Although nano technology has the promise of being able to build copies of itself like bacteria and indeed infect people with bacteria like infections, it is in fact a machine and not life and therefore its use in warefare is entirely lawful.
A new international conference needs to be held in order to add these agents to the list of banned weapons of war.
Otherwise we may indeed see contries developing the "grey plague."
Additionally it seems that our technology always seems to get out from under our control through the law of unintended consequences.
We need to have an international safety board to review all research in the area of nano technology and to slow down the release of wild strains of nanobots into the environment. Some will still get out, but at a slower, more manageable rate than otherwise.
Does this sound like the begining of some grade B horror flick to anyone else?
Prior to Virtual Motion's breakthrough, galvanic stimulation of the vestibular system had only been used for medical treatment and/or the diagnosis of balance disorders.
Gee, maybe prolonged (~8 hours a day for a year) exposure will hurt peoples sense of balance. And don't tell me that you can't play video games that long, because _I_ did it in college.
On the same insane desire for reality, they are going to start putting a few grams of radioactive toxic waste in the next doom package so that you can actually feel the effects of radiation poisoning...
People tend to forget that computers are basically a very thin 2D layer. All we have to do is to layer the computers and pipe refrigerant through tubes in the layers to pull the heat out.
Can you imagine how powerful a computer you would have if it was a cube a centimeter to a side and was completely packed with small low powered switches? As powerful as a supercomputer of today. And such computers will have fault tolerance to disable cuircuits that are malfunctioning and enable spare cuircuits.
And inside of ten years the technology to actually use neural nets in computers will come to market. This technology will allow computers to perform pattern matching and learning skills similarly to or even superior to humans, without wasting a lot of CPU on the problem.
Not to mention how much bigger we will be able to make these compucubes once we master the art of the high temperature superconductor. I.e. lower power consumption, greater heat dissapation.
Most data buses are being simplified to high speed serial access. The only external connections for the computer would be a gigabit serial connector and power. Storage, memory, other processors would all sit on this gigabit network. There would even be a bridge to route packets to the internet.
I think that with the correct software that a computer like this could essentially emulate a human being.
But then the software is always the rub. If the most popular desktop environment is based on software design from close to 30 years ago and it still has reliablity problems, how well do you think that we will be able to write computer programs that emulate the person writing the program?
With the correct software the current hardware is powerful enough to understand the spoken word and respond apropriately, within very stringent limits. About the level of an ant, but with speach.
The only problem is that even a dog can do very smart things that a modern computer can't, like recognize motivations and identify friends from foes. If I was in my yard with my dogs and someone walks up to the fence and tries to enter the yard, my dogs bark at that person. If I tell the dogs to shut up and let the person in, they stop barking and want to be petted. If the person goes away and comes back, the dogs bark at the person again. If I am not in the yard the dogs will show a lot of aggression.
But the dogs never bark at the neighbors grandchildren and will go act cute so that the child will pet them through the fence.
Sometimes a dog messes up and attacks a child, but not very often. A mechanical guard dog would be a very dangerous thing and might accidentally attack you instead of an intruder. And with opposing chainsaws for teeth, it could get messy.
I think that we will have a computer about the le vel of HAL by 3001. I think that with HAL's help we will be able to translate ourselfs into a machine equivilant of ourselves within a few centuries after that. Say 3500.
And the great thing is that these predictions are comfortably long after I am dead, so I won't be bothered by people saying, "You were wrong."
And if I am wrong and someone tells me so, my computer clone will kill them.
Wow, a real Open GL implementation for Linux. And this will be ported to *BSD too. Mesa was great, but it was slow. Xwindows 4.0 will take full advantage of all the improvements this offers.
Once this is in place with any decent card we will be able to do anything graphical as fast or faster than Windows. Linux will have as good a graphics subsystem at that point as BeOS. Move over SGI graphics workstations, Linux is here.
Exciting times lay ahead for all of us graphics junkies. Look for super fast X, great games and best of all, the ablility to write my own great graphics routines and have them be portable across multiple distributions/video cards.
I am thinking that I want to be able to use fog effects for a screen saver... After I haven't used the computer for a while, fog begins drifting across the screen, slowly bluring more and more of the screen as the fog grows heavy. As the screen darkens and swirls a howl peirces the night.
Funny how W2K comes in third in file performance, short TCP tests, doesn't interoperate with anyone else, and has no written documentation, yet still seems to come in first and get the award.
By their own admission Netware either beat Microsoft hands down or tied with Microsoft in all but the long TCP test. And funny how they only looked at optimizing _W2K_ when it did unexpectedly badly on a test. They probably could have modified Netware to do much better on the long TCP test if they had cared to. Can anyone say Netware got screwed?
And as far as Linux coming in last, what a crock. Linux came in first on short file writes, and short TCP writes. Linuxconf was given short shift considering that the underlying text mode of configuration is still available remotely from anything that supports telnet. And if they wanted a little more performance they could always just turn off X and get a few extra cycles that way.
For system monitoring under Linux try typing 'xosview'. This has been a standard tool for as long as I can remember and is much more responsive than anyone elses monitors. Not to mention the hundreds of other tools that are available. Not to mention that all of this information is also available through the/proc filesystem for use in automatic scripts.
And top shouldn't be overlooked either. With its fine grained ability to monitor and modify process priority on the fly it is the best tool in my book. Under top I can see when Netscape is growing out of control and kill it. I can find the processes which are taking all the processor and turn down their priority so the rest of the system gets its fair share. You just can't do this on non *NIX systems.
For managing users across machines, Redhat comes with NIS. Sure, it has its problems, but once you get it set up and running, it works like a charm. And *NIX boxes are the only ones that will map in the users home, utility and share directories to any *NIX box that the user logs into. This has the effect of the user getting their own environment and files no matter what workstation they log into. This just isn't possible under Netware or W2K. Not that the testers are even aware of this capability, as they have obviously never ran *NIX before.
Linux has file and print services for Netware, Windows, Mac, and *NIX. It is easy to configure a single Linux box to act as a file and print server for all four networks at the same time, while not having to load four clients on each of the users workstations. We all know how well loading competing network clients on a single workstation works (In case you have never tried it, not very well).
Stability and fault tolerance? I like how they talk up Microsoft, even though none of W2K's features are actually being used by anyone. Including Microsoft itself. For anything mission critical to Microsoft they use *NIX or mainframes. Hotmail runs Solaris and *BSD, not W2K. Because W2K doesn't scale anything like *NIX.
As far as documentation, they neglect to mention the fact that you also get a/usr/doc directory with notes on every package in your system, man pages, info pages and a complete set of html based HOWTO's that describe in easy to understand terms how things work and how to configure them to work the way you want.
I am sick and tired of these people rating software and saying that something is bad because it is a command line utility. This, in and of itself, doesn't make a utility bad. In fact, it is relatively easy for command line utilities to have a graphical shell written for them(xcdroast anyone), that still allows you to use the underlying command line tool in scripts and the like. I don't care how easy a graphical tool is to use, it is not as flexible as a command line utility and _someone_ has to be their to fill in the blanks and press ok.
Command line utilites are only cryptic if you haven't read the man page. If you haven't read the man page you shouldn't be playing with a tool on a production box, graphical or command line.
And they didn't even have catagories for the areas in which Linux truely shines; development tools, scripting languages, shell environments, programming language support, and internet services.
But it seems to me that Microsoft is practicing FUD against NDS and Novell is giving detail examples of the problems with Active Directory. These are two different things entirely and I auplaud Novell for their restraint.
One of the bigest issues I have with AD is that it only runs on W2K. It isn't even backwards compatible to Windows 98/95 or even Windows 3.1 which a lot of businesses are still using. And the fact that they took a thing like kerberos and perverted it to be proprietary and incompatible with the standard kerberos is beyond belief. "Embrace and Extend" anyone?
Novell works and plays well with others. Novell supplies clients to work with nearly every OS so that you can use their servers or not and NDS is seperate from their servers. You can run NDS on a network without _any_ Novell servers.
All in all I think that Novell is playing very fair against an unscrupulous opponent.
I am sick of lawyers thinking that they can tell people what to do. I am getting the software and posting it to my own web site on a page where I talk about freedom of speech. I don't even own a DVD player.
If everyone does this I think that we can shut _them_ up. After all, they can't go after all of us.
I supported the patent on a method of cloning earlier today and I said that it was an example of the patent system working to protect the life work of a team of researchers. A patent on the idea of an on-screen guide is an example of a really bad patent.
Tivo is so revolutionary and so far ahead of its time. I would think that by merging the features of a digital VCR into an onscreen guide that TIVO could actually get a new patent on the manner in which they did this that superseeds all previous patents.
In a similar manner, if you took a basic invention and improved it in a non-obvious way you can re-patent it and get a monopoly on your new method. You still couldn't build the basic invention, only the new, improved invention.
In my opinion, these companies that patent ideas without ever intending to produce a product are bigger leaches than the cyber squatters who take domain names with the intention of selling them to the company later.
Why doesn't congress pass some laws to protect companies from these people?
And don't get me started on how general these patents are. They actually patented the general idea of on-screen interactive guides? This is so obvious that it is stupid.
"Gee, I have a tv card in my machine and a feed to TV guide. Hmmm, channel that I want to watch, tuner all in the same computer... I know, I will change to that channel when I click a button." This doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure out.
And they didn't spend any money to reseach the idea, so if there patent gets overturned, it isn't like they have lost anything.
This patent is as insane as the patent on "one-click shopping."
These researchers have a formula to produce clones. They are only trying let everyone know exactly how their process works, while protecting their lifes work.
This is exactly what the patent process is supposed to do. Otherwise these researchers would keep their work secret and that would hold back other peoples work. People would have to reinvent the wheel everytime they wanted to do any research at all.
They are not abusing the patent process by trying to patent life or something obvious to anyone. They aren't broadly trying to patent the whole idea of cloning, only one method of doing so.
We all know that the DVD CCA can't really think that they can make people stop distributing DeCSS. This is all just a big smoke screen for what they are really trying to do.
Could the DVD CCA be attacking a bunch of young people because they thought that those people were too poor to defend themselves from a crack team of lawyers?
The DVD CCA thought that they could walk right over those naive programmers and get the judge to hand them a court order with which they would use to bludgeon the rest of us back into line.
It makes me proud to see so many people pulling together to support these fellow programmers.
The only thing that has me worried is the fact that the same people that own the DVD CCA also own the press in the US. I have yet to see even a single news article or report in favor of the defendants in this case.
To listen to the main stream media the defendants are all pirates who want to rob everyone blind and sell inferior products.
I hope that the judge isn't as gullable as the DVD CCA thinks that he is.
Here are the facts that I believe to be true. I am wrong about most of them to hear the DVD CCA talk.
Fact: You don't need to decode the DVD's in order to copy them.
Fact: You do need to decode them in order to watch them or to make an archival copy of them.
Fact: It is perfectly legal for a person in the US to make an archival copy of any digital media that they own as long as they don't distribute them and as long as they only make a _reasonable_ number of archival copies. Reasonable being whether or not the judge thinks you were trying to pirate the software!
Fact: You may defeat any copy protection that is in place in order to make your archival copies. This is a court case that we won in the early 1980's. Why do you think all the software vendors stopped copy protecting their software?
Fact: Big business (and big government) will always harass the little guy in order to get him to fall into line. As long as we can show solidarity toward each other we are safe.
Usenet newsgroups used to get flamed all the time.
I think that the bigest problem is that before we could only influence a few people at a time within ear shot. And we have social conventions to keep our public behavior in check. Or we could write a book and it would be published a year from now and someone might read it a year or more after that.
A writer rarely writes contraversial articles and publishers rarely print them. When the article is published somewhere, it is normally in a magazine that only people who feel a certain way have gone to the trouble to subscribe to.
Windows users rarely get upset about an article in Linux Journal, because they don't subscribe to that magazine.
But discusion groups like slashdot tend to draw from a wide audience. And many of the articles are opinion pieces, like _this_ article. It is impossible to prove one way or another.
Many people, including myself, find Jon Katz to be a little irritating. But that is OK with me. He probably finds me irritating. *S*
The problem comes in when someone sees an article that is brand new. And the article really doesn't have any concrete facts to contradict. But they know that the article is wrong. And the answer to their problem is only a "reply now" button away...
So they attack the author. They must correct the error of his ways as quickly as possible, so that he can retract his horrenous article before anyone else can be inflicted with it.
But it doesn't matter that this type of argument argument is false. All that matters is that the person forced you to defend yourself. And by defending yourself you make it seem like there was something to the other persons argument. Ipso facto, the person has dragged you down to their level of "are not, are too" argument.
The best response to people like this is a polite reply thanking them for their response to your article. Don't defend yourself, because there is absolutely nothing to be gained by doing so. And you know that you are right anyway. *L*
Or that's what I think anyway. Take it or leave it, it's only my opinion.
My old mp3 player, mp3studio used to have those annoying gaps as well.
I am now using xmms and it seamlessly plays entire ripped cd's using a playlist. Use grip to rip the cd's and generate the playlist.
On another note, I think that we need a standard format for mp3 CDROM's. I would love to be able to pop my mp3 CDROM into a portable player, a computer or a car sterio and have it know in each case where the music and the playlists were located.
I propose that we use a directory structure of
/type_of_music/artist/album
where type of music is country, R and B, rock, various....
artist is the name of the group or individual that performed the work
alblum is the name of the collection of songs, singles should be used for a groups set of singles.
all the MP3's will be located in the album level of the subdirectory and each album subdirectory will contain a single M3U of the tracks that are present in that subdirectory.
There could also be one or more M3U's at the type_of_music and artist level to give a higher level view of how to play the music on the CDROM.
For instance, At the root level you could have M3U's called sad.m3u and dance.m3u all.m3u that contain colectively only sad songs, only dance songs and all the music on the cdrom respecively.
How does this sound? Anyone else have any ideas about how to do something like this?
Leave the sofware just as free as it has always been, but offer support only to those who are willing to pay for that support.
Many people who would like to use your product probably need help setting it up and integrating it into their systems.
Set up a very professional looking site, it would be worth paying a specialist to help you create custom graphics and a consistant design.
Then provide information in the documentation, or if it is a Xwindow based product, provide a help button that is a little sales blurb to your web site. And if they can just click a button on your app and it launches a browser with a window to your support site, so much the better.
You can offer configuration classes. Charge people around a thousand dollars a head for a weeks worth of class. Offer this class at least once a quarter. Businesses love sending their employees to these things. Employees love going to a nice location and getting a little break from their day to day jobs.
Keep in mind that you will spend a week getting ready for the class and will need a break afterward. Teaching is very hard work.:)
You can also offer phone support at a set fee per minute. Get a 900 number for this. Or you can charge a set fee for a set number of incidents, or for a set period of time. I would charge at least $250 per incident, $1,000 for 10 incidents, or a $2,500 a year support contract. This is for off site _only._
If they want you to come on-site then we are talking time and materials, oh yeah buddy! I wouldn't charge less than $125 an hour for this service and would start charging when I left the house and would stop charging when I got back. And they would pick up the tab on all your food, travel and lodging while you worked for them. You'll need a platinum card or an American Express card for this. Get a Purchase Order from the company _before_ you jump on a jet plane. Or drive across country.
Don't forget to charge a billing fee if they go over 30 days and 60 days. If they go over 90 days they probably aren't going to pay. Contact a lawyer...
Once you get all of this running smoothly you can then hire a couple of people to answer the phones and to go running over god's green earth, and to manage your business, while you program and ensure that all the other people keep working.
You may find that you are spending less time programming than you did before you started all this, but that is the life of the consultant.
HP has a clone that emulates _all_ the functionallity of echange server. The location of the site is here.
And there is even an offer of 50 free licenses! And the web based mail interface looks awesome.
I liked the article. Brian Livingstone was fair to both Microsoft and Linux. He basically pointed out that consumers want stability and security, two features that Microsoft fails to deliver and that Linux does deliver.
He wants Microsoft to improve their products and sees Linux as pointing the way to a better computer platform, one that has stability, security, and ease of use.
But Mr. Livingstone is still missing the big picture. The reason that Linux is gaining such a big share is that Linux uses open standards. Linux works and plays well with others. Linux doesn't want to be the only choice. Linux wants to be one of many choices.
And Linux runs on just about every computer platform right now that will support a multitasking OS. Everything from palmtops, to routers, to the desktop, to servers, all the way up to the most powerful supercomputers in the world.
Most of the software that runs on Linux also runs on a dozen other OSes. If your samba server under Linux doesn't have enough power, put in a Sun Enterprise server in its place, also running samba.
In contrast, Microsoft makes proprietary every standard that they touch. They can't seem to help themself. Everyone uses sendmail, they use exchange. Everyone uses java, they use j++. They are even trying to pervert perl right now by adding windows only extentions to the language. Microsoft does want to be your only choice.
Microsoft runs only on one platform. The x86. Given that there is a wide range of power in this venerable processor and the IA64 is coming, but even then you don't have much choice of vendors.
Microsoft only writes applications for one platform. Yes, they have done a little work with the macs, but only as an after thought.
I think that Linux is the tip of a new way of doing things that gives the consumer maximum choice.
I think that Bill is just now realizing that. Microsoft will need to change and change radically to keep any of their marketshare. You may not even recognize MS in a few years.
I wonder if we can store the crypto in a Linux distribution in sorce code form and have the user execute a command after install to compile and install the code?
Maybe we could have a little checkbox during install to run the command for the user?
Paragraph 3 wasn't specific in the bit sizes that it would allow, which scares me.
And would the distribution fee that is charged for Linux on CD's be misunderstood as a fee for the source code?
Isn't this to see if we can archive the bits on the media that we buy? Didn't we already win this case against the software industry back in the '70's?
That is when the software companies sued a few companies that were making archival copies of software. The judge in that case said that people can make copies of software for archival purposes. And that customers were allowed to defeat anti-copy measures that the manufacturer had installed on the media (floppy disks at the time.)
The case was a joke then and it is a joke now. The manufacturers what us to goto them for the hardware and software that are needed to play their movies. I bet that if the players didn't have this encryption scheme that they would be less than $75 right now.
So what somebody has broken the encrytion scheme. If they didn't want someone to do this they should have _patented_ the technology. Now they are whining in court that someone in Norway is giving away their trade secrets.
Well BooHoo, that person never signed an agreement with the companies that he wouldn't give away trade secrets. If that person had been an employee of the company then this argument would make a lot of sense.
Now they are claiming that all of us had agreed to not reverse engineer the software because of the shrink wrap agreement that comes with every player. I am so glad someone is finally trying to sue someone over shrink wrapped licenses. This will expose them for the sham that they are.
I don't agree to any contract that I haven't signed. Especially one that I don't even see until after I have already purchased something. Especially when these agreements effectively say that I can't do anything to the company if their product causes me harm and that the product isn't actually suitable for anything. And that I don't really own the product that I am holding in my hand and that I had just paid my good hard dollars for.
Of course I can sue the software company if I use their product in the way that it was marketed and it causes me harm. Of course I own the product and all of its bits if I paid money for it. And I own all the little bits on my own computer.
I will be so glad when the judge throws out the shrink wrap agreements for the sham that they are.
Slashdot Mirror
Although nano technology has the promise of being able to build copies of itself like bacteria and indeed infect people with bacteria like infections, it is in fact a machine and not life and therefore its use in warefare is entirely lawful.
A new international conference needs to be held in order to add these agents to the list of banned weapons of war.
Otherwise we may indeed see contries developing the "grey plague."
Additionally it seems that our technology always seems to get out from under our control through the law of unintended consequences.
We need to have an international safety board to review all research in the area of nano technology and to slow down the release of wild strains of nanobots into the environment. Some will still get out, but at a slower, more manageable rate than otherwise.
Prior to Virtual Motion's breakthrough, galvanic stimulation of the vestibular system had only been used for medical treatment and/or the diagnosis of balance disorders.
Gee, maybe prolonged (~8 hours a day for a year) exposure will hurt peoples sense of balance. And don't tell me that you can't play video games that long, because _I_ did it in college.
On the same insane desire for reality, they are going to start putting a few grams of radioactive toxic waste in the next doom package so that you can actually feel the effects of radiation poisoning...
Oooohhh, look at how the green slime glows...
Oh really?
What was the model number of these Cray compucubes?
Can you point me to a resource that talks about them?
And please, be specific.
People tend to forget that computers are basically a very thin 2D layer. All we have to do is to layer the computers and pipe refrigerant through tubes in the layers to pull the heat out.
Can you imagine how powerful a computer you would have if it was a cube a centimeter to a side and was completely packed with small low powered switches? As powerful as a supercomputer of today. And such computers will have fault tolerance to disable cuircuits that are malfunctioning and enable spare cuircuits.
And inside of ten years the technology to actually use neural nets in computers will come to market. This technology will allow computers to perform pattern matching and learning skills similarly to or even superior to humans, without wasting a lot of CPU on the problem.
Not to mention how much bigger we will be able to make these compucubes once we master the art of the high temperature superconductor. I.e. lower power consumption, greater heat dissapation.
Most data buses are being simplified to high speed serial access. The only external connections for the computer would be a gigabit serial connector and power. Storage, memory, other processors would all sit on this gigabit network. There would even be a bridge to route packets to the internet.
I think that with the correct software that a computer like this could essentially emulate a human being.
But then the software is always the rub. If the most popular desktop environment is based on software design from close to 30 years ago and it still has reliablity problems, how well do you think that we will be able to write computer programs that emulate the person writing the program?
With the correct software the current hardware is powerful enough to understand the spoken word and respond apropriately, within very stringent limits. About the level of an ant, but with speach.
The only problem is that even a dog can do very smart things that a modern computer can't, like recognize motivations and identify friends from foes. If I was in my yard with my dogs and someone walks up to the fence and tries to enter the yard, my dogs bark at that person. If I tell the dogs to shut up and let the person in, they stop barking and want to be petted. If the person goes away and comes back, the dogs bark at the person again. If I am not in the yard the dogs will show a lot of aggression.
But the dogs never bark at the neighbors grandchildren and will go act cute so that the child will pet them through the fence.
Sometimes a dog messes up and attacks a child, but not very often. A mechanical guard dog would be a very dangerous thing and might accidentally attack you instead of an intruder. And with opposing chainsaws for teeth, it could get messy.
I think that we will have a computer about the le vel of HAL by 3001. I think that with HAL's help we will be able to translate ourselfs into a machine equivilant of ourselves within a few centuries after that. Say 3500.
And the great thing is that these predictions are comfortably long after I am dead, so I won't be bothered by people saying, "You were wrong."
And if I am wrong and someone tells me so, my computer clone will kill them.
;)
Wow, a real Open GL implementation for Linux. And this will be ported to *BSD too. Mesa was great, but it was slow. Xwindows 4.0 will take full advantage of all the improvements this offers.
Once this is in place with any decent card we will be able to do anything graphical as fast or faster than Windows. Linux will have as good a graphics subsystem at that point as BeOS. Move over SGI graphics workstations, Linux is here.
Exciting times lay ahead for all of us graphics junkies. Look for super fast X, great games and best of all, the ablility to write my own great graphics routines and have them be portable across multiple distributions/video cards.
I am thinking that I want to be able to use fog effects for a screen saver... After I haven't used the computer for a while, fog begins drifting across the screen, slowly bluring more and more of the screen as the fog grows heavy. As the screen darkens and swirls a howl peirces the night.
Funny how W2K comes in third in file performance, short TCP tests, doesn't interoperate with anyone else, and has no written documentation, yet still seems to come in first and get the award.
/proc filesystem for use in automatic scripts.
/usr/doc directory with notes on every package in your system, man pages, info pages and a complete set of html based HOWTO's that describe in easy to understand terms how things work and how to configure them to work the way you want.
By their own admission Netware either beat Microsoft hands down or tied with Microsoft in all but the long TCP test. And funny how they only looked at optimizing _W2K_ when it did unexpectedly badly on a test. They probably could have modified Netware to do much better on the long TCP test if they had cared to. Can anyone say Netware got screwed?
And as far as Linux coming in last, what a crock. Linux came in first on short file writes, and short TCP writes. Linuxconf was given short shift considering that the underlying text mode of configuration is still available remotely from anything that supports telnet. And if they wanted a little more performance they could always just turn off X and get a few extra cycles that way.
For system monitoring under Linux try typing 'xosview'. This has been a standard tool for as long as I can remember and is much more responsive than anyone elses monitors. Not to mention the hundreds of other tools that are available. Not to mention that all of this information is also available through the
And top shouldn't be overlooked either. With its fine grained ability to monitor and modify process priority on the fly it is the best tool in my book. Under top I can see when Netscape is growing out of control and kill it. I can find the processes which are taking all the processor and turn down their priority so the rest of the system gets its fair share. You just can't do this on non *NIX systems.
For managing users across machines, Redhat comes with NIS. Sure, it has its problems, but once you get it set up and running, it works like a charm. And *NIX boxes are the only ones that will map in the users home, utility and share directories to any *NIX box that the user logs into. This has the effect of the user getting their own environment and files no matter what workstation they log into. This just isn't possible under Netware or W2K. Not that the testers are even aware of this capability, as they have obviously never ran *NIX before.
Linux has file and print services for Netware, Windows, Mac, and *NIX. It is easy to configure a single Linux box to act as a file and print server for all four networks at the same time, while not having to load four clients on each of the users workstations. We all know how well loading competing network clients on a single workstation works (In case you have never tried it, not very well).
Stability and fault tolerance? I like how they talk up Microsoft, even though none of W2K's features are actually being used by anyone. Including Microsoft itself. For anything mission critical to Microsoft they use *NIX or mainframes. Hotmail runs Solaris and *BSD, not W2K. Because W2K doesn't scale anything like *NIX.
As far as documentation, they neglect to mention the fact that you also get a
I am sick and tired of these people rating software and saying that something is bad because it is a command line utility. This, in and of itself, doesn't make a utility bad. In fact, it is relatively easy for command line utilities to have a graphical shell written for them(xcdroast anyone), that still allows you to use the underlying command line tool in scripts and the like. I don't care how easy a graphical tool is to use, it is not as flexible as a command line utility and _someone_ has to be their to fill in the blanks and press ok.
Command line utilites are only cryptic if you haven't read the man page. If you haven't read the man page you shouldn't be playing with a tool on a production box, graphical or command line.
And they didn't even have catagories for the areas in which Linux truely shines; development tools, scripting languages, shell environments, programming language support, and internet services.
But it seems to me that Microsoft is practicing FUD against NDS and Novell is giving detail examples of the problems with Active Directory. These are two different things entirely and I auplaud Novell for their restraint.
One of the bigest issues I have with AD is that it only runs on W2K. It isn't even backwards compatible to Windows 98/95 or even Windows 3.1 which a lot of businesses are still using. And the fact that they took a thing like kerberos and perverted it to be proprietary and incompatible with the standard kerberos is beyond belief. "Embrace and Extend" anyone?
Novell works and plays well with others. Novell supplies clients to work with nearly every OS so that you can use their servers or not and NDS is seperate from their servers. You can run NDS on a network without _any_ Novell servers.
All in all I think that Novell is playing very fair against an unscrupulous opponent.
I am sick of lawyers thinking that they can tell people what to do. I am getting the software and posting it to my own web site on a page where I talk about freedom of speech. I don't even own a DVD player.
If everyone does this I think that we can shut _them_ up. After all, they can't go after all of us.
I supported the patent on a method of cloning earlier today and I said that it was an example of the patent system working to protect the life work of a team of researchers. A patent on the idea of an on-screen guide is an example of a really bad patent.
Tivo is so revolutionary and so far ahead of its time. I would think that by merging the features of a digital VCR into an onscreen guide that TIVO could actually get a new patent on the manner in which they did this that superseeds all previous patents.
In a similar manner, if you took a basic invention and improved it in a non-obvious way you can re-patent it and get a monopoly on your new method. You still couldn't build the basic invention, only the new, improved invention.
In my opinion, these companies that patent ideas without ever intending to produce a product are bigger leaches than the cyber squatters who take domain names with the intention of selling them to the company later.
Why doesn't congress pass some laws to protect companies from these people?
And don't get me started on how general these patents are. They actually patented the general idea of on-screen interactive guides? This is so obvious that it is stupid.
"Gee, I have a tv card in my machine and a feed to TV guide. Hmmm, channel that I want to watch, tuner all in the same computer... I know, I will change to that channel when I click a button." This doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure out.
And they didn't spend any money to reseach the idea, so if there patent gets overturned, it isn't like they have lost anything.
This patent is as insane as the patent on "one-click shopping."
Maybe Linus can patent the process used to clone *NIX?
That way he could sue anyone who used his method to clone any OS.
These researchers have a formula to produce clones. They are only trying let everyone know exactly how their process works, while protecting their lifes work.
This is exactly what the patent process is supposed to do. Otherwise these researchers would keep their work secret and that would hold back other peoples work. People would have to reinvent the wheel everytime they wanted to do any research at all.
They are not abusing the patent process by trying to patent life or something obvious to anyone. They aren't broadly trying to patent the whole idea of cloning, only one method of doing so.
This is a _good_ thing.
We all know that the DVD CCA can't really think that they can make people stop distributing DeCSS. This is all just a big smoke screen for what they are really trying to do.
Could the DVD CCA be attacking a bunch of young people because they thought that those people were too poor to defend themselves from a crack team of lawyers?
The DVD CCA thought that they could walk right over those naive programmers and get the judge to hand them a court order with which they would use to bludgeon the rest of us back into line.
It makes me proud to see so many people pulling together to support these fellow programmers.
The only thing that has me worried is the fact that the same people that own the DVD CCA also own the press in the US. I have yet to see even a single news article or report in favor of the defendants in this case.
To listen to the main stream media the defendants are all pirates who want to rob everyone blind and sell inferior products.
I hope that the judge isn't as gullable as the DVD CCA thinks that he is.
Here are the facts that I believe to be true. I am wrong about most of them to hear the DVD CCA talk.
Fact: You don't need to decode the DVD's in order to copy them.
Fact: You do need to decode them in order to watch them or to make an archival copy of them.
Fact: It is perfectly legal for a person in the US to make an archival copy of any digital media that they own as long as they don't distribute them and as long as they only make a _reasonable_ number of archival copies. Reasonable being whether or not the judge thinks you were trying to pirate the software!
Fact: You may defeat any copy protection that is in place in order to make your archival copies. This is a court case that we won in the early 1980's. Why do you think all the software vendors stopped copy protecting their software?
Fact: Big business (and big government) will always harass the little guy in order to get him to fall into line. As long as we can show solidarity toward each other we are safe.
Usenet newsgroups used to get flamed all the time.
I think that the bigest problem is that before we could only influence a few people at a time within ear shot. And we have social conventions to keep our public behavior in check. Or we could write a book and it would be published a year from now and someone might read it a year or more after that.
A writer rarely writes contraversial articles and publishers rarely print them. When the article is published somewhere, it is normally in a magazine that only people who feel a certain way have gone to the trouble to subscribe to.
Windows users rarely get upset about an article in Linux Journal, because they don't subscribe to that magazine.
But discusion groups like slashdot tend to draw from a wide audience. And many of the articles are opinion pieces, like _this_ article. It is impossible to prove one way or another.
Many people, including myself, find Jon Katz to be a little irritating. But that is OK with me. He probably finds me irritating. *S*
The problem comes in when someone sees an article that is brand new. And the article really doesn't have any concrete facts to contradict. But they know that the article is wrong. And the answer to their problem is only a "reply now" button away...
So they attack the author. They must correct the error of his ways as quickly as possible, so that he can retract his horrenous article before anyone else can be inflicted with it.
But it doesn't matter that this type of argument argument is false. All that matters is that the person forced you to defend yourself. And by defending yourself you make it seem like there was something to the other persons argument. Ipso facto, the person has dragged you down to their level of "are not, are too" argument.
The best response to people like this is a polite reply thanking them for their response to your article. Don't defend yourself, because there is absolutely nothing to be gained by doing so. And you know that you are right anyway. *L*
Or that's what I think anyway. Take it or leave it, it's only my opinion.
My old mp3 player, mp3studio used to have those annoying gaps as well.
I am now using xmms and it seamlessly plays entire ripped cd's using a playlist. Use grip to rip the cd's and generate the playlist.
On another note, I think that we need a standard format for mp3 CDROM's. I would love to be able to pop my mp3 CDROM into a portable player, a computer or a car sterio and have it know in each case where the music and the playlists were located.
I propose that we use a directory structure of
/type_of_music/artist/album
where type of music is country, R and B, rock, various....
artist is the name of the group or individual that performed the work
alblum is the name of the collection of songs, singles should be used for a groups set of singles.
all the MP3's will be located in the album level of the subdirectory and each album subdirectory will contain a single M3U of the tracks that are present in that subdirectory.
There could also be one or more M3U's at the type_of_music and artist level to give a higher level view of how to play the music on the CDROM.
For instance, At the root level you could have M3U's called sad.m3u and dance.m3u all.m3u that contain colectively only sad songs, only dance songs and all the music on the cdrom respecively.
How does this sound? Anyone else have any ideas about how to do something like this?
Leave the sofware just as free as it has always been, but offer support only to those who are willing to pay for that support.
:)
Many people who would like to use your product probably need help setting it up and integrating it into their systems.
Set up a very professional looking site, it would be worth paying a specialist to help you create custom graphics and a consistant design.
Then provide information in the documentation, or if it is a Xwindow based product, provide a help button that is a little sales blurb to your web site. And if they can just click a button on your app and it launches a browser with a window to your support site, so much the better.
You can offer configuration classes. Charge people around a thousand dollars a head for a weeks worth of class. Offer this class at least once a quarter. Businesses love sending their employees to these things. Employees love going to a nice location and getting a little break from their day to day jobs.
Keep in mind that you will spend a week getting ready for the class and will need a break afterward. Teaching is very hard work.
You can also offer phone support at a set fee per minute. Get a 900 number for this. Or you can charge a set fee for a set number of incidents, or for a set period of time. I would charge at least $250 per incident, $1,000 for 10 incidents, or a $2,500 a year support contract. This is for off site _only._
If they want you to come on-site then we are talking time and materials, oh yeah buddy! I wouldn't charge less than $125 an hour for this service and would start charging when I left the house and would stop charging when I got back. And they would pick up the tab on all your food, travel and lodging while you worked for them. You'll need a platinum card or an American Express card for this. Get a Purchase Order from the company _before_ you jump on a jet plane. Or drive across country.
Don't forget to charge a billing fee if they go over 30 days and 60 days. If they go over 90 days they probably aren't going to pay. Contact a lawyer...
Once you get all of this running smoothly you can then hire a couple of people to answer the phones and to go running over god's green earth, and to manage your business, while you program and ensure that all the other people keep working.
You may find that you are spending less time programming than you did before you started all this, but that is the life of the consultant.
This is my form of humor, please do not flame me. ;)
I am wondering how this naming convention got started. English does have a plural form when discusing multiple instances of a thing.
If I only had one window up at a time then I would need something to manage a window. Let's call this a window manager.
But since I often have multiple windows up, wouldn't I need a something to manage all my windows? Let's call this a windows manager.
And since these managers all now handle icons and taskbars and the like, perhaps a better term would be display manager?
But now all the OS'es support multiple displays!!!
So what we should really call it is a displays manager!
HP has a clone that emulates _all_ the functionallity of echange server. The location of the site is here.
And there is even an offer of 50 free licenses! And the web based mail interface looks awesome.
I liked the article. Brian Livingstone was fair to both Microsoft and Linux. He basically pointed out that consumers want stability and security, two features that Microsoft fails to deliver and that Linux does deliver.
He wants Microsoft to improve their products and sees Linux as pointing the way to a better computer platform, one that has stability, security, and ease of use.
But Mr. Livingstone is still missing the big picture. The reason that Linux is gaining such a big share is that Linux uses open standards. Linux works and plays well with others. Linux doesn't want to be the only choice. Linux wants to be one of many choices.
And Linux runs on just about every computer platform right now that will support a multitasking OS. Everything from palmtops, to routers, to the desktop, to servers, all the way up to the most powerful supercomputers in the world.
Most of the software that runs on Linux also runs on a dozen other OSes. If your samba server under Linux doesn't have enough power, put in a Sun Enterprise server in its place, also running samba.
In contrast, Microsoft makes proprietary every standard that they touch. They can't seem to help themself. Everyone uses sendmail, they use exchange. Everyone uses java, they use j++. They are even trying to pervert perl right now by adding windows only extentions to the language. Microsoft does want to be your only choice.
Microsoft runs only on one platform. The x86. Given that there is a wide range of power in this venerable processor and the IA64 is coming, but even then you don't have much choice of vendors.
Microsoft only writes applications for one platform. Yes, they have done a little work with the macs, but only as an after thought.
I think that Linux is the tip of a new way of doing things that gives the consumer maximum choice.
I think that Bill is just now realizing that. Microsoft will need to change and change radically to keep any of their marketshare. You may not even recognize MS in a few years.
We will have to beef up the network security to keep crackers from deactivating the software...
;)
Looks like a few hundred hours of consulting fees from every business in the world...
Life _is_ good.
I wonder if we can store the crypto in a Linux distribution in sorce code form and have the user execute a command after install to compile and install the code?
Maybe we could have a little checkbox during install to run the command for the user?
Paragraph 3 wasn't specific in the bit sizes that it would allow, which scares me.
And would the distribution fee that is charged for Linux on CD's be misunderstood as a fee for the source code?
Isn't this to see if we can archive the bits on the media that we buy? Didn't we already win this case against the software industry back in the '70's?
That is when the software companies sued a few companies that were making archival copies of software. The judge in that case said that people can make copies of software for archival purposes. And that customers were allowed to defeat anti-copy measures that the manufacturer had installed on the media (floppy disks at the time.)
The case was a joke then and it is a joke now. The manufacturers what us to goto them for the hardware and software that are needed to play their movies. I bet that if the players didn't have this encryption scheme that they would be less than $75 right now.
So what somebody has broken the encrytion scheme. If they didn't want someone to do this they should have _patented_ the technology. Now they are whining in court that someone in Norway is giving away their trade secrets.
Well BooHoo, that person never signed an agreement with the companies that he wouldn't give away trade secrets. If that person had been an employee of the company then this argument would make a lot of sense.
Now they are claiming that all of us had agreed to not reverse engineer the software because of the shrink wrap agreement that comes with every player. I am so glad someone is finally trying to sue someone over shrink wrapped licenses. This will expose them for the sham that they are.
I don't agree to any contract that I haven't signed. Especially one that I don't even see until after I have already purchased something. Especially when these agreements effectively say that I can't do anything to the company if their product causes me harm and that the product isn't actually suitable for anything. And that I don't really own the product that I am holding in my hand and that I had just paid my good hard dollars for.
Of course I can sue the software company if I use their product in the way that it was marketed and it causes me harm. Of course I own the product and all of its bits if I paid money for it. And I own all the little bits on my own computer.
I will be so glad when the judge throws out the shrink wrap agreements for the sham that they are.
to Mark Ewing and Michael Tiemann in their new positions.
Does anyone know what the Red Hat Center for Open Source is actually doing?