Well, I wouldn't know about how much money Sun makes from licensing StarOffice, but they do license it.
You're trying to show that Troll Tech's business model is examplary for OSS funding. Then you gave OpenOffice as an example supporting your assertion. Now, you say you don't know what exactly Sun's business model is. But whatever it is, it is clearly very different from Troll Tech's--even you admit that.
Whether your examples are good ones or bad ones doesn't really matter anyway. It's a simple exercise to look at the largest chunks of code in, say, your average Linux distribution and look at the business model that funded that development; almost none of it is like Troll Tech's. Troll Tech, a small OSS vendor with a single major product under a dual license, is very unusual (and, in fact, I think quite bad for OSS, but that's a separate discussion).
So it's not just Redhat and Troll Tech. It's also Novell, Mandriva, and other commercial Linux distros, Sun with OpenOffice and OpenSolaris, Novell again with programs like Evolution, various Exchange alternatives, and... well, a bunch more. I'm just thinking of things that I actually use or have evaluated. The companies that sell commercial OSS generally help fund the project they're using as a base, as well as having paid programmers.
Let's take Sun as an example. They ship OpenOffice. Are the OpenOffice developers paid for by revenue derived from OpenOffice licensing? No. They are subsidized by Sun's hardware business and other software businesses. OpenOffice development is a means to an end for Sun, not a self-supporting open source effort.
If you go through your own list, you'll see that most open source programmers do not get financed by revenue that is derived from the software they create. In fact, prior to the early 1990's, no open source programmers for major projects were financed from their software because that business model simply didn't exist.
Really, I'm not trying to discount other people's submissions, but just suggesting that we shouldn't ignore the benefit that the FOSS community gains from commercial funding and contributions.
Open source software is almost exclusively funded commercially. But it is also almost completely funded by business models other than Troll Tech's.
The backbone and heart of commercial open source funding is thousands of companies and organizations that have no corporate interest in open source software development; that is the business model that works best and that we should encourage. Open source business models like IBM's and RedHat's have also been good for open source. Troll Tech, however, is an aberration, and I think Troll Tech's business model would kill open source if it became widespread.
You've got that backwards - KDE used Qt. Financially, KDE is useless to Trolltech - anything that KDE touches is GPL'ed, so commercial developers stay away from it.
Troll Tech would be out of business if it weren't for KDE. Pretty much all the big companies I have worked at had Qt licenses, and they only had Qt licenses because people started finding out about Qt through KDE.
What other cross-platform toolkits can even come close to Qt? If you're only developing for a single platform, Qt may seem overpriced. But if you want a superb cross-platform toolkit, there really is no other option.
Businesses don't need "superbly designed" toolkits, they need toolkits that get the job done at the lowest possible cost. In fact, one big strike against Qt in many applications is precisely that it is large and complete, which translates into complex.
Qt is straightforward and elegantly designed
Qt is a big, complicated C++ toolkit that, in addition, defines its own C++ extensions (as if C++ wasn't complicated enough already). Q_OBJECT and "moc" isn't elegant, it's evil.
a well designed toolkit leads to more productive development.
The Edsel was also hailed as being "well designed", but that didn't make it a good car.
QT really is quite excellent if you want to develop for all three of Windows, Macs and Linux/Unix. I know of no toolkit that can match it.
Swing and SWT are obvious alternatives. Gtk+, gtkmm, and Gtk# are excellent on Linux and acceptable on Windows (the Mac version is being worked on). Tcl/Tk is still the toolkit to beat for rapid development, good cross-platform support, and easy C/C++ interfacing and the fact that it has a limited widget set actually works for it in many applications.
Qt is only "quite excellent" if you restrict yourself to C++ toolkits and then think that more features in the toolkit make it better. In fact, for many cross-platform applications and many GUI development problems, most of the stuff in Qt is not only overkill, it makes it more costly to develop software.
In addition, licensing and cost issues aside, what makes Qt totally unacceptable in many environments is that it is not standard C++. Q_OBJECT and moc were arguably bad design decisions even when Qt was originally developed, and with modern C++, they are an anachronism.
I'm sorry, but there just isn't any two ways about it: Qt is an expensive toolkit compared to other commercial offerings. And at the tie the KDE project adopted it, Qt was immature and incomplete compared to other commercial offerings. Qt managed to become a predominant toolkit only because it used KDE to get a big user community quickly, which helped improve the product and helped with marketing.
You can reasonably try to argue that the Troll Tech - KDE relationship is mutually beneficial and that the price of Qt is acceptable relative to other development costs, but that's a separate issue, but those are different arguments from whether Qt is competitively priced.
if you need the tool to do the job you want to do, you suck it up and buy it
10 years ago, people may have needed Qt, since the state of Linux/UNIX toolkits was poor. But I think these days, nobody "needs" Qt, since there are plenty of excellent alternatives that cost you nothing under less restrictive licenses.
I don't mean to insult anyone here, and I don't want to quibble about the ratio of good Samaritan contributions vs. paid contributions.
Your characterization of the funding models is misleading. Yes, most programmers are paid for developing OSS, but they are not paid by revenue directly derived from the OSS product.
The overwhelming amount of OSS development has always been, and continues to be, people who develop OSS in order to address a problem that needs solving in their business. They share the software freely because that turns out to reduce the amount of work they have to invest in developing the software and therefore lowers cost. They don't try to derive revenues from that software.
Business models like Troll Tech's, real time Linux vendors, and RedHat are the exception, not the rule, among open source business models. And from a user's perspective, open source software whose development is directly funded by revenue derived from the software is undesirable because the developers of the software will make decisions based on their business interests, not based on solving problems most effectively.
So, please don't confuse the issues. Yes, RedHat and Troll Tech get paid for developing OSS, but they are a rare exception, and I think open source would die out if their model became predominant (in fact, I'd go as far as suggesting that people should avoid them if they want to help OSS). Most OSS developers get paid for OSS development but don't derive revenue from their software, and that's the arrangement that has made OSS so enormously successful.
Yeah, Qt is expensive (overpriced even among commercial cross-platform toolkits, IMO). So why did you buy it? There are dozens of other toolkits you could have used. And why do you blame open source for the particular business model of a commercial toolkit? You weren't using the open source Qt toolkit, you were using the commercially licensed one.
We have dropped the development and rewrote everything to C# (MSVS 2005 is ~$700).
If C# met your requirements, why the hell were you writing your application in Qt/C++? Choosing to write applications in C++ when your requirements are met by a managed language (C#, Java, etc.) is an incredible waste of money. We're not talking a few tens of thousands of dollars in licensing fees, we are talking hundreds of thousands of dollars in development costs.
Embedded Linux from a reputable RT vendor is $25,000 per 5 seats per year. We needed only 3 seats. We had to buy 5 nevertheless.
Lots of people do embedded RT development on Linux without ever buying anything from anyone, so it can't be that you were paying for the ability to develop on Linux.
We will go for VxWorks or WinCE in our next product. An OEM version of Windows XP Pro is ~$140.
Be sure to look up the term "runtime license" before you start shipping.
After all, we have decided that the survival of our business is more important for us then 'do-good' ideas.
You don't "do good" by using open source software, you "do good" by contributing to open source software.
Furthermore, you obviously require lots of handholding from a vendor since you're incapable of making informed decisions on your own and aren't even able to understand simple licensing terms and their business consequences. So, go ahead and pay your $140 fo Windows XP Pro. Microsoft will be happy to give you all the advice about your long term business strategy that they can, and you are obviously willing to do as you're told.
PS: Don't bet on that "survival" thing. I think your company is doomed no matter what platform you're choosing.
If de Raadt is throwing around accusations like "open source fraud", I think de Raadt can be caulled an "open source fraud" with similar justification. After all, de Raadt wants us all to use a license for open source software that permits companies to take the source and make it proprietary.
So, Theo, stop the rhetoric. In particular as a proponent of the BSD license, you should take a laissez-faire attitude towards licenses.
All these discussions are based on the incorrect assumption that these jobs are US jobs in the first place; they are not. IT companies are doing business globally, and it's only logical and fair that the jobs are distributed globally as well.
Globalization is working exactly as it should. Yes, globalization means more competition and potentially less wealth for the average American. It also means greater wealth for a small group of global companies and investors. But what's the alternative? Do you think that protectionist policies by the US government would stop or even slow globalization?
What the US government can do is try to adopt policies that raise the standard of living around the world, and that will mean that when globalization happens and salaries and working conditions average out across the globe, US workers will not be losing too much. Also, the more skilled foreign workers the US lets immigrate, the less foreign competition the US will have.
Unrestrictive skilled immigration and free trade are still the best policies for the US.
You're missing the point. Microsoft has software patents so when IBM says 'hey, you're infringing 200 of our patents' Microsoft can say 'well you're infringing 300 of ours, how about a cross-licensing deal where we get to use each others patents for free?
That's not "defensive". In fact, what it really is is companies with large patent portfolios colluding on keeping new players out of the market.
It may slowly be dawning on Microsoft that software patents aren't always good for them, but in the past, Microsoft executives have stated quite clearly that they view software patents as a way of shutting down open source projects they don't like.
Furthemore, there is no such thing as a "defensive patent"; if Microsoft wants to protect itself against someone else patenting their idea, all they need to do is publish the idea. The only reason to use a patent is if you're going to threaten to assert it in court.
Most likely, Microsoft actually likes the current patent system because the current patent system is geared towards keeping new players out of the market. Under the current patent system, Microsoft itself might not have been able to come into existence, and Microsoft probably wants to keep patents as a means of killing the "next Microsoft".
There is no "robot" there; this is an electronically controlled, remotely operated puppet. And compared to traditional puppetteers, I think they didn't even do a particularly good job.
It's an embarrassment that stuff like this goes on in the name of research at universities.
Who's to say what evolution could come up with based on the sulphur-metabolising bacteria found in caves?
There isn't enough chemical energy there to support intelligent life.
probably would use something better for climbing than bipedalism [...] *Supposedly, we're only bipeds because we needed the height to cool our brains. In a uniform-temperature cave that doesn't apply.
We use bipedalism because it's energy efficient.
A species that is based underground in caves isn't likely to have vision,
And it probably doesn't have a need for a big brain either.
and as for your two-genders idea there are some rather complex hermaphrodite creatures on Earth - it's an equally effective way to reproduce
No, from biology we know that it is not an "equally effective way to reproduce".
There is a vast universe of possible arrangements for life - yes, we know that our particular arrangement works for us, but given the variety of conditions that life might develop in and the many unknowns in the process it's madness to claim that you have a handle on the relative probabilities of humanoid vs other types of intelligent life.
Biologists have analyzed tens of thousands of species and the evolution of thousands of sensory organs, reproductive strategies, and locomotive strategies. Nobody can make definitive statements about xenobiology from that, but we've gotten a pretty good idea from that what kinds of solutions evolution comes up with. And it turns out that physics and biology leave a lot less room for variation than the imagination of science fiction writers.
However, what if it takes as long as Earth has been around, on average, for intelligent life to come about?
Given what we know about the history of life on earth, there is no reason why humanity couldn't have appeared hundreds of millions of years earlier or later.
That would make it more likely, I'd think, for concurrent civilizations to exist since all of the ecosystems started at 'nearly' the same time.
The universe is somehwere upwards of 13 billion years old, the solar system is somewhere around 4.5 billion years old. Other "third generation" solar systems like our own may be at least several billion years older, meaning that there is no reason why life should be particularly synchronized throughout the galaxy.
what good would it do if they didn't have the ability to detect/interpet sound waves the same way we do? The same could be said for visual recordings. They might not 'see' the same spectrums of light that we do and not be able to see anything on a screen.
That would be a problem if we sent them an actual television set, but we're sending them a television signal: an abstract encoding of 2D information. They can translate that into whatever 2D representation they want.
For all we know, they could only hear magnetic waves and only see sound waves.
Physics gives fairly little leeway in terms of what senses biological species can usefully have. Most intelligent alien species will probably have vision that's pretty similar to humans.
Why do people continue to delude themselves that an alien intelligence will be able to comprehend communication as we consider it?
Because it's quite likely that intelligent alien life is DNA, RNA, and protein based, has developed vision, has developed color vision, communicates with a linear stream of symbols, and has two sexes. In fact, there's a good chance that it has a body plan similar to ours, is bipedal, and uses sound to communicate. How do we know that? Because a lot of what we are is determined by physics, and many of these features have developed multiple times in evolution.
It's also quite likely that if there is any concurrent alien civilization at all capable of receiving our signals, they are millions of years old and have no interest in colonizing earth (because otherwise, they would have done so). It's just as likely that intelligent species, as a rule, exist as technologically advanced species for only a few hundred to a few thousand years, in which case there are not going to be any concurrent alien civilizations capable of receiving our signals.
We are a crippled duck, currently hidden in a vast swamp. Our only security being through obscurity. Why the hell do people insist on flailing around screaming for the hunters?
Now you're deluding yourself: you're deluding yourself into thinking that it is worth traveling 45 light years to do--what exactly? Eat us? Enslave us? Colonize earth? Blow it up? If any civilization has figured out how to send any substantial object (weapon, crew, colony ship) 45 light years towards earth, they have so much energy available to them that they don't need to fear us and that they don't need to bother with colonizing earth either. And that works in reverse, too: by the time we have figured out how to travel 45 light years, we have the energy to either annihilate ourselves completely if we aren't peaceful, or to travel purely out of scientific curiosity, since whatever resource or colonization needs we have, we can more easily satisfy in the solar system.
We're about as much of a "threat" to these people as some native tribe of cannibals in New Guinea is to your average suburban Chicago housewife. On the whole, it doesn't matter whether we let them know that we're here; they probably alread know and eitherthey don't care, or they are waiting with first contact. Of course, the most likely possibility is that they simply don't exist and that we're alone.
Physicists rediscovers century-old, widely used methods of spatial statistics! We'll keep you informed about breaking news. We don't expect it to happen, but if this person were actually to open a textbook outside his field, we'll be the first to report it!
Nothing except for the thousands of man-years it took to develop and deploy PNG and other workarounds for the Unisys patent.
And for what? Unisys didn't even develop the key technology in question, and what was patented provided no useful advantage over open methods. The only reason Unisys was able to blackmail the world and cause all this trouble is because they failed to enforce the patent until the method had become a standard part of the infrastructure.
This patent has cost the world a huge amount of money and provided nothing in return.
In a year or two, many players will have some form of wireless: Bluetooth, WiFi, and/or wireless USB. Apple will probably include something like it in an upcoming iPod and it will be slightly less crippled, and people will ooh and aah about how "open" Apple is. And then you'll see a huge number of cheap MP3 players with wireless that really do come without all those annoying restrictions, and those will be the good ones to get.
The problem is that the Zune isn't providing wireless, it's providing a Microsoft-restricted DRM'ed version of wireless on a tightly controlled platform. And that, I don't have any use for.
Sadly, I think that photo essay just about sums up the state of Perl these days.
Hint: pictures of the grandkids is not what people with deliverables and deadlines want to see.
(I probably started using Perl more than 15 years ago. Perl was the best thing since sliced bread then, because it provided a cleaner and easier to use alternative to writing scripts in combinations of shell, awk, sed, tr, and a few other command line tools.)
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Well, I wouldn't know about how much money Sun makes from licensing StarOffice, but they do license it.
You're trying to show that Troll Tech's business model is examplary for OSS funding. Then you gave OpenOffice as an example supporting your assertion. Now, you say you don't know what exactly Sun's business model is. But whatever it is, it is clearly very different from Troll Tech's--even you admit that.
Whether your examples are good ones or bad ones doesn't really matter anyway. It's a simple exercise to look at the largest chunks of code in, say, your average Linux distribution and look at the business model that funded that development; almost none of it is like Troll Tech's. Troll Tech, a small OSS vendor with a single major product under a dual license, is very unusual (and, in fact, I think quite bad for OSS, but that's a separate discussion).
So it's not just Redhat and Troll Tech. It's also Novell, Mandriva, and other commercial Linux distros, Sun with OpenOffice and OpenSolaris, Novell again with programs like Evolution, various Exchange alternatives, and... well, a bunch more. I'm just thinking of things that I actually use or have evaluated. The companies that sell commercial OSS generally help fund the project they're using as a base, as well as having paid programmers.
Let's take Sun as an example. They ship OpenOffice. Are the OpenOffice developers paid for by revenue derived from OpenOffice licensing? No. They are subsidized by Sun's hardware business and other software businesses. OpenOffice development is a means to an end for Sun, not a self-supporting open source effort.
If you go through your own list, you'll see that most open source programmers do not get financed by revenue that is derived from the software they create. In fact, prior to the early 1990's, no open source programmers for major projects were financed from their software because that business model simply didn't exist.
Really, I'm not trying to discount other people's submissions, but just suggesting that we shouldn't ignore the benefit that the FOSS community gains from commercial funding and contributions.
Open source software is almost exclusively funded commercially. But it is also almost completely funded by business models other than Troll Tech's.
The backbone and heart of commercial open source funding is thousands of companies and organizations that have no corporate interest in open source software development; that is the business model that works best and that we should encourage. Open source business models like IBM's and RedHat's have also been good for open source. Troll Tech, however, is an aberration, and I think Troll Tech's business model would kill open source if it became widespread.
You've got that backwards - KDE used Qt. Financially, KDE is useless to Trolltech - anything that KDE touches is GPL'ed, so commercial developers stay away from it.
Troll Tech would be out of business if it weren't for KDE. Pretty much all the big companies I have worked at had Qt licenses, and they only had Qt licenses because people started finding out about Qt through KDE.
What other cross-platform toolkits can even come close to Qt? If you're only developing for a single platform, Qt may seem overpriced. But if you want a superb cross-platform toolkit, there really is no other option.
Businesses don't need "superbly designed" toolkits, they need toolkits that get the job done at the lowest possible cost. In fact, one big strike against Qt in many applications is precisely that it is large and complete, which translates into complex.
Qt is straightforward and elegantly designed
Qt is a big, complicated C++ toolkit that, in addition, defines its own C++ extensions (as if C++ wasn't complicated enough already). Q_OBJECT and "moc" isn't elegant, it's evil.
a well designed toolkit leads to more productive development.
The Edsel was also hailed as being "well designed", but that didn't make it a good car.
QT really is quite excellent if you want to develop for all three of Windows, Macs and Linux/Unix. I know of no toolkit that can match it.
Swing and SWT are obvious alternatives. Gtk+, gtkmm, and Gtk# are excellent on Linux and acceptable on Windows (the Mac version is being worked on). Tcl/Tk is still the toolkit to beat for rapid development, good cross-platform support, and easy C/C++ interfacing and the fact that it has a limited widget set actually works for it in many applications.
Qt is only "quite excellent" if you restrict yourself to C++ toolkits and then think that more features in the toolkit make it better. In fact, for many cross-platform applications and many GUI development problems, most of the stuff in Qt is not only overkill, it makes it more costly to develop software.
In addition, licensing and cost issues aside, what makes Qt totally unacceptable in many environments is that it is not standard C++. Q_OBJECT and moc were arguably bad design decisions even when Qt was originally developed, and with modern C++, they are an anachronism.
I'm sorry, but there just isn't any two ways about it: Qt is an expensive toolkit compared to other commercial offerings. And at the tie the KDE project adopted it, Qt was immature and incomplete compared to other commercial offerings. Qt managed to become a predominant toolkit only because it used KDE to get a big user community quickly, which helped improve the product and helped with marketing.
You can reasonably try to argue that the Troll Tech - KDE relationship is mutually beneficial and that the price of Qt is acceptable relative to other development costs, but that's a separate issue, but those are different arguments from whether Qt is competitively priced.
if you need the tool to do the job you want to do, you suck it up and buy it
10 years ago, people may have needed Qt, since the state of Linux/UNIX toolkits was poor. But I think these days, nobody "needs" Qt, since there are plenty of excellent alternatives that cost you nothing under less restrictive licenses.
No, it's not, because even the free versions of RedHat already include more functionality and software than WinXP.
I don't mean to insult anyone here, and I don't want to quibble about the ratio of good Samaritan contributions vs. paid contributions.
Your characterization of the funding models is misleading. Yes, most programmers are paid for developing OSS, but they are not paid by revenue directly derived from the OSS product.
The overwhelming amount of OSS development has always been, and continues to be, people who develop OSS in order to address a problem that needs solving in their business. They share the software freely because that turns out to reduce the amount of work they have to invest in developing the software and therefore lowers cost. They don't try to derive revenues from that software.
Business models like Troll Tech's, real time Linux vendors, and RedHat are the exception, not the rule, among open source business models. And from a user's perspective, open source software whose development is directly funded by revenue derived from the software is undesirable because the developers of the software will make decisions based on their business interests, not based on solving problems most effectively.
So, please don't confuse the issues. Yes, RedHat and Troll Tech get paid for developing OSS, but they are a rare exception, and I think open source would die out if their model became predominant (in fact, I'd go as far as suggesting that people should avoid them if they want to help OSS). Most OSS developers get paid for OSS development but don't derive revenue from their software, and that's the arrangement that has made OSS so enormously successful.
Now behold: QT is $3300 per seat
Yeah, Qt is expensive (overpriced even among commercial cross-platform toolkits, IMO). So why did you buy it? There are dozens of other toolkits you could have used. And why do you blame open source for the particular business model of a commercial toolkit? You weren't using the open source Qt toolkit, you were using the commercially licensed one.
We have dropped the development and rewrote everything to C# (MSVS 2005 is ~$700).
If C# met your requirements, why the hell were you writing your application in Qt/C++? Choosing to write applications in C++ when your requirements are met by a managed language (C#, Java, etc.) is an incredible waste of money. We're not talking a few tens of thousands of dollars in licensing fees, we are talking hundreds of thousands of dollars in development costs.
Embedded Linux from a reputable RT vendor is $25,000 per 5 seats per year. We needed only 3 seats. We had to buy 5 nevertheless.
Lots of people do embedded RT development on Linux without ever buying anything from anyone, so it can't be that you were paying for the ability to develop on Linux.
We will go for VxWorks or WinCE in our next product. An OEM version of Windows XP Pro is ~$140.
Be sure to look up the term "runtime license" before you start shipping.
After all, we have decided that the survival of our business is more important for us then 'do-good' ideas.
You don't "do good" by using open source software, you "do good" by contributing to open source software.
Furthermore, you obviously require lots of handholding from a vendor since you're incapable of making informed decisions on your own and aren't even able to understand simple licensing terms and their business consequences. So, go ahead and pay your $140 fo Windows XP Pro. Microsoft will be happy to give you all the advice about your long term business strategy that they can, and you are obviously willing to do as you're told.
PS: Don't bet on that "survival" thing. I think your company is doomed no matter what platform you're choosing.
If de Raadt is throwing around accusations like "open source fraud", I think de Raadt can be caulled an "open source fraud" with similar justification. After all, de Raadt wants us all to use a license for open source software that permits companies to take the source and make it proprietary.
So, Theo, stop the rhetoric. In particular as a proponent of the BSD license, you should take a laissez-faire attitude towards licenses.
All these discussions are based on the incorrect assumption that these jobs are US jobs in the first place; they are not. IT companies are doing business globally, and it's only logical and fair that the jobs are distributed globally as well.
Globalization is working exactly as it should. Yes, globalization means more competition and potentially less wealth for the average American. It also means greater wealth for a small group of global companies and investors. But what's the alternative? Do you think that protectionist policies by the US government would stop or even slow globalization?
What the US government can do is try to adopt policies that raise the standard of living around the world, and that will mean that when globalization happens and salaries and working conditions average out across the globe, US workers will not be losing too much. Also, the more skilled foreign workers the US lets immigrate, the less foreign competition the US will have.
Unrestrictive skilled immigration and free trade are still the best policies for the US.
You're missing the point. Microsoft has software patents so when IBM says 'hey, you're infringing 200 of our patents' Microsoft can say 'well you're infringing 300 of ours, how about a cross-licensing deal where we get to use each others patents for free?
That's not "defensive". In fact, what it really is is companies with large patent portfolios colluding on keeping new players out of the market.
It may slowly be dawning on Microsoft that software patents aren't always good for them, but in the past, Microsoft executives have stated quite clearly that they view software patents as a way of shutting down open source projects they don't like.
Furthemore, there is no such thing as a "defensive patent"; if Microsoft wants to protect itself against someone else patenting their idea, all they need to do is publish the idea. The only reason to use a patent is if you're going to threaten to assert it in court.
Most likely, Microsoft actually likes the current patent system because the current patent system is geared towards keeping new players out of the market. Under the current patent system, Microsoft itself might not have been able to come into existence, and Microsoft probably wants to keep patents as a means of killing the "next Microsoft".
There is no "robot" there; this is an electronically controlled, remotely operated puppet. And compared to traditional puppetteers, I think they didn't even do a particularly good job.
It's an embarrassment that stuff like this goes on in the name of research at universities.
Who's to say what evolution could come up with based on the sulphur-metabolising bacteria found in caves?
There isn't enough chemical energy there to support intelligent life.
probably would use something better for climbing than bipedalism [...] *Supposedly, we're only bipeds because we needed the height to cool our brains. In a uniform-temperature cave that doesn't apply.
We use bipedalism because it's energy efficient.
A species that is based underground in caves isn't likely to have vision,
And it probably doesn't have a need for a big brain either.
and as for your two-genders idea there are some rather complex hermaphrodite creatures on Earth - it's an equally effective way to reproduce
No, from biology we know that it is not an "equally effective way to reproduce".
There is a vast universe of possible arrangements for life - yes, we know that our particular arrangement works for us, but given the variety of conditions that life might develop in and the many unknowns in the process it's madness to claim that you have a handle on the relative probabilities of humanoid vs other types of intelligent life.
Biologists have analyzed tens of thousands of species and the evolution of thousands of sensory organs, reproductive strategies, and locomotive strategies. Nobody can make definitive statements about xenobiology from that, but we've gotten a pretty good idea from that what kinds of solutions evolution comes up with. And it turns out that physics and biology leave a lot less room for variation than the imagination of science fiction writers.
However, what if it takes as long as Earth has been around, on average, for intelligent life to come about?
Given what we know about the history of life on earth, there is no reason why humanity couldn't have appeared hundreds of millions of years earlier or later.
That would make it more likely, I'd think, for concurrent civilizations to exist since all of the ecosystems started at 'nearly' the same time.
The universe is somehwere upwards of 13 billion years old, the solar system is somewhere around 4.5 billion years old. Other "third generation" solar systems like our own may be at least several billion years older, meaning that there is no reason why life should be particularly synchronized throughout the galaxy.
what good would it do if they didn't have the ability to detect/interpet sound waves the same way we do? The same could be said for visual recordings. They might not 'see' the same spectrums of light that we do and not be able to see anything on a screen.
That would be a problem if we sent them an actual television set, but we're sending them a television signal: an abstract encoding of 2D information. They can translate that into whatever 2D representation they want.
For all we know, they could only hear magnetic waves and only see sound waves.
Physics gives fairly little leeway in terms of what senses biological species can usefully have. Most intelligent alien species will probably have vision that's pretty similar to humans.
The only way to get out of the inverse square law is either to use coherent sources like lasers,
Lasers also follow the inverse square law, they just have better constants. Furthermore, coherence is incidental to their directional properties.
Why do people continue to delude themselves that an alien intelligence will be able to comprehend communication as we consider it?
Because it's quite likely that intelligent alien life is DNA, RNA, and protein based, has developed vision, has developed color vision, communicates with a linear stream of symbols, and has two sexes. In fact, there's a good chance that it has a body plan similar to ours, is bipedal, and uses sound to communicate. How do we know that? Because a lot of what we are is determined by physics, and many of these features have developed multiple times in evolution.
It's also quite likely that if there is any concurrent alien civilization at all capable of receiving our signals, they are millions of years old and have no interest in colonizing earth (because otherwise, they would have done so). It's just as likely that intelligent species, as a rule, exist as technologically advanced species for only a few hundred to a few thousand years, in which case there are not going to be any concurrent alien civilizations capable of receiving our signals.
We are a crippled duck, currently hidden in a vast swamp. Our only security being through obscurity. Why the hell do people insist on flailing around screaming for the hunters?
Now you're deluding yourself: you're deluding yourself into thinking that it is worth traveling 45 light years to do--what exactly? Eat us? Enslave us? Colonize earth? Blow it up? If any civilization has figured out how to send any substantial object (weapon, crew, colony ship) 45 light years towards earth, they have so much energy available to them that they don't need to fear us and that they don't need to bother with colonizing earth either. And that works in reverse, too: by the time we have figured out how to travel 45 light years, we have the energy to either annihilate ourselves completely if we aren't peaceful, or to travel purely out of scientific curiosity, since whatever resource or colonization needs we have, we can more easily satisfy in the solar system.
We're about as much of a "threat" to these people as some native tribe of cannibals in New Guinea is to your average suburban Chicago housewife. On the whole, it doesn't matter whether we let them know that we're here; they probably alread know and eitherthey don't care, or they are waiting with first contact. Of course, the most likely possibility is that they simply don't exist and that we're alone.
Physicists rediscovers century-old, widely used methods of spatial statistics! We'll keep you informed about breaking news. We don't expect it to happen, but if this person were actually to open a textbook outside his field, we'll be the first to report it!
Nothing except for the thousands of man-years it took to develop and deploy PNG and other workarounds for the Unisys patent.
And for what? Unisys didn't even develop the key technology in question, and what was patented provided no useful advantage over open methods. The only reason Unisys was able to blackmail the world and cause all this trouble is because they failed to enforce the patent until the method had become a standard part of the infrastructure.
This patent has cost the world a huge amount of money and provided nothing in return.
In a year or two, many players will have some form of wireless: Bluetooth, WiFi, and/or wireless USB. Apple will probably include something like it in an upcoming iPod and it will be slightly less crippled, and people will ooh and aah about how "open" Apple is. And then you'll see a huge number of cheap MP3 players with wireless that really do come without all those annoying restrictions, and those will be the good ones to get.
Three times nothing is still nothing.
There half a dozen mature, widely used post-Perl scripting languages; take your pick.
The problem is that the Zune isn't providing wireless, it's providing a Microsoft-restricted DRM'ed version of wireless on a tightly controlled platform. And that, I don't have any use for.
Sadly, I think that photo essay just about sums up the state of Perl these days.
Hint: pictures of the grandkids is not what people with deliverables and deadlines want to see.
(I probably started using Perl more than 15 years ago. Perl was the best thing since sliced bread then, because it provided a cleaner and easier to use alternative to writing scripts in combinations of shell, awk, sed, tr, and a few other command line tools.)