In case anyone's wondering: no, Randal hasn't gone bonkers. Someone's managed to hijack his Slashdot account. He even got the "Your email and password have been changed" email from the system, and has the IP address from which it was done, for all the help it will do him.
To whomever did it: You're a great example of humanity. The guy just took it bending over again from the legal system, and you feel the need to play pre-pubescent 31337 haxx0r tricks to screw with him even more. Not that I expect the highest standard of decency from Slashdot trolls, but this *is* a real person you're impersonating.
He's a nice guy, and he's helped a lot of people. Not in a UNICEF or Amnesty International sort of way, but he's done his bit. Hell, if CmdrTaco read any of his O'Reilly books, he helped this place get made. That's irony.
But, in the end, this is "only Slashdot". I see amazing crap like this here, and I see amazing discussion here. Unfortunately, things like this are making me take this place less and less seriously.
Anyway, if you know Randal, you know this wasn't him anyway...
In case anyone's wondering: no, Randal hasn't gone bonkers. Someone's managed to hijack his Slashdot account. He even got the "Your email and password have been changed" email from the system, and has the IP address from which it was done, for all the help it will do him.
To whomever did it: You're a great example of humanity. The guy just took it bending over again from the legal system, and you feel the need to play pre-pubescent 31337 haxx0r tricks to screw with him even more. Not that I expect the highest standard of decency from Slashdot trolls, but this *is* a real person you're impersonating.
He's a nice guy, and he's helped a lot of people. Not in a UNICEF or Amnesty International sort of way, but he's done his bit. Hell, if CmdrTaco read any of his O'Reilly books, he helped this place get made. That's irony.
But, in the end, this is "only Slashdot". I see amazing crap like this here, and I see amazing discussion here. Unfortunately, things like this are making me take this place less and less seriously.
Anyway, if you know Randal, you know this wasn't him anyway...
Okay, so it's like a barcode, or like those little static-pattern square things, or any other form of scannable printable data. Maybe it's really really high capacity printed data....
But umm, where'd the "embedded" and "GUI" come from? Were those just buzzword burps as you were trying to type "Printable Data"?
Heeheehee... my favorite line of this message comes right at the end:
Hey, this is a funny thing. Did you know that the name of Bill Gate's wife is Melinda? Isn't that the name of your virtual sweetheart?
(giggle)
Re:Invention without Ethics
on
Paper Phones
·
· Score: 2
And yet, at the same time, this paper technology will probably help bring formerly expensive technological things like cell phones, laptops, and other personal devices to lower and lower rungs of the socio-economic ladder. Combine this with e-Ink tech on the horizon, and you could have extremely cheap textbooks. Imagine something like this being so cheap that the only barrier to entry in an information-based economy is intelligence? When all the tools and means of production are made of paper and special ink, and cost next to nothing, it's kinda hard to make it any more open.
Now, this is pie-in-the-sky thinking, I know, but it's as pie-in-the-sky as you are cynical. The reality will be somewhere in-between.
Have you worked on any Open Source projects, or have you seen what happens when a previously closed source project gets released? Strange as it may sound, there is a bit of reverse engineering that must take place, especially if this bundle of source is not brilliantly commented and documented.
In this case, it was worse, because when Interbase was Open Sourced, it was not buildable. Important scripts, Makefiles, and other assets were missing. So, you had this whole mess of random source that you could begin to guess the function of, but if you hadn't been a former Interbase developer at Inprise, it was all a black box to you.
Have you ever "read the code from start to finish with a pen and paper next to them" on any major project? Have you ever heard someone do that? Frequently? Or are you just trying to be a troll? That's just not the way it happens.
Personally, I'm impressed that they've been able to find this. I mean the Firebird project found a working binary from Inprise and a collection of code rumored to, through some magic process, produce that binary. They worked out the magic process, produced their own binary, and moved on from there.
Only then, after they had source code corresponding to a working program could they start doing the poking and reverse engineering it took to figure out the parts and the places. They had some luck, since they do have the original creators of Interbase on their side, but there were quite a few hurdles to go through before they could even start to make heads or tails of what they were looking at.
Then again, I dunno, maybe I have it all wrong and these guys were just sitting on their thumbs all day.
Even more... If you read the saga of the backdoor here, it seems that not only was the backdoor known about by Inprise R & D engineers-- but that when the original creators of Interbase (no longer a part of Inprise, but now part of the Firebird development fork) brought the security breach to their attention engineers at Inprise were forbidden to speak to them.
And furthermore, as they realized that not only was this in the Open Source release, this backdoor was also in the last 3 closed source versions of the database. So they fixed the Firebird source, but also-- even with the company itself forbidding its own engineers to contact these people-- they wrote a binary patch program to disable the backdoor on previous versions.
Imagine that. Even while being slapped in the face, these guys fixed their product for them.
...and why it existed for years in open source before being discovered.
Correction... Note that the blurb above says "...a direct addition by the original Borland/Inprise authors done before the program was released as open source." This wasn't done after the Open Source release.
So, the thing is from what I can see, this is an instance where an Open Source release allowed a security hole, hidden for years as closed source, to be found finally. Which is, of course, the complete opposite of what you said.
I like this evilla thing, I am not going to elaborate why.
Blah, you're no fun.
I also like the memory stick, and on that I am going to spend afew lines: memory sticks are very practical. More practical than the click(tm) because they are pure solid-state and don't require a special (and expensive and clumsy and power-consuming) drive, and faster, too.
Don't require a drive? Remember that's if, and only if, you own a Sony product with the Memory Stick reader built-in. As far as I know, there are no 3rd party devices with this tech built-in. If Memory Stick tech is licensed, then you WILL need a possibly expensive/clumsy/power-consuming drive to read them.
If Iomega made computers too, I bet they'd have Pocket Zip (it's no longer called Clik) drives built in.
You get to transfer 64/128 MB of pictures/mp3 from your camera to the evilla or from the evilla to your portable mp3 player. In solid state. I think it has it's benefits, and your trashing is a bit gratuitous.
What you're citing as a benefit of Memory Sticks is, as far as I know, also a benefit of technologies like SmartMedia and Compact Flash. The difference is, Compact Flash is an industry standard, not controlled by a single company like Memory Sticks.
I still don't see what's so great about Memory Sticks versus every other solid state storage tech out there. Other than the fact that Sony has the clout to force it into the market in every one of its products. Oh, and maybe the packaging of the sticks themselves is slicker.
It's not that I don't appreciate your opinion, I do, but I'm puzzled you are unable to envision any benefits of this technology.
Well, let's see... A technology that practically duplicates the benefits of several other existing technologies. A storage media tech that is controlled by one central company, who also happens to be a media giant, who also happens to be on the forefront of pushing to limit fair use rights.
Hmm. Do you think Memory Sticks will be free of hardware level copy protection, and simply remain bit repositories? Hmm.. Oh, wait, here it is, and it's called "Magic Gate".
I'd rather just pay for the flash ram, and not a bunch of content gateways on top of it.
Oh, one more thing. To the argument about 'not everyone can afford insurance'...
My basic answer is: Tough.
There are *some* options, since we don't live in a 100% capitalist system. But when you really hit rock bottom, you might just be screwed. And sometimes it's not fair. Life is sometimes like that, and no government, Mother, Father, angel or prayer can help you.
But when the alternative is a system that creates mediocrity for all, and lowers the standard overall, I'll pass. That's a curse on everyone, evenly spread and causing a little bit of suffering to everyone.
The basic thing is, for ever how much we build systems and institutions to shield each other from the raw rule of nature, there sometimes comes a point where we come in contact with it. Sometimes, you know, one has to take care of one's self, and cannot be taken care of.
Because that seems to be the basic issue in all of these utopian systems that piss me off. Yeah, it's warm and sparkly and great to take care of the populace. But in the end, when everyone expects the government to force others to take care of them, eventually, no one will take care of themselves. Then what?
Okay... Medical services cost money. People who perform medical services-- that is *doctors*-- expect to make a living. Furthermore, since many medical procedures require a high level of skill and preparation, perhaps a lifetime of study, doctors do and should expect to be paid very well. You can argue all you want about overpaid doctors, but just read up a bit and see what they have to go through, between demanding work and the pressures of being sued out of existence if they slip less than a hair's breadth with a scalpel.
You know what? I wouldn't trust a completely government run program to pay me what I'm worth, were I a doctor. That's one of the problems we have now with HMO's, and they're not even on the scale of a government. Any time you divorce pay from worth, and base it on need, you're in trouble unless someone, somewhere makes up the difference.
"This is a system that I would feel is the best possible," you say. But, are you a doctor? No, you just want. You want to be cared for. As if its a right of yours. Because you might die. Well who gives a shit, other than you and your family? Should a government with laws and guns force a talented person to perform acts of repair and therapy upon you for less in return than those services are truly worth? A doctor's good will only goes so far.
So you know what? When someone is underpaid and undervalued, and they see an alternative, they leave. Even if it is leaving their country. And, the most talented individuals are the first to leave. Thus, Brain Drain.
The price for universal health care, in the end, is a brain drain and a tendency for lower quality care. Period.
The best possible solution? Personal insurance. Why? Because poor health is usually an accident. I'm not always sick. In fact, many more people are healthy when one person is sick. So, if all of us pay a little bit into a pool, you can take it when you get sick and we are healthy. Now, since this is a business, there is overhead, and other talented people need to be paid their worth to run it. But in the end, your overall individual cost is less than constant medical coverage. And, pressuring HMO's notwithstanding, since these companies don't directly control the price of medical services (they just collect money), that price is controlled by the market.
"impossibly inefficient"? It's a "serious abuse"? I beg to differ. It's not like building an XML document and sending it in an HTTP request is an O(n) algorithm or something. Yeah, maybe you can preserve CPU and bandwidth with some pure binary stream protocol, maybe even direct marshalling of your internal data structures. Like, say... many other similar protocols in the past. But you lose intercompatibility, convenience, blah blah blah.
Seriously, it's not that heavy weight. And you DO NOT need to build a DOM tree, there are myriad alternatives, such as event-driven processing of XML for one. XML-RPC is very easy and very simple. I can't speak for SOAP, not having used it, but XML-RPC has performed great in my work. It crosses OS'es, crosses languages, crosses platforms, and leverages protocols and knowledge we already have. This is great stuff.
Honestly, CPU power is cheap. In comparison to my hours producing something and diagnosing problems, CPU power is nothing. People are expensive, computers are getting ever cheaper and more powerful. Hell, cut back on bandwidth by using some of that cheap CPU power to gzip the XML stream as it goes across the network. As far as I'm concerned, fretting over the performance hits (which are really close to negligible from what I see) is silly when faced with how easy things can get.
Umm, I'm sure someone's already told you this, but this OS isn't for your stinky Intel box. Sure, you can run it on an Amiga emulator, but it's meant for "the classic 68k/PPC Amiga computer". You know, A4000, A1200, etc and so forth? YOu know, those machines that ruled over Wintel PCs before the people running the company thought it would be fun to fly it into a cliff?
I would think the answer to this is maybe a "No", since unlike in the Open Source world, Handspring's module technology is most likely a proprietary thing and will not be shared up the licensing stream with Palm. I'm thinking the fork, if any, will remain forked.
I think this kind of misses the point. Ala Heinlein: TANSTAAFL, and everyone knows it. Of course hardware costs money, and of course running it costs money. This is a big-ole "DUH". Implementation is not free. That's not what "free as in beer" means. The beer recipe is downloadable gratis, but running the microbrewery is not.
But "free as in beer" means that the Intellectual Property *is* free. That vapor about which everyone is so worked up, patenting, and suing over is free. The details are out there, for free, is non-proprietary, and open to comment and further development.
The idea behind all this open network development is not so that you, or anyone for that matter, can get a cheaper lunch, it's so that those odd people out there who like burning themselves occasionally with solder might tweak with something that they're not going to get sued for reverse engeneering, folding, spindling, or mangling. Maybe, just maybe, an open development model might eventually come up with ways to make it as cheap or cheaper than commercial service... but that's not the point. That's a potential side effect of people who want to tweak.
So if you don't want to muck around with wiring, schematics, frequencies, climbing up on your roof, network settings, etc... feel free to just buy service from your local carrier. That's why they exist. It's an easy choice.
But the moment you want to start helping out that local carrier, or figure out how their tech works so that you can tweak it for your own benefit... forget about it. Their stuff is neither "free as in speech", nor "free as in beer".
If you ask Jon Udell, the web services are already here. The latest buzzword advances with XML, SOAP, XML-RPC, and friends are all just further refinement and evolution of the interface. Also, Udell's book, Practical Internet Groupware, talks extensively about adapting existing sites into web services. For example, a site like MetaCrawler demonstrates this in how it uses search engines' HTML "interface" to scoop up search results. Or, take the scripts that query news sites without the benefit of RDF or RSS, parsing HTML to scoop up and aggregate news headlines. These are all primitive web services.
And this is not to mention app servers such as Zope and Frontier, which are already built to offer web services natively. It just seems irresistable to use all of these simple building blocks to create neato keen distributed systems...
"The [music] industry will take whatever steps it needs to protect itself and protect its revenue streams. It will not lose that revenue stream, no matter what... Sony is going to take aggressive steps to stop this... We will develop technology that transcends the individual user. We will firewall Napster at source -- we will block it at your cable company, we will block it at your phone company, we will block it at your [Internet-service provider]. We will firewall it at your PC."
Whether you give squat about Napster, you do need to remember that this is a corporation who apparently wants to sell you on products which will be the gatekeepers to your access to the internet. Not for your convenience, but to protect their REVENUE STREAMS. (Read: not artists, not property, not people, but HOW MUCH MONEY THEY CAN GET FROM YOU)
Granted, that's what most companies are after, but many seem to do it more tactfully than this. I've canceled my future purchases of Sony hardware and products (although I admit the PS2 is tempting) because of this stance. Not advocating an organized boycott, but I figured I might be yet another one of those people who won't let this down.
I mean they're counting on you to be a goldfish:
"Not in MY PC, not in MY CABLE MODEM!
Not in MY-- ooh... shiny, purple.. buttons... VaaaaIIIIIooo.."
But what about the children in Columbine being secretly and subtly trained by the evil, evil gaming industry to prepare for the overthrow of the US Government? That's what these skins are about! You think kids will know the difference between a skin and an elected official?!
Why? Because I'm an Ubergeek and I like barcodes, shiny red lights, and coming up with neat things to do with free hardware. Hell, I even like the thing when it's just sitting on my desk shining the LED light on my wall.
I have been using it on my Windows machine as it was designed, scanning things and bumping my profile value for them up a few pennies... but soon I plan to attach it to a little 486 computer on top my fridge.
Why? Because then I can scan things as I throw empty containers out. And then post that to my own private house 'intranet'. And then at the market, browse my shopping list from my WAP phone. Eventually, I might even automatically have certain things ordered via internet once I've built a buying profile on myself.
After that, I might even get bored and start cataloging my CD's & Books (several 1000 items in each collection) for insurance purposes. I figure that might work better than photographing everything.
See, that's what being a Geek is about. Have stuff. Open the hood. Hook stuff together and make it do stuff it probably shouldn't. For fun.
In the end, my advice to DC would be to embrace the hacking community. The value they 'lose' on hackers not providing profile data could be recouped in cultivating a community to help generate new ideas for their product. Hell, establish projects for bounty using the CueCat. Sell the CueCat for up to US$20 for hackers who aren't going to use it as designed for marketing money.
Spread good will in the hacking community, let me do my projects, hire me to polish them up and let you sell them... (I mean, I don't have the business sense or money to produce the hardware) and my mom will still use it to scan things and see the neat home pages. And eventually you (DC) might even be able to sell my fridge idea.
Kinda offtopic, but... Just better hope you never slip & fall & break something. Or basically need any kind of civic services. Get off the power grid, but if you move away from everything else, you'd better know how to take care of yourself. Thus the price for isolation from society.
Slashdot Mirror
In case anyone's wondering: no, Randal hasn't gone bonkers. Someone's managed to hijack his Slashdot account. He even got the "Your email and password have been changed" email from the system, and has the IP address from which it was done, for all the help it will do him.
To whomever did it: You're a great example of humanity. The guy just took it bending over again from the legal system, and you feel the need to play pre-pubescent 31337 haxx0r tricks to screw with him even more. Not that I expect the highest standard of decency from Slashdot trolls, but this *is* a real person you're impersonating.
He's a nice guy, and he's helped a lot of people. Not in a UNICEF or Amnesty International sort of way, but he's done his bit. Hell, if CmdrTaco read any of his O'Reilly books, he helped this place get made. That's irony.
But, in the end, this is "only Slashdot". I see amazing crap like this here, and I see amazing discussion here. Unfortunately, things like this are making me take this place less and less seriously.
Anyway, if you know Randal, you know this wasn't him anyway...
In case anyone's wondering: no, Randal hasn't gone bonkers. Someone's managed to hijack his Slashdot account. He even got the "Your email and password have been changed" email from the system, and has the IP address from which it was done, for all the help it will do him.
To whomever did it: You're a great example of humanity. The guy just took it bending over again from the legal system, and you feel the need to play pre-pubescent 31337 haxx0r tricks to screw with him even more. Not that I expect the highest standard of decency from Slashdot trolls, but this *is* a real person you're impersonating.
He's a nice guy, and he's helped a lot of people. Not in a UNICEF or Amnesty International sort of way, but he's done his bit. Hell, if CmdrTaco read any of his O'Reilly books, he helped this place get made. That's irony.
But, in the end, this is "only Slashdot". I see amazing crap like this here, and I see amazing discussion here. Unfortunately, things like this are making me take this place less and less seriously.
Anyway, if you know Randal, you know this wasn't him anyway...
Okay, so it's like a barcode, or like those little static-pattern square things, or any other form of scannable printable data. Maybe it's really really high capacity printed data....
But umm, where'd the "embedded" and "GUI" come from? Were those just buzzword burps as you were trying to type "Printable Data"?
Heeheehee... my favorite line of this message comes right at the end:
Hey, this is a funny thing. Did you know that the name of Bill Gate's wife is Melinda? Isn't that the name of your virtual sweetheart?
(giggle)
And yet, at the same time, this paper technology will probably help bring formerly expensive technological things like cell phones, laptops, and other personal devices to lower and lower rungs of the socio-economic ladder. Combine this with e-Ink tech on the horizon, and you could have extremely cheap textbooks. Imagine something like this being so cheap that the only barrier to entry in an information-based economy is intelligence? When all the tools and means of production are made of paper and special ink, and cost next to nothing, it's kinda hard to make it any more open.
Now, this is pie-in-the-sky thinking, I know, but it's as pie-in-the-sky as you are cynical. The reality will be somewhere in-between.
Yeah, but the cursor can really wink at you.
Well, no MAME yet, but I imagine someone will pick it up soon. In the mean time, check out this:
http://boob.thegypsy.com/emulators.html
NES, SNES, Gameboy, Genesis/Megadrive, PlayStation, NeoGeo pocket color...
Have you worked on any Open Source projects, or have you seen what happens when a previously closed source project gets released? Strange as it may sound, there is a bit of reverse engineering that must take place, especially if this bundle of source is not brilliantly commented and documented.
In this case, it was worse, because when Interbase was Open Sourced, it was not buildable. Important scripts, Makefiles, and other assets were missing. So, you had this whole mess of random source that you could begin to guess the function of, but if you hadn't been a former Interbase developer at Inprise, it was all a black box to you.
Have you ever "read the code from start to finish with a pen and paper next to them" on any major project? Have you ever heard someone do that? Frequently? Or are you just trying to be a troll? That's just not the way it happens.
Personally, I'm impressed that they've been able to find this. I mean the Firebird project found a working binary from Inprise and a collection of code rumored to, through some magic process, produce that binary. They worked out the magic process, produced their own binary, and moved on from there.
Only then, after they had source code corresponding to a working program could they start doing the poking and reverse engineering it took to figure out the parts and the places. They had some luck, since they do have the original creators of Interbase on their side, but there were quite a few hurdles to go through before they could even start to make heads or tails of what they were looking at.
Then again, I dunno, maybe I have it all wrong and these guys were just sitting on their thumbs all day.
Wow.
Even more... If you read the saga of the backdoor here, it seems that not only was the backdoor known about by Inprise R & D engineers-- but that when the original creators of Interbase (no longer a part of Inprise, but now part of the Firebird development fork) brought the security breach to their attention engineers at Inprise were forbidden to speak to them .
And furthermore, as they realized that not only was this in the Open Source release, this backdoor was also in the last 3 closed source versions of the database. So they fixed the Firebird source, but also-- even with the company itself forbidding its own engineers to contact these people-- they wrote a binary patch program to disable the backdoor on previous versions.
Imagine that. Even while being slapped in the face, these guys fixed their product for them.
...and why it existed for years in open source before being discovered.
Correction... Note that the blurb above says "...a direct addition by the original Borland/Inprise authors done before the program was released as open source." This wasn't done after the Open Source release.
Furthermore, Interbase has only been under an Open ource license for less than a year. Inprise was considering the move around last December, and was finally (although missing parts and amidst great controversy which eventually forked the code) released under an Open Source license around July 2000
So, the thing is from what I can see, this is an instance where an Open Source release allowed a security hole, hidden for years as closed source, to be found finally. Which is, of course, the complete opposite of what you said.
I like this evilla thing, I am not going to elaborate why.
Blah, you're no fun.
I also like the memory stick, and on that I am going to spend afew lines: memory sticks are very practical. More practical than the click(tm) because they are pure solid-state and don't require a special (and expensive and clumsy and power-consuming) drive, and faster, too.
Don't require a drive? Remember that's if, and only if, you own a Sony product with the Memory Stick reader built-in. As far as I know, there are no 3rd party devices with this tech built-in. If Memory Stick tech is licensed, then you WILL need a possibly expensive/clumsy/power-consuming drive to read them.
If Iomega made computers too, I bet they'd have Pocket Zip (it's no longer called Clik) drives built in.
You get to transfer 64/128 MB of pictures/mp3 from your camera to the evilla or from the evilla to your portable mp3 player. In solid state. I think it has it's benefits, and your trashing is a bit gratuitous.
What you're citing as a benefit of Memory Sticks is, as far as I know, also a benefit of technologies like SmartMedia and Compact Flash. The difference is, Compact Flash is an industry standard, not controlled by a single company like Memory Sticks.
I still don't see what's so great about Memory Sticks versus every other solid state storage tech out there. Other than the fact that Sony has the clout to force it into the market in every one of its products. Oh, and maybe the packaging of the sticks themselves is slicker.
It's not that I don't appreciate your opinion, I do, but I'm puzzled you are unable to envision any benefits of this technology.
Well, let's see... A technology that practically duplicates the benefits of several other existing technologies. A storage media tech that is controlled by one central company, who also happens to be a media giant, who also happens to be on the forefront of pushing to limit fair use rights.
Hmm. Do you think Memory Sticks will be free of hardware level copy protection, and simply remain bit repositories? Hmm.. Oh, wait, here it is, and it's called "Magic Gate".
I'd rather just pay for the flash ram, and not a bunch of content gateways on top of it.
Oh, one more thing. To the argument about 'not everyone can afford insurance'...
My basic answer is: Tough.
There are *some* options, since we don't live in a 100% capitalist system. But when you really hit rock bottom, you might just be screwed. And sometimes it's not fair. Life is sometimes like that, and no government, Mother, Father, angel or prayer can help you.
But when the alternative is a system that creates mediocrity for all, and lowers the standard overall, I'll pass. That's a curse on everyone, evenly spread and causing a little bit of suffering to everyone.
The basic thing is, for ever how much we build systems and institutions to shield each other from the raw rule of nature, there sometimes comes a point where we come in contact with it. Sometimes, you know, one has to take care of one's self, and cannot be taken care of.
Because that seems to be the basic issue in all of these utopian systems that piss me off. Yeah, it's warm and sparkly and great to take care of the populace. But in the end, when everyone expects the government to force others to take care of them, eventually, no one will take care of themselves. Then what?
Ever heard of something called a 'brain drain?'
Okay... Medical services cost money. People who perform medical services-- that is *doctors*-- expect to make a living. Furthermore, since many medical procedures require a high level of skill and preparation, perhaps a lifetime of study, doctors do and should expect to be paid very well. You can argue all you want about overpaid doctors, but just read up a bit and see what they have to go through, between demanding work and the pressures of being sued out of existence if they slip less than a hair's breadth with a scalpel.
You know what? I wouldn't trust a completely government run program to pay me what I'm worth, were I a doctor. That's one of the problems we have now with HMO's, and they're not even on the scale of a government. Any time you divorce pay from worth, and base it on need, you're in trouble unless someone, somewhere makes up the difference.
"This is a system that I would feel is the best possible," you say. But, are you a doctor? No, you just want. You want to be cared for. As if its a right of yours. Because you might die. Well who gives a shit, other than you and your family? Should a government with laws and guns force a talented person to perform acts of repair and therapy upon you for less in return than those services are truly worth? A doctor's good will only goes so far.
So you know what? When someone is underpaid and undervalued, and they see an alternative, they leave. Even if it is leaving their country. And, the most talented individuals are the first to leave. Thus, Brain Drain.
The price for universal health care, in the end, is a brain drain and a tendency for lower quality care. Period.
The best possible solution? Personal insurance. Why? Because poor health is usually an accident. I'm not always sick. In fact, many more people are healthy when one person is sick. So, if all of us pay a little bit into a pool, you can take it when you get sick and we are healthy. Now, since this is a business, there is overhead, and other talented people need to be paid their worth to run it. But in the end, your overall individual cost is less than constant medical coverage. And, pressuring HMO's notwithstanding, since these companies don't directly control the price of medical services (they just collect money), that price is controlled by the market.
"impossibly inefficient"? It's a "serious abuse"? I beg to differ. It's not like building an XML document and sending it in an HTTP request is an O(n) algorithm or something. Yeah, maybe you can preserve CPU and bandwidth with some pure binary stream protocol, maybe even direct marshalling of your internal data structures. Like, say... many other similar protocols in the past. But you lose intercompatibility, convenience, blah blah blah.
Seriously, it's not that heavy weight. And you DO NOT need to build a DOM tree, there are myriad alternatives, such as event-driven processing of XML for one. XML-RPC is very easy and very simple. I can't speak for SOAP, not having used it, but XML-RPC has performed great in my work. It crosses OS'es, crosses languages, crosses platforms, and leverages protocols and knowledge we already have. This is great stuff.
Honestly, CPU power is cheap. In comparison to my hours producing something and diagnosing problems, CPU power is nothing. People are expensive, computers are getting ever cheaper and more powerful. Hell, cut back on bandwidth by using some of that cheap CPU power to gzip the XML stream as it goes across the network. As far as I'm concerned, fretting over the performance hits (which are really close to negligible from what I see) is silly when faced with how easy things can get.
Umm, I'm sure someone's already told you this, but this OS isn't for your stinky Intel box. Sure, you can run it on an Amiga emulator, but it's meant for "the classic 68k/PPC Amiga computer". You know, A4000, A1200, etc and so forth? YOu know, those machines that ruled over Wintel PCs before the people running the company thought it would be fun to fly it into a cliff?
I would think the answer to this is maybe a "No", since unlike in the Open Source world, Handspring's module technology is most likely a proprietary thing and will not be shared up the licensing stream with Palm. I'm thinking the fork, if any, will remain forked.
I think this kind of misses the point. Ala Heinlein: TANSTAAFL, and everyone knows it. Of course hardware costs money, and of course running it costs money. This is a big-ole "DUH". Implementation is not free. That's not what "free as in beer" means. The beer recipe is downloadable gratis, but running the microbrewery is not.
But "free as in beer" means that the Intellectual Property *is* free. That vapor about which everyone is so worked up, patenting, and suing over is free. The details are out there, for free, is non-proprietary, and open to comment and further development.
The idea behind all this open network development is not so that you, or anyone for that matter, can get a cheaper lunch, it's so that those odd people out there who like burning themselves occasionally with solder might tweak with something that they're not going to get sued for reverse engeneering, folding, spindling, or mangling. Maybe, just maybe, an open development model might eventually come up with ways to make it as cheap or cheaper than commercial service... but that's not the point. That's a potential side effect of people who want to tweak.
So if you don't want to muck around with wiring, schematics, frequencies, climbing up on your roof, network settings, etc... feel free to just buy service from your local carrier. That's why they exist. It's an easy choice.
But the moment you want to start helping out that local carrier, or figure out how their tech works so that you can tweak it for your own benefit... forget about it. Their stuff is neither "free as in speech", nor "free as in beer".
If you ask Jon Udell, the web services are already here. The latest buzzword advances with XML, SOAP, XML-RPC, and friends are all just further refinement and evolution of the interface. Also, Udell's book, Practical Internet Groupware, talks extensively about adapting existing sites into web services. For example, a site like MetaCrawler demonstrates this in how it uses search engines' HTML "interface" to scoop up search results. Or, take the scripts that query news sites without the benefit of RDF or RSS, parsing HTML to scoop up and aggregate news headlines. These are all primitive web services.
And this is not to mention app servers such as Zope and Frontier, which are already built to offer web services natively. It just seems irresistable to use all of these simple building blocks to create neato keen distributed systems...
Does anyone here also frequent www.memepool.com? If not, then do.
This story was posted there last Thursday.
Now, I know this is proper News for Nerds, and some Nerds don't care squat about the Napster thing, but anyone remember:
Aug 23, 2000: Sony VP on Stopping Napster
"The [music] industry will take whatever steps it needs to protect itself and protect its revenue streams. It will not lose that revenue stream, no matter what... Sony is going to take aggressive steps to stop this... We will develop technology that transcends the individual user. We will firewall Napster at source -- we will block it at your cable company, we will block it at your phone company, we will block it at your [Internet-service provider]. We will firewall it at your PC."
Whether you give squat about Napster, you do need to remember that this is a corporation who apparently wants to sell you on products which will be the gatekeepers to your access to the internet. Not for your convenience, but to protect their REVENUE STREAMS. (Read: not artists, not property, not people, but HOW MUCH MONEY THEY CAN GET FROM YOU )
Granted, that's what most companies are after, but many seem to do it more tactfully than this. I've canceled my future purchases of Sony hardware and products (although I admit the PS2 is tempting) because of this stance. Not advocating an organized boycott, but I figured I might be yet another one of those people who won't let this down.
I mean they're counting on you to be a goldfish:
"Not in MY PC, not in MY CABLE MODEM!
Not in MY-- ooh... shiny, purple.. buttons... VaaaaIIIIIooo.."
But what about the children in Columbine being secretly and subtly trained by the evil, evil gaming industry to prepare for the overthrow of the US Government? That's what these skins are about! You think kids will know the difference between a skin and an elected official?!
Mr Katz? Where are you?!?
I care about a CueCat.
Why? Because I'm an Ubergeek and I like barcodes, shiny red lights, and coming up with neat things to do with free hardware. Hell, I even like the thing when it's just sitting on my desk shining the LED light on my wall.
I have been using it on my Windows machine as it was designed, scanning things and bumping my profile value for them up a few pennies... but soon I plan to attach it to a little 486 computer on top my fridge.
Why? Because then I can scan things as I throw empty containers out. And then post that to my own private house 'intranet'. And then at the market, browse my shopping list from my WAP phone. Eventually, I might even automatically have certain things ordered via internet once I've built a buying profile on myself.
After that, I might even get bored and start cataloging my CD's & Books (several 1000 items in each collection) for insurance purposes. I figure that might work better than photographing everything.
See, that's what being a Geek is about. Have stuff. Open the hood. Hook stuff together and make it do stuff it probably shouldn't. For fun.
In the end, my advice to DC would be to embrace the hacking community. The value they 'lose' on hackers not providing profile data could be recouped in cultivating a community to help generate new ideas for their product. Hell, establish projects for bounty using the CueCat. Sell the CueCat for up to US$20 for hackers who aren't going to use it as designed for marketing money.
Spread good will in the hacking community, let me do my projects, hire me to polish them up and let you sell them... (I mean, I don't have the business sense or money to produce the hardware) and my mom will still use it to scan things and see the neat home pages. And eventually you (DC) might even be able to sell my fridge idea.
If you're going to quote the cheer, at least spell it right. "agressive" doesn't have any rhythm. :)
It's:
Beeee aggressive.
B-E aggressive.
B. E.
A-G-G.
R-E-S-S-I-V-E.
(HTH)
Kinda offtopic, but... Just better hope you never slip & fall & break something. Or basically need any kind of civic services. Get off the power grid, but if you move away from everything else, you'd better know how to take care of yourself. Thus the price for isolation from society.
Can we please make an exception in the moderation system to give this one a 6?
Thank you.
:)