Re:About LinuxToday's coverage...
on
Forbes on Linux
·
· Score: 2
I think it's because the article on browsers reads like it was written by a spammer. I was shocked at how bad the grammar was. Forbes is usually so good, I have no idea how that one got past the editors.
You didn't read the article on Linux web browsers, did you?
Re:The Cult Of Linux?
on
Forbes on Linux
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
I think it's important to recognize that in the market Forbes targets, the word Cult doesn't have the same negative connotations that it does in the rest of society. The Cult of Personality around someone like Bill Gates, or a Cult Brand like Apple, which has a core of devoted customers it can depend on no matter what, are things execs lust over.
The strong beleif and devoted following connotations of the word are much stronger with this crowd than the blood sacrifice, shaved head connotations. But then, if someone is willing to shave their heads and perform blood sacrifices for your product, well, nothing says "Success!" quite like that...;-)
No, I pay to see TV shows. The ads are something I must endure in the process. If there were a "premium" channel that just showed ads, and I subscribed to it, then I would be paying to see ads.
The advertisers should be the ones paying. Let them post their add and bill them for the bandwidth (plus markup to cover overhead, obviously). It's got to be cheaper than getting TV ad spots, and the advertiser gets direct feedback on how many people actually watched it, as opposed to a guess based on "ratings systems".
Adcritic was one of my favorite sites back in the day, but there's no way I'm going to pay to watch ads.
The ID requirement is still useless. Ample evidence is provided by the fact that some terrorists were able to board airliners, despite the fact that they were required to show ID, and fly them into buildings. Nothing has changed. All the so-called security measures being taken are just a dog and pony show created to make gullible people like you feel safe.
Did you know that it's actually legal to make fake IDs? It's only illegal to use them. I'm sure someone planning to fly a plane into a building is going to be really worried about that!
I'll agree that the California court you mentioned is "wacky" as soon as you can show me the part of the Constitution that negates seperation of church and state.
Seriously, that is absolutely the best solution to the problem that I've heard yet.
You're right; the climate is right but no one in government will sponsor it. Obviously, someone outside of government is needed to get the ball roling. Somebody like Nader or Jerry Brown, but with less of a "fruitcake" image problem to overcome. Lessig with a good PR team would be effective.
I bet he'd reconsider his position if he got thousands of phone calls from polite, telemarketer types asking to discuss their expectation of reduced privacy.
To bad that isn't what would happen.
"I'VE GOT REDUCED EXPECTATION OF PRIVACY RIGHT HERE, YOU ASSHOLE! I'LL FUCKING KILL YOU, YOU FUCKING FUCK!" is really only a convincing arguement if it's being proposed by someone who has a gun in your mouth, and even then, it's not convincing in a way that is useful to our purpose.
Any market affected by capitalism will tend toward consolidation, for the simple reason that competition is not profitable. The goal of capitalism is to amass capital, and the amount of capital that can be amassed is largely limited by ones competition. Thus, eliminating ones competition, even through a merger, will ultimately by more profitable than than to maintain a competitive market.
To put it bluntly: the goal of capitalism is monopoly.
I don't think capitalism is evil, but it's important to realize that capitalism and the free market (and democracy, but that's not our topic)are almost completely seperate concepts, a fact which has been sadly obfuscated by political and corporate rhetoric since the industrial revolution, and will only become more so as media continues to consolidate under a few big corporations.
the system determines differences between the current input signals and the previous input signals
Seems like this applies to MPEG, not JPEG, unless by "input signels" the mean pixels.
Regardless, it seems that if somone where to come up with an algorythm that relied on a mathematical method other than mean-square difference, that they would be unaffected by this patent.
I'm certainly not suggesting that the state of multi-national corporatism is such that this kind of reponse is called for.
I am.;-P
Seriously, though, the lack of responsibility for decisions created by the protections offered by the corporate legal structure is a real problem for our society as a whole. Corporations have all the rights of a person with none of the consequences. You can't put a corporation in jail. What needs to happen is for those protections to be reduced for the decision makers (meaning the board members and top executives). This does make sense in our legal structure, since a key part of our body of law is based on intent. The people in charge, the people responsible, need to be held accountable for the decisions they make, and not just financially, but criminally. I think this would bring a serious change, and I sincerely beleive that it would be for the better.
I would love to believe that our system will work, since I much prefer to do things that way. It may not be fast, but it is usually right in the end. If it comes down to it, though, I'll be right there on the front lines decapitating execs and their government puppets. If the system no longer responds to the people, than the people need to dismantle it.
OH MY GOD!!! THE SAME ARTICLE WAS POSTED ON 2 DIFFERENT SITES!!! THE WORLD IS COMING TO AN END!!!
Perhaps you haven't noticed, but slashdot and kuro5hin are two different sites, with different readership. I personally only read k5 for a short time; it simply didn't hold my interest. In contrast, I've been reading/. for years, and have yet to get bored with it. I very much doubt that I'm the only one who feels this way.
Animal Farm, 1984, and All Quiet on the Western Front were all required reading at my High School, along with Brave New World, which I would also add to that list.
Since Taco insists on progressively obfuscating karma, I suggest that he go one step further and simply show you an icon of what animal you will be reincarnated as if you continue with your current karmic habits.
That's a pretty cool idea. I actually like that better than numbers.
Now Symantec can screw up SecurityFocus like they've screwed up everything else that was useful until they bought it!
Sorry for the flamebait, but I've bought too many Symantec products over the years, and they seem to get worse with every revision. I remember when Norton Utilities was something beneficial, now I refer to that package as Norton Anti-System.
Other fun past experiences with Symantec products have included Act, which was a big pile of poo, and WinFax, which was pretty good last time I used it, as long as you limited your use to a specific subset of it's advertised functionality.
Interesting. None of those are technologies, per se, neither did any of them origionate with Microsoft. In fact, Unix had all of those before anyone had even heard of Microsoft.
You and your 3 friends, who couldn't get laid in a whorehouse even if they had a $50 bill hanging out of their zippers
That's probably true, but mostly because I would be to busy getting my ass kicked by my wife for being in a whorehouse in the first place. I have to admit that I've never attempted this experiment, though, since I've never had any difficulty getting laid, even without the assistance of a $50 bill.
At my old community college there were big signs in the cafeteria that said PLEASE BUS YOUR OWN TABLES. In one corner there was an area with some big comfy chairs and a couple of coffee tables. For some unknown reason the coffee tables had glass tops.
One day, a friend of mine decided to chug his soda and then slam the empty can down on the table in a manly display of soda-guzzling prowess. The glass tabletop, of course, shattered. Fortunately, though, my friend was prepared: He pulled out his big fat permenant marker (you know, the ones with the fumes that almost knock you flat when you pull off the cap) and added a T to the end of the BUS on all of those signs...
I probably sounded a lot more "hardcore Unix" than I intended to. I'm fully aware of the need for monkey-level GUI tools on Unix (it just makes me sad) in order to gain popular acceptance, but at the same time I keep running into the limitations imposed by those tools while working on Windows.
For example, I recently had a strong desire to do some mass database manipulation/extraction at work. The only experience I have with that sort of thing is from my Intro to Unix class, but we use Access for all the databases I have any reason to look at. I figured it would take me a few minutes to work out the syntax to do what I wanted with cut, but I could do it even with my limited knowledge, and hey, we use Windows and it should be even easier there, right? Our IT guy, who's Windows only but definately above monkey level, looked at me like I was mad (or maybe had a disfiguring disease) and said "No! It's not easy to do that at all!"
Anyway, my point is that I'm all for making the hard things easy, but we need to be very careful that in the process we don't make the easy things hard, or even worse, the clever things impossible.
For one, from a developer's perspective, system call traces that don't require buying multi-hundred or multi-thousand-dollar third party packages, to do the job.;-)
But, there's no reason any other OS couldn't have that, just nobody has done it. The pipe, and the whole philosophy around it, is the thing that sets Unix apart from all the rest.
Being fortunate enough to live in Grass Valley, CA, I frequently stumble across neat video-related projects and companies. In that vein, one of my classes recently had a guest speaker from a company that specializes in video I/O (I don't remember the name of the company, but they've historically specialized in conversion boxes). He was specifically talking about a product which is just coming out of developement now; an add-on card for Mac which did rendering and handled I/O between a dual-channel SCSI storage unit and a professional VTR. The product was Mac only, and the reason he gave was Quicktime, which he described as being kind of like a low-level multimedia API which was quite simple to write hardware drivers for. This brings me to my question(s):
How would you describe the present and future of Linux with regards to video I/O? Is there anything in Linux which is analagous to the Quicktime framework (in any stage of developement) in the sense that it would encourage developement of such hardware for Linux? I'm assuming you use Linux for rendering, do you also use it for I/O, and why or why not?
My objective is not to suggest alternatives, but rather to support my arguement that Microsoft does not innovate.
As for Unix GUI tools, I have no difficulty understanding why they came around so late in the game. In many ways a GUI is anathema to Unix. Unix was built around the central philosophy of taking many small programs, each of which does one thing very well, and being able to string them together to accomplish complex tasks. GUIs effectively remove that ability.
Am I wrong? Has someone found a way to implement the pipe graphically? Without the pipe, what advantage does Unix have?
The public is the largest single stakeholder on the issue of copyright. Stallman is a member of the public. If you don't want him representing you in the copyright debate, then perhaps you should get out and represent yourself.
Copyright is theft. It is theft from the Public Domain. It is not a natural right, but a granted one. The Public grants copyright to the Rights Holder, and the price of that granted right is Fair Use and the passage of the work into the Public Domain after a limited time. If that price is not paid, and the Rights Holders are doing everything they possibly can to avoid paying it, there is no reason for the Public to grant, nor respect, copyright. Copyright has no value without public consent.
The market can't stop DRM if the law requires it. Since the Public is the largest stakeholder, it is extremely irresponsible of an allegedly public body, the Department of Commerce, to prevent public participation in a debate which will affect government policy regarding copyright and DRM.
Seriously, your friend should just quit and get a different job. The end results will be the same either way; he'll no longer be working at Starbucks and so he won't have to listen to their crappy music anymore.
If he hacks the machine and gets caught (and he will get caught), he'll just get fired anyway, and might even be looking at a lawsuit (public establishments have limits on what music they can play, though I'd have to ask my wife about the particulars) or even criminal charges. In other words, stuff that looks real bad on a resume.
That said, it shouldn't be difficult if you can get ahold of one of the expired CDs and know how to read a hex dump. It'll probably take some time, though.
Slashdot Mirror
I think it's because the article on browsers reads like it was written by a spammer. I was shocked at how bad the grammar was. Forbes is usually so good, I have no idea how that one got past the editors.
You didn't read the article on Linux web browsers, did you?
I think it's important to recognize that in the market Forbes targets, the word Cult doesn't have the same negative connotations that it does in the rest of society. The Cult of Personality around someone like Bill Gates, or a Cult Brand like Apple, which has a core of devoted customers it can depend on no matter what, are things execs lust over.
;-)
The strong beleif and devoted following connotations of the word are much stronger with this crowd than the blood sacrifice, shaved head connotations. But then, if someone is willing to shave their heads and perform blood sacrifices for your product, well, nothing says "Success!" quite like that...
And really, success is what Forbes is all about.
No, I pay to see TV shows. The ads are something I must endure in the process. If there were a "premium" channel that just showed ads, and I subscribed to it, then I would be paying to see ads.
Actually, my nic comes from the fact that I measure over 17MOhms across my tongue.
But, no, I haven't read "A Tale of Two Cities" yet. I plan to, though. I really enjoyed "Great Expectations".
Is it just me?
The advertisers should be the ones paying. Let them post their add and bill them for the bandwidth (plus markup to cover overhead, obviously). It's got to be cheaper than getting TV ad spots, and the advertiser gets direct feedback on how many people actually watched it, as opposed to a guess based on "ratings systems".
Adcritic was one of my favorite sites back in the day, but there's no way I'm going to pay to watch ads.
The ID requirement is still useless. Ample evidence is provided by the fact that some terrorists were able to board airliners, despite the fact that they were required to show ID, and fly them into buildings. Nothing has changed. All the so-called security measures being taken are just a dog and pony show created to make gullible people like you feel safe.
Did you know that it's actually legal to make fake IDs? It's only illegal to use them. I'm sure someone planning to fly a plane into a building is going to be really worried about that!
I'll agree that the California court you mentioned is "wacky" as soon as you can show me the part of the Constitution that negates seperation of church and state.
Why is it cool to think that the United States Government is out to spy on everyone and in general fuck things up?
Because the current administration is doing everything it can to prove it.
It could be worse...
They could be sold to ALL bidders!
Brilliant!
Seriously, that is absolutely the best solution to the problem that I've heard yet.
You're right; the climate is right but no one in government will sponsor it. Obviously, someone outside of government is needed to get the ball roling. Somebody like Nader or Jerry Brown, but with less of a "fruitcake" image problem to overcome. Lessig with a good PR team would be effective.
I bet he'd reconsider his position if he got thousands of phone calls from polite, telemarketer types asking to discuss their expectation of reduced privacy.
To bad that isn't what would happen.
"I'VE GOT REDUCED EXPECTATION OF PRIVACY RIGHT HERE, YOU ASSHOLE! I'LL FUCKING KILL YOU, YOU FUCKING FUCK!" is really only a convincing arguement if it's being proposed by someone who has a gun in your mouth, and even then, it's not convincing in a way that is useful to our purpose.
Any market affected by capitalism will tend toward consolidation, for the simple reason that competition is not profitable. The goal of capitalism is to amass capital, and the amount of capital that can be amassed is largely limited by ones competition. Thus, eliminating ones competition, even through a merger, will ultimately by more profitable than than to maintain a competitive market.
To put it bluntly: the goal of capitalism is monopoly.
I don't think capitalism is evil, but it's important to realize that capitalism and the free market (and democracy, but that's not our topic)are almost completely seperate concepts, a fact which has been sadly obfuscated by political and corporate rhetoric since the industrial revolution, and will only become more so as media continues to consolidate under a few big corporations.
the system determines differences between the current input signals and the previous input signals
Seems like this applies to MPEG, not JPEG, unless by "input signels" the mean pixels.
Regardless, it seems that if somone where to come up with an algorythm that relied on a mathematical method other than mean-square difference, that they would be unaffected by this patent.
I'm certainly not suggesting that the state of multi-national corporatism is such that this kind of reponse is called for.
;-P
I am.
Seriously, though, the lack of responsibility for decisions created by the protections offered by the corporate legal structure is a real problem for our society as a whole. Corporations have all the rights of a person with none of the consequences. You can't put a corporation in jail. What needs to happen is for those protections to be reduced for the decision makers (meaning the board members and top executives). This does make sense in our legal structure, since a key part of our body of law is based on intent. The people in charge, the people responsible, need to be held accountable for the decisions they make, and not just financially, but criminally. I think this would bring a serious change, and I sincerely beleive that it would be for the better.
I would love to believe that our system will work, since I much prefer to do things that way. It may not be fast, but it is usually right in the end. If it comes down to it, though, I'll be right there on the front lines decapitating execs and their government puppets. If the system no longer responds to the people, than the people need to dismantle it.
OH MY GOD!!! THE SAME ARTICLE WAS POSTED ON 2 DIFFERENT SITES!!! THE WORLD IS COMING TO AN END!!!
/. for years, and have yet to get bored with it. I very much doubt that I'm the only one who feels this way.
Perhaps you haven't noticed, but slashdot and kuro5hin are two different sites, with different readership. I personally only read k5 for a short time; it simply didn't hold my interest. In contrast, I've been reading
Animal Farm, 1984, and All Quiet on the Western Front were all required reading at my High School, along with Brave New World, which I would also add to that list.
Since Taco insists on progressively obfuscating karma, I suggest that he go one step further and simply show you an icon of what animal you will be reincarnated as if you continue with your current karmic habits.
That's a pretty cool idea. I actually like that better than numbers.
Now Symantec can screw up SecurityFocus like they've screwed up everything else that was useful until they bought it!
Sorry for the flamebait, but I've bought too many Symantec products over the years, and they seem to get worse with every revision. I remember when Norton Utilities was something beneficial, now I refer to that package as Norton Anti-System.
Other fun past experiences with Symantec products have included Act, which was a big pile of poo, and WinFax, which was pretty good last time I used it, as long as you limited your use to a specific subset of it's advertised functionality.
1) Drivers
2) Games
3) A broad user base
Interesting. None of those are technologies, per se, neither did any of them origionate with Microsoft. In fact, Unix had all of those before anyone had even heard of Microsoft.
You and your 3 friends, who couldn't get laid in a whorehouse even if they had a $50 bill hanging out of their zippers
That's probably true, but mostly because I would be to busy getting my ass kicked by my wife for being in a whorehouse in the first place. I have to admit that I've never attempted this experiment, though, since I've never had any difficulty getting laid, even without the assistance of a $50 bill.
At my old community college there were big signs in the cafeteria that said PLEASE BUS YOUR OWN TABLES. In one corner there was an area with some big comfy chairs and a couple of coffee tables. For some unknown reason the coffee tables had glass tops.
One day, a friend of mine decided to chug his soda and then slam the empty can down on the table in a manly display of soda-guzzling prowess. The glass tabletop, of course, shattered. Fortunately, though, my friend was prepared: He pulled out his big fat permenant marker (you know, the ones with the fumes that almost knock you flat when you pull off the cap) and added a T to the end of the BUS on all of those signs...
I probably sounded a lot more "hardcore Unix" than I intended to. I'm fully aware of the need for monkey-level GUI tools on Unix (it just makes me sad) in order to gain popular acceptance, but at the same time I keep running into the limitations imposed by those tools while working on Windows.
;-)
For example, I recently had a strong desire to do some mass database manipulation/extraction at work. The only experience I have with that sort of thing is from my Intro to Unix class, but we use Access for all the databases I have any reason to look at. I figured it would take me a few minutes to work out the syntax to do what I wanted with cut, but I could do it even with my limited knowledge, and hey, we use Windows and it should be even easier there, right? Our IT guy, who's Windows only but definately above monkey level, looked at me like I was mad (or maybe had a disfiguring disease) and said "No! It's not easy to do that at all!"
Anyway, my point is that I'm all for making the hard things easy, but we need to be very careful that in the process we don't make the easy things hard, or even worse, the clever things impossible.
For one, from a developer's perspective, system call traces that don't require buying multi-hundred or multi-thousand-dollar third party packages, to do the job.
But, there's no reason any other OS couldn't have that, just nobody has done it. The pipe, and the whole philosophy around it, is the thing that sets Unix apart from all the rest.
A little background:
Being fortunate enough to live in Grass Valley, CA, I frequently stumble across neat video-related projects and companies. In that vein, one of my classes recently had a guest speaker from a company that specializes in video I/O (I don't remember the name of the company, but they've historically specialized in conversion boxes). He was specifically talking about a product which is just coming out of developement now; an add-on card for Mac which did rendering and handled I/O between a dual-channel SCSI storage unit and a professional VTR. The product was Mac only, and the reason he gave was Quicktime, which he described as being kind of like a low-level multimedia API which was quite simple to write hardware drivers for. This brings me to my question(s):
How would you describe the present and future of Linux with regards to video I/O? Is there anything in Linux which is analagous to the Quicktime framework (in any stage of developement) in the sense that it would encourage developement of such hardware for Linux? I'm assuming you use Linux for rendering, do you also use it for I/O, and why or why not?
My objective is not to suggest alternatives, but rather to support my arguement that Microsoft does not innovate.
As for Unix GUI tools, I have no difficulty understanding why they came around so late in the game. In many ways a GUI is anathema to Unix. Unix was built around the central philosophy of taking many small programs, each of which does one thing very well, and being able to string them together to accomplish complex tasks. GUIs effectively remove that ability.
Am I wrong? Has someone found a way to implement the pipe graphically? Without the pipe, what advantage does Unix have?
Stallman is not a "stakeholder."
The public is the largest single stakeholder on the issue of copyright. Stallman is a member of the public. If you don't want him representing you in the copyright debate, then perhaps you should get out and represent yourself.
Copyright is theft. It is theft from the Public Domain. It is not a natural right, but a granted one. The Public grants copyright to the Rights Holder, and the price of that granted right is Fair Use and the passage of the work into the Public Domain after a limited time. If that price is not paid, and the Rights Holders are doing everything they possibly can to avoid paying it, there is no reason for the Public to grant, nor respect, copyright. Copyright has no value without public consent.
The market can't stop DRM if the law requires it. Since the Public is the largest stakeholder, it is extremely irresponsible of an allegedly public body, the Department of Commerce, to prevent public participation in a debate which will affect government policy regarding copyright and DRM.
Seriously, your friend should just quit and get a different job. The end results will be the same either way; he'll no longer be working at Starbucks and so he won't have to listen to their crappy music anymore.
If he hacks the machine and gets caught (and he will get caught), he'll just get fired anyway, and might even be looking at a lawsuit (public establishments have limits on what music they can play, though I'd have to ask my wife about the particulars) or even criminal charges. In other words, stuff that looks real bad on a resume.
That said, it shouldn't be difficult if you can get ahold of one of the expired CDs and know how to read a hex dump. It'll probably take some time, though.