If there are alternatives, it's a bad idea to build any kind of revenue making site that depends in an essential way on software and/or infrastructure provided by a small startup.
Are there alternatives? As far as I can tell, there are. In fact, a general purpose content management system like Drupal already has a lot of "social networking" features, and they are open and server-to-server. I see no compelling reason to put Ning in the loop for something like that.
And in the meantime, maybe the GIMP will replace Photoshop, is that your next line?
Why not? No matter what you think of the relative features of Gimp and Photoshop today, today's Gimp has many more features than Photoshop of a few years ago. Heck, a few years ago, Photoshop didn't have more than 8 bits per channel, and Photoshop zealots like you were foaming at the mouth telling everybody how that was all anybody ever needed.
In fact, the fancy features that Photoshop has are rarely important in day-to-day professional imaging use; professionals simply don't have the time to fiddle for hours with every image--most digital images should come out of the camera ready to use, and if they require editing, the less of it, the better.
There are some other applications of Photoshop besides its core image editing functionality, like web design, where the Gimp doesn't compete with Photoshop. But that's OK--that's not the Gimp's purpose. I think Photoshop took a wrong turn somewhere when it incorporated all that cruft.
Take a gander at the book 'Marine Sniper' some time. It's the story of Carlos Hathcock in Vietnam. There's some pretty amazing tales in there.
I find it truly amazing that someone would admit in public to sneaking up on around 90 people and killing them with premeditation. Even if he truly believed that he was doing it out of patriotic duty and that it was necessary, that is not the kind of thing you ought to brag about. But, frankly, I think the guy must have been mentally disturbed and a psychopath in order to do what he did and then even talk about it in public.
Signing slips of paper is a good system: each individual signature is hard to duplicate in its original form, the terms (total amount etc.) you agree to are clearly spelled out on the piece of paper, and both sides get a copy. All these electronic payment systems have the problem that the credit card company or store can, potentially, generate arbitrary numbers of transactions and you have no physical basis on which to challenge them ("please produce the credit slips"). With credit cards, you have some legal protections if you pay enough attention to your credit card statements, but since the same systems are also used for debit cards and other forms of payment, companies can empty your account and if they don't want to cancel bogus charges, there is nothing you can do.
And this sort of thing is not theoretical: I have had duplicate charges to my credit cards several times, with the company claiming that they had a signature (electronic) for each charge. Of course, it was the same signature; it is possible that they just keep a record of all signatures you ever made to them and all transactions, and just pick and choose.
Note also that it's software developers and engineers--geeks--that are responsible for creating these bogus payment systems. Please use your heads (a bit more) if you work on these kinds of systems.
I suppose it's appropriate that a movie based on a Microsoft video game reminds me why Microsoft's push for DRM doesn't concern me much: there have been almost no movies over the last decade or two that I really think are worth watching more than once (and most of them aren't even worth watching at all).
A big chunk of its $7bn research budget is spent on digital rights management (DRM). A senior source in the company says Microsoft is in talks with the main electronics manufacturers about developing DVD players to play the new discs. And when the movie industry does find the courage to move to a fully internet-based distribution model, Microsoft wants its DRM software to be the industry standard, giving it dominance of the server market, and the telecoms and cable companies that need to store and manage their video-on-demand services.
Of course, you don't need Microsoft technologies for DRM--there are plenty of workable systems. Microsoft didn't even invent DRM or the key DRM technologies. But Microsoft has likely amassed a big patent portfolio anyway to create big problems for everybody else, and they are going to try and create a monopoly on media servers based on proprietary, non-interoperable servers, and by pushing their software into players.
Of course, the media companies and device manufacturers would be fools if they went for this, but I suspect at least some will.
Microsoft will soon have the music and movie industry by the balls, given that those industries are busy committing to Microsoft-proprietary DRM and Microsoft-proprietary media formats. At that point, such negotiations will be over pretty quickly. If we're lucky, Microsoft, the RIAA, and the MPAA will all just annihilate each other.
There are plenty of on-line backup services. Not only do they let you store you data, they also give you web-based access if you like. A simple solution is Apple's.Mac, but there are others. You can automate the backup so that you don't have to keep things up to date by hand.
I think it's good that this is getting released. The LispM software contained a lot of low-level ideas that are being rediscovered now 25 years later. This will be useful for the history of computing, as well as a potential source of prior art in patent claims.
Still, personally, I think Smalltalk 80, developed around the same time, was more innovative and interesting than the LispM software. You can get a complete Smalltalk 80 environment in its original form as part of the Squeak project.
16M is sufficient for running X11, a good web browser, and mail client. In any case, upping the memory to, say, 128M and flash to 256M wouldn't make the thing much more expensive.
As I recall, this device was originally hailed as a PC for developing nations, priced at around $100. Looks like they missed their target.
As an Internet appliance, this doesn't stand a snowball's chance in hell: it's too expensive, too big, too ugly, and it runs the wrong kind of software.
Probably the main reason it missed its target is its operating system--Windows is far too heavyweight. Companies like Linksys have no trouble putting out $50 Linux systems like the WRT 54G; if they replaced the wireless on that box with video out, you'd have the hardware for an Internet appliance.
The end result is that specifications have never improved interoperability by themselves,
They aren't supposed to "improve" interoperability, they are supposed to allow multiple people to write code together in the first place. If you don't write down how you break up a big software project into lots of little projects, then the people whose head that sort of information resides in become the bottleneck. Sounds familiar?
the best specifications are the ones that describe something already done
Yes, and exactly those are missing from the Linux kernel: stable specifications for functionality and interfaces that are well-understood and for which writing code is routine. People aren't asking Linus to write specifications for every piece of code he likes to play around with.
Linus does code to specs: the kernel is intended to comply with all sorts of formal and informal specs, and its developers pay attention.
What is missing is people writing and committing to specs for some important kernel internal interfaces and functionality. This attitude goes hand in hand, of course, with the lack of stable internal interfaces within the Linux kernel and is one of the major reasons why the kernel source has bloated to such a humungous size and why every kernel release needs to include all the accumulated garbage of the past decade. If internal kernel interfaces were specified and committed to for each major version, then driver and module development could be separated from the rest of the kernel.
Of course, Linus is right in one area: most specs are useless. There are two primary reasons for that. Either, the spec is poorly written; there are lots of those. Or, the spec describes a bad design; there are many more of those. Many of the original UNIX design documents were exemplary specs: they told you concisely what you could and could not rely on. On the other hand, many recent standards (like HTML or SOAP) are examples of well-written specs that are bad specs because the underlying designs suck. But the fact that many specs are bad doesn't mean that it is inevitable that the Linux specs would be bad; that only depends on Linus.
Service-oriented architectures is basically the UNIX philosophy: lots of little tools, often implemented as little servers. Yes, it helps with reuse, it helps with limiting the effects of errors, and a whole set of other problems. What else is new.
It's funny that this is now becoming popular among the UNIX haters (you know, like many object oriented developers, Windows developers, mainframe programmers, and all those guys). But, of course, they couldn't simply just use the approach, they needed a new acronym, massive amounts of new syntax and protocols, a constant stream of hot air, and preferably gigabytes of memory to implement it all.
A big crater like that on a little moon would probably have torn it apart if created by a collision. More likely, all the craters, big and small, are the result of the thing blowing up again and again from the inside.
Minimum-wage call center employees don't have any idea what they're talking about; film at 11!
They may be even less intelligent and less informed than Hilary Rosen, they are still official representatives. If they make a statement, it's a statement made by the company. If the company doesn't like stupid people making comments, they should hire smarter people (and fire Hilary).
(I have to wonder where the/. obsession with the DMCA comes from. There are a whole universe of laws, and yet around here it's DMCA this, DMCA that.)
Probably because lots of companies have tried to use the DMCA for trying to control all sorts of things completely unrelated to its original intent, so cut people some slack.
There is nothing in any law, copyright or otherwise, that requires you to provide a license to share your own works.
Quite to the contrary: you do not get to pick and choose what people can do with your copyrighted works. If you publish in paper form, there are quite a number of rights you implicitly "license" to your buyers (it's not called a "license" because it's set forth by copyright law, but it amounts to the same thing).
Limewire is certainly in the spirit of that: "if you use this network for distributing your content, you automatically agree to certain terms". That's particularly appropriate because the people paying for the distribution of your content are the people receiving your content.
Granted, they can chose not to use Limewire, but if this catches on in P2P in general then there is little choice left (hence the "slippery slope). I hope it doesn't catch on.
I hope it does. If you want to distribute content under more restrictive licenses, you should bloody well pay for your own bandwidth and not use P2P networks.
I think the quality of that "ontology" speaks for itself.
People have been trying to draw these little graphs for years, and I have yet to see one that actually is more useful than a simple textual presentation.
What would that look like? Something like this:
Related Topics: - Music Players - Cell Phones - Gadgets Related Stories: - Motorola introduces the Uberfrob [in Motorola] - Apple and Motorola team up [in Apple, Motorola] - Microsoft's new media player has Really Secure DRM now [in Microsoft]
If it gets more complex than that, you can use multiple levels of indentation to group things (but don't you go out and patent that now!).
Slashdot Mirror
and so have other people. For obvious reasons, banks don't want it, and they have the power to prevent it.
That was actually the original idea behind worms, which, like so many other things, came from Xerox PARC
If there are alternatives, it's a bad idea to build any kind of revenue making site that depends in an essential way on software and/or infrastructure provided by a small startup.
Are there alternatives? As far as I can tell, there are. In fact, a general purpose content management system like Drupal already has a lot of "social networking" features, and they are open and server-to-server. I see no compelling reason to put Ning in the loop for something like that.
And in the meantime, maybe the GIMP will replace Photoshop, is that your next line?
Why not? No matter what you think of the relative features of Gimp and Photoshop today, today's Gimp has many more features than Photoshop of a few years ago. Heck, a few years ago, Photoshop didn't have more than 8 bits per channel, and Photoshop zealots like you were foaming at the mouth telling everybody how that was all anybody ever needed.
In fact, the fancy features that Photoshop has are rarely important in day-to-day professional imaging use; professionals simply don't have the time to fiddle for hours with every image--most digital images should come out of the camera ready to use, and if they require editing, the less of it, the better.
There are some other applications of Photoshop besides its core image editing functionality, like web design, where the Gimp doesn't compete with Photoshop. But that's OK--that's not the Gimp's purpose. I think Photoshop took a wrong turn somewhere when it incorporated all that cruft.
Take a gander at the book 'Marine Sniper' some time. It's the story of Carlos Hathcock in Vietnam. There's some pretty amazing tales in there.
I find it truly amazing that someone would admit in public to sneaking up on around 90 people and killing them with premeditation. Even if he truly believed that he was doing it out of patriotic duty and that it was necessary, that is not the kind of thing you ought to brag about. But, frankly, I think the guy must have been mentally disturbed and a psychopath in order to do what he did and then even talk about it in public.
Signing slips of paper is a good system: each individual signature is hard to duplicate in its original form, the terms (total amount etc.) you agree to are clearly spelled out on the piece of paper, and both sides get a copy. All these electronic payment systems have the problem that the credit card company or store can, potentially, generate arbitrary numbers of transactions and you have no physical basis on which to challenge them ("please produce the credit slips"). With credit cards, you have some legal protections if you pay enough attention to your credit card statements, but since the same systems are also used for debit cards and other forms of payment, companies can empty your account and if they don't want to cancel bogus charges, there is nothing you can do.
And this sort of thing is not theoretical: I have had duplicate charges to my credit cards several times, with the company claiming that they had a signature (electronic) for each charge. Of course, it was the same signature; it is possible that they just keep a record of all signatures you ever made to them and all transactions, and just pick and choose.
Note also that it's software developers and engineers--geeks--that are responsible for creating these bogus payment systems. Please use your heads (a bit more) if you work on these kinds of systems.
I suppose it's appropriate that a movie based on a Microsoft video game reminds me why Microsoft's push for DRM doesn't concern me much: there have been almost no movies over the last decade or two that I really think are worth watching more than once (and most of them aren't even worth watching at all).
Of course, you don't need Microsoft technologies for DRM--there are plenty of workable systems. Microsoft didn't even invent DRM or the key DRM technologies. But Microsoft has likely amassed a big patent portfolio anyway to create big problems for everybody else, and they are going to try and create a monopoly on media servers based on proprietary, non-interoperable servers, and by pushing their software into players.
Of course, the media companies and device manufacturers would be fools if they went for this, but I suspect at least some will.
Microsoft will soon have the music and movie industry by the balls, given that those industries are busy committing to Microsoft-proprietary DRM and Microsoft-proprietary media formats. At that point, such negotiations will be over pretty quickly. If we're lucky, Microsoft, the RIAA, and the MPAA will all just annihilate each other.
When Google is accessed from China, label it "A Province of China".
When Google accessed from Taiwan, label it "The Nation of Taiwan".
When accessed from anywhere else, label both China and Taiwan as "Butthead Totalitarian Regimes".
There are plenty of on-line backup services. Not only do they let you store you data, they also give you web-based access if you like. A simple solution is Apple's .Mac, but there are others. You can automate the backup so that you don't have to keep things up to date by hand.
I think it's good that this is getting released. The LispM software contained a lot of low-level ideas that are being rediscovered now 25 years later. This will be useful for the history of computing, as well as a potential source of prior art in patent claims.
Still, personally, I think Smalltalk 80, developed around the same time, was more innovative and interesting than the LispM software. You can get a complete Smalltalk 80 environment in its original form as part of the Squeak project.
What we really need is a new form of energy and/or propulsion, period.
What about antimatter sails? Simple and technologically doable.
16M is sufficient for running X11, a good web browser, and mail client. In any case, upping the memory to, say, 128M and flash to 256M wouldn't make the thing much more expensive.
That's not a fair comparison--they'll probably give away refurbed versions of this thing for free soon.
As I recall, this device was originally hailed as a PC for developing nations, priced at around $100. Looks like they missed their target.
As an Internet appliance, this doesn't stand a snowball's chance in hell: it's too expensive, too big, too ugly, and it runs the wrong kind of software.
Probably the main reason it missed its target is its operating system--Windows is far too heavyweight. Companies like Linksys have no trouble putting out $50 Linux systems like the WRT 54G; if they replaced the wireless on that box with video out, you'd have the hardware for an Internet appliance.
The end result is that specifications have never improved interoperability by themselves,
They aren't supposed to "improve" interoperability, they are supposed to allow multiple people to write code together in the first place. If you don't write down how you break up a big software project into lots of little projects, then the people whose head that sort of information resides in become the bottleneck. Sounds familiar?
the best specifications are the ones that describe something already done
Yes, and exactly those are missing from the Linux kernel: stable specifications for functionality and interfaces that are well-understood and for which writing code is routine. People aren't asking Linus to write specifications for every piece of code he likes to play around with.
Linus does code to specs: the kernel is intended to comply with all sorts of formal and informal specs, and its developers pay attention.
What is missing is people writing and committing to specs for some important kernel internal interfaces and functionality. This attitude goes hand in hand, of course, with the lack of stable internal interfaces within the Linux kernel and is one of the major reasons why the kernel source has bloated to such a humungous size and why every kernel release needs to include all the accumulated garbage of the past decade. If internal kernel interfaces were specified and committed to for each major version, then driver and module development could be separated from the rest of the kernel.
Of course, Linus is right in one area: most specs are useless. There are two primary reasons for that. Either, the spec is poorly written; there are lots of those. Or, the spec describes a bad design; there are many more of those. Many of the original UNIX design documents were exemplary specs: they told you concisely what you could and could not rely on. On the other hand, many recent standards (like HTML or SOAP) are examples of well-written specs that are bad specs because the underlying designs suck. But the fact that many specs are bad doesn't mean that it is inevitable that the Linux specs would be bad; that only depends on Linus.
There's nothing particularly unusual about that explanation; it's the same explanation as for craters on comet Wild 2, for example.
Service-oriented architectures is basically the UNIX philosophy: lots of little tools, often implemented as little servers. Yes, it helps with reuse, it helps with limiting the effects of errors, and a whole set of other problems. What else is new.
It's funny that this is now becoming popular among the UNIX haters (you know, like many object oriented developers, Windows developers, mainframe programmers, and all those guys). But, of course, they couldn't simply just use the approach, they needed a new acronym, massive amounts of new syntax and protocols, a constant stream of hot air, and preferably gigabytes of memory to implement it all.
A big crater like that on a little moon would probably have torn it apart if created by a collision. More likely, all the craters, big and small, are the result of the thing blowing up again and again from the inside.
Ah, never mind about Hilary: she's already history.
Minimum-wage call center employees don't have any idea what they're talking about; film at 11!
/. obsession with the DMCA comes from. There are a whole universe of laws, and yet around here it's DMCA this, DMCA that.)
They may be even less intelligent and less informed than Hilary Rosen, they are still official representatives. If they make a statement, it's a statement made by the company. If the company doesn't like stupid people making comments, they should hire smarter people (and fire Hilary).
(I have to wonder where the
Probably because lots of companies have tried to use the DMCA for trying to control all sorts of things completely unrelated to its original intent, so cut people some slack.
There is nothing in any law, copyright or otherwise, that requires you to provide a license to share your own works.
Quite to the contrary: you do not get to pick and choose what people can do with your copyrighted works. If you publish in paper form, there are quite a number of rights you implicitly "license" to your buyers (it's not called a "license" because it's set forth by copyright law, but it amounts to the same thing).
Limewire is certainly in the spirit of that: "if you use this network for distributing your content, you automatically agree to certain terms". That's particularly appropriate because the people paying for the distribution of your content are the people receiving your content.
Granted, they can chose not to use Limewire, but if this catches on in P2P in general then there is little choice left (hence the "slippery slope). I hope it doesn't catch on.
I hope it does. If you want to distribute content under more restrictive licenses, you should bloody well pay for your own bandwidth and not use P2P networks.
I think the quality of that "ontology" speaks for itself.
People have been trying to draw these little graphs for years, and I have yet to see one that actually is more useful than a simple textual presentation.
What would that look like? Something like this:
Related Topics:
- Music Players
- Cell Phones
- Gadgets
Related Stories:
- Motorola introduces the Uberfrob [in Motorola]
- Apple and Motorola team up [in Apple, Motorola]
- Microsoft's new media player has Really Secure DRM now [in Microsoft]
If it gets more complex than that, you can use multiple levels of indentation to group things (but don't you go out and patent that now!).