What I'd like to see is an update to the firmware with some real apps. I wouldn't mind giving up breakout if it could be replaced by, say, a text file reader. Apple or any decent embedded systems hacker should be able to do it. It's likely not been done just based on time-to-market and strategy reasons, not technical ones.
Admittedly, the iPod is not a heavy-hitter in the RAM department, but if you can play breakout, you obviously have the system calls to do some cool stuff.
Of course, anyone other than Apple hacking the firmware is illegal under the DMCA. Far be it from me to incite illegal activity.
Unfortunately, Sony is within their rights under the DMCA (a bad law in our quickly maturing police state). But wouldn't they be a lot more successful by co-opting this hacker's work and selling it to Aibo lovers? Copyright law shouldn't need to be used to stifle innovation.
Quick, while you still can, program your Aibo to bite the hand that feeds it...
Peace, Love, Tux? He may be a loveable penguin icon, but he represents the way the Linux community has sold out to big money and big corporations.
For all the hard work of the hackers in this community, we don't deserve to have IBM mock us with a symbol of our own design. What will it mean when someone sees the penguin image and says to you, "Hey, isn't that the new thing from IBM?"
IBM wants to televize the revolution. We shouldn't let them.
I can think of a decent reason -- I already have coax cable inside the walls. It would be a hell of a lot easier to use that for ethernet than laying new Cat5 fiber.
If you have a Palm (any Palm with IR) and a cell phone, why not just get Palm's mobile internet kit? It's cheap and works with a wide variety of phones. Let the phone do phone stuff, and let the PDA do PDA stuff and wireless web. With the right ISP you can run web-clipping apps and all that fun stuff.
Given that you can sign up for free to Palm's developer network, and download all kinds of OS versions (regular, debug, beta...) I'm not too worried about this.
$20 is a reasonable price tag for boxing it, shrink-wrapping it, and distributing it with a nice install guide and user's manual so your PHB can get it at BestBuy. The cost is for the convenience, not the technology.
Same thing as getting a Linux distro: if you know what you're doing, it's free. If you want the "for Dummies" edition, get out the checkbook.
Technically, GNUJSP's not an Apache module -- it piggybacks on JServ. In the credit where credit is due dept., my vote goes the Apache JServ/Jakarta team.
Ecommerce sites should enable SSL by default. The performance difference is a small penalty to pay and can be addressed by hardware solutions for larger sites. With SSL, you already have a certificate and session, so you don't need cookies or encoded URLs. Unfortunately most web app APIs ignore this fact (though the new JSDK 2.2 spec has provisions for doing it in the Java world).
I'd love to go into miserable detail on why my formative junior high and high school years were filled with terror and alienation, but it would be just another scar on the collective/. belt so I'll leave it at that. (How did I get through? Found a few other like-minded individuals, channelled that energy into writing, listened to "Quadrophenia" incessantly.)
More important to me is that the public education system is so ass-backward that it doesn't recognize the need to support its top students, the ones most likely to feel the pangs of alienation. Schools that have fought an uphill battle to have tracking (i.e. grouping intelligent kids together) are going to be hard-hit by the Columbine massacre. I'm sure we'll see folks saying that we can't trust all these geeks, nerds and gamers together or they'll turn out like the TCM. Well, obviously that's not the case -- the Denver killers had no support network, that's part of what drove them to do what they did. Smart kids need other smart kids around to understand them. Often their parents don't. I know when I'm a parent, I'll do my damnedest, having been there before, but only systemic change to the education system is going to make a substantial difference, regardless of the efforts of any parent.
The lowest levels of our society have miles of support groups, and schools are required by federal law to provide special education and counseling services to the worst performing students. However, nothing mandates similar programs for the top tier of kids, and we have to squeak by on what sustenance we can gain from the few parents and teachers who know what it's like to be the one crawling from the garbagecans.
We have some plexiglass cases set up. Fun to watch all the blinking SCSI lights.
Just make sure you have enough air circulation. PII's and Cyrix MIIs put out a LOT of heat and will often cook themselves if the airflow is not to their liking. This means put lots of vents and fans in the plexiglass, or mount a GOOD (i.e. not the cheapest one you can find) cooling fan on the CPU itself.
The GPL isn't a person, so it doesn't make sense to say that it "regards" business as anything at all! Be, Inc. was worried about Microsoft...
Okay, let's move on to the real issues...
...the GPL is designed to undermine and sabotage business. Read the GNU Manifesto for more on this.
The GNU GPL is designed to guarantee freedom. Read your local COPYING-2.0 file for more on this. Inasmuch as business practices are at odds with freedom (in the Information Age, more and more), yes, the GPL is in opposition to that.
Individuals as much as large businesses will suffer if they cannot hold intellectual property.
This is certainly true under the dominant paradigm. Is this the way you want the world to work?
I don't. As an individual, my choices are limited to creating my own business (expensive, difficult, but possible) or giving up my intellectual property to my employer. The GPL gives me a viable tool to protect my intellectual property so that I personally, and other developers, can benefit from it.
Programmers will suffer because they will have nothing to sell in order to make a living.
Again, you're too caught up in the notion that you must be able to sell a software product. Why not charge the same fee for installing your product, providing support, selling nicely-bound manuals? You seem to scoff at these notions, or the disk foundry concept, but I hear the same sort of knee-jerk reaction all the time with people who are used to the process of selling software licenses. I consider myself a decent programmer, and thus my services are in high demand. I'm not going to starve on the street. If I can provide services to someone and retain the rights to the software I produce, everyone wins. The GPL gives me a tool to do so.
To destroy intellectual property is to destroy value and freedom.
When the value proposition of the economic structure does not benefit the society that relies on it, it needs to be destroyed. There are other forms of value, however, and other forms of freedom. I am, in point of fact, very much a proponent of the free market and of capitalism. But the world economic system is not a free market of the kind envisioned by Adam Smith, idealized by Ayn Rand, and paid lip service to by our intellectuals and economists. If I tend to say "corporation" every other sentence, it's because those embodiments (latin root) are the golems of modern-day society, creations of an unjust socio-economic system. This is getting far afield from software engineering, but the intellectual property ideas are the same.
It's like saying, "Sorry, but you can't create a better car; the only option that's open to you is to be an auto mechanic."
Lots of open source projects have built better cars and the individuals involved profited from their work. The key is realizing that the mainstream business model is incompatible. O'Reilly makes a ton of money from Perl, and has Larry Wall on staff. Larry could just as easily have started his own Perl company, without making Perl closed-source. That many open source developers, Linus included, are happy to work for free is of little interest to me. That's their choice, but it should not be held as the sine qua non of open source development.
The GPL does not regard business as the enemy. Intellectual property is the enemy, and unfortunately the business world is built on the premise of IP.
Open source has a chance to change the business structure, not merely be coopted by it. This is the point on which ESR and RMS are 180 degrees apart.
What the GPL ensures is that a business using free software is contributing back to the community. Other licenses turn the communal capital of open source into financial capital without taking any care to benefit the community. David Korten's "When Corporations Rule the World" explains this process of turning social economies into corporate ones, and the effect this has on the deterioration of the social structure and environment. Free software is merely an application of this principle, albeit one that is very close to my heart.
Brett, I agree with your assessment, but I think it's worth trying to persuade corporations that the GPL presents a viable economic model. We seem too stuck in the trap of thinking that selling a software product is the only way to make money.
Eric, it was an anonymous coward who sent in the link, not who wrote the article. Thomas Scoville is no Mr. YCHTH, and his reportage is consistently far more articulate, well composed, and balanced then your own.
Speaking for my own read of yesterday's essay, the thesis I got was not that business simply doesn't get open source -- in fact they are starting to, thanks in part to your organization's aggressive marketing. Scoville seemed more focused on the point that the suits are approaching Open Source/Free Software as something of an alien force, or even a potential panacaea, without a clear idea of how to fit it into their particular worldview.
I find your callous disregard for one of your own uncalled for, and your further insult to the community here as a group of inarticulate J. Random Slashdotters particularly telltale. By distancing yourself from those of us who truly support the advancement of free software, you are doing the community a grave disservice.
Slashdot Mirror
What I'd like to see is an update to the firmware with some real apps. I wouldn't mind giving up breakout if it could be replaced by, say, a text file reader. Apple or any decent embedded systems hacker should be able to do it. It's likely not been done just based on time-to-market and strategy reasons, not technical ones.
Admittedly, the iPod is not a heavy-hitter in the RAM department, but if you can play breakout, you obviously have the system calls to do some cool stuff.
Of course, anyone other than Apple hacking the firmware is illegal under the DMCA. Far be it from me to incite illegal activity.
Wes
Unfortunately, Sony is within their rights under the DMCA (a bad law in our quickly maturing police state). But wouldn't they be a lot more successful by co-opting this hacker's work and selling it to Aibo lovers? Copyright law shouldn't need to be used to stifle innovation.
Quick, while you still can, program your Aibo to bite the hand that feeds it...
Peace, Love, Tux? He may be a loveable penguin icon, but he represents the way the Linux community has sold out to big money and big corporations.
_ _
For all the hard work of the hackers in this community, we don't deserve to have IBM mock us with a symbol of our own design. What will it mean when someone sees the penguin image and says to you, "Hey, isn't that the new thing from IBM?"
IBM wants to televize the revolution. We shouldn't let them.
(Now back to my developerWorks article...)
_______________________________________________
Actually, I heard he wanted to turn it into DivX and host it on Gnutella...
_ __________
[snort]
______________________________________
Yes, but how many motherboards could they make with all that gold?
_ _
_______________________________________________
I didn't know trolls could read!_ ______
__________________________________________
Um, that's the same story. Note the "Reuters" tag. Crazy but true._ ______
__________________________________________
I can think of a decent reason -- I already have coax cable inside the walls. It would be a hell of a lot easier to use that for ethernet than laying new Cat5 fiber.
If you have a Palm (any Palm with IR) and a cell phone, why not just get Palm's mobile internet kit? It's cheap and works with a wide variety of phones. Let the phone do phone stuff, and let the PDA do PDA stuff and wireless web. With the right ISP you can run web-clipping apps and all that fun stuff.
http://www.palm.com/software/mik/
We had a little contest at work and came up with these:
TOP 10 REASONS WHY PALM CHOSE CLAUDIA SCHIFFER
10. Couldn't do a Palm V promo with only 4 Spice Girls
9. Claudia already wrote in Grafitti
8. Cray Research had already taken Naomi Campbell
7. Palm is the one thing that Tyra Banks couldn't figure out how to turn on
6. Nobody needs their handheld like Claudia does.
5. Schiffer Palm was a safe bet after debacle with Deborah Harry sponsorship
4. Perfect capacity for her memoirs
3. She's got plenty of experience guiding people's Palms.
2. She turned down Pocket PC, saying too many people already looked at her through Windows.
AND #1...
1. Ad slogan: When you think of your unit, think of Claudia.
Given that you can sign up for free to Palm's developer network, and download all kinds of OS versions (regular, debug, beta...) I'm not too worried about this.
$20 is a reasonable price tag for boxing it, shrink-wrapping it, and distributing it with a nice install guide and user's manual so your PHB can get it at BestBuy. The cost is for the convenience, not the technology.
Same thing as getting a Linux distro: if you know what you're doing, it's free. If you want the "for Dummies" edition, get out the checkbook.
Wes
Better yet, buy a monthly subscription to Emusic.com for $9.99 and download all the TMBG MP3s you want...
Technically, GNUJSP's not an Apache module -- it piggybacks on JServ. In the credit where credit is due dept., my vote goes the Apache JServ/Jakarta team.
Wes
http://www.klomp.org/gnujsp/
Ecommerce sites should enable SSL by default. The performance difference is a small penalty to pay and can be addressed by hardware solutions for larger sites. With SSL, you already have a certificate and session, so you don't need cookies or encoded URLs. Unfortunately most web app APIs ignore this fact (though the new JSDK 2.2 spec has provisions for doing it in the Java world).
I'd love to go into miserable detail on why my formative junior high and high school years were filled with terror and alienation, but it would be just another scar on the collective /. belt so I'll leave it at that. (How did I get through? Found a few other like-minded individuals, channelled that energy into writing, listened to "Quadrophenia" incessantly.)
More important to me is that the public education system is so ass-backward that it doesn't recognize the need to support its top students, the ones most likely to feel the pangs of alienation. Schools that have fought an uphill battle to have tracking (i.e. grouping intelligent kids together) are going to be hard-hit by the Columbine massacre. I'm sure we'll see folks saying that we can't trust all these geeks, nerds and gamers together or they'll turn out like the TCM. Well, obviously that's not the case -- the Denver killers had no support network, that's part of what drove them to do what they did. Smart kids need other smart kids around to understand them. Often their parents don't. I know when I'm a parent, I'll do my damnedest, having been there before, but only systemic change to the education system is going to make a substantial difference, regardless of the efforts of any parent.
The lowest levels of our society have miles of support groups, and schools are required by federal law to provide special education and counseling services to the worst performing students. However, nothing mandates similar programs for the top tier of kids, and we have to squeak by on what sustenance we can gain from the few parents and teachers who know what it's like to be the one crawling from the garbagecans.
Wes
With a half-size mobo and laptop HD, rip out the innards of your vintage computer and hook it up to the keyboard. I'd buy that.
Wes
We have some plexiglass cases set up. Fun to watch all the blinking SCSI lights.
Just make sure you have enough air circulation. PII's and Cyrix MIIs put out a LOT of heat and will often cook themselves if the airflow is not to their liking. This means put lots of vents and fans in the plexiglass, or mount a GOOD (i.e. not the cheapest one you can find) cooling fan on the CPU itself.
Wes
Linux Uses GNU Tools
Be, Inc. was worried about Microsoft...
Okay, let's move on to the real issues...
The GNU GPL is designed to guarantee freedom. Read your local COPYING-2.0 file for more on this. Inasmuch as business practices are at odds with freedom (in the Information Age, more and more), yes, the GPL is in opposition to that.
Individuals as much as large businesses will suffer if they cannot hold intellectual property.
This is certainly true under the dominant paradigm. Is this the way you want the world to work?
I don't. As an individual, my choices are limited to creating my own business (expensive, difficult, but possible) or giving up my intellectual property to my employer. The GPL gives me a viable tool to protect my intellectual property so that I personally, and other developers, can benefit from it.
Programmers will suffer because they will have nothing to sell in order to make a living.
Again, you're too caught up in the notion that you must be able to sell a software product. Why not charge the same fee for installing your product, providing support, selling nicely-bound manuals? You seem to scoff at these notions, or the disk foundry concept, but I hear the same sort of knee-jerk reaction all the time with people who are used to the process of selling software licenses. I consider myself a decent programmer, and thus my services are in high demand. I'm not going to starve on the street. If I can provide services to someone and retain the rights to the software I produce, everyone wins. The GPL gives me a tool to do so.
To destroy intellectual property is to destroy value and freedom.
When the value proposition of the economic structure does not benefit the society that relies on it, it needs to be destroyed. There are other forms of value, however, and other forms of freedom. I am, in point of fact, very much a proponent of the free market and of capitalism. But the world economic system is not a free market of the kind envisioned by Adam Smith, idealized by Ayn Rand, and paid lip service to by our intellectuals and economists. If I tend to say "corporation" every other sentence, it's because those embodiments (latin root) are the golems of modern-day society, creations of an unjust socio-economic system. This is getting far afield from software engineering, but the intellectual property ideas are the same.
It's like saying, "Sorry, but you can't create a better car; the only option that's open to you is to be an auto mechanic."
Lots of open source projects have built better cars and the individuals involved profited from their work. The key is realizing that the mainstream business model is incompatible. O'Reilly makes a ton of money from Perl, and has Larry Wall on staff. Larry could just as easily have started his own Perl company, without making Perl closed-source. That many open source developers, Linus included, are happy to work for free is of little interest to me. That's their choice, but it should not be held as the sine qua non of open source development.
Wes
Open source has a chance to change the business structure, not merely be coopted by it. This is the point on which ESR and RMS are 180 degrees apart.
What the GPL ensures is that a business using free software is contributing back to the community. Other licenses turn the communal capital of open source into financial capital without taking any care to benefit the community. David Korten's "When Corporations Rule the World" explains this process of turning social economies into corporate ones, and the effect this has on the deterioration of the social structure and environment. Free software is merely an application of this principle, albeit one that is very close to my heart.
Brett, I agree with your assessment, but I think it's worth trying to persuade corporations that the GPL presents a viable economic model. We seem too stuck in the trap of thinking that selling a software product is the only way to make money.
Wes
Quote from Rutherford B. Hayes --
Eric, it was an anonymous coward who sent in the link, not who wrote the article. Thomas Scoville is no Mr. YCHTH, and his reportage is consistently far more articulate, well composed, and balanced then your own.
Speaking for my own read of yesterday's essay, the thesis I got was not that business simply doesn't get open source -- in fact they are starting to, thanks in part to your organization's aggressive marketing. Scoville seemed more focused on the point that the suits are approaching Open Source/Free Software as something of an alien force, or even a potential panacaea, without a clear idea of how to fit it into their particular worldview.
I find your callous disregard for one of your own uncalled for, and your further insult to the community here as a group of inarticulate J. Random Slashdotters particularly telltale. By distancing yourself from those of us who truly support the advancement of free software, you are doing the community a grave disservice.
Yours,
Wes