>Ah ha! I toldja somebody would call me "naive" and "ignorant."
That was not my intent, and I apologise for giving that impression. I'm sure you are neither of those things; this is an issue of differing opinions, not of certain knowledge.
>But there are a million of me. Some 270 million, >in fact. They may not all agree with me, but I >take comfort in the hope that a great many of >them make an honest effort to make themselves >educated and heard in our political system, even >if their views are directly opposite mine.
This paragraph illustrates what I think is the basic point on which we differ. Your hope seems to depend on a bit of trust in those 270 million people, some degree of reliance on them to look out for your interests as well as their own. I don't share that trust.
"Torte reform", if such a thing were proposed, would have to do with adjusting the recipes used to create certain layered desserts. The legal term you're referring to is "tort".
>It honestly sounds like most of you people would >prefer that law enforcement have *no* ability to >collect evidence. No wire-taps, no search >warrants, no security cameras.
I think you are failing to see the distinction between these two situations:
- Government officer obtains a court order allowing them to sift through suspect's trash looking for receipts.
- Government agency obtains legislation requiring all owners of trash cans to provide and use a separate bin for receipts.
If one accepts the premise of a law-enforcement agency, the ability to collect information follows. The situation I have a problem with is where law enforcement needs start to take precedence over those of the society supposedly being protected.
This is what is happening with things like the digital wiretap law and persistent government efforts to hamstring (or backdoor) encryption: The FBI is trying to force the rest of society to bend over to make their lives easier when investigation time comes around.
>Don't hinder law enforcement's abilities to >conduct investigations in a LAWFUL and DISCRETE >manner just because there exists the POSSIBILITY >that these abilities will be misused.
Why on earth not? Isn't that the whole point of such legal gems as amendments 4 and 5 to the U.S. constitution?
Unpunished crime is one of the prices of a free society. That's what the legal principle known as "innocent until proven guilty" is there for.
>The government is NOT OUT TO GET YOU.
Not at the moment, no. But I am not so ignorant of history or naive with respect to human nature as to believe that it can never happen in the future. Civil rights activists, women's rights advocates, environmentalists, socialists, gay-rights activists, and other people many of us now regard as heroes were once wiretapped and otherwise persecuted - legally - for their beliefs. Who's being persecuted today? Who will it be tomorrow?
I don't see any reason to make the persecutors' lives easier.
>If you don't like how your local law enforcement >is behaving, you have two options: 1) Write a >letter to your local government and media and >express your concerns; 2) MOVE OUT.
Even if I adopt your point of view for a moment, that's not a terribly optimistic pair of choices. #1 only works if there are a million of you or you become a full-time lobbyist. #2 is expensive and difficult to pull off, even for a rootless knowledge worker like myself. For some people, emotional ties make it impossible.
It doesn't sound to me like you have anything to offer but "shut up and take it".
This is just one of the many ways the open source world manifests its delightful anarchy. If there's only one guy working on Win32 GIMP, it's because only one guy feels like working on Win32 GIMP. If you want more people to work on it, do it yourself, or convince somebody to work on it for you.
People don't write code because The Masses(tm) need it. People write code because whatever program they (or their friends) need doesn't exist, or because the project cool and an interesting challenge, or because someone is paying them to write code, or because they are showing off, or just because they can.
Actually, this isn't exactly true. There is a full featured development system available with excellent compilers for both the PowerPC and 680x0 Macs. It's called MPW, and it's available for the downloading at Apple's FTP site:
You're right, programming is not particularly convenient under MacOS. But MPW has been available for free for almost two years now, so expensive tools should no longer be the issue they once were.
Patents may be the nineteenth century equivalent of open source, but this ain't the nineteenth century. Patents came about when industrial processes took lots of time and effort to create and perfect. Take Thomas Edison: he spent buckets of money on his Menlo Park lab to do nothing but sit there and invent new gadgets. This would not have been cost effective had his competitors been able to simply watch what came out his back door, duplicate it, and start selling. The cost of coming up with the invention was significantly higher than the cost of tooling up to produce it.
This is simply not true where software is concerned, and *that* is why the waters are murky. In software-land, the idea is extremely cheap; the software algorithm that requires any peculiar genius or extraordinary effort to design (not to implement, just to design) is an exceedingly rare beast. The great majority of software patents I've ever heard of are just things that anyone with the appropriate background could have designed, had the occasion presented itself. (Doesn't somebody have a patent on the use of XOR to flash a cursor?)
The cost in software is NOT in the design of the mechanisms; it is in the implementation, testing, and marketing of those mechanisms. The costly part of software production is already covered by copyright law and does not need the protection of patent law.
In general, patents may be a good thing, but this is not the general case. This is a situation in which the entire assumption on which patent law was founded is no longer true. This is a situation in which patents stifle creativity by preventing people from improving the state of the art. This is a situation bad enough to potentially kill the free software movement.
Software patents are a strong incentive *against* publishing one's software work, since any two-bit lawyer with a fistful of patents can sue one's ass off.
>Just look at RISC computers which use a 32-bit >opcode. They sure as heck don't implement 4 >billion different instructions.
Being in the throes of a PowerPC assembler, let me tell you that it sure as heck does *feel* like 4 billion different instructions. There are, to pick one random example, something like 24 variants of the integer 'add' instruction...
Would someone please volunteer to be the saviour of online humanity and kill the Caps Lock key?
It has one useful function, and one only: to instantly mark newbies. While this is nice, there are equally effective ways of spotting newbies that don't leave you pressing your hands to your ears and moaning about Advil.
This godforsaken waste of plastic is positioned right between Shift, A, and tab - as though it were placed next to some of the most common keys on the keyboard specifically to encourage typists to strike it accidentally.
WebTV lost an opportunity to atone for the fact of their existence by including a Caps Lock key on their keyboard. Just think how many newbies could have been saved from ETERNAL LUSERDOM if WebTV's engineers had taken a little thought to the monster they were unleashing on the world and simply omitted it. Then again, if they had been thinking along those lines, they would have blown all their cash on a big party and then quit, which would have pissed off their investors to no end.
This is exactly the sort of thing Douglas Hofstadter has been working on for the last N years, with some success. Check out:
Fluid Concepts & Creative Analogies: Computer Models of the Fundamental Mechanisms of Thought.
It's a paperback, gold & black cover with fancy cursive writing.
He uses puzzles of the exact sort you describe - continuing sequences, rearranging letters, etc - to tease out the fundamentals of intelligence. It's a fascinating book whether you are interested in the way the human mind works or in ways of analysing complex situations via computer.
IPMasq might be technologically evil, but we still live in an IPv4 universe, and IP addresses are expensive. Until that changes, I think masqing is a fact of life, and something that designers of new protocols really should consider.
The process of writing a letter - a single letter - takes at least an hour. Getting an envelope, finding paper with nothing written on the back of it, finding a pen that works, finding a different pen that doesn't result in hand cramps after ten minutes.
Thinking of what to say. Writing very slowly and thinking everything out as you go, because there's no backspace and you can't fix any mistakes so you'd better not make any in the first place. Thinking of more stuff to say, because this letter is going to Feel Important to whomever receives it and thus it'd damn well better have Something Important In It, or they're going to wonder why you bothered to write and spend hours trying to read between the lines.
Finding the person's current address. Remembering that they moved, and that the address book isn't updated, and that their new address is on a piece of paper in an envelope somewhere. Writing the address. Trying to remember where you last saw the stamps. Putting on the stamps. Waiting for a few days until you left early enough for work that you can take the time to stop at the mail room on the way out of the apartment complex and drop the mail off.
Damn. The only messages *that* important are graduation, wedding, baby, and death announcements. Is it a coincidence that they have pre-printed cards for those?
I doubt the USPS will ever truly go away, much as most of us would like it to, but I can see it eventually living among the horse-buggies, steam trains, and other overpriced services catering to romantics and tourists.
MP3 may not be good enough for "the audiophile who likes to turn off all the lights and just listen", but that doesn't describe the majority of music listeners *or* the majority of music listening.
The last time I had enough free time to just sit there and do nothing but listen to music was probably at least six months ago. By contrast, I've listened to hundreds of hours of background music between then and now.
The storage capacity of DVD and other mediums is irrelevant. MP3 did not take off because the files were small enough to fit on peoples' hard drives: it took off because the files were small enough to send over the 'net.
I do not see "a T1 on every desktop" anytime soon, so I think that the market forces which made MP3 popular (i.e. saving a few megabytes during file transfers) are still stacked against the adoption of less-lossy formats.
MountainGate sells a filesystem called " CentraVision" which sounds like it might be similar to what you're looking for. It is designed for streaming video and shared fibre channel RAID boxes; there are clients for Irix 6.2 through 6.5 and Windows NT. Partitions can be customized for specific types of media, and performance is top of the line. It is a distributed file system, so there is a lock manager but no server - clients load data directly from the drives. Thus it is scaleable.
This system gets you two things: a filesystem capable of handling large amounts of data with grace and speed, and a copy-free way to share the same data between more than one video server.
If you're not going to use more than one video server, why not look into SCSI-3 instead of fibre channel? The whole point of fibre channel is that multiple workstations can have direct access to drives. If you don't need that, SCSI-3 gives you 160mb/sec transfer rates (as opposed to fibre's 100mb/sec), and SCSI equipment is generally cheaper and easier to find than fibre.
There is no linux port of CentraVision yet. I'm writing this in hopes that you'll phone up the marketing department at 800 556 0222 and ask for a Linux port, thus making it easier for us linux-friendly engineering types to get management to approve the project...:-)
(Just don't ask them about the MacOS port. That's my department, and I'm getting tired of them asking when it's going to be ready!)
The law has very little to do with morality. A law changes when it becomes more expensive to maintain the law than to change or drop it. Either the enforcement is abandoned and the law forgotten (so-called "blue laws"), or citizens openly flout the law and it is eventually changed (remember the 55 mph U.S. speed limit?).
The 1995 situation with respect to music distribution and record-label monopoly power is founded on copyright law. The record companies are not about to get together and change that law to our favour, and I'd be really surprised if the U.S. congress breaks their tradition of putting big companies' interests first. If we want music in Y2K to look different than 1995, copyright law must change - and we will have to change it ourselves.
One could make a good case for mp3 "piracy" as a legitimate form of civil disobedience. There's a long tradition of deliberately breaking bad laws in order to demonstrate their absurdity. Modern copyright law is certainly absurd; it's unenforceable and often meaningless.
"Piracy" assumes that current copyright law is valid and should be maintained. I do not agree with this assumption.
I read "Travels with Samantha" online in its entirety as well. I had eyestrain when I was done, but it was worth it.
-Mars
Re:GNU do say what they mean
on
RMS Responds
·
· Score: 1
Those are simple words. They should be used in the simple ways that the whole world uses them. It's far easier to change oneself than the world.
This assumes that the whole world does, in fact, use the same words the same ways. This is simply untrue.
Webster's aside, there is no One True Right and Holy Standard of what words mean, and there can never be. Word meanings are inevitably coloured by our histories and associations.
I think that defining your terms, in detail, is an excellent start on the path toward clearer understanding. Assuming that we use the same strings of characters to represent exactly the same concepts sounds like a recipe for communications breakdown to me.
I'd find another profession before joining a programmer's union.
-Mars
Re:HR people use Word - deal with it
on
Feature:Geek Jobs
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· Score: 1
Recent experience with recruiter:
I attached a text file and emailed it in. "Sorry, that file you sent is all garbled up, I can't read it. Please send it in Word format next time."
I attached a text file, selected a different encoding method, and emailed it in. No response.
A few days later, "Are you going to resend your resume, or should I conclude you're not interested?" They apparently managed to completely lose the email.
I attached a text file copy of my resume, *and* pasted the entire contents of the resume into the email itself. No response. They apparently managed to lose this email as well.
"I'm still waiting for your resume, are you going to send it?"
I send the resume. Again. In plain old ASCII text format. And I paste the resume into the body of the email. Again.
"I got the email you sent me, but it is still all garbled up when I try to open it in Word, just like the first time. Just send me a Word file, please."
This person apparently does not know what a scroll bar is, has never heard of plain-text documents, and likely would not believe me if I told her about them. So I reply that I don't have Word and can't send that format, and would something else - say, HTML or PDF - be acceptable?
"No, just send me it in Word format."
At this point I decide that an employment agency which expects me to spend $500 on software I don't need in order to spare them the effort of learning how to open a plain-text file is just plain not worth dealing with.
This is more than just telecommuting, because the "everyone" is bigger. It's not just the programmer and the company that benefit - it's the entire open source community.
I suppose that without the open source provisions, this system devolves into a really laid-back recruiting agency.
Emulation sold many machines for Apple Computer. Good emulation was necessary for allowing the "Power Macintosh" series to take off. In fact, the emulation was a little bit *too* successful: some vendors were satisfied enough with its performance that they continued to release 68040 binaries for a year or two after the Power Macs' release, electing to add new features rather than port what was already a sufficiently fast product.
What's the difference? Apple pushed the Power Macs as the next step in their line; they were the clear successors to the Quadras, the new cutting edge.
There is no such unambiguous message with Pentium vs. Alpha. Intel markets their chips beyond belief, regardless of the Alpha's superior performance, and people buy it. It's as though some other company had released the PowerPC Macs while Apple shouted the glories of their upcoming 68060 machines with colourful dancing bunnymen.
These are materials patents: they deal with operations on atoms and energy. This is the kind of thing patent law was designed for.
Idiocies of the "let's patent the idea of using more than one computer to serve web pages" idea have little to nothing to do with material. They are operations on bits and time.
Perhaps matter patents are being abused as flagrantly as software patents, but I'm not aware of it.
In any case, asking the USPTO to make judgements on software patents is absurd.
The nice thing about this sort of thing is that *you* are their only source of information. They have no control you don't give them.
Boycotts make a small point, but in my (admittedly peculiar) opinion, a much better approach to sites which demand your entire CV before viewing anything interesting is to actively corrupt their database by feeding in bogus information.
It doesn't take much creativity to cobble up a fake name and address; the only thing you need besides that is a pseudonymous email address (which take all of ten minutes to create at hotmail, iname, yahoo, or dozens of others).
Doing this raises the cost of collecting such databases while reducing their usefulness. It doesn't cost us anything, since we still get what we want from them, and they ultimately have no way of tracking us down.
Consider a few scenarios where POP account providers (or the webmail equivalents) require you to submit a credit card number when you sign up for an account.
- The email provider takes your credit card number, calls up the appropriate authorities, and verifies that the number is valid. Results: More load on the credit card system. Anonymous and pseudonymous email become illegal. People with bad credit and those who prefer not to use credit can no longer legally use email. The cheap spammers go back to usenet flooding; the well funded ones get around ISPs.
- The email provider takes your credit card number, performs a checksum to make sure it is a well-formed number, and only calls Visa/MC/Amex if they feel like billing your number. [Forgive me if I'm remembering incorrectly that credit card numbers hold checksum information - just skip this paragraph...] Results: every scriptkiddie on the planet gets hold of the checksumming algorithm within a few weeks, and fake number generators proliferate. The situation stays basically the same as it is now, except that less people will use pseudonymous accounts for legitimate purposes.
- The email provider takes your credit card number but does nothing with it until they decide to bill you. Result: Less people use pseudonymous accounts for legitimate purposes. No other changes from the current situation. (Even a three year old can type in a random number.)
Further problems with this idea: it assumes that the only people running sendmail & pop servers are ISPs of some sort. What's to stop someone from getting some sort of connectivity, running sendmail, and shipping off all the mail they want from their own machine?
I don't think ISPs have any responsibility beyond denying service to people who misuse it
Slashdot Mirror
>Ah ha! I toldja somebody would call me "naive" and "ignorant."
That was not my intent, and I apologise for giving that impression. I'm sure you are neither of those things; this is an issue of differing opinions, not of certain knowledge.
>But there are a million of me. Some 270 million,
>in fact. They may not all agree with me, but I
>take comfort in the hope that a great many of
>them make an honest effort to make themselves
>educated and heard in our political system, even
>if their views are directly opposite mine.
This paragraph illustrates what I think is the basic point on which we differ. Your hope seems to depend on a bit of trust in those 270 million people, some degree of reliance on them to look out for your interests as well as their own. I don't share that trust.
-Mars
"Torte reform", if such a thing were proposed, would have to do with adjusting the recipes used to create certain layered desserts. The legal term you're referring to is "tort".
-Mars
>It honestly sounds like most of you people would
>prefer that law enforcement have *no* ability to
>collect evidence. No wire-taps, no search
>warrants, no security cameras.
I think you are failing to see the distinction between these two situations:
- Government officer obtains a court order allowing them to sift through suspect's trash looking for receipts.
- Government agency obtains legislation requiring all owners of trash cans to provide and use a separate bin for receipts.
If one accepts the premise of a law-enforcement agency, the ability to collect information follows. The situation I have a problem with is where law enforcement needs start to take precedence over those of the society supposedly being protected.
This is what is happening with things like the digital wiretap law and persistent government efforts to hamstring (or backdoor) encryption: The FBI is trying to force the rest of society to bend over to make their lives easier when investigation time comes around.
>Don't hinder law enforcement's abilities to
>conduct investigations in a LAWFUL and DISCRETE
>manner just because there exists the POSSIBILITY
>that these abilities will be misused.
Why on earth not? Isn't that the whole point of such legal gems as amendments 4 and 5 to the U.S. constitution?
Unpunished crime is one of the prices of a free society. That's what the legal principle known as "innocent until proven guilty" is there for.
>The government is NOT OUT TO GET YOU.
Not at the moment, no. But I am not so ignorant of history or naive with respect to human nature as to believe that it can never happen in the future. Civil rights activists, women's rights advocates, environmentalists, socialists, gay-rights activists, and other people many of us now regard as heroes were once wiretapped and otherwise persecuted - legally - for their beliefs. Who's being persecuted today? Who will it be tomorrow?
I don't see any reason to make the persecutors' lives easier.
>If you don't like how your local law enforcement
>is behaving, you have two options: 1) Write a
>letter to your local government and media and
>express your concerns; 2) MOVE OUT.
Even if I adopt your point of view for a moment, that's not a terribly optimistic pair of choices. #1 only works if there are a million of you or you become a full-time lobbyist. #2 is expensive and difficult to pull off, even for a rootless knowledge worker like myself. For some people, emotional ties make it impossible.
It doesn't sound to me like you have anything to offer but "shut up and take it".
-Mars
This is just one of the many ways the open source world manifests its delightful anarchy. If there's only one guy working on Win32 GIMP, it's because only one guy feels like working on Win32 GIMP. If you want more people to work on it, do it yourself, or convince somebody to work on it for you.
People don't write code because The Masses(tm) need it. People write code because whatever program they (or their friends) need doesn't exist, or because the project cool and an interesting challenge, or because someone is paying them to write code, or because they are showing off, or just because they can.
It's all wonderfully banal, and it works fine.
-Mars
Actually, this isn't exactly true. There is a full featured development system available with excellent compilers for both the PowerPC and 680x0 Macs. It's called MPW, and it's available for the downloading at Apple's FTP site:
a cOS_Tools/MPW_etc./
ftp://ftp.apple.com/developer/Tool_Chest/Core_M
You're right, programming is not particularly convenient under MacOS. But MPW has been available for free for almost two years now, so expensive tools should no longer be the issue they once were.
-Mars
Patents may be the nineteenth century equivalent of open source, but this ain't the nineteenth century. Patents came about when industrial processes took lots of time and effort to create and perfect. Take Thomas Edison: he spent buckets of money on his Menlo Park lab to do nothing but sit there and invent new gadgets. This would not have been cost effective had his competitors been able to simply watch what came out his back door, duplicate it, and start selling. The cost of coming up with the invention was significantly higher than the cost of tooling up to produce it.
This is simply not true where software is concerned, and *that* is why the waters are murky. In software-land, the idea is extremely cheap; the software algorithm that requires any peculiar genius or extraordinary effort to design (not to implement, just to design) is an exceedingly rare beast. The great majority of software patents I've ever heard of are just things that anyone with the appropriate background could have designed, had the occasion presented itself. (Doesn't somebody have a patent on the use of XOR to flash a cursor?)
The cost in software is NOT in the design of the mechanisms; it is in the implementation, testing, and marketing of those mechanisms. The costly part of software production is already covered by copyright law and does not need the protection of patent law.
In general, patents may be a good thing, but this is not the general case. This is a situation in which the entire assumption on which patent law was founded is no longer true. This is a situation in which patents stifle creativity by preventing people from improving the state of the art. This is a situation bad enough to potentially kill the free software movement.
Software patents are a strong incentive *against* publishing one's software work, since any two-bit lawyer with a fistful of patents can sue one's ass off.
-Mars
>Just look at RISC computers which use a 32-bit
>opcode. They sure as heck don't implement 4
>billion different instructions.
Being in the throes of a PowerPC assembler, let me tell you that it sure as heck does *feel* like 4 billion different instructions. There are, to pick one random example, something like 24 variants of the integer 'add' instruction...
don't mind me, I haven't had any coffee today.
-Mars
Would someone please volunteer to be the saviour of online humanity and kill the Caps Lock key?
It has one useful function, and one only: to instantly mark newbies. While this is nice, there are equally effective ways of spotting newbies that don't leave you pressing your hands to your ears and moaning about Advil.
This godforsaken waste of plastic is positioned right between Shift, A, and tab - as though it were placed next to some of the most common keys on the keyboard specifically to encourage typists to strike it accidentally.
WebTV lost an opportunity to atone for the fact of their existence by including a Caps Lock key on their keyboard. Just think how many newbies could have been saved from ETERNAL LUSERDOM if WebTV's engineers had taken a little thought to the monster they were unleashing on the world and simply omitted it. Then again, if they had been thinking along those lines, they would have blown all their cash on a big party and then quit, which would have pissed off their investors to no end.
OK, enough ranting. I hate Caps Lock.
-Mars
This is exactly the sort of thing Douglas Hofstadter has been working on for the last N years, with some success. Check out:
Fluid Concepts & Creative Analogies: Computer Models of the Fundamental Mechanisms of Thought.
It's a paperback, gold & black cover with fancy cursive writing.
He uses puzzles of the exact sort you describe - continuing sequences, rearranging letters, etc - to tease out the fundamentals of intelligence. It's a fascinating book whether you are interested in the way the human mind works or in ways of analysing complex situations via computer.
-Mars
IPMasq might be technologically evil, but we still live in an IPv4 universe, and IP addresses are expensive. Until that changes, I think masqing is a fact of life, and something that designers of new protocols really should consider.
-Mars
It's the last one that gets me.
The process of writing a letter - a single letter - takes at least an hour. Getting an envelope, finding paper with nothing written on the back of it, finding a pen that works, finding a different pen that doesn't result in hand cramps after ten minutes.
Thinking of what to say. Writing very slowly and thinking everything out as you go, because there's no backspace and you can't fix any mistakes so you'd better not make any in the first place. Thinking of more stuff to say, because this letter is going to Feel Important to whomever receives it and thus it'd damn well better have Something Important In It, or they're going to wonder why you bothered to write and spend hours trying to read between the lines.
Finding the person's current address. Remembering that they moved, and that the address book isn't updated, and that their new address is on a piece of paper in an envelope somewhere. Writing the address. Trying to remember where you last saw the stamps. Putting on the stamps. Waiting for a few days until you left early enough for work that you can take the time to stop at the mail room on the way out of the apartment complex and drop the mail off.
Damn. The only messages *that* important are graduation, wedding, baby, and death announcements. Is it a coincidence that they have pre-printed cards for those?
I doubt the USPS will ever truly go away, much as most of us would like it to, but I can see it eventually living among the horse-buggies, steam trains, and other overpriced services catering to romantics and tourists.
-Mars
*cough* um, actually, I have a whole bunch of saved love emails. So does she.
The future is today, my friend.
-Mars
MP3 may not be good enough for "the audiophile who likes to turn off all the lights and just listen", but that doesn't describe the majority of music listeners *or* the majority of music listening.
The last time I had enough free time to just sit there and do nothing but listen to music was probably at least six months ago. By contrast, I've listened to hundreds of hours of background music between then and now.
The storage capacity of DVD and other mediums is irrelevant. MP3 did not take off because the files were small enough to fit on peoples' hard drives: it took off because the files were small enough to send over the 'net.
I do not see "a T1 on every desktop" anytime soon, so I think that the market forces which made MP3 popular (i.e. saving a few megabytes during file transfers) are still stacked against the adoption of less-lossy formats.
-Mars
A plug for the company that pays my salary:
MountainGate sells a filesystem called " CentraVision" which sounds like it might be similar to what you're looking for. It is designed for streaming video and shared fibre channel RAID boxes; there are clients for Irix 6.2 through 6.5 and Windows NT. Partitions can be customized for specific types of media, and performance is top of the line. It is a distributed file system, so there is a lock manager but no server - clients load data directly from the drives. Thus it is scaleable.
This system gets you two things: a filesystem capable of handling large amounts of data with grace and speed, and a copy-free way to share the same data between more than one video server.
If you're not going to use more than one video server, why not look into SCSI-3 instead of fibre channel? The whole point of fibre channel is that multiple workstations can have direct access to drives. If you don't need that, SCSI-3 gives you 160mb/sec transfer rates (as opposed to fibre's 100mb/sec), and SCSI equipment is generally cheaper and easier to find than fibre.
There is no linux port of CentraVision yet. I'm writing this in hopes that you'll phone up the marketing department at 800 556 0222 and ask for a Linux port, thus making it easier for us linux-friendly engineering types to get management to approve the project... :-)
(Just don't ask them about the MacOS port. That's my department, and I'm getting tired of them asking when it's going to be ready!)
-Mars
The law has very little to do with morality. A law changes when it becomes more expensive to maintain the law than to change or drop it. Either the enforcement is abandoned and the law forgotten (so-called "blue laws"), or citizens openly flout the law and it is eventually changed (remember the 55 mph U.S. speed limit?).
The 1995 situation with respect to music distribution and record-label monopoly power is founded on copyright law. The record companies are not about to get together and change that law to our favour, and I'd be really surprised if the U.S. congress breaks their tradition of putting big companies' interests first. If we want music in Y2K to look different than 1995, copyright law must change - and we will have to change it ourselves.
One could make a good case for mp3 "piracy" as a legitimate form of civil disobedience. There's a long tradition of deliberately breaking bad laws in order to demonstrate their absurdity. Modern copyright law is certainly absurd; it's unenforceable and often meaningless.
"Piracy" assumes that current copyright law is valid and should be maintained. I do not agree with this assumption.
-Mars
I read "Travels with Samantha" online in its entirety as well. I had eyestrain when I was done, but it was worth it.
-Mars
Those are simple words. They should be used in
the simple ways that the whole world uses
them. It's far easier to change oneself than
the world.
This assumes that the whole world does, in fact, use the same words the same ways. This is simply untrue.
Webster's aside, there is no One True Right and Holy Standard of what words mean, and there can never be. Word meanings are inevitably coloured by our histories and associations.
I think that defining your terms, in detail, is an excellent start on the path toward clearer understanding. Assuming that we use the same strings of characters to represent exactly the same concepts sounds like a recipe for communications breakdown to me.
-Mars
You nailed it there...
I'd find another profession before joining a programmer's union.
-Mars
Recent experience with recruiter:
I attached a text file and emailed it in.
"Sorry, that file you sent is all garbled up, I can't read it. Please send it in Word format next time."
I attached a text file, selected a different encoding method, and emailed it in.
No response.
A few days later, "Are you going to resend your resume, or should I conclude you're not interested?" They apparently managed to completely lose the email.
I attached a text file copy of my resume, *and* pasted the entire contents of the resume into the email itself.
No response. They apparently managed to lose this email as well.
"I'm still waiting for your resume, are you going to send it?"
I send the resume. Again. In plain old ASCII text format. And I paste the resume into the body of the email. Again.
"I got the email you sent me, but it is still all garbled up when I try to open it in Word, just like the first time. Just send me a Word file, please."
This person apparently does not know what a scroll bar is, has never heard of plain-text documents, and likely would not believe me if I told her about them. So I reply that I don't have Word and can't send that format, and would something else - say, HTML or PDF - be acceptable?
"No, just send me it in Word format."
At this point I decide that an employment agency which expects me to spend $500 on software I don't need in order to spare them the effort of learning how to open a plain-text file is just plain not worth dealing with.
-Mars
This is more than just telecommuting, because the "everyone" is bigger. It's not just the programmer and the company that benefit - it's the entire open source community.
I suppose that without the open source provisions, this system devolves into a really laid-back recruiting agency.
-Mars
Emulation sold many machines for Apple Computer. Good emulation was necessary for allowing the "Power Macintosh" series to take off. In fact, the emulation was a little bit *too* successful: some vendors were satisfied enough with its performance that they continued to release 68040 binaries for a year or two after the Power Macs' release, electing to add new features rather than port what was already a sufficiently fast product.
What's the difference? Apple pushed the Power Macs as the next step in their line; they were the clear successors to the Quadras, the new cutting edge.
There is no such unambiguous message with Pentium vs. Alpha. Intel markets their chips beyond belief, regardless of the Alpha's superior performance, and people buy it. It's as though some other company had released the PowerPC Macs while Apple shouted the glories of their upcoming 68060 machines with colourful dancing bunnymen.
-Mars
These are materials patents: they deal with operations on atoms and energy. This is the kind of thing patent law was designed for.
Idiocies of the "let's patent the idea of using more than one computer to serve web pages" idea have little to nothing to do with material. They are operations on bits and time.
Perhaps matter patents are being abused as flagrantly as software patents, but I'm not aware of it.
In any case, asking the USPTO to make judgements on software patents is absurd.
-Mars
-Mars
It's a little difficult to hire an orchestra to play for you at work. It also tends to annoy your workmates.
There certainly isn't space in the back seat of my car for a rock band.
My bank would get upset with me *very* quickly if I tried to attend a concert every evening.
Yes, live music is great, but a purist attitude like that is unrealistic and pointless.
You ought to like the mp3 revolution, though - it can only *help* small-time musicians playing unusual, non-mainstream music.
-Mars
The nice thing about this sort of thing is that *you* are their only source of information. They have no control you don't give them.
Boycotts make a small point, but in my (admittedly peculiar) opinion, a much better approach to sites which demand your entire CV before viewing anything interesting is to actively corrupt their database by feeding in bogus information.
It doesn't take much creativity to cobble up a fake name and address; the only thing you need besides that is a pseudonymous email address (which take all of ten minutes to create at hotmail, iname, yahoo, or dozens of others).
Doing this raises the cost of collecting such databases while reducing their usefulness. It doesn't cost us anything, since we still get what we want from them, and they ultimately have no way of tracking us down.
-Mars
Consider a few scenarios where POP account providers (or the webmail equivalents) require you to submit a credit card number when you sign up for an account.
- The email provider takes your credit card number, calls up the appropriate authorities, and verifies that the number is valid. Results: More load on the credit card system. Anonymous and pseudonymous email become illegal. People with bad credit and those who prefer not to use credit can no longer legally use email. The cheap spammers go back to usenet flooding; the well funded ones get around ISPs.
- The email provider takes your credit card number, performs a checksum to make sure it is a well-formed number, and only calls Visa/MC/Amex if they feel like billing your number. [Forgive me if I'm remembering incorrectly that credit card numbers hold checksum information - just skip this paragraph...] Results: every scriptkiddie on the planet gets hold of the checksumming algorithm within a few weeks, and fake number generators proliferate. The situation stays basically the same as it is now, except that less people will use pseudonymous accounts for legitimate purposes.
- The email provider takes your credit card number but does nothing with it until they decide to bill you. Result: Less people use pseudonymous accounts for legitimate purposes. No other changes from the current situation. (Even a three year old can type in a random number.)
Further problems with this idea: it assumes that the only people running sendmail & pop servers are ISPs of some sort. What's to stop someone from getting some sort of connectivity, running sendmail, and shipping off all the mail they want from their own machine?
I don't think ISPs have any responsibility beyond denying service to people who misuse it
-Mars