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*bows* +5 Informative, thank yoo, dankyooverymurch!

I almost cried tears of joy when I read the transcript of W. Brian Arthur (economist), Andy Grove (Intel chairman), and Lawrence Lessig's (law professor) discussion about these issues. A lot of the same points are made that you see daily here on /., and a lot of comparisons to the nineteenth century railroad industry and various information revolutions of the past 200 years.

A very interesting read that helps put current events in an historical context...

Oooookay.

Sir? Please step away from the bong.

I just spent an ejoyable half hour or so reading Business 2.0's "minable database" of 101 Dumbest Moments in Business, and then I had a look at their even-more-hilarious 100 Dumbest moments in e-Business. This article really does have that weird flavor of megalomaniacal Internet-hype gibberish that we all came to know so well during the boom years. In a way, it's a pleasant little nostalgia trip to see the same old idiocy presented with the same old mindless confidence, but in another way it's just depressing.

Reality Check: Slashdot is a BBS for bored IT workers taking a break while installing nine hundred copies of Word on nine hundred 266 MHz beige boxes at the local credit union. It is not a minable database of ideas (or at least not of ideas worth mining). At its best, it's an undergraduate bull session.

What the hell are you people smoking?

Had Bemer or IBM, his employer at the time, patented the escape concept, he or they could own a sizable chunk of the world's technology right now.

If he had indeed patented this in 1960, the patent would have expired by now. Even if it took a few years for him to get the patent, the 17 years would be long over.

Unless he purposely dragged on the application process for years to make the patent last longer, like The Patent King.

Now, there is a 20 year limit from the year of filing.

IANAL, BIWOWALF3Y.

yo.

Business 2.0 has a easy to understand graphic that explains how this new technology works in their article on Foveon's new chip. http://www.business2.com/articles/web/0,1653,37797 ,FF.html

There's also a decent article on business2.com

http://www.business2.com/articles/web/print/0,1650 ,37797,FF.html

However Corporations exist for the sole purpose of making money and are not in and of themselves moral entities.

No less an authority than Peter Drucker disputes this statement. He says: "...no financial man will ever understand business because financial people think a company makes money. A company makes shoes, and no financial man understands that. They think money is real. Shoes are real. Money is an end result. What is a business? The only function of a business is to create customer [value] and to innovate."

He considers profit "the test of the validity" of the business's activities. Earning a profit, it says here, is how one measures the firm's efficiency in fulfilling its fundamental purpose, namely, to create a customer.

Corporations have a role to play in society so the ultimate question is is not what the purpose of the corporation is, but what the purpose of society is. Corporations cannot achieve a profit and at the same time thwart the objectives of society in which they exist.

The idea that work and human endeavor have no higher purpose than making money is a pretty miserable philosophy of life and has never been a sufficient foundation for a society or a corporation.

Interesting. Fast Company and Business 2.0 have stories of similar topics. B2.0's article is on where airplanes go when they're decommissioned.

A good article related to this. Talks about trying to stick it out after the Dot Bomb has exploded.

Business 2.0 had an interesting article earlier this year about the possibility of using the relatively cheaper DSL service to replace T1 voice lines for small and medium businesses.

For those of you who are into paper stuff, there was a very complete article on this in Business 2.0 last week. Well written, and also talks a lot about McMaster's history.

For those of you who are into paper stuff, there was a very complete article on this in Business 2.0 last week. Well written, and also talks a lot about McMaster's history.

Eben Moglen's Opinion

Mike Dooley's Opinion

Ronald Johnston's Opinion

The main article, by Paul Keegan

Eben Moglen's Opinion

Mike Dooley's Opinion

Ronald Johnston's Opinion

The main article, by Paul Keegan

Eben Moglen's Opinion

Mike Dooley's Opinion

Ronald Johnston's Opinion

The main article, by Paul Keegan

Eben Moglen's Opinion

Mike Dooley's Opinion

Ronald Johnston's Opinion

The main article, by Paul Keegan

here's the graphical description. ...basically, this just slaps a few machines together and automates a bit, but this kind of 'new' technology existed in my /high school/ six years ago and wasn't new then (actually, it was rather old). at $30k for the machine, you can expect to pay a bit more than the actual production of your book.

and this machine prints ONE book at a time, making it useless for anything other than personal books (so your school is still better off with a publisher or in-house method to produce your yearbooks). I'd expect a four hundred page book to cost you roughly $25-$40 ... hardly worth it. (math done: 3-5 cents a page, $5-10 for other materials like binding, $5-10 surcharge.)

Now, really: You can't expect Digital Convergence to ignore experts like those, can you?

As it says at their site, it is currently only able to reach speeds of 96 kbps. Why not use a modem instead?

Other things worth noting: "Running on a 333 MHz AMD K6-2 processor, the software modem consumes about 38% of the CPU cycles." - Ouch. And that's on Linux. I wouldn't want to try something of the sort on Windoze with a few browser windows and an app or two open.

Could this technology become interesting? Perhaps... maybe in three years when they have the bugs worked out and the code optimized, you can use it to get 256 kbps, maybe... Personally, I'm not planning on waiting that long!

There are so many better solutions out there, and if you want my opinion, the real future of broadband is in the wire that is already running into your house. No, not the phone wire. This one. Now serving over 90% of the world's population...

i always thought sending data through water was a cool idea

with all the solids showing up in our tap water maybe this is the future of home networking

Lucent have a division called Lucent Optical which are (unsurprisingly) world leaders at this sort of thing.

A good article about what they do can be found here

Incidentally, a company called Global Crossing plan to implement a network based upon lasers.

The only problem is that the music companies will say that their decreased revenue is due to "illegal file sharing over the internet" (not neccessarily Napster).

Actually, you can do a couple of things to prevent your hard earned dollars from reaching the RIAA and stil have full music enjoyment;

1)Buy used CDs. The studios don't get any money from this kind of sale.

2)Discover the perfectly legal activity of taping FM Radio. High quality receivers can be had at the thrift store for a song. Use metal tape, and use that to cut your own CDs.

3)Rediscover older music. Vinyl records are a fraction of the retail price of CDs at thrift stores and garage sales.

Between all of these options, you can throw a punch to the RIAA where it hurts. The secondary market is a big thorn for the RIAA (and one that they will continue to try to squelch)

The fact of the matter is that Napster was actually helping CD sales.

The only thing you can count on is the lies that the RIAA will spew forth in order to achieve total control.

I find it interesting...the article I had from Business 2.0 open on my desk when reading the linked article by O'Reilly runs much along this vein. Alas, since it is published in the 10/24 print issue and not yet published on the Web, I can't link to it.

It's more interesting to me to watch the consortia-standards group fight than it is to worry about any single fight over any standard. If there's anything that watchers of IT should know, it's that if technology standards stink, we'll ignore them. You would think that businesses would eventually kowtow to standards groups, as consortia-derived standards tend to have a shorter shelf life--driving costs up as a new standard must be developed. Independently-developed standards tend to have greater market acceptance and therefore a longer shelf-life--eventually driving down marginal cost and increasing profits.

Why the companies that are out creating consortia can't realize this is beyond me...

Telecommuting out of state will kill your Drag Coefficient as an employee. To be more competitive, you should consider a combination desk/hideaway-bed. You won't miss the morning commute! ;^)