This is true, it is also true I'd guess that arcades in general have suffered because of the home entertainment center and the PC. This would make my goal as a pinball machine company obvious, a home pinball machine. No not one of those itty bitty plastic toy ones, a real pinball machine. One that can reconfigure itself by entering a new program. There would be two ways to do this I think. Through using a virtual table that replaces the mechanical table w/ a screen of some sort and a computer processor. This would probably be the easiest way to go for a true home pinball table. You could also arrange the various table elements to be able to rearrange themselves which would probably please the hardcore pinball junkies best. Myself I'd vote for going w/ a virtual pinball table that is light and reasonably cheap but maintains as much of the feel of the old games as possible. You could probably build and sale such units in the same price range as the PS2. Then use the money from that to keep making the mechanical pinball machines for arcades and such to buy. As I kid I always watched my father play Pinball games (and PacMan) and I wouldn't say either is dead. When I was in my teens I was rebuilding pinball machines in a rotting abandoned warehouse across the alley from my home. I have no idea who would leave 30+ pinball machines to rot but I really appreciated it as a kid. Pinball is here to stay, it just needs to grow with the times. I love the Phantom Menace pinball table. When it comes down in price I want to add it to my collection.
IMO DHTML is still to messy for real world use. To make it work across browsers you have to do all that work making different versions and then somebody always seems to find the one version of whatever browser that is incompatible. On the other hand I'd agree that most db-oriented apps could probably use the browser as their client. PHP makes it rather easy to program powerful apps w/ db backends. I wouldn't use anything but a browser front-end unless it was something that really needed a special function that HTML can't offer.. then I might look at the Mozilla API's to see if I could use it as my front-end.. if not then I'd probably listen to one of these smart C/C++ coders here who do that sort of work often.:)
Have you considered putting up a SourceForge like site for oss projects that may not be totally legal such as DeCSS? Have you considered distributing your own Linux or BSD versions that included such software out-of-the-box? Even if you could only provide online ISO's that had to be downloaded and burnt this would be a great way to keep such things from being left to rot. Possibly you could also make such distro's high-security specialized since you have experience in that area. You could run your own machines on such a distro possibly so it has a functional use for your company to sponsor such a project.
I don't mind a reasonable bite but Western Union takes a bite that would have been fair in the days before everyone and their dog could wire information back and forth for little or nothing. A 3% fee wouldn't be a problem. A 15% fee is a problem. Afterall this is essentially a loan where they get the money before they give it to you.. just in a different place than you are.. there is little risk for them and obviously the wiring of the information costs little so their fee isn't justified IMO.:) In an ideal world I could spend Internet money in real life stores but until that day comes I still need a way to convert between the two easily, quickly, and affordably.
Well as I said the information would be editable by the user after the other site supplies the data. You'd want to do some sort of check for any possible hidden chars/data depending on how you passed the information in but as long as you did this and then showed it all to the end-user so that they could correct information as needed it shouldn't present any problems. It'd just pass in the default values for each form element so as long as the information was correct it'd save the user a lot of hassle. ie name, address, email address, phone number, etc are pretty easy to pass along and it'd present little security risk in accepting the default values from the originating site.
Well I meant bank in a general way.. as any place I can keep something valuable to me. Last time I checked Western Union ate a sizable amount of $ from anything you transfered through them. Also do they offer a way for the e-store linking to them to suggest the users name, address, etc as used by e-gold in the making of a new suer account. It'd be very good if the site could provide this information (and the user edit it if needed) so that it'd be less of a hassle for users to start a new e-gold account while in the middle of shopping from the e-store. I know I at least get annoyed at providing the same information about myself to a dozen sites a day and I'm sure my customers do also and I don't want them to lose interest in the middle of a sell. Passing a template of common information would help I think.
I do have a few wishes for e-gold and similar online banks I use. The biggest problem I face with them is the ease of putting money in and getting money out. It'd be nice to be able to wire or charge to my credit card the amount I want and have a reasonable short wait before I could spend that e-gold $$$. Also it'd be nice if these places issued actual debit cards that I could use at real stores/atm's and if they could wire the money to my bank the same day I asked for it (Pay-pal says 3-5 days which is painful when you need the money right away.). I don't like it when reality and the Net don't merge painlessly into one another.:) GoldChanger seems to be going to take paypal and wire transfers to make e-gold which is great but it still needs some work before it's ready for every Tom, Dick, and and Harry.:)
Possibly if I was bothering to buy really expensive things so that I needed to keep a lot of $ in the account. As usually I buy small things I rarely put more than $30 or so into the account at a time. If I was buying something expensive I'd probably look it up online and then go buy it in person just so I could do a reality check on it and also of course because I'd be excited to see my new toy.
And yes, I'm a dope on a rope. Is that like How to be an Evil Genius for Dummies book? I've been screwed over by almost every bank and credit card company I've tried (and I was an employee of them in some cases) so maybe I'm just paranoid about their promises. Is much safer not to give them the chance to let things go to hell.:)
Never use credit cards online.. from experience..
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A Matter Of Trust?
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I always use E-gold or something similar when possible because it protects me as a consumer. I did work for a large catalog/online company that sells computers and related products. While employeed there I showed them several methods their system could be penetrated, including grabbing a list of credit cards (several thousand) which I dropped on mgmt's desk w/ a detailed step-by-step list of how I did it and how to fix it. They never have fixed it (it's been over a year) and it's been enough to cure me from most online shopping. If I use a credit card I use a debit card with a hard limit and only a small amount of $ in the account. It should be noted that this company is using the same software that many other companies use and that I had no special access to the system. Just by knowing the software they used and how those bits work together I was able to access the system at a very high level.
Does anyone know if any company is selling (or soon will be) Transmeta powered laptops w/ Linux? I need a portable computer suitable for both work and play and I'd rather throw my money in with those I'd like to support if possible.:)
Re:How does Code Morphing software integrate?
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Inside Transmeta
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I can't see how it should be a problem doing this other than they may not have had it as a design goal so it may not work well with this version. I could highly imagine them taking this into account on the new versions. I was also mentally comparing the Transmeta CPU's w/ the articles they had posted here about a week ago about Linux on IBM's mainframes and how those had virtualization and such built into the design. Having this code morphing layer I'd think that the Transmeta CPU could handle this at least as well if they set their mind to it. This would allow further neat tricks such as booting Windows within Linux at the same speed as if it were booted as just one or the other. I'd like to see them work on this, possibly with the FreeMWare project and VMWare. Of course they probably want to pay the most attention to the x86 instruction set so Java, PowerPC, and others may be long in coming.. this would be a good reason to open the source to all their code morphing software so that we could port other instruction sets over. You'd still need an OS that was aware of the possibility though I'd imagine.. otherwise it'd probably not try running them in the first place.. and you might have to flag your binaries by instruction set in some manor without interferring with the default instruction set being executed w/out user intervention.. hrmmm.
I am planning on removing my PS2 from it's case and building a new case out of Mindstorms. My actual goal is to get Mindstorm software working on the PS2 also so that it can program it's own case to do weird things as you play.
I predict that the current Internet model will continue for a few years with freedom/privacy groups and corporate/government groups fighting over the standards until the whole thing becomes shaky and there are so many Internet and IP laws existing that nobody knows for sure what is and isn't legal online. Frustrated with this system and inspired by modern wireless network technology some group will create a peer-peer network that allows everyone to be equal. This OpenNet will be encrypted and anonymous as well as completely distributed. There will be no central domain servers and rather than IP numbers we'll use some sort of random id such as an ecryption code that uniquely identifies us without revealing who we are. Later this network driven by nanotech and other futuristic techs will become embedded in the human body and mind until we can no longer sepperate ourselves from our online self. Reality and the Net will have merged. As always the technology will keep evolving but it will have become intuitive to us as any other part of the brain might be.
You might try Cold MUD. It has all the benefits of MOO and is much more modern and clean of design. Either is a great introduction to object oriented programming (there is nothing like walking around your objects to get a feel for them), VR systems, text processing, and Internet programming. This might be a good second step after giving them a go on the Mindstorms.
Politicians and corporate moneybags no longer own the earth.. today everything is driven by technology. Everything you see or hear or touch or eat has probably came out of the hands of geeks. Without us those in power would find themselves holding an empty bag. Only the geek tendacy not to want money and power has kept us the underdog and now that our basis for existance is being challenged we will fight harder and harder until the day we win. To the geek what things are more important than knowledge and freedom? These very things are being taken away from us. They leave us no choice. We must hide our fair natures and become beasts. We have seen the future and they can not take it from us. They can not drive us out without destroying themselves and so we shall win if only we fight.
I've already spouted my ideas for appropiate replacements before in this series of stores. I would agree that you can't make a revolution without a proper replacement but it's also true that revolution happens in society of it's own accord. This one is coming regardless of if we plan it and attack or just let it evolve itself. This revolution is a revolution that by nature must strip power not only from those who already have it but also from those who would lead the revolution. Sure there will be parts that go out of whack but I think not as much as you'd expect from most other cultural revolutions we've had. opensource wouldn't work for all of society, only intellectual property concerns, but the moral and personalities that give us such works would do well to show itself more in aour daily lives. Mainly I speak of trust and a sense of looking out for society above your own needs. Sure many free software projects have been made to scratch the authors own itch, but how many features have been added to scratch the itches of others? Look at how the community has responded since the negative ratings that came out of that stupid paid-by-M$ test for Linux vrs Windows. Practically all the weak points have been addressed. Not for anyone person but for the pride of our community in being the best. Everything we do is transparent to the world so we better do it well. Look at how many people are concerned about Microsoft trying to censor Slashdot or what is happening in the MP3 and DVD arenas. Honestly these legal outcomes will not greatly effect most of us who are most interested because we know how to get software that can't be bought/sold in the U.S. but we are concerned for our community and our communities freedoms.
I think you're sort of missing the point here JK. Everyone, for the most part, already considers themself an individual. They choose to become the mindless clone drones they are and know no different. Probably 75% of our society is made up of these drones and so you will never win this war by trying to motivate these folks into action. This group includes all those people who watch tv and laugh when the tv audience laughs, those who listen to all the new pop music and always think it's something new, those people who actually think their vote counts for something but choose who to vote for based on what they've seen on television. This is the reality of America. Vast masses of unthinking workers under the control of greedy, power hungry corporations. The real tragedy is that I think even those in control of these corporations are as much a slave as the rest of us. The only way out of being a slave worker is to become a slave driver. It's a circle of sacrificing ourselves to nameless gods all in the name of money.
On the other hand we are already hearing the first shots fired in a new revolution and they are deeply tied into our Internet community. For us that have grown up on the Internet and with opensourced software we have developed an expectation of freedom of expression and freedom from paying for everything we get. To a large extent our entire youth culture is now moving into this area and you can see the generation lines largely forming. For the first time in many years, maybe ever, we actually are putting an educational communications tool in the hands of the youth that doesn't rob them of their creativity and individualism. This is creating a generation that will bring the revolution. Their may be violence and people hurt on either side but for the most part this will be a slow transfer of power from the old to the young. Many of these youth may buy into the old system with all it's promises but there will be many who will not. Those such as the recording industry and other corporations who no longer serve any useful purpose will doubtless fight on but they are fighting the spectre of an unstoppable change and they will fall by the roadside for their efforts.
What would be the legality of opening system hooks for easy mirroring of articles and the following discussion so that Slashdot could have dozens of mirrors around the world? Then any article that was forced to be removed from one server could blank it but include a link to the article on one of the mirrors. You could even set up a mirror system that'd automaticlly select a copy of the article that wasn't censored from the set of mirrors from whichever mirror was closest to the user. As long as the mirrors weren't legally owned by Slashdot or it's parent company I see no legal way they could be held responsible. It'd be a sort of saftey for Slashdot as users could still access any post no matter what happens to Slashdot legally, by natural disaster, corporate changes, etc.
I usually split a license so that either I, the designer, or the company which hired me can either use the code as we like. Usually content is retained by the company with permission for me to use it in exact form only (for showing new potential clients etc). As a lot of the HTML is generated from my personal PHP libraries there isn't really much for them to own as far as code goes.
Being that I usually will put together a good middle sized web site for $100 including hosting and domain registration few companies are very bossy on the subject. I can create a site and have it hosted for an entire year for $500 which sure beats the rest of their marketing budget.;>
Is there any reason why the browser can't have an addition that checks incoming pages as they are rendered and modifies them? Then you could download filters or write your own in like Javascript that'd block unwanted ads, links to known porn sites, or whatever concerns you. Since the DOM is completely exposed this should be fairly flexible right? Could use pattern matching, reg expr's, whatever..
People stop preaching doom on RedHat. They've shown themselves on numerous occassions to be a good neighbor in out little community. They've earned our trust. Some of you just watch to much of the X-Files. If we can't show a unified front then we allow chinks to open so that companies like Microsoft and AOL have a way to tear us down.
RedHat's stock is down, so what.. a lot of tech stocks are down.. it's a market thing.. they go up and down. Be smart and take this chance to buy all you can afford. The market value, it seems to me, of a company is more politics and media glitz than profits. The actual profit being made is largely in the stock value itself. That is what allows these companies to exist and grow. This is nothing new. If you want RedHat to do better then go buy it's stocks. Higher demand can only mean it becomes worth more.
This is great news that RedHat is helping others in our community grow. I hope they take the next step and do some angel investing and possibly give advice on what it takes to start a company from a free software project. The more OSS companies we have that are doing well the more OSS programmers we have that are well fed and able to spend their time coding for us.
(Note: First post glory hounds should be circumsized with dull rusty spoons.)
How is 3D handled? One thing I always was annoyed by is programs that are made for a different resolution or color depth and just don't look right in a really high res w/ True Color. Is there no way they could make it possible to change the res/depth for individual programs and desktops? BeOS seems to be able to handle this somewhat better. Prehaps X should borrow some ideas from them also. However, my main complaints with X are drag&drop and cut&paste which are both being addressed I think.:)
I tried reading the full set of doc's on X once.. I only understood about half and oooh did my head hurt. That was several thousand pages.:)
Who could? Certainly not Microsoft if they were required by law to keep all their source open. Possibly some other company but that'd be Microsoft's problem. Guess that's a good reason for them to use the GPL but hey I don't care as long as the source is available to me. I fail to see what point you were trying to make though.
First off.. you hit the nail right on the head.. I've spent a lot of time with hardware company reps so I've learned some things.. one of my favorite things is when the rep from a certain digital camera company told me that the current line of cameras had all the features the new model would have.. only that they'd been disabled on the circuit board.. all so that the company could make people buy the new model when they released it six months later.. without them having to pay for any new R&D or even any major changes to the design as all they had to do is activate the features by connecting power to a certain input on the IC they were using.
That being said, I think the practice is completely wrong. The only way to make companies give us the specs is if we can make it look like a benefit to them. When you go to buy something write a short letter to various companies that sell that type of product and ask them if the specifications are open and outline the reasons you are concerned. These things do work their way up the mgmt chain the more attention you, the consumer, bring to it. Write a letter to your favorite newspaper or magazine talking about the issue. Open software is big right now, convince the right reporters that open hardware is the next big thing and you may begin to get some response. Hardware companies have the benefit that even if they open their specs someone still has to buy their product (unlike software which can be downloaded) so play that kind of thing up. If you can convince even a few major companies to make such a move then the rest of them will begin taking the idea seriously.
To avoid being split up the government should force Microsoft to opensource all it's software under a true opensource license (GPL, LGPL, BSD) for say ten years. Of course they should till require the extra anti-trust rules so that M$ doesn't try to pressure others out of the game. That'd be fairly intereesting if M$ was required under law to open a Mozilla-like project for all it's software with absolutely no closed development being done in a for-release product. ie R&D could keep its source hidden, but if they sold or gave the program to anyone then the source must be posted to the Open Gates web site for everyone to see and add to. I'd also bar M$ from buying any opensource software companies so that they couldn't eat the competition over the next 10 years and then when they could close source again just kill all the competions funding.
This is one of the major problems with copyright laws and the Internet I think. It should not be illegal to copy other sites verbatim because this is important for saving the web from aging and to reduce lag. Caching is a good idea but really the infrastructure needs to be set up to encourage it and that won't happen as long as outdated copyright laws exist. Once I write something and publish it then it no longer belongs to just me, it belongs to everyone.
Slashdot Mirror
This is true, it is also true I'd guess that arcades in general have suffered because of the home entertainment center and the PC. This would make my goal as a pinball machine company obvious, a home pinball machine. No not one of those itty bitty plastic toy ones, a real pinball machine. One that can reconfigure itself by entering a new program. There would be two ways to do this I think. Through using a virtual table that replaces the mechanical table w/ a screen of some sort and a computer processor. This would probably be the easiest way to go for a true home pinball table. You could also arrange the various table elements to be able to rearrange themselves which would probably please the hardcore pinball junkies best. Myself I'd vote for going w/ a virtual pinball table that is light and reasonably cheap but maintains as much of the feel of the old games as possible. You could probably build and sale such units in the same price range as the PS2. Then use the money from that to keep making the mechanical pinball machines for arcades and such to buy. As I kid I always watched my father play Pinball games (and PacMan) and I wouldn't say either is dead. When I was in my teens I was rebuilding pinball machines in a rotting abandoned warehouse across the alley from my home. I have no idea who would leave 30+ pinball machines to rot but I really appreciated it as a kid. Pinball is here to stay, it just needs to grow with the times. I love the Phantom Menace pinball table. When it comes down in price I want to add it to my collection.
IMO DHTML is still to messy for real world use. To make it work across browsers you have to do all that work making different versions and then somebody always seems to find the one version of whatever browser that is incompatible. On the other hand I'd agree that most db-oriented apps could probably use the browser as their client. PHP makes it rather easy to program powerful apps w/ db backends. I wouldn't use anything but a browser front-end unless it was something that really needed a special function that HTML can't offer.. then I might look at the Mozilla API's to see if I could use it as my front-end.. if not then I'd probably listen to one of these smart C/C++ coders here who do that sort of work often. :)
Have you considered putting up a SourceForge like site for oss projects that may not be totally legal such as DeCSS? Have you considered distributing your own Linux or BSD versions that included such software out-of-the-box? Even if you could only provide online ISO's that had to be downloaded and burnt this would be a great way to keep such things from being left to rot. Possibly you could also make such distro's high-security specialized since you have experience in that area. You could run your own machines on such a distro possibly so it has a functional use for your company to sponsor such a project.
I don't mind a reasonable bite but Western Union takes a bite that would have been fair in the days before everyone and their dog could wire information back and forth for little or nothing. A 3% fee wouldn't be a problem. A 15% fee is a problem. Afterall this is essentially a loan where they get the money before they give it to you.. just in a different place than you are.. there is little risk for them and obviously the wiring of the information costs little so their fee isn't justified IMO. :) In an ideal world I could spend Internet money in real life stores but until that day comes I still need a way to convert between the two easily, quickly, and affordably.
Well as I said the information would be editable by the user after the other site supplies the data. You'd want to do some sort of check for any possible hidden chars/data depending on how you passed the information in but as long as you did this and then showed it all to the end-user so that they could correct information as needed it shouldn't present any problems. It'd just pass in the default values for each form element so as long as the information was correct it'd save the user a lot of hassle. ie name, address, email address, phone number, etc are pretty easy to pass along and it'd present little security risk in accepting the default values from the originating site.
Well I meant bank in a general way.. as any place I can keep something valuable to me. Last time I checked Western Union ate a sizable amount of $ from anything you transfered through them. Also do they offer a way for the e-store linking to them to suggest the users name, address, etc as used by e-gold in the making of a new suer account. It'd be very good if the site could provide this information (and the user edit it if needed) so that it'd be less of a hassle for users to start a new e-gold account while in the middle of shopping from the e-store. I know I at least get annoyed at providing the same information about myself to a dozen sites a day and I'm sure my customers do also and I don't want them to lose interest in the middle of a sell. Passing a template of common information would help I think.
I do have a few wishes for e-gold and similar online banks I use. The biggest problem I face with them is the ease of putting money in and getting money out. It'd be nice to be able to wire or charge to my credit card the amount I want and have a reasonable short wait before I could spend that e-gold $$$. Also it'd be nice if these places issued actual debit cards that I could use at real stores/atm's and if they could wire the money to my bank the same day I asked for it (Pay-pal says 3-5 days which is painful when you need the money right away.). I don't like it when reality and the Net don't merge painlessly into one another. :) GoldChanger seems to be going to take paypal and wire transfers to make e-gold which is great but it still needs some work before it's ready for every Tom, Dick, and and Harry. :)
Possibly if I was bothering to buy really expensive things so that I needed to keep a lot of $ in the account. As usually I buy small things I rarely put more than $30 or so into the account at a time. If I was buying something expensive I'd probably look it up online and then go buy it in person just so I could do a reality check on it and also of course because I'd be excited to see my new toy.
:)
And yes, I'm a dope on a rope. Is that like How to be an Evil Genius for Dummies book? I've been screwed over by almost every bank and credit card company I've tried (and I was an employee of them in some cases) so maybe I'm just paranoid about their promises. Is much safer not to give them the chance to let things go to hell.
I always use E-gold or something similar when possible because it protects me as a consumer. I did work for a large catalog/online company that sells computers and related products. While employeed there I showed them several methods their system could be penetrated, including grabbing a list of credit cards (several thousand) which I dropped on mgmt's desk w/ a detailed step-by-step list of how I did it and how to fix it. They never have fixed it (it's been over a year) and it's been enough to cure me from most online shopping. If I use a credit card I use a debit card with a hard limit and only a small amount of $ in the account. It should be noted that this company is using the same software that many other companies use and that I had no special access to the system. Just by knowing the software they used and how those bits work together I was able to access the system at a very high level.
Does anyone know if any company is selling (or soon will be) Transmeta powered laptops w/ Linux? I need a portable computer suitable for both work and play and I'd rather throw my money in with those I'd like to support if possible. :)
I can't see how it should be a problem doing this other than they may not have had it as a design goal so it may not work well with this version. I could highly imagine them taking this into account on the new versions. I was also mentally comparing the Transmeta CPU's w/ the articles they had posted here about a week ago about Linux on IBM's mainframes and how those had virtualization and such built into the design. Having this code morphing layer I'd think that the Transmeta CPU could handle this at least as well if they set their mind to it. This would allow further neat tricks such as booting Windows within Linux at the same speed as if it were booted as just one or the other. I'd like to see them work on this, possibly with the FreeMWare project and VMWare. Of course they probably want to pay the most attention to the x86 instruction set so Java, PowerPC, and others may be long in coming.. this would be a good reason to open the source to all their code morphing software so that we could port other instruction sets over. You'd still need an OS that was aware of the possibility though I'd imagine.. otherwise it'd probably not try running them in the first place.. and you might have to flag your binaries by instruction set in some manor without interferring with the default instruction set being executed w/out user intervention.. hrmmm.
I am planning on removing my PS2 from it's case and building a new case out of Mindstorms. My actual goal is to get Mindstorm software working on the PS2 also so that it can program it's own case to do weird things as you play.
I predict that the current Internet model will continue for a few years with freedom/privacy groups and corporate/government groups fighting over the standards until the whole thing becomes shaky and there are so many Internet and IP laws existing that nobody knows for sure what is and isn't legal online. Frustrated with this system and inspired by modern wireless network technology some group will create a peer-peer network that allows everyone to be equal. This OpenNet will be encrypted and anonymous as well as completely distributed. There will be no central domain servers and rather than IP numbers we'll use some sort of random id such as an ecryption code that uniquely identifies us without revealing who we are. Later this network driven by nanotech and other futuristic techs will become embedded in the human body and mind until we can no longer sepperate ourselves from our online self. Reality and the Net will have merged. As always the technology will keep evolving but it will have become intuitive to us as any other part of the brain might be.
You might try Cold MUD. It has all the benefits of MOO and is much more modern and clean of design. Either is a great introduction to object oriented programming (there is nothing like walking around your objects to get a feel for them), VR systems, text processing, and Internet programming. This might be a good second step after giving them a go on the Mindstorms.
Politicians and corporate moneybags no longer own the earth.. today everything is driven by technology. Everything you see or hear or touch or eat has probably came out of the hands of geeks. Without us those in power would find themselves holding an empty bag. Only the geek tendacy not to want money and power has kept us the underdog and now that our basis for existance is being challenged we will fight harder and harder until the day we win. To the geek what things are more important than knowledge and freedom? These very things are being taken away from us. They leave us no choice. We must hide our fair natures and become beasts. We have seen the future and they can not take it from us. They can not drive us out without destroying themselves and so we shall win if only we fight.
I've already spouted my ideas for appropiate replacements before in this series of stores. I would agree that you can't make a revolution without a proper replacement but it's also true that revolution happens in society of it's own accord. This one is coming regardless of if we plan it and attack or just let it evolve itself. This revolution is a revolution that by nature must strip power not only from those who already have it but also from those who would lead the revolution. Sure there will be parts that go out of whack but I think not as much as you'd expect from most other cultural revolutions we've had. opensource wouldn't work for all of society, only intellectual property concerns, but the moral and personalities that give us such works would do well to show itself more in aour daily lives. Mainly I speak of trust and a sense of looking out for society above your own needs. Sure many free software projects have been made to scratch the authors own itch, but how many features have been added to scratch the itches of others? Look at how the community has responded since the negative ratings that came out of that stupid paid-by-M$ test for Linux vrs Windows. Practically all the weak points have been addressed. Not for anyone person but for the pride of our community in being the best. Everything we do is transparent to the world so we better do it well. Look at how many people are concerned about Microsoft trying to censor Slashdot or what is happening in the MP3 and DVD arenas. Honestly these legal outcomes will not greatly effect most of us who are most interested because we know how to get software that can't be bought/sold in the U.S. but we are concerned for our community and our communities freedoms.
I think you're sort of missing the point here JK. Everyone, for the most part, already considers themself an individual. They choose to become the mindless clone drones they are and know no different. Probably 75% of our society is made up of these drones and so you will never win this war by trying to motivate these folks into action. This group includes all those people who watch tv and laugh when the tv audience laughs, those who listen to all the new pop music and always think it's something new, those people who actually think their vote counts for something but choose who to vote for based on what they've seen on television. This is the reality of America.
Vast masses of unthinking workers under the control of greedy, power hungry corporations. The real tragedy is that I think even those in control of these corporations are as much a slave as the rest of us. The only way out of being a slave worker is to become a slave driver. It's a circle of sacrificing ourselves to nameless gods all in the name of money.
On the other hand we are already hearing the first shots fired in a new revolution and they are deeply tied into our Internet community. For us that have grown up on the Internet and with opensourced software we have developed an expectation of freedom of expression and freedom from paying for everything we get. To a large extent our entire youth culture is now moving into this area and you can see the generation lines largely forming. For the first time in many years, maybe ever, we actually are putting an educational communications tool in the hands of the youth that doesn't rob them of their creativity and individualism. This is creating a generation that will bring the revolution. Their may be violence and people hurt on either side but for the most part this will be a slow transfer of power from the old to the young. Many of these youth may buy into the old system with all it's promises but there will be many who will not. Those such as the recording industry and other corporations who no longer serve any useful purpose will doubtless fight on but they are fighting the spectre of an unstoppable change and they will fall by the roadside for their efforts.
What would be the legality of opening system hooks for easy mirroring of articles and the following discussion so that Slashdot could have dozens of mirrors around the world? Then any article that was forced to be removed from one server could blank it but include a link to the article on one of the mirrors. You could even set up a mirror system that'd automaticlly select a copy of the article that wasn't censored from the set of mirrors from whichever mirror was closest to the user. As long as the mirrors weren't legally owned by Slashdot or it's parent company I see no legal way they could be held responsible. It'd be a sort of saftey for Slashdot as users could still access any post no matter what happens to Slashdot legally, by natural disaster, corporate changes, etc.
I usually split a license so that either I, the designer, or the company which hired me can either use the code as we like. Usually content is retained by the company with permission for me to use it in exact form only (for showing new potential clients etc). As a lot of the HTML is generated from my personal PHP libraries there isn't really much for them to own as far as code goes.
;>
Being that I usually will put together a good middle sized web site for $100 including hosting and domain registration few companies are very bossy on the subject. I can create a site and have it hosted for an entire year for $500 which sure beats the rest of their marketing budget.
Is there any reason why the browser can't have an addition that checks incoming pages as they are rendered and modifies them? Then you could download filters or write your own in like Javascript that'd block unwanted ads, links to known porn sites, or whatever concerns you. Since the DOM is completely exposed this should be fairly flexible right? Could use pattern matching, reg expr's, whatever..
People stop preaching doom on RedHat. They've shown themselves on numerous occassions to be a good neighbor in out little community. They've earned our trust. Some of you just watch to much of the X-Files. If we can't show a unified front then we allow chinks to open so that companies like Microsoft and AOL have a way to tear us down.
RedHat's stock is down, so what.. a lot of tech stocks are down.. it's a market thing.. they go up and down. Be smart and take this chance to buy all you can afford. The market value, it seems to me, of a company is more politics and media glitz than profits. The actual profit being made is largely in the stock value itself. That is what allows these companies to exist and grow. This is nothing new. If you want RedHat to do better then go buy it's stocks. Higher demand can only mean it becomes worth more.
This is great news that RedHat is helping others in our community grow. I hope they take the next step and do some angel investing and possibly give advice on what it takes to start a company from a free software project. The more OSS companies we have that are doing well the more OSS programmers we have that are well fed and able to spend their time coding for us.
(Note: First post glory hounds should be circumsized with dull rusty spoons.)
How is 3D handled? One thing I always was annoyed by is programs that are made for a different resolution or color depth and just don't look right in a really high res w/ True Color. Is there no way they could make it possible to change the res/depth for individual programs and desktops? BeOS seems to be able to handle this somewhat better. Prehaps X should borrow some ideas from them also. However, my main complaints with X are drag&drop and cut&paste which are both being addressed I think. :)
:)
I tried reading the full set of doc's on X once.. I only understood about half and oooh did my head hurt. That was several thousand pages.
Who could? Certainly not Microsoft if they were required by law to keep all their source open. Possibly some other company but that'd be Microsoft's problem. Guess that's a good reason for them to use the GPL but hey I don't care as long as the source is available to me. I fail to see what point you were trying to make though.
First off.. you hit the nail right on the head.. I've spent a lot of time with hardware company reps so I've learned some things.. one of my favorite things is when the rep from a certain digital camera company told me that the current line of cameras had all the features the new model would have.. only that they'd been disabled on the circuit board.. all so that the company could make people buy the new model when they released it six months later.. without them having to pay for any new R&D or even any major changes to the design as all they had to do is activate the features by connecting power to a certain input on the IC they were using.
That being said, I think the practice is completely wrong. The only way to make companies give us the specs is if we can make it look like a benefit to them. When you go to buy something write a short letter to various companies that sell that type of product and ask them if the specifications are open and outline the reasons you are concerned. These things do work their way up the mgmt chain the more attention you, the consumer, bring to it. Write a letter to your favorite newspaper or magazine talking about the issue. Open software is big right now, convince the right reporters that open hardware is the next big thing and you may begin to get some response. Hardware companies have the benefit that even if they open their specs someone still has to buy their product (unlike software which can be downloaded) so play that kind of thing up. If you can convince even a few major companies to make such a move then the rest of them will begin taking the idea seriously.
To avoid being split up the government should force Microsoft to opensource all it's software under a true opensource license (GPL, LGPL, BSD) for say ten years. Of course they should till require the extra anti-trust rules so that M$ doesn't try to pressure others out of the game. That'd be fairly intereesting if M$ was required under law to open a Mozilla-like project for all it's software with absolutely no closed development being done in a for-release product. ie R&D could keep its source hidden, but if they sold or gave the program to anyone then the source must be posted to the Open Gates web site for everyone to see and add to. I'd also bar M$ from buying any opensource software companies so that they couldn't eat the competition over the next 10 years and then when they could close source again just kill all the competions funding.
This is one of the major problems with copyright laws and the Internet I think. It should not be illegal to copy other sites verbatim because this is important for saving the web from aging and to reduce lag. Caching is a good idea but really the infrastructure needs to be set up to encourage it and that won't happen as long as outdated copyright laws exist. Once I write something and publish it then it no longer belongs to just me, it belongs to everyone.