It is not a question of being able to do it or support it. The real problem is the threat of lawsuit. There is no one to sue with Linux, so they have nothing to fear. Unfortunately, there is apparently a lot of bad blood between JLG and Jobs and so Be felt that unless they had Apple's direct blessing (in the form of a willful handout of motherboard specs) that it wouldn't be worth the risk. Apple probably has more lawyers than Be has employees so they decided to keep working rather than waste their investors' money on an avoidable court battle.
Yes, Be killed off support for BeOS on the PPC, not Apple. But indirectly it was Apple's fault because they never said they *wouldn't* sue. And given that Be is a commercial company and JLG and Jobs aren't very friendly there was a very real risk that Be may have been attacked.
It's a simple explaination and I suspect it's very very close to the mark. I really don't think it has anything to do with Intel investing in Be or anything else other than legal politics. It's a shame because I'd love to be using BeOS on a nice fast G4 right about now, but I guess that's the way it goes. I'll have to stick to using it on a nice fast PC then.
This is a *very* good point. I run a website and we're getting income rates so low we can no longer cover the server's colocation cost. The excuse we get is that no one is clicking and therefore ads do not work. Unfortunately, the information advertisers are able to get from banner ads (like impressions, clicks, etc) are giving marketing people *way* more info than they would normally get with a TV ad. To a marketing person, these stats are the hard facts and therefore banner ads clearly do not work. It's odd that they just ignore the biggest reason to advertise in the first place (brand recognition). Or it's also possible that companies that advertise on the net just don't "get" advertising since they aren't used to it. Most banner ads seem to be new tech companies that were born online and lack the experience older offline companies have.
Where do you think new innovations come from? Sure, we see lots of stuff come out of commercial companies and small garages--but only if it's cheap to produce and there is a market. The people who spend the big bucks researching new technology are often professors at research universities thanks to government grant money. Who else has the means to even try some of this stuff? The commercial sector sure isn't going to waste money on advanced R&D (unless they are IBM or Bell Labs or something). Small companies don't have the resources. And besides, often advanced R&D doesn't pay for itself. So without all these supposedly leeching academia I think you'd find that life wouldn't be much better than it was 200 years ago.
Perhaps you should be the first person you know to try, then.:-) I use Jabber exclusivly now and by using the Jabber transports I'm able to chat with friends on AIM and ICQ while talking directly with Jeremie (head Jabber honcho) using Jabber. There's really more to the Jabber idea than IM, but that's how it got started so it's likely to appear that Jabber is just an IM solution for a long time. However, since it is all XML based, you can really transmit any form of data just as you would send a regular Jabber IM. That opens up huge possibilites for inter-program communications across the Internet (for example). It's a really big idea under the hood, but you have to get in there and play with it to understand it. Check out jabber.ORG (not.com) if you want to find out cool technical details.
He also made an appearance in a story here on Slashdot awhile ago about his cool wheel chair.
Unless this is a huge PR stunt for something silly, this could be an amazing invention (this guy has the history for it). Personally, I think it might be something like a power source or simple personal transportation device. My guess is that whatever it is it will be enviromentally friendly, simple, and elegant. Anyway, that's my 2 bits.
I know this isn't exactly on topic.... But maybe someone here will know.
I have a server colocated on a nice fat pipe. The only problem is, I'm stuck on a dial up. I've been wondering if anyone knows of a way to do MP3 streaming like the article talks about except have the source data coming from another MP3 stream? The reason is I want to be able to listen to some of the various MP3 stations out there, but as more and more people get cable/DSL/etc, I find that the streams are greater than my bandwidth will allow for. I figured a good solution would be to just stream it through my remote server and downgrade the quality a bit so I can tune in.
You just have to lift it higher and angle it.. It took me quite awhile to get used to it while playing UT, but now I don't really notice it anymore (aside from the MUCH finer grained aiming I can pull off).
I'd like to know when nVidia will start supporting BeOS like they support Linux. BeOS needs GeForce drivers badly and nVidia doesn't seem to want to help. Oh sure, BeOS has TNT and TNT2 drivers. But that doesn't do much good anymore since everyone is getting GeForce cards. Grrrrr....
l8r Sean
Re:Economic boom loosely tied to Echelon?
on
Inside Echelon
·
· Score: 1
"One of [the Kagnew Station at Asmara in Eritrea] more spectacular features was a tracking dish used to pass messages to the United States by reflecting them off the surface of the moon."
I hate to be a downer.. But Amateur (ham) radio folks have been doing this for years. It's called moonbounce or EME (I think: Earth Moon Earth or something). I've been out of the ham scene for quite a few years now, but I'm sure someone else can verify my claim.
Heck, I know an old guy who does this with a simple beam antenna and off the shelf radio gear. There's certainly nothing amazing about it.
Well, since this Tea thing looks somewhat similar (although far more complex) than a project I've been working on, I figured I'd see if anyone had any opinions on my idea. I have a rather crappy site (with no actual releases yet (unless of course there's lots of interest)) here: http://tarp.fifthace.com.
The basic idea is simple templates and PHP modules that come together to help make building database-driven websites a little easier. Let me know what you think. I've recently been slacking off on the idea since I'm not sure how original or good it is. When I saw this story here, I figured it was a great time to see if anyone was actually interested in something like this. It seems Tea uses Java (which I've always thought of as big and slow). My creation (TARP) uses raw PHP4.0 as the solution.
Someday I want to meet Woz, shake his hand, maybe have a short chat, and then be on my way. That is one of my dreams in life. Too bad I live a few thousand miles from Silicon Valley.:-)
To have such an amazingly positive outlook on life after all he's seen and done is what makes him so danged respectable. Too bad we all can't be like that.
He did that for me too! I was so shocked I could hardly focus on the monitor for about an hour!
I honored him in my own special way by making a "Woz" folder in my e-mail client as well as a mail filter rule.. Just in case he ever sends me anything again.:-)
I'm in the process of setting up secure ordering online right now. You'd be amazed just how much the credit card companies don't care about merchants.....
If you have too many charge backs (fraud, etc) they can boot and/or fine you.
If you have no proof that the user owns the card (ie, you don't have the actual imprint or it wasn't scanned using the magnetic strip), then you have nearly no protections.
When there's a problem (chargeback, etc) you not only are out that money, you also have to pay a fine (usually something like $20.00). The credit card holder gets a refund (to keep them happy since that's where they make the money), and the merchent gets screwed over by the thief or the cardholder who just decided you didn't deserve the money after all.
Unfortunatly, there's pretty much no good way to verify that a user of a number is the owner of that number. So, we merchants often have to revert to using the billing address. The credit card systems (Visa/Mastercard, anyway) have a system called AVS (address verification service) that attempts to match the address given with the address for that card number. The problem is, it only works in the USA.
Without an AVS match, you have nothing to fall back on. You could argue against a chargeback until you are blue in the face, but it won't matter. With an AVS match, you have some proof that you at least tried to verify ownership as much as you can. Then you could argue about it a bit.
Unfortunatly, though, since AVS is USA only, it makes it very hard for us small merchants to take orders outside the US. And no, Canada is not part of the USA.:-)
So there's the problem. The credit card companies have almost nothing to allow merchants to verify ownership with an online transaction. And what little we do have doesn't really hold much water in an argument. So most places just refuse any card they can't get an AVS match on which includes the entire world minus the United States.
That's why things in the e-commerce world kind of suck. Each merchant has their own standards on how secure they want to be and how much they want to avoid chargebacks. Until the credit card companies figure out a better/universal way to verify that a person actually has the card and has the right to use it, e-commerce is not going to be getting better any time soon.
"However, the video card makers made each card access this in a different way, and the code to access this is in the video card BIOS and runs only in X86 real mode. Not good, when you are running X86 protected mode (Linux/86) or on something else (Alpha, PPC, MIPS,....)"
It's once again hardware design that causes the problem. They are working on it, but bringing up a virtual real mode processor just to read the fscking monitor information seems a bit like over kill, don't ya think? I don't imagine that was easy to do.
Now if the hardware design made more sense, then there's a good chance we would have better software (less time needed to work around stupid issues like the above). Not only would it be better, it would be smaller, cleaner, and less likely to crash and burn. Not to mention easier to maintain farther into the future.
Part of the reason a lot of software sucks is because almost every time some new hardware company gets a large crazy idea everything needs to be rewritten or hacked up to keep working (which is why we are still stuck with x86, etc--hacking up and rewritting would have been too expensive/time consuming even though there is better hardware to run on out there). Video cards are the *perfect* example of this problem.
"However, and I a hope that I am not the only dissenter here, but F-451 I find to be the most boring and laboriously told of any of the Bradbury fables. There is no wit, as the point is beaten home with a sledgehammer."
In a way, I think that's the point. There's more to the story than just the words. The style speaks volumes as well.
As I remember the story (I read it in high school 4 years ago), society had become amazingly dull and boring. People didn't really know what to do with themselves. Some would engage in terribly dangerous sport just so they could feel that rush of living and dying. Life was boring. So the style was boring too. It helped set the mood and drive the boredom of the time home to the reader.
I'm going to be in London this fall. Since I'm from the USA I have no idea what to expect or where the best resturants and pubs can be found. Do you have any particular recomendations?
I know I often find myself coming up with crazy theories to explain life and things only to later find they resembled theories hundreds and even thousands of years old. Then I think back to Hitchhikers and find that you covered the same idea at some point in the story. Was it intentional or purely accidental that you seem to have covered all major (and strange) philosophical ideas on the nature of life?
Isn't it the Linux crowd that generally all screams "Make money on the service!"?
Here we have a small company trying to do just that and now they get abused on here because of it. That hardware is dirt cheap and they can't be making anything on it (most likely they are losing money). This is exactly what most of you wanted to see--get free hardware, pay for the services. This is how RedHat makes...er..tries to make money, right? Give the OS away and charge for the service and tech support.
Netpliance doesn't seem any different to me.
All that being said, however, I agree that promising one thing at the time of sale and then charging extra later is WAY out of line. It was their fault and they should pay for that obvious mistake. But starting now no one here should have a complaint against Netpliance's business model of selling the service and "giving" away the actual product.
It's just like the "open source" world to close off other people's options in the name of "freedom". If I want to use a closed source OS, there's no reason I shouldn't be able to. Now the OSS world is doing the same thing the closed commercial world has done to them.
Commercial companies would patent things and then attack open projects using those patents (MP3). So now the "open" people/projects/companies will be punishing the closed companies by requiring payment for the patent--only if you make money!
Yes, this is his patent and he has the right to set the license rules. However, if he truly believed in an open world, he would never have patented it anyway. Since it already exists and is in use in RT-Linux, there would be plenty of prior art to get any similar patent (if it ever showed up) thrown out, right?
This is the same kind of close minded actions that silly people who sue Microsoft use. They go after those with money. There's no real higher-purpose at work here. Just good old fashioned GREED disguised as activism.
Slashdot Mirror
"So go find another excuse besides cowardice."
HA! That's pretty funny coming from an AC...
It is not a question of being able to do it or support it. The real problem is the threat of lawsuit. There is no one to sue with Linux, so they have nothing to fear. Unfortunately, there is apparently a lot of bad blood between JLG and Jobs and so Be felt that unless they had Apple's direct blessing (in the form of a willful handout of motherboard specs) that it wouldn't be worth the risk. Apple probably has more lawyers than Be has employees so they decided to keep working rather than waste their investors' money on an avoidable court battle.
Yes, Be killed off support for BeOS on the PPC, not Apple. But indirectly it was Apple's fault because they never said they *wouldn't* sue. And given that Be is a commercial company and JLG and Jobs aren't very friendly there was a very real risk that Be may have been attacked.
It's a simple explaination and I suspect it's very very close to the mark. I really don't think it has anything to do with Intel investing in Be or anything else other than legal politics. It's a shame because I'd love to be using BeOS on a nice fast G4 right about now, but I guess that's the way it goes. I'll have to stick to using it on a nice fast PC then.
And I'll probably *still* only be able to get a 28.8kbps connection to the Internet right here on *EARTH*. Grrrr....
This is a *very* good point. I run a website and we're getting income rates so low we can no longer cover the server's colocation cost. The excuse we get is that no one is clicking and therefore ads do not work. Unfortunately, the information advertisers are able to get from banner ads (like impressions, clicks, etc) are giving marketing people *way* more info than they would normally get with a TV ad. To a marketing person, these stats are the hard facts and therefore banner ads clearly do not work. It's odd that they just ignore the biggest reason to advertise in the first place (brand recognition). Or it's also possible that companies that advertise on the net just don't "get" advertising since they aren't used to it. Most banner ads seem to be new tech companies that were born online and lack the experience older offline companies have.
Where do you think new innovations come from? Sure, we see lots of stuff come out of commercial companies and small garages--but only if it's cheap to produce and there is a market. The people who spend the big bucks researching new technology are often professors at research universities thanks to government grant money. Who else has the means to even try some of this stuff? The commercial sector sure isn't going to waste money on advanced R&D (unless they are IBM or Bell Labs or something). Small companies don't have the resources. And besides, often advanced R&D doesn't pay for itself. So without all these supposedly leeching academia I think you'd find that life wouldn't be much better than it was 200 years ago.
Perhaps you should be the first person you know to try, then. :-) I use Jabber exclusivly now and by using the Jabber transports I'm able to chat with friends on AIM and ICQ while talking directly with Jeremie (head Jabber honcho) using Jabber. There's really more to the Jabber idea than IM, but that's how it got started so it's likely to appear that Jabber is just an IM solution for a long time. However, since it is all XML based, you can really transmit any form of data just as you would send a regular Jabber IM. That opens up huge possibilites for inter-program communications across the Internet (for example). It's a really big idea under the hood, but you have to get in there and play with it to understand it. Check out jabber.ORG (not .com) if you want to find out cool technical details.
He also made an appearance in a story here on Slashdot awhile ago about his cool wheel chair.
Unless this is a huge PR stunt for something silly, this could be an amazing invention (this guy has the history for it). Personally, I think it might be something like a power source or simple personal transportation device. My guess is that whatever it is it will be enviromentally friendly, simple, and elegant. Anyway, that's my 2 bits.
I know this isn't exactly on topic.... But maybe someone here will know.
I have a server colocated on a nice fat pipe. The only problem is, I'm stuck on a dial up. I've been wondering if anyone knows of a way to do MP3 streaming like the article talks about except have the source data coming from another MP3 stream? The reason is I want to be able to listen to some of the various MP3 stations out there, but as more and more people get cable/DSL/etc, I find that the streams are greater than my bandwidth will allow for. I figured a good solution would be to just stream it through my remote server and downgrade the quality a bit so I can tune in.
Suggestions?
Thanks!
Did hell just freeze over or something? How else could this be possible?
l8r
Sean
"This is just another piece of woe for those of us whose only broadband choice is @Home. Bah!"
Waaa waaa. Try having NO choices for broadband.
Grr..
l8r
Sean
Gee.. Suddenly the US courts seem to be more sane than previously thought.. Hmmm...
l8r
Sean
You just have to lift it higher and angle it.. It took me quite awhile to get used to it while playing UT, but now I don't really notice it anymore (aside from the MUCH finer grained aiming I can pull off).
l8r
Sean
I'd like to know when nVidia will start supporting BeOS like they support Linux. BeOS needs GeForce drivers badly and nVidia doesn't seem to want to help. Oh sure, BeOS has TNT and TNT2 drivers. But that doesn't do much good anymore since everyone is getting GeForce cards. Grrrrr....
l8r
Sean
"One of [the Kagnew Station at Asmara in Eritrea] more spectacular features was a tracking dish used to pass messages to the United States by reflecting them off the surface of the moon."
I hate to be a downer.. But Amateur (ham) radio folks have been doing this for years. It's called moonbounce or EME (I think: Earth Moon Earth or something). I've been out of the ham scene for quite a few years now, but I'm sure someone else can verify my claim.
Heck, I know an old guy who does this with a simple beam antenna and off the shelf radio gear. There's certainly nothing amazing about it.
l8r
Sean
Well, since this Tea thing looks somewhat similar (although far more complex) than a project I've been working on, I figured I'd see if anyone had any opinions on my idea. I have a rather crappy site (with no actual releases yet (unless of course there's lots of interest)) here: http://tarp.fifthace.com.
:-)
The basic idea is simple templates and PHP modules that come together to help make building database-driven websites a little easier. Let me know what you think. I've recently been slacking off on the idea since I'm not sure how original or good it is. When I saw this story here, I figured it was a great time to see if anyone was actually interested in something like this. It seems Tea uses Java (which I've always thought of as big and slow). My creation (TARP) uses raw PHP4.0 as the solution.
Anyway, thanks for looking.
Someday I want to meet Woz, shake his hand, maybe have a short chat, and then be on my way. That is one of my dreams in life. Too bad I live a few thousand miles from Silicon Valley. :-)
To have such an amazingly positive outlook on life after all he's seen and done is what makes him so danged respectable. Too bad we all can't be like that.
l8r
Sean
He did that for me too! I was so shocked I could hardly focus on the monitor for about an hour!
:-)
I honored him in my own special way by making a "Woz" folder in my e-mail client as well as a mail filter rule.. Just in case he ever sends me anything again.
l8r
Sean
I'm in the process of setting up secure ordering online right now. You'd be amazed just how much the credit card companies don't care about merchants.....
:-)
If you have too many charge backs (fraud, etc) they can boot and/or fine you.
If you have no proof that the user owns the card (ie, you don't have the actual imprint or it wasn't scanned using the magnetic strip), then you have nearly no protections.
When there's a problem (chargeback, etc) you not only are out that money, you also have to pay a fine (usually something like $20.00). The credit card holder gets a refund (to keep them happy since that's where they make the money), and the merchent gets screwed over by the thief or the cardholder who just decided you didn't deserve the money after all.
Unfortunatly, there's pretty much no good way to verify that a user of a number is the owner of that number. So, we merchants often have to revert to using the billing address. The credit card systems (Visa/Mastercard, anyway) have a system called AVS (address verification service) that attempts to match the address given with the address for that card number. The problem is, it only works in the USA.
Without an AVS match, you have nothing to fall back on. You could argue against a chargeback until you are blue in the face, but it won't matter. With an AVS match, you have some proof that you at least tried to verify ownership as much as you can. Then you could argue about it a bit.
Unfortunatly, though, since AVS is USA only, it makes it very hard for us small merchants to take orders outside the US. And no, Canada is not part of the USA.
So there's the problem. The credit card companies have almost nothing to allow merchants to verify ownership with an online transaction. And what little we do have doesn't really hold much water in an argument. So most places just refuse any card they can't get an AVS match on which includes the entire world minus the United States.
That's why things in the e-commerce world kind of suck. Each merchant has their own standards on how secure they want to be and how much they want to avoid chargebacks. Until the credit card companies figure out a better/universal way to verify that a person actually has the card and has the right to use it, e-commerce is not going to be getting better any time soon.
l8r
Sean
Did you read the other part?
"However, the video card makers made each card access this in a different way, and the code to access this is in the video card BIOS and runs only in X86 real mode. Not good, when you are running X86 protected mode (Linux/86) or on something else (Alpha, PPC, MIPS,....)"
It's once again hardware design that causes the problem. They are working on it, but bringing up a virtual real mode processor just to read the fscking monitor information seems a bit like over kill, don't ya think? I don't imagine that was easy to do.
Now if the hardware design made more sense, then there's a good chance we would have better software (less time needed to work around stupid issues like the above). Not only would it be better, it would be smaller, cleaner, and less likely to crash and burn. Not to mention easier to maintain farther into the future.
Part of the reason a lot of software sucks is because almost every time some new hardware company gets a large crazy idea everything needs to be rewritten or hacked up to keep working (which is why we are still stuck with x86, etc--hacking up and rewritting would have been too expensive/time consuming even though there is better hardware to run on out there). Video cards are the *perfect* example of this problem.
My $0.015
l8r
Sean
"However, and I a hope that I am not the only dissenter here, but F-451 I find to be the most boring and laboriously told of any of the Bradbury fables. There is no wit, as the point is beaten home with a sledgehammer."
In a way, I think that's the point. There's more to the story than just the words. The style speaks volumes as well.
As I remember the story (I read it in high school 4 years ago), society had become amazingly dull and boring. People didn't really know what to do with themselves. Some would engage in terribly dangerous sport just so they could feel that rush of living and dying. Life was boring. So the style was boring too. It helped set the mood and drive the boredom of the time home to the reader.
My $0.015.
l8r
Sean
I'm going to be in London this fall. Since I'm from the USA I have no idea what to expect or where the best resturants and pubs can be found. Do you have any particular recomendations?
I know I often find myself coming up with crazy theories to explain life and things only to later find they resembled theories hundreds and even thousands of years old. Then I think back to Hitchhikers and find that you covered the same idea at some point in the story. Was it intentional or purely accidental that you seem to have covered all major (and strange) philosophical ideas on the nature of life?
Isn't it the Linux crowd that generally all screams "Make money on the service!"?
Here we have a small company trying to do just that and now they get abused on here because of it. That hardware is dirt cheap and they can't be making anything on it (most likely they are losing money). This is exactly what most of you wanted to see--get free hardware, pay for the services. This is how RedHat makes...er..tries to make money, right? Give the OS away and charge for the service and tech support.
Netpliance doesn't seem any different to me.
All that being said, however, I agree that promising one thing at the time of sale and then charging extra later is WAY out of line. It was their fault and they should pay for that obvious mistake. But starting now no one here should have a complaint against Netpliance's business model of selling the service and "giving" away the actual product.
Don't forget BeOS..
This has been known for awhile now.
It is my personal belief that BioWare rocks!
It's just like the "open source" world to close off other people's options in the name of "freedom". If I want to use a closed source OS, there's no reason I shouldn't be able to. Now the OSS world is doing the same thing the closed commercial world has done to them.
Commercial companies would patent things and then attack open projects using those patents (MP3). So now the "open" people/projects/companies will be punishing the closed companies by requiring payment for the patent--only if you make money!
Yes, this is his patent and he has the right to set the license rules. However, if he truly believed in an open world, he would never have patented it anyway. Since it already exists and is in use in RT-Linux, there would be plenty of prior art to get any similar patent (if it ever showed up) thrown out, right?
This is the same kind of close minded actions that silly people who sue Microsoft use. They go after those with money. There's no real higher-purpose at work here. Just good old fashioned GREED disguised as activism.
I say again: What a bunch of crap.
l8r
Sean