That is, as opposed to a rhetorical question.
What I mean by framing the question in these terms is that the phrase "information wants to be free" did not originate with the Open Source movement or software at all. This is a very old idea that can be traced back to the origins of western ideas and certainly to the trivium of classical Greek education. The trivium was the set of subjects that were fit for study by the free citizens of Anicent Greece, that is, the free citizens as opposed to the unfree slaves.
The trivium consited of three subjects, Music, Math and Rhetoric. The last item is sometimes translated into the modern vernacular as "persuasive speech", but this is a rather peculiar and problematic definition once one begins to question what exactly is meant by persuasive.
A central question quickly emerges which is why anyone would bother to use language at all. Forming words into meaningful phrases and sentences implies a willful attempt to communicate and since communication requires at a minimum an author, a message and a listener then there is always the minimum level of persuasion in all communication since you must at least persuade someone to receive your message or you have failed to communicate.
In this sense, all intentional communication is persuasive and thus these acts of communication can all be considered to be rhetoric.
And once you understand this simple yet subtle idea --that all intentional communications are inherently persuasive and thus rhetorical-- then you can understand what is meant by the phrase "information wants to be free".
What it really means is that rhetoric is intentional and there's really no question that this is true.
Furthermore, once you undestand the ancient origins of the notion that information does indeed need to be free, that is must be free, it is simple to see there is no way that this fact poses any problem for Open Source or Free Software advocates who value their privacy.
Hey even Kwrite kicks ass.
You want to write up list of long commands for a script and you need a lightweight editor? There's nothing wrong with Kwrite. I mean the fact is, it's bloated as hell compared to zile or nano and definitely a second choice if you have nedit, but if all you have in X is xedit or something nasty like that, and I use a distro like that which happens to be a language localization so it does happen sometimes that the choices get slim once you get beyond mainstream English distros. But when editors are lacking, it's not the end of the world if you need to use Kwrite to do a lot of text replacing and take care of word wraps to keep it clean and do other nice editor fun. I would argue that Kwrite goes far beyond Windows Write or whatever they started calling it these days.
That Kexi does look interesting. And Krita, well jeez most distros I use already have both Gimp 1 and 2 and I tend to think of them as fairly lightweight distros. So, in a way Krita looks a bit like bloat, but I bet it's a tiny addition so more the merrier. Besides, Knoppix is going to go full time with a DVD version now so what's a few extra Ks. I just want to see stuff that starts fast and is stable. If there's redundancy, well that's not a problem as long as it's not ads or sneaky who knows what crap code. And you know it aint that. So, why not.
No.
Not only would iTunes make less money if the had more DRM, but Microsoft is also clearly committed to dragging their feet on DRM as well because they know it's bad for business and they always have known that which is why things are the way they are and this is why Apple is said to "get it".
But it's not just Apple and Microsoft either. Everybody knows DRM is lousy for business, even justices of the Supreme Court.
Court procedings are public documents with a GPL-alike character in that they are publicly owned.
So perhaps it's no surprise that even members of the court might "get it". I forget who it was but one of the justices going into Grokster gave quite a bit of opinion on what a good idea he thought the iPod was and that such devices need to be protected against litigation. That was after pointing out that the real reason to use an iPod was not because of the iTunes store, but because of the fact that people could fill it up with free data off the Net and plenty of it. And by free, he acknowledged both Net Radio and P2P as sources of getting free data to listen to on the iPod and that this was the key benefit of the iPod. Pretty straightforward.
That was a justice of the Supreme Court. So, a lot of people "get it".
The issue they're looking at in this session is P2P obviously and I guess we'll be hearing about that any minute. But without P2P there's still NetRadio. It's all there. In fact, the variety is stunning and that's not going away fast even in the US. And even if it did, it will never disappear internationally because laws about the use of airwaves vary dramatically across nations and the legitimate tie-in with existing radio laws makes it simply a fact that has to be accepted until those laws change and that's just not going to happen, even in the US. Given that there wasn't even such a thing as web radio just a few years ago, the odds of this happening internationally in a timely manner are negigible.
So, as long as there's net radio broadcasters and people have the legal right to make back-ups of radio station broadcasts then it is legitimate to have an enormous music collection. That will fill up an iPod or even a fatboy iPod with one of these 160Gig 2.5''notebook drives for the car. And with wireless so you can just pull in and download music from inside the house.
Hell, Apple had better move on a few new products in the near-term because if they don't the cell phones are gonna beat them to it with nothing but RAM. Shoot, and why not. You won't need WiFi with a phone that does WIFly mobile. Just stream from home and up or download whatever plalist you like wherever you are anytime. At that point you can just stream it off your desktop or home file server. If you get out of range for awhile you can buffer four gigs or so onto the local cache till you get back. I mean hell just look at the idea of a file server at home. There was no consumer product categoy for file servers a few years ago, but now there you see such things being sold in retail stores along with the related category of very cheap NAT routers. Those things tend to be especially fond of notebook drives and no wonder. They're often plug-and-play. Running them together with a little SOC package makes a cute little value added toy but they're as big as a terrabyte. And look at the prevalence of GigE in the consumer market. If GigE isn't going to be helpful to someone with a major media archive, I don't know what is. Ineed, what else are you using that kind of bandwidth for in the home environment? Writing e-mails?
So the answer is definitively no. Apple would not make more money with better DRM and neither would Sony or Samsung or Toshiba or Matsushita or Benq or Tatung or Hong Hai or Flextronic. Note that Flextronics is among the sponsors of OpenCores.org and has written up some interesting SOC work that they've done using OpenCores designs. None of those companies can benefit form greater DRM and they are all aware of it at many levels. That doesn't mean the
And the reason is Knoppix.
Knoppix is the biggest threat to all other OSes in existence and its affect has hardly begun to be felt for simple reasons.
As always, you've got to look at the hardware to see where the software is going. In this case, we're at a point where the future is easy to see.
Look no further than the RAM market. Go ahead and take a look at PriceWatch or TigerDirect or NewEgg of whatever hardware price guide you like. You'll notice that 1Gig RAM modules are becoming entry level commodity items.
CPU tech has hit the wall and both Mac and Microsoft are CPU junkies. RAM, on the other hand, is right on course for several more generations of lithography because it doesn't need to be faster which is now synonymous with hotter and more power hungry. With RAM, bigger is just as good as faster. And there is no doubt it's still getting bigger in both the NAND and NOR varieties.
Two Gigs of RAM will soon be common on even low-end budget machines. We might not see a CPU that can do what Longhorn was originally proposed to do in terms of speech recognition and all this for a long time but we'll certainly see machines with plenty of RAM in the very near future. The near future is the only one that counts in the corporate world.
And the one platform that benefits the most from all this RAM is Knoppix because it's already convenient to load the whole distro into RAM. One Gig is really a starting point. Once two Gigs gets common it will start to catch on big time.
While it may be possible to run OSX and XP in Ramdisk, they're just not built for it the way Knoppix is.
They're betting on open source like a whole lot of other companies which is great. But I would strongly argue that it is unjustified and even far-fetched to call Real Networks the heroes of the Open Source community. And it would be completely false to say that they're even friends with the free software movement.
Real is first and foremost about closed proprietary protocols which are a form of DRM. That has been the core of their business from the beginning and still is and there is no reason yet to expect that this will ever change while the company remains in business. That has not changed in any way with Helix.
What really pisses me off about Real is the relationship with NPR. NPR is self-described as "community supported radio" and I was so upset that NPR's directors developed a cozy relationship with Real and adamantly refused for years to use open computer formats or to allow their affiliated to do so. I was so pissed after writing to NPR many years ago on the matter of Ogg or at least MP3 streams and getting these blatantly lying letters about how these alternatives weren't practical for "technical reasons" that I completely stopped listening to NPR for many years. Now that I can get KCRW on Streamcast I'm once again a listener, but this is still a major sore spot for me.
Real Networks is not a hero of Open Source, Real Networks is all about the selling and marketing of intellectual property, even "community based programming", as for profit commodities. The Helix source code does not change that in any way. Have they made contributions to the Open Source code base, yes. Are they valuable members of the FOSS community? Not even close and almost certainly never will or even can be without opening their protocols. The day that happens will be the day they START to begin the journey to being Open Source heroes. So far, they're nothing special.
Well, it's about five days later and I'm just following up on this thread because it's quite possible we may have had a direct influence on the news that came out today.
Apparently Intel has denied the report.
That fits in with what I was saying from the start. It's not about whether it's there or not, the problem is they definitely should not publicly admit it is there. If it is there secretly, then keep it that way. Of course it could eventually come out if it ever comes into play in a court situation which makes it a bit of a catch 22. But anyway, it was interesting to see the story "scuttled" as it was put.
Whenever there's a story about Stallman and you get all these hundreds of vehemnent posts with these absurd degrees of loathing people on Slashdot have towards this guy who is a leading figure in the free software movement and you see so clearly that the people who post on Slashdot, versus the reading audiance at large, are predominantly composed of anti-free software people. There's nothing like a Stallman story to flush them out in droves like great flocks of quail darkening the sky on the approach of a bootstep crunching on the gravel.
Being a great advocate of free software myself the reason I tink this is great is because it shows you just how scared these small-minded, misguided fools are of Open Source. I mean what are these weirdos doing here at Slashdot if they hate Open Source? What compells them to vent their rage so loudly and spend their time in an ostensibly pro-free software forum? The answer is simple and it is impressive --they are scared.
Listen, the bootstep approaches. . . fly away in your great masses. The Stallman approaches, take to your wing. Click the submit button now, quickly. Fly away, fly away.
to see if I could actually find a written policy that talked about the security issue. I didn't find anything you would call a regulation per se.
Of course just because I couldn't find one in a five minute Google session doesn't mean it's not there at all. But although I didn't find anything from Mainland China besides a lot of advisory legislation rather than mandates, I did find a surprisingly large and apparently growing list of other countries which do have mandatory open source policies. Those policies might quite likely specify security issues that could effect sales of these double-secret tap-tap-no-black-magic stick-a-needle-in-your-eye Intel chips.
There's some interesting info in there. Surprsing how many countries are moving on this legislation. South America seems to be quite active in this area as well as parts of Europe.
Well, that's the crux of the issue right there. If they had hidden it and denied it was there, then there wouldn't be an issue. The problem comes when they admit it. At that point, they're violating a stated policy. This is a pretty serious problem for a beauracratic government like that of Mainland China. Even if some folks would like to bend the rules and let is slide, there's going to be other folks seeing that as a chance to advance their careers. The state policy is the state policy. You violate policy and you face the consequences.
My understanding is that Mainland China has surpassed Japan as Intel's second largest global market. That's gotta hurt if you get shut out of your number two market.
Hasn't it been publicly stated numerous times that the whole reason China was pusing for localized Linux was to avoid having hidden backdoors on PCs in China that the government had no control over? If Intel is really installing a sub-system that is specifically designed to re-direct information it seems like a pretty obvious violation of that stated policy. It's hard for Intel to say they didn't know about it when it has been rolled out pretty much every time the topic of Linux and China gets mentioned in the IT press.
And is it just China? Don't a number of other countries have similar policies? This seems like it could have serious implications for Intel's global position. The US market is big, but it's not necessarily where the PC growth is coming from over the next few decades.
Here's a few of the key tidbits from a two page article about Open Source and the Cell.
Regarding portability. . .
The team is actually running Cell at 3.2 GHz. Although the developers talked about the chip's going into handhelds such as next-generation Playstation Portables, that's not currently practical.
"The architecture is too power hungry for a handheld device," said Krewell. "They would have to do a significant re-design to get this into handhelds, and that's where a lot of the interesting business is these days, for things like portable MPEG-4 video players."
As for servers:
The high-end supercomputing option that Cell members have discussed may face hurdles as well. As currently architected, only two Cell processors can be directly attached to each other. A separate switch is needed to link more processors into the kinds of large arrays of CPUs used in supercomputers like IBM's BlueGene/L.
. . .
One thing the architecture clearly lacks is any of the peripherals, such as Gigabit Ethernet media-access controllers and packet-processing blocks, that would be of use in networking scenario.
It seems like Microsoft is feeling a bit chafed about the Longhorn release date and so they're sort of overcompensating in the console market to get something, anything out before Sony. So, I wouldn't expect much from this thing beyond what's already in the X-Box and there's a lot there already so I'm not saying it's a piece of shit. It might not be a lot more than what's already in place.
The interesting one is the PS3 both in terms of the Cell and the BluRay. Now that's some real new toys. Obviously BluRay sounds rad especially since it's meant to be writeable from day one. That's a welcome change in the optical market. But what about the Cell?
Just in the last day or so there was a blurb on the Cell and Open Source over at the EETimes. Of course the announcement about opening the specs is great and welcome and exciting. But at the same time there were some things that didn't sound too hot. Or more accurately, sounded a bit too hot and power hungry.
I was excited about that new AMD Geode running at 500Mhz at one freakin watt. Now that is the kind of thing that I see as exciting. Sure, one of them might be nothing, but at one watt you could have eighty of those things running instead of a single Cell running at 3.2Ghz.
And although they said the Cell could be clocked beyond 3.2Ghz, the EETimes seemed to be suggesting that it couldn't be configured to run that fast and still be air coooled. Whoa, that doesn't sound so good.
I'd say these kinds of issues that we're seeing in the PC market about power consumption at these ultra high clock speeds are going to be the same for games. These seem to be limits to CMOS manufacturing, not some vendo specific limitations.
If that's the case, then the CNNMoney article is probably quite correct that there's going to be some disappointment in the cards. A nice little warm-up for the Longhorn debut.
Yes, but that's my point. You don't know either. Nobody knows. It's not on the lablel. This isn't a food product. They won't tell what it's composed of because it's not a food product and there are no regulations that force them to tell you. You can only guess. And with a brand of Clorox on a floor cleaning product I'm guessing it would have strong chemicals. You think that's a far flung conclusion?
This is the whole "Gillette" business model. You intentionally don't make it easy for people to refill for one tenth the price. That's not how the game is played. And that's all fine and good. What I'm saying is that this policy of not telling people exactly what is going onto their floors can be a major liability because certain types of floors are very sensitive to staining and discoloration from harsh cleansers and that damage could be extremely costly.
Just think, some kid buys one of these for his mom while she's on vacation. Mom happens to have a salmon marble tile floor with white limstone inlays. Whoa, after a week of scrubbing with Clorox special formulated linoleum scrubber you've got yellow streaks in this fifty grand worth of tiles. It happens man. People fuck up nice floors all the time.
Indeed, the US is not where the growth is.
on
Layoffs at OSDL
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· Score: 3, Insightful
You're absolutely right that expanding into Asia and Europe is hardly synonymous with outsourcing. It's more like being realistic about where the growth is in IT. I'm suprised they aren't also setting up in Brazil.
The key markets for information technology in the next few decades are not the US, Western Europe or Japan. The key markets key, as in where the majority of goods will be purchsed and consumed-- are Mainlaind China, India, Eastern Europe and South America.
Where do I get that idea? Easy, hardware manufacturers. People in the wealthy nations often have a hard time imagining how hardware can get any cheaper and still remain profitable and yet it does relentlessly continue to decline in price. The answer to how it remains profitable is simple, volume. And that volume cannot and will not exist in the highly profitable and yet relatively sparsely populated wealthy countries. There simply are not enough consumers.
So, as a manufacturer, you simply enter new markets by lowering your costs until the real masses, the billions, can afford your products. And you can bet that WiMax is going to be one of the enabling technolgies that is going to make this push into the "third world" happen all that much faster.
Which means it makes perfect sense for OSDL to have a real presence in these markets. In fact, you could argue they're moving too slowly.
But none of that has the slightest thing to do with "outsourcing". It's just the reality of where IT is going.
I'm big on floor cleaning because we've got some nice floors where I live including a living room and dining room with marble floors. And being the main caretaker of those floors I know for damn sure you don't use anything like bleach on marble unless you're looking to do permanent and freakin' expensive damage.
The same goes double for decorative concrete which is often even more expensive than marble tiles because of the labor involved in the installation. The same goes for stained and etched polished concrete. Those are all very sensitive to discoloration from the use of any strong acids of bases.
This seems like a major potential liability. I can't see how bleach would be good for nice hardwood floors either. Especially, on a continuous daily basis for years on end.
Tile I can see, but the typical floor I would associate with being particularly bleach compatible is so-called linoleum which is typically composed of polyester resins these days. But even in the case of linoleum I'd definitely insist on a wax finish. Linoleum is actually not a bad flooring option when it is waxed regularly. Unfortunately, there's no way this thing does waxing so I guess it's really only good for tile floors.
So, I think they should market this as a the Tilebot or whatever rather than as a general replacement for a mop because there is no general way to use a mop for all kinds of flooring and there's no way in hell you can generalize that Clorox Bleach is the best cleanser for all types of flooring. That sounds like a dangerously negligent approach to a potentially very costly liability.
They should do it right and not oversell the product. After all, specialized tasks just opens the market all the more. Later they could introduce the Waxbot for wood and linoleum floors and a Bufferbot for polished stone floors. Indeed, the latter already exist and are in use all over the world and have been for years. They just tend to be a bit too big and pricey for the home market.
But I think it's a mistake to market something like this as a general purpose mop machine when different floors require different methods of cleaning. Bleach is great for linoleum, but for stone a very mild soap solution is about as far as you want to go. For wood, I'd also avoid bleach and stay with a mild regular soap.
This seems like a case, where being more open about the details could save them from some costly lawsuits down the road even if it ruins the "Gillette" business model.
I suspect it will work.
And what I did was to turn on my proxy settings in Firefox and then go to an IP check site. My current IP is being reported as other than any in the range of my ISP.
If you think Microsoft, IBM and Apple aren't all riding the government coat-tails to success, you are poorly informed. In fact, all of those companies are heavily subsidized by tax payer money in a number or ways but two are quite obvious.
First, in the form of direct government purchases from federal and state government agencies including shools, K-12 through university --fucking vast sums of money right there because they are sitting ducks for license agreements-- the military, the police departments, national research laboratories, state funded hospitals, border patrol, coast guard, ports of entry, the list is enormous and they pay top dollar and often buy more seats than they actualy need.
Second, business capital depreciation is subsidized by the rest of us paying income tax on our salaries. While we pay our taxes based on income, businesses are able to deduct taxes for capital depreciation and guess what asshole, yeah, tech is one hell of a quickly depreciating asset. So, there ya go funny boy. They sure as hell did ride to success on the coat tails of the taxpayers.
As for Pfizer, jesus don't even get me started on that one. So, the fact that the US government usess the force of law to prevent you from importing drugs from other countries cheaper than the rate at which Pfizer wants to push them is a good indicator of how efficient they are eh?
I only teach part-time, but I definitely make use of class time to push P2P on the students and tell them that it is their responsibility to get out there and share as much as they can. I find the students are eager to discuss the issue.
I see it as a personal obligation to get people to use P2P, especially the ones that are scared of it. Now, I don't publicly encourage them to violate copyright in the sense that I direct them to sites like eTree and Knoppix, but I do use class time to teach them how to set up BitTorrent to work with TOR and discuss the merits of clients like Mute and GNUnet.
To me, this is just following the trend. The RIAA, MPAA and BSA are all into encouraging shools to spend more time on the topic of intellectual property so teachers should feel obliged to take them up on it and use class time to discuss these topics at length.
I think schools should spend a whole day each week doing nothing but discussing P2P and exchanging examples of the right way to share. The more time devoted to the topic, the better.
That BBC link is actually not the same story. I got them both from Googling for "stem cells produce eggs" and I assumed they were both reporting on the same research. But reading through them I realized that the BBC was reporting on research from UPenn while Betterhumans was reporting research from University of Tennessee.
That might explain the difference in tone between the two pieces. The Betterhumans article sounds very promsing while the Beeb's is very toned down and doubtful.
But before you go and say, well duh maybe a website called Betterhumans is obviously going to put a positive spin on things, here's two more links on the Tennessee research that sound similarly enthusiastic.
I don't have the link handy, but I did just read about viable eggs being coaxed from ovary stem cells. I don't recall the exact details, but I do recall being very excited, because, as you mentioned, it's a hassle to collect all those eggs. And with a plentiful supply of human eggs, the possibilties are huge.
So, this egg research specifically suggested that it was a technique expected to reduce the need for eggs from donors.
I don't have the link, but it could be at betterhumans. I'll go take a look.
Anyway, I just want to chime in on this story as a major armchair biotechnician and say that cloning is where all REAL stem cell therapy must start. This allows you to overcome so many obstacles it's not even funny. If the US doesn't allow this kind of therapy all I can say is, all the better for Korea.
here on Slashdot and I'm not going to go back and find the links for you, but the bottom line was that there's no real interest in diamonds for CPUs at this time even though they are already becoming available in a form useable by the semiconductor industry.
The interest in diamonds semiconductors is in high energy applications and specifically power amplifiers. Think along the lines of a low cost 10KW class D home theater amp in a package that is almost all heat sink. There are many other possibilities, but they're in the form of high capacity amplifiers rather than CPUs.
Well, I'm sure you realize a server is just a piece of software. Any PC can be called a server as long as it's running a server. I mean I'm sure you understand that almost all Linux distros come with FTP,HTTP and SSH.
But I assume what you are emphasizing is that people don't have enough upstream bandwidth to run a home server. This, howver, is precisely why I said these revolutionary devices should have bi-directional 1mbps.
This is the crux of the matter than you mention about ISPs, these devices would not just replace cell phones, cameras and MP3 players, they would also be used for fixed broadband access. They'd be so cheap there would be no reason not to.
So, that's the answer to your problem. The old ISP infrastructure won't present a problem becuase it won't be a part of the equation.
WiFly is staring out as a fixed broadband sollution. When the mobile version comes out and has a few years to sink in and saturate the markets, I think this is a realistic scenario and it doesn't involve Apple or Microsoft.
Slashdot Mirror
That is, as opposed to a rhetorical question.
What I mean by framing the question in these terms is that the phrase "information wants to be free" did not originate with the Open Source movement or software at all. This is a very old idea that can be traced back to the origins of western ideas and certainly to the trivium of classical Greek education. The trivium was the set of subjects that were fit for study by the free citizens of Anicent Greece, that is, the free citizens as opposed to the unfree slaves.
The trivium consited of three subjects, Music, Math and Rhetoric. The last item is sometimes translated into the modern vernacular as "persuasive speech", but this is a rather peculiar and problematic definition once one begins to question what exactly is meant by persuasive.
A central question quickly emerges which is why anyone would bother to use language at all. Forming words into meaningful phrases and sentences implies a willful attempt to communicate and since communication requires at a minimum an author, a message and a listener then there is always the minimum level of persuasion in all communication since you must at least persuade someone to receive your message or you have failed to communicate.
In this sense, all intentional communication is persuasive and thus these acts of communication can all be considered to be rhetoric.
And once you understand this simple yet subtle idea --that all intentional communications are inherently persuasive and thus rhetorical-- then you can understand what is meant by the phrase "information wants to be free".
What it really means is that rhetoric is intentional and there's really no question that this is true.
Furthermore, once you undestand the ancient origins of the notion that information does indeed need to be free, that is must be free, it is simple to see there is no way that this fact poses any problem for Open Source or Free Software advocates who value their privacy.
Hey even Kwrite kicks ass.
You want to write up list of long commands for a script and you need a lightweight editor? There's nothing wrong with Kwrite. I mean the fact is, it's bloated as hell compared to zile or nano and definitely a second choice if you have nedit, but if all you have in X is xedit or something nasty like that, and I use a distro like that which happens to be a language localization so it does happen sometimes that the choices get slim once you get beyond mainstream English distros. But when editors are lacking, it's not the end of the world if you need to use Kwrite to do a lot of text replacing and take care of word wraps to keep it clean and do other nice editor fun. I would argue that Kwrite goes far beyond Windows Write or whatever they started calling it these days.
That Kexi does look interesting. And Krita, well jeez most distros I use already have both Gimp 1 and 2 and I tend to think of them as fairly lightweight distros. So, in a way Krita looks a bit like bloat, but I bet it's a tiny addition so more the merrier. Besides, Knoppix is going to go full time with a DVD version now so what's a few extra Ks. I just want to see stuff that starts fast and is stable. If there's redundancy, well that's not a problem as long as it's not ads or sneaky who knows what crap code. And you know it aint that. So, why not.
No.
Not only would iTunes make less money if the had more DRM, but Microsoft is also clearly committed to dragging their feet on DRM as well because they know it's bad for business and they always have known that which is why things are the way they are and this is why Apple is said to "get it".
But it's not just Apple and Microsoft either. Everybody knows DRM is lousy for business, even justices of the Supreme Court.
Court procedings are public documents with a GPL-alike character in that they are publicly owned.
So perhaps it's no surprise that even members of the court might "get it". I forget who it was but one of the justices going into Grokster gave quite a bit of opinion on what a good idea he thought the iPod was and that such devices need to be protected against litigation. That was after pointing out that the real reason to use an iPod was not because of the iTunes store, but because of the fact that people could fill it up with free data off the Net and plenty of it. And by free, he acknowledged both Net Radio and P2P as sources of getting free data to listen to on the iPod and that this was the key benefit of the iPod. Pretty straightforward.
That was a justice of the Supreme Court. So, a lot of people "get it".
The issue they're looking at in this session is P2P obviously and I guess we'll be hearing about that any minute. But without P2P there's still NetRadio. It's all there. In fact, the variety is stunning and that's not going away fast even in the US. And even if it did, it will never disappear internationally because laws about the use of airwaves vary dramatically across nations and the legitimate tie-in with existing radio laws makes it simply a fact that has to be accepted until those laws change and that's just not going to happen, even in the US. Given that there wasn't even such a thing as web radio just a few years ago, the odds of this happening internationally in a timely manner are negigible.
So, as long as there's net radio broadcasters and people have the legal right to make back-ups of radio station broadcasts then it is legitimate to have an enormous music collection. That will fill up an iPod or even a fatboy iPod with one of these 160Gig 2.5''notebook drives for the car. And with wireless so you can just pull in and download music from inside the house.
Hell, Apple had better move on a few new products in the near-term because if they don't the cell phones are gonna beat them to it with nothing but RAM. Shoot, and why not. You won't need WiFi with a phone that does WIFly mobile. Just stream from home and up or download whatever plalist you like wherever you are anytime. At that point you can just stream it off your desktop or home file server. If you get out of range for awhile you can buffer four gigs or so onto the local cache till you get back. I mean hell just look at the idea of a file server at home. There was no consumer product categoy for file servers a few years ago, but now there you see such things being sold in retail stores along with the related category of very cheap NAT routers. Those things tend to be especially fond of notebook drives and no wonder. They're often plug-and-play. Running them together with a little SOC package makes a cute little value added toy but they're as big as a terrabyte. And look at the prevalence of GigE in the consumer market. If GigE isn't going to be helpful to someone with a major media archive, I don't know what is. Ineed, what else are you using that kind of bandwidth for in the home environment? Writing e-mails?
So the answer is definitively no. Apple would not make more money with better DRM and neither would Sony or Samsung or Toshiba or Matsushita or Benq or Tatung or Hong Hai or Flextronic. Note that Flextronics is among the sponsors of OpenCores.org and has written up some interesting SOC work that they've done using OpenCores designs. None of those companies can benefit form greater DRM and they are all aware of it at many levels. That doesn't mean the
And the reason is Knoppix.
Knoppix is the biggest threat to all other OSes in existence and its affect has hardly begun to be felt for simple reasons.
As always, you've got to look at the hardware to see where the software is going. In this case, we're at a point where the future is easy to see.
Look no further than the RAM market. Go ahead and take a look at PriceWatch or TigerDirect or NewEgg of whatever hardware price guide you like. You'll notice that 1Gig RAM modules are becoming entry level commodity items.
CPU tech has hit the wall and both Mac and Microsoft are CPU junkies. RAM, on the other hand, is right on course for several more generations of lithography because it doesn't need to be faster which is now synonymous with hotter and more power hungry. With RAM, bigger is just as good as faster. And there is no doubt it's still getting bigger in both the NAND and NOR varieties.
Two Gigs of RAM will soon be common on even low-end budget machines. We might not see a CPU that can do what Longhorn was originally proposed to do in terms of speech recognition and all this for a long time but we'll certainly see machines with plenty of RAM in the very near future. The near future is the only one that counts in the corporate world.
And the one platform that benefits the most from all this RAM is Knoppix because it's already convenient to load the whole distro into RAM. One Gig is really a starting point. Once two Gigs gets common it will start to catch on big time.
While it may be possible to run OSX and XP in Ramdisk, they're just not built for it the way Knoppix is.
They're betting on open source like a whole lot of other companies which is great. But I would strongly argue that it is unjustified and even far-fetched to call Real Networks the heroes of the Open Source community. And it would be completely false to say that they're even friends with the free software movement.
Real is first and foremost about closed proprietary protocols which are a form of DRM. That has been the core of their business from the beginning and still is and there is no reason yet to expect that this will ever change while the company remains in business. That has not changed in any way with Helix.
What really pisses me off about Real is the relationship with NPR. NPR is self-described as "community supported radio" and I was so upset that NPR's directors developed a cozy relationship with Real and adamantly refused for years to use open computer formats or to allow their affiliated to do so. I was so pissed after writing to NPR many years ago on the matter of Ogg or at least MP3 streams and getting these blatantly lying letters about how these alternatives weren't practical for "technical reasons" that I completely stopped listening to NPR for many years. Now that I can get KCRW on Streamcast I'm once again a listener, but this is still a major sore spot for me.
Real Networks is not a hero of Open Source, Real Networks is all about the selling and marketing of intellectual property, even "community based programming", as for profit commodities. The Helix source code does not change that in any way. Have they made contributions to the Open Source code base, yes. Are they valuable members of the FOSS community? Not even close and almost certainly never will or even can be without opening their protocols. The day that happens will be the day they START to begin the journey to being Open Source heroes. So far, they're nothing special.
Well, it's about five days later and I'm just following up on this thread because it's quite possible we may have had a direct influence on the news that came out today.
Apparently Intel has denied the report.
That fits in with what I was saying from the start. It's not about whether it's there or not, the problem is they definitely should not publicly admit it is there. If it is there secretly, then keep it that way. Of course it could eventually come out if it ever comes into play in a court situation which makes it a bit of a catch 22. But anyway, it was interesting to see the story "scuttled" as it was put.
Whenever there's a story about Stallman and you get all these hundreds of vehemnent posts with these absurd degrees of loathing people on Slashdot have towards this guy who is a leading figure in the free software movement and you see so clearly that the people who post on Slashdot, versus the reading audiance at large, are predominantly composed of anti-free software people. There's nothing like a Stallman story to flush them out in droves like great flocks of quail darkening the sky on the approach of a bootstep crunching on the gravel.
Being a great advocate of free software myself the reason I tink this is great is because it shows you just how scared these small-minded, misguided fools are of Open Source. I mean what are these weirdos doing here at Slashdot if they hate Open Source? What compells them to vent their rage so loudly and spend their time in an ostensibly pro-free software forum? The answer is simple and it is impressive --they are scared.
Listen, the bootstep approaches. . . fly away in your great masses. The Stallman approaches, take to your wing. Click the submit button now, quickly. Fly away, fly away.
Of course just because I couldn't find one in a five minute Google session doesn't mean it's not there at all. But although I didn't find anything from Mainland China besides a lot of advisory legislation rather than mandates, I did find a surprisingly large and apparently growing list of other countries which do have mandatory open source policies. Those policies might quite likely specify security issues that could effect sales of these double-secret tap-tap-no-black-magic stick-a-needle-in-your-eye Intel chips.
If you want to check it out, here's the URL for the Google cached HTML version of a PDF on the topic.
There's some interesting info in there. Surprsing how many countries are moving on this legislation. South America seems to be quite active in this area as well as parts of Europe.
Well, that's the crux of the issue right there. If they had hidden it and denied it was there, then there wouldn't be an issue. The problem comes when they admit it. At that point, they're violating a stated policy. This is a pretty serious problem for a beauracratic government like that of Mainland China. Even if some folks would like to bend the rules and let is slide, there's going to be other folks seeing that as a chance to advance their careers. The state policy is the state policy. You violate policy and you face the consequences.
My understanding is that Mainland China has surpassed Japan as Intel's second largest global market. That's gotta hurt if you get shut out of your number two market.
Hasn't it been publicly stated numerous times that the whole reason China was pusing for localized Linux was to avoid having hidden backdoors on PCs in China that the government had no control over? If Intel is really installing a sub-system that is specifically designed to re-direct information it seems like a pretty obvious violation of that stated policy. It's hard for Intel to say they didn't know about it when it has been rolled out pretty much every time the topic of Linux and China gets mentioned in the IT press.
And is it just China? Don't a number of other countries have similar policies? This seems like it could have serious implications for Intel's global position. The US market is big, but it's not necessarily where the PC growth is coming from over the next few decades.
Regarding portability. . .
As for servers:
Here's the article.It seems like Microsoft is feeling a bit chafed about the Longhorn release date and so they're sort of overcompensating in the console market to get something, anything out before Sony. So, I wouldn't expect much from this thing beyond what's already in the X-Box and there's a lot there already so I'm not saying it's a piece of shit. It might not be a lot more than what's already in place.
The interesting one is the PS3 both in terms of the Cell and the BluRay. Now that's some real new toys. Obviously BluRay sounds rad especially since it's meant to be writeable from day one. That's a welcome change in the optical market. But what about the Cell?
Just in the last day or so there was a blurb on the Cell and Open Source over at the EETimes. Of course the announcement about opening the specs is great and welcome and exciting. But at the same time there were some things that didn't sound too hot. Or more accurately, sounded a bit too hot and power hungry.
I was excited about that new AMD Geode running at 500Mhz at one freakin watt. Now that is the kind of thing that I see as exciting. Sure, one of them might be nothing, but at one watt you could have eighty of those things running instead of a single Cell running at 3.2Ghz.
And although they said the Cell could be clocked beyond 3.2Ghz, the EETimes seemed to be suggesting that it couldn't be configured to run that fast and still be air coooled. Whoa, that doesn't sound so good.
I'd say these kinds of issues that we're seeing in the PC market about power consumption at these ultra high clock speeds are going to be the same for games. These seem to be limits to CMOS manufacturing, not some vendo specific limitations.
If that's the case, then the CNNMoney article is probably quite correct that there's going to be some disappointment in the cards. A nice little warm-up for the Longhorn debut.
I think you're just jealous because I've got a marble floor.
I was waiting for someobdy to respond just so I could say that.
Yes, but that's my point. You don't know either. Nobody knows. It's not on the lablel. This isn't a food product. They won't tell what it's composed of because it's not a food product and there are no regulations that force them to tell you. You can only guess. And with a brand of Clorox on a floor cleaning product I'm guessing it would have strong chemicals. You think that's a far flung conclusion?
This is the whole "Gillette" business model. You intentionally don't make it easy for people to refill for one tenth the price. That's not how the game is played. And that's all fine and good. What I'm saying is that this policy of not telling people exactly what is going onto their floors can be a major liability because certain types of floors are very sensitive to staining and discoloration from harsh cleansers and that damage could be extremely costly.
Just think, some kid buys one of these for his mom while she's on vacation. Mom happens to have a salmon marble tile floor with white limstone inlays. Whoa, after a week of scrubbing with Clorox special formulated linoleum scrubber you've got yellow streaks in this fifty grand worth of tiles. It happens man. People fuck up nice floors all the time.
You're absolutely right that expanding into Asia and Europe is hardly synonymous with outsourcing. It's more like being realistic about where the growth is in IT. I'm suprised they aren't also setting up in Brazil.
The key markets for information technology in the next few decades are not the US, Western Europe or Japan. The key markets key, as in where the majority of goods will be purchsed and consumed-- are Mainlaind China, India, Eastern Europe and South America.
Where do I get that idea? Easy, hardware manufacturers. People in the wealthy nations often have a hard time imagining how hardware can get any cheaper and still remain profitable and yet it does relentlessly continue to decline in price. The answer to how it remains profitable is simple, volume. And that volume cannot and will not exist in the highly profitable and yet relatively sparsely populated wealthy countries. There simply are not enough consumers.
So, as a manufacturer, you simply enter new markets by lowering your costs until the real masses, the billions, can afford your products. And you can bet that WiMax is going to be one of the enabling technolgies that is going to make this push into the "third world" happen all that much faster.
Which means it makes perfect sense for OSDL to have a real presence in these markets. In fact, you could argue they're moving too slowly.
But none of that has the slightest thing to do with "outsourcing". It's just the reality of where IT is going.
I'm big on floor cleaning because we've got some nice floors where I live including a living room and dining room with marble floors. And being the main caretaker of those floors I know for damn sure you don't use anything like bleach on marble unless you're looking to do permanent and freakin' expensive damage.
The same goes double for decorative concrete which is often even more expensive than marble tiles because of the labor involved in the installation. The same goes for stained and etched polished concrete. Those are all very sensitive to discoloration from the use of any strong acids of bases.
This seems like a major potential liability. I can't see how bleach would be good for nice hardwood floors either. Especially, on a continuous daily basis for years on end.
Tile I can see, but the typical floor I would associate with being particularly bleach compatible is so-called linoleum which is typically composed of polyester resins these days. But even in the case of linoleum I'd definitely insist on a wax finish. Linoleum is actually not a bad flooring option when it is waxed regularly. Unfortunately, there's no way this thing does waxing so I guess it's really only good for tile floors.
So, I think they should market this as a the Tilebot or whatever rather than as a general replacement for a mop because there is no general way to use a mop for all kinds of flooring and there's no way in hell you can generalize that Clorox Bleach is the best cleanser for all types of flooring. That sounds like a dangerously negligent approach to a potentially very costly liability.
They should do it right and not oversell the product. After all, specialized tasks just opens the market all the more. Later they could introduce the Waxbot for wood and linoleum floors and a Bufferbot for polished stone floors. Indeed, the latter already exist and are in use all over the world and have been for years. They just tend to be a bit too big and pricey for the home market.
But I think it's a mistake to market something like this as a general purpose mop machine when different floors require different methods of cleaning. Bleach is great for linoleum, but for stone a very mild soap solution is about as far as you want to go. For wood, I'd also avoid bleach and stay with a mild regular soap.
This seems like a case, where being more open about the details could save them from some costly lawsuits down the road even if it ruins the "Gillette" business model.
I suspect it will work.
And what I did was to turn on my proxy settings in Firefox and then go to an IP check site. My current IP is being reported as other than any in the range of my ISP.
Here, I'll try and do it again right now.
If you think Microsoft, IBM and Apple aren't all riding the government coat-tails to success, you are poorly informed. In fact, all of those companies are heavily subsidized by tax payer money in a number or ways but two are quite obvious.
First, in the form of direct government purchases from federal and state government agencies including shools, K-12 through university --fucking vast sums of money right there because they are sitting ducks for license agreements-- the military, the police departments, national research laboratories, state funded hospitals, border patrol, coast guard, ports of entry, the list is enormous and they pay top dollar and often buy more seats than they actualy need.
Second, business capital depreciation is subsidized by the rest of us paying income tax on our salaries. While we pay our taxes based on income, businesses are able to deduct taxes for capital depreciation and guess what asshole, yeah, tech is one hell of a quickly depreciating asset. So, there ya go funny boy. They sure as hell did ride to success on the coat tails of the taxpayers.
As for Pfizer, jesus don't even get me started on that one. So, the fact that the US government usess the force of law to prevent you from importing drugs from other countries cheaper than the rate at which Pfizer wants to push them is a good indicator of how efficient they are eh?
I only teach part-time, but I definitely make use of class time to push P2P on the students and tell them that it is their responsibility to get out there and share as much as they can. I find the students are eager to discuss the issue.
I see it as a personal obligation to get people to use P2P, especially the ones that are scared of it. Now, I don't publicly encourage them to violate copyright in the sense that I direct them to sites like eTree and Knoppix, but I do use class time to teach them how to set up BitTorrent to work with TOR and discuss the merits of clients like Mute and GNUnet.
To me, this is just following the trend. The RIAA, MPAA and BSA are all into encouraging shools to spend more time on the topic of intellectual property so teachers should feel obliged to take them up on it and use class time to discuss these topics at length.
I think schools should spend a whole day each week doing nothing but discussing P2P and exchanging examples of the right way to share. The more time devoted to the topic, the better.
That might explain the difference in tone between the two pieces. The Betterhumans article sounds very promsing while the Beeb's is very toned down and doubtful.
But before you go and say, well duh maybe a website called Betterhumans is obviously going to put a positive spin on things, here's two more links on the Tennessee research that sound similarly enthusiastic.
One from Wired
And one from Medical News Today
Google cached version
Here's the BBC with their coverage of the same story.
I don't have the link handy, but I did just read about viable eggs being coaxed from ovary stem cells. I don't recall the exact details, but I do recall being very excited, because, as you mentioned, it's a hassle to collect all those eggs. And with a plentiful supply of human eggs, the possibilties are huge.
So, this egg research specifically suggested that it was a technique expected to reduce the need for eggs from donors.
I don't have the link, but it could be at betterhumans. I'll go take a look.
Anyway, I just want to chime in on this story as a major armchair biotechnician and say that cloning is where all REAL stem cell therapy must start. This allows you to overcome so many obstacles it's not even funny. If the US doesn't allow this kind of therapy all I can say is, all the better for Korea.
here on Slashdot and I'm not going to go back and find the links for you, but the bottom line was that there's no real interest in diamonds for CPUs at this time even though they are already becoming available in a form useable by the semiconductor industry.
The interest in diamonds semiconductors is in high energy applications and specifically power amplifiers. Think along the lines of a low cost 10KW class D home theater amp in a package that is almost all heat sink. There are many other possibilities, but they're in the form of high capacity amplifiers rather than CPUs.
Well, I'm sure you realize a server is just a piece of software. Any PC can be called a server as long as it's running a server. I mean I'm sure you understand that almost all Linux distros come with FTP,HTTP and SSH.
But I assume what you are emphasizing is that people don't have enough upstream bandwidth to run a home server. This, howver, is precisely why I said these revolutionary devices should have bi-directional 1mbps.
This is the crux of the matter than you mention about ISPs, these devices would not just replace cell phones, cameras and MP3 players, they would also be used for fixed broadband access. They'd be so cheap there would be no reason not to.
So, that's the answer to your problem. The old ISP infrastructure won't present a problem becuase it won't be a part of the equation.
WiFly is staring out as a fixed broadband sollution. When the mobile version comes out and has a few years to sink in and saturate the markets, I think this is a realistic scenario and it doesn't involve Apple or Microsoft.