Imagine my disappointment when I learned that these were not killer Linux centipede robots, but a rather ordinary swarm of peaceful robots, powered by Linux. Oh well, I guess that's pretty cool too.
On a more serious (but still pleasant) note, is it just me, or is there a little too much testosterone superimposed, in robot culture? Once in a while I see a documentary on Discovery about a lady scientist who is coo-ing daily at a baby emulation robot, only to discover that her software (amazing) and hardware (primative/serviceable in a nifty way) is working pretty well...
Wait a second. I know. The problem is that disaster is not eminent. If this were a sinking ship, we would think, "Women and children first." Because robotics is not doomed, we can go along at an even keel, confident in the future of civilization, and get robots to do the every-day, generic, regular, standard-issue, run-of-the-mill warfare on TV. Yeah. Now it all makes sense to me.
;-)
BTW, I still play DOOM once in a while so don't think I've gotten all foo foo on ya. (chuckle)
Hey! Wait a second. Just before hitting the submit button (no pun intended), it just occurred to me that there is a sort of correlation in personality type (and level of social skill, etc. etc.;-) with those who would decide to design and build robots. Perhaps due to this correlation, someone wants to compensate. I mean, yeah, in principle, a robot could be designed with intrinsic motivation by a man with big arms who can bench press 300 pounds and can still slam dunk a live animal into a regulation basketball hoop while keeping his cool and his composure and his self-regard in front of a live audience of people who despise him and who jeer at him. In principle, and in the very same "social conditions", he could give a twirl to his propeller beanie immediately thereafter. In principle, the Fourteenth Amendment (one class of citizens) makes me equally suitable as a partnered citizen with Jennifer Lopez, but...
What's missing from this discussion is a definition of what a public good is:
...a public good is essentially a good that is difficult to exclude someone from using, and that one person's use does not deny someone else the use of that good. A public park or clean air are typical examples of public goods. (read this article for typical incorrect definitions of public goods provided by econ 101 students)
Free software is indeed a public good because by definitoin it is difficult to exclude other people from using it and other than the cost of bandwidth to make the code available my using doesn't prevent anyone else using it.
Thank you. That was a great post. It reminds me of one of my favorite philosophers (certainly of the 20th Century), Bertrand Russell. Using concise simple arguments in a tiny book, he argued that ideology and politics are a subset of ethics, and (as most famous British moralists) he fitted that tidily into his utilitarianism by discussing--go figgur--goods. I suppose this is handiest to consider in English due to the "puns", but anyway, what is good is that which satisfies, that which has beneficiary. In the same pages where he was making this general case, he argued that there are roughly three categories of goods.
Inherently abundant
Scarce ("happen to be scarce" as typical of items on a store shelf)
Inherently scarce
This pertains directly to Eric Raymond's "The Cathedral and the Bizaar". Why do geeks toil to speed-optimize device drivers? Ego or its subset "egoboo" (which is obvious to its "victims" as ephemeral inherently). That's why. It does not defy economics. Gift cultures do not defy economics, and that is because of what Russell noticed: the 3rd category. What we modern Americans might call "esteem" I suppose a British aristocrat, circa 1955, would call "honor". In this matter, Russell was extremely interesting.Honor is inherently scarce, the ultimate scarce commodity. I feel more honored than this person, less honored than the other. Witness the oxymoronic culture of popularity contests among adolescents who stab each other in the back in order to become the most...
...loved?
No. In order to become the most admired, esteemed, honored. In filthy rich cultures like that in the United States (richer on the whole than any social place and time), the necessities of life are asymptotically approaching zero cost to a skilled worker. What's left? The subset of honor that can be bought--the inherently economic subset of what is not in the first of Russell's three categories.
The problem with the economy these days (I have scarcely seen admitted) is the scarcity of scarcity. How many must-drool-over items are there? Hey. I don't give two hoots about 5 megapixel cameras (YMMV), and I will soon happily get a non-color low end Palm Pilot. How much does Best Buy get from me? Not much, and I know that I'm not weird enough to avoid syllogism in this thinking.
This thinking is about abundance of hardware, and it is more visceral than Moore's Law. In combination with cheapening bandwidth, it can only amplify the gift cultures. Everyone is flushed. Everyone is damned near satiated. I mean, think about that last $50+ video game you bought. I know nothing about it except what I read in the papers, which is that the thing was probably so expertly designed that it is quite likely a more sophisticated variation on reality than is typical for most entire careers. You'll get traction out of it before getting bored. That's "payware". If it's that efficient per quantity spent, and if the standards-compliant interoperability stuff at the altar and prayer rug of the FSF and offshoots uses the gift culture, well, nothing but optimism can be a rational assessment of the circumstance.
Also, why is Cisco's site the SLOWEST site on the internet?!?!
Because they are the most popular company of network professionals. I mean if even they cannot keep up with the traffic, they must be making a killing. Only in America!
Remember Gateway Gold Premium Service for the extra coupla hundred dollars? By failing to hire enough support techs, timely support attention became the scarce commodity--subject, in turn, to the law of supply and demand in realtime among a decidedly type A personality subpopulation of the world's most impatient culture! Sell a license for rudeness (jumping in line or to the "front of the queue" for our British friends only not in America;-), and what do you get? A sucker born every minute! It would be against the interests of the vendor to provide adequate staffing for support. That would reduce the paid premium.
RTFC before modding down. The joke is at the very end, folks, and so is the topical connection. CNA cert = Certified Netware Admin. certificate. By the time CNA's matter, the whole regime has come full cycle, which is implicitly a prediction for next month, given what Novell has been up to lately. And how might one deduce that? By RTFA and then RTFC.
Reminds me of when I worked for compaq tech support back in the day and the official line was "There is no MS-DOS 7.0, there is only Windows 95. Rebooting into DOS mode is just that - a mode of Windows 95." Man whatta load of crap. But I guess it was true "from a certain point of view."
Well dang you! Now we're getting almost back on topic again, and we don't get that naughty, edgy "Slash Dot really doesn't want us to be saying this," kind of a feeling!;-)
Y'know, back then RAM still was a tad spendy. People actually saved up for a little while to move from 8 MB RAM to 16 MB RAM. Even though there was swap space, that precious RAM space mattered. That was part of the deal, part of my gripe. (In the back of my mind I wanted my own code to be used in some kind of embedded project some day with a squeaky tight hardware budget and with very little electric power to the processor.) About "actual DOS", you were right both times. Since you were in customer support, I suppose you remember how the machine could be F8 booted in any of several modes. There was at least one mode that looked like "in DOS" with the screen operating in hardcore text mode, but it was actually with the entire Windows 95 setup loaded in RAM. In that case long filenames behaved themselves, but all those extra hardware resources were used for nothing (but the super-duper fast text-mode video-hardware outputting code, that could exploit the time-efficiency of BIOS interrupts, could very easily crash the whole system in that mode). Then there was a genuine MS-DOS 7.0 mode, wherein only extreme care in assembly language could access long file names, and there really was no GUI code loaded into memory (in which case, access to the hardware-level text mode video output was safe, saving both runtime and RAM resources). I suppose Microsoft permitted the possibility of the GUI-free mode in the first place in order to accomodate a bootable floppy without having to do inelegant things like the Linux boot floppies (with "boot and root disks"). Then I suppose to prepare for the inherent disasters of only one descriptor table entry for all "concurrently" running programs (the nature of the oxymoron, "DOS Protected Mode"), Microsoft probably wanted an available all-hell-has-in-fact-broken-loose mode, raw COMMAND.COM, in order to enable the launching of primative diagnostics or whatnot else. (Remember the red MSD screen, finding your COM port addresses and other such trivia?)
Jeeze. It feels really strange to be "talking" like this--like I'm such a poseur or something. With 8 times as much time and effort devoted to studying "internals" of later releases from Microsoft, I don't suppose I could know even half as much (proportionally) about what is going on. I haven't bothered trying either. Just as everyone else, I have gotten really really jaded about any breathless "insider's" info on the Registry or API or system tuning information. Microsoft has come a long way in the fine arts of obfuscation and in making things, um, meretricious as Eric Raymond would put it. I think 1995 was a good year for sending curious tinkerers from the pages of "MS-Something" internals books to Linux books, most of which had a CD with an entire operating system inside a little envelope right with the book. Mine was "Red Hat Linux Unleashed" with Red Hat 3.0.3 and (I think) kernel 1.2.3something. Why fsck around with guesswork about tweaks in the System Registry when you can directly edit the relevant configuration files and can call any kernel function you please in any language! It's flabbergasting--is flabbergasting a word?--to think that you can even rewrite chunks of the kernel and startup programs. Instead of "LILO", you could make it say, "J-LO" or instead of "starting file systems" it could say, "Hi, mom! ext2fs is in!:-)" without really engineering anything.
It's the principle of the matter, right? I don't adore computers quite enough to do such things
1. Contact a lawyer about a living will. 2. Kiss all your loved ones farewell. 3. Dive into a pool of liquid nitrogen. 4. When they thaw you out, you'll get a free HDTV set with a magazine subscription.
Hey. It worked for pocket calculators. They used to cost--what--a hundred bucks when the minimum wage was $2.50?
If you're gonna make comments like that! (groan deleted)
Re:Why? (app. codebase in MS-DOS 7.0)
on
Windows 95 in 4.47MB
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
Why? To get mileage out of custom code. Partly for the reason of learning stuff, I wrote a whole bunch of little programs that accessed long filenames in MS-DOS 7.0. I used combinations of assembly language and its register-controlling counterpart techniques in C/C++ to call MS-DOS 7.0 long filename services. (INT 21/AH=0x71)
(BTW, geeks used to call Windows 95 "MS-DOS 7.0 with illegally tied UI". Furthermore, geeks used to brag about their Norton Commander customizations, which is probably why The Borg decided...) Anyway, to make a short story long, this very topic is what got my fists to clench vis-a-vis Microsoft. I got mad while I was debugging my programs. If you're programming something in C and then have to fsck around in assembly language to use long file names with a modicum of portability, it's not a good-mood environment to begin with half the time. Then along comes this weird runtime error message something like, "For this (kernel call) to work, you must be using the full graphical Windows 95."
Hello? What on gawd$ green earth doe$ a graphical u$er interface have to do with file $y$tem kernel call$? It'$ a fuggen enigma, no?;-)
If my memory serves me right, there were about 3 different ways to access the long filename services in MS-DOS 7.0, and for each detail in each way, you had to use either undocumented features or tiptoe around a gauntlet in code. Everything worked if you decided to stick with Microsoft's crammed-down-throat GUI, but if not ___. The D.O.J. slapped a wrist about it, but whatever.
Anyway, if I felt sorry for having wasted your time on this, I would announce that regret here. As it turns out, the whole MS-DOS 7.0 compatability stuff of my programs was/should_have_been inside of sections that were #ifdef'ed out of the compiler's view for target environments not in Windows 95 anyway.
First Place in uncollaborative C programming contest (due to extra credit, keeping executable file smaller than 35 kilobytes), University of Virgin-cough-yeah
Took out second mortgage, got Certified Netware Administrator standing (like millions of other clueless mouse jockeys)
Read article in Wall Street Journal, felt scared, got MCSE (and put "training" on new credit card)
Developed more stable drivers for network cards in The Kernel 1.2, failed to recognize wife immediately upon completion. (Sold what equity there was in house to pay lawyer.)
Fast forward to 1999:
Encountered violent rabble of drooling investor wannabes at door of fly-infested wife-free apartment... got accosted, kidnapped and thrown into a cubicle beside mountain of free soda of my choice... developed pr0n-and-bars-of-soap-through-UPS website, all coded in Visual Basic, according to plan of New Boss (which was generated by a Perl script found in Silicon Valley as developed and test-marketed for free by a post-IPO startup firm whose management team consisted of an anthropological student of venture capitalists' tastes and YACJ, i.e., yet another caffeine junkie with Ethernet cables running through every hallway and even into his bathroom). Put bandwidth on YACC (no, not that one--Yet Another Credit Card).
Ok. So the May 2000 time of reckoning came, right? (shaking head)
June 2001:
Got layed off and cashed in stock options for a box of Fruit Loops, which (consumed of course without milk) wound up pretty tasty while watching the vintage pr0n from the with-bars-of-soap-through-UPS Dot Com days.
Got YACC and got Linux certified from the following vendors:
Dell, Red Hat, IBM, LinuxCare, SGI, SuSE, and TGIHHFL (that guy I haven't heard from lately), all for a few grand each.
September 2003:
Found nothing but Netware Administrator job openings.
Discovered there was some kind of de facto expiration date on the old CNA cert.
Realized that government was headed for Reagan 2.0 and looked in the private sector's yellow pages before making my choice, taking out YACC and checking myself into inpatient...
First thing, let's kill all the Lawyers. (Henry IV or V?)
Henry VI, Part 2, act 4, sc. 2, l. 76-7
I believe, in context, he's referring to "language lawyers" but it's a great idea either way.
How to you spell "IANAL" in Elizabethan era English? Methinks hell hath no wrath like a yuppie lawyer scorned. Thy legal hassles doth make me shiver fortnight upon fortnight, and bandwidth comes forth not unto me. Lo, for I am neither bestowed nor endowed with Antarctic fowl, nether as they fly--for they fly not!
...
To bait fish withal; if it will feed nothing else, it will feed my revenge. He hath disgraced me, and hinder'd me of half a million, laugh'd at my losses, mock'd at my gains, scorn'd my nation, thwarted my bargains, cooled my friends, heated mine enemies; and what's his reason? I am a Penguin. Hath not a Penguin eyes; hath not a Penguin hands, organs, dimensions, senses, affections, passions; fed with the same food, hurt with the same weapons, subject to the same diseases, healed by the same means, warmed and cooled by the same winter and summer that a SCO luser is? If you prick us, do we not bleed? If you tickle us, do we not laugh? If you poison us, do we not die? and if you wrong us, shall we not revenge? If we are like you in the rest, we will resemble you in that. If a Penguin wrong a SCO luser, what is his humility? revenge. If a SCO luser wrong a penguin, what should his sufferance be by SCO luser example? why revenge. The villainy you teach me I will execute, and it shall go hard but I will better the instruction.
(Sniffle.) Going down memory lane, hmm? Awwww. I lost my C++ cherry at 10 MHz on a Cyrix-equipped AT clone. It was in a butt-ugly greenish beige box from Northgate Computer. The turnkey machine was the precursor to the M1A1 Abrams tank, man. You could put an office staff on top of one of them things. The "tin" must have been like 14 guage. Anyway, the chip had no math coprocessor. It looked so cute sitting in the QFP square (68 pins???? maybe the next size bigger), and you could actually look at it and touch it. There was no fan or big ole' heat sink covering it up.
Please, do not revive the old jokes about mount and devices.
But that parrot hurts so bad, and Natalie Portman's fresh grits were ready to eat by breakfast time, and a Beowolf cluster really really would be a fscking economical way to get the most out of whatever device she wants to mount... and, and, and
I understand that the price will be longer development cycles and raw performance, but there are a LOT of uses for machines based on this type of thinking. Imagine how inexpensive PCs based on this type of thing could get, and how little power they would require!
Yeah. But that makes me wonder if that super duper closure of architecture wouldn't wind up inspiring someone to corner the market and play jealous pranks like SCO and Microsoft do in the system software space? Throughout the past several years when people were singing praise hymns to the improved cell phones, I always failed to get a boner. Where is the API? Where is the community? Where is at least the port for doing things? For quite a few generations of "amazing" cell phones, you were allowed the microphone, the speaker, the battery contacts, a dozen pushbuttons, and the rights to say wow and to pay technoparanoiacs royalties. Now if an ornery cuss like Scott McNealy were in charge of such things...;-)
Damn Compaq for not letting us have alphas that way (The first mention of it being serious was alphas-just before compaq bought them and decided to milk the alpha users)
"Milk"? Is that what you kids are calling it these days? Is "Milk" when you drop trou and make some grunting noises and exudate malodorous brown substance upon the object of that transitive verb? Don't get me wrong. I don't completely hate Compaq. It's just that I like everything Canadian (including their ever-threatened sense of independence up there, eh), and I think Compaq squandered the capabilities of what it drank up there (i.e., the great company, Digital Equipment Corp).
Look. A close relative of mine works intimately with telecom hardware. Let's put it this way: He keeps a screwdriver and a VT100 emulator handy everywhere he goes. VT100. Ah. That was an invention from whom? From Digital Equipment Corp. Back in the day... (Now you are waking up again.)...and the second fastest number cruncher on earth was the VAX, which was the open system platform while I was in college, challenging Unix for the ultimate in pissing contests.
Now that I've completely alienated everyone...
...I had always drooled over the DEC Alphas. There seemed something magical when the clock rate was 200ish MHz, but they could demonstrably perform--what was it?--230ish million floating point operations per second. The thing was that I could never quite justify the price, yanno?:-/ Anyone else wanna contribute to this orgy of vague self pity and eulogy for the de facto dead company, DEC?
At the car parts store is ugly tubing in a closed "C" profile called wire loom. It is somewhat inflexible. It works. But that gets too much important stuff accomplished without enough consultancy firms and PHB's employed. Sheesh. The next thing you know people will be selling bottled water and canned air! (Shaking head.)
1. OS X is based on FreeBSD and NeXTSTEP, which contain no AT&T or SCO code. SCO doesn't want a piece of that action.
You are all off the mark! The whole realm of technology, when you trace to the teleological root, comes from the sliderule carrying fellas turning on the on switch. Y'see, Kirningham, Ritchie and the whole crowd all promised me to pay me a license fee for the act of turning on computers, and...
What is 'competitive' behavior?
Here's what slashdotters want microsoft to be. they want it split up so that the real 'microsoft' is just office and windows. but any good executive will tell you, if you put all your eggs in one basket, you'll most likely fail in an industry like software distrobution.
Slashdotters want microsoft to stop bundling software. Since when is bundling products illegal?
Maybe so. Maybe eventually the market will take care of itself.
But that could easily be 10 years down the road. Meanwhile, MS will have stamped Real Networks and many other perceived threats out of existence, trampling on the livelihoods of thousands of people who are trying to find markets for innovative new products...
Kind of a strained analogy, but it's not unlike saying "Why bother arresting criminals? They'll eventually die anyway."
Scrolling up even further, this reminds me of something. One of the bazillionaires who rode a Dot Com wave with RealNetworks decided to get out of the racket, and she became a Senator. Is this also a racket? I like Senator Cantwell. I liked the guy she unseated. Doesn't it really suck to believe in people and/or things?
If you look at all their branches, they're all being funded by the OS sales alone. Everything else is losing money by the bucketload, only to maintain a monopoly dominance in the market by doing so. Giving away close to, if not free software at a huge loss on purpose to be supported by a completely different division is absurd.
They need to be split, and now. Just my opinion...
It's not just for justice. Though there are times I want to turn it off, the red squiggly line and the green squiggly line in MS-Word are pretty nice. Though I don't want to disparage Kedit and the like, the old Wordpad from Microsoft is possibly my truthfully favorite program of all time. Ok. So there is this huge installed base of MS Excel spreadsheet macros and the like in files in offices throughout the world. There are junkies of the UI for Powerpoint, and probably also for the UI of Front Page--not to mention people who hate "duplication" of any kind of skills. Now imagine all that stuff working correctly as designed by handsomely compensated coders, and imagine it working on OpenBSD. If the Microsoft Office crew didn't have to keep that tie so strong to the perverted "kernel32.dll" crew, then this kind of thing would be ok, and that would be ok with me. I'd love OpenBSD running MS-Word. I bet if that kind of thing were to happen in the real world, we would discover that millions of people would "discover" that they have the same opinion of things.
(Linux? Oh yeah. That. (giggle) That's part of my point. What difference does it make if it's Linux instead of a Canadian BSD flavor, eh? Perhaps no more and no less difference than that which suits your tastes as an admin and/or user and/or developer! Hmm?:-D )
There is precedent for limitations on free speech. There are a few main reasons that the courts will permit as the reason to sensor. Among the most important is when the censor prevents someone from issuing "fighting words". Half decent link Half decent link Half decent link
A judge, as you say, should be a judge of men and of words, not simply of law? I find that opinion literally interesting. (I'm not just making a euphemism before criticizing you.)
Just the other day in the Senate Judiciary Committee on C-SPAN, I watched some squabbling about the qualifications of a U.S. federal District Court judge. Ordinarily--most of all in politics--I find myself becoming inevitably opinionated about things. In this stuff, all I do is chalk up opinions I've heard. Ok. Robert Bork was over the top in '87, and Thomas Pennfield Jackson's mouth (judged ^ 2 in 20/20 realpolitik hindsight) was too big in, um, 2001ish. But there is no overarching philosophy. It's all ad hoc. I've heard people get foaming at the mouth about whether the Constitution is or is not a "living document", and I've seen Scalia make an absolute buffoon of himself, one minute declaring as if from a gypsy's crystal ball a divine insight into the minds of those Original Intenders and the next minute whining about popular anti-gay opinion (as if that would pertain to an objective definition of privacy under the 4th, 5th, 6th, 8th, and 14th Amendments after the cops barge into someone's house in Texas).
If things should be as you say--taking into account the intent of the law and the prevailing social considerations--then it could very well be argued that the "authorities" are the dead and the rabble. The dead wouldn't know an index register from a register of deeds, and the rabble distrusts free-as-in-beer code. I therefore imagine wide-eyed virtual dead and virtual rabble blinking silently and attentively and deferring to the person in the black robe. I mean it "bounces back". I mean the authority. "Judge" means what it says I guess.
That reminds me of some of the Senators complaining about the temperment of a judicial nominee. It makes sense. Personality matters. It matters in ways that don't immediately come to mind to enumerate.
The thing I don't understand, if SCO thinks they have a copyright infringement and 'conspiracy' case against redhat, why did SCO wait until they were sured by redhat to file. One would think that they would want to protect their 'copyrighted' materials long before this.
Then again, I think there is a reasonable case to be made that an ambush strategy is more efficient in the cold calculated interests of SCO. There is more disputably illegal crop to harvest, more addiction to kernel 2.4 in various measure, less capacity for end users to pull stuff out by the roots. Just venturing a guess.:-|
Slashdot Mirror
Yessssssssssss! ^5 Way ta go! :-)
On a more serious (but still pleasant) note, is it just me, or is there a little too much testosterone superimposed, in robot culture? Once in a while I see a documentary on Discovery about a lady scientist who is coo-ing daily at a baby emulation robot, only to discover that her software (amazing) and hardware (primative/serviceable in a nifty way) is working pretty well...
Wait a second. I know. The problem is that disaster is not eminent. If this were a sinking ship, we would think, "Women and children first." Because robotics is not doomed, we can go along at an even keel, confident in the future of civilization, and get robots to do the every-day, generic, regular, standard-issue, run-of-the-mill warfare on TV. Yeah. Now it all makes sense to me.
;-)
BTW, I still play DOOM once in a while so don't think I've gotten all foo foo on ya. (chuckle)
Hey! Wait a second. Just before hitting the submit button (no pun intended), it just occurred to me that there is a sort of correlation in personality type (and level of social skill, etc. etc. ;-) with those who would decide to design and build robots. Perhaps due to this correlation, someone wants to compensate. I mean, yeah, in principle, a robot could be designed with intrinsic motivation by a man with big arms who can bench press 300 pounds and can still slam dunk a live animal into a regulation basketball hoop while keeping his cool and his composure and his self-regard in front of a live audience of people who despise him and who jeer at him. In principle, and in the very same "social conditions", he could give a twirl to his propeller beanie immediately thereafter. In principle, the Fourteenth Amendment (one class of citizens) makes me equally suitable as a partnered citizen with Jennifer Lopez, but...
Thank you. That was a great post. It reminds me of one of my favorite philosophers (certainly of the 20th Century), Bertrand Russell. Using concise simple arguments in a tiny book, he argued that ideology and politics are a subset of ethics, and (as most famous British moralists) he fitted that tidily into his utilitarianism by discussing--go figgur--goods. I suppose this is handiest to consider in English due to the "puns", but anyway, what is good is that which satisfies, that which has beneficiary. In the same pages where he was making this general case, he argued that there are roughly three categories of goods.
This pertains directly to Eric Raymond's "The Cathedral and the Bizaar". Why do geeks toil to speed-optimize device drivers? Ego or its subset "egoboo" (which is obvious to its "victims" as ephemeral inherently). That's why. It does not defy economics. Gift cultures do not defy economics, and that is because of what Russell noticed: the 3rd category. What we modern Americans might call "esteem" I suppose a British aristocrat, circa 1955, would call "honor". In this matter, Russell was extremely interesting. Honor is inherently scarce, the ultimate scarce commodity. I feel more honored than this person, less honored than the other. Witness the oxymoronic culture of popularity contests among adolescents who stab each other in the back in order to become the most...
No. In order to become the most admired, esteemed, honored. In filthy rich cultures like that in the United States (richer on the whole than any social place and time), the necessities of life are asymptotically approaching zero cost to a skilled worker. What's left? The subset of honor that can be bought--the inherently economic subset of what is not in the first of Russell's three categories.
The problem with the economy these days (I have scarcely seen admitted) is the scarcity of scarcity. How many must-drool-over items are there? Hey. I don't give two hoots about 5 megapixel cameras (YMMV), and I will soon happily get a non-color low end Palm Pilot. How much does Best Buy get from me? Not much, and I know that I'm not weird enough to avoid syllogism in this thinking.
This thinking is about abundance of hardware, and it is more visceral than Moore's Law. In combination with cheapening bandwidth, it can only amplify the gift cultures. Everyone is flushed. Everyone is damned near satiated. I mean, think about that last $50+ video game you bought. I know nothing about it except what I read in the papers, which is that the thing was probably so expertly designed that it is quite likely a more sophisticated variation on reality than is typical for most entire careers. You'll get traction out of it before getting bored. That's "payware". If it's that efficient per quantity spent, and if the standards-compliant interoperability stuff at the altar and prayer rug of the FSF and offshoots uses the gift culture, well, nothing but optimism can be a rational assessment of the circumstance.
That is inherently weird and paradoxical.
Remember Gateway Gold Premium Service for the extra coupla hundred dollars? By failing to hire enough support techs, timely support attention became the scarce commodity--subject, in turn, to the law of supply and demand in realtime among a decidedly type A personality subpopulation of the world's most impatient culture! Sell a license for rudeness (jumping in line or to the "front of the queue" for our British friends only not in America ;-), and what do you get? A sucker born every minute! It would be against the interests of the vendor to provide adequate staffing for support. That would reduce the paid premium.
The defense rests, your honor.
Well dang you! Now we're getting almost back on topic again, and we don't get that naughty, edgy "Slash Dot really doesn't want us to be saying this," kind of a feeling! ;-)
Y'know, back then RAM still was a tad spendy. People actually saved up for a little while to move from 8 MB RAM to 16 MB RAM. Even though there was swap space, that precious RAM space mattered. That was part of the deal, part of my gripe. (In the back of my mind I wanted my own code to be used in some kind of embedded project some day with a squeaky tight hardware budget and with very little electric power to the processor.) About "actual DOS", you were right both times. Since you were in customer support, I suppose you remember how the machine could be F8 booted in any of several modes. There was at least one mode that looked like "in DOS" with the screen operating in hardcore text mode, but it was actually with the entire Windows 95 setup loaded in RAM. In that case long filenames behaved themselves, but all those extra hardware resources were used for nothing (but the super-duper fast text-mode video-hardware outputting code, that could exploit the time-efficiency of BIOS interrupts, could very easily crash the whole system in that mode). Then there was a genuine MS-DOS 7.0 mode, wherein only extreme care in assembly language could access long file names, and there really was no GUI code loaded into memory (in which case, access to the hardware-level text mode video output was safe, saving both runtime and RAM resources). I suppose Microsoft permitted the possibility of the GUI-free mode in the first place in order to accomodate a bootable floppy without having to do inelegant things like the Linux boot floppies (with "boot and root disks"). Then I suppose to prepare for the inherent disasters of only one descriptor table entry for all "concurrently" running programs (the nature of the oxymoron, "DOS Protected Mode"), Microsoft probably wanted an available all-hell-has-in-fact-broken-loose mode, raw COMMAND.COM, in order to enable the launching of primative diagnostics or whatnot else. (Remember the red MSD screen, finding your COM port addresses and other such trivia?)
Jeeze. It feels really strange to be "talking" like this--like I'm such a poseur or something. With 8 times as much time and effort devoted to studying "internals" of later releases from Microsoft, I don't suppose I could know even half as much (proportionally) about what is going on. I haven't bothered trying either. Just as everyone else, I have gotten really really jaded about any breathless "insider's" info on the Registry or API or system tuning information. Microsoft has come a long way in the fine arts of obfuscation and in making things, um, meretricious as Eric Raymond would put it. I think 1995 was a good year for sending curious tinkerers from the pages of "MS-Something" internals books to Linux books, most of which had a CD with an entire operating system inside a little envelope right with the book. Mine was "Red Hat Linux Unleashed" with Red Hat 3.0.3 and (I think) kernel 1.2.3something. Why fsck around with guesswork about tweaks in the System Registry when you can directly edit the relevant configuration files and can call any kernel function you please in any language! It's flabbergasting--is flabbergasting a word?--to think that you can even rewrite chunks of the kernel and startup programs. Instead of "LILO", you could make it say, "J-LO" or instead of "starting file systems" it could say, "Hi, mom! ext2fs is in! :-)" without really engineering anything.
It's the principle of the matter, right? I don't adore computers quite enough to do such things
1. Contact a lawyer about a living will.
2. Kiss all your loved ones farewell.
3. Dive into a pool of liquid nitrogen.
4. When they thaw you out, you'll get a free HDTV set with a magazine subscription.
Hey. It worked for pocket calculators. They used to cost--what--a hundred bucks when the minimum wage was $2.50?
Hey! Put a semicolon in front...
If you're gonna make comments like that! (groan deleted)
(BTW, geeks used to call Windows 95 "MS-DOS 7.0 with illegally tied UI". Furthermore, geeks used to brag about their Norton Commander customizations, which is probably why The Borg decided...) Anyway, to make a short story long, this very topic is what got my fists to clench vis-a-vis Microsoft. I got mad while I was debugging my programs. If you're programming something in C and then have to fsck around in assembly language to use long file names with a modicum of portability, it's not a good-mood environment to begin with half the time. Then along comes this weird runtime error message something like, "For this (kernel call) to work, you must be using the full graphical Windows 95."
Hello? What on gawd$ green earth doe$ a graphical u$er interface have to do with file $y$tem kernel call$? It'$ a fuggen enigma, no? ;-)
If my memory serves me right, there were about 3 different ways to access the long filename services in MS-DOS 7.0, and for each detail in each way, you had to use either undocumented features or tiptoe around a gauntlet in code. Everything worked if you decided to stick with Microsoft's crammed-down-throat GUI, but if not ___. The D.O.J. slapped a wrist about it, but whatever.
Anyway, if I felt sorry for having wasted your time on this, I would announce that regret here. As it turns out, the whole MS-DOS 7.0 compatability stuff of my programs was/should_have_been inside of sections that were #ifdef'ed out of the compiler's view for target environments not in Windows 95 anyway.
I'm new here...
Could somebody please tell me how to spell RTF/.'dA? And, if I may be permitted a follow-up, how is that even possible?
BTW, please mod up parent. It's early in the morning (most likely), and you're not in as good of a mood as you should be. HMM? :-/
Fast forward to 1999: Ok. So the May 2000 time of reckoning came, right? (shaking head)
June 2001:
September 2003:
How to you spell "IANAL" in Elizabethan era English? Methinks hell hath no wrath like a yuppie lawyer scorned. Thy legal hassles doth make me shiver fortnight upon fortnight, and bandwidth comes forth not unto me. Lo, for I am neither bestowed nor endowed with Antarctic fowl, nether as they fly--for they fly not!
...
To bait fish withal; if it will feed nothing else, it will feed my revenge. He hath disgraced me, and hinder'd me of half a million, laugh'd at my losses, mock'd at my gains, scorn'd my nation, thwarted my bargains, cooled my friends, heated mine enemies; and what's his reason? I am a Penguin. Hath not a Penguin eyes; hath not a Penguin hands, organs, dimensions, senses, affections, passions; fed with the same food, hurt with the same weapons, subject to the same diseases, healed by the same means, warmed and cooled by the same winter and summer that a SCO luser is? If you prick us, do we not bleed? If you tickle us, do we not laugh? If you poison us, do we not die? and if you wrong us, shall we not revenge? If we are like you in the rest, we will resemble you in that. If a Penguin wrong a SCO luser, what is his humility? revenge. If a SCO luser wrong a penguin, what should his sufferance be by SCO luser example? why revenge. The villainy you teach me I will execute, and it shall go hard but I will better the instruction.
(Sniffle.) Going down memory lane, hmm? Awwww. I lost my C++ cherry at 10 MHz on a Cyrix-equipped AT clone. It was in a butt-ugly greenish beige box from Northgate Computer. The turnkey machine was the precursor to the M1A1 Abrams tank, man. You could put an office staff on top of one of them things. The "tin" must have been like 14 guage. Anyway, the chip had no math coprocessor. It looked so cute sitting in the QFP square (68 pins???? maybe the next size bigger), and you could actually look at it and touch it. There was no fan or big ole' heat sink covering it up.
But that parrot hurts so bad, and Natalie Portman's fresh grits were ready to eat by breakfast time, and a Beowolf cluster really really would be a fscking economical way to get the most out of whatever device she wants to mount... and, and, and
Yeah. But that makes me wonder if that super duper closure of architecture wouldn't wind up inspiring someone to corner the market and play jealous pranks like SCO and Microsoft do in the system software space? Throughout the past several years when people were singing praise hymns to the improved cell phones, I always failed to get a boner. Where is the API? Where is the community? Where is at least the port for doing things? For quite a few generations of "amazing" cell phones, you were allowed the microphone, the speaker, the battery contacts, a dozen pushbuttons, and the rights to say wow and to pay technoparanoiacs royalties. Now if an ornery cuss like Scott McNealy were in charge of such things... ;-)
"Milk"? Is that what you kids are calling it these days? Is "Milk" when you drop trou and make some grunting noises and exudate malodorous brown substance upon the object of that transitive verb? Don't get me wrong. I don't completely hate Compaq. It's just that I like everything Canadian (including their ever-threatened sense of independence up there, eh), and I think Compaq squandered the capabilities of what it drank up there (i.e., the great company, Digital Equipment Corp).
Look. A close relative of mine works intimately with telecom hardware. Let's put it this way: He keeps a screwdriver and a VT100 emulator handy everywhere he goes. VT100. Ah. That was an invention from whom? From Digital Equipment Corp. Back in the day... (Now you are waking up again.) ...and the second fastest number cruncher on earth was the VAX, which was the open system platform while I was in college, challenging Unix for the ultimate in pissing contests.
Now that I've completely alienated everyone...
...I had always drooled over the DEC Alphas. There seemed something magical when the clock rate was 200ish MHz, but they could demonstrably perform--what was it?--230ish million floating point operations per second. The thing was that I could never quite justify the price, yanno? :-/ Anyone else wanna contribute to this orgy of vague self pity and eulogy for the de facto dead company, DEC?
At the car parts store is ugly tubing in a closed "C" profile called wire loom. It is somewhat inflexible. It works. But that gets too much important stuff accomplished without enough consultancy firms and PHB's employed. Sheesh. The next thing you know people will be selling bottled water and canned air! (Shaking head.)
Man am I bummed Anonymnous Coward!!! I thought I could trust you! :-)
Since the FTC said so.
Scrolling up even further, this reminds me of something. One of the bazillionaires who rode a Dot Com wave with RealNetworks decided to get out of the racket, and she became a Senator. Is this also a racket? I like Senator Cantwell. I liked the guy she unseated. Doesn't it really suck to believe in people and/or things?
It's not just for justice. Though there are times I want to turn it off, the red squiggly line and the green squiggly line in MS-Word are pretty nice. Though I don't want to disparage Kedit and the like, the old Wordpad from Microsoft is possibly my truthfully favorite program of all time. Ok. So there is this huge installed base of MS Excel spreadsheet macros and the like in files in offices throughout the world. There are junkies of the UI for Powerpoint, and probably also for the UI of Front Page--not to mention people who hate "duplication" of any kind of skills. Now imagine all that stuff working correctly as designed by handsomely compensated coders, and imagine it working on OpenBSD. If the Microsoft Office crew didn't have to keep that tie so strong to the perverted "kernel32.dll" crew, then this kind of thing would be ok, and that would be ok with me. I'd love OpenBSD running MS-Word. I bet if that kind of thing were to happen in the real world, we would discover that millions of people would "discover" that they have the same opinion of things.
(Linux? Oh yeah. That. (giggle) That's part of my point. What difference does it make if it's Linux instead of a Canadian BSD flavor, eh? Perhaps no more and no less difference than that which suits your tastes as an admin and/or user and/or developer! Hmm? :-D )
There is precedent for limitations on free speech. There are a few main reasons that the courts will permit as the reason to sensor. Among the most important is when the censor prevents someone from issuing "fighting words".
Half decent link
Half decent link
Half decent link
Just the other day in the Senate Judiciary Committee on C-SPAN, I watched some squabbling about the qualifications of a U.S. federal District Court judge. Ordinarily--most of all in politics--I find myself becoming inevitably opinionated about things. In this stuff, all I do is chalk up opinions I've heard. Ok. Robert Bork was over the top in '87, and Thomas Pennfield Jackson's mouth (judged ^ 2 in 20/20 realpolitik hindsight) was too big in, um, 2001ish. But there is no overarching philosophy. It's all ad hoc. I've heard people get foaming at the mouth about whether the Constitution is or is not a "living document", and I've seen Scalia make an absolute buffoon of himself, one minute declaring as if from a gypsy's crystal ball a divine insight into the minds of those Original Intenders and the next minute whining about popular anti-gay opinion (as if that would pertain to an objective definition of privacy under the 4th, 5th, 6th, 8th, and 14th Amendments after the cops barge into someone's house in Texas).
If things should be as you say--taking into account the intent of the law and the prevailing social considerations--then it could very well be argued that the "authorities" are the dead and the rabble. The dead wouldn't know an index register from a register of deeds, and the rabble distrusts free-as-in-beer code. I therefore imagine wide-eyed virtual dead and virtual rabble blinking silently and attentively and deferring to the person in the black robe. I mean it "bounces back". I mean the authority. "Judge" means what it says I guess.
That reminds me of some of the Senators complaining about the temperment of a judicial nominee. It makes sense. Personality matters. It matters in ways that don't immediately come to mind to enumerate.
Then again, I think there is a reasonable case to be made that an ambush strategy is more efficient in the cold calculated interests of SCO. There is more disputably illegal crop to harvest, more addiction to kernel 2.4 in various measure, less capacity for end users to pull stuff out by the roots. Just venturing a guess. :-|