True radicals and free thinkers should have nothing to do with them, as they force one to limit one's ambitions and thoughts.
That's fair enough.
We should be constraining the use of these devices, not promoting them.
OK, here's where you lose me. If these devices are bad because the power elite force them on us, wouldn't the power elite preventing us from using them be equally bad?
That said, I know where you're coming from. Devices like this have the potential to become the brain-strangling neck ties of the 21st century.
McCain-Feingold won't last 5 minutes in the Supreme Court. I don't think I've ever heard of the court handing down sentences in a case like this, but if they did, here is my suggestion:
Set up blackboards in the rotunda of the Capitol. Have every legislator that voted for it write "I will not vote for obviously unconstitutional bills" 1000 times on the blackboard while the tourists mock them.
The article didn't say. I guess he's 64. He must have lots of stock and stuff. So Intel doesn't need you when you're 64, but it probably still feeds you....OK, geek and Beatles references in the same post. I'll stop now.
You (Reg 233434, Tony Soprano) mean "to tell" (Reg 23432, CBS Networks) me that They (TM) can copyright (c) such short phrases? (Reg 345243). This is (Reg 4111999, Bill Clinton) getting ridiculous.
What the guy did was the equivalent of walking into a quiet suburban neighborhood and shouting the constitution through a bullhorn at 3 AM. That's the difference between "free speech" and "disturbing the peace". So, even if it were a public forum (which it isn't) I see no hypocrisy in them suing the guy. He must have been very persistant for this to end up in court, so he certainly can't argue that he had no warning.
You just reminded me of something, circa late 1995 or early 1996. This was when Erols (now a subsidiary of RCN) still had that local ISP flavor.
One night I had trouble with the news server. It wouldn't let me in. I had heard that CAIS provided the servers. Just for the heck of it, I sent e-mail to root@cais.com. I got an answer. One of their sysadmins politely informed me that Erols had just set up their own news servers. CAIS had locked out non-CAIS customers after that. Erol's hadn't told us, but I just took that in stride. After all, this was the internet. It wasn't like I needed it.
Not long after that, I actually worked at Erol's, starting out in tech support. One of the groups of people we used to make fun of were daytraders who called us up screaming in our ears telling us "MY BUSINESS DEPENDS ON THE INTERNET!!!". The very idea of any business depending on the internet was ludicrous. Assuming it was true, they were foolish not to have a backup provider.
After a while I got used to that idea. So did a lot of people. The entire economy has, in a very real sense, behaved just like that idiot daytrader. But, but, but... technology companies can't go down. "THE ECONOMY DEPENDS ON THE INTERNET".
Well, guess what folks. The internet is just as flaky today as it was in 1995. Worse yet, there doesn't appear to be any "backup provider" for the kind of sizzling hot growth that the internet spurred throughout the 90s.
If you are in a car accident, HailStorm could automatically send your medical history and insurance information to the hospital before the ambulance arrived. Then it could page your spouse and reschedule your appointments.
Honey, I'm in the ER bleeding like a sieve. Could you pick up the kids at soccer practice today?
How would you say "10"? You can't have kids saying "two times eight is ten". That's just wrong. Calling it "sixteen" doesn't seem right either since the name "sixteen" is based on the old decimal system.
Also, learning the multiplication table would be as much as 2.56 times harder, assuming that teachers only teach a 10 by 10 table. When I was a kid they taught us a 12 by 12 table, which probably has roots in the English system (a foot is 12 inches).
Well... there's always the StarTrek approach: Aldebaran-5, Ceti-alpha 6, etc. In other words, the name of the star followed by the number of the planet; although I'm not sure if they were numbering them from the center out, or the fringe in.
Wouldn't it be something if one of the real planets turned out to be like one of the StarTrek planets?
The radio isn't a vital system. Everybody places the gears in PRNDL order. Unless GM wants to get sued by a lot of people, they must place the pedals clutch, break and gas from left to right in that order.
Fiddling with the radio is one thing, but people would be mighty pissed if they hopped into a car and slipped it straight into Drive at full throttle when they thought they were backing up with the break on.
I certainly don't blame anybody for being upset by a system that doesn't ask them "do you really want to delete those files (y/n)".
OK, the problem with fiber is not as extreme as it is with cars, but... what will happen if there is no rural fiber subsidy? Well, the rural folks might get some kind of wireless network. They might get nothing, and for some of them that might be reason to abandon the country. Fine. America has a long tradition of people moving to get what they want. The black exodus to Chicago. The gold rush. The sun belt boom. The whole country to begin with. None of these migrations hurt anybody. A "fiber migration" away from far flung rural areas to the city could spark an urban renaissance. It would do it without government intervention. We don't know what the future holds. Broadband is *not* essential. If it were, people would have already abandoned areas that don't have it. I speak from experience. I am not in a rural area, but I am in a broadband blackhole. I have not moved because there are other far more essential reasons for me to stay. I am not "suffering". This is a convenience we are talking about. Not food, shelter, or clothing.
Implicit in many of these debates is the idea that everybody having broadband is a good thing. Why?
Are we going to duplicate the same mistakes that were made with highways? Everybody just had to have paved roads through their county. We tore up rail systems and built roads. Now everybody complains about smog and sprawl. Highway casualty rates are the equivalent of re-fighting the entire Vietnam war every other year.
So what if only a few get broadband? The countryside will be a refuge from the ubiquitous connectivity that can be just as confining as it is liberating. I say, don't subsidize any of this crap. That will just result in more taxpayer expense. Then 50 years from now some unforseen social problem will arise because of it. The same liberals who advocated the subsidy that created the problem will advocate some other subsidy to solve it. Feh!
About 2k, eh? Just about *all* laptops are about 2k. Sound familiar? Desktops were the same way until a couple years ago, then the major manufacturers finally started dropping price. At the time, I remarked that this might be a warning sign of "PC saturation" and I turned out to be frighteningly correct.
Laptops are still not saturated. As a consumer, I would like to see them saturate. They may be starting to a little. I have managed to find a few laptops in the $1000 range but I'd like to see major manufacturers advertising $600 laptops. That's right about my price point for a good new laptop.
It's really a shame that laptops didn't clone like the PC did. The race to see who can be thinner, lighter, more ergonomic has resulted in a slew of nonstandard parts. IIRC there were some standardization efforts but they were doomed in any attempt to produce something as useful as the ATX case/motherboard standard.
Anyway, I'm rooting for a "laptop downturn" to follow the PC downturn. If history repeats itself, a price war will precede it. I'm holding off on buying a new PC because I would like my next "PC" to be an affordable laptop with a docking station. Then I could have all the benefits of both stationary and mobile computing without having to buy two machines.
Step 1 - The IceBox. This is a box that will sit in your house, connect up to the power company (AC) and also have the side benifit of allowing you to eat "frozen dinners" and other foods that didn't exist before. It Will act as the "Electricity furnace" for the rest of the devices (coming soon)
Step 2 - The Radio.You have these speakers (Of various sizes and quality, just watch you'll see all sizes dorn to a cheap 3 inch model) that connect up wirelessly to an Electricity furnace (Step 1) and give you neat-o keen connectivity from anywhere within range.
Step 3 - More Appliances. As the limitations of the radio become apparent, General Electric starts to roll out the ability to use your "Electricity Furnace" as a means of pitching other devices (such as hair dryers and blenders). You have all the devices on your home power grid powered at once. No fuss no muss. This is accepted because of:
Step 4 - Electricity Bills. The cost for this will be ongoing because the power will be subscription based. You won't even need to administer your elecritity, because the subscription includes monthly maintenance of your furnace. Of course, with persistant electric connectivity, they will always have complete access over all the General Electric appliances on your home power grid.
This is how General Electric will get complete control of the home power arena. They don't tell you to bend all the way over all at once. First, you lean a little, then a little more. Pretty soon you are completely bent over and you don't even know it.
Yes. Perfectly legal. There could be a number of results: 1. your download becomes popular and you reach your transfer limit, so you have to stop. 2. your download doesn't become popular so it doesn't harm the original company very much.
As economic reality continues to progress into the web, expect to see more of this. When people are looking to cut costs, expensive servers that don't generate revenue are a good target for the axe.
Eventually, the cost of these "free downloads" will be born by somebody. Does anybody know what the real cost of a typical Linux download is? If this plays our like meatworld retail, we might expect the equilibrium price to be about twice the cost of the download (typical retail markup).
Any company that charges more will eventually lose customers. Any company that charges less will eventually fail to provide adequate service.
OTOH, the equilibrium cost of distributing free software might turn out to be ridiculously low. A distributed system like Napster (except perfectly legal in this case) could probably distribute Linux for very little. Of course, TANSTAAFL. The additional bandwidth usage might drive up ISP rates for everybody and/or lead to more ISPs clamping down on uploads.
Regardless, it will be interesting to see how it plays out. Of course, despite what the Liberal Software advocates like to say, you are not paying for software here. You are paying for a copying service.
The the GPL finally gets it's day in court, and is defeated
Or at the very least the programmer who does it gets fired. There probably aren't criminal penalties, but perhaps a civil suit. Picture forfeiting assets and having your wages garnished for a very, very long time.
OTOH, you could just as easily blame the management for not having some kind of policy in place for the use of 3rd party code. If I were in charge of the team you could be d#%@ sure that any programmer working under me is going to run 3rd party code by legal before we use it.
Almost every digital computer has a clock in it. You should devote one lecture to the history of clocks.
Some of the fancy cukoo clocks built in Europe at the height of their popularity could arguably be called the first "robotic multimedia" computing devices.
I stumbled onto the "all your base..." phenomoneon on/., pretty much like you did except that I wasn't away very much. The.sig was my response to what I thought, at first, was just/. silliness, but there were hints of something bigger.
So, I typed "all your base are belong to us" into Google, just like that with the quotes and everything. I got the complete history of it, but I didn't save the URL.
To make a long story short, it all started with a Japanese video game with poor English translation. It snowballed from there, with the production of a slick photoshop/flash music video as one of the major catalysts for widespread popularity.
Oh boy, the PDF vs. HTML war. When it comes to reading things on screen, I'm firmly in the HTML camp. The PDF viewer is unstable on my box, it always defaults to page flipping mode, and antialiased fonts are ugly unless you blow them up. Then you have to scroll sideways. Yuck.
That said, it's perfectly understandable why this is PDF. It was a book, remember? For work that is destined for the offset press, PDF, PostScript, or something else that forces an exact size is ideal. For work that is destined for the screen, HTML is better. What's needed is a free tool to convert PDF to HTML that is a decent approximation of the PDF.
I've seen documentation that was originally TeX and was converted to HTML, and it looked pretty decent. I haven't actually viewed TeX documents, but if it is a page layout like PDF, and *it* can accomplish this, I see no reason why PDF can't.
Slashdot Mirror
Sounds more like a grounding problem to me.
True radicals and free thinkers should have nothing to do with them, as they force one to limit one's ambitions and thoughts.
That's fair enough.
We should be constraining the use of these devices, not promoting them.
OK, here's where you lose me. If these devices are bad because the power elite force them on us, wouldn't the power elite preventing us from using them be equally bad?
That said, I know where you're coming from. Devices like this have the potential to become the brain-strangling neck ties of the 21st century.
McCain-Feingold won't last 5 minutes in the Supreme Court. I don't think I've ever heard of the court handing down sentences in a case like this, but if they did, here is my suggestion:
Set up blackboards in the rotunda of the Capitol. Have every legislator that voted for it write "I will not vote for obviously unconstitutional bills" 1000 times on the blackboard while the tourists mock them.
Thanks. I think maybe the trend towards tall ads to the side of articles caused me to tune it out the first time.
The article didn't say. I guess he's 64. He must have lots of stock and stuff. So Intel doesn't need you when you're 64, but it probably still feeds you. ...OK, geek and Beatles references in the same post. I'll stop now.
You (Reg 233434, Tony Soprano) mean "to tell" (Reg 23432, CBS Networks) me that They (TM) can copyright (c) such short phrases? (Reg 345243). This is (Reg 4111999, Bill Clinton) getting ridiculous.
What the guy did was the equivalent of walking into a quiet suburban neighborhood and shouting the constitution through a bullhorn at 3 AM. That's the difference between "free speech" and "disturbing the peace". So, even if it were a public forum (which it isn't) I see no hypocrisy in them suing the guy. He must have been very persistant for this to end up in court, so he certainly can't argue that he had no warning.
No more calling up and talking to the owner
You just reminded me of something, circa late 1995 or early 1996. This was when Erols (now a subsidiary of RCN) still had that local ISP flavor.
One night I had trouble with the news server. It wouldn't let me in. I had heard that CAIS provided the servers. Just for the heck of it, I sent e-mail to root@cais.com. I got an answer. One of their sysadmins politely informed me that Erols had just set up their own news servers. CAIS had locked out non-CAIS customers after that. Erol's hadn't told us, but I just took that in stride. After all, this was the internet. It wasn't like I needed it.
Not long after that, I actually worked at Erol's, starting out in tech support. One of the groups of people we used to make fun of were daytraders who called us up screaming in our ears telling us "MY BUSINESS DEPENDS ON THE INTERNET!!!". The very idea of any business depending on the internet was ludicrous. Assuming it was true, they were foolish not to have a backup provider.
After a while I got used to that idea. So did a lot of people. The entire economy has, in a very real sense, behaved just like that idiot daytrader. But, but, but... technology companies can't go down. "THE ECONOMY DEPENDS ON THE INTERNET".
Well, guess what folks. The internet is just as flaky today as it was in 1995. Worse yet, there doesn't appear to be any "backup provider" for the kind of sizzling hot growth that the internet spurred throughout the 90s.
If you are in a car accident, HailStorm could automatically send your medical history and insurance information to the hospital before the ambulance arrived. Then it could page your spouse and reschedule your appointments.
Honey, I'm in the ER bleeding like a sieve. Could you pick up the kids at soccer practice today?
Sure. No problem.
How would you say "10"? You can't have kids saying "two times eight is ten". That's just wrong. Calling it "sixteen" doesn't seem right either since the name "sixteen" is based on the old decimal system.
Also, learning the multiplication table would be as much as 2.56 times harder, assuming that teachers only teach a 10 by 10 table. When I was a kid they taught us a 12 by 12 table, which probably has roots in the English system (a foot is 12 inches).
Well... there's always the StarTrek approach: Aldebaran-5, Ceti-alpha 6, etc. In other words, the name of the star followed by the number of the planet; although I'm not sure if they were numbering them from the center out, or the fringe in.
Wouldn't it be something if one of the real planets turned out to be like one of the StarTrek planets?
The radio isn't a vital system. Everybody places the gears in PRNDL order. Unless GM wants to get sued by a lot of people, they must place the pedals clutch, break and gas from left to right in that order.
Fiddling with the radio is one thing, but people would be mighty pissed if they hopped into a car and slipped it straight into Drive at full throttle when they thought they were backing up with the break on.
I certainly don't blame anybody for being upset by a system that doesn't ask them "do you really want to delete those files (y/n)".
Exactly how many overviews per second can I get?
OK, the problem with fiber is not as extreme as it is with cars, but... what will happen if there is no rural fiber subsidy? Well, the rural folks might get some kind of wireless network. They might get nothing, and for some of them that might be reason to abandon the country. Fine. America has a long tradition of people moving to get what they want. The black exodus to Chicago. The gold rush. The sun belt boom. The whole country to begin with. None of these migrations hurt anybody. A "fiber migration" away from far flung rural areas to the city could spark an urban renaissance. It would do it without government intervention. We don't know what the future holds. Broadband is *not* essential. If it were, people would have already abandoned areas that don't have it. I speak from experience. I am not in a rural area, but I am in a broadband blackhole. I have not moved because there are other far more essential reasons for me to stay. I am not "suffering". This is a convenience we are talking about. Not food, shelter, or clothing.
Cable has ads. Why shouldn't this?
Implicit in many of these debates is the idea that everybody having broadband is a good thing. Why?
Are we going to duplicate the same mistakes that were made with highways? Everybody just had to have paved roads through their county. We tore up rail systems and built roads. Now everybody complains about smog and sprawl. Highway casualty rates are the equivalent of re-fighting the entire Vietnam war every other year.
So what if only a few get broadband? The countryside will be a refuge from the ubiquitous connectivity that can be just as confining as it is liberating. I say, don't subsidize any of this crap. That will just result in more taxpayer expense. Then 50 years from now some unforseen social problem will arise because of it. The same liberals who advocated the subsidy that created the problem will advocate some other subsidy to solve it. Feh!
About 2k, eh? Just about *all* laptops are about 2k. Sound familiar? Desktops were the same way until a couple years ago, then the major manufacturers finally started dropping price. At the time, I remarked that this might be a warning sign of "PC saturation" and I turned out to be frighteningly correct.
Laptops are still not saturated. As a consumer, I would like to see them saturate. They may be starting to a little. I have managed to find a few laptops in the $1000 range but I'd like to see major manufacturers advertising $600 laptops. That's right about my price point for a good new laptop.
It's really a shame that laptops didn't clone like the PC did. The race to see who can be thinner, lighter, more ergonomic has resulted in a slew of nonstandard parts. IIRC there were some standardization efforts but they were doomed in any attempt to produce something as useful as the ATX case/motherboard standard.
Anyway, I'm rooting for a "laptop downturn" to follow the PC downturn. If history repeats itself, a price war will precede it. I'm holding off on buying a new PC because I would like my next "PC" to be an affordable laptop with a docking station. Then I could have all the benefits of both stationary and mobile computing without having to buy two machines.
Let's see:
Step 1 - The IceBox. This is a box that will sit in your house, connect up to the power company (AC) and also have the side benifit of allowing you to eat "frozen dinners" and other foods that didn't exist before. It Will act as the "Electricity furnace" for the rest of the devices (coming soon)
Step 2 - The Radio.You have these speakers (Of various sizes and quality, just watch you'll see all sizes dorn to a cheap 3 inch model) that connect up wirelessly to an Electricity furnace (Step 1) and give you neat-o keen connectivity from anywhere within range.
Step 3 - More Appliances. As the limitations of the radio become apparent, General Electric starts to roll out the ability to use your "Electricity Furnace" as a means of pitching other devices (such as hair dryers and blenders). You have all the devices on your home power grid powered at once. No fuss no muss. This is accepted because of:
Step 4 - Electricity Bills. The cost for this will be ongoing because the power will be subscription based. You won't even need to administer your elecritity, because the subscription includes monthly maintenance of your furnace. Of course, with persistant electric connectivity, they will always have complete access over all the General Electric appliances on your home power grid.
This is how General Electric will get complete control of the home power arena. They don't tell you to bend all the way over all at once. First, you lean a little, then a little more. Pretty soon you are completely bent over and you don't even know it.
Of course, I could be wrong.
Yes. Perfectly legal. There could be a number of results: 1. your download becomes popular and you reach your transfer limit, so you have to stop. 2. your download doesn't become popular so it doesn't harm the original company very much.
As economic reality continues to progress into the web, expect to see more of this. When people are looking to cut costs, expensive servers that don't generate revenue are a good target for the axe.
Eventually, the cost of these "free downloads" will be born by somebody. Does anybody know what the real cost of a typical Linux download is? If this plays our like meatworld retail, we might expect the equilibrium price to be about twice the cost of the download (typical retail markup).
Any company that charges more will eventually lose customers. Any company that charges less will eventually fail to provide adequate service.
OTOH, the equilibrium cost of distributing free software might turn out to be ridiculously low. A distributed system like Napster (except perfectly legal in this case) could probably distribute Linux for very little. Of course, TANSTAAFL. The additional bandwidth usage might drive up ISP rates for everybody and/or lead to more ISPs clamping down on uploads.
Regardless, it will be interesting to see how it plays out. Of course, despite what the Liberal Software advocates like to say, you are not paying for software here. You are paying for a copying service.
The the GPL finally gets it's day in court, and is defeated
Or at the very least the programmer who does it gets fired. There probably aren't criminal penalties, but perhaps a civil suit. Picture forfeiting assets and having your wages garnished for a very, very long time.
OTOH, you could just as easily blame the management for not having some kind of policy in place for the use of 3rd party code. If I were in charge of the team you could be d#%@ sure that any programmer working under me is going to run 3rd party code by legal before we use it.
hehe... karmma to spare. Do your worst.
Almost every digital computer has a clock in it. You should devote one lecture to the history of clocks.
Some of the fancy cukoo clocks built in Europe at the height of their popularity could arguably be called the first "robotic multimedia" computing devices.
I stumbled onto the "all your base..." phenomoneon on /., pretty much like you did except that I wasn't away very much. The .sig was my response to what I thought, at first, was just /. silliness, but there were hints of something bigger.
So, I typed "all your base are belong to us" into Google, just like that with the quotes and everything. I got the complete history of it, but I didn't save the URL.
To make a long story short, it all started with a Japanese video game with poor English translation. It snowballed from there, with the production of a slick photoshop/flash music video as one of the major catalysts for widespread popularity.
I wonder how you get sperm out of a stiff.
Well, the guy is dead so you can just cut out the right parts and empty them. It's not like he's going to feel any pain.
Oh boy, the PDF vs. HTML war. When it comes to reading things on screen, I'm firmly in the HTML camp. The PDF viewer is unstable on my box, it always defaults to page flipping mode, and antialiased fonts are ugly unless you blow them up. Then you have to scroll sideways. Yuck.
That said, it's perfectly understandable why this is PDF. It was a book, remember? For work that is destined for the offset press, PDF, PostScript, or something else that forces an exact size is ideal. For work that is destined for the screen, HTML is better. What's needed is a free tool to convert PDF to HTML that is a decent approximation of the PDF.
I've seen documentation that was originally TeX and was converted to HTML, and it looked pretty decent. I haven't actually viewed TeX documents, but if it is a page layout like PDF, and *it* can accomplish this, I see no reason why PDF can't.