The real question is, who made RHAT skyrocket: geeks, or businessmen? If geeks, then that might explain the currently static state of RHAT. They don't have sufficient funds to continue buying, and they may also have a more-than-common dose of common sense about daytrading since it isn't their typical investment pattern. But by the same token, if it was the geeks, then VA probably can't expect anything nearly as spectacular as RHAT - the geek money is already spent! The only way VA could win big under this scenario (they'll win regardless because they're a respected company, but they may not win 'big') is at the expense of sold RHAT stock, and thus a drop in the RHAT value. If businessmen (aka "Wallys" and "PHB's") then damn! Buy me summa dat stock! The clueless enthusiasm of daytraders can't have all been spent on RHAT if it is indeed they who sent the price up. With IPOs fairly poor recently, look for VA to be a big financial win under this scenario. However, I personally vote for C - a mixture of the two but heavily biased towards geeks. If that is correct, then VA will do moderately well, but will only be worth investment in the long term, if at all. -konstant
Our current situation at the pinnacle of the labor force reminds me a lot of the "royal proletariat" of the 19th century. Since the majority of workers during the industrial revolution were unfamiliar with the new machinery, they were qualified to do little more than pull levers and run thread through spindles. But a handful of these workers were prized because they had acquired a familiarity with the workings of the machines. They were the artisans who could fix a mill when it broke, or adjust a boiler, or plan a mine shaft, etc.
These workers were highly paid and greatly catered to by their employers, but they ultimately remained working men. Their social standing was not greatly changed by their wealth. As the technology gradually became ubiquitous, more and more of these skilled workers were needed for their maintenance. This proliferation diluted the value of the skill, and the lofty position of the "royal proletariat" disintegrated. Consider the lowly plumber of today: he is lampooned and considered inferior by those not in the know, but he quite probably is indispensible to our civilization.
If computers undergo a shift towards simplification, or if they become as common as some people predict, then our own cushy posture might have to change as well. Ultimately, it's important to realize that we are getting these concessions only because our skills are rare, and not because we are inherently remarkable. If the supply ever exceeds the demand, some of you might start reconsidering JonKatz's endless calls for geek unionization.
To play devil's advocate for a moment, consider the benefits from allowing packets to be uniquely identified. 0) Firstly, I'm not at all sure that this is accurate. In theory, the client has complete control over its outgoing packets. I don't see why this couldn't be wiped to zero on outgoing packets. It would be a simple app, tho it would introduce some overhead into TCP/IP. 1) If the data section of the packet is being handled by SSL, unique IDs cannot harm you. This is because knowing the originator of the packet is meaningless unless you know what they are saying. The most information a snoop could glean would be that X is talking to Y at time Z. 2) packet spoofing would be far more difficult. Consider all the cracking cases in the last few weeks that implicated a national governmental body, probably falsely. First there was the "Department of Defense" breaking into the Australian stock Xchange, then the "Russians" breaking into the Department of Defense. A few months ago didn't the "CIA" break into something in France. Almost certainly spoofed. 3) PoD and DoS would become vulnerable to intelligent routers. Cisco I know tears its hair out over the susceptibility of its routers to denial of service attacks. But if all the packets bore the same GUID, it would be simple to filter them. 4) If you're super-paranoid, just have more than one ethernet card. That's where they're drawing out these GUID's you know, from your hardware signature. Microsoft does the same thing with the in-house GUID Gen program. 5) plus many more good reasons...:P -konstant
No doubt many of us will grab our foreheads in disbelief that Red Hat has chosen to spend its money battling another Linux distro rather than increasing its market presence in the US. But if you take a moment to think about it, you see how much sense it makes.
In the US, Red Hat is the talk du jour, as is Linux itself. The disorganized (or, actually, unwittingly organized) mass media have done a far better job marketing Red Hat Linux in the last few months than any targeted ad campaigns could do.
In Europe, however, SuSe is making the bucks. It's the number one rule of publicly held companies that the stock must go up. That imperative overrides all other converns. It's for this reason that we see companies purchasing their competitors after they have exhausted their slice of the demographic pie. They have to keep growing if they want to survive.
Well, RHAT wants to survive. They can't ride the tide forever, but eventually the journalists will discover some other new fad. Thus they have to send a message to their stockholders that RHAT is a sound, competitive investment. One that will continue to grow its market share and maybe someday (preposterous as it sounds) make a little money.
Thus this maneuver against SuSe. It's the obvious target. The only target, really. They can't pique interest any higher in the US directly, so they're doing it indirectly. And if they happen to gain market share while they're at it, I'm sure they don't mind a bit.
Oh, and if you're worried this will be a bad thing for Linux, don't. RHAT is not big enough yet to be a MSFT, so in the mean time they'll just be one more capitalist company fighting for dominance. And that always brings benefits to users. At least in the short run.
Then what does that do to the elaborate castles of theory people have been building on the "Open Source Movement". Pundits from the credible (think ESR) to the credulous (think Jon Katz) have been pounding their shoes on the pulpit about the unstoppable force that is community code. More than one reputation is now founded on the premise that open source is "unique" and provides marvellous, unheard of benefits that tightly controlled products never could enjoy.
But the BSD's are not nearly so open, as I understand it. Yes, much of their codebase is contributed, but the maintainers carefully vet submissions and frequently reject code they feel will contrast with their envisioned implementation. If I'm correct in that interpretation (and I might not be - please correct me) the BSD's are much more like Netscape's model than Linux's model.
So if the BSD's succeed in gaining considerable market share, doesn't that mean most of the rhetoric we've been reading about open source is mostly hot air? Wouldn't it imply that, really, strict central control is a good idea for a software project?
I did not plagiarize this. I wrote it in my spare time and submitted it to CmdrTaco about a week and a half ago. I don't think he's going to post it, so I just added it as a comment.
If I'm right about that, then this development (while still insanely cool - don't get me wrong) might not be so surprising. As I recall from college brain-and-mind psych courses, humans use a variety of factors when singling out a lone voice or conversation in a noisy environment. These include spacial orientation, visual cues, etc. My prof called the "cocktail party effect". Rob them of these cues, and it isn't suprising that they are hobbled.
Also, computers have the mixed blessing of ignoring information patterns unless they are instructed to do otherwise. A person, listening to white noise, would subconsciously attempt to find meaning in every bleep and scratch. A computer, listening only for certain cues, can disregard the majority of the signal.
I would be interested in learning what rate of word recognition this system achieves. Current technology manages about 90%, which means one in every ten words is heard incorrectly. If they could improve that to 99.9% or even just 99%, we might actually get some speech-processors in Office desktop products.
Surprisingly, the most prominent evangelists of the open source community are also the most abject victims of its flame. These individuals, pedigreed by years of code, use their eloquence to plead for free software worldwide. Their work is the reproductive force of the movement, stimulating conversions and showing businessmen the money to be made embracing open source. In reward, the open source community takes the beliefs of these leaders seriously - by far the gravest honor this opinionated clan can bestow. Yet these public speakers are also subject to a continuous trickle of hate mail from the geeks they represent, one that widens into a deluge the moment they stray from open software's traditional path. While they behave predictably, open source leaders have the backing of their constituents, but if they articulate a new vision or take a risk, the community that could rally round them instead sits down and jeers.
This humiliating puzzle is bound up with the role of leadership in the open source movement. The computer industry is rife with the Napoleonic model of business, which views software as the manifest will of visionary CEOs. At Scott McNealy's Sun, Larry Ellison's Oracle, Bill Gates' Microsoft and others, resources flow back and forth in obedience to the whims of charismatic chairmen. Like competing generals, they glower at each other across the battlefield of the NASDAQ listings, struggling to see furthest and direct their armies of coders accordingly.
Open source is altogether different. By its nature, the community responds indifferently to grand visions, and the definition of success varies from participant to participant, each according to his or her own needs. The aim of open software is to serve the people who write it, and consequently its users react warily to those advocating a de-emphasis of their rights in exchange for money, publicity, or convenience. Because initiatives flow upwards in this population, its ideal leadership is not that of an emperor tending to a legacy, but that of an ambassador speaking for a people. And in the free software movement, just as in government, an overly inventive diplomat is an incompetent one.
Enter the brash politics of Eric Raymond. A decade and a half into the GNU project, and with the 8th birthday of Linux hard approaching, credit is due to Raymond, who has single-handedly sweetened the reputation of open source. Once considered a toy of seditious kids, Linux is now a titan thanks to Raymond's ability to creep inside the heads of corporate decision makers and craft arguments against their fears. Raymond established his importance to the community with his paper The Cathedral and the Bazaar, a stunning explanation of open source methods that convinced Netscape Corporation to open the source of its popular Mozilla browser in 1998. All was smiles and backslapping in the community as the campaigning Raymond brought businesses to openness. In Eric Raymond, it seemed, open source had found a missionary capable of converting the heathen without going native himself.
The giddiness didn't last long. Raymond was a volunteer, neither salaried nor elected, but made powerful by his own work with companies and the press. True altruism is rare, and especially so when attached to the magnitude of celebrity Raymond was achieving. The nasty word 'sellout' appeared in sporadic flames on the net, and Raymond stoked the fires by conspicuously avoiding talk of 'freedom' or 'free software' in his speeches, a policy he later attributed to the unease those terms stir in businessmen. Open source developers, whose professional lives often fall short of perfection due to the interference of suits, awoke to the possibility Eric Raymond was a Judas, willing to sell their rebellion in return for the gratifications of fame.
The flashpoint was the release of Apple's Public Source License in early March of this year. Apple, hoping to bring the dynamism of open source to its OS kernel, requested a meeting with Raymond to discuss its License. Raymond and Apple retreated behind closed doors. Other open source activists, such as Richard Stallman and Bruce Perens, learned of the meeting through the grapevine but were so far out of the loop that they could not even locate a phone number to call at Apple. The talks disbanded shortly afterwards without their contribution. Eric Raymond emerged flushed with victory, and Apple trumpeted APSL 1.0, fully certified as Open Source. Stallman and Perens went on the offensive, denouncing the License as deficient and enumerating reasons. Community discussion boards buzzed with speculation, with many participants agreeing Raymond had misrepresented open source. To this criticism he issued a retort, stating that objections to the License were founded in loose reading and lack of legal competence. It appeared that from Raymond's point of view, the discussion was at an end.
Eric Raymond had many defenders, but others stuttered with anger. Apple's inadvertent exclusion of the community forced a realization long in coming: the position of public representative is as much bestowed by corporations and the media as by the community itself. Raymond had succeeded as a promoter by cultivating his credibility with the forces arrayed against open source. Once allowed in their camp, he could persuade them gently, in words they understood, rather than bellowing from the perimeter. This arrangement was convenient for reporters and businesses: the affable Raymond provided translations and spared them the chore of researching open source. But Raymond was only one man, presenting a tinted perspective of the diverse opinions alive in his movement. Indeed, Apple stated afterwards that the APSL fracas was the first it had heard of other community factions. Once it was clear Raymond would not yield to the disagreement of his peers, it became academic whether the APSL was a good license. He was one man defying the movement that had made him, and not a few felt it was time he was deposed.
Disciplining a volunteer leader
Rationally, there was little the community could do to rebuke its spokesman. There was no salary to slash, no vote to cast, not even any media contacts who would prefer a few ragtag emails to the word of the established Raymond. But flame has little to do with the rational. The great furnaces were heard chugging across the land, and what profane masterpieces of filth were disgorged only Eric Raymond can say. His email address became a sump of all that is foul in the minds of hundreds of raging geeks. Before the month was out, Raymond issued a statement in which he threatened to resign his leadership. Ironically, his sarcasm was misinterpreted; leaving the impression he had already drawn the blinds and settled into a life of oblivion. The reaction to this perceived development, while poignant, lacked the tenor of fear that might be present at Microsoft, for example, should Gates unexpectedly retire. Open source was prepared to move on without Eric Raymond, and he rushed to clarify himself and remind his listeners that much work remained only he could complete. After some skeptical grumbling, he was reinstated to the community's good graces. The Apple Public Source License was revised three weeks later, correcting all the disputed terms.
Spats such as this illuminate a problem with open source gift culture. Ego gratification is a powerful stimulant for open source developers. Participants give gifts of source code partially to satisfy their craving for recognition as magnanimous geniuses. The community encourages this motive in all cases save one: leadership. Public representatives for the open source movement are expected to be meek and shun self-promotion. Those who stray are lashed with vicious emotional reprisals. All their work must be for the good of the whole, and none for themselves. In short, the community demands its foremost members adhere to ethics the average hacker finds intolerable. Small wonder most open source leaders ultimately disappoint the led.
Many arguments reduce to a handful of facts that can be viewed in more than one light, and emotion rather than intellect is the deciding element. The civilized compromise is an agreement to disagree, but when it comes to community speakers, there is no room for such courtesies. Since ideas rise upwards in the open source movement, allowing a leader to advocate one thing while the community believes another would be as damaging as allowing a diplomat to Russia to announce IMF debt forgiveness on his own initiative. Ambassadors may suggest, but they cannot decide. They must either represent the community, or be expelled.
Examples of this are abundant on the popular board Slashdot.org. Roving journalists frequently refer to Slashdot when plumbing the attitudes of the open source community; making it crucial they not receive a false impression during their stay. Slashdot real estate is therefore valuable and the power to select discussion topics is great. If a site operator abuses Slashdot to gratify an emotional itch, the response from readers is not only rational debate - though logic is always voiced - but also emotional counterattack. While calmer members discredit the logic of the offender, volatile participants demolish their motives with insults. It becomes psychologically expensive for the offender to continue.
Sengan Baring-Gould learned this during the Lewinsky scandal, when he exercised his operator power to post a denunciation of American missile strikes in Iraq. Perhaps seduced by a captive audience of thousands, he forbade community responses, effectively hijacking the open source mouthpiece for his own politics. Slashdotters responded with furious floods of mail to Baring-Gould and site owner Rob Malda, who scrambled to enable comments and posted two apologies. Criticisms swamped the board, ranging from windy dissections of Baring-Gould's logic to far rawer fare. With his argument tattered by logic and his power trip soiled by emotional assaults, Baring-Gould had little motive to fight on. The episode was not repeated.
But Baring-Gould's experience was a mere candle to the bonfire roasting of Jonathan Katz. Katz, a former editor with Wired, is surprisingly innocent of technical knowledge. Empowered with posting privileges, Katz writes opinions for a board patronized by thousands of open source developers, and consequently is a sort of de facto community representative when journalists come calling, regardless of whether his columns are actually read. His pieces endure much scrutiny from those who do not appreciate his company.
Early in his tenure, Katz was known for unabashed promotion of his own books. His columns effused over dubious notions such as 'sexbots' and at least once a month declared the dawn of a new era, as evinced by a movie he had seen. Rational criticisms did little to improve his quality. Slashdotters turned to flame. The rage came ripe and sloppy for weeks, even prompting a Katz column in which he wondered whether he was still wanted (he decided he was). Then, when it seemed inevitable he would lose his position, Katz had a moment of brilliance. In a daring piece, he defied popular media and declared the Columbine geeks had killed because they were driven to it, persecuted by merciless jocks. Instantly, the sewage of popular opinion sprouted roses. Katz had said something the community had needed to hear for a long time. Today, Katz confines himself largely to variations on the Columbine theme and book reviews. There remains little for which he can be flamed, save lack of innovation.
Open source advocates - and the hacker clan in general - fancy themselves as dispassionate creatures, able to analyze facts from a distance and judge impartially. This is a delusion. If emotion runs high anywhere, it is among geeks, and if any group is harnessing this volatility, it is the open source community. When reason's bullets are spent, only raw feeling remains to dispute actions that are wrong or damaging. Like the Salem Puritans many geeks profess to despise, the open source community manipulates emotion to enforce the curious strictures of its morality. It remains to them to decide whether this is a suitable tool for their advancement. Their success in quelling it or wielding it will reveal a great deal about their culture.
I have a feeling some of the more extreme technophiles/conservatives are going to chastise us for being alarmed by this sort of accident. Generally, after a nuclear mishap, the pattern goes like this:
1) BOOOM 2) a number of people are rushed to the hospital 3) liberals run around screaming "Look how awful nukes are!" 4) conservatives tilt their Laz-e-boys up a notch, puff on their pipes, and make devastating comments about "Luddites"
But look folks, nuclear technology really is a technology unlike most others. Only genetic modification has as much potential for literally wiping out the human race if somebody forgets to carry the two. We all know from experience that even experts make miscalculations, and that sometimes the results are hazardous. Generally, these are tragic but containable. They are what you might call "acceptable losses" on the path towards improving the lot of our species.
But I'll be damned if waking up each morning to a pitcher of radioactive milk is acceptable to me. Just a single reactor in Russia threw the world's food supply into havoc for months. And mistakes like Chernobyl have happened before and will happen again. Every once in a while somebody fucks up. It's just that, with nukes, the ramifications are so very large!
The reason that we don't see more accidents like this in Japan is not because nuclear energy is, on the whole, safe. It's because most people have extreme NIMBY reactions to nuclear facility proposals. People are scared of nuclear technology, and I think rationally so. The development of a clever scientific pet trick is not enough justification for its deployment. We do not have to do everything that we can do.
I'm sure that statement alone will be enough to moderate me down on slashdot;)
between "visual" brains and "mathematical" brains. At least when it comes to programmers. Look at the fascination these images evoke in slashdotters... people who've been informed all their lives that they are "left-brained" and "technical" people, who would do best to leave art to the gifted.
My feeling has always been that visualization is an indispensible part of technology. How can you understand load balancing without having a feel for the way the net looks? How can you understand a select or a try instruction without picturing a cascade of logic? Is it possible to understand the TCP/IP protocol without one of those helpful flow charts?
Hey folks, maybe awe and love for technology is a lot more "right-brained" than it appears at first glance. Could just be that we are well rounded individuals, after all.
Sure, they're the Feds, yes they have lots of money, but fundamentally how are they going to operate at a high level of competence without hiring people who know what they're doing, i.e. some of us? Think 8 days of the Condor Basically its a bunch of guys with ponytails sitting in a boileroom, with an extra guy to fill out requisition forms.
It's a scary thing, but there are probably people working for these agencies that most of us could respect, or even admire under other circumstances. As much as the violation of privacy bothers me, I'm far more disturbed by the perversion of good, powerful brains. How do they convince intelligent geeks that, after all, the long-term assurance of privacy and personal liberties isn't that important. Is it money? Do they snag them early in college? What?
I install Windows all the time. Literally every week. It's part of my job. I don't feel it's difficult in the least. Unless my machine has hardware too recent to be included in the drivers library, I do not need to know a thing about the internals of my machines. If you're having trouble with Windows intallations, I recommend you install a more recent copy, which is more likely to include drivers for unusual hardware like yours. -konstant
If he finds Linux is more difficult to install than Windows, it's not because he's stupid. It's because Windows is superior.
Deal with that. Take a deep breath. If you have trouble doing that, smash some China, then take a deep breath.
Blaming the user for their difficulties setting up a program is like blaming a driver because when their car breaks down on I-5, they don't understand it's due to a dirty spark plug and a frazzled timing belt. "Well, Duh! Obviously your coolant line is leaking, MORON!" Well designed software, like well desinged cars, let you choose your level of abstraction. If you want to work on your OS at the command line level, that's wonderful. But if there are no other choices, then the software is inherently poor.
Anybody still out there who remembers the days when they admired Microsoft for bringing software to the masses? I think I do... dimly. And making the complex simple is and admirable thing. One of the most admirable things, in my mind.
Don't flame this poor man. Fix what sucks about Linux. If there are no things that suck about Linux, then we might as well go home because there is no longer any room for improvement. But we all know that, along with the many wonderful things about a free and community-defined OS, there are also some pitfalls. Wouldn't it be great to impress the world with our response to these concerns?
I have a friend who is an internet entrepreneur. He works from home producing the back end of a bodybuilding supplement company. (shameless plug: www.massquantities.com>)
I was talking to him the other day about his work habits. Generally, he crawls out of bed early in the morning in his underwear, teleconferences with some people on the east coast, then maybe shaves, maybe showers, and most definitely sits down to a day of work. His most amusing comment was, "Thank god I don't have videoconferencing"
Personally I agree. I'd love to work at home, but most of the benefits come from being a slob in privacy. I personally work better that way. Videoconferencing has a nasty way of spoiling things.
'Course, if its only from the neck up, I guess he could throw on a tie and still sit around in his underwear...:-)
They're spectators. IOW, they're subscribed because they want news about Fetchmail, or because they're enamoured with ESR. They aren't coding.
Look at the coding curve. It's logarithmic, and approaching a constant of about 17,000. That means that the additional participants just aren't producing proportionate changes in the open source project.
ESR has graphed how the popularity of his fetchmail project has grown over time, which could very reasonably be linear for such a specialized application. He has not graphed how an open source effort grows. A more suitable graph would indicate number of contributors rather than constituents of the mailing lists.
-konstant
There's a reason econuts have no love for Monsanto
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Monsanto is the last company I'd want producing plastic, oil, or any other product crucial to the US economy. Greenpeace crazies and eco terrorists are certainly right about one thing - dealing with Monsanto is dangerous for your long-term independence. Their clever mechanism for ensuring repeat buyers is to build infertility into the plants they sell. Farmers buy them because they are indeed very good crops for certain purposes, namely for surviving the popular but toxic herbicide RoundUp, which Monsanto also sells. Monsanto works vigorously to bankrupt competing seed sellers, so that only their perishable brand is available, thus locking farmers into their system for life. Prior to the development of these terminator genes, Monsanto would actually maraud around the countryside burning "illicitly stocked" seed.
A recent company tactic as been to push this "system" as a solution for hunger in third-world countries. Of course, what it would really entail would be a complete regional ownership by Monsanto of the food supply.
Monsanto is also renowned for suing magazines and television stations when they are about to produce an article critical of the company. Most news providers can't fight them, so they buckle and the issues are never aired.
http://www.inmotionmagazine.com/fox.html
And much like certain proprietary software companies, Monsanto patents its creations. We all are familiar with the stupidity of patenting ideas, and genetic engineering, especially of plants, is quite simply that. One plant can turn into two plants with only a negligable investment of soil, water, and sun. This means they are not a zero-sum game, and hence the arguments against patenting software apply to them.
Monsanto is one of the least palatable companies out there. They are easily the Microsoft of genetic science. I think I'd rather stick to the Sheiks for my gallon of gas and pound of shrink-wrap, thank you very much.
Many people are commenting that "clean" or "standards-compliant" HTML is already portable across sundry platforms, and therefore this product is only a crutch for sloppy content providers. This is absolutely not true! Having made many webpages myself, and two or three that actually see a lot of use, I know from experience that standard HTML is one of the least standardized lingos in computing.
The reason is quite simple: people don't upgrade their browsers. Look at www.gnu.org for pete's sake! That page is specifically designed to be Lynx 2.0 compatible because use of "novelty tags" like (included in the HTML 3.2 spec) will break those clients. As a result, the page is fairly ugly.
Choose an involved combination of "standard" tags and it's a fairly safe bet that Netscape 3.0 will display it differently than Opera, which will display it differently than IE4, which will display it differently than Netscape 4.5, etc, etc.
The human is the bottleneck. People don't see a powerful incentive to upgrade their browsers, so they don't. Hence webdesigners like Rob Malda spend weeks of headache time on making their pages BassAckwards 2.7 compliant.
This transcoder, if it works, will really be a boon.
It'll happen, and probably in our lifetimes, although maybe not Hilton, and you might not be able to afford it. Well, you will, Rob. There are far too many luxury activities that can only be hosted in zero G. Gorgeous architechture that defies earthly phsyics. Sunsets that burn themselves into your memory. Sexual acrobatics that turn even a septuagenarian into a spry young chicken...
And the sheer novelty of flying through the air (in certain non-rotating domes, perhaps) is in my mind the greatest of all.
There is a market for this. It's only a matter of time until the space program is sufficiently privatized and the VC are sufficiently ravenous.
Convenience is the great enemy of privacy. Corporations like IBM, Intel, Microsoft, and Sun will always be able to justify (or perhaps legitimately believe) that the convenience of ID stamping or data broadcasting for their latest nifty upgrade-inducing "feature" outweighs the small decrease in consumer privacy. And because most of us are lazy - yes, even you noble Slashdotter - we will ultimately accept these small intrusions in the name of preserving our free time and sanity. Can you imagine living life in American without a SSN? It is legal I believe, and it would indeed greatly inhance your personal privacy, but it is incredibly inconvenient. What about eschewing license plates, and therefore cars? Possible. Not convenient. The process will continue as long as we are blinded by our love of "progress", as defined by the availability of neat new gadgets everywhere we go. Real progress is social change than enhances lives, not merely technology that makes life more ornate. Fat chance of changing our culture, though. -konstant
Senator McCain is running for president of the United States. He has little to distinguish himself from Bush apart from his harsh stance on campaign finance. The man can't speak spanish, so this will be his gimmick. "Liberate the internet from the oppressive grip of the Feds!" etc.
I predict several of the major Republican contenders will echo this in the next few weeks. Notably Forbes, who has next to no standing, but who perseveres due to his rich boy's innocence of reality. This is just the sort of thing he adores. Gore will make noises about something similar, but a ban on internet taxes he will not suffer to endure.
This bill will die in committee. This was the same committee that saw and killed the "teachers and net taxes" bill that was featured on/. a few weeks ago. It also died. However, McCain will be able to use it to prod his competitors regardless of how quickly it dies, and he knows that.
And I'm sure that they will also have flying cars and household appliances that address you by your first name.
"I would like a pizza" "I'm sorry. I can't do that Dave"
The "evidence" that Helsinki is wired to the lower lip appears to be internet kiosks and Mr. Linturi's Super Duper Futuro Home. Yes, I'm cynical, but these are things we already have in abundance here in America: broadband booths at airports and rich people with expensive and largely useless toys installed in their bathrooms.
Well deployed technology doesn't appear with a bang and a cloud of pyrotechnic fog. It slips seamlessly into your life. I don't think I can remember the first time I used a calling card at a telephone booth rather than 25 cents change. It just seemed to be there when I needed it. And that is the definition of a successful deployment.
Look, everybody here likes cool tech news. We've been hearing about the world of the future for so long now that "in the year 2000" is a ridiculous cliche. I for one am pretty tired of it.
There'll be a lot of people in this thread who sympathize with the goals of the study and state that online learning can't compete with the simple human experience of collaring a classmate after the lecture and asking "WTF was that about?" Particularly a pretty, blonde classmate.
Hey, I confess that socializing was the primary reason I attended classes in college. Learning certainly wasn't a large attribute of CS 333.
But look, that's precisely the problem with college today. It's become an incubator for all the yuppie larva, a passport to the middle class. It has next to nothing to do with actually learning any longer. There was very little I learned at UIUC that I hadn't known previously or learned in my own time. I was so disgusted with the process (which put my family $50 in the hole) that I quit after three years. But that degree still played a crucial role in obtaining my job. Even though I've barely used it.
That's what we need to abolish. College needs to be about learning again, not certifying yourself as part of the High Income Club. If there are no people to hang out with, no babes to flirt with, no professors to fight with, then there's only one ting remaining: the knowledge.
I'm sure people said the same thing once about learning literature or engineering from books. Yet those are things I do all the time.
Let's put higher education back in the hands of people who deserve it: the people who love the knowledge and have a use for it. Not ungrateful shits like myself who only want a cushy job. Not to whale on myself or anything...
I'm no free-software Sandanista, but I sometimes sympathize with Richard Stallman and the GNU project. This is one of those times. Listen to this man. He's knowledgable, he's intelligent, and he influences hundreds or perhaps thousands of people directly and indirectly with his advice. And this is the message he has received about freedom in software:
"My advice is: Don't let ideology get in the way of business. Open source makes sense when it makes business sense, otherwise not."
I don't want to start a flame war. This is offtopic, and it should probably be moderated down. There are more interesting things to discuss in the realm of databases. Still, this is the message that people like Eric Raymond (bless him for his work) are inadvertantly spreading. Open source? User's rights? Freedom? Yes, those are all excellent means to secure a profit! But it's not as if they're important in their own right.
I understand the message of ESR to be, "Freedom is wonderful - and you can make a buck."
Slashdot Mirror
The real question is, who made RHAT skyrocket: geeks, or businessmen? If geeks, then that might explain the currently static state of RHAT. They don't have sufficient funds to continue buying, and they may also have a more-than-common dose of common sense about daytrading since it isn't their typical investment pattern. But by the same token, if it was the geeks, then VA probably can't expect anything nearly as spectacular as RHAT - the geek money is already spent! The only way VA could win big under this scenario (they'll win regardless because they're a respected company, but they may not win 'big') is at the expense of sold RHAT stock, and thus a drop in the RHAT value. If businessmen (aka "Wallys" and "PHB's") then damn! Buy me summa dat stock! The clueless enthusiasm of daytraders can't have all been spent on RHAT if it is indeed they who sent the price up. With IPOs fairly poor recently, look for VA to be a big financial win under this scenario. However, I personally vote for C - a mixture of the two but heavily biased towards geeks. If that is correct, then VA will do moderately well, but will only be worth investment in the long term, if at all.
-konstant
Our current situation at the pinnacle of the labor force reminds me a lot of the "royal proletariat" of the 19th century. Since the majority of workers during the industrial revolution were unfamiliar with the new machinery, they were qualified to do little more than pull levers and run thread through spindles. But a handful of these workers were prized because they had acquired a familiarity with the workings of the machines. They were the artisans who could fix a mill when it broke, or adjust a boiler, or plan a mine shaft, etc.
These workers were highly paid and greatly catered to by their employers, but they ultimately remained working men. Their social standing was not greatly changed by their wealth. As the technology gradually became ubiquitous, more and more of these skilled workers were needed for their maintenance. This proliferation diluted the value of the skill, and the lofty position of the "royal proletariat" disintegrated. Consider the lowly plumber of today: he is lampooned and considered inferior by those not in the know, but he quite probably is indispensible to our civilization.
If computers undergo a shift towards simplification, or if they become as common as some people predict, then our own cushy posture might have to change as well. Ultimately, it's important to realize that we are getting these concessions only because our skills are rare, and not because we are inherently remarkable. If the supply ever exceeds the demand, some of you might start reconsidering JonKatz's endless calls for geek unionization.
Hey, so I'm a pessimist. Sue me.
-konstant
To play devil's advocate for a moment, consider the benefits from allowing packets to be uniquely identified. 0) Firstly, I'm not at all sure that this is accurate. In theory, the client has complete control over its outgoing packets. I don't see why this couldn't be wiped to zero on outgoing packets. It would be a simple app, tho it would introduce some overhead into TCP/IP. 1) If the data section of the packet is being handled by SSL, unique IDs cannot harm you. This is because knowing the originator of the packet is meaningless unless you know what they are saying. The most information a snoop could glean would be that X is talking to Y at time Z. 2) packet spoofing would be far more difficult. Consider all the cracking cases in the last few weeks that implicated a national governmental body, probably falsely. First there was the "Department of Defense" breaking into the Australian stock Xchange, then the "Russians" breaking into the Department of Defense. A few months ago didn't the "CIA" break into something in France. Almost certainly spoofed. 3) PoD and DoS would become vulnerable to intelligent routers. Cisco I know tears its hair out over the susceptibility of its routers to denial of service attacks. But if all the packets bore the same GUID, it would be simple to filter them. 4) If you're super-paranoid, just have more than one ethernet card. That's where they're drawing out these GUID's you know, from your hardware signature. Microsoft does the same thing with the in-house GUID Gen program. 5) plus many more good reasons... :P
-konstant
No doubt many of us will grab our foreheads in disbelief that Red Hat has chosen to spend its money battling another Linux distro rather than increasing its market presence in the US. But if you take a moment to think about it, you see how much sense it makes.
In the US, Red Hat is the talk du jour, as is Linux itself. The disorganized (or, actually, unwittingly organized) mass media have done a far better job marketing Red Hat Linux in the last few months than any targeted ad campaigns could do.
In Europe, however, SuSe is making the bucks. It's the number one rule of publicly held companies that the stock must go up. That imperative overrides all other converns. It's for this reason that we see companies purchasing their competitors after they have exhausted their slice of the demographic pie. They have to keep growing if they want to survive.
Well, RHAT wants to survive. They can't ride the tide forever, but eventually the journalists will discover some other new fad. Thus they have to send a message to their stockholders that RHAT is a sound, competitive investment. One that will continue to grow its market share and maybe someday (preposterous as it sounds) make a little money.
Thus this maneuver against SuSe. It's the obvious target. The only target, really. They can't pique interest any higher in the US directly, so they're doing it indirectly. And if they happen to gain market share while they're at it, I'm sure they don't mind a bit.
Oh, and if you're worried this will be a bad thing for Linux, don't. RHAT is not big enough yet to be a MSFT, so in the mean time they'll just be one more capitalist company fighting for dominance. And that always brings benefits to users. At least in the short run.
-konstant
Then what does that do to the elaborate castles of theory people have been building on the "Open Source Movement". Pundits from the credible (think ESR) to the credulous (think Jon Katz) have been pounding their shoes on the pulpit about the unstoppable force that is community code. More than one reputation is now founded on the premise that open source is "unique" and provides marvellous, unheard of benefits that tightly controlled products never could enjoy.
But the BSD's are not nearly so open, as I understand it. Yes, much of their codebase is contributed, but the maintainers carefully vet submissions and frequently reject code they feel will contrast with their envisioned implementation. If I'm correct in that interpretation (and I might not be - please correct me) the BSD's are much more like Netscape's model than Linux's model.
So if the BSD's succeed in gaining considerable market share, doesn't that mean most of the rhetoric we've been reading about open source is mostly hot air? Wouldn't it imply that, really, strict central control is a good idea for a software project?
Just a thought.
-konstant
I did not plagiarize this. I wrote it in my spare time and submitted it to CmdrTaco about a week and a half ago. I don't think he's going to post it, so I just added it as a comment.
I don't plagiarize.
-konstant
I get the impression that this net did not perform better "even" under noisy conditions, but "only" under noisy conditions.
r ies/36013.html
Here's the original link
http://ww w.usc.edu/ext-relations/news_service/releases/sto
If I'm right about that, then this development (while still insanely cool - don't get me wrong) might not be so surprising. As I recall from college brain-and-mind psych courses, humans use a variety of factors when singling out a lone voice or conversation in a noisy environment. These include spacial orientation, visual cues, etc. My prof called the "cocktail party effect". Rob them of these cues, and it isn't suprising that they are hobbled.
Also, computers have the mixed blessing of ignoring information patterns unless they are instructed to do otherwise. A person, listening to white noise, would subconsciously attempt to find meaning in every bleep and scratch. A computer, listening only for certain cues, can disregard the majority of the signal.
I would be interested in learning what rate of word recognition this system achieves. Current technology manages about 90%, which means one in every ten words is heard incorrectly. If they could improve that to 99.9% or even just 99%, we might actually get some speech-processors in Office desktop products.
-konstant
Pardon the length....
Surprisingly, the most prominent evangelists of the open source community are also the most abject victims of its flame. These individuals, pedigreed by years of code, use their eloquence to plead for free software worldwide. Their work is the reproductive force of the movement, stimulating conversions and showing businessmen the money to be made embracing open source. In reward, the open source community takes the beliefs of these leaders seriously - by far the gravest honor this opinionated clan can bestow. Yet these public speakers are also subject to a continuous trickle of hate mail from the geeks they represent, one that widens into a deluge the moment they stray from open software's traditional path. While they behave predictably, open source leaders have the backing of their constituents, but if they articulate a new vision or take a risk, the community that could rally round them instead sits down and jeers.
This humiliating puzzle is bound up with the role of leadership in the open source movement. The computer industry is rife with the Napoleonic model of business, which views software as the manifest will of visionary CEOs. At Scott McNealy's Sun, Larry Ellison's Oracle, Bill Gates' Microsoft and others, resources flow back and forth in obedience to the whims of charismatic chairmen. Like competing generals, they glower at each other across the battlefield of the NASDAQ listings, struggling to see furthest and direct their armies of coders accordingly.
Open source is altogether different. By its nature, the community responds indifferently to grand visions, and the definition of success varies from participant to participant, each according to his or her own needs. The aim of open software is to serve the people who write it, and consequently its users react warily to those advocating a de-emphasis of their rights in exchange for money, publicity, or convenience. Because initiatives flow upwards in this population, its ideal leadership is not that of an emperor tending to a legacy, but that of an ambassador speaking for a people. And in the free software movement, just as in government, an overly inventive diplomat is an incompetent one.
Enter the brash politics of Eric Raymond. A decade and a half into the GNU project, and with the 8th birthday of Linux hard approaching, credit is due to Raymond, who has single-handedly sweetened the reputation of open source. Once considered a toy of seditious kids, Linux is now a titan thanks to Raymond's ability to creep inside the heads of corporate decision makers and craft arguments against their fears. Raymond established his importance to the community with his paper The Cathedral and the Bazaar, a stunning explanation of open source methods that convinced Netscape Corporation to open the source of its popular Mozilla browser in 1998. All was smiles and backslapping in the community as the campaigning Raymond brought businesses to openness. In Eric Raymond, it seemed, open source had found a missionary capable of converting the heathen without going native himself.
The giddiness didn't last long. Raymond was a volunteer, neither salaried nor elected, but made powerful by his own work with companies and the press. True altruism is rare, and especially so when attached to the magnitude of celebrity Raymond was achieving. The nasty word 'sellout' appeared in sporadic flames on the net, and Raymond stoked the fires by conspicuously avoiding talk of 'freedom' or 'free software' in his speeches, a policy he later attributed to the unease those terms stir in businessmen. Open source developers, whose professional lives often fall short of perfection due to the interference of suits, awoke to the possibility Eric Raymond was a Judas, willing to sell their rebellion in return for the gratifications of fame.
The flashpoint was the release of Apple's Public Source License in early March of this year. Apple, hoping to bring the dynamism of open source to its OS kernel, requested a meeting with Raymond to discuss its License. Raymond and Apple retreated behind closed doors. Other open source activists, such as Richard Stallman and Bruce Perens, learned of the meeting through the grapevine but were so far out of the loop that they could not even locate a phone number to call at Apple. The talks disbanded shortly afterwards without their contribution. Eric Raymond emerged flushed with victory, and Apple trumpeted APSL 1.0, fully certified as Open Source. Stallman and Perens went on the offensive, denouncing the License as deficient and enumerating reasons. Community discussion boards buzzed with speculation, with many participants agreeing Raymond had misrepresented open source. To this criticism he issued a retort, stating that objections to the License were founded in loose reading and lack of legal competence. It appeared that from Raymond's point of view, the discussion was at an end.
Eric Raymond had many defenders, but others stuttered with anger. Apple's inadvertent exclusion of the community forced a realization long in coming: the position of public representative is as much bestowed by corporations and the media as by the community itself. Raymond had succeeded as a promoter by cultivating his credibility with the forces arrayed against open source. Once allowed in their camp, he could persuade them gently, in words they understood, rather than bellowing from the perimeter. This arrangement was convenient for reporters and businesses: the affable Raymond provided translations and spared them the chore of researching open source. But Raymond was only one man, presenting a tinted perspective of the diverse opinions alive in his movement. Indeed, Apple stated afterwards that the APSL fracas was the first it had heard of other community factions. Once it was clear Raymond would not yield to the disagreement of his peers, it became academic whether the APSL was a good license. He was one man defying the movement that had made him, and not a few felt it was time he was deposed.
Disciplining a volunteer leader
Rationally, there was little the community could do to rebuke its spokesman. There was no salary to slash, no vote to cast, not even any media contacts who would prefer a few ragtag emails to the word of the established Raymond. But flame has little to do with the rational. The great furnaces were heard chugging across the land, and what profane masterpieces of filth were disgorged only Eric Raymond can say. His email address became a sump of all that is foul in the minds of hundreds of raging geeks. Before the month was out, Raymond issued a statement in which he threatened to resign his leadership. Ironically, his sarcasm was misinterpreted; leaving the impression he had already drawn the blinds and settled into a life of oblivion. The reaction to this perceived development, while poignant, lacked the tenor of fear that might be present at Microsoft, for example, should Gates unexpectedly retire. Open source was prepared to move on without Eric Raymond, and he rushed to clarify himself and remind his listeners that much work remained only he could complete. After some skeptical grumbling, he was reinstated to the community's good graces. The Apple Public Source License was revised three weeks later, correcting all the disputed terms.
Spats such as this illuminate a problem with open source gift culture. Ego gratification is a powerful stimulant for open source developers. Participants give gifts of source code partially to satisfy their craving for recognition as magnanimous geniuses. The community encourages this motive in all cases save one: leadership. Public representatives for the open source movement are expected to be meek and shun self-promotion. Those who stray are lashed with vicious emotional reprisals. All their work must be for the good of the whole, and none for themselves. In short, the community demands its foremost members adhere to ethics the average hacker finds intolerable. Small wonder most open source leaders ultimately disappoint the led.
Many arguments reduce to a handful of facts that can be viewed in more than one light, and emotion rather than intellect is the deciding element. The civilized compromise is an agreement to disagree, but when it comes to community speakers, there is no room for such courtesies. Since ideas rise upwards in the open source movement, allowing a leader to advocate one thing while the community believes another would be as damaging as allowing a diplomat to Russia to announce IMF debt forgiveness on his own initiative. Ambassadors may suggest, but they cannot decide. They must either represent the community, or be expelled.
Examples of this are abundant on the popular board Slashdot.org. Roving journalists frequently refer to Slashdot when plumbing the attitudes of the open source community; making it crucial they not receive a false impression during their stay. Slashdot real estate is therefore valuable and the power to select discussion topics is great. If a site operator abuses Slashdot to gratify an emotional itch, the response from readers is not only rational debate - though logic is always voiced - but also emotional counterattack. While calmer members discredit the logic of the offender, volatile participants demolish their motives with insults. It becomes psychologically expensive for the offender to continue.
Sengan Baring-Gould learned this during the Lewinsky scandal, when he exercised his operator power to post a denunciation of American missile strikes in Iraq. Perhaps seduced by a captive audience of thousands, he forbade community responses, effectively hijacking the open source mouthpiece for his own politics. Slashdotters responded with furious floods of mail to Baring-Gould and site owner Rob Malda, who scrambled to enable comments and posted two apologies. Criticisms swamped the board, ranging from windy dissections of Baring-Gould's logic to far rawer fare. With his argument tattered by logic and his power trip soiled by emotional assaults, Baring-Gould had little motive to fight on. The episode was not repeated.
But Baring-Gould's experience was a mere candle to the bonfire roasting of Jonathan Katz. Katz, a former editor with Wired, is surprisingly innocent of technical knowledge. Empowered with posting privileges, Katz writes opinions for a board patronized by thousands of open source developers, and consequently is a sort of de facto community representative when journalists come calling, regardless of whether his columns are actually read. His pieces endure much scrutiny from those who do not appreciate his company.
Early in his tenure, Katz was known for unabashed promotion of his own books. His columns effused over dubious notions such as 'sexbots' and at least once a month declared the dawn of a new era, as evinced by a movie he had seen. Rational criticisms did little to improve his quality. Slashdotters turned to flame. The rage came ripe and sloppy for weeks, even prompting a Katz column in which he wondered whether he was still wanted (he decided he was). Then, when it seemed inevitable he would lose his position, Katz had a moment of brilliance. In a daring piece, he defied popular media and declared the Columbine geeks had killed because they were driven to it, persecuted by merciless jocks. Instantly, the sewage of popular opinion sprouted roses. Katz had said something the community had needed to hear for a long time. Today, Katz confines himself largely to variations on the Columbine theme and book reviews. There remains little for which he can be flamed, save lack of innovation.
Open source advocates - and the hacker clan in general - fancy themselves as dispassionate creatures, able to analyze facts from a distance and judge impartially. This is a delusion. If emotion runs high anywhere, it is among geeks, and if any group is harnessing this volatility, it is the open source community. When reason's bullets are spent, only raw feeling remains to dispute actions that are wrong or damaging. Like the Salem Puritans many geeks profess to despise, the open source community manipulates emotion to enforce the curious strictures of its morality. It remains to them to decide whether this is a suitable tool for their advancement. Their success in quelling it or wielding it will reveal a great deal about their culture.
-konstant
I have a feeling some of the more extreme technophiles/conservatives are going to chastise us for being alarmed by this sort of accident. Generally, after a nuclear mishap, the pattern goes like this:
;)
1) BOOOM
2) a number of people are rushed to the hospital
3) liberals run around screaming "Look how awful nukes are!"
4) conservatives tilt their Laz-e-boys up a notch, puff on their pipes, and make devastating comments about "Luddites"
But look folks, nuclear technology really is a technology unlike most others. Only genetic modification has as much potential for literally wiping out the human race if somebody forgets to carry the two. We all know from experience that even experts make miscalculations, and that sometimes the results are hazardous. Generally, these are tragic but containable. They are what you might call "acceptable losses" on the path towards improving the lot of our species.
But I'll be damned if waking up each morning to a pitcher of radioactive milk is acceptable to me. Just a single reactor in Russia threw the world's food supply into havoc for months. And mistakes like Chernobyl have happened before and will happen again. Every once in a while somebody fucks up. It's just that, with nukes, the ramifications are so very large!
The reason that we don't see more accidents like this in Japan is not because nuclear energy is, on the whole, safe. It's because most people have extreme NIMBY reactions to nuclear facility proposals. People are scared of nuclear technology, and I think rationally so. The development of a clever scientific pet trick is not enough justification for its deployment. We do not have to do everything that we can do.
I'm sure that statement alone will be enough to moderate me down on slashdot
-konstant
between "visual" brains and "mathematical" brains. At least when it comes to programmers. Look at the fascination these images evoke in slashdotters... people who've been informed all their lives that they are "left-brained" and "technical" people, who would do best to leave art to the gifted.
My feeling has always been that visualization is an indispensible part of technology. How can you understand load balancing without having a feel for the way the net looks? How can you understand a select or a try instruction without picturing a cascade of logic? Is it possible to understand the TCP/IP protocol without one of those helpful flow charts?
Hey folks, maybe awe and love for technology is a lot more "right-brained" than it appears at first glance. Could just be that we are well rounded individuals, after all.
-konstant
Sure, they're the Feds, yes they have lots of money, but fundamentally how are they going to operate at a high level of competence without hiring people who know what they're doing, i.e. some of us? Think 8 days of the Condor Basically its a bunch of guys with ponytails sitting in a boileroom, with an extra guy to fill out requisition forms.
It's a scary thing, but there are probably people working for these agencies that most of us could respect, or even admire under other circumstances. As much as the violation of privacy bothers me, I'm far more disturbed by the perversion of good, powerful brains. How do they convince intelligent geeks that, after all, the long-term assurance of privacy and personal liberties isn't that important. Is it money? Do they snag them early in college? What?
-konstant
I install Windows all the time. Literally every week. It's part of my job. I don't feel it's difficult in the least. Unless my machine has hardware too recent to be included in the drivers library, I do not need to know a thing about the internals of my machines. If you're having trouble with Windows intallations, I recommend you install a more recent copy, which is more likely to include drivers for unusual hardware like yours.
-konstant
And yes, I'm aware that there are two wonderful UIs available for Linux. But the fact is, this guy didn't feel the love.
-konstant
If he finds Linux is more difficult to install than Windows, it's not because he's stupid. It's because Windows is superior.
Deal with that. Take a deep breath. If you have trouble doing that, smash some China, then take a deep breath.
Blaming the user for their difficulties setting up a program is like blaming a driver because when their car breaks down on I-5, they don't understand it's due to a dirty spark plug and a frazzled timing belt. "Well, Duh! Obviously your coolant line is leaking, MORON!" Well designed software, like well desinged cars, let you choose your level of abstraction. If you want to work on your OS at the command line level, that's wonderful. But if there are no other choices, then the software is inherently poor.
Anybody still out there who remembers the days when they admired Microsoft for bringing software to the masses? I think I do... dimly. And making the complex simple is and admirable thing. One of the most admirable things, in my mind.
Don't flame this poor man. Fix what sucks about Linux. If there are no things that suck about Linux, then we might as well go home because there is no longer any room for improvement. But we all know that, along with the many wonderful things about a free and community-defined OS, there are also some pitfalls. Wouldn't it be great to impress the world with our response to these concerns?
-konstant
I have a friend who is an internet entrepreneur. He works from home producing the back end of a bodybuilding supplement company. (shameless plug: www.massquantities.com>)
:-)
I was talking to him the other day about his work habits. Generally, he crawls out of bed early in the morning in his underwear, teleconferences with some people on the east coast, then maybe shaves, maybe showers, and most definitely sits down to a day of work. His most amusing comment was, "Thank god I don't have videoconferencing"
Personally I agree. I'd love to work at home, but most of the benefits come from being a slob in privacy. I personally work better that way. Videoconferencing has a nasty way of spoiling things.
'Course, if its only from the neck up, I guess he could throw on a tie and still sit around in his underwear...
-konstant
They're spectators. IOW, they're subscribed because they want news about Fetchmail, or because they're enamoured with ESR. They aren't coding.
Look at the coding curve. It's logarithmic, and approaching a constant of about 17,000. That means that the additional participants just aren't producing proportionate changes in the open source project.
ESR has graphed how the popularity of his fetchmail project has grown over time, which could very reasonably be linear for such a specialized application. He has not graphed how an open source effort grows. A more suitable graph would indicate number of contributors rather than constituents of the mailing lists.
-konstant
Monsanto is the last company I'd want producing plastic, oil, or any other product crucial to the US economy. Greenpeace crazies and eco terrorists are certainly right about one thing - dealing with Monsanto is dangerous for your long-term independence. Their clever mechanism for ensuring repeat buyers is to build infertility into the plants they sell. Farmers buy them because they are indeed very good crops for certain purposes, namely for surviving the popular but toxic herbicide RoundUp, which Monsanto also sells. Monsanto works vigorously to bankrupt competing seed sellers, so that only their perishable brand is available, thus locking farmers into their system for life. Prior to the development of these terminator genes, Monsanto would actually maraud around the countryside burning "illicitly stocked" seed.
k /upd/umar99/monsan/ecol1.htm#anc hor52768
http://www.mat.auckland.ac.nz/~king/Preprints/boo
A recent company tactic as been to push this "system" as a solution for hunger in third-world countries. Of course, what it would really entail would be a complete regional ownership by Monsanto of the food supply.
http://www.greenpeac e.org/~geneng/highlights/food/98_10_15.htm
Monsanto is also renowned for suing magazines and television stations when they are about to produce an article critical of the company. Most news providers can't fight them, so they buckle and the issues are never aired.
http://www.inmotionmagazine.com/fox.html
And much like certain proprietary software companies, Monsanto patents its creations. We all are familiar with the stupidity of patenting ideas, and genetic engineering, especially of plants, is quite simply that. One plant can turn into two plants with only a negligable investment of soil, water, and sun. This means they are not a zero-sum game, and hence the arguments against patenting software apply to them.
Monsanto is one of the least palatable companies out there. They are easily the Microsoft of genetic science. I think I'd rather stick to the Sheiks for my gallon of gas and pound of shrink-wrap, thank you very much.
-konstant
Many people are commenting that "clean" or "standards-compliant" HTML is already portable across sundry platforms, and therefore this product is only a crutch for sloppy content providers. This is absolutely not true! Having made many webpages myself, and two or three that actually see a lot of use, I know from experience that standard HTML is one of the least standardized lingos in computing.
The reason is quite simple: people don't upgrade their browsers. Look at www.gnu.org for pete's sake! That page is specifically designed to be Lynx 2.0 compatible because use of "novelty tags" like (included in the HTML 3.2 spec) will break those clients. As a result, the page is fairly ugly.
Choose an involved combination of "standard" tags and it's a fairly safe bet that Netscape 3.0 will display it differently than Opera, which will display it differently than IE4, which will display it differently than Netscape 4.5, etc, etc.
The human is the bottleneck. People don't see a powerful incentive to upgrade their browsers, so they don't. Hence webdesigners like Rob Malda spend weeks of headache time on making their pages BassAckwards 2.7 compliant.
This transcoder, if it works, will really be a boon.
-konstant
It'll happen, and probably in our lifetimes, although maybe not Hilton, and you might not be able to afford it. Well, you will, Rob. There are far too many luxury activities that can only be hosted in zero G. Gorgeous architechture that defies earthly phsyics. Sunsets that burn themselves into your memory. Sexual acrobatics that turn even a septuagenarian into a spry young chicken...
And the sheer novelty of flying through the air (in certain non-rotating domes, perhaps) is in my mind the greatest of all.
There is a market for this. It's only a matter of time until the space program is sufficiently privatized and the VC are sufficiently ravenous.
-konstant
Convenience is the great enemy of privacy. Corporations like IBM, Intel, Microsoft, and Sun will always be able to justify (or perhaps legitimately believe) that the convenience of ID stamping or data broadcasting for their latest nifty upgrade-inducing "feature" outweighs the small decrease in consumer privacy. And because most of us are lazy - yes, even you noble Slashdotter - we will ultimately accept these small intrusions in the name of preserving our free time and sanity. Can you imagine living life in American without a SSN? It is legal I believe, and it would indeed greatly inhance your personal privacy, but it is incredibly inconvenient. What about eschewing license plates, and therefore cars? Possible. Not convenient. The process will continue as long as we are blinded by our love of "progress", as defined by the availability of neat new gadgets everywhere we go. Real progress is social change than enhances lives, not merely technology that makes life more ornate. Fat chance of changing our culture, though.
-konstant
Senator McCain is running for president of the United States. He has little to distinguish himself from Bush apart from his harsh stance on campaign finance. The man can't speak spanish, so this will be his gimmick. "Liberate the internet from the oppressive grip of the Feds!" etc.
/. a few weeks ago. It also died. However, McCain will be able to use it to prod his competitors regardless of how quickly it dies, and he knows that.
I predict several of the major Republican contenders will echo this in the next few weeks. Notably Forbes, who has next to no standing, but who perseveres due to his rich boy's innocence of reality. This is just the sort of thing he adores. Gore will make noises about something similar, but a ban on internet taxes he will not suffer to endure.
This bill will die in committee. This was the same committee that saw and killed the "teachers and net taxes" bill that was featured on
-konstant
And I'm sure that they will also have flying cars and household appliances that address you by your first name.
"I would like a pizza"
"I'm sorry. I can't do that Dave"
The "evidence" that Helsinki is wired to the lower lip appears to be internet kiosks and Mr. Linturi's Super Duper Futuro Home. Yes, I'm cynical, but these are things we already have in abundance here in America: broadband booths at airports and rich people with expensive and largely useless toys installed in their bathrooms.
Well deployed technology doesn't appear with a bang and a cloud of pyrotechnic fog. It slips seamlessly into your life. I don't think I can remember the first time I used a calling card at a telephone booth rather than 25 cents change. It just seemed to be there when I needed it. And that is the definition of a successful deployment.
Look, everybody here likes cool tech news. We've been hearing about the world of the future for so long now that "in the year 2000" is a ridiculous cliche. I for one am pretty tired of it.
-konstant
There'll be a lot of people in this thread who sympathize with the goals of the study and state that online learning can't compete with the simple human experience of collaring a classmate after the lecture and asking "WTF was that about?" Particularly a pretty, blonde classmate.
Hey, I confess that socializing was the primary reason I attended classes in college. Learning certainly wasn't a large attribute of CS 333.
But look, that's precisely the problem with college today. It's become an incubator for all the yuppie larva, a passport to the middle class. It has next to nothing to do with actually learning any longer. There was very little I learned at UIUC that I hadn't known previously or learned in my own time. I was so disgusted with the process (which put my family $50 in the hole) that I quit after three years. But that degree still played a crucial role in obtaining my job. Even though I've barely used it.
That's what we need to abolish. College needs to be about learning again, not certifying yourself as part of the High Income Club. If there are no people to hang out with, no babes to flirt with, no professors to fight with, then there's only one ting remaining: the knowledge.
I'm sure people said the same thing once about learning literature or engineering from books. Yet those are things I do all the time.
Let's put higher education back in the hands of people who deserve it: the people who love the knowledge and have a use for it. Not ungrateful shits like myself who only want a cushy job. Not to whale on myself or anything...
-konstant
I'm no free-software Sandanista, but I sometimes sympathize with Richard Stallman and the GNU project. This is one of those times. Listen to this man. He's knowledgable, he's intelligent, and he influences hundreds or perhaps thousands of people directly and indirectly with his advice. And this is the message he has received about freedom in software:
"My advice is: Don't let ideology get in the way of business. Open source makes sense when it makes business sense, otherwise not."
I don't want to start a flame war. This is offtopic, and it should probably be moderated down. There are more interesting things to discuss in the realm of databases. Still, this is the message that people like Eric Raymond (bless him for his work) are inadvertantly spreading. Open source? User's rights? Freedom? Yes, those are all excellent means to secure a profit! But it's not as if they're important in their own right.
I understand the message of ESR to be, "Freedom is wonderful - and you can make a buck."
That doesn't appear to be what this man heard.
-konstant
Didn't mean to imply Eyes Wide Shut is fit for children! Heh heh... parent's, don't take my movie advice as any more accurate than the MPAA critics. :)
But you get my drift, I hope.
-konstant