Sadly few have realized (despite it being the main focus of most of those articles, but hey, who reads those) that quality will not be the merit to win this battle.
You can say that again. Otherwise Windows would be in the dustbin for years.
I disagree. I 've tried many times to read a novel stored in my netbook, or even laptop. It is awkward and clumsy. Books are more comfortable. Plus, when I fall asleep I drop the book to the floor. I can't do the same with the laptop:)
And when I finish the book, it is free for my wife to read it, while I read another one.
Under the circumstances it does not work. When software patents become illegal, you may have a point. An entity can not take the whole internet hostage.
By the way, where would you be if I had patented the Pythagorean theorem and through ridiculous extensions the patent were still valid? You know in short it works.
They don't understand physics. They understand that a ball going in that direction and speed lands about there, and they learn that through repetition, not understanding of the underlying math.
But their brain does understand the underlying physics. And not only that, it can predict the future (where the ball will be) by applying this knowledge. And it solves the problem using parallel processing.
The dogs do not know _why_ there is gravity. Neither do humans.
Not only that, in a pinch I can use a friggin' Windows XP video driver in Windows 7, which I needed to do to get 3D to work on a Dell C610 - that's a Pentium III running Windows 7. As easy as it is to knock Windows for its faults, that's pretty damn good compatability.
With so much luck, you should go to Vegas:)
Cause I have an Athlon64, which works fine (well as fine windows can) with XP, but Windows 7 does not load at all. And in another Athlon64, Windows7 does not play the sound (XP does), nor does it find the NIC of the motherboard. And you know, Autocad2005-2007 won't work on Windows7 (they work on XP).
On the other hand Linux (Open SuSE) worked from day 1, in 64bits, and it installed in half an hour, full with all the apps.
Oddly enough, I don't. But since you do, please give away you hard earned euros to get a copy for your office and then another for your home (and don't forget to carefully file the licenses and the invoices, should BSA break into your office). And also, give more money to buy Windows too, because Photoshop does not run anywhere else (and keep the windows licenses and invoices in a safe place too, because it is YOUR responsibility to prove that you are not a pirate). And don't forget to give more money for the upgrades too.
Meanwhile, I have installed GIMP to 20 or so PCs in my office, and, oddly enough, my colleagues have the basic intelligence to type text in a text box (which then goes on top the image). And no meetings for budget, no licenses, no bureaucracy. Somehow, I feel more competitive.
Face it, folks, GTK+ is cross platform only by the loosest possible interpretation
Is it only me that I care for functionality and not decoration? So really, if the print button looks like a dot-matrix printer and not as a laser printer, is it a show stopper? I must be getting old.
And before someone says anything about Photoshop, I have never needed more functionality than the one GIMP provides. I am an engineer, not an artist. And GIMP, being FOSS, has saved my day, when it opened multi-GB satellite images in 4GB RAM 64bit SuSE linux box. At that time, windows couldn't see more that 2 or 3 GB, and photoshop couldn't use more than 2 (and windows XP64 was a joke).
Just because GIMP has a different interface than photoshop, it does not make it user-enemy. If you are used to GIMP's interface, then that of photoshop looks odd.
When I say this I remember a secretary that we had a decade ago, who said that Staroffice (early Openoffice) didn't have an open button (and thus it was unusable). In reality, the button was there (a few positions to the right) and, after all, there was the open command in the file menu. But you know, if it isn't exactly like MSOffice, it is broken.
Please correct me if I am wrong, but It was my understanding that we look for signals that the aliens purposely transmit to make their existence known. All that is needed, is a slightly more advanced civilization than us (and a richer one too).
(Like Europeans, aliens may be religious nuts bent on destroying our religion and replacing it with their own, but that seems somewhat unlikely.)
I would reconsider if I were you. The Vatican says that aliens are not incompatible with catholicism (and they were created, like us, by the same God).
Has anyone considered the historical evidence of what happens when superior civilizations encounter lesser ones?
No, as it turns out, you're the first person ever to consider it. The first person in the entirety of human history. Even as I type, the Nobel Committee are holding an emergency session to create a new honour that's significant enough to even begin to recognise the enormity of your insight. Do not leave your home: a team of crack sculptors are en route to measure you up for your 400 foot tall solid gold statue.
The sad news is that, though what the grand parent said is obvious, large masses of people in the "advanced" countries have not considered it. Or they say that a sufficiently technologically advanced civilization, will also be morally sufficiently advanced (against every single fact in history).
Given that any alien race who chose to expand could colonise the entire galaxy in under ten million years without even trying hard (or a hundred million years without trying at all, just by tourists on a random walk), the answer to the Fermi Paradox is simple: there aren't any... if they existed, they'd be about as hard to spot as technological life in Manhattan.
What if the speed of light IS the limit? And what if the huge energy required to send a ship to interstellar distances REMAINS huge cause there are no other means of thrust than Newton's. What if the habitable planters ARE rare (for example 100).
In all these I assume that you send sperm and eggs to travel to another star, along with robots to incubate and raise new human beings (otherwise you assume S.F. is fact - just think, what if all SF says, simply can not be done). What if the eggs/sperm or the robots don't last the thousands of years of the journey? What if the planets there do not have the raw materials needed? What if due to little biological diversity the colony dies out? What if the new human civilization takes thousand of years to reach technological advancement? What if in the mean time Earth civilization is self destructed? If we assumed that a new colony, after thousands of years would send 10 successful missions, and in the mean time 10 human civilizations are self destructed, where is the exponential growth?
It is a fact that in advanced countries people have few children. What if this is true, and in a colony the population is stabilized, and they don't want to leave their comfortable lives?
What if my speculations are correct and yours aren't?
Remember that many technology predictions (moon base, human in mars, flying cars for common people, cure of cancer, supersonic passenger planes, population control, etc) turned out to be false or failed.
Certainly going to Mars would be an enormous victory but you need to balance between spending huge amounts of money on something which has enormous propaganda but huge risks associated with failure vs. spending relatively little continuing to send robots up and generating tonnes of new scientific knowledge.
Please read "The case for Mars" by Robert Zubrin. The risks are reasonable and the cost is certainly not huge (less than the 1st moon landing).
Do you want to democratize technology or just have it controlled by elites? Non-techies want to do things like scripting...
You make the implicit assumption that windows and icons and clicks are easier for non-techies. I am afraid it is not so. The non-techies are functional human beings and they are able to understand ordinary scripts. And it is actually easier to learn text than icons.
I am not making this up. Back in the early 90's, when windows was novel, many times I sold computers to complete novices. What is saw was that it was easier for them to understand commands (DOS style) than icons (windows) style. It took them much time to get accustomed with icons, buttons pull down menus (for example, "in which menu is the replace command? why can't I type replace and do the job").
The same thing happened to me when a friend bought a macintosh and told me how "easy" was to operate the machine. I could not figure out how to remove a file. When my friend opened the file manager, clicked on the file (holding the mouse button pressed), and dragged it to an icon, which was the "garbage", I could not believe how time consuming, clumsy and unintuitive it was. Of course, after years of getting accustomed to windows, it was straightforward to learn the Mac too.
Off topic, what happens if you try to run the Sikuli script to a computer with different resolution, or different font, or different (customized) icons.
If visual studio is the IDE that Compaq Visual Fortran uses, then IMO it sucks. It is too complicated. The error messages are unintuitive and hidden (they don't fit in a line, and the line does not wrap). It is a PITA to learn how to compile multiple files and include non-default libraries (never mind the "shortcuts"). Lots of windows clutter the desktop. It is difficult to keep track what file is open, if it is modified or if it has been modified by external process. It dies often. It uses up the computer resources, rather than the program beeing written. To me, and to a lot of students where I work, it is unnecessary complexity.
By the way, does it (or can it) support compilers, like g77, gfortran, to produce non-x86 code? or non-windows code? Thought so.
.... So for 190 Euro more, you get OS X, a much faster, 64-bit, virtualisation-capable CPU, and a real GPU with dual display support, but lose 1GB RAM....
poor excuses for replacements of legitimate products (OpenOffice versus Microsoft Office, for example), etc.
Obviously, you have not used OpenOffice more than a few minutes. MS Office is a huge time sink. With OpenOffice you save time, which you don't realize, unless you try to go back to MS Office.
But don't let this make you switch. It makes me look more competitive:)
I've tried hard for two years to like Linux (I installed Ubuntu on two computers during that time and used it reasonably frequently), and it just never happened. But the absolute worst part of all of this is how Linux users often say that people should switch over to their OS because it's free, there aren't any viruses, and everything works just fine. However, they neglect to mention how much work and inside knowledge is required to make everything work, and when people point out things that just work better on a different OS (or work at all, period), they say "well I don't really care about that, so it doesn't matter."
Well, I have 2 old machines (ATHLON 64 since 2006). The sound driver never worked in XP. I tried numerous tines to find updated drivers in the internet. Nothing. Some days ago I tried windows7. Still nothing. On the other hand Linux worked out of the box. SuSE10.3, 11, 11.1, 11.2, Mandriva 2009, PCLINUXOS2009, Ubuntu (I don't remember which version).
By the way, have you tried to install winXP. It is a PITA. After the installation you have to install the various drivers, and each one requires a reboot (and if it doesn't say so, you have to reboot anyway, because otherwise it doesn't work). And then you have to install the applications. It takes more than a working day. On the other hand SuSE Linux installs in half an hour, complete with all the drivers AND a ton of applications as well. My 7 years old son has been installing SuSE LINUX by himself for more than a year now.
And this is why I like Linux. And another huge advantage is that it is FREE as in beer (no "please boss, give me the money to upgrade my windows and MSoffice). And another huge advantage is that it is FREE as in speech (no "I have to keep an archive of all the licenses and invoices, and I have to police all the computers at my company should someone install an proprietary app).
But, again, don't let these make you switch. It makes me look more competitive:)
Like Firefox, Opera and Chrome do with Google? It's not hard to change search engine in IE, btw
Well, there are fundamental differences.
At first, Firefox and Opera are created by organizations independent to Google.
Then, nobody preinstalls Firefox, or Opera or Chrome by default to your Windows computer. On the other hand, IE comes preinstalled and it happens to have BING as a default. And this also happens to be a practice that Microsoft, a convicted monopoly, has done in the past.
Oh, come on. The first time you run IE8 it prompts you to pick a search provider
Funny
I installed Windows 7-64 in my son's computer (no sound - WinXP had sound, All versions of SuSE had and PCLINUXOS too), and I fired IE in order to download firefox. IE asked nothing about search providers. It just used BING.
I know you probably meant that as a joke, but the fact is that the epicycle model fit observable data quite nicely.
It didn't. Even Ptolemy acknowledged it. The epicycles predicted that some times the moon would be in the half distance to earth than usually, which means that its apparent size should be much larger. This of course had not been observed and Ptolemy called it "anomaly".
For me, the only reason for sending robots to space, is to gain experience (flight, science, material etc) for later colonization. Put our humanity eggs to more than one place in space. The reasons are many and are detailed in 'the case for mars' by Robert Zubrin.
For example, in recent slashdot news, free speech (fourth amendment) is in jeopardy in the US. The same or worse in Europe, where Ireland passed a law about blasphemy. If you wanted to escape these, where would you go?
But do you "voluntary" provide detailed information about yourself to the insurance company (which in many cases is a private corporation)? Well, where I live, it was my right to deny to provide the information, but if I didn't, I would not get insured.
What about registering software? For example a friend bought the 3 licenses of an anti-virus, and he had to register giving his name and e-mail, which should not be fake.
Slashdot Mirror
Sadly few have realized (despite it being the main focus of most of those articles, but hey, who reads those) that quality will not be the merit to win this battle.
You can say that again. Otherwise Windows would be in the dustbin for years.
Donald Knuth has stated that algorithms ARE math. Do you know better?
Without stealing of ideas
Stealing? Ideas? Right. Every time you use the Pythagorean theorem, you steal the idea of Pythagoras.
Seriously though, ideas are cheap, implementations are difficult.
I disagree. I 've tried many times to read a novel stored in my netbook, or even laptop. It is awkward and clumsy. Books are more comfortable. Plus, when I fall asleep I drop the book to the floor. I can't do the same with the laptop :)
And when I finish the book, it is free for my wife to read it, while I read another one.
In short it works.
Under the circumstances it does not work. When software patents become illegal, you may have a point. An entity can not take the whole internet hostage.
By the way, where would you be if I had patented the Pythagorean theorem and through ridiculous extensions the patent were still valid? You know in short it works.
They don't understand physics. They understand that a ball going in that direction and speed lands about there, and they learn that through repetition, not understanding of the underlying math.
But their brain does understand the underlying physics. And not only that, it can predict the future (where the ball will be) by applying this knowledge. And it solves the problem using parallel processing.
The dogs do not know _why_ there is gravity. Neither do humans.
Not only that, in a pinch I can use a friggin' Windows XP video driver in Windows 7, which I needed to do to get 3D to work on a Dell C610 - that's a Pentium III running Windows 7. As easy as it is to knock Windows for its faults, that's pretty damn good compatability.
With so much luck, you should go to Vegas:)
Cause I have an Athlon64, which works fine (well as fine windows can) with XP, but Windows 7 does not load at all. And in another Athlon64, Windows7 does not play the sound (XP does), nor does it find the NIC of the motherboard. And you know, Autocad2005-2007 won't work on Windows7 (they work on XP).
On the other hand Linux (Open SuSE) worked from day 1, in 64bits, and it installed in half an hour, full with all the apps.
Do you realize how basic a feature that is?
Oddly enough, I don't. But since you do, please give away you hard earned euros to get a copy for your office and then another for your home (and don't forget to carefully file the licenses and the invoices, should BSA break into your office). And also, give more money to buy Windows too, because Photoshop does not run anywhere else (and keep the windows licenses and invoices in a safe place too, because it is YOUR responsibility to prove that you are not a pirate). And don't forget to give more money for the upgrades too.
Meanwhile, I have installed GIMP to 20 or so PCs in my office, and, oddly enough, my colleagues have the basic intelligence to type text in a text box (which then goes on top the image). And no meetings for budget, no licenses, no bureaucracy. Somehow, I feel more competitive.
Face it, folks, GTK+ is cross platform only by the loosest possible interpretation
Is it only me that I care for functionality and not decoration? So really, if the print button looks like a dot-matrix printer and not as a laser printer, is it a show stopper? I must be getting old.
And before someone says anything about Photoshop, I have never needed more functionality than the one GIMP provides. I am an engineer, not an artist. And GIMP, being FOSS, has saved my day, when it opened multi-GB satellite images in 4GB RAM 64bit SuSE linux box. At that time, windows couldn't see more that 2 or 3 GB, and photoshop couldn't use more than 2 (and windows XP64 was a joke).
Just because GIMP has a different interface than photoshop, it does not make it user-enemy. If you are used to GIMP's interface, then that of photoshop looks odd.
When I say this I remember a secretary that we had a decade ago, who said that Staroffice (early Openoffice) didn't have an open button (and thus it was unusable). In reality, the button was there (a few positions to the right) and, after all, there was the open command in the file menu. But you know, if it isn't exactly like MSOffice, it is broken.
Please correct me if I am wrong, but It was my understanding that we look for signals that the aliens purposely transmit to make their existence known. All that is needed, is a slightly more advanced civilization than us (and a richer one too).
(Like Europeans, aliens may be religious nuts bent on destroying our religion and replacing it with their own, but that seems somewhat unlikely.)
I would reconsider if I were you. The Vatican says that aliens are not incompatible with catholicism (and they were created, like us, by the same God).
No, as it turns out, you're the first person ever to consider it. The first person in the entirety of human history. Even as I type, the Nobel Committee are holding an emergency session to create a new honour that's significant enough to even begin to recognise the enormity of your insight. Do not leave your home: a team of crack sculptors are en route to measure you up for your 400 foot tall solid gold statue.
The sad news is that, though what the grand parent said is obvious, large masses of people in the "advanced" countries have not considered it. Or they say that a sufficiently technologically advanced civilization, will also be morally sufficiently advanced (against every single fact in history).
Given that any alien race who chose to expand could colonise the entire galaxy in under ten million years without even trying hard (or a hundred million years without trying at all, just by tourists on a random walk), the answer to the Fermi Paradox is simple: there aren't any... if they existed, they'd be about as hard to spot as technological life in Manhattan.
What if the speed of light IS the limit? And what if the huge energy required to send a ship to interstellar distances REMAINS huge cause there are no other means of thrust than Newton's. What if the habitable planters ARE rare (for example 100).
In all these I assume that you send sperm and eggs to travel to another star, along with robots to incubate and raise new human beings (otherwise you assume S.F. is fact - just think, what if all SF says, simply can not be done). What if the eggs/sperm or the robots don't last the thousands of years of the journey? What if the planets there do not have the raw materials needed? What if due to little biological diversity the colony dies out? What if the new human civilization takes thousand of years to reach technological advancement? What if in the mean time Earth civilization is self destructed? If we assumed that a new colony, after thousands of years would send 10 successful missions, and in the mean time 10 human civilizations are self destructed, where is the exponential growth?
It is a fact that in advanced countries people have few children. What if this is true, and in a colony the population is stabilized, and they don't want to leave their comfortable lives?
What if my speculations are correct and yours aren't?
Remember that many technology predictions (moon base, human in mars, flying cars for common people, cure of cancer, supersonic passenger planes, population control, etc) turned out to be false or failed.
Certainly going to Mars would be an enormous victory but you need to balance between spending huge amounts of money on something which has enormous propaganda but huge risks associated with failure vs. spending relatively little continuing to send robots up and generating tonnes of new scientific knowledge.
Please read "The case for Mars" by Robert Zubrin. The risks are reasonable and the cost is certainly not huge (less than the 1st moon landing).
Do you want to democratize technology or just have it controlled by elites? Non-techies want to do things like scripting...
You make the implicit assumption that windows and icons and clicks are easier for non-techies. I am afraid it is not so. The non-techies are functional human beings and they are able to understand ordinary scripts. And it is actually easier to learn text than icons.
I am not making this up. Back in the early 90's, when windows was novel, many times I sold computers to complete novices. What is saw was that it was easier for them to understand commands (DOS style) than icons (windows) style. It took them much time to get accustomed with icons, buttons pull down menus (for example, "in which menu is the replace command? why can't I type replace and do the job").
The same thing happened to me when a friend bought a macintosh and told me how "easy" was to operate the machine. I could not figure out how to remove a file. When my friend opened the file manager, clicked on the file (holding the mouse button pressed), and dragged it to an icon, which was the "garbage", I could not believe how time consuming, clumsy and unintuitive it was. Of course, after years of getting accustomed to windows, it was straightforward to learn the Mac too.
Off topic, what happens if you try to run the Sikuli script to a computer with different resolution, or different font, or different (customized) icons.
I have been using SuSE Linux 64 since 2005 with no problems.
If visual studio is the IDE that Compaq Visual Fortran uses, then IMO it sucks. It is too complicated. The error messages are unintuitive and hidden (they don't fit in a line, and the line does not wrap). It is a PITA to learn how to compile multiple files and include non-default libraries (never mind the "shortcuts"). Lots of windows clutter the desktop. It is difficult to keep track what file is open, if it is modified or if it has been modified by external process. It dies often. It uses up the computer resources, rather than the program beeing written. To me, and to a lot of students where I work, it is unnecessary complexity.
By the way, does it (or can it) support compilers, like g77, gfortran, to produce non-x86 code? or non-windows code? Thought so.
.... So for 190 Euro more, you get OS X, a much faster, 64-bit, virtualisation-capable CPU, and a real GPU with dual display support, but lose 1GB RAM....
Just for another perspective:
poor excuses for replacements of legitimate products (OpenOffice versus Microsoft Office, for example), etc.
Obviously, you have not used OpenOffice more than a few minutes. MS Office is a huge time sink. With OpenOffice you save time, which you don't realize, unless you try to go back to MS Office.
But don't let this make you switch. It makes me look more competitive :)
I've tried hard for two years to like Linux (I installed Ubuntu on two computers during that time and used it reasonably frequently), and it just never happened. But the absolute worst part of all of this is how Linux users often say that people should switch over to their OS because it's free, there aren't any viruses, and everything works just fine. However, they neglect to mention how much work and inside knowledge is required to make everything work, and when people point out things that just work better on a different OS (or work at all, period), they say "well I don't really care about that, so it doesn't matter."
Well, I have 2 old machines (ATHLON 64 since 2006). The sound driver never worked in XP. I tried numerous tines to find updated drivers in the internet. Nothing. Some days ago I tried windows7. Still nothing. On the other hand Linux worked out of the box. SuSE10.3, 11, 11.1, 11.2, Mandriva 2009, PCLINUXOS2009, Ubuntu (I don't remember which version).
By the way, have you tried to install winXP. It is a PITA. After the installation you have to install the various drivers, and each one requires a reboot (and if it doesn't say so, you have to reboot anyway, because otherwise it doesn't work). And then you have to install the applications. It takes more than a working day. On the other hand SuSE Linux installs in half an hour, complete with all the drivers AND a ton of applications as well. My 7 years old son has been installing SuSE LINUX by himself for more than a year now.
And this is why I like Linux. And another huge advantage is that it is FREE as in beer (no "please boss, give me the money to upgrade my windows and MSoffice). And another huge advantage is that it is FREE as in speech (no "I have to keep an archive of all the licenses and invoices, and I have to police all the computers at my company should someone install an proprietary app).
But, again, don't let these make you switch. It makes me look more competitive :)
Like Firefox, Opera and Chrome do with Google? It's not hard to change search engine in IE, btw
Well, there are fundamental differences.
At first, Firefox and Opera are created by organizations independent to Google.
Then, nobody preinstalls Firefox, or Opera or Chrome by default to your Windows computer. On the other hand, IE comes preinstalled and it happens to have BING as a default. And this also happens to be a practice that Microsoft, a convicted monopoly, has done in the past.
Oh, come on. The first time you run IE8 it prompts you to pick a search provider
Funny
I installed Windows 7-64 in my son's computer (no sound - WinXP had sound, All versions of SuSE had and PCLINUXOS too), and I fired IE in order to download firefox. IE asked nothing about search providers. It just used BING.
I know you probably meant that as a joke, but the fact is that the epicycle model fit observable data quite nicely.
It didn't. Even Ptolemy acknowledged it. The epicycles predicted that some times the moon would be in the half distance to earth than usually, which means that its apparent size should be much larger. This of course had not been observed and Ptolemy called it "anomaly".
For me, the only reason for sending robots to space, is to gain experience (flight, science, material etc) for later colonization. Put our humanity eggs to more than one place in space. The reasons are many and are detailed in 'the case for mars' by Robert Zubrin.
For example, in recent slashdot news, free speech (fourth amendment) is in jeopardy in the US. The same or worse in Europe, where Ireland passed a law about blasphemy. If you wanted to escape these, where would you go?
I don't know about LexisNexis.
But do you "voluntary" provide detailed information about yourself to the insurance company (which in many cases is a private corporation)? Well, where I live, it was my right to deny to provide the information, but if I didn't, I would not get insured.
What about registering software? For example a friend bought the 3 licenses of an anti-virus, and he had to register giving his name and e-mail, which should not be fake.