Maybe this way Iran can finally hang all of the Hollywood moguls for violating their laws on propiety and morality. After all, Hollywood is making their material available over the 'net...
1) The conference wasn't held in the Science Center, just the exhibits. And the exhibitors were good neighbors. 2) Classes were out - there weren't many students around. 3) There was usually a free uncovered Mac, so use wasn't a problem. 4) The computer lab was practically deserted (I noticed every time I went to take a leak.) Of course what it boils down to is some numbnut trying to cover his ass because he never thought to move the terminals instead of shutting them down. (Remember the place was littered with ethernet hookups for all the exhibits, so it would have been trivial.)
Not only was I an exhibitor right next to the covered Macs in question, but 5 years ago I was a student using those same Mac terminals to check my email.
The Macs in question were directly (2 feet) behind 3 exhibitors - for students to use the terminals they would have had to have been continuouslly tromping through the the exhibits. There were 20+ exhibits in all - Intel had one, and it happened to be the one in front of the email terminals (the iMacs) - they would have wanted them shut down no matter what brand they were. They were covered to keep students from walking up and booting them up (which they would still occasionally do anyway.)
Finally, Harvard left a number of Mac terminals open at the edges of the exhibit hall, in plain view. It was only the terminals that sat in the middle of the exhibits that were turned off and covered.
This whole thing smacks of a bunch of whiny Ivy league kids with nothing better to do. Remember Intel spent a _bundle_ funding that conference and the majority of exhibitors and participants were from non-profit organizations. Give the company some credit when it deserves it.
AOL bought Compuserve which actually offers one of the best dial-up networks in the world. You can find access points just about anywhere... on the other hand its not supported under that latest version of Compuserve (a modified AOL client) and good luck finding anyone at Compuserve/AOL to help.
I have no idea what's going to happen in the future, but printed manuals are far from dead in the here and now.
At least in my office we get very few printed manuals anymore, most everything is included as a PDF file. These PDFs then get printed late at night on our overworked HP and then the Kinko's downstairs 3 hole punches them and puts them in a binder for a couple bucks. It costs us probably 3 times as much as it would have cost the publisher to print it and the end result isn't as nice.
As to why we (and most everyone else does this) is simple. Its easier to read. You can annotate it easier. You can walk around with it. It doesn't take up valuable screen real estate.
So as far as I'm concerned, companies that provide their manuals on CD are just looking to save a few bucks and it bugs me.
Its interesting to read the list of included _desktop_ software with these devices - MS Outlook 2000, MusicMatch MP3 Jukebox etc. Redmond is going after Palm this time from its strength; market domination of the desktop.
Unfortunatly, the hardware is superior to the Palm stuff as well - and if Palm doesn't wise up will crush them. While "eBooks" may never be big sellers, mobile databases like Zagats restaraunt guides, drug databases for physicians, product specs for technicians etc etc are a tremendous market driver.
If when I'm replacing my Palm Vx a year from now I have the choice between something WinCE-ish that can store all of the medical texts I currently lug around (but crashes a couple of times a day) a slick Palm that doesn't have the same display quality or storage... I'm afraid I'll take the crashes.
Funny, I'm an MD/MPH student and the CTO of a (succesful) internet start up. I crushed the SATs like a fly hitting a Buick, and so did the other half-dozen ex-programmers in med school that I've met.
ArsDigita isn't looking for people with either brains _or_ drive, they quite explicitly stated they are looking for people with both. If you've spent any time around MIT you'd instantly recognize these people. There are lots of folks who can handle the intensity of 12X6 easily (med school is a great example -- even an absolute moron can get through it with a good work ethic), but that doesn't mean they could keep up with their very bright peers also working those hours.
And, of course, for what its worth this isn't a cheap "online coursework deal" -- its in-person courses taught by some of Boston's brightest. If I had a year to spare I'd jump at the chance to learn the theory that I never got (seeing as my major was poly sci...)
Since this whole topic got opened, I've got a question of my own:
What _US_ available phones emulate a modem via IR? It seems that most of the newer phones available in Europe do this, but that its not available in US models. (The cynic in me suspects it because US carriers want to charge for internet access and thus don't want built in modems.)
I've heard from lots of people in Europe using connecting their Palm Pilots to the internet by dialing their own ISP this way, but have yet to find a way to do this here in the States. Anyone have any suggestions?
"Darwin" is only a small part of OS-X. Just because it compiles on Intel doesn't mean that the rest of Apple's code will. Apple's new OS is a lot more than just the kernel.
Actually Be didn't ask for a reference manual. They didn't need it - they already had a port working. Apple not-so-subtly threatened to sue for IP infringment and Be figured it wasn't worth it.
Be would have made Apple look terrible if their software made Macs run 2X as fast. Apple didn't need that black eye, especially since it would have been unlikely to increase sales.
Those aren't consumers selling the tapes - the are professional crooks with high speed dubbing machines. They rent a copy of "The Matrix" and buy a box of blanks, they feed the tapes into dubbing rig and sell the copies.
You couldn't make a profit trying to do this consumer gear. The heads couldn't take the wear and tear - even if they did you couldn't copy enough tapes in a day to make any money.
As for the shrink wrapped movies - they come from Asia (try getting a US print shop to whip out some "Scream 3" boxes for you - not happening) where IP laws are weak and enforcment even weaker. Once you get smugglers involved its pretty clear it ain't "consumers" anymore.
BTW I lived downtown in a major US city and I see pirated tapes for sale maybe once a month, or when I walk through Chinatown. Thats it. On the other hand if I tended to go where stolen/pirated/illicit goods were sold I might think they were more prevelant...
Common is relative. The movie industry raised fears that they would be destroyed by rampant piracy - that just about every average Joe would be trading movies rather than buying/renting.
But relatively, piracy was uncommon. During the early days of VCRs they were very expensive. A pair of decent Betamaxes of VHSes in 1982 would have run you over $1000 (1982 dollars - double it 2000 dollars). I knew a couple of people who had dual rigs and basically copied everything they rented, but that was 2 out of 100s. Compare that to Napster: how many legal downloads would you guess are made each day? 0.1%? 0.01% Less?
The undeniable fact is that the vast majority of people used VCRs legally, and the vast majority of people use Napster illegally. The funny thing is that most Americans get this, while the geeks (who are building huge MP3 collections) are in denial.
When VCRs were first released the movie industry's protestations were immediately shown to be baseless. Pirating (on the level of _consumers_ which was the industry fear) never materialized.
Napster has been out for a while now and is currently used almost exclusively for piracy. Denying this fact makes it difficult to push forward for changes in the music industry and intellectual property laws. If the music industry gets this in front of congress, runs a quick search and shows that 98% of all available songs on the Napster network are copyrighted it will absolutely destroy any credibility Napster has if their (and our) defense is "ummm, no really, people don't use it for piracy... and if they did its not our fault."
Prior history is _not_ a valid comparison because previous devices did not turn out to be tools for piracy. Napster has - there is absolutely no denying the fact. Lets not bury our heads in the sand here people.
While Amazon may be acting inappropriately by suing B&N, the idea of setting up an "organization" to hold patents makes no sense.
The acknowledged purpose of these bullshit patents is to defend yourself against a suit based on _an entirely different patent_. For example if Slashdot/Andover were to sue Yahoo! over "threaded discussion forums" Yahoo! could countersue for the use of "preprocessed templated HTML" (for which it really does hold a patent.) If Yahoo! had given that bullshit patent away, it couldn't defend itself against another bullshit lawsuit.
In order to make an idea like a patent holding organization work we would have to totally subvert and destroy the system by paying for every possible patent people could dream up. Aside from the cost (who is going to pay for such foolishness) it would stalemate the USPO and make it impossible to get valid patents.
6 weeks ago I might have agreed with the boycott and all the Slashdot tirades. Then I found out my startup could be put out of business by a company without a product that essentially invested all their money is a patent - a very specific patent that will be expensive although not difficult to challenge.
We don't have shareholders - its just me and my partners (and a few VCs who don't have a controlling interest.) The way we see it right now we have two choices: 1) "Buy" a patent of our own from the patent office that covers something that both we and our competitor are doing so we can block any future suit, or 2) Wait until its obvious that they can't compete with us, let them obtain an injunction against us, shut a major part of our flagship site down as well as our software biz, borrow another $200k from the VCs for the legal fight get their patent thrown out and watch us both sink to the bottom.
The idea that Bezos is thinking only of his stock holders is ridiculous - Amazon.com is his baby, his mark on history. He is bound and determined to see it succeed. Patent law has been used historically to really screw up competitors and he is realizing that it could be done to him. Its very personal.
I'd like to think there was a third way for us or for Amazon or for any other company - but there isn't until US patent law is reformed. Want to end this _stupidity_? Lobby your senator or representative. Write a letter to the editor. But don't pretend that Bezos should risk his company to prove how inane the laws are.
And if thats all it is it will be a dismal failure. WinCE isn't getting clobbered in the market because its unstable, bloated or slow (while it may be all of those, the hardware Casio et al has been throwing at it makes it fairly nimble compared to the Palm) -- its getting clobbered because its hard to use.
I'll give you an example: in the medical field people need to access to large amounts of data - being able to get a complete drug book in your PDA saves time and lives. Access to texts on basic disesases and therapies without leaving the wards is a godsend. WindowsCE devices offer a lot of expansion memory - the PalmOS is limited to 8 megs (ignoring the nifty new TRGPro). None the less I've yet to see _anyone_ using a WinCE device.
So where is the advantage of Linux here? The existing desktops would be just as bad (and possibly _worse_) than WinCE in terms of ease of use: does anyone seriouslly think KDE or Gnome would work well on one of these tiny screens?
What these devices will need is an entirely new desktop, one designed from the ground up to for handheld devices - one like the PalmOS. With that in place, a vendor could take advatage of the tremendous developer energy in the opens source community. I hope Samsung has a some tricks up their sleeves, cuz from these pictures they are going to get they are going to have a lot of unshippable inventory.
The benefits to MS are just to obvious. Remember their resources in terms of programmers are _immense_ - they hire thousands of temp workers, chew them up in a couple years and spit them out. According to people I know at MS the number of projects that never see daylight are obscene.
So whats the benefit? Profit? Maybe. Making sure that they have a port in case they need it? Possibly. Providing for a check on Linux? Certainly.
If MS were to release a 1.0 port of MS Office for Linux it would instantly destroy much of Corel's projected Linux income, freeze many other development projects and basically monkeywrench the entire nascent office app industry for free software. But I would be _very_ suprised if they stopped there.
I suspect that they are preparing as a commercial product a UNIX porting layer (similar to Wine) which will allow Office and other MS products to run. The API will be tightly controlled. In conjunction with such a product they could/might produce an MS branded Linux distro which would be available for free. These products would be initially all free (as almost all MS version 1.0 products are) and promoted and distributed to business and consumers and basically called the way to experiment with Linux and still get MS software.
If the market took off MS would then control the API, have a product (MS Linux Enhancements) that most people would purchase on top of their favorite distro so that they could still run MS apps. They would have done just what Apple has done - move to an open source kernel and supporting utilities while controlling the top layer, API and applications.
There are any number of holes in this theory - but it makes a lot of sense in light of MS's past history, their aquisitions and their enormous research budget.
Slashdot Mirror
... whether this is the most miserable piece of "modern art" I've seen yet, or just the most insipid use of a Palm.
"Because I can" is a reason to climb a mountain, not choose an artistic medium.
Maybe this way Iran can finally hang all of the Hollywood moguls for violating their laws on propiety and morality. After all, Hollywood is making their material available over the 'net ...
Subject says it all.
Great. Send them your machine or run the benchmakrs yourself.
The benchmarks appear to be internally valid - how extrapolate them to the millions of possible configurations in the PC universe is your problem.
1) The conference wasn't held in the Science Center, just the exhibits. And the exhibitors were good neighbors. 2) Classes were out - there weren't many students around. 3) There was usually a free uncovered Mac, so use wasn't a problem. 4) The computer lab was practically deserted (I noticed every time I went to take a leak.) Of course what it boils down to is some numbnut trying to cover his ass because he never thought to move the terminals instead of shutting them down. (Remember the place was littered with ethernet hookups for all the exhibits, so it would have been trivial.)
Not only was I an exhibitor right next to the covered Macs in question, but 5 years ago I was a student using those same Mac terminals to check my email.
The Macs in question were directly (2 feet) behind 3 exhibitors - for students to use the terminals they would have had to have been continuouslly tromping through the the exhibits. There were 20+ exhibits in all - Intel had one, and it happened to be the one in front of the email terminals (the iMacs) - they would have wanted them shut down no matter what brand they were. They were covered to keep students from walking up and booting them up (which they would still occasionally do anyway.)
Finally, Harvard left a number of Mac terminals open at the edges of the exhibit hall, in plain view. It was only the terminals that sat in the middle of the exhibits that were turned off and covered.
This whole thing smacks of a bunch of whiny Ivy league kids with nothing better to do. Remember Intel spent a _bundle_ funding that conference and the majority of exhibitors and participants were from non-profit organizations. Give the company some credit when it deserves it.
AOL bought Compuserve which actually offers one of the best dial-up networks in the world. You can find access points just about anywhere ... on the other hand its not supported under that latest version of Compuserve (a modified AOL client) and good luck finding anyone at Compuserve/AOL to help.
I have no idea what's going to happen in the future, but printed manuals are far from dead in the here and now.
At least in my office we get very few printed manuals anymore, most everything is included as a PDF file. These PDFs then get printed late at night on our overworked HP and then the Kinko's downstairs 3 hole punches them and puts them in a binder for a couple bucks. It costs us probably 3 times as much as it would have cost the publisher to print it and the end result isn't as nice.
As to why we (and most everyone else does this) is simple. Its easier to read. You can annotate it easier. You can walk around with it. It doesn't take up valuable screen real estate.
So as far as I'm concerned, companies that provide their manuals on CD are just looking to save a few bucks and it bugs me.
Its interesting to read the list of included _desktop_ software with these devices - MS Outlook 2000, MusicMatch MP3 Jukebox etc. Redmond is going after Palm this time from its strength; market domination of the desktop.
... I'm afraid I'll take the crashes.
Unfortunatly, the hardware is superior to the Palm stuff as well - and if Palm doesn't wise up will crush them. While "eBooks" may never be big sellers, mobile databases like Zagats restaraunt guides, drug databases for physicians, product specs for technicians etc etc are a tremendous market driver.
If when I'm replacing my Palm Vx a year from now I have the choice between something WinCE-ish that can store all of the medical texts I currently lug around (but crashes a couple of times a day) a slick Palm that doesn't have the same display quality or storage
Funny, I'm an MD/MPH student and the CTO of a (succesful) internet start up. I crushed the SATs like a fly hitting a Buick, and so did the other half-dozen ex-programmers in med school that I've met.
...)
ArsDigita isn't looking for people with either brains _or_ drive, they quite explicitly stated they are looking for people with both. If you've spent any time around MIT you'd instantly recognize these people. There are lots of folks who can handle the intensity of 12X6 easily (med school is a great example -- even an absolute moron can get through it with a good work ethic), but that doesn't mean they could keep up with their very bright peers also working those hours.
And, of course, for what its worth this isn't a cheap "online coursework deal" -- its in-person courses taught by some of Boston's brightest. If I had a year to spare I'd jump at the chance to learn the theory that I never got (seeing as my major was poly sci
Since this whole topic got opened, I've got a question of my own:
What _US_ available phones emulate a modem via IR? It seems that most of the newer phones available in Europe do this, but that its not available in US models. (The cynic in me suspects it because US carriers want to charge for internet access and thus don't want built in modems.)
I've heard from lots of people in Europe using connecting their Palm Pilots to the internet by dialing their own ISP this way, but have yet to find a way to do this here in the States. Anyone have any suggestions?
"Darwin" is only a small part of OS-X. Just because it compiles on Intel doesn't mean that the rest of Apple's code will. Apple's new OS is a lot more than just the kernel.
Actually Be didn't ask for a reference manual. They didn't need it - they already had a port working. Apple not-so-subtly threatened to sue for IP infringment and Be figured it wasn't worth it.
Be would have made Apple look terrible if their software made Macs run 2X as fast. Apple didn't need that black eye, especially since it would have been unlikely to increase sales.
Those aren't consumers selling the tapes - the are professional crooks with high speed dubbing machines. They rent a copy of "The Matrix" and buy a box of blanks, they feed the tapes into dubbing rig and sell the copies.
...
You couldn't make a profit trying to do this consumer gear. The heads couldn't take the wear and tear - even if they did you couldn't copy enough tapes in a day to make any money.
As for the shrink wrapped movies - they come from Asia (try getting a US print shop to whip out some "Scream 3" boxes for you - not happening) where IP laws are weak and enforcment even weaker. Once you get smugglers involved its pretty clear it ain't "consumers" anymore.
BTW I lived downtown in a major US city and I see pirated tapes for sale maybe once a month, or when I walk through Chinatown. Thats it. On the other hand if I tended to go where stolen/pirated/illicit goods were sold I might think they were more prevelant
Common is relative. The movie industry raised fears that they would be destroyed by rampant piracy - that just about every average Joe would be trading movies rather than buying/renting.
But relatively, piracy was uncommon. During the early days of VCRs they were very expensive. A pair of decent Betamaxes of VHSes in 1982 would have run you over $1000 (1982 dollars - double it 2000 dollars). I knew a couple of people who had dual rigs and basically copied everything they rented, but that was 2 out of 100s. Compare that to Napster: how many legal downloads would you guess are made each day? 0.1%? 0.01% Less?
The undeniable fact is that the vast majority of people used VCRs legally, and the vast majority of people use Napster illegally. The funny thing is that most Americans get this, while the geeks (who are building huge MP3 collections) are in denial.
When VCRs were first released the movie industry's protestations were immediately shown to be baseless. Pirating (on the level of _consumers_ which was the industry fear) never materialized.
... and if they did its not our fault."
Napster has been out for a while now and is currently used almost exclusively for piracy. Denying this fact makes it difficult to push forward for changes in the music industry and intellectual property laws. If the music industry gets this in front of congress, runs a quick search and shows that 98% of all available songs on the Napster network are copyrighted it will absolutely destroy any credibility Napster has if their (and our) defense is "ummm, no really, people don't use it for piracy
Prior history is _not_ a valid comparison because previous devices did not turn out to be tools for piracy. Napster has - there is absolutely no denying the fact. Lets not bury our heads in the sand here people.
While Amazon may be acting inappropriately by suing B&N, the idea of setting up an "organization" to hold patents makes no sense.
The acknowledged purpose of these bullshit patents is to defend yourself against a suit based on _an entirely different patent_. For example if Slashdot/Andover were to sue Yahoo! over "threaded discussion forums" Yahoo! could countersue for the use of "preprocessed templated HTML" (for which it really does hold a patent.) If Yahoo! had given that bullshit patent away, it couldn't defend itself against another bullshit lawsuit.
In order to make an idea like a patent holding organization work we would have to totally subvert and destroy the system by paying for every possible patent people could dream up. Aside from the cost (who is going to pay for such foolishness) it would stalemate the USPO and make it impossible to get valid patents.
6 weeks ago I might have agreed with the boycott and all the Slashdot tirades. Then I found out my startup could be put out of business by a company without a product that essentially invested all their money is a patent - a very specific patent that will be expensive although not difficult to challenge.
We don't have shareholders - its just me and my partners (and a few VCs who don't have a controlling interest.) The way we see it right now we have two choices:
1) "Buy" a patent of our own from the patent office that covers something that both we and our competitor are doing so we can block any future suit, or
2) Wait until its obvious that they can't compete with us, let them obtain an injunction against us, shut a major part of our flagship site down as well as our software biz, borrow another $200k from the VCs for the legal fight get their patent thrown out and watch us both sink to the bottom.
The idea that Bezos is thinking only of his stock holders is ridiculous - Amazon.com is his baby, his mark on history. He is bound and determined to see it succeed. Patent law has been used historically to really screw up competitors and he is realizing that it could be done to him. Its very personal.
I'd like to think there was a third way for us or for Amazon or for any other company - but there isn't until US patent law is reformed. Want to end this _stupidity_? Lobby your senator or representative. Write a letter to the editor. But don't pretend that Bezos should risk his company to prove how inane the laws are.
And if thats all it is it will be a dismal failure. WinCE isn't getting clobbered in the market because its unstable, bloated or slow (while it may be all of those, the hardware Casio et al has been throwing at it makes it fairly nimble compared to the Palm) -- its getting clobbered because its hard to use.
I'll give you an example: in the medical field people need to access to large amounts of data - being able to get a complete drug book in your PDA saves time and lives. Access to texts on basic disesases and therapies without leaving the wards is a godsend. WindowsCE devices offer a lot of expansion memory - the PalmOS is limited to 8 megs (ignoring the nifty new TRGPro). None the less I've yet to see _anyone_ using a WinCE device.
So where is the advantage of Linux here? The existing desktops would be just as bad (and possibly _worse_) than WinCE in terms of ease of use: does anyone seriouslly think KDE or Gnome would work well on one of these tiny screens?
What these devices will need is an entirely new desktop, one designed from the ground up to for handheld devices - one like the PalmOS. With that in place, a vendor could take advatage of the tremendous developer energy in the opens source community. I hope Samsung has a some tricks up their sleeves, cuz from these pictures they are going to get they are going to have a lot of unshippable inventory.
The benefits to MS are just to obvious. Remember their resources in terms of programmers are _immense_ - they hire thousands of temp workers, chew them up in a couple years and spit them out. According to people I know at MS the number of projects that never see daylight are obscene.
So whats the benefit? Profit? Maybe. Making sure that they have a port in case they need it? Possibly. Providing for a check on Linux? Certainly.
If MS were to release a 1.0 port of MS Office for Linux it would instantly destroy much of Corel's projected Linux income, freeze many other development projects and basically monkeywrench the entire nascent office app industry for free software. But I would be _very_ suprised if they stopped there.
I suspect that they are preparing as a commercial product a UNIX porting layer (similar to Wine) which will allow Office and other MS products to run. The API will be tightly controlled. In conjunction with such a product they could/might produce an MS branded Linux distro which would be available for free. These products would be initially all free (as almost all MS version 1.0 products are) and promoted and distributed to business and consumers and basically called the way to experiment with Linux and still get MS software.
If the market took off MS would then control the API, have a product (MS Linux Enhancements) that most people would purchase on top of their favorite distro so that they could still run MS apps. They would have done just what Apple has done - move to an open source kernel and supporting utilities while controlling the top layer, API and applications.
There are any number of holes in this theory - but it makes a lot of sense in light of MS's past history, their aquisitions and their enormous research budget.