So, what you are saying is that digital freezers are cantankerous beasts that are hard to maintain, and the frozen bits are really still slushy and only a pain in the neck to drink, instead of impossible?
Seriously, my post was meant as a joke. On the other hand, I was considering NWN, has the copy protection thing been resolved?
"who confuse temporary control of a thing with ownership"
The nature of ownership is control. If it can be controled, it can be owned. If it cannot be controled, it cannot be owned. For example, what does it mean to own something if you do not have control of it?.
Let me clarify with your own post.:
But guess what... where the US Patent Office doesn't control it, they're ignoring it . .
Where the patent office (and by extension, the government) doesn't control it, they do not own it. And if they don't own it, they can't grant a patent on it to anyone. (that is what patents and copyrights are anyway)
Ideas are inherently free. If you think you own it, that just means you're fooling yourself.
And just why are they inherently free? Because they are difficult if not impossible to control.
Why are copyrights becoming such an issue? They haven't always been. The reason is that with the internet, and digital tech in general, it is becoming much harder for the government to control ( read own ) the act of copying. and so businesses are trying to take ownership themselvs. DRM is the way for a business to own something even after they have sold someone a copy. But it is not perfect, and to they need the DCMA to make their ownership complete. I could continue, but my point is, ownership is control. (not necessarly legal ownership, but that is a different story)
" "If all of this digital property is free, who is going to invest 50 to 60 million dollars to make a movie?" he (Jack Valenti) asked.
Exactally my point. 50-60 million dollars blown on just-another-movie instead of innovating and coming up with innovative new entertainment. What he said actually has nothing to do with innovation but instead it is about a product that (without extensive government intervention in the market) is no longer profitable to make. (50-60 million dollar movies!) So sad. In another 10-25 years teenagers will be creating similar movies in their basement for 500-600 dollars. Such is technology.
"I'd rather have a career writing software, rather than a career of supporting it."
Think 'new versions' and we 'need this new feature' and we need it ported to this platform' etc.
If that does not appeal to you, just remember this "I would rather have a career doing nothing at all and getting lots of money for it than actually working" Deal with the fact that that option is disapearing. Buggy whip makers mostly went out of buisness too.
"It is the leverage that is so extraordinarily powerful - and that is summarily rejected by the Open Source movement."
And because OSS rejects it, it will eventually go away because nobody will pay. The profit margin of closed source software is a temporary thing that is disapearing everywhere there is not a momopoly. (read MS)
Just like the market for model T tires was big at one time and isnt anymore, the huge profits of closed source software is big and is going to disapear. Sorry, deal with it or die. If lots of money is your goal, find a different job.
Compared to finding totally alien life, that would be a real letdown. But even so that fact would be very interesting. It would no longer be 'speculation'.
Hmmmm.... The M1 abraham tank, is it offense or defense? Our aircraft carriers? tomahawk cruise missile? the Hummer?
Offhand I cannot think of very many defensive weapons that we have that are not also offensive. The Patriot missile is the only one that I can think of. Most of our weapons are actually better at offense than defense.
'The best defense is a good offense' means something here. Unless the enemy is attacking with nuclear weapons, (or maby biological) their offense will be countered by our offense.
I think your logic is sound here, it just was formed in a vacuum. I think $1 - $1 is a fair estimate.
Besides, turn it around, How is the rest of the world supposed to stand up to our offense if they barely spend as much as we do, and offense is much better than defense, $ for $ ??? Anyway you cut it, We spend way too much on our military.
Go look up the debates of the first congress (the one that passed the bill of rights) Look at the initial proposed wordings of the second amendment.
The meaning that they had in mind when it was passed goes something like this:
"Because a capable militia, composed of all able-bodied males, is necessary for the security of any free nation, the right of the people to keep and bear the means to wage war, shall not be infringed"
Is that clearer? And yes, I am an able-bodies male!
" But if you cut it at geosync (which is a pretty likely altitude for collisions, being so crowded), wouldn't the lower half fall to Earth while the upper half fell into space?"
Yes. But geosync is less than one earth diameter.
Geosync is crowded, but everything is moving at the same speed, and same direction. There is more of a chance of a collision at LEO, things are moving at different speeds than the elevator, and in different directions.
Umm, between one and two times* anything above geosync orbit would not ever land. It is possible that up to geosync*2 of it could, the part above geosync could be pulled down by the longer and therefore heaver lower half. If the elevator is longer than that, it would not fall. It would stay in orbit, and actually pull up. (cut it at the bottom and watch it ascend . . )
*This assumes that each section of the elevator has the same mass as any other equally long section.
Yup. Most people simply saw 'perpetual motion, must be bogus'
Most of the scientific/physics reasons given that this won't work are wrong, or like you said, simply not what the article said. This is bogus, but few here seem to know why.
" This means that you can generally expect a top average speed of about half (best case) what a really fast glider can sustain."
Why? who said that you cannot deflate the balloon? it is a rigid airship design after all. Vent or compress all of the hydrogen/helium.
The only things impractical about this that I see are the fuelless part, and the materials. I am sure that you cannot get as much energy out of a buoyancy change(after friction) than it takes to cause the change. He may however be able to offload the cost to the ground (pressurizes helium or hydrogen tanks) and not need to carry the fuel on the plane. Materials? Zeplins were used a long time ago and had problems with frailty. this is a much more ambitious design and will require much lighter materials to work.
" The energy required to recompress the helium or create the vaccume will always be greater than the energy created by the turbine if the system is closed."
I agree with this statement. I belive it is true. But can you prove it without simply quoting the second law of thermodynamics? Because if you do your argument amounts to 'The second law of thermodynamics is true because the second law of thermodynamics says so' !!
The term 'lighter than air' is not wrong, it is simply incomplete It should be 'lighter than the air it displaces' Not sure if you were missing that point or not, but you were not clear on that.
The blimp thing. Blimps are basically oval balloons. They hold their shape because they are pressurized. (blown up!) as such the gas inside is under pressure, I imagine quite a bit ~5 lbs/square inch at least. This is in direct conflict with the goal of being bouyant, as pressurized gas is more dense.
On the other hand, this plane would be a rigid airship. It would hold it's shape regardless of pressure inside (within limits, too much or too little, pop or squish.) My point here is that comparing rigid airships to blimps in lifting volume is not that simple. Also, rigid airships can have much better areodynamics than blimps. Oh, and they do not constantly change shape. If you want to go higher, either have the gas bags inside only partly full at the fround (limits lift, does not waste gas) or add valves and vent it (limits range, cause you will not have enough lift when you decend again, unless you use ballast . ..)
I take this article with a large bucket of salt too, but not for any of the reasons you listed.
When I am trying to put together a command with all of the options needed to do something really weird, that 'app {opt1,,opt2] [opt3:dev1] opt4 source dest' crap is indespensible. What it is useless for is your first look at the app, and you want to do the simplest most straightforward thing, and you don't know which, if any, of these opts you need or not.
To man page writers: do not exlcude the [opt] stuff. It is needed. but please, put in some basic examples. They are at least as important.
(same goes for API documentation, show one bare-bones-minimum-to-make-it-work example, one or two I-am-using-as-many-options-as-possible examples, and then document each option. )
Windows would be hell and a half if it were not for all of the PC hardware makers writting drivers and utilities for windows that works with their hardware. While I agree that UI design stuff is a major problem with linux adoption, most of linux's problems stem directly from a lack of hardware manufacturer support.
Case in point, your Viao did not come with XP support, and XP did not have a clue how to use the Viao. I would bet you would have a much easier time now if you downloaded all the tools that the XP Viaos have.
Funny, I have compiled many kernels, from 2.4.16 through 2.6.3. Installed them I don't know how many tines, lilo and grub. recently started patching them to taste (supermount mostly). It is not hard, and the config in the 2.6.x series is pointy-clicky easy.
But I could never get CUPS to work right. . . (same situation as the article author, maby I'll get somewhere with his hints)
I guess my point is, yes it takes some skill to properly use a computer, but some things are far harder than they should be. I think that is what you meant too.
"Unix is not something to be learned. It is something to be experienced. You have to play around with it. Pick up a concept at a time."
If that is true, then unix will never succeed on the desktop, or anywhere that non-geeks have to mess with it. Most people do not want to 'expierience' their OS. They do not want to play around with it. And any concept more complicated than the filesystem is way beyond their wildest thoughts regarding their computer.
The P/E ratio does not say much about a companies success. In this case it says a lot more about people's perception of furure earnings, and stock speculation stupidity than sucess. (the stock is overvalued because too many morons bought it at too high of a price, not because the company is successfull/unsuccessful)
Most companies lose money at first, the fact that they have many clients and are not losing tons of cash is some measure of sucess.
I chose red hat mostly 'cause I vaguely recalled somewhere that they were becomming profitable. I haven't studied their finances or the like. I guess Google would be a better example. A buisness model that depends on selling open source software seems to be a hard one to do, but you do not have to sell it to make money on it.
The thing to notice here is how far behind we have left Aunt Tillie. Rule 1 of writing software for nontechnical users is this: if they have to read documentation to use it you designed it wrong. The interface of the software should be all the documentation the user needs. You'd have lost the non-techie before the point in this troubleshooting sequence where a hacker like me even got fully engaged.
I have some quibbles with this. Mostly it is correct, but I think that it needs fleshing out. First, Command line. Half the time I need to poke around in the man pages to find out what the command I want is called. And when the program spits out an error, like 'you must specify --sign for raw data type' (happened to me today, flac, never used it before, piping data to it from sox) you need to poke into the man pages to learn that --sign is either signed or unsigned , not yes or no etc. Printing all of the options in the error can make error messages way to big. I think the answer here is: command line programs are not for the non-technical, and they are not 'esoteric' Opinions welcome.
Second, frequently, things are too complecated for the interface to be the full documentation. CUPS is actually a good example of this. CUPS does a lot of stuff, and has tons of options. The interface would look more like a man page than an interface if you took this too far. What the interface should do, and this was mentioned in the rant, is lead the user to the parts of the documentation that he needs to read to do what he wants. And it should be clear from the start just what the user needs to do to sart doing to do the job. CUPS miserably fails at this as the rant points out. Flac did not fail. I had to read the man page, but it told me specifically what I needed to look at. (does the author consider the help screens that CUPS gave to be part of the interface, or the documentation? assuming they had helped of course!)
On the whole, I agree with this article, but this rule needs some qualifiers, because as stated, it will make GUI interfaces unusable for anyone, including the non-techie people.
I ran into the same issue with CUPS, and never got it to work.I gave up and just print to a.ps file, and use smbclient to actually print it! Maby with these pointers I can get it to work.....
"We blow this stuff off because we want to make it workable for those smart enough to deserve to enjoy it then quickly move on to the Next Great Thing that Needs to be Made Now."
This has to do with psycological personality types. google for INTP and INTJ (the two most common geek types) INTP in particular gets bored with something as soon as they have it figured out. ( I am an INTP BTW)
Either my memory is faulty, or CTRL+TAB used to be for switching between windows in the window manager. ALT+TAB is now doing that. (GNOME 2.2) When did that change?(GNOME 1.4->2.0??)
Thanks for the tip, I didn't try CRTL+TAB for the above reason.
Slashdot Mirror
Seriously, my post was meant as a joke. On the other hand, I was considering NWN, has the copy protection thing been resolved?
The nature of ownership is control. If it can be controled, it can be owned. If it cannot be controled, it cannot be owned. For example, what does it mean to own something if you do not have control of it?.
Let me clarify with your own post.:
Where the patent office (and by extension, the government) doesn't control it, they do not own it. And if they don't own it, they can't grant a patent on it to anyone. (that is what patents and copyrights are anyway)And just why are they inherently free? Because they are difficult if not impossible to control.Why are copyrights becoming such an issue? They haven't always been. The reason is that with the internet, and digital tech in general, it is becoming much harder for the government to control ( read own ) the act of copying. and so businesses are trying to take ownership themselvs. DRM is the way for a business to own something even after they have sold someone a copy. But it is not perfect, and to they need the DCMA to make their ownership complete. I could continue, but my point is, ownership is control. (not necessarly legal ownership, but that is a different story)
Exactally my point. 50-60 million dollars blown on just-another-movie instead of innovating and coming up with innovative new entertainment. What he said actually has nothing to do with innovation but instead it is about a product that (without extensive government intervention in the market) is no longer profitable to make. (50-60 million dollar movies!) So sad. In another 10-25 years teenagers will be creating similar movies in their basement for 500-600 dollars. Such is technology.
A good Idea, IMHO, but not an easy undertaking. Now that I think about it, who would hold such an escrow? Think international copyrights (see link).
That is easy, just freeze it solid. Not much good for drinking though, and i suspect that is your point.
Try it. It sounds like you have the equipment. I await your results.
Think 'new versions' and we 'need this new feature' and we need it ported to this platform' etc.
If that does not appeal to you, just remember this "I would rather have a career doing nothing at all and getting lots of money for it than actually working" Deal with the fact that that option is disapearing. Buggy whip makers mostly went out of buisness too.
And because OSS rejects it, it will eventually go away because nobody will pay. The profit margin of closed source software is a temporary thing that is disapearing everywhere there is not a momopoly. (read MS)
Just like the market for model T tires was big at one time and isnt anymore, the huge profits of closed source software is big and is going to disapear. Sorry, deal with it or die. If lots of money is your goal, find a different job.
Compared to finding totally alien life, that would be a real letdown. But even so that fact would be very interesting. It would no longer be 'speculation'.
Our aircraft carriers?
tomahawk cruise missile?
the Hummer?
Offhand I cannot think of very many defensive weapons that we have that are not also offensive. The Patriot missile is the only one that I can think of. Most of our weapons are actually better at offense than defense.
'The best defense is a good offense' means something here. Unless the enemy is attacking with nuclear weapons, (or maby biological) their offense will be countered by our offense.
I think your logic is sound here, it just was formed in a vacuum. I think $1 - $1 is a fair estimate.Besides, turn it around, How is the rest of the world supposed to stand up to our offense if they barely spend as much as we do, and offense is much better than defense, $ for $ ??? Anyway you cut it, We spend way too much on our military.
The meaning that they had in mind when it was passed goes something like this:
Is that clearer? And yes, I am an able-bodies male!
Yes. But geosync is less than one earth diameter.
Geosync is crowded, but everything is moving at the same speed, and same direction. There is more of a chance of a collision at LEO, things are moving at different speeds than the elevator, and in different directions.
*This assumes that each section of the elevator has the same mass as any other equally long section.
Most of the scientific/physics reasons given that this won't work are wrong, or like you said, simply not what the article said. This is bogus, but few here seem to know why.
Why? who said that you cannot deflate the balloon? it is a rigid airship design after all. Vent or compress all of the hydrogen/helium.
The only things impractical about this that I see are the fuelless part, and the materials. I am sure that you cannot get as much energy out of a buoyancy change(after friction) than it takes to cause the change. He may however be able to offload the cost to the ground (pressurizes helium or hydrogen tanks) and not need to carry the fuel on the plane. Materials? Zeplins were used a long time ago and had problems with frailty. this is a much more ambitious design and will require much lighter materials to work.
I agree with this statement. I belive it is true. But can you prove it without simply quoting the second law of thermodynamics? Because if you do your argument amounts to 'The second law of thermodynamics is true because the second law of thermodynamics says so' !!
The math can't be that hard... anyone?
The blimp thing. Blimps are basically oval balloons. They hold their shape because they are pressurized. (blown up!) as such the gas inside is under pressure, I imagine quite a bit ~5 lbs/square inch at least. This is in direct conflict with the goal of being bouyant, as pressurized gas is more dense.
On the other hand, this plane would be a rigid airship. It would hold it's shape regardless of pressure inside (within limits, too much or too little, pop or squish.) My point here is that comparing rigid airships to blimps in lifting volume is not that simple. Also, rigid airships can have much better areodynamics than blimps. Oh, and they do not constantly change shape. If you want to go higher, either have the gas bags inside only partly full at the fround (limits lift, does not waste gas) or add valves and vent it (limits range, cause you will not have enough lift when you decend again, unless you use ballast . . .)
I take this article with a large bucket of salt too, but not for any of the reasons you listed.
Were you doing the same thing ESR was trying to do? If so, tell me how, It still is not working. (using 9.0 on both machines now.) If not . . .
To man page writers: do not exlcude the [opt] stuff. It is needed. but please, put in some basic examples. They are at least as important.
(same goes for API documentation, show one bare-bones-minimum-to-make-it-work example, one or two I-am-using-as-many-options-as-possible examples, and then document each option. )
Case in point, your Viao did not come with XP support, and XP did not have a clue how to use the Viao. I would bet you would have a much easier time now if you downloaded all the tools that the XP Viaos have.
But I could never get CUPS to work right. . . (same situation as the article author, maby I'll get somewhere with his hints)
I guess my point is, yes it takes some skill to properly use a computer, but some things are far harder than they should be. I think that is what you meant too.
If that is true, then unix will never succeed on the desktop, or anywhere that non-geeks have to mess with it. Most people do not want to 'expierience' their OS. They do not want to play around with it. And any concept more complicated than the filesystem is way beyond their wildest thoughts regarding their computer.
Most companies lose money at first, the fact that they have many clients and are not losing tons of cash is some measure of sucess.
I chose red hat mostly 'cause I vaguely recalled somewhere that they were becomming profitable. I haven't studied their finances or the like. I guess Google would be a better example. A buisness model that depends on selling open source software seems to be a hard one to do, but you do not have to sell it to make money on it.
I have some quibbles with this. Mostly it is correct, but I think that it needs fleshing out. First, Command line. Half the time I need to poke around in the man pages to find out what the command I want is called. And when the program spits out an error, like 'you must specify --sign for raw data type' (happened to me today, flac, never used it before, piping data to it from sox) you need to poke into the man pages to learn that --sign is either signed or unsigned , not yes or no etc. Printing all of the options in the error can make error messages way to big. I think the answer here is: command line programs are not for the non-technical, and they are not 'esoteric' Opinions welcome.
Second, frequently, things are too complecated for the interface to be the full documentation. CUPS is actually a good example of this. CUPS does a lot of stuff, and has tons of options. The interface would look more like a man page than an interface if you took this too far. What the interface should do, and this was mentioned in the rant, is lead the user to the parts of the documentation that he needs to read to do what he wants. And it should be clear from the start just what the user needs to do to sart doing to do the job. CUPS miserably fails at this as the rant points out. Flac did not fail. I had to read the man page, but it told me specifically what I needed to look at. (does the author consider the help screens that CUPS gave to be part of the interface, or the documentation? assuming they had helped of course!)
On the whole, I agree with this article, but this rule needs some qualifiers, because as stated, it will make GUI interfaces unusable for anyone, including the non-techie people.
I ran into the same issue with CUPS, and never got it to work.I gave up and just print to a .ps file, and use smbclient to actually print it! Maby with these pointers I can get it to work.....
"We blow this stuff off because we want to make it workable for those smart enough to deserve to enjoy it then quickly move on to the Next Great Thing that Needs to be Made Now."
This has to do with psycological personality types. google for INTP and INTJ (the two most common geek types) INTP in particular gets bored with something as soon as they have it figured out. ( I am an INTP BTW)
Either my memory is faulty, or CTRL+TAB used to be for switching between windows in the window manager. ALT+TAB is now doing that. (GNOME 2.2) When did that change?(GNOME 1.4->2.0??)
Thanks for the tip, I didn't try CRTL+TAB for the above reason.