I'm not going to hide anything, I pirated Matlab and Mathematica in college. But I wasn't selling them or making a profit off them, I was simply installing old versions of them so that I could get my homework done without having to go to campus and be restricted by lab hours.
And by investing time and effort in learning Matlab and Mathematica, you actually perpetuate this kind of stupidity. What you should have done is used their open source equivalents.
A crank like Galileo perhaps? The community doesn't always know which ideas are correct.
The scientific community is frequently wrong. Nevertheless, nobody has come up with a better mechanism.
But you keep missing the point anyway: these people aren't being silenced, it's just Science and Nature that tell them to go take a hike. The whole point of Science and Nature is to represent the mainstream community view of what is important. For alternative views, there are other journals, and that's where these people should publish their results.
If the court interprets what is known as an "email signature" as a "signature", the court is deeply confused about how signatures are added. An email signature is more like pre-printed stationery.
The science supporting global warming is suppressed by the politicians.
The science opposing global warming is "suppressed" by peer review in prestigious journals.
You can easily figure out from that one where the scientific community stands on the issue.
(Note that his complaint isn't even that these people can't publish their work at all, it's that it's hard to publish these results in the most prestigious journals. That's kind of like saying that your human rights are being violated because Britney Spears refuses to date you.)
It's irrelevant for my point whether it's Lindzen's papers who get rejected (I'm sure some of them do--Lindzen did point out he was having trouble with publishing in Nature) or whether it's the papers of his idelogical buddies.
The key point remains: nobody is being suppressed; Lindzen and his ideological buddies have plenty of other journals and venues to publish in. But he wants the endorsement of publications in Nature and Science because that lends more credence to his favorite point of view; when he doesn't get it, the throws a hissy fit. The fact is: his scientific peers don't believe the science is good and that's why it's not getting into the top journals. I'm sorry he doesn't like their opinion, but that's the way science works: the community decides what does and does not get rated highly. That's where the buck stops when it comes to science.
If he wants his pet ideas to make it into Nature or Science again, he will need to come up with more convincing data; accusing his peers of political bias and fraud is merely going to make that even harder because, right now, he looks like a crank.
Lindzen gets his papers rejected by Science and Nature, has a bunch of grants not come through, and then whines about having his views being "suppressed". Well, if we take those criteria, 99% of all scientists are being "suppressed" because that's the rule rather than the exception.
I applaud Nature and Science in "suppressing" people like Lindzen--they simply don't have anything to say that I care about anymore, and I suspect that's true for the majority of readers of those journals. As far as I'm concerned, reducing CO2 emissions has so many other economic, political, and environmental benefits that this is simply not an interesting debate anymore; arguments like Lindzen's should be relegated to obscure journals.
What they are saying with the "1.5 pixel statement" is not that the thing is small, it is that they can't estimate the size of the object by measuring its diameter (because for that, they'd need more than 1.5 pixels), but they have to estimate it from its brightness. It's a perfectly reasonable thing to say in this kind of article.
Ah, excellent suggestion. Java GUI programs fail to comply with HIGs on all platforms and integrate poorly with the desktop on any platform, so they will deaden any kind of expectations the user has about the user interface.
It's funny that you say that because I see that as a problem with the entire KDE desktop. Qt is a cross-platform toolkit; it ignores large portions of Linux and X11 and instead re-implements them itself. And that's not going to change because Troll Tech is never going to give up cross-platform features--it's their core business.
Funny, I thought it sucked that Konqueror and KOffice are Qt based--they never look right on a Gnome desktop, and they print all this crap when they start up.
Technically, his comment makes no sense; the only way to achieve reliable DRM is through hardware--something like a TPM. That's true even on Windows, although the lack of source code makes it slightly harder working around DRM in the kernel.
What this really tells us is that RealNetworks doesn't have a f*cking clue. But, then, we knew that already. Fortunately, I think they'll probably go out of business pretty soon.
Apple should just support Xen financially and with contributions; with very little money, they could get excellent virtualization software that will run both Windows and Linux (Xen 3 supports virtualizing arbitrary operating systems on the current and future generations of Intel and AMD chips).
I just think that Apple deserves to have some lead time before the clones come out
Well, then Apple should make sure their employees aren't talking; they shouldn't go after random people once the cat is out of the bag.
If Apple wanted to, they could patent everything and its brother and start a stringent enforcement campaign of its patents.
That's exactly what Apple has been doing. It's just that most of the things from Apple people like you oooh and aaah about aren't patentable--either they are obvious, or they have been done before. The only thing that's unusual about them is that Apple picked them.
Re:Symphathy for Apple
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Apple vs Bloggers
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· Score: 3, Insightful
They need to be able to project an image that they will not tolerate people releasing their trade secrets, because Apple loses significant amounts of money to people cloning their products. While a Firewire breakout box isn't a big deal, think of the amount of money that people make putting out unlicensed accessories for the iPod.
My, of course, you should have to get a license to sell products! Those evil add-on companies are even daring to ship their accessories in white, without a license!!!
As for "cloning", Apple constantly clones other companies. It's the way business works. It's a good thing. If it weren't for the stuff Apple can copy freely, Apple products wouldn't be as good, since, although Apple engineers are pretty good, they can't invent everything by themselves.
Essentially, Kettler argued, Dell was responsible for selecting, if not necessarily developing, many of the technologies in today's desktop computers and servers. Among standards for which he said Dell deserves credit are 802.11 wireless networking, PCI Express communications technology and 64-bit extensions to Intel's x86 line of processors."
Apple and Microsoft can make that claim to fame: neither company invents a lot themselves, but they do pick winners and losers. As for Dell, I don't think so: 802.11, PCI Express, and Intel's 64 bit extensions were going to happen even if Dell decided to snub them.
One thing I do feel pretty certain of is that if you're against software patents, you're against patents in general. Gradually our machines consist more and more of software.
Well, most people don't have a problem with understanding the difference between buying a physical object and buying software.
So, if you buy or sell a physical object, then patents should apply. If you buy a physical object that contains patented algorithms, then patents should apply. If you buy or sell software separately from hardware, then patents should not apply.
It's debatable whether a user of software should ever be considered infringing if he combines software and hardware himself, but he certainly should never be considered infringing when he combines general purpose hardware (for some definition of "general purpose") and software.
There are lots of reasons why people who oppose software patents but are in favor of hardware patents believe this to be a good thing. The point here is that if Graham doesn't even get this, he hasn't thought the issues through.
These people are less likely concerned with your security and more likely concerned with making it impossible for you to get at the bits of digital media content; that's because right now, you can still capture digital audio and video if you know where to look in memory.
Too many applications are just plain huge; e.g. Open Office.
OpenOffice is a cross-platform office suite developed by a commercial vendor; I really don't see how you can lay this one at the feet of "Linux" just because they changed the license at one point.
However, in general, the thing is: OpenOffice is fast and small enough and developers don't have unlimited time to improve aspects of the software that satisfy requirements. They may not satisfy the OLPC requirements, but they aren't intended to.
Too many applications do plain stupid things, like leak pixmaps in the X Window server.
Applications do stupid things because people don't have time, tools, and incentives to find and fix all the bugs. If you want people to fix this, you have to include diagnostics and error messages into the libraries, or just solve the problem with distributed garbage collection.
People have become downright sloppy. Our systems, even with.5 gig of RAM like my laptop, have to swap things out due to this sort of sloppyness. This should just not be necessary.
Even if that were the case, so what? Just put 1G in it.
If you ever wondered why our intereactive response is unpredictable, just consider what happens if you have to start waiting on disk drives to page things out and in.
I don't know about you, but I use Linux, OS X, and Windows regularly, and Linux+Gnome and Linux+KDE overal still beat OS X and Windows hands down in terms of performance and predictability. A few things are slower on Linux (like OOo startup and boot), but not in a way that matters.
This is (mostly) fixable, if we just buckle down and realize we have a problem that needs to be fixed.
I don't think there is anything that needs to be "fixed", although performance can always be improved. One thing you can do is advocate the switch away from C/C++, because the use of C/C++ is one of the fundamental causes of software bloat.
As for OLPC, well, you have correctly observed that the machine you are designing is not the target machine that most developers are writing to. So, a lot of today's Linux software will not be usable for you. That will not be fixed because there is nothing wrong with that state of affairs. Fortunately, Linux offers a wide range of software, so you can, in fact, find software that will transform your underpowered laptops into useful machines.
My personal recommendation, however, would be to rewrite a lot of the software in a good higher-level language than C/C++; if you choose a reasonable language and runtime, you'll find that not only is it easier to write the software, it will also run more efficiently.
In fact, Linux with a full GUI runs fine on a machine 1/4 the speed and memory of Negroponte's design.
Maybe what he means is that Gnome and KDE require more memory and CPU power than that; well, they do: the features users apparently demand (vector graphics, theming, animation, translucency, etc.) just require a lot of CPU power. That's not Linux getting "too fat", it's Linux following the desktop mainstream, which is what a lot of people apparently want.
It's a serious problem when the self-styled designer of a $100 laptop can't figure out how to even pick an existing Linux distribution that runs on a 500MHz ARM with 128M of memory. But Negroponte's skill has always been more talk than technology, I suppose.
There is no intrinsic problem with that--nothing prevents those kinds of chips from working. However, you need different design and verification methods and tools.
Newspapers should focus on the news. Unfortunately, ours are trying to provide entertainment, sensationalism, titillation, thrills, and witticisms. Lets hope that, after the gimmicky double-entendre headlines are gone, we can also get rid of these other misfeatures of journalism. And, yes, the NYT is one of the biggest offenders.
D-Link produced their list of NTP servers by scraping the public stratum 1 list, where the restrictions are clearly spelled out.
Well, that's your hypothesis, but you have no evidence that they ever agreed to, or even saw, your terms.
I can only state it again clearly: we aren't disagreeing about whether what D-Link did is bad or wrong; but the problem is that you are making legal claims against them without ever having done the things necessary to get a binding agreement from them. You may well be able to get away with constructing some argument over "theft of service" and get a jury to agree with you, but that would set a lousy precedent for the rest of us, because next time, it won't be an inept volunteer holding D-Link responsible, it will be some big company holding their customers by the balls.
Finally, you still quite seem to have grasped the difference between HTTP and NTP. You should study that a bit.
Given your attitude, as well as your naivite when it comes to service agreements, it seems inevitable that your volunteer operation would hit a rock sooner or later. It's probably for the best if some professionally run organization take over this service anyway; they'll know what they need to do beforehand so that they can later sue D-Link without hare-brained legal constructs.
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I'm not going to hide anything, I pirated Matlab and Mathematica in college. But I wasn't selling them or making a profit off them, I was simply installing old versions of them so that I could get my homework done without having to go to campus and be restricted by lab hours.
And by investing time and effort in learning Matlab and Mathematica, you actually perpetuate this kind of stupidity. What you should have done is used their open source equivalents.
A crank like Galileo perhaps? The community doesn't always know which ideas are correct.
The scientific community is frequently wrong. Nevertheless, nobody has come up with a better mechanism.
But you keep missing the point anyway: these people aren't being silenced, it's just Science and Nature that tell them to go take a hike. The whole point of Science and Nature is to represent the mainstream community view of what is important. For alternative views, there are other journals, and that's where these people should publish their results.
If the court interprets what is known as an "email signature" as a "signature", the court is deeply confused about how signatures are added. An email signature is more like pre-printed stationery.
The science supporting global warming is suppressed by the politicians.
The science opposing global warming is "suppressed" by peer review in prestigious journals.
You can easily figure out from that one where the scientific community stands on the issue.
(Note that his complaint isn't even that these people can't publish their work at all, it's that it's hard to publish these results in the most prestigious journals. That's kind of like saying that your human rights are being violated because Britney Spears refuses to date you.)
It's irrelevant for my point whether it's Lindzen's papers who get rejected (I'm sure some of them do--Lindzen did point out he was having trouble with publishing in Nature) or whether it's the papers of his idelogical buddies.
The key point remains: nobody is being suppressed; Lindzen and his ideological buddies have plenty of other journals and venues to publish in. But he wants the endorsement of publications in Nature and Science because that lends more credence to his favorite point of view; when he doesn't get it, the throws a hissy fit. The fact is: his scientific peers don't believe the science is good and that's why it's not getting into the top journals. I'm sorry he doesn't like their opinion, but that's the way science works: the community decides what does and does not get rated highly. That's where the buck stops when it comes to science.
If he wants his pet ideas to make it into Nature or Science again, he will need to come up with more convincing data; accusing his peers of political bias and fraud is merely going to make that even harder because, right now, he looks like a crank.
Lindzen gets his papers rejected by Science and Nature, has a bunch of grants not come through, and then whines about having his views being "suppressed". Well, if we take those criteria, 99% of all scientists are being "suppressed" because that's the rule rather than the exception.
I applaud Nature and Science in "suppressing" people like Lindzen--they simply don't have anything to say that I care about anymore, and I suspect that's true for the majority of readers of those journals. As far as I'm concerned, reducing CO2 emissions has so many other economic, political, and environmental benefits that this is simply not an interesting debate anymore; arguments like Lindzen's should be relegated to obscure journals.
What they are saying with the "1.5 pixel statement" is not that the thing is small, it is that they can't estimate the size of the object by measuring its diameter (because for that, they'd need more than 1.5 pixels), but they have to estimate it from its brightness. It's a perfectly reasonable thing to say in this kind of article.
and anyone saying JAVA is slow, just shows he doesn't know what he is talking about.
You Java zealots are really pathetic: you argue against statements people didn't even make.
Thanks for at least agreeing that Swing fails to comply with HIGs; SWT unfortunately doesn't solve the problem either.
This is "News for Nerds. Stuff that Matters."; a serious IE exploit seems to fit neither category.
Ah, excellent suggestion. Java GUI programs fail to comply with HIGs on all platforms and integrate poorly with the desktop on any platform, so they will deaden any kind of expectations the user has about the user interface.
It's funny that you say that because I see that as a problem with the entire KDE desktop. Qt is a cross-platform toolkit; it ignores large portions of Linux and X11 and instead re-implements them itself. And that's not going to change because Troll Tech is never going to give up cross-platform features--it's their core business.
Funny, I thought it sucked that Konqueror and KOffice are Qt based--they never look right on a Gnome desktop, and they print all this crap when they start up.
Technically, his comment makes no sense; the only way to achieve reliable DRM is through hardware--something like a TPM. That's true even on Windows, although the lack of source code makes it slightly harder working around DRM in the kernel.
What this really tells us is that RealNetworks doesn't have a f*cking clue. But, then, we knew that already. Fortunately, I think they'll probably go out of business pretty soon.
Apple should just support Xen financially and with contributions; with very little money, they could get excellent virtualization software that will run both Windows and Linux (Xen 3 supports virtualizing arbitrary operating systems on the current and future generations of Intel and AMD chips).
I just think that Apple deserves to have some lead time before the clones come out
Well, then Apple should make sure their employees aren't talking; they shouldn't go after random people once the cat is out of the bag.
If Apple wanted to, they could patent everything and its brother and start a stringent enforcement campaign of its patents.
That's exactly what Apple has been doing. It's just that most of the things from Apple people like you oooh and aaah about aren't patentable--either they are obvious, or they have been done before. The only thing that's unusual about them is that Apple picked them.
They need to be able to project an image that they will not tolerate people releasing their trade secrets, because Apple loses significant amounts of money to people cloning their products. While a Firewire breakout box isn't a big deal, think of the amount of money that people make putting out unlicensed accessories for the iPod.
My, of course, you should have to get a license to sell products! Those evil add-on companies are even daring to ship their accessories in white, without a license!!!
As for "cloning", Apple constantly clones other companies. It's the way business works. It's a good thing. If it weren't for the stuff Apple can copy freely, Apple products wouldn't be as good, since, although Apple engineers are pretty good, they can't invent everything by themselves.
Essentially, Kettler argued, Dell was responsible for selecting, if not necessarily developing, many of the technologies in today's desktop computers and servers. Among standards for which he said Dell deserves credit are 802.11 wireless networking, PCI Express communications technology and 64-bit extensions to Intel's x86 line of processors."
Apple and Microsoft can make that claim to fame: neither company invents a lot themselves, but they do pick winners and losers. As for Dell, I don't think so: 802.11, PCI Express, and Intel's 64 bit extensions were going to happen even if Dell decided to snub them.
One thing I do feel pretty certain of is that if you're against software patents, you're against patents in general. Gradually our machines consist more and more of software.
Well, most people don't have a problem with understanding the difference between buying a physical object and buying software.
So, if you buy or sell a physical object, then patents should apply.
If you buy a physical object that contains patented algorithms, then patents should apply.
If you buy or sell software separately from hardware, then patents should not apply.
It's debatable whether a user of software should ever be considered infringing if he combines software and hardware himself, but he certainly should never be considered infringing when he combines general purpose hardware (for some definition of "general purpose") and software.
There are lots of reasons why people who oppose software patents but are in favor of hardware patents believe this to be a good thing. The point here is that if Graham doesn't even get this, he hasn't thought the issues through.
These people are less likely concerned with your security and more likely concerned with making it impossible for you to get at the bits of digital media content; that's because right now, you can still capture digital audio and video if you know where to look in memory.
Too many applications are just plain huge; e.g. Open Office.
.5 gig of RAM like my laptop, have to swap things out due to this sort of sloppyness. This should just not be necessary.
OpenOffice is a cross-platform office suite developed by a commercial vendor; I really don't see how you can lay this one at the feet of "Linux" just because they changed the license at one point.
However, in general, the thing is: OpenOffice is fast and small enough and developers don't have unlimited time to improve aspects of the software that satisfy requirements. They may not satisfy the OLPC requirements, but they aren't intended to.
Too many applications do plain stupid things, like leak pixmaps in the X Window server.
Applications do stupid things because people don't have time, tools, and incentives to find and fix all the bugs. If you want people to fix this, you have to include diagnostics and error messages into the libraries, or just solve the problem with distributed garbage collection.
People have become downright sloppy. Our systems, even with
Even if that were the case, so what? Just put 1G in it.
If you ever wondered why our intereactive response is unpredictable, just consider what happens if you have to start waiting on disk drives to page things out and in.
I don't know about you, but I use Linux, OS X, and Windows regularly, and Linux+Gnome and Linux+KDE overal still beat OS X and Windows hands down in terms of performance and predictability. A few things are slower on Linux (like OOo startup and boot), but not in a way that matters.
This is (mostly) fixable, if we just buckle down and realize we have a problem that needs to be fixed.
I don't think there is anything that needs to be "fixed", although performance can always be improved. One thing you can do is advocate the switch away from C/C++, because the use of C/C++ is one of the fundamental causes of software bloat.
As for OLPC, well, you have correctly observed that the machine you are designing is not the target machine that most developers are writing to. So, a lot of today's Linux software will not be usable for you. That will not be fixed because there is nothing wrong with that state of affairs. Fortunately, Linux offers a wide range of software, so you can, in fact, find software that will transform your underpowered laptops into useful machines.
My personal recommendation, however, would be to rewrite a lot of the software in a good higher-level language than C/C++; if you choose a reasonable language and runtime, you'll find that not only is it easier to write the software, it will also run more efficiently.
In fact, Linux with a full GUI runs fine on a machine 1/4 the speed and memory of Negroponte's design.
Maybe what he means is that Gnome and KDE require more memory and CPU power than that; well, they do: the features users apparently demand (vector graphics, theming, animation, translucency, etc.) just require a lot of CPU power. That's not Linux getting "too fat", it's Linux following the desktop mainstream, which is what a lot of people apparently want.
It's a serious problem when the self-styled designer of a $100 laptop can't figure out how to even pick an existing Linux distribution that runs on a 500MHz ARM with 128M of memory. But Negroponte's skill has always been more talk than technology, I suppose.
There is no intrinsic problem with that--nothing prevents those kinds of chips from working. However, you need different design and verification methods and tools.
Newspapers should focus on the news. Unfortunately, ours are trying to provide entertainment, sensationalism, titillation, thrills, and witticisms. Lets hope that, after the gimmicky double-entendre headlines are gone, we can also get rid of these other misfeatures of journalism. And, yes, the NYT is one of the biggest offenders.
I dunno. Is it the year for Desktop Windows or Desktop Mac yet? Because all major desktop platforms have serious usability problems.
D-Link produced their list of NTP servers by scraping the public stratum 1 list, where the restrictions are clearly spelled out.
Well, that's your hypothesis, but you have no evidence that they ever agreed to, or even saw, your terms.
I can only state it again clearly: we aren't disagreeing about whether what D-Link did is bad or wrong; but the problem is that you are making legal claims against them without ever having done the things necessary to get a binding agreement from them. You may well be able to get away with constructing some argument over "theft of service" and get a jury to agree with you, but that would set a lousy precedent for the rest of us, because next time, it won't be an inept volunteer holding D-Link responsible, it will be some big company holding their customers by the balls.
Finally, you still quite seem to have grasped the difference between HTTP and NTP. You should study that a bit.
Given your attitude, as well as your naivite when it comes to service agreements, it seems inevitable that your volunteer operation would hit a rock sooner or later. It's probably for the best if some professionally run organization take over this service anyway; they'll know what they need to do beforehand so that they can later sue D-Link without hare-brained legal constructs.