While what you say is true (I have seen free preview releases of movies here in NYC on many occasions - in the summer, all you gotta do is walk around in front of Sony Lincoln Square on 68th st and Bway to get some, but you have no say over what movie it will be), I also will point out that even though I love Howard Stern, he gets paid off big time to endorse shit on his show. So take it with a grain of salt - you can usually tell by his tone when he actually means something and when he's just getting paid to say it.
I do believe the Open Source community is CAPABLE of the feat you describe. I think the biggest weakness of the Open Source and Free Software communities is a lack of business understanding. For example - if you want to come up with something that can take a significant desktop market share (and thereby bootstrap itself to get sufficient application support) you need to start by looking at the hardware manufacturers. This is the first "bootstrapping" problem of developing OS marketshare - supporting the plethora of x86 devices out there, graphics, sound, USB mice, etc. Be did an okay job at this but it was always lagging behind Linux and Windows (obviously). Linux has good device support, and therefore has attracted enough Open Source and commercial app developers to give it sufficient useful apps to be at least minimally functional on the desktop. Of course, as you point out rightfully the desktop capabilities of Linux/X windows are just not sufficiently modern, no matter how nice the toolkit is. Different widget sets, fragmented app appearance and feel, slow redraws (sorry, but look at an app like Mozilla in Windows and X on the same machine and you can't tell me it redraws, responds to user interaction, etc. anywhere near as fast on X).
What's the solution? Well, entice the hardware manufacturers or make their life easier. For example, make something that can work with X windows drivers (X Acceleration Architecture) or whatever. That way manufacturer support is strengthened for a standard rather than weakened. Trying to come in and force manufacturers to start from scratch is just going to fragment their modest support for the Linux platform and make them think the Open Source community is too much work to support.
X11 is wrong. It needs to go away. But the alternative needs to be something that can get developer and hardcore community support united behind it. That community support is key to getting apps, which in the end make the win in the desktop market. Users and apps are a chicken and egg problem, but that's the power of Open Source - you don't need millions of dollars to entice app developers with incentives and marketing blitz to get some users. You just need to get the developers and "hardcore" community members to come your way, and the rest will (eventually) follow. And the developers just need a complete set of tools that are convincing enough and will show potential to fulfill their own needs and desires and get a lot of other users using their apps at the same time. Then if you can convince companies that it will be able to reach a broader user base, they will start chugging out commercial apps - this is where Linux broke down, because it just doesn't have the usability to go that next step, limiting it to the power users and developers even now, and attracting modest commercial interest, but not the "snowball" effect something needs to be perceived as a full-fledged equal of Windows.
Moral community? The guy is allowed to express his view. Furthermore, he wasn't even saying he believes that Jesus is a lie. He just said it was in a videogame, and made absolutely no statement about his faith or lack thereof. The Slashdot community has a lot of people of a lot of faiths in it. Our common thread is that we mostly view faith as private and personal, and that we are very tolerant of the other people on/. who have a variety of wacky views. If you can't tolerate that and insist that everybody accept Jesus, then bugger off to adequacy.org.
Since really the only way as I understand it that such a product could make money is embedding in successful closed source projects, I think this would be an ideal candidate for the TrollTech business model. Release a GPL version that is embeddable only into GPL and GPL compatible Free Software products. This will gain you recognition and acclaim if your product is good. Now you've stirred up interest. You should release, simultaneous with the GPL release, a press release indicating your intention to issue commercial licenses for embedding in closed source products. Hell, you can even claim your commercial licensees will get access to the "Plus" form of your codec.
Now pimp the hell out of the GPL version and everyone that whines about how they can't use it in their closed source products, point them to your web page explaining how to contact you/your company for commercial licensing terms. Also perhaps consider a joint distribution agreement up front with some commercial video tool providers whereby you will develop plug ins, etc. I gather your point is this might be hard in this climate. Also consider getting pr0n distributors to use it. No, I'm not kidding. Honestly, people download pr0n from usenet, etc. If there is pr0n out there in your video format, people will get players for it. This will eventually convince commercial users that your format is worthwhile. There are plenty of Linux/Mac pr0n viewing folks out there, so you definitely will find some rapid fans if you take this tactic.
Anyway, this is my advice for a bootstrapped marketing technique that you might find effective. I make no promises, but it sounds like you don't have much to lose if you are posting to Ask Slashdot for marketing advice (hint: lots of/. readers can tell you about GPL violations, some can tell you about how the Linux kernel is put together, and very few can tell you how to successfully market a product).
This is reasonable - I am willing to pay a graded amount based on different guaranteed uptime and service levels from my ISP/ILEC/CLEC/CableCo for my internet access. Just spell it out to me, stop treating me like a fucking kid, and then KEEP your goddamned guarantees. Even my company, which pays through the rectum for real T1 service doesn't really get the service level or uptime we were promised (and our silly folks signed a deal that basically gives us minimal compensation for excess downtime).
If I have more downtime in a month than I am guaranteed, I expect the entire month for free. This should be at least a two or three sigma event, so it shouldn't be too costly for the involved companies to give me this.
Then give me an honest deal that says "Residential Service == guaranteed 98% uptime", "Business Service == guaranteed 99.95% uptime". Real business users WILL pay for the guaranteed 99.95% uptime, and home users, even those who casually use VPNs to transfer files to and fro from servers at work, or to log into some machines at work to do some compiles or testing, will probably stick with residential (unless they telecommute exclusive and their company needs them to be guaranteed available all the time).
Frankly, there's no excuse for anything else, and if residential service can't even be maintained at that sort of guaranteed service level, the provider doesn't deserve to stay in that business anyway (and I don't want to sign up with them).
Yes it has, but the "real" proof that was finally accepted as being logically consistent and valid required the use of entire fields of mathematics that didn't exist until the 1970s or 1980s. Since we can safely assume that Fermat didn't invent all of mathematics contained between his era and that era in order to arrive at the modern proof, he likely had a different proof. It is widely believed that the "proof" he had was one of the ones that was discovered in the years after his death and eventually determined to be logically inconsistent or invalid. OR he may have had some absolutely brilliant proof that didn't require extremely complex modern math, but if so, nobody has ever found THAT PROOF.
As the other responder said, nope. Factoring large pseudo-primes is not an NP-complete problem. For reference, see the RSA, Inc. FAQ - they clearly admit this. Or see any reasonable crypto textbook of the academic variety.
In the US the standard is "obvious to a skilled practitioner of the art". Mind you, it doesn't really define what "the art" is, as it differs in each case (is the art software in general for software patents, is it just technology in general, is it a specific part of the software industry?). These open ended questions are a major part of the reason the PTO has been failing to keep up with rapid change in technology and the business world in the last 20-30 years, IMHO. I'm not a lawyer, but I've worked with enough of them to know that that all they have and use is a heuristic knowledge of what the patent office tends to accept and what it tends to not accept, and they advise companies to file as many patents as possible, and no lawyer will ever tell you "I don't think this is patentable" or "won't be awarded a patent in the end". This also sucks, as it encourages companies to just submit willy-nilly and get whatever they can accepted.
See http://www.edig.com for the company e.Digital's website. By way of confirmation of your post, there is nothing at all there to indicate that they are discontinuing anything. So your hoax conclusion seems fully justified.
This argument doesn't hold for almost ANY other business, so if you could be so kind, explain in detail what is special about the economics of this one? Businesses generally don't price themselves out of existence even in perfect competition, they all ought to be making a normal profit. I've never heard of a "natural" industry pricing itself out of competitiveness and into bankruptcy - the only industry that approaches being that fucked up is the airline industry.
The problem as I see it is the weird split between the monopolistic line owners and the purely competitive ISPs in the broadband arena. The traditional dial-up ISP business didn't have this problem since everyone had pretty much the same cost structure so profitability, even though relatively low, was pretty much the same across the board, and competetition could occur on features and the dreaded "ease of use" (AOL drool-proofing).
DSL has monopolistic ILECs and generally monopolistic CLECs (you can use Covad or Rhythms, but it's fixed based on your choice of ISP and location usually). Cable has monopolistic line owners. Because ILECs (I'm thinking Verizon here) can be ISPs too, they will naturally take a price gouging on their ISP service to get business and avoid having to share profits with a seperate company. This allows them to drive ISPs out of business and become the "last man standing". At that point they can price service however they damn well feel. See: Microsoft, monopoly. Cable modem service is different in that you have no choices as the consumer, but because the ISP business is basically a commodity, the separation is farcical: the Cable companies own the pipe, and will abuse the ISP until the ISP leaves the business, realizing they can't make a buck, or just goes out of business. Now again the Cable modem company is the last man standing - or they just find some other drooling ISP to give them el cheapo contract, who they will slowly abuse and tighten a noose on until the same happens again.
Re:This raises some frightening questions
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Battlefield Lasers
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Okay, what you are saying is that IF the targetting were so good it could figure out how to hit a vital area AND the fire rate were 100 times a second (i.e. target acquisition and firing combined take only 1/100th of a second) and you had a continous source of large amounts of electricity to power the sucker.
I agree with that - but I don't think any of your assumptions are terribly reasonable. It would take longer than 1/100th of a second to kill somebody with a laser. Also target acquisition and aiming would take on the order of 1 second. Nevertheless, it could theoretically be used to set up a "kill zone" that would be mildly effective. I still think you could be just as effective if you used the same automatic targetting and aiming system with a machine gun. And you face the same problem that it won't be able to figure out who are the bad guys and who are the good guys. Too many friendly fire instances are possible with this sort of thing, unless you just want to create a no-man's land.
Re:This raises some frightening questions
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Battlefield Lasers
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You are right - I meant 50 cal, by which I was thinking of "largest possible gauge for reasonable anti-personnel usage". And yes, it would definitely do some serious damage.
Re:This raises some frightening questions
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Battlefield Lasers
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Honestly, I'm not sure that on the battlefield per se this would be terribly effective. The thing is, bullets cause huge amounts of collateral damage, make organs bleed, bounce around, create big exit holes, etc. Bullets are very good at wounding and killing. Is a bulky, truck mounted laser any more effective against personnel than a 50 mm automatic cannon on a truck which can mow people down? I doubt it. And you can keep firing the cannon, you don't need a huge generator to keep it going. Just doesn't seem like a cost effective way to kill ground troops.
Against tanks and vehicles, perhaps this would be effective... though those are slow enough in general that a guided rocket or smart bomb is probably just as effective. And they are big and much better armored than a small incoming Katyusha rocket, so I don't know how well that would work at this point.
Planes are not that much unlike missiles and artillery shells in that they are big things flying through the sky at high speeds with lots of fuel in them. I would think that planes would be susceptible to this class of laser weapons too, as a result, and avoid the complexities of defeating chaff, ECM and jamming systems.
Also, if this actually works for shooting down these small projectiles, is there any fundamental reason a later iteration of this technology couldn't be used to defend from ICBMs - I suppose you would need a lot more range to get high enough to hit them while it still mattered. Perhaps better than the missile defense program missiles that don't seem to work really well in the real world.
The "plane-mounted assasination" might be effective though. If we can hit a rocket from the ground, we can probably hit a person from a plane with the same laser. And it might not be efficient against large numbers of ground troops, but if you want to knock out one guy with minimal or no collateral damage that would result from shooting missiles or rockets at him, this would possibly be effective. Although I may be wrong about the "no collateral damage" thing... refracted laser light all over the place could definitely at least blind a lot of people.
This is an interesting idea. However, the counterpoint is that for a small, single product company it's a lot tougher to scrap your only product. For a company that has already passed that stage and has multiple product groups, it is much easier to take an objective look and scrap the ones that suck.
Lots of large companies scrap groups working on sucky products that bring in no revenue and don't have a prayer of ever doing so. For a sufficiently large company, the key becomes the _ratio_ of sucessful groups to unsuccessful groups. This doesn't have much of an equivalent in the small/startup world, so for a start-up stage company to succeed, they need to maintain extreme flexibility and be resilient to changes in market situation and need, and be able to rapidly refocus if they realize a particular version or release of their product is biting the bullet big time.
Interesting. I am not sure that I accept the proposition that "constructing a perceptional world" is a sin, and that madness, baldness, and fatness are a sign that scientists are paying for this sin. Searching for the answers and the foundations of knowledge, reducing complexity to simplicity, and taking a joy in the quest even knowing that the quest will most likely have no final, absolute answers in the end is a reasonable, practical, and functional point of view for a scientist. I don't believe the only ends are defeat or madness. I find that to be an obnoxious point of view.
And I don't believe that most scientists believe that their own consciousness or the concept of the personal ego is the place at which the boundaries of science fail and they wall off inquisition right around there and accept that fundamental limitation to their methods.
Anyway, it's an interesting, well written, articulate set of thoughts that doesn't appear accurate or meaningful to me, but maybe I'm just reading it out of context.
LOL. That's absurd. Do they not realize that many of us have digital connections to our speakers and therefore we won't hear anything? Oh well, the obvious conclusion is that this format is broken and that I will not install an operating system that restricts my freedom in this way.
Re:More a proof of concept than a finished product
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This is IT?
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I agree for the most part. There are a couple of places in the US where it is relevant. New York is one - though public transportation is good, it's not perfect. I lived in NYC for 7 years so I'm pseudo-qualified to comment - though I think this loses out for a bit of ugly and non-chic factor, I do think if marketed properly it could eventually be quite useful.
If you live out in the boroughs - public transportation is good for getting you into and then around Manhattan, but not too good for going out and about in the area. A car however is sorta overkill for many people, since the distance from home -> stores and the like is really quite short. Also, for getting around Manhattan - getting across town is always a bitch and a half - take a cab, or a really slow bus that stops every block, or a subway that goes WAY out of the way. I think this would be a ton faster and more convenient for most of these trips.
It could also be useful to a lesser degree in some places that seem sorta tailor made for this - like Boston and adjoining Cambridge area (I live in Cambridge myself now). Everything is a little too far to walk conveniently too, but pulling out my car to go to a restaurant or bar in Harvard Square is overkill, and the T will take 3 times longer.
Of course, I commute to work 13 miles away in the burbs (unfortunately a 45 minute drive in traffic, but usually more like 25 minutes since I tend to work odd hours), and this just doesn't quite have the speed/range for that to be convenient. If the speed were closer to 20 mph, and it had a range of 30-40 miles, I bet it would be a viable commuting choice for much of America. I'm not saying people are gonna get rid of cars, it seems like you still need a car for trips, for shopping for larger items, etc. but if I could cruise to work on some scooter type device instead of sitting my arse in traffic and it was on the same order of magnitude timewise as the car trip, I'd probably take the scooter. Of course, I think having to stand the whole time might be annoying, but I've never tried it. And I'm so goddamned tired at 8 or 9 in the morning that I might be dangerous on a scooter - sitting on my ass in the car I seem less likely to cause damage, though that might just be a complete fallacy.
By the way, I failed to note a failure significant point - I've worked on projects that decided to design monolithically with a design dictated by a single megalomaniac who insisted he dictate the whole design even though he obviously didn't understand the consequences of every piece of the system. The result? A product that doesn't really work and does a poor job for the original primary target market and is not flexible enough to be retargetted at the new primary market (and the funny part is that most of the over-engineering was specifically with the goal of making it 100% flexible). Overengineering is even worse than underengineering - underengineering will probably get you to a mediocre solution, but at least you didn't waste lots of time getting there and you can throw away the pieces that suck and rewrite them.
Okay, perhaps I'm stepping out on a limb, but this thread is already jammed so nobody is likely to read my post anyway.
I didn't read the whole thread rant with Linus et. al. - but from my own experience and observation EVERY successful project mixes both initial design and evolution in design AND implementation. If you fix the design absolutely up front at both the macro level AND of every sub-system in a large project, you will invariably run into huge roadblocks at some point. Something will not work as planned. As I see the Linux Bazaar process, it reaps benefits when this happens - some person or organization stumbles into a roadblock with poor networking code, poor SCSI subsystem behavior at high loads, or an unreliable VM. These emergent behaviors may only affect some small portion of the user base - but the subsystems then enter an evolutionary phase where people varyingly fix what's there or design something new, and some design ends up surviving based on what the most people seem to like and want and in the end, if all else fails, what Linus dictates.
So no, this isn't strict "evolution" after the style of Darwin. If we let purely random decisions drive software and forked every few minutes, the analogy would be pretty complete. It would also take as long to write good software as it does to evolve a well adapted creature. An eternity.
I see where the idea of selective breeding comes in - Linus sees himself and the kernel leading guns as picking and choosing the best patches and suggestions. Up to a point, this means they are exercising design and discretion, but they generally don't "assign" work from their central database of TODO tasks to IBM, Red Hat, and other individuals or organizations participating in kernel development - those organizations and individuals scratch their own itches and their work usually finds its way back into the kernel. Other posters accurately said that a more random evolution could be effected by letting people check in free-for-all into CVS. This is true, but I don't think that would necessarily improve the results and timeline of kernel development.
You have to realize that the comparison here is, as others pointed out, to a monolithic software development process - in the Cathedral, a centralized decision is made - "we are going to make Windows NT better able to support large enterprise database deployments" and a team is assigned to break it down and work through all the implications, then implement. In Linux-land, the interested parties don't call to schmooze with MS biz dev people who pass info down to technical guiding councils, they pony up and write their own patches to the subsystems they see that need improvement. If there are enough interest parties, presumably enough patches will get submitted that the best from all get incorporated into the set of relevant subsystems that effect large enterprise database deployment, and we end up with a Linux kernel that supports exactly that. Of course the primary difference is that at the same time, somebody else may have made complementary and/or conflicting changes to make Linux a better desktop OS. Chaos ensues and flames erupt on kernel-dev and wonderously, eventually, something better for everyone results after compromises are made.
In fact the entire state of Massachusetts is probably fine. Strangely enough, I expected a rollover to new DNS servers and a new IP address when @home cut us off, but I think the network here in Massachusetts must largely be old MediaOne stuff that AT&T bought along with MediaOne, since my DNS servers (all 3 of them) and routes outward and inward appear completely intact. Email is probably out, but I've never used their email service so I wouldn't know. In fact, I wouldn't even know there was a problem at all if I didn't read/. (and CNN.com).
I wish we still had the old RoadRunner service - dunno why the hell AT&T BB dropped them for Excite@Home a few months ago - I guess because the rest of the AT&T BB customers are on @home, but I would gladly pay an extra 5 bucks a month if RR had jacked our rates up as I think they did with lots of their customers, if they had given us a good, solid reliable network. When will people get it through their thick skulls - I don't WANT content from my ISP, the excite part of Excite@Home was therefore useless to me and anyone who is halfway clueful, and the @home part had the worst service ever. What a moronic move on AT&T's part.
Sorry, I misinterpreted "parse" to mean "grok" or "parse via wetware". Nevertheless, Python maintains readability by forcing indentation. LISP relies on the kindheartedness of the editor and user. My entire point is that while this is great and fine for a project you are working on yourself, coding standards on large projects with tight, tight deadlines are REALLY difficult to enforce. Of course, this is mostly because my experience involves working with illiterate, non-native english speakers who are also just really bad programmers. But I think that Python and Java both share a certain degree of idiot-proofing that makes them valuable in larger projects. I think LISP fails this test, mostly because LISP seems to force a certain slightly unnatural way of thinking on you. Please don't talk down to me like I don't know LISP - I learned CLISP in college my freshman year and have written substantially large applications in it (it would take me several months to get back up to speed with it since that was 6 or 7 years ago now), but I am not talking through my arse entirely here.
Anyway, there's a great page out there by a guy who wrote a series of articles on the topic of "Worse is Better" and why LISP failed to maintain critical mindshare in the professional world and lost so much ground to C and C++, though functional languages seem to retain a serious support base in academe.
I sincerely doubt that LISP is that widely used - certainly it has a miniscule hobbyist following left, compared to Python. Even Ruby, while new-ish in the US probably has more users in Japan alone. LISP still has a lot of users in the business world, in software development projects at companies working on the rare project that is well suited to LISPs strengths (whatever exactly they are - beats me).
Java syntax is least common denominator because it basically steals C++ and removes everything that fucked up the morons working on larger projects (pointers, multiple inheritence, certain weird keywords, operator overloading). They left some stuff in it that may be weird to a LISP person, but to most people, thinking in one of the ALGOL-derived languages is still much more natural (procedural style) than thinking in functional style. Everyone seems to forget the real goal of a programming language is to translate between my wetware and bits and bytes and provide me with some insulation while still providing enough power and performance to build useable applications that can perform significant tasks.
LOL. This is the best description I've ever seen of the fucking bullshit hoops I've had to jump through for AT&T, both under previous RoadRunner network management and under the new, substantially worse @home folks. At least before we got moved to @home I knew I could call after midnight and usually get somebody half-way competent who could tell me if there was a network problem or not rather than force me to pretend I was rebooting a non-existant Windows 98 box.:)
I find Python to fit this bill quite well, though I'm sure Ruby has the same general style to it and can be just as readable. In particular I love the fixed indenting for code organization. The variants and often times complete failure of many projects to format source code and adhere to a coding standard in anything resembling a readable format always annoys me. Some people find this feature of Python even more annoying though - whatever floats your boat (I've often sat around wondering why we don't just force Java to have a common indenting syntax so everyone can use the editor of their choice and they will play nice out of the box).
Easy to parse? Are you insane? The primary reason for LISPs lack of success in the real world, IMHO, and the ultimate success of least common denominator languages like Java lies in their parseability to somebody with only general knowledge of the specifics of the applications (i.e. lead time on bringing new developers into a project). This is the one of the most significant strengths of Java over C++ (well, not the only one, and there are plenty of weaknesses, but this strength wins out with much "enterprise" or "business" server-side software). I also find Python generally quite pleasant to parse and read. LISP, on the other hand, is easily parseable only for those with strange brain defects that make them love spending their days counting parens with bleary eyes.
I have AT&T@home. When I signed up it was AT&T RoadRunner, here in Boston. We got switched against our will and with no advance notification to speak of a month or two ago. Luckily the service terms and the like didn't change. But I'm still likely to see my connection go down like a two dollar whore tonight. Do I deserve this? Am I a spammer? I have a well protected LAN at my apartment - yes, their abuse/anti-spam personnel may suck, but the vast majority of subscribers are either regular folks, or around here, mostly saavy tech people who realized that DSL sucks nads a long while back (both my residential DSL in NYC and my office's business DSL are far, far less reliable with skinnier pipes than AT&T BB ever has been).
So, in short, yes, Excite@Home sucks rocks, but the infrastructure they are running on here in Massachusetts is top rate, and was built out by MediaOne which unfortunately got gobbled up by AT&T. If I could pick and choose a better ISP and keep my cable service, I would in a second (an ISP that doesn't force me to pretend I'm rebooting my theoretical Win98 box which is theoretically connected directly to the cable modem rather than through a firewall, to refresh a DHCP address, so I can prove to them that they have a router on the fritz).
Slashdot Mirror
While what you say is true (I have seen free preview releases of movies here in NYC on many occasions - in the summer, all you gotta do is walk around in front of Sony Lincoln Square on 68th st and Bway to get some, but you have no say over what movie it will be), I also will point out that even though I love Howard Stern, he gets paid off big time to endorse shit on his show. So take it with a grain of salt - you can usually tell by his tone when he actually means something and when he's just getting paid to say it.
What's the solution? Well, entice the hardware manufacturers or make their life easier. For example, make something that can work with X windows drivers (X Acceleration Architecture) or whatever. That way manufacturer support is strengthened for a standard rather than weakened. Trying to come in and force manufacturers to start from scratch is just going to fragment their modest support for the Linux platform and make them think the Open Source community is too much work to support.
X11 is wrong. It needs to go away. But the alternative needs to be something that can get developer and hardcore community support united behind it. That community support is key to getting apps, which in the end make the win in the desktop market. Users and apps are a chicken and egg problem, but that's the power of Open Source - you don't need millions of dollars to entice app developers with incentives and marketing blitz to get some users. You just need to get the developers and "hardcore" community members to come your way, and the rest will (eventually) follow. And the developers just need a complete set of tools that are convincing enough and will show potential to fulfill their own needs and desires and get a lot of other users using their apps at the same time. Then if you can convince companies that it will be able to reach a broader user base, they will start chugging out commercial apps - this is where Linux broke down, because it just doesn't have the usability to go that next step, limiting it to the power users and developers even now, and attracting modest commercial interest, but not the "snowball" effect something needs to be perceived as a full-fledged equal of Windows.
Moral community? The guy is allowed to express his view. Furthermore, he wasn't even saying he believes that Jesus is a lie. He just said it was in a videogame, and made absolutely no statement about his faith or lack thereof. The Slashdot community has a lot of people of a lot of faiths in it. Our common thread is that we mostly view faith as private and personal, and that we are very tolerant of the other people on /. who have a variety of wacky views. If you can't tolerate that and insist that everybody accept Jesus, then bugger off to adequacy.org.
Now pimp the hell out of the GPL version and everyone that whines about how they can't use it in their closed source products, point them to your web page explaining how to contact you/your company for commercial licensing terms. Also perhaps consider a joint distribution agreement up front with some commercial video tool providers whereby you will develop plug ins, etc. I gather your point is this might be hard in this climate. Also consider getting pr0n distributors to use it. No, I'm not kidding. Honestly, people download pr0n from usenet, etc. If there is pr0n out there in your video format, people will get players for it. This will eventually convince commercial users that your format is worthwhile. There are plenty of Linux/Mac pr0n viewing folks out there, so you definitely will find some rapid fans if you take this tactic.
Anyway, this is my advice for a bootstrapped marketing technique that you might find effective. I make no promises, but it sounds like you don't have much to lose if you are posting to Ask Slashdot for marketing advice (hint: lots of
If I have more downtime in a month than I am guaranteed, I expect the entire month for free. This should be at least a two or three sigma event, so it shouldn't be too costly for the involved companies to give me this.
Then give me an honest deal that says "Residential Service == guaranteed 98% uptime", "Business Service == guaranteed 99.95% uptime". Real business users WILL pay for the guaranteed 99.95% uptime, and home users, even those who casually use VPNs to transfer files to and fro from servers at work, or to log into some machines at work to do some compiles or testing, will probably stick with residential (unless they telecommute exclusive and their company needs them to be guaranteed available all the time).
Frankly, there's no excuse for anything else, and if residential service can't even be maintained at that sort of guaranteed service level, the provider doesn't deserve to stay in that business anyway (and I don't want to sign up with them).
Yes it has, but the "real" proof that was finally accepted as being logically consistent and valid required the use of entire fields of mathematics that didn't exist until the 1970s or 1980s. Since we can safely assume that Fermat didn't invent all of mathematics contained between his era and that era in order to arrive at the modern proof, he likely had a different proof. It is widely believed that the "proof" he had was one of the ones that was discovered in the years after his death and eventually determined to be logically inconsistent or invalid. OR he may have had some absolutely brilliant proof that didn't require extremely complex modern math, but if so, nobody has ever found THAT PROOF.
As the other responder said, nope. Factoring large pseudo-primes is not an NP-complete problem. For reference, see the RSA, Inc. FAQ - they clearly admit this. Or see any reasonable crypto textbook of the academic variety.
In the US the standard is "obvious to a skilled practitioner of the art". Mind you, it doesn't really define what "the art" is, as it differs in each case (is the art software in general for software patents, is it just technology in general, is it a specific part of the software industry?). These open ended questions are a major part of the reason the PTO has been failing to keep up with rapid change in technology and the business world in the last 20-30 years, IMHO. I'm not a lawyer, but I've worked with enough of them to know that that all they have and use is a heuristic knowledge of what the patent office tends to accept and what it tends to not accept, and they advise companies to file as many patents as possible, and no lawyer will ever tell you "I don't think this is patentable" or "won't be awarded a patent in the end". This also sucks, as it encourages companies to just submit willy-nilly and get whatever they can accepted.
See http://www.edig.com for the company e.Digital's website. By way of confirmation of your post, there is nothing at all there to indicate that they are discontinuing anything. So your hoax conclusion seems fully justified.
The problem as I see it is the weird split between the monopolistic line owners and the purely competitive ISPs in the broadband arena. The traditional dial-up ISP business didn't have this problem since everyone had pretty much the same cost structure so profitability, even though relatively low, was pretty much the same across the board, and competetition could occur on features and the dreaded "ease of use" (AOL drool-proofing).
DSL has monopolistic ILECs and generally monopolistic CLECs (you can use Covad or Rhythms, but it's fixed based on your choice of ISP and location usually). Cable has monopolistic line owners. Because ILECs (I'm thinking Verizon here) can be ISPs too, they will naturally take a price gouging on their ISP service to get business and avoid having to share profits with a seperate company. This allows them to drive ISPs out of business and become the "last man standing". At that point they can price service however they damn well feel. See: Microsoft, monopoly. Cable modem service is different in that you have no choices as the consumer, but because the ISP business is basically a commodity, the separation is farcical: the Cable companies own the pipe, and will abuse the ISP until the ISP leaves the business, realizing they can't make a buck, or just goes out of business. Now again the Cable modem company is the last man standing - or they just find some other drooling ISP to give them el cheapo contract, who they will slowly abuse and tighten a noose on until the same happens again.
I agree with that - but I don't think any of your assumptions are terribly reasonable. It would take longer than 1/100th of a second to kill somebody with a laser. Also target acquisition and aiming would take on the order of 1 second. Nevertheless, it could theoretically be used to set up a "kill zone" that would be mildly effective. I still think you could be just as effective if you used the same automatic targetting and aiming system with a machine gun. And you face the same problem that it won't be able to figure out who are the bad guys and who are the good guys. Too many friendly fire instances are possible with this sort of thing, unless you just want to create a no-man's land.
You are right - I meant 50 cal, by which I was thinking of "largest possible gauge for reasonable anti-personnel usage". And yes, it would definitely do some serious damage.
Against tanks and vehicles, perhaps this would be effective... though those are slow enough in general that a guided rocket or smart bomb is probably just as effective. And they are big and much better armored than a small incoming Katyusha rocket, so I don't know how well that would work at this point.
Planes are not that much unlike missiles and artillery shells in that they are big things flying through the sky at high speeds with lots of fuel in them. I would think that planes would be susceptible to this class of laser weapons too, as a result, and avoid the complexities of defeating chaff, ECM and jamming systems.
Also, if this actually works for shooting down these small projectiles, is there any fundamental reason a later iteration of this technology couldn't be used to defend from ICBMs - I suppose you would need a lot more range to get high enough to hit them while it still mattered. Perhaps better than the missile defense program missiles that don't seem to work really well in the real world.
The "plane-mounted assasination" might be effective though. If we can hit a rocket from the ground, we can probably hit a person from a plane with the same laser. And it might not be efficient against large numbers of ground troops, but if you want to knock out one guy with minimal or no collateral damage that would result from shooting missiles or rockets at him, this would possibly be effective. Although I may be wrong about the "no collateral damage" thing... refracted laser light all over the place could definitely at least blind a lot of people.
Lots of large companies scrap groups working on sucky products that bring in no revenue and don't have a prayer of ever doing so. For a sufficiently large company, the key becomes the _ratio_ of sucessful groups to unsuccessful groups. This doesn't have much of an equivalent in the small/startup world, so for a start-up stage company to succeed, they need to maintain extreme flexibility and be resilient to changes in market situation and need, and be able to rapidly refocus if they realize a particular version or release of their product is biting the bullet big time.
Just my tuppence.
And I don't believe that most scientists believe that their own consciousness or the concept of the personal ego is the place at which the boundaries of science fail and they wall off inquisition right around there and accept that fundamental limitation to their methods.
Anyway, it's an interesting, well written, articulate set of thoughts that doesn't appear accurate or meaningful to me, but maybe I'm just reading it out of context.
LOL. That's absurd. Do they not realize that many of us have digital connections to our speakers and therefore we won't hear anything? Oh well, the obvious conclusion is that this format is broken and that I will not install an operating system that restricts my freedom in this way.
If you live out in the boroughs - public transportation is good for getting you into and then around Manhattan, but not too good for going out and about in the area. A car however is sorta overkill for many people, since the distance from home -> stores and the like is really quite short. Also, for getting around Manhattan - getting across town is always a bitch and a half - take a cab, or a really slow bus that stops every block, or a subway that goes WAY out of the way. I think this would be a ton faster and more convenient for most of these trips.
It could also be useful to a lesser degree in some places that seem sorta tailor made for this - like Boston and adjoining Cambridge area (I live in Cambridge myself now). Everything is a little too far to walk conveniently too, but pulling out my car to go to a restaurant or bar in Harvard Square is overkill, and the T will take 3 times longer.
Of course, I commute to work 13 miles away in the burbs (unfortunately a 45 minute drive in traffic, but usually more like 25 minutes since I tend to work odd hours), and this just doesn't quite have the speed/range for that to be convenient. If the speed were closer to 20 mph, and it had a range of 30-40 miles, I bet it would be a viable commuting choice for much of America. I'm not saying people are gonna get rid of cars, it seems like you still need a car for trips, for shopping for larger items, etc. but if I could cruise to work on some scooter type device instead of sitting my arse in traffic and it was on the same order of magnitude timewise as the car trip, I'd probably take the scooter. Of course, I think having to stand the whole time might be annoying, but I've never tried it. And I'm so goddamned tired at 8 or 9 in the morning that I might be dangerous on a scooter - sitting on my ass in the car I seem less likely to cause damage, though that might just be a complete fallacy.
By the way, I failed to note a failure significant point - I've worked on projects that decided to design monolithically with a design dictated by a single megalomaniac who insisted he dictate the whole design even though he obviously didn't understand the consequences of every piece of the system. The result? A product that doesn't really work and does a poor job for the original primary target market and is not flexible enough to be retargetted at the new primary market (and the funny part is that most of the over-engineering was specifically with the goal of making it 100% flexible). Overengineering is even worse than underengineering - underengineering will probably get you to a mediocre solution, but at least you didn't waste lots of time getting there and you can throw away the pieces that suck and rewrite them.
I didn't read the whole thread rant with Linus et. al. - but from my own experience and observation EVERY successful project mixes both initial design and evolution in design AND implementation. If you fix the design absolutely up front at both the macro level AND of every sub-system in a large project, you will invariably run into huge roadblocks at some point. Something will not work as planned. As I see the Linux Bazaar process, it reaps benefits when this happens - some person or organization stumbles into a roadblock with poor networking code, poor SCSI subsystem behavior at high loads, or an unreliable VM. These emergent behaviors may only affect some small portion of the user base - but the subsystems then enter an evolutionary phase where people varyingly fix what's there or design something new, and some design ends up surviving based on what the most people seem to like and want and in the end, if all else fails, what Linus dictates.
So no, this isn't strict "evolution" after the style of Darwin. If we let purely random decisions drive software and forked every few minutes, the analogy would be pretty complete. It would also take as long to write good software as it does to evolve a well adapted creature. An eternity.
I see where the idea of selective breeding comes in - Linus sees himself and the kernel leading guns as picking and choosing the best patches and suggestions. Up to a point, this means they are exercising design and discretion, but they generally don't "assign" work from their central database of TODO tasks to IBM, Red Hat, and other individuals or organizations participating in kernel development - those organizations and individuals scratch their own itches and their work usually finds its way back into the kernel. Other posters accurately said that a more random evolution could be effected by letting people check in free-for-all into CVS. This is true, but I don't think that would necessarily improve the results and timeline of kernel development.
You have to realize that the comparison here is, as others pointed out, to a monolithic software development process - in the Cathedral, a centralized decision is made - "we are going to make Windows NT better able to support large enterprise database deployments" and a team is assigned to break it down and work through all the implications, then implement. In Linux-land, the interested parties don't call to schmooze with MS biz dev people who pass info down to technical guiding councils, they pony up and write their own patches to the subsystems they see that need improvement. If there are enough interest parties, presumably enough patches will get submitted that the best from all get incorporated into the set of relevant subsystems that effect large enterprise database deployment, and we end up with a Linux kernel that supports exactly that. Of course the primary difference is that at the same time, somebody else may have made complementary and/or conflicting changes to make Linux a better desktop OS. Chaos ensues and flames erupt on kernel-dev and wonderously, eventually, something better for everyone results after compromises are made.
I wish we still had the old RoadRunner service - dunno why the hell AT&T BB dropped them for Excite@Home a few months ago - I guess because the rest of the AT&T BB customers are on @home, but I would gladly pay an extra 5 bucks a month if RR had jacked our rates up as I think they did with lots of their customers, if they had given us a good, solid reliable network. When will people get it through their thick skulls - I don't WANT content from my ISP, the excite part of Excite@Home was therefore useless to me and anyone who is halfway clueful, and the @home part had the worst service ever. What a moronic move on AT&T's part.
Anyway, there's a great page out there by a guy who wrote a series of articles on the topic of "Worse is Better" and why LISP failed to maintain critical mindshare in the professional world and lost so much ground to C and C++, though functional languages seem to retain a serious support base in academe.
I sincerely doubt that LISP is that widely used - certainly it has a miniscule hobbyist following left, compared to Python. Even Ruby, while new-ish in the US probably has more users in Japan alone. LISP still has a lot of users in the business world, in software development projects at companies working on the rare project that is well suited to LISPs strengths (whatever exactly they are - beats me).
Java syntax is least common denominator because it basically steals C++ and removes everything that fucked up the morons working on larger projects (pointers, multiple inheritence, certain weird keywords, operator overloading). They left some stuff in it that may be weird to a LISP person, but to most people, thinking in one of the ALGOL-derived languages is still much more natural (procedural style) than thinking in functional style. Everyone seems to forget the real goal of a programming language is to translate between my wetware and bits and bytes and provide me with some insulation while still providing enough power and performance to build useable applications that can perform significant tasks.
LOL. This is the best description I've ever seen of the fucking bullshit hoops I've had to jump through for AT&T, both under previous RoadRunner network management and under the new, substantially worse @home folks. At least before we got moved to @home I knew I could call after midnight and usually get somebody half-way competent who could tell me if there was a network problem or not rather than force me to pretend I was rebooting a non-existant Windows 98 box. :)
I find Python to fit this bill quite well, though I'm sure Ruby has the same general style to it and can be just as readable. In particular I love the fixed indenting for code organization. The variants and often times complete failure of many projects to format source code and adhere to a coding standard in anything resembling a readable format always annoys me. Some people find this feature of Python even more annoying though - whatever floats your boat (I've often sat around wondering why we don't just force Java to have a common indenting syntax so everyone can use the editor of their choice and they will play nice out of the box).
Easy to parse? Are you insane? The primary reason for LISPs lack of success in the real world, IMHO, and the ultimate success of least common denominator languages like Java lies in their parseability to somebody with only general knowledge of the specifics of the applications (i.e. lead time on bringing new developers into a project). This is the one of the most significant strengths of Java over C++ (well, not the only one, and there are plenty of weaknesses, but this strength wins out with much "enterprise" or "business" server-side software). I also find Python generally quite pleasant to parse and read. LISP, on the other hand, is easily parseable only for those with strange brain defects that make them love spending their days counting parens with bleary eyes.
So, in short, yes, Excite@Home sucks rocks, but the infrastructure they are running on here in Massachusetts is top rate, and was built out by MediaOne which unfortunately got gobbled up by AT&T. If I could pick and choose a better ISP and keep my cable service, I would in a second (an ISP that doesn't force me to pretend I'm rebooting my theoretical Win98 box which is theoretically connected directly to the cable modem rather than through a firewall, to refresh a DHCP address, so I can prove to them that they have a router on the fritz).