What I never realised was how quickly van Gogh painted. That whole canvas in an hour. Even over an hour I would expect to see the star appear as a line (as in long-exposure photography).
Anyway, either van Gogh's perspective is out or that building has a very strangely shaped gable. Also, the gate posts are not parralel to the walls of the building, so either one of the references is wrong, or van Gogh's perspective is inaccurate. Given this, how can one say that he put the star in the right place?
It is inevatable that (some) patents in "grey areas" are authorised. This is the nature of human error. The courts are available to challenge these errors.
Still, it would be better if the courts were more reasonable with their rulings.
Anyway, it is my suggestion that the duration of "technology" patents be reduced. Something like 2 years is about right for the Computer technology arena. Further, if a patent is found by a court to be inappropriate, then the patent-holder should be forced to repay any royalties whaih it has received as a result of the patent.
This would put some financial cost in to producing shotgun patents.
Anyway, two years is a good time in Computer / internet related patents. If you can not take advantage of your patent in that time, it is at your peril.
It seems that they were compiling habits of everyone who used their product, not just students. In the case of students there is an added emotional facet to the issue, but the basic privacy issue is unaltered. Effectively, companies, schools, libraries and others installed the software, now at least they can all rest assured that their habits are not monitored.
Bottom line, N2H2 decided that it was not their core business (it was a distraction). Bet that they were "asked to resign...".
Many people will wonder why we need another port. The reality is as follows:
Ports are relatively easy and mechanical to do
It opens the platform to a variety of applications
It generates "cross pollination" of ideas.
It gives consumer choice
Generally, the big benefit to this will be the broadening of the application base. Further, it will allow the Linux / NetBSD ports to compare against each other leading to innovation and performance tuning.
Quoting the controvercial is a/. "thing". Devil's advocate is useful at times to generate discussion.
With 5 replies it is difficult to chose which to reply to.
I have worked in contract positions in many companies, and have pretty much experienced the extremes of both sides when it comes to eomplyee training.
It is easiest to see when you considder the differing management attitudes toward employees and contractors. With contractors it difficult to see the investment value of mentoring a contractor.
With an employee, the attitude changes. In a number of cases I have been brought on with part of my contract being to "share" my knowledge. This is a direct investment by management in a mentoring program. Still, though, when the 11th hour strikes, and the project is behind, management invariable puts the mentoring on the back-burner, and sends everyone off to battle stations. Typically, that puts the "mentor" out of touch with the trainee.
Thus, my argument that when time is a constraint, mentoring dissipates.
It takes people with practical experience, patience, and the willingness to invest time in another person's education.
To this you have to add that the person also has little else to do.
So, this is the flaw with the above. In any environment (other than an academic envoronment), the people who an actually do the work best spend their time doing the work. This is why we have schools, colleges, and universities. That is where the people go to get the "practical experience, patience, and the willingness", and they get it because they pay.
Mentoring is inefficient in a business environment because it reduces the productivity of two people to the average of the collective.(you have a 100% productive person and a 50% productive person producing at 75%. It is better to not have mentoring because your productivity doubles (150%))
Thus, in a business perspective, if mentoring happens, it is quickly realised that the solution is to put the mentor back to work, and in extreme circumstances, to replace the 'trainee' with a person who does not need mentoring.
Law is a funny thing. The judge has many roles to play in the courtroom. But, primarily it is to determine which laws, if any, may have been broken. The judge then instructs the Jury what conditions must be met to find the defendant guilty. In an ideal world, there is no need for the judge to be familiar with the business related to the case. As an analogy, one does not need to be able to play golf to be able to determine which rules may be broken.
Although making the judge more knowledgable in the technology field is of some benefit, the important part is the Jury. The jury is meant to be your peers. It is my belief that jury should be golfers if the crime involved golf, and they should be technologists if the crime involved technology, etc.
As always, it is difficult to select an impartial jury, but that is true for any case.
All this time I thought lay-offs were a form of "dot-com puberty".... as in, your dot-com is in a little league until you survive the perils of puberty.
Surprisingly, lay-offs are also a part of mid-life-crisis. as in the automakers, Nortel, etc.
By inference, Microsoft has not hit puberty... yet. Alternatively, it has passed the puberty stage, but just was simply a eunuch, and thus infallable (in the Survivor theme, was immune...)
gus.
To play with the big dogs, you have to pee in the long grass.
There is a serious flaw in the logic of the article.
Games are sold through awareness. People only buy the games if they have heard them (over and over and over). This is a generalisation, but typically, a game will only make it if it has a "wow" factor, i.e. it grabs media attention. A similar factor lies in content. Controvercial content like blood-and-guts enhances the game's hype. This is well understood. Take Rogue for example. A simple, complete, and quality game, but lacking any wow factor (except, when it was released / escaped).
Thus, a game creator has to produce at the leading edge, else the game fails. There is no alternative. Either it is a game which pushes the limits, or it is not a game which succeeds (easily).
This is encouraged by hardware manufacturers as well. New technologies, providing only marginal benifits are touted as "the next best thing", and games are close on the heels.
Basically, I am the sort of person who refuses to race technology, so I play classic games like Civilisation, etc. These are what I considder quality games (and I know this is not a universal opinion), but it does allow me to spend my money on things other than the cash-draining graphical revolution.
On the other hand, I wish the chastity thing would work, it is a nice (but doomed) idea.
I think the comment I can't imagine something that could be worse than this for the software business and the intellectual-property business. sums it all up. Competition!
Basically, if your income comes through intellectual property, then of course comparable products without the intellectual property overhead are worse... for the software business If you are not in the Software Business, then you have nothing to fear, and can only gain through having alternatives.
I am not American, but I always understood that "The American Way" was to cultivate competition. Microsoft, accourding to the courts is thus a poor American Citizen. What right do they have to use the American Way as a defense?
Self-healing structures have been around for years. Tetrapod structures are an example. Tetrapods are the large, strangely shaped concrete blocks used in breakwaters and coastal protection schemes. Basically, the more the ocean pounds the blocks the tighter they lock together. Here is a page of Pictures by SYS (Malaysia). The original company to create them I believe is French, but URL is hard to get. The US Mil has some graphics here.
Anyway, self-healing is one thing, these blocks go one further, and the more they take punnishment, the stronger they get.
Google is by no means an innocent and fully open engine, but they have made many quality decisions. Taking on Deja has to be considdered an overwhelming accomplishment. There is simply no way for any other party to supercede this. Essentially, Google has the Usenet Monopoly.
What Google must now do differently is to re-create the hype that Usenet was before the fancy graphics of web pages. The only way to do this is to get more awareness out there for usenet.
I wish them the best.
But for now, I wish I could search usenet for perl right now, and use threads.
It is almost embarrasing how many big names are trying to maintain their composure by climbing on the Linux Bandwagon. The media attention, and general goodwill these companies receive is huge. It is one of the ironies in life that Microsoft, at arguably the lowest point in it's existance, has alienated what could perhaps be it's saviour.
Is this really a case of the dominant Neanderthal being usurped by the more lean and mean Sapiens?
As a pure guess, the media reports at least two associations which companies are making with a linux community for every one which involves Microsoft.
My intial aspirations were for a trusted network. The server farm being on a dedicated and trusted net. SSl with careful access control could provide enough security over public nets to be useful.
Hive would be a good name, with clients (servers) running 'drones'.
Applications I was thinkin of, as well as certain CGI, were things like spell checking, things similar to Babelfish, creating thumbnails from images, etc. Each unit packaged in an XML structure, with the code to support the function. Again, having trusted code is paramount. Easiest to use in a controlled environment.
Of course, you opened yourself up to this one...
Americans are not only able to lie, but they lie to themselves, ti such an extent they actually believe those lies. This is a near definition of arrogance. It is this arrogance which leads you to believe "America is the greatest country on earth..."
Many non-Americans have a lot to say about the U.S.Arrogance.
Now that my rant is over, I have to admit that I will be a pile of ashes soon, having risen to such obvious flame-bait.
Grid is a push based system, monitoring the activity on a set of servers, and pushing work to the more idle ones.
This is great, but I believe more in the Seti@home approach, let the idle servers pull work down.
Everyone who has worked with distributed computing knows that the application really has to be designed paying carefult attention to the distribution model. How about a more generic solution, say an XML based data and programming unit (in a language with multi platform capabilities like Java or perl) queued on a controlling server, with a farm of slave servers pulling down a unit during an idle time. It sould be something similar to:
As far as babelfish can tell, the announcement indicates that a new free long distance dialing code will be introduced exclusively for these machines. As far as the purchase cost is concerned, it is not intended to be for the masses, it is for public areas like schools, wehre people congregate.
No matter which way you look at it, it is a step in the right direction.
I think an interesting side-bar to this story is that they have found, or will find a way to load/boot/maintain a machine with only 16 meg of boot space. It is remarkable.
Another item of interest is that Brazil is taking this very seriously. The architecture has been tested, they are talking of introducing a new telephone dialling code 0100 exclusiely to keep calls from these machines free for the locals, and further, it ios proposed that each school and publuc building get a machine.
This is a very progressive action by a government. It is not unusual though, as similar comments have been heard from many third world countries. Brazil has stated it as follows (relying on Babelfish for the translation...) "A personal computer, without mobile parts, that function with opened software, of public domain, constructed to take the Internet of favour the schools, ranks of health, microcompanies and small communities... with cost zero for the final user."
I read recently that the WindowsME license is more expensive than the average monthy salary in Nigeria. This is where GPL and public domain really contribute to world prosperity.
Here is a link of interest Algeria has less than 6% telephone density (about one phone per 20 people), and an average ISP (there are only three) costs about 25% of the average person's income.
Bringing the world a little closer to people like this is a calling worthy of Linux. Built by the people for the people.
is the appropriate expression here. Yet, the world repeatedly provides examples of where this is sadly true: cult groups, chain letters, and more.
But, business is all about taking advantage of customers to some extent, and in reality, kudos to Juno. They need a lot of fools to keep their business going, and they have certainly managed to excel even with a blatantly intrusive product.
On the flip side, I would want to employ the marketers of Juno, they are able to make a tough sell.
As for their web-site, I can not display their first page www.juno.com, it ends somewhere in the middle of a form so my Netscape leaves the page blank.
Slashdot Mirror
What I never realised was how quickly van Gogh painted. That whole canvas in an hour. Even over an hour I would expect to see the star appear as a line (as in long-exposure photography).
Anyway, either van Gogh's perspective is out or that building has a very strangely shaped gable. Also, the gate posts are not parralel to the walls of the building, so either one of the references is wrong, or van Gogh's perspective is inaccurate. Given this, how can one say that he put the star in the right place?
People have too much time on their hands...
It is inevatable that (some) patents in "grey areas" are authorised. This is the nature of human error. The courts are available to challenge these errors.
Still, it would be better if the courts were more reasonable with their rulings.
Anyway, it is my suggestion that the duration of "technology" patents be reduced. Something like 2 years is about right for the Computer technology arena. Further, if a patent is found by a court to be inappropriate, then the patent-holder should be forced to repay any royalties whaih it has received as a result of the patent.
This would put some financial cost in to producing shotgun patents.
Anyway, two years is a good time in Computer / internet related patents. If you can not take advantage of your patent in that time, it is at your peril.
gus
It seems that they were compiling habits of everyone who used their product, not just students. In the case of students there is an added emotional facet to the issue, but the basic privacy issue is unaltered. Effectively, companies, schools, libraries and others installed the software, now at least they can all rest assured that their habits are not monitored.
Bottom line, N2H2 decided that it was not their core business (it was a distraction). Bet that they were "asked to resign...".
gus
- Ports are relatively easy and mechanical to do
- It opens the platform to a variety of applications
- It generates "cross pollination" of ideas.
- It gives consumer choice
Generally, the big benefit to this will be the broadening of the application base. Further, it will allow the Linux / NetBSD ports to compare against each other leading to innovation and performance tuning.A good thing.
With 5 replies it is difficult to chose which to reply to.
I have worked in contract positions in many companies, and have pretty much experienced the extremes of both sides when it comes to eomplyee training.
It is easiest to see when you considder the differing management attitudes toward employees and contractors. With contractors it difficult to see the investment value of mentoring a contractor.
With an employee, the attitude changes. In a number of cases I have been brought on with part of my contract being to "share" my knowledge. This is a direct investment by management in a mentoring program. Still, though, when the 11th hour strikes, and the project is behind, management invariable puts the mentoring on the back-burner, and sends everyone off to battle stations. Typically, that puts the "mentor" out of touch with the trainee.
Thus, my argument that when time is a constraint, mentoring dissipates.
To this you have to add that the person also has little else to do.
So, this is the flaw with the above. In any environment (other than an academic envoronment), the people who an actually do the work best spend their time doing the work. This is why we have schools, colleges, and universities. That is where the people go to get the "practical experience, patience, and the willingness", and they get it because they pay.
Mentoring is inefficient in a business environment because it reduces the productivity of two people to the average of the collective.(you have a 100% productive person and a 50% productive person producing at 75%. It is better to not have mentoring because your productivity doubles (150%))
Thus, in a business perspective, if mentoring happens, it is quickly realised that the solution is to put the mentor back to work, and in extreme circumstances, to replace the 'trainee' with a person who does not need mentoring.
Hard, cold, fact of life.
... very cool.
....
Picture a starting grid of 100 international players all vieing for the world championship in the 500cc superbike
There is definately a cool-factor to this idea...
Here's the link......here.
Law is a funny thing. The judge has many roles to play in the courtroom. But, primarily it is to determine which laws, if any, may have been broken. The judge then instructs the Jury what conditions must be met to find the defendant guilty. In an ideal world, there is no need for the judge to be familiar with the business related to the case. As an analogy, one does not need to be able to play golf to be able to determine which rules may be broken.
Although making the judge more knowledgable in the technology field is of some benefit, the important part is the Jury. The jury is meant to be your peers. It is my belief that jury should be golfers if the crime involved golf, and they should be technologists if the crime involved technology, etc.
As always, it is difficult to select an impartial jury, but that is true for any case.
just my thoughts...
Web Page Matches (1 - 20 of about 24800)
based on Yahoo.com
So, you are correct when you say Now thats not right.
All this time I thought lay-offs were a form of "dot-com puberty" .... as in, your dot-com is in a little league until you survive the perils of puberty.
... yet. Alternatively, it has passed the puberty stage, but just was simply a eunuch, and thus infallable (in the Survivor theme, was immune ...)
Surprisingly, lay-offs are also a part of mid-life-crisis. as in the automakers, Nortel, etc.
By inference, Microsoft has not hit puberty
gus.
To play with the big dogs, you have to pee in the long grass.
Games are sold through awareness. People only buy the games if they have heard them (over and over and over). This is a generalisation, but typically, a game will only make it if it has a "wow" factor, i.e. it grabs media attention. A similar factor lies in content. Controvercial content like blood-and-guts enhances the game's hype. This is well understood. Take Rogue for example. A simple, complete, and quality game, but lacking any wow factor (except, when it was released / escaped).
Thus, a game creator has to produce at the leading edge, else the game fails. There is no alternative. Either it is a game which pushes the limits, or it is not a game which succeeds (easily).
This is encouraged by hardware manufacturers as well. New technologies, providing only marginal benifits are touted as "the next best thing", and games are close on the heels.
Basically, I am the sort of person who refuses to race technology, so I play classic games like Civilisation, etc. These are what I considder quality games (and I know this is not a universal opinion), but it does allow me to spend my money on things other than the cash-draining graphical revolution.
On the other hand, I wish the chastity thing would work, it is a nice (but doomed) idea.
Basically, if your income comes through intellectual property, then of course comparable products without the intellectual property overhead are worse ... for the software business If you are not in the Software Business, then you have nothing to fear, and can only gain through having alternatives.
I am not American, but I always understood that "The American Way" was to cultivate competition. Microsoft, accourding to the courts is thus a poor American Citizen. What right do they have to use the American Way as a defense?
Enough Ranting.
Guess that you could say that he is leaving Debian with the hot potato...
Anyway, self-healing is one thing, these blocks go one further, and the more they take punnishment, the stronger they get.
Google is by no means an innocent and fully open engine, but they have made many quality decisions. Taking on Deja has to be considdered an overwhelming accomplishment. There is simply no way for any other party to supercede this. Essentially, Google has the Usenet Monopoly.
What Google must now do differently is to re-create the hype that Usenet was before the fancy graphics of web pages. The only way to do this is to get more awareness out there for usenet.
I wish them the best.
But for now, I wish I could search usenet for perl right now, and use threads.
... is that there is no news in the interview. About the only definitive answer was that BeOS is not going to have nVidia as a pal.
The rest was boring "nVidia is getting better" stuff with discussion about memory management (which is no longer news).
In reality they are evolving, not making any breakthroughs.
In light of the prevailing disdain about certain URL's, I will refrain from linking to the goatse.cx site.
....
For the record, though, I do belive the combination of a monkey and a gnome would not be far off
Is this really a case of the dominant Neanderthal being usurped by the more lean and mean Sapiens?
As a pure guess, the media reports at least two associations which companies are making with a linux community for every one which involves Microsoft.
$HP->kharma++;
$MS->Kharma-- unless $MS->karma
My intial aspirations were for a trusted network. The server farm being on a dedicated and trusted net. SSl with careful access control could provide enough security over public nets to be useful.
Hive would be a good name, with clients (servers) running 'drones'.
Applications I was thinkin of, as well as certain CGI, were things like spell checking, things similar to Babelfish, creating thumbnails from images, etc. Each unit packaged in an XML structure, with the code to support the function. Again, having trusted code is paramount. Easiest to use in a controlled environment.
Many non-Americans have a lot to say about the U.S.Arrogance.
Now that my rant is over, I have to admit that I will be a pile of ashes soon, having risen to such obvious flame-bait.
Grid is a push based system, monitoring the activity on a set of servers, and pushing work to the more idle ones.
This is great, but I believe more in the Seti@home approach, let the idle servers pull work down.
Everyone who has worked with distributed computing knows that the application really has to be designed paying carefult attention to the distribution model. How about a more generic solution, say an XML based data and programming unit (in a language with multi platform capabilities like Java or perl) queued on a controlling server, with a farm of slave servers pulling down a unit during an idle time. It sould be something similar to:
nice -19 jobpoller --controlhost=control.server.com
Picture this as a backend to a website processing CGI, etc.
Anyone interested in forming a subscription based distributed computing project with me drop me a mail...
No matter which way you look at it, it is a step in the right direction.
Another item of interest is that Brazil is taking this very seriously. The architecture has been tested, they are talking of introducing a new telephone dialling code 0100 exclusiely to keep calls from these machines free for the locals, and further, it ios proposed that each school and publuc building get a machine.
This is a very progressive action by a government. It is not unusual though, as similar comments have been heard from many third world countries. Brazil has stated it as follows (relying on Babelfish for the translation...) "A personal computer, without mobile parts, that function with opened software, of public domain, constructed to take the Internet of favour the schools, ranks of health, microcompanies and small communities... with cost zero for the final user."
I read recently that the WindowsME license is more expensive than the average monthy salary in Nigeria. This is where GPL and public domain really contribute to world prosperity.
Here is a link of interest Algeria has less than 6% telephone density (about one phone per 20 people), and an average ISP (there are only three) costs about 25% of the average person's income.
Bringing the world a little closer to people like this is a calling worthy of Linux. Built by the people for the people.
Three cheers
But, business is all about taking advantage of customers to some extent, and in reality, kudos to Juno. They need a lot of fools to keep their business going, and they have certainly managed to excel even with a blatantly intrusive product.
On the flip side, I would want to employ the marketers of Juno, they are able to make a tough sell.
As for their web-site, I can not display their first page www.juno.com, it ends somewhere in the middle of a form so my Netscape leaves the page blank.
It seems that they themselves are h4ck3rs.