The examples given in the write-up, and most of those I can think of on my own, are things that seem far better served by a simple user preferences setting...Ideally one that is time-of-day (and maybe even season) aware, and can store multiple user profiles...But I don't really see any compelling use for a neural network scheme? Anyone have any better examples of what the benefit would be in a certain circumstance?
On the lighter side, I can imagine Homer Simpson jumping into the shower in a Neural Net house, the water coming on, scaulding hot... DOH! Freezing Cold... DOH! Slightly less hot... DOH! Slightly less cold... DOH! (and on and on for 5 minutes until it settles on a good temperature).
I agree with a lot of your post, except a few points.
Even so, Sun is way ahead with Java and net based applications, with the promise of openning it [java] to the world, something MS has never said they would do with.NET
Actually this is not true. While Sun has made most of Java's source code viewable (if not Open), they still retain sole ownership of the standard. Sun has talked and talked in the past about how they would open Java up as an ISO or ECMA standard, but always wound up pulling out and retaining sole control of the future direction of Java. Microsoft, on the other hand, while certainly not a champion of true open standards in the past, has submitted the core technology behind.Net to ECMA for standardization.
Companies will NOT pay for subscription based applications. There is no way that if most of the world would not pay to upgrade to Office 97, that they are going to decide that monthly charges are better. I know accountants, they will NEVER buy into this idea.
This is not an absolute. In fact, many companies are turning a profit even in these 'terrible times for tech' supplying subscription-based software to companies. Its more the consumer space that is going to freak out (ala DIVX) when this model is hoisted upon them. Many businesses already spend ridiculous sums on support contracts, and many will see subscription based software as a way to save on labor costs in IT, and will try it out..Whether or not it works on a grand scale depends on the pricing schemes and the support the software companies are able to provide.
Bush has no official stance on the Microsoft trial as of yet, but he said this in a PBS interview last year:
``I hope, though, that whatever settlement is done it won't ruin this company because this company has been a very interesting innovator. I hope the judge would keep in mind that this company is an important part of the technological revolution taking place in America.''
By cross-platform, Microsoft has generally meant 'the specs are available and other companies/groups are free to port it'. A number of people ported COM/DCOM (or at least parts of it useful for their own software) to non-MS platforms.
With.NET, what Microsoft means is that their MSIL (their Java byte-code like language), C# and some other technologies are being submitted to the ECMA standards organization (Note: This is more than Sun ever did with Java).
It is very unlikely that Microsoft will release a Linux version of the.Net platform in the future..But, since it will be standardized, nothing is stopping another company or Open Source developers from doing it.
The article seems to focus and dwindle on summing up whats been happening in a more digestable format. I would have liked to see more about how Microsoft will convert shrink-wrap into on-tap delivery and how, since it controls the tap, buisness could be crippled if Microsoft decides that they should be (rasing the level of entry bar).
Well, the problem is that as of right now nobody is sure of how Microsoft is going to make this move. It is clear that Microsoft plans to get into the 'ASP' application business in a big way, and that they are also creating a set of standards for others to get into this space along-side them, but its not clear what their exact plans for, say, Office.Net are and what kind of upgrade path their might be, etc, etc.
Its not just Microsoft who is salivating at this subscription-based software model, just about every other big software company is chomping at the bit for this as well...And most industry analysts (for whatever their opinion is worth...) agree that this will be the model for software in the future...
It will be interesting to see how it all plays out, especially in light of other subscription-type service plays (like DIVX -- the DVD-based format, not the MPEG4 beta codec) which consumers totally rejected.
Wait 'til those suckas find out how hard it is to get good anti-aliased displays running on their weapon systems!!! Note to Saddam: Sure, the Dreamcast has less power, but believe me, your engineers will appreciate the noticable lack of 'jaggies'!!! You'll have to create at least 2 generations of weapon systems with these babies to work out all the kinks!!
But don't you realize that one person's "dumb" post is another person's humor?
The most brilliant aspect of Bradbury's Farenheit 451 (and I'm not particularly a Bradbury fan in general) is that he presented a future in which books and other forms of speech were banned NOT because they government wanted to control the people, but because the people WANTED the government to ban these books because they made them feel uncomfortable.
Don't you see that parallels between that and what you are trying to have banned here on Slashdot?
And yes, I too realize Slashdot is not a democracy, but considering all the lip service paid to freedom of expression by the editors, it would be really hypocritical of them to start banning links, don't you think? And besides, this is the sort of thing moderation was invented for. If you don't like the current moderation system, attack that, not individial posts or links.
Web site that exist soley based on ad revenue are going to have to be very careful moving forward. Speaking for myself, and most every other web surfer I know, even the current, relatively non-intrusive (compared to what is detailed in this ad) popup ads are a huge turn-off that not only give us a bad taste for whatever is being advertised, but also a bad taste for the web site allowing the ad.
I realize web sites aren't free to run, and the companies behind them need to turn a profit, but I think if they want to be successful, they are going to have to find another way..Perhaps by charging a very small subscription fee as a way to opt out of ads (ala premium cable).
The more mainstream sites become like current pr0n sites, where you get so many popups and redirects that you're better off killing your parent browser process than trying to contain them all, the less useful the web is, and the more people will be completely turned off.
They would certainly be more accurate at how the hardware will perform under Linux!
Though the writeup above seems to vaguely indicate CPU speed was what was being measured, video card performance was a big part of these benchmarks. These days, with the complexity of all types of add-on cards, and especially video cards, drivers play a fairly large role in the overall measured speed, and since Windows and Linux drivers will clearly be different, you could side hugely different numbers on each platform. Even under Windows itself, a card like the GeForce 2 will perform nearly 10% faster or slower depending upon the version of Nvidia's drivers you have installed.
This is true also for other components, like disks, where the underlying code in the OS and device driver level comes into play.
You can't prove a source code license violation with a simple disassembly...well, that is, assuming the person who stole the code isn't stupid enough to have left debug symbols, copyright strings and other obvious identifiers in there.
You could *suspect* a certain piece of software to infringe, but you'd need to go to a judge and go through the process of forcing the court to subpoena the source code of the product and have experts look at the open source and closed source versions and decide whether it was a justified claim. Needless to day, most people working on open source software do not have the type of money that would be required to get that far in the legal process, especially when compared to large software companies.
Also, there's the matter of these licenses never having been tested in court. RMS's lawyers can write any license they want, but until a judge has made a ruling in an infringment case, you can't say for sure whether or not the GPL (as an example) is even legally binding.
Personally, I think that license abuse is morally wrong, and also very dangerous (because there's always the off chance the company COULD get caught, and thus they might end up having to legally release the source code of their product. My guess, however, would be that most companies would be totally against using GPL code in their closed source products, but in mid-sized software shops some programmers probably sneak some GPLed code in anyway, as a way of making their jobs easier.
There are quite a lot of geeks who worship the Evil Dead movies as cult classics. My guess would be that the status of the source movies with many geeks has more to do with this being posted than the actual game itself.
In any case, I don't see why people bother to get so bent out of shape about stories that don't interest them. Just skip the article... (I *do* understand why people get a bit miffed about story reposts, and stories that are based on links to FUD and/or flamebait articles, but this is different IMO).
The vast majority of Duke Nukem's one-liners were not original. A few were taken from the Evil Dead movies (including 'Hail to the King, Baby'), and the rest come from other random movies like "They Live".
First of all, the 'lame' remark was a quote. One that seemed to be taken verbally. You can't really fauly the article author with questionable word usage when they are simply reporting quotes.
Secondly, the word 'lame' is a perfectly valid word in the context it was used, ie. not a very good effort. The word 'lame' had been around a long time before it was co-opted into ElYTe Sp33k, and Slashdot-types who recognize 'lame' as the opposite of 'elite' (and therefore a very simple label applied by very simple minded people) are a vast minority of the world's population. If the guy quoted had said "M1cr0S0ftZ ElYT3!!! Sun B s0 L4ym3!!!" then I'd agree with you. But he didn't.
Slashdot Mirror
On the lighter side, I can imagine Homer Simpson jumping into the shower in a Neural Net house, the water coming on, scaulding hot... DOH! Freezing Cold... DOH! Slightly less hot... DOH! Slightly less cold... DOH! (and on and on for 5 minutes until it settles on a good temperature).
Even so, Sun is way ahead with Java and net based applications, with the promise of openning it [java] to the world, something MS has never said they would do with .NET
Actually this is not true. While Sun has made most of Java's source code viewable (if not Open), they still retain sole ownership of the standard. Sun has talked and talked in the past about how they would open Java up as an ISO or ECMA standard, but always wound up pulling out and retaining sole control of the future direction of Java. Microsoft, on the other hand, while certainly not a champion of true open standards in the past, has submitted the core technology behind .Net to ECMA for standardization.
Companies will NOT pay for subscription based applications. There is no way that if most of the world would not pay to upgrade to Office 97, that they are going to decide that monthly charges are better. I know accountants, they will NEVER buy into this idea.
This is not an absolute. In fact, many companies are turning a profit even in these 'terrible times for tech' supplying subscription-based software to companies. Its more the consumer space that is going to freak out (ala DIVX) when this model is hoisted upon them. Many businesses already spend ridiculous sums on support contracts, and many will see subscription based software as a way to save on labor costs in IT, and will try it out..Whether or not it works on a grand scale depends on the pricing schemes and the support the software companies are able to provide.
``I hope, though, that whatever settlement is done it won't ruin this company because this company has been a very interesting innovator. I hope the judge would keep in mind that this company is an important part of the technological revolution taking place in America.''
With .NET, what Microsoft means is that their MSIL (their Java byte-code like language), C# and some other technologies are being submitted to the ECMA standards organization (Note: This is more than Sun ever did with Java).
It is very unlikely that Microsoft will release a Linux version of the .Net platform in the future..But, since it will be standardized, nothing is stopping another company or Open Source developers from doing it.
Well, the problem is that as of right now nobody is sure of how Microsoft is going to make this move. It is clear that Microsoft plans to get into the 'ASP' application business in a big way, and that they are also creating a set of standards for others to get into this space along-side them, but its not clear what their exact plans for, say, Office .Net are and what kind of upgrade path their might be, etc, etc.
Its not just Microsoft who is salivating at this subscription-based software model, just about every other big software company is chomping at the bit for this as well...And most industry analysts (for whatever their opinion is worth...) agree that this will be the model for software in the future...
It will be interesting to see how it all plays out, especially in light of other subscription-type service plays (like DIVX -- the DVD-based format, not the MPEG4 beta codec) which consumers totally rejected.
Open Source might not need financial success (that is debatable), but IBM, as a public FOR-PROFIT company, sure does.
paranoia? More like hand-greasing and lobbying from the Censorware software developers.
The most brilliant aspect of Bradbury's Farenheit 451 (and I'm not particularly a Bradbury fan in general) is that he presented a future in which books and other forms of speech were banned NOT because they government wanted to control the people, but because the people WANTED the government to ban these books because they made them feel uncomfortable.
Don't you see that parallels between that and what you are trying to have banned here on Slashdot?
And yes, I too realize Slashdot is not a democracy, but considering all the lip service paid to freedom of expression by the editors, it would be really hypocritical of them to start banning links, don't you think? And besides, this is the sort of thing moderation was invented for. If you don't like the current moderation system, attack that, not individial posts or links.
That's why the astronauts aren't dead.
I realize web sites aren't free to run, and the companies behind them need to turn a profit, but I think if they want to be successful, they are going to have to find another way..Perhaps by charging a very small subscription fee as a way to opt out of ads (ala premium cable).
The more mainstream sites become like current pr0n sites, where you get so many popups and redirects that you're better off killing your parent browser process than trying to contain them all, the less useful the web is, and the more people will be completely turned off.
Though the writeup above seems to vaguely indicate CPU speed was what was being measured, video card performance was a big part of these benchmarks. These days, with the complexity of all types of add-on cards, and especially video cards, drivers play a fairly large role in the overall measured speed, and since Windows and Linux drivers will clearly be different, you could side hugely different numbers on each platform. Even under Windows itself, a card like the GeForce 2 will perform nearly 10% faster or slower depending upon the version of Nvidia's drivers you have installed.
This is true also for other components, like disks, where the underlying code in the OS and device driver level comes into play.
You could *suspect* a certain piece of software to infringe, but you'd need to go to a judge and go through the process of forcing the court to subpoena the source code of the product and have experts look at the open source and closed source versions and decide whether it was a justified claim. Needless to day, most people working on open source software do not have the type of money that would be required to get that far in the legal process, especially when compared to large software companies.
Also, there's the matter of these licenses never having been tested in court. RMS's lawyers can write any license they want, but until a judge has made a ruling in an infringment case, you can't say for sure whether or not the GPL (as an example) is even legally binding.
Personally, I think that license abuse is morally wrong, and also very dangerous (because there's always the off chance the company COULD get caught, and thus they might end up having to legally release the source code of their product. My guess, however, would be that most companies would be totally against using GPL code in their closed source products, but in mid-sized software shops some programmers probably sneak some GPLed code in anyway, as a way of making their jobs easier.
In any case, I don't see why people bother to get so bent out of shape about stories that don't interest them. Just skip the article... (I *do* understand why people get a bit miffed about story reposts, and stories that are based on links to FUD and/or flamebait articles, but this is different IMO).
The vast majority of Duke Nukem's one-liners were not original. A few were taken from the Evil Dead movies (including 'Hail to the King, Baby'), and the rest come from other random movies like "They Live".
That's all well and good, but...
I didn't realize Jar Jar was a female!!
Secondly, the word 'lame' is a perfectly valid word in the context it was used, ie. not a very good effort. The word 'lame' had been around a long time before it was co-opted into ElYTe Sp33k, and Slashdot-types who recognize 'lame' as the opposite of 'elite' (and therefore a very simple label applied by very simple minded people) are a vast minority of the world's population. If the guy quoted had said "M1cr0S0ftZ ElYT3!!! Sun B s0 L4ym3!!!" then I'd agree with you. But he didn't.