It is going to ge interesting to see their actual reaction to this. Especially when they wake up in a few hours on the west coast.
It will have to make the mainstream news first, of course. Although I suspect that their law trolls probably have folks who monitor places like this for breaking news(?)
Of course, this is not a bug. It is a feature. MS say so.
Seriously, it looks like w2k has got a bad case of software bloat. But we should make sure that everyone knows what MS is doing. Just so that people get the appropriate warm and fuzzy feeling.
After all, it is NOT a bug. it is a feature.
For those interested, here is a link to the original benkmarks
I'm sick of "The Mentor's" trite little "Hacker Manifesto". If you'd have posted a Zero Wing joke, it would have been far more meaningful than this tired piece of crap from someone who wouldn't know a real hacker if he were suckerpunched by one. This little piece uses "hacker" in the l33t h4x0r sense, not the "curious computer guy" sense. It has no relevance to the article, or to the book being discussed.
Well, let's see, what are the credentials of this "mentor" guy -
THE MENTOR- Handle of Loyd Blankenship. Also known as the Neuromancer. Elite hacker and former member
of the Legion of Doom, the PhoneLine Phantoms, the Racketeers and Extasyy Elite. Writer of the legendary "Conscience of a Hacker." He also used to work for Steve Jackson Games, where he wrote _GURPS Cyberpunk_. He is currently a freelance game designer/electronic musician. [Handle is from the Grey Lensman series by E.E. "Doc" Smith.]
(from the Hacker's Encyclopedia by Logik Bomb)
Hey! there is an interview with him here. Let's see what they have to say:
Elf Qrin:How did you become a hacker? Mentor: If you mean 'hacker' in the true sense, I think it happened when I started porting _Star Trek_. (NB - from PDP4 source code to Basic for a Compucolor) If you mean it in the 'breaking into computers', it started during that first summer when I found out the university had a PDP-4. I wrangled a guest password from a friend of the family, but it expired at the end of the summer. By then I had a pretty good list of user account pairs, and I hacked an account (something like [1,5], pw: games I think).
- - -
Elf Qrin:
Why you quit the scene in 1990? Mentor: When I put up _The Phoenix Project_, I knew I had to stop. I was running the highest-profile (and best) hacking BBS in the world. I knew I'd be watched. I was also at the point where a lot of the original challenge was gone -- LOD had control over pretty much anything we wanted to at that time, and I personally had finished taking over huge chunks of Autonet. Prime Suspect owned Telenet. Erik Bloodaxe owned pretty much anything he wanted (plug here -- Erik Bloodaxe was the best hacker I ever met). Our phone gurus owned every phone network in the country. There was nowhere to go but down.
Yep, looks like he knows nothing about being a hacker. He has been out of the business for over ten years, and never had a clue.
There is an interesting Closed Captioning FAQ here. There is also an excellent collection of resources here at Captions.org, with legal resources here. There is also a list of technical requirements here, which will answer more of the engineering questions.
That said...
Why can I see the movie industry balking on this, fighting this technology?
Because a pure HDTV system that does not allow backward capability allows them to digitally block services according to their desires. Take a look at recent slashdot stories on Direct TV and HDTV. It takes a spanner (wrench) and throws it right into the gears of their plans to assert perfect control over copying, etc. Everyone can still make their tapes, and the old analog recorder might not even copy the HDTV code correctly to ensure watermarks, etc.
While it will allow the more rapid adoption of HDTV, it will also reveal their plans to rip off the consumer by covert standards. It slaps them up side the head.
This is something that should be urged for adoption as quickly as possible. It is the best good for the public. The media moguls will fight it tooth and nail.
I shed no tears.
You may want to share your opinion on this with your political representative.
Not flaming...just pointing out that this work is well over 10 years old.
You are correct.
quick research reveals that it was "Written on January 8, 1986" attributed to Loyd Blankenship (mentor@blankenship.com)and is also known as the "Hackers Manifesto". It was probably quoted in the movie.
Fascinating that it is so timely, and seems like it could have been written over that past year or so. It has stood up to the Test of Time (tm) very well.
NB - There is no blankenship.com website right now, but it does cross check with the above name nicely via whois, etc. This would probably be a good person to send a note of appreciation to.
The following was posted in a Story on the Register a month or so ago, and is archived at Attrition.org
While you may not agree with everything in it (I don't) it offers as much insight as anything else into the culture and the mindset. What I see, among other things, is the waste of a young brilliant mind by a system tumbling towards the state of being cripple ware.
I greatly admire this bit hacker culture. It communicates (more than anything else I've read) what is going on
"The Conscience of a Hacker" by Mentor
(reproduced without permission.)
Another one got caught today, it's all over the papers.
"Teenager Arrested in Computer Crime Scandal", "Hacker Arrested after Bank Tampering"...
Damn kids. They're all alike.
But did you, in your three-piece psychology and 1950's technobrain, ever take a look behind the eyes of the hacker?
Did you ever wonder what made him tick, what forces shaped him, what may have molded him?
I am a hacker, enter my world...
Mine is a world that begins with school... I'm smarter than most of the other kids, this crap they teach us bores me...
Damn underachiever. They're all alike.
I'm in junior high or high school. I've listened to teachers explain for the fifteenth time how to reduce a fraction.
I understand it. "No, Ms. Smith, I didn't show my work. I did it in my head..."
Damn kid. Probably copied it. They're all alike.
I made a discovery today. I found a computer. Wait a second, this is cool.
It does what I want it to. If it makes a mistake, it's because I screwed it up.
Not because it doesn't like me...
Or feels threatened by me...
Or thinks I'm a smart ass...
Or doesn't like teaching and shouldn't be here...
Damn kid. All he does is play games. They're all alike.
And then it happened... a door opened to a world...
rushing through the phone line like heroin through an addict's veins,
an electronic pulse is sent out, a refuge from the day-to-day incompetencies is sought... a board is found.
"This is it... this is where I belong..."
I know everyone here... even if I've never met them, never talked to them, may never hear from them again... I know you all...
Damn kid. Tying up the phone line again. They're all alike...
You bet your ass we're all alike... we've been spoon-fed baby food at school when we hungered for steak...
the bits of meat that you did let slip through were pre-chewed and tasteless.
We've been dominated by sadists, or ignored by the apathetic.
The few that had something to teach found us willing pupils, but those few are like drops of water in the desert.
This is our world now... the world of the electron and the switch, the beauty of the baud.
We make use of a service already existing without paying for what could be dirt-cheap if it wasn't run by profiteering gluttons,
and you call us criminals.
We explore... and you call us criminals.
We seek after knowledge... and you call us criminals.
We exist without skin color, without nationality, without religious bias... and you call us criminals.
You build atomic bombs, you wage wars, you murder, cheat, and lie to us,
you try to make us believe it's for our own good, yet we're the criminals.
Yes, I am a criminal. My crime is that of curiosity.
My crime is that of judging people by what they say and think, not what they look like.
My crime is that of outsmarting you, something that you will never forgive me for.
I am a hacker, and this is my manifesto.
You may stop this individual, but you can't stop us all... after all, we're all alike.
Yeah, but we all know Linux will be ported to the X-Box within 3 hours of its release.
Actually, I like it - hacking the x-box so that it actually can do something useful.
Problem is, will anything useful run on it, or will it be obsolete by the time it is release, because even a bargain basement Compaq pizza box unit will have more power?
Among other things, I used to do support for an old time DOS relational database for small businesses. It actually used to work out pretty well. It certainly did the job, and there are *still* businesses out there using it.
That being said, part of the support issue in that end of the market is design. You get an awful lot of adhoc awful designs. An example would be using a single name field. Not separate fields for first name, last name, title, etc. - but a single field for everything, entered any old which way. Great for mailing labels, useless for anything else. Stupid design, as as soon as you have thousands of records, and you want to find an individual person, etc. And then you have somone who calls up, and wants to sort this out automatically (HA HA HA!)
One call I recall was one person who wanted us to help him design his invoicing system. I asked him if he understood accounting. He said "No..." I asked him if this was his first computer... (you can figure out the rest.) Point being is that some of these things are complex, and they are not intuitive, and there is a market for some sort of solution.
Another part of the problem at that end of the market is the new owner of the business. A guy sets up his files with the old dos program, learns it pretty well, gets to be a wiz, grows the business well, and then decides to sell the business and go play golf or something. The new owners do not know dos, do not know database basics, do not know that design or that system, and might be simple users.
And now the madness begins, when they want to move it to a windows system, and do not know the windows version either.
The mom and pop shop are usually farming their work out as far as a database system goes, or they are band-aiding it with what they have been sold on as a solution, such as that intuition impaired product of the Very Important Software Company. Let's face it, that was designed for people who are programmers, and even then it can be a rather big hassle.
The best low end rdbms I have seen is the one put out by Alpha Software, at least for the Windows platform. Granted you still have to know something, but you can get something productive on it faster than anything else out there I know. They used to be a bit bigger, but then there was the power of Microsoft marketing.
There is a market for a good solution, but sadly, the dominant player is putting out something ordinary folks cannot use. You have to be a guru.
Today, because of distribution (ignoring the internet) and the *amount* of IP now generated compared to back then, the value depriciation is much higher (how many people talk about CDs or movies or books more than 1 or 2 years old?), so say this is around 50% (a conservative #). In 5 years, only 3% of the initial value is left, and in 10, 1/10th % is left. After 96 years, at 50% depriciation, only 1.26 x 10^-24 % of the initial value is left.
well, the problem is not the depreciation of value. Often someone will go back through some old book, or artwork, and make something new with it. With the copyright law and patent law extending almost a century, odds are that the art will not even be around to be inspected a century later.
Maybe there should be a "use it or loose it" clause, just so that people can not arbitrarily tie things up forever.
All to often, copyright, being broad and general, lets companies tie up properties, not so that they can make money, but because then they can keep someone else from making money.
It also raises the question, though, of how to avoid an early lead from remaining permanent;
how do new but excellent books gain a foothold? And what about situations where the popular
books aren't the best ones? Kudos to Jonathan for putting this together, now it's your turn to point out the best books in your field to others.
It seems to me that an awful lot of this is dependant on things like attitude of the community. For example, take a look at the content of freenet. As described, the typical member could be "a crypto-anarchist Perl hacker with a taste for the classics of literature, political screeds, 1980s pop music, Adobe software, and lots of porn"
Somehow I think that the books recommended by that cultural cross section would be different than that of the Reader's Digest (which has a circulation approaching 100 million)
My initial reactions are that it would work easiset in things like embedded processing. I also wonder if there would have to be some sort of evolution similar to what we have seen over the past few years with Intel, Motorola, etc.
An added thought to this is that since, according to the article, a lot of the research is being done of the Sun side, this will have interesting implications for the Wintel crowd.
It seems that it would make its' way into the market first via the UNIX crowd. This makes for interesting opportunities. The last two paragraphs of the article are interesting in this regard:
Mr. Sutherland, in fact, says a new magic is precisely what he has found. He draws an analogy to the first steel bridges, which were built like stone bridges, with arches. It took some time, he said, for designers to recognize the possibilities of the suspension bridge -- a form impossible to create with stone alone but which was perfectly suited to the properties of steel.
The same is true with asynchronous logic, he said. His research shows that it will be possible to double the switching speed of conventional clock-based circuits, he said, and he is confident that Sun in particular will soon begin to take advantage of that speed. "A 2X increase in speed makes a big difference," he said, "particularly if this is the only way to get that fast."
As I recall, this story has been around for a few years. But this does not make it less relevant.
What makes it interesting is that you have to fundamentally redesign your your whole logical design so that you have a general purpose design.
With clocked computing, it is easy to see how you would flush buffers, etc. Clockless computing would be more problematic, and of course, would probably be proprietary.
My initial reactions are that it would work easiset in things like embedded processing. I also wonder if there would have to be some sort of evolution similar to what we have seen over the past few years with Intel, Motorola, etc.
One must not forget that the increases in performance for an awfull lot of these chips has to do with clock speed increases, as well as code designed to take advantadge of certain coding features in the hardware.
an early example of this is when the Pentiums first came out. For a while you had 486 boxes and pentiums with the same clock speeds on the market. you could compare performance between systems with the same video cards, same ram, same cache, etc. even though the chip sets with not the same, etc. This was educational. As I recall, the performance boost for somewhere not taking advantadge of the pentium feature set was aboput 20 - 25% (?) I may have this wrong, of course.
But at a time when pentium systems cost twice of a 486, it was definitely buying for the future.
Do you want to appear on Voyager before it goes off the air, to keep the Number One/Christine
Chapel/Lwaxana Troi track record going? How about Series V?
I'm still doing the voice of the computer on Voyager. But I know there is no chance of appearing. Two years ago, I would have loved to work on a campaign to get me on the show, because I was thinking, after thirty-some years, why not? But then as it started to settle in -- the older you get, the wiser you get -- I started to say, not on your life.
I know absolutely nothing about the next Star Trek series. I don't think there are many people over at Paramount who do either. I haven't heard anything, not even that the main office has said, here's the money, go ahead. Those days are over.
Then you could use it (Interdev) to give the database a web front end. Operate it via the browser. Password it, etc. This could be on the intranet, with another front end for web use as desired.
Bonus points! - The boss could work from home.
In Fact, you could sell the boss on this, saying that this is what you use instead of Access if you want to be "really serious". Acess is for the low end business, and you need the MS industrial products, etc.
We normally think of cosmic rays as something that causes bit rot (though in practice it's alpha particles). In a chip that has transistors only 3 atoms thick, would this radiation cause physical damage instead? If so, we'd need to think about employing a lossy grid of gates, so that a few failures don't kill the processor
I found this:
"Recently there has been increased emphasis on radiation effects in space due to an increasing number of satellite launches for commercial and defense systems. The natural space environment can damage electronics because of total-ionizing-dose and single-event effects (SEE). These are caused by the high energy electrons, protons, and heavy ions that are intrinsic to the space environment due to cosmic rays and the Earth's radiation belts. SEE due to cosmic rays and high-energy protons can lead to hard or soft errors in many types of devices and ICs. SEE are even possible in avionics and ground applications of advanced microelectronics with submicron feature sizes. SEE can cause failure at any point during a system's lifetime due to one inopportune particle strike, if circuits and systems are not suitably designed, tested, and built. Total dose effects accumulate over a system's lifetime, and can lead to premature performance degradation and system failure."
There are some interesting links on this at the Sandia Labs website here. Some of these go to sites that are a bit encyclopedic.
Secondly, DO NOT WORK ON YOUR EMPLOYER'S PROJECT. Do not consult, brainstorm, collaborate, talk about, listen to discussions about, or otherwise become in any way involved (even peripherally) with your employer's project. Don't do anything that could result in cross-pollenization of your products. What you do on their time could very well be attributed to them when the dust settles.
Actually, tell them that you cannot work on the project because it conflicts with a previous non-disclosure that you have with a prior client? and you cannot even reveal the client because that is part of the non-disclosure.
This looks fascinating. To fully appreciate it, I would proabably need to read lots of stuff with incredibly tiny print. I can feel the headache coming on now;-)
Seriously, I wonder how this would handle all of the various chip sets out there. There are enough variations in hardware configs that I wonder how much of it needs to be handled in the bios, and how much can be set aside until you start loading drivers?
I am waiting for the day when not only do they say you don't own what you own (the present day) but they come along and say something like:
"Failure to purchase at least one of the items presented on this web page is a violation of applicable laws"
or
"You are in violation of the patriotic consumer statutes. Your wages will be garnished to make minimum payments on the credit card charges we are incurring on your behalf. You will also be sent products our surveys indicate that you need to have."
feh. Police state nothing. We need a new word for this governmental dictactorship by commercial interests.
Without on orbit assembly capability -- I mean real work in space done by riggers who can do a day's work -- things have to be pre-assembled and taken up in big chunks, which means shuttle which means a BILLION DOLLARS A FLIGHT for 50,000 pounds or so. What we need is 20 million a flight for 10,000 pounds and that would be achievable but "there
is no urgent need for that" because -- well because the stupid space station ate it all. The shuttle and the space station ate the dream. Make no mistake about that. Those monsters need to GO and be replaced by smaller, operations driven, flexible re-usable designs.
Note - original words not my own, original author linked in original message.
Nasa needs to get its act together. The Pluto mission makes sense based on orbital mechanics, etc.
but the rest of the program needs to be rethought. It has slid into boondoggle land instead of being as effective and efficient as it could be. I want them to do things right.
Slashdot Mirror
It will have to make the mainstream news first, of course. Although I suspect that their law trolls probably have folks who monitor places like this for breaking news(?)
Seriously, it looks like w2k has got a bad case of software bloat. But we should make sure that everyone knows what MS is doing. Just so that people get the appropriate warm and fuzzy feeling.
After all, it is NOT a bug. it is a feature.
For those interested, here is a link to the original benkmarks
Well, let's see, what are the credentials of this "mentor" guy -
THE MENTOR- Handle of Loyd Blankenship. Also known as the Neuromancer. Elite hacker and former member of the Legion of Doom, the PhoneLine Phantoms, the Racketeers and Extasyy Elite. Writer of the legendary "Conscience of a Hacker." He also used to work for Steve Jackson Games, where he wrote _GURPS Cyberpunk_. He is currently a freelance game designer/electronic musician. [Handle is from the Grey Lensman series by E.E. "Doc" Smith.] (from the Hacker's Encyclopedia by Logik Bomb)
Hey! there is an interview with him here. Let's see what they have to say:
Elf Qrin:How did you become a hacker?
Mentor: If you mean 'hacker' in the true sense, I think it happened when I started porting _Star Trek_. (NB - from PDP4 source code to Basic for a Compucolor) If you mean it in the 'breaking into computers', it started during that first summer when I found out the university had a PDP-4. I wrangled a guest password from a friend of the family, but it expired at the end of the summer. By then I had a pretty good list of user account pairs, and I hacked an account (something like [1,5], pw: games I think).
- - -
Elf Qrin: Why you quit the scene in 1990?
Mentor: When I put up _The Phoenix Project_, I knew I had to stop. I was running the highest-profile (and best) hacking BBS in the world. I knew I'd be watched. I was also at the point where a lot of the original challenge was gone -- LOD had control over pretty much anything we wanted to at that time, and I personally had finished taking over huge chunks of Autonet. Prime Suspect owned Telenet. Erik Bloodaxe owned pretty much anything he wanted (plug here -- Erik Bloodaxe was the best hacker I ever met). Our phone gurus owned every phone network in the country. There was nowhere to go but down.
Yep, looks like he knows nothing about being a hacker. He has been out of the business for over ten years, and never had a clue.
Right?
That said ...
Why can I see the movie industry balking on this, fighting this technology?
Because a pure HDTV system that does not allow backward capability allows them to digitally block services according to their desires. Take a look at recent slashdot stories on Direct TV and HDTV. It takes a spanner (wrench) and throws it right into the gears of their plans to assert perfect control over copying, etc. Everyone can still make their tapes, and the old analog recorder might not even copy the HDTV code correctly to ensure watermarks, etc.
While it will allow the more rapid adoption of HDTV, it will also reveal their plans to rip off the consumer by covert standards. It slaps them up side the head.
This is something that should be urged for adoption as quickly as possible. It is the best good for the public. The media moguls will fight it tooth and nail.
I shed no tears.
You may want to share your opinion on this with your political representative.
You are correct.
quick research reveals that it was "Written on January 8, 1986" attributed to Loyd Blankenship (mentor@blankenship.com)and is also known as the "Hackers Manifesto". It was probably quoted in the movie.
Fascinating that it is so timely, and seems like it could have been written over that past year or so. It has stood up to the Test of Time (tm) very well.
NB - There is no blankenship.com website right now, but it does cross check with the above name nicely via whois, etc. This would probably be a good person to send a note of appreciation to.
There was recently a story about kids in Massachusetts sending fraudulently ordered goods to a house not used during the winter.
(As they say, don't do this at home kiddies.)
They got caught, not because of any online monitoring, or business complaint, but because of a suspicious neighbor who turned them in.
one big mess where all possible forms of encryption are banned, except for use by megacorporations.
Criminals, actually.
Remember, if encryption is banned, only criminals will have encryption.
hmm ...
RIAA = ???
works for me, since their tactics have reminded me of a mafia family protecting their profits.
This is walking into the direction of one heck of a bloody mess in the coursts and the legal system.
While you may not agree with everything in it (I don't) it offers as much insight as anything else into the culture and the mindset. What I see, among other things, is the waste of a young brilliant mind by a system tumbling towards the state of being cripple ware.
I greatly admire this bit hacker culture. It communicates (more than anything else I've read) what is going on
"The Conscience of a Hacker" by Mentor
(reproduced without permission.)
Another one got caught today, it's all over the papers.
"Teenager Arrested in Computer Crime Scandal", "Hacker Arrested after Bank Tampering"...
Damn kids. They're all alike.
But did you, in your three-piece psychology and 1950's technobrain, ever take a look behind the eyes of the hacker?
Did you ever wonder what made him tick, what forces shaped him, what may have molded him?
I am a hacker, enter my world...
Mine is a world that begins with school... I'm smarter than most of the other kids, this crap they teach us bores me...
Damn underachiever. They're all alike.
I'm in junior high or high school. I've listened to teachers explain for the fifteenth time how to reduce a fraction.
I understand it. "No, Ms. Smith, I didn't show my work. I did it in my head..."
Damn kid. Probably copied it. They're all alike.
I made a discovery today. I found a computer. Wait a second, this is cool.
It does what I want it to. If it makes a mistake, it's because I screwed it up.
Not because it doesn't like me...
Or feels threatened by me...
Or thinks I'm a smart ass...
Or doesn't like teaching and shouldn't be here...
Damn kid. All he does is play games. They're all alike.
And then it happened... a door opened to a world...
rushing through the phone line like heroin through an addict's veins,
an electronic pulse is sent out, a refuge from the day-to-day incompetencies is sought... a board is found.
"This is it... this is where I belong..."
I know everyone here... even if I've never met them, never talked to them, may never hear from them again... I know you all...
Damn kid. Tying up the phone line again. They're all alike...
You bet your ass we're all alike... we've been spoon-fed baby food at school when we hungered for steak...
the bits of meat that you did let slip through were pre-chewed and tasteless.
We've been dominated by sadists, or ignored by the apathetic.
The few that had something to teach found us willing pupils, but those few are like drops of water in the desert.
This is our world now... the world of the electron and the switch, the beauty of the baud.
We make use of a service already existing without paying for what could be dirt-cheap if it wasn't run by profiteering gluttons,
and you call us criminals.
We explore... and you call us criminals.
We seek after knowledge... and you call us criminals.
We exist without skin color, without nationality, without religious bias... and you call us criminals.
You build atomic bombs, you wage wars, you murder, cheat, and lie to us,
you try to make us believe it's for our own good, yet we're the criminals.
Yes, I am a criminal. My crime is that of curiosity.
My crime is that of judging people by what they say and think, not what they look like.
My crime is that of outsmarting you, something that you will never forgive me for.
I am a hacker, and this is my manifesto.
You may stop this individual, but you can't stop us all... after all, we're all alike.
So they will likely make a few bucks on it.
Actually, I like it - hacking the x-box so that it actually can do something useful.
Problem is, will anything useful run on it, or will it be obsolete by the time it is release, because even a bargain basement Compaq pizza box unit will have more power?
That being said, part of the support issue in that end of the market is design. You get an awful lot of adhoc awful designs. An example would be using a single name field. Not separate fields for first name, last name, title, etc. - but a single field for everything, entered any old which way. Great for mailing labels, useless for anything else. Stupid design, as as soon as you have thousands of records, and you want to find an individual person, etc. And then you have somone who calls up, and wants to sort this out automatically (HA HA HA!)
One call I recall was one person who wanted us to help him design his invoicing system. I asked him if he understood accounting. He said "No ..." I asked him if this was his first computer ... (you can figure out the rest.) Point being is that some of these things are complex, and they are not intuitive, and there is a market for some sort of solution.
Another part of the problem at that end of the market is the new owner of the business. A guy sets up his files with the old dos program, learns it pretty well, gets to be a wiz, grows the business well, and then decides to sell the business and go play golf or something. The new owners do not know dos, do not know database basics, do not know that design or that system, and might be simple users.
And now the madness begins, when they want to move it to a windows system, and do not know the windows version either.
The mom and pop shop are usually farming their work out as far as a database system goes, or they are band-aiding it with what they have been sold on as a solution, such as that intuition impaired product of the Very Important Software Company. Let's face it, that was designed for people who are programmers, and even then it can be a rather big hassle.
The best low end rdbms I have seen is the one put out by Alpha Software, at least for the Windows platform. Granted you still have to know something, but you can get something productive on it faster than anything else out there I know. They used to be a bit bigger, but then there was the power of Microsoft marketing.
There is a market for a good solution, but sadly, the dominant player is putting out something ordinary folks cannot use. You have to be a guru.
well, the problem is not the depreciation of value. Often someone will go back through some old book, or artwork, and make something new with it. With the copyright law and patent law extending almost a century, odds are that the art will not even be around to be inspected a century later.
Maybe there should be a "use it or loose it" clause, just so that people can not arbitrarily tie things up forever.
All to often, copyright, being broad and general, lets companies tie up properties, not so that they can make money, but because then they can keep someone else from making money.
It seems to me that an awful lot of this is dependant on things like attitude of the community. For example, take a look at the content of freenet. As described, the typical member could be "a crypto-anarchist Perl hacker with a taste for the classics of literature, political screeds, 1980s pop music, Adobe software, and lots of porn"
Somehow I think that the books recommended by that cultural cross section would be different than that of the Reader's Digest (which has a circulation approaching 100 million)
I mean, how many things can I do at one time that require 100% of my attention?
no, wait, maybe my GF might want to download some pr0n for me for when we get back to the house...
. . . right.
Now the game of Lawyers, etc has been to keep changing the rules of the game, so that they are in a winning position. They keep moving the goal posts.
Too bad that the duration of copyright and patent wasn't specified in the constitution. It would have solved a lot of these issues.
An added thought to this is that since, according to the article, a lot of the research is being done of the Sun side, this will have interesting implications for the Wintel crowd.
It seems that it would make its' way into the market first via the UNIX crowd. This makes for interesting opportunities. The last two paragraphs of the article are interesting in this regard:
Mr. Sutherland, in fact, says a new magic is precisely what he has found. He draws an analogy to the first steel bridges, which were built like stone bridges, with arches. It took some time, he said, for designers to recognize the possibilities of the suspension bridge -- a form impossible to create with stone alone but which was perfectly suited to the properties of steel.
The same is true with asynchronous logic, he said. His research shows that it will be possible to double the switching speed of conventional clock-based circuits, he said, and he is confident that Sun in particular will soon begin to take advantage of that speed. "A 2X increase in speed makes a big difference," he said, "particularly if this is the only way to get that fast."
fascinating.
What makes it interesting is that you have to fundamentally redesign your your whole logical design so that you have a general purpose design.
With clocked computing, it is easy to see how you would flush buffers, etc. Clockless computing would be more problematic, and of course, would probably be proprietary.
My initial reactions are that it would work easiset in things like embedded processing. I also wonder if there would have to be some sort of evolution similar to what we have seen over the past few years with Intel, Motorola, etc.
One must not forget that the increases in performance for an awfull lot of these chips has to do with clock speed increases, as well as code designed to take advantadge of certain coding features in the hardware.
an early example of this is when the Pentiums first came out. For a while you had 486 boxes and pentiums with the same clock speeds on the market. you could compare performance between systems with the same video cards, same ram, same cache, etc. even though the chip sets with not the same, etc. This was educational. As I recall, the performance boost for somewhere not taking advantadge of the pentium feature set was aboput 20 - 25% (?) I may have this wrong, of course.
But at a time when pentium systems cost twice of a 486, it was definitely buying for the future.
Do you want to appear on Voyager before it goes off the air, to keep the Number One/Christine Chapel/Lwaxana Troi track record going? How about Series V?
I'm still doing the voice of the computer on Voyager. But I know there is no chance of appearing. Two years ago, I would have loved to work on a campaign to get me on the show, because I was thinking, after thirty-some years, why not? But then as it started to settle in -- the older you get, the wiser you get -- I started to say, not on your life.
I know absolutely nothing about the next Star Trek series. I don't think there are many people over at Paramount who do either. I haven't heard anything, not even that the main office has said, here's the money, go ahead. Those days are over.
Says an awful lot about Paramount
Bonus points! - The boss could work from home.
In Fact, you could sell the boss on this, saying that this is what you use instead of Access if you want to be "really serious". Acess is for the low end business, and you need the MS industrial products, etc.
I found this:
"Recently there has been increased emphasis on radiation effects in space due to an increasing number of satellite launches for commercial and defense systems. The natural space environment can damage electronics because of total-ionizing-dose and single-event effects (SEE). These are caused by the high energy electrons, protons, and heavy ions that are intrinsic to the space environment due to cosmic rays and the Earth's radiation belts. SEE due to cosmic rays and high-energy protons can lead to hard or soft errors in many types of devices and ICs. SEE are even possible in avionics and ground applications of advanced microelectronics with submicron feature sizes. SEE can cause failure at any point during a system's lifetime due to one inopportune particle strike, if circuits and systems are not suitably designed, tested, and built. Total dose effects accumulate over a system's lifetime, and can lead to premature performance degradation and system failure."
There are some interesting links on this at the Sandia Labs website here. Some of these go to sites that are a bit encyclopedic.
Actually, tell them that you cannot work on the project because it conflicts with a previous non-disclosure that you have with a prior client? and you cannot even reveal the client because that is part of the non-disclosure.
Sticky situation, all in all?
Seriously, I wonder how this would handle all of the various chip sets out there. There are enough variations in hardware configs that I wonder how much of it needs to be handled in the bios, and how much can be set aside until you start loading drivers?
"Failure to purchase at least one of the items presented on this web page is a violation of applicable laws"
or
"You are in violation of the patriotic consumer statutes. Your wages will be garnished to make minimum payments on the credit card charges we are incurring on your behalf. You will also be sent products our surveys indicate that you need to have."
feh. Police state nothing. We need a new word for this governmental dictactorship by commercial interests.
Without on orbit assembly capability -- I mean real work in space done by riggers who can do a day's work -- things have to be pre-assembled and taken up in big chunks, which means shuttle which means a BILLION DOLLARS A FLIGHT for 50,000 pounds or so. What we need is 20 million a flight for 10,000 pounds and that would be achievable but "there is no urgent need for that" because -- well because the stupid space station ate it all. The shuttle and the space station ate the dream. Make no mistake about that. Those monsters need to GO and be replaced by smaller, operations driven, flexible re-usable designs.
Note - original words not my own, original author linked in original message.
Nasa needs to get its act together. The Pluto mission makes sense based on orbital mechanics, etc.
but the rest of the program needs to be rethought. It has slid into boondoggle land instead of being as effective and efficient as it could be. I want them to do things right.
of course, this is the favorite buzzword, but maybe it could somehow be done P2P? I can't see how right now.