Whatever happened to offices? Some years ago, you always heard how much productivity of Engineering staff was enhanced by offices, but now, all you hear about is that "open" workspaces encourage collaboration.
Two factors, I'd say. One is cost. You can set up people in cubies far more cost effectively, and more densely (yet still reasonable) than with offices requiring studs, drywall, windows, frames, doors, in-wall wiring, and so on.
Plus, cubies aren't a "leasehold improvement" that creating many offices would be, when getting into a lease. Furniture has more flexibility this way, and can be taken with you. Leaseholds can't.
And as you mention collaboration is another point. It's not just an excuse, but a reality, in my experience. I've worked with the same group of people (in the same company) in offices, and then later in cubies, and there was far more interaction and communication in the latter. A company should provide ample meeting rooms for when a group needs to get together to discuss something (without bothering their cubie neighbors), or to make certain phone calls, or whatever.
Independant of the cost factor, if I were to create an office from scratch, I'd use cubies (errr, workstations) rather than offices for all.
Of course, it does depend upon the nature of the work. Web-related programming generally works well with lots of collaboration. Cranking out the latest encryption technology or MPEG5 encoding algorithm, is probably something a programmer would best do in a quiet office.
I always saw directional IEEE 802 as very cool. Since you are keeping the same wattage on the emission, are you clear legally (as far as the FCC goes)? It makes sense that you wouldn't be violating anything; rather than radiating it out weakly in all directions, you're focusing that same energy on a tiny spot in the distance. In either case, you're not upsetting the airwaves in general for other people.
Man, far more than the usual number of knee-jerk reactions, this time:-)
First of all, didn't Divx require you to buy a special Divx player? That's a big difference, investing in a new technology that *only* supports limited use.
Second, regarding the waste factor: have you ever been to McDonald's? Or any fast food place? The amount of trash one gets is huge as compared to a single disc. (And the disc seems to start biodegrading anyway, the minute you open it:-) Have you ever subscribed to MSDN? You end up throwing out dozens of CD's a month (or a DVD or two a month now). And I've certainly created many times more coasters than the number of movies I've watched in my life.
I'm not saying more waste is good, just that in perspective, this isn't a huge factor.
This needs to be compared to rentals, not purchase. I've spent more money on Blockbuster's annoying but smart (for them) return policy; midnight the next day. It lulls you into a sense that if you don't get around to it tonight, you can watch it tomorrow, and return it before midnight; tomorrow night comes, you watch the movie, and are too tired to return it (I always:-). They spent a lot of time coming up with that policy. So I end up paying late fees on top of the not-so-cheap rental. I personally find returns horribly inconvenient. And the rental companies no doubt find them extra labour to process.
The rental places could also have a better rate at movie availability. I would guess that they could predict the total number of rentals more easily than the daily rates. So they stock up, and you can be assurred the movie will be in. In fact, the day the movie is released, you stand a *greater* chance of being able to get it. That's when people most want it, too. That kind of works out well.
The main disadvantages I see are 1) storage space required in the store will be greater; 2) there will be less older run movies available, since they don't stick around. If this takes off, six months after release, it may be very hard to get a copy of a movie. And, as mentioned, there will be some waste, although that can be played off a bit against gas, pollution, and labour in handling returns.
I wonder if they could make them taste like chocoloate or nachos? $2 or $4 for a rental, that would be a nice tasty snack afterwards would be very cool, and avoid the waste problem, too (well, at least modify the waste problem to an organic one:-) There'd also be something symbolic in becoming one with a movie you really liked, and even one that sucked and deserves no better fate than being eaten:-)
Meanwhile, the Bill and Melinda Gates foundation is giving extraordinary sums of money to real nuts and bolts making the world a better place kinds of causes. Gates could literally turn out to be the most significant philanthropist in the history of the world. They're giving so much money that you can almost see a chunk of what you spend on MS going to a good cause.
An awful lot of his charitable contributions are for putting Windows in schools. Not only cranks up Windows sales, gets a tax credit, and further entrenches Windows' monopoly in one of the most critical places. Seems like a pretty good deal.
I believe his foundation (run by his dad, I think) does also contribute to other things, but the overall contributions, while large in absolute terms, are tiny in comparison to his wealth. Wasn't it Ted Turner that challenged Bill and the other Billionaires, to contribute more significant portions of their fortunes to the public good? And set a good example through his own contributions. (And I don't Bill or friends rose to the challenge at all.)
It's a shame that 1/4 of the people responding did it in opinionated, baseless ways, and had their say thrown out. (I'm assuming most of these were negative:-)
While a 2:1 margin of negative versus positive response to the lame-ass settlement is good to see, it could have been 3:1 if people would have expressed real reasons as to why the settlement was not adequate, rather than ranting.
This is exactly why copyleft is IMPORTANT to keeping free and open source projects free and open and why the X.11 or other so called "commercial exploitation friendly" licenses are indeed very bad. I am glad to see the people behind WINE understand this although it is a shame they had to learn this lesson as a result of abuse by others.
You make a statement, but give absolutely no evidence why this be "indeed very bad." FreeBSD and the X Window system are thriving, from what I can see, and haven't been hampered/killed by their "commercial-exploitation friendly" licenses.
In fact, I'd hazard a guess that X would be in far *worse* shape today, if it were GPL'd. Before Linux and FreeBSD sprang into popularity, X was kept alive largely by closed-source commercial concerns (Sun, HP, SCO, etc.), who very possibly would not have used it, were it to have the "forced openness" of GPL.
I think LGPL for Wine is great, and will bode well for it's continued growth in functionality and popularity.
I think this is an excellent idea. I move back and forth between work daily, and it always seems wasteful to carry a laptop, when all I really need is my data/os/environment moved, and not all the peripherals, screen, keyboard. I'm not using them in the car.
I realize this was for Yahoo Finance, and not exactly aimed at the SlashDot crowd, but seriously:
that runs at 800 megahertz, or 800 million cycles per second.
Sheeesh. Like explaining that 800 megahertz is 800 million cycles per second is going to clue folks in with such valuable information. "Gawrsh, that's a lot of cycles per second.":-)
And IBM's statements seem weird:
Ocheltree said IBM doesn't have specific plans to sell the prototype, which could be ready for market in few years.
Ready for the market in a few years??? In a few years, this thing should be *way* obsolete, with tiny pocket computers more powerful than our desktops of today. This thing would be useful and interesting today, not a year from now.
IBM is talking to computer makers and customers about how it could be used, he said.
``We're trying to understand how people would use it and interact with it,'' Ocheltree said.
I thought IBM had top notch people in usability, market research, laptop design, and so on. It seems strange to hear them say "we have this cool technology, but we're not sure how people would use it." I can think of a dozen ways it could be turned into a useful product. I guess it's good that they're asking the industry, but it sounds like these guys are a bit directionless, and will end up deliverying too little, way too late.
Too bad, I'd likely buy one of these if it were available today.
For those not taking the time to dig it up themselves, on woz.com:
I was hurt in later years when I heard that Steve was paid more than he'd told me, and I don't think that I hurt easily. But it was a long time ago and I prefer to get away from it. Steve has always been a good friend to me in many ways more than just palling around. It's so ancient that maybe it didn't happen, and maybe the Atari people that said it and wrote it were wrong in their own memories. I do believe that this is possible. Also, if my own self, or my own children, or my own friends did such a thing in their life, it's easy to excuse it if the circumstances were as I described. It's not 'necessarily' akin to stealing. If there was some dishonesty, I'm over that. Who hasn't done some things that would be considered bad, anyway? I doubt that I'd find such a person interesting.
Ouch! What a guy! From my perspective, that only enhances my view of Woz, and diminishes that of Jobs. He discovered Jobs probably screwed him, but prefers to make bygones be bygones. Maybe he's just naive, or maybe he's just a great guy (I really suspect the latter). I hope to be that big a man someday about folks who have screwed me over in my career.
More power to the Woz. He exudes hard work, talent, integrity, caring, and understanding. We should all do so well to live up to that.
I used to get a chuckle out of the Simpeons' line, regarding the US festival, "the guy from *what* computer?" But the guy was obviously trying to make a difference and have an impact on society back then, just as he does now in more personal ways through his teaching career. He's one of the few real heroes out there in this industry. I raise a glass to you, Woz...
I had always pictured Wozniak as the tehcnical genius behind Apple, Jobs as the guy who was btter able to commercialize and sell the product. But both as key partners, and ethical in their behaviour.
I've read Jobs is hard on his employees, but I've seen that some of the best and most successful leaders sometimes are.
Then I read this:
Bushnell assigned Steve Jobs to design the circuitry for Breakout, but it was too difficult for Jobs. He asked his friend (and Apple co-founder) Steve Wozniak to help, and promised to split the payment from Bushnell. Wozniak did it in four days and was paid $350. But it turned out that Bushnell actually paid $5,000 for Breakout -- Jobs pocketed the remaining $4,650.
Now, over the years, partially due to misrepresentations of myself in the media, I've learned to take public reports with a grain of salt. Anyone have any confirmation or details on the above statement?
My opinion of Wozniak (which couldn't be higher), wouldn't be harmed; but my business admiration for Jobs would be seriously affected if this were true. I don't mind business people being harsh, as long as they're fair, and this most certainly wouldn't have been, if it were true.
(On the other hand, I've seen people with big egos justify in their own mind that they were due the majority of the benefit, while "worker bees" did all the work. So it might just be a case of that...)
Actually, I thought I heard that Google uses single IDE drives, in a whack of distributed generic PC's. No SCSI involved.
And as several other posters commented, *YES*, I AGREE, if speed vs. cost is a factor, then the 65x caculation is less relevant. But it'd take a heck of a lot of requirement for speed to overcome a 65x cost savings (put 30x more machines in place at half the cost, and get the performance you need, with the right architecture).
And one of the most popular (my favorite) search engines might just mandate speed to the point that a 65x cost penality is *well* worth it.
Man, I wish people would *read* the posts in detail before posting. (Not that *I've* ever been guilty of that:-
On the other hand, walking down the street, do we have a reasonable expectation of privacy? I'd love to say yes, but that's not the case.
Ask any celebrity, and I think they'd give you the real answer to this. They can't walk down the street without having zero privacy. Similarly, the annoyances of paparazzi are due to the fact that when you're in public, you lose privacy. (I believe that as a celebrity, the privacy you can legally expect in public is even lower, actually.)
hmm...I guess then we'd need RF detector Detectors...
:-) The radar detector detector's that the police use, rely upon the fact that radar detectors use a crystal of similar frequencies (using the heterodyne principle, that if you mix a frequency with another, you not only get the sum, but the difference, or something like that:-) And these detectors leak enough of that frequency that they can be spotted.
Directionally finding a signal within a bandwidth can be done without such leakage:-)
Again, this is all theoretical stuff. I agree with the folks who say that the police will probably never bother with something like this.
But I disagree with the over-reactive folks that think they can hide behind privacy protections or technological confusion to avoid being caught on something like this. Legally, and technologically, I think the's an open and shut case. But I seriously doubt law enforcement would ever bother to pursue it. It's not because they couldn't, but a matter of priorities, I guess. (What else *are* they doing? Solving all the murders? Winning the war on drugs? I don't knock the folks out there fighting this noble cause, but given the lack of progress on some of these more visible issues, I wonder of more focus upon more personal issues such as solving B&E might be appropriate. I'm not objective on this point, however...)
In another post (on another topic, I think), a few folks mentioned that even with *pictures* of people who broke into their houses, the police were unable/unwilling/unmotivated/whatever to use that information. This is very frightening and disappoinging to me, but for similar reasons, short-range public P2P would probably never be prosecuted.
Sure, finding one source amongst hundreds of sources is a major problem. Mid 1900's wartime kind of problems.
But finding one IEEE 802.2/11 lan singal in a mall, and then locating the source of the signal within that bandwidth??? Easy stuff:-) Seriously, anything in the 2.4ghz range for wireless lan is going to be blantantly obvious to find in close range. Yes, specific frequencies within that range might be used for other purposes, but in much more distant proximities, so they'd be tiny background noise.
Again, where are the electrical engineers to confirm what I'm saying, or to tell me I'm full of shit? Is it strictly coders on slashdot these days?:-)
Is there an engineer in the house? Seriously. You could be right, although I always believed spread spectrum prevented interference with a specific frequency. And it's spread within the spectrum, not spacially. If you're *looking* everywhere in that *band* of spread spectrum for RF energy, you should be able to find it. I could be wrong, though.
If I put a lead wall on one side of my laptop, and get a certain signal strength, and put it on the other side of my laptop, and get a lower one, I've found directional information. And I've seen such effects with wireless lan cards. Despite being spread in the spectrum usage, the RF energy still propagates outwards in straight lines, it doesn't just "spread around the area":-)
As part of the token exchange to setup the P2P wireless exchange and encryption, the peers also exchange a randomized one time frequency map for the exchange. Just try to triangulate that!
If you've found someone you know beforehand, exchanged private keys, and are doing encrypted stuff, yeah, they might find the signal, but won't have a clue what the contents is. But that's not public piracy, as discussed in the original article.
If this thing is generally accessable to the public, or even a subset of hacker subculture, there's nothing stopping a police officer from using the system himself, going to the mall, doing a key exchange with an individual on the system, whose PDA then presents a bunch of pirate software/music to download. Doesn't matter a bit if there was a key exchange, if ability to partake in that key exchange as a partner is a public ability.
But again, this is specifically targeting you in the privacy of your own home, which is highly respected in American law. They can't peek inside your house (with or without technology) if they have no reason to believe you're performing an illegal activity.
The police also point a radar at the streets in public, where speeding crimes are likely to occur, and press charges accordingly. If people are likely to speed on public streets, and swap songs in malls, then I think the police will be well within their rights to monitor and prosecute. (Again, if they think it's worth their while; I'm just saying legally, I'd guess that they could do it).
And to the poster who said probably cause doesn't apply to groups, I've never been talking about frisking down groups of people in malls, but spotting an individual, and honing in on them with a directional antennae. You don't need to search a group; you can spot the illegal activity on your pirate-walkman-thingy, and use your directional antenna to find the person sending the illegal signals. QED. Absolutely no different from getting signals on your radar gun about someone who is breaking the law, singling them out, and prosecuting them. (In fact, I'd think directionally finding an IEEE signal in public would be far more accurate than a radar gun aimed down a highway.)
Even if you never had a beta-tester contract with them (which would have been a good idea), I think there's enough historical precedent about the role of a beta tester that you're on pretty good ground.
It's unheard of for beta testers to obtain IP rights to what they're testing, so without a contract giving them such rights, I'd say the reasonable assumptions for both parties would be that there is no IP ownership promised to any beta tester.
I think they'd have a more difficult time in court proving that there *was* some reason for them to think they should have partial IP ownership, when the standard way of doing things clearly is not this way.
I'd either ignore them, and let them fade away, or hire a good IP lawyer, who probably wouldn't need to spend much time on the issue, sending them a one page letter outlining why their claims are baseless.
The police can't really do that. Well, at least here in America anyway. They can't just stop people on the street, searching each and every one of them to see if one might possibly have this offending device in a pocket or backpack.
Huh? If they have probable cause, they can search you. If they see drugs through your car window, they can search your car.
And I'm pretty sure publicly emitting radio waves with pirated music and software is pretty clear-cut probably cause for a search. The fact you can't see the radio waves without a device, doesn't matter. They use other electronic devices to measure and determine illegal activity on a regular basis (radar).
And no, they wouldn't need fancy equipment to "triangulate" as another poster suggested, or have to search a dozen people. Triangulation is used for more wide-area stuff (cell phone towers). If you're close enough for IEEE 802.2 communication, I'd think a simple directional signal finder would suffice. I'm not an engineer (nor a cop, nor a lawyer:-), and maybe an engineer with more RF experience than I can comment, but I think spotting an IEEE 802.2 card in an area with the radius of a few hundred meters would be a simple weekend project. (Directional antennae, filter circuitry for the 2.4ghz range, and a signal strength meter.)
Now, I'm not saying the cops would actually bother to do this. However, if it became as popular as the walkman, I bet industry would make sure they do start enforcing it, and it wouldn't be that hard to do.
Now if the network were closed and encrypted, they wouldn't know the content. But that kind of defeats the purpose of this public-oriented system. If the public can sign up, so can enforcement.
The whole thing just strikes me as akin to an electronic equivalent of selling pirated video tapes or CD's on the street corner. Definitely illegal.
North American society seems far more permissive of things done in the privacy of one's own home. Illegal things done visibly (even if only electronically-visible) in public, is far more risky, I'd say.
I think the technological possibilities of this type of system are very exciting, but pirating music and software isn't likely to be the best use of it. (Swapping restaurant reviews for the area, and other city-information type of thing would be very cool.)
This reminds me of the system (in Japan, think?) where people carry little wireless devices saying what they like in a partner, and they help spot folks which are good matches. Kinda silly, but interesting nonetheless.
On the distributed P2P system, where stuff is traded as people walk by, it seems like this is a pretty simple system to thwart. Police officers could simply carry a unit themselves, and when they see a system offering up copyrighted or pirated content, they just confiscate the gear. Pretty simple. I don't think you'll ever see it take off because of this (among other reasons).
Real advertisements in games that are attempting to simulate reality, seems like a boon to me. And if helps pay the bills for the game maker, more power to them.
And dynamically changing ads would actually ad more interest to the game. I think it'd be cool to be distracted momentarily by a new interesting ad, and become someone else's frag due to the distraction. Hah!
I find it hard to see the down side. In movies, I think there's a far greater likelihood of compromising the creator's artistic integrity (when each shot starts with a well-framed shot of a Pepsi can:-); in games, where the viewpoints are less well defined, and user controlled, I think it's a lot harder to compromise the game's value.
Whenver the ads rolover, I'd be just like Homer when all the new billboard's come out. Might even end up joining a clown college because of it. "Dooo doo doo do do do do doooo doo dooo dooo"...:-)
We're still a changing species - but we're looking at ourselves in a relatively small time window. Modern society in comparison to evolution is a silly idea. The window isn't large enough to fit 'evolution' in.
This is a very good point. The worldwide mixing of human genes is a relatively recent phenomenon, and who's to say in 10,000 years (a mere blip in evolutionary terms) people will still intermix worldwide in the same way. It'd just take one good nucular holocaust, world-wide virus outbreak, comet strike (or other social reason for a massive population drop or intentional quarrantine), or breakdown in the technology of the global transportation for us to largely separate and differentiate again.
There's too many possibilities over the enormous timeframes we're talking, for us to make any assumptions of stability.
On the other hand, humans are inherently curious creatures, so the tendency may be to spread and intermix, no matter what the situation, once the population reaches a certain critical mass again.
D'oh! The new touchpad driver on this laptop is a little sensitive; I submitted before finishing:-)
I was going to say that they could have devoted the same time, effort, and bandwidth to something like broadcast text from the Gutenberg project, and done something useful (as well as novel).
Slashdot Mirror
Plus, cubies aren't a "leasehold improvement" that creating many offices would be, when getting into a lease. Furniture has more flexibility this way, and can be taken with you. Leaseholds can't.
And as you mention collaboration is another point. It's not just an excuse, but a reality, in my experience. I've worked with the same group of people (in the same company) in offices, and then later in cubies, and there was far more interaction and communication in the latter. A company should provide ample meeting rooms for when a group needs to get together to discuss something (without bothering their cubie neighbors), or to make certain phone calls, or whatever.
Independant of the cost factor, if I were to create an office from scratch, I'd use cubies (errr, workstations) rather than offices for all.
Of course, it does depend upon the nature of the work. Web-related programming generally works well with lots of collaboration. Cranking out the latest encryption technology or MPEG5 encoding algorithm, is probably something a programmer would best do in a quiet office.
-me
I always saw directional IEEE 802 as very cool. Since you are keeping the same wattage on the emission, are you clear legally (as far as the FCC goes)? It makes sense that you wouldn't be violating anything; rather than radiating it out weakly in all directions, you're focusing that same energy on a tiny spot in the distance. In either case, you're not upsetting the airwaves in general for other people.
Anyone know?
-me
Man, far more than the usual number of knee-jerk reactions, this time :-)
:-) Have you ever subscribed to MSDN? You end up throwing out dozens of CD's a month (or a DVD or two a month now). And I've certainly created many times more coasters than the number of movies I've watched in my life.
:-). They spent a lot of time coming up with that policy. So I end up paying late fees on top of the not-so-cheap rental. I personally find returns horribly inconvenient. And the rental companies no doubt find them extra labour to process.
:-) There'd also be something symbolic in becoming one with a movie you really liked, and even one that sucked and deserves no better fate than being eaten :-)
First of all, didn't Divx require you to buy a special Divx player? That's a big difference, investing in a new technology that *only* supports limited use.
Second, regarding the waste factor: have you ever been to McDonald's? Or any fast food place? The amount of trash one gets is huge as compared to a single disc. (And the disc seems to start biodegrading anyway, the minute you open it
I'm not saying more waste is good, just that in perspective, this isn't a huge factor.
This needs to be compared to rentals, not purchase. I've spent more money on Blockbuster's annoying but smart (for them) return policy; midnight the next day. It lulls you into a sense that if you don't get around to it tonight, you can watch it tomorrow, and return it before midnight; tomorrow night comes, you watch the movie, and are too tired to return it (I always
The rental places could also have a better rate at movie availability. I would guess that they could predict the total number of rentals more easily than the daily rates. So they stock up, and you can be assurred the movie will be in. In fact, the day the movie is released, you stand a *greater* chance of being able to get it. That's when people most want it, too. That kind of works out well.
The main disadvantages I see are 1) storage space required in the store will be greater; 2) there will be less older run movies available, since they don't stick around. If this takes off, six months after release, it may be very hard to get a copy of a movie. And, as mentioned, there will be some waste, although that can be played off a bit against gas, pollution, and labour in handling returns.
I wonder if they could make them taste like chocoloate or nachos? $2 or $4 for a rental, that would be a nice tasty snack afterwards would be very cool, and avoid the waste problem, too (well, at least modify the waste problem to an organic one
-dale
I believe his foundation (run by his dad, I think) does also contribute to other things, but the overall contributions, while large in absolute terms, are tiny in comparison to his wealth. Wasn't it Ted Turner that challenged Bill and the other Billionaires, to contribute more significant portions of their fortunes to the public good? And set a good example through his own contributions. (And I don't Bill or friends rose to the challenge at all.)
-me
It's a shame that 1/4 of the people responding did it in opinionated, baseless ways, and had their say thrown out. (I'm assuming most of these were negative :-)
While a 2:1 margin of negative versus positive response to the lame-ass settlement is good to see, it could have been 3:1 if people would have expressed real reasons as to why the settlement was not adequate, rather than ranting.
In any case, a good result.
-me
In fact, I'd hazard a guess that X would be in far *worse* shape today, if it were GPL'd. Before Linux and FreeBSD sprang into popularity, X was kept alive largely by closed-source commercial concerns (Sun, HP, SCO, etc.), who very possibly would not have used it, were it to have the "forced openness" of GPL.
I think LGPL for Wine is great, and will bode well for it's continued growth in functionality and popularity.
-me
I realize this was for Yahoo Finance, and not exactly aimed at the SlashDot crowd, but seriously:
Sheeesh. Like explaining that 800 megahertz is 800 million cycles per second is going to clue folks in with such valuable information. "Gawrsh, that's a lot of cycles per second."
And IBM's statements seem weird:Ready for the market in a few years??? In a few years, this thing should be *way* obsolete, with tiny pocket computers more powerful than our desktops of today. This thing would be useful and interesting today, not a year from now.I thought IBM had top notch people in usability, market research, laptop design, and so on. It seems strange to hear them say "we have this cool technology, but we're not sure how people would use it." I can think of a dozen ways it could be turned into a useful product. I guess it's good that they're asking the industry, but it sounds like these guys are a bit directionless, and will end up deliverying too little, way too late.
Too bad, I'd likely buy one of these if it were available today.
-me
Did the 'net get SlashDotted today?
Oh, maybe not; I think they forgot to include a URL for this Internet thing. I'll post the "root URL" here:
http://
Don't everybody visit at once.
-me
As I indicate in another post, I see this is indeed true.
Maybe Woz has forgiven Jobs, but I haven't!
-me
Ouch! What a guy! From my perspective, that only enhances my view of Woz, and diminishes that of Jobs. He discovered Jobs probably screwed him, but prefers to make bygones be bygones. Maybe he's just naive, or maybe he's just a great guy (I really suspect the latter). I hope to be that big a man someday about folks who have screwed me over in my career.
More power to the Woz. He exudes hard work, talent, integrity, caring, and understanding. We should all do so well to live up to that.
I used to get a chuckle out of the Simpeons' line, regarding the US festival, "the guy from *what* computer?" But the guy was obviously trying to make a difference and have an impact on society back then, just as he does now in more personal ways through his teaching career. He's one of the few real heroes out there in this industry. I raise a glass to you, Woz...
-me
Please, mod this response up! Without centralized control, distributed source control is worthless!
-me
I've read Jobs is hard on his employees, but I've seen that some of the best and most successful leaders sometimes are.
Then I read this:
Now, over the years, partially due to misrepresentations of myself in the media, I've learned to take public reports with a grain of salt. Anyone have any confirmation or details on the above statement?
My opinion of Wozniak (which couldn't be higher), wouldn't be harmed; but my business admiration for Jobs would be seriously affected if this were true. I don't mind business people being harsh, as long as they're fair, and this most certainly wouldn't have been, if it were true.
(On the other hand, I've seen people with big egos justify in their own mind that they were due the majority of the benefit, while "worker bees" did all the work. So it might just be a case of that...)
-me
Actually, I thought I heard that Google uses single IDE drives, in a whack of distributed generic PC's. No SCSI involved.
:-
And as several other posters commented, *YES*, I AGREE, if speed vs. cost is a factor, then the 65x caculation is less relevant. But it'd take a heck of a lot of requirement for speed to overcome a 65x cost savings (put 30x more machines in place at half the cost, and get the performance you need, with the right architecture).
And one of the most popular (my favorite) search engines might just mandate speed to the point that a 65x cost penality is *well* worth it.
Man, I wish people would *read* the posts in detail before posting. (Not that *I've* ever been guilty of that
-me
Ask any celebrity, and I think they'd give you the real answer to this. They can't walk down the street without having zero privacy. Similarly, the annoyances of paparazzi are due to the fact that when you're in public, you lose privacy. (I believe that as a celebrity, the privacy you can legally expect in public is even lower, actually.)
:-) The radar detector detector's that the police use, rely upon the fact that radar detectors use a crystal of similar frequencies (using the heterodyne principle, that if you mix a frequency with another, you not only get the sum, but the difference, or something like that
Directionally finding a signal within a bandwidth can be done without such leakage
Again, this is all theoretical stuff. I agree with the folks who say that the police will probably never bother with something like this.
But I disagree with the over-reactive folks that think they can hide behind privacy protections or technological confusion to avoid being caught on something like this. Legally, and technologically, I think the's an open and shut case. But I seriously doubt law enforcement would ever bother to pursue it. It's not because they couldn't, but a matter of priorities, I guess. (What else *are* they doing? Solving all the murders? Winning the war on drugs? I don't knock the folks out there fighting this noble cause, but given the lack of progress on some of these more visible issues, I wonder of more focus upon more personal issues such as solving B&E might be appropriate. I'm not objective on this point, however...)
In another post (on another topic, I think), a few folks mentioned that even with *pictures* of people who broke into their houses, the police were unable/unwilling/unmotivated/whatever to use that information. This is very frightening and disappoinging to me, but for similar reasons, short-range public P2P would probably never be prosecuted.
-me
Sure, finding one source amongst hundreds of sources is a major problem. Mid 1900's wartime kind of problems.
:-) Seriously, anything in the 2.4ghz range for wireless lan is going to be blantantly obvious to find in close range. Yes, specific frequencies within that range might be used for other purposes, but in much more distant proximities, so they'd be tiny background noise.
:-)
But finding one IEEE 802.2/11 lan singal in a mall, and then locating the source of the signal within that bandwidth??? Easy stuff
Again, where are the electrical engineers to confirm what I'm saying, or to tell me I'm full of shit? Is it strictly coders on slashdot these days?
-me
Is there an engineer in the house? Seriously. You could be right, although I always believed spread spectrum prevented interference with a specific frequency. And it's spread within the spectrum, not spacially. If you're *looking* everywhere in that *band* of spread spectrum for RF energy, you should be able to find it. I could be wrong, though.
If I put a lead wall on one side of my laptop, and get a certain signal strength, and put it on the other side of my laptop, and get a lower one, I've found directional information. And I've seen such effects with wireless lan cards. Despite being spread in the spectrum usage, the RF energy still propagates outwards in straight lines, it doesn't just "spread around the area"
If you've found someone you know beforehand, exchanged private keys, and are doing encrypted stuff, yeah, they might find the signal, but won't have a clue what the contents is. But that's not public piracy, as discussed in the original article.
If this thing is generally accessable to the public, or even a subset of hacker subculture, there's nothing stopping a police officer from using the system himself, going to the mall, doing a key exchange with an individual on the system, whose PDA then presents a bunch of pirate software/music to download. Doesn't matter a bit if there was a key exchange, if ability to partake in that key exchange as a partner is a public ability.
-me
But again, this is specifically targeting you in the privacy of your own home, which is highly respected in American law. They can't peek inside your house (with or without technology) if they have no reason to believe you're performing an illegal activity.
The police also point a radar at the streets in public, where speeding crimes are likely to occur, and press charges accordingly. If people are likely to speed on public streets, and swap songs in malls, then I think the police will be well within their rights to monitor and prosecute. (Again, if they think it's worth their while; I'm just saying legally, I'd guess that they could do it).
And to the poster who said probably cause doesn't apply to groups, I've never been talking about frisking down groups of people in malls, but spotting an individual, and honing in on them with a directional antennae. You don't need to search a group; you can spot the illegal activity on your pirate-walkman-thingy, and use your directional antenna to find the person sending the illegal signals. QED. Absolutely no different from getting signals on your radar gun about someone who is breaking the law, singling them out, and prosecuting them. (In fact, I'd think directionally finding an IEEE signal in public would be far more accurate than a radar gun aimed down a highway.)
-me
Even if you never had a beta-tester contract with them (which would have been a good idea), I think there's enough historical precedent about the role of a beta tester that you're on pretty good ground.
It's unheard of for beta testers to obtain IP rights to what they're testing, so without a contract giving them such rights, I'd say the reasonable assumptions for both parties would be that there is no IP ownership promised to any beta tester.
I think they'd have a more difficult time in court proving that there *was* some reason for them to think they should have partial IP ownership, when the standard way of doing things clearly is not this way.
I'd either ignore them, and let them fade away, or hire a good IP lawyer, who probably wouldn't need to spend much time on the issue, sending them a one page letter outlining why their claims are baseless.
-me
Huh? If they have probable cause, they can search you. If they see drugs through your car window, they can search your car.
And I'm pretty sure publicly emitting radio waves with pirated music and software is pretty clear-cut probably cause for a search. The fact you can't see the radio waves without a device, doesn't matter. They use other electronic devices to measure and determine illegal activity on a regular basis (radar).
And no, they wouldn't need fancy equipment to "triangulate" as another poster suggested, or have to search a dozen people. Triangulation is used for more wide-area stuff (cell phone towers). If you're close enough for IEEE 802.2 communication, I'd think a simple directional signal finder would suffice. I'm not an engineer (nor a cop, nor a lawyer
Now, I'm not saying the cops would actually bother to do this. However, if it became as popular as the walkman, I bet industry would make sure they do start enforcing it, and it wouldn't be that hard to do.
Now if the network were closed and encrypted, they wouldn't know the content. But that kind of defeats the purpose of this public-oriented system. If the public can sign up, so can enforcement.
The whole thing just strikes me as akin to an electronic equivalent of selling pirated video tapes or CD's on the street corner. Definitely illegal.
North American society seems far more permissive of things done in the privacy of one's own home. Illegal things done visibly (even if only electronically-visible) in public, is far more risky, I'd say.
I think the technological possibilities of this type of system are very exciting, but pirating music and software isn't likely to be the best use of it. (Swapping restaurant reviews for the area, and other city-information type of thing would be very cool.)
-me
Directionally finding a signal is trivial, and wireless pirating in public is going to be a blatant target for law enforcement.
-me
This reminds me of the system (in Japan, think?) where people carry little wireless devices saying what they like in a partner, and they help spot folks which are good matches. Kinda silly, but interesting nonetheless.
On the distributed P2P system, where stuff is traded as people walk by, it seems like this is a pretty simple system to thwart. Police officers could simply carry a unit themselves, and when they see a system offering up copyrighted or pirated content, they just confiscate the gear. Pretty simple. I don't think you'll ever see it take off because of this (among other reasons).
-me
Real advertisements in games that are attempting to simulate reality, seems like a boon to me. And if helps pay the bills for the game maker, more power to them.
:-); in games, where the viewpoints are less well defined, and user controlled, I think it's a lot harder to compromise the game's value.
:-)
And dynamically changing ads would actually ad more interest to the game. I think it'd be cool to be distracted momentarily by a new interesting ad, and become someone else's frag due to the distraction. Hah!
I find it hard to see the down side. In movies, I think there's a far greater likelihood of compromising the creator's artistic integrity (when each shot starts with a well-framed shot of a Pepsi can
Whenver the ads rolover, I'd be just like Homer when all the new billboard's come out. Might even end up joining a clown college because of it. "Dooo doo doo do do do do doooo doo dooo dooo"...
-me
This is a very good point. The worldwide mixing of human genes is a relatively recent phenomenon, and who's to say in 10,000 years (a mere blip in evolutionary terms) people will still intermix worldwide in the same way. It'd just take one good nucular holocaust, world-wide virus outbreak, comet strike (or other social reason for a massive population drop or intentional quarrantine), or breakdown in the technology of the global transportation for us to largely separate and differentiate again.
There's too many possibilities over the enormous timeframes we're talking, for us to make any assumptions of stability.
On the other hand, humans are inherently curious creatures, so the tendency may be to spread and intermix, no matter what the situation, once the population reaches a certain critical mass again.
Only time will tell.
-me
D'oh! The new touchpad driver on this laptop is a little sensitive; I submitted before finishing :-)
I was going to say that they could have devoted the same time, effort, and bandwidth to something like broadcast text from the Gutenberg project, and done something useful (as well as novel).
-me
I gotta say, I'm all for cool and geeky ideas for their own sake. But this just strikes me as a major waste of time, effort, and especially bandwidth.
It'd take a lot of spam mail to equate to an audiobroad cast that long.
-me