Request for new mod category: +1 Justified Sarcasm.
Anyway...
What I want to know is what chance UCITA has in court if anyone ever sues. Seems to me that it's a pretty cut-and-dried whitewash of contract law -- for those who are in fact not IANAL, what would be the basic plan for blowing holes in this thing and what would be the chances of said gambit actually succeeding?
Add underrated +1... What a horrific waste of human life, er, mod points.
/Brian
Re:I'm tired of the argument
on
Star In A Jar
·
· Score: 2
Seems pretty clear to me that Einstein was an agnostic more than anything else, and if he was a believer at all he was a deist (i.e. God exists but is essentially irrelevant to the universe as it exists now). And that would be stretching it.
Given that it's rather ironic that a Microsoft-funded study would actually slant in favor of the competition (even if there's a pretty clear bias against it in the first place), what do you, as someone who is part of this industry, think of the ethics involved in doing this kind of research for hire, and perhaps more importantly, should anyone outside the company commissioning the study really be paying attention to any such research in the first place?
Ah, gold cables. I just think that whole thing is a little silly myself, especially the Monster cables that they're selling these days for computers.
To all those crazy audiophiles paying ten bucks extra for a USB cable just because it has gold-plated contacts: give it up. In theory it might last longer, but it's really only useful if you're using your computer in the rain on a regular basis... and if you're using your computer like that you deserve your overpriced gold-plated cables anyway.
Guitar amps ain't got nothing to do with this. In fact, the reason so many guitarists use tube amps these days has nothing to do with sound *reproduction* at all -- if you're using a Marshall stack, you're essentially using a tube-based preamp as an analog signal processor. Go to a guitar store if you don't have a guitar in your closet to see what I mean.
Tube amp distortion softens the fuzz; if you distort a transistor amp you get a sort of clipping effect that creates the crashing buzzsaw distortion you hear in grunge music, but that effect doesn't work so well for blues or classic rock. Tube amps sort of round that out, and the net effect is rather different.
First off, a joke (that someone else has probably already told).
Q: Define Audiophile.
A: Someone who listens to the stereo rather than the music.
I do think the whole thing is a little warped. And I don't quite get the "warm" thing at all (I think I did as a kid, because I had a slight allergy to FM radio, but I grew out of it...).
Ick. P4SX maybe, but I think they probably need a new name for it altogether.
That's a fun thought, though: the P6 as the pinnacle of Intel's chip design capabilities (and don't tell me Itanium's not a boondoggle). And they've been milking it for what, six years now?
I think it's rather interesting, though, that Intel seems to have hit the limits of its collective ability to do anything interesting. FWIW, I think Sledgehammer will get a lot more mileage than Itanium myself just because there's no tricky business in the instruction set. But the fact remains -- Intel's day in the sun definitely seems to be over. They used to be the most dangerous fish in the tank; now they're just the biggest.
Intel would wind up looking rather stupid if they released Tualatin, that's the problem. It would be very much like the situation they had trying to position the Celeron against the Athlon, and we all know how well that went over.
The situation Intel has right now is that it's becoming obvious to all that the P4 was a mistake. If they try to market the P3/Tualatin as downmarket (the P3 seems to have pretty much replaced the Celeron these days) nobody will pay attention. If they put it up against the Athlon where it belongs, it's lights out for the P4 and the Intel marketing department will wind up guzzling Alka-Seltzer after blowing big money on commercials and such.
Either way, it works to AMD's advantage -- all they need is an ad agency with the stones to tease Intel about pulling their punches.
I've had this idea floating around for a while, but the level of functionality it provided didn't really measure up to the cost.
First take your basic Linux PC with an S-video capable video card and a DVD-ROM drive. With the right software you have a region-free DVD player, even if it's not quite legal. Slap on audio codecs for Ogg Vorbis (and MP3 and WMA playback if you want) and a CD burner and you also have a very nice digital music station (completely free and clear on top of it). Now all that would probably be worth somewhere in the vicinity of $400 as is, and I couldn't picture a mom-and-pop operator (realistically the only outfits who would be able to get away with selling these things) making enough of a profit off of these boxes to justify it. But... you put in a good-sized hard drive or something of the sort, you've got a PVR. To me, that does justify the likely cost (probably $600-$800US)...
Seems to me that the Gardner Group study may be right on the money. What's interesting about it is that even if it is in fact true, it's a pretty meaningless study for precisely the reasons Roblimo went into.
And that's the big problem with statistical studies -- surely there are plenty of Linux servers running under the table that no survey is going to find because the techies' boss doesn't even know about it. Web servers? Okay, that's publicly accessible stuff, but only a small fraction of the server market.
What I find especially interesting, though, is that as slanted and pointless as the survey is, it still works in Tux's favor over the long run, at least a little bit...
Still, like I said, look at Blade. Who is buying this? I'd bet it was at least intended as much for amateur techies as it is the target SPARC market. We know what Scott McNealy thinks of Microsoft, and I'm sure he'd take a piece of that pie if he could get it. I submit that it sure as hell looks like he's going to give it a try.
This is true, but the flipside is that placing some of your day-to-day data in the hands of an outside company seems penny-wise and pound-foolish. And renting out your office suite is just flat out stupid.
Actually, that's precisely how Mandrake and TurboLinux (and Yellow Dog, for that matter) started out; they were all RedHat clones in the beginning. They've all grown in different directions, though.
I actually don't think there's anything wrong with this, though -- that's why the GPL exists. They didn't all copy RedHat, obviously, but a lot of them did.
Oh, I wouldn't put it past Scotty Boy. One does get the sense that he'd love to see Sun move out of the market it's built for itself, into the consumer market -- how else do you explain Blade, which IMHO is a pretty blatant attempt to test the downmarket waters?
I think Sun wants into the consumer market very badly but so far has had to take it slow. (Heck, for all I know that was their intent with the failed Apple merger in '97...) They do have an in with Linux (LI members for how long? A couple of years anyway...) and roughly the same interest in promoting it as Apple does Darwin (i.e. selling the hardware to people who don't care for the OS), so that's no shock there. Buying Cobalt gave them some expertise in condensed systems design as well; I doubt it's that much of a stretch to go from a Qube to a set-top box.
So I think we'll be seeing Sun making noise about moving into the consumer market Real Soon Now. I doubt they'd go after the desktop, but the TV room or thin client (think SPARC-based iOpener)... hey. Could happen.
For the most part, I don't think ASPs are worth the risk. I was offered equity but no pay in an ASP company a while back for doing some Palm development for them; it would have looked good on my resume, but as I told the guy making the offer, "I can't eat equity."
ASPs have a certain attraction for business managers because they cut costs, but I still don't see how the risk is worthwile when critical data is on the line. I had a discussion with someone who was talking about "minimizing risk" -- seems to me that outsourcing things like desktop application isn't doing that.
Someone mentioned above that cell phone radiation is nonionizing, so there's no mechanism to cause the DNA mutations that cause cancer.
Radio waves are basically microwave radiation. Read Voodoo Science by Robert Park -- he goes into great detail about the history of the microwave-ovens-cause-cancer story. The guy who broke the story (Paul Brodeur) went about his research backwards, starting from the premise that if the (Cold War era)military was doing most of the research work that there must be something being covered up. There's still no shortage of true believers, but the research on microwaves came up empty a long time ago, even before Brodeur got to work. He still nearly killed the microwave oven market because he was an expert fearmonger.
You'll find the same about the whole power line controversy of the early 90s -- study after study showed no statistical link between electromagnetic fields and cancer, disproving some rather sloppy early work; in fact, the power lines are even less likely to cause problems because there's a lot less energy in a power line field than there is coming out of a magnetron tube. Park makes no explicit reference to cell phones in his book, but when you realize you're talking about the same sort of radiation, it seems pretty clear that the cell phone controversy is the same shit in a different bag.
Ah, For The Kids. Argumentum ad Fragmentum -- make your point by throwing emotional grenades. At least it failed this time around.
It never fails, though. When all else is failing to go your way, say you're doing it for the good of the children. Everyone wants to protect their children, right?
I wonder how much of the Republican party has crypto-fascist tendencies myself (see, I can do it too!). There is a definite coercive trend in daily life these days, and I can only hope a mainstream backlash is in the offing.
God: And on top of all that some of you missed the part about "you shall not take my name in vain, etc". Now to be honest with you I've got a sense of humor about it so I don't really mind *per se*, and after all that someone else seems to think that I can be proven or disproven.
Oy. After all these years, whether I exist or not you'd think I'd have taught some of you something...
CMYK would actually be the Right Thing for some applications anyway -- say Apple started using EInk displays in a PowerBook with CMYK capability. The publishing industry would go nuts -- this is as close to pure WYSIWIG as you're going to get, I should think.
Ewww, the Brigitte Bardot effect -- stunning in her day, looks like something I scraped off a frying pan now...
That is an interesting point, though. I got lazy and didn't notice what the refresh rate was, unfortunately, but it's pretty interesting anyway.
The big question: will it replace Dead Trees? I don't really think so -- I suspect it will always be a bit too expensive for most purposes, but the idea of making recyclable newsprint out of it isn't such a bad one. (Though the day they start printing newspapers on this stuff is the day I start buying shitloads of Xerox stock...)
Okay, I was a little naive the way I stated it, *but* it's also reasonable to say that Fortran performance is what it is because it's entrenched. If it isn't necessarily the right tool, that doesn't mean it can't become the right tool. As Fortran did.
That's what I mean about "not everywhere it should but everywhere it can". It would be nice to start legacy-free, but it's not practical to replace everything in the world. Scientific programmers still use Fortran, for example; you could argue that C is better just because of the compiler tech or whatnot, but the fact is that it's entrenched.
You are quite right about the Next Best Thing problem, of course. But somewhere in the alphabet soup someone does find something useful. Linux for example -- it was one of a decent-size handful of projects like it, but it had a few features that stuck out: GPL, open development model, etc. It worked. That's where the dotcom bubble came from too -- though many an investment manager can be faulted for losing all trace of common sense and throwing old economy rules out the window prematurely, the basic idea was sound (if hilariously sloppily implemented): if you have no seeds, throw water at dirt and see if anything edible will grow.
The things you mentioned... I still don't get the whole UML thing; it sounds like a bureaucratic construct of roughly the same nature as flowcharts (when was the last time you saw one of those in use?). HTML is a standard and it's not going to die out as long as the web is still in service. CSS... it's a seedling, if we follow the above metaphor. We don't know where it's going to lead (I'm a bit suspicious of it myself because I don't like complicated HTML formatting; some kind of server-side processing might be better). COOL/C#... another early-stage seed(ling?). Microsoft might yet cook up an open standard from it (though I wouldn't bet on it), but I don't think it's going to fully displace Java.
Lots of technologies do get thrown out there. I happen to think XML, while maybe not likely to become entrenched where it was intended, will still wind up being a very popular way of structuring data.
Slashdot Mirror
Request for new mod category: +1 Justified Sarcasm.
Anyway...
What I want to know is what chance UCITA has in court if anyone ever sues. Seems to me that it's a pretty cut-and-dried whitewash of contract law -- for those who are in fact not IANAL, what would be the basic plan for blowing holes in this thing and what would be the chances of said gambit actually succeeding?
Add underrated +1... What a horrific waste of human life, er, mod points.
/Brian
Seems pretty clear to me that Einstein was an agnostic more than anything else, and if he was a believer at all he was a deist (i.e. God exists but is essentially irrelevant to the universe as it exists now). And that would be stretching it.
/Brian
Given that it's rather ironic that a Microsoft-funded study would actually slant in favor of the competition (even if there's a pretty clear bias against it in the first place), what do you, as someone who is part of this industry, think of the ethics involved in doing this kind of research for hire, and perhaps more importantly, should anyone outside the company commissioning the study really be paying attention to any such research in the first place?
/Brian
Ah, gold cables. I just think that whole thing is a little silly myself, especially the Monster cables that they're selling these days for computers.
To all those crazy audiophiles paying ten bucks extra for a USB cable just because it has gold-plated contacts: give it up. In theory it might last longer, but it's really only useful if you're using your computer in the rain on a regular basis... and if you're using your computer like that you deserve your overpriced gold-plated cables anyway.
/Brian
Guitar amps ain't got nothing to do with this. In fact, the reason so many guitarists use tube amps these days has nothing to do with sound *reproduction* at all -- if you're using a Marshall stack, you're essentially using a tube-based preamp as an analog signal processor. Go to a guitar store if you don't have a guitar in your closet to see what I mean.
Tube amp distortion softens the fuzz; if you distort a transistor amp you get a sort of clipping effect that creates the crashing buzzsaw distortion you hear in grunge music, but that effect doesn't work so well for blues or classic rock. Tube amps sort of round that out, and the net effect is rather different.
/Brian
First off, a joke (that someone else has probably already told).
Q: Define Audiophile.
A: Someone who listens to the stereo rather than the music.
I do think the whole thing is a little warped. And I don't quite get the "warm" thing at all (I think I did as a kid, because I had a slight allergy to FM radio, but I grew out of it...).
/Brian
Ick. P4SX maybe, but I think they probably need a new name for it altogether.
That's a fun thought, though: the P6 as the pinnacle of Intel's chip design capabilities (and don't tell me Itanium's not a boondoggle). And they've been milking it for what, six years now?
I think it's rather interesting, though, that Intel seems to have hit the limits of its collective ability to do anything interesting. FWIW, I think Sledgehammer will get a lot more mileage than Itanium myself just because there's no tricky business in the instruction set. But the fact remains -- Intel's day in the sun definitely seems to be over. They used to be the most dangerous fish in the tank; now they're just the biggest.
/Brian
Intel would wind up looking rather stupid if they released Tualatin, that's the problem. It would be very much like the situation they had trying to position the Celeron against the Athlon, and we all know how well that went over.
The situation Intel has right now is that it's becoming obvious to all that the P4 was a mistake. If they try to market the P3/Tualatin as downmarket (the P3 seems to have pretty much replaced the Celeron these days) nobody will pay attention. If they put it up against the Athlon where it belongs, it's lights out for the P4 and the Intel marketing department will wind up guzzling Alka-Seltzer after blowing big money on commercials and such.
Either way, it works to AMD's advantage -- all they need is an ad agency with the stones to tease Intel about pulling their punches.
/Brian
/Brian
I've had this idea floating around for a while, but the level of functionality it provided didn't really measure up to the cost.
First take your basic Linux PC with an S-video capable video card and a DVD-ROM drive. With the right software you have a region-free DVD player, even if it's not quite legal. Slap on audio codecs for Ogg Vorbis (and MP3 and WMA playback if you want) and a CD burner and you also have a very nice digital music station (completely free and clear on top of it). Now all that would probably be worth somewhere in the vicinity of $400 as is, and I couldn't picture a mom-and-pop operator (realistically the only outfits who would be able to get away with selling these things) making enough of a profit off of these boxes to justify it. But... you put in a good-sized hard drive or something of the sort, you've got a PVR. To me, that does justify the likely cost (probably $600-$800US)...
/Brian
What this is is just an enhanced cable box. IMHO it's going to be the Divx to Tivo/ReplayTV/UltimateTV's DVD...
/Brian
Seems to me that the Gardner Group study may be right on the money. What's interesting about it is that even if it is in fact true, it's a pretty meaningless study for precisely the reasons Roblimo went into.
And that's the big problem with statistical studies -- surely there are plenty of Linux servers running under the table that no survey is going to find because the techies' boss doesn't even know about it. Web servers? Okay, that's publicly accessible stuff, but only a small fraction of the server market.
What I find especially interesting, though, is that as slanted and pointless as the survey is, it still works in Tux's favor over the long run, at least a little bit...
/Brian
I'd say and/or is more like it, but y'know...
Still, like I said, look at Blade. Who is buying this? I'd bet it was at least intended as much for amateur techies as it is the target SPARC market. We know what Scott McNealy thinks of Microsoft, and I'm sure he'd take a piece of that pie if he could get it. I submit that it sure as hell looks like he's going to give it a try.
/Brian
This is true, but the flipside is that placing some of your day-to-day data in the hands of an outside company seems penny-wise and pound-foolish. And renting out your office suite is just flat out stupid.
/Brian
Actually, that's precisely how Mandrake and TurboLinux (and Yellow Dog, for that matter) started out; they were all RedHat clones in the beginning. They've all grown in different directions, though.
I actually don't think there's anything wrong with this, though -- that's why the GPL exists. They didn't all copy RedHat, obviously, but a lot of them did.
/Brian
Oh, I wouldn't put it past Scotty Boy. One does get the sense that he'd love to see Sun move out of the market it's built for itself, into the consumer market -- how else do you explain Blade, which IMHO is a pretty blatant attempt to test the downmarket waters?
I think Sun wants into the consumer market very badly but so far has had to take it slow. (Heck, for all I know that was their intent with the failed Apple merger in '97...) They do have an in with Linux (LI members for how long? A couple of years anyway...) and roughly the same interest in promoting it as Apple does Darwin (i.e. selling the hardware to people who don't care for the OS), so that's no shock there. Buying Cobalt gave them some expertise in condensed systems design as well; I doubt it's that much of a stretch to go from a Qube to a set-top box.
So I think we'll be seeing Sun making noise about moving into the consumer market Real Soon Now. I doubt they'd go after the desktop, but the TV room or thin client (think SPARC-based iOpener)... hey. Could happen.
/Brian
For the most part, I don't think ASPs are worth the risk. I was offered equity but no pay in an ASP company a while back for doing some Palm development for them; it would have looked good on my resume, but as I told the guy making the offer, "I can't eat equity."
ASPs have a certain attraction for business managers because they cut costs, but I still don't see how the risk is worthwile when critical data is on the line. I had a discussion with someone who was talking about "minimizing risk" -- seems to me that outsourcing things like desktop application isn't doing that.
/Brian
Someone mentioned above that cell phone radiation is nonionizing, so there's no mechanism to cause the DNA mutations that cause cancer.
Radio waves are basically microwave radiation. Read Voodoo Science by Robert Park -- he goes into great detail about the history of the microwave-ovens-cause-cancer story. The guy who broke the story (Paul Brodeur) went about his research backwards, starting from the premise that if the (Cold War era)military was doing most of the research work that there must be something being covered up. There's still no shortage of true believers, but the research on microwaves came up empty a long time ago, even before Brodeur got to work. He still nearly killed the microwave oven market because he was an expert fearmonger.
You'll find the same about the whole power line controversy of the early 90s -- study after study showed no statistical link between electromagnetic fields and cancer, disproving some rather sloppy early work; in fact, the power lines are even less likely to cause problems because there's a lot less energy in a power line field than there is coming out of a magnetron tube. Park makes no explicit reference to cell phones in his book, but when you realize you're talking about the same sort of radiation, it seems pretty clear that the cell phone controversy is the same shit in a different bag.
/Brian
Ah, For The Kids. Argumentum ad Fragmentum -- make your point by throwing emotional grenades. At least it failed this time around.
It never fails, though. When all else is failing to go your way, say you're doing it for the good of the children. Everyone wants to protect their children, right?
I wonder how much of the Republican party has crypto-fascist tendencies myself (see, I can do it too!). There is a definite coercive trend in daily life these days, and I can only hope a mainstream backlash is in the offing.
/Brian
God: And on top of all that some of you missed the part about "you shall not take my name in vain, etc". Now to be honest with you I've got a sense of humor about it so I don't really mind *per se*, and after all that someone else seems to think that I can be proven or disproven.
Oy. After all these years, whether I exist or not you'd think I'd have taught some of you something...
/Brian
Trust the Computer.
/Brian
CMYK would actually be the Right Thing for some applications anyway -- say Apple started using EInk displays in a PowerBook with CMYK capability. The publishing industry would go nuts -- this is as close to pure WYSIWIG as you're going to get, I should think.
/Brian
Ewww, the Brigitte Bardot effect -- stunning in her day, looks like something I scraped off a frying pan now...
That is an interesting point, though. I got lazy and didn't notice what the refresh rate was, unfortunately, but it's pretty interesting anyway.
The big question: will it replace Dead Trees? I don't really think so -- I suspect it will always be a bit too expensive for most purposes, but the idea of making recyclable newsprint out of it isn't such a bad one. (Though the day they start printing newspapers on this stuff is the day I start buying shitloads of Xerox stock...)
/Brian
Stale thread, but...
Okay, I was a little naive the way I stated it, *but* it's also reasonable to say that Fortran performance is what it is because it's entrenched. If it isn't necessarily the right tool, that doesn't mean it can't become the right tool. As Fortran did.
/Brian
That's what I mean about "not everywhere it should but everywhere it can". It would be nice to start legacy-free, but it's not practical to replace everything in the world. Scientific programmers still use Fortran, for example; you could argue that C is better just because of the compiler tech or whatnot, but the fact is that it's entrenched.
You are quite right about the Next Best Thing problem, of course. But somewhere in the alphabet soup someone does find something useful. Linux for example -- it was one of a decent-size handful of projects like it, but it had a few features that stuck out: GPL, open development model, etc. It worked. That's where the dotcom bubble came from too -- though many an investment manager can be faulted for losing all trace of common sense and throwing old economy rules out the window prematurely, the basic idea was sound (if hilariously sloppily implemented): if you have no seeds, throw water at dirt and see if anything edible will grow.
The things you mentioned... I still don't get the whole UML thing; it sounds like a bureaucratic construct of roughly the same nature as flowcharts (when was the last time you saw one of those in use?). HTML is a standard and it's not going to die out as long as the web is still in service. CSS... it's a seedling, if we follow the above metaphor. We don't know where it's going to lead (I'm a bit suspicious of it myself because I don't like complicated HTML formatting; some kind of server-side processing might be better). COOL/C#... another early-stage seed(ling?). Microsoft might yet cook up an open standard from it (though I wouldn't bet on it), but I don't think it's going to fully displace Java.
Lots of technologies do get thrown out there. I happen to think XML, while maybe not likely to become entrenched where it was intended, will still wind up being a very popular way of structuring data.
/Brian