I did read the article, and as the next sentence you wrote goes on to explain where my cricicism came from...
Obsolescence is the wrong question here; timothy should be ashamed of himself for titling this Is The x86 Obsolete?
Which I agree with completely. The article was great, the titling left something to be desired. Well.. it's not like this was the first time slashdot mucked up a headline. I just wish they'd change 'em.
There was a point? He asked me to define nobody and "uses". So I did! And he implied he wanted a literal (ie, strict) definition of the two! Don't blame me if I missed it - it was probably too subtle.
Equally dumb questions get equally smartass answers...
nobody \No"bod*y\, n.; pl. Nobodies. [No, a. + body.] 1. No person; no one; not anybody.
use (yz) v. used, using, uses. v. tr. To put into service or apply for a purpose; employ. To avail oneself of; practice: use caution. To conduct oneself toward; treat or handle: "the peace offering of a man who once used you unkindly" (Laurence Sterne). To seek or achieve an end by means of; exploit: used their highly placed friends to gain access to the president; felt he was being used by seekers of favor. To take or consume; partake of: She rarely used alcohol. v
Example of usage: By strict definitions, you are a complete nobody who has used up all of your brain cells!
All this stuff aside, there is one very simple, absolutely deterministic way to determine whether something is obsolete: nobody uses it anymore! It doesn't get any simpler than this - the x86 has some redeeming qualities, otherwise nobody would use it.
Cannibalism and incest are two obvious examples of things which are clearly frowned upon by the establishment, but which are not (at present) very popular.
Cannibalism was popular for awhile. Then there was nobody left, so it couldn't be popular anymore.:) Oh, and incest causes very clear and obvious problems - and it isn't very fun. But you're right.. not all anti-establishment things are popular.
The problem is that if an established power base attempts to ban an item or product (and sometimes behaviour) it is assumed by at least a large minority, if not the majority, that it's something worth having.
That definately displays the high mistrust of authority even the general public has.
believe that if sex, even erotica, was discussed openly and sensibly from a young age then demand for pornography and prostitution would decrease dramatically.
There is empirical evidence to support this as well - like Sweden, for example.
". Sure, take in a mainstream movie every so often, but try to lose the false sense of need that's been implanted by immoral marketing practices. (I tell you, many of the complaints about DVD make people sound like they're hooked on drugs rather than home movies.)
Ideas are the most powerful drugs we have.. ideas which are communicated by sight and sound. There is no question it is a mind-altering substance.
Something needs to be said about the concept of the forbidden apple. The Romans tried to stop christianity. Christianity became popular. Drugs were made illegal in this country. Drugs became popular. Rock music was chastized by the establishment as being "satanic". Rock becomes popular. Anyone starting to see a pattern here?
Now, music becomes illegal to download. Downloading music becomes popular. As any sysadmin who has made the claim that their system is "uncrackable" will tell you, saying that something is impossible is a very good way of drawing engineers in - like moths to fire.
So Microsoft goes out and builds this standard. Then they say it's impossible. Then, to top it off, they make it illegal to crack it. Who shall be the first to taste the forbidden apple?
First they put an apple on the scanner, and then it disappeared, so then, like, I stepped up, and it digitized me. But now the world looks alot lower resolution (like, 800x166 at 16 bit!), and I'm glowing blue! What's worse, the games I play aren't ANYTHING like quake - I'm riding around in a motorcycle and playing discus! What's the fun in THAT?!
And had you spent a few additional seconds looking over the material instead of flaming me, you might have noticed that I gave a link to "GNU BIOS" - the original name of OpenBIOS. And, strangely enough, the top of the page for the "Linux BIOS" project has the words: Combining OpenBIOS and Linux." with a link.
But, of course, you had to be a quick-post and flame me instead of doing your R&D, right?
They're not obligated to nail everybody. All they need to do is nail enough in order to create an atmosphere of fear and make it more difficult to find illegally shared recordings.
Well, that's the lovely part - if they don't excercise control over their copyright it reverts to public domain. They have no choice.:) Ah, I love it - the legal community is going to DoS itself.
Fact: People have no morals. Speak for yourself, pal. As the RIAA itself has demonstrated, profit and economic gain rule the marketplace. You make this sound like a bad thing.
Well, that sums up YOUR morals....
Anyway, about piracy v. incentive, you forgot the other two measurements on determining the cost/benefit of crime - the probability of being caught, and the net return.
Well, if they put in a handful of 1F caps (they can be quite small) and an inverter (for the flash, high voltages), it would be alot easier to use than batteries. For one, your recharge time could be, uhh.. 1 minute. And it could have a car-adapter. The nice thing about caps is that they can charge *very* quickly. If there is enough current from the source, you can do it nearly instantly.
So they took a minidisk and put it in a camera? That's not a bad idea. Not a new one though, either. What I'm waiting for is a palm-sized camcorder with jitter-adjustments - just mount it on the side of your head and run a fiber-optic link down to the waist where the actual unit is. Give it the ability to do wireless (ala bluetooth?) transmission to a base unit back at the van. It would revolutionize the way reporting is done. That, and if the price was low enough, I could see the vaporware product of so-called "blackboxes" for automobiles becoming a reality. I, for one, would love to have GPS tracking and stuff on my car - I hate missing my exit. Having my car beep or something (QUIETLY beep) to let me know if I'm about to miss my exit would be *so* cool. And writing out my vehicle's vitals to cd-r would make it easy to prove it was the "other guy" who creamed my car, not the other way around.
It is obvious you know less than nothing about how the internet works, so here is a quick breakdown for you.
Fact: the internet is a peer-to-peer network. This means that no centralized control exists. The closest thing we have to controlling the internet at the protocol level is the DNS system (which is making attempts to decentralize) and the loosely-knit agreements between ISPs and backbones to provide connectivity. Beyond that, every packet is routable through *some* means, and every packet is treated the same (it is a "dumb" network).
Fact: The primary means to search for information on the internet is via a search engine. Most all search engines use a substring glob search, with the more advanced ones allowing for regular expressions. What this means is that there is no definitive way to find any particular page or piece of information on the internet. When you use a search engine, you get "close enough" to the result that you can follow the links to where you want to go. More popular sites are easier to find, obviously.
Fact: People on the internet like low-cost to no-cost services. Consider pricewatch.com, ebay.com, any local newspaper or TV station - all of these offer up-to-the-minute content that often serves as a replacement for conventional media. This also lowers the cost of distribution dramatically as the cost-per-character is vastly lower than paper.
Fact: People have no morals. As the RIAA itself has demonstrated, profit and economic gain rule the marketplace. This is not limited to corporations - call it "Trickle down morality" if you will, but people have taken their que from businesses and also seek out the best ways to maximize their profits. This is an excellent example of true capitalism.
Conclusion: Here's where we put it all together. In a nutshell, you cannot control the medium as it was engineered specifically to resist centralized control - the US military built it to survive a nuclear blast.. I doubt a few lawyers can cause that kind of damage to the network. The network routes around failure automatically - if you kill an ISP another takes over the previous services. The network has mirroring capabilities and built-in redundancy. You cannot shut down the network. Next, due to the way search engines work, you cannot a) locate all of the material you want to remove -OR- b) quickly and efficiently identify that material. This means that if you plot the amount of money put into removing information log-log with the amount of return, it will rapidly drop to zero and infinity, respectively. In short - there will always be a sizeable percentage of "forbidden" material available. Even with no mirroring, napster, or crawlers.
Guys, you do not need more lawyers, you need more engineers. Evil engineers. Go build an internet that's trademark and copyright-friendly. And good luck getting everyone else to use it.:)
a case MAY be fast tracked to the SC, so as to preserve the rights of consumers at large (read: ALL Americans) rather than the rights of the few or the one (I.E. Microsoft).
The courts do not recognize 3rd parties in a lawsuit.. I cannot enjoin myself simply because I have been harmed by MS. This is not about the consumers.. not at this stage. Remember the rule: "innocent until proven guilty" - MS can, and will, exhaust every avenue of appeal and excercise every right a defender has. This is just one in a long string of slowdowns and setbacks for the DOJ.. and quite right, as it should be! When MS comes down, I want to know that it happened by the letter and spirit of the law.. not because of politics.
A quick note - Microsoft is perfectly entitled to this and we should not complain - they ARE the defendant, and as such are afforded every protection the law offers them - including this. Oh, and incase you think this is an economic sanction, I'll remind you that stock prices jumped up on news that Judge Jackson had ruled for the breakup. Even the baby-bills will be profitable.
Yup, that's the one.. I got it using a 3c509 with a seriously fux0red hub. "too much work in 0xblah.. disabling".. followed by "aiiii, killing interrupt handler! Lost inode from underneath us! call linus!" *THUD*
The fatal flaw is that if it records, it can be played back. Sorry guys, no dice.. digital protection is flawed for exactly one reason - you can't obscure whether the bit is there or not. Solve that and I have a quantum physicist that wants to talk to you.
Slashdot Mirror
Trying 24.128.93.104...
Connected to car54.race.cadillac.com
Escape character is '^]'.
Welcome to Car 54, find out where we are!
CarMon version 0.99b
Cockpit temp: 108F
Gas: 68% +/- 5%
Driver: Agitated
Reason: Gotta pee *really bad*
Car speed: 180 MPH
Number of people logged in: 48391
...
Cockpit temp: 123F
Gas: 45% +/- 5%
Driver: Agitated
Reason: Gotta pee *really bad*
Car speed: 245 MPH
Number of people logged in: 92838
...
Broadcast message from driver (pts/1) Sat Jun 17 06:14:54 2000...
Pitstop!
The system is going down to maintenance mode NOW !!
Connection to remote host lost.
~$ _
I did read the article, and as the next sentence you wrote goes on to explain where my cricicism came from...
Obsolescence is the wrong question here; timothy should be ashamed of himself for titling this Is The x86 Obsolete?
Which I agree with completely. The article was great, the titling left something to be desired. Well.. it's not like this was the first time slashdot mucked up a headline. I just wish they'd change 'em.
There was a point? He asked me to define nobody and "uses". So I did! And he implied he wanted a literal (ie, strict) definition of the two! Don't blame me if I missed it - it was probably too subtle.
Equally dumb questions get equally smartass answers...
nobody \No"bod*y\, n.; pl. Nobodies. [No, a. + body.] 1. No person; no one; not anybody.
use (yz) v. used, using, uses. v. tr. To put into service or apply for a purpose; employ. To avail oneself of; practice: use caution. To conduct oneself toward; treat or handle: "the peace offering of a man who once used you unkindly" (Laurence Sterne). To seek or achieve an end by means of; exploit: used their highly placed friends to gain access to the president; felt he was being used by seekers of favor. To take or consume; partake of: She rarely used alcohol. v
Example of usage: By strict definitions, you are a complete nobody who has used up all of your brain cells!
All this stuff aside, there is one very simple, absolutely deterministic way to determine whether something is obsolete: nobody uses it anymore! It doesn't get any simpler than this - the x86 has some redeeming qualities, otherwise nobody would use it.
Cannibalism was popular for awhile. Then there was nobody left, so it couldn't be popular anymore. :) Oh, and incest causes very clear and obvious problems - and it isn't very fun. But you're right.. not all anti-establishment things are popular.
That definately displays the high mistrust of authority even the general public has.
believe that if sex, even erotica, was discussed openly and sensibly from a young age then demand for pornography and prostitution would decrease dramatically.
There is empirical evidence to support this as well - like Sweden, for example.
". Sure, take in a mainstream movie every so often, but try to lose the false sense of need that's been implanted by immoral marketing practices. (I tell you, many of the complaints about DVD make people sound like they're hooked on drugs rather than home movies.)
Ideas are the most powerful drugs we have.. ideas which are communicated by sight and sound. There is no question it is a mind-altering substance.
Just click on the user info button. If the user # is 7608, you got the right one. ;)
Now, music becomes illegal to download. Downloading music becomes popular. As any sysadmin who has made the claim that their system is "uncrackable" will tell you, saying that something is impossible is a very good way of drawing engineers in - like moths to fire.
So Microsoft goes out and builds this standard. Then they say it's impossible. Then, to top it off, they make it illegal to crack it. Who shall be the first to taste the forbidden apple?
Nope.
Fake-o signal ell-one.
Heh. Dude, I spend too much time hitting reload to bother creating new accounts. :P~~~
~# mount -t ext2 /dev/sda2 /home
Error: fuzzy dice in foo buffer found.
~# mount -t ext2 /dev/sda2 /home -o fuzzy_dice
Error: fuzzy dice requires car.o module
~# insmod car.o
Unresolved symbols: car_need_oil, car_need_gas
~# dd if=/dev/cash of=/dev/bank bs=1 count=300
0+300 records in
0+300 records out
~# dd if=/dev/bank of=/dev/wallet bs=1 count=50
0+50 records in
0+50 records out
~# insmod car.o io=/dev/wallet
~# mount -t ext2 /dev/sda2 /home -o fuzzy_dice
Succeeded.
~# cd /home
~# ls
KERNEL PANIC!
000:000 FF 00 CC G0 BB LE DE G0 0K
Goddamn illogical drives...
First they put an apple on the scanner, and then it disappeared, so then, like, I stepped up, and it digitized me. But now the world looks alot lower resolution (like, 800x166 at 16 bit!), and I'm glowing blue! What's worse, the games I play aren't ANYTHING like quake - I'm riding around in a motorcycle and playing discus! What's the fun in THAT?!
But, of course, you had to be a quick-post and flame me instead of doing your R&D, right?
I will never live this down...
Well, that's the lovely part - if they don't excercise control over their copyright it reverts to public domain. They have no choice. :) Ah, I love it - the legal community is going to DoS itself.
Fact: People have no morals.
Speak for yourself, pal.
As the RIAA itself has demonstrated, profit and economic gain rule the marketplace.
You make this sound like a bad thing.
Well, that sums up YOUR morals....
Anyway, about piracy v. incentive, you forgot the other two measurements on determining the cost/benefit of crime - the probability of being caught, and the net return.
Well, if they put in a handful of 1F caps (they can be quite small) and an inverter (for the flash, high voltages), it would be alot easier to use than batteries. For one, your recharge time could be, uhh.. 1 minute. And it could have a car-adapter. The nice thing about caps is that they can charge *very* quickly. If there is enough current from the source, you can do it nearly instantly.
So they took a minidisk and put it in a camera? That's not a bad idea. Not a new one though, either. What I'm waiting for is a palm-sized camcorder with jitter-adjustments - just mount it on the side of your head and run a fiber-optic link down to the waist where the actual unit is. Give it the ability to do wireless (ala bluetooth?) transmission to a base unit back at the van. It would revolutionize the way reporting is done. That, and if the price was low enough, I could see the vaporware product of so-called "blackboxes" for automobiles becoming a reality. I, for one, would love to have GPS tracking and stuff on my car - I hate missing my exit. Having my car beep or something (QUIETLY beep) to let me know if I'm about to miss my exit would be *so* cool. And writing out my vehicle's vitals to cd-r would make it easy to prove it was the "other guy" who creamed my car, not the other way around.
It is obvious you know less than nothing about how the internet works, so here is a quick breakdown for you.
Fact: the internet is a peer-to-peer network. This means that no centralized control exists. The closest thing we have to controlling the internet at the protocol level is the DNS system (which is making attempts to decentralize) and the loosely-knit agreements between ISPs and backbones to provide connectivity. Beyond that, every packet is routable through *some* means, and every packet is treated the same (it is a "dumb" network).
Fact: The primary means to search for information on the internet is via a search engine. Most all search engines use a substring glob search, with the more advanced ones allowing for regular expressions. What this means is that there is no definitive way to find any particular page or piece of information on the internet. When you use a search engine, you get "close enough" to the result that you can follow the links to where you want to go. More popular sites are easier to find, obviously.
Fact: People on the internet like low-cost to no-cost services. Consider pricewatch.com, ebay.com, any local newspaper or TV station - all of these offer up-to-the-minute content that often serves as a replacement for conventional media. This also lowers the cost of distribution dramatically as the cost-per-character is vastly lower than paper.
Fact: People have no morals. As the RIAA itself has demonstrated, profit and economic gain rule the marketplace. This is not limited to corporations - call it "Trickle down morality" if you will, but people have taken their que from businesses and also seek out the best ways to maximize their profits. This is an excellent example of true capitalism.
Conclusion: Here's where we put it all together. In a nutshell, you cannot control the medium as it was engineered specifically to resist centralized control - the US military built it to survive a nuclear blast.. I doubt a few lawyers can cause that kind of damage to the network. The network routes around failure automatically - if you kill an ISP another takes over the previous services. The network has mirroring capabilities and built-in redundancy. You cannot shut down the network. Next, due to the way search engines work, you cannot a) locate all of the material you want to remove -OR- b) quickly and efficiently identify that material. This means that if you plot the amount of money put into removing information log-log with the amount of return, it will rapidly drop to zero and infinity, respectively. In short - there will always be a sizeable percentage of "forbidden" material available. Even with no mirroring, napster, or crawlers.
Guys, you do not need more lawyers, you need more engineers. Evil engineers. Go build an internet that's trademark and copyright-friendly. And good luck getting everyone else to use it. :)
The courts do not recognize 3rd parties in a lawsuit.. I cannot enjoin myself simply because I have been harmed by MS. This is not about the consumers.. not at this stage. Remember the rule: "innocent until proven guilty" - MS can, and will, exhaust every avenue of appeal and excercise every right a defender has. This is just one in a long string of slowdowns and setbacks for the DOJ.. and quite right, as it should be! When MS comes down, I want to know that it happened by the letter and spirit of the law.. not because of politics.
A quick note - Microsoft is perfectly entitled to this and we should not complain - they ARE the defendant, and as such are afforded every protection the law offers them - including this. Oh, and incase you think this is an economic sanction, I'll remind you that stock prices jumped up on news that Judge Jackson had ruled for the breakup. Even the baby-bills will be profitable.
Yup, that's the one.. I got it using a 3c509 with a seriously fux0red hub. "too much work in 0xblah.. disabling" .. followed by "aiiii, killing interrupt handler! Lost inode from underneath us! call linus!" *THUD*
The fatal flaw is that if it records, it can be played back. Sorry guys, no dice.. digital protection is flawed for exactly one reason - you can't obscure whether the bit is there or not. Solve that and I have a quantum physicist that wants to talk to you.