Since Transmeta is already a bit off the deep end and is known for energy-saving Intel compatible CPU's it seems to me it'd be good for them to partner with one of these async companies and work on a chip that incorporates both their ideas. Because Transmeta CPU's use less hardware they'd seem to me to be easier to reimplement in this manner and because of their code morphing concept they can still be Intel compat. Because of both the code morphing and the async design they'd run with less energy and less heat and because of the async design they'd be faster than Intel. (well even if it took long enough to get to market they'd still be pretty fast.. and very good for rack mounted machines and laptops)
Objections..
[1] Unfair limitation to the poor
[2] What about public terminals?
[3] Do search engines have to pay to index sites?
[4] What if a site didn't provide what I wanted?
[5] Who said the web existed to make money?
[6] Who would police the ISP's?
[7] Do we want so much control forced into our freedoms?
As a developer it sounds great.. mostly.. but as a user it sounds very iffy. I'm willing to pay for what I find useful but I'm not willing to be forced to pay for what I find useful. I much prefer some sort of universal donation model. Let there be an easy way to pay site owners without need of a credit card or checking account and without the site needing expensive credit processing abilities. I put PayPal Donate on my sites.. if people want to keep me writing opensource software and useful websites they can donate.. if not then I can give up on it and go back to working at Blockbuster or something. That's the way it should be.. even if I do wish people would donate more. A universal donation interface would lower the effort involved so maybe people would donate more.
I totally agree. Just because you draw a picture doesn't make it art and just because something is numbers and strange symbols doesn't make it not art. When I write a program it is art to me. I am concerned in function, interface, and all the usual programming issues but am also concerned with the internal structures beauty and making the user understand what I was thinking as I designed the program and connecting with them. At the same time I'm trying to connect with any future programmers who may work on the program. IMO it's a very complex and artistic process and in ways much more difficult than any other form of art because the entire process is interactive and in general lacking of direct emotional cues such as background music, pretty pictures, etc. You have to express emotion through logic.
It's hard enough managing the basics of living being an unemployed geek. Who has money for toys? As soon as I find a new job and catch up on some bills I'll be back to broadband. A normal modem is hell after being used to broadband at home and the huge pipes at work.
If they want to save their business maybe they could talk the govt into giving the actual unemployed some of those billions their bailing companies out with. Would help those of us who have already used up our unemployment and still haven't found new jobs.:P
True. I was being rather nice. In reality I'll just copy all the stuff anyway and let them try to figure out how to keep children from accessing the files after I've inserted them into FreeNet version 72.
I don't have the money to buy off our officials like Disney can but I can out-geek them. It's best in a war not to fight where your enemy is strongest right?:)
Wait til the copyrights expire.. all these books we've known and loved will be preserved forever for all future generations to experience thanks to the joy of the Internet.
I'd love to have one of those printers that can print a real book. Imagine when every kid has the ability to read any book in the library of congress online or printed instantly into a paperback. Never shall another book fade quietly into the night.
My current sadness is the difficult time I'm having finding all the books in the very good Son of the Hero series. I hope this is a problem that the future can avoid.
I would say Neal Stephenson, Bruce Sterling, Terry Brooks, C.S. Lewis, and Douglas Adams would probably be in my top five. It's really a hard list to make but those are the authors that have had the biggest impact on me so far through different periods of my life. Authors such as Susan Cooper and Lloyd Alexander also played an important part during my teen years. Dr. Suess and the Brothers Grimm were my favorite during my childhood.
I think tabs and frames are a common interface now because of popularity in web interfaces and they've proven to be useful. Docking and stacking has always been rather useful. I don't want forced to have a 2D grid of windows though. I like it made easy to align windows to a grid and to other windows and like it when I can stick them together so if I move, open/close, etc one the others will follow. I also am really waiting for the day that KDE/Gnome stop chasing Windows and put some really useful features such as pie menus, cluster menus, and gesture support in rather than all the nasty pull down menus and icons. At least Mozilla is supporting these things so any Mozilla-based apps should be able to also.
I think the basic form to use is some simplified base system designed to be upgraded to the extreme. No built-in crap on the motherboard to speak of.. just lots of PCI slots. If they could share harddrive and RAM and provide a keyboard/mouse/monitor switching method similar to KVM switches but all in one box it'd be great. So rather than replacing older computers we could just add to them. Maybe perfect something like MOSIX and drop the whole stupid SMP idea. I've always imagined computers would someday be like legos where you could buy a CPU lego, a RAM lego, a harddrive lego, etc and just plug them together in any order to add to a hot system. No reboot and no case to open. If one burned out just toss it and put a new one in.
"It's not where the lies come from - whether it's a silly website or a recognised authority - it's the absence of the filters. That's why again a more popular kind of filtering, where the people looking at the information can actually help filter it, is a very, very important approach for the future. It's not done very much but it could solve issues of pornography, it could solve credibility issues of the kind you just mentioned."
Well I thought it sounded like one of my projects so thought it might be of interest to someone else..
Open image directory software: http://mlug.missouri.edu/~mogmios/projects/kigdemo.html
Civ & Alpha Centari are the closest I've played. You can win through several methods and have to balance the amount of resources being wasted on your military against expanding your civilization and technologies. If you're playing against a couple good players it can be a good mental exercise.
The author does have a point in his article. A lot of programs do spout nasty pointless error messages both at compile-time and at run-time. This is fine in development but stable versions should catch and properly handle such errors. That goes for any program regardless of the license it comes under. I think the main reason we notice it more on opensource apps is because they are public during development and a lot of times are already being included in your favorite distros. While the extra use does help the debugging process it can leave an impression of lack of polish.
Re:Give me some targetted marketing
on
Slashdot Updates
·
· Score: 2
I agree. I like Slashdot's current selection of ads because they are of interest to me more than of any other site so I actually click on them. If you could refine the targeting process and work out a deal with your advertisers to get a percentage of the money I spend at their sites then maybe you could avoid big nasty ads. I would hate to see Slashdot reduced to just another ad covered crappy site. If the site annoys me I won't use it anymore. I'm sure others agree. If I get a nasty popup ad I'm not going to come back.:)
Also if you are actually trying to sell opensource software it helps a lot if it belongs to you in the first place. Linux has multiple distros mostly because Linus never made an effort to sell his own product as a business. If he had then most people would want to buy from the guy who actually knows what's going on and not some other guy down the street just trying to make a buck. Even so most distros have key Linux programmers as employees which gives them the reputation and experience they need to be serious businesses. Lots of opensource authors do consulting and provide customizations and such to earn their living. These may not be multi-million dollar companies but they are profitable. If you want to make money selling opensourced products then have your own original product (or hire the authors of an underfunded project) and come up with a realistic business plan and go into business as you would with any other type of product. If you are unrealistic then you will bomb just as if you try to open a Burger King in the middle of nowhere.
episode: 'who knew' or 'the lack of funding'
on
Opposing Open Source?
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
Well there are two main issues here. The first is that if nobody asks for a certain type of software or features programmers aren't always going to know you want them. I mean most people don't read through large files in hex but to a programmer that is a useful feature. Equally most programmers might not know that some sort of business information processing is needed unless someone asks and explains what they are asking for. The second issue is resources. If I'm writing a program the features I need will come first because I've only got so much time to put towards the project. If you want to bump a special feature up the list then you should consider hiring me to add it or at least making some donations. Someone that sends me a new computer or my rent money will be MUCH more likely to get the feature they want added right away. People who give away their work tend to need that extra buck now and then so don't be afraid to invest.:)
My experience with those switches has all been bad. We had them in an apartment I usda have and they were a pain. And I've had more expensive versions at several jobs and all were also pains. I'd honestly rather just just network to the other machines and run apps remotely. I do keep an extra monitor etc around in case I need to install some hardware on another computer.
I've had a couple projects that have been highly modified and extended and are still being used in new and interesting ways years after I stopped development myself.
The important part seems to be working on it until you have something that is actually usable. Once it's usable other people will just start fixing things for you and adding new features.
After seeing all the things that have been implemented (or attempted) in the old version it's not hard to design a new version where again a central person or group does the brute of the work and then the masses again use as a core.
It's sort of a flux between chaos and order that repeats over and over and both parts are equally important.
I live without a drivers license and auto. It isn't easy but it's doable. Probably the worst part is that many jobs don't want to hire people without cars. It seems stupid to me to pay half my paycheck towards car expenses when I can walk/bicycle just about anywhere local and can often as not do my work remotely as I'm a programmer.
I can and do grow some of my own food. If supermarkets start that crap I'll just stop buying food from stores. That goes for any product.
I certainly would refuse to have such a universal ID. I don't really mind the SSN stuff because I consider that to be my 'true' name but I don't let anyone fingerprint me. Are we going to start doing genetic prints on our little ID cards and make Gattaca a reality too? Not me. I'll cease to be a citizen first. I'd be curious where they'd deport me too anyway. Maybe they could send me somewhere nice like Costa Rica or Italy. Do they pay the airfare?:)
I think it'd make plenty sense to calculate reputation against both number of transactions and total dollar amount. If you can give a party a negative, neutral, or positive rating then when you calculate it put that +/- 1 per dollar in the transaction. Then maybe take your total and take some percentage off for every transaction under the line you've drawn for the experienced users.. say 100 transactions..
You could still screw with the system somewhat but you'd have to work a lot harder at it. I think forcing escrow on all transactions greater than $100 makes sense too. It doesn't even have to be through a corporation.. allow users with really high trust ratings to work as escrow for a couple dollars per transaction if they're willing.. have an escrow service reverse auction built-in.
I have a normal Sanyo 4500 phone (Sprint PCS) and it has a built-in calculator, games, web browser, messaging, etc. I use it for web & email more than for phone calls actually. It cost me $50. I've yet to see a good PDA sell for that much. Now if only they'd make it possible to jack into their network over the Internet and add an 802.11b interface to the phone.:)
Last time I went to buy a camera when I was out and needed to take some quick pics I decided against the Polaroids and disposables and just bought the cheapest digital camera they were selling (~ $65) which happened to be branded by Polaroid. That Walmart didn't happen to sell the model of digital camera I was wanting to spend big bucks on so I went cheap. It did what I needed and still works fine. I wouldn't use it for professional level work but for a few snapshots or for children it's great. Being so affordable it certainly beats the price point of even a few rolls of Polaroid film.
How big of tapes are available these days? The last time I used tape to backup to they only held about 5gigs tops and were very slow if I remember right. I still used them for very important files but mostly I set the lab up so each computer had it's important files backed up on two other lab computers at any given time. Every night each machine would just tarball the files and then scp them over to the other two machines. I might have even encrypted the tarballs. I don't remember.:)
In highschool some friends and I created a device for around $30 from parts we found in electronics magazines that fed rough brainwave patterns into the serial port which we were able to adapt into a mouse driver and play Doom with. It took a lot of work to train both the user and the system to each other but it was doable. Was pretty cool. I think keyboarding would take a lot of training to be good at though. You have to train every single new action you add for every single user. At least we did.
Slashdot Mirror
Since Transmeta is already a bit off the deep end and is known for energy-saving Intel compatible CPU's it seems to me it'd be good for them to partner with one of these async companies and work on a chip that incorporates both their ideas. Because Transmeta CPU's use less hardware they'd seem to me to be easier to reimplement in this manner and because of their code morphing concept they can still be Intel compat. Because of both the code morphing and the async design they'd run with less energy and less heat and because of the async design they'd be faster than Intel. (well even if it took long enough to get to market they'd still be pretty fast.. and very good for rack mounted machines and laptops)
Objections..
[1] Unfair limitation to the poor
[2] What about public terminals?
[3] Do search engines have to pay to index sites?
[4] What if a site didn't provide what I wanted?
[5] Who said the web existed to make money?
[6] Who would police the ISP's?
[7] Do we want so much control forced into our freedoms?
As a developer it sounds great.. mostly.. but as a user it sounds very iffy. I'm willing to pay for what I find useful but I'm not willing to be forced to pay for what I find useful. I much prefer some sort of universal donation model. Let there be an easy way to pay site owners without need of a credit card or checking account and without the site needing expensive credit processing abilities. I put PayPal Donate on my sites.. if people want to keep me writing opensource software and useful websites they can donate.. if not then I can give up on it and go back to working at Blockbuster or something. That's the way it should be.. even if I do wish people would donate more. A universal donation interface would lower the effort involved so maybe people would donate more.
I totally agree. Just because you draw a picture doesn't make it art and just because something is numbers and strange symbols doesn't make it not art. When I write a program it is art to me. I am concerned in function, interface, and all the usual programming issues but am also concerned with the internal structures beauty and making the user understand what I was thinking as I designed the program and connecting with them. At the same time I'm trying to connect with any future programmers who may work on the program. IMO it's a very complex and artistic process and in ways much more difficult than any other form of art because the entire process is interactive and in general lacking of direct emotional cues such as background music, pretty pictures, etc. You have to express emotion through logic.
Must be a crappy site. It won't even load with Javascript disabled. Well there goes my specialized screen reader that uses wget to fetch pages. ;)
It's hard enough managing the basics of living being an unemployed geek. Who has money for toys? As soon as I find a new job and catch up on some bills I'll be back to broadband. A normal modem is hell after being used to broadband at home and the huge pipes at work.
:P
If they want to save their business maybe they could talk the govt into giving the actual unemployed some of those billions their bailing companies out with. Would help those of us who have already used up our unemployment and still haven't found new jobs.
True. I was being rather nice. In reality I'll just copy all the stuff anyway and let them try to figure out how to keep children from accessing the files after I've inserted them into FreeNet version 72.
:)
I don't have the money to buy off our officials like Disney can but I can out-geek them. It's best in a war not to fight where your enemy is strongest right?
Wait til the copyrights expire.. all these books we've known and loved will be preserved forever for all future generations to experience thanks to the joy of the Internet.
I'd love to have one of those printers that can print a real book. Imagine when every kid has the ability to read any book in the library of congress online or printed instantly into a paperback. Never shall another book fade quietly into the night.
My current sadness is the difficult time I'm having finding all the books in the very good Son of the Hero series. I hope this is a problem that the future can avoid.
I would say Neal Stephenson, Bruce Sterling, Terry Brooks, C.S. Lewis, and Douglas Adams would probably be in my top five. It's really a hard list to make but those are the authors that have had the biggest impact on me so far through different periods of my life. Authors such as Susan Cooper and Lloyd Alexander also played an important part during my teen years. Dr. Suess and the Brothers Grimm were my favorite during my childhood.
I think tabs and frames are a common interface now because of popularity in web interfaces and they've proven to be useful. Docking and stacking has always been rather useful. I don't want forced to have a 2D grid of windows though. I like it made easy to align windows to a grid and to other windows and like it when I can stick them together so if I move, open/close, etc one the others will follow. I also am really waiting for the day that KDE/Gnome stop chasing Windows and put some really useful features such as pie menus, cluster menus, and gesture support in rather than all the nasty pull down menus and icons. At least Mozilla is supporting these things so any Mozilla-based apps should be able to also.
I think the basic form to use is some simplified base system designed to be upgraded to the extreme. No built-in crap on the motherboard to speak of.. just lots of PCI slots. If they could share harddrive and RAM and provide a keyboard/mouse/monitor switching method similar to KVM switches but all in one box it'd be great. So rather than replacing older computers we could just add to them. Maybe perfect something like MOSIX and drop the whole stupid SMP idea. I've always imagined computers would someday be like legos where you could buy a CPU lego, a RAM lego, a harddrive lego, etc and just plug them together in any order to add to a hot system. No reboot and no case to open. If one burned out just toss it and put a new one in.
"It's not where the lies come from - whether it's a silly website or a recognised authority - it's the absence of the filters. That's why again a more popular kind of filtering, where the people looking at the information can actually help filter it, is a very, very important approach for the future. It's not done very much but it could solve issues of pornography, it could solve credibility issues of the kind you just mentioned."
o .html
Well I thought it sounded like one of my projects so thought it might be of interest to someone else..
Open image directory software: http://mlug.missouri.edu/~mogmios/projects/kigdem
Civ & Alpha Centari are the closest I've played. You can win through several methods and have to balance the amount of resources being wasted on your military against expanding your civilization and technologies. If you're playing against a couple good players it can be a good mental exercise.
The author does have a point in his article. A lot of programs do spout nasty pointless error messages both at compile-time and at run-time. This is fine in development but stable versions should catch and properly handle such errors. That goes for any program regardless of the license it comes under. I think the main reason we notice it more on opensource apps is because they are public during development and a lot of times are already being included in your favorite distros. While the extra use does help the debugging process it can leave an impression of lack of polish.
I agree. I like Slashdot's current selection of ads because they are of interest to me more than of any other site so I actually click on them. If you could refine the targeting process and work out a deal with your advertisers to get a percentage of the money I spend at their sites then maybe you could avoid big nasty ads. I would hate to see Slashdot reduced to just another ad covered crappy site. If the site annoys me I won't use it anymore. I'm sure others agree. If I get a nasty popup ad I'm not going to come back. :)
Also if you are actually trying to sell opensource software it helps a lot if it belongs to you in the first place. Linux has multiple distros mostly because Linus never made an effort to sell his own product as a business. If he had then most people would want to buy from the guy who actually knows what's going on and not some other guy down the street just trying to make a buck. Even so most distros have key Linux programmers as employees which gives them the reputation and experience they need to be serious businesses. Lots of opensource authors do consulting and provide customizations and such to earn their living. These may not be multi-million dollar companies but they are profitable. If you want to make money selling opensourced products then have your own original product (or hire the authors of an underfunded project) and come up with a realistic business plan and go into business as you would with any other type of product. If you are unrealistic then you will bomb just as if you try to open a Burger King in the middle of nowhere.
Well there are two main issues here. The first is that if nobody asks for a certain type of software or features programmers aren't always going to know you want them. I mean most people don't read through large files in hex but to a programmer that is a useful feature. Equally most programmers might not know that some sort of business information processing is needed unless someone asks and explains what they are asking for. The second issue is resources. If I'm writing a program the features I need will come first because I've only got so much time to put towards the project. If you want to bump a special feature up the list then you should consider hiring me to add it or at least making some donations. Someone that sends me a new computer or my rent money will be MUCH more likely to get the feature they want added right away. People who give away their work tend to need that extra buck now and then so don't be afraid to invest. :)
My experience with those switches has all been bad. We had them in an apartment I usda have and they were a pain. And I've had more expensive versions at several jobs and all were also pains. I'd honestly rather just just network to the other machines and run apps remotely. I do keep an extra monitor etc around in case I need to install some hardware on another computer.
I've had a couple projects that have been highly modified and extended and are still being used in new and interesting ways years after I stopped development myself.
The important part seems to be working on it until you have something that is actually usable. Once it's usable other people will just start fixing things for you and adding new features.
After seeing all the things that have been implemented (or attempted) in the old version it's not hard to design a new version where again a central person or group does the brute of the work and then the masses again use as a core.
It's sort of a flux between chaos and order that repeats over and over and both parts are equally important.
I live without a drivers license and auto. It isn't easy but it's doable. Probably the worst part is that many jobs don't want to hire people without cars. It seems stupid to me to pay half my paycheck towards car expenses when I can walk/bicycle just about anywhere local and can often as not do my work remotely as I'm a programmer.
:)
I can and do grow some of my own food. If supermarkets start that crap I'll just stop buying food from stores. That goes for any product.
I certainly would refuse to have such a universal ID. I don't really mind the SSN stuff because I consider that to be my 'true' name but I don't let anyone fingerprint me. Are we going to start doing genetic prints on our little ID cards and make Gattaca a reality too? Not me. I'll cease to be a citizen first. I'd be curious where they'd deport me too anyway. Maybe they could send me somewhere nice like Costa Rica or Italy. Do they pay the airfare?
I think it'd make plenty sense to calculate reputation against both number of transactions and total dollar amount. If you can give a party a negative, neutral, or positive rating then when you calculate it put that +/- 1 per dollar in the transaction. Then maybe take your total and take some percentage off for every transaction under the line you've drawn for the experienced users.. say 100 transactions..
You could still screw with the system somewhat but you'd have to work a lot harder at it. I think forcing escrow on all transactions greater than $100 makes sense too. It doesn't even have to be through a corporation.. allow users with really high trust ratings to work as escrow for a couple dollars per transaction if they're willing.. have an escrow service reverse auction built-in.
I have a normal Sanyo 4500 phone (Sprint PCS) and it has a built-in calculator, games, web browser, messaging, etc. I use it for web & email more than for phone calls actually. It cost me $50. I've yet to see a good PDA sell for that much. Now if only they'd make it possible to jack into their network over the Internet and add an 802.11b interface to the phone. :)
Last time I went to buy a camera when I was out and needed to take some quick pics I decided against the Polaroids and disposables and just bought the cheapest digital camera they were selling (~ $65) which happened to be branded by Polaroid. That Walmart didn't happen to sell the model of digital camera I was wanting to spend big bucks on so I went cheap. It did what I needed and still works fine. I wouldn't use it for professional level work but for a few snapshots or for children it's great. Being so affordable it certainly beats the price point of even a few rolls of Polaroid film.
How big of tapes are available these days? The last time I used tape to backup to they only held about 5gigs tops and were very slow if I remember right. I still used them for very important files but mostly I set the lab up so each computer had it's important files backed up on two other lab computers at any given time. Every night each machine would just tarball the files and then scp them over to the other two machines. I might have even encrypted the tarballs. I don't remember. :)
In highschool some friends and I created a device for around $30 from parts we found in electronics magazines that fed rough brainwave patterns into the serial port which we were able to adapt into a mouse driver and play Doom with. It took a lot of work to train both the user and the system to each other but it was doable. Was pretty cool. I think keyboarding would take a lot of training to be good at though. You have to train every single new action you add for every single user. At least we did.
http://www.nomadphones.org/