I suspect that in elections from 2000 to 2006, the standards of democracy in the US fell to below what we would consider acceptable in emerging democracies. Where there would be monitoring from outside observers.
Not to make this more political than it will be, but do we know what direction those stolen votes went? Do we know how much this influenced the national vote?
Another thing I did not find in TFA: how was this uncovered?
Markets that are in periods of rapid change obviously have rapid product cycles. When the race to the bottom is finished, and the winners have divided up the market, the product cycle will slow down again.
There are still too many camera manufacturers and the costs are still too high. The market will slow down when the cost per camera has come down to around $20 and the functionality is more than the average consumer wants. There will always be a market for premium products but this is not what is driving the current cycle: it's the mass market.
Standard technology curve... aka Heironymous' Law.
You get what's called 'glassnose syndrome' too easily.
Instead concentrate on building software in many small incremental steps so that problems are caught quickly, and on separation of design so that dependencies are rare.
If you can't find a problem, leave it and do something else.
Otherwise, print statements, yes, that's about the right level to debug at.
They were the first to try to make a Linux distribution that was usable by ordinary computer users.
They invested significantly in promoting Linux as a viable alternative to Windows.
They were willing to take on Microsoft in the courts, for two years.
They were among the first to repackage Debian and demonstrate Debian's value as a meta-distribution.
They sponsored numerous projects and Linux-related web sites.
They pushed the concept of a one-click GUI-driven installation process that actually works.
They raised the standard for installers: the Lindows installer works extremely rapidly and well.
The business of running as root is out of date, this was done early on and has changed since.
Note that at the same time as it ran as root, it also installed a firewall by default.
What did they do wrong?
They were brash and aggressive. God knows we hate people who think they can do better than us.
They dared to _sell_ their distro. What, making money from other people's work? Surely the GPL forbids this? Actually, no...
They made the source code to their modified installer and tools available only to people who purchased the product. Again, outrageous? No, perfectly correct.
And they dared to compare themselves to Windows.
Michael Robertson is not a confirmed scammer, and your comment is basically flamebait. He is someone who invested wisely in mp3.com and put his profits into a good, if somewhat low-brow Linux business.
He deserves a lot more support from the Linux community.
But elitists just hate it, don't they, when the common person gets to join the club. Remember AOL? It's the same all over again.
"emergent byproduct of highly complex strange loops" just means you don't know.
The brain is a (hugely complex) collection of mental tools. For instance some of the tools that are fairly unique to the human brain:
- sense of self
- language
- short-term memory
- long-term memory
- social feedback
- empathy
- self of justice
- sense of time
- abstract sense of danger
- sense of opportunity
All these mental tools (and many more I can't even name) will eventually be mapped and understood.
Consciousness is, I believe, simply a photoshopped reality that one part of our brain feeds to the "front-end" so that we can operate usefully in a complex world.
For example: we decide to pick up a cup of coffee. The decision happens, the signals get sent to our arm, we pick up the cup, and we start drinking. With a significant delay, our "conscious mind" - i.e. the parts of the brain associated with waking thought and action - register the event. We believe our consciousness is acting in real time, but in fact we're just reacting to a series of events that is happening unconciously.
There is an extreme school of thought that suggests that there is no active mind at all, that everything we do is reactive and that our consciousness is simply a PR department that spins this ongoing chaos into some kind of coherent "I'm in charge" scenario that allows us to operate.
In such a scenario, the consciousness is computing nothing.
Cars are not really about technology any longer but about materials (and marketing). I think cars reached the flat part of the curve some time ago - probably when Ford started mass production.
Other example: houses. Any physical objects with significant production costs are not going to get cheaper even if the technology they embody is close to free.
But all products where technology (not raw materials, marketing, and labour) is the main cost get cheaper following the standard curve:
- pharmaceuticals
- consumer electronics
Products where raw materials are cheap but production is technically complex get cheaper as their production facilities get cheaper. It's not just about "economies of scale", but about the real reduction in underlying costs:
- bikes
- clothes
- many kinds of food
This is why you can buy Chinese bikes in West Africa for $25.
To a large extent the growth in prosperity that technological advance brings is simply the lower cost of producing the things we need (or want).
But even cars come with a lot more value (if you consider gadgets, smarter engines, reliability, etc. as value) for the same money.
Moore's Law is not a physical theory, it is the observation of a common phenomenon, namely the curve that technology goes through as it becomes cheaper and eventually free.
All technologies seem to obey this general law. Software, chips, disk space, they all tend to zero.
Even a passenger jet costs a fraction of what it did 20 years ago.
Moore's Law turns this around to say that for the same price we can expect more and more capacity. Long before 600 years are passed, this capacity will effectively reach "infinite", being the point where no-one can use more capacity or power, no matter what the application. At which point Moore's Law will gently slow down.
Are we talking about the physical computational capacity of a headful of neurons, which is finite by definition unless you believe that the brain can somehow reach into unknown dimensions somewhat like early CPUs used bank shifting to increase their RAM range?
Or are we talking about the sensation we have of being alive, a sensation that is arguably simply generated by our brains as a mechanism to ensure our survival. Yes, the vaunted consciousness that reacts a full 1/4 second after the fact when we do most common actions such as crossing the road, kicking a ball, picking up a cup, or typing comments to Slashdot?
The definition of "consciousness" is seriously under debate and it's meaningless to discuss whether it's finite or infinite.
Most likely, consciousness is a sense, like sight or sound. Would you frame the discussion of your sense of smell in terms of computational power? No, me neither.
Bringing in the lawyers is the only way to stop GPL violators.
It's true when it comes to closed products (like DVD players). But not when it comes to drivers that the kernel can actively choose to load or reject.
All it takes is a community-moderated database of drivers and their GPL-conformancy status. A non-conformant driver would be rejected by the kernel. Its authors would have to release the source code and have this vetted.
Something like the GPL equivalent of trusted computing.
Part of every attempt to legislate (which the kernel's interrogation of drivers is) should include the question "how will people cheat, and how can we stop this". Otherwise this kind of game is inevitable.
(And if the answer to the question is: "people will cheat and we can't stop them", then there is little point in playing legislator.)
One of the defining characteristics of the Net seems to have been its ability to defy planning and design.
Even simply "increasing capacity" without addressing specific bottlenecks is often a waste of time. Look at the heavy investment in fibre-optics, most of which lies unused as new technology squeezes more and more out of existing cables.
Call me a cynic, but such projects sound more like fun for research grants than useful for real life.
My humble opinion of the Net is that it is a largely a self-steering phenomena that feeds on change and technology cycles. Since you can't predict change, and you can't prevent the technology cycles that cause it, it's meaningless to hope to plan this.
Putting all the "cook your eyes with high-powered laser" jokes aside, this has several useful applications.
I'd like a subtitle application. A smart application analyses voices and sends subtitles only I can see.
"He's lying".
"She's eager but expecting disappointment"
"They want to buy, at any price".
"He's still lying".
Subtitling conversations is a great thing. But we can go further. GPS is an obvious plug-in. "Go left, now!" "Almost there" "Cops ahead, slow down and hide the bottles".
Next, how about linking this to streaming news sources. I'd never miss another Fark story. Granted, ticker-tape messages scrolling under your line of sight might get boring. But that's what bash.org is for.
I also want the reality-skinning software. This has been briefly touched on in a previous comment. We can go further. Everyone we meet can get their own photoshopped skin. The boss? He gets a moustache and bright red hair. That girl in finance who refuses all your expenses? A sign on her back saying 'Kick Me'.
Finally, I'd like a system of virtual real-world messaging. This works as follows: comments are linked to real spatial cordinates. As you look at the appropriate building or space, you get to read the comments. To keep comments semi-private, you'd have join a server and channel, like irc.
So I think laser-augmented vision has the potential to radically change society.
Of course we have to get around the fried-eye issues first.
Actually the cost of a trademark registration is quite reasonable. You can do the discovery and filing for around $1000, possibly less if you do some of the paperwork yourself.
IANAL but I have a few trademarks.
Patents... OTOH cost 10x more to start with, and considerably more after that if you try to defend them.
So a registered trademark is a good investment for a small company that fears competition.
I don't see the immediate benefit to NetBSD, however.
Scribus appears to be a decent desktop publishing tool. I've installed it but personally I prefer to use the OOo drawing tool for mockups, and our graphist uses QuarkXpress for the final designs.
The point is that printshops accept files only with specific formats, namely with CMYK color separation, the appropriate resolution, and in "well-known" file formats: Quark, Illustrator, et al.
A Linux desktop publishing program that can product color-separated files in the correct format can be a dog to learn and use, that'd be fine! As long as it can produce print-ready files, a painful learning curve is not an issue.
The UI is not the key. Business usefulness is the key.
A decent game often gets better in its second abnd third versions as technology improves and the story lines get more mature.
Films sequels are rarely better than the original and often dramatically worse.
Today, games make more money than films. A successful game franchise - that has many years of life left - can be ruined by one poor film tie-in.
So the ideal model is to take a good film and turn it into a series of games, and to resist at all costs the temptation to make film sequels. (Yes, I'm thinking of the Matrix).
LoTR does not really count as a film + sequels since it is based on an existing story and was shot in one go.
Any user without the technical competence to inspect and repair TCP/IP packets on the fly should not be allowed to use the Internet. Such vulnerabilities only exist because people too lazy and ignorant to download the patches for their Cisco routers!
Very close to my ideal writer's tool: a portable writing pad consisting of a high-resolution B&W screen like this, a fold-up wireless keyboard, a long battery life, and just one application: a word processor. It should run entirely from flash memory . And a $400 price tag would be sweet too.
Slashdot Mirror
FWIW I work on a netbook (Eee 1000 with eeebuntu) which is small, cheap, robust, and runs for 12 hours on an extended battery.
But Firefox is painfully slow. Chromium warns "This browser is not ready!" but is actually really great.
Apart from that cut and paste bug and a few more.
It's fast, fast, fast, and I don't mind if it crashes. I just restart it, remember to not press Ctrl-V, and let other people post my URLs for me.
I enjoyed Firefox a lot but the speed Chromium runs at makes it a compelling switch, even unfinished. Amazing, no?
I suspect that in elections from 2000 to 2006, the standards of democracy in the US fell to below what we would consider acceptable in emerging democracies. Where there would be monitoring from outside observers.
Not to make this more political than it will be, but do we know what direction those stolen votes went? Do we know how much this influenced the national vote?
Another thing I did not find in TFA: how was this uncovered?
Too lazy to post the link?
No, I'm using Chromium on Linux and though it's fast it crashes whenever I try to paste text. So thanks for posting the link.
Check the Firehose for another patent story (some fools tried to claim a patent on SOAP!)
...before a majority of Windows users have decided to give up and switch to a safer platform for their browsing, email, chat, and p2p.
Windows has a terminal parasitical infestation, the only way to keep a Windows box safe these days is to keep it off the net.
So, I predict: one box for the net, running a Linux disc, and another box for games and photos and all those Windows-only toys.
It's becoming clear that Windows and the Internet simply do not mix.
By Margaret Atwood.
http://www.oryxandcrake.co.uk/
Good story about a group of biohackers building a new future. Lots of "eat your face off" viruses. And blue penises.
SFW.
Markets that are in periods of rapid change obviously have rapid product cycles. When the race to the bottom is finished, and the winners have divided up the market, the product cycle will slow down again.
There are still too many camera manufacturers and the costs are still too high. The market will slow down when the cost per camera has come down to around $20 and the functionality is more than the average consumer wants. There will always be a market for premium products but this is not what is driving the current cycle: it's the mass market.
Standard technology curve... aka Heironymous' Law.
You get what's called 'glassnose syndrome' too easily.
Instead concentrate on building software in many small incremental steps so that problems are caught quickly, and on separation of design so that dependencies are rare.
If you can't find a problem, leave it and do something else.
Otherwise, print statements, yes, that's about the right level to debug at.
I've been writing about this in my journal for ages. Well, since last year at least.
Yes.
They were the first to try to make a Linux distribution that was usable by ordinary computer users.
They invested significantly in promoting Linux as a viable alternative to Windows.
They were willing to take on Microsoft in the courts, for two years.
They were among the first to repackage Debian and demonstrate Debian's value as a meta-distribution.
They sponsored numerous projects and Linux-related web sites.
They pushed the concept of a one-click GUI-driven installation process that actually works.
They raised the standard for installers: the Lindows installer works extremely rapidly and well.
The business of running as root is out of date, this was done early on and has changed since.
Note that at the same time as it ran as root, it also installed a firewall by default.
What did they do wrong?
They were brash and aggressive. God knows we hate people who think they can do better than us.
They dared to _sell_ their distro. What, making money from other people's work? Surely the GPL forbids this? Actually, no...
They made the source code to their modified installer and tools available only to people who purchased the product. Again, outrageous? No, perfectly correct.
And they dared to compare themselves to Windows.
Michael Robertson is not a confirmed scammer, and your comment is basically flamebait. He is someone who invested wisely in mp3.com and put his profits into a good, if somewhat low-brow Linux business.
He deserves a lot more support from the Linux community.
But elitists just hate it, don't they, when the common person gets to join the club. Remember AOL? It's the same all over again.
Two icebergs, in particular:
1. stream ripping
2. cheap offshore music sites
The only consumers who will pay $.99 for a track are those who have absolutely no choice due to DRM in media players and mobile phones.
"emergent byproduct of highly complex strange loops" just means you don't know.
The brain is a (hugely complex) collection of mental tools. For instance some of the tools that are fairly unique to the human brain:
- sense of self
- language
- short-term memory
- long-term memory
- social feedback
- empathy
- self of justice
- sense of time
- abstract sense of danger
- sense of opportunity
All these mental tools (and many more I can't even name) will eventually be mapped and understood.
Consciousness is, I believe, simply a photoshopped reality that one part of our brain feeds to the "front-end" so that we can operate usefully in a complex world.
For example: we decide to pick up a cup of coffee. The decision happens, the signals get sent to our arm, we pick up the cup, and we start drinking. With a significant delay, our "conscious mind" - i.e. the parts of the brain associated with waking thought and action - register the event. We believe our consciousness is acting in real time, but in fact we're just reacting to a series of events that is happening unconciously.
There is an extreme school of thought that suggests that there is no active mind at all, that everything we do is reactive and that our consciousness is simply a PR department that spins this ongoing chaos into some kind of coherent "I'm in charge" scenario that allows us to operate.
In such a scenario, the consciousness is computing nothing.
Cars are not really about technology any longer but about materials (and marketing). I think cars reached the flat part of the curve some time ago - probably when Ford started mass production.
Other example: houses. Any physical objects with significant production costs are not going to get cheaper even if the technology they embody is close to free.
But all products where technology (not raw materials, marketing, and labour) is the main cost get cheaper following the standard curve:
- pharmaceuticals
- consumer electronics
Products where raw materials are cheap but production is technically complex get cheaper as their production facilities get cheaper. It's not just about "economies of scale", but about the real reduction in underlying costs:
- bikes
- clothes
- many kinds of food
This is why you can buy Chinese bikes in West Africa for $25.
To a large extent the growth in prosperity that technological advance brings is simply the lower cost of producing the things we need (or want).
But even cars come with a lot more value (if you consider gadgets, smarter engines, reliability, etc. as value) for the same money.
Moore's Law is not a physical theory, it is the observation of a common phenomenon, namely the curve that technology goes through as it becomes cheaper and eventually free.
All technologies seem to obey this general law. Software, chips, disk space, they all tend to zero.
Even a passenger jet costs a fraction of what it did 20 years ago.
Moore's Law turns this around to say that for the same price we can expect more and more capacity. Long before 600 years are passed, this capacity will effectively reach "infinite", being the point where no-one can use more capacity or power, no matter what the application. At which point Moore's Law will gently slow down.
Can you even define consciousness?
Are we talking about the physical computational capacity of a headful of neurons, which is finite by definition unless you believe that the brain can somehow reach into unknown dimensions somewhat like early CPUs used bank shifting to increase their RAM range?
Or are we talking about the sensation we have of being alive, a sensation that is arguably simply generated by our brains as a mechanism to ensure our survival. Yes, the vaunted consciousness that reacts a full 1/4 second after the fact when we do most common actions such as crossing the road, kicking a ball, picking up a cup, or typing comments to Slashdot?
The definition of "consciousness" is seriously under debate and it's meaningless to discuss whether it's finite or infinite.
Most likely, consciousness is a sense, like sight or sound. Would you frame the discussion of your sense of smell in terms of computational power? No, me neither.
Mu.
Bringing in the lawyers is the only way to stop GPL violators.
It's true when it comes to closed products (like DVD players). But not when it comes to drivers that the kernel can actively choose to load or reject.
All it takes is a community-moderated database of drivers and their GPL-conformancy status. A non-conformant driver would be rejected by the kernel. Its authors would have to release the source code and have this vetted.
Something like the GPL equivalent of trusted computing.
Part of every attempt to legislate (which the kernel's interrogation of drivers is) should include the question "how will people cheat, and how can we stop this". Otherwise this kind of game is inevitable.
(And if the answer to the question is: "people will cheat and we can't stop them", then there is little point in playing legislator.)
One of the defining characteristics of the Net seems to have been its ability to defy planning and design.
Even simply "increasing capacity" without addressing specific bottlenecks is often a waste of time. Look at the heavy investment in fibre-optics, most of which lies unused as new technology squeezes more and more out of existing cables.
Call me a cynic, but such projects sound more like fun for research grants than useful for real life.
My humble opinion of the Net is that it is a largely a self-steering phenomena that feeds on change and technology cycles. Since you can't predict change, and you can't prevent the technology cycles that cause it, it's meaningless to hope to plan this.
Putting all the "cook your eyes with high-powered laser" jokes aside, this has several useful applications.
I'd like a subtitle application. A smart application analyses voices and sends subtitles only I can see.
"He's lying".
"She's eager but expecting disappointment"
"They want to buy, at any price".
"He's still lying".
Subtitling conversations is a great thing. But we can go further. GPS is an obvious plug-in. "Go left, now!" "Almost there" "Cops ahead, slow down and hide the bottles".
Next, how about linking this to streaming news sources. I'd never miss another Fark story. Granted, ticker-tape messages scrolling under your line of sight might get boring. But that's what bash.org is for.
I also want the reality-skinning software. This has been briefly touched on in a previous comment. We can go further. Everyone we meet can get their own photoshopped skin. The boss? He gets a moustache and bright red hair. That girl in finance who refuses all your expenses? A sign on her back saying 'Kick Me'.
Finally, I'd like a system of virtual real-world messaging. This works as follows: comments are linked to real spatial cordinates. As you look at the appropriate building or space, you get to read the comments. To keep comments semi-private, you'd have join a server and channel, like irc.
So I think laser-augmented vision has the potential to radically change society.
Of course we have to get around the fried-eye issues first.
Actually the cost of a trademark registration is quite reasonable. You can do the discovery and filing for around $1000, possibly less if you do some of the paperwork yourself.
IANAL but I have a few trademarks.
Patents... OTOH cost 10x more to start with, and considerably more after that if you try to defend them.
So a registered trademark is a good investment for a small company that fears competition.
I don't see the immediate benefit to NetBSD, however.
Scribus appears to be a decent desktop publishing tool. I've installed it but personally I prefer to use the OOo drawing tool for mockups, and our graphist uses QuarkXpress for the final designs.
The point is that printshops accept files only with specific formats, namely with CMYK color separation, the appropriate resolution, and in "well-known" file formats: Quark, Illustrator, et al.
A Linux desktop publishing program that can product color-separated files in the correct format can be a dog to learn and use, that'd be fine! As long as it can produce print-ready files, a painful learning curve is not an issue.
The UI is not the key. Business usefulness is the key.
Games and movies have different life cycles.
A decent game often gets better in its second abnd third versions as technology improves and the story lines get more mature.
Films sequels are rarely better than the original and often dramatically worse.
Today, games make more money than films. A successful game franchise - that has many years of life left - can be ruined by one poor film tie-in.
So the ideal model is to take a good film and turn it into a series of games, and to resist at all costs the temptation to make film sequels. (Yes, I'm thinking of the Matrix).
LoTR does not really count as a film + sequels since it is based on an existing story and was shot in one go.
Can't quite find the previous Slashdot story though this one is close.
But Tango and Cash dangling from electric cables as part of a physics course? This is kinda old news.
Any user without the technical competence to inspect and repair TCP/IP packets on the fly should not be allowed to use the Internet. Such vulnerabilities only exist because people too lazy and ignorant to download the patches for their Cisco routers!
Very close to my ideal writer's tool: a portable writing pad consisting of a high-resolution B&W screen like this, a fold-up wireless keyboard, a long battery life, and just one application: a word processor. It should run entirely from flash memory . And a $400 price tag would be sweet too.