I have seen several examples of this ad-grafiti in the upscale Licoln Park neighborhood of Chicago. I was wondering what kind of weirdo Linux zealot it would take to do such a thing - now I know - IBM.
The first time I saw it I barely even payed attention - about the third time I figure it out. Subtle ad campaign if ever there was one.
I still have a Pentium 166 (overclocked from 150 - pushing the envelope here:) that still works perfectly well as a desktop. It runs W2K, Office 2000, and most everything else I throw at it, but alas, no modern games. It is 6 years old now I believe. Granted the original hard drive is too small to hold anything but the operating system and the orignal 16MB of memory was laughable, but I stuck a new 16 gig drive in a few years back, and I upgraded the RAM to 92MB when EDO was still cheap.
We need to define a long term storage standard which is a suite of storage media and standard file formats. Call it LTSS 1.0. To be a LTSS 1.0 compliant reader you have to support all media and file formats. This could be a dedicated reader, or a general computer with some specialized software and hardware.
LTSS 2.0 might have whizbang new file formats and storage media which supports 100 times as much information density, but it must be compatible with version 1.0.
LTSS 1.0 could support WAV, MP3, GIF, TIFF, Text/ASCII, Text/Unicode, HTML version whatever, and perhaps even Java for interpretation of abirtrary file formats. The media, CD-R, or perhaps one of the writeable DVD formats when they mature.
Copied all my e-mail from outlook to the standard text format when I went to Linux. <p>
How did you do that? I have tons of old mail I would love to archive, but can't seem to convert from.mbx format.
<p>
-josh
First, this is old news, as many have pointed out several different sources reported on this in '98. This particular story is actually less informative.
Second, the chips don't freakin mutate and reprogram themselves. An external agent programs the FPGAs with a 'genetic' string and tests that capabilities of that string, then tries other variations that were based on the previous generation. It is not as if these things just magically mutate themselves to do a particular task, there is much external intervention.
Thirdly. When I last heard about this guy he was off exploring ways of making the chips more robust. Because the algorithms evolved appear to depend heavily on the analog, non-linear nature of the components in the chip, they were extremely sensitive to temparture variations. Also some programs evolved on one chip lot would not work on another chip lot, even though they were functionally identical chips. He was looking into ways of testing fitness at a variety of temperatures and using different chip lot in the process, perhaps producing a result less efficient than his original attempts but more robust.
And now we have heard nothing new from this guy for the last 2.5 years. My guess is that this was just too good for the specialized chip manufacturers to pass up. It's extremely promising technology - but I betcha most of it is patented by now.
I thought the keyring itself is encrypted using conventional (non public key) encryption which is keyed by your passphrase.
Sure, someone getting hold of my keyring compromises the security of any encrypted transmissions I send, but only somewhat, as it is not terribly useful without my passphrase (which will never ever ever fall to a dictionary attack).
The omens are that this will get worse. It seems that open source's time has come. It has been said that open source will provide 50% of software for the country. The result of this is less money into the economy. If people now buy one $50 Redhat installer instead of 10,000 Microsoft licenses, there is that much less money into the economy. Companies such as Microsoft will find that they will do less well, and the knockon effect will be on the economy - not just that of the US but economies around the world. The potential is for global recession without the growth caused by the IT industry.
This is an old argument, trotted out and tarted up for review every time some new technology or business practice leads to greater efficiency. Unfortunately history has proven this argument to be a fallacy. It never makes sense in the long term to stick with a less efficient means of production. Never, ever, and greater efficiency has so far lead to every increasing wealth. Somehow all those manually telephone switchers found jobs elsewhere in the economy when automated switches replaced them.
It is getting to the point now where in my projects I can usually search the net and find a piece of free code or a free library that does a specific function, no matter how arcane or niche I might find that function to be - the code is out there and it is free.
Now, do you realize how marvelously productive this can make a single programmer? No license fees to pay, and little code to write - just script together other's components to create a new and unique piece of software. In the past this would have taken 1000's of man hours of programming, or thousands of dollars in licensing fees. Now it can take me a weekend.
How long can Microsoft compete? Not long. Sure, Microsoft will lose money, but the market as a whole will remain robust, I just think that the money will be more evenly distribute among smaller companies and freelancers whose job it will be to integrate and repack the free software for those that don't want to muck with the details.
I read once that even if all natural and disease based causes of death were eliminated, the average human would only live about 600 years. The reason? Accidents.
One might argue that medical science's ability to clean up after our accidents will improve with time, but I doubt it is every going to figure out a way to put our brains back together if they are splattered all over the road in the course of being struck by a car.
So there is an upper bound to our life span even if we are technically 'immortal'.
How exactly could I get such a job, for the last 5 years. I have an advanced degree in physics, and undergrad degree in physics and math, and left the field due to the exceedingly poor career prospects in the field. I have since been very bored (though well paid) programming in the business arena. I have often though my dream job would be programming in a scientific setting, because thats exactly where I learned to program - but have never run across such a job...
To answer these guy's question, look for someone like me. There are plenty of people that bailed out of math and science at the graduate level for a more lucrative career in programming. The only problem is you will probably need a lot of money to entice them back into the fold...
Right now, I suspect a virtual flotilla of Microsoft VP's - maybe even executive staff - is heading to Mexico City to reverse this
Yep, you are exactly right.
The meeting might go something like:
MS: "Please reconsider your position. It's not the upfront costs, but the long term support and management that counts. Look at windows 2000 and all the management wizzbangs it has. Yes it costs $1000 per server, but it will save you $750/yr/user, much more than what you save with linux"
Mexican bigwig: "Yes, but we do not have $1000 for each server"
MS: "You will not be able to run all of the wonderful windows applications out there on linux."
Mex: "You mean those expensive applications we cannot afford to buy anyway?"
MS: "But, You will not be able to process industry standard office documents created by micrsoft products."
Mex: "Silly Microsoft, everyone will be using Linux in the mexican government, who will be creating Word Documents? "
MS: "Well, If you feel our products are so expensive, perhaps we can cut a deal... How about we get a tax free XBox factory in Mexico, and you get 10000 free government user licenses and free support for the next two years."
Mex: "Well, now your are speaking our language, but still, I do not know..."
MS: "Oh, and we have brought some very nice cigars with us, compliments of our Dictatorial Carribean neighbor, Mr. Castro."
Mex: "Yes, all very nice, but really, what might I myself gain from this 'deal'"
MS: "And I believe the concierge has arranged some 'entertainment' for you gentleman tonight on the Microsoft Corporate Yacht in the Gulf - said Yacht could possibly be on loan to you for an extended period of time if you wish - there are also some interesting, very heavy suitcases on board..."
Mex: "Yes, Yes, very nice..."
Next day the newspapers declare the government's reversal on the Linux implementation. And Mexico is locked into Microsoft for the coming decades of.NET.
When I was in High school a new geometry computer program came out that allowed you to rapidly visualize triangles and other geometric shapes, keeping certain variables constant while rapidly changing others and seeing the resulting shapes. From this you could quickly visualize generalizations and relations that appeared true in 'experiment' and then set out to prove them from first principles.
The year after this program came out there were several new theorems discovered by High School students with the assistance of this program. Kids in my school thought perhaps we had discovered some new theorems as well, but did not bother to research further beyond our text books (Usenet was not available to us at the time).
This kid's theorem is not all that big a deal - Geometry is a fairly accessible mathematical topic for kids. I imagine that most mathemeticians, if they had really needed this result in their work could have derived it on their own, it's just that noone has needed it thus far, or bothered to document their derivation in the literature. Plus this makes a good headline.
Of course, this is far off, but we can see the effects of the easyness of programming in the modern age even now. You used to need a mathematics degree and be a top flight academic to be a programmer, back in the beginning.
What the heck did a math degree every have to do with programming? How this post got rate "Interesting" I have no idea. Back in the old days it was not a matter of high level degrees, but access, because the computers were so expensive only a few could use them.
Today almost everyone who wants access can have a computer orders of magnitude faster than the original clunkers which were once solely the purvey of your "top flight academics". Thus it is a heck of a lot easier to learn how to program.
Granted, programming languages are getting simpler to use, but building a complex app in any language is still a very difficult endeavor. Languages like Java make it easy for novices to build simple apps, but writing a solid program with any thing over a few thousands lines of code and integrating your work with the work of others is still just about as hard in Java as it is an any other language.
So yes, the unwashed massed of 'programmers' whose expertise stops at the point of an applet or scripting single web pages are going to have a hard time find jobs in a tight economy, because there are so many of them - but those with the skills to engineer large, complex systems will always have a job.
I first owned a Palm 500, Palm 1000 (if I remember correctly that far back), a Palm V and now a Palm Vx. I simply love the Vx. All I can say is that Handspring's new offering is simply not competitive - I might have bought it if I did not already have a Vx. And I might think about buying one in the future if they double the memory and halve the price (or add color and price it at around $300).
These companies are still trying to make Mac like profit margins in a market that is rapidly being driven to PC like commodity level economics. It is only because the few current vendors of Palm devices participate in a de facto form of price fixing (they are all greedy) on their high end models that these damned things are still so expensive.
I can't wait until there is some *real* price competition in this market.
I agree completely. Some features I would love to see in graphical file management tools (I know some have these, but ALL should):
- Directory compare
- "Copy to" (and TYPE the destination with autocomplete, screw click and drag.)
- Bulk rename *.rtf -> *.txt etc...
- Filter a directory view by rex exp
- Click and drag files without having to open two different directory views (if I drag and hold over a folder long enough it should open)
- An easy way to bookmark locations in the file system.
- Search and replace in files (text files only of course)
- A simple "move directory up tree" function
- Select files by rex exp filter.
- built in pseudo-command line where I could control the graphical view with typed text, for example "cd.." "filter a*.rtf" "select b*" "copy dude.rtf.."
Incorporating encryption and proprietary
hardware will not solve the problem, if for
no other reason than the fact that I will
always pay more for open products.
YouYou nerd.;-) You're outnumbered a thousand to one.:(
No I am not. Look at all the people that bought beta video tapes. Look at how memory sticks (Sony proprietary) are fairing versus SmartMedia cards in digital cameras. The market rewards open standards time after time.
The article basically says that hardware and software vendors are scraping by on razor thin margins because current products do not incorporate proprietary interfaces or encryption standards. So the conclusion is that anyone who remains open is subjecting themselves to too much market competition, and thus will either have to go proprietary or go out of business.
This pretty much ignores the fact that the market demands interoperability. Great, Intel can make more money selling proprietary 'wireless 1394' because it is a standard it owns, and has no direct competitors. This ignores the fact that if a corporation spends $1million of bluetooth PDAs they want them to work with their intel hardware without having to by an extra interface card or adapter.
Yes, the tech market is rampantly competitive, but the market has proven again and again that proprietary vendors are the ones that become non-competitive in the long run. How many closed standards have we seen become defacto open standards because the market demands that level of interoperability and efficiency. VHS, CDs, the original IBM PC, even to some extent Intel's older chip designs.
The same thing applies to encryption, as this has the same goal in mind, but instead of making proprietary hardware, encrypting creates proprietary information. Again, who in their right mind is going to buy a DVD that can only be played on Sony hardware, or a TV that can only get service from certain satellite providers.
Yes, it's hard to make money in the computer industry selling or creating hardware or software. Incorporating encryption and proprietary hardware will not solve the problem, if for no other reason than the fact that I will always pay more for open products.
Perhaps manufacturers should just threaten these moves, creating a perceived scarcity of 'open' products, and then up their prices. Hmmmm....
Slashdot Mirror
Will they be able to tell I am typing with only one hand?
-josh
I have seen several examples of this ad-grafiti in the upscale Licoln Park neighborhood of Chicago. I was wondering what kind of weirdo Linux zealot it would take to do such a thing - now I know - IBM.
The first time I saw it I barely even payed attention - about the third time I figure it out. Subtle ad campaign if ever there was one.
-josh
I still have a Pentium 166 (overclocked from 150 - pushing the envelope here :) that still works perfectly well as a desktop. It runs W2K, Office 2000, and most everything else I throw at it, but alas, no modern games. It is 6 years old now I believe. Granted the original hard drive is too small to hold anything but the operating system and the orignal 16MB of memory was laughable, but I stuck a new 16 gig drive in a few years back, and I upgraded the RAM to 92MB when EDO was still cheap.
-josh
We need to define a long term storage standard which is a suite of storage media and standard file formats. Call it LTSS 1.0. To be a LTSS 1.0 compliant reader you have to support all media and file formats. This could be a dedicated reader, or a general computer with some specialized software and hardware.
LTSS 2.0 might have whizbang new file formats and storage media which supports 100 times as much information density, but it must be compatible with version 1.0.
LTSS 1.0 could support WAV, MP3, GIF, TIFF, Text/ASCII, Text/Unicode, HTML version whatever, and perhaps even Java for interpretation of abirtrary file formats. The media, CD-R, or perhaps one of the writeable DVD formats when they mature.
-josh
Copied all my e-mail from outlook to the standard text format when I went to Linux. .mbx format.
<p>
How did you do that? I have tons of old mail I would love to archive, but can't seem to convert from
<p>
-josh
First, this is old news, as many have pointed out several different sources reported on this in '98. This particular story is actually less informative.
Second, the chips don't freakin mutate and reprogram themselves. An external agent programs the FPGAs with a 'genetic' string and tests that capabilities of that string, then tries other variations that were based on the previous generation. It is not as if these things just magically mutate themselves to do a particular task, there is much external intervention.
Thirdly. When I last heard about this guy he was off exploring ways of making the chips more robust. Because the algorithms evolved appear to depend heavily on the analog, non-linear nature of the components in the chip, they were extremely sensitive to temparture variations. Also some programs evolved on one chip lot would not work on another chip lot, even though they were functionally identical chips. He was looking into ways of testing fitness at a variety of temperatures and using different chip lot in the process, perhaps producing a result less efficient than his original attempts but more robust.
And now we have heard nothing new from this guy for the last 2.5 years. My guess is that this was just too good for the specialized chip manufacturers to pass up. It's extremely promising technology - but I betcha most of it is patented by now.
-josh
I thought the keyring itself is encrypted using conventional (non public key) encryption which is keyed by your passphrase.
Sure, someone getting hold of my keyring compromises the security of any encrypted transmissions I send, but only somewhat, as it is not terribly useful without my passphrase (which will never ever ever fall to a dictionary attack).
-josh
This is an old argument, trotted out and tarted up for review every time some new technology or business practice leads to greater efficiency. Unfortunately history has proven this argument to be a fallacy. It never makes sense in the long term to stick with a less efficient means of production. Never, ever, and greater efficiency has so far lead to every increasing wealth. Somehow all those manually telephone switchers found jobs elsewhere in the economy when automated switches replaced them.
It is getting to the point now where in my projects I can usually search the net and find a piece of free code or a free library that does a specific function, no matter how arcane or niche I might find that function to be - the code is out there and it is free.
Now, do you realize how marvelously productive this can make a single programmer? No license fees to pay, and little code to write - just script together other's components to create a new and unique piece of software. In the past this would have taken 1000's of man hours of programming, or thousands of dollars in licensing fees. Now it can take me a weekend.
How long can Microsoft compete? Not long. Sure, Microsoft will lose money, but the market as a whole will remain robust, I just think that the money will be more evenly distribute among smaller companies and freelancers whose job it will be to integrate and repack the free software for those that don't want to muck with the details.
-josh
Be cool if it were something like product placement ads in a movie. Someone drinking a coke, or wearing a T-shirt with a logo.
Think about it, in an FPS, blowing away bad guys and monsters that are wearing corporate logo might be fun. "DIE Microsoft, DIE Target!!"
-josh
The movies on the web site seem pretty darned convincing, if it is a fake, it is a good one.
-josh
I read once that even if all natural and disease based causes of death were eliminated, the average human would only live about 600 years. The reason? Accidents.
One might argue that medical science's ability to clean up after our accidents will improve with time, but I doubt it is every going to figure out a way to put our brains back together if they are splattered all over the road in the course of being struck by a car.
So there is an upper bound to our life span even if we are technically 'immortal'.
-josh
It will be too cheap and oversold - resulting in shitty service, low bandwidth and spurious connections.
Sorry, I will never ever ever buy a Sprint product or service every again. 'Crystal clear calling' my ass.
-josh
GSLV=geosynchronous satellite launch vehicle.
I guess we all speak space jargon, so there was not need to put that on the front page.
-josh
hell, that's only about 50 cents US :)
-josh
> Wow, grammar at its best.
I don't get it, what's you're point?
-josh
Wow, cutting edge reporting at it's best.
Did you hear Commander Odama was dead too?
-josh
How exactly could I get such a job, for the last 5 years. I have an advanced degree in physics, and undergrad degree in physics and math, and left the field due to the exceedingly poor career prospects in the field. I have since been very bored (though well paid) programming in the business arena. I have often though my dream job would be programming in a scientific setting, because thats exactly where I learned to program - but have never run across such a job...
To answer these guy's question, look for someone like me. There are plenty of people that bailed out of math and science at the graduate level for a more lucrative career in programming. The only problem is you will probably need a lot of money to entice them back into the fold...
-josh
-josh
Yep, you are exactly right.
The meeting might go something like:
MS: "Please reconsider your position. It's not the upfront costs, but the long term support and management that counts. Look at windows 2000 and all the management wizzbangs it has. Yes it costs $1000 per server, but it will save you $750/yr/user, much more than what you save with linux"
Mexican bigwig: "Yes, but we do not have $1000 for each server"
MS: "You will not be able to run all of the wonderful windows applications out there on linux."
Mex: "You mean those expensive applications we cannot afford to buy anyway?"
MS: "But, You will not be able to process industry standard office documents created by micrsoft products."
Mex: "Silly Microsoft, everyone will be using Linux in the mexican government, who will be creating Word Documents? "
MS: "Well, If you feel our products are so expensive, perhaps we can cut a deal... How about we get a tax free XBox factory in Mexico, and you get 10000 free government user licenses and free support for the next two years."
Mex: "Well, now your are speaking our language, but still, I do not know..."
MS: "Oh, and we have brought some very nice cigars with us, compliments of our Dictatorial Carribean neighbor, Mr. Castro."
Mex: "Yes, all very nice, but really, what might I myself gain from this 'deal'"
MS: "And I believe the concierge has arranged some 'entertainment' for you gentleman tonight on the Microsoft Corporate Yacht in the Gulf - said Yacht could possibly be on loan to you for an extended period of time if you wish - there are also some interesting, very heavy suitcases on board..."
Mex: "Yes, Yes, very nice..."
Next day the newspapers declare the government's reversal on the Linux implementation. And Mexico is locked into Microsoft for the coming decades of .NET.
-josh
When I was in High school a new geometry computer program came out that allowed you to rapidly visualize triangles and other geometric shapes, keeping certain variables constant while rapidly changing others and seeing the resulting shapes. From this you could quickly visualize generalizations and relations that appeared true in 'experiment' and then set out to prove them from first principles.
The year after this program came out there were several new theorems discovered by High School students with the assistance of this program. Kids in my school thought perhaps we had discovered some new theorems as well, but did not bother to research further beyond our text books (Usenet was not available to us at the time).
This kid's theorem is not all that big a deal - Geometry is a fairly accessible mathematical topic for kids. I imagine that most mathemeticians, if they had really needed this result in their work could have derived it on their own, it's just that noone has needed it thus far, or bothered to document their derivation in the literature. Plus this makes a good headline.
-josh
What the heck did a math degree every have to do with programming? How this post got rate "Interesting" I have no idea. Back in the old days it was not a matter of high level degrees, but access, because the computers were so expensive only a few could use them.
Today almost everyone who wants access can have a computer orders of magnitude faster than the original clunkers which were once solely the purvey of your "top flight academics". Thus it is a heck of a lot easier to learn how to program.
Granted, programming languages are getting simpler to use, but building a complex app in any language is still a very difficult endeavor. Languages like Java make it easy for novices to build simple apps, but writing a solid program with any thing over a few thousands lines of code and integrating your work with the work of others is still just about as hard in Java as it is an any other language.
So yes, the unwashed massed of 'programmers' whose expertise stops at the point of an applet or scripting single web pages are going to have a hard time find jobs in a tight economy, because there are so many of them - but those with the skills to engineer large, complex systems will always have a job.
-josh
I first owned a Palm 500, Palm 1000 (if I remember correctly that far back), a Palm V and now a Palm Vx. I simply love the Vx. All I can say is that Handspring's new offering is simply not competitive - I might have bought it if I did not already have a Vx. And I might think about buying one in the future if they double the memory and halve the price (or add color and price it at around $300).
These companies are still trying to make Mac like profit margins in a market that is rapidly being driven to PC like commodity level economics. It is only because the few current vendors of Palm devices participate in a de facto form of price fixing (they are all greedy) on their high end models that these damned things are still so expensive.
I can't wait until there is some *real* price competition in this market.
-josh
I agree completely. Some features I would love to see in graphical file management tools (I know some have these, but ALL should): .." "filter a*.rtf" "select b*" "copy dude.rtf .."
- Directory compare
- "Copy to" (and TYPE the destination with autocomplete, screw click and drag.)
- Bulk rename *.rtf -> *.txt etc...
- Filter a directory view by rex exp
- Click and drag files without having to open two different directory views (if I drag and hold over a folder long enough it should open)
- An easy way to bookmark locations in the file system.
- Search and replace in files (text files only of course)
- A simple "move directory up tree" function
- Select files by rex exp filter.
- built in pseudo-command line where I could control the graphical view with typed text, for example "cd
YouYou nerd. ;-) You're outnumbered a thousand to one. :(
No I am not. Look at all the people that bought beta video tapes. Look at how memory sticks (Sony proprietary) are fairing versus SmartMedia cards in digital cameras. The market rewards open standards time after time.
-josh
The article basically says that hardware and software vendors are scraping by on razor thin margins because current products do not incorporate proprietary interfaces or encryption standards. So the conclusion is that anyone who remains open is subjecting themselves to too much market competition, and thus will either have to go proprietary or go out of business.
This pretty much ignores the fact that the market demands interoperability. Great, Intel can make more money selling proprietary 'wireless 1394' because it is a standard it owns, and has no direct competitors. This ignores the fact that if a corporation spends $1million of bluetooth PDAs they want them to work with their intel hardware without having to by an extra interface card or adapter.
Yes, the tech market is rampantly competitive, but the market has proven again and again that proprietary vendors are the ones that become non-competitive in the long run. How many closed standards have we seen become defacto open standards because the market demands that level of interoperability and efficiency. VHS, CDs, the original IBM PC, even to some extent Intel's older chip designs.
The same thing applies to encryption, as this has the same goal in mind, but instead of making proprietary hardware, encrypting creates proprietary information. Again, who in their right mind is going to buy a DVD that can only be played on Sony hardware, or a TV that can only get service from certain satellite providers.
Yes, it's hard to make money in the computer industry selling or creating hardware or software. Incorporating encryption and proprietary hardware will not solve the problem, if for no other reason than the fact that I will always pay more for open products.
Perhaps manufacturers should just threaten these moves, creating a perceived scarcity of 'open' products, and then up their prices. Hmmmm....
-josh