I took a hiatus too. I didn't miss the show - I was just sidelined playing with stuff I knew was good. It didn't take me more than three months of Windows development to figure out that it was a trap. The last month of that I spent looking for specifications for a sound card so I could do audio capture before I discovered that the company that wrote the drivers for SoundBlaster was actually a wholly owned Microsoft subsidiary that wasn't giving up the specs at any price or terms I could live with.
I started with Unix in late 1981, Linux in late 1995 and I have very nearly spent more time with Linux than Unix. Unix in the form of its descendents Linux and Mac OS X is still very much alive.
OS X bought Unix certification because it was an important selling point. They had to do significant engineering to qualify for the mark, but they have it not in recognition of their engineering, but because they licensed the right to call OS X a Unix from The Open Group.
Unix is not what it was in the 1960s and 1970s - the love child of great minds. It's now just a service mark. A brand. Intellectual property law ruined it, and Ransom Love killed it with his hubris. It's time to let it go.
No, BSD is not Unix. To say that BSD is Unix is perhaps like saying that grass is rice. That's not quite correct. Some grasses are rice. Some grasses are differently purposed and differently used. They may share some genetic material but a putting green is not a bowl of cereal.
However, all rices are grasses. All of the currently used Unixes owe the vast majority of their genetic material to the University of California at San Diego and Berkeley. It would be fair to say that modern Unixes are all Berkeley System Developments with proprietary "enhancements". This is perhaps the acknowledgment you were looking for. That's not the same thing as saying that BSD is Unix.
But the whole of a Unix was never Open until Open Solaris, which as I said is still in doubt. In fact, since Open Solaris hasn't been accepted by The Open Group, who bought the name "Unix" and certify Unix systems, it's not a Unix either. Nor is any particular flavor of BSD.
And still... Linux Is Not UniX. It was never intended to be. Linux is Linux. It's its own brand and that's all it needs to be. It doesn't need to carry forward the heritage from the Information Science pirates of a byegone era. To the extent that it pays homage to the great minds that went before, it's standing on the shoulders of giants as all great art does. It doesn't steal their intellectual property -- it just acknowledges the best of their ideas in new and creative ways and creates on that foundation new expressions that, in our litigation constrained environment, can be used and expanded upon freely.
This was the same state Unix was in around the early 1990s. We're not dead yet! In fact, we've taken over the large computer market since then.
Ahem. Linux Is Not UniX. Linux owns the big iron these days, holding over 85% of the Top500. It's pretty dominant on the small end too, with home routers and file servers being the extreme of that bracket. The middle is getting squeezed out as thin-is-in netbooks and nettops push into the mainstream.
ISO has lost its street cred so expect an Open Source replacement. Open Standards benefit everyone, so I expect someone to fill in the gap.
Unix was never open source until Open Solaris (the provenance of which is still subject to vigorous debate).
But of course you knew that. I was a Unix admin in 1984. At the time it was the stuff. Unfortunately because it was born before the age of software as property it wasn't designed to be protected from the greatest threat progress has ever faced: intellectual property lawyers. Linux was.
First among them treason. Agents of a US corporation have subverted major agencies of sovereign nations. Those government employees of non-US nations have by their participation betrayed their nation, the public trust they held in their positions, and their duty. They've done it to preserve the profitability of a foreign enterprise, and by extension line their own pockets.
It's only a matter of time before this is figured out. Heads will roll - in some cases figuratively and in some cases literally.
When principled people withdraw from an endeavor, they take with them the credibility they leant to it. The credibility of principled participants is all a standards body has to offer.
They are by their action hastening a day when a new, credible standards body can displace the corrupt corpse of ISO.
In the shakeout a bank's assets, including mortgages, are purchased at a heavy discount -- usually dimes on the dollar. If this happens several times as the toxic assets poison more and more optimistic firms your 250K mortgage may be sold for what's essentialy a single house payment after repetetive discounting.
But not to you. When they "write down" these mortgages that means they write in their account book that the asset is presumed to be worth less. It doesn't affect the principal or interest on your loan.
Yes, that was the right answer. Because Android is open, you can run whatever barcode scanning software you want on it, and use the open cam to capture barcodes to be interpreted in any way you like.
That makes the G1 smartphone the cheapest available wireless barcode scanner. The leverage of freedom is that there are a lot of expensive special purpose proprietary tools that are about to go obsolete because they solve a problem that this device can solve with the addition of software. Since this device is open, every concievable bit of software will quickly be ported. Many more that exploit its special blend of features will be invented.
That's what makes Freedom the killer app.
Recognizing that is what makes the Google guys so smart. I gotta get that stock.
Capturing data in this way is a killer app that justifies the whole expense of the device to me -- even if the device had no other features at all. Cordless barcode scanners are pretty spendy units.
So yeah the freedom is great. Let's not overlook that it's the freedom to share your killer app and so enhance the utility of this tool for people with similar needs to yours. There will be a lot more way cool stuff presently.
Actually I do have a bulletproof method of DRM that customers will accept. There's no patent - it's currently a trade secret. I could show them how it works without revealing the secret, and they could license it from me.
I only want $40m cash up front, and 10% of the back end.
I'm calling it MP[34]. Of course with licensing comes naming rights. I think "Plays For Now" is not yet taken.
I can't see how more than 50% of the population would ever be bothered enough to learn how to use all of their phone's features even if they were dirt simple to use. It's just one of the facts of life that us geeks need to be willing to accept.
I'm trying to imagine the average user exploiting even 1% of the capabilities of Excel. I don't see it. It's a platform, and it does stuff. What it is designed to do no longer seems relevant if it's Open because people will use it not for what it's designed to do but rather for what they want to do with it.
The big corps currently steal the commons. That has to change. It is not right that to publish a new treatment of a Grimms fairy tale you need $50m in legal fees to fight Disney.
Copyright is also being used to promote censorship in ways our parents never would have permitted. That must be stopped.
You do realize you're arguing against Internet freedom, freedom of speech, and fair play, right?
If you want to pursue your anti-twitter war you could have chosen a much better post. It's not like he doesn't post a lot of useless crap. You don't need to soil your hands with opposing him when he's obviously right.
Sony's problem here is one of branding. Bear with me for a minute.
They have world class engineers that expand the scope of human knowlege. They invent stuff. They embed their technology into products. And then they slap the "Sony" brand on them.
Their problem is that there's no more reliable brand for failure of a new medium than "Sony". You can't engineer your way out of this social problem. Because we've all been burned so many times by buying our content on the new Sony format, only to have to buy it again in the format that's become the standard, the "Sony" brand is certain death for a new content medium. They can fix this. I had hoped they'd offer me a few mil for this wisdom, but they didn't offer now I'll give it for free. They can pay for the next one.
For the next medium, they need to take their engineers working on a new media format and assign them to a product group. Then they need to isolate that group and spin it off into a wholly owned subsidiary. Then they need to create the usual three-times indirect shield of layers of corporate ownership that wind up with an untraceable "investment group" that buys the subsidiary. Then they need to release the new medium with no mention of the Sony origins or ownership.
By careful press they can pretend to compete against the new medium with their usual lame efforts with their hardware arm, while licensing content for it with their media arm.
Finally, once the new medium is fully accepted in the marketplace they can "buy" their subsidiary and take ownership of the related hardware IP. Perhaps in time they can admit that it was all a sham.
This is the only way they're going to get people to buy content on a new format they invent.
Oh, and they can forget the DRM... or they can buy my awesome and customer friendly DRM technology that people will accept. (work with me here.... Don't spoil the joke.)
No DRM, a convenient - if not perfect - format, quality as high as my feeble ears can hear. A reusable portable container. No DRM.
If they'll just partner with music stores to provide as much choice as they can and dump to your microSD instead of prepackaging albums with content in the volumes that they hope will sell, they'll eliminate much of the waste of the current system and deliver music I can buy.
For all we know, our solar system just whipped right through a cloud of stellar cooked organics, and we practically just have life rained down on our little world.
And since all the stars we can closely observe have planets, to expect that the star that went supernova and gave us all the elements above Iron did not also have them is perhaps silly.
So... Is the "stuff of life" common or not? Further study is needed and is under way. We may discover in the Oort cloud the seeds of life. If we do, that should lay the question to rest.
The evidence is right in your face but you are too stupid to see it. Here goes, ahahaha... You are a fucking moron, a gutless ass kisser, a boot licker, a sycophant, a believer in Star-trek voodoo physics and a Hawking dingleberry. ahahaha... You deserve every piece of crap that comes out of Hawking's asshole. How about that? ahahaha... AHAHAHA... ahahaha...
Excuse me. I think you may have lost your train of thought here. I would suggest you check your meds.
General relativity does not consider - neither allow nor permit "time travel." To suppose it does so would be to presume that some specific mathematical theory could encompass and deny evey possible interpretation of that term, which would be ridiculous - in the definition of "made an object of ridicule".
As any relativist worth his/her Phd can tell you, GR does not permit time travel....
Did you know that you can get a Phd in underwater basketweaving? Our current education system is broken and measuring what is true or not based on which degrees are offered or what grants you can get regarding the subject is perhaps naive.
Slashdot Mirror
I took a hiatus too. I didn't miss the show - I was just sidelined playing with stuff I knew was good. It didn't take me more than three months of Windows development to figure out that it was a trap. The last month of that I spent looking for specifications for a sound card so I could do audio capture before I discovered that the company that wrote the drivers for SoundBlaster was actually a wholly owned Microsoft subsidiary that wasn't giving up the specs at any price or terms I could live with.
OS X bought Unix certification because it was an important selling point. They had to do significant engineering to qualify for the mark, but they have it not in recognition of their engineering, but because they licensed the right to call OS X a Unix from The Open Group.
Unix is not what it was in the 1960s and 1970s - the love child of great minds. It's now just a service mark. A brand. Intellectual property law ruined it, and Ransom Love killed it with his hubris. It's time to let it go.
No, BSD is not Unix. To say that BSD is Unix is perhaps like saying that grass is rice. That's not quite correct. Some grasses are rice. Some grasses are differently purposed and differently used. They may share some genetic material but a putting green is not a bowl of cereal.
However, all rices are grasses. All of the currently used Unixes owe the vast majority of their genetic material to the University of California at San Diego and Berkeley. It would be fair to say that modern Unixes are all Berkeley System Developments with proprietary "enhancements". This is perhaps the acknowledgment you were looking for. That's not the same thing as saying that BSD is Unix.
But the whole of a Unix was never Open until Open Solaris, which as I said is still in doubt. In fact, since Open Solaris hasn't been accepted by The Open Group, who bought the name "Unix" and certify Unix systems, it's not a Unix either. Nor is any particular flavor of BSD.
And still... Linux Is Not UniX. It was never intended to be. Linux is Linux. It's its own brand and that's all it needs to be. It doesn't need to carry forward the heritage from the Information Science pirates of a byegone era. To the extent that it pays homage to the great minds that went before, it's standing on the shoulders of giants as all great art does. It doesn't steal their intellectual property -- it just acknowledges the best of their ideas in new and creative ways and creates on that foundation new expressions that, in our litigation constrained environment, can be used and expanded upon freely.
Ahem. Linux Is Not UniX. Linux owns the big iron these days, holding over 85% of the Top500. It's pretty dominant on the small end too, with home routers and file servers being the extreme of that bracket. The middle is getting squeezed out as thin-is-in netbooks and nettops push into the mainstream.
Unix was never open source until Open Solaris (the provenance of which is still subject to vigorous debate).
But of course you knew that. I was a Unix admin in 1984. At the time it was the stuff. Unfortunately because it was born before the age of software as property it wasn't designed to be protected from the greatest threat progress has ever faced: intellectual property lawyers. Linux was.
First among them treason. Agents of a US corporation have subverted major agencies of sovereign nations. Those government employees of non-US nations have by their participation betrayed their nation, the public trust they held in their positions, and their duty. They've done it to preserve the profitability of a foreign enterprise, and by extension line their own pockets.
It's only a matter of time before this is figured out. Heads will roll - in some cases figuratively and in some cases literally.
When principled people withdraw from an endeavor, they take with them the credibility they leant to it. The credibility of principled participants is all a standards body has to offer.
They are by their action hastening a day when a new, credible standards body can displace the corrupt corpse of ISO.
Good on 'em.
In the shakeout a bank's assets, including mortgages, are purchased at a heavy discount -- usually dimes on the dollar. If this happens several times as the toxic assets poison more and more optimistic firms your 250K mortgage may be sold for what's essentialy a single house payment after repetetive discounting.
But not to you. When they "write down" these mortgages that means they write in their account book that the asset is presumed to be worth less. It doesn't affect the principal or interest on your loan.
See redxxx's post below. (S)He nailed it.
Yes, that was the right answer. Because Android is open, you can run whatever barcode scanning software you want on it, and use the open cam to capture barcodes to be interpreted in any way you like.
That makes the G1 smartphone the cheapest available wireless barcode scanner. The leverage of freedom is that there are a lot of expensive special purpose proprietary tools that are about to go obsolete because they solve a problem that this device can solve with the addition of software. Since this device is open, every concievable bit of software will quickly be ported. Many more that exploit its special blend of features will be invented.
That's what makes Freedom the killer app.
Recognizing that is what makes the Google guys so smart. I gotta get that stock.
Capturing data in this way is a killer app that justifies the whole expense of the device to me -- even if the device had no other features at all. Cordless barcode scanners are pretty spendy units.
So yeah the freedom is great. Let's not overlook that it's the freedom to share your killer app and so enhance the utility of this tool for people with similar needs to yours. There will be a lot more way cool stuff presently.
If we did we would quit whining about what the telecoms offer us and let our power utility districts build us a real network.
I also have alternate methods MP[34]XOR-AF and MP[34]XOR-00.
This is valuable intellectual property here.
That was MP[34]XOR-B3
Sorry about that. MP[34] is already taken.
Actually I do have a bulletproof method of DRM that customers will accept. There's no patent - it's currently a trade secret. I could show them how it works without revealing the secret, and they could license it from me.
I only want $40m cash up front, and 10% of the back end.
I'm calling it MP[34]. Of course with licensing comes naming rights. I think "Plays For Now" is not yet taken.
I'm trying to imagine the average user exploiting even 1% of the capabilities of Excel. I don't see it. It's a platform, and it does stuff. What it is designed to do no longer seems relevant if it's Open because people will use it not for what it's designed to do but rather for what they want to do with it.
And isn't that the point?
The big corps currently steal the commons. That has to change. It is not right that to publish a new treatment of a Grimms fairy tale you need $50m in legal fees to fight Disney.
Copyright is also being used to promote censorship in ways our parents never would have permitted. That must be stopped.
And my counter offer would be 10 years, once and no more.
As an alternative: first year is free, second year is $100. Doubling every year thereafter.
So is manned spaceflight.
This is some insightful video commentary on the whole Windows market share issue:
YouTube
It's not a rickroll, I promise. Think about that the next time you've said "we're a Windows shop" and the sound is still ringing in your ears.
You do realize you're arguing against Internet freedom, freedom of speech, and fair play, right?
If you want to pursue your anti-twitter war you could have chosen a much better post. It's not like he doesn't post a lot of useless crap. You don't need to soil your hands with opposing him when he's obviously right.
Sony's problem here is one of branding. Bear with me for a minute.
They have world class engineers that expand the scope of human knowlege. They invent stuff. They embed their technology into products. And then they slap the "Sony" brand on them.
Their problem is that there's no more reliable brand for failure of a new medium than "Sony". You can't engineer your way out of this social problem. Because we've all been burned so many times by buying our content on the new Sony format, only to have to buy it again in the format that's become the standard, the "Sony" brand is certain death for a new content medium. They can fix this. I had hoped they'd offer me a few mil for this wisdom, but they didn't offer now I'll give it for free. They can pay for the next one.
For the next medium, they need to take their engineers working on a new media format and assign them to a product group. Then they need to isolate that group and spin it off into a wholly owned subsidiary. Then they need to create the usual three-times indirect shield of layers of corporate ownership that wind up with an untraceable "investment group" that buys the subsidiary. Then they need to release the new medium with no mention of the Sony origins or ownership.
By careful press they can pretend to compete against the new medium with their usual lame efforts with their hardware arm, while licensing content for it with their media arm.
Finally, once the new medium is fully accepted in the marketplace they can "buy" their subsidiary and take ownership of the related hardware IP. Perhaps in time they can admit that it was all a sham.
This is the only way they're going to get people to buy content on a new format they invent.
Oh, and they can forget the DRM... or they can buy my awesome and customer friendly DRM technology that people will accept. (work with me here.... Don't spoil the joke.)
I'll go ahead and applaud their brilliance.
No DRM, a convenient - if not perfect - format, quality as high as my feeble ears can hear. A reusable portable container. No DRM.
If they'll just partner with music stores to provide as much choice as they can and dump to your microSD instead of prepackaging albums with content in the volumes that they hope will sell, they'll eliminate much of the waste of the current system and deliver music I can buy.
It may be time to consider buying music again.
Second response
Perhaps you're right. "To hope" ignores that you should be careful what you wish for.
Maybe "To expect" is a better term.
And since all the stars we can closely observe have planets, to expect that the star that went supernova and gave us all the elements above Iron did not also have them is perhaps silly.
So... Is the "stuff of life" common or not? Further study is needed and is under way. We may discover in the Oort cloud the seeds of life. If we do, that should lay the question to rest.
Pandora.
Excuse me. I think you may have lost your train of thought here. I would suggest you check your meds.
General relativity does not consider - neither allow nor permit "time travel." To suppose it does so would be to presume that some specific mathematical theory could encompass and deny evey possible interpretation of that term, which would be ridiculous - in the definition of "made an object of ridicule".
Did you know that you can get a Phd in underwater basketweaving? Our current education system is broken and measuring what is true or not based on which degrees are offered or what grants you can get regarding the subject is perhaps naive.