Re:Isn't Lego a bit childish for /. ?
on
Lego + Linux HOWTO
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· Score: 1
Hey I know you! You're one of those guys on the old Frosted Flakes commercials. Yea, the ones where the person is sitting in shadow because they're ashamed of liking a "kids" cereal. I knew I recognized you!
Steven
Won $50 worth of Lego's in a "creative building" contest when he was seven with a cool skateboarding robot design built out of the little Lego sets that came with McDonalds Happy Meals(all I had at the time). Used the money to buy three Lego Technic sets, the pneumatic ones, and never looked back.
Is teaching his 4 year old how to program Mindstorms, and dug out the old pneumatic sets too.
I saw the title and even though I knew the Sledgehammer was a new CPU, I just thought "How sweet would it be to LART some spammer with a Linux-based sledgehammer."
SuSe on a Sledgehammer, For those times when you want to do more than just ping someone.
In their standard agreement they make everyone sign, they set themselves up as technically being a publisher and they reserve the right to distribute your work in printed and electronic form. They say that if your thesis generates more then $10 in sales in a calendar year, they will pay you a 10% royalty. The ownership of the copyright remains entirely with the author. This is the same agreement they have used for a long time when theses are ordered by other libraries and sometimes by individuals. The only part that's new is the aggressive marketing.
YEA! 10% of $10 bucks a year is...$1 per year, at this rate I'll be able to pay off my student loans in just 75,000 years!
We've seen several different articles on/. recently about intellectual property and the rights/responsibilities that come along with it. Some people are pushing for programmers to be responsible for how what they create is used, and some are pushing for abolution of intellectual property as technology makes copying and distributing such works easier and easier. Both viewpoints seem to get a fair amount of backing in the form of court rulings and new legislation.
Is anyone else seeing a catch-22 developing here? Force the creators to stop people from using their creations negatively, but take away their ability to decide how and where their creation can be distributed/used.
Personally I think the Napster case will have it's greatest impact, not on the music industry, but on the computing industry. We're seeing our future being ruled and legislated right now. I'm going to keep a close eye on this and contact my representatives if I see something that concerns me, it may not work, but I'd rather try to stop stupid laws from making my livelyhood impossible than just leave the country when the stupid laws get passed.
Steven
Re:Premise of article is utterly false
on
A Praise To Unix
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· Score: 2
/usr/bin/perl -e 'for ($i=0; $i 10000000000; $i++) {print "Linux is a Unix";}'
followed almost immediately by ^C because ten billion iterations of anything is just ridiculous.
Even if you could somehow hold Yahoo responsible for the information that flows through it, everyone knows that keeping people from getting Nazi stuff from Yahoo auctions wouldn't stop the spread of Nazi stuff. And even if someone is keeping it as a "collectible" what does it matter?
I had a professor in college who collected WWII memorabelia, he had two little flag holders which were used to hold miniature flags. These were once the property of Adolf Hitler and were set out at state banquets, one flying the Nazi flag and one flying Hitler's personal banner. Does this mean my prof was a neo-nazi?
I think the judge is asking for something that is impossible in practice and silly in theory. Sure let's wipe out all traces of the Nazi's existance, then when someone in the future starts down the same path they did, we won't remember where that path leads.
As Rafiki told Simba "The past can hurt" but I think the important thing to remember here is, if you forget the past, you are doomed to repeat it.
I've seen the statement "we don't want all the money going to the middle man" tossed around here quite a bit, and it got me thinking... I bet most of us here who have jobs end up working for some sort of "middle man". So if we try to cut out the middle man in these transactions, aren't we in fact taking money away from our fellow workers' pockets? (i.e. the middle men will see a decline in revenue, have to cut wages/jobs, etc.)
But a fair number of us are running full steam towards making ourselves obsolete as it is. Think about it, scientists are working on the Grand Unified Theory of Everything, programmers are writing programs that write programs, everything is moving towards making the business of living not involve people on a daily basis. Soon we'll be able to buy a car without dealing with a salesman(oops, done that already), buy a book without going to a bookstore(damn, done that too),
or listen to live music without leaving our chairs(fsck! another thing we can do already).
Every time someone discovers how something works, there is one less thing to find out in the universe. Sure, the universe is huge, but this is happening at a phenomenal rate in the IT field. People write code that writes more code, people build computers that design and build better computers. Everywhere you look the middleman _and_ the bottom man is being replaced. On top we have lusers who click pretty widgets. When something goes wrong, they click some other pretty widget and it fixes it.
I write programs with maximum useability in mind, code re-use, portability, and flexibility to be used in multiple areas. The day is fast coming when someone can just take my code and do small easy modifications to it by clicking a couple pretty widgets and solve their problem. Where does that leave me? (hopefully retired early, but this obviously won't happen for everyone)
I think this may be foreshadowing. Right now the producers control the means of production, but we're producing means for others to control the means of production. The RIAA is going the way of the dinosaur as connectivity between consumers and artists increases. Will IT people be next as we develop more and more ways for joe blow to do what we used to do?
Cybersquatting is wrong, everyone knows that. I think the vast majority of the controversy over this issue is the definitions people like the WIPO use to decide if someone is a squatter or not. All these seem to fall under personal judgement of the arbiter in most cases. We need clearer definitions of what is and what isn't cybersquatting.
I looked through the case history of the WIPO one time, it was very interesting. I especially remember one case.
There were two companies, the defendant was a small home-based textile business which sold things like doilies and stuff, the plaintiff was a larger multinational textile business which sold doilies and stuff. The plaintiff had been in business for years and had recognized trademarks on the name(there was no indication that the home-based business knew of the other's existance when they choose the name or registered the domain), but they hadn't gone into cyberspace yet.
Meanwhile, this little home-based business was selling their doilies through the internet, only had the one domain registered, was actively using it and still showed no signs of knowledgeably treading on the other companies trademark. Then one day the big company decided they wanted to branch out into cyberspace. They found the little companies website, and took it to the WIPO immediately. I'll give you one guess how the WIPO ruled.
So now the little home-based business has to change all it's flyers that were probably posted at the local YMCA, all thier business cards and stationary, and totally re-do their website and any deals they had with things like VeriSign to provide a secure web ordering environment. Basically they have to start up the business all over again. This kind of capital is almost impossible to generate when you start a business, now some random company(even though they were old, and fairly large, they weren't high profile and they certainly weren't a household name) they didn't even know existed takes them to the WIPO and now they have to pay startup costs all over again.
What does this say about the American Dream? You better be damn sure you aren't dreaming on the same wavelength as anyone with more resources than you, that's what it says.
I'm not so sure the analogy holds. I choose my domain name, I don't choose my 1-800 number if I don't want to. I've never heard of people signing up for 1-800 numbers which would spell out things like dom-inoe and then not using it and just waiting until the company called them then selling it to them.
Companies need to be able to protect their intellectual property from people who are using it in bad faith. The problem is, who defines "bad faith?" The definitions being used right now are pretty poor. I'm going to post a reply to the main thread where I think the WIPO was really wrong and showed it's colors as "the corporate friend."
First things first, my comment was mainly meant as a joke, aparently some people got it, and some didn't.
...some years back I worked for IBM and my job in the 1990s was to diseminate AIX & Risc technology awareness throughout IBM in the Asia Pacific region...
Oh goody, I always love discussing the merits of an OS with a salesman.
AIX is neither a good technology nor a bad one. They are much easier to administer than Digital Unix, much less easy to deal with than HP-UX and less featureful than Solaris. They are mediocre as a development platform.
As far as support goes? Well all the customer support reps are useless for anything more than FAQ's until you've escalated the call a couple of times. That's nothing personal to IBM.
I considered a short diatribe on what IBM's real problem is, especially as it relates to their ever decreasing market share in todays market and the projections for this trend to continue. But that would take us way too far off topic. Here it is in a sentence. There are a lot more individual consumers than there are businesses, and their aggregate buying power is far greater.
I'm sure you didn't mean to, but your post sure as hell looks like it could be easily adapted for pretty much any story on/. and get modded up every time. Let's look at it.
This is a powerful technology, while many will be quick to dismiss it, condemn it, and villify it. It is just a tool. It is inherently neutral. The good or bad that will come from it will come from those that use it. The technology is there, once it has been announced, it can't be taken away, so learn it, use it, understand it, just like so many seem to say about the various hacking/cracking tools.
Too many people are quick to assume that when it is in someone else's hands, they must be evil, but in your hands it would be good. I can see some very powerful uses of this- [Random possible use] for one. How about [a new twist on on old profession]- maybe you still will need to [insert former method here], but this machine will tell you [something semi-insightful]- heck maybe [some huge corporate entity with tons of market share] would support it, since it would mean [saving them money, streamlining their processes].
Yes, this technology can be abused, but exploring the uses and abuses of technology is what hacking (in the classic sense) is all about.
Damn, fill in the blanks and you've got +5 for almost any new story with a technological impact. And it could easily apply to new laws, or almost anything with just a little modification. If everything you write is this generic I bet you could be/are one hell of a programmer.
IBM has always been committed to maximum profitability for minimum costs. A supreme example of this was the AIX operating system, not only did we put very little time into developing it, we put even less time into training the customer support reps.
IBM is proud to announce our new vision for the future. We have already previewed some of this vision with the introduction of the multi-Linux s/390 configuration and the Linux watch. Keep an eye on IBM as we incorporate this free OS into more and more of our systems. What this means to investors is much higher profits as our R&D costs drop. We also expect to see a reducion in the amount of time and money we must expend on our customer support lines as we can now say "It's Linus's Fault."
DAMN! Now I'll have to wear one watch for each Linux distro or risk being shunned at the local LUG. Let's see
Red Hat
Caldera
Debian
Suse
Slackware
...(repeat ad nauseum)
The teacher was just out of college and had tons of aspirations about how he was going to motivate and pass on all this great stuff he had just learned himself. So here's what he did. It's amazingly ambitious and really difficult to pull off without a good group of students who really want to learn, but it worked really well.
He split the class up into six groups of 4-5 people each. He set up six groups of workstations in the lab, one for the history of computing, one for hardware, one for databases, one for word processing, one for OS admin, and one for programming. The school year was split into six six-week periods. Each group was randomly assigned a number and so was each workstation area. At the beginning of the semester he sat the appropriate group down at their section area and showed all six groups everything he could about each of their areas, but mainly teaching them how to find information about their fields themselves, ie man pages and documentation. So now we have one group which were the "experts" on databases, one group of "experts" in programming, etc. The next six weeks, we all rotated stations. The group which had been the programmers(and were still the programming "experts") rotated to the history area, database "experts" rotated to the programming area, etc.
Now the cool part began, the teacher just stood back and said, "Now, in addition to learning about the history of computers, you programming 'experts' are responsible for teaching programming to the new group. Likewise the history of computing "experts" will teach the history of computing to the programmers which rotated into the history area while learning about their new area." So for the second six weeks, the people who had learned about area 1 were responsible for learning about area 2 and teaching what they learned about area 1 to a new group of students. You wouldn't believe how this solidified our knowledge of each area. But wait, it get's better. At the end of each six weeks we had tests, and teacher evaluations. The "learning group" at each station would take a test that the "teaching group" made up. And the "learning group" would write evaluations of how well the "teaching group" taught.
I have a feeling this won't come across very clearly, so this may help.
A student may have a cycle like this, each numbered event lasts six weeks.
1. learning Programming, teaching nothing Take test on Programming
2. learning Database, teaching Programming Write test on Programming, take test on Database, get evaluated on how you taught Programming
3. learning OS, teaching Database Write test on Database, take test on OS, get evaluated on how you taught Database
Winter Break
4. learning Hardware, teaching OS Write test on OS, take test on Hardware, get evaluated on how you taught OS
5. learning History, teaching Hardware Write test on Hardware, take test on History, get evaluated on how you taught Hardware
6. learning Word Processing, teaching History Write test on History, take test on Word Processing, get evaluated on how you taught History
So, they wouldn't get a chance to teach Word Processing, but everything else they would have had experience as both a learner and a teacher in. Typically the teacher would step in during the last six weeks and help make that section of the course more comprehensive to make up for the fact that the currently learning groups woudn't get experience teaching that particular area.
In addition, there were all kinds of real world things happening here, real hands-on stuff. If a hard drive failed, turn the machine over to the hardware group and let them fix it. Then give it to the OS group to get re-installed so it's back up and running. If some naughty boy wrote a startup script(autoexec.bat typically, old DOS systems) which taunted the user and locked up the computer, the current OS group were required to clean it up. The history group was required to keep up on current news on the computer front, new hardware/software releases. The more static fields like Databases or Word Processing weren't as hard pressed to keep up with stuff, but they had to as well. Grades were a function of how well you did on the tests, how well you wrote your tests, and your evaluations. We also did group evaluations for our other group members so we could deal with slackers who never helped make up tests or left all the teaching to the others. It was very fast-paced because of all the stuff we had to do, but I think we rose to the challenge very well. Myself and another student even came up before/after school and helped the teacher build a LAN connecting our lab and the school library so we could do library searches from the lab. This was very useful the next semester since they could read about a reference book online and then check the library for it, reserve it and have it by the next class period to help teach from.(that seems to be the story of my academic career, all the cool stuff happens the semester after I leave, and usually it's me who makes it possible for the cool stuff to happen in the first place. In college I built a couple webservers and a Beowulf cluster that I never got to use and they ran fiber ethernet connections to the dorm I was in the semester after I left:p )
If I were going to do this today? I'd have the following groups
Hardware Programming(the most current language you can get your hands on, Java, Perl, etc) OS (seriously, it's sad how many people in CS 101 in college don't know how to use the system) Networking (both internet and LAN, basics of IP and LAN types Ethernet, Token Ring, etc.) Office type apps Databases(RDB theory and SQL at least)
Steven
This post would have been a lot cleaner if stupid slashdot didn't strip all my whitespace down to a single space. I had to completely re-format what was originally a table-like structure about the cycle of a student in a class.:p
Mr. Nolan says the agency believes it can be a trusted intermediary between Internet marketers and the public. "People say the Internet could be a lot more usable if there was a greater trust involved," he says. "At the Postal Service, people trust us."
You heard it here trolls! Head on over to SIashdot.org and you too can get F1R57 P057! Even better, you can get F1R57 P057 3V3R!!!
SIashdot.org News for trolls, stuff that no one else gives a shit about.
Steven
PS Be the first to respond to the story about Penis Birds pulling off Gates willie and win a free session with Natalie Portman! She'll pour hot grits down your pants and then later become petrified for your amusement!
PPS That's right SIashdot.org, now with Beowulf Clusters!
Admitely I haven't read all the discussion on this thread yet, but I haven't seen this mentioned.
The plain and simple reason a transparent society won't work is because morals can only be applied on an individual basis. If everyone used the same moral guidelines the theory would work. You find a skeleton in my closet, well that's fine, you consider trying to bring it up in public but stop because you have a skeleton in your closet that you don't want me to expose. Well, what if the skeleton in your closet is not something you'd be ashamed of?
Hypothetical situation(please don't do something petty like saying "the examples you picked and called misdemeanors are really felonies" or somesuch. Please address intent, not semantics)
Person A has a history of petty theft, stealing candy bars, occasionally walking out of a restraunt without paying etc. All misdemeanors.
Person B has a history of soliciting prostitutes, also a misdemeanor in most areas.
Person A finds out about Person B's "crimes" and is competition with them for a job/public office/etc. If they made them public and, in retalliation, Person B exposed the "crimes" of Person A, who do you think would lose the most face?
Simple, whoever the majority felt was the "most wrong" In the Bible-thumping Southern US, Person B loses. In another area where prostitution is technically illegal but typically socially acceptable, but theft is neither legal nor socially acceptable(IIRC Rio DeJenario is such a place), Person A loses.
The author of the "Transparent Society" theory understands the moral fibre of the world is not ready for total exposure of every skeleton. My question? If you take it for granted that the moral guidelines are different for each individual, what causes this individuality? Churches and states have both tried to impose a morality on their members for as long as they have both existed. The human animal continues to have a decidedly non-approved moral model. So, is morality a cognitive choice? Or is it some combination of mind, society's pressures, and instinct/intuition which shapes the individual's morality?
I realize this is a big question, and it is as loaded as the assertation that "homosexuality is a biological directive." I'm just wanting to get some feedback. I believe it is a combination of conscious choice, society's pressures, and possibly intuition/instinct.
If morality is a conscious process, a Transparent Society can work given enough conditioning. If it has biological and sociological factors? Good luck.
Yeah! Cause you don't wanna lose brunes69's respect. You got your choice, either walk around with one nut for the rest of your life, or (horror of horrors) lose brunes69's respect.
Deja is already culling messages not sent through their services for archival and when they archive them they insert hyperlinks to their product reviews and catalogue. Well, if it's well done, i.e. they don't insert an add for a totally unrelated(to the topic of the message) product which happened to be mentioned in a post, then I don't really have a problem with it. They are changing some of the content of _their_ archives to provide people who read the NG through their service to look up consumer information about a product mentioned there. No big deal to me, hyperlinks aren't too offensive as long as I know this isn't one of the authors, I won't click it.
But, always a but, what happens if they go further with this? What if they start putting these hyperlinks into the original messages if these messages are posted through their service? Or worse, small banner ads. With more and more people reading the NG through a web-based front-end, this seems to be the next logical step.
That would bother me. I use Deja because I don't have a newsreader configured at work, but I'm not real thrilled with the spamsig they force on me, and I'd be even less likely to use them if they're randomly going to insert hyperlinks to thier catalogue in my posts.
As for what they're doing now? If they only link on general product categories, like the "modem" example we've seen, which lead to decent information about a wide variety of products and customer reviews about them, then this seems like a good idea. An educated consumer can't be a bad thing.
The problem with the web, and especially with the NG's is simply one of mis-information. Sure, the anonymous nature of the web makes it easier to write about sensitive issues or let your opinion out when you wouldn't if you had to put your name on it, but it also makes it _tons_ easier to spread FUD. If Deja becomes a major source for pre-purchase research, I forsee a new brand of spam. Spammers will post false reviews on the NG and these will be included in Deja's information about a product. With so many new users ignorant of how Deja comes by it's information, they'll take it at face value. I've been apprehensive ever since Deja changed their front page from the Usenet index to a product catalog front page. Beware Deja, you can either be made or broken by how you approach this issue. Play it more conservative and you can become a new Consumer Reports. Do this badly? You'll be blacklisted as a spam haven.
Bill: Hey look, BOB's conked out in front of his workstation again. Steve: Yea, wow, he must be having a great dream, check out what his REM patterns are doing to his computer. Bill: I'll give it fifteen seconds before it segfaults. Steve: I'll say twenty seconds and it'll be a page fault. Boss: Eight seconds, and GPF.
(20 seconds later) Bill: Damn, I've never seen a program GPF, Page Fault _and_ segfault at the same time! Steve: Must be dreaming about Natalie Portman.
Slashdot Mirror
Hey I know you! You're one of those guys on the old Frosted Flakes commercials. Yea, the ones where the person is sitting in shadow because they're ashamed of liking a "kids" cereal. I knew I recognized you!
Steven
Won $50 worth of Lego's in a "creative building" contest when he was seven with a cool skateboarding robot design built out of the little Lego sets that came with McDonalds Happy Meals(all I had at the time). Used the money to buy three Lego Technic sets, the pneumatic ones, and never looked back.
Is teaching his 4 year old how to program Mindstorms, and dug out the old pneumatic sets too.
I saw the title and even though I knew the Sledgehammer was a new CPU, I just thought "How sweet would it be to LART some spammer with a Linux-based sledgehammer."
SuSe on a Sledgehammer, For those times when you want to do more than just ping someone.
Steven
In their standard agreement they make everyone sign, they set themselves up as technically being a publisher and they reserve the right to distribute your work in printed and electronic form. They say that if your thesis generates more then $10 in sales in a calendar year, they will pay you a 10% royalty. The ownership of the copyright remains entirely with the author. This is the same agreement they have used for a long time when theses are ordered by other libraries and sometimes by individuals. The only part that's new is the aggressive marketing.
YEA! 10% of $10 bucks a year is...$1 per year, at this rate I'll be able to pay off my student loans in just 75,000 years!
Steven
We've seen several different articles on /. recently about intellectual property and the rights/responsibilities that come along with it. Some people are pushing for programmers to be responsible for how what they create is used, and some are pushing for abolution of intellectual property as technology makes copying and distributing such works easier and easier. Both viewpoints seem to get a fair amount of backing in the form of court rulings and new legislation.
Is anyone else seeing a catch-22 developing here? Force the creators to stop people from using their creations negatively, but take away their ability to decide how and where their creation can be distributed/used.
Personally I think the Napster case will have it's greatest impact, not on the music industry, but on the computing industry. We're seeing our future being ruled and legislated right now. I'm going to keep a close eye on this and contact my representatives if I see something that concerns me, it may not work, but I'd rather try to stop stupid laws from making my livelyhood impossible than just leave the country when the stupid laws get passed.
Steven
/usr/bin/perl -e 'for ($i=0; $i 10000000000; $i++) {print "Linux is a Unix";}'
followed almost immediately by ^C because ten billion iterations of anything is just ridiculous.
Steven
Even if you could somehow hold Yahoo responsible for the information that flows through it, everyone knows that keeping people from getting Nazi stuff from Yahoo auctions wouldn't stop the spread of Nazi stuff. And even if someone is keeping it as a "collectible" what does it matter?
I had a professor in college who collected WWII memorabelia, he had two little flag holders which were used to hold miniature flags. These were once the property of Adolf Hitler and were set out at state banquets, one flying the Nazi flag and one flying Hitler's personal banner. Does this mean my prof was a neo-nazi?
I think the judge is asking for something that is impossible in practice and silly in theory. Sure let's wipe out all traces of the Nazi's existance, then when someone in the future starts down the same path they did, we won't remember where that path leads.
As Rafiki told Simba "The past can hurt" but I think the important thing to remember here is, if you forget the past, you are doomed to repeat it.
Steven
I've seen the statement "we don't want all the money going to the middle man" tossed around here quite a bit, and it got me thinking... I bet most of us here who have jobs end up working for some sort of "middle man". So if we try to cut out the middle man in these transactions, aren't we in fact taking money away from our fellow workers' pockets? (i.e. the middle men will see a decline in revenue, have to cut wages/jobs, etc.)
But a fair number of us are running full steam towards making ourselves obsolete as it is. Think about it, scientists are working on the Grand Unified Theory of Everything, programmers are writing programs that write programs, everything is moving towards making the business of living not involve people on a daily basis. Soon we'll be able to buy a car without dealing with a salesman(oops, done that already), buy a book without going to a bookstore(damn, done that too),
or listen to live music without leaving our chairs(fsck! another thing we can do already).
Every time someone discovers how something works, there is one less thing to find out in the universe. Sure, the universe is huge, but this is happening at a phenomenal rate in the IT field. People write code that writes more code, people build computers that design and build better computers. Everywhere you look the middleman _and_ the bottom man is being replaced. On top we have lusers who click pretty widgets. When something goes wrong, they click some other pretty widget and it fixes it.
I write programs with maximum useability in mind, code re-use, portability, and flexibility to be used in multiple areas. The day is fast coming when someone can just take my code and do small easy modifications to it by clicking a couple pretty widgets and solve their problem. Where does that leave me? (hopefully retired early, but this obviously won't happen for everyone)
I think this may be foreshadowing. Right now the producers control the means of production, but we're producing means for others to control the means of production. The RIAA is going the way of the dinosaur as connectivity between consumers and artists increases. Will IT people be next as we develop more and more ways for joe blow to do what we used to do?
Steven
of why suck.com will never be taken away by the WIPO. It'd be impossible for anyone to suck more than them.
Steven
Cybersquatting is wrong, everyone knows that. I think the vast majority of the controversy over this issue is the definitions people like the WIPO use to decide if someone is a squatter or not. All these seem to fall under personal judgement of the arbiter in most cases. We need clearer definitions of what is and what isn't cybersquatting.
I looked through the case history of the WIPO one time, it was very interesting. I especially remember one case.
There were two companies, the defendant was a small home-based textile business which sold things like doilies and stuff, the plaintiff was a larger multinational textile business which sold doilies and stuff. The plaintiff had been in business for years and had recognized trademarks on the name(there was no indication that the home-based business knew of the other's existance when they choose the name or registered the domain), but they hadn't gone into cyberspace yet.
Meanwhile, this little home-based business was selling their doilies through the internet, only had the one domain registered, was actively using it and still showed no signs of knowledgeably treading on the other companies trademark. Then one day the big company decided they wanted to branch out into cyberspace. They found the little companies website, and took it to the WIPO immediately. I'll give you one guess how the WIPO ruled.
So now the little home-based business has to change all it's flyers that were probably posted at the local YMCA, all thier business cards and stationary, and totally re-do their website and any deals they had with things like VeriSign to provide a secure web ordering environment. Basically they have to start up the business all over again. This kind of capital is almost impossible to generate when you start a business, now some random company(even though they were old, and fairly large, they weren't high profile and they certainly weren't a household name) they didn't even know existed takes them to the WIPO and now they have to pay startup costs all over again.
What does this say about the American Dream? You better be damn sure you aren't dreaming on the same wavelength as anyone with more resources than you, that's what it says.
Steven
I'm not so sure the analogy holds. I choose my domain name, I don't choose my 1-800 number if I don't want to. I've never heard of people signing up for 1-800 numbers which would spell out things like dom-inoe and then not using it and just waiting until the company called them then selling it to them.
Companies need to be able to protect their intellectual property from people who are using it in bad faith. The problem is, who defines "bad faith?" The definitions being used right now are pretty poor. I'm going to post a reply to the main thread where I think the WIPO was really wrong and showed it's colors as "the corporate friend."
Steven
First things first, my comment was mainly meant as a joke, aparently some people got it, and some didn't.
...some years back I worked for IBM and my job in the 1990s was to diseminate AIX & Risc technology awareness throughout IBM in the Asia Pacific region...
Oh goody, I always love discussing the merits of an OS with a salesman.
AIX is neither a good technology nor a bad one. They are much easier to administer than Digital Unix, much less easy to deal with than HP-UX and less featureful than Solaris. They are mediocre as a development platform.
As far as support goes? Well all the customer support reps are useless for anything more than FAQ's until you've escalated the call a couple of times. That's nothing personal to IBM.
I considered a short diatribe on what IBM's real problem is, especially as it relates to their ever decreasing market share in todays market and the projections for this trend to continue. But that would take us way too far off topic. Here it is in a sentence. There are a lot more individual consumers than there are businesses, and their aggregate buying power is far greater.
Steven
I'm sure you didn't mean to, but your post sure as hell looks like it could be easily adapted for pretty much any story on /. and get modded up every time. Let's look at it.
This is a powerful technology, while many will be quick to dismiss it, condemn it, and villify it. It is just a tool. It is inherently neutral. The good or bad that will come from it will come from those that use it. The technology is there, once it has been announced, it can't be taken away, so learn it, use it, understand it, just like so many seem to say about the various hacking/cracking tools.
Too many people are quick to assume that when it is in someone else's hands, they must be evil, but in your hands it would be good. I can see some very powerful uses of this- [Random possible use] for one. How about [a new twist on on old profession]- maybe you still will need to [insert former method here], but this machine will tell you [something semi-insightful]- heck maybe [some huge corporate entity with tons of market share] would support it, since it would mean [saving them money, streamlining their processes].
Yes, this technology can be abused, but exploring the uses and abuses of technology is what hacking (in the classic sense) is all about.
Damn, fill in the blanks and you've got +5 for almost any new story with a technological impact. And it could easily apply to new laws, or almost anything with just a little modification. If everything you write is this generic I bet you could be/are one hell of a programmer.
Steven
IBM has always been committed to maximum profitability for minimum costs. A supreme example of this was the AIX operating system, not only did we put very little time into developing it, we put even less time into training the customer support reps.
IBM is proud to announce our new vision for the future. We have already previewed some of this vision with the introduction of the multi-Linux s/390 configuration and the Linux watch. Keep an eye on IBM as we incorporate this free OS into more and more of our systems. What this means to investors is much higher profits as our R&D costs drop. We also expect to see a reducion in the amount of time and money we must expend on our customer support lines as we can now say "It's Linus's Fault."
Steven
Excuse me, do you have the time?
<Linux Watch user>Yes, just a sec
[root@localhost]$date
Tue Aug 8 10:
<BATT LOW>
<BATT LOW>
<BAT
DAMN! I would swear I recharged it last night! Well, it's ten something, does that help?
<Random person> Umm, yea. Thanks (runs away)
Steven
The ability to severly retard. That's the best summary of the legal process I've ever seen.
Steven
DAMN! Now I'll have to wear one watch for each Linux distro or risk being shunned at the local LUG. Let's see
Red Hat
Caldera
Debian
Suse
Slackware
...(repeat ad nauseum)
Steven
Here was my CS experience in HS.
:p )
:p
The teacher was just out of college and had tons of aspirations about how he was going to motivate and pass on all this great stuff he had just learned himself. So here's what he did. It's amazingly ambitious and really difficult to pull off without a good group of students who really want to learn, but it worked really well.
He split the class up into six groups of 4-5 people each. He set up six groups of workstations in the lab, one for the history of computing, one for hardware, one for databases, one for word processing, one for OS admin, and one for programming. The school year was split into six six-week periods. Each group was randomly assigned a number and so was each workstation area. At the beginning of the semester he sat the appropriate group down at their section area and showed all six groups everything he could about each of their areas, but mainly teaching them how to find information about their fields themselves, ie man pages and documentation. So now we have one group which were the "experts" on databases, one group of "experts" in programming, etc.
The next six weeks, we all rotated stations. The group which had been the programmers(and were still the programming "experts") rotated to the history area, database "experts" rotated to the programming area, etc.
Now the cool part began, the teacher just stood back and said, "Now, in addition to learning about the history of computers, you programming 'experts' are responsible for teaching programming to the new group. Likewise the history of computing "experts" will teach the history of computing to the programmers which rotated into the history area while learning about their new area." So for the second six weeks, the people who had learned about area 1 were responsible for learning about area 2 and teaching what they learned about area 1 to a new group of students. You wouldn't believe how this solidified our knowledge of each area. But wait, it get's better. At the end of each six weeks we had tests, and teacher evaluations. The "learning group" at each station would take a test that the "teaching group" made up. And the "learning group" would write evaluations of how well the "teaching group" taught.
I have a feeling this won't come across very clearly, so this may help.
A student may have a cycle like this, each numbered event lasts six weeks.
1. learning Programming, teaching nothing
Take test on Programming
2. learning Database, teaching Programming
Write test on Programming, take test on Database, get evaluated on how you taught Programming
3. learning OS, teaching Database
Write test on Database, take test on OS, get evaluated on how you taught Database
Winter Break
4. learning Hardware, teaching OS
Write test on OS, take test on Hardware, get evaluated on how you taught OS
5. learning History, teaching Hardware
Write test on Hardware, take test on History, get evaluated on how you taught Hardware
6. learning Word Processing, teaching History
Write test on History, take test on Word Processing, get evaluated on how you taught History
So, they wouldn't get a chance to teach Word Processing, but everything else they would have had experience as both a learner and a teacher in. Typically the teacher would step in during the last six weeks and help make that section of the course more comprehensive to make up for the fact that the currently learning groups woudn't get experience teaching that particular area.
In addition, there were all kinds of real world things happening here, real hands-on stuff. If a hard drive failed, turn the machine over to the hardware group and let them fix it. Then give it to the OS group to get re-installed so it's back up and running. If some naughty boy wrote a startup script(autoexec.bat typically, old DOS systems) which taunted the user and locked up the computer, the current OS group were required to clean it up. The history group was required to keep up on current news on the computer front, new hardware/software releases. The more static fields like Databases or Word Processing weren't as hard pressed to keep up with stuff, but they had to as well.
Grades were a function of how well you did on the tests, how well you wrote your tests, and your evaluations. We also did group evaluations for our other group members so we could deal with slackers who never helped make up tests or left all the teaching to the others. It was very fast-paced because of all the stuff we had to do, but I think we rose to the challenge very well. Myself and another student even came up before/after school and helped the teacher build a LAN connecting our lab and the school library so we could do library searches from the lab. This was very useful the next semester since they could read about a reference book online and then check the library for it, reserve it and have it by the next class period to help teach from.(that seems to be the story of my academic career, all the cool stuff happens the semester after I leave, and usually it's me who makes it possible for the cool stuff to happen in the first place. In college I built a couple webservers and a Beowulf cluster that I never got to use and they ran fiber ethernet connections to the dorm I was in the semester after I left
If I were going to do this today? I'd have the following groups
Hardware
Programming(the most current language you can get your hands on, Java, Perl, etc)
OS (seriously, it's sad how many people in CS 101 in college don't know how to use the system)
Networking (both internet and LAN, basics of IP and LAN types Ethernet, Token Ring, etc.)
Office type apps
Databases(RDB theory and SQL at least)
Steven
This post would have been a lot cleaner if stupid slashdot didn't strip all my whitespace down to a single space. I had to completely re-format what was originally a table-like structure about the cycle of a student in a class.
And if they don't trust us, we shoot them.
Steven
You heard it here trolls! Head on over to SIashdot.org and you too can get F1R57 P057! Even better, you can get F1R57 P057 3V3R!!!
SIashdot.org News for trolls, stuff that no one else gives a shit about.
Steven
PS Be the first to respond to the story about Penis Birds pulling off Gates willie and win a free session with Natalie Portman! She'll pour hot grits down your pants and then later become petrified for your amusement!
PPS That's right SIashdot.org, now with Beowulf Clusters!
Admitely I haven't read all the discussion on this thread yet, but I haven't seen this mentioned.
The plain and simple reason a transparent society won't work is because morals can only be applied on an individual basis. If everyone used the same moral guidelines the theory would work. You find a skeleton in my closet, well that's fine, you consider trying to bring it up in public but stop because you have a skeleton in your closet that you don't want me to expose. Well, what if the skeleton in your closet is not something you'd be ashamed of?
Hypothetical situation(please don't do something petty like saying "the examples you picked and called misdemeanors are really felonies" or somesuch. Please address intent, not semantics)
Person A has a history of petty theft, stealing candy bars, occasionally walking out of a restraunt without paying etc. All misdemeanors.
Person B has a history of soliciting prostitutes, also a misdemeanor in most areas.
Person A finds out about Person B's "crimes" and is competition with them for a job/public office/etc. If they made them public and, in retalliation, Person B exposed the "crimes" of Person A, who do you think would lose the most face?
Simple, whoever the majority felt was the "most wrong" In the Bible-thumping Southern US, Person B loses. In another area where prostitution is technically illegal but typically socially acceptable, but theft is neither legal nor socially acceptable(IIRC Rio DeJenario is such a place), Person A loses.
The author of the "Transparent Society" theory understands the moral fibre of the world is not ready for total exposure of every skeleton.
My question? If you take it for granted that the moral guidelines are different for each individual, what causes this individuality?
Churches and states have both tried to impose a morality on their members for as long as they have both existed. The human animal continues to have a decidedly non-approved moral model. So, is morality a cognitive choice? Or is it some combination of mind, society's pressures, and instinct/intuition which shapes the individual's morality?
I realize this is a big question, and it is as loaded as the assertation that "homosexuality is a biological directive." I'm just wanting to get some feedback. I believe it is a combination of conscious choice, society's pressures, and possibly intuition/instinct.
If morality is a conscious process, a Transparent Society can work given enough conditioning. If it has biological and sociological factors? Good luck.
Steven
Yeah! Cause you don't wanna lose brunes69's respect. You got your choice, either walk around with one nut for the rest of your life, or (horror of horrors) lose brunes69's respect.
Score adjusted accordingly.
Steven
Evil is immortal and BS lives forever. You want proof? Look up your local city ordinances, especially if you live in a "bible belt" area of the US.
Lies, more lies. This is probably the biggest piece of FUD you've written in years.
Deja is already culling messages not sent through their services for archival and when they archive them they insert hyperlinks to their product reviews and catalogue. Well, if it's well done, i.e. they don't insert an add for a totally unrelated(to the topic of the message) product which happened to be mentioned in a post, then I don't really have a problem with it. They are changing some of the content of _their_ archives to provide people who read the NG through their service to look up consumer information about a product mentioned there. No big deal to me, hyperlinks aren't too offensive as long as I know this isn't one of the authors, I won't click it.
But, always a but, what happens if they go further with this? What if they start putting these hyperlinks into the original messages if these messages are posted through their service? Or worse, small banner ads. With more and more people reading the NG through a web-based front-end, this seems to be the next logical step.
That would bother me. I use Deja because I don't have a newsreader configured at work, but I'm not real thrilled with the spamsig they force on me, and I'd be even less likely to use them if they're randomly going to insert hyperlinks to thier catalogue in my posts.
As for what they're doing now? If they only link on general product categories, like the "modem" example we've seen, which lead to decent information about a wide variety of products and customer reviews about them, then this seems like a good idea. An educated consumer can't be a bad thing.
The problem with the web, and especially with the NG's is simply one of mis-information. Sure, the anonymous nature of the web makes it easier to write about sensitive issues or let your opinion out when you wouldn't if you had to put your name on it, but it also makes it _tons_ easier to spread FUD. If Deja becomes a major source for pre-purchase research, I forsee a new brand of spam. Spammers will post false reviews on the NG and these will be included in Deja's information about a product. With so many new users ignorant of how Deja comes by it's information, they'll take it at face value. I've been apprehensive ever since Deja changed their front page from the Usenet index to a product catalog front page.
Beware Deja, you can either be made or broken by how you approach this issue. Play it more conservative and you can become a new Consumer Reports. Do this badly? You'll be blacklisted as a spam haven.
Steven
Bill: Hey look, BOB's conked out in front of his workstation again.
Steve: Yea, wow, he must be having a great dream, check out what his REM patterns are doing to his computer.
Bill: I'll give it fifteen seconds before it segfaults.
Steve: I'll say twenty seconds and it'll be a page fault.
Boss: Eight seconds, and GPF.
(20 seconds later)
Bill: Damn, I've never seen a program GPF, Page Fault _and_ segfault at the same time!
Steve: Must be dreaming about Natalie Portman.