I've got a friend who has a friend that works in the USPO and he was telling me how ridiculous it is to work there. Basically, you're supposed to nail predatory patents like these obviously are, but this guy who works there gets creamed by his boss whenever he tries to deny a patent. His boss is involved in all sorts of payoffs and dirt - I literally couldn't believe the stories he was telling. He later got put on a committee that was trying to track fraud and they figured out that some really high percentage (don't remember exactly, but it was over half) of the patents are frivolous and completely bunk. One tactic lots of patent filers like to use is to send in a 25 page document, and the first 24 pages are garbage designed to lull the reviewer to sleep, then they slip in a couple of paragraphs that involve what they're really trying to patent at the end. So to sum things up, its his opinion that the whole system is completely out of control, which is too bad, and he also thinks its so broken it can't be fixed, which is where things REALLY begin to suck.
My guess is that even if they're successful guaranteeing things like the DMCA can't be enforced in some state, the rest of the US will just prevent them from access to such content. Kind of like if child porn or something was hosted in SeaLand, Britain would just cut them off upstream. You're always going to be censored on some level.
Re:Interaction, not Merging
on
Phoenix 0.3 Is Out
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
You know what's ironic - that's the way Microsoft has been doing things with their internet tools: chat, email, and browser are all separate, lightweight apps (outlook express, msn messenger and IE) that don't need each other but work well together. Then you've got Mozilla chugging around. I used Phoenix and I love it - its really fast and seems stable. Good work guys.
But it kind of cheezes me how Sourceforge projects are REQUIRED to be open source. I wish they'd allow people who want to do closed source stuff on there to pay a low monthly fee or something. Just a thought.
Kind of along similar lines - I participated in several "brain training" sessions where I was hooked up to a computer and when my brain waves were in a sweet spot, a tone would sound. The tone was interpreted as positive reinforcement by my brain and over time my brainwaves adjusted to the more efficient state. This allowed me to sleep better, concentrate better, etc. Kind of related to what you're talking about, but cooler.
It's been my experience over the last two-three years that price does not matter in bidding for a project. What matters is your ability to convince the client that you're competent, easy to work with, trustworthy, and able to give him the best overall service along with a quality application. You have to SELL your product, and yourself, and frankly, most programmers SUCK at sales. The process is analogous to us techy types paying more for an nVidia card with equal or slightly less performance, simply because nVidia has better drivers and better support for more platforms. I have never won a bid where i am the lowest priced bidder. It's just not important - what's the point - finish the project, or spend the least amount of money? In most cases, finishing the project is all that matters.
You've got to love the old Build Engine. I remember spending tons of hours working on custom maps for Duke3D. One time we were playing on a map my friend built and I couldn't figure out why he was suddenly so much better than me. I decided to follow him around the map and caught him sneaking into a hidden control room, complete with video cameras showing all parts of the map, a weapons stockpile, and walls that you could see through and shoot through, but only in one direction. Lots of fun. Back on topic - the build engine's integration did make things easier, even though one might not think it would.
In general, I agree with you, however, one company I've worked for (Orientproducts.com)is doing pretty well on the internet as an E-Commerce only operation, because its hard to find the stuff that they sell offline. There are other operations like Ebay and Paypal that have really succeeded too, so I think we just find ourselves getting back to the "good businesses plans work" instead of "all internet businesses suck".
I agreed with you that the game didn't look that great graphics-wize until I downloaded the video on the making of Doom. Holy crap. It was a night and day difference, and I literally couldn't believe how good it looked as they showed short clips of the game. The jump was on the order of magnitude between Quake1 and Quake3, it was that impressive.
I had a 500mhz iBook running 10.1, and while the OS was pure heaven, the speed of the iBook was pure hell. I constantly said "damn, I wish this was faster" until I finally gave up when I noticed it'd take me twice as long to browse the web as on a PC. What a drag. I sold it and am looking forward to the day when I can get a decently fast iBook. Maybe the 700mhz model is a lot faster, but I'd be surprised.
Your post sounds a lot like sour grapes. Nobody cares how or why something runs faster, just that it does. Fonts in Mozilla suck. It takes forever to start. Nobody uses it. I really wish that Mozilla was better, and I continue to use it and support it, but the fact is that IE wins, no matter how they do it. The end result is that IE is faster and ultimately more useful and cost effective to develop for.
Whenever I hear this argument about standards compliance I cringe because like it or not (I don't), IE is THE STANDARD and will be for a long time. I don't know a single serious web developer who uses Mozilla as their primary development tool - its used after the fact to check for Mozilla problems. IE is faster, looks better, has a better mail client, uses less resources, and is more widely supported - sounds a lot like what the dream open source product would be, without the open source code of course.
Another option would be to enable gzip compression on Apache. That would save probably 3/4 of the bandwidth they use, which is a huge immediate savings money-wise, and would greatly decrease load times.
Oh man, it's so true. I'm interning right now and an extra greedy regular expression I wrote totally hosed our $300,000.00 intranet server. One minute I'm searching and replacing, the next second I'm using 2.5 gigs of RAM, and I get kicked off of my ssh session. Then the box starts to drop pings and the intranet domain goes offline. Talk about adrenaline. Nothing like a good CGI and an extra good intern playing with a Sun box to make the SysAdmin wet himself.
I think that the real value of this device will become apparent once we get our hands on some high quality display devices that can be worn like glasses or beamed straight into the retina. One of those palm sized folding keyboards and an in-eye display with this thing would rock. Otherwise, I kind of agree with you that the display is a little kludgy.
Here's where someone needs to come along and verbally abuse you for abusing someone else. A template:
Why do you insist on looking down on [insert people group] when you're just as bad because of [insert something their people group is known for]. Your [bad adjective] attitude is responsible for [insert any open source project or multiple projects for bonus]'s failure. Screw off.
Their implementation of their current firewall is very loosely implemented as it is up to each carrier in each city to do the blocking. They are currently rolling out a much improved system that will enable them to completely control and/or replace content, as referenced by several stories on slashdot. The attractive thing about SSL proxies is that they either allow SSL or deny it completely - making this arrangement very attractive. Of course, there's nothing that will prevent them from declaring this product illegal, which, unlike the US has serious ramifications if you're found violating a state security law. Additionally, they could just deny all traffic that doesn't run through their proxies. China currently mandates that a site must have approval for a site to be hosted in China. It's a small step to require companies to buy an SSL cert from China in order to reach a quarter of the world's market in the coming years. Bottom line - it will be a constantly evolving war between the freedom seekers and the freedom takers.
I overwhelmingly agree with his point on the separate user/system application databases. This is one of the things that absolutely infuriates me about linux. You install something - well, where the hell did it go? Who knows? I haven't found a way to get rpm to tell me, there's no standard place that things go you can look in, and half the time you have to be root or something. Maybe I'm just retarded, but it should be more clear cut. If anyone knows a solution to this - I'd love to hear it also.
I don't see why everyone goes nuts about advertising. I think its ridiculous how everyone whines and moans about ads when they're getting something for free. Heck - I click on Slashdot's ads all the time, just because I know that by doing so I'm keeping the site available FOR FREE. Often, the ads on slashdot and other sites I visit interest me too and are higher quality than the "film girls with our digital camera" X10 crap. I would love to see redhat include an open source ad display app and just let people turn it on - maybe even turn it on by default, but make it easy to turn off, and explain where the money's going to and how much you've generated, etc. It could be a contest to see who generates the most revenue for a project. I'm all for something that lets me SPONSOR OPEN SOURCE PROJECTS FOR FREE SIMPLY BY WATCHING ADS.
I agree totally. Unified Instant Messaging will never be a reality, and it never needs to be. Everyone (read: typical user) already has three or four different handles on all the systems and the only thing we need is a really high quality, cross platform application that can service the big 4: ICQ, AIM, MSN, and Yahoo.
Bonus points if all the vendors could agree to support the unified application, while still offering their branded versions for their own networks. I think this last option is much closer to reality and is actually achievable, as opposed to unifying the underlying protocols.
Sigh. Why's it so difficult to keep news like this from the public? Did you read the article and here how the Chinese news was reporting that the picture was "fuzzy" and "only displayed for about 20 seconds"? This happened in one province of China, so that leaves about a billion people left who didn't see it for themselves. Here's a quote from a previous post of mine about China and the internet:
"Also, why can't they control the internet? They own all the infrastructure, the ISPs, the cable, everything. You're not very informed to think they just can't turn off whatever they want. They block all of geocities and angelfire, and often block cnn and other news sites when some issue that is sensitive to the government is happening. Don't underestimate what a determined dictatorship can accomplish, especially when they hold all of the cards."
Another point - why does it matter if the people aren't convinced that the CCP has the right to rule? The CCP (Chinese Communist Party) has all the guns, military, etc. and revolt is downright impossible.
Slashdot Mirror
I've got a friend who has a friend that works in the USPO and he was telling me how ridiculous it is to work there. Basically, you're supposed to nail predatory patents like these obviously are, but this guy who works there gets creamed by his boss whenever he tries to deny a patent. His boss is involved in all sorts of payoffs and dirt - I literally couldn't believe the stories he was telling. He later got put on a committee that was trying to track fraud and they figured out that some really high percentage (don't remember exactly, but it was over half) of the patents are frivolous and completely bunk. One tactic lots of patent filers like to use is to send in a 25 page document, and the first 24 pages are garbage designed to lull the reviewer to sleep, then they slip in a couple of paragraphs that involve what they're really trying to patent at the end. So to sum things up, its his opinion that the whole system is completely out of control, which is too bad, and he also thinks its so broken it can't be fixed, which is where things REALLY begin to suck.
My guess is that even if they're successful guaranteeing things like the DMCA can't be enforced in some state, the rest of the US will just prevent them from access to such content. Kind of like if child porn or something was hosted in SeaLand, Britain would just cut them off upstream. You're always going to be censored on some level.
You know what's ironic - that's the way Microsoft has been doing things with their internet tools: chat, email, and browser are all separate, lightweight apps (outlook express, msn messenger and IE) that don't need each other but work well together. Then you've got Mozilla chugging around. I used Phoenix and I love it - its really fast and seems stable. Good work guys.
But it kind of cheezes me how Sourceforge projects are REQUIRED to be open source. I wish they'd allow people who want to do closed source stuff on there to pay a low monthly fee or something. Just a thought.
More like 8 yuan (or RMB) is roughly 1 dollar.
Kind of along similar lines - I participated in several "brain training" sessions where I was hooked up to a computer and when my brain waves were in a sweet spot, a tone would sound. The tone was interpreted as positive reinforcement by my brain and over time my brainwaves adjusted to the more efficient state. This allowed me to sleep better, concentrate better, etc. Kind of related to what you're talking about, but cooler.
It's been my experience over the last two-three years that price does not matter in bidding for a project. What matters is your ability to convince the client that you're competent, easy to work with, trustworthy, and able to give him the best overall service along with a quality application. You have to SELL your product, and yourself, and frankly, most programmers SUCK at sales. The process is analogous to us techy types paying more for an nVidia card with equal or slightly less performance, simply because nVidia has better drivers and better support for more platforms. I have never won a bid where i am the lowest priced bidder. It's just not important - what's the point - finish the project, or spend the least amount of money? In most cases, finishing the project is all that matters.
You've got to love the old Build Engine. I remember spending tons of hours working on custom maps for Duke3D. One time we were playing on a map my friend built and I couldn't figure out why he was suddenly so much better than me. I decided to follow him around the map and caught him sneaking into a hidden control room, complete with video cameras showing all parts of the map, a weapons stockpile, and walls that you could see through and shoot through, but only in one direction. Lots of fun. Back on topic - the build engine's integration did make things easier, even though one might not think it would.
In general, I agree with you, however, one company I've worked for (Orientproducts.com)is doing pretty well on the internet as an E-Commerce only operation, because its hard to find the stuff that they sell offline. There are other operations like Ebay and Paypal that have really succeeded too, so I think we just find ourselves getting back to the "good businesses plans work" instead of "all internet businesses suck".
I agreed with you that the game didn't look that great graphics-wize until I downloaded the video on the making of Doom. Holy crap. It was a night and day difference, and I literally couldn't believe how good it looked as they showed short clips of the game. The jump was on the order of magnitude between Quake1 and Quake3, it was that impressive.
I had a 500mhz iBook running 10.1, and while the OS was pure heaven, the speed of the iBook was pure hell. I constantly said "damn, I wish this was faster" until I finally gave up when I noticed it'd take me twice as long to browse the web as on a PC. What a drag. I sold it and am looking forward to the day when I can get a decently fast iBook. Maybe the 700mhz model is a lot faster, but I'd be surprised.
Your post sounds a lot like sour grapes. Nobody cares how or why something runs faster, just that it does. Fonts in Mozilla suck. It takes forever to start. Nobody uses it. I really wish that Mozilla was better, and I continue to use it and support it, but the fact is that IE wins, no matter how they do it. The end result is that IE is faster and ultimately more useful and cost effective to develop for.
Whenever I hear this argument about standards compliance I cringe because like it or not (I don't), IE is THE STANDARD and will be for a long time. I don't know a single serious web developer who uses Mozilla as their primary development tool - its used after the fact to check for Mozilla problems. IE is faster, looks better, has a better mail client, uses less resources, and is more widely supported - sounds a lot like what the dream open source product would be, without the open source code of course.
Not cool for pointing out the fact that I hadn't done my homework. Just not cool.
Another option would be to enable gzip compression on Apache. That would save probably 3/4 of the bandwidth they use, which is a huge immediate savings money-wise, and would greatly decrease load times.
vendor, contractor or intern-caused
Oh man, it's so true. I'm interning right now and an extra greedy regular expression I wrote totally hosed our $300,000.00 intranet server. One minute I'm searching and replacing, the next second I'm using 2.5 gigs of RAM, and I get kicked off of my ssh session. Then the box starts to drop pings and the intranet domain goes offline. Talk about adrenaline. Nothing like a good CGI and an extra good intern playing with a Sun box to make the SysAdmin wet himself.
I think that the real value of this device will become apparent once we get our hands on some high quality display devices that can be worn like glasses or beamed straight into the retina. One of those palm sized folding keyboards and an in-eye display with this thing would rock. Otherwise, I kind of agree with you that the display is a little kludgy.
Dual Xeon ?
Here's where someone needs to come along and verbally abuse you for abusing someone else. A template:
Why do you insist on looking down on [insert people group] when you're just as bad because of [insert something their people group is known for]. Your [bad adjective] attitude is responsible for [insert any open source project or multiple projects for bonus]'s failure. Screw off.
Their implementation of their current firewall is very loosely implemented as it is up to each carrier in each city to do the blocking. They are currently rolling out a much improved system that will enable them to completely control and/or replace content, as referenced by several stories on slashdot. The attractive thing about SSL proxies is that they either allow SSL or deny it completely - making this arrangement very attractive. Of course, there's nothing that will prevent them from declaring this product illegal, which, unlike the US has serious ramifications if you're found violating a state security law. Additionally, they could just deny all traffic that doesn't run through their proxies. China currently mandates that a site must have approval for a site to be hosted in China. It's a small step to require companies to buy an SSL cert from China in order to reach a quarter of the world's market in the coming years. Bottom line - it will be a constantly evolving war between the freedom seekers and the freedom takers.
Can't you ctrl-alt-plus or minus to change resolutions? You used to anyways...
I overwhelmingly agree with his point on the separate user/system application databases. This is one of the things that absolutely infuriates me about linux. You install something - well, where the hell did it go? Who knows? I haven't found a way to get rpm to tell me, there's no standard place that things go you can look in, and half the time you have to be root or something. Maybe I'm just retarded, but it should be more clear cut. If anyone knows a solution to this - I'd love to hear it also.
I don't see why everyone goes nuts about advertising. I think its ridiculous how everyone whines and moans about ads when they're getting something for free. Heck - I click on Slashdot's ads all the time, just because I know that by doing so I'm keeping the site available FOR FREE. Often, the ads on slashdot and other sites I visit interest me too and are higher quality than the "film girls with our digital camera" X10 crap. I would love to see redhat include an open source ad display app and just let people turn it on - maybe even turn it on by default, but make it easy to turn off, and explain where the money's going to and how much you've generated, etc. It could be a contest to see who generates the most revenue for a project. I'm all for something that lets me SPONSOR OPEN SOURCE PROJECTS FOR FREE SIMPLY BY WATCHING ADS.
I agree totally. Unified Instant Messaging will never be a reality, and it never needs to be. Everyone (read: typical user) already has three or four different handles on all the systems and the only thing we need is a really high quality, cross platform application that can service the big 4: ICQ, AIM, MSN, and Yahoo.
Bonus points if all the vendors could agree to support the unified application, while still offering their branded versions for their own networks. I think this last option is much closer to reality and is actually achievable, as opposed to unifying the underlying protocols.
Sigh. Why's it so difficult to keep news like this from the public? Did you read the article and here how the Chinese news was reporting that the picture was "fuzzy" and "only displayed for about 20 seconds"? This happened in one province of China, so that leaves about a billion people left who didn't see it for themselves. Here's a quote from a previous post of mine about China and the internet:
"Also, why can't they control the internet? They own all the infrastructure, the ISPs, the cable, everything. You're not very informed to think they just can't turn off whatever they want. They block all of geocities and angelfire, and often block cnn and other news sites when some issue that is sensitive to the government is happening. Don't underestimate what a determined dictatorship can accomplish, especially when they hold all of the cards."
Another point - why does it matter if the people aren't convinced that the CCP has the right to rule? The CCP (Chinese Communist Party) has all the guns, military, etc. and revolt is downright impossible.