New computers come with Open Office for free, hardware vendors no longer have to fork out to MS, Corel, Lotus, etc. to supply productivity software. This is good for the consumer. Good for the hardware vendor. Bad for the Office suite makers.
Assuming that Open Office eventually competes with MS Office feature-wise and has 'good-enough' MS Office compatibility, it will remove Microsoft's ability to subsidize Windows development with Office revenue. This is good for consumers as Windows will have to stand or fall on its own merits instead of on the merits of Office. As a side note, anyone that thinks Open Office currently is feature comparable with MS Office is either kidding themselves or has never used Star Office for non-trivial documents. The same goes for Office compatibility. That said, I do have hope that Open Office will get there, someday.
Also with the above assumptions, the end of the need for Windows will decrease and more companies will move to alternative operating systems such as Be, Linux, BSD, Mac OS, etc.
On Friday the 13th -- a target fatalistically selected by Sun
Is Sun trying to say that this is something that they do not really believe in or do they just have one or more project managers with a black sense of humor?
I hope its the latter, but it would not altogether surprise me if the former was the case.
Speaking of which, does anyone see the release of StarOffice as GPL as anything other than an attempt by Sun to kill off Microsoft's cash cow, Office? Sun spent buckets and scads and tons of money on buying StarOffice, giving it away for free and then hiring CollabNet to clean up the code and modularize the CVS tree. I don't think that Sun is making enough on its SunRay thin clients to justify the expense. OTOH, a high quality, multi-platform, free Office suite might take away Microsoft's ability to subsidize W2K development with Office revenues. The question with this strategy is whether or not ms.net will be available and functional to make the desktop office suite irrelevant before a working and spectacular Star Office 6.0 for Windows is ready and available.
Hmm. Are any of the developers for this project are going to make Star Office into the free equivalent of.net? That would be funny. Hmm. Maybe the MS investment in Corel is an attempt to come up with an alternative to a free Star Office.
The most encouraging thing for me is that, to a certain extent, it seems that Sun has learned from AOL/Netscape's mistakes with Mozilla:
It has divided the massive StarOffice code base into 75
modules, grouped into 18 projects, such as printing, scripting engines, spreadsheets, and the like. Currently, all 18 projects are
headed by Sun employees, but Roth said Sun is expecting "others in the community to take over some of them over time."
They made things organized and pretty and split things up into well defined sub-projects. This will make it much easier to (1) part out the useful parts of Star Office for other projects, (2) graft in new systems to fix Star Office's deficiencies, (3) keep the ball rolling, and (4) get new people involved.
Maybe after a few days and the CVS server comes back to life I'll download the code and look at it out of curiosity. I've always wondered how much of Star Office was written in Java. It's certainly slow enough at times for the whole thing to have been.
One thing is for certain, this will be an adventure....
Katz, your big and intelligent percentages and numbers are just fuzzy math.
As others have pointed out that Jamie is the author of this one, not Katz.
Aside from that, despite its name, fuzzy math and its accompanying multi-valented logic (correctly used) is typically much more accurate than traditional math with its bi-valented logic.
I cracked up while watching the first presidential debate when George W. Bush tried to condemn Al Gore's numbers with allegations of fuzzy math. It became quite apparent that Mr. Bush has no comprehension of advance mathematics. The same can likely be said for Mr. Gore, but I don't have any firsthand evidence of that.
Both IBM and Motoral are currently shipping PPC ships at 700Mhz. I don't think these faster parts include Alti-Vec so Apple refuses to use them. And that is the key to the problem. THE PARTS ARE AVAILABLE AND APPLE REFUSES TO BUY THEM. As far as I know, there is nothing preventing other companies from buying them.
IBM did a demo of a 1Ghz PPC over two years ago. Granted the PPC in the demo was hand built and only used a subset of the PPC instruction set, but it served to show what the PPC chip is capable of. As it is, IBM is currently focusing on the big iron where bus speed and io typically matter more than CPU clock speed and Motorola is focussing on the embedded applications. The focus of the other two AIM partners, in effect, leaves Apple out to dry. Of course, this is bound to happen in a partnership where one or more of the partners doesn't actually make chips, so it's not like this situation isn't Apple's fault.
If I were Steve Jobs, I'd talk to Paul Allen about getting Transmeta to make some PPC instruction set compatible Ghz chips. That would be interesting.
The cardinal problem with term limits is that they are likely to increase the corporate influence, especially in a world where campaign spending is reformed.
Think about it, a lage part of the problem with the current system is that advisors and elected officials will serve in government, retire to the public sector on staff at some huge company and then eventually return to office. Even if they never returned to office the problem would exist. Vote this way for such and such legislation and x years down the road serve in a cushy position on the board of directors for some large wealthy corporation.
Personally, I think anyone that wants to serve as an elected public official ought to disqualified. And add a 'none of the above' option along with legislation that if 'none of the above' wins the election, an individual is selected at random from the pool of registered voters to serve.
Me: Why does Sun not have the energy to drive more than one operating system when its competition does
sql*kitten: If they can unify on a single OS, then they potentially have a strategic edge that their competitors can't match.
This might be true. Being Solaris end to end might very well give Sun a strategic advantage, but that is an entirely different line or reasoning than Sun doesn't have the energy to support two operating systems.
We don't have the energy to drive two operating
systems.
Microsoft manages to drive W2K, WinCe, W9.x
IBM manages to drive OS/390, Linux, Windows, AIX, OS/400
SGI manages to drive Irix, Windows, Linux
HP manages to drive HP/UX, Windows, Linux
Compaq manages to drive Tru64, Linux, Windows, VMS (or is VMS dead yet?)
Why does Sun not have the energy to drive more than one operating system when its competition does?
I'm a big Sun fan. From what I've seen only IBM (with AIX) can compete with Sun in the enterprise class open systems niche (though HP might have something with Superdome). And I don't know that the move to put Solaris on the Cobalt line is necessarily a bad thing. However, I don't understand the suggested reasoning put forth by Sun at all.
I'll avoid the tortured analogies to an unlocked house, but I certainly expect that polite users will stay the fuck away from my
machines, whether or not I overlooked the buffer-overflow-du-jour. I wouldn't for a moment trust any asshole who ended up with a root prompt on a system I use
or run without authorization.
Lets get into the tortured analogies. If I accidentally leave the lights on in my car, I'd really prefer someone check to see if the door is open to turn them off for me rather than leaving a note on the window, "you left your lights on, if your car doesn't start its likely the battery is dead."
Assuming that the hackers didn't do anything malicious, I don't see how what they did was very much different.
Well, gee, when those shitheads at the riot following the Rage Against the Machine concert in LA started throwing concrete blocks at the police, they were lucky they
only got tear gas. And considering that RATM is on SONY, for crying out loud, what kind of a corporate tool are they?
Pardon my ignorance, but what do riots at a RATM concert have to do with the protests against the WTO?
I'll admit that the default color scheme was designed to drain one's life force out through one's nostrils, but once customization of colors and behaviors was engaged in by the knowledgable user, its beauty had no limits.
If only I could go back to the days of reworking the launchpad with a few short sweet lines of rexx.....
the people protesting the WTO, World Bank, and IMF (and the Republican and Democrat Conventions) are spoiled, self-important, ignorant facsists.
I think you don't know what you are speaking of. Try reading the literature of some of the opponents of the WTO. One such paper is here.
Some excerpts:
The removal of import controls and tariffs on the
entry of cheap agricultural products has undermined indigenous subsistence agriculture and led to the bankruptcy of small-scale indigenous farmers. This is
pushing them to abandon their organic and low-impact agricultural practices and shift to high-chemical input, commercial cash-crop production. To add insult to
injury, those who were pushed to shift to the production of so-called `high-value, globally competitive' crops, could not even rely on any support and protection
anymore since these are considered trade barriers.
...
The destruction of the traditional lifestyles of indigenous peoples because of the appropriation of their lands and resources, has resulted not only in the
degradation of the environment but also in ill health, and high levels of stress manifested in alcoholism and suicides. This is a conclusion reached in the
"International Consultation of the World Health Organization with Indigenous Peoples"
...
The liberalization of investment laws, like the Philippine Mining Act of 1995, has allowed for the entry of foreign mining corporations. They are allowed to lease
lands for 75 years, are given the right to evict peoples from these mineral lands, and have full rights to the water. They can also repatriate 100% of the profits.
Indigenous peoples who were not successful in resisting the entry of these mines, now find themselves displaced and the use of open-pit mining methods is
destroying their lands and polluting the seas and rivers.
While total world trade expanded rapidly in the past two decades, the 48 poorest countries--where 10 percent of the world's population live--saw their share of world
exports decline by almost half. The U.S. and the Western Europe countries have roughly the same total population as the 48 poorest countries--but account for almost half
of the world's exports. More than 80 countries in the Third World are worse off today economically than they were a decade ago. Global food production increased almost
25 percent between 1990 and 1997--yet 800 million people around the world are malnourished.
"Free trade" and globalization are also leading to further impoverishment and ruin of peasant farmers around the world. Small farmers in countries like Mexico, India and
the Philippines cannot compete with cheaper agricultural imports from countries like the U.S. This is contributing to massive social dislocation in the countryside of the
Third World and accelerating concentration of land ownership--while traditional agriculture and basic food production are being destroyed. When the NAFTA Treaty
went into effect in 1994, there were estimates that millions of Mexican peasants were going to lose their land over the next decade.
Aside from the reality of the severe effects of the WTO on the world, I really have to wonder how when people protest and are met by tear gas and billy clubs how the people doing the protesting are the 'fascists.'
Workers were being offered heavy, regulated, industrial work in exchange to a farming lifestyle. But to characterise the exchange as uniformly bad is probably
unfair.
Factory owners and forement were allowed to beat the assembly line workers for virtually any reason they wanted to. Pay was subsistence level or less. Neither hours nor age was regulated (until after the luddite rebellion).
Honestly, Katz did a disservice in implying that luddites were agrarian. Most luddites were skilled tradeworkers put out of work by factories that could make the same types of goods at a far lower cost.
The other falacy is that most (but not all) people will think of modern assembly line jobs when they think of factory work. Factory work in the 1800's was mostly unregulated. Workers were often chained into the factories. There were no health standards, little or no air circulation. Often there was no heat in the winter. Breaks were seldom. Beatings for not meeting a quota were common.
Now, sure farm life can be difficult, especially in times of famine. But this is apples and oranges. The luddites weren't farmers that went to the city to find regular work. They skilled tradeworkers that had been apprenticed in a skilled trade and suddenly put out of work.
I think most/. readers would start breaking machines if they lost their well paying IT job and the only alternative to put food on the table was working in a dark, dirty factory for fifteen or sixteen hours at a stretch while the line supervisor often beat you for not working fast enough.
I agree very much with your comments. Most people don't get what the luddite movement was all about. The folks protesting the WTO meetings held all over the world are much closer in spirit and tactics to the followers of Ned Ludd than most who profess luddism today.
I also don't think that John Katz quite grokked the luddite movement. Very few luddites were farmers. Luddites were mostly skilled tradeworkers. Nor did they break into all factories to randomly smash machines. They broke into factories which had dangerous working conditions, unfair wages, and turned out a shoddy product. (British textiles went from being acclaimed throughout Europe to being the last pick of those who couldn't afford anything better as a result of many of the textile factories that put the hand laboring luddites out of work. Its hard enough to get by making hand made goods with a factory making the same goods next door at less than 1/4 the price, but when the market starts thinking that all the goods made in your area suck canal water, it gets almost impossible.)
Another thing that Katz misses is that while the luddite rebellion was bloody, the violence was almost entirely on the part of the establishment. The luddites broke machines. Capitalists and Sheriffs shot luddites. IIRC, there was only one case of a luddite shooting back during the entire course of the luddite rebelllion.
And anyone who thinks that the luddites should have just gotten a grip and taken up new trades has no clue to what working in a factory during the industrial revolution was like. Pay was subsistance level or less for inordinately long shifts. Sometimes entire families, including children, had to work just to buy enough food to get buy. The rebellion was not about people being upset about losing their jobs, it was about people being upset about being trampled on by factory owners seeking to maximize profits at the expense of the workers.
And no, contrary to what some posters have alleged, the luddites were not communists. They just wanted fair wages for a fair day's work.
On the other hand, we have the neo-luddites of today that aren't looking for a way to get by, but looking for a way to prevent others from getting by. Most (but probably not all) neo-luddites want to censor instead of propagate. They want the large IP corporations to be in charge of the rules governing music and software. They want to return to the good old days where a few large corporations have control over the means of the production of information.
Look at the past.
Before the industrial revolution most goods were made in cottage industries by skilled tradeworkers. Enter the industrial revolution, one person with capital can now control a large segment of the industry.
Look at the present.
Before the information revolution most IP was produced and controlled by a few large corporations with large amounts of capital. Enter the information revolution, content transforms into a cottage industry where skilled workers can have the same potential benefits as the media moguls.
The free software movement and groups like the EFF (and even 2600) have more in common with the luddite movement than the neo (or modern day) luddites that Katz describes.
To make it simple, sun sells enterprise solutions with an enterprise pricetag. Most corporations could get along fine with something that commodity hardware and linux, but
corps seem to be funny that way and love to spend their enterprise budgets.
Given that the contracts a good deal of data centers sign with clients specify hefty penalties for downtime other than scheduled maintenance, I don't think that Sun gear is overpriced for what it delivers. Its not just a matter of buying good hardware, its a matter of buying hardware with failure rollover.
Also, most people don't quite get the idea when they see the term: enterprise. Enterprise class machinery typically deals with multiple boxes with multiple CPUs and tens or hundreds of gigs of RAM with failure rollover and other nifty features.
And the cost is mostly in the hardware. I'm sure someone could design and build Linux box that had as much hardware as most of the Sun boxes in our datacenter, but I'd doubt it would be much less expensive. 20+ CPUS and twenty or thirty gigs of RAM per machine starts to add up when you have a cluster of fifteen or twenty boxes for just one client.
Now if you're only talking about clustering a few Linux boxes each with two or four processors, then, yeah, Linux will likely get you much better price/performance with the same sort of stability. Unfortunately, this isn't quite what Sun has in mind when it targets the Enterprise market.
Anyway, back to FC... As long as they're using the IdeaLab! logo's to make fun of IdeaLab!, they're clear...
Right if the graphic in question is a parody, it is protected speech.
If they're using the Idealab! design and logo to
make fun of other companies, then they could be in trouble
If the graphic in question is satire, it is not protected speech.
And of course, this is only within the context of intellectual property claims. Both satire and parody are protected in the context of whether or not the government is allowed to censor the speech in question.
If they're doing both, then they're
probably okay, as the fair use should hold.
Now, we part ways, the one case I can remember (regarding the satire of the O.J. Simpson trial told in the manner of Dr. Seuss) seemed to rule the other way. Then again, this was a jury trial so it might just have been an issue of bad taste that the jurors found more compelling than legal arguments.
I could have sworn that as part of the Intel vs. Digital lawsuit that Digital sold their fab to Intel. Perhaps, Compaq is now fabless, but I don't believe Samsung is.
Transmeta's Ditzel said in fairly unequivocal words why Transmeta had a five year head start:
``For them to catch up, they would also need a software based approach. That
means they would have to start from scratch and from my 20 years of
experience, it would take at least five years to get a new microprocessor out the
door,'' David Ditzel said in an interview.
Now to understand the context, keep in mind that Transmeta does not see itself as a head to head competitor with Intel or AMD in the x86 market. Transmeta is really going after the embedded space and the mobile computing space. While notebook manufacturers are intending to implement Crusoe, Transmeta is really targeting the Palm sized computers, the mobile phones, etc.
What Ditzel is saying then is that Transmeta has a Quantum leap on AMD and Intel in this area. Transmeta's technology allows them to shave off 1/4 to 1/3 of the transistors needed for a CPU. If, and this is a big if, Transmeta's technology scales down (not up) they have the potential to be the embedded king of the processor because, in theory, the chips of the competition will always be more complicated.
Now, I don't know if Ditzel is right on this. Intel's StrongARM looks mighty fine in comparrison. I'm still waiting for Rebel (formerly Corel) to come out with a poratable Netwinder around the StrongARM. The Netwinder desktop runs a nice little Linux desktop class machine on 15 Watts. That's less juice than some x86 CPUs alone (let alone the hard drive, the fan, etc.). And of course if Palm does move to the StrongARM as they are rumored to be doing, it will get very interesting....
I'm not counting Transmeta out, just not holding my breath for them to achieve world domination. It seems like they've got a decent product and given the slow acceptance of non x86 CPU's, they might have a good shot at gaining enough marketshare to make some money.
If you enjoy upsetting people so.. then why do you use 'c-word' and 'f-word'
I enjoy a good wine, but that doesn't mean I want to use it on my corn flakes.
If you don't grok that, consider the following: Just because I find something to be fun, doesn't mean that I want to do it all the time.
After all, variety is the spice of life. And the more frequently offensive language is used, the less offensive it becomes.
Is anyone else old enough to remember when NIN's 'sex crime' video first started playing in night clubs? What impressed me the most the first time I saw it wasn't the graphic violence but the fact that an entire dance floor full of hardened goths, punks, alternatives, etc. had stopped dancing entirely and were staring slack-jawed at the screen. That is a powerful statement. Good old Trent managed to shock the whole scene full of rejects.
But then, by the end of the month everyone was used to the video and mostly ignored the formerly shocking scenes of mutilation. The shock had lost its effect.
If you want to shock, be tight fisted with your profanity. A zinger at the correct time and place makes a much, much stronger statement than ad naseum repetition.
In my experience, the c-word is indeed the only word in the English language virtually guaranteed to offend everyone present. I've yet to bring the word up in conversation and not have everybody offended. In high school, I used to get a game going by saying I could offend every woman present with just two words. The first, douche-bag, would offend about 95% of those present. The smug looking remaining five percent would almost inevitably gasp in unision when I uttered the dreaded c-word.
I've often wondered what makes it so profane.
A far as the f word goes, its decline as a 'shocker' is perhaps due to the current prevalence of its presence in media of all types. Once you hear a word 10,000 times while sitting through a single action movie, it just doesn't have quite the same impact as it used to.
Hopefully movie-makers won't catch on anytime soon and some words will continue to offend....
As always, IANAL, but I believe the following to be correct. Please consult legal counsel before interpreting my opinion as the correct interpretation of law in your locality.
Within the context of using other people's copyrighted intellectual property, satire is not a protected form of speech in the US. Parody, on the other hand, is.
What's the difference? According to Webster:
satire. n. a literary work in which vices, follies, etc. are held up to ridicule and contempt.
parody. n. a farcical imitation of a literary or musical work or style.
OTOH, both parody and satire are protected forms of speech in the context that the the government cannot censor them without trodding on the bill or rights.
Wrong, consoles typically sell at a loss, profits are made from the game royalties.
So says the conventional wisdom. Personally I disbelieve that this is always the case or even predominantly the case. Do you have any support for the conventional wisdom?
Slashdot Mirror
have a day,
-l
Is Sun trying to say that this is something that they do not really believe in or do they just have one or more project managers with a black sense of humor?
I hope its the latter, but it would not altogether surprise me if the former was the case.
Speaking of which, does anyone see the release of StarOffice as GPL as anything other than an attempt by Sun to kill off Microsoft's cash cow, Office? Sun spent buckets and scads and tons of money on buying StarOffice, giving it away for free and then hiring CollabNet to clean up the code and modularize the CVS tree. I don't think that Sun is making enough on its SunRay thin clients to justify the expense. OTOH, a high quality, multi-platform, free Office suite might take away Microsoft's ability to subsidize W2K development with Office revenues. The question with this strategy is whether or not ms.net will be available and functional to make the desktop office suite irrelevant before a working and spectacular Star Office 6.0 for Windows is ready and available.
Hmm. Are any of the developers for this project are going to make Star Office into the free equivalent of .net? That would be funny. Hmm. Maybe the MS investment in Corel is an attempt to come up with an alternative to a free Star Office.
The most encouraging thing for me is that, to a certain extent, it seems that Sun has learned from AOL/Netscape's mistakes with Mozilla:
They made things organized and pretty and split things up into well defined sub-projects. This will make it much easier to (1) part out the useful parts of Star Office for other projects, (2) graft in new systems to fix Star Office's deficiencies, (3) keep the ball rolling, and (4) get new people involved.
Maybe after a few days and the CVS server comes back to life I'll download the code and look at it out of curiosity. I've always wondered how much of Star Office was written in Java. It's certainly slow enough at times for the whole thing to have been.
One thing is for certain, this will be an adventure....
have a day,
-l
As others have pointed out that Jamie is the author of this one, not Katz.
Aside from that, despite its name, fuzzy math and its accompanying multi-valented logic (correctly used) is typically much more accurate than traditional math with its bi-valented logic.
I cracked up while watching the first presidential debate when George W. Bush tried to condemn Al Gore's numbers with allegations of fuzzy math. It became quite apparent that Mr. Bush has no comprehension of advance mathematics. The same can likely be said for Mr. Gore, but I don't have any firsthand evidence of that.
have a day,
-l
Both IBM and Motoral are currently shipping PPC ships at 700Mhz. I don't think these faster parts include Alti-Vec so Apple refuses to use them. And that is the key to the problem. THE PARTS ARE AVAILABLE AND APPLE REFUSES TO BUY THEM. As far as I know, there is nothing preventing other companies from buying them.
IBM did a demo of a 1Ghz PPC over two years ago. Granted the PPC in the demo was hand built and only used a subset of the PPC instruction set, but it served to show what the PPC chip is capable of. As it is, IBM is currently focusing on the big iron where bus speed and io typically matter more than CPU clock speed and Motorola is focussing on the embedded applications. The focus of the other two AIM partners, in effect, leaves Apple out to dry. Of course, this is bound to happen in a partnership where one or more of the partners doesn't actually make chips, so it's not like this situation isn't Apple's fault.
If I were Steve Jobs, I'd talk to Paul Allen about getting Transmeta to make some PPC instruction set compatible Ghz chips. That would be interesting.
have a day,
-l
+ network latency would likely be lowered by an order of magnitude.
- I can't imagine frame rates being very good.
An accomplished Quake god in text mode Quake on a router might very well be someone to fear.
regards,
-l
have a day,
-l
Microsoft still supports these non-Intel CPUs.
Granted, this is for WinCE. See the full list here.
regards,
-l
have a day,
-l
But does anyone have a choice?
If the RIAA et. al. can get the DCMA passed, why not a law requring all disk players to include SDMI circuitry?
have a day,
-l
have a day,
-l
The cardinal problem with term limits is that they are likely to increase the corporate influence, especially in a world where campaign spending is reformed.
Think about it, a lage part of the problem with the current system is that advisors and elected officials will serve in government, retire to the public sector on staff at some huge company and then eventually return to office. Even if they never returned to office the problem would exist. Vote this way for such and such legislation and x years down the road serve in a cushy position on the board of directors for some large wealthy corporation.
Personally, I think anyone that wants to serve as an elected public official ought to disqualified. And add a 'none of the above' option along with legislation that if 'none of the above' wins the election, an individual is selected at random from the pool of registered voters to serve.
have a day,
-l
have a day,
-l
This is the age of information age and the new economy. How is a gear head supposed to know now what toys he or she desires in three months time?
The only solution is to go for the tried and true classics.
The best of which are Penguin brand caffeinated peppermints and Jolt cola.
have a day,
-l
have a day,
-l
This might be true. Being Solaris end to end might very well give Sun a strategic advantage, but that is an entirely different line or reasoning than Sun doesn't have the energy to support two operating systems.
have a day,
-l
One of Sun's senior VPs (Andy Ingram) said:
Why does Sun not have the energy to drive more than one operating system when its competition does?
I'm a big Sun fan. From what I've seen only IBM (with AIX) can compete with Sun in the enterprise class open systems niche (though HP might have something with Superdome). And I don't know that the move to put Solaris on the Cobalt line is necessarily a bad thing. However, I don't understand the suggested reasoning put forth by Sun at all.
have a day,
-l
Lets get into the tortured analogies. If I accidentally leave the lights on in my car, I'd really prefer someone check to see if the door is open to turn them off for me rather than leaving a note on the window, "you left your lights on, if your car doesn't start its likely the battery is dead."
Assuming that the hackers didn't do anything malicious, I don't see how what they did was very much different.
regards,
-l
have a day,
-l
Pardon my ignorance, but what do riots at a RATM concert have to do with the protests against the WTO?
have a day,
-l
I'll admit that the default color scheme was designed to drain one's life force out through one's nostrils, but once customization of colors and behaviors was engaged in by the knowledgable user, its beauty had no limits.
If only I could go back to the days of reworking the launchpad with a few short sweet lines of rexx. ....
have a day,
-l
I think you don't know what you are speaking of. Try reading the literature of some of the opponents of the WTO. One such paper is here.
Some excerpts:
Here is another article.
Some excerpts:
Aside from the reality of the severe effects of the WTO on the world, I really have to wonder how when people protest and are met by tear gas and billy clubs how the people doing the protesting are the 'fascists.'
have a day,
-l
have a day,
-l
Factory owners and forement were allowed to beat the assembly line workers for virtually any reason they wanted to. Pay was subsistence level or less. Neither hours nor age was regulated (until after the luddite rebellion).
Honestly, Katz did a disservice in implying that luddites were agrarian. Most luddites were skilled tradeworkers put out of work by factories that could make the same types of goods at a far lower cost.
The other falacy is that most (but not all) people will think of modern assembly line jobs when they think of factory work. Factory work in the 1800's was mostly unregulated. Workers were often chained into the factories. There were no health standards, little or no air circulation. Often there was no heat in the winter. Breaks were seldom. Beatings for not meeting a quota were common.
Now, sure farm life can be difficult, especially in times of famine. But this is apples and oranges. The luddites weren't farmers that went to the city to find regular work. They skilled tradeworkers that had been apprenticed in a skilled trade and suddenly put out of work.
I think most /. readers would start breaking machines if they lost their well paying IT job and the only alternative to put food on the table was working in a dark, dirty factory for fifteen or sixteen hours at a stretch while the line supervisor often beat you for not working fast enough.
have a day,
-l
have a day,
-l
I agree very much with your comments. Most people don't get what the luddite movement was all about. The folks protesting the WTO meetings held all over the world are much closer in spirit and tactics to the followers of Ned Ludd than most who profess luddism today.
I also don't think that John Katz quite grokked the luddite movement. Very few luddites were farmers. Luddites were mostly skilled tradeworkers. Nor did they break into all factories to randomly smash machines. They broke into factories which had dangerous working conditions, unfair wages, and turned out a shoddy product. (British textiles went from being acclaimed throughout Europe to being the last pick of those who couldn't afford anything better as a result of many of the textile factories that put the hand laboring luddites out of work. Its hard enough to get by making hand made goods with a factory making the same goods next door at less than 1/4 the price, but when the market starts thinking that all the goods made in your area suck canal water, it gets almost impossible.)
Another thing that Katz misses is that while the luddite rebellion was bloody, the violence was almost entirely on the part of the establishment. The luddites broke machines. Capitalists and Sheriffs shot luddites. IIRC, there was only one case of a luddite shooting back during the entire course of the luddite rebelllion.
And anyone who thinks that the luddites should have just gotten a grip and taken up new trades has no clue to what working in a factory during the industrial revolution was like. Pay was subsistance level or less for inordinately long shifts. Sometimes entire families, including children, had to work just to buy enough food to get buy. The rebellion was not about people being upset about losing their jobs, it was about people being upset about being trampled on by factory owners seeking to maximize profits at the expense of the workers.
And no, contrary to what some posters have alleged, the luddites were not communists. They just wanted fair wages for a fair day's work.
On the other hand, we have the neo-luddites of today that aren't looking for a way to get by, but looking for a way to prevent others from getting by. Most (but probably not all) neo-luddites want to censor instead of propagate. They want the large IP corporations to be in charge of the rules governing music and software. They want to return to the good old days where a few large corporations have control over the means of the production of information.
Look at the past.
Before the industrial revolution most goods were made in cottage industries by skilled tradeworkers. Enter the industrial revolution, one person with capital can now control a large segment of the industry.
Look at the present.
Before the information revolution most IP was produced and controlled by a few large corporations with large amounts of capital. Enter the information revolution, content transforms into a cottage industry where skilled workers can have the same potential benefits as the media moguls.
The free software movement and groups like the EFF (and even 2600) have more in common with the luddite movement than the neo (or modern day) luddites that Katz describes.
have a day,
-l
have a day,
-l
Given that the contracts a good deal of data centers sign with clients specify hefty penalties for downtime other than scheduled maintenance, I don't think that Sun gear is overpriced for what it delivers. Its not just a matter of buying good hardware, its a matter of buying hardware with failure rollover.
Also, most people don't quite get the idea when they see the term: enterprise. Enterprise class machinery typically deals with multiple boxes with multiple CPUs and tens or hundreds of gigs of RAM with failure rollover and other nifty features.
And the cost is mostly in the hardware. I'm sure someone could design and build Linux box that had as much hardware as most of the Sun boxes in our datacenter, but I'd doubt it would be much less expensive. 20+ CPUS and twenty or thirty gigs of RAM per machine starts to add up when you have a cluster of fifteen or twenty boxes for just one client.
Now if you're only talking about clustering a few Linux boxes each with two or four processors, then, yeah, Linux will likely get you much better price/performance with the same sort of stability. Unfortunately, this isn't quite what Sun has in mind when it targets the Enterprise market.
Right if the graphic in question is a parody, it is protected speech.
If the graphic in question is satire, it is not protected speech.
And of course, this is only within the context of intellectual property claims. Both satire and parody are protected in the context of whether or not the government is allowed to censor the speech in question.
Now, we part ways, the one case I can remember (regarding the satire of the O.J. Simpson trial told in the manner of Dr. Seuss) seemed to rule the other way. Then again, this was a jury trial so it might just have been an issue of bad taste that the jurors found more compelling than legal arguments.
have a day,
-l
I could have sworn that as part of the Intel vs. Digital lawsuit that Digital sold their fab to Intel. Perhaps, Compaq is now fabless, but I don't believe Samsung is.
have a day,
-l
Now to understand the context, keep in mind that Transmeta does not see itself as a head to head competitor with Intel or AMD in the x86 market. Transmeta is really going after the embedded space and the mobile computing space. While notebook manufacturers are intending to implement Crusoe, Transmeta is really targeting the Palm sized computers, the mobile phones, etc.
What Ditzel is saying then is that Transmeta has a Quantum leap on AMD and Intel in this area. Transmeta's technology allows them to shave off 1/4 to 1/3 of the transistors needed for a CPU. If, and this is a big if, Transmeta's technology scales down (not up) they have the potential to be the embedded king of the processor because, in theory, the chips of the competition will always be more complicated.
Now, I don't know if Ditzel is right on this. Intel's StrongARM looks mighty fine in comparrison. I'm still waiting for Rebel (formerly Corel) to come out with a poratable Netwinder around the StrongARM. The Netwinder desktop runs a nice little Linux desktop class machine on 15 Watts. That's less juice than some x86 CPUs alone (let alone the hard drive, the fan, etc.). And of course if Palm does move to the StrongARM as they are rumored to be doing, it will get very interesting....
I'm not counting Transmeta out, just not holding my breath for them to achieve world domination. It seems like they've got a decent product and given the slow acceptance of non x86 CPU's, they might have a good shot at gaining enough marketshare to make some money.
have a day,
-l
Some people don't get it.
I enjoy a good wine, but that doesn't mean I want to use it on my corn flakes.
If you don't grok that, consider the following: Just because I find something to be fun, doesn't mean that I want to do it all the time.
After all, variety is the spice of life. And the more frequently offensive language is used, the less offensive it becomes.
Is anyone else old enough to remember when NIN's 'sex crime' video first started playing in night clubs? What impressed me the most the first time I saw it wasn't the graphic violence but the fact that an entire dance floor full of hardened goths, punks, alternatives, etc. had stopped dancing entirely and were staring slack-jawed at the screen. That is a powerful statement. Good old Trent managed to shock the whole scene full of rejects.
But then, by the end of the month everyone was used to the video and mostly ignored the formerly shocking scenes of mutilation. The shock had lost its effect.
If you want to shock, be tight fisted with your profanity. A zinger at the correct time and place makes a much, much stronger statement than ad naseum repetition.
have a day,
-l
In my experience, the c-word is indeed the only word in the English language virtually guaranteed to offend everyone present. I've yet to bring the word up in conversation and not have everybody offended. In high school, I used to get a game going by saying I could offend every woman present with just two words. The first, douche-bag, would offend about 95% of those present. The smug looking remaining five percent would almost inevitably gasp in unision when I uttered the dreaded c-word.
I've often wondered what makes it so profane.
A far as the f word goes, its decline as a 'shocker' is perhaps due to the current prevalence of its presence in media of all types. Once you hear a word 10,000 times while sitting through a single action movie, it just doesn't have quite the same impact as it used to.
Hopefully movie-makers won't catch on anytime soon and some words will continue to offend....
regards,
-l
As always, IANAL, but I believe the following to be correct. Please consult legal counsel before interpreting my opinion as the correct interpretation of law in your locality.
Within the context of using other people's copyrighted intellectual property, satire is not a protected form of speech in the US. Parody, on the other hand, is.
What's the difference? According to Webster:
satire. n. a literary work in which vices, follies, etc. are held up to ridicule and contempt.
parody. n. a farcical imitation of a literary or musical work or style.
OTOH, both parody and satire are protected forms of speech in the context that the the government cannot censor them without trodding on the bill or rights.
So there are two seperate issues here.
So says the conventional wisdom. Personally I disbelieve that this is always the case or even predominantly the case. Do you have any support for the conventional wisdom?