Yeah, I'd actually seen it a couple of days ago. It left me a tad disappointed. Still, their argument certainly holds weight: the point of the system is to get people to post intelligently by allowing the populace to vote, and while this worked with a numeric system, people were getting obsessed over their karma ratings.
Yeah, it was about a 35-minute drive to Manchester from Brookline, NH, two towns west of Nashua. Everyone else at the table was from Manchester or Merrimack (closer to Manchester than Brookline is). I'm hoping we can get more people to the next one - it's a good time!
I arrived at the Manchester, NH, about fifteen minutes late, since I didn't know where on route 28 the TGI Friday's was (and there are about a half million restaurants on route 28). It turned out to be right off the exit. I got there and met jmccay immediately. Next came perlmangler (sp?) and his brothers. Much beer and other potables were imbibed, and a good time was had by all, discussing karma, old hardware (VIC-20's and the ubitiquous 300 Hz Vicmodem), operating systems, jobs, wireless, etc, etc... and playing mind games with the waitress... I had to leave a little early, but I'm making a point to put aside the entire evening for the next one.
Granted I'm writing for a persepctive of someone who hasn't read your work in many years (I gobbled up the Incarnations of Immortality, Xanth and Blue Adept novels in college). Based on your writing and the snippets of biographical information you snuck into forewards, etc, you never stuck me as as "bleeding-edge hardcore technical" kind of guy. Granted also that Linux has worked hard to outgrow its reputation as a "hackers only need apply" operating system; even now, though, it does so with only a certain amount of success. I wondered: how did you discover Linux, and what brought you to adopt it (and welcome aboard, by the way!).
I'm surprised any of these suits would have ever gotten anywhere.
The point was not go "get the suit anywahere"; I strongly suspect that Ford knew it would lose once this made it to court. The point was the scare 2600 into dropping the site. Like many other large companies, Ford uses this tactic in lieu of any actual legal right to shut down registrants of domains with "ford" in their names. fordreallysucks.com is full of anectodes of this.
Fortunately, 2600 doesn't scare easily. And the precedent set will help protect other domain name registrants who are being bullied by Corporate America.
WEP = Wired Equivalent Privacy. It's a wireless security protocol that was supopsed to make your wireless communication at least as secure as if it were running across an ethernet cable (but not necesarily any more so). It gets a lot of flak because it's not very secure; but it was never really intended to be.
I can't imagine I'll find myself skulking about the streets of West London, laptop under one arm, looking for excess bandwidth any time soon, but in case I do, thank you for making some of that bandwidth available to the public.
Sounds funny...but presented with a threatening letter from the [RI|MP]AA, many ISP's won't even bother to check if the files are accessible from your access point; they'll just cut your connection. I've spoken with several people who've had this happen, including one who was never serving anything at all (or so he says;-)). Besides, serving files illegally to Cyveillance is just as illegal as serving them to the rest of the world, and I'm sure the [RI|MP]AA would be just as happy to screw you on the technicality.
Unfortunately for SuSe, Caldera, et. al, the standard most businesses are choosing is Red Hat.
If a business is going to offer a linux version of an existing product, it needs a stable, recognized, widely-used Linux platform to develop for. Writing the code to be Linux-compliant distributed source based on glibc version x, Gnome version Y, places the onus of getting the code running on either the end user or the distribution. This won't cut it in the business world, where you're expected to deliver a binary that had damned well better run once it's installed or the customer will take their business somewhere else.
More and more often, the "standard" that businesses are developing for is Red Hat. This could have the eventual effect of shutting the other players out of the enterprise platform, which, as any of them will tell you, is where most of the money is.
In order to provide a competing stable platform for enterprises to develop for (and buy software for), the aformetioned companies all threw their weight behind one joint enterprise-ready Linux platform.
Will it work? I don't know. I wish them luck, though. I have no ill-will toward Red Hat as I consider them one of the "good guys", but I'd hate to see them (or any one other distro) dominate the market.
I would belive this if people didn't already have the freedom to copy their files, download their music to MP3 players, etc. The minute Napster went de-facto belly up, did people stop downloading music? No, they just found other ways to do it. Hell, people will download spyware and install it on their system rather than give up the ability to trade files online. There's a reason Pressplay and it's kindred services are going down in flames right now. Who'd pay money for a massively overprotected, restricted, paranoid, expensive music downloading system, when there's Kazaa, Gnutella, etc.
The problem for Hollywood is that one person will find the way around their protection scheme, and the equivalent of a libcss file will enable a thousand more to write software the average Joe can use to circumvent "CSS-Plus", SDMI, or whatever it will end up being called.
As publishers notice "dang - there's lots of money to be made with science fiction", you can expect a flurry of studies, marketing strategies - imagine the N'Sync of sci-fi, as one evil example. It means the corner of the universe that used to be yours - or in the case of groups, ours, is now open to the world - with all the good and bad it brings.
Many would argue this has already happened. I noticed it after Star Wars: A New Hope came out (oops! I'm dating myself!). Publishers realized that while only around 5% of books written 10-20 years earlier were still in print, 40% of SF novels were (many of those authors that are now considered the fathers of the genre, like Asimov, Clarke, Heinlein, Silverberg, Simak, and, yes, Harlan Ellison), notr to mention HG Wells, Jules Verne and other "historical" writers. After SW:ANH came out, publishers realized there was a market for SF, and while the SF shelf space increased at the local bookstore, the average quality of the books thereupon most certainly did not.
I had a worse experience. I was a taking a graduate course in Software Engineering, ie, we were studying how to write software in groups. The teacher assigned a fairly simple project for us all to work on, with the stipulation that each of us would write part of the code, publish our API's so the others can call it, and hopefully have a perfectly working project at the end of it all. The guy who's job it was to write the main body of code threw away our API's and code, wrote the whole thing himself (badly, I might mention), and handed it in without telling any of us what he did. He missed the whole point of the project! The prof took a good look at the code and knew immediately that it was written by one person. He confronted the aformentioned student, and our entire team lost a letter on our final grades.
I don't knew GT's side of this story. I suspect that the sprit of the rule is to make every student think and work for themselves; but it's hard to "legistlate" that. At point does asking a friend for some advice become plagiarism?
Have you gotten a sense of how Microsoft views the existence of an open source alternative to.NET? Do you think that, over the long term, Microsoft will grow to love, ignore or loathe (and perhaps seek to undermine) Mono?
USers who use KDE exclusively as their desktop may not even have installed all the GNOME libraries needed to run gvim, so now they'll be able to run a GUI version of vim. It seems like these days desktop linux users have both KDE and GNOME installed from the get-go, though.
This is out of my area of expertise, but what would stop the major hardware vendors from getting together and creating an open standard for software DSP for this? Customers could still realize the cost savings associated with handling the DSP in software, and hardware manufacturers could produce hardware that would conceivably work with any OS available for that hardware platform. Everybody wins, except Microsoft.
There's something to be said for the fact that much of the community-level WiFi stuff being done today wouldn't be available if it weren't for the easy availability of cheap Linux-based routing PC's (ie, that spare 486/66 sitting in a closet). Having switch to Windows to use the WiFi-based hardware could kill the software savings.
I'm not going to hold my breath that some of the "bravest of us" are going to reverse-engineer the new Win-Wifi hardware. How long have WinModems been around, and no one's been able to reverse-engineer them yet - not that many haven't tried.
It occurs to me that AOL and their ilk committed quite a bit of code to the Moz CVS tree over the years. If they choose to conspire to help provide a free-as-in-speech alternative to IE, they have my blessings...
...and five or ten or twenty years from now they'll be able to implant one of these into your skull at birth. Just think! You'll never have to worry about being "lost" again!
Does the thought of this technology being used for... other purposes... scare the hell out of anyone else?
When I first read the headline for this story, it creeped me out. There's a scene in one of William Gibson's books (it might have been Neuromancer) where corporate employees are expected to get up in the morning and sing the company anthems in unison before starting work. I know the songs are in jest, but think about it: exactly how far away from this are we?
I'm surprised that this thread has so many responses and no one has yet mentioned Chuck Jones' brilliant collaboration with Ted Giesel (AKA Dr. Seuss). Back before the VCR made it possible to watch your favorite stuff over and over again, I used eagerly pour over TV Guide listings around Christmastime looking for anyone who would broadcast the Grinch... *Sigh* - Rest In Peace, Chuck.
Slashdot Mirror
The Scary Monkey Show
ravenpowers (I think this is the guy you were asking about).
Yeah, I'd actually seen it a couple of days ago. It left me a tad disappointed. Still, their argument certainly holds weight: the point of the system is to get people to post intelligently by allowing the populace to vote, and while this worked with a numeric system, people were getting obsessed over their karma ratings.
Yeah, it was about a 35-minute drive to Manchester from Brookline, NH, two towns west of Nashua. Everyone else at the table was from Manchester or Merrimack (closer to Manchester than Brookline is). I'm hoping we can get more people to the next one - it's a good time!
I arrived at the Manchester, NH, about fifteen minutes late, since I didn't know where on route 28 the TGI Friday's was (and there are about a half million restaurants on route 28). It turned out to be right off the exit. I got there and met jmccay immediately. Next came perlmangler (sp?) and his brothers. Much beer and other potables were imbibed, and a good time was had by all, discussing karma, old hardware (VIC-20's and the ubitiquous 300 Hz Vicmodem), operating systems, jobs, wireless, etc, etc ... and playing mind games with the waitress... I had to leave a little early, but I'm making a point to put aside the entire evening for the next one.
Right here.
Granted I'm writing for a persepctive of someone who hasn't read your work in many years (I gobbled up the Incarnations of Immortality, Xanth and Blue Adept novels in college). Based on your writing and the snippets of biographical information you snuck into forewards, etc, you never stuck me as as "bleeding-edge hardcore technical" kind of guy. Granted also that Linux has worked hard to outgrow its reputation as a "hackers only need apply" operating system; even now, though, it does so with only a certain amount of success. I wondered: how did you discover Linux, and what brought you to adopt it (and welcome aboard, by the way!).
I'm surprised any of these suits would have ever gotten anywhere.
The point was not go "get the suit anywahere"; I strongly suspect that Ford knew it would lose once this made it to court. The point was the scare 2600 into dropping the site. Like many other large companies, Ford uses this tactic in lieu of any actual legal right to shut down registrants of domains with "ford" in their names. fordreallysucks.com is full of anectodes of this.
Fortunately, 2600 doesn't scare easily. And the precedent set will help protect other domain name registrants who are being bullied by Corporate America.
WEP = Wired Equivalent Privacy. It's a wireless security protocol that was supopsed to make your wireless communication at least as secure as if it were running across an ethernet cable (but not necesarily any more so). It gets a lot of flak because it's not very secure; but it was never really intended to be.
I can't imagine I'll find myself skulking about the streets of West London, laptop under one arm, looking for excess bandwidth any time soon, but in case I do, thank you for making some of that bandwidth available to the public.
...and 4,000 year old mummies coming back to life is completely realistic...
There is an open source version of Cyc called OpenCyc, and it's available right here.
Sounds funny...but presented with a threatening letter from the [RI|MP]AA, many ISP's won't even bother to check if the files are accessible from your access point; they'll just cut your connection. I've spoken with several people who've had this happen, including one who was never serving anything at all (or so he says ;-)). Besides, serving files illegally to Cyveillance is just as illegal as serving them to the rest of the world, and I'm sure the [RI|MP]AA would be just as happy to screw you on the technicality.
Unfortunately for SuSe, Caldera, et. al, the standard most businesses are choosing is Red Hat.
If a business is going to offer a linux version of an existing product, it needs a stable, recognized, widely-used Linux platform to develop for. Writing the code to be Linux-compliant distributed source based on glibc version x, Gnome version Y, places the onus of getting the code running on either the end user or the distribution. This won't cut it in the business world, where you're expected to deliver a binary that had damned well better run once it's installed or the customer will take their business somewhere else.
More and more often, the "standard" that businesses are developing for is Red Hat. This could have the eventual effect of shutting the other players out of the enterprise platform, which, as any of them will tell you, is where most of the money is.
In order to provide a competing stable platform for enterprises to develop for (and
buy software for), the aformetioned companies all threw their weight behind one joint enterprise-ready Linux platform.
Will it work? I don't know. I wish them luck, though. I have no ill-will toward Red Hat as I consider them one of the "good guys", but I'd hate to see them (or any one other distro) dominate the market.
I would belive this if people didn't already have the freedom to copy their files, download their music to MP3 players, etc. The minute Napster went de-facto belly up, did people stop downloading music? No, they just found other ways to do it. Hell, people will download spyware and install it on their system rather than give up the ability to trade files online. There's a reason Pressplay and it's kindred services are going down in flames right now. Who'd pay money for a massively overprotected, restricted, paranoid, expensive music downloading system, when there's Kazaa, Gnutella, etc.
The problem for Hollywood is that one person will find the way around their protection scheme, and the equivalent of a libcss file will enable a thousand more to write software the average Joe can use to circumvent "CSS-Plus", SDMI, or whatever it will end up being called.
As publishers notice "dang - there's lots of money to be made with science fiction", you can expect a flurry of studies, marketing strategies - imagine the N'Sync of sci-fi, as one evil example. It means the corner of the universe that used to be yours - or in the case of groups, ours, is now open to the world - with all the good and bad it brings.
Many would argue this has already happened. I noticed it after Star Wars: A New Hope came out (oops! I'm dating myself!). Publishers realized that while only around 5% of books written 10-20 years earlier were still in print, 40% of SF novels were (many of those authors that are now considered the fathers of the genre, like Asimov, Clarke, Heinlein, Silverberg, Simak, and, yes, Harlan Ellison), notr to mention HG Wells, Jules Verne and other "historical" writers. After SW:ANH came out, publishers realized there was a market for SF, and while the SF shelf space increased at the local bookstore, the average quality of the books thereupon most certainly did not.
I had a worse experience. I was a taking a graduate course in Software Engineering, ie, we were studying how to write software in groups. The teacher assigned a fairly simple project for us all to work on, with the stipulation that each of us would write part of the code, publish our API's so the others can call it, and hopefully have a perfectly working project at the end of it all. The guy who's job it was to write the main body of code threw away our API's and code, wrote the whole thing himself (badly, I might mention), and handed it in without telling any of us what he did. He missed the whole point of the project! The prof took a good look at the code and knew immediately that it was written by one person. He confronted the aformentioned student, and our entire team lost a letter on our final grades.
I don't knew GT's side of this story. I suspect that the sprit of the rule is to make every student think and work for themselves; but it's hard to "legistlate" that. At point does asking a friend for some advice become plagiarism?
Nat,
.NET? Do you think that, over the long term, Microsoft will grow to love, ignore or loathe (and perhaps seek to undermine) Mono?
Have you gotten a sense of how Microsoft views the existence of an open source alternative to
Wouldn't it be called... KDEmacs ?
USers who use KDE exclusively as their desktop may not even have installed all the GNOME libraries needed to run gvim, so now they'll be able to run a GUI version of vim. It seems like these days desktop linux users have both KDE and GNOME installed from the get-go, though.
A couple of thoughts here:
This is out of my area of expertise, but what would stop the major hardware vendors from getting together and creating an open standard for software DSP for this? Customers could still realize the cost savings associated with handling the DSP in software, and hardware manufacturers could produce hardware that would conceivably work with any OS available for that hardware platform. Everybody wins, except Microsoft.
There's something to be said for the fact that much of the community-level WiFi stuff being done today wouldn't be available if it weren't for the easy availability of cheap Linux-based routing PC's (ie, that spare 486/66 sitting in a closet). Having switch to Windows to use the WiFi-based hardware could kill the software savings.
I'm not going to hold my breath that some of the "bravest of us" are going to reverse-engineer the new Win-Wifi hardware. How long have WinModems been around, and no one's been able to reverse-engineer them yet - not that many haven't tried.
It occurs to me that AOL and their ilk committed quite a bit of code to the Moz CVS tree over the years. If they choose to conspire to help provide a free-as-in-speech alternative to IE, they have my blessings...
...and five or ten or twenty years from now they'll be able to implant one of these into your skull at birth. Just think! You'll never have to worry about being "lost" again!
... other purposes ... scare the hell out of anyone else?
Does the thought of this technology being used for
When I first read the headline for this story, it creeped me out. There's a scene in one of William Gibson's books (it might have been Neuromancer) where corporate employees are expected to get up in the morning and sing the company anthems in unison before starting work. I know the songs are in jest, but think about it: exactly how far away from this are we?
I'm surprised that this thread has so many responses and no one has yet mentioned Chuck Jones' brilliant collaboration with Ted Giesel (AKA Dr. Seuss). Back before the VCR made it possible to watch your favorite stuff over and over again, I used eagerly pour over TV Guide listings around Christmastime looking for anyone who would broadcast the Grinch... *Sigh* - Rest In Peace, Chuck.
This is the only mirror I've found to work. Thank you, thank you, thank you!