Yes, I agree. In fact, the real point of diminishing returns is 6 MP. I frequently set my 12 MP camera at 6 for snapshots. Who needs to download a 15 MB RAW file for the average photo? These megapixel wars have been in the nutty zone for about 2-3 years now. I have watched it assuming the camera manufacturers don't know a better way to market their cameras.
The future of photography will be the same as the past of photography: signal to noise and color in the hands of craftsmen will make the best pictures.
The megapixelly challenged are just collecting lenses and bodies. Frankly, I'm glad they are distracted by something.
The installer cd and desktop skin of the platform is irrelevant to the underlying functionality. This is precisely why we should pool our resources around the best distribution. Does Linus weigh in on what boot loader people should use? Or what X11 based gui?
Embedded systems, and rare platforms will take care of themselves. They will always be supported in the same sense that any platform is supported because this is open source.
This ruling applies to live event coverage where the broadcaster does not control the content. Pre-programmed material will continue to be subject to the same draconian and childish FCC rules as before.
This is no victory for free speech or free thought.
I have to admit I was excited by the possibility! I mean ET contact is so significant that even a hint of a hint of a 1000:1 against chance is an amazingly profound event.
Unfortunately SETI is hopeless. Last week a paper came out making a convincing argument that it is far more energy efficient to SNAIL MAIL a stack of DVD's to ET than it is to try to broadcast a radio signal.
One needs stellar type energies to propagate a signal far enough to believe that even a modest percentage of the galaxy would see it. For example, most planets, such as Jupiter and Saturn emit strong radio signals, but when it comes to searching for planets in OTHER systems we still use gravitational effects observed based on the motion of a star in the same system.
SETIGuy should save Paul Allen some money and fire himself.
Sure there are problems with Wi-Fi, but not the kind of problems described in this article. From the kitchen to the living room? Are you kidding? Wi-Fi works great at that range!
No my Wi-Fi didn't work like this out of the box, but after I read about the various settings on my 'access point' I was able to "dial it in" for a nearly flawless connection thru the entire house!
As I type, I'm sitting in the living room with no cords at all, and my DSL hub is upstairs in the office. Give it another try, and this time be prepared to do a bit of optimization. The out of the box configuration may not work for you...but it can be made to work!
John
PS. I've also used wireless access points across the country, like on the campuses of several major universities, and they work great! Just as advertised, wireless access, anywhere, anytime!
This essay misses a crucial, yet subtle, distinction between art and technology, that of utility. It is the common practice of our modern technology oriented culture to assume that all aspects of life, and all aspects of intellect somehow correlate with or eventually will be augmented by technology. This assertion, though compelling, remains to be proved in any substantial way.
The use of paint programs, and computer graphics hardly represents a revolution in the field of art. On the contrary, your assertion that Leonardo Da Vince was a technologist is hopelessly contradictory with your conclusion. Da Vince is known to have cut open corpses and examined their innards. The key here, is that that Da Vince's purpose was not to revive or revitalize the corpses, his purpose was to examine their internal *form* to understand perfectly how to represent them in *art*.
The ancient ideal of *form* is a key aspect of classical art, one that has been nearly erased in modern times, and this is why it is easier to assume that technology and art are the same thing. The underlying principal is that ideal form has a deep and lasting appeal, whereas so much of technology represents a compromise between form and utility, for profit, for performance, for a number of reasons that should never come into consideration in art!
Leave your compter behind and visit an art museum!
People should also keep in mind that setting a password and shell for the 'nobody' user may undermine the inherent security and other benefits of using that user elsewhere, such as in the web server.
Of course, and as always, the nytimes missed the real story. Obviously, there are economic realities concerning medicines in the third world. This is not a new story at all. Many of these countries can not even obtain 'relatively' in-expensive medicines, such as Polio vaccine.
The real story is that HIV is not just a single viral strain. It takes many forms. Each of the drug cocktails and treatments currently only has the ability to treat a single strain or a narrow range of the viral incarnations, and in fact, often the individual undergoing treatment must switch from drug to drug, or continue adding drugs to their therapy regime over time, just to keep up with mutations of the virus.
The point? Almost all of the research going on with AIDS/HIV is taking place in the western world to the benefit of western patients. Even if most of the current AIDS/HIV drugs could be sent to every suffering patient in the third world, many of them would be ineffective, or useless because the third world has different strains of the virus then we have in the western world.
Why is no research money spent on formulating drugs for the third world? Easy, drug companies don't stand to make money on the third world. And money to pay for AIDS/HIV research is all coming from western society to pay to help western patients.
Ironically, hundreds of people have posted messages espousing the virtue of capitalism, and how violating IP law is some slight against the American "free market" and capitalistic society.
It's irrelavent. The question is the same as "Why do people drive excessively large vehicles?" We would rather waste fuel, or have drugs here, then have it for the third world. Simple old world selfishness, I guess.
The SETI project is an impossible pipe dream. 7 Billion miles, thats nothing, thats a mere 1/1000 (.001) light year, dwarfed into negligability by intergalactic and even interstellar distances.
And remember radio signal density drops off by the square of distance (r^2) !!! This proves that in order for the signal to be heard at only 1 light year, the signal would have to be at least 1000*1000 or 1 Million times more powerful than Pioneer. This is feasable, considering the weak transmitter on the aging satelite, but too bad there are no stars that are only 1 light year from us, to hear from the nearest star, more than 4 light years, would require a signal 16 Million times more powerful.
Some of the systems SETI activly surveys are much further than this. Give it up folks!
If you read the spec it appears that SMDI hasn't done anything but create a bunch of acronyms. One technical detail I could gleen from the spec is that it appears they are going to try to use some type of public key cryptography to protect the stream to the portable device. Since the device identification stream has 'certificate' and 'issuing authority' fields.
Nonetheless, the protocols described in the spec are TOO weak and it looks like its subject to replay attacks all over the place. Using a CD Image would get you as many SMDI copies as you like. It is also likely that the SMDI to device stream is replayable if you record it.
These coroporate design by committee things always make me wonder about the mean intellegence of greedy corporate bastards. They can come up with acronyms all day, but try and get them to give you a decent protocol, just try it.
According to the spec, the analog playback is bandwidth limited. The spec is designed for devices that have digital and compliant speakers so you couln't mine a DVD-audio quality signal out of the playblack stream, but you could make a tape from it.
In order to hack it, you have to get access to the original watermarked and 'protected' content.
Some in the community believe that ElGamal and other public key cryptosystems are based on the RSA patent. However, this has never been proven, or tested in court. The release of the RSA patent means all of those systems become unencumbered by any such restrictions which may have been lurking.
BS! If I was the first one to take one of these and try and get it up and running on my PC, and I call these jokers to ask about a developer license for Linux. The response would be the immediate standard Linux request response:
1. Huh? What's Linux?
2. No we don't support that.
It's the 'hackers' who caused widespread interest, and made this thing useful for Linux, these guys didn't see Linux on their radar, and made no attempt whatsoever to support it. This is the same as a million other hardware vendors how have been clued into the reality that Linux users are activists and we'll use your hardware with or without your 'SUPPORT.'
Even the vendors who open the spigot and say 'we support Linux' usually respond with at least #1 when you talk to them.
What happens when a lisp programmer writes a function to produce a lisp routine as output?
Interesting.
I'd make sure it output the GPL along with the routine, so it couldn't be usurped.
Even more interesting, this is exactly the type of license on derivitive work generated by a state machine that everyone on this site was outraged about in Borland C++ builder a couple of months ago.
I would argue that the purpose of any review is to have a trusted authority give an opinion on a product or service. The opinion is just that.
Most peoples opinions are based on prejudices of one sort or another. Someone who is keen on free software is more likely to be intelligent enough to use it. Someone who is keen on Windows, is probably not a UNIX user (the platform of choice for most free software) and therefore probably going to pan most free software...
except napster, since that's about free beer and not free software.
Every time you type an editorial and mail it to the New York Times (I assume this wasn't dictated over wireless).
Every time you research a product or service. Every time you make a deposit in Denver, CO and make a withdrawl in Miami, FL the same day. Every time you buy books, music, movies. Drive a car, ride a bike. Bake in an oven that has more accurate temperature control so you don't burn the muffins...
In fact, as my list grows longer, I'm having more trouble coming up with things that have not been impcted by the digital age.
I don't use the non-free packages, I suspect many Debian users don't use them. On the other hand I don't see that they hurt anything in the current form of distribution.
Its up to the user to decide, as it should be, this is the heart of what free software is all about.
As compiler technology moves further into the future, this question will come up more and more.
The question is how much of what I cause a computer to do FOR ME, actually belongs to me? I say all of it, but Borland seems to be pushing the envelope here, since, although, they may have some reasonable clame to their executable code, the code that they generate on my behalf is as dependent on my code, as it is theirs. But more importantly it is dependant on my intellectual property, and my design. Just as if I hired a consultant to generate the same code for me, I would own the code and not a consultant!
Borland is selling a product to serve MY needs in exchange for financial gain. They are trying to reduce the ammount one gets in the exchange. For a company like Borland, that is dying, they should be doing just the opposite.
If the compiler company can define all code built using their compiler as a derivitive work, can they hold your code hostage if you develop it using their platform?
Moreover, if this code is not derivitive, what does that do for the lesser GPL?
There are many questions here, I'm sure most of them, in one way or another will ultimatly serve to point out the gaping holes in current copyright and digital format laws.
This machine uses NTSC color encoding, so this would seem to imply future plans for America, and the ability to buy one (and some discs) next time I'm in Japan.
It seems any reasonable investor with only the minimum level of information has known much of this for years, however, in case you havn't noticed many of the stocks which were causing this trouble have retreated significantly in the last few months.
There will always be companies that are valued higher or lower than perhaps their financials indicate they should be, but this is the nature of a speculative stock market.
Investors are free to invest in the FUTURE success of a company or industry that is not reflected in the current financial performance. Likewise, investors are free to sell or go short on any position even if it's financials currently indicate future profitability.
The inflation figure quoted in the article of 30% is ludicrous. If inflation was 30%, corn flakes that cost $4.00 in 1995, would now cost $17.93 to just break even.
As far as industry valuation for Internet and technology stocks. Yes, some stocks are quite overvalued due to investor hyperactivity, however, some of the technology companies are good companies with good financials. There are quite a few examples of profitable, or mostly profitable pillars of the industry, they have been around and in the market for years, they provide good products for good value, and they have a demostrated track record of growth and performance. Some of these companies seem to be fairly appropriatly valued based on the current economy.
If the current valuation is due to irationality in the tech sector, how do you explain the 10-15 year dow trend of 20-30% growth? I think we can explain a great deal of this with the IRA and the 401(k). These programs have shifted vast amounts of financial resources from government pensions into the stock market, and as more and more people enter the economy as workers with retirement hopes, more and more money enters the stock market. Still more growth comes from the social popularity of internet investing, and stock purchases as a whole, employee stock options, and more.
These factors, in addition to investor emotionality, have driven solid growth for the past decade or so. The real question is, how much of the current value is based only on emotion and irrational hopes for an industry.
I believe much less than this article predicts, but more than the current market indicates.
Therefore, on a 2-3 year trend I would guess we will see a slight decrease in the current growth rate, but not quite a reversal in the growth trend.
I think Freenet would dovetail nicely with wireless network technology. I system of Freenet servers 1-2 km apart could blanket metropolitan areas and eliminate dependancy on ISP's for network service.
What are your thoughts on this? Are any hardware people interested in looking at this problem? Building some prototypes?
IMO this system can not work without true cryptographic level anonymity, or at least a continuous distribution of data wherin it would be impossible to ever determine where a message is being stored or has been originated.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, I agree. In fact, the real point of diminishing returns is 6 MP. I frequently set my 12 MP camera at 6 for snapshots. Who needs to download a 15 MB RAW file for the average photo? These megapixel wars have been in the nutty zone for about 2-3 years now. I have watched it assuming the camera manufacturers don't know a better way to market their cameras.
The future of photography will be the same as the past of photography: signal to noise and color in the hands of craftsmen will make the best pictures.
The megapixelly challenged are just collecting lenses and bodies. Frankly, I'm glad they are distracted by something.
The installer cd and desktop skin of the platform is irrelevant to the underlying functionality. This is precisely why we should pool our resources around the best distribution. Does Linus weigh in on what boot loader people should use? Or what X11 based gui?
Embedded systems, and rare platforms will take care of themselves. They will always be supported in the same sense that any platform is supported because this is open source.
Apparently, "open source" is the new word for "end of life."
This ruling applies to live event coverage where the broadcaster does not control the content. Pre-programmed material will continue to be subject to the same draconian and childish FCC rules as before.
This is no victory for free speech or free thought.
I posted an automated weekly analysis of the language used in my email some time ago.
http://www.2ad.com/~john/spam_zeitgeist/
This focuses more on language used rather than on message type. So it reveals some of the patterns used in marketing messages.
John
I have to admit I was excited by the possibility! I mean ET contact is so significant that even a hint of a hint of a 1000:1 against chance is an amazingly profound event.
Unfortunately SETI is hopeless. Last week a paper came out making a convincing argument that it is far more energy efficient to SNAIL MAIL a stack of DVD's to ET than it is to try to broadcast a radio signal.
One needs stellar type energies to propagate a signal far enough to believe that even a modest percentage of the galaxy would see it. For example, most planets, such as Jupiter and Saturn emit strong radio signals, but when it comes to searching for planets in OTHER systems we still use gravitational effects observed based on the motion of a star in the same system.
SETIGuy should save Paul Allen some money and fire himself.
John
Sure there are problems with Wi-Fi, but not the kind of problems described in this article. From the kitchen to the living room? Are you kidding? Wi-Fi works great at that range!
No my Wi-Fi didn't work like this out of the box, but after I read about the various settings on my 'access point' I was able to "dial it in" for a nearly flawless connection thru the entire house!
As I type, I'm sitting in the living room with no cords at all, and my DSL hub is upstairs in the office. Give it another try, and this time be prepared to do a bit of optimization. The out of the box configuration may not work for you...but it can be made to work!
John
PS. I've also used wireless access points across the country, like on the campuses of several major universities, and they work great! Just as advertised, wireless access, anywhere, anytime!
This essay misses a crucial, yet subtle, distinction between art and technology, that of utility. It is the common practice of our modern technology oriented culture to assume that all aspects of life, and all aspects of intellect somehow correlate with or eventually will be augmented by technology. This assertion, though compelling, remains to be proved in any substantial way.
The use of paint programs, and computer graphics hardly represents a revolution in the field of art. On the contrary, your assertion that Leonardo Da Vince was a technologist is hopelessly contradictory with your conclusion. Da Vince is known to have cut open corpses and examined their innards. The key here, is that that Da Vince's purpose was not to revive or revitalize the corpses, his purpose was to examine their internal *form* to understand perfectly how to represent them in *art*.
The ancient ideal of *form* is a key aspect of classical art, one that has been nearly erased in modern times, and this is why it is easier to assume that technology and art are the same thing. The underlying principal is that ideal form has a deep and lasting appeal, whereas so much of technology represents a compromise between form and utility, for profit, for performance, for a number of reasons that should never come into consideration in art!
Leave your compter behind and visit an art museum!
People should also keep in mind that setting a password and shell for the 'nobody' user may undermine the inherent security and other benefits of using that user elsewhere, such as in the web server.
Of course, and as always, the nytimes missed the real story. Obviously, there are economic realities concerning medicines in the third world. This is not a new story at all. Many of these countries can not even obtain 'relatively' in-expensive medicines, such as Polio vaccine.
The real story is that HIV is not just a single viral strain. It takes many forms. Each of the drug cocktails and treatments currently only has the ability to treat a single strain or a narrow range of the viral incarnations, and in fact, often the individual undergoing treatment must switch from drug to drug, or continue adding drugs to their therapy regime over time, just to keep up with mutations of the virus.
The point? Almost all of the research going on with AIDS/HIV is taking place in the western world to the benefit of western patients. Even if most of the current AIDS/HIV drugs could be sent to every suffering patient in the third world, many of them would be ineffective, or useless because the third world has different strains of the virus then we have in the western world.
Why is no research money spent on formulating drugs for the third world? Easy, drug companies don't stand to make money on the third world. And money to pay for AIDS/HIV research is all coming from western society to pay to help western patients.
Ironically, hundreds of people have posted messages espousing the virtue of capitalism, and how violating IP law is some slight against the American "free market" and capitalistic society.
It's irrelavent. The question is the same as "Why do people drive excessively large vehicles?" We would rather waste fuel, or have drugs here, then have it for the third world. Simple old world selfishness, I guess.
The SETI project is an impossible pipe dream. 7 Billion miles, thats nothing, thats a mere 1/1000 (.001) light year, dwarfed into negligability by intergalactic and even interstellar distances.
And remember radio signal density drops off by the square of distance (r^2) !!! This proves that in order for the signal to be heard at only 1 light year, the signal would have to be at least 1000*1000 or 1 Million times more powerful than Pioneer. This is feasable, considering the weak transmitter on the aging satelite, but too bad there are no stars that are only 1 light year from us, to hear from the nearest star, more than 4 light years, would require a signal 16 Million times more powerful.
Some of the systems SETI activly surveys are much further than this. Give it up folks!
John
If you read the spec it appears that SMDI hasn't done anything but create a bunch of acronyms. One technical detail I could gleen from the spec is that it appears they are going to try to use some type of public key cryptography to protect the stream to the portable device. Since the device identification stream has 'certificate' and 'issuing authority' fields.
Nonetheless, the protocols described in the spec are TOO weak and it looks like its subject to replay attacks all over the place. Using a CD Image would get you as many SMDI copies as you like. It is also likely that the SMDI to device stream is replayable if you record it.
These coroporate design by committee things always make me wonder about the mean intellegence of greedy corporate bastards. They can come up with acronyms all day, but try and get them to give you a decent protocol, just try it.
John
Not really.
According to the spec, the analog playback is bandwidth limited. The spec is designed for devices that have digital and compliant speakers so you couln't mine a DVD-audio quality signal out of the playblack stream, but you could make a tape from it.
In order to hack it, you have to get access to the original watermarked and 'protected' content.
John
Some in the community believe that ElGamal and other public key cryptosystems are based on the RSA patent. However, this has never been proven, or tested in court. The release of the RSA patent means all of those systems become unencumbered by any such restrictions which may have been lurking.
John
BS! If I was the first one to take one of these and try and get it up and running on my PC, and I call these jokers to ask about a developer license for Linux. The response would be the immediate standard Linux request response:
1. Huh? What's Linux?
2. No we don't support that.
It's the 'hackers' who caused widespread interest, and made this thing useful for Linux, these guys didn't see Linux on their radar, and made no attempt whatsoever to support it. This is the same as a million other hardware vendors how have been clued into the reality that Linux users are activists and we'll use your hardware with or without your 'SUPPORT.'
Even the vendors who open the spigot and say 'we support Linux' usually respond with at least #1 when you talk to them.
John
Interesting.
I'd make sure it output the GPL along with the routine, so it couldn't be usurped.
Even more interesting, this is exactly the type of license on derivitive work generated by a state machine that everyone on this site was outraged about in Borland C++ builder a couple of months ago.
Find it here John
I would argue that the purpose of any review is to have a trusted authority give an opinion on a product or service. The opinion is just that.
Most peoples opinions are based on prejudices of one sort or another. Someone who is keen on free software is more likely to be intelligent enough to use it. Someone who is keen on Windows, is probably not a UNIX user (the platform of choice for most free software) and therefore probably going to pan most free software...
except napster, since that's about free beer and not free software.
John
Every time you type an editorial and mail it to the New York Times (I assume this wasn't dictated over wireless).
Every time you research a product or service. Every time you make a deposit in Denver, CO and make a withdrawl in Miami, FL the same day. Every time you buy books, music, movies. Drive a car, ride a bike. Bake in an oven that has more accurate temperature control so you don't burn the muffins...
In fact, as my list grows longer, I'm having more trouble coming up with things that have not been impcted by the digital age.
Flat Earthers aside, this is a revolution.
John
I don't use the non-free packages, I suspect many Debian users don't use them. On the other hand I don't see that they hurt anything in the current form of distribution.
Its up to the user to decide, as it should be, this is the heart of what free software is all about.
John
As compiler technology moves further into the future, this question will come up more and more.
The question is how much of what I cause a computer to do FOR ME, actually belongs to me? I say all of it, but Borland seems to be pushing the envelope here, since, although, they may have some reasonable clame to their executable code, the code that they generate on my behalf is as dependent on my code, as it is theirs. But more importantly it is dependant on my intellectual property, and my design. Just as if I hired a consultant to generate the same code for me, I would own the code and not a consultant!
Borland is selling a product to serve MY needs in exchange for financial gain. They are trying to reduce the ammount one gets in the exchange. For a company like Borland, that is dying, they should be doing just the opposite.
If the compiler company can define all code built using their compiler as a derivitive work, can they hold your code hostage if you develop it using their platform?
Moreover, if this code is not derivitive, what does that do for the lesser GPL?
There are many questions here, I'm sure most of them, in one way or another will ultimatly serve to point out the gaping holes in current copyright and digital format laws.
John
This machine uses NTSC color encoding, so this would seem to imply future plans for America, and the ability to buy one (and some discs) next time I'm in Japan.
John
It seems any reasonable investor with only the minimum level of information has known much of this for years, however, in case you havn't noticed many of the stocks which were causing this trouble have retreated significantly in the last few months.
There will always be companies that are valued higher or lower than perhaps their financials indicate they should be, but this is the nature of a speculative stock market.
Investors are free to invest in the FUTURE success of a company or industry that is not reflected in the current financial performance. Likewise, investors are free to sell or go short on any position even if it's financials currently indicate future profitability.
The inflation figure quoted in the article of 30% is ludicrous. If inflation was 30%, corn flakes that cost $4.00 in 1995, would now cost $17.93 to just break even.
As far as industry valuation for Internet and technology stocks. Yes, some stocks are quite overvalued due to investor hyperactivity, however, some of the technology companies are good companies with good financials. There are quite a few examples of profitable, or mostly profitable pillars of the industry, they have been around and in the market for years, they provide good products for good value, and they have a demostrated track record of growth and performance. Some of these companies seem to be fairly appropriatly valued based on the current economy.
If the current valuation is due to irationality in the tech sector, how do you explain the 10-15 year dow trend of 20-30% growth? I think we can explain a great deal of this with the IRA and the 401(k). These programs have shifted vast amounts of financial resources from government pensions into the stock market, and as more and more people enter the economy as workers with retirement hopes, more and more money enters the stock market. Still more growth comes from the social popularity of internet investing, and stock purchases as a whole, employee stock options, and more.
These factors, in addition to investor emotionality, have driven solid growth for the past decade or so. The real question is, how much of the current value is based only on emotion and irrational hopes for an industry.
I believe much less than this article predicts, but more than the current market indicates.
Therefore, on a 2-3 year trend I would guess we will see a slight decrease in the current growth rate, but not quite a reversal in the growth trend.
John
It's only for sale in Europe, and it's being marketed as a business 'security' solution...
NOT as a home appliance, and surely not a recordable DVD replacement.
John
I think Freenet would dovetail nicely with wireless network technology. I system of Freenet servers 1-2 km apart could blanket metropolitan areas and eliminate dependancy on ISP's for network service.
What are your thoughts on this? Are any hardware people interested in looking at this problem? Building some prototypes?
IMO this system can not work without true cryptographic level anonymity, or at least a continuous distribution of data wherin it would be impossible to ever determine where a message is being stored or has been originated.
How do you propose to solve this problem?