I would buy CodeWarrier for the Palm Pilot if it ran under Linux, but apparently the only version that is targetted at the PDA runs under Windows. A pity.
I can't think why it would be more difficult to port a cross-development system to Linux than a native development system. Any ideas?
Separate the rhetoric from the substance and all you find is the usual legal travesty: the global controls will limit what the ordinary man can do, not the outlaw who can and does ignore the laws with impunity.
The only "undesirable element" that will get curbed by this is the freedom of the people. But then, it has always been the goal of those in power to put a firm cap on that. No change.
It is the lack of jurisdiction of national governments and legislatures on the Internet that has resulted in this single most free environment on the planet.
Not surprisingly, their lack of direct control over it has got them scared shitless --- just imagine, too much of this and the little people might get the idea that their "leaders" perform no useful function in the offline world either.
This is a big issue and other posters have adequately covered its most common angles I think, but there are other contributing factors as well.
One of the reasons why the US is so hung up over these issues is that (in a very chicken-and-egg sort of way) it does not allow naturism or nudism on public ground, no matter how remote and inaccessible the place.
This has the unfortunate effect of reinforcing the view that nudity *AND EVERYTHING RELATED TO IT* is bad. In contrast, in countries where naturism is accepted, it rapidly becomes obvious to all (including those that wouldn't be seen dead joining in) that public nudity is no big deal at all, and this leads to a general relaxation in all other areas where nudity plays a part.
By denying this freedom even to the traditional minority group of naturists, the US effectively isn't giving the rest of its social groups a chance to lose their general hangup.
You're completely mistaken. The Internet runs on a single basic networking standard, namely IP, which is universal regardless of the delivery mechanism (Ethernet, ISDN, PSTN, ATM, frame relay, xDSL, etc). Without IP as a universal compatibility layer to which everyone subscribes, we'd be nowhere. (All the non-standards you mention are layered on top of IP.)
There is nothing to take the place of IP in the TV world, so unless some standard is agreed the US is going rapidly nowhere in this area. The FCC understands standards, so as long as they don't go further and try to regulate content, their intervention would do the whole US TV scene a massive service.
Alternatively of course, the US could continue to be a 3rd world country when it comes to TV. Your choice. Europe has for decades been laughing at the US backwater, quite rightly (PAL and MAC are massively better than NTSC), and now that Europe's gone digital, the laughter is deafening. Is that how you want things to stay?
Being screwed by your cable company isn't going to change until something new like digital TV is available and deliverable by competitors. That's a result of the "free market" in cable being free only in name, not in reality, because market forces don't work properly when only a single provider at a time can deliver cable and services to your door.
You say you don't want multiple feeds in, but keeping everything separate works in your favour: when all communication goes through a single point, whoever operates the medium has you by the balls. That's why your cable operator can afford to give you crap service in the first place. Put up a dish and an antenna, and suddenly the cable operator has to wake up to a massive loss in profits, or else.
Whatever one may feel about the role of government and the FCC, it is nevertheless true that this is one area in which competition has failed in the US. Technically speaking, the US TV system has been *way* behind Europe's PAL and MAC for decades, and now that Europe has gone digital, the US has just dropped another step behind.
Why market forces have failed utterly in this regard I have no idea, but they have, and it doesn't surprise me in the slightest that the US government is tired of 3rd world country status and is telling the FCC to do something about it. Heck, *somebody* needs to break the logjam. It's not as if the market hasn't had long enough to do it itself.
Why has the market failed? Is it sewn up in cartels perhaps, and not actually free? Are Warner and Co to blame, seeing profits continue to roll in over the old system and hence not wanting to invest in new infrastructure? Whatever the reason, something pathological has happened there. Hopefully it'll get sorted out now.
I see that they've structured their website to be topologically consistent with the capacity of their Klein bottles: my browser has just returned "Document contains no data".
And all that's fine and well. The trouble comes when our gods (and yes, you're right, it is we that make them) go beyond being the lucky beneficiaries of our adulation and start carving in stone the means by which the lucrative time-fold of the last few decades can continue forever.
After reading his articles, one gets the impression that he doesn't recite very often the mantra of "Their job is to make you feel good", as you put it. The element of feedback that is so important to the vast majority of artists seems to have got lost in a sea of business as usual, not in ignorance of the new technology but in active disregard of the calls for change. Of course, Bowie is not the only one that can be accused of protecting the hand that feeds him, but this thread is about him alone.
Hey man, the industry lawyers are tarring those techie upstarts good and proper, so why should I rock the boat when the old system is bringing in those dollars so reliably.
Not at all --- it is the speakers that are the weakest link here, whereas the quality of cheap audio amplification is comparatively superb. The car is *not* an audiophile environment, and $10 is ample nowadays for all the integrated components needed to provide perceptually reasonable in-car sound, far better in fact than the quality of the original speaker installation. ($10 audio component cost for a built-in amplifier easily maps to a $100-$150 typical radio-cassette player cost.)
Furthermore, there must be plenty of people (I extrapolate from myself) that would spend quite a lot of money on an MP3 in-car player just for the convenience while being perfectly happy with the "hifi experience" provided by the car's default sound installation, so Empeg definitely *has* lost a potential market segment by that decision.
The SUSE ad in the Slashdot banner says that the distro is out on DVD now. This raises a host of interesting questions and maybe opportunities.
First of all, does this mean that there is no major licensing/royalty issue with the underlying format as long as the content is not encrypted?
And does this also mean that we can stamp out our own DVDs commercially at reasonable cost if we have appropriate content, eg. maybe our own computer-generated films or reporting footage?
Does anyone know what the cost of pressing and the minimum size of production run is for DVD? And which production facility did SUSE use?
Don't be all that enamoured with Bowie folks. If you read his magazine interviews, it's clear that he believes in the good old standard way: the artist is God and will do whatever he/she wants and will charge whatever he/she desires and the rest of us are just one of two things --- either pirates, or suckers for the milking.
Yes, he's aware of the new technologies, but he doesn't accept that this means that earlier social relationships should change to match the new possibilities. Watch your back, as he's as likely as not to stab you in the back with an RIAA dagger. I wouldn't bank with him. One should trust one's banker.
A more honest description would have been along the lines of: "There's something really odd going on here guys, something not explained by any known physics of materials, and we've been running experiments to try to figure out what's going on."
Calling the unexplained phenomenon cold fusion at that stage (or even at the current stage) was pretty damn silly --- despite the fact that whatever is happening is very real and very unexplained by current theory, it is not fusion as we've known it for decades and may not be fusion of any kind at all. This could have led to an excellent area for loads of well-funded pure science and maybe by now even some solid engineering, instead of the media circus that was. Shame on everyone.
The in-car unit from empeg.com has a few problems.
It's far too expensive, it's a closed system at the present time (though they say they'll open it to techies eventually), and rather incredibly, it doesn't have an audio amplifier built in so that it can't simply replace a normal integrated car entertainment unit. That decision must have saved them less than $10 while totally destroying their chances in the market.
The kicking that Casio are getting in this thread may be well deserved, if for no other reason than that they don't seem to have woken up to the fact that Microsoft is no longer the only game in town. Their search box returns nothing for "Linux" anyway.
Looks like there's a good opening here for a more progressive competitor in the gadget world.
Does anyone know who their main competitor is currently?
Your point is totally bogus, because cameras built to look like other objects can be used for many purposes that are quite unrelated to invading other people's personal privacy: eg. very usefully and practically, to catch burglars and other nasty people in the act.
Don't put the blame on objects but on the people that use them, otherwise all knives and most other tools would have to be banned as potential murder weapons.
We can't design such a political system because no single system can satisfy all the multiple conflicting requirements: it's the well-known "failure of universalism".
That's why the meta-philosophy of individualism is in ascendency, ie. no single right or wrong but a multiplicity of consensual views between interacting individuals instead. Bruce is heading right down the middle of that road, although the needs of his writing competency doesn't allow him to express it that simply.
Credit to the Y2K techies after years of work
on
Apocalypse Not
·
· Score: 2
It was an engineering problem with potentially very disruptive and costly repercussions, quite capable of unravelling western civilization for years if widespread failures had caused loss of confidence and triggered a major stock market crash (even if no nukes were launched accidentally).
But that didn't happen, and only an idiot could dismiss the Y2K-related efforts of hundreds of thousands of techies over 2-5 years as having had nothing to do with avoiding any serious problems.
We have ensured through our work that the world did not come to harm. Why are we so slow to sing our own praises and so quick to suggest that maybe there was nothing to fear in the first place? After years of effort in this area, I find this response to the lack of trouble most odd, almost an attempt to rewrite the pre-Y2K history.
We did a good job folks, and we should be proud of our achievement.
Not true... from above they can fire the "bad quality" and hire the "good quality".
Sure, they can fire the bad quality, but how exactly are they going to hire the good quality?:-)
See, it's not that simple. Resumes do not give managers any insight into the quality of a person as this is not the same thing as skill set, and even worse, if managers practice a hire-and-fire policy in a scatter-gun attempt at finding a good set of people then the better ones will start to leave because of bad team feeling. No, it's not that simple. Giving people motivation is a better approach.
Most of the TQM stuff is a waste of time in the most literal sense --- paperwork is generated for the purpose of satisfying an audit and is never again revisited nor used by anyone. As a freelance contractor, I've seen that too many times in too many companies for this to be a one-off aberration.
Here's a quick recipe for quality in the workplace: Responsibility and Traceability. Give people full responsibility over a complete part or aspect of the product, and ensure that you can trace back to the party responsible at every stage. And make the responsibility stick, all the way up to the ultimate sanction of financial penalty or loss of position or employment.
People will do a good job when they have full responsibility over something, unlike when they are made to feel like an anonymous cog in a big machine. Give them that (and the authority that has to go with it) and you'll get quality, with minimal paperwork.
Thanks, Miguel. I've started to read those docs, and some of my worries are disappearing.
With a bit of luck I'll also find that there are also (going to be) non-graphic front-ends to generate the intermediate XML to drive the back-ends, so that the remote, non-graphic or scripted installer is not left out in the cold.
Keep up the good work, and a Happy New Year to you!
It is true that the BSD license is (in an absolute sense) more free than the GPL, in the same way as an environment where killing is allowed is more free (in an absolute sense) than one where it is not allowed.
However, in both cases, the TOTAL AMOUNT OF FREEDOM in the community is increased by denying the respective absolute freedoms, ie. trading off the loss of freedom to a few code hoarders (and to a few killers in the analogy) for a greater amount of longer-term freedom for a larger number of people.
This is hardly a new concept. Humanity has been trading off short-term freedom for long-term freedom for as long as civilization has existed. The trade-off seems to work, despite sticking in the gullet for a few purists that don't give importance to long-term views.
The thing that worries me Miguel is that a lot of functionality is going into graphic apps directly, instead of going into utilities that are managed through graphic apps. Since graphic apps are almost entirely non-integratable using linguistic glue, we're in severe danger of losing touch with the key element that made Linux/BSD/Unix the powerhouse that it is, namely programmable integration through non-graphic scripting.
Your comments about Red Carpet brought this to mind vividly, and raised other spectres as well. We all hope that Red Carpet will become a great generic package manager, but alas it seems that the power user that is doing remote or scripted non-graphic installations is not going to be able to make use of your good work.
Frankly, graphic-only apps suck, or more technically, are not as powerful as graphic apps that interface to underlying non-graphic utilities. Why is Helix going down this non-optimal road towards Microsoft-style systems of low intrinsic power? Why not have your cake and eat it too by using graphics for interfacing only, not for implementing new functionality?
Slashdot Mirror
I would buy CodeWarrier for the Palm Pilot if it ran under Linux, but apparently the only version that is targetted at the PDA runs under Windows. A pity.
I can't think why it would be more difficult to port a cross-development system to Linux than a native development system. Any ideas?
Separate the rhetoric from the substance and all you find is the usual legal travesty: the global controls will limit what the ordinary man can do, not the outlaw who can and does ignore the laws with impunity.
The only "undesirable element" that will get curbed by this is the freedom of the people. But then, it has always been the goal of those in power to put a firm cap on that. No change.
It is the lack of jurisdiction of national governments and legislatures on the Internet that has resulted in this single most free environment on the planet.
Not surprisingly, their lack of direct control over it has got them scared shitless --- just imagine, too much of this and the little people might get the idea that their "leaders" perform no useful function in the offline world either.
This is a big issue and other posters have adequately covered its most common angles I think, but there are other contributing factors as well.
One of the reasons why the US is so hung up over these issues is that (in a very chicken-and-egg sort of way) it does not allow naturism or nudism on public ground, no matter how remote and inaccessible the place.
This has the unfortunate effect of reinforcing the view that nudity *AND EVERYTHING RELATED TO IT* is bad. In contrast, in countries where naturism is accepted, it rapidly becomes obvious to all (including those that wouldn't be seen dead joining in) that public nudity is no big deal at all, and this leads to a general relaxation in all other areas where nudity plays a part.
By denying this freedom even to the traditional minority group of naturists, the US effectively isn't giving the rest of its social groups a chance to lose their general hangup.
You're completely mistaken. The Internet runs on a single basic networking standard, namely IP, which is universal regardless of the delivery mechanism (Ethernet, ISDN, PSTN, ATM, frame relay, xDSL, etc). Without IP as a universal compatibility layer to which everyone subscribes, we'd be nowhere. (All the non-standards you mention are layered on top of IP.)
There is nothing to take the place of IP in the TV world, so unless some standard is agreed the US is going rapidly nowhere in this area. The FCC understands standards, so as long as they don't go further and try to regulate content, their intervention would do the whole US TV scene a massive service.
Alternatively of course, the US could continue to be a 3rd world country when it comes to TV. Your choice. Europe has for decades been laughing at the US backwater, quite rightly (PAL and MAC are massively better than NTSC), and now that Europe's gone digital, the laughter is deafening. Is that how you want things to stay?
Being screwed by your cable company isn't going to change until something new like digital TV is available and deliverable by competitors. That's a result of the "free market" in cable being free only in name, not in reality, because market forces don't work properly when only a single provider at a time can deliver cable and services to your door.
You say you don't want multiple feeds in, but keeping everything separate works in your favour: when all communication goes through a single point, whoever operates the medium has you by the balls. That's why your cable operator can afford to give you crap service in the first place. Put up a dish and an antenna, and suddenly the cable operator has to wake up to a massive loss in profits, or else.
Whatever one may feel about the role of government and the FCC, it is nevertheless true that this is one area in which competition has failed in the US. Technically speaking, the US TV system has been *way* behind Europe's PAL and MAC for decades, and now that Europe has gone digital, the US has just dropped another step behind.
Why market forces have failed utterly in this regard I have no idea, but they have, and it doesn't surprise me in the slightest that the US government is tired of 3rd world country status and is telling the FCC to do something about it. Heck, *somebody* needs to break the logjam. It's not as if the market hasn't had long enough to do it itself.
Why has the market failed? Is it sewn up in cartels perhaps, and not actually free? Are Warner and Co to blame, seeing profits continue to roll in over the old system and hence not wanting to invest in new infrastructure? Whatever the reason, something pathological has happened there. Hopefully it'll get sorted out now.
I see that they've structured their website to be topologically consistent with the capacity of their Klein bottles: my browser has just returned "Document contains no data".
And all that's fine and well. The trouble comes when our gods (and yes, you're right, it is we that make them) go beyond being the lucky beneficiaries of our adulation and start carving in stone the means by which the lucrative time-fold of the last few decades can continue forever.
After reading his articles, one gets the impression that he doesn't recite very often the mantra of "Their job is to make you feel good", as you put it. The element of feedback that is so important to the vast majority of artists seems to have got lost in a sea of business as usual, not in ignorance of the new technology but in active disregard of the calls for change. Of course, Bowie is not the only one that can be accused of protecting the hand that feeds him, but this thread is about him alone.
Hey man, the industry lawyers are tarring those techie upstarts good and proper, so why should I rock the boat when the old system is bringing in those dollars so reliably.
A is to B as X is to Y. That doesn't mean that A equates to X.
I use both Linux and FreeBSD, and the analogy was as even-handed and as fair as I could make it. I'm sorry if your bias prevents you from seeing that.
Not at all --- it is the speakers that are the weakest link here, whereas the quality of cheap audio amplification is comparatively superb. The car is *not* an audiophile environment, and $10 is ample nowadays for all the integrated components needed to provide perceptually reasonable in-car sound, far better in fact than the quality of the original speaker installation. ($10 audio component cost for a built-in amplifier easily maps to a $100-$150 typical radio-cassette player cost.)
Furthermore, there must be plenty of people (I extrapolate from myself) that would spend quite a lot of money on an MP3 in-car player just for the convenience while being perfectly happy with the "hifi experience" provided by the car's default sound installation, so Empeg definitely *has* lost a potential market segment by that decision.
The SUSE ad in the Slashdot banner says that the distro is out on DVD now. This raises a host of interesting questions and maybe opportunities.
First of all, does this mean that there is no major licensing/royalty issue with the underlying format as long as the content is not encrypted?
And does this also mean that we can stamp out our own DVDs commercially at reasonable cost if we have appropriate content, eg. maybe our own computer-generated films or reporting footage?
Does anyone know what the cost of pressing and the minimum size of production run is for DVD? And which production facility did SUSE use?
Don't be all that enamoured with Bowie folks. If you read his magazine interviews, it's clear that he believes in the good old standard way: the artist is God and will do whatever he/she wants and will charge whatever he/she desires and the rest of us are just one of two things --- either pirates, or suckers for the milking.
Yes, he's aware of the new technologies, but he doesn't accept that this means that earlier social relationships should change to match the new possibilities. Watch your back, as he's as likely as not to stab you in the back with an RIAA dagger. I wouldn't bank with him. One should trust one's banker.
A more honest description would have been along the lines of: "There's something really odd going on here guys, something not explained by any known physics of materials, and we've been running experiments to try to figure out what's going on."
Calling the unexplained phenomenon cold fusion at that stage (or even at the current stage) was pretty damn silly --- despite the fact that whatever is happening is very real and very unexplained by current theory, it is not fusion as we've known it for decades and may not be fusion of any kind at all. This could have led to an excellent area for loads of well-funded pure science and maybe by now even some solid engineering, instead of the media circus that was. Shame on everyone.
The in-car unit from empeg.com has a few problems.
It's far too expensive, it's a closed system at the present time (though they say they'll open it to techies eventually), and rather incredibly, it doesn't have an audio amplifier built in so that it can't simply replace a normal integrated car entertainment unit. That decision must have saved them less than $10 while totally destroying their chances in the market.
The kicking that Casio are getting in this thread may be well deserved, if for no other reason than that they don't seem to have woken up to the fact that Microsoft is no longer the only game in town. Their search box returns nothing for "Linux" anyway.
Looks like there's a good opening here for a more progressive competitor in the gadget world.
Does anyone know who their main competitor is currently?
The frame that had me in stitches was the first exchange between Morpheus and Neo:
Welcome Neo. As you may have guessed, I am mOrpheus.
-- What? Don't you mean 'Morpheus'?
Right, and I bet you think "Zero Cool" isn't taken yet either.
Your point is totally bogus, because cameras built to look like other objects can be used for many purposes that are quite unrelated to invading other people's personal privacy: eg. very usefully and practically, to catch burglars and other nasty people in the act.
Don't put the blame on objects but on the people that use them, otherwise all knives and most other tools would have to be banned as potential murder weapons.
We can't design such a political system because no single system can satisfy all the multiple conflicting requirements: it's the well-known "failure of universalism".
That's why the meta-philosophy of individualism is in ascendency, ie. no single right or wrong but a multiplicity of consensual views between interacting individuals instead. Bruce is heading right down the middle of that road, although the needs of his writing competency doesn't allow him to express it that simply.
It was an engineering problem with potentially very disruptive and costly repercussions, quite capable of unravelling western civilization for years if widespread failures had caused loss of confidence and triggered a major stock market crash (even if no nukes were launched accidentally).
But that didn't happen, and only an idiot could dismiss the Y2K-related efforts of hundreds of thousands of techies over 2-5 years as having had nothing to do with avoiding any serious problems.
We have ensured through our work that the world did not come to harm. Why are we so slow to sing our own praises and so quick to suggest that maybe there was nothing to fear in the first place? After years of effort in this area, I find this response to the lack of trouble most odd, almost an attempt to rewrite the pre-Y2K history.
We did a good job folks, and we should be proud of our achievement.
Not true... from above they can fire the "bad quality" and hire the "good quality".
:-)
Sure, they can fire the bad quality, but how exactly are they going to hire the good quality?
See, it's not that simple. Resumes do not give managers any insight into the quality of a person as this is not the same thing as skill set, and even worse, if managers practice a hire-and-fire policy in a scatter-gun attempt at finding a good set of people then the better ones will start to leave because of bad team feeling. No, it's not that simple. Giving people motivation is a better approach.
Most of the TQM stuff is a waste of time in the most literal sense --- paperwork is generated for the purpose of satisfying an audit and is never again revisited nor used by anyone. As a freelance contractor, I've seen that too many times in too many companies for this to be a one-off aberration.
Here's a quick recipe for quality in the workplace: Responsibility and Traceability. Give people full responsibility over a complete part or aspect of the product, and ensure that you can trace back to the party responsible at every stage. And make the responsibility stick, all the way up to the ultimate sanction of financial penalty or loss of position or employment.
People will do a good job when they have full responsibility over something, unlike when they are made to feel like an anonymous cog in a big machine. Give them that (and the authority that has to go with it) and you'll get quality, with minimal paperwork.
Thanks, Miguel. I've started to read those docs, and some of my worries are disappearing.
With a bit of luck I'll also find that there are also (going to be) non-graphic front-ends to generate the intermediate XML to drive the back-ends, so that the remote, non-graphic or scripted installer is not left out in the cold.
Keep up the good work, and a Happy New Year to you!
It is true that the BSD license is (in an absolute sense) more free than the GPL, in the same way as an environment where killing is allowed is more free (in an absolute sense) than one where it is not allowed.
However, in both cases, the TOTAL AMOUNT OF FREEDOM in the community is increased by denying the respective absolute freedoms, ie. trading off the loss of freedom to a few code hoarders (and to a few killers in the analogy) for a greater amount of longer-term freedom for a larger number of people.
This is hardly a new concept. Humanity has been trading off short-term freedom for long-term freedom for as long as civilization has existed. The trade-off seems to work, despite sticking in the gullet for a few purists that don't give importance to long-term views.
The thing that worries me Miguel is that a lot of functionality is going into graphic apps directly, instead of going into utilities that are managed through graphic apps. Since graphic apps are almost entirely non-integratable using linguistic glue, we're in severe danger of losing touch with the key element that made Linux/BSD/Unix the powerhouse that it is, namely programmable integration through non-graphic scripting.
Your comments about Red Carpet brought this to mind vividly, and raised other spectres as well. We all hope that Red Carpet will become a great generic package manager, but alas it seems that the power user that is doing remote or scripted non-graphic installations is not going to be able to make use of your good work.
Frankly, graphic-only apps suck, or more technically, are not as powerful as graphic apps that interface to underlying non-graphic utilities. Why is Helix going down this non-optimal road towards Microsoft-style systems of low intrinsic power? Why not have your cake and eat it too by using graphics for interfacing only, not for implementing new functionality?