Excellent point. At least one of the authors (Gelerntner) put out a book about how computers 'ought' to be organized. And whaddya know, he had the answer in "Machine Beauty": 'well, MY idea is better'.
It wasn't, but that didn't stop him from barbering on through more than half the book about why file systems ought to be organized his way. The book had a few good points early on, but the rest of it was an infomercial.
This is one of the few books I ever bought that I threw away. Anything Gelerntner says is suspect from my POV, since he appears to be nothing more than a huckster.
-Guncotton is made from wood chips
-Sodium cyanide is made from salt
-Hydrochloric acid is made from salt
-Carbon monoxide is made from coal and air
NaBH4 is -nasty- stuff. You don't want to touch it, it will take the water right out of your skin. You don't want water near it until you want the hydrogen. It -burns-, too.
Probably less dangerous than gasoline, but it is NOT as innocuous as laundry detergent.
Encourage the Senator to remain aware that legislation about the Internet doesn't have crisp borders. Bits don't change color when they cross national boundaries.
When you do that, you might get him to understand that such laws are not easy to enforce and will certainly involve a lot of jurisdictional disputes.
And you might encourage him to realize that it is the lowest common denominator of behavior on the Internet that represents the cutting edge of security needs.
In other words, passing legislation against US Internet users is tantamount to taking their guns away, when they can at any minute be involved in a virtual gun-fight with, for example, Chinese or Indian crackers who have no such laws hampering them.
That was the toughest thing to do until the PPC ROM came out. I still have mine, and use it for the complex-number functions.
My 41C has the upright keys and the 'old' HP logo. It was expensive when I bought it, but it turned out to be the best piece of electronics gear I've ever had.
While I like the way IBM supports os/2, they are worse than useless for hardware. I bought a Home and Away modem/Ethernet card years ago. Under IBM's -own OS-, the Ethernet was not supported though the box said it was. When I called to ask about it, they said "Oh, well, that's part of the LAN group. They do support, at $150/incident". I pointed out that I could buy a new Xircom ethernet card for a lot less than that - and it had os/2 support.
There was some muttering and a promise, never fulfilled, to 'get back to you'.
Quel waste de time. I don't buy IBM hardware any more.
Except for their old heavy keyboards, which are cool.
on the Web. Paypal limits you to a certain amount if you don't give them a bank number. That's fine, they can limit me all they like, but when they only have a credit card number the max I can lose if it gets loose is fifty bucks.
Try recovering -all the money you had in the bank- and eating, paying rent, and so on.
Your suggestion would kill eBay one of two ways: 1)people would wise up and not put their bank numbers on line, or 2)the huge h4x0r population would try to find those bank numbers, see 1).
Most ISPs won't do -anything- when someone is knocking on your firewall. IME their staffs generally don't understand the issues. I've had, for some time, a guy -on my subnet- knocking. Easy enough for me, just deny his IP address, but he's probably doing it to the -whole- subnet.
For the RIAA: sooner or later we'll find where they launch their attacks from. An analog of teergrube might help them waste their time. I don't have the coding skill to build this, but allowing, say, one bit per second from RIAA addresses on 10% of machines ought to keep them from having much fun.
No, the spectrum with 'security' on one end and 'freedom' on the other doesn't exist unless you are killing your own point by making security==slavery.
We HAVE freedom, though it is under assault. We WANT security.
The idea that freedom has to be compromised (and compromised the way the Senate feels is a good idea at the time) in order to get security is what is at issue.
There are many too many times when you get this kind of polar thinking, without anyone defining the axis properly. The 'problem' here is, I submit, 'it was feasible to fly aircraft into the WTC'. This is out-of-the-box thinking, folks, and though the nasty little man figured that one out it has actually been damned difficult for real terrorist activity to get moving in the USA. But what if we said "We have lots of security -assets-. Had they -done their jobs properly- we wouldn't have had incident X"? Why is it every out-of-the-box incident means the government TAKES something? Wouldn't it be in the government's -interest- to screw up on a routine basis?
The War on Some Drugs is like that. The War on Some Drugs is a cash cow for the Fed, some state and local governments, a bunch of police forces and, paradoxically, drug importers themselves.
So, using -existing- assets, requiring -competence- in their use, and holding government -accountable- instead of giving them free rein to shorten our leashes, is what we ought to be doing.
Digital TV isn't selling. There's a giant squabble about how to roll it out, and there are a few people buying the first generation, but how many times will even a rich dumb guy be willing to shell out for new tech once the old goes incompatible? The state of affairs is looking so dire that IIRC the FCC is considering -retiring the analog broadcast spectrum- to drive digital sales.
DivX didn't sell. People didn't want someone telling them 'you've only rented the content, now you have to pay to use it.'
Ebooks don't sell. Duh. There isn't anything going for ebooks in terms of convenience, and people realize that putting content in digital form comes with controls that -take rights away- they're accustomed to having in books.
DAT didn't sell. SCaMS (Serial Copy Management System) killed it.
So - when SSSCA-protected content comes out, only the -latest- hardware will be able to display it. All the other hardware won't. The thinking appears to be that people will just rush out in droves to buy the new compliant hardware.
Bet they won't. I bet they'll say 'bring it to me, so I can see it on -my- machine right now." The idea that selling can be -driven- is wrong and getting wronger. And imagine driving it by telling people "The computer you have now is illegal." The answer will be "OK, screw it, if my computer is that bad I'll just forget the whole thing."
If you want to see the entertainment industry pleading for a bailout, watch what happens when they try to push this crap on people who don't understand.
As in most things, what goes around, comes around
on
Morals and Layoffs
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
I work in the Silicon Valley. A number of companies here find it hard to get workers because they treated layoffs wrong. Loyalty is a two-way transaction. For example, the armed services are learning this, because there appears to be a crisis of downward loyalty (this has been written about pretty extensively). Basically top brass sacrifice their subordinates, and it's quit working. Captain-level attrition was never higher.
It's the same in industry. Some companies -always- have waiting lists. Some companies play hell getting people to come on board. There's a reason for that. Corporate, like individual, reputation has a lot to do with how willing people are to work there. And reputation, both good and bad, is pretty often earned.
I sent Mike Honda an email expressing a couple specific concerns: the expansion of wiretap authorization to US Attorneys and the encryption backdoor issue. I requested that he oppose such legislation.
His response was drivel. A little speech about how bad the WTC attack was, and how displeased he was about it.
That is all the evidence I need to ensure he gets no vote from me next time. There isn't any incumbent Congresscritter from California to vote for, since Barbara Boxer is silly anyway, and Feinstein is a co-sponsor of one of these "Terrorism Bad! Government Good!" bills.
If you send mail to your critter, and you get anything intelligent, perhaps you'd post it as a counter-example.
I don't know how many times I have seen a "degreed scientist" torpedoing his own argument as you do. Look at your citations. What's the common thread? Science?
Hell, no. The common thread is 'wants money'.
Global warming is the biggest pork-barrel since Star Wars (and I know, I worked on Star Wars). You can't tell when you're done, you can't tell whether what you did worked or whether the effect came from something else. You can't even deconvolve normal changes from "global warming" changes. There hasn't been enough -time-. Twenty years ago global -cooling- was the worry bead. And twenty years? You haven't even learned how limited little fixes are in that time, how can you advocate a -global- fix?
You don't have the moral high ground. Stop using Appeal to Authority when you need to present -data- that are clear and unambiguous (good luck getting it).
Second, who gets to define what p2p is? I would argue that the first Internet connection was by definition peer-to-peer. When do boxen stop being peers and start being, well, something else? According to Microsoft SMB file sharing -is- peer-to-peer. And the business I am in lives and dies by SMB file sharing. As do a lot of businesses where the 'Network Neighborhood' icon can be found. The water gets awfully muddy if we do SMB file sharing to a box that has a 'server' name tag on it. If SMB is p2p but the connection is between my workstation and the server, is it still p2p?
If p2p isn't the connection type, is it the boxen? I could say 'no, we're NOT using p2p communication since we just hung a 'server' name tag on the box where the files are stored'. Sit someone down at the console and have him run an app. Now, is it still a server? Does a telnet connection become p2p if someone is playing Tetris on the console, and start being client/server when the game ends? If Tetris doesn't make the box qualify as a workstation, then what about Solid Designer?
Someone needs to define the terms. I suspect this is why p2p is such a versatile marketing term - anything that was plain ol' networking can be called p2p if you keep the definition vague enough.
The paper attacks the economics of the PMBR. Worse, it does it the way a five-year-old does magic tricks (See the quarter? Now close your eyes.... it's GONE!). The assumptions change with the point being made. Item. Look at the 'biomass' bar on the CO2 graph, page 13 - it is -zero-. How are you going to -move- that much biomass? With non-polluting oxen?
There is a long, obligatory 'let's scare the proles' section about how dangerous nuclear power is, but there isn't anything in there that admits the PBMRs are -not susceptible- to the accidents they discuss.
Dreadful reference; this is a bunch of smear tactics, very slightly removed from outright fraud. The only value in the paper is it's the last one I need from Earthlife Africa.
Electronics are just expensive useless boxes without the software to make them do something useful.
Right, d00d. Check out a McIntosh MC 75 amplifier before you say anything else. Name me the code in there. (It is a tube amplifier.) Manley, VAC, and many others still make electronics that don't embody a single line of code today.
The engineers who designed the 75 knew a lot, don't kid yourself. If you look at the number of -discrete devices- in a tube amp you will find there aren't many. Yet they amplify.
So - a long time ago, people didn't have computers, and they still made electronics. Fussy electronics? Yup. Flaky electronics? Maybe. But electronics that sold, and worked, and brought music into their houses.
There were electronics before computers. There will be electronics after computers.
And I can still do that. I can still use a slide rule and books of tables, which were accurate enough before computers were available. My first equipment designs were that way, with analog -everything-, on a real drawing board. And BTW, you probably have depended on those designs for your comfort and safety, they're pneumatic controls for DC-9s.
So if a massive EMP event kills all silicon worldwide, you're going to need me a hell of a lot more than I'm going to need you. I can use the tools, but if I didn't have them I could still get my job done. The equipment wouldn't be as pretty or as efficient but it would work.
Can you say the same about your job? Do you have the grace to admit that knowing -multiple- ways to deliver the goods is better than having only one? Yep, engineers have a choice. We choose to use computers the way we choose to use certain alloys in structures. In case of need there is another way.
Ever since those idiotic banner ads started showing up I've been using proxy filters for Web browsing. This breaks some services, and I live without them. It is now breaking fewer services than my unwillingness to run Java does.
The idea that ad delivery costs browsing time, and that ad creators are willing to make me pay with time in advance to see the ads, is all I ever needed to know about them.
Advertisers, instead of advertising/annoying people, spend your money making a -usable- Web site without a lot of 'experience management' crap. When I want to buy something, I'll come to your Web site if you have it -but try to get me to sign in or have a username/password pair and I'll leave. Show me a "x-shockwave-flash" error and I'm gone. Insist on cookies, Java, Javascript, ActiveX or whatever and I'm history.
And don't spam.
Once you've got through all these criteria you have a site from which I'll -buy stuff-. There aren't many. Amazon spams, so does Elstead Maps. They're two of my former suppliers. McMaster-Carr and Mouser Electronics meet all the criteria above (well, OK, for McM I'll turn on Javascript) and they have been selling me stuff for years. Textbooksource.net is beginning to look good.
So - do you want sales, or do you want to create a user experience? If you just want to sell stuff, get on with it and lose the cute graphics. If you want to create a user experience, forget it, because -my- experience is going to be locate, purchase, leave. If you want a 'relationship', forget it. We'll have one if -I- say so. I'm the one with the money, remember?
The same phenomenon is affecting every bit of the recording and distribution of content: there have not been enough gains in technological complexity to keep small participants out, yet the second-tier or widely available tech is increasingly top drawer. The idea of throwing patches of complexity on top of a basically accessible technology is the end game in the fight between the studios and the average guy. And it increasingly doesn't work, since the technological patches are challenging only on this generation of hardware and are fixed, then quickly disseminated by the very distribution means that looks to be the primary threat.
Think it over. Twenty years ago we had a few studios making movies, and that was it. Anything done by a bunch of people on a low budget was -obviously- low-budget, that's because the difference between a 35mm Panaflex camera and even an Arri was a couple orders of magnitude. No other technology was capable of delivering anything like 'pro' quality.
Same with sound recording. Either you had a garage band recording whose bad acoustics were a feature, or you had a 'good' recording, and the difference (purpose-designed rooms, ribbon mikes, big mixing boards and Otari tape recorders) was millions of bucks. Now, so much of this is just a non-issue that a careful person can make a recording whose quality rivals anything out of a major studio. You can fix the acoustics, even, if you work at it, but very often you don't need a physical instrument anyway. The biggest non-technological need is talent, but the talent is getting re-defined by the tech.
The problem as far as the studios are concerned is that -every step- of the creation and distribution process is feasibly done at home now. It isn't just distribution. It isn't just recording. It isn't just mixdown. It's the whole shooting match. Every phase of the business can be done at home.
A new -presentation- of art is what it would take for the studios to regain their dominance. Imagine 'feelies'. Have the recording deliver to you what the MTV bimbos -feel like- and there you have a new presentation that would sell. Now, if the tech to deliver the feelies involved an NMR scanner, a research-grade nuclear reactor and fifty square miles of land, -there- would be a barrier to participation that would vault a deep-pockets studio to its former dominance.
As long as this doesn't happen, the big studios are doomed and they know it. They are fighting a delaying action that will ultimately fail.
There is no such thing as a productive meeting with 19 entities. It will be on this order:
(Mr. Jones) uh... uh... what's port 23?
(Mr. Smith) (inaudible) Oh that's the Frabazz port.
(Mr. Gates) When I was writing DOS...(inaudible) any ports at all.
(Mr. Wilson) um...fscken kiddies
And so on.
What will come of this is blathersgate. These fellows will have a marvelous time pulling one anothers' puds and releasing statements. Nothing productive will emerge.
Beeline, Integranautics, Modular Mining and Trimble Navigation already have self-navigating farm tractors and mining trucks.
These systems will to my knowledge measure their positions to within 10 cm horizontally and within 30 cm vertically. This is done using differential GPS (DGPS).
Selective availability has been turned off. Using only instantaneous measurements from a constellation the expected accuracy is on the order of 10 m today.
Differential GPS nulls out atmospheric errors by 'knowing' a fixed position and sending CMR (corrective measurement records) to other systems nearby. In dynamic situations (the tractor is moving) you use RTK (real-time kinematic) data to update the system.
Most of the self-navigating systems have inertial measurement as a patch method while the tractors are under trees or bridges.
they're also free to take your money and run (without a government to enforce the contract between buyer and seller) or to send you shoddy goods. Here's where having a government actually helps - you can get contracts enforced.
Look for credit card companies to start requiring you to do business only with vendors within a national jurisdiction, or accept the full risk of any problem (i.e. a credit card number willingly given outside national boundaries is same-as-cash).
The coin of -reputation- will outshine the coin of enforcement, though, if extranationals know what's good for them.
Slashdot Mirror
Excellent point. At least one of the authors (Gelerntner) put out a book about how computers 'ought' to be organized. And whaddya know, he had the answer in "Machine Beauty": 'well, MY idea is better'.
It wasn't, but that didn't stop him from barbering on through more than half the book about why file systems ought to be organized his way. The book had a few good points early on, but the rest of it was an infomercial.
This is one of the few books I ever bought that I threw away. Anything Gelerntner says is suspect from my POV, since he appears to be nothing more than a huckster.
Every time I see a "X made from Y" I think of
-Guncotton is made from wood chips
-Sodium cyanide is made from salt
-Hydrochloric acid is made from salt
-Carbon monoxide is made from coal and air
NaBH4 is -nasty- stuff. You don't want to touch it, it will take the water right out of your skin. You don't want water near it until you want the hydrogen. It -burns-, too.
Probably less dangerous than gasoline, but it is NOT as innocuous as laundry detergent.
Encourage the Senator to remain aware that legislation about the Internet doesn't have crisp borders. Bits don't change color when they cross national boundaries.
When you do that, you might get him to understand that such laws are not easy to enforce and will certainly involve a lot of jurisdictional disputes.
And you might encourage him to realize that it is the lowest common denominator of behavior on the Internet that represents the cutting edge of security needs.
In other words, passing legislation against US Internet users is tantamount to taking their guns away, when they can at any minute be involved in a virtual gun-fight with, for example, Chinese or Indian crackers who have no such laws hampering them.
That was the toughest thing to do until the PPC ROM came out. I still have mine, and use it for the complex-number functions.
My 41C has the upright keys and the 'old' HP logo. It was expensive when I bought it, but it turned out to be the best piece of electronics gear I've ever had.
While I like the way IBM supports os/2, they are worse than useless for hardware. I bought a Home and Away modem/Ethernet card years ago. Under IBM's -own OS-, the Ethernet was not supported though the box said it was. When I called to ask about it, they said "Oh, well, that's part of the LAN group. They do support, at $150/incident". I pointed out that I could buy a new Xircom ethernet card for a lot less than that - and it had os/2 support.
There was some muttering and a promise, never fulfilled, to 'get back to you'.
Quel waste de time. I don't buy IBM hardware any more.
Except for their old heavy keyboards, which are cool.
on the Web. Paypal limits you to a certain amount if you don't give them a bank number. That's fine, they can limit me all they like, but when they only have a credit card number the max I can lose if it gets loose is fifty bucks.
Try recovering -all the money you had in the bank- and eating, paying rent, and so on.
Your suggestion would kill eBay one of two ways: 1)people would wise up and not put their bank numbers on line, or 2)the huge h4x0r population would try to find those bank numbers, see 1).
Most ISPs won't do -anything- when someone is knocking on your firewall. IME their staffs generally don't understand the issues. I've had, for some time, a guy -on my subnet- knocking. Easy enough for me, just deny his IP address, but he's probably doing it to the -whole- subnet.
For the RIAA: sooner or later we'll find where they launch their attacks from. An analog of teergrube might help them waste their time. I don't have the coding skill to build this, but allowing, say, one bit per second from RIAA addresses on 10% of machines ought to keep them from having much fun.
No, the spectrum with 'security' on one end and 'freedom' on the other doesn't exist unless you are killing your own point by making security==slavery.
We HAVE freedom, though it is under assault. We WANT security.
The idea that freedom has to be compromised (and compromised the way the Senate feels is a good idea at the time) in order to get security is what is at issue.
There are many too many times when you get this kind of polar thinking, without anyone defining the axis properly. The 'problem' here is, I submit, 'it was feasible to fly aircraft into the WTC'. This is out-of-the-box thinking, folks, and though the nasty little man figured that one out it has actually been damned difficult for real terrorist activity to get moving in the USA. But what if we said "We have lots of security -assets-. Had they -done their jobs properly- we wouldn't have had incident X"? Why is it every out-of-the-box incident means the government TAKES something? Wouldn't it be in the government's -interest- to screw up on a routine basis?
The War on Some Drugs is like that. The War on Some Drugs is a cash cow for the Fed, some state and local governments, a bunch of police forces and, paradoxically, drug importers themselves.
So, using -existing- assets, requiring -competence- in their use, and holding government -accountable- instead of giving them free rein to shorten our leashes, is what we ought to be doing.
I'm not so sure.
Digital TV isn't selling. There's a giant squabble about how to roll it out, and there are a few people buying the first generation, but how many times will even a rich dumb guy be willing to shell out for new tech once the old goes incompatible? The state of affairs is looking so dire that IIRC the FCC is considering -retiring the analog broadcast spectrum- to drive digital sales.
DivX didn't sell. People didn't want someone telling them 'you've only rented the content, now you have to pay to use it.'
Ebooks don't sell. Duh. There isn't anything going for ebooks in terms of convenience, and people realize that putting content in digital form comes with controls that -take rights away- they're accustomed to having in books.
DAT didn't sell. SCaMS (Serial Copy Management System) killed it.
So - when SSSCA-protected content comes out, only the -latest- hardware will be able to display it. All the other hardware won't. The thinking appears to be that people will just rush out in droves to buy the new compliant hardware.
Bet they won't. I bet they'll say 'bring it to me, so I can see it on -my- machine right now." The idea that selling can be -driven- is wrong and getting wronger. And imagine driving it by telling people "The computer you have now is illegal." The answer will be "OK, screw it, if my computer is that bad I'll just forget the whole thing."
If you want to see the entertainment industry pleading for a bailout, watch what happens when they try to push this crap on people who don't understand.
I work in the Silicon Valley. A number of companies here find it hard to get workers because they treated layoffs wrong. Loyalty is a two-way transaction. For example, the armed services are learning this, because there appears to be a crisis of downward loyalty (this has been written about pretty extensively). Basically top brass sacrifice their subordinates, and it's quit working. Captain-level attrition was never higher.
It's the same in industry. Some companies -always- have waiting lists. Some companies play hell getting people to come on board. There's a reason for that. Corporate, like individual, reputation has a lot to do with how willing people are to work there. And reputation, both good and bad, is pretty often earned.
I sent Mike Honda an email expressing a couple specific concerns: the expansion of wiretap authorization to US Attorneys and the encryption backdoor issue. I requested that he oppose such legislation.
His response was drivel. A little speech about how bad the WTC attack was, and how displeased he was about it.
That is all the evidence I need to ensure he gets no vote from me next time. There isn't any incumbent Congresscritter from California to vote for, since Barbara Boxer is silly anyway, and Feinstein is a co-sponsor of one of these "Terrorism Bad! Government Good!" bills.
If you send mail to your critter, and you get anything intelligent, perhaps you'd post it as a counter-example.
Please don't touch the equipment then.
I don't know how many times I have seen a "degreed scientist" torpedoing his own argument as you do. Look at your citations. What's the common thread? Science?
Hell, no. The common thread is 'wants money'.
Global warming is the biggest pork-barrel since Star Wars (and I know, I worked on Star Wars). You can't tell when you're done, you can't tell whether what you did worked or whether the effect came from something else. You can't even deconvolve normal changes from "global warming" changes. There hasn't been enough -time-. Twenty years ago global -cooling- was the worry bead. And twenty years? You haven't even learned how limited little fixes are in that time, how can you advocate a -global- fix?
You don't have the moral high ground. Stop using Appeal to Authority when you need to present -data- that are clear and unambiguous (good luck getting it).
3. He clarifies the license (the distribution policies of HIS software).
He changed it, adding restrictions that were not stated, and that therefore did not exist originally in the license...
No, he did not change it. The point is made in this thread .
The license was never *BSD. Nobody is free to modify the code, since the right of modification doesn't exist if it isn't explicitly offered.
So there is no question of forking the code. If "OpenIPF" is ever produced it will have to be a clean-sheet development. Darren owns IPF.
And with the war of words that's under way, Darren would have to be a saint or a wuss to open-source it now.
This question almost looks like a troll.
First, why would a marketing term need a defense?
Second, who gets to define what p2p is? I would argue that the first Internet connection was by definition peer-to-peer. When do boxen stop being peers and start being, well, something else? According to Microsoft SMB file sharing -is- peer-to-peer. And the business I am in lives and dies by SMB file sharing. As do a lot of businesses where the 'Network Neighborhood' icon can be found. The water gets awfully muddy if we do SMB file sharing to a box that has a 'server' name tag on it. If SMB is p2p but the connection is between my workstation and the server, is it still p2p?
If p2p isn't the connection type, is it the boxen? I could say 'no, we're NOT using p2p communication since we just hung a 'server' name tag on the box where the files are stored'. Sit someone down at the console and have him run an app. Now, is it still a server? Does a telnet connection become p2p if someone is playing Tetris on the console, and start being client/server when the game ends? If Tetris doesn't make the box qualify as a workstation, then what about Solid Designer?
Someone needs to define the terms. I suspect this is why p2p is such a versatile marketing term - anything that was plain ol' networking can be called p2p if you keep the definition vague enough.
The paper attacks the economics of the PMBR. Worse, it does it the way a five-year-old does magic tricks (See the quarter? Now close your eyes.... it's GONE!). The assumptions change with the point being made. Item. Look at the 'biomass' bar on the CO2 graph, page 13 - it is -zero-. How are you going to -move- that much biomass? With non-polluting oxen?
There is a long, obligatory 'let's scare the proles' section about how dangerous nuclear power is, but there isn't anything in there that admits the PBMRs are -not susceptible- to the accidents they discuss.
Dreadful reference; this is a bunch of smear tactics, very slightly removed from outright fraud. The only value in the paper is it's the last one I need from Earthlife Africa.
If your opinion is not like mine you are morally defective anyway.
So what was your point, Katz?
Electronics are just expensive useless boxes without the software to make them do something useful.
Right, d00d. Check out a McIntosh MC 75 amplifier before you say anything else. Name me the code in there. (It is a tube amplifier.) Manley, VAC, and many others still make electronics that don't embody a single line of code today.
The engineers who designed the 75 knew a lot, don't kid yourself. If you look at the number of -discrete devices- in a tube amp you will find there aren't many. Yet they amplify.
So - a long time ago, people didn't have computers, and they still made electronics. Fussy electronics? Yup. Flaky electronics? Maybe. But electronics that sold, and worked, and brought music into their houses.
There were electronics before computers. There will be electronics after computers.
I've done that.
And I can still do that. I can still use a slide rule and books of tables, which were accurate enough before computers were available. My first equipment designs were that way, with analog -everything-, on a real drawing board. And BTW, you probably have depended on those designs for your comfort and safety, they're pneumatic controls for DC-9s.
So if a massive EMP event kills all silicon worldwide, you're going to need me a hell of a lot more than I'm going to need you. I can use the tools, but if I didn't have them I could still get my job done. The equipment wouldn't be as pretty or as efficient but it would work.
Can you say the same about your job? Do you have the grace to admit that knowing -multiple- ways to deliver the goods is better than having only one? Yep, engineers have a choice. We choose to use computers the way we choose to use certain alloys in structures. In case of need there is another way.
Ever since those idiotic banner ads started showing up I've been using proxy filters for Web browsing. This breaks some services, and I live without them. It is now breaking fewer services than my unwillingness to run Java does.
The idea that ad delivery costs browsing time, and that ad creators are willing to make me pay with time in advance to see the ads, is all I ever needed to know about them.
Advertisers, instead of advertising/annoying people, spend your money making a -usable- Web site without a lot of 'experience management' crap. When I want to buy something, I'll come to your Web site if you have it -but try to get me to sign in or have a username/password pair and I'll leave. Show me a "x-shockwave-flash" error and I'm gone. Insist on cookies, Java, Javascript, ActiveX or whatever and I'm history.
And don't spam.
Once you've got through all these criteria you have a site from which I'll -buy stuff-. There aren't many. Amazon spams, so does Elstead Maps. They're two of my former suppliers. McMaster-Carr and Mouser Electronics meet all the criteria above (well, OK, for McM I'll turn on Javascript) and they have been selling me stuff for years. Textbooksource.net is beginning to look good.
So - do you want sales, or do you want to create a user experience? If you just want to sell stuff, get on with it and lose the cute graphics. If you want to create a user experience, forget it, because -my- experience is going to be locate, purchase, leave. If you want a 'relationship', forget it. We'll have one if -I- say so. I'm the one with the money, remember?
You're thinking too small.
The same phenomenon is affecting every bit of the recording and distribution of content: there have not been enough gains in technological complexity to keep small participants out, yet the second-tier or widely available tech is increasingly top drawer. The idea of throwing patches of complexity on top of a basically accessible technology is the end game in the fight between the studios and the average guy. And it increasingly doesn't work, since the technological patches are challenging only on this generation of hardware and are fixed, then quickly disseminated by the very distribution means that looks to be the primary threat.
Think it over. Twenty years ago we had a few studios making movies, and that was it. Anything done by a bunch of people on a low budget was -obviously- low-budget, that's because the difference between a 35mm Panaflex camera and even an Arri was a couple orders of magnitude. No other technology was capable of delivering anything like 'pro' quality.
Same with sound recording. Either you had a garage band recording whose bad acoustics were a feature, or you had a 'good' recording, and the difference (purpose-designed rooms, ribbon mikes, big mixing boards and Otari tape recorders) was millions of bucks. Now, so much of this is just a non-issue that a careful person can make a recording whose quality rivals anything out of a major studio. You can fix the acoustics, even, if you work at it, but very often you don't need a physical instrument anyway. The biggest non-technological need is talent, but the talent is getting re-defined by the tech.
The problem as far as the studios are concerned is that -every step- of the creation and distribution process is feasibly done at home now. It isn't just distribution. It isn't just recording. It isn't just mixdown. It's the whole shooting match. Every phase of the business can be done at home.
A new -presentation- of art is what it would take for the studios to regain their dominance. Imagine 'feelies'. Have the recording deliver to you what the MTV bimbos -feel like- and there you have a new presentation that would sell. Now, if the tech to deliver the feelies involved an NMR scanner, a research-grade nuclear reactor and fifty square miles of land, -there- would be a barrier to participation that would vault a deep-pockets studio to its former dominance.
As long as this doesn't happen, the big studios are doomed and they know it. They are fighting a delaying action that will ultimately fail.
Snort can do this now.
There is no such thing as a productive meeting with 19 entities. It will be on this order:
(Mr. Jones) uh... uh... what's port 23?
(Mr. Smith) (inaudible) Oh that's the Frabazz port.
(Mr. Gates) When I was writing DOS...(inaudible) any ports at all.
(Mr. Wilson) um...fscken kiddies
And so on.
What will come of this is blathersgate. These fellows will have a marvelous time pulling one anothers' puds and releasing statements. Nothing productive will emerge.
Beeline, Integranautics, Modular Mining and Trimble Navigation already have self-navigating farm tractors and mining trucks.
These systems will to my knowledge measure their positions to within 10 cm horizontally and within 30 cm vertically. This is done using differential GPS (DGPS).
Selective availability has been turned off. Using only instantaneous measurements from a constellation the expected accuracy is on the order of 10 m today.
Differential GPS nulls out atmospheric errors by 'knowing' a fixed position and sending CMR (corrective measurement records) to other systems nearby. In dynamic situations (the tractor is moving) you use RTK (real-time kinematic) data to update the system.
Most of the self-navigating systems have inertial measurement as a patch method while the tractors are under trees or bridges.
This works and you can see it here .
they're also free to take your money and run (without a government to enforce the contract between buyer and seller) or to send you shoddy goods. Here's where having a government actually helps - you can get contracts enforced.
Look for credit card companies to start requiring you to do business only with vendors within a national jurisdiction, or accept the full risk of any problem (i.e. a credit card number willingly given outside national boundaries is same-as-cash).
The coin of -reputation- will outshine the coin of enforcement, though, if extranationals know what's good for them.
if that person doesn't say "os/2" somewhere. Burbling on about the relative merits of NT/Gnome/KDE GUIs is comparing cars in a junkyard.
I use them all and the killer GUI is the Presentation Manager (TM).