The goal of both Kazaa and Napster were about dominating a market. Being uno supremo means having no competition.
Now I'm an Apple fan boy. But they too use proprietary tech to make sure that just about the only things that will bolt on to a Mac or iTunes is an Apple product. Apple went the proprietary route for many of the same reasons, they wanted to be sure THEY would capitalize on the product's success, not a generic competitor. Especially since iTunes required licensing out intellectual property from other companies (namely the songs.) If they didn't have a way to lock down the exchange of music they would be eaten alive by lawsuits.
While proprietary does work for the first few years in a new market, eventually generic competitors WILL eat you alive. Which is why today "gnutella" is synonymous with p2p file sharing, and people say "Napster Who?".
What will happen with iTunes? Apple has actually built up a brand loyalty, not to mention a massive library of titles. I find paying a buck a download for music to be simpler, more reliable, and faster than trying to hunt for a song on a p2p network. And I have some pretty obscure tastes.
I guess it comes down to whether you are delivering a product or a commodity. Kazaa and Napster were middle men. They were crazy to think they could make money off of what is otherwise a generic service: file delivery over the Internet.
Eat your own dogfood might be a better expression to describe it.
A lot of tech companies use it to describe th practice of using their own products in house. That's also where to discover many of the problems that infuriate customers.
One nice thing about any devious plots. People always have to write them down to either keep their lies straight, or to justify it somehow to themselves.
Then you have wierdos like me who live iTunes but does not own an iPod. I use a Sony Clie to listen to music on the go. I purchase music on iTunes because when I'm shopping I generally have a tune stuck in my head, not an album.
A better analogy would be a CD player and CD's to feed them. Or a casette deck and tapes to feed them. And note that the "cheaper" element isn't a comodity, it is an intellectual product.
People really have got to stop thinking there is only one operating system, one economic system, one religion, and one business model.
I would like to point out though that spirituality and the rational mind are not mutually exclusive. What does seem to get in the road of both is religion. And science is a belief system just like any other.
While our gut feelings may seem "subjective", they are often in tune with a knowledge that surpasses understanding. You can rationalize almost anything. Hate, bigotry, nationalism. They are logical constructs that teach us to simplify the world.
Are we arguing about science, or some notion of the purity of the species?
I agree with you that this research is just begging for disaster to happen.
But I can't say that the threat of disaster has ever kept mankind from exploring. It's not right, or wrong. It is. And it's not rational. It's human nature.
Exploration has never been the endeavor of the rational mind. The rational pick up the scraps from (or of) the explorers, and write it into history.
Engineers with sloppy minds and little formal training think they know it all, or think that what they know in one area is easily transfered to another completely different area.
You mean like the Wright brothers, who pretty much invented the field of aeronitics based on their experience running a bicycle shop?
How about Nobel who turned a knowledge of chemistry into the modern field of explosives and demolition? (We may not use Dynamite much anymore, but we still use his other invention, the blasting cap.)
Many developments in human history required people with "imperfect" understanding. Development requires DEVELOPMENT, and research requires RESEARCH, knowledge does not spring forth perfect from man's forehead. It comes in tantelizing peices as the fruits of failure.
Flooding out most habital areas near sea shores, massive flooding in river basins, combined with widespread drought in most other places seems like a fairly corrective measure on nature's part to me.
So really, we are talking about 0.02% of the (usable) Earth's surface. My point is that it just so happens to be the 0.02% where more than 1 billion (and counting) people live, in the neighborhood of another country (China) that is in the path of the fallout with another 1 billion (and counting) people.
70 nuclear explosions throws a tremendous amount of irradiated dust into the atmosphere, and each renders several square miles of land uninhabitable. Period. Several thousand square miles of land would be contaminated by nuclear fallout. All this in one of the most densly populated parts of the world.
Particularly the section on delayed effects. Life would suck for most of Asia. You would see a world war break out simply from the billions of people living on contaminated land looking at Australia, Africa, and Europe for arable land.
I've actually been happy with the last few Viao laptops work bought, but having to send a 6 month old Clie in for a new backlight really chapped my ass.
That said, prior to my Clie I went through at least 4 palm devices in 4 years. But you would expect a $300 device to at least outlive the free piece of junk they ship with the Dells.
What we keep discovering, the hard way, is that there really isn't any COTS software to do what we need it to. Sure there are operational chunks, but some of the stuff I do it pretty exotic. Workorder system for tracking exhibit repairs. Web-based volunteer checkin system.
And even if there is a solution TODAY, most of the problems I needed to solve were 5 years ago.
Clock in a computer act like the drum major in a marching band. Everyone takes their cue from the major's baton on when to start musical notes.
In a clocked computer major steps are broken into what is called the "pipeline". When you add two numbers there are several steps required to load the information into the right places on the chip, adding takes a certain amount of time, and then the result has to be dug out of the adder and fed to the correct output register. Each of these steps take a clock cycle. Since they don't overlap, you can make the processor seem to work 4 times as fast by feeding in new values at the same rate you snatch the results. You just have to know that the answer you are looking for takes X clock cycles, and anything in the register before or after that is not the right answer.
Imagine, if you will, that a chip is a small factory with workstations and coveyer belts. Instructions are passed to the factory by the program through the factory's loading doc (the registers.) The clock is used to coordinate the movement of products between the registers and "workstations" in the chip. Many times the "product" of on operation never leaves the loading doc, it is fed as an "ingredient" for the next instruction/
Clockless computers are designed in such a way that each componant plays whisper down the lane. The results of one step of the operation automatically triggers the next phase of the process. Short operations don't have to wait around for the longer ones to finish before they move on.
However, what you run into with clockless computers are propagation delays. You can never be sure how long an operation is going to take, because each step of the process requires time to perform, and the response time for some operations varies with the input. You also run into problems with traffic control. What if two steps in the process require the same "workstation"? Who goes first? Sometimes you can't tell. So instructions in a clockless chip have to be very carefully designed to prevent contention.
If your system bus isn't clocked you also have to implement traffic signals to control who is getting what for what. Complex, but doable. And all this traffic management after a while starts to act like downtown stop lights. Each intersection is a delay.
So you see, propogation delays have nothing to do with the speed of light, and everything to do with the complexity of the machinery. They are having trouble today with large blocks of RAM, because to address a single cell in a massive array takes time. Picture having to drive, at random, to one of 200 million homes. The roads might take time, but figuring out which way to go at what intersection is what really kills your speed.
Distance sometimes becomes an issue on chips because very thin, narrow, circuit paths are vulnerable to electrical noise. It's not really a speed issue, except that one answer to noise is to slow down. Kinda like speaking over a crappy cell phone. Yelling loader doesn't really help, but speaking clearly does.
Slashdot Mirror
Now I'm an Apple fan boy. But they too use proprietary tech to make sure that just about the only things that will bolt on to a Mac or iTunes is an Apple product. Apple went the proprietary route for many of the same reasons, they wanted to be sure THEY would capitalize on the product's success, not a generic competitor. Especially since iTunes required licensing out intellectual property from other companies (namely the songs.) If they didn't have a way to lock down the exchange of music they would be eaten alive by lawsuits.
While proprietary does work for the first few years in a new market, eventually generic competitors WILL eat you alive. Which is why today "gnutella" is synonymous with p2p file sharing, and people say "Napster Who?".
What will happen with iTunes? Apple has actually built up a brand loyalty, not to mention a massive library of titles. I find paying a buck a download for music to be simpler, more reliable, and faster than trying to hunt for a song on a p2p network. And I have some pretty obscure tastes.
I guess it comes down to whether you are delivering a product or a commodity. Kazaa and Napster were middle men. They were crazy to think they could make money off of what is otherwise a generic service: file delivery over the Internet.
If it was comon sense you wouldn't need to spin it in a "Manifesto", would you?
Can I steal that?
A lot of tech companies use it to describe th practice of using their own products in house. That's also where to discover many of the problems that infuriate customers.
One nice thing about any devious plots. People always have to write them down to either keep their lies straight, or to justify it somehow to themselves.
Then you have wierdos like me who live iTunes but does not own an iPod. I use a Sony Clie to listen to music on the go. I purchase music on iTunes because when I'm shopping I generally have a tune stuck in my head, not an album.
A better analogy would be a CD player and CD's to feed them. Or a casette deck and tapes to feed them. And note that the "cheaper" element isn't a comodity, it is an intellectual product.
People really have got to stop thinking there is only one operating system, one economic system, one religion, and one business model.
Why only make money on the razors or the blades when you can charge full price for both?
My bad it was a Don Bluth film.
Tap water costs the bottled water industry billions.
I would like to point out though that spirituality and the rational mind are not mutually exclusive. What does seem to get in the road of both is religion. And science is a belief system just like any other.
While our gut feelings may seem "subjective", they are often in tune with a knowledge that surpasses understanding. You can rationalize almost anything. Hate, bigotry, nationalism. They are logical constructs that teach us to simplify the world.
Are we arguing about science, or some notion of the purity of the species?
And what true research hasn't?
(In response to the example you gave, there is a chasm between research and sadism. Horror movies always focus on the sadism.)
But I can't say that the threat of disaster has ever kept mankind from exploring. It's not right, or wrong. It is. And it's not rational. It's human nature.
Exploration has never been the endeavor of the rational mind. The rational pick up the scraps from (or of) the explorers, and write it into history.
You mean like the Wright brothers, who pretty much invented the field of aeronitics based on their experience running a bicycle shop?
How about Nobel who turned a knowledge of chemistry into the modern field of explosives and demolition? (We may not use Dynamite much anymore, but we still use his other invention, the blasting cap.)
Many developments in human history required people with "imperfect" understanding. Development requires DEVELOPMENT, and research requires RESEARCH, knowledge does not spring forth perfect from man's forehead. It comes in tantelizing peices as the fruits of failure.
And with a 2 year lifespan the would be on an even keel with humans as far as turnover and training...
And not that silly Disney movie either. The original book.
Flooding out most habital areas near sea shores, massive flooding in river basins, combined with widespread drought in most other places seems like a fairly corrective measure on nature's part to me.
So really, we are talking about 0.02% of the (usable) Earth's surface. My point is that it just so happens to be the 0.02% where more than 1 billion (and counting) people live, in the neighborhood of another country (China) that is in the path of the fallout with another 1 billion (and counting) people.
Powder keg... meet Mr. Match.
70 nuclear explosions throws a tremendous amount of irradiated dust into the atmosphere, and each renders several square miles of land uninhabitable. Period. Several thousand square miles of land would be contaminated by nuclear fallout. All this in one of the most densly populated parts of the world.
Read up on exactly how nasty low-yield nuclear weapons can be.
Particularly the section on delayed effects. Life would suck for most of Asia. You would see a world war break out simply from the billions of people living on contaminated land looking at Australia, Africa, and Europe for arable land.
I'm not worthy! (Begins ritual self mutilation)
That said, prior to my Clie I went through at least 4 palm devices in 4 years. But you would expect a $300 device to at least outlive the free piece of junk they ship with the Dells.
And even if there is a solution TODAY, most of the problems I needed to solve were 5 years ago.
Clock in a computer act like the drum major in a marching band. Everyone takes their cue from the major's baton on when to start musical notes.
In a clocked computer major steps are broken into what is called the "pipeline". When you add two numbers there are several steps required to load the information into the right places on the chip, adding takes a certain amount of time, and then the result has to be dug out of the adder and fed to the correct output register. Each of these steps take a clock cycle. Since they don't overlap, you can make the processor seem to work 4 times as fast by feeding in new values at the same rate you snatch the results. You just have to know that the answer you are looking for takes X clock cycles, and anything in the register before or after that is not the right answer.
Imagine, if you will, that a chip is a small factory with workstations and coveyer belts. Instructions are passed to the factory by the program through the factory's loading doc (the registers.) The clock is used to coordinate the movement of products between the registers and "workstations" in the chip. Many times the "product" of on operation never leaves the loading doc, it is fed as an "ingredient" for the next instruction/
Clockless computers are designed in such a way that each componant plays whisper down the lane. The results of one step of the operation automatically triggers the next phase of the process. Short operations don't have to wait around for the longer ones to finish before they move on.
However, what you run into with clockless computers are propagation delays. You can never be sure how long an operation is going to take, because each step of the process requires time to perform, and the response time for some operations varies with the input. You also run into problems with traffic control. What if two steps in the process require the same "workstation"? Who goes first? Sometimes you can't tell. So instructions in a clockless chip have to be very carefully designed to prevent contention.
If your system bus isn't clocked you also have to implement traffic signals to control who is getting what for what. Complex, but doable. And all this traffic management after a while starts to act like downtown stop lights. Each intersection is a delay.
So you see, propogation delays have nothing to do with the speed of light, and everything to do with the complexity of the machinery. They are having trouble today with large blocks of RAM, because to address a single cell in a massive array takes time. Picture having to drive, at random, to one of 200 million homes. The roads might take time, but figuring out which way to go at what intersection is what really kills your speed.
Distance sometimes becomes an issue on chips because very thin, narrow, circuit paths are vulnerable to electrical noise. It's not really a speed issue, except that one answer to noise is to slow down. Kinda like speaking over a crappy cell phone. Yelling loader doesn't really help, but speaking clearly does.
(Golf Clap)
I agree.