There are certainly ways to improve DNS, but name spaces are should not be confused with content indicators. Looking for Ford, or "Bob Jones", or "Pictures of Bubbles the Chimp" is fundamentally different than connecting to www.ford.com.
Or do you also agree that the phone book should indicate what sort of information you'll get from me when you call my phone number, and be surprised if I start reading bad science fiction to you instead of telling you to place me on your Do Not Call list?
Names are identifiers, not semantic indicators. Otherwise I'd be named Software Hack #22948236, White Male #039784982367, or perhaps Annoying Sarcastic Jerk #9865666652, depending on one's priorities.
If Google resolved all links to IPs, that would make Google far more brittle, because content moves and IP addresses change.
And I'm ignoring the larger issues of decentralized name delegation and the fact that you seem to be conflating the web with the net.
I believe if you look at the wider URI specification, there is some what what you're looking for. URLs were considered Good Enough(TM) by most people, which is a little unfortunate, but if development houses can't even support that, how are you going to get them to toss DNS? (If you're really interested, DNS SERV records get closer to what I think you mean, too.)
Real has been an annoying company, what with spyware and such. That's unfortunate.
Real is realeasing code you can either play with, or ignore. That's a good thing.
If Real gets a benefit from giving away code in terms of PR, browney points or Slashdot Karma, what's the problem, again? That would be the case because some people, somewhere, appreciated what Real did.
Of course there's a strategy behind doing so, and I suspect it isn't quick what RMS would prefer. If that weren't the case, we'd be chatting about this on Fucked Company instead of here.(Which is not to assert GPLed software can't support a company - if that were the case, I'd have a little problem.)
I'm not sure you have worked on a large network supporting lots of people with responsibility for an IT budget.
When I was doing this (and thank god I'm not any more), we started by applying patch clusters and whatnot without testing. And of course, it quickly became a problem - if you haven't had a patch destroy an application, count yourself as leading a charmed life.
We had to build a test network duplicating the machines to be updated, to test everything before deployment. Granted, it was useful for things besides security patch planning, but it was expensive. And then you have the personell cost of rebuilding the environment you're patching, every time a new patch comes out. Sometimes it isn't a big deal, sometimes you reinstall the OS from scratch and install Oracle, say, or Great Plains, to replicate a specific environment. It quickly becomes a couple of day job for an expensive admin. Do the math - it costs money. The only reason it is worth is is by contrast - if you bring down a service used by millions of people a day on a patch, that costs more. Ask Ebay.
The point the poster made, however, remains solid. Subverting the firewall internally calls in to question why you have one in the first place.
Look at it from a different angle. If corporate security won't let you take files you need out of the office on a business trip and you do so anyway, would you expect to remain employed if caught doing so? The big dumb guards didn't get the word from on management and are probably subcontractors, and it is hard to coordinate with them. Does that mean you just sneak around them?
I'm not advocating blindly following rules, just pointing out that companies need to _manage_ security, otherwise there is absolutely no point in having it.
I'm going to reply once more, for the sake of education, but then I'm done.
1) There are fine PDF editors out there. Acrobat is not an editor, in the general sense of the term - it is more of a PDF metadata editor with bundled PDF creation tools for other editors.
2) Definition of terms:
- trapping: Selectively overlapping colors at print time so that the elasticity of paper, lateral drift, etc. do not leave gaps between different areas and bleeds off the page don't leave a white border. Take a magnifying glass to a mass market magazine ad some time, especially at the intersection between light colors and areas in black - you'll see it.
- font kerning: I don't know what you're talking about with Mozilla and Helvetica. What I'm talking about is a designer's ability to specify the space between letters to a high degree of precision. And I haven't gotten in to baseline shifting yet.
- font deformation: Scaling a font horizontally or vertically in a carefully defined way.
- CMYK: Cyan, Magenta, Yellow, Black, AKA 4 color printing. That's the color model nearly all mass amrket printing is done in (some add Pantone colors, but that's expensive). Contrast with RGB, the method used for all the graphics on the web. One is for print, one is for CRTs.
- PPD device hints: Using a machine readable description of a printer to better display on screen what the printer will do with it.
- multi-layer transparency screen angle adjustments: Automatically altering the screen angle of certain pages based on the nature of the colors used when rendering overlapping objects with transparency in order to avoid Moire patterns. Explaining screen angles is not something I'm going to get in to. Google it if you're really interested.
So if these are the lowsy features, why are you stressing them?
They aren't lousy (or lowsy), they're a baseline. If you can't do them, you're not in the race. HTML can't.
3) Well, if they aren't setup to handle one format, then giving something to them in that format wont exactly work will it? See how well they do when you hand them a WordStar document.
You're making my case for me. No, prepresses don't handle Wordstar, or HTML, or Word XP for that matter, for a reason. That reason is that the formats do not offer sufficient control over the output.
For some perspective, I did (no longer do) production for a small magazine - we printed ~120K issues every two months. Each issue cost about $230K to print, including all of the business angles. Profit margins then were on the order of 1%, and I hear it is worse now. If you fuck up (which I did, once, everyone does getting started), you cost your company serious money. More than one magazine has failed over printing mistakes. Quark format documents work brilliantly nearly all the time, but is complex, which leads to failures. PDF works briliantly, and is much less complex. HTML is a joke for these environments.
Of course, the fact remains that anyone can convert HTML to PS/PDF practically in their sleep.
Sure. That doesn't mean the result is going to print well. It will look like a web page, and have horrible color problems.I still encourage you to do the experiment - Offset print a web page, and compare it to a copy of any mass market magazine out there.Here's another experiment - take a copy of WiReD, and duplicate a page in HTML. I'm sure it is possible, using the Z axis and a lot of time. Now display it in another browser. Which one is the reference platform for the result when you print it? The nature of Postscript is that it displays the same everywhere. HTML is becoming a user interface description language, not a print language.
Well, I've used Adobe, and it certainly doesn't come close... What is this magical program?
Adobe what? Adobe Illustrator, for one, is a fine platform for editing them. Photoshop will happily import them (not quite the same thing, but then Photoshop is a raster based platform). Other vendors provide PDF editing, too, but I'm less familiar with them, so I won't mention them.
Anything you could want to print can be accurately reproduced with HTML. There certainly is a difference, but HTML is certainly not more limited than PDF.
I'm not trying to be rude here, but you really don't know what you're talking about. Show me trapping, font kerning, font deformation, CMYK, PPD device hints, or multi-layer transparency screen angle adjustments in HTML. And that's without getting into some of the cooler features of Postscript, or the features of PDF that make it attractive to print shops.
I highly suggest you actually look at what professional printers do for a living before making assertions like this. At the very least, take an HTML document to a prepress and ask them what it will cost to get it to output correctly on a large print run. You'll probably give them hives, or be laughed at, or both.
I'm no fan of Adobe. They abuse a dominant position, too (take Photoshop's most recent changes with "improving" tiffs).
However, saying all HTML needs to match PDF is page breaks is like saying all a Pinto needs to take on a Porsche is not to explode.
PDFs are entirely editable in many applications. They can include font data. They include everything needed to output cleanly on a variety of output devices. They are made to look the same on screen as they will on output devices. They solve many of the main problems with delivering files to press.
HTML is markup. PDF is page description. There is an enormous difference.
When the government grants a certain business a regional territory, franchise, subsidy, or, protection, competition is legally prevented by threat of force.
Violators of the government's will are arrested at gun point [...] When the government allows companies to merge into huge monopolies, they are only laying the foundations for socialism -- and that's the last thing we ever want in America.
What you are describing is termed Fascism, not socialism. You might profit by learning a bit more about political science.
Without free markets and cutthroat competition, our economy will become stagnant and weak and eventually fall apart due to corruption and incompetence, like in the former Soviet Union and soon to be in socialist western Europe.
I think a little less Usenet and a little more Friedman and Hayek would allow you to make the case you want to make a bit more clearly.
I've certainly thought of this at least once when trying to get something working that was being a pain in the ass.
Stop and think about what is actually going on here, though. The point of a driver is to provide glue between a standard set of apis and whatever the external device speaks. If you include the driver on the device, you just require a higher layer abstraction to manage the drivers - a driver driver, basically. What happens when there's a bug fix for the driver you install,and you upgrade/reinstall your system? Either the driver driver has to track dependencies and know when to override the card or you have to write the new drivers to EEPROM or some such. In the first case, you have to have an update list it can contact to find out if the card has the right version (your drive or WinXX died), and in the later, you drive cost up and potentially add new ways to fry hardware. And if you're doing a net enabled driver manager, why worry about what software lives on the card at all?
At best, you can support recent kernels of popular OSes. Older ones and newer ones will still have to ignore the supplied drivers and provide different ones. You're providing a shortcut for a possibly short temporal period at the cost of a new protocol, more on-board memory and engineering for the device, and a new driver manager. A better approach would be to ape a well standardized protocol for communication (like some really old modems and some very high end scanners and image setters do).
It isn't a great idea, cost-wise, and for non-throw-away hardware, there's no point. I have a NIC that I've had for 7 years currently happily doing service in a firewall. It is a piece of crap, but it works fine and outperforms my outgoing bandwidth. What good are Win3.1 drivers on that card going to do me, other than be potentially annoying and drive (ahem) the price up?
But isn't bandwidth fundamentally different from electricity and water, in that the latter 2 cost money to generate or pump? With broadband, once you lay the pipe, it doesn't cost anything to actually pull data up and down. Or is there a significant overhead for the ISP in managing all these bits flying around?
Um... There's significant overhead. Your average datacenter eats as much electricity as a small city. Network architects, admins, and technicians are not cheap. Hardware has to be replaced a lot more freqently than you'd think. Automated billing systems constantly require tweaking by quality coders who talk to expensive accountants and lawyers. Tech support is extremely expensive to provide.And then you have to start thinking about staying competitive, and adding new features...
I'm not agreeing with tiered pricing and walled gardens, I'm just saying that a quality network costs a lot more than you think.
Rather than trying to get away from the desktop we should find ways to make it prettier, faster, more responsive, and more intuitive. I think that using something besides X is a good way to start, but I dont' see that happening any time soon. Sure a stripped down window manager might be more efficient for.01% of the population. And it's great, you've got what you want. But 99% of the people need a better, complete, window manager.
"What you mean 'we', white man?"
The biggest problem I've seen in the open source world is that the people writing the software write it for themselves. Big software companies like MS and Adobe write software for the least common denominator. I wonder why more people use their stuff??
If you want software written for the lowest common denominator, you are welcome to write it for yourself.
The difference between big software companies and people who want different software than that is, well, that big software companies want money, and people who want different software than that want different software than that.
Slashdot finally posts something really amusing. It has been too long. This is the best article I've read all week. Extremely bizarre stuff, plus, it has rocket belts. What could be better than that?
Most of your statements prove my point exactly correct, if we are to belive you..
Yes, various practices that fall under the moniker of 'technical trading' have been around a long time. By some counts, since right after the 1930s. By others, before then. Software assisted trading is in some ways new, but in the past the same result happened, aleit slower, through agents.
To give you a point...
Sure, ill tuned risk management systems fuck up. Plus, they're extremely important to the world economy. That's why Greenspan bailed out a certain well known hedge fund very recently.
I was not asserting that "much of the research in this area died suddenly". On the contrary, research in risk management is hitting a rather furious pace. Please re-read what I wrote, and this time pay attention.
The volume of trades taking place without human interention causes huge swings at the moment. We're seeing this now, and have been for a couple of years.
Bonus points if you come up with a theory why seeking short-term gains are going to cause exactly the "double dip" so many cheerleaders at Bussinessweek and Fortune are trying to recant.(
If you get bored, you could actually respond to what I was asserting, which was that a commercially viable trading system would rapidly stabilize any advantage it had, because it would spread to everyone who had a serious interest in tracking new developments in this area. That's what's still oddly on topic for the parent post. Thank you, drive though.
_Please_ don't speak for the rest of us. Just direct all calls to someone who can actually engage others in a meaningful conversation. We can actually articulate a concept, and by doing so, win the war. You can just ride on the dividends.Go look at that bondage pr0n some more. There, all better, yes?
You have two problems. The first one is a physics issue, which is the easier of the two to fix. What you want to do is understand your local law enforcement's measures (not that hard to do, really) and correct for the proper wavelengh (hint: you probably want a green laser, assuming you can't get a cool variable spectrum job). Next, you need to make sure your plate only refracts in the visible spectrum, by putting a "dust plate" over it, that happens to have the proper composition to deflect the read and near infra-red spectrum. Oh, and than green laser won't fit in a ball jack. So you have to pipe it in via fibre. Plus, those green lasers are rather experimental right now. Hope you have some cash. Why were you driving around again?
The second problem is that you (or your computer) has to have a pretty good idea where the camera is. There has been some publicly accessibile purchases that hint at that sort of thing, which you can find if you follow the links on the guy's site who started this whole discussion, but I bet you can't afford one, not to mention it won't work at driving speeds. Sorry.
Without driving a tank with Class IV lasers and some serious computing power, or some very, very careful planning for a very specific operation, you're not terribly likely to confuse cameras. And if you have either, why are you worried?
Sorry to recommend against what you're wishing after, but I have to say that "mind mapping" software leads to really poorly thought out structures.
I've dealt with this concept a few times (both as a full-time employee and, more frequently, since I became a consultant), and every time someone comes to me with a Mind Map, it takes an absurd amount of time to straighten out what they actually want, and how to implement it. I'm sure that the method is great for brain storming, or getting stoned and coming up with ideas, or whatever, but it simply sucks as a substitute for coming up with a plan of action.
Every time I've encountered this sort of behaviour out of people, I end up first sitting in endless meetings determining what people actually care about, then turning it into a prioritised outline, and finally coming up with a plan that roughly fits what they started with. All at a rather serious cost to clients, now that I'm working for myself. (I'd like to say that that's fine because I'm making money doing it, but I hate the process of reverse engineering a client's crappy notes. If they'd just plan correctly in the first place, they'd be richer, and I'd have more hair.)
Do yourself a favor. Instead of a Mind Map, start thinking about what you want to say/do, what is most important, and if you have to draw, use a real graphical business system modeller, like Visio or Kivio. (I must say I hate Kivio. Visio sort of sucks, but Kivio sucks more. Sure, flame me.) If you're more technical than I'm giving you credit for, forgive me first, and then whip out a note book, and start combining scribbles with words. That's my personal dirty secret - I have a business diary (coming on, I think 18 volumes shortly) that I take endless notes in and - yes! - draw in. I use that to model proposals that I send to clients. Those proposals are almost always in words, but occasionally I do draw a diagram, but only after I have the full gameplan and the processes to support it in my head.*
That's the difference, I think. One doesn't submit one's class notes to a professor, and one doesn't submit Mind Maps to people who actually have to implement things.Sure, I'm sure this software can turn your mental process into a web page. Please point me to a site developed that way (besides the parent corp.) which is relevant on a frequent basis to others.
Don't mean to be harsh, but I've hard learned lessons that this is not a model to push for efficient business practice.
-j
* For the zealots out there, I've been using almost nothing but Open Source software in my personal business for over a year. I frequently have to do something for clients with software like Oracle and a host of small providers of commercial software, but aside from the W2K box to test web interfaces with (and that's a dual boot server that also has my ripped CD collection on it), there is no commercial software in our office. I still miss Mathematica, and might end up making an exception for it. I haven't given up yet, though.And at least Mathematica runs on Linux.
statistical modelling - wouldn't you like to know if the stock market is going to go up or down tomorrow, before it happens?
I agree with you on most respects (even if much of what you're talking about is very, very far beyond most realistically imaginable systems in the near future), but simple economics shows why the above is silly.
Simple question: someone uses a tool to make a killing on a pre-existing market. How does everyone respond (not counting RIAA, et al, who depend on regulation)? They either curl up and die, or figure out what the winners are doing, and quickly. Learning what people are doing is even easier in markets like finance, where there's a lot of transparency in actions, a very close knit group of participants, people who like to brag, and a lot of people staring at the winners.
Fact is, any new innovation in trading quickly becomes used by everyone who has a serious enough stake. It is just market economics. Once everyone gets an innovation, it is no longer an advantage, because everyone is doing it (bonus points for those who see past and potential systemic failures lurking in this behaviour).
Of course, keeping your traders free of risks like sharing information and regulatory oversight can extend an advantage, and that works in a very few situations. But hell, even Warren Buffett took a fairly serious beeting recently due to things he couldn't predict (and this is an insurance guy!), not to mention Soros when he attacked Asian currencies a few years ago.
Not only is there no silver bullet for the folks who run finance, there's just no way in hell peons in the game (anyone with less than a few hundred million invested) will profit from raw computational power. Sorry.
ITAR does not apply anymore. EAR is the currently governing US policy on this. You should probably have your company talk to a laywer in the know. A good place to start looking, if you insist on doing this yourself, is the Export control reference materials site
I think we're speaking in two entirely orthagonal directions, so I won't bother with being too verbose here. (as a matter of fact, someone looking over my shoulder as I wrote my post asked me why I bothered to even post the message to which you're responding.)
The point of what I posted, which I had hoped people would grasp, was simply that there is no difference between sharing music, sampling music, selling music, and selling sampled music, at least from an economic perspective. That was all I was saying. It was a very, very narrow statement of fact.
If you're morally opposed to one member of that class of activities, you should be opposed to all of them, if you want to be internally consistent in your moral judgement.
I did read your post, several times, which you might have noticed from the direct quote from it. I hate to say it, but I'm not sure you read mine, starting from the point where I start trying to explain how cash and labor over time are equivelant. Er, that would be the start of the message.
If you still don't get what I'm saying, fine. You can even have the last word. I would suggest taking an econ class in your spare time, though (not trying to be a jerk, really. Just a suggestion.).
-j, heading back to slashdot lurk mode, because I don't have the time to deal with the mess.
I think there are some basic misunderstandings in your post.
The most basic one if that economics, as a whole, does not talk about money. It talks about transfers of resources. Much of it talks about finite resources, which is why so much ill-informed debate goes on as we witness a previously finite resource become effectively infinite. Money (dollars, rubles, pesos, etc.) are extremely useful measures for talking about these things, but one must be careful to realize that they are simply proxies for understandings and agreements between people.
If I perform an action, and give the result to you, a transfer of value as occurred. If I give you a recording of your favorite artist, you are better off. I may be, because of implied agreements to get something in return. The artist is slightly better off in terms of being more well known, which may lead to you in some way benefiting them in the future. Some people think they are slightly worse off because we're engaging in a pattern of behaviour that does not involve a third party who by legal convention serves to broker such activites.
I think you can sort of work out the rest of my thoughts based on the premises above. In terms of sampling lots of things and "using it to make money", I wonder if you ever made a mix tape for someone. You probably did not get dollars from the person you gave it to, but you did at the very least expect to recieve value in some way or another (i.e., a mix tape in return, get laid, something).
Slashdot Mirror
There are certainly ways to improve DNS, but name spaces are should not be confused with content indicators. Looking for Ford, or "Bob Jones", or "Pictures of Bubbles the Chimp" is fundamentally different than connecting to www.ford.com.
Or do you also agree that the phone book should indicate what sort of information you'll get from me when you call my phone number, and be surprised if I start reading bad science fiction to you instead of telling you to place me on your Do Not Call list?
Names are identifiers, not semantic indicators. Otherwise I'd be named Software Hack #22948236, White Male #039784982367, or perhaps Annoying Sarcastic Jerk #9865666652, depending on one's priorities.
If Google resolved all links to IPs, that would make Google far more brittle, because content moves and IP addresses change.
And I'm ignoring the larger issues of decentralized name delegation and the fact that you seem to be conflating the web with the net.
I believe if you look at the wider URI specification, there is some what what you're looking for. URLs were considered Good Enough(TM) by most people, which is a little unfortunate, but if development houses can't even support that, how are you going to get them to toss DNS? (If you're really interested, DNS SERV records get closer to what I think you mean, too.)
-j
God, just the thought makes me want to take a bath.
And what sort of bait do you use for your breath?
Helix is mostly open source. That's a good thing.
Some of it is not. That's unfortunate.
Real has been an annoying company, what with spyware and such. That's unfortunate.
Real is realeasing code you can either play with, or ignore. That's a good thing.
If Real gets a benefit from giving away code in terms of PR, browney points or Slashdot Karma, what's the problem, again? That would be the case because some people, somewhere, appreciated what Real did.
Of course there's a strategy behind doing so, and I suspect it isn't quick what RMS would prefer. If that weren't the case, we'd be chatting about this on Fucked Company instead of here.(Which is not to assert GPLed software can't support a company - if that were the case, I'd have a little problem.)
-j
I'm not sure you have worked on a large network supporting lots of people with responsibility for an IT budget.
When I was doing this (and thank god I'm not any more), we started by applying patch clusters and whatnot without testing. And of course, it quickly became a problem - if you haven't had a patch destroy an application, count yourself as leading a charmed life.
We had to build a test network duplicating the machines to be updated, to test everything before deployment. Granted, it was useful for things besides security patch planning, but it was expensive. And then you have the personell cost of rebuilding the environment you're patching, every time a new patch comes out. Sometimes it isn't a big deal, sometimes you reinstall the OS from scratch and install Oracle, say, or Great Plains, to replicate a specific environment. It quickly becomes a couple of day job for an expensive admin. Do the math - it costs money. The only reason it is worth is is by contrast - if you bring down a service used by millions of people a day on a patch, that costs more. Ask Ebay.
The point the poster made, however, remains solid. Subverting the firewall internally calls in to question why you have one in the first place.
Look at it from a different angle. If corporate security won't let you take files you need out of the office on a business trip and you do so anyway, would you expect to remain employed if caught doing so? The big dumb guards didn't get the word from on management and are probably subcontractors, and it is hard to coordinate with them. Does that mean you just sneak around them?
I'm not advocating blindly following rules, just pointing out that companies need to _manage_ security, otherwise there is absolutely no point in having it.
(Emphasis mine).
That's the problem, now, isn't it?
-j
Sorry , I would show you but that would volatile the DMCA....
Hey, I'm all for it!
I'm going to reply once more, for the sake of education, but then I'm done.
1) There are fine PDF editors out there. Acrobat is not an editor, in the general sense of the term - it is more of a PDF metadata editor with bundled PDF creation tools for other editors.
2) Definition of terms:
- trapping: Selectively overlapping colors at print time so that the elasticity of paper, lateral drift, etc. do not leave gaps between different areas and bleeds off the page don't leave a white border. Take a magnifying glass to a mass market magazine ad some time, especially at the intersection between light colors and areas in black - you'll see it.
- font kerning: I don't know what you're talking about with Mozilla and Helvetica. What I'm talking about is a designer's ability to specify the space between letters to a high degree of precision. And I haven't gotten in to baseline shifting yet.
- font deformation: Scaling a font horizontally or vertically in a carefully defined way.
- CMYK: Cyan, Magenta, Yellow, Black, AKA 4 color printing. That's the color model nearly all mass amrket printing is done in (some add Pantone colors, but that's expensive). Contrast with RGB, the method used for all the graphics on the web. One is for print, one is for CRTs.
- PPD device hints: Using a machine readable description of a printer to better display on screen what the printer will do with it.
- multi-layer transparency screen angle adjustments: Automatically altering the screen angle of certain pages based on the nature of the colors used when rendering overlapping objects with transparency in order to avoid Moire patterns. Explaining screen angles is not something I'm going to get in to. Google it if you're really interested.
So if these are the lowsy features, why are you stressing them?
They aren't lousy (or lowsy), they're a baseline. If you can't do them, you're not in the race. HTML can't.
3) Well, if they aren't setup to handle one format, then giving something to them in that format wont exactly work will it? See how well they do when you hand them a WordStar document.
You're making my case for me. No, prepresses don't handle Wordstar, or HTML, or Word XP for that matter, for a reason. That reason is that the formats do not offer sufficient control over the output.
For some perspective, I did (no longer do) production for a small magazine - we printed ~120K issues every two months. Each issue cost about $230K to print, including all of the business angles. Profit margins then were on the order of 1%, and I hear it is worse now. If you fuck up (which I did, once, everyone does getting started), you cost your company serious money. More than one magazine has failed over printing mistakes. Quark format documents work brilliantly nearly all the time, but is complex, which leads to failures. PDF works briliantly, and is much less complex. HTML is a joke for these environments.
Of course, the fact remains that anyone can convert HTML to PS/PDF practically in their sleep.
Sure. That doesn't mean the result is going to print well. It will look like a web page, and have horrible color problems.I still encourage you to do the experiment - Offset print a web page, and compare it to a copy of any mass market magazine out there.Here's another experiment - take a copy of WiReD, and duplicate a page in HTML. I'm sure it is possible, using the Z axis and a lot of time. Now display it in another browser. Which one is the reference platform for the result when you print it? The nature of Postscript is that it displays the same everywhere. HTML is becoming a user interface description language, not a print language.
Well, I've used Adobe, and it certainly doesn't come close... What is this magical program?
Adobe what? Adobe Illustrator, for one, is a fine platform for editing them. Photoshop will happily import them (not quite the same thing, but then Photoshop is a raster based platform). Other vendors provide PDF editing, too, but I'm less familiar with them, so I won't mention them.
Anything you could want to print can be accurately reproduced with HTML. There certainly is a difference, but HTML is certainly not more limited than PDF.
I'm not trying to be rude here, but you really don't know what you're talking about. Show me trapping, font kerning, font deformation, CMYK, PPD device hints, or multi-layer transparency screen angle adjustments in HTML. And that's without getting into some of the cooler features of Postscript, or the features of PDF that make it attractive to print shops.
I highly suggest you actually look at what professional printers do for a living before making assertions like this. At the very least, take an HTML document to a prepress and ask them what it will cost to get it to output correctly on a large print run. You'll probably give them hives, or be laughed at, or both.
I'm no fan of Adobe. They abuse a dominant position, too (take Photoshop's most recent changes with "improving" tiffs).
However, saying all HTML needs to match PDF is page breaks is like saying all a Pinto needs to take on a Porsche is not to explode.
PDFs are entirely editable in many applications. They can include font data. They include everything needed to output cleanly on a variety of output devices. They are made to look the same on screen as they will on output devices. They solve many of the main problems with delivering files to press.
HTML is markup. PDF is page description. There is an enormous difference.
-j
When the government grants a certain business a regional territory, franchise, subsidy, or, protection, competition is legally prevented by threat of force.
Violators of the government's will are arrested at gun point [...] When the government allows companies to merge into huge monopolies, they are only laying the foundations for socialism -- and that's the last thing we ever want in America.
What you are describing is termed Fascism, not socialism. You might profit by learning a bit more about political science.
Without free markets and cutthroat competition, our economy will become stagnant and weak and eventually fall apart due to corruption and incompetence, like in the former Soviet Union and soon to be in socialist western Europe.
I think a little less Usenet and a little more Friedman and Hayek would allow you to make the case you want to make a bit more clearly.
-j
I've certainly thought of this at least once when trying to get something working that was being a pain in the ass.
Stop and think about what is actually going on here, though. The point of a driver is to provide glue between a standard set of apis and whatever the external device speaks. If you include the driver on the device, you just require a higher layer abstraction to manage the drivers - a driver driver, basically. What happens when there's a bug fix for the driver you install,and you upgrade/reinstall your system? Either the driver driver has to track dependencies and know when to override the card or you have to write the new drivers to EEPROM or some such. In the first case, you have to have an update list it can contact to find out if the card has the right version (your drive or WinXX died), and in the later, you drive cost up and potentially add new ways to fry hardware. And if you're doing a net enabled driver manager, why worry about what software lives on the card at all?
At best, you can support recent kernels of popular OSes. Older ones and newer ones will still have to ignore the supplied drivers and provide different ones. You're providing a shortcut for a possibly short temporal period at the cost of a new protocol, more on-board memory and engineering for the device, and a new driver manager. A better approach would be to ape a well standardized protocol for communication (like some really old modems and some very high end scanners and image setters do).
It isn't a great idea, cost-wise, and for non-throw-away hardware, there's no point. I have a NIC that I've had for 7 years currently happily doing service in a firewall. It is a piece of crap, but it works fine and outperforms my outgoing bandwidth. What good are Win3.1 drivers on that card going to do me, other than be potentially annoying and drive (ahem) the price up?
-j
But isn't bandwidth fundamentally different from electricity and water, in that the latter 2 cost money to generate or pump? With broadband, once you lay the pipe, it doesn't cost anything to actually pull data up and down. Or is there a significant overhead for the ISP in managing all these bits flying around?
Um... There's significant overhead. Your average datacenter eats as much electricity as a small city. Network architects, admins, and technicians are not cheap. Hardware has to be replaced a lot more freqently than you'd think. Automated billing systems constantly require tweaking by quality coders who talk to expensive accountants and lawyers. Tech support is extremely expensive to provide.And then you have to start thinking about staying competitive, and adding new features...
I'm not agreeing with tiered pricing and walled gardens, I'm just saying that a quality network costs a lot more than you think.
-j
"What you mean 'we', white man?"
The biggest problem I've seen in the open source world is that the people writing the software write it for themselves. Big software companies like MS and Adobe write software for the least common denominator. I wonder why more people use their stuff??
If you want software written for the lowest common denominator, you are welcome to write it for yourself.
The difference between big software companies and people who want different software than that is, well, that big software companies want money, and people who want different software than that want different software than that.
Everything clear now?
-j
Slashdot finally posts something really amusing. It has been too long. This is the best article I've read all week. Extremely bizarre stuff, plus, it has rocket belts. What could be better than that?
-j
Thanks for reminding me. I ran across this at one point when I was too busy to try it out. I think I'll install it somewhere this weekend.
-j
Yes, various practices that fall under the moniker of 'technical trading' have been around a long time. By some counts, since right after the 1930s. By others, before then. Software assisted trading is in some ways new, but in the past the same result happened, aleit slower, through agents.
To give you a point...
Sure, ill tuned risk management systems fuck up. Plus, they're extremely important to the world economy. That's why Greenspan bailed out a certain well known hedge fund very recently.
I was not asserting that "much of the research in this area died suddenly". On the contrary, research in risk management is hitting a rather furious pace. Please re-read what I wrote, and this time pay attention.
The volume of trades taking place without human interention causes huge swings at the moment. We're seeing this now, and have been for a couple of years.
Bonus points if you come up with a theory why seeking short-term gains are going to cause exactly the "double dip" so many cheerleaders at Bussinessweek and Fortune are trying to recant.(
If you get bored, you could actually respond to what I was asserting, which was that a commercially viable trading system would rapidly stabilize any advantage it had, because it would spread to everyone who had a serious interest in tracking new developments in this area. That's what's still oddly on topic for the parent post.
Thank you, drive though.
-j
_Please_ don't speak for the rest of us. Just direct all calls to someone who can actually engage others in a meaningful conversation. We can actually articulate a concept, and by doing so, win the war. You can just ride on the dividends.Go look at that bondage pr0n some more. There, all better, yes?
The second problem is that you (or your computer) has to have a pretty good idea where the camera is. There has been some publicly accessibile purchases that hint at that sort of thing, which you can find if you follow the links on the guy's site who started this whole discussion, but I bet you can't afford one, not to mention it won't work at driving speeds. Sorry.
Without driving a tank with Class IV lasers and some serious computing power, or some very, very careful planning for a very specific operation, you're not terribly likely to confuse cameras. And if you have either, why are you worried?
-j
Sure hope it isn't. Let me know when you're exonerated because That Dumb Machine(tm) made a mistake.
Oh, too late, is it?
Our police don't even carry guns, and I don't want them to start.
Sorry, but what does this have to do with automated cameras?
-j
I've dealt with this concept a few times (both as a full-time employee and, more frequently, since I became a consultant), and every time someone comes to me with a Mind Map, it takes an absurd amount of time to straighten out what they actually want, and how to implement it. I'm sure that the method is great for brain storming, or getting stoned and coming up with ideas, or whatever, but it simply sucks as a substitute for coming up with a plan of action.
Every time I've encountered this sort of behaviour out of people, I end up first sitting in endless meetings determining what people actually care about, then turning it into a prioritised outline, and finally coming up with a plan that roughly fits what they started with. All at a rather serious cost to clients, now that I'm working for myself. (I'd like to say that that's fine because I'm making money doing it, but I hate the process of reverse engineering a client's crappy notes. If they'd just plan correctly in the first place, they'd be richer, and I'd have more hair.)
Do yourself a favor. Instead of a Mind Map, start thinking about what you want to say/do, what is most important, and if you have to draw, use a real graphical business system modeller, like Visio or Kivio. (I must say I hate Kivio. Visio sort of sucks, but Kivio sucks more. Sure, flame me.) If you're more technical than I'm giving you credit for, forgive me first, and then whip out a note book, and start combining scribbles with words. That's my personal dirty secret - I have a business diary (coming on, I think 18 volumes shortly) that I take endless notes in and - yes! - draw in. I use that to model proposals that I send to clients. Those proposals are almost always in words, but occasionally I do draw a diagram, but only after I have the full gameplan and the processes to support it in my head.*
That's the difference, I think. One doesn't submit one's class notes to a professor, and one doesn't submit Mind Maps to people who actually have to implement things.Sure, I'm sure this software can turn your mental process into a web page. Please point me to a site developed that way (besides the parent corp.) which is relevant on a frequent basis to others.
Don't mean to be harsh, but I've hard learned lessons that this is not a model to push for efficient business practice.
-j
* For the zealots out there, I've been using almost nothing but Open Source software in my personal business for over a year. I frequently have to do something for clients with software like Oracle and a host of small providers of commercial software, but aside from the W2K box to test web interfaces with (and that's a dual boot server that also has my ripped CD collection on it), there is no commercial software in our office. I still miss Mathematica, and might end up making an exception for it. I haven't given up yet, though.And at least Mathematica runs on Linux.
I agree with you on most respects (even if much of what you're talking about is very, very far beyond most realistically imaginable systems in the near future), but simple economics shows why the above is silly.
Simple question: someone uses a tool to make a killing on a pre-existing market. How does everyone respond (not counting RIAA, et al, who depend on regulation)? They either curl up and die, or figure out what the winners are doing, and quickly. Learning what people are doing is even easier in markets like finance, where there's a lot of transparency in actions, a very close knit group of participants, people who like to brag, and a lot of people staring at the winners.
Fact is, any new innovation in trading quickly becomes used by everyone who has a serious enough stake. It is just market economics. Once everyone gets an innovation, it is no longer an advantage, because everyone is doing it (bonus points for those who see past and potential systemic failures lurking in this behaviour).
Of course, keeping your traders free of risks like sharing information and regulatory oversight can extend an advantage, and that works in a very few situations. But hell, even Warren Buffett took a fairly serious beeting recently due to things he couldn't predict (and this is an insurance guy!), not to mention Soros when he attacked Asian currencies a few years ago.
Not only is there no silver bullet for the folks who run finance, there's just no way in hell peons in the game (anyone with less than a few hundred million invested) will profit from raw computational power. Sorry.
-j
-j
I think we're speaking in two entirely orthagonal directions, so I won't bother with being too verbose here. (as a matter of fact, someone looking over my shoulder as I wrote my post asked me why I bothered to even post the message to which you're responding.)
The point of what I posted, which I had hoped people would grasp, was simply that there is no difference between sharing music, sampling music, selling music, and selling sampled music, at least from an economic perspective. That was all I was saying. It was a very, very narrow statement of fact.
If you're morally opposed to one member of that class of activities, you should be opposed to all of them, if you want to be internally consistent in your moral judgement.
I did read your post, several times, which you might have noticed from the direct quote from it. I hate to say it, but I'm not sure you read mine, starting from the point where I start trying to explain how cash and labor over time are equivelant. Er, that would be the start of the message.
If you still don't get what I'm saying, fine. You can even have the last word. I would suggest taking an econ class in your spare time, though (not trying to be a jerk, really. Just a suggestion.).
-j, heading back to slashdot lurk mode, because I don't have the time to deal with the mess.
I think there are some basic misunderstandings in your post.
The most basic one if that economics, as a whole, does not talk about money. It talks about transfers of resources. Much of it talks about finite resources, which is why so much ill-informed debate goes on as we witness a previously finite resource become effectively infinite. Money (dollars, rubles, pesos, etc.) are extremely useful measures for talking about these things, but one must be careful to realize that they are simply proxies for understandings and agreements between people.
If I perform an action, and give the result to you, a transfer of value as occurred. If I give you a recording of your favorite artist, you are better off. I may be, because of implied agreements to get something in return. The artist is slightly better off in terms of being more well known, which may lead to you in some way benefiting them in the future. Some people think they are slightly worse off because we're engaging in a pattern of behaviour that does not involve a third party who by legal convention serves to broker such activites.
I think you can sort of work out the rest of my thoughts based on the premises above. In terms of sampling lots of things and "using it to make money", I wonder if you ever made a mix tape for someone. You probably did not get dollars from the person you gave it to, but you did at the very least expect to recieve value in some way or another (i.e., a mix tape in return, get laid, something).
-j