Katz & Daisey -- a match made in heaven?
on
Amazon.Heartbreak
·
· Score: 2
I figure these two should collaborate on a book. Or better yet, a 20 volume treatise on the failings of everything and everyone in modern society, and what the symbolism of those failings really means. They both have a unique insight into how the world should operate, and what other people should do with their time, money, and energy.
It must be really frustrating to have such a pure vision and yet be stuck, helpless, in a position where the rest of the world isn't rushing to implement your vision. Katz and Daisey surely deserve each other, but what the hell did we innocent/.'ers who actually work for a living do to deserve *them*?
Yeah, who would want a $200 general purpose computer wiuth built in ethernet and DVD capability? I mean, what are you going to do, get a keyboard working and have a $200 Linux machine that's comprable to most $800 boxen? Or get it to run DivX movies? Or network 5 of them into a $1000 Beowulf cluster?
It's not a gaming system. It's a computer that's been artificially limited to gaming. People want to break into it to remove those limitations, so they can have a very cheap, fairly powerful and flexible computer system.
The article -- the whole console hacking phenomenon -- is not about people breaking into your Xbox of ther internet. If you had read the article, you would have seen that it's about hacking the box to be able to boot custom code. There's no question of "reinstalling a few games" unless someone breaks into your house, reprograms the flash ROM in your Xbox, and turns it into a Linux machine.
Works for me, as long as there's some mechanism to confirm that the opt-out message made it all the way back. If your official agency has a software problem and drops a couple of thousand opt-outs, let's not have ethical, decent, opt-in types being beaten while tripping completely out of their minds.
Come to think of it, maybe digital signatures are the answer. Sign a return message to opt-in, and if (even 10 years later) you later complain that you didn't opt-in and that some message is spam, *you* got injected with LSD and beaten up. How's that sound?
Really? What about web site confirmation (you mail a link, they click on it). Many people find that less confusing.
Even if you disable that very nice feature, and require people to email you something (which non-technical people have real trouble with; they're not sure whether to leave the body of the message, change the subject to "subscribe", etc), where exactly do you keep them? And when someone still doesn't remember opting in, and you show them a text message that they sent, they'll just say "so you typed up a message that looks like it came from me, you foul spammer!"
This is a very valid concern, but also very hard to legislate. What defines "quickly and easily"? If it's a web page, and a user goes to opt out, and there's a transient internet routing problem that prevents them from getting to the web page at that particular moment, does the company in question get busted when the user complains?
I hate spam as much as anyone. However, I'm concerned about the burden of proof issue. Anyone who has operated a large opt-in list knows that some percentage of users don't remember opting in (a tiny percentage, but if you've got a list of 50,000 people and.1% of them don't rememeber opting in, you've got 50 angry people).
Likewise, sometimes email addresses change, especially ISP based mail. joe@someisp.com may opt in for a list, then cancel his ISP account. A month later, there may be a different person using the joe@someisp.com account, depending on ISP policies. And that person is going to be getting truly unsolicited email.
Of course, the idea is to ban egregious spammers, but I'm concerned about how laws / courts will deal with issues more subtle than "Joe Idiot bought a CD of a million email addresses and spammed them all." There has to be some protection, or some threshold of complaints, so that a tiny percentage of emails going wrong (either due to user or company error) doesn't result in huge legal issues... otherwise, we're talking about outlawing commercial email altogether, which I don't think anyone wants.
Remember how, for years, Apple yelled and screamed when people called it FireWire? How they expected to get rich from licensing the name? How it's caused confusion for consumer, with the identical thing being alternately called 1394, FireWire, and iLink, depending on the vendor?
Just shows to go ya, you don't have to be a *successful* monopoly to be incredibly slow and inefficient and unresponsive to consumer interest. Wanna-be monopolies can do it to!
Anyone doing high end audio work is probably capable of procuring, compiling, and using the available tools. Even in the Windows world (even in the *Mac* world, for chrissake), people who need SMPTE, notation, and Csound are typically fairly knowledgeable.
This is like creating an "Desktop Publishing Distribution" by including LaTeX, PDF support, a bunch of printer drivers, and emacs.
Maybe it's just me, but I really don't see the point.
I can partly answer this one, and I'm not one of the Linux developers at IBM.
IBM's model is only partly to use Linux to sell their hardware. Today's IBM is more of a service company than a hardware company. Their move towards Linux is more because they think (and rightfully so) that they can make money with *service* for Linux, not because Linux will sell a ton of hardware boxes. IBM knows that hardware (except for the highest-end stuff) becomes a commodity over time with little to no margin. Service, however, allows the company to leverage its brand and experience to charge a premium over the local VAR, and thus create a reasonable margin.
As for IBM's opinion of Open Source business models and their validity, I certainly hope they have a lot of belief in the business model of giving away the software and charging for service... otherwise, they're one confused company.
Wouldn't this be a better question for IBM's marketing department, or business/technology strategist types? I'm sure the IBM Linux developers are bright folks, but I'd be surprised if they're in a position to comment on IBM's strategic vision for Linux (let along IBM-as-a-whole's estimation of the "importance of Linux to the future of computing in general").
No offense, but I'd rather see questions that the interviewees are well suited to answer.
Are you kidding? Gleaming the Cube was way ahead of its time with its avant-garde look at post-internet geek culture. With its insightful blend of anti-corporate undertones and a decidedly technophiliac representation of the analogs between skateboarding and modern routing protocols, Gleaming the Cube is truly a groundbreaking and prophetic vision.
I tend to agree that this looks like just so much more bunk.
However, what they seem to be claiming is that the technology converts heat into electricity, which would allow you to then transport that energy somewhere else where it could do some good rather than just directly heating up the air.
So there's no violation of thermodynamics; ultimately, that waste heat would be put back out by a motor, or a light bulb, or a television set. It's just the idea of being able to direct it to something other than radiant heat that's novel.
All that said, I still don't believe it for a minute, but we might as well shoot it down legitimately.
What, this guy likes joking with cops? They'll all stand around reading some poor guy's email and laughing at how he was pretending to be a hot young girl in some chatroom?
Me, if police came to my workplace, I think it would add a great deal of *gravity* to the situation.
So who decides what's pornographic? Do bikini shots count? How about Madonna's "sex" book; should amazon not be allowed to sell that except from a different site, Amazon.Sex?
Suggesting that the entire internet should be legislated to only kid-friendly content is stupid and reckless.
Rather than limit what everyone else can do "to protect the children," why not go with the.kids domain, and make it illegal to host pornography there? There's still the question of what constitutes pornography, but by intentionally registering and operating in the.kids domain, and company or individual could be said to be buying into the restrictions on that domain.
I'm with you on the spam, though, but I'd say just make unsolicited email in general illegal. While porn content may be more offensive or inappropriate for some people or children, the root problem is not the content but the delivery method; fix that, and the content problem goes away.
Sure, you can use a fairly normal lamp and a fairly normal LCD panel to produce large images on a wall. Heck, you can do it even cheaper with a bunch of colored markers, some saran wrap, and a light bulb.
If you absolutely do not care about video quality, it's easy to get/build a projector on the cheap.
However, today's typical $3500 projector includes:
- Built-in line doubler. Most LCDs have 768 vertical pixels; some have 600, some have 1024. DVD's have 525 vertical lines. VHS has something like 240 lines. How do you get from 525 or 240 to 768 or 1024? Anyone who knows anything about computer grahpics will realize that the answer is not "double every 1/X line". Line doublers interpolate lines on the fly.
- Progressive scan support. Again, not a huge big deal, but the way I read the article, not supported.
- Component video in support. Like progressive scan, increasingly critical for decent video.
- Distortion correction, especially trapezoid. It's very rare to be able to project from the geometric center of the screen. Most of us have to live with projecting from the ceiling or floor, and use optical or digital means to correct the image for that.
Sure, you can build a "projector" for $400. Heck, you can probably build one for $100 (see earlier lightbulb, saran wrap, and markers note). But if it were really that easy to produce a home theater quality projector for $1000, don't you think any of the mass producers would have done it? For less than the cost of a one-off? (Anyone who responds that all 8 major projector manufacturers are colluding in price fixing should be laughed at).
I wonder if his business dealings were characterized by the same level of professionalism as this little stunt?
I particularly like the "I testified on Microsoft's behalf when I stood to make a boatload of money from them, but now that they've cancelled that arrangement, I think they're stifling innovation" bit. Pretty telling, IMHO.
Thing is, anyone with any kind of reasonable knowledge of law, patents, and copyright knows that the Blizzard lawsuit is, to be blunt, bullshit.
Blizzard has no chance, or interest, in winning on the merits of their case. They know that open source developers have limited resources and are unlikely to mount a decent legal defense. So why not sue? It's not a legal decision so much as a strategic one: given the chance to squash potential future competitors for free, why not?
It's a smart move on Blizzard's part. American IP laws favor corporations to such an incredibly laughable degree, it's amazing that Disney isn't suing everyone who uses a wheel (Steamboat Willie, 1928, and anyone who claims to have invented it before then had better have a notaraized motion picture).
Bottom line: disgusting on the USPTO's part, dispicable on Blizzard's part, par for the course for the good old USA. Oh, wait, this is *good* for consumers. I must have missed that edict somehow.
...typically, heat-related coatings on engine components are designed to keep heat *in*, so belts, hoses, and other non-metal parts don't get fried.
I guess I could see an application to radiators -- parts that are specifically designed to radiate heat -- for some "heat-phobic" coating, but it seems highly unlikely. 1) Drag racers are concerned about a quarter mile that goes by in somewhere between 4 and 10 seconds; there's not enough time for heat to make it to these fancy coatings. 2) Road racers sustain speeds of 100mph+, and wind alone does a heck of a cooling job at those speeds.
I can't say the racecar angle is bunk, but I can say it's the reverse of my limited experience in that field.
Danese seems like a pretty bright person, but damn does she ever go for corporatespeak. In case slashdotters aren't up on the latest productivity implying circumlocutions, here are my translations:
It generally uplevels coding quality... It generally improves coding quality
we are deferring (not cancelling) the productization of x86 for Solaris 9 we are deferring (not cancelling) the release of x86 for Solaris 9
The shift to pervasively liberated infrastructure code will be regulated by... The shift to open source will be regulated by...
PHP is pretty decent. Apache is top notch. MySQL is a joke, as far as databases go. It's maybe on par with MS Access as far as scalability.
Can't you just see the headlines? "Ebay's new site: 2,000,000 lines of code, $5,000,000 in hardware and networking infrastructure, no stored procedures, no database fault tolerance, no referential integrity!"
Anyone who has worked with / for / against MAPS knows that they are primarily interested in fighting. Their original purpose was to fight spam, but they're just as into fighting folks they don't like and each other. As far as I can tell, they really don't care *who* they fight, as long as there's lots of name calling and moral outrage involved.
MAPS is a joke. A classic case of the old saying about the pavement on the road to hell, and also a classic case of people thinking there's a technical solution to a social problem.
Slashdot Mirror
I figure these two should collaborate on a book. Or better yet, a 20 volume treatise on the failings of everything and everyone in modern society, and what the symbolism of those failings really means. They both have a unique insight into how the world should operate, and what other people should do with their time, money, and energy.
/.'ers who actually work for a living do to deserve *them*?
It must be really frustrating to have such a pure vision and yet be stuck, helpless, in a position where the rest of the world isn't rushing to implement your vision. Katz and Daisey surely deserve each other, but what the hell did we innocent
Cheers
-b
Yeah, who would want a $200 general purpose computer wiuth built in ethernet and DVD capability? I mean, what are you going to do, get a keyboard working and have a $200 Linux machine that's comprable to most $800 boxen? Or get it to run DivX movies? Or network 5 of them into a $1000 Beowulf cluster?
It's not a gaming system. It's a computer that's been artificially limited to gaming. People want to break into it to remove those limitations, so they can have a very cheap, fairly powerful and flexible computer system.
The article -- the whole console hacking phenomenon -- is not about people breaking into your Xbox of ther internet. If you had read the article, you would have seen that it's about hacking the box to be able to boot custom code. There's no question of "reinstalling a few games" unless someone breaks into your house, reprograms the flash ROM in your Xbox, and turns it into a Linux machine.
-b
Works for me, as long as there's some mechanism to confirm that the opt-out message made it all the way back. If your official agency has a software problem and drops a couple of thousand opt-outs, let's not have ethical, decent, opt-in types being beaten while tripping completely out of their minds.
Come to think of it, maybe digital signatures are the answer. Sign a return message to opt-in, and if (even 10 years later) you later complain that you didn't opt-in and that some message is spam, *you* got injected with LSD and beaten up. How's that sound?
Cheers
-b
Really? What about web site confirmation (you mail a link, they click on it). Many people find that less confusing.
Even if you disable that very nice feature, and require people to email you something (which non-technical people have real trouble with; they're not sure whether to leave the body of the message, change the subject to "subscribe", etc), where exactly do you keep them? And when someone still doesn't remember opting in, and you show them a text message that they sent, they'll just say "so you typed up a message that looks like it came from me, you foul spammer!"
Cheers
-b
This is a very valid concern, but also very hard to legislate. What defines "quickly and easily"? If it's a web page, and a user goes to opt out, and there's a transient internet routing problem that prevents them from getting to the web page at that particular moment, does the company in question get busted when the user complains?
.1% of them don't rememeber opting in, you've got 50 angry people).
I hate spam as much as anyone. However, I'm concerned about the burden of proof issue. Anyone who has operated a large opt-in list knows that some percentage of users don't remember opting in (a tiny percentage, but if you've got a list of 50,000 people and
Likewise, sometimes email addresses change, especially ISP based mail. joe@someisp.com may opt in for a list, then cancel his ISP account. A month later, there may be a different person using the joe@someisp.com account, depending on ISP policies. And that person is going to be getting truly unsolicited email.
Of course, the idea is to ban egregious spammers, but I'm concerned about how laws / courts will deal with issues more subtle than "Joe Idiot bought a CD of a million email addresses and spammed them all." There has to be some protection, or some threshold of complaints, so that a tiny percentage of emails going wrong (either due to user or company error) doesn't result in huge legal issues... otherwise, we're talking about outlawing commercial email altogether, which I don't think anyone wants.
Cheers
-b
Remember how, for years, Apple yelled and screamed when people called it FireWire? How they expected to get rich from licensing the name? How it's caused confusion for consumer, with the identical thing being alternately called 1394, FireWire, and iLink, depending on the vendor?
Just shows to go ya, you don't have to be a *successful* monopoly to be incredibly slow and inefficient and unresponsive to consumer interest. Wanna-be monopolies can do it to!
Cheers
-b
Anyone doing high end audio work is probably capable of procuring, compiling, and using the available tools. Even in the Windows world (even in the *Mac* world, for chrissake), people who need SMPTE, notation, and Csound are typically fairly knowledgeable.
This is like creating an "Desktop Publishing Distribution" by including LaTeX, PDF support, a bunch of printer drivers, and emacs.
Maybe it's just me, but I really don't see the point.
Cheers
-b
I can partly answer this one, and I'm not one of the Linux developers at IBM.
IBM's model is only partly to use Linux to sell their hardware. Today's IBM is more of a service company than a hardware company. Their move towards Linux is more because they think (and rightfully so) that they can make money with *service* for Linux, not because Linux will sell a ton of hardware boxes. IBM knows that hardware (except for the highest-end stuff) becomes a commodity over time with little to no margin. Service, however, allows the company to leverage its brand and experience to charge a premium over the local VAR, and thus create a reasonable margin.
As for IBM's opinion of Open Source business models and their validity, I certainly hope they have a lot of belief in the business model of giving away the software and charging for service... otherwise, they're one confused company.
Cheers
-b
Wouldn't this be a better question for IBM's marketing department, or business/technology strategist types? I'm sure the IBM Linux developers are bright folks, but I'd be surprised if they're in a position to comment on IBM's strategic vision for Linux (let along IBM-as-a-whole's estimation of the "importance of Linux to the future of computing in general").
No offense, but I'd rather see questions that the interviewees are well suited to answer.
Cheers
-b
...Only Katz could write such a lengthy, flowerly, pretentious, but ultimately meaningless and empty condemnation of style over substance.
Cheers
-b
Are you kidding? Gleaming the Cube was way ahead of its time with its avant-garde look at post-internet geek culture. With its insightful blend of anti-corporate undertones and a decidedly technophiliac representation of the analogs between skateboarding and modern routing protocols, Gleaming the Cube is truly a groundbreaking and prophetic vision.
Can I have a ghostwriting job, Mr. Katz?
-b
From ./'s blurb:
From the article:
Aren't most architects involved before something is built? Is it really that hard to get this kind of thing right?
Cheers
-b
I tend to agree that this looks like just so much more bunk.
However, what they seem to be claiming is that the technology converts heat into electricity, which would allow you to then transport that energy somewhere else where it could do some good rather than just directly heating up the air.
So there's no violation of thermodynamics; ultimately, that waste heat would be put back out by a motor, or a light bulb, or a television set. It's just the idea of being able to direct it to something other than radiant heat that's novel.
All that said, I still don't believe it for a minute, but we might as well shoot it down legitimately.
-b
What, this guy likes joking with cops? They'll all stand around reading some poor guy's email and laughing at how he was pretending to be a hot young girl in some chatroom?
Me, if police came to my workplace, I think it would add a great deal of *gravity* to the situation.
Chers
-b
So who decides what's pornographic? Do bikini shots count? How about Madonna's "sex" book; should amazon not be allowed to sell that except from a different site, Amazon.Sex?
.kids domain, and make it illegal to host pornography there? There's still the question of what constitutes pornography, but by intentionally registering and operating in the .kids domain, and company or individual could be said to be buying into the restrictions on that domain.
Suggesting that the entire internet should be legislated to only kid-friendly content is stupid and reckless.
Rather than limit what everyone else can do "to protect the children," why not go with the
I'm with you on the spam, though, but I'd say just make unsolicited email in general illegal. While porn content may be more offensive or inappropriate for some people or children, the root problem is not the content but the delivery method; fix that, and the content problem goes away.
Cheers
-b
You're getting 802.11 coverage from 1.5 kilometers away in inner-city Sydney?
-b
Surely you mean "Last 200 feet." At least, that's what it's like in any remotely urban area.
-b
Sure, you can use a fairly normal lamp and a fairly normal LCD panel to produce large images on a wall. Heck, you can do it even cheaper with a bunch of colored markers, some saran wrap, and a light bulb.
If you absolutely do not care about video quality, it's easy to get/build a projector on the cheap.
However, today's typical $3500 projector includes:
- A truly full-spectrum lamp. Retail price: $425. Wholesale price: $300. Manufacturing price: $250.
- Built-in line doubler. Most LCDs have 768 vertical pixels; some have 600, some have 1024. DVD's have 525 vertical lines. VHS has something like 240 lines. How do you get from 525 or 240 to 768 or 1024? Anyone who knows anything about computer grahpics will realize that the answer is not "double every 1/X line". Line doublers interpolate lines on the fly.
- Progressive scan support. Again, not a huge big deal, but the way I read the article, not supported.
- Component video in support. Like progressive scan, increasingly critical for decent video.
- Distortion correction, especially trapezoid. It's very rare to be able to project from the geometric center of the screen. Most of us have to live with projecting from the ceiling or floor, and use optical or digital means to correct the image for that.
Sure, you can build a "projector" for $400. Heck, you can probably build one for $100 (see earlier lightbulb, saran wrap, and markers note). But if it were really that easy to produce a home theater quality projector for $1000, don't you think any of the mass producers would have done it? For less than the cost of a one-off? (Anyone who responds that all 8 major projector manufacturers are colluding in price fixing should be laughed at).
Cheers
-b
I wonder if his business dealings were characterized by the same level of professionalism as this little stunt?
I particularly like the "I testified on Microsoft's behalf when I stood to make a boatload of money from them, but now that they've cancelled that arrangement, I think they're stifling innovation" bit. Pretty telling, IMHO.
Cheers
-b
Thing is, anyone with any kind of reasonable knowledge of law, patents, and copyright knows that the Blizzard lawsuit is, to be blunt, bullshit.
Blizzard has no chance, or interest, in winning on the merits of their case. They know that open source developers have limited resources and are unlikely to mount a decent legal defense. So why not sue? It's not a legal decision so much as a strategic one: given the chance to squash potential future competitors for free, why not?
It's a smart move on Blizzard's part. American IP laws favor corporations to such an incredibly laughable degree, it's amazing that Disney isn't suing everyone who uses a wheel (Steamboat Willie, 1928, and anyone who claims to have invented it before then had better have a notaraized motion picture).
Bottom line: disgusting on the USPTO's part, dispicable on Blizzard's part, par for the course for the good old USA. Oh, wait, this is *good* for consumers. I must have missed that edict somehow.
-b
C'mon, this is a great chance to play a practical joke on future generations.
How about a sign with amorous stick figures, hearts, and in every modern language, "Procreate here and you will have interesting offspring"?
I swear, government takes the fun out of everything.
-b
...typically, heat-related coatings on engine components are designed to keep heat *in*, so belts, hoses, and other non-metal parts don't get fried.
I guess I could see an application to radiators -- parts that are specifically designed to radiate heat -- for some "heat-phobic" coating, but it seems highly unlikely. 1) Drag racers are concerned about a quarter mile that goes by in somewhere between 4 and 10 seconds; there's not enough time for heat to make it to these fancy coatings. 2) Road racers sustain speeds of 100mph+, and wind alone does a heck of a cooling job at those speeds.
I can't say the racecar angle is bunk, but I can say it's the reverse of my limited experience in that field.
-b
Danese seems like a pretty bright person, but damn does she ever go for corporatespeak. In case slashdotters aren't up on the latest productivity implying circumlocutions, here are my translations:
It generally uplevels coding quality...
It generally improves coding quality
we are deferring (not cancelling) the productization of x86 for Solaris 9
we are deferring (not cancelling) the release of x86 for Solaris 9
The shift to pervasively liberated infrastructure code will be regulated by ...
The shift to open source will be regulated by...
Cheers
-b
That may be the funniest thing I've ever read.
PHP is pretty decent. Apache is top notch. MySQL is a joke, as far as databases go. It's maybe on par with MS Access as far as scalability.
Can't you just see the headlines? "Ebay's new site: 2,000,000 lines of code, $5,000,000 in hardware and networking infrastructure, no stored procedures, no database fault tolerance, no referential integrity!"
Cheers
-b
Anyone who has worked with / for / against MAPS knows that they are primarily interested in fighting. Their original purpose was to fight spam, but they're just as into fighting folks they don't like and each other. As far as I can tell, they really don't care *who* they fight, as long as there's lots of name calling and moral outrage involved.
MAPS is a joke. A classic case of the old saying about the pavement on the road to hell, and also a classic case of people thinking there's a technical solution to a social problem.
-b