The artificial barrier erected by studio-led organizations against access to DVD by the free operating systems is not dissimilar to a fault in the (information) network.
Well, the Internet is good at dealing with network faults, ie. with the classic response of routing around the problem. In this case the problem is that lawyers and other luddites can prosecute website owners. No big deal: just post the sources repeatedly and automatically to appropriate Usenet newsgroups, and automatic news archiving worldwide will ensure that anyone that needs the code will be able to find it without presenting a target for slobbering lawyers.
[And no, I do not accept that lawyers can get away with "just doing their job" without accepting responsibility for their luddism, just like I do not accept that it is moral for scientists to place tools of destruction in the hands of brainless politicians. If the legal profession wants to be well regarded, it needs to stop washing the blood of its actions off its hands.]
You write: Irix scales much better, and so does Solaris and UnixWare.
Whatever systems happen to scale better today, Linux and the free BSDs will scale better than anything else tomorrow, simply because there are 10 zillion developers beavering away at them continuously.
Furthermore, this continual and rapid improvement will happen regardless of whether or not SGI invest any development time of their own. The economics of this are devastatingly obvious... devastating to anyone that doesn't jump on the bandwagon that is. Development and post-sales maintenance/support are extremely costly overheads for any manufacturer, so a decision which massively reduces that expense makes great economic sense.
Furthermore, with Irix behind them, SGI have the pedigree to stand out in the Linux marketplace despite the eventual dilution created by GPL licensing of their enhancements. I doubt if they'll lose many of their old customers, and they are bound to acquire many new ones from their new and greatly expanded Linux audience.
With this move, I reckon that SGI have their future assured at least until the competition wises up and catches up, and as long as their marketing, pricing and distribution is similarly forward thinking. But that of course remains to be seen.
I was of course referring to materials scientists, inorganic chemists, solid-state physicists and all the related engineering types who are avidly absorbing nanotech-related news and even contributing to the research, but who typically lack an in-depth background in biotech, organic chemistry or genetic engineering.
It's a difficult subject largely because of its multidisciplinary nature, so any help that can be offered by more biotec-aware folk would be extremely useful and welcome.
We need people with a good overview of the field to make informed comment and separate the wheat from the chaff in areas such as biotech, which is outside of the sphere of competence of many inorganic materials-based nanotech experts.
How about creating a website devoted to such analysis? It could be a valuable resource.
You write: I'm thrilled that a group of high-powered antitrust lawyers can find the time to read questions from the unwashed/. masses, by the way.
High-powered antitrust lawyers and unwashed masses? You're talking about the power politics of an earlier age. It's the techies that rule the new world, and most others just don't understand it and are running hard to try to catch up. Stop watching the telly where the old systems are still portrayed as alive and well despite their waning power. Of course they still have power over the nationally-located physicals, but that's becoming less relevant by the minute.
Lawyers and the judiciary are in a particularly difficult position, because whatever country they currently practice in, they're outside of their jurisdiction when it comes to the net.
I'm sure that they're ecstatic though that people like yourself still postrate themselves before the old high priests. It makes their uphill struggle in a new environment much easier.
The judge is outside his jurisdiction
on
Usenet Gag Order
·
· Score: 2
Don't treat the judiciary as independent and unbiased on this issue. The fact that a national judge tries to limit communication on a trans-national forum should give pause for thought.
The Internet is a new frontier (for them), one which is beyond their current jurisdiction, and since they are accustomed to power, one in which they will try to gain the same might as they have in the physical world. This was just an early shot. In due course, I expect that it'll get quite ugly.
What the Internet needs is Fair Witnesses, a la Robert Heinlein's 'Stranger in a Strange Land'.
There is no solution to problems like those highlighted on this thread unless a single person looks at all the issues dispassionately and is then questioned about the facts.
Questioning the actual parties concerned is pointless: you always get 50% bullshit, but you never know from which of the two sides it's coming.
CryptInfo may be a great bit of software, but what use is that if you can't trust it since the code isn't open?
This isn't to impune its author in any way: the software could have been compromised without his knowledge, or else his family might be held under risk of murder unless he distributes a non-obvious backdoor.
Cryptographic software has to be open-sourced, full stop. No exception.
Strip is GPL'd, so even if it were god-awful (which it is isn't), at least one can trust it.
Don't forget that Sun think that they're in a difficult position because of the Linux vs Solaris issue, so inevitably there will be internal pressure from some of their divisions *not* to help out the Linux scene too much. In contrast, adding value to little ol' Be holds no danger for them.
In reality of course, assuming that they really make no money from Solaris as the rumours suggest, their best bet is probably to GPL the entirety of Solaris and to support all free operating systems equally on their nice hardware. Unfortunately, internal politics may not allow that --- the Solaris empires within Sun are far too deeply entrenched in the internal political mechanisms of the company. A pity.
You write: If we recognise any form of Intellectual property you have to respect this.
For consistency, yes. But I'm glad you phrased it that way, because there is a huge school of thought that says that the very concept of intellectual property is bogus. I find the arguments presented very persuasive, so IDG's claim does not look all that convincing to me.
You write: I have no problem with a monopoly if it was achieved through the natural workings of the marketplace.
Alas, you can't have a fair, competition-driven marketplace when the O/S and the applications come from the same party and are tied together in an exclusive arrangement. In such a situation, migrating from the O/S entails abandoning all the apps, since their producer has a conflict of interest which prevents him from making his apps work well on any platform other than his own. As a result the customer is forced to abandon all her favourite apps if she wishes to migrate to another O/S, ie. a huge disincentive. It's primarily this negative feedback that has created the monopoly, and not Microsoft's rather questionable but possibly still "competitive" business practices. The O/S-applications tie is essentially anti-competitive.
I don't see how this link can be broken now though, not in an effective way: it's far too late for that, as the tie is carved in stone in people's minds. It would require Microsoft to be forced to port its apps to a number of competing O/S's (and possibly forced also to abandon its Windows ports or sell them off), which really isn't going to happen even if the O/S divisionn is sold off.
I'll be very interested to see what solution they can conjur up.
But a fat lot of good a kernel debugger does you on a closed-source OS.
NT had the future almost in its grasp, but let it slip away by being impossibly unreliable and horribly admin-unfriendly compared to any Unix product. [We worked with it for a year but eventually had to discard it as a worthless toy.)
But that was then. Now it's just plain obsolete. Face it.
If you think the whole premise was unbelievable, I'm afraid you aren't well clued in as to where technology is going.
The only major flights of technical fancy in The Matrix were the potty idea that humans thought they could kill off the machines by blotting out the sun, and that the machines would find humans to be a sensible alternative power source. There were quite a few general weaknesses as well, such as the whole business of the oracle and the apparent inability of the machines to trace Matrix events back to their physical location in particular humans. But those are hardly fatal weaknesses.
All in all, The Matrix is fairly down to earth, rather than unbelievable. Hugely more unbelievable things are about to hit our everyday reality in the shape of nanotech. No doubt you think that that whole area of study is unrealistic as well.;-)
Solid nanotech textbook for the dedicated
on
Nanosystems
·
· Score: 2
Nanosystems is truly excellent, but I'd hesitate to recommend it to anyone that doesn't benefit from a solid engineering background. This is a real textbook, not a lay read.
It's not an occasional read either. I've spent about 18 months on it so far and I'm about halfway through, plus a few occasional excursions into parts further on. It won't be less than another year or so before I've finished my first pass. What you get back from this book is proportional to the effort that you put into understanding it, ie. as in any other scientific or engineering field.
For people that don't fit the above category of readers, I wholeheartedly recommend Engines of Creation, also by Drexler, the popular book which opened up the possibilities of the field to the masses. It's extremely, wonderfully good, but without the maths.
If you want to get somewhere fast, go via train or plane. Otherwise, be patient.
No. Who are you to tell us what to do?
I bow to the will of the majority, so if something gets a majority vote in the community then I'll obey it, even if I disagree with it. That's what belonging to a community is all about.
But the speed limit on motorways was never put to the vote, and they don't dare put it to the vote because they know they'd lose. That's why the normal free-flowing speed on British motorways is over 85 mph, despite a legal limit of 70. (Even the Metropolitan Police recommend raising the limit, without effect.) In a democracy, when politicians don't listen, their laws get ignored.
Stupid/senseless/blinkered/over-zealous laws are nothing new. As always, just ignore them.
Heck, on British motorways, only about 15% of drivers obey the speed limit. That's not because we're a nation of anarchists, but simply because there is no other recourse (this was never put to democratic vote, and politicians won't listen anyway), and stupid laws deserve contempt.
I sure hope that nobody who comes face-to-face with an extra-terrestrial is so totally lacking in gray matter that the first thing on their mind is whether contact is allowed by some politician. Sheesh. We'd lose all universe-cred.
This strikes me as mighty unusual. I hope this guy gets some more important cases, especially some about bogus patent claims.
I also hope he realizes that his jurisdiction is limited to just one piece of land, and does not extend to the Internet itself. Probably a difficult pill to swallow for someone in legal power.
I know maybe a couple of hundred people that use Linux as their primary system, including first and second-hand friends, acquaintances, and contacts. Of those, I am aware of only two that have registered with the Linux Counter. That doesn't mean that none of the rest have done so, but it does mean that it's not the done thing to register and let it be known that you have done so.
Extrapolating from this personal experience, I'd say that while the error margins on any estimate of total Linux population must necessarily be very large, the ballpark figure is probably massively underestimated.
Under a million and over 50 million would be unreasonable, but anywhere in between is not unreasonable at all. And remember that estimates of Microsoft usage count the number of licensed copies, so to be even-handed one ought to count all the released distros that each Linux user has obtained, ie. often a whole lot of them.
The nanomachines could distribute themselves either throughout the entirety of the body's skin and mucus membranes or throughout the whole body. There's no need for any magical "burning into constituent atoms", because the machines would be interlinked, either directly or into larger scale transportation systems, so any material that needs to be eliminated (or provided) at any given site is moved bodily.
All this talk of energy problems misses the rather basic point that nanomachines are *already* doing this throughout our bodies. The current ones are soft protein-based, whereas we'll be heading for hard MNT because of its better engineering properties. Despite the differences in detail, the energy considerations aren't all that different in the two cases, so lack or excess of energy certainly doesn't look like a showstopper of any sort.
Having said that, this subthread completely misses another point: once it becomes the norm to have hard MNT machines running around your body, it's only a matter of time before bodies will no longer stick to their homo sapien form at all, so "personal grooming" may end up about as relevant to you as it was to the "liquid-metal" Terminator.
Sites that don't allow one to leave the place using the browser's back button (like this MSNBC site) deserve to be either slashdotted or boycotted, I'm not sure which. It's damn user-unfriendly site design.
That possibility isn't necessarily being suggested on high moral or commonsense grounds. It may be driven mainly by the desire to prevent Microsoft from moving their crypto development labs abroad, eg. to the UK as was suggested by Gates' recent hob-knobbing with the British PM.
Slashdot Mirror
The artificial barrier erected by studio-led organizations against access to DVD by the free operating systems is not dissimilar to a fault in the (information) network.
Well, the Internet is good at dealing with network faults, ie. with the classic response of routing around the problem. In this case the problem is that lawyers and other luddites can prosecute website owners. No big deal: just post the sources repeatedly and automatically to appropriate Usenet newsgroups, and automatic news archiving worldwide will ensure that anyone that needs the code will be able to find it without presenting a target for slobbering lawyers.
[And no, I do not accept that lawyers can get away with "just doing their job" without accepting responsibility for their luddism, just like I do not accept that it is moral for scientists to place tools of destruction in the hands of brainless politicians. If the legal profession wants to be well regarded, it needs to stop washing the blood of its actions off its hands.]
You write: Irix scales much better, and so does Solaris and UnixWare.
... devastating to anyone that doesn't jump on the bandwagon that is. Development and post-sales maintenance/support are extremely costly overheads for any manufacturer, so a decision which massively reduces that expense makes great economic sense.
Whatever systems happen to scale better today, Linux and the free BSDs will scale better than anything else tomorrow, simply because there are 10 zillion developers beavering away at them continuously.
Furthermore, this continual and rapid improvement will happen regardless of whether or not SGI invest any development time of their own. The economics of this are devastatingly obvious
Furthermore, with Irix behind them, SGI have the pedigree to stand out in the Linux marketplace despite the eventual dilution created by GPL licensing of their enhancements. I doubt if they'll lose many of their old customers, and they are bound to acquire many new ones from their new and greatly expanded Linux audience.
With this move, I reckon that SGI have their future assured at least until the competition wises up and catches up, and as long as their marketing, pricing and distribution is similarly forward thinking. But that of course remains to be seen.
Hehe, good question! :-)
I was of course referring to materials scientists, inorganic chemists, solid-state physicists and all the related engineering types who are avidly absorbing nanotech-related news and even contributing to the research, but who typically lack an in-depth background in biotech, organic chemistry or genetic engineering.
It's a difficult subject largely because of its multidisciplinary nature, so any help that can be offered by more biotec-aware folk would be extremely useful and welcome.
We need people with a good overview of the field to make informed comment and separate the wheat from the chaff in areas such as biotech, which is outside of the sphere of competence of many inorganic materials-based nanotech experts.
How about creating a website devoted to such analysis? It could be a valuable resource.
You write: I'm thrilled that a group of high-powered antitrust lawyers can find the time to read questions from the unwashed /. masses, by the way.
High-powered antitrust lawyers and unwashed masses? You're talking about the power politics of an earlier age. It's the techies that rule the new world, and most others just don't understand it and are running hard to try to catch up. Stop watching the telly where the old systems are still portrayed as alive and well despite their waning power. Of course they still have power over the nationally-located physicals, but that's becoming less relevant by the minute.
Lawyers and the judiciary are in a particularly difficult position, because whatever country they currently practice in, they're outside of their jurisdiction when it comes to the net.
I'm sure that they're ecstatic though that people like yourself still postrate themselves before the old high priests. It makes their uphill struggle in a new environment much easier.
Don't treat the judiciary as independent and unbiased on this issue. The fact that a national judge tries to limit communication on a trans-national forum should give pause for thought.
The Internet is a new frontier (for them), one which is beyond their current jurisdiction, and since they are accustomed to power, one in which they will try to gain the same might as they have in the physical world. This was just an early shot. In due course, I expect that it'll get quite ugly.
I'm in awe too, even before Y2K! :-)
Ref: Fawn's in AWE
(Abacus or no abacus)
What the Internet needs is Fair Witnesses, a la Robert Heinlein's 'Stranger in a Strange Land'.
There is no solution to problems like those highlighted on this thread unless a single person looks at all the issues dispassionately and is then questioned about the facts.
Questioning the actual parties concerned is pointless: you always get 50% bullshit, but you never know from which of the two sides it's coming.
Dunno about its origin, but a BLT is a Bacon-Lettuce-Tomato sandwich over here (UK).
From the sound of it, LBT is probably lower on calories.
CryptInfo may be a great bit of software, but what use is that if you can't trust it since the code isn't open?
This isn't to impune its author in any way: the software could have been compromised without his knowledge, or else his family might be held under risk of murder unless he distributes a non-obvious backdoor.
Cryptographic software has to be open-sourced, full stop. No exception.
Strip is GPL'd, so even if it were god-awful (which it is isn't), at least one can trust it.
Don't forget that Sun think that they're in a difficult position because of the Linux vs Solaris issue, so inevitably there will be internal pressure from some of their divisions *not* to help out the Linux scene too much. In contrast, adding value to little ol' Be holds no danger for them.
In reality of course, assuming that they really make no money from Solaris as the rumours suggest, their best bet is probably to GPL the entirety of Solaris and to support all free operating systems equally on their nice hardware. Unfortunately, internal politics may not allow that --- the Solaris empires within Sun are far too deeply entrenched in the internal political mechanisms of the company. A pity.
You write: If we recognise any form of Intellectual property you have to respect this.
For consistency, yes. But I'm glad you phrased it that way, because there is a huge school of thought that says that the very concept of intellectual property is bogus. I find the arguments presented very persuasive, so IDG's claim does not look all that convincing to me.
Alas, it's exactly that kind of sucker attitude among customers that has brought us to where we are today in the software world.
You write: I have no problem with a monopoly if it was achieved through the natural workings of the marketplace.
Alas, you can't have a fair, competition-driven marketplace when the O/S and the applications come from the same party and are tied together in an exclusive arrangement. In such a situation, migrating from the O/S entails abandoning all the apps, since their producer has a conflict of interest which prevents him from making his apps work well on any platform other than his own. As a result the customer is forced to abandon all her favourite apps if she wishes to migrate to another O/S, ie. a huge disincentive. It's primarily this negative feedback that has created the monopoly, and not Microsoft's rather questionable but possibly still "competitive" business practices. The O/S-applications tie is essentially anti-competitive.
I don't see how this link can be broken now though, not in an effective way: it's far too late for that, as the tie is carved in stone in people's minds. It would require Microsoft to be forced to port its apps to a number of competing O/S's (and possibly forced also to abandon its Windows ports or sell them off), which really isn't going to happen even if the O/S divisionn is sold off.
I'll be very interested to see what solution they can conjur up.
But a fat lot of good a kernel debugger does you on a closed-source OS.
NT had the future almost in its grasp, but let it slip away by being impossibly unreliable and horribly admin-unfriendly compared to any Unix product. [We worked with it for a year but eventually had to discard it as a worthless toy.)
But that was then. Now it's just plain obsolete. Face it.
I wonder how many caught your pun.
If you think the whole premise was unbelievable, I'm afraid you aren't well clued in as to where technology is going.
;-)
The only major flights of technical fancy in The Matrix were the potty idea that humans thought they could kill off the machines by blotting out the sun, and that the machines would find humans to be a sensible alternative power source. There were quite a few general weaknesses as well, such as the whole business of the oracle and the apparent inability of the machines to trace Matrix events back to their physical location in particular humans. But those are hardly fatal weaknesses.
All in all, The Matrix is fairly down to earth, rather than unbelievable. Hugely more unbelievable things are about to hit our everyday reality in the shape of nanotech. No doubt you think that that whole area of study is unrealistic as well.
Nanosystems is truly excellent, but I'd hesitate to recommend it to anyone that doesn't benefit from a solid engineering background. This is a real textbook, not a lay read.
It's not an occasional read either. I've spent about 18 months on it so far and I'm about halfway through, plus a few occasional excursions into parts further on. It won't be less than another year or so before I've finished my first pass. What you get back from this book is proportional to the effort that you put into understanding it, ie. as in any other scientific or engineering field.
For people that don't fit the above category of readers, I wholeheartedly recommend Engines of Creation, also by Drexler, the popular book which opened up the possibilities of the field to the masses. It's extremely, wonderfully good, but without the maths.
If you want to get somewhere fast, go via train or plane. Otherwise, be patient.
No. Who are you to tell us what to do?
I bow to the will of the majority, so if something gets a majority vote in the community then I'll obey it, even if I disagree with it. That's what belonging to a community is all about.
But the speed limit on motorways was never put to the vote, and they don't dare put it to the vote because they know they'd lose. That's why the normal free-flowing speed on British motorways is over 85 mph, despite a legal limit of 70. (Even the Metropolitan Police recommend raising the limit, without effect.) In a democracy, when politicians don't listen, their laws get ignored.
Stupid/senseless/blinkered/over-zealous laws are nothing new. As always, just ignore them.
Heck, on British motorways, only about 15% of drivers obey the speed limit. That's not because we're a nation of anarchists, but simply because there is no other recourse (this was never put to democratic vote, and politicians won't listen anyway), and stupid laws deserve contempt.
I sure hope that nobody who comes face-to-face with an extra-terrestrial is so totally lacking in gray matter that the first thing on their mind is whether contact is allowed by some politician. Sheesh. We'd lose all universe-cred.
Wow, a judge with a clue about the Internet!
This strikes me as mighty unusual. I hope this guy gets some more important cases, especially some about bogus patent claims.
I also hope he realizes that his jurisdiction is limited to just one piece of land, and does not extend to the Internet itself. Probably a difficult pill to swallow for someone in legal power.
I know maybe a couple of hundred people that use Linux as their primary system, including first and second-hand friends, acquaintances, and contacts. Of those, I am aware of only two that have registered with the Linux Counter. That doesn't mean that none of the rest have done so, but it does mean that it's not the done thing to register and let it be known that you have done so.
Extrapolating from this personal experience, I'd say that while the error margins on any estimate of total Linux population must necessarily be very large, the ballpark figure is probably massively underestimated.
Under a million and over 50 million would be unreasonable, but anywhere in between is not unreasonable at all. And remember that estimates of Microsoft usage count the number of licensed copies, so to be even-handed one ought to count all the released distros that each Linux user has obtained, ie. often a whole lot of them.
I guess someone had better spell it out.
The nanomachines could distribute themselves either throughout the entirety of the body's skin and mucus membranes or throughout the whole body. There's no need for any magical "burning into constituent atoms", because the machines would be interlinked, either directly or into larger scale transportation systems, so any material that needs to be eliminated (or provided) at any given site is moved bodily.
All this talk of energy problems misses the rather basic point that nanomachines are *already* doing this throughout our bodies. The current ones are soft protein-based, whereas we'll be heading for hard MNT because of its better engineering properties. Despite the differences in detail, the energy considerations aren't all that different in the two cases, so lack or excess of energy certainly doesn't look like a showstopper of any sort.
Having said that, this subthread completely misses another point: once it becomes the norm to have hard MNT machines running around your body, it's only a matter of time before bodies will no longer stick to their homo sapien form at all, so "personal grooming" may end up about as relevant to you as it was to the "liquid-metal" Terminator.
Sites that don't allow one to leave the place using the browser's back button (like this MSNBC site) deserve to be either slashdotted or boycotted, I'm not sure which. It's damn user-unfriendly site design.
That possibility isn't necessarily being suggested on high moral or commonsense grounds. It may be driven mainly by the desire to prevent Microsoft from moving their crypto development labs abroad, eg. to the UK as was suggested by Gates' recent hob-knobbing with the British PM.