I've given this a bit of thought over the past month, and I've been thinking of a tallbar interface with multiple collapsing groups of people. In other words, you can have multiple channels on multiple servers in your tallbar at the same time. All your friends/coworkers can exist in password protected hidden channels. I think it is a great idea.
Anybody out there an IRC client author who is willing to rip up their UI? It shouldn't be hard to do this sort of thing.
Hmmm... I really have to learn X programming... maybe ripping up another Opensource IRC client GUI is the way to do it. hmm...
I agree with this completely, I think there must be a way of creating a "tallbar" interface for IRC which would simulate an ICQ/AIM/whatever environment. The "tallbar" can represent a series of different channels. You would have your work channel on your work IRC server where all your coworkers hang out... then on undernet you have that hidden channel where your friends hang out. Almost all the "IM" aspects of it could be done with DCC chat and file transfers... while you would also have the advantage of not having to build a contact list... you just create a hidden, password protected channel, and invite people to it.
The only problem I can see with this interface are the problems with IRC in general.. But the protocol, infrastructure and servers are already there. It sounds like all we need is a IM GUI.
(Off-topic though because it neglects the cross-protcol client question...)
I am certainly no legal expert. I don't even consider myself an amature. But how do you explain stories like those which appeared in the Off-the-Hook broadcast in August.
$100 for personal use. $300 if you actually do any work on your computer.
I'm torn up about this because it is more simple and more cost effective for me to go out and buy a small second system and outfit it with a monitor/keyboard switchbox.
The real power is in creating multiple machines on one for experimenting with system interactions over networks. But you still pay through the nose for memory.. and there are a lot of things you still can't do.
The biggest difference between BBSes and the Internet is that when you dialed up a BBS, it was in your local calling range. Everyone else online was in your local calling range. Yes, you could hold conversations with people on the other side of the continent, but those were slow and generally infrequent. For the mostpart, everyone was within a reasonable distance of eachother.
On BBSes, there were meet and greets, you could buy a beer for the guy who's planet you crushed in Tradewars, or chat (physically) with those women you were flirting with. Just try that on the Internet.
You're right. I'm sorry, by "commerce" I meant closed source commercial applications such as Wordperfect, the Corel Suite etc.
As long as they target KDE, and choose not to release their source code they have to answer to Troll Tech.
It is very possible that Troll Tech has no ill intentions, and simply opened up their source code because they agree with the open source philosophy. That the QPL is simply an effort to recoup operations and development expenses. However there is nothing in writing to prevent them from seriously damaging KDE as a platform for traditional closed source application development.
Troll Tech is profiting from all commercial development. The development of commercial applications for KDE would not occur if it were not for the popularity of free software and the efforts of free software developers.
By supporting QT, free software is marketing a commercial product.
Furthermore, the free software community has no control over the freedom of all future commercial development under KDE. Troll Tech exclusively owns all commercial development activities under KDE.
You could not be more wrong. This has nothing to do with freedom it has everything to do with money.
Is there a fact somewhere in that opinion?
As soon as you are legally required to pay a third party... for what ever reason, that's no longer free speech, or free beer. That's a commercial developer profiting because they simply happened to be in the right place at the right time.
But you're right, so long as the software is open and free, Troll Tech cannot restrict it or charge money for it. But they do profit from the network effect.
QT is free software with an ambiguous commercial license loophole. That makes it nothing more than free beer.
I can understand people wanting stuff for free but pretending to be a concerned free software user and praying on the good will of the free software community would be a sick.
Troll Tech's fees are minimal. This has nothing to do with money, it has to do with the freedom of the software.
From my perspective, Troll Tech is preying upon the good will of the software community by tying a commercial product into the works of thousands of free software developers. There's nothing wrong with that, but I don't have to agree with it.
If Linux enjoys widespread desktop acceptance, commerce will be at the mercy of Troll Tech in order to create QT enabled applications. That means commercial vendor lock-in in Linux.
That is not the goal of the foundation. The foundation doesn't give a damn about commercial software developers. That's TT's job.
So KDE is a QT marketing machine?
The more I hear of this the more I think that KDE proponents are simply ignoring legal ambiguities. Is there any reason what-so-ever, other than convenience, that we should accept the strings Troll Tech has applied to KDE?
What's so bad about Gnome? KDE is more mature, but has strings attached. Gnome is less mature, but has absolutely no strings attached. I just don't get it.
Just admit you used a bad example. Trying to save face by using run on sentences is not working.
"Evolution" is the name we have given a theory. It also happens to be the name given to an observed phenomenon. Whether or not it fits into creationism really isn't of any concern...
...That is until creationism, which is as much an observed phenomenon as Shakespeare, Batman, or a Smurf, is presented to children as a truth which contradicts the observed phenomenon.
We all know the theory of gravitation is bunk too. We stick to the earth because God wills it. Why can't all those pesky scientists figure out that God wills F=Gm1m2/d^2, just like God wills Creationists to refute all modern evidence in favour of a 6000 year old text.:-)
Or is it just a software package which will let you decode mp3's onto your MD player?
The article doesn't even imply that the product converts text to speech on the fly, and there isn't much to say that it stores MP3s, only that the software allows you to manage and play MP3s.
To do this Sharp has teamed up with Voquette to bundle its NetLink software. This will let you download, record and manage Internet audio files and create personalised playlist. The software will also let you convert text into voice. These playlists can then be recorded onto MiniDiscs for playback on the MD player.
The pricepoint seems pretty average for an MD player too. Does anyone have a link to the product on Sharp's site?
They had a Green PC which when it served its useful life, had a case which could be taken apart with your hands and separated for recycling. The display was geared towards low power consumption -- it was one of the early colour flatpanel LCDs. IIRC, it had one of the "Blue Lightning" motherboards a 486SLC type system.
It costed around $7000.
I remember wanting it because it produced very little heat, required very little noisy cooling, had a relatively small footprint and naturally, the display was dead sharp. The recycling end of it was completely bogus though. A small box in a landfill is nothing compared to copper mines, smelters, chip fabs and chemical plants. It was around the same time that reusable glass bottles began to dissapear, replaced with "environmentally friendly" recyclable plastic bottles. I have trouble believing that cleaning glass bottles is worse for the environment than pouring plastic.
Wow, I'm wickedly off topic.
I guess if he patented "recyclable" cell phones, nobody would care. Ah well, my girfriend bought her digital phone for roughly $70CDN, and pays roughly $20CDN for more airtime than she can use. That's already less than $20USD.
If you're catering to a U.S. audience, getting thousands of little penguins drawn by oodles of volunteers and arranging them into the statue of liberty... fine enough that from a few feet it looks like the statue, but when held in your hands all the little tiny penguins drawn by thousands of volunteers are quite visible.
It all depends on what kind of resources are at your disposal.
My original thought was to do the same with a visual representation of the internet, but it's a stretch of a claim, and I just couldn't think of an image which would be fitting.
Why is Netcraft not responding?... infact, it is refusing my connection. That's a BSD/Apache solution.
I commonly hear people say that it doesn't take much horsepower to supply enough capacity to handle a high-speed internet connection (eg. multiple T1). Wouldn't my connection time out if it were a bandwidth issue? If it were the dynamic content generation, wouldn't I get some headers, then a long pause? Instead my connection is being outright refused nine times out of ten. It is as though I'm hitting a port with no server on it at all.
I guess it all comes down to the Admin. They could have a high load, they could have a cap on the number of threads which Apache will generate, but this kind of stuff makes me quite skeptical. Slashdot occasionally does this too, far less frequently, but frequently enough to notice.
I strongly dislike the closed MS solution, and I know Apache works well for small and medium sized sites, but I've never come close to administering something with vicious traffic on it, so I'm quite ignorant of these things. If Apache is so vastly superior to IIS, why is Apache/BSD unable to serve my requests when I point my browser at Netcraft?
The U.S. would have to dissolve the island nation or seize political control of it in order to have direct control over the laws which permit the bank to exist. If you recall, the U.S doesn't even do such things to non-member nations. There are some rules which they do take seriously... for instance the one which prevented them from taking Saddam out of Iraq... which I believe is part of thier constitution.
Despite the instances you describe above, I think the U.S. does not think lightly of attacks on U.N. member nations... much less toppling their governments and taking control of their banks.
As for the physically existing in any significant capacity on an island with a weak communications infrastructure and limited access by air... that's just silly. They probably operate much like cruise ships. Offices all over the world, but they pay taxes and work by the rules of foreign governments. It's even covered quite clearly in the article:
Tracking Nauru banks is difficult, the State Department report said, because all "have the same post office box."
The only visible presence offshore firms have on Nauru may be a wall display in a hallway of the Nauru Agency Corp., where their names are engraved in plastic.
As a practical matter, it is only in the form of ledger entries that offshore dollars ordinarily pass through Nauru. The way the international banking system works, funds are electronically transferred to and from "correspondent accounts" that the Nauru-registered banks maintain in distant money centers such as New York.
But they don't need physical defenses. The bank doesn't exist on the island, and the island itself is part of the U.N. If the U.S. waltzes in and tries to take it over, they'll get themselves into a lot of trouble.
If you want to write a closed-source application for Linux, you must pay Troll Tech roughly $1,500 USD per developer.
Of course that's only if it uses QT.
It's a very reasonable one-time fee. It does however mean that the low budget "shareware" model is broken under the QPL. There are no royalties or hidden fees beyond this one-time cost, but as of my last reading of the QPL there is nothing to prevent TT from introducing royalties in future versions of QT for commercial application development.
Most people don't seem to care about this though because it doesn't hurt free software, and it even promotes using the GPL as opposed to developing software commerically. I however find the concept of TT profiting for every QT/KDE based commerical Linux venture very objectionable.
Read the QPL.. it's a very fair licence and very interesting. Just also pay attention to what it doesn't say.
I didn't believe that useful BASIC programs could be written in such an environment until I worked with it myself. It used some kind of grammatical rules to save memory. BASIC commands were displayed as text, but consisted of single keystroke/characters.
I just had to mention it, it was such a fun thing to play with. A computer which would run out of memory if you typed too much:-)
I don't know, that error message is probably one of the fastest I've ever seen.
It must be some kind of capacity issue, the server doesn't seem to be suffering any speed problems at all... I just can't figure out why the page doesn't say "capacity exceeded" or something.
Snow crash was a fun book, a light read, with an absolutely silly ending. I gave my copy away when I finished with it... Other people seem to enjoy the book a lot more than I did.
You're not the only one who dislikes Stephenson's writing.
Just to be redundant, I can confirm this, about three weeks before the quake, I went to go buy an SDRAM, the place I went to was out of stock... the next weekend, prices had doubled and were still climbing. Many companies in my area refused to sell or carry RAM, then the quake hit.
I heard from a somewhat reliable source that this has to do with a major SDRAM manufacturer going bankrupt. I haven't been able to confirm this through any channels though. I suppose with all the competition and the economic crisis in Asia, even a high volume manufacturer of SDRAM can go bankrupt... it makes sense, but again, I have no confirmation of this story.
I heard from an unreliable source (a slashdot comment some time ago) that RAMBUS was pointless in systems with busses around 100MHz... that it only really shone at 200MHz... which coincidentally was the bus speed of the K7. Since RamBUS was an Intel technology, they were inadvertently helping a competitor by promoting this technology.
Slashdot Mirror
I've given this a bit of thought over the past month, and I've been thinking of a tallbar interface with multiple collapsing groups of people. In other words, you can have multiple channels on multiple servers in your tallbar at the same time. All your friends/coworkers can exist in password protected hidden channels. I think it is a great idea.
Anybody out there an IRC client author who is willing to rip up their UI? It shouldn't be hard to do this sort of thing.
Hmmm... I really have to learn X programming... maybe ripping up another Opensource IRC client GUI is the way to do it. hmm...
I agree with this completely, I think there must be a way of creating a "tallbar" interface for IRC which would simulate an ICQ/AIM/whatever environment. The "tallbar" can represent a series of different channels. You would have your work channel on your work IRC server where all your coworkers hang out... then on undernet you have that hidden channel where your friends hang out. Almost all the "IM" aspects of it could be done with DCC chat and file transfers... while you would also have the advantage of not having to build a contact list... you just create a hidden, password protected channel, and invite people to it.
The only problem I can see with this interface are the problems with IRC in general.. But the protocol, infrastructure and servers are already there. It sounds like all we need is a IM GUI.
(Off-topic though because it neglects the cross-protcol client question...)
I am certainly no legal expert. I don't even consider myself an amature. But how do you explain stories like those which appeared in the Off-the-Hook broadcast in August.
http://www.2600.com/offthehook/1999/0 899.html
A fellow was sued by satellite manufacturers and was dragged through court until he was completely broke.
$100 for personal use. $300 if you actually do any work on your computer.
I'm torn up about this because it is more simple and more cost effective for me to go out and buy a small second system and outfit it with a monitor/keyboard switchbox.
The real power is in creating multiple machines on one for experimenting with system interactions over networks. But you still pay through the nose for memory.. and there are a lot of things you still can't do.
And are games even on their "to-do" list?
The biggest difference between BBSes and the Internet is that when you dialed up a BBS, it was in your local calling range. Everyone else online was in your local calling range. Yes, you could hold conversations with people on the other side of the continent, but those were slow and generally infrequent. For the mostpart, everyone was within a reasonable distance of eachother.
On BBSes, there were meet and greets, you could buy a beer for the guy who's planet you crushed in Tradewars, or chat (physically) with those women you were flirting with. Just try that on the Internet.
You're right. I'm sorry, by "commerce" I meant closed source commercial applications such as Wordperfect, the Corel Suite etc.
As long as they target KDE, and choose not to release their source code they have to answer to Troll Tech.
It is very possible that Troll Tech has no ill intentions, and simply opened up their source code because they agree with the open source philosophy. That the QPL is simply an effort to recoup operations and development expenses. However there is nothing in writing to prevent them from seriously damaging KDE as a platform for traditional closed source application development.
Troll Tech is profiting from all commercial development. The development of commercial applications for KDE would not occur if it were not for the popularity of free software and the efforts of free software developers.
By supporting QT, free software is marketing a commercial product.
Furthermore, the free software community has no control over the freedom of all future commercial development under KDE. Troll Tech exclusively owns all commercial development activities under KDE.
You could not be more wrong. This has nothing to do with freedom it has everything to do with money.
Is there a fact somewhere in that opinion?
As soon as you are legally required to pay a third party... for what ever reason, that's no longer free speech, or free beer. That's a commercial developer profiting because they simply happened to be in the right place at the right time.
But you're right, so long as the software is open and free, Troll Tech cannot restrict it or charge money for it. But they do profit from the network effect.
QT is free software with an ambiguous commercial license loophole. That makes it nothing more than free beer.
I can understand people wanting stuff for free but pretending to be a concerned free software user and praying on the good will of the free software community would be a sick.
Troll Tech's fees are minimal. This has nothing to do with money, it has to do with the freedom of the software.
From my perspective, Troll Tech is preying upon the good will of the software community by tying a commercial product into the works of thousands of free software developers. There's nothing wrong with that, but I don't have to agree with it.
If Linux enjoys widespread desktop acceptance, commerce will be at the mercy of Troll Tech in order to create QT enabled applications. That means commercial vendor lock-in in Linux.
What written contract prevents this?
That is not the goal of the foundation. The foundation doesn't give a damn about commercial software developers. That's TT's job.
So KDE is a QT marketing machine?
The more I hear of this the more I think that KDE proponents are simply ignoring legal ambiguities. Is there any reason what-so-ever, other than convenience, that we should accept the strings Troll Tech has applied to KDE?
What's so bad about Gnome? KDE is more mature, but has strings attached. Gnome is less mature, but has absolutely no strings attached. I just don't get it.
Just admit you used a bad example. Trying to save face by using run on sentences is not working.
"Evolution" is the name we have given a theory. It also happens to be the name given to an observed phenomenon. Whether or not it fits into creationism really isn't of any concern...
...That is until creationism, which is as much an observed phenomenon as Shakespeare, Batman, or a Smurf, is presented to children as a truth which contradicts the observed phenomenon.
We all know the theory of gravitation is bunk too. We stick to the earth because God wills it. Why can't all those pesky scientists figure out that God wills F=Gm1m2/d^2, just like God wills Creationists to refute all modern evidence in favour of a 6000 year old text. :-)
Or is it just a software package which will let you decode mp3's onto your MD player?
The article doesn't even imply that the product converts text to speech on the fly, and there isn't much to say that it stores MP3s, only that the software allows you to manage and play MP3s.
The pricepoint seems pretty average for an MD player too. Does anyone have a link to the product on Sharp's site?
They had a Green PC which when it served its useful life, had a case which could be taken apart with your hands and separated for recycling. The display was geared towards low power consumption -- it was one of the early colour flatpanel LCDs. IIRC, it had one of the "Blue Lightning" motherboards a 486SLC type system.
It costed around $7000.
I remember wanting it because it produced very little heat, required very little noisy cooling, had a relatively small footprint and naturally, the display was dead sharp. The recycling end of it was completely bogus though. A small box in a landfill is nothing compared to copper mines, smelters, chip fabs and chemical plants. It was around the same time that reusable glass bottles began to dissapear, replaced with "environmentally friendly" recyclable plastic bottles. I have trouble believing that cleaning glass bottles is worse for the environment than pouring plastic.
Wow, I'm wickedly off topic.
I guess if he patented "recyclable" cell phones, nobody would care. Ah well, my girfriend bought her digital phone for roughly $70CDN, and pays roughly $20CDN for more airtime than she can use. That's already less than $20USD.
I'll go find my bed now.
If you're catering to a U.S. audience, getting thousands of little penguins drawn by oodles of volunteers and arranging them into the statue of liberty... fine enough that from a few feet it looks like the statue, but when held in your hands all the little tiny penguins drawn by thousands of volunteers are quite visible.
It all depends on what kind of resources are at your disposal.
My original thought was to do the same with a visual representation of the internet, but it's a stretch of a claim, and I just couldn't think of an image which would be fitting.
Why is Netcraft not responding?... infact, it is refusing my connection. That's a BSD/Apache solution.
I commonly hear people say that it doesn't take much horsepower to supply enough capacity to handle a high-speed internet connection (eg. multiple T1). Wouldn't my connection time out if it were a bandwidth issue? If it were the dynamic content generation, wouldn't I get some headers, then a long pause? Instead my connection is being outright refused nine times out of ten. It is as though I'm hitting a port with no server on it at all.
I guess it all comes down to the Admin. They could have a high load, they could have a cap on the number of threads which Apache will generate, but this kind of stuff makes me quite skeptical. Slashdot occasionally does this too, far less frequently, but frequently enough to notice.
I strongly dislike the closed MS solution, and I know Apache works well for small and medium sized sites, but I've never come close to administering something with vicious traffic on it, so I'm quite ignorant of these things. If Apache is so vastly superior to IIS, why is Apache /BSD unable to serve my requests when I point my browser at Netcraft?
The U.S. would have to dissolve the island nation or seize political control of it in order to have direct control over the laws which permit the bank to exist. If you recall, the U.S doesn't even do such things to non-member nations. There are some rules which they do take seriously... for instance the one which prevented them from taking Saddam out of Iraq... which I believe is part of thier constitution.
Despite the instances you describe above, I think the U.S. does not think lightly of attacks on U.N. member nations... much less toppling their governments and taking control of their banks.
As for the physically existing in any significant capacity on an island with a weak communications infrastructure and limited access by air... that's just silly. They probably operate much like cruise ships. Offices all over the world, but they pay taxes and work by the rules of foreign governments. It's even covered quite clearly in the article:
But they don't need physical defenses. The bank doesn't exist on the island, and the island itself is part of the U.N. If the U.S. waltzes in and tries to take it over, they'll get themselves into a lot of trouble.
If you want to write a closed-source application for Linux, you must pay Troll Tech roughly $1,500 USD per developer.
Of course that's only if it uses QT.
It's a very reasonable one-time fee. It does however mean that the low budget "shareware" model is broken under the QPL. There are no royalties or hidden fees beyond this one-time cost, but as of my last reading of the QPL there is nothing to prevent TT from introducing royalties in future versions of QT for commercial application development.
Most people don't seem to care about this though because it doesn't hurt free software, and it even promotes using the GPL as opposed to developing software commerically. I however find the concept of TT profiting for every QT/KDE based commerical Linux venture very objectionable.
Read the QPL.. it's a very fair licence and very interesting. Just also pay attention to what it doesn't say.
Timex Sinclair 1000, 1k of ram. Spooky.
I didn't believe that useful BASIC programs could be written in such an environment until I worked with it myself. It used some kind of grammatical rules to save memory. BASIC commands were displayed as text, but consisted of single keystroke/characters.
I just had to mention it, it was such a fun thing to play with. A computer which would run out of memory if you typed too much :-)
I don't know, that error message is probably one of the fastest I've ever seen.
It must be some kind of capacity issue, the server doesn't seem to be suffering any speed problems at all... I just can't figure out why the page doesn't say "capacity exceeded" or something.
Snow crash was a fun book, a light read, with an absolutely silly ending. I gave my copy away when I finished with it... Other people seem to enjoy the book a lot more than I did.
You're not the only one who dislikes Stephenson's writing.
Poor OS/2. It beat MS to market, it had better technology than MS products, but alas, somehow IBM botched it.
I know it's not dead yet... I still read IBM's newsletters.
..and time-limited authenticated email.
We could all then have virtual milk cartons complete with expiry dates... and trade them on E-bay.
I can't think of any secure way of doing this without a central authority, but then, I'm not a mathematician.
Just to be redundant, I can confirm this, about three weeks before the quake, I went to go buy an SDRAM, the place I went to was out of stock... the next weekend, prices had doubled and were still climbing. Many companies in my area refused to sell or carry RAM, then the quake hit.
I heard from a somewhat reliable source that this has to do with a major SDRAM manufacturer going bankrupt. I haven't been able to confirm this through any channels though. I suppose with all the competition and the economic crisis in Asia, even a high volume manufacturer of SDRAM can go bankrupt... it makes sense, but again, I have no confirmation of this story.
I heard from an unreliable source (a slashdot comment some time ago) that RAMBUS was pointless in systems with busses around 100MHz... that it only really shone at 200MHz... which coincidentally was the bus speed of the K7. Since RamBUS was an Intel technology, they were inadvertently helping a competitor by promoting this technology.
Does anyone care to confirm or refute this?