I was just pointing out that government subsidy of open source software can have distortions in private markets.
The government defines the software markets
by introducing the concept of copyright. Without that,
the dollar value of any particular copy of a piece of
software would be almost zero.
How can a government possibly "distort" something
that is its own creation? There
is no "natural" state of a software market independent
from government control.
Re:may god forgive him for what he has unleashed
on
The First Smiley :-)
·
· Score: 1, Funny
I've heard it summed up in this quote:
"The Holy Roman Empire
was neither Holy, Roman, nor an Empire."
There are programmers and there are application developers. They are two completely different animals. Each one has that use.
Which allows us to propose some difinitions:
programn: An executable process
on your computer that may be useful or even enjoyable
to use.
applicationn: Can't really be defined,
but you know one when you see it. For example,
the awkward bug-ridden systems HR departments typically
make you use to update your records.
Come to think of it, did these microwave transmissions
have any encryption over the decades they were
in operation? Were people able to sit on a ridge
and collect credit card numbers and other dirt
from the hundreds of phone calls flying through the air?
The U.S. has free internet access too. All you have to do is live in a college dorm at most large colleges.
In my day, you were lucky if you had a couple of
slow TTYs and a chain printer in your dorm's
dismal basement. We were connected to exactly
one overloaded obsolete mainframe, and we liked it!
... Well, actually we didn't like it. But at least this setup never
distracted us from the top priority: Beer.
The people who make movies and such have the right to sell the product in any way they please
This is true. Now, after they've sold me a copy, it's
my property. The law says I can do whatever I please
with my new property, except for one thing:
I am not generally allowed to make new copies of the
content encoded in my physical copy, other than
copies allowed under the statute of "fair use".
yet people for some reason feel they are 'entitled' to use it any way they want
I should be, as long as I don't make copies of the
content that aren't protected by fair use.
There is nothing wrong with companies trying to peddle
information that is saddled with any kind of onerous
encrpytion/copy protectsion/annoyances/whatever..
However, by the same token, there should be nothing
wrong with me doing whatever I want with my property,
including decrypting it, hacking it, burning it, or
gluing it to my forehead. (As long as I don't make copies
of the content on it that aren't protected by fair use.)
The problem is that the media industry has bought
legislation that gives these technical tricks the force
of law. That is a huge change in the nature of the
copyright landscape, and it effectively eliminates many
of the tair use rights people used to hold over their
own bought-and-paid-for property.
It used to be, you bought a CD, and you owned it;
the record company only owned a lein that prevented
you from redistributing additional copies of the CD.
Now, through technical measures backed by new
laws, the record company
removes most of your ownership rights in your CD
and retains them for itself. You are effectively renting
the CD and are only allowed to play it on
record-company approved equipment.
I highly recommend the excellent and Free (as in love)
GNU metric2imperial library if you are planning something
ambitious like a Mars mission. It can really reduce
the possiblity of a miscommunication with your
subcontractors.
I'm well aware of what every signal in the serial
connector is for. They could have
done the signaling in-band without much added
complexety by adding a few extra bits per serial word.
(Not with weird ASCII bytes inserted in the data stream.)
They could have picked an operating mode
(parity, stop bit, bits-per-byte) while
they were at it, leaving baud rate as the only variable.
I'm sure they just weren't thinking that their design
would be still in use many decades after its introduction.
Hmm... I'll waste some time here and assign grades to the connectors in my
PC on a scale of 1 to 10:
Keyboard/mouse DIN - 5. Works OK, but hard to orient. Making mouse and
keyboard identical was stupid. Feel not very satisfying.
AC Power cord to power supply - 9. Very satisfying feel. Easy to use.
AC Power cord to wall outlet - 6. A true classic. Rated down because of
childhood memories of annoying transition to 3-prong grounded outlets. Could have
used better protection against fingers/children.
1/8-inch audo jacks - 8. Easy to use. It would be better if all audio
equipment would use the same connector (i.e., no 1/4-inch or RCA jacks).
USB connector - 9. Sure beats previous solutions. Would be nice if
the up/down orientation distinction was more obvious.
RJ-11/RJ-45 modem/network - 8. Very convenient; elegant design.
Achilles heel: if you try
to pull the cable out of a tangle of wires, you're likely to break the little retaining
tab and ruin the cable.
15-pin VGA video - 5. Hard to orient, screws are inconvenient
(but easier than the 3-BNC connector alternative).
Technical achievement award to those who figured out how to kludge 1600x1200
signal frequencies through this thing.
9-pin serial connector - 3. Boring. Same problems as VGA. Should have been
done with 2 or 3 pins. (Old larger serial connectors rate a 1 for total overkill.)
Parallel printer connector - 1. Choosing to save money by not putting
a shift register in the printer was one of the most unfortunate decisions in the
history of personal computing. How many kilotons of copper have been needlessly
wasted on all those wires? Cable is thick, heavy and expensive. This is a classic
example of how the marketplace can converge on a suboptimal solution and then
get locked in.
Centronix printer connector - 1. See previous entry. This end is
especially bulky and cheap feeling, to boot.
Internal IDE connection - 3. Ribbon cable is hard to manage. Master/slave
business is a hassle. Doesn't seem to be a clear standard on orientation keying. Hard
to tell when properly seated. Max length too short.
Internal SCSI connection - 3. Same problems as IDE (except for length
limitation), plus additional
confusion over terminations, ID numbers, and incompatible speeds and widths.
CD-ROM audio - 6. Not too bad, once you track down where the connection
is on the motherboard.
Hard drive power. - 9. Surprisingly easy to use, given the amperage
it must support. The twisting behavior is really nice. I've never had problems
with these.
Motherboard power - 7. Doesn't stand out much, no big problems.
Misc motherboard stake pin connections - 2. No physical alignment
constraints and poor silkscreen markings make these a big hassle.
ISA Slots - 3. The lack of a proper mechanical specification for these
caused a lot of alignment headaches. It's a good thing you could use the slot screw
to get the thing all the way in with brute force. Things got better once most cards
shrunk to the size of a business card; less to go wrong.
PCI Slots - 6. Relatively unexciting.
PCMCIA Slots - 8. I'm amazed at how all of those tiny pins connect without
getting crushed. Good feel, ejection button is fun.
People e-mail me tips every day about how I can
work at home. I've never looked into it, but it sounds
like there are dozens of ways that you can be
self-employed and make thousands
of dollars per week,
with little or no investment required. I'm surprised
you haven't seen these tips, everybody I know seems
to get them. I'll forward them to you if you want.
What's the difference between grammar and spelling?
Grammar errors are underlined with green squiggleys.
Spelling errors are underlined with red squiggleys.
Re:Sounds expensive
on
Electric Armor
·
· Score: 3, Funny
Wouldn't it be cheaper to have the tank scuff its feet on the carpet?
No, that would be silly. The cost reduction
plan currently under study calls for installing a clothes
dryer full of polyester slacks at the rear of the tank.
For those who might be wondering what PLATO
was, it was a system far ahead of its time. Kind
of a preview of the world wide web in the 1970's. It was a
mainframe-based system designed from the
ground up for interactive graphic use in a
teaching environment. It used cool orange
flat panel plasma displays. I took a couple of
classes that used PLATO for all of the homework
and a lot of interactive teaching material.
It supported hundreds of simultaneous interactive
users all sharing a single mainframe that was
probably less powerful than a 286, usually
with snappy performance. Now, with "modern"
OSes, a single CPU -- hundreds of times more powerful
than the entire PLATO site -- supports
a single user surfing the web, sometimes with
sluggish performance. Sometimes it makes you
wonder about progress and the concept
of diminishing returns.
The signal-to-noise ratio in popular music always _seems_ to go down... It's just that you don't remember the shit music of the past, and you're forced to acknowledge the shit music of the present.
Not true. I've been around long enough to
see several cycles of good music and
shitty music. The late 70's just before punk
arrived was a memorable shitty spell. There
were a couple more in the 80's and 90's.
The (before my time) interval between Elvis and the Beatles
was also pretty dismal.
I remember things being bad, and I remember
them getting better. Take my word for it, the last
few years have been the worst ever. I attribute
it to the focus-group filtered, computer
database driven playlists that Clear Channel and its
ilk uses to control their radio stations. At least
in the bad old days, real human greedy executives
decided what got played, and they had to use
their taste (good or bad) to pick the music.
Now, the music on the radio is a bland
predictable mush selected by
computer algorithms.
As usual, this bad spell will probably be broken
out of when some new music genre to hit the scene.
I suspect that unlike previous cycles, this new
movement will have to use a completely
alternate distribution method (not CDs or
radio) to avoid the current deadlock in the
music industry.
The irony here is that the launch sent up Eutelsats Hot Bird 6 so they can get the Playboy Channel all throughout Europe, the Mediteranian and North Africa.
That's what he's mad about. Other regions
can't compete with the unfair imperialistic silicone
boobies featured in American porn. These
monster plastic orbs, the full-sized SUVs of the
reproductive organ realm,
have been crowding
out indigenous genuine breasts wherever
they're broadcast.
Now the full resources of the
government subsidized U.S. Military Industrial
Complex have been utilized to help propagate
this imperialistic porn to the whole world.
It's a shameless use of a phallic space-aged
vehicle to literally embrace and extend mammaries
with space-aged polymers.
Hey, that 7 megs of drive space costs at least
3 cents. That may not sound like much, but
every penny adds up. If you're going to keep
a lid on costs, you've got to start somewhere.
Well, it's not as open as it was in the early 80's
when IBM used to sell technical reference guides
for PCs which contained the actual circuit diagrams.
Those of us who worked at PC clone companies
found these to be immensely useful.
You might argue that IBM ended up losing out
to its competition in the PC market and shouldn't
have done this. I believe, however, that the
open nature of the PC eventually resulted in a total market sized
hundreds of times larger than what would
have resulted under IBM's total proprietary control.
They probably made more profit in PCs,
PC-based servers and
PC software over the last 20 years than they
ever would have if the system weren't open.
Their relative share of the pie was smaller,
but the pie turned into a monster pie.
Moreover, other clone companies pioneered
the concept of the very profitable PC-based
server. IBM stole this idea back and created
their own lines of servers. The PC pie became
richer, too.
There's even a control case to check this theory:
witness the what happened when they tried to
go back to a closed hardware system with
the PS/2. It wasn't a poster child for success.
Secondarily, its NSA/CSS. Ever hear of the CSS [nsa.gov] side of the house? I
It's bad enough that the NSA is dabbling with
OS design. But wasting our tax money on efforts
to make prettier HTML formats is even worse.
That job clearly should be left to independent standards organizations
such as the W3C. Devoting half of a government agency to this
effort is totally absurd. Does anybody in
Washington have any sense of priorities??
What you do have the potential for (given significant further progress) is very fast cruise missiles, not ICBM's.
Very fast ramjet cruise missiles were under development
in the 1950's, but they fell out of favor because
ICBMs are even faster and just about impossible
to shoot down. However, they did
look way cooler than today's boring
ICBMs.
The Palladium scenario would be a net benefit for
the environment. Nobody would ever throw
away any electronic equipment ever again,
for fear of losing the magic keys that enable them
to watch the content that they paid for.
No circuit boards would be dumped in Asia.
They would remain embedded in ever growing stacks
of redundant consumer electronics devices in American living rooms.
One side effect: sales of outlet strips, surge
protectors, A/V cables and video selector
switches will skyrocket. Buy Belkin stock
today to get in on the ground floor.
Check out the bar codes at the supermarket-- there are two sets of numbers (plus a check digit). The first set of numbers (I believe it's five digits) will be the same for every product by a given manufacturer. The box of Kraft Mac & Cheese will have the same first five digits as the package of Kraft salad dressing. The second set of digits identifies the particular product and size of that manufacturer.
Exactly. If these two fields weren't each allocated
a static number of bits, the assignments could
be much more efficient. Manufacturers that
only make a couple of products would get a large
mfg number and a few bits for product codes.
Manufacturers that make many products would
get a small mfg number and a larger number
of bits for product codes. Similar to IP network
classes.
Seriously, it should be enough for
everyone. The whole Internet currently gets by
with 9.5 digits of IPV4 address space. The UPC
space has 200 times more points. It is allocated
per product, not per user, so there should
be fewer points needed. It currently is enough to
identify over 100 unique products for
each person on earth.
The UPC space is just inefficiently sliced up into
static sized subfields. If they assigned arbitrary
numbers to products and relied on a separate
database to interpret the meanings (like DNS does
with IP addresses, more or less), there'd be plenty of UPC codespace
for everyone for a long, long time.
Of course, such a change would really break
all of the UPC software, so it's easier to just throw
an extra digit or two at the problem.
Slashdot Mirror
The government defines the software markets by introducing the concept of copyright. Without that, the dollar value of any particular copy of a piece of software would be almost zero.
How can a government possibly "distort" something that is its own creation? There is no "natural" state of a software market independent from government control.
I've heard it summed up in this quote: "The Holy Roman Empire was neither Holy, Roman, nor an Empire."
Which allows us to propose some difinitions:
program n: An executable process on your computer that may be useful or even enjoyable to use.
application n: Can't really be defined, but you know one when you see it. For example, the awkward bug-ridden systems HR departments typically make you use to update your records.
Come to think of it, did these microwave transmissions have any encryption over the decades they were in operation? Were people able to sit on a ridge and collect credit card numbers and other dirt from the hundreds of phone calls flying through the air?
In my day, you were lucky if you had a couple of slow TTYs and a chain printer in your dorm's dismal basement. We were connected to exactly one overloaded obsolete mainframe, and we liked it!
This is true. Now, after they've sold me a copy, it's my property. The law says I can do whatever I please with my new property, except for one thing: I am not generally allowed to make new copies of the content encoded in my physical copy, other than copies allowed under the statute of "fair use".
yet people for some reason feel they are 'entitled' to use it any way they want
I should be, as long as I don't make copies of the content that aren't protected by fair use.
There is nothing wrong with companies trying to peddle information that is saddled with any kind of onerous encrpytion/copy protectsion/annoyances/whatever..
However, by the same token, there should be nothing wrong with me doing whatever I want with my property, including decrypting it, hacking it, burning it, or gluing it to my forehead. (As long as I don't make copies of the content on it that aren't protected by fair use.)
The problem is that the media industry has bought legislation that gives these technical tricks the force of law. That is a huge change in the nature of the copyright landscape, and it effectively eliminates many of the tair use rights people used to hold over their own bought-and-paid-for property.
It used to be, you bought a CD, and you owned it; the record company only owned a lein that prevented you from redistributing additional copies of the CD. Now, through technical measures backed by new laws, the record company removes most of your ownership rights in your CD and retains them for itself. You are effectively renting the CD and are only allowed to play it on record-company approved equipment.
And a brick wall?
Methinks there is no higher density than bit-per-atom.
6.02x10^23 Kb ought to be enough for anyone.
Example:
They could have picked an operating mode (parity, stop bit, bits-per-byte) while they were at it, leaving baud rate as the only variable.
I'm sure they just weren't thinking that their design would be still in use many decades after its introduction.
People e-mail me tips every day about how I can work at home. I've never looked into it, but it sounds like there are dozens of ways that you can be self-employed and make thousands of dollars per week, with little or no investment required. I'm surprised you haven't seen these tips, everybody I know seems to get them. I'll forward them to you if you want.
Grammar errors are underlined with green squiggleys.
Spelling errors are underlined with red squiggleys.
No, that would be silly. The cost reduction plan currently under study calls for installing a clothes dryer full of polyester slacks at the rear of the tank.
It supported hundreds of simultaneous interactive users all sharing a single mainframe that was probably less powerful than a 286, usually with snappy performance. Now, with "modern" OSes, a single CPU -- hundreds of times more powerful than the entire PLATO site -- supports a single user surfing the web, sometimes with sluggish performance. Sometimes it makes you wonder about progress and the concept of diminishing returns.
Not true. I've been around long enough to see several cycles of good music and shitty music. The late 70's just before punk arrived was a memorable shitty spell. There were a couple more in the 80's and 90's. The (before my time) interval between Elvis and the Beatles was also pretty dismal.
I remember things being bad, and I remember them getting better. Take my word for it, the last few years have been the worst ever. I attribute it to the focus-group filtered, computer database driven playlists that Clear Channel and its ilk uses to control their radio stations. At least in the bad old days, real human greedy executives decided what got played, and they had to use their taste (good or bad) to pick the music. Now, the music on the radio is a bland predictable mush selected by computer algorithms.
As usual, this bad spell will probably be broken out of when some new music genre to hit the scene. I suspect that unlike previous cycles, this new movement will have to use a completely alternate distribution method (not CDs or radio) to avoid the current deadlock in the music industry.
That's what he's mad about. Other regions can't compete with the unfair imperialistic silicone boobies featured in American porn. These monster plastic orbs, the full-sized SUVs of the reproductive organ realm, have been crowding out indigenous genuine breasts wherever they're broadcast.
Now the full resources of the government subsidized U.S. Military Industrial Complex have been utilized to help propagate this imperialistic porn to the whole world. It's a shameless use of a phallic space-aged vehicle to literally embrace and extend mammaries with space-aged polymers.
Just be sure to remember to save it to one of the lossy non-secret formats before your word processor locks you out.
Hey, that 7 megs of drive space costs at least 3 cents. That may not sound like much, but every penny adds up. If you're going to keep a lid on costs, you've got to start somewhere.
Well, it's not as open as it was in the early 80's when IBM used to sell technical reference guides for PCs which contained the actual circuit diagrams. Those of us who worked at PC clone companies found these to be immensely useful.
You might argue that IBM ended up losing out to its competition in the PC market and shouldn't have done this. I believe, however, that the open nature of the PC eventually resulted in a total market sized hundreds of times larger than what would have resulted under IBM's total proprietary control. They probably made more profit in PCs, PC-based servers and PC software over the last 20 years than they ever would have if the system weren't open.
Their relative share of the pie was smaller, but the pie turned into a monster pie. Moreover, other clone companies pioneered the concept of the very profitable PC-based server. IBM stole this idea back and created their own lines of servers. The PC pie became richer, too.
There's even a control case to check this theory: witness the what happened when they tried to go back to a closed hardware system with the PS/2. It wasn't a poster child for success.
It's bad enough that the NSA is dabbling with OS design. But wasting our tax money on efforts to make prettier HTML formats is even worse. That job clearly should be left to independent standards organizations such as the W3C. Devoting half of a government agency to this effort is totally absurd. Does anybody in Washington have any sense of priorities??
They do it to try to find out if repeating these steps for 196 ever ends up with a palindrome.
Very fast ramjet cruise missiles were under development in the 1950's, but they fell out of favor because ICBMs are even faster and just about impossible to shoot down. However, they did look way cooler than today's boring ICBMs.
No circuit boards would be dumped in Asia. They would remain embedded in ever growing stacks of redundant consumer electronics devices in American living rooms.
One side effect: sales of outlet strips, surge protectors, A/V cables and video selector switches will skyrocket. Buy Belkin stock today to get in on the ground floor.
Exactly. If these two fields weren't each allocated a static number of bits, the assignments could be much more efficient. Manufacturers that only make a couple of products would get a large mfg number and a few bits for product codes. Manufacturers that make many products would get a small mfg number and a larger number of bits for product codes. Similar to IP network classes.
Seriously, it should be enough for everyone. The whole Internet currently gets by with 9.5 digits of IPV4 address space. The UPC space has 200 times more points. It is allocated per product, not per user, so there should be fewer points needed. It currently is enough to identify over 100 unique products for each person on earth.
The UPC space is just inefficiently sliced up into static sized subfields. If they assigned arbitrary numbers to products and relied on a separate database to interpret the meanings (like DNS does with IP addresses, more or less), there'd be plenty of UPC codespace for everyone for a long, long time.
Of course, such a change would really break all of the UPC software, so it's easier to just throw an extra digit or two at the problem.