Could one make an economic case for building a multi billion dollar
space station, and then renting it out to tourists for the cost of
delivering them to orbit? No way! How would you pay for your multi
billion dollar space station?
I'm sorry to say this (honestly, I really am
sorry to say this) but there is not economic case
of any sort for building the space station.
Hopefully they'll do some good science up there,
but the odds are not good that it's going to be
worth billions. The standard line was that they
were going to do lots of cool zero-gee materials
research, but that last time I looked into this
that was looking awfully bogus (like, let's say
you *can* find a material that's easier to
crystallize in microgravity, and let's say you
do have a use for it... then what? You're going
to ship raw materials into orbit, and finished
product down? At current launch costs, how is it
possibly going to be worth doing that?).
The first commercial use of space was comsats,
because information doesn't weigh anything.
The second big commercial use will probably be
power generation, for similar reasons.
(If someone wants to tell me that the right way
to build a powersat in space is to use manual
labor, I'm willing to be convinced (in fact I'd
be happy to be convinced), but you're talking
a lot of overhead to get people up there and
keep them alive...)
Moderators: if someone says they haven't read
the article, then you shouldn't be ranking them
as "informative".
The article specifically talks about studies of
people *working* on the cleanup at Cherynobyl,
so you *might* assume that the "internal
radiation" under discussion is the result of
inhaling radioactive dust... *but* if you read
the article and were actually paying atteniton, you'd realize that the closing quotes are not from the scientists who worked on this, but rather:
"Richard Bramhall, of the Low Level Radiation Campaign"
Which is to say, that the BBC (as is not unusual
for news stories about nuclear power) chose to give
the last word to an alarmist activist, who may
or may not know all that much about what he's
talking about.
Brief editorial: I like political activists. I'm
glad they exist. But they are not great sources
for accurate information, and traditionaly anti-nuke
activists have been some of the worst.
The Free Software Foundation is not anit-business,
and is not a synonym for communism.
You've heard this before I imagine, but you
can't see anything but the standard dualities.
And let me see, you're *complaining* that
Stallman *only* got as far as writing a
(1) compiler (2) some utilities (3) an integrated
development environment that includes an editor.
Well, this seems like a good place to attach this
comment:
Okay, first of all, I'm glad to see someone pushing
Lisp, even though I don't know it very well myself.
I get really annoyed at the endless announcements for
Yet Another Scripting Language ("It's just like Perl,
except without that annoying flexibility!"). If I'm going
to take the trouble to learn something new, I'd like it
to be really new, and Lisp is high on my list
(even if I am over 25).
But I think his premises are severely flawed:
Robert and I both knew Lisp well, and we couldn't see any
reason not to trust our instincts and go with Lisp. We
knew that everyone else was writing their software in C
++ or Perl. But we also knew that that didn't mean
anything. If you chose technology that way, you'd be
running Windows. When you choose technology, you have
ignore what other people are doing, and consider only
what will work the best.
The trouble is that if you're planning on working with other
human beings, all of a sudden you have to worry about things
like "what languages do they know? what will they enjoy
working on?" If your team is just two stunt programmers you
can just talk it over and use whatever you like. If you've
got to expand your team later, then you may be stuck sifting
through stacks of C, perl and VB resumes.
And I have to say I think there's a huge gap between saying
"there's an advantage in using tools that aren't too unusual"
and saying "we should all use Windows".
I'll say something. Really, there is so little to this guy. In that
management article there is a paragraph:
"Your business success will depend on the extent to which programmers
essentially live at your office. For this to be a common choice, your
office had better be nicer than the average programmer's home. There
are two ways to achieve this result. One is to hire programmers who
live in extremely shabby apartments. The other is to create a nice
office. Microsoft understands this. In the early 1990s they did radio
spots with John Cleese as a spokesman. One of the main points of the
ad was to ridicule the cheap open-plan offices in which programmers
were traditionally housed and promote the fact that at Microsoft each
developer gets a plush personal office."
The remark about shabby apartments are pretty snotty. Oh, it was
humor.
Ding!
If there is anything right about this paragraph it is the idea
that personal offices are good. I'm in an organization with individual
offices and I feel there is no substitute for the ways it improves our
productivity.
Um... so you mean you agree with the main thesis of the
paragraph you just quoted?
Then Phil gets into various dimensions of improving the office and,
guess what, that's the last mention of personal offices. He talks
about Aeron chairs, and spreading desks apart, and pin ball machines.
Horrors.
Anyone who works in their own office will tell you that those other
things are nothing compared to their own office. This is major league
hand waving to me.
Well, I like my hardwall. I don't care much that I'm not
sitting in an Aeron... but I often hear the other geeks
around here talking about getting on ebay and trying to
score some dot.boomed Aerons cheap. Some people seem to
think they're important.
I can't figure out why this is such a big deal with you
guys... "my god, he recommends buying Aerons! You see,
what a spendthrift!".
It is followed by more nothing attempts to keep the
programmers shackled to their job.
Well, what he appears to be doing is trying to justify
to managers, from a managers perspective, why he thinks
they should treat they're engineers really well. This
doesn't strike me as being all that nefarious, nor does
it seem so grossly unfounded as to shrug it off as
"handwaving". It's not like people management is an
exact science... don't expect too many differential
equations when you're reading management text books.
Looking at the rest of the article, there are actually
a number of things in it that really should be obvious,
common sense, but really aren't always attended to.
The place where I'm working right now, the landlord
turns off the HVAC at 6pm sharp. By 7pm or so it's
getting so hot and stuffy I can't breath. This being
a moderne office building, there ain't no windows I
can open. You would think it would be in their interests
to make it easy for me to hang out until midnight, but
somehow they can't get their act together on the simple
stuff like this.
Anyway, I'll skip the rest of your rant... you may have some
points in there, but it looks to me like there's a lot of
hand-waving going on about Philips hand-waving...
Like look at what wuliao was saying originally:
I work at aD, and I've been here since the beginning a few years ago.
The amount of misinformation on this staggers me, and the amount of
blind Philip worship makes me ill. The posts by Philip represent one
side of the story (his), but are far from being the complete story.
What actually staggers me is the amount of anti-Greenspun
vitriol that doesn't seem to have any solid foundation
behind it, at least not that anyone can put into words.
What is it that inspires this kind of empty, free floating
disgust? You'd think we were talking about Harlan Ellsion.
In fact, the best developers have stayed because Philip (and
his complete disdain for software engineering, design, QA, scalability
testing, etc.) no longer exert an influence here. Philip is smart,
articulate, and knowledgable about many things, bu the is not a
software engineering god, nor is he an expert software architect, nor
is he a capable manager.
Well, as long as you're talking, why not say something?
Some examples would be appreciated: it's difficult to
imagine anyone who can be both "smart" and have a complete
disdain for:
software engineering
design
QA
scalability testing
If you don't feel like you can talk about internal
ArsDigita business (even though you've already
started) how about pointing out some of the flaws
in Greenspun's writing? In another post you asserted
that they were mere "handwaving"... how about pointing
out one or two of the places that are lacking?
It remains to be seen how much further Oracle will go, and how
quickly. However (and I've already prepared my will in case of God's
heavenly thunderbolt), I predict that the Oracle database server
itself will be open source within ten years. (If it isn't, it will no
longer exist!)
Ten years is a long time, long enough that this prediction
is almost certainly correct.
As it stands, the postgresql project has been advancing very
rapidly, and is getting extrememly close to beating Oracle
in functionality. If Oracle doesn't react to this in the
next few years, they're going to start taking serious hits
in revenue.
Unfortunately, going open source is only *one* way they can
react. Rather than going "open" they might go "free", that
is, gratis. Using the db binary as a loss leader for other
products (including support) wouldn't be the siliest thing
they could do, and it would help to stay ahead of the
*really* free competition for some time.
The Great Bridge benchmarks, Postgresql beat Oracle on
speed slightly (Bruce Momjian confirms this in this
interview: http://lwn.net/2001/features/Momjian/).
Version 7.1 has just been released, with the big news being
the addition of outer-joins. I understand that replication
is one of the next targets (and given the speed that these
guys have been working at, I would expect it to be in the
next rev).
Key New Features and Capabilities of Version 7.1 Include:
Write-ahead Log (WAL) increases data integrity and processing
speed. To maintain database consistency in case of an operating
system crash, previous releases of PostgreSQL have forced all all
data modifications to disk before each transaction commit. With
WAL, only one log file must be flushed to disk, greatly improving
performance. (Tech note: can eliminate use of -F in to disable
disk flushes)
TOAST (The Oversized-Attribute Storage Technique) Past releases
had compiled-in row length limit typically between 8Kb & 32Kb.
This restriction made storage of long text fields difficult,
cumbersome and slow. TOAST enables rows of any length while
maintaing the high performance PostgreSQL users have come to
expect.
SQL92 Outer Joins are now supported. (Tech note: eliminates the
UNION/NOT IN workaround)
64-bit C Language Function Manager support The previous C function
manager did not handle support 64-bit CPU's (e.g. Alpha, Sun,
Itanium). (Tech note: This change should not impact existing
custom functions developed for past versions, but performance will
be improved through rewriting to use the new call interface.)
Complex Queries that are better, stronger and faster Many complex
queries were unsupported in previous releases. With v7.1
combinations of views, aggregates, UNION, LIMIT, cursors,
subqueries, and inherited tables are enabled. Inherited tables are
now accessed by default, and subqueries in FROM are now supported.
Prove that this something is in fact the content you think it is.
Prove that the recipient doesn't have a legal copy of the the work
in some form already.
The assholes at the RIAA coerced Napster into kicking people off with
only the first criteria above being met. I fear the MPAA will do the
same thing.
As I understand it, there's no objection to
someone having a private copy of a CD in MP3
form. The objection is against putting it
up on Napster for multiple other people to grab.
If you're argument is that *some* of the people
getting your MP3 copy may have paid for the music
in another form, I think you're trying to hide
behind legalisms...
Corporations have an innocent and noble aim, to make
money. They have no interest in advancing political agendas or using
that information to harm people.
You know, there's a lot of things about
libertarian theory that's really interesting
to me, but this sort of thing is a good example
of why I'm drifting further away from the
libertarians as time goes on: there's a near
complete confusion of reality and theory here.
Whatever a real free market firm might be like,
the actual existing US-style corporations are clearly
not the same animal. The US corporation is
very much a creation of government policies
(the tax code, the legal limits on liability,
pollution regulations, allocation of property
rights and so on). In turn, corporations do
their best to control the US government through
a system of legalized bribery called "campaign
contributions".
Think about the Big 5 record companies. Are you sure that they have no interest in advancing a "political agenda"? Have you ever heard of the RIAA?
Consider the fact that you can't get elected
to high office without heavy contributions
needed to pay for access to the airwaves, whose
"ownership" was pretty much arbitrarily assigned
to certain companies by government fiat.
The real world is so far away from the ideal
libertarian situation, that libertarians can
only apply their theories by selectively ignoring
inconvienient facts...
Jakob Nielsen just wrote a column about
making sure that journalists know how to
use your web site: www.useit.com.
Do your best to annoy the hell out of the
RIAA and MPAA. You can't buy the kind of publicity
that Napster got.
4. Post lots of places with a self-promotional.sig,
like: "The author of this piece does not speak for
Emusic, which is
still a cool company, even if it has been bought
by one of the Big 5".
But it's awfully long, and burdened with a lot
of the usual lefty/pomo jargon. I mean really:
Human reality is socially constructed.
Some of it is, some of it isn't, and it isn't clear why this an interesting thing to say in context.
Some day I'm going to sit down and write a persuasive anti-libertarian
argument, but when I do I'm going to try and talk about
things the way libertarians do.
If I were going to take a stab at it, I would
cover the ground a little differently. The point
would be that while an institution like "private
property" is clearly very useful in many ways,
the details of what that really means aren't
engraved in stone anywhere. Libertarians like very simple
statements of principle, perhaps something like
"you're free to do what you like with your
property, as long as you don't infringe on other's
freedom", but the exact boundaries of where the
infringement begins aren't exactly clear. (It
would seem, for example, that you guys driving
around in your cars really shouldn't be allowed
to poison me with your exhaust, but for some reason
libertarians really like "private" cars (despite
the heavy government subsidies running all
through the auto transit system).
And once you recognize that there isn't any
obvious one correct way that "capitalism" has
to be set-up, there are a lot of things that
are open to question. You do not, for example
have to be a communist to wonder if the limited
liability corporation is really that great
an idea (if it's so useful for corporations
to have limits put on their liability to protect
them from frivolous law suits, why not grant
the same liability limits to individuals?).
Nor do you need to be a communist
to
wonder if
"intellectual property" is exactly the same
beast as physical property (you steal my bike,
I can't ride anywhere, you steal a song I wrote,
I can still sing it... but on the other hand
I *might* lose income because of that "theft".
I might quit writing songs. Should the legal
system be set up to protect *my* interest in this
case, or in yours? How original was the material
in those songs I wrote, anyway? Maybe I used
a standard chord progression, lifted a riff here
and there... how do we decide who wrote what?)
What I'd like to know is where are the slides?
I was checking out Lance Larsh's talk about
high-performance database needs, and he keeps
referring to these diagrams, but all I get to
see is his goatee.
Incidentally, having Lance droning on about
elevator algorithms in Real while I've got
the "Artifcats" album by Information playing in Freeamp
is pretty cool.
What about -- don't yawn -- quality?
on
Ask Robert Young
·
· Score: 2
It often seems to me that RedHat is a bit
schizophrenic about what it's market is: it
can't make up it's mind whether it's for
newbies, or a bleeding-edge, experimental
distro. Despite the fact that RedHat's reputation
was originally built on being eaisier-to-use,
it has a distressing habit of shipping alpha
quality software and making it the default, in
effect pushing it on the new folks who are least
able to deal with it. (I'm thinking about
AnotherLevel, linuxconf and Enlightenment at the
moment, I could probably think of others.)
So my question is, can you say something concrete
about what RedHat is doing about the problem
of Quality? Post-IPO, was there an attempt at
beefing up the QA department? Has there been
any change in QA proceedures? Are there any
plans to deviate from shipping by the calender
rather than just whenever the software is ready?
I do realize that this is a difficult problem:
how do you work out QA proceedures
for software that has no spec? I would guess
that you must write your own specs based on how you
expect the distribution to be used. Or do you
get by without somehow?
Will RMS be fined 1$ every time any of the GNU utilities crash, or
Linus everytime Linux crashes? Sure it doesn't happen ofter, but with
the number of people using it...
I'll stop writing free software the day a law like that passes...
Try actually reading the article. Lanier's
(presumably tounge-in-cheek) idea is that there
should be two classes for software, "creative"
and "useful". If you want to legally claim that
your software is good for something, then you're
legally obligated if it has problems.
Presumably if you're not trying to make money off of the code, you just call it "creative/experimental" and leave it at that.
The fact that this is such a crazy, radical,
idea probably says a lot about the software industry.
In the UK (or nearby) there was a period when the seas were crowded
with pirate radio stations. One of these, Radio 390, was based on the
seafort now known as Sealand.
This period ended in 1967 (dear God, is it that long ago?) with the
Marine Offences Act, which made it illegal to supply/advertise on the
pirates.
Radio 390? Would that happen to be the setting of the old
Secret Agent (aka Dangerman) episode ("Not So Jolly Roger")
that took place at an offshore pirate radio station?
Here's someone who says that it was filmed at "Radio
309"... but I get the feeling he made a digit transposition
error: http://members.aol.com/irahome/17.3.html
One of this later batch 'Not So Jolly Roger' involved the
topical subject of pirate radio, with J.D. going
undercover as a replacement disc jockey on a pirate radio
station. The location footage was shot at the Red Sands
off shore platform, home to Radio 309. Much of the
incidental music was made up of fictitious performers
having their 60's style discs spun on Radio Jolly Roger's
turntables, with two notable exceptions, an instrumental
'The Scorpion' credited to Ted Astley and Patsy Ann
Noble's 'He Who Rides The Tiger' neither of which was
made available officially.
What I would like is a hybrid dynamic/static ad system. The ad itself can be random, but once I've seen it, it should remain each time I return to a specific page.
Actually this is a good point. Few people out
there have ad avoidance skills more highly
developed than mine (in fact, right now i'm
using an "ad filtering" system called lynx),
but there was one time slashdot had an ad up
that caught my eye: a picture of Philip Greenspun.
I'd already clicked on something else before
I started wondering "Hey, what was that an ad for?"
So in this case the "bookmarkable" ad feature
would not have been helpful. The quasi-static
idea would make more sense: if you hit the back
button you should get back what you had before.
(But when you come down to it, this one-and-only
ad that caught my attention: it was probably just
and ad for Philip and Alex's guide to website
design. A book I'd already bought and read, or
else I wouldn't have recognized Greenspun's photo.
So even in this case, the ad was useless:
my opinion is that advertising is doomed,
as are most commercial web sties... without a new
revenue model, the internet is going to return
to a volunteer-supported activity. What a shame
that would be, eh?)
There's nothing wrong with the artist making money off the deal. But,
what you are proposing is that instead of the RIAA being the
middleman, eMusic should become the middleman.
I'm not suggesting that emusic should be
the *only* middleman, there are certainly other services
around (for example, there's the original, IUMA -- Emusic kicked in a
years worth of funding for them, incidentally).
What we are suggesting
is that there be NO middleman! The artist writes music and releases it
in MP3 format for free. Then, the artist makes money by selling CDs,
merchandise and touring.
The artist also presumably ends up paying someone or other
to get a lot of these things done, you know. There's all
sorts of "middlemen" -- it's kind of what capitalism is about.
(They're probably not going to build their own truck to use to go
touring).
Sure eMusic is offering a good deal now. But, there is plenty of
competition. What would happen if eMusic got to be in the position of
the RIAA? What if the sole distribution channel between the artist and
fan was eMusic. Do you think that the price would still be $15 per
month?
Beats me, it's not something I'd worry about, because it
isn't going to happen.
I doubt it. eMusic does have a couple decent artists that I
like. But, to be honest - I'm not impressed with the overall
selection.
Well, as long as we're being completely honest, I have to
say that I *am* impressed by the emusic collection. I
didn't expect to think very much of it -- their top level
web page makes them look to me like just another commercial crap
site -- but I picked up the dozen CDs I had on my desk one
day punched them into their Search feature, and I scored
hits on a third of them. Relatively obscure stuff, too,
like "Sun Ra", "John Cage", "Namanax", "The Go-betweens"...
I want any artist, any song, any album, any genre --
anytime! Basically we all want the "big jukebox in the sky" that has
every song ever recorded.
What I want is for you guys to make of your minds... you
don't want anyone to have a monopoly, *but* you want
everything that exists to be inside of the *same* system?
Because that's the only way you get a "big jukebox in the
sky". And what happens if there's some artist that doesn't
want their work in your big jukebox? Do you care?
I have never used eMusic and I never intend to. I am opposed to you
"acoustic fingerprinting" technique. Same goes for Windows Media and
Liquid Audio. Once you try to watermark my music - I'm not interested.
I like being in control.
Sorry, I think you're confused about something. Emusic
doesn't have any kind of watermarking that they do.
I assume MD5 is some sort of file checksum. That is, you have to fetch
the file to find it, rather than just looking at the database listing.
That puts quite a load on Napster's pipes. Maybe you have to add up
all the bytes in the file to calculate it -- that's quite a
computational load, plus it means Napster has to download every file
they list, and takes a lot of bandwidth.
Nope, because:
Or maybe the MD5 sum is pre-calculated and embedded in the
file header?
As I understand it, that's essentially the situation.
Napster originally wanted to make it easier on people with
who got disconnected with incomplete downloads to be able to
reconnect and automatically find a copy of the same track to
complete the download with. So in their system, there
already is an MD5 checksum that was *intended* to be used
as a music identification system. As I understand it,
they've been trying to downplay it's existance (one might
speculate because it's a little too obvious how to use it
for enforcement purposes).
In any case, couldn't you just add.01 second of silence to the end of
the file and change the MD5 sum?
I think you're on stronger ground here, but this still isn't
a show stopper if you really sincerely *wanted* to police
the system for illegal music trading. Think about it. How
would *you* get around the problem? Myself, I imagine that
I would use multiple different techniques simultaneously,
e.g. look at the MD5 sum, look at the text name (and obvious
variations... using some good cracker tools perhaps?) and
maybe do some spot check downloads using (1) automated pycho-acoustic music
detection algorithms and (2) human ears.
Most people are not going to bother re-ripping to tweak
a files musical fingerprint -- in fact most people probably
wouldn't bother switching to a different service that
doesn't have the MD5 sum feature. So your problem in most
cases would boil down to looking for the occasional mutation
in the MD5 sums. Every so often a new copy of the same
music will pop up with a different MD5 print, but there's
ways you can look for those.
(That point about automated pyscho-acoustic techniques is not as
far-fetched as it sounds. I wouldn't claim to know how they
work, but from what I understand the technology
exists already. I would guess the main trick is to come up
with some decent heuristics to apply it without having to
do complete downloads of every MP3 in existence.)
He's speaking in perl (really, he's speaking
in unix, but it's about the same thing).
s/blah/bleh/g finds all occurences of
"blah" in a string and replaces it with "bleh".
(And the fallacy of course, is that if Napster
were *sincere* in wanting to police the name
space, they would track whatever renaming
standard you were using, and incorporate it
into the name filter.)
For example, I might suggest (warning, blatant
plug) you take a look at emusic.com,
which has a pretty big collection of different
kinds of music available fairly cheaply (e.g.
a three month sub at 15 bucks a month gets you
unlimited access to the collection). Amazingly
enough, the artists actually get some money out
of this. A strange thought, eh?
A lot of the chatter about Napster seems to
center around the idea that it might or might
not be hurting CD sales, but what about MP3 sales?
Is it possible to make money selling music on
the web? How would you do it in a world where it's
eaisier to find non-legit copies for free?
(And to me, there's an even scarier thought:
It's actually relatively easy for Napster to
police their users *if* they were inclined to
do it -- e.g. there's that MD5 signature that
Napster built into the system, originally to
deal with interrupted downloads. But they
refused, and now they may be legally shut down
and various less centralized systems may be
put in use. What's the next move of the RIAA?
Will they start going after people running
servers? Will they start pushing for a
re-engineered internet without that pesky
anonymity feature?)
Anyway, Full (ha) disclosure: Yeah, I work at
emusic these days. Simultaneous disclaimer:
I don't speak for emusic, and vice versa.
I spent a couple of years working an engineering job in
Southern Idaho (and used to hang out in Salt Lake City on
weekends on occasion).
This was back in the early 80s, so things may have changed
a bit, but here's my experience of the area:
I moved out there from New York with some trepidation, but
more-or-less found interesting stuff to do. I got into
skiing (downhill and cross-country) and rock climbing, and
one of the real advantages of being in that part of the
country is you've got a lot of easy access to places to
engage in sports like that and just as importantly, everyone
you meet is going to be interested in something like this
(the question is typically not "Are you doing anything this
weekend?" but "Hey, where are you going skiing this
weekend?").
Culturally, the area leaves a lot to be desired. I picked
Pocatello as a place to live because it had a small state
university. The weekly film series there was watchable, but
nothing heavy. The bands that they got to play were
tremendously lame (I actually went to see Journey there
because I hadn't seen any other live music in months. I
left early.) There were was one funky old bookstore (with an
impressive collection of hardcore pornography) in the old
part of Idaho, but more often then not I ended up going to
Waldenbooks and special ordering things. Salt Lake City was
a little better in some respects, for example, they had a
really good Science Fiction bookstore. I also thought the
punk/mod types were interesting... you'd see these kids
hanging around on scooters with "Clash" stickers on them.
The SF convention in Salt Lake was small, but interesting
(e.g. they got Fritz Leiber in as Goh).
The people I met were okay by me, though a lot of them
weren't from the area (a lot of ex-auto industry engineers
from Michigan, for example). The few Mormon people I did
hang around with were fine by me... nice folks with a sense
of humor. (I personally have no complaints about Mormon women
either... funny, I've heard other women complain about how
"flirtatious" they are, though.)
But: I don't know what it would've been like to live around
there if I didn't have short hair, if I wasn't a white guy,
etc. I also don't drink, so the liquor law weirdness didn't
bother me tremendously: but there was one this time when I
was doing a road trip through Utah, and a freind of mine
wanted to buy beer. He didn't have an ID on him, but I had
a NY driver's license (with no photo) and my security
pass with photo and "Naval Reactor Facilty" emblazoned
across it: They refused to sell me the beer. My friend was
incensed by this: "This man has a DOE security clearence!
He's authorized to handle nuclear fuel!"
I guess I can remember another off-putting little incident:
My girlfriend put in a request for a birthday present; she
wanted a collection of nylons/tights of every available
color. So I try and buy this stuff at a local department
store, using a credit card, and my NRF site ID as photo ID.
They went away into the back room and kept me standing
around for a solid 20 minutes before deciding it was okay
for me to buy women's lingerie. (In retrospect, maybe it
was a mistake to try and do this with a "*Naval* Reactor
Facility" ID.)
So, bottom line is that I don't regret living there for a
couple of years, but I also don't regret that I left after
that, and I much prefer living in a "real" city...
Slashdot Mirror
The first commercial use of space was comsats, because information doesn't weigh anything. The second big commercial use will probably be power generation, for similar reasons.
(If someone wants to tell me that the right way to build a powersat in space is to use manual labor, I'm willing to be convinced (in fact I'd be happy to be convinced), but you're talking a lot of overhead to get people up there and keep them alive...)
The article specifically talks about studies of people *working* on the cleanup at Cherynobyl, so you *might* assume that the "internal radiation" under discussion is the result of inhaling radioactive dust... *but* if you read the article and were actually paying atteniton, you'd realize that the closing quotes are not from the scientists who worked on this, but rather: "Richard Bramhall, of the Low Level Radiation Campaign" Which is to say, that the BBC (as is not unusual for news stories about nuclear power) chose to give the last word to an alarmist activist, who may or may not know all that much about what he's talking about.
Brief editorial: I like political activists. I'm glad they exist. But they are not great sources for accurate information, and traditionaly anti-nuke activists have been some of the worst.
You've heard this before I imagine, but you can't see anything but the standard dualities.
And let me see, you're *complaining* that Stallman *only* got as far as writing a (1) compiler (2) some utilities (3) an integrated development environment that includes an editor.
XML: a standardized framework for creating
incompatible data formats.
Okay, first of all, I'm glad to see someone pushing Lisp, even though I don't know it very well myself. I get really annoyed at the endless announcements for Yet Another Scripting Language ("It's just like Perl, except without that annoying flexibility!"). If I'm going to take the trouble to learn something new, I'd like it to be really new, and Lisp is high on my list (even if I am over 25).
But I think his premises are severely flawed:
http://www.redhat.com/products/software/linux/rhl
And I see:
From the little "RH" there after the version number, can I conclude that RedHat is still shipping an oddball, non-standard gcc compiler?I can't figure out why this is such a big deal with you guys... "my god, he recommends buying Aerons! You see, what a spendthrift!".
Well, what he appears to be doing is trying to justify to managers, from a managers perspective, why he thinks they should treat they're engineers really well. This doesn't strike me as being all that nefarious, nor does it seem so grossly unfounded as to shrug it off as "handwaving". It's not like people management is an exact science... don't expect too many differential equations when you're reading management text books.Looking at the rest of the article, there are actually a number of things in it that really should be obvious, common sense, but really aren't always attended to. The place where I'm working right now, the landlord turns off the HVAC at 6pm sharp. By 7pm or so it's getting so hot and stuffy I can't breath. This being a moderne office building, there ain't no windows I can open. You would think it would be in their interests to make it easy for me to hang out until midnight, but somehow they can't get their act together on the simple stuff like this.
Anyway, I'll skip the rest of your rant... you may have some points in there, but it looks to me like there's a lot of hand-waving going on about Philips hand-waving...
Like look at what wuliao was saying originally:
What actually staggers me is the amount of anti-Greenspun vitriol that doesn't seem to have any solid foundation behind it, at least not that anyone can put into words. What is it that inspires this kind of empty, free floating disgust? You'd think we were talking about Harlan Ellsion.If you don't feel like you can talk about internal ArsDigita business (even though you've already started) how about pointing out some of the flaws in Greenspun's writing? In another post you asserted that they were mere "handwaving"... how about pointing out one or two of the places that are lacking?
As I remember it, the phrasing has something to do with brief quotations for purposes of review. Don't see how that applies here at all.
You might be thinking of the practice of "sampling", which arguably is allowed under the doctrine of "fair use".
As it stands, the postgresql project has been advancing very rapidly, and is getting extrememly close to beating Oracle in functionality. If Oracle doesn't react to this in the next few years, they're going to start taking serious hits in revenue.
Unfortunately, going open source is only *one* way they can react. Rather than going "open" they might go "free", that is, gratis. Using the db binary as a loss leader for other products (including support) wouldn't be the siliest thing they could do, and it would help to stay ahead of the *really* free competition for some time.
The Great Bridge benchmarks, Postgresql beat Oracle on speed slightly (Bruce Momjian confirms this in this interview: http://lwn.net/2001/features/Momjian/).
Version 7.1 has just been released, with the big news being the addition of outer-joins. I understand that replication is one of the next targets (and given the speed that these guys have been working at, I would expect it to be in the next rev).
From The postgresql site (http://www.postgresql.org):
Key New Features and Capabilities of Version 7.1 Include:
As I understand it, there's no objection to someone having a private copy of a CD in MP3 form. The objection is against putting it up on Napster for multiple other people to grab.
If you're argument is that *some* of the people getting your MP3 copy may have paid for the music in another form, I think you're trying to hide behind legalisms...
Whatever a real free market firm might be like, the actual existing US-style corporations are clearly not the same animal. The US corporation is very much a creation of government policies (the tax code, the legal limits on liability, pollution regulations, allocation of property rights and so on). In turn, corporations do their best to control the US government through a system of legalized bribery called "campaign contributions".
Think about the Big 5 record companies. Are you sure that they have no interest in advancing a "political agenda"? Have you ever heard of the RIAA?
Consider the fact that you can't get elected to high office without heavy contributions needed to pay for access to the airwaves, whose "ownership" was pretty much arbitrarily assigned to certain companies by government fiat.
The real world is so far away from the ideal libertarian situation, that libertarians can only apply their theories by selectively ignoring inconvienient facts...
making sure that journalists know how to
use your web site: www.useit.com.
RIAA and MPAA. You can't buy the kind of publicity
that Napster got.
4. Post lots of places with a self-promotional
like: "The author of this piece does not speak for
Emusic, which is
still a cool company, even if it has been bought
by one of the Big 5".
Some day I'm going to sit down and write a persuasive anti-libertarian argument, but when I do I'm going to try and talk about things the way libertarians do.
If I were going to take a stab at it, I would cover the ground a little differently. The point would be that while an institution like "private property" is clearly very useful in many ways, the details of what that really means aren't engraved in stone anywhere. Libertarians like very simple statements of principle, perhaps something like "you're free to do what you like with your property, as long as you don't infringe on other's freedom", but the exact boundaries of where the infringement begins aren't exactly clear. (It would seem, for example, that you guys driving around in your cars really shouldn't be allowed to poison me with your exhaust, but for some reason libertarians really like "private" cars (despite the heavy government subsidies running all through the auto transit system).
And once you recognize that there isn't any obvious one correct way that "capitalism" has to be set-up, there are a lot of things that are open to question. You do not, for example have to be a communist to wonder if the limited liability corporation is really that great an idea (if it's so useful for corporations to have limits put on their liability to protect them from frivolous law suits, why not grant the same liability limits to individuals?).
Nor do you need to be a communist to wonder if "intellectual property" is exactly the same beast as physical property (you steal my bike, I can't ride anywhere, you steal a song I wrote, I can still sing it... but on the other hand I *might* lose income because of that "theft". I might quit writing songs. Should the legal system be set up to protect *my* interest in this case, or in yours? How original was the material in those songs I wrote, anyway? Maybe I used a standard chord progression, lifted a riff here and there... how do we decide who wrote what?)
Incidentally, having Lance droning on about elevator algorithms in Real while I've got the "Artifcats" album by Information playing in Freeamp is pretty cool.
It often seems to me that RedHat is a bit schizophrenic about what it's market is: it can't make up it's mind whether it's for newbies, or a bleeding-edge, experimental distro. Despite the fact that RedHat's reputation was originally built on being eaisier-to-use, it has a distressing habit of shipping alpha quality software and making it the default, in effect pushing it on the new folks who are least able to deal with it. (I'm thinking about AnotherLevel, linuxconf and Enlightenment at the moment, I could probably think of others.) So my question is, can you say something concrete about what RedHat is doing about the problem of Quality? Post-IPO, was there an attempt at beefing up the QA department? Has there been any change in QA proceedures? Are there any plans to deviate from shipping by the calender rather than just whenever the software is ready?
I do realize that this is a difficult problem: how do you work out QA proceedures for software that has no spec? I would guess that you must write your own specs based on how you expect the distribution to be used. Or do you get by without somehow?
http://members.aol.com/irahome/17.3.html
(But when you come down to it, this one-and-only ad that caught my attention: it was probably just and ad for Philip and Alex's guide to website design. A book I'd already bought and read, or else I wouldn't have recognized Greenspun's photo. So even in this case, the ad was useless: my opinion is that advertising is doomed, as are most commercial web sties... without a new revenue model, the internet is going to return to a volunteer-supported activity. What a shame that would be, eh?)
Most people are not going to bother re-ripping to tweak a files musical fingerprint -- in fact most people probably wouldn't bother switching to a different service that doesn't have the MD5 sum feature. So your problem in most cases would boil down to looking for the occasional mutation in the MD5 sums. Every so often a new copy of the same music will pop up with a different MD5 print, but there's ways you can look for those.
(That point about automated pyscho-acoustic techniques is not as far-fetched as it sounds. I wouldn't claim to know how they work, but from what I understand the technology exists already. I would guess the main trick is to come up with some decent heuristics to apply it without having to do complete downloads of every MP3 in existence.)
s/blah/bleh/g finds all occurences of "blah" in a string and replaces it with "bleh".
(And the fallacy of course, is that if Napster were *sincere* in wanting to police the name space, they would track whatever renaming standard you were using, and incorporate it into the name filter.)
For example, I might suggest (warning, blatant
plug) you take a look at emusic.com,
which has a pretty big collection of different
kinds of music available fairly cheaply (e.g.
a three month sub at 15 bucks a month gets you
unlimited access to the collection). Amazingly
enough, the artists actually get some money out
of this. A strange thought, eh?
A lot of the chatter about Napster seems to
center around the idea that it might or might
not be hurting CD sales, but what about MP3 sales?
Is it possible to make money selling music on
the web? How would you do it in a world where it's
eaisier to find non-legit copies for free?
(And to me, there's an even scarier thought:
It's actually relatively easy for Napster to
police their users *if* they were inclined to
do it -- e.g. there's that MD5 signature that
Napster built into the system, originally to
deal with interrupted downloads. But they
refused, and now they may be legally shut down
and various less centralized systems may be
put in use. What's the next move of the RIAA?
Will they start going after people running
servers? Will they start pushing for a
re-engineered internet without that pesky
anonymity feature?)
Anyway, Full (ha) disclosure: Yeah, I work at
emusic these days. Simultaneous disclaimer:
I don't speak for emusic, and vice versa.
I moved out there from New York with some trepidation, but more-or-less found interesting stuff to do. I got into skiing (downhill and cross-country) and rock climbing, and one of the real advantages of being in that part of the country is you've got a lot of easy access to places to engage in sports like that and just as importantly, everyone you meet is going to be interested in something like this (the question is typically not "Are you doing anything this weekend?" but "Hey, where are you going skiing this weekend?").
Culturally, the area leaves a lot to be desired. I picked Pocatello as a place to live because it had a small state university. The weekly film series there was watchable, but nothing heavy. The bands that they got to play were tremendously lame (I actually went to see Journey there because I hadn't seen any other live music in months. I left early.) There were was one funky old bookstore (with an impressive collection of hardcore pornography) in the old part of Idaho, but more often then not I ended up going to Waldenbooks and special ordering things. Salt Lake City was a little better in some respects, for example, they had a really good Science Fiction bookstore. I also thought the punk/mod types were interesting... you'd see these kids hanging around on scooters with "Clash" stickers on them. The SF convention in Salt Lake was small, but interesting (e.g. they got Fritz Leiber in as Goh).
The people I met were okay by me, though a lot of them weren't from the area (a lot of ex-auto industry engineers from Michigan, for example). The few Mormon people I did hang around with were fine by me... nice folks with a sense of humor. (I personally have no complaints about Mormon women either... funny, I've heard other women complain about how "flirtatious" they are, though.)
But: I don't know what it would've been like to live around there if I didn't have short hair, if I wasn't a white guy, etc. I also don't drink, so the liquor law weirdness didn't bother me tremendously: but there was one this time when I was doing a road trip through Utah, and a freind of mine wanted to buy beer. He didn't have an ID on him, but I had a NY driver's license (with no photo) and my security pass with photo and "Naval Reactor Facilty" emblazoned across it: They refused to sell me the beer. My friend was incensed by this: "This man has a DOE security clearence! He's authorized to handle nuclear fuel!"
I guess I can remember another off-putting little incident: My girlfriend put in a request for a birthday present; she wanted a collection of nylons/tights of every available color. So I try and buy this stuff at a local department store, using a credit card, and my NRF site ID as photo ID. They went away into the back room and kept me standing around for a solid 20 minutes before deciding it was okay for me to buy women's lingerie. (In retrospect, maybe it was a mistake to try and do this with a "*Naval* Reactor Facility" ID.)
So, bottom line is that I don't regret living there for a couple of years, but I also don't regret that I left after that, and I much prefer living in a "real" city...