Yeh.. when I was a little kid, and that was way some time ago, I remember the Church installed transmit loops in a few of the pews and passed little receivers so the deaf could listen into the preacher's mike directly. The little receivers had believe it or not, little vacuum tubes, I think they were 1U5 and 3V4, if I remember correctly. They ran on 2 flashlight batteries and one 67.5 volt battery.
I remember marveling at the high technology, as the church had its very own "radio station", albeit it only worked in four pews.
It was an interesting example of the principles of the old Maxwell stuff we were doing in science classes - the old two-coil stuff where the teacher was demonstrating the interaction of current, magnetic fields, and why a transformer works.
I hope the patent office didn't issue a patent on this. Geez, imagine the flood of lawsuits if the operation of transformers became a litigatable item.
I really liked the DEC PDP instruction set. Really elegant for the guy doing assembler in his head. I went nuts over the 8080 when it first came out, shortly thereafter there was a slew of other chips out there - 8085, Z80, 6502, 6800 and derivatives. Each had their own advantages, but nothing really out of the ordinary until the Motorola 68000 came out, which became my processor of choice for the bigger embedded stuff... and a helluva lot of love for the 68000 for me came from the fact that Motorola's addressing schemes were damn near identical to that old PDP I knew and loved. I know about the LSI-11, but somehow I never got around to just designing stuff around the chip.
Most of the stuff I was building at the time, I would decide whether or not I wanted to go 8085, 65C02, or 68000 depending on how much processor power, electrical power, and cost tradeoffs, and go from there. (Yeh, I knew about the RCA 1802, and absolutely hated to code assembler for it.)
Looking back on it, I think the main reason I went Motorola for all my 32-bit stuff is I got ahold of one of the chip kits pretty soon after it came out, and learned enough to make functional devices with it. Then I was soundly in the rut with insufficient motivation to jump out. Intel made some neat stuff, but I considered the Motorola implementations much cleaner from a hardware point of view, despite the fact PC's were running Intel processors.
Today, my main choices are the ATMEL AVR/ATMEGA series , and the Motorola 320X0's. Incidentally, I think ATMEL has done a helluva job supporting us little guys in the trenches with all sorts of nifty tools on their website, development kits, and making sure places which deal a lot with us little guys, like Digi-Key , have a wide selection of product for us.
I do get concerned at Motorola though, as they seem to keep changing their product. To me, implementing a product in a design is a lot like my selection of building materials... if I do not have confidence that ten years from now, I will be able to obtain compatible materials, I go back to my design and change it to use something more generic. Yes, the 68000 is old hat - but it is exactly what I needed to do a job at hand. Example: I like to design with standard brick. I am quite leery of custom roofing material or exotic plumbing fixtures. Just because something is old does not mean you have to abandon making it. ( 68000 in the 64-pin plastic DIP package for PTH mounting ). To me, that makes just about as much sense as no longer making 100 watt incandescent light bulbs in an Edison base.
If any Motorola rep is out there reading this, please cut this out and hand it to management. You guys can really make us little guys in the trenches look bad when no sooner than we get our customer all geared up for production and the rug gets pulled on us. They blame me for it. ( Rightfully so, cause people like me should know who it is out there who won't stay on the ship long enough to complete the voyage. ) If you percieve that I am both disappointed and angry about discontinuation of this product, you are right.
The last point you bring up about the DRM is the one that concerns me the most.
What concerns me most is concepts like protecting copyrights/patents of protocols or formats so that any work created using these protocols is rendered inaccessible if the holder of the copyright of the file format used deems so. The part I fume over a lot is not necessarily that one has the rights to enforce protection of something like a protocol, but that businessmen seem to completely lack the foresight into knowing not to stick their heads into nooses that others control.
For as long as I have been in this business, I have insisted on creating any content I produce in open formats, so that it can be imported into any subsequent editors for viewing/manipulation. It bugs the shit out of me when some manager type wants the whole shebang in "word format", as now I know, not only will this whole thing most likely be readable one one kind of system, its now very likely to have compatibility issues over versioning of the OS, file manipulator, and any "enforced obsolence" the vendor may use his authority to require. I can still read files today that I originally coded for my IMSAI and Commodore-64. It was all ASCII. If I want to go back to that old program I coded for my Commodore-64 to see the equations for how I modeled my varactors for my phase-locked-loops, I am quite free to do so ( they had quite complicated equations to do it right... including calculus derivatives. ).
If I had locked myself into a proprietary format, I would have been in the same boat as one of my previous employers who had us for years putting drawings into a proprietary-type filebase, only later to have that old filebase drift into unsupported oblivion. I learned a lot from that.
The whole affair, in my mind, was millions of dollars worth of wasted effort - when one considers not only the salary of all those people we had at the drafting tables entering the data into the system, but on top of that, the loss of the benefit we were supposed to have by doing all this work. It sure taught me that having a file format open and supported by many vendors is critical to long-term usability of anything. I find a sue-happy company out there launching lawsuits against anyone "infringing" on their little proprietary protocols, and I will show you a company I won't touch with a ten foot pole. I haven't the foggiest idea why some businessmen think they can involve themselves with such a company and not get burned.
I had a PDP11/20 at the University to play with. Neat machine. Its just that it was built with really old parts - and a helluva lot of them.
The 8080 seemed the first big step to putting boards full of logic right into the microcomputer chip itself, yielding a much simpler mechanical design. The 8080 was a milestone for me. I haven't seen anything like it as far as simplifying my hardware designs until MicroChip and Atmel came up with those dandy little PIC and AVR chips. AVR has become my new favorite.
I am afraid that for me the old PDP will rest in peace. It was a good machine for its day. Probably the best. But, like the old vacuum-tube flip flop, it's seen its day. ( I won't go into vacuum tube audio... those old tubes had some peculiar logarithmic curves as they approached cutoff and saturation that "color" audio in such a way that I have yet to see properly matched by the solid state systems. In the pure linear mode, both can very closely mimic each other, but feed them the dynamics of music, and I can tell em apart. I know its something to do with intermodulation around the peaks, but I'll be dammed if I can find out exactly what it is thats doing it. )
Oh yes, if you wanna see a picture of an IMSAI, its the one Matthew Broderick used in the movie "War Games". A big blue box, nice snazzy black plexiglas front panel, with rows of switches for entering data and address into the memory manually.
Remember, when this machine shipped, it was TOTALLY without software of any kind in it. You entered your program into memory, manually, byte by byte, then jumped to wherever you wanted to start execution, and let fly.
One of the first peripherals one bought with such a machine was an EPROM programmer card and a TTY terminal. And one usually coined their own OS - ( which was usually referred to as a 'monitor' program.) On mine, I had the latest EPROM programmer which used 1702 Eproms, which held an unheard-of-in-its-day 256 Bytes per chip! That's right, 2,048 BITS of data per IC. I remember the joy I had when I finally had the program running that let me program the EPROM which would allow me to not only enter my data from a keyboard instead of the front panel switches, but also burn EPROMS so I would not have to enter the program manually every time I crashed or powered up. Such programs were called "boot" programs. Mine fit in two of these eproms. A whole 512 bytes, hand coded, to not only load memory from my keyboard, but also display it on one of my four videoram cards, or burn a block of 256 bytes into EPROM.
These 'videoram' cards were popular back then as commercial video terminals were still in the thousand dollar range, but a videoram card could drive a standard black&white TV monitor with 16 lines of 64 characters of plain ASCII text. Using a videoram card, one could at least get rudimentary text images on a phosphor screen for around $100 or so, compared to the thousands of dollars a commercial CRT terminal costed. Color was damn near unheard of. Each videoram would consume 1K of address space. You got 64K address space on those old 8080 chips, and 256 locations of I/O space. I had a total of 48K RAM area ( All 2102 type 1K x 1 Static Ram ), 12K of EPROM space which held my monitor and assorted programs to read/write cassette tapes, and 4K of videoram space.
I am on memory lane here... remember making your cassette drives out of anything you could find laying around? As long as you could find an operable tape transport around, you could make your own data storage device. First step, get rid of all the tape recorder electronics. You were'nt in Analog anymore. You drive the head directly from a manchester encoded digital signal, whose polarity changes occur in sync with your digital signal stream, as that particular protocol had no DC offset, as you can't record DC. Playing back, you would only pay attention to the timing of the flux changes coming back and use a monostable multivibrator and exclusive-or gates to reconstruct the serial stream of ones-and-zeroes.
Forget trying to buy off-the-shelf solutions. There weren't any.
God, tinkering was fun in those days. It was all on how much you knew, not how much was in your wallet.
That was my "first one". I kept looking at the Altair ( which the IMSAI was kinda a "clone" of ) but was quite unhappy with its design - especially around the power supply and mechanical details. The IMSAI, in my mind, had covered those bases. It had something like a 30 AMP 8-volt power supply which was regulated down to 5 volts on each S-100 card.. I think it would house something like 21 cards on the backplane. The console interface was an array of switches for its 16-bit address and 8-bit data busses, and corresponding rows of LED's to indicate which address and data were currently being executed. During "operation", the LED's were just a blur, but at any time you could drop down and single step the processor from a switch on the front panel.
I loved this one as I made many of the cards for it... cards which would do really weird things like interface to gas turbines, as I had some projects back then which involved large heavy machinery, and it occured to me that I could program one of these machines to act like a gas turbine, and allow me to check out all the logic of a Gas Turbine Controller without having to power up an actual gas turbine, that is I could read the fuel injector signals, generate a corresponding RPM signal, mimic fuel failure signals, vibration signals, etc. I remember how weird it seemed sitting in the control room of the turbine control room, with the entire room aglow with all sorts of displays indicating the turbine running full power, yet the turbine just down the hall was dead quiet as it was undergoing replacement of its blades.
It was my first taste of having my own programmable device that I understood intimately... and I still have it, albeit I have not used it in years... as I use several old ISA PC's to do this now... ( I like my old Borland 3 C++ compiler for DOS way too much.. it does exactly what I want it to do, and is much quicker for me to get something done than coding in 8080 assembler. And hell, I don't want GUI or its assorted bloatware just to do quickie process simulations. )
Uh huh, not only does the money stay in Brazil to be respent in its local economies, at the same time, the local IT labor force is learning how to create and run their own farm, not just be a captive sharecropper on Bill's Farm.
And about the cost... as popularity goes up, it gets more common, and like all common things, the price plummets downward like any commodity item. Its only more expensive now because its a specialty skill. There is nothing inherently different in the skillset required for a Linux or Windows box.
Its your classic Chicken and Egg, and I don't blame ol Gates for trying to keep as few eggs as hatching as possible, cause once those eggs hatch, and the resulting hens go online, its gonna be hard as hell to control of the egg market.
Yup, and poor people shop at WalMart. See where that got ol Sam Walton?
Actually, I don't blame Microsoft for their lobbying efforts to try to stop governments from adopting open software. Microsoft, unlike RIAA, is not so dumb as to see where people can channel around them, to get their needs met without involving Microsoft in any way. The RIAA waited until the cat was completely out of the bag and running down the street before they noticed and began to give chase. I doubt they will ever get the cat back in the bag.
Microsoft is holding a fragile bag based mostly on faith. As soon as foreign governments stray from doing things in a method that is controlled from Richmond, more software starts getting developed, and it gets proven more and more by example that open source works in the real world, Microsoft will have increasingly hard times trying to convince businessmen to pay for something they get for free, much like RIAA is having increasingly hard times trying to convince people to pay for DRM-ridden products once people know what alternatives exist.
But worse yet is the "embrace and extend" paradigm, where often Microsoft products are made deliberately incompatible with what was agreed upon as a "standard" by use of proprietary extensions. For instance, I can not access my school grades on my linux box, as the College uses a Microsoft server - and their IIS talks to IE through proprietary extensions. If Linux begins increasing market share on the client side, Microsoft may have some very intense explaining to do to businessmen who wonder why people can not use their websites after the businessmen have paid good money for a Microsoft system. They may highly resent paying top dollar for for a system that only some people can see, whereas the free system their competitor is using can be seen by all.
I get the idea this whole empire can snowball quite rapidly, and the company has to do all they can do to hold onto control as long as possible. I get the idea once this cat gets out of the bag, good luck getting him back in. I think they will have as much luck trying to maintain their revenue stream as the RIAA would have getting people to pay for a song sans DMCA and the pressures of copyright law.
Hehe.. you got me on this one.. I guess technically the flight is no problem to anybody - its the landing. If you don't know what you are doing, you are apt to land in the most unusual place and way.
And as for whether the 911 suicide 'pilots' are in heaven or hell.. I have no idea of knowing. The Bible warned me not to eat of the tree of knowledge of good and evil. I have seen many men cause so much grief because they thought they knew about good and evil. To me, this "religion" thing is mostly an artifact of man, used as a two-pronged psychological tool used to coerce the obedience of other people, as well as to allowing one to avoid having to take personal responsibility for their actions ( as if they were only following Orders from God ).
If I think I have to get involved in this kinda stuff, messing in the affairs of others because somebody tells me to, in the name of God, then am I to believe the "hand of God is short"? I mean if an infinite God creates heaven and earth and everything in it, why does he need me to go pester someone? Am I not supposed to be intelligent enough to know some little runt somewhere is just feeding me a line to put me up to no good?
God warned me about all the false prophets. If God has anything that he wants me to know, He has the power to see to it I find out. I flat do not trust Man.
I see a lot of grief - and I did not see any good come out of the whole sordid affair. But then, I am not privy to all the data, so my judgment, based on admittedly incomplete data, is probably moot.
So it looks as if we could get rid of the resistance, we could have essentially "perpetual" computing, much like we have essentially "perpetual" current flow in a superconducting ring... except this time with switches directing the electron flow amongst many parallel channels.
I think you are onto the superconducting computer.
I read the main article and was kinda confused about the use of "resonators" to store energy with much less loss. I design a lot of switching power supplies, and I use those techniques a lot to boost the efficiency, as well as reduce stress, on my power supply components. By doing resonant designs, I can use stray capacitances to my advantage, storing their energy in inductors during switching intervals, then re-introduce the stored energy back into the circuit at the proper time to make some really cool power converters.. ( pun intended ).
But here's the problem.. my frequencies are determined by the laws of physics and are either sinusoidal or sinusoidal derivatives. Data is not. I would find it hard to store energy is some sort of inductor, as the energy will bounce back at me in a given time... and if I am not prepared to route the energy in a constructive way when it comes back at me, its wasted, only thing it does then is expend its energy heating up and stressing my switch. I have looked at enough core-dump to know data is not periodic.
It doesn't look like an easy thing to do to try to recover energy from the edges of many switching lines that are all switching at asynchronous times. I would have to know a lot more about this before I could really generate a cogent comment.
Airline pilots are the sole ones on the given list that I think justifiably earn the compensation given.
There is a helluva lot of training and responsibility to running the aircraft, to be there, and do whatever has to be done in the event of ANY malfunction, no matter what. Sure, I can see its all automated. I'll betcha they could take a whole planeload of passengers from one airport to another by remote control without a pilot at all in the plane.
Now, try it if the plane has major malfunctions midflight.. say part of the fuselage gets caught up in the slipstream, the hydraulics jam, some kook gets onboard and causes sabotage. Now, without a knowledgeable individual onboard who knows how to handle any emergency, what's the chance of getting back to earth alive?
On top of that, I consider these guys face a major health problem, by the nature of their job which requires MUCH sitting. Sitting through training. Sitting in the cockpit. All this sitting... guess what happens to the old cardiovascular system? The blood will start pooling in the legs. The heart is not a suction pump. It won't pull the blood up. You HAVE to walk around in order to get the blood back up, by way of contractions of the calf and thigh muscles, to squeeze the blood back up. The eventual end to this is a condition like phlebitis, where blood pools in the legs, forms clots, which eventually break loose, shooting up the leg venuous system, up to the heart, over to the lung, where they become trapped forming a pulmonary embolism. Not a fun thing.
I am not an airline pilot, nor are any of my family or friends... but I did consider it as a possible career option and when I realized I would have to spend a large portion of my live confined to a cubbyhole that would make a restroom stall large by comparison, I reconsidered. I feel these guys earn their pay, not only for their skills, but as compensation for the wear and tear it puts on them.
I doubt the ink will leach much... there's not much of it, and the carrier is pretty volatile and evaporates to the air pretty quickly ( i.e. the ink 'dries' ).
But what I am a bit more concerned over is the solvents that make the adhesive sticky. If those evaporate, the adhesive is no longer an adhesive.. you know, like old adhesive tape that isn't sticky anymore. My concern is that the organic compounds in the adhesive react with the organic compounds in the CD-R, resulting in deterioration of its optical qualities - like even some rather innocent looking cleaners can cloud some plastics.
For this reason, I have been rather reticent to apply labels onto CD-R's, as I see the mass produced CD's appear to have their labels silkscreened on, their solvents long since dissipated by the time I see it.
I have it too. There is so much neat stuff out there I want to buy, but am afraid to touch it because I don't understand how it works, and how to fix it if it doesn't work, and I really hate to make a big investment only to find now I must pay through the nose to "protect my investment". If I don't watch myself carefully these days, I will stumble right into their trap. And be paying for it the rest of my life.
My current television is 25 years old. I want one of those new big-screen plasmas so bad I can taste it, but I know better. No sooner than I plunk down the big bux, I will find myself with a very expensive white elephant on my hands, inoperable with tomorrow's technology, and even ways to make it operable will be deemed as illegal, with those willing to help me overcome the technical hurdles liable for jail time. Hell, that neat monitor I buy today for a princely sum might bring all the excitement of a proprietary format medical monitor at my next garage sale. Scrap metal would probably sell for more.
Basically, I just plan to hold back any spending until I see what they are going to standardize on. It doesn't look like that will be anytime soon. Gee, my old 25 year old TV is still working great.
It should last another ten years if thats what it takes.
I am sure others out there are going to do the same thing you did.. spend big bucks to get the good stuff, only to have perfectly good hardware rendered obsolete by nothing more than the pen of legislators which we elected to office.
A "joe-job' is what its called when a spammer encodes someone's ( the 'joe' ) address who the spammer would like to cause immense harm to in the 'reply-to' field of his spam message.
Millions of spam go out, and the named joe gets hit with all the ire and bounced-mail replies. His ISP usually becomes quite upset with him as well, and he's left trying to explain to everyone that he doesn't even know what the hell is going on.
Its a really neat way of framing somebody on the internet - making it appear to all the outside world that 'joe' did it, when in reality joe was completely uninvolved.
You have a very good point there about Google being relatively unknown 4 years ago.
The first engine I used extensively was Yahoo. Eventually, as their pages filled up with graphics and bloat, they displayed very little information per page load, and each page load was getting excruciatingly slow.
Dogpile to the rescue. I became an avid Dogpile fan.
Then Google came along. I liked Dogpile. But Google was so thorough, their sorting algorithm worked to my liking, and their link and paidspace presentations were so clean. Designed from the get-go for fast pageloads. A very clean system.
Now, it appears to me Yahoo is going the way of AOL, trying to squeeze the last bit of profit out of captive audiences. I had to leave SBC because Yahoo saw their captive ISP subscribers ahd sweet-talked PacBell into a business partnership where we ISP subscribers would receive a mandate to load proprietary Yahoo software on our end, software that would only load on other Proprietary operating systems. They want to collect all sorts of info on us by having everything we do subject to all sorts of logins and registrations.
Until Congress steps up to the plate and holds businesses responsible for info leaks, irregardless of what was 'agreed' to in the EULA, I do not want to be pasting my private info onto the net. I do not want my private info on the web. If I have a pile of rocks in my yard, and some neighbor kid gets hurt, I am responsible. If an oil company pipe ruptures, making a mess, they are responsible. If they can't pass law holding those who used the info I give them responsibly, then I will resist like all getout giving them accurate info ( although I will quite readily give them something completely wrong to put in the box.).
I know Microsoft has this passport thing that they seem to require to do anything. That passport thing is the reason I dropped my Hotmail addy.
This is the same problem I see with the banks. When the FDIC steps in to guarantee depositors security of their savings, no-one seems to be much interested in the internal workings or security of the bank. With the law granting indemnity for identity thefts from leaking servers, no-one seems much concerned with security. Its given great lip service for PR purposes, but I haven't seen this lip service reflected in code and algoritms. Its just putting all sorts of military-style locks and steel plating on the front door, while leaving all the windows wide open. So far, from all I've seen, its all for show.
Maybe the deterioration of data is a good thing? The good stuff will be retained, and the stuff no-one took the care to see to its preservation fades away to oblivion.
I take it that without death, life would suffocate, as there soon would be no room for new life. Hence no room for improvements.
I would think that at least 99% of the data mentioned will have no use in as little as one year.
I have often contemplated a world where nothing died. Anything once created kept going. You yell, and the echoes continue forever without dampening themselves into oblivion. Can you imagine the cacophony which would result in just a few minutes? If plants never died, would there be any room left on earth for a seedling?
I have come to the belief that death is just another word for reboot.
As a system, we experience all sorts of random events, a very few notable, most best forgotten. The information destruction ( death ) is just the way to purge the buffers of noise so that things worth the space can be loaded into it.
In the case of information, I think we are bumping onto a very elastic "limit" on how much information we can keep track of. This limit will increase as the number of individuals who take an interest in keeping this information increase.
The exact DNA of a tree living several centuries ago may be lost forever, but its progeny continue if they were fit for survival.
We may lose a lot of data through deterioration, but I think we will always have a way to keep the important stuff. I have no doubt that one day we will understand DNA where we too can encode information on a molecular lattice, and have it copy or execute itself whenever needed.
Ok.. I'll finish this one with a little troll.. I love Science classes. I hated studying English Literature. You don't know how much as a kid I would have appreciated it if all the works of Dickens and Chaucer went to rot before they copied all that stuff and made us study it.
Yup.. when you know what you are doing, its really painful ( psychologically ) to do all the work knowing all along the inevitable outcome - but I do understand... it generates a good income.
I've done construction work too. I know about concrete foundations. It would pain me greatly to be required to build a house, on untreated wood foundation, directly on termite laden ground. I know the home's outcome before I even drive the first nail. But if everyone else was doing it, and I had some moneyhead insisting I do it that way too, my knowledge of how to build something that would last centuries is moot. He has the money, I need the money, I have the knowledge, but he just wants my efforts.
A fool and his money are soon parted. Just take his money and do what he says.
You know, with all this DRM, licensing enforcement, and required authentications floating around the proprietary technologies area, its gonna be interesting to see how this affects data recovery in the event of something like a hard drive crash. Everything will be encrypted. Keys and all gone. Kinda similar to locking yourself out of your own safe - but its made of something so secure that its impossible to open sans key. One prankster foul up the lock and the whole business which depends on the data in that safe shuts down.
WMA.. another term denoting that the vendor wants to control my usage of the product after the sale.
Say, the tables were turned. I kept trying to push a new form of electronic money payment onto the business. With my new payment model, I can still control how he's allowed to use the cash I paid him - after the transaction! I could restrict him on how and where the money could be spent. If I didn't want him to buy anything from China, I could technologically enforce that and any transaction he tried to engage in using the money I paid him would then fail.
Would any business accept my "electronic payment" as money?
Then why do they expect me to accept this DRM ware?
People sure get the wrong idea of "free" software.
Software is just a language that computers use to "think" in. Just as humans "think" in their native language. For me, the use of the English language is public domain... its given to me to use free. I do not have to pay everyone for every word I type. But if you think that means you work for free, try hiring a lawyer to put those words in the correct sequence to produce a desired result!
The main advantage I have using English, rather than some ephemeral proprietary language, is the permanance of the language. I can read things written centuries ago. I thoroughly expect anything written today to be readable centuries from now. The language is not under control of anybody who can willy-nilly revoke the license for its use, thereby rendering all my work I have done using it moot, or to hold me hostage to force me to "upgrade" to whatever he wants, whether I want it or not.
One thing I have to keep in mind though: knowlegeable individuals like those here feel comfortable next to the machine and know how things are supposed to work. There are a lot of people out there who don't. For us, computing is a science - we know what we want the machine to do and we arrange the laws of physics to make any possible outcome we desire inevitable. But for many people, they seem to run on faith that someone out there is going to support them, and they feel a handful of cash will get them anything they want.
We cling to knowledge, as it gives us the comfort of knowing in advance what the outcome will be before we even begin the effort to do something. Those who deal with money motivators cling to their fiduciary controls, hoping that the pipers will keep piping to the tune of cash flow, which they control. And they want lots of cheap pipers so they play them off against each other.
I find generally its people who are personally responsible seem to prefer open source, as they see in the long term - once the infrastructure to do something is in place ( such as running a business ), it will continue to run indefinitely. People who are in a command chain, using other people's money, making profit for other people, seem to prefer everything proprietary, cause they actually make a lot of personal money from relentless re-doing of everything. Just the time they get it working, its "unsupported" or some other term for obsolete.
Its like keeping plumbers on hire when they figure out that by using plumbing fixtures that will corrode out in a couple of years, and proprietary pipes that can't be acquired in 5 years or so, they can coerce lifetime employment from any businessman they can convince to do a "lock-in" to their way of thinking. The type of businessman most apt to swing to that way of thinking is the one who loves the idea of waving money in front of the plumber for "support", and has no idea that properly installed copper plumbing will last the life of the building, and more can be acquired anytime you want it at darned near any hardware store.
Of course anyone can see what the outcome is going to be... one business is going to spend a helluva lot of time in the future going through their enterprise redoing the plumbing over and over again. The other business may have spent a bit of time to understand how their plumbing works, but from then on, the pipes sit quietly in the wall, doing their thing, while the business does what it does to earn its keep.
When you run your own place, the money you pay the plumbers is no longer yours. When you are running the place for other's profits, it makes pretty good sense to divert as much of that to your pockets as you can - so might as well use your pull to lock-in an ephemeral solution to insure future income.
The longterm money saved never was yours anyway. Its just profits the investors will never see.
"Intellectual
Property" and litigation as a source of income will end up passing as a fad.
I sure hope you are right.
Right now, I am quite disenchanted.
You see, I am taking some law classes in intellectual property, copyright, and trademark so I can see where I stand as far as trying to develop new product and bring it to market. In the next building, the Data Structures class is meeting. My law class had a full house of 50 students, and we were turning students back at the door for lack of space to put them. I walked over to the data structures class to greet my old professor ( whom I highly admire and respect for his insights ) and noted six students.
The data structures class is a core class through which all computer science students must pass. Six students. Same as when I took the class. This class is only offered once a year. Six students. And here I am in a class of fifty students being taught how to bicker over what these six students will produce.
I can't help but fume. To me, something's gone horribly wrong.
They use lenses in such a manner that the eye sees a virtual image at an apparent distance of six feet away or so. Its not like you are looking directly at the imaging screen up close.
Here's some I was looking at. Unfortunately, these things are expensive, and the sponsor I was going to research the interfaces for backed out, so I am left with an interest, a bit of driver software, but not sufficient money to pursue the research anyway on my own.
I agree with your fear the box's testimony would be regarded by the court as being highly credible. After all, it is a machine, and runs according to the laws of physics. Which means some sort of recording machinery you can't tamper with is going to be about as impartial as you can get. Error-free? Nah. Anything made by Man is subject to error. But my take is that given consideration of any sources of error the machine could have been subject to, the machine's testimony is very credible.
Consider.. you are driving home from work. Alone. A car full of people pull out in front of you to make a left turn. You see theres plenty of time for them to get in their lane, and don't take any action. Then the other car's driver suddenly changes their mind and swirls around making a right instead of a left, leaving you with a ton of metal heading right up their arse at 40 mph. The inevitable happens. Of course, the people in the car you hit now collaborate and it comes out in the courtroom you were doing at least 60. And all five people in the other car are saying so. Wouldn't you just love your box to testify in your behalf you were driving responsibly, and what happened was unavoidable for you, given the circumstances?
Several problems continue to plague Slashdot, so consider this a status report, and a request to not continue reporting problems
we're working on;)... "
I went ahead and linked his journal . Now, anyone who sees this can know as much as the rest of us of what our leader has to say of the situation.
There are many pieces of evidence left behind after an event.
Tire marks. The amount of energy required to cause so much metal deformation. Distances airborne. Inertial effects. Witnesses. And I am sure there are many I did not think of.
The black box evidence is just one of many. It will either confirm the other evidence, in which case you have some explaining to do, or it may exonerate you. ( i.e. you WERE driving a safe legal speed and the other party did in fact do a real lulu in front of you. ).
My own take - its a non-issue. Every observable event will leave evidence. This is just one more of many trails left after an automotive accident event. You can really prejudice yourself by trying to tamper with the evidence.
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I remember marveling at the high technology, as the church had its very own "radio station", albeit it only worked in four pews.
It was an interesting example of the principles of the old Maxwell stuff we were doing in science classes - the old two-coil stuff where the teacher was demonstrating the interaction of current, magnetic fields, and why a transformer works.
I hope the patent office didn't issue a patent on this. Geez, imagine the flood of lawsuits if the operation of transformers became a litigatable item.
Most of the stuff I was building at the time, I would decide whether or not I wanted to go 8085, 65C02, or 68000 depending on how much processor power, electrical power, and cost tradeoffs, and go from there. (Yeh, I knew about the RCA 1802, and absolutely hated to code assembler for it.)
Looking back on it, I think the main reason I went Motorola for all my 32-bit stuff is I got ahold of one of the chip kits pretty soon after it came out, and learned enough to make functional devices with it. Then I was soundly in the rut with insufficient motivation to jump out. Intel made some neat stuff, but I considered the Motorola implementations much cleaner from a hardware point of view, despite the fact PC's were running Intel processors.
Today, my main choices are the ATMEL AVR/ATMEGA series , and the Motorola 320X0's. Incidentally, I think ATMEL has done a helluva job supporting us little guys in the trenches with all sorts of nifty tools on their website, development kits, and making sure places which deal a lot with us little guys, like Digi-Key , have a wide selection of product for us.
I do get concerned at Motorola though, as they seem to keep changing their product. To me, implementing a product in a design is a lot like my selection of building materials... if I do not have confidence that ten years from now, I will be able to obtain compatible materials, I go back to my design and change it to use something more generic. Yes, the 68000 is old hat - but it is exactly what I needed to do a job at hand. Example: I like to design with standard brick. I am quite leery of custom roofing material or exotic plumbing fixtures. Just because something is old does not mean you have to abandon making it. ( 68000 in the 64-pin plastic DIP package for PTH mounting ). To me, that makes just about as much sense as no longer making 100 watt incandescent light bulbs in an Edison base.
If any Motorola rep is out there reading this, please cut this out and hand it to management. You guys can really make us little guys in the trenches look bad when no sooner than we get our customer all geared up for production and the rug gets pulled on us. They blame me for it. ( Rightfully so, cause people like me should know who it is out there who won't stay on the ship long enough to complete the voyage. ) If you percieve that I am both disappointed and angry about discontinuation of this product, you are right.
What concerns me most is concepts like protecting copyrights/patents of protocols or formats so that any work created using these protocols is rendered inaccessible if the holder of the copyright of the file format used deems so. The part I fume over a lot is not necessarily that one has the rights to enforce protection of something like a protocol, but that businessmen seem to completely lack the foresight into knowing not to stick their heads into nooses that others control.
For as long as I have been in this business, I have insisted on creating any content I produce in open formats, so that it can be imported into any subsequent editors for viewing/manipulation. It bugs the shit out of me when some manager type wants the whole shebang in "word format", as now I know, not only will this whole thing most likely be readable one one kind of system, its now very likely to have compatibility issues over versioning of the OS, file manipulator, and any "enforced obsolence" the vendor may use his authority to require. I can still read files today that I originally coded for my IMSAI and Commodore-64. It was all ASCII. If I want to go back to that old program I coded for my Commodore-64 to see the equations for how I modeled my varactors for my phase-locked-loops, I am quite free to do so ( they had quite complicated equations to do it right... including calculus derivatives. ).
If I had locked myself into a proprietary format, I would have been in the same boat as one of my previous employers who had us for years putting drawings into a proprietary-type filebase, only later to have that old filebase drift into unsupported oblivion. I learned a lot from that.
The whole affair, in my mind, was millions of dollars worth of wasted effort - when one considers not only the salary of all those people we had at the drafting tables entering the data into the system, but on top of that, the loss of the benefit we were supposed to have by doing all this work. It sure taught me that having a file format open and supported by many vendors is critical to long-term usability of anything. I find a sue-happy company out there launching lawsuits against anyone "infringing" on their little proprietary protocols, and I will show you a company I won't touch with a ten foot pole. I haven't the foggiest idea why some businessmen think they can involve themselves with such a company and not get burned.
The 8080 seemed the first big step to putting boards full of logic right into the microcomputer chip itself, yielding a much simpler mechanical design. The 8080 was a milestone for me. I haven't seen anything like it as far as simplifying my hardware designs until MicroChip and Atmel came up with those dandy little PIC and AVR chips. AVR has become my new favorite.
I am afraid that for me the old PDP will rest in peace. It was a good machine for its day. Probably the best. But, like the old vacuum-tube flip flop, it's seen its day. ( I won't go into vacuum tube audio... those old tubes had some peculiar logarithmic curves as they approached cutoff and saturation that "color" audio in such a way that I have yet to see properly matched by the solid state systems. In the pure linear mode, both can very closely mimic each other, but feed them the dynamics of music, and I can tell em apart. I know its something to do with intermodulation around the peaks, but I'll be dammed if I can find out exactly what it is thats doing it. )
Remember, when this machine shipped, it was TOTALLY without software of any kind in it. You entered your program into memory, manually, byte by byte, then jumped to wherever you wanted to start execution, and let fly.
One of the first peripherals one bought with such a machine was an EPROM programmer card and a TTY terminal. And one usually coined their own OS - ( which was usually referred to as a 'monitor' program.) On mine, I had the latest EPROM programmer which used 1702 Eproms, which held an unheard-of-in-its-day 256 Bytes per chip! That's right, 2,048 BITS of data per IC. I remember the joy I had when I finally had the program running that let me program the EPROM which would allow me to not only enter my data from a keyboard instead of the front panel switches, but also burn EPROMS so I would not have to enter the program manually every time I crashed or powered up. Such programs were called "boot" programs. Mine fit in two of these eproms. A whole 512 bytes, hand coded, to not only load memory from my keyboard, but also display it on one of my four videoram cards, or burn a block of 256 bytes into EPROM.
These 'videoram' cards were popular back then as commercial video terminals were still in the thousand dollar range, but a videoram card could drive a standard black&white TV monitor with 16 lines of 64 characters of plain ASCII text. Using a videoram card, one could at least get rudimentary text images on a phosphor screen for around $100 or so, compared to the thousands of dollars a commercial CRT terminal costed. Color was damn near unheard of. Each videoram would consume 1K of address space. You got 64K address space on those old 8080 chips, and 256 locations of I/O space. I had a total of 48K RAM area ( All 2102 type 1K x 1 Static Ram ), 12K of EPROM space which held my monitor and assorted programs to read/write cassette tapes, and 4K of videoram space.
I am on memory lane here... remember making your cassette drives out of anything you could find laying around? As long as you could find an operable tape transport around, you could make your own data storage device. First step, get rid of all the tape recorder electronics. You were'nt in Analog anymore. You drive the head directly from a manchester encoded digital signal, whose polarity changes occur in sync with your digital signal stream, as that particular protocol had no DC offset, as you can't record DC. Playing back, you would only pay attention to the timing of the flux changes coming back and use a monostable multivibrator and exclusive-or gates to reconstruct the serial stream of ones-and-zeroes.
Forget trying to buy off-the-shelf solutions. There weren't any.
God, tinkering was fun in those days. It was all on how much you knew, not how much was in your wallet.
I loved this one as I made many of the cards for it... cards which would do really weird things like interface to gas turbines, as I had some projects back then which involved large heavy machinery, and it occured to me that I could program one of these machines to act like a gas turbine, and allow me to check out all the logic of a Gas Turbine Controller without having to power up an actual gas turbine, that is I could read the fuel injector signals, generate a corresponding RPM signal, mimic fuel failure signals, vibration signals, etc. I remember how weird it seemed sitting in the control room of the turbine control room, with the entire room aglow with all sorts of displays indicating the turbine running full power, yet the turbine just down the hall was dead quiet as it was undergoing replacement of its blades.
It was my first taste of having my own programmable device that I understood intimately... and I still have it, albeit I have not used it in years... as I use several old ISA PC's to do this now... ( I like my old Borland 3 C++ compiler for DOS way too much.. it does exactly what I want it to do, and is much quicker for me to get something done than coding in 8080 assembler. And hell, I don't want GUI or its assorted bloatware just to do quickie process simulations. )
And about the cost... as popularity goes up, it gets more common, and like all common things, the price plummets downward like any commodity item. Its only more expensive now because its a specialty skill. There is nothing inherently different in the skillset required for a Linux or Windows box.
Its your classic Chicken and Egg, and I don't blame ol Gates for trying to keep as few eggs as hatching as possible, cause once those eggs hatch, and the resulting hens go online, its gonna be hard as hell to control of the egg market.
Actually, I don't blame Microsoft for their lobbying efforts to try to stop governments from adopting open software. Microsoft, unlike RIAA, is not so dumb as to see where people can channel around them, to get their needs met without involving Microsoft in any way. The RIAA waited until the cat was completely out of the bag and running down the street before they noticed and began to give chase. I doubt they will ever get the cat back in the bag.
Microsoft is holding a fragile bag based mostly on faith. As soon as foreign governments stray from doing things in a method that is controlled from Richmond, more software starts getting developed, and it gets proven more and more by example that open source works in the real world, Microsoft will have increasingly hard times trying to convince businessmen to pay for something they get for free, much like RIAA is having increasingly hard times trying to convince people to pay for DRM-ridden products once people know what alternatives exist.
But worse yet is the "embrace and extend" paradigm, where often Microsoft products are made deliberately incompatible with what was agreed upon as a "standard" by use of proprietary extensions. For instance, I can not access my school grades on my linux box, as the College uses a Microsoft server - and their IIS talks to IE through proprietary extensions. If Linux begins increasing market share on the client side, Microsoft may have some very intense explaining to do to businessmen who wonder why people can not use their websites after the businessmen have paid good money for a Microsoft system. They may highly resent paying top dollar for for a system that only some people can see, whereas the free system their competitor is using can be seen by all.
I get the idea this whole empire can snowball quite rapidly, and the company has to do all they can do to hold onto control as long as possible. I get the idea once this cat gets out of the bag, good luck getting him back in. I think they will have as much luck trying to maintain their revenue stream as the RIAA would have getting people to pay for a song sans DMCA and the pressures of copyright law.
And as for whether the 911 suicide 'pilots' are in heaven or hell.. I have no idea of knowing. The Bible warned me not to eat of the tree of knowledge of good and evil. I have seen many men cause so much grief because they thought they knew about good and evil. To me, this "religion" thing is mostly an artifact of man, used as a two-pronged psychological tool used to coerce the obedience of other people, as well as to allowing one to avoid having to take personal responsibility for their actions ( as if they were only following Orders from God ).
If I think I have to get involved in this kinda stuff, messing in the affairs of others because somebody tells me to, in the name of God, then am I to believe the "hand of God is short"? I mean if an infinite God creates heaven and earth and everything in it, why does he need me to go pester someone? Am I not supposed to be intelligent enough to know some little runt somewhere is just feeding me a line to put me up to no good?
God warned me about all the false prophets. If God has anything that he wants me to know, He has the power to see to it I find out. I flat do not trust Man.
I see a lot of grief - and I did not see any good come out of the whole sordid affair. But then, I am not privy to all the data, so my judgment, based on admittedly incomplete data, is probably moot.
So it looks as if we could get rid of the resistance, we could have essentially "perpetual" computing, much like we have essentially "perpetual" current flow in a superconducting ring... except this time with switches directing the electron flow amongst many parallel channels.
I think you are onto the superconducting computer.
I read the main article and was kinda confused about the use of "resonators" to store energy with much less loss. I design a lot of switching power supplies, and I use those techniques a lot to boost the efficiency, as well as reduce stress, on my power supply components. By doing resonant designs, I can use stray capacitances to my advantage, storing their energy in inductors during switching intervals, then re-introduce the stored energy back into the circuit at the proper time to make some really cool power converters.. ( pun intended ).
But here's the problem.. my frequencies are determined by the laws of physics and are either sinusoidal or sinusoidal derivatives. Data is not. I would find it hard to store energy is some sort of inductor, as the energy will bounce back at me in a given time... and if I am not prepared to route the energy in a constructive way when it comes back at me, its wasted, only thing it does then is expend its energy heating up and stressing my switch. I have looked at enough core-dump to know data is not periodic.
It doesn't look like an easy thing to do to try to recover energy from the edges of many switching lines that are all switching at asynchronous times. I would have to know a lot more about this before I could really generate a cogent comment.
There is a helluva lot of training and responsibility to running the aircraft, to be there, and do whatever has to be done in the event of ANY malfunction, no matter what. Sure, I can see its all automated. I'll betcha they could take a whole planeload of passengers from one airport to another by remote control without a pilot at all in the plane.
Now, try it if the plane has major malfunctions midflight.. say part of the fuselage gets caught up in the slipstream, the hydraulics jam, some kook gets onboard and causes sabotage. Now, without a knowledgeable individual onboard who knows how to handle any emergency, what's the chance of getting back to earth alive?
On top of that, I consider these guys face a major health problem, by the nature of their job which requires MUCH sitting. Sitting through training. Sitting in the cockpit. All this sitting... guess what happens to the old cardiovascular system? The blood will start pooling in the legs. The heart is not a suction pump. It won't pull the blood up. You HAVE to walk around in order to get the blood back up, by way of contractions of the calf and thigh muscles, to squeeze the blood back up. The eventual end to this is a condition like phlebitis, where blood pools in the legs, forms clots, which eventually break loose, shooting up the leg venuous system, up to the heart, over to the lung, where they become trapped forming a pulmonary embolism. Not a fun thing.
I am not an airline pilot, nor are any of my family or friends... but I did consider it as a possible career option and when I realized I would have to spend a large portion of my live confined to a cubbyhole that would make a restroom stall large by comparison, I reconsidered. I feel these guys earn their pay, not only for their skills, but as compensation for the wear and tear it puts on them.
But what I am a bit more concerned over is the solvents that make the adhesive sticky. If those evaporate, the adhesive is no longer an adhesive.. you know, like old adhesive tape that isn't sticky anymore. My concern is that the organic compounds in the adhesive react with the organic compounds in the CD-R, resulting in deterioration of its optical qualities - like even some rather innocent looking cleaners can cloud some plastics.
For this reason, I have been rather reticent to apply labels onto CD-R's, as I see the mass produced CD's appear to have their labels silkscreened on, their solvents long since dissipated by the time I see it.
Kinda like the 'free' cookie in the mall... take it and they hope you like it enough to buy a couple of dozen.
I have it too. There is so much neat stuff out there I want to buy, but am afraid to touch it because I don't understand how it works, and how to fix it if it doesn't work, and I really hate to make a big investment only to find now I must pay through the nose to "protect my investment". If I don't watch myself carefully these days, I will stumble right into their trap. And be paying for it the rest of my life.
My current television is 25 years old. I want one of those new big-screen plasmas so bad I can taste it, but I know better. No sooner than I plunk down the big bux, I will find myself with a very expensive white elephant on my hands, inoperable with tomorrow's technology, and even ways to make it operable will be deemed as illegal, with those willing to help me overcome the technical hurdles liable for jail time. Hell, that neat monitor I buy today for a princely sum might bring all the excitement of a proprietary format medical monitor at my next garage sale. Scrap metal would probably sell for more.
Basically, I just plan to hold back any spending until I see what they are going to standardize on. It doesn't look like that will be anytime soon. Gee, my old 25 year old TV is still working great. It should last another ten years if thats what it takes.
I am sure others out there are going to do the same thing you did.. spend big bucks to get the good stuff, only to have perfectly good hardware rendered obsolete by nothing more than the pen of legislators which we elected to office.
Millions of spam go out, and the named joe gets hit with all the ire and bounced-mail replies. His ISP usually becomes quite upset with him as well, and he's left trying to explain to everyone that he doesn't even know what the hell is going on.
Its a really neat way of framing somebody on the internet - making it appear to all the outside world that 'joe' did it, when in reality joe was completely uninvolved.
The first engine I used extensively was Yahoo. Eventually, as their pages filled up with graphics and bloat, they displayed very little information per page load, and each page load was getting excruciatingly slow.
Dogpile to the rescue. I became an avid Dogpile fan.
Then Google came along. I liked Dogpile. But Google was so thorough, their sorting algorithm worked to my liking, and their link and paidspace presentations were so clean. Designed from the get-go for fast pageloads. A very clean system.
Now, it appears to me Yahoo is going the way of AOL, trying to squeeze the last bit of profit out of captive audiences. I had to leave SBC because Yahoo saw their captive ISP subscribers ahd sweet-talked PacBell into a business partnership where we ISP subscribers would receive a mandate to load proprietary Yahoo software on our end, software that would only load on other Proprietary operating systems. They want to collect all sorts of info on us by having everything we do subject to all sorts of logins and registrations.
Until Congress steps up to the plate and holds businesses responsible for info leaks, irregardless of what was 'agreed' to in the EULA, I do not want to be pasting my private info onto the net. I do not want my private info on the web. If I have a pile of rocks in my yard, and some neighbor kid gets hurt, I am responsible. If an oil company pipe ruptures, making a mess, they are responsible. If they can't pass law holding those who used the info I give them responsibly, then I will resist like all getout giving them accurate info ( although I will quite readily give them something completely wrong to put in the box.). I know Microsoft has this passport thing that they seem to require to do anything. That passport thing is the reason I dropped my Hotmail addy.
This is the same problem I see with the banks. When the FDIC steps in to guarantee depositors security of their savings, no-one seems to be much interested in the internal workings or security of the bank. With the law granting indemnity for identity thefts from leaking servers, no-one seems much concerned with security. Its given great lip service for PR purposes, but I haven't seen this lip service reflected in code and algoritms. Its just putting all sorts of military-style locks and steel plating on the front door, while leaving all the windows wide open. So far, from all I've seen, its all for show.
I take it that without death, life would suffocate, as there soon would be no room for new life. Hence no room for improvements.
I would think that at least 99% of the data mentioned will have no use in as little as one year.
I have often contemplated a world where nothing died. Anything once created kept going. You yell, and the echoes continue forever without dampening themselves into oblivion. Can you imagine the cacophony which would result in just a few minutes? If plants never died, would there be any room left on earth for a seedling?
I have come to the belief that death is just another word for reboot.
As a system, we experience all sorts of random events, a very few notable, most best forgotten. The information destruction ( death ) is just the way to purge the buffers of noise so that things worth the space can be loaded into it.
In the case of information, I think we are bumping onto a very elastic "limit" on how much information we can keep track of. This limit will increase as the number of individuals who take an interest in keeping this information increase.
The exact DNA of a tree living several centuries ago may be lost forever, but its progeny continue if they were fit for survival.
We may lose a lot of data through deterioration, but I think we will always have a way to keep the important stuff. I have no doubt that one day we will understand DNA where we too can encode information on a molecular lattice, and have it copy or execute itself whenever needed.
Ok.. I'll finish this one with a little troll.. I love Science classes. I hated studying English Literature. You don't know how much as a kid I would have appreciated it if all the works of Dickens and Chaucer went to rot before they copied all that stuff and made us study it.
I've done construction work too. I know about concrete foundations. It would pain me greatly to be required to build a house, on untreated wood foundation, directly on termite laden ground. I know the home's outcome before I even drive the first nail. But if everyone else was doing it, and I had some moneyhead insisting I do it that way too, my knowledge of how to build something that would last centuries is moot. He has the money, I need the money, I have the knowledge, but he just wants my efforts.
A fool and his money are soon parted. Just take his money and do what he says.
You know, with all this DRM, licensing enforcement, and required authentications floating around the proprietary technologies area, its gonna be interesting to see how this affects data recovery in the event of something like a hard drive crash. Everything will be encrypted. Keys and all gone. Kinda similar to locking yourself out of your own safe - but its made of something so secure that its impossible to open sans key. One prankster foul up the lock and the whole business which depends on the data in that safe shuts down.
Say, the tables were turned. I kept trying to push a new form of electronic money payment onto the business. With my new payment model, I can still control how he's allowed to use the cash I paid him - after the transaction! I could restrict him on how and where the money could be spent. If I didn't want him to buy anything from China, I could technologically enforce that and any transaction he tried to engage in using the money I paid him would then fail.
Would any business accept my "electronic payment" as money?
Then why do they expect me to accept this DRM ware?
Software is just a language that computers use to "think" in. Just as humans "think" in their native language. For me, the use of the English language is public domain... its given to me to use free. I do not have to pay everyone for every word I type. But if you think that means you work for free, try hiring a lawyer to put those words in the correct sequence to produce a desired result!
The main advantage I have using English, rather than some ephemeral proprietary language, is the permanance of the language. I can read things written centuries ago. I thoroughly expect anything written today to be readable centuries from now. The language is not under control of anybody who can willy-nilly revoke the license for its use, thereby rendering all my work I have done using it moot, or to hold me hostage to force me to "upgrade" to whatever he wants, whether I want it or not.
One thing I have to keep in mind though: knowlegeable individuals like those here feel comfortable next to the machine and know how things are supposed to work. There are a lot of people out there who don't. For us, computing is a science - we know what we want the machine to do and we arrange the laws of physics to make any possible outcome we desire inevitable. But for many people, they seem to run on faith that someone out there is going to support them, and they feel a handful of cash will get them anything they want.
We cling to knowledge, as it gives us the comfort of knowing in advance what the outcome will be before we even begin the effort to do something. Those who deal with money motivators cling to their fiduciary controls, hoping that the pipers will keep piping to the tune of cash flow, which they control. And they want lots of cheap pipers so they play them off against each other.
I find generally its people who are personally responsible seem to prefer open source, as they see in the long term - once the infrastructure to do something is in place ( such as running a business ), it will continue to run indefinitely. People who are in a command chain, using other people's money, making profit for other people, seem to prefer everything proprietary, cause they actually make a lot of personal money from relentless re-doing of everything. Just the time they get it working, its "unsupported" or some other term for obsolete.
Its like keeping plumbers on hire when they figure out that by using plumbing fixtures that will corrode out in a couple of years, and proprietary pipes that can't be acquired in 5 years or so, they can coerce lifetime employment from any businessman they can convince to do a "lock-in" to their way of thinking. The type of businessman most apt to swing to that way of thinking is the one who loves the idea of waving money in front of the plumber for "support", and has no idea that properly installed copper plumbing will last the life of the building, and more can be acquired anytime you want it at darned near any hardware store.
Of course anyone can see what the outcome is going to be... one business is going to spend a helluva lot of time in the future going through their enterprise redoing the plumbing over and over again. The other business may have spent a bit of time to understand how their plumbing works, but from then on, the pipes sit quietly in the wall, doing their thing, while the business does what it does to earn its keep.
When you run your own place, the money you pay the plumbers is no longer yours. When you are running the place for other's profits, it makes pretty good sense to divert as much of that to your pockets as you can - so might as well use your pull to lock-in an ephemeral solution to insure future income.
The longterm money saved never was yours anyway. Its just profits the investors will never see.
Right now, I am quite disenchanted.
You see, I am taking some law classes in intellectual property, copyright, and trademark so I can see where I stand as far as trying to develop new product and bring it to market. In the next building, the Data Structures class is meeting. My law class had a full house of 50 students, and we were turning students back at the door for lack of space to put them. I walked over to the data structures class to greet my old professor ( whom I highly admire and respect for his insights ) and noted six students.
The data structures class is a core class through which all computer science students must pass. Six students. Same as when I took the class. This class is only offered once a year. Six students. And here I am in a class of fifty students being taught how to bicker over what these six students will produce.
I can't help but fume. To me, something's gone horribly wrong.
Here's some I was looking at. Unfortunately, these things are expensive, and the sponsor I was going to research the interfaces for backed out, so I am left with an interest, a bit of driver software, but not sufficient money to pursue the research anyway on my own.
Consider.. you are driving home from work. Alone. A car full of people pull out in front of you to make a left turn. You see theres plenty of time for them to get in their lane, and don't take any action. Then the other car's driver suddenly changes their mind and swirls around making a right instead of a left, leaving you with a ton of metal heading right up their arse at 40 mph. The inevitable happens. Of course, the people in the car you hit now collaborate and it comes out in the courtroom you were doing at least 60. And all five people in the other car are saying so. Wouldn't you just love your box to testify in your behalf you were driving responsibly, and what happened was unavoidable for you, given the circumstances?
His latest entry starts off:
I went ahead and linked his journal . Now, anyone who sees this can know as much as the rest of us of what our leader has to say of the situation.
Tire marks. The amount of energy required to cause so much metal deformation. Distances airborne. Inertial effects. Witnesses. And I am sure there are many I did not think of.
The black box evidence is just one of many. It will either confirm the other evidence, in which case you have some explaining to do, or it may exonerate you. ( i.e. you WERE driving a safe legal speed and the other party did in fact do a real lulu in front of you. ).
My own take - its a non-issue. Every observable event will leave evidence. This is just one more of many trails left after an automotive accident event. You can really prejudice yourself by trying to tamper with the evidence.