Well everybody is entitled to their opinion. I'm sure Mr. Ellison would agree with your assessment.
And I realize that a CEO is often little more than a mascot and shouldn't be treated as a proxy for a giant corporation with thousands of highly skilled workers.
Having said that, I would use Mr. Ellison's own vision as my own sharpest weapon. He seems to think that the only real growth for his product is in biotech and that Oracle's database experience puts them in the best position to provide bioinformatics services. I, on the other hand, would suggest that biotech is a field that will inherently gravitate towards open and shared formats whenever possible. This is not corporate databases we're talking about, it's the essence of our shared humanity. The raw data cannot be the product if biotech is to go forward at a reasonable and near-term profitable pace. Therapies based on publicly available data will be the most likely products. I don't believe it will be politically feasible in the long term to manage data on human genetics the way corporate sales data is managed.
But that's just my opinion and I'll subtract my own mod point for being overly opionated and off-topic.
It's find it amusing to speculate on the future of Oracle. I just read some of Ellison's prognostications on the future of the company and I couldn't help finding his smug, overbearing manner enjoyable not to mention his flair for style. He's the reverend Mr. Black. He reminds me of an uncle of mine in his sixties still hanging out at the beach trying to make it in the teen scene talking about the virtues of maturity and how bigger is always better. Okay Pops.
But cheap personal sniping aside, the clearest conclusion I could draw after hearing about how Oracle owned bioinformatics was that the dude is insane and pretty much detatched from reality. They may still have a line on a lot of juicy contacts, but they're not going to be around in ten years.
So, you're absolutely right Oracle is silly. No point in drawing any conclusions on the actions of one rather odd company.
Re:It's not about transistor count
on
The Diamond Age
·
· Score: 1
Well, it depends on your agenda I suppose. Perfoming well means different things in different applications.
If you can get enough transistors on a given area then you can start talking about SOC designs and in some cases you might end up having an overall faster system than something that relies on a blazing fast, not to mention blazingly hot, CPU and a slow bus on a clunky motherboard.
I don't mean to make it sound like I don't find this exciting. I thought the article was absolutely fascinating and there are undoubtedly countless applcations both outside of and in computing for cheap custom grown diamonds. I wonder about making solar cells for concentrated solar energy applications for one.
My skepticism about the need for speed is just a general theme I've picked up on when it comes to CPUs and the way they're marketed in the consumer arena where most of them are sold. I've watched too many overheated CPUs literally cook motherboards to find them amusing any more. My cynical side wants to call it out and out fraud, but the least I can say is that I have a few fanless early Pentiums boards that are still doing fine after many years of service while the vast majority of systems I've bought since the advent of active cooling have died from thermal failure and in my experience it's usually the board that dies, not the CPU. In fact, I have a whole set of extra working CPUs and no extra boards. I'd like to see that issue addressed before I get excited about doubling up the heat.
But is heat really the main issue anyway?
on
The Diamond Age
·
· Score: 1
I think design is more important than materials science at this point. Obviously they both have their place, but I'm not convinced cooling is the major obstacle to higher performance computing.
We're already so close to the end of the road in semiconductor design I have to wonder if this is a solution in search of a problem. If we're at a hundred nanometers right now, there's not a hell of a lot of shrinking that can happen before we're dealing with individual atomic bonds as circuits. An Si-Si bond is about a quarter of a nanometer.
One technique is simply to reduce voltage. I understand that you can lose performace by reducing voltage, but is that really a good enough reason to switch from Si this late in the game?
It seems that better System On a Chip or System in a Package designs are more important at this point than materials technology. I tend to agree with the guy from Intel that Si is already quite satisfactory. What sucks is the packaging. Why do we still even have motherboards?
How about a square chip package similar to what we have now, but with a dual DIMM on each side, a VGA out, a USB2 port and two ethernet jacks. Screw all that other crap. I'd rather have five of those running at 1.Ghz each for fifty bucks a pop than a 20Ghz beige monstrosity growling with the strain of its active cooling system that literally melts down every time it gets so full of dust the fan sticks.
Just because you could technically tolerate more system heat within the CPU package with diamond circuitry, I think it's really worth asking if that's where we really should be heading. You've still got to deal with the heat just because it doesn't destroy the CPU doesn't mean it disappears. People are sensitive to heat too.
Then again, there's always cogeneration. Who knows. The home PC becomes the powerplant. That could be intersting too.
Are you quite sure the lumber industry didn't kill asbestos with FUD because it was too cheap? You might want to check your history before spouting off about the evils of environmentalism.
Wow, there's so much going on in LiveCDs these days. I'm terribly impressed. I use Morphix as a router with almost everything running out of RAM and I love it, but there's so many different versions coing out these days I don't have time to try them all. It sure is cool though. I'm going to check out this MoviX in addition to this LASL I'm downloading.
Getting totally off the point, but since you mention Taipei 101. I just moved away from that neighborhood. I loved it there, but I moved to the coast which is also cool.
Anyhow, I was living not more than a city block away from the work site when there was a major earthquake and a work crane with a worker inside broke off and tumbled down the side of the incomplete structure from the eightieth floor. I heard it tumbling all the way down. I thought the whole city had collapsed. I guess it's nothing compared to 911, but it was a wild experience I'll never forget.
Quoting ESR
Who was borrowing from Blanchot and Lyotard who were derivative of Mallarme, Rilke, Kafka and Holderlin etc and on and on and on and back all the way to the first pre-Chinese characters that appeared in the baked tortoise shells of some long forgotten poor dead turtle.
The Internet is the beginning of a global community and there's no good evidence to support the that putting another price tag on it will improve it. I say another price tag, because like the post above mentions, the Internet is already paid for.
If you look through history with an eye to literature, you find that much of the greatest writing know to man was put down for reasons other than the exchange of coins. Just because it doesn't support your feelings of entitlement, you can't just jump to the conclusion that non-commercially produced material is inferior. You're arguing against the heritage of humanity if you take that position.
What I find so shocking is not that people won't pay. I can tolerate that despite the fact that my own works get ripped off. What I can't stand is when the US Congress passes an amendment like they did to the Net Act that equates all exchanges where anything of value is recieved in return with commerce. This is unbelieveable. By this logic, all sex is prostitution. How can America have gotten to this point? The greed is so insane it's impossible to conceive of love.
Well I'm using K++Lite right now and it says 3.3 million. So, that's not quite dead. And an issue that is just casually glazed over in this debate that the RIAA has ignited is that much of the material traded isn't under the copyright of any RIAA memeber.
Moreover, the laws vary from country to country. Sadly, as an American, I am under the impression that the most repressive and backwards copyright laws are from the US although they're spreading fast in Europe. I live in Asia though, and laws tend to vary dramatically here from region to region. And since we have abundant bandwidth, it makes me wonder about the future of P2P.
This may be a long shot, but perhaps we'll begin to see a rising Asian cultural imperialism as an unintended consequence of this western reaction to the progress of information tehcnology. I already notice vast amounts of Japanese porn on P2P although you don't tend to see it unless you use Chinese or Japanese characters for your searches. If you do, however, there's a surprisingly large quantity.
This could be interesting as it might foreshadow P.K. Dick's vision of the future Los Angeles with Japanese and Chinese overtaking Spanish as the predominant popular culture languages of the region. I actually moved to Taipei in the early 90s because it reminded me so much of the image of LA in the movie Bladerunner.
Forgot to take off the Karma bonus.
But also it's after dinner and I'm feeling like less of a pompous ass and wondering what semiotics you were thinking of. I assume it's something to do with programming, right.
I'm interested to know. As you can see from my analogy to Newton, it's not that I'm anti-semiotics. I love Jakobson and all those crazy structuralists. I was just pushing my agenda, but I'm interested to know where you're coming from?
Yeah, I grew up in a household with hundreds and hundreds of copied cassettes. If it wasn't a problem for my parents then why should it bother me? Then there's the library issue. Our local library has thousands of CDs. Do I feel guilty about checking them out and copying them? No.
Copyright is an exclusive right to control commercial usage and anything non-commercial SHOULD not have anything to do with copyright at all. That is a common understanding of the law. No matter how the law gets twisted by special interests who want to twist the word "commercial" till it breaks, that's what it was supposed to mean and that's how the majority feels.
Well, I mod myself down a point for getting a bit off topic, but I meant semiotics as in Barthes, Jakobson, Levi-Strauss, Saussure etc and yes I'm confindent it should be dead outside historical discussion and limited instances of application. These authors still sell books, but so does Newton. It's not that they're useless by any means --quite the contrary, they're essential in undertanding what came next--but their original claim to fame no longer holds.
In buzzword happy fields semiotics is a ripe source of obfuscating rhetoric. It was from the beginning.
Here's a quote from the Journal of Applied Semiotics' own suggested overview of the field
"Certainly, in some cases, semiotic analysis seems little more than an excuse for interpreters to display the appearance of mastery through the use of jargon which excludes most people from participation. In practice, semiotic analysis invariably consists of individual readings. We are seldom presented with the commentaries of several analysts on the same text, to say nothing of evidence of any kind of consensus amongst different semioticians."
So, I would agree that it's not dead in the sense that it is still being practiced. I would just disagree that it's anywhere near as meaningful as it once was thought to be. Hence, I refer to the failure of the semiotic experiment.
Well, I don't see that our opinions are all that divergent, but I'd like to point out that the "they" in humanities that I was referring to was the instability of meaning for all words, rather than particularly obscure instances of words such as "values" and "ideas."
More specifically, I was thinking along the lines of the thoughts that resulted from the failure of semiotics and the rise of post-structuralism.
These ideas were best summarized in the highly derivative work of a well-known Frenchman who used the metaphor of a coin and a sunflower to deconstruct the notion of metaphor itself. Named . ..
Anybody.
Are you guys in the back even listening?
It looks like I'm the only one to bring this up, but as a native English speaker that frequently has to work in Chinese what caught my eye about Gentoo was its alleged ability to made the bleeding edge character input systems work.
I haven't actually tried it yet, but I'm very intrigued with their on-line instructions showing a working copy of Chinput which is very close to the kind of Chinese input support we see on the Windows desktop and unfortunately this is one area where Linux desktops can really lag. I've had success getting Xcin to work on various distros including Knoppix, but the NCurses look is really not what end users expect in a key-in system these days.
The lack of a fundamental unit of meaning of any sort was established in the humanities long before it came into vogue in the hard sciences.
And a look at the title of the web site certaily brought to my mind Thomas Kunh's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions that I happen to have sitting right next to me here.
EurekaAlert? That's a joke, right?
Unions brings up an interesting issue.
on
Build-to-Order Cars?
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
Maybe a new US car company isn't as absurd as it sounds. If you look at Ford/GM/Chrysler's problems, one of the biggest burdens they have is their pension systems. From a cold blooded capitalist perspective, it makes sense to just let them die and start from scratch with a young workforce and no pension burden.
I'm not saying that's a good thing. Quite the contrary, it's another example of how inherently immoral capitalism is. I'm just suggesting that it gives an up and comer a bit of credibility.
As soon as anything gets expensive, you can rent it. In fact, for high end digital video where different scenes require reprogramming --well downloading new code anyway-- of FPGAs, they even rent techs to do the "programming." But that business model only works as long as the things remain pricey enough to make it worth it to rent.
But as for digital still cameras. I think you need look no further than EETimes and the Asian IT trade mags to see that Taiwan is taking over the digital still camera market big time this year and usually that means the prices are going to be falling. So, the disposable/rental thing is probably just a passing idea on the way to low end commodity priced multi-megapixel DSCs.
If you look at the fair use subsections of US copyright law, you see that there is very clearly a difference between individual fair use and fair use by a library or archive.
Instead of arguing that P2P should be allowed as inidividual fair use and that P2P users are patrons of an archive, I think the better analogy is that each P2P node IS an archive and should be allowed to lend to other archives.
According to the law, one copy can of a copyrighted work can still be made specifically for lending to other archives.
The stipulations are that the archives must be without commercial advantage, open to the public and retain any copyright notices.
Now, the one copy part might not fit Kazaa, but a differen type of P2P app could meet this requirement. It might not be as efficient, but it would still be P2P.
At least that's how I understood it. The EFF case history seems to suggest that this is the case unless that page is out of date.
I also was under the impression that this was likely to end up in the Supreme Court because it's an issue of Congress stomping on the Constitution with the passage of the DMCA.
If it does go that far, the RIAA may be sorry for their tactics.
I got the impression that the whole distro is loaded into RAMDisk from a flash.
This really caught my eye because just recently on the Knoppix boards, a script has come out to load a whole Knoppix distro directly into RAMDisk.
I bet this is how it works and I think it's an awesome way to go. I want to try and load Morphix into 300 Megs of RAM using the script over at Knoppix. You could try it too! They say it's freakin' fast once you load everything into RAM.
I think it's interesting that the other popular desktops, MS and Apple, really don't have any incentive to go this way since it could potentially stall high end hardware sales and that's not really in their business interests.
After all, why do you need a bunch of hard drives if your OS is in RAM and you have cheap optical media for storage. And why do you need fast CPUs if your OS is already snappy as hell on an older --or newer, but slower, cheaper and less power hungry-- machines.
I think this is huge news. I knew it was coming, but I thought it would be awhile. I think the immersion lithography deal made it pointless to put things off anymore. The tech transfer is complete and it had jack to do with Taiwan. The Taiwanese are far too greedy. This was home grown all the way. I have no doubt.
Actually the statuate of limitations is very short in a tort case. They might not have a case after twelve months. Also, they'd have to try it as a willful tort to even have a chance at challenging a chapter7 filing and even then it would be iffy and that's assuming the jury sides with them. They're playing the long shot here.
I personally did notice what looked like a dip right after they announced that subpeonas had been served and they started posting screen names. At one point last week my client was showing only about 3.1 million but then this weekend I glanced at the screen and saw 4.3 which is about as high as I've ever seen. I was surprised to see it pop back so fast, but then again not too surprised. I think one thing the RIAA is failing to perceive is the utter lack of attention span amongst the people they're trying to shock.
I think this is a real obvious flaw in their strategy. Their biggest artists are best known for their shock value. Using the "scared straight" tactic on a group of consumers who are specifically self selected as seeking out shock as entertainment is questionable.
Slashdot Mirror
Well everybody is entitled to their opinion. I'm sure Mr. Ellison would agree with your assessment.
And I realize that a CEO is often little more than a mascot and shouldn't be treated as a proxy for a giant corporation with thousands of highly skilled workers.
Having said that, I would use Mr. Ellison's own vision as my own sharpest weapon. He seems to think that the only real growth for his product is in biotech and that Oracle's database experience puts them in the best position to provide bioinformatics services. I, on the other hand, would suggest that biotech is a field that will inherently gravitate towards open and shared formats whenever possible. This is not corporate databases we're talking about, it's the essence of our shared humanity. The raw data cannot be the product if biotech is to go forward at a reasonable and near-term profitable pace. Therapies based on publicly available data will be the most likely products. I don't believe it will be politically feasible in the long term to manage data on human genetics the way corporate sales data is managed.
But that's just my opinion and I'll subtract my own mod point for being overly opionated and off-topic.
It's find it amusing to speculate on the future of Oracle. I just read some of Ellison's prognostications on the future of the company and I couldn't help finding his smug, overbearing manner enjoyable not to mention his flair for style. He's the reverend Mr. Black. He reminds me of an uncle of mine in his sixties still hanging out at the beach trying to make it in the teen scene talking about the virtues of maturity and how bigger is always better. Okay Pops.
But cheap personal sniping aside, the clearest conclusion I could draw after hearing about how Oracle owned bioinformatics was that the dude is insane and pretty much detatched from reality. They may still have a line on a lot of juicy contacts, but they're not going to be around in ten years.
So, you're absolutely right Oracle is silly. No point in drawing any conclusions on the actions of one rather odd company.
Well, it depends on your agenda I suppose. Perfoming well means different things in different applications.
If you can get enough transistors on a given area then you can start talking about SOC designs and in some cases you might end up having an overall faster system than something that relies on a blazing fast, not to mention blazingly hot, CPU and a slow bus on a clunky motherboard.
I don't mean to make it sound like I don't find this exciting. I thought the article was absolutely fascinating and there are undoubtedly countless applcations both outside of and in computing for cheap custom grown diamonds. I wonder about making solar cells for concentrated solar energy applications for one.
My skepticism about the need for speed is just a general theme I've picked up on when it comes to CPUs and the way they're marketed in the consumer arena where most of them are sold. I've watched too many overheated CPUs literally cook motherboards to find them amusing any more. My cynical side wants to call it out and out fraud, but the least I can say is that I have a few fanless early Pentiums boards that are still doing fine after many years of service while the vast majority of systems I've bought since the advent of active cooling have died from thermal failure and in my experience it's usually the board that dies, not the CPU. In fact, I have a whole set of extra working CPUs and no extra boards. I'd like to see that issue addressed before I get excited about doubling up the heat.
I think design is more important than materials science at this point. Obviously they both have their place, but I'm not convinced cooling is the major obstacle to higher performance computing.
We're already so close to the end of the road in semiconductor design I have to wonder if this is a solution in search of a problem. If we're at a hundred nanometers right now, there's not a hell of a lot of shrinking that can happen before we're dealing with individual atomic bonds as circuits. An Si-Si bond is about a quarter of a nanometer.
One technique is simply to reduce voltage. I understand that you can lose performace by reducing voltage, but is that really a good enough reason to switch from Si this late in the game?
It seems that better System On a Chip or System in a Package designs are more important at this point than materials technology. I tend to agree with the guy from Intel that Si is already quite satisfactory. What sucks is the packaging. Why do we still even have motherboards?
How about a square chip package similar to what we have now, but with a dual DIMM on each side, a VGA out, a USB2 port and two ethernet jacks. Screw all that other crap. I'd rather have five of those running at 1.Ghz each for fifty bucks a pop than a 20Ghz beige monstrosity growling with the strain of its active cooling system that literally melts down every time it gets so full of dust the fan sticks.
Just because you could technically tolerate more system heat within the CPU package with diamond circuitry, I think it's really worth asking if that's where we really should be heading. You've still got to deal with the heat just because it doesn't destroy the CPU doesn't mean it disappears. People are sensitive to heat too.
Then again, there's always cogeneration. Who knows. The home PC becomes the powerplant. That could be intersting too.
Are you quite sure the lumber industry didn't kill asbestos with FUD because it was too cheap? You might want to check your history before spouting off about the evils of environmentalism.
Wow, there's so much going on in LiveCDs these days. I'm terribly impressed. I use Morphix as a router with almost everything running out of RAM and I love it, but there's so many different versions coing out these days I don't have time to try them all. It sure is cool though. I'm going to check out this MoviX in addition to this LASL I'm downloading.
That's an amusing rhetorical stab, but that's the literal word of the law. And interestingly enough, that's all laws are --words.
Or in the pool or the bathtub. I do my best brainstorming underwater.
Getting totally off the point, but since you mention Taipei 101. I just moved away from that neighborhood. I loved it there, but I moved to the coast which is also cool.
Anyhow, I was living not more than a city block away from the work site when there was a major earthquake and a work crane with a worker inside broke off and tumbled down the side of the incomplete structure from the eightieth floor. I heard it tumbling all the way down. I thought the whole city had collapsed. I guess it's nothing compared to 911, but it was a wild experience I'll never forget.
Quoting ESR
Who was borrowing from Blanchot and Lyotard who were derivative of Mallarme, Rilke, Kafka and Holderlin etc and on and on and on and back all the way to the first pre-Chinese characters that appeared in the baked tortoise shells of some long forgotten poor dead turtle.
The Internet is the beginning of a global community and there's no good evidence to support the that putting another price tag on it will improve it. I say another price tag, because like the post above mentions, the Internet is already paid for.
If you look through history with an eye to literature, you find that much of the greatest writing know to man was put down for reasons other than the exchange of coins. Just because it doesn't support your feelings of entitlement, you can't just jump to the conclusion that non-commercially produced material is inferior. You're arguing against the heritage of humanity if you take that position.
What I find so shocking is not that people won't pay. I can tolerate that despite the fact that my own works get ripped off. What I can't stand is when the US Congress passes an amendment like they did to the Net Act that equates all exchanges where anything of value is recieved in return with commerce. This is unbelieveable. By this logic, all sex is prostitution. How can America have gotten to this point? The greed is so insane it's impossible to conceive of love.
Well I'm using K++Lite right now and it says 3.3 million. So, that's not quite dead. And an issue that is just casually glazed over in this debate that the RIAA has ignited is that much of the material traded isn't under the copyright of any RIAA memeber.
Moreover, the laws vary from country to country. Sadly, as an American, I am under the impression that the most repressive and backwards copyright laws are from the US although they're spreading fast in Europe. I live in Asia though, and laws tend to vary dramatically here from region to region. And since we have abundant bandwidth, it makes me wonder about the future of P2P.
This may be a long shot, but perhaps we'll begin to see a rising Asian cultural imperialism as an unintended consequence of this western reaction to the progress of information tehcnology. I already notice vast amounts of Japanese porn on P2P although you don't tend to see it unless you use Chinese or Japanese characters for your searches. If you do, however, there's a surprisingly large quantity.
This could be interesting as it might foreshadow P.K. Dick's vision of the future Los Angeles with Japanese and Chinese overtaking Spanish as the predominant popular culture languages of the region. I actually moved to Taipei in the early 90s because it reminded me so much of the image of LA in the movie Bladerunner.
Forgot to take off the Karma bonus.
But also it's after dinner and I'm feeling like less of a pompous ass and wondering what semiotics you were thinking of. I assume it's something to do with programming, right.
I'm interested to know. As you can see from my analogy to Newton, it's not that I'm anti-semiotics. I love Jakobson and all those crazy structuralists. I was just pushing my agenda, but I'm interested to know where you're coming from?
Yeah, I grew up in a household with hundreds and hundreds of copied cassettes. If it wasn't a problem for my parents then why should it bother me? Then there's the library issue. Our local library has thousands of CDs. Do I feel guilty about checking them out and copying them? No.
Copyright is an exclusive right to control commercial usage and anything non-commercial SHOULD not have anything to do with copyright at all. That is a common understanding of the law. No matter how the law gets twisted by special interests who want to twist the word "commercial" till it breaks, that's what it was supposed to mean and that's how the majority feels.
Well, I mod myself down a point for getting a bit off topic, but I meant semiotics as in Barthes, Jakobson, Levi-Strauss, Saussure etc and yes I'm confindent it should be dead outside historical discussion and limited instances of application. These authors still sell books, but so does Newton. It's not that they're useless by any means --quite the contrary, they're essential in undertanding what came next--but their original claim to fame no longer holds.
In buzzword happy fields semiotics is a ripe source of obfuscating rhetoric. It was from the beginning.
Here's a quote from the Journal of Applied Semiotics' own suggested overview of the field
"Certainly, in some cases, semiotic analysis seems little more than an excuse for interpreters to display the appearance of mastery through the use of jargon which excludes most people from participation. In practice, semiotic analysis invariably consists of individual readings. We are seldom presented with the commentaries of several analysts on the same text, to say nothing of evidence of any kind of consensus amongst different semioticians."
So, I would agree that it's not dead in the sense that it is still being practiced. I would just disagree that it's anywhere near as meaningful as it once was thought to be. Hence, I refer to the failure of the semiotic experiment.
Well, I don't see that our opinions are all that divergent, but I'd like to point out that the "they" in humanities that I was referring to was the instability of meaning for all words, rather than particularly obscure instances of words such as "values" and "ideas." .
More specifically, I was thinking along the lines of the thoughts that resulted from the failure of semiotics and the rise of post-structuralism.
These ideas were best summarized in the highly derivative work of a well-known Frenchman who used the metaphor of a coin and a sunflower to deconstruct the notion of metaphor itself. Named . .
Anybody.
Are you guys in the back even listening?
It looks like I'm the only one to bring this up, but as a native English speaker that frequently has to work in Chinese what caught my eye about Gentoo was its alleged ability to made the bleeding edge character input systems work.
I haven't actually tried it yet, but I'm very intrigued with their on-line instructions showing a working copy of Chinput which is very close to the kind of Chinese input support we see on the Windows desktop and unfortunately this is one area where Linux desktops can really lag. I've had success getting Xcin to work on various distros including Knoppix, but the NCurses look is really not what end users expect in a key-in system these days.
The lack of a fundamental unit of meaning of any sort was established in the humanities long before it came into vogue in the hard sciences.
And a look at the title of the web site certaily brought to my mind Thomas Kunh's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions that I happen to have sitting right next to me here.
EurekaAlert? That's a joke, right?
Maybe a new US car company isn't as absurd as it sounds. If you look at Ford/GM/Chrysler's problems, one of the biggest burdens they have is their pension systems. From a cold blooded capitalist perspective, it makes sense to just let them die and start from scratch with a young workforce and no pension burden.
I'm not saying that's a good thing. Quite the contrary, it's another example of how inherently immoral capitalism is. I'm just suggesting that it gives an up and comer a bit of credibility.
As soon as anything gets expensive, you can rent it. In fact, for high end digital video where different scenes require reprogramming --well downloading new code anyway-- of FPGAs, they even rent techs to do the "programming." But that business model only works as long as the things remain pricey enough to make it worth it to rent.
But as for digital still cameras. I think you need look no further than EETimes and the Asian IT trade mags to see that Taiwan is taking over the digital still camera market big time this year and usually that means the prices are going to be falling. So, the disposable/rental thing is probably just a passing idea on the way to low end commodity priced multi-megapixel DSCs.
If you look at the fair use subsections of US copyright law, you see that there is very clearly a difference between individual fair use and fair use by a library or archive.
Instead of arguing that P2P should be allowed as inidividual fair use and that P2P users are patrons of an archive, I think the better analogy is that each P2P node IS an archive and should be allowed to lend to other archives.
According to the law, one copy can of a copyrighted work can still be made specifically for lending to other archives.
The stipulations are that the archives must be without commercial advantage, open to the public and retain any copyright notices.
Now, the one copy part might not fit Kazaa, but a differen type of P2P app could meet this requirement. It might not be as efficient, but it would still be P2P.
At least that's how I understood it. The EFF case history seems to suggest that this is the case unless that page is out of date.
I also was under the impression that this was likely to end up in the Supreme Court because it's an issue of Congress stomping on the Constitution with the passage of the DMCA.
If it does go that far, the RIAA may be sorry for their tactics.
I got the impression that the whole distro is loaded into RAMDisk from a flash.
This really caught my eye because just recently on the Knoppix boards, a script has come out to load a whole Knoppix distro directly into RAMDisk.
I bet this is how it works and I think it's an awesome way to go. I want to try and load Morphix into 300 Megs of RAM using the script over at Knoppix. You could try it too! They say it's freakin' fast once you load everything into RAM.
I think it's interesting that the other popular desktops, MS and Apple, really don't have any incentive to go this way since it could potentially stall high end hardware sales and that's not really in their business interests.
After all, why do you need a bunch of hard drives if your OS is in RAM and you have cheap optical media for storage. And why do you need fast CPUs if your OS is already snappy as hell on an older --or newer, but slower, cheaper and less power hungry-- machines.
I think this is huge news. I knew it was coming, but I thought it would be awhile. I think the immersion lithography deal made it pointless to put things off anymore. The tech transfer is complete and it had jack to do with Taiwan. The Taiwanese are far too greedy. This was home grown all the way. I have no doubt.
Actually the statuate of limitations is very short in a tort case. They might not have a case after twelve months. Also, they'd have to try it as a willful tort to even have a chance at challenging a chapter7 filing and even then it would be iffy and that's assuming the jury sides with them. They're playing the long shot here.
I personally did notice what looked like a dip right after they announced that subpeonas had been served and they started posting screen names. At one point last week my client was showing only about 3.1 million but then this weekend I glanced at the screen and saw 4.3 which is about as high as I've ever seen. I was surprised to see it pop back so fast, but then again not too surprised. I think one thing the RIAA is failing to perceive is the utter lack of attention span amongst the people they're trying to shock.
I think this is a real obvious flaw in their strategy. Their biggest artists are best known for their shock value. Using the "scared straight" tactic on a group of consumers who are specifically self selected as seeking out shock as entertainment is questionable.