I haven't run any numbers on this myself, but that fellow's arguments look sensible. Wholesale isn't taxed anywhere in the U.S., the value of the transactions which are taxable will certainly fall if a tax is imposed, and so on. I think his basic point is sound: attempts to tax e-commerce will fail, and do far more harm than good in the process.
Another poster, above, pointed out the obvious: the solution is to eliminate sales taxes on the local merchants,too! That levels the playing field in a sane fashion. This is a solution that both ends of the political spectrum should like. Liberals are supposed to be against the sales tax because it's regressive. Conservatives are supposed to be against it because it puts a disproportionate burden on small business, and because it is economically inefficient. We need to make it clear to all who will listen that this is an opportunity to get rid of sales taxes everywhere. How to replace the revenue? Let each state figure that out for themselves. At least one will probably come up with a good idea.
A brief quote from the link above: The report mentions that one of the possible reasons is because of the implementation of Sony's unique encryption technology, called Magic Gate, onto the PS2 memory card. This is the first time a game console has been given such prohibition,... I think this gets a couple of points across:
Sony is very serious about copy protection, as befits their status as big-shot members of RIAA;
Sony is very serious about maintaining their marketing plan, with different introduction dates, and probably different prices, for different regions. Again, this is like the region coding in the DVD's.
It seems that the reason that this is cheap is that Sony plans to make their profit on the consumables, such as games, internet access, and so on. They haven't magically made the hardware cheaper, I suspect; they're willing to sell this very restrictive hardware at a loss so that they'll have you over a barrel. It's a pity, really, since this seems to be a really nifty little thing, which could make a great successor to the spirit of the old Commodore 64.
I can see it now! It'll be right up there with ascii quake, for practicality and popularity. Seriously, could you use the infrared ports on the palms to network and let two play a game?
I am glad to hear the Mr. Bezos has his heart in the right place, more or less. I think I agree with the tone of Mr. O'Reilly's opinions, if not always with their exact form.
One comment I have after reading the account of this conversation is that Amazon's survival is far more important to Mr. Bezos than to the rest of us. As we keep hearing, the barriers to entry are very low, and we can count on seeing zero economic profit in this business. That's the best outcome we can hope for in any event. That also suggests that Amazon stock is way over-priced!
Now a comment about the patent system. The U.S. patent system is intended to encourage innovation by letting folks earn monopoly rents from their innovations, for a reasonable period of time. Reasonable, I think, should be defined roughly as: "long enough to make it worth while to develop the idea". I think it's obvious that for an idea like using a bit-wise operation to change lower-case to capital letters, the cost of developing the idea is pretty low. I came up with this one, and was rather proud of myself, until I learned that every programmer I talked to about it had dreamed it up too (I'm not too far past the "hello, world" stage myself). A 15 minute patent would have been about right... that is, no socially worthwhile purpose could have been served by patents on this sort of thing. Many of the software patents are on ideas obvious enough that no-one bothers to publish them; anyone faced with the same problem gets the same solution.
I would suggest that for someone who develops a rocket ship ( there is at least one group which has made a successful test flight! See the back issues of Analog Sciencefiction/fact, they've nothing I can link to.), or who is developing an improved method of producing steel, or a new drug, there is a much higher cost to innovate, and patents on truely new ideas would have to run for some years, in order to have any significant affect on innovation.
My point is that a "one-size-fits-all-inventions" patent system is proving itself to be a very bad idea! Different sorts of inventions need different durations of government-granted monopoly, and for many innovations which have very low cost, such as software, it seems possible that no monopoly period at all is the socially optimal solution.
Why should some ideas not be patentable? I think that Mr. O'Reilly's article puts the idea in a nutshell (...hey, that's a really neat phrase... "in a nutshell"... I should patent it!): If Amazon could only defend itself by innovation, they would have to keep on finding newer and better ways to serve their customers. Since they have gone down this blind alley of paying lawyers rather than programmers and marketers, innovation will slow. Resources are being switched from productive work to nonproductive lawsuits. This will be true in any industry in which the cost of innovation is low, and I suspect this category will be expanding for the immediate future at least.
I suggest that we need to overhaul our patent law to take into account both the degree of obviousness-after-the-fact and the cost of innovation. Patent protection should run a long time for innovations which could only come through the expenditure of a great deal of resources. I think that new drugs probably fall into that category. As above, patents for "innovation" which take little or no resources should be disallowed. An innovation which would be obvious to anyone faced with the same problem should probably not be patentable, either. Why should we reward anyone for being the first one stop his work and file a patent application? This sort of innovation will probably fall into the "little-or-no-resources-required" category, anyway.
We must remember the original intent of patent law: it's not intended to enrich inventors, it's intended to enrich all of us by encouraging inventors. In the cases where no encouragement is needed, enriching the inventors makes our society worse off.
In the mean time, the idea of a non-profit corporation to hold and NOT use defensive patents is a really good stopgap!
I agree completely. However, in the article, they are comparing within an archeticture! Within the alpha architecture, to be specific. They reported the trade-off between CPU spped and number of CPUs. It seems to me that this is about the only legitimate use of MHz as an indicator of speed.
To continue your rant, if CPU speed mattered, a cheap wintel box with a cyrix at 233MHz would whomp the pants off an origin with a 150MHz R10000 CPU. I don't think so. You might be able to find something that would run faster on the cyrix... but I think that pretty much anything involving floating point wouldn't fall into that category. Of all the many things which determine a systems speed, MHz may be the easiest to understand, and the least important. Perfect for marketing purposes!
There was a big discussion of this under the "banning export of beowolf" heading a while back. The discussion, in a nutshell (hey, neat phrase... I should patent/trademark it!) pointed out that for problems which don't parallelize well, beowolfs won't do the job. One poster mentioned some problems from astrophysics, as examples which involve a LOT of interprocess communication, relative tot he number crunching. If you need to be able to handle large quantities of data, the PC architecture begins to fall down. If you need to sequentially do the same operations on every bit of that data, you need something fast and vectorized, with far better busses than PCI...
Then there's the issue of reliability. In a discussion on big iron several days ago, it was pointed out that the big expensive equipment (mainframes, in that context) is made to far higher standards than the PC's. For the heavies, cost is no object. For the PC's, cost is the only object. There's only a one year warrenty, and if the manufacturer has to replace a few, who cares? It just means junior can't play his games for a few days.
My point is that there are still things that we just can't do with PC's, not even with the nice four-way, crossbar-connected smp alpha from Microway that I've been drooling over. (It's only $13,000)
I never compile if there's an RPM. I like keeping track of what's on the system through the package manager, you see. I used a binary on Mandrake 6.0 and 6.1 without any problems. Another, similar program is Scilab, from someplace in France. They have some of the features that Octave is lacking, and lack a few that Octave has. Scilab is NOT gpl, unfortunately, so we should concentrate any improvement efforts on Octave, I suppose.
What we are really hurting for is a symbolic math package, as that first fellow said. There seem to be several small efforts out there, none of which amount ot anything yet. Mupad seems to be very much NOT GPL. They have now a corporate sponsor,and may get less open in the future.
The unspoken assumption in several of these posts seems to be that taxes are a good thing, and there's no reason to keep the government from taking its share of the net, too. A better idea would be to level the playing field by eliminating all sales taxes, off-line and on.
Yes, I realize that some little bit of government will always be necessary, but that little bit that performs the legitimate functions of a government is pretty cheap. A government should enforce our property rights, and nothing more. That includes most of criminal law, and specifically excludes "income redistribution", AKA theft.
Even the socialists among you should be able to see flaws in the sales tax idea: it's regressive, and socialists are supposed to be against that sort of tax. It is inefficient; ask any economist. It causes underproduction and loss of welfare (in the economic sense of the word). Eliminating sales taxes would force the governments to collect the taxes more directly from the people. Yes, that's good. Then folks will see more clearly how deeply the government is gouging them.
I think that the tax-free status of the net is a great chance for all of us who don't like big government at any level to push for the elimination of sales taxes in general, so that the brick-and-mortar guys can keep up, and so we can keep government in check just a little better.
You don't really thiink that buddy bill would put anything critical on Win-anything, do you? He knows better! He's been selling that crap, not buying it, and he's too smart to believe his own lies^H^H^H^H marketing. I'll bet that back when DOS1.0 came out, they were using CPM86 in house. It sucked a good deal less, and I always thought that wordstar ran better on CPM.
Obviously. And, as I pointed out above, the cheap old stuff in the classified ads works just fine. Restricting these clusters would be impossible. There is an interesting article out there about a fellow in Taiwan who put together a Beowolf for Academica Sinica. He is using it to replace some older SGI's. He said that one strong point of the beowolf idea is that he was no longer dependent on the US for parts. Saves lots of bucks, and sppeds things up immeasurably: no more waiting months for SGI parts to ship, clear customs, and so on.
The point is, this whole idea seems trivial nonsense. That won't stop the government from trying, of course, if there is some sort of political gain in it.
Lets see: forbid export of NIC's, old 486 boxes, (ESPECIALLY if stripped down), cabeling, linux...
Yep, that should keep the cat in the bag. It worked for cryptography, after all. Them furriners don't have kryptography, 'cause of our export controls.
First, the report tells us that the Government has been doing commercial espionage for years. "The Government makes the laws", is not the same as "the government obeys the laws". What does their treatment of their contractors have to do with it? The cops won't let you steal donuts or weasle out of traffic tickets, but they do it all the time. This commercial espionage stuff is common knowlege in Europe. I'm not saying it's true, but rather that the average guy in Europe has heard about it often enough, from respectable enough sources, that it's yet another reason why we Americans are unpopular overseas.
Now, about the Government reading your mail: by that logic, you wouldn't mind if I read it, too, would you? I couldn't legally use it (in any way that you could find out about). So why should you mind? You shouldn't be worried that I would make some illegal use of your personal information. After all, I'm just as reliable as the guys who get hired by the Government! Maybe more so; they usually aren't held personally liable for their illegal acts, while I would be.
I agree that the Government is more interested in terrorists than the likes of you or me. But you should remember that when the terrorists are having a holiday, they've got to watch somebody! More to the point, what if you are politically active? What if somebody with connections (or enough bucks to rent Clinton for an evening) decides he wants to screw you up? Sound ridiculous? How about that Norwegian kid who's getting pushed around by the movie industry? What about an environmental activist who really embarrases a big corporation (the movie "Silkwood" claimed to be based on a true story)? I guess I've made my point: you don't have to think you're important to be made an example of.
Look who it was delivered to(and presumably paid for it): the EU Parliment. It's only natural that the author adopted their view point. Why am I indignant about Echelon? Those scumbags in Washington are hiding behind our good names, so to speak. We are associated with the evil they do.
This government in Washington is a terrible embarrasment to America, I think. I suppose it's better than most, but that's not the appropriate comparison. Most other governments exist explicitly to screw the governed for the benefit of the governors (e.g., think about the history of the English government). That's not supposed to be how it works here.
The author points out, clearly and up front where it belongs, that this was NOT a randomized sample. That means that he only heard from guys eager to talk about this. What's the point? Don't take his results as being typical of gamers. They aren't. They are typical of gamers who do this and like to talk about it. So, still interesting, and a fairly respectable piece, but recall that little limitation that the author warned you about.
I think that the most interesting part is in the technical annexe. First, he tells us that it seems that they can't yet do much with speech, but they can pick out your voice to record. Second, he tells us that the NSA (and probably other country's agencys, as well) have managed to subvert most closed-source software. He mentions CryptoAG, a Swiss company, and Lotus Notes. What can we learn from this? Yes, open source does matter!
I think this also points up the reason the government has fought PGP so fiercely. Even if they subvert the author, they can't do anything very obvious or easy, and you or I are quite likely to break anything they hide in the code, while rooting about in it.
Perhaps the most important question now is: what do the new crypto rules imply, in light of this? If we can really just give the no-goods at NSA a heads-up and export freely, does this mean that they're giving up? Or could it be that they can do an end run around the crypto if they have to (as in Tempest, bounce a laser off your window, intimidate your neighbor, et cetera)? Perhaps the best answer is: don't do anything bad, and encrypt everything, just in case.
First, this is really no different than what they've been doing for the miserysoft products since DOS 1.0: the manufacturer puts his name on the manuals, and tweaks it here and there, in ways that don't break compatibility.
Second, I get the impression that they've just taken a standard distro (someone above said RedHat) and put in a few bells and whistles which will work with their hardware. If that's true, there shouldn't be any fragmentation problems. It'll be what a knowledgable user would set up if he started with the base distro and added a few linux specific goodies from the manufacturers web-site. But this approach is probably better for PR.
Third, that mascot might look a bit (ABIT?) better in 3D. Or not... I'm not so sure whether I like it.
Fourth, this seems overall to ba a good thing. It will be that much easier for someone to make linux work on their hardware. I've never had any problems that way, but my experience has been very limited. This tells us that ABIT will be considering Linux when they design their boards. No point, now, to make a choice that makes it harder to run linux.
Gee, I thought that the author meant that the Norwegians had decided to read this book instead of persecuting that poor young fool. Oh, well.
Seriously, this is a pretty bad mistake, certainly not a typo. Is there someplace (on the web, that is) we can direct these clueless folks for vocabulary and grammer help? If so, might be worth putting a link to it in a signature line. I suppose I'd have to figure out how. I suppose it would be worth while.
There are problems there that a spellchecker won't catch. "due" != "do" but both are spelled correctly. If we fuzz over the distinctions between words, we reduce the utility of our language.
To give an example which might get across, how about if I start using "*=" when I mean "+=" ? I can use a macro to make the compiler take it... so why not? One reason 'why not' is that this effectively removes an operator from the language. It's not one that I'd really miss much, but imagine what would happen when someone tried to read my code. If I were to get used to this kind of substitution, I certainly couldn't read your code.
Back to the language we're using here, English, there are reasons for all these silly little rules about spelling and punctuation and using the correct homophone and not letting sentences run on and on and on... Those reasons all center around communicating effectively. If you can learn to make a computer take your code, you can learn to communicate in writing with another human being.
Oh, I guess there is one more reason; consideration for others. I hope I haven't made any errors in this. I haven't found the spellcheck button in Netscape yet (haven't looked, really).
I'm in a big university. Most of the secretaries in the Stat and Math departments are using Tex, on unix terminals. They can't help me much with my LaTeX questions... they just use PlainTex. My point is that these guys were hired off the street, and not chosen for their coding prowess. They are secretaries! And they do just fine with AIX and Tex and Pine, which don't seem any easier to use than the same programs on Linux.
Our secretaries have learned this stuff, and are very productive, and don't want to use Word etc. They do have that option, too; their unix terminals are PC's! Don't say that "Unix is hard to learn", say that folks haven't learned it yet. I think that it may well be easier to bring someone up to a given level of productivity on a CLI.
I first installed linux about 6 months back. It was my first experience ever as root on a *nix box, though I had been a user on them, long in the past. It took me three tries to get RedHat 6.0 to install. The problem was that I didn't realize (till the third try) that one partition must be named/. After that, everything except the sound was automatic. The sound required me to find and run sndconfig, not a big problem, since I found instructions in a HOWTO.
The reason that I decided to try linux was that I had to reinstall Win95 on my laptop (Dell Inspiron 3200) after the Win98 upgrade supplied by Dell caused repeated problems. That was a nightmare! I spent hours on the phone with Dell technical support, and finally was so disgusted that I decided going back to a command line would be better than windows. So I tried linux, and everything just worked. I have installed linux on my laptop twice, now, and a couple times on other machines, and it's smooth, fast and painless (knock on wood). It still takes me over two hours to reinstall windows on my laptop, counting the time it takes to upgrade all the many drivers by hand that linux takes care of automatically. That sucks, because I seem to need to reinstall two or three times a year, since the registry gets corrupted (I think... you never quite know what's up).
To add insult to injury, I'll probably never be able to run any of the newer windows on my laptop, since Dell doesn't provide drivers which will run with them. And Miserysoft certainly doesn't! Oh, there are drivers on the Microslime installation CD, all right... but my screen is 800x600x16 colors, and it goes downhill from there. Of course, starting with DOS 1.1, which I remember well, Microstuff's software has gotten bigger, slower and flakier. Not being able to "upgrade" may be a blessing.
We have certainly had very different experiences. My laptop was about a year old when I installed linux, so that might explain a lot. I found out afterwards that RedHat6.0 was the first to include support for my neomagic graphics, so I got lucky on that one. If I had tried it a few months earlier, I might have gotten a very different first impression. I have heard many horror stories about X, but haven't experienced any problems myself. The neomagic on the laptop, and the ATI card at home both were set up just fine, automatically, during the install.
I'm not sure that I could install linux to run on a Jaz either, but did you look at the linux-on-a-zip HOWTO? I think that they must have covered some of the same issues you faced.
I agree with you. That's why I was thinking in terms of something like a removable media hard drive, such as a cheap Jazz or Syquest. Whether it's magnetic or optical or a screwy hybrid, if it's cheap it will break their stranglehold. A big outfit like IBM or Fujitsu could afford to sink some bucks into R&D, and would be hard to push around. Companies like those two have some pretty good patent strength, too, and very deep pockets.
Yes, the studios and record companies will fight it, but how do you fight harddrives? It will be pretty tough to paint Ma and Pa as evil hacker pirates for buying one of these hypothetical "giant floppies" to store movies of the grandkids. I really think that once we have the media, the content will follow. Why do we put music on CD's? Because storing an hour of music on magnetic media in that data format would cost too much, not because there is something magic about optical media.
Think about the sort of content that will become possible in the near future. As 64bit machines become affordable and common, animation via ray-tracing will become possible for the really dedicated hobbyist. Eventually artists will ba able to do anime as easily as comic books. An amateur theatre company with a good graphics editor will be able to mix their performances with special effects, as in Who Framed Roger Rabbit. I think that once these giant floppies become cheap enough, there will be plenty of content on them, and the big studios will become a lot less relevant.
The hardware doesn't have to be free, just a lot better (cheaper) than what's out there now. Iomega is keeping the price of its disks pretty high, but look at the 120M competitor. They're downright cheap. Similarly for the Jaz, there are several competitors out there which are a lot cheaper. As good bandwidth gets more common, we won't need or want to be able to carry these disks to someone else's computer, so the compatibility argument which is keeping Zip prices high will start to wear thin.
Ultimatly, any technology will go commodity, and wind up cheap. If that never happens to Zip, it will be because Iomega stupidly allowed themselves to be superceded by a cheaper alternative.
Those Orbs look neat. I guess that my point was that the whole DVD thing has gotten so fouled up that it's likely to go the way of Betamax, and even if not, whatever emerges will be full of artificial problems, so that we will pay the cost of maintaining Jack Valenti's monoply rents, in inconvenience and cash. That's why I'm talking about something like a harddrive, rather than like a CD.
What I was calling for was giving up on the many DVD standards entirely, and moving on to something without the artificial limits. That would be rough on the people who have bought them, but given the current legal climate, I fear that's where we'll have to go to get what DVD originally promised.
What I would really like to see is hobby directors putting movies on the web, small theatre groups putting their performances on the web, and so on, in the same format the big boys use. The current mess seems to rule that out. If we had an open standard which worked pretty well, the big boys could become irrelevant, just as cable and satelite made the big three networks shrink in importance.
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I haven't run any numbers on this myself, but that fellow's arguments look sensible. Wholesale isn't taxed anywhere in the U.S., the value of the transactions which are taxable will certainly fall if a tax is imposed, and so on. I think his basic point is sound: attempts to tax e-commerce will fail, and do far more harm than good in the process.
Another poster, above, pointed out the obvious: the solution is to eliminate sales taxes on the local merchants,too! That levels the playing field in a sane fashion. This is a solution that both ends of the political spectrum should like. Liberals are supposed to be against the sales tax because it's regressive. Conservatives are supposed to be against it because it puts a disproportionate burden on small business, and because it is economically inefficient. We need to make it clear to all who will listen that this is an opportunity to get rid of sales taxes everywhere. How to replace the revenue? Let each state figure that out for themselves. At least one will probably come up with a good idea.
The report mentions that one of the possible reasons is because of the implementation of Sony's unique encryption technology, called Magic Gate, onto the PS2 memory card. This is the first time a game console has been given such prohibition,...
I think this gets a couple of points across:
Sony is very serious about copy protection, as befits their status as big-shot members of RIAA;
Sony is very serious about maintaining their marketing plan, with different introduction dates, and probably different prices, for different regions. Again, this is like the region coding in the DVD's.
It seems that the reason that this is cheap is that Sony plans to make their profit on the consumables, such as games, internet access, and so on. They haven't magically made the hardware cheaper, I suspect; they're willing to sell this very restrictive hardware at a loss so that they'll have you over a barrel. It's a pity, really, since this seems to be a really nifty little thing, which could make a great successor to the spirit of the old Commodore 64.
I can see it now! It'll be right up there with ascii quake, for practicality and popularity. Seriously, could you use the infrared ports on the palms to network and let two play a game?
I am glad to hear the Mr. Bezos has his heart in the right place, more or less. I think I agree with the tone of Mr. O'Reilly's opinions, if not always with their exact form.
One comment I have after reading the account of this conversation is that Amazon's survival is far more important to Mr. Bezos than to the rest of us. As we keep hearing, the barriers to entry are very low, and we can count on seeing zero economic profit in this business. That's the best outcome we can hope for in any event. That also suggests that Amazon stock is way over-priced!
Now a comment about the patent system. The U.S. patent system is intended to encourage innovation by letting folks earn monopoly rents from their innovations, for a reasonable period of time. Reasonable, I think, should be defined roughly as: "long enough to make it worth while to develop the idea". I think it's obvious that for an idea like using a bit-wise operation to change lower-case to capital letters, the cost of developing the idea is pretty low. I came up with this one, and was rather proud of myself, until I learned that every programmer I talked to about it had dreamed it up too (I'm not too far past the "hello, world" stage myself). A 15 minute patent would have been about right... that is, no socially worthwhile purpose could have been served by patents on this sort of thing. Many of the software patents are on ideas obvious enough that no-one bothers to publish them; anyone faced with the same problem gets the same solution.
I would suggest that for someone who develops a rocket ship ( there is at least one group which has made a successful test flight! See the back issues of Analog Sciencefiction/fact, they've nothing I can link to.), or who is developing an improved method of producing steel, or a new drug, there is a much higher cost to innovate, and patents on truely new ideas would have to run for some years, in order to have any significant affect on innovation.
My point is that a "one-size-fits-all-inventions" patent system is proving itself to be a very bad idea! Different sorts of inventions need different durations of government-granted monopoly, and for many innovations which have very low cost, such as software, it seems possible that no monopoly period at all is the socially optimal solution.
Why should some ideas not be patentable? I think that Mr. O'Reilly's article puts the idea in a nutshell (...hey, that's a really neat phrase... "in a nutshell"... I should patent it!): If Amazon could only defend itself by innovation, they would have to keep on finding newer and better ways to serve their customers. Since they have gone down this blind alley of paying lawyers rather than programmers and marketers, innovation will slow. Resources are being switched from productive work to nonproductive lawsuits. This will be true in any industry in which the cost of innovation is low, and I suspect this category will be expanding for the immediate future at least.
I suggest that we need to overhaul our patent law to take into account both the degree of obviousness-after-the-fact and the cost of innovation. Patent protection should run a long time for innovations which could only come through the expenditure of a great deal of resources. I think that new drugs probably fall into that category. As above, patents for "innovation" which take little or no resources should be disallowed. An innovation which would be obvious to anyone faced with the same problem should probably not be patentable, either. Why should we reward anyone for being the first one stop his work and file a patent application? This sort of innovation will probably fall into the "little-or-no-resources-required" category, anyway.
We must remember the original intent of patent law: it's not intended to enrich inventors, it's intended to enrich all of us by encouraging inventors. In the cases where no encouragement is needed, enriching the inventors makes our society worse off.
In the mean time, the idea of a non-profit corporation to hold and NOT use defensive patents is a really good stopgap!
To continue your rant, if CPU speed mattered, a cheap wintel box with a cyrix at 233MHz would whomp the pants off an origin with a 150MHz R10000 CPU. I don't think so. You might be able to find something that would run faster on the cyrix... but I think that pretty much anything involving floating point wouldn't fall into that category. Of all the many things which determine a systems speed, MHz may be the easiest to understand, and the least important. Perfect for marketing purposes!
Then there's the issue of reliability. In a discussion on big iron several days ago, it was pointed out that the big expensive equipment (mainframes, in that context) is made to far higher standards than the PC's. For the heavies, cost is no object. For the PC's, cost is the only object. There's only a one year warrenty, and if the manufacturer has to replace a few, who cares? It just means junior can't play his games for a few days.
My point is that there are still things that we just can't do with PC's, not even with the nice four-way, crossbar-connected smp alpha from Microway that I've been drooling over. (It's only $13,000)
What we are really hurting for is a symbolic math package, as that first fellow said. There seem to be several small efforts out there, none of which amount ot anything yet. Mupad seems to be very much NOT GPL. They have now a corporate sponsor,and may get less open in the future.
Moderators, what were you thinking? It may be informative, but it's wrong. If you don't know, don't touch.
Yes, I realize that some little bit of government will always be necessary, but that little bit that performs the legitimate functions of a government is pretty cheap. A government should enforce our property rights, and nothing more. That includes most of criminal law, and specifically excludes "income redistribution", AKA theft.
Even the socialists among you should be able to see flaws in the sales tax idea: it's regressive, and socialists are supposed to be against that sort of tax. It is inefficient; ask any economist. It causes underproduction and loss of welfare (in the economic sense of the word). Eliminating sales taxes would force the governments to collect the taxes more directly from the people. Yes, that's good. Then folks will see more clearly how deeply the government is gouging them.
I think that the tax-free status of the net is a great chance for all of us who don't like big government at any level to push for the elimination of sales taxes in general, so that the brick-and-mortar guys can keep up, and so we can keep government in check just a little better.
You don't really thiink that buddy bill would put anything critical on Win-anything, do you? He knows better! He's been selling that crap, not buying it, and he's too smart to believe his own lies^H^H^H^H marketing.
I'll bet that back when DOS1.0 came out, they were using CPM86 in house. It sucked a good deal less, and I always thought that wordstar ran better on CPM.
The point is, this whole idea seems trivial nonsense. That won't stop the government from trying, of course, if there is some sort of political gain in it.
Yep, that should keep the cat in the bag. It worked for cryptography, after all. Them furriners don't have kryptography, 'cause of our export controls.
Oh, well.....
Now, about the Government reading your mail: by that logic, you wouldn't mind if I read it, too, would you? I couldn't legally use it (in any way that you could find out about). So why should you mind? You shouldn't be worried that I would make some illegal use of your personal information. After all, I'm just as reliable as the guys who get hired by the Government! Maybe more so; they usually aren't held personally liable for their illegal acts, while I would be.
I agree that the Government is more interested in terrorists than the likes of you or me. But you should remember that when the terrorists are having a holiday, they've got to watch somebody! More to the point, what if you are politically active? What if somebody with connections (or enough bucks to rent Clinton for an evening) decides he wants to screw you up? Sound ridiculous? How about that Norwegian kid who's getting pushed around by the movie industry? What about an environmental activist who really embarrases a big corporation (the movie "Silkwood" claimed to be based on a true story)? I guess I've made my point: you don't have to think you're important to be made an example of.
This government in Washington is a terrible embarrasment to America, I think. I suppose it's better than most, but that's not the appropriate comparison. Most other governments exist explicitly to screw the governed for the benefit of the governors (e.g., think about the history of the English government). That's not supposed to be how it works here.
I think that's covered in there, and after this report, you can bet they all know about it!
The author points out, clearly and up front where it belongs, that this was NOT a randomized sample. That means that he only heard from guys eager to talk about this.
What's the point? Don't take his results as being typical of gamers. They aren't. They are typical of gamers who do this and like to talk about it. So, still interesting, and a fairly respectable piece, but recall that little limitation that the author warned you about.
I think this also points up the reason the government has fought PGP so fiercely. Even if they subvert the author, they can't do anything very obvious or easy, and you or I are quite likely to break anything they hide in the code, while rooting about in it.
Perhaps the most important question now is: what do the new crypto rules imply, in light of this? If we can really just give the no-goods at NSA a heads-up and export freely, does this mean that they're giving up? Or could it be that they can do an end run around the crypto if they have to (as in Tempest, bounce a laser off your window, intimidate your neighbor, et cetera)? Perhaps the best answer is: don't do anything bad, and encrypt everything, just in case.
First, this is really no different than what they've been doing for the miserysoft products since DOS 1.0: the manufacturer puts his name on the manuals, and tweaks it here and there, in ways that don't break compatibility.
Second, I get the impression that they've just taken a standard distro (someone above said RedHat) and put in a few bells and whistles which will work with their hardware. If that's true, there shouldn't be any fragmentation problems. It'll be what a knowledgable user would set up if he started with the base distro and added a few linux specific goodies from the manufacturers web-site. But this approach is probably better for PR.
Third, that mascot might look a bit (ABIT?) better in 3D. Or not... I'm not so sure whether I like it.
Fourth, this seems overall to ba a good thing. It will be that much easier for someone to make linux work on their hardware. I've never had any problems that way, but my experience has been very limited. This tells us that ABIT will be considering Linux when they design their boards. No point, now, to make a choice that makes it harder to run linux.
Gee, I thought that the author meant that the Norwegians had decided to read this book instead of persecuting that poor young fool. Oh, well.
Seriously, this is a pretty bad mistake, certainly not a typo. Is there someplace (on the web, that is) we can direct these clueless folks for vocabulary and grammer help? If so, might be worth putting a link to it in a signature line. I suppose I'd have to figure out how. I suppose it would be worth while.
To give an example which might get across, how about if I start using "*=" when I mean "+=" ? I can use a macro to make the compiler take it... so why not?
One reason 'why not' is that this effectively removes an operator from the language. It's not one that I'd really miss much, but imagine what would happen when someone tried to read my code. If I were to get used to this kind of substitution, I certainly couldn't read your code.
Back to the language we're using here, English, there are reasons for all these silly little rules about spelling and punctuation and using the correct homophone and not letting sentences run on and on and on...
Those reasons all center around communicating effectively. If you can learn to make a computer take your code, you can learn to communicate in writing with another human being.
Oh, I guess there is one more reason; consideration for others. I hope I haven't made any errors in this. I haven't found the spellcheck button in Netscape yet (haven't looked, really).
Nels
Our secretaries have learned this stuff, and are very productive, and don't want to use Word etc. They do have that option, too; their unix terminals are PC's! Don't say that "Unix is hard to learn", say that folks haven't learned it yet. I think that it may well be easier to bring someone up to a given level of productivity on a CLI.
The reason that I decided to try linux was that I had to reinstall Win95 on my laptop (Dell Inspiron 3200) after the Win98 upgrade supplied by Dell caused repeated problems. That was a nightmare! I spent hours on the phone with Dell technical support, and finally was so disgusted that I decided going back to a command line would be better than windows. So I tried linux, and everything just worked. I have installed linux on my laptop twice, now, and a couple times on other machines, and it's smooth, fast and painless (knock on wood). It still takes me over two hours to reinstall windows on my laptop, counting the time it takes to upgrade all the many drivers by hand that linux takes care of automatically. That sucks, because I seem to need to reinstall two or three times a year, since the registry gets corrupted (I think... you never quite know what's up).
To add insult to injury, I'll probably never be able to run any of the newer windows on my laptop, since Dell doesn't provide drivers which will run with them. And Miserysoft certainly doesn't! Oh, there are drivers on the Microslime installation CD, all right... but my screen is 800x600x16 colors, and it goes downhill from there. Of course, starting with DOS 1.1, which I remember well, Microstuff's software has gotten bigger, slower and flakier. Not being able to "upgrade" may be a blessing.
We have certainly had very different experiences. My laptop was about a year old when I installed linux, so that might explain a lot. I found out afterwards that RedHat6.0 was the first to include support for my neomagic graphics, so I got lucky on that one. If I had tried it a few months earlier, I might have gotten a very different first impression. I have heard many horror stories about X, but haven't experienced any problems myself. The neomagic on the laptop, and the ATI card at home both were set up just fine, automatically, during the install.
I'm not sure that I could install linux to run on a Jaz either, but did you look at the linux-on-a-zip HOWTO? I think that they must have covered some of the same issues you faced.
I agree with you. That's why I was thinking in terms of something like a removable media hard drive, such as a cheap Jazz or Syquest. Whether it's magnetic or optical or a screwy hybrid, if it's cheap it will break their stranglehold. A big outfit like IBM or Fujitsu could afford to sink some bucks into R&D, and would be hard to push around. Companies like those two have some pretty good patent strength, too, and very deep pockets.
Yes, the studios and record companies will fight it, but how do you fight harddrives? It will be pretty tough to paint Ma and Pa as evil hacker pirates for buying one of these hypothetical "giant floppies" to store movies of the grandkids. I really think that once we have the media, the content will follow. Why do we put music on CD's? Because storing an hour of music on magnetic media in that data format would cost too much, not because there is something magic about optical media.
Think about the sort of content that will become possible in the near future. As 64bit machines become affordable and common, animation via ray-tracing will become possible for the really dedicated hobbyist. Eventually artists will ba able to do anime as easily as comic books. An amateur theatre company with a good graphics editor will be able to mix their performances with special effects, as in Who Framed Roger Rabbit. I think that once these giant floppies become cheap enough, there will be plenty of content on them, and the big studios will become a lot less relevant.
The hardware doesn't have to be free, just a lot better (cheaper) than what's out there now. Iomega is keeping the price of its disks pretty high, but look at the 120M competitor. They're downright cheap. Similarly for the Jaz, there are several competitors out there which are a lot cheaper. As good bandwidth gets more common, we won't need or want to be able to carry these disks to someone else's computer, so the compatibility argument which is keeping Zip prices high will start to wear thin.
Ultimatly, any technology will go commodity, and wind up cheap. If that never happens to Zip, it will be because Iomega stupidly allowed themselves to be superceded by a cheaper alternative.
Those Orbs look neat. I guess that my point was that the whole DVD thing has gotten so fouled up that it's likely to go the way of Betamax, and even if not, whatever emerges will be full of artificial problems, so that we will pay the cost of maintaining Jack Valenti's monoply rents, in inconvenience and cash. That's why I'm talking about something like a harddrive, rather than like a CD.
What I was calling for was giving up on the many DVD standards entirely, and moving on to something without the artificial limits. That would be rough on the people who have bought them, but given the current legal climate, I fear that's where we'll have to go to get what DVD originally promised.
What I would really like to see is hobby directors putting movies on the web, small theatre groups putting their performances on the web, and so on, in the same format the big boys use. The current mess seems to rule that out. If we had an open standard which worked pretty well, the big boys could become irrelevant, just as cable and satelite made the big three networks shrink in importance.