Ok the idea of open source writing eludes me. If I understand the concept correctly you write a piece and then put it on the web for free in hopes that someone will change it? Thats all well and good but it kind of defeats the purpose of getting a message across. Not that this isn't already the case but who would want to read 6 million versions of Tom Sawyer all with a different overriding message and many about a completely different thing than the original?
This is what happens when you use a compiler written before the standard was solid. MS has patched quite a bit but I'm sure that some of the bugs in MSVC are hard to fix in a patch. Let MS come out with its next full version before you get too down on compliance or non-compliance. GCC needed a few versions before it was up to par I'm sure.
Questions like this are why spending 4 years in university might be valuable. It helps to all be speaking the same language when you head out to solve a big problem.
I think the more important point is that napster was a small search space and heavily mirrored. Moreover, the mirrors could be reached with no knowledge of thier existance, you just asked for a song and got it. Maybe archie provided this capability (I admit that it went out of style right about the time I started on the i-net) but if so where are the archie servers today?
The thing that made P2P ala Napster so great is that it was easy to search. Just type in a song title and out comes a list of places to get the song.
I agree, thats what the internet is supposed to be but it never turns out that way. You type in a search term, get 50% adds, 25% porn, 15% on topic but wildly innaccurate stuff, 10% completely unrelated stuff, and finally in the bottom 5% that is usually on the 20th page you find some info that is useful or the file you want. Maybe if we had specialized search engines on the web (or for ftp or whatever) that only carried a portion of what we were looking for sort of by category then people would be able to find what they want and this p2p revolution wouldn't be necessary.
The other facet to making the i-net behave like what we saw in P2P is to let various and random people automatically mirror a site and serve it to other people. This would give the effect of having millions of average servers instead of one good but extremely overloaded server.
Unfortunately MS is not selling this info, its included in the hotmail public directory by default (maybe with no choice to opt out of the directory). Bigfoot would only have to search the hotmail directory to get the info from the looks of it.
As far as I can tell spammers just blanket all the hotmail accounts listed in the directory and hotmail accounts seem to be in the directory by default. I highly doubt that MS sells your address or any of your info, its just that by providing a public searchable directory they kind of give you away to spam.
I fell for this one at first but then about 10 minutes after I posted the "story" to slashdot the IRCOps kicked out a global message assuring everyone that it was just an april fools joke. A good one at that.
A debit card is also less secure than a credit card. Well not exactly less secure but if false charges are placed against a debit card there are far less insurances that they will be removed if disputed. Most credit cards have fraud insurance and protect you for nearly everything over $50 but many debit cards do not have this feature, the money is gone when the charge is levied end of story.
Ok, I submit that I made a mistake:) Upon my second reading tonight of the constitution I find that there is allowance to congress to make laws of copyright for limited time.
I'm afraid that the US constitution doesn't cover copyright. That is just a normal law sorry. It may well be that the law says for a "limited time" but that can always change.
The sticky part comes in proving ownership of an arbitrary sound bite in order to opt in. I think that what will end up happening is Napster/BMI will only distribute thier own files on the network and the rest will be booted which sux. I don't see another way that napster can be saved though unless they manage to make a deal with the RIAA which we all know won't happen.
This is a case were we as consumers need to be careful and just not buy RIAA albums, stick with BMI and show the RIAA that being an ass won't make them money.
Just because an image doesn't come from the same server as the page doesn't make it any more or less likely or more or less capable of tracking your usage. These stats are fully bogus and give you no real idea of who is tracking what. More information is tracked on the same server that hosts the page than is tracked on the ad server I will nearly garuntee that.
Basically people you need to realize that marketing knows what you are doing and they use this to make more money off of you. Furthermore you need to realize that they make more money off of you by providing you advertising of something you actually want. Is this awful?
Another thing to realize is that none of these companies does a very good job at using the stats they collect. Few if any companies provide an automated targeted ad system. Few if any have solved the problem of sorting these large lists of numbers.
I mean how scared can you get when you get 3 calls a week from the phone company asking you to order phone service that you already get. They don't know what you are doing because there is just to much info.
In defense of the judges they seemed to know more about technology than any other people I've heard talk of computers in a legal sense.
They understood the way that IE was implemented and how that differed from netscape. They knew what the govt lawyers were saying when they discussed the team of Sun and Netscape. They knew how java worked and the point of java. The also seemed to understand the economics of the situation pretty darn well.
I am not saying you are thinking this, but you can't say someone is stupid just because they don't say what you want to hear.
I did alot of what would be considered overclocking mods on my computer just to get the processor temp down to what seemed reasonable and safe. I got a super sized heatsink for my processor and lots of case fans. I think that the knowledge in cooling that overclockers discovered will be very useful as the power dissipation of modern chips increases
Better it be the govt store its data in word and excel which is popular enough that the software will survive for a while than it being stored in a govt invented format like alot of the documents that the govt has but sold all the hardware and software off that can read it. There is something to be said for using something that is standard whether by monopoly or by industry wide acceptance.
As I understand it, the word format is open and distributed. The problem with it being that its just a list of serialized COM objects and noone has all the pieces to display them properly. That is the price we pay for being able to show pictures and spreadsheets and movies in our word documents.
If people want to write a text document then save it as RichText which is widely supported. Or even better save it as html or straight text or something that is even more widely supported. Don't get upset that your document only opens in word when you were silly enough to write it in word and save it in word format.
On a different note, the office phenomena shows the main benefit of ubiquitous software and software monopolies. We may pay more and we may get less inovation but we can open our documents the same way on every computer we come to.
There is a very good argument that software wouldn't matter in the world were it not for MS. There is no doubt that MS widened the audience for computers greatly by allowing them to work in the hands of the masses. I have a feeling that without companies like MS selling software and marketing it like they did all computers would be in colleges and huge businesses and I wouldn't have squat.
People like you are why other people think that being a geek is a bad thing. I'm a geek and I've never hidden that fact and I support my fellow geeks. Divinci was ultra cool in my opinion, but it certainly can't be denied that he was a geek.
Its terrible that in our modern sophisticated society there is more prejudice against geeks than at any time in history. As I understand it back in the day DaVicni was considered so ultra cool that he got to hang out with the king and all that kind of stuff. Now we ignore geeks, and then when they start go get somewhere, we beat them down with every means possible.
Why do people thing companies are obligated to...
on
HP Ending OpenMail
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· Score: 3
...give away code?
Perhaps when HP decides to discontinue it as a product, they should open the source code.
It is highly likely that much of the code in open mail will be reused in a future product. If not the code itself at least the technologies contained within it.
I think mainly I am sick and tired that every chance people get they want something for nothing and get angry if they don't get it. There is good arguments for letting everyone use the knowledge to try and make newer and cooler things that will advance society, but there is also a pretty good argument that if you spent your time and resources to create something, that thing is yours to distribute how you see fit.
I guess what is really awful in the open source world is that the people that really annoy me aren't the ones I should be listening to. I know that many of the people developing open source projects do a TON of work on thier own and come a long way in providing alternatives for the world and not asking anything in return. Could those people who are a positive force in Open Source get rid of all the whining gnits that keep shouting "Give me your software and your mp3's!" so that I can renew my faith in the motives of the Open Source world.
I think that is a stupid user issue. I have never needed to use office for anything. I can read most.doc files with other word processors and I can write all the documents I want in other word processors and just save them as a different format. And guess what? Other people can read them too because I save them in a format that nearly everyone has.
I don't think microsoft can be blamed for the stupidity of people. I'm not sure what to think about them capitalizing on it, but really if you build something that people want and they buy it are you really that bad? Is it wrong to not want other people to copy what you can do?
I listened to the appeals hearings as well. First off the judges did that to both sides. Microsoft got cut off just as often as the govt did. It makes sense too because the whole case had been tried before, there were piles and piles of documents that the judges had read already, and the hearings were to clear up those few points on which the judges and lawyers thought the case hinged.
Mostly what I noticed is that all the lawyers sounded stupid. They were so busy trying to dodge questions that they failed to argue thier case.
DaVinci was a huge geek, just look at all the drawings and writings he did.
Re:I think we'd have more important problems
on
Rebooting The World?
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· Score: 1
The true spirit of a hacker is to take an object and make it do what you want it to no matter what that takes.
Think back to great hacker moments like the creation of the "hackintosh" when some mac owners wanted to be able to use IDE drives in thier mac computers. Then remember back to the KIM computer that had any number of hacks from the creation of a tape drive interface for the computer to the creation of a TV display interface.
I think the skills to take an object and transform it to your will are vastly useful. Working directly with electronics may not be important in the hypothetical world of this article, but I know that most of my geek friends also hack thier cars and bicycles and bond fires to get them to do any number of crazy things. That skill and drive and desire will make them useful in the fully restarted world.
I mean really, can you classify the great inventors of the last century as anything other than geeks and hackers? I think that the true spirit is being lost in the.com era of making billions on ideas that never pan out. *sigh* Tis life.
When countries trade each one is better off because all prices fall. So what if one company in one country goes down, it can start up in an industry where that country has an advantage over the rest of the world. I forget the exact economics in all of this but trade makes everyone better off.
Slashdot Mirror
Ok the idea of open source writing eludes me. If I understand the concept correctly you write a piece and then put it on the web for free in hopes that someone will change it? Thats all well and good but it kind of defeats the purpose of getting a message across. Not that this isn't already the case but who would want to read 6 million versions of Tom Sawyer all with a different overriding message and many about a completely different thing than the original?
This is what happens when you use a compiler written before the standard was solid. MS has patched quite a bit but I'm sure that some of the bugs in MSVC are hard to fix in a patch. Let MS come out with its next full version before you get too down on compliance or non-compliance. GCC needed a few versions before it was up to par I'm sure.
Questions like this are why spending 4 years in university might be valuable. It helps to all be speaking the same language when you head out to solve a big problem.
I think the more important point is that napster was a small search space and heavily mirrored. Moreover, the mirrors could be reached with no knowledge of thier existance, you just asked for a song and got it. Maybe archie provided this capability (I admit that it went out of style right about the time I started on the i-net) but if so where are the archie servers today?
I agree, thats what the internet is supposed to be but it never turns out that way. You type in a search term, get 50% adds, 25% porn, 15% on topic but wildly innaccurate stuff, 10% completely unrelated stuff, and finally in the bottom 5% that is usually on the 20th page you find some info that is useful or the file you want. Maybe if we had specialized search engines on the web (or for ftp or whatever) that only carried a portion of what we were looking for sort of by category then people would be able to find what they want and this p2p revolution wouldn't be necessary.
The other facet to making the i-net behave like what we saw in P2P is to let various and random people automatically mirror a site and serve it to other people. This would give the effect of having millions of average servers instead of one good but extremely overloaded server.
Unfortunately MS is not selling this info, its included in the hotmail public directory by default (maybe with no choice to opt out of the directory). Bigfoot would only have to search the hotmail directory to get the info from the looks of it.
As far as I can tell spammers just blanket all the hotmail accounts listed in the directory and hotmail accounts seem to be in the directory by default. I highly doubt that MS sells your address or any of your info, its just that by providing a public searchable directory they kind of give you away to spam.
I fell for this one at first but then about 10 minutes after I posted the "story" to slashdot the IRCOps kicked out a global message assuring everyone that it was just an april fools joke. A good one at that.
A debit card is also less secure than a credit card. Well not exactly less secure but if false charges are placed against a debit card there are far less insurances that they will be removed if disputed. Most credit cards have fraud insurance and protect you for nearly everything over $50 but many debit cards do not have this feature, the money is gone when the charge is levied end of story.
Ok, I submit that I made a mistake :) Upon my second reading tonight of the constitution I find that there is allowance to congress to make laws of copyright for limited time.
I'm afraid that the US constitution doesn't cover copyright. That is just a normal law sorry. It may well be that the law says for a "limited time" but that can always change.
This is a case were we as consumers need to be careful and just not buy RIAA albums, stick with BMI and show the RIAA that being an ass won't make them money.
Most signing bonuses have a 1 year work contingency. Mine sure did, the contract said I work for 1 year or I pay them back the bonus money.
Basically people you need to realize that marketing knows what you are doing and they use this to make more money off of you. Furthermore you need to realize that they make more money off of you by providing you advertising of something you actually want. Is this awful?
Another thing to realize is that none of these companies does a very good job at using the stats they collect. Few if any companies provide an automated targeted ad system. Few if any have solved the problem of sorting these large lists of numbers.
I mean how scared can you get when you get 3 calls a week from the phone company asking you to order phone service that you already get. They don't know what you are doing because there is just to much info.
They understood the way that IE was implemented and how that differed from netscape. They knew what the govt lawyers were saying when they discussed the team of Sun and Netscape. They knew how java worked and the point of java. The also seemed to understand the economics of the situation pretty darn well.
I am not saying you are thinking this, but you can't say someone is stupid just because they don't say what you want to hear.
I did alot of what would be considered overclocking mods on my computer just to get the processor temp down to what seemed reasonable and safe. I got a super sized heatsink for my processor and lots of case fans. I think that the knowledge in cooling that overclockers discovered will be very useful as the power dissipation of modern chips increases
As I understand it, the word format is open and distributed. The problem with it being that its just a list of serialized COM objects and noone has all the pieces to display them properly. That is the price we pay for being able to show pictures and spreadsheets and movies in our word documents.
If people want to write a text document then save it as RichText which is widely supported. Or even better save it as html or straight text or something that is even more widely supported. Don't get upset that your document only opens in word when you were silly enough to write it in word and save it in word format.
On a different note, the office phenomena shows the main benefit of ubiquitous software and software monopolies. We may pay more and we may get less inovation but we can open our documents the same way on every computer we come to.
There is a very good argument that software wouldn't matter in the world were it not for MS. There is no doubt that MS widened the audience for computers greatly by allowing them to work in the hands of the masses. I have a feeling that without companies like MS selling software and marketing it like they did all computers would be in colleges and huge businesses and I wouldn't have squat.
Its terrible that in our modern sophisticated society there is more prejudice against geeks than at any time in history. As I understand it back in the day DaVicni was considered so ultra cool that he got to hang out with the king and all that kind of stuff. Now we ignore geeks, and then when they start go get somewhere, we beat them down with every means possible.
...give away code?
Perhaps when HP decides to discontinue it as a product, they should open the source code.
It is highly likely that much of the code in open mail will be reused in a future product. If not the code itself at least the technologies contained within it.
I think mainly I am sick and tired that every chance people get they want something for nothing and get angry if they don't get it. There is good arguments for letting everyone use the knowledge to try and make newer and cooler things that will advance society, but there is also a pretty good argument that if you spent your time and resources to create something, that thing is yours to distribute how you see fit.
I guess what is really awful in the open source world is that the people that really annoy me aren't the ones I should be listening to. I know that many of the people developing open source projects do a TON of work on thier own and come a long way in providing alternatives for the world and not asking anything in return. Could those people who are a positive force in Open Source get rid of all the whining gnits that keep shouting "Give me your software and your mp3's!" so that I can renew my faith in the motives of the Open Source world.
I don't think microsoft can be blamed for the stupidity of people. I'm not sure what to think about them capitalizing on it, but really if you build something that people want and they buy it are you really that bad? Is it wrong to not want other people to copy what you can do?
Mostly what I noticed is that all the lawyers sounded stupid. They were so busy trying to dodge questions that they failed to argue thier case.
DaVinci was a huge geek, just look at all the drawings and writings he did.
Think back to great hacker moments like the creation of the "hackintosh" when some mac owners wanted to be able to use IDE drives in thier mac computers. Then remember back to the KIM computer that had any number of hacks from the creation of a tape drive interface for the computer to the creation of a TV display interface.
I think the skills to take an object and transform it to your will are vastly useful. Working directly with electronics may not be important in the hypothetical world of this article, but I know that most of my geek friends also hack thier cars and bicycles and bond fires to get them to do any number of crazy things. That skill and drive and desire will make them useful in the fully restarted world.
I mean really, can you classify the great inventors of the last century as anything other than geeks and hackers? I think that the true spirit is being lost in the .com era of making billions on ideas that never pan out. *sigh* Tis life.
When countries trade each one is better off because all prices fall. So what if one company in one country goes down, it can start up in an industry where that country has an advantage over the rest of the world. I forget the exact economics in all of this but trade makes everyone better off.