I'll have to try it when I get home, but I'm 90% certain that's what you get if you open a document in MS Word on the Mac, and then use the native PDF exporter (which you get to through the Print dialog).
Maybe there's some formatting or something that they were worried about keeping in the outputted PDF that caused them to not want to export using OpenOffice?
Ironically enough, I don't use OpenOffice on a day to day basis, but I keep it on my work PC for the sole purpose of converting things to PDF when I'm at work. (I used to use a little freeware printer driver for this, but unfortunately it's license agreement specifies that it's for noncommercial use only.)
That might work for software companies, but think of other businesses -- like a medical transcription office, or some other place that probably uses fairly standard "office" software. (Actually I'm not sure what transcriptionists use, so if you want to insert a better example, feel free.) They could have gone with Macintosh, but it's perceived -- probably with good reason -- as being very expensive. Linux is perceived as being complicated, or was until quite recently in its evolution, if it was even known to people at all. Windows was the choice nobody ever got fired for, and it became that way because IBM was the thing nobody was ever fired for suggesting, and IBMs ran Windows.
Since then, most businesses have just been moving on inertia. There's never been a real reason for them to change, or at least one that outweighs the perceived problems associated with changing OSes. And over time the rut gets deeper and deeper, until it's too deep to even see out of.
Nobody really cares what new employees are comfortable with, coming in to a business. The job market is not (and historically has not been, I don't think) so tight that business owners are really falling over themselves to cater to whatever they're teaching in colleges and high schools. Quite the opposite; when it became clear that Windows was the "operating system of business," a lot of schools faced pressure to drop Macs and switch to Windows, for no other reason than parents thought it would make their kids more 'salable' on the job market.
And software companies didn't target Windows because that's the OS it was easy to get programmers for, they targeted Windows because that's where the largest base of customers is, and then they hired the kind of programmers that can do that sort of work.
In short I think you're reversing the motivations. The corporate world drives what people major in while in college, not the other way around. It's not hard to program on a Mac, and the developments tools weren't really that much harder to get a hold of -- I had a copy of the Macintosh Programmers Workshop when I was in Junior High, and I'm pretty sure that's been freely available since the advent of the platform, or soon after.
People will learn to program for a platform when there is a market for programmers who know that platform, and they'll be a demand for programmers when there is a large installed base of potential customers for that software. Not the other way around.
If it were the other way around, we'd all be using software that was written in Pascal.
I did some Googling and apparently some work has already been done [sourceforge.net] to get extents into ext3, motivated by the desire to eliminate slow deletion (which I've noticed... deleting a 160GB hard disk image took minutes on ext3, but was instantaneous on NTFS).
Very interesting. I've noticed the exact same thing, although I was comparing an HFS+ Mac to an ext3 Linux box. They both had the same data on them (rsync'ed from the same server), consisting of several large files; deleting them on the Mac was basically instant, which is what I'm used to, while deleting them on the Linux machine caused a noticeable delay. The delay was not present when deleting large numbers of small files. I suspected something like this was the case, although for some reason I was laboring under the impression that ext3 was extents-based.
I noticed nobody had pointed out HFS+ until this. Although it's not widely used (except on Apple systems), it is available under the APSL (FSF approved, although GPL incompatible) and there is support for it on Linux and BSD, although I'm not sure if it's something I'd want to use on a production system yet; it exists now more as a way for people to access their iPods, I think. I've never seen any hard metrics on how it performs, but it does do journaling and it has a reasonably good reputation as a workstation FS since it was introduced.
If they were serious about doing anything to China, they would threaten to put some tariffs on Chinese imports into the U.S. -- perhaps equal to whatever China puts on U.S. goods? There would be a certain amount of poetic justice in that. (Actually, I'd be all for doing that just as a general rule, with every country.) Or if we agree that's unworkable, we could go for an industry that they haven't really started yet, so that it wouldn't affect American consumers too much -- how about the Chinese auto market? I suspect it would only take a few hundred dollars of tariffs per unit to make them less competitive than the Koreans or the Japanese. I can't imagine that the central planners there haven't started to take automobile exports to the U.S. into consideration for the next few years -- all that predicted revenue would disappear from the sheets overnight.
Do I think we have the balls to do that? Sadly, no.
But to stop a U.S. high tech firm from exporting things to China, especially given that high tech is one of the only areas where the U.S. is even close to competitive with the Third World, seems a little like shooting ourselves in the foot.
I think what Cisco, Google, and Yahoo (among many others) have done is deplorable, and I'm particularly incensed at Google's brazen hypocrisy. But as a country which exports so little in relation to our imports, I'm not sure this is the way to make a point to the Chinese government.
Erm, producing neutrons implies some sort of nuclear activity. Either fission or fusion of some sort of decay process (spontaneous neutron emission). By ruling out fission and neutron emission via decay, which are possible to do by knowing the inputs, you're pretty much stuck with fusion as an explanation for the output.
You make it sound like shuffling some neutrons around is easy. It's not. Producing a source of neutrons is a pretty nice feat by itself. However there's a very, very large difference between producing neutrons via fusion, and plonking down a SimCity 2000-esque, pollution-free, "Fusion Power Plant."
Given how destructive neutron radiation is, I'm somewhat surprised that they'd be talking about strapping a reasonably strong source to someone's person.
I think that's kind of the idea, if you were trying to kill a tumor with it.
At any rate, I get the feeling that the 'cancer treatment' idea was probably just something that whoever gave the interview to the article's author pulled out of their ass when they were asked about 'possible uses.' It sounds good, and who knows, it might even be true.
I think that's why they're marketing it as a cancer treatment. For, you know, people who already have cancer. Which tends to kill you without treatment.
Chemotherapy drugs aren't exactly a walk in the park either, but they have their place.
make people aware that if they intend to kill themselves, they better make sure it works.
I think this is basically the idea.
You don't want people halfheartedly trying to kill themselves and just becoming vegetables; it gets expensive to keep them in nursing homes and whatnot. Or if they don't go that far and just manage to injure themselves, it's still a drag on the system that has to take care of them.
The only people that are going to be affected by anti-suicide laws are people who either don't manage to do the job right (i.e., they don't end up dead), or they tell a lot of people what they're planning beforehand and someone blows the whistle on them. In the former case, they're just stupid, in the latter, it's likely their suicide is more of a 'cry for help' than anything (or at least, that's the theory).
If you went out and bought a 12-ga shotgun or similar, and proceeded to blow your brainstem out the back of your head, I think you'd find the law rather indifferent.
Although my first actual, purchased system was too 'modern' to have a native command interpreter mode, I spent a lot of hours in the Apple II BASIC mode and will always have a soft spot for it (and will probably also never be fully comfortable with BASIC that doesn't begin each line with a number).
You don't -- or at least, I don't -- get that same 'blank page' feeling on turning on a modern desktop'ed system. Especially on my office Windows machine, where it always seems as though the hard drive is churning and clicking, for no particular reason. It's irrational, but it gives me the impression I don't have the computer's full and complete attention, and damnit -- I want that. (Besides which, it's distracting.)
I still do a lot of personal correspondance on an IBM Selectric II typewriter. Actual, physical paper letters. (Yes, the Post Office does still do things besides eBay shipments and junk mail.) If I had to pin down the one thing that keeps me coming back to the Selectric, it's the "user experience" you get when you switch it on. You sit down, you take off the cover, you insert a piece of paper. You turn the switch "On." There's a nice heavy clunking sound, the carriage twitches a bit, and then there's nothing but a low humming, and sometimes a faint whiff of ozone. If you put your hand against it, you can feel a slight vibration. And then it does nothing else, except wait for you to do something. That's its equivalent of "READY."
As much as I appreciate a good preemptively-multitasking OS and the ability to schedule things with my crontab and otherwise have the computer just 'deal with things' for me, I can't deny that there's something reassuring from time to time about using a machine that doesn't try to out-think you.
I remember not being able to play System Shock, because I wasn't on the PPC arch (which I think means I was on a m68k), but I do remember having a desktop enviroment.
That kind of leaves a big area open for suggestions. Like, every product Apple made from the Apple IIgs on until the introduction of the PPC processor (the PM6100/60, I think). I'm guessing it was a Macintosh, and not a late-model Apple (the IIgs did have a desktop environment, actually quite a nice one).
I remember being in a boat similar to yours with my Quadra 605, which used a 68LC040 processor. The thing that finally forced me to upgrade was the proliferation of "PPC only" applications (I really wanted to play Descent, actually was the thing that did it). That and it just started getting unacceptably slow with each new version of Netscape or IE that came out.
Sometimes I wonder what I would be doing now if he had given in and bought me a NES.
I wonder the exact same thing. I was the only person I knew who didn't have some form of video-game system (there was a distinct rift at some points between the "nintendo kids" and the "sony kids," and then those rich bastards who had both); the first video game system that came into our house was an NES I bought at a yard sale. I still have it around.
The tradeoff for not having an NES was that we were one of the first families to have a computer that wasn't there for some sort of business purpose.
The OP asked what people's first computer was that they actually considered theirs, and for me that was a certain Macintosh Quadra 605. In retrospect a quite miserable computer; no internal expansion bays, no way to upgrade the video, a 68LC040 processor (no FPU and buggy so that it wouldn't run the FPU emulators, either)...but it was actually mine and I did well by it for a number of years. In fact until the computer I'm using now, it was the longest-lived system I'd owned. Not too bad for a beige pizzabox.
By the time I upgraded, it sat at the center of a deskful of peripherals and addons: modem, Zip drive, CD-Rom, external hard drive, serial-port switchbox (how else are you going to attach a modem and a local printer and a network?), and about a half-dozen things daisy-chained off of the ADB ports.
That computer is gone now (although I did attempt to use it as a webserver for a while, but without built-in Ethernet it's a bit of a pain), and the only thing that's still in use from my original purchase is the keyboard: an Apple Extended Keyboard II. Even in the 1990s, Apple still did a few things right, and keyboards were one of them.
Hey, that's no different than running Windows; by running somebody's OS, you're giving them effectively absolute trust and control over your data, and Microsoft has sold out to China as well.
My point is that whether or not a company has sold out to Beijing doesn't seem to interest many members of either the corporate-decisionmaking nor the WalMart-shopping segments of our society. The corporate decisionmakers will still support China because it makes "good business sense;" that is, it keeps them competitive in one way or another to do so, and they know consumers don't care. The WalMart shoppers buy Chinese stuff at the expense of free-world goods because they're cheap. So round and round we go -- anyone who refuses to sell out basically gets ignored by consumers and crushed by their competitors.
The consumer public would have to start to care a LOT more, and demonstrating how much they care in their shopping/buying/boycotting preferences, before companies will stop funding or facilitating oppression, and doing business in (and fueling the economies of) such countries.
As a nation, I think the U.S. is far too apathetic at this point to do anything about it. As long as the people who are being oppressed don't look like us, we don't give a damn. When white Christians get massacred, we send in the Marines; when it's black Africans, we watch it on the History channel. The Chinese people are culturally too dissimilar for Americans to empathize with them closely enough to not buy that Apex DVD player; given that, you can't really blame the tech companies for what they do.
Re:What do corporations have to do with it?
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Can We Trust Google?
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· Score: 2, Insightful
True security is a fallacy in the information age.
Well said.
I think I might change it to "True privacy is a fallacy in the information age," although you could make a valid argument over whether security implies privacy or vice versa. It's really just semantics as far as I'm concerned at the moment, though.
The point is, there are people out there -- or "Corporations," but I think it's silly to point the finger at the C-word, when really they're just groups of people acting out of self-interest -- who can, if they want, drag up a lot of information on you with a few keystrokes. Of course, they probably don't know you, and don't care what you're doing, any more than they care about what any other individual in their database has written about them.
Being "secure" or maintaining your "privacy" today -- unless you're willing to just fall off the grid, and that's difficult and for most people unpleasant -- is really about keeping a low profile. Plant yourself right in the middle of that bell curve, and nobody will probably ever care who you are or what you do. Don't be the tall blade of grass, in other words, if you've got something to hide.
Do I think this is a good thing? No, I don't. But it's also the situation most people have to deal with right now.
Also, it's worth noting that SCART practically does not exist on televisions in the US. If you went into most electronics stores and asked for one, you'd probably get blank looks, or get told that it's a "weird French thing" and get pointed towards the foreign adaptor section (if they have one).
I went shopping for (analog) TV sets a few months ago and if they have a input aside from RF, composite and S-Video, it's on RCA connectors and it's not RGB, it's "component" -- that is, Y (luminance), R-Y, and B-Y. The only exception to this that I've seen are professional monitors and some high-end projectors (and stuff with a VGA port, which is basically RGB).
So for the average Joe, having RGB wouldn't do a whole lot of good, without an RGB-component converter. It's not like such a thing is exactly brain surgery (in fact I think there are ICs that do nothing but that), but it's just another hurdle you'd have to overcome.
But anyway, I do agree that the RGB outputs on the graphics card will probably be the first thing that's attacked in a HDCP system; it's going to be rather difficult to not have an unencrypted video signal of some sort available somewhere, and really it just takes somebody with a lot of free time and a good 'scope to poke around and find it. Of course, the downside to this is that you'd still need to have a valid HDCP monitor connected to the digital output in order for the signal not to be downsampled upstream; so you wouldn't be able to easily replace your HDCP monitor with some sort of un-castrated display or recording device, you'd only be able to tap into the signal.
I'm waiting for what anyone informed has to say about this suggestion as well.
I wonder what would happen if this was done on a large scale; create a "poison pill" DVD that contained a large number of garbage keys with a date set some time in the future (so that its keys would be preferred over other DVDs' that you might insert later), and you could just fill up your player's key catalog and prevent it from loading any new ones.
It seems too obvious an attack, though. I assume there's something that keeps you from trivially adding new keys to the list in the player.
However, I wonder if disabling the WRITE ability of the EPROMs or whatever they use to store the keys in the player hardware wouldn't become a popular hack.
I'm not sure that the hack for HDCP is going to come from some 'lone wolf' like DVD Jon. I think it's more likely that it'll come from some nameless Chinese electrical engineer, working for some factory that wants to get into the mod-chip business. That's unless the hardware is completely potted under an inch of epoxy.
No crashes outside of the few days needed to configure it.
That, to me, is probably the most unappealing thing that you could have said.
I've been thinking for a while of installing MythTV, but I'm afraid after using an Elgato EyeTV on my Mac, that it would probably just be an exercise that would leave me very frustrated. (The EyeTV is a commercial PVR, and it takes roughly 5-10 mins to set up and basically seems to do most of what people are trying to get MythTV to do, except the client/server stuff, for which there is a free addon.) It's basically a zero config install, does one-click to DVD and iPod (provided you have Toast), and does TiVo-like functions with the TitanTV site providing scheduling data.
Is it cheap? No. A software encoder is $149 (it relies on your processor for the heavy lifting), or an MPEG-2/MPEG-4 encoder is $329; Toast for DVD burning functions is $80. (Or you could get the older MPEG-1 model for about $70 on eBay.) There is also an HDTV version if you want that for $350. Plus you have the 'Mac tax' to factor in. But I can tell you from personal experience, it really does 'just work.'
I appreciate the effort that everyone involved in MythTV is putting in, but I think you have to be careful advocating something that's still at an early enough stage that it's a bit of a project to set up. If what you want is just a PVR, that is, the PRODUCT and not a PROJECT, there might be better alternatives out there.
Because you mentioned it, maybe you can answer this... how does MythTV/MythDVD stack up for DVD transcoding to other programs (e.g., dvd::rip, etc.)? I'm 'shopping around' for software to do this, in order to reduce the load on my Mac, and I'm trying to figure out which one is worth spending the time to set up.
On MacOS, I use the (excellent) "HandBrake" utility, which does a direct 'one shot' DVD -> MP4 transcode, while also handling subtitles, cropping/scaling, etc. It comes as one binary, too. It has a claimed 'Linux version' but from what I've seen, it's not really ready for prime-time. (Although I'd be willing to change that assessment if anyone wanted to offer evidence that it's easy to get going.)
Is there anything which does something similar on x86 Linux? I'm hoping for something that's equally easy to use -- I'm really not interested in shooting an afternoon setting up a half-dozen utilities to do what ought to be a fire-and-forget operation, if I can avoid it.
If you come in via the Ambulance-only entrance, or if you really look like you're having a "true emergency" (i.e., life threatening) they don't make you stop to fill out forms first. Otherwise, they generally like to get your insurance information first.
In most emergency departments I've been to, there are at least two, if not three, ways to get to the same treatment areas: one, you come in the 'back door' from the ambulance and/or helicopter dock, two, you come in through the front door marked "Emergency," three, you come in the front door marked "Prompt Care." The latter two differ in that you're only supposed to use the 'Emergency' one for life-threatening cases, the wait is usually shorter, and it costs substantially more (for whoever ends up paying). I suppose at bigger hospitals perhaps "Prompt Care" and "Emergency" are really two different areas, but at the ones I've been to, generally "Prompt Care" just means there's an extra waiting area and reception desk to screen you and decide how quickly you get into the E.R.
On most insurance plans, if you go into the "Emergency" door when it's not something later deemed to be life threatening, you're on your own for the increased cost. As such, I always use the cheap door.
I agree. Every once in a while I'll play a FPS game, usually with or against someone, but they just don't hold my interest for very long. As far as I'm concerned, they're really just "twitch" games, and reaction time has never really been my strong suit. I didn't like Pong, and I don't much like Quake, either.
I first played 7th Guest not as a computer game, but as a CD-I game (it was about the only useful thing I ever did with a CD-I, too). It was well thought out, the graphics were acceptable, and it was fun; although I think today the puzzles might strike most people as not flowing too well within the game -- they were almost 'mini-games.'
I spent hours, too, playing Myst and Riven, which I thought were just stellar. And the first few top-down RTS games that I played were cool, too; but I think that genre has become tired as well.
Right now I'm playing WoW, although I'm not sure I'll be very interested once I've explored the whole world; I've realized that what I really enjoy in most games is more the exploratory aspect than anything else, and WoW is neat for that because the world is probably an order of magnitude or two bigger than anything else I've experienced. Plus, if you're careful there's no reason why you get killed a lot, and that's something that's always annoyed me in other games.
I think the game industry clearly is myopic -- there's almost no question. Recently, the games that have come out which have appealed to "not mainstream" markets (where the mainstream market is 15-22 year old white males, apparently), including older folks, female gamers, etc., have seemed almost accidental. That is to say, they've ended up being popular with other groups, although it doesn't seem like they were designed that way. For right now that's okay -- there are enough games that I'm interested in checking out, once I get bored with WoW, but I have to wonder if the game industry goes through a bad round of consolidation, if these 'accidents' will become more and more rare.
Linux: Yellow Dog Linux runs on Cell. (Link; this is the same military product that is linked to in a Register article further up in the thread.) It's being marketed for semi-embedded uses, like in medical imaging systems, sonar and radar, etc., apparently.
Free Optimizing Compiler: I have no idea whether there are any compiler optimizations for it in GCC, I suspect not, though. However there is a version of the IBM XL C compiler for it, available here (no idea if registration is required, I didn't attempt to download). I wonder how the IBM compiler is implemented, and whether you could use it in a Linux-based Cell system as a drop-in replacement for GCC. It says "GNU C extensions are welcome."
I think if you came up with a patent for cold fusion, the energy companies would just kidnap you, torture you into transferring the patent to them, and then arrange for you to have a horrible-yet-regrettable accident while standing over the inlet hopper of a grinding machine at a dog food factory.
When you get a Blackberry, you don't get it just from RIM.
RIM makes the devices themselves, but not the networks that they access. If you wanted to get a BB today, you'd go down to your local cellphone company of choice (well, of the ones that support the device you want to buy), and buy the handset and service from them. You might be able to buy the BlackBerry itself separately, but you're still going to need to go to a cell phone company to get service.
So you go to TMobile or whatever. They are the "operator." They have a system, also purchased from BlackBerry, which handles talking to your handheld device through their cellular network, and sending it email. When somebody sends an email to your BlackBerry's address, it goes first to RIM, and then to the cell-phone company's system, and then to your device. I'm not too familiar with how the BlackBerry system works (the changes in response to the patent involve where the email is being stored), but basically one of the reasons why RIM has been so successful, is that they make life pretty easy for the cellular carriers to offer BB service to their customers.
So the GP was speculating that this change might make life more difficult for the cellular carriers.
I wasn't responding just solely to you. I should have been more clear there. I'm in agreement that the patent system needs reform, in a bad way.
I think perhaps a 4- or 5-year patent on particular software algorithms would be the way to go, combined with traditional copyright protection on the actual source code implementation. Combined with a well-maintained database of prior art, I think this would go a long way to fixing the system without killing the golden goose that is corporate tech R&D. (I'd also support reforming copyright to 'life of the author plus 21 years,' which is the traditional limit to prevent the creation of perpetuties.)
There is a large segment of Slashdot, though, who definitely like to tout the "down with patents! Down with corporations! Viva la revolution!" thing, and they're frequently (especially re the RIM debacle) the ones saying that they wish the whole system would just crash and burn. That's more the mindset I was going after, since I think it's pretty trite for people to say 'down with corporations' when they're typing away at a PC -- an example of a corporate invention if I ever saw one.
I admit I've never heard of WOXY before this. But I like them, I really do. They seem like my kind of radio station. Except that they're not a radio station, which is too bad. It's unfortunate they haven't figured that out yet.
I think they've blown it. I don't know the backstory, so I won't speculate why they jumped conventional radio for internet broadcasting, but it seems like it was probably not a particularly smart move. I'm going to assume maybe they were forced to do it for financial reasons.
Internet-streaming "radio" (I prefer internet broadcasting, but whatever) is always going to be a niche market. You can't listen to it in your car, which is probably 90% of the traditional radio market, and you need a computer with a broadband connection (which potentially cuts out a lot of blue-collar employees who have a radio playing in the shop/office, another big traditional radio market). It's a solution looking for a problem that doesn't exist.
Podcasting, on the other hand, is a solution to a very definite problem -- people have these neato iPods (and other MP3 players, but mostly iPods) and need more content for them. So you use the internet, but not as a streaming source. You download and put the file on the player, then let people listen to it wherever. It's the content freshness of radio, but it's "on my schedule," which is something people have come to expect in the Age of TiVo. Now that the new version of iTunes supports Podcasts (a "duh" feature if I ever saw one) I think you're going to see these things explode. Right now a lot of iPod users don't know they have this ability, but that's going to change.
Rather than trying to use the internet to (poorly) emulate a traditional media, Podcasting actually does something new, and different, and better. You grab your iPod out of the cradle in the morning, and plug it into your iTrip in the car, and you've got your own personal, customized morning show. This is the direction that internet broadcasting needs to go in. If people wanted to just listen to a stream, there's a whole lot of them on regular radio that are free and don't require anything but a cheap, ubiquitous FM receiver. And if you don't like what's on FM or AM radio, there's satellite radio for the higher-end consumer.
I'd really like to see an independent station like WOXY succeed. But I'm not sure they're going to, if they keep trying to do radio, on the Internet. If I were them, and they can figure out how to get the licensing to work, they really ought to be looking at Podcasts. Break their day up into 'radio shows,' instead of the traditional daytime 3 and 4-hour DJ slots. Give each DJ two hours or something, and tell them to stick with a theme throughout (if being off the way is going to be their 'theme', fine too). Then let people subscribe to their favorite DJs' shows as podcasts, for a subscription fee. Rather than just going for the minority of people who have computers with broadband (and permission to suck down bandwidth) all day, their market is anyone with an iPod and broadband at home. (Fully saturated, a 1.5Mb/s line will get 8 hrs of MP3 audio in less than an hour.)
I'm not sure anyone has really tried that business model yet, but I think it's a hell of a lot more promising than what they're doing now.
I think you better think twice about all that. It's easy to say 'down with the man,' especially when you ignore what the man's doing for you.
When there's more money to be had in patent-mongering than in R&D, nobody is going to bother to do R&D. And I don't care how much of a FOSS zealot you are, there aren't any free projects that approach the scale of the big commercial research projects. You aren't going to go on Sourceforge and start a project to develop the next silicon wafer technology. Development takes a lot of money, and a lot of time, and a lot of expensive equipment, and to be honest, sometimes just requires putting a lot of smart people in a room together for a while. That kind of stuff is funded by corporations -- in the semiconductor and technology sector, in the pharamaceutical sector, and probably in lots of other places. That's not to say that 'lone wolves' don't do important bits of invention, but innovation -- fitting those bits together along with existing technologies -- is not something that's easy (or frankly, always fun; which is why they pay people do it) to break up and work on in a distributed-collaborative environment.
Governments aren't going to pick up the ball here either. Nor, I think, would we want them to -- anyone who's been paying attention shouldn't have been surprised about the recent "revelations" that research at NASA gets politicized. Can you imagine the right mess we'd be in, if some Senate committee handed out all the awards to do drug research in this country? (No doubt we'd have Viagra that would make your penis eight feet long...)
Unless you want technological development to come to a grinding, screeching halt, you want private corporations to want to develop new stuff. What we need to get rid of are these parasitic non-developers (to be fair, I'm not sure where AT&T fits into all of this) who are destroying the incentive to innovate and develop by companies that actually do useful work. They are the really dangerous ones, and if you look at the companies who do useful stuff (IBM, for instance) and generally play nice with others, they have some of the most realistic proposals for patent reform.
In short, when I hear people on Slashdot writing stuff like "fuck the system" and "down with patents," it reminds me of a suburban teenager driving their mom's minivan, while wearing a Che Guevera t-shirt. It may score you points with your buddies, but I really doubt that you want what you're advocating, if you saw where it would leave you.
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I'll have to try it when I get home, but I'm 90% certain that's what you get if you open a document in MS Word on the Mac, and then use the native PDF exporter (which you get to through the Print dialog).
Maybe there's some formatting or something that they were worried about keeping in the outputted PDF that caused them to not want to export using OpenOffice?
Ironically enough, I don't use OpenOffice on a day to day basis, but I keep it on my work PC for the sole purpose of converting things to PDF when I'm at work. (I used to use a little freeware printer driver for this, but unfortunately it's license agreement specifies that it's for noncommercial use only.)
That might work for software companies, but think of other businesses -- like a medical transcription office, or some other place that probably uses fairly standard "office" software. (Actually I'm not sure what transcriptionists use, so if you want to insert a better example, feel free.) They could have gone with Macintosh, but it's perceived -- probably with good reason -- as being very expensive. Linux is perceived as being complicated, or was until quite recently in its evolution, if it was even known to people at all. Windows was the choice nobody ever got fired for, and it became that way because IBM was the thing nobody was ever fired for suggesting, and IBMs ran Windows.
Since then, most businesses have just been moving on inertia. There's never been a real reason for them to change, or at least one that outweighs the perceived problems associated with changing OSes. And over time the rut gets deeper and deeper, until it's too deep to even see out of.
Nobody really cares what new employees are comfortable with, coming in to a business. The job market is not (and historically has not been, I don't think) so tight that business owners are really falling over themselves to cater to whatever they're teaching in colleges and high schools. Quite the opposite; when it became clear that Windows was the "operating system of business," a lot of schools faced pressure to drop Macs and switch to Windows, for no other reason than parents thought it would make their kids more 'salable' on the job market.
And software companies didn't target Windows because that's the OS it was easy to get programmers for, they targeted Windows because that's where the largest base of customers is, and then they hired the kind of programmers that can do that sort of work.
In short I think you're reversing the motivations. The corporate world drives what people major in while in college, not the other way around. It's not hard to program on a Mac, and the developments tools weren't really that much harder to get a hold of -- I had a copy of the Macintosh Programmers Workshop when I was in Junior High, and I'm pretty sure that's been freely available since the advent of the platform, or soon after.
People will learn to program for a platform when there is a market for programmers who know that platform, and they'll be a demand for programmers when there is a large installed base of potential customers for that software. Not the other way around.
If it were the other way around, we'd all be using software that was written in Pascal.
I did some Googling and apparently some work has already been done [sourceforge.net] to get extents into ext3, motivated by the desire to eliminate slow deletion (which I've noticed... deleting a 160GB hard disk image took minutes on ext3, but was instantaneous on NTFS).
Very interesting. I've noticed the exact same thing, although I was comparing an HFS+ Mac to an ext3 Linux box. They both had the same data on them (rsync'ed from the same server), consisting of several large files; deleting them on the Mac was basically instant, which is what I'm used to, while deleting them on the Linux machine caused a noticeable delay. The delay was not present when deleting large numbers of small files. I suspected something like this was the case, although for some reason I was laboring under the impression that ext3 was extents-based.
I noticed nobody had pointed out HFS+ until this. Although it's not widely used (except on Apple systems), it is available under the APSL (FSF approved, although GPL incompatible) and there is support for it on Linux and BSD, although I'm not sure if it's something I'd want to use on a production system yet; it exists now more as a way for people to access their iPods, I think. I've never seen any hard metrics on how it performs, but it does do journaling and it has a reasonably good reputation as a workstation FS since it was introduced.
Exactly. This is a stupid measure.
If they were serious about doing anything to China, they would threaten to put some tariffs on Chinese imports into the U.S. -- perhaps equal to whatever China puts on U.S. goods? There would be a certain amount of poetic justice in that. (Actually, I'd be all for doing that just as a general rule, with every country.) Or if we agree that's unworkable, we could go for an industry that they haven't really started yet, so that it wouldn't affect American consumers too much -- how about the Chinese auto market? I suspect it would only take a few hundred dollars of tariffs per unit to make them less competitive than the Koreans or the Japanese. I can't imagine that the central planners there haven't started to take automobile exports to the U.S. into consideration for the next few years -- all that predicted revenue would disappear from the sheets overnight.
Do I think we have the balls to do that? Sadly, no.
But to stop a U.S. high tech firm from exporting things to China, especially given that high tech is one of the only areas where the U.S. is even close to competitive with the Third World, seems a little like shooting ourselves in the foot.
I think what Cisco, Google, and Yahoo (among many others) have done is deplorable, and I'm particularly incensed at Google's brazen hypocrisy. But as a country which exports so little in relation to our imports, I'm not sure this is the way to make a point to the Chinese government.
Erm, producing neutrons implies some sort of nuclear activity. Either fission or fusion of some sort of decay process (spontaneous neutron emission). By ruling out fission and neutron emission via decay, which are possible to do by knowing the inputs, you're pretty much stuck with fusion as an explanation for the output.
You make it sound like shuffling some neutrons around is easy. It's not. Producing a source of neutrons is a pretty nice feat by itself. However there's a very, very large difference between producing neutrons via fusion, and plonking down a SimCity 2000-esque, pollution-free, "Fusion Power Plant."
Given how destructive neutron radiation is, I'm somewhat surprised that they'd be talking about strapping a reasonably strong source to someone's person.
I think that's kind of the idea, if you were trying to kill a tumor with it.
At any rate, I get the feeling that the 'cancer treatment' idea was probably just something that whoever gave the interview to the article's author pulled out of their ass when they were asked about 'possible uses.' It sounds good, and who knows, it might even be true.
I think that's why they're marketing it as a cancer treatment. For, you know, people who already have cancer. Which tends to kill you without treatment.
Chemotherapy drugs aren't exactly a walk in the park either, but they have their place.
make people aware that if they intend to kill themselves, they better make sure it works.
I think this is basically the idea.
You don't want people halfheartedly trying to kill themselves and just becoming vegetables; it gets expensive to keep them in nursing homes and whatnot. Or if they don't go that far and just manage to injure themselves, it's still a drag on the system that has to take care of them.
The only people that are going to be affected by anti-suicide laws are people who either don't manage to do the job right (i.e., they don't end up dead), or they tell a lot of people what they're planning beforehand and someone blows the whistle on them. In the former case, they're just stupid, in the latter, it's likely their suicide is more of a 'cry for help' than anything (or at least, that's the theory).
If you went out and bought a 12-ga shotgun or similar, and proceeded to blow your brainstem out the back of your head, I think you'd find the law rather indifferent.
Agreed.
Although my first actual, purchased system was too 'modern' to have a native command interpreter mode, I spent a lot of hours in the Apple II BASIC mode and will always have a soft spot for it (and will probably also never be fully comfortable with BASIC that doesn't begin each line with a number).
You don't -- or at least, I don't -- get that same 'blank page' feeling on turning on a modern desktop'ed system. Especially on my office Windows machine, where it always seems as though the hard drive is churning and clicking, for no particular reason. It's irrational, but it gives me the impression I don't have the computer's full and complete attention, and damnit -- I want that. (Besides which, it's distracting.)
I still do a lot of personal correspondance on an IBM Selectric II typewriter. Actual, physical paper letters. (Yes, the Post Office does still do things besides eBay shipments and junk mail.) If I had to pin down the one thing that keeps me coming back to the Selectric, it's the "user experience" you get when you switch it on. You sit down, you take off the cover, you insert a piece of paper. You turn the switch "On." There's a nice heavy clunking sound, the carriage twitches a bit, and then there's nothing but a low humming, and sometimes a faint whiff of ozone. If you put your hand against it, you can feel a slight vibration. And then it does nothing else, except wait for you to do something. That's its equivalent of "READY."
As much as I appreciate a good preemptively-multitasking OS and the ability to schedule things with my crontab and otherwise have the computer just 'deal with things' for me, I can't deny that there's something reassuring from time to time about using a machine that doesn't try to out-think you.
I remember not being able to play System Shock, because I wasn't on the PPC arch (which I think means I was on a m68k), but I do remember having a desktop enviroment.
x .html
That kind of leaves a big area open for suggestions. Like, every product Apple made from the Apple IIgs on until the introduction of the PPC processor (the PM6100/60, I think). I'm guessing it was a Macintosh, and not a late-model Apple (the IIgs did have a desktop environment, actually quite a nice one).
If you look here, you can browse all Mac systems by processor:
http://www.everymac.com/systems/by_processor/inde
I remember being in a boat similar to yours with my Quadra 605, which used a 68LC040 processor. The thing that finally forced me to upgrade was the proliferation of "PPC only" applications (I really wanted to play Descent, actually was the thing that did it). That and it just started getting unacceptably slow with each new version of Netscape or IE that came out.
Sometimes I wonder what I would be doing now if he had given in and bought me a NES.
I wonder the exact same thing. I was the only person I knew who didn't have some form of video-game system (there was a distinct rift at some points between the "nintendo kids" and the "sony kids," and then those rich bastards who had both); the first video game system that came into our house was an NES I bought at a yard sale. I still have it around.
The tradeoff for not having an NES was that we were one of the first families to have a computer that wasn't there for some sort of business purpose.
The OP asked what people's first computer was that they actually considered theirs, and for me that was a certain Macintosh Quadra 605. In retrospect a quite miserable computer; no internal expansion bays, no way to upgrade the video, a 68LC040 processor (no FPU and buggy so that it wouldn't run the FPU emulators, either)...but it was actually mine and I did well by it for a number of years. In fact until the computer I'm using now, it was the longest-lived system I'd owned. Not too bad for a beige pizzabox.
By the time I upgraded, it sat at the center of a deskful of peripherals and addons: modem, Zip drive, CD-Rom, external hard drive, serial-port switchbox (how else are you going to attach a modem and a local printer and a network?), and about a half-dozen things daisy-chained off of the ADB ports.
That computer is gone now (although I did attempt to use it as a webserver for a while, but without built-in Ethernet it's a bit of a pain), and the only thing that's still in use from my original purchase is the keyboard: an Apple Extended Keyboard II. Even in the 1990s, Apple still did a few things right, and keyboards were one of them.
Hey, that's no different than running Windows; by running somebody's OS, you're giving them effectively absolute trust and control over your data, and Microsoft has sold out to China as well.
My point is that whether or not a company has sold out to Beijing doesn't seem to interest many members of either the corporate-decisionmaking nor the WalMart-shopping segments of our society. The corporate decisionmakers will still support China because it makes "good business sense;" that is, it keeps them competitive in one way or another to do so, and they know consumers don't care. The WalMart shoppers buy Chinese stuff at the expense of free-world goods because they're cheap. So round and round we go -- anyone who refuses to sell out basically gets ignored by consumers and crushed by their competitors.
The consumer public would have to start to care a LOT more, and demonstrating how much they care in their shopping/buying/boycotting preferences, before companies will stop funding or facilitating oppression, and doing business in (and fueling the economies of) such countries.
As a nation, I think the U.S. is far too apathetic at this point to do anything about it. As long as the people who are being oppressed don't look like us, we don't give a damn. When white Christians get massacred, we send in the Marines; when it's black Africans, we watch it on the History channel. The Chinese people are culturally too dissimilar for Americans to empathize with them closely enough to not buy that Apex DVD player; given that, you can't really blame the tech companies for what they do.
True security is a fallacy in the information age.
Well said.
I think I might change it to "True privacy is a fallacy in the information age," although you could make a valid argument over whether security implies privacy or vice versa. It's really just semantics as far as I'm concerned at the moment, though.
The point is, there are people out there -- or "Corporations," but I think it's silly to point the finger at the C-word, when really they're just groups of people acting out of self-interest -- who can, if they want, drag up a lot of information on you with a few keystrokes. Of course, they probably don't know you, and don't care what you're doing, any more than they care about what any other individual in their database has written about them.
Being "secure" or maintaining your "privacy" today -- unless you're willing to just fall off the grid, and that's difficult and for most people unpleasant -- is really about keeping a low profile. Plant yourself right in the middle of that bell curve, and nobody will probably ever care who you are or what you do. Don't be the tall blade of grass, in other words, if you've got something to hide.
Do I think this is a good thing? No, I don't. But it's also the situation most people have to deal with right now.
Also, it's worth noting that SCART practically does not exist on televisions in the US. If you went into most electronics stores and asked for one, you'd probably get blank looks, or get told that it's a "weird French thing" and get pointed towards the foreign adaptor section (if they have one).
I went shopping for (analog) TV sets a few months ago and if they have a input aside from RF, composite and S-Video, it's on RCA connectors and it's not RGB, it's "component" -- that is, Y (luminance), R-Y, and B-Y. The only exception to this that I've seen are professional monitors and some high-end projectors (and stuff with a VGA port, which is basically RGB).
So for the average Joe, having RGB wouldn't do a whole lot of good, without an RGB-component converter. It's not like such a thing is exactly brain surgery (in fact I think there are ICs that do nothing but that), but it's just another hurdle you'd have to overcome.
But anyway, I do agree that the RGB outputs on the graphics card will probably be the first thing that's attacked in a HDCP system; it's going to be rather difficult to not have an unencrypted video signal of some sort available somewhere, and really it just takes somebody with a lot of free time and a good 'scope to poke around and find it. Of course, the downside to this is that you'd still need to have a valid HDCP monitor connected to the digital output in order for the signal not to be downsampled upstream; so you wouldn't be able to easily replace your HDCP monitor with some sort of un-castrated display or recording device, you'd only be able to tap into the signal.
Interesting thought.
I'm waiting for what anyone informed has to say about this suggestion as well.
I wonder what would happen if this was done on a large scale; create a "poison pill" DVD that contained a large number of garbage keys with a date set some time in the future (so that its keys would be preferred over other DVDs' that you might insert later), and you could just fill up your player's key catalog and prevent it from loading any new ones.
It seems too obvious an attack, though. I assume there's something that keeps you from trivially adding new keys to the list in the player.
However, I wonder if disabling the WRITE ability of the EPROMs or whatever they use to store the keys in the player hardware wouldn't become a popular hack.
I'm not sure that the hack for HDCP is going to come from some 'lone wolf' like DVD Jon. I think it's more likely that it'll come from some nameless Chinese electrical engineer, working for some factory that wants to get into the mod-chip business. That's unless the hardware is completely potted under an inch of epoxy.
No crashes outside of the few days needed to configure it.
That, to me, is probably the most unappealing thing that you could have said.
I've been thinking for a while of installing MythTV, but I'm afraid after using an Elgato EyeTV on my Mac, that it would probably just be an exercise that would leave me very frustrated. (The EyeTV is a commercial PVR, and it takes roughly 5-10 mins to set up and basically seems to do most of what people are trying to get MythTV to do, except the client/server stuff, for which there is a free addon.) It's basically a zero config install, does one-click to DVD and iPod (provided you have Toast), and does TiVo-like functions with the TitanTV site providing scheduling data.
Is it cheap? No. A software encoder is $149 (it relies on your processor for the heavy lifting), or an MPEG-2/MPEG-4 encoder is $329; Toast for DVD burning functions is $80. (Or you could get the older MPEG-1 model for about $70 on eBay.) There is also an HDTV version if you want that for $350. Plus you have the 'Mac tax' to factor in. But I can tell you from personal experience, it really does 'just work.'
I appreciate the effort that everyone involved in MythTV is putting in, but I think you have to be careful advocating something that's still at an early enough stage that it's a bit of a project to set up. If what you want is just a PVR, that is, the PRODUCT and not a PROJECT, there might be better alternatives out there.
Because you mentioned it, maybe you can answer this ... how does MythTV/MythDVD stack up for DVD transcoding to other programs (e.g., dvd::rip, etc.)? I'm 'shopping around' for software to do this, in order to reduce the load on my Mac, and I'm trying to figure out which one is worth spending the time to set up.
On MacOS, I use the (excellent) "HandBrake" utility, which does a direct 'one shot' DVD -> MP4 transcode, while also handling subtitles, cropping/scaling, etc. It comes as one binary, too. It has a claimed 'Linux version' but from what I've seen, it's not really ready for prime-time. (Although I'd be willing to change that assessment if anyone wanted to offer evidence that it's easy to get going.)
Is there anything which does something similar on x86 Linux? I'm hoping for something that's equally easy to use -- I'm really not interested in shooting an afternoon setting up a half-dozen utilities to do what ought to be a fire-and-forget operation, if I can avoid it.
If you come in via the Ambulance-only entrance, or if you really look like you're having a "true emergency" (i.e., life threatening) they don't make you stop to fill out forms first. Otherwise, they generally like to get your insurance information first.
In most emergency departments I've been to, there are at least two, if not three, ways to get to the same treatment areas: one, you come in the 'back door' from the ambulance and/or helicopter dock, two, you come in through the front door marked "Emergency," three, you come in the front door marked "Prompt Care." The latter two differ in that you're only supposed to use the 'Emergency' one for life-threatening cases, the wait is usually shorter, and it costs substantially more (for whoever ends up paying). I suppose at bigger hospitals perhaps "Prompt Care" and "Emergency" are really two different areas, but at the ones I've been to, generally "Prompt Care" just means there's an extra waiting area and reception desk to screen you and decide how quickly you get into the E.R.
On most insurance plans, if you go into the "Emergency" door when it's not something later deemed to be life threatening, you're on your own for the increased cost. As such, I always use the cheap door.
I agree. Every once in a while I'll play a FPS game, usually with or against someone, but they just don't hold my interest for very long. As far as I'm concerned, they're really just "twitch" games, and reaction time has never really been my strong suit. I didn't like Pong, and I don't much like Quake, either.
I first played 7th Guest not as a computer game, but as a CD-I game (it was about the only useful thing I ever did with a CD-I, too). It was well thought out, the graphics were acceptable, and it was fun; although I think today the puzzles might strike most people as not flowing too well within the game -- they were almost 'mini-games.'
I spent hours, too, playing Myst and Riven, which I thought were just stellar. And the first few top-down RTS games that I played were cool, too; but I think that genre has become tired as well.
Right now I'm playing WoW, although I'm not sure I'll be very interested once I've explored the whole world; I've realized that what I really enjoy in most games is more the exploratory aspect than anything else, and WoW is neat for that because the world is probably an order of magnitude or two bigger than anything else I've experienced. Plus, if you're careful there's no reason why you get killed a lot, and that's something that's always annoyed me in other games.
I think the game industry clearly is myopic -- there's almost no question. Recently, the games that have come out which have appealed to "not mainstream" markets (where the mainstream market is 15-22 year old white males, apparently), including older folks, female gamers, etc., have seemed almost accidental. That is to say, they've ended up being popular with other groups, although it doesn't seem like they were designed that way. For right now that's okay -- there are enough games that I'm interested in checking out, once I get bored with WoW, but I have to wonder if the game industry goes through a bad round of consolidation, if these 'accidents' will become more and more rare.
Linux:
Yellow Dog Linux runs on Cell. (Link; this is the same military product that is linked to in a Register article further up in the thread.) It's being marketed for semi-embedded uses, like in medical imaging systems, sonar and radar, etc., apparently.
Free Optimizing Compiler:
I have no idea whether there are any compiler optimizations for it in GCC, I suspect not, though. However there is a version of the IBM XL C compiler for it, available here (no idea if registration is required, I didn't attempt to download). I wonder how the IBM compiler is implemented, and whether you could use it in a Linux-based Cell system as a drop-in replacement for GCC. It says "GNU C extensions are welcome."
I think if you came up with a patent for cold fusion, the energy companies would just kidnap you, torture you into transferring the patent to them, and then arrange for you to have a horrible-yet-regrettable accident while standing over the inlet hopper of a grinding machine at a dog food factory.
When you get a Blackberry, you don't get it just from RIM.
RIM makes the devices themselves, but not the networks that they access. If you wanted to get a BB today, you'd go down to your local cellphone company of choice (well, of the ones that support the device you want to buy), and buy the handset and service from them. You might be able to buy the BlackBerry itself separately, but you're still going to need to go to a cell phone company to get service.
So you go to TMobile or whatever. They are the "operator." They have a system, also purchased from BlackBerry, which handles talking to your handheld device through their cellular network, and sending it email. When somebody sends an email to your BlackBerry's address, it goes first to RIM, and then to the cell-phone company's system, and then to your device. I'm not too familiar with how the BlackBerry system works (the changes in response to the patent involve where the email is being stored), but basically one of the reasons why RIM has been so successful, is that they make life pretty easy for the cellular carriers to offer BB service to their customers.
So the GP was speculating that this change might make life more difficult for the cellular carriers.
I wasn't responding just solely to you. I should have been more clear there. I'm in agreement that the patent system needs reform, in a bad way.
I think perhaps a 4- or 5-year patent on particular software algorithms would be the way to go, combined with traditional copyright protection on the actual source code implementation. Combined with a well-maintained database of prior art, I think this would go a long way to fixing the system without killing the golden goose that is corporate tech R&D. (I'd also support reforming copyright to 'life of the author plus 21 years,' which is the traditional limit to prevent the creation of perpetuties.)
There is a large segment of Slashdot, though, who definitely like to tout the "down with patents! Down with corporations! Viva la revolution!" thing, and they're frequently (especially re the RIM debacle) the ones saying that they wish the whole system would just crash and burn. That's more the mindset I was going after, since I think it's pretty trite for people to say 'down with corporations' when they're typing away at a PC -- an example of a corporate invention if I ever saw one.
I admit I've never heard of WOXY before this. But I like them, I really do. They seem like my kind of radio station. Except that they're not a radio station, which is too bad. It's unfortunate they haven't figured that out yet.
I think they've blown it. I don't know the backstory, so I won't speculate why they jumped conventional radio for internet broadcasting, but it seems like it was probably not a particularly smart move. I'm going to assume maybe they were forced to do it for financial reasons.
Internet-streaming "radio" (I prefer internet broadcasting, but whatever) is always going to be a niche market. You can't listen to it in your car, which is probably 90% of the traditional radio market, and you need a computer with a broadband connection (which potentially cuts out a lot of blue-collar employees who have a radio playing in the shop/office, another big traditional radio market). It's a solution looking for a problem that doesn't exist.
Podcasting, on the other hand, is a solution to a very definite problem -- people have these neato iPods (and other MP3 players, but mostly iPods) and need more content for them. So you use the internet, but not as a streaming source. You download and put the file on the player, then let people listen to it wherever. It's the content freshness of radio, but it's "on my schedule," which is something people have come to expect in the Age of TiVo. Now that the new version of iTunes supports Podcasts (a "duh" feature if I ever saw one) I think you're going to see these things explode. Right now a lot of iPod users don't know they have this ability, but that's going to change.
Rather than trying to use the internet to (poorly) emulate a traditional media, Podcasting actually does something new, and different, and better. You grab your iPod out of the cradle in the morning, and plug it into your iTrip in the car, and you've got your own personal, customized morning show. This is the direction that internet broadcasting needs to go in. If people wanted to just listen to a stream, there's a whole lot of them on regular radio that are free and don't require anything but a cheap, ubiquitous FM receiver. And if you don't like what's on FM or AM radio, there's satellite radio for the higher-end consumer.
I'd really like to see an independent station like WOXY succeed. But I'm not sure they're going to, if they keep trying to do radio, on the Internet. If I were them, and they can figure out how to get the licensing to work, they really ought to be looking at Podcasts. Break their day up into 'radio shows,' instead of the traditional daytime 3 and 4-hour DJ slots. Give each DJ two hours or something, and tell them to stick with a theme throughout (if being off the way is going to be their 'theme', fine too). Then let people subscribe to their favorite DJs' shows as podcasts, for a subscription fee. Rather than just going for the minority of people who have computers with broadband (and permission to suck down bandwidth) all day, their market is anyone with an iPod and broadband at home. (Fully saturated, a 1.5Mb/s line will get 8 hrs of MP3 audio in less than an hour.)
I'm not sure anyone has really tried that business model yet, but I think it's a hell of a lot more promising than what they're doing now.
I think you better think twice about all that. It's easy to say 'down with the man,' especially when you ignore what the man's doing for you.
When there's more money to be had in patent-mongering than in R&D, nobody is going to bother to do R&D. And I don't care how much of a FOSS zealot you are, there aren't any free projects that approach the scale of the big commercial research projects. You aren't going to go on Sourceforge and start a project to develop the next silicon wafer technology. Development takes a lot of money, and a lot of time, and a lot of expensive equipment, and to be honest, sometimes just requires putting a lot of smart people in a room together for a while. That kind of stuff is funded by corporations -- in the semiconductor and technology sector, in the pharamaceutical sector, and probably in lots of other places. That's not to say that 'lone wolves' don't do important bits of invention, but innovation -- fitting those bits together along with existing technologies -- is not something that's easy (or frankly, always fun; which is why they pay people do it) to break up and work on in a distributed-collaborative environment.
Governments aren't going to pick up the ball here either. Nor, I think, would we want them to -- anyone who's been paying attention shouldn't have been surprised about the recent "revelations" that research at NASA gets politicized. Can you imagine the right mess we'd be in, if some Senate committee handed out all the awards to do drug research in this country? (No doubt we'd have Viagra that would make your penis eight feet long...)
Unless you want technological development to come to a grinding, screeching halt, you want private corporations to want to develop new stuff. What we need to get rid of are these parasitic non-developers (to be fair, I'm not sure where AT&T fits into all of this) who are destroying the incentive to innovate and develop by companies that actually do useful work. They are the really dangerous ones, and if you look at the companies who do useful stuff (IBM, for instance) and generally play nice with others, they have some of the most realistic proposals for patent reform.
In short, when I hear people on Slashdot writing stuff like "fuck the system" and "down with patents," it reminds me of a suburban teenager driving their mom's minivan, while wearing a Che Guevera t-shirt. It may score you points with your buddies, but I really doubt that you want what you're advocating, if you saw where it would leave you.