The idea that consistency really matters is flawed.
First, people arent the idiots that interface 'designers' want to make them appear. Everyone from my mom to a secretary can learn a new UI for playing a game or using some program they want to use in a short time. And games have some of the absolutely worst user interfaces ever designed. Anyone who should be using a computer can learn a new interface. If they cant, I doubt they can handle the job they need the computer for.
And, the fact is, you dont have any choice either way. Microsoft changed the interface between dos and windows 3. And between 3 and 95. And between 95 and 98. Etc. And they're gonna change it again and again and again. So you might just as well switch to Linux where you can at least choose for yourself what you want the interface to look like.
Its funny how analysts complain about potential stock losses from investing in Microsoft...
Perhaps the stock holders should tell the company leadership that violating the law isnt part of their mandate for maximizing profits?
And perhaps investors should think twice about investing in companies known throughout the industry for their blatant disregard for the differences between legal or illegal competetive practices.
The software industry itself isnt innovative in its nature. Its evolutionary. Movement forward takes place by filling needs and slowly evolving products. You find few leaps. Sometimes there may appear to be 'inventions' like the internet (where free software played the major role), but that's usually because years of evolution happen outside the public eye and then theres a critical mass reached for mass market adaption.
Neither side 'innovates' to a large extent (which is a serious objection to the existence of software patents). Both sides appear to be 'copying', but that is because one sides users identified useful features, and reimplementing similar features will be reassuring to both users, easier for developers and good for marketing.
The entire IP issue has gotten entirely out of hand. This is no longer even close to any form of justice, this is mob tactics. And this has no innocent until proven guilty anywhere in it.
Mr Powell has apparently hired someone who can read newsgroup headers. Which can be forged. Which are _usually_ forged in these cases. Then he goes after the 'apparent' target and threatens them into paying him (wether or not they even know how to use a news reader...). This isnt even funny.
The argument for Freenet and similar technologies becomes so much stronger. These lawyers must not have any sort of information to go on _at_ all. Sources and destination adresses, storage nodes and everything must be moved entirely outside anyones ability to obtain, because it has become blindingly obvious that the justice system cannot be trusted anymore, and that blackmail has become standard legal practice.
Its not even about protecting freedom of speech, its about protecting the innocent bystanders from an IP industry run amok.
It doesnt so much "destroy" it as make it very difficult for Microsoft to buy, assimilate or steal. Which makes it rather difficult for Microsoft to maintain their primary forms of "innovation".
Of course, you make the mistake of thinking that genetic makeup form very much of the personality. If I remember correctly, genetically identical twins that are separated at birth (adoption, etc) are less similar in personality than genetically different twins who are raised in the same family.
That means, loads of surprises. Different health issues, probably similar physical characteristics to an extent, but food and environment affects that a lot too, as well as new diseases, etc. Sexual predisposition might be entirely different, since what forms that is largely unknown, and probably to a large extent formed by environment.
Many parents seem to dream about being a perfect parent. Give it up. Start up a therapy fund that the kids can use when they turn 18, because if the parents themselves dont screw the kids over (and you will _never_ know how a kid will react to the most innocent correction, unfairness, too much fairness, pampering until its far far too late) then the rest of the world will.
Are twins then born with half a spirit? Or one of them without (Evil Twin (tm))? There is no difference between a clone or a twin, and regarding them any differently or debating them as being anything other than a twin with different birthdate is erraneous and fraught with the perils of having bad science fiction influence feelings.
Well, the Tomshardware link isnt very positive towards RDRAM really, and Sander Sassens articles on hardwarecentral have been rather controversial.
Theory is very nice, but unless there are some hard facts or at least consistent benchmarks made by several independent testers (rather than
the dubious ones that exist now), that show anything more than an infinitesimal performance difference either way for general applications (and which currently appear to show a generally worse performance for RDRAM), the price isnt even close to worth it. Even for servers.
http://www.inqst.com/ddrvrmbs.htm, tomshardware articles on ddr sdram, etc.
Im not sure exactly which kind of server RDRAM would be good for tho. Most servers Ive ever seen would be even more sensitive to latency issues compared to a desktop, due to the multiuser nature of servers in general.
Maybe it would be useable for some very specialized multimedia work or computation machines, where the benefits of high bandwidth would outweigh the latency problems.
But if you have to go that far out from any ordinary usage to find a use for the product, just forget it. Its probably not ever worth it. RDRAM might find a niche if it was cheaper than ordinary SDRAM but as it is now, its dead.
And maybe when they do that they will end up being just another proprietary unused worthless security-through-obscurity product.
SSH would be exactly there, had they gone down that route from the beginning.
The author of SSH was kind enough to release his code and make it public (sorta had to since he had GPL parts in there at the time), we were nice enough to decide ssh was a good idea and use it in a lot of places, creating the market for him. We got a turnaround, license changed, proprietary product that didnt work on all platforms any more and an incompatible shiny new protocol.
However, it is a clear proof that the name ssh was in general use for products complying with the ssh RFC long before the trademark was granted, which basically means the trademark isnt valid, nor has ever been a valid trademark.
Read USC title 15 section 1115 for the various reasons that a trademark can be contested. There are at least 4 possible separate paragraphs that can be used in this case, including prior use, abandonment, permission and mark functionality.
All this is is a lesson to other people that legalities like trademark issues, patents and license issues isnt something you play around with and later decide what you really meant (or change your mind about it). SSH has been messy this way from the beginning.
Of course, without the product actually being opensource for a while it would never ever have reached any form of popularity.
The major marketing investment done in SSH has been made by Unix system admins who needed a secure and practical (and easily obtainable) way to connect between hosts, and who were later left to fend for themselves as the product went closed and unsupported on a large number of platforms.
And, frankly, having gone through the pains of dealing with the forms of licensing of SSH and having salesmen tell me there is NO version that has ever been free (ok, I know more about the licensing than the salesmen) to the various other stages, it was a true pleasure to dump the commercial branch and go entirely with OpenSSH.
If SSH has any brandname value it is despite SSH Inc, not because of it.
True. And the basic problem is I cant get an order for 5000 licenses of SSH through the purchasing department without a 3 year project, but I _can_ push OpenSSH into our servers.
Which, of course, means that I will advocate OpenSSH rather than SSH, since one is implementable in assbackwards large corps and the other one isnt. And since I know that a load of other people have the same problem, Id guess that SSH should be very glad they're getting buisness from people who confuse OpenSSH with the proprietary SSH product, because SSH dropped off the roadmap as being useable at the same time they went proprietary and dropped a load of platforms.
Rambus provided nothing. The technology was independently developed without the use of Rambus technology.
That Rambus managed to con the USPTO into granting patents on (obviously) obvious technology that anyone in the industry could, and did, develop is hardly surprising. The USPTO grants such patents every day.
Open Source isnt, of course, the solution to companies in the consumer productivity software producing buisness. It is their death. They have no place in the Open Source world (not that they have one in the Microsoft world either).
That is the reality of a finite number of needed features, code reuse and a virtually costless reproduction capability.
It is, however, a very good solution for the consumers of that software, for vertical software companies, software services companies, dedicated devices companies, etc.
In my opinion, Microsoft already sees its own death in the numbers. They cannot sustain a consumer buisness on unneeded features and random incompatibilities indefinitely. They have to switch over to a for-hire model in.net, to have a future sustainable buisness model (not because there is any form of consumer advantage in it). However, with Linux and the free alternatives here, they will find it rather difficult to get people to buy into that model.
What Burney further fails to understand is that there is no surviving viable market for proprietary consumer applications either. That market is squarely divided between Microsoft (who will ensure there is no serious competition to their products in proprietaryland) and the free alternatives. There simply isnt any niche to fill between anymore.
People would rather go with a pirated copy of Office than buy a decent cheaper office suite that fulfills their needs. Or they will go with the entirely free one.
Actually, at least here, dumping the BSD userland would go a long bit towards getting BSD more acceptable.
The rest of the unix world is for better or worse, fairly sysvish these days, and the number of extra if statements you save by using linux instead of BSD is enough to tip the balance if youre scripting across Solaris, HP-UX, AIX and a pc unix.
The GPL doesnt place anything but GPL code under the GPL. Not through linking or any other way. However, _YOU MAY NOT DISTRIBUTE THE GPL CODE_, unless all the code can be distributed under the TERMS of the GPL.
There is no relicensing taking place. There is no enforced GPL on the other code. It is simply the GPL code that the GPL applies to. You can distribute the otherwise licensed code however you want, but if it does not have as lenient (or more lenient) terms as the GPL code, you may not distribute the GPL parts of the code.
GPL bashing often comes because of an incomplete understanding of how the GPL works (which is understandable, it isnt exactly clear until you've read it about ten thousand times and even then its easy to slip).
Government does some things good and others not as good. But government funded research does a good job in many cases, because government doesnt do much more than pay for it; the scientists do the job. The same ones who do the research for the pharmaceutical industry.
Add to that the slight difference in motivations; pharmaceutical companies do not want a cure, they want something they can sell again and again. While the government motivation is to find a cure so they dont have to pay for it again and again.
Id rather have free drugs today and free drugs tomorrow, government funded and research grant funded, than rampant greed, lifetime drugs and no real cure.
Face it, the drug companies arent needed. Get rid of them all and we'll still have the research. We'll just have a lot of unemployed IP lawyers, administrators and marketing people.
Well, frankly, in my opinion the abuse that drug companies and other IP industries have done to the IP system has terminated their right to exist. We do not need intellectual property any more, because it does no longer serve society.
The consistent abuse done to patents and copyright will guarantee that that is the eventual outcome. Tension will build up as society sees no legitimacy in the existence anymore, and revokes most if not all forms of IP, with the result that the rampant greed shown in the abuse will destroy even the useful and semi-legitimate forms of IP.
Research will continue, but government funded. The good scientists arent in it for the money, but rather the prestige and enjoyment of research.
Oh, I know where we would be without Microsoft. We would have cheaper, faster computers with better sound and graphics, easier to program for, easier to use, and not requireing a weekly reboot and a 6-month reinstall cycle.
Thats where we would be. Because that is the history of computers that we have.
Big flywheel connected to diesel generator here (and were the IT department for a major manufacturing company). Power goes offline, flywheel keeps power going while it starts up the generator. Ive never noticed a power dip. Servers and IT support personell workstations will keep running.
The thing you usually miss when comparing CS and CIS degrees, and any kind of degree, is the time you could have spent doing something else. 5 years of CS isnt entirely wasted, but the experience will be 90% irrelevant to the job you're going to be doing later. You dont need anything more advanced than algebra to do programming. Youll barely even start to touch anything more advanced even if you do 3d programming, and _if_ you need it, you can pick up the nearest book on the topic and learn that then.
Because _the_, _only_ thing you need to know is how to find information and how to understand that information when you need it.
A lot of CS majors either learn that or they drop out simply because CS is harder than CIS and you often (not always) have to learn those qualities to succeed. On the other hand, a fair number of CS majors drop out because CS is BORING to most people, especially when you know you're wasting your time on things you'll never use in your life again (simply because this is the way academics traditionally work).
Those years can be used better. Either on a more relevant degree where you get time to study other things on your own, or on the job, if you are lucky enough to find a good one. After 5 years of work experience the employers who care wether you went with CIS, CS or on your own arent the ones you want to work for either way.
1) This doesnt spell out very fun for us... if it turns out the traits that create civilizations of our type lead to pretty much assured self-annhilation. But the thought has crossed my mind. Without strife, individuality, dissatisfaction, wish for dominance and more resources the drive to populate other areas might be much smaller. So either you get self-destructive colonizing species or you get complacent ones that disappear without a trace as their planet goes boom by itself after some time.
2) That would account for some, but if life was as common as theories would have it, not that many.
3) Indeed a problem. Self-repair and compartementalization would have to be functional to the extreme. Probably to the extent of generation fleets rather than generation ships.
4) Actually not a real problem; the solution is frozen gene pools. You dont breed the people in the fleet, you breed with stored genetic material. You could easily have a genepool of millions and with genetic screening you could sustain a viable genepool indefinitely.
5) Yep, see 1. Bleah.
6) Could be, but I doubt it. Respect for others will likely be a secondary attribute for any species motivated enough to not drown in their own mediocrity:). I think the mindset that would drive such an expansion (barring FTL travel, you're unlikely to see actual exploration with non-conization ships, I think) would ignore any non-sentient species at least.
7) Yep. Well, hey, at least the parents left us with TV when they decided to go awol...
Slashdot Mirror
The idea that consistency really matters is flawed.
First, people arent the idiots that interface 'designers' want to make them appear. Everyone from my mom to a secretary can learn a new UI for playing a game or using some program they want to use in a short time. And games have some of the absolutely worst user interfaces ever designed. Anyone who should be using a computer can learn a new interface. If they cant, I doubt they can handle the job they need the computer for.
And, the fact is, you dont have any choice either way. Microsoft changed the interface between dos and windows 3. And between 3 and 95. And between 95 and 98. Etc. And they're gonna change it again and again and again. So you might just as well switch to Linux where you can at least choose for yourself what you want the interface to look like.
Its funny how analysts complain about potential stock losses from investing in Microsoft...
Perhaps the stock holders should tell the company leadership that violating the law isnt part of their mandate for maximizing profits?
And perhaps investors should think twice about investing in companies known throughout the industry for their blatant disregard for the differences between legal or illegal competetive practices.
The software industry itself isnt innovative in its nature. Its evolutionary. Movement forward takes place by filling needs and slowly evolving products. You find few leaps. Sometimes there may appear to be 'inventions' like the internet (where free software played the major role), but that's usually because years of evolution happen outside the public eye and then theres a critical mass reached for mass market adaption.
Neither side 'innovates' to a large extent (which is a serious objection to the existence of software patents). Both sides appear to be 'copying', but that is because one sides users identified useful features, and reimplementing similar features will be reassuring to both users, easier for developers and good for marketing.
The entire IP issue has gotten entirely out of hand. This is no longer even close to any form of justice, this is mob tactics. And this has no innocent until proven guilty anywhere in it.
Mr Powell has apparently hired someone who can read newsgroup headers. Which can be forged. Which are _usually_ forged in these cases. Then he goes after the 'apparent' target and threatens them into paying him (wether or not they even know how to use a news reader...). This isnt even funny.
The argument for Freenet and similar technologies becomes so much stronger. These lawyers must not have any sort of information to go on _at_ all. Sources and destination adresses, storage nodes and everything must be moved entirely outside anyones ability to obtain, because it has become blindingly obvious that the justice system cannot be trusted anymore, and that blackmail has become standard legal practice.
Its not even about protecting freedom of speech, its about protecting the innocent bystanders from an IP industry run amok.
It doesnt so much "destroy" it as make it very difficult for Microsoft to buy, assimilate or steal. Which makes it rather difficult for Microsoft to maintain their primary forms of "innovation".
Of course, you make the mistake of thinking that genetic makeup form very much of the personality. If I remember correctly, genetically identical twins that are separated at birth (adoption, etc) are less similar in personality than genetically different twins who are raised in the same family.
That means, loads of surprises. Different health issues, probably similar physical characteristics to an extent, but food and environment affects that a lot too, as well as new diseases, etc. Sexual predisposition might be entirely different, since what forms that is largely unknown, and probably to a large extent formed by environment.
Many parents seem to dream about being a perfect parent. Give it up. Start up a therapy fund that the kids can use when they turn 18, because if the parents themselves dont screw the kids over (and you will _never_ know how a kid will react to the most innocent correction, unfairness, too much fairness, pampering until its far far too late) then the rest of the world will.
Are twins then born with half a spirit? Or one of them without (Evil Twin (tm))? There is no difference between a clone or a twin, and regarding them any differently or debating them as being anything other than a twin with different birthdate is erraneous and fraught with the perils of having bad science fiction influence feelings.
Well, the Tomshardware link isnt very positive towards RDRAM really, and Sander Sassens articles on hardwarecentral have been rather controversial.
Theory is very nice, but unless there are some hard facts or at least consistent benchmarks made by several independent testers (rather than
the dubious ones that exist now), that show anything more than an infinitesimal performance difference either way for general applications (and which currently appear to show a generally worse performance for RDRAM), the price isnt even close to worth it. Even for servers.
http://www.inqst.com/ddrvrmbs.htm, tomshardware articles on ddr sdram, etc.
Im not sure exactly which kind of server RDRAM would be good for tho. Most servers Ive ever seen would be even more sensitive to latency issues compared to a desktop, due to the multiuser nature of servers in general.
Maybe it would be useable for some very specialized multimedia work or computation machines, where the benefits of high bandwidth would outweigh the latency problems.
But if you have to go that far out from any ordinary usage to find a use for the product, just forget it. Its probably not ever worth it. RDRAM might find a niche if it was cheaper than ordinary SDRAM but as it is now, its dead.
And maybe when they do that they will end up being just another proprietary unused worthless security-through-obscurity product.
SSH would be exactly there, had they gone down that route from the beginning.
The author of SSH was kind enough to release his code and make it public (sorta had to since he had GPL parts in there at the time), we were nice enough to decide ssh was a good idea and use it in a lot of places, creating the market for him. We got a turnaround, license changed, proprietary product that didnt work on all platforms any more and an incompatible shiny new protocol.
However, it is a clear proof that the name ssh was in general use for products complying with the ssh RFC long before the trademark was granted, which basically means the trademark isnt valid, nor has ever been a valid trademark.
Read USC title 15 section 1115 for the various reasons that a trademark can be contested. There are at least 4 possible separate paragraphs that can be used in this case, including prior use, abandonment, permission and mark functionality.
All this is is a lesson to other people that legalities like trademark issues, patents and license issues isnt something you play around with and later decide what you really meant (or change your mind about it). SSH has been messy this way from the beginning.
Of course, without the product actually being opensource for a while it would never ever have reached any form of popularity.
The major marketing investment done in SSH has been made by Unix system admins who needed a secure and practical (and easily obtainable) way to connect between hosts, and who were later left to fend for themselves as the product went closed and unsupported on a large number of platforms.
And, frankly, having gone through the pains of dealing with the forms of licensing of SSH and having salesmen tell me there is NO version that has ever been free (ok, I know more about the licensing than the salesmen) to the various other stages, it was a true pleasure to dump the commercial branch and go entirely with OpenSSH.
If SSH has any brandname value it is despite SSH Inc, not because of it.
True. And the basic problem is I cant get an order for 5000 licenses of SSH through the purchasing department without a 3 year project, but I _can_ push OpenSSH into our servers.
Which, of course, means that I will advocate OpenSSH rather than SSH, since one is implementable in assbackwards large corps and the other one isnt. And since I know that a load of other people have the same problem, Id guess that SSH should be very glad they're getting buisness from people who confuse OpenSSH with the proprietary SSH product, because SSH dropped off the roadmap as being useable at the same time they went proprietary and dropped a load of platforms.
Rambus provided nothing. The technology was independently developed without the use of Rambus technology.
That Rambus managed to con the USPTO into granting patents on (obviously) obvious technology that anyone in the industry could, and did, develop is hardly surprising. The USPTO grants such patents every day.
Open Source isnt, of course, the solution to companies in the consumer productivity software producing buisness. It is their death. They have no place in the Open Source world (not that they have one in the Microsoft world either).
.net, to have a future sustainable buisness model (not because there is any form of consumer advantage in it). However, with Linux and the free alternatives here, they will find it rather difficult to get people to buy into that model.
That is the reality of a finite number of needed features, code reuse and a virtually costless reproduction capability.
It is, however, a very good solution for the consumers of that software, for vertical software companies, software services companies, dedicated devices companies, etc.
In my opinion, Microsoft already sees its own death in the numbers. They cannot sustain a consumer buisness on unneeded features and random incompatibilities indefinitely. They have to switch over to a for-hire model in
What Burney further fails to understand is that there is no surviving viable market for proprietary consumer applications either. That market is squarely divided between Microsoft (who will ensure there is no serious competition to their products in proprietaryland) and the free alternatives. There simply isnt any niche to fill between anymore.
People would rather go with a pirated copy of Office than buy a decent cheaper office suite that fulfills their needs. Or they will go with the entirely free one.
Actually, at least here, dumping the BSD userland would go a long bit towards getting BSD more acceptable.
The rest of the unix world is for better or worse, fairly sysvish these days, and the number of extra if statements you save by using linux instead of BSD is enough to tip the balance if youre scripting across Solaris, HP-UX, AIX and a pc unix.
The GPL doesnt place anything but GPL code under the GPL. Not through linking or any other way. However, _YOU MAY NOT DISTRIBUTE THE GPL CODE_, unless all the code can be distributed under the TERMS of the GPL.
There is no relicensing taking place. There is no enforced GPL on the other code. It is simply the GPL code that the GPL applies to. You can distribute the otherwise licensed code however you want, but if it does not have as lenient (or more lenient) terms as the GPL code, you may not distribute the GPL parts of the code.
GPL bashing often comes because of an incomplete understanding of how the GPL works (which is understandable, it isnt exactly clear until you've read it about ten thousand times and even then its easy to slip).
Government does some things good and others not as good. But government funded research does a good job in many cases, because government doesnt do much more than pay for it; the scientists do the job. The same ones who do the research for the pharmaceutical industry.
Add to that the slight difference in motivations; pharmaceutical companies do not want a cure, they want something they can sell again and again. While the government motivation is to find a cure so they dont have to pay for it again and again.
Id rather have free drugs today and free drugs tomorrow, government funded and research grant funded, than rampant greed, lifetime drugs and no real cure.
Face it, the drug companies arent needed. Get rid of them all and we'll still have the research. We'll just have a lot of unemployed IP lawyers, administrators and marketing people.
Well, frankly, in my opinion the abuse that drug companies and other IP industries have done to the IP system has terminated their right to exist. We do not need intellectual property any more, because it does no longer serve society.
The consistent abuse done to patents and copyright will guarantee that that is the eventual outcome. Tension will build up as society sees no legitimacy in the existence anymore, and revokes most if not all forms of IP, with the result that the rampant greed shown in the abuse will destroy even the useful and semi-legitimate forms of IP.
Research will continue, but government funded. The good scientists arent in it for the money, but rather the prestige and enjoyment of research.
Oh, I know where we would be without Microsoft. We would have cheaper, faster computers with better sound and graphics, easier to program for, easier to use, and not requireing a weekly reboot and a 6-month reinstall cycle.
Thats where we would be. Because that is the history of computers that we have.
Big flywheel connected to diesel generator here (and were the IT department for a major manufacturing company). Power goes offline, flywheel keeps power going while it starts up the generator. Ive never noticed a power dip. Servers and IT support personell workstations will keep running.
The thing you usually miss when comparing CS and CIS degrees, and any kind of degree, is the time you could have spent doing something else. 5 years of CS isnt entirely wasted, but the experience will be 90% irrelevant to the job you're going to be doing later. You dont need anything more advanced than algebra to do programming. Youll barely even start to touch anything more advanced even if you do 3d programming, and _if_ you need it, you can pick up the nearest book on the topic and learn that then.
Because _the_, _only_ thing you need to know is how to find information and how to understand that information when you need it.
A lot of CS majors either learn that or they drop out simply because CS is harder than CIS and you often (not always) have to learn those qualities to succeed. On the other hand, a fair number of CS majors drop out because CS is BORING to most people, especially when you know you're wasting your time on things you'll never use in your life again (simply because this is the way academics traditionally work).
Those years can be used better. Either on a more relevant degree where you get time to study other things on your own, or on the job, if you are lucky enough to find a good one. After 5 years of work experience the employers who care wether you went with CIS, CS or on your own arent the ones you want to work for either way.
1) This doesnt spell out very fun for us... if it turns out the traits that create civilizations of our type lead to pretty much assured self-annhilation. But the thought has crossed my mind. Without strife, individuality, dissatisfaction, wish for dominance and more resources the drive to populate other areas might be much smaller. So either you get self-destructive colonizing species or you get complacent ones that disappear without a trace as their planet goes boom by itself after some time.
:). I think the mindset that would drive such an expansion (barring FTL travel, you're unlikely to see actual exploration with non-conization ships, I think) would ignore any non-sentient species at least.
2) That would account for some, but if life was as common as theories would have it, not that many.
3) Indeed a problem. Self-repair and compartementalization would have to be functional to the extreme. Probably to the extent of generation fleets rather than generation ships.
4) Actually not a real problem; the solution is frozen gene pools. You dont breed the people in the fleet, you breed with stored genetic material. You could easily have a genepool of millions and with genetic screening you could sustain a viable genepool indefinitely.
5) Yep, see 1. Bleah.
6) Could be, but I doubt it. Respect for others will likely be a secondary attribute for any species motivated enough to not drown in their own mediocrity
7) Yep. Well, hey, at least the parents left us with TV when they decided to go awol...