Actually, the race to get more bandwidth was actually driven by EC (which was then the EEC - where did that other E go? Oh yeah, on the gravy train to Brussels). EEC legislature forced European Telco's into providing fully digital backbones across each country. England was one of the first to achieve this, then got privatised (at a large profit to the cabinet ministers & cronies). I'm always amazed that countries like France & Germany are rabid pro-europeans, and yet last I checked, appear very low on the EU legislature compliance list...
Does it provide a new method of producing high-quality software, or does it apply to only some programme categories?
I'd say it suits all, but fits some better than others. As a general note, Open Source code is only released when it is correct - I can't bring to mind any new release of any OSS that is not a definite step forward, yet I can easily bring to mind many patches from commercial suppliers which exacerbate what they were trying to fix. I think this is because OSS programmers aren't under pressure to bang out the next version - proof that Sales & Marketing departments are inherently evil and counterproductive to good code. By this nature, OSS software is not suited to very fast moving technologies, yet is excellent at instances where programmers have the time and opportunity to get it right.
What does it mean for the economics of cyberspace?
I can see less & less commercial vendors out there flogging proprietary code, which could be dangerous. If there are less professional programmers, there will be less students, so who will actually write the Open Source Code? There will have to be a big shift in corporate attitude to prevent this. Companies will sell mostly services, and give away the applications free. So cost models will shift to reflect that; most of the cost models I have seen in industry are heavy on the "system" cost and mostly have support services bundled in. But will users pay heavily for something as ephemeral as support? If you buy a system, you have something shiny & new you can show your shareholders. If you buy support, you have a voice at the end of a phone line that shareholders never see.
How can free software coexist with hard-nosed profit-maximising companies?
Closed Source will almost always be the poor cousin of Open. Even if companies base their code on existing Open source and charge for any additional reworking, there will still exist a "free" version within a few months. Companies won't dare invest in innovation with Open source, in case someone picks up the idea, rewrites it and gives it away.
Business which depends on Open Source (like RedHat) must keep the OSS community on side, or will rapidly perish.
"Besides, given the Data Protection Act (people aren`t allowed to hold personal data (including as little as a name and address) about you on computers unless you give them permission,..." Read the DPA. Governmental institutions have a cast iron opt out clause, pretty much whenever they want...
And for those who bleat that they would like a National ID card in the UK because the "innocent have nothing to fear", I would suggest they spend 90 minutes being strip searched in the back of a Police van, having comitted no crime other than being a passenger in a car that was being driven at 10mph over the speed limit. Then tell me you really want that ID card.
I accept your point, but it's a question of what is easier to implement - clamp down on guns, or completely rework society?
I don't have any convenient stats to prove this, but I'd bet a pound to a penny that the US has more gun deaths per head than the UK. Because guns are so prevalent in the US.
Most mass gun murders in the UK were committed with licensed guns. OK, I accept that if someone wants a gun, they will obtain it illegally. But most of the murderers are nutters, and by making it harder for them to own guns in the first place removes part of the problem. Attempting to buy an illegal gun also exposes a potential murderer to the possibility of detection.
You are right, in an ideal society, this would not happen. But how easy is it to create Utopia, and how easy is it to control guns?
What's really scary are the number of mass killings that could have easily been prevented if one of the victims had been in possession of a gun.
Hmm, kind of fight fire with fire? So you've got a Reservoir Dogs kind of standoff? Or just a good old fashioned showdown at the OK Corral?
Personally, I don't see how this could work, unless everybody carried guns all the time. Which would be great on a Saturday night after a few beers... Not.
Compare the stats of how many (armed) US police officers per capita who get shot each year to how many (unarmed)UK police officers get shot each year; if there's less guns in circulation, there's less murder...
And what if the murderer steals the gun from the victim-to-be?
I guess I'm just looking for some enlightenment as to why you people in the US are so keen to own guns. I know it's in your Constitution and all, but why is it still in place / exercised so much?
I'm British, and although I can't speak for the rest of the UK population, I'd think that most people over here would rather not stop at putting smart chips in guns to control access. We'd much rather pour molten lead into an unloaded gun and let it solidify.
But of course, we have had a debate about gun control over here recently following the Dunblane tragedy (nutter massacred a whole bunch of schoolkids). Possession of handguns is now severely restricted, all handguns were returned or decommisioned and owners compensated. We have no bill of rights in the UK, so the political manoevering was mostly based on those who shoot for sport (by which I mean paper targets), and farmers who need guns for pest control. It kind of degenerated into a social class debate after a while, but the Government stood firm.
As was remarked elsewhere, the ruling has minimal effect on the criminals, yet penalising those who have a legitimate interests in gun ownership. A few months back, I watched an ambulance crew take a gunshot victim away, not far from my own front door. I wish I could convey my feelings of horror about this to anyone who thinks guns are cool, and bringing back the original topic, wish I could download the entire scene as I experienced it to people with the cyber chip technology implanted, who still see gun ownership as a "right". There is always the argument "guns don't kill people, people kill people". But I don't think it takes a genius to work out who could kill more people, the person with a knife, or the person with an automatic pistol. I later found out from a policeman attending the above incident that the woman who had been shot wasn't even anything to do with the two blokes who were arguing, she was just at the wrong place at the wrong time. So, we do have a very different approach to gun control, and things are different in the US. Given the lobbyists for the NRA's standpoint on gun ownership as a "right", surely legislating the ownership of guns in the US is a positive thing, if coupled with very stiff penalties for possessing an unchipped gun?
I'm not trying to evangelise here, just asking for points of view, and trying to understand your society better.
Hey, calm down to a panic, would you? This is exactly the point I was trying too make, although it seems to have passed you by. I should imagine that the "out-of-touch... CS people" you refer to probably are considering the impact of this technology. And most would agree, that yes, it is repugnant to make animals suffer just so people don't have to get off their lardarses to switch a light on. But when you consider the scope of this, do you want to be the one to tell a blind mother that she'll never see her newborn baby, because artificial retinas could not be developed and testedd? Or let the Nobel physicist die an early death because they couldn't test an autopaging heart monitor?
I don't agree with animal testing either, but I think the moral and ethical issues here are extremely wide ranging, and to simply condemn a breaking technology such as this as "evil" is dangerously shortsighted.
I remember seeing something like a remote control cat a fair while back... The poor moggy had electrodes stuck into it's brain, but apparently researchers could influence the cat's basic movements depending on what signal they sent to it... Anyone else remember this?
So, I guess the technology is almost there in a rudimentary sense; I also recall that researchers managed to get human brain cells to bond & grow on silicon wafers not too long ago, as well. Imagine it if you could augment your memory with as much DRAM as you could afford! And you'd never have to drink to forget, just flush the RAM! Uh oh - just realised the flaw in the plan - you could have perfect clarity of the night before when you danced drunk and naked across the bar...:) And worse still, other people could play their memories of it back to you!
Whatever your beliefs about 666 and all that, I think there are a number of big ethical hurdles way before the technology will be usable and theologists start getting worked up. With all the research that still needs to be done, there's never been a worse time to be a Rhesus monkey...
Borland is seriously committing to Linux, which is good to see. And I like the "well, what do you want" angle instead of a "this is what we want you to have" approach to the project. I've used Borland Delphi & C++ Builder (cut my teeth on Borland's C++ v1.0:) ) for quite some time, and quite frankly, they rock. A bit weak on debugging, but there's always the excellent Numega debug tools to help out...
What Borland must focus on is making the path for Win * programmers to migrate to Linux as easy and intuitive as possible. This may irk the hardcore "never run windows" Linux programmers; how about it if they produce a development tool with skins like WinAmp, to please both camps?
Maybe Sun will knock Micro$lop out of the business arena; the idea of a MultiVac type machine supporting dumb terminals works well for business (and for tech support guys - how many times have you had to explain to an irate/hysterical user that the grinding sound coming from the PC is their files being shredded on disk as the heads scour the platters, and there's no way to bring the files back?;) ). At least diskless wonder clients will force this on business users who have the bandwidth to support such a model, which is possibly a good thing.
But even if the home market can be supported (which will only happen if everybody gets LAN-like bandwidths through their modems - dream on!), how many people are willing to let their files be distributed across the Internet? I mean, these will not be harmless pictures of the family holiday, the data will actually be peoples' tax accounts, letters to lawyers, etc etc. And people get squirelly over these things. Especially in the light of the recent security breaches the largest corporation in the world has been exposed to recently, the public are slowly realising that security across distributed systems is not a simple matter, and they will want their confidential files where they feel they are safe from the evil "haX0r d00dz". This is surely perception over reality, but that's the general public for you...
So, I think the home market is safe for a loooong while, and who in business will replace a £2000 Linux webserver for a £50000 Sun server? It's only the desktop I see Linux having to fight for, and that will be a capricious market for Sun to capture. Here's a sample business case for you - as IT manager:
1) Install Linux for free on your worthless old Pentium 100Mhz's
or
2) Buy our thin client toasters at £300 per desk. Oh, and you'll need a whacking great server to sit behind these, and a FDDI LAN to go with it...
From the CNN article: "And for makers of mass-market software, such as Microsoft Corp. and IBM Corp., the rules forced companies to weaken the security in Web browsers, e-mail programs and other products. "
The question is, did the Government actually have to get Micro$lop to weaken their security for NT in the first place?:)
Geeks have to be caught at an early age. You want more women in I.T.? Get your four-year-old niece/daughter interested in how to code, and sit back and wait twenty years. Yep, that's how geeks are made!!!;-) Add a pinch of tech manual, a smidgen of attitude, and pressurise at 120 Atm! Et Voila, instant geek!;-) Seriously, there just aren't enough geek grrls in the world. But the few I have met have been hotter than Satan's kitchen on curry night at coding (possibly because in order to survive, they must be that extra cut above? Who knows...). Mind you, I've never met a geek grrl who programmed in assembler, or one that exhibited the poor social skills us male geeks are alleged to have (or should it be lack?); then again if you spend your life surrounded by drooling male geeks, I guess you have to learn some interpersonal skills...
Geeks have to be caught at an early age. You want more women in I.T.? Get your four-year-old niece/daughter interested in how to code, and sit back and wait twenty years.
No, no, no no no!!! Visio is the only thing I can use at work to save some of the slave labour when documenting DB structures/relations during reverse engineering of new clients' DB's! The mismanagement I work for are too cheap to invest in a decent RDBMS documenting / admin tool, so Visio is the only thing I can use. It's not brilliant, but at least it dumps rudimentary data into a semi-pretty format, which is quite easy to rework into a halfway decent relational diagram. Can you imagine an M$ Visio still supporting metadata extraction out of Sybase/Interbase/etc DB's? It will be SQL Slaver, Access, or nothing I think. I'd best get the pencil & paper out before the next release....:-(.
I know what you mean about the nerd game binge... But those days are past, and most games these days are an exercise in multimedia rather than being a game... Anybody remember such classics like Uridium, Raid Over Moscow, Infiltrator and Paradroid? Blocky graphics, clunky music. Kept me at the keyboard for hours! These days, even the "rated" games tend to bore after a few hours playing... Or am I just getting old?;-)
Yeah, these days the populace are mostly just ignorant... I forget who said it, but "you can lead a whore to culture, but you can't force them to read". At that low price, this could place net access into the hands of most citizens of the developed nations. Does this mean that there will be less ignorant people, or a more ignorant net?
Still, if it means more people can get to read/. then there could be hope for us yet...
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, the race to get more bandwidth was actually driven by EC (which was then the EEC - where did that other E go? Oh yeah, on the gravy train to Brussels).
EEC legislature forced European Telco's into providing fully digital backbones across each country.
England was one of the first to achieve this, then got privatised (at a large profit to the cabinet ministers & cronies). I'm always amazed that countries like France & Germany are rabid pro-europeans, and yet last I checked, appear very low on the EU legislature compliance list...
But when will you Americans learn to spell "colour" correctly? :)
Whoever it was that said "England and America are two great nations seperated by a common language" got it spot on...
I'd say it suits all, but fits some better than others. As a general note, Open Source code is only released when it is correct - I can't bring to mind any new release of any OSS that is not a definite step forward, yet I can easily bring to mind many patches from commercial suppliers which exacerbate what they were trying to fix. I think this is because OSS programmers aren't under pressure to bang out the next version - proof that Sales & Marketing departments are inherently evil and counterproductive to good code. By this nature, OSS software is not suited to very fast moving technologies, yet is excellent at instances where programmers have the time and opportunity to get it right.
What does it mean for the economics of cyberspace?
I can see less & less commercial vendors out there flogging proprietary code, which could be dangerous. If there are less professional programmers, there will be less students, so who will actually write the Open Source Code? There will have to be a big shift in corporate attitude to prevent this. Companies will sell mostly services, and give away the applications free. So cost models will shift to reflect that; most of the cost models I have seen in industry are heavy on the "system" cost and mostly have support services bundled in. But will users pay heavily for something as ephemeral as support? If you buy a system, you have something shiny & new you can show your shareholders. If you buy support, you have a voice at the end of a phone line that shareholders never see.
How can free software coexist with hard-nosed profit-maximising companies?
Closed Source will almost always be the poor cousin of Open. Even if companies base their code on existing Open source and charge for any additional reworking, there will still exist a "free" version within a few months. Companies won't dare invest in innovation with Open source, in case someone picks up the idea, rewrites it and gives it away.
Business which depends on Open Source (like RedHat) must keep the OSS community on side, or will rapidly perish.
And beer, of course, only takes 18 years (in the UK) before you can legally "study" it! :)
And for those who bleat that they would like a National ID card in the UK because the "innocent have nothing to fear", I would suggest they spend 90 minutes being strip searched in the back of a Police van, having comitted no crime other than being a passenger in a car that was being driven at 10mph over the speed limit. Then tell me you really want that ID card.
I don't have any convenient stats to prove this, but I'd bet a pound to a penny that the US has more gun deaths per head than the UK. Because guns are so prevalent in the US.
Most mass gun murders in the UK were committed with licensed guns. OK, I accept that if someone wants a gun, they will obtain it illegally. But most of the murderers are nutters, and by making it harder for them to own guns in the first place removes part of the problem. Attempting to buy an illegal gun also exposes a potential murderer to the possibility of detection.
You are right, in an ideal society, this would not happen. But how easy is it to create Utopia, and how easy is it to control guns?
Hmm, kind of fight fire with fire? So you've got a Reservoir Dogs kind of standoff? Or just a good old fashioned showdown at the OK Corral?
Personally, I don't see how this could work, unless everybody carried guns all the time. Which would be great on a Saturday night after a few beers... Not.
Compare the stats of how many (armed) US police officers per capita who get shot each year to how many (unarmed)UK police officers get shot each year; if there's less guns in circulation, there's less murder...
And what if the murderer steals the gun from the victim-to-be?
I guess I'm just looking for some enlightenment as to why you people in the US are so keen to own guns. I know it's in your Constitution and all, but why is it still in place / exercised so much?
I'm British, and although I can't speak for the rest of the UK population, I'd think that most people over here would rather not stop at putting smart chips in guns to control access. We'd much rather pour molten lead into an unloaded gun and let it solidify.
But of course, we have had a debate about gun control over here recently following the Dunblane tragedy (nutter massacred a whole bunch of schoolkids). Possession of handguns is now severely restricted, all handguns were returned or decommisioned and owners compensated. We have no bill of rights in the UK, so the political manoevering was mostly based on those who shoot for sport (by which I mean paper targets), and farmers who need guns for pest control. It kind of degenerated into a social class debate after a while, but the Government stood firm.
As was remarked elsewhere, the ruling has minimal effect on the criminals, yet penalising those who have a legitimate interests in gun ownership. A few months back, I watched an ambulance crew take a gunshot victim away, not far from my own front door. I wish I could convey my feelings of horror about this to anyone who thinks guns are cool, and bringing back the original topic, wish I could download the entire scene as I experienced it to people with the cyber chip technology implanted, who still see gun ownership as a "right". There is always the argument "guns don't kill people, people kill people". But I don't think it takes a genius to work out who could kill more people, the person with a knife, or the person with an automatic pistol. I later found out from a policeman attending the above incident that the woman who had been shot wasn't even anything to do with the two blokes who were arguing, she was just at the wrong place at the wrong time. So, we do have a very different approach to gun control, and things are different in the US. Given the lobbyists for the NRA's standpoint on gun ownership as a "right", surely legislating the ownership of guns in the US is a positive thing, if coupled with very stiff penalties for possessing an unchipped gun?
I don't agree with animal testing either, but I think the moral and ethical issues here are extremely wide ranging, and to simply condemn a breaking technology such as this as "evil" is dangerously shortsighted.
So, I guess the technology is almost there in a rudimentary sense; I also recall that researchers managed to get human brain cells to bond & grow on silicon wafers not too long ago, as well. Imagine it if you could augment your memory with as much DRAM as you could afford! And you'd never have to drink to forget, just flush the RAM! Uh oh - just realised the flaw in the plan - you could have perfect clarity of the night before when you danced drunk and naked across the bar...:) And worse still, other people could play their memories of it back to you!
Whatever your beliefs about 666 and all that, I think there are a number of big ethical hurdles way before the technology will be usable and theologists start getting worked up. With all the research that still needs to be done, there's never been a worse time to be a Rhesus monkey...
Borland's Linux page
Borland is seriously committing to Linux, which is good to see. And I like the "well, what do you want" angle instead of a "this is what we want you to have" approach to the project. I've used Borland Delphi & C++ Builder (cut my teeth on Borland's C++ v1.0 :) ) for quite some time, and quite frankly, they rock. A bit weak on debugging, but there's always the excellent Numega debug tools to help out...
What Borland must focus on is making the path for Win * programmers to migrate to Linux as easy and intuitive as possible. This may irk the hardcore "never run windows" Linux programmers; how about it if they produce a development tool with skins like WinAmp, to please both camps?
Think about it with this handy comparision guide...
Virus:
Spreads itself across your hard disk, and tries to make itself impossible to remove.
Micro$lop
Internet Destroyer 4.0
Virus:
Appropriates HDD space unnecessarily
Micro$lop
Turd '97
Virus:
Causes system crashes
Micro$lop
Win *
Virus:
Causes loss of data
Micro$lop
M$ Orifice 2000
Virus:
Can be a security risk
Micro$lop
SAM files
So Linus was the first; now the Finnish government is giving Bill a hard time :)
But even if the home market can be supported (which will only happen if everybody gets LAN-like bandwidths through their modems - dream on!), how many people are willing to let their files be distributed across the Internet? I mean, these will not be harmless pictures of the family holiday, the data will actually be peoples' tax accounts, letters to lawyers, etc etc. And people get squirelly over these things. Especially in the light of the recent security breaches the largest corporation in the world has been exposed to recently, the public are slowly realising that security across distributed systems is not a simple matter, and they will want their confidential files where they feel they are safe from the evil "haX0r d00dz". This is surely perception over reality, but that's the general public for you...
So, I think the home market is safe for a loooong while, and who in business will replace a £2000 Linux webserver for a £50000 Sun server? It's only the desktop I see Linux having to fight for, and that will be a capricious market for Sun to capture. Here's a sample business case for you - as IT manager:
1) Install Linux for free on your worthless old Pentium 100Mhz's
or
2) Buy our thin client toasters at £300 per desk. Oh, and you'll need a whacking great server to sit behind these, and a FDDI LAN to go with it...
The question is, did the Government actually have to get Micro$lop to weaken their security for NT in the first place? :)
Geeks have to be caught at an early age. You want more women in I.T.? Get your four-year-old niece/daughter interested in how to code, and sit back and wait twenty years. Yep, that's how geeks are made!!! ;-) Add a pinch of tech manual, a smidgen of attitude, and pressurise at 120 Atm! Et Voila, instant geek! ;-) Seriously, there just aren't enough geek grrls in the world. But the few I have met have been hotter than Satan's kitchen on curry night at coding (possibly because in order to survive, they must be that extra cut above? Who knows...). Mind you, I've never met a geek grrl who programmed in assembler, or one that exhibited the poor social skills us male geeks are alleged to have (or should it be lack?); then again if you spend your life surrounded by drooling male geeks, I guess you have to learn some interpersonal skills...
Geeks have to be caught at an early age. You want more women in I.T.? Get your four-year-old niece/daughter interested in how to code, and sit back and wait twenty years.
No, no, no no no!!! Visio is the only thing I can use at work to save some of the slave labour when documenting DB structures/relations during reverse engineering of new clients' DB's! The mismanagement I work for are too cheap to invest in a decent RDBMS documenting / admin tool, so Visio is the only thing I can use. It's not brilliant, but at least it dumps rudimentary data into a semi-pretty format, which is quite easy to rework into a halfway decent relational diagram. :-(.
Can you imagine an M$ Visio still supporting metadata extraction out of Sybase/Interbase/etc DB's? It will be SQL Slaver, Access, or nothing I think.
I'd best get the pencil & paper out before the next release....
I know what you mean about the nerd game binge... But those days are past, and most games these days are an exercise in multimedia rather than being a game... Anybody remember such classics like Uridium, Raid Over Moscow, Infiltrator and Paradroid? Blocky graphics, clunky music. Kept me at the keyboard for hours! These days, even the "rated" games tend to bore after a few hours playing... Or am I just getting old? ;-)
Yeah, these days the populace are mostly just ignorant...
/. then there could be hope for us yet...
I forget who said it, but "you can lead a whore to culture, but you can't force them to read". At that low price, this could place net access into the hands of most citizens of the developed nations. Does this mean that there will be less ignorant people, or a more ignorant net?
Still, if it means more people can get to read