Re:Here is the PR
on
Sun Buys MySQL
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
For sure, The big guys (IBM, Sun, Oracle, Microsoft) are starting to look the same, with only Microsoft not playing with Open Source something. Could be interesting days ahead, it really looks like business models are starting to reshape themselves as they try to squeeze more dollars out of each account and/or IBM/Sun/Oracle eyeing over how much profit they could squeeze out of the demise of Microsoft's market share in the business sector.
Perhaps Sun will be playing around with open sourcing some more of their hardware as a pseudo way of moving away from hardware, without actually losing all their hardware aquisitions.
But it is interesting to see how open source as a business model is evolving by allowing competitors to leverage off each other and still compete. Maybe what we are looking at is the "horizontalisation" of the market, I note that with speculation about an open sourcing of DB2 and Oracle databases, Microsoft's position in the market looks more and more isolated every day.
Then thats politicians trying to destroy the bill of rights.
I think people have to remember that lawyers are the instruments of the people that wield them. The corporations that use them for some fucked up goal, the lawyer may not even know what the end result is, just a cog in a machine of lawyers controlled by the board of some company who thinks they have the right to pump toxic waste into your mouth.
Lawyers are also the ones diligent enough to try to prevent stupid changes to laws through civil rights organisation's but they also get trampled on by the "fucking civil right's activist" crowd.
And when you get slammed against a police car and a cop decided to ram his trunchen up your arse, who the fuck are you going to run to? That's right the lawyer who defends people for free out of obligation to the community.
IANAL, but if you want to blame some one for the mess we are all in, don't blame the people who understand the law, blame the ones who don't.
My bad, I meant a "representation of democracy" in that sentence rather than "representative democracy". What I'm trying to illustrate is that the politicians slowly twist the meaning until it is something that it isn't.
I shudder to think where it will go if some megalomaniac decided to use all that power.
It looks like the trend of implementing Australia's harsh Anti-Terror legislation is happening again. I've noted this before with at least two pieces of A.T legislation as it appears since George 'dubya' Bush and John 'dubya' Howard were such good friends, Georgey boy has been coping Johnny's homework and making it law in the U.S.
If it passes as it did here you will find the legal warrants to tap phone's (called an interception warrant here) which are harder to get for law enforcement than a normal search warrant will no longer be required. The law will allow the surveillance of email, sms messages and voice mail.
It's pretty poor for countries that are supposed to be free democracies. When I discussed it with one of my friends he just didn't want to know and he said "It's not that I'm apathetic, it's just that I don't care", I could have screamed. While we have this attitude fostered into people `democratic countries will incrementally become 'representative democracies' i.e. they look like a democracy but are really something else (kinda like looking at the ice cream but not being allowed to eat it), and therefore allowing the politicians to say "This is a democracy", when in reality it's a police state.
Incrementally we are becoming more like Soviet Russia everyday.
this'd happen on floppy drives, 'fore any new fangled web browser or memory stick, when a real virus fit in a boot sector. Why we din'ner 'ave no serial bus unless it had a bored rate and even then it had'der have 25 pin's 'fore it were useful...
But how about extinction? I've said it before, we need to become a space faring race, and that begins with space exploration.
It's fairly straightforward really, without space Humanity with quickly reach the peak capacity of the earths ability to sustain us and civilisation as we know it will decline, inevitably so will the human population. Maybe not immediately, but unless we want to return to being a few nomadic settlers scattered over the face of the planet in a few generations, we had better get off this rock.
The irony is that this argument is even being had with the line..
Royalties on NASA patents and licenses currently go directly to the U.S. Treasury, not back to NASA.
So in other words NASA could be self funding if they were able to realise the R.O.I from their investments, in other words the space program could already be self perpetuating if it were allowed to stand on it's own two feet. In other words from forty years of returns we would probably have space stations and all the other things if the income NASA derived from invention was plowed back into itself, without the need for government funding. I'd be curious to see what else NASA could have come up with from the invention they weren't able to fund.
Suddenly this argument looks a whole lot different to me now that I've discovered that NASA's real budget has been plundered for the last 40 years. Collectively we have expanded into all the four corners of the earth, where else is there for us to go?
Until we start treating space exploration with the seriousness it deserves we will looking at the end, rather than the beginning, of history.
I would have thought that they would be promoting bittorrent servers within their own networks as a way to decrease their own network costs. I mean it's not as if people are going to stop down loading things just because they interfere or want to do what the RIAA/MPAA say.
i.e, people using bittorrent == cash for them (in reduced external network costs) at least thats how I understand it. If the torrents are between two comcast customers then they would be able to charge both customers for the bandwidth with no (or one time only) external network bandwidth costs.
They are in the business of connectivity - or am I missing something aside from the wrath of the ??aa's ?
I'll make a prediction, every few years we will see someone saying pretty much exactly the same thing. Like "4th generation programming tools will mean the end of the programmer forever", "5th generation tools will be...". The first question I have is when will this happen? or is he just enamoured by the current cycles the IT industry is in.
Carr is talking from the perspective of a user - not a technologist so when I see an article by someone qualified to make such predictions I'll pay more attention. He talks about distributed applications like google apps, which while they have their place for casual users I don't see any business trusting their sensitive business data to anyone outside their own fire walls and applications like Sales-force are already revealing the weakness in their business models. Distributed app's within a corporate intranet, yes - outside no, and more likely so open applications (i.e Open Office) will be employed first to negate licensing fees, and new models of developing applications we start to dominate.
Even if that was the only point I don't see any developments on the horizon that will decrease internet latency to a point where users won't notice the difference between a local and remote application and be annoyed by it. Four to ten users on one-pc yes, end of the pc no.
Before ousting the entire IT Department Carr has to realise that many businesses seek ways to increase their competitive advantage from within, i.e. once a business has their data systems that run their business mapped, they are likely to examine that to find ways to do business better. Thats why I.T departments exist, not because they are confined to a narrow "horizontal" everyone-uses-this-application view of the world but the "Vertical" hey-if-we-try-this we may be able to yield more return on our IT investment. Of course every competitive business has an IT Department, those who don't cannot compete. Business is war-like, you don't go out there ill-prepared.
The P.C will be a museum piece in 20 years, well DUUUUHH. In twenty years the amount of computing time in PC will make it well beyond any super-computer available today - so heres a prediction for you, it will be able to run thousands of distributed applications out to users whose workstations won't even look like what we have today and even those dumb workstations will be able to do ten times what a PC can do today - i.e everything will change, well who would have thought it. Puuuleeeeze, look at a 20 year old PC - you can't even do what you can do today, on it, without sacrificing massive amounts of usability. Back then they were predicting then end of the programmer, and I don't think that all of the algorithms that make up computer science have been discovered yet. So once that milestone is passed maybe such arrogant predictions can be made.
Humans are lazy, the more complicated the view of the world we have, the more complicated our information systems are to make sense of it. Presuming no immediate failure of our world systems that sustain us, I predict that nano-technology AND genetic engineering will increase the demand for programmers, and I haven't even started analysing the need for control systems to address global warming and energy efficiency initiatives that will become government requirements.
All up I think that Nick Carr can see a change on the horizon but that is the limit, he has gone out on a limb to say "it will mean this" because he doesn't have the imagination to extrapolate the actual possibilities. Thats ok, thinking is hard work, it's not for everyone. I won't be buying his book and instead of trying to make predictions about the future I'll just go about my business making my contribution to building it.
I think we have to keep in mind that Mr Gates lives in a world where he probably uses windows all the time, and in that world he lives in a "Billy Bubble"(tm) where what he say's goes in that world, therefore his perception of the actual world is skewed.
Likelyhood of Mr Gates ever using a Mac - very small, likelyhood of Mr Gates using a Linux distribution - very unlikely.
Changes afoot in the music industry suggest that the RIAA cartel are changing their attitude towards DRM so it's not much of a stretch to think that the MPAA will be that far behind, as attested by this users recently reported attempt at using DRM services legitimately. If you have that much trouble using the services legitimately, why use them at all. How many windows users out there are using pirated content? I bet it's alot.
So as I am unable to even view Mr Gates final address it's unlikely that I will participate in the future he is describing. Not that I think that this is significant because Mr Gates also predicted that no one will need more than 640K of ram and that the internet would not be a significant development. I would have liked to have watch it because even though I don't like MS I do pay a be-grudging respect to Mr Gates. Not being able to view this address is a classic case of people people losing interest in what he has to say, and shows that any strategic planning MS has only applies to the MS world.
I'm sure those who have the capa-bill-ity to watch the address will enjoy it and be awestruck - me I just hear "blah blah blah blah"
No, you're pretty much spot on. In Australia the two party is completely entrenched, voting is mandatory (you get fined if you don't participate) but apathy is rife and not participating is ignored.
Our electoral system was originally designed to accommodate independant politicians with issue based platforms. In 1999 both the major parties destroyed that by changing the voting system in the lower house to effectively nobble the power of the remaining independant politicians who were able to get elected outside of the two party system (slashdot reported it - I wish I could find it). Consequently the "Goods and Services Tax", which no-one wanted, was introduced. It's been all downhill from there, with the introduction of new and scary surveillance laws, anti-terrorism laws, dis-arming the population and allowing our military to point and fire on civilians, the legal landscape of Australia is now somewhat similar to a sleazy dictatorship without a dictator - demonstrating how bad it can be.
I have to say from the perspective of someone who lives in a western country that the two party system is obsolete but it remains like an embalming fluid around the carcass of a democracy long dead, it's so sad. Sure in Australia we are only small part of the world but the story is the same for the UK and America, who's people benefit only by the forsight of those thoughtful enough to install a bill of rights into their countries constitution long ago.
Corporate lobbying and factionalism within these two party systems make the parties almost identical and the entire electoral is held at the behest of a marginal band of swinging voters who put no more thought into their vote than the flavor of ice cream they intend to buy. Their vote maybe affected by something as trivial and the incumbents tie.
Corporate lobbying of political parties must end, it's the same in UK, USA, Australia and I'd hazard a guess Canada. This is the key issue in politics today, not global warming, or anything else. Until this problem is solved our military and economic influence will be used to bludgeon all that stand in the way of the corporations brought up under the umbrella of democracy.
No change will be possible in any of our countries until this occurs, reactionary politics will continue in the western world. Unfortunately unless we are able to change this and then progress to change the legal structure of the corporations that are driving the consumption of resources and the race to the bottom for workers and human rights I fear they will outlast our political systems and install themselves into new superpowers.
It looks like a really nice player, does it mount like a flash drive under linux? If it does, are you free from having to mess around with a database on the player. What I'm getting at here is are you able to just copy the song files onto the player/unplug/listen.
For sure! I was bummed out by it, I have another iriver (ifp-795) which plays oggs but difficult to connect to under linux (*sigh*) and the H10 has a fiddly database that has to be updated by using easyh10 - ok for me - but not my girlfriend. I tried the iriver x20 and it worked straight away under linux (i.e connecting to and transferring files to) but I haven't tried ogg on it yet.
Thanks for that, it's bothered me for a long time that all the music has to be mp3. I want to use ogg too because I want to do all I can to migrate away from solutions with patent restrictions. Iriver said they play ogg, but my H10 didn't.
So you're saying a good GUI would just have a window to type commands in ?
That's so korny, who would shell out for that? I mean for a real user interface you'd have to bash the commands into it so the computer actually gets the message.
I got an immediate sense of DUUUUUUUUUUHHHHH after reading that!!
From another point of view what if you were to say that every second of your life experience is copyrighted, subject to copyright and unauthorised recordings are not permitted or only permitted at the rate of $10,000 per second - if you do not agree do not record me.
Maybe I could have a terms and conditions/copyright notice tattooed on my forehead and say, "well your worship, the terms were in plain site for the officer to see".
Yes I know, it's impractical. It just irk's me that I am being recorded all the time, what about a camera jammer? no one says I have to _agree_ to being recorded - what if I'm just making sure.
So much better to have a small amount of highly radioactive waste which will be gone soon than a large ammount of slightly radioactive waste that will hang around for thousands of years.
Well, its not San Francisco, but we do have 2 nuclear power plants operating along the California coast. Frisco isn't the only place in California that has earthquakes, either.
He said viable, not crazy! I mean we are hoping the reactor will scram under those circumstances, but the reality is you'd still cross your fingers.
Slashdot Mirror
Perhaps Sun will be playing around with open sourcing some more of their hardware as a pseudo way of moving away from hardware, without actually losing all their hardware aquisitions.
But it is interesting to see how open source as a business model is evolving by allowing competitors to leverage off each other and still compete. Maybe what we are looking at is the "horizontalisation" of the market, I note that with speculation about an open sourcing of DB2 and Oracle databases, Microsoft's position in the market looks more and more isolated every day.
I think people have to remember that lawyers are the instruments of the people that wield them. The corporations that use them for some fucked up goal, the lawyer may not even know what the end result is, just a cog in a machine of lawyers controlled by the board of some company who thinks they have the right to pump toxic waste into your mouth.
Lawyers are also the ones diligent enough to try to prevent stupid changes to laws through civil rights organisation's but they also get trampled on by the "fucking civil right's activist" crowd.
And when you get slammed against a police car and a cop decided to ram his trunchen up your arse, who the fuck are you going to run to? That's right the lawyer who defends people for free out of obligation to the community.
IANAL, but if you want to blame some one for the mess we are all in, don't blame the people who understand the law, blame the ones who don't.
I shudder to think where it will go if some megalomaniac decided to use all that power.
If it passes as it did here you will find the legal warrants to tap phone's (called an interception warrant here) which are harder to get for law enforcement than a normal search warrant will no longer be required. The law will allow the surveillance of email, sms messages and voice mail.
It's pretty poor for countries that are supposed to be free democracies. When I discussed it with one of my friends he just didn't want to know and he said "It's not that I'm apathetic, it's just that I don't care", I could have screamed. While we have this attitude fostered into people `democratic countries will incrementally become 'representative democracies' i.e. they look like a democracy but are really something else (kinda like looking at the ice cream but not being allowed to eat it), and therefore allowing the politicians to say "This is a democracy", when in reality it's a police state.
Incrementally we are becoming more like Soviet Russia everyday.
It's fairly straightforward really, without space Humanity with quickly reach the peak capacity of the earths ability to sustain us and civilisation as we know it will decline, inevitably so will the human population. Maybe not immediately, but unless we want to return to being a few nomadic settlers scattered over the face of the planet in a few generations, we had better get off this rock.
The irony is that this argument is even being had with the line..
So in other words NASA could be self funding if they were able to realise the R.O.I from their investments, in other words the space program could already be self perpetuating if it were allowed to stand on it's own two feet. In other words from forty years of returns we would probably have space stations and all the other things if the income NASA derived from invention was plowed back into itself, without the need for government funding. I'd be curious to see what else NASA could have come up with from the invention they weren't able to fund.
Suddenly this argument looks a whole lot different to me now that I've discovered that NASA's real budget has been plundered for the last 40 years. Collectively we have expanded into all the four corners of the earth, where else is there for us to go?
Until we start treating space exploration with the seriousness it deserves we will looking at the end, rather than the beginning, of history.
BMW has already done it. I'm sure it was on slashdot, but the exhaust heat is used to boil water, to drive a turbine attached to the crankshaft.
i.e, people using bittorrent == cash for them (in reduced external network costs) at least thats how I understand it. If the torrents are between two comcast customers then they would be able to charge both customers for the bandwidth with no (or one time only) external network bandwidth costs.
They are in the business of connectivity - or am I missing something aside from the wrath of the ??aa's ?
Set,
OPEN your wallets!!!!
Carr is talking from the perspective of a user - not a technologist so when I see an article by someone qualified to make such predictions I'll pay more attention. He talks about distributed applications like google apps, which while they have their place for casual users I don't see any business trusting their sensitive business data to anyone outside their own fire walls and applications like Sales-force are already revealing the weakness in their business models. Distributed app's within a corporate intranet, yes - outside no, and more likely so open applications (i.e Open Office) will be employed first to negate licensing fees, and new models of developing applications we start to dominate.
Even if that was the only point I don't see any developments on the horizon that will decrease internet latency to a point where users won't notice the difference between a local and remote application and be annoyed by it. Four to ten users on one-pc yes, end of the pc no.
Before ousting the entire IT Department Carr has to realise that many businesses seek ways to increase their competitive advantage from within, i.e. once a business has their data systems that run their business mapped, they are likely to examine that to find ways to do business better. Thats why I.T departments exist, not because they are confined to a narrow "horizontal" everyone-uses-this-application view of the world but the "Vertical" hey-if-we-try-this we may be able to yield more return on our IT investment. Of course every competitive business has an IT Department, those who don't cannot compete. Business is war-like, you don't go out there ill-prepared.
The P.C will be a museum piece in 20 years, well DUUUUHH. In twenty years the amount of computing time in PC will make it well beyond any super-computer available today - so heres a prediction for you, it will be able to run thousands of distributed applications out to users whose workstations won't even look like what we have today and even those dumb workstations will be able to do ten times what a PC can do today - i.e everything will change, well who would have thought it. Puuuleeeeze, look at a 20 year old PC - you can't even do what you can do today, on it, without sacrificing massive amounts of usability. Back then they were predicting then end of the programmer, and I don't think that all of the algorithms that make up computer science have been discovered yet. So once that milestone is passed maybe such arrogant predictions can be made.
Humans are lazy, the more complicated the view of the world we have, the more complicated our information systems are to make sense of it. Presuming no immediate failure of our world systems that sustain us, I predict that nano-technology AND genetic engineering will increase the demand for programmers, and I haven't even started analysing the need for control systems to address global warming and energy efficiency initiatives that will become government requirements .
All up I think that Nick Carr can see a change on the horizon but that is the limit, he has gone out on a limb to say "it will mean this" because he doesn't have the imagination to extrapolate the actual possibilities. Thats ok, thinking is hard work, it's not for everyone. I won't be buying his book and instead of trying to make predictions about the future I'll just go about my business making my contribution to building it.
Likelyhood of Mr Gates ever using a Mac - very small, likelyhood of Mr Gates using a Linux distribution - very unlikely.
Changes afoot in the music industry suggest that the RIAA cartel are changing their attitude towards DRM so it's not much of a stretch to think that the MPAA will be that far behind, as attested by this users recently reported attempt at using DRM services legitimately. If you have that much trouble using the services legitimately, why use them at all. How many windows users out there are using pirated content? I bet it's alot.
So as I am unable to even view Mr Gates final address it's unlikely that I will participate in the future he is describing. Not that I think that this is significant because Mr Gates also predicted that no one will need more than 640K of ram and that the internet would not be a significant development. I would have liked to have watch it because even though I don't like MS I do pay a be-grudging respect to Mr Gates. Not being able to view this address is a classic case of people people losing interest in what he has to say, and shows that any strategic planning MS has only applies to the MS world.
I'm sure those who have the capa-bill-ity to watch the address will enjoy it and be awestruck - me I just hear "blah blah blah blah"
Our electoral system was originally designed to accommodate independant politicians with issue based platforms. In 1999 both the major parties destroyed that by changing the voting system in the lower house to effectively nobble the power of the remaining independant politicians who were able to get elected outside of the two party system (slashdot reported it - I wish I could find it). Consequently the "Goods and Services Tax", which no-one wanted, was introduced. It's been all downhill from there, with the introduction of new and scary surveillance laws, anti-terrorism laws, dis-arming the population and allowing our military to point and fire on civilians, the legal landscape of Australia is now somewhat similar to a sleazy dictatorship without a dictator - demonstrating how bad it can be.
I have to say from the perspective of someone who lives in a western country that the two party system is obsolete but it remains like an embalming fluid around the carcass of a democracy long dead, it's so sad. Sure in Australia we are only small part of the world but the story is the same for the UK and America, who's people benefit only by the forsight of those thoughtful enough to install a bill of rights into their countries constitution long ago.
Corporate lobbying and factionalism within these two party systems make the parties almost identical and the entire electoral is held at the behest of a marginal band of swinging voters who put no more thought into their vote than the flavor of ice cream they intend to buy. Their vote maybe affected by something as trivial and the incumbents tie.
Corporate lobbying of political parties must end, it's the same in UK, USA, Australia and I'd hazard a guess Canada. This is the key issue in politics today, not global warming, or anything else. Until this problem is solved our military and economic influence will be used to bludgeon all that stand in the way of the corporations brought up under the umbrella of democracy.
No change will be possible in any of our countries until this occurs, reactionary politics will continue in the western world. Unfortunately unless we are able to change this and then progress to change the legal structure of the corporations that are driving the consumption of resources and the race to the bottom for workers and human rights I fear they will outlast our political systems and install themselves into new superpowers.
One of them looks like Thunderbird 2.
I'll be checking out rockbox, thanks again!!!!
maybe we could call it punsh!
From another point of view what if you were to say that every second of your life experience is copyrighted, subject to copyright and unauthorised recordings are not permitted or only permitted at the rate of $10,000 per second - if you do not agree do not record me.
Maybe I could have a terms and conditions/copyright notice tattooed on my forehead and say, "well your worship, the terms were in plain site for the officer to see".
Yes I know, it's impractical. It just irk's me that I am being recorded all the time, what about a camera jammer? no one says I have to _agree_ to being recorded - what if I'm just making sure.
Reboot the machine
Reload the application
Reinstall the Operating system
Now we can add
Revert to a previous version
Vista has given me a whole new view of windows, Oh and it looks like the site is past it's quota. Slashdot strikes again.
I've never seen am energetic estimate.