Reminds me of the discovery of the Infinite Improbability Drive. About the same probability that this could result in anything actually worthwhile. Though it is said that people used to pour beer down the back of bar pianos to "improve the sound".
Don't have any motivation for doing the best job they can? Oh boy, there went most of ancient literature. Sorry, Homer, Aeskylus, Euripides, Sappho, Aristophanes, Virgil, Irenaeus, St. Augustine, Thomas Aquinas, et al, because you weren't writing for money you were doing a basically crap job. And poets...how many of them make any money? James Joyce, now there was a timewaster - never made any real money out of Ulysses, it must be rubbish. Dante- bloody wandering beggar, why do they bother printing the stuff?
Actually, anyone who knows anything about the manufactured output of the recording studios knows that talent and desire for a big income are not directly linked at all. Auri sacra fames, indeed.
"Monumentum exigere aere perennius" - "I have created a monument more durable than bronze". Virgil meant that he knew his words were worth preserving, and so people would find a way to preserve them. And in general, that's it. Things worth keeping get endlessly copied and stay in circulation. No matter how durable the material, no matter how human readable, if the language is lost the meaning is lost. Etruscan is unreadable, Latin is readable because the Romans built the great civilisation and the Etruscans didn't. Great paintings survive because they get cleaned, restored and generally looked after.
But CDs are an interesting case. You could argue that, unless we lapse into complete barbarism or some rejection of science, recovering old CDs should be possible for any future civilisation if the bit pattern is preserved. Provided the encoding and protocols are stored safely somewhere, it should be possible to construct a reader if anything is considered important enough to read. Unlike tape or punch card, the mechanical handling needed for a CD reader is very simple. Small lasers are made in ever greater volumes, and anything that replaces them is going to be more, not less capable. They use little power and there is no environmental reason why they are likely to fall into disuse.
Even so, my best photos are printed on archival grade non-resin coated acid free stock that should last a couple of hundred years. As if anyone is likely to care.
Yes, lawyers like it too. My father used to take pleasure in showing me some of the old leases and deeds he would come across which were written on vellum. The ink was basically iron oxide after so many years, and therefore still quite legible. The vellum from the late 1700s was in better condition than parchment from the 1900s.
Actually, the people who fund/. understand things much better than you do. That's why they fund new software development rather than try to sell the same versions forever. Are you going to tell me that a 5 year old Mustang is worth as much as a new one? Or that a copy of Windows 3.11 has the same resale value as a licensed copy of XP Pro? Or, by the same token, that a recording of a 6 month old pop song printed in millions and whose sales have already fallen through the floor, is worth as much as the latest release?
That is what I was talking about. But I guess someone who thinks "commie moron" is intelligent discourse, has trouble with rational thought.
Oh, and by the way, I don't have a Mustang. I have a VW. They hold their value better....
Some people seem to forget that in any half way democratic society, law is to a certain extent the codified prejudices of that society. IANAL but lawyers go a long way back in my background, and I think this is a fair restatement of their views.
If a sufficiently large number of people - more than it takes to elect a president, say - do not understand a law or its basis to the extent that they regularly break it, eventually it falls into desuetude. That's why Prohibition ended: it was unenforceable. Equally, if enough people decide that certain people shall not be rewarded for certain activities, that business plan is doomed. (and vice versa, of course, hence the fruits of the cult of celebrity.) In the UK, you cannot legally make money selling handguns to people. In the US you can. I do not believe there is any absolute moral standard for this difference: it reflects different views of different societies. If the RIAA pushes things to the point that a lot of people turn round and say, in effect "We didn't understand that was what copyright meant. Now we do, and it sucks", then ultimately that business model will fall.
Perhaps successful musicians will only be rewarded for live performances. Perhaps music will only be sold in conjunction with some other service, as has been suggested by the guy who thought the telecoms companies should buy up the studios. Just as a record company can lay off an exec because of a downturn, incompetence or whatever, we the people can decide to lay off an industry. When we started to travel by air, the railways could not impose a tax on air travelers to recover their lost revenue. But the airlines were certainly taking away the railways' monopoly on long distance intracontinental travel.
I think one thing that obsesses some people here is the idea that the most sacred thing there is, is property, and that anything which apparently removes my property is theft. (Strangely, many of them will claim to belong to a religion whose founder was extremely anti-property, but I leave that one for the psychoanalysts.) Yet things are constantly encroaching on my property. It gets old, it wears out, it falls out of fashion, and one day I will die and it will cease to be mine in any very meaningful sense. Somehow, the suits in the RIAA need to realise that they need to adapt to society, rather than the other way round. But they won't...they are actually frightened, and behaving like frightened men in a position of power.
McBride is no fool. He is actually exploiting weaknesses in the US media, business structure and investment industries, in order to massage the SCO share price. I say "he" but I guess a significant part of the Canopy Group budget must be going on copywriters to think the stuff up, and lawyers to decide how close to the wind it can go.
The weaknesses are to do with "free speech" and the spreading of disinformation. In Europe regulation tends to be tighter, the constraints on expression of views by parties in litigation are much tighter, and the silencing of anyone making unsubstantiated allegations that adversely affect another business tends to be a fast track process. Hence the non-action in Germany.
McBride is also pushing carefully selected buttons by trying to show that (a) he has the force of a large legal firm behind him and (b) that his opponents are somehow liberal, pinko, anti-business, unpatriotic, you name it. He knows that his large opponents won't behave like that because they are too staid (IBM) or because they want to maintain an image of reliable business practice and stability (Red Hat, SuSE), while his small opponents won't get quoted in the business press. And knows that the story is too boring for 99% of the population, so investigative journalists on big papers won't be interested.
My suggestion? Make it worth someone's while. Someone with access to the necessary resources start a fund. Hire a decent PR company. There has got to be at least one that is perhaps not already working for large software companies and would like some real exposure. Place a one off full pager in the Wall Street Journal, or whatever the PR company recommends. No mention of Eric Raymond or other well known figures, just originating from an independent coming together of developers and systems implementers. See where it goes from there. Perhaps the ad could mention the number of contributors, ranked by size of company, at the bottom.
I would certainly put a few $ into such a scheme. Would anybody else?
(An epithet meaning "Old-Etonian with assumed name, badly behaved Englishman with chip on shoulder dying of tuberculosis in post-war Britain, but I'll assume the usual ludicrous use of the word to mean "totalitarian") then what does that make MRPII and ERP systems? Are you suggesting, since the control available to managements nowadays is so much greater than this little low-bandwidth system, that big business is ultra-left wing and ultra-totalitarian?
No, I don't think so either. Most sane people would think that giving a business the information it needs to stay in business is a good thing. And if you actually RTFA, you will see it describes how the system was able to keep the Chilean economy functioning during a national strike. It made the economy more resilient. Isn't that what software is supposed to do?
I feel a major rant coming on, but it's off-topic.
Um..this really isn't meant to be a troll, but how many Middle Eastern construction companies are getting big contracts for rebuilding Iraq? Mr Ballmer presumably just attended Politics 101, course tutor D Rumsfeld.
What happened when telecoms were liberalised? Remember, Enron wasn't really a utilities company: it was a derivative trading company. You cannot compare a company that makes products that people want to buy, with a gambling outfit.
Surely no nation has a God-given right to export its goods to another nation if they aren't wanted there, despite past efforts by some governments.If the US loses tech jobs, it won't be because Microsoft got replaced by something better. It will be because company officers and shareholders (who allow it to happen) outsourced jobs abroad, contrary to the interest of the majority. In fact, it will be because of politics.
And don't forget, Microsoft is not the dominant world superpower. It is dominant on the desktop, in operating systems and office applications. Collectively, Sun, HP, IBM and EDS are far bigger. They do not have the cash mountain that allows Microsoft to do largely what it wants, but overall they are more important to the US economy.
Well, it's possible you are right about Titanic. I only have the word of an ex-captain RN who spent much of his career as a ship designer, and you doubtless have access to more reliable sources. But on nuclear reprocessing and Sellafield I beg to differ. To be honest, I can't be bothered to go into detail because your posting is illiterate, intemperate and doesn't look like it came from anyone qualified to comment. I just hope that you don't work at BNF, because if you do then I just hope the wind is blowing Eastwards.
Hydrofoils make better ferries than hovercraft, as just about every other country knows.
Concorde is hellishly noisy, cramped, unsafe, and has never repaid the development cost.
The Titanic was poorly designed and weak - it's been pointed out that one of Brunel's ships would most likely have survived the collision with the iceberg.
And nuclear waste processing has resulted in a large economic loss for the UK, polluted parts of the North-West and left the Irish sea full of radioactive waste. Why reuse it when you could toss it in the sea instead? They DID toss it in the sea.
I may be an idiot, but like the guy above who listed a whole load of foreign inventions as British, you're a chauvinist. Now go and salute your Union Jack and remind yourself that Britain once had an empire.
The UK has a long sad history of inventors producing things that are unaffordable, impractical, or both, owing to a cultural blindness that seems to prevent reality checks. Of course other nations have their cultural blindnesses too...Spruce Goose, anyone?
This reminds me of the idea of replacing the SI system by the unit vole system. A vole would be kept in a special cage at Paris. The unit of mass would be its mass, the unit of length its length (over tail for preference) and the unit of power the energy it put into running round the treadmill, if that's what voles do.
Of course the units would constantly change according to the state of health etc. of the vole, so all the energy devoted to stock market speculation could be rediverted to betting on commodity prices. It might make engineering and physics a bit difficult, but what the heck.
OK, that was a really stupid idea. So what does that make measuring things in elephant masses? Very, very stupid indeed.
It's worth noting that the Star Office 6.1 beta has PDF output available, which works nicely. It has also managed to cope rather well with the Office stuff I have thrown at it, including Powerpoint. The main problem is the lack of support for certain Excel structures (PivotTables, anyone), though privately I think that these have no place in a properly designed IT system- if you need this stuff you should be using a proper database engine and front end to give control.
In fact, 6.1 seems a nice product generally and is the first version of SO that I think I can actually recommend to clients when it is released. It may even be possible to train users to export PDFs for email, which would be a big win.
Everything else has been removed from the picture. In effect, in order to see the comet you have to know exactly where it is, and what all the other things are in the vicinity. It also took a lot of observation (hours) to get the picture.
It's a remarkable achievement, and shows what can be done with Earth-based telescopes, but it seems to be more proof of concept than practical.
All the people commenting that "1 in 909000 is a very small number" or words to that effect, forget that almost every time, someone does get to win the lottery. If we just happen to be in the unfortunate 909000th parallel universe, the fact that it missed in all the others will be small consolation.
How close can it actually come without causing ill effects? Suppose it missed by 100kM ? 10kM? Can anyone provide enlightenment?
Actually it was British jerks (the word behind the first initial in BBC does give away the plot a bit). But yes, I do agree with your elegantly stated request. Believe it or not, the British Army went metric in, I think, around 1948. The rest of the country will doubtless catch up with the rest of Europe shortly after Hell freezes over.
You don't. It's the ceramic plates that stop the bullets. The Kevlar is there to hold the thing together.
And, given the time that life has had to develop, it is far from amazing that "natural" materials can be strong. Life is a bit like an arms race that has been going on for over a billion years. The development of advanced materials by human beings using brainpower and technology is just an extension of the normal mechanisms of evolution.
Wood (for instance) is chemically and structurally similar to many advanced composite plastics, and the strongest woods are as strong as structural plastics. It just shows that there is a clever way of making strong, resilient materials and that you can do this by natural selection of biochemistry or you can do it by technology. It's interesting, but not amazing.
Well, in theory they allow efficient cooperation between users within the corporate environment by providing access to shared data and resources, by providing group access to diaries, and by providing an effective means to sort and categorise information. BEGIN cynicism: In practice, often the only feature that really gets used is email (which could just as easily be handled with plain old SMTP) but at least Exchange keeps MCSEs employed.END cynicism
I guess groupware has a bell function: the people who most need it are too disorganised to use it, the people best qualified to use it are in the jobs where they don't need it, or make their own arrangements.
No, you aren't. Companies giving away product below cost is called dumping, and is illegal in most markets. MS could afford to sell their products very much cheaper than they do and still make a profit - but, if they start to do that, a ball would start rolling. For the same reason, drug companies are frightened of selling drugs at reasonable prices in the Third World. It wouldn't be long before the same was expected of them at home.
Todat tends to parrot uncritically anything corporate to do with copyright and patentability. The BBC makes a lot of money from selling its productions, and I suspect they might see software patents as a possible tool in their battle with Murdoch.
You are partly right. The tube myth arose in the days of early silicon transistor amplifiers which had low gain and poor linearity around the crossover point. The result was they did sound worse than tube amps which had excellent gain at low signal, and degraded gradually as power increased.
Enhancement mode MOS transistors have characteristics very close to those of ideal pentodes, and should therefore give even better results (no transformers.) But that doesn't suit the guys (always guys) with the "golden ears" and the bullshit filter bypass.
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Reminds me of the discovery of the Infinite Improbability Drive. About the same probability that this could result in anything actually worthwhile. Though it is said that people used to pour beer down the back of bar pianos to "improve the sound".
Actually, anyone who knows anything about the manufactured output of the recording studios knows that talent and desire for a big income are not directly linked at all. Auri sacra fames, indeed.
But CDs are an interesting case. You could argue that, unless we lapse into complete barbarism or some rejection of science, recovering old CDs should be possible for any future civilisation if the bit pattern is preserved. Provided the encoding and protocols are stored safely somewhere, it should be possible to construct a reader if anything is considered important enough to read. Unlike tape or punch card, the mechanical handling needed for a CD reader is very simple. Small lasers are made in ever greater volumes, and anything that replaces them is going to be more, not less capable. They use little power and there is no environmental reason why they are likely to fall into disuse.
Even so, my best photos are printed on archival grade non-resin coated acid free stock that should last a couple of hundred years. As if anyone is likely to care.
Yes, lawyers like it too. My father used to take pleasure in showing me some of the old leases and deeds he would come across which were written on vellum. The ink was basically iron oxide after so many years, and therefore still quite legible. The vellum from the late 1700s was in better condition than parchment from the 1900s.
That is what I was talking about. But I guess someone who thinks "commie moron" is intelligent discourse, has trouble with rational thought.
Oh, and by the way, I don't have a Mustang. I have a VW. They hold their value better....
If a sufficiently large number of people - more than it takes to elect a president, say - do not understand a law or its basis to the extent that they regularly break it, eventually it falls into desuetude. That's why Prohibition ended: it was unenforceable. Equally, if enough people decide that certain people shall not be rewarded for certain activities, that business plan is doomed. (and vice versa, of course, hence the fruits of the cult of celebrity.) In the UK, you cannot legally make money selling handguns to people. In the US you can. I do not believe there is any absolute moral standard for this difference: it reflects different views of different societies. If the RIAA pushes things to the point that a lot of people turn round and say, in effect "We didn't understand that was what copyright meant. Now we do, and it sucks", then ultimately that business model will fall.
Perhaps successful musicians will only be rewarded for live performances. Perhaps music will only be sold in conjunction with some other service, as has been suggested by the guy who thought the telecoms companies should buy up the studios. Just as a record company can lay off an exec because of a downturn, incompetence or whatever, we the people can decide to lay off an industry. When we started to travel by air, the railways could not impose a tax on air travelers to recover their lost revenue. But the airlines were certainly taking away the railways' monopoly on long distance intracontinental travel.
I think one thing that obsesses some people here is the idea that the most sacred thing there is, is property, and that anything which apparently removes my property is theft. (Strangely, many of them will claim to belong to a religion whose founder was extremely anti-property, but I leave that one for the psychoanalysts.) Yet things are constantly encroaching on my property. It gets old, it wears out, it falls out of fashion, and one day I will die and it will cease to be mine in any very meaningful sense. Somehow, the suits in the RIAA need to realise that they need to adapt to society, rather than the other way round. But they won't...they are actually frightened, and behaving like frightened men in a position of power.
The weaknesses are to do with "free speech" and the spreading of disinformation. In Europe regulation tends to be tighter, the constraints on expression of views by parties in litigation are much tighter, and the silencing of anyone making unsubstantiated allegations that adversely affect another business tends to be a fast track process. Hence the non-action in Germany.
McBride is also pushing carefully selected buttons by trying to show that (a) he has the force of a large legal firm behind him and (b) that his opponents are somehow liberal, pinko, anti-business, unpatriotic, you name it. He knows that his large opponents won't behave like that because they are too staid (IBM) or because they want to maintain an image of reliable business practice and stability (Red Hat, SuSE), while his small opponents won't get quoted in the business press. And knows that the story is too boring for 99% of the population, so investigative journalists on big papers won't be interested.
My suggestion? Make it worth someone's while. Someone with access to the necessary resources start a fund. Hire a decent PR company. There has got to be at least one that is perhaps not already working for large software companies and would like some real exposure. Place a one off full pager in the Wall Street Journal, or whatever the PR company recommends. No mention of Eric Raymond or other well known figures, just originating from an independent coming together of developers and systems implementers. See where it goes from there. Perhaps the ad could mention the number of contributors, ranked by size of company, at the bottom.
I would certainly put a few $ into such a scheme. Would anybody else?
No, I don't think so either. Most sane people would think that giving a business the information it needs to stay in business is a good thing. And if you actually RTFA, you will see it describes how the system was able to keep the Chilean economy functioning during a national strike. It made the economy more resilient. Isn't that what software is supposed to do?
I feel a major rant coming on, but it's off-topic.
Um..this really isn't meant to be a troll, but how many Middle Eastern construction companies are getting big contracts for rebuilding Iraq? Mr Ballmer presumably just attended Politics 101, course tutor D Rumsfeld.
Surely no nation has a God-given right to export its goods to another nation if they aren't wanted there, despite past efforts by some governments.If the US loses tech jobs, it won't be because Microsoft got replaced by something better. It will be because company officers and shareholders (who allow it to happen) outsourced jobs abroad, contrary to the interest of the majority. In fact, it will be because of politics.
And don't forget, Microsoft is not the dominant world superpower. It is dominant on the desktop, in operating systems and office applications. Collectively, Sun, HP, IBM and EDS are far bigger. They do not have the cash mountain that allows Microsoft to do largely what it wants, but overall they are more important to the US economy.
Well, it's possible you are right about Titanic. I only have the word of an ex-captain RN who spent much of his career as a ship designer, and you doubtless have access to more reliable sources. But on nuclear reprocessing and Sellafield I beg to differ. To be honest, I can't be bothered to go into detail because your posting is illiterate, intemperate and doesn't look like it came from anyone qualified to comment. I just hope that you don't work at BNF, because if you do then I just hope the wind is blowing Eastwards.
Concorde is hellishly noisy, cramped, unsafe, and has never repaid the development cost.
The Titanic was poorly designed and weak - it's been pointed out that one of Brunel's ships would most likely have survived the collision with the iceberg.
And nuclear waste processing has resulted in a large economic loss for the UK, polluted parts of the North-West and left the Irish sea full of radioactive waste. Why reuse it when you could toss it in the sea instead? They DID toss it in the sea.
I may be an idiot, but like the guy above who listed a whole load of foreign inventions as British, you're a chauvinist. Now go and salute your Union Jack and remind yourself that Britain once had an empire.
Of course the units would constantly change according to the state of health etc. of the vole, so all the energy devoted to stock market speculation could be rediverted to betting on commodity prices. It might make engineering and physics a bit difficult, but what the heck.
OK, that was a really stupid idea. So what does that make measuring things in elephant masses? Very, very stupid indeed.
In fact, 6.1 seems a nice product generally and is the first version of SO that I think I can actually recommend to clients when it is released. It may even be possible to train users to export PDFs for email, which would be a big win.
Yes, I do understand this. I was referring to the claims for tracking of TNOs.
It's a remarkable achievement, and shows what can be done with Earth-based telescopes, but it seems to be more proof of concept than practical.
How close can it actually come without causing ill effects? Suppose it missed by 100kM ? 10kM? Can anyone provide enlightenment?
Actually it was British jerks (the word behind the first initial in BBC does give away the plot a bit). But yes, I do agree with your elegantly stated request. Believe it or not, the British Army went metric in, I think, around 1948. The rest of the country will doubtless catch up with the rest of Europe shortly after Hell freezes over.
The article says something like "It is hoped that [the tethered aircraft] will return to earth". It would be far more interesting if it didn't.
And, given the time that life has had to develop, it is far from amazing that "natural" materials can be strong. Life is a bit like an arms race that has been going on for over a billion years. The development of advanced materials by human beings using brainpower and technology is just an extension of the normal mechanisms of evolution.
Wood (for instance) is chemically and structurally similar to many advanced composite plastics, and the strongest woods are as strong as structural plastics. It just shows that there is a clever way of making strong, resilient materials and that you can do this by natural selection of biochemistry or you can do it by technology. It's interesting, but not amazing.
BEGIN cynicism:
In practice, often the only feature that really gets used is email (which could just as easily be handled with plain old SMTP) but at least Exchange keeps MCSEs employed.END cynicism
I guess groupware has a bell function: the people who most need it are too disorganised to use it, the people best qualified to use it are in the jobs where they don't need it, or make their own arrangements.
No, you aren't. Companies giving away product below cost is called dumping, and is illegal in most markets. MS could afford to sell their products very much cheaper than they do and still make a profit - but, if they start to do that, a ball would start rolling. For the same reason, drug companies are frightened of selling drugs at reasonable prices in the Third World. It wouldn't be long before the same was expected of them at home.
Todat tends to parrot uncritically anything corporate to do with copyright and patentability. The BBC makes a lot of money from selling its productions, and I suspect they might see software patents as a possible tool in their battle with Murdoch.
Enhancement mode MOS transistors have characteristics very close to those of ideal pentodes, and should therefore give even better results (no transformers.) But that doesn't suit the guys (always guys) with the "golden ears" and the bullshit filter bypass.