Don't know how many of you are still interested, but here's my last update. I finally found Forever Bright lights for sale at a local Ace Hardware. $24.99 for the blue lights, $14.99 for the red/green lights. Pricey, but worth it if they reduce my electric bill noticeably.
So, I brought them home. The red/green lights are dim. Not very bright at all. The individual lights are small, although the colors are evenly bright throughout the entire string of lights. My first impression was so-so.
The blue lights were spectacular. Blazingly deep blues, the larger plastic around the LEDs make them seem much bigger than usual, and the color is just wonderfully satisfying. I plugged them in immediately and left them on all night. My first impression was extremely positive.
Now, one thing I noticed is that the lights appear to have a 60-hz cycle. If you wave the lights back and forth in the dark, you get a strobe effect. It seems strange to me, but I got used to it. You can only notice it strongly when you are close to the lights and/or moving past them quickly.
So, next morning I plugged my lights back in, and you know what? Both strings of lights were broken. The red/green string burnt out half its length. The blue string was completely dead. I've tried replacing dozens of individual lights, but without much success.
It seems to matter which direction the lights go in. If they go in the sockets backwards, it seems like they don't work. But then sometimes I'll plug the same light back in the same socket and everything will work again. It doesn't make much sense.
So, I'll probably return the whole set and wait for the lights to get better for another year. Sorry to disappoint.
Lesson Learned - never ask a question on slashdot without answering all possible snide replies.
I have bought, tried, and returned many LED light sets. I have hunted at all the stores listed on the ForeverBright where-to-buy page. I have been searching regularly for three weeks now. I have seen the online ordering pages; but somehow I just don't feel comfortable buying mail order when there's only a few more weeks till Christmas, and seeing as how I'll probably have to return them anyway.
Thank you, Wil, for mentioning the "House" phrase. Here is a history of this phrase as far as I am aware.
1) In 1995, Blizzard released Warcraft II. The Goblin Zeppelin unit, when repeatedly clicked, had a set of silly phrases it would say. "I can see my house from here!" was born.
2) For a long time, nothing.
3) September, 2001. The series premiere of Star Trek: Enterprise, a few Klingons are invited to view a Holodeck for the first time. Presented with a recreation of the Klingon homeworld, one of them utters the phrase, "I can see my house from here!" in a guttural Klingon accent. Fans of the phrase are delighted.
4) July, 2002. The incredible Mr. Krol takes over the voice of the Goblin Zeppelin for the new Warcraft III. Although the phrase "I can see my house from here!" is absent from the game, early reviews of "What what what?!?" are positive.
5) November, 2002. Wil Wheaton uses the phrase in a Slashdot Posting, although we do not have an audio file of him saying it. Fans of the phrase are delighted and hopeful.
Yeah, designing for space is a bitch - a good friend's uncle worked on the Saturn moon rockets. I bet to a technical person my suggestion didn't make much sense; I wrote it targeting a layman [read: linux geek].
To a more technical person, I would suggest developing and launching more experimental products that have longer lifespans and greater margins of error. Find the thing (maybe it's a fan blade in an oxygen pump) that broke, design a better fan blade or a better oxygen pump, and connect it to the space station to see if you can actually get a better lifespan out of it.
I would like to imagine the ISS as a gigantic workshop where the issues of manned spaceflight are gradually being solved and better approaches are being developed. However, I suspect that this is not the case; all the design work was probably done during the first few years of the nineties. Most likely, when a part fails today, Nasa simply pays their contractor another $5 million for a replacement part and throws it on the shuttle. That's the safest approach; but it makes each shuttle trip just another fix-it mission.
My suggestion would be, why not pay the $5 million for a spare part, and also put $1 million into designing a jury rigged replacement that might prove an interesting design concept? I'd expect most of these jury rigged replacement parts to fail, but every once in a while you might discover something... and then you'd have more knowledge to build better parts in the future.
"Significant risk increase" is expected based on the loss of the ability for a permanent crew to make an urgent repair spacewalk, as may become necessary under the normal rate of equipment breakdown.
If NASA wants to do some useful science on the ISS, they should start researching equipment that doesn't break down in orbit. Even if the ISS doesn't provide any great research or achievements, why not use it to validate methods of building things and keeping stuff in orbit reliably?
NASA could stop sending up identical copies of the gyros and oxygen scrubbers that break every week, and start sending up experimental items to find one with a better failure ratio (while of course keeping spares handy to avert disaster, I'm sure).
Maybe this way, when a cheaper space vehicle or space station comes about, they'll know how to keep it working.
The number one problem preventing broadband from reaching everyone is competition.
Your local DSL company knows they can charge $49.95 forever for DSL. They know that they don't have to invest in upgrading infrastructures that could threaten their phone revenue. They know they can stall competitive DSL providers by overcharging and underserving them. It's just too easy for a baby bell to sit on the status quo.
On the other hand, some communities around the world have bypassed the phone companies and installed fibre and/or high speed metropolitan networks. Those areas have cheap, fast, always-on Internet service.
The proper way to stimulate Broadband adoption is to take ownership of the telecommunications infrastructure away from the Baby Bells and give it to each city. Then, each city can invest in the infrastructure that makes the most sense for them (microwave perhaps for remote counties; fibre for urban centers). Competing Internet Service providers (and baby bells too) will have fair, equal access to each house and building in the city. Your local city will invest in upgrading its infrastructure to provide a competitive advantage to encourage people to move in and provide tax revenue. Taxes which currently are used to force the baby bells to provide universal telephone service can be repurposed to aid development in poor counties.
Wow, I'm totally amazed that my comment caused such a gigantic tizzy. I thought I'd reply to your message, though, since your perspective seemed closest to mine.
It's obvious that there are many people who have different opinions about the way that the X server/client relationship is defined. I'm sure it's possible to make an argument about any one of a hundred possible "correct" server/client relationships. In my head, I imagine grad students at a bar celebrating a milestone in X/Windows development:
Grad Student A: "Hey, man, you know that IP based X client program we wrote? It's really a server, not a client, because it accepts graphics connections." Grad Student B: "Whoah, you're right. I'll buy next round if you'll update the docs."
The part I like most about X is the sophomoric smirk:
Me: Where can I get client software to connect to your server? Sysop: No, you need X Server software. Me: I don't need server software. I just want to connect to your server. Sysop: Yes, but your client provides a display surface to the server, which is a client to your server. Me: Huh? Sysop: You see, it makes perfect sense; your client machine is serving graphics to the server! So your computer is a server, and the server is a client! It's all backwards! Me: Yes.
I would wager I am a bigger nerd. At the moment I am reading this article, I am working on a product called "space station", and I am in fact using rsync to send our weekly batch up to the production server. For a minute I thought the original message came from my lead developer.
This article has nearly all the technical specs, except benchmarks. Sightings for Opteron/Hammer chips have been sparsely available for a while. When actual results show up in SPEC CPU2000 listings, that's when the chip will be finally ready for market.
As a side bonus, you can find SPEC benchmarks for Itanium and Itanium IIs on that chart (search for the word Itanium - Dell and HP have both submitted results).
I got my X-Box last week! It runs all my favorite Microsoft software.
Re:My one big issue with the film (SPOILER?)
on
Minority Report
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
In the short story, this was the real crisis. In the movie, the crisis is, will Tom Cruise escape prison? But in the book, Tom Cruise's character was totally nerve-wracked: if he sat in a hotel room and waited for 72 hours, he wouldn't commit a murder and he'd be safe, but the entire department of precrime - which he had helped to build - would be a fraud.
On one hand, he could murder the person for the good of society, and precrime would stay, and the world would be safe; but he would go to jail.
On the other hand, he could stay in his hotel room, not commit a murder, and prove that his system was a fake; they'd have to set everyone free and murders would start all over again.
I didn't see it in the list, so I'll karma shoot myself.
Bart gets the boot in Australia - after making a prank call, Bart arrives in Australia, unknowingly bearing a simple ordinary bullfrog, whose progeny then goes nuts and devastates the Australian continent.
Marge: We have them in America. They're called bullfrogs.
Clerk: What? That's an odd name. I'd have called them "chazzwazzers".
Ribbit. Not only are the Simpsons running out of ideas, they're now predicting the Future. Any more episodes with Al Gore in them? Look for the season finale! </weak joke>
As I recall, the previous judge on this case did roughly say "enough is enough, stop lying;" he went on to declare a breakup as the penalty Microsoft would have to pay. However, Microsoft deftly turned that around and claimed the judge was biased, so they had to re-do the whole penalty phase of the trial.
that Microsoft has discovered the key to getting good press on Slashdot. What if some of the unusual articles that have appeared recently are coming (whether directly or indirectly) from Microsoft PR?
By Way Of Example: This article, the strangely prophesied Unix Isn't Dead, and this booster for the next version of Windows.
Although I might be paranoid to wonder about this, it would be a pretty impressive use of grassroots resources. It seems like what they're doing is writing articles that cast doubt on the official Microsoft position. These articles naturally become (in a free spirited discussion site) a thread with some people defending MS and some people attacking it, which provides an excellent position for posting Microsoft's stronger arguments which then reach open-minded developers.
Reminds me of an excellent joke (I read it in Mad Magazine, one of the old issues where they spoofed The Right Stuff). It went something like this:
Eisenhower: The Soviets launched Sputnik and our rocket crashed?!? What are we doing wrong? We're using German Scientists, and the Russians are using German Scientists!
Secretary of State: The difference is, here, our German Scientists work forty hours a week! In Russia, the German Scientists work forty hours a day!
Okay, so maybe it isn't the greatest joke in the world, and sure Mad Magazine retreaded it thoroughly in the Return of the Jedi spoof (picture Darth Vader and the Emperor replacing Eisenhower and John Foster Dulles). Anyway, I thought it was cute.
Once, a long time ago (this was the very early nineties), my friend bought a brand new Macintosh. This was an A/V Macintosh; one of the generation of machines they released before they adopted PowerPC as their chip. It had monitors and a speaker combined, a microphone for recording, Quicktime (then a novelty) and a mess of new features nobody had ever seen before.
So my friend opened up the box, invited two of his buddies over, and they were oohing and aahing and congratulating each other on the purchase of a most excellent machine. Suddenly, in the midst of all this hullabaloo, the Macintosh says out loud, "I can do that, but I need extra software."
Sadly, they didn't buy any new software, and (not for lack of trying) they were never able to make the Mac speak again.
Having only one way to do something is not an advantage, if that way sucks.
Having more than one proper way to do something leads to code bloat.
The part I really like about having multiple interfaces is that one of them gets upgraded faster and becomes more robust, and I've usually chosen the other one because it was simpler. So my code gets out of date fast.
One of the worst things Microsoft ever did to Windows was to have multiple, redundant APIs that each did roughly the same thing. You can accomplish the same task with WIN32, MFC, ATL,.NET, and so on down the line. The part that really bothered me was the scatterbrained implementation of multimedia. There were WINMM libraries, media player interfaces, text parsing launchers, direct function calls, and eventually COM wrappers.
If you have one interface, and it's obnoxious and complicated, at least everyone knows what function they have to call.
What's really sad is that DVD is a terrible random access format. Each time I hit "skip", or "menu", or some other button, I get a ten-second intro animation that the DVD producer thought was clever. Then I get an FCC warning. Then when I click on the area I want to go to, I get an outgoing animation.
My favorite part is how they refuse to let me skip through these animations. Oh, and on some DVDs, you can't skip from one section to another - you have to fast forward to the end of the current chapter and wait for it to reach the end before it will increment the chapter number.
The reason you enable streaming video on a cellphone is so you can have a video phone. You are correct that nobody is interested in watching a Britney Spears video on their cellphone; but once our phones are powerful enough to do video encoding, you'd be able to do a video call as easily as a regular voice call.
It really discourages me to read so many people writing such mean things about a product admittedly in a beta stage. I read through post after post just hoping to find someone that had a positive thought, but maybe my browsing level was set too high.
What seemed most frustrating to me is that people are complaining that Lindows lacks feature X, or doesn't have any advantages over "apt-get Y". Actually, I regard this as a positive step forward. My understanding of Lindows is that it is a customized Linux distribution intended to be a drop-in replacement for users who only use basic Office applications. I appreciate and encourage Linux developers to create narrow, focused distributions in addition to huge general purpose ones. Imagine a store where you could purchase a Linux distribution that only runs MAME; a distribution that only runs Word and Excel for example; a web server distribution; and so on. Each distribution would behave (for the user) a lot like a game console - a piece of hardware that performs one useful function.
I for one would be quite happy to see Lindows succeed in its market niche, and engender many imitators. Reading the review posted on NewsForge, I really only got the impression that the reviewer was constantly disappointed because you couldn't add users, it was tough to open a shell window, and the WINE emulation wasn't much better than the off-the-shelf source.
On the other hand, the reviewer seemed to be complaining that there weren't any options available when installing Lindows. Considering the market niche the product aims for, this is good design; it enables customers to begin appreciating their new product rapidly, without having to worry about creating lots of users and passwords and downloading lots of updates.
Please, encourage entrepreneurs like Mr. Robertson to continue working on new products. His product may not be for everybody; and he may need to improve its security and WINE support, but in the end he might just release a useful product.
May I propose an addition? What if the law said "Software that is avaliable for sale must be available indefinitely". Example: Microsoft makes Windows 3.1 a success by selling copies for $49. If we apply this rule, Microsoft is required to keep on selling Windows 3.1 for $49. We shouldn't require them to keep on manufacturing boxes forever, but when they stop making boxes it shouldn't be too hard to make it available for electronic purchase over the Internet at the same price (maybe increasing profit margins?).
If Microsoft came up with a better program, Windows 95, they could start selling that at $95, but that wouldn't let them stop selling version 3.1. We wouldn't allow them to drastically raise the price of old products (maybe it should be permissible to raise prices to keep up with inflation), and they wouldn't have to keep advertising obsolete software; but a customer who wants the product should still be able to buy a new copy no matter how old the program. That way, people whose businesses or homes depended on Win 3.1 could still get a new copy if it was necessary.
In this context, if Microsoft wanted to stop selling Win 3.1, we should require that they make the code public domain (excluding any stuff owned by third parties that Microsoft was licensing). This should also be a requirement if the company goes bankrupt.
This seems like it would have a number of benefits:
Software developers would be unable to force you to upgrade to a new software version.
Abandonware would be eliminated - software would either be always available for purchase or always available for free.
Electronic commerce would get a huge boost.
We would have, as a society, a huge archive of software, pay and free, to draw upon. Kind of like the library of Congress.
I'm sure I'm overlooking some negative points, but maybe with some inventive thinking this could be a good idea to propose... Any thoughts?
I appreciate the reply - I'd like to add a few clarifications regarding your comments.
That's only one (relatively unimpprtant) part of privacy. Privacy also means that you can do stuff without being watched. ID money is a great step to remove this ability.
Speaking as a person who has developed projects based on SmartCards, I have a bit of familiarity with the limitations of an embedded chip. First, to get or set data on the chip you have to press it up against the transmitter firmly; and even then the transmission is unreliable. If I receive a E100 euro bill from my buddy, it doesn't get my name and address, nor is it capable of transmitting any data to a central receiver as you walk through a doorway.
Think, for example, of your corporate ID card that you press up against the security pad at the door to your office; or the gate card you use at your apartment - they use the same technology. You know that you have to stop and push it against the pad, and sometimes even swipe it a few times before it clicks.
This is not about copy protection. People faking money fake the smaller notes, because nobody looks closely at them.
Well, true; but a little misleading. People who forge currencies fake the largest notes they can get away with. If a government puts strict controls and copy protection on the big bills, then the forgers will turn to small bills. To make their money back, the small bills will have to be more numerous, hopefully increasing their chances of getting caught.
That's basically what's happening here, just more automatic and with other data schemes (data stored centrally and not locally).
Playing devil's advocate, let me imagine a project whereby the government tries to figure out how you spend your money. First, we add smartchips to money, drastically increasing the cost to print the currency. Since this is an obvious step, people who want to avoid getting caught will just use small bills or coins.
Second, we'd require all ATMs to imprint your name and address in the memory of the smartchip of the money it disperses to you. This is a huge project which involves embedding sensors and money activators in all the ATMs throughout a continent. Probably a five-year project which the banking industry will lobby against (extra cost for no benefit to them). Again, people who want to avoid getting caught can simply get their money from somewhere else - in change at a restaurant, by cashing a check, so on, so forth.
Next, the government has to convince every retailer who accepts money to not only install a money smartchip detector, but to force all of their employees to swipe every bill across the detector every time a transaction is made. This, in my mind, is laughable. Most importantly, businesses where customers want to avoid getting caught are likely to be sympathetic to their customers' needs.
Finally, the government has to somehow receive the data. They could either wait until the banks turn the money back to the government for retirement (at which point the chip might be so beaten up as to be broken), or the government could force every retailer to transmit data on their purchased money regularly. When the data is all collected, they somehow have to filter out all the "noise" - like when I ask someone for change, or when I pay my friend back without swiping the card to indicate the money is now in his posession.
This project not only seems painfully impractical, but also like it would be vigorously fought against, constantly error-prone, and by its nature easy to circumvent. The reason I encourage governments to take the first step of putting smartchips in money is because helping banks detect forgeries is truly something that benefits me - fewer people will commit crimes.
Slashdot Mirror
Don't know how many of you are still interested, but here's my last update. I finally found Forever Bright lights for sale at a local Ace Hardware. $24.99 for the blue lights, $14.99 for the red/green lights. Pricey, but worth it if they reduce my electric bill noticeably.
So, I brought them home. The red/green lights are dim. Not very bright at all. The individual lights are small, although the colors are evenly bright throughout the entire string of lights. My first impression was so-so.
The blue lights were spectacular. Blazingly deep blues, the larger plastic around the LEDs make them seem much bigger than usual, and the color is just wonderfully satisfying. I plugged them in immediately and left them on all night. My first impression was extremely positive.
Now, one thing I noticed is that the lights appear to have a 60-hz cycle. If you wave the lights back and forth in the dark, you get a strobe effect. It seems strange to me, but I got used to it. You can only notice it strongly when you are close to the lights and/or moving past them quickly.
So, next morning I plugged my lights back in, and you know what? Both strings of lights were broken. The red/green string burnt out half its length. The blue string was completely dead. I've tried replacing dozens of individual lights, but without much success.
It seems to matter which direction the lights go in. If they go in the sockets backwards, it seems like they don't work. But then sometimes I'll plug the same light back in the same socket and everything will work again. It doesn't make much sense.
So, I'll probably return the whole set and wait for the lights to get better for another year. Sorry to disappoint.
--Glassware
- Have a separate email address for slashdot mail? I presume your regular email address isn't "slashdot".
- Spam-protect your email address by inserting no-spam into it?
Inquiring minds are curious how much email you still get. --GlasswareI have bought, tried, and returned many LED light sets. I have hunted at all the stores listed on the ForeverBright where-to-buy page. I have been searching regularly for three weeks now. I have seen the online ordering pages; but somehow I just don't feel comfortable buying mail order when there's only a few more weeks till Christmas, and seeing as how I'll probably have to return them anyway.
1) In 1995, Blizzard released Warcraft II. The Goblin Zeppelin unit, when repeatedly clicked, had a set of silly phrases it would say. "I can see my house from here!" was born.
2) For a long time, nothing.
3) September, 2001. The series premiere of Star Trek: Enterprise, a few Klingons are invited to view a Holodeck for the first time. Presented with a recreation of the Klingon homeworld, one of them utters the phrase, "I can see my house from here!" in a guttural Klingon accent. Fans of the phrase are delighted.
4) July, 2002. The incredible Mr. Krol takes over the voice of the Goblin Zeppelin for the new Warcraft III. Although the phrase "I can see my house from here!" is absent from the game, early reviews of "What what what?!?" are positive.
5) November, 2002. Wil Wheaton uses the phrase in a Slashdot Posting, although we do not have an audio file of him saying it. Fans of the phrase are delighted and hopeful.
To a more technical person, I would suggest developing and launching more experimental products that have longer lifespans and greater margins of error. Find the thing (maybe it's a fan blade in an oxygen pump) that broke, design a better fan blade or a better oxygen pump, and connect it to the space station to see if you can actually get a better lifespan out of it.
I would like to imagine the ISS as a gigantic workshop where the issues of manned spaceflight are gradually being solved and better approaches are being developed. However, I suspect that this is not the case; all the design work was probably done during the first few years of the nineties. Most likely, when a part fails today, Nasa simply pays their contractor another $5 million for a replacement part and throws it on the shuttle. That's the safest approach; but it makes each shuttle trip just another fix-it mission.
My suggestion would be, why not pay the $5 million for a spare part, and also put $1 million into designing a jury rigged replacement that might prove an interesting design concept? I'd expect most of these jury rigged replacement parts to fail, but every once in a while you might discover something ... and then you'd have more knowledge to build better parts in the future.
NASA could stop sending up identical copies of the gyros and oxygen scrubbers that break every week, and start sending up experimental items to find one with a better failure ratio (while of course keeping spares handy to avert disaster, I'm sure).
Maybe this way, when a cheaper space vehicle or space station comes about, they'll know how to keep it working.
Your local DSL company knows they can charge $49.95 forever for DSL. They know that they don't have to invest in upgrading infrastructures that could threaten their phone revenue. They know they can stall competitive DSL providers by overcharging and underserving them. It's just too easy for a baby bell to sit on the status quo.
On the other hand, some communities around the world have bypassed the phone companies and installed fibre and/or high speed metropolitan networks. Those areas have cheap, fast, always-on Internet service.
The proper way to stimulate Broadband adoption is to take ownership of the telecommunications infrastructure away from the Baby Bells and give it to each city. Then, each city can invest in the infrastructure that makes the most sense for them (microwave perhaps for remote counties; fibre for urban centers). Competing Internet Service providers (and baby bells too) will have fair, equal access to each house and building in the city. Your local city will invest in upgrading its infrastructure to provide a competitive advantage to encourage people to move in and provide tax revenue. Taxes which currently are used to force the baby bells to provide universal telephone service can be repurposed to aid development in poor counties.
Have I overlooked anything?
It's obvious that there are many people who have different opinions about the way that the X server/client relationship is defined. I'm sure it's possible to make an argument about any one of a hundred possible "correct" server/client relationships. In my head, I imagine grad students at a bar celebrating a milestone in X/Windows development:
Grad Student A: "Hey, man, you know that IP based X client program we wrote? It's really a server, not a client, because it accepts graphics connections."
Grad Student B: "Whoah, you're right. I'll buy next round if you'll update the docs."
The part I like most about X is the sophomoric smirk:
Me: Where can I get client software to connect to your server?
Sysop: No, you need X Server software.
Me: I don't need server software. I just want to connect to your server.
Sysop: Yes, but your client provides a display surface to the server, which is a client to your server.
Me: Huh?
Sysop: You see, it makes perfect sense; your client machine is serving graphics to the server! So your computer is a server, and the server is a client! It's all backwards!
Me: Yes.
I would wager I am a bigger nerd. At the moment I am reading this article, I am working on a product called "space station", and I am in fact using rsync to send our weekly batch up to the production server. For a minute I thought the original message came from my lead developer.
How's that for a coincidence?
As a side bonus, you can find SPEC benchmarks for Itanium and Itanium IIs on that chart (search for the word Itanium - Dell and HP have both submitted results).
I got my X-Box last week! It runs all my favorite Microsoft software.
On one hand, he could murder the person for the good of society, and precrime would stay, and the world would be safe; but he would go to jail.
On the other hand, he could stay in his hotel room, not commit a murder, and prove that his system was a fake; they'd have to set everyone free and murders would start all over again.
Bart gets the boot in Australia - after making a prank call, Bart arrives in Australia, unknowingly bearing a simple ordinary bullfrog, whose progeny then goes nuts and devastates the Australian continent.
Marge: We have them in America. They're called bullfrogs.
Clerk: What? That's an odd name. I'd have called them "chazzwazzers".
Ribbit. Not only are the Simpsons running out of ideas, they're now predicting the Future. Any more episodes with Al Gore in them? Look for the season finale! </weak joke>
Where were you in April/May of 2000?
By Way Of Example: This article, the strangely prophesied Unix Isn't Dead, and this booster for the next version of Windows.
Although I might be paranoid to wonder about this, it would be a pretty impressive use of grassroots resources. It seems like what they're doing is writing articles that cast doubt on the official Microsoft position. These articles naturally become (in a free spirited discussion site) a thread with some people defending MS and some people attacking it, which provides an excellent position for posting Microsoft's stronger arguments which then reach open-minded developers.
Anyways, it's an amusing thought. :)
Eisenhower: The Soviets launched Sputnik and our rocket crashed?!? What are we doing wrong? We're using German Scientists, and the Russians are using German Scientists!
Secretary of State: The difference is, here, our German Scientists work forty hours a week! In Russia, the German Scientists work forty hours a day!
Okay, so maybe it isn't the greatest joke in the world, and sure Mad Magazine retreaded it thoroughly in the Return of the Jedi spoof (picture Darth Vader and the Emperor replacing Eisenhower and John Foster Dulles). Anyway, I thought it was cute.
So my friend opened up the box, invited two of his buddies over, and they were oohing and aahing and congratulating each other on the purchase of a most excellent machine. Suddenly, in the midst of all this hullabaloo, the Macintosh says out loud, "I can do that, but I need extra software."
Sadly, they didn't buy any new software, and (not for lack of trying) they were never able to make the Mac speak again.
Having more than one proper way to do something leads to code bloat.
The part I really like about having multiple interfaces is that one of them gets upgraded faster and becomes more robust, and I've usually chosen the other one because it was simpler. So my code gets out of date fast.
One of the worst things Microsoft ever did to Windows was to have multiple, redundant APIs that each did roughly the same thing. You can accomplish the same task with WIN32, MFC, ATL, .NET, and so on down the line. The part that really bothered me was the scatterbrained implementation of multimedia. There were WINMM libraries, media player interfaces, text parsing launchers, direct function calls, and eventually COM wrappers.
If you have one interface, and it's obnoxious and complicated, at least everyone knows what function they have to call.
What's really sad is that DVD is a terrible random access format. Each time I hit "skip", or "menu", or some other button, I get a ten-second intro animation that the DVD producer thought was clever. Then I get an FCC warning. Then when I click on the area I want to go to, I get an outgoing animation.
My favorite part is how they refuse to let me skip through these animations. Oh, and on some DVDs, you can't skip from one section to another - you have to fast forward to the end of the current chapter and wait for it to reach the end before it will increment the chapter number.
It has been asked, so I will answer.
The reason you enable streaming video on a cellphone is so you can have a video phone. You are correct that nobody is interested in watching a Britney Spears video on their cellphone; but once our phones are powerful enough to do video encoding, you'd be able to do a video call as easily as a regular voice call.
It really discourages me to read so many people writing such mean things about a product admittedly in a beta stage. I read through post after post just hoping to find someone that had a positive thought, but maybe my browsing level was set too high.
What seemed most frustrating to me is that people are complaining that Lindows lacks feature X, or doesn't have any advantages over "apt-get Y". Actually, I regard this as a positive step forward. My understanding of Lindows is that it is a customized Linux distribution intended to be a drop-in replacement for users who only use basic Office applications. I appreciate and encourage Linux developers to create narrow, focused distributions in addition to huge general purpose ones. Imagine a store where you could purchase a Linux distribution that only runs MAME; a distribution that only runs Word and Excel for example; a web server distribution; and so on. Each distribution would behave (for the user) a lot like a game console - a piece of hardware that performs one useful function.
I for one would be quite happy to see Lindows succeed in its market niche, and engender many imitators. Reading the review posted on NewsForge, I really only got the impression that the reviewer was constantly disappointed because you couldn't add users, it was tough to open a shell window, and the WINE emulation wasn't much better than the off-the-shelf source.
On the other hand, the reviewer seemed to be complaining that there weren't any options available when installing Lindows. Considering the market niche the product aims for, this is good design; it enables customers to begin appreciating their new product rapidly, without having to worry about creating lots of users and passwords and downloading lots of updates.
Please, encourage entrepreneurs like Mr. Robertson to continue working on new products. His product may not be for everybody; and he may need to improve its security and WINE support, but in the end he might just release a useful product.
Tyrell: Is this to be a capillary dilation test? Involuntary reaction of the iris? The so called Blush Response?
Deckard: We like to call it Voigt-Kampf for short.
You both have good points.
May I propose an addition? What if the law said "Software that is avaliable for sale must be available indefinitely". Example: Microsoft makes Windows 3.1 a success by selling copies for $49. If we apply this rule, Microsoft is required to keep on selling Windows 3.1 for $49. We shouldn't require them to keep on manufacturing boxes forever, but when they stop making boxes it shouldn't be too hard to make it available for electronic purchase over the Internet at the same price (maybe increasing profit margins?).
If Microsoft came up with a better program, Windows 95, they could start selling that at $95, but that wouldn't let them stop selling version 3.1. We wouldn't allow them to drastically raise the price of old products (maybe it should be permissible to raise prices to keep up with inflation), and they wouldn't have to keep advertising obsolete software; but a customer who wants the product should still be able to buy a new copy no matter how old the program. That way, people whose businesses or homes depended on Win 3.1 could still get a new copy if it was necessary.
In this context, if Microsoft wanted to stop selling Win 3.1, we should require that they make the code public domain (excluding any stuff owned by third parties that Microsoft was licensing). This should also be a requirement if the company goes bankrupt.
This seems like it would have a number of benefits:
Software developers would be unable to force you to upgrade to a new software version.
Abandonware would be eliminated - software would either be always available for purchase or always available for free.
Electronic commerce would get a huge boost.
We would have, as a society, a huge archive of software, pay and free, to draw upon. Kind of like the library of Congress.
I'm sure I'm overlooking some negative points, but maybe with some inventive thinking this could be a good idea to propose... Any thoughts?
I appreciate the reply - I'd like to add a few clarifications regarding your comments.
That's only one (relatively unimpprtant) part of privacy. Privacy also means that you can do stuff without being watched. ID money is a great step to remove this ability.
Speaking as a person who has developed projects based on SmartCards, I have a bit of familiarity with the limitations of an embedded chip. First, to get or set data on the chip you have to press it up against the transmitter firmly; and even then the transmission is unreliable. If I receive a E100 euro bill from my buddy, it doesn't get my name and address, nor is it capable of transmitting any data to a central receiver as you walk through a doorway.
Think, for example, of your corporate ID card that you press up against the security pad at the door to your office; or the gate card you use at your apartment - they use the same technology. You know that you have to stop and push it against the pad, and sometimes even swipe it a few times before it clicks.
This is not about copy protection. People faking money fake the smaller notes, because nobody looks closely at them.
Well, true; but a little misleading. People who forge currencies fake the largest notes they can get away with. If a government puts strict controls and copy protection on the big bills, then the forgers will turn to small bills. To make their money back, the small bills will have to be more numerous, hopefully increasing their chances of getting caught.
That's basically what's happening here, just more automatic and with other data schemes (data stored centrally and not locally).
Playing devil's advocate, let me imagine a project whereby the government tries to figure out how you spend your money. First, we add smartchips to money, drastically increasing the cost to print the currency. Since this is an obvious step, people who want to avoid getting caught will just use small bills or coins.
Second, we'd require all ATMs to imprint your name and address in the memory of the smartchip of the money it disperses to you. This is a huge project which involves embedding sensors and money activators in all the ATMs throughout a continent. Probably a five-year project which the banking industry will lobby against (extra cost for no benefit to them). Again, people who want to avoid getting caught can simply get their money from somewhere else - in change at a restaurant, by cashing a check, so on, so forth.
Next, the government has to convince every retailer who accepts money to not only install a money smartchip detector, but to force all of their employees to swipe every bill across the detector every time a transaction is made. This, in my mind, is laughable. Most importantly, businesses where customers want to avoid getting caught are likely to be sympathetic to their customers' needs.
Finally, the government has to somehow receive the data. They could either wait until the banks turn the money back to the government for retirement (at which point the chip might be so beaten up as to be broken), or the government could force every retailer to transmit data on their purchased money regularly. When the data is all collected, they somehow have to filter out all the "noise" - like when I ask someone for change, or when I pay my friend back without swiping the card to indicate the money is now in his posession.
This project not only seems painfully impractical, but also like it would be vigorously fought against, constantly error-prone, and by its nature easy to circumvent. The reason I encourage governments to take the first step of putting smartchips in money is because helping banks detect forgeries is truly something that benefits me - fewer people will commit crimes.