talks about how in the future the net will be less about computers and more about the net (eg astronomy isn't about telescopes)
This analogy is flawed. The network is to computers what empty space is to astronomy. Light is to a telescope as information is to a computer. Information traverses the network just as light traverses empty space (although not quite so efficiently).
The statement is also flawed. Who really cares about the network, other than those who maintain it? The only time I ever think about the network is when it goes down. What I care about is the stuff that's on the network. I want to get stuff from the network that makes the PC better.
This is not to say that the network is not important, only that it is a means to an end, not the end itself.
Accountant: Hey Taco, ad revenues are down this week. Do something.
Taco: Don't worry I'll post another Microsoft article.
Accountant: Thank God for Microsoft, gauranteed 500 post articles. I see you're poking fun of Microsoft for using the term "grass roots". Do you think anybody is going to realize that your average joe really likes Microsoft? Have they seen the ABC polls? Do they ever talk to mechanics, soccer moms, those kinds of people?
Taco: No, for them "grass roots" is the Linux hacker community.
Accountant: Well, I guess that's to be expected from people who call "outside" the "big blue room with the bright light".
Fairly quick into this, I expect the military to adopt this into cheap and easy mimetic armor systems.
You must mean "chameleon cloth". It's been a goal for a while, and this will bring it closer to reality. A few tiny cameras on one side of the tank feed pictures to the cloth on the other side, and vice-versa. Presto! a huge armoured vehicle has a visual profile the size of the camera openings, which could probably be pinholes.
You need some real sophisticated intelligent image processing and projection technology to hide shadows and depressions in the soil. If your tank is rolling across the desert, you can't hide the dust either.
Another difficulty will be getting it to hold up under fire. If the enemy suspects armoured vehicles on the field, they can spray random fire and damage the surface. Then there are other detection techniques--thermo, radar, etc...
In short, build better camo, and the enemy will build better detection.
The beauty of/. is that you can read it wherever you can get web access: work, home, the library. I don't feel like trying to persuade the library system or my boss to install and maintain a slash client.
Come on, you fantastic/. developers: figure out a way to add kill files to/. user profiles. I want to put "Whatever happened to beer" in my kill list. Splice it into the moderation system so that if a particular user is in the kill profile of more than 90% of the users who use kill profiles, that user loses karma or gets posted at a lower level.
After someone on USENET mentioned some version of gcc that was modified in a very specialized way, and sold for $5000, that got me thinking. Under the GPL (and many other open source licenses), you don't have to reveal source unless you distribute. If the price point is really, really high, the fact that you are giving the product away (after the sale) won't matter.
Think about it. Sure, people burn red-hat CDs and give them to their friends all the time. It's only a few bucks. Pizza money. What's a pizza among friends? OTOH, some business that payed $5000 for a system is not gonna just burn it and give it to a friend.
This obviously only works if the system you are selling is worth that kind of money. What you are describing sounds like a fairly specialized mission-critical business application--the niche for which I've anticipated that this business model for open source could be successful.
This model obviously fails for small, general purpose, consumer applications (drawing programs, spreadsheets, word processors and the like). Nobody will pay $5000 for that kind of stuff.
I have also toyed with the idea of anouncing that all my software will be Open Source. But it will cost you $200,000. Hey, Free Speach is what matters, not Free Beer, right?:)
As a salesman for your company, I'd approach customers and sell them a system which includes software that they will be allowed to modify and customize without legal restrictions. Sounds like a good product now, eh?
Coming soon: encrypted sound card protocol, and de-encryption chips with an encrypted input on one side, and analog output on the other. This can probably be patched onto existing DSP hw, and it will remain backward compatable with unencrypted raw data APIs. Then, the only way you can decrypt is to get inside the black caterpiller, or use an FPGA that emulates it or something. Still vulnerable, but no longer a casual hack. People who want to do this will have to agree on a protocol (difficult for the vendors to cooperate) and then they will have to push it in the market place and wait for it to achieve saturation level. They will start putting it on portable players first. Given consumer education and the level of coordination this will take, I give it about as much chance as DIVX, but you never know.
I know, we'll change the language. That'll fix everything.
"Holdup" Convenience store owners often refer to this kind of prohibited payment as a "holdup". In this way, they imply that illegal payments are ethicly equivalent to preventing people from ariving at work on time by stopping all the trains and buses in the city. If you don't believe that illegal payments are just like transportation disruptions, you might prefer not to use the word "holdup" to describe it. Neutral terms such as "prohibited payment" or "unauthorized wealth transfer" are available for use instead. Some of us might even prefer to use a positive term such as "encouraging local businesses to give something back to the community".
My VRML software is being built on some Open Source components (zlib, libpng, and libjpeg), but notice that I drew a distinction between market pressures due to piracy and market pressures due to Free Software/Open Source. The latter are a legitimate, natural part of the development of things in a free market economy. If you lose to Open Source, you lose fair and square.
Nothing I've done is "warezed" and any use of Open Source in my work is legal and properly documented. I don't see how you can put me in the same category as some gangster from Hong Kong with a CD replicator.
ASP model is all about piracy prevention. You can't pirate a service as easily as you can pirate a product. Will it benefit the consumer? Of course not. Thank the pirates. Welcome to the future, where you will here people saying "I can't use my word processor, the network is down".
You might want to thank the Free Software movement too. You can't really sell free software. You can sell a service. Software vendors pressured by falling values for software sold in the traditional manner will do what they can to follow the ASP model.
I've seen plenty of people worrying that they don't want their code used by someone else to make money. To these people I suggest a)you're being a bit arrogant and stupid (I'll let you figure out why), and b)you're forgetting what makes open-source software "better".
You've got a good idea here, but haven't expressed it very well. Indeed it is a myth that GPL will protect developers from being exploited. The reason it is a myth is because taking source and making it proprietary is only one of many ways to exploit somebody.
Just look at all the GPL'd software that is used to run corporate servers.
In economic terms, the BSD team helping Apple write an OS (by maintaining the BSD kernel) is no different than Linux hackers helping ISPs run web servers (by maintaining the Linux kernel).
The real difference here is that Linux hackers are helping all corporations except those who sell proprietary software.
Now, their reasoning for this is centered around the idea that proprietary software is evil. If they want to say that, fine, but don't go telling us that writing under the GPL will prevent us from being exploited. It simply isn't true.
Is this like slashdot's version of the "numbers" stations
No. All 3 of those stories that were posted in the last 1 day have only a 33% chance of containing hidden meanings for 7 specific individuals.
#VRML V2.0 utf8
Re:Another quickie: Clinton gave out his passphras
on
1.21 Quickiewatts
·
· Score: 2
I wonder if anyone's tried to get/etc/passwd from whitehouse.gov released under the Freedom of Information Act?
FOIA has exceptions for national security, and I'm sure that's how they'd argue against releasing that information. Either that, or they'd give you a printout with lots of black rectangles where the sensitive data is. That's always fun.
#VRML V2.0 utf8
Re:Real link to Packard Bell article
on
1.21 Quickiewatts
·
· Score: 2
Not that it matters. Packard Bells worked about as well as that link. We used to call them Packard H*** in tech support.
...that the smaller the organism, the more careful we should be. After all, if somebody botches up and creates a bunch of overly flatulant geneticly engineered cows, we can just slaughter them. But if somebody screws up and creates mutated flies with a poisonous sting, we will have to have massive insecticide drops. Worse yet, if somebody screws up and creates an airborne bacterial disease, we could all die.
Now humans are the exception to my "small is dangerous" rule because there is no ethical way to kill them (forgetting the animal rights arguments for a minute).
Of course, I could say more, but why bother. This is probably the 789th post.
Of course I thought of all that. I simply wanted to point out that a lot of people were looking at this from a "the glass is half empty" point of view.
There is a 10 million $ prize for the first private space shot, but you have to reach 100km.
Oh well, I guess he's not doing it for the prize anyway, but it seems like a shame to risk your life and not get the honor. I think there is some other millionare using a much more sensible approach involving a 747 boosted rocket plane.
...maybe I've been looking at the computer too much. When I glanced at the headline, for a minute it looked like the legality of thinking was going to be tested. Then again... who knows.
Slashdot Mirror
talks about how in the future the net will be less about computers and more about the net (eg astronomy isn't about telescopes)
This analogy is flawed. The network is to computers what empty space is to astronomy. Light is to a telescope as information is to a computer. Information traverses the network just as light traverses empty space (although not quite so efficiently).
The statement is also flawed. Who really cares about the network, other than those who maintain it? The only time I ever think about the network is when it goes down. What I care about is the stuff that's on the network. I want to get stuff from the network that makes the PC better.
This is not to say that the network is not important, only that it is a means to an end, not the end itself.
I still can't find where my cat hides all afternoon
He's playing with the sock that you lost in the dryer.
Accountant: Hey Taco, ad revenues are down this week. Do something.
Taco: Don't worry I'll post another Microsoft article.
Accountant: Thank God for Microsoft, gauranteed 500 post articles. I see you're poking fun of Microsoft for using the term "grass roots". Do you think anybody is going to realize that your average joe really likes Microsoft? Have they seen the ABC polls? Do they ever talk to mechanics, soccer moms, those kinds of people?
Taco: No, for them "grass roots" is the Linux hacker community.
Accountant: Well, I guess that's to be expected from people who call "outside" the "big blue room with the bright light".
Yep you're right; I guess you'd need holographic chameleon cloth then. It'll be a *while* before we have any kind of decent holographic display.
Fairly quick into this, I expect the military to adopt this into cheap and easy mimetic armor systems.
You must mean "chameleon cloth". It's been a goal for a while, and this will bring it closer to reality. A few tiny cameras on one side of the tank feed pictures to the cloth on the other side, and vice-versa. Presto! a huge armoured vehicle has a visual profile the size of the camera openings, which could probably be pinholes.
You need some real sophisticated intelligent image processing and projection technology to hide shadows and depressions in the soil. If your tank is rolling across the desert, you can't hide the dust either.
Another difficulty will be getting it to hold up under fire. If the enemy suspects armoured vehicles on the field, they can spray random fire and damage the surface. Then there are other detection techniques--thermo, radar, etc...
In short, build better camo, and the enemy will build better detection.
it's really hard to imagine Dell fudging a benchmark to make Linux look better than Windows.
No it ain't. HW vendors like Linux because they no longer have to pay the "Microsoft Tax".
Yeah, perhaps I got a bit carried away by suggesting it should get mixed up with the moderation system, which I agree works pretty well.
As for browsing at level 2, well... I have to admit. Some of the trolls are amusing.
The beauty of /. is that you can read it wherever you can get web access: work, home, the library. I don't feel like trying to persuade the library system or my boss to install and maintain a slash client.
Come on, you fantastic /. developers: figure out a way to add kill files to /. user profiles. I want to put "Whatever happened to beer" in my kill list. Splice it into the moderation system so that if a particular user is in the kill profile of more than 90% of the users who use kill profiles, that user loses karma or gets posted at a lower level.
After someone on USENET mentioned some version of gcc that was modified in a very specialized way, and sold for $5000, that got me thinking. Under the GPL (and many other open source licenses), you don't have to reveal source unless you distribute. If the price point is really, really high, the fact that you are giving the product away (after the sale) won't matter.
Think about it. Sure, people burn red-hat CDs and give them to their friends all the time. It's only a few bucks. Pizza money. What's a pizza among friends? OTOH, some business that payed $5000 for a system is not gonna just burn it and give it to a friend.
This obviously only works if the system you are selling is worth that kind of money. What you are describing sounds like a fairly specialized mission-critical business application--the niche for which I've anticipated that this business model for open source could be successful.
This model obviously fails for small, general purpose, consumer applications (drawing programs, spreadsheets, word processors and the like). Nobody will pay $5000 for that kind of stuff.
I have also toyed with the idea of anouncing that all my software will be Open Source. But it will cost you $200,000. Hey, Free Speach is what matters, not Free Beer, right? :)
As a salesman for your company, I'd approach customers and sell them a system which includes software that they will be allowed to modify and customize without legal restrictions. Sounds like a good product now, eh?
Somebody had to say it.
Coming soon: encrypted sound card protocol, and de-encryption chips with an encrypted input on one side, and analog output on the other. This can probably be patched onto existing DSP hw, and it will remain backward compatable with unencrypted raw data APIs. Then, the only way you can decrypt is to get inside the black caterpiller, or use an FPGA that emulates it or something. Still vulnerable, but no longer a casual hack. People who want to do this will have to agree on a protocol (difficult for the vendors to cooperate) and then they will have to push it in the market place and wait for it to achieve saturation level. They will start putting it on portable players first. Given consumer education and the level of coordination this will take, I give it about as much chance as DIVX, but you never know.
I know, we'll change the language. That'll fix everything.
"Holdup"
Convenience store owners often refer to this kind of prohibited payment as a "holdup". In this way, they imply that illegal payments are ethicly equivalent to preventing people from ariving at work on time by stopping all the trains and buses in the city. If you don't believe that illegal payments are just like transportation disruptions, you might prefer not to use the word "holdup" to describe it. Neutral terms such as "prohibited payment" or "unauthorized wealth transfer" are available for use instead. Some of us might even prefer to use a positive term such as "encouraging local businesses to give something back to the community".
#VRML V2.0 utf8
VRML makes you a type of pirate too
My VRML software is being built on some Open Source components (zlib, libpng, and libjpeg), but notice that I drew a distinction between market pressures due to piracy and market pressures due to Free Software/Open Source. The latter are a legitimate, natural part of the development of things in a free market economy. If you lose to Open Source, you lose fair and square.
Nothing I've done is "warezed" and any use of Open Source in my work is legal and properly documented. I don't see how you can put me in the same category as some gangster from Hong Kong with a CD replicator.
#VRML V2.0 utf8
ASP model is all about piracy prevention. You can't pirate a service as easily as you can pirate a product. Will it benefit the consumer? Of course not. Thank the pirates. Welcome to the future, where you will here people saying "I can't use my word processor, the network is down".
You might want to thank the Free Software movement too. You can't really sell free software. You can sell a service. Software vendors pressured by falling values for software sold in the traditional manner will do what they can to follow the ASP model.
#VRML V2.0 utf8
I've seen plenty of people worrying that they don't want their code used by someone else to make money. To these people I suggest a)you're being a bit arrogant and stupid (I'll let you figure out why), and b)you're forgetting what makes open-source software "better".
You've got a good idea here, but haven't expressed it very well. Indeed it is a myth that GPL will protect developers from being exploited. The reason it is a myth is because taking source and making it proprietary is only one of many ways to exploit somebody.
Just look at all the GPL'd software that is used to run corporate servers.
In economic terms, the BSD team helping Apple write an OS (by maintaining the BSD kernel) is no different than Linux hackers helping ISPs run web servers (by maintaining the Linux kernel).
The real difference here is that Linux hackers are helping all corporations except those who sell proprietary software.
Now, their reasoning for this is centered around the idea that proprietary software is evil. If they want to say that, fine, but don't go telling us that writing under the GPL will prevent us from being exploited. It simply isn't true.
#VRML V2.0 utf8
Is this like slashdot's version of the "numbers" stations
No. All 3 of those stories that were posted in the last 1 day have only a 33% chance of containing hidden meanings for 7 specific individuals.
#VRML V2.0 utf8
I wonder if anyone's tried to get /etc/passwd from whitehouse.gov released under the Freedom of Information Act?
FOIA has exceptions for national security, and I'm sure that's how they'd argue against releasing that information. Either that, or they'd give you a printout with lots of black rectangles where the sensitive data is. That's always fun.
#VRML V2.0 utf8
Not that it matters. Packard Bells worked about as well as that link. We used to call them Packard H*** in tech support.
#VRML V2.0 utf8
...that the smaller the organism, the more careful we should be. After all, if somebody botches up and creates a bunch of overly flatulant geneticly engineered cows, we can just slaughter them. But if somebody screws up and creates mutated flies with a poisonous sting, we will have to have massive insecticide drops. Worse yet, if somebody screws up and creates an airborne bacterial disease, we could all die.
Now humans are the exception to my "small is dangerous" rule because there is no ethical way to kill them (forgetting the animal rights arguments for a minute).
Of course, I could say more, but why bother. This is probably the 789th post.
#VRML V2.0 utf8
Of course I thought of all that. I simply wanted to point out that a lot of people were looking at this from a "the glass is half empty" point of view.
#VRML V2.0 utf8
If they had posted an article (or two) stating that the U.S. was going to resume above-ground testing, how would that make you feel?
This is the "alternative" that they are always talking about in those debates. So, quit whining or we're gonna have to make Nevada glow.
#VRML V2.0 utf8
Now that's a headline.
There is a 10 million $ prize for the first private space shot, but you have to reach 100km.
Oh well, I guess he's not doing it for the prize anyway, but it seems like a shame to risk your life and not get the honor. I think there is some other millionare using a much more sensible approach involving a 747 boosted rocket plane.
For more information, check out http://www.xprize.org/.
...maybe I've been looking at the computer too much. When I glanced at the headline, for a minute it looked like the legality of thinking was going to be tested. Then again... who knows.