Let me preface this by saying it is merely a what-if exercise, since I have not studied studied theology in seminary. I did read a few philosophy books, though.
I would rephrase the first assumption of your point in the opposite direction: our moral system resembles God's character. That may be important. If we accept the idea that God did create the universe and the idea that creation reflects His nature, we come to the idea that physical laws (like gravity) and moral laws (like those against murder) are similar.
One might as well ask, "Why do I fall when I step off of my roof?", but that doesn't really help.
Another piece to consider is the concept of divine justice and mercy. If you believe that God is all-knowing and all-loving (presupposed here, supported and explained in another argument), His view of justice and mercy is greater (as in, not limited by a certain amount of time or in scope to only a certain amount of people). I hate to use the word 'ineffable', but I think we bump up against human limitations quickly when attempting to understand Someone purported to be much greater than we are.
Another idea is much simpler. Does God make anyone do anything? (This is different from the question "Can God make anyone do anything?") It comes back to the free will argument again. (Standard Christian reasoning goes that God did not want a race of robots who love and obey Him because they were 'programmed' to do so -- He would rather some chose to do so, knowing that some would not.)
The previous poster's mention of God's purpose may help explain the pattern you bring up. The question there is, "What is God's purpose in acting in the world? Is it to enforce a standard of morality or is it to find a way to bring humanity back into relationship with him?" Christianity chooses the latter as His primary purpose.
What would I pick as an acceptable answer out of these? I would say that God allows moral choice (knowing that some will choose to do evil) and allows the consequences of these actions. If you are to believe Christianity, one day all wrongs will be righted and justice will prevail (tempered with great mercy, if you also accept their anthropology).
Did anyone else think of Red Mars and start to worry about the idea of a Space Elevator? At least when a rocket explodes or a satellite orbit decays, it only ruins a small chunk of real estate.
Sure, it would be cool... but you won't catch me moving to the equator.
Hemos gave a fiction book a 4/10 a while ago... I don't remember what the book was, but he apparently didn't like it.
In my case, there are two things that come into play. First, I'm careful of the books I buy. Second, of those books I review, I try to decide the target audience and judge the book's effectiveness and appropriateness for that audience, even if I'm not normally someone who would read it.
Snow Crash? A best of genre book. 9.5/10.
Programming Web Graphics with Perl and GNU Software? A unique book with lots of interesting information, but limited to a particular audience. 8/10. (Most of the O'Reilly books I've read are 8 or better.)
I'm reading a Java 2 beginners book right now, and it won't be getting a glowing review.
Might I bring to mind Gutenberg's printing press, created to print Bibles?
How about most of the major universities in Europe (and many Ivy League schools), set up to train preachers?
Don't forget the Celts storing and copying manuscripts centuries ago, as well as monks in various other monastaries... ask yourself why the Roman Catholic church performed the High Mass in Latin exclusively until Vatican II and why so much legal, medical, and scientific terminology is based in Latin.
Look at the Islamic side of things, too. Who kept the knowledge lost after the collapse of the Roman Empire and the destruction of Alexandria until the Crusades, when Westerners were re-exposed to the classics?
It would be unfair to say that pundits are opposed to history based on Mr. Katz article here, but so very tempting...
PS -- It's just a video game. Yeah, it sounds kinda dumb to me too, but I respect people who follow their beliefs more than I respect people who bitch about stuff. Especially when the latter get their facts wrong.
People actually do ask Roblimo those questions fairly often. (It helps that he's head-over-heels for Debbie and talks about her a lot.) Maybe he just attracts single guys who think they're down on their luck. Seems like a thankless job to me, telling a bunch of people to get up, look beyond themselves, and start talking to other people.
Suppose I or another consultant find a bug in Excel that prevents our customers from doing their normal work. Suppose we contact Microsoft about this bug, and the engineer there tells us that we will have to upgrade to Office 2000 in six months to fix the bug. (True story from February 1999). It's a really dumb bug, too.
Suppose Microsoft generously provides us a beta-test CD and allows us to find other bugs in Office 2000. Suppose we do. (True... ah, you get the picture.)
Granted, we benefit from the bug fixes, but so does everyone else, including our customer's competitors, if they use Office 2000.
I suppose you could claim that Microsoft didn't have to give us a beta of Office 2000, which is true. Still, how much money are we (actually, our customers) paying to Microsoft for the privilege of talking to a second-tier phone monkey? Much more than it would cost for me to e-mail someone at Abiword or KOffice or even StarOffice, that's for sure. If it were up to me, I wouldn't want to pay that much. Different business sense, I guess.
If there were a way to update the WAD file (in memory?) to reflect changing topology and geography automatically, you'd be on to something... that would solve the one-map-at-a-time issue.
Now if one could "lock" the current room in memory and not allow any architectural changes there, that would solve another issue. Interesting.
Could someone please review this book on Slashdot?
Since you asked so nicely, yes. It's really interesting -- more of an overview of the different things you can do than an in-depth exploration of any one thing. It reminds me of Programming Web Graphics with Perl and GNU Utilities in that sense. The demo robots are quite interesting.
You're right about me leaving out the mythological underpinnings... I must have moved that from the synopsis to the analysis and forgotten to paste it. To wit:
Let it be known that Hiro knowingly attempts to reenact the ancient Sumerian myth which is explained throughout the story. One might analyze 'Snow Crash' as the germ of a future hacker mythos, where the sorceror-priests are those who can reach into the guts of the [mind|machine] and rewire [consciousness|digital reality] as they see fit. Except that the advertising age necessitates a word from our sponsor... (Hiro's business card at the lightshow.)
Mea culpa. Sorry everyone!
As for cyberspace, I took that for part of the mythology. Did Hiro find it more real than reality?
Sun, however, needs to turn a profit. This can be done only if they keep property of their product.
This is one thing that confuses me about Sun's behavior as of late. I think they're a hardware company. They think they're a software company, I guess.
The question they should be asking is, "Are people buying our nice & expensive hardware to get Solaris, or are they getting Solaris when they buy our nice & expensive hardware?"
There should be a clause in the NIC agreement: Use it or lose it. 3 months to get *something* at that domain name (besides a 'coming soon' page from your registrar) or you lose it and your cash.
The problem is that these people refuse to consider an alternative point-of-view to such an extent that they threaten to murder the speaker.
That's not a problem of speech. That's a problem of listening and understanding.
Whenever I hear a viewpoint different from my own and take the time to consider it, it does change my own world view.
This too. You cannot guarantee (even if you are the government) that when you speak freely, people will take the time to listen, to consider, and to allow your viewpoint to change theirs.
When one's life is threatened for speaking one canNOT speak freely.
I disagree -- look at the Declaration of Independence. The signers' lives were threatened, yet they spoke freely anyway.
Threatening death for voicing/holding a different point-of-view, that is religious nature.
It seems to be more widespread in statism, from my studies in history.
Ahh, now that is a different issue. What does True Free Speech actually mean?
It does not mean that:
People have to listen
People who listen will agree
People who agree will do something about it
Most people will agree
Most people have something worth saying
People who disagree have to defend themselves for disagreeing
Besides that, you could argue that the people who have made threats against Dr. Singer (I presume that this is the case, as Jon has alluded to armed guards and an unmarked classroom) have not actually harmed him, but have merely talked about harming him. Fortunately, there are consequences for certain types of speech.
I just don't agree that saying controversial things "just to make people think" gets people very far. Maybe Jon is surprised that the standard reaction isn't, "Wow, that is so bizarre that I should change my worldview to incorporate it!"
As I understand Katz' argument, modern technology has created both a need for and the solution of forums in which lots of people can say lots of things. (There's probably a better way to phrase this.) That's nothing new -- we went through the same thing with literacy, the printing press, radio, the telephone, television, and so on.
I'm wandering, so I'll restate the point: Having free speech doesn't mean that you'll change the world. It may help... but you'll still run into human nature.
Clueless admins who have to reinstall to fix something aren't admins. They're looking for a new job.
I wouldn't call someone following the TechNet directions clueless. On the other hand, I would rather find a new job than work with an operating system which may require reinstallation to recover from a Service Pack.
(TechNet directions may be found at http://support.microsoft.com/support/kb/articles/Q 173/5/07.ASP )
Is it truly freedom, when you expect to be (at least) socially blasted for expressing controversial ideas?
Sure! Or do you want Freedom From Consequences?
If Singer has the free-speech rights to suggest euthanizing children under certain circumstances, I have the same right to call him a murderer or a monster or a hero or a saint.
Funny, how expressing "unpopular" views makes one heroic, while expressing "popular" views makes one vulgar. If the simple act of expressing one's views is a Good Thing, does it really matter what those views are, Jon?
Even if the majority of them are "Welcome to my homepage, it is under construction. Click Me to go back to Yahoo!"? Or does the message actually count for something, too?
No, the last time I reinstalled NT Server was four months ago. Our department print/web/file server suddenly started to give the strange error message, "Evaluation Period Ended. This installation will shut down in an hour." It had to be rebooted every hour so that people could get their work done before we had a chance to fix it.
The rumor going around here was that my predecessor had installed a Service Pack with a severe problem -- turning a licensed installation of NT Server into the Evaluation version. He got that service pack from Microsoft. Just a rumor. From the corporate IT guys who talk on the phone with Microsoft every week. Just a rumor.
Either way, an Operating System that has to be rebooted every hour until you reinstall is not what I want on my server. It might also have been nice to have warning beforehand... but then, I guess, there wouldn't have been as many people willing to write a $2000 check for a license (which we already had).
PS -- Linux novices have no business administering production servers. Someone whose idea of fixing a misbehaving server is reinstallation is not welcome to touch any of my servers.
Assigning papers that call for the rote repetition of researched facts (I wish there were another r-word in there) is like forcing musicians to hand-craft their own instruments?
Serious Musicians building their own instruments (at least once) would be a good thing. Just like Serious Programmers writing their own programming languages or compilers or whatever else good Computer Science Courses have them do.
Now the author is right in that repeating the same facts on some assigned topic isn't all that useful. But isn't the point of education to teach people how to find things out for themselves? (Okay, maybe I'm an idealist.)
If I were a teacher, I'd rather have one student sweating over a stack of books in the library for the first time in his life turn in a list of facts he culled from that stack, giving credit to those books, than a dozen students (like I was) who can crack a book and write a nice essay that doesn't say much but winks at the author.
Yeah, essays for sale and graders for sale subverts this process... but plagiarism was always a problem with education, and graduate assistants have been doing the grading for a long time anyway. That's not a reason to get rid of meaningless assignments. At the very least, it prepares students for the Real World. (As I'm contemplating a two-hour meeting to present some guy with a box of cigars....)
Bruce, you're spot-on right. The only explanation I can offer is that Sun is a Bigger Deal than Troll Tech. If a big proprietary vendor with a nice Unix (admittedly a loss leader for nicer hardware) can open things up a little bit, that's a validation of what we believe in (that the bazaar is better than the cathedral in certain circumstances), that is a major achievement. To find out that it isn't really the case, but rather a marketing-type of move... well, that smarts more than having to use lesstif or GTK.
That, and a lot of us are kinda disappointed with Java and standards.
I tend to think of this Linus as the one who says "Whoever writes the code gets to make the license" followed by "but shouldn't lie about the license terms in order to capitalize on the hard work lots of people have already done to make the World A Better Place." The second part just wasn't necessary before.
At least, that's my understanding of what he said. I don't speak for Linus Torvalds or my employers or many other people.
As a side note, maybe you ought to call up Scott MacNealy and remind him that being able to look at some source code doesn't necessarily mean that Solaris is libre. (ouvre?)
Remember kids, compare the future versions of your product with the previous version of your competitor's product, and you will gain marketshare.
(128 MB swap partitions being a limitation of the 2.0.x kernels, for example).
Plus, if Microsoft can claim (er, insinuate) that Plug and Play, USB, and APM actually work in NT 4.0 (maybe with special patches and hacks), shouldn't we be able to claim that XFS and ext3 support journaling right now? I mean, Stephen Tweedie and his merry men are testing journaling Right Now! Not to mention the memory limitation being erased... and which OS is 64 bit clean?
Linux could be orders of magnitude ahead of it's current state if everyone were working on a common distribution rather than wasting resources through duplication.
Linux or *BSD could be orders of magnitude behind the curerent state if everyone took the current code as The Best Way To Do It instead of wasting resources submitting patches.
Sometimes having competition and similar projects leads to very good things.
Rereading Islands in the Net recently, I was struck by the observation that the humble DVD rendered some of the early scenes almost obsolete (only in a speculative sense).
With that in mind, are there any technological or cultural developments in the past few years that have caused you to rethink your speculations/predictions/opinions about the near future? If so, what are they?
RedHat 6 came out months before RedHat went public.
Besides that, RedHat did not write Netscape, so it is unfair to blame them for Netscape's bugginess (it hardly seems fair to blame Netscape for it -- I think the definition of a web browser has to include random crashes anymore).
On this RH 6 box right here, Enlightenment is working just fine, with regard to focus. I don't use Gnome, so I won't comment on that, except to say that my X used to do the same thing, until I realized that the stupid onboard video chipset needed a tweak in my XF86Config.
Yes, some companies care more about the bottom line than quality software. That doesn't mean that all companies do.
RedHat may ship buggy stuff now and then, just like most everyone else, but until I see otherwise, I'm convinced they're trying to do the Right Thing.
Redhat can't go a week without having a security problem found. It rescently IPO'd. I only expect this to get worse.
So... how many of the security problems are in programs written by RedHat programmers?
Believing that software gets worse when a company gets public investors is as naive as believing that software is buggy because consumers are computer-ignorant and want lots and lots of nifty features.
Slashdot Mirror
Let me preface this by saying it is merely a what-if exercise, since I have not studied studied theology in seminary. I did read a few philosophy books, though.
I would rephrase the first assumption of your point in the opposite direction: our moral system resembles God's character. That may be important. If we accept the idea that God did create the universe and the idea that creation reflects His nature, we come to the idea that physical laws (like gravity) and moral laws (like those against murder) are similar.
One might as well ask, "Why do I fall when I step off of my roof?", but that doesn't really help.
Another piece to consider is the concept of divine justice and mercy. If you believe that God is all-knowing and all-loving (presupposed here, supported and explained in another argument), His view of justice and mercy is greater (as in, not limited by a certain amount of time or in scope to only a certain amount of people). I hate to use the word 'ineffable', but I think we bump up against human limitations quickly when attempting to understand Someone purported to be much greater than we are.
Another idea is much simpler. Does God make anyone do anything? (This is different from the question "Can God make anyone do anything?") It comes back to the free will argument again. (Standard Christian reasoning goes that God did not want a race of robots who love and obey Him because they were 'programmed' to do so -- He would rather some chose to do so, knowing that some would not.)
The previous poster's mention of God's purpose may help explain the pattern you bring up. The question there is, "What is God's purpose in acting in the world? Is it to enforce a standard of morality or is it to find a way to bring humanity back into relationship with him?" Christianity chooses the latter as His primary purpose.
What would I pick as an acceptable answer out of these? I would say that God allows moral choice (knowing that some will choose to do evil) and allows the consequences of these actions. If you are to believe Christianity, one day all wrongs will be righted and justice will prevail (tempered with great mercy, if you also accept their anthropology).
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Did anyone else think of Red Mars and start to worry about the idea of a Space Elevator? At least when a rocket explodes or a satellite orbit decays, it only ruins a small chunk of real estate.
Sure, it would be cool... but you won't catch me moving to the equator.
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Hemos gave a fiction book a 4/10 a while ago... I don't remember what the book was, but he apparently didn't like it.
In my case, there are two things that come into play. First, I'm careful of the books I buy. Second, of those books I review, I try to decide the target audience and judge the book's effectiveness and appropriateness for that audience, even if I'm not normally someone who would read it.
Snow Crash? A best of genre book. 9.5/10.
Programming Web Graphics with Perl and GNU Software? A unique book with lots of interesting information, but limited to a particular audience. 8/10. (Most of the O'Reilly books I've read are 8 or better.)
I'm reading a Java 2 beginners book right now, and it won't be getting a glowing review.
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Might I bring to mind Gutenberg's printing press, created to print Bibles?
How about most of the major universities in Europe (and many Ivy League schools), set up to train preachers?
Don't forget the Celts storing and copying manuscripts centuries ago, as well as monks in various other monastaries... ask yourself why the Roman Catholic church performed the High Mass in Latin exclusively until Vatican II and why so much legal, medical, and scientific terminology is based in Latin.
Look at the Islamic side of things, too. Who kept the knowledge lost after the collapse of the Roman Empire and the destruction of Alexandria until the Crusades, when Westerners were re-exposed to the classics?
It would be unfair to say that pundits are opposed to history based on Mr. Katz article here, but so very tempting...
PS -- It's just a video game. Yeah, it sounds kinda dumb to me too, but I respect people who follow their beliefs more than I respect people who bitch about stuff. Especially when the latter get their facts wrong.
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People actually do ask Roblimo those questions fairly often. (It helps that he's head-over-heels for Debbie and talks about her a lot.) Maybe he just attracts single guys who think they're down on their luck. Seems like a thankless job to me, telling a bunch of people to get up, look beyond themselves, and start talking to other people.
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Suppose I or another consultant find a bug in Excel that prevents our customers from doing their normal work. Suppose we contact Microsoft about this bug, and the engineer there tells us that we will have to upgrade to Office 2000 in six months to fix the bug. (True story from February 1999). It's a really dumb bug, too.
Suppose Microsoft generously provides us a beta-test CD and allows us to find other bugs in Office 2000. Suppose we do. (True... ah, you get the picture.)
Granted, we benefit from the bug fixes, but so does everyone else, including our customer's competitors, if they use Office 2000.
I suppose you could claim that Microsoft didn't have to give us a beta of Office 2000, which is true. Still, how much money are we (actually, our customers) paying to Microsoft for the privilege of talking to a second-tier phone monkey? Much more than it would cost for me to e-mail someone at Abiword or KOffice or even StarOffice, that's for sure. If it were up to me, I wouldn't want to pay that much. Different business sense, I guess.
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If there were a way to update the WAD file (in memory?) to reflect changing topology and geography automatically, you'd be on to something... that would solve the one-map-at-a-time issue.
Now if one could "lock" the current room in memory and not allow any architectural changes there, that would solve another issue. Interesting.
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Could someone please review this book on Slashdot?
Since you asked so nicely, yes. It's really interesting -- more of an overview of the different things you can do than an in-depth exploration of any one thing. It reminds me of Programming Web Graphics with Perl and GNU Utilities in that sense. The demo robots are quite interesting.
Full review coming when I finish it.
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You're right about me leaving out the mythological underpinnings... I must have moved that from the synopsis to the analysis and forgotten to paste it. To wit:
Let it be known that Hiro knowingly attempts to reenact the ancient Sumerian myth which is explained throughout the story. One might analyze 'Snow Crash' as the germ of a future hacker mythos, where the sorceror-priests are those who can reach into the guts of the [mind|machine] and rewire [consciousness|digital reality] as they see fit. Except that the advertising age necessitates a word from our sponsor... (Hiro's business card at the lightshow.)
Mea culpa. Sorry everyone!
As for cyberspace, I took that for part of the mythology. Did Hiro find it more real than reality?
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Sun, however, needs to turn a profit. This can be done only if they keep property of their product.
This is one thing that confuses me about Sun's behavior as of late. I think they're a hardware company. They think they're a software company, I guess.
The question they should be asking is, "Are people buying our nice & expensive hardware to get Solaris, or are they getting Solaris when they buy our nice & expensive hardware?"
It makes a big difference.
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There should be a clause in the NIC agreement:
Use it or lose it. 3 months to get *something* at that domain name (besides a 'coming soon' page from your registrar) or you lose it and your cash.
Hmm, maybe they could start with Transmeta!
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The problem is that these people refuse to consider an alternative point-of-view to such an extent that they threaten to murder the speaker.
That's not a problem of speech. That's a problem of listening and understanding.
Whenever I hear a viewpoint different from my own and take the time to consider it, it does change my own world view.
This too. You cannot guarantee (even if you are the government) that when you speak freely, people will take the time to listen, to consider, and to allow your viewpoint to change theirs.
When one's life is threatened for speaking one canNOT speak freely.
I disagree -- look at the Declaration of Independence. The signers' lives were threatened, yet they spoke freely anyway.
Threatening death for voicing/holding a different point-of-view, that is religious nature.
It seems to be more widespread in statism, from my studies in history.
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Ahh, now that is a different issue. What does True Free Speech actually mean?
It does not mean that:
- People have to listen
- People who listen will agree
- People who agree will do something about it
- Most people will agree
- Most people have something worth saying
- People who disagree have to defend themselves for disagreeing
Besides that, you could argue that the people who have made threats against Dr. Singer (I presume that this is the case, as Jon has alluded to armed guards and an unmarked classroom) have not actually harmed him, but have merely talked about harming him. Fortunately, there are consequences for certain types of speech.I just don't agree that saying controversial things "just to make people think" gets people very far. Maybe Jon is surprised that the standard reaction isn't, "Wow, that is so bizarre that I should change my worldview to incorporate it!"
As I understand Katz' argument, modern technology has created both a need for and the solution of forums in which lots of people can say lots of things. (There's probably a better way to phrase this.) That's nothing new -- we went through the same thing with literacy, the printing press, radio, the telephone, television, and so on.
I'm wandering, so I'll restate the point: Having free speech doesn't mean that you'll change the world. It may help... but you'll still run into human nature.
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Clueless admins who have to reinstall to fix something aren't admins. They're looking for a new job.
I wouldn't call someone following the TechNet directions clueless. On the other hand, I would rather find a new job than work with an operating system which may require reinstallation to recover from a Service Pack.
(TechNet directions may be found at http://support.microsoft.com/support/kb/articles/
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Is it truly freedom, when you expect to be (at least) socially blasted for expressing controversial ideas?
Sure! Or do you want Freedom From Consequences?
If Singer has the free-speech rights to suggest euthanizing children under certain circumstances, I have the same right to call him a murderer or a monster or a hero or a saint.
Funny, how expressing "unpopular" views makes one heroic, while expressing "popular" views makes one vulgar. If the simple act of expressing one's views is a Good Thing, does it really matter what those views are, Jon?
Even if the majority of them are "Welcome to my homepage, it is under construction. Click Me to go back to Yahoo!"? Or does the message actually count for something, too?
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No, the last time I reinstalled NT Server was four months ago. Our department print/web/file server suddenly started to give the strange error message, "Evaluation Period Ended. This installation will shut down in an hour." It had to be rebooted every hour so that people could get their work done before we had a chance to fix it.
The rumor going around here was that my predecessor had installed a Service Pack with a severe problem -- turning a licensed installation of NT Server into the Evaluation version. He got that service pack from Microsoft. Just a rumor. From the corporate IT guys who talk on the phone with Microsoft every week. Just a rumor.
Either way, an Operating System that has to be rebooted every hour until you reinstall is not what I want on my server. It might also have been nice to have warning beforehand... but then, I guess, there wouldn't have been as many people willing to write a $2000 check for a license (which we already had).
PS -- Linux novices have no business administering production servers. Someone whose idea of fixing a misbehaving server is reinstallation is not welcome to touch any of my servers.
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I'm not sure MTV wants to show Rob and Jeff not wearing pants all day, unless it's "Hackers: Living in an Underwear Commercial".
Sorry guys.
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Assigning papers that call for the rote repetition of researched facts (I wish there were another r-word in there) is like forcing musicians to hand-craft their own instruments?
Serious Musicians building their own instruments (at least once) would be a good thing. Just like Serious Programmers writing their own programming languages or compilers or whatever else good Computer Science Courses have them do.
Now the author is right in that repeating the same facts on some assigned topic isn't all that useful. But isn't the point of education to teach people how to find things out for themselves? (Okay, maybe I'm an idealist.)
If I were a teacher, I'd rather have one student sweating over a stack of books in the library for the first time in his life turn in a list of facts he culled from that stack, giving credit to those books, than a dozen students (like I was) who can crack a book and write a nice essay that doesn't say much but winks at the author.
Yeah, essays for sale and graders for sale subverts this process... but plagiarism was always a problem with education, and graduate assistants have been doing the grading for a long time anyway. That's not a reason to get rid of meaningless assignments. At the very least, it prepares students for the Real World. (As I'm contemplating a two-hour meeting to present some guy with a box of cigars....)
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Bruce, you're spot-on right. The only explanation I can offer is that Sun is a Bigger Deal than Troll Tech. If a big proprietary vendor with a nice Unix (admittedly a loss leader for nicer hardware) can open things up a little bit, that's a validation of what we believe in (that the bazaar is better than the cathedral in certain circumstances), that is a major achievement. To find out that it isn't really the case, but rather a marketing-type of move... well, that smarts more than having to use lesstif or GTK.
That, and a lot of us are kinda disappointed with Java and standards.
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I'm not so sure it's a change.
I tend to think of this Linus as the one who says "Whoever writes the code gets to make the license" followed by "but shouldn't lie about the license terms in order to capitalize on the hard work lots of people have already done to make the World A Better Place." The second part just wasn't necessary before.
At least, that's my understanding of what he said. I don't speak for Linus Torvalds or my employers or many other people.
As a side note, maybe you ought to call up Scott MacNealy and remind him that being able to look at some source code doesn't necessarily mean that Solaris is libre. (ouvre?)
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Remember kids, compare the future versions of your product with the previous version of your competitor's product, and you will gain marketshare.
(128 MB swap partitions being a limitation of the 2.0.x kernels, for example).
Plus, if Microsoft can claim (er, insinuate) that Plug and Play, USB, and APM actually work in NT 4.0 (maybe with special patches and hacks), shouldn't we be able to claim that XFS and ext3 support journaling right now? I mean, Stephen Tweedie and his merry men are testing journaling Right Now! Not to mention the memory limitation being erased... and which OS is 64 bit clean?
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Linux could be orders of magnitude ahead of it's current state if everyone were working on a common distribution rather than wasting resources through duplication.
Linux or *BSD could be orders of magnitude behind the curerent state if everyone took the current code as The Best Way To Do It instead of wasting resources submitting patches.
Sometimes having competition and similar projects leads to very good things.
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Rereading Islands in the Net recently, I was struck by the observation that the humble DVD rendered some of the early scenes almost obsolete (only in a speculative sense).
With that in mind, are there any technological or cultural developments in the past few years that have caused you to rethink your speculations/predictions/opinions about the near future? If so, what are they?
Thanks for your time!
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RedHat 6 came out months before RedHat went public.
Besides that, RedHat did not write Netscape, so it is unfair to blame them for Netscape's bugginess (it hardly seems fair to blame Netscape for it -- I think the definition of a web browser has to include random crashes anymore).
On this RH 6 box right here, Enlightenment is working just fine, with regard to focus. I don't use Gnome, so I won't comment on that, except to say that my X used to do the same thing, until I realized that the stupid onboard video chipset needed a tweak in my XF86Config.
Yes, some companies care more about the bottom line than quality software. That doesn't mean that all companies do.
RedHat may ship buggy stuff now and then, just like most everyone else, but until I see otherwise, I'm convinced they're trying to do the Right Thing.
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Redhat can't go a week without having a security problem found. It rescently IPO'd. I only expect this to get worse.
So... how many of the security problems are in programs written by RedHat programmers?
Believing that software gets worse when a company gets public investors is as naive as believing that software is buggy because consumers are computer-ignorant and want lots and lots of nifty features.
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