Perhaps you should read Kant's "Critique of Judgment" for a some insight into those value judgments that you circularly refute yet engage in yourself......
That would indeed be a possible counter argument, if it weren't for the fact that I did not refute the reviewer's value judgements about the film. What I said was that his judgements were not of universal relevance. Undoubtedly his judgements are completely valid in so far as he applies them to himself.
The question here is not the validity of the value judgements, but of the scope of their validity.
As for Kant, he was the ultimate universalist, a position which he somehow managed to defend while accepting the impossibility of direct knowledge of hard reality because our only access to it is empirical. Good observation, but questionable and dangerous deduction, in view of where it led his successors through Fichte. If he were alive today my reply to him would be "Fine, just as long as you don't impose your inferred universals on those who beg to differ." Ultimately it leads to absolutism, and coercion at the point of a gun.
I'm not asking for miracles. Subjective opinion and point-by-point analysis are not only valid, they're often very useful to the movie watcher. What's totally worthless is an overall recommendation to not go and see it yourself, even if it's in the general subject area that you'd normally enjoy.
On the other hand, maybe one should examine the premise behind your question entirely. Perhaps we've been deluded into thinking that reviews do actually serve a useful purpose, on balance. Maybe the benefit is not so clearcut, maybe analysis without assessment should be the goal. It's academic though, because today's reviewers would not tolerate the suggestion that their personal emotional response is of no interest to anyone else.
I think I'll vote for diversity and support the existence of even the most extreme of reviews as general input. It's worth noting though that the only reason why the film industry does frequently produce masterpieces despite them not being box-office hits is because critics are generally ignored by everyone with a mind of their own. If it weren't so, the studios simply couldn't afford to produce the films, since nobody would go and see them after the first negative review.
I can sum the movie up in one sentence: It's worse than both Mission to Mars and Waterworld.
I can sum the review up in one sentence: it suffers from the usual problem with critics, subjective myopia. Belief in the universality of values seems to be mandatatory for film reviewers, presumably because otherwise it would admit the possibility that their critical judgements are irrelevant to anyone except themselves. Sigh.
The fact of the matter is, watching a movie is a different experience for different people, and no single value judgement applies. One man's charisma is another man's overacting, and one man's scientific accuracy is another man's lack of imagination.
And it gets even worse when the critic somehow manages to synthesize a number of failings into an overall recommendation to avoid the show at all costs. Among other things, that's scientifically inaccurate, because a movie is definitely more than the sum of its parts.
I liked Mission to Mars, Mars Attacks! and Waterworld, all for different reasons (haven't seen B.E. yet) which may or may not match the experience of others. The perfect movie doesn't exist [well, apart from possibly The Matrix:-)], but it's a rare film that doesn't have some good qualities and some very committed fans.
And hey, some people don't like The Matrix. Would we listen to them if their profession happened to be film critic?
You only see a difference because in each case you're reading the ruling from the point of view of the party bringing the suit. That doesn't reflect how things work at all.
Judges almost never rule anti-establishment (it's career-limiting), and in this regard the ruling was identical to that in the Napster affair in which big business won out over the small guy. The item in dispute is irrelevant --- lawyers can produce an argument supporting either view with equal ease. All that matters is which side big business is on.
Here eBay is big business, so the deadhead was told to take a flying jump. Are you surprised?
I bet that the ruling would have been very different if the case had been brought forward by the RIAA, MPAA or one of the mega studios directly.
Here eBay is the establishment, versus a deadhead that is seen as trying to limit the profits of business. It doesn't take much cynicism to know in advance who would be coming out on top.
Judges almost never rule against the establishment. There are very few mavericks who don't care how their peers on the bar feel. It would be career-limiting.
However, there could be a useful lesson to learn from this. If grey areas ripe for suits could be anticipated and suits filed in advance by a faction seen as anti-establishment, then the failure of the action would set a precedent which would then deny success to parties like the RIAA on the same topic. Precedents are very powerful weapons in law.
While the dialogue and acting were dreadful and elementary science was so obviously ignored that it was painful to watch, the movie did have some nice touches.
In particular, the Martian landscapes were done very prettily and not horribly wrong, and the effects overall were quite reasonable apart from a few embarrassing moments during the sand tornado and during alleged "weightlessness".
If you survived cringing throughout the dreadful dialogues and didn't care much about storylines or basic physics then it was watchable. Almost.:-)
I hear that a lot of the problems were due to a change of director or producer or something part-way through. The politics probably pissed off all the actors and other staff, and the end result was amateurish without the benefits of B-movie chuckle value.
Trial by money as bad as patent idiocy
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Patent Warfare
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· Score: 5
Everybody is irritated at the idiocy of patent claims in the US, but the article touched on another issue as well, one that is likely to be the deciding factor in this particular patent claim. The article states, rather obviously, that Intel has deeper pockets with which to fight the action.
Money is an issue that distorts justice far more than the recent patent nonsense, and I bet that nobody sees any light at the end of that tunnel. The legal profession has very effectively perverted the course of justice in that regard, and the perversion is so endemic that we consider it quite normal and the status quo.
These two things are actually related. After all, the people that chase down patents are not productive contributors to society's building of a better world. They create nothing, but merely leech off the creativity of others. They are the fine upstanding members of the legal profession, for whom logic and commonsense can be freely disregarded when sophistry and technicalities are judged to yield a better paycheck.
To be fair, you should have labelled the FBI lines "lawyer" or "barrister". The FBI may be intrusive and power-mad and have an over-inflated opinion of their own value to society, but at least they're not the totally amoral, logic distorting scum of the earth that roam the courtroom.
The FBI are just misguided protectors of an obsolescent social order with their backs against the wall in a desperate and impossible fight to keep up with the times. They need to be kept at arms length, but ultimately some sympathy is due to them. They think they're fighting the good fight, and it just so happens that their fight is based on false premises. Sigh.
But that contrasts markedly with the lower officers of the bar, the only human social group that institutionalizes moral bankruptcy in an official medium built on professional sophistry while having the gall to call the result justice. No punishment is bad enough for them. Douglas Adams had the right idea with his Ark 'B'.
Why are the various scripting languages in such overwhelming favor?
For two reasons, and they're both true:
(i) A lot of web programmers simply don't have the background to use professional development standards, nor the attention span nor attention to detail required for successful non-trivial programming in C or C++. As a result, if they used these relatively low-level tools the result would be fairly horrendous. It's *much* easier to generate buggy code in inherently unsafe languages than in safe scripting ones. Pragmatically, it makes sense.
(ii) The web moves at a break-neck pace, and there just isn't the time to produce a well engineered product using C/C++ before the requirements have changed yet again. Scripting languages allow you to make ad hoc changes without blowing your whole foot off every time. Errors tend to be comparatively minor, easy to diagnose, and the language usually stays in control rather than bombing out altogether.
In a nutshell, scripting languages make a lot of sense in this application area. That said, they're definitely not the answer to everything.
This doesn't look like patenting the instruction set at all. That would be utterly anticompetitive, as it wouldn't allow competition by manufacturers wanting to make their own chips with compatible instructions sets. It wouldn't even allow simulators to be created by software tools companies, and arguably even compiler writers would be caught by it. I don't think they'd be so blinkered to attempt that.
No, this looks like merely a patent on particular aspects of the implementation of certain instructions. As long as the implementation details aren't generic catch-all ones that every competitor would have to implement identically, this seems relatively innocuous as patents go.
Uhhh....I work in The Alley as a C++ programmer. What's Pointer Arithmetic?
It's why C++ was invented, when it was found that the new generation of CSc grads were all wizards at HTML but couldn't align a struct on a power of two boundary.:-)
Personally, I know of no IT company anywhere working on Internet-related technologies that isn't massively overstretching its skilled workforce just trying to keep up with the explosion. Managers abound, but techies are working 90-hour weeks more often than they would wish.
What downturn? I can't believe that NY inhabits a different universe to the rest of the planet. Perhaps the author was just working for a dead company.
The fact that many companies are not making money is easy to believe, simply because business managers still don't actually understand the Internet, despite their 5-year "long term Internet expertise" (ha ha, the newbies). But techies sitting around twiddling their thumbs? That seems unlikely, unless the business model underlying the company was seriously flawed right from the start.
If you're twiddling your thumbs in NY and you're really competent technically, then come to Europe, and specifically the UK. We need you.
[And you wouldn't believe the rates that contract agencies are offering!]
Barclays' (UK) Internet banking works fine for me from Linux and Netscape 4.7 -- it doesn't even use anything dodgy like Java.
Cheers. I'll tell my friend to try again with the original unmodified browser before his Id hack. Perhaps Barclays did eventually take his comments into account.
Funnily enough, I think they could succeed in their proposed business, not because the category of products that they want to produce are particularly useful, but because the corporate machine requires employees to have them on their desktops. Yes, a large and lucrative market may exist for them, despite costing good money and despite lacking the freedom benefits of Free Software.
Note that these kinds of applications are not thought of very highly by tech individuals, otherwise they'd have been created by the community already. There has never been much of an itch to scratch for program developers in this area, but the PHBs probably think that they are essential, and no doubt are willing to pay for their belief.
If only people were more aware of the intrinsic relationship between art and effects on society as a whole, then we might be a littl slower to choose to make that buck at the expense of our common weal.
That was such a nicely written troll that it deserves a reply.:-)
Two points:
(i) With very few exceptions, anime is fiction, set in fictional worlds or universes, with fictional characters involved in fictional situations, and the characters are very commonly non-human or otherwise exceptional in some way. We sometimes identify with one or more of them to a limited degree within the context of the fiction ("identify" may be too strong a word, maybe "sympathize" or "empathize" are closer to the mark), but it almost never goes beyond that. Moreover, the identification is voluntary and personal. Nobody will identify a third party with a character in a cartoon, it just doesn't work that way, to the best of my knowledge. You are looking for demons where none exist.
(ii) Diversity is good. OK, that's just my moral standpoint and I don't have anything to back it up, except possibly the widely acknowledged benefits of genetic diversity. Be that as it may, if we accept your worries for the sake of argument, all you are doing is trying to impose your own particular set of values on others. There is no future in that. Universal morality always was a flawed concept in any case, but it seemed to prevail in the past simply because it drove alternative viewpoints underground and hence marginalized them. That's no longer possible: as a result of universal connectivity, alternative viewpoints blossom even out of sight of the majority and despite being ignored by the mass media. Diversity wins. You can still live in your own little world of fixed values, but I'm afraid that your wish to coerce others to those views no longer has much likelihood of success. There is no longer a single common weal. It has been replaced by an exploding constellation of different ones, each defining their own rights and wrongs.
[By the way, it was obviously a troll because anyone that can write as clearly as Anne Marie can also think clearly enough to analyse the situation for herself rather than just repeat mass propaganda and support a single-group viewpoint.]
The group's portrayal of DMCA is interesting. From their FAQ:
We think the DMCA, by criminalizing some kinds of study of important technologies, represents an "ignorance is bliss" approach to technological copyright enforcement, which will not work in the long run. We lobbied against certain aspects of the DMCA while it was before Congress, and we still consider it to be a seriously flawed law.
If so many well-reputed groups lobbied against the law without any effect whatsoever, it really brings home how the legislature is already in the pockets of the corporations today. It's not a worry for the future. It's already with us now.
In reality, the unauthorized installation of Linux or any other open-source operating system on the corporate network would be a non-issue in any half-sane company, for the simple reason that it's almost entirely only the more competent techies that mess around with these things at work so openly.
However brain-dead management may be, it does not fire its top techies in any tech-based business. The repercussions of doing so should be obvious. It's far better and cheaper to fire the managers that object.
Barclays has a really bad reputation for being willfully limited to Microsoft clients only, and of couruse they were running MS IIS servers. A colleague of mine spent months trying to get them to do something about it, but they were utterly unresponsive. Eventually he hacked the Id string in his Linux Netscape binary to make it pretend to be MS Internet Exploiter, and everything worked fine.
Lloyds TSB is client-neutral, it seems. Their Verisign certificate is registered to their Unix group, which might explain it. On the other hand, when I first looked they were running Stronghold/Apache on Unix but now their secure service appears to have changed to use Netscape:
But Java crashes all the Netscape browsers we've ever used under Linux here, regardless of Netscape version and regardless of RedHat release in use. (Yeah, we tried the fonts fix too, no change.)
So, what are you guys doing under Linux to make Java work for you in a web browser?
Maybe the huge potential turnoffs of costly developer box and controlled certification could be overcome by providing some added value with the developer unit.
Here's an idea for adding value in a form with which many a developer will identify: supply the developer box in a 1U or 2U 19" rack module!
Developers are suckers for rackmount equipment. I should know, my wallet's already half open.:-)
I think you made a good point, but it can be condensed into a much shorter one which I bet will concern many a potential games developer.
In a nutshell, you want to develop GPL'd games for this console, but you are worried that the terms of certification for the Indrema effectively prevent that. Yes, it seems that you are right, judging by the information on the Indrema site and the implications by omission in the interview. There is little doubt that the Indrema is neither intended to be nor can be a console for GPL'd games, nor for GPL'd anything else, for the reason you gave and also for a slightly different version of it in (i) below.
I want to buy and to develop for this machine because it has such great potential for being the premier open multimedia A/V platform, not just a gaming console. I would like to develop GPL'd products for it which make use of the hardware beyond typical gaming. I'd like to help to make it the lounge interface to the open, online multimedia world.
The trouble is, the above will never happen for three reasons:
(i) It won't happen because you appear to be right about the incompatibility of Indrema with the GPL, and here's a radically different slant on why that is. It is impossible to provide to the end user the GPL'd source code corresponding to a released product, because of the encryption step that denies the possibility of any direct correspondence between a given source and a given binary being established. In effect it cannot be proved that you have supplied the source code, and of course the end user cannot prove it independently nor make independent executable modifications either since the certification process is a closed black box.
(ii) It won't happen as long as certification is necessary, simply because I would guess that ad hoc developers (unlike corporate ones) aren't going to accept being limited by one company's particular view of the world. [This assumes that certification will involve vetting, which appears to be the case.]
(iii) It won't happen for GPL-conscious developers because the toolset is NOT open: one key part, the certification tool is entirely unavailable unless you buy a much more expensive version of the Indrema hardware, it seems. The cost will stop some, and the restrictions inherent in certification will stop others. How many will be left?
Don't get me wrong, I love this platform and I intend to help make it succeed like the poster of the parent article. However, it won't succeed unless somebody breaks the certification system, and Indrema the company isn't likely to support that. We'll see what develops, but I expect it'll be a slow and painful ebbing away of the prospects of the console if it remains restricted in this way, because such things will turn potentially excellent developers away from it. I specially worry about the demo groups, as it's the kiss of death to lose their interest and great energy. They'll just go to the X-box where the manufacturer certainly won't be going out of its way to control use of its hardware, based on past precedent.
The actual creation of nanotech can't be open sourced, since the requirement to create it can not be bought off the shelf. (Well, if you have a few million, you probably could buy it.)
You're way off the mark. You can buy a posh commercial SPM for 50K dollars, and you can build a poor-man's equivalent for 2-5K.
Nanotech is basically kitchen-table technology, and it's only got a "K" after its price at all because we're still in the research phase and so calibrated instrumentation is needed. That's the reason for the "high" prices, which are of course actually peanuts in commercial terms and easily affordable by Ferrari-owning hobbiests.:-)
You, me, and potatoes are full of nanomachines. Cost is not going to be a problem.
You're confusing "anonymous" with "unlisted"
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Anonymity
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· Score: 2
The word "anonymous" is being misused here to mean merely "not attributed" or "unlisted".
If a communication is truly anonymous then that "right" you claim, ie. to be able to look for you, within the bounds of the legal system is utterly worthless. Go waste your dollars if you want, but it won't do you any good because any modern cryptographic anonymizing system protects you with barriers far beyond the power of legislation to penetrate. Your "right" becomes just empty words, not dissimilar to an unenforceable law.
I sure hope nobody on this forum thinks that the "anonymous" as in Anonymous Coward is in any way really anonymous, otherwise they'll receive a rude awakening one day. It's actually just "unlisted", which means that it takes two turns of the crank to uncover the origin instead of just one.
Slashdot Mirror
Perhaps you should read Kant's "Critique of Judgment" for a some insight into those value judgments that you circularly refute yet engage in yourself......
That would indeed be a possible counter argument, if it weren't for the fact that I did not refute the reviewer's value judgements about the film. What I said was that his judgements were not of universal relevance. Undoubtedly his judgements are completely valid in so far as he applies them to himself.
The question here is not the validity of the value judgements, but of the scope of their validity.
As for Kant, he was the ultimate universalist, a position which he somehow managed to defend while accepting the impossibility of direct knowledge of hard reality because our only access to it is empirical. Good observation, but questionable and dangerous deduction, in view of where it led his successors through Fichte. If he were alive today my reply to him would be "Fine, just as long as you don't impose your inferred universals on those who beg to differ." Ultimately it leads to absolutism, and coercion at the point of a gun.
What is a reviewer supposed to say?
I'm not asking for miracles. Subjective opinion and point-by-point analysis are not only valid, they're often very useful to the movie watcher. What's totally worthless is an overall recommendation to not go and see it yourself, even if it's in the general subject area that you'd normally enjoy.
On the other hand, maybe one should examine the premise behind your question entirely. Perhaps we've been deluded into thinking that reviews do actually serve a useful purpose, on balance. Maybe the benefit is not so clearcut, maybe analysis without assessment should be the goal. It's academic though, because today's reviewers would not tolerate the suggestion that their personal emotional response is of no interest to anyone else.
I think I'll vote for diversity and support the existence of even the most extreme of reviews as general input. It's worth noting though that the only reason why the film industry does frequently produce masterpieces despite them not being box-office hits is because critics are generally ignored by everyone with a mind of their own. If it weren't so, the studios simply couldn't afford to produce the films, since nobody would go and see them after the first negative review.
For an action move, it was bad drama. For a dramatic movie, it was bad action.
But despite the simplifications of film critics, movie watchers don't necessarily pigeon-hole themselves into single-genre consumers.
I liked Waterworld because it was a combination of drama and action, and of other things as well. Just like The Matrix. Just like virtually all films.
Real life is more complex than our tools of analysis might have us imagine.
I can sum the movie up in one sentence: It's worse than both Mission to Mars and Waterworld.
:-)], but it's a rare film that doesn't have some good qualities and some very committed fans.
I can sum the review up in one sentence: it suffers from the usual problem with critics, subjective myopia. Belief in the universality of values seems to be mandatatory for film reviewers, presumably because otherwise it would admit the possibility that their critical judgements are irrelevant to anyone except themselves. Sigh.
The fact of the matter is, watching a movie is a different experience for different people, and no single value judgement applies. One man's charisma is another man's overacting, and one man's scientific accuracy is another man's lack of imagination.
And it gets even worse when the critic somehow manages to synthesize a number of failings into an overall recommendation to avoid the show at all costs. Among other things, that's scientifically inaccurate, because a movie is definitely more than the sum of its parts.
I liked Mission to Mars, Mars Attacks! and Waterworld, all for different reasons (haven't seen B.E. yet) which may or may not match the experience of others. The perfect movie doesn't exist [well, apart from possibly The Matrix
And hey, some people don't like The Matrix. Would we listen to them if their profession happened to be film critic?
You only see a difference because in each case you're reading the ruling from the point of view of the party bringing the suit. That doesn't reflect how things work at all.
Judges almost never rule anti-establishment (it's career-limiting), and in this regard the ruling was identical to that in the Napster affair in which big business won out over the small guy. The item in dispute is irrelevant --- lawyers can produce an argument supporting either view with equal ease. All that matters is which side big business is on.
Here eBay is big business, so the deadhead was told to take a flying jump. Are you surprised?
In both cases, the law acted identically.
I bet that the ruling would have been very different if the case had been brought forward by the RIAA, MPAA or one of the mega studios directly.
Here eBay is the establishment, versus a deadhead that is seen as trying to limit the profits of business. It doesn't take much cynicism to know in advance who would be coming out on top.
Judges almost never rule against the establishment. There are very few mavericks who don't care how their peers on the bar feel. It would be career-limiting.
However, there could be a useful lesson to learn from this. If grey areas ripe for suits could be anticipated and suits filed in advance by a faction seen as anti-establishment, then the failure of the action would set a precedent which would then deny success to parties like the RIAA on the same topic. Precedents are very powerful weapons in law.
While the dialogue and acting were dreadful and elementary science was so obviously ignored that it was painful to watch, the movie did have some nice touches.
:-)
In particular, the Martian landscapes were done very prettily and not horribly wrong, and the effects overall were quite reasonable apart from a few embarrassing moments during the sand tornado and during alleged "weightlessness".
If you survived cringing throughout the dreadful dialogues and didn't care much about storylines or basic physics then it was watchable. Almost.
I hear that a lot of the problems were due to a change of director or producer or something part-way through. The politics probably pissed off all the actors and other staff, and the end result was amateurish without the benefits of B-movie chuckle value.
Everybody is irritated at the idiocy of patent claims in the US, but the article touched on another issue as well, one that is likely to be the deciding factor in this particular patent claim. The article states, rather obviously, that Intel has deeper pockets with which to fight the action.
Money is an issue that distorts justice far more than the recent patent nonsense, and I bet that nobody sees any light at the end of that tunnel. The legal profession has very effectively perverted the course of justice in that regard, and the perversion is so endemic that we consider it quite normal and the status quo.
These two things are actually related. After all, the people that chase down patents are not productive contributors to society's building of a better world. They create nothing, but merely leech off the creativity of others. They are the fine upstanding members of the legal profession, for whom logic and commonsense can be freely disregarded when sophistry and technicalities are judged to yield a better paycheck.
To be fair, you should have labelled the FBI lines "lawyer" or "barrister". The FBI may be intrusive and power-mad and have an over-inflated opinion of their own value to society, but at least they're not the totally amoral, logic distorting scum of the earth that roam the courtroom.
The FBI are just misguided protectors of an obsolescent social order with their backs against the wall in a desperate and impossible fight to keep up with the times. They need to be kept at arms length, but ultimately some sympathy is due to them. They think they're fighting the good fight, and it just so happens that their fight is based on false premises. Sigh.
But that contrasts markedly with the lower officers of the bar, the only human social group that institutionalizes moral bankruptcy in an official medium built on professional sophistry while having the gall to call the result justice. No punishment is bad enough for them. Douglas Adams had the right idea with his Ark 'B'.
Why are the various scripting languages in such overwhelming favor?
For two reasons, and they're both true:
(i) A lot of web programmers simply don't have the background to use professional development standards, nor the attention span nor attention to detail required for successful non-trivial programming in C or C++. As a result, if they used these relatively low-level tools the result would be fairly horrendous. It's *much* easier to generate buggy code in inherently unsafe languages than in safe scripting ones. Pragmatically, it makes sense.
(ii) The web moves at a break-neck pace, and there just isn't the time to produce a well engineered product using C/C++ before the requirements have changed yet again. Scripting languages allow you to make ad hoc changes without blowing your whole foot off every time. Errors tend to be comparatively minor, easy to diagnose, and the language usually stays in control rather than bombing out altogether.
In a nutshell, scripting languages make a lot of sense in this application area. That said, they're definitely not the answer to everything.
This doesn't look like patenting the instruction set at all. That would be utterly anticompetitive, as it wouldn't allow competition by manufacturers wanting to make their own chips with compatible instructions sets. It wouldn't even allow simulators to be created by software tools companies, and arguably even compiler writers would be caught by it. I don't think they'd be so blinkered to attempt that.
No, this looks like merely a patent on particular aspects of the implementation of certain instructions. As long as the implementation details aren't generic catch-all ones that every competitor would have to implement identically, this seems relatively innocuous as patents go.
Uhhh....I work in The Alley as a C++ programmer. What's Pointer Arithmetic?
:-)
It's why C++ was invented, when it was found that the new generation of CSc grads were all wizards at HTML but couldn't align a struct on a power of two boundary.
Personally, I know of no IT company anywhere working on Internet-related technologies that isn't massively overstretching its skilled workforce just trying to keep up with the explosion. Managers abound, but techies are working 90-hour weeks more often than they would wish.
What downturn? I can't believe that NY inhabits a different universe to the rest of the planet. Perhaps the author was just working for a dead company.
The fact that many companies are not making money is easy to believe, simply because business managers still don't actually understand the Internet, despite their 5-year "long term Internet expertise" (ha ha, the newbies). But techies sitting around twiddling their thumbs? That seems unlikely, unless the business model underlying the company was seriously flawed right from the start.
If you're twiddling your thumbs in NY and you're really competent technically, then come to Europe, and specifically the UK. We need you.
[And you wouldn't believe the rates that contract agencies are offering!]
Barclays' (UK) Internet banking works fine for me from Linux and Netscape 4.7 -- it doesn't even use anything dodgy like Java.
Cheers. I'll tell my friend to try again with the original unmodified browser before his Id hack. Perhaps Barclays did eventually take his comments into account.
Funnily enough, I think they could succeed in their proposed business, not because the category of products that they want to produce are particularly useful, but because the corporate machine requires employees to have them on their desktops. Yes, a large and lucrative market may exist for them, despite costing good money and despite lacking the freedom benefits of Free Software.
Note that these kinds of applications are not thought of very highly by tech individuals, otherwise they'd have been created by the community already. There has never been much of an itch to scratch for program developers in this area, but the PHBs probably think that they are essential, and no doubt are willing to pay for their belief.
If only people were more aware of the intrinsic relationship between art and effects on society as a whole, then we might be a littl slower to choose to make that buck at the expense of our common weal.
:-)
That was such a nicely written troll that it deserves a reply.
Two points:
(i) With very few exceptions, anime is fiction, set in fictional worlds or universes, with fictional characters involved in fictional situations, and the characters are very commonly non-human or otherwise exceptional in some way. We sometimes identify with one or more of them to a limited degree within the context of the fiction ("identify" may be too strong a word, maybe "sympathize" or "empathize" are closer to the mark), but it almost never goes beyond that. Moreover, the identification is voluntary and personal. Nobody will identify a third party with a character in a cartoon, it just doesn't work that way, to the best of my knowledge. You are looking for demons where none exist.
(ii) Diversity is good. OK, that's just my moral standpoint and I don't have anything to back it up, except possibly the widely acknowledged benefits of genetic diversity. Be that as it may, if we accept your worries for the sake of argument, all you are doing is trying to impose your own particular set of values on others. There is no future in that. Universal morality always was a flawed concept in any case, but it seemed to prevail in the past simply because it drove alternative viewpoints underground and hence marginalized them. That's no longer possible: as a result of universal connectivity, alternative viewpoints blossom even out of sight of the majority and despite being ignored by the mass media. Diversity wins. You can still live in your own little world of fixed values, but I'm afraid that your wish to coerce others to those views no longer has much likelihood of success. There is no longer a single common weal. It has been replaced by an exploding constellation of different ones, each defining their own rights and wrongs.
[By the way, it was obviously a troll because anyone that can write as clearly as Anne Marie can also think clearly enough to analyse the situation for herself rather than just repeat mass propaganda and support a single-group viewpoint.]
The group's portrayal of DMCA is interesting. From their FAQ:
We think the DMCA, by criminalizing some kinds of study of important technologies, represents an "ignorance is bliss" approach to technological copyright enforcement, which will not work in the long run. We lobbied against certain aspects of the DMCA while it was before Congress, and we still consider it to be a seriously flawed law.
If so many well-reputed groups lobbied against the law without any effect whatsoever, it really brings home how the legislature is already in the pockets of the corporations today. It's not a worry for the future. It's already with us now.
In reality, the unauthorized installation of Linux or any other open-source operating system on the corporate network would be a non-issue in any half-sane company, for the simple reason that it's almost entirely only the more competent techies that mess around with these things at work so openly.
However brain-dead management may be, it does not fire its top techies in any tech-based business. The repercussions of doing so should be obvious. It's far better and cheaper to fire the managers that object.
Hey, there's nothing wrong with that, the feeling is mutual.
... :-)
After all, we fire anyone that brings Microsoft onto our network
Well, not really, becauses we'd lose all the fun of the instant bluescreens from the regular background radiation of death packets.
Barclays has a really bad reputation for being willfully limited to Microsoft clients only, and of couruse they were running MS IIS servers. A colleague of mine spent months trying to get them to do something about it, but they were utterly unresponsive. Eventually he hacked the Id string in his Linux Netscape binary to make it pretend to be MS Internet Exploiter, and everything worked fine.
Lloyds TSB is client-neutral, it seems. Their Verisign certificate is registered to their Unix group, which might explain it. On the other hand, when I first looked they were running Stronghold/Apache on Unix but now their secure service appears to have changed to use Netscape:
HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Server: Netscape-Enterprise/3.6 SP3
Date: Sat, 21 Oct 2000 20:59:47 GMT
Content-type: text/html
Last-modified: Tue, 05 Sep 2000 09:24:57 GMT
Is that still a Unix version of Netscape server, or they gone over to the dark side and now run NT like on their port 80 service?
But Java crashes all the Netscape browsers we've ever used under Linux here, regardless of Netscape version and regardless of RedHat release in use. (Yeah, we tried the fonts fix too, no change.)
So, what are you guys doing under Linux to make Java work for you in a web browser?
Maybe the huge potential turnoffs of costly developer box and controlled certification could be overcome by providing some added value with the developer unit.
:-)
Here's an idea for adding value in a form with which many a developer will identify: supply the developer box in a 1U or 2U 19" rack module!
Developers are suckers for rackmount equipment. I should know, my wallet's already half open.
I think you made a good point, but it can be condensed into a much shorter one which I bet will concern many a potential games developer.
In a nutshell, you want to develop GPL'd games for this console, but you are worried that the terms of certification for the Indrema effectively prevent that. Yes, it seems that you are right, judging by the information on the Indrema site and the implications by omission in the interview. There is little doubt that the Indrema is neither intended to be nor can be a console for GPL'd games, nor for GPL'd anything else, for the reason you gave and also for a slightly different version of it in (i) below.
I want to buy and to develop for this machine because it has such great potential for being the premier open multimedia A/V platform, not just a gaming console. I would like to develop GPL'd products for it which make use of the hardware beyond typical gaming. I'd like to help to make it the lounge interface to the open, online multimedia world.
The trouble is, the above will never happen for three reasons:
(i) It won't happen because you appear to be right about the incompatibility of Indrema with the GPL, and here's a radically different slant on why that is. It is impossible to provide to the end user the GPL'd source code corresponding to a released product, because of the encryption step that denies the possibility of any direct correspondence between a given source and a given binary being established. In effect it cannot be proved that you have supplied the source code, and of course the end user cannot prove it independently nor make independent executable modifications either since the certification process is a closed black box.
(ii) It won't happen as long as certification is necessary, simply because I would guess that ad hoc developers (unlike corporate ones) aren't going to accept being limited by one company's particular view of the world. [This assumes that certification will involve vetting, which appears to be the case.]
(iii) It won't happen for GPL-conscious developers because the toolset is NOT open: one key part, the certification tool is entirely unavailable unless you buy a much more expensive version of the Indrema hardware, it seems. The cost will stop some, and the restrictions inherent in certification will stop others. How many will be left?
Don't get me wrong, I love this platform and I intend to help make it succeed like the poster of the parent article. However, it won't succeed unless somebody breaks the certification system, and Indrema the company isn't likely to support that. We'll see what develops, but I expect it'll be a slow and painful ebbing away of the prospects of the console if it remains restricted in this way, because such things will turn potentially excellent developers away from it. I specially worry about the demo groups, as it's the kiss of death to lose their interest and great energy. They'll just go to the X-box where the manufacturer certainly won't be going out of its way to control use of its hardware, based on past precedent.
Opportunity lost? It's distinctly possible.
The actual creation of nanotech can't be open sourced, since the requirement to create it can not be bought off the shelf. (Well, if you have a few million, you probably could buy it.)
:-)
You're way off the mark. You can buy a posh commercial SPM for 50K dollars, and you can build a poor-man's equivalent for 2-5K.
Nanotech is basically kitchen-table technology, and it's only got a "K" after its price at all because we're still in the research phase and so calibrated instrumentation is needed. That's the reason for the "high" prices, which are of course actually peanuts in commercial terms and easily affordable by Ferrari-owning hobbiests.
You, me, and potatoes are full of nanomachines. Cost is not going to be a problem.
The word "anonymous" is being misused here to mean merely "not attributed" or "unlisted".
If a communication is truly anonymous then that "right" you claim, ie. to be able to look for you, within the bounds of the legal system is utterly worthless. Go waste your dollars if you want, but it won't do you any good because any modern cryptographic anonymizing system protects you with barriers far beyond the power of legislation to penetrate. Your "right" becomes just empty words, not dissimilar to an unenforceable law.
I sure hope nobody on this forum thinks that the "anonymous" as in Anonymous Coward is in any way really anonymous, otherwise they'll receive a rude awakening one day. It's actually just "unlisted", which means that it takes two turns of the crank to uncover the origin instead of just one.