But will they open up the hardware specs?
on
Apple releases iPod
·
· Score: -1, Offtopic
Yes, open source as a hobbyist development model can and will persist long into the future, and I'm sure that there will be fun and exciting products as a result of it.
That said, now that the heady, greedy days of the dot com boom are long behind us, it's high time to re-evaluate the position. Money isn't growing on trees and being plucked from the asses of VCs star-struck by that beautiful three-letter phrase (IPO, IPO, IPO!) so much that they can overlook that little thing called "a business plan."
Internet advertising is the redheaded stepchild of the marketing family. Old media ads have no need to justify themselves with inanities like "click-through"; they know their demographic and their real estate is mindshare, that precious commodity which they assume that they're purchasing with their ad dollars, regardless of whether or not this purchase translates into a product purchase immediately or down the road. The internet is a fickle bastard: people gravitate towards the warez model of "buy none, get one free" and so there's the propensity towards stealing everything we can. To wit: the inevitable linking to archives.nytimes.com anytime they've got an article up because registration is such a chore, but if you were to ask the average Slashdotter how they feel about someone using "their" resources without registration (think Anonymous Cowards here), one would instead getsthe impression that merely providing a name and e-mail address is as simple as could be. Hmm. To wit: proxies, ad-killing bots and specialized hosts files that insure that our precious bandwidth isn't eaten up by ancillary ads that might keep the sites afloat, but then again if we don't click on them and buy something might not even if we do see them. Hmm.
Ah, open source. Communism reborn, and who can hate that? Not the watered down Leninism that the Soviet Union ran through in short order, but honest-to-goodness communism. Take what you need, give what you have. Beautiful. A touching sentiment.
Also impossible to be a commercially viable entity when human nature comes into play. If we can get our content ad-free we will, even though it means economic hardship and possibly the closing of the sites we visit and love (or love to hate, as the case may be) and if we can get our software cost-free, without the dirty stigma of clicking through porno banners to find the 3rd word of the 4th paragraph to get entry to L33t b0b'5 h0u53 0f w4r3z, all the better. I whip up a weekend project that is derivative but I'm proud of and off to Freshmeat with you! Maybe even Sourceforge! Take it! Share it!
I'll pour a few hundred hours of blood, sweat and tears into it! Shiny new! Everyone wants it! It's hot!
But how do I parlay it into a commercial venture when everyone can get it for free and fix it up as they want? Hmm.
Open source is a lovely idea with lofty goals, and as long as talented, motivated, intelligent programmers buy into it, it will generate impressive results. Unfortunately, there's a very finite number of talented, motivated, intelligent, ascetic programmers out there who will buy into it.
OSDN's changing business strategies faster than you can say "we're a B2B play now!" (read: brushed up that resume yet?). If bigger ads or a subscription service to a website who doesn't give a whit about the quality of its journalism and doesn't know the meaning of the word "editing", relying on constantly inflammatory agitprop to woo its readership are the order of the day, then I'll just stick with Ars Technica, The Register and memepool (topical, informative, and normally journalistically objective sites), thanks. Slashdot's been a fun little ride, and like many other things, peer moderation was a sexy little idea, just unfortunate in that it pretty much disintegrated into ugly mob rule groupthink. Scene, not herd.
It's good to know that their memories aren't so short that they've forgotten the furor over the CPRM.
Thankfully, this bill isn't masquerading as an anti-terrorism/anti-pedophile bill but rather being seen for the anti-consumer bill that it really is.
I can't see these _not_ getting foxed.
on
Ultima Revived
·
· Score: 2
All the Ultima crew did was talk to Richard Garriot (aka Lord British) and he OK'd it... as long as they don't profit from it.
Unfortunately, Origin holds the rights to the games, don't they? No clearance from EA for The Bard's Tale means that they'll at least have to change the names of the games, the people and places. Still, an interesting enough idea.
Oh well. As long as they're updating old games, howsabout Wasteland and the good ol' SSI RPGs?
Open source out with the dot com bust?
on
Slashdot Updates
·
· Score: 1
Yes, open source as a hobbyist development model can and will persist long into the future, and I'm sure that there will be fun and exciting products as a result of it.
That said, now that the heady, greedy days of the dot com boom are long behind us, it's high time to re-evaluate the position. Money isn't growing on trees and being plucked from the asses of VCs star-struck by that beautiful three-letter phrase (IPO, IPO, IPO!) so much that they can overlook that little thing called "a business plan."
Internet advertising is the redheaded stepchild of the marketing family. Old media ads have no need to justify themselves with inanities like "click-through"; they know their demographic and their real estate is mindshare, that precious commodity which they assume that they're purchasing with their ad dollars, regardless of whether or not this purchase translates into a product purchase immediately or down the road. The internet is a fickle bastard: people gravitate towards the warez model of "buy none, get one free" and so there's the propensity towards stealing everything we can. To wit: the inevitable linking to archives.nytimes.com anytime they've got an article up because registration is such a chore, whereas from the threads further up, one gets the impression that merely providing a name and e-mail address is as simple as could be. Hmm. To wit: proxies, ad-killing bots and specialized hosts files that insure that our precious bandwidth isn't eaten up by ancillary ads that might keep the sites afloat, but then again if we don't click on them and buy something might not even if we do see them. Hmm.
Ah, open source. Communism reborn, and who can hate that? Not the watered down Leninism that the Soviet Union ran through in short order, but honest-to-goodness communism. Take what you need, give what you have. Beautiful. A touching sentiment.
Also impossible to be a commercially viable entity when human nature comes into play. If we can get our content ad-free we will, even though it means economic hardship and possibly the closing of the sites we visit and love (or love to hate, as the case may be) and if we can get our software cost-free, without the dirty stigma of clicking through porno banners to find the 3rd word of the 4th paragraph to get entry to L33t b0b'5 h0u53 0f w4r3z, all the better. I whip up a weekend project that is derivative but I'm proud of and off to Freshmeat with you! Maybe even Sourceforge! Take it! Share it!
I'll pour a few hundred hours of blood, sweat and tears into it! Shiny new! Everyone wants it! It's hot!
But how do I parlay it into a commercial venture when everyone can get it for free and fix it up as they want? Hmm.
Open source is a lovely idea with lofty goals, and as long as talented, motivated, intelligent programmers buy into it, it will generate impressive results. Unfortunately, there's a very finite number of talented, motivated, intelligent, ascetic programmers out there who will buy into it.
OSDN's changing business strategies faster than you can say "we're a B2B play now!" (read: brushed up that resume yet?). If bigger ads or a subscription service to a website who doesn't give a whit about the quality of its journalism and doesn't know the meaning of the word "editing", relying on constantly inflammatory agitprop to woo its readership are the order of the day, then I'll just stick with Ars Technica and memepool (both topical, informative, and normally journalistically objective), thanks. Slashdot's been a fun little ride, and like many other things, peer moderation was a sexy little idea, just unfortunate in that it pretty much disintegrated into ugly mob rule groupthink. Scene, not herd.
What with the "PATRIOT" bill, the USA bill, the SSSCA and whatnot throwing citizens' rights out the window, I'd figured we were already in a state of war.
Go figure.
Having been involved with its development almost from the get-go, in the good old days when Netscape 4.0 was beating the pants off of Internet Explorer and mostly supporting the standards better than IE, I figured it'd be exciting to be in on the ground floor of something new and visionary.
What I wasn't ready for was the clashing of inflated heads, the war of egos, the cacophony of nonsense. I got in on the ground floor, got involved in some flame wars (don't ask what about, i can't even remember) and got off shortly thereafter. The bloating code and slipping deadlines are a testament to the impotence of Mozilla's development model.
The bazaar's just too bizarre for me: I'll stick with the tried-and-true methodology of project leads, senior and junior developers, thanks.
It's been an off week for open source.
on
Linux Kernel Bugs
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
Mac OSX also got a remote root exploit of its own.
I don't know whether it's ironic or not that the introduction of open source software led to the first Mac-based remote exploit that I can remember in a long, long time. I'm leaning against it as code's still made by humans and humans still make mistakes. You'd be well-advised to remember this and temper your flames against Any OS That Isn't Mine next time.
Linux is written by geeks, for geeks.
MS/Windows is written by geeks and business types, for business types... and geeks. Who controls the pursestrings in the enterprise?
Which OS spends millions on UI design? As long as Linux continues to move ahead with fragmented windowing systems, it'll continue to fail to compete with Windows on the desktop.
If you've learned nothing else from models, it's that sometimes it's better to be pretty than smart.
The answer, unfortunately, isn't so cut and dry as one would imagine.
Certainly product advertisement and suchly, but couldn't website links be construed as such? And if pushed through a mailing list or something else that purposefully obfuscates the sender's address?
Anonymous remailers would become a (n even more) dangerous service to run.
Everyone hates spam, everyone wants it to go away... unfortunately, no one has any really good answers as to how it should happen.
Making falsified return addresses a punishable offense has the side effect of rendering anonymous communications illegal.
Any legislation created will boil down to one thing: the Balkanization of the Internet.
I see a big market in e-mail wizards that will help guide you towards writing e-mail that's legal in every country in the world if anti-spam bills start getting passed.
Forget the right to a fair trial, hackers are threatening our country's very lifeblood! Or something equally dramatic.
The good news is that they won't be high-profile cases where there's some sort of onus on the government to come through in a big, excessively punitive way (are shoplifters forbidden to walk in stores after they've served their time? are murderers forbidden to be around people after they've served their time? embezzlers forbidden to be around company books after they've done theirs? then why exactly are mitnick et. al forbidden to be around computers/electronic equipment after they've served theirs?). The bad news is that we'll have a new branch of the government with a minimum of public overview running wild on an increasingly marginalized subset of society.
It's my duty as a scientist to look into this, and I've been doing it... for the children.
So far, no one's been forthcoming with any money. Yet. Probably ever, but I can hope.
If I were to surreptituously tap into someone else's webcam, I gander my chances would be better. Oh well.
Just because the guy who sponsored the bill "came to his senses" doesn't mean it's going anywhere. He won't be getting my vote anytime soon, and if he read my letter (mailed pre-anthrax scare) he'd know that by now.
All depends on what they're after. Just for shits and giggles, I took a version of Eliza grafted onto an ICQ client, stripped out all the word recognition, and had it spit out nonsense mixed in with snippets of cybersex logs I found floating around with a quick search off of Google.
Surprisingly (or maybe not?), people will have extended conversations with it, returning for days and weeks asking it if it feels horny, sending it pictures, asking it to call or turn on its webcam... all that good stuff.
The judges' expectation going into it definitely plays a major part in their findings. People find a way to "objectively" find what they want to find. There have been theses about this, and that's why the Turing test makes sense but will ultimately fail: it's trying to objectively determine something that's purely subjective.
It must feel pretty bad to be the posterboy for dotcom greed, huh?
On the bright side, we've got the RIAA replacing them on the "Giving Our Customers What They Don't Want And Suing Them When They Reject It" front. Unfortunately, they've got some a stable business model backing the inane business plan for what will likely end up being an infinite amount of time.
Sounds like nothing more than a power-guzzling alternative to Bluetooth, which is a nice way of saying "worthless".
Range and security are what people want.
They may not have put out a good (read: profitable) game system since the Genesis, but innovative games like Jet Set Radio and the ridiculously addictive Samba de Amigo should show everyone that Sega's still got plenty to offer when it comes to the often-stale world of video games.
It's lovely to see that we don't actually own the things we pay for (boy, do we ever) anymore, isn't it?
Would the legislation that the RIAA failed to get pushed through be viable for Microsoft if they decided they wanted to go blanking peoples' disks in the future?
I'd forgotten that they were going towards asinine modes of dealership like "$4/song", treating the filler surrounding the singles like the singles themselves. Of course, I could argue that no one wanted anything but the singles off those 300 CDs I put up on my theoretical site, so I'm back in the black again. I like this New Math!
...as long as you have less than 300 CDs up on your theoretical FTP site, you're doing less than $5000 in damage to the RIAA's bottom line.
Problem solved.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, open source as a hobbyist development model can and will persist long into the future, and I'm sure that there will be fun and exciting products as a result of it.
That said, now that the heady, greedy days of the dot com boom are long behind us, it's high time to re-evaluate the position. Money isn't growing on trees and being plucked from the asses of VCs star-struck by that beautiful three-letter phrase (IPO, IPO, IPO!) so much that they can overlook that little thing called "a business plan."
Internet advertising is the redheaded stepchild of the marketing family. Old media ads have no need to justify themselves with inanities like "click-through"; they know their demographic and their real estate is mindshare, that precious commodity which they assume that they're purchasing with their ad dollars, regardless of whether or not this purchase translates into a product purchase immediately or down the road. The internet is a fickle bastard: people gravitate towards the warez model of "buy none, get one free" and so there's the propensity towards stealing everything we can. To wit: the inevitable linking to archives.nytimes.com anytime they've got an article up because registration is such a chore, but if you were to ask the average Slashdotter how they feel about someone using "their" resources without registration (think Anonymous Cowards here), one would instead getsthe impression that merely providing a name and e-mail address is as simple as could be. Hmm. To wit: proxies, ad-killing bots and specialized hosts files that insure that our precious bandwidth isn't eaten up by ancillary ads that might keep the sites afloat, but then again if we don't click on them and buy something might not even if we do see them. Hmm.
Ah, open source. Communism reborn, and who can hate that? Not the watered down Leninism that the Soviet Union ran through in short order, but honest-to-goodness communism. Take what you need, give what you have. Beautiful. A touching sentiment.
Also impossible to be a commercially viable entity when human nature comes into play. If we can get our content ad-free we will, even though it means economic hardship and possibly the closing of the sites we visit and love (or love to hate, as the case may be) and if we can get our software cost-free, without the dirty stigma of clicking through porno banners to find the 3rd word of the 4th paragraph to get entry to L33t b0b'5 h0u53 0f w4r3z, all the better. I whip up a weekend project that is derivative but I'm proud of and off to Freshmeat with you! Maybe even Sourceforge! Take it! Share it!
I'll pour a few hundred hours of blood, sweat and tears into it! Shiny new! Everyone wants it! It's hot!
But how do I parlay it into a commercial venture when everyone can get it for free and fix it up as they want? Hmm.
Open source is a lovely idea with lofty goals, and as long as talented, motivated, intelligent programmers buy into it, it will generate impressive results. Unfortunately, there's a very finite number of talented, motivated, intelligent, ascetic programmers out there who will buy into it.
OSDN's changing business strategies faster than you can say "we're a B2B play now!" (read: brushed up that resume yet?). If bigger ads or a subscription service to a website who doesn't give a whit about the quality of its journalism and doesn't know the meaning of the word "editing", relying on constantly inflammatory agitprop to woo its readership are the order of the day, then I'll just stick with Ars Technica, The Register and memepool (topical, informative, and normally journalistically objective sites), thanks. Slashdot's been a fun little ride, and like many other things, peer moderation was a sexy little idea, just unfortunate in that it pretty much disintegrated into ugly mob rule groupthink. Scene, not herd.
It's good to know that their memories aren't so short that they've forgotten the furor over the CPRM.
Thankfully, this bill isn't masquerading as an anti-terrorism/anti-pedophile bill but rather being seen for the anti-consumer bill that it really is.
All the Ultima crew did was talk to Richard Garriot (aka Lord British) and he OK'd it... as long as they don't profit from it.
Unfortunately, Origin holds the rights to the games, don't they? No clearance from EA for The Bard's Tale means that they'll at least have to change the names of the games, the people and places. Still, an interesting enough idea.
Oh well. As long as they're updating old games, howsabout Wasteland and the good ol' SSI RPGs?
Yes, open source as a hobbyist development model can and will persist long into the future, and I'm sure that there will be fun and exciting products as a result of it.
That said, now that the heady, greedy days of the dot com boom are long behind us, it's high time to re-evaluate the position. Money isn't growing on trees and being plucked from the asses of VCs star-struck by that beautiful three-letter phrase (IPO, IPO, IPO!) so much that they can overlook that little thing called "a business plan."
Internet advertising is the redheaded stepchild of the marketing family. Old media ads have no need to justify themselves with inanities like "click-through"; they know their demographic and their real estate is mindshare, that precious commodity which they assume that they're purchasing with their ad dollars, regardless of whether or not this purchase translates into a product purchase immediately or down the road. The internet is a fickle bastard: people gravitate towards the warez model of "buy none, get one free" and so there's the propensity towards stealing everything we can. To wit: the inevitable linking to archives.nytimes.com anytime they've got an article up because registration is such a chore, whereas from the threads further up, one gets the impression that merely providing a name and e-mail address is as simple as could be. Hmm. To wit: proxies, ad-killing bots and specialized hosts files that insure that our precious bandwidth isn't eaten up by ancillary ads that might keep the sites afloat, but then again if we don't click on them and buy something might not even if we do see them. Hmm.
Ah, open source. Communism reborn, and who can hate that? Not the watered down Leninism that the Soviet Union ran through in short order, but honest-to-goodness communism. Take what you need, give what you have. Beautiful. A touching sentiment.
Also impossible to be a commercially viable entity when human nature comes into play. If we can get our content ad-free we will, even though it means economic hardship and possibly the closing of the sites we visit and love (or love to hate, as the case may be) and if we can get our software cost-free, without the dirty stigma of clicking through porno banners to find the 3rd word of the 4th paragraph to get entry to L33t b0b'5 h0u53 0f w4r3z, all the better. I whip up a weekend project that is derivative but I'm proud of and off to Freshmeat with you! Maybe even Sourceforge! Take it! Share it!
I'll pour a few hundred hours of blood, sweat and tears into it! Shiny new! Everyone wants it! It's hot!
But how do I parlay it into a commercial venture when everyone can get it for free and fix it up as they want? Hmm.
Open source is a lovely idea with lofty goals, and as long as talented, motivated, intelligent programmers buy into it, it will generate impressive results. Unfortunately, there's a very finite number of talented, motivated, intelligent, ascetic programmers out there who will buy into it.
OSDN's changing business strategies faster than you can say "we're a B2B play now!" (read: brushed up that resume yet?). If bigger ads or a subscription service to a website who doesn't give a whit about the quality of its journalism and doesn't know the meaning of the word "editing", relying on constantly inflammatory agitprop to woo its readership are the order of the day, then I'll just stick with Ars Technica and memepool (both topical, informative, and normally journalistically objective), thanks. Slashdot's been a fun little ride, and like many other things, peer moderation was a sexy little idea, just unfortunate in that it pretty much disintegrated into ugly mob rule groupthink. Scene, not herd.
What with the "PATRIOT" bill, the USA bill, the SSSCA and whatnot throwing citizens' rights out the window, I'd figured we were already in a state of war.
Go figure.
Having been involved with its development almost from the get-go, in the good old days when Netscape 4.0 was beating the pants off of Internet Explorer and mostly supporting the standards better than IE, I figured it'd be exciting to be in on the ground floor of something new and visionary.
What I wasn't ready for was the clashing of inflated heads, the war of egos, the cacophony of nonsense. I got in on the ground floor, got involved in some flame wars (don't ask what about, i can't even remember) and got off shortly thereafter. The bloating code and slipping deadlines are a testament to the impotence of Mozilla's development model.
The bazaar's just too bizarre for me: I'll stick with the tried-and-true methodology of project leads, senior and junior developers, thanks.
Mac OSX also got a remote root exploit of its own.
I don't know whether it's ironic or not that the introduction of open source software led to the first Mac-based remote exploit that I can remember in a long, long time. I'm leaning against it as code's still made by humans and humans still make mistakes. You'd be well-advised to remember this and temper your flames against Any OS That Isn't Mine next time.
Linux is written by geeks, for geeks.
MS/Windows is written by geeks and business types, for business types... and geeks. Who controls the pursestrings in the enterprise?
Which OS spends millions on UI design? As long as Linux continues to move ahead with fragmented windowing systems, it'll continue to fail to compete with Windows on the desktop.
If you've learned nothing else from models, it's that sometimes it's better to be pretty than smart.
The answer, unfortunately, isn't so cut and dry as one would imagine.
Certainly product advertisement and suchly, but couldn't website links be construed as such? And if pushed through a mailing list or something else that purposefully obfuscates the sender's address?
Anonymous remailers would become a (n even more) dangerous service to run.
Everyone hates spam, everyone wants it to go away... unfortunately, no one has any really good answers as to how it should happen.
Making falsified return addresses a punishable offense has the side effect of rendering anonymous communications illegal.
Any legislation created will boil down to one thing: the Balkanization of the Internet.
I see a big market in e-mail wizards that will help guide you towards writing e-mail that's legal in every country in the world if anti-spam bills start getting passed.
Forget the right to a fair trial, hackers are threatening our country's very lifeblood! Or something equally dramatic.
The good news is that they won't be high-profile cases where there's some sort of onus on the government to come through in a big, excessively punitive way (are shoplifters forbidden to walk in stores after they've served their time? are murderers forbidden to be around people after they've served their time? embezzlers forbidden to be around company books after they've done theirs? then why exactly are mitnick et. al forbidden to be around computers/electronic equipment after they've served theirs?). The bad news is that we'll have a new branch of the government with a minimum of public overview running wild on an increasingly marginalized subset of society.
It's my duty as a scientist to look into this, and I've been doing it... for the children.
So far, no one's been forthcoming with any money. Yet. Probably ever, but I can hope.
If I were to surreptituously tap into someone else's webcam, I gander my chances would be better. Oh well.
Just because the guy who sponsored the bill "came to his senses" doesn't mean it's going anywhere. He won't be getting my vote anytime soon, and if he read my letter (mailed pre-anthrax scare) he'd know that by now.
But I was looking forward to buying my next mobo from Metamucil.
Curses! Foiled again!
Sure, it's a hoax, but nothing else will suffice.
Although Peltier cooling is pretty nifty, too.
All depends on what they're after. Just for shits and giggles, I took a version of Eliza grafted onto an ICQ client, stripped out all the word recognition, and had it spit out nonsense mixed in with snippets of cybersex logs I found floating around with a quick search off of Google.
Surprisingly (or maybe not?), people will have extended conversations with it, returning for days and weeks asking it if it feels horny, sending it pictures, asking it to call or turn on its webcam... all that good stuff.
The judges' expectation going into it definitely plays a major part in their findings. People find a way to "objectively" find what they want to find. There have been theses about this, and that's why the Turing test makes sense but will ultimately fail: it's trying to objectively determine something that's purely subjective.
It must feel pretty bad to be the posterboy for dotcom greed, huh?
On the bright side, we've got the RIAA replacing them on the "Giving Our Customers What They Don't Want And Suing Them When They Reject It" front. Unfortunately, they've got some a stable business model backing the inane business plan for what will likely end up being an infinite amount of time.
Color me surprised. Having made one in the past, uh. On the cheap, it's not horrible, but let's just say I won't be trading in my Vega anytime soon.
It's well-known that all Germans love David Hasselhoff, so I'm thinking that when he's not headlining as the Prince of Lies, Satan, he must have a secret thing for Linux.
Sounds like nothing more than a power-guzzling alternative to Bluetooth, which is a nice way of saying "worthless".
Range and security are what people want.
I first played that puppy on the TG16 and I still can't get enough of it.
Ah, memories.
They may not have put out a good (read: profitable) game system since the Genesis, but innovative games like Jet Set Radio and the ridiculously addictive Samba de Amigo should show everyone that Sega's still got plenty to offer when it comes to the often-stale world of video games.
It's lovely to see that we don't actually own the things we pay for (boy, do we ever) anymore, isn't it?
Would the legislation that the RIAA failed to get pushed through be viable for Microsoft if they decided they wanted to go blanking peoples' disks in the future?
I'd forgotten that they were going towards asinine modes of dealership like "$4/song", treating the filler surrounding the singles like the singles themselves. Of course, I could argue that no one wanted anything but the singles off those 300 CDs I put up on my theoretical site, so I'm back in the black again. I like this New Math!
...as long as you have less than 300 CDs up on your theoretical FTP site, you're doing less than $5000 in damage to the RIAA's bottom line.
Problem solved.