If RNA conducts, couldn't we have a computational response to a phyisiological stimuli. If electrical DNA mapping can work then we can use dna as sort of an organic "in-wire" resistor possibly also a transistor. We could make a computer built on a blueprint of itself, oh wait.
"A socity that cannot adequately distiguish between science and magic is insufficently advanced"
Let's see what I remember from my third grade report on nuclear disasters (Dad did some programing work for the nuke program, and was originally a physicist, so I had NRC demo matierials and everything):
Three Mile island nuclear plant had two "major" accidents, both released less radation than the radioactive dye used in heart surgery (by an order of magnitude).
The Chernobyl disaster was as much a function of reactor design as poor disaster mitigation. The USSR reactor design at the time raised the graphite control rods from below rather than the American method of lowering them. The advantage of the American method is in the event of a runaway reaction the control rods drop in to the core stifling the reaction before the core can melt through and breach the reactor core housing.
I may not have a nuke plant in my back yard, but I would much rather live near a nuclear power plant than a fossil fuel power plant. (Acctually, about 2 miles from my parents house is a small hydro electric plant which wins.)
To get the full benfit of Open Source development you may prefer to release as early as you have a stable beta. This allows you to have a wide range of Beta testers, and in the Bazaar model, real world troubleshooting and feature evaluation. But, the trade off is you never get to sell the software. There are a number of commercial apps that I know of and use here at (Unspecified Government Agency) that have excellent (and expensive) consulting services for implementation and customization of those applications. If the application that your company is developing lends itself to those services then your business model is: The application is in effect a marketing tool for the consulting services that actually brings money in. This works best if two things are true: a) Your consulting services know your product best and b) you have the capacity to satisfy demand. Open Sourcing your software can make your software much more widely used, thus increasing that critical word of mouth factor. I know that in purchasing recommendations I have recommended for or against use of a product because of the size of the user base of the product. If I've never heard of an application and it isn't used in more than one or two major places, I won't have confidence in continued support and development. This is what I think is the biggest strength of OSS, 'The cream alway floats to the top.'. OSS by it's nature can not prevent bad software, but without the use of monopolistic (and I'm not just talking M$ here) marketing bad software doesn't get used. The greatest weakness I see in OSS is dealing with responding to the customer's needs in development; this mechinism is just as important as keeping you code clean if your software is going to continue to be viable.
In the Beginning, The 'Net emerged from the primortial ooze of analog bit streams and flaky phone lines. The Denizens of this early 'Net learned about cooperation and fault tolerance, and it was good. As time progressed (fast forward) the uninitated, the normal citizens of the BBR, used to protection under the law and the burden of it's restrictiveness were unprepared for a world where there was no shelter for the expliotable under a omnipotent protector. Seriously folks, the laws regarding 'Net crime are both vauge and largely untested. I think that Nike might be liable. On the 'Net you have to take total responsibility for your presence. Like every tinker and his brother on @Home, putting up insecure servers, it's you (Give me a sword of burning code and the arrows of design.), your box and the forces of darkness. The artical yeaterday about the unfortunate lack of a "hacker threat" does demonstrate the pricipal 'The bigger the name the bigger the target.'. Nike has spent millions (billions?) becoming a brand name that every 4 year old in America knows, and in accordance should be persuing security with due vigilance. The big expliots that security pros tell their children at night, the 'Net age boogie man, DDoS on Yahoo.com and others, IExplore that shut down part of MCI, have all been perpetrated on big names.
General System Fault: Please sacrifice two chickens and a goat to continue.
Stuff that I think is important to both to my users and myself in a UI:
1. A conveniant and consistant way of managing tasks (Taskbars are the common solution, but Be 4.5's sucked as far as my test group was concerned, so it can be doen wrong)
2. User visual settings from the silly color sheming to the more important font sizing and resolution.
3. Bounding on commonly used click areas, things like puting the program close button in a corner is very important and the system menu button in another corner are ideas that make the GUI just plain easier.
4. Cutting and pasting, I know user level stuff, but I'm serious when I say it's just important. If you have ever had to VT100 a configuration, copying it from (Insert text editor here) just saves aggrevation.
5. A good file manager, I know a lot of people that say win 3.1's file manager was the hieght of technology in the field.
Why do all the things resembal microsoft? MS 'intergrated'(read stole) some of the best ideas of the best UIs out there. The thing you can say about windows is that it's easy--it's easier to learn to use windows that it is to program a VCR.
I long for the day when somebody comes up with a UI more useful and capable than a windows workalike. My sorrow comes when I realize the incredable feat of out of the box thinking it will take.
2. Tell those "wealthy organizations accostomed to getting their way" to take their "schedules" and shove them. We have no time for that. If they want crappy software with lots of features, point them to the borg in the northwest. They'll come crawling back.
No, if they think they need a feature set they pay their own development staff to add those features and send the changes back to the FSF or whom ever maintains the software. Open source works economicly because the money comes from development and support of a commonly availible, 'safe' API (by safe I mean that the company won't go under and it won't care twice as much or require twice as many client licenses as last year). We make our bucks by making it run, and being paid to develop the sooulution specific features, not on the sale of the enviornment. I keep saying, when you make Linux more robust, by creating software or documentation, you keep the pay checks of everyone that maintains linux system's safe.
It's not about our apps are more stable, it's not about our apps are cheaper. Uptime is as much a function of how a sever is run as the OS running, and TCO depends on a thousand things. It's about creating Linux jobs. Hopefully jobs that none of us have to say "why didn't they put this feature in?", or "Why in the heck did they do it that way?", or even "this feature would make this useful for me". We have everything we need to make the bells that the big guys want, if they want us to make it bad enough.
Here in the US you can get Ricochet from Metricom if you live in DC, San Francisco or Seattle. Their press says that they're going to 128kbs, and it's unlimited connection time. Works on a frequency hopping spread spectrum radio system. The coverage sucks outside those three cities, just major airports and a few universities. Linux isn't offically supported but you guys with linux laptops are used to that.
Here is the argument I would make about Linux liability. A distribution sets its own warrenty, though one may be considered implyed. So if RedHat's current distro, for example, has a giltch that formats your non-linux partition, and the instructions don't tell you that that will happen, then RedHat could be held liable. On the other hand, if you home brew, modify, add to, or any thing else that is outside the distro's warrenty, you are on your own. If you download something that has a line in the help file "No warrenties expressed or implied" your only recourse is to find someone to fix it. This is where support comes in. I was always under the impression that the idea of how to make OSS work in the economy is to sell support and development. OSS is to give us jobs by making the tools availible to anyone whom has a use for them. Why is SGI paying some of the Samba developers? because it helps sell their servers. Why should one develop a secrure, web enabled project mangement tool kit? So some company that needs it can pay to have the features they need developed and to maintain the system. The nice thing is (idealy) that not only do you get yourself a job but by making OSS more versatile and valuable you give others in the OSC a job also. Warrenties, support contracts, are what the OSS economic justification are all about. The thing we as a community need to be most wary of is making OSS deliberately more difficult than it need to be. It has been proven that no matter how simple a system is, support for it becomes vital enough to dedicate professionals to maintain it i.e. Windows NT.
Hopfully this will be and odd post
on
Happy Odd Day!
·
· Score: 1
Geregorian tricks - no one susppects the spanish inqusition.
Really nothing any more or less specail than 1-1-2000, just how the numbers lineup in a base ten number system on the gregorian calander, based (roughly) on the orbits of this planet and it's satallite, nad when a significant man was born (though his accomplishments may be subject to debate, he had a great effect on our culture).
Then what's this Exceed icon on my desktop for? It been said a million times, the patent system is over burdened. It's a combination of the sheer breadth of knowlage need to understand so many high tech fields, and a lack of experienced staff (with 5 years of experience one can double one's salary in the private sector). The strategy is to give out the patent and have the courts sort it out in litigation. A great deal of software patents don't qualify under the Previous Works rule: (paraphrased) If anyone, including you has done this before, it is assumed to be common knowlage in the field. Technically if you have an idea for a polymorphic variable decrypting code key block (I'll gpl it if it ever works), you have to patent the idea before you get it working. In practice this is usually not the case. But IMHO the open source model is beginning to show that ideas and information can only be kept by great effort. You stay ahead by getting the next big thing to market faster and better than the compition, by being the only or best ones to get the product to work, or by just selling the development not the software. It makes it hard to fathom for those of us that grew up under the assumption of intellectual property, but it is increasingly evident that those rights only go to those that can afford to defend them. It will cost millions for anyone to get that patent revoked even though it should have never been granted in the first place.
How much do you actually think they're going to let the kids do?, on a unix platform and a system dependent on the server for everything those NC's are going to be locked-up tighter than you could ever hope for with a win9x system. They do what they're supposed to do, but the kids won't learn squat about *inx.
"Never attribute to malice what can be explained by stupidity." Hanlon's Razor
Actully Dell is now, but here we're lucky enough to have standard ATX systems with asus P2L97 and P2B motherboards, no funky weird proprietary crap here.
If you can beat you computer at chess, try kickboxing
One of the reasons that many of us have jobs and one of the major concerns of the of the idustry we are in is security. I actully think that crackers, how ever ethicly misaligned, are a boon to us. The fact that they exist gives us several things. First they give us a real and preasent threat, both to explain the necessity of secutity and also to keep us wary. Second, because of the nature of the cracker sub-culture the cracks or the methods used for the cracks are accessable to us and thus we learn our weaknesses. Because crackers are vocal we learn about each potental problem quickly, if instead the real counter posibility of idustrail espionige, who would be less likely to be vocal.
Were still seeing physics like this is the 1960's. No we don't have free energy but, some physics labs are having luck, or at least mesureable results with Zero-Point energy devices, working on EM theory based on Tesla. And speaking of the wacky world of electromagnetics here's theory for a reactionless drive: Reactionless Drive. Just because it sounds like Scifi doesn't mean that little green men are at the source of the future. I don't know about antimatter (and why anyone would experiment with it in atmosphere is beyond me, as dangerous as nanotech if we ever get there) but, just because '60's physics can't handle it doesn't mean it can't happen.
Even if NT 4.0 did what it was billed to do, and even if you could claim that MS gets it's bug fixes out (I remember an extremly buggy 95 original and 3-5 MONTHS for a service release, NT sevice pack 1 took several months and even at SR4 it only tenitivly makes the C2 rating it claims out of the box). Your forgeting, IT'S FREE, and the people who support it do it out of the goodness of their hearts, for us and The Industry as a whole.
I like the barcode scanner, but if you were going to apply this setup to a retail kit of some kind I think having the lookup for the UPC local is a waste of rescoures. I was actually thinking that the scanner saves the UPCs and then encrypts them using a combo or PGP and acustomer entered PIN, send it SMTP and let the lookup happen on the grocers end not the client. Also the app would be simple and easy to port.
If vegitarians eat Vegitables what do humanitarians eat?
The way I express it is that your not making money, but you can be saving money. If you sell computers, for example, and your drivers, FAQs and Bios updates are on you site, then your customer's technical support staff are likely to check the site first rather than put a burden on you phone support, which saves you money. Your driver, and Bios updates won't cost you shipping and media expenses if you distribute them over the web. But by definition if you aren't producing cash you are not 'making money'.
Slashdot Mirror
If RNA conducts, couldn't we have a computational response to a phyisiological stimuli. If electrical DNA mapping can work then we can use dna as sort of an organic "in-wire" resistor possibly also a transistor. We could make a computer built on a blueprint of itself, oh wait.
"A socity that cannot adequately distiguish between science and magic is insufficently advanced"
Let's see what I remember from my third grade report on nuclear disasters (Dad did some programing work for the nuke program, and was originally a physicist, so I had NRC demo matierials and everything):
Three Mile island nuclear plant had two "major" accidents, both released less radation than the radioactive dye used in heart surgery (by an order of magnitude).
The Chernobyl disaster was as much a function of reactor design as poor disaster mitigation. The USSR reactor design at the time raised the graphite control rods from below rather than the American method of lowering them. The advantage of the American method is in the event of a runaway reaction the control rods drop in to the core stifling the reaction before the core can melt through and breach the reactor core housing.
I may not have a nuke plant in my back yard, but I would much rather live near a nuclear power plant than a fossil fuel power plant. (Acctually, about 2 miles from my parents house is a small hydro electric plant which wins.)
To get the full benfit of Open Source development you may prefer to release as early as you have a stable beta. This allows you to have a wide range of Beta testers, and in the Bazaar model, real world troubleshooting and feature evaluation. But, the trade off is you never get to sell the software. There are a number of commercial apps that I know of and use here at (Unspecified Government Agency) that have excellent (and expensive) consulting services for implementation and customization of those applications. If the application that your company is developing lends itself to those services then your business model is: The application is in effect a marketing tool for the consulting services that actually brings money in. This works best if two things are true: a) Your consulting services know your product best and b) you have the capacity to satisfy demand. Open Sourcing your software can make your software much more widely used, thus increasing that critical word of mouth factor. I know that in purchasing recommendations I have recommended for or against use of a product because of the size of the user base of the product. If I've never heard of an application and it isn't used in more than one or two major places, I won't have confidence in continued support and development. This is what I think is the biggest strength of OSS, 'The cream alway floats to the top.'. OSS by it's nature can not prevent bad software, but without the use of monopolistic (and I'm not just talking M$ here) marketing bad software doesn't get used. The greatest weakness I see in OSS is dealing with responding to the customer's needs in development; this mechinism is just as important as keeping you code clean if your software is going to continue to be viable.
In the Beginning,
The 'Net emerged from the primortial ooze of analog bit streams and flaky phone lines. The Denizens of this early 'Net learned about cooperation and fault tolerance, and it was good. As time progressed (fast forward) the uninitated, the normal citizens of the BBR, used to protection under the law and the burden of it's restrictiveness were unprepared for a world where there was no shelter for the expliotable under a omnipotent protector.
Seriously folks, the laws regarding 'Net crime are both vauge and largely untested. I think that Nike might be liable. On the 'Net you have to take total responsibility for your presence. Like every tinker and his brother on @Home, putting up insecure servers, it's you (Give me a sword of burning code and the arrows of design.), your box and the forces of darkness. The artical yeaterday about the unfortunate lack of a "hacker threat" does demonstrate the pricipal 'The bigger the name the bigger the target.'. Nike has spent millions (billions?) becoming a brand name that every 4 year old in America knows, and in accordance should be persuing security with due vigilance. The big expliots that security pros tell their children at night, the 'Net age boogie man, DDoS on Yahoo.com and others, IExplore that shut down part of MCI, have all been perpetrated on big names.
General System Fault:
Please sacrifice two chickens and a goat to continue.
Stuff that I think is important to both to my users and myself in a UI:
1. A conveniant and consistant way of managing tasks (Taskbars are the common solution, but Be 4.5's sucked as far as my test group was concerned, so it can be doen wrong)
2. User visual settings from the silly color sheming to the more important font sizing and resolution.
3. Bounding on commonly used click areas, things like puting the program close button in a corner is very important and the system menu button in another corner are ideas that make the GUI just plain easier.
4. Cutting and pasting, I know user level stuff, but I'm serious when I say it's just important. If you have ever had to VT100 a configuration, copying it from (Insert text editor here) just saves aggrevation.
5. A good file manager, I know a lot of people that say win 3.1's file manager was the hieght of technology in the field.
Why do all the things resembal microsoft? MS 'intergrated'(read stole) some of the best ideas of the best UIs out there. The thing you can say about windows is that it's easy--it's easier to learn to use windows that it is to program a VCR.
I long for the day when somebody comes up with a UI more useful and capable than a windows workalike. My sorrow comes when I realize the incredable feat of out of the box thinking it will take.
2. Tell those "wealthy organizations accostomed to getting their way" to take their "schedules" and shove them. We have no time for that. If they want crappy software with lots of features, point them to the borg in the northwest. They'll come crawling back.
No, if they think they need a feature set they pay their own development staff to add those features and send the changes back to the FSF or whom ever maintains the software. Open source works economicly because the money comes from development and support of a commonly availible, 'safe' API (by safe I mean that the company won't go under and it won't care twice as much or require twice as many client licenses as last year). We make our bucks by making it run, and being paid to develop the sooulution specific features, not on the sale of the enviornment. I keep saying, when you make Linux more robust, by creating software or documentation, you keep the pay checks of everyone that maintains linux system's safe.
It's not about our apps are more stable, it's not about our apps are cheaper. Uptime is as much a function of how a sever is run as the OS running, and TCO depends on a thousand things. It's about creating Linux jobs. Hopefully jobs that none of us have to say "why didn't they put this feature in?", or "Why in the heck did they do it that way?", or even "this feature would make this useful for me". We have everything we need to make the bells that the big guys want, if they want us to make it bad enough.
Here in the US you can get Ricochet from Metricom if you live in DC, San Francisco or Seattle. Their press says that they're going to 128kbs, and it's unlimited connection time. Works on a frequency hopping spread spectrum radio system. The coverage sucks outside those three cities, just major airports and a few universities. Linux isn't offically supported but you guys with linux laptops are used to that.
Here is the argument I would make about Linux liability. A distribution sets its own warrenty, though one may be considered implyed. So if RedHat's current distro, for example, has a giltch that formats your non-linux partition, and the instructions don't tell you that that will happen, then RedHat could be held liable. On the other hand, if you home brew, modify, add to, or any thing else that is outside the distro's warrenty, you are on your own. If you download something that has a line in the help file "No warrenties expressed or implied" your only recourse is to find someone to fix it. This is where support comes in. I was always under the impression that the idea of how to make OSS work in the economy is to sell support and development. OSS is to give us jobs by making the tools availible to anyone whom has a use for them. Why is SGI paying some of the Samba developers? because it helps sell their servers. Why should one develop a secrure, web enabled project mangement tool kit? So some company that needs it can pay to have the features they need developed and to maintain the system. The nice thing is (idealy) that not only do you get yourself a job but by making OSS more versatile and valuable you give others in the OSC a job also. Warrenties, support contracts, are what the OSS economic justification are all about. The thing we as a community need to be most wary of is making OSS deliberately more difficult than it need to be. It has been proven that no matter how simple a system is, support for it becomes vital enough to dedicate professionals to maintain it i.e. Windows NT.
Geregorian tricks - no one susppects the spanish inqusition.
Really nothing any more or less specail than 1-1-2000, just how the numbers lineup in a base ten number system on the gregorian calander, based (roughly) on the orbits of this planet and it's satallite, nad when a significant man was born (though his accomplishments may be subject to debate, he had a great effect on our culture).
Then what's this Exceed icon on my desktop for? It been said a million times, the patent system is over burdened. It's a combination of the sheer breadth of knowlage need to understand so many high tech fields, and a lack of experienced staff (with 5 years of experience one can double one's salary in the private sector). The strategy is to give out the patent and have the courts sort it out in litigation. A great deal of software patents don't qualify under the Previous Works rule: (paraphrased) If anyone, including you has done this before, it is assumed to be common knowlage in the field. Technically if you have an idea for a polymorphic variable decrypting code key block (I'll gpl it if it ever works), you have to patent the idea before you get it working. In practice this is usually not the case. But IMHO the open source model is beginning to show that ideas and information can only be kept by great effort. You stay ahead by getting the next big thing to market faster and better than the compition, by being the only or best ones to get the product to work, or by just selling the development not the software. It makes it hard to fathom for those of us that grew up under the assumption of intellectual property, but it is increasingly evident that those rights only go to those that can afford to defend them. It will cost millions for anyone to get that patent revoked even though it should have never been granted in the first place.
How much do you actually think they're going to let the kids do?, on a unix platform and a system dependent on the server for everything those NC's are going to be locked-up tighter than you could ever hope for with a win9x system. They do what they're supposed to do, but the kids won't learn squat about *inx.
"Never attribute to malice what can be explained by stupidity." Hanlon's Razor
Actully Dell is now, but here we're lucky enough to have standard ATX systems with asus P2L97 and P2B motherboards, no funky weird proprietary crap here.
If you can beat you computer at chess, try kickboxing
Spyd'
One of the reasons that many of us have jobs and one of the major concerns of the of the idustry we are in is security. I actully think that crackers, how ever ethicly misaligned, are a boon to us. The fact that they exist gives us several things. First they give us a real and preasent threat, both to explain the necessity of secutity and also to keep us wary. Second, because of the nature of the cracker sub-culture the cracks or the methods used for the cracks are accessable to us and thus we learn our weaknesses. Because crackers are vocal we learn about each potental problem quickly, if instead the real counter posibility of idustrail espionige, who would be less likely to be vocal.
Were still seeing physics like this is the 1960's. No we don't have free energy but, some physics labs are having luck, or at least mesureable results with Zero-Point energy devices, working on EM theory based on Tesla. And speaking of the wacky world of electromagnetics here's theory for a reactionless drive: Reactionless Drive. Just because it sounds like Scifi doesn't mean that little green men are at the source of the future. I don't know about antimatter (and why anyone would experiment with it in atmosphere is beyond me, as dangerous as nanotech if we ever get there) but, just because '60's physics can't handle it doesn't mean it can't happen.
Even if NT 4.0 did what it was billed to do, and even if you could claim that MS gets it's bug fixes out (I remember an extremly buggy 95 original and 3-5 MONTHS for a service release, NT sevice pack 1 took several months and even at SR4 it only tenitivly makes the C2 rating it claims out of the box). Your forgeting, IT'S FREE, and the people who support it do it out of the goodness of their hearts, for us and The Industry as a whole.
I like the barcode scanner, but if you were going to apply this setup to a retail kit of some kind I think having the lookup for the UPC local is a waste of rescoures. I was actually thinking that the scanner saves the UPCs and then encrypts them using a combo or PGP and acustomer entered PIN, send it SMTP and let the lookup happen on the grocers end not the client. Also the app would be simple and easy to port.
If vegitarians eat Vegitables what do humanitarians eat?
The way I express it is that your not making money, but you can be saving money. If you sell computers, for example, and your drivers, FAQs and Bios updates are on you site, then your customer's technical support staff are likely to check the site first rather than put a burden on you phone support, which saves you money. Your driver, and Bios updates won't cost you shipping and media expenses if you distribute them over the web. But by definition if you aren't producing cash you are
not 'making money'.