At least for users with domains that are not run by large corporate entities. I have already been designing an email server which will allow each user to maintain lists of trusted email senders, define policies by which they will accept email from senders not on the list, etc. The basic idea is that the user would be able to control their receipt of email by the server. I am sure that better coders than I are already thinking along these lines, as well. As the volume of spam grows, it will be easy to get ISPs and self-managed domains to switch to this kind of email system. The only people who would be SOL (besides the spammers) are those using AOL, Hotmail and the like.
Of course, this also inherently reduces the utility of email, because it will almost certainly result in the loss of mail we want, because human nature is to forget to add things in to filters like this.
What will it take to get a program going to actually send people out to them?
We appear to be waiting for a crisis, wherein the surface of Earth is sterilized by a marauding enemy. We'll then live underground long enough to retrofit the Yamato as a space battleship, and send her and her brave crew out as the last hope of mankind.
Civil rights is not the issue. We are probably the only country with *natural* rights. There is a difference, in that civil rights are granted to you by the government, and can be taken away, while natural rights are inalienably yours. That said, of course, our own government has no clue of this, nor do the vast majority of citizens, so we are devolving into a state of civil rights and losing our natural rights as a consequence.
A self-selecting group of users (Outlook users) are producing email that he cannot read. Rather than be faced with unintelligible email on the mailing lists he runs, he does not allow people with illiterate mail readers to post to them.
They are not necessarily self-selecting. Not everyone has a choice of mail clients. Some are bound by corporate standards, or by their ISP's support policies. Further, he could ban the offending emails more efficiently by disallowing attachments, filtering any message which is not 7-bit clean and setting the max message size to, say, 10K or so.
Instead, he is blocking Windows users who are unwilling to accomodate his oddness (by munging their headers) from posting to his email list, and blocking Outlook users from reading his email by deliberately mangling his email.
Frankly, it's dumb. The whole point of the Internet is that people should be able to communicate without regard to what platform/software is being used. To do what this guy is doing actually improves MicroSoft's position, because it plays into their hands by turning the Internet into disconnected islands.
So he wants people to be able to use any kind of software to read email, and is annoyed that he gets documents from Windows users which are unreadable in his email program. So his response is to make sure that other people cannot necessarily read his email messages, and he expects others to adjust their computing environment to read what he sends. How is this any different from his adjusting his own computing environment to read what they send? Or is it that he just believes that the Internet should be mutually unintelligible (I mean, more than it already is)?
What crap. And by the way, there is a difference between being libertarian (which has to do with political structure) and being a lassez-faire capitalist (which has to do with economic structure). The ad hominem attacks you make are not only off-base, they also undermine the credibility of your arguments in general.
It is undeniable from even a cursory study of US business history that government support is not necessary to a monopoly. It is certainly possible for government to create monopolies (such as the cable and telecom franchises that cities award). It is also possible for a company to take advantage of an early lead and ruthless business practices to lock up a market which naturally tends to monopoly or oligopoly (GM/Ford/Chrysler, Microsoft, Standard Oil, etc).
In such a case, it is not always possible for a consumer to decide the outcome. For example, every bit of oil shipped by train at the height of Standard Oil's dominance required a payment by the rail shipper to Standard Oil. Yes, you read that right, the rail companies had to pay Standard Oil to ship oil from Standard's competitors, or lose Standard's business entirely. Similarly, if I wanted in the mid-80s to buy a machine pre-installed with CP/M, I was still paying to get MSDOS: each computer manufacturer paid MS for every machine produced, or did not get good prices for MSDOS for those customers who wanted it.
It is necessary for the government to take a largely hands-off approach to businesses - and certainly the government should not be granting monopolies. However, it is also necessary for the government to step in when a market becomes so uncompetitive that consumers cannot change the market because of the use of the monopolist's market power to force acceptance of their products. The alternative is that innovation *doesn't* happen, because there is no incentive for a monopoly to innovate.
You'd have to define what you mean by "nothing has changed in the System folder", since prefs, for example, can change all the time. I suppose if you checked the image against the latest modification time of all files in the system folder, and threw away the image if the image was older than any file, it would work, but it seems that it could be pretty time consuming to do.
I once had an enourmous computer working out a very important question but it was destroyed by Volgons[sic] five minutes before it was finished. I feel your pain.
That must have annoyed the Vogons, who were coming to do the same thing. Not to mention the mice!
Well, OS X certainly can sleep (both OS X and Classic go to sleep), putting to sleep also all processes. As to hibernating the Classic environment, I don't know how useful that would really be in the long run.
Your limitations will be primarily floor space, power and connectivity. These will drive layout to a very large degree. You will have problems with heat in a confined space as well. Arrangement will largely be dictated by the width of the chosen vehicle.
Since your audience can be assumed to be newbies, and since your function appears to be non-platform-specific (web access, etc), the OS should be chosen for stability and remote administration capabilities. The hardware should be chosen for space and power features.
I would suggest either running MacOS X on new iMacs (for space/power/remote admin/stability) or running Linux/GNOME or Linux/KDE on ldaptops, with external keyboards, mice and flat panel screens (for the same reasons, though the admin skill level will need to be higher, and it's more difficult to reload the OS/reconfigure the system if needed).
Also, in either case, you should be able to get some assistance from vendors in making this work.
For power, you can use readily-available generators that can be packed into tight spaces. For connectivity, you will probably need a microwave tower (if you can get line of site) or a bidirectional encrypted radio or satellite link. You might talk to the local telecom companies, or the local TV stations - they both have to solve this problem.
Just get an airport base station as your 802.11 access point, and then configure it to only accept connections from MACs you trust, using the appropriate box in the GUI. Oh, wait, that wouldn't be as much fun. It's too easy.
Re:All I want is the connection
on
Broadband Obstacles
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
An ISP should provide:
connectivity, POP/SMTP/NNTP/DNS (things that NORMAL people don't host themselves), and some form of customer support.
No, an ISP should not provide connectivity. That should be handled by any one of several competing entities (the phone company(s), cable company, satellite, wireless - whatever), while the ISP provides services. Then I, as a consumer, can select connectivity from the best provider of connectivity and services (if I need them) from the best provider of services.
Too bad that it's a waste of time [joelonsoftware.com] though..
You are quoting a Microsoft software designer on software design. Wow, that has to redefine either "guts" or "insanity".
Quality. Art. The "soul" of a machine.
Bull! 1) The machine is a tool. It's not meant to be a piece of art. 2) It has no soul. It's a thing. A dead object. I agree with you on the quality point though but sometimes it seems like Apple uses waaaay too much money on design. Pretty design does not equal quality. Not by a longshot.
Every machine is the creation of a human. Some of those creations have a beauty and functionality surpassing that of others. Part of that can be unquanitifiable, and it is that that is a machine's "soul" - the very essence of what makes it different that cannot be summed up in numbers. Not every human has a mystical bent, but the vast majority do, even in this cynical time. This is why most people buy tables, instead of putting plywood on a bunch of cinderblocks.
For those of you who haven't programmed using Cocoa or haven't messed around much with OS X or actually seen and used a recent iMac in person, there's no substitute for the tangible results of Apple's years of dedication.
I wouldn't touch either with a ten foot pole.
Obviously, because you've never used either, and from this and your other comments have no idea what constitutes worth.
Cocoa is "Java for kids" (Java is bad enough..), iMacs are a pain and OS X is not where the money is...
Cocoa, meaning the frameworks and objective C language in this case, is the best object oriented programming environment I've ever seen. Perhaps the problem is that it is not difficult enough for you to use? Perhaps you couldn't get enough "cool points" by accomplishing something easily, when there is a harder way to do it?
And "not where the money is"??? OK, it's true you can make more money if you use VB than if you program in Cocoa. I'm not aware of any decent programs written in VB, or any decent programmers who use VB, but whatever floats your boat, I guess.
The thing that strikes me about all of the attempts that I have seen to implement DRM, is that they all work on the principle that the consumer is a thief. If the content owners keep making this argument, and implementing it in hardware, it will actually spawn rampant thievery. After all, today I buy CDs (and rip them to MP3s immediately) and DVDs. If I cannot play a CD in my computer, I'll get it from a pirate online so that I can listen to it. How long, then, until I decide to skip the step of buying the CD in the first place? And it will be the same with movies at some point, I'm certain.
Virtual PC is a fantastic program. Adding it to the base config will mean:
1) Macs would become more expensive, by the cost of VPC+Win??? - and which version of Windows should they include?
2) every user who chooses Apple to avoid paying MS money would be unable to do so
All in all, this would shrink, not expand, their market share.
I have this problem as well. I explain to the person that they can use Word's File->Open Web Page menu option, enter the URL for my resume, and it will be opened as a Word document. (I have my resume formatted completely into a table, which makes it look right on Word as well as the web.)
If they are not willing to go that small distance for me, there is generally not going to be a good working relationship anyway.
Yeah, the uptime on my *laptop* is currently 17 days (since I installed the last system upgrade) and that includes moving it around a lot (in sleep mode). Just sweet.
Yeah, and the Sony DiscMan sucks, too. It's limited to a meager 700MB of storage, won't play MP3s or even cassettes (and as long as that format has been around, there's NO excuse for that!) and don't even talk to me about vinyl!
I suspect that Apple will either bundle a third-party basic Windows package (maybe or maybe not XPlay) in the near future, or release the specs for reading and writing the device, or both. I doubt that they will change the hardware, port iTunes to Windows or Linux, or try to make it where it's just as easy to get an iPod to work with non-Apple computers as it is to justify a low-end Mac. Any of those things would cut into the potential of the digital hub to draw users to the Mac platform.
Cass Sunstein Professor, University of Chicago Law School
It's hard to predict the future. But let's look closely at (a) efforts to use to Internet to track terrorism and other crimes, (b) the possible diminution of privacy rights, and (c) efforts to censor apparently dangerous speech on the Internet.
The scary part about this is that virtually all speech (at least, any that expresses a preference or point of view) is dangerous to someone. Just witness the fact that the famous picture of three firemen (all white males) raising the flag at the WTC site was turned into a statue... where two of the firemen have been replaced with firemen of other races in order to "show the diversity" of firefighters in NYC. How many countries and companies would like to ban the opinions of their critics?
That may well be true, but I suspect that the Internet is alive. What I mean by that, is that the Internet is capable of growing and evolving.
Let's say that the Internet begins to evolve in such a direction that content and access are heavily controlled - geographically, by companies, whatever. The Internet is just a series of connected networks, and you don't have to be part of the Internet to be networked. I suspect that Internet2 and freenet would grow, and that other networks with (small 'l') libertarian principles would grow as well. I certainly would be willing to get a leased line network set up between my friends and I, and have a gateway or two to the Internet at large, in order to preserve my ability to communicate freely.
It can be argued that I would then be unable to access the content of the Internet at large, but that is bunk. I would be able to, should I choose, but I would not be forced to use the (putatively bad) protocols and such in order to email friends and family.
Would this be expensive? Yes. Is it impossible to do or to afford? No.
Slashdot Mirror
At least for users with domains that are not run by large corporate entities. I have already been designing an email server which will allow each user to maintain lists of trusted email senders, define policies by which they will accept email from senders not on the list, etc. The basic idea is that the user would be able to control their receipt of email by the server. I am sure that better coders than I are already thinking along these lines, as well. As the volume of spam grows, it will be easy to get ISPs and self-managed domains to switch to this kind of email system. The only people who would be SOL (besides the spammers) are those using AOL, Hotmail and the like.
Of course, this also inherently reduces the utility of email, because it will almost certainly result in the loss of mail we want, because human nature is to forget to add things in to filters like this.
-jeff
We appear to be waiting for a crisis, wherein the surface of Earth is sterilized by a marauding enemy. We'll then live underground long enough to retrofit the Yamato as a space battleship, and send her and her brave crew out as the last hope of mankind.
Civil rights is not the issue. We are probably the only country with *natural* rights. There is a difference, in that civil rights are granted to you by the government, and can be taken away, while natural rights are inalienably yours. That said, of course, our own government has no clue of this, nor do the vast majority of citizens, so we are devolving into a state of civil rights and losing our natural rights as a consequence.
They are not necessarily self-selecting. Not everyone has a choice of mail clients. Some are bound by corporate standards, or by their ISP's support policies. Further, he could ban the offending emails more efficiently by disallowing attachments, filtering any message which is not 7-bit clean and setting the max message size to, say, 10K or so.
Instead, he is blocking Windows users who are unwilling to accomodate his oddness (by munging their headers) from posting to his email list, and blocking Outlook users from reading his email by deliberately mangling his email.
Frankly, it's dumb. The whole point of the Internet is that people should be able to communicate without regard to what platform/software is being used. To do what this guy is doing actually improves MicroSoft's position, because it plays into their hands by turning the Internet into disconnected islands.
So he wants people to be able to use any kind of software to read email, and is annoyed that he gets documents from Windows users which are unreadable in his email program. So his response is to make sure that other people cannot necessarily read his email messages, and he expects others to adjust their computing environment to read what he sends. How is this any different from his adjusting his own computing environment to read what they send? Or is it that he just believes that the Internet should be mutually unintelligible (I mean, more than it already is)?
What crap. And by the way, there is a difference between being libertarian (which has to do with political structure) and being a lassez-faire capitalist (which has to do with economic structure). The ad hominem attacks you make are not only off-base, they also undermine the credibility of your arguments in general.
It is undeniable from even a cursory study of US business history that government support is not necessary to a monopoly. It is certainly possible for government to create monopolies (such as the cable and telecom franchises that cities award). It is also possible for a company to take advantage of an early lead and ruthless business practices to lock up a market which naturally tends to monopoly or oligopoly (GM/Ford/Chrysler, Microsoft, Standard Oil, etc).
In such a case, it is not always possible for a consumer to decide the outcome. For example, every bit of oil shipped by train at the height of Standard Oil's dominance required a payment by the rail shipper to Standard Oil. Yes, you read that right, the rail companies had to pay Standard Oil to ship oil from Standard's competitors, or lose Standard's business entirely. Similarly, if I wanted in the mid-80s to buy a machine pre-installed with CP/M, I was still paying to get MSDOS: each computer manufacturer paid MS for every machine produced, or did not get good prices for MSDOS for those customers who wanted it.
It is necessary for the government to take a largely hands-off approach to businesses - and certainly the government should not be granting monopolies. However, it is also necessary for the government to step in when a market becomes so uncompetitive that consumers cannot change the market because of the use of the monopolist's market power to force acceptance of their products. The alternative is that innovation *doesn't* happen, because there is no incentive for a monopoly to innovate.
You'd have to define what you mean by "nothing has changed in the System folder", since prefs, for example, can change all the time. I suppose if you checked the image against the latest modification time of all files in the system folder, and threw away the image if the image was older than any file, it would work, but it seems that it could be pretty time consuming to do.
That must have annoyed the Vogons, who were coming to do the same thing. Not to mention the mice!
Well, OS X certainly can sleep (both OS X and Classic go to sleep), putting to sleep also all processes. As to hibernating the Classic environment, I don't know how useful that would really be in the long run.
Your limitations will be primarily floor space, power and connectivity. These will drive layout to a very large degree. You will have problems with heat in a confined space as well. Arrangement will largely be dictated by the width of the chosen vehicle.
Since your audience can be assumed to be newbies, and since your function appears to be non-platform-specific (web access, etc), the OS should be chosen for stability and remote administration capabilities. The hardware should be chosen for space and power features.
I would suggest either running MacOS X on new iMacs (for space/power/remote admin/stability) or running Linux/GNOME or Linux/KDE on ldaptops, with external keyboards, mice and flat panel screens (for the same reasons, though the admin skill level will need to be higher, and it's more difficult to reload the OS/reconfigure the system if needed).
Also, in either case, you should be able to get some assistance from vendors in making this work.
For power, you can use readily-available generators that can be packed into tight spaces. For connectivity, you will probably need a microwave tower (if you can get line of site) or a bidirectional encrypted radio or satellite link. You might talk to the local telecom companies, or the local TV stations - they both have to solve this problem.
-jeff
Just get an airport base station as your 802.11 access point, and then configure it to only accept connections from MACs you trust, using the appropriate box in the GUI. Oh, wait, that wouldn't be as much fun. It's too easy.
No, an ISP should not provide connectivity. That should be handled by any one of several competing entities (the phone company(s), cable company, satellite, wireless - whatever), while the ISP provides services. Then I, as a consumer, can select connectivity from the best provider of connectivity and services (if I need them) from the best provider of services.
Wouldn't "swarms of microscopic robots" constitute "potentially dangerous microorganisms"?
You are quoting a Microsoft software designer on software design. Wow, that has to redefine either "guts" or "insanity".
Every machine is the creation of a human. Some of those creations have a beauty and functionality surpassing that of others. Part of that can be unquanitifiable, and it is that that is a machine's "soul" - the very essence of what makes it different that cannot be summed up in numbers. Not every human has a mystical bent, but the vast majority do, even in this cynical time. This is why most people buy tables, instead of putting plywood on a bunch of cinderblocks.
Obviously, because you've never used either, and from this and your other comments have no idea what constitutes worth.
Cocoa, meaning the frameworks and objective C language in this case, is the best object oriented programming environment I've ever seen. Perhaps the problem is that it is not difficult enough for you to use? Perhaps you couldn't get enough "cool points" by accomplishing something easily, when there is a harder way to do it?
And "not where the money is"??? OK, it's true you can make more money if you use VB than if you program in Cocoa. I'm not aware of any decent programs written in VB, or any decent programmers who use VB, but whatever floats your boat, I guess.
The thing that strikes me about all of the attempts that I have seen to implement DRM, is that they all work on the principle that the consumer is a thief. If the content owners keep making this argument, and implementing it in hardware, it will actually spawn rampant thievery. After all, today I buy CDs (and rip them to MP3s immediately) and DVDs. If I cannot play a CD in my computer, I'll get it from a pirate online so that I can listen to it. How long, then, until I decide to skip the step of buying the CD in the first place? And it will be the same with movies at some point, I'm certain.
-jeff
Virtual PC is a fantastic program. Adding it to the base config will mean:
1) Macs would become more expensive, by the cost of VPC+Win??? - and which version of Windows should they include?
2) every user who chooses Apple to avoid paying MS money would be unable to do so
All in all, this would shrink, not expand, their market share.
I would show you if Slashdot allowed the tag. Let's just say that I've seen large pink text blinking on a yellow background, and leave it at that.
I just shuddered when I saw Gates dressed as Harry Potter. What a travesty!
Right after people who use the BLINK tag in HTML pages.
I have this problem as well. I explain to the person that they can use Word's File->Open Web Page menu option, enter the URL for my resume, and it will be opened as a Word document. (I have my resume formatted completely into a table, which makes it look right on Word as well as the web.)
If they are not willing to go that small distance for me, there is generally not going to be a good working relationship anyway.
Yeah, the uptime on my *laptop* is currently 17 days (since I installed the last system upgrade) and that includes moving it around a lot (in sleep mode). Just sweet.
Yeah, and the Sony DiscMan sucks, too. It's limited to a meager 700MB of storage, won't play MP3s or even cassettes (and as long as that format has been around, there's NO excuse for that!) and don't even talk to me about vinyl!
So I guess what I'm saying is, stop whining.
I suspect that Apple will either bundle a third-party basic Windows package (maybe or maybe not XPlay) in the near future, or release the specs for reading and writing the device, or both. I doubt that they will change the hardware, port iTunes to Windows or Linux, or try to make it where it's just as easy to get an iPod to work with non-Apple computers as it is to justify a low-end Mac. Any of those things would cut into the potential of the digital hub to draw users to the Mac platform.
The scary part about this is that virtually all speech (at least, any that expresses a preference or point of view) is dangerous to someone. Just witness the fact that the famous picture of three firemen (all white males) raising the flag at the WTC site was turned into a statue ... where two of the firemen have been replaced with firemen of other races in order to "show the diversity" of firefighters in NYC. How many countries and companies would like to ban the opinions of their critics?
That may well be true, but I suspect that the Internet is alive. What I mean by that, is that the Internet is capable of growing and evolving.
Let's say that the Internet begins to evolve in such a direction that content and access are heavily controlled - geographically, by companies, whatever. The Internet is just a series of connected networks, and you don't have to be part of the Internet to be networked. I suspect that Internet2 and freenet would grow, and that other networks with (small 'l') libertarian principles would grow as well. I certainly would be willing to get a leased line network set up between my friends and I, and have a gateway or two to the Internet at large, in order to preserve my ability to communicate freely.
It can be argued that I would then be unable to access the content of the Internet at large, but that is bunk. I would be able to, should I choose, but I would not be forced to use the (putatively bad) protocols and such in order to email friends and family.
Would this be expensive? Yes. Is it impossible to do or to afford? No.