Slashdot Mirror
Slashback: SmoothWall, Gopher, Be
But can you backtrack through a google cache? pointym5 writes "Checked out the ZeoSync web site lately? Remember all those PhDs on the scientific staff? Well, like I'm sure others did, I sent e-mail to a few of them expressing interest in more technical details. All that I contacted responded with absolute disclaimers of any relationship whatsoever with ZeoSync. This morning I note that most names are gone from the 'org chart' and the scientific team list. There are only five left, including Dr. Piotr Blass, 'developer of one of the world's first web sites.' Wow!"
How smooth is smooth? juct writes: "I appreciate it, that Slashdot gave the SmoothWall Team an opportunity to answer to the concerns in my review of their firewall. But it is full of errors and might leave a wrong feeling of security. So I invite everybody to my Tour on SmoothWall where you can judge for yourself."
Whispered words of wisdom, 'Let it be.' Sander van Dragt writes: "Many BeOS news lately. Not all so good for the BeOS community though. BeUnited, the organization which tried to license BeOS from Palm, has received today a final answer from Palm: '...we have made a firm decision NOT to license any part of this technology other than that which we incorporate into the Palm OS.' It is already known that the new 32-bit PalmOS will feature some elements of the Be technology, but that OS is built for PDAs, not for the desktop."
You can read that letter and the rest of the article on OS news.
And take this as you will -- An Anonymous Coward writes: "osnews.com is reporting that there is a new version of BeOS on the way... A German company called 'yellowTab' is said to be ready to ship a new version of BeOS (Just when everyone thought it was dead, and the final shovel full of dirt laid on top), get the full article here ... Hrm, I sure liked BeOS, I hope this one works out."
Dig, my brethren -- the Gopher Palace is almost complete! SuperguyA1 writes "Lwn is reporting that the gopher team has done it again with a 3.0 release marking Gopher's 10th anniversary. Happy birthday gopher. Thanks for helping me find all the muds I wasted so much time in college on:)"
"Bad connection, say again, you invented WHAT?" mi writes: "Yahoo! reports a potential problem, the Segway Scooter may have in Japan -- a Japanese robotics professor seems to have a patent on something very very similar since 1996. On the other hand, the USPTO knew about, when granting the patent to Segway's Dean Kamen, but still found Mr. Kamen's invention worthy of a patent in 1999. My favorite is the Kazuo Yamafuji's words: 'I would hand over my patent for one dollar if Mr. Kamen admitted that we were first.' Indeed, he just sat on the invention for 15 years."
Its really amazing how quickly gopher dried up as http took off. The gopher clients for windows are all written for Windows 3.1 or NT 3.1 and the major browser vendors seemed to have left the code in a state of neglect.
I was also amazed to find CGI like scripts for handling gopher+ (or something like that, my memory is hazy and in true /. fashion I'm too lazy to recheck facts) forms. If everyone wasn't so busy re-inventing the wheel gopher might have made a good base for all the low bandwidth wireless devices running around today instead of WAP. A few modifications and it might have worked. Problem is, 'gopher' just isn't as sexy on the resume as all those modern TLA's...
Bleh!
This isn't as far fetched as it may sound!
The first time I tried Freenet I instantly thought of Gopher. A Gopher like protocol that runs over Freenet is exactly what it needs to make it more user friendly.
Freenet doesn't need the depth of the WWW, it just needs simple resources to navigate around to find stuff. Something like Gopher just seems perfect to me.
So it's free, but only if you pay for it. Why don't they just use a pay model?
If everyone wasn't so busy re-inventing the wheel...
Like a Web based message board where NNTP would do?
- - - - - - - - - - -
I am a programmer. I am paid to produce syntax not grammar. Deal with it.
So yes it's really over. well that goes only for the Palm deal, since there are already some projects to make an OpenSource BeOs:
:-(
http://www.openbeos.org/
http://blueos.free.fr/
And those surely won't stop their efforts !
That's yet another example of the dangers of closed source systems...
RIP BEOS.
ZeoSync really should look up the pigeonhole principle. You can't fit n pieces of data into n-1 slots with one piece of data in each slot.
Basically, if you can reduce 1 million bits to 10,000, then you can only represent 2^10000 different outcomes. But, they need to represent all 2^1000000 outcomes! There are only so many outcomes in there that can be compressed, and that means that the other outcomes take up more space.
In other words, their data is not random.
If a 12th grade high school student can figure this out, surely people with PHD's can see how this idea is flawed. I am surprised that such an absurd idea is even being taken seriously in the news.
"I have not failed. I've simply found 10,000 ways that won't work." --Thomas Edison
So it looks like BeOS is going to be lost forever -- the modern day equivalent of being bulldozed into a pit, burned, and buried under concrete.
... and in the end you have no one but yourself for getting fucked over and spit out.
Think of this as another example of the failure of modern-day copyright law. The purpose of copyright law is to place fine examples of the arts into the public domain -- if instead of computer software, BeOS consisted of a series of patents, then 20 years from now we would all have complete, free, access to BeOS, because the patents would have:
(1) been disclosed when the monopoly was granted
(2) expired
However, in the case of copyrighted computer object code, in exchange for granting a government monopoly of 95 years, the public gets nothing. Zilch. Nada. Copyright law hasn't just "tilted" to the side of copyright holders, it has no other master. The public interest is completely removed from consideration. Modern copyright law is NOTHING more then corporate welfare. It no longer benefits the public, and like all laws that work directly against the public interest, no longer deserves respect. Want to get rid of ancient, outdated, overreaching copyright law? Disobey it. Sit in the front of the bus -- in the seat labeled "for corporations only."
Take this as a warning. No matter how "cool" a piece of software is, if it is proprietary software, it is absolutely worthless. It can disappear at any moment, and it contributes nothing to the progress of computer science. nothing. Sure, you can pretend that you're part of the future by playing with a "cool" proprietary OS, but you're just wasting your time and energy on someone else's game.
Score: -1: Troll
I agree. It makes perfect sense. What doesn't make sense is how a superb piece of technology like BeOS winds up in the dustbin of computing history. A sleek and lean desktop OS. Who knows how things might have turned out if there was such a thing as competition in the desktop market?
I was hoping that Palm would consider doing something else with it. Too bad. It's the perfect answer for those Mac people who hate PCs.
When the first response to user's letter of complaint, a reasonably written one at that, is a series of three rude emails, something is *very wrong* with that group of developers.
Email #1:
Email #2:
Email #3:
The general attitude shown in those emails is amazingly foul. Either we're not being told the whole story or the people behind SmoothWall don't know the first thing about PR and consumer relations. I am actually inclined to go with the second option.
And if you actually took an "Engineering Law Class" and you were taught that people deserve patent protection because they implement their controller software in "ASM" as opposed to C++, you should ask for your tuition back. But perhaps you just made that up.
The part I can't figure out is why anyone would bother with a Linux software firewall running on a PC if you can get good firewall appliances with web-based configuration for little more than $100.
I find it hard to believe that there is only one patent involved in the Segway.
As mentioned in the Yahoo article, "the basic ideas incorporated in the Segway scooter are the same: a computer processor to detect minute shifts in balance to keep the machine upright on two parallel wheels." That is hard to refute (at least according to the patent dates), but yes, they do differ in actual implementation.
As mentioned, the gyroscope is a lot different from using an outrigger or pendulum sensor, and that's probably what distinguished the Segway from Yamafuji's enough to justify a patent.
But that's just implementation (as is the transmission). The basic idea is still Yamafuji's.
If I were Kaman, I'd swallow my pride, admit that Yamafuji invented the thing first and buy his patent for a buck. This would prevent anyone else from implementing the Segway differently (for instance, with a pendulum, accelerometer, or mere tilt-switch) and trying to market it even in the US.
Rather, the Segway patent can't be for the parallel wheel bicycle since that's what Yamafuji's patent is (prior art). So Kaman better have that patent if he wants to protect himself from cheap Taiwanese/Chinese knock-offs that don't use such expensive things as transmission systems, solid-state gyroscopes and redundancy.
I figure that Yamafuji is doing the decent thing: he realizes he hasn't done anything to capitalize on the patent and Kaman may very well deserve it, so the way to save face for essentially giving away a potentially lucrative patent is to seek recognition from his peer.
From what I'm reading Yamafuji isn't all to upset.
He could of course sue Kamen and his company to the point where releasing the product isn't possible.
He just wants the nod, and he should get it. Kamen should at least give him two bucks to show that he appreciates Yamafuji's view of IP and patents.
Look at it from this side: he could be like Prodigy and try to shut everyone down that uses the hyperlink. eBay and the rest should take note from Yamafuji.
He seems to be someone who won't let progress be stopped because of a piece of paper sitting in the patent office.
Hell, why not have the two get together and work on another invention. Kamen on the surface seems to be a nice guy. Yamafuji seems to be even nicer.
Kamen: Get Yamafuji on your staff. Don't turn this into a Xerox-Apple-Microsoft battle.
Note:I'm sure if Kamen repackaged Yamafuji's invention and tried to market it as all his own - Yamafuji might not be so open about this deal
Get your Unix fortune now!
This is pretty silly.
1) User comes onto some IRC channel, and makes some foolish requests.
2) People on the channel give less then amazingly helpful answers.
3) User gets his back up because he doesn't undertand the unhelpful answers.
4) IRC channel people kick him out.
5) Ego brused, poor user writes longwinded complaint to project staff.
6) Project lead is far more juvenile than user; a pissing contest ensues.
short form: foolish and juvenile users should stay away from pissy and volatile developer retards.
-josh
Q: Why isn't the horse moving or whinnying or anything?
A: BECAUSE IT'S DEAD.
Does yellowTab really think anyone wants to pay some tens of dollars U.S. for an O/S that has far less application support than damn near everything else?
Or that they'd want it for free for use as anything other than a toy, like AtheOS?
Hmm. Maybe we could use it to power an Internet applia-- oh, wait, Be already went there. Buying into BeOS is like learning Latin: it's cool and all, but unless there is some killer app (which is doubtful), it's just cool, pretty perhaps, but not the optimal choice.
Come to think of it, I still don't get why the hell they don't just use gopher. The protocol is there, it's lightweight, and it's perfect for providing text-based menus to access text content.
Oh, wait. These are phone companies...
"NNTP doesn't support mass moderation or metamoderation."
:)
...which are completely broken and cause more problems than they solve.
"NNTP doesn't readily support banner advertisements that keep the server free."
i'll grant you this, but it wouldn't be too difficult to hack an article-ad-interruptor, where the first (or middle, or a random) bit of the article has a textual ad (with http link) inserted.
"NNTP servers often don't have very long retention of old discussion."
...which isn't a problem if you run your own.
"NNTP doesn't have server-side search."
yes, it has working client-side searching, rather than broken/incomplete server-side searching.
seriously, have you ever tried to find something you saw on slashdot, say, two months ago? what if it was a comment, not a story? it's virtually impossible. you can't even query for all the posts that user xyz has posted. i wanted to find an old (~1 year) post of mine - couldn't. if i search for "phexro" in "stories", i get some stories i submitted. if i search in "comments" i get nothing. if i search in "users", i get me, and the last 24 posts i made. if i search for some key words in my post, i get page after page after page of incorrect results. if i search for a specific phrase, i get the same thing.
i've been meaning to bitch about this... thanks for the chance to let me do it on-topic.
VAGINA