whether or not that implies the studies are biased
No, we can't say positively.
The natural forces of the marketplace, however, suggest that such studies would become biased.
If
my research company was able to produce an apparently sound technical report detailing how company X's products were superior to competitors products,
company X paid for the report, and,
as a consequence of an apparently well-researched independent technical report company X's sales were to increase relative to its competitors,
then
company X would be inclined to contintue funding my research company, which I would like, and
I would continue to strive to produce the kinds of reports that company X wanted to buy.
I would continue to repeat this procedue until I made enough money or until my reputation as an impartial sound technical research company had eroded too much for my reports to be taken seriously.
Sure, there's forums and there's newsgroups, and of course there's mailing lists...but none of them *have* to help you resolve your problem.
The fact that, in practice, such tenuous support turns out to look pretty darn in good in comparison with the existing commercial software support ought to give commercial providers some pause.
Either improve your support, or make it easier for the open forums to provide even better support for your product.
Reward your internal experts for trolling the usenet groups, for offering advice, making FAQs, fixing bugs, writing documentation, tutorials, quick start guides, searchable answers on web databases, etc.
Re:For those of you who don't know waxman....
on
Politicizing Science
·
· Score: 2, Informative
Statistics here seem to show Republicans outspending Democrats in the 2002 election cycle by $652 million to $ 466 million.
More important than whether the candidate is Republican or Democrat, is that incumbents tend to win.
And that incumbents tend to get more of whatever money it is that is being given.
[Your arguement is diluted by using emotional labeling like "stolen", "fat cats", and sarcasm "shock, shock". Leave such tactics to the professional demagogues.]
All information will be politicized, not just what comes from scientific investigation.
The only defense for scientists is to continue to pursue the truth, postulate hypotheses, and to ask questions and get answers about the validity of those hypotheses.
Honestly, what this world needs is less politics in science and more science in politics.
Politics is so heavily weighted in emotion and personality that I hold out little hope of rational and critical thought making any more than a stage appearance in government.
Re:For those of you who don't know waxman....
on
Politicizing Science
·
· Score: 3, Funny
looks like a run of the mill democrat stooge
Waxman, a stooge for the democrats, is a rarity these days.
Contributors to the Republican seem to be able to afford to buy a lot more stooges.
I'm surprised that more free-market fundamentalists don't realize or conveniently ignore this reality.
I'm not surprised.
Promoting the advantages of the free market system but simultaneously ignoring or diminishing the disadvantages of monopolies is to the advantage of wealthy and influential people who owe much of their continued well-being to the continuation of some monopoly.
These individuals are only pro free-market up to a point.
Many other people abandon their principles when it becomes inconvenient to their material well-being; why should we expect the very wealthy to act any differently?
there's always the possiblity of the very determined/very rich individual buying off several key players.
Possibility?
Voters are key players. In our current system it's not too difficult to whip up an emotional frenzy in some of them to get them to vote for you.
Then, if that fails, it's always possible to call in the debts from politicians to whose campaigns you've donated money to act in closer accordance with your will.
Using money and determination to affect the electoral system is not just a possibility, it's a reality.
the only reason UltraSPARC III isn't blasting away everyone else, I believe, is due to manufacturing constraints.
UltraSPARC III would have been a great chip if it were released when Sun originally planned, instead of two years later.
Makers of superior CPU technology are probably hitting themselves in the stomach because Intel, with huge money for fabs, was able to get enough performance per dollar to dominate the industry, merely to fritter it all away on the Itanic.
Ah, if only the designers of Alpha, UltraSPARC, MIPS, PA-RISC and Power had had that kind of development budget and Fab facility!
If DEC had had Intel's money, or if Alpha had been absorbed early into Intel and they invested in it as if it were Invented Here, we'd have much a much better leading edge chip than we do now.
policy that disallows connecting Windows machines to the Sun network from home.
Not at all surprising.
Most internal corporate networks are, compared to folks that endure the raw net, relatively relaxed (years old vulnerabilities available) behind their firewalls.
They sure as hell don't want Joe Manager logging in from his home Windows box onto the internal network right after his teenage daughter has been viewing email attachments from all her new "friends".
tend to ignore email for long stretches at a time.
I've noticed that the most knowledgeable and effective people in an organization tend to become swamped with email and start to ignore it. (Think of DEK.)
They become SMTP blackholes, their email boxes full of ideas and proposals that other people want them to review. They're too busy doing things to pay attention to getting more things to do. An effective coping mechanism, by some accounts.
Conversely, the people who are the biggest sources of email tend to be the clueless, or those without much to do, either because they fsck things up so badly or piss off other people routinely.
Anyway, it's an interesting phenomena compared to phones and to memoranda.
It's becoming clear that SCO is a rather deliberate-placed fly in the soothing low cost ointment of growing Linux deployments.
It's also clear that certain companies stand to benefit from slowing the rate of Linux adoption. It's in their interest to keep the question raised by SCO open for as long as possible because it will retard the growth rate of Linux. (I doubt the number of Linux deployments will decrease, or even level off, but the growth rate will probably slow.)
So how long will it take for the SCO issue to be closed?
Most current Linux users have dismissed SCO's claims as frivolous, but potential new users are probably more easily dissuaded by these kinds of questions.
What kind of legal event and how long will it take before SCO claims are no longer a question?
I've been partial to SuSE, too, mainly because of the huge 7 CD releases that include all kinds of lesser known packages that are convenient to have around, especially living beyond the reach of DSL and cable modem broadband connections. If there's something you need, downloading lots of MBs takes too long.
Gentoo advertises something like 4000 packages.
Is a fully loaded Gentoo distribution comparable to SuSE in that regard?
Why don't corporations have easy legal means for property disposal after "death", just as Last Wills and Testaments offer individuals a convenient means for avoiding probabe and all those complications?
Is it just that no one thinks their corporation will ever die? Are bankruptcy proceedings so sloppy that they leave any property unassigned?
And, if there is no hope for this particular after the fact problem, or for corporations to put in general legal safeguards for tidy disposal of property without the need for expensive lawyers, then is there some small "sunset" clause that software developers could put in their code to ease the transfer, like a quit-claim that goes into effect if the corporation dissolves and no creditors assert any rights for a period of one year.
IANAL, but, now and then, they're indispensible.
[It's too bad the code author didn't have some claim on the company's assets, such as a paycheck that didn't come. I could see where he could submit a claim as a creditor and negotiate to settle for said source code.]
You are not responsible for what other people chose to do.
(The number of people leading screwed-up lives or screwing up other peoples' lives, because they don't understand that principle, is vast.)
That said, there's no reason to leave your tool in ready-made form for nefarious attack that any script kiddie to download and run.
Since you're producing a professional work, publishing the code in the text of your thesis pretty much guarantees the only people that will get a hold of it will be intelligent and perserving people with an interest in what you've contributed.
While it's not absolutely foolproof, the set of people who are both intelligent and persevering have better than average ethics, IMHO.
Exactly the same principles apply to other non-IT information (chemistry, biology, nuclear physics) which can potentially be used for evil purposes.
The solution is not to try and stuff the genie back into the bottle, but to try to find ways of generating fewer new nefarious people.
It's interesting to see that we look at the amount of money a company has in order to figure out who is most likely to come out on top when it comes to litigation.
The same principle seems to work pretty well for figuring out
who will win an election,
how legislation will be crafted to benefit certain parties, and
what kind of infotainment we'll see on television.
Just because the government can consider buying Linux, doesn't mean it will.
Correct. And it's true that no one ever got fired for buying Microsoft.
But much of the Linux deployment in government up to this point has been precisely because it can be had for no official government expenditure. It's always harder to get money for projects than it is to get money to keep your existing people. Those people have been doing some testing of Linux.
Shoestring Linux projects have proven themselves to be
not only cost-effective, but generally reliable and useful.
Given that prototype testing already in place, authorizing incremental purchases to add on to that base of Linux functionality is an easier decision than if were made cold, without any evidence to support.
Slashdot Mirror
Slashdot already includes those tags in most cases to wrap their entire pages.
View source and you'll see these tags right at the beginning:
whether or not that implies the studies are biased
No, we can't say positively.
The natural forces of the marketplace, however, suggest that such studies would become biased.
If
- my research company was able to produce an apparently sound technical report detailing how company X's products were superior to competitors products,
- company X paid for the report, and,
- as a consequence of an apparently well-researched independent technical report company X's sales were to increase relative to its competitors,
thenI would continue to repeat this procedue until I made enough money or until my reputation as an impartial sound technical research company had eroded too much for my reports to be taken seriously.
just define the function twice with the same name
I can handle the alternative spellings between the UK and the USA myself.
Perhaps we ought to rely upon preprocessing with m4 or cpp .
Quick!
There goes Osama bin Laden out the door of Walmart with a whole case of Gillette razors!
Sure, there's forums and there's newsgroups, and of course there's mailing lists...but none of them *have* to help you resolve your problem.
The fact that, in practice, such tenuous support turns out to look pretty darn in good in comparison with the existing commercial software support ought to give commercial providers some pause.
Either improve your support, or make it easier for the open forums to provide even better support for your product.
Reward your internal experts for trolling the usenet groups, for offering advice, making FAQs, fixing bugs, writing documentation, tutorials, quick start guides, searchable answers on web databases, etc.
More important than whether the candidate is Republican or Democrat, is that incumbents tend to win.
And that incumbents tend to get more of whatever money it is that is being given.
[Your arguement is diluted by using emotional labeling like "stolen", "fat cats", and sarcasm "shock, shock". Leave such tactics to the professional demagogues.]
All information will be politicized, not just what comes from scientific investigation.
The only defense for scientists is to continue to pursue the truth, postulate hypotheses, and to ask questions and get answers about the validity of those hypotheses.
Honestly, what this world needs is less politics in science and more science in politics.
Politics is so heavily weighted in emotion and personality that I hold out little hope of rational and critical thought making any more than a stage appearance in government.
looks like a run of the mill democrat stooge
Waxman, a stooge for the democrats, is a rarity these days.
Contributors to the Republican seem to be able to afford to buy a lot more stooges.
I'm surprised that more free-market fundamentalists don't realize or conveniently ignore this reality.
I'm not surprised.
Promoting the advantages of the free market system but simultaneously ignoring or diminishing the disadvantages of monopolies is to the advantage of wealthy and influential people who owe much of their continued well-being to the continuation of some monopoly.
These individuals are only pro free-market up to a point.
Many other people abandon their principles when it becomes inconvenient to their material well-being; why should we expect the very wealthy to act any differently?
there's always the possiblity of the very determined/very rich individual buying off several key players.
Possibility?
Voters are key players. In our current system it's not too difficult to whip up an emotional frenzy in some of them to get them to vote for you.
Then, if that fails, it's always possible to call in the debts from politicians to whose campaigns you've donated money to act in closer accordance with your will.
Using money and determination to affect the electoral system is not just a possibility, it's a reality.
Why isn't this code open source by law?
The source code doesn't strictly have to be under a free or open source license.
However it is vital that every single voter should have the right to examine the software and the hardware of the election process.
Without that right, there's nothing to prevent elections turning into the kinds of events that Robert Mugabe has been staging in Zimbabwe.
These desperate gasps from a dying company were annoying, exasperating.
I'm feeling calm, now, though.
I honestly think this point in time will be viewed as the inflection point at which Linux usage took off for the big time.
I'll bet a six-pack of your favorite beer or ale that on August 6, 2005 most people will agree that the SCO incident was the dark before the dawn.
>Not everyone uses credit cards...
True. Cash is always an alternative
Is it?
See if you can buy an airline ticket and rent a car with only cash and a driver's license. I doubt you can.
the only reason UltraSPARC III isn't blasting away everyone else, I believe, is due to manufacturing constraints.
UltraSPARC III would have been a great chip if it were released when Sun originally planned, instead of two years later.
Makers of superior CPU technology are probably hitting themselves in the stomach because Intel, with huge money for fabs, was able to get enough performance per dollar to dominate the industry, merely to fritter it all away on the Itanic.
Ah, if only the designers of Alpha, UltraSPARC, MIPS, PA-RISC and Power had had that kind of development budget and Fab facility!
If DEC had had Intel's money, or if Alpha had been absorbed early into Intel and they invested in it as if it were Invented Here, we'd have much a much better leading edge chip than we do now.
Please, do not revive the old jokes about mount and devices.
We've all read the sigs about the subject.
policy that disallows connecting Windows machines to the Sun network from home.
Not at all surprising.
Most internal corporate networks are, compared to folks that endure the raw net, relatively relaxed (years old vulnerabilities available) behind their firewalls.
They sure as hell don't want Joe Manager logging in from his home Windows box onto the internal network right after his teenage daughter has been viewing email attachments from all her new "friends".
tend to ignore email for long stretches at a time.
I've noticed that the most knowledgeable and effective people in an organization tend to become swamped with email and start to ignore it. (Think of DEK.)
They become SMTP blackholes, their email boxes full of ideas and proposals that other people want them to review. They're too busy doing things to pay attention to getting more things to do. An effective coping mechanism, by some accounts.
Conversely, the people who are the biggest sources of email tend to be the clueless, or those without much to do, either because they fsck things up so badly or piss off other people routinely.
Anyway, it's an interesting phenomena compared to phones and to memoranda.
It's becoming clear that SCO is a rather deliberate-placed fly in the soothing low cost ointment of growing Linux deployments.
It's also clear that certain companies stand to benefit from slowing the rate of Linux adoption. It's in their interest to keep the question raised by SCO open for as long as possible because it will retard the growth rate of Linux. (I doubt the number of Linux deployments will decrease, or even level off, but the growth rate will probably slow.)
So how long will it take for the SCO issue to be closed?
Most current Linux users have dismissed SCO's claims as frivolous, but potential new users are probably more easily dissuaded by these kinds of questions.
What kind of legal event and how long will it take before SCO claims are no longer a question?
I chose SuSE
I've been partial to SuSE, too, mainly because of the huge 7 CD releases that include all kinds of lesser known packages that are convenient to have around, especially living beyond the reach of DSL and cable modem broadband connections. If there's something you need, downloading lots of MBs takes too long.
Gentoo advertises something like 4000 packages.
Is a fully loaded Gentoo distribution comparable to SuSE in that regard?
Sounds grim but true.
So I have to wonder,
Is it just that no one thinks their corporation will ever die? Are bankruptcy proceedings so sloppy that they leave any property unassigned?And, if there is no hope for this particular after the fact problem, or for corporations to put in general legal safeguards for tidy disposal of property without the need for expensive lawyers, then is there some small "sunset" clause that software developers could put in their code to ease the transfer, like a quit-claim that goes into effect if the corporation dissolves and no creditors assert any rights for a period of one year.
IANAL, but, now and then, they're indispensible.
[It's too bad the code author didn't have some claim on the company's assets, such as a paycheck that didn't come. I could see where he could submit a claim as a creditor and negotiate to settle for said source code.]
You are not responsible for what other people chose to do.
(The number of people leading screwed-up lives or screwing up other peoples' lives, because they don't understand that principle, is vast.)
That said, there's no reason to leave your tool in ready-made form for nefarious attack that any script kiddie to download and run.
Since you're producing a professional work, publishing the code in the text of your thesis pretty much guarantees the only people that will get a hold of it will be intelligent and perserving people with an interest in what you've contributed.
While it's not absolutely foolproof, the set of people who are both intelligent and persevering have better than average ethics, IMHO.
Exactly the same principles apply to other non-IT information (chemistry, biology, nuclear physics) which can potentially be used for evil purposes.
The solution is not to try and stuff the genie back into the bottle, but to try to find ways of generating fewer new nefarious people.
It's interesting to see that we look at the amount of money a company has in order to figure out who is most likely to come out on top when it comes to litigation.
The same principle seems to work pretty well for figuring out
Just because the government can consider buying Linux, doesn't mean it will.
Correct. And it's true that no one ever got fired for buying Microsoft.
But much of the Linux deployment in government up to this point has been precisely because it can be had for no official government expenditure. It's always harder to get money for projects than it is to get money to keep your existing people. Those people have been doing some testing of Linux.
Shoestring Linux projects have proven themselves to be not only cost-effective, but generally reliable and useful.
Given that prototype testing already in place, authorizing incremental purchases to add on to that base of Linux functionality is an easier decision than if were made cold, without any evidence to support.
I'm confused.
Is there really a clause somewhere that prevents me from loaning my CD to a friend?
How is this any different from loaning my friend a book of some copyrighted work?
Finally, shouldn't libraries be able to loan CDs too?
Dear Santa,
We need a robust WINE implementation that permits any shrink-wrapped software bought at BestBuy to be run on any Linux box.
We need OpenOffice to fully support all the heavily-used Microsoft file formats.
We need user-interfaces that can be made to look enough like Microsoft application interfaces that retraining costs are minimized.
In short, we need to address the recurring issues that come up when you ask knowledgeable IT managers,
P.S. I need a high-quality recent-standard-conforming SVG implementation in Mozilla Firebird.