Finally us white aristocratic land owners won't be the only ones electing the president!
Nope, what it means now is that California, New York, Florida, and Texas will pick our president. I am sorry, but if my state votes overwhelmingly for the losing candidate and its electoral votes get cast for the other candidate because they won the popular vote, explain to me how democracy was served?
People who think the Electoral College is bad have to be ignorant of the consequences of doing away with it. What it means is that candidates for national office will only campaign in a handful of states that will guarantee a popular majority. No one will ever again campaign in New England, the Midwest, or much of the South. So by doing away with electoral votes and tying them to the popular vote, you are potentially disenfranchising a huge number of states and their citizens from any meaningful participation in national elections.
No, we are wasting much of our production capacity on stupid, tree-hugging, already-shown-to-be-a-wrong-solution "technology" like ethanol production from corn. And a lot of people starve, not because there isn't enough food for them. But because there are corrupt, nasty people between them and a stable food supply.
Interestingly, there are roughly 2 acres of arable land per person on the planet right now. And guess what? Global warming would actually increase that acreage by almost 25% if average global temperatures rose 3F. It's entirely possible that a warming planet (despite the realities of sunspot cycles and impending cooling cycle) is actually required to support humanity, rather than being a harbinger of its demise.
Truth is, we are too stupid to know and too enamored with our culture of "fear" to admit it.
Anyone who followed the photo essay about the fire on Sealand a few years ago would recognize that Sealand is little more than a fantasy/hobby of a couple of nut jobs trying to scam some income out of a rusty hulk. No reliable power source, no easy transport, not potable water, no permanent residents. It is a investor funded camping expedition with the occasional porn video streamed over a slow-ass satellite connection. It is not, nor was it ever, a viable "offshore hosting facility".
And after they burned up the generators and half of the platform, it's really not even habitable now. So no surprise that the royalty has likely departed to points closer to the mailboxes holding their dole checks.
I would have loved dearly to hear Jeff Kaplan's answer to the following:
Does Blizzard have a Quality Assurance department staffed with senior engineering talent that follows industry standard best practices? Do they have a testbed that mirrors the live production environment? and do they actually perform unit level and integration testing? Or is this week's 3.02 patch deployment just another example of "million monkey" testing that most commercial software houses confuse with QA?
I don't mean to be snide, but for a company that pulls down roughly $150 million a month in revenue from the World of Warcraft, is there any legitimate excuse for the rolling QA horror story that happens around expansion releases? Why does Blizzard's QA suck so bad?
Huh? You are missing my point. I am only talking about the economy around digital goods that can be infinitely reproduced. The existing "old economy" infrastructure is intact and irrelevant. This whole thread is about how to monetize "free" items. My point is that you pay for the act of creation, not the item. I have no idea what you are talking about.
We already have an amazing system of "micro-payments", where you and I spend a tiny fraction of the amount of money it took to create a given work. Why screw it up?
Well, it's pretty much broken when it comes to paying for items with zero manufacturing costs. If I can get something for free, there is no real economic benefit to me to pay for it. The value is in the act of creation, not the result of it. My point is that for that category of value creation, a reputation based economy is more fair than not. Lowering the barrier to entry for new participants is the long-standing job of marketing organizations, venture investors, and other entities whose market existence is based on enhancing value, lowering risk, and commoditizing novelty.
Those organizations don't go away. But what alternative do you have for monetizing "free" other than to place value on creation? That is the only unique thing in an otherwise endless sea of copies.
There is an alternative to getting paid for "free" content. It's a simple mind-shift that has to happen and it gets us away from the centuries old idea of an economy based on sale of tangible goods. Put concisely, you should get paid for the ability to create value in the future, not the items you create. Musicians could receive what amounts to "futures contracts", fans paying for (or rewarding) musicians for creating of future works. The works are given away for free. The people with the talent and skill to produce them are paid to create. No pay, no new music. Sucky music, no pay for future albums.
It's fairly balanced out but it requires a one-time leap of faith on the consumer's part that by paying in advance for someone to create something of value, the value will be freely given. Fans (customers, etc.) are essentially paying in advance for the creator to make something of value that they will then get to freely enjoy. It is essentially an institutionalized form of patronage. It would work with any kind of product for which multiple free copies can be made (i.e. data) but would work best if there was some sort of controlled reputation system in place to actually measure the relative value of someone's creations.
I dunno the genesis of the "open source" meme with this FCS story. The SoSCOE code I worked with wasn't made of very much open source stuff. In fact, the initial versions weren't even aimed at Linux. The crap all ran on SGI boxes. So to the extent that they have aimed the code base at Posix compliant operating systems, I guess Linux can play now.
In any case, open or closed source doesn't matter much these days when you have countries like China willing to pay 1000's of hackers to reverse engineer all sorts of stuff, source code or not. All they need is access to the system and it'll eventually have all of its holes uncovered.
SoSCOE is not classified. It can be used (and demonstrated) in unclassified environments without issue. The JTTRS (radio) and crypto components are obviously classified, but the core platform is only controlled now by a bunch of lawyer babble and proprietary rights claims that Boeing inflicts on anyone wanting to use it.
Be VERY afraid. FCS/SoSCOE (System of Systems Common Operating Environment) is your worst, worst nightmare. It all squats upon an antiquated CORBA infrastructure and is the most bloated, incredibly poorly engineered PoS that has ever been birthed by an aerospace contractor. And I should know. As chief architect for the Common Operating System component of DARPA's J-UCAS program, we fought Boeing long and hard over their insistence that this architecture form the basis of the J-UCAS software infrastructure. While the idea stems from the long-running quest within the DoD to develop a true cross-service network-centric software architecture, it was built by people who completely ignored the last 15 years of lessons learned about large scale distributed systems from the Internet. It has multiple single points of failure baked into the architecture, requires outrageous amounts of RAM and CPU power to run (making it incredibly unsuitable for embedded systems use), and is licensed in such a way as to make it virtually impossible to obtain and modify without Boeing's involvement.
Furthermore, Boeing has expressed in public on several occasions that they intend for SoSCOE to make them the "Microsoft" of military systems. They are purposefully engineering a system designed to cement their position as a sole provider of OS components for network centric platforms. Nice bastardization of the open source components they are using to say the least.
Having tried repeatedly to get 2 SoSCOE nodes to communicate, we subsequently replicated 100% of the functionality that J-UCAS required using less than 150,000 lines of code and $2M of budget. Makes you wonder how long we need to support the programmer welfare for Boeing's "software engineers" and their 60 million line monstrosity if it can all be done with 400 times less code than that?
While the quality of the product (or the lack thereof) isn't in question, I find it ironic that the professors crying foul are likely to never have had to write a line of production code, maintain it in a live environment, or do anything remotely approaching what their students will be asked to do 5 years after they turn them loose. The burden is on the professors to teach, and not to blame tools. It's like a contractor saying "Gee Mr. Smith, sorry about the crappy job on building your house, but my hammer sucked." The ivory tower denizens need a dose of reality before they lob hand grenades like this.
Honestly, if they want to teach systems fundamentals, make the kids write a chip simulator and an assembler in Java. Then they can kill two birds with one stone. It doesn't take much creativity to devise a curriculum that teaches proper computer science fundamentals, even if it involves a mandate to use a "squishy" language like Java. I fault the professors screaming the loudest about this problem. It's theirs to fix, not programming language designers.
I think this comparison is fallacious. The difference between some younger than 25 using a more instant form of communication and those older than 25 using something more "archaic" like e-mail likely has more to do with the nature of their communications required by their current role in society and the workplace than anything to do with the fact that one mode is better than the other. When the kiddies grow up and understand that having a persistent, searchable, ubiquitous, reliable repository of communications with their peers, co-workers, and family is actually valuable, I think we'll see them shift their communications tool of preference. There is so much you cannot do with an IM style message in a corporate environment -- send attachments, search the past 5 years of messages, access the same message base from dozens of different device types and locations, etc. -- that e-mail will never be outpaced as a business communication tool by the current crop of IM tools and social networks.
And as a social tool, IMs match the attention span of the users. Sure, it's fun to play with Twitter and I have daily dialogs via SMS. But I am not going to write a note to a family member about a significant issue using AIM, nor am I going to discuss terms of a legal deal, send a 500 source file archive, or use SMS to read a 50 thread mailing list.
I think a more interesting study would be to follow a sub-25 year old Internet user for 10 years and see how their communications tool usage changes. That has some intrinsic value. This "study" has none. It's like saying lots of little kids play with Legos while only a handful of adults do, so therefore Legos are the wave of the future.
I think you have it exactly backwards.
As projects become larger and more complex, they outstrip the ability of anything but a decentralised network of programmers.
There are many, many types of systems that do not lend themselves to the "million monkeys" approach to systems engineering. Grafting one-off utility programs or plug-ins or other modular elements onto a large, central framework (be it an O/S, and IDE, a web browser, graphics tool or any other modular app) is not anything like the design and engineering effort required to create the initial framework. I think many (certainly not all) programmers who espouse the virtues of the "open source culture" have never actually tackled a 1 million line+ system or been involved in a project with dozens of engineers working from a predefined set of requirements towards a definite deadline with a finite budget.
It's nice to idealize the concept of a decentralized network of programmers but in practice, herding that many cats towards a desired outcome is not nearly as efficient or productive as a well-run, centralized project. And until you have actually tried both methods to achieve a similar goal, you're just blowing smoke if you say one is better than the other.
Is there such a thing as 'too much money' when it comes to developing software?"
The issue isn't about whether too much money or commercialization is killing open source software (culture/roots/projects). It seems to me that the root cause has to do with the nature of the widely publicized open source projects. As open operating systems (Linux, NetBSD, etc.) and applications (Mozilla/Firefox, OpenOffice, etc.) grow in complexity, they outstrip the abilities of ad hoc, grass roots "open source" organizations to develop and maintain them.
Simply put any serious, valuable, widely-used open source project today is very likely a large and complicated one. Open Source has outgrown its own infrastructure and the only one available that can pick up the projects and move them forward are those operated by commercial organizations with the resources to throw at these hard problems.
There are a large crowd of email maintainers who believe anonymous email is important for political reasons.
Nothing about integrating public key crypto (or other signing technologies) into the e-mail infrastructure eliminates the ability to send anonymous e-mail. But it DOES make it a certainty that you can identify anonymous or fraudulent e-mail and reject it at the protocol level if you choose to do so. The lack of a pervasive authenticated e-mail infrastructure is the only reason spam exists. If the sender can be consistently identified (even if they are anonymous) or can be consistently identified as fraudulent or not verified, rejection of undesired message traffic becomes trivial.
You have to realize this is a war. Much more than 50 percent of email is spam - we have to take drastic measures to provide a basic service - email.
That is because e-mail is an inherently broken set of protocols that were designed in the 70's as a hack to implement a store and forward message system on the old ARPAnet. If the e-mail industry spent the same amount of effort on engineering a next generation set of e-mail protocols and authentication methods that they spend on hacks like black hole lists, white lists, spam filters, etc., we'd have solved this problem long ago.
The problem is that the e-mail software business is much like the pharmaceutical industry. There's no long-term money in providing a cure. The money is made off of hacks that address symptoms, regardless of their ineffectiveness. The tragedy is that with a few well-considered extensions to the current SMTP standard, integrated public key technology could completely eliminate spam from anonymous or bogus senders.
The real question is why hasn't the IETF addressed this problem and issued standards that correct the flaws? Sure, there is an enormous installed base of broken SMTP servers, but a freely available backward compatible implementation of a new mail infrastructure solves that problem in a few years. So why don't we fix e-mail?
The whole problem has to do with the industry and public perceptions of what a UAV is. For most people, "UAV" means "big remote-controlled airplane with cameras and/or weapons." That is the old school definition, where the ground station essentially consists of a remote cockpit and the vehicles are flown by a human (or autopilot commands are sent) via a persistent RF link. Communications failure means vehicle failure.
As the former chief architect for software on the DARPA/USAF Joint Unmanned Combat Air System (J-UCAS), I can tell you that the public's perception of UAVs have about as much in common with state of the art UAVs as the Wright Flyer has to a F-16. The difference is the degree of autonomy the aircraft exhibits. J-UCAS aircraft (the X-45C and X-47A) were designed to be completely autonomous in their mission execution, from take off to landing. In fact, the ground stations have nothing resembling a joystick. Mission planning is performed prior to take-off and the vehicle is responsible itself for all re-routing and mission contingencies.
The vehicles are configured to support the standard civil avionics elements such as TCAS, digitally encoded transponders, and data links to air traffic control. The only "frequency" challenge has to do with being able to backhaul voice communications with ATC to a human for interpretation and action when operating in airspace that doesn't support digital data links from ATC.
Traffic deconfliction is usually performed by having the UCAS aircraft operate at altitudes specifically assigned for their use. The reality is that with a little work from the FAA to set aside some dedicated altitudes above 30,000' and ensure that ATC centers can all issue routing instructions via data link as well as voice, UAVs can quite happily and safely operate in the national airspace.
The challenge is how (or if) to accommodate older UAV systems such as Predator and Globalhawk, which require man-in-the-loop control and could never be easily retrofitted to operate autonomously because of their need for persistent communications. Smaller UAVs that have performance or weight parameters that move them from the realm of R/C airplanes (and very light-weight UAVs) into the range of what the FAA defines as "aircraft" will have a serious challenge in the civil marketplace until they can adopt the degree of autonomy and ATC interaction that is just now emerging in the state of the art UAV programs.
While current UAV suppliers and operaters are scrambling for frequency spectrum now, this is fundamentally a software and FAA (ICAO) procedural problem in the future. By 2011, we may find that the industry has moved beyond the first generation UAVs and the issue of spectrum allocation becomes moot. We can only hope so, because the man-in-the-loop control model for large UAV platforms is not the desired end state for the industry.
I doubt anyone alive at this point in time has so much for so many worthy causes as Gates. He has certainly given more money to charity than anyone else, probably by a magnitude.
Another victim of successful PR by Gates. The reality is far different. If you'll recall, Gates was roundly chided by his billionaire buddies for having made NO substantive contributions to charitable causes prior to 2000. In fact, it was the subject of a WSJ article and also multi-page articles in Time and Newsweek, discussing his stingy nature. That whole tempest in a teapot led to the formation of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and only then did we see any sort of significant charitable contributions from him. The simple fact of the matter is that the man is not a philanthropist and has only acted as one to silence public criticism.
Furthermore, his "contributions" are not particularly noteworthy when considered as a percentage of his net worth. The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation was started with an endowment of less than $4 billion, primarily in the form of a stock transfer from Bill Gates (which nicely offset the HUGE capital gains he'd made in 1999-2000 as MSFT split twice in that time period.) As a percentage of his net worth, it amounted to less than 10%.
Warren Buffet, on the other hand, has set in motion the donation of 100% of his personal fortune to charity. Perhaps someone who has genuinely excelled in business and philanthropy like Mr. Buffet would make a more legitimate non-traditional candidate for Scott Adams to advocate than the guy who ripped off CP/M and parlayed it into a fortune by blackmailing IBM and other box manufacturers into bundling his technically substandard O/S?
reviled by the Geek, perhaps. but not by TIME magazine. and not by the population generally. which has never shared the Geek's hatred of Microsoft.
All that shows is Gates' ability to retain a competent PR firm to groom his image in such a way that his misanthropic tendencies, dubious business practices, and outdated technical expertise are hidden behind the gloss of a $50 billion net worth. In a land of "Who wants to be a millionaire", most of the shallow end of the gene pool can't be bothered with actually analyzing the skills and merits (or lack thereof) of their political candidates.
This story is one of the biggest meta-trolls posted in Slashdot history. Honestly, what qualifies a newspaper cartoonist to advocate the political candidacy of one of the least qualified personalities imaginable other than the possible humor value when he laughs about it with friends a year from now?
Re:This is getting old...
on
Leopard Vs. Vista
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· Score: 2, Insightful
I have seen Macs do stupid buggy things just like PCs do. If you think you can type faster or click and drag faster -- Apple will be there to happily take those extra bills from your wallet to make you feel better about yourself.
First, you clearly didn't read what I wrote. I made no claims about any software being "bug-free." What I said was that the integrated solution provided a better user experience for the end user, and that was what has apparently been the driving force behind consumers' purchasing decisions in every industry EXCEPT the desktop PC market. I, personally, am happy to pay more money for a better user experience, whether that takes the form of fewer visits to the repair shop because I bought a Honda instead of a Hundai or the form of fewer reboots, crashes, viruses, trojans, and other end user problems because I might choose a computer system that was designed and integrated as a whole rather than a cheap (and badly integrated) operating system and PC hardware combination.
You obviously still ascribe to the "old think" about what constitutes value in a personal computer. I suspect you fall into the hobbyist category of user that enjoys being confronted with some nasty little problem afflicting your computer and derive some sense of accomplishment from solving it. That sort of self-eating watermelon of a computer system is inherently broken. Owning a PC isn't supposed to be about buying into a culture of continually fixing broken stuff. It is about obtaining and using a device that makes you more productive and able to perform tasks you couldn't do without it. In my book, one of those tasks is NOT at-home computer diagnostics, repair, debugging, or any other sort of jacking around under the hood of the machine to make it do what I want. That is what I PAY for when I purchase the machine. I assume someone competent has already handled those issues.
Sadly, 90% of the user base out there doesn't expect that when it comes to PCs. That is the one great disservice Microsoft has done the computer industry and its consumers -- forced lowered expectations on us. Well, sorry if I don't share your lowered expectations.
With a PC I have choices: AMD vs Intel, nVidia vs ATI, Tyan vs ASUS, Corsair vs Kingston, WD vs Seagate, XP vs Fedora vs BSD vs SUSE, etc. etc. etc.
With Macs I have have what Apple blesses. "See how seamlessly it works!?" Yeah, because you only support that hardware, duh. I had to buy extra storage for various servers we have (which predate my arrival) and a 500GB SATA drive from Apple is $400; I can get a 500GB SATA for a PC for $220.
Perhaps the take-away has nothing to do with e-peening one hardware platform over another or one OS over another. Perhaps the thing the computer industry has yet to learn and what consumers have not realized they should demand is a good user experience. You can second guess Apple's decision to build a narrow range of hardware to be seamlessly supported by their OS, but you cannot legitimately argue that the user experience of the Mac hardware/software combination is inferior to Windows or Linux.
The mind-set change that has to happen is that people need to stop focusing on initial cost of ownership and the false sense of value offered by an unmanageable selection of peripherals and software. Instead, they should focus on the total cost of ownership, not only in dollar terms, but frustration, lost productivity, and inability to perform a task. Many other industries have long since abandoned the home-built piece part solutions that the average PC user has to endure. Who'd want to buy their wheels, engines, seats, wiring harnesses, body panels, and other automotive parts separately to assemble a running car? A few hobbyists, yes, but long ago the average automobile owner opted for seamless turnkey operation of their vehicles.
Apple has chosen a path that delivers a complete, integrated customer solution. Microsoft and beige box manufacturers have opted for the multiple source, OEM style solution where the user bears ultimate responsibility for successfully integrating a solution that meets their needs. I'd submit that over time, the latter method of delivering computing functionality to end users is a dead end path. There's no other industry producing a consumer product that I can think of that survives today using the customer-forced integration that the Windows industry uses.
I disagree with the whole idea that it's unnecessary to protect the works of content creators
This is old school thinking.
A reputation-based economy solves this problem (and many others). As soon as an infrastructure exists that allows a managed exchange of reputation in a market that values it relative to one's contributions to society and the inherent value of the information/data/software/media you have created, there is an easy conversion between the reputation economy and hard goods/currency economy. Then, all you need to protect is the relationship between the content and the creator so that the real author is known and forgers and pirates cannot make a claim on the resulting reputation value.
It is a technical challenge to develop a ubiquitous system for reputation "trading" that works as well as existing stock markets and currency exchanges, but our network and crypto systems are up to the task. It's just a matter of there being a compelling economic reason to switch from currency to reputation as a means of compensating the creators of digitally represented products. A trusted network of reputation exchanges that are managed as part of our existing markets isn't hard to build, just hard to deploy. But it is a model that completely eliminates the need for DRM.
In short, downloads == reputation. Provide a means to convert reputation to currency (a one way conversion, mind you), and you're done.
I meant what I said. Neutral. Not ground.
As for neutral in switch boxes, most new construction these days does have neutral pulled through the switch box, precisely for home automation tasks. The usual technique is to pull the wire through the switchbox and then directly to the fixture. Neutral wires are usually left uncut/untouched in the switch box and the switch is placed in-line with the load, as with a normal switch leg. But the neutral wire is made available if necessary for these sorts of applications.
In new construction, you end up running exactly the same amount of wire. I believe the final solution that Insteon intends to provide is to place controllable switches in the fixture with a simple(r) switch in the switchbox. But they don't have those products completed yet.
Neutral and ground are not the same thing. Tying these switches to ground will sometimes work, but it actually puts current on your ground wire and ultimately through your entire house by way of your breaker panel. Don't use ground. Use neutral. If you don't know the difference, get up off the sofa and turn the switch off by hand instead of using X-10 or Insteon.
Slashdot Mirror
Nope, what it means now is that California, New York, Florida, and Texas will pick our president. I am sorry, but if my state votes overwhelmingly for the losing candidate and its electoral votes get cast for the other candidate because they won the popular vote, explain to me how democracy was served?
People who think the Electoral College is bad have to be ignorant of the consequences of doing away with it. What it means is that candidates for national office will only campaign in a handful of states that will guarantee a popular majority. No one will ever again campaign in New England, the Midwest, or much of the South. So by doing away with electoral votes and tying them to the popular vote, you are potentially disenfranchising a huge number of states and their citizens from any meaningful participation in national elections.
Is that what you want?
No, we are wasting much of our production capacity on stupid, tree-hugging, already-shown-to-be-a-wrong-solution "technology" like ethanol production from corn. And a lot of people starve, not because there isn't enough food for them. But because there are corrupt, nasty people between them and a stable food supply.
Interestingly, there are roughly 2 acres of arable land per person on the planet right now. And guess what? Global warming would actually increase that acreage by almost 25% if average global temperatures rose 3F. It's entirely possible that a warming planet (despite the realities of sunspot cycles and impending cooling cycle) is actually required to support humanity, rather than being a harbinger of its demise.
Truth is, we are too stupid to know and too enamored with our culture of "fear" to admit it.
Pics of the fire. Not a place I'd base my business computer infrastructure...
Anyone who followed the photo essay about the fire on Sealand a few years ago would recognize that Sealand is little more than a fantasy/hobby of a couple of nut jobs trying to scam some income out of a rusty hulk. No reliable power source, no easy transport, not potable water, no permanent residents. It is a investor funded camping expedition with the occasional porn video streamed over a slow-ass satellite connection. It is not, nor was it ever, a viable "offshore hosting facility". And after they burned up the generators and half of the platform, it's really not even habitable now. So no surprise that the royalty has likely departed to points closer to the mailboxes holding their dole checks.
Does Blizzard have a Quality Assurance department staffed with senior engineering talent that follows industry standard best practices? Do they have a testbed that mirrors the live production environment? and do they actually perform unit level and integration testing? Or is this week's 3.02 patch deployment just another example of "million monkey" testing that most commercial software houses confuse with QA?
I don't mean to be snide, but for a company that pulls down roughly $150 million a month in revenue from the World of Warcraft, is there any legitimate excuse for the rolling QA horror story that happens around expansion releases? Why does Blizzard's QA suck so bad?
Huh? You are missing my point. I am only talking about the economy around digital goods that can be infinitely reproduced. The existing "old economy" infrastructure is intact and irrelevant. This whole thread is about how to monetize "free" items. My point is that you pay for the act of creation, not the item. I have no idea what you are talking about.
Well, it's pretty much broken when it comes to paying for items with zero manufacturing costs. If I can get something for free, there is no real economic benefit to me to pay for it. The value is in the act of creation, not the result of it. My point is that for that category of value creation, a reputation based economy is more fair than not. Lowering the barrier to entry for new participants is the long-standing job of marketing organizations, venture investors, and other entities whose market existence is based on enhancing value, lowering risk, and commoditizing novelty.
Those organizations don't go away. But what alternative do you have for monetizing "free" other than to place value on creation? That is the only unique thing in an otherwise endless sea of copies.
There is an alternative to getting paid for "free" content. It's a simple mind-shift that has to happen and it gets us away from the centuries old idea of an economy based on sale of tangible goods. Put concisely, you should get paid for the ability to create value in the future, not the items you create. Musicians could receive what amounts to "futures contracts", fans paying for (or rewarding) musicians for creating of future works. The works are given away for free. The people with the talent and skill to produce them are paid to create. No pay, no new music. Sucky music, no pay for future albums. It's fairly balanced out but it requires a one-time leap of faith on the consumer's part that by paying in advance for someone to create something of value, the value will be freely given. Fans (customers, etc.) are essentially paying in advance for the creator to make something of value that they will then get to freely enjoy. It is essentially an institutionalized form of patronage. It would work with any kind of product for which multiple free copies can be made (i.e. data) but would work best if there was some sort of controlled reputation system in place to actually measure the relative value of someone's creations.
I dunno the genesis of the "open source" meme with this FCS story. The SoSCOE code I worked with wasn't made of very much open source stuff. In fact, the initial versions weren't even aimed at Linux. The crap all ran on SGI boxes. So to the extent that they have aimed the code base at Posix compliant operating systems, I guess Linux can play now.
In any case, open or closed source doesn't matter much these days when you have countries like China willing to pay 1000's of hackers to reverse engineer all sorts of stuff, source code or not. All they need is access to the system and it'll eventually have all of its holes uncovered.
SoSCOE is not classified. It can be used (and demonstrated) in unclassified environments without issue. The JTTRS (radio) and crypto components are obviously classified, but the core platform is only controlled now by a bunch of lawyer babble and proprietary rights claims that Boeing inflicts on anyone wanting to use it.
Be VERY afraid. FCS/SoSCOE (System of Systems Common Operating Environment) is your worst, worst nightmare. It all squats upon an antiquated CORBA infrastructure and is the most bloated, incredibly poorly engineered PoS that has ever been birthed by an aerospace contractor. And I should know. As chief architect for the Common Operating System component of DARPA's J-UCAS program, we fought Boeing long and hard over their insistence that this architecture form the basis of the J-UCAS software infrastructure. While the idea stems from the long-running quest within the DoD to develop a true cross-service network-centric software architecture, it was built by people who completely ignored the last 15 years of lessons learned about large scale distributed systems from the Internet. It has multiple single points of failure baked into the architecture, requires outrageous amounts of RAM and CPU power to run (making it incredibly unsuitable for embedded systems use), and is licensed in such a way as to make it virtually impossible to obtain and modify without Boeing's involvement.
Furthermore, Boeing has expressed in public on several occasions that they intend for SoSCOE to make them the "Microsoft" of military systems. They are purposefully engineering a system designed to cement their position as a sole provider of OS components for network centric platforms. Nice bastardization of the open source components they are using to say the least.
Having tried repeatedly to get 2 SoSCOE nodes to communicate, we subsequently replicated 100% of the functionality that J-UCAS required using less than 150,000 lines of code and $2M of budget. Makes you wonder how long we need to support the programmer welfare for Boeing's "software engineers" and their 60 million line monstrosity if it can all be done with 400 times less code than that?
While the quality of the product (or the lack thereof) isn't in question, I find it ironic that the professors crying foul are likely to never have had to write a line of production code, maintain it in a live environment, or do anything remotely approaching what their students will be asked to do 5 years after they turn them loose. The burden is on the professors to teach, and not to blame tools. It's like a contractor saying "Gee Mr. Smith, sorry about the crappy job on building your house, but my hammer sucked." The ivory tower denizens need a dose of reality before they lob hand grenades like this.
Honestly, if they want to teach systems fundamentals, make the kids write a chip simulator and an assembler in Java. Then they can kill two birds with one stone. It doesn't take much creativity to devise a curriculum that teaches proper computer science fundamentals, even if it involves a mandate to use a "squishy" language like Java. I fault the professors screaming the loudest about this problem. It's theirs to fix, not programming language designers.
I think this comparison is fallacious. The difference between some younger than 25 using a more instant form of communication and those older than 25 using something more "archaic" like e-mail likely has more to do with the nature of their communications required by their current role in society and the workplace than anything to do with the fact that one mode is better than the other. When the kiddies grow up and understand that having a persistent, searchable, ubiquitous, reliable repository of communications with their peers, co-workers, and family is actually valuable, I think we'll see them shift their communications tool of preference. There is so much you cannot do with an IM style message in a corporate environment -- send attachments, search the past 5 years of messages, access the same message base from dozens of different device types and locations, etc. -- that e-mail will never be outpaced as a business communication tool by the current crop of IM tools and social networks.
And as a social tool, IMs match the attention span of the users. Sure, it's fun to play with Twitter and I have daily dialogs via SMS. But I am not going to write a note to a family member about a significant issue using AIM, nor am I going to discuss terms of a legal deal, send a 500 source file archive, or use SMS to read a 50 thread mailing list.
I think a more interesting study would be to follow a sub-25 year old Internet user for 10 years and see how their communications tool usage changes. That has some intrinsic value. This "study" has none. It's like saying lots of little kids play with Legos while only a handful of adults do, so therefore Legos are the wave of the future.
There are many, many types of systems that do not lend themselves to the "million monkeys" approach to systems engineering. Grafting one-off utility programs or plug-ins or other modular elements onto a large, central framework (be it an O/S, and IDE, a web browser, graphics tool or any other modular app) is not anything like the design and engineering effort required to create the initial framework. I think many (certainly not all) programmers who espouse the virtues of the "open source culture" have never actually tackled a 1 million line+ system or been involved in a project with dozens of engineers working from a predefined set of requirements towards a definite deadline with a finite budget.
It's nice to idealize the concept of a decentralized network of programmers but in practice, herding that many cats towards a desired outcome is not nearly as efficient or productive as a well-run, centralized project. And until you have actually tried both methods to achieve a similar goal, you're just blowing smoke if you say one is better than the other.
The issue isn't about whether too much money or commercialization is killing open source software (culture/roots/projects). It seems to me that the root cause has to do with the nature of the widely publicized open source projects. As open operating systems (Linux, NetBSD, etc.) and applications (Mozilla/Firefox, OpenOffice, etc.) grow in complexity, they outstrip the abilities of ad hoc, grass roots "open source" organizations to develop and maintain them.
Simply put any serious, valuable, widely-used open source project today is very likely a large and complicated one. Open Source has outgrown its own infrastructure and the only one available that can pick up the projects and move them forward are those operated by commercial organizations with the resources to throw at these hard problems.
Nothing about integrating public key crypto (or other signing technologies) into the e-mail infrastructure eliminates the ability to send anonymous e-mail. But it DOES make it a certainty that you can identify anonymous or fraudulent e-mail and reject it at the protocol level if you choose to do so. The lack of a pervasive authenticated e-mail infrastructure is the only reason spam exists. If the sender can be consistently identified (even if they are anonymous) or can be consistently identified as fraudulent or not verified, rejection of undesired message traffic becomes trivial.
You have to realize this is a war. Much more than 50 percent of email is spam - we have to take drastic measures to provide a basic service - email.
That is because e-mail is an inherently broken set of protocols that were designed in the 70's as a hack to implement a store and forward message system on the old ARPAnet. If the e-mail industry spent the same amount of effort on engineering a next generation set of e-mail protocols and authentication methods that they spend on hacks like black hole lists, white lists, spam filters, etc., we'd have solved this problem long ago.
The problem is that the e-mail software business is much like the pharmaceutical industry. There's no long-term money in providing a cure. The money is made off of hacks that address symptoms, regardless of their ineffectiveness. The tragedy is that with a few well-considered extensions to the current SMTP standard, integrated public key technology could completely eliminate spam from anonymous or bogus senders.
The real question is why hasn't the IETF addressed this problem and issued standards that correct the flaws? Sure, there is an enormous installed base of broken SMTP servers, but a freely available backward compatible implementation of a new mail infrastructure solves that problem in a few years. So why don't we fix e-mail?
The whole problem has to do with the industry and public perceptions of what a UAV is. For most people, "UAV" means "big remote-controlled airplane with cameras and/or weapons." That is the old school definition, where the ground station essentially consists of a remote cockpit and the vehicles are flown by a human (or autopilot commands are sent) via a persistent RF link. Communications failure means vehicle failure.
As the former chief architect for software on the DARPA/USAF Joint Unmanned Combat Air System (J-UCAS), I can tell you that the public's perception of UAVs have about as much in common with state of the art UAVs as the Wright Flyer has to a F-16. The difference is the degree of autonomy the aircraft exhibits. J-UCAS aircraft (the X-45C and X-47A) were designed to be completely autonomous in their mission execution, from take off to landing. In fact, the ground stations have nothing resembling a joystick. Mission planning is performed prior to take-off and the vehicle is responsible itself for all re-routing and mission contingencies.
The vehicles are configured to support the standard civil avionics elements such as TCAS, digitally encoded transponders, and data links to air traffic control. The only "frequency" challenge has to do with being able to backhaul voice communications with ATC to a human for interpretation and action when operating in airspace that doesn't support digital data links from ATC.
Traffic deconfliction is usually performed by having the UCAS aircraft operate at altitudes specifically assigned for their use. The reality is that with a little work from the FAA to set aside some dedicated altitudes above 30,000' and ensure that ATC centers can all issue routing instructions via data link as well as voice, UAVs can quite happily and safely operate in the national airspace.
The challenge is how (or if) to accommodate older UAV systems such as Predator and Globalhawk, which require man-in-the-loop control and could never be easily retrofitted to operate autonomously because of their need for persistent communications. Smaller UAVs that have performance or weight parameters that move them from the realm of R/C airplanes (and very light-weight UAVs) into the range of what the FAA defines as "aircraft" will have a serious challenge in the civil marketplace until they can adopt the degree of autonomy and ATC interaction that is just now emerging in the state of the art UAV programs.
While current UAV suppliers and operaters are scrambling for frequency spectrum now, this is fundamentally a software and FAA (ICAO) procedural problem in the future. By 2011, we may find that the industry has moved beyond the first generation UAVs and the issue of spectrum allocation becomes moot. We can only hope so, because the man-in-the-loop control model for large UAV platforms is not the desired end state for the industry.
I doubt anyone alive at this point in time has so much for so many worthy causes as Gates. He has certainly given more money to charity than anyone else, probably by a magnitude.
Another victim of successful PR by Gates. The reality is far different. If you'll recall, Gates was roundly chided by his billionaire buddies for having made NO substantive contributions to charitable causes prior to 2000. In fact, it was the subject of a WSJ article and also multi-page articles in Time and Newsweek, discussing his stingy nature. That whole tempest in a teapot led to the formation of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and only then did we see any sort of significant charitable contributions from him. The simple fact of the matter is that the man is not a philanthropist and has only acted as one to silence public criticism.
Furthermore, his "contributions" are not particularly noteworthy when considered as a percentage of his net worth. The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation was started with an endowment of less than $4 billion, primarily in the form of a stock transfer from Bill Gates (which nicely offset the HUGE capital gains he'd made in 1999-2000 as MSFT split twice in that time period.) As a percentage of his net worth, it amounted to less than 10%.
Warren Buffet, on the other hand, has set in motion the donation of 100% of his personal fortune to charity. Perhaps someone who has genuinely excelled in business and philanthropy like Mr. Buffet would make a more legitimate non-traditional candidate for Scott Adams to advocate than the guy who ripped off CP/M and parlayed it into a fortune by blackmailing IBM and other box manufacturers into bundling his technically substandard O/S?
reviled by the Geek, perhaps. but not by TIME magazine. and not by the population generally. which has never shared the Geek's hatred of Microsoft.
All that shows is Gates' ability to retain a competent PR firm to groom his image in such a way that his misanthropic tendencies, dubious business practices, and outdated technical expertise are hidden behind the gloss of a $50 billion net worth. In a land of "Who wants to be a millionaire", most of the shallow end of the gene pool can't be bothered with actually analyzing the skills and merits (or lack thereof) of their political candidates.
This story is one of the biggest meta-trolls posted in Slashdot history. Honestly, what qualifies a newspaper cartoonist to advocate the political candidacy of one of the least qualified personalities imaginable other than the possible humor value when he laughs about it with friends a year from now?
I have seen Macs do stupid buggy things just like PCs do. If you think you can type faster or click and drag faster -- Apple will be there to happily take those extra bills from your wallet to make you feel better about yourself.
First, you clearly didn't read what I wrote. I made no claims about any software being "bug-free." What I said was that the integrated solution provided a better user experience for the end user, and that was what has apparently been the driving force behind consumers' purchasing decisions in every industry EXCEPT the desktop PC market. I, personally, am happy to pay more money for a better user experience, whether that takes the form of fewer visits to the repair shop because I bought a Honda instead of a Hundai or the form of fewer reboots, crashes, viruses, trojans, and other end user problems because I might choose a computer system that was designed and integrated as a whole rather than a cheap (and badly integrated) operating system and PC hardware combination.
You obviously still ascribe to the "old think" about what constitutes value in a personal computer. I suspect you fall into the hobbyist category of user that enjoys being confronted with some nasty little problem afflicting your computer and derive some sense of accomplishment from solving it. That sort of self-eating watermelon of a computer system is inherently broken. Owning a PC isn't supposed to be about buying into a culture of continually fixing broken stuff. It is about obtaining and using a device that makes you more productive and able to perform tasks you couldn't do without it. In my book, one of those tasks is NOT at-home computer diagnostics, repair, debugging, or any other sort of jacking around under the hood of the machine to make it do what I want. That is what I PAY for when I purchase the machine. I assume someone competent has already handled those issues.
Sadly, 90% of the user base out there doesn't expect that when it comes to PCs. That is the one great disservice Microsoft has done the computer industry and its consumers -- forced lowered expectations on us. Well, sorry if I don't share your lowered expectations.
With Macs I have have what Apple blesses. "See how seamlessly it works!?" Yeah, because you only support that hardware, duh. I had to buy extra storage for various servers we have (which predate my arrival) and a 500GB SATA drive from Apple is $400; I can get a 500GB SATA for a PC for $220.
Perhaps the take-away has nothing to do with e-peening one hardware platform over another or one OS over another. Perhaps the thing the computer industry has yet to learn and what consumers have not realized they should demand is a good user experience. You can second guess Apple's decision to build a narrow range of hardware to be seamlessly supported by their OS, but you cannot legitimately argue that the user experience of the Mac hardware/software combination is inferior to Windows or Linux.
The mind-set change that has to happen is that people need to stop focusing on initial cost of ownership and the false sense of value offered by an unmanageable selection of peripherals and software. Instead, they should focus on the total cost of ownership, not only in dollar terms, but frustration, lost productivity, and inability to perform a task. Many other industries have long since abandoned the home-built piece part solutions that the average PC user has to endure. Who'd want to buy their wheels, engines, seats, wiring harnesses, body panels, and other automotive parts separately to assemble a running car? A few hobbyists, yes, but long ago the average automobile owner opted for seamless turnkey operation of their vehicles.
Apple has chosen a path that delivers a complete, integrated customer solution. Microsoft and beige box manufacturers have opted for the multiple source, OEM style solution where the user bears ultimate responsibility for successfully integrating a solution that meets their needs. I'd submit that over time, the latter method of delivering computing functionality to end users is a dead end path. There's no other industry producing a consumer product that I can think of that survives today using the customer-forced integration that the Windows industry uses.
This is old school thinking.
A reputation-based economy solves this problem (and many others). As soon as an infrastructure exists that allows a managed exchange of reputation in a market that values it relative to one's contributions to society and the inherent value of the information/data/software/media you have created, there is an easy conversion between the reputation economy and hard goods/currency economy. Then, all you need to protect is the relationship between the content and the creator so that the real author is known and forgers and pirates cannot make a claim on the resulting reputation value.
It is a technical challenge to develop a ubiquitous system for reputation "trading" that works as well as existing stock markets and currency exchanges, but our network and crypto systems are up to the task. It's just a matter of there being a compelling economic reason to switch from currency to reputation as a means of compensating the creators of digitally represented products. A trusted network of reputation exchanges that are managed as part of our existing markets isn't hard to build, just hard to deploy. But it is a model that completely eliminates the need for DRM.
In short, downloads == reputation. Provide a means to convert reputation to currency (a one way conversion, mind you), and you're done.
I meant what I said. Neutral. Not ground. As for neutral in switch boxes, most new construction these days does have neutral pulled through the switch box, precisely for home automation tasks. The usual technique is to pull the wire through the switchbox and then directly to the fixture. Neutral wires are usually left uncut/untouched in the switch box and the switch is placed in-line with the load, as with a normal switch leg. But the neutral wire is made available if necessary for these sorts of applications. In new construction, you end up running exactly the same amount of wire. I believe the final solution that Insteon intends to provide is to place controllable switches in the fixture with a simple(r) switch in the switchbox. But they don't have those products completed yet.
Neutral and ground are not the same thing. Tying these switches to ground will sometimes work, but it actually puts current on your ground wire and ultimately through your entire house by way of your breaker panel. Don't use ground. Use neutral. If you don't know the difference, get up off the sofa and turn the switch off by hand instead of using X-10 or Insteon.