Good points; however, with a proxy TCP stack providing increased TCP buffer sizes at the gateway, and gateway-side ACKs, along with other methods, TCP over satellite is not only possible, but practical.
I've used satellite connections, and they are just fine. You get used to the latency, especially if you have a lot of bandwidth (say, 8 Mb/s). VoIP over satellite is awkward at first, but I understand you get used to it after a while.
As far as rain fade, modern satellite systems adapt power output for attenuation due to weather. What works in Phoenix *will* work in Portland.
True. But, consider the times. Gearing up a production line for a new product was expensive. In general, most companies produced one product for many, many years. That's just the way it was.
(I forgot Esdel was produced by Ford. *sigh*)
The times are different. "Innovation" at that point often took years. These days, a production line can be rapidly reconfigured to produce just about any kind of car.
I do get your point, though. I guess I was just being pedantic.
It's this sort of rationalization that is slowly eroding liberty.
In a free society, rights *cannot* be taken away. That's why they are called, "Rights." Abuse of rights leads to convictions of the individuals that abuse the right, not the abridgement of those rights across society.
That fact is you simply can't have rights if you refuse to take the responsibility to not abuse them.
Uhm... this is true; however, it does not follow that others cannot have rights because some (even a majority) abuse those rights.
Laws like these are not only an attack on liberty; they are an attack on our status as citizens of a free society. We are labelled as "consumers." I reject that label. I am a citizen. An equal participant. And I refuse to sit idly by while our government grants the whims of a minority of our citizens, when those whims adversely affect the majority of citizens.
I believe it is the responsibility of every free citizen to stand up in the defense of liberty. I believe that corporations are not citizens, and receive their rights only by charter of the people; they do not have the right to abridge liberty in any way. They are not guaranteed profits, and a decrease in profits does not mean people are necessarily breaking the law.
We are not guilty. Not as a society. Go after the infringers. File suit against 11 year old girls. Use the recourse of existing law to punish those that are breaking them. Do not assume we are all guilty.
Notice that none of those options involve not compensating artists whose livelihoods depend on music.
Are you under the impression that musicians are generally compensated for sales of their pre-packaged recordings? In general, they are not. With only a few exceptions, most artists see very little of the profits from the sales of their albums. Most profit comes from concert ticket sales, and now the record labels are after a large cut of that pie, too.
I'm not justifying the illegal download of music files from certain P2P networks. I'm merely illustrating a weakness in your rhetoric.
That's sort of like saying Henry Ford's only success story was the Model T.
That's kinda the point. If FoMoCo had stopped "innovating" at the Model T, they would have gone the way of Edsel. Similarly, if Microsoft doesn't figure something out soon, they will go the way of... well, IBM, probably, unless corporate pride causes them to go the way of WordPerfect Corp.
They've used up almost all of their natural resources; companies are not buying computers like they once were. Desktop growth has flattened, and server growth is not promising.
MS has not shown much talent at diversification. Unlike Ford, which has at least a couple of more recent popular cars to their name, Microsoft hasn't been able to "move into the future," to borrow a marketting phrase.
I think that is the fear. It's certainly not unexpected.
If I owned a chip fab plant, and I built the meanest, most dangerous computer in the world, all I'd have is a single, evil computer. Which is damned cool, don't get me wrong.
If I built a single replicating evil germ, though, I could potentially have an army of billions of mind-controlling bacteria that obey my every command. Those bacteria would replicate and spread throughout the population until, on a pre-programmed evening, while watching a re-run of the Jerry Sienfeld "Frogger" episode, everyone turns into my personal zombie-slave!
You are not on private property. You are on property that has been zoned "commercial." There is nothing private about it.
And you agree to nothing when you enter a store, other than behaving civilly. First, they do not post those policies, and so there is nothing that can constitute an agreement; secondly, they are not within their rights to demand abridgement of your fourth amendment rights.
Okay, if you drop a super-hot mass of incandescent gas into the Hudson, you're going to get one big fuck-off jet of super-heated steam gushing out, like a mini-explosion. Spidey and MJ should have had the flesh boiled from their bones in a matter of seconds.
I'm probably feeding a troll, but I'll assume you are sincere.
Mono was developed because Miguel thought Mono was kinda cool, and because he could. Beyond that, though, there are a few other important issues.
Most importantly, Mono is vital to the future of Linux and other open-source projects. This was a blatant attempt by Microsoft to reign in wandering developer mindshare. Also, it is part of their strategy to bring the application space back from the web, to the desktop-- Microsoft's desktop.
Also, although most geeks realize that Microsoft is not to be trusted, and that generally they produce shoddy (or downright dangerous) software, most of the rest of the world doesn't understand the danger. So, for a lot of manager-types (you know the ones, knuckles dragging the ground, sloped brow furrowed in concentration while parsing simple sentences, signs your paychecks with an 'X'), they see this as "Microsoft's next big direction." Many will choose to follow that direction, because they love Power Point.
And finally, there's the issue of choice. Java is Okay, but there are issues with it. C# has a different set of issues. Both suck. Both are great. Both cower before the awesome power of LISP. Different developers like different things in a language. Some languages suit our personalities better than others. Me, I'm a LISP and Perl kinda guy. The guy sitting next to me likes C and PHP.
There are potential pitfalls with C#, but at the moment that is all they are: potential. And in most cases, those problems are perceived, and not actual. Now.NET is deployable on any platform with a CLI, like Mono. Nobody pays Microsoft anything, though it doesn't put them at the disadvantage that Java would.
But ultimately our goal should be to produce damned good software, not just destroy Microsoft; we should concentrate on building up, not tearing down.
When I see the words "think tank," I replace them with "paid mouthpieces." This properly indicates the purpose of these groups.
Near as I can tell, there are few real "think tanks" left in the US, unless you mean, "Stick these people in a tank until they think of a way to sell our bullshit as chocolate pudding."
I stay away from MS-Windows for one simple reason: the future.
Microsoft has done its damndest to lock up the computing world. They have shown no interest in cooperating in the computing world: they are only interested in control.
I cannot ethically remain idle while a single group tries to control the flow of information. Microsoft has already set the computer industry back a decade through their tactics; by being complacent or "practical/pragmatic," by using MS software, I am tacitly approving their actions.
This might seem a bit simple to some, but to me it is the most important thing: we as professionals should try to make choices now that provide for the best future.
As with any long-term project, the choices we make now will affect future abilities. Until Microsoft universally takes a cooperative approach, I will not use their products.
I'm just not willing to sacrifice the future to them.
Sony isn't doing too poorly. They're reacting to sluggish sales by restructuring. They've spent $1.2B last year to restructure, with fiscal net profits of $815M US with the fiscal year ending 31 Mar 04. This is down 25% or so from the prior year. This, on sales and operating revenue of $72B US.
They expect to spend another billion US or so in the coming year during the restructuring, which will keep profits down over the next year; but they will be in a much better position during the 2005/2006 fiscal year.
Sony isn't doing badly; they just aren't raking in the money. I figure that's the sign of a balanced market, where pressure from competition forces a complacent giant to keep up or die.
... i should say that zealots have ZERO credibility because they are (by definition) fanatical and unreasoning.
Doesn't mean they are wrong. Some zealots are quite correct.
Credibility should be given to the message, not the messenger, and only after careful consideration. People are more often misled by people they trust than people they don't trust.
Just as people have a right to speak, others have a right to not listen.
If the spammers were civil and provided a way to honestly opt-out, I don't think there'd be much debate. As it is, "opt-out" options are used to verify legitimate mail addresses to which more spam is sent.
The essence of fairness is respect. If spammers were to respect the wishes of email participants, these drastic blacklist measures would not be necessary.
Just as a person may not be allowed to speak at a public forum with no curtailment of free speech, so an ISP may filter spam with no curtailment of free speech. Plus, as SpamCop merely provides a service (the identification of spam black-hole lists), they are not themselves curtailing free speech. If I (as an individual) decide to pre-filter my email by using SpamCop, I have also not curtailed the free speech rights of spammers; I have merely invoked my right to not listen.
If SpamCop is inhibited in any way by first amendment arguments, justice has been subverted. Since SpamCop itself is opt-in, they are providing more free speech than the spammers themselves.
Granted, I am not a lawyer, one of the many things of which I am glad. (I don't see how many lawyers sleep at night, but then again, I fret when I realize I only left a 15% tip instead of a 20% tip.)
The system was tested over a 2-year pilot program and produced results virtually identical to those of trained readers.
So it gives its favorite students 'A's without reading, least favorite students 'F's, and the rest arbitrary grades somewhere in between to mimic a bell curve?
Excellent!
"Artificial Intelligence is easy. It's artificial stupidity that impresses me." -- Arthur Oscar
Im European by the way, and strongly believed that this crap would never pass. Americans are welcome to point and laugh at me for my ignorance.
In some respects, innocense is ignorance; do not be ashamed of innocense.
God, fucking stupid politicians, they don't know shit about software and should keep away.
Problem is, politicians are by nature corrupt. No, every politician is not corrupt; but many are, and the carreer attracts those that love power for the sake of power. It doesn't take but one or two of those to ruin the whole batch, as they introduce corrupt bills (such as this patent "reform") that are sponsored by those with deep pockets and deeper self-interest.
In this case, the politicians that don't know shit about software were encouraged to vote, and educated by, the ones with the most self-interest in this perversion of knowledge ownership. And all they saw were the most "important" players in the software industry backing the bill.
The problem isn't politicians, per se, its the corporate influence on politicians that fuck things up so badly. Once the government starts serving the corporations instead of the people, we are screwed. And that has started to happen.
Then let's play the game their way. Let's grab some patents ourselves; it's time to patent everything we can and donate to the FSF (or some other entity that will safeguard Free Software Patents) under a GPL (general patent license).
Let's DOS the patent office with requests; it's time to start patenting *every*-fucking-thing, from mail filters to user interfaces. Got a nifty new P2P algorithm? Patent! A new filesystem? Patent! A cool new interface? You know the drill.
At this point, the only defense is a damned good offense. If SCO has taught us anything, it's that we're naked to corporate attack. The only thing protecting us from SCO is their own lack of evidence. It's rather difficult to infringe copyright without intentionally infringing copyright.
In the case of Patents, you can infringe without realizing you are infringing; something obvious that has been patented is just as taboo as something truly ingenious.
Yeah, because I know *I* have the resources to defend myself in court because my programs have an interface that is similar to some corporation's software?
. . . eventually they'd be outcompeted by the previous versions of their own products, which don't wear out and need to be replaced . . .
In a monopoly position, that shortcoming of capitalism is fixed simply by either going to a rental model, or by causing the old software to expire, and refuse to work (which is effectively the same as the rental model).
Please note the heavy push by Microsoft in recent years to migrate current customers to a rental model. I believe this is evidence that they are already feeling competition from their old software.
Slashdot Mirror
Good points; however, with a proxy TCP stack providing increased TCP buffer sizes at the gateway, and gateway-side ACKs, along with other methods, TCP over satellite is not only possible, but practical.
I've used satellite connections, and they are just fine. You get used to the latency, especially if you have a lot of bandwidth (say, 8 Mb/s). VoIP over satellite is awkward at first, but I understand you get used to it after a while.
As far as rain fade, modern satellite systems adapt power output for attenuation due to weather. What works in Phoenix *will* work in Portland.
Sorry. Further down the page is the Enterprise version, which gives 8 Mb/s down, 4 Mb/s up.
Depends on the satellite system. Thaicom has iPSTAR, which provides 4 Mb/s down, 2 Mb/s up. That's not bad.
But, you have to be in their service area.
Yeah. We don't want to give money to people who don't *have* money. They obviously wouldn't know what to do with it.
Logically, we give money to the people with the most money, as they have a fucking clue.
True. But, consider the times. Gearing up a production line for a new product was expensive. In general, most companies produced one product for many, many years. That's just the way it was.
(I forgot Esdel was produced by Ford. *sigh*)
The times are different. "Innovation" at that point often took years. These days, a production line can be rapidly reconfigured to produce just about any kind of car.
I do get your point, though. I guess I was just being pedantic.
It's this sort of rationalization that is slowly eroding liberty.
In a free society, rights *cannot* be taken away. That's why they are called, "Rights." Abuse of rights leads to convictions of the individuals that abuse the right, not the abridgement of those rights across society.
That fact is you simply can't have rights if you refuse to take the responsibility to not abuse them.
Uhm... this is true; however, it does not follow that others cannot have rights because some (even a majority) abuse those rights.
Laws like these are not only an attack on liberty; they are an attack on our status as citizens of a free society. We are labelled as "consumers." I reject that label. I am a citizen. An equal participant. And I refuse to sit idly by while our government grants the whims of a minority of our citizens, when those whims adversely affect the majority of citizens.
I believe it is the responsibility of every free citizen to stand up in the defense of liberty. I believe that corporations are not citizens, and receive their rights only by charter of the people; they do not have the right to abridge liberty in any way. They are not guaranteed profits, and a decrease in profits does not mean people are necessarily breaking the law.
We are not guilty. Not as a society. Go after the infringers. File suit against 11 year old girls. Use the recourse of existing law to punish those that are breaking them. Do not assume we are all guilty.
Notice that none of those options involve not compensating artists whose livelihoods depend on music.
Are you under the impression that musicians are generally compensated for sales of their pre-packaged recordings? In general, they are not. With only a few exceptions, most artists see very little of the profits from the sales of their albums. Most profit comes from concert ticket sales, and now the record labels are after a large cut of that pie, too.
I'm not justifying the illegal download of music files from certain P2P networks. I'm merely illustrating a weakness in your rhetoric.
That's sort of like saying Henry Ford's only success story was the Model T.
That's kinda the point. If FoMoCo had stopped "innovating" at the Model T, they would have gone the way of Edsel. Similarly, if Microsoft doesn't figure something out soon, they will go the way of... well, IBM, probably, unless corporate pride causes them to go the way of WordPerfect Corp.
They've used up almost all of their natural resources; companies are not buying computers like they once were. Desktop growth has flattened, and server growth is not promising.
MS has not shown much talent at diversification. Unlike Ford, which has at least a couple of more recent popular cars to their name, Microsoft hasn't been able to "move into the future," to borrow a marketting phrase.
I think that is the fear. It's certainly not unexpected.
If I owned a chip fab plant, and I built the meanest, most dangerous computer in the world, all I'd have is a single, evil computer. Which is damned cool, don't get me wrong.
If I built a single replicating evil germ, though, I could potentially have an army of billions of mind-controlling bacteria that obey my every command. Those bacteria would replicate and spread throughout the population until, on a pre-programmed evening, while watching a re-run of the Jerry Sienfeld "Frogger" episode, everyone turns into my personal zombie-slave!
Just you wait.
The Corporation is NOT your friend any more than the State is.
Especially now the two seem to be merging. Or rather, corporations are performing a hostile takeover of the State.
You are not on private property. You are on property that has been zoned "commercial." There is nothing private about it.
And you agree to nothing when you enter a store, other than behaving civilly. First, they do not post those policies, and so there is nothing that can constitute an agreement; secondly, they are not within their rights to demand abridgement of your fourth amendment rights.
Okay, if you drop a super-hot mass of incandescent gas into the Hudson, you're going to get one big fuck-off jet of super-heated steam gushing out, like a mini-explosion. Spidey and MJ should have had the flesh boiled from their bones in a matter of seconds.
But, otherwise I really enjoyed the movie.
I'm probably feeding a troll, but I'll assume you are sincere.
.NET is deployable on any platform with a CLI, like Mono. Nobody pays Microsoft anything, though it doesn't put them at the disadvantage that Java would.
Mono was developed because Miguel thought Mono was kinda cool, and because he could. Beyond that, though, there are a few other important issues.
Most importantly, Mono is vital to the future of Linux and other open-source projects. This was a blatant attempt by Microsoft to reign in wandering developer mindshare. Also, it is part of their strategy to bring the application space back from the web, to the desktop-- Microsoft's desktop.
Also, although most geeks realize that Microsoft is not to be trusted, and that generally they produce shoddy (or downright dangerous) software, most of the rest of the world doesn't understand the danger. So, for a lot of manager-types (you know the ones, knuckles dragging the ground, sloped brow furrowed in concentration while parsing simple sentences, signs your paychecks with an 'X'), they see this as "Microsoft's next big direction." Many will choose to follow that direction, because they love Power Point.
And finally, there's the issue of choice. Java is Okay, but there are issues with it. C# has a different set of issues. Both suck. Both are great. Both cower before the awesome power of LISP. Different developers like different things in a language. Some languages suit our personalities better than others. Me, I'm a LISP and Perl kinda guy. The guy sitting next to me likes C and PHP.
There are potential pitfalls with C#, but at the moment that is all they are: potential. And in most cases, those problems are perceived, and not actual. Now
But ultimately our goal should be to produce damned good software, not just destroy Microsoft; we should concentrate on building up, not tearing down.
When I see the words "think tank," I replace them with "paid mouthpieces." This properly indicates the purpose of these groups.
Near as I can tell, there are few real "think tanks" left in the US, unless you mean, "Stick these people in a tank until they think of a way to sell our bullshit as chocolate pudding."
I stay away from MS-Windows for one simple reason: the future.
Microsoft has done its damndest to lock up the computing world. They have shown no interest in cooperating in the computing world: they are only interested in control.
I cannot ethically remain idle while a single group tries to control the flow of information. Microsoft has already set the computer industry back a decade through their tactics; by being complacent or "practical/pragmatic," by using MS software, I am tacitly approving their actions.
This might seem a bit simple to some, but to me it is the most important thing: we as professionals should try to make choices now that provide for the best future.
As with any long-term project, the choices we make now will affect future abilities. Until Microsoft universally takes a cooperative approach, I will not use their products.
I'm just not willing to sacrifice the future to them.
...and Sony is doing so well these days!
Sony isn't doing too poorly. They're reacting to sluggish sales by restructuring. They've spent $1.2B last year to restructure, with fiscal net profits of $815M US with the fiscal year ending 31 Mar 04. This is down 25% or so from the prior year. This, on sales and operating revenue of $72B US.
They expect to spend another billion US or so in the coming year during the restructuring, which will keep profits down over the next year; but they will be in a much better position during the 2005/2006 fiscal year.
Sony isn't doing badly; they just aren't raking in the money. I figure that's the sign of a balanced market, where pressure from competition forces a complacent giant to keep up or die.
...while the old-timers whine that we should all really be using Lisp.
That could be because Lisp provides most of the features outlined in the article, without the problems?
... i should say that zealots have ZERO credibility because they are (by definition) fanatical and unreasoning.
Doesn't mean they are wrong. Some zealots are quite correct.
Credibility should be given to the message, not the messenger, and only after careful consideration. People are more often misled by people they trust than people they don't trust.
Just as people have a right to speak, others have a right to not listen.
If the spammers were civil and provided a way to honestly opt-out, I don't think there'd be much debate. As it is, "opt-out" options are used to verify legitimate mail addresses to which more spam is sent.
The essence of fairness is respect. If spammers were to respect the wishes of email participants, these drastic blacklist measures would not be necessary.
Just as a person may not be allowed to speak at a public forum with no curtailment of free speech, so an ISP may filter spam with no curtailment of free speech. Plus, as SpamCop merely provides a service (the identification of spam black-hole lists), they are not themselves curtailing free speech. If I (as an individual) decide to pre-filter my email by using SpamCop, I have also not curtailed the free speech rights of spammers; I have merely invoked my right to not listen.
If SpamCop is inhibited in any way by first amendment arguments, justice has been subverted. Since SpamCop itself is opt-in, they are providing more free speech than the spammers themselves.
Granted, I am not a lawyer, one of the many things of which I am glad. (I don't see how many lawyers sleep at night, but then again, I fret when I realize I only left a 15% tip instead of a 20% tip.)
The system was tested over a 2-year pilot program and produced results virtually identical to those of trained readers.
So it gives its favorite students 'A's without reading, least favorite students 'F's, and the rest arbitrary grades somewhere in between to mimic a bell curve?
Excellent!
"Artificial Intelligence is easy. It's artificial stupidity that impresses me." -- Arthur Oscar
Im European by the way, and strongly believed that this crap would never pass. Americans are welcome to point and laugh at me for my ignorance.
In some respects, innocense is ignorance; do not be ashamed of innocense.
God, fucking stupid politicians, they don't know shit about software and should keep away.
Problem is, politicians are by nature corrupt. No, every politician is not corrupt; but many are, and the carreer attracts those that love power for the sake of power. It doesn't take but one or two of those to ruin the whole batch, as they introduce corrupt bills (such as this patent "reform") that are sponsored by those with deep pockets and deeper self-interest.
In this case, the politicians that don't know shit about software were encouraged to vote, and educated by, the ones with the most self-interest in this perversion of knowledge ownership. And all they saw were the most "important" players in the software industry backing the bill.
The problem isn't politicians, per se, its the corporate influence on politicians that fuck things up so badly. Once the government starts serving the corporations instead of the people, we are screwed. And that has started to happen.
The big difference is that Isreal (the person) does not have ties to Geo. W. Bush, Gov. Arnold S., and many other people in the Republican party.
Ken Lay, OTOH, does.
Lesson Learned: share the wealth with powerful people, and you can get away with anything.
Greed is second only to stupidity in the SE arsonal.
Are they good or are they wack?
Yes.
Then let's play the game their way. Let's grab some patents ourselves; it's time to patent everything we can and donate to the FSF (or some other entity that will safeguard Free Software Patents) under a GPL (general patent license).
Let's DOS the patent office with requests; it's time to start patenting *every*-fucking-thing, from mail filters to user interfaces. Got a nifty new P2P algorithm? Patent! A new filesystem? Patent! A cool new interface? You know the drill.
At this point, the only defense is a damned good offense. If SCO has taught us anything, it's that we're naked to corporate attack. The only thing protecting us from SCO is their own lack of evidence. It's rather difficult to infringe copyright without intentionally infringing copyright.
In the case of Patents, you can infringe without realizing you are infringing; something obvious that has been patented is just as taboo as something truly ingenious.
So let's get to work.
Yeah, because I know *I* have the resources to defend myself in court because my programs have an interface that is similar to some corporation's software?
That's a damned good idea.
. . . eventually they'd be outcompeted by the previous versions of their own products, which don't wear out and need to be replaced . . .
In a monopoly position, that shortcoming of capitalism is fixed simply by either going to a rental model, or by causing the old software to expire, and refuse to work (which is effectively the same as the rental model).
Please note the heavy push by Microsoft in recent years to migrate current customers to a rental model. I believe this is evidence that they are already feeling competition from their old software.