Maybe instead of a server they'd be better off building a super huge beowulf cluster to crank through data. That generates lots of heat and eats up lots of power, two problems the cluster wouldn't face in Alaska. You'd only need bandwidth to feed the cluster new problems to do and to receive results. That shouldn't be a problem with the existing bandwidth.
I get the impression that living room game playing will be just one of the selling points of the box, and one that Nokia will probably not put too much stock into. The webpage makes it clear that you are supposed to do internet browsing with it (Mozilla!). Maybe they want a deal with an ISP. But it would be much smarter to take advantage of an existing connection and make this box a router, the focus of a home network. Since it has Linux anyway, no extras are needed. Add to this TV-recording technology, but much better than Tivo because your computers have a network connection to the Nokia box. This could mean you could play the stuff back on your computer, and maybe even burn it on CD/DVD-R. It will also be a DVD player. I don't expect them to go crazy and get an ultrafast CPU or GPU, which will keep production costs low, low enough so that Joe Average browsing in Circuit City will say hmm, it's a DVD player (that also plays mp3 disks, video CD, and anything else that can run on Linux) and a digital recorder and a router and a network hub? Not a bad deal for US$350! (Price has obvously not been set, but $350 would not be less than production costs if they chose their components wisely.)
And then they're told it can play games too, many of which are free.
This is the sort of sales pitch that even I would take out my credit card for.
I hope you hate GTK and the Gimp (troll below)
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Eazel Come, Eazel Go?
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I was never able to trust the authors of the Gimp because it originally needed Motif to compile. Now granted, now it needs only GPLed software but I remember my history... You have to question the authors' commitment to free software if they were willing to use such an unfree toolkit to write their program. The very same people are responsible for GTK which is the core of Gnome--so I ask you, how can you trust the code of people who have obviously shown a willingness to compile against closed-source software?
Well, like you said, Harmony was almost far enough along when QT was freed to be usable as the core of KDE. So why do you also say "The KDE team would had to have rewritten Qt from the ground up"? They would not have needed to start on the ground--they would have finished the remaining 20% of Harmony and gone on. I just don't see what you people find so scary about this. Besides, the original "code under glass" license said that there will always be a gratis and up-to-date QT and if anything happens to TT to prevent this then the code gets released under a BSD license. This on its own prevented the "microsoft purchase" scenario.
So your point is that we can't trust KDE developers because some of them actually thought it was moral to work on KDE even before QT became fully open-sourced... That is just dumb, I'm sorry. If you had any evidence that KDE people "-ARE- happy inserting proprietary technology..." then someone might take what you wrote as more than a troll. A project that at one point picked usability over ideology but is now MUCH CLEANER ideologically than gnome can never escape its past. And don't the ends show that they DID NOT make a mistake? What is there to apologize for? Why don't you think that this was exactly their plan? Not only did they code the most usable desktop environment that UNIX has ever seen, but in the process lured a competent company to GPL what is arguably the most versatile toolkit on any platform--two incredible benefits for open source.
But here is a troll to match yours, only more in touch with reality, I think: It is the judgement of GNOME's leaders that endangers the freedom of our software. It is not KDE people who will hop in bed with some self-serving companies at the drop of a hat. Eazel was a perfect example, thought they obviously didn't pull this off -- but they tried: You can write GPL code that is as good as closed-source: make it so ugly, twisted and convoluted that in effect the company responsible for it are the only ones who can maintain it (let's take bets on nautilus). Then intergrate some features that benefit the company. They'll stay in as long as it's too much of a pain to maintain a fork without the crap (ugly code helps) and then you've got a company basically in controll of your supposedly free system. It's not that they can't be opposed, but they de-facto won't be. OK, so Eazel failed, but what do you think Ximian is after? What do you think Sun's motivations are for Gnomifying StarOffice? They know they can cram it down our throats with whatever features suit THEM; no one will bother compiling them out (certainly not RedHat!). Corporations are turning Gnome into nothing more than bait for us to do what they want us to, and still kiss their feet for their generosity. Yeah, I bet this is what you would call the ideological high road...
At this point I'd use KDE even if it weren't better. At least it's not a whore of the corporations, filled with their jizz.
Microsoft were hoping for this sort of a response from the open source community--one that stirs the common man (especially of the geek variety that appreciates theoretical physics) but not the upper-manager in charge of licensing decisions.
Microsoft is confident (perhaps irrationaly) that they can bulldoze a "loose-knit band of hobbyists" writing OSS, but the way they see it, two things could go wrong.
1) Companies with gangs of professional coders might decide to release commercially-viable software under the GPL. If HP, IBM, AOL (Mozilla), SGI (XFS), Sun (StarOffice) are allowed to set a trend, the resulting system would cause them headaches no "casual hackers" could induce.
Remember that Mundie is a running dog whose master commanded him to prevent this by oration. What he said was perfect: nobody gets rich in the software buisiness without owning IP. The argument is targeted for the ears of an upper-manager who matters, someone actually calling the shots about licensing. Sure, s/he may have techies who beg to have their code released (as long as they keep the jobs) and they may promise there are all kinds of other ways to make money. After Mundie's speech s/he will say "Oh yeah, like what? Is it the sort of sure bet that our company owes its shareholders, or are the motivations more "ideological"? Because if they are then I would have to be a crappy manager to take them seriously. I've been appointed to make the company rich, or at least stay above water--not to enforce justice.
Now in comes a rebuttal from Linus (paraphrased): "Open source produces great things; forbidding "giant-stacking" only hinders great things." Only an idiot could disagree. But someone who is making the final call about the licensing of some good software now feels this as a tension between the nobility creating great things and making money. Sure, there is some honor in being a Xerox-type: They'd have us by the balls if they defended their IP, but instead everyone else was allowed to make the personal computer revolution out of their ideas. Humanity is better off, but try explaining that to the stockholders!
Newton, Rutherford, Bohr, Einstein--giants who would have been much smaller had academic IP been closed--but how can this comfort a manager? Two problems: One is that not one of these guys was filthy rich, not within two orders of magnitude of Bill Gates. For an individual there is some glory in being poor and noble, but not for a company. The second problem is that all these guys are brilliant, and as an upper manager you can never assume your people are--but it's your job to make money anyway. Nobody uses a piece of GPL code unless they think it's the best that's available. The runner-ups fall into neglect. This is good news because the cream should rise to the top, but it's bad news if you're not sure whether what you have is creamy. One good example is AOL: they invested serious money in the development of Mozilla and it's beginning to work great, hell, I'm using it right now. But with Konqueror and other competition around, there is not even a guarantee people care about Mozilla in two years. This is because Mozilla might not be the absolute best OSS program of its kind. Same goes for XFS and StarOffice. So what's a manager to do? To succeed in OSS you have to make absolute best program available, and even if you do there is still no reliable model for sustaining a company (never mind getting rich). Who could go on and say "oh, let's do it anyway"? What sane venture capitalist would put his money down?
With these professional elements out of the way OSS again becomes a project of hobbyists and Microsoft feels safe. If it weren't for
2) Governments legislating OSS software for their departments or maybe even for their populations for whatever reasons./. is full of murmurings about this from France, Korea, China, Argentina and even certain US departments. Mundie has to try and stop this. Here he was not very convincing. His line about how IP boosts the economy could only ring true in the US, where Microsoft pays taxes. In the rest of the world, the allegation that Linux is un-american is the shrewdest advertising campaign possible. Anyway, we see Microsoft is worried about it, and it looks like they don't yet have a strategy for fixing it.
But they do have a perfect strategy for convincing capitalistic software firms to keep their code to themselves (and die clutching it). No one doubts this situation is a win for Microsoft.
I'm sure Taco's device wouldn't be stupidly designed like a TV/VCR box but be instead more like a computer. If the DVD-ROM fails you unplug it and replace it... and so with every other part. If the drive fails in your DVD component player you have to chuck the whole thing and pay a lot more for a replacement. And you don't have to pay an expert to fix a computer with a broken part, you just RTFM, find what's wrong and swap it out (not possible with any standalone device anymore). Isn't this more reasonable?
I keep seeing this argument in the forum, but I think it's stupid. If you're worried about parts of your computer system becoming obsolete or braking, you can trade them out without having to mess with the rest of the components. Is it really that much easier to throw out and replace a standalone DVD player than it is to replace a DVD-ROM, for example? I'm sure TIVO2 will have a much bigger hard drive and all you TIVO1 owners will weep. If you had a computer that had TIVO funcionality you would just buy an extra hard drive. It seems like the more reasonable thing to do, don't you think?
Big companies are pretending that the convergence device is something that was rejected by consumers. I don't believe it for a second.
First, my vision of the convergence future
People would love it if they could just hit "record" on their TV and a show would start saving to your computer's hard drive, and when there are spare cycles it would compress into DIVX. New SMP computers can already compress DTV into DIVX in real time, and it won't be long before they can also do HDTV. For playback you would just call up a simple file browswer on your TV and start watching. Then you could post the shows to usenet with your cable modem so that even people who don't get those channels can see them... or you can just run an FTP server from the same machine. Your music collection would all be on your hard drives but could be accessed anywhere because it would be fed out in digital format through your power lines, and your stereo amplifier would just have a decoder. No sound degredation, no stacks of CDs, no messy cables, etc. When you want to play video games in the living room you can, though they would also run off your computer's DVD-ROM. Of course you could burn a backup of all your games on that machine...
Because the architecture of the machine would be almost indefinitely extensible (you can always keep adding scuzzy hard drives) or at least partwise upgradable you wouldn't hit the artificial limits that TIVO or even PS2 impose on you (memory, processing power, etc).
Now this is important: nothing that connects to the computer is hackproof. Notice that we don't pirate music using our stereo equipment like we used to; we use the computer. Now we also pirate game disks and DVDs. On the computer. No copy protection will stand up to crackers when directly accessible to a computer. Whatever hardware copy protection needs to be in place in a standalone device to play media can be emulated in software if that sort of media is mechanically readable by the computer (as Dreamcast disks or DVDs are). So the lesson is: whatever media touches the computer will be hacked and copied and distributed on the internet if it's worth anything. (Notice that people aren't posting shows they captured on their TIVOs; they're just watching them.) Now it's obvious why copyright-holding companies are fighting to kill the convergence device. Once there is a general home media server there will always be legal hardware plus (sometimes) illegal software that allows for easy duplication, archiving and distribution of that media. If there were no computers there would be (almost) no CD piracy, no PSX game piracy, no Napster-style piracy, no DVD-to-DIVX stuff... There would just be a bunch of single-use devices with no "record" privilidges. This is how the media companies want us to play their media. They wish we would save the computer for computing. And this is why they will resist any move that makes us want to stick their media into a computer.
If the initial launch really is for around $300 like suggested, MS will initially be losing LOTS of money on each unit. In 2001 the hardware in the box would retail for twice as much.
With that in mind, I expect Microsoft to meet their schedule the Sony way: release just a handful of consoles so that 31337s can flood Slashdot and other forums with declarations of superiority. Everyone else and their grandma will be on a waiting list and realistically, won't get their box before late spring--which might be a blessing, because by then some of the initial bugs will be worked out. People are more likely to wait it out once they see that some X-boxes have already sold, even if not yet to them: just a few months of gratification delay and they'll be blowing away their once-cool PS2 friends.
Sure, PS2s will sell between now and the X-box rollout date, but that might have the effect of being a dare to the rest of the kids on the block who don't have a game station from this generation yet. All those kids will want the X-box.
But here are some arguments against waiting that the article didn't consider:
1. There is finally a real stampede of consumers buying DVD players, and it's not over yet. But if you have a player in your system already, that's one less reason to buy an X-box. I think DVD functionality appealed to the "prudent" side of current PS2 owners. Several of my friends said "I'll wait to buy a DVD player and get the PS2 instead"--and they did. Who will wait for the X-box depends on how long the wait is.
2. Computers can come a long way in two quarters, and the longer Microsoft waits to release their console, the more reasonable it will seem to just upgrade your PC.
People agree on a convention that Blue=1 and Red=2
First person adds up all the colors on hats that aren't his own. If the sum is an even number then he guesses "Red" and if it's odd he guesses "Blue". This is, of course, not an informed guess and he might be toast...BUT:
Now everyone else knows what hat they are wearing: They just add up all the hats they see except the first guy's. If they get an even number and the first guy said "Red" they know their hat is red. If he said "Blue" then their own hat is blue. Likewise, if their sum is odd, each person has to say the opposite of what the first guy said... But they are guaranteed to be saved.
I think you're right, Erasmus; here's even better!
on
The Three Hat Problem
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All the people replying to this thread are fools; they think in your system your last guy is just guessing but he isn't. He knows his hat is red because if it weren't, somebody else would have spoken up before it came his turn.
Well, there's the exception where everyone has a blue hat, in which case the no one answers until the last guy and since he automatically says "red" he automatically gets it wrong. So your method fails exactly when all the hats are blue. Not a bad result, but here's a small patch: If the first guy sees only blue hats he has to take a blind guess. Sure, his chances are only 50% but if he followed your rules that turn would be lost inevitably--so this patch cuts the error rate of your method in half.
Well, it's possible we both misunderstood the problem, because this is just too easy... But whatever. So this might be a good solution to a different problem.
I agree with graveyhead that UI people should just try to squeeze out X by making either GTK or QT run right on the kernel and standardizing on the corresponding desktop environment.
Not to fan old flames, but doesn't QT already have this capacity? TrollTech wanted to make some embedded qt apps and that was their rationalle. I just wish those Norwegians would get more evil and actually make a concerted effort of elbow out X windows. Wouldn't this be much quicker than waiting for Berlin to ripen?
Penrose seems to think that provability is not our only means of establishing what is true and false in mathematics. Interestingly, Goedel thought the same thing. These guys believe in something like "mathematical intuition", a special causal hookup between the human mind and the (wooooo) realm of mathematical reality. This is how we are supposed to "know", for example, that the axiom of choice is true even though it is provably unprovable. Most professionals in mathematics and philosophy think these guys are kooks, at least with regard to mathematical epistemology.
Remember also that there is another school of mathematicians who just equate truth with provability; they are called the intuitionists. They take Goedel's results to show that vastly many mathematical statements are neither true nor false. About Turing machines whose haltability is uncalculable they say it is neither true nor false that they halt. Maybe you see why they too are a tiny minority.
Almost everybody else thinks that some unprovable statements are true and some are false in the full red-blooded sense of those terms, but we just have no access to any way of deciding which. But that's not the same thing as saying that their truth and falsity are random, as the article and some comments here suggest. Well, maybe in Chaitin's special sense of 'random' connected with uncompressability--but not in the "it's up in the air" sense of 'random'. (Mathematical randomness a la Chaitin is very different from quantum-mechanical randomness and Penrose sluffs over this distinction.) It's not like there is indeterminacy in the mathematical realm. There is nothing dynamic about it; mathematical truths are as eternal as we thought before Goedel, and so are falsehoods. It's just that the mathematical axioms are of no help at all in identifying certain truths and falsehoods. If God took an undecidable statement and asked if it is true, a mathematician with a 40-year sabbatical and all the supercomputers in the world would be just as likely to answer correctly as a guy flipping a coin. But that's not to say it's random whether the answer is right--only that there is no better method of getting the answer than a random one.
Well, the AI "creatures" are being put to use by the RAF to play enemies in the flight simulators that train elite pilots. Already they are kicking some limey ass, so much so that they are considering the idea that future generations might pilot actual Tornados and Harriers, or whatever the RAF flies at that point. Would that be enough "CAUSAL POWERS" for you?
Why is the stupid idea that randomness is required for life so common among ordinary people? Are people so dumb that they can't distinguish between randomness (indeterminacy) and practical unpredictability? Sure, the origin of life requires a bunch of really complex interactions where tiny differences in initial conditions result in huge differences in outcome--but this has nothing to do with randomness. Indeterminacy is totally unnecessary for any such thing. That's not to say I think that our world is deterministic; I studied 20th century physics. I'm only saying that we shouldn't pretend we need indeterminism for anything like consciousness, life, etc. I have heard of some kooks who suggest this sort of thing (and some, like Penrose, are very good in their own field), but their argument is ultimately this: X is weird (consciousness, life, whatever) and quantum mechanics is weird, so it must be that the only explanation for X has something to do with quantum indeterminacy. Way to go, genius!
Then we have ejaculations like the following: "somehow I think that it is beyond our technology. Life is not a simple Turing machine, and intelligent life cannot, I suspect, be reduced to a Turing or Von Neumann machine. We are more complex than that, more beautiful, more mysterious, and more profound." Unless you think that what accounts for intelligence are souls, what you say just looks ignorant. And if you do believe in souls, just go ahead and say it.
Expanding and recompressing the napster II format is a bad solution because mp3 is a lossy compression algorithm. It will sound like a tape recording of a tape recording and degrade with every iteration. This would in fact be one way to kill p2p that has been discussed before: populate the service with morons who don't care about sound quality so that the typical song returned in a search will be crap. Your suggestion would be one way to do it: make sure people are constantly decompressing and recompressing their songs and trading them like they were freshly ripped.
I think the comment above is exactly right. The way to reproduce the efficiency of the napster system without having designated search servers is through what might be called opportunistic servers. The parent/child topography omnifarious talked about is exactly the right start, and here's how I picture it working:
The parent "takes responsibility" for a child by accepting its list of shared files--not a large text file that can be stored on the parent's disk. Along with the list it saves information about the child's bandwidth, IP adress, etc. Now when someone searches the parent they also search the child without causing much extra inconvenience to the parent (a few more lines of filenames to search through). Importantly, no packets pass between the parent and the child during a simple search. Periodically, when there is bandwidh lull, parents and children send each other "are you still alive" queries. If a parent dies the child finds a new one. A standard "who will adopt me?" query which locates a machine with
1. Enough bandwidth
2. Enough spare CPU cycles to be able to churn through a few more search list enteries.
3. Relative proximity to the child as defined by ping time. (Perhaps not necessary)
Once the child is adopted it passes its list of files to the parent and is notified only when there is a request for something from its list.
Maximal efficiency would be achieved through superparents, fast computers on fast connections that accumulate and search filelists from many children.
What would be the relationship among parents? Why not just the regular Gnutella protocol? The inefficiency of the current system is because everybody is sending requests to everybody. With the new hierarchy, only parents speak to each other. This way you can search the whole network and pass only a tiny fraction of the packets a similar search of Gnutella would require.
What I am in no position to write is a program for calculating which computer makes an eligible parent, how many parents there should be in a system, how to tell what a parent's TTL should be from a check of the general network health (busy network->only seach some fraction of parents; tough luck). The point is, algorithms like these should be possible, and when optimized they would automatically keep the network balanced. This with a whole lot less pinging in the system, an exponential reduction in traffic and no need to pass search queries through slow lines. (No people with dialup modems would be parents).
I wish I were more solid on the hardcore technical stuff. So you folks tell me--why wouldn't this work?
Right on! But it's even worse than you think. You see, once they launch the Son of Star Wars system they will immediately establish that it does not even come close to working, which is obvious now. (Rumsfeld said he wants to deploy it even if it fails again in the upcoming tests.)
Solution? Obviously, we'll need a few hundred billion more to "fix" the system. I'm not the world's biggest conspiracy theorist but this seems too convenient for the defense contractors and the party they bought out. They basically have decades of guaranteed money and don't need to to achieve any results at all. Actually, failiure extends their contracts. Wow, and everyone was getting mad that the Democrats might misspend our tax money...
I would trust the Slashdot audience to recognize an absolutely stupid technology before most other people do. But I forget I am dealing with people whose eyes glaze over when they thing about the glory of big guns. I'll just say I'm not that sort of geek. But I digress...
I have to laugh at the stupidity of the current Star Wars incarnation. The way the system will work is basically public already, and the countermeasures against it are so absolutely obvious that all you need is one issue of Scientific American to figure out how to render the system useless. Basically you need balloons with little 10W heaters inside to fly alongside your warhead while it's outside the atmosphere. Anyone with the technology to make an ICBM can do this in a weekend. And that's if the system works correctly, the chances of which are close to zero.
TRW, one of the main contractors in the project are being tried for fraud because clear evidence has come up they were systematically lying about the effectiveness of their decoy detection system. Basically they said it works and it doesn't. In the latest test a single missle was supposed to be shot down but the interceptor didn't even make it out of orbit. If it did, countermeasures that would cost an enemy on the order of $10^5 can totally disable this $10^11 system. This, plus we piss off people with missiles who were willing to honor the START treaty which we will now unilaterally invalidate. I am absolutely shocked by the stupidity of this plan. I wish I could blame the Republicans, but the truth is, Gore wanted this too.
Great geek project for 2010: Once the system is up make an ICBM and launch it from somewhere using the simple countermeasures we know the system cannot handle (the ICBM requires fancy science; the countermeasures a well-stocked garage). Be kind and don't actually send any warheads; just fancy fireworks. This would actually increase world stability because your payload would get through all the interceptors and the world could rest knowing that the US really can't stop their missiles, restoring the delicate ICBM stalemate we have now. Plus, (say) Washington would get a free light show! The hundreds of billions of dollars that could have been paying for tuition or medicine will still be wasted, though.
I'll eat my words if in my lifetime this stupid system actually stops a missile, but I'm not holding my breath. Remember that the kill ratio of the Gulf War Patriot missile (against technology that was already second class in the 50's) was exactly 0%. That's right. Not one interception--and ICBM warheads are an order of magnitude faster than SCUDs. (This information did not become public until long after the Gulf War; Some SCUDs broke up in mid-flight on their own so we thought we hit them.) Meanwhile Rumsfeld said pretty clearly in his confirmation hearings that he wants to shell out the money for SDI even if it fails again in the upcoming tests. This even when 50 Nobel Prize winners signed a petition claiming that the current missile defense has no chance of protecting anything and can only aggrivate tensions.
I'm not making this up. If I were less lazy I'd find links.
It is obvious that the cracked version of Whistler will be much better in terms of usability + security than the retail version. Soon, the check-the-NIC-code "feature" will be hacked away, making an OS that sits content on your hard drive without any notions of wanting to do an authentication check every once in a while.
So even if I'm a doctor who can afford all the MS crap they ever made, the OS I will want is the cracked one. There is a cost to MS when their real software is this much worse than the cracks. Instead of going to CompUSA to blow $200, Joe Money will go ask the pimply, pale neighbor for a burned CD.
Hopefully this is the end of "secret" API calls
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Microsoft Cracked
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WIth the source code people will be able to see just how much of the eratic behavior of Windows is due to incompetence and how much is malice. Do they really have secret API calls that only Microsoft apps use? And isn't it amazing WINE announced this week it can suddenly run MS Office?
Slashdot Mirror
Maybe instead of a server they'd be better off building a super huge beowulf cluster to crank through data. That generates lots of heat and eats up lots of power, two problems the cluster wouldn't face in Alaska. You'd only need bandwidth to feed the cluster new problems to do and to receive results. That shouldn't be a problem with the existing bandwidth.
I'm afraid they are. Sorry. Do the math: (-40 - 32)*5/9 = -40
And then they're told it can play games too, many of which are free.
This is the sort of sales pitch that even I would take out my credit card for.
I was never able to trust the authors of the Gimp because it originally needed Motif to compile. Now granted, now it needs only GPLed software but I remember my history... You have to question the authors' commitment to free software if they were willing to use such an unfree toolkit to write their program. The very same people are responsible for GTK which is the core of Gnome--so I ask you, how can you trust the code of people who have obviously shown a willingness to compile against closed-source software?
Well, like you said, Harmony was almost far enough along when QT was freed to be usable as the core of KDE. So why do you also say "The KDE team would had to have rewritten Qt from the ground up"? They would not have needed to start on the ground--they would have finished the remaining 20% of Harmony and gone on. I just don't see what you people find so scary about this. Besides, the original "code under glass" license said that there will always be a gratis and up-to-date QT and if anything happens to TT to prevent this then the code gets released under a BSD license. This on its own prevented the "microsoft purchase" scenario.
But here is a troll to match yours, only more in touch with reality, I think: It is the judgement of GNOME's leaders that endangers the freedom of our software. It is not KDE people who will hop in bed with some self-serving companies at the drop of a hat. Eazel was a perfect example, thought they obviously didn't pull this off -- but they tried: You can write GPL code that is as good as closed-source: make it so ugly, twisted and convoluted that in effect the company responsible for it are the only ones who can maintain it (let's take bets on nautilus). Then intergrate some features that benefit the company. They'll stay in as long as it's too much of a pain to maintain a fork without the crap (ugly code helps) and then you've got a company basically in controll of your supposedly free system. It's not that they can't be opposed, but they de-facto won't be. OK, so Eazel failed, but what do you think Ximian is after? What do you think Sun's motivations are for Gnomifying StarOffice? They know they can cram it down our throats with whatever features suit THEM; no one will bother compiling them out (certainly not RedHat!). Corporations are turning Gnome into nothing more than bait for us to do what they want us to, and still kiss their feet for their generosity. Yeah, I bet this is what you would call the ideological high road...
At this point I'd use KDE even if it weren't better. At least it's not a whore of the corporations, filled with their jizz.
Microsoft is confident (perhaps irrationaly) that they can bulldoze a "loose-knit band of hobbyists" writing OSS, but the way they see it, two things could go wrong.
1) Companies with gangs of professional coders might decide to release commercially-viable software under the GPL. If HP, IBM, AOL (Mozilla), SGI (XFS), Sun (StarOffice) are allowed to set a trend, the resulting system would cause them headaches no "casual hackers" could induce.
Remember that Mundie is a running dog whose master commanded him to prevent this by oration. What he said was perfect: nobody gets rich in the software buisiness without owning IP. The argument is targeted for the ears of an upper-manager who matters, someone actually calling the shots about licensing. Sure, s/he may have techies who beg to have their code released (as long as they keep the jobs) and they may promise there are all kinds of other ways to make money. After Mundie's speech s/he will say "Oh yeah, like what? Is it the sort of sure bet that our company owes its shareholders, or are the motivations more "ideological"? Because if they are then I would have to be a crappy manager to take them seriously. I've been appointed to make the company rich, or at least stay above water--not to enforce justice.
Now in comes a rebuttal from Linus (paraphrased): "Open source produces great things; forbidding "giant-stacking" only hinders great things." Only an idiot could disagree. But someone who is making the final call about the licensing of some good software now feels this as a tension between the nobility creating great things and making money. Sure, there is some honor in being a Xerox-type: They'd have us by the balls if they defended their IP, but instead everyone else was allowed to make the personal computer revolution out of their ideas. Humanity is better off, but try explaining that to the stockholders!
Newton, Rutherford, Bohr, Einstein--giants who would have been much smaller had academic IP been closed--but how can this comfort a manager? Two problems: One is that not one of these guys was filthy rich, not within two orders of magnitude of Bill Gates. For an individual there is some glory in being poor and noble, but not for a company. The second problem is that all these guys are brilliant, and as an upper manager you can never assume your people are--but it's your job to make money anyway. Nobody uses a piece of GPL code unless they think it's the best that's available. The runner-ups fall into neglect. This is good news because the cream should rise to the top, but it's bad news if you're not sure whether what you have is creamy. One good example is AOL: they invested serious money in the development of Mozilla and it's beginning to work great, hell, I'm using it right now. But with Konqueror and other competition around, there is not even a guarantee people care about Mozilla in two years. This is because Mozilla might not be the absolute best OSS program of its kind. Same goes for XFS and StarOffice. So what's a manager to do? To succeed in OSS you have to make absolute best program available, and even if you do there is still no reliable model for sustaining a company (never mind getting rich). Who could go on and say "oh, let's do it anyway"? What sane venture capitalist would put his money down?
With these professional elements out of the way OSS again becomes a project of hobbyists and Microsoft feels safe. If it weren't for
2) Governments legislating OSS software for their departments or maybe even for their populations for whatever reasons. /. is full of murmurings about this from France, Korea, China, Argentina and even certain US departments. Mundie has to try and stop this. Here he was not very convincing. His line about how IP boosts the economy could only ring true in the US, where Microsoft pays taxes. In the rest of the world, the allegation that Linux is un-american is the shrewdest advertising campaign possible. Anyway, we see Microsoft is worried about it, and it looks like they don't yet have a strategy for fixing it.
But they do have a perfect strategy for convincing capitalistic software firms to keep their code to themselves (and die clutching it). No one doubts this situation is a win for Microsoft.
I'm sure Taco's device wouldn't be stupidly designed like a TV/VCR box but be instead more like a computer. If the DVD-ROM fails you unplug it and replace it... and so with every other part. If the drive fails in your DVD component player you have to chuck the whole thing and pay a lot more for a replacement. And you don't have to pay an expert to fix a computer with a broken part, you just RTFM, find what's wrong and swap it out (not possible with any standalone device anymore). Isn't this more reasonable?
I keep seeing this argument in the forum, but I think it's stupid. If you're worried about parts of your computer system becoming obsolete or braking, you can trade them out without having to mess with the rest of the components. Is it really that much easier to throw out and replace a standalone DVD player than it is to replace a DVD-ROM, for example? I'm sure TIVO2 will have a much bigger hard drive and all you TIVO1 owners will weep. If you had a computer that had TIVO funcionality you would just buy an extra hard drive. It seems like the more reasonable thing to do, don't you think?
First, my vision of the convergence future
People would love it if they could just hit "record" on their TV and a show would start saving to your computer's hard drive, and when there are spare cycles it would compress into DIVX. New SMP computers can already compress DTV into DIVX in real time, and it won't be long before they can also do HDTV. For playback you would just call up a simple file browswer on your TV and start watching. Then you could post the shows to usenet with your cable modem so that even people who don't get those channels can see them... or you can just run an FTP server from the same machine. Your music collection would all be on your hard drives but could be accessed anywhere because it would be fed out in digital format through your power lines, and your stereo amplifier would just have a decoder. No sound degredation, no stacks of CDs, no messy cables, etc. When you want to play video games in the living room you can, though they would also run off your computer's DVD-ROM. Of course you could burn a backup of all your games on that machine...
Because the architecture of the machine would be almost indefinitely extensible (you can always keep adding scuzzy hard drives) or at least partwise upgradable you wouldn't hit the artificial limits that TIVO or even PS2 impose on you (memory, processing power, etc).
Now this is important: nothing that connects to the computer is hackproof. Notice that we don't pirate music using our stereo equipment like we used to; we use the computer. Now we also pirate game disks and DVDs. On the computer. No copy protection will stand up to crackers when directly accessible to a computer. Whatever hardware copy protection needs to be in place in a standalone device to play media can be emulated in software if that sort of media is mechanically readable by the computer (as Dreamcast disks or DVDs are). So the lesson is: whatever media touches the computer will be hacked and copied and distributed on the internet if it's worth anything. (Notice that people aren't posting shows they captured on their TIVOs; they're just watching them.) Now it's obvious why copyright-holding companies are fighting to kill the convergence device. Once there is a general home media server there will always be legal hardware plus (sometimes) illegal software that allows for easy duplication, archiving and distribution of that media. If there were no computers there would be (almost) no CD piracy, no PSX game piracy, no Napster-style piracy, no DVD-to-DIVX stuff... There would just be a bunch of single-use devices with no "record" privilidges. This is how the media companies want us to play their media. They wish we would save the computer for computing. And this is why they will resist any move that makes us want to stick their media into a computer.
With that in mind, I expect Microsoft to meet their schedule the Sony way: release just a handful of consoles so that 31337s can flood Slashdot and other forums with declarations of superiority. Everyone else and their grandma will be on a waiting list and realistically, won't get their box before late spring--which might be a blessing, because by then some of the initial bugs will be worked out. People are more likely to wait it out once they see that some X-boxes have already sold, even if not yet to them: just a few months of gratification delay and they'll be blowing away their once-cool PS2 friends.
Sure, PS2s will sell between now and the X-box rollout date, but that might have the effect of being a dare to the rest of the kids on the block who don't have a game station from this generation yet. All those kids will want the X-box.
But here are some arguments against waiting that the article didn't consider:
1. There is finally a real stampede of consumers buying DVD players, and it's not over yet. But if you have a player in your system already, that's one less reason to buy an X-box. I think DVD functionality appealed to the "prudent" side of current PS2 owners. Several of my friends said "I'll wait to buy a DVD player and get the PS2 instead"--and they did. Who will wait for the X-box depends on how long the wait is.
2. Computers can come a long way in two quarters, and the longer Microsoft waits to release their console, the more reasonable it will seem to just upgrade your PC.
Others?
Spork
First person adds up all the colors on hats that aren't his own. If the sum is an even number then he guesses "Red" and if it's odd he guesses "Blue". This is, of course, not an informed guess and he might be toast...BUT:
Now everyone else knows what hat they are wearing: They just add up all the hats they see except the first guy's. If they get an even number and the first guy said "Red" they know their hat is red. If he said "Blue" then their own hat is blue. Likewise, if their sum is odd, each person has to say the opposite of what the first guy said... But they are guaranteed to be saved.
Well, there's the exception where everyone has a blue hat, in which case the no one answers until the last guy and since he automatically says "red" he automatically gets it wrong. So your method fails exactly when all the hats are blue. Not a bad result, but here's a small patch: If the first guy sees only blue hats he has to take a blind guess. Sure, his chances are only 50% but if he followed your rules that turn would be lost inevitably--so this patch cuts the error rate of your method in half.
Well, it's possible we both misunderstood the problem, because this is just too easy... But whatever. So this might be a good solution to a different problem.
Spork
Not to fan old flames, but doesn't QT already have this capacity? TrollTech wanted to make some embedded qt apps and that was their rationalle. I just wish those Norwegians would get more evil and actually make a concerted effort of elbow out X windows. Wouldn't this be much quicker than waiting for Berlin to ripen?
Remember also that there is another school of mathematicians who just equate truth with provability; they are called the intuitionists. They take Goedel's results to show that vastly many mathematical statements are neither true nor false. About Turing machines whose haltability is uncalculable they say it is neither true nor false that they halt. Maybe you see why they too are a tiny minority.
Almost everybody else thinks that some unprovable statements are true and some are false in the full red-blooded sense of those terms, but we just have no access to any way of deciding which. But that's not the same thing as saying that their truth and falsity are random, as the article and some comments here suggest. Well, maybe in Chaitin's special sense of 'random' connected with uncompressability--but not in the "it's up in the air" sense of 'random'. (Mathematical randomness a la Chaitin is very different from quantum-mechanical randomness and Penrose sluffs over this distinction.) It's not like there is indeterminacy in the mathematical realm. There is nothing dynamic about it; mathematical truths are as eternal as we thought before Goedel, and so are falsehoods. It's just that the mathematical axioms are of no help at all in identifying certain truths and falsehoods. If God took an undecidable statement and asked if it is true, a mathematician with a 40-year sabbatical and all the supercomputers in the world would be just as likely to answer correctly as a guy flipping a coin. But that's not to say it's random whether the answer is right--only that there is no better method of getting the answer than a random one.
Well, the AI "creatures" are being put to use by the RAF to play enemies in the flight simulators that train elite pilots. Already they are kicking some limey ass, so much so that they are considering the idea that future generations might pilot actual Tornados and Harriers, or whatever the RAF flies at that point. Would that be enough "CAUSAL POWERS" for you?
Then we have ejaculations like the following: "somehow I think that it is beyond our technology. Life is not a simple Turing machine, and intelligent life cannot, I suspect, be reduced to a Turing or Von Neumann machine. We are more complex than that, more beautiful, more mysterious, and more profound." Unless you think that what accounts for intelligence are souls, what you say just looks ignorant. And if you do believe in souls, just go ahead and say it.
Expanding and recompressing the napster II format is a bad solution because mp3 is a lossy compression algorithm. It will sound like a tape recording of a tape recording and degrade with every iteration. This would in fact be one way to kill p2p that has been discussed before: populate the service with morons who don't care about sound quality so that the typical song returned in a search will be crap. Your suggestion would be one way to do it: make sure people are constantly decompressing and recompressing their songs and trading them like they were freshly ripped.
The parent "takes responsibility" for a child by accepting its list of shared files--not a large text file that can be stored on the parent's disk. Along with the list it saves information about the child's bandwidth, IP adress, etc. Now when someone searches the parent they also search the child without causing much extra inconvenience to the parent (a few more lines of filenames to search through). Importantly, no packets pass between the parent and the child during a simple search. Periodically, when there is bandwidh lull, parents and children send each other "are you still alive" queries. If a parent dies the child finds a new one. A standard "who will adopt me?" query which locates a machine with
1. Enough bandwidth
2. Enough spare CPU cycles to be able to churn through a few more search list enteries.
3. Relative proximity to the child as defined by ping time. (Perhaps not necessary)
Once the child is adopted it passes its list of files to the parent and is notified only when there is a request for something from its list.
Maximal efficiency would be achieved through superparents, fast computers on fast connections that accumulate and search filelists from many children.
What would be the relationship among parents? Why not just the regular Gnutella protocol? The inefficiency of the current system is because everybody is sending requests to everybody. With the new hierarchy, only parents speak to each other. This way you can search the whole network and pass only a tiny fraction of the packets a similar search of Gnutella would require.
What I am in no position to write is a program for calculating which computer makes an eligible parent, how many parents there should be in a system, how to tell what a parent's TTL should be from a check of the general network health (busy network->only seach some fraction of parents; tough luck). The point is, algorithms like these should be possible, and when optimized they would automatically keep the network balanced. This with a whole lot less pinging in the system, an exponential reduction in traffic and no need to pass search queries through slow lines. (No people with dialup modems would be parents).
I wish I were more solid on the hardcore technical stuff. So you folks tell me--why wouldn't this work?
Spork
Solution? Obviously, we'll need a few hundred billion more to "fix" the system. I'm not the world's biggest conspiracy theorist but this seems too convenient for the defense contractors and the party they bought out. They basically have decades of guaranteed money and don't need to to achieve any results at all. Actually, failiure extends their contracts. Wow, and everyone was getting mad that the Democrats might misspend our tax money...
I hope you're kidding about the mass nuking plan, but you make a good point.
I have to laugh at the stupidity of the current Star Wars incarnation. The way the system will work is basically public already, and the countermeasures against it are so absolutely obvious that all you need is one issue of Scientific American to figure out how to render the system useless. Basically you need balloons with little 10W heaters inside to fly alongside your warhead while it's outside the atmosphere. Anyone with the technology to make an ICBM can do this in a weekend. And that's if the system works correctly, the chances of which are close to zero.
TRW, one of the main contractors in the project are being tried for fraud because clear evidence has come up they were systematically lying about the effectiveness of their decoy detection system. Basically they said it works and it doesn't. In the latest test a single missle was supposed to be shot down but the interceptor didn't even make it out of orbit. If it did, countermeasures that would cost an enemy on the order of $10^5 can totally disable this $10^11 system. This, plus we piss off people with missiles who were willing to honor the START treaty which we will now unilaterally invalidate. I am absolutely shocked by the stupidity of this plan. I wish I could blame the Republicans, but the truth is, Gore wanted this too.
Great geek project for 2010: Once the system is up make an ICBM and launch it from somewhere using the simple countermeasures we know the system cannot handle (the ICBM requires fancy science; the countermeasures a well-stocked garage). Be kind and don't actually send any warheads; just fancy fireworks. This would actually increase world stability because your payload would get through all the interceptors and the world could rest knowing that the US really can't stop their missiles, restoring the delicate ICBM stalemate we have now. Plus, (say) Washington would get a free light show! The hundreds of billions of dollars that could have been paying for tuition or medicine will still be wasted, though.
I'll eat my words if in my lifetime this stupid system actually stops a missile, but I'm not holding my breath. Remember that the kill ratio of the Gulf War Patriot missile (against technology that was already second class in the 50's) was exactly 0%. That's right. Not one interception--and ICBM warheads are an order of magnitude faster than SCUDs. (This information did not become public until long after the Gulf War; Some SCUDs broke up in mid-flight on their own so we thought we hit them.) Meanwhile Rumsfeld said pretty clearly in his confirmation hearings that he wants to shell out the money for SDI even if it fails again in the upcoming tests. This even when 50 Nobel Prize winners signed a petition claiming that the current missile defense has no chance of protecting anything and can only aggrivate tensions.
I'm not making this up. If I were less lazy I'd find links.
Pissed off,
Spork
So even if I'm a doctor who can afford all the MS crap they ever made, the OS I will want is the cracked one. There is a cost to MS when their real software is this much worse than the cracks. Instead of going to CompUSA to blow $200, Joe Money will go ask the pimply, pale neighbor for a burned CD.
WIth the source code people will be able to see just how much of the eratic behavior of Windows is due to incompetence and how much is malice. Do they really have secret API calls that only Microsoft apps use? And isn't it amazing WINE announced this week it can suddenly run MS Office?
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