All religion is based on control. The money is a necessary expression of that control. So is the control of utterances and thought and the control of the exposure your primary and secondary sexual characteristics. Seen any good looking Taliban babes lately? Nor are you likely to...
But WTF is this doing on/. ?
While it might matter to some, its hardly news or while its news, it hardly matters.
In the Proximity to God Index today... and the Satinists are still slightly closer to God than the Scientologists. -Three Dead Trolls in a Baggie.
The internet is a vastly superior medium for content distribution. I sometimes like to listen to Blue Grass music.
There are exactly 0(zero, zip, nada, none, nicth, nul,) stations in my area that broadcast Blue Grass. Not popular enough. You'll never attack the advertizing revenue you need to pay yourself, pay the rent and pay for that license.
I log into http://www.OzarkMountainAirwaves.com/ and listen all I want. They "narrowcast" 24/7/52 over the net.
You can tell the power that be to screw their high price of entry (millions for a broadcast licence,) when you can use a T1 or T3 switch and you're in business shoving packets that YOU like all over the planet.
All these schemes are trivially defeated by a screw driver, a pair of wire cutters and some solder.
Your CD player won't let you record a copy? Will it let you listen? At the extreme delivery end, you open the speaker cabinet, splice onto the speaker wires, hook up some potentiometers for volume control and sample the stream at 44kHz.
Your VCR won't let you copy? Will it let you watch? Same crap. Instead of an audio card, you need a video card. Big deal.
I have never seen such a lame-ass ineffectual attempt to "protect" alleged intellectual property. DeCSS, DMCA. The media "powers that be" are trying to fight a "traditional" war in a wired world filler with a bazillion guerillas. Their customers are their enemy. It makes real hard to do business.
The media corporations are desperatly trying to retain their profitability as exemplified by the old adage "The power of the press (or any "broadcast" medium,) belongs to those who own one". Mostly its the power to advertize.
And they are trying to retain ownership over ephemera. There is nothing as incredibly valueless as last month's "Who Let The Dogs Out" or "All Your Bases Arew Belong To Us." Just ask the content creator how valuable it was.
The broadcasters don't want to pay the content creators and they don't want the consumer to know how badly he's been ripped off.
And as long as the content pimps control the means of production, content creators have to apply lips to orifice and bend over the L-shaped table for the opportunity to try to get something "out there."
Maybe... If you fit into their nice, bland, unimaginative, unoriginal categories. (Have you noticed that there are tens of thousands of musicians out there, enough to support instrument makers, magazines, live bands in venues all over the world, but Tower Records doesn't stock their CDs? That's because They didn't have this month's "sound." Because they didn't apply lips and won't bend over the table. And your ears go thirsty because you don't control the pipe.)
But on the internet, there are search engines and alternatives to all those voices crying out in the wilderness and charging dinars for the bland, safe, unimaginative din.
Eventually, we will win. If only because we'll run out of money ("No money? Get lost. This ain't no charity.") and we'll always be able to masturbate for free.
I'd hate to run Unix apps on Windows (like, yuck,) but anything that will let users see the power of open source is good.
That means of course that whatever software escapes down the LINE has to be visibly supported otherwise, there's no point.
A nice little app that get out to the Windows community, say a little calendar thingy, that would grow as people use it and provide feed back or code mods would be absolutely great and very visible feed back to hang Redmond with.
Where do you get your figures (everybody does not know that, yadda, yadda...)
Don't fall into the arrogant assumption of thinking one architecture is enough for everything. You wouldn't want just VGA graphics now would you?
The 370 architecture is alive and quite well, thank you, and processing payroll, accounting and other mundane crap that you can't live without.
But you wouldn't want to have to write a game for a 3279 terminal now would you. No more than you'd want to bank with somebody who'd balance your accounts on a PS2.
The PPC architecture is alive and well and the G4 is very useful for some types of processing and totally useless for other things but what it does, it does damn fast.
The x86 is as much of a dead-end as the z80. It will be utterly swamped by the requirements of voice processing and image recognition that a wired economy needs. Forget passwords. Just say your name and smile for the cam. (And that's only the first app. The one at the gate, so to speak. )
Linux is simply too effin' big for a single user, (cmon, its SUPPOSED to be tiny,) hand-held that doesn't need NFS, sendmail, Apache, and bazillion languages, (I can just imagine trying to configure x86 for a 160x160 screen,) yaddah, yaddah...
That's not to say that the core functionality wouldn't be good but realistically, we're looking at a badly forked core with interoperability ports, not the full blown Linux.
Might as well work with Palm to help it happen rather than trying to compete with them. (Competition: Doing it the hard, expensive way. Cooperation: Doing it the Linux way.)
To put some perspective on the problem, if people from the [censored] community spill all they know, they'll be jailed and possibly be shot.
But are the skills they have acquired working for that community useless and worthless?... Hardly. Just ask the people who had to pay for the repair of the flawed Hubble mirror. If somebody had thought to ask for an open anonymous review of the lens polishing parameters, the whole debacle might have been avoided.
The secret of, uh, pardon me, path to success is the ability to apply knowledge without revealing details about what was being worked on that required the acquisition of the knowledge.
Its possible to have non-competition clauses that restrict one from a particular application domain without its impeding with employment in a related but non-competing domain for a specified period of time.
In effect, if you work for A, you shouldn't go work for ~A to do the same thing for a while. Specially if you work in the [censored] community.
That doesn't mean that you can't apply the skills gained while working for A to solving the problems of B or C. The marketing has to be done by skill not domain knowledge.
Uh where did you get the line that M$ started anything about affordability? Linux and all the OpenSource stuff is FREE! Developped because somebody needed it and wasn't greedy with it.
Find me anything that M$ actually created that has not been an utter failure. Bob?
Pu-leez! M$ sees something and buys it outright (QDOS) or reverse-engineers it (Make it more like the Mac! -Gates) Before he acquired Express, there was MultiPlan, a VisiCalc clone. Want me to go on?
Gates is a pimp and a nasty bully one at that. Technology lets him have a bulding full of hos. But they're still hos.
Not the other way around. Its coming out to give M$ better XML capabilities.
And now that there's no competition its going to come out as slowly as M$ can get away with it.
Look at the history of the business... IBM sold OS 360 well into the eighties on 360s and 370 because they could. Why did they want to when they had a better OS (MVS) waiting in the wings?
Because it was pure gravy. Zero development cost and zero marketing costs. Just pure gravy.
Its not about you. Its never about you. Its about the bottom line.
I've always maintained that breaking up M$ is the dumbest thing to do.
M$ is and has always been a one trick pony. Their trick is see something that anyone else is doing and buy it outright or 'reverse engineer (can anyone say DMCA is a two edged sword?)' it and vanquish the competition under the elephantine weight of the leverage M$ has with its OS.
But they have proved completely incapable of competing fairly on the basis of product quality.
If you force them into competing fairly, they might be able to learn how to do it on other platforms and you've just metastacized the cancer of having to deal with an arrogant school yard bully onto the next generation of hardware.
Between the flat-lining of x86 sales, the competition with Linux and the arrival of the 64 bit hurdle onto the desktop, M$'s days are numbered (in surprizingly low numbers too, they have no assets beyond some real-estate,) as long as they effectively corrall themselves onto the x86.
Let M$ die with the x86 and it will merely have been an extremely expensive abberation and we can all get on with our lives.
If Sun can get 64 bits onto the desk top (they have the StarOffice suite for free,) the connectivity and reliability of Solaris and the horsepower of 64 bits at the low end will make M$ drop trou. It's all about TCO.
This is good news. Sun is positionning themselves to be the favored delivery platform for the next killer apps: Voice recognition and image interpretation. (the ears and eyes of the machine.) No more friggin' passwords. The machine will see that its you!
The Mac content-creators who have stayed loyal all these years aren't about to defect.
Solaris vs.OS X? Now there's a blood bath waiting to happen. Lets hope it doesn't.
Or maybe they are actually planning on collaborating with a competitor and joining forces so the content-servers and the content-creators can meet on M$'s desktop turf and drop da bomb.
The ISPs, wether the big boyz or the mom and pop shops (who have to go through the big boyz wire, cable or fibre,) are starting to count the number of packets they send to your IP address.
They don't need to do more than count and log. Hit the limit and you'll get a message saying you're cut off. I already have.
Got a 24kbps modem, you might never hit it. Got DSL, you will probably hit it. The more you surf, the faster you'll get cut off.
Belong to an active news group, retrieve a lot of files (a typical Smalltalk image is 100MB where I work, that's a lot of MP3s,) you could find yourself cut off from the world real fast.
Unless you pay (and pay [and pay {and pay}]) for plans with different limits you'll be sucking on a dry pipe.
To attract traffic you let search engines index your site.
You present snippets and precis of your content. It shouldn't cost too much. It will establish your copyright or ownership.
To break-even with your site, you charge a micropayment for any hit onto something useful on your site.
If they surfers aren't already using a micro payment service provider, you spawn links to services like BTarrray, et alia so your prospective customers can make their purchase.
Those who are interested enough to pay the ten-cents will get their info. Those who aren't won't have cost you an arm and a leg.
The whole point of having search engines is to get that dross outta my face. There would be no problem with search engines if manufacturers and content producers would make as much of an effort in indexing their stuff as they do cutting down on their expense.
The bandwidth we fought so hard to get (like my ADSL conection wasn't a PITA to get from Verison,) is being chewed up by contentless noise.
The reason TV sucks, the real reason, is that you can't offend the advertisers. So we get lame-ass wrappers as ad delivery vehicles.
TV's a parc. That crap in reverse because its being used as a suppository. People are packing your fudge trying to get you to remember their name when you buy anti-inflamatory cream.
The problem stems from the use of words to name things. Referee, eReferee, iReferee, eReferee, iReferee, oReferee.
Naming things is a HARD and expensive problem (see: Coca-Cola Co. & "Ttab," shortened to "Tab.")
However its made almost impossible by lawyers who, lacking common sense and speaking in gibberish, (did you know that the legal definition of "better" is "as good as"?) utterly throw the notion of language as a consually derived means of communication into a cocked hat and have turned it into a revenue producing source of obfustation.
That's why Prince went with TAFKSP and that logo as symbolically representing him. The lawyers couldn't get a handle on it.
That's also why the Canadian government gives all Amerindians band and individual numbers. Their names change according to the lives they have lived and what one may call him or her self may not be what others call him or her.
What next? Is someone going to argue that I can't buy a book and get the actual text? I should gouge out my eyes.
Is someone going to argue that the government, or anyone else for that matter, can hire software developpers to write whatever they need and that they can't then give it away?
Is someone going to argue that manufacturers should all have their own measurement scales. What's an inch for then, or a milimeter?
Is someone going to argue that the only "free" speech is found scribbled on bathroom walls.
Is someone going to shrink my world down to what-ever I can defend with my bare hands.
You want to see the result of this kind of abusive restrictive regime?
Look to India before Ghandi. Look to China before Mao. Look to every barbarian who ever terrorized a village and the sorry state the village was in when they were reduced to huddling in fear.
You want to know who's un-American?
It's the Facists who want to restrict anybody's ability to express themselves and share it and/or stomp on my ability to write software to suit my needs and pass it on.
Shakespeare was right: The first thing we do. Kill all the lawyers! This is the kind abjest stupidity that reduces common sense to a lost art and reduces people to slaves.
M$ will die by the law or the lower TCO that created them in the first place.
Slashdot Mirror
All religion is based on control. The money is a necessary expression of that control. So is the control of utterances and thought and the control of the exposure your primary and secondary sexual characteristics. Seen any good looking Taliban babes lately? Nor are you likely to...
/. ?
... and the Satinists are still slightly closer to God than the Scientologists. -Three Dead Trolls in a Baggie.
But WTF is this doing on
While it might matter to some, its hardly news or while its news, it hardly matters.
In the Proximity to God Index today
Disney's been supporting the Squeak! Smalltalk community (Squeak! is as open an OpenSource language as you can get!) for some time now.
If you want to see where you're IDE's heading, look at Squeak!
Someday everybody will develop software this way. Its so much faster, cheaper and better.
Oooo. A lawyer with some brains and some integrity?
:-)
Nah, can't be.
The internet is a vastly superior medium for content distribution. I sometimes like to listen to Blue Grass music.
There are exactly 0(zero, zip, nada, none, nicth, nul,) stations in my area that broadcast Blue Grass. Not popular enough. You'll never attack the advertizing revenue you need to pay yourself, pay the rent and pay for that license.
I log into http://www.OzarkMountainAirwaves.com/ and listen all I want. They "narrowcast" 24/7/52 over the net.
You can tell the power that be to screw their high price of entry (millions for a broadcast licence,) when you can use a T1 or T3 switch and you're in business shoving packets that YOU like all over the planet.
Freedom of choice!
All these schemes are trivially defeated by a screw driver, a pair of wire cutters and some solder.
Your CD player won't let you record a copy? Will it let you listen? At the extreme delivery end, you open the speaker cabinet, splice onto the speaker wires, hook up some potentiometers for volume control and sample the stream at 44kHz.
Your VCR won't let you copy? Will it let you watch? Same crap. Instead of an audio card, you need a video card. Big deal.
I have never seen such a lame-ass ineffectual attempt to "protect" alleged intellectual property. DeCSS, DMCA. The media "powers that be" are trying to fight a "traditional" war in a wired world filler with a bazillion guerillas. Their customers are their enemy. It makes real hard to do business.
The media corporations are desperatly trying to retain their profitability as exemplified by the old adage "The power of the press (or any "broadcast" medium,) belongs to those who own one". Mostly its the power to advertize.
And they are trying to retain ownership over ephemera. There is nothing as incredibly valueless as last month's "Who Let The Dogs Out" or "All Your Bases Arew Belong To Us." Just ask the content creator how valuable it was.
The broadcasters don't want to pay the content creators and they don't want the consumer to know how badly he's been ripped off.
And as long as the content pimps control the means of production, content creators have to apply lips to orifice and bend over the L-shaped table for the opportunity to try to get something "out there."
Maybe... If you fit into their nice, bland, unimaginative, unoriginal categories. (Have you noticed that there are tens of thousands of musicians out there, enough to support instrument makers, magazines, live bands in venues all over the world, but Tower Records doesn't stock their CDs? That's because They didn't have this month's "sound." Because they didn't apply lips and won't bend over the table. And your ears go thirsty because you don't control the pipe.)
But on the internet, there are search engines and alternatives to all those voices crying out in the wilderness and charging dinars for the bland, safe, unimaginative din.
Eventually, we will win. If only because we'll run out of money ("No money? Get lost. This ain't no charity.") and we'll always be able to masturbate for free.
I'd hate to run Unix apps on Windows (like, yuck,) but anything that will let users see the power of open source is good.
That means of course that whatever software escapes down the LINE has to be visibly supported otherwise, there's no point.
A nice little app that get out to the Windows community, say a little calendar thingy, that would grow as people use it and provide feed back or code mods would be absolutely great and very visible feed back to hang Redmond with.
Where do you get your figures (everybody does not know that, yadda, yadda...)
Don't fall into the arrogant assumption of thinking one architecture is enough for everything. You wouldn't want just VGA graphics now would you?
The 370 architecture is alive and quite well, thank you, and processing payroll, accounting and other mundane crap that you can't live without.
But you wouldn't want to have to write a game for a 3279 terminal now would you. No more than you'd want to bank with somebody who'd balance your accounts on a PS2.
The PPC architecture is alive and well and the G4 is very useful for some types of processing and totally useless for other things but what it does, it does damn fast.
The x86 is as much of a dead-end as the z80. It will be utterly swamped by the requirements of voice processing and image recognition that a wired economy needs. Forget passwords. Just say your name and smile for the cam. (And that's only the first app. The one at the gate, so to speak. )
Dubya has no more clue than his old man did in front of a super-market checkout.
What are you thinking of? That he'll RTFM? He's dyslexic dude. He can't.
Linux is simply too effin' big for a single user, (cmon, its SUPPOSED to be tiny,) hand-held that doesn't need NFS, sendmail, Apache, and bazillion languages, (I can just imagine trying to configure x86 for a 160x160 screen,) yaddah, yaddah...
That's not to say that the core functionality wouldn't be good but realistically, we're looking at a badly forked core with interoperability ports, not the full blown Linux.
Might as well work with Palm to help it happen rather than trying to compete with them. (Competition: Doing it the hard, expensive way. Cooperation: Doing it the Linux way.)
To put some perspective on the problem, if people from the [censored] community spill all they know, they'll be jailed and possibly be shot.
... Hardly. Just ask the people who had to pay for the repair of the flawed Hubble mirror. If somebody had thought to ask for an open anonymous review of the lens polishing parameters, the whole debacle might have been avoided.
But are the skills they have acquired working for that community useless and worthless?
The secret of, uh, pardon me, path to success is the ability to apply knowledge without revealing details about what was being worked on that required the acquisition of the knowledge.
Its possible to have non-competition clauses that restrict one from a particular application domain without its impeding with employment in a related but non-competing domain for a specified period of time.
In effect, if you work for A, you shouldn't go work for ~A to do the same thing for a while. Specially if you work in the [censored] community.
That doesn't mean that you can't apply the skills gained while working for A to solving the problems of B or C. The marketing has to be done by skill not domain knowledge.
Uh where did you get the line that M$ started anything about affordability? Linux and all the OpenSource stuff is FREE! Developped because somebody needed it and wasn't greedy with it.
Find me anything that M$ actually created that has not been an utter failure. Bob?
Pu-leez! M$ sees something and buys it outright (QDOS) or reverse-engineers it (Make it more like the Mac! -Gates) Before he acquired Express, there was MultiPlan, a VisiCalc clone. Want me to go on?
Gates is a pimp and a nasty bully one at that. Technology lets him have a bulding full of hos. But they're still hos.
Not the other way around. Its coming out to give M$ better XML capabilities.
.
And now that there's no competition its going to come out as slowly as M$ can get away with it.
Look at the history of the business... IBM sold OS 360 well into the eighties on 360s and 370 because they could. Why did they want to when they had a better OS (MVS) waiting in the wings?
Because it was pure gravy . Zero development cost and zero marketing costs. Just pure gravy
Its not about you. Its never about you. Its about the bottom line.
I've always maintained that breaking up M$ is the dumbest thing to do.
M$ is and has always been a one trick pony. Their trick is see something that anyone else is doing and buy it outright or 'reverse engineer (can anyone say DMCA is a two edged sword?)' it and vanquish the competition under the elephantine weight of the leverage M$ has with its OS.
But they have proved completely incapable of competing fairly on the basis of product quality.
If you force them into competing fairly, they might be able to learn how to do it on other platforms and you've just metastacized the cancer of having to deal with an arrogant school yard bully onto the next generation of hardware.
Between the flat-lining of x86 sales, the competition with Linux and the arrival of the 64 bit hurdle onto the desktop, M$'s days are numbered (in surprizingly low numbers too, they have no assets beyond some real-estate,) as long as they effectively corrall themselves onto the x86.
Let M$ die with the x86 and it will merely have been an extremely expensive abberation and we can all get on with our lives.
M$ has never been able to port NT off of the x86.
If Sun can get 64 bits onto the desk top (they have the StarOffice suite for free,) the connectivity and reliability of Solaris and the horsepower of 64 bits at the low end will make M$ drop trou . It's all about TCO.
This is good news. Sun is positionning themselves to be the favored delivery platform for the next killer apps: Voice recognition and image interpretation. (the ears and eyes of the machine.) No more friggin' passwords. The machine will see that its you!
The Mac content-creators who have stayed loyal all these years aren't about to defect.
This is an end-run against M$ Maginot line.
Solaris vs.OS X? Now there's a blood bath waiting to happen. Lets hope it doesn't.
Or maybe they are actually planning on collaborating with a competitor and joining forces so the content-servers and the content-creators can meet on M$'s desktop turf and drop da bomb.
The ISPs, wether the big boyz or the mom and pop shops (who have to go through the big boyz wire, cable or fibre,) are starting to count the number of packets they send to your IP address.
They don't need to do more than count and log. Hit the limit and you'll get a message saying you're cut off. I already have.
Got a 24kbps modem, you might never hit it. Got DSL, you will probably hit it. The more you surf, the faster you'll get cut off.
Belong to an active news group, retrieve a lot of files (a typical Smalltalk image is 100MB where I work, that's a lot of MP3s,) you could find yourself cut off from the world real fast.
Unless you pay (and pay [and pay {and pay}]) for plans with different limits you'll be sucking on a dry pipe.
Have any idea how much the average porn site rakes in in a year?
There's a lot of money out there to be grabbed at a nickel a shot (pardon the pun.)
To attract traffic you let search engines index your site.
You present snippets and precis of your content. It shouldn't cost too much. It will establish your copyright or ownership.
To break-even with your site, you charge a micropayment for any hit onto something useful on your site.
If they surfers aren't already using a micro payment service provider, you spawn links to services like BTarrray, et alia so your prospective customers can make their purchase.
Those who are interested enough to pay the ten-cents will get their info. Those who aren't won't have cost you an arm and a leg.
Sounds reasonable to me.
The whole point of having search engines is to get that dross outta my face. There would be no problem with search engines if manufacturers and content producers would make as much of an effort in indexing their stuff as they do cutting down on their expense.
The bandwidth we fought so hard to get (like my ADSL conection wasn't a PITA to get from Verison,) is being chewed up by contentless noise.
The reason TV sucks, the real reason, is that you can't offend the advertisers. So we get lame-ass wrappers as ad delivery vehicles.
TV's a parc. That crap in reverse because its being used as a suppository. People are packing your fudge trying to get you to remember their name when you buy anti-inflamatory cream.
Would it be that surprising to find Windows soon available "for non-commericial use"?
Yes!
Big deal/ If they don't make money, they go the way of the z80.
The problem stems from the use of words to name things. Referee, eReferee, iReferee, eReferee, iReferee, oReferee.
Naming things is a HARD and expensive problem (see: Coca-Cola Co. & "Ttab," shortened to "Tab.")
However its made almost impossible by lawyers who, lacking common sense and speaking in gibberish, (did you know that the legal definition of "better" is "as good as"?) utterly throw the notion of language as a consually derived means of communication into a cocked hat and have turned it into a revenue producing source of obfustation.
That's why Prince went with TAFKSP and that logo as symbolically representing him. The lawyers couldn't get a handle on it.
That's also why the Canadian government gives all Amerindians band and individual numbers. Their names change according to the lives they have lived and what one may call him or her self may not be what others call him or her.
This is devolution. What a couple of morons. Call the damn thing Fred and fuck the lawyers.
M$ will die by the lower TCO that created tthem in the first place.
What next? Is someone going to argue that I can't buy a book and get the actual text? I should gouge out my eyes.
Is someone going to argue that the government, or anyone else for that matter, can hire software developpers to write whatever they need and that they can't then give it away?
Is someone going to argue that manufacturers should all have their own measurement scales. What's an inch for then, or a milimeter?
Is someone going to argue that the only "free" speech is found scribbled on bathroom walls.
Is someone going to shrink my world down to what-ever I can defend with my bare hands.
You want to see the result of this kind of abusive restrictive regime?
Look to India before Ghandi. Look to China before Mao. Look to every barbarian who ever terrorized a village and the sorry state the village was in when they were reduced to huddling in fear.
You want to know who's un-American?
It's the Facists who want to restrict anybody's ability to express themselves and share it and/or stomp on my ability to write software to suit my needs and pass it on.
Shakespeare was right: The first thing we do. Kill all the lawyers! This is the kind abjest stupidity that reduces common sense to a lost art and reduces people to slaves.
M$ will die by the law or the lower TCO that created them in the first place.