While this is a troll a lot of the posters here are missing the point entirely.
Avoiding jail is not being polical!
You may have the opinion that anything Alan does as a kernel developer/maintainer is not affected by the DMCA and will not result in charges from some over zelous DA, but I seriously doubt there are any lawyers out there that would back you up. There have to be quite a few court rulings before anyone will even have a feel for this.
One of the reasons that everyone calls DMCA bad law is it's total lack of boundaries. This makes it unpredictable law, subject to abuse. While you and I may feel that there would be no justification to jail someone because they worked on CD/DVD drivers that someone else could use to run DECSS(?) is no guarantee for Alan or anyone else that someone won't arrest them and see what the courts say.
Avoiding being someone's legal guinea pig is not being political.
I have a fair amount of money invested in a 802.11 WLAN at home which I am not going to use anymore because it has been totally cracked. This issue has been discussed here on slashdot in recent weeks (sorry no links - Slashdot search engine down).
Having said that, the 802.11 silicon is getting more integrated and I don't see that there will be much difference between the two from a cost point of view.
Blue tooth may win out because of the security issue as 802.11 fades away.
With only 15 minutes to clear out I wonder what it was like. Were there mobs of people running around screaming holding their most dearest possesions?? The whole thing is unbelievable.
I completely agree. Rejecting this type of bug fix *in particular* is a total crock of sh*t. Any *competent* software engineer knows that integration bugs are total death and *any* bug fix that addresses this area, notorious for hard to reproduce conditions, is pure gold.
If they actualy rejected the patch for the reasons stated they are *idiots*.
I think you are missing the point here. The Bell Labs benchmark was done at 40gbs a channel. This story is talking about 800gbs on one stream of light or channel. (Not that I think/. is very current on its news either...)
Sorry, as bad as the numbers are you need a good solid *thwak* with the clue stick for taking M$ minimum recommendations at their face value.
Even ZDNet benchmarks indicate that you need 256meg (I kid you not)before Win00 beats NT or 98 in desktop benchmarks. The one thing for sure is that Microsoft has moved bloat to a whole new level...
I don't need Slashdot to tell me that microsoft's products suck. You see, like many people here, I once used them. That's far more damning than any article posted here
Promising that the next release will be better won't get me to come back. I have something you don't - software that works. Why should I consider changing that?
Best rebuttal so far to all the smurfs out there...
One thing MS won't be mentioning when it happens is the cost of doing so. To license Win2K for as many boxes as they need to run hotmail would cost most companies many millions of dollars, particularly versus the cost of FreeBSD.
One very real but very ugly truth that all the smurfs out there really don't want to see...
The solution to this problem as it stands is to expect cheating by clients and try and detect it. There are two approaches to doing this.
Firstly, the server would create 'signiture' types of situations that would be normally very hard to get a hit under normal situations. A person would be allowed (say) to be lucky once but get bounced if he got too lucky.
Secondly, the server could look for players that are just too good. Yes a hacked client could get smart and introduce errors to mask aimboting, etc. but that would be fine. Enough errors and a person is back to relatively normal skill levels.
Probably a combination of the two would be good enough. A person meeting certain statistical signatures would start to be passed bogus situations in combination with real ones to see how the client reacts.
My take on this - if it is true - is that it is a reflection of the.com/geek mainia that is flooding the mainstream. Time is a political rag. If they stuck to their guns they would have chosen FDR or Ghandi. Einstien would be a rational choice for Slashdot but I have to wonder about Time magazine. Of course, I wonder about just everything that the mainstream media does these days....
Salesman, bullshit. The guy came up with a theory that predicted experimental results that were confirmed by experimental data from independent labs. That, my boy, is sterling science.
No one accepts his theory yet but at least the guy has gone out of his way to attempt to get independent experimental confirmation.
Getting 25 million out of conservative utilities and retired investment bankers from Morgan Stanley is gonna take a *little* more than a nice smile and shiney shoes.
1. Sorry working from memory here. Maybe it was a ratio where they needed to get to 90% of the theoretical maximum possible. Anyway this is more or less antique technology in this area. See this page for a synopsis of important experiments.
3. Allegedly - until published and peer reviewed. However, the work was convincing enough to get conservative investors coughing up 25 million.
4. It is a theory with alleged (see above) experimental confirmation repeated by independent labs. A slightly different situation.
5. I am too tired and irritated by your attitude to provide specific counter examples. However, there is one story I came across that summarizes what I see happening in this field. The Wright Brothers were ignored or denounced as frauds by 'authorities' for 5 years in America even though they could be seen to be flying regularly by Long Island commuters. They only got attention from institutions like the US DOD after they moved to Europe and became an instant press sensation. (sorry no links).
I am really hesitant to post anything about this since it will most likely be flamed to a crisp.
However, Mills stuff is just the tip of the iceberg. There has been quite a bit of active research in this whole, particularly in Japan and Europe.
The most interesting work has not been in the original electolysis using heavy water and palladium although SRI and to a lesser extent Los Alamos have been doing work in this area and have essentially confirmed the *original* observations of Pons and Fleischman. The major problem with this type of experiment is that you need to get close to a 1:1 (.9 as I recall) ratio of hydrogen atoms for each atom of the palladium crystal matrix before you get results. If you have cracks or other impurities you will NOT achieve that level of packing. If you use bulk materials the stuff gets explosive. One SRI researcher died from this. Also this whole area is *very* close to weapons research so Los Alamos has become very quite in the last couple of years while SRI is still plugging along. Here is a link to a page that has a nice summary of the issues.
The most interesting area, in my opinion, has been in the area of light water electrolysis where some people have seen signs of transmutation - which of course goes from 'fradulence' to 'outright witch craft' as far as conventional science goes.
Mills work is actually kind of on the sidelines from the 'mainstream' research in this area. He does have a lot of backing by reasonably conservative investors (2 mid size power utilities). He does have a comprehensive theory and has done numerous experiments to validate various aspects of his theory that have allegedly been confirmed by independent labratories.
Here is a link to a reprint of a recent Wall Street Journal article on BlackLight and its recent work.
I think if you go to the black light site you will find that they have independent labs verifying their work and have been doing so for a couple of years.
I don't think everyone should start dancing in the streets until after Micro$oft goes through the appeal process. I can remember some early news articles stating that the court that would handle the appeal for this trial was quite conservative as far as "government interference" in commerce.
Who knows if they have the story right but building a platform with application server, database, directory server, etc. internaly or through aquisitions is *very* ambitious.
So what would be the value added that these guys could contribute compared to their erstwhile competition such as IBM, Oracle and (lest we forget) Micro$oft?
Either the story is wrong or this thing has a *very* high probability of crashing and burning.
It's very hard to say whether nano tech will ever reach the hights of Neil Stephenson's 'Diamond Age' or Greg Bear's 'City of Angels' (one of my favorites). However I am willing to bet that people will come up with uses that are completely unimaginable today.
One of the big issues with the sci fi nano tech is the whole concept of assemblers - those little nanobots shuffling around molecules in a coordinated fashion.
On the other hand there is a great deal of work being done using chip fabrication to build micro mechanical devices. So far they seem to be good for things like sensors including gyros (beleive it or not - they use resonant righ gyro technology with no moving parts). There is also TI's 'Digital Light Processor' chip technology with little mirrors that is starting to show up everywhere.
Maybe, the sci fi nanotech will never happen but will have inspired some very interesting work done using chip technology.
Well I don't have time to check the references but they were published by credible authors. As for work gangs not being where they could find mammoths, the soviet gulag was in the deepest parts of siberia. These work gangs were sent where no one else would go (or find them)...
There are a number of tales from survivors of the soviet gulag where chain gangs would find a mammoth while digging a ditch and would eat the thing on the spot. No comment on how it tasted as far as I can recall. Perhaps some historian out there can add to this.
This is part of an ongoing evolution of trying to nail down who has legal (and by extension, taxation) jurisdiction in cyberspace. This is an interesting issue. Suppose a Canadian gambling company has a server farm (possibly third party) in Bermuda and has clients in California. Who do you sue? Who is performing an illegal act?
It seems so far that the courts are looking more at the client and not the providers. In this case visa was seen by the courts to be giving gambling loans to the client which were illegal in California.
Likewise for things like child pornography (although the providers are also highly illegal). The simple reason is that clients are easier to target and nail down as far as a legal jurisdiction.
Somebody moderate this up! Very good points about time.
People make two mistakes about linux/community development. Firstly, that project 'x' will die away because it is not following all the hottest windows trends and so there will no immediate cash flow. Commercial companies tend to be real trend followers since that is where the money is. This is a game that M$ has well and truely mastered, dragging around the commercial software world by the nose.
Secondly, they are totaly clueless about the time base. Commercial companies have 5 developers and 100 marketsrs, support staff etc. Open software project 'x' has 'only' (say) 20 contributors. 'Sadly understaffed and certainly not a threat to any 'real' software firm.' I don't think so. The simple and brutal reality is that not only are there 4 times as many developers those developers don't have to waste all their time with organizational politics.
At the end of the day, man per man I would guess that the community is probably more effective even if they are only involved on a part time basis simply because they don't have to deal with political noise and marketing issues. That is not to say that there is no politics in community projects but the politics *tend* to focus on technology issues and which is useful technological competition.
The other simple reality is that as gnome and kde stabilize their infrastructures there will be an explosion of desktop development. If people think they are impressed with what is coming out now, wait a year!
This whole report will be yet another classic embarassment cited by Gartner's flourishing competition as an example of a one time powerhouse that 'no longer gets it'.
This may indeed be the lesson. The trick will be to make sure your bills are paid in real money and try to get options as well. Don't know what the issues are for 3 parties and stock option payments but this would be the ideal play.
As long as you realize the fantasy game is what it is and are careful about cashing in your chips vs buying more chips on your credit card one can do quite well.
To complete the circle IMVVHO you may also want to take currency risk into account if you are American. The US$ has had a very good run but nothing lasts forever.
Andrew, you have got the nub of the issue here. So what is the answer? Community bookstore? Slashdot books? (Maybe not such a bad idea..).
On the one hand Amazon could say that we like our proprietary approach and screw you. On the other hand they may have an opportunity to leverage their presence on the web greatly by supporting people building their own book sites and using Amazon as the provider of the back room services.
Then Amazon would be fostering a bazzar approach to it's growth rather than a cathedral one which is great when it works but when it doesn't...
Slashdot Mirror
Avoiding jail is not being polical!
You may have the opinion that anything Alan does as a kernel developer/maintainer is not affected by the DMCA and will not result in charges from some over zelous DA, but I seriously doubt there are any lawyers out there that would back you up. There have to be quite a few court rulings before anyone will even have a feel for this.
One of the reasons that everyone calls DMCA bad law is it's total lack of boundaries. This makes it unpredictable law, subject to abuse. While you and I may feel that there would be no justification to jail someone because they worked on CD/DVD drivers that someone else could use to run DECSS(?) is no guarantee for Alan or anyone else that someone won't arrest them and see what the courts say.
Avoiding being someone's legal guinea pig is not being political.
Having said that, the 802.11 silicon is getting more integrated and I don't see that there will be much difference between the two from a cost point of view.
Blue tooth may win out because of the security issue as 802.11 fades away.
With only 15 minutes to clear out I wonder what it was like. Were there mobs of people running around screaming holding their most dearest possesions?? The whole thing is unbelievable.
If they actualy rejected the patch for the reasons stated they are *idiots*.
I think you are missing the point here. The Bell Labs benchmark was done at 40gbs a channel. This story is talking about 800gbs on one stream of light or channel. (Not that I think /. is very current on its news either...)
Even ZDNet benchmarks indicate that you need 256meg (I kid you not)before Win00 beats NT or 98 in desktop benchmarks. The one thing for sure is that Microsoft has moved bloat to a whole new level...
Promising that the next release will be better won't get me to come back. I have something you don't - software that works. Why should I consider changing that?
Best rebuttal so far to all the smurfs out there...
One very real but very ugly truth that all the smurfs out there really don't want to see...
Sombody moderate this one up, funny! :o
Firstly, the server would create 'signiture' types of situations that would be normally very hard to get a hit under normal situations. A person would be allowed (say) to be lucky once but get bounced if he got too lucky.
Secondly, the server could look for players that are just too good. Yes a hacked client could get smart and introduce errors to mask aimboting, etc. but that would be fine. Enough errors and a person is back to relatively normal skill levels.
Probably a combination of the two would be good enough. A person meeting certain statistical signatures would start to be passed bogus situations in combination with real ones to see how the client reacts.
My take on this - if it is true - is that it is a reflection of the .com/geek mainia that is flooding the mainstream. Time is a political rag. If they stuck to their guns they would have chosen FDR or Ghandi. Einstien would be a rational choice for Slashdot but I have to wonder about Time magazine. Of course, I wonder about just everything that the mainstream media does these days....
Salesman, bullshit. The guy came up with a theory that predicted experimental results that were confirmed by experimental data from independent labs. That, my boy, is sterling science.
No one accepts his theory yet but at least the guy has gone out of his way to attempt to get independent experimental confirmation.
Getting 25 million out of conservative utilities and retired investment bankers from Morgan Stanley is gonna take a *little* more than a nice smile and shiney shoes.
Sigh, I don't know why I bother with this..
1. Sorry working from memory here. Maybe it was a ratio where they needed to get to 90% of the theoretical maximum possible. Anyway this is more or less antique technology in this area. See this page for a synopsis of important experiments.
2. See near bottom of this page .
3. Allegedly - until published and peer reviewed. However, the work was convincing enough to get conservative investors coughing up 25 million.
4. It is a theory with alleged (see above) experimental confirmation repeated by independent labs. A slightly different situation.
5. I am too tired and irritated by your attitude to provide specific counter examples. However, there is one story I came across that summarizes what I see happening in this field. The Wright Brothers were ignored or denounced as frauds by 'authorities' for 5 years in America even though they could be seen to be flying regularly by Long Island commuters. They only got attention from institutions like the US DOD after they moved to Europe and became an instant press sensation. (sorry no links).
I am really hesitant to post anything about this since it will most likely be flamed to a crisp.
However, Mills stuff is just the tip of the iceberg. There has been quite a bit of active research in this whole, particularly in Japan and Europe.
The most interesting work has not been in the original electolysis using heavy water and palladium although SRI and to a lesser extent Los Alamos have been doing work in this area and have essentially confirmed the *original* observations of Pons and Fleischman. The major problem with this type of experiment is that you need to get close to a 1:1 (.9 as I recall) ratio of hydrogen atoms for each atom of the palladium crystal matrix before you get results. If you have cracks or other impurities you will NOT achieve that level of packing. If you use bulk materials the stuff gets explosive. One SRI researcher died from this. Also this whole area is *very* close to weapons research so Los Alamos has become very quite in the last couple of years while SRI is still plugging along. Here is a link to a page that has a nice summary of the issues.
The most interesting area, in my opinion, has been in the area of light water electrolysis where some people have seen signs of transmutation - which of course goes from 'fradulence' to 'outright witch craft' as far as conventional science goes.
Mills work is actually kind of on the sidelines from the 'mainstream' research in this area. He does have a lot of backing by reasonably conservative investors (2 mid size power utilities). He does have a comprehensive theory and has done numerous experiments to validate various aspects of his theory that have allegedly been confirmed by independent labratories.
Here is a link to a reprint of a recent Wall Street Journal article on BlackLight and its recent work.
Here are some other 'Cold Fusion' sites:
Cold Fusion Times
Infite Energy Online
BlackLight Power
Clean Energy Technologies a company that has done a lot with light water cold fusion and has recieved a number of patents in the area.
A Cold Fusion Bibliograph by Dieter Britz
I think if you go to the black light site you will find that they have independent labs verifying their work and have been doing so for a couple of years.
I don't think everyone should start dancing in the streets until after Micro$oft goes through the appeal process. I can remember some early news articles stating that the court that would handle the appeal for this trial was quite conservative as far as "government interference" in commerce.
Who knows if they have the story right but building a platform with application server, database, directory server, etc. internaly or through aquisitions is *very* ambitious.
So what would be the value added that these guys could contribute compared to their erstwhile competition such as IBM, Oracle and (lest we forget) Micro$oft?
Either the story is wrong or this thing has a *very* high probability of crashing and burning.
It's very hard to say whether nano tech will ever reach the hights of Neil Stephenson's 'Diamond Age' or Greg Bear's 'City of Angels' (one of my favorites). However I am willing to bet that people will come up with uses that are completely unimaginable today.
One of the big issues with the sci fi nano tech is the whole concept of assemblers - those little nanobots shuffling around molecules in a coordinated fashion.
On the other hand there is a great deal of work being done using chip fabrication to build micro mechanical devices. So far they seem to be good for things like sensors including gyros (beleive it or not - they use resonant righ gyro technology with no moving parts). There is also TI's 'Digital Light Processor' chip technology with little mirrors that is starting to show up everywhere.
Maybe, the sci fi nanotech will never happen but will have inspired some very interesting work done using chip technology.
Well I don't have time to check the references but they were published by credible authors. As for work gangs not being where they could find mammoths, the soviet gulag was in the deepest parts of siberia. These work gangs were sent where no one else would go (or find them)...
There are a number of tales from survivors of the soviet gulag where chain gangs would find a mammoth while digging a ditch and would eat the thing on the spot. No comment on how it tasted as far as I can recall. Perhaps some historian out there can add to this.
Errr, there are at least a few theories that, *cough*, the woolly mammoths were hunted to extinction by our famous ancestors, the neanderthals.
This is part of an ongoing evolution of trying to nail down who has legal (and by extension, taxation) jurisdiction in cyberspace. This is an interesting issue. Suppose a Canadian gambling company has a server farm (possibly third party) in Bermuda and has clients in California. Who do you sue? Who is performing an illegal act?
It seems so far that the courts are looking more at the client and not the providers. In this case visa was seen by the courts to be giving gambling loans to the client which were illegal in California.
Likewise for things like child pornography (although the providers are also highly illegal). The simple reason is that clients are easier to target and nail down as far as a legal jurisdiction.
Somebody moderate this up! Very good points about time.
People make two mistakes about linux/community development. Firstly, that project 'x' will die away because it is not following all the hottest windows trends and so there will no immediate cash flow. Commercial companies tend to be real trend followers since that is where the money is. This is a game that M$ has well and truely mastered, dragging around the commercial software world by the nose.
Secondly, they are totaly clueless about the time base. Commercial companies have 5 developers and 100 marketsrs, support staff etc. Open software project 'x' has 'only' (say) 20 contributors. 'Sadly understaffed and certainly not a threat to any 'real' software firm.' I don't think so. The simple and brutal reality is that not only are there 4 times as many developers those developers don't have to waste all their time with organizational politics.
At the end of the day, man per man I would guess that the community is probably more effective even if they are only involved on a part time basis simply because they don't have to deal with political noise and marketing issues. That is not to say that there is no politics in community projects but the politics *tend* to focus on technology issues and which is useful technological competition.
The other simple reality is that as gnome and kde stabilize their infrastructures there will be an explosion of desktop development. If people think they are impressed with what is coming out now, wait a year!
This whole report will be yet another classic embarassment cited by Gartner's flourishing competition as an example of a one time powerhouse that 'no longer gets it'.
This may indeed be the lesson. The trick will be to make sure your bills are paid in real money and try to get options as well. Don't know what the issues are for 3 parties and stock option payments but this would be the ideal play.
As long as you realize the fantasy game is what it is and are careful about cashing in your chips vs buying more chips on your credit card one can do quite well.
To complete the circle IMVVHO you may also want to take currency risk into account if you are American. The US$ has had a very good run but nothing lasts forever.
Andrew, you have got the nub of the issue here. So what is the answer? Community bookstore? Slashdot books? (Maybe not such a bad idea..).
On the one hand Amazon could say that we like our proprietary approach and screw you. On the other hand they may have an opportunity to leverage their presence on the web greatly by supporting people building their own book sites and using Amazon as the provider of the back room services.
Then Amazon would be fostering a bazzar approach to it's growth rather than a cathedral one which is great when it works but when it doesn't...