Except for a tiny minority of specialists, most scientific programmers, even those working on large-scale problems, have neither the time nor the expertise to hand-optimize. Many of them don't even know how to use optimized library routines properly.
If their dissatisfaction is linked to the E-mail and messaging user interfaces of their cell phones, that tells you that they are actually using those functions; if they didn't want those functions, they'd just not be using them and they wouldn't complain about their user interfaces. So, they don't want "simpler" cell phones (in the sense of cell phones with fewer functions), they want "easier to use" cell phones.
and in the process, over four months, gained 10 pounds while surviving largely on one meal a day of instant noodles.
You don't gain 10 pounds on "one meal a day of instant noodles". If that's the only solid food he had, he must have had sugary soft drinks for the calories.
Java is fighting a rear-guard action. The language is 10 years old.
Actually, except for the new-fangled C-like syntax, the language is really more than 30 years old.
Forget.NET. Go with Python. It has features that.NET doesn't support yet.
Python is a lovely and productive scripting language, and I think it's great for many of the things people use Java for. But nice as it is, some features (e.g., the use of hash tables to represent objects) just aren't heavy-duty enough for me. Overall, when it comes to dynamic languages, I think Smalltalk is still the overall best design, 25 years after its creation.
However,.NET and Mono are persuasive: between IronPython and Boo, it is a great and productive programming environment that, unlike either Java or Python, covers everything from low-level systems programming, to application programming, numerical programming, and scripting.
Actually, if you look at it, what was different in the West (and China for that matter) from Africa and a number of other third world countries was the complete domination for periods of time of dominant world views
Some of the prosperous nations achieved wealth and power through conquest. Others achieved it through being conquered. Yet others achieved it in near isolation. All of those are routes that we know work. None have so far through the kind of foreign aid and technological quick fixes we are attempting to impose on the third world today.
I hate conflict, but I am willing to state that war has solved a lot of things throughout history--slavery, Fascism, tyranny, and a whole host of other problems.
I think the occupation of parts of Europe by the Romans and later Napoleon was a big contributor to European prosperity. If there was reason to believe that would work in Africa, I'd be for it.
Trouble is, the US and Europe are too lazy, squeamish, and cheap to invest the money and people. It takes a lot of sacrifice to run an empire, and on the whole, it's not worth it unless you have to. Right now, we're having trouble even coping with a single Middle Eastern nation. And, perhaps more importantly, we sort of tried that before with colonialism and it didn't work out so well.
I challenge the statement that the US developed into a modern economy devoid of meddling. Slave trade from Africa transported by English and other frigates? Help from the French in War of independence?
I didn't say the US developed in isolation. But what you describe is political and economic interactions between nations, not foreign aid of the kind people are prescribing for third world nations.
how can we get their foot in the door?
We can hold the door open, but it's their foot to move. If they don't figure out how to move it themselves, pushing it won't make a difference.
Also, there is a huge issue of malaria and HIV. I don't see the free market on it's own solving this.
Both of those problems are already solved. If you don't settle in malaria-infested areas, you don't usually get malaria. And if women get the information and control necessary to protect themselves, HIV will disappear from most of the population.
but I think the market on its own, without assistance, is not a cure-all for the economic malaise facing sub-saharan Africa
I think you have me confused with some free market idologue. Historically, most of the gain in life expectancy and economic development has probably been due to government action, and I imagine it would be the same for many of today's developing nations (but don't know for certain).
What I am pretty certain of, however, is that the solution is not a high-tech crop from California or in unloading buckets of foreign cash (often with strings attached) on top of random third world governments.
Look at it this way: You're a two year old. I'm the wise old grandmother who babysits you.
That's typical parochial Western bullshit. People in developing nations aren't two year olds and you aren't their wise old grandmother.
Are you saying that nobody should give bio-genetics firms any money, because it's just a waste?
I'm saying that people should concentrate on those things that we know increase life expectancy the most, like building sewers. On the other hand, selling proprietary US crops to these nations makes the primary problem worse: poverty.
Furthermore, we know that nations can develop without "bio-genetics", 20th century medicine, or high tech because almost all nations that are prosperous today have done so.
Just like no one was ever helped by vaccinations, penicillin, DDT, or any of a host of other scientific advances, right?
The rich nations of the world became rich long before vaccinations, penicillin, DDT, or most other scientific advances. In fact, equal rights for women and a good sanitation system are more important for social progress and increased life expectancy than any of those scientific gimmicks.
If the fruits of science are "crutches", why don't you go live in a cave in Alaska and see how long you last?
I'm sorry this surprises you, but people didn't live in caves prior to penicillin. There were many prosperous nations with good standards of living. Yes, I would mind living in a cave in Alaska, but I wouldn't mind living in ancient Rome, Athens, or Alexandria.
How exactly does a product intended for sale create "corruption and dependency?"
You mean like baby formula, soft drings, and hamburgers? Not to mention cigarettes and alcohol? And where exactly do you think that money for that product is coming from and what strings come attached with that money?
These nations need to develop internal markets, they need to strengthen their own agriculture, and they need to use environmentally appropriate indigenous crops. The last thing they need is some bioengineered shit designed in the US that costs them all their foreign currency and is not adapted to their environment in order to solve a problem that is far more easily solved with good sanitation and good public health.
You, sir, are a moron of the lowest order, an utterly callous, ideological yet self-contradictory moron
No, the moron is you: a consumerist closet right-winger that thinks technology can fix everything. You want to keep the rest of the world in perpetual servitude by making their economies dependent on expensive and unnecessary stuff from the US and Europe. Great deal for the West, lousy deal for developing nations.
You claim it's a vicious cycle, but history tells us differently. All the prosperous nations suffered through plagues, political turmoil, wars, high child mortality, religious fundamentalism, and vicious plagues, without even as much as antibiotics. If there was a key medical technology at all, it was sanitation, something every developing nation on this planet can build for themselves and create jobs in the process.
In contrast, if you look at the result of modern aid efforts, it's clear that they are at best ineffective; in fact, in many cases, they seem to prop up corrupt regimes and support military excursions.
Medicine has the principle "first, do no harm". That's what we should apply to international relations. And the best you can usually do for nations around the globe is to leeave their internal affairs alone, but trade with them equitably.
When folks feel that its ok to steal because they don't believe in a way a company does business that company will be forced to take countermeasures.
First of all, this step punishes a lot of people who have trusted Apple's commitment to open source and who have never stolen anything from Apple. This just reinforces the perception that Apple can't be trusted on open source issues.
What's particularly absurd about your statement is that Darwin is actually built on two open source projects in the first place: CMU's Mach and Berkeley BSD. It was questionable that NeXT made this code proprietary in the first place; Apple's open sourcing of their modifications was not generosity, it was merely doing what we expect of any user of open source software. Closing it again places them back in the category of companies that take a lot but give fairly little back.
Meanwhile there are people - real, live people - people with thoughts, and feelings, and whose well-being you'd place at first-priority, whose well-being would be your tantamount concern, whose well-being would trump these silly goddamn over-analytical beardo quack ideas and "what ifs"
These people are not going to be helped with bioengineered rice. The problems in the third world are political chaos, war, lack of family planning, lack of education, religious fundamentalism, and others. Poverty, disease, high mortality, child labor, homelessness, and migration are symptoms of that. You can't fix the problems by treating the symptoms, and even if the first world made it its top priority to help the third world, it couldn't being to alleviate the suffering. The only way this is ever going to get fixed is to address the root problems.
Every dollar you invest in attempts at quick fixes like bioengineered rice is a dollar you aren't spending on fixing the fundamental problems. It's actually worse than that: if you give these people crutches like bioengineered rice, they're even less likely to do what's necessary to modernize their infrastructure, and you make them dependent on high-tech products and imports.
It's well-meaning idiots like you that focus on the short term and keep meddling in those societies (creating corruption and dependency in the process) that are responsible for a large part of the suffering in the third world. Europe and the US developed into modern societies with long life expectancies without such meddling, and these nations can and will as well if we give them access to world markets and let them compete and develop freely.
The fact that Sun has made it easy to obtain Java source code under license by merely clicking through is a trap; it lulls people into the belief that they can download the source code without consequences. It is cynical and deceptive to say that the source code is available without being clear how seriously encumbered it is. Windows source code is available under restrictive licenses as well, but frankly, I consider the fact that you have to do more than click through a license a bit more honest than what Sun is doing.
Let me say it again: do not donwload Sun's Java source code unless you are absolutely clear of what the legal implications are. Sun is serious about their licenses and they have enforced them in the past when it suited them. Neither the JRL nor the SCSL are open source licenses and violate many of the implicit assumptions you may make about downloadable source code. In addition, keep in mind that significant aspects of the Java platform are patented by Sun, so that it's not clear that merely having source code, even if you could use it, would help you.
Microsoft says "Great Sun open sourced Java". We will take it bundle it with windows, change all the underlying code so that it actually uses windows API's, remove anything that competes against our stuff like SWING, EJB's, Servlets, messaging API's et al, and make it so that our Java only runs on Windows, and even if you try to run a "normal" Java application , it will not work unless you change it to support com.microsoft.xxx libraries, and jump through a ton of hoops.
The already did this. It's called.NET. It's an open standard and there are open source implementations. It provides excellent desktop integration on Windows and Linux. It gives you a choice of native toolkits or cross platform toolkits. It's technically superior to Java and the implementations are better than Sun Java. Recent Linux distributions include a dozen or so Mono applications as part of the Gnome desktop, and they work so well that most people won't even know it. Even Gnome's desktop search is based on it. And both Microsoft and Mono provide backwards compatibility with Java (you can even run Eclipse on top of Mono).
By giving the finger to both Microsoft and the open source world, Sun really screwed themselves.
Remember, Microsoft already tried to pull that routine with the NON-OSS version of Java.
Microsoft didn't need Sun's source code to create an incompatible version of Java, as the existence of.NET shows. Microsoft even provides tools to let you convert all your Java programs to the.NET platform, but the reverse migration is pretty much impossible since.NET has functionality that Java cannot emulate efficiently.
By not permitting Microsoft to fork Java and create a somewhat incompatible version, Sun has created a competitor for itself that is far, far worse than a slightly incompatible "Microsoft Java".
And the icing on the cake is that Sun was such an ass when it came to dealing with the open source community when it came to Java that they have antagonized large parts of the open source world. They've also dropped the ball technologically on Java (there wasn't much debate on 1.6 because few people outside Java's core zealots give a damn anymore). The open source community has instead created its own, open source, high-quality implementation of.NET, with the effect that.NET and Mono are already far more prevalent on Linux distributions than Java.
The notion that Sun could control Java by playing hardball was hubris, and it backfired. Now, a few years later, Sun is scrambling trying to pick up the pieces of their broken strategy. And Schwartz still doesn't get it--he is still trying to square the circle and come up with a "non-forking OSS license".
Sure they can - there are other ways to pevent forking than in the license. Look at most of the major OSS projects around and you'll see that there is very little in the way of forking - sure minor forks exist but they quickly die.
Ultimately, the only way to prevent forking is to do such a good job at managing the project and on the technical side that few people will want to use a fork.
I don't think that Sun is up to that standard, and it's pretty clear that Sun themselves doesn't think that, otherwise they wouldn't be so worried about forking.
We are only interested in non-interbreeding pairs of creatures if there are also clear ecological and phenetic identity criteria to separate them.
First, the interbreeding criterion for species is obviously a statistical criterion at the population level (it does require fertile offspring). You could pick an arbitrary numerical threshold to make a decision in the oddball cases, the analog of an LD50, but it's not worth bothering: most cases are clearcut, and the ones that aren't require additional explanation anyway.
Second, populations of creatures that occupy the same ecological niche and "phenetic identity criteria" are essentially non-existent; usually, diversification or separation precedes an inability to breed. Dogs will eventually speciate.
Third, even if otherwise identical, non-interbreeding subpopulations were to occur, they would probably soon occupy different niches or start appearing differently.
Why are wolves and jackals considered different species? Surely some jackal species are also able to interbreed with dogs and wolves, even if they normally don't?
Well, biology reclassified dogs and wolves as the same species, so the same may yet happen for dogs and golden jackals.
If, according to your criteria, Polar Bears and Grizzly Bears really belong to the same species, then you are using the wrong criteria since they clearly have a different colour and ecological niche.
So do Massai and Eskimos, yet they are clearly the same species. So do cocker spaniels and dalmatians, yet they, too, are clearly the same species.
It's you who is using the wrong criteria.
As for polar bears and grizzly bears, they may or may not be the same species, or they may be a border case.
and I think Parent's point was that the idea of species is outdated. [...] "Species" is a Linnaean concept that goes way back, certainly before evolution was understood at all.
The situation is quite analogous to the distinction between solids, liquids, and gasses. People knew about those long before modern physics, and the purpose of physical theory was to explain them. Physics did this, and in the process also discovered that there are cases in which those terms are meaningless, hard to determine, fuzzy, or ill-defined.
Just like the concepts of "solid", "liquid", and "gas", the Linnean or Mayerian concept of "species" is readily observable in nature and it needs to be explained by theory; you can't just define it away. In fact, in some sense, one of the primary goals of evolutionary biology is to explain when groups of organisms stop breeding with one another.
No comparison between Windows and Linux makes sense if you buy Windows pre-installed and then try to install Linux on top of that; of course, Linux is going to lose. But if you have ever tried to install Windows on random hardware, you know what at pain it can be trying to find all the necessary drivers.
Beyond that, it's naive to think that switching from any operating system to any other operating system is going to be painless. It's not the point or goal of Linux to make it easy to switch to it from Windows.
There is a world of difference between the spec defining a language being an open standard, and the reference implementation being Open Source.
But Java IS NOT an open standard: the specs are only available under a restrictive license and remain proprietary to Sun. And they are still incomplete so that you need Sun's implementation. The only compliant implementation of Java there is (and likely ever will be) is Sun's.
That's why it doesn't matter whether Microsoft open sources Visual C++, but it does matter a great deal whether Sun open sources Java.
The problem _is_ the GPL. If NVIDIA wants to distribute their driver without giving out the source that _should_ be fine.
No, it should not be "fine".
The GPL has made it a pain in the ass for any company that wants to write drivers for Linux.
No, only for the companies that want to write closed source drivers, and we don't want them.
A story like this just makes more decide it's just not worth it.
Good riddance. If only it were so. Unfortunately, nVidia knows that if they left Linux, the void would be filled by an open source competitor, and that's the last thing they want.
Slashdot Mirror
Except for a tiny minority of specialists, most scientific programmers, even those working on large-scale problems, have neither the time nor the expertise to hand-optimize. Many of them don't even know how to use optimized library routines properly.
If their dissatisfaction is linked to the E-mail and messaging user interfaces of their cell phones, that tells you that they are actually using those functions; if they didn't want those functions, they'd just not be using them and they wouldn't complain about their user interfaces. So, they don't want "simpler" cell phones (in the sense of cell phones with fewer functions), they want "easier to use" cell phones.
and in the process, over four months, gained 10 pounds while surviving largely on one meal a day of instant noodles.
You don't gain 10 pounds on "one meal a day of instant noodles". If that's the only solid food he had, he must have had sugary soft drinks for the calories.
Sun's rocking motion.
Java is fighting a rear-guard action. The language is 10 years old.
.NET. Go with Python. It has features that .NET doesn't support yet.
.NET and Mono are persuasive: between IronPython and Boo, it is a great and productive programming environment that, unlike either Java or Python, covers everything from low-level systems programming, to application programming, numerical programming, and scripting.
Actually, except for the new-fangled C-like syntax, the language is really more than 30 years old.
Forget
Python is a lovely and productive scripting language, and I think it's great for many of the things people use Java for. But nice as it is, some features (e.g., the use of hash tables to represent objects) just aren't heavy-duty enough for me. Overall, when it comes to dynamic languages, I think Smalltalk is still the overall best design, 25 years after its creation.
However,
Actually, if you look at it, what was different in the West (and China for that matter) from Africa and a number of other third world countries was the complete domination for periods of time of dominant world views
Some of the prosperous nations achieved wealth and power through conquest. Others achieved it through being conquered. Yet others achieved it in near isolation. All of those are routes that we know work. None have so far through the kind of foreign aid and technological quick fixes we are attempting to impose on the third world today.
I hate conflict, but I am willing to state that war has solved a lot of things throughout history--slavery, Fascism, tyranny, and a whole host of other problems.
I think the occupation of parts of Europe by the Romans and later Napoleon was a big contributor to European prosperity. If there was reason to believe that would work in Africa, I'd be for it.
Trouble is, the US and Europe are too lazy, squeamish, and cheap to invest the money and people. It takes a lot of sacrifice to run an empire, and on the whole, it's not worth it unless you have to. Right now, we're having trouble even coping with a single Middle Eastern nation. And, perhaps more importantly, we sort of tried that before with colonialism and it didn't work out so well.
I challenge the statement that the US developed into a modern economy devoid of meddling. Slave trade from Africa transported by English and other frigates? Help from the French in War of independence?
I didn't say the US developed in isolation. But what you describe is political and economic interactions between nations, not foreign aid of the kind people are prescribing for third world nations.
how can we get their foot in the door?
We can hold the door open, but it's their foot to move. If they don't figure out how to move it themselves, pushing it won't make a difference.
Also, there is a huge issue of malaria and HIV. I don't see the free market on it's own solving this.
Both of those problems are already solved. If you don't settle in malaria-infested areas, you don't usually get malaria. And if women get the information and control necessary to protect themselves, HIV will disappear from most of the population.
but I think the market on its own, without assistance, is not a cure-all for the economic malaise facing sub-saharan Africa
I think you have me confused with some free market idologue. Historically, most of the gain in life expectancy and economic development has probably been due to government action, and I imagine it would be the same for many of today's developing nations (but don't know for certain).
What I am pretty certain of, however, is that the solution is not a high-tech crop from California or in unloading buckets of foreign cash (often with strings attached) on top of random third world governments.
Look at it this way: You're a two year old. I'm the wise old grandmother who babysits you.
That's typical parochial Western bullshit. People in developing nations aren't two year olds and you aren't their wise old grandmother.
Are you saying that nobody should give bio-genetics firms any money, because it's just a waste?
I'm saying that people should concentrate on those things that we know increase life expectancy the most, like building sewers. On the other hand, selling proprietary US crops to these nations makes the primary problem worse: poverty.
Furthermore, we know that nations can develop without "bio-genetics", 20th century medicine, or high tech because almost all nations that are prosperous today have done so.
Just like no one was ever helped by vaccinations, penicillin, DDT, or any of a host of other scientific advances, right?
The rich nations of the world became rich long before vaccinations, penicillin, DDT, or most other scientific advances. In fact, equal rights for women and a good sanitation system are more important for social progress and increased life expectancy than any of those scientific gimmicks.
If the fruits of science are "crutches", why don't you go live in a cave in Alaska and see how long you last?
I'm sorry this surprises you, but people didn't live in caves prior to penicillin. There were many prosperous nations with good standards of living. Yes, I would mind living in a cave in Alaska, but I wouldn't mind living in ancient Rome, Athens, or Alexandria.
How exactly does a product intended for sale create "corruption and dependency?"
You mean like baby formula, soft drings, and hamburgers? Not to mention cigarettes and alcohol? And where exactly do you think that money for that product is coming from and what strings come attached with that money?
These nations need to develop internal markets, they need to strengthen their own agriculture, and they need to use environmentally appropriate indigenous crops. The last thing they need is some bioengineered shit designed in the US that costs them all their foreign currency and is not adapted to their environment in order to solve a problem that is far more easily solved with good sanitation and good public health.
You, sir, are a moron of the lowest order, an utterly callous, ideological yet self-contradictory moron
No, the moron is you: a consumerist closet right-winger that thinks technology can fix everything. You want to keep the rest of the world in perpetual servitude by making their economies dependent on expensive and unnecessary stuff from the US and Europe. Great deal for the West, lousy deal for developing nations.
You claim it's a vicious cycle, but history tells us differently. All the prosperous nations suffered through plagues, political turmoil, wars, high child mortality, religious fundamentalism, and vicious plagues, without even as much as antibiotics. If there was a key medical technology at all, it was sanitation, something every developing nation on this planet can build for themselves and create jobs in the process.
In contrast, if you look at the result of modern aid efforts, it's clear that they are at best ineffective; in fact, in many cases, they seem to prop up corrupt regimes and support military excursions.
Medicine has the principle "first, do no harm". That's what we should apply to international relations. And the best you can usually do for nations around the globe is to leeave their internal affairs alone, but trade with them equitably.
When folks feel that its ok to steal because they don't believe in a way a company does business that company will be forced to take countermeasures.
First of all, this step punishes a lot of people who have trusted Apple's commitment to open source and who have never stolen anything from Apple. This just reinforces the perception that Apple can't be trusted on open source issues.
What's particularly absurd about your statement is that Darwin is actually built on two open source projects in the first place: CMU's Mach and Berkeley BSD. It was questionable that NeXT made this code proprietary in the first place; Apple's open sourcing of their modifications was not generosity, it was merely doing what we expect of any user of open source software. Closing it again places them back in the category of companies that take a lot but give fairly little back.
Meanwhile there are people - real, live people - people with thoughts, and feelings, and whose well-being you'd place at first-priority, whose well-being would be your tantamount concern, whose well-being would trump these silly goddamn over-analytical beardo quack ideas and "what ifs"
These people are not going to be helped with bioengineered rice. The problems in the third world are political chaos, war, lack of family planning, lack of education, religious fundamentalism, and others. Poverty, disease, high mortality, child labor, homelessness, and migration are symptoms of that. You can't fix the problems by treating the symptoms, and even if the first world made it its top priority to help the third world, it couldn't being to alleviate the suffering. The only way this is ever going to get fixed is to address the root problems.
Every dollar you invest in attempts at quick fixes like bioengineered rice is a dollar you aren't spending on fixing the fundamental problems. It's actually worse than that: if you give these people crutches like bioengineered rice, they're even less likely to do what's necessary to modernize their infrastructure, and you make them dependent on high-tech products and imports.
It's well-meaning idiots like you that focus on the short term and keep meddling in those societies (creating corruption and dependency in the process) that are responsible for a large part of the suffering in the third world. Europe and the US developed into modern societies with long life expectancies without such meddling, and these nations can and will as well if we give them access to world markets and let them compete and develop freely.
Yeah, but time-shifting is fair use, and storing songs in the XM's memory is at most equivalent to time shifting (actually, it's more restrictive).
If they were to license it under the GPL that would kill it because all the commerical applications that rely on it would then have to go GPL as well.
No, not at all. There are many cases in which a runtime and compiler are GPL, but allow commercial applications to run on them.
The fact that Sun has made it easy to obtain Java source code under license by merely clicking through is a trap; it lulls people into the belief that they can download the source code without consequences. It is cynical and deceptive to say that the source code is available without being clear how seriously encumbered it is. Windows source code is available under restrictive licenses as well, but frankly, I consider the fact that you have to do more than click through a license a bit more honest than what Sun is doing.
Let me say it again: do not donwload Sun's Java source code unless you are absolutely clear of what the legal implications are. Sun is serious about their licenses and they have enforced them in the past when it suited them. Neither the JRL nor the SCSL are open source licenses and violate many of the implicit assumptions you may make about downloadable source code. In addition, keep in mind that significant aspects of the Java platform are patented by Sun, so that it's not clear that merely having source code, even if you could use it, would help you.
Microsoft says "Great Sun open sourced Java". We will take it bundle it with windows, change all the underlying code so that it actually uses windows API's, remove anything that competes against our stuff like SWING, EJB's, Servlets, messaging API's et al, and make it so that our Java only runs on Windows, and even if you try to run a "normal" Java application , it will not work unless you change it to support com.microsoft.xxx libraries, and jump through a ton of hoops.
.NET. It's an open standard and there are open source implementations. It provides excellent desktop integration on Windows and Linux. It gives you a choice of native toolkits or cross platform toolkits. It's technically superior to Java and the implementations are better than Sun Java. Recent Linux distributions include a dozen or so Mono applications as part of the Gnome desktop, and they work so well that most people won't even know it. Even Gnome's desktop search is based on it. And both Microsoft and Mono provide backwards compatibility with Java (you can even run Eclipse on top of Mono).
The already did this. It's called
By giving the finger to both Microsoft and the open source world, Sun really screwed themselves.
Remember, Microsoft already tried to pull that routine with the NON-OSS version of Java.
.NET shows. Microsoft even provides tools to let you convert all your Java programs to the .NET platform, but the reverse migration is pretty much impossible since .NET has functionality that Java cannot emulate efficiently.
.NET, with the effect that .NET and Mono are already far more prevalent on Linux distributions than Java.
Microsoft didn't need Sun's source code to create an incompatible version of Java, as the existence of
By not permitting Microsoft to fork Java and create a somewhat incompatible version, Sun has created a competitor for itself that is far, far worse than a slightly incompatible "Microsoft Java".
And the icing on the cake is that Sun was such an ass when it came to dealing with the open source community when it came to Java that they have antagonized large parts of the open source world. They've also dropped the ball technologically on Java (there wasn't much debate on 1.6 because few people outside Java's core zealots give a damn anymore). The open source community has instead created its own, open source, high-quality implementation of
The notion that Sun could control Java by playing hardball was hubris, and it backfired. Now, a few years later, Sun is scrambling trying to pick up the pieces of their broken strategy. And Schwartz still doesn't get it--he is still trying to square the circle and come up with a "non-forking OSS license".
Sure they can - there are other ways to pevent forking than in the license. Look at most of the major OSS projects around and you'll see that there is very little in the way of forking - sure minor forks exist but they quickly die.
Ultimately, the only way to prevent forking is to do such a good job at managing the project and on the technical side that few people will want to use a fork.
I don't think that Sun is up to that standard, and it's pretty clear that Sun themselves doesn't think that, otherwise they wouldn't be so worried about forking.
Lots of crooks are using buggy P2P software or Trojan horses to "borrow" money from their "friends", all 500 million of them.
We are only interested in non-interbreeding pairs of creatures if there are also clear ecological and phenetic identity criteria to separate them.
First, the interbreeding criterion for species is obviously a statistical criterion at the population level (it does require fertile offspring). You could pick an arbitrary numerical threshold to make a decision in the oddball cases, the analog of an LD50, but it's not worth bothering: most cases are clearcut, and the ones that aren't require additional explanation anyway.
Second, populations of creatures that occupy the same ecological niche and "phenetic identity criteria" are essentially non-existent; usually, diversification or separation precedes an inability to breed. Dogs will eventually speciate.
Third, even if otherwise identical, non-interbreeding subpopulations were to occur, they would probably soon occupy different niches or start appearing differently.
Why are wolves and jackals considered different species? Surely some jackal species are also able to interbreed with dogs and wolves, even if they normally don't?
Well, biology reclassified dogs and wolves as the same species, so the same may yet happen for dogs and golden jackals.
If, according to your criteria, Polar Bears and Grizzly Bears really belong to the same species, then you are using the wrong criteria since they clearly have a different colour and ecological niche.
So do Massai and Eskimos, yet they are clearly the same species. So do cocker spaniels and dalmatians, yet they, too, are clearly the same species.
It's you who is using the wrong criteria.
As for polar bears and grizzly bears, they may or may not be the same species, or they may be a border case.
and I think Parent's point was that the idea of species is outdated. [...] "Species" is a Linnaean concept that goes way back, certainly before evolution was understood at all.
The situation is quite analogous to the distinction between solids, liquids, and gasses. People knew about those long before modern physics, and the purpose of physical theory was to explain them. Physics did this, and in the process also discovered that there are cases in which those terms are meaningless, hard to determine, fuzzy, or ill-defined.
Just like the concepts of "solid", "liquid", and "gas", the Linnean or Mayerian concept of "species" is readily observable in nature and it needs to be explained by theory; you can't just define it away. In fact, in some sense, one of the primary goals of evolutionary biology is to explain when groups of organisms stop breeding with one another.
No comparison between Windows and Linux makes sense if you buy Windows pre-installed and then try to install Linux on top of that; of course, Linux is going to lose. But if you have ever tried to install Windows on random hardware, you know what at pain it can be trying to find all the necessary drivers.
Beyond that, it's naive to think that switching from any operating system to any other operating system is going to be painless. It's not the point or goal of Linux to make it easy to switch to it from Windows.
There is a world of difference between the spec defining a language being an open standard, and the reference implementation being Open Source.
But Java IS NOT an open standard: the specs are only available under a restrictive license and remain proprietary to Sun. And they are still incomplete so that you need Sun's implementation. The only compliant implementation of Java there is (and likely ever will be) is Sun's.
That's why it doesn't matter whether Microsoft open sources Visual C++, but it does matter a great deal whether Sun open sources Java.
The problem _is_ the GPL. If NVIDIA wants to distribute their driver without giving out the source that _should_ be fine.
No, it should not be "fine".
The GPL has made it a pain in the ass for any company that wants to write drivers for Linux.
No, only for the companies that want to write closed source drivers, and we don't want them.
A story like this just makes more decide it's just not worth it.
Good riddance. If only it were so. Unfortunately, nVidia knows that if they left Linux, the void would be filled by an open source competitor, and that's the last thing they want.