I pass by it every morning when I take my son to daycare. There's always a group in front, having their morning smoke. They all look pretty unexcited to start their day, probably no more or less than a typical office worker. Makes me wonder how much it's a belief for them, and how much it's just a job.
Nothing too special to add, just wanted to comment. And to say that it'd be nice to have them move out, if that ends up happening.
...and I think I've already seen this in operation. I go to the movies a lot, especially at a couple of major theaters.
Ever since the start of summer, at certain screens I've noticed that my phone shows "emergency calls only" when I go to silence/turn it off before the film (and sometimes during the film, when I remmeber part way through).
It doesn't always seem to be on, but there definitely seems to be some sort of system like this already in place. Maybe it was a testing/proof of concept phase?
In any case, man am I looking forward to this system being on all the time. The worst are the kids who have entire conversations during the film, and this is the only kind of thing that will shut them up.
No, but he proposed almost exactly what he's talking about here for the sale of spectrum to broadcasters.
Remember raking in all those millions (if not billions) of dollars that the government earned from selling spectrum for a pretty penny? Me neither. But that was the original plan: require a switch, but bill the money centers (the ad-selling broadcasters).
The broadcasters whined enough about unfair competition from cable that they were basically given the spectrum (except that they will have to give back the old VHF/UHF spectrum once it's freed).
Funny, it's exactly that money that was supposed to have subsidized the necessary converter boxes for older equipment. Instead, guess who's footing the $300/TV bill? Hmmm -- that would be us, the same taxpayers who owned the spectrum to begin with.
Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me. I sure as hell wouldn't support his latest plan, even overlooking any other technical or ideological problems that one could have with it.
I wish I had a +1 Funny to throw your way. So true, at least in the case of her "reviews".
Still, I couldn't just submit a/. story with "Mandrake's juuust about to come out with 9.1" and get it accepted. With the hook, it was ready hours before the official announcement. Too bad DistroWatch (whose beta reviews have been great) wasn't the one given this review opportunity.
Nah. I wasn't the one writing the review (thank god) -- and there will be many better. I just chose this one because it gave a better story than "Mandrake 9.1 is going to be out soon").
And "beta production" doesn't have to mean "asking for trouble". Choose your timing and setup well, and you can install later betas of many things on a spare workstation. I don't do it all the time, and you don't have to do it at all.
My choice, my risk. But it's pretty hard to test a desktop-oriented distro unless you use it on a daily basis.
Who would consider putting a beta product into a production environment?
Someone with a spare workstation.
"Production" doesn't mean that I was hosting anything or even open to the world. It's a machine safely (as safe as that can be) behind a firewall that I did production work on. Anything I lost was my own fault.
Remember, it's a desktop-oriented distro. Best way to test it? Choose a point when you can spare the time and install it for everyday use. And save things on a network share so that you can get to them from a stable machine if need be.
True enough; and DistoWatch reviews are much better (I'd read them all). But at the time I submitted the story, I needed a hook. Now that 9.1 is officially released, I don't need that excuse any more. But if I'd waited, I wouldn't have an accepted Mandrake 9.1 story on/. either.;)
This Agreement grants developers a royalty-free license to allow a maximum of 250,000 End-Users to register with Gracenote and thereby "turn-on" the Gracenote features of their Gracenote-Enabled copies.
If you want to license more than 250,000 Gracenote-Enabled copies of your Licensed Applications, or if your Licensed Applications are commercial in any way (see below) you must enter into a Commercial Application License with Gracenote, and you should contact licensing@gracenote.com.
And, funny enough, you have to first register with them to see the terms of the commercial developers' license.
So, unless you've seen that license and know something I don't, I call bullshit and reiterate my original position: Gracenote (ex-CDDB) changed their licensing in mid-run. It's a reasonable change, but it still affects people. And it does imply a fee-bsaed relationship should your software become popular.
Credit where credit's due: post #5286740 is the one that jogged my brain. Right after I made my own post, I found it lurking around the bottom of the list here along with mine.
Someone mentioned that this technology helped the music industry in its lawsuit against Napster (or another service?), showing which files were being swapped. I haven't been able to quickly find that post again, so here's my thoughts in the void.
Would technology that allows fingerprinting down to the file level, in conjunction with a user-supported (i.e. richly populated) database, actually help music file swapping? Conceivably, someone could integrate this into their service to indicate that a file was what it was called before it was transferred.
Granted, there are other ways to fake a file than just giving the "right" name to a bogus file of the right size. But I imagine something like this (along with checks) could make it much more difficult to kill PNP by populating services with bogus files.
A half-baked idea, but my two cents' worth anyway.
*Paranoid pondering* what if the TRM tech owners decided to charge for future use after the database was largely used and accepted.
This is almost exactly what happened with CDDB, which is why freedb exists. CDDB changed their protocols and you can no longer program for their service without using their own plugins (DLLs or librarys) -- which requires registering with them, and agreeing to pay a fee.
The fee is based on usage numbers of your software, not how much you charge. That can lead to a situation where a creator of successful freeware owes them money (I don't know how WinAmp does it, perhaps they have a special agreement in light of their marquee status).
I don't know, but am I the only one who found Malone's writing to be mushy? He wanders around, talking about how Moore's Law applies to the burst Web bubble, that Intel isn't surviving because of an inability to follow it's founder's law, and yet that we shouldn't be enslaved by this "law".
In fact, the whole article is based around Moore's Law still applying, desptie being "unhealthy". Well, duh. I think he had a point to make somewhere, but lost it on the way to the deadline. Personally, I would have appreciated more concrete reasons about why Google's bucking the trend is so interesting (to him).
He did bring up one very interesting point, but didn't explore it enough to my taste. Where is reliability in the equation? What happens if you keep all three factors the same, and use the cost savings in the technology to address failure points?
Google ran into bum hard drives, and yet the solution was simply to change brands? The people who are trying to address that very need would seem to be a perfect fit for a story about why Moore's Law isn't the end-all be-all answer.
My point is that it is giving IBM hardware independance.
Definitely! I love this aspect of a good OS, in that a vendor can offer a single solution across their product range. Talk about differentiators (e.g. when comparing to competitors' lines).
Of course, we should keep in mind that this could be done with any properly designed OS. It's just cool that it was done with a grassroots-created OS.
It may also be possible, some medical practitioners believe, to use copies to save lives on the operating table. A copy could be made of a kidney dialysis patient's good kidney, and then the copy could be inserted into the patient's body cavity, replacing the bad kidney.
I think you misunderstood me. I agree that platform independance is a nice feature, but my point was that it's not the one that made Linux so widespread. As a result, there isn't the critical mass that the AC said would keep processor makers "in line" -- much less keep Intel in check. In fact, it's quite the contrary.
Sure, there are some who will upgrade their servers -- and maybe switch platforms at that point. But I'd be willing to bet that the mass of people already on Intel-based platforms will continue to use Intel. This is why Microsoft is actually worried by an alternate OS, for once. Linux is the sole competetor that actually has momentum on Intel.
BTW, Linux wasn't originally designed for platform independance. The GNU core libs and apps, of course, are. But the kernel was Intel all the way, even having some hacks based specifically on x86 features/behaviors.
All this said, the AC post totally missed the intent of my original comment. The "interesting point" that I mentioned in my original post doesn't apply to the hardware side, because the game is totally different. Re-read my first post, and you'll see that it had nothing to say about hardware independance, good or bad.
From the press release: "The Bitstream Vera fonts will be available for free copying and redistribution and can be modified as long as the font name is changed."
I tried to look in the Bitstream store's find fonts section, but it was slow as molasses. I'm sure it't been indirectly Slashdotted. If you're lucky enough to get in, they should have sample images of the fonts.
I'm not so sure about that. Intel is already pretty much the dominant player. There's very little risk that Linux could actually cause people to change processor architectures. In fact, it benefits from Intel's ubiquity.
A handy case in point of Intel's safe position is in this very article: "Linux runs on machines powered by cheaper standard Intel microprocessors, unlike the proprietary chips that run the variations of Unix." Huh? The x86 architecture is only "standard" because more people use that than any other single architecture.
Sure, we Linux users could take their marbles and play somewhere else. But I'd say a major reason (if not the one) that Linux is so popular is because it didn't require a platform change. To switch, people could do a software install rather than buying a whole new hardware platform. I honestly don't think that Linux loyalty would ever lead to the migration of its user base en masse to another processor architecture, unless it were free as well.
The car companies are trying to buy some good karma with enviro freaks and government types while they continue to produce gas-guzzling behemoths for the public.
I agree. The first thing that entered my mind when I read this was, "when will it stop being a concept car?" (the second being how ugly it is, as others have posted). I'm far from being a granola, but I'd like to see at least some balance in companies' lineups.
And for those saying that the auto industry is just "answering a need": The market difference between a green car and a power SUV is virtually nil. In both cases, you've created the demand through endless hype and ads. Taking the easy out in marketing, I'm sure that a "green" car could be sexy, too (c.f. all those reviewers talking about electric cars' near-instant acceleration).
I thought I'd head the name of this consultancy before: Wired had an article on MBDC last year. It spotlights their work with Ford, so I'm guessing that Ford has at least some actual intent to put their money where their mouth is. At least, until the government gets even softer on pollution regulation...
Keeping the big companies in line this time round - other than an increased mutual respect for Microsoft - is a licensing system that gives them little incentive to try to commandeer Linux for their own purposes. Developed by Stallman, the so-called general public licence attached to Linux forces anyone who modifies the system to make the modification freely available to others. "The licence doesn't guarantee there won't be fragmentation but it makes it very difficult to support a business model" if a company wants to develop a proprietary Linux, says Mr Frye at IBM.
That's a part of the model that I don't often see pointed out. It's pretty apparent, when you think about it, but not obvious. Sure, companies can add distinguishing (and proprietary) applications, but the core stays relatively stable.
Not only do others benefit from what is added, they benefit from what isn't added.
I'd wager that those of us who give two damns about our privacy would much rather use a cross-platform, free solution such as Helix as opposed to [...] Windows Media Player.
First off, you're mixing your apples and oranges, comparing servers and clients. WMP and RealPlayer are both the devil's spawn, when it comes to individual users' privacy and rights.
Second, "cross-platform" and "free" are hardly synonymous with "privacy". I think you're confusing "free"-as-in-beer with "free"-as-in-liberty. Even "open" code isn't free from being abused to lock you in to solutions. Notice "lock-in" coming up as a recent buzzword at LinuxWorld? Wonder where the Slashdot rightousness was then. 'Course it must be okay if it's only companies who are locked into a proprietary solution, right?
RealNetworks isn't opening Helix out of altruism. They need market share, and this is a (potentially) sound business decision. Don't confuse it with any sort of plan on their part to stop doing everything they can to get more users -- and more information about those users.
Glad to see that while I was writing this, you got modded back down.
Man, and I thought Minnesoh-tans had a complex when I lived there (don't take it badly, I'm smiling as I write this).
I don't think the media automatically puts MN before WI. It's just that they're both in flyover country and are cold in the winter (some people aren't beyond believing that there's snow in the summer).
Re:Hasn't this been done before?
on
Peephole Displays
·
· Score: 3, Informative
Yeah, it was called "Rock 'n' Scroll" (someone who grew up with Sit 'n' Spin?) and was actually well over two years ago, according to a colleague.
You can see it at HP/Compaq's Western Research Lab. The photo shows the device was called "Itsy", but I'm not sure if that was the model or the name of the implementation of Rock 'n' Scroll. Both names are pretty lame, though.
There was even Doom running on the thing -- check out the AVI or QuickTime files linked towards the end of the article.
Slashdot Mirror
I pass by it every morning when I take my son to daycare. There's always a group in front, having their morning smoke. They all look pretty unexcited to start their day, probably no more or less than a typical office worker. Makes me wonder how much it's a belief for them, and how much it's just a job.
Nothing too special to add, just wanted to comment. And to say that it'd be nice to have them move out, if that ends up happening.
However, the reality is that it would be better to have no bugs in the first place.
"Le mieux est l'ennemi du bien."
("The best [the perfect] is the enemy of the good.")
- Voltaire, Dictionnaire Philosophique (1764)
Sometimes, things have to be "good enough" or else nothing gets accomplished.
...and I think I've already seen this in operation. I go to the movies a lot, especially at a couple of major theaters.
Ever since the start of summer, at certain screens I've noticed that my phone shows "emergency calls only" when I go to silence/turn it off before the film (and sometimes during the film, when I remmeber part way through).
It doesn't always seem to be on, but there definitely seems to be some sort of system like this already in place. Maybe it was a testing/proof of concept phase?
In any case, man am I looking forward to this system being on all the time. The worst are the kids who have entire conversations during the film, and this is the only kind of thing that will shut them up.
No, but he proposed almost exactly what he's talking about here for the sale of spectrum to broadcasters.
Remember raking in all those millions (if not billions) of dollars that the government earned from selling spectrum for a pretty penny? Me neither. But that was the original plan: require a switch, but bill the money centers (the ad-selling broadcasters).
The broadcasters whined enough about unfair competition from cable that they were basically given the spectrum (except that they will have to give back the old VHF/UHF spectrum once it's freed).
Funny, it's exactly that money that was supposed to have subsidized the necessary converter boxes for older equipment. Instead, guess who's footing the $300/TV bill? Hmmm -- that would be us, the same taxpayers who owned the spectrum to begin with.
Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me. I sure as hell wouldn't support his latest plan, even overlooking any other technical or ideological problems that one could have with it.
I wish I had a +1 Funny to throw your way. So true, at least in the case of her "reviews".
/. story with "Mandrake's juuust about to come out with 9.1" and get it accepted. With the hook, it was ready hours before the official announcement. Too bad DistroWatch (whose beta reviews have been great) wasn't the one given this review opportunity.
Still, I couldn't just submit a
Nah. I wasn't the one writing the review (thank god) -- and there will be many better. I just chose this one because it gave a better story than "Mandrake 9.1 is going to be out soon").
And "beta production" doesn't have to mean "asking for trouble". Choose your timing and setup well, and you can install later betas of many things on a spare workstation. I don't do it all the time, and you don't have to do it at all.
My choice, my risk. But it's pretty hard to test a desktop-oriented distro unless you use it on a daily basis.
Who would consider putting a beta product into a production environment?
Someone with a spare workstation.
"Production" doesn't mean that I was hosting anything or even open to the world. It's a machine safely (as safe as that can be) behind a firewall that I did production work on. Anything I lost was my own fault.
Remember, it's a desktop-oriented distro. Best way to test it? Choose a point when you can spare the time and install it for everyday use. And save things on a network share so that you can get to them from a stable machine if need be.
True enough; and DistoWatch reviews are much better (I'd read them all). But at the time I submitted the story, I needed a hook. Now that 9.1 is officially released, I don't need that excuse any more. But if I'd waited, I wouldn't have an accepted Mandrake 9.1 story on /. either. ;)
9.1 "final" is available right now
/. lag time, no biggie.
Yup. I submitted this much earlier in the day. Normal
If you look in their non-commercial developer licensing overview, you'll find this gem:
And, funny enough, you have to first register with them to see the terms of the commercial developers' license.
So, unless you've seen that license and know something I don't, I call bullshit and reiterate my original position: Gracenote (ex-CDDB) changed their licensing in mid-run. It's a reasonable change, but it still affects people. And it does imply a fee-bsaed relationship should your software become popular.
Credit where credit's due: post #5286740 is the one that jogged my brain. Right after I made my own post, I found it lurking around the bottom of the list here along with mine.
Someone mentioned that this technology helped the music industry in its lawsuit against Napster (or another service?), showing which files were being swapped. I haven't been able to quickly find that post again, so here's my thoughts in the void.
Would technology that allows fingerprinting down to the file level, in conjunction with a user-supported (i.e. richly populated) database, actually help music file swapping? Conceivably, someone could integrate this into their service to indicate that a file was what it was called before it was transferred.
Granted, there are other ways to fake a file than just giving the "right" name to a bogus file of the right size. But I imagine something like this (along with checks) could make it much more difficult to kill PNP by populating services with bogus files.
A half-baked idea, but my two cents' worth anyway.
*Paranoid pondering* what if the TRM tech owners decided to charge for future use after the database was largely used and accepted.
This is almost exactly what happened with CDDB, which is why freedb exists. CDDB changed their protocols and you can no longer program for their service without using their own plugins (DLLs or librarys) -- which requires registering with them, and agreeing to pay a fee.
The fee is based on usage numbers of your software, not how much you charge. That can lead to a situation where a creator of successful freeware owes them money (I don't know how WinAmp does it, perhaps they have a special agreement in light of their marquee status).
I don't know, but am I the only one who found Malone's writing to be mushy? He wanders around, talking about how Moore's Law applies to the burst Web bubble, that Intel isn't surviving because of an inability to follow it's founder's law, and yet that we shouldn't be enslaved by this "law".
In fact, the whole article is based around Moore's Law still applying, desptie being "unhealthy". Well, duh. I think he had a point to make somewhere, but lost it on the way to the deadline. Personally, I would have appreciated more concrete reasons about why Google's bucking the trend is so interesting (to him).
He did bring up one very interesting point, but didn't explore it enough to my taste. Where is reliability in the equation? What happens if you keep all three factors the same, and use the cost savings in the technology to address failure points?
Google ran into bum hard drives, and yet the solution was simply to change brands? The people who are trying to address that very need would seem to be a perfect fit for a story about why Moore's Law isn't the end-all be-all answer.
My point is that it is giving IBM hardware independance.
Definitely! I love this aspect of a good OS, in that a vendor can offer a single solution across their product range. Talk about differentiators (e.g. when comparing to competitors' lines).
Of course, we should keep in mind that this could be done with any properly designed OS. It's just cool that it was done with a grassroots-created OS.
Mexican Scientists Perfect Copying
I think you misunderstood me. I agree that platform independance is a nice feature, but my point was that it's not the one that made Linux so widespread. As a result, there isn't the critical mass that the AC said would keep processor makers "in line" -- much less keep Intel in check. In fact, it's quite the contrary.
Sure, there are some who will upgrade their servers -- and maybe switch platforms at that point. But I'd be willing to bet that the mass of people already on Intel-based platforms will continue to use Intel. This is why Microsoft is actually worried by an alternate OS, for once. Linux is the sole competetor that actually has momentum on Intel.
BTW, Linux wasn't originally designed for platform independance. The GNU core libs and apps, of course, are. But the kernel was Intel all the way, even having some hacks based specifically on x86 features/behaviors.
All this said, the AC post totally missed the intent of my original comment. The "interesting point" that I mentioned in my original post doesn't apply to the hardware side, because the game is totally different. Re-read my first post, and you'll see that it had nothing to say about hardware independance, good or bad.
From the press release: "The Bitstream Vera fonts will be available for free copying and redistribution and can be modified as long as the font name is changed."
I tried to look in the Bitstream store's find fonts section, but it was slow as molasses. I'm sure it't been indirectly Slashdotted. If you're lucky enough to get in, they should have sample images of the fonts.
I'm not so sure about that. Intel is already pretty much the dominant player. There's very little risk that Linux could actually cause people to change processor architectures. In fact, it benefits from Intel's ubiquity.
A handy case in point of Intel's safe position is in this very article: "Linux runs on machines powered by cheaper standard Intel microprocessors, unlike the proprietary chips that run the variations of Unix." Huh? The x86 architecture is only "standard" because more people use that than any other single architecture.
Sure, we Linux users could take their marbles and play somewhere else. But I'd say a major reason (if not the one) that Linux is so popular is because it didn't require a platform change. To switch, people could do a software install rather than buying a whole new hardware platform. I honestly don't think that Linux loyalty would ever lead to the migration of its user base en masse to another processor architecture, unless it were free as well.
The car companies are trying to buy some good karma with enviro freaks and government types while they continue to produce gas-guzzling behemoths for the public.
I agree. The first thing that entered my mind when I read this was, "when will it stop being a concept car?" (the second being how ugly it is, as others have posted). I'm far from being a granola, but I'd like to see at least some balance in companies' lineups.
And for those saying that the auto industry is just "answering a need": The market difference between a green car and a power SUV is virtually nil. In both cases, you've created the demand through endless hype and ads. Taking the easy out in marketing, I'm sure that a "green" car could be sexy, too (c.f. all those reviewers talking about electric cars' near-instant acceleration).
I thought I'd head the name of this consultancy before: Wired had an article on MBDC last year. It spotlights their work with Ford, so I'm guessing that Ford has at least some actual intent to put their money where their mouth is. At least, until the government gets even softer on pollution regulation...
That's a part of the model that I don't often see pointed out. It's pretty apparent, when you think about it, but not obvious. Sure, companies can add distinguishing (and proprietary) applications, but the core stays relatively stable.
Not only do others benefit from what is added, they benefit from what isn't added.
Hey, at least they mentioned RMS (and got most of the salient points correct). Usually the business articles leave it at "Linus wrote Linux".
I'd wager that those of us who give two damns about our privacy would much rather use a cross-platform, free solution such as Helix as opposed to [...] Windows Media Player.
First off, you're mixing your apples and oranges, comparing servers and clients. WMP and RealPlayer are both the devil's spawn, when it comes to individual users' privacy and rights.
Hiding Your Choices And Saying You Made Them (just this month!!!)
RealPlayer Uploads Your ID Too
(though, can't forget Big Brother Lifetime Award Goes To Microsoft)
Second, "cross-platform" and "free" are hardly synonymous with "privacy". I think you're confusing "free"-as-in-beer with "free"-as-in-liberty. Even "open" code isn't free from being abused to lock you in to solutions. Notice "lock-in" coming up as a recent buzzword at LinuxWorld? Wonder where the Slashdot rightousness was then. 'Course it must be okay if it's only companies who are locked into a proprietary solution, right?
RealNetworks isn't opening Helix out of altruism. They need market share, and this is a (potentially) sound business decision. Don't confuse it with any sort of plan on their part to stop doing everything they can to get more users -- and more information about those users.
Glad to see that while I was writing this, you got modded back down.
Man, and I thought Minnesoh-tans had a complex when I lived there (don't take it badly, I'm smiling as I write this).
I don't think the media automatically puts MN before WI. It's just that they're both in flyover country and are cold in the winter (some people aren't beyond believing that there's snow in the summer).
Yeah, it was called "Rock 'n' Scroll" (someone who grew up with Sit 'n' Spin?) and was actually well over two years ago, according to a colleague.
You can see it at HP/Compaq's Western Research Lab. The photo shows the device was called "Itsy", but I'm not sure if that was the model or the name of the implementation of Rock 'n' Scroll. Both names are pretty lame, though.
There was even Doom running on the thing -- check out the AVI or QuickTime files linked towards the end of the article.