Sadly only the geeks care about standards anymore.
Which is why geeks will RULE THE WORLD. Bwaaa-haa-haaa!
Re:Smart Move for Ebay, bad for paypal people.
on
Ebay buys PayPal
·
· Score: 4, Funny
"I get my pay from germany with paypal, if they change it to you can only use your paypal money to pay for ebay stuff, ebay will gain, but we will all be stuffed."
If they did pull something like this, it would obviously annoy a lot of people. In that case, I would expect another 'replacement service' from another company to spring up with a different name but similar functionality, and perhaps fewer problems*.
This has already happened. Richard Stallman, shortly after the story broke, announced the creation of GnuPal, citing the need for an free (free to use, anyway) payment system. It will be deployed using the DotGNU web services platform.
Now that they've added the coffee can exhaust, 300 pound wing (someone explain why you put a wing on the back of a FWD car that isn't set up in a way to break the rear loose) $800 worth of stickers, and $2000 worth of wheels/tires, the only thing left is some stereo.
Don't forget neon lights under the car. And hydraulic lifts on the tires.. And 300 watt speakers in the bed of the pickup, also with hydraulic lifts.
A couple years ago, the alpha geek where I work, who has since moved on the do kernel hacking somewhere else, made an off hand remark that he hated it when people used the stuff he wrote.
"That's odd," I replied. "We write programs to solve people's problems."
"No," he shot back. "I code because I like to code. As soon as a user gets hold of it, all he does is start complaining and asking for more features."
Which is true enough, I've since learned. Users' wants are ill-defined as well as infinite.
Why does it take a Congressional resolution for this? Aren't there professional historians who are supposed to research historical documents to find out what really happened?
I've been watching this on the Linux Security Module mailing list and have high hopes that SCC sticks to their original promise and not place restrictions on the use of this technology.
Either let the technology be public domain, or assign the patent to the FSF. Agreeing to "not place restrictions on the use of this technology" is a shallow promise. The situation needs to be rectified to where SCC *is unable* to place restrictions on the technology, kept promises or broken ones.
Metered net access will kill Internet Radio also. And, people (well, at least me) will be quite diligent in blocking ads. I don't want to *pay* to download ads that I don't want to see in the first place.
One possible benefit, if there is any silver-lining to be had, is that spamm may well become illegal, since spame incurs cost onto the reciever.
I say let those pages that are "built for IE" look like crap. Sooner or later, Mozilla will gain market share (we hope,) and people will have to begin building web pages that are standards-compliant not IE-compliant.
If AOL uses NS7 for its AOL 8.0 client. I'd say that's a safe bet.
There is serious questions on whether humans could touch down safely on Mars in any case. People who have spent extended time on Mir, for example, need hospitalization and cardiovascular rehab to teach their hearts to pump blood against a gravity well again. And when these astronauts land on the Martian surface, there will obviously not be a vast, healthy medical staff awaiting them.
The starship will need a spinning ring for the human habitable sections, using centrifugal force for gravity simulation. Only go to zero gee for take off and landing (or maneuvering, if necessary)
Watch 2001.
Now that I think of it, the ISS should have something like this -- for extended astronaut missions and research on how to do it right.
This is his response to the GPL issue. It's a good point. The choice is: Enough money to feed the family and pay the mortgage, or give back to the community and make a fraction of what you could have otherwise. It's not always this black and white, but many times it is.
Larry McVoy: I've never bought into the open source model as a self sustaining model for all software. It works in some places the software is tied to some other source of revenue, such as hardware, but in general, it stinks as a business model. It's fantastic if your goal is to have a lot of free software out there, but it starts to fall apart when building that free software costs more than you can extract from it in revenue.
BitKeeper is in that camp. There is about 25 man years of effort in BitKeeper so far, with no end in sight. We pay Bay Area salaries, so our cost for an engineer is about $160K/year. That's at least 4 million dollars no matter how you look at it, and that's a lower bound. I took a hard look at the Cyclic people who tried to make a business out of supporting CVS and they pulled in $145K in their best year. It would take 27 years to make $4 million at that rate, and that assumes we stop drawing salaries today. In this product space, if people can use it for free, they will. People have tried to argue with me that BitKeeper is a better tool and it would generate more support revenue. That's nonsense, exactly because it is a better tool. At least with CVS, there are enough broken or missing features that you could generate revenue to fix them. Maybe.
So I took a hard look at the situation and decided that I wanted to maximize value to everyone. I divided the world up into 3 camps: the free users, the commercial users, and the vendor. The goals were to provide maximum value to everyone and have everyone provide value back in return. Here's how it works:
Free users: these users don't pay in money, but they do pay. They pay by using the product and pointing out bugs. BitKeeper is a dramatically better product because of the free users. The BKL, the free usage license, insists that you are running the latest images, because that's where the free users provide value. It doesn't help anyone to get bug reports on problems we've already fixed. The job of the free users is to help debug the latest.
Commercial users: these users pay in money which funds further development. As a commercial user, they can pick which release they want to run, which sometimes means they stay back for stability reasons, perceived or otherwise. They benefit from the free users running a new release first, and it's typical that they wait for the timestamps in the download area to be a few weeks old before upgrading.
Vendor: we provide value in the form of the product and support. We get the bug fix value from the free users and financial benefit from the commercial users. The money is turned right around into additional development.
While BitKeeper is hardly a get rich quick scheme, it is self supporting. We've taken no outside investment, the company is built on the backs and wallets of the people who work here, and that's cool. It means there is no outside board of directors in the form of VC's telling us to stop wasting time giving it away. I know that giving it away has helped make it a better product, which is good for everyone, but I'd hate to be in the position of having to justify that decision to a VC before the fact. It's easy to see that things worked after the fact, it's much harder to see that they will work ahead of time.
The bottom line on the licensing scheme is that it was designed to give as much and get as much as possible to and from all parties. Licenses such as the GPL give more to the free users, but give dramatically less to both the original author and to the commercial users. Using GPLed software for everything is like living in a world where the answer for when you have an illness is "here are the plans for the hospital, you can finish building it and check yourself in. Oh, and here's the medical instruments you'll need, you can slice yourself open and poke around. You can do it, good luck!".
Licensed software is more like the insurance model. Nobody pays what it cost to develop the software, that's way to expensive. So everyone pays a little bit and the cost load is spread out. Yeah, for consumer applications like what Microsoft ships, they can get very rich because there is a very large market. But for applications like BitKeeper, it's a tiny market, about a million seats world wide, and there are about 300 different SCM tools out there. Hardly the area to go try and do a free product and hope that support revenue will work. It's just not realistic. There is absolutely no chance that BitKeeper would be anywhere near as good as it is today if we had chosen to GPL it.
With the increase of the pace of technological change, why is the transition from TV to HDTV taking as long as the transition from radio to TV?
What is the compelling reason to do so, other than legal requirements? Is HDTV more than an order of magnitude better than the millions of tvs and their currently satisfied users?
Is WWF and Pokemon really *that* much better on HTDV?
Good counter-examples. I was being hyperbolic in my earlier post.
I would also add that neither of the examples offered a business entity to target for elmination. Both the PC and the Internet we based on open standards where anyone could participate.
This might bode well for Linux as an OS also.
However, a precedent has been set for suing an 'industry' with the tobacco settlement a few years ago. I hope no one tries to sue 'open source' and name all the companies involved as defendents.
In any case, I don't know of a specific business entity that was allowed to be disruptive without the eventual litigation and legislation? Does Amazon count?
Well, if the wheeled base is connected via USB and has a control pannel, then a USB arm seems just as possible. Not that I could do it, though.
Put arms on it! Send it to pick up the paper and pick up dog crap. That's what robots are for.
The RDK (Robot Development Kit) page says you can get a laptop preconfigured to run this thing. The laptop runs "Standard Red Hat 7.2". Cool!
The thing has loads of sensors: Video input, Sound input, 9 infrared sensor and 4 bump sensors.
Wonder if the hardware interface has an open spec? Again, not that I could do anything with it. Not for a while.
This is incredibly cool.
Re:Interesting strategy
on
KaZaA Collapses
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
... yet another indicator that if you want to start an innovative business, don't do it inthe USA, or in anywhere with strong treaties with the USA.
I mostly agree.
If you clarify by saying "innovative and disruptive" business, then I think you are 100% correct. You can be innovative, but you can't disrupt revenue streams of larger corporations.
Innovation may be tolerated, depending on circumstances. Disruptive technology will be eliminated at all costs.
But, come on, Gattaca being a "yawn" ?? Gattaca is an excellent film, and it is science fiction. It's one of the most "real" science fiction films I've ever seen. The acting is superb, and the ending is terribly emotional. No, it doesn't have lasers and battles and monsters and millions of dollars of special effects, but as a sci-fi film I've always thought everyone should go see it. People who complain that sci-fi is just for geeky teens who never really grow up would do themselves a favor by seeing that film. It's quite brilliantly done.
I agree 100%. I rented Gattaca on video just becuase it was "a new sci-fi I hadn't seen". I didn't remember seeing it promoted in the theaters. Sci-Fi, Uma Thurman (yowza), Ethan Hawke. A cheap way to spend a couple hours.
Since I had no expectations, I was totally blown away by how good that movie was. "There is no gene for the human spirit." I bought it on DVD and have seen it 10 times. It's one of my favorite movies. I recommend it to anyone.
At what point does the performance of computers become "adequate"?
Not for a long while. Error-free Voice Recognition? Artificial Intelligence? Robots? Cars that don't need drivers?
We need Terahertz processors.
Perhaps if Moore's Law finally packs in for computers, we can all stop chasing progress and concentrate on things like social implications, human factors, and software that does something useful.
These are not mutually exclusive goals. I'd say they go hand in hand. You can't concetrate on the social implications of progress without first having progress.
Slashdot Mirror
Sadly only the geeks care about standards anymore.
Which is why geeks will RULE THE WORLD. Bwaaa-haa-haaa!
This has already happened. Richard Stallman, shortly after the story broke, announced the creation of GnuPal, citing the need for an free (free to use, anyway) payment system. It will be deployed using the DotGNU web services platform.
I'm sure billpoint wont be missed until paypal fees are raised due to lack of competition. ... which will be shortly after billpoint closes shop.
This whole thing stinks.
Now that they've added the coffee can exhaust, 300 pound wing (someone explain why you put a wing on the back of a FWD car that isn't set up in a way to break the rear loose) $800 worth of stickers, and $2000 worth of wheels/tires, the only thing left is some stereo.
Don't forget neon lights under the car. And hydraulic lifts on the tires.. And 300 watt speakers in the bed of the pickup, also with hydraulic lifts.
*shakes head*
A couple years ago, the alpha geek where I work, who has since moved on the do kernel hacking somewhere else, made an off hand remark that he hated it when people used the stuff he wrote.
"That's odd," I replied. "We write programs to solve people's problems."
"No," he shot back. "I code because I like to code. As soon as a user gets hold of it, all he does is start complaining and asking for more features."
Which is true enough, I've since learned. Users' wants are ill-defined as well as infinite.
This all reminds me of my Software Development Rules from a few months ago.
We need to think of a new way to fight bacterias or we're all going to die!!
1. Nanotechnology
2. Genetic Engineering
Note to self:
/.
Drink *two* cups of coffee before dashing off replies to
;-)
Why should this be scary? We have all watched how Bender fits just fine in the human society. So what is different about this?
Bender is a fucking cartoon character.
If Lindows is not windows compatible, then what are users paying for? Why not just put Mandrake (or other desktop-friendly distrib)?
Lindows (tm)
"Our name sounds like Windows and starts with an 'L'. We are clever."
Why does it take a Congressional resolution for this? Aren't there professional historians who are supposed to research historical documents to find out what really happened?
I've been watching this on the Linux Security Module mailing list and have high hopes that SCC sticks to their original promise and not place restrictions on the use of this technology.
Either let the technology be public domain, or assign the patent to the FSF. Agreeing to "not place restrictions on the use of this technology" is a shallow promise. The situation needs to be rectified to where SCC *is unable* to place restrictions on the technology, kept promises or broken ones.
Metered net access will kill Internet Radio also. And, people (well, at least me) will be quite diligent in blocking ads. I don't want to *pay* to download ads that I don't want to see in the first place.
One possible benefit, if there is any silver-lining to be had, is that spamm may well become illegal, since spame incurs cost onto the reciever.
Slashdot on the other hand is seldom anything more than a news cutting service with the occasional editorial comment.
When has it been anything different? How is it expected to be different? Ingoring Katz, of course.
I say let those pages that are "built for IE" look like crap. Sooner or later, Mozilla will gain market share (we hope,) and people will have to begin building web pages that are standards-compliant not IE-compliant.
If AOL uses NS7 for its AOL 8.0 client. I'd say that's a safe bet.
First open source stuff I've used.I'm running it at home on XP and at work on NT4.
Welcome aboard, friend! Now, about that XP...
;-P
There is serious questions on whether humans could touch down safely on Mars in any case. People who have spent extended time on Mir, for example, need hospitalization and cardiovascular rehab to teach their hearts to pump blood against a gravity well again. And when these astronauts land on the Martian surface, there will obviously not be a vast, healthy medical staff awaiting them.
The starship will need a spinning ring for the human habitable sections, using centrifugal force for gravity simulation. Only go to zero gee for take off and landing (or maneuvering, if necessary)
Watch 2001.
Now that I think of it, the ISS should have something like this -- for extended astronaut missions and research on how to do it right.
With the increase of the pace of technological change, why is the transition from TV to HDTV taking as long as the transition from radio to TV?
What is the compelling reason to do so, other than legal requirements? Is HDTV more than an order of magnitude better than the millions of tvs and their currently satisfied users?
Is WWF and Pokemon really *that* much better on HTDV?
Will it let you see the Death Star from the other side of Yavin befor Massassi gets within range?
Good counter-examples. I was being hyperbolic in my earlier post.
I would also add that neither of the examples offered a business entity to target for elmination. Both the PC and the Internet we based on open standards where anyone could participate.
This might bode well for Linux as an OS also.
However, a precedent has been set for suing an 'industry' with the tobacco settlement a few years ago. I hope no one tries to sue 'open source' and name all the companies involved as defendents.
In any case, I don't know of a specific business entity that was allowed to be disruptive without the eventual litigation and legislation? Does Amazon count?
Well, if the wheeled base is connected via USB and has a control pannel, then a USB arm seems just as possible. Not that I could do it, though.
Put arms on it! Send it to pick up the paper and pick up dog crap. That's what robots are for.
The RDK (Robot Development Kit) page says you can get a laptop preconfigured to run this thing. The laptop runs "Standard Red Hat 7.2". Cool!
The thing has loads of sensors: Video input, Sound input, 9 infrared sensor and 4 bump sensors.
Wonder if the hardware interface has an open spec? Again, not that I could do anything with it. Not for a while.
This is incredibly cool.
... yet another indicator that if you want to start an innovative business, don't do it inthe USA, or in anywhere with strong treaties with the USA.
I mostly agree.
If you clarify by saying "innovative and disruptive" business, then I think you are 100% correct. You can be innovative, but you can't disrupt revenue streams of larger corporations.
Innovation may be tolerated, depending on circumstances. Disruptive technology will be eliminated at all costs.
They obviously aren't figuring inflation into this number. Wouldn't it be a little more accurate to list how many tickets were sold instead?
The inflation-adjusted top movies of all time list for viewing pleasure...
http://boxofficemojo.com/alltime/adjusted/
But, come on, Gattaca being a "yawn" ?? Gattaca is an excellent film, and it is science fiction. It's one of the most "real" science fiction films I've ever seen. The acting is superb, and the ending is terribly emotional. No, it doesn't have lasers and battles and monsters and millions of dollars of special effects, but as a sci-fi film I've always thought everyone should go see it. People who complain that sci-fi is just for geeky teens who never really grow up would do themselves a favor by seeing that film. It's quite brilliantly done.
I agree 100%. I rented Gattaca on video just becuase it was "a new sci-fi I hadn't seen". I didn't remember seeing it promoted in the theaters. Sci-Fi, Uma Thurman (yowza), Ethan Hawke. A cheap way to spend a couple hours.
Since I had no expectations, I was totally blown away by how good that movie was. "There is no gene for the human spirit." I bought it on DVD and have seen it 10 times. It's one of my favorite movies. I recommend it to anyone.
At what point does the performance of computers become "adequate"?
Not for a long while. Error-free Voice Recognition? Artificial Intelligence? Robots? Cars that don't need drivers?
We need Terahertz processors.
Perhaps if Moore's Law finally packs in for computers, we can all stop chasing progress and concentrate on things like social implications, human factors, and software that does something useful.
These are not mutually exclusive goals. I'd say they go hand in hand. You can't concetrate on the social implications of progress without first having progress.