I don't know the current situation, but 10 years ago GM had 10x more robots on assembly lines than Toyota. GM liked the robots because they were more reliable than people. Toyota like the people because they were smarter than robots.
Fuck this shit. Who need robots at McDoos? I want these geniuses to get working on an Orgasmatron like in Woody Allen's Sleeper. Think of the productivity gains because of the time we'd save not having to get and look at all that porn.
Ok, we wouldn't really save that much time. People would still want porn. Like the people you see wearing a nicotine patch and puffing away. But I want one anyway.
I think a "shoot-not-to-kill" policy is a TV invention. If you shoot someone anywhere but the legs or arms, odds are they will die. Trying to aim at their arms or legs is a poor idea, cause if you miss the ricochet might hit someone else. If you are going to shoot someone, you shoot them. Surviving the shot is their problem.
If it wasn't life or death, then the cop shouldn't be firing in the first place. And for the most part, they are very, very careful. Because if it wasn't life or death before the first shot, it sure is after.
"for use by enterprise customers, it(Linux) must be re-designed...This...is not...possible...without (1) a high degree of design coordination, (2) access to expensive and sophisticated design and testing equipment; (3) access to UNIX code, methods and concepts; (4) UNIX architectural experience; and (5) a very significant financial investment."
Too bad one can't be held in contempt of court for blatant and aggravated stupidity. This reminds me of the Nazi dentist in the Kurt Vonnegut novel who proved Jesus was Aryan and not Jewish through careful examination of His teeth in medieval paintings.
I agree that there are many motives for people doing anything. But a big motive is play. Because necessity isn't the mother of invention, play is. Not just throwing the baseball, or playing BF1942, but serious play as well. People like to play with things that they are interested in. It keeps them interested. They also want to show their best. Open Source is an arena to show what they can do.
Someone said here one day that nobody writes a sales database 8hrs a day because they enjoy it. But someone who writes code 8 hrs a day needs to enjoy coding. Play is what we call it when they have fun with code into the night after their 8rs are over. Well, play is what I call it. Others call it "free" work. And they wonder why people will "work" for nothing. These are people who measure accomplishment only by money.
Nonsense. Trolltech has bent over backwards to comply with the wishes of the open source community. Not only have they done an excellent job of doing so, but we have all benifitted tremendously as a result of their coding efforts.
This is the digital Dredd Scott. The loss that changes the game. It makes the whole problem perfectly clear. The government and courts belong to the corporations. The technology belongs to the rest of us. We are now free to formalize the underground content economy. We, the consumers own the means of consumption. And the consumption is what pays. Nothing the RIAA et. al. does can compel anyone to watch, listen or ingest anything. The corps are experts at making the consumption desirable, but they cannot make it compulsory.
Its already resolving into a simple political model. A classic guerilla war. The activists provoke the occupying powers into more and more agressive tactics of retribution. The retribution falls on the unradicalized general population. The general population becomes radicalized. The guerillas become stronger, striking at will and disapearing. Controlling the agenda. The occupiers retreat into their garrisons. At some point, the cost of maintaining the rule outweighs the benifits, and the occupiers go home.
Lets not talk about boycotts or rising up, cause it won't happen. We need to provoke. We need to neutralize the main weapon of the corps, lawsuits. How? Don't be afraid, that's how. Unless Disney can persuade your local law enforcers to drop the war on drugs and the war on terror to start a war on piracy, then they are restricted to the civil courts. Disney cannot choke the court system with millions of civil lawsuits. Even if they could, there is little they can do to ordinary people. And what they can do to ordinary people will radicalize the general population. Eventually, they will piss off so many people, their position becomes untenable. So trade away boys, make copies of dvds for your nieces and nephews. Give your mom a nice Frank Sinatra collection for her birthday. You are not a pirate anymore. You are a freedom fighter.
Most professional photographers use 2x2 or larger. Few food shots, still lifes or other studio pictures are done on less than 4x5. A lot of the high-end auto, liquor and cosmetic stuff is still done on 8x10. Fashion, medical, PR and journalism are the only fields that use 35mm as a standard format.
There is no question that for these professions, digital has now moved ahead in terms of cost and useability. Eventually, digital will also achieve quaility levels sufficient to take over the studio as well. As the previous poster noted, this is already happening in a few niches, like catalogue where the first digital cameras started appearing over 10 years ago. The time savings alone make switching to digital almost automatic when the technology passes the bar for any particular photo specialty. Film will always be around for many uses, but most photographers have no special devotion to it. They care more about cost and reliability.
This is really important stuff. The file cabinet concept worked well for many years, because it bridged the tree model systems design could create, and an intuitive real-world model users could understand. There are three prevalent models individuals use to interact with the world. Any system design that encompasses only one of these will always be difficult to use for the majority of the population. This app doesnt break new ground beyond the text based approch, but it DOES try to break out of the document/tree centered way things work now. That is a good thing and we should applaud.
The next big mountain to climb is expanding the interface. A variety of ways to interact with systems in different circumstances is needed before the real promise of computers can be realized in everyday life. That means a variety of ways to manage documents and information. While I am at my desk, a HFS is fine. But I want to use a wearable computer for active tasks. A voice driven, keyword oriented filing system with audio feedback is probably going to be more useful than a point and click driven HFS in that situation. An app like this one is helping to build the foundation for these kinds of new interfaces.
The posters that ask whats wrong with HFS, or say that unorganized users will lose their files anyway are suffering from ivory tower vertigo. They are like the monks that saw no reason why anything needed to be written in anything but Latin. Ignore them. They don't understand what you are doing.
Yikes. The wired writer, and most of the posters here are looking at this enirely wrong. Wired is looking at the user's attachement to Apple. The./s are looking at the user's attachement to a technology. Both miss the point.
Look at it this way. Dos and Unix were (are) command line driven. The text paradigm underlies everything. Macs were never text driven, always visual. You can divide the population very roughly into three instinctive communication/learning styles. Visual, text and aural. These styles correlate to many other personality types, cognitive styles, etc. Computers were invented by the text crew. The aural people have their phones. But for visual communicators, there is simply no alternative to the MAC. Sure there are enough similarities across all modern GUIs that there is some room for substitution. But the text derived systems betray their origins at ever turn.
That is why a comparison between the loyalty of Apple users and Dell users is ludicrous. Think if only one company made mice for left handers. Good or bad, that company would own the market. Comparing the loyalty of its customers to those of one of the right handed only mouse companies would profoundly miss the point. Same here. The user's devotion to Apple is beside the point. The Mac is much bigger than Apple.
This is, of course not to diss the command line derived approach. I use the CLI all the time for Linux, and suprisingly often in XP. But almost never in OSX. You can, but it never feels right.
AFAIK, they got turned down flat for a preliminary injunction in the Lindows case. With the judge expressing doubt that "windows" was a term that could be trademarked. So are these letters not an extra judicial effort to obtain by intimidation what they have been denied in court? If so, does it constitute contempt? Anyone have an informed opinion?
You have articulated a fundamental problem with any kind of recording process. its similar for sound, but humans have incredible visual acuity, so that's where we notice this most. No photographic process can reproduce what your eye sees. Not only can your eye handle ridiculous ranges of contrast, brightness, saturation, etc., but it does it dynamically. Never say never, but a process that can accuratly reproduce what your eye sees is probably harder than a process that reproduces what your mouth tastes.
There was a great article years ago in the Wall Street Journal about a Japanese scientist that reproduced great French wines in his lab. He created exact chemical duplicates of Margaux and others. Through exacting objective chemical analysis, it was impossible to tell which was the original Margaux, and which was his lab-created Margaux. The only problem was his "wine" tasted horrible.
Apart from technical issues, there is the problem of imagination. You look at your photos, and compare them not to the aquarium, but to your memory of the aquarium. Generally, you remember vivid perceptions, like strong smells, bright colours, loud or pleasing noises.
Lastly, professional photographers take great pains to create photographs rather than take them. They know their materials and what the do, or do not do, best. Low-speed slide film is great for brilliant colours where exessive contrast will not be a problem. Super-fast film is good where grain and lack of maximum colour saturation is not a problem. The pro makes the trade-offs to get the picture they want. The National Geographic photographers either light the subject, use an appropriate type of film, or just look for subjects that suit the kind of film they are using.
As an amateur, I would recommend you find the kind of pictures your equipment/film/tastes can best deal with. For example, I like my little Samsung point-and-shoot all-auto camera for snapshots. The Hassleblad takes better pictures, but is totally unsuited for the job. So I put people in front of bright colours, get close enough so that their belt-buckle, chest & head fills the frame and use a fill flash. Also, take lots of pictures. If you are going to take a shot, take three variations as well. Film is cheap.
Showing my age, but I remember when the album came out. Everyone knew they were a joke. That first BBC interview made headlines around the world. Yes they were pre-packaged. Yes, their schtik was to be as offensive as possible at all times. But it was funny. Nobody had ever called Paul McCartney an old fart before.
Nobody thought they would ever get their shit together to actually put together an album. And when they did, it looked like it would never be released. And when it was, it looked like it would never be distributed.
But the big suprise was that the album was incredible. Pure distilled venom with a beat. People would recoil when they heard it. It was shocking to a degree hard to imagine today.
The amazing thing was that this "punk version of NSync" went off like an atomic bomb. And the music business looked like Hiroshima afterwards. Don't kid yourself, they changed everything.
Wouldn't it be nice if one of those cybermillionairs out there (and there are some left) would pledge $5 million to fight this patent in court. The idea that a company should be able to patent a gene and charge for access to it is obscene. This is not business, it's robbery. To compare this company's actions to the legitimate recouping of R&D is ridiculous.
That there are people in BC not getting this test because of this company's actions should be sufficient to land the executives and lawyers of this company in jail. And the BC government should also be condemed. For lack of a better term, they not have the balls to look out for the well being of their people.
If there is a conspiracy to manipulate the market, then it is not open. Microsoft has been convicted of such manipulation. Possibly you are right, that no one would have used Be. But nobody ever got the chance, did they? Because MS shut them down. That's a crime in your country. They are lucky not to be charged under the RICO act, IMHO.
To put your argument another way, cartels should be legal because the market will eventually punish them. Unsafe cars should be permitted because eventually, people will stop buying them. However, open markets work best in democratic societies. And in a democratic society you can't kill or maim a certain portion of the population in the name of market efficiency. That's a good thing.
And the "millions wasted"? Redmond has it all in the bank. MSFT stock has become the most expensive municipal bond fund in history. That is exactly the kind of inefficiency illegal monopolies generate.
Open markets are self-correcting. Over time, there can't be too many competitors because new entrants will percieve a lack of opportunity, and invest elsewhere. Existing players will consolidate. Look at the early car business. There were over 200 car makers in the US at one point. The small ones could not command the resources needed to build big assembly lines, they could not compete. They were eaten by the bigger companies.
So you would not get 1000 world class interoperable OS products unless the market could support that many. There is no reason at all why the OS market should tend towards a natural monopoly. In an open market, natural monopolies usually exist only where duplicated infrastructure is inefficient. Like your local power company. It is very doubtful that another power company could come along, string new power lines and still compete effectively with the existing utility. Again, in most open markets, natural monopolies are allowed, but regulated to some degree.
Microsoft is not a natural monopoly. There is no reason at all one company should have a 90% share of the OS market. Indeed, MS has been convicted of using illegal means to protect that monopoly. If they had anything close to a natural monopoly, they would not have felt the need to employ those means.
Economics also posits that unnatural monopolies eventually fall apart. The monopolist eventually puts more resouces into protecting the monopoly than the monopoly is worth. If no competition exists, subsitution begins to happen as people find more efficient ways to accomplish the same tasks. In this case, PDAs are a good example. Between subsitution and inefficient protection, the monopolist's power begins to slip away.
The thing is that Apple has done something remarkable here. They have put Unix on the desktop of ordinary users. The flexibility and extensibility of this OS is beyond belief. They haven't dumbed down Unix, they have transformed it. My kids can set up an Apache server in about five minutes. They can't do that with any other OS.
I use Windows, Linux and Mac every day, and like them all. But objectively, OSX is light years ahead of anything else. IMHO, that is. It will take another year or two before this becomes clearly apparent.
The thought had crossed my mind that I was being too paranoid about this. That MS really was trying to do well and make money by trying to do the right thing. Because really, they are not evil and stupid people, despite our (my) prejudices.
BUT, then came the change to the Media Player EULA. They want me to grant them admin rights over my computer. If they wanted to disable content so that I could not run it unauthorized, that would be one thing. But, that is not what they want. They explicitly want the right to change my software so that it complies with their views of what is right and proper.
Sorry, but I view Palladium in light of these proven facts. Microsoft is a monopolist. Microsoft deliberately used illegal acts to maintain that monopoly. Microsoft has not admitted any wrongdoing. Microsoft has made no promise to change anything except with regard to the narrow markets where it feels the court's judgements should apply.
So given all that, there is no rational basis to assume Palladium is anything but what it appears to be. A "final solution" by MS to the problem of markets and competition. There will be no markets, there will be no competition. Microsoft will decide what products we use, when we use them and what we will use them for. They will decide what we pay, when and what for.
The thing is that Microsoft believes that what they are doing is good and right. They believe that they have the best interests of everyone at heart. They believe that their success comes from virtue. And that therefore, everyone that opposes them is evil, venal, corrupt, dishonest or stupid.
So despite the inherent wisdom of your approach to the subject, I cannot agree with you. I do not want Palladium, or any other Microsoft security scheme within ten miles of my computers.
I am suprised at the negativity. Is there something I don't know about Boeing, or are we just down on all Seattle area tech companies?
Many of the more reasoned objections are airport and infrastructure oriented. This is sensible since the 380 will clearly have issues in this regard. However, it is worth remembering that this is a long-haul airliner. Midway, or La Guardia, or Logan are not going to see these planes, except when they are flying over. There are probably less than 100 airports in the whole world where these planes make sense. But in those places, they make A LOT of sense.
Right now, gates are like slots along the frontage of the terminal. More slots = more capacity. All the access to the plane happens along its length. Have you ever seen a 747-400 on a quick international turnaround? Its like the queen with her minions buzzing around. Speed of turnaround is partly limited by the amount of access available, i.e. access capacity. A 747 has multi-decks, but there are only a few access points to each. The 380 exacerbates these issues by trying to fit more passengers and cargo into the existing ifrastructure capacity, with little extra access capacity in the airframe design.
The BWB has the chance to be more efficient BECAUSE it is so radically different. The BWB can offer access across the entire front, AND the entire top and bottom, at the same time. The access capacity is potentially multiples of that on a 747 or 380. As a result, turnaround times might be cut in half. Passengers would use mulitple access points, possibly through the front, or even the top. At the same time, cargo, fuel etc. could have free acces to the entire underside of the airframe. It might even be possible to use an "assembly line" for vast cost savings.
The point is that there are wide opportunities for new and more efficient systems. So rather than a constraint, the plane's size and configuration could prove a huge advantage to the airlines and the airports.
The RIAA et. al. want to find a technological/legal solution to their business problems. When you have a business or management problem, technology solutions don't work. Think of facial recognition, or the war on drugs, or prohibition, or crippled cds, or the Titanic. As long as they keep trying technology solutions, we will get to download as many free songs as we want. As long as they keep trying technology solutions, they can never win. There should be a law of technology like Moore's law that any single technology will always be vulnerable to the combined weight of a gazillion hackers. Look at the post-it-note-on-the-crippled-audio-cd for an example.
Apart from that, this story raises other interesting issues. First is that this bill won't go anywhere. Congress won't want to touch this with a barge pole. Remember that while any given representative can be swayed with influence and campaign funds, differing interests will ensure that it will be almost impossible for one group to sway all represntatives on the same issue at the same time. For example, MS can't set the agenda in Washington because Utah, California, New York and Massachusets have large companies that compete with MS. Which is why Orrin Hatch is an MS critic.
Second, Congress and the law enforcement communities will recognize this as a minefield. The FBI et. al. don't like vigilantes. Its bad for business. Messy. Amateur.
Third, they don't need this. MS will solve the problem for them with Palladium. MS will simply ensure those nasty P2P programs won't run on Windows.;)
BTW, second thoughts on Palladium. A hacker's paradise. MS is incapable of building the system they described. It will be so full of holes that hacking will be child's play BUT, everyone will THINK they are secure.
I had a friend once who loved British motorcycles. He had some Nortons and Triumphs. British bikes were at that time notorious for requiring constant maintenence (they may still be). His feeling was that British bikes are great, for people who enjoy fixing bikes. For anyone else, Japanese. Best bang for the buck, totally reliable, just like cars. Its the same way with boxes as with bikes.
I build all my own systems, but when others ask me for a recommendation, I usually tell them to buy Dell. Because if they need to ask me to recommend an overall system, they don't have sufficient interest to deal with the headaches of rolling your own. And there are headaches.
In my experience, getting the right parts together and installed is easy. Its getting them all to play nice afterwards that is the challenge. To get really intimate with your OS, install some cutting edge hardware. You will learn things about Windows and Linux that Bill and Linus do not know.
There is also a middle way. Many of your local strip mall OEM type places will build a box for you, more or less to your specifications. Depending on the OS you want, they may be able to set it up and test it as well. That can eliminate some of the more interesting issues you run into with self-assembly.
Last, I suggest using a local retailer over online suppliers. You can build a relationship, they remember your name, returns are simple and when you get a fever for a certain part, you can have it in hours rather than days.
A company cannot release a program (or distro) free for all, and then retroactivly demand licensing licensing agreements. This has nothing to do with the GPL. Existing case law can handle it.
The only reason the GPL is important here because it is clear that SCC intended the code they released to be open in the spirit and practice of the GPL. They are within their rights to change the license, but they cannot enforce that change retroactively. The publication by SCC and use by others governed by the GPL constitutes a contract. A contract is a contract. Unless both parties consent to a change, the contract stands.
But let's not jump to conclusions (he said stupidly, because after-all, it was slashdot). The tone of the company's comments points to confusion rather than conspiracy. Can't remember who said it, but: Never attribute to malice that which can be explained by incompetence.
Slashdot Mirror
How to REALLY make a killing on the markets!
Bet on death for fun and prizes!
Every dark cloud has a silver lining!
Wall Street 'o Death
The Semtex NASDAQ
The Pentagon. Where death means business.
Misery may love company, but I want CASH!
I don't know the current situation, but 10 years ago GM had 10x more robots on assembly lines than Toyota. GM liked the robots because they were more reliable than people. Toyota like the people because they were smarter than robots.
Fuck this shit. Who need robots at McDoos? I want these geniuses to get working on an Orgasmatron like in Woody Allen's Sleeper. Think of the productivity gains because of the time we'd save not having to get and look at all that porn.
Ok, we wouldn't really save that much time. People would still want porn. Like the people you see wearing a nicotine patch and puffing away. But I want one anyway.
I think a "shoot-not-to-kill" policy is a TV invention. If you shoot someone anywhere but the legs or arms, odds are they will die. Trying to aim at their arms or legs is a poor idea, cause if you miss the ricochet might hit someone else. If you are going to shoot someone, you shoot them. Surviving the shot is their problem.
If it wasn't life or death, then the cop shouldn't be firing in the first place. And for the most part, they are very, very careful. Because if it wasn't life or death before the first shot, it sure is after.
"for use by enterprise customers, it(Linux) must be re-designed ...This ...is not...possible ...without (1) a high degree of design coordination, (2) access to expensive and sophisticated design and testing equipment; (3) access to UNIX code, methods and concepts; (4) UNIX architectural experience; and (5) a very significant financial investment."
Too bad one can't be held in contempt of court for blatant and aggravated stupidity. This reminds me of the Nazi dentist in the Kurt Vonnegut novel who proved Jesus was Aryan and not Jewish through careful examination of His teeth in medieval paintings.
I agree that there are many motives for people doing anything. But a big motive is play. Because necessity isn't the mother of invention, play is. Not just throwing the baseball, or playing BF1942, but serious play as well. People like to play with things that they are interested in. It keeps them interested. They also want to show their best. Open Source is an arena to show what they can do.
Someone said here one day that nobody writes a sales database 8hrs a day because they enjoy it. But someone who writes code 8 hrs a day needs to enjoy coding. Play is what we call it when they have fun with code into the night after their 8rs are over. Well, play is what I call it. Others call it "free" work. And they wonder why people will "work" for nothing. These are people who measure accomplishment only by money.
Nonsense. Trolltech has bent over backwards to comply with the wishes of the open source community. Not only have they done an excellent job of doing so, but we have all benifitted tremendously as a result of their coding efforts.
Let's not practice guilt by association.
This is the digital Dredd Scott. The loss that changes the game. It makes the whole problem perfectly clear. The government and courts belong to the corporations. The technology belongs to the rest of us. We are now free to formalize the underground content economy. We, the consumers own the means of consumption. And the consumption is what pays. Nothing the RIAA et. al. does can compel anyone to watch, listen or ingest anything. The corps are experts at making the consumption desirable, but they cannot make it compulsory.
Its already resolving into a simple political model. A classic guerilla war. The activists provoke the occupying powers into more and more agressive tactics of retribution. The retribution falls on the unradicalized general population. The general population becomes radicalized. The guerillas become stronger, striking at will and disapearing. Controlling the agenda. The occupiers retreat into their garrisons. At some point, the cost of maintaining the rule outweighs the benifits, and the occupiers go home.
Lets not talk about boycotts or rising up, cause it won't happen. We need to provoke. We need to neutralize the main weapon of the corps, lawsuits. How? Don't be afraid, that's how. Unless Disney can persuade your local law enforcers to drop the war on drugs and the war on terror to start a war on piracy, then they are restricted to the civil courts. Disney cannot choke the court system with millions of civil lawsuits. Even if they could, there is little they can do to ordinary people. And what they can do to ordinary people will radicalize the general population. Eventually, they will piss off so many people, their position becomes untenable. So trade away boys, make copies of dvds for your nieces and nephews. Give your mom a nice Frank Sinatra collection for her birthday. You are not a pirate anymore. You are a freedom fighter.
Most professional photographers use 2x2 or larger. Few food shots, still lifes or other studio pictures are done on less than 4x5. A lot of the high-end auto, liquor and cosmetic stuff is still done on 8x10. Fashion, medical, PR and journalism are the only fields that use 35mm as a standard format.
There is no question that for these professions, digital has now moved ahead in terms of cost and useability. Eventually, digital will also achieve quaility levels sufficient to take over the studio as well. As the previous poster noted, this is already happening in a few niches, like catalogue where the first digital cameras started appearing over 10 years ago. The time savings alone make switching to digital almost automatic when the technology passes the bar for any particular photo specialty. Film will always be around for many uses, but most photographers have no special devotion to it. They care more about cost and reliability.
This is really important stuff. The file cabinet concept worked well for many years, because it bridged the tree model systems design could create, and an intuitive real-world model users could understand. There are three prevalent models individuals use to interact with the world. Any system design that encompasses only one of these will always be difficult to use for the majority of the population. This app doesnt break new ground beyond the text based approch, but it DOES try to break out of the document/tree centered way things work now. That is a good thing and we should applaud.
The next big mountain to climb is expanding the interface. A variety of ways to interact with systems in different circumstances is needed before the real promise of computers can be realized in everyday life. That means a variety of ways to manage documents and information. While I am at my desk, a HFS is fine. But I want to use a wearable computer for active tasks. A voice driven, keyword oriented filing system with audio feedback is probably going to be more useful than a point and click driven HFS in that situation. An app like this one is helping to build the foundation for these kinds of new interfaces.
The posters that ask whats wrong with HFS, or say that unorganized users will lose their files anyway are suffering from ivory tower vertigo. They are like the monks that saw no reason why anything needed to be written in anything but Latin. Ignore them. They don't understand what you are doing.
Yikes. The wired writer, and most of the posters here are looking at this enirely wrong. Wired is looking at the user's attachement to Apple. The ./s are looking at the user's attachement to a technology. Both miss the point.
Look at it this way. Dos and Unix were (are) command line driven. The text paradigm underlies everything. Macs were never text driven, always visual. You can divide the population very roughly into three instinctive communication/learning styles. Visual, text and aural. These styles correlate to many other personality types, cognitive styles, etc. Computers were invented by the text crew. The aural people have their phones. But for visual communicators, there is simply no alternative to the MAC. Sure there are enough similarities across all modern GUIs that there is some room for substitution. But the text derived systems betray their origins at ever turn.
That is why a comparison between the loyalty of Apple users and Dell users is ludicrous. Think if only one company made mice for left handers. Good or bad, that company would own the market. Comparing the loyalty of its customers to those of one of the right handed only mouse companies would profoundly miss the point. Same here. The user's devotion to Apple is beside the point. The Mac is much bigger than Apple.
This is, of course not to diss the command line derived approach. I use the CLI all the time for Linux, and suprisingly often in XP. But almost never in OSX. You can, but it never feels right.
AFAIK, they got turned down flat for a preliminary injunction in the Lindows case. With the judge expressing doubt that "windows" was a term that could be trademarked. So are these letters not an extra judicial effort to obtain by intimidation what they have been denied in court? If so, does it constitute contempt? Anyone have an informed opinion?
You have articulated a fundamental problem with any kind of recording process. its similar for sound, but humans have incredible visual acuity, so that's where we notice this most. No photographic process can reproduce what your eye sees. Not only can your eye handle ridiculous ranges of contrast, brightness, saturation, etc., but it does it dynamically. Never say never, but a process that can accuratly reproduce what your eye sees is probably harder than a process that reproduces what your mouth tastes.
There was a great article years ago in the Wall Street Journal about a Japanese scientist that reproduced great French wines in his lab. He created exact chemical duplicates of Margaux and others. Through exacting objective chemical analysis, it was impossible to tell which was the original Margaux, and which was his lab-created Margaux. The only problem was his "wine" tasted horrible.
Apart from technical issues, there is the problem of imagination. You look at your photos, and compare them not to the aquarium, but to your memory of the aquarium. Generally, you remember vivid perceptions, like strong smells, bright colours, loud or pleasing noises.
Lastly, professional photographers take great pains to create photographs rather than take them. They know their materials and what the do, or do not do, best. Low-speed slide film is great for brilliant colours where exessive contrast will not be a problem. Super-fast film is good where grain and lack of maximum colour saturation is not a problem. The pro makes the trade-offs to get the picture they want. The National Geographic photographers either light the subject, use an appropriate type of film, or just look for subjects that suit the kind of film they are using.
As an amateur, I would recommend you find the kind of pictures your equipment/film/tastes can best deal with. For example, I like my little Samsung point-and-shoot all-auto camera for snapshots. The Hassleblad takes better pictures, but is totally unsuited for the job. So I put people in front of bright colours, get close enough so that their belt-buckle, chest & head fills the frame and use a fill flash. Also, take lots of pictures. If you are going to take a shot, take three variations as well. Film is cheap.
Showing my age, but I remember when the album came out. Everyone knew they were a joke. That first BBC interview made headlines around the world. Yes they were pre-packaged. Yes, their schtik was to be as offensive as possible at all times. But it was funny. Nobody had ever called Paul McCartney an old fart before.
Nobody thought they would ever get their shit together to actually put together an album. And when they did, it looked like it would never be released. And when it was, it looked like it would never be distributed.
But the big suprise was that the album was incredible. Pure distilled venom with a beat. People would recoil when they heard it. It was shocking to a degree hard to imagine today.
The amazing thing was that this "punk version of NSync" went off like an atomic bomb. And the music business looked like Hiroshima afterwards. Don't kid yourself, they changed everything.
Wouldn't it be nice if one of those cybermillionairs out there (and there are some left) would pledge $5 million to fight this patent in court. The idea that a company should be able to patent a gene and charge for access to it is obscene. This is not business, it's robbery. To compare this company's actions to the legitimate recouping of R&D is ridiculous.
That there are people in BC not getting this test because of this company's actions should be sufficient to land the executives and lawyers of this company in jail. And the BC government should also be condemed. For lack of a better term, they not have the balls to look out for the well being of their people.
Isn't there about a billion years of prior art? If that doesn't matter, then I will make a killing by patenting the numbers 0 through 9.
That's why they are scared. Their freedom to innovate is under attack.
And they are going to start innovating.
Any minute now.
Really.
They promise.
If there is a conspiracy to manipulate the market, then it is not open. Microsoft has been convicted of such manipulation. Possibly you are right, that no one would have used Be. But nobody ever got the chance, did they? Because MS shut them down. That's a crime in your country. They are lucky not to be charged under the RICO act, IMHO.
To put your argument another way, cartels should be legal because the market will eventually punish them. Unsafe cars should be permitted because eventually, people will stop buying them. However, open markets work best in democratic societies. And in a democratic society you can't kill or maim a certain portion of the population in the name of market efficiency. That's a good thing.
And the "millions wasted"? Redmond has it all in the bank. MSFT stock has become the most expensive municipal bond fund in history. That is exactly the kind of inefficiency illegal monopolies generate.
Open markets are self-correcting. Over time, there can't be too many competitors because new entrants will percieve a lack of opportunity, and invest elsewhere. Existing players will consolidate. Look at the early car business. There were over 200 car makers in the US at one point. The small ones could not command the resources needed to build big assembly lines, they could not compete. They were eaten by the bigger companies.
So you would not get 1000 world class interoperable OS products unless the market could support that many. There is no reason at all why the OS market should tend towards a natural monopoly. In an open market, natural monopolies usually exist only where duplicated infrastructure is inefficient. Like your local power company. It is very doubtful that another power company could come along, string new power lines and still compete effectively with the existing utility. Again, in most open markets, natural monopolies are allowed, but regulated to some degree.
Microsoft is not a natural monopoly. There is no reason at all one company should have a 90% share of the OS market. Indeed, MS has been convicted of using illegal means to protect that monopoly. If they had anything close to a natural monopoly, they would not have felt the need to employ those means.
Economics also posits that unnatural monopolies eventually fall apart. The monopolist eventually puts more resouces into protecting the monopoly than the monopoly is worth. If no competition exists, subsitution begins to happen as people find more efficient ways to accomplish the same tasks. In this case, PDAs are a good example. Between subsitution and inefficient protection, the monopolist's power begins to slip away.
The thing is that Apple has done something remarkable here. They have put Unix on the desktop of ordinary users. The flexibility and extensibility of this OS is beyond belief. They haven't dumbed down Unix, they have transformed it. My kids can set up an Apache server in about five minutes. They can't do that with any other OS.
I use Windows, Linux and Mac every day, and like them all. But objectively, OSX is light years ahead of anything else. IMHO, that is. It will take another year or two before this becomes clearly apparent.
The thought had crossed my mind that I was being too paranoid about this. That MS really was trying to do well and make money by trying to do the right thing. Because really, they are not evil and stupid people, despite our (my) prejudices.
BUT, then came the change to the Media Player EULA. They want me to grant them admin rights over my computer. If they wanted to disable content so that I could not run it unauthorized, that would be one thing. But, that is not what they want. They explicitly want the right to change my software so that it complies with their views of what is right and proper.
Sorry, but I view Palladium in light of these proven facts. Microsoft is a monopolist. Microsoft deliberately used illegal acts to maintain that monopoly. Microsoft has not admitted any wrongdoing. Microsoft has made no promise to change anything except with regard to the narrow markets where it feels the court's judgements should apply.
So given all that, there is no rational basis to assume Palladium is anything but what it appears to be. A "final solution" by MS to the problem of markets and competition. There will be no markets, there will be no competition. Microsoft will decide what products we use, when we use them and what we will use them for. They will decide what we pay, when and what for.
The thing is that Microsoft believes that what they are doing is good and right. They believe that they have the best interests of everyone at heart. They believe that their success comes from virtue. And that therefore, everyone that opposes them is evil, venal, corrupt, dishonest or stupid.
So despite the inherent wisdom of your approach to the subject, I cannot agree with you. I do not want Palladium, or any other Microsoft security scheme within ten miles of my computers.
I am suprised at the negativity. Is there something I don't know about Boeing, or are we just down on all Seattle area tech companies?
Many of the more reasoned objections are airport and infrastructure oriented. This is sensible since the 380 will clearly have issues in this regard. However, it is worth remembering that this is a long-haul airliner. Midway, or La Guardia, or Logan are not going to see these planes, except when they are flying over. There are probably less than 100 airports in the whole world where these planes make sense. But in those places, they make A LOT of sense.
Right now, gates are like slots along the frontage of the terminal. More slots = more capacity. All the access to the plane happens along its length. Have you ever seen a 747-400 on a quick international turnaround? Its like the queen with her minions buzzing around. Speed of turnaround is partly limited by the amount of access available, i.e. access capacity. A 747 has multi-decks, but there are only a few access points to each. The 380 exacerbates these issues by trying to fit more passengers and cargo into the existing ifrastructure capacity, with little extra access capacity in the airframe design.
The BWB has the chance to be more efficient BECAUSE it is so radically different. The BWB can offer access across the entire front, AND the entire top and bottom, at the same time. The access capacity is potentially multiples of that on a 747 or 380. As a result, turnaround times might be cut in half. Passengers would use mulitple access points, possibly through the front, or even the top. At the same time, cargo, fuel etc. could have free acces to the entire underside of the airframe. It might even be possible to use an "assembly line" for vast cost savings.
The point is that there are wide opportunities for new and more efficient systems. So rather than a constraint, the plane's size and configuration could prove a huge advantage to the airlines and the airports.
The RIAA et. al. want to find a technological/legal solution to their business problems. When you have a business or management problem, technology solutions don't work. Think of facial recognition, or the war on drugs, or prohibition, or crippled cds, or the Titanic. As long as they keep trying technology solutions, we will get to download as many free songs as we want. As long as they keep trying technology solutions, they can never win. There should be a law of technology like Moore's law that any single technology will always be vulnerable to the combined weight of a gazillion hackers. Look at the post-it-note-on-the-crippled-audio-cd for an example.
;)
Apart from that, this story raises other interesting issues. First is that this bill won't go anywhere. Congress won't want to touch this with a barge pole. Remember that while any given representative can be swayed with influence and campaign funds, differing interests will ensure that it will be almost impossible for one group to sway all represntatives on the same issue at the same time. For example, MS can't set the agenda in Washington because Utah, California, New York and Massachusets have large companies that compete with MS. Which is why Orrin Hatch is an MS critic.
Second, Congress and the law enforcement communities will recognize this as a minefield. The FBI et. al. don't like vigilantes. Its bad for business. Messy. Amateur.
Third, they don't need this. MS will solve the problem for them with Palladium. MS will simply ensure those nasty P2P programs won't run on Windows.
BTW, second thoughts on Palladium. A hacker's paradise. MS is incapable of building the system they described. It will be so full of holes that hacking will be child's play BUT, everyone will THINK they are secure.
I had a friend once who loved British motorcycles. He had some Nortons and Triumphs. British bikes were at that time notorious for requiring constant maintenence (they may still be). His feeling was that British bikes are great, for people who enjoy fixing bikes. For anyone else, Japanese. Best bang for the buck, totally reliable, just like cars. Its the same way with boxes as with bikes.
I build all my own systems, but when others ask me for a recommendation, I usually tell them to buy Dell. Because if they need to ask me to recommend an overall system, they don't have sufficient interest to deal with the headaches of rolling your own. And there are headaches.
In my experience, getting the right parts together and installed is easy. Its getting them all to play nice afterwards that is the challenge. To get really intimate with your OS, install some cutting edge hardware. You will learn things about Windows and Linux that Bill and Linus do not know.
There is also a middle way. Many of your local strip mall OEM type places will build a box for you, more or less to your specifications. Depending on the OS you want, they may be able to set it up and test it as well. That can eliminate some of the more interesting issues you run into with self-assembly.
Last, I suggest using a local retailer over online suppliers. You can build a relationship, they remember your name, returns are simple and when you get a fever for a certain part, you can have it in hours rather than days.
A company cannot release a program (or distro) free for all, and then retroactivly demand licensing licensing agreements. This has nothing to do with the GPL. Existing case law can handle it.
The only reason the GPL is important here because it is clear that SCC intended the code they released to be open in the spirit and practice of the GPL. They are within their rights to change the license, but they cannot enforce that change retroactively. The publication by SCC and use by others governed by the GPL constitutes a contract. A contract is a contract. Unless both parties consent to a change, the contract stands.
But let's not jump to conclusions (he said stupidly, because after-all, it was slashdot). The tone of the company's comments points to confusion rather than conspiracy. Can't remember who said it, but: Never attribute to malice that which can be explained by incompetence.