The first time this happened, it was mostly driven by fear of the new medium. The execs and counsel at TSR looked at what was floating around the pre-web net and freaked out, concerned about the potential loss of sales and damage to rights of ownership.
This one seems to be the money concern all over again. Obviously, someone peeked under the sheets at WotC and decided the numbers weren't working for them.
I know pen-and-paper games are uniquely piratable, but it's funny to me that after all this time and so many new, "open" business models, the gaming companies still fail to capitalize on the goodwill of their consumers.
There's money out there, if you engage your audience correctly. Why is that so hard to get right in this industry?
Before you freak out about a screen that can see, let me offer one memory I have from back in Apple's early days. In, I believe, 1984, Apple produced a sales promo video intended for Apple employees that showed what a future laptop computer might look like. It featured the "Knowledge Navigator" bow-tie guy from some of the other Apple videos, as well as interactive voice response interface and some advanced display technologies.
The one vignette I'm thinking of from the video showed an adult man, maybe late 40s, sitting on a park bench with his future Apple laptop displaying a simple reading primer. At that point, it comes across that the man is functionally illiterate, and the machine is teaching him to read. The lesson ends, and the man picks up a newspaper and says to his computer, "Now, I want to read this." He takes a marker, circles an article in the paper's sports pages, and presses the paper against the screen of his laptop. About three seconds later, the machine beeps in the familiar way and the article is then displayed, primer-style, on the screen. Words are large and clear, and change color syllable by syllable as the man slowly makes his way through the article, occasionally getting some guidance from the machine.
This vision, as much as the elegance of the machines themselves, is what keeps me buying Apples year on year. Can you imagine how empowering this would be for education? What about you personally? Can't read Greek? Or Russian? Or Aramaic? Now you can. Go read Neal Stephenson's "Diamond Age" for a fully fleshed-out version of this meme.
Like any new technology, there's room to panic about misapplication, but there's room to rejoice at the opportunity, too, don't you think?
"Who is accountable for the security of the Linux kernel?"
This is the strength of the Open Source development model. Every piece of code is transparent and available for audit by anyone from you and your IT staff all the way up to trusted governmental and academic bodies.
I just read Clemens' letter and dashed this off. The next time someone tries to tell you that Open Source is bad, hopefully these might help. Please feel free to add on and flesh out the arguments with better ones, links, etc.
-------
Analogy: This is no different from complaining that Medicins Sans Frontiers give away their medical skills for free or that Habitat for Humanity offer the efforts of skilled tradesmen at no cost.
Refutation: Assertion. You will need money. Rebuttal. Participating in an Open Source project doesn't eliminate my other opportunities to make money. In fact, it has occasionally created opportunities for development work. R. Participation is scalable, much like charitable giving. R. Participation has value in and of itself in increased skills and industry contacts, both of which facilitate making money in my field of choice.
A. Companies benefit from your work. R. That's the point. Benefiting the common good means benefiting corporate citizens equally with private ones. R. Companies aren't the only ones downloading Samba, Gnome, etc. In fact, IIRC, Samba was created because the developer wanted to share a printer with his wife. Individuals benefit from my work. R. By removing the profit incentive to write and release software, Open Source developers enable development and exploration of new techniques and technologies that might not have ever been explored simply because no one could conceive of a short-term way to profit from them. R. Someone else using my software in no way limits the benefits I receive from using my software.
A. The whole thing about "free software" is a lie created by people who have a keen interest in having cheap software so that they can drive down their own cost and profit more; or by people who can easily demand it, because they make their money out of speaking at conferences or write books about how nice it is to have free software. R. Free software was created by Stallman, OSF, etc. (Needs detailed research, but you get the idea.) R. Some companies are able to realize a profit from supporting or re-distributing specific combinations of Open Source software. This is almost universally a company adding value in the form of subject-matter expertise and profiting in the process. They are profiting from the added value, not the software. R. The economic barrier to entry for an Open Source company is very low. Anyone with an entrepreneurial bent and a sufficiently competitive idea can do the same kind of bundling and consulting that an IBM can. In time, it's possible for anyone to grow a company that can compete with IBM in this space. R. Getting paid to advocate an idea is not a bad thing. In fact, if I could make a living advocating something that benefited society as opposed to, say, trying to sell chicken rotisseries, I would consider that an ethical victory.
A. At the bottom of the food chain are people like you, who are easily fooled by the "let's make the world a better place" rhetoric and who are so enthusiastic about technology that writing open-source - or any source for that matter - is the absolutely best imaginable way to spend their time. It doesn't matter whether you love what you are doing and consider this the hobby you want to spend 110% of your time on: It's exploitation by companies who are not at all interested in creating stuff. They want to use your stuff for free. That's why they trick you into doing it. R. I am not at the bottom of the food chain. In fact, I maintain ownership and control of all my work, and I am able to choose the terms under which I license it, just like any other author. No one is allowed to use my work without my explicit complicity. R. I am not easily fooled, and your grounds for asserting that I am seem to stem from the single conclusion that because I support Open Source, I must somehow be unintelligent. This is, on it's face, a logical failure, compounded by a lack of supporting evidence. Please stop saying it. R. No one is tricked
I put in a network in a million dollar house (a friend's, not mine) perched on a cliff face in the Ozarks. They used DirecWay for connectivity and a cheap Dell PC running Wingate for the router. The following observations apply:
1. The original equipment installer makes a big difference. There are a lot of details to keep track of, and a missed detail creates huge problems later. On our site, the installer aimed the feed horn at the wrong satellite. Hughes/DirecWay thought the box was in one subnet, when it was really in another. The thing only worked intermittently for the first three months until a DirecWay support guy noticed the IP we were getting. Rather than reassign us a new IP, we wound up having the tech come out to re-aim the dish. We discovered shortly after that that he had failed to ground the dish assembly properly, too. Wound up killing three satellite TV receivers before we figured that one out.
2. The ping times are brutal. SSH to a machine in Chicago got to the 1 second per keystroke level at one point. Games other than chess are right out.
3. Transfer speeds for longer downloads are actually pretty good. Streaming was okay, too, as long as there was no unexpected return traffic.
4. There aren't too many support options for software routers, and the equipment we were using was satellite on one side and USB cable on the other. Wingate, as it turns out, has a native driver for the Hughes USB equipment. There's an open source project, too, but configuring a Linux box to use one of these things is pretty hairy. I believe there's newer equipment available now that will output to an ethernet port, but you might want to do some research there.
5. The DirecWay software is Windows-based. It installs either on a lone client machine, or on the gateway PC alongside the router software. The latest version is pretty stable, but the software is closely tied to the firmware in the transceivers you get from DirecWay, so version upgrades and bug fixes have to happen separately for every kind of equipment they have in the field. This means bugs tend to linger a while.
6. Weather is a factor. High-sun days heat the dish and cause something called thermal fade, or heat fade. Sunspots are a big deal, especially this year. Rain isn't too bad, nor is snow. Electrical storms, however, are a show stopper. I don't know about Ann Arbor, but Shell Knob, MO gets some of the most amazing lightning storms I've ever seen. In the spring, this rig was down a few hours every night for a few weeks.
7. Support is spotty. The first-tier guys are, frankly, miserable. They don't even do much of a job reading the scripted answers off the cards. The second-tier support "specialists" are a different matter; very knowledgeable and extremely willing to "own your issue" until it is resolved. Sadly, I know this because I've had to deal with three of them. Field installers are almost all subcontractors. DirecWay uses their network of satellite TV installers to deploy the internet equipment. Some of them know what they're doing. Some are in the field because their landscaping job was taken over by a cheaper laborer. There's no way to know which you'll get.
8. There are a lot of variables in this particular setup. You're radiating high-frequency RF into open space, and a million things can happen to the signal en route. Some of the equipment in this setup lives in space along with radiation, thermal swings that would surprise a Midwesterner, meteors, sunspots, and what-have-you; sometimes things just don't work for a while. Hughes is trying to either sell off or retool this whole endeavor; as a result, what they do with your packets once they receive them isn't entirely predictable from week to week.
All in all, it took us a year or so to get this running as well as it is. At peak performance, it's about 400k down and 50k up, with 800ms+ ping times. It stalls about ten times a month (or more) for weather, software hangs or freak space gremlins. We rely on Wingate's squid cache to m
Oh, there's a rabbit, all right...
on
Back To SCO
·
· Score: 0, Redundant
Magicians hate me because I always look -away- from where the misdirection is obviously pointing, and I always see the wires. I don't know enough about the politics of this whole situation to be able to tell you where to look, but I know this: Darl McBride is a master manipulator and very expert at controlling a situation. So, with his letter so obviously a troll, what is it he's got you -not- looking at? Heaven knows this man has something coming in from another direction, waiting to say "Ta daaaah!" to the shareholders. What is it?
Search Results
Perform another SEARCH or a SUBMIT
Error Running HTX File:
file://camsx/camfind1.htx
Database error: [S1001][Microsoft][ODBC Microsoft Access Driver] System resource exceeded.
Slashdot Mirror
The first time this happened, it was mostly driven by fear of the new medium. The execs and counsel at TSR looked at what was floating around the pre-web net and freaked out, concerned about the potential loss of sales and damage to rights of ownership.
This one seems to be the money concern all over again. Obviously, someone peeked under the sheets at WotC and decided the numbers weren't working for them.
I know pen-and-paper games are uniquely piratable, but it's funny to me that after all this time and so many new, "open" business models, the gaming companies still fail to capitalize on the goodwill of their consumers.
There's money out there, if you engage your audience correctly. Why is that so hard to get right in this industry?
Don't worry, I'm pretty sure this is just a Cloverfield promotion...
Before you freak out about a screen that can see, let me offer one memory I have from back in Apple's early days. In, I believe, 1984, Apple produced a sales promo video intended for Apple employees that showed what a future laptop computer might look like. It featured the "Knowledge Navigator" bow-tie guy from some of the other Apple videos, as well as interactive voice response interface and some advanced display technologies.
The one vignette I'm thinking of from the video showed an adult man, maybe late 40s, sitting on a park bench with his future Apple laptop displaying a simple reading primer. At that point, it comes across that the man is functionally illiterate, and the machine is teaching him to read. The lesson ends, and the man picks up a newspaper and says to his computer, "Now, I want to read this." He takes a marker, circles an article in the paper's sports pages, and presses the paper against the screen of his laptop. About three seconds later, the machine beeps in the familiar way and the article is then displayed, primer-style, on the screen. Words are large and clear, and change color syllable by syllable as the man slowly makes his way through the article, occasionally getting some guidance from the machine.
This vision, as much as the elegance of the machines themselves, is what keeps me buying Apples year on year. Can you imagine how empowering this would be for education? What about you personally? Can't read Greek? Or Russian? Or Aramaic? Now you can. Go read Neal Stephenson's "Diamond Age" for a fully fleshed-out version of this meme.
Like any new technology, there's room to panic about misapplication, but there's room to rejoice at the opportunity, too, don't you think?
"Who is accountable for the security of the Linux kernel?"
This is the strength of the Open Source development model. Every piece of code is transparent and available for audit by anyone from you and your IT staff all the way up to trusted governmental and academic bodies.
Who's accountable? You are!
I just read Clemens' letter and dashed this off. The next time someone tries to tell you that Open Source is bad, hopefully these might help. Please feel free to add on and flesh out the arguments with better ones, links, etc.
-------
Analogy:
This is no different from complaining that Medicins Sans Frontiers give away their medical skills for free or that Habitat for Humanity offer the efforts of skilled tradesmen at no cost.
Refutation:
Assertion. You will need money.
Rebuttal. Participating in an Open Source project doesn't eliminate my other opportunities to make money. In fact, it has occasionally created opportunities for development work.
R. Participation is scalable, much like charitable giving.
R. Participation has value in and of itself in increased skills and industry contacts, both of which facilitate making money in my field of choice.
A. Companies benefit from your work.
R. That's the point. Benefiting the common good means benefiting corporate citizens equally with private ones.
R. Companies aren't the only ones downloading Samba, Gnome, etc. In fact, IIRC, Samba was created because the developer wanted to share a printer with his wife. Individuals benefit from my work.
R. By removing the profit incentive to write and release software, Open Source developers enable development and exploration of new techniques and technologies that might not have ever been explored simply because no one could conceive of a short-term way to profit from them.
R. Someone else using my software in no way limits the benefits I receive from using my software.
A. The whole thing about "free software" is a lie created by people who have a keen interest in having cheap software so that they can drive down their own cost and profit more; or by people who can easily demand it, because they make their money out of speaking at conferences or write books about how nice it is to have free software.
R. Free software was created by Stallman, OSF, etc. (Needs detailed research, but you get the idea.)
R. Some companies are able to realize a profit from supporting or re-distributing specific combinations of Open Source software. This is almost universally a company adding value in the form of subject-matter expertise and profiting in the process. They are profiting from the added value, not the software.
R. The economic barrier to entry for an Open Source company is very low. Anyone with an entrepreneurial bent and a sufficiently competitive idea can do the same kind of bundling and consulting that an IBM can. In time, it's possible for anyone to grow a company that can compete with IBM in this space.
R. Getting paid to advocate an idea is not a bad thing. In fact, if I could make a living advocating something that benefited society as opposed to, say, trying to sell chicken rotisseries, I would consider that an ethical victory.
A. At the bottom of the food chain are people like you, who are easily fooled by the "let's make the world a better place" rhetoric and who are so enthusiastic about technology that writing open-source - or any source for that matter - is the absolutely best imaginable way to spend their time. It doesn't matter whether you love what you are doing and consider this the hobby you want to spend 110% of your time on: It's exploitation by companies who are not at all interested in creating stuff. They want to use your stuff for free. That's why they trick you into doing it.
R. I am not at the bottom of the food chain. In fact, I maintain ownership and control of all my work, and I am able to choose the terms under which I license it, just like any other author. No one is allowed to use my work without my explicit complicity.
R. I am not easily fooled, and your grounds for asserting that I am seem to stem from the single conclusion that because I support Open Source, I must somehow be unintelligent. This is, on it's face, a logical failure, compounded by a lack of supporting evidence. Please stop saying it.
R. No one is tricked
I put in a network in a million dollar house (a friend's, not mine) perched on a cliff face in the Ozarks. They used DirecWay for connectivity and a cheap Dell PC running Wingate for the router. The following observations apply:
1. The original equipment installer makes a big difference. There are a lot of details to keep track of, and a missed detail creates huge problems later. On our site, the installer aimed the feed horn at the wrong satellite. Hughes/DirecWay thought the box was in one subnet, when it was really in another. The thing only worked intermittently for the first three months until a DirecWay support guy noticed the IP we were getting. Rather than reassign us a new IP, we wound up having the tech come out to re-aim the dish. We discovered shortly after that that he had failed to ground the dish assembly properly, too. Wound up killing three satellite TV receivers before we figured that one out.
2. The ping times are brutal. SSH to a machine in Chicago got to the 1 second per keystroke level at one point. Games other than chess are right out.
3. Transfer speeds for longer downloads are actually pretty good. Streaming was okay, too, as long as there was no unexpected return traffic.
4. There aren't too many support options for software routers, and the equipment we were using was satellite on one side and USB cable on the other. Wingate, as it turns out, has a native driver for the Hughes USB equipment. There's an open source project, too, but configuring a Linux box to use one of these things is pretty hairy. I believe there's newer equipment available now that will output to an ethernet port, but you might want to do some research there.
5. The DirecWay software is Windows-based. It installs either on a lone client machine, or on the gateway PC alongside the router software. The latest version is pretty stable, but the software is closely tied to the firmware in the transceivers you get from DirecWay, so version upgrades and bug fixes have to happen separately for every kind of equipment they have in the field. This means bugs tend to linger a while.
6. Weather is a factor. High-sun days heat the dish and cause something called thermal fade, or heat fade. Sunspots are a big deal, especially this year. Rain isn't too bad, nor is snow. Electrical storms, however, are a show stopper. I don't know about Ann Arbor, but Shell Knob, MO gets some of the most amazing lightning storms I've ever seen. In the spring, this rig was down a few hours every night for a few weeks.
7. Support is spotty. The first-tier guys are, frankly, miserable. They don't even do much of a job reading the scripted answers off the cards. The second-tier support "specialists" are a different matter; very knowledgeable and extremely willing to "own your issue" until it is resolved. Sadly, I know this because I've had to deal with three of them. Field installers are almost all subcontractors. DirecWay uses their network of satellite TV installers to deploy the internet equipment. Some of them know what they're doing. Some are in the field because their landscaping job was taken over by a cheaper laborer. There's no way to know which you'll get.
8. There are a lot of variables in this particular setup. You're radiating high-frequency RF into open space, and a million things can happen to the signal en route. Some of the equipment in this setup lives in space along with radiation, thermal swings that would surprise a Midwesterner, meteors, sunspots, and what-have-you; sometimes things just don't work for a while. Hughes is trying to either sell off or retool this whole endeavor; as a result, what they do with your packets once they receive them isn't entirely predictable from week to week.
All in all, it took us a year or so to get this running as well as it is. At peak performance, it's about 400k down and 50k up, with 800ms+ ping times. It stalls about ten times a month (or more) for weather, software hangs or freak space gremlins. We rely on Wingate's squid cache to m
Magicians hate me because I always look -away- from where the misdirection is obviously pointing, and I always see the wires. I don't know enough about the politics of this whole situation to be able to tell you where to look, but I know this: Darl McBride is a master manipulator and very expert at controlling a situation. So, with his letter so obviously a troll, what is it he's got you -not- looking at? Heaven knows this man has something coming in from another direction, waiting to say "Ta daaaah!" to the shareholders. What is it?
R.
This puts in me in mind of a couple of novels:
David Brin - Earth
and
Bruce Sterling - Islands in the Net
Couple of neat stories with ubiquitous cameras as part of the social dynamic. Sick of being watched? Check out iSee.
Search Results Perform another SEARCH or a SUBMIT Error Running HTX File: file://camsx/camfind1.htx Database error: [S1001][Microsoft][ODBC Microsoft Access Driver] System resource exceeded.