I predict that the next big thing will be sub-games, set up in the context of larger "virtual real estate" systems eg: Second Life. The VRE acts as a convenient driver and gateway for both small (hobbyist) and large (commercially sublet) inner games. For a new game company, this could make excellent business sense. The software's done for you, there's a ready made in-game economy and customer base, all you need to do is dev the game-world and put a toll-gate at the door.
I expect it to fail in the movie market, for the same reason laserdisk never beat VHS - ye olde DVD is quite adequate, already here, and much cheaper. Also, I expect the early-adopter market to be surprisingly hostile to obtrusive DRM. See the original "DIVX" fiasco.
Blu-Ray might actually succeed, ironically, in the writable-media and DVD-ROM market, to which DRM does not apply. Movies don't grow to fit a bigger disk - software alays seems to, and backups certainly do.
As to the "self destruct" - it's a class-action lawsuit waiting to happen, not to mention a PR nightmare. The distributor's legal department would veto any such a daft proposal long before any booby-trapped disks were cut.
They're a matter of when the planets are close together so that you can conveniently lob a piece of hardware from one to another, and when the Earth has rotated to point in the right direction. Closeness of Earth and Mars happens every so often as they mutually orbit the sun at different speeds, and pointing in the right direction happens once a day.
It's pretty obvious that SSH/PGP makes this null for open source and offshore software at least. I suspect though that what they're aiming at is the sort of hardware VOIP that's quite likely to supplant landline phones anytime inside the next half decade. The economic lure of "once you have connectivity, calls are free" is too large to be kept down. The FCC are basically shit scared that everyone is going to be using hard crypto by default, and phone tapping will go the way of the dinosaur.
They know they can't do much about pure software phone systems like Skype, but they're aiming strategically at the plugs-straight-into-ethernet hardware VOIP industry. They probably hope to force insecurity as a defacto standard, since you won't be able to get headsets for anything secure.
...between a well informed market and a democracy, is that the democracy is zero-sum while the market tries to serve all profitable niches. That's why Tesco carries both regular pasta and low-carb Atkins stuff (and no-gluten stuff, and rice pasta, and etc). It's not an election between the carb and anti-carb parties, where the winner takes all and the rarer minorities get stiffed.
Took me bloody ages to get the gobbledygoop they talk out of my head as the yardstick for "real science". Reverse the polarity on the warp phase transponder! Ehhh.
when you see Emperor Palpatine in the spot where Pope Benedict's picture is supposed to be, Wikipedia loses credibility.
People need to learn to cope with variable credibility. They need to learn to apply their minds to stuff like edit histories and discussion pages. The anointing of "definitive" content is all of hubristic, limiting, and an unhelpful feather-bed for lazy thinkers. TANSTAAFL.
...you still have to guard against vandals, virus spreaders, reputation poisoning attempts by unscrupulous rival operators, and innocents whose files have been trashed by coincidental factors eg: a failing hard drive.
Your mistake is thinking that the shuttle was an advance towards spaceplanes. Not so. The shuttle was and is a Big Dumb Booster chopped and reattached side-by-side, with wings.
The shuttle shares no characteristics with a spaceplane, apart from visual appearance. It is not flyable on ascent and barely glidable on reentry. It does not utilize atmospheric oxygen to save fuel. It is rebuildable rather than reusable. It costs more than boosters.
Rather than a paddle boat, a better metaphor for the shuttle would be the bamboo planes and runways constructed by pacific islander cargo cults, in the belief that appearance could be used to decoy substance.
Right now one spaceplane exists, and Burt Rutan owns it.
CL is much "closer to the metal" than Haskell or even OCAML and it's designed to compile to efficient code. As a result it's not particularly "functional" (nowhere near as much as Scheme, for example). CMUCL compiled lisp should approximately match native-compiled OCAML in speed, and CL has an advantage in being a multiple-sourced standard.
Main advantages of CL
- Scalable ratio of easy:fast. Prototype lazily and tune iteratively.
- Macros facilitate "little languages" for task areas, making core algorithms terse and readable.
- Running apps can be hot-debugged, tested and recompiled in situ.
- Exception mechanism provides something I've seen nowhere else, namely the ability to catch an exception, repair the problem, and reverse the thow to resume where the code left off.
Main serious problems with CL
- Too many fiddly features makes writing a compiler hard
- Lack of a good standalone-binary compiler.
- Weakly standardized library mechanism makes cross-implementation libraries unnecessarily hard and hence rare. (NB: "common lisp controller" is a fix for this and standard in Debian.)
- No fixed standard for foreign function interface (or requirement that one even exist).
- No sockets or threading in the standard library.
No, the odd thing is that it isn't using all the bandwidth. Looking at the network monitors in and out on my KDE taskbar, the state of wedged-ness causes them both to show low activity, as though it were some sort of a resource-exhaustion deadlock.
2.6 although I think it happened before with 2.4 (not sure though).
Could well be the router - I have an ethernet based router in front of my ADSL. I don't think it's so simple as connections piling up, though, for 2 reasons. First, I often do other stuff that could be expected to pile them up (eg: usiong "linky" extension in firefox to open 50 webcomics in tabs all at once), and this doesn't exhibit the same problem. Second, I try to turn down the settings (connections at once, connections per time, bandwidth throttle) and this doesn't seem to help.
It seems to be particularly typical of distributed searching p2p like gnutella and mldonkey - not bittorrent. Perhaps it's the incoming packets that are throwing it off? Anyway, it's wierd. The behaviour is almost as though some connection-related resource were being leaked. Not memory or CPU - top shows nothing unusual. But the p2p program slows its bandwidth to a crawl and wedges, and everything else wedges too.
The linux network stack sure ain't it. Anytime I run a connection-hungry p2p program, particularly the edonkey type, it munches so much network resources everything else starts failing to establish connections. Damn nuisance!
...because there is zero chance of humanity giving up mobile phones (or bluetooth stuff, or wireless laptops, or any similar close-to-the-body radio emitter). Their utility is high enough that most people will see the risk of being maimed as the lesser evil.
True enough, existing customers may have a right to sue. Seeing as I'm not the litigious type, that hadn't occurred to me. So yeah, in that context, you're probably correct. Depends what was actually in the agreement, what the judge reads in as "implied" by context, and so forth. Take 'em to court and find out.
It's THEIR PROPERTY. The whole "public utility" schtick amounts to theiving nationalization by the back door. Yes, it's their network, and yes they can throw a childish fingers-in-ears tantrum if they want to. If I were a customer, though, I'd switch.
Example, "crypto ID": run a secure hash over your public x509 cert, and voila, ID number. If you can sign with that cert, you've proven your ID. Doesn't mean a damn thing, of course, except that you're someone with the private key to that cert.
The hard part is linking abstract bits to offline identity. And I agree, every use of that I can imagine is at best unnecessarily nosy for the sake of mere convenience, at worst a platform for discriminatory censorship, DRM, panoptic tracking, and intrusive data-mining.
I'd never heard of any work of his except "Witches of Karres", but even famous as that is, I actually prefer the other novels. Start with "Telzey Amberdon" as an outstanding example.
After first reading them online on the Baen site, I realized they fell within the small category of "good for infinite re-reading" books, and bought hardcopies from amazon.
This is a generalization of how I recieve my own mails. I have a script set up that polls POP3, filters through SpamBayes and then into Courier maildrop with a.mailfiler file to sort them into maildirs. These are them made locally available to any mail client via Courier IMAP. They're remotely available too. For all it sounds complicated it's really just 2 programs (Courier and SpamBayes) and 5 minutes of perl mucking about with POP3.
An arrangement like that could be set up on a rented box (you don't need to pay extra to run your own SMTP server) rather than locally as I have it, and it would let a wireless user browse mails efficiently.
Slashdot Mirror
I predict that the next big thing will be sub-games, set up in the context of larger "virtual real estate" systems eg: Second Life. The VRE acts as a convenient driver and gateway for both small (hobbyist) and large (commercially sublet) inner games. For a new game company, this could make excellent business sense. The software's done for you, there's a ready made in-game economy and customer base, all you need to do is dev the game-world and put a toll-gate at the door.
... it ships with a initrd containing bash, gcc, tar, gzip, and gentoo_src.tar.gz
I expect it to fail in the movie market, for the same reason laserdisk never beat VHS - ye olde DVD is quite adequate, already here, and much cheaper. Also, I expect the early-adopter market to be surprisingly hostile to obtrusive DRM. See the original "DIVX" fiasco.
Blu-Ray might actually succeed, ironically, in the writable-media and DVD-ROM market, to which DRM does not apply. Movies don't grow to fit a bigger disk - software alays seems to, and backups certainly do.
As to the "self destruct" - it's a class-action lawsuit waiting to happen, not to mention a PR nightmare. The distributor's legal department would veto any such a daft proposal long before any booby-trapped disks were cut.
They're a matter of when the planets are close together so that you can conveniently lob a piece of hardware from one to another, and when the Earth has rotated to point in the right direction. Closeness of Earth and Mars happens every so often as they mutually orbit the sun at different speeds, and pointing in the right direction happens once a day.
It's pretty obvious that SSH/PGP makes this null for open source and offshore software at least. I suspect though that what they're aiming at is the sort of hardware VOIP that's quite likely to supplant landline phones anytime inside the next half decade. The economic lure of "once you have connectivity, calls are free" is too large to be kept down. The FCC are basically shit scared that everyone is going to be using hard crypto by default, and phone tapping will go the way of the dinosaur.
They know they can't do much about pure software phone systems like Skype, but they're aiming strategically at the plugs-straight-into-ethernet hardware VOIP industry. They probably hope to force insecurity as a defacto standard, since you won't be able to get headsets for anything secure.
...between a well informed market and a democracy, is that the democracy is zero-sum while the market tries to serve all profitable niches. That's why Tesco carries both regular pasta and low-carb Atkins stuff (and no-gluten stuff, and rice pasta, and etc). It's not an election between the carb and anti-carb parties, where the winner takes all and the rarer minorities get stiffed.
Took me bloody ages to get the gobbledygoop they talk out of my head as the yardstick for "real science". Reverse the polarity on the warp phase transponder! Ehhh.
Nothing to see here folks, move along...
(Yes, I know this is ironic in context.)
...you still have to guard against vandals, virus spreaders, reputation poisoning attempts by unscrupulous rival operators, and innocents whose files have been trashed by coincidental factors eg: a failing hard drive.
Your mistake is thinking that the shuttle was an advance towards spaceplanes. Not so. The shuttle was and is a Big Dumb Booster chopped and reattached side-by-side, with wings.
The shuttle shares no characteristics with a spaceplane, apart from visual appearance. It is not flyable on ascent and barely glidable on reentry. It does not utilize atmospheric oxygen to save fuel. It is rebuildable rather than reusable. It costs more than boosters.
Rather than a paddle boat, a better metaphor for the shuttle would be the bamboo planes and runways constructed by pacific islander cargo cults, in the belief that appearance could be used to decoy substance.
Right now one spaceplane exists, and Burt Rutan owns it.
I mean, I know they're both shining examples of niceness, but the amount of sheer webwide clout they could wield...
How long until we start seeing little icons saying "this site only works with Google Firefox"?
Problem: combining the functions of fuel and reaction mass makes the reaction mass noxious.
Solution: use a rocket technology that seperates the two. Nuclear-heated rockets, for example. Then the reaction mass can be regular tap-water.
CL is much "closer to the metal" than Haskell or even OCAML and it's designed to compile to efficient code. As a result it's not particularly "functional" (nowhere near as much as Scheme, for example). CMUCL compiled lisp should approximately match native-compiled OCAML in speed, and CL has an advantage in being a multiple-sourced standard.
Main advantages of CL
- Scalable ratio of easy:fast. Prototype lazily and tune iteratively.
- Macros facilitate "little languages" for task areas, making core algorithms terse and readable.
- Running apps can be hot-debugged, tested and recompiled in situ.
- Exception mechanism provides something I've seen nowhere else, namely the ability to catch an exception, repair the problem, and reverse the thow to resume where the code left off.
Main serious problems with CL
- Too many fiddly features makes writing a compiler hard
- Lack of a good standalone-binary compiler.
- Weakly standardized library mechanism makes cross-implementation libraries unnecessarily hard and hence rare. (NB: "common lisp controller" is a fix for this and standard in Debian.)
- No fixed standard for foreign function interface (or requirement that one even exist).
- No sockets or threading in the standard library.
No, the odd thing is that it isn't using all the bandwidth. Looking at the network monitors in and out on my KDE taskbar, the state of wedged-ness causes them both to show low activity, as though it were some sort of a resource-exhaustion deadlock.
2.6 although I think it happened before with 2.4 (not sure though).
Could well be the router - I have an ethernet based router in front of my ADSL. I don't think it's so simple as connections piling up, though, for 2 reasons. First, I often do other stuff that could be expected to pile them up (eg: usiong "linky" extension in firefox to open 50 webcomics in tabs all at once), and this doesn't exhibit the same problem. Second, I try to turn down the settings (connections at once, connections per time, bandwidth throttle) and this doesn't seem to help.
It seems to be particularly typical of distributed searching p2p like gnutella and mldonkey - not bittorrent. Perhaps it's the incoming packets that are throwing it off? Anyway, it's wierd. The behaviour is almost as though some connection-related resource were being leaked. Not memory or CPU - top shows nothing unusual. But the p2p program slows its bandwidth to a crawl and wedges, and everything else wedges too.
The linux network stack sure ain't it. Anytime I run a connection-hungry p2p program, particularly the edonkey type, it munches so much network resources everything else starts failing to establish connections. Damn nuisance!
No wonder they keep getting it wrong! Not only do they have to keep track of Sedna, but Planet X too. And who knows how many more?
Anyone get the feeling this solar system is getting a mite crowded?
On the other hand, the repeat business can't be so shabby - just think how many of their best customers will need their charts recalculating...
You're the guy who tried to kill the kernel idle daemon, because it was eating 90% of his
CPU time.
...because there is zero chance of humanity giving up mobile phones (or bluetooth stuff, or wireless laptops, or any similar close-to-the-body radio emitter). Their utility is high enough that most people will see the risk of being maimed as the lesser evil.
True enough, existing customers may have a right to sue. Seeing as I'm not the litigious type, that hadn't occurred to me. So yeah, in that context, you're probably correct. Depends what was actually in the agreement, what the judge reads in as "implied" by context, and so forth. Take 'em to court and find out.
It's THEIR PROPERTY. The whole "public utility" schtick amounts to theiving nationalization by the back door. Yes, it's their network, and yes they can throw a childish fingers-in-ears tantrum if they want to. If I were a customer, though, I'd switch.
Example, "crypto ID": run a secure hash over your public x509 cert, and voila, ID number. If you can sign with that cert, you've proven your ID. Doesn't mean a damn thing, of course, except that you're someone with the private key to that cert.
The hard part is linking abstract bits to offline identity. And I agree, every use of that I can imagine is at best unnecessarily nosy for the sake of mere convenience, at worst a platform for discriminatory censorship, DRM, panoptic tracking, and intrusive data-mining.
I'd never heard of any work of his except "Witches of Karres", but even famous as that is, I actually prefer the other novels. Start with "Telzey Amberdon" as an outstanding example.
After first reading them online on the Baen site, I realized they fell within the small category of "good for infinite re-reading" books, and bought hardcopies from amazon.
This is a generalization of how I recieve my own mails. I have a script set up that polls POP3, filters through SpamBayes and then into Courier maildrop with a .mailfiler file to sort them into maildirs. These are them made locally available to any mail client via Courier IMAP. They're remotely available too. For all it sounds complicated it's really just 2 programs (Courier and SpamBayes) and 5 minutes of perl mucking about with POP3.
An arrangement like that could be set up on a rented box (you don't need to pay extra to run your own SMTP server) rather than locally as I have it, and it would let a wireless user browse mails efficiently.