...not to invest in software companies. Why? Two words: Free Software.
Free Software is great for hardware companies. It sucks for most software companies. RedHat will never pull in the dough like MS did.
Now, MS is one of the few software companies with the $$$ and wherewithall to transform intself into a hardware company via initiatives such as this, the X-box, and their various PDA efforts.
A lot of other software companies are just going to go *poof*.
Probably rejected because of me, and other/. readers who have complained about the "tabloid" quality of some/. stories. I think the editors were wise to reject this one. Keep up the good work.
Hardware will be so cheap and powerful, that we will forgo the dull, mundane materials now used in favor of "optoelectronic substrate". It will be moldeable into various shapes, strong enough to be used as a substitute for drywall or maybe even steel, and it will have any "active properties" you might desire.
Need a computer? No problem. All you have to do is tap the desk and say "keyboard" (remember, everything is made of this material) and a keyboard and active display will appear on your desk. Any data you enter will be stored permanently on a secure central server that you can access from any item that is made of substrate.
Lightbulbs and sockets? The dark ages! Just tap the wall, and say "light, medium intensity" and the wall will emenate a soft glow.
Children will be born and grow up in entire cities where the walls, sidewalks, and cars are made of substrate. Just tap your foot on the sidewalk and say "hopskotch!" and a hopskotch board appears.
You'll take your daughter to visit the country. She'll tap a rock and nothing will happen. She'll say "how boring".
Oh come on, it's got some use. It's a great piece of kitsch (sp?). 100 years from now it might get high praise on whatever 22nd century manifestation of Antiques Roadshow they happen to have.
I mean, come on. We can't just remove stuff because people abuse it. The goto statement is bad, remove that. Way too many programmers write code that overflows buffers, remove pointers. Way too many people dividing by zero. Remove the division operator.
I traveled accross country with a CB one time. Most of the channels are empty. Most people are not interested. There are 3 or 4 channels with truckers on them, who keep better track of the police than the police keep track of themselves. That's it.
You wanna talk on the radio? Get a shortwave license. It's probably no more difficult than, say, becoming an ISP.
I too remember the Internet the way it used to be: Obscure, Intellectual and Hostile. Now that black turtleneck voice would appear to be drowned in a sea of polo shirts and khakis, but it's not. You just have to look for it, like you always have had to do.
There is no way they can kill the www. The nature of the Internet is far freer than radio even, because the bandwidth is only limited by the ammount of fiber that they are willing to bury in the ground. With IPv6 we have virtually no chance of ever encountering rationing like we do with the airwaves.
Exactly how would they go about taking away my ability to post my own original material on a website? They won't. But if they want to go after me posting somebody else's original material without their permission, well, that's to be expected.
...when they run out of cute caffeine inspired names to call things. Now let me get back to that new compiler I'm working on. I call it "The Percolator".
2. Watch all the yuck-a-puck daytraders make the stock "pop". Then SELL ALL YOUR SHARES, thus making a huge profit.
If you were here for the last round of discussions concerning "the letter", you would know that this is called "flipping your stock". It is unethical (though not illegal) and can prevent you from participating in future IPOs, and will certainly damage your reputation on Wall Street, assuming that they keep a record of such things.
If Wall Street didn't frown on this, then LinuxOne type companies could float stock. They would send letters to their partners who would flip the stock and kick back the profits. Then they would fly off to South America leaving lots of investors holding worthless paper.
1. If they do send "the letter", tear it up and throw it away.
2. Watch all the yuck-a-puck daytraders make the stock "pop".
3. Wait for the stock to settle down and pass the "lock-out" period.
4. After the lock-out you will likely have at least one or two opportunities to buy the stock for close to, or perhaps even less than the IPO price. At that point, decide for yourself whether or not the company has a future worth investing in. Be sure to base this decision on your knowledge of the market and the competition. In this case, that means knowing a lot about Intel, Motorola, Xilinx, and other chip manufacturers.
Another good thing about this approach is that you don't have to buy some minimum alottment or conform to any rules about when you take a profit. If you only want 50 shares, then that's all you have to buy. If the stock jumps on some analyst's recommendation, you can cash out without having to worry about being barred from future IPOs.
The real beauty of this stategy is that while all the other fools are riding over the IPO hill and crying their eyes out on Yahoo message boards, you can put your money someplace else where it will really work for you.
Of course, if you are a Type-A "I lost 20k yesterday and it doesn't bother me" cocaine snorting day-trader, you can ignore my advice. Don't blame me if this advice doesn't work for you, and don't blame me if you drop dead from a heart attack at 40 either.
The article says they are having a rough time of it, even with the Windows source code. Maybe the strategy will be to flood the market with poorly written Linux applications. People will say stuff like "Office runs bad on Linux, Linux sucks".
I have to admire Bill Gates as the PT Barnum of computing. He intends to use Linux as a gateway to get people interested in Windows. Maybe his Linux desktop will have a link on it that says "This Way To The Egress".
Sure Linux is stable, sure it's free and all that junk. But where's the *showmanship*?
My contention has always been that failure to maintain backward compatability between VRML-1 and VRML-97 *seriously wounded* VRML. It isn't dead.
As for parsers, I have seen yacc compatable grammars for VRML-1 and VRML-97. I'm not sure what you mean by trivially parseable. The VRML grammars are certainly a lot easier to understand than the C-grammar.
I felt no need for a generated lexer/parser when I wrote my first VRML software back in '96. I wrote it all by hand, and continue to write parsers by hand, but maybe that's just me.
Wow... all of the sudden, Slashdot==comp.lang.vrml
Unfortunately, the API and the file format both appear to be called Open Inventor. At least, I have heard many people use the same phrase to mean too different things.
So, do you mean Open Inventor as in Free Beer, or Open Inventor as in Free Speach?
Of course you develop apps with the API, and of course the apps don't have to be used for stupid web graphics. That remark was tangential to... awwww fagedaboutit.
Open Inventor, as the FAQs will tell you, is a 3d format designed to work with OpenGL.
Mark Pesce used Inventor as a starting point for VRML-1 around 1995. VRML-1 was the first real attempt to create a standard 3d file format that would work over the web. It has seen limited success as a standard of exchange betweed CAD programs.
A second version of VRML based loosely on VRML-1 (but not backward compatable with it) was proposed by one of the major industry players and rapidly became an ISO standard in 1997. By many arguments, it failed as a standard because the required plugin is not installed by default. There are other reasons too, but by and large, mention of VRML still gets a "huh?" even from some fairly computer savvy people.
The next version of VRML being developed by the Web3D Consortium is based on XML. The tags are designed such that conversion from VRML97 to X3D is quite straightforward. If X3D is built into IE and Mozilla, we could finally see the standard VR format gaining acceptance.
As for all the Open Source software flying around in the 3d community now, it tends to make things less exciting from a money point of view. OTOH, I'm sure the same web designers who like to make bandwidth hogging flash sites are getting very excited now.
I am obviously biased in certain areas. Other, less biased histories can be found at:
http://hiwaay.net/~crispen/vrml/history.html
I can see a time when Windows and Linux developers will meet somewhere in the middle; I just hope we won't all be carrying weapons when we do...
Dibs on the rocket launcher.
Re:The problem with today's users
on
A Praise To Unix
·
· Score: 2
You just said the same thing I've been saying a long, long, time. You probably said it more eloquently than I ever have. Thank-you.
I might add, it's frustrating when I say I like Windows, and people automaticly assume I like NT. Not so. I think NT is a lame server, just like so many others do. But on a consumer desktop, which is where I do most of my computing, Win9x rules.
You might say that my ideal experience is surfing to websites that run *NIX, using my Win9x PC.
meta http-equiv="pics-label" content='(pics-1.1 "http://www.rsac.org/ratingsv01.html" l gen true comment "RSACi North America Server" for "http://www.playboy.com" on "1996.05.04T06:51-0800" r (n 4 s 3 v 0 l 4))'
Of course, not all pornographers are as responsable as Playboy, but it's a start.
I think keeping out all the fly-by-night-look-at-me-I-got-a-porn-CD-and-put-it -on-line people is impossible.
1. Check for body odor. If body odor is found, shower every day and use deoderant.
2. Check to make sure belly is not hanging over belt. If it is, start exercising.
3. Check to make sure your job does not involve french fries. If it does, get a better job. You don't have to be a Rockefeller, but you at least have to be able to convince women that they won't end up living in a van. Women hate that.
4. Check to make sure you are not underconfident.
5. Check to make sure you really want to settle down. Visit the suburbs, and ask yourself if you're really ready to live there, because you know it will happen if you get married and have kids.
6. Whatever you do, I repeat, *whatever* you do, don't try to figure out women like the last guy said. If women could be figured, believe me, somebody woulda done it.
Someplace else it said the engine supplies 75N at what looks like maximum power. Now:
g=10 m/s^2.
1N=1kg * 1m/s^2 (F=ma)
So, let's assume lawn chair + human + fuel + control system + misc = 150kg.
That's 1500N so you need at least 20 of those bad boys.
I was thinking that 4 on the back of a bicycle might provide a nice assist up hill, but it would probably be loud, and I'd hate to be riding this if it blew up.
Slashdot Mirror
...when RMS meant "Root Mean Square", and I thought getting an engineering degree would be both fun *and* profitable.
...not to invest in software companies. Why? Two words: Free Software.
Free Software is great for hardware companies. It sucks for most software companies. RedHat will never pull in the dough like MS did.
Now, MS is one of the few software companies with the $$$ and wherewithall to transform intself into a hardware company via initiatives such as this, the X-box, and their various PDA efforts.
A lot of other software companies are just going to go *poof*.
Probably rejected because of me, and other /. readers who have complained about the "tabloid" quality of some /. stories. I think the editors were wise to reject this one. Keep up the good work.
Hardware will be so cheap and powerful, that we will forgo the dull, mundane materials now used in favor of "optoelectronic substrate". It will be moldeable into various shapes, strong enough to be used as a substitute for drywall or maybe even steel, and it will have any "active properties" you might desire.
Need a computer? No problem. All you have to do is tap the desk and say "keyboard" (remember, everything is made of this material) and a keyboard and active display will appear on your desk. Any data you enter will be stored permanently on a secure central server that you can access from any item that is made of substrate.
Lightbulbs and sockets? The dark ages! Just tap the wall, and say "light, medium intensity" and the wall will emenate a soft glow.
Children will be born and grow up in entire cities where the walls, sidewalks, and cars are made of substrate. Just tap your foot on the sidewalk and say "hopskotch!" and a hopskotch board appears.
You'll take your daughter to visit the country. She'll tap a rock and nothing will happen. She'll say "how boring".
Oh come on, it's got some use. It's a great piece of kitsch (sp?). 100 years from now it might get high praise on whatever 22nd century manifestation of Antiques Roadshow they happen to have.
Your not trying to buy my vote, are you?
That's what #ifdef is for.
I mean, come on. We can't just remove stuff because people abuse it. The goto statement is bad, remove that. Way too many programmers write code that overflows buffers, remove pointers. Way too many people dividing by zero. Remove the division operator.
You wanna talk on the radio? Get a CB.
I traveled accross country with a CB one time. Most of the channels are empty. Most people are not interested. There are 3 or 4 channels with truckers on them, who keep better track of the police than the police keep track of themselves. That's it.
You wanna talk on the radio? Get a shortwave license. It's probably no more difficult than, say, becoming an ISP.
I too remember the Internet the way it used to be: Obscure, Intellectual and Hostile. Now that black turtleneck voice would appear to be drowned in a sea of polo shirts and khakis, but it's not. You just have to look for it, like you always have had to do.
There is no way they can kill the www. The nature of the Internet is far freer than radio even, because the bandwidth is only limited by the ammount of fiber that they are willing to bury in the ground. With IPv6 we have virtually no chance of ever encountering rationing like we do with the airwaves.
Exactly how would they go about taking away my ability to post my own original material on a website? They won't. But if they want to go after me posting somebody else's original material without their permission, well, that's to be expected.
In cyberspace, nobody can hear you being sarcastic.
...when they run out of cute caffeine inspired names to call things. Now let me get back to that new compiler I'm working on. I call it "The Percolator".
What is the environmental impact of letting tons of nitrogen a day escape into the atmosphere?
It could be almost as bad as dumping millions of gallons of Dihydrogen Monoxide into our lakes and rivers.
2. Watch all the yuck-a-puck daytraders make the stock "pop". Then SELL ALL YOUR SHARES, thus making a huge profit.
If you were here for the last round of discussions concerning "the letter", you would know that this is called "flipping your stock". It is unethical (though not illegal) and can prevent you from participating in future IPOs, and will certainly damage your reputation on Wall Street, assuming that they keep a record of such things.
If Wall Street didn't frown on this, then LinuxOne type companies could float stock. They would send letters to their partners who would flip the stock and kick back the profits. Then they would fly off to South America leaving lots of investors holding worthless paper.
What's everyone griping about? Unpossible is a perfectly cromulent word.
...you may remember me from such motivational films as "Smoke Yourself Thin" and "Get Confident! Stupid."
Yoink!
1. If they do send "the letter", tear it up and throw it away.
2. Watch all the yuck-a-puck daytraders make the stock "pop".
3. Wait for the stock to settle down and pass the "lock-out" period.
4. After the lock-out you will likely have at least one or two opportunities to buy the stock for close to, or perhaps even less than the IPO price. At that point, decide for yourself whether or not the company has a future worth investing in. Be sure to base this decision on your knowledge of the market and the competition. In this case, that means knowing a lot about Intel, Motorola, Xilinx, and other chip manufacturers.
Another good thing about this approach is that you don't have to buy some minimum alottment or conform to any rules about when you take a profit. If you only want 50 shares, then that's all you have to buy. If the stock jumps on some analyst's recommendation, you can cash out without having to worry about being barred from future IPOs.
The real beauty of this stategy is that while all the other fools are riding over the IPO hill and crying their eyes out on Yahoo message boards, you can put your money someplace else where it will really work for you.
Of course, if you are a Type-A "I lost 20k yesterday and it doesn't bother me" cocaine snorting day-trader, you can ignore my advice. Don't blame me if this advice doesn't work for you, and don't blame me if you drop dead from a heart attack at 40 either.
The article says they are having a rough time of it, even with the Windows source code. Maybe the strategy will be to flood the market with poorly written Linux applications. People will say stuff like "Office runs bad on Linux, Linux sucks".
I have to admire Bill Gates as the PT Barnum of computing. He intends to use Linux as a gateway to get people interested in Windows. Maybe his Linux desktop will have a link on it that says "This Way To The Egress".
Sure Linux is stable, sure it's free and all that junk. But where's the *showmanship*?
My contention has always been that failure to maintain backward compatability between VRML-1 and VRML-97 *seriously wounded* VRML. It isn't dead.
As for parsers, I have seen yacc compatable grammars for VRML-1 and VRML-97. I'm not sure what you mean by trivially parseable. The VRML grammars are certainly a lot easier to understand than the C-grammar.
I felt no need for a generated lexer/parser when I wrote my first VRML software back in '96. I wrote it all by hand, and continue to write parsers by hand, but maybe that's just me.
Wow... all of the sudden, Slashdot==comp.lang.vrml
Unfortunately, the API and the file format both appear to be called Open Inventor. At least, I have heard many people use the same phrase to mean too different things.
So, do you mean Open Inventor as in Free Beer, or Open Inventor as in Free Speach?
Of course you develop apps with the API, and of course the apps don't have to be used for stupid web graphics. That remark was tangential to... awwww fagedaboutit.
Open Inventor, as the FAQs will tell you, is a 3d format designed to work with OpenGL.
Mark Pesce used Inventor as a starting point for VRML-1 around 1995. VRML-1 was the first real attempt to create a standard 3d file format that would work over the web. It has seen limited success as a standard of exchange betweed CAD programs.
A second version of VRML based loosely on VRML-1 (but not backward compatable with it) was proposed by one of the major industry players and rapidly became an ISO standard in 1997. By many arguments, it failed as a standard because the required plugin is not installed by default. There are other reasons too, but by and large, mention of VRML still gets a "huh?" even from some fairly computer savvy people.
The next version of VRML being developed by the Web3D Consortium is based on XML. The tags are designed such that conversion from VRML97 to X3D is quite straightforward. If X3D is built into IE and Mozilla, we could finally see the standard VR format gaining acceptance.
As for all the Open Source software flying around in the 3d community now, it tends to make things less exciting from a money point of view. OTOH, I'm sure the same web designers who like to make bandwidth hogging flash sites are getting very excited now.
I am obviously biased in certain areas. Other, less biased histories can be found at: http://hiwaay.net/~crispen/vrml/history.html
Well, if they strip out all the GNU tools, which they probably would for a net appliance, then this would be justified.
Hey, at least it's probably not a lemon.
I can see a time when Windows and Linux developers will meet somewhere in the middle; I just hope we won't all be carrying weapons when we do...
Dibs on the rocket launcher.
You just said the same thing I've been saying a long, long, time. You probably said it more eloquently than I ever have. Thank-you.
I might add, it's frustrating when I say I like Windows, and people automaticly assume I like NT. Not so. I think NT is a lame server, just like so many others do. But on a consumer desktop, which is where I do most of my computing, Win9x rules.
You might say that my ideal experience is surfing to websites that run *NIX, using my Win9x PC.
meta http-equiv="pics-label" content='(pics-1.1 "http://www.rsac.org/ratingsv01.html" l gen true comment "RSACi North America Server" for "http://www.playboy.com" on "1996.05.04T06:51-0800" r (n 4 s 3 v 0 l 4))'
Of course, not all pornographers are as responsable as Playboy, but it's a start.
I think keeping out all the fly-by-night-look-at-me-I-got-a-porn-CD-and-put-it -on-line people is impossible.
Such complex design. Keep it simple:
1. Check for body odor. If body odor is found, shower every day and use deoderant.
2. Check to make sure belly is not hanging over belt. If it is, start exercising.
3. Check to make sure your job does not involve french fries. If it does, get a better job. You don't have to be a Rockefeller, but you at least have to be able to convince women that they won't end up living in a van. Women hate that.
4. Check to make sure you are not underconfident.
5. Check to make sure you really want to settle down. Visit the suburbs, and ask yourself if you're really ready to live there, because you know it will happen if you get married and have kids.
6. Whatever you do, I repeat, *whatever* you do, don't try to figure out women like the last guy said. If women could be figured, believe me, somebody woulda done it.
Someplace else it said the engine supplies 75N at what looks like maximum power. Now:
g=10 m/s^2.
1N=1kg * 1m/s^2 (F=ma)
So, let's assume lawn chair + human + fuel + control system + misc = 150kg.
That's 1500N so you need at least 20 of those bad boys.
I was thinking that 4 on the back of a bicycle might provide a nice assist up hill, but it would probably be loud, and I'd hate to be riding this if it blew up.