Well if you happen to be in the Portland, Oregon MTA you could consider donating your computer to Free Geek which would support, linux, not-for-profits and the environment (through recycling) in one fell swoop. IMHO this is a model which could be propogated to other communities.
Dude, get a grip. Those guys are going to smell pretty bad (this may of been a pre-existing condition). You should try to find another theater and steer clear of the art-that-stinks crowd.
sarchasm writes: "Apparently George Lucas is suing
the Department of Defense and the federal governmanet for calling some of
its new missle defense systems Star Wars. According to the suit:
"Any deficiencies or faults in the quality of the defendant's goods are
likely to reflect negatively upon, tarnish and seriously injure the
reputation which Lucasfilm has established for goods and services
marketed under its Star Wars mark. This confusion is likely to result in
loss of revenues to Lucasfilm, damage to its reputation and property and casualty damage in some western nations. Lucasfilm would also like to note that the quality of the acting in the film series should be no reflection upon the quality of the engineering in the missle defense system."
Too Small? We should think more broadly. People don't want to carry around laptops, they don't want to carry around devices at all. That probably means wearables.
A friend of mine works at Nike on clothing product development, sort of the R&D end of Nike. Her current work is in wearables, and though their initial market is athletic performance monitoring we've had some fascinating conversations about what she has seen and her take on where it's headed.
All the components are in place for wearables to begin entering the consumer market EXCEPT for the market pull at the current price point. It's becoming common place for everyone to walk around with their ear-buds in place while talking on the cell phone. Not much of a leap there to putting on goggles.
The keyboard is a little trickier. What I'd love to see is a 'Johnny Pneumonic' style virtual keybord, but without gloves or anything in my hands. Perhaps a camera captures the reflection off my fingernails, or some sensor correlates which muscles are being activated in order to determine hand position and finger movement.
Perhaps the more interesting thing is if we allow traditionally 'hard' interfaces to become software, and therefor highly configurable, what will those interfaces morph to look like? The keyboard is a metaphor that we inhereted from the typewriter which is a mechanical efficiency built on top of printing technology. Keyboards are good UI's, but so is voice, or eye movement, or facial expressions. I know that's just dreaming at this point but those technologies do exist.
When an existing technology faces market pressure to change but is reaching its limitations it creates market conditions which are favorable to the creation of disruptive technology. And that's where we're at. It's already showing up in everywhere from shopfloor controls to Webvan deliveries, but it won't be long before these are consumer devices.
Oh, oh, oh PLEEAAAAASSSSSSSSE hiiiiiiiiiiiirrrrrrreeeeeee me. I am so lonely here in my house. There is very little for me todo except surf the web and wait for the phone to ring. Oh my life is so lonely. I wish I could be a productive member of society but instead I sit here and need to dream up sapm to ship into/. Please help me help our economy turn around.
You're suggesting that a Microwave is simple and elegant. Or that a toaster couldn't benefit from awareness of the environment.
Well if that isn't a fine "Who is John Galt?"
You wanna quote authors? I think T.S. Eliot put it best when he said "Our beginnings never know our ends".
Let's tackle the toaster first (not a football reference). Let's say I get up in the morning in my groggy way and I walk to the kitchen while my wife is doing her hair in the loo and begin to make toast. As I depress the lever to allow the toast to descend into the toaster....
1) my circuit breaker blows because the toaster is competing with my wife's hair dryer
OR
2) my house lets me know that the breaker box has informed the toaster that not enough energy is available to run at this time and prompts to leave the toaster's request in queue or disregard or override (screw her damn hair, it's too expensive anyways)
Or better yet, how about an upgrade to my microwave that allows it to toast. What could be more elegant than reducing the number of devices that I have to interact with.
I can envision smarter Microwaves that remember how long it took to cook this particular size of Potato last time (adjusted for current room temperature) and offers that as a default preference.
These are (IMHO) more elegant solutions, but even with the simplest toaster your interaction is complex. It is counter-intuitive that you would put a piece of fermented baked wheat into a shiny silver box on your counter in order to improve it's texture and taste. These are really just things that you learned. So why can't I learn how to use an integrated environment to my benefit?
Your disdain for this kind of progress is not the kind of thought that I read in the work of Ayn Rand and I think you do her a disservice by using her name.
You don't like my toaster? That's fine. You go ahead and hunt ebay for your appliances and I'll remind myself not to invite you over. I agree that not all progress is beneficial, but there is no reason to impeed it and I have faith that the market will weed out the bad ideas.
I have a site which I developed in 1998, wanderlist which has been growing at a glacial pace ever since.;)
While it wasn't released to the public until November 8th, I conducted some 'focus group' style meetings earlier that year, the first of which was in March.
I have notes from this session and could receive affidavits from some of the participants. I'd be pretty bummed if I had to increase the size of the hole in to which I'm throwing money on account of ponying up for an MS tax.
That asside, I'm certain that we can find prior art for polls and voting in much deeper pockets than mine. Hasn't MIT beein using online voting for elections since at least 1996.
Please let me know if you plan to organize any formal retort to this clearly erroneous patent.
> So, if you're not running Exchange and don't have two virtual NNTP servers, then the bug does not affect you.
Then why should the solution?
> You can understand kernel source code, but can't read English. Are you a bot?
Yes, ofcourse I'm a bot. In fact, I'm the first bot to be able to understand kernel source code and evaluate it's effectiveness for use. You should fear for your job!
Yes, lets take a look at that. Here's the first article I looked at under that link...
http://support.microsoft.com/support/kb/articles/Q 253/6/07.ASP
Includes
SYMPTOMS
When you add a second NNTP virtual server, master/slave feeds and control messages may not work when Microsoft Exchange 2000 Server Release Candidate 1 (RC1) is also installed.
CAUSE
A property is incorrectly set in the metabase on the control and slave groups as to which driver to use. By default, Windows 2000 assumes the Exchange store rather than NTFS store. This breaks both control messages and master/slave feeds.
RESOLUTION
To resolve this problem, obtain the latest service pack for Windows 2000. For additional information, please see the following article in the Microsoft Knowledge Base:
Q260910 How to Obtain the Latest Windows 2000 Service Pack
And this really doesn't give me much to chomp on with regard to if this is a good idea for my system. And considering that I may not be running exchange, may not be serving NNTP, and may not be running two virtual NNTP servers on my box, is this something that I need anyways? And how do I judge this on it's merits? There is little diagnostic information available and basically they ask for blind trust in a situation which time and time again they have shown that they are not deserving of it.
The benefits of linux release methodology over the Microsoft release methodology:
- I can quickly get a sense of what is being improved with each kernel release by looking at the changes notice that is included with each kernel.
- I can find in depth discussion of some changes by following the kernel development list or the major discussion by reading the kernel traffic summaries that are published weekly at http://kt.zork.net/kernel-traffic/latest.html - I can go read the code in the kernel to try to discern what is going on
- I can try to contact a kernel developer directly to seek information on a particular improvement
- I can offer my own improvements to the code
- I can tell what the benefits or a particular improvement are and who will benefit from this improvement
- I do not have to blindly go forth into the mire of a service pack and hope that it fixes a problem in a correct and well thought out manner and hope that it truly offers a benefit and does not only serve the interests of one entity
Does this mean that some bad ideas don't get brought into kernel releases? No. Does this mean that I have to expend less effort in deciding upon and then executing a update of my system? No. But I do have more tools available and better information to help me to decide if this is the right decision.
Nice piece of work here. It looks like you've really put yourselves into this one, and from the missive above you either had a bunch of fun writing it or your marketing people are not your average bunch of monkeys.
My one concern with all these kinds of systems is infrastructure. For one, I can remember when getting an RPM from redhat.com was a pain because they didn't have their mirror's set up and their ftp site was getting hammered all the time, but I'm not really concerned about scalabilty bottleknecks, that's really just relationship building and it sounds like you have a lot of friends.;) What I'm more concerned about is "channel" maintenance and what the chain is for that?
Does channel == ftp server?
Who maintains that channel?
What would be a reasonable timeframe to expect an update to a channel in the case of say, the bind security problem from a few weeks back?
Too often it seems to me that the web of trust between me as a sys admin and package maintainer x is not as stable as a simple `gpg --verify`. I realize that your updater is probably not geared towards me, but I need to understand the system which I am utilizing before I could consider adding your monkeys to my arsenal.
More than likely Microsoft is playing the bigger strategy of trying to win the legal battle on the home court with regard to GPL software on the innovation argument as an initial step towards winning the whole kitty. After all, we now know they understand what is at stake here.
Once they have the big bad US government on their side then they can begin lining the pockets of the world trade organization or key members of the EU in order to leverage US policy decisions in the world markets. After all, the United States has a long history of being sure that their view of intellectual property is the correct one and should be used as the standard in international trade.
The GCTP (group calendar transfer protocol) project has a significant code base and is tackling the calendar end of the groupware problem. There is also a related project, OpenFlock.
GPL'd, and the current model is written in perl, though the more important aspect of this project is the protocol and establishing a standard for information availability and interoperabiltiy of calendar and event applications.
Both of these are the incarnation of David Sifry of LinuxCare. David presented a paper at ALS describing the protocol.
The code is available via cvs:
$ cvs -d:pserver:cvs@www.gctp.org:/cvsroot login
Password is "cvs"
$ cvs -d:pserver:cvs@www.gctp.org:/cvsroot co -P -d openflock_acls1 -r openflock_acls1 openflock
Between this book and/Consider Phlebas/ Mr. Banks shows himself to Love T.S. Eliot's/The Waste Land/ and particularly:
Part 4 - Death by Water
Phelbas the Phoenician, a fortnight dead,
Forgot the cry of gulls, and the deep sea swell
And the profit and loss.
A current under sea
Picked his bones in whispers. As he rose and fell
He passed the stages of his age and youth
Entering whirpool.
Gentile or Jew
O you who turn the wheel and look to windward,
Consider Phlebas, who was once handsome and tall as you.
I feel that you have skirted an important point that was included in the original threads that addressed the release of Slashdot source code. Specifically, which license will you be using to release your code and what is your reasoning for choosing that license?
This is a shameless plug so I'll just plan on being moderated accordingly.
I built a site called wanderlist.com about a year ago as a way of learning Perl/CGI/MySQL. The site allows anyone to set up a list and for others who come along to interact with the list. Soon after I launched it my good friend Mike started using it to manage his christmas list. I soon followed suit.
I've found that as I've oriented my friends and family to going to the site to find my christmas list, I've stopped getting those "What do you want?" questions that I can never seem to answer quick enough and I've begun getting stuff I really like, because it was on my list.
There are a bunch of similar services out there as well.
In Friday's responses from Havoc Pennington we learned that there is a Tuesday cut-off for question selection. I would like to suggest that once questions are selected, The Powers That Be(SM) post an Update: to the article explaining that we should all sit on our hands until Friday and not promote additional carpal tunnel syndrome by needlessly posting additional questions or wasting valuable moderator points.
By synchronizing my Palm III with my linux machine I've been able to passively extend my ldap contact database in several directions. I had already set up a small app that let my friends use my website to keep their own information up to date, or for long lost friends who find me out there to send me their info. Now this all gets synchronised with the palm (thanks to pilot-ldif) where I can access, edit, delete to my hearts content. All using open source tools that extend my overall information management to embrace the palm. (no pun intended)
My next goal is to get the Palm calendar to synch cleanly with KOrganizer and then either find or build some CGI's to take the vcal file that KOrganizer uses and present it as HTML.
Why should you care? Well my point is this: The real value of a tool is not measured in any one device (Palm, my.personal.machine, mywebsite.at-my-isp.com) but in how that tool can be used in conjunction to form larger more useful constructs.
Slashdot Mirror
bnf
And here's one of them together
This guy and his kids live with his mother? CEO's jut don't get bank no more.
Dude, get a grip. Those guys are going to smell pretty bad (this may of been a pre-existing condition). You should try to find another theater and steer clear of the art-that-stinks crowd.
bnf
bnf
A friend of mine works at Nike on clothing product development, sort of the R&D end of Nike. Her current work is in wearables, and though their initial market is athletic performance monitoring we've had some fascinating conversations about what she has seen and her take on where it's headed.
All the components are in place for wearables to begin entering the consumer market EXCEPT for the market pull at the current price point. It's becoming common place for everyone to walk around with their ear-buds in place while talking on the cell phone. Not much of a leap there to putting on goggles.
The keyboard is a little trickier. What I'd love to see is a 'Johnny Pneumonic' style virtual keybord, but without gloves or anything in my hands. Perhaps a camera captures the reflection off my fingernails, or some sensor correlates which muscles are being activated in order to determine hand position and finger movement.
Perhaps the more interesting thing is if we allow traditionally 'hard' interfaces to become software, and therefor highly configurable, what will those interfaces morph to look like? The keyboard is a metaphor that we inhereted from the typewriter which is a mechanical efficiency built on top of printing technology. Keyboards are good UI's, but so is voice, or eye movement, or facial expressions. I know that's just dreaming at this point but those technologies do exist.
When an existing technology faces market pressure to change but is reaching its limitations it creates market conditions which are favorable to the creation of disruptive technology. And that's where we're at. It's already showing up in everywhere from shopfloor controls to Webvan deliveries, but it won't be long before these are consumer devices.
bnf
bnf
Well if that isn't a fine "Who is John Galt?"
You wanna quote authors? I think T.S. Eliot put it best when he said "Our beginnings never know our ends".
Let's tackle the toaster first (not a football reference). Let's say I get up in the morning in my groggy way and I walk to the kitchen while my wife is doing her hair in the loo and begin to make toast. As I depress the lever to allow the toast to descend into the toaster....
1) my circuit breaker blows because the toaster is competing with my wife's hair dryer
OR
2) my house lets me know that the breaker box has informed the toaster that not enough energy is available to run at this time and prompts to leave the toaster's request in queue or disregard or override (screw her damn hair, it's too expensive anyways)
Or better yet, how about an upgrade to my microwave that allows it to toast. What could be more elegant than reducing the number of devices that I have to interact with.
I can envision smarter Microwaves that remember how long it took to cook this particular size of Potato last time (adjusted for current room temperature) and offers that as a default preference.
These are (IMHO) more elegant solutions, but even with the simplest toaster your interaction is complex. It is counter-intuitive that you would put a piece of fermented baked wheat into a shiny silver box on your counter in order to improve it's texture and taste. These are really just things that you learned. So why can't I learn how to use an integrated environment to my benefit?
Your disdain for this kind of progress is not the kind of thought that I read in the work of Ayn Rand and I think you do her a disservice by using her name.
You don't like my toaster? That's fine. You go ahead and hunt ebay for your appliances and I'll remind myself not to invite you over. I agree that not all progress is beneficial, but there is no reason to impeed it and I have faith that the market will weed out the bad ideas.
bnf
Just wait until they work their way up to building this. Then we'll really start seeing the good stuff.
I have a site which I developed in 1998, wanderlist which has been growing at a glacial pace ever since. ;)
While it wasn't released to the public until November 8th, I conducted some 'focus group' style meetings earlier that year, the first of which was in March.
I have notes from this session and could receive affidavits from some of the participants. I'd be pretty bummed if I had to increase the size of the hole in to which I'm throwing money on account of ponying up for an MS tax.
That asside, I'm certain that we can find prior art for polls and voting in much deeper pockets than mine. Hasn't MIT beein using online voting for elections since at least 1996.
Please let me know if you plan to organize any formal retort to this clearly erroneous patent.
> So, if you're not running Exchange and don't have two virtual NNTP servers, then the bug does not affect you.
Then why should the solution?
> You can understand kernel source code, but can't read English. Are you a bot?
Yes, ofcourse I'm a bot. In fact, I'm the first bot to be able to understand kernel source code and evaluate it's effectiveness for use. You should fear for your job!
Includes
And this really doesn't give me much to chomp on with regard to if this is a good idea for my system. And considering that I may not be running exchange, may not be serving NNTP, and may not be running two virtual NNTP servers on my box, is this something that I need anyways? And how do I judge this on it's merits? There is little diagnostic information available and basically they ask for blind trust in a situation which time and time again they have shown that they are not deserving of it.
Okay, I'll bite.
The benefits of linux release methodology over the Microsoft release methodology:
- I can quickly get a sense of what is being improved with each kernel release by looking at the changes notice that is included with each kernel.
- I can find in depth discussion of some changes by following the kernel development list or the major discussion by reading the kernel traffic summaries that are published weekly at http://kt.zork.net/kernel-traffic/latest.html
- I can go read the code in the kernel to try to discern what is going on
- I can try to contact a kernel developer directly to seek information on a particular improvement
- I can offer my own improvements to the code
- I can tell what the benefits or a particular improvement are and who will benefit from this improvement
- I do not have to blindly go forth into the mire of a service pack and hope that it fixes a problem in a correct and well thought out manner and hope that it truly offers a benefit and does not only serve the interests of one entity
Does this mean that some bad ideas don't get brought into kernel releases? No. Does this mean that I have to expend less effort in deciding upon and then executing a update of my system? No. But I do have more tools available and better information to help me to decide if this is the right decision.
My one concern with all these kinds of systems is infrastructure. For one, I can remember when getting an RPM from redhat.com was a pain because they didn't have their mirror's set up and their ftp site was getting hammered all the time, but I'm not really concerned about scalabilty bottleknecks, that's really just relationship building and it sounds like you have a lot of friends. ;) What I'm more concerned about is "channel" maintenance and what the chain is for that?
Does channel == ftp server?
Who maintains that channel?
What would be a reasonable timeframe to expect an update to a channel in the case of say, the bind security problem from a few weeks back?
Too often it seems to me that the web of trust between me as a sys admin and package maintainer x is not as stable as a simple `gpg --verify`. I realize that your updater is probably not geared towards me, but I need to understand the system which I am utilizing before I could consider adding your monkeys to my arsenal.
Once they have the big bad US government on their side then they can begin lining the pockets of the world trade organization or key members of the EU in order to leverage US policy decisions in the world markets. After all, the United States has a long history of being sure that their view of intellectual property is the correct one and should be used as the standard in international trade.
The GCTP (group calendar transfer protocol) project has a significant code base and is tackling the calendar end of the groupware problem. There is also a related project, OpenFlock.
GPL'd, and the current model is written in perl, though the more important aspect of this project is the protocol and establishing a standard for information availability and interoperabiltiy of calendar and event applications.
Both of these are the incarnation of David Sifry of LinuxCare. David presented a paper at ALS describing the protocol.
The code is available via cvs:
$ cvs -d:pserver:cvs@www.gctp.org:/cvsroot login
Password is "cvs"
$ cvs -d:pserver:cvs@www.gctp.org:/cvsroot co -P -d openflock_acls1 -r openflock_acls1 openflock
Between this book and /Consider Phlebas/ Mr. Banks shows himself to Love T.S. Eliot's /The Waste Land/ and particularly:
Part 4 - Death by Water
Phelbas the Phoenician, a fortnight dead,
Forgot the cry of gulls, and the deep sea swell
And the profit and loss.
A current under sea
Picked his bones in whispers. As he rose and fell
He passed the stages of his age and youth
Entering whirpool.
Gentile or Jew
O you who turn the wheel and look to windward,
Consider Phlebas, who was once handsome and tall as you.
Of course that's a direct cut and paste out of the press release.
bnf
I feel that you have skirted an important point that was included in the original threads that addressed the release of Slashdot source code. Specifically, which license will you be using to release your code and what is your reasoning for choosing that license?
bnf
---
I built a site called wanderlist.com about a year ago as a way of learning Perl/CGI/MySQL. The site allows anyone to set up a list and for others who come along to interact with the list. Soon after I launched it my good friend Mike started using it to manage his christmas list. I soon followed suit.
I've found that as I've oriented my friends and family to going to the site to find my christmas list, I've stopped getting those "What do you want?" questions that I can never seem to answer quick enough and I've begun getting stuff I really like, because it was on my list.
There are a bunch of similar services out there as well.
In Friday's responses from Havoc Pennington we learned that there is a Tuesday cut-off for question selection. I would like to suggest that once questions are selected, The Powers That Be(SM) post an Update: to the article explaining that we should all sit on our hands until Friday and not promote additional carpal tunnel syndrome by needlessly posting additional questions or wasting valuable moderator points.
just an idea.
bnf
Locomotive
Protomatter
Enhydra
My next goal is to get the Palm calendar to synch cleanly with KOrganizer and then either find or build some CGI's to take the vcal file that KOrganizer uses and present it as HTML.
Why should you care? Well my point is this: The real value of a tool is not measured in any one device (Palm, my.personal.machine, mywebsite.at-my-isp.com) but in how that tool can be used in conjunction to form larger more useful constructs.
bnf