Re:On a somewhat unrelated topic...
on
NYT on EA Games
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· Score: 1
Marshall Brain has been addressing this topic with a series of essays called "Robotic Nation" (google it).
While I don't agree with all he says, everything he says is certainly worth considering. Start there.
Personally I think there will always be things to do, the hard part is getting the minimum wage to drop as production efficiency goes up, and thus allowing people to live cheaply on a small amount of work (sounds like a contradiction, I know, but I don't think it is).
Last I looked (and bought), they only had two motors. Althoug it really is amazing what you can do with only two motors, everything I really wanted to build really needed like 6 or so.
Notes is actually a very popular solution for collaberation and content management.
But it is kind of old, and under attack in that area from MS and several other smaller and newer solutions.
One of the problems with Notes was that it was good for so many things, that Lotus never figured out where they should concentrate their efforts. And eventual it was eclipsed everywhere.
Remember Lotus Symphony? Same fate, (but nowhere nears as profitable).
I know everyone hates the Evil Empire, but from where I stand SharePoint looks hot, everybody with money wants it.
IBM never really understood Lotus, and now they are letting it die. Too bad, they were years ahead of their time. Now they are lagging..
Wiki's make everything public, right? I find it hard to believe that every business model can accomodate that, even if more can than the PHBs realize. There has got to be a form of collaberation that allows a firm to control their own IP..
Unless of course we do away with firms owning IP...
I was told by someone that should know that the variable cost by one of the biggest american laptop manufactures was $150. Seems a bit low to me, but if it is true than a $100 PC seems rather trivial.
I am still amazed that gasoline engines work. They seem to be a far too complex solution for a relatively simple problem. But they do, and they are cheap, because we put so much engineering energy into them.
I am sure the same can happen for chemical rockets. And with manufacturing costs dropping ever closer to zero, and materials science cooking along as well (I prefer that name to nanotech), I think that cheap chemical spaceflight is around the corner.
And life is risky. Why shouldn't people be allowed to risk their lives? There are plenty of people willing to risk their lives to do something unique, or just cool, rather then live out their lives as unremarkable consumers.
The problem is the legal profession (out to make a buck anyway they can) and the press (who have a total lack of perspective as they are all numerically illiterate).
This is not really true. From the invention of the gasoline internal combustion engine, to the cheap and mass usage of it, there were no radically new ideas introduced. People just kept making it cheaper, and taking the idea more seriously.
Seems a lot like what the X-Prize people (BR in particular) are doing.
I think your comment is going to look pretty silly in a decade or so.
Umm hmm, reminds of once when I swerved out of annoyance on the Autobahn (idiot in front of my was slowing down suddenly for no reason, not another car or speed limit or anything in sight), probably just to annoy me.
Thing is, as I verred right, my car (a big German car built for speed) started to swerve back and forth (some kind of resonance, scared the sh*t out of me).
In the end nothing bad happenend, but it taught me a few lessons,
- one is that high speed driving is no place for peevishness (shouldn't have to learn that),
- another is that unexpected things happen when you try new things out (especially at high speed).
I think Mike Melville just got a taste of the second.
You make a valid point, but I think it is over-the-top to not use the term IP. As you say, IP is characterized by the fact it can be copied for free, and material objects can't be (nanotechnological miracles set aside).
While the law treats patents, copyrights and trademarks differently, they are all forms of IP, and it is not clear (to me at least) that they should be treated differently at all. So it is okay to use the term IP, as long as you do not make the mistake of assuminig that it is a legally well-defined term.
The underlying question is how should society allocate resources to developing IP, as the abiltiy to copy it for free invalidates the usual price/cost (marginal ROI) mechanism for resource allocation.
The current laws are just history, and while they might offer guidence, they are clearly non-optimal.
I love the lousy camera in my phone. I do a lot of business travel (in europe) and it is nice to have a camera to take shots of various landmarks. I never have my good camera "handy".
However the point about some firms not liking cameras it valid. I wish the camera could be physically extracted so I could leave it at the desk sometimes, instead of the entire unit.
So you are for restrictions keeping people or corperations from getting too rich or sucessful?
I'm not saying you can't make a case against MS or RIAA (MS is clearly reaping monopoly rents, and the RIAA is a classic cartel). But the arguments you just put forward are simple jealousy.
But I personally am fine with Malaysis's "guidelines". If they make sense, then their public sector should operate more efficiently then their neighbors who have no such "guidelines" (like Thailand).
Actually he pointed at evidence where critism by him seemed to directly and immediately (like in a period of days) to those features being added. He actually seemed to be taking credit for calling attention to those missing Linux features. This seems a bit rich, but I am way to lazy to check up on his evidence.
But I think the real conclusion (that he implied but didn't say) is that the Linux Kernel Team is very quick to add any feature that Windows has and Linux is missing, even if the actual utility of the feature is debatable. Which actually makes sense because Windows is Linux's main competitor, and perceptions are as important as reality.
But we all know that those features mostly don't bring more than a few percent to the table either way (in most senarios). Kernels are basically already pretty close to perfect. Except Linux has better scheduling and you can read the source code without a disassembler:)
The medium term future of Windows will be decided more by how all that extra hard-wired Longhorn functionality is accepted by the market rather than a Kernel feature gap.
Very, very few of the comments here have any relevance to what Russinovich talked about, or have any kind of developer perspective at all.
The topic and the talk (I saw it) was very interesting for a real developer, and the slides were all cleared by Linus, Dave Cutler, Ingo Molnar and several others.
Russinovich's conclusion (that Linux is adding many Windows features) was no where near as interesting as the discussion of what those features where and how they were evolving.
I think people just piled into this thread to rag on MS. And the comments (mostly modded all the way to 5) are repetitive and non-original. It would be a pity if that became SlashDot's main purpose.
Slashdot Mirror
Marshall Brain has been addressing this topic with a series of essays called "Robotic Nation" (google it).
While I don't agree with all he says, everything he says is certainly worth considering. Start there.
Personally I think there will always be things to do, the hard part is getting the minimum wage to drop as production efficiency goes up, and thus allowing people to live cheaply on a small amount of work (sounds like a contradiction, I know, but I don't think it is).
Politely: detension is not a word (I think you were thinking of "entspannung").
:)
And your english is great. In fact it is so good that I decided I had better check on www.dictionary.com before I posted this
And yes, I am a pedant.
Last I looked (and bought), they only had two motors. Althoug it really is amazing what you can do with only two motors, everything I really wanted to build really needed like 6 or so.
Notes is actually a very popular solution for collaberation and content management.
But it is kind of old, and under attack in that area from MS and several other smaller and newer solutions.
One of the problems with Notes was that it was good for so many things, that Lotus never figured out where they should concentrate their efforts. And eventual it was eclipsed everywhere.
Remember Lotus Symphony? Same fate, (but nowhere nears as profitable).
I know everyone hates the Evil Empire, but from where I stand SharePoint looks hot, everybody with money wants it.
IBM never really understood Lotus, and now they are letting it die. Too bad, they were years ahead of their time. Now they are lagging..
Wiki's make everything public, right? I find it hard to believe that every business model can accomodate that, even if more can than the PHBs realize. There has got to be a form of collaberation that allows a firm to control their own IP..
Unless of course we do away with firms owning IP...
I was told by someone that should know that the variable cost by one of the biggest american laptop manufactures was $150. Seems a bit low to me, but if it is true than a $100 PC seems rather trivial.
I am still amazed that gasoline engines work. They seem to be a far too complex solution for a relatively simple problem. But they do, and they are cheap, because we put so much engineering energy into them.
I am sure the same can happen for chemical rockets. And with manufacturing costs dropping ever closer to zero, and materials science cooking along as well (I prefer that name to nanotech), I think that cheap chemical spaceflight is around the corner.
And life is risky. Why shouldn't people be allowed to risk their lives? There are plenty of people willing to risk their lives to do something unique, or just cool, rather then live out their lives as unremarkable consumers.
The problem is the legal profession (out to make a buck anyway they can) and the press (who have a total lack of perspective as they are all numerically illiterate).
This is not really true. From the invention of the gasoline internal combustion engine, to the cheap and mass usage of it, there were no radically new ideas introduced. People just kept making it cheaper, and taking the idea more seriously.
Seems a lot like what the X-Prize people (BR in particular) are doing.
I think your comment is going to look pretty silly in a decade or so.
Umm hmm, reminds of once when I swerved out of annoyance on the Autobahn (idiot in front of my was slowing down suddenly for no reason, not another car or speed limit or anything in sight), probably just to annoy me.
Thing is, as I verred right, my car (a big German car built for speed) started to swerve back and forth (some kind of resonance, scared the sh*t out of me).
In the end nothing bad happenend, but it taught me a few lessons,
- one is that high speed driving is no place for peevishness (shouldn't have to learn that),
- another is that unexpected things happen when you try new things out (especially at high speed).
I think Mike Melville just got a taste of the second.
That is what I think. He even said he thought it was kinda cool.
I think he just wanted to say "Yehaa...".
I would start with what they are used for. If you start out with the history you will lose a lot of them.
History is more interesting ina context.
But will they forever? We are at the begining of OSS and people are still very idealistic. But we all have to eat...
You make a valid point, but I think it is over-the-top to not use the term IP. As you say, IP is characterized by the fact it can be copied for free, and material objects can't be (nanotechnological miracles set aside).
While the law treats patents, copyrights and trademarks differently, they are all forms of IP, and it is not clear (to me at least) that they should be treated differently at all. So it is okay to use the term IP, as long as you do not make the mistake of assuminig that it is a legally well-defined term.
The underlying question is how should society allocate resources to developing IP, as the abiltiy to copy it for free invalidates the usual price/cost (marginal ROI) mechanism for resource allocation.
The current laws are just history, and while they might offer guidence, they are clearly non-optimal.
I love the lousy camera in my phone. I do a lot of business travel (in europe) and it is nice to have a camera to take shots of various landmarks. I never have my good camera "handy".
However the point about some firms not liking cameras it valid. I wish the camera could be physically extracted so I could leave it at the desk sometimes, instead of the entire unit.
So you are for restrictions keeping people or corperations from getting too rich or sucessful?
I'm not saying you can't make a case against MS or RIAA (MS is clearly reaping monopoly rents, and the RIAA is a classic cartel). But the arguments you just put forward are simple jealousy.
But I personally am fine with Malaysis's "guidelines". If they make sense, then their public sector should operate more efficiently then their neighbors who have no such "guidelines" (like Thailand).
We shall see.
Obviously free software benefits those economies more that import software, and harms more those that export it. At least at first.
However this might later lead to them chosing the "wrong" tool, when a more appropriate non-OSS tool exists.
In the long run restrictions tend to hurt more than they help, and often achieve the opposite (like rent control or job protection).
Simple economics really.
Can't slashdot readers take critisim and self-reflection? He is only stating facts.
It is easier to critise than to construct, and many in this forum are guilty of that.
PS, You can send me one of those gmail thingees if you have any left (mark99 aaattt gmx dot net)
Actually he pointed at evidence where critism by him seemed to directly and immediately (like in a period of days) to those features being added. He actually seemed to be taking credit for calling attention to those missing Linux features. This seems a bit rich, but I am way to lazy to check up on his evidence.
:)
But I think the real conclusion (that he implied but didn't say) is that the Linux Kernel Team is very quick to add any feature that Windows has and Linux is missing, even if the actual utility of the feature is debatable. Which actually makes sense because Windows is Linux's main competitor, and perceptions are as important as reality.
But we all know that those features mostly don't bring more than a few percent to the table either way (in most senarios). Kernels are basically already pretty close to perfect. Except Linux has better scheduling and you can read the source code without a disassembler
The medium term future of Windows will be decided more by how all that extra hard-wired Longhorn functionality is accepted by the market rather than a Kernel feature gap.
Linux will clearly last forever.
Very, very few of the comments here have any relevance to what Russinovich talked about, or have any kind of developer perspective at all.
The topic and the talk (I saw it) was very interesting for a real developer, and the slides were all cleared by Linus, Dave Cutler, Ingo Molnar and several others.
Russinovich's conclusion (that Linux is adding many Windows features) was no where near as interesting as the discussion of what those features where and how they were evolving.
I think people just piled into this thread to rag on MS. And the comments (mostly modded all the way to 5) are repetitive and non-original. It would be a pity if that became SlashDot's main purpose.
Bill didn't write the NT Kernel. It was Dave Cutler.
For MS software for example. A good anti-virus with an up-to-date library. This might actually be too much work for unpaid volunteers.
And a good disassembly program. Like IDA Pro. This is what the pros use to analyze viruses and the like.
Something like a kick-ass OSS IDA Pro will be needed in the upcoming OSS-DRM wars.
Pardon the spelling. It was never my strong suite:)
The question is did MS fund them to be anti-OSS? Or does MS go looking for anti-OSS organizations to fund?
Don't flame me but:
Seeing as IIS costs money and Apache doesn't I would expect IIS to be somewhat more popular on big comercial sites that serve a lot of pages.
Does anybody have any statistics for those?
Ouch again.
That would be "683,000 people and I".
Ouch. It looked wrong, but I checked on Google and got 683,000 hits and no suggestion of an alternate spelling, so I thought it was right.
:)
Me and 683,000 other people can't be wrong