Actually, I remember reading an article about this way back when. Immersion basically judged that they didn't have the money available to out lawyer Microsoft at the time so they decided not to pull a DR-DOS and just become a lawsuit company but continue to do engineering work.
It looks like now that they've got a fatter bank balance and Micorosoft has been declared a monopolist, they like their chances better.
Actually, #3 is not quite accurate. They can't encrypt because their license to use the public airwaves says that they have to do so in the public interest. It is not their publicness that disallows their encryption but the public interest clause
Credit cards are regularly accepted when the strip is demagnetized. You type in the number and do an ID check for the signature and advise the cardholder to get a replacement card.
If random rf fields can render my cash unusable I would guess that large constituencies would form to vote for new legislators to change that.
Actually, the first country to have plastic notes was Romania so have some palinca and toast those wacky transylvanians for having the guts to be first to try it out.
Since this is wireless, there will be a whole new arena for the people for whom web defacement is a hobby, currency RFID defacement. I can see it now, you're walking down the street and a 'bike messenger' passes you and changes all your currency RFID memory to cool haxor speak. If the memory isn't overwriteable, privacy advocates can simply emit signals to fill all their cash chip memory. It would cut the lifetime of the bill down to the next time it hit an RFID equipped bank but so what? It just makes this sort of bill printing prohibitively expensive.
This is going to be a new frontier in the hacker wars. Be prepared for an influx from the right wing fever swamps boys and girls. They *will* be coming.
"The teminal is not so great. It does an appalling job of color support."
Since all the low level code is freely available and open source, the development tools cost no money, it should be a snap to make a better terminal replacement (there are other problems with the app besides the color support, like load speed). So what's keeping you?
DB
Perhaps you misunderstood the 'unix application' reference. Microsoft Office for Mac OS X is a unix application as much as the GIMP is, just not a very portable one. It's not perceived to be a unix application because the interface conforms to the Apple Human Interface Guidelines and it just works. If somebody slogged through all the successful open source projects out there and created UI's that not only conformed to one set of guidelines but the *same* one, open source applications would begin to understand what a difference it makes not to have to learn or remember all those different ways of doing the same thing.
As a practical matter, you can do all that work and maybe make Linux get in the same league as Apple in a decade or so, maybe not because you'd have to do a lot of rigorous research into making those guidelines *good* and if you have to issue major revisions along the way, you'd have to herd the open source cats into following each new revision of the guideline just to make things interoperable and consistent. Apple did it by diktat and by force but they did it and from a user perspective, strong-arming the programmers so that at least one of the ways to make things work was the standard way was a great leap in useability. Is there a way to replicate this in the open source movement? I don't think so. At least there isn't one separate from taking those UI guidelines and adopting them for GIMP and the rest of the open source A team.
Feel free to provide some sort of alternate methodology.
1. Take a tube with a piston in it.
2. Attach a hose between the tube and the air checker unit
3. Pull the piston back to create suction
4. Push the piston forward to administer air.
The obvious gotcha is in throwing out values with insufficient CO2 but you could always breathe into chambers *before* you went out drinking and pass the gass through the apparatus when you wanted to go home.
Actually, that's around today, but it's in the form of speeding ticket cameras. It's a local scandal in DC that even police are getting ticketed by these systems and it's such a pain to appeal that they're slowing down their responses to calls because they won't speed or run red lights to emergencies anymore
The threat of the 2nd Amendment to usurping politicians has always been much more potent to make politicians nervous about assassination than to fight the US armed forces. The Interior department was so heavy handed during the Clinton administration that they were seriously talking about certain areas being quite high risk in implementing their land use directives. Suddenly, everything calmed down as soon as Bush got in but a Gore administration would have probably lost some agents if they kept going in that direction
I think that IBM would be more than happy to sell integration services for Enhydra as they are for WebSphere and DB2. The money isn't in the license, it's in the multi-year effort for tens of highly paid analysts going over your business logic and implementing it in software.
"Yuh huh... trying ripping off a websphere license or two and see how the great linux savior IBM will react.
The point that slashdotters tend to miss is that for 80%+ of the market the Microsoft middleware is more that good enough and is a damn sight cheaper than the *nix competition.
"
Take a look at enhydra. It doesn't matter if it isn't as scalable, useable, etc. as Websphere or BEA today (or even if it is). The point is that the same mechanics that worked for Apache is working in the application server market and will continue to work in all other markets as soon as you have also-rans or interested outsiders (Bull Software and France Telecom in Enhydra's case) willing to pour in resources to provide a free alternative.
The internal combustion engine requires lubrication in the cylinder besides having the fuel-air mixture burning. The resulting combustion products are unpredictable, gaseous, have to be gotten rid of quickly, and generally bad for people's health. If you use fuel cells, the reaction is much more predictable and the pollutants don't have to be quickly vented into the air but can be held as solids to be periodically emptied into landfill. In the case of methane, you essentially are going to end up with a charcoal briquette every once in awhile. I'd call these significant advantages.
Carbon thrown into the air and eventually into little jimmy's lungs contributing to his asthma is a major problem. Carbon that comes out and dumps into a hopper as little carbon briquets is not a major problem. Burning causes unpredictable outputs, chemical reactions are more predictable and the pollutants are either reduced or mitigated by the fact that they aren't just spewed into the air.
Now multi-fueling means that pig farmers have a secondary market and can become local fuel suppliers. If you're in farm country, you might fuel up with some nice biomass produced methane. Natural Gas is also mostly methane and can be found almost all over the country in private homes so you can top off via that source (Natural gas is usually *not* transported from the Middle East).
"just spreading out the processing stage" isn't quite accurate and even if it were, isn't quite the yawner you make it out to be. Indirect competition limits OPEC to ~$40/barrel right now because at a persistent price above that level, massive deposits that are out of their control become economic to exploit and the sheikhs aren't dumb enough to lose market share by creating new competitors. A vast majority of their foreign exchange comes from oil and if they don't pump for too long, they get overthrown by their starving people. By changing the market so we are not looking necessarily for oil per se but for hydrogen which can come from oil or other sources, we might be able to push the ceiling down into the ~$25 range. That means that if the sheikhs don't behave, we won't buy their oil and not suffer any major economic consequences (think war on terrorism). Also, it is quite likely that there are some producers of what is now categorized as waste gas that will be able to economically ship domestically into this new hydrogen market instead of burning their gas or letting it into the air as a pollutant (again, the noble pig farmer comes to mind).
On storage, you can store the NG or methane or whatever and just convert seconds before the fuel cell needs the hydrogen. No special hydrogen storage facilities needed.
Hydrogen is probably not going to come from H20 but rather from methane, natural gas, or other hydrogen rich sources that don't take as much energy to break apart as H20. The multi-fuel issue is going to set apart hydrogen because you don't need to build an infrastructure, you can use the one we already have and shift the fuel as new ones become available. Indirect competition rules the roost and OPEC pricing power is broken because all of a sudden, switching becomes possible without killing the economy.
When you don't have land ownership, Ogg will pull out rocks whether or not it disturbs a watershed and pollutes a stream killing Grog's favorite bushes. How does Grog avoid losing his favorite berry source or get compensated because he now has to go 20 minutes further to find decent berries that he can trade for axes? Wherever you don't have ownership you have the tragedy of the commons, a nasty process of overuse of common resources until they are exhausted because nobody cares enough to cry out *stop*! and halt the madness. Look up what's going on at the Aral Sea if you want to see a real life application of this tragedy. They've had capitalism for 10 years in the former USSR but no real land ownership. They pollution and destruction of the Aral Sea continued because there was no constituency for saving it.
It would be better to say that blueprints are the preferred method of civil engineers to communicate with builders. How much information via english passes between the architect, engineer, and builder? Now how much information is passed via blueprint?
Who's talking about big corporations? Small, growing companies are where it's at for job growth because they tend to be more nimble and with the right legal framework, for ever 10 that go bankrupt, another 20 spring up so even an entrepreneur with bad business plan can't kill a city or town (this happens with one industry towns all too frequently). Diversification of job opportunities is a good thing. Big companies are a good place to park yourself and plan a bold move as they go from one mediocre product/service to another.
We're fighting a semantics game here. To fix a price is to determine, at a particular time, a particular price for a unique service or good. I put my house up for sale. When I make the sale, I've fixed a price.
You are correct that rigid, state imposed price systems are not very sensible. However, if you read Adam Smith, you might find that some prices are rather fixed over the long haul (AS used wheat across a hundred years).
If it has a market, people trade with each other the things that they own. Libertarian Socialism (or anarchism if you wish) doesn't recognize ownership. "Property is theft" so why should I work to build a surplus if I can't control it, can't direct it, and it has almost no benefit for me, just an suckers share of 1/total population.
Markets without ownership just don't work. It's been tried and has always failed.
Their other current options are to go back to work at the rice farm and make almost no money working harder, hang on to an SOE job until they kick you out making hardly any money (and since all the SOEs are losing money hand over fist they are all going under eventually), or join the throngs of unemployed chinese who have already lost their jobs and are roaming from city to city looking for work. Suddenly, the sweatshop life doesn't look so bad if it gives you enough to save for your own venture.
The PRC has had a *lot* of problems getting into the WTO. Perhaps that is because their system is not connected with the globalism we're discussing? WTO membership is going to produce a lot of changes in the PRC and, eventually, people are going to have enough jobs available to them that work in such barbaric conditions won't have any takers. Right now, the SOEs are all going broke, living as a peasant is horribly brutal compared to those sweatshops you're moaning about, and there aren't *enough* sweatshops so that the price of labor is starting to get bid up. It's a lousy situation, true, but the cure is *more* globalism, not less.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, I remember reading an article about this way back when. Immersion basically judged that they didn't have the money available to out lawyer Microsoft at the time so they decided not to pull a DR-DOS and just become a lawsuit company but continue to do engineering work.
It looks like now that they've got a fatter bank balance and Micorosoft has been declared a monopolist, they like their chances better.
DB
Actually, #3 is not quite accurate. They can't encrypt because their license to use the public airwaves says that they have to do so in the public interest. It is not their publicness that disallows their encryption but the public interest clause
IANAL etc.
Credit cards are regularly accepted when the strip is demagnetized. You type in the number and do an ID check for the signature and advise the cardholder to get a replacement card.
If random rf fields can render my cash unusable I would guess that large constituencies would form to vote for new legislators to change that.
DB
Actually, the first country to have plastic notes was Romania so have some palinca and toast those wacky transylvanians for having the guts to be first to try it out.
DB
Since this is wireless, there will be a whole new arena for the people for whom web defacement is a hobby, currency RFID defacement. I can see it now, you're walking down the street and a 'bike messenger' passes you and changes all your currency RFID memory to cool haxor speak. If the memory isn't overwriteable, privacy advocates can simply emit signals to fill all their cash chip memory. It would cut the lifetime of the bill down to the next time it hit an RFID equipped bank but so what? It just makes this sort of bill printing prohibitively expensive.
This is going to be a new frontier in the hacker wars. Be prepared for an influx from the right wing fever swamps boys and girls. They *will* be coming.
There is cocoa for x86. It's called gnustep. http://www.gnu.org/software/gnustep/
If you need to run a Windows only application, try Virtual PC or Bochs for Mac OS X.
"The teminal is not so great. It does an appalling job of color support."
Since all the low level code is freely available and open source, the development tools cost no money, it should be a snap to make a better terminal replacement (there are other problems with the app besides the color support, like load speed). So what's keeping you?
DB
Perhaps you misunderstood the 'unix application' reference. Microsoft Office for Mac OS X is a unix application as much as the GIMP is, just not a very portable one. It's not perceived to be a unix application because the interface conforms to the Apple Human Interface Guidelines and it just works. If somebody slogged through all the successful open source projects out there and created UI's that not only conformed to one set of guidelines but the *same* one, open source applications would begin to understand what a difference it makes not to have to learn or remember all those different ways of doing the same thing.
As a practical matter, you can do all that work and maybe make Linux get in the same league as Apple in a decade or so, maybe not because you'd have to do a lot of rigorous research into making those guidelines *good* and if you have to issue major revisions along the way, you'd have to herd the open source cats into following each new revision of the guideline just to make things interoperable and consistent. Apple did it by diktat and by force but they did it and from a user perspective, strong-arming the programmers so that at least one of the ways to make things work was the standard way was a great leap in useability. Is there a way to replicate this in the open source movement? I don't think so. At least there isn't one separate from taking those UI guidelines and adopting them for GIMP and the rest of the open source A team.
Feel free to provide some sort of alternate methodology.
They're adding Applescript to the development tools right about now.
It's supposed to be a free download from ADC this week.
DB
1. Take a tube with a piston in it.
2. Attach a hose between the tube and the air checker unit
3. Pull the piston back to create suction
4. Push the piston forward to administer air.
The obvious gotcha is in throwing out values with insufficient CO2 but you could always breathe into chambers *before* you went out drinking and pass the gass through the apparatus when you wanted to go home.
DB
Actually, that's around today, but it's in the form of speeding ticket cameras. It's a local scandal in DC that even police are getting ticketed by these systems and it's such a pain to appeal that they're slowing down their responses to calls because they won't speed or run red lights to emergencies anymore
$100-$200 a pop adds up on a cops salary.
DB
How about shell is fired and is identified, targeted, and zapped by laser before it reaches your troops.
The shrapnel still flies but it either gets nobody or, even better, gets the launcher's own troops.
Does anybody else think the guys who thought this up must be David Drake fans (Hammer's Slammers)?
The threat of the 2nd Amendment to usurping politicians has always been much more potent to make politicians nervous about assassination than to fight the US armed forces. The Interior department was so heavy handed during the Clinton administration that they were seriously talking about certain areas being quite high risk in implementing their land use directives. Suddenly, everything calmed down as soon as Bush got in but a Gore administration would have probably lost some agents if they kept going in that direction
DB
I think that IBM would be more than happy to sell integration services for Enhydra as they are for WebSphere and DB2. The money isn't in the license, it's in the multi-year effort for tens of highly paid analysts going over your business logic and implementing it in software.
DB
"Yuh huh... trying ripping off a websphere license or two and see how the great linux savior IBM will react.
The point that slashdotters tend to miss is that for 80%+ of the market the Microsoft middleware is more that good enough and is a damn sight cheaper than the *nix competition.
"
Take a look at enhydra. It doesn't matter if it isn't as scalable, useable, etc. as Websphere or BEA today (or even if it is). The point is that the same mechanics that worked for Apache is working in the application server market and will continue to work in all other markets as soon as you have also-rans or interested outsiders (Bull Software and France Telecom in Enhydra's case) willing to pour in resources to provide a free alternative.
DB
The internal combustion engine requires lubrication in the cylinder besides having the fuel-air mixture burning. The resulting combustion products are unpredictable, gaseous, have to be gotten rid of quickly, and generally bad for people's health. If you use fuel cells, the reaction is much more predictable and the pollutants don't have to be quickly vented into the air but can be held as solids to be periodically emptied into landfill. In the case of methane, you essentially are going to end up with a charcoal briquette every once in awhile. I'd call these significant advantages.
DB
Carbon thrown into the air and eventually into little jimmy's lungs contributing to his asthma is a major problem. Carbon that comes out and dumps into a hopper as little carbon briquets is not a major problem. Burning causes unpredictable outputs, chemical reactions are more predictable and the pollutants are either reduced or mitigated by the fact that they aren't just spewed into the air.
Now multi-fueling means that pig farmers have a secondary market and can become local fuel suppliers. If you're in farm country, you might fuel up with some nice biomass produced methane. Natural Gas is also mostly methane and can be found almost all over the country in private homes so you can top off via that source (Natural gas is usually *not* transported from the Middle East).
"just spreading out the processing stage" isn't quite accurate and even if it were, isn't quite the yawner you make it out to be. Indirect competition limits OPEC to ~$40/barrel right now because at a persistent price above that level, massive deposits that are out of their control become economic to exploit and the sheikhs aren't dumb enough to lose market share by creating new competitors. A vast majority of their foreign exchange comes from oil and if they don't pump for too long, they get overthrown by their starving people. By changing the market so we are not looking necessarily for oil per se but for hydrogen which can come from oil or other sources, we might be able to push the ceiling down into the ~$25 range. That means that if the sheikhs don't behave, we won't buy their oil and not suffer any major economic consequences (think war on terrorism). Also, it is quite likely that there are some producers of what is now categorized as waste gas that will be able to economically ship domestically into this new hydrogen market instead of burning their gas or letting it into the air as a pollutant (again, the noble pig farmer comes to mind).
On storage, you can store the NG or methane or whatever and just convert seconds before the fuel cell needs the hydrogen. No special hydrogen storage facilities needed.
Hydrogen is probably not going to come from H20 but rather from methane, natural gas, or other hydrogen rich sources that don't take as much energy to break apart as H20. The multi-fuel issue is going to set apart hydrogen because you don't need to build an infrastructure, you can use the one we already have and shift the fuel as new ones become available. Indirect competition rules the roost and OPEC pricing power is broken because all of a sudden, switching becomes possible without killing the economy.
DB
When you don't have land ownership, Ogg will pull out rocks whether or not it disturbs a watershed and pollutes a stream killing Grog's favorite bushes. How does Grog avoid losing his favorite berry source or get compensated because he now has to go 20 minutes further to find decent berries that he can trade for axes? Wherever you don't have ownership you have the tragedy of the commons, a nasty process of overuse of common resources until they are exhausted because nobody cares enough to cry out *stop*! and halt the madness. Look up what's going on at the Aral Sea if you want to see a real life application of this tragedy. They've had capitalism for 10 years in the former USSR but no real land ownership. They pollution and destruction of the Aral Sea continued because there was no constituency for saving it.
DB
It would be better to say that blueprints are the preferred method of civil engineers to communicate with builders. How much information via english passes between the architect, engineer, and builder? Now how much information is passed via blueprint?
Get the point? Good.
DB
Who's talking about big corporations? Small, growing companies are where it's at for job growth because they tend to be more nimble and with the right legal framework, for ever 10 that go bankrupt, another 20 spring up so even an entrepreneur with bad business plan can't kill a city or town (this happens with one industry towns all too frequently). Diversification of job opportunities is a good thing. Big companies are a good place to park yourself and plan a bold move as they go from one mediocre product/service to another.
DB
We're fighting a semantics game here. To fix a price is to determine, at a particular time, a particular price for a unique service or good. I put my house up for sale. When I make the sale, I've fixed a price.
You are correct that rigid, state imposed price systems are not very sensible. However, if you read Adam Smith, you might find that some prices are rather fixed over the long haul (AS used wheat across a hundred years).
DB
If it has a market, people trade with each other the things that they own. Libertarian Socialism (or anarchism if you wish) doesn't recognize ownership. "Property is theft" so why should I work to build a surplus if I can't control it, can't direct it, and it has almost no benefit for me, just an suckers share of 1/total population.
Markets without ownership just don't work. It's been tried and has always failed.
DB
Their other current options are to go back to work at the rice farm and make almost no money working harder, hang on to an SOE job until they kick you out making hardly any money (and since all the SOEs are losing money hand over fist they are all going under eventually), or join the throngs of unemployed chinese who have already lost their jobs and are roaming from city to city looking for work. Suddenly, the sweatshop life doesn't look so bad if it gives you enough to save for your own venture.
DB
The PRC has had a *lot* of problems getting into the WTO. Perhaps that is because their system is not connected with the globalism we're discussing? WTO membership is going to produce a lot of changes in the PRC and, eventually, people are going to have enough jobs available to them that work in such barbaric conditions won't have any takers. Right now, the SOEs are all going broke, living as a peasant is horribly brutal compared to those sweatshops you're moaning about, and there aren't *enough* sweatshops so that the price of labor is starting to get bid up. It's a lousy situation, true, but the cure is *more* globalism, not less.
DB