This does risk having technology NOT reach consumers because too much self-interested tech decisions bottle up useful inventions in useless patents.
What does this mean? Someone finally wins the battle to get their format used in cell networks (note I did *not* say "wins the battle to invent a suitable codec" - that's just time and engineering). No problem with licensing as far as the hardware is concerned - it's just part of the cost of the phone. But now if you want to integrate it in, say, a universal instant messaging framework, the licensing fees become crippling, and for most of the world, the technology is withheld from them for an additional 17 years! Now, weren't patents supposed to benefit the public?
There is one way, and only one way, to completely close code with no loss to the customers, and that is to put that code in hardware and have open specs for interacting with it.
Anything else means that you can be stranded by the vendor.
Re:For once, I'm sympathising with MS
on
al Qaeda Hacks XP?
·
· Score: 2
It's also highly unlikely to be the work of Islamic terrorists. The strain used has been fingerprinted as belonging to the
US military industrial complex. Every sign points to a US origin. Nothing indicates that al Qaeda would or could do something so cute as create false clues that would make us think it was domestic terrorism. But no right-leaning Americans would ever commit terrorism in the US, right? I mean, hadn't you wondered why al Qaeda seemed to hate liberal politicians?
Both al Qaeda and their anti-Semitic admirers in the US (the likely source of the anthrax mailings) had exactly the same delusion that Charles Manson had - that they could start chaos that would destroy the US, and they would be recognized as heroes and invited to become the new leaders. It's just not that easy. Plus Charlie was probably a better lay than them and wasn't as hairy as Bin Laden and "only" killed a few people.
I would love to think I'd take them to small claims court, but frankly, hitting them with the credit card charge is more, er, bang for the buck. That's $25 bucks a pop when the credit card company hits them with a charge. Just make sure to repeat "the CD was defective" and don't buy it from a small record store.
... and install it for me, then i'll consider buying their CDs. I listen to CDs all day at work, so a CD is useless to me
Hey, here's an idea; list some bands CDs you won't buy if this happens. Note their record label. Compile a list - hell, just start listing them here!
Only when they see the kind of negative impact this will have on their sales will they abandon these silly strategies for boxing us out of owning music.
I think you misread the article, because it makes nearly the same case you do; a "desktop" should be a logical work area. Just extend what you said to include shared work areas and you've got what they're getting at. Recourse to other filesystem tools should only be for administrative work, and applications should be designed to conform to this expectation.
Consider the number of users who can't find files after they've downloaded them and you'll see how right they are. Consider what "My Documents" tries to do and you'll see that half-assed efforts have been made to address a fundamental usability issue.
If you've ever gotten really used to multiple desktops for organizing your open applications - if you are one of those people like me who has about 25 windows open at any given time - you'd see what a strong point they have beyond the filesystem notion; it makes more sense to put similar tasks and data in groups together, to have a fairly flat set of groups, and to be able to switch between these contexts.
Beats me what kind of IT guys you have. I revamped someone's network and I spent 100 more times patching the 4 NT servers than I did the Linux box. For one thing, RedHat conveniently puts the patches in one place. Microsoft uses about 5000, because there are too many to put in one place. The Linux box, BTW, just stays up. Period. Before I patched it, it had been up for about 180 days without administration of any kind. And the FreeBSD firewall I made just keeps running. Period. I don't want to even think about the number of times those NT machines - well-configured or hellish messes too important to reinstall anytime soon - go up and down.
Aside from your refreshing unconcern for risk, freedom, or due process, and refreshing appreciation for Stalinist oppression, one might draw exactly the opposite conclusion from your given facts; AIDS has remained largely the province of those who insist on engaging in risky behaviors, and has not spread into the general populace because of education and prevention efforts.
Still think it's a gay disease? Go get a map of the world and look for a really big place called "Africa". There, lack of education and a refusal by many heterosexuals to stop certain risky behaviors has turned AIDS into the epidemic that didn't happen here.
The reason more heterosexual people here don't have it is that many of the ones who got it are dead.
... Hillary Rosen declared the iPod the year's most dangerous toy.
Re:This is the sneaker of small vehicals...chill.
on
This is IT?
·
· Score: 2
I don't know what reports you saw, but the ones I saw (NY Times, Reuters, AP) all mentioned 12 mph, not 17. The difference there is the difference between falling off onto your face and stepping off at full speed.
Regardless, it's not a less good version of existing battery powered bikes. If you think so, try, say, retrieving books from closed stacks in a library on a bike, battery-powered or not. It doesn't work. For one thing, the pain of getting on and off is going to keep you from doing it. For another thing, the maneuverability is all wrong. For another, the bike requires the ability to raise your leg as high as your waist, balance, support yourself, etc. IT requires the ability to step 1 foot up and stand. It's a huge difference. The profile of the device is vastly different and thus works in a lot of places the other doesn't. The fact that it has some rather innovative technology to deal with an engineering hurdle (2 wheels and balance) makes it pretty cool.
And I can carry 65 pounds quite a long way; you don't speak for my weaknesses. If the thing runs out of batteries, it should have a free-wheel mode so you can just drag it. That's not a hard configuration to pull; I've seen little old ladies haul 150 lbs in a garden cart up a hill without breaking a sweat. I don't know what your problem is.
Right. Which has a lot more to do with corporate pricing policy - how to soak your customers or how to get rewardwed for the value you provide, depending on your attitudes - than it does with any technological reason.
Of course, the data could be pornographic images that steganographically hide terrorist instructions. Have you looked?
Great point. Of course, the head of the CIA (M-x spook) brought classified secrets home on his laptop and surfed the internet with it, so ya never know.
This is true, but if it really concerns you that someone might try looking at things listed in robots.txt (I've done it), try adding an exclude to robots.txt that specifies a bogus, but tempting directory, say "/mp3/*" or "/warez/*" or "/bspears/*". Then create the directory, make index.cgi mail you immediately when someone requests the directory index.... haha.
There are a lot of Chinese dot-coms that are flourishing. I know because they won't stop sending me spam. Do you consider spam "subversive"? It doesn't appear the Chinese gov't thinks so, because I get it from dot-cn addresses, too.
And the reference to Marxism only shows how little you know about China.
Seriously, the most likely reason for this is that the bidnessmen running the cafes that were closed got too big for the level of government connections they have. Better-connected competitors may have happened to mention to officials that "gee, those guys let anything through." I would be surprised if you couldn't still get stuff from many of the 78,000 cafes still open.
The point is not acquiring expertise from elsewhere, but in preventing them from leaving. Presumably, NT/2k admins are less likely to leave, because less reward entices them from outside, because there are more NT/2k admins in the market and so the salary incentive to jump ship is not so great.
I put up an anonymizing proxy somewhere and ran it for a year or so. Threw out the logs after analysis. But found out that most of my traffic was from United Arab Emirates. They used the site for surfing porn, which is blocked by their country. They also used it for reading news that I doubt they can easily get there.
So if all it means is that some rich Arabs can get easy access to porn, so what. It might just mean that someone from a religiously repressive and sexually repressed society learns that if you look at porn, it doesn't make you blind, it doesn't turn you into a rapist, and if your spouse/SO shares your tastes, it could even enhance your sex life. And the 5% of the time they were reading news sites might just give them a wider view of the world. All of which might make their country, eventually, more tolerant. So you can whine all you want, but sometimes the inability to surf porn is the man smacking people down, and sometimes the ability to surf porn is a sign that freedom exists, regardless of whether exercising that freedom at any given time is wise or tasteful.
SQL is a terrible idea. Really, really bad. For one thing, you add a whole layer of complexity to the code that just isn't needed; support for all the different databases. The cost of maintaining that code takes away from auditing the other parts that can go wrong. For another thing, DNS should be as fast as possible, and that means having the information cached in memory for instant use. SQL adds overhead for no real benefit.
I've actually tried loading up BIND with hundreds of thousands of domains and records. If you have enough RAM, it doesn't take a mighty machine to answer large amounts of requests. That is not what is broken with it. At present, the strategy is to refresh the information in memory on request by an administrator. Otherwise, don't check, serve requests. This is as fast and efficient as you can get. SQL would break that.
And it only takes a couple of hours to write perl code that extracts info from a SQL database, dumps it into flat files, and kicks the name server. It's a common naive mistake to think that putting everything into a database is a good idea.
I'd still trust a software engineer to run a software business over a carpet cleaning magnate. The engineer has a better shot at understanding the market. Let the software engineer take an accounting class and the only advantage left for the carpet king is salesmanship.
And any asshole knows that the paperclip was put in by people in marketing. Actually, I don't care who actually did it. Just go back and read the article until my comment makes sense. Better yet, go buy the book and see how many engineers were running those companies. Then ask yourself which successful tech companies were created by carpet-cleaning magnates. Look at the 10 biggest companies in computing and see how many were created by those with non-technical backgrounds.
Well, either you are a non-U.S. resident who is insentitive to the restrictions placed on us by the DMCA, in which case your opinion doesn't count, or else you are a scofflaw who thinks that the option to break the law is an acceptive alternative to freedom. Either way, your opinion is flippant and irresponsible.
I would be outraged, except this is one area where I actually agree with our president 100%, and one area where conservatives in the executive branch are presently living up to their name (as opposed to the massive corporate welfare being enacted). I'm pleased that they've actually be let it known, if slightly indirectly, that they do not support this. Our previous president was at his worst on these kind of issues.
Slashdot Mirror
D'oh.
What does this mean? Someone finally wins the battle to get their format used in cell networks (note I did *not* say "wins the battle to invent a suitable codec" - that's just time and engineering). No problem with licensing as far as the hardware is concerned - it's just part of the cost of the phone. But now if you want to integrate it in, say, a universal instant messaging framework, the licensing fees become crippling, and for most of the world, the technology is withheld from them for an additional 17 years! Now, weren't patents supposed to benefit the public?
Anything else means that you can be stranded by the vendor.
Both al Qaeda and their anti-Semitic admirers in the US (the likely source of the anthrax mailings) had exactly the same delusion that Charles Manson had - that they could start chaos that would destroy the US, and they would be recognized as heroes and invited to become the new leaders. It's just not that easy. Plus Charlie was probably a better lay than them and wasn't as hairy as Bin Laden and "only" killed a few people.
You got it. The only way to respond to a troll is with a better troll. Oh, wait, did I just hit "submit"? Damn.
I would love to think I'd take them to small claims court, but frankly, hitting them with the credit card charge is more, er, bang for the buck. That's $25 bucks a pop when the credit card company hits them with a charge. Just make sure to repeat "the CD was defective" and don't buy it from a small record store.
Hey, here's an idea; list some bands CDs you won't buy if this happens. Note their record label. Compile a list - hell, just start listing them here!
Only when they see the kind of negative impact this will have on their sales will they abandon these silly strategies for boxing us out of owning music.
Consider the number of users who can't find files after they've downloaded them and you'll see how right they are. Consider what "My Documents" tries to do and you'll see that half-assed efforts have been made to address a fundamental usability issue.
If you've ever gotten really used to multiple desktops for organizing your open applications - if you are one of those people like me who has about 25 windows open at any given time - you'd see what a strong point they have beyond the filesystem notion; it makes more sense to put similar tasks and data in groups together, to have a fairly flat set of groups, and to be able to switch between these contexts.
Beats me what kind of IT guys you have. I revamped someone's network and I spent 100 more times patching the 4 NT servers than I did the Linux box. For one thing, RedHat conveniently puts the patches in one place. Microsoft uses about 5000, because there are too many to put in one place. The Linux box, BTW, just stays up. Period. Before I patched it, it had been up for about 180 days without administration of any kind. And the FreeBSD firewall I made just keeps running. Period. I don't want to even think about the number of times those NT machines - well-configured or hellish messes too important to reinstall anytime soon - go up and down.
Aside from your refreshing unconcern for risk, freedom, or due process, and refreshing appreciation for Stalinist oppression, one might draw exactly the opposite conclusion from your given facts; AIDS has remained largely the province of those who insist on engaging in risky behaviors, and has not spread into the general populace because of education and prevention efforts.
Still think it's a gay disease? Go get a map of the world and look for a really big place called "Africa". There, lack of education and a refusal by many heterosexuals to stop certain risky behaviors has turned AIDS into the epidemic that didn't happen here.
The reason more heterosexual people here don't have it is that many of the ones who got it are dead.
... Hillary Rosen declared the iPod the year's most dangerous toy.
Regardless, it's not a less good version of existing battery powered bikes. If you think so, try, say, retrieving books from closed stacks in a library on a bike, battery-powered or not. It doesn't work. For one thing, the pain of getting on and off is going to keep you from doing it. For another thing, the maneuverability is all wrong. For another, the bike requires the ability to raise your leg as high as your waist, balance, support yourself, etc. IT requires the ability to step 1 foot up and stand. It's a huge difference. The profile of the device is vastly different and thus works in a lot of places the other doesn't. The fact that it has some rather innovative technology to deal with an engineering hurdle (2 wheels and balance) makes it pretty cool.
And I can carry 65 pounds quite a long way; you don't speak for my weaknesses. If the thing runs out of batteries, it should have a free-wheel mode so you can just drag it. That's not a hard configuration to pull; I've seen little old ladies haul 150 lbs in a garden cart up a hill without breaking a sweat. I don't know what your problem is.
I don't think that comment should be moderated flamebait. Jack Valenti does think that.
So the question remains.
I've seen that comment a number of times but it doesn't address the idea that routers are built with relatively small amounts of a commodity resource.
Well, that was obtuse. I thought he was implying that both things make you want to wear a tin foil hat
This is true, but if it really concerns you that someone might try looking at things listed in robots.txt (I've done it), try adding an exclude to robots.txt that specifies a bogus, but tempting directory, say "/mp3/*" or "/warez/*" or "/bspears/*". Then create the directory, make index.cgi mail you immediately when someone requests the directory index.... haha.
And the reference to Marxism only shows how little you know about China.
Seriously, the most likely reason for this is that the bidnessmen running the cafes that were closed got too big for the level of government connections they have. Better-connected competitors may have happened to mention to officials that "gee, those guys let anything through." I would be surprised if you couldn't still get stuff from many of the 78,000 cafes still open.
The point is not acquiring expertise from elsewhere, but in preventing them from leaving. Presumably, NT/2k admins are less likely to leave, because less reward entices them from outside, because there are more NT/2k admins in the market and so the salary incentive to jump ship is not so great.
So if all it means is that some rich Arabs can get easy access to porn, so what. It might just mean that someone from a religiously repressive and sexually repressed society learns that if you look at porn, it doesn't make you blind, it doesn't turn you into a rapist, and if your spouse/SO shares your tastes, it could even enhance your sex life. And the 5% of the time they were reading news sites might just give them a wider view of the world. All of which might make their country, eventually, more tolerant. So you can whine all you want, but sometimes the inability to surf porn is the man smacking people down, and sometimes the ability to surf porn is a sign that freedom exists, regardless of whether exercising that freedom at any given time is wise or tasteful.
I've actually tried loading up BIND with hundreds of thousands of domains and records. If you have enough RAM, it doesn't take a mighty machine to answer large amounts of requests. That is not what is broken with it. At present, the strategy is to refresh the information in memory on request by an administrator. Otherwise, don't check, serve requests. This is as fast and efficient as you can get. SQL would break that.
And it only takes a couple of hours to write perl code that extracts info from a SQL database, dumps it into flat files, and kicks the name server. It's a common naive mistake to think that putting everything into a database is a good idea.
And any asshole knows that the paperclip was put in by people in marketing. Actually, I don't care who actually did it. Just go back and read the article until my comment makes sense. Better yet, go buy the book and see how many engineers were running those companies. Then ask yourself which successful tech companies were created by carpet-cleaning magnates. Look at the 10 biggest companies in computing and see how many were created by those with non-technical backgrounds.
Well, either you are a non-U.S. resident who is insentitive to the restrictions placed on us by the DMCA, in which case your opinion doesn't count, or else you are a scofflaw who thinks that the option to break the law is an acceptive alternative to freedom. Either way, your opinion is flippant and irresponsible.
I would be outraged, except this is one area where I actually agree with our president 100%, and one area where conservatives in the executive branch are presently living up to their name (as opposed to the massive corporate welfare being enacted). I'm pleased that they've actually be let it known, if slightly indirectly, that they do not support this. Our previous president was at his worst on these kind of issues.