cut a hard rubber. It gives, but it doesn't want to yield. It grabs the bit.
Also, titanium literally eats taps and dies for the same reason. It can get exspensive to work fast.
However, I'd be interested in seeing another round of benchmarks, especially between Linux 2.4.0 (preferably whenever it's officially released) and Windows 2000.
On identical hardware, linux 2.4 with Tux web server beats the crap out of Windows 2000 with IIS Click here for result and don't forget to click here also for comparisons with different numbers of CPUs/NICs.
For file system spec test, it isn't pretty. Reiserfs home pages list comparisons against ext2 - they are quite comparable. NTFS hardly wins ANY performance test against any file systems.
Hopfield's experiment is going to be a sanity check against this kind of work - a kind of experimental control. Here's a situation where somebody does know the answer and work can be checked. A neural net involving only a few hundred neurons. If researchers are unable to reverse engineer this then should they really have jobs supposedly reverse engineering animal or even human brains?
Hopfield is a well respected theoretician. He is not in the business of reverse engineering animal or human brains. The fact is most of the physiologists that do reverse engineer sensory systems (in a manner of speaking) would not prioritize Hopfield's game very high.
The likely result is that lots of theoreticians will engage in his game, and maybe there will be some fun in it for them. Most of the physiologists will be busy engaging in the game for a living. It may very well result in a science of reverse engineering neural systems evolving to describe what successful physiolgists do - in the same manner that Kuhn described how science progesses in his career.
But don't kid yourself that this is a sanity check on people who do this for a living. That is not Hopfield's contribution to neuroscience.