If there was a slot on my computer where I could stick a quarter, I'd have done it. I have a quarter right here on my desk. But I really can't see filling in some form, working out a bank transaction, no doubt getting a bunch more spam, etc, etc, just for some comic.
It's definitely worth 25c in a cash transaction. But micropayments still fundamentally don't work on the Web.
Maybe you were there, maybe you weren't, but your information is not factual.
1. How the hell would you write a TSR program for MS-DOS 1.0? The int 21 ah=0x31 call ("Terminate and Stay Resident") did not appear until MS-DOS 2.0. MS-DOS 1.0 didn't even have config.sys - there was no such thing as a TSR or anything even remotely similar to it.
It did, however, have a rudimentary memory allocator, in the sense that a running program could load another subprogram into the remaining available memory, and the system kept track of which memory was in use by which program. This is actually a CP/M feature ("chain to program").
The best-selling early IBM PC word processor was WordStar, which certainly ran under the OS. There was no major word processor that ran on the "bare metal." It was written in assembly language, but it functioned as an MS-DOS executable and used MS-DOS FCB calls to access the disk.
I do agree that it was not immediately clear that the IBM PC would dominate over the other systems at the time. The Apple II and TRS-80 were both cheaper, had more features, and were initially more popular than the PC.
It has always sucked and it always will suck. It provides no advantages over existing, well-understood technologies. If I wanted to listen to the radio, I'd turn on the radio. Media that gets downloaded to my PC has significant advantages, like the ability to instantly reposition to any point, scan through for a point of interest, or what have you. The one and only reason why streaming has ever been popular is the lame attempt by media owners to control distribution and charge for the same media content over and over.
There just isn't a reason why a user would ever want a provider to use streaming.
I agree that it's wrong to say that MS-DOS can't address non-continuous memory. It clearly can, otherwise why go to the trouble of creating all those memory holes in the top 384k?
However, you are wrong to state that MS-DOS didn't provide a memory allocator. It certainly did, otherwise how would it load programs? If you don't believe me, look up INT 21 AH=0x48, 0x49 and 0x4A.
MAPI does not replace any of these things. MAPI is a set of COM interfaces that define the interaction between a GUI and an email service provider, all within the client PC. The proprietary over-the-wire protocol used between Exchange and Outlook is sometimes incorrectly referred to as MAPI, but so what.
What's needed is a MAPI service provider that implements all the standard protocols, including the ability to store "special folders" (e.g. a calendar folder) along with the necessary metadata. This is what Bynari has attempted to do but their implementation is cumbersome.
I looked into doing this at one point, but I don't seem to have enough free time.
Everyone wants to talk about usability. What if they're wrong? What if this notion of design through usability testing hits a brick wall sometime in the future? I want Debian to be there to say "I told you so." Because if they aren't, nobody will be.
Actually, this is the second time Novell has ported the Netware core services to Linux. The first time, it was when Caldera had just started and Ray Noorda (ex Novell CEO) was heavily involved. They released "NDS for Linux" for the then-current Red Hat Linux 6.0, with great fanfare. It worked well; your Linux box was basically indistinguishable from a native Novell box on your network. Which, at the time, was a valuable and worthwhile feature.
I spent some time selling and installing these boxes to small businesses because they could seriously undercut the price of native Netware. They ran well on RHL 6.0, but got flakier on 6.1 and 6.2, and broke completely on 7.0. Novell/Caldera never upgraded or patched. Every time I called or talked to them at a trade show, they would tell me that a new updated version was right around the corner and should be out any day now. But it never happened.
That was FOUR YEARS AGO. Four years and not a peep or whistle or so much as a security patch.
Corporatism yes, fascism no. Fascism, essentially, is a name for what happens when a democratic system of government chooses to allow the ruling party to use all control and authority to propagate their rule, thus ending (or fictionalizing) democratic control over the government. It is usually also associated with fierce nationalism and racism, though I don't think these are required by definition.
Corporatism is fascism in the service of corporate interests. It happens when corporations gain so much power that they can use that power to propagate the rule of a puppet government under their own control.
The U.S. is not yet fascist. You can determine this by asking the following question: If the Democrats win a majority of Electoral College votes in the 2004 Presidential election, will it be possible for George W. Bush to hang on to power anyway? If not, then the U.S. is not fascist.
Napster may be dead as a bent dog, but while it was still kicking it achieved something significant: It convinced my mom, my grandma, and my friend's mom and grandma that they could find and download all the Perry Como songs they could (force me to) tolerate.
They haven't forgotten. If they can't P2P, it just makes them pissed off - they aren't buying $20 CDs ever again.
In past generations, clothes were relatively permanent posessions. Today, most clothes you buy can be expected to wear out after a year of regular use. Give me a T-shirt that I can reasonably expect will be part of my estate when I die, and I'll pay $50 or even $100 for it and consider it a bargain.
Yeah, I saw about $75,000 totally wasted on a project in Bangalore. But the thing is, it turned out that the U.S.-based project manager was the whole problem - he couldn't understand or communicate the requirements properly. Once we achieved direct communication with the programmers, it all started going much better. There are some smart people in India, and some idiots, just like here...
Not so fast with the assumption that people protecting information can just automatically make use of new techniques. The idea with encryption is that you transmit your information over an insecure channel. This means that the bad guys already have copies of your information, encrypted using the techniques you used. If new techniques become available, you can't go back and use them on your old data, because it's already been transmitted. Therefore, in an arms race where cryptography and cryptanalysis proceed at equal rates, all the information you already own becomes increasingly vulnerable.
People (or agencies) holding a portfolio of critically sensitive information that has already been transmitted (and therefore probably intercepted in encrypted form) have a vital and sustaining interest in research into prime numbers. In many case their interest is in having such research stopped. It will be interesting to see what happens to super-smart but real-world-naive math Ph.D candidates if and when high efficiency factoring techniques become the subject of dissertations....
Yeah, except that unless you're really fast at noticing an ad's about to start, you miss the first several seconds after the ads finish. For a few shows, it might matter.
The National Institute of Health produces many of the interesting drug candidates which the pharmas then develop and market. Vast amounts of taxpayer money are spent having the FDA review the results of the clinical trials the pharmas produce, to defend against the obvious profit motive. This defense is doomed to permanent inadequacy since there is more money available for the pharmas to cheat or game the system than for the FDA to defend against such cheating.
So replace the whole mess with a government department dedicated to new drug development, enjoined by its charter to make the new drugs freely available once they are developed. All pharmaceutical companies can become generics manufacturers, which is a reasonably (but not excessively) profitable business.
I know that everyone will reject this for ideological reasons, but consider that it solves every one of the problems you mentioned.
-Graham
Why are integral trees radially oriented?
on
Ask Larry Niven
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· Score: 1
It seems that the gale-force winds at the tufts integral trees would cause torque that would rotate the trees to be aligned along the direction of travel. In the Smoke Ring books, integral trees remain radially oriented. What force prevents them from rotating?
You're right, it really does make you wonder what you can trust. The kicker is that you can easily verify that memories are not reliable. Put someone (possibly yourself) in a situation with many details and some sort of activity or storyline, then get them to tell you about it 30 minutes later. Get them to give you detail on what they remember, particularly their visual recollections. They will be clear, specific, and the subject will most likely insist on their accuracy. But they will be wrong in many details. Often so convincingly wrong that if you don't have photographic evidence of what actually happened, you will yourself have difficulty resisting the credibility of the new version!
Better yet, talk to someone who was nodding off during a movie, but didn't realize it. It's best if they clearly saw the beginning and the end. Ask them to describe the plot of the movie. You'll get a complete and (moderately) coherent summary of a plotline that gets you from beginning to end, but it won't match the actual plotline of the film!
It appears that visual memory is constructed on-the-fly as we recollect things, from whatever details are actually available plus a great deal of interpolation based on what we think is probable. Think of it as a compression method: Long-term memory only stores "factoids" that are unique or differ from regular/repeatable experience.
Once you realize that your own memories are untrustworthy, it all gets quite weird...
Slashdot Mirror
If there was a slot on my computer where I could stick a quarter, I'd have done it. I have a quarter right here on my desk. But I really can't see filling in some form, working out a bank transaction, no doubt getting a bunch more spam, etc, etc, just for some comic.
It's definitely worth 25c in a cash transaction. But micropayments still fundamentally don't work on the Web.
-Graham
Maybe you were there, maybe you weren't, but your information is not factual.
1. How the hell would you write a TSR program for MS-DOS 1.0? The int 21 ah=0x31 call ("Terminate and Stay Resident") did not appear until MS-DOS 2.0. MS-DOS 1.0 didn't even have config.sys - there was no such thing as a TSR or anything even remotely similar to it.
It did, however, have a rudimentary memory allocator, in the sense that a running program could load another subprogram into the remaining available memory, and the system kept track of which memory was in use by which program. This is actually a CP/M feature ("chain to program").
The best-selling early IBM PC word processor was WordStar, which certainly ran under the OS. There was no major word processor that ran on the "bare metal." It was written in assembly language, but it functioned as an MS-DOS executable and used MS-DOS FCB calls to access the disk.
I do agree that it was not immediately clear that the IBM PC would dominate over the other systems at the time. The Apple II and TRS-80 were both cheaper, had more features, and were initially more popular than the PC.
-Graham
Windows 1.0 didn't "work wonderfully." Desqview was better.
It has always sucked and it always will suck. It provides no advantages over existing, well-understood technologies. If I wanted to listen to the radio, I'd turn on the radio. Media that gets downloaded to my PC has significant advantages, like the ability to instantly reposition to any point, scan through for a point of interest, or what have you. The one and only reason why streaming has ever been popular is the lame attempt by media owners to control distribution and charge for the same media content over and over.
There just isn't a reason why a user would ever want a provider to use streaming.
-Graham
I agree that it's wrong to say that MS-DOS can't address non-continuous memory. It clearly can, otherwise why go to the trouble of creating all those memory holes in the top 384k?
However, you are wrong to state that MS-DOS didn't provide a memory allocator. It certainly did, otherwise how would it load programs? If you don't believe me, look up INT 21 AH=0x48, 0x49 and 0x4A.
-Graham
MAPI does not replace any of these things. MAPI is a set of COM interfaces that define the interaction between a GUI and an email service provider, all within the client PC. The proprietary over-the-wire protocol used between Exchange and Outlook is sometimes incorrectly referred to as MAPI, but so what.
What's needed is a MAPI service provider that implements all the standard protocols, including the ability to store "special folders" (e.g. a calendar folder) along with the necessary metadata. This is what Bynari has attempted to do but their implementation is cumbersome.
I looked into doing this at one point, but I don't seem to have enough free time.
-Graham
Name one example where what you say has actually happened.
Everyone wants to talk about usability. What if they're wrong? What if this notion of design through usability testing hits a brick wall sometime in the future? I want Debian to be there to say "I told you so." Because if they aren't, nobody will be.
-Graham
Actually, this is the second time Novell has ported the Netware core services to Linux. The first time, it was when Caldera had just started and Ray Noorda (ex Novell CEO) was heavily involved. They released "NDS for Linux" for the then-current Red Hat Linux 6.0, with great fanfare. It worked well; your Linux box was basically indistinguishable from a native Novell box on your network. Which, at the time, was a valuable and worthwhile feature.
I spent some time selling and installing these boxes to small businesses because they could seriously undercut the price of native Netware. They ran well on RHL 6.0, but got flakier on 6.1 and 6.2, and broke completely on 7.0. Novell/Caldera never upgraded or patched. Every time I called or talked to them at a trade show, they would tell me that a new updated version was right around the corner and should be out any day now. But it never happened.
That was FOUR YEARS AGO. Four years and not a peep or whistle or so much as a security patch.
Why should we trust them now?
-Graham
1. If the FBI started pulling over speeders and making them serve 5 year jail terms, you would presumably have to protest.
2. Speeding is a criminal act. File sharing is not. Copyright violation is a CIVIL matter.
-Graham
Corporatism yes, fascism no. Fascism, essentially, is a name for what happens when a democratic system of government chooses to allow the ruling party to use all control and authority to propagate their rule, thus ending (or fictionalizing) democratic control over the government. It is usually also associated with fierce nationalism and racism, though I don't think these are required by definition.
Corporatism is fascism in the service of corporate interests. It happens when corporations gain so much power that they can use that power to propagate the rule of a puppet government under their own control.
The U.S. is not yet fascist. You can determine this by asking the following question: If the Democrats win a majority of Electoral College votes in the 2004 Presidential election, will it be possible for George W. Bush to hang on to power anyway? If not, then the U.S. is not fascist.
-Graham
Napster may be dead as a bent dog, but while it was still kicking it achieved something significant: It convinced my mom, my grandma, and my friend's mom and grandma that they could find and download all the Perry Como songs they could (force me to) tolerate.
They haven't forgotten. If they can't P2P, it just makes them pissed off - they aren't buying $20 CDs ever again.
-Graham
In past generations, clothes were relatively permanent posessions. Today, most clothes you buy can be expected to wear out after a year of regular use. Give me a T-shirt that I can reasonably expect will be part of my estate when I die, and I'll pay $50 or even $100 for it and consider it a bargain.
And you're posting this on Slashdot. My head hurts...
What about multi-story buildings? Lat/long to one meter gives you an accurate 2D location, but which floor is it on?
-Graham
Yeah, I saw about $75,000 totally wasted on a project in Bangalore. But the thing is, it turned out that the U.S.-based project manager was the whole problem - he couldn't understand or communicate the requirements properly. Once we achieved direct communication with the programmers, it all started going much better. There are some smart people in India, and some idiots, just like here...
Not so fast with the assumption that people protecting information can just automatically make use of new techniques. The idea with encryption is that you transmit your information over an insecure channel. This means that the bad guys already have copies of your information, encrypted using the techniques you used. If new techniques become available, you can't go back and use them on your old data, because it's already been transmitted. Therefore, in an arms race where cryptography and cryptanalysis proceed at equal rates, all the information you already own becomes increasingly vulnerable.
People (or agencies) holding a portfolio of critically sensitive information that has already been transmitted (and therefore probably intercepted in encrypted form) have a vital and sustaining interest in research into prime numbers. In many case their interest is in having such research stopped. It will be interesting to see what happens to super-smart but real-world-naive math Ph.D candidates if and when high efficiency factoring techniques become the subject of dissertations....
-Graham
Yeah, except that unless you're really fast at noticing an ad's about to start, you miss the first several seconds after the ads finish. For a few shows, it might matter.
-Graham
Do you feel they owe you something? If the industry collapsed, why should you not feel the effects? What is your rationale for boycotting them?
The National Institute of Health produces many of the interesting drug candidates which the pharmas then develop and market. Vast amounts of taxpayer money are spent having the FDA review the results of the clinical trials the pharmas produce, to defend against the obvious profit motive. This defense is doomed to permanent inadequacy since there is more money available for the pharmas to cheat or game the system than for the FDA to defend against such cheating.
So replace the whole mess with a government department dedicated to new drug development, enjoined by its charter to make the new drugs freely available once they are developed. All pharmaceutical companies can become generics manufacturers, which is a reasonably (but not excessively) profitable business.
I know that everyone will reject this for ideological reasons, but consider that it solves every one of the problems you mentioned.
-Graham
It seems that the gale-force winds at the tufts integral trees would cause torque that would rotate the trees to be aligned along the direction of travel. In the Smoke Ring books, integral trees remain radially oriented. What force prevents them from rotating?
-Graham
I really want to know: Do you know where that reference comes from?
-Graham
You're right, it really does make you wonder what you can trust. The kicker is that you can easily verify that memories are not reliable. Put someone (possibly yourself) in a situation with many details and some sort of activity or storyline, then get them to tell you about it 30 minutes later. Get them to give you detail on what they remember, particularly their visual recollections. They will be clear, specific, and the subject will most likely insist on their accuracy. But they will be wrong in many details. Often so convincingly wrong that if you don't have photographic evidence of what actually happened, you will yourself have difficulty resisting the credibility of the new version!
Better yet, talk to someone who was nodding off during a movie, but didn't realize it. It's best if they clearly saw the beginning and the end. Ask them to describe the plot of the movie. You'll get a complete and (moderately) coherent summary of a plotline that gets you from beginning to end, but it won't match the actual plotline of the film!
It appears that visual memory is constructed on-the-fly as we recollect things, from whatever details are actually available plus a great deal of interpolation based on what we think is probable. Think of it as a compression method: Long-term memory only stores "factoids" that are unique or differ from regular/repeatable experience.
Once you realize that your own memories are untrustworthy, it all gets quite weird...
-Graham
How do you talk when someone is crushing your balls in a deterministically ordered sequence?
-Graham
Very good point. It's clear what the emotional basis of motivation is: We do things to make ourselves feel good. (cf. Freud, Darwin et. al.)
But what is the logical basis of motivation? Why is it logically necessary for Spock to be on the Enterprise, rather than anywhere else?
-Graham