Funny thing, last few years people have been calling client/server systems distributed systems. For me they are not distributed as the architect has simply decided to draw a line some where between the datafocused stuff (the provider) and the end user interface fluff (the consumer) and separated the logic into two components (often on separate nodes) The relationship on a conceptual level is always 1..* where many identical consumers use one and the same provider. For me distributed is P2P where a node can both provide and consume data centered services, rather than simply relying on others provide or consume (file-swapping p2p and the SETI apps are good examples). Anyway, that's my immediate reflection.
Hmm. It seems this could be used to cut down on the time spent doing nitty-gritty stuff on each P2P project. "Gnutella like" projects might in the future spend more time doing GUI clients instead of implementing P2P specifications and protocols.
It will be interesting to see which areas are going to be covered. I guess a way of identification will be included, so the "traditional" P2P projects will probably have to spend some time counter the identification stuff as well.
I don't suppose it has occurred to anyone at Universal to simply release the album as an ordinary CD with no PIN? And that consumers might actually buy it?
If they did, all potential customers (both of them) would simply Napster the CD.
No, the record label(s) need to protect their customers from possibilities of end user mistakes.
I'm buying a patched X-Box on Monday. Why? Because I want a practical media and storage server which can be online 24/7 and doesn't sound like a frigging airplane. I'm having my computers in my bedroom and as such can't have them on during nights (as they emit too much sound, kind of like trying to sleep on a runway). The X-Box is a fairly quiet machine, which for the first time enables me to have a server online at all times. It's also a great alternative for viewing series or movies I get from friends (not yet available in my region).
I'm not trying to deny the fact that I download series and stuff. I justify that to myself morally by the fact that there is no other way for me to get certain stuff. If I want something and it has been released on DVD, I purchase it (like the TV series 24, available via import from the US), but some stuff simply aren't available by other means than via the Net. I also download stuff like movies showing at theaters (in the US). Not denying that either. However, if I like the movie, I'm buying it later on when it's available in my country on DVD as well, as the image and sound quality is so much better than the VCD rips. Downloading stuff, for me, isn't about being cheep. I've got enough money to buy the CDs, DVDs etc. that I want. The problem though is the f*cking idiocy of restricting access of or varying release dates of stuff in different geographic regions.
The XBox (refitted with a 120 GB HD) will also be a great platform for storing and playing the DivX converted holiday videos, I've captured with my digi-cam.
All and all, I've been waiting for the Linux port to be available for quite some time!
(Now I'm just waiting for the next version of the X-Box, which if rumors are true, will have a video capture feature. Then my vision of the optimal media station can become true)
As stated in the subject; there are only Links (s 12.1).
The term "deep link" is something some technology illiterate zealot (read lawyer or journalist) came up with not that long ago.
Try finding anything in any RFC declaring or describing the term "Deep Link"!
Thanks, I liked that explanation. For now, perhaps I should add, as new discoveries might bring forth new theories:)
Anyway, your description of the width- and consequently the border of the universe being the distance light has traveled since the big blast, is something I find as a simple end elegant explanation to this problem, which can easily be conveyed to others.
Not too long ago (IIRC) there was a story on/. describing that information has been moved faster than light (think it was something about fiddeling with photons or some thingy about matter), ie. instantaneous data transfer. What is probably keeping the result of that discovery from creating a loop-hole in the logic that light is the absolute maximum speed at which matter can never exceed, is the fact that matter of light were components in this data transfer. Thus this finding would not allow anything to travel past the border of the universe.
For the sake of modern science I hope "Star-Trek Warp" stuff thingies won't be realizable as that would make rather a few assumpions of the universe go straight out the window.
If the Universe is an ever expanding "sphere", then what is making it infinite? A sphere has an outer surface and so would the Universe in such case. If this is so, then what astronomical / mathematical / theological phenomenon is preventing matter or energy from passing through that border?
IIRC there are observations or theories that the universe is slowing it's expansion due to the fact that matter attracts matter. If the mass in the universe is enough to sufficiently slow down the expansion, stop it or even reverse it, light would in such case be able to travel faster than the universe is expanding. This would seemingly lead to light actually being able to at least reach the outer surface of the theoretical sphere of the universe and possibly pass it unless God or some other phenomenon stops it.
Anyway, the above could be hogwash, or it might not. If anyone has a simple layman explanation (read not more complex than absolutely needed) to why the universe wouldn't have an outer surface I'd be interested to know of it.
I agree with the author when he says that photographers will either have to adapt or become near extinct. However, I also understand the reasons for why the hired photographer would not let him have the negative. The latter is as others have pointed out that her business model is based on keeping the negatives private and if she gave the negative away she would probably suffer rather much financially.
What is a bit interesting though is that I assume competition in the "photography business" is rather tough and as such, I'd see a rather sweet business opportunity where "open art" photographers could create a niche and step by step take over most of the professional photography. If people want the "source" (negative), then they'd turn to an open art photographer. I'd be the first in line when need arise, as I'd like to have access to the highest quality images which I could use and distribute however, and to whomever I choose whenever I wanted to. Having printouts isn't enough for me and as such the first section in the yellow pages I'd look at would be the future section "Open art photography".
I recall a few years ago, when Big Blue tried to get to the bottom of that. They wanted to know whether their campaigns were worth while or if they should instead slice and dice marketers and spend the money on better stuff. The PR departments (web, marketing, phone etc. ) got the directives that they should ask each person calling and ordering something, whether "that customer" was contacting IBM because of an any of the active ad-campaigns... and if so, which campaign. Needless to say, this wasn't too popular amongst the people calling in:
- Welcome to ibm.com, how can I help you. - Ah, sorry, I must have dialled the wrong number, you see I was trying to reach IBM the computer manufacturer. - Sir, you have not dialled the wrong number. ibm.com is just a funny gimmick we at the marketing department thought up. We liked the association with the new economy and the enterprising new companies.. So.. how can I help you? - Ah.. I see.. Well I'm interested in buying 4 AS/400 machines and would like.. - Sir, excuse me for asking, but the reason you called us, was that due to campaign XYZ1 currently running in the press? - Err.. what?.. No... How'd I know? - Ok sir, perhaps it was the direct marketing campaign QRIW5? - what... WHAT? - It's quite simple sir, you can find the ID of each campaign in the lower right corner of... - Hey MISS! I don't have time for 20 questions, Either you put me in contact with someone who can help me get what I need, or I'll rip the contract I currently have with your company!
[Something like that..]
Last I heard they stopped that and switched to bar-coding stuff they send out instead. For Web, they used to "encourage" people to enter campaign ID's ( like xy61xwikl...) when visiting certain pages.
So, is there a point here? (besides making jibes at blue berry?) Unfortunately, profiling and measuring the results of non-digital activities can get pretty intrusive for the clients/customers/potential customers/people-companies-pray-might-consider-bec oming-their-customers. But it *can* be done. (Once at lease per customer. questionable whether anyone would call back after suffering the Spanish inquisition).
At the time it was to be priced like a mid-speced Thinkpad 560 laptop, thus making it affordable to the average Joe.
<rant> Personally I'd like to have this box with todays laptop specs, which I could carry around as I do an IPAQ. I have no need for battery (as todays laptop battery life suck big time ans is just a gimmick and not really usable at all), and would prefer to plug in this IPAQ sized portable PC into a port replicator or a docking station, as that's what I'm doing with my T23 anyway when moving from office to office (out own or our customers). </rant>
Here's to rights back to consumer. Err, actually, its "here's to rights back to the (non)-consumers.
Or, "Here's to rights back to the private individuals / citizen".
Good and right is what gives most happiness to the largest amount of people, not necessary what is written in a book of law. As a result laws are at times changed by ethics and the idea of a better society. Just because it is printed does not mean it is any more right than if it weren't.
Are people not agreeing to the law evil? Is the law as it is today the final revision and thus being good, right and fair? Should we condemn all who whish to change the law? .. or, albeit seemingly very unlikely judging from many a slashdot post, are the laws not yet in their final revision and still in need of refinement and change, making the laws not being the equivalence of rightousness, goodness and the hall mark of what to strive and aim for in all cases?
From my stand point I agree, the fragmentation gap seem to be widening. My "shop" has approx. 300 000 licenses for W2K and just recently (last year) started rolling it out as the preferred corporate platform. Most every app we develop for Win32 is aimed at Windows 2000. I know there are still win95 and OS/2 boxen left amongst the desktops/laptops and that XP isn't even on the horizon. There is absolutely no incitement for us to upgrade to XP other than for a "few select PCs" to run acceptance testing on, of the software we sell to customers (to get the sw MS certified).
My belief is that when MS rings the bell sounding the end of W2K many within the company will migrate to Linux. Already, about 30% (of the developers) within my organization dual-boot into Linux (don't know the figures for the entire company though) and the only need we have for running Win32 is to access MS Office 2000, MS Project and Lotus Notes. When these applications can run on Linux without a glitch there will be absolutely no reason for us to stay on MS Windows. A total migration to Linux isn't that far fetched either, as Linux is one of the officially supported corporate platforms (although W2K is still the primary/preferred).
The only joker in the deck is regarding how well Wine or OpenOffice will support future MS Office formats, as it's very important for us to be able to exchange documents with our customers. If our customers use the latest version of Word, we need to be able to read, edit and submit documents in the same format. It all hangs on future format compatibility.
There are a lot of jobs that don't need anything approaching "good" performance (batch reports--I need a web usage report every morning on my desk/in my inbox--where the quick-and-dirty multipass solution that takes 3 hours to run can be scheduled at midnight, and the programmer can then do another project with big ROI instead of spending time writing a faster solution that takes only seconds to run) are one extremely common example of this (as is other batch processing).
Hmm, it depends on how you pay for hardware (cpu-cycles for ex.), now doesn't it? Take IBM's scheme for Mainframes where you pay for what you use... Here I can certainly see long term gain / reduction of costs / benefit for a company optimizing a batch job taking 3 hours into running in a few seconds. Often these bottle necks don't cost astronomic sums, but "letting a ksh script loop in OMVS" certainly will.
Ok, this will be one of the lengthier posts, but if you bare with me, there might be some shreds of information worth digesting in here...
It seems that regardless of what P2P technology emerge, they all have a certain characteristic in common, abuse potentiality. This characteristic needs to be addressed, so that each p2p solution out there (and coming out in the future as well) won't suffer "pollution" effects by certain members of the community, be the effects intentionally inflicted or not.
Primary assumptions: * All P2P solutions have aggregations of the user entity. * Each user is to share and consume "high quality" files according to the P2P model. * No single point of failure should exist for the P2P network.
And an assumption barely bordering on being implemented today, however, as there is an obvious demand for this, it might as well be listed. * Each user is to be anonymous.
Now, this scheme works well as long as each and every user entity behaves in the spirit of P2P, which would be sharing good quality information/data of the kind the specific P2P network is designed for.
Now to the core problem: As soon as one or more users start spreading low quality or outright bogus (read misappropriated) information/data the network starts to deteriorate.
Non functional requirements such performance means squat if the data contained on the network is crap. What you possibly end up with in a few years with the current model is a network which is very decentralized and efficient at spreading crap. In the light of this, it's obvious that the primary concern to address is the "environmental pollution" on the P2P networks.
Now, a few schemes have been proposed and they seem to be in either one of two camps.
Camp one suggest encryption and "seemingly random" distribution of the entire data set, and the current solution symbolizing this would be Freenet. * The advantage here is that these kinds of solutions would allow anonymity for the end users as well as making it immensely more difficult for a single entity (such as the RIAA for ex.) to shut down nodes and prosecute the owners of said nodes. Also, it's very distributed, so there is no single point of failure. * The disadvantage is that a model such as Freenet in it's pure form would be unable to use any kind of search engine for finding data and would make rare / obscure data impossible to find since it would deteriorate out of the network (as the Freenet propagation is demand driven). In short, You'd know there are a billion stashed of Brittany Spears on the network but things like Neil Young or a paper on human cloning would perhaps only be available at the original node. This is a way of automatic moderation, however, as it will indivertibly "flag" even valid (obscure) data as bogus (or the consequences will be most similar) it might not be very optimal for a sharing a wide array of data. Also, how would you find Ms. Spears? You'd have to rely on another network for creating lists "by hand" and linking these entries to the Freenet like network. Searching of Freenet would still be out of the question.
Camp number two followers suggest a moderation scheme, which could be applied to most all existing P2P solutions. The security / anonymity and single points of failure is pretty much up in the air as there are a lot of different P2P implementations. The most popular is probably the Gnutella network and will be acting as the role model for this section. This network has no SPF but is rather lacking on security and anonymity. Advantage: Search capability, no SPF. Disadvantage: lacking anonymity and thus protection from prosecution.
Ok, now let's address the moderation scheme suggested countless times on/. over the past year and which would deal with camp no. two. We have the following requirements: 1. No SPF must exist. 2. The moderation must be performed without a central database as dictated by req. no. one. 3. Performance hits should be acceptable. This is something which can be tuned quite a lot, but whatever scheme design is agreed upon will obviously have to take this into account. 4. User overhead must be minimal (as compared to the current model, where no time at all is spent, just "d-click" a set of files and they download and are automatically shared)
These four above are essential for a scheme to work. Personally I'd like to add another requirement as well, but realize that it might not be feasible to implement this in an initial draft depending on how the current Gnutella designs look at present.
5. Users should be anonymous, ie. there should be a severe overhead at revealing a user. relate to decrypting a RSA key or similar, where one breach of the protection scheme does not compromise the entire community, just the single instance being attacked.
I'd love to see some dedicated souls of the P2P community establish a project on source forge or similar, where these issues are being addressed and hopefully the fruit of such an endeavor would result in some kind of standard draft which hopefully most P2P client and server developers would adhere to, propelling these implementations along rather swiftly and as a consequence giving us these feature in a relatively short amount of time.
As a note: I mentioned prosecution above. This isn't necessary related to just IP violations, but could relate to free speech as well. China is a good example where people aren't encouraged to speak up. Also the citizen in the US and many other western countries are being monitored more or less for one reason or another and this will only escalate in scope as time progress (I really hope no one is delusional enough to not realize this). Also note that by "High quality" it refers to the technical definition and not a subjective one.
There are a gazillion other stuff to do.
on
Games in the Workplace?
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
Gaming at work? Sounds very foreign to me. In today's competitive business culture, you need to stay on the front line. Having some spare time? Fine, read Sun's latest Java specs, or W3C's XML specification. There are always stuff to learn and the more you know, the better you will perform. Playing games will hardly lead to any promotions nor more interesting job assignments.
I hear what you are saying.. and you are right. Having worked many years with a certain brand you mentioned in your post (at the company developing the product), I've become rather indoctrinated when it comes to my company's tools and solutions. To be honest, these products are no better or worse than anything else you might be able to find in the OSS community, just as complex or even more so than OSS counter parts when you look past pretty UIs and start planning or implementing whatever it was you wanted the product for in the first place. That the "industry" is engaged in the "feature game" at the expense of other areas of improvements doesn't help much either other than sales.
The main difference between an OSS solution and one from a large company is A) management at a customer *knows* they will be able to get support for the product in the future, B) They have someone to nag at if they are not satisfied with whatever it may be and C) the product cost an insanely amount of money (and some draw a false conclusion that expense at purchase == quality). FYI: We have been using ALOT of OSS software during customer engagements (especially from the Apache foundation) due to their high quality, speedy enhancements and FULL SOURCE (which we don't always get even from our laboratories which develop our "cutting edge" software). I can only echo what you say by agreeing that anything we can do with most any commercial software out there (including our own), we can do just as well with OSS software. On the other hand, there is quite a gap between "being able to run" a product and fully exploiting a products strengths. This takes knowledge and experience and most companies don't possess that. This all lead to "OSS is excellent to top-of-the-crop people", but the same is also true for expensive commercial products. The difference is probably that commercial sw is quicker than an OSS counterpart, to get up doing *anything* (i.e. the invested cost in learning "hello world" is cheaper with commercial products), but when you actually set out to do more advanced stuff, the intellectual investment is probably about the same.
To conclude, the more I see the world, the more companies I visit and the more engagements I'm at, the more I stand puzzled about our customer's corporate decisions. They purchase expensive hw and sw from us, but they still need many many consulting hours, which we are more than happy to provide, to get the most (or at times, *anything*) out of their acquisitions. Our products have a life span, meaning that if the customers want any kind of support from us, after 1 - 2 versions, it's upgrade time or an expensive service agreement since we won't (and economically can't) support older products. In the end, If you have the skills, OSS is by far the most bang for the bucks and probably the lesser headache during upgr. cycles. If you have swelling pockets instead, sure you can contract the vendors' consultants getting their products buzzing. It's all about skills, ambition, money and marketing.
The current genre of the titles mentioned in the article is MMOLG, Massively Multiplayer Online Levelling Games. (I admit though, some like to call new titles in this genre "More Meaningless Online Running Past Groups").
Normally, I'm all for the little guy, but in this case, seems like the poster was a troll, not an "outspoken critic of corporate America."
Wow! Does this mean that I can now sue trolls when they make statements which are not backup up by facts and cause some kind of theoretical injury to me?
This *must* be investigated. I've suffered trolling for the last 15 years... if I only had known...
According to the guys ISP, the demographic distribution of visitors are as follow: 1. United States (48.6%) 2. Canada (6.7%) 3. Netherlands (6.2) 4. UK (5.1%) 5. Australia (3.3%) 6. Sweden (2.2%) 7. Belgium (2.1%) 8. [visitors from.net] (1.5%) 9. Germany (1.5%) 10. France (1.4%)
Does anyone know the actual figures for/.? If the figures above figures are representative, it would mean that the US visitors are loosing ground and that perhaps/. should start expanding it's view a bit wider than the US. The reason I write this is that there previously was a section in the FAQ _basically saying_ "/. is made by americans for americans and we pretty much give a damn about anyone else, so if you don't like it, go away" (personal interpretation).
Am I the only one being amazed at the absolute conviction and dedication the media industry (MI) has toward trying to stop time and changes?
The last few years it's been like a weekly serial, where articles pop up regarding the MI's attempts to stop this, ban that, prosecute these, convince those etc. etc.
Imagine what the MI could have been able to achieve, had they thrown all this money, effort and resources at developing new business models, investigating how people will use media in the near future, what things the public wants and the like.
It's admirable their being so persistent, though unfortunate it's at the wrong things.
Don't tell a large business "Well, it will get better the more people who use it". They'll spit in your face. They need to know what works, and what works now, and what will continue to work in the future.
I agree with you here. Regardless if it's Solaris, AIX or OS/390. These stuff have been around for a long time and most all major companies have invested and used these OSs extensively with great success. Especially now, proposing something unproven will probably be like a slap in the face, due to a lot of "their" failed "web projects" (ie. hype investments).
Slashdot Mirror
Funny thing, last few years people have been calling client/server systems distributed systems. For me they are not distributed as the architect has simply decided to draw a line some where between the datafocused stuff (the provider) and the end user interface fluff (the consumer) and separated the logic into two components (often on separate nodes) The relationship on a conceptual level is always 1..* where many identical consumers use one and the same provider. For me distributed is P2P where a node can both provide and consume data centered services, rather than simply relying on others provide or consume (file-swapping p2p and the SETI apps are good examples).
Anyway, that's my immediate reflection.
Hmm. It seems this could be used to cut down on the time spent doing nitty-gritty stuff on each P2P project. "Gnutella like" projects might in the future spend more time doing GUI clients instead of implementing P2P specifications and protocols.
It will be interesting to see which areas are going to be covered. I guess a way of identification will be included, so the "traditional" P2P projects will probably have to spend some time counter the identification stuff as well.
If they did, all potential customers (both of them) would simply Napster the CD.
No, the record label(s) need to protect their customers from possibilities of end user mistakes.
I'm buying a patched X-Box on Monday. Why?
Because I want a practical media and storage server which can be online 24/7 and doesn't sound like a frigging airplane.
I'm having my computers in my bedroom and as such can't have them on during nights (as they emit too much sound, kind of like trying to sleep on a runway). The X-Box is a fairly quiet machine, which for the first time enables me to have a server online at all times. It's also a great alternative for viewing series or movies I get from friends (not yet available in my region).
I'm not trying to deny the fact that I download series and stuff. I justify that to myself morally by the fact that there is no other way for me to get certain stuff. If I want something and it has been released on DVD, I purchase it (like the TV series 24, available via import from the US), but some stuff simply aren't available by other means than via the Net.
I also download stuff like movies showing at theaters (in the US). Not denying that either. However, if I like the movie, I'm buying it later on when it's available in my country on DVD as well, as the image and sound quality is so much better than the VCD rips. Downloading stuff, for me, isn't about being cheep. I've got enough money to buy the CDs, DVDs etc. that I want. The problem though is the f*cking idiocy of restricting access of or varying release dates of stuff in different geographic regions.
The XBox (refitted with a 120 GB HD) will also be a great platform for storing and playing the DivX converted holiday videos, I've captured with my digi-cam.
All and all, I've been waiting for the Linux port to be available for quite some time!
(Now I'm just waiting for the next version of the X-Box, which if rumors are true, will have a video capture feature. Then my vision of the optimal media station can become true)
My grandpa is one of them.. so, "old people"?
Try finding anything in any RFC declaring or describing the term "Deep Link"!
Thanks, I liked that explanation. :)
/. describing that information has been moved faster than light (think it was something about fiddeling with photons or some thingy about matter), ie. instantaneous data transfer. What is probably keeping the result of that discovery from creating a loop-hole in the logic that light is the absolute maximum speed at which matter can never exceed, is the fact that matter of light were components in this data transfer. Thus this finding would not allow anything to travel past the border of the universe.
For now, perhaps I should add, as new discoveries might bring forth new theories
Anyway, your description of the width- and consequently the border of the universe being the distance light has traveled since the big blast, is something I find as a simple end elegant explanation to this problem, which can easily be conveyed to others.
Not too long ago (IIRC) there was a story on
For the sake of modern science I hope "Star-Trek Warp" stuff thingies won't be realizable as that would make rather a few assumpions of the universe go straight out the window.
If the Universe is an ever expanding "sphere", then what is making it infinite? A sphere has an outer surface and so would the Universe in such case. If this is so, then what astronomical / mathematical / theological phenomenon is preventing matter or energy from passing through that border?
IIRC there are observations or theories that the universe is slowing it's expansion due to the fact that matter attracts matter. If the mass in the universe is enough to sufficiently slow down the expansion, stop it or even reverse it, light would in such case be able to travel faster than the universe is expanding. This would seemingly lead to light actually being able to at least reach the outer surface of the theoretical sphere of the universe and possibly pass it unless God or some other phenomenon stops it.
Anyway, the above could be hogwash, or it might not. If anyone has a simple layman explanation (read not more complex than absolutely needed) to why the universe wouldn't have an outer surface I'd be interested to know of it.
I agree with the author when he says that photographers will either have to adapt or become near extinct. However, I also understand the reasons for why the hired photographer would not let him have the negative. The latter is as others have pointed out that her business model is based on keeping the negatives private and if she gave the negative away she would probably suffer rather much financially.
What is a bit interesting though is that I assume competition in the "photography business" is rather tough and as such, I'd see a rather sweet business opportunity where "open art" photographers could create a niche and step by step take over most of the professional photography. If people want the "source" (negative), then they'd turn to an open art photographer. I'd be the first in line when need arise, as I'd like to have access to the highest quality images which I could use and distribute however, and to whomever I choose whenever I wanted to. Having printouts isn't enough for me and as such the first section in the yellow pages I'd look at would be the future section "Open art photography".
I recall a few years ago, when Big Blue tried to get to the bottom of that. They wanted to know whether their campaigns were worth while or if they should instead slice and dice marketers and spend the money on better stuff. The PR departments (web, marketing, phone etc. ) got the directives that they should ask each person calling and ordering something, whether "that customer" was contacting IBM because of an any of the active ad-campaigns... and if so, which campaign.
.. No... How'd I know?
c oming-their-customers. But it *can* be done. (Once at lease per customer. questionable whether anyone would call back after suffering the Spanish inquisition).
Needless to say, this wasn't too popular amongst the people calling in:
- Welcome to ibm.com, how can I help you.
- Ah, sorry, I must have dialled the wrong number, you see I was trying to reach IBM the computer manufacturer.
- Sir, you have not dialled the wrong number. ibm.com is just a funny gimmick we at the marketing department thought up. We liked the association with the new economy and the enterprising new companies.. So.. how can I help you?
- Ah.. I see.. Well I'm interested in buying 4 AS/400 machines and would like..
- Sir, excuse me for asking, but the reason you called us, was that due to campaign XYZ1 currently running in the press?
- Err.. what?
- Ok sir, perhaps it was the direct marketing campaign QRIW5?
- what... WHAT?
- It's quite simple sir, you can find the ID of each campaign in the lower right corner of...
- Hey MISS! I don't have time for 20 questions, Either you put me in contact with someone who can help me get what I need, or I'll rip the contract I currently have with your company!
[Something like that..]
Last I heard they stopped that and switched to bar-coding stuff they send out instead. For Web, they used to "encourage" people to enter campaign ID's ( like xy61xwikl...) when visiting certain pages.
So, is there a point here? (besides making jibes at blue berry?) Unfortunately, profiling and measuring the results of non-digital activities can get pretty intrusive for the clients/customers/potential customers/people-companies-pray-might-consider-be
I saw one of these in -98 while IBM still had travelling budgets, allowing the lab-techies to tour around the world.
About the device
And the specs
At the time it was to be priced like a mid-speced Thinkpad 560 laptop, thus making it affordable to the average Joe.
<rant>
Personally I'd like to have this box with todays laptop specs, which I could carry around as I do an IPAQ. I have no need for battery (as todays laptop battery life suck big time ans is just a gimmick and not really usable at all), and would prefer to plug in this IPAQ sized portable PC into a port replicator or a docking station, as that's what I'm doing with my T23 anyway when moving from office to office (out own or our customers).
</rant>
Err, actually, its "here's to rights back to the (non)-consumers.
Or, "Here's to rights back to the private individuals / citizen".
Good and right is what gives most happiness to the largest amount of people, not necessary what is written in a book of law. As a result laws are at times changed by ethics and the idea of a better society. Just because it is printed does not mean it is any more right than if it weren't.
Are people not agreeing to the law evil?
.. or, albeit seemingly very unlikely judging from many a slashdot post, are the laws not yet in their final revision and still in need of refinement and change, making the laws not being the equivalence of rightousness, goodness and the hall mark of what to strive and aim for in all cases?
Is the law as it is today the final revision and thus being good, right and fair?
Should we condemn all who whish to change the law?
From my stand point I agree, the fragmentation gap seem to be widening.
My "shop" has approx. 300 000 licenses for W2K and just recently (last year) started rolling it out as the preferred corporate platform. Most every app we develop for Win32 is aimed at Windows 2000. I know there are still win95 and OS/2 boxen left amongst the desktops/laptops and that XP isn't even on the horizon. There is absolutely no incitement for us to upgrade to XP other than for a "few select PCs" to run acceptance testing on, of the software we sell to customers (to get the sw MS certified).
My belief is that when MS rings the bell sounding the end of W2K many within the company will migrate to Linux. Already, about 30% (of the developers) within my organization dual-boot into Linux (don't know the figures for the entire company though) and the only need we have for running Win32 is to access MS Office 2000, MS Project and Lotus Notes. When these applications can run on Linux without a glitch there will be absolutely no reason for us to stay on MS Windows. A total migration to Linux isn't that far fetched either, as Linux is one of the officially supported corporate platforms (although W2K is still the primary/preferred).
The only joker in the deck is regarding how well Wine or OpenOffice will support future MS Office formats, as it's very important for us to be able to exchange documents with our customers. If our customers use the latest version of Word, we need to be able to read, edit and submit documents in the same format. It all hangs on future format compatibility.
Hmm, it depends on how you pay for hardware (cpu-cycles for ex.), now doesn't it?
Take IBM's scheme for Mainframes where you pay for what you use... Here I can certainly see long term gain / reduction of costs / benefit for a company optimizing a batch job taking 3 hours into running in a few seconds. Often these bottle necks don't cost astronomic sums, but "letting a ksh script loop in OMVS" certainly will.
Ok, this will be one of the lengthier posts, but if you bare with me, there might be some shreds of information worth digesting in here...
/. over the past year and which would deal with camp no. two. We have the following requirements:
It seems that regardless of what P2P technology emerge, they all have a certain characteristic in common, abuse potentiality. This characteristic needs to be addressed, so that each p2p solution out there (and coming out in the future as well) won't suffer "pollution" effects by certain members of the community, be the effects intentionally inflicted or not.
Primary assumptions:
* All P2P solutions have aggregations of the user entity.
* Each user is to share and consume "high quality" files according to the P2P model.
* No single point of failure should exist for the P2P network.
And an assumption barely bordering on being implemented today, however, as there is an obvious demand for this, it might as well be listed.
* Each user is to be anonymous.
Now, this scheme works well as long as each and every user entity behaves in the spirit of P2P, which would be sharing good quality information/data of the kind the specific P2P network is designed for.
Now to the core problem:
As soon as one or more users start spreading low quality or outright bogus (read misappropriated) information/data the network starts to deteriorate.
Non functional requirements such performance means squat if the data contained on the network is crap. What you possibly end up with in a few years with the current model is a network which is very decentralized and efficient at spreading crap.
In the light of this, it's obvious that the primary concern to address is the "environmental pollution" on the P2P networks.
Now, a few schemes have been proposed and they seem to be in either one of two camps.
Camp one suggest encryption and "seemingly random" distribution of the entire data set, and the current solution symbolizing this would be Freenet.
* The advantage here is that these kinds of solutions would allow anonymity for the end users as well as making it immensely more difficult for a single entity (such as the RIAA for ex.) to shut down nodes and prosecute the owners of said nodes. Also, it's very distributed, so there is no single point of failure.
* The disadvantage is that a model such as Freenet in it's pure form would be unable to use any kind of search engine for finding data and would make rare / obscure data impossible to find since it would deteriorate out of the network (as the Freenet propagation is demand driven). In short, You'd know there are a billion stashed of Brittany Spears on the network but things like Neil Young or a paper on human cloning would perhaps only be available at the original node. This is a way of automatic moderation, however, as it will indivertibly "flag" even valid (obscure) data as bogus (or the consequences will be most similar) it might not be very optimal for a sharing a wide array of data. Also, how would you find Ms. Spears? You'd have to rely on another network for creating lists "by hand" and linking these entries to the Freenet like network. Searching of Freenet would still be out of the question.
Camp number two followers suggest a moderation scheme, which could be applied to most all existing P2P solutions. The security / anonymity and single points of failure is pretty much up in the air as there are a lot of different P2P implementations. The most popular is probably the Gnutella network and will be acting as the role model for this section. This network has no SPF but is rather lacking on security and anonymity.
Advantage: Search capability, no SPF.
Disadvantage: lacking anonymity and thus protection from prosecution.
Ok, now let's address the moderation scheme suggested countless times on
1. No SPF must exist.
2. The moderation must be performed without a central database as dictated by req. no. one.
3. Performance hits should be acceptable. This is something which can be tuned quite a lot, but whatever scheme design is agreed upon will obviously have to take this into account.
4. User overhead must be minimal (as compared to the current model, where no time at all is spent, just "d-click" a set of files and they download and are automatically shared)
These four above are essential for a scheme to work. Personally I'd like to add another requirement as well, but realize that it might not be feasible to implement this in an initial draft depending on how the current Gnutella designs look at present.
5. Users should be anonymous, ie. there should be a severe overhead at revealing a user. relate to decrypting a RSA key or similar, where one breach of the protection scheme does not compromise the entire community, just the single instance being attacked.
I'd love to see some dedicated souls of the P2P community establish a project on source forge or similar, where these issues are being addressed and hopefully the fruit of such an endeavor would result in some kind of standard draft which hopefully most P2P client and server developers would adhere to, propelling these implementations along rather swiftly and as a consequence giving us these feature in a relatively short amount of time.
As a note: I mentioned prosecution above. This isn't necessary related to just IP violations, but could relate to free speech as well. China is a good example where people aren't encouraged to speak up. Also the citizen in the US and many other western countries are being monitored more or less for one reason or another and this will only escalate in scope as time progress (I really hope no one is delusional enough to not realize this). Also note that by "High quality" it refers to the technical definition and not a subjective one.
Gaming at work?
Sounds very foreign to me. In today's competitive business culture, you need to stay on the front line. Having some spare time? Fine, read Sun's latest Java specs, or W3C's XML specification.
There are always stuff to learn and the more you know, the better you will perform.
Playing games will hardly lead to any promotions nor more interesting job assignments.
Or should I say a circular transportation facilitation device?
I hear what you are saying.. and you are right.
Having worked many years with a certain brand you mentioned in your post (at the company developing the product), I've become rather indoctrinated when it comes to my company's tools and solutions. To be honest, these products are no better or worse than anything else you might be able to find in the OSS community, just as complex or even more so than OSS counter parts when you look past pretty UIs and start planning or implementing whatever it was you wanted the product for in the first place. That the "industry" is engaged in the "feature game" at the expense of other areas of improvements doesn't help much either other than sales.
The main difference between an OSS solution and one from a large company is A) management at a customer *knows* they will be able to get support for the product in the future, B) They have someone to nag at if they are not satisfied with whatever it may be and C) the product cost an insanely amount of money (and some draw a false conclusion that expense at purchase == quality).
FYI: We have been using ALOT of OSS software during customer engagements (especially from the Apache foundation) due to their high quality, speedy enhancements and FULL SOURCE (which we don't always get even from our laboratories which develop our "cutting edge" software).
I can only echo what you say by agreeing that anything we can do with most any commercial software out there (including our own), we can do just as well with OSS software. On the other hand, there is quite a gap between "being able to run" a product and fully exploiting a products strengths. This takes knowledge and experience and most companies don't possess that. This all lead to "OSS is excellent to top-of-the-crop people", but the same is also true for expensive commercial products. The difference is probably that commercial sw is quicker than an OSS counterpart, to get up doing *anything* (i.e. the invested cost in learning "hello world" is cheaper with commercial products), but when you actually set out to do more advanced stuff, the intellectual investment is probably about the same.
To conclude, the more I see the world, the more companies I visit and the more engagements I'm at, the more I stand puzzled about our customer's corporate decisions. They purchase expensive hw and sw from us, but they still need many many consulting hours, which we are more than happy to provide, to get the most (or at times, *anything*) out of their acquisitions. Our products have a life span, meaning that if the customers want any kind of support from us, after 1 - 2 versions, it's upgrade time or an expensive service agreement since we won't (and economically can't) support older products. In the end, If you have the skills, OSS is by far the most bang for the bucks and probably the lesser headache during upgr. cycles. If you have swelling pockets instead, sure you can contract the vendors' consultants getting their products buzzing. It's all about skills, ambition, money and marketing.
The current genre of the titles mentioned in the article is MMOLG, Massively Multiplayer Online Levelling Games. (I admit though, some like to call new titles in this genre "More Meaningless Online Running Past Groups").
Wow! Does this mean that I can now sue trolls when they make statements which are not backup up by facts and cause some kind of theoretical injury to me?
This *must* be investigated. I've suffered trolling for the last 15 years... if I only had known...
* a ripp-off name of MS. DotNet, waiting to get it's owners sued.
According to the guys ISP, the demographic distribution of visitors are as follow: .net] (1.5%)
/.? /. should start expanding it's view a bit wider than the US. The reason I write this is that there previously was a section in the FAQ _basically saying_ "/. is made by americans for americans and we pretty much give a damn about anyone else, so if you don't like it, go away" (personal interpretation).
1. United States (48.6%)
2. Canada (6.7%)
3. Netherlands (6.2)
4. UK (5.1%)
5. Australia (3.3%)
6. Sweden (2.2%)
7. Belgium (2.1%)
8. [visitors from
9. Germany (1.5%)
10. France (1.4%)
Does anyone know the actual figures for
If the figures above figures are representative, it would mean that the US visitors are loosing ground and that perhaps
Am I the only one being amazed at the absolute conviction and dedication the media industry (MI) has toward trying to stop time and changes?
The last few years it's been like a weekly serial, where articles pop up regarding the MI's attempts to stop this, ban that, prosecute these, convince those etc. etc.
Imagine what the MI could have been able to achieve, had they thrown all this money, effort and resources at developing new business models, investigating how people will use media in the near future, what things the public wants and the like.
It's admirable their being so persistent, though unfortunate it's at the wrong things.
"Here, let me try this new gizmo out by beaming these MP3s over to ya. Just line up your comp. right next to mine."
[Star Trek phaser sound]
"Wow! that was the fastest transfer I've ever seen!!! Sorry about the big hole in your computer though.."