The assumption that presidents need to understand physics (rather than employ well-informed experts as advisors on the subject)... makes me wary of his preaching.
Presidents don't need to understand physics, but liberal arts majors need to take a couple of soft science classes to fulfill their distribution requirements. And what physics class could be more fitting for a dazzling, charming and sexy berkeley arts major than a class designed for "future presidents"? Ahem....
The capitalist system has so deeply entrenched itself that two things have occurred. First, those who suggest that there should be alternatives for everyone are labelled as "Commies" or "Dirty Hippies" and largely ignored.
Many consumers are not Lore oriented. Some never learn to set the time on the VCR. This forms a barrier to the introduction of Linux to the Broad masses, the "I just want it to work" crowd.?
Let's call it as it is: Linux is a time waster. It wastes people's time, it's unproductive. People in the real world have no time to waste figuring out how to get their computers working - they need to get on with their work and their lives. Every minute spent figuring out how to get their computers do what they want is a minute wasted.
When I was in college, I used Linux - it was fun hacking and figuring out how to get things working; I wouldn't go near Linux today, and I certainly wouldn't recommend that my co-workers use it.
Never mind that other systems often never really work right in the first place. Why would people accept the idea that "computers just crash" otherwise?
Where have you been? Windows 2k and Xp are much easier to get going, and they don't crash.
China, over the next 40 or 50 years, becomes an enormous economic juggernaut. With cheap labor.. the average standard of living doesn't increase significantly.
It's impossible for China to be an economic juggernaut, and yet have low wages and standards of living. Basic economic reasoning - if there's real economic growth on a per capita basis, the growth must go towards increased real wages, otherwise where does the wealth go to? You wouldn't be able to name a single counter-example.
The government in place will put down initial unrest, but a civil war could occur the likes of which we have never seen in the world. The world economy that has come to depend on the Chinese government for goods.
Or there could be peaceful transition to democracy, like to Taiwan or South Korea.
That these scientists downloaded their instructions off the net and used ordered the sequence mail order is not at all the shock that this story portrays it as.... Any trained molecular biologist would have a pretty easy time recreating the "kit" from the directions and the ingredient list.
Well, that's the whole point - it's not difficult to do, and someone has finally done it. Terrorist groups can assemble their own viruses - no need to gain access to actual viruses which may be tightly controlled.
Poor villages in India and China typically share a single telephone. So I could see a village sharing a simputer, provided the simputer actually does something useful.
However the simputer page is very vague about what the simputer actually does, and why a villager would want one. The page which purports to describe the role of the Simputer basically states the simputer will bring IT to the masses. Well, yes, but to what end?
I live in Asia but I read the nytimes nearly daily. I don't see any problem with registration - it seems like an eminently reasonable trade to give some demographic information in exchange for free access to a great paper. Is it reasonable to expect something for nothing?
read the article
on
Is Linux Dead?
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
Go read the article. It's actually pretty reasonable and well-balanced; the same can't be said of the/. summary.
Close one eye. Can you still estimate the distances of objects around you? Of course you can. This demonstrates that there's much more to depth perception than stereo vision.
Stereo vision is inherently limited. It requires that the objects have sufficient texture so that points on the two stereo images can be correlated. Our depth perception relies on much more than stereo e.g. common sense knowledge about the world, intution about shading and lighting, etc.
they are a logical construct brought into and maintained in existence by whoever runs the root servers, for the convenience of internet users. Those who run the root servers have pledged no allegiance or subordination to the South African government.
I have no idea how the domain name system works. However, the internet has become a public resource, and national governments are in the best position to regulate public resources.
Which is the more reasonable outcome: to have the country domains regulated by the corresponding governments (presumably democratically elected by their people), or by a group of arbitrary, unelected system administrators?
The fact that domain names are not bricks or mortar is irrelevant; we're in the 21st century, assets don't have to be physical.
On June 3rd, we reported that members of the US Congress were pressing for construction of a brand-new Capitol, complete with a retractable dome and luxury boxes, in order to stay competitive.
Our reporter in Washington checked out the story, he discovered that some of its contents were identical to the Onion's joke article.
Some small American newspapers frequently fabricate offbeat news to trick people into noticing them, with the aim of making money. This is what the Onion does. According to congressional workers, the Onion is a publication that never ceases making up false reports.
This is a practice that we, fortunately, do not suffer from China. In China, newspapers are not allowed to make up all sorts of wild stories about our dear leaders. We were therefore caught off guard.
We are open to our readers' criticism, and we apologize.
You don't seem to understand the concept of state sovereignty and representative government. The South African government is duly elected to represent its people. It derives, from the South African people, the right to regulate public assets, such as country domain names.
It is not for a vigilante admin to decide that he will take over a function of government because he doesn't like the government's plans. Who are the South African voters who elected him? He may have the support of the "geek" or even "internet community", but he does not represent the South Africa people and the potential internet users in South Africa.
His actions amount to a subversion of the will of the South African people.
if an open source programmer toils day and night "for fun", is it fair that someone takes all that work and sells it as if it were his own...like any Linux distro?
No it isn't. The biggest winners from open source are companies like IBM, redhat and others - which company wouldn't want free labour?
The biggest losers are the free software developers, who have been brainwashed into thinking that developing software for free is "fun", and that they have a moral obligation to make software available for free to companies.
Of course, there are a precious few for whom the gains in prestige (i.e Linus Torvalds) make developing free software worthwhile.
But get it straight. For most, Microsoft is your friend, Redhat is your enemy.
I've translated the beijing evening news article from chinese:
Translated from http://www.ben.com.cn/WLZB/20020603/GB/WLZB^357^7^ 03R1101.htm
WASHINGTON, DC--Calling the current U.S. Capitol "inadequate and obsolete," Congress will relocate to Charlotte or Memphis if its demands for a new, state-of-the-art facility are not met, leaders announced Monday.
Above: An architectural firm's proposal for a new retractable-dome capitol. Inset: Hastert addresses reporters.
"Don't get us wrong: We love the drafty old building," Speaker of the House Dennis Hastert (R-IL) said. "But the hard reality is, it's no longer suitable for a world-class legislative branch. The sight lines are bad, there aren't enough concession stands or bathrooms, and the parking is miserable. It hurts to say, but the capitol's time has come and gone."
"If we want to stay competitive, we need to upgrade," said House Minority Leader Dick Gephardt (D-MO), who has proposed a new $3.5 billion capitol on the site of the current edifice. "Look at British Parliament. Look at the Vatican. Respected institutions in their markets. But without modern facilities, they've been having big problems attracting top talent."
Its cornerstone laid in 1793 by President Washington, the capitol has been built, rebuilt, extended, and restored countless times over the past 209 years. Legislators say another multimillion-dollar renovation is not an acceptable alternative to a new building.
"How many times can you put a fresh coat of paint over an old, broken-down horse?" asked Sen. Rick Santorum (R-PA), co-chair of the Senate Relocation Subcommittee. "We need a building that befits our status as the nation's number-one democratically elected legislative body. And if D.C. isn't willing to provide that, I can think of plenty of other cities that would be more than happy to."
The leading candidates for a possible congressional relocation are Charlotte and Memphis, both of which have long sought a major organization to raise their national profile. San Francisco civic leaders have also lobbied hard, offering to finance a $4 billion Pac Bell Capitol Building using a combination of private corporate funds (40 percent), a county sales tax (35 percent), and a local cigarette tax (25 percent). Dallas, Seattle, and Toronto have also been mentioned as long shots.
Demonstrating its commitment to "stay in Washington if at all possible," Congress has invited more than a dozen architectural firms to submit proposals for a new D.C. capitol. Among the early favorites is the ambitiously titled "Halls Of Power," a retro-futuristic design by the Kansas City architectural firm of Hellmuth, Obata, and Kassabaum. The Halls Of Power would feature a retractable rotunda for daytime sessions, a Dancing Waters fountain in the front courtyard, and 55 more luxury boxes than the current building.
"This is just the kind of thing we need to stay competitive in today's lawmaking environment," said agent Barry Halperin, who represents many prominent government officials, including Sen. Jim Jeffords (I-VT) and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld. "Washington can no longer afford to ignore the fact that visitor attendance has dropped every year since 1989. Our elected officials don't like coming to this building and, clearly, neither do their constituents."
Experts attribute the decline in congressional attendance to a number of factors, including increased home viewership of legislative activities on C-SPAN, with which Congress signed an exclusive 20-year, $360 million broadcast pact in 1984. It is not known how a new capitol building would affect the terms of that soon-to-expire contract, but Congress is expected to restructure the deal to increase its share of revenues and secure possible advertising rights, regardless of whether it opts for rebuilding or relocation.
According to the lawmakers' constituents, the capitol is not the problem.
"Sure, the capitol's a little beat-up, but it's got its charms," said Geoff Lapointe, a Glendale, CA, voter. "The real problem is the legislators. Back in the old days, you had big stars like John Kennedy and Richard Nixon. Who've they got today? Evan Bayh? Paul Sarbanes? Who's gonna get excited about those guys?"
Lapointe said he is "fed up" with the legislators and their demands.
"Those guys are all just a bunch of spoiled, overpaid crybabies," Lapointe said. "All they want is money--they don't care about all the hardworking people who pay their salaries. Look at 'em: When's the last time you saw them acting like a team? They can take their capitol and shove it."
That only makes sense if the work you're doing is valuable enough, and need to attract top talent. For the average VB programmer, that's hard to justify.
Your view is far too simplistic. Pollution causes negative externalities - without government intervention, the cost of pollution generated in producing a product is not paid for by either the producer or the consumer of the product.
It is therefore the job of government to regulate pollution.
Philo T. Farnsworth was born in 1906, and he looked the way an inventor of that era was supposed to look: slight and gaunt, with bright-blue exhausted eyes, and a mane of brown hair swept back from his forehead. He was nervous and tightly wound. He rarely slept. He veered between fits of exuberance and depression. At the age of three, he was making precise drawings of the internal mechanisms of locomotives. At six, he declared his intention to follow in the footsteps of Thomas Edison and Alexander Graham Bell. At fourteen, while tilling a potato field on his family's farm in Idaho, he saw the neat, parallel lines of furrows in front of him, and it occurred to him--in a single, blinding moment--that a picture could be sent electronically through the airwaves in the same way, broken down into easily transmitted lines and then reassembled into a complete picture at the other end.
If they believe in linux as a principle of their company they won't prevent anyone else from using it, but if they simply want to make shareholders happy they might charge for it.
Redhat is a public company. Public companies are owned by the shareholders. Shareholders are interested only in a profit. So what do you think?
Some companies never pay out dividends (Sun, Cisco, Microsoft, etc are all examples of this).
All companies have to pay out dividends eventually, otherwise the price of the share would be zero (since the price of the share is basically the net present value of the the stream of expected dividends).
Microsoft uses stock splits to basically pay out a stock dividend to their shareholders...
I believe you're thinking of stock buy backs, not stock splits.
It's worth pointing out that Creative has bought 3d labs, and Creative's CEO Sim Wong Hoo has every intention of taking 3d Labs out on an aggressive push into the consumer 3d market. See article.
I would expect to get *paid* to recycle something. Getting paid for recycling means that the effort which went into recycling has value to society - when you do something that creates value for society, you expect to get paid.
When you do something that costs the society resources, you expect it to cost you something. Now, if it *costs* the consumer money to get the computer case recycled, it means that it costs more resources to recycle the case than what the product produced as a result of recycling is worth.
Which means that, on the balance, recycling *costs* the world resources. Which means that (in this case at least), recycling is a bad idea.
The other explanation is that the consumer is providing a subsidy to a company somewhere in the food chain...
I think that's exactly right. The success or failure of any enterprise eventually boils down to people, people, people - the quality and type of people the venture can attract.
The solution to the open software UI problem is obvious but difficult - open software needs to attract the best UI designers before it can have the best UI.
Write all the tomes on UI design you want; open software won't have good UI till it attracts as high calibre UI designers as it attracts programmers.
Slashdot Mirror
The assumption that presidents need to understand physics (rather than employ well-informed experts as advisors on the subject) ... makes me wary of his preaching.
Presidents don't need to understand physics, but liberal arts majors need to take a couple of soft science classes to fulfill their distribution requirements. And what physics class could be more fitting for a dazzling, charming and sexy berkeley arts major than a class designed for "future presidents"? Ahem....
The capitalist system has so deeply entrenched itself that two things have occurred. First, those who suggest that there should be alternatives for everyone are labelled as "Commies" or "Dirty Hippies" and largely ignored.
So what's the alternative wise guy?
Many consumers are not Lore oriented. Some never learn to set the time on the VCR. This forms a barrier to the introduction of Linux to the Broad masses, the "I just want it to work" crowd.?
Let's call it as it is: Linux is a time waster. It wastes people's time, it's unproductive. People in the real world have no time to waste figuring out how to get their computers working - they need to get on with their work and their lives. Every minute spent figuring out how to get their computers do what they want is a minute wasted.
When I was in college, I used Linux - it was fun hacking and figuring out how to get things working; I wouldn't go near Linux today, and I certainly wouldn't recommend that my co-workers use it.
Never mind that other systems often never really work right in the first place. Why would people accept the idea that "computers just crash" otherwise?
Where have you been? Windows 2k and Xp are much easier to get going, and they don't crash.
China, over the next 40 or 50 years, becomes an enormous economic juggernaut. With cheap labor .. the average standard of living doesn't increase significantly.
It's impossible for China to be an economic juggernaut, and yet have low wages and standards of living. Basic economic reasoning - if there's real economic growth on a per capita basis, the growth must go towards increased real wages, otherwise where does the wealth go to? You wouldn't be able to name a single counter-example.
The government in place will put down initial unrest, but a civil war could occur the likes of which we have never seen in the world. The world economy that has come to depend on the Chinese government for goods.
Or there could be peaceful transition to democracy, like to Taiwan or South Korea.
That these scientists downloaded their instructions off the net and used ordered the sequence mail order is not at all the shock that this story portrays it as. ...
Any trained molecular biologist would have a pretty easy time recreating the "kit" from the directions and the ingredient list.
Well, that's the whole point - it's not difficult to do, and someone has finally done it. Terrorist groups can assemble their own viruses - no need to gain access to actual viruses which may be tightly controlled.
Poor villages in India and China typically share a single telephone. So I could see a village sharing a simputer, provided the simputer actually does something useful.
However the simputer page is very vague about what the simputer actually does, and why a villager would want one. The page which purports to describe the role of the Simputer basically states the simputer will bring IT to the masses. Well, yes, but to what end?
Not really. The point is that it looks as though it were hovering in front of the screen, and you can look at it from different angles.
I live in Asia but I read the nytimes nearly daily. I don't see any problem with registration - it seems like an eminently reasonable trade to give some demographic information in exchange for free access to a great paper. Is it reasonable to expect something for nothing?
Go read the article. It's actually pretty reasonable and well-balanced; the same can't be said of the /. summary.
All this is empty theorizing. Is there empirical evidence which demonstrates whether open source or closed source is more secure?
Close one eye. Can you still estimate the distances of objects around you? Of course you can. This demonstrates that there's much more to depth perception than stereo vision.
Stereo vision is inherently limited. It requires that the objects have sufficient texture so that points on the two stereo images can be correlated. Our depth perception relies on much more than stereo e.g. common sense knowledge about the world, intution about shading and lighting, etc.
they are a logical construct brought into and maintained in existence by whoever runs the root servers, for the convenience of internet users. Those who run the root servers have pledged no allegiance or subordination to the South African government.
I have no idea how the domain name system works. However, the internet has become a public resource, and national governments are in the best position to regulate public resources.
Which is the more reasonable outcome: to have the country domains regulated by the corresponding governments (presumably democratically elected by their people), or by a group of arbitrary, unelected system administrators?
The fact that domain names are not bricks or mortar is irrelevant; we're in the 21st century, assets don't have to be physical.
Following on my translation of the original beijing evening news article, I now translate the apology:
On June 3rd, we reported that members of the US Congress were pressing for construction of a brand-new Capitol, complete with a retractable dome and luxury boxes, in order to stay competitive.
Our reporter in Washington checked out the story, he discovered that some of its contents were identical to the Onion's joke article.
Some small American newspapers frequently fabricate offbeat news to trick people into noticing them, with the aim of making money. This is what the Onion does. According to congressional workers, the Onion is a publication that never ceases making up false reports.
This is a practice that we, fortunately, do not suffer from China. In China, newspapers are not allowed to make up all sorts of wild stories about our dear leaders. We were therefore caught off guard.
We are open to our readers' criticism, and we apologize.
You don't seem to understand the concept of state sovereignty and representative government. The South African government is duly elected to represent its people. It derives, from the South African people, the right to regulate public assets, such as country domain names.
It is not for a vigilante admin to decide that he will take over a function of government because he doesn't like the government's plans. Who are the South African voters who elected him? He may have the support of the "geek" or even "internet community", but he does not represent the South Africa people and the potential internet users in South Africa.
His actions amount to a subversion of the will of the South African people.
I've gone through the links, but where can I find an actual demo of Cyc? - where I can ask cyc questions, and it answers.
if an open source programmer toils day and night "for fun", is it fair that someone takes all that work and sells it as if it were his own...like any Linux distro?
No it isn't. The biggest winners from open source are companies like IBM, redhat and others - which company wouldn't want free labour?
The biggest losers are the free software developers, who have been brainwashed into thinking that developing software for free is "fun", and that they have a moral obligation to make software available for free to companies.
Of course, there are a precious few for whom the gains in prestige (i.e Linus Torvalds) make developing free software worthwhile.
But get it straight. For most, Microsoft is your friend, Redhat is your enemy.
I've translated the beijing evening news article from chinese:
^ 03R1101.htm
Translated from http://www.ben.com.cn/WLZB/20020603/GB/WLZB^357^7
WASHINGTON, DC--Calling the current U.S. Capitol "inadequate and obsolete," Congress will relocate to Charlotte or Memphis if its demands for a new, state-of-the-art facility are not met, leaders announced Monday.
Above: An architectural firm's proposal for a new retractable-dome capitol. Inset: Hastert addresses reporters.
"Don't get us wrong: We love the drafty old building," Speaker of the House Dennis Hastert (R-IL) said. "But the hard reality is, it's no longer suitable for a world-class legislative branch. The sight lines are bad, there aren't enough concession stands or bathrooms, and the parking is miserable. It hurts to say, but the capitol's time has come and gone."
"If we want to stay competitive, we need to upgrade," said House Minority Leader Dick Gephardt (D-MO), who has proposed a new $3.5 billion capitol on the site of the current edifice. "Look at British Parliament. Look at the Vatican. Respected institutions in their markets. But without modern facilities, they've been having big problems attracting top talent."
Its cornerstone laid in 1793 by President Washington, the capitol has been built, rebuilt, extended, and restored countless times over the past 209 years. Legislators say another multimillion-dollar renovation is not an acceptable alternative to a new building.
"How many times can you put a fresh coat of paint over an old, broken-down horse?" asked Sen. Rick Santorum (R-PA), co-chair of the Senate Relocation Subcommittee. "We need a building that befits our status as the nation's number-one democratically elected legislative body. And if D.C. isn't willing to provide that, I can think of plenty of other cities that would be more than happy to."
The leading candidates for a possible congressional relocation are Charlotte and Memphis, both of which have long sought a major organization to raise their national profile. San Francisco civic leaders have also lobbied hard, offering to finance a $4 billion Pac Bell Capitol Building using a combination of private corporate funds (40 percent), a county sales tax (35 percent), and a local cigarette tax (25 percent). Dallas, Seattle, and Toronto have also been mentioned as long shots.
Demonstrating its commitment to "stay in Washington if at all possible," Congress has invited more than a dozen architectural firms to submit proposals for a new D.C. capitol. Among the early favorites is the ambitiously titled "Halls Of Power," a retro-futuristic design by the Kansas City architectural firm of Hellmuth, Obata, and Kassabaum. The Halls Of Power would feature a retractable rotunda for daytime sessions, a Dancing Waters fountain in the front courtyard, and 55 more luxury boxes than the current building.
"This is just the kind of thing we need to stay competitive in today's lawmaking environment," said agent Barry Halperin, who represents many prominent government officials, including Sen. Jim Jeffords (I-VT) and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld. "Washington can no longer afford to ignore the fact that visitor attendance has dropped every year since 1989. Our elected officials don't like coming to this building and, clearly, neither do their constituents."
Experts attribute the decline in congressional attendance to a number of factors, including increased home viewership of legislative activities on C-SPAN, with which Congress signed an exclusive 20-year, $360 million broadcast pact in 1984. It is not known how a new capitol building would affect the terms of that soon-to-expire contract, but Congress is expected to restructure the deal to increase its share of revenues and secure possible advertising rights, regardless of whether it opts for rebuilding or relocation.
According to the lawmakers' constituents, the capitol is not the problem.
"Sure, the capitol's a little beat-up, but it's got its charms," said Geoff Lapointe, a Glendale, CA, voter. "The real problem is the legislators. Back in the old days, you had big stars like John Kennedy and Richard Nixon. Who've they got today? Evan Bayh? Paul Sarbanes? Who's gonna get excited about those guys?"
Lapointe said he is "fed up" with the legislators and their demands.
"Those guys are all just a bunch of spoiled, overpaid crybabies," Lapointe said. "All they want is money--they don't care about all the hardworking people who pay their salaries. Look at 'em: When's the last time you saw them acting like a team? They can take their capitol and shove it."
That only makes sense if the work you're doing is valuable enough, and need to attract top talent. For the average VB programmer, that's hard to justify.
Your view is far too simplistic. Pollution causes negative externalities - without government intervention, the cost of pollution generated in producing a product is not paid for by either the producer or the consumer of the product.
It is therefore the job of government to regulate pollution.
http://newyorker.com/critics/atlarge/?020527crat_a tlarge
Philo T. Farnsworth was born in 1906, and he looked the way an inventor of that era was supposed to look: slight and gaunt, with bright-blue exhausted eyes, and a mane of brown hair swept back from his forehead. He was nervous and tightly wound. He rarely slept. He veered between fits of exuberance and depression. At the age of three, he was making precise drawings of the internal mechanisms of locomotives. At six, he declared his intention to follow in the footsteps of Thomas Edison and Alexander Graham Bell. At fourteen, while tilling a potato field on his family's farm in Idaho, he saw the neat, parallel lines of furrows in front of him, and it occurred to him--in a single, blinding moment--that a picture could be sent electronically through the airwaves in the same way, broken down into easily transmitted lines and then reassembled into a complete picture at the other end.
If they believe in linux as a principle of their company they won't prevent anyone else from using it, but if they simply want to make shareholders happy they might charge for it.
Redhat is a public company. Public companies are owned by the shareholders. Shareholders are interested only in a profit. So what do you think?
Some companies never pay out dividends (Sun, Cisco, Microsoft, etc are all examples of this).
All companies have to pay out dividends eventually, otherwise the price of the share would be zero (since the price of the share is basically the net present value of the the stream of expected dividends).
Microsoft uses stock splits to basically pay out a stock dividend to their shareholders...
I believe you're thinking of stock buy backs, not stock splits.
It's worth pointing out that Creative has bought 3d labs, and Creative's CEO Sim Wong Hoo has every intention of taking 3d Labs out on an aggressive push into the consumer 3d market. See article.
It doesn't make sense:
I would expect to get *paid* to recycle something. Getting paid for recycling means that the effort which went into recycling has value to society - when you do something that creates value for society, you expect to get paid.
When you do something that costs the society resources, you expect it to cost you something. Now, if it *costs* the consumer money to get the computer case recycled, it means that it costs more resources to recycle the case than what the product produced as a result of recycling is worth.
Which means that, on the balance, recycling *costs* the world resources. Which means that (in this case at least), recycling is a bad idea.
The other explanation is that the consumer is providing a subsidy to a company somewhere in the food chain...
I think that's exactly right. The success or failure of any enterprise eventually boils down to people, people, people - the quality and type of people the venture can attract.
The solution to the open software UI problem is obvious but difficult - open software needs to attract the best UI designers before it can have the best UI.
Write all the tomes on UI design you want; open software won't have good UI till it attracts as high calibre UI designers as it attracts programmers.