scientists stimulated one nerve cell to communicate with a second cell which transmitted that signal to multiple cells within the network.
Singal up (probably down too, though that is not said). That's a start. Now let me jump.
Imagine how this would feel in your own brain. Even strengthened to noticeable level by a lump of neurons, the signal would still read "beep". Now imagine being fed information through that channel. "Beep, bip beep bip bip beep". Better start training that morse.
Now let's enhance the input by adding more bits into it and running data through a digital-to-analog converter. This is where you would slowly be able to "see colors", one at a time. Low signal, cold feeling; high signal, hot feeling. That is brainable information. You can associate different patterns of these "colors" to different ideas. But still it's not like you could see any shapes, is it?
Now add more bytes, feed them in side-by-side. That's a feed. At this point, feel nausea. Something is feeding noise into your thoughts, something you cannot possibly comprehend.
Would take a processing system not unlike vision inside the brain to translate that feed into experiences like colors, tastes, touches, then further associate these to make shapes out of the noise.
A long way.
Worth taking, of course, as research goes, but I wouldn't toss away those external displays as of yet. Have a hunch computers won't be the same, either, when we get there.
Future research will focus on interfacing silicon chips with the human brain to control artificial limbs and develop "thinking" computers.
IT is infrastructure for companies. It is not (arguably ever) their essential business. Their essential business is a combination of management, sales, accounting, production and assorted support procedures for the aforementioned as well as for their clients. Each stream of the gigantic process that is the company has specific tool requirements. I can not see a sustainable model wherein an IT department (outsourced or not) could keep up to its clients' necessities from any monocultural standpoint. I'd rather prepare to separate each task to a platform that best supports it, then define these separations and make my staff follow the definitions, of course redefining where need arises.
Now as for small companies that cannot afford a multitude of servers, I'd offer a single solution that best fulfills most of their needs and that I would like to keep up and polished for them myself... A debian.
war-dial all phone numbers of the company looking for rogue modems
Combine this with talking each answering person into giving their authentication information. I understand the easiest way to achieve that is by telling them you are hired by their company to make a security audit and said authentication information is necessary to point out flaws in their IT security. Not like I were experienced in the field but that's what they keep telling 'round the 'net, Mr. Mitnick for instance.
I was going to reply with "what an excellent definition".
Then I thought of my favourite defense for democracy, "in any group of people large enough, the average of guesses about a value tends to be close to truth". That I took from economy, because for some unfortunate reason I tend to get into talks about economy versus democracy (power to the people or to the money, that is) every now and then. I think it is originally used to prove that a share value would get to a reasonable realistic level.
Now I'm confused.
BTW, SCO has bullied us long enough and should be conquered^Wcorrected.
No, I'm not unemployed! I'm not just one of those hordes of people thrown out of the common boat by the waves of fate, while others have to pay for my life-support costs.
I am self-employed, an Entrepreneur, a captain of my own fate, hungrily looking for opportunities, just temporarily loaning some more investment from my family, monthly.
Some information at different paths might require cross-referencing. Thus, the scheme you propose should be extended so that there would be a way for text documents to contain links to each other.
However, if you just take a big enough storage system and download all the documents from teh intterweb, you can have a flat directory containing all the documents. Woohoo, progress!
You really make it sound simple. Sure there'll be problems like really getting the image to boot, but a few trials-and-errors should get those right. And a plain approach such as this spells out total control, a pair of words every root should love.
As for the partitioning (printf) problem, I'd save a partition table with sfdisk -d/dev/hda >partitions.txt, and restore it with sfdisk/dev/hda <partitions.txt. If you have clients with different-sized disks, leave a partition (say,/home or/scratch) out, and after running sfdisk do something like
fdisk/dev/hda <<EOT n l <newline> <newline> w EOT
(notice the two empty lines to use defaults for partition start and end - will use the rest of the disk.)
Also notice that tar --one-file-system already creates the directories (/proc,/usr,...) to use as mount points for subsequent filesystems, no need to handle them specially. Of course if the original file system consists of several partitions (like a separate/usr or/var) you'll need to run one tar --one-file-system for each of them - spanning several file systems with one tar command will force you to explicitly exclude sources like/proc,/home,/tmp that should not be copied. Whatever suits you best.
Also note that even while files under/var/log and/var/run should not be copied, subdirectories therein should be.
If you choose this 'roll your own dirty solution' I'd like to hear about your experiences.
It has been my experience, and correct me if I'm wrong, but most open source projects pride themselves on the design behind the technical aspects of their projects, not by their quality assurance.
That might well be. It might well be a contributor to quality as well, but this is getting hypothetical. In the free software world, it seems quality is being ensured more by stabile service uptime than development-documentation. More process-like, where the process is a software's life cycle from the inception of an idea to version 1.0 to being replaced by something else, including its development, deployment, use and redevelopment, rather than a "product" out of the door never to return. A service model rather than a shrink-wrapped shopping item.
I can see how that service would be a tremendous service to an open project, but I don't know if you're going to find people who want to do QA in their free time.
I know I wouldn't want to, and I know the people I know who do it for money wouldn't. But if and when someone needs it done, that someone will pay for it. Be it governmental or other bodies embracing open source, insurance companies or some Homeland Security office. It's a whole lot easier to do thorough QA after active development cycle for software with its source code available than without.
This far the code itself together with pounding throughout the world has provided a quite sufficient natural quality assurance for quite a few projects... Please just don't think "Linux kernel" here;)
So yes, we seem to agree; traditional corporative-style QA won't be likely to happen upon free software unless that software is finding it's way to an environment that requires it, and at that stage corporate-style budget ceases to be a problem.
I suppose that the third stage of the open model might be to do this - to help open projects apply best practices for software creation, test, and maintenance.
Are you implying that open development (with its world-readable version trees, communication through archived, public message systems, bypassing monetary systems as the controlling aspect of software development, etc.) has somehow proved itself so inefficient that it should be given up in favor of whatever the closed development sector has to offer?
It's the closed commercial sector that is supposed to bend toward open methods, not vice versa. That is happening through grass-roots efforts like "stealth" installments of Linux-servers in the end of 1990's followed by "stealth" installments of Linux-workstations right now, as well as governmental and communal bodies around the world already embracing the open model as a cost- and result-effective method unbound by the insecurities of commercial offerings.
I'm sorry to sound this flamy, but your comment (as well as this whole subject, actually) reminds me of quite a few people who claim they have a grasp of the open development model, while they still look at it through a 1980's commerce school's window.
As for the security of Open offerings, mature projects' insecurity (the cumulative time window of exploits open against product's lifetime) should be compared to that of closed-development (=non-patch-accepting) offerings. From what I gather, on that basis insurance prices against IT disasters should be considerably cheaper with mature Open products.
IBM is sure it won't stand the test of a real trial, and they are putting all their eggs in that basket, so they are pretty sure about it. Even if they aren't, and SCO wins, they'll just buy SCO out; that way, they'd only lose the real battle, that's about whether you can make money by forcing a bigger company to buy you by becoming enough of a hassle.
Got it? They got no case. Even if they did, it'd be solved by IBM buying them out.
Then again - like someone already pointed out;) - you should be well advised to mention in your talks also the *BSD efforts and that whenever one free *nix path closes, there are several more open, and that's about as central a point of open source as there is. Think about it.
Even if there were some patented or otherwise somehow restricted code in some version of Linux, it doesn't hinder development at all. It'd be just dropped out and a new version without it released immediately. It's functionality would be reimplemented in other ways, pretty soon, and with pretty big wheels behind it, now that IBM et al are playing along.
This will get worse until it will be sufficiently resolved. Not this particular incident, but virtual entertainment centers getting hit with the old "in-out, in-out" trick.
Now, will game industry take the lead in security development like it has taken in hardware limit pushing?
I always find it amusing when one person feels he can talk with such an air of confidence about the ideals of a company with as many people as Microsoft.
Organizations as social bodies seem quite weird. I tend to wonder, based on my own experience, why people can't manage better their natural need to align their views with those they assume their group's views to be.
Also, is it just me, or did that first chapter read more like a high school physics book rather than a 101 to blind platform faith?
Reality can have no flaws - please adjust your view;)
Wouldn't it figure that a person with such a world view would try to drive his points through with references to atomic and newtonian powers rather than use sociopsychological terminology? He needs his "war" to see a fit place for his own emotions in the world; thus, all the world is about war to him. Not quite an unique attitude.
The tone of the "first chapter" linked is astonishingly rude. It seems like the thinking were from a mindscape of cubic boulders splatted murky red with blood, not unlike the ending levels of original Doom. If this speaks of mentality inside Microsoft, that company definitely is the temple (and on this millennia, the memorial) of the idea of self-justificating greed of the 1980's. And in the networked (in social and organizational sense) world of today, it is quite alone waving that ugly flag.
Microsoft will be truly lost, not by getting bankrupt or marginalized or anything, but by simply being left as one of the group of players on the software field. That is the loss of its central philosophy, that there could "only be one". Is it not so?
--
On totally other news, it is imminent now that free software will prevail, and must start to prepare to deliver its promise. A lot of infrastructure must be invented in order to best utilize the power of shared development. Just think of all of those organizations from Münich and Turku to the enlightened countries of South America, asking for preparation, development and upkeep of their systems... It can be left to happen, or it can be planned for.
I must say that I appreciate VMWare for both its hack value and usefulness. (It's also one of the too few commercial applications that's as easy to deploy as should be with it's download-configure-pay -model.) Nice to hear a human^Wnerdish voice from someone inside as well.
On MacOSX 10.1.5, Celestia apparently wraps a realtime mirror image around us. Does not apply on any other planets.
Share source, collect money for releases
on
Shareware and Unix?
·
· Score: 2
I've been thinking about productizing software development as part of my private enterprise. Most of the cases ordered from me have fit GPL/BSD style licenses, but i've received payment for the development work by hour.
I think that most Unix operators require the source and development rights, as well as rights to use the product unlimitedly, with the possible exception of reselling the product as long as the original producer continues offering it. I do. I shy away from restrictive licensing. But you should and can put a price for your own work. The best price you can get for it. That is even RMS-compatible!-)
Release 0.9 versions of your software, and make an easily usable wish gathering website. Users should be able to come up with fixes and features they want for next stable release, and prices they would pay for the implementation. Then you can decide which ones you implement. You can also pay part of the promised price to anyone else who comes up with an implementation patch, and keep part of it for yourself for organizing the payment system and taking responsibility of the releases.
One thing that keeps free software from being deployed in many places is the old problem of "who do you sue". You can always offer to take some responsibility of malfunctions for a price. This price you can set yourself, after you've thought through the risks you will be ready to take and writing the support agreement accordingly.
Sorry to hear that. My first thought when I saw this article was "gosh, a lot of potential comers will be disappointed by it being too soon." Hopefully they'll be able to announce it earlier here next time. Then again, the place can only hold a few hundred people:/
I'll probably pop by although I have no idea what I'd be doing there except getting jealous of others' unuseless skillz.
Old-skool-skene people should have some means of int'l communications of their own.
...in spirit of Ian M. Banks' Culture. True and computer-related (if just socially) at the same time. But can you really love a name that is not your own?
You still wouldn't be able to reconstruct the system to do anything else than what you've been given dialog settings for. Unless the Windows Registry is considered as efficient a way to configure things as configurations files + man pages + source. Or rebuilding that is considered part of the bugsquashing campaign. Which it should be, given the design.
And then there's the price. And spirit. Like, what fun would it be running around rebooting machines instead of chatting in irc about configuration details?-)
That comes quite close to it (except now that I work on macosX). Just scrollback wouldn't work and different logs wouldn't run in separate, relocatable windows.
I'd pay someone half a year's worth of sexual services if I could keep logs running dimly in the background while keeping my interactive CLI windows on the front.
That, and the network transparency. Oh, and the ability to move around in 3D representations of networks. Just so that I were not expected to visualize them barely in my head all the time. That makes my thoughts fuzzy and responses to realtime challenges - like gf's speech or overrunning cars - slow.
Slashdot Mirror
Quoth the article:
scientists stimulated one nerve cell to communicate with a second cell which transmitted that signal to multiple cells within the network.
Singal up (probably down too, though that is not said). That's a start. Now let me jump.
Imagine how this would feel in your own brain. Even strengthened to noticeable level by a lump of neurons, the signal would still read "beep". Now imagine being fed information through that channel. "Beep, bip beep bip bip beep". Better start training that morse.
Now let's enhance the input by adding more bits into it and running data through a digital-to-analog converter. This is where you would slowly be able to "see colors", one at a time. Low signal, cold feeling; high signal, hot feeling. That is brainable information. You can associate different patterns of these "colors" to different ideas.
But still it's not like you could see any shapes, is it?
Now add more bytes, feed them in side-by-side. That's a feed. At this point, feel nausea. Something is feeding noise into your thoughts, something you cannot possibly comprehend.
Would take a processing system not unlike vision inside the brain to translate that feed into experiences like colors, tastes, touches, then further associate these to make shapes out of the noise.
A long way.
Worth taking, of course, as research goes, but I wouldn't toss away those external displays as of yet. Have a hunch computers won't be the same, either, when we get there.
Future research will focus on interfacing silicon chips with the human brain to control artificial limbs and develop "thinking" computers.
Mostly fun!
IT is infrastructure for companies. It is not (arguably ever) their essential business. Their essential business is a combination of management, sales, accounting, production and assorted support procedures for the aforementioned as well as for their clients. Each stream of the gigantic process that is the company has specific tool requirements. I can not see a sustainable model wherein an IT department (outsourced or not) could keep up to its clients' necessities from any monocultural standpoint. I'd rather prepare to separate each task to a platform that best supports it, then define these separations and make my staff follow the definitions, of course redefining where need arises.
Now as for small companies that cannot afford a multitude of servers, I'd offer a single solution that best fulfills most of their needs and that I would like to keep up and polished for them myself... A debian.
war-dial all phone numbers of the company looking for rogue modems
Combine this with talking each answering person into giving their authentication information. I understand the easiest way to achieve that is by telling them you are hired by their company to make a security audit and said authentication information is necessary to point out flaws in their IT security. Not like I were experienced in the field but that's what they keep telling 'round the 'net, Mr. Mitnick for instance.
Have fun!
I was going to reply with "what an excellent definition".
Then I thought of my favourite defense for democracy, "in any group of people large enough, the average of guesses about a value tends to be close to truth". That I took from economy, because for some unfortunate reason I tend to get into talks about economy versus democracy (power to the people or to the money, that is) every now and then. I think it is originally used to prove that a share value would get to a reasonable realistic level.
Now I'm confused.
BTW, SCO has bullied us long enough and should be conquered^Wcorrected.
No, I'm not unemployed! I'm not just one of those hordes of people thrown out of the common boat by the waves of fate, while others have to pay for my life-support costs.
I am self-employed, an Entrepreneur, a captain of my own fate, hungrily looking for opportunities, just temporarily loaning some more investment from my family, monthly.
Haha only serious.
Some information at different paths might require cross-referencing. Thus, the scheme you propose should be extended so that there would be a way for text documents to contain links to each other.
However, if you just take a big enough storage system and download all the documents from teh intterweb, you can have a flat directory containing all the documents. Woohoo, progress!
As for the partitioning (printf) problem, I'd save a partition table with sfdisk -d
(notice the two empty lines to use defaults for partition start and end - will use the rest of the disk.)
Also notice that tar --one-file-system already creates the directories (/proc,
Also note that even while files under
If you choose this 'roll your own dirty solution' I'd like to hear about your experiences.
FAI (http://www.informatik.uni-koeln.de/fai/) is a system that can be used to automatically install Debian on any kinds of different machinery (you define the differentiating classes yourself). Documentation on its site states that "Booting and installing from CD-ROM is in progress".
If you happen to need that level of complexity, maybe you can lend in a helping hand for them to finish that CD-ROM version.
Just thought FAI would deserve to be mentioned here along with all the others. It might very well be overly complex for your purposes.
Is that too simplistic? man lilo for the -R switch.
But lets be realistic about whats going on.
;)
Absolutely. Real world is infinitely interesting.
It has been my experience, and correct me if I'm wrong, but most open source projects pride themselves on the design behind the technical aspects of their projects, not by their quality assurance.
That might well be. It might well be a contributor to quality as well, but this is getting hypothetical. In the free software world, it seems quality is being ensured more by stabile service uptime than development-documentation. More process-like, where the process is a software's life cycle from the inception of an idea to version 1.0 to being replaced by something else, including its development, deployment, use and redevelopment, rather than a "product" out of the door never to return. A service model rather than a shrink-wrapped shopping item.
I can see how that service would be a tremendous service to an open project, but I don't know if you're going to find people who want to do QA in their free time.
I know I wouldn't want to, and I know the people I know who do it for money wouldn't. But if and when someone needs it done, that someone will pay for it. Be it governmental or other bodies embracing open source, insurance companies or some Homeland Security office. It's a whole lot easier to do thorough QA after active development cycle for software with its source code available than without.
This far the code itself together with pounding throughout the world has provided a quite sufficient natural quality assurance for quite a few projects... Please just don't think "Linux kernel" here
So yes, we seem to agree; traditional corporative-style QA won't be likely to happen upon free software unless that software is finding it's way to an environment that requires it, and at that stage corporate-style budget ceases to be a problem.
I suppose that the third stage of the open model might be to do this - to help open projects apply best practices for software creation, test, and maintenance.
Are you implying that open development (with its world-readable version trees, communication through archived, public message systems, bypassing monetary systems as the controlling aspect of software development, etc.) has somehow proved itself so inefficient that it should be given up in favor of whatever the closed development sector has to offer?
It's the closed commercial sector that is supposed to bend toward open methods, not vice versa. That is happening through grass-roots efforts like "stealth" installments of Linux-servers in the end of 1990's followed by "stealth" installments of Linux-workstations right now, as well as governmental and communal bodies around the world already embracing the open model as a cost- and result-effective method unbound by the insecurities of commercial offerings.
I'm sorry to sound this flamy, but your comment (as well as this whole subject, actually) reminds me of quite a few people who claim they have a grasp of the open development model, while they still look at it through a 1980's commerce school's window.
As for the security of Open offerings, mature projects' insecurity (the cumulative time window of exploits open against product's lifetime) should be compared to that of closed-development (=non-patch-accepting) offerings. From what I gather, on that basis insurance prices against IT disasters should be considerably cheaper with mature Open products.
omfg a missspeling
IBM is sure it won't stand the test of a real trial, and they are putting all their eggs in that basket, so they are pretty sure about it. Even if they aren't, and SCO wins, they'll just buy SCO out; that way, they'd only lose the real battle, that's about whether you can make money by forcing a bigger company to buy you by becoming enough of a hassle.
Got it? They got no case. Even if they did, it'd be solved by IBM buying them out.
Then again - like someone already pointed out
Even if there were some patented or otherwise somehow restricted code in some version of Linux, it doesn't hinder development at all. It'd be just dropped out and a new version without it released immediately. It's functionality would be reimplemented in other ways, pretty soon, and with pretty big wheels behind it, now that IBM et al are playing along.
This will get worse until it will be sufficiently resolved. Not this particular incident, but virtual entertainment centers getting hit with the old "in-out, in-out" trick.
Now, will game industry take the lead in security development like it has taken in hardware limit pushing?
I always find it amusing when one person feels he can talk with such an air of confidence about the ideals of a company with as many people as Microsoft.
;)
Organizations as social bodies seem quite weird. I tend to wonder, based on my own experience, why people can't manage better their natural need to align their views with those they assume their group's views to be.
Also, is it just me, or did that first chapter read more like a high school physics book rather than a 101 to blind platform faith?
Reality can have no flaws - please adjust your view
Wouldn't it figure that a person with such a world view would try to drive his points through with references to atomic and newtonian powers rather than use sociopsychological terminology? He needs his "war" to see a fit place for his own emotions in the world; thus, all the world is about war to him. Not quite an unique attitude.
The tone of the "first chapter" linked is astonishingly rude. It seems like the thinking were from a mindscape of cubic boulders splatted murky red with blood, not unlike the ending levels of original Doom. If this speaks of mentality inside Microsoft, that company definitely is the temple (and on this millennia, the memorial) of the idea of self-justificating greed of the 1980's. And in the networked (in social and organizational sense) world of today, it is quite alone waving that ugly flag.
Microsoft will be truly lost, not by getting bankrupt or marginalized or anything, but by simply being left as one of the group of players on the software field. That is the loss of its central philosophy, that there could "only be one". Is it not so?
--
On totally other news, it is imminent now that free software will prevail, and must start to prepare to deliver its promise. A lot of infrastructure must be invented in order to best utilize the power of shared development. Just think of all of those organizations from Münich and Turku to the enlightened countries of South America, asking for preparation, development and upkeep of their systems... It can be left to happen, or it can be planned for.
And wait, there's more:
No '*' or '&' unary ops. Pointers are not supported.
Suddenly you begin to feel enlighted. But where were these guys when all the previous derivatives of c hit us?!
I feel soo nice reading about a language that has no strings. Literally.
I must say that I appreciate VMWare for both its hack value and usefulness. (It's also one of the too few commercial applications that's as easy to deploy as should be with it's download-configure-pay -model.) Nice to hear a human^Wnerdish voice from someone inside as well.
Is this the future of Earth?!
http://kato.iki.fi/htraEwolloF.jpg
On MacOSX 10.1.5, Celestia apparently wraps a realtime mirror image around us. Does not apply on any other planets.
I've been thinking about productizing software development as part of my private enterprise. Most of the cases ordered from me have fit GPL/BSD style licenses, but i've received payment for the development work by hour.
I think that most Unix operators require the source and development rights, as well as rights to use the product unlimitedly, with the possible exception of reselling the product as long as the original producer continues offering it. I do. I shy away from restrictive licensing. But you should and can put a price for your own work. The best price you can get for it. That is even RMS-compatible!-)
Release 0.9 versions of your software, and make an easily usable wish gathering website. Users should be able to come up with fixes and features they want for next stable release, and prices they would pay for the implementation. Then you can decide which ones you implement. You can also pay part of the promised price to anyone else who comes up with an implementation patch, and keep part of it for yourself for organizing the payment system and taking responsibility of the releases.
One thing that keeps free software from being deployed in many places is the old problem of "who do you sue". You can always offer to take some responsibility of malfunctions for a price. This price you can set yourself, after you've thought through the risks you will be ready to take and writing the support agreement accordingly.
Sorry to hear that. My first thought when I saw this article was "gosh, a lot of potential comers will be disappointed by it being too soon." Hopefully they'll be able to announce it earlier here next time. Then again, the place can only hold a few hundred people :/
I'll probably pop by although I have no idea what I'd be doing there except getting jealous of others' unuseless skillz.
Old-skool-skene people should have some means of int'l communications of their own.
You still wouldn't be able to reconstruct the system to do anything else than what you've been given dialog settings for. Unless the Windows Registry is considered as efficient a way to configure things as configurations files + man pages + source. Or rebuilding that is considered part of the bugsquashing campaign. Which it should be, given the design.
And then there's the price. And spirit. Like, what fun would it be running around rebooting machines instead of chatting in irc about configuration details?-)
That comes quite close to it (except now that I work on macosX). Just scrollback wouldn't work and different logs wouldn't run in separate, relocatable windows.
;-P
I'll be happy to keep the services to myself
I'd pay someone half a year's worth of sexual services if I could keep logs running dimly in the background while keeping my interactive CLI windows on the front.
That, and the network transparency. Oh, and the ability to move around in 3D representations of networks. Just so that I were not expected to visualize them barely in my head all the time. That makes my thoughts fuzzy and responses to realtime challenges - like gf's speech or overrunning cars - slow.