Perhaps 2004 will not be the year when Linux makes it big. Maybe not 2005, 2006, or even 2007. But it is becoming clear to every honest observer that Microsoft is running out of time. Their business model sits smack in the middle of that part of the software ecology that has become commoditized. They are selling ice in an age of cheap refrigeration. It's hardly even worth asking 'when'. Frankly, who cares whether it's next year or in 10 years. The only interesting questions are, IMHO, (a) how can Microsoft survive (and it ain't gonna happen by producing TCO studies!), and (b) what will happen to the software world if MS does not survive. Open Source software is a threat only to some classes of commercial software producer, and it's a boon to every single software consumer. Attempts to polarize this debate into "opinion" and "zealotry" miss the point: it's about technology curves and the way they change the economics of doing business.
I just submitted this as a story, but it's relevant. A leaked email from SCO shows that SCO received around $100m from Mircosoft. The Register has the details. The war is cold only because Microsoft is unsure of how an overt war would be seen by regulators and clients. But cold wars can be damaging - just look at Africa and South America in the last decades.
Prediction about "social network software"
on
ICQ Universe
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
This round is a fad.
It will last about 2-3 years and then disappear as people realize that the software does not support the true exchanges that keep human social networks running.
And in 5-10 years someone will build social networking software that really works. Some clues: men and women build different kinds of social networks. Younger and older people build different kinds of network. Information has value. People trade information. Social networks are information economies.
Every time Microsoft announce a new gadget I see them trying to define a new platform where they can sell OS licenses. Does anyone really want to reboot their jewelry every few days because it has a memory leak?
But seriously, what happens when people start to wear cameras all the time? Saunas, changing rooms, neighbour's teenage daughter undressi... Oops, I did not mean to be standing in that direction. Sometimes the things we see are best kept private.
*ster rehabilitated for 2004?
on
See Spot Surf
·
· Score: 4, Funny
The coolster suffix for all those dudesters who dream of starting their own boomster sitester.
Catster.com for pussies? Ratster for rodents? How about Hamster.com for those who like smoked pig thighs? Chickster.com for girls?
I mean, seriously. I'm not trolling, just scratching my head...
We are sitting on a planet that has everything we could possibly want. Water, food, sun, beaches, fresh mangos, carnival once a year, beer, ADSL for peanuts.
And now the hint of the memory of water on Mars is enough to give us sciencegasms of pleasure. "Oooh, water, bacterial lifeforms,"... I know, water = life, life = understanding, etc.
But it seems so perverse. There is such a huge waste of life and resources going on all around us. Nothing we ever find on Mars will be remotely as interesting as - say - a bucket of seawater from any corner of the world's oceans. We'll spend fortunes trying to extract a few nuggets of knowledge from the furthest corners of our domain while ignoring the mountains of knowledge that remain to be unpuzzled all around us.
Webster's defines this as "having completed natural growth and development". I think that is precisely what I meant.
If jocks and nerds are competing, it is for access to sex, through one strategy or another. Jocks mature early because they adopt a strategy that works young: bigger, faster, more successful at physical sports. Nerds compete with a strategy that works older: collect technical skills and build into business accumen over time.
The statement that jocks are still "immature at 30" is easily countered when we see that they in fact completed their development at 18, and will forever remain that mental age. Mature, thus.
Most nerds are men, and men change their priorities and attitudes over time. My rule of thumb is that the jocks mature early, the nerds mature late.
A nerd invests hugely in a technical subject and should, with time, be able to leverage that into a high value career. So it's quite normal that many men who were totally nerdy in their teens and twenties become relaxed, charming, social, and wealthy as they get older and more succesful.
The GPL is not just the agenda of an extremist code liberty organisation. It's also the basic constitution of a large part of the Internet.
The fact that Apache has been moving towards a GPL-compatible license and away from the more open earlier licenses shows that there is a desire to benefit from some of the protection that the GPL offers.
(As a free software author, I've made the same move from liberal BSD-style licenses to the GPL in the last years, swayed in part by Stallman's argument that anything less than the GPL helps commercial competitors more than open source developers.)
The compatibility of these two licenses is essential if we're to see Apache smoothly integrated into wider GPL'd frameworks.
The FSF appears quite flexible in considering changes to the GPL for future versions, and I suspect the Apache Group are important enough to push through what they need.
It's an important discussion and one I'll be following.
Not exactly the state of mind of most people when they purchase that ultra-compact incredibly powerful new machine using the PHP's lost credit card. I hate to ask this, but what kind of terrible Freudian traumas did you suffer as a child?
Mother: Pudge, are you surfing in there? Pudge: Yes, mom, now leave me alone? Mother: Two-hand surfing, Pudge! And stay away from newsnet! Pudge: Grrrr... mumble. Thank god for peer-to-... Mother: And no Kazaa either! Pudge: Damn!
But where the components of the computer are small bricks that fit together like Logo. Assemble anything you like out of a pile of bricks, plug it in and it boots and does something fun. Ideally the bricks should be plastic and unbreakable, and made to a standard so that different vendors can produce speciality bricks.
Apart from the minor technical details involved in implementation, this would make the use of computers much more flexible. Not to mention fun, as we replace the computing brick in the boss's PC with a fish tank, and build ourselves entire walls of disk brick to hold our movies.
I think the comment proposes distributed computing, not clustering. This is pretty reasonable wrt network consumption. (seti@home is not known for slowing down your net connection!)
I have an idea as how to make Wifi hotspots economical. Imagine the Matrix meets Slashdot - in our wifi hotspot, imagine a network that sucks the living cycles from a beowulf cluster of you!
Here is the deal... to use a hotspot you have to download a package that connects your computer to the local "grid". In exchange for network access the grid gets your spare CPU cycles. The best hotspots could leverage the power of hundreds of notebooks, and then resell this on the market as a computing resource commodity, for multiplayer games, data crunching, whatever.
Though... I'm running a high fever and this is perhaps the fruit of a deranged mind.
The article describes the encryption technique as a way of signing open source code. But psudo-randomly changing all the program's variable names, in the source code, apart from being impossible to do at 'runtime' (it's source, remember), makes the open source code aspects null.
How can you submit a kernel patch that contains mangled code?
Bah. A useless article that hypes a junk technology designed to solve a false problem created by a weak solution to a weakness in a marketing-driven architecture that answers what is, anyway, a pretty simple question... how to write software people can use.
It's not rarely corporate policy to release faulty products. (Microsoft freaks, step aside, please.)
What happens is that internal politics turn problems into cover ups. Someone, somewhere decides that it's more logical to ignore the issue than to address it. The falacy continues up the line, since decisions are often based on information from 'down the line'.
The best thing IBM can do is to issue a general recall, offer generous replacement policies ("bring it in, we'll fix it on the spot") and try to recover their image as a reliable drive manufacturer. Otherwise their HD business is down the drain.
Oh wait! They sold it to Fujitsu! OK, sue their asses!
Surfing the web:
- cache pages on a RAM disk and then throw them away
- no cookies
- no history, no embarassment.
- bookmarks saved in home directory on USB disk
Game saves:
- they're large because disk space is cheap. Easy to be more efficient and compress the data
- for multiplayer games, save on a server
Media burner:
- download new distros to RAM disk, then burn onto CDR or DVDR
- download photos from camera, burn immediately to CD
- download other stuff, burn immediately to CD
- requires lots of RAM but that is not an issue
Why no hard disk? Because permanent shared storage breaks the "console" model and will inevitably be used by software providers in the wrong way. Plus it makes noise, creates more cooling issues, and forces the case to be larger.
Example: you've saved your game and now you want to go play on another machine... how do you do it?
But... it's not a big deal: such boxes should be easily modded to included whatever hardware people want. Just not for the mass market.
To answer the 'why more distro' trolls, hundreds of LiveCDs does not mean thousands of Knoppix/Gnoppix clones.
It means hundreds of applications, each specialized for a particular niche, each provided in an ultimately convenient format: plug and play.
It's a lot like console computing: plug in a cartridge and play. It's so different from the "traditional" computing model where software is carefully installed into an environment...
I've always believed that the need to install software was one of the biggest handicaps with delivering software to a global public.
LiveCDs eliminate this problem. We are coming back to the 1980's when home computers booted clean and software came on cartridges. Robust, stable, cheap. Look at some of the advantages from the home user's point of view:
- no installation
- total separation of data (on some kind of memory stick?) and code
- unstable system? reboot it!
- many people can share the same hardware with no interference
- you can use any available box to run the software
Conclusion: LiveCDs are not some esoteric hack. They represent a fundamental change in the home computer paradigm, and will open the door to a huge new public that still faces computers with trepidation (and after that Windows XP virus disaster that wiped their snapshots for the third time), and some trauma.
If I was a computer manufacturer, I'd be looking at designs optimized for this way of working:
- small, silent case
- optimised for game playing
- large amount of RAM (2Gb+)
- no hard disk
- easy-access USB memory sticks
- very fast CDROM/DVDRW
- no diskette
- network, TV out, 5.1 sound, etc.
And then distribute it with a pack of 20 or so interesting Linux LiveCDs including Mythtv.
With full automation of the USPTO, planned in 2005, patents will be issued directly to pre-approved parties without the tedious business of examination. This will allow the USPTO to increase its turnover by 5000% and will reach the 10bn mark in late 2007. The pre-approval process will also be streamlined so that a single large contribution to the political party in power suffices to purchase bulk patents. Breath now while it's still Free!
Superrat "Mitee Mus" runs for governor of the Democratic Republic of California, winning 63% of the votes. Standing 7'3" tall, weighing 120kg and gifted with an IQ of 192, Mitee Mus told reporters "Now I can get to the real business of building nice warm nests for every Californian". He is married to the cousin of a Kennedy.
No, no, been there, done that. No moon and you get into an infinite outer loop!
You need the moon, see, to arrange a decent center of gravity so you get an inner loop. Inner loop = closer to the Sun, so more light. More light = increased photosynthesis, means more plants, and thus space for protein-based intelligence.
You need the moon, take it from me.
Drop the moon and you get the Deep Space of Death. (DSoD).
Signed - A Lesser God
(Outsourced to India circa AD2004, still available for minor miracles and miscellaneous magiks. Please call first, the wife does not like visitors.)
Slashdot Mirror
And you are reading Slashdot how, exactly?
The Internet is built on open source software.
Perhaps 2004 will not be the year when Linux makes it big. Maybe not 2005, 2006, or even 2007. But it is becoming clear to every honest observer that Microsoft is running out of time. Their business model sits smack in the middle of that part of the software ecology that has become commoditized. They are selling ice in an age of cheap refrigeration.
It's hardly even worth asking 'when'. Frankly, who cares whether it's next year or in 10 years.
The only interesting questions are, IMHO, (a) how can Microsoft survive (and it ain't gonna happen by producing TCO studies!), and (b) what will happen to the software world if MS does not survive. Open Source software is a threat only to some classes of commercial software producer, and it's a boon to every single software consumer.
Attempts to polarize this debate into "opinion" and "zealotry" miss the point: it's about technology curves and the way they change the economics of doing business.
Enjoy yourselves, you deserve it.
BTW, my company is now an official corporate sponsor of the FSF, which means, I guess, that we're partly paying for the dinner. It's well worth while.
Damn. I sank to the level of the Slashdot editors. Submitted a dupe and then boasted about it... oh, the shame of it.
On the bright side, my six-month old daughter just learnt to say "blehsughhx" and stick her tongue out. I bet that wasn't posted to Slashdot yet.
I just submitted this as a story, but it's relevant. A leaked email from SCO shows that SCO received around $100m from Mircosoft. The Register has the details.
The war is cold only because Microsoft is unsure of how an overt war would be seen by regulators and clients. But cold wars can be damaging - just look at Africa and South America in the last decades.
This round is a fad.
It will last about 2-3 years and then disappear as people realize that the software does not support the true exchanges that keep human social networks running.
And in 5-10 years someone will build social networking software that really works. Some clues: men and women build different kinds of social networks. Younger and older people build different kinds of network. Information has value. People trade information. Social networks are information economies.
Every time Microsoft announce a new gadget I see them trying to define a new platform where they can sell OS licenses. Does anyone really want to reboot their jewelry every few days because it has a memory leak?
But seriously, what happens when people start to wear cameras all the time? Saunas, changing rooms, neighbour's teenage daughter undressi... Oops, I did not mean to be standing in that direction. Sometimes the things we see are best kept private.
The coolster suffix for all those dudesters who dream of starting their own boomster sitester.
Catster.com for pussies? Ratster for rodents? How about Hamster.com for those who like smoked pig thighs? Chickster.com for girls?
We can make it even more cool:
Dogsta! Chicksta! Gangsta! Hamsta!
Hey d00d, I'm a Slashsta!
I mean, seriously. I'm not trolling, just scratching my head...
We are sitting on a planet that has everything we could possibly want. Water, food, sun, beaches, fresh mangos, carnival once a year, beer, ADSL for peanuts.
And now the hint of the memory of water on Mars is enough to give us sciencegasms of pleasure. "Oooh, water, bacterial lifeforms,"... I know, water = life, life = understanding, etc.
But it seems so perverse. There is such a huge waste of life and resources going on all around us. Nothing we ever find on Mars will be remotely as interesting as - say - a bucket of seawater from any corner of the world's oceans. We'll spend fortunes trying to extract a few nuggets of knowledge from the furthest corners of our domain while ignoring the mountains of knowledge that remain to be unpuzzled all around us.
Are we just a perverse species, or what?
Webster's defines this as "having completed natural growth and development". I think that is precisely what I meant.
If jocks and nerds are competing, it is for access to sex, through one strategy or another. Jocks mature early because they adopt a strategy that works young: bigger, faster, more successful at physical sports. Nerds compete with a strategy that works older: collect technical skills and build into business accumen over time.
The statement that jocks are still "immature at 30" is easily countered when we see that they in fact completed their development at 18, and will forever remain that mental age. Mature, thus.
I hope this clarifies my original pithy analysis.
Most nerds are men, and men change their priorities and attitudes over time. My rule of thumb is that the jocks mature early, the nerds mature late.
A nerd invests hugely in a technical subject and should, with time, be able to leverage that into a high value career. So it's quite normal that many men who were totally nerdy in their teens and twenties become relaxed, charming, social, and wealthy as they get older and more succesful.
But for the discussion. If I want stories I go to El Reg. And then I end up reading every single story anyhow.
The GPL is not just the agenda of an extremist code liberty organisation. It's also the basic constitution of a large part of the Internet.
The fact that Apache has been moving towards a GPL-compatible license and away from the more open earlier licenses shows that there is a desire to benefit from some of the protection that the GPL offers.
(As a free software author, I've made the same move from liberal BSD-style licenses to the GPL in the last years, swayed in part by Stallman's argument that anything less than the GPL helps commercial competitors more than open source developers.)
The compatibility of these two licenses is essential if we're to see Apache smoothly integrated into wider GPL'd frameworks.
The FSF appears quite flexible in considering changes to the GPL for future versions, and I suspect the Apache Group are important enough to push through what they need.
It's an important discussion and one I'll be following.
Not exactly the state of mind of most people when they purchase that ultra-compact incredibly powerful new machine using the PHP's lost credit card. I hate to ask this, but what kind of terrible Freudian traumas did you suffer as a child?
Mother: Pudge, are you surfing in there?
Pudge: Yes, mom, now leave me alone?
Mother: Two-hand surfing, Pudge! And stay away from newsnet!
Pudge: Grrrr... mumble. Thank god for peer-to-...
Mother: And no Kazaa either!
Pudge: Damn!
....
:PANIC
MOV AX,DS:OSID[BX]
CMP AX,2 ; 2=Windows 3.x
JE PANIC
CMP AX,3 ; 3=Windows 9x
JE PANIC
CMP AX,4 ; 4=Windows 2K/ME/XP
JE PANIC
CMP AX,10 ; 10=Minix
JE OKAY
CMP AX,11 ; 11=...
ISSUE 'CPU BUFFER OVERFLOW ACTIVATED'
JMP PANIC
But where the components of the computer are small bricks that fit together like Logo. Assemble anything you like out of a pile of bricks, plug it in and it boots and does something fun. Ideally the bricks should be plastic and unbreakable, and made to a standard so that different vendors can produce speciality bricks.
Apart from the minor technical details involved in implementation, this would make the use of computers much more flexible. Not to mention fun, as we replace the computing brick in the boss's PC with a fish tank, and build ourselves entire walls of disk brick to hold our movies.
Now, only if I'd noted this in my journal.
I think the comment proposes distributed computing, not clustering. This is pretty reasonable wrt network consumption. (seti@home is not known for slowing down your net connection!)
It could actually work.
I have an idea as how to make Wifi hotspots economical. Imagine the Matrix meets Slashdot - in our wifi hotspot, imagine a network that sucks the living cycles from a beowulf cluster of you!
Here is the deal... to use a hotspot you have to download a package that connects your computer to the local "grid". In exchange for network access the grid gets your spare CPU cycles. The best hotspots could leverage the power of hundreds of notebooks, and then resell this on the market as a computing resource commodity, for multiplayer games, data crunching, whatever.
Though... I'm running a high fever and this is perhaps the fruit of a deranged mind.
The article describes the encryption technique as a way of signing open source code. But psudo-randomly changing all the program's variable names, in the source code, apart from being impossible to do at 'runtime' (it's source, remember), makes the open source code aspects null.
How can you submit a kernel patch that contains mangled code?
Bah. A useless article that hypes a junk technology designed to solve a false problem created by a weak solution to a weakness in a marketing-driven architecture that answers what is, anyway, a pretty simple question... how to write software people can use.
It's not rarely corporate policy to release faulty products. (Microsoft freaks, step aside, please.)
What happens is that internal politics turn problems into cover ups. Someone, somewhere decides that it's more logical to ignore the issue than to address it. The falacy continues up the line, since decisions are often based on information from 'down the line'.
The best thing IBM can do is to issue a general recall, offer generous replacement policies ("bring it in, we'll fix it on the spot") and try to recover their image as a reliable drive manufacturer. Otherwise their HD business is down the drain.
Oh wait! They sold it to Fujitsu! OK, sue their asses!
Surfing the web:
- cache pages on a RAM disk and then throw them away
- no cookies
- no history, no embarassment.
- bookmarks saved in home directory on USB disk
Game saves:
- they're large because disk space is cheap. Easy to be more efficient and compress the data
- for multiplayer games, save on a server
Media burner:
- download new distros to RAM disk, then burn onto CDR or DVDR
- download photos from camera, burn immediately to CD
- download other stuff, burn immediately to CD
- requires lots of RAM but that is not an issue
Why no hard disk? Because permanent shared storage breaks the "console" model and will inevitably be used by software providers in the wrong way. Plus it makes noise, creates more cooling issues, and forces the case to be larger.
Example: you've saved your game and now you want to go play on another machine... how do you do it?
But... it's not a big deal: such boxes should be easily modded to included whatever hardware people want. Just not for the mass market.
To answer the 'why more distro' trolls, hundreds of LiveCDs does not mean thousands of Knoppix/Gnoppix clones.
It means hundreds of applications, each specialized for a particular niche, each provided in an ultimately convenient format: plug and play.
It's a lot like console computing: plug in a cartridge and play. It's so different from the "traditional" computing model where software is carefully installed into an environment...
I've always believed that the need to install software was one of the biggest handicaps with delivering software to a global public.
LiveCDs eliminate this problem. We are coming back to the 1980's when home computers booted clean and software came on cartridges. Robust, stable, cheap. Look at some of the advantages from the home user's point of view:
- no installation
- total separation of data (on some kind of memory stick?) and code
- unstable system? reboot it!
- many people can share the same hardware with no interference
- you can use any available box to run the software
Conclusion: LiveCDs are not some esoteric hack. They represent a fundamental change in the home computer paradigm, and will open the door to a huge new public that still faces computers with trepidation (and after that Windows XP virus disaster that wiped their snapshots for the third time), and some trauma.
If I was a computer manufacturer, I'd be looking at designs optimized for this way of working:
- small, silent case
- optimised for game playing
- large amount of RAM (2Gb+)
- no hard disk
- easy-access USB memory sticks
- very fast CDROM/DVDRW
- no diskette
- network, TV out, 5.1 sound, etc.
And then distribute it with a pack of 20 or so interesting Linux LiveCDs including Mythtv.
With full automation of the USPTO, planned in 2005, patents will be issued directly to pre-approved parties without the tedious business of examination. This will allow the USPTO to increase its turnover by 5000% and will reach the 10bn mark in late 2007. The pre-approval process will also be streamlined so that a single large contribution to the political party in power suffices to purchase bulk patents.
Breath now while it's still Free!
Superrat "Mitee Mus" runs for governor of the Democratic Republic of California, winning 63% of the votes. Standing 7'3" tall, weighing 120kg and gifted with an IQ of 192, Mitee Mus told reporters "Now I can get to the real business of building nice warm nests for every Californian". He is married to the cousin of a Kennedy.
using 2 comets omitting the moon entirely
No, no, been there, done that. No moon and you get into an infinite outer loop!
You need the moon, see, to arrange a decent center of gravity so you get an inner loop. Inner loop = closer to the Sun, so more light. More light = increased photosynthesis, means more plants, and thus space for protein-based intelligence.
You need the moon, take it from me.
Drop the moon and you get the Deep Space of Death. (DSoD).
Signed
- A Lesser God
(Outsourced to India circa AD2004, still available for minor miracles and miscellaneous magiks. Please call first, the wife does not like visitors.)
((No mormons, thank you.))