If iBiblio is willing to host Propaganda, i'm sure they're more than willing to host a kernel.org mirror. In my experience, they've been wonderfully good hosts and run a very professional operation. Better still, they aren't hiding alterior motives by hosting free software projects, unlike the two-letter chameleon we've all grown to hate over the past year or two.
As for SourceForge, I wouldnt bother..The company that runs it turned its back on the community that made it's existance even possible. That alone should dissuade anyone. More tangible perhaps would be that the company has only one product (which they cant sell), and only enough cash on hand to last another year at most.
The HRL Pheromone *DING* Robotics program *DING* aims to provide a robust *DING* , scalable *DING* approach for coordinating actions of large numbers of small scale robots *DING* to achieve large scale results in surveillance *DING* , reconnaissance *DING* , hazard detection *DING* , path finding *DING* , payload *DING* conveyance *DING* , and small-scale actuation *DING* *DING* *DING* . We intend to accomplish this by developing innovative *DING* concepts for coordinating *DING* , and interacting *DING* with, a large
collective *DING* of tiny robots *DING* . Borrowing techniques used by ants and termites *DING* , our robots exhibit emergent *DING* collaboration *DING* . Inspired *DING* by the chemical markers *DING* used by these insects for communication *DING* and coordination *DING* , we exploit *DING* the notion of a "virtual *DING* pheromone," *DING*
implemented *DING* using simple beacons *DING* and directional sensors *DING* mounted on each robot. Virtual *DING* pheromones *DING* facilitate *DING* simple communication *DING* and coordination *DING* and require little on-board *DING* processing. Our approach is applicable to future robots with much smaller form factors (e.g., to dust-particle size) (hah, yeah right-- *DING* )and is scaleable *DING* to large, heterogeneous *DING* groups of robots.
We plan to provide robustness *DING* by requiring no explicit *DING* maps or models of the environment, and no explicit knowledge "explicit knowledge? What, the robots watch porn movies? *DING* of robot location. Collections of robots will be able to perform complex tasks *DING* such as leading the way through a building to a hidden intruder *DING* or locating critical choke points. *DING* This is possible because the
robot collective *DING* will become a computing grid *DING* embedded *DING* within
the environment *DING* while acting as a physical embodiment *DING* of the user interface What the FUCK are you talking about? *DING* . Over the past decades, the literature on path planning and terrain analysis *DING* has dealt primarily with algorithms *DING* operating on an internal map containing terrain
features. Our approach externalizes *DING* the map, spreading it across a collection *DING* of simple processors *DING* , each of which determines the terrain features in its locality *DING* . The terrain processing algorithms *DING* of interest are then spread over the population of simple processors *DING* , allowing such global *DING* quantities *DING* as shortest routes, blocked routes, and contingency *DING* plans to be computed by the population.
The user interface *DING* to this distributed robot collective *DING* *DING* *DING* is itself distributed *DING* . Instead of communicating with each robot individually, the entire collective will work cooperatively *DING* to provide a unified *DING* display *DING* embedded *DING* in the environment *DING* . For example, robots that have dispersed themselves throughout a building will be able to guide a user toward an intruder by synchronizing *DING* to collectively blink
in a marquee-style *DING* pattern to highlight the shortest path to the intruder. Through the use of augmented *DING* reality *DING* , robots will be able to present more complex displays *DING* . Users wearing a see-through *DING* head-mounted *DING* display and a head-mounted *DING* camera that detects and tracks infrared *DING* beacons emanating *DING* from the robots will
be able to see a small amount of information superimposed *DING* over each robot. Each robot will, in effect, be
a pixel *DING* that paints *DING* information upon its local environment. The combination of this
world-embedded *DING* interface *DING* with our world-embedded *DING* computation means that the results of complex *DING* distributed *DING* computations *DING* can
be mapped *DING* directly onto the world with no intermediate *DING* representations *DING*
required.
(Insert your obligatory "those who refuse to learn from the past" quote here)
This article, Jon Katz's usual clueless rhetoric and this book are all examples of "been there, done that."...Back in the early 60's, the evil buzzword d'jour was "automation". Everyone thought "automation" would lead to absolutely rampant unemployment as the march of progress supplanted human workers with machines. It never happened. Infact, the opposite happened. A 40 year economic boom, coupled with the lowest unemployment rates in history.
So, why do "we're all going to be replaced with robots!!!!" fearmongers continue to get airtime? Two reasons -- First and foremost, the view that we are being replaced by machines is terribly myopic and one-directional. In reality, automation is a cyclical process. Human labor is replaced with mechanical labor, which in turn needs an INCREASED demand for human labor in the form of design, implementation, deployment, usage, maintenance, and other forms of engineering.
The second reason is simple. People listen to Katz, a well-documented idiot, and in doing so commit the mental equivalent of trying to put out a fire with a bucket of gasoline.
1) Who on earth is going to buy a stainless steel case, and then mount drives with BEIGE faceplates inside of it? Talk about ugly, sheesh.
2) It may take off elsewhere, but this is America. Bigger is better. Most people want a machine that kicks ass and takes names, not something that looks a blinking vaccum cleaner attachment.
3) Design thats pleasing to the eye will take off. Not this crap. I'm still waiting for a company with some balls to produce a nice black pyramid shaped case, an oversized corner slab or monolith-shaped case.. Those things would take off hardcore.
I'm afraid your thinking is just a touch flawed. Yeah, Americans had their head in the anthrax bucket for a month straight, and it only killed a handful of people. By your logic, we should just dismiss what happened on 9/11 because only 3000 people died, and only a handful of buildings collapsed. We should go after Boeing because after all, they manufacture FLYING DEATH WEAPONS that PERMANENTLY DAMAGE stuff.
Don't be so dramatic. The same technology used to irradiate your Compact Flash at the post office is the same technology used to heat your damn burrito at CIrcle K. Take your tinfoil hat off and relax.
( I've been critical, very critical of RMS in the past. My motivation for writing this post isn't to put him through the meat-grinder..I'm merely addressing some points that weren't addressed in his article.)
" Don't you just hate receiving Word documents in email messages? Word attachments are annoying, but worse than that, they impede people from switching to free software. Maybe we can stop this practice with a simple collective effort. All we have to do is ask each person who sends us a Word file to reconsider that way of doing things."
If these people happen to be your friends, sure. But any sysadmin who's worked more than an hour in any professional capacity can tell you that people simply don't understand email. Yes, to you and I, we know about RFCs, the fact that the email infrastructure of the net was never meant to handle anything but raw ASCII.. They don't know these things, nor do they care to learn why sending binaries via email is a bad idea. They just want to send 80MB.avi files of them waving at a camera to Grandma.
IMHO, what needs to happen is a revamping of the email infrastructure to the net, to turn it into a binary-friendly medium. Its a kludge to do anything short of that. Providing HTML links to binaries stored at the originator's machine, MIME, UUEncode/UUDecode are are simply methods of sidestepping the issue and putting a band-aid on a garden hose. As a side note, the same "effort" you speak of could be directed at revising badly out of date protocols like FTP as well. FTP is a NAT-ignorant protocol.. Good luck trying to move data in anything but an Active mode.
" Most computer users use Microsoft Word. That is unfortunate for them, because Word is proprietary software, denying its users the freedom to study, change, copy, and redistribute it. And because Microsoft changes the Word file format with each release, its users are locked into a system that compels them to buy each upgrade whether they want a change or not. They may even find, several years from now, that the Word documents they are writing this year can no longer be read with the version of Word they use then."
Lame as it is, this is Microsoft's right. If they want to, they can make Word pop up an evil clown covered with blood that randomly insults you every 18 seconds if they feel like it. Its their product. If you don't like the design of their product, you are welcome to come up with something better, as the folks behind AbiWord, KWord, StarOffice and others have done. In my opinion, Microsoft has done an exemplary job in allowing users to import legacy documents. Infact, you'll still have the ability to import documents from MS Works, a cheapo text-based version of MS Office that ran on DOS systems more than a decade ago. I've personally never encountered the sort of situation you're describing. Besides, if they opened up the standard and described how Word documents are formed, any number of parties (ourselves included) would ultimately pervert the standard, intentionally or not. I'm glad they keep that door shut. Theres only one version of Microsoft Word 2002 documents--Not 18 different ones, all slightly different from one another.
"Someone I know was unable to apply for a job because resumes had to be Word files. Even governments sometimes impose Word format on the public, which is truly outrageous."
The government also requires us to ride on/in motor vehicles when we use the highways, regardless of the fact your bike will get you from Point A to Point B. Infact, if you tried to ride a bike on an expressway, you'de be pulled over within minutes, fined, and/or carted off to jail. Whether we like it or not, Word is the standard when it comes to the exchange of formatted electronic documents. That may change. It has in the past, and will likely continue to do so in the future. Even today, we're already moving away from statically formatted Word-like documents and into more sophisticated markup-based documents like HTML/XML. Don't whine about not being to ride your bike on the expressway. Its illegal because nobody wants the disruption and inconvenience... The same reasons rest behind why Word is the current standard format for electronic business documents. It prevents disruption and inconvenience for everyone to agree upon the best standard available at the time the decision is made.
"Example No. 1: You sent the attachment in Microsoft Word format, a secret proprietary format, so I cannot read it. If you send me the plain text, HTML, or PDF, then I could read it."
If you say this to anyone in a business environment, two things will happen. They'll think youre friggin crackpot, and they'll be less inclined to conduct any further business with you. Get serious..The way to get to your goal, Richard, is not to retroactively repeal the existing standard in favor of ye olden days of document exchange. Develop a BETTER standard than Word, make it available to all so that they'de be crazy not to implement it, and in so doing force Microsoft to conform to it. After all, they had to do so with HTML, did they not? And JPEG? And GIF? And DivX, and MPEG, and Java...the list goes on and on.. None of these formats were created by Microsoft, yet, Microsoft was forced into adopting support for them simply due to their popularity and pervasiveness. BMP didn't win out over JPEG. PCX didn't win out over GIF. Get the picture? The best way to get where you wanna go is to put one foot infront of the other and enjoy the slow march of progress and adaptation, not to turn around and do backwards somersaults of disruption till you get there.
This argument was terribly misguided. It identifies a problem that doesn't exist, and suggests and equally pointless and disruptive method of fixing it. I didn't buy a CueCat then, and I'm sure as hell not gonna buy a CueCat now.
Cheers,
Re:Wait, I WANT a Gundam suit!
on
The Drone War
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· Score: 1
A good reply.:)
Well, before we all run off and buy Gundam suits..
on
The Drone War
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· Score: 5, Insightful
Sure, robots have their place..But what difference does it really make in the long run?
Every militarized country in the world wishes it's military was comprised of individuals who purely execute orders. Flesh robots, if you will. Mind you, theres nothing denegrating about that label--Countries are liberated, people are saved, and the world's criminals are punished due to the work of "flesh robots". You've got a bad case of function guilt if you think robots will ever supplant people on the front lines -- It simply isn't feasable.
Wars are rarely fought with singular orders. The typical soldier in a wartime scenario relies heavilly upon the information he recieves, the situation he percieves around him, and is capable of making rational & complex decisions based upon that information. Sure, a machine can be taught to do all that, but how is that information going to get there? And if your ultimate goal is programmable warfare, isn't the most flexible solider the human?
Here's a few things to think about before you buy stock in Honda--Flesh robots do not require battery power. Metal robots would be prone to power loss at critical times. Flesh robots can usually continue to fight, even after physical injury. Metal robots would be severely impaired if even one portion of their body is rendered useless. And, above all, we have nukes. It wouldn't matter at all what you put on the battlefeild, 22 kg of plutonium smooshed together at the right angle will kill anything that lives, flesh or metal. Insanely high-tech creations would be rendered completely and totally useless by 1940's technology.
Look, I think robots are cool too, especially ones designed to kill eachother. I just don't think you'll ever see 5000 robots cross a river chest deep in water, scaling the cliffs of Normandy, or making it through a Korean winter. Why bother making metal robots then, when you've already got flesh robots who can do the same?
"When Sony and IBM get together it means nothing but trouble"..
Careful, you might upset YRO readers. Times are tough -- and theres only so much tinfoil to go around, you know.
The More I Read Slashdot, The More Disgusted I Get
on
Xbox Sequel Rumors
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· Score: 2
"Supposedly it will be the home entertainment system that Microsoft has always wanted. It will tie into Microsoft's.NET strategy, delivering video-on-demand, high speed internet connection, and communicate wirelessly with portable devices. It might even be able to play Xbox games, along with PC games."
Funny, I heard the codename for this project was "Personal Computer"
Reminds me of another story. Mead Corp is developing a flexible input, storage and display medium capable of infinite resolution, consumes no power, and can be produced so cheaply that literally millions these objects can be produced for a few cents a pound! Theyre calling it, "paper".
Simple. Same reason why you cant take the pen with you when you deposit a check at a bank teller. Its not your damn pen. That pen was bought with your money, more specifically, the interest earned on your money.
It may not be in keeping with what we specifically would like to see done with the code, but...as far as i'm concerned, they're not doing anything wrong, or bad, or illegal by trying to make money off code that was developed on their boxen, and on their time.
If you cant stand the heat, get out of the kitchen, if you don't want your cow gettin' out, keep your barn door shut, and if you don't want Corporate Entity X making money off your work, don't develop it on their gear on their time. Simple as that.
I wish I could. Much of the original storyline was nuked by everyones favorite company, VA Linux Systems, before I had a chance to archive it and move it off.
Remember, kids. VA Resear...uhh...VA Lin..no.. VA Software Corporation loves you, and Bowie is crazy.
What good is it, if nobody adopts it?
on
GNOME 3.16 Released
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· Score: 0, Troll
rant_mode(on);
Ummm, something tells me the GNOME guys would be better off spending their time making the desktop more marketplace-friendly and user-friendly versus adding yet more and more crap no one will ever use into the API. It pains me to think of how much time is spent by the developers building what amounts to a waste of time, when the same effort could be diverted toward:
o Making the GUI easier for first-time Linux users, which was the whole point of GNOME in the first place, wasnt it?
o Building stronger interoperability between Windows apps and Linux apps. WINE is a good start, but its bloated, and even when it works, its clumsy and never works the way anyone wants it to. Modal emulation has been the established standard for years. People are smart enough to know when they should use an "emulator" versus using their native environments.
o Establishing "bounty rewards" for the things we don't yet have. Why not set up a collection plate where people can donate, and award its contents to the first person who can deliver a Microsoft Word 2002 format.doc loader for AbiWord? Set up another collection plate, and award its contents to the first person who can provide a true, full-breadth gaming SDK? People, companies, upstarts, college students and the like can build them, compete against eachother, and actually get PAID for open-source work.
Look, guys. I'm not trying to bash GNOME, but you guys need to STOP TRYING TO BUILD A DESKTOP FOR PROGRAMMERS. Its a mistake to try and make a damn desktop aimed at programmers. Why? The rest of the world isn't made up of people like us. You need to aim your work at people like your dad, and NOT aim to impress people like your friend "31337b0y" on IRC. Youre gonna have to accept this idea if you want your work to go anywhere. You don't go building an GUI for programmers because the programmer is ultimately going to fashion his own environment by and for himself, not thru GNOME, or KDE, or any other environment. Sit down, look at the damn road ahead of you. The world is waiting, and waiting, and waiting for a solid, usable GUI for Linux, something we can be identified by, and we're busy pissing in the wind. Pretty soon they're going to give up, and write Linux off along with the dot-com duds. Look, you're at point A, you wanna get to point B. B is total worldwide acceptance of your desktop as the universal standard for Linux. Do what you have to do to get to B. Here, i'll even give you a hint: It doesn't involve anyone saying "I just spent 4 weeks optimizing your patch for gtk that allows nonorthoganal crossreferences to referential database templates in Python!!!!". Start by getting rid of the foot. Its not cute. Feet stink, and using a "foot" for an emblem opens the door wide open to any number of foot-related jokes about your work when it bombs. Think!
rant_mode(off);
Cheers,
Re: have a tough NUt to crack--Are you retarded?
on
Apple PDA?
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· Score: 1
Send me your email address, Mr. Anonodumbass Coward, and i'll send you a photo, straight from the Arizona desert. Hurry up, its 10 AM here.. Itll be especially easy since both my digital camera and my iPaq both take Compact Flash memory.
I wrote a series of essays on alt.religion and alt.philosophy.debate about the existance of God as it applies to the HUP. The thread is, "Does God Necessarrily Have To Be Intelligent?".. I just picked up a few interesting insights while I was there, the pink unicorn line included.:)
Re: have a tough NUt to crack--Are you retarded?
on
Apple PDA?
·
· Score: 0, Troll
I still use my Palm IIIx. I have thought of changing or upgrading several times
My condolences. Although, its a step in the right direction to gett off the Palm sinking ship, as the CEO of Palm has made it abundantly clear he's sticking to organizers, and not Pocket PCs.
But nothing can add any useability or real functionality to my Palm IIIx. the color screen is nothing more than a gimmick. and make the unit un-useable outside, and forces you to charge it everyday.
Mind if I move your bong? Just picked up a new iPaq 3765 the other day. It has a light sensor on the top that can detect the ambient light in a room, and adjust the brightness of the display if you want it to. Looks great during the day, looks great during the night. Something tells me you dont get out much.
The neat-o add-on gadgets are only toys, and the mp3 player add-on for the handspring is lame and more expensive than buying a seperate mp3 player.
Here, lemmie wave some of that ganja smoke away from your eyes. The "add on gadgets" follow standards..Compact Flash, Secure Digital, PC Card, all of which offer you added memory, connectivity, a buncha stuff. Something Palm apparently knows nothing about. See, I'm not trying to beat you up here, but Palm is worse than apple when it comes to providing upgrades for their products. Half the shit Palm makes is already obsolete, straight out of the box. And, since Palm has no intention of moving away from pocket organizers to Pocket PC, you're already screwed. Enjoy your "organizer". Walgreens has the same thing off the rack for $9. Most Pocket PCs have the ability to play MP3 straight out of the box. Mine does streaming audio and video as well. You can do alot of things with a 64MB StrongARM at 210 Mhz. Hell, I can run a damn webserver off the thing. Did I mention Linux is available for it?
the only palm device that has my interest is the Sharp Zaurus running linux. but only for a few of the neat-o features. as for productivity? it offer's nothing, and will actually hamper my productivity by forcing to learn a new interface, no Linux sync and probably a much shorter battery life.
Oh dear, looks like the Clue Train didn't stop in your town. If youre looking for a Linux handheld, buy an iPaq. If your productivity is "hampered" by going from a Windows style interface to another Windows style interface, I have concerns for you. Nonetheless, don't give up hope. There are 3 or 4 methods of entering text into this iPaq, one of which includes Palm-style writing. And yeah, it has a Linux sync.
This is so profoundly retarded that I'm having trouble, for one in my life, expressing my true feelings.
So, I called up the NIST and asked them to create a unit of measurement that accurately describes the ratio between retarded things and lame things. I proposed that 1.0 would be the standard ratio for something that would be equally retarded and lame, and suggested Episode II, George Lucas, and N'Sync might be good benchmarks from which to gauge this new standard. They agreed, with one stipulation. They wanted to put "mebi" on it somewhere, because there was a sale on "mebi"s this week..They overestimated public demand for them and had a whole bunch lying around they needed to get rid of.
Without further adue, Star Wars's ratio of lameness to retardedness will be measured in Mebijarjars, and more specifically, Episode II will be exactly 1.0 Mebijarjars if N'Sync happens to be in it. Ten bucks says Episode III will feature nothing but chimpanzee actors wearing garbage can lids on their heads beepy-boopy sounds dubbed over a laugh track supplied by the surviving members of Menudo.
Theres one important clue here that points to this email as being legitimate. The lack of British euphamisms. The Register is a UK-based resource. If they wanted to doctor up a fake email in a conversational tone, it would have been written differently from the style in which it appears. Infact, when I was reading it, I kept expecting to see language differences, and didn't find any. Hell, to any self-respecting haxx0r, that bad-bad-doggy conclusion at the bottom of the email just begs to be disobeyed.
Even more true is the snippet about DH Brown being total FUD-whores. It says so right on their damn webpage, you can pay for the results you want.. Give em $1M and they'll tell that the majority of people surveyed think the sky is green, Windows is better, and we all ride around on invisible pink unicorns.
Slashdot Mirror
If iBiblio is willing to host Propaganda, i'm sure they're more than willing to host a kernel.org mirror. In my experience, they've been wonderfully good hosts and run a very professional operation. Better still, they aren't hiding alterior motives by hosting free software projects, unlike the two-letter chameleon we've all grown to hate over the past year or two.
As for SourceForge, I wouldnt bother..The company that runs it turned its back on the community that made it's existance even possible. That alone should dissuade anyone. More tangible perhaps would be that the company has only one product (which they cant sell), and only enough cash on hand to last another year at most.
Cheers,
Ugh..Here we go again...
The HRL Pheromone *DING* Robotics program *DING* aims to provide a robust *DING* , scalable *DING* approach for coordinating actions of large numbers of small scale robots *DING* to achieve large scale results in surveillance *DING* , reconnaissance *DING* , hazard detection *DING* , path finding *DING* , payload *DING* conveyance *DING* , and small-scale actuation *DING* *DING* *DING* . We intend to accomplish this by developing innovative *DING* concepts for coordinating *DING* , and interacting *DING* with, a large
collective *DING* of tiny robots *DING* . Borrowing techniques used by ants and termites *DING* , our robots exhibit emergent *DING* collaboration *DING* . Inspired *DING* by the chemical markers *DING* used by these insects for communication *DING* and coordination *DING* , we exploit *DING* the notion of a "virtual *DING* pheromone," *DING*
implemented *DING* using simple beacons *DING* and directional sensors *DING* mounted on each robot. Virtual *DING* pheromones *DING* facilitate *DING* simple communication *DING* and coordination *DING* and require little on-board *DING* processing. Our approach is applicable to future robots with much smaller form factors (e.g., to dust-particle size) (hah, yeah right-- *DING* )and is scaleable *DING* to large, heterogeneous *DING* groups of robots.
We plan to provide robustness *DING* by requiring no explicit *DING* maps or models of the environment, and no explicit knowledge "explicit knowledge? What, the robots watch porn movies? *DING* of robot location. Collections of robots will be able to perform complex tasks *DING* such as leading the way through a building to a hidden intruder *DING* or locating critical choke points. *DING* This is possible because the
robot collective *DING* will become a computing grid *DING* embedded *DING* within
the environment *DING* while acting as a physical embodiment *DING* of the user interface What the FUCK are you talking about? *DING* . Over the past decades, the literature on path planning and terrain analysis *DING* has dealt primarily with algorithms *DING* operating on an internal map containing terrain
features. Our approach externalizes *DING* the map, spreading it across a collection *DING* of simple processors *DING* , each of which determines the terrain features in its locality *DING* . The terrain processing algorithms *DING* of interest are then spread over the population of simple processors *DING* , allowing such global *DING* quantities *DING* as shortest routes, blocked routes, and contingency *DING* plans to be computed by the population.
The user interface *DING* to this distributed robot collective *DING* *DING*
*DING* is itself distributed *DING* . Instead of communicating with each robot individually, the entire collective will work cooperatively *DING* to provide a unified *DING* display *DING* embedded *DING* in the environment *DING* . For example, robots that have dispersed themselves throughout a building will be able to guide a user toward an intruder by synchronizing *DING* to collectively blink
in a marquee-style *DING* pattern to highlight the shortest path to the intruder. Through the use of augmented *DING* reality *DING* , robots will be able to present more complex displays *DING* . Users wearing a see-through *DING* head-mounted *DING* display and a head-mounted *DING* camera that detects and tracks infrared *DING* beacons emanating *DING* from the robots will
be able to see a small amount of information superimposed *DING* over each robot. Each robot will, in effect, be
a pixel *DING* that paints *DING* information upon its local environment. The combination of this
world-embedded *DING* interface *DING* with our world-embedded *DING* computation means that the results of complex *DING* distributed *DING* computations *DING* can
be mapped *DING* directly onto the world with no intermediate *DING* representations *DING*
required.
I think I broke my dinger.
(Insert your obligatory "those who refuse to learn from the past" quote here)
This article, Jon Katz's usual clueless rhetoric and this book are all examples of "been there, done that."
So, why do "we're all going to be replaced with robots!!!!" fearmongers continue to get airtime? Two reasons -- First and foremost, the view that we are being replaced by machines is terribly myopic and one-directional. In reality, automation is a cyclical process. Human labor is replaced with mechanical labor, which in turn needs an INCREASED demand for human labor in the form of design, implementation, deployment, usage, maintenance, and other forms of engineering.
The second reason is simple. People listen to Katz, a well-documented idiot, and in doing so commit the mental equivalent of trying to put out a fire with a bucket of gasoline.
Cheers,
1) Who on earth is going to buy a stainless steel case, and then mount drives with BEIGE faceplates inside of it? Talk about ugly, sheesh.
2) It may take off elsewhere, but this is America. Bigger is better. Most people want a machine that kicks ass and takes names, not something that looks a blinking vaccum cleaner attachment.
3) Design thats pleasing to the eye will take off. Not this crap. I'm still waiting for a company with some balls to produce a nice black pyramid shaped case, an oversized corner slab or monolith-shaped case.. Those things would take off hardcore.
Cheers,
Oh dear..
I'm afraid your thinking is just a touch flawed. Yeah, Americans had their head in the anthrax bucket for a month straight, and it only killed a handful of people. By your logic, we should just dismiss what happened on 9/11 because only 3000 people died, and only a handful of buildings collapsed. We should go after Boeing because after all, they manufacture FLYING DEATH WEAPONS that PERMANENTLY DAMAGE stuff.
Don't be so dramatic. The same technology used to irradiate your Compact Flash at the post office is the same technology used to heat your damn burrito at CIrcle K. Take your tinfoil hat off and relax.
Cheers,
( I've been critical, very critical of RMS in the past. My motivation for writing this post isn't to put him through the meat-grinder..I'm merely addressing some points that weren't addressed in his article.)
" Don't you just hate receiving Word documents in email messages? Word attachments are annoying, but worse than that, they impede people from switching to free software. Maybe we can stop this practice with a simple collective effort. All we have to do is ask each person who sends us a Word file to reconsider that way of doing things."
If these people happen to be your friends, sure. But any sysadmin who's worked more than an hour in any professional capacity can tell you that people simply don't understand email. Yes, to you and I, we know about RFCs, the fact that the email infrastructure of the net was never meant to handle anything but raw ASCII.. They don't know these things, nor do they care to learn why sending binaries via email is a bad idea. They just want to send 80MB
IMHO, what needs to happen is a revamping of the email infrastructure to the net, to turn it into a binary-friendly medium. Its a kludge to do anything short of that. Providing HTML links to binaries stored at the originator's machine, MIME, UUEncode/UUDecode are are simply methods of sidestepping the issue and putting a band-aid on a garden hose. As a side note, the same "effort" you speak of could be directed at revising badly out of date protocols like FTP as well. FTP is a NAT-ignorant protocol.. Good luck trying to move data in anything but an Active mode.
" Most computer users use Microsoft Word. That is unfortunate for them, because Word is proprietary software, denying its users the freedom to study, change, copy, and redistribute it. And because Microsoft changes the Word file format with each release, its users are locked into a system that compels them to buy each upgrade whether they want a change or not. They may even find, several years from now, that the Word documents they are writing this year can no longer be read with the version of Word they use then."
Lame as it is, this is Microsoft's right. If they want to, they can make Word pop up an evil clown covered with blood that randomly insults you every 18 seconds if they feel like it. Its their product. If you don't like the design of their product, you are welcome to come up with something better, as the folks behind AbiWord, KWord, StarOffice and others have done. In my opinion, Microsoft has done an exemplary job in allowing users to import legacy documents. Infact, you'll still have the ability to import documents from MS Works, a cheapo text-based version of MS Office that ran on DOS systems more than a decade ago. I've personally never encountered the sort of situation you're describing. Besides, if they opened up the standard and described how Word documents are formed, any number of parties (ourselves included) would ultimately pervert the standard, intentionally or not. I'm glad they keep that door shut. Theres only one version of Microsoft Word 2002 documents--Not 18 different ones, all slightly different from one another.
"Someone I know was unable to apply for a job because resumes had to be Word files. Even governments sometimes impose Word format on the public, which is truly outrageous."
The government also requires us to ride on/in motor vehicles when we use the highways, regardless of the fact your bike will get you from Point A to Point B. Infact, if you tried to ride a bike on an expressway, you'de be pulled over within minutes, fined, and/or carted off to jail. Whether we like it or not, Word is the standard when it comes to the exchange of formatted electronic documents. That may change. It has in the past, and will likely continue to do so in the future. Even today, we're already moving away from statically formatted Word-like documents and into more sophisticated markup-based documents like HTML/XML. Don't whine about not being to ride your bike on the expressway. Its illegal because nobody wants the disruption and inconvenience... The same reasons rest behind why Word is the current standard format for electronic business documents. It prevents disruption and inconvenience for everyone to agree upon the best standard available at the time the decision is made.
"Example No. 1: You sent the attachment in Microsoft Word format, a secret proprietary format, so I cannot read it. If you send me the plain text, HTML, or PDF, then I could read it."
If you say this to anyone in a business environment, two things will happen. They'll think youre friggin crackpot, and they'll be less inclined to conduct any further business with you. Get serious..The way to get to your goal, Richard, is not to retroactively repeal the existing standard in favor of ye olden days of document exchange. Develop a BETTER standard than Word, make it available to all so that they'de be crazy not to implement it, and in so doing force Microsoft to conform to it. After all, they had to do so with HTML, did they not? And JPEG? And GIF? And DivX, and MPEG, and Java...the list goes on and on.. None of these formats were created by Microsoft, yet, Microsoft was forced into adopting support for them simply due to their popularity and pervasiveness. BMP didn't win out over JPEG. PCX didn't win out over GIF. Get the picture? The best way to get where you wanna go is to put one foot infront of the other and enjoy the slow march of progress and adaptation, not to turn around and do backwards somersaults of disruption till you get there.
This argument was terribly misguided. It identifies a problem that doesn't exist, and suggests and equally pointless and disruptive method of fixing it. I didn't buy a CueCat then, and I'm sure as hell not gonna buy a CueCat now.
Cheers,
A good reply. :)
Sure, robots have their place..But what difference does it really make in the long run?
Every militarized country in the world wishes it's military was comprised of individuals who purely execute orders. Flesh robots, if you will. Mind you, theres nothing denegrating about that label--Countries are liberated, people are saved, and the world's criminals are punished due to the work of "flesh robots". You've got a bad case of function guilt if you think robots will ever supplant people on the front lines -- It simply isn't feasable.
Wars are rarely fought with singular orders. The typical soldier in a wartime scenario relies heavilly upon the information he recieves, the situation he percieves around him, and is capable of making rational & complex decisions based upon that information. Sure, a machine can be taught to do all that, but how is that information going to get there? And if your ultimate goal is programmable warfare, isn't the most flexible solider the human?
Here's a few things to think about before you buy stock in Honda--Flesh robots do not require battery power. Metal robots would be prone to power loss at critical times. Flesh robots can usually continue to fight, even after physical injury. Metal robots would be severely impaired if even one portion of their body is rendered useless. And, above all, we have nukes. It wouldn't matter at all what you put on the battlefeild, 22 kg of plutonium smooshed together at the right angle will kill anything that lives, flesh or metal. Insanely high-tech creations would be rendered completely and totally useless by 1940's technology.
Look, I think robots are cool too, especially ones designed to kill eachother. I just don't think you'll ever see 5000 robots cross a river chest deep in water, scaling the cliffs of Normandy, or making it through a Korean winter. Why bother making metal robots then, when you've already got flesh robots who can do the same?
Cheers,
Look real close at the blow-up version of the photo. The lettering and icons have no perspective. They're photoshopped onto the image.
If they're planning to go to market with a device in less than 6 months, don't you think they'de have a REAL photo of it? Mmmhmmm.
Ahhh, I love the smell vaporware in the morning...
Errr...gee, first release on CD..Great. Welcome to 1992, FreeBSD!
This is no more a "virus" than rm -rf is a trojan.
I don't get it. How final is a fantasy when there are dozen of them?
Cheers,
"When Sony and IBM get together it means nothing but trouble"..
Careful, you might upset YRO readers. Times are tough -- and theres only so much tinfoil to go around, you know.
"Supposedly it will be the home entertainment system that Microsoft has always wanted. It will tie into Microsoft's
Funny, I heard the codename for this project was "Personal Computer"
Reminds me of another story. Mead Corp is developing a flexible input, storage and display medium capable of infinite resolution, consumes no power, and can be produced so cheaply that literally millions these objects can be produced for a few cents a pound! Theyre calling it, "paper".
Simple. Same reason why you cant take the pen with you when you deposit a check at a bank teller. Its not your damn pen. That pen was bought with your money, more specifically, the interest earned on your money.
Community machines are not community property.
Show me a University that doesn't have a "Property Of University Of (n)" sticker on its machines. Ours here at U of A are even metallic.
Its their box, not yours.
Next youll be telling me the Xerox machines at Kinkos are yours too, because you go there and use them, and pay money to do so.
It may not be in keeping with what we specifically would like to see done with the code, but...as far as i'm concerned, they're not doing anything wrong, or bad, or illegal by trying to make money off code that was developed on their boxen, and on their time.
If you cant stand the heat, get out of the kitchen, if you don't want your cow gettin' out, keep your barn door shut, and if you don't want Corporate Entity X making money off your work, don't develop it on their gear on their time. Simple as that.
I wish I could. Much of the original storyline was nuked by everyones favorite company, VA Linux Systems, before I had a chance to archive it and move it off.
Remember, kids. VA Resear...uhh...VA Lin..no.. VA Software Corporation loves you, and Bowie is crazy.
rant_mode(on);
Ummm, something tells me the GNOME guys would be better off spending their time making the desktop more marketplace-friendly and user-friendly versus adding yet more and more crap no one will ever use into the API. It pains me to think of how much time is spent by the developers building what amounts to a waste of time, when the same effort could be diverted toward:
o Making the GUI easier for first-time Linux users, which was the whole point of GNOME in the first place, wasnt it?
o Building stronger interoperability between Windows apps and Linux apps. WINE is a good start, but its bloated, and even when it works, its clumsy and never works the way anyone wants it to. Modal emulation has been the established standard for years. People are smart enough to know when they should use an "emulator" versus using their native environments.
o Establishing "bounty rewards" for the things we don't yet have. Why not set up a collection plate where people can donate, and award its contents to the first person who can deliver a Microsoft Word 2002 format
Look, guys. I'm not trying to bash GNOME, but you guys need to STOP TRYING TO BUILD A DESKTOP FOR PROGRAMMERS. Its a mistake to try and make a damn desktop aimed at programmers. Why? The rest of the world isn't made up of people like us. You need to aim your work at people like your dad, and NOT aim to impress people like your friend "31337b0y" on IRC. Youre gonna have to accept this idea if you want your work to go anywhere. You don't go building an GUI for programmers because the programmer is ultimately going to fashion his own environment by and for himself, not thru GNOME, or KDE, or any other environment. Sit down, look at the damn road ahead of you. The world is waiting, and waiting, and waiting for a solid, usable GUI for Linux, something we can be identified by, and we're busy pissing in the wind. Pretty soon they're going to give up, and write Linux off along with the dot-com duds. Look, you're at point A, you wanna get to point B. B is total worldwide acceptance of your desktop as the universal standard for Linux. Do what you have to do to get to B. Here, i'll even give you a hint: It doesn't involve anyone saying "I just spent 4 weeks optimizing your patch for gtk that allows nonorthoganal crossreferences to referential database templates in Python!!!!". Start by getting rid of the foot. Its not cute. Feet stink, and using a "foot" for an emblem opens the door wide open to any number of foot-related jokes about your work when it bombs. Think!
rant_mode(off);
Cheers,
Send me your email address, Mr. Anonodumbass Coward, and i'll send you a photo, straight from the Arizona desert. Hurry up, its 10 AM here.. Itll be especially easy since both my digital camera and my iPaq both take Compact Flash memory.
I wrote a series of essays on alt.religion and alt.philosophy.debate about the existance of God as it applies to the HUP. The thread is, "Does God Necessarrily Have To Be Intelligent?".. I just picked up a few interesting insights while I was there, the pink unicorn line included.
I love you.
I still use my Palm IIIx. I have thought of changing or upgrading several times
My condolences. Although, its a step in the right direction to gett off the Palm sinking ship, as the CEO of Palm has made it abundantly clear he's sticking to organizers, and not Pocket PCs.
But nothing can add any useability or real functionality to my Palm IIIx. the color screen is nothing more than a gimmick. and make the unit un-useable outside, and forces you to charge it everyday.
Mind if I move your bong? Just picked up a new iPaq 3765 the other day. It has a light sensor on the top that can detect the ambient light in a room, and adjust the brightness of the display if you want it to. Looks great during the day, looks great during the night. Something tells me you dont get out much.
The neat-o add-on gadgets are only toys, and the mp3 player add-on for the handspring is lame and more expensive than buying a seperate mp3 player.
Here, lemmie wave some of that ganja smoke away from your eyes. The "add on gadgets" follow standards..Compact Flash, Secure Digital, PC Card, all of which offer you added memory, connectivity, a buncha stuff. Something Palm apparently knows nothing about. See, I'm not trying to beat you up here, but Palm is worse than apple when it comes to providing upgrades for their products. Half the shit Palm makes is already obsolete, straight out of the box. And, since Palm has no intention of moving away from pocket organizers to Pocket PC, you're already screwed. Enjoy your "organizer". Walgreens has the same thing off the rack for $9. Most Pocket PCs have the ability to play MP3 straight out of the box. Mine does streaming audio and video as well. You can do alot of things with a 64MB StrongARM at 210 Mhz. Hell, I can run a damn webserver off the thing. Did I mention Linux is available for it?
the only palm device that has my interest is the Sharp Zaurus running linux. but only for a few of the neat-o features. as for productivity? it offer's nothing, and will actually hamper my productivity by forcing to learn a new interface, no Linux sync and probably a much shorter battery life.
Oh dear, looks like the Clue Train didn't stop in your town. If youre looking for a Linux handheld, buy an iPaq. If your productivity is "hampered" by going from a Windows style interface to another Windows style interface, I have concerns for you. Nonetheless, don't give up hope. There are 3 or 4 methods of entering text into this iPaq, one of which includes Palm-style writing. And yeah, it has a Linux sync.
So whats your point?
This is so profoundly retarded that I'm having trouble, for one in my life, expressing my true feelings.
So, I called up the NIST and asked them to create a unit of measurement that accurately describes the ratio between retarded things and lame things. I proposed that 1.0 would be the standard ratio for something that would be equally retarded and lame, and suggested Episode II, George Lucas, and N'Sync might be good benchmarks from which to gauge this new standard. They agreed, with one stipulation. They wanted to put "mebi" on it somewhere, because there was a sale on "mebi"s this week..They overestimated public demand for them and had a whole bunch lying around they needed to get rid of.
Without further adue, Star Wars's ratio of lameness to retardedness will be measured in Mebijarjars, and more specifically, Episode II will be exactly 1.0 Mebijarjars if N'Sync happens to be in it. Ten bucks says Episode III will feature nothing but chimpanzee actors wearing garbage can lids on their heads beepy-boopy sounds dubbed over a laugh track supplied by the surviving members of Menudo.
Cheers, its meant to make you laugh,
Theres one important clue here that points to this email as being legitimate. The lack of British euphamisms. The Register is a UK-based resource. If they wanted to doctor up a fake email in a conversational tone, it would have been written differently from the style in which it appears. Infact, when I was reading it, I kept expecting to see language differences, and didn't find any. Hell, to any self-respecting haxx0r, that bad-bad-doggy conclusion at the bottom of the email just begs to be disobeyed.
Even more true is the snippet about DH Brown being total FUD-whores. It says so right on their damn webpage, you can pay for the results you want.. Give em $1M and they'll tell that the majority of people surveyed think the sky is green, Windows is better, and we all ride around on invisible pink unicorns.