This is an old maxim of design of any multi-tiered system. The reason is this: computation is largely about selecting and filtering data, before sending the results on to further tiers. This selection and filtering process requires many times more bandwidth towards the data source than it does towards the client layers. This only stops being true when there is no significant data, i.e. when the computation creates the data, as in the author's examples of render farms.
Legality and morality are similar and thus easy to confuse. Both are concepts that exist solely through collective agreement. Unfortunately they are not the same thing. Legality is the set of rules that the state defines to control its citizen's behavior, morality is the set of rules that citizens define themselves. In an ideal world, the same thing, perhaps. In reality, often quite different. It is legal for a crook to pay expensive lawyers to try to keep him out of jail, but immoral. It is moral for a citizen to refuse to pay taxes to a government whose policies he disagrees with, but illegal. And then, of course, legality depends on context, since laws are made and applied at many levels, from city to UN. Morality also applies at many levels, from the individual to the global community. Very, very often these frameworks are incoherent and contradictory, and this is probably inevitable and even necessary if they are to accomodate the richness between and within societies. The moral frameworks of the young, and old, for instance are quite often very different, and reflect the different viewpoints of the individuals within their societies. These differences are often striking. The young often rebel, the old often control. When many young people choose a certain behavior that goes against existing trends defined and enforced by old people, it is almost always illegal, by definition. That does not make it immoral. Debating these is like debating one's favourite color. Blue! No, Red! BLUE!! RED, DAMN YOU ALL!!! Only there is often money and power at stake, as is the case with digital media and illegal (or immoral) copying and distribution. What it comes down to is this: can the existing moral and legal systems accomodate and/or suppress the changes demanded of them by a discontended youth? Yes, no, maybe. If yes, how? If no, what will happen? Revolution, suppression, or disassociation (i.e. 'forking')? That should be the real debate.
What I said was "Sequel to...". Resident Evil, which was a silly movie but with a lucious performance by Jovovich, ended with her awakening in a hospital, alone in a deserted and dead city. This is where "28 Days Later" starts, and that was my statement. Probably much too subtle for the US market, I admit. Next time I will explain it slow-ly usi-in short words and many dia-grams.
(When it came out in Belgium). Bloody great movie, mate, a remake of John Wyndham's Day of the Triffids only wiff cockney vampire zombies. Bloke wakes up from a come, finds himself all alone in London on a grey monday morning. Not a bleedin' soul. Stumbles into a church, gets attacked by a bunch of howling crazy red-eyed winos, and saved by a duo dressed in tank glasses and leather. The film only gets better and better, exploring some serious themes in a generously superficial manner: the individual against society (what bleeding society, they're all dead!), sexism (army squad saves hero and ladies, then tries to kill hero and rape ladies), abuse of power (same army squad) and armageddon (play with fire, get burnt). Actually it was a cool movie, going lightly on the monster makeup and relying heavily on the viewer's own imagination. It may be too subtle for the US market, clearly a UK film, dry and sharp. Think of it as the film as the sequel to Resident Evil, without Milla Jovovich but with an equally sexy Naomie Harris.
I think you are confusing Estonia and Lithuania. Estonia has always been one of the better organized of the Baltic republics, even in the era of the USSR, and one of the first to define and push towards a new west-facing economy thereafter. Dramatise if you must, but get your facts right.
I spent several months working in Nigeria from 1999-2001. My client, a large business, had installed expensive VSAT links to its six or seven locations around the country - Lagos, Ibadan, Kano, etc. The satellite links provided a data channel (128kpbs, I think) and two voice channels. But what people really used the network for was VoIP, since the normal Nytel phone lines are so bad. People would find a pair of loudspeakers, a microphone, Netmeeting, and then shout at their PCs all day long. Very funny.
DNA profiling is an inevitable step
on
Twist on DNA Privacy
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
I predict that this will become standard procedure. Say a murderer leaves a DNA trace, but this matches nothing on record. It will be possible to match this DNA against known samples to come up with a fairly accurate picture of the criminal's ethnic origins, facial features, blood type, and much more. Quite probably police will be able to search for criminals by family or community, much more precise than saying "an asian male did this", more like "we're looking for a young chinese from Guandong province who has long ears and eyes of this and that shape". Eventually, a single DNA sample will allow scientists to create a detailed facial reconstruction, the only problem for identification being the age of the perp. And that can be pinpointed too, since DNA frays at the edges over time, and this fraying can be measured. DNA profiling is probably the single most important anti-crime tool of the future. It will make it almost impossible to escape punishment for one's acts. The big question will be (and it is almost too late to answer this) whether society is willing to pay the price for this security. I suspect the answer is "YES" for most people except theoretical libertarians. I think most people are wrong on this. The tentacles of the state reach too far already, and that crime is not solvable by a better police system, but by better social structures. I was burglared last month, robbed of about $30,000. The thieves left a cigarette stub on the carpet. Yet would it really be a good thing to apprehend them and put them into prison? It's an easy answer but prison is like crime college. Lock up a small thief and release a hardened criminal. Conclusion: the current trend towards giving the state more power, aided by the sword of science, will not result in more security. Technological solutions are not a replacement for social policies that attack the causes of crime, by providing youths with alternative careers, and by dismantling the structures of power that nuture organized crime.
The answer should be obvious: a web server able to run on a C64 can run on any embedded system that can emulate a 6502 CPU. This means I can put a web server into my mouse. The possibilities are stunning...
First the Winloo, then this monster. Wake up, Slashdot, this is a parody by some over-active marketing execs in Toshiba. Toshiba has for years been fighting the tendency to make large portables, being smart people and understanding that the sweetspot for portable screens is 14.2" the way God intended. This invention is clearly designed as ridiculo in absurdum, mockery by over-sincere imitation. It is a fine form of that lost art we call "irony". Clearly no-one is going to buy this, but just in case someone was tempted, they have lowered the specifications further. The screen resolution gives it away - my mobile phone has a higher resolution, and those sly guys at Toshiba, they know it. Rumour has it that Toshiba is actually going to announce a new line of ultraportables that are revolutionary because you can carry them around all day without pain, and the batteries run for more than 3 hours even during normal work. This monstrosity is just meant to create some noise so that Toshiba's new "carryme" line will find a receptive audience. Toshiba, congratulations on an excellent gimmick!!
In those days, 'audiovisual feedback' actually meant something. Long rolls of dead tree recording every single charxxxacaaxxxx ^h^h\H^H^H/d/d ^C^C^Q^Deof.DAMN...
Raising the GPL as "exposing companies to legal risks" is playing games with concepts. The GPL defines what can and can't be done with software written under that license. It does not, and cannot, define commercial conditions and liabilities for using the software. This is firstly a matter for national legal systems, and secondly a matter for contracts between parties.
Let us imagine for a second that this is actually a fault in the GPL. Now, what about public domain software (not GPL), such as software freely provided by computer manufacturers, or by individuals or groups. Exactly the same issues apply: writing such software can expose the programmer and company to liability, and using such software means you have to accept that no-one is liable.
Now how about commercial software. Is this any different? No, it can be criticised for exactly the same reasons.
So, it's clear that the so-called study is a misdirection. The GPL is about ownership and freedom, the study is about legal liabilities. No matter who owns the software, the legal liabilities remain shared between the author and the user, as defined by contracts and legislation.
That the study was paid for by a group representing commercial software vendors suggests that the deep pockets of interested parties lie behind it. Why Frankfurt, Germany? Because Germany is at the fore-front of the OSS revolution. (Note that my company has been distributing OSS products since 1997 and a steady 9-10% of all downloads have been from Germany, against 40-50% from the USA and 30-40% from the rest of the world).
The study is bunkum and can be dismissed easily, since taken to its logical conclusion, no-one should write software at all, and no company should use any product whatsoever if they are not able and willing to sue the person making it.
Actually you are wrong. I grew up in Africa and spent much time in Kenya, Tanzania, Congo, Angola, Burkina Faso, Nigeria, and Rwanda.
The trade in weapons is like the trade in ivory or diamonds or landmines: easily controlled if there is a political will to do so.
A basic analysis of the many bush wars in Africa show that the free availability of small arms are the primary enabling factor, although several other factors are also required, most damaging the interests of outside parties in mineral exploitation.
The huge numbers of civilian wounded and dead in these invisible and unsung bush wars goes beyond anything you can imagine. The trade in arms is a cynical exploitation of the instabilities that oil, diamonds, and other precious minerals provoke. Governments backed by foreign groups battle rebels backed by yet other foreign groups, and each time it is the civilian population that is caught in the cross-fire.
Banning the trade in arms to Africa is eminently feasible and would be the greatest contribution to improved living standards for much of Africa. The fact that organized politics does not call for such a ban lies in the fact that the African bush wars profit many people in the west.
Africa does not, as you suggest, have wars because there are many so people. In fact the continent is becoming depopulated: the largest African countries (Sudan, Angola, Congo) are extremely underpopulated.
Blaming the victims is a poor answer to problems.
Lastly, you think that the forests are ripped up in order to lay cable? Think again: timber is cut down to be sold. If there are people living in the forests, kill them or enslave them as workers, it's so much simpler than arguing with them.
WiFi is so cool when you can buy an AK47 for $150 and hand-grenades for $3 in such lovely spots as Congo DRC, Indonesia's lost islands, the WWI memorial frontier between Ethiopia and Eritrea, etc.
The the undeveloping nations of the 3rd world desperately need something much simpler: peace. This is beyond the UN's capacity to deliver, but a firm statement that the weapons trade is an evil that must be abolished would be a great start.
The 3.5 million dead in Congo during the last 5 years is worth something more than a campaign for WiFi, IMHO.
Actually I can run gigabit over the CAT5 cabling. No big deal. It just takes my trusty Dremel to slice a 1/4" hole in the NIC, about 2.5mm above the PCI slot connector, so that I can run a length of bullshit conductor down the left-hand side.
Easy to say that patents are necessary to make money. I run a business and spend much of my life making inventions. Patents are out of my reach, not being a lawyer or being able to pay for one full time. Conclusion: the many things I invent and make I cannot patent, yet I am faced with companies who patent things they cannot make.
It is not a fair playing field, and patents are not about protecting hard work, they are about exploiting one's ability to work burocracy in order to get exclusive trading rights.
Your sarcasm is misplaced, some honest and useful dialog would be much better.
Actually, wrong. Because it's open source, any company can take the application, make a "better" version, and sell or distribute it. (With source, they have to adhere to the license.)
You imply that OSS means user unfriendly, but this is speaking in bad faith. I'm an OSS developer and my applications have always been extremely nice to use.
Specifically with OpenOffice, the interface does have a few things (like the imitation paperclip) that annoy but overall it is extremely clean and the quality of the design comes over in its minimalism and efficiency.
I'm fairly sure that you can report your usability concerns to the OOo team and they will take them into account.
The argument against software patents is made on three grounds:
1. the products of the software industry are so large and complex (because of the lack of physical constraints) that the scale of 'invention' is hundreds times greater than in the physical world.
2. patents are expensive (10k Euro in Europe) and rarely can small businesses or individuals afford to aquire them.
3. even when people overcome point 2, they find that the large patent portfolios of large companies render their patents useless.
Conclusion: large companies purchase patents in order to protect not their inventions, but their competitive advantage. Since innovation comes from smaller teams, patents thus work against innovation.
Software patents exaggerate what is a manageable problem with physical patents, and turn it into a serious problem for smaller designers. Basically patents allow large businesses to collaborate with burocracy to create barriers against the entrance of smaller groups.
My house is wired with CAT5, every room leading down to the server room with a couple of patch panels.
Taking my trusty Dremel I modded some CAT5 cables so that output from my MP3 player went into the wall and came out in the server room. Now took random patch cables and hooked-up outputs around the house. After this success, I devised two CAT5-to-speaker cable types (LEFT and RIGHT) that let me hook up speakers in any room in the house.
Actually, it works well. I never thought UTP would carry the speaker signal, but it does, and the computer network does not seem to mind.
Slashdot Mirror
This is an old maxim of design of any multi-tiered system. The reason is this: computation is largely about selecting and filtering data, before sending the results on to further tiers. This selection and filtering process requires many times more bandwidth towards the data source than it does towards the client layers.
This only stops being true when there is no significant data, i.e. when the computation creates the data, as in the author's examples of render farms.
Legality and morality are similar and thus easy to confuse. Both are concepts that exist solely through collective agreement. Unfortunately they are not the same thing. Legality is the set of rules that the state defines to control its citizen's behavior, morality is the set of rules that citizens define themselves.
In an ideal world, the same thing, perhaps. In reality, often quite different. It is legal for a crook to pay expensive lawyers to try to keep him out of jail, but immoral. It is moral for a citizen to refuse to pay taxes to a government whose policies he disagrees with, but illegal.
And then, of course, legality depends on context, since laws are made and applied at many levels, from city to UN. Morality also applies at many levels, from the individual to the global community.
Very, very often these frameworks are incoherent and contradictory, and this is probably inevitable and even necessary if they are to accomodate the richness between and within societies.
The moral frameworks of the young, and old, for instance are quite often very different, and reflect the different viewpoints of the individuals within their societies. These differences are often striking. The young often rebel, the old often control. When many young people choose a certain behavior that goes against existing trends defined and enforced by old people, it is almost always illegal, by definition. That does not make it immoral.
Debating these is like debating one's favourite color. Blue! No, Red! BLUE!! RED, DAMN YOU ALL!!! Only there is often money and power at stake, as is the case with digital media and illegal (or immoral) copying and distribution.
What it comes down to is this: can the existing moral and legal systems accomodate and/or suppress the changes demanded of them by a discontended youth? Yes, no, maybe. If yes, how? If no, what will happen? Revolution, suppression, or disassociation (i.e. 'forking')? That should be the real debate.
What I said was "Sequel to...". Resident Evil, which was a silly movie but with a lucious performance by Jovovich, ended with her awakening in a hospital, alone in a deserted and dead city. This is where "28 Days Later" starts, and that was my statement. Probably much too subtle for the US market, I admit. Next time I will explain it slow-ly usi-in short words and many dia-grams.
(When it came out in Belgium).
Bloody great movie, mate, a remake of John Wyndham's Day of the Triffids only wiff cockney vampire zombies. Bloke wakes up from a come, finds himself all alone in London on a grey monday morning. Not a bleedin' soul. Stumbles into a church, gets attacked by a bunch of howling crazy red-eyed winos, and saved by a duo dressed in tank glasses and leather. The film only gets better and better, exploring some serious themes in a generously superficial manner: the individual against society (what bleeding society, they're all dead!), sexism (army squad saves hero and ladies, then tries to kill hero and rape ladies), abuse of power (same army squad) and armageddon (play with fire, get burnt).
Actually it was a cool movie, going lightly on the monster makeup and relying heavily on the viewer's own imagination. It may be too subtle for the US market, clearly a UK film, dry and sharp. Think of it as the film as the sequel to Resident Evil, without Milla Jovovich but with an equally sexy Naomie Harris.
I think you are confusing Estonia and Lithuania. Estonia has always been one of the better organized of the Baltic republics, even in the era of the USSR, and one of the first to define and push towards a new west-facing economy thereafter.
Dramatise if you must, but get your facts right.
1. take VulnXML db
2. convert to OpenSTA script
3. run OpenSTA
I spent several months working in Nigeria from 1999-2001. My client, a large business, had installed expensive VSAT links to its six or seven locations around the country - Lagos, Ibadan, Kano, etc. The satellite links provided a data channel (128kpbs, I think) and two voice channels. But what people really used the network for was VoIP, since the normal Nytel phone lines are so bad. People would find a pair of loudspeakers, a microphone, Netmeeting, and then shout at their PCs all day long. Very funny.
I predict that this will become standard procedure. Say a murderer leaves a DNA trace, but this matches nothing on record. It will be possible to match this DNA against known samples to come up with a fairly accurate picture of the criminal's ethnic origins, facial features, blood type, and much more.
Quite probably police will be able to search for criminals by family or community, much more precise than saying "an asian male did this", more like "we're looking for a young chinese from Guandong province who has long ears and eyes of this and that shape".
Eventually, a single DNA sample will allow scientists to create a detailed facial reconstruction, the only problem for identification being the age of the perp. And that can be pinpointed too, since DNA frays at the edges over time, and this fraying can be measured.
DNA profiling is probably the single most important anti-crime tool of the future. It will make it almost impossible to escape punishment for one's acts.
The big question will be (and it is almost too late to answer this) whether society is willing to pay the price for this security. I suspect the answer is "YES" for most people except theoretical libertarians. I think most people are wrong on this.
The tentacles of the state reach too far already, and that crime is not solvable by a better police system, but by better social structures. I was burglared last month, robbed of about $30,000. The thieves left a cigarette stub on the carpet. Yet would it really be a good thing to apprehend them and put them into prison?
It's an easy answer but prison is like crime college. Lock up a small thief and release a hardened criminal.
Conclusion: the current trend towards giving the state more power, aided by the sword of science, will not result in more security. Technological solutions are not a replacement for social policies that attack the causes of crime, by providing youths with alternative careers, and by dismantling the structures of power that nuture organized crime.
The answer should be obvious: a web server able to run on a C64 can run on any embedded system that can emulate a 6502 CPU. This means I can put a web server into my mouse. The possibilities are stunning...
Isn't the next logical step to ask Bill to kill spammers?
First the Winloo, then this monster. Wake up, Slashdot, this is a parody by some over-active marketing execs in Toshiba. Toshiba has for years been fighting the tendency to make large portables, being smart people and understanding that the sweetspot for portable screens is 14.2" the way God intended.
This invention is clearly designed as ridiculo in absurdum, mockery by over-sincere imitation. It is a fine form of that lost art we call "irony".
Clearly no-one is going to buy this, but just in case someone was tempted, they have lowered the specifications further. The screen resolution gives it away - my mobile phone has a higher resolution, and those sly guys at Toshiba, they know it.
Rumour has it that Toshiba is actually going to announce a new line of ultraportables that are revolutionary because you can carry them around all day without pain, and the batteries run for more than 3 hours even during normal work.
This monstrosity is just meant to create some noise so that Toshiba's new "carryme" line will find a receptive audience.
Toshiba, congratulations on an excellent gimmick!!
In those days, 'audiovisual feedback' actually meant something. Long rolls of dead tree recording every single charxxxacaaxxxx ^h^h\H^H^H/d/d ^C^C^Q^Deof.DAMN...
Raising the GPL as "exposing companies to legal risks" is playing games with concepts. The GPL defines what can and can't be done with software written under that license. It does not, and cannot, define commercial conditions and liabilities for using the software. This is firstly a matter for national legal systems, and secondly a matter for contracts between parties.
Let us imagine for a second that this is actually a fault in the GPL. Now, what about public domain software (not GPL), such as software freely provided by computer manufacturers, or by individuals or groups. Exactly the same issues apply: writing such software can expose the programmer and company to liability, and using such software means you have to accept that no-one is liable.
Now how about commercial software. Is this any different? No, it can be criticised for exactly the same reasons.
So, it's clear that the so-called study is a misdirection. The GPL is about ownership and freedom, the study is about legal liabilities. No matter who owns the software, the legal liabilities remain shared between the author and the user, as defined by contracts and legislation.
That the study was paid for by a group representing commercial software vendors suggests that the deep pockets of interested parties lie behind it. Why Frankfurt, Germany? Because Germany is at the fore-front of the OSS revolution. (Note that my company has been distributing OSS products since 1997 and a steady 9-10% of all downloads have been from Germany, against 40-50% from the USA and 30-40% from the rest of the world).
The study is bunkum and can be dismissed easily, since taken to its logical conclusion, no-one should write software at all, and no company should use any product whatsoever if they are not able and willing to sue the person making it.
Actually you are wrong. I grew up in Africa and spent much time in Kenya, Tanzania, Congo, Angola, Burkina Faso, Nigeria, and Rwanda.
The trade in weapons is like the trade in ivory or diamonds or landmines: easily controlled if there is a political will to do so.
A basic analysis of the many bush wars in Africa show that the free availability of small arms are the primary enabling factor, although several other factors are also required, most damaging the interests of outside parties in mineral exploitation.
The huge numbers of civilian wounded and dead in these invisible and unsung bush wars goes beyond anything you can imagine. The trade in arms is a cynical exploitation of the instabilities that oil, diamonds, and other precious minerals provoke. Governments backed by foreign groups battle rebels backed by yet other foreign groups, and each time it is the civilian population that is caught in the cross-fire.
Banning the trade in arms to Africa is eminently feasible and would be the greatest contribution to improved living standards for much of Africa. The fact that organized politics does not call for such a ban lies in the fact that the African bush wars profit many people in the west.
Africa does not, as you suggest, have wars because there are many so people. In fact the continent is becoming depopulated: the largest African countries (Sudan, Angola, Congo) are extremely underpopulated.
Blaming the victims is a poor answer to problems.
Lastly, you think that the forests are ripped up in order to lay cable? Think again: timber is cut down to be sold. If there are people living in the forests, kill them or enslave them as workers, it's so much simpler than arguing with them.
WiFi is so cool when you can buy an AK47 for $150 and hand-grenades for $3 in such lovely spots as Congo DRC, Indonesia's lost islands, the WWI memorial frontier between Ethiopia and Eritrea, etc.
The the undeveloping nations of the 3rd world desperately need something much simpler: peace. This is beyond the UN's capacity to deliver, but a firm statement that the weapons trade is an evil that must be abolished would be a great start.
The 3.5 million dead in Congo during the last 5 years is worth something more than a campaign for WiFi, IMHO.
Actually I can run gigabit over the CAT5 cabling. No big deal. It just takes my trusty Dremel to slice a 1/4" hole in the NIC, about 2.5mm above the PCI slot connector, so that I can run a length of bullshit conductor down the left-hand side.
And a good occasion for gathering signatures against software patents in Europe.
Developer: I'd like to use Linux for this project.
Manager: I'll check with our suppliers to see if they support Linux.
Suppliers: hahahaha.
Manager: sorry, developer, company policy is clear: no support, no project.
Developer: COM+ gnash MTS splutter IIS damnation.
Easy to say that patents are necessary to make money. I run a business and spend much of my life making inventions. Patents are out of my reach, not being a lawyer or being able to pay for one full time. Conclusion: the many things I invent and make I cannot patent, yet I am faced with companies who patent things they cannot make.
It is not a fair playing field, and patents are not about protecting hard work, they are about exploiting one's ability to work burocracy in order to get exclusive trading rights.
Your sarcasm is misplaced, some honest and useful dialog would be much better.
Actually, wrong. Because it's open source, any company can take the application, make a "better" version, and sell or distribute it. (With source, they have to adhere to the license.)
You imply that OSS means user unfriendly, but this is speaking in bad faith. I'm an OSS developer and my applications have always been extremely nice to use.
Specifically with OpenOffice, the interface does have a few things (like the imitation paperclip) that annoy but overall it is extremely clean and the quality of the design comes over in its minimalism and efficiency.
I'm fairly sure that you can report your usability concerns to the OOo team and they will take them into account.
The argument against software patents is made on three grounds:
1. the products of the software industry are so large and complex (because of the lack of physical constraints) that the scale of 'invention' is hundreds times greater than in the physical world.
2. patents are expensive (10k Euro in Europe) and rarely can small businesses or individuals afford to aquire them.
3. even when people overcome point 2, they find that the large patent portfolios of large companies render their patents useless.
Conclusion: large companies purchase patents in order to protect not their inventions, but their competitive advantage. Since innovation comes from smaller teams, patents thus work against innovation.
Software patents exaggerate what is a manageable problem with physical patents, and turn it into a serious problem for smaller designers. Basically patents allow large businesses to collaborate with burocracy to create barriers against the entrance of smaller groups.
This is bad, corrupt, and economically stupid.
End of argument.
My house is wired with CAT5, every room
leading down to the server room with a
couple of patch panels.
Taking my trusty Dremel I modded some
CAT5 cables so that output from my MP3
player went into the wall and came out
in the server room. Now took random
patch cables and hooked-up outputs around
the house. After this success, I devised
two CAT5-to-speaker cable types (LEFT and
RIGHT) that let me hook up speakers in
any room in the house.
Actually, it works well. I never thought
UTP would carry the speaker signal, but it
does, and the computer network does not
seem to mind.
Old joke. The only intelligent life
in my office is the cat, who knows
that it's better to sleep in the sun
than to push bytes in the shadows.
Grand plans are great, but small steps
are what it takes.
In any case, the 'crash and burn' part was deep and profound. It is a glorious thing to send objects into the air and watch them explode.
Thus continuing a great tradition of first flights.
If it does not crash and burn it was not a good test.