And it's cost us a hell of a lot of money. The trouble is that for all of the advances in computing technology, which is governed by Moore's Law, the tecnology involved in keeping people alive and healthy in space has hardly advanced at all in the last 30 years. The always round the corner drop in costs for getting stuff into orbit have yet to materialise, and the ISS is just not practical.
The whole point of the ISS was never anything more than a showpiece to get people interested in space again. There's no serious research going on up there, all of the money is going into providing living quarters and equipment for a small crew of people. It would be far more practical to have a set of automated laboratories up there engaged in experiments which could be controlled from the ground, but people have this rediculously quaint idea that people have to be there!
This level of pandering to the sentimentality of the masses is both impractical and foolish. The ISS will never be more than a blip on the attention of a public too jaded from MTV to care, and all of the valuable research that could have been funded with the absurd sums of money they spent on it will never happen.
Maybe NASA needs to start thinking of science rather than ratings.
Okay, so maybe that's a bit harsh, but it seems like you're risking a lot of money on a product which will give only minimal returns. Linux is simply not viable as a gaming platform at the moment, and indeed for the forseeable future. Like it or loathe it, DirectX support would go a long way to making Linux more popular with the kind of trigger-happy moron who enjoys playing Quake.
And then there's the fact that within a week of launch some hacker spouting Stallmanist rhetoric will have hacked into the box and posted instructions on how to do so onto the net for all and sundry to read. Hell, Taco'll probably help them out by posting a story on/. about it.
So my question is, where exactly is the market for this box and how will you generate a profit? It all seems like a pipe-dream to me.
The very structure of the net means that it will always be vulnerable to DDoS attacks of one kind or another. And with a typically lax attitude on the part of sys admins who'd rather play Quake than get the latest patches for security holes, hackers are always going to find machines to 0wn and use.
The trouble is that systems like Carnivore could be used to prevent wide-scale DDoS attacks by isolating affected computers quickly enough to prevent the infection to spread. And as more and more critical applications move online (financial information, long-distance surgery etc.) the costs of a DDoS attack will grow and grow. Unlike the first Flood, the after effects of a successful DDoS could last for a lot longer than forty days and nights.
Not to detract from your attempt at fearcasting...
It's "forecasting". There's no such word as "fearcasting".
... but how exactly is making an uninformed decision about something superior to an informed decision?
When it's not an informed decision, but instead an amalgamation of fifty different people's opinions, none of whom really know what's going on in your situation. This merely means that rather than going with what you would normally do, you're ending up with a kind of "lowest common denominator" decision.
If mobile phones had been around three hundred years ago, do you think America would be independant today? I think not.
Alastair Reynolds is one of the breed of science fiction writers who is also a professional scientist.
This is hardly a "new breed", try for instance, Stephen Baxter who has a PhD in mathematics and whose Xeelee sequence contains some of the most epic ideas in all of SF (neutron stars as weapons? engineered singularities a billion light years wide?). Or check out Greg Egan's homepage, which has some of his fiction and a load of Java applets which he has programmed.
Seriously, there are a lot of tecnically accomplished science-fiction writers out there today who really do know what they're talking about. The two above are IMHO the best, but they're far from the only ones...
Has no-one else realised that Napster is the perfect front for the RIAA? Whilst they present a pose of innocence to the world, headed by Shawn Fanning's oh-so "innocent" posturings, the truth is that they are an organisation funded by the RIAA for the sole purpose of letting them lobby the most restrictive of laws into reality.
Shawn Fanning was nothing more than a willing stooge in the RIAA's plans to bring in a new tyranny of intellectual property laws. In return for paying him a large sum of money, the RIAA purchased his services as front man for "Napster", a piece of software knocked up in about half an hour by RIAA techies. He then started up the Napster company with the sole purpose of providing a music piracy service that was as blatent and as visible as possible, an aim in which he has done exceedingly well in.
Now the RIAA has the impetus to get all kinds of restrictive laws but into place by a Congress dazzled by the "threat" that Napster poses to the music industry. And it's working like a charm, and everyone has been fooled. When the RIAA gets what they want, Napster will quietly fold, all involved will get their paychecks, and we'll be the ones living under the Big Brother regime that KKKlinton approved.
The rise of the mobile phone has given momentum to the idea that people can be permanently connected via a web of communication, day or night, 365 days a year. And now with services like WAP/iMode, they can not only be connected with each other, they can be connected with the vast amount of data found online.
Does anyone else see the dangerous parallels between this and the actions of a hive mind? People are becoming less autonomous, more used to communicating their plans and ideas with others and receiving feedback before acting. Rather than allowing us to share information, mobile phones are acting as mechanisms which dampen individual creativity and instead encourage people to conform to the hive.
And with the advent of WAP/iMode, this trend is only getting worse. Why think for yourself when a premade answer is only a few button presses away? Sooner or later people will learn to stop thinking at all, for they will be connected to a grid in which everybody else can do their thinking for them. And rather than the wonderful quantities which make us unique, we'll all be drones, revelling in our powers of "communication".
No thanks, leave me out of this "revolution" in communication.
The idea of certification is that it provides a guaranteed level of competance in a certain area, is a nice one and all that, but it's hardly one that has a place in the modern computing industry. Like all training and courses, it merely provides an illusion of competance which can lull employers in a false sense of security - no "certified professional" is worth anything without the real-world experiance that comes from being on the job.
In many ways, having a certificate is like being part of a trade union - it provides a group which seeks to push its own members foward regardless of whether they're the right people for the job. And like trade unions, this attitude is the downfall of a capitalist economy based on the cut and thrust of a free market, including a free market for employment.
I'd rather hire someone willing to learn than some wet behind the ears fool with a Red Hat certificate who thinks they've already learnt everything.
... not the consumers. Anyone that thinks that a contract is in place to protect the consumer is living in some kind of socialist fairy-land, because the point of a contract in the modern world is to ensure that a corporation has a legal basis for getting payment from their customers.
Not that this is a bad thing - people love getting away without paying for things, and corporations have a right to receive proper payment for the services and products they provide to customers. In a capitalist economy contracts are always going to exist, because people are inherently selfish and you need to have a legally binding method of forcing them to pay.
New developments in contracts and licenses are merely making sure that this legal obligation to pay is still enforcable in the new digital domains that are becoming prevalent today. Like them or loathe them, they're an inevitable outgrowth of the rise of digital technology in a capitalist society, and they are necessary for the continued growth of our economy.
The reason people were so pissed about the FBI's Carnivore is because we have no way of knowing what it really does.
At least with an open-source version, we know what the system's capabilities are.
So basically what you're saying is that you want an open-source version because it's easier to hack? That certainly seems to be what you're implying - you want to know it's capabilities which makes it easier to plan a defence for...
So much for the vaunted "open source is more secure" mantra...
True, but this "outrage" is all from groups which are dedicated to freedom at the cost of security anyway. After all if a law was passed requiring people with red hair to register on a national database, of course it would be people with red hair who would complain. So that's a bit of a strawman argument IMHO.
What I don't understand about all of the fuss over Carnivore I've read on sites like/. is that essentially it isn't any different from already existing methods of surveillance like phone tapping. If you don't trust the FBI to use Carnivore properly, then you shouldn't trust them to use other methods legally either. But there's no outcry over phone tapping because a) it's already here, and b) it's not affecting the Internet.
Really, the only reason that Carnivore wasn't built into the net when it was first created was that nobody in law enforcement ever thought it would come to what it has? The original ARPAnet was mainly used by academics in America - who would have ever thought that it would eventually be used by terrorist organisations in the Middle East to coordinate with cells in New York?
The astounding growth of the net both in America and abroad caught agencies off guard, and they're not moving to recitify the problem in whatever way they can. This is not an invasion of privacy, it's a sensible precaution to be used when it is required. Anyone who thinks that the FBI will scan every packet going through routers in the US is living in a paranoid fantasy world.
Carnivore isn't a "new danger to liberty", it's a new medium for an old technique. Either you trust the FBI or you don't, but stop being hypocritical in what you complain about.
It's great to see that the open source browsers can finally be used for "secure" use over the internet, but at the same time I'm wondering why they're using the now-public RSA encryption algorithm.
I'm not an encryption expert, but surely it seems to me that any algorithm that has been released by a company into the public domain cannot be particularly secure, and indeed the RSA has been cracked already. RSA have obviously got something better up their sleeves, and why should open source products always lag behind their closed source counterparts when it comes to innovation?
What we really need is to develop new encryption algorithms for our products rather than relying on the left-overs from commercial products.
Sun has unfortunately missed out on the whole low-end server game over the last few years, most likely because of their focus on Solaris and other "big iron" type products. Whilst they had recognised the potential for webservers, they seem to have totally missed out on the idea that people would want to run them from home, and this is why Linux has taken off - it may not be as good as Solaris, but it runs on your home PC.
Now they're trying to get back into the low-end market through buy-outs rather than repositioning, because they're just not flexible enough to do so - just look at Java for an example of Sun's cluelessness when it comes to the market. Buying Cobalt may given them a portion of the market, but it will hardly path the way for them to gain any appreciable amount of market share.
To be honest, I don't really see much of a future for Sun. All of their recent moves seem to be those of desparation - giving away Solaris, trying to keep Java proprietary and now buying Cobalt. Between Microsoft and Linux, they're fast becoming a non-entity in the computing world.
Whilst this is a piece of technology and as such falls within the domain of "News for Nerds" it most certainly isn't "Stuff that matters" is it? Companies are releasing new products everyday, and the release of a new "network storage solution" is hardly something people here are going to care about unless we are buying for companies.
Is Taco getting paid to post this shit? It seems like it, because otherwise he really needs to remember that we're not all rich off of selling out to commercial interests. In fact, it'd be nice if every time Taco posts a story he stops dropping little comments about how much money he has and how many gadgets he's bought this week.
Next time, leave this shit for the advertisements in the back of Computing Weekly.
Oh, yes, it is. All speech is speech. Even if you don't like it. I don't like the stuff you mentioned either, but I acknowledge its fundamental right to exist. Freenet is not a tool for bookburners.
Well technically you could define anything as speech since anything can be represented by information, but adopting this as a definition is meaningless. Speech is nothing more than what the public desires it to be, and I think most people would agree that child pornography has no right to be classed in the same league as the works of Mozart, Van Gogh or Shakespeare. And if the public doesn't want it, then they have a right to not have it.
The idea of a more "free" network built on top of the current one is something I thing we're going to need more and more in the current climate of censorship and oppressive legislation, but I'd like to know if it is possible for Freenet users to be indentified, either through the content they upload or their behaviour whilst online.
Whilst there is a lot of information which certain national governments would rather have suppressed that deserves to kept alive, there is also a lot of stuff on the internet which shouldn't be kept alive, but which will quite likely attempt to preserve itself through services like Freenet. Things like instructions for making drugs, race hate literature and pornography are not "speech", and should not benefit from the protections built into Freenet.
So what I want to know is - is it possible to track this kind of rubbish and remove it, along with users who upload/download it? Keeping it free of this crap will mean that Freenet will be a much cleaner place than the web, and it will also attract less attention from governments looking for their next target.
In fact, they're legally obliged to. And the idea of a loss leader is hardly a new one after all, there is a hell of a lot of hardware out there designed to pull in after-sales business rather than make money from the initial sale.
I seem to remember one of the first things I was taught in Economics class being that consumers should be assumed as rational beings that will try their best to maximize their utility (i.e. consumer happiness) by paying as little as possible for a service. In my opinion a company that fails to factor in the lessons of ECON 101 while designing a business plan deserves to fail.
But this fails to take into consideration the fact that in the long-term this kind of selfish behaviour can only lead to a loss of utility as cash-starved companies are forced to reduce services thanks to the actions of a few people whose greed outweighs their rationality.
It strikes me that whenever a company comes out with something where they intend to make their profits from after-sale mechanisms, the first thing that people want to do is to try and avoid this. We've recently had this CueCat business and a page complaining about paying $10 a month for TiVo, despite the fact that they sell their hardware as a loss leader and rely on the subscription charges to make any money.
To me, all of this seems like trying to rip off companies that are providing something which people obviously want. And if people succeed, then these companies are going to suffer, which means no more deals for people. Is this what we want?
Every time a new service is hacked into so that the company fails to be able to make a profit, it just discourages other companies from being so generous, or encourages them to follow the MPAA/RIAA in slapping restrictive laws or licenses on the technology. Do we really want a situation where every new technology comes out hand in hand with restrictive legislation to give the companies a chance to make a profit?
I'm not condoning Apple's actions over this, they've been heavy-handed and way too zealous in what basically amounts to a "getting your own back" campaign against sites whose job is to report this kind of stuff.
But still, you can see where they're coming from in wanting to keep information to themselves. There have been several cases in computing history where plans have changed, and a vast circulation of rumours means that the company can end up looking bad for not having done something they'd never wanted to announce.
And when you get rumours flying around, as the net is so good for doing, it becomes next to impossible to separate the true ones from the false ones, and again this can make the company look bad, especially if the rumours are malicious. These rumours are a great way of influencing things like stock prices, and the net has already shown us that a mere rumour spread online can cause stocks to plummit or climb. What company is really going to want to the at the whim of that?
But still, Apple really needs to stop being so vindictive about this. All they're doing is making themselves look like tyrants, a problem they've had in the past. If they relaxed a little, I'm sure things wouldn't be so bad - every time Apple blows up, it draws attention to the rumours...
No, I think you're missing the point. There's this thing called humour, and you seem to have totally missed it. Not every comment has to be serious,/. even has a "Funny" moderation category...
Funny, that's exactly what happened to the real world... the novelty wore off. Hence the popularity of online games.
Yeah, but at the end of the day the real world offers more than any virtual world ever can, simply due to the available processing power within the Universe.
I know people for whom an hour inside EverQuest is a lot more fulfilling socially than an hour in a smoky nightclub with loud techno music pounding their eardrums and brains into a pulp.
Personally, I do not see this inevitable, and it is inevitable, coupling between artificial worlds and the one we currently consume as a wrong or bad thing. In fact, it could be argued that an eventual migration to such technologies could be beneficial, rather than degenerative.
No, I'm not saying that this process will be a bad thing, merely that for some people it will be, in much the same way that for some people alcohol or drugs are used solely as a means of escaping a world they hate. I'm sure that for many these new worlds will be of great benefit, for recreational, educational and scientific purposes.
If the inevitable end of online gaming and virtual reality results in a world that is as rich as ours, yet with the added bonus of being able to escape the types of problems that plague our intelligence-oriented society, what could be wrong with a migration?
What do you mean? Surely the problems that plauge our "intelligence-orientated" society (could you clarify that?) mainly arise from the people that live in it. Moving from the real world to a virtual one won't change human nature, that's something that will happen slowly.
The obvious answer to that, would be the fact that our bodies and the machines keeping them alive would still be rooted in this reality, and thus our lives within the alternative reality would be anchored in the safety of these machines, and our flesh body. If there was nobody on the "look out" anything could happen and nobody would know it had happened until they snapped out of their world and found their body trapped in a tomb of ice and machinery.
I think you're assuming some kind of permanent migration, which is something I think will never happen. After all, the technology will always be limited by processing power, and the Universe cannot contain the necessary processing power to model itself after all. There won't be any true frontiers in a virtual world, and its underpinnings will always reflect the knowledge its creators had when they built it.
So then, what about a society based upon balance? Instead of one alternative reality, why not many? Why not have them all be built to serve individual goals in their chaotic structure, like a function produces mathematical order, and have these massive functions increasing the value of the planet, as well as the other societies within societies?
It depends whether or not the societies are linked or not. If they aren't, then you basically have a huge fragmentation of human resources, and this will likely lead to stagnation of a lot of these groups. You'd assume that like-minded individuals would form each society, and in that case you'd lose out on the strengths that interactions between opposing viewpoints gives humanity.
If these societies were separate but interacting then you have the problem of nationalism all over again, but based upon the aims and beliefs of these groups. Just think about the conflicts that have occured over the different ideas of God, even between groups were the beliefs were remarkably similar.
I know, I know, this is all rather far fetched to say the least. My point is to make clear that the concept of dissasociation might very well need to be discarded here, bringing the whole topic to be viewed in a different manner.
I don't think it's too far fetched to be unworthy of discussion. But at the same time, its hard to see exactly how it'll turn out in the end. But judging from the polarisation of beliefs that occurs on communities like/. I tend to think fragmentation would cause more conflicts than it would solve.
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And it's cost us a hell of a lot of money. The trouble is that for all of the advances in computing technology, which is governed by Moore's Law, the tecnology involved in keeping people alive and healthy in space has hardly advanced at all in the last 30 years. The always round the corner drop in costs for getting stuff into orbit have yet to materialise, and the ISS is just not practical.
The whole point of the ISS was never anything more than a showpiece to get people interested in space again. There's no serious research going on up there, all of the money is going into providing living quarters and equipment for a small crew of people. It would be far more practical to have a set of automated laboratories up there engaged in experiments which could be controlled from the ground, but people have this rediculously quaint idea that people have to be there!
This level of pandering to the sentimentality of the masses is both impractical and foolish. The ISS will never be more than a blip on the attention of a public too jaded from MTV to care, and all of the valuable research that could have been funded with the absurd sums of money they spent on it will never happen.
Maybe NASA needs to start thinking of science rather than ratings.
Okay, so maybe that's a bit harsh, but it seems like you're risking a lot of money on a product which will give only minimal returns. Linux is simply not viable as a gaming platform at the moment, and indeed for the forseeable future. Like it or loathe it, DirectX support would go a long way to making Linux more popular with the kind of trigger-happy moron who enjoys playing Quake.
And then there's the fact that within a week of launch some hacker spouting Stallmanist rhetoric will have hacked into the box and posted instructions on how to do so onto the net for all and sundry to read. Hell, Taco'll probably help them out by posting a story on /. about it.
So my question is, where exactly is the market for this box and how will you generate a profit? It all seems like a pipe-dream to me.
The very structure of the net means that it will always be vulnerable to DDoS attacks of one kind or another. And with a typically lax attitude on the part of sys admins who'd rather play Quake than get the latest patches for security holes, hackers are always going to find machines to 0wn and use.
The trouble is that systems like Carnivore could be used to prevent wide-scale DDoS attacks by isolating affected computers quickly enough to prevent the infection to spread. And as more and more critical applications move online (financial information, long-distance surgery etc.) the costs of a DDoS attack will grow and grow. Unlike the first Flood, the after effects of a successful DDoS could last for a lot longer than forty days and nights.
Hmm, Robert Jordan has a degree in Physics, but I can't think of any more who have off the top of my head...
Not to detract from your attempt at fearcasting ...
It's "forecasting". There's no such word as "fearcasting".
When it's not an informed decision, but instead an amalgamation of fifty different people's opinions, none of whom really know what's going on in your situation. This merely means that rather than going with what you would normally do, you're ending up with a kind of "lowest common denominator" decision.
If mobile phones had been around three hundred years ago, do you think America would be independant today? I think not.
Alastair Reynolds is one of the breed of science fiction writers who is also a professional scientist.
This is hardly a "new breed", try for instance, Stephen Baxter who has a PhD in mathematics and whose Xeelee sequence contains some of the most epic ideas in all of SF (neutron stars as weapons? engineered singularities a billion light years wide?). Or check out Greg Egan's homepage, which has some of his fiction and a load of Java applets which he has programmed.
Seriously, there are a lot of tecnically accomplished science-fiction writers out there today who really do know what they're talking about. The two above are IMHO the best, but they're far from the only ones...
Has no-one else realised that Napster is the perfect front for the RIAA? Whilst they present a pose of innocence to the world, headed by Shawn Fanning's oh-so "innocent" posturings, the truth is that they are an organisation funded by the RIAA for the sole purpose of letting them lobby the most restrictive of laws into reality.
Shawn Fanning was nothing more than a willing stooge in the RIAA's plans to bring in a new tyranny of intellectual property laws. In return for paying him a large sum of money, the RIAA purchased his services as front man for "Napster", a piece of software knocked up in about half an hour by RIAA techies. He then started up the Napster company with the sole purpose of providing a music piracy service that was as blatent and as visible as possible, an aim in which he has done exceedingly well in.
Now the RIAA has the impetus to get all kinds of restrictive laws but into place by a Congress dazzled by the "threat" that Napster poses to the music industry. And it's working like a charm, and everyone has been fooled. When the RIAA gets what they want, Napster will quietly fold, all involved will get their paychecks, and we'll be the ones living under the Big Brother regime that KKKlinton approved.
The rise of the mobile phone has given momentum to the idea that people can be permanently connected via a web of communication, day or night, 365 days a year. And now with services like WAP/iMode, they can not only be connected with each other, they can be connected with the vast amount of data found online.
Does anyone else see the dangerous parallels between this and the actions of a hive mind? People are becoming less autonomous, more used to communicating their plans and ideas with others and receiving feedback before acting. Rather than allowing us to share information, mobile phones are acting as mechanisms which dampen individual creativity and instead encourage people to conform to the hive.
And with the advent of WAP/iMode, this trend is only getting worse. Why think for yourself when a premade answer is only a few button presses away? Sooner or later people will learn to stop thinking at all, for they will be connected to a grid in which everybody else can do their thinking for them. And rather than the wonderful quantities which make us unique, we'll all be drones, revelling in our powers of "communication".
No thanks, leave me out of this "revolution" in communication.
The idea of certification is that it provides a guaranteed level of competance in a certain area, is a nice one and all that, but it's hardly one that has a place in the modern computing industry. Like all training and courses, it merely provides an illusion of competance which can lull employers in a false sense of security - no "certified professional" is worth anything without the real-world experiance that comes from being on the job.
In many ways, having a certificate is like being part of a trade union - it provides a group which seeks to push its own members foward regardless of whether they're the right people for the job. And like trade unions, this attitude is the downfall of a capitalist economy based on the cut and thrust of a free market, including a free market for employment.
I'd rather hire someone willing to learn than some wet behind the ears fool with a Red Hat certificate who thinks they've already learnt everything.
... not the consumers. Anyone that thinks that a contract is in place to protect the consumer is living in some kind of socialist fairy-land, because the point of a contract in the modern world is to ensure that a corporation has a legal basis for getting payment from their customers.
Not that this is a bad thing - people love getting away without paying for things, and corporations have a right to receive proper payment for the services and products they provide to customers. In a capitalist economy contracts are always going to exist, because people are inherently selfish and you need to have a legally binding method of forcing them to pay.
New developments in contracts and licenses are merely making sure that this legal obligation to pay is still enforcable in the new digital domains that are becoming prevalent today. Like them or loathe them, they're an inevitable outgrowth of the rise of digital technology in a capitalist society, and they are necessary for the continued growth of our economy.
The reason people were so pissed about the FBI's Carnivore is because we have no way of knowing what it really does.
At least with an open-source version, we know what the system's capabilities are.
So basically what you're saying is that you want an open-source version because it's easier to hack? That certainly seems to be what you're implying - you want to know it's capabilities which makes it easier to plan a defence for...
So much for the vaunted "open source is more secure" mantra...
True, but this "outrage" is all from groups which are dedicated to freedom at the cost of security anyway. After all if a law was passed requiring people with red hair to register on a national database, of course it would be people with red hair who would complain. So that's a bit of a strawman argument IMHO.
What I don't understand about all of the fuss over Carnivore I've read on sites like /. is that essentially it isn't any different from already existing methods of surveillance like phone tapping. If you don't trust the FBI to use Carnivore properly, then you shouldn't trust them to use other methods legally either. But there's no outcry over phone tapping because a) it's already here, and b) it's not affecting the Internet.
Really, the only reason that Carnivore wasn't built into the net when it was first created was that nobody in law enforcement ever thought it would come to what it has? The original ARPAnet was mainly used by academics in America - who would have ever thought that it would eventually be used by terrorist organisations in the Middle East to coordinate with cells in New York?
The astounding growth of the net both in America and abroad caught agencies off guard, and they're not moving to recitify the problem in whatever way they can. This is not an invasion of privacy, it's a sensible precaution to be used when it is required. Anyone who thinks that the FBI will scan every packet going through routers in the US is living in a paranoid fantasy world.
Carnivore isn't a "new danger to liberty", it's a new medium for an old technique. Either you trust the FBI or you don't, but stop being hypocritical in what you complain about.
It's great to see that the open source browsers can finally be used for "secure" use over the internet, but at the same time I'm wondering why they're using the now-public RSA encryption algorithm.
I'm not an encryption expert, but surely it seems to me that any algorithm that has been released by a company into the public domain cannot be particularly secure, and indeed the RSA has been cracked already. RSA have obviously got something better up their sleeves, and why should open source products always lag behind their closed source counterparts when it comes to innovation?
What we really need is to develop new encryption algorithms for our products rather than relying on the left-overs from commercial products.
Sun has unfortunately missed out on the whole low-end server game over the last few years, most likely because of their focus on Solaris and other "big iron" type products. Whilst they had recognised the potential for webservers, they seem to have totally missed out on the idea that people would want to run them from home, and this is why Linux has taken off - it may not be as good as Solaris, but it runs on your home PC.
Now they're trying to get back into the low-end market through buy-outs rather than repositioning, because they're just not flexible enough to do so - just look at Java for an example of Sun's cluelessness when it comes to the market. Buying Cobalt may given them a portion of the market, but it will hardly path the way for them to gain any appreciable amount of market share.
To be honest, I don't really see much of a future for Sun. All of their recent moves seem to be those of desparation - giving away Solaris, trying to keep Java proprietary and now buying Cobalt. Between Microsoft and Linux, they're fast becoming a non-entity in the computing world.
Whilst this is a piece of technology and as such falls within the domain of "News for Nerds" it most certainly isn't "Stuff that matters" is it? Companies are releasing new products everyday, and the release of a new "network storage solution" is hardly something people here are going to care about unless we are buying for companies.
Is Taco getting paid to post this shit? It seems like it, because otherwise he really needs to remember that we're not all rich off of selling out to commercial interests. In fact, it'd be nice if every time Taco posts a story he stops dropping little comments about how much money he has and how many gadgets he's bought this week.
Next time, leave this shit for the advertisements in the back of Computing Weekly.
Oh, yes, it is. All speech is speech. Even if you don't like it. I don't like the stuff you mentioned either, but I acknowledge its fundamental right to exist. Freenet is not a tool for bookburners.
Well technically you could define anything as speech since anything can be represented by information, but adopting this as a definition is meaningless. Speech is nothing more than what the public desires it to be, and I think most people would agree that child pornography has no right to be classed in the same league as the works of Mozart, Van Gogh or Shakespeare. And if the public doesn't want it, then they have a right to not have it.
The idea of a more "free" network built on top of the current one is something I thing we're going to need more and more in the current climate of censorship and oppressive legislation, but I'd like to know if it is possible for Freenet users to be indentified, either through the content they upload or their behaviour whilst online.
Whilst there is a lot of information which certain national governments would rather have suppressed that deserves to kept alive, there is also a lot of stuff on the internet which shouldn't be kept alive, but which will quite likely attempt to preserve itself through services like Freenet. Things like instructions for making drugs, race hate literature and pornography are not "speech", and should not benefit from the protections built into Freenet.
So what I want to know is - is it possible to track this kind of rubbish and remove it, along with users who upload/download it? Keeping it free of this crap will mean that Freenet will be a much cleaner place than the web, and it will also attract less attention from governments looking for their next target.
In fact, they're legally obliged to. And the idea of a loss leader is hardly a new one after all, there is a hell of a lot of hardware out there designed to pull in after-sales business rather than make money from the initial sale.
I seem to remember one of the first things I was taught in Economics class being that consumers should be assumed as rational beings that will try their best to maximize their utility (i.e. consumer happiness) by paying as little as possible for a service. In my opinion a company that fails to factor in the lessons of ECON 101 while designing a business plan deserves to fail.
But this fails to take into consideration the fact that in the long-term this kind of selfish behaviour can only lead to a loss of utility as cash-starved companies are forced to reduce services thanks to the actions of a few people whose greed outweighs their rationality.
It strikes me that whenever a company comes out with something where they intend to make their profits from after-sale mechanisms, the first thing that people want to do is to try and avoid this. We've recently had this CueCat business and a page complaining about paying $10 a month for TiVo, despite the fact that they sell their hardware as a loss leader and rely on the subscription charges to make any money.
To me, all of this seems like trying to rip off companies that are providing something which people obviously want. And if people succeed, then these companies are going to suffer, which means no more deals for people. Is this what we want?
Every time a new service is hacked into so that the company fails to be able to make a profit, it just discourages other companies from being so generous, or encourages them to follow the MPAA/RIAA in slapping restrictive laws or licenses on the technology. Do we really want a situation where every new technology comes out hand in hand with restrictive legislation to give the companies a chance to make a profit?
I'm not condoning Apple's actions over this, they've been heavy-handed and way too zealous in what basically amounts to a "getting your own back" campaign against sites whose job is to report this kind of stuff.
But still, you can see where they're coming from in wanting to keep information to themselves. There have been several cases in computing history where plans have changed, and a vast circulation of rumours means that the company can end up looking bad for not having done something they'd never wanted to announce.
And when you get rumours flying around, as the net is so good for doing, it becomes next to impossible to separate the true ones from the false ones, and again this can make the company look bad, especially if the rumours are malicious. These rumours are a great way of influencing things like stock prices, and the net has already shown us that a mere rumour spread online can cause stocks to plummit or climb. What company is really going to want to the at the whim of that?
But still, Apple really needs to stop being so vindictive about this. All they're doing is making themselves look like tyrants, a problem they've had in the past. If they relaxed a little, I'm sure things wouldn't be so bad - every time Apple blows up, it draws attention to the rumours...
Jon should do more of his articles in this style, because this time we get a nice summary:
ploddingly written but important premise
Much easier than wading though his prose :)
I think you're missing the point.
No, I think you're missing the point. There's this thing called humour, and you seem to have totally missed it. Not every comment has to be serious, /. even has a "Funny" moderation category...
Funny, that's exactly what happened to the real world... the novelty wore off. Hence the popularity of online games.
Yeah, but at the end of the day the real world offers more than any virtual world ever can, simply due to the available processing power within the Universe.
I know people for whom an hour inside EverQuest is a lot more fulfilling socially than an hour in a smoky nightclub with loud techno music pounding their eardrums and brains into a pulp.
Really? How bizarre... :)
Personally, I do not see this inevitable, and it is inevitable, coupling between artificial worlds and the one we currently consume as a wrong or bad thing. In fact, it could be argued that an eventual migration to such technologies could be beneficial, rather than degenerative.
No, I'm not saying that this process will be a bad thing, merely that for some people it will be, in much the same way that for some people alcohol or drugs are used solely as a means of escaping a world they hate. I'm sure that for many these new worlds will be of great benefit, for recreational, educational and scientific purposes.
If the inevitable end of online gaming and virtual reality results in a world that is as rich as ours, yet with the added bonus of being able to escape the types of problems that plague our intelligence-oriented society, what could be wrong with a migration?
What do you mean? Surely the problems that plauge our "intelligence-orientated" society (could you clarify that?) mainly arise from the people that live in it. Moving from the real world to a virtual one won't change human nature, that's something that will happen slowly.
The obvious answer to that, would be the fact that our bodies and the machines keeping them alive would still be rooted in this reality, and thus our lives within the alternative reality would be anchored in the safety of these machines, and our flesh body. If there was nobody on the "look out" anything could happen and nobody would know it had happened until they snapped out of their world and found their body trapped in a tomb of ice and machinery.
I think you're assuming some kind of permanent migration, which is something I think will never happen. After all, the technology will always be limited by processing power, and the Universe cannot contain the necessary processing power to model itself after all. There won't be any true frontiers in a virtual world, and its underpinnings will always reflect the knowledge its creators had when they built it.
So then, what about a society based upon balance? Instead of one alternative reality, why not many? Why not have them all be built to serve individual goals in their chaotic structure, like a function produces mathematical order, and have these massive functions increasing the value of the planet, as well as the other societies within societies?
It depends whether or not the societies are linked or not. If they aren't, then you basically have a huge fragmentation of human resources, and this will likely lead to stagnation of a lot of these groups. You'd assume that like-minded individuals would form each society, and in that case you'd lose out on the strengths that interactions between opposing viewpoints gives humanity.
If these societies were separate but interacting then you have the problem of nationalism all over again, but based upon the aims and beliefs of these groups. Just think about the conflicts that have occured over the different ideas of God, even between groups were the beliefs were remarkably similar.
I know, I know, this is all rather far fetched to say the least. My point is to make clear that the concept of dissasociation might very well need to be discarded here, bringing the whole topic to be viewed in a different manner.
I don't think it's too far fetched to be unworthy of discussion. But at the same time, its hard to see exactly how it'll turn out in the end. But judging from the polarisation of beliefs that occurs on communities like /. I tend to think fragmentation would cause more conflicts than it would solve.