Aside from Apple people I've talked to (and except for the old Rhapsody team, they're pretty negative), I go by the history of the API. First it was the native API for the NextStep cube. When that product failed, it became the native API for the NextStep OS. When that product failed, it became an API layer on Solaris. And when that product failed, the NextStep CEO and the Apple CEO (who happened to be the same person) agreed that Apple should buy NextStep and use the OS to restart its moribund OS effort. Not a history to inspire confidence.
In refutation of this, you offer me enthusiasm at the D&P show. Unconvincing, to say the least!
Technically, you're talking about Affirming the consquent. And judging from the news, it's pretty popular in police departments.
But then again, a good theory doesn't have to be logically irrefutable. Science, history, and yes, criminal justice are full of theories that are valued mainly for their explanatory power. Circumstancial evidence (the butler had access to the fatal candlestick, the butler cannot acount for his whereabout when the crime was committed) can't irrefutably prove that the butler did it. But it can be strong enough to convict the butler, if there's so much of it that alternative theories cease to be plausible.
The con artist who's squatting on this abandoned radar platform and calls himself "Prince of Sealand" says that he's not part of the UK. But not a single government or international entity recognizes this. There's one ambiguous legal decision that the "Prince" like to interpret as official recognition, but that's it. The UK authorities have never pressed the point. But if they decided that illegal stuff was happening there, they probably would. Or they could just go in, seize all the HavenCo servers, arrest everybody in sight, and blow up the platform. Then let the lawyers sort it out. Even if it turned out that they exceeded their authority (and it probably wouldn't) it would be the end of Sealand.
Bogus nations are a dime a dozen: The Republic of Texas, the Kingdom of Patagonia, you name it. They have nothing backing them up, no army, no political following, no external recognition, not even citizens. All they have is some weird legal theory that nobody outide accepts. If you want to trust your data to somebody like that, then maybe you'll want to buy the Brooklyn Bridge -- I can get it for you real cheap!
Some history on Jonathan Schwartz is semi-relevent. He was the CEO of Lighthouse Design a company that made NextStep apps. When that platform went away, LD got swallowed by Sun, which wanted LD to rewrite its apps in Java so they'd run on Network Devices. When that platform went away, LD got dispersed throughout Sun, and Schwartz somehow managed to survive the death match that is Sun upper management.
I can understand his fondness for Macs, since OS X is more or less a successor to NextStep. But very few programmers, even at Apple, are fans of the NextStep API. And I'm skeptical as to whether there are as many Mac fans at Sun as he says, or whether this translates into any kind of Sun/Apple synnergy.
Besides, this sort of thing has been tried before. That's why JavaSoft and Taligent were headquartered accross the street from Apple. The clash of egos was always fatal.
Come on, what admin in their right mind would enter a password in cleartext on the command line and allow it to be stored in ~/.bash_history?
An inept one. Of which there are a great many. A lot of exploits simply capitalize on stupid-but-common mistakes, like not changing the default password on your router. I don't know whether this kind of mistake causes more exploits than Microsoft's alleged software engineering, but it's pretty big.
The important thing is that you're not going to be able to get the same kinds of street mapping and driving instructions on the lower priced units that the Street Pilot and the iQue provide.
When you throw the iQue in with the Street Pilot, you're missing my point. Despite its price tag, I consider the iQue a cheapie. That's because it's basically a Palm PDA with a GPS tacked on. If you ignore the GPS features, it's pretty much the same as a Palm m515, which sells for about $200 less. So it seems to me that considered purely as a GPS, it's a cheapie.
My experience is with a Navman GPSm. It's got all kinds of features designed to make it driver friendly: downloadable street maps, audio turn indicators... What it does not have is the ability to fix its position quickly enough to be usable in a moving car. Lucky for me Amazon is nice about returns.
When I see an urban GPS in the $200 range, I have to suspect that the designers have tagged a bunch of driver-support features on top of a cheap GPS receiver that's not really up to the job. Perhaps I'm wrong.
I'm forced to admit that I've committed the great Slashdot sin: I jumped into the discussion without RingTFA. You're right, it's not a subscription. Still, the payment system has too much granularity to be called "micropayments". "Minipayments"?
Yeah, don't you wish you could go back to the days when the internet was an informal community where the really important rules where self-enforced. Of course, that would mean going back to a tiny system accessible only to a few academics.
The telecom industry is pretty simplistic about what they call "commercial". A guy in a dorm at Stanford put a humourous announcement on his answering machine that made it sound like he was runninging a business. Even though it was an obvious joke, PacBell told him that if he didn't change it, they'd charge him business rates for his phone.
Yeah, it's dumb. But that's how things work when you're servicing millions of customers. You come up with rules that are pretty arbitrary, because they're easy to explain to the people that enforce them, and training is big cost factor for any large org. Smaller ISPs, like Speakeasy, can be more flexible.
So Cray/Tera is BSing Wall Street and Wall Street is buying it. Ho Hum. Where have I seen this before?
I'm no expert on High Performance Computing. But I know a few, and none of them think that Vector Computing was killed off by government policy. Maybe they're right, maybe they're wrong. But John Markoff presenting just one side of the argument as Proven Fact is pretty pathetic. Some tech journalists don't seem to know anything except what they were told at their last Dog and Pony Show.
The Slashdot COLLECTIVE??????
on
Replacing SMTP?
·
· Score: 1
With all the loopholes in the current SMTP specification, is it possible for the Slashdot collective to come up with another one?
Oh dear. Oh my. I guess you learned the word "collective" from watching that TV show. If you were acquainted with the term as most Slashdotters would define it you'd know how silly your request is!
This technology has always gone against the spirit of the Internet, that every node is a peer, there's no such thing as a "server node" or a "client node" except in the context of a specific connection.
Oh please. There's nothing in the client-server model that says that the client has to receive more data than it gets. It's just a interaction design model. As is the "context" role-playing of internet nodes. Calling it the "spirit of the internet" is Rheingoldian crap.
I was finally told by a manager that any upload in excess of 35 minutes (size of file or type, etc have no bearing) would result in an automatic capping of the user's upstream.
That's kind of a vague benchmark. (But of course, this is "Ask Slashdot" where vagueness is mandatory!) Does this mean an upstream connection that active for 35 minutes continuous? 35 minutes per month? 35 minutes total?
What they're doing here is preventing their customers from operating servers. It's perfectly reasonable that they should want to do this: why should they provide commercial service for consumer prices? Their solution is pretty procrustean though.
Anyway, if you need unlimited uploads, you need a provider that allows it. Might cost more than you're spending now, but that's how business works.
The "micropayments" in this story are bogus, so we're offtopic. But I have to address your argument.
I hear lots of theories as to "why micropayments don't work". But that's all they are: theories. Have consumers in the U.S. ever had access to a real micropayment system? If so, I it happened while I wasn't looking.
Micropayments would be ideal for selling web based content. Pay a couple cents every time you read an article. That generates an income flow that's a nice alternative to subscriptions and advertising. We know that subscriptions mostly don't work. And there just isn't enough ad revenue to sustain everybody.
Here's a non-theory: micropayments have a counterpary in the dead-tree world. You can subscribe to a newspaper, but if you just want today's copy, you go to a machine, stick in a quarter, and voila! If it were practical, there'd probably be a machine that would let you put in a penny for each article you actually read. On the web, that is practical. Why has nobody tried it?
My own pet theory is that banks make too much money off of the exiting payment systems, especially credit cards. They're not about to support a competing system -- and you can't have money transfers of any kind without their support.
The key word here is "subscription". Any subscription-based business can't hope to survive unless it minimizes "churn". So either they satisfy enough people to make them permanent subscribers, or they go out of business.
Quoting a pseudo-minimal payment that's beyond "the boundary of perceptibility" is precisely why it's marketing BS. It's like those insurance offers that say, "Protect your loved ones for 10 cents a day!" They're trying to make something expensive look like a bargain.
Micropayments don't just involve keeping transactions small, they involve flexibility. Like if you automatically pay a very small fee every time you look at a certain web page. A subscription fee that's due on a regular basis, whether you access the site or not, is as far from micropayments as you can possibly get.
I'd never claim that cheap routers are the right fit for everybody. But not everybody needs peer-to-peer file transfer.
With a Linksys router, you completely isolate your system from outside access without interfering with any client-server web apps. And you do so with a minimum of administration hassle. It seems to me that this fits the needs of 90% of all home users far better than any alternative.
Somalia and DRC are both doing GREAT in terms of telephone and internet access. The call prices are far cheaper there, there's more competition, and the business is healthier. Both countries are TOTAL DISASTER AREAS otherwise.
"TOTAL DISASTER" is actually an understatement. Somalia doesn't even have a government, and Congo is World War III, only without the good parts.
You often hear the economic and social libertarians saying, "Government is the problem, not the solution. If you want you want more goods and services, let the marketplace take care of itself." I guess these two examples prove that this is actually true -- but when taken to extremes, the price of this approach can be pretty high.
Why do you own a separate set of nut drivers? Wouldn't it make more sense to have nut bits for your electric screwdriver?
Several extra PC power cords.
I once needed one of these in a hurry, and had to spend way to much for it. Then I saw a pile of them at a computer surplus store, and bought about a dozen of them. I'll never use them all, but better to have too many than...
Slashdot Mirror
In refutation of this, you offer me enthusiasm at the D&P show. Unconvincing, to say the least!
But then again, a good theory doesn't have to be logically irrefutable. Science, history, and yes, criminal justice are full of theories that are valued mainly for their explanatory power. Circumstancial evidence (the butler had access to the fatal candlestick, the butler cannot acount for his whereabout when the crime was committed) can't irrefutably prove that the butler did it. But it can be strong enough to convict the butler, if there's so much of it that alternative theories cease to be plausible.
Bogus nations are a dime a dozen: The Republic of Texas, the Kingdom of Patagonia, you name it. They have nothing backing them up, no army, no political following, no external recognition, not even citizens. All they have is some weird legal theory that nobody outide accepts. If you want to trust your data to somebody like that, then maybe you'll want to buy the Brooklyn Bridge -- I can get it for you real cheap!
I can understand his fondness for Macs, since OS X is more or less a successor to NextStep. But very few programmers, even at Apple, are fans of the NextStep API. And I'm skeptical as to whether there are as many Mac fans at Sun as he says, or whether this translates into any kind of Sun/Apple synnergy.
Besides, this sort of thing has been tried before. That's why JavaSoft and Taligent were headquartered accross the street from Apple. The clash of egos was always fatal.
My experience is with a Navman GPSm. It's got all kinds of features designed to make it driver friendly: downloadable street maps, audio turn indicators... What it does not have is the ability to fix its position quickly enough to be usable in a moving car. Lucky for me Amazon is nice about returns.
When I see an urban GPS in the $200 range, I have to suspect that the designers have tagged a bunch of driver-support features on top of a cheap GPS receiver that's not really up to the job. Perhaps I'm wrong.
I'm forced to admit that I've committed the great Slashdot sin: I jumped into the discussion without RingTFA. You're right, it's not a subscription. Still, the payment system has too much granularity to be called "micropayments". "Minipayments"?
Yeah, don't you wish you could go back to the days when the internet was an informal community where the really important rules where self-enforced. Of course, that would mean going back to a tiny system accessible only to a few academics.
The telecom industry is pretty simplistic about what they call "commercial". A guy in a dorm at Stanford put a humourous announcement on his answering machine that made it sound like he was runninging a business. Even though it was an obvious joke, PacBell told him that if he didn't change it, they'd charge him business rates for his phone.
Yeah, it's dumb. But that's how things work when you're servicing millions of customers. You come up with rules that are pretty arbitrary, because they're easy to explain to the people that enforce them, and training is big cost factor for any large org. Smaller ISPs, like Speakeasy, can be more flexible.
I'm no expert on High Performance Computing. But I know a few, and none of them think that Vector Computing was killed off by government policy. Maybe they're right, maybe they're wrong. But John Markoff presenting just one side of the argument as Proven Fact is pretty pathetic. Some tech journalists don't seem to know anything except what they were told at their last Dog and Pony Show.
What they're doing here is preventing their customers from operating servers. It's perfectly reasonable that they should want to do this: why should they provide commercial service for consumer prices? Their solution is pretty procrustean though.
Anyway, if you need unlimited uploads, you need a provider that allows it. Might cost more than you're spending now, but that's how business works.
I hear lots of theories as to "why micropayments don't work". But that's all they are: theories. Have consumers in the U.S. ever had access to a real micropayment system? If so, I it happened while I wasn't looking.
Micropayments would be ideal for selling web based content. Pay a couple cents every time you read an article. That generates an income flow that's a nice alternative to subscriptions and advertising. We know that subscriptions mostly don't work. And there just isn't enough ad revenue to sustain everybody.
Here's a non-theory: micropayments have a counterpary in the dead-tree world. You can subscribe to a newspaper, but if you just want today's copy, you go to a machine, stick in a quarter, and voila! If it were practical, there'd probably be a machine that would let you put in a penny for each article you actually read. On the web, that is practical. Why has nobody tried it?
My own pet theory is that banks make too much money off of the exiting payment systems, especially credit cards. They're not about to support a competing system -- and you can't have money transfers of any kind without their support.
Quoting a pseudo-minimal payment that's beyond "the boundary of perceptibility" is precisely why it's marketing BS. It's like those insurance offers that say, "Protect your loved ones for 10 cents a day!" They're trying to make something expensive look like a bargain.
Micropayments don't just involve keeping transactions small, they involve flexibility. Like if you automatically pay a very small fee every time you look at a certain web page. A subscription fee that's due on a regular basis, whether you access the site or not, is as far from micropayments as you can possibly get.
You gonna prove me wrong? I wouldn't mind if you did!
With a Linksys router, you completely isolate your system from outside access without interfering with any client-server web apps. And you do so with a minimum of administration hassle. It seems to me that this fits the needs of 90% of all home users far better than any alternative.
Well, I exaggerate. But you got to admit that modern physics is really weird.
Sounds like France during the fourth republic.
Scoff if you must, but the ability of small metal objects to wander off if not closely watched is well known!
You often hear the economic and social libertarians saying, "Government is the problem, not the solution. If you want you want more goods and services, let the marketplace take care of itself." I guess these two examples prove that this is actually true -- but when taken to extremes, the price of this approach can be pretty high.
Aha! Smart people never forget things! And when they put a screw down, it stays where they put it! Must be the force of their mental energy!
You did say, "Most of the world's problems have nothing to do with technology". That's the specific point I don't care for.
Who thought of this, Harry Turtledove?.
Why do you own a separate set of nut drivers? Wouldn't it make more sense to have nut bits for your electric screwdriver?
I once needed one of these in a hurry, and had to spend way to much for it. Then I saw a pile of them at a computer surplus store, and bought about a dozen of them. I'll never use them all, but better to have too many than...