Actually, according to Slyck, the population of FastTrack users is down about 1m users (it's current around 3.5M from peaks of around 4.5M a while back). Of course, slyck doesn't say how they arrive at that number, but since they're an active promoter of p2p, you wouldn't expect them to make the number artificially low. I'd call a drop of 1/3rd pretty substantial.:-)
"one of the persons getting sued doesn't even know how to use a computer."
It's pretty simple. To quote from the article:
Brenot and her husband said their son-in-law briefly added Internet service to their own cable television account while living with the couple because Comcast Cable Communications Inc. said it would add a surcharge to send separate bills to the same mailing address.
"There's a mistake in this case," Dorothy Brenot said. "We're innocent in all of this, but I don't know how we're going to prove it."
It's a pretty simple situation. The son-in-law set up broadband access, billed to the Brenots. He then downloaded and shared tons of music (774 titles, according to the article), and the RIAA found him and logged his IP address. Then the ISP said that the IP address was assigned to the Brenots, so they are the ones whose name is on the lawsuit. IANAL, but this sounds just like the cases where someone gets a parking ticket based on the license plate of the car, even though someone else parked the car illegally. At least where I live, if you prove that the other person was the one that parked illegally, they pay the ticket.
This is like pretty much all of the other "I didn't do it" cases. Someone was paying for a broadband account that someone else was using, so they got sued for what the other person did. This isn't terribly interesting except to journalists looking for a catchy, if misleading, story, since it's a pretty obvious situation -- I can't think of a way that the RIAA could _avoid_ these sorts of errors, since there's no way for them to know who's actually using the computer, just who's paying for the broadband connection, until they file the lawsuit.
What _would_ be interesting is if the RIAA sued in a case where _nobody_ was doing any illegal file sharing. But so far, out of 382 lawsuits, I haven't heard of any case where that's being claimed. Of course, anything can happen...
Based on the numbers that you can see on Slyck.com, after years of consistent growth, p2p usage is down substantially for the last few months, especially on the networks believed to be actively monitored by the RIAA, with the decline starting at the same time as the filing of the first lawsuits. And based on the announcements by Apple, Napster, MusicMatch, etc., digital music sales appear to be up substantially over the past few months as well. So while coorelation can't prove causality, it sure looks like the lawsuits are effective at making some people stop using the p2p file sharing networks, and might even be helping with digital download music sales.
You're correct -- I misread the article (which has since been made more clear in correcting/.'s summary). That being said, I think that it's lame of Dell not to at least guide naive users towards third party products that could help them. Especially since adware is almost always snuck onto PC's without the user's knowledge (bundled into some other app, or via ActiveX, etc., with only a vague or misleading description). Given how big a problem this is for many users (pretty much anyone with a PC), it's pretty irresponsible of Dell to refuse to discuss the problem with its customers.
They've rewritten the article to explicitly corrent for/.'s misleading article summary (and I didn't catch the "if" in the article the first time around, my bad). Dell is _not_ installing spyware on PC's, they're just refusing to help any of their customers who end up with spyware on their computer. I still think that this is a mistake, since Dell should be more concerned with their customer's computer working than in offending some spyware company's lawyers, but it's not as horrifying as I earlier thought.
"If you buy a Dell, they support the hardware and software they sold you. They don't support random crap you decided to download from the Internet, nor will they be able to answer your cooking questions. Why does this surprise people?"
That's not what's going on, however. Dell is selling you a computer with spyware PRE-INSTALLED, and are refusing to help you remove it because the spyware companies are paying Dell to put it there. Even more horrifying, they're claiming that if you remove the spyware they won't support you. This isn't motivated by any real issues of customer support -- it's pretty well established that removing spyware makes computers more stable. They just don't want to annoy the spyware companies that are paying Dell to be allowed to harass their customers.
That tells me that Dell cares more about its bundled software deals than its customers. The answer is easy -- give your money to a company that puts its customers first.
Here's the entire reference to PKD. It's very cool. Go to http://www.powells.com/authors/powers.html to read the entire interview...
Powers: I met him in '72, when he flew down to Orange County, California. His house had been blown up by unknown evil powers - which really had happened; I've seen photos. He was really just homeless. He flew down to stay with two young ladies who had just lost a roommate and needed somebody to make up the rent, and I knew the two young ladies.
Luckily, I hadn't read more than maybe a couple short stories of his at the time because I would have been just choked with awe. I got to know him, and my wife met him when we started going, which would have been the late seventies. We were there when the paramedics took him out of his apartment in '82.
He was a great guy to hang around. If you just read his biographies, you could get the idea that he was just a doper visionary, a crazy man - and if you just read the biographies, yes, that's the conclusion you'd come to - but actually, he was totally sane and just the funniest guy you'd ever hope to meet. Also the nicest guy. At a crowded party, if he saw some ill-at-ease person who didn't know anybody just kind of hanging by the punch bowl, he'd go over and strike up a conversation. He was always very unaffectedly interested in what you were doing.
I don't know to what extent his work has influenced mine. I've now read all his stuff. He was a natural genius. He could sit down and in twelve days turn out an absolutely brilliant book. He wouldn't sleep or eat, but he could do it in twelve days - almost as if he'd got his fingers stuck in a light socket. It would be hard to emulate that. You can just admire it.
Dave: Is there a book of his that you find above and beyond the rest? Do you have a favorite?
Powers: I think my favorite of his is Martian Time-Slip. It's just a dazzling book. I'm glad his books have started to be published by Vintage. It's fun to see such dignified heavyweight F. Scott Fitzgerald-type books with titles likeMartian Time-Slip. It's nice that he's got himself into that hallowed venue.
"Much as Wired writers like to sensationalize everything nowadays, it is too much of a stretch to attribute all 'false realities' stories to Dick. Philosophers going back to Plato and Descartes have explored doubt of their external realities. They are certainly NOT Dick's themes."
I think you're reading the sentence wrong -- the claim isn't that PKD "owns" the themes of paranoia, memory and alternate realities -- the claim is that paranoia, memory and alternate realities were the themes that underlay his writing. And it's also pretty obvious that PKD's work was a massive influence on writers that followed him. And given how obsessively he dwelt on those themes, even though he didn't invent them, they've become "his".
"This was what happened to all the things that came out of the wet earth, out of the filthy slime and mold. All things that lived, big and little. They appeared, struggling out of the sticky wetness. And then, after a time, they died."
"I mean, after all; you have to consider, we're only made out of dust. That's admittedly not much to go on and we shouldn't forget that. But even considering, I mean it's a sort of bad beginning, we're not doing to bad. So I personally have faith that even in this lousy situation we're faced with we can make it. You get me?"
"Can we consider the universe real, and if so, in what way?"
"I hear voices from another star. (I clocked it once, and reception is best between 3:00 A.M. and 4:45 A.M.). Of course, I don't usually tell people this when they ask, 'Say where do you get your ideas?' I just say I don't know. It's safer."
"Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, does not go away."
"The basic tool for the manipulation of reality is the manipulation of words. If you can control the meaning of words, you can control the people who must use the words."
I just want to thank the author of the article for mentioning the lesser known movies based on PKD's works (Screamers and Imposter) -- I'm a huge PKD fan, and now I've got a few interesting movies to go rent.
I recommend reading all of PKD's short stories. They've been collected into a series of four books, and you can read through them all in a few weeks. And those weeks will be really odd, enlightening weeks. They'll mess with your mind, and cleanse your soul.
Go to Amazon and search for "Collected Stories of Philip K. Dick".
"I mean that right now my Sprint phone wouldn't work if I go to AT&Ts network or Cingular's network or someone else. They all use different systems."
This is only kinda true, and for two different reasons that are worth explaining:
First, several of the US carriers use network protocols (CDMA, TDMA) that aren't supported anywhere else, so if you buy a CDMA phone from Verizon it won't physically cannot work with T-Mobile's GSM network, but it will physically work with Alltel's CDMA network.
However, between carriers that use the same network protocol, the telephones that they sell are usually "locked" to a single carrier, which means that you have to get an "unlock code" to use the phone between carriers. Most good wireless phone stores know these codes, and the carriers themselves will often give you the unlock code if you give them a reason that you need to use your phone with another carrier (e.g. international travel). For GSM networks, you can always buy phones "unlocked" so that they can be used with any network -- this is often done in Europe, where people tend to buy pre-paid SIM cards (that go into the phones) rather than long-term contracts.
Personally, I'm optimistic that the US is finally moving to GSM. Not only are there several GSM carriers (Cingular, T-Mobile), but AT&T is moving to GSM as well. The end result of telephone number portability and the adoption of GSM should be that US cell phone market will finally be as competitive as it has been in the rest of the world.
In aggregate there was no power generation shortage -- their were local shortages due to artificial manipulation of generation capacity (e.g. power companies pulling stations offline in order to cause brownouts to scare people into approving higher rates) and in transmission (e.g. shipping the power all over the power grid in order to create bottlenecks).
That being said, it's true that since deregulation the power companies were underinvesting in building new capacity. luckily, while they were regulated they were forced to build enough capacity that they were able to survive a period of laziness. Remember, executives aren't paid to spend money to fix problems that won't be obvious for a decade; they're paid to save money right now, and the next guy in the job can deal with the inherited problems.
Well, the way other markets work (e.g. the stock market) you don't know WHY people buy up a stock, just that they did. So you can't tell whether "President X will die" went up because someone plans to do it himself or simply suspects that someone else will do so, but since people's money is on the line, in aggregate they make good predictions. In practice, these sorts of markets have been working well to predict all sorts of events for many years. It's hard to say why, exactly, markets generate better than average predictions, but they do so fairly consistently.
See http://www.longbets.org for an example of this sort of approach applied without the horrifying moral implications (all of the 'winnings' to go a charity of your choice. Some of the 'long bet' predictions being debated are: "By 2020, bioterror or bioerror will lead to one million casualties in a single event." "By 2050, we will receive intelligent signals from outside our solar system" "By 2007, the U.S. Government will intervene to prevent at least one of the Incumbent Local Exchange Carriers (ILECs)/Regional Bell Operating Companines (RBOCs) (e.g. Verizon, SBC, Bell South, and EXCEPTING Qwest) from filing for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection." "In 2012, 75 percept of all revenue for enterprise software companies will be from subscription fees rather than license fees." There are tons of interesting bets at http://www.longbets.org/bets...
It's somewhat an outgrowth of the Delphi method (http://www.iit.edu/~it/delphi.html), invented back in 1964.
"Unless they can make sure that it's not possible to profit by betting that an event will occur and then causing that event to occur, it could lead to damage."
The fact that people can manipulate the market based on special knowledge is one of the reasons that the whole scheme works. For example, if Assassin X knows that "President Y is going to die" because he's going to shoot him, then buys lots of futures on him dying, shoots him, and makes money on the market. In return for Assasin X making money, he's also provided a warning to President Y, because the stock price in "President Y is going to die" would go up. It's pretty horrifying (IMO) to reward assassins for successful assassinations, but the logic justifying the markets is that the market also gives you advanced warning of the assassination.
Actually, California never had a power generation shortage. They had a pricing problem, where the power distribution companies jacked up their prices (often to 50x pre-deregulation pricing) by manipulating the system (such as creating artificial scarcity, so that the state had to pay more because of a scarcity surcharge clause in the law, or by routing power out of the state and back in in order to invoke an 'out of state power' surcharge)to the point where the state couldn't keep paying.
"It's all about early adopter. We invested huge amounts of money to wire up the whole country before nuclear was an option, and there's no way we can spend that much again to rip it all out and replace it with newer/better/safer alternatives. Same thing with our telephone system, cable tv, internet, etc. We're trying to squeeze every last ounce of usefulness out of the existing system, while so-called "3rd world" countries are getting the latest and greatest tech because they have no prior investments."
I disagree completely -- until the US deregulated, we had an extremely reliable power system that was able to expand dramatically for many decades to keep up with demand while keeping prices low. Then some lunatics convinced enough people that it was a good idea to make power companies unregulated monopolies (i.e. they were no longer required to invest in maintenance and infrastructure, or to maintain excess capacity to cover emergencies or power spikes, and removed the cap on profit margin), after which the power companies did what you'd expect -- raised rates like crazy while slashing spending on infrastructure maintenance and expansion. The result is that a bunch of investors and CEO's made tons of money while the capacity and quality of service that they provided suffered. The problem was not just the big outage -- the number of instabilities in the power grid that didn't result in actual outages has been increasing dramatiaclly for decades.
See http://www.ncpa.org/iss/ene/2003/pd081503a.html for some more info.
Who do I blame? The politicians who allowed themselves to be bought off (or conned) by the power companies, to the detriment of the entire country.
"Sure, some people do get paid to develop free software, but the fact is that free software financially supports far fewer professionals."
If you're only looking at programmers working on products, I suspect that you're correct. However, the vast majority (80% the last time I saw a report) of programmers don't work on products at all, but work on systems integration and internal corporate applications, which is where all of that wonderful open source software is used.
"So, as I said, you guys need to get over your irrational hatred of Gates and start seeing what is really going on. There is more to life than your OSS holy war, and Gates has given FAR more money to charity than Torvalds has."
I have mixed feeling about this. Gates has certainly given tons of money away to noble causes, making many people's lives better, but he collected the money in part by doing things that were illegal and unethical on a massive scale. How do you balance those two? I sure don't have the answer.
"BTW, I don't fall for the argument of wonderfullness of altruism."
I think that attributing all work done on open source software to altruism is a mistake. Certainly there are many people working on open source projects because they want to contribute to the world, but most of the people that I know working on open source projects do so because they need to write software to get a job done, and it's more efficient for people with the same problem to write one common piece of software than each to write their own solution, and they don't want to get into the software business instead of the business that they're in. Why does IBM or SGI or Apple pay engineers to work on open source software? It's not altruism, it's a smart business decision -- Apple and IBM sell hardware that is vastly more valuable because of the open source software that runs on it.
My personal opinion is that ultimately the operating system market will resolve down to Microsoft, selling Windows, and every other computer company, collaboratively making open source operating systems (Linux, BSD, etc.) better. And the combined investment of IBM, Apple, HP, Sun, etc., combined with the efforts of the "grass roots developers" will continue to outpace Microsoft.
"Right now, for Open Source Software, I can pay $0 and get developer status and pre-release versions of multiple OS's (including server) and a plethora of programs, and buying non-apple hardware gets me more than a 15% discount."
Sure (except for the pricing bit, which gets into religion that I'd rather not start debating). Of course, every copy of MacOS X comes with a full set of development tools and documentation for free, and of course you've never HAD to pay anyone to develop software for MacOS. The only reason to pay to be an apple developer is that you want the additional support. In any case, the point of my post was that, contrary to the claim of the post I was responding to, Apple's developer program has never been either expensive or exclusive, and that Apple hasn't been secretive with developer information.
"That's just for the "general" case. For example, the Merge Sort has the best worst case performance of any sort, and thats been proven. Also despite the halting problem, automated theorem provers still prove theroems every day."
Right, but to get back to the original point of the discussion, you can't ever prove that a given program CANNOT be further optimized. And as long as it's possible for someone or something to improve the optimization of the "100% optimized" code, there's no such thing as "100% optimized" code.
This is an interesting sounding post, but I just can't make any of it make sense. "It turns out that hand tuning will ALWAYS get you the best optimizations, but human nature dictates that a certain portion of optimizations will never be found. Genetic algorithms will find some of these optimizations in a reasonable time, but not all. So the bottom line is, no code can ever be 100% optimized, unless it is compiled for weeks." If genetic algorithms can find better optimizations than hand tuning (which has been proven on a variety of cases for a decade or so), then it's clearly NOT the case that hand tuning will ALWAYS get you the best optimization. And compiling code for weeks won't optimize it at all (unless you're using HotSpot, I suppose).
Even the phrase "100% optimized" doesn't make sense, because there's no such thing as perfectly optimized code -- someone could always come along with a clever trick, or even a better way to solve the problem.
While there are legitimate things that you could complain about, you're just wrong with these accusations:
"Don't forget that you used to have to register all applications with apple in order to get a unique program identification number"
Apple administers the application ID's because there can only be one list of such ID's. They've never charged for it, or favored any particular application developer pver another, simply assigned unique application ID's as they're asked for.
"extorting money from their developers developers and kept very close reigns on all technical information about their API"
Apple's never required anyone to pay them anything in order to develop software. They have almost always had a free level of developer program that provided access to all of the technical documentation, just without access to their engineers or pre-release software or hardware. And all technical documentation has been widely published, usually available in any good technical bookstore. I've been an Apple developer since the late 80's, and I can't think of a time that they kept any API secret once the product shipped -- they did keep some things secret because it was a unique feature of a new product (e.g. the Newton API's before the Newton shipped), but those case are pretty rare.
"I beleive the artificially constructed hurtles agains program development were what actually killed their development community"
It's always been a good deal to be an Apple developer. You get tons of free software, and discounts on hardware that can often exceed the cost of membership. And, of course, anyone could always buy a copy of any MacOS development tools and build and ship anything that they want without paying Apple anything.
Heck, right now you can pay $500 a year for premier developer status, which gets you pre-release versions of the OS, a free copy of MacOS X Server, and around 15% off on hardware.
I don't think that Apple routinely treats its employees this way -- there are plenty of cool software projects from Apple employees. I suspect in this case something unusual was going on. For example, if Apple did a deal with NetFlix to integrate it into Sherlock, then his work would be directly relevant and Apple could claim it. But since nobody here actually knows anything about what's going on, it's all idle speculation...
I think that it's defined by the number of router hops. I know that people have written software to proxy "LAN" traffic (http://ileech.sourceforge.net/RendezvousProxy/) so that you can access your home music collection from work (for example)...
"iTunes is not transcoding my VBR mp3 files down to 64k in real time just to stream them"
This is correct. The "streamed" files are identical to the files on disk, in their original encoding, with metadata and DRM intact. This is more like "file downloading" without the files being saved to disk than it is like traditional "streaming".
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Actually, according to Slyck, the population of FastTrack users is down about 1m users (it's current around 3.5M from peaks of around 4.5M a while back). Of course, slyck doesn't say how they arrive at that number, but since they're an active promoter of p2p, you wouldn't expect them to make the number artificially low. I'd call a drop of 1/3rd pretty substantial. :-)
"one of the persons getting sued doesn't even know how to use a computer."
It's pretty simple. To quote from the article:
Brenot and her husband said their son-in-law briefly added Internet service to their own cable television account while living with the couple because Comcast Cable Communications Inc. said it would add a surcharge to send separate bills to the same mailing address.
"There's a mistake in this case," Dorothy Brenot said. "We're innocent in all of this, but I don't know how we're going to prove it."
It's a pretty simple situation. The son-in-law set up broadband access, billed to the Brenots. He then downloaded and shared tons of music (774 titles, according to the article), and the RIAA found him and logged his IP address. Then the ISP said that the IP address was assigned to the Brenots, so they are the ones whose name is on the lawsuit. IANAL, but this sounds just like the cases where someone gets a parking ticket based on the license plate of the car, even though someone else parked the car illegally. At least where I live, if you prove that the other person was the one that parked illegally, they pay the ticket.
This is like pretty much all of the other "I didn't do it" cases. Someone was paying for a broadband account that someone else was using, so they got sued for what the other person did. This isn't terribly interesting except to journalists looking for a catchy, if misleading, story, since it's a pretty obvious situation -- I can't think of a way that the RIAA could _avoid_ these sorts of errors, since there's no way for them to know who's actually using the computer, just who's paying for the broadband connection, until they file the lawsuit.
What _would_ be interesting is if the RIAA sued in a case where _nobody_ was doing any illegal file sharing. But so far, out of 382 lawsuits, I haven't heard of any case where that's being claimed. Of course, anything can happen...
Based on the numbers that you can see on Slyck.com, after years of consistent growth, p2p usage is down substantially for the last few months, especially on the networks believed to be actively monitored by the RIAA, with the decline starting at the same time as the filing of the first lawsuits. And based on the announcements by Apple, Napster, MusicMatch, etc., digital music sales appear to be up substantially over the past few months as well. So while coorelation can't prove causality, it sure looks like the lawsuits are effective at making some people stop using the p2p file sharing networks, and might even be helping with digital download music sales.
You're correct -- I misread the article (which has since been made more clear in correcting /.'s summary). That being said, I think that it's lame of Dell not to at least guide naive users towards third party products that could help them. Especially since adware is almost always snuck onto PC's without the user's knowledge (bundled into some other app, or via ActiveX, etc., with only a vague or misleading description). Given how big a problem this is for many users (pretty much anyone with a PC), it's pretty irresponsible of Dell to refuse to discuss the problem with its customers.
They've rewritten the article to explicitly corrent for /.'s misleading article summary (and I didn't catch the "if" in the article the first time around, my bad). Dell is _not_ installing spyware on PC's, they're just refusing to help any of their customers who end up with spyware on their computer. I still think that this is a mistake, since Dell should be more concerned with their customer's computer working than in offending some spyware company's lawyers, but it's not as horrifying as I earlier thought.
"If you buy a Dell, they support the hardware and software they sold you. They don't support random crap you decided to download from the Internet, nor will they be able to answer your cooking questions. Why does this surprise people?"
That's not what's going on, however. Dell is selling you a computer with spyware PRE-INSTALLED, and are refusing to help you remove it because the spyware companies are paying Dell to put it there. Even more horrifying, they're claiming that if you remove the spyware they won't support you. This isn't motivated by any real issues of customer support -- it's pretty well established that removing spyware makes computers more stable. They just don't want to annoy the spyware companies that are paying Dell to be allowed to harass their customers.
That tells me that Dell cares more about its bundled software deals than its customers. The answer is easy -- give your money to a company that puts its customers first.
Here's the entire reference to PKD. It's very cool. Go to http://www.powells.com/authors/powers.html to read the entire interview...
Powers: I met him in '72, when he flew down to Orange County, California. His house had been blown up by unknown evil powers - which really had happened; I've seen photos. He was really just homeless. He flew down to stay with two young ladies who had just lost a roommate and needed somebody to make up the rent, and I knew the two young ladies.
Luckily, I hadn't read more than maybe a couple short stories of his at the time because I would have been just choked with awe. I got to know him, and my wife met him when we started going, which would have been the late seventies. We were there when the paramedics took him out of his apartment in '82.
He was a great guy to hang around. If you just read his biographies, you could get the idea that he was just a doper visionary, a crazy man - and if you just read the biographies, yes, that's the conclusion you'd come to - but actually, he was totally sane and just the funniest guy you'd ever hope to meet. Also the nicest guy. At a crowded party, if he saw some ill-at-ease person who didn't know anybody just kind of hanging by the punch bowl, he'd go over and strike up a conversation. He was always very unaffectedly interested in what you were doing.
I don't know to what extent his work has influenced mine. I've now read all his stuff. He was a natural genius. He could sit down and in twelve days turn out an absolutely brilliant book. He wouldn't sleep or eat, but he could do it in twelve days - almost as if he'd got his fingers stuck in a light socket. It would be hard to emulate that. You can just admire it.
Dave: Is there a book of his that you find above and beyond the rest? Do you have a favorite?
Powers: I think my favorite of his is Martian Time-Slip. It's just a dazzling book. I'm glad his books have started to be published by Vintage. It's fun to see such dignified heavyweight F. Scott Fitzgerald-type books with titles likeMartian Time-Slip. It's nice that he's got himself into that hallowed venue.
"Much as Wired writers like to sensationalize everything nowadays, it is too much of a stretch to attribute all 'false realities' stories to Dick. Philosophers going back to Plato and Descartes have explored doubt of their external realities. They are certainly NOT Dick's themes."
I think you're reading the sentence wrong -- the claim isn't that PKD "owns" the themes of paranoia, memory and alternate realities -- the claim is that paranoia, memory and alternate realities were the themes that underlay his writing. And it's also pretty obvious that PKD's work was a massive influence on writers that followed him. And given how obsessively he dwelt on those themes, even though he didn't invent them, they've become "his".
As a side note, it left out Confessions d'un Barjo.
And just 'cause I can, a few cool PKD lines:
"This was what happened to all the things that came out of the wet earth, out of the filthy slime and mold. All things that lived, big and little. They appeared, struggling out of the sticky wetness. And then, after a time, they died."
"I mean, after all; you have to consider, we're only made out of dust. That's admittedly not much to go on and we shouldn't forget that. But even considering, I mean it's a sort of bad beginning, we're not doing to bad. So I personally have faith that even in this lousy situation we're faced with we can make it. You get me?"
"Can we consider the universe real, and if so, in what way?"
"I hear voices from another star. (I clocked it once, and reception is best between 3:00 A.M. and 4:45 A.M.). Of course, I don't usually tell people this when they ask, 'Say where do you get your ideas?' I just say I don't know. It's safer."
"Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, does not go away."
"The basic tool for the manipulation of reality is the manipulation of words. If you can control the meaning of words, you can control the people who must use the words."
"Anything you think may be held against you."
You get the idea...
I just want to thank the author of the article for mentioning the lesser known movies based on PKD's works (Screamers and Imposter) -- I'm a huge PKD fan, and now I've got a few interesting movies to go rent. I recommend reading all of PKD's short stories. They've been collected into a series of four books, and you can read through them all in a few weeks. And those weeks will be really odd, enlightening weeks. They'll mess with your mind, and cleanse your soul. Go to Amazon and search for "Collected Stories of Philip K. Dick".
"I mean that right now my Sprint phone wouldn't work if I go to AT&Ts network or Cingular's network or someone else. They all use different systems."
This is only kinda true, and for two different reasons that are worth explaining:
First, several of the US carriers use network protocols (CDMA, TDMA) that aren't supported anywhere else, so if you buy a CDMA phone from Verizon it won't physically cannot work with T-Mobile's GSM network, but it will physically work with Alltel's CDMA network.
However, between carriers that use the same network protocol, the telephones that they sell are usually "locked" to a single carrier, which means that you have to get an "unlock code" to use the phone between carriers. Most good wireless phone stores know these codes, and the carriers themselves will often give you the unlock code if you give them a reason that you need to use your phone with another carrier (e.g. international travel). For GSM networks, you can always buy phones "unlocked" so that they can be used with any network -- this is often done in Europe, where people tend to buy pre-paid SIM cards (that go into the phones) rather than long-term contracts.
Personally, I'm optimistic that the US is finally moving to GSM. Not only are there several GSM carriers (Cingular, T-Mobile), but AT&T is moving to GSM as well. The end result of telephone number portability and the adoption of GSM should be that US cell phone market will finally be as competitive as it has been in the rest of the world.
In aggregate there was no power generation shortage -- their were local shortages due to artificial manipulation of generation capacity (e.g. power companies pulling stations offline in order to cause brownouts to scare people into approving higher rates) and in transmission (e.g. shipping the power all over the power grid in order to create bottlenecks).
That being said, it's true that since deregulation the power companies were underinvesting in building new capacity. luckily, while they were regulated they were forced to build enough capacity that they were able to survive a period of laziness. Remember, executives aren't paid to spend money to fix problems that won't be obvious for a decade; they're paid to save money right now, and the next guy in the job can deal with the inherited problems.
Well, the way other markets work (e.g. the stock market) you don't know WHY people buy up a stock, just that they did. So you can't tell whether "President X will die" went up because someone plans to do it himself or simply suspects that someone else will do so, but since people's money is on the line, in aggregate they make good predictions. In practice, these sorts of markets have been working well to predict all sorts of events for many years. It's hard to say why, exactly, markets generate better than average predictions, but they do so fairly consistently.
See http://www.longbets.org for an example of this sort of approach applied without the horrifying moral implications (all of the 'winnings' to go a charity of your choice. Some of the 'long bet' predictions being debated are: "By 2020, bioterror or bioerror will lead to one million casualties in a single event." "By 2050, we will receive intelligent signals from outside our solar system" "By 2007, the U.S. Government will intervene to prevent at least one of the Incumbent Local Exchange Carriers (ILECs)/Regional Bell Operating Companines (RBOCs) (e.g. Verizon, SBC, Bell South, and EXCEPTING Qwest) from filing for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection." "In 2012, 75 percept of all revenue for enterprise software companies will be from subscription fees rather than license fees." There are tons of interesting bets at http://www.longbets.org/bets...
It's somewhat an outgrowth of the Delphi method (http://www.iit.edu/~it/delphi.html), invented back in 1964.
"Unless they can make sure that it's not possible to profit by betting that an event will occur and then causing that event to occur, it could lead to damage."
The fact that people can manipulate the market based on special knowledge is one of the reasons that the whole scheme works. For example, if Assassin X knows that "President Y is going to die" because he's going to shoot him, then buys lots of futures on him dying, shoots him, and makes money on the market. In return for Assasin X making money, he's also provided a warning to President Y, because the stock price in "President Y is going to die" would go up. It's pretty horrifying (IMO) to reward assassins for successful assassinations, but the logic justifying the markets is that the market also gives you advanced warning of the assassination.
Actually, California never had a power generation shortage. They had a pricing problem, where the power distribution companies jacked up their prices (often to 50x pre-deregulation pricing) by manipulating the system (such as creating artificial scarcity, so that the state had to pay more because of a scarcity surcharge clause in the law, or by routing power out of the state and back in in order to invoke an 'out of state power' surcharge)to the point where the state couldn't keep paying.
"It's all about early adopter. We invested huge amounts of money to wire up the whole country before nuclear was an option, and there's no way we can spend that much again to rip it all out and replace it with newer/better/safer alternatives. Same thing with our telephone system, cable tv, internet, etc. We're trying to squeeze every last ounce of usefulness out of the existing system, while so-called "3rd world" countries are getting the latest and greatest tech because they have no prior investments."
I disagree completely -- until the US deregulated, we had an extremely reliable power system that was able to expand dramatically for many decades to keep up with demand while keeping prices low. Then some lunatics convinced enough people that it was a good idea to make power companies unregulated monopolies (i.e. they were no longer required to invest in maintenance and infrastructure, or to maintain excess capacity to cover emergencies or power spikes, and removed the cap on profit margin), after which the power companies did what you'd expect -- raised rates like crazy while slashing spending on infrastructure maintenance and expansion. The result is that a bunch of investors and CEO's made tons of money while the capacity and quality of service that they provided suffered. The problem was not just the big outage -- the number of instabilities in the power grid that didn't result in actual outages has been increasing dramatiaclly for decades.
See http://www.ncpa.org/iss/ene/2003/pd081503a.html for some more info.
Who do I blame? The politicians who allowed themselves to be bought off (or conned) by the power companies, to the detriment of the entire country.
"Sure, some people do get paid to develop free software, but the fact is that free software financially supports far fewer professionals."
If you're only looking at programmers working on products, I suspect that you're correct. However, the vast majority (80% the last time I saw a report) of programmers don't work on products at all, but work on systems integration and internal corporate applications, which is where all of that wonderful open source software is used.
"So, as I said, you guys need to get over your irrational hatred of Gates and start seeing what is really going on. There is more to life than your OSS holy war, and Gates has given FAR more money to charity than Torvalds has."
I have mixed feeling about this. Gates has certainly given tons of money away to noble causes, making many people's lives better, but he collected the money in part by doing things that were illegal and unethical on a massive scale. How do you balance those two? I sure don't have the answer.
"BTW, I don't fall for the argument of wonderfullness of altruism."
I think that attributing all work done on open source software to altruism is a mistake. Certainly there are many people working on open source projects because they want to contribute to the world, but most of the people that I know working on open source projects do so because they need to write software to get a job done, and it's more efficient for people with the same problem to write one common piece of software than each to write their own solution, and they don't want to get into the software business instead of the business that they're in. Why does IBM or SGI or Apple pay engineers to work on open source software? It's not altruism, it's a smart business decision -- Apple and IBM sell hardware that is vastly more valuable because of the open source software that runs on it.
My personal opinion is that ultimately the operating system market will resolve down to Microsoft, selling Windows, and every other computer company, collaboratively making open source operating systems (Linux, BSD, etc.) better. And the combined investment of IBM, Apple, HP, Sun, etc., combined with the efforts of the "grass roots developers" will continue to outpace Microsoft.
"Right now, for Open Source Software, I can pay $0 and get developer status and pre-release versions of multiple OS's (including server) and a plethora of programs, and buying non-apple hardware gets me more than a 15% discount."
Sure (except for the pricing bit, which gets into religion that I'd rather not start debating). Of course, every copy of MacOS X comes with a full set of development tools and documentation for free, and of course you've never HAD to pay anyone to develop software for MacOS. The only reason to pay to be an apple developer is that you want the additional support. In any case, the point of my post was that, contrary to the claim of the post I was responding to, Apple's developer program has never been either expensive or exclusive, and that Apple hasn't been secretive with developer information.
"That's just for the "general" case. For example, the Merge Sort has the best worst case performance of any sort, and thats been proven. Also despite the halting problem, automated theorem provers still prove theroems every day."
Right, but to get back to the original point of the discussion, you can't ever prove that a given program CANNOT be further optimized. And as long as it's possible for someone or something to improve the optimization of the "100% optimized" code, there's no such thing as "100% optimized" code.
This is an interesting sounding post, but I just can't make any of it make sense. "It turns out that hand tuning will ALWAYS get you the best optimizations, but human nature dictates that a certain portion of optimizations will never be found. Genetic algorithms will find some of these optimizations in a reasonable time, but not all. So the bottom line is, no code can ever be 100% optimized, unless it is compiled for weeks."
If genetic algorithms can find better optimizations than hand tuning (which has been proven on a variety of cases for a decade or so), then it's clearly NOT the case that hand tuning will ALWAYS get you the best optimization. And compiling code for weeks won't optimize it at all (unless you're using HotSpot, I suppose).
Even the phrase "100% optimized" doesn't make sense, because there's no such thing as perfectly optimized code -- someone could always come along with a clever trick, or even a better way to solve the problem.
So close to making sense...
While there are legitimate things that you could complain about, you're just wrong with these accusations:
"Don't forget that you used to have to register all applications with apple in order to get a unique program identification number"
Apple administers the application ID's because there can only be one list of such ID's. They've never charged for it, or favored any particular application developer pver another, simply assigned unique application ID's as they're asked for.
"extorting money from their developers developers and kept very close reigns on all technical information about their API"
Apple's never required anyone to pay them anything in order to develop software. They have almost always had a free level of developer program that provided access to all of the technical documentation, just without access to their engineers or pre-release software or hardware. And all technical documentation has been widely published, usually available in any good technical bookstore. I've been an Apple developer since the late 80's, and I can't think of a time that they kept any API secret once the product shipped -- they did keep some things secret because it was a unique feature of a new product (e.g. the Newton API's before the Newton shipped), but those case are pretty rare.
"I beleive the artificially constructed hurtles agains program development were what actually killed their development community"
It's always been a good deal to be an Apple developer. You get tons of free software, and discounts on hardware that can often exceed the cost of membership. And, of course, anyone could always buy a copy of any MacOS development tools and build and ship anything that they want without paying Apple anything.
Heck, right now you can pay $500 a year for premier developer status, which gets you pre-release versions of the OS, a free copy of MacOS X Server, and around 15% off on hardware.
I don't think that Apple routinely treats its employees this way -- there are plenty of cool software projects from Apple employees. I suspect in this case something unusual was going on. For example, if Apple did a deal with NetFlix to integrate it into Sherlock, then his work would be directly relevant and Apple could claim it. But since nobody here actually knows anything about what's going on, it's all idle speculation...
I think that it's defined by the number of router hops. I know that people have written software to proxy "LAN" traffic (http://ileech.sourceforge.net/RendezvousProxy/) so that you can access your home music collection from work (for example)...
"iTunes is not transcoding my VBR mp3 files down to 64k in real time just to stream them"
This is correct. The "streamed" files are identical to the files on disk, in their original encoding, with metadata and DRM intact. This is more like "file downloading" without the files being saved to disk than it is like traditional "streaming".