Date: Sun, 23 Feb 1997 11:50:46 -0700 (MST) From: Terry Lambert <terry@lambert.org> To: hoek@freenet.hamilton.on.ca (Tim Vanderhoek) Cc: jkh@time.cdrom.com, terry@lambert.org, ben@narcissus.ml.org, nate@trout.mt.sri.com, chat@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: RMS's view on dynamic linking Message-ID: <199702231850.LAA06545@phaeton.artisoft.com> In-Reply-To: <Pine.GSO.3.95.970223051925.16211C-100000@james.freenet.hamilton.on.ca> from "Tim Vanderhoek" at Feb 23, 97 05:32:53 am
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> This, of course, proves what we have all known --- namely that > quantum physics is not science. Now that it's not a science we > can start making some of those excess English majors study it and > save our precious Math majors for real work. Either you are a physicist and you are joking, or you are a non-physicist and you are ignorant of the facts. Using quantum mechanics, I can predict the color and other properties of atoms and molecules. I can also model relativistically invariant P-P, N-P, and N-N collisions which result in pair production, and disallow some results on the basis of a soloution of Feynman-Dyson diagrams, and end up doing little things. Like predicting W particles 14 years before their existance is confirmed by a high energy collider at CERN. Quantum mechanics is not necessary for many types of investigation, and there are alternate explanations of the mathematics which don't require quarks. Nevertheless, the mathematics provides a usefully predictive model of the way the universe works, regardless of what story you tell to justify it. > I believe it was John Dyson (although if someone wishes to > correct me, they are free to do so) who at one point wrote that > if he left the project for whatever reason, he felt confident > that someone would appear and replace him. Backing up his > suggestion that people magically appear is the recent > gnats-meister incident. It's filled by mpp now, but before > scrappy had been making noises about it, and still before there > had still been people who made it work. Without Mike P. it would > still exist, and would still continue existing into the future. > > All of this suggests that the funding situation of FreeBSD is > more stable and less dependant on the whims of individual > developers than your [Jordan's] comet analogy suggests. My point is that the project will steady-state at a given energy level. If John did leave, why should we be satisfied with *one* someone stepping up to the task? The "gnats-meister incident" is a good case in point: if I have a track that can accommodate two slot cars, I can never race more than two slot cars at a time, no matter how many people want to play (and have the cars in hand to do it). To continue the analogy to its conclusion, I've only been suggesting that FreeBSD should build a bigger track, and that Linux runs multiple tracks, each track with the equivalent to FreeBSD two-slot limit. Regards, Terry Lambert terry@lambert.org --- Any opinions in this posting are my own and not those of my present or previous employers.
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