duh... put the right sort of condom on the OQO, and you can use your grubby fingers as a touchpad.
these things are just a software patch or two away from being -good- devices in the usability department, turning it into almost totally tactile software (i.e. you are touching the place the action is happening, not some remote peripheral...)
i can already see the 'flash animation' games that you can do with pocket touchscreens and such. oqo will bring it, and who knows, maybe linux ain't so far away from having serious interface pull. a few thousand oqo's running some easy distribution system (oh, gentoo, OE, etc...) could be a big headsup for creative minds...
i wouldn't buy a handheld, though, which couldn't run linux by default. this article sorta made a good point about that, i think.
I don't use it to store 'everything', just the current set of tunes that I want to carry around with me.
Has the added benefit that I can do 5gig backups of my iPod at a time, to a large offline Firewire disk, and swap 'collections' really easily, 5 fat gigs at once.
I rarely listen to more than 5gigs of music in one session... it doesn't make much sense to me to carry around everything... just the set I feel like having.
I've lost too many disks containing too many valuable archives to always get 'the biggest I can' for storing stuff. I use big disks as backup devices, and 'russian-doll' my most active disks around, so I'm always pretty safe...
You're saying that software should be free because software is useless without hardware and because hardware is useless without software.
Why yes I am. I suggest you read the whole thread before you break out your insult toy.
Actually, I am intimately familiar with software development, having been a professional coder for 22 years. I know how easy it is to write good code that distributes well. Quite.
Once the boards have been designed and the fabs built, it is very "easy" to fabricate silicon.
So, you're saying you can FTP me a CPU upgrade? Cool, lemme at it!
Someone has to write it, which takes time and effort, and that someone should be compensated for his time and effort, assuming that someone else finds his work valuable and is willing to pay for it.
Someone 'does have to' write software, it doesn't write itself. But you can write software for fun, for the love of it, and exclusively for the use you will get out of the hardware. It shouldn't be that the only thing you can do with computers, specific hardware, is dictated to you by an economically-ensconced technocracy.
Free Software is radical because its at one end of the scale. Have you ever considered what is at the other end? As long as those two ends are far and wide apart, and our society supports such a suspension, then there is still tons of room in the middle for a compromise which works for all who choose to use computers to do useful things in their life.
If, instead, software can only be licensed, and there is no choice, and there are no possibilities to further attend to that software and improve it, then the quality of software - and computer use in general - degrades. This has been proven, time and again, against many sound and resolute laws (Moore, et al.)
I'm not advocating a free-only approach to computer usage; sure, as long as we've got an economic system which feeds us, we should strengthen that system. But we ought to be very careful about having the controls of that system usurped from us.
Free Software is a front against that control. Compilers and run-time environments, specifically...
Ummm... Sofware and computers are not a case of guns and ammo, my friend, and I will tell you why.
Yeah, okay, it'd be a 'fine argument' to compare computers+software with blade+razor (though it seems you're not even thinking about it, you're just arguing) were it not for the fact that, computers and software are -essential- to each other in a profoundly different way than razors, or gas and stoves, in that they represent an infinite-resource machine.
An essence exists in the relationship which factually promotes freedom.
The thing about computers+software, philosophically, is that one is a resource made of generally cheap materials, refined and processed into a machine of finite design which as a product must be 100% operational to be of any value whatsoever, and one is an entire realm of infinite possibilities which requires no additional earthly resources more than electricity (generally easy to produce) in order to accomplish magnanimous gain through the productive attention of a living human being... who is incidentally, while operating in the state which produces code to run on such machines, generally not killing anyone, while enhancing their environment with wonderous tasks of automation.
Maybe thats too deep a concept for you (this is/. after all), so maybe I should frame it a little more comfortably: When was the last time you used your gas stove to mine gas?
(I'd love to see that hack!)
Software 'should be free' because in fact, it is an expression of Infinity, as close to any that humans have ever made. As a resource, computers represent infinity.
There are an infinite number of things you can do with computer+software... as long as you've got an intrinsically finite machine (physically, I mean...) to run it on. That means a functioning power grid as much as it means silicon in a box.
We'll run out of gas eventually, and those stoves will be useless. But good computers will run for hundreds and hundreds of years, doing productively useful things presuming we are creating civilization capable of running them... and there's a compiler available.
Sure, Microsoft Windows runs on those PC's now. Think those PC's (which should, factually, still be around) will be running that same software in 200 years? In 300 years? In 400?
Free Software now means better software in the future. In Linux' case, that event horizon has been relatively short...
What I don't like is to be forced into giving my work away for free.
Nobody is forcing you to do anything. If there was force involved in "Free Software", then it wouldn't be "Free", it'd be "Enforced" software.
What you should be saying is, "I don't like being forced to pay out the nose for software that should be free", such as the operating system, without which your hardware is essentially useless. When you buy hardware, it does nothing until you've "bought" software to make it run.
Ideas are cheap to duplicate, but expensive to invent (cost of doing research vs. buying a book).
This is not an absolute. Some idea's are extremely cheap, some are very difficult (and thus costly) to realize. In the end, though, software idea's don't go anywhere without the hardware... and it is this fact which brings about the free software movement; the notion that expensive computer hardware is essentially useless without a second, easy-to-produce (and duplicate) commodity, namely software.
Software is easy to produce. Compare what it takes to write software with what it takes to fabricate silicon. This comparison cannot be made without the conclusion that software is *always* going to be cheaper than hardware. It is simply a natural law, alongside the other 'obvious' natural law that states that software is useless without something to run it on.
Free software is an attempt to embrace that natural law. $oftware which co$ts is an attempt to refute it... and involves a degree of ignorance, nay naivete, on the part of the purchaser, like all capitalist systems...
Concept-wise, the notion of a wireless grid of computing devices is as old as the hills, or at least i-Tron...
As with i-Tron, though, the problem has been in-fighting between the various chipset/SOC vendors for control of the protocol... 'licensing revenue' as a line-item has always been a big barrier for implementors who want to get multi-vendor devices talking with each other.
As usual, its not a technological stumbling block, its a legal/business one. However it seems that the market has taught a few lessons in this regard... people want wireless, and a fairly significant portion of the market are willing to pay for it, already. That market weight is starting to overcome the big-business reasons for holding all this tech back, it seems...
Yeah, and I guess all that mass wealth that gets taken from Cocaine dealers and redistributed is being done by "Communists" too, eh?
Microsoft got this way because they were exceptionally vicious and predatory, destroying all competitors, caring not one single iota about quality, just like your average crack dealer... should society allow such behaviour to go by, rewarded?
They have ruined the computer industry. Why shouldn't they be punished?
Microsoft has overstayed its welcome. Their past litany of cut-throat misadventures has piss-tainted this sand-box far too many times.
The only thing that would entice me to contribute to their efforts to get even more richer, and even more powerful, is if they were broken up into smaller companies, their mass wealth redistributed, and Windows gets open sourced.
Honestly, not a flame. I've been completely Microsoft-free for 5 years now, I intend to keep it that way...
there are tons out there, cheap. ARM, even... google is your friend (so is linuxdevices...) they can be had for $99 or so, or free, in some cases, if you know your vendors...
that, and the linux kernel, is all you need to debug USB.
Also, if customers are writing their own programs with a C compiler to get speed, why not just use something like the Zaurus running Linux, and one of the many, full featured, science/math software suites for Linux?
Ah yes, rampant Consumericanism at its finest.
Maybe the reason 'they' 'don't just use something like a Zaurus running Linux' is because they've already got a fine working H49g+ in 'their' posession.
Don't you get it? You're only 'countering the view' on automatic. The solution to every cool hack is not automatically "you can buy something else instead and it'll be cooler".
(Not a Flame, not a Troll. Truly, this is Consumerican 'logic' at its finest...)
Sure, it may be 'safe' by our standards now, just like asbestos was safe enough to make underwear out of, and people used to get their toes x-ray'ed 'for the perfect fit'... but who is to say there won't be horrible, unwanted side-effects from this, somewhere down the road, when someone else invents a technology that allows us to connect the dots together in ways we don't, currently?
The problem with Science is the same as the problem with Religion. Absolutes are un-attainable.
Oh, and also, if it goes out of control and creates a small black hole that slowly starts consuming everything, we'll have time to use the bits of the moon that are left to shove the whole mess off into the Sun.
All I'm saying is, and you seem to be intent on 'defeating me' in spite of my point, is that Terrorism is defined by those who would use its threat to convince people to fight where ordinarily they would not.
You think Osama doesn't consider the U.S. a "terror-using nation"? He's quite justified in that view.
You think the British didn't call early Americans "Terrorists"? All the arguments that the modern American can bring to bear against their 'terrorist enemies' were once used against their fledgling state too, you know.
So where do you draw the line on such name-calling?
You are the product of a Police State. Such systems believe there can be no order without a policing force, without the state using threat of force upon its citizens to govern.
I don't, factually, believe this to be true, nor a valid means of building civilization - this doesn't make me an anarchist.
America is not fighting a war on terrorism. It is fighting a war on itself...
Slashdot Mirror
duh ... put the right sort of condom on the OQO, and you can use your grubby fingers as a touchpad.
these things are just a software patch or two away from being -good- devices in the usability department, turning it into almost totally tactile software (i.e. you are touching the place the action is happening, not some remote peripheral...)
i can already see the 'flash animation' games that you can do with pocket touchscreens and such. oqo will bring it, and who knows, maybe linux ain't so far away from having serious interface pull. a few thousand oqo's running some easy distribution system (oh, gentoo, OE, etc...) could be a big headsup for creative minds...
i wouldn't buy a handheld, though, which couldn't run linux by default. this article sorta made a good point about that, i think.
I don't use it to store 'everything', just the current set of tunes that I want to carry around with me.
...
Has the added benefit that I can do 5gig backups of my iPod at a time, to a large offline Firewire disk, and swap 'collections' really easily, 5 fat gigs at once.
I rarely listen to more than 5gigs of music in one session... it doesn't make much sense to me to carry around everything... just the set I feel like having.
I've lost too many disks containing too many valuable archives to always get 'the biggest I can' for storing stuff. I use big disks as backup devices, and 'russian-doll' my most active disks around, so I'm always pretty safe
I lived in LA for 15 years. I lived in Tokyo for 5 months. Both towns are Blade Runner analogs, today.
... In LA you have nothing but replicants, though.)
(Tokyo is downtrodden humanity
yeah, soon as i parsed that sentence, i pretty much phased out.
yet another obsessive technoid reviewing the latest landfill dreck, attempting to 'bump his cool' by surrounding himself with gadgets.
i know, i know. this is slashdot. but geeze, really. all this rampant techno consumericanism is starting to get really passé...
converge already, damnit, so i only need ONE toy to be enslaved to!
You're saying that software should be free because software is useless without hardware and because hardware is useless without software.
Why yes I am.
I suggest you read the whole thread before you break out your insult toy.
Actually, I am intimately familiar with software development, having been a professional coder for 22 years. I know how easy it is to write good code that distributes well. Quite.
Once the boards have been designed and the fabs built, it is very "easy" to fabricate silicon.
So, you're saying you can FTP me a CPU upgrade? Cool, lemme at it!
Someone has to write it, which takes time and effort, and that someone should be compensated for his time and effort, assuming that someone else finds his work valuable and is willing to pay for it.
Someone 'does have to' write software, it doesn't write itself. But you can write software for fun, for the love of it, and exclusively for the use you will get out of the hardware. It shouldn't be that the only thing you can do with computers, specific hardware, is dictated to you by an economically-ensconced technocracy.
Free Software is radical because its at one end of the scale. Have you ever considered what is at the other end? As long as those two ends are far and wide apart, and our society supports such a suspension, then there is still tons of room in the middle for a compromise which works for all who choose to use computers to do useful things in their life.
If, instead, software can only be licensed, and there is no choice, and there are no possibilities to further attend to that software and improve it, then the quality of software - and computer use in general - degrades. This has been proven, time and again, against many sound and resolute laws (Moore, et al.)
I'm not advocating a free-only approach to computer usage; sure, as long as we've got an economic system which feeds us, we should strengthen that system. But we ought to be very careful about having the controls of that system usurped from us.
Free Software is a front against that control. Compilers and run-time environments, specifically...
Ummm... Sofware and computers are not a case of guns and ammo, my friend, and I will tell you why.
/. after all), so maybe I should frame it a little more comfortably: When was the last time you used your gas stove to mine gas?
... as long as you've got an intrinsically finite machine (physically, I mean...) to run it on. That means a functioning power grid as much as it means silicon in a box.
... and there's a compiler available.
...
Yeah, okay, it'd be a 'fine argument' to compare computers+software with blade+razor (though it seems you're not even thinking about it, you're just arguing) were it not for the fact that, computers and software are -essential- to each other in a profoundly different way than razors, or gas and stoves, in that they represent an infinite-resource machine.
An essence exists in the relationship which factually promotes freedom.
The thing about computers+software, philosophically, is that one is a resource made of generally cheap materials, refined and processed into a machine of finite design which as a product must be 100% operational to be of any value whatsoever, and one is an entire realm of infinite possibilities which requires no additional earthly resources more than electricity (generally easy to produce) in order to accomplish magnanimous gain through the productive attention of a living human being... who is incidentally, while operating in the state which produces code to run on such machines, generally not killing anyone, while enhancing their environment with wonderous tasks of automation.
Maybe thats too deep a concept for you (this is
(I'd love to see that hack!)
Software 'should be free' because in fact, it is an expression of Infinity, as close to any that humans have ever made. As a resource, computers represent infinity.
There are an infinite number of things you can do with computer+software
We'll run out of gas eventually, and those stoves will be useless. But good computers will run for hundreds and hundreds of years, doing productively useful things presuming we are creating civilization capable of running them
Sure, Microsoft Windows runs on those PC's now. Think those PC's (which should, factually, still be around) will be running that same software in 200 years? In 300 years? In 400?
Free Software now means better software in the future. In Linux' case, that event horizon has been relatively short
What I don't like is to be forced into giving my work away for free.
... and it is this fact which brings about the free software movement; the notion that expensive computer hardware is essentially useless without a second, easy-to-produce (and duplicate) commodity, namely software.
... and involves a degree of ignorance, nay naivete, on the part of the purchaser, like all capitalist systems ...
Nobody is forcing you to do anything. If there was force involved in "Free Software", then it wouldn't be "Free", it'd be "Enforced" software.
What you should be saying is, "I don't like being forced to pay out the nose for software that should be free", such as the operating system, without which your hardware is essentially useless. When you buy hardware, it does nothing until you've "bought" software to make it run.
Ideas are cheap to duplicate, but expensive to invent (cost of doing research vs. buying a book).
This is not an absolute. Some idea's are extremely cheap, some are very difficult (and thus costly) to realize. In the end, though, software idea's don't go anywhere without the hardware
Software is easy to produce. Compare what it takes to write software with what it takes to fabricate silicon. This comparison cannot be made without the conclusion that software is *always* going to be cheaper than hardware. It is simply a natural law, alongside the other 'obvious' natural law that states that software is useless without something to run it on.
Free software is an attempt to embrace that natural law. $oftware which co$ts is an attempt to refute it
... its just new 'implementation'.
...
... 'licensing revenue' as a line-item has always been a big barrier for implementors who want to get multi-vendor devices talking with each other.
... people want wireless, and a fairly significant portion of the market are willing to pay for it, already. That market weight is starting to overcome the big-business reasons for holding all this tech back, it seems...
Concept-wise, the notion of a wireless grid of computing devices is as old as the hills, or at least i-Tron
As with i-Tron, though, the problem has been in-fighting between the various chipset/SOC vendors for control of the protocol
As usual, its not a technological stumbling block, its a legal/business one. However it seems that the market has taught a few lessons in this regard
Oh, and ObSlashdotIsm: Imagine a Beou..
Yeah, and I guess all that mass wealth that gets taken from Cocaine dealers and redistributed is being done by "Communists" too, eh?
... should society allow such behaviour to go by, rewarded?
Microsoft got this way because they were exceptionally vicious and predatory, destroying all competitors, caring not one single iota about quality, just like your average crack dealer
They have ruined the computer industry. Why shouldn't they be punished?
I'm not asking for a violent solution, I'm asking for a punitive one, so that such behaviour isn't rewarded and further encouraged ...
Microsoft has overstayed its welcome. Their past litany of cut-throat misadventures has piss-tainted this sand-box far too many times.
The only thing that would entice me to contribute to their efforts to get even more richer, and even more powerful, is if they were broken up into smaller companies, their mass wealth redistributed, and Windows gets open sourced.
Honestly, not a flame. I've been completely Microsoft-free for 5 years now, I intend to keep it that way
Different period, different characters, different plot, different subject.
...
Same style.
I'm reading "Pattern Recognition" now, and I don't frankly see much difference between "Neuromancers" Case, and PR's Cayce.
Cyberpunk authors get stuck in ruts. Paint a box different colors, its still a box
there are tons out there, cheap. ARM, even
that, and the linux kernel, is all you need to debug USB.
Does your wife pay for the Olympics? Probably not.
Thus, Coke makes the Olympics happen.
Also, if customers are writing their own programs with a C compiler to get speed, why not just use something like the Zaurus running Linux, and one of the many, full featured, science/math software suites for Linux?
Ah yes, rampant Consumericanism at its finest.
Maybe the reason 'they' 'don't just use something like a Zaurus running Linux' is because they've already got a fine working H49g+ in 'their' posession.
Don't you get it? You're only 'countering the view' on automatic. The solution to every cool hack is not automatically "you can buy something else instead and it'll be cooler".
(Not a Flame, not a Troll. Truly, this is Consumerican 'logic' at its finest...)
... Doesn't Mean that It actually Won't Be.
... but who is to say there won't be horrible, unwanted side-effects from this, somewhere down the road, when someone else invents a technology that allows us to connect the dots together in ways we don't, currently?
Sure, it may be 'safe' by our standards now, just like asbestos was safe enough to make underwear out of, and people used to get their toes x-ray'ed 'for the perfect fit'
The problem with Science is the same as the problem with Religion. Absolutes are un-attainable.
Geeze. Do the words "Big Oil" mean nothing to you?
.. here's another one: General Electric!
...
What about "Monsanto"?
How about "Microsoft"? (okay, that one was cheap)
Oh, oh, I know
These guys all sell 'ice', you know
Nobody sides with them because they are nuts.
This is the problem with politics (and people) today. Those who want power and use it are quite busy defining what a 'nut' is to include their enemy.
Yesterdays patriot is todays terrorist. And we've got so-called 'experts' re-defining sanity daily.
Its been out for 6 years.
Thats 6 years worth of people having to go through this same issue.
That way, we get two programs in one.
...
Oh, and also, if it goes out of control and creates a small black hole that slowly starts consuming everything, we'll have time to use the bits of the moon that are left to shove the whole mess off into the Sun.
Or something
yeah, but you don't see people trying to pay for their lifestyles with shuttles and booster rockets, either ...
duh ... you're the one who is lousy at extrapolating trends.
...
point 1: its not 2020 yet.
point 2: cell phones are rapidly becoming computing devices. by 2020, they may well be the only computing device you need.
i know i'm currently shopping for a new cell phone that can handle my e-mail needs
All I'm saying is, and you seem to be intent on 'defeating me' in spite of my point, is that Terrorism is defined by those who would use its threat to convince people to fight where ordinarily they would not.
...
You think Osama doesn't consider the U.S. a "terror-using nation"? He's quite justified in that view.
You think the British didn't call early Americans "Terrorists"? All the arguments that the modern American can bring to bear against their 'terrorist enemies' were once used against their fledgling state too, you know.
So where do you draw the line on such name-calling?
You are the product of a Police State. Such systems believe there can be no order without a policing force, without the state using threat of force upon its citizens to govern.
I don't, factually, believe this to be true, nor a valid means of building civilization - this doesn't make me an anarchist.
America is not fighting a war on terrorism. It is fighting a war on itself
damn, i missed that ... would make the olympics worth watching if they only had more sex in it.
as it is right now, its nothing but a platform for alpha- types and worship of the elite.
just like any commercial sport, more brainwashing for the masses...