Ah, so we should stiffle useful technological advances, and live in fear of terror until the problem magically goes away?
The universe is a big scary place; we won't have the pleasure fully discovering this if we crawl under our beds and hide.
So when to elevator tickets go on sale?
Sadly, it's not a problem with the networks
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Discarded Cell Phones
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· Score: 3, Informative
I've worked as an engineer for cellular (an/dig/PCS/GSM etc.) providers for about 13 years now and stood around many a water cooler chatting with the marketing people.
They have two basic reasons for not wanting your old phone.
1. Sometimes, unbeknownst to you, the reason you had a crappy experience with your other service provider was the phone. This is not a profitable fact to advertise. It is more profitable to claim, "Yes, the other guys suck" and here's proof. You get a new phone and better reception and are convinced the other guys weren't as good, and you tell all your friends. The other problem is with letting you convert a possibly (but unlikely) bad phone is that the problem doesn't go away, and again, the user becomes aware that the old provider had just as good a service.
2. Most providers want to spend as little as possible on sales staff. This means a minimum of training. The simplest solution is to give them a box'o'phones, that all work alike, and train them for two or three different models. Better still is to preprogram the phone with numbers that are in the system, but "suspended." This way, without any knowledge of cell phones at all they can get you to sign a contract, take your money, call the customer care department to have the phone "unsuspended." And Voila! Sales without training.
Unless you change system types (Cell to PCS, PCS to GSM etc.) your phone would work just fine. GSM providers (T-Mobile, Cingular and the like) don't have this hassle since most of the programming is in the removable SIM. With those systems they will charge you a $10-$20 new sim fee and you can slip it into your old GSM phone and keep using all the headsets, batteries, chargers, covers and other stuff you purchased. That is assuming you can put up with their typically lousy rural coverage.
My Tivo has 60some hours of recording time. And it's more than enough. The reality of TV watching is that there is very little worth seeing more than twice. I don't know that I've ever had anything auto-deleted that I wanted to watch, and if I did, I'd blame myself for not getting around to it in the first 30 days. If you're shopping Tivos, upgrade, but don't go nuts, it's just not necessary...
My best idea is public execution of spammers, preferably by hanging. After the first few die on live TV, the others might become discouraged.
I hate to interrupt the formation of the new Nazi Party, but if you're curious as to whether you're standing on moral highground, substitute the word hacker for the word spammer in your post and the other "...Drawn and quartered, and burned, and then we jump on their ashes till our feet have blisters..." posts.
Spammers are easily the Net's most annoying feature. And since they press our hot button few people seem to mind when the same draconian tactics are used against them that were used against Kevin Mitnick. When corporations that testified against Mitnick claimed that he cost them thousands in damages, but didn't report any losses to their stock holders, the Internet community was quick to call foul (for all the good it did). But when the ball is in our court "justifiable costs" don't seem to apply. It does not cost me $100 per e-mail to hit the delete button. The ten spams I get a day don't cost anybody $1000 in bandwidth, storage, maintenance or any of the other exaggerated costs the/. crowd cites.
The bill calls for fines up to $50,000 dollars for "accidental violations." I don't know about the rest of you, but my first experience with m4 macros in the sendmail.cf file was not pretty. Did anybody but the author get it all right the first time?
When hundreds of thousands of dollars are at stake it becomes clear (to lawyers and congressfolk) that better tracking measures are needed. How many innocent ISPs will have to go out of business for "aiding and abetting" before "unsigned" e-mail is disallowed altogether. After all, the Federally Approved key database will be free in the beginning. The only people who wouldn't want to use it will be spammers, terrorists and drug dealers. How long will it be before you have to have a Microsoft Passport (tm, r, etc.) to send to an MSN subscriber. Is this the direction you want the net to take? We decide.
"...the Ohio law is a positive action in the war on spam..."
or is that "War on Terrorism" or "War on Drugs," or the War on our Freedom.
their Nintendos. The instant satisfaction factor of playing Max Payne has not yet lost it's gloss; but it will. Once you've shot every imaginable bad guy, with every imaginable weapon while falling through fluidic space backwards and tumbling... it will get old and the rewards of the longer term pursuits will again seem worthy of the efforts. Computers have been an adventure for a couple decades now, but soon, for most, they'll just be tools again, about as exciting as screwdriver design.
Thankfully some will retain their interest after the glam is gone, Blessed be the inventers of Torx.
Sadly,when the industries feel is it their right to uniquely label and track these things they'll feel it's their right to watermark more and more thoroughly until, as others have suggested, the quality is barely better than VHS tapes. Before that occurs they'll have come up with mathematically unique IDs that use some variation public key exchange to verify their authenticity to the player. Players that don't require this, will the "tools of terrorism" etc. etc. The real pirates will breeze through all these safeguards like they don't exist, and the only net effect will be higher costs and lost civil liberties.
When I read stories like yours I'm filled with nothing but frank admiration. Raising kids, going to school and holding a job was something my Dad did while I was growing up. He had Mom's help, but he also worked three jobs. I have no idea when he slept.
I believe you've made the classic programmer's mistake however.
If you download and run a hundred programs off of freshmeat, you'll find that half of them require a good level of programming understanding to make them work. One might conclude that the people who wrote them are inconsiderate pricks for not going to the extra 5% effort to save the user all the hassles that you encountered. If reading some of the README.txt files that come with them you wouldn't have look hard to find an attitude that supports this opinion, and perhaps you'd be right from your perspective. But the people involved in gifting this software to the world are rarely as inconsiderate or prickish as the average user of their software might conclude.
The fact is that to these people, everything about their programs is obvious. They have been living, working, and breathing computers for so long that they take for granted the erosion of their old perspectives and the creation of their new, more useful ones. So when they bust their butts putting out some terribly cool, new piece of software, and days later they have three compliments and a hundred e-mail's asking about the most trivial bugglettes they conclude that people are whiners. They chat with the people who gave good constructive criticism or compliments, and go on with their lives, forming a community of people around them that "get it."
This community only reinforces their high-standards for computer savvy. And they look down their nose at the rest of the world as being "pathetic."
As anyone who is new to the Linux community will attest, this attitude does not well serve their longterm goals, of ubiquitous availability of their feature packed, stable, Free desktop.
"I did it twice. And I am not alone, nor am I exceptional in that regard."
Yes, you are.
And as a consequence, you recognize and are attracted to people that are. The corollary is especially true. People that whine to you about their lesser problems may get a sympathetic ear, but they will divine more about your opinions by your actions than your words. Your mouth may say, "poor dear" but your actions say "suck it up and and push through."
And in many cases this may be just the message they need.
I've met a number of people who weren't up to the task, and the results aren't pretty. Like the user that spends hours trying to run the "simple" software but just can't make it work, these women took on the task, were overwhelmed and fell apart, or more commonly became bad workers, bad students, and bad mothers. They whine enough that the good men (that they have concluded no longer exist) all recognize the lack of good companionship, and go about their business. They overeat such that the shallow but decent men avoid them as well. They scream at their kids till the kindhearted men seek like soulmates elsewhere. This leaves them in relationships with saints and the losers, and the ratio of the two isn't very good. Additionally they have the opportunity to pass on to the next generation, all the damage they have accumulated in this one.
Personally, I do not comb through 100 A.D. texts to find justifications for my actions. The places where I've shown character or talent do not isolate me from the damaged women raising especially damaged children. And from my perspective whether or not ancient texts can be translated and interpreted to define a fetus as life or not is interesting, but irrelevant. I will concede that the fetus can be defined as human, and alive, but that doesn't really affect the issue either. If we are to be social engineers, as laws pro and anti abortion force us to be, the question is are we better off letting the woman kill it or not (regardless of how it's labeled). It's a lose/lose proposition. The women that don't have what it takes to tough it out are not as rare as you might like to think, and the damage they do to their children, and that their children pass on their children is very costly. It's a murder in self-defense of a society that doesn't condone murder. Which makes about as much sense as a society that enforces pro-life laws at gunpoint against women who aren't up to the task of properly creating members of that society.
I do not pretend to have an answer to this problem. But I do know a tough person when I read their works, and like many of the excellent programmers I've written to on freshmeat, I must say, "you're not alone, but your not the norm." People who aren't up to your standards, are still people and their needs still count for something. When the time comes that you've lost sight of that, you're either an elitist 5up3r hax0r, or a bible-thumping religious zealot. The world has enough of these.
From the article: "But software is advancing at a tremendous pace, so it becomes obsolete every 18 months."
Um, no, it's hardware that doubles in speed every 18 months. The approval rate for new aircraft technologies (at least in the states) is unbearably slow. This is clearly a weak excuse for the correctly identified problem:
"The basic stumbling block was not to get off-the-shelf components and software"
Maturity couldn't be a more critical issue to this kind of software. Where half a day's downtime can cause inconvenience to 10% of the population of your island, and ignoring a problem can get people killed, you need a proven winner. Software for managing the traffic over the UK should not even have been considered unless it had been proven for years of service controlling airspace over something noticably less crowded than one of the hubs of global trade.
I've never owned a parallel port scanner, mostly because, well, they suck. The money vs. features ratio on them is very good, but they are just too darned slow.
I have had an Astra 1200S (S for SCSI) since 600/1200 was cutting edge. In the beginning one had to fiddle about quite a bit to get Xsane working with it, but now, it and it's beefier scsi breathren work like champs.
I've had the same good luck with PayPal for many dozens' of Ebay auctions, and still use them.
I did, however, join the WebPlayer coop where a very hardworking and industrious fellow (Slatch) negotiated to buy a pile (> 400) of the little personal Internet appliances from the manufacturerer when their "sell you the box, hook you on our ISP" service died like all the others of it's kind (e.g. I-Opener). Anyhow, we all agreed on methods and such and e-mailed Slatch our funds. And according to PayPal this behavior tripped, some undisclosed, undocumented limit for "suspicious" activity.
Everybody stood behind the hardworking fellow, but the hundred or so people who called to complain that they didn't have their money and that the recipient didn't either, got the same line, "This is really a matter between us and the recipient." Slatch forwarded them obscene amounts of data, to get his account unfrozen, and it did finally happen, but it was weeks.
Luckily, no-one is ever really desperate to get a new hackable-netappliance.
So as useful as I find PayPal, I can't credit them with being a good company, as any company can deliver good service when all their scripts are working, and in fact, doing all the work. The hallmark of good businessfolk is how they handle things when they go awry. My observation would have to be, "poorly."
The proprietary lic. was a very smart move.
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LinuxWorld Summary
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· Score: 1
I just installed the latest Xfree and layered Ximian on it. Once working, this IS good enough for the non-geeks to enjoy, and Moz. 9.7 is noticably snappier.
But the most important reason that I can't recommend this platform to my fortune 500 client (yes, sadly, only one) is that it's not a slam dunk with their crappy Exchange Servers. And it has to be. Reverse engineering that interface is not nearly as good a solution as licensing it from the manufacturer, and that costs money, and there are undoubtedly "don't open source this or we'll crush you like Netscape" clauses in the contract they signed.
The corporate folk who need this won't give a damn about $60 a head to have out of the box interoperability with with their current systems, and once it's on everyone's system, they may later discover the wonder of Sendmail.
These are two very different cases that should have two very different treatments.
First I would like to point out Jennifer's poor sense of perspective:
For every person using a computer or the Internet for research, commerce or communication, there may be another person using that technology to commit a crime.
The suggestion that there "may be" one "criminal user" out there for every legitimate user is nothing less than retarded. If there were 10 million+ hackers out there it seems unlikely that Jennifer's toaster would remain unhacked after a display of such blatant prejudice.
But reactionary posturing aside, the ugly part of this mess is that these two people can be mentioned on the same page.
Salcedo is likely a criminal under non-computer law. And additionally, he's an idiot. If he's responsible for intentionally, irrecoverably (to the novice of course) crashing a business system, there is no need for computer-oriented law to prosecute him.
Salens on the other hand is just a punk kid to did a little digital graffiti. It's ironic that Jennifer can make the connection to real world graffiti, but then go on to push for the digital version (which is cheaper and easier to clean up) to be a felony.
Obviously to people with so little sense of the spirit of the law, anything their afraid of should be a felony.
When they are killing children for stealing lollipops, and the children start shooting back, the authoritarians will wonder, "What kind of monster would kill for a lollipop?" The bell tolls for thee.
I believe your road traffic analysis is a good one. More, faster, better, roads do encourage people to drive. A faster quicker internet encourages people to consume it with what would once have been considered trivial things. If you had been trying to download an MP3 across the original ARPANet government agents would have found and quitely gotten rid of "their problem." The hard drive analogy hits home to probably everyone reading this post.
I believe the question is not, "how do we solve the bandwidth problem," but, "can we do something more worthy with our next bump in bandwidth."
In the case of hard drives it is obviously completely under your control. You can upgrade your 4.3gig 3600rpm PIO mode 4 IDE, to a 34gig 7200rpm UDMA 66, and you put your same old data on it and have piles of free space. If that space gets filled with crud that isn't worth the price of the upgrade then you wasted your money.
The example that springs to mind is Deus Ex, a first person shooter/interactive fiction from EIDOS. With my many save games it chews up a GIGABYTE of hard drive all on it's little lonesome. Doom takes up a tiny fraction of the space and has the same general description. But side by side there is no comparison between these two games. The credits of Deus Ex list 52 people who did the voices for 200+ characters that you meet, interact with (and occasionally kill). It is a wholly different experience (which obviously would not exist if not for Doom and descendants (no flame please:))).
Using my hard drives as an example, it is true that they still aren't enough, and it was worth every dime.
I believe the purchase of Internet bandwidth (backbone or endpoint) to be governed by the same logic.
Yes the marketing people will try to waste it on cooler and cooler adds, and people will make 3D VRMLs of their pets, but you don't have to visit their sites. What are you going to do with your extra bandwidth, and will that be worth the extra cost. Will the way you use it enrich your life more than the extra cost. Anybody who can't find needles for their 78 RPM record player and has a taste for '40s and '50s Chicago area blues will find the ability to download the MP3s to be worth the extra $15 a month they spent going from 33.6kbps to 80+kbps.
One of the critical factors that you can control about the bandwidth-traffic loop is to be intolerant of poor connections. The ISP economic loop is guided by what people are willing to put up with. If AT&T@home decides to add 5000 subscribers to an area that already has 5000 without increasing they bandwidth to the backbone, and a year later they have 5000 subscribers and 5000 cancelations, they'll rethink this decision I'm certain.
Please excuse me now, there is multicast of Britney Spears latest interview that I need to go watch;).
We can't actually get behind either. Americans are as techno-hungry as any people on the planet. If they see their European buddies playing with a workable, cool technology, they will have it if they have to pay twice as much and completely re-engineer it to fit their country's freqency band plan. As for the lack of penetration for things like net appliances, do consider how many of us already purchased more computer than we can possibly use, and that next year, we'll buy even more, and give our current ones to people who might otherwise buy net appliances. The world may have Quake 3, but where is it most played at 1600x1200/72fps:).
A respected author who stands to loose more money than I can jump over has risked it all to step into the new age publishing. This is a comendable act regardless of the lack of technical savvy employed.
Way to go Stephen. Now if only I liked your books. Regardless, however, I'll buy one for Mom, and hope that others do the same.
The difference between those who genuinely value freedom, and people that are simply cheap, is that the former will pay for goods received when no entity can force them to do so.
Whether or not Japanese manufacturers try to cram too much Linux into too small a device seems irrelevant to me. Some will, some won't. What is outstanding about this is that on the occasion that I see something that they manufacture, and I want I can retire the phrase, "Damn, only Windows drivers."
If every new computer-interfaced toy that comes out of that island is developed first with a Linux driver, and secondly with a micros~1 driver, it's going to make our fav. OS vastly more appealling to consumers.
If they screw up their kernel, they can always download a good working one from Debian:) .
I've worked in some of the cities mentioned, Calgary, Vancouver, Fairfield CA, Big Bear City CA, Blaine WA to name a few.
The availability of techie drinking buddies varies from place to place. And being able to drive to the road and pick up computer components for "near-net" prices is a nice feature.
But honestly, when "I get my kicks above the waistline, Sunshine." It is with the community of people that I am part of on the Internet.
I currently live in Blaine, WA. I'm easily the geekiest person in this town (3k people), and can't talk techy with anyone in walking distance. Kind of a downer.
I can, however, walk 100 meters to step into a lush forest teaming with huge varieties of birds , and moles and shrews and deer and coyotes.
In Yucca Valley California, there were 330+ days of bright sunshine. Nearly every morning, I could walk out onto the porch, and kick back with some well indexed tome, and feel the cool morning breeze fight the warm desert sun for thrermal dominace of my dermal layers. Of course, three hours a day for 2 months a year, one must be in a well-shaded, well swamp cooled environment.
The reason the Northern folks drink so much coffee BTW, is not because they are inherently geeky. It's because when you go 14 consecutive days without seeing the sun, (no exag. here) you must do something to establish your mind's active/inactive cycles. Else you (really about 90% of humans) will become depressed and continuously tired. They call it Seasonal Affective Disorder. It's real.
Though AT&T has been promising cable modem service here for 11 months, it hasn't quite arrived. My sat. dish give me 400kb download speeds and delivers on that promise 90% of the time. It's quite comfy.
If I were to recommend a city for a fellow geeky person I would say this:
"Connectivity is there for the taking. Toys can be mail ordered. If you want to pick a city, pick one that suits your non-geeky self, dry or moist, forest, desert, or beach. Make it suit your whole person. Geeky goes anywhere, connects to anything, and most importantly adapts at a rate that your body and taste in music and culture cannot match."
Would you want your pacemaker microcode to be writen by the people who created the burned-metal skins for XMMS? Me neither.
Trusted software is not worth the cost and is inappropriate for our 95% of what Linux users do. It helps to make my point if you substitute the words "Mathematically Proven Correct" for the word trusted.
It's a slight simplification, but it eliminates the notion that Linux isn't trustworthy, because of course it is. It is more than trustworthy enough for what we want it to do. It is vastly more trustworthy than any software developed in Redmond, WA.
Formal standards and procedures slow the evolution of a software product to a crawl. For a pacemaker this is fine. For a hype-versatile desktop OS this is silly.
My actual point, be careful what you wish for. Every version of RH software has more cool features added then the last 3 versions of HPUX. This is an excellent trade.
Speaking as one of the winners in the I-Opener contest, our team worked hard on it's submission which was pages long.
The silly little summary posted on the Winner's page was just the cinnamon of the sticky-bun.
This is a great gesture.
The real problem with Netpliance's approach is not a lack of generosity, but a lack of interest in pursuing the profitable aspects of opensource develpment.
One of my clients has an application (that I wrote for them) that absolutely screams for this box. Even if I-Opener priced them at the E-machine level ($550), it would still pay this client to purchase I-Openers for the reduced noise, additional desk space, virus resistance and ease of deployment. My needs were flexible. I needed cost/availability of Non-applianced I-Openers, or a pricing plan to pay royalties to have their design produced in Tiawan for my client, completly at my client's expense.
As much as this may seem like easy money for Netpliance the answer was a very firm "No, thank you."
The summary of extensive, well-considered replies I recieved, was that bringing the Internet to the the entire planet's non-technical population was all they were planning to do in the near future, but they "appreciated my interest."
Even with this business model, The Pilot 100 program will yeild several projects that dove-tail nicely with their current offering. In particular, the employment of the I-Opener as the next generation stereo that downloads music of your selected type, and plays it unbidden will be pleasantly cool. Superfriendly X10 control from a quiet, solid state computer (Andrew Williams and My submisssion), will be a profitable addition as well.
I hope their business plan changes down the road. I'd really like my client to buy 1200 of these things, so they can cut support costs, and most of all of licensing fees to a Big Company(tm).
Ok, it's mostly whiny rubbish, but Microsoft makes some excellent points. Their motive for doing this is to provide loopholes by pointing them out from the word go (slime). The clarifications they ask for are very necessary however.
It's obvious to us where a Browser stops and an O/S begins because we have a well designed O/S.
Windows is an organizational catastrophie. If every file found in/usr were copied into/etc, with only a handful of directories to seperate thousands of unrelated files, the problem would be obvious.
Microsoft's position that the DOJ should define browser with precision is essential to the victory at hand. It's current definition:
"that software which allows the user to browse the Web."
Is far to vague. Some competent Windoze programmer should be hired to go through the mess file by file. Library by library.
The rest of the doc. however is pretty comical, save yourself the ugly read, here are my two favorites:
Since Microsoft's software products are all comprised of software "technology" and nothing else, the semantic distinction the government seeks to draw is not sustainable.
When are they going to learn that refering to software as "technology" doesn't scare us or make a point. We can, in very clear terms, define where an O/S stops and an application begins, they just won't like our definition.
"Microsoft should be permitted to continue providing incentives to OEMs to do things that increase demand..."
Blatant phrases of contempt for the court's finding may create the atmosphere of "brutal justice" that the perpetrator obviously need to experience.
While I agree that E-bay's behavior is inappropriate, they have no choice, and cannot be justly accused of villany.
We, the public, gave Micro$oft the money with which to walk on the rights of consumers and bully any non-cooperating party into bankrupcy. To complain that a neighbor is irresponsibly blasting off his shotgun in the middle of the night is unjust if he is shooting at our monster.
If we want to be free of it we must insure that we do not feed it, and give our fellow humans the means to stop feeding it themselves.
Slashdot Mirror
Ah, so we should stiffle useful technological advances, and live in fear of terror until the problem magically goes away?
The universe is a big scary place; we won't have the pleasure fully discovering this if we crawl under our beds and hide.
So when to elevator tickets go on sale?
I've worked as an engineer for cellular (an/dig/PCS/GSM etc.) providers for about 13 years now and stood around many a water cooler chatting with the marketing people.
They have two basic reasons for not wanting your old phone.
1. Sometimes, unbeknownst to you, the reason you had a crappy experience with your other service provider was the phone. This is not a profitable fact to advertise. It is more profitable to claim, "Yes, the other guys suck" and here's proof. You get a new phone and better reception and are convinced the other guys weren't as good, and you tell all your friends. The other problem is with letting you convert a possibly (but unlikely) bad phone is that the problem doesn't go away, and again, the user becomes aware that the old provider had just as good a service.
2. Most providers want to spend as little as possible on sales staff. This means a minimum of training. The simplest solution is to give them a box'o'phones, that all work alike, and train them for two or three different models. Better still is to preprogram the phone with numbers that are in the system, but "suspended." This way, without any knowledge of cell phones at all they can get you to sign a contract, take your money, call the customer care department to have the phone "unsuspended." And Voila! Sales without training.
Unless you change system types (Cell to PCS, PCS to GSM etc.) your phone would work just fine. GSM providers (T-Mobile, Cingular and the like) don't have this hassle since most of the programming is in the removable SIM. With those systems they will charge you a $10-$20 new sim fee and you can slip it into your old GSM phone and keep using all the headsets, batteries, chargers, covers and other stuff you purchased. That is assuming you can put up with their typically lousy rural coverage.
sic transit gloria mundi
"Thus passes the glory of the world"
It's a perfect quote for someone applying one-upsmanship to a braggard's boast, sadly parallel to Mr. Bush's responses to Mr. Hussein.
Way to go!
My Tivo has 60some hours of recording time. And it's more than enough. The reality of TV watching is that there is very little worth seeing more than twice. I don't know that I've ever had anything auto-deleted that I wanted to watch, and if I did, I'd blame myself for not getting around to it in the first 30 days. If you're shopping Tivos, upgrade, but don't go nuts, it's just not necessary...
My best idea is public execution of spammers, preferably by hanging. After the first few die on live TV, the others might become discouraged.
/. crowd cites.
I hate to interrupt the formation of the new Nazi Party, but if you're curious as to whether you're standing on moral highground, substitute the word hacker for the word spammer in your post and the other "...Drawn and quartered, and burned, and then we jump on their ashes till our feet have blisters..." posts.
Spammers are easily the Net's most annoying feature. And since they press our hot button few people seem to mind when the same draconian tactics are used against them that were used against Kevin Mitnick. When corporations that testified against Mitnick claimed that he cost them thousands in damages, but didn't report any losses to their stock holders, the Internet community was quick to call foul (for all the good it did). But when the ball is in our court "justifiable costs" don't seem to apply. It does not cost me $100 per e-mail to hit the delete button. The ten spams I get a day don't cost anybody $1000 in bandwidth, storage, maintenance or any of the other exaggerated costs the
The bill calls for fines up to $50,000 dollars for "accidental violations." I don't know about the rest of you, but my first experience with m4 macros in the sendmail.cf file was not pretty. Did anybody but the author get it all right the first time?
When hundreds of thousands of dollars are at stake it becomes clear (to lawyers and congressfolk) that better tracking measures are needed. How many innocent ISPs will have to go out of business for "aiding and abetting" before "unsigned" e-mail is disallowed altogether. After all, the Federally Approved key database will be free in the beginning. The only people who wouldn't want to use it will be spammers, terrorists and drug dealers. How long will it be before you have to have a Microsoft Passport (tm, r, etc.) to send to an MSN subscriber. Is this the direction you want the net to take? We decide.
"...the Ohio law is a positive action in the war on spam..."
or is that "War on Terrorism" or "War on Drugs," or the War on our Freedom.
their Nintendos. The instant satisfaction factor of playing Max Payne has not yet lost it's gloss; but it will. Once you've shot every imaginable bad guy, with every imaginable weapon while falling through fluidic space backwards and tumbling... it will get old and the rewards of the longer term pursuits will again seem worthy of the efforts. Computers have been an adventure for a couple decades now, but soon, for most, they'll just be tools again, about as exciting as screwdriver design.
Thankfully some will retain their interest after the glam is gone, Blessed be the inventers of Torx.
Yes, cash will work for a while.
Sadly,when the industries feel is it their right to uniquely label and track these things they'll feel it's their right to watermark more and more thoroughly until, as others have suggested, the quality is barely better than VHS tapes. Before that occurs they'll have come up with mathematically unique IDs that use some variation public key exchange to verify their authenticity to the player. Players that don't require this, will the "tools of terrorism" etc. etc. The real pirates will breeze through all these safeguards like they don't exist, and the only net effect will be higher costs and lost civil liberties.
When I read stories like yours I'm filled with nothing but frank admiration. Raising kids, going to school and holding a job was something my Dad did while I was growing up. He had Mom's help, but he also worked three jobs. I have no idea when he slept.
I believe you've made the classic programmer's mistake however.
If you download and run a hundred programs off of freshmeat, you'll find that half of them require a good level of programming understanding to make them work. One might conclude that the people who wrote them are inconsiderate pricks for not going to the extra 5% effort to save the user all the hassles that you encountered. If reading some of the README.txt files that come with them you wouldn't have look hard to find an attitude that supports this opinion, and perhaps you'd be right from your perspective. But the people involved in gifting this software to the world are rarely as inconsiderate or prickish as the average user of their software might conclude.
The fact is that to these people, everything about their programs is obvious. They have been living, working, and breathing computers for so long that they take for granted the erosion of their old perspectives and the creation of their new, more useful ones. So when they bust their butts putting out some terribly cool, new piece of software, and days later they have three compliments and a hundred e-mail's asking about the most trivial bugglettes they conclude that people are whiners. They chat with the people who gave good constructive criticism or compliments, and go on with their lives, forming a community of people around them that "get it."
This community only reinforces their high-standards for computer savvy. And they look down their nose at the rest of the world as being "pathetic."
As anyone who is new to the Linux community will attest, this attitude does not well serve their longterm goals, of ubiquitous availability of their feature packed, stable, Free desktop.
"I did it twice. And I am not alone, nor am I exceptional in that regard."
Yes, you are.
And as a consequence, you recognize and are attracted to people that are. The corollary is especially true. People that whine to you about their lesser problems may get a sympathetic ear, but they will divine more about your opinions by your actions than your words. Your mouth may say, "poor dear" but your actions say "suck it up and and push through."
And in many cases this may be just the message they need.
I've met a number of people who weren't up to the task, and the results aren't pretty. Like the user that spends hours trying to run the "simple" software but just can't make it work, these women took on the task, were overwhelmed and fell apart, or more commonly became bad workers, bad students, and bad mothers. They whine enough that the good men (that they have concluded no longer exist) all recognize the lack of good companionship, and go about their business. They overeat such that the shallow but decent men avoid them as well. They scream at their kids till the kindhearted men seek like soulmates elsewhere. This leaves them in relationships with saints and the losers, and the ratio of the two isn't very good. Additionally they have the opportunity to pass on to the next generation, all the damage they have accumulated in this one.
Personally, I do not comb through 100 A.D. texts to find justifications for my actions. The places where I've shown character or talent do not isolate me from the damaged women raising especially damaged children. And from my perspective whether or not ancient texts can be translated and interpreted to define a fetus as life or not is interesting, but irrelevant. I will concede that the fetus can be defined as human, and alive, but that doesn't really affect the issue either. If we are to be social engineers, as laws pro and anti abortion force us to be, the question is are we better off letting the woman kill it or not (regardless of how it's labeled). It's a lose/lose proposition. The women that don't have what it takes to tough it out are not as rare as you might like to think, and the damage they do to their children, and that their children pass on their children is very costly. It's a murder in self-defense of a society that doesn't condone murder. Which makes about as much sense as a society that enforces pro-life laws at gunpoint against women who aren't up to the task of properly creating members of that society.
I do not pretend to have an answer to this problem. But I do know a tough person when I read their works, and like many of the excellent programmers I've written to on freshmeat, I must say, "you're not alone, but your not the norm." People who aren't up to your standards, are still people and their needs still count for something. When the time comes that you've lost sight of that, you're either an elitist 5up3r hax0r, or a bible-thumping religious zealot. The world has enough of these.
Be careful of the thin line.
From the article:
"But software is advancing at a tremendous pace, so it becomes obsolete every 18 months."
Um, no, it's hardware that doubles in speed every 18 months. The approval rate for new aircraft technologies (at least in the states) is unbearably slow. This is clearly a weak excuse for the correctly identified problem:
"The basic stumbling block was not to get off-the-shelf components and software"
Maturity couldn't be a more critical issue to this kind of software. Where half a day's downtime can cause inconvenience to 10% of the population of your island, and ignoring a problem can get people killed, you need a proven winner. Software for managing the traffic over the UK should not even have been considered unless it had been proven for years of service controlling airspace over something noticably less crowded than one of the hubs of global trade.
I've never owned a parallel port scanner, mostly because, well, they suck. The money vs. features ratio on them is very good, but they are just too darned slow.
I have had an Astra 1200S (S for SCSI) since 600/1200 was cutting edge. In the beginning one had to fiddle about quite a bit to get Xsane working with it, but now, it and it's beefier scsi breathren work like champs.
I've had the same good luck with PayPal for many dozens' of Ebay auctions, and still use them.
I did, however, join the WebPlayer coop where a very hardworking and industrious fellow (Slatch) negotiated to buy a pile (> 400) of the little personal Internet appliances from the manufacturerer when their "sell you the box, hook you on our ISP" service died like all the others of it's kind (e.g. I-Opener). Anyhow, we all agreed on methods and such and e-mailed Slatch our funds. And according to PayPal this behavior tripped, some undisclosed, undocumented limit for "suspicious" activity.
Everybody stood behind the hardworking fellow, but the hundred or so people who called to complain that they didn't have their money and that the recipient didn't either, got the same line, "This is really a matter between us and the recipient." Slatch forwarded them obscene amounts of data, to get his account unfrozen, and it did finally happen, but it was weeks.
Luckily, no-one is ever really desperate to get a new hackable-netappliance.
So as useful as I find PayPal, I can't credit them with being a good company, as any company can deliver good service when all their scripts are working, and in fact, doing all the work. The hallmark of good businessfolk is how they handle things when they go awry. My observation would have to be, "poorly."
I just installed the latest Xfree and layered Ximian on it. Once working, this IS good enough for the non-geeks to enjoy, and Moz. 9.7 is noticably snappier.
But the most important reason that I can't recommend this platform to my fortune 500 client (yes, sadly, only one) is that it's not a slam dunk with their crappy Exchange Servers. And it has to be. Reverse engineering that interface is not nearly as good a solution as licensing it from the manufacturer, and that costs money, and there are undoubtedly "don't open source this or we'll crush you like Netscape" clauses in the contract they signed.
The corporate folk who need this won't give a damn about $60 a head to have out of the box interoperability with with their current systems, and once it's on everyone's system, they may later discover the wonder of Sendmail.
Best of luck to Ximian in this endeavor.
Cornell Marine Disease Predictions
:)
Yup. It's mine. All the fluffy bunny insights about society, trees, children and kittens seemed to have been taken. :)
Art
These are two very different cases that should have two very different treatments.
First I would like to point out Jennifer's poor sense of perspective:
For every person using a computer or the Internet for research, commerce or communication, there may be another person using that technology to commit a crime.
The suggestion that there "may be" one "criminal user" out there for every legitimate user is nothing less than retarded. If there were 10 million+ hackers out there it seems unlikely that Jennifer's toaster would remain unhacked after a display of such blatant prejudice.
But reactionary posturing aside, the ugly part of this mess is that these two people can be mentioned on the same page.
Salcedo is likely a criminal under non-computer law. And additionally, he's an idiot. If he's responsible for intentionally, irrecoverably (to the novice of course) crashing a business system, there is no need for computer-oriented law to prosecute him.
Salens on the other hand is just a punk kid to did a little digital graffiti. It's ironic that Jennifer can make the connection to real world graffiti, but then go on to push for the digital version (which is cheaper and easier to clean up) to be a felony.
Obviously to people with so little sense of the spirit of the law, anything their afraid of should be a felony.
When they are killing children for stealing lollipops, and the children start shooting back, the authoritarians will wonder, "What kind of monster would kill for a lollipop?" The bell tolls for thee.
Jon,
:))).
;).
I believe your road traffic analysis is a good one. More, faster, better, roads do encourage people to drive. A faster quicker internet encourages people to consume it with what would once have been considered trivial things. If you had been trying to download an MP3 across the original ARPANet government agents would have found and quitely gotten rid of "their problem." The hard drive analogy hits home to probably everyone reading this post.
I believe the question is not, "how do we solve the bandwidth problem," but, "can we do something more worthy with our next bump in bandwidth."
In the case of hard drives it is obviously completely under your control. You can upgrade your 4.3gig 3600rpm PIO mode 4 IDE, to a 34gig 7200rpm UDMA 66, and you put your same old data on it and have piles of free space. If that space gets filled with crud that isn't worth the price of the upgrade then you wasted your money.
The example that springs to mind is Deus Ex, a first person shooter/interactive fiction from EIDOS. With my many save games it chews up a GIGABYTE of hard drive all on it's little lonesome. Doom takes up a tiny fraction of the space and has the same general description. But side by side there is no comparison between these two games. The credits of Deus Ex list 52 people who did the voices for 200+ characters that you meet, interact with (and occasionally kill). It is a wholly different experience (which obviously would not exist if not for Doom and descendants (no flame please
Using my hard drives as an example, it is true that they still aren't enough, and it was worth every dime.
I believe the purchase of Internet bandwidth (backbone or endpoint) to be governed by the same logic.
Yes the marketing people will try to waste it on cooler and cooler adds, and people will make 3D VRMLs of their pets, but you don't have to visit their sites. What are you going to do with your extra bandwidth, and will that be worth the extra cost. Will the way you use it enrich your life more than the extra cost. Anybody who can't find needles for their 78 RPM record player and has a taste for '40s and '50s Chicago area blues will find the ability to download the MP3s to be worth the extra $15 a month they spent going from 33.6kbps to 80+kbps.
One of the critical factors that you can control about the bandwidth-traffic loop is to be intolerant of poor connections. The ISP economic loop is guided by what people are willing to put up with. If AT&T@home decides to add 5000 subscribers to an area that already has 5000 without increasing they bandwidth to the backbone, and a year later they have 5000 subscribers and 5000 cancelations, they'll rethink this decision I'm certain.
Please excuse me now, there is multicast of Britney Spears latest interview that I need to go watch
-Art
We can't actually get behind either. Americans are as techno-hungry as any people on the planet. If they see their European buddies playing with a workable, cool technology, they will have it if they have to pay twice as much and completely re-engineer it to fit their country's freqency band plan. As for the lack of penetration for things like net appliances, do consider how many of us already purchased more computer than we can possibly use, and that next year, we'll buy even more, and give our current ones to people who might otherwise buy net appliances. The world may have Quake 3, but where is it most played at 1600x1200/72fps :).
A respected author who stands to loose more money than I can jump over has risked it all to step into the new age publishing. This is a comendable act regardless of the lack of technical savvy employed.
Way to go Stephen. Now if only I liked your books. Regardless, however, I'll buy one for Mom, and hope that others do the same.
The difference between those who genuinely value freedom, and people that are simply cheap, is that the former will pay for goods received when no entity can force them to do so.
Whether or not Japanese manufacturers try to cram too much Linux into too small a device seems irrelevant to me. Some will, some won't. What is outstanding about this is that on the occasion that I see something that they manufacture, and I want I can retire the phrase, "Damn, only Windows drivers."
:) .
If every new computer-interfaced toy that comes out of that island is developed first with a Linux driver, and secondly with a micros~1 driver, it's going to make our fav. OS vastly more appealling to consumers.
If they screw up their kernel, they can always download a good working one from Debian
I've worked in some of the cities mentioned, Calgary, Vancouver, Fairfield CA, Big Bear City CA, Blaine WA to name a few.
The availability of techie drinking buddies varies from place to place. And being able to drive to the road and pick up computer components for "near-net" prices is a nice feature.
But honestly, when "I get my kicks above the waistline, Sunshine." It is with the community of people that I am part of on the Internet.
I currently live in Blaine, WA. I'm easily the geekiest person in this town (3k people), and can't talk techy with anyone in walking distance. Kind of a downer.
I can, however, walk 100 meters to step into a lush forest teaming with huge varieties of birds , and moles and shrews and deer and coyotes.
In Yucca Valley California, there were 330+ days of bright sunshine. Nearly every morning, I could walk out onto the porch, and kick back with some well indexed tome, and feel the cool morning breeze fight the warm desert sun for thrermal dominace of my dermal layers. Of course, three hours a day for 2 months a year, one must be in a well-shaded, well swamp cooled environment.
The reason the Northern folks drink so much coffee BTW, is not because they are inherently geeky. It's because when you go 14 consecutive days without seeing the sun, (no exag. here) you must do something to establish your mind's active/inactive cycles. Else you (really about 90% of humans) will become depressed and continuously tired. They call it Seasonal Affective Disorder. It's real.
Though AT&T has been promising cable modem service here for 11 months, it hasn't quite arrived. My sat. dish give me 400kb download speeds and delivers on that promise 90% of the time. It's quite comfy.
If I were to recommend a city for a fellow geeky person I would say this:
"Connectivity is there for the taking. Toys can be mail ordered. If you want to pick a city, pick one that suits your non-geeky self, dry or moist, forest, desert, or beach. Make it suit your whole person. Geeky goes anywhere, connects to anything, and most importantly adapts at a rate that your body and taste in music and culture cannot match."
Wah wah wah.
Would you want your pacemaker microcode to be writen by the people who created the burned-metal skins for XMMS? Me neither.
Trusted software is not worth the cost and is inappropriate for our 95% of what Linux users do. It helps to make my point if you substitute the words "Mathematically Proven Correct" for the word trusted.
It's a slight simplification, but it eliminates the notion that Linux isn't trustworthy, because of course it is. It is more than trustworthy enough for what we want it to do. It is vastly more trustworthy than any software developed in Redmond, WA.
Formal standards and procedures slow the evolution of a software product to a crawl. For a pacemaker this is fine. For a hype-versatile desktop OS this is silly.
My actual point, be careful what you wish for. Every version of RH software has more cool features added then the last 3 versions of HPUX. This is an excellent trade.
Speaking as one of the winners in the I-Opener contest, our team worked hard on it's submission which was pages long.
The silly little summary posted on the Winner's page was just the cinnamon of the sticky-bun.
This is a great gesture.
The real problem with Netpliance's approach is not a lack of generosity, but a lack of interest in pursuing the profitable aspects of opensource develpment.
One of my clients has an application (that I wrote for them) that absolutely screams for this box. Even if I-Opener priced them at the E-machine level ($550), it would still pay this client to purchase I-Openers for the reduced noise, additional desk space, virus resistance and ease of deployment. My needs were flexible. I needed cost/availability of Non-applianced I-Openers, or a pricing plan to pay royalties to have their design produced in Tiawan for my client, completly at my client's expense.
As much as this may seem like easy money for Netpliance the answer was a very firm "No, thank you."
The summary of extensive, well-considered replies I recieved, was that bringing the Internet to the the entire planet's non-technical population was all they were planning to do in the near future, but they "appreciated my interest."
Even with this business model, The Pilot 100 program will yeild several projects that dove-tail nicely with their current offering. In particular, the employment of the I-Opener as the next generation stereo that downloads music of your selected type, and plays it unbidden will be pleasantly cool. Superfriendly X10 control from a quiet, solid state computer (Andrew Williams and My submisssion), will be a profitable addition as well.
I hope their business plan changes down the road. I'd really like my client to buy 1200 of these things, so they can cut support costs, and most of all of licensing fees to a Big Company(tm).
Ok, it's mostly whiny rubbish, but Microsoft makes some excellent points. Their motive for doing this is to provide loopholes by pointing them out from the word go (slime). The clarifications they ask for are very necessary however.
/usr were copied into /etc, with only a handful of directories to seperate thousands of unrelated files, the problem would be obvious.
It's obvious to us where a Browser stops and an O/S begins because we have a well designed O/S.
Windows is an organizational catastrophie. If every file found in
Microsoft's position that the DOJ should define browser with precision is essential to the victory at hand. It's current definition:
"that software which allows the user to browse the Web."
Is far to vague. Some competent Windoze programmer should be hired to go through the mess file by file. Library by library.
The rest of the doc. however is pretty comical, save yourself the ugly read, here are my two favorites:
Since Microsoft's software products are all comprised of software "technology" and nothing else, the semantic distinction the government seeks to draw is not sustainable.
When are they going to learn that refering to software as "technology" doesn't scare us or make a point. We can, in very clear terms, define where an O/S stops and an application begins, they just won't like our definition.
"Microsoft should be permitted to continue providing incentives to OEMs to do things that increase demand..."
Blatant phrases of contempt for the court's finding may create the atmosphere of "brutal justice" that the perpetrator obviously need to experience.
We, the public, gave Micro$oft the money with which to walk on the rights of consumers and bully any non-cooperating party into bankrupcy. To complain that a neighbor is irresponsibly blasting off his shotgun in the middle of the night is unjust if he is shooting at our monster.
If we want to be free of it we must insure that we do not feed it, and give our fellow humans the means to stop feeding it themselves.
Linux was the first step
WINE was the second.
Use them!