Would "Businessman" vs. "Hobbyist" be less objectionable?
Of course not. That a "businessman" - or anyone else - has any more default legal standing is odious because it welcomes abuse.
Old Sears catalogs had engravings of the huge factory/warehouse that was the center of the company. People had to be reassured that the unseen stranger they were sending money to really existed and was big enough to make sure their order really got shipped out to them.
Microsoft had a series of ads about the hordes of people working hard on the new versions of their products, and still talks about the sheer number of man-years of effort invested every time they release something.
I am not suggesting "business" should have more standing, nor am I suggesting that it's OK for someone to prejudge that way; I'm saying that a lot of effort has been made by Big Business to convey the assurance that Big Business is the source of innovation and the trustworthy way to go. I also recall that for every legitimate story of the little guy fighting the good fight (I used my intermittent wipers this very morning!) there's a cautionary story about another little guy defrauding or scamming the "deep pockets" (whether business or government). I can *understand* the judge's ignorance without approving of it, and *understand* why testimony from a hacker's hacker friends and hacker journalists might seem like more noisy teenagers to chase off his lawn. Public relations campaigns are serious business, just like "community organizing", and the non-commercial non-moneyed Open Source world DOESN'T HAVE ONE because nobody's there to pay for it. It really is the tragedy of the commons.
Would "Businessman" vs. "Hobbyist" be less objectionable? It's no different from the way M$ seems to claim that they invented everything since sliced bread, not even admitting that there were other *companies* in the business with good ideas, let alone the Open Source community.
Justice works - among other things - on which evidence carries more weight. That includes which is more believable. And to NORMAL PEOPLE, it seems unbelievable that significant technical work can be done by people noodling around on their own. Yes, they can understand the solo artist or musician, perhaps the garage band, that makes it big; and yes, they *might* have read the stories of how HP started in a garage; but they think of computer programming as big technical projects requiring big technical budgets and corporate backing. For all we know, this judge's VCR is still blinking 12:00.
The crux of both cases come down to code ownership/authorship. Is that something that just goes "Whoosh" to all judges?
I completely agree. If I photocopied a famous author's work and printed it with my name in the author's spot, I'd lose in a heartbeat. That's because there is an existing legal tool called "copyright" that the judges *do* understand, with an entire set of procedures and precedents. Because nobody is paying for open source - which looks to normal people like hobbyist dabbling - nobody has paid lawyers to establish the parallel precedents.
IANAL, so this is just opinion: Instead of trying to create new licensing concepts,I would pursue the same logic as a musician performing a "cover song" under a "mechanical license". Any artist is permitted to record any published song simply by paying the publisher; the original author has made the song available to everyone by publishing it, so the performer doesn't have to get specific permission. Similarly, open source projects should be copyrighted in the exact form they're released - meaning nobody can copy that exact form and claim it as their own - with the "mechanical license" cost being *specified* as attribution (including full history). Use the existing legal tools, in a way that the existing legal structure can equate to a precedent, and maybe we'd help them understand better.
How many of us have been *both*? I've been the new guy who sees the spaghetti, and I've been the experienced guy who knows where the bodies are buried AND WHY. Right now I'm both at the same time: building a re-engineered re-designed version of an old codebase on obsolete hardware, and it has turned out over time that most of the special cases and weird code were because the APPLICATION has special cases and weird situations that the so-called subject expert had forgotten to tell us about.
Look at it the other way - "That code that's been working and trusted for years - USE IT instead of your new untried untested code that we have to review and certify and write completely new tests for and document and and and...."
Do you write a new file system for every application, or do you rely on the OS to be stable and trustworthy? Once things become "infrastructure", their stability is a *positive*. Of course, like the railroad track width being related to Roman chariot wheels, sometimes the consistency becomes stupid; but compatibility is a good thing too.
Y2K happened because once upon a time memory and storage were *expensive*. One 6250 BPI tape gave you 170MB. Today you see 2GB flash cards as impulse buys near the cash register at CVS! We would have killed for that much spare storage that small.
That's why you hear quotes from very smart men such as Benjamin Franklin saying "If we restrict liberty to attain security we will lose them both." We've seen that actually play out since Sept. 11th.
And which party was most of that done by, between 2001 and 2009? The one that keeps insisting on *less* government intrusion . . . except when it suits them. Not that I'm happy with the changed administration going along with much of the same.
No parallel. This location data they're requesting is HISTORICAL, not real time tracking and location information. This is NO DIFFERENT than the lack of a warrant it takes to acquire your calling records, to scan your e-mail headers (not message content), to pull credit card receipts, and more.
This data helps cops, who have DOCUMENTED PROBABLY CAUSE, and how FILE A FORM, and go through DUE PROCESS...
1. That information should take a warrant as well.
2. Document cause? File a form? Due process? Which part of "warrantless" are you contradicting? "Warrantless" means "without a warrant", which means "without having to convince a judge, even one already sympathetic to police action, and without having to prove anything, and without having to go through any process."
Your argument seems to come down to the usual "if you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear". Tell me: When you go to the bathroom, do you close the door? I'm betting yes, even when you're the only one home. Are you trying to hide something? Of course not - societal norms suggest some degree of privacy, both for you and for others who don't particularly need to look. And that's the point.
EXACTLY! And that's the point! They managed to fit a typical romantic comedy movie into a 30-second "elevator pitch" without even stating anything directly! Look at it as a short story - a MICRO-story - and think of how much story they compressed into it - because it's just references, so viewers are really making up the whole story in their own heads.
Exactly. The OS does it in expensive RAM with slower access to the platters. Windows ReadyBoost does it with complicated extra software and special hardware and secret knowledge. I want to speed up existing platter drives generically, automatically, and OS-insensitively, with a large percentage of the SSD benefit (one's typical working set) for a low percentage of the cost (because it's a "dongle extension cord" instead of a full SSD).
Why hasn't someone already made this, just like caching IDE controllers? (Terminology wrong, of course, in that SATA doesn't need a "controller" in the IDE sense because it's host-to-host)
An inline device that you plug in the SATA line. Should be the size of a USB memory stick with a connector at each end, or with an extension cord & connector at one end. Give it 2 to 8 GB of memory, again like a USB memory stick. Different sizes could be different price points.
Monitor all reads. Cache them while you have empty pages. Obviously the first thing to be read and cached will be the boot sequence on the first powerup after installation, which is probably what you want most anyway, and 2GB is bigger than your core working set even on Windows. On any read, if in cache, return cached copy (obviously), otherwise pass along to disk. Best design will completely avoid delay on the return data by letting it pass through and monitoring it multidrop. Maintain a reference counter on the N pages cached, and on the next favorite N pages (at least); any time a page in cache (or reference count list) is written, invalidate it, replacing the next time you see one of your "next favorite" pages go past. Ditto if a "next favorite" reference count gets higher than the lowest of the N live pages.
Remember, this thing never instigates action on its own, just piggybacks on system activity. Eventually it stabilizes on your OS, your most-used programs, etc. When you do an update, things get invalidated for a while - your next-frequently-used replace them, until the reference counts go back up. It's self-tuning. The operating system doesn't even know it's there - no driver, no changes, no special code. The disk drive doesn't know it's there. For a frame delay on the SATA request you get acceleration on everything; and if you parse the request in parallel to match you can keep the delay below a full frame.
Maybe the converse: People who go out, see friends, do things are happier. People who can't go out, don't have friends, can't do things get depressed. (and yes, "can't" != "don't"; some people don't because they can't, because of physical or psychological handicaps, or because they get too much negative response due to appearance or other problems).
Or maybe the inverse: people who surf the net and see sexier/wealthier/happier/successful-er people than themselves (and partner (if any)) get depressed at their relatively low status. (Argument previously applied to TV viewing in poorer/rural/developing areas.)
Or maybe human beings are much more complicated and have many simultaneous reasons for good and bad habits. Just a thought.
Oddly enough, I thought this was an article on how to make remote terrorist bombs thinly veneered with respectability by claiming it was for something productive.
Somehow nobody has trouble dealing with the Muppets, or the Henson-created aliens on Farscape; even little children deal with them, and my non-techie mother-in-law thinks my wife's Rygel doll is "cute". (Well, maybe it looks better than Rygel did; point is she doesn't say "it's a squishy frog".) Somehow the folks at Pixar manage to make an architect's lamp behave enough to make people think of it as a creature. Humans can accept a *lot*.
Yes, but. A DVR isn't a VCR; but "digital storage" is all the same, whether the file is text or audio or video or any future coding, and "activating based on a clock timer" is a concept that already existed. In the 1960s and 70s the patent office would NOT patent ANYTHING to do with a computer, on the grounds that "algorithms are laws of nature". It was business lobbying and a particular political philosophy that swung the pendulum to the point where you can patent the same process people did for years on paper simply because you now do it on a computer. One could copyright a particular calendar or account-book format; that's much less particular, and MUCH less protection, than being able to patent the entire *concept* of keeping a calendar or account-book because someone does it on a computer. For example, good salespeople always knew their customers and anticipated their needs (my barista has my coffee ready by the time I've reached the front of the line); the fact that online shops do that with a database instead of an index card file should not be considered a new concept worthy of patent protection.
Perhaps you need to stop using a 7 year old OS as your reference of what "Windows does".
Would you be as quick to say: Perhaps you need to stop using the OS with the most installs at the moment as your reference?
It sucks, but it's what's out there. You wouldn't design your system around Betamax, even though it was technically better, because there aren't any; and you can't ignore XP, because it's the most common. By all means let's help the non-technical move to something better, by showing them the better alternatives - but you have to put one foot in the muck to reach them and pull them out.
I got no problem with people making rat poison. My problem is with people putting rat poison in MY food. Even worse, people putting "stuff" in my food when they themselves don't even know the effects.
Random thought: These business people can all do arithmetic when it comes to money, right? Why wasn't it obvious to them that "corn that kills bugs" might be "corn that kills whatever eats it"?
Pong and Space Invaders just got faster and faster until you couldn't possibly keep up. No such thing as "finish"; more of a race against clock and record book.
As noted above, it takes the stylistic move into "telling a story" to need an ending, and that move requires more of a computer and a database. The first games had playing logic but very little memory.
>>>when I look at teens today, it's terrifying how basically ignorant they are, and how amazingly short their attention spans are.
Gee, us 50+ folks thought the same about *you*.:-) Then realized we sounded like our parents.:-):-):-)
The problem is there's truth in it. The pace of technological change has been much faster than the pace at which society and individuals can adjust in a sensible fashion. Witness the thread about privacy expectations.
Oops. that was supposed to be just "The Hub", as in James H. Schmitz, not the Hegen Hub from Lois McMaster Bujold, since I already mentioned Vorkosigan.
Add Amber, and the Gaean Reach, the Dying Earth, the Corps Diplomatique Terrestrienne . . .
Wash and Book are only dead in the movie, which wasn't real:-) if they picked up the show where it left off.
But yes, it's probably impractical at best. Perhaps I'll throw in with what others have said: better to go on and keep trying new things. There may also be some benefit to the one-season or miniseries approach; have a good idea, present it, enjoy it, move along, more like the way authors come out with books. A series isn't necessarily exact sequels and continuations; there could be gaps of time and action in between, and even different people/places in the "universe" (I'm thinking of Vorkosigan, Dresden, Known Space, the Hegen Hub...)
I assumed it meant "restart/continue" Firefly, not redo it from scratch.
It would have been nice if the "government experiments on its own people" story crammed into "Serenity" had been a season's story arc, like it was probably designed to be.
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Would "Businessman" vs. "Hobbyist" be less objectionable?
Of course not. That a "businessman" - or anyone else - has any more default legal standing is odious because it welcomes abuse.
Old Sears catalogs had engravings of the huge factory/warehouse that was the center of the company. People had to be reassured that the unseen stranger they were sending money to really existed and was big enough to make sure their order really got shipped out to them. Microsoft had a series of ads about the hordes of people working hard on the new versions of their products, and still talks about the sheer number of man-years of effort invested every time they release something.
I am not suggesting "business" should have more standing, nor am I suggesting that it's OK for someone to prejudge that way; I'm saying that a lot of effort has been made by Big Business to convey the assurance that Big Business is the source of innovation and the trustworthy way to go. I also recall that for every legitimate story of the little guy fighting the good fight (I used my intermittent wipers this very morning!) there's a cautionary story about another little guy defrauding or scamming the "deep pockets" (whether business or government). I can *understand* the judge's ignorance without approving of it, and *understand* why testimony from a hacker's hacker friends and hacker journalists might seem like more noisy teenagers to chase off his lawn. Public relations campaigns are serious business, just like "community organizing", and the non-commercial non-moneyed Open Source world DOESN'T HAVE ONE because nobody's there to pay for it. It really is the tragedy of the commons.
Would "Businessman" vs. "Hobbyist" be less objectionable? It's no different from the way M$ seems to claim that they invented everything since sliced bread, not even admitting that there were other *companies* in the business with good ideas, let alone the Open Source community.
Justice works - among other things - on which evidence carries more weight. That includes which is more believable. And to NORMAL PEOPLE, it seems unbelievable that significant technical work can be done by people noodling around on their own. Yes, they can understand the solo artist or musician, perhaps the garage band, that makes it big; and yes, they *might* have read the stories of how HP started in a garage; but they think of computer programming as big technical projects requiring big technical budgets and corporate backing. For all we know, this judge's VCR is still blinking 12:00.
The crux of both cases come down to code ownership/authorship. Is that something that just goes "Whoosh" to all judges?
I completely agree. If I photocopied a famous author's work and printed it with my name in the author's spot, I'd lose in a heartbeat. That's because there is an existing legal tool called "copyright" that the judges *do* understand, with an entire set of procedures and precedents. Because nobody is paying for open source - which looks to normal people like hobbyist dabbling - nobody has paid lawyers to establish the parallel precedents.
IANAL, so this is just opinion: Instead of trying to create new licensing concepts,I would pursue the same logic as a musician performing a "cover song" under a "mechanical license". Any artist is permitted to record any published song simply by paying the publisher; the original author has made the song available to everyone by publishing it, so the performer doesn't have to get specific permission. Similarly, open source projects should be copyrighted in the exact form they're released - meaning nobody can copy that exact form and claim it as their own - with the "mechanical license" cost being *specified* as attribution (including full history). Use the existing legal tools, in a way that the existing legal structure can equate to a precedent, and maybe we'd help them understand better.
How many of us have been *both*? I've been the new guy who sees the spaghetti, and I've been the experienced guy who knows where the bodies are buried AND WHY. Right now I'm both at the same time: building a re-engineered re-designed version of an old codebase on obsolete hardware, and it has turned out over time that most of the special cases and weird code were because the APPLICATION has special cases and weird situations that the so-called subject expert had forgotten to tell us about.
Look at it the other way - "That code that's been working and trusted for years - USE IT instead of your new untried untested code that we have to review and certify and write completely new tests for and document and and and...."
Do you write a new file system for every application, or do you rely on the OS to be stable and trustworthy? Once things become "infrastructure", their stability is a *positive*. Of course, like the railroad track width being related to Roman chariot wheels, sometimes the consistency becomes stupid; but compatibility is a good thing too.
Y2K happened because once upon a time memory and storage were *expensive*. One 6250 BPI tape gave you 170MB. Today you see 2GB flash cards as impulse buys near the cash register at CVS! We would have killed for that much spare storage that small.
That's why you hear quotes from very smart men such as Benjamin Franklin saying "If we restrict liberty to attain security we will lose them both." We've seen that actually play out since Sept. 11th.
And which party was most of that done by, between 2001 and 2009? The one that keeps insisting on *less* government intrusion . . . except when it suits them. Not that I'm happy with the changed administration going along with much of the same.
No parallel. This location data they're requesting is HISTORICAL, not real time tracking and location information. This is NO DIFFERENT than the lack of a warrant it takes to acquire your calling records, to scan your e-mail headers (not message content), to pull credit card receipts, and more.
This data helps cops, who have DOCUMENTED PROBABLY CAUSE, and how FILE A FORM, and go through DUE PROCESS...
1. That information should take a warrant as well.
2. Document cause? File a form? Due process? Which part of "warrantless" are you contradicting? "Warrantless" means "without a warrant", which means "without having to convince a judge, even one already sympathetic to police action, and without having to prove anything, and without having to go through any process."
Your argument seems to come down to the usual "if you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear". Tell me: When you go to the bathroom, do you close the door? I'm betting yes, even when you're the only one home. Are you trying to hide something? Of course not - societal norms suggest some degree of privacy, both for you and for others who don't particularly need to look. And that's the point.
EXACTLY! And that's the point! They managed to fit a typical romantic comedy movie into a 30-second "elevator pitch" without even stating anything directly! Look at it as a short story - a MICRO-story - and think of how much story they compressed into it - because it's just references, so viewers are really making up the whole story in their own heads.
Maybe by some V-day, you'll have had an experience that explains why it's worth putting up with., :-) :-)
It's introducing the low latency of SSD to the *disk drive*, with persistence over powerdown. Plus my motherboard is maxed out. :-)
Exactly. The OS does it in expensive RAM with slower access to the platters. Windows ReadyBoost does it with complicated extra software and special hardware and secret knowledge. I want to speed up existing platter drives generically, automatically, and OS-insensitively, with a large percentage of the SSD benefit (one's typical working set) for a low percentage of the cost (because it's a "dongle extension cord" instead of a full SSD).
Why hasn't someone already made this, just like caching IDE controllers? (Terminology wrong, of course, in that SATA doesn't need a "controller" in the IDE sense because it's host-to-host)
An inline device that you plug in the SATA line. Should be the size of a USB memory stick with a connector at each end, or with an extension cord & connector at one end. Give it 2 to 8 GB of memory, again like a USB memory stick. Different sizes could be different price points.
Monitor all reads. Cache them while you have empty pages. Obviously the first thing to be read and cached will be the boot sequence on the first powerup after installation, which is probably what you want most anyway, and 2GB is bigger than your core working set even on Windows. On any read, if in cache, return cached copy (obviously), otherwise pass along to disk. Best design will completely avoid delay on the return data by letting it pass through and monitoring it multidrop. Maintain a reference counter on the N pages cached, and on the next favorite N pages (at least); any time a page in cache (or reference count list) is written, invalidate it, replacing the next time you see one of your "next favorite" pages go past. Ditto if a "next favorite" reference count gets higher than the lowest of the N live pages.
Remember, this thing never instigates action on its own, just piggybacks on system activity. Eventually it stabilizes on your OS, your most-used programs, etc. When you do an update, things get invalidated for a while - your next-frequently-used replace them, until the reference counts go back up. It's self-tuning. The operating system doesn't even know it's there - no driver, no changes, no special code. The disk drive doesn't know it's there. For a frame delay on the SATA request you get acceleration on everything; and if you parse the request in parallel to match you can keep the delay below a full frame.
Maybe the converse: People who go out, see friends, do things are happier. People who can't go out, don't have friends, can't do things get depressed. (and yes, "can't" != "don't"; some people don't because they can't, because of physical or psychological handicaps, or because they get too much negative response due to appearance or other problems).
Or maybe the inverse: people who surf the net and see sexier/wealthier/happier/successful-er people than themselves (and partner (if any)) get depressed at their relatively low status. (Argument previously applied to TV viewing in poorer/rural/developing areas.)
Or maybe human beings are much more complicated and have many simultaneous reasons for good and bad habits. Just a thought.
Oddly enough, I thought this was an article on how to make remote terrorist bombs thinly veneered with respectability by claiming it was for something productive.
Somehow nobody has trouble dealing with the Muppets, or the Henson-created aliens on Farscape; even little children deal with them, and my non-techie mother-in-law thinks my wife's Rygel doll is "cute". (Well, maybe it looks better than Rygel did; point is she doesn't say "it's a squishy frog".) Somehow the folks at Pixar manage to make an architect's lamp behave enough to make people think of it as a creature. Humans can accept a *lot*.
Yes, but. A DVR isn't a VCR; but "digital storage" is all the same, whether the file is text or audio or video or any future coding, and "activating based on a clock timer" is a concept that already existed. In the 1960s and 70s the patent office would NOT patent ANYTHING to do with a computer, on the grounds that "algorithms are laws of nature". It was business lobbying and a particular political philosophy that swung the pendulum to the point where you can patent the same process people did for years on paper simply because you now do it on a computer. One could copyright a particular calendar or account-book format; that's much less particular, and MUCH less protection, than being able to patent the entire *concept* of keeping a calendar or account-book because someone does it on a computer. For example, good salespeople always knew their customers and anticipated their needs (my barista has my coffee ready by the time I've reached the front of the line); the fact that online shops do that with a database instead of an index card file should not be considered a new concept worthy of patent protection.
Perhaps you need to stop using a 7 year old OS as your reference of what "Windows does".
Would you be as quick to say: Perhaps you need to stop using the OS with the most installs at the moment as your reference?
It sucks, but it's what's out there. You wouldn't design your system around Betamax, even though it was technically better, because there aren't any; and you can't ignore XP, because it's the most common. By all means let's help the non-technical move to something better, by showing them the better alternatives - but you have to put one foot in the muck to reach them and pull them out.
I got no problem with people making rat poison. My problem is with people putting rat poison in MY food. Even worse, people putting "stuff" in my food when they themselves don't even know the effects.
Random thought: These business people can all do arithmetic when it comes to money, right? Why wasn't it obvious to them that "corn that kills bugs" might be "corn that kills whatever eats it"?
Pong and Space Invaders just got faster and faster until you couldn't possibly keep up. No such thing as "finish"; more of a race against clock and record book.
As noted above, it takes the stylistic move into "telling a story" to need an ending, and that move requires more of a computer and a database. The first games had playing logic but very little memory.
>>>when I look at teens today, it's terrifying how basically ignorant they are, and how amazingly short their attention spans are. Gee, us 50+ folks thought the same about *you*. :-) Then realized we sounded like our parents. :-) :-) :-)
The problem is there's truth in it. The pace of technological change has been much faster than the pace at which society and individuals can adjust in a sensible fashion. Witness the thread about privacy expectations.
Oops. that was supposed to be just "The Hub", as in James H. Schmitz, not the Hegen Hub from Lois McMaster Bujold, since I already mentioned Vorkosigan. Add Amber, and the Gaean Reach, the Dying Earth, the Corps Diplomatique Terrestrienne . . .
And I expect your names to SHINE!
Ooooh. Lensmen with modern tech. And all the sexism and racism and . . . Hmm. Maybe not. :-)
Wash and Book are only dead in the movie, which wasn't real :-) if they picked up the show where it left off.
But yes, it's probably impractical at best. Perhaps I'll throw in with what others have said: better to go on and keep trying new things. There may also be some benefit to the one-season or miniseries approach; have a good idea, present it, enjoy it, move along, more like the way authors come out with books. A series isn't necessarily exact sequels and continuations; there could be gaps of time and action in between, and even different people/places in the "universe" (I'm thinking of Vorkosigan, Dresden, Known Space, the Hegen Hub...)
I assumed it meant "restart/continue" Firefly, not redo it from scratch. It would have been nice if the "government experiments on its own people" story crammed into "Serenity" had been a season's story arc, like it was probably designed to be.