Sun's education-market giveaway is exactly the sort of behavior that Microsoft has been attacked for in the past.
Well yeah, but Sun ain't a monopoly. That changes everything. I don't think anyone would object to giving material to schools if all other things were equal, but when a company in Microsoft's position does it then the action can fairly be described as an illegal extension of their monopoly powers, whereas if Sun does it that criticism doesn't work.
Moreover, what is Sun talking about giving away here? Linux machines? Java tools? StarOffice? Sun isn't exactly the only provider of such technology, so even if the giveaways propel adoption of these technologies, their open nature means that this won't necessarily translate back to their bottom line. On the other hand, for every PC Microsoft gives away it'll be running Windows [money back to themselves], it'll probably be running Office [money back to themselves], and maybe it'll have Visual Studio [money back to themselves]. None of these are open, none of these have significant competition. If they get people using such technology, there's only one vendor supplying it.
Please compare Apples to Apples or, in this case, Suns to Suns.
Nah -- initial review tends to come out immediately, but it seldom amounts to more than "what was the movie about and would you want to pay to see it now". More thoughtful literary criticism tends to come later, and really that's what this review is an early example of (note how a lot of it seems like just crib notes in no particular order -- I can see Brin turning this stuff into a book later if he wanted to).
Literary criticism can actually get more interesting as time goes on. What if anything does "Blade Runner" have to say now that we have cloning? Does "Seven Samurai" or "Magnificent Seven" inform the debate on terrorism today? How does a character like Charles Foster Kane illustrate what we now see in people like Rupert Murdoch or, for that matter, Bill Clinton?
Every generation gets to reintrepret stories, whether those stories are Star Wars movies, Shakespeare's plays, or the epics of the Greeks & Romans. The first generation gets a first crack at such review, but really it takes time for the first wave of interesting stuff to fall out, and the revisionism that later generations can bring can be even more interesting, even if it makes purists wince. Compared to that slower, more thoughtful criticism, the puff pieces you get to see right when the movie/book/etc comes out are for the most part pretty boring & useless.
Check out Net::ICal, by Shane Landrum. The module hasn't been updated in a while, but now that Apple is basing this [apparently wildly popular] software around interfhance of.ical format files, it may get moving again. Net::ICal is available via CPAN, but also take a look at reefknot.org, the development site for Net::ICal & related materials. Lots of links, sample code, reference material, etc. there.
Like everyone else in the Mac/Unix world, I'm finding this stuff fascinating and am trying to figure out how I can get interchange running between things like iCal, my Palm Pilot, my work-mandated Lotus Notes account, and other fun things on the side. iCal seems like a decent switchboard for a lot of these ideas, but automatiing things with Perl &/or Applescript is also going to be essential....
My only reply is that this breaks down because, especially in this context, the word 'administrator' is commonly abbreviated to 'admin', without having to use punctuation e.g. "admin." So, because the term is commonly & familiarly abbreviated without punctuation, and because using the apostrophe raises ambiguity over whether the writer meant possession, abbreviation, or was just being sloppy, I still stand by my point that the word is better expressed without the apostrophe.
But still, you make a very entertaining argument and I won't try to change your mind about it if you're that set on it:-)
None of your points really met this guy's questions. The way I see it, Gimp is an excellent graphics application for programmers & sysadmins. Photoshop is, with good reason, *the* graphics application for graphics professionals.
Take for example automation, which is critical for anyone that's going to be driving the software as their job. Photoshop actions, kind of like Applescript, allow you to record your activity and then have the software play it back to you by pantomime. There isn't much to get the hang of, because you're just recording the activity you're doing normally. Gimp's ScriptFu, on the other hand, allows you to script actions in Perl -- right? Now I love Perl, use it all the time, am a member of the local Perl Mongers group, etc, but that is *not* how I picture the average graphics professional wanting to work.
Gimp over Photoshop is an argument much like Linux over Windows -- in spite of all the shouting, the dominant player actually does have some strengths going for it, and the hackishness of the open source competitor just doesn't compare to the polished maturity of the dominant software. If you've got the time to spend on beating the open source stuff into submission -- and hey, that can be fun, I'm not trying to knock that if it's what you're in to -- then sure, the path of "freedom" might be worthwhile. But for everyone else, this isn't a political matter, and they don't exactly feel like slaves because they happen to prefer the [unfortunately] generally superior proprietary software to the open/freee/whatever alternative, whiich has been "almost catching up" for years now...
Seriously though, keeping on the bleeding edge of updates isn't always feasible. A lot of companies might be running third party software that is explicitly not supported unless you're running a particular version of Apache, or a particular version of the Linux kernel, C libraries, etc. (And likewise for Windows software, etc.)
Please be generous and accept that negligence isn't the only explanation for failure to keep up with the latest patches of all the major & minor components of a modern computer system...
The thing is, does the apparent thickness difference mean anything? Is it even the case that all centuries old glass is thicker at the bottom, as opposed to along some other axis?
If not, and you find exampls where say the top of the glass is thicker pretty frequently, then the idea that glass flows isn't as compelling as the idea that only in modern times have we been able to mass produce industrial quality, evenly flat panes of glass.
But even if the panes are generally thicker on the bottom, what does that mean? Maybe it was easier / safer / more reliable to set the thick end of the glass at the bottom. Maybe it's easier to install that way. Maybe experience showed that glass set that way held up longer. Who knows?
Either way, "melting glass" is only one of several explanations, with others including "no difference" and "difference can be explained by work practices", and it isn't clear which if any explanation is the valid one.
But that's just it. Point one is not the same as point three, because "sumi" is not a literal match for "sosumi". An obvious echo of it? Yes, sure, ok, but it has been changed a bit.
I guess the funny bit for me is all contextual, which the "that's not funny" crowd are also seeing but from a different angle. I think it's funny that Apple, no stranger to these legal intimidation [and defense] tactics, is now having "their" phrase turned against them.
To put it in cinematic terms, it reminds me of something like the good guy / action hero turning the bad guy's catchphrase against him as he begins to fight back...
Mindless repitition of an overworn joke is, we all agree, not funny at all. Clever recasting of such jokes can be though.
Why did the chicken cross the road?
Fish. </surrealism>
Ok maybe not a good example but you get the idea:-)
This isn't entirely correct. Yes, iTunes is Apple's product, and I don't doubt that they've put a good deal of work into it. However, the foundation isn't theirs, they just bought it off the people that developed the MP3 player SoundJam. I can't find a link with the details at the moment, but this will do for now:
By the way, if iTunes sounds a lot like SoundJam (reviewed here in October 1999), it is. SoundJam has some additional features -- a graphic equalizer, custom "themes" (a.k.a. "skins"), more visual effects, and better sound quality. But it also costs $50 and doesn't have iTunes' cool browser or fast search features. Frankly, I think iTunes is all the MP3 player most people will ever want or need. (For what it's worth, the same programmers wrote both iTunes and SoundJam.)
Casady & Greene, Inc. ceased publication of SoundJam MP on June 1, 2001 at the request of its developers. We believe that SoundJam MP will continue to give our customers long and useful service, and, in keeping with our philosophy of putting our customers first, Casady & Greene will continue to offer tech support to SoundJam MP owners. The SoundJam development team is now working for Apple on their popular iTunes jukebox software, and will continue to work on exciting and innovative products for Mac users.
Anyway, I thought there may have been a Windows version of SoundJam, but at the moment I'm not turning anything up, Mac or otherwise....
See, several years ago, Apple used Sagan as a codename for one of their prototype systems, after the well-known astronomer Carl Sagan. After they got sued for using the namee without his permission, engineers started calling their prototype BHA instead -- as in, "Butt Head Astronomer".:-)
I like the way the Sumi people are tweaking Apple back now...:-)
Rosicrucians, eh? Heh. Ever read Umberto Eco's Foucault's Pendulum? Great book about all that nutty conspiracy stuff. Now that I've heard of this manuscript, I'd be surprised if it & the lore surrounding it weren't part of the source material Eco turned to while writing the novel...
Uhh, isn't one of the big deals about Jaguar that it builds LDAP right into the system, as a replacement for both the user level AddressBook application and the system level NetInfo database?
I mean yeah, you can use Marc Liyanage's site to download OpenLDAP package, or [my preference] you can just install Fink and let it do the work for you with a simple (if slow) fink install openldap-ssl, but really -- if it's built into the system then why go to all that trouble? Development of the Fink package more or less stalled once it was announced that LDAP would be built into the client version of Jaguar, and that's not unreasonable. Why reinvent the wheel, ya know? Just upgrade your OS....
I bought this book about a year ago [and it had already been out for a while at that point -- why are we just getting the Slashdot review now?] and at that point I was also basically a vim/vi newbie, having been a happy Pico user for many years that only ever used vi when I needed to:%s/foo/bar something.
/me chuckles as half the slashdot readership runs away at someone admitting that he likes pico:)
So anyway, this was my first serious exposure to the editor, and I have to say I liked what I read. I did catch some typos -- and probably would have picked up more if I was better versed in the software -- but these weren't enough to scare me away. I liked how the book was structured, with a quick dash through the major features in the opening chapters -- here & there touching on concepts that would be formally introduced later on -- and then a longer, more detailed review of that major functionality, revisiting those concepts and showing faster & easier ways to approach different tasks, as well as customizing default behavior with such things in mind. That way, functionality I'm not interested in -- sorry, I don't read or write Farsi, so that section wasn't particularly relevant for me -- can be safely skipped without leaving the feeling that you may have needed something in there.
Maybe the book just isn't for advanced users, or jaded Unix blowhards, or what have you. But for me, as a user of intermediate incoming experience -- and, incidently, for some of my co-workers, who do seem quite proficient in Vim -- this book was just what I had been looking for. It's worth at least skimming over in ye old bookateria some time to see if maybe the reviews & errata are blown out of proportion...
I assume that they have not really given Linux a try, and should not compare it to OS/X for that reason....
Actually, if you read that article, the consensus seems to be that they *have* all been using Linux, but only for the grunt work. For a lot of them, peripheral work was often getting done on old Macs anyway, using software like PowerPoint, while the high performance scientific software would be written on and for Linux or Irix. The big step forward -- and no, Gnome/KDE/etc does not negate this -- is that with OSX all these researchers can do all their work on a single platform.
I know it's a cliche, but you really should read the article before offering these kneejerk responses. These people have considered your points about Linux, and rejected them. I actually had a temp job in the bioinformatics department at one of these companies last year, and everyone was running brand new, high quality workstations, with brand new Sun Blades and moderately old Mac G3s [with OS9 or even OS8.6] in about equal proportion (and most people running two computers). If they were to switch to new G4s running OSX -- and from the sound of it, they may be doing so -- then everyone would be much more productive. Switching to 100% Linux wouldn't be nearly as helpful to these people.
But name anyone who makes money running a huge website (Slashdot excluded, they don't make money) with MySQL
At Boston.com, MySQL and other open source technologies are used extensively, both for our live site and for back end infrastructure. I, for one, am not worried about the company going out of business any time soon. In addition, we run third party software, both open source & proprietary, that is able to effectively use MySQL as a storage mechanism (in addition to Oracle, which we'd rather not shell out that much money for thankyouverymuch). And in the future we'll be making use of Zope -- open source, Python based content management software -- for much or all public web content.
I mean, you're kinda right to point out that a lot of people like pointy clicky Windows-ness in their software, and that's fine. But there are other ways to go about this, and those other ways can be *much* cheaper and *much* more trustworthy, if not being beholden to vendor control of buggy source code is an issue to you (and it should be). Even paying support contracts to some of the organizations supporting open source software you can still come out way ahead in your business expenses, *and* you have more control over what the software is doing, which itself is priceless.
You aren't going to install a new database just to run a website when you already have one.
Well that depends, doesn't it? What if the security risk of exposing your corporate database is a higher cost than you'd rather bear? Wouldn't it make more sense to have a deployment tier of cheap, expendable LAMP [ Linux / Apache / Mysql/PostgreSQL / Perl/Python/PHP ] servers sitting between your safe little intranet and the big, scary world out there? What if your big expensive mainframe database systems were set up a decade or more before it occurred to anyone that this stuff ought to be globally accessible over thw web? Again, wouldn't it be easier & safer to put up a cheap proxy tier that is designed to work well over the web rather than screwing around with the old internal system?
Again, I don't want to seem like I'm just trying to shoot down your argument. Your concerns are valid -- open source is not a panacea. But at the same time, it can play a very effective role, either as part of the overall picture [putting LAMP machines in front of the big Oracle / mainframe] or, if you're brave enough, as the whole of the overall picture. Such a decision isn't necessarily corporate suicide. If you've got the expertise -- and hey, any interested college or high school kid can start playing around with the professional quality open source stuff for free if they want to, so the pool of experience developers is big & growing fast -- then licensing costs and often-dangerous code obscurity falls out of the picture. It's doubleplus good:)
Sounds good, but what about Korea? Most of the spam I get these days comes from Korean sources, selling Korean products to a Korean audience and all written in, yep, Korean. I have nothing against the good people of Korea, but I am not Korean, I do not speak Korean, and really if I never get another piece of mail from that country it'll be much, much too soon.
Beyond that, I get lots of spam from other parts of Asia (China and Taiwan are the next two big sources for me), occasional messages from Russia or Europe, and course our old friend the kinda spam, kinda scam Nigerian get rich quick schemes.
The common thread to all of this being that it's all immune to almost any legislation that any one jurisdiction could come up with. This idea sounds good, but it's far too easy for a spammer to switch ISPs and so the information in that second database of yours always runs the risk of being too stale to be useful. In the degenerate case, the only way it'll work would be to ban entire countries or even all non-domestic mail, and in that case the cure would probably be worse than the disease.
I agree that legislation is probably the surest way to get spam to go away, but the cross-jurisdiction problem brings in such an enormous loophole that I'm pessimistic of any legal solution being effective on anything short of global treaty level -- and somehow I doubt all the nations of the world are going to ban together to fight the scourge spam when we can't even get them all to agree that landmines & air pollution are bad [no, wait, the world *did* agree on those two things and the US is holding them back, but I digress].
Proving that spam isn't economically useful would help, but shit it's so cheap that I'm not at all surprised that so many companies are trying it and will continue to try it. Finding a way to make unsolicited bulk mail *not* be cheap might actually help more than any legislation could. Have ISPs charge for mail delivery on a basis where usage under a certain threshhold is free -- and so allowing regular mail for most people to get through okay -- but start placing a tariff on it when [a] the number of recipients gets too high (but we don't want to tax regular mailing lists if we can help it) or [b] when the bandwidth consumption gets too high (but same caveat about mailing lists). I'm not really sure how to formulate this, but I bet if something like this could be done then the economics of spamming might stop appearing to be so favorable, and in turn the amount of it will drop.
Searching for "dystopia novel" on Google, the first hit is a top five list on Salon.com:
Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood
White Noise by Don DeLillo
Fiskadoro by Denis Johnson
Paradise by Toni Morrison
Galapagos by Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
Hit number two is a discussion on H2G2 about the genre, including books and films. Etc.
There's lots of good stuff out there if you're willing to go beyond just scifi &/or books. There's a lot of dystopian movies, for example -- take some of Terry Gilliam's for example ("Brazil", "12 Monkeys").
That's my hope. From what I've heard -- Boston.pm meetings where Dan Sugalski, Parrot developer gaves talks on the project -- it's very hard to get a dynamic language like Perl, Python, Ruby, or Lisp to run on the static-oriented virtual machines like JVM, CLI, and Mono. On the other hand, getting the static languages to run on top of the dynamic runtime engine might not be that bad -- they just won't be leveraging the cool high level hooks put in there for the Perls etc.
If so, then the point isn't "we don't need Parrot since we've already got Mono/JVM/CLI, etc", it's that "we're getting Parrot so we won't need Mono/JVM/CLI". Parrot gets the upper hand there. Programs written for say Microsoft's.NET CLI -- Office 2004 anyone? -- could hypothetically work on any machine that has an instance of Parrot installed. Hey presto, all that Win32ware just got ported to Linux/BSD/BeOS/etc...:)
'course, this is all strictly hypothetical at this point, and I personally don't know nearly enough about the field to contribute much, but I'd love to see it happen within the next few years...
Actually, almost all of the high power AM stations are required to throttle back at night so that they can't interfere with each other. During the day they have to pump out that much power to get through the Sun's radiation; at night the signals have no such interference and so have to operate at low power to keep from trampling each other. There are only a dozen or so AM stations allowed to broadcast at full power overnight as a result.
So, yeah. The amount of power required to broadcast to three states rises & falls every single day, and the amount of power used to accomplish this is adjusted accordingly:)
Another interesting angle is signal compression & encryption, both of which can make the signal sound like so much static. Will this make us more "invisible" too? Presumably a burst or stream of seeming gibberish might be distinguishable from true static if you know what you're listening for, but if not it could easily blend into the background noice. Conversely, if other civilizations are doing the same thing, picking up their signals could be very difficult -- much harder than just scanning for Betelgeusian episodes of "I Love Lucy"...:)
Meet the new media, same as the old media
on
Make Money Fast Online
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· Score: 3, Insightful
Of course, the most profitable part of a traditional newspaper is also the classifieds. Think about it -- classifieds are pretty much the only advertisements that people actually want to look through. The rest of the ads are just distractions, but classifieds -- want ads, job listings, movie listings, personals, etc -- are actually attractions, bringing in readers & revenues.
And even though they're dirt simple -- no need to pay salaries for journalists, editors, illustrators & other creative talent -- a huge fraction of a paper's regular readers will spend lots of time poring over the daily classified ads. In other words, they're not just a big source of income, they're also a small expense.
If marketers are just waking up to this now, they've been asleep at the wheel for years.
Slashdot Mirror
Look jackass, you can't take out a patent on midgets and nobody here thinks the idea is funny. Quit horsing around you insensitive jerks...
...
heh... :)
Too bad sites can't be moderated as -1 troll... :-)
Moreover, what is Sun talking about giving away here? Linux machines? Java tools? StarOffice? Sun isn't exactly the only provider of such technology, so even if the giveaways propel adoption of these technologies, their open nature means that this won't necessarily translate back to their bottom line. On the other hand, for every PC Microsoft gives away it'll be running Windows [money back to themselves], it'll probably be running Office [money back to themselves], and maybe it'll have Visual Studio [money back to themselves]. None of these are open, none of these have significant competition. If they get people using such technology, there's only one vendor supplying it.
Please compare Apples to Apples or, in this case, Suns to Suns.
Literary criticism can actually get more interesting as time goes on. What if anything does "Blade Runner" have to say now that we have cloning? Does "Seven Samurai" or "Magnificent Seven" inform the debate on terrorism today? How does a character like Charles Foster Kane illustrate what we now see in people like Rupert Murdoch or, for that matter, Bill Clinton?
Every generation gets to reintrepret stories, whether those stories are Star Wars movies, Shakespeare's plays, or the epics of the Greeks & Romans. The first generation gets a first crack at such review, but really it takes time for the first wave of interesting stuff to fall out, and the revisionism that later generations can bring can be even more interesting, even if it makes purists wince. Compared to that slower, more thoughtful criticism, the puff pieces you get to see right when the movie/book/etc comes out are for the most part pretty boring & useless.
Like everyone else in the Mac/Unix world, I'm finding this stuff fascinating and am trying to figure out how I can get interchange running between things like iCal, my Palm Pilot, my work-mandated Lotus Notes account, and other fun things on the side. iCal seems like a decent switchboard for a lot of these ideas, but automatiing things with Perl &/or Applescript is also going to be essential....
My only reply is that this breaks down because, especially in this context, the word 'administrator' is commonly abbreviated to 'admin', without having to use punctuation e.g. "admin." So, because the term is commonly & familiarly abbreviated without punctuation, and because using the apostrophe raises ambiguity over whether the writer meant possession, abbreviation, or was just being sloppy, I still stand by my point that the word is better expressed without the apostrophe.
But still, you make a very entertaining argument and I won't try to change your mind about it if you're that set on it :-)
All the more reason not to run experimental versions on things that matter :-)
Take for example automation, which is critical for anyone that's going to be driving the software as their job. Photoshop actions, kind of like Applescript, allow you to record your activity and then have the software play it back to you by pantomime. There isn't much to get the hang of, because you're just recording the activity you're doing normally. Gimp's ScriptFu, on the other hand, allows you to script actions in Perl -- right? Now I love Perl, use it all the time, am a member of the local Perl Mongers group, etc, but that is *not* how I picture the average graphics professional wanting to work.
Gimp over Photoshop is an argument much like Linux over Windows -- in spite of all the shouting, the dominant player actually does have some strengths going for it, and the hackishness of the open source competitor just doesn't compare to the polished maturity of the dominant software. If you've got the time to spend on beating the open source stuff into submission -- and hey, that can be fun, I'm not trying to knock that if it's what you're in to -- then sure, the path of "freedom" might be worthwhile. But for everyone else, this isn't a political matter, and they don't exactly feel like slaves because they happen to prefer the [unfortunately] generally superior proprietary software to the open/freee/whatever alternative, whiich has been "almost catching up" for years now...
Learn what, how to use apostrophes? ;-)
Seriously though, keeping on the bleeding edge of updates isn't always feasible. A lot of companies might be running third party software that is explicitly not supported unless you're running a particular version of Apache, or a particular version of the Linux kernel, C libraries, etc. (And likewise for Windows software, etc.)
Please be generous and accept that negligence isn't the only explanation for failure to keep up with the latest patches of all the major & minor components of a modern computer system...
If not, and you find exampls where say the top of the glass is thicker pretty frequently, then the idea that glass flows isn't as compelling as the idea that only in modern times have we been able to mass produce industrial quality, evenly flat panes of glass.
But even if the panes are generally thicker on the bottom, what does that mean? Maybe it was easier / safer / more reliable to set the thick end of the glass at the bottom. Maybe it's easier to install that way. Maybe experience showed that glass set that way held up longer. Who knows?
Either way, "melting glass" is only one of several explanations, with others including "no difference" and "difference can be explained by work practices", and it isn't clear which if any explanation is the valid one.
I guess the funny bit for me is all contextual, which the "that's not funny" crowd are also seeing but from a different angle. I think it's funny that Apple, no stranger to these legal intimidation [and defense] tactics, is now having "their" phrase turned against them.
To put it in cinematic terms, it reminds me of something like the good guy / action hero turning the bad guy's catchphrase against him as he begins to fight back...
Mindless repitition of an overworn joke is, we all agree, not funny at all. Clever recasting of such jokes can be though.
Ok maybe not a good example but you get the ideaIMO that doesn't stop it from being funny... :-)
This isn't entirely correct. Yes, iTunes is Apple's product, and I don't doubt that they've put a good deal of work into it. However, the foundation isn't theirs, they just bought it off the people that developed the MP3 player SoundJam. I can't find a link with the details at the moment, but this will do for now:
Ahh, of couse, also see SoundJam.com:
Anyway, I thought there may have been a Windows version of SoundJam, but at the moment I'm not turning anything up, Mac or otherwise....
See, several years ago, Apple used Sagan as a codename for one of their prototype systems, after the well-known astronomer Carl Sagan. After they got sued for using the namee without his permission, engineers started calling their prototype BHA instead -- as in, "Butt Head Astronomer". :-)
I like the way the Sumi people are tweaking Apple back now... :-)
Rosicrucians, eh? Heh. Ever read Umberto Eco's Foucault's Pendulum? Great book about all that nutty conspiracy stuff. Now that I've heard of this manuscript, I'd be surprised if it & the lore surrounding it weren't part of the source material Eco turned to while writing the novel...
I mean yeah, you can use Marc Liyanage's site to download OpenLDAP package, or [my preference] you can just install Fink and let it do the work for you with a simple (if slow) fink install openldap-ssl, but really -- if it's built into the system then why go to all that trouble? Development of the Fink package more or less stalled once it was announced that LDAP would be built into the client version of Jaguar, and that's not unreasonable. Why reinvent the wheel, ya know? Just upgrade your OS....
So anyway, this was my first serious exposure to the editor, and I have to say I liked what I read. I did catch some typos -- and probably would have picked up more if I was better versed in the software -- but these weren't enough to scare me away. I liked how the book was structured, with a quick dash through the major features in the opening chapters -- here & there touching on concepts that would be formally introduced later on -- and then a longer, more detailed review of that major functionality, revisiting those concepts and showing faster & easier ways to approach different tasks, as well as customizing default behavior with such things in mind. That way, functionality I'm not interested in -- sorry, I don't read or write Farsi, so that section wasn't particularly relevant for me -- can be safely skipped without leaving the feeling that you may have needed something in there.
Maybe the book just isn't for advanced users, or jaded Unix blowhards, or what have you. But for me, as a user of intermediate incoming experience -- and, incidently, for some of my co-workers, who do seem quite proficient in Vim -- this book was just what I had been looking for. It's worth at least skimming over in ye old bookateria some time to see if maybe the reviews & errata are blown out of proportion...
I know it's a cliche, but you really should read the article before offering these kneejerk responses. These people have considered your points about Linux, and rejected them. I actually had a temp job in the bioinformatics department at one of these companies last year, and everyone was running brand new, high quality workstations, with brand new Sun Blades and moderately old Mac G3s [with OS9 or even OS8.6] in about equal proportion (and most people running two computers). If they were to switch to new G4s running OSX -- and from the sound of it, they may be doing so -- then everyone would be much more productive. Switching to 100% Linux wouldn't be nearly as helpful to these people.
At Boston.com, MySQL and other open source technologies are used extensively, both for our live site and for back end infrastructure. I, for one, am not worried about the company going out of business any time soon. In addition, we run third party software, both open source & proprietary, that is able to effectively use MySQL as a storage mechanism (in addition to Oracle, which we'd rather not shell out that much money for thankyouverymuch). And in the future we'll be making use of Zope -- open source, Python based content management software -- for much or all public web content.
I mean, you're kinda right to point out that a lot of people like pointy clicky Windows-ness in their software, and that's fine. But there are other ways to go about this, and those other ways can be *much* cheaper and *much* more trustworthy, if not being beholden to vendor control of buggy source code is an issue to you (and it should be). Even paying support contracts to some of the organizations supporting open source software you can still come out way ahead in your business expenses, *and* you have more control over what the software is doing, which itself is priceless.
Well that depends, doesn't it? What if the security risk of exposing your corporate database is a higher cost than you'd rather bear? Wouldn't it make more sense to have a deployment tier of cheap, expendable LAMP [ Linux / Apache / Mysql/PostgreSQL / Perl/Python/PHP ] servers sitting between your safe little intranet and the big, scary world out there? What if your big expensive mainframe database systems were set up a decade or more before it occurred to anyone that this stuff ought to be globally accessible over thw web? Again, wouldn't it be easier & safer to put up a cheap proxy tier that is designed to work well over the web rather than screwing around with the old internal system?
Again, I don't want to seem like I'm just trying to shoot down your argument. Your concerns are valid -- open source is not a panacea. But at the same time, it can play a very effective role, either as part of the overall picture [putting LAMP machines in front of the big Oracle / mainframe] or, if you're brave enough, as the whole of the overall picture. Such a decision isn't necessarily corporate suicide. If you've got the expertise -- and hey, any interested college or high school kid can start playing around with the professional quality open source stuff for free if they want to, so the pool of experience developers is big & growing fast -- then licensing costs and often-dangerous code obscurity falls out of the picture. It's doubleplus good :)
Beyond that, I get lots of spam from other parts of Asia (China and Taiwan are the next two big sources for me), occasional messages from Russia or Europe, and course our old friend the kinda spam, kinda scam Nigerian get rich quick schemes.
The common thread to all of this being that it's all immune to almost any legislation that any one jurisdiction could come up with. This idea sounds good, but it's far too easy for a spammer to switch ISPs and so the information in that second database of yours always runs the risk of being too stale to be useful. In the degenerate case, the only way it'll work would be to ban entire countries or even all non-domestic mail, and in that case the cure would probably be worse than the disease.
I agree that legislation is probably the surest way to get spam to go away, but the cross-jurisdiction problem brings in such an enormous loophole that I'm pessimistic of any legal solution being effective on anything short of global treaty level -- and somehow I doubt all the nations of the world are going to ban together to fight the scourge spam when we can't even get them all to agree that landmines & air pollution are bad [no, wait, the world *did* agree on those two things and the US is holding them back, but I digress].
Proving that spam isn't economically useful would help, but shit it's so cheap that I'm not at all surprised that so many companies are trying it and will continue to try it. Finding a way to make unsolicited bulk mail *not* be cheap might actually help more than any legislation could. Have ISPs charge for mail delivery on a basis where usage under a certain threshhold is free -- and so allowing regular mail for most people to get through okay -- but start placing a tariff on it when [a] the number of recipients gets too high (but we don't want to tax regular mailing lists if we can help it) or [b] when the bandwidth consumption gets too high (but same caveat about mailing lists). I'm not really sure how to formulate this, but I bet if something like this could be done then the economics of spamming might stop appearing to be so favorable, and in turn the amount of it will drop.
Hey, I can dream...
I thought he was just a bloviated wannabe essayist, not a crypto analyst. Surely this can't be the same guy...
Hit number two is a discussion on H2G2 about the genre, including books and films. Etc.
There's lots of good stuff out there if you're willing to go beyond just scifi &/or books. There's a lot of dystopian movies, for example -- take some of Terry Gilliam's for example ("Brazil", "12 Monkeys").
If so, then the point isn't "we don't need Parrot since we've already got Mono/JVM/CLI, etc", it's that "we're getting Parrot so we won't need Mono/JVM/CLI". Parrot gets the upper hand there. Programs written for say Microsoft's .NET CLI -- Office 2004 anyone? -- could hypothetically work on any machine that has an instance of Parrot installed. Hey presto, all that Win32ware just got ported to Linux/BSD/BeOS/etc... :)
'course, this is all strictly hypothetical at this point, and I personally don't know nearly enough about the field to contribute much, but I'd love to see it happen within the next few years...
So, yeah. The amount of power required to broadcast to three states rises & falls every single day, and the amount of power used to accomplish this is adjusted accordingly :)
Another interesting angle is signal compression & encryption, both of which can make the signal sound like so much static. Will this make us more "invisible" too? Presumably a burst or stream of seeming gibberish might be distinguishable from true static if you know what you're listening for, but if not it could easily blend into the background noice. Conversely, if other civilizations are doing the same thing, picking up their signals could be very difficult -- much harder than just scanning for Betelgeusian episodes of "I Love Lucy"... :)
And even though they're dirt simple -- no need to pay salaries for journalists, editors, illustrators & other creative talent -- a huge fraction of a paper's regular readers will spend lots of time poring over the daily classified ads. In other words, they're not just a big source of income, they're also a small expense.
If marketers are just waking up to this now, they've been asleep at the wheel for years.