there seem to be, on all levels, problems when business has to run or administer, and governments control, some part of technology. thre doesn't seem to be enough research, consulting, or any form of knowledge input into the process.
look at how ICANN has handled this - a mess. look at how domain registration has performed as a whole since it was "opened up" - the lack of sensible regulation resulted in people buying up masses of domains, poaching domains from artists, companies and the like, the "goldrush" mentality... to say nothing of the way something like etoy v eToys was handled. regulation to avert such a nonsensical case should have been in place before day 1.
then there's the whole issue of technology patents - the government again doing something it obviously knows nothing about. i'm sure we don't want to go through another amazon-style "i patented right-clicking" ridiculosity.
some business and technology analysis could have helped prevent this. it still could, given half a chance.
the fact is, any business that acted in these manners would be ripped apart. the government should be taught if it wants to play in business, it has to play by the same rules.
Well, we're all familiar with William Gibson being pretty spot-on in the early 80s with the impact the Net and technology in general would have on our lives, with his book Neuromancer.
In many ways his imagination has probably been the inspiration for many researchers, wanting to get things moving in the directions he comes up with. Prophecies are usually cyclical in that manner - events can tailor themselves around the prophet's tellings:)
And so in Idoru, he talks a lot about nanotech, from construction to, ultimately, a fusion between nanotechnology and AI - the idea and implications of which are fascinating, both on a micro- and macro- scale.
Is he pointing in the right direction again? Or are we following his call again? Nanotech really has a great potential for medicine, allowing *intelligent* manipulation on a cellular level, a far more light-handed approach than simply administering antibiotics or any of the other solutions we ingest to counter ailments or conditions.
Ultimately, in the field of medicine, fusing AI and nanotech might create a learning "fixer cell" system, which can run round the body scanning things, and warn about, or even prevent, the onset of diseases such as cancer. Fantastic.
Hopefully releasing this to Open Source will prompt many more developers, both from a multimedia standpoint, and OS developers, who will port and extend the functionality.
Though based around and on the web, the Flash file format is an incredibly efficient and versatile format - the Flash Player, for those not familiar with it, is the desktop standalone player for Flash files.
To those who think this is simply a marketing ploy, this is simply part of a progression - the Flash file format was Open Sourced about a year ago, to allow exporting in other packages to Flash format, for instance.
Hopefully this will both catalyse the use of Flash as one of the most extensible and versatile multimedia formats available, and act as another "toe in the water" for one of the biggest multimedia companies entering the Linux waters. Let's welcome them aboard.
Fross
Catastrophe? It would have been...
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Apocalypse Not
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i think it's awful that people, in the media in particular, are being so vocal about being disappointed by the lack of problems following Y2K. that really is unbelievable, like they were expecting to get their money's worth of doom and gloom and destruction. they should be grateful things didn't go wrong.
the almost perfectly smooth transition from the 1900s to the 2000s is a result of the largest ever collaborative effort from all aspects of the computer and computer-related industries, spanning most of the last decade. that everyone woke up to the potential damage it could have caused, and worked swiftly to avert the problems, is the reason it went so well.
that withstanding, there were very small disruptions, which hint darkly at what could have happened had we not been so prepared. in the UK, as was reported on/. i believe, one bank had Y2K related problems which resulted in their credit services (affecting about 10000 outlets) becoming unusable for five days. had this been magnified to cover the vast majority of banks, pandemonium would have broken out. the sudden lack of confidence in the banks could have triggered a money run that would have dealt the economy a severe blow. implications this severe can be levelled throughout the affected industries.
the problem was there, as anyone who worked on a Y2K team can testify. the sheer amount of work put in over the years more than justifies the global expenditure, to say nothing of the effort put in by those who were standing by valiantly as the moment approached, in case everything went wrong. had nothing been done about the problem, i think the repercussions would have resulted in the greatest catastrophe to mankind possibly ever. the key is the potential for damage was enormous, and the lack of any significant resulting problems is testimony to the effort, organisation and preparedness of all involved.
well done to all, and you can put your feet up for the next 7999 years:)
I think there are a couple of issues here that are being confused. The first is the versioning system we hve for differentiating between different releases of products, internally. The second is a "name" for the product, used to promote and sell it, hopefully with some semblance of what the product does in the name.
Some quick comparisons: Windows 4.00.950 = Windows 95 Redhat 6.1 = (based on Kernel 2.0.13 or so)
for the "internal" numbering system, this seems to have reached a pretty stable system throughout the development world, with major revisions being whole numbers, minor revisions first decimal place, small fixes etc after that. This would go from the Linux kernel to Windows (as illustrated above!) and most software packages!
then there's the "marketing spin" on it, where the product has to seem to be new, improved, is so much more advanced than the competition, will do your laundry, shopping, talk to your girlfriend, etc. and this is where the marketing people come in with their names and numbers and everything that make no sense other than for product recognition. examples that come to mind are Intel (...386, 486, Pentium, Pentium Pro, Pentium II, Xeon, Pentium III, Itanium, etc), AMD (Athlon), Macintosh (OS 7, 8, 9... X?) and so on ans so forth. the list goes on.
As long as both are available, I dont see this as being a problem. The internal numbering system is useful for developers, of course. They might be able to tell the differences between Kernels 1.2 and 2.0, which would be important for them. On the other hand, a user with no development skills or designs in that direction, would rather know the differences between redhat 5 and 6, such as what WindowManagers it gets shipped with, what the installation is like, and so forth.
all this needs now is a set of standards on how to interface an "object", or set of objects, in your household network, so you can throw a "turn yourself on" request at your toaster, or "close all the windows" at a general window controller.
perhaps, with verification and security of some sort, this could even be done remotely. eg, while sitting on the train on the way home, tell the radiators and lights to turn on, and the microwave to start cooking the meal you left in it of a morning...
then of course, you could play a version of "Quake" along said lines too, with a webcam mounted on top of a vacuum cleaner, chasing household pets *evil grin*... but i digress.
that behaviour in xdaliclock looks more like a planted easteregg than an actual bug... the behaviour really is bizarre. i doubt it's a malfunction.
on that note, did anyone find any "strange" behaviour in other programs? i was expecting windows to do something strange, but apart from crashing as usual, it seems normal. anyone find any other y2k easter eggs in other programs?
What concerns me (and likely other Amiga enthusiasts too) is the rights for existing and new Amiga technology - are these part of the deal? Will they ever be released? What does a company making an Amiga clone (as several are in development, it seems) have to bear in mind or licence?
The Amiga still isn't dead, and has a good community, which deserves better support than being shifted from company to company in business deals. How about some new hardware or licencing?
The customs service isn't a facility provided by any *airline*, it's in the airport: you have to go through it regardless of what airline you're flying on. in essence, what's forcing you to go through this is the government, to check you don't have any weapons/contraband/etc on you when you leave the country. hard to boycott that.
i do agree though, it is an invasion of privacy to be "electronically strip-searched". to develop an AI that can tell what is normal and what isn't, would be the best solution, but that is likely a very long way off. still, it is a necessary precaution, and any step necessary is worthwhile to prevent anything from arms trading to hijacking. surely there is a better way though?
>>Genetically modifying crops is only one stage further than spraying fertiliser on a crop. its purpose is to increase the yield, health, and quality of the food - something which is good for everyone. >No it isn't. That's like saying it's one step further than watering the plants.
according to the point i was making, yes it is. it is altering the crop's environment. as an extrapolation of this view, genetic modification of crops could be viewed as "selective evolution". my point is simply that GM food isn't necessarily "wrong" by its very definition - there may be some good in it, and bad in it, but we have to research it and find out.
>Monsanto isn't doing this for the good of everyone, that's the part you miserably fail to see.
i am more than aware of this fact, thank you. i was, however, not addressing the current commercial situation, but of the ethical question of genetic modification in general, as explained in the rest of my post.
>We already grow enough food to feed everyone a couple of times over. Introducing pesticide into my food does not increase it's quality.
there are still areas of the world affected by famine. on the other hand, there are areas where there is a huge surplus. the reasons for the distribution (or lack thereof) may be political, or whatever, but the fact still remains that hundreds of thousands, of not millions of people, die every year of starvation.
to give an example, if research lead to a set of GM plants being developed that were able to withstand the greatly increased heat, lack of water, or other circumstances that prevented crops from growing in these affected areas, wouldn't that be great? it could help avert future famine.
i for one am fully against leaving research like this in the hands of private investors and their companies, such as monsanto, as i stated before. i do believe that this is an area which has the potential to hold benefits, if approached and treated properly. hence research should be conducted into it, and by some organisation not concerned about its own profits!
the research should be not simply to see what we CAN do, but what the ramifications are, and possible consequences. i'm sure the very first time farmers started to use animal waste as a fertiliser, people were against that in principle. hopefully research into GM will show us something which is as beneficial with no side-effects to ourselves or the environment.
Fross
Re: Laptops should not be treated like desktops...
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I have to make the two concessions that:
a) laptops easily become as good as a desktop system when placed in a docking station
(for obvious reasons. it's just something i didnt cover in my original post), and
b) the portability of data is the single most important aspect thereof, next to its accessibility en route.
however, these reasons seem to be more of using a laptop as a computer to transport between two working environments, not one to be used anywhere, which is in my mind what portable computing really should be.
i have to say my opinions are (as everyone else's) based on personal experience - the sort of work i do is simply unsuitable for laptops - programming (running something like symantec cafe on a 1-year old typical spec laptop is *not* fun!) and graphic design (where the lack of a sizeable display and good input device makes it nigh-on impossible) - as a result, i can't get much more usefulness from the laptop as i can something like a palmtop, which covers much the same ground on the lower-end of things.
i can understand if someone wants to tap out something under Office, or access large amounts of data en-route, then a laptop is the only option, i simply don't think it's a good enough solution for a number of applications, unfortunately most of the ones i use!
Few people will notice that the power, TV, etc., fails to go off at midnight UTC. Even if there is a big "oomph," recent newspaper and TV reports make me doubt that the reporters will understand the situation well enough to explain it everyone else.
and hell, if all the electricity DOES go off, then at least they won't be able to shove the "breaking news" down our necks for once:)
There's been a huge backlash in the media about GM crops and so forth, over the last couple of years. I don't know what it's like in the states, but here in england some supermarkets have gone so far as to completely boycott GM foods throughout their entire product range - quite an amazing feat. feelings run very strongly about it here.
but what is Genetically Modifying a crop? If you take cells and start messing around with them and build up a plant that is, say immune to a local parasite, then sure, that's a GM crop.
but how about if you cut down all the plants that are not bearing fruit well, but leave the ones that are? one might argue you are simply accelerating natural selection, but the overall genetic makeup of the crop is being modified - the "weak" ones are being removed. by such reasoning, evolution is genetically modifying crops, albeit extremely slowly - if darwin's theory of evolution holds, what are humans but genetically-modified apes?
most of the "fear" seems to come from the impression that some loony in a white coat is tampering with food, in order to increase a company's profits. while i'm sure monsanto and others would be keen on this, it doesn't seem to hold much water past media sensationalisation.
genetically modifying crops is only one stage further than spraying fertiliser on a crop. its purpose is to increase the yield, health, and quality of the food - something which is good for everyone.
we made the mistake with fertilisers and similar products - many were used without proper testing, research, and thoughts for the environment. anyone remember DDT? what we must NOT do is make the same mistakes again.
thus research must continue - knowledge is _everything_. by implication it must be forced out of private enterprise's hands, and into an open, non-profit organisation - open-sourced, effectively, until it is known and understood to its full extent. best case - we find something we can use to benefit ourselves and the environment. worst case - we find we can't improve it, so we drop it. but at least we *know*, which is better than doing it unknowingly.
Fross
Laptops should not be treated like desktops...
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...they have their role, and they can rock at it, but they are not the best system to replace a whole desktop computer, not because of their cost or power, but because of... their size.
the *interface* to the laptop, what you use to work with it, the keyboard, the screen, the mouse/equivalent, are all components that suffer through miniaturisation, due to their having to interface with our eyes and hands. small, unresponsive keyboards (still using the unwieldy qwerty layout! a disaster, sizewise), poor substitutions for the mouse, and a small screen, all hinder its usage.
coding on it is passable, non-type-intensive applications are better, but anything demanding accurate mouse-control is difficult, graphic design nigh-on impossible. the laptop should not be performing any of these tasks though - by implication, the environment it should be used in is quite unsuitable to these sorts of developments - it should be used on the move.
on the train/bus/etc while commuting, in a restaurant on a lunch break, so on and so forth - a non-work environment. as such it should be used primarily for supplemental tasks... anything from catching up on email to reading documents, filing things, noting down ideas, and so on and so on.. work that can then consolidate the work on the regular computer.
this is probably what has lead to the increasing popularity of palmtop computers - they offer a similar range of functions as detailed above, but are all the more portable. people are finding laptops unwieldy for anything more. it is likely people could make more use of a portable computer than they can get from a palmtop, but in its current incarnation, the laptop is unable to fulfil this role to any great extent.
ideally, the ultimate goal would be to produce a "portable computer" (i refrain from using the term laptop here) whose interface system is not an adaptation of the desktop computer's, but rather one made for the job, ie working on the move. speculation here could end up in the fantastic, but the technology, from voice-activated commands through eye-tracking pointers to thought-control, can't be too many years away.
...following the model of "A Stroll Through Perl" at the end of Chapter 1 in the O'Reilly "Learning Perl" book.
i think this is a very good analogy - this section of the book explains and explores what you can do, rather than just aiming for a goal straight off, which i think is important in exploring a new "environment" (such as a new language or, in this case, an operating system)
however, rather than an expanding syntactical approach (which is useful in its own right, anyway!) what i was envisioning was something more global, something conceptual. a few ideas would be:
a run through the directory structure, so the user knows where to find what
a word on drives, some of the most obvious bits of hardware on the machine (such as harddrives and cdroms), and the concept of mounting
devices in general, soundcard and modem, etc
the idea of users with different access privileges, even on a single-user system
the concept of a windowmanager, what it does and what it can do
(etc etc)
with these basic concepts in place, the user will get a fair idea of all the different "bits" are, and how they work together, and as a resuly what sort of things are possible, and where to look to get them done. i think it's important to do it on a conceptual level first as that helps understand the purpose and direction of the components while the technical detail is still too much to absorb, and allows that to come later.
I for one would be perfectly happy to see this - during the "Java Hysteria", everyone was so pro-Java it was being used for all sorts of applications it wasn't suited for... hell, Java is the flavour of the month, lets write a database querying language in it!;)
And now, where is Java? Well, the exposure it got through this "hysteria" has served it well - it got to people's attention, and is now widespread in applications best suited to it. All around success story (so far, Sun's maneouvers may put paid to that but that's another story)
So I wish the same to Linux - eventually the hype will end as the media moves elsewhere (though I predict they won't get over it until the David-and-Goliath type battle with Microsoft has a resolution one way or the other, however minor), and it will come to be used as a solid, great desktop and server environment for the technical user. and the non-techies will have their webtv boxen or interactive tv or what-have-you, and everyone will be happy.
eToys apparently still doesn't get it. Internet was never meant to be a shopping mall. Yes, commerce can succeed in this medium, but that does not neccesarily make this a shopping mall.
even more so, the statement released by eToy's PR asking eToy to control the content of certain parts of its site smacks of a "Well ok, we lost the battle in court, but we own the name, and people would only be going to our site and find yours, never the other way round."
which is of course entirely incorrect.
i hope eToys flounders and dies. it has shown a consistently eschewed and incomplete understanding of the Net and how it works, and has simply been allowed to stretch its ignorant muscles through massive funding, against an organisation based around culture, and then tried to silence it when it doesn't satisfy its candy-coated view of what the net should be.
i agree, there is a bit of a dearth of good introductory documentation for Linux. there definitely is a lot of documentation out there, a lot of it very good, and as technical as can be. the HOW-TOs have been one of the best additions in recent years - giving good guides to get things done.
however, both from my own experience getting to know linux and helping others with the same, the question that crops up most commonly, for a newbie, once the lot is installed, is not "How do I do xxx" but rather "Ok, so what do I do now?"
The beginning user is unfamiliar with the potential of what they can do with Linux, rather than how to do what they want. This is where I feel the documentation lacks a little. What we would need is a set of "beginner tutorials" for various tasks, kinda like meta-HOW-TOs, or WHAT-TOs, if you like:)
These would familiarize the user what they can look into doing, and in the process, get them familiar with the resources they have - what the HOW-TOs are, how to look up something in the man pages, and so on and so forth. Once a user is familiar with what to look through to get an idea of what to do and how, they are usually pretty self-sufficient. A development of this sort of documentation would make entry to Linux less daunting, more friendly, and help users get on and learn the OS with more confidence.
As long as we don't have a stupid paperclip or anything.
As of right now (4pm GMT, 11am EST) i managed to actually register on the petition.
Suffice to say, the total number right now is just short of 2000. Considering the difficulty it took in actually getting in to register, the server must be oversubscribed several times over with people trying to register! however many of these are obviously being lost - 2000 in (approximately?) 4 hours the article's been live on/. implies 500 registrations per hour, or just under 10 a minute. there is a severe bottleneck in there somewhere, probably the server being a very slow machine unable to cope with running multiple instances of perl, at a guess.
if someone is in a position to mirror this, on a more powerful machine, with more bandwidth, this could help bring in the signatures, striking while the iron is hot and all that.
for anyone willing to do so, i urge you to contact libranet about it - webmaster@libranet.com seems to be their only contact on this, though petition@libranet.com may also work, though i am by no means sure.
at present, companies don't charge for their drivers (afaik!), so releasing them for an alternative platform should incur no additional cost than the development of said drivers. and in the case of a platform running on the same architecture (such as running linux on an ix86 board), i'd guesstimate a lot of the work had been done already.
if anything, it makes good commercial sense for companies to release drivers for as many OSes as they can; as "alternative" OSes such as linux become more widespread, the userbase becomes a significant market share - would you buy a videocard with no linux support? didn't think so.
the one persistant problem here seems to be the "opensourcing" argument. i don't consider this much of a problem - the development cycle for these products is so long that no-one could really gain enough information from them to cause the company to lose considerable pace to the competition - for instance, when Voodoo 1 boards were released, 3dfx already had a timeplan (and likely, chip designs) for the series up to Voodoo 3.
regardless of opensourcing, making these companies feel our presence can't do any harm... go on, sign the petition!
I don't know if the tone of my argument got completely miplaced or what, but...
certainly, i wasn't trying to be elitist, either about my own coding abilities (which i haven't mentioned, one way or the other, so i don't see how they figure), or about linux. if anything, i was answering a push of elitism by the original poster, claiming he was the most important type of user for linux to target, the "future of linux" if you will.
i have a lot of enthusiasm about linux, i have for many years. why? not because of the product (well, to be honest, partly so, because it's brilliant), but because of the community, the whole open source movement, and the idea that if you want to contribute something to it, then you can. the _potential_ in a system like this is enormous, and in years to come will be realised even further.
really, the difference here is one community where the majority of users have the mentality of expecting everything handed to them, that they can't do something to improve their system, as opposed to one where people *know* their system is extensible, expandable, either by themselves or by people just like them. that is the spirit that keeps linux as vibrant and innovative as it has been, and hopefully still will.
to reiterate, i'm not classifying people according to what OS they use, or saying they're good enough or not to use one OS or another. hell, god knows there are enough good windows developers who release their products freeware or shareware, simply for the love of distributing their effort. the key is, the vast majority of the userbase is unaware or unwilling to use, let alone try to develop, such software. for instance, think of what proportion of windows users you know who use an alternative shell or windowmanager.
the point is, thanks to microsoft's blanket-marketing approach, most windows users are not even aware of alternative options available even for programs under their own OS, let alone alternative OSes. for the new user whose only experience of computers is through this route, that gives a very narrow view of the options, and (from what i've seen) an unwillingness to look into anything different. as a result, the way i would like to see users get into linux is through being exposed to it, seeing what it is, and wanting to get into that for that reason exactly - because they want to be part of the sort of community we have, not because they're told "linux is better". i would rather people go to linux because they like it, like the idea, and want to be part of it, rather than upgrade and use it simply because it's the "in thing" or someone told them to.
of course, any user for linux is better than none, but i think it's important to acknowledge the great spirit that brought people there in the first place, as that's made it the wonderful community we know today, and i for one care about that enough to want to help preserve it.
more than anything, i'm disappointed in being moderated down on that comment which, while harsh, i still think contains a valid point - seemingly through people asking for it to be moderated down simply because they don't agree with me. very disappointing.
The single reason I personally use Windows and don't use my set of four RedHat v6 disks sitting right here is becuase one thing, Gloss.
It's shallow i know, but im an average user, im a student, i don't study IT, im more interested in the social context of the internet, it's effects upon communication psychology, but im the user that Linux needs to convert to have any hope of ever fighting back against the "Windows on every desk" mantra.
[snip]
This may sound lazy, but i don't have the time to do this, i don't have the energy to do this, i don't have the knowledge to do this. Most of the market that Linux needs to reach out and grab is like me
Sorry to disappoint, but you are *not* the kind of person the Linux community needs on board. The sort of person it needs are people with enthusiasm, people who WANT to achieve something, people who are willing to put in a little effort for a great result, and share that with everyone else.
You want a little program to do something neat for you? Write it. Does it work nicely? Release it on a linux utilities page, other people will use it! Simple program languages allow you to do this nowadays, with not that much effort. If you can cope with editing something in notepad, or write HTML, a basic scripting or C-style language isn't too far off. Hell, even VB is an option under windows!
You may ask why Windows doesn't have such huge communities of programs... winfiles.com and other places have a lot of large shareware programs etc, sure, but nowhere near the number or scope of any Linux repository. Why? Because Windows users are in general just as lazy as you are, they want something for nothing, and to get someone else to do everything for them.
(Not to say *everyone* who uses Windows is a drooling idiot, there are many who write great programs, who even open source things, and play around with customizing their own machines and spreading knowledge between people. But in the Windows community, this is by far the minority. THESE are the people we want in the Linux community.)
Do you feel the activities of the Australian Government and, to a lesser extent, the attitude being taken by the Chinese authorities, to be setting global precedents with regard to censorship on the Internet that other governments or similar bodies would choose to either adopt or use as justification for such action?
And secondly, what steps do you recommend programmers/developers/geeks in general can take both individually and en masse to combat the censorship of the medium as a whole?
I'm the slightest bit curious why NC (or any other state trying to tax the 'net) thinks they deserve a share of this money? It is my understanding that the primary justification for a sales tax is because it costs a city/state quite a bit of money every year to maintain a good enviroment for business to function (road work, police coverage other basic services) By this logic taxing transactions at brick and mortar shops makes sense. However it falls apart when applied to internet transactions.
The implication of adapting this tax system to online transactions would be to treat it as any other out-of-state transaction - ie the purchaser would have to declare it and pay tax on it when it entered the state.
personally i dont understand the big deal here - a lot of online businesses i have seen already make allowances for sales tax (though from what i have seen it may only be limited to those buying from the same state the online business is registered? as a european thankfully we dont have to deal with it as much, and as a result don't have too much exposure to it). the fact that the state is trying to enforce taxation on online commerce however IS a disturbing precedent, and it's time to provide resistance to it, or other states will follow suit (what governing body would refuse free money?)
Slashdot Mirror
there seem to be, on all levels, problems when business has to run or administer, and governments control, some part of technology. thre doesn't seem to be enough research, consulting, or any form of knowledge input into the process.
look at how ICANN has handled this - a mess. look at how domain registration has performed as a whole since it was "opened up" - the lack of sensible regulation resulted in people buying up masses of domains, poaching domains from artists, companies and the like, the "goldrush" mentality... to say nothing of the way something like etoy v eToys was handled. regulation to avert such a nonsensical case should have been in place before day 1.
then there's the whole issue of technology patents - the government again doing something it obviously knows nothing about. i'm sure we don't want to go through another amazon-style "i patented right-clicking" ridiculosity.
some business and technology analysis could have helped prevent this. it still could, given half a chance.
the fact is, any business that acted in these manners would be ripped apart. the government should be taught if it wants to play in business, it has to play by the same rules.
Well, we're all familiar with William Gibson being pretty spot-on in the early 80s with the impact the Net and technology in general would have on our lives, with his book Neuromancer.
:)
In many ways his imagination has probably been the inspiration for many researchers, wanting to get things moving in the directions he comes up with. Prophecies are usually cyclical in that manner - events can tailor themselves around the prophet's tellings
And so in Idoru, he talks a lot about nanotech, from construction to, ultimately, a fusion between nanotechnology and AI - the idea and implications of which are fascinating, both on a micro- and macro- scale.
Is he pointing in the right direction again? Or are we following his call again? Nanotech really has a great potential for medicine, allowing *intelligent* manipulation on a cellular level, a far more light-handed approach than simply administering antibiotics or any of the other solutions we ingest to counter ailments or conditions.
Ultimately, in the field of medicine, fusing AI and nanotech might create a learning "fixer cell" system, which can run round the body scanning things, and warn about, or even prevent, the onset of diseases such as cancer. Fantastic.
Fross
Hopefully releasing this to Open Source will prompt many more developers, both from a multimedia standpoint, and OS developers, who will port and extend the functionality.
Though based around and on the web, the Flash file format is an incredibly efficient and versatile format - the Flash Player, for those not familiar with it, is the desktop standalone player for Flash files.
To those who think this is simply a marketing ploy, this is simply part of a progression - the Flash file format was Open Sourced about a year ago, to allow exporting in other packages to Flash format, for instance.
Hopefully this will both catalyse the use of Flash as one of the most extensible and versatile multimedia formats available, and act as another "toe in the water" for one of the biggest multimedia companies entering the Linux waters. Let's welcome them aboard.
Fross
i think it's awful that people, in the media in particular, are being so vocal about being disappointed by the lack of problems following Y2K. that really is unbelievable, like they were expecting to get their money's worth of doom and gloom and destruction. they should be grateful things didn't go wrong.
/. i believe, one bank had Y2K related problems which resulted in their credit services (affecting about 10000 outlets) becoming unusable for five days. had this been magnified to cover the vast majority of banks, pandemonium would have broken out. the sudden lack of confidence in the banks could have triggered a money run that would have dealt the economy a severe blow. implications this severe can be levelled throughout the affected industries.
:)
the almost perfectly smooth transition from the 1900s to the 2000s is a result of the largest ever collaborative effort from all aspects of the computer and computer-related industries, spanning most of the last decade. that everyone woke up to the potential damage it could have caused, and worked swiftly to avert the problems, is the reason it went so well.
that withstanding, there were very small disruptions, which hint darkly at what could have happened had we not been so prepared. in the UK, as was reported on
the problem was there, as anyone who worked on a Y2K team can testify. the sheer amount of work put in over the years more than justifies the global expenditure, to say nothing of the effort put in by those who were standing by valiantly as the moment approached, in case everything went wrong. had nothing been done about the problem, i think the repercussions would have resulted in the greatest catastrophe to mankind possibly ever. the key is the potential for damage was enormous, and the lack of any significant resulting problems is testimony to the effort, organisation and preparedness of all involved.
well done to all, and you can put your feet up for the next 7999 years
Fross
I think there are a couple of issues here that are being confused. The first is the versioning system we hve for differentiating between different releases of products, internally. The second is a "name" for the product, used to promote and sell it, hopefully with some semblance of what the product does in the name.
Some quick comparisons:
Windows 4.00.950 = Windows 95
Redhat 6.1 = (based on Kernel 2.0.13 or so)
for the "internal" numbering system, this seems to have reached a pretty stable system throughout the development world, with major revisions being whole numbers, minor revisions first decimal place, small fixes etc after that. This would go from the Linux kernel to Windows (as illustrated above!) and most software packages!
then there's the "marketing spin" on it, where the product has to seem to be new, improved, is so much more advanced than the competition, will do your laundry, shopping, talk to your girlfriend, etc. and this is where the marketing people come in with their names and numbers and everything that make no sense other than for product recognition. examples that come to mind are Intel (...386, 486, Pentium, Pentium Pro, Pentium II, Xeon, Pentium III, Itanium, etc), AMD (Athlon), Macintosh (OS 7, 8, 9... X?) and so on ans so forth. the list goes on.
As long as both are available, I dont see this as being a problem. The internal numbering system is useful for developers, of course. They might be able to tell the differences between Kernels 1.2 and 2.0, which would be important for them. On the other hand, a user with no development skills or designs in that direction, would rather know the differences between redhat 5 and 6, such as what WindowManagers it gets shipped with, what the installation is like, and so forth.
Fross
all this needs now is a set of standards on how to interface an "object", or set of objects, in your household network, so you can throw a "turn yourself on" request at your toaster, or "close all the windows" at a general window controller.
:>
perhaps, with verification and security of some sort, this could even be done remotely. eg, while sitting on the train on the way home, tell the radiators and lights to turn on, and the microwave to start cooking the meal you left in it of a morning...
then of course, you could play a version of "Quake" along said lines too, with a webcam mounted on top of a vacuum cleaner, chasing household pets *evil grin*... but i digress.
Fross
that behaviour in xdaliclock looks more like a planted easteregg than an actual bug... the behaviour really is bizarre. i doubt it's a malfunction.
on that note, did anyone find any "strange" behaviour in other programs? i was expecting windows to do something strange, but apart from crashing as usual, it seems normal. anyone find any other y2k easter eggs in other programs?
Fross
"ah well, i needed a can-opener, anyway."
:)
Fross
What concerns me (and likely other Amiga enthusiasts too) is the rights for existing and new Amiga technology - are these part of the deal? Will they ever be released? What does a company making an Amiga clone (as several are in development, it seems) have to bear in mind or licence?
The Amiga still isn't dead, and has a good community, which deserves better support than being shifted from company to company in business deals. How about some new hardware or licencing?
Fross
The customs service isn't a facility provided by any *airline*, it's in the airport: you have to go through it regardless of what airline you're flying on. in essence, what's forcing you to go through this is the government, to check you don't have any weapons/contraband/etc on you when you leave the country. hard to boycott that.
i do agree though, it is an invasion of privacy to be "electronically strip-searched". to develop an AI that can tell what is normal and what isn't, would be the best solution, but that is likely a very long way off. still, it is a necessary precaution, and any step necessary is worthwhile to prevent anything from arms trading to hijacking. surely there is a better way though?
Fross
>>Genetically modifying crops is only one stage further than spraying fertiliser on a crop. its purpose is to increase the yield, health, and quality of the food - something which is good for everyone.
>No it isn't. That's like saying it's one step further than watering the plants.
according to the point i was making, yes it is. it is altering the crop's environment. as an extrapolation of this view, genetic modification of crops could be viewed as "selective evolution". my point is simply that GM food isn't necessarily "wrong" by its very definition - there may be some good in it, and bad in it, but we have to research it and find out.
>Monsanto isn't doing this for the good of everyone, that's the part you miserably fail to see.
i am more than aware of this fact, thank you. i was, however, not addressing the current commercial situation, but of the ethical question of genetic modification in general, as explained in the rest of my post.
>We already grow enough food to feed everyone a couple of times over. Introducing pesticide into my food does not increase it's quality.
there are still areas of the world affected by famine. on the other hand, there are areas where there is a huge surplus. the reasons for the distribution (or lack thereof) may be political, or whatever, but the fact still remains that hundreds of thousands, of not millions of people, die every year of starvation.
to give an example, if research lead to a set of GM plants being developed that were able to withstand the greatly increased heat, lack of water, or other circumstances that prevented crops from growing in these affected areas, wouldn't that be great? it could help avert future famine.
i for one am fully against leaving research like this in the hands of private investors and their companies, such as monsanto, as i stated before. i do believe that this is an area which has the potential to hold benefits, if approached and treated properly. hence research should be conducted into it, and by some organisation not concerned about its own profits!
the research should be not simply to see what we CAN do, but what the ramifications are, and possible consequences. i'm sure the very first time farmers started to use animal waste as a fertiliser, people were against that in principle. hopefully research into GM will show us something which is as beneficial with no side-effects to ourselves or the environment.
Fross
I have to make the two concessions that:
a) laptops easily become as good as a desktop system when placed in a docking station
(for obvious reasons. it's just something i didnt cover in my original post), and
b) the portability of data is the single most important aspect thereof, next to its accessibility en route.
however, these reasons seem to be more of using a laptop as a computer to transport between two working environments, not one to be used anywhere, which is in my mind what portable computing really should be.
i have to say my opinions are (as everyone else's) based on personal experience - the sort of work i do is simply unsuitable for laptops - programming (running something like symantec cafe on a 1-year old typical spec laptop is *not* fun!) and graphic design (where the lack of a sizeable display and good input device makes it nigh-on impossible) - as a result, i can't get much more usefulness from the laptop as i can something like a palmtop, which covers much the same ground on the lower-end of things.
i can understand if someone wants to tap out something under Office, or access large amounts of data en-route, then a laptop is the only option, i simply don't think it's a good enough solution for a number of applications, unfortunately most of the ones i use!
Fross
Few people will notice that the power, TV, etc., fails to go off at midnight UTC. Even if there is a big "oomph," recent newspaper and TV reports make me doubt that the reporters will understand the situation well enough to explain it everyone else.
:)
and hell, if all the electricity DOES go off, then at least they won't be able to shove the "breaking news" down our necks for once
Fross
There's been a huge backlash in the media about GM crops and so forth, over the last couple of years. I don't know what it's like in the states, but here in england some supermarkets have gone so far as to completely boycott GM foods throughout their entire product range - quite an amazing feat. feelings run very strongly about it here.
but what is Genetically Modifying a crop? If you take cells and start messing around with them and build up a plant that is, say immune to a local parasite, then sure, that's a GM crop.
but how about if you cut down all the plants that are not bearing fruit well, but leave the ones that are? one might argue you are simply accelerating natural selection, but the overall genetic makeup of the crop is being modified - the "weak" ones are being removed. by such reasoning, evolution is genetically modifying crops, albeit extremely slowly - if darwin's theory of evolution holds, what are humans but genetically-modified apes?
most of the "fear" seems to come from the impression that some loony in a white coat is tampering with food, in order to increase a company's profits. while i'm sure monsanto and others would be keen on this, it doesn't seem to hold much water past media sensationalisation.
genetically modifying crops is only one stage further than spraying fertiliser on a crop. its purpose is to increase the yield, health, and quality of the food - something which is good for everyone.
we made the mistake with fertilisers and similar products - many were used without proper testing, research, and thoughts for the environment. anyone remember DDT? what we must NOT do is make the same mistakes again.
thus research must continue - knowledge is _everything_. by implication it must be forced out of private enterprise's hands, and into an open, non-profit organisation - open-sourced, effectively, until it is known and understood to its full extent. best case - we find something we can use to benefit ourselves and the environment. worst case - we find we can't improve it, so we drop it. but at least we *know*, which is better than doing it unknowingly.
Fross
...they have their role, and they can rock at it, but they are not the best system to replace a whole desktop computer, not because of their cost or power, but because of... their size.
the *interface* to the laptop, what you use to work with it, the keyboard, the screen, the mouse/equivalent, are all components that suffer through miniaturisation, due to their having to interface with our eyes and hands. small, unresponsive keyboards (still using the unwieldy qwerty layout! a disaster, sizewise), poor substitutions for the mouse, and a small screen, all hinder its usage.
coding on it is passable, non-type-intensive applications are better, but anything demanding accurate mouse-control is difficult, graphic design nigh-on impossible. the laptop should not be performing any of these tasks though - by implication, the environment it should be used in is quite unsuitable to these sorts of developments - it should be used on the move.
on the train/bus/etc while commuting, in a restaurant on a lunch break, so on and so forth - a non-work environment. as such it should be used primarily for supplemental tasks... anything from catching up on email to reading documents, filing things, noting down ideas, and so on and so on.. work that can then consolidate the work on the regular computer.
this is probably what has lead to the increasing popularity of palmtop computers - they offer a similar range of functions as detailed above, but are all the more portable. people are finding laptops unwieldy for anything more. it is likely people could make more use of a portable computer than they can get from a palmtop, but in its current incarnation, the laptop is unable to fulfil this role to any great extent.
ideally, the ultimate goal would be to produce a "portable computer" (i refrain from using the term laptop here) whose interface system is not an adaptation of the desktop computer's, but rather one made for the job, ie working on the move. speculation here could end up in the fantastic, but the technology, from voice-activated commands through eye-tracking pointers to thought-control, can't be too many years away.
Fross
i think this is a very good analogy - this section of the book explains and explores what you can do, rather than just aiming for a goal straight off, which i think is important in exploring a new "environment" (such as a new language or, in this case, an operating system)
however, rather than an expanding syntactical approach (which is useful in its own right, anyway!) what i was envisioning was something more global, something conceptual. a few ideas would be:
a run through the directory structure, so the user knows where to find what
a word on drives, some of the most obvious bits of hardware on the machine (such as harddrives and cdroms), and the concept of mounting
devices in general, soundcard and modem, etc
the idea of users with different access privileges, even on a single-user system
the concept of a windowmanager, what it does and what it can do
(etc etc)
with these basic concepts in place, the user will get a fair idea of all the different "bits" are, and how they work together, and as a resuly what sort of things are possible, and where to look to get them done. i think it's important to do it on a conceptual level first as that helps understand the purpose and direction of the components while the technical detail is still too much to absorb, and allows that to come later.
Fross
I for one would be perfectly happy to see this - during the "Java Hysteria", everyone was so pro-Java it was being used for all sorts of applications it wasn't suited for... hell, Java is the flavour of the month, lets write a database querying language in it! ;)
And now, where is Java? Well, the exposure it got through this "hysteria" has served it well - it got to people's attention, and is now widespread in applications best suited to it. All around success story (so far, Sun's maneouvers may put paid to that but that's another story)
So I wish the same to Linux - eventually the hype will end as the media moves elsewhere (though I predict they won't get over it until the David-and-Goliath type battle with Microsoft has a resolution one way or the other, however minor), and it will come to be used as a solid, great desktop and server environment for the technical user. and the non-techies will have their webtv boxen or interactive tv or what-have-you, and everyone will be happy.
Fross
eToys apparently still doesn't get it. Internet was never meant to be a shopping mall. Yes, commerce can succeed in this medium, but that does not neccesarily make this a shopping mall.
even more so, the statement released by eToy's PR asking eToy to control the content of certain parts of its site smacks of a "Well ok, we lost the battle in court, but we own the name, and people would only be going to our site and find yours, never the other way round."
which is of course entirely incorrect.
i hope eToys flounders and dies. it has shown a consistently eschewed and incomplete understanding of the Net and how it works, and has simply been allowed to stretch its ignorant muscles through massive funding, against an organisation based around culture, and then tried to silence it when it doesn't satisfy its candy-coated view of what the net should be.
ok i'm done. grr.
Fross
i agree, there is a bit of a dearth of good introductory documentation for Linux. there definitely is a lot of documentation out there, a lot of it very good, and as technical as can be. the HOW-TOs have been one of the best additions in recent years - giving good guides to get things done.
:)
:)
however, both from my own experience getting to know linux and helping others with the same, the question that crops up most commonly, for a newbie, once the lot is installed, is not "How do I do xxx" but rather "Ok, so what do I do now?"
The beginning user is unfamiliar with the potential of what they can do with Linux, rather than how to do what they want. This is where I feel the documentation lacks a little. What we would need is a set of "beginner tutorials" for various tasks, kinda like meta-HOW-TOs, or WHAT-TOs, if you like
These would familiarize the user what they can look into doing, and in the process, get them familiar with the resources they have - what the HOW-TOs are, how to look up something in the man pages, and so on and so forth. Once a user is familiar with what to look through to get an idea of what to do and how, they are usually pretty self-sufficient. A development of this sort of documentation would make entry to Linux less daunting, more friendly, and help users get on and learn the OS with more confidence.
As long as we don't have a stupid paperclip or anything.
Fross
As of right now (4pm GMT, 11am EST) i managed to actually register on the petition.
/. implies 500 registrations per hour, or just under 10 a minute. there is a severe bottleneck in there somewhere, probably the server being a very slow machine unable to cope with running multiple instances of perl, at a guess.
Suffice to say, the total number right now is just short of 2000. Considering the difficulty it took in actually getting in to register, the server must be oversubscribed several times over with people trying to register! however many of these are obviously being lost - 2000 in (approximately?) 4 hours the article's been live on
if someone is in a position to mirror this, on a more powerful machine, with more bandwidth, this could help bring in the signatures, striking while the iron is hot and all that.
for anyone willing to do so, i urge you to contact libranet about it - webmaster@libranet.com seems to be their only contact on this, though petition@libranet.com may also work, though i am by no means sure.
Fross
at present, companies don't charge for their drivers (afaik!), so releasing them for an alternative platform should incur no additional cost than the development of said drivers. and in the case of a platform running on the same architecture (such as running linux on an ix86 board), i'd guesstimate a lot of the work had been done already.
if anything, it makes good commercial sense for companies to release drivers for as many OSes as they can; as "alternative" OSes such as linux become more widespread, the userbase becomes a significant market share - would you buy a videocard with no linux support? didn't think so.
the one persistant problem here seems to be the "opensourcing" argument. i don't consider this much of a problem - the development cycle for these products is so long that no-one could really gain enough information from them to cause the company to lose considerable pace to the competition - for instance, when Voodoo 1 boards were released, 3dfx already had a timeplan (and likely, chip designs) for the series up to Voodoo 3.
regardless of opensourcing, making these companies feel our presence can't do any harm... go on, sign the petition!
fross
I don't know if the tone of my argument got completely miplaced or what, but...
certainly, i wasn't trying to be elitist, either about my own coding abilities (which i haven't mentioned, one way or the other, so i don't see how they figure), or about linux. if anything, i was answering a push of elitism by the original poster, claiming he was the most important type of user for linux to target, the "future of linux" if you will.
i have a lot of enthusiasm about linux, i have for many years. why? not because of the product (well, to be honest, partly so, because it's brilliant), but because of the community, the whole open source movement, and the idea that if you want to contribute something to it, then you can. the _potential_ in a system like this is enormous, and in years to come will be realised even further.
really, the difference here is one community where the majority of users have the mentality of expecting everything handed to them, that they can't do something to improve their system, as opposed to one where people *know* their system is extensible, expandable, either by themselves or by people just like them. that is the spirit that keeps linux as vibrant and innovative as it has been, and hopefully still will.
to reiterate, i'm not classifying people according to what OS they use, or saying they're good enough or not to use one OS or another. hell, god knows there are enough good windows developers who release their products freeware or shareware, simply for the love of distributing their effort. the key is, the vast majority of the userbase is unaware or unwilling to use, let alone try to develop, such software. for instance, think of what proportion of windows users you know who use an alternative shell or windowmanager.
the point is, thanks to microsoft's blanket-marketing approach, most windows users are not even aware of alternative options available even for programs under their own OS, let alone alternative OSes. for the new user whose only experience of computers is through this route, that gives a very narrow view of the options, and (from what i've seen) an unwillingness to look into anything different. as a result, the way i would like to see users get into linux is through being exposed to it, seeing what it is, and wanting to get into that for that reason exactly - because they want to be part of the sort of community we have, not because they're told "linux is better". i would rather people go to linux because they like it, like the idea, and want to be part of it, rather than upgrade and use it simply because it's the "in thing" or someone told them to.
of course, any user for linux is better than none, but i think it's important to acknowledge the great spirit that brought people there in the first place, as that's made it the wonderful community we know today, and i for one care about that enough to want to help preserve it.
more than anything, i'm disappointed in being moderated down on that comment which, while harsh, i still think contains a valid point - seemingly through people asking for it to be moderated down simply because they don't agree with me. very disappointing.
The single reason I personally use Windows and don't use my set of four RedHat v6 disks sitting right here is becuase one thing, Gloss.
It's shallow i know, but im an average user, im a student, i don't study IT, im more interested in the social context of the internet, it's effects upon communication psychology, but im the user that Linux needs to convert to have any hope of ever fighting back against the "Windows on every desk" mantra.
[snip]
This may sound lazy, but i don't have the time to do this, i don't have the energy to do this, i don't have the knowledge to do this. Most of the market that Linux needs to reach out and grab is like me
Sorry to disappoint, but you are *not* the kind of person the Linux community needs on board. The sort of person it needs are people with enthusiasm, people who WANT to achieve something, people who are willing to put in a little effort for a great result, and share that with everyone else.
You want a little program to do something neat for you? Write it. Does it work nicely? Release it on a linux utilities page, other people will use it! Simple program languages allow you to do this nowadays, with not that much effort. If you can cope with editing something in notepad, or write HTML, a basic scripting or C-style language isn't too far off. Hell, even VB is an option under windows!
You may ask why Windows doesn't have such huge communities of programs... winfiles.com and other places have a lot of large shareware programs etc, sure, but nowhere near the number or scope of any Linux repository. Why? Because Windows users are in general just as lazy as you are, they want something for nothing, and to get someone else to do everything for them.
(Not to say *everyone* who uses Windows is a drooling idiot, there are many who write great programs, who even open source things, and play around with customizing their own machines and spreading knowledge between people. But in the Windows community, this is by far the minority. THESE are the people we want in the Linux community.)
Fross
Two questions here, sort of related:
Do you feel the activities of the Australian Government and, to a lesser extent, the attitude being taken by the Chinese authorities, to be setting global precedents with regard to censorship on the Internet that other governments or similar bodies would choose to either adopt or use as justification for such action?
And secondly, what steps do you recommend programmers/developers/geeks in general can take both individually and en masse to combat the censorship of the medium as a whole?
/Fross
I'm the slightest bit curious why NC (or any other state trying to tax the 'net) thinks they deserve a share of this money? It is my understanding that the primary justification for a sales tax is because it costs a city/state quite a bit of money every year to maintain a good enviroment for business to function (road work, police coverage other basic services) By this logic taxing transactions at brick and mortar shops makes sense. However it falls apart when applied to internet transactions.
The implication of adapting this tax system to online transactions would be to treat it as any other out-of-state transaction - ie the purchaser would have to declare it and pay tax on it when it entered the state.
personally i dont understand the big deal here - a lot of online businesses i have seen already make allowances for sales tax (though from what i have seen it may only be limited to those buying from the same state the online business is registered? as a european thankfully we dont have to deal with it as much, and as a result don't have too much exposure to it). the fact that the state is trying to enforce taxation on online commerce however IS a disturbing precedent, and it's time to provide resistance to it, or other states will follow suit (what governing body would refuse free money?)
Fross