Isn't this what happened with the Amiga. "Once a games machine, always a games machine" is what people thought, and although a few academics and scientists and the odd media company bought into the "Amiga as computer", business by and large treated it as 'games machine', despite its greater power.
I think Sony have a tough task if they want to pull this off.
As I understand it, for it to be illegal in UK law, it must be shown that the user is genuinely trying to confuse people about their identity with regard to the trademark in question.
If I produce candy similar to the PEZ product, and then put PEZ in the meta tags there is probably some grounds for prosecution, since I am hoping to fool some people into thinking I sell genuine PEZ.
If I run a (commercial) site about market penetration of various candy products, and put trademarks like 'mars' 'PEZ' 'polo' 'smarties' in my metatags - that's probably OK.
And of course a private non-profit site should be pretty safe.
In all cases you'd probably need to acknowledge the trademark ownerships.
I want funny blue numbers across the top of my vision and a green target sight. And, I want to talk in a menacing sounding way. And, when I download updated killing algorithms from Master Global Corp's CyberNet, I want to stand really still with my head at a slight angle.
Plus, I want flesh that withstands extremes of hot and cold, and a copy of the British Library on minidisc that I can slide into a slot on the back of my neck.
Finally, I want a subtle logic bug that will be discovered by a 12 year old kid who will thus disable me save his cute pet dog, his mom and the whole world (in that order).
Apparently, all this will be possible in 50 years, and it'll replace plasic surgery and novely hats as the pastime of the rich and stupid.
BUT, only if you study cybernetics at reading. Hey Tom Hume, ever meet this guy?
But the Sun Community Source License is not open source by any definition (unless it has changed recently), so such a release would hardly have been meaningful.
I work with (not _for_) Sun a fair deal, and they are extremely cagey on Open Source stuff. A definite case of fence sitting a bet hedging, IMHO.
They try to position linux as ideal for Unix newbies who are upgrading for NT, but unsuitable for 'real work' such as serving Star Office...
With the acquisition of Netscape's server software, they tend to say the same about Apache - "It's great for old fashioned HTML pages, but now that you need Java, XML, DOM, LDAP and CORBA, you really want to look at a proper server".
It's not great. Mind you Solaris rocks once you get bash/gcc/kde on it:_)
I was talking to SGI about Linux the other day (now _there's_ a sign of the times!) and the guy used the annoying-yet-correct leenoocks pronounciation. I use lihnucks, and it's really hard to have a conversation where you each pronounce the thing you're talking about in completely different ways.
But FWIW, lienucks (long i) was the normal UK pronounciation for years and years, and is still pretty common. Maybe that is the most common Chinese/taiwanese pronounciation too?
I realise this is OT, but it galls me to see this event used as if everyone recognised that the verdict was just, and to see this event used as promotion of a commercial product.
Well, they give the example that the system was used to help the 'good guy' USAF pilot who killed a number of skiers by flying so low he cut the cable wires of the gondola. I'm so glad he got off.
The accident obviously had nothing to do with the fact the maps the USAF had were so old they didn't even show the ski lift.
All pilots suffer from many kinds of illusion and distortion. That's why they learn to trust their instruments and not their instincts. It may well have looked as though his plane was high above the mountain side, but that's not an excuse. "Sorry officer, I didn't know I was doing 50mph in an urban zone when I killed the school kids - with this new car it felt like 25 mph!". Yeah right, good excuse.
For those in the U.S. who may never have heard this story, people in Europe were deeply upset at the high handed way the US military handled this. They basically said "oh, whoops, sorry, accidents happen". Disgraceful, and using this dubious incident to promote the technology is a massive faux pas to anyone in Europe. The pilot should have been found guilty, and the US authorities should have been diciplined for having such outdated maps.
"Bill Gates would probably rather lose all of his money and become a drunk hobo before he gives up on the vision of "Windows Everywhere" ".
Absolutely wrong. Bill has no pride in this respect, and that is his greatest strength. He was quite happy to admit that MS was wrong with Xenix. Quite happy to admit Win3.x was crap, and move to NT. Quite happy to admit that Blackbird was crap, that the net was important afterall, and that MS would beat Netscape at their own game.
When/if Bill decides that NT is crap, and Unix was right afterall, he will have a big company meeting, a big press release, and a big spending spree. Then, in 4 or 5 years he will beat every other Unix vendor out there, by doing stuff like replacing X windows with something that works, creating a solid Win32 emu layer, and creating modern development tools.
This was unspectacular (NFS server/client, telnet server for NT, maybe a NIS thing, etc) but from the little I used it, it worked perfectly well. Worth installing if you have a lone NT box in your Unix farm.
"Philosophers aren't really a class of people anymore, everyone and anyone can be a philosopher, we're all philosophizing here. "
I'd disagree. We can all write, but we aren't all authors. We can all provide an argument that is structured, but we aren't all philosophers. We can all do arithmetic, and I know how to get copper from malachite, but we aren't mathematicians and I'm not a chemist.
Philosopher's are people who read lots of books of past research, think hard, and write stuff that's interesting enough to be published in philosophy journals.
Needles to say, I did philosophy at university... As for authors - they are just that. I think Mondrian's later art is rubbish, but I'm not saying the man's a fool or talentless. I'm saying I think alot (not all) of AC Clarke's writing is poor, but I've nothing against the bloke. It's art - you don't have to give great reasons for not liking it.
And yes, I always thought Azimov was a bit dull too. Philip K Dick was a bit more like it!
1. CPU power will increase at the same rate it has increased in the past. Unfounded. The ICE (internal combustion engine) increased it's power year on year when it was first invented. Now, people spend millions stretching the last little bit out of it. It reached a limit. Why do you suppose CPU's won't also reach a limit?
2. You assume, circularly, that a computer will be able to design a new computer, that is better than it. There is no evidence to support this, that I know of.
3. You assume nanotechnology will catch on (the most likely of your assumptions IMHO), and also assume that computers can construct other computers.
Hmmm. A bunch of (rather past it) novelists predict that in n years we will be doing all sorts of wild far out things with new acronyms. How many times have these novelists been right in the past?
"just as thermonuclear weapons have made us face the realities of war and aggression, after five thousand years of pious jabber."
What? So, you mean the soldiers involved in the Napoleonic wars, who after battles piled bodies into piles so large they started to burn spontaneously like compost, did not face the realities of war and aggression? Or were they jabbering piously?
Or is it rather CNN in the post nuclear age, who jabber piously about defending human rights as they replay in slo mo for the 16th time that evening a missile hitting some black and white blob in a far off land.
I've yet to see any artificial life, or anything that comes close to it. Maybe when I do see it it will evolve so fast we'll all be slaves to it by tea time.
And as to whether androids feel pain - who cares? Do worms feel pain? Do cats? If androids feel pain, do they suffer from it? These are questions that have been asked for hundreds of years by people who have thought much harder about it than old AC Clarke.
Philosophers have a greater insight into the mind than do computer programers and authors. Try:
Bruce Twickler, President of Andover, noted, "The acquisition, repurposing and commercialization of content is an extraordinary opportunity for growth. Our proprietary database-driven site creation tools, data collection tools, web tracking and reporting systems, and other technologies allow us to get to a breakeven point on a new site quickly."
Sounds like a man after Rupert Murdoch's heart, to me.
Umm, I like/. and fm, but they are neither of them significant parts of the glue that holds the Linux community together.
The Linux community was doing _just fine_ prior to either of these sites - you're forgetting just how recent/. is:-)
They are both good sites, but they are not important to any definable community (OpenSource, Linux, FreeBSD, Internet, Techy).
kernel.org might be important glue - certainly some of the mailing lists are important glue - but/. and fm are simply notification sites - they help distribute important stuff, but they are neither hard to replicate if they fail, or vital links in the chain.
Mmm, MS didn't write Age of Empires, they simply commissioned, published, marketed it. And yes, it is a good bit of software, as is Excel (which they did write), and FAIK, MS Flight Simulator, which a pilot friend of mine praises highly.
MS should be punished/restrained becuase they have done wrong, not because they are bad.
People are welcome to write very bad software, and companies are welcome to buy it. The fact that bad stuff succeeds in the marketplace and good stuff fails is not unique to either Microsoft or the software industry. It's a pity when it happens, but there's nothing inherently wrong with it.
Digital TV is available now in the UK - but only via satellite, and possibly some cable. Not on terrestrial _quite_ yet, but it will be very soon.
Sky has just started broadcasting some sprots events in digital format, so that users with the right set top box can select camera angles blah blah blah.
I'm not convinced any of that is all that useful, but I'm sure they;ll find a use for it all one day.
Shame about the way HDTV died though - that was, in some ways, miles ahead of the new digital t.v.
Rather than learn to live with people who are different from us, and learn to tolerae their failings, it's better to just turn on the computer, so that the only people you interact with are the ones that are just like you.
What a fun society _that_ will lead to:-(
This is the problem with the internet. It results in groups of people who can only talk to those that agree with them. Note the way any kind of discussion bewteen people who disagree on an important matter disintegrates into flames.
We talk alot here about the evils of censorship, but have you ever stopped to think about the evils of the usenet kill file?
'Hmmm - this guy said something I disagree with, and he said it in a kind of annoying way, and I've got a sore head this morning, so I'll press this one little button and make sure I never listen to anything he has to say again.'
Sure, you can un-kill them - but if you never hear from them, chances are you won't know if they've anything good to say.
Nasty stuff...
Re:Supercomputing and the future of the computer..
on
IBM takes aim at Sun
·
· Score: 1
"I, being the optimist that i am, am hoping that they will continue to become more and more part of our everyday lives. Infiltrating our appliances, homes, and everything in between. "
You scare me. Cars are good, but having them involved at every point in our lives leads to isolation, obesity, increased child mortality and pollution to name just a few.
Increased use of computers will lead to increased eye/finger/voice strain, loss of privacy, homogonization of expression, and so on.
Sure, there are benefits that computers bring, but plenty of downsides, and the bad _will_ outweigh the good at some point.
"They're big companies. The bigger they are, the less likely they are to buck the laws - and since there aren't many of them, they're easy to monitor for compliance. Civil disobedience isn't in their vocabulary: give them a law, and they'll just implement it. "
I disagree. Big companies break laws all over the place if they don't like them. They are able to apply a whole load of pressure to government, too. See how they behave with trade agreements, environmental controls, price fixing, and anything else.
Big companies care about money. Labelling will impose some cost on them, but unless they see it as dramatically affecting their market or sales, it's easier to play along.
To break this, we can try to convince big companies that this _will_ affect their bottom line significantly, but that won't be easy to do.
"open source software, on the other hand, allows you to check the source yourself (eg, grep strcpy *.c) and quickly fix known bugs. "
Um, it's the unknown bugs that are the problem. Making source available does not always result in fewer bugs. At all. There are plenty of rock solid closed applications, and plenty of flakey open source applications*. People who want stability go with stable software, wherever it is from.
The fact that there are fewer crackers or scripts targetting Mac OS does not make Mac OS more secure - but it makes it much less likely to be compromised.
In real life (i.e. the time spend earning your rent/mortgage), running a web site that is unlikely to be hacked is often more useful than running a theoritically more secure one that is likely to be hacked.
*If you really don't believe this, email me for a list:-)
If you look _only_ from a security point of view, I think something like a Mac wins hands down.
With *nix, even if you deleted telnetd, ftpd and what have you from the system altogether, there are still too many potential holes.
The abscence of a command shell of any kind in Mac OS makes it harder to trick a network service into executing commands or code.
The OS is not readily available to hackers and not widely used in any case. Likewise the web server.
Of course in functionality terms its a mess, and in reliability terms it's not great. But if I was asked to create a secure web server for flat files, I'd get a Mac with a http server and nothing else. Transfer data to it via floppy or CD-Rom. Access it via direct keyboard/monitor only. Run nothing except ping and http. NOTHING except those.
Slashdot Mirror
Isn't this what happened with the Amiga. "Once a games machine, always a games machine" is what people thought, and although a few academics and scientists and the odd media company bought into the "Amiga as computer", business by and large treated it as 'games machine', despite its greater power.
I think Sony have a tough task if they want to pull this off.
IANAL.
As I understand it, for it to be illegal in UK law, it must be shown that the user is genuinely trying to confuse people about their identity with regard to the trademark in question.
If I produce candy similar to the PEZ product, and then put PEZ in the meta tags there is probably some grounds for prosecution, since I am hoping to fool some people into thinking I sell genuine PEZ.
If I run a (commercial) site about market penetration of various candy products, and put trademarks like 'mars' 'PEZ' 'polo' 'smarties' in my metatags - that's probably OK.
And of course a private non-profit site should be pretty safe.
In all cases you'd probably need to acknowledge the trademark ownerships.
Tee hee.
I want funny blue numbers across the top of my vision and a green target sight. And, I want to talk in a menacing sounding way. And, when I download updated killing algorithms from Master Global Corp's CyberNet, I want to stand really still with my head at a slight angle.
Plus, I want flesh that withstands extremes of hot and cold, and a copy of the British Library on minidisc that I can slide into a slot on the back of my neck.
Finally, I want a subtle logic bug that will be discovered by a 12 year old kid who will thus disable me save his cute pet dog, his mom and the whole world (in that order).
Apparently, all this will be possible in 50 years, and it'll replace plasic surgery and novely hats as the pastime of the rich and stupid.
BUT, only if you study cybernetics at reading. Hey Tom Hume, ever meet this guy?
Yup,
:_)
But the Sun Community Source License is not open source by any definition (unless it has changed recently), so such a release would hardly have been meaningful.
I work with (not _for_) Sun a fair deal, and they are extremely cagey on Open Source stuff. A definite case of fence sitting a bet hedging, IMHO.
They try to position linux as ideal for Unix newbies who are upgrading for NT, but unsuitable for 'real work' such as serving Star Office...
With the acquisition of Netscape's server software, they tend to say the same about Apache - "It's great for old fashioned HTML pages, but now that you need Java, XML, DOM, LDAP and CORBA, you really want to look at a proper server".
It's not great. Mind you Solaris rocks once you get bash/gcc/kde on it
I was talking to SGI about Linux the other day (now _there's_ a sign of the times!) and the guy used the annoying-yet-correct leenoocks pronounciation. I use lihnucks, and it's really hard to have a conversation where you each pronounce the thing you're talking about in completely different ways.
But FWIW, lienucks (long i) was the normal UK pronounciation for years and years, and is still pretty common. Maybe that is the most common Chinese/taiwanese pronounciation too?
I realise this is OT, but it galls me to see this event used as if everyone recognised that the verdict was just, and to see this event used as promotion of a commercial product.
0 3/
If you care, here's a link to CNN info on it all.
http://www.cnn.com/US/9903/04/marines.cablecar.
Well, they give the example that the system was used to help the 'good guy' USAF pilot who killed a number of skiers by flying so low he cut the cable wires of the gondola. I'm so glad he got off.
The accident obviously had nothing to do with the fact the maps the USAF had were so old they didn't even show the ski lift.
All pilots suffer from many kinds of illusion and distortion. That's why they learn to trust their instruments and not their instincts. It may well have looked as though his plane was high above the mountain side, but that's not an excuse. "Sorry officer, I didn't know I was doing 50mph in an urban zone when I killed the school kids - with this new car it felt like 25 mph!". Yeah right, good excuse.
For those in the U.S. who may never have heard this story, people in Europe were deeply upset at the high handed way the US military handled this. They basically said "oh, whoops, sorry, accidents happen". Disgraceful, and using this dubious incident to promote the technology is a massive faux pas to anyone in Europe. The pilot should have been found guilty, and the US authorities should have been diciplined for having such outdated maps.
Rather like the maps of Belgrade....
Well - the web server may run linux, but maybe the workhorse (the search engine) runs on something else. I would expect something 64bit.
"Bill Gates would probably rather lose all of his money and become a drunk hobo before he gives up on the vision of "Windows Everywhere" ".
Absolutely wrong. Bill has no pride in this respect, and that is his greatest strength. He was quite happy to admit that MS was wrong with Xenix. Quite happy to admit Win3.x was crap, and move to NT. Quite happy to admit that Blackbird was crap, that the net was important afterall, and that MS would beat Netscape at their own game.
When/if Bill decides that NT is crap, and Unix was right afterall, he will have a big company meeting, a big press release, and a big spending spree. Then, in 4 or 5 years he will beat every other Unix vendor out there, by doing stuff like replacing X windows with something that works, creating a solid Win32 emu layer, and creating modern development tools.
Wait and see.
This was unspectacular (NFS server/client, telnet server for NT, maybe a NIS thing, etc) but from the little I used it, it worked perfectly well. Worth installing if you have a lone NT box in your Unix farm.
"Philosophers aren't really a class of people anymore, everyone and anyone can be a philosopher, we're all philosophizing here. "
I'd disagree. We can all write, but we aren't all authors. We can all provide an argument that is structured, but we aren't all philosophers. We can all do arithmetic, and I know how to get copper from malachite, but we aren't mathematicians and I'm not a chemist.
Philosopher's are people who read lots of books of past research, think hard, and write stuff that's interesting enough to be published in philosophy journals.
Needles to say, I did philosophy at university... As for authors - they are just that. I think Mondrian's later art is rubbish, but I'm not saying the man's a fool or talentless. I'm saying I think alot (not all) of AC Clarke's writing is poor, but I've nothing against the bloke. It's art - you don't have to give great reasons for not liking it.
And yes, I always thought Azimov was a bit dull too. Philip K Dick was a bit more like it!
You make three assumptions:
1. CPU power will increase at the same rate it has increased in the past. Unfounded. The ICE (internal combustion engine) increased it's power year on year when it was first invented. Now, people spend millions stretching the last little bit out of it. It reached a limit. Why do you suppose CPU's won't also reach a limit?
2. You assume, circularly, that a computer will be able to design a new computer, that is better than it. There is no evidence to support this, that I know of.
3. You assume nanotechnology will catch on (the most likely of your assumptions IMHO), and also assume that computers can construct other computers.
Hmmm. A bunch of (rather past it) novelists predict that in n years we will be doing all sorts of wild far out things with new acronyms. How many times have these novelists been right in the past?
"just as thermonuclear weapons have made us face the realities of war and aggression, after five thousand years of pious jabber."
What? So, you mean the soldiers involved in the Napoleonic wars, who after battles piled bodies into piles so large they started to burn spontaneously like compost, did not face the realities of war and aggression? Or were they jabbering piously?
Or is it rather CNN in the post nuclear age, who jabber piously about defending human rights as they replay in slo mo for the 16th time that evening a missile hitting some black and white blob in a far off land.
I've yet to see any artificial life, or anything that comes close to it. Maybe when I do see it it will evolve so fast we'll all be slaves to it by tea time.
And as to whether androids feel pain - who cares? Do worms feel pain? Do cats? If androids feel pain, do they suffer from it? These are questions that have been asked for hundreds of years by people who have thought much harder about it than old AC Clarke.
Philosophers have a greater insight into the mind than do computer programers and authors. Try:
http://ling.ucsc.edu/~chalmers/biblio.html
Please check out:
http://www.mtdc.com/press004.html
In particular:
Bruce Twickler, President of Andover, noted, "The acquisition, repurposing and commercialization of content is an extraordinary opportunity for growth. Our proprietary database-driven site creation tools, data collection tools, web tracking and reporting systems, and other technologies allow us to get to a breakeven point on a new site quickly."
Sounds like a man after Rupert Murdoch's heart, to me.
Umm, I like /. and fm, but they are neither of them significant parts of the glue that holds the Linux community together.
/. is :-)
/. and fm are simply notification sites - they help distribute important stuff, but they are neither hard to replicate if they fail, or vital links in the chain.
The Linux community was doing _just fine_ prior to either of these sites - you're forgetting just how recent
They are both good sites, but they are not important to any definable community (OpenSource, Linux, FreeBSD, Internet, Techy).
kernel.org might be important glue - certainly some of the mailing lists are important glue - but
Mmm, MS didn't write Age of Empires, they simply commissioned, published, marketed it. And yes, it is a good bit of software, as is Excel (which they did write), and FAIK, MS Flight Simulator, which a pilot friend of mine praises highly.
MS should be punished/restrained becuase they have done wrong, not because they are bad.
People are welcome to write very bad software, and companies are welcome to buy it. The fact that bad stuff succeeds in the marketplace and good stuff fails is not unique to either Microsoft or the software industry. It's a pity when it happens, but there's nothing inherently wrong with it.
Digital TV is available now in the UK - but only
via satellite, and possibly some cable. Not on terrestrial _quite_ yet, but it will be very soon.
Sky has just started broadcasting some sprots events in digital format, so that users with the right set top box can select camera angles blah blah blah.
I'm not convinced any of that is all that useful, but I'm sure they;ll find a use for it all one day.
Shame about the way HDTV died though - that was, in some ways, miles ahead of the new digital t.v.
Right, a benchmark done in lab conditions by a company that just happens to sell the both the hardware and the software they are benchmarking.
So, in no way an independant test of anything much.
And in any case the thruput probably exceeds what would be possible in an office with the normal mix of 10/100 switched/unswitched ethernet.
Stats - magic words that simultaneously operate as gospel facts and 'damned lies' depending on which side you are on.
Wohoo
And you think that's good?
:-(
Rather than learn to live with people who are different from us, and learn to tolerae their failings, it's better to just turn on the computer, so that the only people you interact with are the ones that are just like you.
What a fun society _that_ will lead to
This is the problem with the internet. It results in groups of people who can only talk to those that agree with them. Note the way any kind of discussion bewteen people who disagree on an important matter disintegrates into flames.
We talk alot here about the evils of censorship, but have you ever stopped to think about the evils of the usenet kill file?
'Hmmm - this guy said something I disagree with, and he said it in a kind of annoying way, and I've got a sore head this morning, so I'll press this one little button and make sure I never listen to anything he has to say again.'
Sure, you can un-kill them - but if you never hear from them, chances are you won't know if they've anything good to say.
Nasty stuff...
"I, being the optimist that i am, am hoping that they will continue to become more and more part of our everyday lives. Infiltrating our appliances, homes, and everything in between. "
You scare me. Cars are good, but having them involved at every point in our lives leads to isolation, obesity, increased child mortality and pollution to name just a few.
Increased use of computers will lead to increased eye/finger/voice strain, loss of privacy, homogonization of expression, and so on.
Sure, there are benefits that computers bring, but plenty of downsides, and the bad _will_ outweigh the good at some point.
Whooa there.
Being required to provide some additional descriptive information on a product that is widely distributed isn't an obvious violation of your rights.
People are required to label food they distribute, so people who hate, say, peanuts, can avoid that food.
What is so obviously bad about requiring people to label multimedia content so that people who hate, say, pornography can avoid it?
Not that I'm in favour of the proposed scheme, but let's _try_ not to jump on things.
"They're big companies. The bigger they are, the less likely they are to buck the laws - and since there aren't many of them, they're easy to monitor for compliance. Civil disobedience isn't in their vocabulary: give them a law, and they'll just implement it. "
I disagree. Big companies break laws all over the place if they don't like them. They are able to apply a whole load of pressure to government, too. See how they behave with trade agreements, environmental controls, price fixing, and anything else.
Big companies care about money. Labelling will impose some cost on them, but unless they see it as dramatically affecting their market or sales, it's easier to play along.
To break this, we can try to convince big companies that this _will_ affect their bottom line significantly, but that won't be easy to do.
"open source software, on the other hand, allows you to check the source yourself (eg, grep strcpy *.c) and quickly fix known bugs. "
:-)
Um, it's the unknown bugs that are the problem. Making source available does not always result in fewer bugs. At all. There are plenty of rock solid closed applications, and plenty of flakey open source applications*. People who want stability go with stable software, wherever it is from.
The fact that there are fewer crackers or scripts targetting Mac OS does not make Mac OS more secure - but it makes it much less likely to be compromised.
In real life (i.e. the time spend earning your rent/mortgage), running a web site that is unlikely to be hacked is often more useful than running a theoritically more secure one that is likely to be hacked.
*If you really don't believe this, email me for a list
If you look _only_ from a security point of view, I think something like a Mac wins hands down.
With *nix, even if you deleted telnetd, ftpd and what have you from the system altogether, there are still too many potential holes.
The abscence of a command shell of any kind in Mac OS makes it harder to trick a network service into executing commands or code.
The OS is not readily available to hackers and not widely used in any case. Likewise the web server.
Of course in functionality terms its a mess, and in reliability terms it's not great. But if I was asked to create a secure web server for flat files, I'd get a Mac with a http server and nothing else. Transfer data to it via floppy or CD-Rom. Access it via direct keyboard/monitor only. Run nothing except ping and http. NOTHING except those.
Riiiight. Are you maybe taking the Gates quote just a leeetle bit literally there?
/. readers have done, IMO.
And, if you are going to be literal about things, it is perfectly accurate to characterise 3 years as 'several months'...
The fact that Gates has read Knuth at all should come as a pleasant surprise - it is by all accounts more than most