"What is the one thing that you need in order for your business to be successful?" --This question was asked in a survey of entrepreneurs. It turned out that those who answered correctly tended to later have successful businesses, and those who answered incorrectly tended to later fail.
The correct answer is "customers". The Linux companies that are now struggling seem to have not understood this. In the real world, there are few customers who want Linux support. Most Linux-using customers actually want computer systems support. Consider this: if something goes wrong, the customer does not want to call ten different vendors, each of whom points their finger at the others. In fact, most customers don't really care about the OS at all; they only care about the applications software. Of course, the OS affects the applications, but customers just want solutions--period.
IBM is a company that understands all this well. IBM is planning to invest a billion dollars in Linux this year alone. IBM is very astute businesswise, and they obviously expect to get a good return on their investment. Why? Because they are going to give the customer what the customer wants.
IBM (specifically, their General Services Division) will provide a customer with support for the entire computer system. So whenver support is needed, the customer just calls IBM. This is what real customers want.
In many cases, that system will run Linux, because Linux has some technological advantages. You know this; I know this; and IBM's service people know this. The customer needn't know, likely doesn't care, and definitely doesn't want to care. The customer wants solutions that work, and someone else to fix the problems. IBM can make money by providing support and by selling hardware, middleware, and applications software. The customer gets a good well-supported system. Linux use spreads almost incidentally....
CONCLUSION. The demise of Linux support companies just means that those companies did not know the first thing about business (literally). It does not mean anything negative for Linux. What will affect Linux is the advent of companies that include Linux support as part of their overall customer support.
_________________________________
"To fall in love is easy, even to remain in it is not difficult; our human
loneliness is cause enough. But it is a hard quest worth making to find a
comrade through whose steady presence one becomes steadily the person one
desires to be." --Anna Louise Strong
This question was asked by Dr. Tom in the original Gnutella announcement (see here). The Britannica is the encyclopedia--it is truly superb. The company behind Britannica, though, is already suffering financially. Additional competition from Nupedia might be enough to push them over the edge.
Britannica's demise would definitely not be in our best interest. Why can't the Nupedia people just work with Britannica? Only Nupedia's ego would lose.
__________________________________ "Is it a book you would even wish your wife or your servants to read?"
--prosecuting lawyer, for the British government, arguing against
permitting publication of D. H. Lawrence's "Lady Chatterly's Lover" (1960)
Not everyone agrees that you need a really high level of math. Richard Feynman, one of greatest physicists ever, had this fairly simple explanation:
Newton's Second Law, which we have expressed by the equation
F = d(mv)/dt,
was stated with the tacit assumption that m is a constant, but we now kinow that this is not true, and that the mass of a body increases with velocity. In Einstein's corrected formula m has the value
m = m0/sqrt(1 - v^2/c^2),
where the "rest mass" m0 represents the mass of a body that is not moving and c is the speed of light.... For those who want to learn just enough about it so they can solve problems, that is all there is to the theory of relativity--it just changes Newton's laws by introducing a correction factor to the mass.
--R. P. Feynman, The Feynmann Lectures On Physics, vol. I, ch. 15 (emphasis added)
Newton's Second Law is more commonly expressed as F = ma, where a is acceleration: a = d(v)/dt.
There is something in economics called "The Law of Supply and Demand". People (I hope) know this. Perhaps those who comment on California's electricity problems could bear it in mind. In CA, the underlying problem is that, although demand for energy has risen rapidly in the past decade, CA has built very little new generating capacity--i.e. little new supply. As to why there has been so little new generating capacity, The Economist has this to say:
... state officials deserve full blame, for they have found plenty of ways to discourage firms from building new power plants.
James Hoecker, chairman of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, put it this way:
As disappointing as it may seem to some, we cannot "price cap" California out of a supply shortage....
His sarcasm is merited. You should not expect investment in a market that has arbitrary price rollbacks and an uncertain and hostile regulatory environment.
California deregulated electricity in the hope of milking power companies. It cannot work like that. Here in Britain, as in Scandinavia, electricity deregulation has gone smoothly.
___________________________________________ "Plea se leave your values at the front desk" --sign posted in a Paris hotel
The ASP site with "this message" will likely get Slashdotted; so here is the message:
Sorry, the browser you currently use is not supported by this site.
This column focuses on Microsoft (only) technologies (take data binding and xsl for example) and, as
an
intranet applications developer, I dont see any reason for me to bother myself with works of horror
such as netscape (no offense, its a fact).
This site's traffic (as well as the world's) is 90% Internet Explorer, I wont bother with compatibility issues
over a misely 10% who use an inferior browser.
In order to view this resource please switch to Internet Explorer 4 or higher.
This is the first study describing an association between radiofrequency radiation exposure and uveal melanoma [eye cancer].
So it does seem to be the first for eye cancer.
The abstract briefly mentions the other studies to which you refer:
There are few epidemiologic studies dealing with electromagnetic radiation and uveal melanoma. The majority of these studies are exploratory and are based on job and industry titles only. We conducted a....
As for increasing growth rate of melanocytes, this is hardly surprising. Melanocytes reproduce and produce pigment in response to electromagnetic radiation (this is how you tan). It would have to be shown that melanocytes reproduce at an unusually high rate when exposed to microwaves (of the levels emitted by cell phones), as compared with the reproduction rate from exposure to sunlight. In short, until someone shows that melanocytes react more strongly to cell-phone level radiation than to sunlight, this is a straw man.
...
Good for him. It sounds like he's a responsible scientist who's found a correlation worthy of further increase. He also has at least the beginnings of a mechanism to explain the correlation. Unfortunately, the Sunday Times has done the usual media thing, and overreacted. One study does not a fact make.
Regarding your first point, are you saying that melanocytes in the eye produce pigment (resulting in tanning) due to sunlight? If so, it's untrue: people have the same eye colour with or without lots of sunlight; uvea do not tan.
Regarding your second point, the Sunday Times was just reporting the study (in layman's terms) as it appeared in Epidemology. There's nothing wrong with this. The study presents EVIDENCE for a link. No more; no less. The Slashdot story, the Sunday Times, and the article in Epidemology made this clear.
Sara Chan (story submitter)
_____________________________ "To fall in love is easy, even to remain in it is not difficult; our human
loneliness is cause enough. But it is a hard quest worth making to find a
comrade through whose steady presence one becomes steadily the person one
desires to be." --Anna Louise Strong
Yeah sure, he'll get off. But how nicely will he be treated if he is held in jail? Just him and the cops, alone together--with them angry with him for mocking them. And it will be the cops's word against his if he complains about it after.
Why is this (comment #11) moderated as "Funny"? The following is a quote from The Economist article:
The holy grail... would be a system in which users had permanent digital certificates on their computers containing details of age, citizenship, sex, professional credentials, and so on. Such technology... would let governments reclaim their authority.... Lawrence Lessig, a law professor at Stanford University, warns that e-commerce firms will push for such certificates and that governments may one day require them.
You won't think it's so funny if it happens.
___________________________ Fish are always the last to discover that they are in the ocean.
Just to correct that last bit--PayPal does NOT take any percentage. The service is entirely free. I know of no problems with it. Except, of course, that if its use becomes widespread, it might seriously harm current distribution channels (such as the MPAA, RIAA, etc.) and their profits.
One drawback might be currency conversion costs. PayPal now seems to have gone more international, but the web really needs a single currency.
IBM recently announced that they plan to spend a billion dollars supporting Linux. As I understand things, if CPRM becomes common, then Linux will be very severely harmed. Thus CPRM will severely harm IBM's billion-dollar investment. Yet IBM is supporting CPRM. This support is bad for IBM.
Is IBM aware of this?--or is it that IBM is so big, the part dealing with CPRM is unaware of the implications for Linux? If the latter, then maybe just making IBM aware of things will help to kill of CPRM, or at least IBM's support for it.
Put the article from The Register with the following quote from Mercury News:
``We will not license this technology for hard drives for PCs. Period,'' [Intel spokesman C.] Mulloy said.
Put together, this means that Intel is being blatantly dishonest. Again.
So in fighting CPRM, it is not enough to use logic, reasonableness, or sense. Intel, and others, don't care about such things. They have to be shown that CPRM is not in their best interests. With IBM, this might not be too difficult: IBM just committed a gigadallar to Linux--and they won't want that wasted.
With Wall Street firms, you get an annual bonus that is typically larger than your basic annual salary. So everybody works for their bonus, which is paid (as a lump sum) at the end of each year. Companies can save a lot of money by firing people just before bonuses are paid. And this has occassionally happens: e.g. with First Boston around 1990 and with CSFB (Europe) around 1995.
Some people worked hard the whole year, and then, right at the end, were told that they were fired. Many of the people that got fired were good, but each company decided that sacking large numbers of employees just before bonus time was the best way to increase its profits. Real trauma resulted.
On Wall Street, these things are much disliked, but accepted with the jobs.
____________________________
"... the microkernel approach was essentially a dishonest approach aimed at receiving more dollars for research. I don't necessarily think these researchers were knowingly dishonest. Perhaps they were simply stupid. Or deluded." --Linus Torvalds on kernel research by Computer Scientists (in Open Sources)
2001-01-04 22:49:49 New Nuclear Spacecraft: Travel To Mars In Two Week (articles,science) (rejected)
Maybe each editor should be required to give his name when rejecting a story, so as to take responsibility. He might even give a short reason for the rejection--just like moderators have to give a short reason for their scoring.
I find it interesting that the various content industries are willing to go through all of that for a 90% solution in order to strip away fair use rights rather than use much simpler watermarking techniques....
Watermarking is a MUCH WORSE thing than CPRM. Watermarks are audible. Thus the music is degraded. The only good thing about watermarks is that they can be removed--that's what the SDMI hacking challenge was all about!
I agree with comment #59. Here are three suggestions that might help.
First, more device drivers for non-IBM hardware. IBM has made the fantastic decision to make its own hardware work with Linux. Could IBM use its superb business skills to persuade other hardware manufacturers to do the same?
Second, better documentation. IBM documentation tends to be very thorough and accurate. Linux documentation tends to be... do I even have to say?
Third, an excellent GUI. Linux will never dominate the world if its presence on the desktop is insignificant. Developing an excellent GUI requires closeness with end users and top ergonomics skills--both of which IBM has in abundance.
Whatever IBM does though, let's be clear that we are extremely happy for it.
The Association for Computing Machinery has a "special interest group" devoted to APL: SIGAPL. SIGAPL publishes an informal journal, much of which is available online at their website.
The research shows that the Internet can survive random failures extremely well. But the Internet is very vulnerable to targeted attacks. The research might help to show how to best alleviate that vulnerability. To quote from the American Institute of PhysicsBulletin of Physics News summary:
"... the powerful percolation-based approach may help Internet architects to maximize resistance against Internet attacks, by controlling the distribution of nodes having certain numbers of connections."
If you go to the trouble of actually reading the CNN story, you find out that it is not a real nerve transplant. Nerves in the infant's left arm were damaged, and the mother's nerves were put inside the infant, but...
"Her nerves are
not providing any function. They are serving as conduits, pathways to direct the child's own nerves to grow back together."
(emphasis added)
The mother's nerves do not carry any of the electro-chemical signals that the infant could use to move or feel its arm.
______________ "Is it a book you would even wish your wife or your servants to read?"
--prosecuting lawyer, for the British government, arguing against
permitting publication of D. H. Lawrence's "Lady Chatterly's Lover" (1960)
In the early 1980s, I lived in a small town in Canada (Waterloo). There was a referendum then about whether or not to have fluoride in the drinking water. The "pro" side was strongly backed by the WHO.
The "con" side was led by a fellow student. The student just kept repeating the same thing: "look at the evidence, then make up your own mind." I didn't take his advice. Instead, I assumed that if the WHO was advocating fluoridation so strongly, then it must be good. The majority of people seem to have thought the same: the "pro" side won the referendum.
In the last few years the official story on fluoridation has changed. Fluoridation might be far more dangerous than was supposed at the time of the referendum. Children's toothpaste is now with very low--or no--fluoride, for that reason. The safety level for adults is not really known. In fact, at the time of the referendum, little was actually known about fluoride safety levels. Yet the WHO claimed that its proposed level of fluoridation was certainly safe for everyone.
There is a good "con" site at http://www.npwa.freeserve.co.uk/. This site is an important part of the campaign that has kept Britain 90% fluoridation-free.
I don't really know for sure, but I suspect that if the same situation existed today, the WHO would prevent a "con" website from going up under.health.
The WHO can make mistakes, there is lots of internal politics, and there is a great deal of conservatism in what is called "medical science". The WHO will face up to none of that on their own.
Another good example is with acupuncture. It is only in the last few years that proper experiments have been done, showing that stimulation of acupuncture points affects related areas of the brain. For example, stimulating the acupuncture point associated with hearing affects the part of the brain associated with hearing. And stimulating nearby skin has no effect. (There is an excellent summary article in The Economisthere and another good summary from Britannicahere ). Again, although the WHO might accept such sites now, they would likely not have done so ten or more years ago.
If the WHO really wants to encourage health, how about a special seal/label/badge that could be put on websites: "This cite certified by the World Health Organisation"? Such a seal would have many advantages, and avoid the main disadvantages, of a regulated.health TLD.
The original paper was published in Physical Review Letters. It is available here, but only the abstract is available to non-subscribers.
At present there is just the theory to make such "superlenses". No such lenses have actually been built.
In principle, superlenses can be made for most any electromagnetic radiation. In practice, finding materials with the right refractive index is going to be difficult. So far, there seem to be materials that will properly handle microwaves, radiowaves, and maybe visible light. The authors have this to say:
Such "superlenses" can be realized in the microwave band with current technology. Our simulations show that a version of the lens operating at the frequency of visible light can be realized in the form of a thin slab of silver. This optical version resolves objects only a few nanometers across.
The most important point was made by the Princton
team in their FAQs:
All hacks to SDMI attempted so far have been made without access to the watermarking algorithm. If SDMI is ever released to the public, however, someone will reverse engineer the algorithm--and post it on the web for all to see. As soon as that happens, SDMI will almost certainly be cracked more or less completely. The current contest wasn't at all close to a real-world test.
Slashdot Mirror
Microsoft's big claim--FREEDOM TO INNOVATE--is a claim that should not be made by Windoze users, but certainly can be made by Linux users!
The correct answer is "customers". The Linux companies that are now struggling seem to have not understood this. In the real world, there are few customers who want Linux support. Most Linux-using customers actually want computer systems support. Consider this: if something goes wrong, the customer does not want to call ten different vendors, each of whom points their finger at the others. In fact, most customers don't really care about the OS at all; they only care about the applications software. Of course, the OS affects the applications, but customers just want solutions--period.
IBM is a company that understands all this well. IBM is planning to invest a billion dollars in Linux this year alone. IBM is very astute businesswise, and they obviously expect to get a good return on their investment. Why? Because they are going to give the customer what the customer wants.
IBM (specifically, their General Services Division) will provide a customer with support for the entire computer system. So whenver support is needed, the customer just calls IBM. This is what real customers want.
In many cases, that system will run Linux, because Linux has some technological advantages. You know this; I know this; and IBM's service people know this. The customer needn't know, likely doesn't care, and definitely doesn't want to care. The customer wants solutions that work, and someone else to fix the problems. IBM can make money by providing support and by selling hardware, middleware, and applications software. The customer gets a good well-supported system. Linux use spreads almost incidentally....
CONCLUSION. The demise of Linux support companies just means that those companies did not know the first thing about business (literally). It does not mean anything negative for Linux. What will affect Linux is the advent of companies that include Linux support as part of their overall customer support.
_________________________________
"To fall in love is easy, even to remain in it is not difficult; our human loneliness is cause enough. But it is a hard quest worth making to find a comrade through whose steady presence one becomes steadily the person one desires to be." --Anna Louise Strong
IBM has plans to spend a billion dollars on Linux--this year alone.
Lots of other companies have employees working full time. There is LOTS OF MONEY.
GREAT story!! Thanks much for passing it on. I began programming near the end of that era, and I really appreciate it.
Britannica's demise would definitely not be in our best interest. Why can't the Nupedia people just work with Britannica? Only Nupedia's ego would lose.
__________________________________
"Is it a book you would even wish your wife or your servants to read?" --prosecuting lawyer, for the British government, arguing against permitting publication of D. H. Lawrence's "Lady Chatterly's Lover" (1960)
Newton's Second Law is more commonly expressed as F = ma, where a is acceleration: a = d(v)/dt.
James Hoecker, chairman of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, put it this way:
His sarcasm is merited. You should not expect investment in a market that has arbitrary price rollbacks and an uncertain and hostile regulatory environment.California deregulated electricity in the hope of milking power companies. It cannot work like that. Here in Britain, as in Scandinavia, electricity deregulation has gone smoothly.
___________________________________________
"Ple
So it does seem to be the first for eye cancer.
The abstract briefly mentions the other studies to which you refer:
Regarding your first point, are you saying that melanocytes in the eye produce pigment (resulting in tanning) due to sunlight? If so, it's untrue: people have the same eye colour with or without lots of sunlight; uvea do not tan.
Regarding your second point, the Sunday Times was just reporting the study (in layman's terms) as it appeared in Epidemology. There's nothing wrong with this. The study presents EVIDENCE for a link. No more; no less. The Slashdot story, the Sunday Times, and the article in Epidemology made this clear.
Sara Chan (story submitter)
_____________________________
"To fall in love is easy, even to remain in it is not difficult; our human loneliness is cause enough. But it is a hard quest worth making to find a comrade through whose steady presence one becomes steadily the person one desires to be." --Anna Louise Strong
The purpose might just be pure intimidation.
You won't think it's so funny if it happens.
___________________________
Fish are always the last to discover that they are in the ocean.
One drawback might be currency conversion costs. PayPal now seems to have gone more international, but the web really needs a single currency.
Is IBM aware of this?--or is it that IBM is so big, the part dealing with CPRM is unaware of the implications for Linux? If the latter, then maybe just making IBM aware of things will help to kill of CPRM, or at least IBM's support for it.
Put together, this means that Intel is being blatantly dishonest. Again.
So in fighting CPRM, it is not enough to use logic, reasonableness, or sense. Intel, and others, don't care about such things. They have to be shown that CPRM is not in their best interests. With IBM, this might not be too difficult: IBM just committed a gigadallar to Linux--and they won't want that wasted.
Some people worked hard the whole year, and then, right at the end, were told that they were fired. Many of the people that got fired were good, but each company decided that sacking large numbers of employees just before bonus time was the best way to increase its profits. Real trauma resulted.
On Wall Street, these things are much disliked, but accepted with the jobs.
____________________________
"... the microkernel approach was essentially a dishonest approach aimed at receiving more dollars for research. I don't necessarily think these researchers were knowingly dishonest. Perhaps they were simply stupid. Or deluded." --Linus Torvalds on kernel research by Computer Scientists (in Open Sources)
2001-01-04 22:49:49 New Nuclear Spacecraft: Travel To Mars In Two Week (articles,science) (rejected)
Maybe each editor should be required to give his name when rejecting a story, so as to take responsibility. He might even give a short reason for the rejection--just like moderators have to give a short reason for their scoring.
Watermarking is a MUCH WORSE thing than CPRM. Watermarks are audible. Thus the music is degraded. The only good thing about watermarks is that they can be removed--that's what the SDMI hacking challenge was all about!
First, more device drivers for non-IBM hardware. IBM has made the fantastic decision to make its own hardware work with Linux. Could IBM use its superb business skills to persuade other hardware manufacturers to do the same?
Second, better documentation. IBM documentation tends to be very thorough and accurate. Linux documentation tends to be ... do I even have to say?
Third, an excellent GUI. Linux will never dominate the world if its presence on the desktop is insignificant. Developing an excellent GUI requires closeness with end users and top ergonomics skills--both of which IBM has in abundance.
Whatever IBM does though, let's be clear that we are extremely happy for it.
The Association for Computing Machinery has a "special interest group" devoted to APL: SIGAPL. SIGAPL publishes an informal journal, much of which is available online at their website.
" ... the powerful percolation-based approach may help Internet architects to maximize resistance against Internet attacks, by controlling the distribution of nodes having certain numbers of connections."
The mother's nerves do not carry any of the electro-chemical signals that the infant could use to move or feel its arm.
______________
"Is it a book you would even wish your wife or your servants to read?" --prosecuting lawyer, for the British government, arguing against permitting publication of D. H. Lawrence's "Lady Chatterly's Lover" (1960)
The "con" side was led by a fellow student. The student just kept repeating the same thing: "look at the evidence, then make up your own mind." I didn't take his advice. Instead, I assumed that if the WHO was advocating fluoridation so strongly, then it must be good. The majority of people seem to have thought the same: the "pro" side won the referendum.
In the last few years the official story on fluoridation has changed. Fluoridation might be far more dangerous than was supposed at the time of the referendum. Children's toothpaste is now with very low--or no--fluoride, for that reason. The safety level for adults is not really known. In fact, at the time of the referendum, little was actually known about fluoride safety levels. Yet the WHO claimed that its proposed level of fluoridation was certainly safe for everyone.
There is a good "con" site at http://www.npwa.freeserve.co.uk/. This site is an important part of the campaign that has kept Britain 90% fluoridation-free.
I don't really know for sure, but I suspect that if the same situation existed today, the WHO would prevent a "con" website from going up under .health.
The WHO can make mistakes, there is lots of internal politics, and there is a great deal of conservatism in what is called "medical science". The WHO will face up to none of that on their own.
Another good example is with acupuncture. It is only in the last few years that proper experiments have been done, showing that stimulation of acupuncture points affects related areas of the brain. For example, stimulating the acupuncture point associated with hearing affects the part of the brain associated with hearing. And stimulating nearby skin has no effect. (There is an excellent summary article in The Economist here and another good summary from Britannica here ). Again, although the WHO might accept such sites now, they would likely not have done so ten or more years ago.
If the WHO really wants to encourage health, how about a special seal/label/badge that could be put on websites: "This cite certified by the World Health Organisation"? Such a seal would have many advantages, and avoid the main disadvantages, of a regulated .health TLD.
At present there is just the theory to make such "superlenses". No such lenses have actually been built.
In principle, superlenses can be made for most any electromagnetic radiation. In practice, finding materials with the right refractive index is going to be difficult. So far, there seem to be materials that will properly handle microwaves, radiowaves, and maybe visible light. The authors have this to say:
All hacks to SDMI attempted so far have been made without access to the watermarking algorithm. If SDMI is ever released to the public, however, someone will reverse engineer the algorithm--and post it on the web for all to see. As soon as that happens, SDMI will almost certainly be cracked more or less completely. The current contest wasn't at all close to a real-world test.