The simple fact is there are no analogies for software development, software, or the software business.
This thread is full of analogy after analogy.
Software dev isn't building dev; the building can't be used incomplete, the building won't have to be changed, the building doesn't have to inter-operate with and depend on other buildings.
Software dev isn't like engineering cars or spacecraft; there is no finished product in software, and again you can use software even when incomplete.
Selling software isn't like selling cars; cars can't be copied
Selling software isn't like selling music/books/any other IP; other forms of IP are usually only used once, software is the only usable system that is entirely IP.
I think if you want to have a discussion amongst people who develop a software you have to ditch the analogies, because none apply. The reasons software development takes longer that you might think, or the reasons software is difficult to create, sometimes doesn't give the expected return, sometimes is buggy, etc, doesn't have anything to do with cars or buildings or spacecraft.
If you put out a bounty for an open source project, no one gets upset. Why should this be any different?
What?!
You're saying that paying scientists to come to your conclusions, on a subject as important as climate change, is morally on par with paying programmers to write open source code?
They are paying for any papers that will cast any sort of doubt. This means "clutch at straws to find any possible way to cast uncertainty on this report, and we'll reward you handsomely". This is not moral in any way. This is like MS paying a bounty on an open source project so that it adopts an MS standard; it's abuse of the system for the companies own gain.
Why do posts like this come up over and over again?
Don't listen to the parent; I don't care about his personal observations and flawed reasoning. Does he really think scientists haven't considered solar influences?
"On behalf of all scientists: Thank you BoRegardless (721219)! We thought it was CO2 but we never stopped to think it was the sun! I guess we should get our noses out of the office and read Slashdot more!"
Doesn't it strike you as amazingly arrogant to think that you have, in a single post on slashdot, shown thousands of climatologists, who have dedicated their academic lives to researching the climate, to have wasted their time? Don't listen to my opinions on climatology, I know fuck all about the climate. Don't listen to politicians; they listen to us.
Listen to the scientists. To those reading please add one thing to your todo list for today: Print off and read the IPCC's 2001 summary report. It's only 34 pages long, has lots of illuminating graphs, it's very readable and clear, and most importantly it is based on peer reviewed scientific evidence that is readily available.
The document above is a summary of summaries for policy makers, if you want to get into more detail:
See here for a summary of the scientific basis for global warming.
See here for a summary of the predicted outcomes of global warming (eg sea levels, global temperature).
And see here for a summary of the expected impacts on humanity (eg droughts, migration) and mitigation.
All of these summaries have respective, exhaustive scientific documents behind them, but they do a good job of summarizing the reasoning and evidence.
Personally I'm looking forward to seeing refined conclusions and increased certainty in estimated from the data accumulated over the last 5-6 years. I thank the scientists which the parent belittled for collecting and summarizing this data.
No-one seems to have commented on the fact that if NDA requirements are met the drivers cannot be open source. This doesn't mean fewer binary blobs, it means more.
And what about Vista's new requirement that all hardware mustn't be compromised by hackers or else the drivers will be remotely disabled? Might a company which produced hardware which is part of the DRM stack risk being more likely to be seen as compromised if it has collaborated with the OSS community?
It's very easy to use, has 3 colors so you can make out different functions which are graphed. You can enter lists and generate statistics, scatter graphs, manipulate matrices, graph functions, recursive formulae, do complex arithmetic, etc, etc.
But best of all is it has a very nice programming environment with an easy to use, rich API for doing just about anything you might regularly do manually (including all the graphing, matrices, etc, above).
You can write programs, store them, and execute them from within the "console", or just enter programs directly into the console.
The language reminds me of basic, here are two programs I wrote while bored back in high school: Game of Life, BF language interpreter.
The great thing about digital information is that it doesn't need to be stored on immortal storage; if people care about the data it can be copied again and again to and from storages which die while the data lives on.
This has the nice bonus that usually no-one cares about information that's boring, so as time goes on the good stuff lingers while the blogs die; it's very similar to natural selection, right down to the immortal digital information being stored in temporary bodies.
It does sound like an attractive energy source for electricity, but remember that cars use fossil fuels to rapidly expand air which drives a piston, and don't use temperature gradients at all.
If the author of TFA needs to dumb it down for him/herself, fine. But I wish they wouldn't assume that we all have a G.W.Bush I.Q.
It seemed like quite an illuminating example to me..
Would you prefer "it can withstand an impulsive force of 4.1x10^7 N"? Do you want to feel smart or just get a feel for what they're up to?
(For the pedantic; yes that figure may well be off by an order of magnitude.)
Now how many are going to hold off on Vista because Carmack said to.
You seem to be suggesting that he has something against Vista and wants you to boycott it, which misses point of what he's saying.
The point is that his company isn't going to be developing Vista-only games in the foreseeable future, or else he would be encouraging migration. As his company is fairly representative of the big business games industry this probably indicates something about how quickly DX10 will be adopted.
This is good news for those of us who don't want to upgrade from XP until we have to.
When I downloaded and wrote a game (that you can't buy here) to CD for my Dreamcast the CD caused its "Final Death".
GDs are read from the inside out, and data is packed together more closely, this means the laser in the CD has to move less. When you use a CD you hear the constant bzzzt-bzzzt sound of the laser moving back and forth. In about a week it would often halt while loading game data, a week after that it couldn't load startup data, now by Dreamcast is unuseable.
So unfortunately CDs won't work as a replacement, it looks like it's eBay and 2nd hand games only from now on.:(
So when you say "being the sort of person who learns another language", I hope you aren't suggesting that only language nerds with special brains do so. Multilingualism is a general human phenomenon, it's people in the West who are usual.
When I said "does being the sort of person who learns another language mean that you already were less susceptible?" I should have said "does being the sort of person who learns another language in a unilingual culture mean that you already were less susceptible?".
You're right that there's nothing special about being bilingual in a bilingual culture; but, as you said, it is much rarer in unilingual cultures.
Cheesy analogy time: It's like a study concluding that "owning a car makes you live longer", after measuring the life expectancy of people with and without cars in Zimbabwe. The fact that you own a car might be a symptom of something else, and that something else is affecting life expectancy.
For the study to be taken seriously it would have to show that the only factor influencing life expectancy is car ownership.
Does learning another language make you less susceptible to dementia, or does being the sort of person who learns another language mean that you already were less susceptible?
It would be interesting to compare the dementia rates in bilingual people in unilingual(?) cultures and bilingual people in bilingual cultures, but it looks like this study was limited to a couple of hundred people at a single mental health clinic.
The quote you're referring to is "God does not roll dice" - Einstein, but your mention of God worries me because Einstein wasn't referring to a supernatural God but using God as a label for the way the universe ticks. (This was discussed at length in Dawkin's book mentioned above actually)
Office 2007 will probably be the de facto standard but why pay the price and risk of an early adopter?
Don't underestimate the advantage of being ahead of the game in the fast moving world of IT. I know someone who probably owes all his success, and his big house, to fanatically learning MS Access and SQL Server before most people knew they existed.
If you can see some extension that people will want you can capitalize on it, if people will need to be trained you can train them, if it really is a useful innovation you can take advantage of it immediately.
However as you said it is a risk, as is any potentially worthwhile investment, and you have to decide for yourself whether it's worth it.
Wouldn't it be a bit strange if there were two entirely separate ways to cause this bizarre phenomenon? I'm sure as they experiment more they'll be able to reproduce all the variations people see.
Hopefully we'll soon see an interesting application of this phenomenon too! (Let's just hope the military don't put it to some nasty use)
Just because they show up when you enter the name of the site doesn't mean they haven't lost lots of PageRank.
They probably mean that they used to show up when you searched for "Java", but because the spambots created so many outgoing links they lost their PageRank and now you have to search for "JavaLobby" to get them.
Basically hackers will have to find their own way to run code on the device, rather than getting a leg up from Apple. It won't take long before YouTube has videos of Linux emulating Newton's OS on one of these.
Just because he won't officially allow it doesn't mean it won't be done, it just means it won't be commercial (No iJamster).
Slashdot Mirror
This thread is full of analogy after analogy.
I think if you want to have a discussion amongst people who develop a software you have to ditch the analogies, because none apply. The reasons software development takes longer that you might think, or the reasons software is difficult to create, sometimes doesn't give the expected return, sometimes is buggy, etc, doesn't have anything to do with cars or buildings or spacecraft.
You're saying that paying scientists to come to your conclusions, on a subject as important as climate change, is morally on par with paying programmers to write open source code?
They are paying for any papers that will cast any sort of doubt. This means "clutch at straws to find any possible way to cast uncertainty on this report, and we'll reward you handsomely". This is not moral in any way. This is like MS paying a bounty on an open source project so that it adopts an MS standard; it's abuse of the system for the companies own gain.
Don't listen to the parent; I don't care about his personal observations and flawed reasoning. Does he really think scientists haven't considered solar influences?
"On behalf of all scientists: Thank you BoRegardless (721219)! We thought it was CO2 but we never stopped to think it was the sun! I guess we should get our noses out of the office and read Slashdot more!"
Doesn't it strike you as amazingly arrogant to think that you have, in a single post on slashdot, shown thousands of climatologists, who have dedicated their academic lives to researching the climate, to have wasted their time?
Don't listen to my opinions on climatology, I know fuck all about the climate.
Don't listen to politicians; they listen to us.
Listen to the scientists. To those reading please add one thing to your todo list for today: Print off and read the IPCC's 2001 summary report. It's only 34 pages long, has lots of illuminating graphs, it's very readable and clear, and most importantly it is based on peer reviewed scientific evidence that is readily available.
The document above is a summary of summaries for policy makers, if you want to get into more detail:
-
See here for a summary of the scientific basis for global warming.
-
See here for a summary of the predicted outcomes of global warming (eg sea levels, global temperature).
- And see here for a summary of the expected impacts on humanity (eg droughts, migration) and mitigation.
All of these summaries have respective, exhaustive scientific documents behind them, but they do a good job of summarizing the reasoning and evidence.Personally I'm looking forward to seeing refined conclusions and increased certainty in estimated from the data accumulated over the last 5-6 years. I thank the scientists which the parent belittled for collecting and summarizing this data.
No-one seems to have commented on the fact that if NDA requirements are met the drivers cannot be open source. This doesn't mean fewer binary blobs, it means more.
And what about Vista's new requirement that all hardware mustn't be compromised by hackers or else the drivers will be remotely disabled? Might a company which produced hardware which is part of the DRM stack risk being more likely to be seen as compromised if it has collaborated with the OSS community?
Err people aren't going to get Vista on their new computer only to immediately head to goodbye-microsoft.com to install Debian.
Oh wait.. On second thought that was a bit short sighted of them.
Okay Richard you can get back to editing your Wikipedia article now..
As a layman this sounds like a pretty massive improvement. Is this a major breakthrough or is this progress as usual?
Here in Australia this is the standard issue graphics calculator: http://www.office365.co.uk/im/pim/354946.jpg
It's very easy to use, has 3 colors so you can make out different functions which are graphed. You can enter lists and generate statistics, scatter graphs, manipulate matrices, graph functions, recursive formulae, do complex arithmetic, etc, etc.
But best of all is it has a very nice programming environment with an easy to use, rich API for doing just about anything you might regularly do manually (including all the graphing, matrices, etc, above).
You can write programs, store them, and execute them from within the "console", or just enter programs directly into the console.
The language reminds me of basic, here are two programs I wrote while bored back in high school: Game of Life, BF language interpreter.
What percentage of people spend more time at work than with their significant other?
The vast majority.
What percentage of people who have a PC with broadband at home (the demographic targeted by this study) use a PC at work?
65% doesn't sound far off.
The great thing about digital information is that it doesn't need to be stored on immortal storage; if people care about the data it can be copied again and again to and from storages which die while the data lives on.
This has the nice bonus that usually no-one cares about information that's boring, so as time goes on the good stuff lingers while the blogs die; it's very similar to natural selection, right down to the immortal digital information being stored in temporary bodies.
It does sound like an attractive energy source for electricity, but remember that cars use fossil fuels to rapidly expand air which drives a piston, and don't use temperature gradients at all.
Would you prefer "it can withstand an impulsive force of 4.1x10^7 N"? Do you want to feel smart or just get a feel for what they're up to?
(For the pedantic; yes that figure may well be off by an order of magnitude.)
Or live in a Faraday cage in your mom's basement making money for your World of Warcraft subscription through eBay.
The point is that his company isn't going to be developing Vista-only games in the foreseeable future, or else he would be encouraging migration. As his company is fairly representative of the big business games industry this probably indicates something about how quickly DX10 will be adopted.
This is good news for those of us who don't want to upgrade from XP until we have to.
When I downloaded and wrote a game (that you can't buy here) to CD for my Dreamcast the CD caused its "Final Death".
:(
GDs are read from the inside out, and data is packed together more closely, this means the laser in the CD has to move less. When you use a CD you hear the constant bzzzt-bzzzt sound of the laser moving back and forth. In about a week it would often halt while loading game data, a week after that it couldn't load startup data, now by Dreamcast is unuseable.
So unfortunately CDs won't work as a replacement, it looks like it's eBay and 2nd hand games only from now on.
You're right that there's nothing special about being bilingual in a bilingual culture; but, as you said, it is much rarer in unilingual cultures.
Cheesy analogy time: It's like a study concluding that "owning a car makes you live longer", after measuring the life expectancy of people with and without cars in Zimbabwe. The fact that you own a car might be a symptom of something else, and that something else is affecting life expectancy.
For the study to be taken seriously it would have to show that the only factor influencing life expectancy is car ownership.
Does learning another language make you less susceptible to dementia, or does being the sort of person who learns another language mean that you already were less susceptible?
It would be interesting to compare the dementia rates in bilingual people in unilingual(?) cultures and bilingual people in bilingual cultures, but it looks like this study was limited to a couple of hundred people at a single mental health clinic.
The quote you're referring to is "God does not roll dice" - Einstein, but your mention of God worries me because Einstein wasn't referring to a supernatural God but using God as a label for the way the universe ticks. (This was discussed at length in Dawkin's book mentioned above actually)
If you can see some extension that people will want you can capitalize on it, if people will need to be trained you can train them, if it really is a useful innovation you can take advantage of it immediately.
However as you said it is a risk, as is any potentially worthwhile investment, and you have to decide for yourself whether it's worth it.
Wouldn't it be a bit strange if there were two entirely separate ways to cause this bizarre phenomenon? I'm sure as they experiment more they'll be able to reproduce all the variations people see.
Hopefully we'll soon see an interesting application of this phenomenon too! (Let's just hope the military don't put it to some nasty use)
Just because they show up when you enter the name of the site doesn't mean they haven't lost lots of PageRank.
They probably mean that they used to show up when you searched for "Java", but because the spambots created so many outgoing links they lost their PageRank and now you have to search for "JavaLobby" to get them.
Safari's rendering engine WebKit is built on KHTML, from Konqueror, and licensed under the GPL, IIRC.
No, probably not. It does seem unfair that the platform's owner should get so much money while the people who own the intellectual property get none.
Basically hackers will have to find their own way to run code on the device, rather than getting a leg up from Apple. It won't take long before YouTube has videos of Linux emulating Newton's OS on one of these.
Just because he won't officially allow it doesn't mean it won't be done, it just means it won't be commercial (No iJamster).