Here we go again. If the Gov't wants to make ISPs responsible for the actions of their users, I certainly hope they're planning on providing some payment for the time it will take.
Effectively, the action suggested in the article would make an ISP a branch of law enforcement - requiring them to comply with orders to disable user accounts and, probably, pay penalties for non-compliance with such orders.
I now question, quite strongly, the reason there are taxes on blank CDs, DVDs, Video Tapes, and other storage media. I had believed that this tax was to go directly to SOCAN (the Canadian RIAA equivalent) to ensure that artists were compensated for copies of their materials. If they now believe that any person downloading a song that they already own is a target for prosecution, I don't think I'll be too keen on paying those taxes. Time to talk to the MP in these parts, I guess.
Don't get me wrong. The science is great - I like it! Understanding how the Oceans are behaving has been said to be a very large part of understanding our global climate.
Aren't there going to be a lot of fatalities of these things in the major shipping lanes, though?
This sounds pretty neat. I'd like to never have to worry about tooth decay again. I'll bet this would do a pretty skookum job of keeping my breath fresher, too. But... Do the scientists who've developed this actually have a clue?
Is this, for example, going to be so successfully alive in my mouth that it'll decide to live elsewhere too? Maybe it will kill my digestive bacteria? Possibly cause less functional first stage digestion in my mouth?
I suppose this, like any new GE type revelation, is one that is only testable imperically. I don't know about anyone else, but that kinda willies my out. Maybe we're creating bacteria-zilla, eh?
I find it surprising that many people I speak with about GE generally place it at the same level of complexity of *any* scientific discipline. Much as I'd like to think that I am a smart fellow because I know some computer stuff, the GE world is waaay waaay more complex than the one I live in. I am convinced that we do NOT have the ability to ensure any level of safety in the deployment of any GE in any form, whatsoever. We just don't have any way of being deterministic about outcomes of GE on any organism.
Maybe I am out to lunch. Please (PLEASE) prove me wrong - but GE seems to be very much a "what happens if we push *this* button" kind of discipline.
I'd be very surprised if the IOC didn't get a freaking ton of money from the "official" distribution of olympic broadcasting.
From the money side, the IOC can use the dough. We already know that they are funded in part by the media. The media want nothing more than to protect their interests and ability to sell advertising. I would guess that this is one of the reasons why there isn't a great deal, if any, Intenet coverage of the games (in a live format, anyhow).
As another poster has commented, there *were* live feeds several years ago of the summer olympics. What happened? I would suggest.com failures have cast considerable doubt on the validity of using the Internet as a media outlet (particularly in the context of generating advertising revenue).
Also, I imagine that there is considerable reluctance on the part of the reporting organizations to put out media that can easily be reproduced around the world without their consent.
I suppose I can't really blame them for the lack of interest in doing anything on the net. There's no significant monetary benefit to the networks distributing the information (at significant cost, mind you) on the net when they have guarantees on advertising and IOC revenues doing things traditionally. Besides, it helps to maintain the value of their current media outlets.
I live in a smaller rural area outside of the local major city (which isn't too big, actually) and I'm getting an average of about 2.5-4 Mbps down and about 500Kbps up. I ocassionally get about 6Mbps down on certain sites (such as kernel.org), but it's rarer. I'm paying 39.95 per month (before a zillion Canadian taxes - so about $46 after taxes, I guess).
I like the speeds I'm getting and surmise that it must be due, at least in part, to the fact I'm living in a very low density community. Other Shaw Cable subscribers in the "City" are seeing speeds on average of more like 1-2 Mbps down (although I'm not sure about speeds up). Same price, of course.
The Amiga was waay ahead of it's time. Yeah, sure, you've heard this before, but I know of what I speak. No kidding. Let me explain.
About 10 years ago, a number of business associates (well, friends, really) and I had a company that used the Amiga extensively. We built, from the ground up, an embedded control and data collection system using Amiga computers. The average facility we installed with this product (yes, we sold it) went for about 70K.
Why the Amiga? Several reasons :
1) it was built for NTSC/PAL output. We needed to get signals to TV's for display.
2) it had state of the art graphics. I believe the only other "standard" at the time was VGA or SVGA.
3) it was *really* fast, compared to the X86 machines of the day. This was probably due more to the custom chips than the CPU clock...
4) it was built by very intelligent people who put a lot of thought into the design of it. The Zorro bus (peripheral card bus) was pretty straightforward to connect with. We built a single card design that worked on an A2000/3000/4000 and the A500.
5) it was cheap. Really really cheap for what you got (about $300 per A500 and this had everything we needed in a nice, small package).
6) apart from the lack of an MMU (generally) and memory protection, the OS was a dream to program and the system a dream to use.
7) we liked it. What can I say? We liked it. In addition to the company that built this embedded system, we had a computer store that dealt in the Amiga and Video Toaster.
We had to kill the product when Commodore went the way of the Dinosaurs. It's too bad, really, because we would have liked to continue.
I still love the Amiga - but it's not ever going to be a viable system to use again. I really *do* hope that the hardware and software guys who built the Amiga system get together and build a *real* piece of hardware and software again.
Think about the custom chips for a minute -
You had the blitter : basically an area based logic unit. Big deal? Well a buddy of mine wrote a program that could run a hi-res screen, some blitter code and very very little CPU and iterate through life (the simulation - not reality) at about 30 frames per second. No discernable CPU use. It wasn't until about '96 that I saw similar achievements on X86 hardware.
You had the copper : the chip that allowed for multiple resolutions. It defined how to output graphics information and at what resolution : take a hi-res screen with x colors and allow it to be dragged over a low res-screen with x*256 colors. There's nothing I've seen since that can do this.
You had the graphics chips themselves : Agnus and Portia (or whatever). They did all the work of putting out the display, along side the other two custom chips.
All of the use of the CPU was in processing - everything was basically DMA, everything ran the same memory interleaved with the CPU. It was *sooo* cool and so very quick.
A couple of my partners wrote a program called Amoeba Invaders (space invaders clone) (through our company Late Night Developments - we were young and thought it was a cool name). I could run about, oh, 20 copies of this game concurrently because most of the animation was done with the custom chips and not the CPU - and this was on an Amiga 1000 (68000 system).
But... Commodore was run by business folks who wanted to make a buck. And they did. And when they were happy with the buck they'd made, they killed it.
So, the Amiga was waay ahead of it's time. But it's now dead and technology has certainly improved well beyond what the Amiga excelled at.
I saw this thread on an emulator and have one thing to say. So what? I liked the Amiga because of the hardware and the software. No emulator so far has been able to do a good job of the hardware that made the Amiga greater than the OS. Oh well.
Well, I guess the patent isn't too onerous. But! What's the big deal anyhow?
Look at it - software patents basically take the idea that you had and force the concept into a legally protected form. But I believe the reality is that duplicating the data streams and storage methodologies (not to mention the marketing and hype) are going to be cost prohibitive for most companies anyhow. Why bother?
I suppose this kind of things bothers me, as I know it does others, because it seems to be getting more prevalent and smacks to me of protectionism in software. To me it's equivalent to providing an incumbant telecommunications infrastructure provider (like a cable-co or telco) exclusivity in a market and keeping out the competition. Good for the provider, bad for competition and business generally. I firmly believe that preventing the use of good technology in any scientific field (like software, biotech, engineering) by many different groups slows the rate of innovation in that field. Patents on specific inventions seem reasonable to me, though. I approve of the patent for the lightbulb, but not a patent on the use of electricity to provide light!
Look, we all know that there are lots of good reasons to use Linux on the desktop. Heck, StarOffice is a good office environment and there are others coming along nicely. From my perspective, coming from management and having had a mixed Linux/Windows/Mac/Solaris shop to keep straight, there are other fundamental issues that Linux distro's and the Open Source community might consider addressing.
1) Installation
Well, Windows is pretty easy to install. No lie, I have seen not too swift computer people install it without blowing up the machine. Granted if there's an issue with the installation, the Windows "guru" had to be called in, but normally it was pretty easy.
Linux distros, on the other hand, while they almost *always* install without barfing, can *not* be installed by the average user. At all. Period. Don't even go there. Why? Lot's of options, lot's of ways to ensure that the system doesn't function as expected and lot's of headaches for the sysadmins (who, incidentally, need to *really* understand the quirks of the distro prior to dealing with it).
So, what does Linux need to succeed? Two things spring to my mind.
a) a distribution aimed at the office environment with *no* install time options outside of some basic ones (like networking and screen resolution) - keep all those RPMs around on the CD, but require the sysadmin to put them on - a script that installs "after market" rpms is pretty easy to write.
b) an installation administration tool that allows an admin to develop system types (ie, office system, development system, etc.) and maintain the software to the current level without a lot of hassles. I know that there's stuff like that out there, but you have to dig to find it. It's *important* - it should be one of the most fundamental things an office setting needs to run Linux.
2) Display/Printing
Oh my god. It's getting better, but Linux has the same problem as the Amiga had (sure, I liked the Amiga, too) - poor fonts, poor font rendering to screen and poor printing.
Ok, you *can* make it work, but it's not great. I'm running kde and using aa fonts. I have, through a purchase years ago, a bunch of Adobe fonts that I can use with the server and the desktop environment. They work fairly well, but the X server does a pretty average job of rendering them and most apps (staroffice, kword, abiword) don't use them well, either.
So, for Linux to work well in an office environment, it needs to *look* as polished as windows. IMNSHO, that means good fonts and better printing. I know that CUPS is coming along, but it's not quite there yet.
3) Better Apps
I put this third because that's really where I think it belongs. Our office got away with Office 97 for 4 years on Windows boxes. It didn't have the latest and greatest features and had several nasty bugs, but people were willing to work around them and curse MS from time to time. Some of the Linux apps are getting there, but they're still not ready for prime time. I believe that StarOffice, once the font/print technology is up to snuff, will be just fine.
Conclusion
Many people have posted about the need to have the killer app. Linux needs to become easy for sysadmins to deploy and painless for users to use. And I *know* it can be. I can see it getting there. Don't believe that the app makes the environment, though. That's just wrong. The real work, day to day, is done by the folks to keep the systems running and maintain them in a standard fashion, and the users to demand a certain level of polish and functionality.
Make it easy for the sysadmins! Make it pretty for the users! Window manager hints and nice colors *aren't* all they are looking for! Linux is getting there and the apps are certainly better, but we're not there yet.
Does anyone know what kind of revenues Loki made? I'm curious as to how possible it is for a company to do linux ports of Windows games in the first place. Was this doomed to failure? Was there a lack of sufficient marketing? I've purchased a few Loki games from a local retailer and have reviewed one (Railroad Tycoon II). I found all of the games to be well done, functional, and extremely playable on my hardware (PIII 500, 512MB RAM).
As an avid gamer (I boot Windows ONLY to play games) I was very happy to see Loki port Windows based games to Linux. And contrary to a bunch of the posts so far, I thought that it was a) simple to get the games running and b) pretty decent in performance. Yeah, sure, Windows generally played the same game better on the same computer (although generally not by much), but then you had to cope with all that Window's garbage, like reboots and mysterious hangs and... sheesh. At least if there was a problem with the game under Linux, I just had to restart the game, not the computer!
Anyhow, does anyone have the answers to my questions?
Best of luck to all who worked at Loki! You did a great job!
Slashdot Mirror
Here we go again. If the Gov't wants to make ISPs responsible for the actions of their users, I certainly hope they're planning on providing some payment for the time it will take.
Effectively, the action suggested in the article would make an ISP a branch of law enforcement - requiring them to comply with orders to disable user accounts and, probably, pay penalties for non-compliance with such orders.
I now question, quite strongly, the reason there are taxes on blank CDs, DVDs, Video Tapes, and other storage media. I had believed that this tax was to go directly to SOCAN (the Canadian RIAA equivalent) to ensure that artists were compensated for copies of their materials. If they now believe that any person downloading a song that they already own is a target for prosecution, I don't think I'll be too keen on paying those taxes. Time to talk to the MP in these parts, I guess.
Don't get me wrong. The science is great - I like it! Understanding how the Oceans are behaving has been said to be a very large part of understanding our global climate.
Aren't there going to be a lot of fatalities of these things in the major shipping lanes, though?
This sounds pretty neat. I'd like to never have to worry about tooth decay again. I'll bet this would do a pretty skookum job of keeping my breath fresher, too. But... Do the scientists who've developed this actually have a clue?
Is this, for example, going to be so successfully alive in my mouth that it'll decide to live elsewhere too? Maybe it will kill my digestive bacteria? Possibly cause less functional first stage digestion in my mouth?
I suppose this, like any new GE type revelation, is one that is only testable imperically. I don't know about anyone else, but that kinda willies my out. Maybe we're creating bacteria-zilla, eh?
I find it surprising that many people I speak with about GE generally place it at the same level of complexity of *any* scientific discipline. Much as I'd like to think that I am a smart fellow because I know some computer stuff, the GE world is waaay waaay more complex than the one I live in. I am convinced that we do NOT have the ability to ensure any level of safety in the deployment of any GE in any form, whatsoever. We just don't have any way of being deterministic about outcomes of GE on any organism.
Maybe I am out to lunch. Please (PLEASE) prove me wrong - but GE seems to be very much a "what happens if we push *this* button" kind of discipline.
I think it's all about money and power.
.com failures have cast considerable doubt on the validity of using the Internet as a media outlet (particularly in the context of generating advertising revenue).
I'd be very surprised if the IOC didn't get a freaking ton of money from the "official" distribution of olympic broadcasting.
From the money side, the IOC can use the dough. We already know that they are funded in part by the media. The media want nothing more than to protect their interests and ability to sell advertising. I would guess that this is one of the reasons why there isn't a great deal, if any, Intenet coverage of the games (in a live format, anyhow).
As another poster has commented, there *were* live feeds several years ago of the summer olympics. What happened? I would suggest
Also, I imagine that there is considerable reluctance on the part of the reporting organizations to put out media that can easily be reproduced around the world without their consent.
I suppose I can't really blame them for the lack of interest in doing anything on the net. There's no significant monetary benefit to the networks distributing the information (at significant cost, mind you) on the net when they have guarantees on advertising and IOC revenues doing things traditionally. Besides, it helps to maintain the value of their current media outlets.
Anyhow, that's my 2 cents.
I live in a smaller rural area outside of the local major city (which isn't too big, actually) and I'm getting an average of about 2.5-4 Mbps down and about 500Kbps up. I ocassionally get about 6Mbps down on certain sites (such as kernel.org), but it's rarer. I'm paying 39.95 per month (before a zillion Canadian taxes - so about $46 after taxes, I guess).
I like the speeds I'm getting and surmise that it must be due, at least in part, to the fact I'm living in a very low density community. Other Shaw Cable subscribers in the "City" are seeing speeds on average of more like 1-2 Mbps down (although I'm not sure about speeds up). Same price, of course.
The Amiga was waay ahead of it's time. Yeah, sure, you've heard this before, but I know of what I speak. No kidding. Let me explain.
About 10 years ago, a number of business associates (well, friends, really) and I had a company that used the Amiga extensively. We built, from the ground up, an embedded control and data collection system using Amiga computers. The average facility we installed with this product (yes, we sold it) went for about 70K.
Why the Amiga? Several reasons :
1) it was built for NTSC/PAL output. We needed to get signals to TV's for display.
2) it had state of the art graphics. I believe the only other "standard" at the time was VGA or SVGA.
3) it was *really* fast, compared to the X86 machines of the day. This was probably due more to the custom chips than the CPU clock...
4) it was built by very intelligent people who put a lot of thought into the design of it. The Zorro bus (peripheral card bus) was pretty straightforward to connect with. We built a single card design that worked on an A2000/3000/4000 and the A500.
5) it was cheap. Really really cheap for what you got (about $300 per A500 and this had everything we needed in a nice, small package).
6) apart from the lack of an MMU (generally) and memory protection, the OS was a dream to program and the system a dream to use.
7) we liked it. What can I say? We liked it. In addition to the company that built this embedded system, we had a computer store that dealt in the Amiga and Video Toaster.
We had to kill the product when Commodore went the way of the Dinosaurs. It's too bad, really, because we would have liked to continue.
I still love the Amiga - but it's not ever going to be a viable system to use again. I really *do* hope that the hardware and software guys who built the Amiga system get together and build a *real* piece of hardware and software again.
Think about the custom chips for a minute -
You had the blitter : basically an area based logic unit. Big deal? Well a buddy of mine wrote a program that could run a hi-res screen, some blitter code and very very little CPU and iterate through life (the simulation - not reality) at about 30 frames per second. No discernable CPU use. It wasn't until about '96 that I saw similar achievements on X86 hardware.
You had the copper : the chip that allowed for multiple resolutions. It defined how to output graphics information and at what resolution : take a hi-res screen with x colors and allow it to be dragged over a low res-screen with x*256 colors. There's nothing I've seen since that can do this.
You had the graphics chips themselves : Agnus and Portia (or whatever). They did all the work of putting out the display, along side the other two custom chips.
All of the use of the CPU was in processing - everything was basically DMA, everything ran the same memory interleaved with the CPU. It was *sooo* cool and so very quick.
A couple of my partners wrote a program called Amoeba Invaders (space invaders clone) (through our company Late Night Developments - we were young and thought it was a cool name). I could run about, oh, 20 copies of this game concurrently because most of the animation was done with the custom chips and not the CPU - and this was on an Amiga 1000 (68000 system).
But... Commodore was run by business folks who wanted to make a buck. And they did. And when they were happy with the buck they'd made, they killed it.
So, the Amiga was waay ahead of it's time. But it's now dead and technology has certainly improved well beyond what the Amiga excelled at.
I saw this thread on an emulator and have one thing to say. So what? I liked the Amiga because of the hardware and the software. No emulator so far has been able to do a good job of the hardware that made the Amiga greater than the OS. Oh well.
Well, I guess the patent isn't too onerous. But! What's the big deal anyhow?
Look at it - software patents basically take the idea that you had and force the concept into a legally protected form. But I believe the reality is that duplicating the data streams and storage methodologies (not to mention the marketing and hype) are going to be cost prohibitive for most companies anyhow. Why bother?
I suppose this kind of things bothers me, as I know it does others, because it seems to be getting more prevalent and smacks to me of protectionism in software. To me it's equivalent to providing an incumbant telecommunications infrastructure provider (like a cable-co or telco) exclusivity in a market and keeping out the competition. Good for the provider, bad for competition and business generally. I firmly believe that preventing the use of good technology in any scientific field (like software, biotech, engineering) by many different groups slows the rate of innovation in that field. Patents on specific inventions seem reasonable to me, though. I approve of the patent for the lightbulb, but not a patent on the use of electricity to provide light!
Look, we all know that there are lots of good reasons to use Linux on the desktop. Heck, StarOffice is a good office environment and there are others coming along nicely. From my perspective, coming from management and having had a mixed Linux/Windows/Mac/Solaris shop to keep straight, there are other fundamental issues that Linux distro's and the Open Source community might consider addressing.
1) Installation
Well, Windows is pretty easy to install. No lie, I have seen not too swift computer people install it without blowing up the machine. Granted if there's an issue with the installation, the Windows "guru" had to be called in, but normally it was pretty easy.
Linux distros, on the other hand, while they almost *always* install without barfing, can *not* be installed by the average user. At all. Period. Don't even go there. Why? Lot's of options, lot's of ways to ensure that the system doesn't function as expected and lot's of headaches for the sysadmins (who, incidentally, need to *really* understand the quirks of the distro prior to dealing with it).
So, what does Linux need to succeed? Two things spring to my mind.
a) a distribution aimed at the office environment with *no* install time options outside of some basic ones (like networking and screen resolution) - keep all those RPMs around on the CD, but require the sysadmin to put them on - a script that installs "after market" rpms is pretty easy to write.
b) an installation administration tool that allows an admin to develop system types (ie, office system, development system, etc.) and maintain the software to the current level without a lot of hassles. I know that there's stuff like that out there, but you have to dig to find it. It's *important* - it should be one of the most fundamental things an office setting needs to run Linux.
2) Display/Printing
Oh my god. It's getting better, but Linux has the same problem as the Amiga had (sure, I liked the Amiga, too) - poor fonts, poor font rendering to screen and poor printing.
Ok, you *can* make it work, but it's not great. I'm running kde and using aa fonts. I have, through a purchase years ago, a bunch of Adobe fonts that I can use with the server and the desktop environment. They work fairly well, but the X server does a pretty average job of rendering them and most apps (staroffice, kword, abiword) don't use them well, either.
So, for Linux to work well in an office environment, it needs to *look* as polished as windows. IMNSHO, that means good fonts and better printing. I know that CUPS is coming along, but it's not quite there yet.
3) Better Apps
I put this third because that's really where I think it belongs. Our office got away with Office 97 for 4 years on Windows boxes. It didn't have the latest and greatest features and had several nasty bugs, but people were willing to work around them and curse MS from time to time. Some of the Linux apps are getting there, but they're still not ready for prime time. I believe that StarOffice, once the font/print technology is up to snuff, will be just fine.
Conclusion
Many people have posted about the need to have the killer app. Linux needs to become easy for sysadmins to deploy and painless for users to use. And I *know* it can be. I can see it getting there. Don't believe that the app makes the environment, though. That's just wrong. The real work, day to day, is done by the folks to keep the systems running and maintain them in a standard fashion, and the users to demand a certain level of polish and functionality.
Make it easy for the sysadmins! Make it pretty for the users! Window manager hints and nice colors *aren't* all they are looking for! Linux is getting there and the apps are certainly better, but we're not there yet.
Does anyone know what kind of revenues Loki made? I'm curious as to how possible it is for a company to do linux ports of Windows games in the first place. Was this doomed to failure? Was there a lack of sufficient marketing? I've purchased a few Loki games from a local retailer and have reviewed one (Railroad Tycoon II). I found all of the games to be well done, functional, and extremely playable on my hardware (PIII 500, 512MB RAM).
... sheesh. At least if there was a problem with the game under Linux, I just had to restart the game, not the computer!
As an avid gamer (I boot Windows ONLY to play games) I was very happy to see Loki port Windows based games to Linux. And contrary to a bunch of the posts so far, I thought that it was a) simple to get the games running and b) pretty decent in performance. Yeah, sure, Windows generally played the same game better on the same computer (although generally not by much), but then you had to cope with all that Window's garbage, like reboots and mysterious hangs and
Anyhow, does anyone have the answers to my questions?
Best of luck to all who worked at Loki! You did a great job!