There's a fundamental difference I think you're missing here, and intentions have much more to do with things than you might think.. for IBM to give an air of embracing the OSI movement, but have ulterior motives does not really help the Open Source community, but actually weakens it at it's very core. I think you're missing the consideration of upper (unenlightened) management structures who will be more likely to believe a large well established corporation's view of what OSI means over smaller bands of disorganised developers. Fork the code as much as you like in your little home lab, but when it comes to making large decisions for corporations - support and SLAs play a much more important role.. expect IBM to support your changes? I'd rather expect the other - they fork your code for their own product - they then get free development effort from you and can run back and say - hey it was our great development efforts that have done all this - Why does this matter? The building of perception in the marketplace is more valuable for a company with respect to their stockholders than having to actually contribute necessary steps to facilitate greater learning. With enough popular perception they can then become the new soma of a brave new world.
At least with the SCSL you have a license that is consistent with their intentions (apparently protection of a standard), but with IBM giving the appearance of embracing the OSI while maintaining unfair business practices in other venues we have what is inconsistent and appears to be more like the pied piper in the community bandwagon.. for a company that is not open to leapfrog 4 levels and suddenly announce they are completely OSI comfortable either indicates that they are either dishonest and not considering the broader implications of what this should mean, or desparate (if we learned anything from pre-MS history, I think you might already know the answers as history has a habit of repeating itself).. I personally would be more comfortable if they were more honest about their intentions and developed their own License to address those concerns as an intermediary step.
First off Tivoli is a widely used Enterprise Management System that can be rather convoluted. I've seen organizations spend lit 5-6 digits in support and customization of Tivoli products for their enterprise. Take my word for it.. to give away WebSphere, but have large Tivoli hooks means that IBM can then follow up and sell Tivoli consulting and customization to many small companies and this is a much larger sell than a simple license for an web/app server. Top this with the IBM jdk and the convolution of the Smalltalk/Java line and I believe we get a dilution of the Java language and protocol extensions.
Second, while not espousing theories of conspiracy that the evil blue empire is on the verge of world domination, I would be cautious in approaching the blue flag of universal friendship. Bad blood between the Unix vendors runs deep and wide and the "embracing of OSI" initiative is a largely political stance to get IBM back into the mainstream culture. I've heard some of the top AIX developers/integrators say "there's a few good ideas in Linux.. like the small graphical install packages", while at the same time saying that they will introduce new functionality in AIX that comes directly from linux source code without giving proper due credit. This effectively goes to the point of stealing code back out of some linux utilities, and then figuring out how little of it they are obligated to make public again.
On top of this AIX has never been a strong O/S (BSD base and slow to adopt later SVR4 revisions - only recently with the acquisition of SCO do they have the license and have things like truss been announced for the O/S).. IBM knows this, and is looking for ways to popularize their lack of technology and innovation - mainly the good old fashioned way of copying and changing a little to make it look like your own (like a good percentage of dissertations out there).. much in linux has this same form of flattery, and a merger of the two means that we now have a hybrid imitation of many things that are better done and supported elsewhere with no real advancement in the field itself. This muddying of the technical waters has persisted for many years, and through the duping of much of the "technical mainstream" will persist for many more while a rift develops between what people understand and what they think they understand. All the while this leads to large $$ capital position as phony needs are created, and a large "enterprise with XX years experience" steps in and says we can support that.. it doesn't take a genius to figure out that the s/w industry will be peanuts compared to the future h/w and service industry.
For IBM, the key issue driving this move is to prevent Microsoft, Sun, or any other vendor from using a core technology to dominate the industry.
bull-hockey!! while I agree with the first part (prevention of Sun or Microsoft to gain dominance), IBM is still out to be dominant. This is attempted (subtle distinction) not through creation of a new technology but rather assimilation and change of "popular" technologies as they set themselves up to be the source point for change
.. beware of large wooden gift horses..
WebSphere includes "Tivoli Ready Modules" - is Tivoli open source? Integration with IBM VisualAge.. is this open source? and will most likely run best on AIX (ever look at the licensing structure for their O/S?) which will enable them to sell more hardware (where everyone knows the real $$ come from)
By positioning themselves in the middle of the market and jumping on the bandwagon to pigeonhole and point the finger at other companies, they make their own bad policies and practices less apparent. Ever look at the cost for IBM services? This is what they really want to sell and dominate.
while a good set of test results, what about performance on a sparc? with the IA-64 in the works for later this year, I think some of the work that sun has been doing for the past 5 years (Ultra-sparc = 64bit) will finally be evident.. and with the Ultra III due out by the end of the year (hopefully), we should see major improvements in the architecture.
keep in mind that Sun has always had a different approach to hardware and this is apparent in their software.. personally I find it impressive that they are able to maintain a good presence in the Intel market while producing their own (better) hardware all along. puts companies like apple to shame. their focus on interoperability, research, and development has undone most of the proprietary obstacles that have persisted since the mid-80s.
my biggest beef with the linux community is the lack of real innovation. ok so sun doesn't give everything away for free.. go write your own language.. develop your own ideas that are fundamentally different and stop copying everybody else.. imitation becomes the highest form of flattery.
Take redhat; I recently installed it on a laptop, and first thing I had to do was to figure out how to disable that crap gnome/enlightenment environment and just get a normal window manager up and running. one without fsking session management. I get really uncomfortable when I have to trace four layers of scripts to figure out why this and that program was started.
Magic is great in fiction, but I hate it on my desktop.
hear hear!.. the common problem with "there's more than one way to do it" tends to be everybody who does it every-which way without simplification or clear hierarchical documentation and/or justification. Tracing program execution is more often like playing the old mousetrap game, with the developer saying "look at what an ingenious mousetrap [and time sink] I've built"!!
too many "genious" chiefs.. not enough lowly indians..
I like the V2 rocket analogy - you bring a good point. Remember the day when people were more known for their achievements than their stock value?
I think your question around the concern of genetic engineering humans comes down to our view of humans, and the change that's happened in say the last 30-40 yrs. It's far different between understanding the matter that makes up things, and changing that matter to change a life. I guess you could also ask, what's the big deal about using the medical research the nazis published after experimenting on on the Jews in WWII? They were (in their minds) just dealing with what they considered (sub)-human matter..
I think the point is that with more knowledge about the human condition comes greater responsibility. Now if the state of things in this world is such that money, position and stock value are of greater value than people in relationship, what will distinguish us from past generations that have created huge atrocities for large groups of people? What may improve the quality of life for some groups of people may in fact decrease the quality of life for other groups of people especially when people who insist on their rights will trample on the rights of others. There's much more to humans than just the materials they consist of.
--- "'Once the rockets go up who cares where they come down.. that's not my department' says Wehner Von Braun" --Tom Lehrer
Wireless transmission of power between earth and the ionosphere is an old unexplored idea - (think spherical capacitor charged at 6.8Hz).. use an electric engine to take you to the ionosphere, then jet engines to escape the gravitational pull.
The more interesting question to me, though is not about space travel, but rather - why are we still stuck on fossil fuels, electric generators, and technology that really hasn't changed in over 100 years?
btw - I still find it fascinating that we listened to Tesla (who?) about the AC thing (look at the generator plates from the niagara falls power station), but somehow his ideas were ludicrous when he talked about wireless power.. I wouldn't call it a government conspiracy though - it's simply that the general public is slow to adopt, understand, and accept that there are better ways of doing things - one look at the (relatively) slow rate of growth of applications and businesses on the internet (considering the earlier potential) proves that..;)
Who cares if you put memory compression on a separate chip? What's the advantage between that and buying more memory or better hardware? It seems to me that it's just another IBM scheme to try and hook more ppl onto their hardware, where then can then turn around and eek more money out of you to buy more of their hardware and compression chips and then charge more $$ for their support on how to code to the chips/etc.. am I the only one who sees this?
Well said - but you obviously come from a country where you have the luxury to be able to make that kind of choice. It's real easy to get worked up over the issues of information control when you don't live in fear of what you might know or not know.
The issues of information and information control are not debatable, or necessarily identifiable in many places. The notion of truth in a human sense is typically subjective to the messenger. Notions of objectivity and right and wrong are generally multi-faceted when you consider larger pictures, and the presuppositions that many ppl start with. Not everything and everyone's version of the truth is worth hearing. Like Pandora's box, there are many images and things that I wish I had never seen or known, since I know that with greater information comes greater responsibility.
Now, since we have opened up large channels of information, it seems to me that the best protection for those channels is responsible behaviour. In that right, I do not think that greed and avarice have a place, especially if the insistence of a particular "right" involves the trampling on the rights of others. The power of a positive example is of greater value than an irresponsible revolution -- (don't get me wrong there is a place for revolution, but I think that it has a greater chance of succeeding when it is preceded by responsible actions.)
It's about making a wise use of your existing resources, not about fascist control over freedom of speech.
I know of a large company that banned napster on their network and literally saw a performance improvement of 60x on their internal network and ~10x on their external network. Bandwidth control, especially in a corporate environment is an extremely vital management task.
Now imagine how fast some of the internet would be if we banned pop-up ads and pornography!!
Scrapping the whole DNS hierarchy effectively involves scrapping DNS (not a bad idea.) DNS is built on a hierarchy and somebody has to sit and answer on the TLD, or at least generate the TLD. Distribution of a common TLD would be extremely difficult in a peer-to-peer scheme, and the whole system would be even more unpredictable, especially when you throw in problems like negative caching.
A better scheme would be to implement better directory services for people or programs to find the IP addresses of the sites they want. In today's world, what's the difference between having a site named gobbledefoo.com and having an address of 216.98.65.8? It's mostly through the use of Directories like Yahoo and Altavista that people are able to find what they're looking for instead of typing random words in a browser (even though is a more common practice.) It's kinda funny when you think that the whole ".com" craze is about the fact that netscape filled that in for you with a "www." when you typed a word into the browser because people couldn't remember what the www and.com were for in the first place.
While I do like ESR, and the initial impact of the Cathedral and the Bazaar, I don't think it holds enough weight, and I think some of it's basis is a little faulty. The C&B paper was a good step to turn attention away from the traditional centralized model, but I think it misses the point that the Linux model works because there is a redirection of talent based on personal responsibility, not because a plethora of developers are now devoted to a project. In that same light - Brooks' Law doesn't take into account the motivation and skills of the individuals involved in a project which is more indicative of a personal factor than an engineering parameter.
The Bazaar, as ESR portrays it, simplifies mass programmers down to intelligent testers refining code and reducing bug counts - this is true, but this does not necessarily mean better, more stable, or more usable software. More problems are revealed and more features creep in, but the real value of Open Source is the sense of personal responsibility people take (at this point in time anyway - perhaps the revolutionary attitudes) to invest their time, talent, and energy in producing something of quality.
Now applying this same attitude to government - I find it pathetic to see the change in the amount of dedication and commitment we currently show to our government. One look at the rusted ornate decorations on most government buildings indicates that most of the American Public takes little responsibility now in making and maintaining our government as something truly valuable. We did at one point in time, but I think Americans take for granted that someone else will take personal responsibility for our government. It's not until these notions of personal responsibility and irresponsibility replace the order/chaos mentality in the minds of the public that a true change in the IP business models will take place.
Sounds like a vaporware response to the recent iplanet Portal and Wireless server products.. Their.net site seems *really* slim on the product offerings
Seems more to me that M$ will do for the internet what NetBios did for networking.. create bad substandards that generate a lot of noise, confusion, and traffic - and then hopefully everybody forgets about them.. (if we all ignore them long enough will they ever go away?)
.je "microsoft.net.. now I can watch my machine helplessly die from anywhere in the world.."
using the car analogy and thinking out loud i find the following conclusions:
Microsoft lets you use their car design, but seals everything up into interconnected pieces and retains ownership - if you need to change out parts, you've got to remove large sections of the car, risking breaking something else and create your own parts to fit into their undocumented plugs. If you have a great enough idea for a nifty new piece, Microsoft will be happy to take it from you and resell it, making more undocumented plugs in the process.
Sun lets you use their car design, and now lets you see how everything works - if you want to change something on your own car great, but they retain ownership, so you can't modify their car and sell it as your own. If you have a great idea for a nifty new piece, you can try and give it to Sun - and if you get someone's attention they'll turn around and give it everyone.
Linux is a collective kit car design, where many people can know how different pieces work, and anybody can create their own car or pieces and sell it as their own. If you have a great idea for a new nifty piece, make it and market it on your own, and if it gets everyone's attention then you can control how everybody can get to it and use it. It's like legos on steriods..:)
Interesting too that one organization now has control over the most lucrative domain names and the most well used authentication service. Perhaps the making for another monopoly.
Watching Microsoft praise it's educational contribution in the State Dept - it's my fear that we are only teaching our kids a blatant disregard for authority.
The educational contribution that Microsoft is making teaches us that if we are found guilty by a higher authority, we can distort the matter and irresponsibly turn away from the repurcussions of damage we have created.
In claiming that an independent governing body has restricted their innovative freedom, Microsoft fails to account for every innovation they have distorted or corrupted, and educates us that dominance is of a higher importance than cooperative diversity and imagination.
I fear that corporate business has already begun to replace the institution of government, and our perceived need for a technocentric unity is short sighted when it decries and discredits the truly innovative human spirit.
quite the contrary - and I think you miss the point of the stymied effect that a monopoly has on the well-being of the "average user".. rather than opening the marketplace to better ways of doing tasks, "average users" have been stuck with 1 way and have adhered to a particular standard that is extremely limited.
As a Sun employee, I have found that 90% of "average users" have never heard of Sun, and when I explain the nature of our business, I frequently get PC questions.. it's like going back in time to answer these.
1) There are no E10000 that were replaced.. there are no E10K servers at NSI. the old a.root-servers.net ran on an E450 (4proc) 4GB of Ram, and of those four processors their single-threaded bind process consumes 1.
2) a.root-servers.net is the top authoritative server for the.com,.net and.org zones and i think they also load the.mil,.edu,.gov, and.arpa on a.root.. that's it. The internal press release claims that they hold zones for all the ccTLDs (country-code specific Top Level Domains). This is incorrect, but they do point to the correct authoritative servers for each of the country codes.
suprising to find that much of NSI isn't aware of what exactly they do..
Interesting, but I believe Tesla already gave relatively clear instructions on how to generate ball lightning back in 1902 (patented 1914).. from page 2 of this patent:
".. if the points of maximum pressure should be shifted.. a ball of fire might break out and destroy support F or anything else in the way.. The accident is apt to occur when, the transmitting circuit being strongly excited, the impressed oscillations upon it are caused, in any manner more or less sudden, to be more rapid than the free oscillations. It is therefore advisable to begin the adjustments with feeble and somewhat slower impressed oscillations, strengthening and quickening them gradually, until the apparatus has been brought under perfect control."
With this and more supporting evidence from Tesla's "Colorado Spring Notes", I believe that the Corum brothers produced this same effect in Ohio back in 1988. They noted that ball lightning could be produced from this sort of circuit arrangement (2 secondary coils of differing frequencies connected to the same primary with the higher frequency coil impressing upon the lower), and also noted that larger balls could be produced by seeding them with some sort of hydrocarbon (as might be kicked up after a lightning strike.. burning tree stump, ash, etc) They noted that the balls followed the streamers (some streamers barely visible) and if struck by multiple streamers, the balls would grow in size. They were able to produce balls about the size of a ping-pong ball with a 3.2kW generator, the above circuit, and a candle.
It would seem to follow that the differing electrical properties of certain materials (Tesla seemed to prefer Tungsten) would make them more or less favorable to electrical exicitation, and Silicon seems to hold some interesting properties. It's good to see a report that's finally starting to catch up with what has already been done, documented, and patented. The publicity is good too, I guess. Oh, btw, the Corum brothers were never able to drum up enough understanding of their research to merit proper credit (sound familiar?)
.je ----------- "The Internet? Too much noise, not enough signal" -- D Edwards
Slashdot Mirror
what's your 2nd regex for?
#!/bin/sh
test $ur -eq "SuSE developer" && exit 1
At least with the SCSL you have a license that is consistent with their intentions (apparently protection of a standard), but with IBM giving the appearance of embracing the OSI while maintaining unfair business practices in other venues we have what is inconsistent and appears to be more like the pied piper in the community bandwagon .. for a company that is not open to leapfrog 4 levels and suddenly announce they are completely OSI comfortable either indicates that they are either dishonest and not considering the broader implications of what this should mean, or desparate (if we learned anything from pre-MS history, I think you might already know the answers as history has a habit of repeating itself) .. I personally would be more comfortable if they were more honest about their intentions and developed their own License to address those concerns as an intermediary step.
Second, while not espousing theories of conspiracy that the evil blue empire is on the verge of world domination, I would be cautious in approaching the blue flag of universal friendship. Bad blood between the Unix vendors runs deep and wide and the "embracing of OSI" initiative is a largely political stance to get IBM back into the mainstream culture. I've heard some of the top AIX developers/integrators say "there's a few good ideas in Linux .. like the small graphical install packages", while at the same time saying that they will introduce new functionality in AIX that comes directly from linux source code without giving proper due credit. This effectively goes to the point of stealing code back out of some linux utilities, and then figuring out how little of it they are obligated to make public again.
On top of this AIX has never been a strong O/S (BSD base and slow to adopt later SVR4 revisions - only recently with the acquisition of SCO do they have the license and have things like truss been announced for the O/S) .. IBM knows this, and is looking for ways to popularize their lack of technology and innovation - mainly the good old fashioned way of copying and changing a little to make it look like your own (like a good percentage of dissertations out there) .. much in linux has this same form of flattery, and a merger of the two means that we now have a hybrid imitation of many things that are better done and supported elsewhere with no real advancement in the field itself. This muddying of the technical waters has persisted for many years, and through the duping of much of the "technical mainstream" will persist for many more while a rift develops between what people understand and what they think they understand. All the while this leads to large $$ capital position as phony needs are created, and a large "enterprise with XX years experience" steps in and says we can support that .. it doesn't take a genius to figure out that the s/w industry will be peanuts compared to the future h/w and service industry.
sigh .. enough ranting for a day ..
bull-hockey!! while I agree with the first part (prevention of Sun or Microsoft to gain dominance), IBM is still out to be dominant. This is attempted (subtle distinction) not through creation of a new technology but rather assimilation and change of "popular" technologies as they set themselves up to be the source point for change
.. beware of large wooden gift horses ..
WebSphere includes "Tivoli Ready Modules" - is Tivoli open source? Integration with IBM VisualAge .. is this open source? and will most likely run best on AIX (ever look at the licensing structure for their O/S?) which will enable them to sell more hardware (where everyone knows the real $$ come from)
By positioning themselves in the middle of the market and jumping on the bandwagon to pigeonhole and point the finger at other companies, they make their own bad policies and practices less apparent. Ever look at the cost for IBM services? This is what they really want to sell and dominate.
keep in mind that Sun has always had a different approach to hardware and this is apparent in their software .. personally I find it impressive that they are able to maintain a good presence in the Intel market while producing their own (better) hardware all along. puts companies like apple to shame. their focus on interoperability, research, and development has undone most of the proprietary obstacles that have persisted since the mid-80s.
my biggest beef with the linux community is the lack of real innovation. ok so sun doesn't give everything away for free .. go write your own language .. develop your own ideas that are fundamentally different and stop copying everybody else .. imitation becomes the highest form of flattery.
hear hear! .. the common problem with "there's more than one way to do it" tends to be everybody who does it every-which way without simplification or clear hierarchical documentation and/or justification. Tracing program execution is more often like playing the old mousetrap game, with the developer saying "look at what an ingenious mousetrap [and time sink] I've built"!!
too many "genious" chiefs .. not enough lowly indians ..
I think your question around the concern of genetic engineering humans comes down to our view of humans, and the change that's happened in say the last 30-40 yrs. It's far different between understanding the matter that makes up things, and changing that matter to change a life. I guess you could also ask, what's the big deal about using the medical research the nazis published after experimenting on on the Jews in WWII? They were (in their minds) just dealing with what they considered (sub)-human matter ..
I think the point is that with more knowledge about the human condition comes greater responsibility. Now if the state of things in this world is such that money, position and stock value are of greater value than people in relationship, what will distinguish us from past generations that have created huge atrocities for large groups of people? What may improve the quality of life for some groups of people may in fact decrease the quality of life for other groups of people especially when people who insist on their rights will trample on the rights of others. There's much more to humans than just the materials they consist of.
--- "'Once the rockets go up who cares where they come down .. that's not my department' says Wehner Von Braun" --Tom Lehrer
The more interesting question to me, though is not about space travel, but rather - why are we still stuck on fossil fuels, electric generators, and technology that really hasn't changed in over 100 years?
btw - I still find it fascinating that we listened to Tesla (who?) about the AC thing (look at the generator plates from the niagara falls power station), but somehow his ideas were ludicrous when he talked about wireless power .. I wouldn't call it a government conspiracy though - it's simply that the general public is slow to adopt, understand, and accept that there are better ways of doing things - one look at the (relatively) slow rate of growth of applications and businesses on the internet (considering the earlier potential) proves that .. ;)
I wonder if Verisign realizes what a bastard child they bought, and the negative impact it'll have on their reputation ..
Who cares if you put memory compression on a separate chip? What's the advantage between that and buying more memory or better hardware? It seems to me that it's just another IBM scheme to try and hook more ppl onto their hardware, where then can then turn around and eek more money out of you to buy more of their hardware and compression chips and then charge more $$ for their support on how to code to the chips/etc .. am I the only one who sees this?
The issues of information and information control are not debatable, or necessarily identifiable in many places. The notion of truth in a human sense is typically subjective to the messenger. Notions of objectivity and right and wrong are generally multi-faceted when you consider larger pictures, and the presuppositions that many ppl start with. Not everything and everyone's version of the truth is worth hearing. Like Pandora's box, there are many images and things that I wish I had never seen or known, since I know that with greater information comes greater responsibility.
Now, since we have opened up large channels of information, it seems to me that the best protection for those channels is responsible behaviour. In that right, I do not think that greed and avarice have a place, especially if the insistence of a particular "right" involves the trampling on the rights of others. The power of a positive example is of greater value than an irresponsible revolution -- (don't get me wrong there is a place for revolution, but I think that it has a greater chance of succeeding when it is preceded by responsible actions.)
I know of a large company that banned napster on their network and literally saw a performance improvement of 60x on their internal network and ~10x on their external network. Bandwidth control, especially in a corporate environment is an extremely vital management task.
Now imagine how fast some of the internet would be if we banned pop-up ads and pornography!!
A better scheme would be to implement better directory services for people or programs to find the IP addresses of the sites they want. In today's world, what's the difference between having a site named gobbledefoo.com and having an address of 216.98.65.8? It's mostly through the use of Directories like Yahoo and Altavista that people are able to find what they're looking for instead of typing random words in a browser (even though is a more common practice.) It's kinda funny when you think that the whole ".com" craze is about the fact that netscape filled that in for you with a "www." when you typed a word into the browser because people couldn't remember what the www and .com were for in the first place.
The Bazaar, as ESR portrays it, simplifies mass programmers down to intelligent testers refining code and reducing bug counts - this is true, but this does not necessarily mean better, more stable, or more usable software. More problems are revealed and more features creep in, but the real value of Open Source is the sense of personal responsibility people take (at this point in time anyway - perhaps the revolutionary attitudes) to invest their time, talent, and energy in producing something of quality.
Now applying this same attitude to government - I find it pathetic to see the change in the amount of dedication and commitment we currently show to our government. One look at the rusted ornate decorations on most government buildings indicates that most of the American Public takes little responsibility now in making and maintaining our government as something truly valuable. We did at one point in time, but I think Americans take for granted that someone else will take personal responsibility for our government. It's not until these notions of personal responsibility and irresponsibility replace the order/chaos mentality in the minds of the public that a true change in the IP business models will take place.
<laugh>While they claim to have invented XML</laugh> .. their white paper seems to be a description of their future bastardization plans. "..The loosely coupled XML-based Microsoft .NET programming model introduces the concept of creating XML-based Web Services.." - methinks i've seen too many other loosely coupled M$ standard "interpretations" (Unicode, Dynamic DNS, Java)
Seems more to me that M$ will do for the internet what NetBios did for networking .. create bad substandards that generate a lot of noise, confusion, and traffic - and then hopefully everybody forgets about them .. (if we all ignore them long enough will they ever go away?)
"microsoft.net
Microsoft lets you use their car design, but seals everything up into interconnected pieces and retains ownership - if you need to change out parts, you've got to remove large sections of the car, risking breaking something else and create your own parts to fit into their undocumented plugs. If you have a great enough idea for a nifty new piece, Microsoft will be happy to take it from you and resell it, making more undocumented plugs in the process.
Sun lets you use their car design, and now lets you see how everything works - if you want to change something on your own car great, but they retain ownership, so you can't modify their car and sell it as your own. If you have a great idea for a nifty new piece, you can try and give it to Sun - and if you get someone's attention they'll turn around and give it everyone.
Linux is a collective kit car design, where many people can know how different pieces work, and anybody can create their own car or pieces and sell it as their own. If you have a great idea for a new nifty piece, make it and market it on your own, and if it gets everyone's attention then you can control how everybody can get to it and use it. It's like legos on steriods .. :)
why not use ELF instead?
Interesting too that one organization now has control over the most lucrative domain names and the most well used authentication service. Perhaps the making for another monopoly.
The educational contribution that Microsoft is making teaches us that if we are found guilty by a higher authority, we can distort the matter and irresponsibly turn away from the repurcussions of damage we have created.
In claiming that an independent governing body has restricted their innovative freedom, Microsoft fails to account for every innovation they have distorted or corrupted, and educates us that dominance is of a higher importance than cooperative diversity and imagination.
I fear that corporate business has already begun to replace the institution of government, and our perceived need for a technocentric unity is short sighted when it decries and discredits the truly innovative human spirit.
As a Sun employee, I have found that 90% of "average users" have never heard of Sun, and when I explain the nature of our business, I frequently get PC questions .. it's like going back in time to answer these.
from an inside Sun source at NSI:
1) There are no E10000 that were replaced .. there are no E10K servers at NSI. the old a.root-servers.net ran on an E450 (4proc) 4GB of Ram, and of those four processors their single-threaded bind process consumes 1.
2) a.root-servers.net is the top authoritative server for the .com, .net and .org zones and i think they also load the .mil, .edu, .gov, and .arpa on a.root .. that's it. The internal press release claims that they hold zones for all the ccTLDs (country-code specific Top Level Domains). This is incorrect, but they do point to the correct authoritative servers for each of the country codes.
suprising to find that much of NSI isn't aware of what exactly they do ..
Interesting, but I believe Tesla already gave relatively clear instructions on how to generate ball lightning back in 1902 (patented 1914) .. from page 2 of this patent:
.. a ball of fire might break out and destroy support F or anything else in the way .. The accident is apt to occur when, the transmitting circuit being strongly excited, the impressed oscillations upon it are caused, in any manner more or less sudden, to be more rapid than the free oscillations. It is therefore advisable to begin the adjustments with feeble and somewhat slower impressed oscillations, strengthening and quickening them gradually, until the apparatus has been brought under perfect control."
.. burning tree stump, ash, etc) They noted that the balls followed the streamers (some streamers barely visible) and if struck by multiple streamers, the balls would grow in size. They were able to produce balls about the size of a ping-pong ball with a 3.2kW generator, the above circuit, and a candle.
.je
".. if the points of maximum pressure should be shifted
With this and more supporting evidence from Tesla's "Colorado Spring Notes", I believe that the Corum brothers produced this same effect in Ohio back in 1988. They noted that ball lightning could be produced from this sort of circuit arrangement (2 secondary coils of differing frequencies connected to the same primary with the higher frequency coil impressing upon the lower), and also noted that larger balls could be produced by seeding them with some sort of hydrocarbon (as might be kicked up after a lightning strike
It would seem to follow that the differing electrical properties of certain materials (Tesla seemed to prefer Tungsten) would make them more or less favorable to electrical exicitation, and Silicon seems to hold some interesting properties. It's good to see a report that's finally starting to catch up with what has already been done, documented, and patented. The publicity is good too, I guess. Oh, btw, the Corum brothers were never able to drum up enough understanding of their research to merit proper credit (sound familiar?)
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