I grew up in Portland, and when I left, TriMet was still getting a halfway decent transit-planning system in place online. It only worked some of the time, and it gagged on my address because it couldn't figure out where the nearest bus stop is.
Fast forward to today. I can see pretty clearly that TriMet's database, which they were building when I moved away about four years ago, is comprehensive enough to map it onto the Google Maps router. I think that's pretty damn impressive.
About the only thing it needs now is hybrid trip functionality: Park-and-ride is pretty successful in Portland, and it'd be great if there were a way for it to tell me how much a trip would cost as a hybrid too. I have no idea if that's possible.
The one thing that would make this even more useful is if it were possible (Homeland Security concerns notwithstanding) to tap into TriMet's GPS data for the buses and trains on the system. Then, Google could actually give you statistical timetable information (this bus is early 65% of the time, this bus runs late 98% of the time [I'm looking at you, 38 and 39]), and could show you where the buses are currently on the route for upcoming trips.
To my knowledge that's not true. There have been a couple of nights when the overnight low was in the vicinity of 95, but the Republic made a big production about how that was setting all kinds of records. Admittedly, that's at Sky Harbor, but I don't think it's much hotter elsewhere in the Valley.
Incidentally, there's more to this than you realize. Lots of the developments in science in the past, say the 17th through 19th centuries, were done by rich men with spare time to kill and an interest in the sciences as well as the arts. You know, the quintessential Renaissance men.
Why should modern computing be any different? I don't know that it would be. While, yes, we now have paid scientists and IT and CS people (whose salaries probably suck but who have access to this stuff), why shouldn't people with some spare money and some interest contribute?
Obviously, anyone who's ever tried to take a poll knows that everyone tries to vote multiple times. Of course, there's no easy way to know whether someone is doing it or not; IP logging only works for those with static IPs, and between dialup and large-environment DHCP God only knows that it's hard to do that.
I don't want to think about it this way, but maybe cookies are the way to go for this sort of thing?
Either that, or we need to stop thinking of Web polls as reliable.
I don't recall the name, but there's a radio show in town that is based on the exploits of these sisters. The two principal hosts actually live here, in Portland, and the remaining sisters live elsewhere and come on as necessary, but they're never in the same studio.
Perhaps what's necessary is figuring out a way to do Internet broadcast and listening. It won't ever be the same, but...
Suggestion number two: Maybe you could use people like Nate as occasional guests, and then simply take somebody else that still lives in the region as a host? You know, turn him into a GiS Correspondant Emeritus or something?
But, as everyone else has said, the show must go on! We're in WITHDRAWAL here, dying from lack of having our precious Geeks in Space!
Ten years from now: Johnny, age twelve, decides he's going to buy a new computer, because he's tired of little Julie using his computer. (After all, she's only six.) But even then, his computer's so cool, he's worried she'll use it anyway. So he buys this mouse. Fast forward four years. Johnny is now a fully blown hacker, producing programs that are the coolest thing in the world and inserting stuff into his kernel that only a Code God could think of. What's up? The FBI comes after him. Yet... because of the awesome power of a system implemented, you can't get into his computer -- at all -- without mouse input that matches his fingerprints.
The thing about this sort of device is just that sort of situation. I'm sure the FBI will find a way around it, but it's our responsibility to stay six steps ahead of them all the time. Let's be realistic: They don't have the manpower that we have. Plus, of course, we have people that think that American imperialistic `secret service' conduct is idiotic, and they'll help out!
With the help of devices like these, we can finally -- if we choose to have it -- the ultimate security. (On workstations, though; models serving as servers on the Internet would still be open to breaches, of course.)
Talk about a good way to thumb your nose at the anti-security people, like Republicans.
I've always been told that it's traditional to use Xbps for X-BITS, and XBps for X-BYTES. In other words, Kbps is kilobits per second, and KBps is kiloBYTES per second. So that probably has to do with the distinction.
"I may disagree vehemently with what you say, but I will fight to the death for your right to say it."
That's awesome stuff, I don't know if anyone else caught that. (laugh) Do you quite appreciate just how fast 40GBps is? That's, hmm, in Internet terms 320Gbps [gigaBITS per second], or 327680 Kbps. Approximately 5789 times the speed of your modem, by my calculations... US West, watch out. DSL may be nine times as fast as a modem, but if you can beat 5789.
No, seriously, that's amazing. What sort of things do you think you could do with a connection that fast? I mean, God, that's probably faster than an internal bus on the motherboard; try throwing that sort of stuff into a Beowulf cluster.
Perhaps they'll throw that technology my way when they're done with it.
"I may disagree vehemently with what you say, but I will fight to the death for your right to say it."
That's truly saddening, to know that someone so... hmm, important, really, should die at such a tragic end. And so YOUNG! 37 is hardly old enough to even say that he lived a good life. No one's ever old enough to die, but some are simply younger than others.
My condolences go out to his family, his friends, everyone that ever used the wonderful software, and in fact the world in general. It's sad to mourn the passing of anyone who pioneers anything, but sadder still when that very pioneer dies young.
We each give up something in exchange for fame, if we want it, and that's something that he, clearly, gave up: A long life. We'll be the lesser without him.
"I may disagree vehemently with what you say, but I will fight to the death for your right to say it."
You actually can; using YaST, you can tell it to use an FTP server, as I understand it, and then update your packages. Not fun, but certainly doable.
"I may disagree vehemently with what you say, but I will fight to the death for your right to say it."
Re:SuSE making inroads in the North American marke
on
SuSE 6.4 Announced
·
· Score: 1
Why is this a problem with the others? I'm not aware of any current distributions that ship GNOME but not KDE. The only difference is the GNOME is the default in Red Hat, while KDE is the default in SuSE.
The problem arises in that each uses a defalt configuration, and SuSE's KDE configuration is nice. I'm too lazy to do it all myself. Plus, the screensavers and bitmaps are all really nice, and harder to find in non-KDE-based distros.
While it may have a stranglehld on the German market, that's certainly not the case in the UK. Yes, it's available, but Red Hat seems to be more prevalent.
I'm not saying that SuSE is the *only* European distribution, but rather that it's much MORE common in Europe than in the United States. I've had people laugh at me, here, for using it; I imagine that's not the case in Europe. Regional differences. My point was that Americans... may start to see some merit in using it, in large enough numbers for more retailers to carry it.
"I may disagree vehemently with what you say, but I will fight to the death for your right to say it."
Re:SuSE making inroads in the North American marke
on
SuSE 6.4 Announced
·
· Score: 1
I actually had never heard of buying Red Hat as a resold set; but I suppose it happens. The reason I wouldn't buy a Red Hat set that wasn't retail is because (a) you don't get paper documentation [unless I'm mistaken], and (b) you get no tech support or anything.
With my boxed SuSE set, I get floppies, my 5-CD set (they're up to six now, I haven't upgraded past 6.1 yet), an installation/configuration guide, and registration certificates for the StarOffice and SuSE tech support.
Plus, don't forget the cool translation errors in the installation guide! *laugh*
"I may disagree vehemently with what you say, but I will fight to the death for your right to say it."
YaST, in package installation mode, is sort of like an RPM frontend. They're all RPM packages, and I've used SuSE packages off of my CD set on an RH system.
However, at the same time, YaST is nice because it's categorized and will even automatically fix dependencies errors. It checks to see if packages conflict, too. Very cool stuff.
In other words -- it's an RPM-based system, with some enhancements. Sorry for being a hair wordy.
"I may disagree vehemently with what you say, but I will fight to the death for your right to say it."
SuSE making inroads in the North American market
on
SuSE 6.4 Announced
·
· Score: 4
This is pretty cool for us American users, because it demonstrates that SuSE is actually making progress in taking the American market domination from Red Hat.
In other words, SuSE may not be just for Europeans any more. There are some distinct reasons that I like it:
Flexibility
A unified installation/administration tool
KDE rather than GNOME (I prefer it)
Less expensive (at least here)
More packages
So -- SuSE is potentially aiming to take that market domination. It might just teach Red Hat that they're NOT the only game in town, even in the US, anymore.
"I may disagree vehemently with what you say, but I will fight to the death for your right to say it."
That's actually extremely cool; but because of that "little" resolution problem, you'd be stuck with basically a wall that cost an arm, a leg and a kidney (laugh, eBay time!) and yet never be able to do anything with it.
Good point about the entire wall thing, the scalability. But is that really something that will ever become practical?
Anyone out there recall the parlor walls in Fahrenheit 451? We don't want to be like that. I think I'll forgo the full-wall TVs and computers, for the time being, as I'm not a department store.
"I may disagree vehemently with what you say, but I will fight to the death for your right to say it."
This is true, but -- well, there's a difference between what Creative and NVidia have done and what Transmeta will do.
Bear in mind that, despite the fact that there are about six hundred million SoundBlaster clones out there, primarily SB16 clones, if you want the real thing -- you buy the real thing. Because the quality's much better.
On the other hand, CPUs themselves are a slightly different beast, in my way of viewing. Look at Intel's market share after AMD figured out how to beat them at their own game -- relatively cheaper chips running at the same speeds or faster. Obviously, the latter portion depends on who does the benchmarking, but the idea remains: Intel couldn't hold on to their all-but-stranglehold on the market.
I'm certainly in favor of open source -- where practical. But despite the obvious advantages to open source,... you can't call the translation layer in the Crusoe a true closed-source software element, at least to my way of thinking.
OK, so you ask, where am I going with THAT paragraph? Well, I'll tell you. Crusoe's translation layer is embedded in the chip, I'm assuming; otherwise, it's already open source, because of its presence in Mobile Linux. And if it is embedded in the chip, then it's another story altogether.
Creative and NVidia took the initiative to do something that only a company in a vastly superior position to Transmeta's can afford to do. NVidia designs what are considered by some, including myself, to be the best graphics controller card chips on the market right now; and Creative -- well, we all know what the SoundBlasters have done for the universe as a whole.
Transmeta is lacking in that tremendously strong position. Therefore, they can't afford to open-source their chip's specifications, etc. This is because if they did that, they'd be practically giving away market share before they were even off the ground. Come back when everyone's using Crusoe chips in their computer, and we can have this discussion again -- but for the time being, it's unrealistic to expect them to take the altruistic standpoint. They ARE a company, after all!
"I may disagree vehemently with what you say, but I will fight to the death for your right to say it."
The hardware is entirely proprietary, meaning that the upgrade possibilities if you replaced your computer with a gaming console are... limited.
Similarly, there are other strange quirks. Sure, all the new consoles will have keyboards and everything, but they require special internet service -- I highly doubt they're PPP compliant, and Ethernet compliance? Probably not, in all fairness.
Lastly -- text on TVs is hard to read. It's getting better, but it will never be a computer monitor, because it's designed for an entirely different effect. Those of us who sit near our computer screens, for lack of a better `ergonomic' setup, can tell you that it looks vastly different from close up from a television.
I doubt the Playstation, or any gaming console, will ever supersede the computer, because they're designed for a very specialized purpose; the hardware is extremely specific, so they can basically provide their gigaflop capabilities; but slap some hardware that makes it worthwhile to the average user, and it becomes (a) slower, (b) more computer-like, and (c) more expensive.
That's all I have to say. I'm banking on my computer for the time being.
"I may disagree vehemently with what you say, but I will fight to the death for your right to say it."
The FBI, who obviously must have been running a generally useless Microsoft product, has been spying on those of us that are considered `subversive;' and in this day and age, I would imagine that anyone that is active in the Linux community has the potential to be subversive. Because the modern economy seems to have this thing for the merger of government and business, Microsoft even in the throes of a DoJ crisis has a lot of sympathetic ears in the govt.
And now their computer crashes. Maybe instead of protesting Echelon, which no one can prove actually exists, we should simply flood their computer and the Internet at large with the news of the FBI's machine going down.
Wouldn't that prove the usefulness of/.? To show the US government that we're far more valuable to them, with our overall hacker mentality, than Microsoft with its billions of dollars is?
Disclaimer: A lot of this is mildly sarcastic; I don't REALLY think the FBI would take us seriously. But the irony really heavy, so that works...
"I may disagree vehemently with what you say, but I will fight to the death for your right to say it."
I guess one of the shortcomings to the Linux community is that we tend to be somewhat underrepresented in certain minority groups. Before you get worried about accusations, no, I've been met only with pleasant people in my experience, but this is a recommendation about how our multiculturalism could be better acknowledged.
I'm Jewish. I read this article with interest... education is hardly the only answer, because in order to have education answer it, you have to make sure that the curriculum doesn't have any `subliminals,' and that's hard because, as it has been said millions of times before, "history is written by the people who win the wars."
Come on, guys! The only way to combat racism is to promote society's positive influences on people. Encourage community service, and discourage antisocial behavior, which frequently degenerates into racist or xenophobic or homophobic or whatever behavior.
What we ought to do is basically reinforce people being positively involved. If that means church, mosque, temple or synagogue, so be it; but if people can only see the negatives in society, then they are going to have a hard time accepting minorities.
Otherwise -- we'll have to do like myself and my ancestors have, for almost the entire time we have existed as a culture and a religion. Ignore the people who are too shortsighted to see the good that can come from multiculturalism, and band together in communities.
Let's work together and use Slashdot to provide a forum for that multiculturalism! Linux is really a universal operating system, and the nerds of the world should unite and prove a model to everyone else as to how they can act to make the world a better place. I'm proud to be a Linux user, a Slashdotter, but to hide the fact that underneath that lies someone who is also Jewish would be doing a disservice to the community. Come on, guys, show the world what a diverse community can be like when it works!
I disagree. The DVD hackers are not exactly doing what I'd call `trashing what good name Linux had in the marketplace.'
The reason I say this is that despite the fact that there are a large number of us, not all of whom have the scruples necessary to function as citizens of any country besides Djazaharazakhstania (if anyone's from there, I'm sorry to offend them:P), I'd hardly say that we soil the reputation. In this same light I'd say that it's hard to accuse us of acting as the Free Software bullies; after all, there's free Windows software, but not all Free Software is Linux software and not all Linux software is Free Software. Note my capitalization.
But back to the point. One of the draws, at least where I come from, to Linux is actually its rebellion-style status. -- If someone in, say, the BeOS world had done the DeCSS stuff, or maybe the Solaris or SCO realms, would you be screaming about how we're defiling the OS' reputation?
The fact remains that for every bad apple, there about three hundred million good apples (every one of which is also a Michigan apple that tastes better than three hundred trillion cheap Chinese apples made into apple juice [eg Windows -- no flames, it's a valid economics analogy!], even if it's harder to find in the modern supermarket).
Well said. The poor people that will have attempted to go for a product -- or to simply invest in a new company -- when/if LinuxOne gets its IPO, are the innocents, and they are going to get sneered down at by those of us in the More Fortress-like Position of knowing the technology.
That's not really fair to them, is it?
OK, besides that point, there's another point that I wanted to make. We actually don't have a responsibility, necessarily, to protect them; it's actually a MORAL obligation, instead. I'm nitpicking, I know, but it's an important hair-split and someone has to make it. Some of us will be so amazed that they even selected LinuxOne at all that they will be recalcitrant to help out; so on the whole, it will become less `obligation' and more `moral duty.'
Lastly, to all of you who believe that getting the SEC or anyone else is a use of government power that is unnecessary in the United States -- I have to ask you a simple question. "Did you say the same thing when the government went after Microsoft? Or do you do this in the same light as Woodrow Wilson, who once said (I'm paraphrasing here), `Never get involved when your enemies are destroying themselves.' I personally support the government's actions in both -- they are, after all, charged with the protection of the citizens' rights, and if the government does not, then as John Locke envisioned in his _Second Treatise on Government_, the people must rebel. Because their fundamental rights are not being protected.
Microsoft most certainly does not have a monopoly, by the traditional definition. I would agree with you wholeheartedly there. After all, I believe personally that it is impossible to actually sustain a monopoly when there are cheaper and/or free products out there which are better.
The thing, though, that sets this case apart as a precedent is that we've never seen this before. Since when do people give things away for FREE? I mean, in the UNIX world this doesn't strike us as terribly new, but in the Windows world-- quite the novel concept.
The reason, referring back to my first paragraph, that I don't see this as a traditional monopoly is that Microsoft has preyed on the people who feel the need, for one reason or another to buy a computer, and yet lack the know-how to actually learn much from the experience. A company with an advertising blitz, flashy manuals, impressive sounding names and more is hard to compete with. That's what Be Inc., Apple Inc., RedHat Inc., SuSE (insert German corporation abbreviation here), and all the others out there have to deal with.
I think that certainly the Justice Department is stretching their definition of a monopoly, but even then if you have that domination of the market psychologically instead of physically, it's the same in my mind. Microsoft has maintained a monopoly by convincing people that their software is good, maybe just because it simply ships with their computer and therefore strikes them as "free" or whatever other reason, and that it's easier to use than other things. Most of the above is not true, or only debatably so, but it's what the people I deal with with on a daily basis, at school, believe.
I think this could be a big boost to consumers in this country and everywhere else. It may mean that we have to go back to the days when it cost more to get all your software, but how many of us really use Microsoft GeeWhizTool that comes preinstalled? This could save consumers the hassle of uninstalling that stuff, and then trying to learn about more; it could also help the Open Source community in getting the word out, on well-known sources (bad pun:P), and getting people to use software that is free. It could revolutionize the computer market.
So ask yourself this then. Do we want a world where every computer comes installed with the programs Microsoft wants you to see-- after all, I doubt many people will dispute after seeing MS' internal email that they had an agenda for computer OEMs? Where instead of maintaining a physical monopoly, where no one else can compete, they simply block out space in the minds of vulnerable -- and sometimes deep-pocketed -- individuals and make it the company's own?
Or instead we can live in a world where everyone competes on an even basis, like an open-air market full of independent vendors instead of a grocery store. (Read The Cathedral and the Bazaar for the basis of my analogy.) You all can pick... I'm decided.
Slashdot Mirror
I grew up in Portland, and when I left, TriMet was still getting a halfway decent transit-planning system in place online. It only worked some of the time, and it gagged on my address because it couldn't figure out where the nearest bus stop is.
Fast forward to today. I can see pretty clearly that TriMet's database, which they were building when I moved away about four years ago, is comprehensive enough to map it onto the Google Maps router. I think that's pretty damn impressive.
About the only thing it needs now is hybrid trip functionality: Park-and-ride is pretty successful in Portland, and it'd be great if there were a way for it to tell me how much a trip would cost as a hybrid too. I have no idea if that's possible.
The one thing that would make this even more useful is if it were possible (Homeland Security concerns notwithstanding) to tap into TriMet's GPS data for the buses and trains on the system. Then, Google could actually give you statistical timetable information (this bus is early 65% of the time, this bus runs late 98% of the time [I'm looking at you, 38 and 39]), and could show you where the buses are currently on the route for upcoming trips.
To my knowledge that's not true. There have been a couple of nights when the overnight low was in the vicinity of 95, but the Republic made a big production about how that was setting all kinds of records. Admittedly, that's at Sky Harbor, but I don't think it's much hotter elsewhere in the Valley.
This is a Cocoa text-field widget feature, and so therefore is new to X -- but not 10.2.
If you're using a Carbon app, you'll notice that that still doesn't happen.
Incidentally, there's more to this than you realize. Lots of the developments in science in the past, say the 17th through 19th centuries, were done by rich men with spare time to kill and an interest in the sciences as well as the arts. You know, the quintessential Renaissance men.
Why should modern computing be any different? I don't know that it would be. While, yes, we now have paid scientists and IT and CS people (whose salaries probably suck but who have access to this stuff), why shouldn't people with some spare money and some interest contribute?
Obviously, anyone who's ever tried to take a poll knows that everyone tries to vote multiple times. Of course, there's no easy way to know whether someone is doing it or not; IP logging only works for those with static IPs, and between dialup and large-environment DHCP God only knows that it's hard to do that.
I don't want to think about it this way, but maybe cookies are the way to go for this sort of thing?
Either that, or we need to stop thinking of Web polls as reliable.
-Sax
I don't recall the name, but there's a radio show in town that is based on the exploits of these sisters. The two principal hosts actually live here, in Portland, and the remaining sisters live elsewhere and come on as necessary, but they're never in the same studio.
...
Perhaps what's necessary is figuring out a way to do Internet broadcast and listening. It won't ever be the same, but
Suggestion number two: Maybe you could use people like Nate as occasional guests, and then simply take somebody else that still lives in the region as a host? You know, turn him into a GiS Correspondant Emeritus or something?
But, as everyone else has said, the show must go on! We're in WITHDRAWAL here, dying from lack of having our precious Geeks in Space!
Ten years from now:
Johnny, age twelve, decides he's going to buy a new computer, because he's tired of little Julie using his computer. (After all, she's only six.) But even then, his computer's so cool, he's worried she'll use it anyway. So he buys this mouse.
Fast forward four years. Johnny is now a fully blown hacker, producing programs that are the coolest thing in the world and inserting stuff into his kernel that only a Code God could think of. What's up?
The FBI comes after him. Yet... because of the awesome power of a system implemented, you can't get into his computer -- at all -- without mouse input that matches his fingerprints.
The thing about this sort of device is just that sort of situation. I'm sure the FBI will find a way around it, but it's our responsibility to stay six steps ahead of them all the time. Let's be realistic: They don't have the manpower that we have. Plus, of course, we have people that think that American imperialistic `secret service' conduct is idiotic, and they'll help out!
With the help of devices like these, we can finally -- if we choose to have it -- the ultimate security. (On workstations, though; models serving as servers on the Internet would still be open to breaches, of course.)
Talk about a good way to thumb your nose at the anti-security people, like Republicans.
I've always been told that it's traditional to use Xbps for X-BITS, and XBps for X-BYTES. In other words, Kbps is kilobits per second, and KBps is kiloBYTES per second. So that probably has to do with the distinction.
"I may disagree vehemently with what you say, but I will fight to the death for your right to say it."
That's awesome stuff, I don't know if anyone else caught that. (laugh) Do you quite appreciate just how fast 40GBps is? That's, hmm, in Internet terms 320Gbps [gigaBITS per second], or 327680 Kbps. Approximately 5789 times the speed of your modem, by my calculations... US West, watch out. DSL may be nine times as fast as a modem, but if you can beat 5789.
No, seriously, that's amazing. What sort of things do you think you could do with a connection that fast? I mean, God, that's probably faster than an internal bus on the motherboard; try throwing that sort of stuff into a Beowulf cluster.
Perhaps they'll throw that technology my way when they're done with it.
"I may disagree vehemently with what you say, but I will fight to the death for your right to say it."
That's truly saddening, to know that someone so ... hmm, important, really, should die at such a tragic end. And so YOUNG! 37 is hardly old enough to even say that he lived a good life. No one's ever old enough to die, but some are simply younger than others.
My condolences go out to his family, his friends, everyone that ever used the wonderful software, and in fact the world in general. It's sad to mourn the passing of anyone who pioneers anything, but sadder still when that very pioneer dies young.
We each give up something in exchange for fame, if we want it, and that's something that he, clearly, gave up: A long life. We'll be the lesser without him.
"I may disagree vehemently with what you say, but I will fight to the death for your right to say it."
You actually can; using YaST, you can tell it to use an FTP server, as I understand it, and then update your packages. Not fun, but certainly doable.
"I may disagree vehemently with what you say, but I will fight to the death for your right to say it."
The problem arises in that each uses a defalt configuration, and SuSE's KDE configuration is nice. I'm too lazy to do it all myself. Plus, the screensavers and bitmaps are all really nice, and harder to find in non-KDE-based distros.
While it may have a stranglehld on the German market, that's certainly not the case in the UK. Yes, it's available, but Red Hat seems to be more prevalent.
I'm not saying that SuSE is the *only* European distribution, but rather that it's much MORE common in Europe than in the United States. I've had people laugh at me, here, for using it; I imagine that's not the case in Europe. Regional differences. My point was that Americans ... may start to see some merit in using it, in large enough numbers for more retailers to carry it.
"I may disagree vehemently with what you say, but I will fight to the death for your right to say it."
With my boxed SuSE set, I get floppies, my 5-CD set (they're up to six now, I haven't upgraded past 6.1 yet), an installation/configuration guide, and registration certificates for the StarOffice and SuSE tech support.
Plus, don't forget the cool translation errors in the installation guide! *laugh*
"I may disagree vehemently with what you say, but I will fight to the death for your right to say it."
However, at the same time, YaST is nice because it's categorized and will even automatically fix dependencies errors. It checks to see if packages conflict, too. Very cool stuff.
In other words -- it's an RPM-based system, with some enhancements. Sorry for being a hair wordy.
"I may disagree vehemently with what you say, but I will fight to the death for your right to say it."
In other words, SuSE may not be just for Europeans any more. There are some distinct reasons that I like it:
- Flexibility
- A unified installation/administration tool
- KDE rather than GNOME (I prefer it)
- Less expensive (at least here)
- More packages
So -- SuSE is potentially aiming to take that market domination. It might just teach Red Hat that they're NOT the only game in town, even in the US, anymore."I may disagree vehemently with what you say, but I will fight to the death for your right to say it."
That's actually extremely cool; but because of that "little" resolution problem, you'd be stuck with basically a wall that cost an arm, a leg and a kidney (laugh, eBay time!) and yet never be able to do anything with it.
Good point about the entire wall thing, the scalability. But is that really something that will ever become practical?
Anyone out there recall the parlor walls in Fahrenheit 451? We don't want to be like that. I think I'll forgo the full-wall TVs and computers, for the time being, as I'm not a department store.
"I may disagree vehemently with what you say, but I will fight to the death for your right to say it."
Bear in mind that, despite the fact that there are about six hundred million SoundBlaster clones out there, primarily SB16 clones, if you want the real thing -- you buy the real thing. Because the quality's much better.
On the other hand, CPUs themselves are a slightly different beast, in my way of viewing. Look at Intel's market share after AMD figured out how to beat them at their own game -- relatively cheaper chips running at the same speeds or faster. Obviously, the latter portion depends on who does the benchmarking, but the idea remains: Intel couldn't hold on to their all-but-stranglehold on the market.
I'm certainly in favor of open source -- where practical. But despite the obvious advantages to open source, ... you can't call the translation layer in the Crusoe a true closed-source software element, at least to my way of thinking.
OK, so you ask, where am I going with THAT paragraph? Well, I'll tell you. Crusoe's translation layer is embedded in the chip, I'm assuming; otherwise, it's already open source, because of its presence in Mobile Linux. And if it is embedded in the chip, then it's another story altogether.
Creative and NVidia took the initiative to do something that only a company in a vastly superior position to Transmeta's can afford to do. NVidia designs what are considered by some, including myself, to be the best graphics controller card chips on the market right now; and Creative -- well, we all know what the SoundBlasters have done for the universe as a whole.
Transmeta is lacking in that tremendously strong position. Therefore, they can't afford to open-source their chip's specifications, etc. This is because if they did that, they'd be practically giving away market share before they were even off the ground. Come back when everyone's using Crusoe chips in their computer, and we can have this discussion again -- but for the time being, it's unrealistic to expect them to take the altruistic standpoint. They ARE a company, after all!
"I may disagree vehemently with what you say, but I will fight to the death for your right to say it."
That's all I have to say. I'm banking on my computer for the time being.
"I may disagree vehemently with what you say, but I will fight to the death for your right to say it."
Err... Oops. Follow-up: It's the NSA, not the FBI. I misread the piece. Sorry guys. No flames!
"I may disagree vehemently with what you say, but I will fight to the death for your right to say it."
And now their computer crashes. Maybe instead of protesting Echelon, which no one can prove actually exists, we should simply flood their computer and the Internet at large with the news of the FBI's machine going down.
Wouldn't that prove the usefulness of /.? To show the US government that we're far more valuable to them, with our overall hacker mentality, than Microsoft with its billions of dollars is?
Disclaimer: A lot of this is mildly sarcastic; I don't REALLY think the FBI would take us seriously. But the irony really heavy, so that works...
"I may disagree vehemently with what you say, but I will fight to the death for your right to say it."
I'm Jewish. I read this article with interest... education is hardly the only answer, because in order to have education answer it, you have to make sure that the curriculum doesn't have any `subliminals,' and that's hard because, as it has been said millions of times before, "history is written by the people who win the wars."
Come on, guys! The only way to combat racism is to promote society's positive influences on people. Encourage community service, and discourage antisocial behavior, which frequently degenerates into racist or xenophobic or homophobic or whatever behavior.
What we ought to do is basically reinforce people being positively involved. If that means church, mosque, temple or synagogue, so be it; but if people can only see the negatives in society, then they are going to have a hard time accepting minorities.
Otherwise -- we'll have to do like myself and my ancestors have, for almost the entire time we have existed as a culture and a religion. Ignore the people who are too shortsighted to see the good that can come from multiculturalism, and band together in communities.
Let's work together and use Slashdot to provide a forum for that multiculturalism! Linux is really a universal operating system, and the nerds of the world should unite and prove a model to everyone else as to how they can act to make the world a better place. I'm proud to be a Linux user, a Slashdotter, but to hide the fact that underneath that lies someone who is also Jewish would be doing a disservice to the community. Come on, guys, show the world what a diverse community can be like when it works!
I disagree. The DVD hackers are not exactly doing what I'd call `trashing what good name Linux had in the marketplace.'
The reason I say this is that despite the fact that there are a large number of us, not all of whom have the scruples necessary to function as citizens of any country besides Djazaharazakhstania (if anyone's from there, I'm sorry to offend them :P), I'd hardly say that we soil the reputation. In this same light I'd say that it's hard to accuse us of acting as the Free Software bullies; after all, there's free Windows software, but not all Free Software is Linux software and not all Linux software is Free Software. Note my capitalization.
But back to the point. One of the draws, at least where I come from, to Linux is actually its rebellion-style status. -- If someone in, say, the BeOS world had done the DeCSS stuff, or maybe the Solaris or SCO realms, would you be screaming about how we're defiling the OS' reputation?
The fact remains that for every bad apple, there about three hundred million good apples (every one of which is also a Michigan apple that tastes better than three hundred trillion cheap Chinese apples made into apple juice [eg Windows -- no flames, it's a valid economics analogy!], even if it's harder to find in the modern supermarket).
Well said. The poor people that will have attempted to go for a product -- or to simply invest in a new company -- when/if LinuxOne gets its IPO, are the innocents, and they are going to get sneered down at by those of us in the More Fortress-like Position of knowing the technology.
That's not really fair to them, is it?
OK, besides that point, there's another point that I wanted to make. We actually don't have a responsibility, necessarily, to protect them; it's actually a MORAL obligation, instead. I'm nitpicking, I know, but it's an important hair-split and someone has to make it. Some of us will be so amazed that they even selected LinuxOne at all that they will be recalcitrant to help out; so on the whole, it will become less `obligation' and more `moral duty.'
Lastly, to all of you who believe that getting the SEC or anyone else is a use of government power that is unnecessary in the United States -- I have to ask you a simple question. "Did you say the same thing when the government went after Microsoft? Or do you do this in the same light as Woodrow Wilson, who once said (I'm paraphrasing here), `Never get involved when your enemies are destroying themselves.' I personally support the government's actions in both -- they are, after all, charged with the protection of the citizens' rights, and if the government does not, then as John Locke envisioned in his _Second Treatise on Government_, the people must rebel. Because their fundamental rights are not being protected.
Email me at: wesleym@teleport.com.
Oops. Hehe. See my above post. I forgot to leave my email address, and BTW I'm forcing all flames in the direction of /dev/null.
Any comments? Forward 'em my way.
Saxifrage / Wes Meltzer / saxifrage@hfs.dhs.org
Microsoft most certainly does not have a monopoly, by the traditional definition. I would agree with you wholeheartedly there. After all, I believe personally that it is impossible to actually sustain a monopoly when there are cheaper and/or free products out there which are better.
The thing, though, that sets this case apart as a precedent is that we've never seen this before. Since when do people give things away for FREE? I mean, in the UNIX world this doesn't strike us as terribly new, but in the Windows world-- quite the novel concept.
The reason, referring back to my first paragraph, that I don't see this as a traditional monopoly is that Microsoft has preyed on the people who feel the need, for one reason or another to buy a computer, and yet lack the know-how to actually learn much from the experience. A company with an advertising blitz, flashy manuals, impressive sounding names and more is hard to compete with. That's what Be Inc., Apple Inc., RedHat Inc., SuSE (insert German corporation abbreviation here), and all the others out there have to deal with.
I think that certainly the Justice Department is stretching their definition of a monopoly, but even then if you have that domination of the market psychologically instead of physically, it's the same in my mind. Microsoft has maintained a monopoly by convincing people that their software is good, maybe just because it simply ships with their computer and therefore strikes them as "free" or whatever other reason, and that it's easier to use than other things. Most of the above is not true, or only debatably so, but it's what the people I deal with with on a daily basis, at school, believe.
I think this could be a big boost to consumers in this country and everywhere else. It may mean that we have to go back to the days when it cost more to get all your software, but how many of us really use Microsoft GeeWhizTool that comes preinstalled? This could save consumers the hassle of uninstalling that stuff, and then trying to learn about more; it could also help the Open Source community in getting the word out, on well-known sources (bad pun :P), and getting people to use software that is free. It could revolutionize the computer market.
So ask yourself this then. Do we want a world where every computer comes installed with the programs Microsoft wants you to see-- after all, I doubt many people will dispute after seeing MS' internal email that they had an agenda for computer OEMs? Where instead of maintaining a physical monopoly, where no one else can compete, they simply block out space in the minds of vulnerable -- and sometimes deep-pocketed -- individuals and make it the company's own?
Or instead we can live in a world where everyone competes on an even basis, like an open-air market full of independent vendors instead of a grocery store. (Read The Cathedral and the Bazaar for the basis of my analogy.) You all can pick... I'm decided.