Well, geek stores are a must. Electronics places, software shops, etc..
But the ambiance of the city is a tough one to change, and a tough one to get right. Seattle and the Bay area work because they're about the right combination of post-60s hippy-ism (?!), techno-geekery, and left-wing sentiment.
Of course, feeling important is a big draw for any and everyone, which means that a thriving geek community is the best way to bring in more geeks.
I'd ask if anyone was surprised at this, but judging from the posts yesterday, ("Oh yay, EToys has changed their mind, they're good guys again") I guess the answer is yes.
EToys never claimed to be dropping the suit--only "backing off," which means, precisely, whatever they want it to. Trying to censor in good faith is apparently what they meant by backing off.
If this is ever resolved satisfactorily, I urge everyone who has been boycotting EToys to _continue_ the boycott. They deserve (and have from the beginning) punitive measures brought against them for the damage they've done to the etoy group.
Section 1832 of the Act makes it a federal criminal act for any person to convert a trade secret to his own benefit or the benefit of others intending or knowing that the offense will injure any owner of the trade secret.
Aye, there's the rub. deCSS was originally created to allow playing DVDs under linux and other non-supported OSes, was it not? If the trade secret holder has no apparent intentions of supporting those platforms, then writing a player on them can't be construed as injury.
Also, the internationalisation only goes so far as dealing with countries which have an extradition agreement with the US. They can't prosecute someone from, say, Cuba for distributing deCSS.
Great. Now we're not forced into using a crappy product from the MS monopoly. Instead, we can use a crappy trojan horse from a DIFFERENT lying, contract-breaking, spamming sleazball company.
Wonderful.
As long as I've got a MS OS on any of my computers, I'll use their product. I will never let RealAnything near one of my systems again, now that they've proven to be a bunch of thieving criminals.
Anyone want to write a good, robust, multi-platform streaming audio player? I'd pay money (yes, cash!) for that.
Is that a trademark infringement? Is O'Reilly going to sic their lawyers on me now? Oh no!!!
Seriously, though...
Somehow, patents have got out of hand. (obviously) For reasons of money, companies and lawyer are aggressively searching for anything and everything they 'own' (in some sense of the word) that might possibly be patentable. Patents were supposed to be on things that you truly created, and they were supposed to be so that you could share your ideas with others. Not make money by suing.
After choosing the packages I wanted to install (from a clean and easy-to-understand menu), the install program decided how much disk space I needed, suggested minimum and recommended partition sizes, and wouldn't let me go below the minimum. Up until actually hitting the 'start install' button, I could change any of the partition sizes and packages at will.
Recently I installed RedHat6.0. After FIRST choosing the partition sizes, I picked my packages to be installed from a long and ugly list, at which point I was told my proposed partitions were too small. Changing them required starting the install process over from scratch!
I wanted my MBR to remain intact, and point to lilo on hda2 to boot from hda5. Lilo insisted on installing itself in the (unusable) BR of hda5.
And don't even get me started on setting up/configuring X11. Last week's discussion speaks loudly enough on that issue.
The point is, I am a professional Unix admin, and this was the most damnably aggravating install I've EVER done, since SunOS4.0! (where you had to configure the kernel by hand before starting the install) RedHat6.0 is so far behind Sun, HP, IBM, SCO, and yes, Windows (gasp!) in terms of getting a machine up and running that I've started telling my friends to go with Solaris on their Intel boxes. A friend of mine is using Caldera, and he said it was a breeze (and it worked) to install. Maybe that's the way to go.
But if you can't install it and get it RUNNING in half a day, people won't use it.
Anyone who has been around online (and especially in usenet) for more than a few years will recognise the above running joke.
Anyways, it was a good article. I hadn't heard about the Transasia case, but it's another nail in the coffin of common sense. How can a company trademark a person's name? How can suits be filed against organisations for using a name _prior_ to the suing company? This is clearly stupid.
The real question is, WHAT CAN WE DO? Make it clear to eToys (by mailing them, phoning them (collect, no doubt), and telling your friends) that they will be boycotted. (and then carry out the boycott, of course)
Unfortunately, while this makes us feel good, boycotts don't seem to be enough. Many people have been boycotting Spamazon for ages before this latest sleazy behaviour. They're still in business, and getting free publicity from Time to boot.
There needs to be a fundamental change in the laws, and it has to be done on a concerted, international scope. As long as countries aren't working together on this, someone can start up a site in the most lawsuit-happy country out there, and then sue everyone else from every other country.
Activism is the key, folks. We're headed for an international anti-establishment clash, far beyond what we say in the '60s. If we don't stand up now and fight it, you can expect to be buried six feet under, in a Sony SurroundCoffin(tm).
@software is only as secure as the knowledge of the person who set it up permits it to be."
Maybe it's more accurate to say, "given equal playing fields, software is only as secure as the knowledge of the person who set it up permits it to be." Certainly, an out-of-the-box installation of linux isn't going to be much more secure (if at all) than NT, and maybe it's easier to achieve a modicum of security with NT for the casual administrator.
However, the crux of the article is this: You cannot make an NT system as secure as I can make a linux (or most Unix variants for that matter) box. The ceiling for NT's 'best security' is substantially lower than that for linux. That's all there is to it. Furthermore, the 'security by obscurity' philosophy means that the ceiling is actually even lower, but you just can't see it. (until you run into it)
Why an instinctive hostile attitude? Because those of us who are or have been in the scientific community have top-secret bullshit detectors to warn us about people like this.:-)
Seriously, the guy appears to not even understand what he's saying. His 'hydrinos' are just a plain silly idea. That's using classical physics in an area (quantum mechanics-scale) where it just doesn't work!
Personally, I'd love to see something like this work, and if the guy who sorts it out wants to make money at it, then go for it. However, _THIS_ guy is just a quack with a poor grasp of modern physics and/or a good sense of marketing.
This wasn't under X, but I've done it. Screwing around with the tweaking utility for my video card in OS/2 2.1 (many years ago), and suddenly the monitor died with a big puff of smoke and the smell of fried electronics. (no exaggeration here--I thought I was about to see flames shooting out!) Luckily, it was still within warranty.
Voice recognition isn't gonna be a big event, no matter how good it gets. Do you really want to sit in your office, dictating code/email/memos to your computer while surrounded by 20 people doing the same thing? I certainly don't!
But with the computing power we have now, you're right--there must be some ways to substantially change our computing environment. How about going back to monitors imbedded into the (physical) desktop, but using LCD displays now? Far more realistic. No reason that touch screens can't be brought into play, and in a more intelligent manner. (example: A desktop would know that it should ignore the input from a stack of papers laying across it)
OK, maybe that's a bit of an overstatement, but not much.
Does anyone else remember searching before the web came into its own? I remember constructing carefully planned Archie searches only to often find either no results, or pages and pages of 'em. After a while (and perusing a lot of those pages of results), you learned which sites had most of the stuff you needed. Windows shareware was at Simtel-20, OS/2 at cdrom.com, Unix at sunsite, etc. Non-software usually necessitated going back to Archie and throwing searches at it until something stuck.
Fast forward, and we're still doing that with the web. The only difference is that the amount of archived, non-software information (and hence its importance) has gone up dramatically. In light of that, I'd say that the search engines are more useful than one might expect.
Unfortunately, that's not really good enough for practical purposes. Forget all of the techniques we're trying to tweak right now. Someone has to come up with a fundamentally different way of searching through indices; one which behaves the way altavista claims (but fails) to do. In other words, enter a question and have the engine _interpret_ the question before searching.
But I don't see it happening for a few years. Oh well.
blah blah blah...more FUD from JonKatz
on
Planet Gattaca
·
· Score: 2
"The future is a scary place! The world is on the cusp of something terrible!"
Guess what? The world has always been on the cusp of something great and terrible. Especially in the 20th century, there has been something at almost every moment that, given a few years, has the potential to change human (i.e. modern and industrialised) society drastically. Some of them happened. Some of them were passe' by the time they arrived. The debate over bioethics has been going on for decades, in the industry and in the halls of governments around the world. The fact that it's only now making the news is pretty much irrelevant to how much (or to be fair, arguably how little) thought and discussion has already gone into it.
Or, more to the point, JonKatz is half a day late to the docks again, and trying to make up for it by throwing around vague, emotionally charged fluff. Again.
Totally off topic now, I followed a link from the suckdot parody of slashdot, and discovered that JonKatz is a professional (meaning "he gets paid") journalist. All I can say is scary.
OK, #1: It's PCR, not PRC. I was willing to let it slide until the article made the same mistake twice.
I have no idea why this has been posted to/., since it really isn't a matter of freedom, stupid patents, etc.
HLR had a patent. The judge said they got it under questionable (i.e. stolen?) circumstances. This is plain ol' low-key industrial espionage/competition, and goes on all the time. The article was not about whether the patent was morally valid, or whether we have a right to patent this stuff, etc. etc.
Taq Polymerase as a tool for improving PCR throughput is a simple, straightforward, clearly patentable concept. End of discussion.
Now as to whether patents are a valid idea at all, I say this: Go hang out at one of the major biotech centres (San Francisco or San Diego leap to mind) and take a good look at the money being spent by corporations on _research_. Then look at where that money is coming from. You'll find privately funded companies and publicly traded companies, both of which operate on the principle of a reasonable change of return on investment. If I had millions of dollars, how much of it would I give to a research group who promised to spend it all and give me nothing back but a warm fuzzy feeling? Some maybe (I'm a humanist), but not the billions that are spent on research every year in the US alone!
Face it gang. Patents (when properly applied) protect intellectual property, intellectual property leads to inventions which make money, and the promise of making money is how startup (research) money is drawn in. Without this system, I'd bet that R&D funding would be cut to about 5% of what it is now.
I have to wonder, though, if the average "burn the patent system!"/.er truly understands research and development, outside of the computer world. Although it's not convenient, any brilliant programmer with a thousand dollar computer can turn out code for the masses. It is entirely impossible to do any R&D in most other fields without many millions of dollars. A small (say 5 person) chemistry lab will require fume hoods, counterspace, flammable storage containers, analytical equipment (GC_MS, IR, and HPLC at a minimum) and miscellaneous equipment. That's about $300k before you even start buying chemicals for them! Ongoing costs are usually figured at $500-$1000 per person per day, not including salaries. This is a LOT of money, and that won't get them even close to cutting edge research!
It's simple. R&D is funded on the patent system. Trash that, and you trash R&D.
Good point, but like someone else said, "remember your audience." If you want meatier info, you don't look at C|Net or (god forbid!) ZDnet, you look at linuxworld, or any of the mailing lists.
I like articles like this, because the newbies are the ones who _need_ articles the most. That's how the market base (yes, it really is a market base) expands.
That said, I've been fighting with RH6.0, and I don't think it's anywhere NEAR ready for desktop primetime.
Don't sweat it. The number of worthwhile AC posts that don't get moderated up are small enough to miss, given the large amount of signal (and noise) on/.
Try it for two days and see if you'll ever go back to threshold=0.
I'm not sure how much (or little) intervention should be allowed before one calls the internet 'self replicating.' Dynamic routing is taken for granted. Plug a new computer into a network with DHCP set up in a certain manner, and the computer will be online in short order. In some cases, the OS doesn't even need to be installed first. (HP's Ignite-UX is pretty useful for this sort of thing)
SBut a crucial point is that since all of the nodes have been physically put in place by people, and are activated (and active) by people, then the nodes we should be looking at are the computer/user pair. Or, since multiple and varying users can use a single computer, maybe humans should be considered necessary symbiotes to computers, and without us, the computers go into something approximating hibrnation.
I don't know why cmdrtaco claims, "Of course not, silly!" to the question of whether the internet is alive.
At any rate, the concept is old enough. John Varley wrote an excellent novella ("Press Enter_") on the idea in, I believe 1982. The debate has been going on for a while.
What I found interesting was the claim that the so called e-cosystem isn't damaged by bombs and so forth. The body squirms, the legs shrink momentarily -- and then grow back, stronger than before. That shouldn't be surprising--it's one of the characteristics of an ecosystem. If you could kick an ecosystem and then leave it alone, and it didn't repair itself in some way, then it wouldn't be a (stable) ecosystem at all, but more like a single organism.
Also, regarding the darwinian nature of the 'net, it should be remembered that while the "strong" survive (and grow, and prosper, and get all the hits) the "weak" don't die off--they can exist quite happily as weaklings. How many personal homepages have you seen with counters saying, "you're the 13th person to visit my website since 1996!" There's no _need_ for them to die off, because unlike in the wild, they don't consume significant resources. In fact, strong websites inherently consume more resources than weak ones, which suggests a levelling effect in the long run. On the other hand, the resources are manmade and growing rapidly, so who knows?
200 grand, and you're even _talking_ to VARs who sell NT? Run away now!
Seriously, what about some of the other alternatives? RS/6000? HP? Sun? I imagine (read: hope) you're looking at these platforms, if only so you can honestly say to the NT VARs, "Actually we decided Linux was a better solution than HP-UX. In light of that, NT/Intel isn't even an option."
Anyway, the point is, we've got all this debris out there. It bugs me.
NASA and every other space agency should be doing something, but with their limited money, they've got "better" things to do than clean up after themselves. This won't change until we get some approximation of the general public into space (and need to make it safer), but in a classic catch-22, we won't get the general public into space until this stuff is cleaned up (making space safe enough)!
What I wonder is how many of the MIR, Hubble, and other space problems are due to them being smacked around by miniscule bits of space junk. There's a _lot_ of untracked stuff up there, discarded and floating freely.
Of course, given our race's history, it's not surprising that we use space (and now Mars) as a garbage dump.
While I've got a copy of Lion's commentary on order, I still wish I'd been able to get a copy from the 'bootleg' days. Getting one of his original two-volume sets would be incredibly cool, but maybe a bit less personal since I didn't know who Lion was until after Unix 7 came out.
How many people here truly appreciate how important this work is, I wonder. I mean, an ENTIRE OS to read through and discover, and with commentary to boot. It's pretty cool, folks.
Of course, this seems to go right over the heads of way too many/. readers. Almost no posts on the subject, and half of them are stupid drivel about "turning teenage girls to stone." Has the entire user base been overrun with twelve year olds fantasising about older girls? Pathetic.
Just rambling folks. Nothing of importance to read here.
The real question is 'how much have CD-ROM burners hurt the videogame/software market?' A lot.
Really? I could, of course, be entirely out to lunch but I really don't see bootleggers affecting the industry as a whole. Within their realm, sure--none of them or their friends actually buy software. How much of the market do they comprise? More importantly, how much of the market that would purchase this software if they couldn't pirate it do they comprise? In other words, what percentage of potential sales are lost, due to piracy?
One of the CD's (and presumable DVD's) earliest problems is what dooms it to be readily copied. The biggest complaint about CDs was that they couldn't have the big artwork or cool liner notes like an album.
Actually, that's a good point. You see the marketing machines trying to combat that aspect, though. "Be the first on your block to own the super-limited collector's edition of George of the Jungle 2!" Hey, it works more often than not. Even when they can get burns or borrow a friends' VCR, most people buy their movies and software.
Next Christmas, nobody will buy George of the Jungle 2.
How much have recordable videotapes hurt the home video industry? None! How much have VCRs hurt the movie industry? None! How much have CD-Rs hurt the music industry? None again!
Recordable DVDs are the same way. In their typical short-sighted way, the industry will harp on about "The death of the home-DVD market" for a year, and then proceed to be shocked when their profits actually go up the same as always. I'm not sure what's worse--that they're constantly making more money from worse entertainment, that they're behaving like undisciplined bullies (to both the consumers and especially to the indies!), or that they're so clueless as to be surprised every time their industry fails to collapse because the consumer got something good.
The parallel with yesterday's story about the mall banning web-site promotion is left as an exercise for the reader.
There's a difference here. MTBF for machine tools (and hard drives and so forth) means mean time before crash and burn failure. That is, the tool dies (pun intended:-), often taking a lot of other equipment and possibly even some people with it. A software MTBF means the time before you have to restart it. Not a big deal.
That said, I think we're becoming much too accustomed to improperly debugged and unstable software.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, geek stores are a must. Electronics places,
software shops, etc..
But the ambiance of the city is a tough one to change, and a tough one to get right. Seattle and the Bay area work because they're about the right combination of post-60s hippy-ism (?!), techno-geekery, and left-wing sentiment.
Of course, feeling important is a big draw for any and everyone, which means that a thriving geek community is the best way to bring in more geeks.
I'd ask if anyone was surprised at this, but judging from the posts yesterday, ("Oh yay, EToys has changed their mind, they're good guys again") I guess the answer is yes.
EToys never claimed to be dropping the suit--only "backing off," which means, precisely, whatever they want it to. Trying to censor in good faith is apparently what they meant by backing off.
If this is ever resolved satisfactorily, I urge everyone who has been boycotting EToys to _continue_ the boycott. They deserve (and have from the beginning) punitive measures brought against them for the damage they've done to the etoy group.
Section 1832 of the Act makes it a federal criminal act for any person to convert a trade secret to his own benefit or the benefit of others intending or knowing that the offense will injure any owner of the trade secret.
Aye, there's the rub. deCSS was originally created to allow playing DVDs under linux and other non-supported OSes, was it not? If the trade secret holder has no apparent intentions of supporting those platforms, then writing a player on them can't be construed as injury.
Also, the internationalisation only goes so far as dealing with countries which have an extradition agreement with the US. They can't prosecute someone from, say, Cuba for distributing deCSS.
Great. Now we're not forced into using a crappy product from the MS monopoly. Instead, we can use a crappy trojan horse from a DIFFERENT lying, contract-breaking, spamming sleazball company.
Wonderful.
As long as I've got a MS OS on any of my computers, I'll use their product. I will never let RealAnything near one of my systems again, now that they've proven to be a bunch of thieving criminals.
Anyone want to write a good, robust, multi-platform streaming audio player? I'd pay money (yes, cash!) for that.
Is that a trademark infringement? Is O'Reilly going to sic their lawyers on me now? Oh no!!!
Seriously, though...
Somehow, patents have got out of hand. (obviously) For reasons of money, companies and lawyer are aggressively searching for anything and everything they 'own' (in some sense of the word) that might possibly be patentable. Patents were supposed to be on things that you truly created, and they were supposed to be so that you could share your ideas with others. Not make money by suing.
The whole thing stinks.
In early '95 I installed Solaris 2.4 on a Sparc5.
After choosing the packages I wanted to install (from a clean and easy-to-understand menu), the install program decided how much disk space I needed, suggested minimum and recommended partition sizes, and wouldn't let me go below the minimum. Up until actually hitting the 'start install' button, I could change any of the partition sizes and packages at will.
Recently I installed RedHat6.0. After FIRST choosing the partition sizes, I picked my packages to be installed from a long and ugly list, at which point I was told my proposed partitions were too small. Changing them required starting the install process over from scratch!
I wanted my MBR to remain intact, and point to lilo on hda2 to boot from hda5. Lilo insisted on installing itself in the (unusable) BR of hda5.
And don't even get me started on setting up/configuring X11. Last week's discussion speaks loudly enough on that issue.
The point is, I am a professional Unix admin, and this was the most damnably aggravating install I've EVER done, since SunOS4.0! (where you had to configure the kernel by hand before starting the install) RedHat6.0 is so far behind Sun, HP, IBM, SCO, and yes, Windows (gasp!) in terms of getting a machine up and running that I've started telling my friends to go with Solaris on their Intel boxes. A friend of mine is using Caldera, and he said it was a breeze (and it worked) to install. Maybe that's the way to go.
But if you can't install it and get it RUNNING in half a day, people won't use it.
Anyone who has been around online (and especially in usenet) for more than a few years will recognise the above running joke.
Anyways, it was a good article. I hadn't heard about the Transasia case, but it's another nail in the coffin of common sense. How can a company trademark a person's name? How can suits be filed against organisations for using a name _prior_ to the suing company? This is clearly stupid.
The real question is, WHAT CAN WE DO? Make it clear to eToys (by mailing them, phoning them (collect, no doubt), and telling your friends) that they will be boycotted. (and then carry out the boycott, of course)
Unfortunately, while this makes us feel good, boycotts don't seem to be enough. Many people have been boycotting Spamazon for ages before this latest sleazy behaviour. They're still in business, and getting free publicity from Time to boot.
There needs to be a fundamental change in the laws, and it has to be done on a concerted, international scope. As long as countries aren't working together on this, someone can start up a site in the most lawsuit-happy country out there, and then sue everyone else from every other country.
Activism is the key, folks. We're headed for an international anti-establishment clash, far beyond what we say in the '60s. If we don't stand up now and fight it, you can expect to be buried six feet under, in a Sony SurroundCoffin(tm).
@software is only as secure as the knowledge of the person who set it up permits it to be."
Maybe it's more accurate to say, "given equal playing fields, software is only as secure as the knowledge of the person who set it up permits it to be." Certainly, an out-of-the-box installation of linux isn't going to be much more secure (if at all) than NT, and maybe it's easier to achieve a modicum of security with NT for the casual administrator.
However, the crux of the article is this: You cannot make an NT system as secure as I can make a linux (or most Unix variants for that matter) box. The ceiling for NT's 'best security' is substantially lower than that for linux. That's all there is to it. Furthermore, the 'security by obscurity' philosophy means that the ceiling is actually even lower, but you just can't see it. (until you run into it)
Why an instinctive hostile attitude? Because those of us who are or have been in the scientific community have top-secret bullshit detectors to warn us about people like this. :-)
Seriously, the guy appears to not even understand what he's saying. His 'hydrinos' are just a plain silly idea. That's using classical physics in an area (quantum mechanics-scale) where it just doesn't work!
Personally, I'd love to see something like this work, and if the guy who sorts it out wants to make money at it, then go for it. However, _THIS_ guy is just a quack with a poor grasp of modern physics and/or a good sense of marketing.
This wasn't under X, but I've done it. Screwing around with the tweaking utility for my video card in OS/2 2.1 (many years ago), and suddenly the monitor died with a big puff of smoke and the smell of fried electronics. (no exaggeration here--I thought I was about to see flames shooting out!) Luckily, it was still within warranty.
Voice recognition isn't gonna be a big event, no matter how good it gets. Do you really want to sit in your office, dictating code/email/memos to your computer while surrounded by 20 people doing the same thing? I certainly don't!
But with the computing power we have now, you're right--there must be some ways to substantially change our computing environment.
How about going back to monitors imbedded into the (physical) desktop, but using LCD displays now? Far more realistic. No reason that touch screens can't be brought into play, and in a more intelligent manner. (example: A desktop would know that it should ignore the input from a stack of papers laying across it)
"...going gargoyle?!"
Dunno what it means, but it has a great sound to it.
OK, maybe that's a bit of an overstatement, but not much.
Does anyone else remember searching before the web came into its own? I remember constructing carefully planned Archie searches only to often find either no results, or pages and pages of 'em. After a while (and perusing a lot of those pages of results), you learned which sites had most of the stuff you needed. Windows shareware was at Simtel-20, OS/2 at cdrom.com, Unix at sunsite, etc. Non-software usually necessitated going back to Archie and throwing searches at it until something stuck.
Fast forward, and we're still doing that with the web. The only difference is that the amount of archived, non-software information (and hence its importance) has gone up dramatically. In light of that, I'd say that the search engines are more useful than one might expect.
Unfortunately, that's not really good enough for practical purposes. Forget all of the techniques we're trying to tweak right now. Someone has to come up with a fundamentally different way of searching through indices; one which behaves the way altavista claims (but fails) to do. In other words, enter a question and have the engine _interpret_ the question before searching.
But I don't see it happening for a few years. Oh well.
"The future is a scary place! The world is on the cusp of something terrible!"
Guess what? The world has always been on the cusp of something great and terrible. Especially in the 20th century, there has been something at almost every moment that, given a few years, has the potential to change human (i.e. modern and industrialised) society drastically. Some of them happened. Some of them were passe' by the time they arrived.
The debate over bioethics has been going on for decades, in the industry and in the halls of governments around the world. The fact that it's only now making the news is pretty much irrelevant to how much (or to be fair, arguably how little) thought and discussion has already gone into it.
Or, more to the point, JonKatz is half a day late to the docks again, and trying to make up for it by throwing around vague, emotionally charged fluff. Again.
Totally off topic now, I followed a link from the suckdot parody of slashdot, and discovered that JonKatz is a professional (meaning "he gets paid") journalist. All I can say is scary.
OK, #1: It's PCR, not PRC. I was willing to let it slide until the article made the same mistake twice.
/., since it really isn't a matter of freedom, stupid patents, etc.
/.er truly understands research and development, outside of the computer world. Although it's not convenient, any brilliant programmer with a thousand dollar computer can turn out code for the masses. It is entirely impossible to do any R&D in most other fields without many millions of dollars. A small (say 5 person) chemistry lab will require fume hoods, counterspace, flammable storage containers, analytical equipment (GC_MS, IR, and HPLC at a minimum) and miscellaneous equipment. That's about $300k before you even start buying chemicals for them! Ongoing costs are usually figured at $500-$1000 per person per day, not including salaries. This is a LOT of money, and that won't get them even close to cutting edge research!
I have no idea why this has been posted to
HLR had a patent. The judge said they got it under questionable (i.e. stolen?) circumstances. This is plain ol' low-key industrial espionage/competition, and goes on all the time. The article was not about whether the patent was morally valid, or whether we have a right to patent this stuff, etc. etc.
Taq Polymerase as a tool for improving PCR throughput is a simple, straightforward, clearly patentable concept. End of discussion.
Now as to whether patents are a valid idea at all, I say this: Go hang out at one of the major biotech centres (San Francisco or San Diego leap to mind) and take a good look at the money being spent by corporations on _research_. Then look at where that money is coming from. You'll find privately funded companies and publicly traded companies, both of which operate on the principle of a reasonable change of return on investment. If I had millions of dollars, how much of it would I give to a research group who promised to spend it all and give me nothing back but a warm fuzzy feeling? Some maybe (I'm a humanist), but not the billions that are spent on research every year in the US alone!
Face it gang. Patents (when properly applied) protect intellectual property, intellectual property leads to inventions which make money, and the promise of making money is how startup (research) money is drawn in. Without this system, I'd bet that R&D funding would be cut to about 5% of what it is now.
I have to wonder, though, if the average "burn the patent system!"
It's simple. R&D is funded on the patent system. Trash that, and you trash R&D.
Good point, but like someone else said, "remember your audience." If you want meatier info, you don't look at C|Net or (god forbid!) ZDnet, you look at linuxworld, or any of the mailing lists.
I like articles like this, because the newbies are the ones who _need_ articles the most. That's how the market base (yes, it really is a market base) expands.
That said, I've been fighting with RH6.0, and I don't think it's anywhere NEAR ready for desktop primetime.
Don't sweat it. The number of worthwhile AC posts that don't get moderated up are small enough to miss, given the large amount of signal (and noise) on /.
Try it for two days and see if you'll ever go back to threshold=0.
Argh. First of all folks, repeat after me:
web != internet
OK, now that I've got that off my chest...
I'm not sure how much (or little) intervention should be allowed before one calls the internet 'self replicating.' Dynamic routing is taken for granted. Plug a new computer into a network with DHCP set up in a certain manner, and the computer will be online in short order. In some cases, the OS doesn't even need to be installed first. (HP's Ignite-UX is pretty useful for this sort of thing)
SBut a crucial point is that since all of the nodes have been physically put in place by people, and are activated (and active) by people, then the nodes we should be looking at are the computer/user pair. Or, since multiple and varying users can use a single computer, maybe humans should be considered necessary symbiotes to computers, and without us, the computers go into something approximating hibrnation.
Hmmm...
I don't know why cmdrtaco claims, "Of course not, silly!" to the question of whether the internet is alive.
At any rate, the concept is old enough. John Varley wrote an excellent novella ("Press Enter_") on the idea in, I believe 1982. The debate has been going on for a while.
What I found interesting was the claim that the so called e-cosystem isn't damaged by bombs and so forth. The body squirms, the legs shrink momentarily -- and then grow back, stronger than before. That shouldn't be surprising--it's one of the characteristics of an ecosystem. If you could kick an ecosystem and then leave it alone, and it didn't repair itself in some way, then it wouldn't be a (stable) ecosystem at all, but more like a single organism.
Also, regarding the darwinian nature of the 'net, it should be remembered that while the "strong" survive (and grow, and prosper, and get all the hits) the "weak" don't die off--they can exist quite happily as weaklings. How many personal homepages have you seen with counters saying, "you're the 13th person to visit my website since 1996!" There's no _need_ for them to die off, because unlike in the wild, they don't consume significant resources. In fact, strong websites inherently consume more resources than weak ones, which suggests a levelling effect in the long run. On the other hand, the resources are manmade and growing rapidly, so who knows?
200 grand, and you're even _talking_ to VARs who sell NT? Run away now!
Seriously, what about some of the other alternatives? RS/6000? HP? Sun? I imagine (read: hope) you're looking at these platforms, if only so you can honestly say to the NT VARs, "Actually we decided Linux was a better solution than HP-UX. In light of that, NT/Intel isn't even an option."
Anyway, the point is, we've got all this debris out there. It bugs me.
NASA and every other space agency should be doing something, but with their limited money, they've got "better" things to do than clean up after themselves. This won't change until we get some approximation of the general public into space (and need to make it safer), but in a classic catch-22, we won't get the general public into space until this stuff is cleaned up (making space safe enough)!
What I wonder is how many of the MIR, Hubble, and other space problems are due to them being smacked around by miniscule bits of space junk. There's a _lot_ of untracked stuff up there, discarded and floating freely.
Of course, given our race's history, it's not surprising that we use space (and now Mars) as a garbage dump.
Now that was a neat article. Poignant, even.
/. readers. Almost no posts on the subject, and half of them are stupid drivel about "turning teenage girls to stone." Has the entire user base been overrun with twelve year olds fantasising about older girls? Pathetic.
While I've got a copy of Lion's commentary on order, I still wish I'd been able to get a copy from the 'bootleg' days. Getting one of his original two-volume sets would be incredibly cool, but maybe a bit less personal since I didn't know who Lion was until after Unix 7 came out.
How many people here truly appreciate how important this work is, I wonder. I mean, an ENTIRE OS to read through and discover, and with commentary to boot. It's pretty cool, folks.
Of course, this seems to go right over the heads of way too many
Just rambling folks. Nothing of importance to read here.
The real question is 'how much have CD-ROM burners hurt the videogame/software market?' A lot.
Really? I could, of course, be entirely out to lunch but I really don't see bootleggers affecting the industry as a whole. Within their realm, sure--none of them or their friends actually buy software. How much of the market do they comprise? More importantly, how much of the market that would purchase this software if they couldn't pirate it do they comprise? In other words, what percentage of potential sales are lost, due to piracy?
One of the CD's (and presumable DVD's) earliest problems is what dooms it to be readily copied. The biggest complaint about CDs was that they couldn't have the big artwork or cool liner notes like an album.
Actually, that's a good point. You see the marketing machines trying to combat that aspect, though. "Be the first on your block to own the super-limited collector's edition of George of the Jungle 2!" Hey, it works more often than not. Even when they can get burns or borrow a friends' VCR, most people buy their movies and software.
Next Christmas, nobody will buy George of the Jungle 2.
Oh no, a tragedy in the making!
:-)
I've said it before and I'll say it again.
How much have recordable videotapes hurt the home video industry? None! How much have VCRs hurt the movie industry? None! How much have CD-Rs hurt the music industry? None again!
Recordable DVDs are the same way. In their typical short-sighted way, the industry will harp on about "The death of the home-DVD market" for a year, and then proceed to be shocked when their profits actually go up the same as always. I'm not sure what's worse--that they're constantly making more money from worse entertainment, that they're behaving like undisciplined bullies (to both the consumers and especially to the indies!), or that they're so clueless as to be surprised every time their industry fails to collapse because the consumer got something good.
The parallel with yesterday's story about the mall banning web-site promotion is left as an exercise for the reader.
There's a difference here. MTBF for machine tools (and hard drives and so forth) means mean time before crash and burn failure. That is, the tool dies (pun intended :-), often taking a lot of other equipment and possibly even some people with it. A software MTBF means the time before you have to restart it. Not a big deal.
That said, I think we're becoming much too accustomed to improperly debugged and unstable software.