Thus, if the movie/book/song "flops", it is still the corporation that loses money. The difference is that if the work is a success, it's the creator of the work, not the distributor of it who stands to profit the most (depending, of course, on the creator's contract with the financer).
No problem. That's the way it currently works. The author keeps the copyright/patent in his/her name. But the corporation cuts a very simple contract. It pays, oh, say, enough to cover 100% of the creators mortgage, food and clothing bill, medical insurance, etc. and in return the creator is often allowed to keep $1 of the profits, if, in fact there are any, which in many case there aren't. Guess what? Most techies agree to this contract. A few choose to work a Starbucks (for a lot less salary) so they get to keep more of the profits, if any. What's wrong with free choice?
To promote the progress of science and useful arts, not to promote financial gain.
What you might be forgetting is that there are lots of different types of people and organizations. Some of these aren't motivated by financial incentive, but many are. The capitalist mantra is that profit motivated people and organizations have contributed far more to the current state of the economy than they have sucked out in royalties and legalized monopolistic restrictions.
A patent is a lotto ticket that might bring in a lot of money in the rare event of a commecial success. If you know the number of failed R&D projects, music compositions, etc. there have been, it's pretty obvious that the lotto payoff has got to be big to keep many companies and people gambling by making a sustained effort to create.
In practice, software that has a low risk of paying off is only developed as Open Source.
Then why are there so many failed software startup companies or commercial computer game titles don't sell well? A significant percentage of new commercial software development is at risk of ever breaking even on development cost. The VC people know this; they do quite well if only one in ten software startups pays off, because the ones that actually pay off usually pay off at much better than 10x on the VC's investment.
It even works that way in your bread analogy. Most new (non-franchise) restaurants go out of business in the first (three?) years. But the ones that succeed return a lot more on investment than does a bank deposit. Whether they succeed or fail has very little to do with the cost of flour used in cooking.
And it's not likely you'd want direct 802.11 support either; the power requirements are a little too high for a pocket size device, and the Clie battery life is already pretty mediocre. Instead the better solution would be to use the Bluetooth MemoryStick with a wall-plug powered Bluetooth-to-802.11 bridge.
Yes, I've made this explicit many times. It takes a pound of flour to "copy" a loaf of bread. In contrast, once you have amortized the cost of creating a piece of software, there is essentially no marginal cost associated with creating another copy. The result of this is that the current proprietary model drastically overvalues software.
The revenue made from each loaf of bread does much more than pay for the ingredients. A vendor who creates a loaf of bread that is more desirable than the competition will probably sell a greater quantity, thus increasing the likelihood of a greater profit. If the vendor took a risk (I think bread type XYZ will sell better in neighborhood ABC than the typical white stuff made out of similar costing ingredients), then that risk would be rewarded if the vendor guessed correctly.
If a business wants to take on a risk of spending money developing software that has a 1% chance of success, how will that risk be rewarded if the software turns out to be successful at some point in the future? Intelligent gamblers will only take on odds of 1 in 100 if the expected payoff is larger than 100x. Where is the upside if a open source software developer turns out to have guessed correctly?
A reply to this is what is missing from the bread/flour rebuttal. Or is software development sector thought to be so exceptional that as to be risk free?
So basically you're saying that computers are magical radio-wave transcievers? Funny, I thought computers were based on capacitively switched [Bi]CMOS transistors. This means the "logical operation" travels at the speed of the capacitor charge / discharge times.
You are a little out of date. In the good old days (maybe a decade or two ago), the interconnect time was small in relationship to the gate switching times. So wire delay could basically be ignored in most digital IC designs, only gate delays were important. Now though, chips are so big in relationship to the clock rate that the speed of propogation of light inside a dielectric limits a signal to only traveling a fraction of the way across a chip within one clock cycle. The wires are also so narrow that they have high R which makes the RC times noticable between non-adjacent gates. The gates themselves can still usually switch in a fraction of a clock cycle. This means modern digital IC designs must usually be partitioned. Any signal that goes between rather than within small logic blocks must be designed as if the wire delay is the important factor and the gate delays are relatively free.
Amiga-like technology lives on. The custom chipset in the A1000 also used precharge/evaluate dynamic logic with a 4-phase clock. 'course it was only clocked at twice NTSC color-burst frequency, not 2.2 GHz... Actually this was common design methodology in many 4 to 8 micron (not 0.4 or 0.8!) NMOS chip designs of that era.
If you were a burglar in the UK you were (and are) very, very unlikely to get shot even before the "draconian" gun laws came in. There simply weren't enough guns around to make it a worry. So even if burglaries HAVE gone up since then, it's completely and totally unrelated.
Depends on whether or not you believe in statistics. Someone wrote an entire book on the inverse relationship between private gun ownership and certain categories of crimes; seems to apply whether or not any burglers get shot. Go figure.
but what I wonder is if you could get away with creating a CGI called default.ida that attempted to automatically connect back to the client, disinfect the machine, and install a patch. It is much less dangerous since it doesn't reproduce, and you could certainly make the argument that it was only done in retaliation to someone (unwittingly) attempting to infect your computer with a virus.
Why not redefine the protocol to where this is the correct and proper response to a codered type connection to port 80?
What I want to know is, why does my palm really need to be faster?
In normal organizer-like usage, the CPU inside a Palm handheld spends most of its time turned off (napping, even when the display is on). The faster the CPU, the faster real work gets done, the more time the CPU spends napping, the longer the battery life (assuming the new CPU is actually more efficient in terms of "mips"/mW).
Plus nice compute-intensive features like compression and encryption are no longer too slow for use under a responsive UI.
For Palm to stay in their longstanding $200-$450 price range, this move is right on schedule. Palms have been shipping for about 5 years now, just over 3 generations of Moore's Law. Since the original Palms were 20 MHz 68030-class computers, it should be possible to produce something 8-10 times faster overall with 8-10 times the memory. This roughly translates to 150-200 MHz ARM-based systems (right on target) with 4MB RAM in the lowest-end devices (think m100) and several times that in the high-end ones.
The original PalmPilots used a 16 Mhz 68000 class CPU (around 0.5 to 2 "mips"), not a 20 MHz '030 class CPU. Thus 3 turns of the performance interpretation of Moore's law only gets you around 8 "mips", or around a factor of 10 less than a 100 MHz ARM-based system.
Using a 200 MHz ARM will be a jump of another 4 factors of 2X, or a huge discontinuity. This huge jump (old CISC to new RISC) is what allowed HP (PA-RISC) and Apple (PPC) to succesfully emulate their old machines while making an architectural transition.
This is about ecology, not pet languages. Think of all the shelves full of books on Java, C, Perl, VB, etc. (also training courses, conferences, managers mindshare, etc.) Think of which languages got displaced from their niches by the currently popular ones (go into a medium size bookshop and see if they have anything still-in-print on Fortran, Cobol, RPG, Pascal or QBasic.) Perl won it's niche because awk and sh were weak in filling that niche before Perl/TCL/Python came along.
What makes anyone think that there is a niche big enough for Ruby to displace the existing species of scripting languages? My guess is that there are already too many solutions in the scripting language niche, and when the shelf space (and/or mindshare) for computer programming shrinks back to normal proportions, some of these languages will become fodder instead for books on the history of programming languages. Ancient languages will still live on in tiny specialists microfactions; people still write Basic interpreters.
Perl and gzip, on the other hand, are separate programs onto themselves, are called by your code at the command line level, so they run in separate memory spaces.
Not true on MMU-less systems (uclinux, etc.) where everything runs in the same memory space. Even on uniprocessor machines with an MMU, they all usually run in the same physical memory.
Is there really any difference between statically linked libraries and seperate applications on a ROMed embedded MMU-less system?
Wrong. It starts snowing, so 5 different stores all raise the price of snow shovels.
So? Buy mail order from the opposite hemisphere (New Zealand?) where it's summer and snow shovels are on sale. (Work fine unless micro$hovel has a world monopoly or the SIA has zone disabling...)
There is basically zero chance that Sony would try to get the GPL overturned in court. The reason why is simple. If they go to court and get the license declared invalid, they no longer have any rights to distribute the source of binary at all!
This assumes that some court in some jurisdiction doesn't declare both the GPL and the copyright unenforceable and equivalent to placing the code in the public domain.
Re:Can we please give them the benefit of the doub
on
Sony Violating GPL?
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· Score: 1
How can the binary be ready before the source code? Is that some kind of temporal engineering there or something?
There's a difference between source that will compile and a source distribution that will unpack and be complete (and perhaps even contain the proper licenses!).
Embedded does not imply schedulable, and schedulable does not imply real-time.
Yes, there do exist some embedded systems that do not have real-time scheduling requirements. But many do, and a much much higher portions of embedded designs do than desktop boxen.
Real-time may or may not have anything to do with time-of-day, instead it's about performing at the time of required event. That x-ray treatment machine must turn off its beam within so a so many milli or microseconds of being turned on, or you are toast (2pm, 3pm, doesn't really matter; as long as it's N mS +- TOL uS after turn-on). Or I'm sure you won't mind an occasional "temporary" blue screen, lengthly interrupt hander, unrecovered floating point exception, random garbage collection cycle, or indeteministic unbounded cache or TLB trash in the middle that causes your death.
They're 20% of what a "real" computer is, at 80% the price. There just is no value in these...
...unless the 20% is a measure of the size and weight. They seem to sell lots of extra thin and light laptops, as well as tons of thin Palm handhelds these days; all for prices around that of a "real" computer (unless you consider a real computer as something that fills a room full of racks on a raised floor).
YMMV.
Re:I don't think that's what it says...
on
High-Speed Greed
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· Score: 1
Charges based on the client's ISP would not be unenforceable. All AT&T would have to do is tell Amazon.com, "If you don't agree to give us a cut of all sales that come from AT&T customers, we'll block all traffic to your site."
AT&T wouldn't have to block traffic. Time is money; and faster web site response equals greater sales. AT&T not only owns the wires, but their end of the network routing tables. Amazon doesn't want to play? Fine. All traffic between @home suscribers and www.amazon.com gets routed through a ISDN switch in Pakistan instead of a NAP right into the AT&T optical backbone colocated with Amazon's servers.
"Gee, the B&N site seems so much faster this month, maybe I'll shop there instead."
Suddenly the Amazon accounting department figures out how to identify @home purchasers.
>With the fans that thing must have
The C90 uses a liquid refridgerant.
...and a heat exchanger. Any idea how big a heat exchanger it takes to dissipate a good fraction of a megawatt? Stories say that some Cray sites put water cooling tower in the back yard to keep things from melting.
Along a sparsely populated dirt road into a rain forest in Central American, I noted a couple things. There were cell phone towers. And even tin roofed huts and tree houses which I saw there contained color TVs. Even though color TVs have saturated this great a portion of the planet, this seems not to have killed off the television industry.
The wristwatch and radio business also seem to be doing well in spite of the fact that most people in the US already seem to have N.
Why should the market for cell phones be different?
I think it's because it will be in the 1.5-2 GHz range. Note that power increases almost as the cube of the clock speed because at the same time, you increase the switching rate, the voltage (so you can switch faster) and the current.
But isn't this somewhat mitigated by the fact that higher clock rate CPU's tend to use newer process technology, where the thinner gate oxides actually require running at a lower voltage?
False. The.com domain is available for registration by Internet users across the globe; but the top level name server is located inside US legal jurisdiction. So a US judge can take away a domain that a Iranian(etc.) court says belongs to you.
I note that many replies here are about the technological aspects of less-than-modern computers. I think that if you were to actually do some reading on the subject (there are many good books), you might find that the people involved in this field are mostly trained historians who are concerned more about the historical issues (preservation and accuracy of the historical record, etc.), rather than being engineers or authors of hero myths.
I believe that many universities, the British Science Museum, the Smithsonian, the Deutsches Museum, and possibly the Computer History Museum Center (at Nasa Ames, Moffit Field) employ historians with specialties in computer "stuff".
Several of these museums have volunteer programs (British Museum, CHMC). The amount of artifacts that need to be sorted and cataloged is enormous.
Good luck. If this really is one of the major revolutions in human culture, than an accurate record of its happenings may have the same importance many centuries from now, as do the works of those ancient students who preserved the teachings of Pythagoras.
Slashdot Mirror
Thus, if the movie/book/song "flops", it is still the corporation that loses money. The difference is that if the work is a success, it's the creator of the work, not the distributor of it who stands to profit the most (depending, of course, on the creator's contract with the financer).
No problem. That's the way it currently works. The author keeps the copyright/patent in his/her name. But the corporation cuts a very simple contract. It pays, oh, say, enough to cover 100% of the creators mortgage, food and clothing bill, medical insurance, etc. and in return the creator is often allowed to keep $1 of the profits, if, in fact there are any, which in many case there aren't. Guess what? Most techies agree to this contract. A few choose to work a Starbucks (for a lot less salary) so they get to keep more of the profits, if any. What's wrong with free choice?
To promote the progress of science and useful arts, not to promote financial gain.
What you might be forgetting is that there are lots of different types of people and organizations. Some of these aren't motivated by financial incentive, but many are. The capitalist mantra is that profit motivated people and organizations have contributed far more to the current state of the economy than they have sucked out in royalties and legalized monopolistic restrictions.
A patent is a lotto ticket that might bring in a lot of money in the rare event of a commecial success. If you know the number of failed R&D projects, music compositions, etc. there have been, it's pretty obvious that the lotto payoff has got to be big to keep many companies and people gambling by making a sustained effort to create.
In practice, software that has a low risk of paying off is only developed as Open Source.
Then why are there so many failed software startup companies or commercial computer game titles don't sell well? A significant percentage of new commercial software development is at risk of ever breaking even on development cost. The VC people know this; they do quite well if only one in ten software startups pays off, because the ones that actually pay off usually pay off at much better than 10x on the VC's investment.
It even works that way in your bread analogy. Most new (non-franchise) restaurants go out of business in the first (three?) years. But the ones that succeed return a lot more on investment than does a bank deposit. Whether they succeed or fail has very little to do with the cost of flour used in cooking.
And it's not likely you'd want direct 802.11 support either; the power requirements are a little too high for a pocket size device, and the Clie battery life is already pretty mediocre. Instead the better solution would be to use the Bluetooth MemoryStick with a wall-plug powered Bluetooth-to-802.11 bridge.
Yes, I've made this explicit many times. It takes a pound of flour to "copy" a loaf of bread. In contrast, once you have amortized the cost of creating a piece of software, there is essentially no marginal cost associated with creating another copy. The result of this is that the current proprietary model drastically overvalues software.
The revenue made from each loaf of bread does much more than pay for the ingredients. A vendor who creates a loaf of bread that is more desirable than the competition will probably sell a greater quantity, thus increasing the likelihood of a greater profit. If the vendor took a risk (I think bread type XYZ will sell better in neighborhood ABC than the typical white stuff made out of similar costing ingredients), then that risk would be rewarded if the vendor guessed correctly.
If a business wants to take on a risk of spending money developing software that has a 1% chance of success, how will that risk be rewarded if the software turns out to be successful at some point in the future? Intelligent gamblers will only take on odds of 1 in 100 if the expected payoff is larger than 100x. Where is the upside if a open source software developer turns out to have guessed correctly?
A reply to this is what is missing from the bread/flour rebuttal. Or is software development sector thought to be so exceptional that as to be risk free?
So basically you're saying that computers are magical radio-wave
transcievers? Funny, I thought computers were based on capacitively
switched [Bi]CMOS transistors. This means the "logical operation"
travels at the speed of the capacitor charge / discharge times.
You are a little out of date. In the good old days (maybe a
decade or two ago), the interconnect time was small in relationship to
the gate switching times. So wire delay could basically be ignored in
most digital IC designs, only gate delays were important. Now though,
chips are so big in relationship to the clock rate that the speed of
propogation of light inside a dielectric limits a signal to only
traveling a fraction of the way across a chip within one clock cycle.
The wires are also so narrow that they have high R which makes the RC
times noticable between non-adjacent gates. The gates themselves can
still usually switch in a fraction of a clock cycle. This means modern
digital IC designs must usually be partitioned. Any signal that goes
between rather than within small logic blocks must be designed as if
the wire delay is the important factor and the gate delays are
relatively free.
Amiga-like technology lives on.
The custom chipset in the A1000 also used precharge/evaluate dynamic logic with a 4-phase clock. 'course it was only clocked at twice NTSC color-burst frequency, not 2.2 GHz...
Actually this was common design methodology in many 4 to 8 micron (not 0.4 or 0.8!) NMOS chip designs of that era.
If you were a burglar in the UK you were (and are) very, very unlikely to get shot even before the "draconian" gun laws came in. There simply weren't enough guns around to make it a worry. So even if burglaries HAVE gone up since then, it's completely and totally unrelated.
Depends on whether or not you believe in statistics. Someone wrote an entire book on the inverse relationship between private gun ownership and certain categories of crimes; seems to apply whether or not any burglers get shot. Go figure.
but what I wonder is if you could get away with creating a CGI called default.ida that attempted to automatically connect back to the client, disinfect the machine, and install a patch. It is much less dangerous since it doesn't reproduce, and you could certainly make the argument that it was only done in retaliation to someone (unwittingly) attempting to infect your computer with a virus.
Why not redefine the protocol to where this is the correct and proper response to a codered type connection to port 80?
They already have. Sony (320x320) and Handera (240x320) already make PalmOS handhelds that have higher resolution displays.
In normal organizer-like usage, the CPU inside a Palm handheld spends most of its time turned off (napping, even when the display is on). The faster the CPU, the faster real work gets done, the more time the CPU spends napping, the longer the battery life (assuming the new CPU is actually more efficient in terms of "mips"/mW).
Plus nice compute-intensive features like compression and encryption are no longer too slow for use under a responsive UI.
For Palm to stay in their longstanding $200-$450 price range, this move is right on schedule. Palms have been shipping for about 5 years now, just over 3 generations of Moore's Law. Since the original Palms were 20 MHz 68030-class computers, it should be possible to produce something 8-10 times faster overall with 8-10 times the memory. This roughly translates to 150-200 MHz ARM-based systems (right on target) with 4MB RAM in the lowest-end devices (think m100) and several times that in the high-end ones.
The original PalmPilots used a 16 Mhz 68000 class CPU (around 0.5 to 2 "mips"), not a 20 MHz '030 class CPU. Thus 3 turns of the performance interpretation of Moore's law only gets you around 8 "mips", or around a factor of 10 less than a 100 MHz ARM-based system.
Using a 200 MHz ARM will be a jump of another 4 factors of 2X, or a huge discontinuity. This huge jump (old CISC to new RISC) is what allowed HP (PA-RISC) and Apple (PPC) to succesfully emulate their old machines while making an architectural transition.
This is about ecology, not pet languages.
Think of all the shelves full of books on Java, C, Perl, VB, etc. (also training courses, conferences, managers mindshare, etc.) Think of which languages got displaced from their niches by the currently popular ones (go into a medium size bookshop and see if they have anything still-in-print on Fortran, Cobol, RPG, Pascal or QBasic.) Perl won it's niche because awk and sh were weak in filling that niche before Perl/TCL/Python came along.
What makes anyone think that there is a niche big enough for Ruby to displace the existing species of scripting languages? My guess is that there are already too many solutions in the scripting language niche, and when the shelf space (and/or mindshare) for computer programming shrinks back to normal proportions, some of these languages will become fodder instead for books on the history of programming languages.
Ancient languages will still live on in tiny specialists microfactions; people still write Basic interpreters.
Perl and gzip, on the other hand, are separate programs onto themselves, are called by your code at the command line level, so they run in separate memory spaces.
Not true on MMU-less systems (uclinux, etc.) where everything runs in the same memory space. Even on uniprocessor machines with an MMU, they all usually run in the same physical memory.
Is there really any difference between statically linked libraries and seperate applications on a ROMed embedded MMU-less system?
Wrong. It starts snowing, so 5 different stores all raise the price of snow shovels.
So? Buy mail order from the opposite hemisphere (New Zealand?) where it's summer and snow shovels are on sale. (Work fine unless micro$hovel has a world monopoly or the SIA has zone disabling...)
There is basically zero chance that Sony would try to get the GPL overturned in court. The reason why is simple. If they go to court and get the license declared invalid, they no longer have any rights to distribute the source of binary at all!
This assumes that some court in some jurisdiction doesn't declare both the GPL and the copyright unenforceable and equivalent to placing the code in the public domain.
There's a difference between source that will compile and a source distribution that will unpack and be complete (and perhaps even contain the proper licenses!).
Embedded does not imply schedulable, and schedulable does not imply real-time.
Yes, there do exist some embedded systems that do not have real-time scheduling requirements. But many do, and a much much higher portions of embedded designs do than desktop boxen.
Real-time may or may not have anything to do with time-of-day, instead it's about performing at the time of required event. That x-ray treatment machine must turn off its beam within so a so many milli or microseconds of being turned on, or you are toast (2pm, 3pm, doesn't really matter; as long as it's N mS +- TOL uS after turn-on). Or I'm sure you won't mind an occasional "temporary" blue screen, lengthly interrupt hander, unrecovered floating point exception, random garbage collection cycle, or indeteministic unbounded cache or TLB trash in the middle that causes your death.
They're 20% of what a "real" computer is, at 80% the price. There just is no value in these...
...unless the 20% is a measure of the size and weight. They seem to sell lots of extra thin and light laptops, as well as tons of thin Palm handhelds these days; all for prices around that of a "real" computer (unless you consider a real computer as something that fills a room full of racks on a raised floor).
YMMV.
Charges based on the client's ISP would not be unenforceable. All AT&T would have to do is tell Amazon.com, "If you don't agree to give us a cut of all sales that come from AT&T customers, we'll block all traffic to your site."
AT&T wouldn't have to block traffic. Time is money; and faster web site response equals greater sales. AT&T not only owns the wires, but their end of the network routing tables. Amazon doesn't want to play? Fine. All traffic between @home suscribers and www.amazon.com gets routed through a ISDN switch in Pakistan instead of a NAP right into the AT&T optical backbone colocated with Amazon's servers.
"Gee, the B&N site seems so much faster this month, maybe I'll shop there instead."
Suddenly the Amazon accounting department figures out how to identify @home purchasers.
>With the fans that thing must have
The C90 uses a liquid refridgerant.
...and a heat exchanger. Any idea how big a heat exchanger it takes to dissipate a good fraction of a megawatt? Stories say that some Cray sites put water cooling tower in the back yard to keep things from melting.
Along a sparsely populated dirt road into a rain forest in Central American, I noted a couple things. There were cell phone towers. And even tin roofed huts and tree houses which I saw there contained color TVs. Even though color TVs have saturated this great a portion of the planet, this seems not to have killed off the television industry.
The wristwatch and radio business also seem to be doing well in spite of the fact that most people in the US already seem to have N.
Why should the market for cell phones be different?
I think it's because it will be in the 1.5-2 GHz range. Note that power increases almost as the cube of the clock speed because at the same time, you increase the switching rate, the voltage (so you can switch faster) and the current.
But isn't this somewhat mitigated by the fact that higher clock rate CPU's tend to use newer process technology, where the thinner gate oxides actually require running at a lower voltage?
>False
.com domain is available for registration by Internet users across the globe; but the top level name server is located inside US legal jurisdiction. So a US judge can take away a domain that a Iranian(etc.) court says belongs to you.
False. The
I note that many replies here are about the technological aspects of less-than-modern computers. I think that if you were to actually do some reading on the subject (there are many good books), you might find that the people involved in this field are mostly trained historians who are concerned more about the historical issues (preservation and accuracy of the historical record, etc.), rather than being engineers or authors of hero myths.
I believe that many universities, the British Science Museum, the Smithsonian, the Deutsches Museum, and possibly the Computer History Museum Center (at Nasa Ames, Moffit Field) employ historians with specialties in computer "stuff".
Several of these museums have volunteer programs (British Museum, CHMC). The amount of artifacts that need to be sorted and cataloged is enormous.
Good luck. If this really is one of the major revolutions in human culture, than an accurate record of its happenings may have the same importance many centuries from now, as do the works of those ancient students who preserved the teachings of Pythagoras.