I had been having ongoing arguments with auditors and DoD scanners about Open Source Software versus "freeware" - it's free, so that means it's Freeware - right? Finally, Daniel Risacher from the "Defense Department's Office of the Chief Information Officer" made this announcement.
Reading that, I got all excited...and waited patiently. For a bit. Finally, come April, I emailed him directly with this question:
At a RedHat conference on Oct8, 2008, you made a comment that the DoD would further clarify that OSS is not the same as Freeware/ Shareware, for those who are still confused about the subject. We are currently undergoing an audit, and are being told that we can't use various products because they are "shareware" - specifically, mysql was on the hitlist. Discontinuing use of mysql would be an engineering nightmare for us, esp since anything else would also be "freeware" according to the auditors.
Of course, 8500.2 says that we can't use shareware because we don't have access to the source code, and we obviously have access to the code of open source products. I can't find the memo that you mentioned would be coming soon - has it been released?
To which he responded:
From: Daniel Risacher ((redacted)) Sent: Monday, April 06, 2009 3:54 PM To: Brian LaMere Subject: Re: OSS in DoD? The memo is essentially finished, but stuck in an near-endless do-loop of executive-level staffing. Forward the names of any gov't personnel who are giving you trouble to my work email: ((redacted)), and I'll try to talk to them.
Wow...that was back in April. Things sure do move fast around there;)
There are countless documents that say so many different things, compounded by the fact that there are a multitude of auditors who have been trained that "Open Source" is "Freeware." And since "Freeware" is disallowed according to 8500.2, they then decide that "Open Source" is too. Nevermind that the Linux kernel is Open Source, no - they would pick and choose randomly which software we could and couldn't use. On a whim they'd suddenly decide mysql was no longer ok, no matter what evidence I could provide otherwise.
If this were an anthropologist saying it were true pre-proof, then that would at least mean something perhaps. But...a geneticist? Since he as yet has zero evidence at all - hasn't even started the research - why is he saying this in such a way that he "knows" anything? He's supposed to base what he knows on dna analytics. Leave the sociology to the sociologists.
A few weeks ago I decided I was going to get a ps3 - this settles it then. Now, if only I wasn't one of the countless senior level people cut during downsizing, and actually had a job!
In all seriousness, I haven't had a "console" since my old Atari that I had in the early 80s or whenever that was. I don't know who won in all this - I know I like the wii on some levels, the games seem more social and less serious pro-gamer (which suits me). However, I also know that no matter what I get, the console will generally sit unused.
I don't have a blueray player yet. I know, what year is it? And my good old, reliable dvd player, though it was (is?) quite a nice component-level appliance with all the happiness stuff, but it skips a lot now, and there was always that place where it paused between layers, about an hour in to a movie. I've had 2 dvds that won't work on it at all - and not for regional reasons, but instead - from what I've been told - for reasons having to do with the dual-layer format changing somewhat. Bryan Wilson's "The Rocker" is an example of such a dvd - won't play at all. Works fine on my computer. And yes, it's a legit dvd.
So who wins? After all this time, still the ps3 - because it's still the only one with blue-ray. Though, by the time I actually go buy one...maybe blueray will have been replaced?
or, alternatively, people who lived in rural areas and who didn't have nearby high-speed internet access. It doesn't have to indicate some sort of insufficiently-technical person. Just how...difficult...do you think Ubuntu is to use as a desktop anyway?
At this point, it's far more useful to people who do events where they teach Ubuntu usage and hand out the free CDs. I've been in a couple groups in the past that would get boxes of the ubuntu cds, and then hand them out at such events.
First, Obama wasn't a change for the sake of change - there was an election. You had to either choose someone, or not choose someone. You couldn't maintain status-quo by simply not showing up. So, considering a change of some sort was going to happen, you had to choose which sort of change you wanted. But just as the problems weren't caused by Bush, they also certainly weren't caused by Obama either. The american political system is much bigger than that, and hides well the fact that people like the speaker of the house is, in many ways, more powerful than the president.
Further along that same vein though - you also do need to "change" your desktop every so often (more often than you are forced to change the president). Within months you at the very least need to do patches. I started with Slackware back in...whatever the hell year that was mid-90s. I've been through many distros since then. You change based on what your needs are, you change to become experienced in the alternatives, and you change because we're an adapting, growing world.
I gave up on Ubuntu some time back because it took tasks I always found to be easy (changing xconfig, for instance) and made them difficult - by burying extra configs and such in various places. An upgrade one day and suddenly selinux is enabled on my home desktop (overkill imo) and most of my crap stopped working. Etc, etc, until I just got rid of it and went back to gentoo - which of course, by now, I've dropped.
But guess what? with the backing from IBM, with more and more people signing on to it - you need to learn it. Or at least, use Debian. There are some fundamental differences between Debian and distros like Fedora/RedHat - and if you don't know them, you'll be at a loss when faced with them.
If your career doesn't put you in jeopardy of that (ie, you're not in IT, research, banking, or engineering) then...stick with whatever does what you currently need to do. Watching trends and planning for the future isn't a worthless task however. Anyone who has watched Shuttleworth's efforts and not seen how successful they'd be wasn't paying attention, and as such people who need to be versatile have at least, by now, familiarized themselves with the Debian distro (if they weren't already familiar with it). Ubuntu had a HUGE grassroots thing going for a long while, and did a great job of converting those efforts to a viable corporate option while not leaving their initial fans out to dry. I commend Mark for the great job he did there. Doesn't mean I like Ubuntu - I'd rather run off a livedvd from various other groups than use Ubuntu. But it's got undeniable appeal, and isn't something that is "change just to change"
Spectacular idea - maybe, just maybe, if we remember what could be happening, and what shouldn't be happening, things will shape up a bit. Both sides seem hell bent on tearing up everything.
I perused the top level sales pitch docs - can't find any good details on how they'd want to organize it. subdomains for each state? subdomains for each type of law? A giant wikipedia? If info can't be easily found on the site through intuitive methods, it's a "failure" from the start (assuming the intent is availability of the data...).
Anyone have any info on such (ie, how it is going to be organized)?
Dell made plain several times that he sees the installed base of technology as very old, and sees a coming "refresh cycle," for which he has high hopes.
While the ultra-rich have been largely unaffected by the current economic situation, the people in the middle are being very badly hurt by it. Guess who the overwhelming majority of people who would by a new computer simply because their older, still responsive and functional computer was merely "old" are? That's right, the middle class.
He can have all the high hopes he wants, but people aren't going to be rushing to replace their 1-3year old computers this Christmas simply because Windows7 is going to be out. While there are a lot of old computers out there, a lot of them are like the ones I have sitting in my closet right now; laptops from 5-7 years ago that I turn on and use for particular projects/tasks.
well, I think I wasn't clear then. Allow most of what someone gets and can do to be dictated by their rank, and their rank to be dictated by the structure (guild, etc) that is below them. Since independents wouldn't have the benefit of having a superior that can give their group a helicopter...they'd be severely limited in how much they could progress as a group of independents. That said, they would still be able to play as individuals - becoming a better medic, etc - but make that a much less important factor.
progress as a guild, instead of as a player? Obtain rank in a military hierarchy, with that rank dictating how many forces you could command and what sort of equipment you could request from your superiors? Not worry about whether your character had 5 extra stamina and a +2 weapon of smite, and instead worry about what your guild was doing?
Yes, but Warcraft has actually had some kind of plot and usable characters.
Tatiana? (sp?) There are certainly character classes in C&C - dog handlers, medics, spies, assassins, flame thrower dudes, etc etc. Think about the idea of letting guilds get tanks for use dungeons as they progress through activities as a guild - they do the first raid where they take out a small, remote enemy camp - and they get 2 jeeps. From there they progress.
One thing that would be revolutionary in the whole MMO bit would be making a happy medium between the FPS games that are over in a couple hours, and the MMOs where your character develops over the course of months, if not years; have the characters develop over the course of maybe just a few weeks (go from being a bumbling medic, to a powerful one) but where the guild itself develops over the course of years. And just like in the real world, there's nothing that would stop the rank structure from 2 different units from working together to solve a common goal; 2 guilds could join forces to fight the same thing. And why limit the number of people that can go? If you want to raid a tiny camp with a force 20x larger than is required...it's you that's wasting your time. Why aren't you allowed to?
And PVP? Give players the option of being members of either of the two alliances of nations, or of being independent. Make guilds of independent players not be able to advance terribly far. Allow people to kill members of their own alliance - yet make it where that has a varying/reasonable chance of retiring their character (npc cops come and arrest them, etc). Allow people to request transfers from one unit to another unit (changing guilds) with transitional units where the GMs are npcs so that those who get guildkicked or who haven't found a guild can still play.
To write off the military experience as a viable MMO is silly. There's ways to make it work, you just have to do something *different* than previous MMOs. The above was just off the top of my head, yet re-reading it - it sounds pretty cool to me. Imagine how much better it could be if someone spent 5 hours thinking about it, instead of 5 minutes! Craziness.
It's merely a problem with MMO saturation really, not MMO background options. To survive past the first couple months, an MMO has to not just be "as good" as it's competition - it has to be *better* than it (better than WoW, mainly) instantly, out of the box, off the starting line. No product is perfect off the starting line, so it is a complicated and huge hurdle to jump.
they aren't reading the whole thing at once - mostly because it isn't practical. Think about the shapes involved, and then try to imagine fitting the whole thing through a hole that is purposefully barely large enough for the dna to squeeze through. They are however reading much much larger fragments. How large? no idea, haven't found anything that quantifies it. Wouldn't be surprised if it was in the 10s of thousands of base pairs, though.
From the article: Dr. Quake's DNA sequencing machine, about the size of a refrigerator, works by splitting the double helix of DNA into single strands and breaking the strands into small fragments that on average are 32 DNA units in length.
That's not terribly different than what happens now; we cut things into chunks of X units (say, 400 base pairs), and then use all sorts of tools to guess how to put it all back together. The major problem being something elsewhere mentioned in that article: A computer program then matches the billions of 32-unit fragments to the completed human genomes already on file...
There are many situations where this is simply not ideal. Not the least of which is when someone wants to sequence a species that has yet to be sequenced. Additionally, you're basing your alignment upon the alignment of the previous set, without actually knowing whether the previous set is properly aligned. More to point, it is well accepted that it is not properly aligned, so you're testing against a known bad. This is (imo) the biggest problem in bioinformatics right now.
IBM's machine doesn't seem to be taking that same approach, and instead appears to be cutting the DNA in to exponentially larger chunks (from what I've read about it). This isn't something where Moore's Law applies; it's a paradigm shift, not a technology improvement.
and when asked if they were ok with getting 80% less advertising in exchange for the ads actually being about things they were interested in, consumers replied "lol wut?"
seriously people - ads pay for the crap you're looking at. Do you want half the page covered in ads? Your alternative is to have much fewer ads, but have them be about things relevant to you. There is no third "everything for free!!!!" option, no matter how strong your sense of entitlement is.
...and while not patronizing them, I don't complain about the fact that their product isn't free. One would hope that people have reasons for doing the things they do. The challenge then is to be consistent and rational; disliking someone else's product on the basis that you can't do anything at you want with it without first unlocking it (wow, hard stuff) is silly - you want to have your way with it because it's a great platform. If it was a poor platform, you wouldn't want to. I don't feel some sort of sense of entitlement towards butcher shops - I don't think they are ethically bound to serve me whatever I want.
Most people tend to miss the point I'm making; Open Society will never be successful if you whine and try to force someone else to share openly - be the change you want to see. Instead of complaining that someone else hasn't opened something, create something yourself and give it away.
I strongly doubt you actually built your own radio - anyone with sufficient ability to do so would also realize that such a task would very quickly be not remotely worth the effort. See Leonard Read's I, Pencil for the classic case regarding that.
Install your own radio? Sure, simple enough. Take an LCD, a circuit board, and a bunch of circuit components and create a useful and functional radio? Man, why the hell would you? Would be fun, yeah - but fun for something sitting on your desk. For something that is in your car and that you actually want to take cds, give them back when you want (and without scratches), handles the special nature of dual-signal FM to create stereo, etc? To do that by yourself, the best-case scenario would put you exponentially higher in cost for the same features. Worst case, same exponential cost - with fewer features.
Did I mention no one is stopping you from unlocking your iPhone?
One of the things I look for in a car is a healthy aftermarket and a knowledgeable community of owners who work on their own cars.
Which is precisely why I stopped screwing around with metrics, and got a Harley;)
And note that I'm not advocating the DRM - I'm advocating an Open Society that is created by people choosing to create things that they then give to the society at large free of hindrance. It should be an activity the creator of stuff (whatever the stuff) should be driving force behind however, not those who want to take someone else's thing and do whatever they want with it. That activity isn't Open Society - it's simple coveting. We are not in a situation where we must take basic rights for ourselves by force - and thus, do not have the ethical backing of suggesting that that any means necessary are righteous.
Especially since it's easy to unlock an iPhone, and there really aren't any serious drawbacks to doing it. Worst one anyone can come up with is that it might cause problems with future updates. So, don't update. Tada!
As a person who just a couple months ago finally won a very simple, obvious breach of warranty lawsuit in regards to a vehicle that was not functioning properly the day I took it new off the dealer floor, I can tell you...they can make claims to anything and cause all sorts of heartaches that people generally just give up on.
Also - failing to publish documentation is a much, much weaker position for the automotive industry than the position of Apple on the iPhone; they make freely available a SDK for the iPhone. Further, you can brick your phone and still get it warranty-fixed or replaced.
The analogy breaks down when you start talking about digital signatures for cars; unless, of course, you allow for the most obvious comparison. That would be, of course - do you think your car manufacturer would still warranty your car if you put diesel in a tank when the cap states super-unleaded only? And if you don't allow for that comparison within the analogy, you have to strike it from the comparison all together, since it is not something for which there is a comparison. Which means you're left with comparing the lack of repair manuals and special tools (many have special keyed tools that are necessary, and only available to branded repair shops) to the completely free and easily obtainable SDK for the iPhone. And in that comparison, the iPhone is by far the more open platform - not the other way around.
Not really. Keep in mind I didn't propose that analogy here, though I do understand that no analogy is perfect. So that said, while it used to be fairly encouraged to replace your radio (car manufacturers went to standardized forms for the slot, etc), that has changed quite dramatically in recent years; I'd be hard-pressed to get any radio to fit in the dash of my wife's 2009 car, even if the wiring and technical functionality would be quite simple. But radios aside, many other changes to a car will very quickly void the warranty (bore out the cylinders and see if the dealer will still warranty-repair a cracked block!) and also have established case history of limiting the liability of the manufacturer...since you changed the configuration. As things become slicker and sleeker, with more tech crammed in to each square inch, things become harder to do.
But let us not stop there, let's go further - for the iPhone, there does indeed exist an app developer's kit which, as it so happens, will unlock your phone. That kit is available directly from Apple themselves. The process for getting that kit is less stringent - less restricted - than the process for getting an official repair manual for a new car. Think about what I just said - if your car is so much more of an open platform, why does the manufacturer refuse to give you a developer's kit (repair manual) while from Apple, you can get that developer's kit relatively easily?
Your car is tested for safety and performance with a certain configuration, and changing much more than just the radio (and these days, even the radio for most cars) is strongly discouraged - no less so than Apple discourages iPhone unlocking by non-devs.
More concisely, tweeking your car's computer to get more performance will void the warranty; tweeking the iPhone to get more performance will not. Car manufacturers greatly restrict repair manuals and tools necessary for making changes to your car - some manufacturers don't even supply complete info to non-brand repair shops at all, recently. Apple provides an iPhone developers kit that anyone can download, for free.
Or even simpler - people are screaming because they heard it was cool to scream, and don't realize there's nothing all that crazy going on. You want to throw apps on your iPhone because it is a great platform - that is a strength, not a weakness. And, as it so happens, you *can*. Just unlock it.
yes, it is avail through various distros. Re-read what I wrote though. Dual screen, plus VMs. That wasn't part of the default config last I checked; the nvidia driver (meaning, the one from nvidia...) wouldn't work if you were using the VM kernels. Caveat being that it was fedora and RHEL I was using at the time. Whether that particular problem still exists is irrelevant; it is well documented that it used to exist, and thus still proves the point. If you require, I can come up with a few thousand other examples of how changing from the standard configuration can cause problems during a later update. The concept is quite simple however, and should be understood even if I didn't give a single example at at all.
no, IP is unethical and flawed. But it is not a "lie." It does in fact exist. If you are honest in your quest for an Open Society, you will want to engage in activities that lend to that society. But just as ELF doesn't actually benefit the planet (and instead, harms it quite frequently), and ALF doesn't actually help animals (again, harms additional animals instead) - you too are being counterproductive to the cause for which you are supposedly fighting.
There are various reasons that would account for being counter-productive to your own cause, but none are very flattering so I won't bother with them here. What I will do though is point out the flaw in what you're saying, since I am an actual advocate of the cause, and wish you'd stop harming it so much.
sorry, I wish I could say I was unclear, but no - I mispoke. Or rather, spoke incompletely, and the later "clarification" didn't fix it. "I haven't bought XYZ from the RIAA since blah..." is what it should have said. I hinted at that later in the comment, but yeah - wasn't clear.
I'm not an "indy" guy for the cutesy reasons most people are, and I have a hard time coming across indy stuff I actually like (since for many of them, the reason they're not RIAA is because the RIAA doesn't want them). But there are those who are indy who are good, and some who are even big.
It allows me to still like Prince - who is and was willing to give away music that he chose to give away, but will seek to protect that which he has not chosen to give away - while at the same time still being pissed off at Lars. I'm an Open Society advocate, but I also strongly feel that it should be done out of respect and choice, not out of theft or piracy. I'm not advocating individual instances of Open Society, but instead an entire cultural shift, which has to be a willing choice.
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I had been having ongoing arguments with auditors and DoD scanners about Open Source Software versus "freeware" - it's free, so that means it's Freeware - right? Finally, Daniel Risacher from the "Defense Department's Office of the Chief Information Officer" made this announcement.
Reading that, I got all excited...and waited patiently. For a bit. Finally, come April, I emailed him directly with this question:
At a RedHat conference on Oct8, 2008, you made a comment that the DoD would further clarify that OSS is not the same as Freeware/ Shareware, for those who are still confused about the subject. We are currently undergoing an audit, and are being told that we can't use various products because they are "shareware" - specifically, mysql was on the hitlist. Discontinuing use of mysql would be an engineering nightmare for us, esp since anything else would also be "freeware" according to the auditors.
Of course, 8500.2 says that we can't use shareware because we don't have access to the source code, and we obviously have access to the code of open source products. I can't find the memo that you mentioned would be coming soon - has it been released?
To which he responded:
From: Daniel Risacher ((redacted))
Sent: Monday, April 06, 2009 3:54 PM
To: Brian LaMere
Subject: Re: OSS in DoD?
The memo is essentially finished, but stuck in an near-endless do-loop of executive-level staffing.
Forward the names of any gov't personnel who are giving you trouble to my work email: ((redacted)), and I'll try to talk to them.
Wow...that was back in April. Things sure do move fast around there ;)
There are countless documents that say so many different things, compounded by the fact that there are a multitude of auditors who have been trained that "Open Source" is "Freeware." And since "Freeware" is disallowed according to 8500.2, they then decide that "Open Source" is too. Nevermind that the Linux kernel is Open Source, no - they would pick and choose randomly which software we could and couldn't use. On a whim they'd suddenly decide mysql was no longer ok, no matter what evidence I could provide otherwise.
G-d, how I miss that circus.
If this were an anthropologist saying it were true pre-proof, then that would at least mean something perhaps. But...a geneticist? Since he as yet has zero evidence at all - hasn't even started the research - why is he saying this in such a way that he "knows" anything? He's supposed to base what he knows on dna analytics. Leave the sociology to the sociologists.
....but they can't play dvds or bluerays. nor are they available for that occasional use as a game console. And I also don't subscribe to cable, so...
A few weeks ago I decided I was going to get a ps3 - this settles it then. Now, if only I wasn't one of the countless senior level people cut during downsizing, and actually had a job!
In all seriousness, I haven't had a "console" since my old Atari that I had in the early 80s or whenever that was. I don't know who won in all this - I know I like the wii on some levels, the games seem more social and less serious pro-gamer (which suits me). However, I also know that no matter what I get, the console will generally sit unused.
I don't have a blueray player yet. I know, what year is it? And my good old, reliable dvd player, though it was (is?) quite a nice component-level appliance with all the happiness stuff, but it skips a lot now, and there was always that place where it paused between layers, about an hour in to a movie. I've had 2 dvds that won't work on it at all - and not for regional reasons, but instead - from what I've been told - for reasons having to do with the dual-layer format changing somewhat. Bryan Wilson's "The Rocker" is an example of such a dvd - won't play at all. Works fine on my computer. And yes, it's a legit dvd.
So who wins? After all this time, still the ps3 - because it's still the only one with blue-ray. Though, by the time I actually go buy one...maybe blueray will have been replaced?
bah, my mod points expired about an hour ago. +insightful
or, alternatively, people who lived in rural areas and who didn't have nearby high-speed internet access. It doesn't have to indicate some sort of insufficiently-technical person. Just how...difficult...do you think Ubuntu is to use as a desktop anyway?
At this point, it's far more useful to people who do events where they teach Ubuntu usage and hand out the free CDs. I've been in a couple groups in the past that would get boxes of the ubuntu cds, and then hand them out at such events.
ok, your comment stays unmodded, and mine gets modded as troll?
First, Obama wasn't a change for the sake of change - there was an election. You had to either choose someone, or not choose someone. You couldn't maintain status-quo by simply not showing up. So, considering a change of some sort was going to happen, you had to choose which sort of change you wanted. But just as the problems weren't caused by Bush, they also certainly weren't caused by Obama either. The american political system is much bigger than that, and hides well the fact that people like the speaker of the house is, in many ways, more powerful than the president.
Further along that same vein though - you also do need to "change" your desktop every so often (more often than you are forced to change the president). Within months you at the very least need to do patches. I started with Slackware back in...whatever the hell year that was mid-90s. I've been through many distros since then. You change based on what your needs are, you change to become experienced in the alternatives, and you change because we're an adapting, growing world.
I gave up on Ubuntu some time back because it took tasks I always found to be easy (changing xconfig, for instance) and made them difficult - by burying extra configs and such in various places. An upgrade one day and suddenly selinux is enabled on my home desktop (overkill imo) and most of my crap stopped working. Etc, etc, until I just got rid of it and went back to gentoo - which of course, by now, I've dropped.
But guess what? with the backing from IBM, with more and more people signing on to it - you need to learn it. Or at least, use Debian. There are some fundamental differences between Debian and distros like Fedora/RedHat - and if you don't know them, you'll be at a loss when faced with them.
If your career doesn't put you in jeopardy of that (ie, you're not in IT, research, banking, or engineering) then...stick with whatever does what you currently need to do. Watching trends and planning for the future isn't a worthless task however. Anyone who has watched Shuttleworth's efforts and not seen how successful they'd be wasn't paying attention, and as such people who need to be versatile have at least, by now, familiarized themselves with the Debian distro (if they weren't already familiar with it). Ubuntu had a HUGE grassroots thing going for a long while, and did a great job of converting those efforts to a viable corporate option while not leaving their initial fans out to dry. I commend Mark for the great job he did there. Doesn't mean I like Ubuntu - I'd rather run off a livedvd from various other groups than use Ubuntu. But it's got undeniable appeal, and isn't something that is "change just to change"
Speaking of people installing it...when does the beta stop working?
Spectacular idea - maybe, just maybe, if we remember what could be happening, and what shouldn't be happening, things will shape up a bit. Both sides seem hell bent on tearing up everything.
I perused the top level sales pitch docs - can't find any good details on how they'd want to organize it. subdomains for each state? subdomains for each type of law? A giant wikipedia? If info can't be easily found on the site through intuitive methods, it's a "failure" from the start (assuming the intent is availability of the data...).
Anyone have any info on such (ie, how it is going to be organized)?
Dell made plain several times that he sees the installed base of technology as very old, and sees a coming "refresh cycle," for which he has high hopes.
While the ultra-rich have been largely unaffected by the current economic situation, the people in the middle are being very badly hurt by it. Guess who the overwhelming majority of people who would by a new computer simply because their older, still responsive and functional computer was merely "old" are? That's right, the middle class.
He can have all the high hopes he wants, but people aren't going to be rushing to replace their 1-3year old computers this Christmas simply because Windows7 is going to be out. While there are a lot of old computers out there, a lot of them are like the ones I have sitting in my closet right now; laptops from 5-7 years ago that I turn on and use for particular projects/tasks.
well, I think I wasn't clear then. Allow most of what someone gets and can do to be dictated by their rank, and their rank to be dictated by the structure (guild, etc) that is below them. Since independents wouldn't have the benefit of having a superior that can give their group a helicopter...they'd be severely limited in how much they could progress as a group of independents. That said, they would still be able to play as individuals - becoming a better medic, etc - but make that a much less important factor.
progress as a guild, instead of as a player? Obtain rank in a military hierarchy, with that rank dictating how many forces you could command and what sort of equipment you could request from your superiors? Not worry about whether your character had 5 extra stamina and a +2 weapon of smite, and instead worry about what your guild was doing?
Yes, but Warcraft has actually had some kind of plot and usable characters.
Tatiana? (sp?) There are certainly character classes in C&C - dog handlers, medics, spies, assassins, flame thrower dudes, etc etc. Think about the idea of letting guilds get tanks for use dungeons as they progress through activities as a guild - they do the first raid where they take out a small, remote enemy camp - and they get 2 jeeps. From there they progress.
One thing that would be revolutionary in the whole MMO bit would be making a happy medium between the FPS games that are over in a couple hours, and the MMOs where your character develops over the course of months, if not years; have the characters develop over the course of maybe just a few weeks (go from being a bumbling medic, to a powerful one) but where the guild itself develops over the course of years. And just like in the real world, there's nothing that would stop the rank structure from 2 different units from working together to solve a common goal; 2 guilds could join forces to fight the same thing. And why limit the number of people that can go? If you want to raid a tiny camp with a force 20x larger than is required...it's you that's wasting your time. Why aren't you allowed to?
And PVP? Give players the option of being members of either of the two alliances of nations, or of being independent. Make guilds of independent players not be able to advance terribly far. Allow people to kill members of their own alliance - yet make it where that has a varying/reasonable chance of retiring their character (npc cops come and arrest them, etc). Allow people to request transfers from one unit to another unit (changing guilds) with transitional units where the GMs are npcs so that those who get guildkicked or who haven't found a guild can still play.
To write off the military experience as a viable MMO is silly. There's ways to make it work, you just have to do something *different* than previous MMOs. The above was just off the top of my head, yet re-reading it - it sounds pretty cool to me. Imagine how much better it could be if someone spent 5 hours thinking about it, instead of 5 minutes! Craziness.
It's merely a problem with MMO saturation really, not MMO background options. To survive past the first couple months, an MMO has to not just be "as good" as it's competition - it has to be *better* than it (better than WoW, mainly) instantly, out of the box, off the starting line. No product is perfect off the starting line, so it is a complicated and huge hurdle to jump.
they aren't reading the whole thing at once - mostly because it isn't practical. Think about the shapes involved, and then try to imagine fitting the whole thing through a hole that is purposefully barely large enough for the dna to squeeze through. They are however reading much much larger fragments. How large? no idea, haven't found anything that quantifies it. Wouldn't be surprised if it was in the 10s of thousands of base pairs, though.
...and to verify that we aligned the initial sequences (that we use as guides) correctly in the first place ;)
From the article: Dr. Quake's DNA sequencing machine, about the size of a refrigerator, works by splitting the double helix of DNA into single strands and breaking the strands into small fragments that on average are 32 DNA units in length.
That's not terribly different than what happens now; we cut things into chunks of X units (say, 400 base pairs), and then use all sorts of tools to guess how to put it all back together. The major problem being something elsewhere mentioned in that article: A computer program then matches the billions of 32-unit fragments to the completed human genomes already on file...
There are many situations where this is simply not ideal. Not the least of which is when someone wants to sequence a species that has yet to be sequenced. Additionally, you're basing your alignment upon the alignment of the previous set, without actually knowing whether the previous set is properly aligned. More to point, it is well accepted that it is not properly aligned, so you're testing against a known bad. This is (imo) the biggest problem in bioinformatics right now.
IBM's machine doesn't seem to be taking that same approach, and instead appears to be cutting the DNA in to exponentially larger chunks (from what I've read about it). This isn't something where Moore's Law applies; it's a paradigm shift, not a technology improvement.
and when asked if they were ok with getting 80% less advertising in exchange for the ads actually being about things they were interested in, consumers replied "lol wut?"
seriously people - ads pay for the crap you're looking at. Do you want half the page covered in ads? Your alternative is to have much fewer ads, but have them be about things relevant to you. There is no third "everything for free!!!!" option, no matter how strong your sense of entitlement is.
...and while not patronizing them, I don't complain about the fact that their product isn't free. One would hope that people have reasons for doing the things they do. The challenge then is to be consistent and rational; disliking someone else's product on the basis that you can't do anything at you want with it without first unlocking it (wow, hard stuff) is silly - you want to have your way with it because it's a great platform. If it was a poor platform, you wouldn't want to. I don't feel some sort of sense of entitlement towards butcher shops - I don't think they are ethically bound to serve me whatever I want.
Most people tend to miss the point I'm making; Open Society will never be successful if you whine and try to force someone else to share openly - be the change you want to see. Instead of complaining that someone else hasn't opened something, create something yourself and give it away.
I strongly doubt you actually built your own radio - anyone with sufficient ability to do so would also realize that such a task would very quickly be not remotely worth the effort. See Leonard Read's I, Pencil for the classic case regarding that.
And more apropos, few could claim to have contributed as much to OSS, and to understand it as deeply, as Linus Torvalds. And yet, even he - though obviously quite capable - prefers distros that make things simple and do most of the things for him.
Install your own radio? Sure, simple enough. Take an LCD, a circuit board, and a bunch of circuit components and create a useful and functional radio? Man, why the hell would you? Would be fun, yeah - but fun for something sitting on your desk. For something that is in your car and that you actually want to take cds, give them back when you want (and without scratches), handles the special nature of dual-signal FM to create stereo, etc? To do that by yourself, the best-case scenario would put you exponentially higher in cost for the same features. Worst case, same exponential cost - with fewer features.
Did I mention no one is stopping you from unlocking your iPhone?
One of the things I look for in a car is a healthy aftermarket and a knowledgeable community of owners who work on their own cars.
Which is precisely why I stopped screwing around with metrics, and got a Harley ;)
And note that I'm not advocating the DRM - I'm advocating an Open Society that is created by people choosing to create things that they then give to the society at large free of hindrance. It should be an activity the creator of stuff (whatever the stuff) should be driving force behind however, not those who want to take someone else's thing and do whatever they want with it. That activity isn't Open Society - it's simple coveting. We are not in a situation where we must take basic rights for ourselves by force - and thus, do not have the ethical backing of suggesting that that any means necessary are righteous.
Especially since it's easy to unlock an iPhone, and there really aren't any serious drawbacks to doing it. Worst one anyone can come up with is that it might cause problems with future updates. So, don't update. Tada!
Ever try to actually apply that act yourself?
As a person who just a couple months ago finally won a very simple, obvious breach of warranty lawsuit in regards to a vehicle that was not functioning properly the day I took it new off the dealer floor, I can tell you...they can make claims to anything and cause all sorts of heartaches that people generally just give up on.
Also - failing to publish documentation is a much, much weaker position for the automotive industry than the position of Apple on the iPhone; they make freely available a SDK for the iPhone. Further, you can brick your phone and still get it warranty-fixed or replaced.
The analogy breaks down when you start talking about digital signatures for cars; unless, of course, you allow for the most obvious comparison. That would be, of course - do you think your car manufacturer would still warranty your car if you put diesel in a tank when the cap states super-unleaded only? And if you don't allow for that comparison within the analogy, you have to strike it from the comparison all together, since it is not something for which there is a comparison. Which means you're left with comparing the lack of repair manuals and special tools (many have special keyed tools that are necessary, and only available to branded repair shops) to the completely free and easily obtainable SDK for the iPhone. And in that comparison, the iPhone is by far the more open platform - not the other way around.
Not really. Keep in mind I didn't propose that analogy here, though I do understand that no analogy is perfect. So that said, while it used to be fairly encouraged to replace your radio (car manufacturers went to standardized forms for the slot, etc), that has changed quite dramatically in recent years; I'd be hard-pressed to get any radio to fit in the dash of my wife's 2009 car, even if the wiring and technical functionality would be quite simple. But radios aside, many other changes to a car will very quickly void the warranty (bore out the cylinders and see if the dealer will still warranty-repair a cracked block!) and also have established case history of limiting the liability of the manufacturer...since you changed the configuration. As things become slicker and sleeker, with more tech crammed in to each square inch, things become harder to do.
But let us not stop there, let's go further - for the iPhone, there does indeed exist an app developer's kit which, as it so happens, will unlock your phone. That kit is available directly from Apple themselves. The process for getting that kit is less stringent - less restricted - than the process for getting an official repair manual for a new car. Think about what I just said - if your car is so much more of an open platform, why does the manufacturer refuse to give you a developer's kit (repair manual) while from Apple, you can get that developer's kit relatively easily?
Your car is tested for safety and performance with a certain configuration, and changing much more than just the radio (and these days, even the radio for most cars) is strongly discouraged - no less so than Apple discourages iPhone unlocking by non-devs.
More concisely, tweeking your car's computer to get more performance will void the warranty; tweeking the iPhone to get more performance will not. Car manufacturers greatly restrict repair manuals and tools necessary for making changes to your car - some manufacturers don't even supply complete info to non-brand repair shops at all, recently. Apple provides an iPhone developers kit that anyone can download, for free.
Or even simpler - people are screaming because they heard it was cool to scream, and don't realize there's nothing all that crazy going on. You want to throw apps on your iPhone because it is a great platform - that is a strength, not a weakness. And, as it so happens, you *can*. Just unlock it.
Unless, of course, you'd rather merely complain.
yes, it is avail through various distros. Re-read what I wrote though. Dual screen, plus VMs. That wasn't part of the default config last I checked; the nvidia driver (meaning, the one from nvidia...) wouldn't work if you were using the VM kernels. Caveat being that it was fedora and RHEL I was using at the time. Whether that particular problem still exists is irrelevant; it is well documented that it used to exist, and thus still proves the point. If you require, I can come up with a few thousand other examples of how changing from the standard configuration can cause problems during a later update. The concept is quite simple however, and should be understood even if I didn't give a single example at at all.
no, IP is unethical and flawed. But it is not a "lie." It does in fact exist. If you are honest in your quest for an Open Society, you will want to engage in activities that lend to that society. But just as ELF doesn't actually benefit the planet (and instead, harms it quite frequently), and ALF doesn't actually help animals (again, harms additional animals instead) - you too are being counterproductive to the cause for which you are supposedly fighting.
There are various reasons that would account for being counter-productive to your own cause, but none are very flattering so I won't bother with them here. What I will do though is point out the flaw in what you're saying, since I am an actual advocate of the cause, and wish you'd stop harming it so much.
sorry, I wish I could say I was unclear, but no - I mispoke. Or rather, spoke incompletely, and the later "clarification" didn't fix it. "I haven't bought XYZ from the RIAA since blah..." is what it should have said. I hinted at that later in the comment, but yeah - wasn't clear.
I'm not an "indy" guy for the cutesy reasons most people are, and I have a hard time coming across indy stuff I actually like (since for many of them, the reason they're not RIAA is because the RIAA doesn't want them). But there are those who are indy who are good, and some who are even big.
It allows me to still like Prince - who is and was willing to give away music that he chose to give away, but will seek to protect that which he has not chosen to give away - while at the same time still being pissed off at Lars. I'm an Open Society advocate, but I also strongly feel that it should be done out of respect and choice, not out of theft or piracy. I'm not advocating individual instances of Open Society, but instead an entire cultural shift, which has to be a willing choice.