Screw virtual, do what I did and buy at least one more monitor! Dual and up monitors rock. Just add Ultramon (Which IMHO is one of the best multimonitor utilities there is going) and you're all set!
You digitally sign the update and the client machine checks the signature against an authority. So it adds an extra check - they'd have to compromise the update server and an authority too. Nothings foolproof and it just hs to be cracked once for total failure (as the crack can be easily disseminated over fast mediums such as the Internet). But two (or three, etc.) independent layers of security is pretty good protection.
I don't think the datacenter is going to go away ever. However the form of the datacenter may change significantly. Imagine a virtual datacenter where instead of a centralized architecture, the storage and processing functions are distributed - decentralized - across multiple units. The only setting where this could be practical is if people allow their house systems (the Desktop is dead already;) ) to host and process information with some small compensation offered for the bother like free net access. Of course there is some magical security module that prevents people from accessing any private information.
The kernal of the article is very valid however - computing is going to become ubiquitous - You won't have distinct units such as an XBox or a PC. Instead I believe the functions provided by said units will become as standardized as electrical sockets in a house. Your house will provide web browsing, gaming, productivity, entertainment, and everything else by standard.
On the other side of the coin, the only people who suffer (inconvenience of finding and loading the disc, damage to disc causing repurchase) are people who legitimately bought the software. The pirates (whom we need more of to lower global tempertures btw..) are all running cracked copies - that don't have any of the annoying dimensions - on the first or second day of the software's release (0-day warez anyone?). CD-Keys at least aren't as intrusive as most of the titles with them don't require the media in the drive. I like what Stardock has done with GalCiv2, a cd-key that is activated over the internet or email once per patch and doesn't require the CD in the drive (keeping pirates from playing multiplayer too btw). That's the balance that I'm willing to accept, how about you?
I'm not implying that Microsoft is out to crush IBM. I'm talking more about the corporate cultures - IBM treats their business partners well while Microsoft is more out to dominate the markets they're involved in. And they both exist in a wider web of other entities ranging from the individual to the corporate each with their own mode of business (not limited to the binary choices offered in my parent post).
Now all google has to do is figure out a way to manage copyright and necessary royalty payments and pruning of material that can't be licensed satisfactorily between parties. Then they got to make a buck.
For the majority of the little videos of skaters and stuff that are not advertising supported all Google needs is a universal micropayment system going in or an escrow account system going out to store payments until a threshold payment-unit is reached. And if you could use your standard bank debit card over the net that would be awesome too. You know - Infrastructure.
Microsoft (and the vast majority of modern corporations) seems to be following Machiavelli's adage of "Men ought either to be well treated or crushed" where MS is in crush mode. IBM seems to be in well-treated mode;)
There's nothing feel good about it - this is business and unless a government steps in and regulates the industry, well, it's all about the benjamins.
...This allows the people who matter most to your community and are much more likely to hang around moderating and fixing things....
When did English become my second language?;)
What I meant - and I'll just rewrite the whole thing - is: By putting control of your community into the hands of the people who have invested the most effort in to it is likely to create a positive cycle where said people spend more time interacting with the system thereby doing most of the moderating and adminstration and enjoying it too.
That doesn't mean you can't pay a few some beer money now and then although;).
First of all, you need to foster a community - something that people care about. Then go with the idea of Karma (ripped straight from slashdot;) ), and like slashdot use karma to set the starting rating of a comment. Now unlike/. grant successively more and more administrative role priviledges to users as they progress through karma levels. Say at 20 they get to mod down what they think are bad comments at 30 they get to mod up at 40 they get to delete comments and so on, make up your own numbers and actions. This allows the people who matter most to your community and are much more likely to hang around moderating and fixing things. This puts general control of the community into the hands of the people who care the most about it. Of course there will be the occasional sleeper troll who progress' as far as it can before attempting to do as much damage to moderation as they can before the sys-op kicks the account but the effort would most likely deter all but the most blatant a**holes.
Absolutely Auditing would be a complicated system. But computers are very good at automation. I guess the first thing that would need to be established would be political. Nations would have to impose their borders around their information. At the border, a router wouldn't let someone outside of the nation download the latest brittney song because their nation doesn't (yet) pay their fees. For distribution, decentralization is superior for reliability when contrasted against a centralized architecture - but - you can mix the two a bit with centralized index servers that are government run as DNS servers are today with distributed transfer and storage of bit-torrent; so like Napster. Centralizing the index allows the controller to filter what content is permitted and track usage. So you could filter out the nasties and pay everyone equitibly. Now to make this work all other forms of unauthorized distribution such as gnutella/fast track/etc. would have to be absent (against a law) for the system to work the best.
The way people interact with Information needs to be completely re-drawn. I believe what is needed is compulsary licensing of most information. Your Internet bill just had a $25US fee attached to it. And in return you get all the downloads you can suck through the tubes. Seriously. Video, audio, books, and software. Your fee is divided back to the copyright holders. Then through regulation mandate that all browsers need to include some kind of bit-torrent like functions to increase the reliability of information access as it would be distributed (vs the current centralized points of failure). Fixing copyright law to reflect the Information Age would make the symptoms of the industrial to information conversion sickness (such as DRM) disappear. Compulsary licensing is the key - like what the Library of Congress evolves into in Snow Crash. Derivative works could explode in this kind of environment - imagine the increased revenue to copyright holders as portions of their works are remixed later on (such as Anime Music Videos).
If you could, what would you do to fix copyright?
I'm not trolling here - this is just a bit of constructive criticism, I've had SuSE installed as my only OS for 8 months at one time. I've had Ubuntu installed in a dual boot (and it had a lot less pain than SuSE when it came time to install software). But now I'm back to just Win XP as my only OS. The reason is usability. I'm talking about consistency and integration with other Microsoft products. Download Visual Studio Express. Install it (no pain unlike SuSE). Now try out the code completion including automatically looking inside your own classes for documentation tool tips. Look how easy it is to programmatically leverage other Microsoft products (Yes Microsoft is opening their API's). Use the debugger (hover over a variable in your source code to see it's value, etc.). Wizards. Compared to the PythonWin IDE I was using it's heaven.
Gnome has the right idea, usability should be a major focus of software. It does no good to be technically superior if your users can't make it go. I'm not bashing GNU/Linux here, I think it's great but as good as it is Linux still needs to be heavily polished before it's ready for mass consumption. I've drank Microsoft's kool-aid and you should too.
Microsoft's strength is the people on a project that they assign exclusively to polish their products. Shiny. And unlike the past current Microsoft products just go.
I believe in Open Source and I also believe that it is a better process on longer timescales. I also believe that Microsoft will switch to open document formats to keep most users on Windows. But in the mean-time Microsoft (especially with Visual Studio) has the advantage with getting people up to speed and generating useful code sooner than someone trying to master the intricacies of EMACS from scratch. This leads into productivity which is Microsoft's major redeeming strength. I think that in twenty years we'll all be using some-unix inspired operating system with amazing software made by a variety of vendors some free, some not, and with-all-their-money definately including Microsoft. Getting to that point however means producing code and that's where Microsoft is putting their development money.
I could go on about a million other things too, like XNA (Microsoft's new environment to standardize game development and yes it's integrated with Visual Studio). But that would be better left to another comment.
Developers! Developers! Developers!;)
I'm not trolling here, I've had SuSE installed as my only OS for 8 months at one time. I've had Ubuntu installed in a dual boot (and it had a lot less pain than SuSE when it came time to install software). But now I'm back to just Win XP as my only OS. The reason is usability. I'm talking about consistency and integration with other Microsoft products. Download Visual Studio Express. Install it (no pain unlike SuSE). Now try out the code completion including automatically looking inside your own classes for documentation tool tips. Look how easy it is to programmatically leverage other Microsoft products (Yes Microsoft is opening their API's). Use the debugger (hover over a variable in your source code to see it's value, etc.). Wizards. Compared to the PythonWin IDE I was using it's heaven.
Gnome has the right idea, usability should be a major focus of software. It does no good to be technically superior if your users can't make it go. I'm not bashing GNU/Linux here, I think it's great but as good as it is Linux still needs to be heavily polished before it's ready for mass consumption. I've drank Microsoft's kool-aid and you should too.
This is just a bit of constructive criticism. Microsoft's strength is the people on a project that they assign exclusively to polish their products. Shiny. And unlike the past current Microsoft products just go.
I believe in Open Source and I also believe that it is a better process on longer timescales. I also believe that Microsoft will switch to open document formats to keep most users on Windows. But in the mean-time Microsoft (especially with Visual Studio) has the advantage with getting people up to speed and generating useful code sooner than someone trying to master the intricacies of EMACS from scratch. This leads into productivity which is Microsoft's major redeeming strength. I think that in twenty years we'll all be using some-unix inspired operating system with amazing software made by a variety of vendors some free, some not, and with-all-their-money definately including Microsoft. Getting to that point however means producing code and that's where Microsoft is putting their development money.
I could go on about a million other things too, like XNA (Microsoft's new environment to standardize game development and yes it's integrated with Visual Studio). But that would be better left to another comment.
Developers! Developers! Developers!;)
Beware he who would deny you access to information, for in his heart he dreams himself your master. -Anonymous
That quote is from an old good game called Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri. It's a bit of voice acting from one of the factions, I think it was Provost Zakarov of the University. Or Chairman Yang of the Hive. Anyway it's a bit of voice acting definately from that game. I'd still play it today if I could get it to run on Win XP.
I was coming more from theology than government, it's kind of a pseudo-morals comment. As for the government regulating lotteries and tobacco, remember prohibition? Once people have tried something and it resonates within them the desire for it will push some people to great lengths to re-experience it. Lotteries would be very difficult to stamp out; people would just go back to the back-room "numbers" games of the 30's. So they're kind of like a tolerated lesser evil. Yes they have the potential to disrupt lives and families and so on but, the revenue generated from regulation offsets some of the damage as ideally the money would be invested into social repair programs such as alcoholics anonymous.
Yeah, I've been a smoker for about 20 years now. Tobacco is the most hypocritical thing going, it's killing me for a fact and yet I still smoke. When I was 15 and started wouldn't it have been better if it just never existed? And you don't even get anything off it.
Anti-vice laws such as this aren't for the average person. They're to protect Society from the evils of the people on the edge of the bell curve who can't limit their own impulses. There are all kinds of walks of life and if the easily addicted we're left unsheparded the inherent evilness of their potential actions would eventually spill over into other peoples lives (embezzlement to pay for the gambling for example). Some paths through life are more rewarding than others and the people who make laws tend to think their paths are better so they create blanket laws because it's very difficult to tell which people need to be protected from themselves.
Welcome to the Information age, the US' future potential is not in grunt labor but rather the creation, marketing, and refinement of information. You'll charge good money for it too. Now get back to work on the spread of WIPO type treaties to cement the foundations.
Or not.;)
You know, I read the article without noticing that it was yet another Roland article. At least I didn't go to his 'blog. And now after reading your comment I don't even feel like talking about the article anymore. Yay, fun times on/. . Your +5 Insightful is a community arrived at fsck you to Zonk despite his apparent lack of caring. Oh well I'm going to go browse somewhere else for a while.
Cheers.
They're taking a big one-time hit although. Once they've rewritten/replaced all their software and migrated their data the cost to add new units will be significantly lower.
Slashdot Mirror
Screw virtual, do what I did and buy at least one more monitor! Dual and up monitors rock. Just add Ultramon (Which IMHO is one of the best multimonitor utilities there is going) and you're all set!
You digitally sign the update and the client machine checks the signature against an authority. So it adds an extra check - they'd have to compromise the update server and an authority too. Nothings foolproof and it just hs to be cracked once for total failure (as the crack can be easily disseminated over fast mediums such as the Internet). But two (or three, etc.) independent layers of security is pretty good protection.
I don't think the datacenter is going to go away ever
I don't think the functions provided by a datacenter are going to go away ever.
I don't think the datacenter is going to go away ever. However the form of the datacenter may change significantly. Imagine a virtual datacenter where instead of a centralized architecture, the storage and processing functions are distributed - decentralized - across multiple units. The only setting where this could be practical is if people allow their house systems (the Desktop is dead already ;) ) to host and process information with some small compensation offered for the bother like free net access. Of course there is some magical security module that prevents people from accessing any private information.
The kernal of the article is very valid however - computing is going to become ubiquitous - You won't have distinct units such as an XBox or a PC. Instead I believe the functions provided by said units will become as standardized as electrical sockets in a house. Your house will provide web browsing, gaming, productivity, entertainment, and everything else by standard.
Oops, my bad.
On the other side of the coin, the only people who suffer (inconvenience of finding and loading the disc, damage to disc causing repurchase) are people who legitimately bought the software. The pirates (whom we need more of to lower global tempertures btw..) are all running cracked copies - that don't have any of the annoying dimensions - on the first or second day of the software's release (0-day warez anyone?). CD-Keys at least aren't as intrusive as most of the titles with them don't require the media in the drive. I like what Stardock has done with GalCiv2, a cd-key that is activated over the internet or email once per patch and doesn't require the CD in the drive (keeping pirates from playing multiplayer too btw). That's the balance that I'm willing to accept, how about you?
I'm not implying that Microsoft is out to crush IBM. I'm talking more about the corporate cultures - IBM treats their business partners well while Microsoft is more out to dominate the markets they're involved in. And they both exist in a wider web of other entities ranging from the individual to the corporate each with their own mode of business (not limited to the binary choices offered in my parent post).
Now all google has to do is figure out a way to manage copyright and necessary royalty payments and pruning of material that can't be licensed satisfactorily between parties. Then they got to make a buck.
For the majority of the little videos of skaters and stuff that are not advertising supported all Google needs is a universal micropayment system going in or an escrow account system going out to store payments until a threshold payment-unit is reached. And if you could use your standard bank debit card over the net that would be awesome too. You know - Infrastructure.
Microsoft (and the vast majority of modern corporations) seems to be following Machiavelli's adage of "Men ought either to be well treated or crushed" where MS is in crush mode. IBM seems to be in well-treated mode ;)
There's nothing feel good about it - this is business and unless a government steps in and regulates the industry, well, it's all about the benjamins.
...This allows the people who matter most to your community and are much more likely to hang around moderating and fixing things....
;)
;).
When did English become my second language?
What I meant - and I'll just rewrite the whole thing - is: By putting control of your community into the hands of the people who have invested the most effort in to it is likely to create a positive cycle where said people spend more time interacting with the system thereby doing most of the moderating and adminstration and enjoying it too.
That doesn't mean you can't pay a few some beer money now and then although
First of all, you need to foster a community - something that people care about. Then go with the idea of Karma (ripped straight from slashdot ;) ), and like slashdot use karma to set the starting rating of a comment. Now unlike /. grant successively more and more administrative role priviledges to users as they progress through karma levels. Say at 20 they get to mod down what they think are bad comments at 30 they get to mod up at 40 they get to delete comments and so on, make up your own numbers and actions. This allows the people who matter most to your community and are much more likely to hang around moderating and fixing things. This puts general control of the community into the hands of the people who care the most about it. Of course there will be the occasional sleeper troll who progress' as far as it can before attempting to do as much damage to moderation as they can before the sys-op kicks the account but the effort would most likely deter all but the most blatant a**holes.
At this point it may be the best deal they'll ever get.
The concept of "Mine" fades off into the distance I guess.
Absolutely Auditing would be a complicated system. But computers are very good at automation. I guess the first thing that would need to be established would be political. Nations would have to impose their borders around their information. At the border, a router wouldn't let someone outside of the nation download the latest brittney song because their nation doesn't (yet) pay their fees. For distribution, decentralization is superior for reliability when contrasted against a centralized architecture - but - you can mix the two a bit with centralized index servers that are government run as DNS servers are today with distributed transfer and storage of bit-torrent; so like Napster. Centralizing the index allows the controller to filter what content is permitted and track usage. So you could filter out the nasties and pay everyone equitibly. Now to make this work all other forms of unauthorized distribution such as gnutella/fast track/etc. would have to be absent (against a law) for the system to work the best.
The way people interact with Information needs to be completely re-drawn. I believe what is needed is compulsary licensing of most information. Your Internet bill just had a $25US fee attached to it. And in return you get all the downloads you can suck through the tubes. Seriously. Video, audio, books, and software. Your fee is divided back to the copyright holders. Then through regulation mandate that all browsers need to include some kind of bit-torrent like functions to increase the reliability of information access as it would be distributed (vs the current centralized points of failure). Fixing copyright law to reflect the Information Age would make the symptoms of the industrial to information conversion sickness (such as DRM) disappear. Compulsary licensing is the key - like what the Library of Congress evolves into in Snow Crash. Derivative works could explode in this kind of environment - imagine the increased revenue to copyright holders as portions of their works are remixed later on (such as Anime Music Videos).
If you could, what would you do to fix copyright?
from the change-or-die dept.
;)
I'm not trolling here - this is just a bit of constructive criticism, I've had SuSE installed as my only OS for 8 months at one time. I've had Ubuntu installed in a dual boot (and it had a lot less pain than SuSE when it came time to install software). But now I'm back to just Win XP as my only OS. The reason is usability. I'm talking about consistency and integration with other Microsoft products. Download Visual Studio Express. Install it (no pain unlike SuSE). Now try out the code completion including automatically looking inside your own classes for documentation tool tips. Look how easy it is to programmatically leverage other Microsoft products (Yes Microsoft is opening their API's). Use the debugger (hover over a variable in your source code to see it's value, etc.). Wizards. Compared to the PythonWin IDE I was using it's heaven.
Gnome has the right idea, usability should be a major focus of software. It does no good to be technically superior if your users can't make it go. I'm not bashing GNU/Linux here, I think it's great but as good as it is Linux still needs to be heavily polished before it's ready for mass consumption. I've drank Microsoft's kool-aid and you should too.
Microsoft's strength is the people on a project that they assign exclusively to polish their products. Shiny. And unlike the past current Microsoft products just go.
I believe in Open Source and I also believe that it is a better process on longer timescales. I also believe that Microsoft will switch to open document formats to keep most users on Windows. But in the mean-time Microsoft (especially with Visual Studio) has the advantage with getting people up to speed and generating useful code sooner than someone trying to master the intricacies of EMACS from scratch. This leads into productivity which is Microsoft's major redeeming strength. I think that in twenty years we'll all be using some-unix inspired operating system with amazing software made by a variety of vendors some free, some not, and with-all-their-money definately including Microsoft. Getting to that point however means producing code and that's where Microsoft is putting their development money.
I could go on about a million other things too, like XNA (Microsoft's new environment to standardize game development and yes it's integrated with Visual Studio). But that would be better left to another comment.
Developers! Developers! Developers!
from the change-or-die dept.
;)
I'm not trolling here, I've had SuSE installed as my only OS for 8 months at one time. I've had Ubuntu installed in a dual boot (and it had a lot less pain than SuSE when it came time to install software). But now I'm back to just Win XP as my only OS. The reason is usability. I'm talking about consistency and integration with other Microsoft products. Download Visual Studio Express. Install it (no pain unlike SuSE). Now try out the code completion including automatically looking inside your own classes for documentation tool tips. Look how easy it is to programmatically leverage other Microsoft products (Yes Microsoft is opening their API's). Use the debugger (hover over a variable in your source code to see it's value, etc.). Wizards. Compared to the PythonWin IDE I was using it's heaven.
Gnome has the right idea, usability should be a major focus of software. It does no good to be technically superior if your users can't make it go. I'm not bashing GNU/Linux here, I think it's great but as good as it is Linux still needs to be heavily polished before it's ready for mass consumption. I've drank Microsoft's kool-aid and you should too.
This is just a bit of constructive criticism. Microsoft's strength is the people on a project that they assign exclusively to polish their products. Shiny. And unlike the past current Microsoft products just go.
I believe in Open Source and I also believe that it is a better process on longer timescales. I also believe that Microsoft will switch to open document formats to keep most users on Windows. But in the mean-time Microsoft (especially with Visual Studio) has the advantage with getting people up to speed and generating useful code sooner than someone trying to master the intricacies of EMACS from scratch. This leads into productivity which is Microsoft's major redeeming strength. I think that in twenty years we'll all be using some-unix inspired operating system with amazing software made by a variety of vendors some free, some not, and with-all-their-money definately including Microsoft. Getting to that point however means producing code and that's where Microsoft is putting their development money.
I could go on about a million other things too, like XNA (Microsoft's new environment to standardize game development and yes it's integrated with Visual Studio). But that would be better left to another comment.
Developers! Developers! Developers!
Beware he who would deny you access to information, for in his heart he dreams himself your master. -Anonymous
That quote is from an old good game called Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri. It's a bit of voice acting from one of the factions, I think it was Provost Zakarov of the University. Or Chairman Yang of the Hive. Anyway it's a bit of voice acting definately from that game. I'd still play it today if I could get it to run on Win XP.
I was coming more from theology than government, it's kind of a pseudo-morals comment. As for the government regulating lotteries and tobacco, remember prohibition? Once people have tried something and it resonates within them the desire for it will push some people to great lengths to re-experience it. Lotteries would be very difficult to stamp out; people would just go back to the back-room "numbers" games of the 30's. So they're kind of like a tolerated lesser evil. Yes they have the potential to disrupt lives and families and so on but, the revenue generated from regulation offsets some of the damage as ideally the money would be invested into social repair programs such as alcoholics anonymous.
Yeah, I've been a smoker for about 20 years now. Tobacco is the most hypocritical thing going, it's killing me for a fact and yet I still smoke. When I was 15 and started wouldn't it have been better if it just never existed? And you don't even get anything off it.
Anti-vice laws such as this aren't for the average person. They're to protect Society from the evils of the people on the edge of the bell curve who can't limit their own impulses. There are all kinds of walks of life and if the easily addicted we're left unsheparded the inherent evilness of their potential actions would eventually spill over into other peoples lives (embezzlement to pay for the gambling for example). Some paths through life are more rewarding than others and the people who make laws tend to think their paths are better so they create blanket laws because it's very difficult to tell which people need to be protected from themselves.
blah blah blah. Off to work.
Welcome to the Information age, the US' future potential is not in grunt labor but rather the creation, marketing, and refinement of information. You'll charge good money for it too. Now get back to work on the spread of WIPO type treaties to cement the foundations. ;)
Or not.
You know, I read the article without noticing that it was yet another Roland article. At least I didn't go to his 'blog. And now after reading your comment I don't even feel like talking about the article anymore. Yay, fun times on /. . Your +5 Insightful is a community arrived at fsck you to Zonk despite his apparent lack of caring. Oh well I'm going to go browse somewhere else for a while.
Cheers.
...and no principle exists to make the atmosphere transparent to UV...
;)
We could start using CFC's again...
They're taking a big one-time hit although. Once they've rewritten/replaced all their software and migrated their data the cost to add new units will be significantly lower.
You might end up getting fragged by an eight year old.