This is one of those statements that can be uttered on its own without any further commentary -- the idiocy speaks for itself.... you have the rediculous idea that if I use the internet for nothing but sending a few emails back and forth... I should be made to contribute toward the cost of the other guy down the street downloading porn and Dr. Dre
You wouldn't have been so quick to criticize the poster if you had thought about it a little, because when people pay their fixed ISP charge today they are doing exactly what you say is idiotic --- paying for resources in the aggregate, rather than on a per-use basis. It even applies to "free" ISPs, because there the cost is "paid" by aggregate viewing of advertising, whether individuals block it or not.
ISPs factor in every customer equally when arriving at their charges, not on the basis of actual use --- for one thing, the cost of fully detailed use accounting would be massive and prohibitive, and there are privacy concerns associated with full accounting anyway. No, much easier to charge by aggregate, and that is exactly what they do.
Except for the EULA of course, barring you from using any other but Microsoft software.
That depends on whether they sell the X-box or just loan it out under a license. If the latter then you could be right, but if the former then the hardware is yours and you can do what the heck you like with it.
Of course, the previous point will be highly debated by lawyers what with DVDs and DeCSS and the DMCA and all that, but everyone will ignore such restrictions utterly because any possible law in this area would be unenforceable. Somehow I don't think that taxpayers around the world would be too happy if their police forces start dedicating their resources to raiding a million console users.
Everything we've heard so far about the X-box seems to indicate that it's going to be an ordinary console with everything that that entails in terms of tight control over software, severe manufacturer-imposed constraints on products, and ridiculously high licensing costs.
I'm going to take a wild stab in the dark on the basis of Microsoft's acknowledged ability to create markets for its products, and suggest that in practice the X-box will become the exact opposite of a conventional console as described in the paragraph above. Instead, it will become an entirely open platform, in practice.
Why do I think that this may be so? For a number of reasons:-
First, the console market is already fairly highly subscribed if not totally saturated, so the X-box will have to be pretty special to make a large proportion of gamers reach into their pockets again. All the other popular consoles are closed platforms. A way of becoming "pretty special" is ready and waiting. [The still-to-be-launched Indrema is doing something similar, albeit with a certification hurdle imposed, but hopefully this will not be a substantive barrier.]
Second, it just so happens that virtually all the big players in the console arena either have or will be bringing out new mega-powerful systems within the same time frame, so high technology alone may not be enough, especially since Microsoft is a latecomer to this market. A novel angle may be required to make headway.
Third, Microsoft knows full well that the popularity of Windows stems very largely from the massive buzz that was created by several years worth of unimpeded free-for-all copying of both the O/S and its applications. The official face of Microsoft may protest about "piracy", but unofficially they must know that in reality unconstrained access is an extremely powerful popularizing mechanism, vastly cheaper yet more effective than advertising.
These three things all point in the same direction: Microsoft will either make the platform fully open, or it will create an easy and inexpensive method for all and sundry to write and install games on the X-box, or it will turn a very blind eye to the cracking systems which will appear 2 microseconds after the machine hits the streets. Nothing is gained by restricting what can run on a platform (all the talk of controlling for "quality" is unadulterated rubbish --- people like to decide for themselves, thank you very much), but everything is gained by having thousands of products run on a console rather than merely hundreds.
Actually, I wasn't referring to the lifts/elevators dropping down the shaft when an EMP fries their electronics, but to the possibility of entombment of people riding in them at the time.
Beyond that, there are probably thousands of other ways in which people would die as a result of such a blast, from failed traffic lights on busy roads and control signals on trains, to machinery or even weapons going haywire. The really nasty deaths would follow later on though if the blast is not just a local one, as society's threads start to unravel after the failing of the primary services which these days are entirely dependent on electronics.
Damn, I didn't realize that the BT universe ever generated anything resembling insight. Usually, the 999:1 manager:tech ratio just generates ticks in boxes and is the key reason why the ET probes return "no intelligent life here" and so first contact gets deferred yet again.
Well, I wouldn't have put it quite like that myself as you make women sound like some sort of alien species. But yes, if you become more confident in yourself then you become more attractive to women.
That's nothing to do with female submissiveness though. It simply makes sense on a human front. You usually hook up with people that have something to offer, and rarely with those that are merely a burden.
... "that can put out such a powerful burst of radio-frequency energy it will destroy or disable electrical and electronic systems for miles around without killing anyone."
As mankind becomes more and more dependent on electronics and begins to integrate with it, statements like the above will become ever more meaningless. In fact, they're meaningless right now, even without thinking about the plight of people with pacemakers: one of those pulses would probably kill many people simply because they happen to be in planes or lifts/elevators at the time.
Sigh. But then, I guess loss of life isn't a severe worry to weapons manufacturers.
I think people are missing something fairly fundamental when discussing the failure of FreeNet to gain buzz and hence mindshare. Java the concept is great. Java the language is great. Java the fully working and transparent VM behind the scenes of every real Winblows/Linux/BSD/BeOS/Solaris is a figment of Java developers' imaginations.
If only it were not so, but it is. In many cases the reason for failure of the concept is trivial --- merely bad CLASSPATH or fonts or Netscape crapness --- but that's enough to make it a failure for the masses. Despite the protestations of Java fans that it's a success right now, the key point is being missed: it's only a success for you, and not transparent for non-fans. Reality sucks, sorry. [You can remedy such failures so easily with VM defaults but you don't. Why? --- A question to the Java community.]
Does this mean that FreeNet has no future? No, in my view, because the issues that it addresses are likely to become ever more important over time, give the lag between realtime and the onset of coercion from the corrupt corporate, legal, and political spheres. It has a future, because in due course the confluence of several factors will give it the boost it needs: it will gain the apps and GUIs it needs to appeal to the masses, and it will be reimplemented in native code so that it actually runs everywhere for the ordinary non-tech man/woman with a computer, not just for you.
FreeNet developers don't despair. You're laying the groundwork, not the final edifice. Once you have something approaching a spec that won't change too much, we'll reimplement in slotted C (OK, probably via a C++ phase) and FreeNet will become universal. Meanwhile, keep doing your good work and ignore the detractors.
Chris, I don't think that we can really just ignore the traditional channels and support the independent artists like yourself exclusively.
The migration of established musicians away from the studios (for which we had hoped) just doesn't seem to be happening, and music consumers aren't willing to abandon their favourite bands. Unfortunately, this means that some sort of accommodation will have to be reached with the studios eventually, because their demise and hence the release of artists from their contracts seems most unlikely to occur. Ditto the abandoning of copyrights on countless thousands of works gathered over decades and treated as financial assets --- it just won't happen, yet people will still be wanting access to this material over the new medium.
I guess it's still a possibility that the traditional music industry will continue its present extreme myopia and in due course all CDs will be available unofficially over the net and the RIAA member institutions will die, but I doubt it. Their shareholders would force a re-org as soon as there is any real downturn in profits, should it ever happen --- but there's no sign of it happening yet of course, quite the opposite, so it seems that the "piracy-as-advertising" brigade is right.
In any event, MP3s aren't going away as they're now part of the music culture and also widely supported by hardware player manufacturers, so initially begrudging acceptance and then finally real exploitation of online distribution by the current detractors is bound to happen eventually, in my view. The result may not be a flat-rate scheme, but something new will arise!:-)
Individual boycotts are unlikely to have a discernible effect --- there just aren't enough disk buyers around who are aware of this issue.
However, there is an easy way of amplifying our insights and making the companies take note: use the extremely active investors' networks, and offer the view that investing in hard drive manufacturers is inadvisable given that their sales will be taking a huge downturn owing to the incorporation of copy protection on drives. Names names if you can: we know that Quantum supports the scheme, and at least 3 of the 4C companies make drives --- IBM, Matsushita and Toshiba.
In the UK, investors' information exchange sites like this one seem to have dozens of thousands of very active customers (we see their mailing lists spew out an incredible torrent of investors' comments every day). Advice offered here is likely to have a significant effect on share prices far beyond the number of people providing the advice, at least in the UK.
Does anyone have a list of equivalent sites in the US and the rest of Europe?
I can't figure out why the hard drive manufacturers are giving this scheme the time of day. If it works, it will dramatically reduce the amount of copying being done (perhaps 95% of all non-corporate copying I'd guess), and so it's absolutely inevitable that the number of drives bought will plummet. This is not to the advantage of disk manufacturers at all.
Given the profit motive, the drive manufacturing sector of the free market should be dismissing/ignoring these proposals altogether. What's happening here, what's pushing them to support it? They're definitely not addressing their customer requirements.
I've finally come around to the conclusion... that the user interface is the most important aspect of an application and should be designed first.
You could well be right, but since an operating system is not an application, your view doesn't apply to Athena.
Furthermore, whether or not the UI is the most important aspect of an application surely must depend on the purpose of the application, don't you think? If the application's main purpose is to control, manage or process things by itself with only occasional user control or none at all, then a pro-UI argument misses the point entirely.
And finally, UIs are not all GUIs, so (in the general case, not necessarily applicable here) a blinkered focus on the graphical regardless of requirements can also entirely miss the point. As has been pointed out many times in the past, graphical input specification typically lacks the power of linguistic specification by a huge margin. So, while I'd have to agree that when a user interface is applicable then it is usually important to keep UI issues in good focus, it is far from true that this always entails a focus on GUI issues. In fact, from a S/E point of view, I'd say that when a GUI is part of the product then the key focus should be on the interface layer between GUI and the core application. Without such a clean separation, graphic and core sides will always severely constrain each other during development of either, and the product will suffer in all areas.
Just how much any of this is relevant to Athena I can't really tell, but if they're really just a high-level abstraction layer as you suggest (and hence potentially very useful) then they should stop calling their product an operating system. And if it is not just an abstraction layer but really an operating system then my original statement still holds, I believe: a focus on GUI issues at this level is a mistake.
Reading their blurb, there seemed to be something missing, something unsatisfactory. Then I realized that I just didn't relate to Athena at all because they appear to be trying to solve a problem that doesn't exist, as far as I am concerned. I can think of many areas in which operating systems need improvement, but fancy GUIs is not one of them. My work is never constrained by inadequacy of the GUI interfaces I use, even when there is a graphic element to it --- a key benefit that stems directly from the fact that on Unix systems X11 is not actually part of the operating system per se but merely provides a sort of viewport.
OK, so there are a few non-GUI aspects to the Athena product, but the overall focus is so strongly tied to their GUI in virtually all areas that it raises the question of whether they are addressing a real requirement. Operating systems do a lot of things and managing graphics visuals and graphic-oriented input is only one of them, and a fairly peripheral task at that, arguably one that should be abstracted out rather than permeating the design.
Without clear separation of concepts you lose traceability of design requirements and hence of product quality --- this applies almost universally. In the fullness of time, the end result for Athena is going to be a fancy GUI system and a poor operating system, I'd venture.
The poster is making an inappropriate analogy when he/she suggests that checking whether a network service is available to the public through the front door on the Internet is equivalent to monitoring sexual activity on private property.
Unless your humping is intended to be on display on the high street, there is no analogy here at all. Presumably if the sex is with your SO then it's not meant to be public. It would usually be on private property, ie. behind a wall and/or locked doors, so that high-street shoppers don't think you're offering viewing of your bedroom antics as a service.
Don't forget that TCP/IP offers no other way for people on the net to determine what services you are making available to them: trying to open connections is the only way of finding out what network services are being offered. Protesting about port scans just shows a lack of understanding of the demands and constraints of TCP/IP. Without the ability to open connections to check on services offered, one would be more constrained than a blind shopper on the high street, never knowing which establishments are open and which are closed.
If you don't want your private resources to be visible to the public, get off the high street by placing your servers on private property, ie. wall them off behind a firewall out of reach of port scans.
The only way people have of knowing whether your servers offer particular network services is by trying a connection. TCP/IP offers no other way. When you're on the main high-street of the Internet (ie. directly connected), it must be expected, because there is no other way for people on the street to know what services you're offering.
In contrast, if your servers are not intended to be "on the main high street" and you don't want people to know what services they provide, then firewall them off --- this makes them private property, off-limits to the high-street wanderer.
The continuous rain of port scans on the Internet is irrelevant to any sysadmin that structures systems properly into public and private parts. Yes, testing for open ports is often performed during crack attempts, just like looking is often performed during burglary, but if you want to know what's around you then you cannot avoid doing either of these. The technology offers no other way.
If you don't want street wanderers looking at your establishment and walking in through any doors that you've left open, put it behind a wall, and silently drop all packets that fail your access policy. To complain about port scans is to misunderstand the limits of TCP/IP.
Yes, I'd have to agree with that, but no Netscape, no life for most Unix-based people. Sad but true, because there is no practical alternative to Netscape as our window on the online world, yet. I guess you must be using Winblows to get around that problem, but we're not sufficiently masochistic to do that. Better to drop any prospect of using Java instead, and that is exactly what hoards of Unix/Linux/BSD people have done.
It's a pity that Java gets blamed for something that isn't the language's fault, but that's life. If you want it to change, either get the existing Netscape Java developers replaced by people that admit that there's a problem and will take less than 5 years to fix it, or else find us an alternative browser that really works, not a toy.
Your statements about the Java language, VM, libraries and IDE are right on the mark, in my opinion.
However, you're forgetting about one other key aspect of Java usage, and that is its integration into web browsers. The web is the window on the online world these days, and you can't ignore it.
So here's the crunch: Java has never worked adequately with Netscape, full stop. For a few people, it just about works. For the vast majority, it has never stayed up for more than a few seconds when accessing Java-based sites. In our organization, for 4 years, every single version of Netscape has always crashed, immediately, on dozens of Linux distros, for many dozens of tech-aware people, despite numerous fixes advised by others on the net (many here on Slashdot) to no avail.
In a nutshell, Java is seen as crap because Netscape's Java support is crap. Nothing else matters. It's a blight on poor ol' Java, which as a language is quite reasonable, but doesn't stand a chance in hell of getting accepted by people who's every exposure to it is greeted with a crash over many years. The whole situation sucks bigtime.
I want to buy one, and the other geeks in my office want to buy one. While this straw poll falls somewhat short of a statistically valid population (:-), I think it means that there is a market for the Indrema.
So, if supporting the community is your goal, I guess I'd advise that you stock it.
Hehe, I liked the 432 -- I guess this dates us!. Nothing quite as revolutionary as that emerged until the transputer, and recently Crusoe. Apart from RISC and superscalability, the integrated CPU scene has been rather dead for years. I agree, everyone seems to be happy with minor variations on 20 year old architectures.
Efficient local CORBA calls would be useful, but they won't help here. In a CORBA-based system, the user can still define local non-CORBA objects, and so he will, so systems will continue to be unreliable through lack of hard boundaries between objects. And anyway, CORBA protection is soft. It's good in many respects, but it's not the solution to this general problem in software engineering.
Objects should not be able to touch the private parts of other objects, not even if they are of the same class, and that is a trivial thing to guarantee given fine-grain hardware assist from the MMU.
In a fully object-oriented system, the trap will happen at the very first transgression, not after you have already blown through a ton of safety nets. And if one's system libraries aren't yet fully OO (ie. the case today just about everywhere) it won't matter much, because it's virtually always the application code that blows up, not system libraries.
Reliability would soar, and so would ease of debugging because of the hard separation between objects. I just cannot understand why software developers haven't been calling for it.
For those that are considering the Nokia Communicator as a handheld computer for connected/mobile use (and I know of one friend that used the first model very successfully for that), the Nokia Phone Card may be a better proposition.
Being just a PCMCIA type II card which will plug into anything, including potentially Linux machines, this doesn't tie you to the phone manufacturer's idea of what a portable computer or PDA should look like. All we need now is a PCMCIA slot in a Palm.:-)
Others are less upbeat. For example, even optimists admit the development of space station software has been difficult.
And it will continue to be so, across the entire software industry, until software developers force the chip manufacturers to provide hard MMU encapsulation for fine-grain objects like they do for processes now.
Programs are unreliable to a very significant extent because their internal objects all live in the same address space and can merrily tramp all over anything they like under fault conditions. And fault conditions always arise in any non-trivial program, yet recovery is impossible in the general case because there is no internal protection against fault propagation.
Today's software developers are still using a 30-year old hardware model. Is it any surprise that software is still as flakey as ever?
Are you sure that that article was by Bertrand Russell, rather than Eugene Wigner? (I'd like to know. It didn't seem to have the clarity of expression typical of BR.)
In any event, the author of The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in the Natural Sciences doesn't seem to have gone to Philosophy of Science 101. He writes:
The argument could be of such abstract nature that it might not be possible to resolve the conflict, in favor of one or of the other theory, by an experiment. Such a situation would put a heavy strain on our faith in our theories and on our belief in the reality of the concepts which we form. It would give us a deep sense of frustration in our search for what I called "the ultimate truth."
Any half-decent introduction to Science would have told him that Science is not a search for "the ultimate truth" -- that dodo is in the realm of philosophy. Furthermore, scientists seek agreement between their models and the behaviour of reality only because that makes their theories useful as opposed to being merely mathematically interesting. The inability to distinguish between two theories is nothing to shed tears about, since scientists know that their models and reality herself are two different things entirely, so there might well be multiple equally effective theoretical representations. One can only approximate to how reality behaves with the models of Science, and they never pretend to represent The Truth. They'll always be subject to revision and replacement by tomorrow's improved versions, and you certainly couldn't throw away The Truth with such impunity if you had it in your hands.
The relationship between theory and reality is very carefully crafted coincidence, nothing more. And that's a very powerful observation, because it means that reality will continue to surprise us forever, so mankind's future is potentially unbounded.
In writing about the "unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics", the author was merely being mystical. It was a good read, but the sense of wonder doesn't really add anything useful to the discussion, even if he hadn't fallen into the trap of thinking of theory as (tentative) reality.
Slashdot Mirror
This is one of those statements that can be uttered on its own without any further commentary -- the idiocy speaks for itself. ... you have the rediculous idea that if I use the internet for nothing but sending a few emails back and forth ... I should be made to contribute toward the cost of the other guy down the street downloading porn and Dr. Dre
You wouldn't have been so quick to criticize the poster if you had thought about it a little, because when people pay their fixed ISP charge today they are doing exactly what you say is idiotic --- paying for resources in the aggregate, rather than on a per-use basis. It even applies to "free" ISPs, because there the cost is "paid" by aggregate viewing of advertising, whether individuals block it or not.
ISPs factor in every customer equally when arriving at their charges, not on the basis of actual use --- for one thing, the cost of fully detailed use accounting would be massive and prohibitive, and there are privacy concerns associated with full accounting anyway. No, much easier to charge by aggregate, and that is exactly what they do.
Except for the EULA of course, barring you from using any other but Microsoft software.
That depends on whether they sell the X-box or just loan it out under a license. If the latter then you could be right, but if the former then the hardware is yours and you can do what the heck you like with it.
Of course, the previous point will be highly debated by lawyers what with DVDs and DeCSS and the DMCA and all that, but everyone will ignore such restrictions utterly because any possible law in this area would be unenforceable. Somehow I don't think that taxpayers around the world would be too happy if their police forces start dedicating their resources to raiding a million console users.
Everything we've heard so far about the X-box seems to indicate that it's going to be an ordinary console with everything that that entails in terms of tight control over software, severe manufacturer-imposed constraints on products, and ridiculously high licensing costs.
:-)
I'm going to take a wild stab in the dark on the basis of Microsoft's acknowledged ability to create markets for its products, and suggest that in practice the X-box will become the exact opposite of a conventional console as described in the paragraph above. Instead, it will become an entirely open platform, in practice.
Why do I think that this may be so? For a number of reasons:-
First, the console market is already fairly highly subscribed if not totally saturated, so the X-box will have to be pretty special to make a large proportion of gamers reach into their pockets again. All the other popular consoles are closed platforms. A way of becoming "pretty special" is ready and waiting. [The still-to-be-launched Indrema is doing something similar, albeit with a certification hurdle imposed, but hopefully this will not be a substantive barrier.]
Second, it just so happens that virtually all the big players in the console arena either have or will be bringing out new mega-powerful systems within the same time frame, so high technology alone may not be enough, especially since Microsoft is a latecomer to this market. A novel angle may be required to make headway.
Third, Microsoft knows full well that the popularity of Windows stems very largely from the massive buzz that was created by several years worth of unimpeded free-for-all copying of both the O/S and its applications. The official face of Microsoft may protest about "piracy", but unofficially they must know that in reality unconstrained access is an extremely powerful popularizing mechanism, vastly cheaper yet more effective than advertising.
These three things all point in the same direction: Microsoft will either make the platform fully open, or it will create an easy and inexpensive method for all and sundry to write and install games on the X-box, or it will turn a very blind eye to the cracking systems which will appear 2 microseconds after the machine hits the streets. Nothing is gained by restricting what can run on a platform (all the talk of controlling for "quality" is unadulterated rubbish --- people like to decide for themselves, thank you very much), but everything is gained by having thousands of products run on a console rather than merely hundreds.
We'll see.
Actually, I wasn't referring to the lifts/elevators dropping down the shaft when an EMP fries their electronics, but to the possibility of entombment of people riding in them at the time.
Beyond that, there are probably thousands of other ways in which people would die as a result of such a blast, from failed traffic lights on busy roads and control signals on trains, to machinery or even weapons going haywire. The really nasty deaths would follow later on though if the blast is not just a local one, as society's threads start to unravel after the failing of the primary services which these days are entirely dependent on electronics.
Hey, thanks, that's a brilliant piece!!
Damn, I didn't realize that the BT universe ever generated anything resembling insight. Usually, the 999:1 manager:tech ratio just generates ticks in boxes and is the key reason why the ET probes return "no intelligent life here" and so first contact gets deferred yet again.
Cheers, I'll have to get in touch with that guy.
I was just compiling up the kernel when I got a sig 11. Can you help me?
:-)
A Happy New Year to all signals everywhere!
Well, I wouldn't have put it quite like that myself as you make women sound like some sort of alien species. But yes, if you become more confident in yourself then you become more attractive to women.
That's nothing to do with female submissiveness though. It simply makes sense on a human front. You usually hook up with people that have something to offer, and rarely with those that are merely a burden.
On the whole though, a very good post!!!
... "that can put out such a powerful burst of radio-frequency energy it will destroy or disable electrical and electronic systems for miles around without killing anyone."
As mankind becomes more and more dependent on electronics and begins to integrate with it, statements like the above will become ever more meaningless. In fact, they're meaningless right now, even without thinking about the plight of people with pacemakers: one of those pulses would probably kill many people simply because they happen to be in planes or lifts/elevators at the time.
Sigh. But then, I guess loss of life isn't a severe worry to weapons manufacturers.
I think people are missing something fairly fundamental when discussing the failure of FreeNet to gain buzz and hence mindshare. Java the concept is great. Java the language is great. Java the fully working and transparent VM behind the scenes of every real Winblows/Linux/BSD/BeOS/Solaris is a figment of Java developers' imaginations.
If only it were not so, but it is. In many cases the reason for failure of the concept is trivial --- merely bad CLASSPATH or fonts or Netscape crapness --- but that's enough to make it a failure for the masses. Despite the protestations of Java fans that it's a success right now, the key point is being missed: it's only a success for you, and not transparent for non-fans. Reality sucks, sorry. [You can remedy such failures so easily with VM defaults but you don't. Why? --- A question to the Java community.]
Does this mean that FreeNet has no future? No, in my view, because the issues that it addresses are likely to become ever more important over time, give the lag between realtime and the onset of coercion from the corrupt corporate, legal, and political spheres. It has a future, because in due course the confluence of several factors will give it the boost it needs: it will gain the apps and GUIs it needs to appeal to the masses, and it will be reimplemented in native code so that it actually runs everywhere for the ordinary non-tech man/woman with a computer, not just for you.
FreeNet developers don't despair. You're laying the groundwork, not the final edifice. Once you have something approaching a spec that won't change too much, we'll reimplement in slotted C (OK, probably via a C++ phase) and FreeNet will become universal. Meanwhile, keep doing your good work and ignore the detractors.
Chris, I don't think that we can really just ignore the traditional channels and support the independent artists like yourself exclusively.
:-)
The migration of established musicians away from the studios (for which we had hoped) just doesn't seem to be happening, and music consumers aren't willing to abandon their favourite bands. Unfortunately, this means that some sort of accommodation will have to be reached with the studios eventually, because their demise and hence the release of artists from their contracts seems most unlikely to occur. Ditto the abandoning of copyrights on countless thousands of works gathered over decades and treated as financial assets --- it just won't happen, yet people will still be wanting access to this material over the new medium.
I guess it's still a possibility that the traditional music industry will continue its present extreme myopia and in due course all CDs will be available unofficially over the net and the RIAA member institutions will die, but I doubt it. Their shareholders would force a re-org as soon as there is any real downturn in profits, should it ever happen --- but there's no sign of it happening yet of course, quite the opposite, so it seems that the "piracy-as-advertising" brigade is right.
In any event, MP3s aren't going away as they're now part of the music culture and also widely supported by hardware player manufacturers, so initially begrudging acceptance and then finally real exploitation of online distribution by the current detractors is bound to happen eventually, in my view. The result may not be a flat-rate scheme, but something new will arise!
Individual boycotts are unlikely to have a discernible effect --- there just aren't enough disk buyers around who are aware of this issue.
However, there is an easy way of amplifying our insights and making the companies take note: use the extremely active investors' networks, and offer the view that investing in hard drive manufacturers is inadvisable given that their sales will be taking a huge downturn owing to the incorporation of copy protection on drives. Names names if you can: we know that Quantum supports the scheme, and at least 3 of the 4C companies make drives --- IBM, Matsushita and Toshiba.
In the UK, investors' information exchange sites like this one seem to have dozens of thousands of very active customers (we see their mailing lists spew out an incredible torrent of investors' comments every day). Advice offered here is likely to have a significant effect on share prices far beyond the number of people providing the advice, at least in the UK.
Does anyone have a list of equivalent sites in the US and the rest of Europe?
I can't figure out why the hard drive manufacturers are giving this scheme the time of day. If it works, it will dramatically reduce the amount of copying being done (perhaps 95% of all non-corporate copying I'd guess), and so it's absolutely inevitable that the number of drives bought will plummet. This is not to the advantage of disk manufacturers at all.
Given the profit motive, the drive manufacturing sector of the free market should be dismissing/ignoring these proposals altogether. What's happening here, what's pushing them to support it? They're definitely not addressing their customer requirements.
I've finally come around to the conclusion ... that the user interface is the most important aspect of an application and should be designed first.
You could well be right, but since an operating system is not an application, your view doesn't apply to Athena.
Furthermore, whether or not the UI is the most important aspect of an application surely must depend on the purpose of the application, don't you think? If the application's main purpose is to control, manage or process things by itself with only occasional user control or none at all, then a pro-UI argument misses the point entirely.
And finally, UIs are not all GUIs, so (in the general case, not necessarily applicable here) a blinkered focus on the graphical regardless of requirements can also entirely miss the point. As has been pointed out many times in the past, graphical input specification typically lacks the power of linguistic specification by a huge margin. So, while I'd have to agree that when a user interface is applicable then it is usually important to keep UI issues in good focus, it is far from true that this always entails a focus on GUI issues. In fact, from a S/E point of view, I'd say that when a GUI is part of the product then the key focus should be on the interface layer between GUI and the core application. Without such a clean separation, graphic and core sides will always severely constrain each other during development of either, and the product will suffer in all areas.
Just how much any of this is relevant to Athena I can't really tell, but if they're really just a high-level abstraction layer as you suggest (and hence potentially very useful) then they should stop calling their product an operating system. And if it is not just an abstraction layer but really an operating system then my original statement still holds, I believe: a focus on GUI issues at this level is a mistake.
Reading their blurb, there seemed to be something missing, something unsatisfactory. Then I realized that I just didn't relate to Athena at all because they appear to be trying to solve a problem that doesn't exist, as far as I am concerned. I can think of many areas in which operating systems need improvement, but fancy GUIs is not one of them. My work is never constrained by inadequacy of the GUI interfaces I use, even when there is a graphic element to it --- a key benefit that stems directly from the fact that on Unix systems X11 is not actually part of the operating system per se but merely provides a sort of viewport.
OK, so there are a few non-GUI aspects to the Athena product, but the overall focus is so strongly tied to their GUI in virtually all areas that it raises the question of whether they are addressing a real requirement. Operating systems do a lot of things and managing graphics visuals and graphic-oriented input is only one of them, and a fairly peripheral task at that, arguably one that should be abstracted out rather than permeating the design.
Without clear separation of concepts you lose traceability of design requirements and hence of product quality --- this applies almost universally. In the fullness of time, the end result for Athena is going to be a fancy GUI system and a poor operating system, I'd venture.
The poster is making an inappropriate analogy when he/she suggests that checking whether a network service is available to the public through the front door on the Internet is equivalent to monitoring sexual activity on private property.
Unless your humping is intended to be on display on the high street, there is no analogy here at all. Presumably if the sex is with your SO then it's not meant to be public. It would usually be on private property, ie. behind a wall and/or locked doors, so that high-street shoppers don't think you're offering viewing of your bedroom antics as a service.
Don't forget that TCP/IP offers no other way for people on the net to determine what services you are making available to them: trying to open connections is the only way of finding out what network services are being offered. Protesting about port scans just shows a lack of understanding of the demands and constraints of TCP/IP. Without the ability to open connections to check on services offered, one would be more constrained than a blind shopper on the high street, never knowing which establishments are open and which are closed.
If you don't want your private resources to be visible to the public, get off the high street by placing your servers on private property, ie. wall them off behind a firewall out of reach of port scans.
Well said.
The only way people have of knowing whether your servers offer particular network services is by trying a connection. TCP/IP offers no other way. When you're on the main high-street of the Internet (ie. directly connected), it must be expected, because there is no other way for people on the street to know what services you're offering.
In contrast, if your servers are not intended to be "on the main high street" and you don't want people to know what services they provide, then firewall them off --- this makes them private property, off-limits to the high-street wanderer.
The continuous rain of port scans on the Internet is irrelevant to any sysadmin that structures systems properly into public and private parts. Yes, testing for open ports is often performed during crack attempts, just like looking is often performed during burglary, but if you want to know what's around you then you cannot avoid doing either of these. The technology offers no other way.
If you don't want street wanderers looking at your establishment and walking in through any doors that you've left open, put it behind a wall, and silently drop all packets that fail your access policy. To complain about port scans is to misunderstand the limits of TCP/IP.
No crashes, no speed issues, no Netscape VM's.
Yes, I'd have to agree with that, but no Netscape, no life for most Unix-based people. Sad but true, because there is no practical alternative to Netscape as our window on the online world, yet. I guess you must be using Winblows to get around that problem, but we're not sufficiently masochistic to do that. Better to drop any prospect of using Java instead, and that is exactly what hoards of Unix/Linux/BSD people have done.
It's a pity that Java gets blamed for something that isn't the language's fault, but that's life. If you want it to change, either get the existing Netscape Java developers replaced by people that admit that there's a problem and will take less than 5 years to fix it, or else find us an alternative browser that really works, not a toy.
Your statements about the Java language, VM, libraries and IDE are right on the mark, in my opinion.
However, you're forgetting about one other key aspect of Java usage, and that is its integration into web browsers. The web is the window on the online world these days, and you can't ignore it.
So here's the crunch: Java has never worked adequately with Netscape, full stop. For a few people, it just about works. For the vast majority, it has never stayed up for more than a few seconds when accessing Java-based sites. In our organization, for 4 years, every single version of Netscape has always crashed, immediately, on dozens of Linux distros, for many dozens of tech-aware people, despite numerous fixes advised by others on the net (many here on Slashdot) to no avail.
In a nutshell, Java is seen as crap because Netscape's Java support is crap. Nothing else matters. It's a blight on poor ol' Java, which as a language is quite reasonable, but doesn't stand a chance in hell of getting accepted by people who's every exposure to it is greeted with a crash over many years. The whole situation sucks bigtime.
Maybe it's being recalled because it works correctly instead of faithfully reproducing the Intel bug. :-)
I want to buy one, and the other geeks in my office want to buy one. While this straw poll falls somewhat short of a statistically valid population (:-), I think it means that there is a market for the Indrema.
So, if supporting the community is your goal, I guess I'd advise that you stock it.
Hehe, I liked the 432 -- I guess this dates us!. Nothing quite as revolutionary as that emerged until the transputer, and recently Crusoe. Apart from RISC and superscalability, the integrated CPU scene has been rather dead for years. I agree, everyone seems to be happy with minor variations on 20 year old architectures.
Efficient local CORBA calls would be useful, but they won't help here. In a CORBA-based system, the user can still define local non-CORBA objects, and so he will, so systems will continue to be unreliable through lack of hard boundaries between objects. And anyway, CORBA protection is soft. It's good in many respects, but it's not the solution to this general problem in software engineering.
I guess you didn't get the point I was making.
Objects should not be able to touch the private parts of other objects, not even if they are of the same class, and that is a trivial thing to guarantee given fine-grain hardware assist from the MMU.
In a fully object-oriented system, the trap will happen at the very first transgression, not after you have already blown through a ton of safety nets. And if one's system libraries aren't yet fully OO (ie. the case today just about everywhere) it won't matter much, because it's virtually always the application code that blows up, not system libraries.
Reliability would soar, and so would ease of debugging because of the hard separation between objects. I just cannot understand why software developers haven't been calling for it.
For those that are considering the Nokia Communicator as a handheld computer for connected/mobile use (and I know of one friend that used the first model very successfully for that), the Nokia Phone Card may be a better proposition.
:-)
Being just a PCMCIA type II card which will plug into anything, including potentially Linux machines, this doesn't tie you to the phone manufacturer's idea of what a portable computer or PDA should look like. All we need now is a PCMCIA slot in a Palm.
Others are less upbeat. For example, even optimists admit the development of space station software has been difficult.
And it will continue to be so, across the entire software industry, until software developers force the chip manufacturers to provide hard MMU encapsulation for fine-grain objects like they do for processes now.
Programs are unreliable to a very significant extent because their internal objects all live in the same address space and can merrily tramp all over anything they like under fault conditions. And fault conditions always arise in any non-trivial program, yet recovery is impossible in the general case because there is no internal protection against fault propagation.
Today's software developers are still using a 30-year old hardware model. Is it any surprise that software is still as flakey as ever?
Are you sure that that article was by Bertrand Russell, rather than Eugene Wigner? (I'd like to know. It didn't seem to have the clarity of expression typical of BR.)
In any event, the author of The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in the Natural Sciences doesn't seem to have gone to Philosophy of Science 101. He writes:
The argument could be of such abstract nature that it might not be possible to resolve the conflict, in favor of one or of the other theory, by an experiment. Such a situation would put a heavy strain on our faith in our theories and on our belief in the reality of the concepts which we form. It would give us a deep sense of frustration in our search for what I called "the ultimate truth."
Any half-decent introduction to Science would have told him that Science is not a search for "the ultimate truth" -- that dodo is in the realm of philosophy. Furthermore, scientists seek agreement between their models and the behaviour of reality only because that makes their theories useful as opposed to being merely mathematically interesting. The inability to distinguish between two theories is nothing to shed tears about, since scientists know that their models and reality herself are two different things entirely, so there might well be multiple equally effective theoretical representations. One can only approximate to how reality behaves with the models of Science, and they never pretend to represent The Truth. They'll always be subject to revision and replacement by tomorrow's improved versions, and you certainly couldn't throw away The Truth with such impunity if you had it in your hands.
The relationship between theory and reality is very carefully crafted coincidence, nothing more. And that's a very powerful observation, because it means that reality will continue to surprise us forever, so mankind's future is potentially unbounded.
In writing about the "unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics", the author was merely being mystical. It was a good read, but the sense of wonder doesn't really add anything useful to the discussion, even if he hadn't fallen into the trap of thinking of theory as (tentative) reality.