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Comment Are they sure? (Score 2) 218

How is OpenStreetMap determining that Apple's using their data versus a similar data set from a different source? I haven't seen anything about their methodology for coming to the conclusion that it's OpenStreetMap data. How easy is it to pin down map data to a specific provider?

Comment Re:Apple earns by tying customers to their store (Score 1) 407

Yes, because build cost is all that matters. You get a bunch of parts together, and they magically design themselves into a product, write their own software, test themselves, market themselves, move themselves into stores, and support themselves. No human intervention or thought or anything else for which people expect to receive money is involved at any step of the process outside of manufacturing.
GNU is Not Unix

Miguel De Icaza Forms New Mono Company: Xamarin 286

rubycodez writes "After being thrown out on the streets by Attachmate, the purchasers of Novell, Miguel De Icaza has formed a new company Xamarin to make .NET development tools for Android and iOS. The company will also provide commercial international Mono support. There are those who would say Mono poses a risk of drawing Microsoft patent or other IP litigation for its inclusion in some major Linux distributions, and that these recent events might be the beginning of the demise of widespread use of Mono and other .NETiness in open source software, a good thing."
Science

Is Science Just a Matter of Faith? 1486

Hugh Pickens writes "Pastabagel writes that the actual scientific answers to the questions of the origins of the universe, the evolution of man, and the fundamental nature of the cosmos involve things like wave equations and quantum electrodynamics and molecular biology that very few non-scientists can ever hope to understand and that if we are honest with ourselves, we must admit that we accept the incredibly complex scientific phenomena in physics, astronomy, and biology through the process of belief, not through reason. When Richard Fenyman wrote, 'I think I can safely say that nobody understands quantum mechanics,' he was including himself which is disconcerting given how many books he wrote on that very subject. The fact is that it takes years of dedicated study before scientific truth in its truest, mathematical and symbolic forms can be understood. The rest of us rely on experts to explain it, someone who has seen and understood the truth and can dumb it down for us in a language we can understand. And therein lies the big problem for science and scientists. For most people, science is really a matter of trusting the expert who tells it to us and believing what they tell us. Trust and belief. Faith. Not understanding. How can we understand science, if we can't understand the language of science? 'We don't learn science by doing science, we learn science by reading and memorizing. The same way we learn history. Do you really know what an atom is, or that a Higgs boson is a rather important thing, or did you simply accept they were what someone told you they were?'"

Comment Re:Of course not.... (Score 1) 154

The IE guys are going to have to fix any problems in how it plays nice with Windows anyway, and if the development process is so broken that they can't even keep O/S-breaking regressions out of the builds, there's a problem.

The problem is that IE is tightly coupled with several other Windows components. This means it can break many other apps which can depend on it, or also can break itself if it depends on something which is not available.

For example, when IE7 came out people were extracting the installer package and installing the individual components inside to bypass the WGA check. If they didn't install the XMLLite component before the IE application installation, it would break several applications including Explorer. It could be fixed if the user booted to Safe Mode and installed the XMLLite package or DLL afterwards, but many users probably didn't know that.

This is exactly the kind of thing Microsoft wants to avoid...people breaking the system because they don't have the proper dependencies installed or some other factor with their configuration. It's much easier to roll it all together into a release canidate where they can be sure it includes everything it needs.

Comment Re:Linux Peace Prize? (Score 2, Informative) 541

Hey, I'll give Ronald Reagan credit for being a part of it, but Gorbachev is the important one here. Gorbachev had to pull out of Afghanistan, he had to let the Eastern Bloc Warsaw Pact nations determine how to handle their internal affairs. All of this was guaranteed to greatly reduce his own personal influence, and had a good chance (As it turns out, great chance) of greatly reducing the influence of communism in the world. Seeing as how Soviet Dogma suggested that the communist revolution needed to spread across the globe in order to succeed, he was basically blowing up his country in exchange for peace. On the other hand, America pretty much carried on as before.

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