Sweet jesus! Now I'm going to need tiny hydrogen-based fuel cells to power my beowulf cluster of electronic papers. I think I shall call such a collection a "notepad."
"Half the number of genes equates to twice the information encoded in forms other than discrete physical blocks of code."
I love the implicit anthropomorphism here. It could also mean simply that there's half as much information in you than you thought. Would that make you feel bad about yourself, thinking that you're less complicated than certain flowers? It could mean that the information density of the resulting blocks is greater, but it could just as easily not mean that. It could also mean that there's a greater level of redundancy in some organisms, limiting the frequency of mutation. Or a whole host of things!
It doesn't mean that you're twice as neat elsewhere because you feel robbed! You, sir, are not a unique and special snowflake!
What happened to "do no evil?" Isn't facilitating censorship in China tacit support of that regime? Are dollars so important post-IPO that Google will abandon its first principle?:(
Property is excludable -- it is easy to prevent others from using it -- and rival -- meaning that one person's use of it will interfere with another person's use of it. Spectrum has neither characteristic.
I'm a big fan of Clay, but what precisely was he smokign when he wrote this? Spectrum is both excludable and rival. Exclusion, as applied to spectrum, can be equivocated with "jamming." Rival is known simply as "interference."
Perhaps his argument is that over range both characteristics (excludability and rivalry) of spectrum diminish, unlike with physical property. But spectrum is absolutely property, by both definitions.
Should spectrum be free? Don't know. Don't care. But let's not jumpstart the debate by twisting core characteristics of property.
Why all the argument and consternation about OSS killing jobs? It's an economic fact that it does, and will continue to do so. When considering any regime of commodification, as efficiencies increase and prices drop, the capital inputs for production decrease. We can think of OSS as the ultimate example of this, where (for commodity software) the price drops to zero and the efficiency and associated quality of the products is VERY high. OSS produces very, very good products at very, very low cost! There's nothing hard to understand here. Think of OSS as "good, cheap products."
Obviously the jobs destroyed will be MicroSoft jobs, and Oracle jobs, and SAP jobs, and the like: fewer people will be paid to make software. Perhaps many of the next generation programmers will become professionals of a different sort, but continue to program as part of OSS? Or whatever. Who know, and who cares? It's pure speculation.
My thesis is this: OSS will kill jobs, but that is not a Bad Thing(tm).
A common parallel example is getting rid of farm subsisdies in the US. It would absolutely kill many farming jobs (mostly small famers), lower agricultural prices (long-term), and invariably increase efficiency and competition in Ag. This is good for just about everyone, save a particular group of current farmers. At the end of the day, EVERYONE ELSE benefits, though. OSS development is the equivalent of taking a cash subsidy from current farmers, er, programmers.
So, please, saying that OSS doesn't kill particular jobs is both naive and dangerous. It OSS makes supporters look ignorant. A better position is that we have no obligation to support jobs that have effectively become "welfware" in the new OSS software economy.
The real hope is that this service, as it relates to emergency response, does not become another layer of dependency. At Stanford we had the pleasure of testing IP phones in the CS department and living with the fact that when the power fails, the phones are gone, too. As an old man, a child of the 70s, I was used to power and telephone access being separate concerns. We liked it.
By isolating services, you often get safety through redundancy. Wiring emergency response into a new infrastructure is a dangerous proposition. Keep fire and rescue response on their own bands. Keep alarm systems on dry pairs. Etc. Save a life today; be old school.;)
EverQuest is NOT a video game (a fact which Sony continues to this day to fail to understand).
This comment got modded up as interesting and insightful? This is one of the least insightful comments on this thread.
Sony is keenly aware of the fact that EQ is much more than a game to its players. Sony had the insight provided by watching UO evolve, and contributed many game elements that are geared specifically for community building, rather than straight gameplay. They're taking the fact that it's not just a video game all the way to the bank.
...if you must. Trust me, I don't need the karma. But stories like this are the reason that I don't subscribe to Slashdot.
This is NOT "news for nerds." Maybe "news for dinosaurs," or perhaps "nerds for antique collectors." But not news for nerds. Hell, my first machine was a C64, and I couldn't care less about this. And this is NOT "stuff that matters."
I had to put on my tinfoil hat for this one, but "Orkut" is really, REALLY old news. The funny thing was, all mention of it has been virtually stripped from Google. "Orkut" is the revival of "Club Nexus", something Orkut built while at Stanford University. You can see a more complete description of Orkut/Club Nexus here.
Also, Stanford mentions it here. It's also been live for quite sometime as Stanford's inCircle. The oldest mentions I can find in Google are from 1991, but then again, Google's been pretty well stripped of information on the subject.
The oddest part, of course, is that http://www.clubnexus.com/ is gone, and purged from the Google cache. Same thing is true of http://clubnexus.stanford.edu/. *sigh*
Anyway, here's Club Nexus/Orkut in a nutshell: "Some people were upset because they're not sexy," says Buyokkokten.
I don't intend to troll, but really, *who cares*? What's the big issue here? Mindshare? Proper credit? Counting ego coup? (Don't spout some "GPL violation" BS, we all *get* that rationale... but there has to be something more to make this news.)
So, here's my thinking: If the code in question is really as simple and trivial as claimed by the MPlayer folks, then why bother facing this Danish DVD group? Don't we expect that trivial code would be written in a nearly identical fashion independently? (I haven't seen the code, just going by what the MPlayer folks have stated about subtitling and the complexity.) And why bother? Is this a zealotry issue... trying to uphold the RMS/FSF flag for its own sake? Or is there something more?
What we've got here is a relatively obscure company (perhaps) taking a relatively small section of admittedly trivial code for their application. If this isn't shaping up to be a legal challenge for the GPL, then it's a waste of time! No good can come of this. My momma always said to "pick your battles", and I don't see the upside of this one...
Fighting every fight for its own sake, or even teh sake of the GPL, is plain stupid and inefficient.
Crap. It sounds like I turned into a flamebait at the end here. *sigh* God forbid Slashdot function as something other than a mental echo-chamber once in a while. We shall see how many steps to "-1".
What's perhaps most interesting is that advertising in the form of product placements used to be much *more* blatant than it is today. For instance, "soap operas" are called such because they were sponsored by soap companies. You could identify not only a particular show, but an entire genre by its sponsors.;)
What we seem to be experiencing today is akin to Ralphie in "A Christmas Story", when he uses his Little Orphan Annie ring to decode the message "Drink More Ovaltine." Thankfully, today, we experience significantly *less* overt product placement. Perhaps we're more sensitive to it these days because it's less common?
I work for the University's Division of Information Technology (DoIT) in the Platforms and Operating Systems group as the senior Macintosh systems engineer, supporting Apple products primarily in research environments at the University, and running the University's Apple Support web server. In 2001, I was honored to be selected as an Apple Distinguished Educator.
Oh. I guess my suspicion that such a post could only come from an Apple shill isn't so far from the truth.
No, the parent is plain wrong. The costs of getting to space will never "catch up" until long after we all have our own tiny submarines, garaged hovercraft, and nanotech housekeepers. Using this logic, we should all have flown on the Concorde after 5 years or so... didn't happen.
As hard as it is to believe, escape velocity is expensive, friends! If the spurrious parent argument's held water, then we would already be there, no? Yuri Gagarin first flew in space over 4 DECADES ago, and I still don't see a Walmart on the moon....
"Attractive Nuisance" isn't really applicable here. The base theory in your example rests on the idea the owner of the pool can reasonably and assuredly secure it. This can be through fences, locks, covers, and various other luddite techniques... techniques that any responsible homeowner can understand and be held liable for implementing correctly.
However, with software, the complexity of the system is so great that even the original authors will not warrant it's correctness and/or security. The average pool owner can reasonably be expected to secure his own pool and can "know" if his/her efforts are good enough. The average computer owner can do nothing equivalent.
You can't even put the OS author's on the hook for "misrepresenting" anything. I've patched more than one Linux security hole that was never "misrepresented" to me! Perhaps there should be a "reasonability standard" here, but no strict liability.
This has been known for decades; why does another study repeateing it warrant attention? It's also accepted that attractive people make more money.
Additionally, as compared to their less attractive counterparts, attractive people tend to have more distinguished positions, earn more money, and characterize themselves as happier (Umberson & Hughes, 1987; Diener, Wolsic, & Fujita, 1995)
The parent post is a pretty funny comment, and one that should be appreciated by the majority of the/. readers. However, as a new parent, a scientist, and a PhD, I'll admit that I too have worries about WiFi and growing children. And I don't wear a tinfoil hat.
We had a WiFi network in-home before my son was born, but removed it during my wife's pregnancy. We *still* have a cordless phone, but stepped back to 900MHz. Why? Well, there's enough evidence out there to say that it's worth it to worry. We don't have a complete story, and that's the issue. Unfortunately, there were no equivalent localized high frequency sources in homes and schools 30 years ago. We don't have enough data to say definitively one way or another that something's safe or not.
And that's what scares the shit out of parents. We don't know enough to rule anything out yet. I know enough that I wouldn't live next to a cell tower, even though I'll risk holding a cell phone to my ear just about everyday. However, when it comes to my kids, I don't take that chance.
Slashdot Mirror
Sweet jesus! Now I'm going to need tiny hydrogen-based fuel cells to power my beowulf cluster of electronic papers. I think I shall call such a collection a "notepad."
"Half the number of genes equates to twice the information encoded in forms other than discrete physical blocks of code."
I love the implicit anthropomorphism here. It could also mean simply that there's half as much information in you than you thought. Would that make you feel bad about yourself, thinking that you're less complicated than certain flowers? It could mean that the information density of the resulting blocks is greater, but it could just as easily not mean that. It could also mean that there's a greater level of redundancy in some organisms, limiting the frequency of mutation. Or a whole host of things!
It doesn't mean that you're twice as neat elsewhere because you feel robbed! You, sir, are not a unique and special snowflake!
...an "animated TV series" used to be abbreviated as "cartoon?" Those were the days.
What happened to "do no evil?" Isn't facilitating censorship in China tacit support of that regime? Are dollars so important post-IPO that Google will abandon its first principle? :(
Property is excludable -- it is easy to prevent others from using it -- and rival -- meaning that one person's use of it will interfere with another person's use of it. Spectrum has neither characteristic.
I'm a big fan of Clay, but what precisely was he smokign when he wrote this? Spectrum is both excludable and rival. Exclusion, as applied to spectrum, can be equivocated with "jamming." Rival is known simply as "interference."
Perhaps his argument is that over range both characteristics (excludability and rivalry) of spectrum diminish, unlike with physical property. But spectrum is absolutely property, by both definitions.
Should spectrum be free? Don't know. Don't care. But let's not jumpstart the debate by twisting core characteristics of property.
They would ahve most likely:
A) Lost the lawsuit, and/or
B) muddied the IPO waters by fighting at this time.
This was a strategic move by Google.
Total download for me was 53 seconds into the *BIG INTERNET COMPANY HERE* campus.
This wouldn't happen if Slashdot editors read Slashdot!
Why all the argument and consternation about OSS killing jobs? It's an economic fact that it does, and will continue to do so. When considering any regime of commodification, as efficiencies increase and prices drop, the capital inputs for production decrease. We can think of OSS as the ultimate example of this, where (for commodity software) the price drops to zero and the efficiency and associated quality of the products is VERY high. OSS produces very, very good products at very, very low cost! There's nothing hard to understand here. Think of OSS as "good, cheap products."
Obviously the jobs destroyed will be MicroSoft jobs, and Oracle jobs, and SAP jobs, and the like: fewer people will be paid to make software. Perhaps many of the next generation programmers will become professionals of a different sort, but continue to program as part of OSS? Or whatever. Who know, and who cares? It's pure speculation.
My thesis is this: OSS will kill jobs, but that is not a Bad Thing(tm).
A common parallel example is getting rid of farm subsisdies in the US. It would absolutely kill many farming jobs (mostly small famers), lower agricultural prices (long-term), and invariably increase efficiency and competition in Ag. This is good for just about everyone, save a particular group of current farmers. At the end of the day, EVERYONE ELSE benefits, though. OSS development is the equivalent of taking a cash subsidy from current farmers, er, programmers.
So, please, saying that OSS doesn't kill particular jobs is both naive and dangerous. It OSS makes supporters look ignorant. A better position is that we have no obligation to support jobs that have effectively become "welfware" in the new OSS software economy.
The real hope is that this service, as it relates to emergency response, does not become another layer of dependency. At Stanford we had the pleasure of testing IP phones in the CS department and living with the fact that when the power fails, the phones are gone, too.
;)
As an old man, a child of the 70s, I was used to power and telephone access being separate concerns. We liked it.
By isolating services, you often get safety through redundancy. Wiring emergency response into a new infrastructure is a dangerous proposition.
Keep fire and rescue response on their own bands. Keep alarm systems on dry pairs. Etc. Save a life today; be old school.
EverQuest is NOT a video game (a fact which Sony continues to this day to fail to understand).
This comment got modded up as interesting and insightful? This is one of the least insightful comments on this thread.
Sony is keenly aware of the fact that EQ is much more than a game to its players. Sony had the insight provided by watching UO evolve, and contributed many game elements that are geared specifically for community building, rather than straight gameplay. They're taking the fact that it's not just a video game all the way to the bank.
Dynamite, yes. Blasting cap, yes. However, his real start was in the production of nitroglycerine.
I already have a removal tool for WMA. Just waiting for it to become a standard. ;)
Odds are more likely he'll take a position with a salary commensurate with having bee a VP at Sun.
$710 per week for life hardly seems like "compensation" for cancer.
...if you must. Trust me, I don't need the karma. But stories like this are the reason that I don't subscribe to Slashdot.
This is NOT "news for nerds." Maybe "news for dinosaurs," or perhaps "nerds for antique collectors." But not news for nerds. Hell, my first machine was a C64, and I couldn't care less about this. And this is NOT "stuff that matters."
What a waste.
I had to put on my tinfoil hat for this one, but "Orkut" is really, REALLY old news. The funny thing was, all mention of it has been virtually stripped from Google. "Orkut" is the revival of "Club Nexus", something Orkut built while at Stanford University. You can see a more complete description of Orkut/Club Nexus here.
Also, Stanford mentions it here. It's also been live for quite sometime as Stanford's inCircle. The oldest mentions I can find in Google are from 1991, but then again, Google's been pretty well stripped of information on the subject.
The oddest part, of course, is that http://www.clubnexus.com/ is gone, and purged from the Google cache. Same thing is true of http://clubnexus.stanford.edu/. *sigh*
Anyway, here's Club Nexus/Orkut in a nutshell: "Some people were upset because they're not sexy," says Buyokkokten.
Cheers.
I don't intend to troll, but really, *who cares*? What's the big issue here? Mindshare? Proper credit? Counting ego coup? (Don't spout some "GPL violation" BS, we all *get* that rationale... but there has to be something more to make this news.)
So, here's my thinking: If the code in question is really as simple and trivial as claimed by the MPlayer folks, then why bother facing this Danish DVD group? Don't we expect that trivial code would be written in a nearly identical fashion independently? (I haven't seen the code, just going by what the MPlayer folks have stated about subtitling and the complexity.) And why bother? Is this a zealotry issue... trying to uphold the RMS/FSF flag for its own sake? Or is there something more?
What we've got here is a relatively obscure company (perhaps) taking a relatively small section of admittedly trivial code for their application. If this isn't shaping up to be a legal challenge for the GPL, then it's a waste of time! No good can come of this. My momma always said to "pick your battles", and I don't see the upside of this one...
Fighting every fight for its own sake, or even teh sake of the GPL, is plain stupid and inefficient.
Crap. It sounds like I turned into a flamebait at the end here. *sigh* God forbid Slashdot function as something other than a mental echo-chamber once in a while. We shall see how many steps to "-1".
What's perhaps most interesting is that advertising in the form of product placements used to be much *more* blatant than it is today. For instance, "soap operas" are called such because they were sponsored by soap companies. You could identify not only a particular show, but an entire genre by its sponsors. ;)
What we seem to be experiencing today is akin to Ralphie in "A Christmas Story", when he uses his Little Orphan Annie ring to decode the message "Drink More Ovaltine." Thankfully, today, we experience significantly *less* overt product placement. Perhaps we're more sensitive to it these days because it's less common?
I work for the University's Division of Information Technology (DoIT) in the Platforms and Operating Systems group as the senior Macintosh systems engineer, supporting Apple products primarily in research environments at the University, and running the University's Apple Support web server. In 2001, I was honored to be selected as an Apple Distinguished Educator.
Oh. I guess my suspicion that such a post could only come from an Apple shill isn't so far from the truth.
No, the parent is plain wrong. The costs of getting to space will never "catch up" until long after we all have our own tiny submarines, garaged hovercraft, and nanotech housekeepers. Using this logic, we should all have flown on the Concorde after 5 years or so... didn't happen.
As hard as it is to believe, escape velocity is expensive, friends! If the spurrious parent argument's held water, then we would already be there, no? Yuri Gagarin first flew in space over 4 DECADES ago, and I still don't see a Walmart on the moon....
"Attractive Nuisance" isn't really applicable here. The base theory in your example rests on the idea the owner of the pool can reasonably and assuredly secure it. This can be through fences, locks, covers, and various other luddite techniques... techniques that any responsible homeowner can understand and be held liable for implementing correctly.
However, with software, the complexity of the system is so great that even the original authors will not warrant it's correctness and/or security. The average pool owner can reasonably be expected to secure his own pool and can "know" if his/her efforts are good enough. The average computer owner can do nothing equivalent.
You can't even put the OS author's on the hook for "misrepresenting" anything. I've patched more than one Linux security hole that was never "misrepresented" to me! Perhaps there should be a "reasonability standard" here, but no strict liability.
Quoted from here
And Enterasys sells what again? Oh yeah, wireless products.
Too funny. Thanks for the laughs.
The parent post is a pretty funny comment, and one that should be appreciated by the majority of the /. readers. However, as a new parent, a scientist, and a PhD, I'll admit that I too have worries about WiFi and growing children. And I don't wear a tinfoil hat.
We had a WiFi network in-home before my son was born, but removed it during my wife's pregnancy. We *still* have a cordless phone, but stepped back to 900MHz. Why? Well, there's enough evidence out there to say that it's worth it to worry. We don't have a complete story, and that's the issue. Unfortunately, there were no equivalent localized high frequency sources in homes and schools 30 years ago. We don't have enough data to say definitively one way or another that something's safe or not.
And that's what scares the shit out of parents. We don't know enough to rule anything out yet. I know enough that I wouldn't live next to a cell tower, even though I'll risk holding a cell phone to my ear just about everyday. However, when it comes to my kids, I don't take that chance.