Ah yes, the "Tax everybody for the crimes of the minority" scheme. you just have to love the busted logic. Where's the love, indeed? Joe over there was speeding so you get a ticket too! I see...
You didn't ever have Physical Education in an American public school, did you? Standard practice, there. If the gym teacher wasn't sure who did whatever it was that annoyed him, the whole class did pushups until most of us collapsed.
Come to think of it, it wasn't just PE. There were those times in elementary school where the whole class had to stay after if the teacher didn't know whodunnit...
One of the first products I can see coming out of this event is little EMP generators that allow you to detect, then blow the living daylight out of the RF circuitry in these things. Remember... any good transmitter is a good receiver, too... find the resonant frequency of this receiver, and you can pump enough energy into it to melt the traces.
Mmmm. But will it be legal? Or could you be found guilty of circumventing (or distributing equipment to circumvent) a certified consumer protection device?
(I'd invoke the DMCA here, but I can't imagine how in the world even it could be used).
Your point is well-taken -- it'd be nice to get product information based on easily machine-readable information. Something like the cue cat could have done this. The question isn't whether or not having quick access to information about a product is useful. The question is: will this be used to track the consumer/vehicle user, or the tire?
My bet is: more likely the former more than the later. At best: both.
Since when is OS X open source? I must have missed the point where they released the other 90% of the code.
(1) As you probably already know, Darwin -- arguably more than 10% of OS X -- is open source, so while the windowing and some of the other components that you call OS X aren't open, the foundation is.
(2) OS X plays well with open source. Very well. As well as any *nix I've ever used (several Linux distros, FreeBSD, BSDI, Solaris, and, not suprisingly NeXTStep).
In short, you're marginally if strictly correct: OS X is not completely open, especially from a political/ideological standpoint. From a practical standpoint, however, its usefulness as a platform is competetive in nearly every way with other comparible operating system that is. Portability of the non-open bits is the only exception I can think of.
Offtopic? Offtopic?. Granted, my post was silly and maybe a bit stupid, but certainly not offtopic. Read the @!$# article.
new versions of Tales Of Middle-Earth are available. It is an open source, one player and online multiplayer game. It is ported to many OS's. Yeah, no terrific graphics, but the game is really worthwhile. It is based on the famous roguelike Angband (variants here). Faithful to Tolkien's writings."
I'm beginning to see that I should subscribe to a filtering service that blocks anything related to "roguelike" and "nethack". My employment search will almost certainly be mortally wounded.
If someone invents a time machine, could you please go back and somehow prevent the invention of Rogue?
there's no getting around the fact that this is hyperbolic bullshit.
Very true. Well... most of it is, anyway. I think there's a few points where he does hit the truth, and that's the sad part. Since he's talking like a right wing talk radio pinhead, the only people who are really going to listen are the folks who would have said exactly the same thing anyway, given the chance.
It is pretty hard fact that cigarettes and booze are evil as far as health is concerned. However, porn is evil only as much as ideology / morality flags it as evil.
First off, most of the posts here on Slashdot seem to be missing the point. It doesn't matter whether any of the above are evil under your idealogy. What does matter about Google is that despite the extra revenue it might provide, they've chosen to incorporate their moral beliefs into a business they've created. They have some beliefs that are higher than the mighty dollar. The submittor almost seems to question this, and insinuates a public businesses doesn't have this luxury, and the sum of its morality is return to shareholders. Frankly, that meme more evil than porn, alcohol, and cigarrettes combined. Once your values are completely based on financial return, the commission of some kind of crime (legal and/or moral) is pretty much inevitable, because there's just so many good ways to make money by screwing others over.
I personally think that porn can distort reality and hurt people and it's a substitute for things that could legitimately fill human needs/desires. I side with Bill Cosby's statement that it's more than a little word -- when you feel hungry, do you go and look at pictures of steak? Videos of people eating pizza? Carefully teasing you with glimpses of halibut, people making satisfied noises while in the throes of a sublime burritto? But my judgement of porn or substance abuse is not really the point of this whole discussion. If you built a business, and believed that porn was an evil, I'd hope that you'd incorporate that belief into the operation of the organization you create -- same goes with guns, marijuana, tobacco, bibles, scientology, Nietsche, Quake, Nethack, whatever. The guys running google have moral beliefs, and they're willing to stand for them despite financial incentives to the contrary. How can that be anything but good?
The curious thing is that they could have come up with a completely legit figure: the production capacity of the operation in terms of some number of copies per unit of time (say, discs per day) based on the speeds of the burners and perhaps loading/latency issues.
Why would they issue some half-assed stat like the one given when they could have done this?
Two answers:
1) They're not competent enough to do that 2) They are, but have a motive that precludes them from presenting a clear picture.
It's alot like the Iraq isssue. I've read convincing arguments for an Iraqi invasion from German Marxists... and the stuff our right-wing hawkish administration presents "has a certain syrup, but just doesn't pour." (Gertrude Stein phrase, I believe). Why is it so hard to make a convincing case when there's a convincing case to be made? I think it's the wrong motives. They keep even otherwise adequately intelligent people from seeing the obvious.
The most a high-level language can do is to furnish all the constructs that the programmer imagines in the abstract program.
A-men. But if it does that well, then it makes the job a lot easier. That's why going from C to Java or Perl was sheer relief. Actual strings? Real associative arrays? Whoohoo! And less memory management grief. Not to mention the component libraries available for things I hadn't even thought of yet. CPAN...
To be sure, the level of our thinking about data structures, data types, and operations is steadily rising, but at an ever decreasing rate. And language development approaches closer and closer to the sophistication of users.
True... but the user sophistication is increasing to. It seems highly apparent to me that with more experience and more shoulders to stand on, language and component developers are able to concieve of more and more useful abstractions. And because of the internet, they're more easily available for sharing, commentary, and change.
To sum up, I am much, much happier with the readily available toolsets I have access to now than the ones I had 15 years ago, or even eight years ago. They make developing much easier and much more fun.
Another problem is that the tech industry is in something of a slump right now. It may well be that the vanguard of EFF supporters are suddenly worrying whether or not they're going to have enough money to make it through the month, let alone support worthy non-profit organizations.
If I were even pulling down $1300 per month, I'd be able to donate something. Until then....
I think your big questions are excellent ones, but I also think that most everyone here has missed something. The sidebar probably isn't just window dressing.
It looks as if what Microsoft has done is taken Netscape's concept of a browser as a platform for computing and aggresively adopted it... except rather than keep the concept of browser-as-application and OS-as-platform, they've decided to turn the OS into the browser/OS-as-platform and make the user experience browser-like and browser-centric. Where was the first place you saw a sidebar in a windows app? IE. What has Microsoft been aggresively integrating into their OS since Win 98? What was Microsoft on trial for?
My guess (for some reason) is that it's part of a larger strategy to own the browsing/internet use experience... not just in the way that they very nearly do with the dominance of IE. That's something that someone will always be able to duplicate and threaten them with, especially if they build off open standards. This is the extend part of embrace and extend. This is the platform for the MS proprietary browsing experiences that are coming down the line. It will be a line easy to cross on Windows systems, harder on others.
It's valuable to have your input here, and your point is well-taken (at least, I think I've taken it well). I'll go read the book.
However, I think the tough job that intelligence has doesn't diminish some of the objections here. How is this database really going to help? I'm not talking about the criminal/INS/FBI databases... I'm talking about travel records, commercial stuff, etc. This smacks of more technology worship which could displace genuine efforts at human intelligence. Second, how are we going to insure this isn't abused? Having Poindexter dismiss oversight as beaurocratic stovepiping doesn't inspire any confidence. Power corrupts. The only check for that is oversight and tranparency. Without that, we stand as much a risk of becoming the "bad guys" as the bad guys.
The local city government can eminent domain away property rights of a street full of homeowners to accomodate the construction of a freakin' Costco. The United States government can install puppet juntas in Latin America to prevent the spread of communism.
Taiwan getting a looky at the the Windows source code to protect their national security from a large, powerful, local, and real communist threat seems pretty tame.
Dragon, nothin'. I want the "dragonFLY" from Danny Dunn, invisible boy. Even without the haptic feedback, I'd be happy. At this point, remote audio surveillance seems like the best strategy for relationships in my life...
I had a weird thought the other day. What if you were a higher-dimensional being, and lived outside the timeline of the universe and could see its development? If you could touch/shape it in the right way, wouldn't influencing events be sort of like pruning a tree?
Crazy stuff, I know, half-lucid, not talkin' sense, but it's a wisp of an idea...
There are 250 Million blank CDRs and tapes bought and used this year for copying music in comparison to 213 Million prerecorded audio media. This means the owners are only being paid for 46 per cent of the musical content. For a comparison: In 1998 almost 90% of all audio media was paid for.
Aside from the fact that most of the CD-Rs I buy go to record data (and the few discs I copy outright are out of print)... there's that little matter of the media taxes levied on tapes and other blank media. Hey BMG, whether we like it or not, we are paying for your damn music. Maybe we should call your bluff: the widespread implementation of copy protection should mean the end of blank media taxes period.
Even without a degree in economics everyone should realise that such trends will result in the music industry ceasing to exist.
You mean, the music industry as it exists today would cease to exist? What a tragedy.
The best part about this whole thing may well be the fact that the used (T)iBooks will drop in price. The original Powerbook G4's are now hovering a bit above $1000 on eBay. They'll drop further. By the time I'm ready to buy another laptop in 6 months, I'll bet I can pick one up for $700 if I work hard.
Oh, speed? I'm typing this from a G3/333 Mhz Powerbook. Audio and image processing, compiling Apache, PHP, Nethack, whatever... all acceptably fast. No OS I've ever used speeds up like OS X when you give it RAM (except NeXT/Openstep, of course).
Where are the Dell or Toshiba laptops that have anything remarkable about them? TiBooks -- and even iBooks -- have a cool factor that Dell nor Toshiba has ever come close to matching. Sony sometimes does... and you'll note that Vaio laptops sometimes do make slashdot.
Dell and Toshiba build beige boxes. Staid, boring, nothing interesting. Sony and Apple -- whatever else you have to say about them -- are consumer electronics companies with a sense of style. They build great computers to.
Why in the world does the depth of a game have anything to do with the visual tokens that represent its elements? Chess is exactly the same when it's represented by little plastic pieces or carved crystal. Or ASCII characters on a board.
I downloaded nethack for Mac OS X today.... when I started it up it had a graphical interface, pictoral representations. I played one game, then deleted it. I'm downloading the source as we speak. The terminal-based play is easier for me to follow. The graphical version was ugly, which was part of my motivation, but the bottom line is that I don't need that much overhead... the game is as playable in 25x80 ascii as it is in 1024x768 pixels. It's about what goes on inside your head as much as on screen.
If we were talking about phone companies or power companies, I'd agree with you. In MS's case, I would disagree. MS's scenario is unique because it provides a standard (de facto that is) for developers to make their apps run.
This "favor" to the computing world seems to be of a dubious nature. Other than MS's market share, there's nothing special about their set of APIs. It's not hard to argue that there are better ones out there (Cocoa/YellowBox, for example). Additionally, their API (like most) is a moving target... it's not as if any developer can sit back and not have to learn anything new. Learning to use new APIs, finally, is generally not that hard if they're relatively well-thought out, and there's significant economic advantage at developing even for platforms with a very minor market share -- as most major application vendors have demonstrated (Adobe, Macromedia, Microsoft) and even some minor/niche application vendors (Mark of the Unicorn, Digidesgn, etc).
Slashdot Mirror
Ah yes, the "Tax everybody for the crimes of the minority" scheme. you just have to love the busted logic. Where's the love, indeed? Joe over there was speeding so you get a ticket too! I see...
You didn't ever have Physical Education in an American public school, did you? Standard practice, there. If the gym teacher wasn't sure who did whatever it was that annoyed him, the whole class did pushups until most of us collapsed.
Come to think of it, it wasn't just PE. There were those times in elementary school where the whole class had to stay after if the teacher didn't know whodunnit...
One of the first products I can see coming out of this event is little EMP generators that allow you to detect, then blow the living daylight out of the RF circuitry in these things. Remember... any good transmitter is a good receiver, too... find the resonant frequency of this receiver, and you can pump enough energy into it to melt the traces.
Mmmm. But will it be legal? Or could you be found guilty of circumventing (or distributing equipment to circumvent) a certified consumer protection device?
(I'd invoke the DMCA here, but I can't imagine how in the world even it could be used).
Your point is well-taken -- it'd be nice to get product information based on easily machine-readable information. Something like the cue cat could have done this. The question isn't whether or not having quick access to information about a product is useful. The question is: will this be used to track the consumer/vehicle user, or the tire?
My bet is: more likely the former more than the later. At best: both.
Since when is OS X open source? I must have missed the point where they released the other 90% of the code.
(1) As you probably already know, Darwin -- arguably more than 10% of OS X -- is open source, so while the windowing and some of the other components that you call OS X aren't open, the foundation is.
(2) OS X plays well with open source. Very well. As well as any *nix I've ever used (several Linux distros, FreeBSD, BSDI, Solaris, and, not suprisingly NeXTStep).
In short, you're marginally if strictly correct: OS X is not completely open, especially from a political/ideological standpoint. From a practical standpoint, however, its usefulness as a platform is competetive in nearly every way with other comparible operating system that is. Portability of the non-open bits is the only exception I can think of.
Comments about roguelikes are not out of line.
I'm beginning to see that I should subscribe to a filtering service that blocks anything related to "roguelike" and "nethack". My employment search will almost certainly be mortally wounded.
If someone invents a time machine, could you please go back and somehow prevent the invention of Rogue?
there's no getting around the fact that this is hyperbolic bullshit.
Very true. Well... most of it is, anyway. I think there's a few points where he does hit the truth, and that's the sad part. Since he's talking like a right wing talk radio pinhead, the only people who are really going to listen are the folks who would have said exactly the same thing anyway, given the chance.
It is pretty hard fact that cigarettes and booze are evil as far as health is concerned. However, porn is evil only as much as ideology / morality flags it as evil.
First off, most of the posts here on Slashdot seem to be missing the point. It doesn't matter whether any of the above are evil under your idealogy. What does matter about Google is that despite the extra revenue it might provide, they've chosen to incorporate their moral beliefs into a business they've created. They have some beliefs that are higher than the mighty dollar. The submittor almost seems to question this, and insinuates a public businesses doesn't have this luxury, and the sum of its morality is return to shareholders. Frankly, that meme more evil than porn, alcohol, and cigarrettes combined. Once your values are completely based on financial return, the commission of some kind of crime (legal and/or moral) is pretty much inevitable, because there's just so many good ways to make money by screwing others over.
I personally think that porn can distort reality and hurt people and it's a substitute for things that could legitimately fill human needs/desires. I side with Bill Cosby's statement that it's more than a little word -- when you feel hungry, do you go and look at pictures of steak? Videos of people eating pizza? Carefully teasing you with glimpses of halibut, people making satisfied noises while in the throes of a sublime burritto? But my judgement of porn or substance abuse is not really the point of this whole discussion. If you built a business, and believed that porn was an evil, I'd hope that you'd incorporate that belief into the operation of the organization you create -- same goes with guns, marijuana, tobacco, bibles, scientology, Nietsche, Quake, Nethack, whatever. The guys running google have moral beliefs, and they're willing to stand for them despite financial incentives to the contrary. How can that be anything but good?
The curious thing is that they could have come up with a completely legit figure: the production capacity of the operation in terms of some number of copies per unit of time (say, discs per day) based on the speeds of the burners and perhaps loading/latency issues.
Why would they issue some half-assed stat like the one given when they could have done this?
Two answers:
1) They're not competent enough to do that
2) They are, but have a motive that precludes them from presenting a clear picture.
It's alot like the Iraq isssue. I've read convincing arguments for an Iraqi invasion from German Marxists... and the stuff our right-wing hawkish administration presents "has a certain syrup, but just doesn't pour." (Gertrude Stein phrase, I believe). Why is it so hard to make a convincing case when there's a convincing case to be made? I think it's the wrong motives. They keep even otherwise adequately intelligent people from seeing the obvious.
From the article:
The most a high-level language can do is to furnish all the constructs that the programmer imagines in the abstract program.
A-men. But if it does that well, then it makes the job a lot easier. That's why going from C to Java or Perl was sheer relief. Actual strings? Real associative arrays? Whoohoo! And less memory management grief. Not to mention the component libraries available for things I hadn't even thought of yet. CPAN...
To be sure, the level of our thinking about data structures, data types, and operations is steadily rising, but at an ever decreasing rate. And language development approaches closer and closer to the sophistication of users.
True... but the user sophistication is increasing to. It seems highly apparent to me that with more experience and more shoulders to stand on, language and component developers are able to concieve of more and more useful abstractions. And because of the internet, they're more easily available for sharing, commentary, and change.
To sum up, I am much, much happier with the readily available toolsets I have access to now than the ones I had 15 years ago, or even eight years ago. They make developing much easier and much more fun.
Another problem is that the tech industry is in something of a slump right now. It may well be that the vanguard of EFF supporters are suddenly worrying whether or not they're going to have enough money to make it through the month, let alone support worthy non-profit organizations.
If I were even pulling down $1300 per month, I'd be able to donate something. Until then....
I think your big questions are excellent ones, but I also think that most everyone here has missed something. The sidebar probably isn't just window dressing.
It looks as if what Microsoft has done is taken Netscape's concept of a browser as a platform for computing and aggresively adopted it... except rather than keep the concept of browser-as-application and OS-as-platform, they've decided to turn the OS into the browser/OS-as-platform and make the user experience browser-like and browser-centric. Where was the first place you saw a sidebar in a windows app? IE. What has Microsoft been aggresively integrating into their OS since Win 98? What was Microsoft on trial for?
My guess (for some reason) is that it's part of a larger strategy to own the browsing/internet use experience... not just in the way that they very nearly do with the dominance of IE. That's something that someone will always be able to duplicate and threaten them with, especially if they build off open standards. This is the extend part of embrace and extend. This is the platform for the MS proprietary browsing experiences that are coming down the line. It will be a line easy to cross on Windows systems, harder on others.
It's valuable to have your input here, and your point is well-taken (at least, I think I've taken it well). I'll go read the book. However, I think the tough job that intelligence has doesn't diminish some of the objections here. How is this database really going to help? I'm not talking about the criminal/INS/FBI databases... I'm talking about travel records, commercial stuff, etc. This smacks of more technology worship which could displace genuine efforts at human intelligence. Second, how are we going to insure this isn't abused? Having Poindexter dismiss oversight as beaurocratic stovepiping doesn't inspire any confidence. Power corrupts. The only check for that is oversight and tranparency. Without that, we stand as much a risk of becoming the "bad guys" as the bad guys.
The local city government can eminent domain away property rights of a street full of homeowners to accomodate the construction of a freakin' Costco. The United States government can install puppet juntas in Latin America to prevent the spread of communism.
Taiwan getting a looky at the the Windows source code to protect their national security from a large, powerful, local, and real communist threat seems pretty tame.
Dragon, nothin'. I want the "dragonFLY" from Danny Dunn, invisible boy. Even without the haptic feedback, I'd be happy. At this point, remote audio surveillance seems like the best strategy for relationships in my life...
(*bitter sigh*)
Perhaps this is a potential alternative...?
Although I don't know what duties and such might be...
I had a weird thought the other day. What if you were a higher-dimensional being, and lived outside the timeline of the universe and could see its development? If you could touch/shape it in the right way, wouldn't influencing events be sort of like pruning a tree?
Crazy stuff, I know, half-lucid, not talkin' sense, but it's a wisp of an idea...
now, if the original of this week's copy of the TV Guide had been stolen...
There are 250 Million blank CDRs and tapes bought and used this year for copying music in comparison to 213 Million prerecorded audio media. This means the owners are only being paid for 46 per cent of the musical content. For a comparison: In 1998 almost 90% of all audio media was paid for.
Aside from the fact that most of the CD-Rs I buy go to record data (and the few discs I copy outright are out of print)... there's that little matter of the media taxes levied on tapes and other blank media. Hey BMG, whether we like it or not, we are paying for your damn music. Maybe we should call your bluff: the widespread implementation of copy protection should mean the end of blank media taxes period.
Even without a degree in economics everyone should realise that such trends will result in the music industry ceasing to exist.
You mean, the music industry as it exists today would cease to exist? What a tragedy.
The best part about this whole thing may well be the fact that the used (T)iBooks will drop in price. The original Powerbook G4's are now hovering a bit above $1000 on eBay. They'll drop further. By the time I'm ready to buy another laptop in 6 months, I'll bet I can pick one up for $700 if I work hard.
Oh, speed? I'm typing this from a G3/333 Mhz Powerbook. Audio and image processing, compiling Apache, PHP, Nethack, whatever... all acceptably fast. No OS I've ever used speeds up like OS X when you give it RAM (except NeXT/Openstep, of course).
Dell, Sony, Toshiba, etc. releasing new laptops?
Where are the Dell or Toshiba laptops that have anything remarkable about them? TiBooks -- and even iBooks -- have a cool factor that Dell nor Toshiba has ever come close to matching. Sony sometimes does... and you'll note that Vaio laptops sometimes do make slashdot.
Dell and Toshiba build beige boxes. Staid, boring, nothing interesting. Sony and Apple -- whatever else you have to say about them -- are consumer electronics companies with a sense of style. They build great computers to.
arg! Such a tantalizing subject and you don't give a single link? Please? Pretty Please?
Why in the world does the depth of a game have anything to do with the visual tokens that represent its elements? Chess is exactly the same when it's represented by little plastic pieces or carved crystal. Or ASCII characters on a board.
I downloaded nethack for Mac OS X today.... when I started it up it had a graphical interface, pictoral representations. I played one game, then deleted it. I'm downloading the source as we speak. The terminal-based play is easier for me to follow. The graphical version was ugly, which was part of my motivation, but the bottom line is that I don't need that much overhead... the game is as playable in 25x80 ascii as it is in 1024x768 pixels. It's about what goes on inside your head as much as on screen.
Actually who wrote the original version of this song?
John Gorka rocks... er... folks. Whatever. I seem to recall from the liner notes that he wrote this song....
If we were talking about phone companies or power companies, I'd agree with you. In MS's case, I would disagree. MS's scenario is unique because it provides a standard (de facto that is) for developers to make their apps run.
This "favor" to the computing world seems to be of a dubious nature. Other than MS's market share, there's nothing special about their set of APIs. It's not hard to argue that there are better ones out there (Cocoa/YellowBox, for example). Additionally, their API (like most) is a moving target... it's not as if any developer can sit back and not have to learn anything new. Learning to use new APIs, finally, is generally not that hard if they're relatively well-thought out, and there's significant economic advantage at developing even for platforms with a very minor market share -- as most major application vendors have demonstrated (Adobe, Macromedia, Microsoft) and even some minor/niche application vendors (Mark of the Unicorn, Digidesgn, etc).