Homebuilding a PC today would cost far more in parts alone than buying a cheap clone at Walmart.
That reminds me of a story I heard a long time ago from a guy
who once worked at a place that sold oscilliscope
"kits". They'd buy cheap fully assembled scopes
from Japan, carefully disassemble them, and package
them up as do-it-yourself kits for hobbyists.
Maybe I'm missing something. I thought that this was about books, you know, those paper-based thingies with little squiggles all over them that you probably had to buy en masse back in kawl-edge. Since when did either the author's guild or Bezos mention anything about electronic media?
Yes, you're missing something. I pointed out
how the Amazon system is able to make even physical
books somewhat similar to electronic media.
Predictably, the authors are wining about "abuse"
of book resale,
and predictably, you respond that you've got
a physical book, so it's not a problem.
I was trying to get past this logjam, which until
now only seemed to apply to electronic media.
Just because Amazon.com can sell used books on a much larger scale than Mom&Pop Used Book Store doesn't change the fundamental issues about selling used books.
But it does change the fundamental issues. It
is part of a bigger trend that computers and
networks cause: the disassociation of content
from any fixed medium.
Low-friction resale of used books enabled by
computer automation is a way to
reduce the importance of the fixed medium
of the physical book. This is similar to (but
not as extreme as) what Napster and its
ilk have done for music.
The problem is that all copyright laws were
written under the assumption that content
is always fixed in a physical medium, and
furthermore, transfer of any physical medium
is burdensom. This is no longer true, and
will become less true in the future.
The current laws are fundamentally broken
because nobody can figure out how they
should apply to the most obvious ways
people want to use their computers and
media equipment. Countless flamewars
prove that there is no good way to apply
the current laws to the new ways to handle
content.
For this controversy to end, both sides of
this debate will have to change their outlooks.
Content producers would have to accept the reality
of end users copying content. End users would
have to modify the concept that once they've
got a copy of bits in any form, that it is a tangible
good that they own outright.
Right now, the content producers want to enforce
the second part of the above paragraph without
allowing the first part. That's bogus.
I don't know how to solve this problem, but
something along the following lines seems
fair to me:
Overhaul the entire copyright concept to not
be dependent on physical media.
Allow anybody to copy/share/resell
any work they have, but such a transfer would
require a compulsory royalty to the
orignal creator (rights can't be reassigned
to corporations). The fee would be a nominal
amount similar to the current ASCAP system
(pennies per song). Of course, any
author (RMS for example) could choose to
waive the royalties.
By law, all file sharing systems would need to
automatically collect these fees (probably
through some kind of PayPal-like system),
but the law would forbid encryption or other
technical enforcement measures. It would
just be illegal and wrong to share files for
or resell books online for free. Cheaters
could be dealt with harshly by
law enforcement because they
would no longer have any good argument
that the publishers are ripping them off.
How would the consumer benefit? The sharing/
resale fees would be set at pennies per work.
The
high markups of publishers would be eliminated.
There would be no DRM hassles. They
would have the guaranteed right to use
the work on any equipment they own.
How would content producers benefit? They
get paid every time someone new uses
their work. They might get more royalties
than they do now. The only people that lose out
are the publishers, but who cares about them?
They'd still be around to create copies on
old-style physical media, but they'd nolonger
have a stranglehold over their customers
or the content creators.
If the fixed licensing scheme seems to "communist",
replace it with some kind of real-time auction.
Free market and all that:-).
Oh and "All that requires is voting intelligently." what happens if they take our right to vote away?
Who the hell are they? Unless
we are conquered by external forces, (not likely)
they are the ones we elect.
If we are sure to never elect the type of
asshole who would take our right to vote away,
we avoid this whole military confrontation
crap in the first place. This kind of vigilance
will be more effective at avoiding bad government
than keeping your gun oiled.
Exhibit A: The Afghan mujahideen, who used rifles and a few light rockets to defeat an army of well-trained soldiers equipped with tanks, helicopters, and fighter-bombers.
However, routed in a few weeks by US-led forces.
Exhibit B: Palestinians, who, with the exception of their abhorrent use of suicide bombers, have made a major pain of themselves using only light weapons and homemade explosives, managing to destroy two Merkava tanks -- arguably the best tanks in the world -- as well as successfully ambushing a number of Israeli patrols.
The only area where they have made an impact is
the suicide bombings, which is based on
explosives and, more importantly, instant worldwide
video coverage. Their guns aren't relavent; few
would notice if all they did was pick off a few
Israeli sodiers.
Exhibit C
I don't know enough about that one to comment.
Small arms are increasingly irrelevant in today's
conflicts. The effective weapons used by today's
rebels and/or terrorists are already illegal in the US.
The average gunowner could do just about diddly
squat to overthrow a hypothetical oppressive
regime in the 21st century. The regime would
probably be elected into power, no offensive assault
necessary. The people couldn't launch a counter-offensive
because modern technology allows the tracking
of all communications and movement; a bad regime
would use these methods to their fullest extent.
All that would remain to cement the hold
on power would be to use old-fashioned Stalinist
methods to eliminate the most troublesome 5% of
the population one household at a time, in the
middle of the night. The secret police would have
body armor and better weapons than most any of
their victims.
If you really want the Constitution to protect
you from evil governments, you should consider
bringing it up to date with the latest advances
in information technology. For example, an
ammendment to prevent the government from accumulating
a Gestapo-like dossier on each citizen by correlating
all available tidbits of personal knowlege in a database.
Ultimately, however, the most effective way to
avoid this scenario is for each citizen to
work against putting these types of people in
power in the first place. All that requires
is voting intelligently.
I remember that one. Big waste of time. The
computer would finish the install within
30 minutes, but I would waste an extra
hour playing the stupid Tetris game.
I'm glad that most modern distributions
show a boring progress bar.
try editing a 700 MB TIFF file in Photoshop with it's graphic tools.
WTF kind of picture is that?
Maybe the NSA needs to do this when they
cut 'n' paste a 6-inch resolution satellite image of an entire
axis-of-evil country into a powerpoint slide for W.
(They are reported to have a budget that
enables them to actually buy Adobe software.)
Us open-source folks had better give up now - there's no way we can catch up with advances like this...
That's very funny. But that doesn't alter the
fact that since the first soft-powered
boxes came out a decade ago, I have never
seen any OS, open source or closed, that
consistently does the right thing on all machines
by default when I push
the button. Nor have I seen one that has power
control settings
that are both understandable and functional
on all machines.
I don't think that the problem is as simple as
you imply; otherwise somebody would have
fixed this mess by now.
You can use it as the WinXP equivalent of an X terminal, apparently.
But first, you'll have to spend 3 years sifting
through byzantine Windows and Office EULA's to figure
out if it's really legal to run a remote connection to
your PC and/or run your applications remotely.
Downloading security patches from a certain company could break the bank for some people.
Yeah, but maybe not the company you're thinking
of. The update packages available since
the latest release a certain very
popular Linux distro weigh in at something like 800MB.
All of the "critical updates" to update an old
CD installation of Win98 are only 30MB or so.
I sure wish they'd figure out how to issue binary
diffs instead of complete rpm packages. How much
bandwidth was wasted having millions of people
download a dozen full packages for the 10
lines of screwed up code in zlib? (No, I don't
want to compile it from source. I just want binary packages
signed with the disto's gpg key.)
I'm now at U-Illinois Urbana-Champaign, and for being such a well regarded school in computer science, I can't believe how many different identities/passwords it takes to get by here
The way I understand it, UIUC is skipping
Kerberos in favor of a new authentication system
that they're developing. It is based on an
advanced, self-aware AI technology, and
it uses a voice-only interface.
It was supposed
to be deployed last year, but they are having
problems with the beta systems; one system
that controls pod bay doors has been
especially trouble prone.
Nintendo is the only system left which still makes games and not graphical shows/interactive movies.
I don't know. I thought that Super Mario 64 was one
of the best video games ever made. I played
it endlessly on my Nintendo 64. A couple of
months ago, full of high hopes, I tried the latest incarnation of
Mario on a demo system at K-mart. For 5 or
10 minutes all I saw was boring speeches
about a pointless plot. There was no action
and I couldn't find anything interesting to do.
Needless to say, I didn't plop down $hundreds
to buy that machine.
Most of my "complex
problem" brain cells are occupied learning
things like new computer languages. I prefer
video games to be a little more mindless and
easy to get into.
The entire software industry should kneel down and kiss the feet of IBM, Xerox, and other early software pioneers for not patenting every software related concept... the linked list, the hash table, binary sorts, bubble sorts, grouping data, grouping data and methods, batch processing...
Considering current USPTO policies,
it may not be too late to patent these ideas.
These innovations are still major opportunities
for enterprising developers to generate licensing
revenue and help stimulate our economy. I call first
dibs on hashtables.
It's an antimatter version of the GPL, like a GPL from the parallel Star Trek universe where everyone was evil.
It's easy to imagine Evil Linus with a goatee,
but what would Evil RMS look like?
I imagine that in this universe Bill Gates is a Luke-Skywalker kind
of figure at the head of the rebel Microsoft
organization, trying to take down the
Orwellianly-named Free Software Foundation.
The best tool I've found to understand the relationships between the different types of "intellectual property" is this IP map
That is an interesting diagram. Using that as a reference,
what I originally meant to say is that they want
to simultaneously apply all of the protections from the bottom
half of that diagram to a single product. Plus an
EULA as a bonus.
OK, trade secrets aren't granted by the government,
but they are recognized by it. You can make your
employees sign contracts that forbid them from
revealing trade secrets, and those contracts are
enforceable.
I left out trademarks because they are pretty
much orthogonal to the software patent problem.
The government grants three primary forms of
protection for IP: trade secrets, copyrights
and patents. Until software arrived, very few
products enjoyed protection under more than one
of these concepts.
Software is often subject to restrictions from all
three protections simultaneously. Copyrights
(of course), trade secrets (closed source), and
now patents. Top it off with the need to enter
into a "contract" to install the software that
further restricts your rights.
Each individual IP protection category was
carefully developed over time
to balance the rights of the producers and consumers.
When software makers OR together all of their
rights and AND together their customers' rights,
this throws the whole system out of balance.
To return software to a more reasonable situation,
at least one of the protections for it should
be disallowed. Since patents are the worst fit
for software, software patents should be severely
curtailed or eliminated.
And I couldn't imagine trying to write code with a pen!
Actually, I think coding could work with a tablet
system, but not the obvious way. Keyboard
use has been bothering me lately, so I've
switched to using vim and learning all of the tricks.
That way, I do the minimal amount of typing and
my fingers rarely leave the home row. I've realized
that only a small amount of the keypresses are
actually spelling words; most of them are magic
sequences to move around or paste snippets.
Tablet computing could use gestures to a similar
effect. A direct port of vim wouldn't work; I've
used it on my iPaq handheld with character
recognition, and misrecognition in command
mode is a recipie for disaster. Instead, a whole
new gesture-based text editor would have to
be developed. Instead of focusing on
individual characters, the editor would focus
on higher level tasks and keywords selected
by gestures.
Another thing to consider would be replacing
the pen with something more comforatable
to hold, maybe similar to a conductor's baton.
Keeping your fingers pinched around a pen
barrel is uncomfortable, but there's no reason
to keep doing that if you're not physically
dispensing ink.
Re:Record year for April fools jokes?
on
CPAN Shifts Focus
·
· Score: 2
I think that next year, the best April Fool's joke
would be to not post any fake stories.
Having everybody reading
between the lines trying to find the nonexistant jokes
would be funnier than most of these stories.
Looking at all your posts, it looks
like there is zero evidence that you can
comprehend the real possibility that you are just plain
wrong. No doubt you will write a lengthy reply
proving my point.
What is wrong with directories and "everything is a file?" Is there something better? Simpler? More powerful?
It's a security nightmare. Keeping filenames and permissions
synced with their contents is hard and bug-prone.
For totally different approach, check out the
EROS OS.
In other news, the rock band Nine Inch
Nails was forced to recall copies of it's
blockbuster album "The Downward Spiral" from store
shelves. This in response to intense government
pressure calling for censorship of the
lyrics to the hit song "Closer".
They will be shortly re-issuing the CD with these
sanitized lyrics that are more compatible with
current American sensitivities:
I want to FUCK you like an animal
I want to feel you from the in***e
When asked for comment, band leader Trent Reznor
said: "Yeah, I'm upset about this. But I feel better
knowing that I've personally scored more chicks
than all of the dorks working at Intel combined."
Slashdot Mirror
That reminds me of a story I heard a long time ago from a guy who once worked at a place that sold oscilliscope "kits". They'd buy cheap fully assembled scopes from Japan, carefully disassemble them, and package them up as do-it-yourself kits for hobbyists.
Yes, you're missing something. I pointed out how the Amazon system is able to make even physical books somewhat similar to electronic media. Predictably, the authors are wining about "abuse" of book resale, and predictably, you respond that you've got a physical book, so it's not a problem.
I was trying to get past this logjam, which until now only seemed to apply to electronic media.
But it does change the fundamental issues. It is part of a bigger trend that computers and networks cause: the disassociation of content from any fixed medium.
Low-friction resale of used books enabled by computer automation is a way to reduce the importance of the fixed medium of the physical book. This is similar to (but not as extreme as) what Napster and its ilk have done for music.
The problem is that all copyright laws were written under the assumption that content is always fixed in a physical medium, and furthermore, transfer of any physical medium is burdensom. This is no longer true, and will become less true in the future.
The current laws are fundamentally broken because nobody can figure out how they should apply to the most obvious ways people want to use their computers and media equipment. Countless flamewars prove that there is no good way to apply the current laws to the new ways to handle content.
For this controversy to end, both sides of this debate will have to change their outlooks. Content producers would have to accept the reality of end users copying content. End users would have to modify the concept that once they've got a copy of bits in any form, that it is a tangible good that they own outright.
Right now, the content producers want to enforce the second part of the above paragraph without allowing the first part. That's bogus.
I don't know how to solve this problem, but something along the following lines seems fair to me:
Overhaul the entire copyright concept to not be dependent on physical media. Allow anybody to copy/share/resell any work they have, but such a transfer would require a compulsory royalty to the orignal creator (rights can't be reassigned to corporations). The fee would be a nominal amount similar to the current ASCAP system (pennies per song). Of course, any author (RMS for example) could choose to waive the royalties.
By law, all file sharing systems would need to automatically collect these fees (probably through some kind of PayPal-like system), but the law would forbid encryption or other technical enforcement measures. It would just be illegal and wrong to share files for or resell books online for free. Cheaters could be dealt with harshly by law enforcement because they would no longer have any good argument that the publishers are ripping them off.
How would the consumer benefit? The sharing/ resale fees would be set at pennies per work. The high markups of publishers would be eliminated. There would be no DRM hassles. They would have the guaranteed right to use the work on any equipment they own.
How would content producers benefit? They get paid every time someone new uses their work. They might get more royalties than they do now. The only people that lose out are the publishers, but who cares about them? They'd still be around to create copies on old-style physical media, but they'd nolonger have a stranglehold over their customers or the content creators.
If the fixed licensing scheme seems to "communist", replace it with some kind of real-time auction. Free market and all that :-).
Who the hell are they? Unless we are conquered by external forces, (not likely) they are the ones we elect.
If we are sure to never elect the type of asshole who would take our right to vote away, we avoid this whole military confrontation crap in the first place. This kind of vigilance will be more effective at avoiding bad government than keeping your gun oiled.
However, routed in a few weeks by US-led forces.
Exhibit B: Palestinians, who, with the exception of their abhorrent use of suicide bombers, have made a major pain of themselves using only light weapons and homemade explosives, managing to destroy two Merkava tanks -- arguably the best tanks in the world -- as well as successfully ambushing a number of Israeli patrols.
The only area where they have made an impact is the suicide bombings, which is based on explosives and, more importantly, instant worldwide video coverage. Their guns aren't relavent; few would notice if all they did was pick off a few Israeli sodiers.
Exhibit C
I don't know enough about that one to comment.
Small arms are increasingly irrelevant in today's conflicts. The effective weapons used by today's rebels and/or terrorists are already illegal in the US.
The average gunowner could do just about diddly squat to overthrow a hypothetical oppressive regime in the 21st century. The regime would probably be elected into power, no offensive assault necessary. The people couldn't launch a counter-offensive because modern technology allows the tracking of all communications and movement; a bad regime would use these methods to their fullest extent.
All that would remain to cement the hold on power would be to use old-fashioned Stalinist methods to eliminate the most troublesome 5% of the population one household at a time, in the middle of the night. The secret police would have body armor and better weapons than most any of their victims.
If you really want the Constitution to protect you from evil governments, you should consider bringing it up to date with the latest advances in information technology. For example, an ammendment to prevent the government from accumulating a Gestapo-like dossier on each citizen by correlating all available tidbits of personal knowlege in a database.
Ultimately, however, the most effective way to avoid this scenario is for each citizen to work against putting these types of people in power in the first place. All that requires is voting intelligently.
2 years ago or so?
I remember that one. Big waste of time. The computer would finish the install within 30 minutes, but I would waste an extra hour playing the stupid Tetris game.
I'm glad that most modern distributions show a boring progress bar.
WTF kind of picture is that?
Maybe the NSA needs to do this when they cut 'n' paste a 6-inch resolution satellite image of an entire axis-of-evil country into a powerpoint slide for W. (They are reported to have a budget that enables them to actually buy Adobe software.)
That's very funny. But that doesn't alter the fact that since the first soft-powered boxes came out a decade ago, I have never seen any OS, open source or closed, that consistently does the right thing on all machines by default when I push the button. Nor have I seen one that has power control settings that are both understandable and functional on all machines.
I don't think that the problem is as simple as you imply; otherwise somebody would have fixed this mess by now.
But first, you'll have to spend 3 years sifting through byzantine Windows and Office EULA's to figure out if it's really legal to run a remote connection to your PC and/or run your applications remotely.
Yeah, but maybe not the company you're thinking of. The update packages available since the latest release a certain very popular Linux distro weigh in at something like 800MB. All of the "critical updates" to update an old CD installation of Win98 are only 30MB or so.
I sure wish they'd figure out how to issue binary diffs instead of complete rpm packages. How much bandwidth was wasted having millions of people download a dozen full packages for the 10 lines of screwed up code in zlib? (No, I don't want to compile it from source. I just want binary packages signed with the disto's gpg key.)
It's called play. Most curious people learn through playing. A few people with Eric Cartman-like personalities, however, can't understand the concept.
The way I understand it, UIUC is skipping Kerberos in favor of a new authentication system that they're developing. It is based on an advanced, self-aware AI technology, and it uses a voice-only interface.
It was supposed to be deployed last year, but they are having problems with the beta systems; one system that controls pod bay doors has been especially trouble prone.
Hmmm, you're right, it wasn't Mario, but Luigi's Mansion. Green cap, not red. I still thought it sucked, though.
I don't know. I thought that Super Mario 64 was one of the best video games ever made. I played it endlessly on my Nintendo 64. A couple of months ago, full of high hopes, I tried the latest incarnation of Mario on a demo system at K-mart. For 5 or 10 minutes all I saw was boring speeches about a pointless plot. There was no action and I couldn't find anything interesting to do. Needless to say, I didn't plop down $hundreds to buy that machine.
Most of my "complex problem" brain cells are occupied learning things like new computer languages. I prefer video games to be a little more mindless and easy to get into.
Considering current USPTO policies, it may not be too late to patent these ideas. These innovations are still major opportunities for enterprising developers to generate licensing revenue and help stimulate our economy. I call first dibs on hashtables.
It's easy to imagine Evil Linus with a goatee, but what would Evil RMS look like?
I imagine that in this universe Bill Gates is a Luke-Skywalker kind of figure at the head of the rebel Microsoft organization, trying to take down the Orwellianly-named Free Software Foundation.
Maybe the technical standards are the same, but the programming quality standards have regressed to incredibly low levels since then.
That is an interesting diagram. Using that as a reference, what I originally meant to say is that they want to simultaneously apply all of the protections from the bottom half of that diagram to a single product. Plus an EULA as a bonus.
I left out trademarks because they are pretty much orthogonal to the software patent problem.
Patents aren't bad. Software patents are bad.
The government grants three primary forms of protection for IP: trade secrets, copyrights and patents. Until software arrived, very few products enjoyed protection under more than one of these concepts.
Software is often subject to restrictions from all three protections simultaneously. Copyrights (of course), trade secrets (closed source), and now patents. Top it off with the need to enter into a "contract" to install the software that further restricts your rights.
Each individual IP protection category was carefully developed over time to balance the rights of the producers and consumers. When software makers OR together all of their rights and AND together their customers' rights, this throws the whole system out of balance.
To return software to a more reasonable situation, at least one of the protections for it should be disallowed. Since patents are the worst fit for software, software patents should be severely curtailed or eliminated.
Actually, I think coding could work with a tablet system, but not the obvious way. Keyboard use has been bothering me lately, so I've switched to using vim and learning all of the tricks. That way, I do the minimal amount of typing and my fingers rarely leave the home row. I've realized that only a small amount of the keypresses are actually spelling words; most of them are magic sequences to move around or paste snippets.
Tablet computing could use gestures to a similar effect. A direct port of vim wouldn't work; I've used it on my iPaq handheld with character recognition, and misrecognition in command mode is a recipie for disaster. Instead, a whole new gesture-based text editor would have to be developed. Instead of focusing on individual characters, the editor would focus on higher level tasks and keywords selected by gestures.
Another thing to consider would be replacing the pen with something more comforatable to hold, maybe similar to a conductor's baton. Keeping your fingers pinched around a pen barrel is uncomfortable, but there's no reason to keep doing that if you're not physically dispensing ink.
I think that next year, the best April Fool's joke would be to not post any fake stories. Having everybody reading between the lines trying to find the nonexistant jokes would be funnier than most of these stories.
Looking at all your posts, it looks like there is zero evidence that you can comprehend the real possibility that you are just plain wrong. No doubt you will write a lengthy reply proving my point.
It's a security nightmare. Keeping filenames and permissions synced with their contents is hard and bug-prone. For totally different approach, check out the EROS OS.
They will be shortly re-issuing the CD with these sanitized lyrics that are more compatible with current American sensitivities:
I want to FUCK you like an animal
I want to feel you from the in***e
When asked for comment, band leader Trent Reznor said: "Yeah, I'm upset about this. But I feel better knowing that I've personally scored more chicks than all of the dorks working at Intel combined."