I think about Windows as being similar to people who smoke unfiltered cigarettes. They'll just
kill you quicker than the other kinds. And, when you can do it, abstinence is the only foolproof
way - just don't visit that web site unless you know what it has inside.
They know that Windows-only computing is risky to their computer's health, compared to other
platforms. If they don't see that, consider your role as their friend. Don't you have an obligation to not enable their risk taking and
self-destructive behaviors, and intervene?
Show them some Apple commercials, take them to an Apple store, and show them the stuff you do on
your Macintosh or Linux system. Also show them Firefox, Noscript (controls javascript), and Little snitch (which monitors outgoing internet connections and allows you to opt-in for the ones you want).
The prize money is kind of like a lottery drawing, except that it's based on knowledge and skill, not so much on luck. It attracts teams who will enter despite the fact that there may be better returns on their investments of time and creativity.
The cash price would generate far more media attention than a simple awards ceremony.
If we want to encourage people to invest in science and technology, this is a good way to do it.
It was non-sensical to kill it.
I'll make a public committment of $200 towards a future Darpa Grand Challenge prize, if 10,000 other people will do the same. (I'll leave it as an exercise to Slashdotters to figure out the best way to use pledgebank along with a credible escrow system to accomplish this.)
It's a nice solution, but incomplete. There is no infrastructure
that lets you know which sites are deserving of your trust
(based on other user's feedback or some other mechanism)
There is a standard called 'cablecard', which FCC is supposed to be mandating.
That lets you run the decryption on a card supplied by your cable provider, which plugs in to your
Tivo (maybe certain models only).
So if you're cable monopoly isn't complying, talk to the FCC and your local government cable authority
A large fraction of my printing is of receipts that I have scanned in, so I have a
permanent record.
Most receipts now use thermal paper that turns black when exposed to heat and/or sunlight.
Why isn't there a class action suit (or a law) against 'self-destructing' business records?
The 'other' (virtual) future - Managed code/CLR?
on
Vista the Last of Its Kind
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
Now that Microsoft has added dynamic language features to the CLR with.NET 2.0, you'll see python,
smalltalk, scheme and other Lisps run tolerably well in that environment. This will enabling fresh new approaches for software development.
If Microsoft offered an operating system release that was:
1) An OS Kernel, no User Interface features
2) Allow new device drivers to be installed/uninstalled to support video, disks and other I/O devices
3) Runs only managed code on top of the kernel
you might have something a bit less bloated. But, you would essentialy be destroying the Earth in order to save the rest of the Solar System. It wouldn't really be Windows anymore.
After about 10 years, enough people will figure out that you can build common (shared) libraries
that encompass the needs of word processing, spreadsheets, web browsing, video and audio codecs, network protocols, web services.
So applications are delivered as scripting code that tie these components together. [Look at the Flux& Fluke project from Utah, and Jini for ways to make all of this work.]
Then you'll be able to run most anything you need for 'everyday' computing in 2017, whatever that is.
Will it seem like 1993 all over again? Probably.
It's a market - if people want to lay proprietary or binary codecs on top of an Open Source
operating system, they can do that. As long as the hardware makers 'allow' you a choice of software,
the "iTunes" people will eventually get it and exercise the power of choice.
Sure, you may have issues with some purists not allowing you to run proprietary code on their "Open Source Nirvana" system, but how are they going to enforce it? With DRM or 'trusted computing' technologies?;-)
DRM is being used to prevent legal operations, like backup of data and software. If I want to backup my Tivo hard drive, I have that right (in the US). Companies abusing the trust of gift economy by putting GPL code behind cloaks like DRM, DCMA, and patents, and the license is a technical solution.
Since people who write the code have the choice of how to license it (unlike people subjected to DRM), how can a choice of license (gplv2, modified GPL2, or GPL3) be wrong?
If I want to run Apple software in Intel hardware, I'm forced into buying Apple hardware, which comes with mandatory (hardware DRM). I can get source code under Apple licenses for darwin for PPC, but not Intel. Why?
Thanks Circuit City.
You saved me from having to replicate my "Star Wars holiday special" bootleg.
The thought of Lumpy and Leia singing gives me a headache every time I put
the master copy in my DVD-ROM drive;-(
The Anandtech article isn't apples-to-apples [sorry, bad pun].)
SGI's better option is to partner with a firm like DRC Computer Corp, and link lots of high-speed Opterons with FPGAs and GPUs, all on a high-speed interconnect.
SGI systems have to beat the Cell processor (with better software) to stay relevant. SGI could focus software on providing gaming dev. platforms that allow you to develop for multiple platforms. Would that require another processor change? Probably.
Whatever that turns into, it's not the "Unix engineering/visualization market", anymore.
Now that Cleanflix has proven the market, the court decision is irrelevant.
Another technology will rise up and make it possible to
skip the 'objectionable' portions, just like you can almost skip commercials with
Tivo.
The real end-game here is taking the humans out of the loop enitirely,
driving isn't that hard if you're paying attention.
I worked on the Navlab project project at Carnegie-Mellon in the 1980s. The project built several a robotic cars, aided by vision systems and other specialized sensors, that could distinguish the road from other features, and drive. Top speed was less than 20 miles/hour in the 1980s. In the 1990s, these systems achieved speeds of 90 mph on the interstate, and only required the equivalent of a Pentium 150 in the trunk of the car (along with good sensors).
Robots don't hog the left lane driving 50 miles per hour, talking on their cell phone.
Human still need to pay attention, since there are always situations where the automated systems get into trouble.
The problem is - there are too many of these subscription services now.
You almost have to pay an intermediary to give you the chunks of all of
them that you need. For example, I should be able to subscribe to satellite
radio as another piece of my cable service. If you have a 'set-top' box that
can limit your attention to one media stream at a time, I believe the providers
will be able to divide up my $20-$30/month into chunks for the music service,
the scheduled TV program service, and the TV program 'rental' service. At
$1/day, there's enough revenue for everything except possibly marketing. Oh well.
Just because something is a new technology doesn't mean I'll pay for it in
addition to all the other stuff I pay for now. The current media systems are
much more flexible and long-lived than what the proposed replacements are.
I use NetFlix at 18.00/month. If there were a digital movie subscription that
didn't impose restrictions on my ability to watch my movie anywhere that has
a DVD player, for example, I'd do that. With a DVD, I can take the physical
medium to any convenient viewing location. I can't do that with my laptop (yet)
Free experiences will always be valued - Open Source can give me a viable
software experience that I can obtain for the cost of the media or the bandwidth
to download it with. I don't have to pay an annual subscription or
'software maintenance' fee unless I see the value in it.
Companies do not seem to want unbundling of their services, it makes their
life more complicated, since they have to treat each customer individually.
Telephone companies, and their obsoleted-by-VOIP 'settlement' process for
sharing revenue among the originating, terminating, and 'long-distance'
telephone company, will be used as a model for this kind of sharing.
I predict SBC and others' attempts to
charge Internet 'information providers' such as Google will fail.
However, if it appears to take hold, a community-based 'serverless' search engine
will take it's place.
Pressure for 'unmetered' access will be constant, now that people have had a taste.
With PalmOS on Phones an orphan, Linux is needed
on
Linux Boots on Treo 650
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
[I'm an unsatistifed Treo 180 owner - mine cracked in half twice.]
PalmOS is a dead platform as far as phones are concerned. The treo 700 uses Windows. At least Linux has a lifetime longer than what the manufacturer will support with their native OS.
I think new classes of applications will be built for these things.
And they'll run a lot faster than my Apple ][ or 386 PC ever ran anything.
I'm just not sure I want to be the first one to order a million units of a
new product.
Just becaause it's linux doesn't mean you have to go with XFree86
and GCC. Some of the good work Apple did on the Newton and eMate
could be resurrected, especially now that Dylan
http://www.gwydiondylan.org/downloading.phtml
implementations are open-sourced.
I just need to get 1000 of my friends to sign up 1000 of their friends, and
we'll be ready.
Look, the whole point of the RFCs is that there are commonly accepted standards.
If they aren't complying, then why on EARTH would you want to accomodate them?
This shows that goDaddy didn't do an adequate job of testing, otherwise this would have shown up before they deployed it. You cannot 'outsource' testing to your vendors, that's a job you should be doing yourself. Back in the day, we even tested using AOL's browser, even though the clueful subscribers used the real deal.
Now, I always put an RFC compliance clause in my vendor contracts, otherwise you could be forced to pay for crap. Even ICANN does that http://www.icann.org/cctlds/au/proposed-sponsorshi p-agmt-04sep01.htm
(Appendix F, section 3)
Next, they'll violate an RFC that is 'more' important. What will you do then?
As long as 'whois' information is available to anyone, anonymously, people will provide incorrect information. The privacy proxy should be required.
The whois queries have to be replaced with an inquiry directly to me, through a mediated mechanism like my ISP's customer service, or a PGP-authenticated e-mail address. This will result in real-time blacklisting of bogus PGP-email addresses, etc. The Internet will develop a kind of 'immune system', eventually.
Once that happens, I'm more likely to provide a mailbox that I actually check.
The risk to national security pales compared to the risk to our emerging digital economy. Imagine the anti-DRM schemes these aliens must have.
We must outlaw ALL A/D converters, 'open' radio receivers, and software defined radio research! If anyone converts those alien signals from analog to digital form, we're done for!
Hey, at least they're going to the right conference and presenting papers!
Every large research group (and/or person with a lot of time on their hands) eventually builds their own operating system, or creates their own programming language.
Choices was an OS written in C++
I believe DEC WRL wrote operating systems in Modula-3 (type-safety helped here)
The Mayflower project (at MIT and elsewhere) planned to use CLU (a type-safe language from MIT) as a base.
The C# guys are adding dynamic language features to their VM, so Microsoft research can hire/distract/annoy a lot of Lisp and smalltalk fans.
It's all good!
The problem is really that people shouldn't have the mindset of writing
raw GUI calls anymore. Once you've build your web broswer or UIMS, you
are then just sending message back and forth between your presentation layer
and application.
This should almost be a no-brainer, given the rich XML examples out there.
Can anyone point to some examples?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UIMS (User Interface Mgmt system)
Slashdot Mirror
I think about Windows as being similar to people who smoke unfiltered cigarettes. They'll just kill you quicker than the other kinds. And, when you can do it, abstinence is the only foolproof way - just don't visit that web site unless you know what it has inside.
They know that Windows-only computing is risky to their computer's health, compared to other platforms. If they don't see that, consider your role as their friend. Don't you have an obligation to not enable their risk taking and self-destructive behaviors, and intervene?
Show them some Apple commercials, take them to an Apple store, and show them the stuff you do on your Macintosh or Linux system. Also show them Firefox, Noscript (controls javascript), and Little snitch (which monitors outgoing internet connections and allows you to opt-in for the ones you want).
The prize money is kind of like a lottery drawing, except that it's based on knowledge and skill, not so much on luck. It attracts teams who will enter despite the fact that there may be better returns on their investments of time and creativity.
The cash price would generate far more media attention than a simple awards ceremony. If we want to encourage people to invest in science and technology, this is a good way to do it.
It was non-sensical to kill it.
I'll make a public committment of $200 towards a future Darpa Grand Challenge prize, if 10,000 other people will do the same. (I'll leave it as an exercise to Slashdotters to figure out the best way to use pledgebank along with a credible escrow system to accomplish this.)
It's a nice solution, but incomplete. There is no infrastructure that lets you know which sites are deserving of your trust (based on other user's feedback or some other mechanism)
There is a standard called 'cablecard', which FCC is supposed to be mandating. That lets you run the decryption on a card supplied by your cable provider, which plugs in to your Tivo (maybe certain models only). So if you're cable monopoly isn't complying, talk to the FCC and your local government cable authority
A large fraction of my printing is of receipts that I have scanned in, so I have a permanent record. Most receipts now use thermal paper that turns black when exposed to heat and/or sunlight. Why isn't there a class action suit (or a law) against 'self-destructing' business records?
Now that Microsoft has added dynamic language features to the CLR with .NET 2.0, you'll see python,
smalltalk, scheme and other Lisps run tolerably well in that environment. This will enabling fresh new approaches for software development.
If Microsoft offered an operating system release that was:
1) An OS Kernel, no User Interface features
2) Allow new device drivers to be installed/uninstalled to support video, disks and other I/O devices
3) Runs only managed code on top of the kernel
you might have something a bit less bloated. But, you would essentialy be destroying the Earth in order to save the rest of the Solar System. It wouldn't really be Windows anymore.
After about 10 years, enough people will figure out that you can build common (shared) libraries that encompass the needs of word processing, spreadsheets, web browsing, video and audio codecs, network protocols, web services.
So applications are delivered as scripting code that tie these components together. [Look at the Flux& Fluke project from Utah, and Jini for ways to make all of this work.]
Then you'll be able to run most anything you need for 'everyday' computing in 2017, whatever that is. Will it seem like 1993 all over again? Probably.
It's a market - if people want to lay proprietary or binary codecs on top of an Open Source operating system, they can do that. As long as the hardware makers 'allow' you a choice of software, the "iTunes" people will eventually get it and exercise the power of choice. Sure, you may have issues with some purists not allowing you to run proprietary code on their "Open Source Nirvana" system, but how are they going to enforce it? With DRM or 'trusted computing' technologies? ;-)
DRM is being used to prevent legal operations, like backup of data and software. If I want to backup my Tivo hard drive, I have that right (in the US). Companies abusing the trust of gift economy by putting GPL code behind cloaks like DRM, DCMA, and patents, and the license is a technical solution. Since people who write the code have the choice of how to license it (unlike people subjected to DRM), how can a choice of license (gplv2, modified GPL2, or GPL3) be wrong? If I want to run Apple software in Intel hardware, I'm forced into buying Apple hardware, which comes with mandatory (hardware DRM). I can get source code under Apple licenses for darwin for PPC, but not Intel. Why?
Sounds like a job for a business analyst, IMO.
Thanks Circuit City. You saved me from having to replicate my "Star Wars holiday special" bootleg. The thought of Lumpy and Leia singing gives me a headache every time I put the master copy in my DVD-ROM drive ;-(
OS X w/Quartz isn't as efficient as a 'basic' Linux or *BSD kernel.6 /36/#comment-805m and
p =8 for details
Check http://ridiculousfish.com/blog/archives/2006/05/1
http://www.anandtech.com/mac/showdoc.aspx?i=2436&
The Anandtech article isn't apples-to-apples [sorry, bad pun].)
SGI's better option is to partner with a firm like DRC Computer Corp, and link lots of
high-speed Opterons with FPGAs and GPUs, all on a high-speed interconnect.
SGI systems have to beat the Cell processor (with better software) to stay relevant.
SGI could focus software on providing gaming dev. platforms that allow you to
develop for multiple platforms. Would that require another processor change? Probably.
Whatever that turns into, it's not the "Unix engineering/visualization market", anymore.
Good luck, SGI.
Now that Cleanflix has proven the market, the court decision is irrelevant. Another technology will rise up and make it possible to skip the 'objectionable' portions, just like you can almost skip commercials with Tivo.
Mac on Linux is one thing, but I've still got 680X0 apps that I like to run from time to time. (Not many, but there is no reason to 'switch')
I worked on the Navlab project project at Carnegie-Mellon in the 1980s. The project built several a robotic cars, aided by vision systems and other specialized sensors, that could distinguish the road from other features, and drive. Top speed was less than 20 miles/hour in the 1980s. In the 1990s, these systems achieved speeds of 90 mph on the interstate, and only required the equivalent of a Pentium 150 in the trunk of the car (along with good sensors).
Technology from the same university has performed well in the DARPA grand challenge. http://www.grandchallenge.org/
Robots don't hog the left lane driving 50 miles per hour, talking on their cell phone. Human still need to pay attention, since there are always situations where the automated systems get into trouble.
Check out http://www.cs.cmu.edu.nyud.net:8090/afs/cs/project /alv/www/
and http://www.assistware.com.nyud.net:8090/
for details
The problem is - there are too many of these subscription services now.
You almost have to pay an intermediary to give you the chunks of all of them that you need. For example, I should be able to subscribe to satellite radio as another piece of my cable service. If you have a 'set-top' box that can limit your attention to one media stream at a time, I believe the providers will be able to divide up my $20-$30/month into chunks for the music service, the scheduled TV program service, and the TV program 'rental' service. At $1/day, there's enough revenue for everything except possibly marketing. Oh well.
Just because something is a new technology doesn't mean I'll pay for it in addition to all the other stuff I pay for now. The current media systems are much more flexible and long-lived than what the proposed replacements are.
I use NetFlix at 18.00/month. If there were a digital movie subscription that didn't impose restrictions on my ability to watch my movie anywhere that has a DVD player, for example, I'd do that. With a DVD, I can take the physical medium to any convenient viewing location. I can't do that with my laptop (yet)
Free experiences will always be valued - Open Source can give me a viable software experience that I can obtain for the cost of the media or the bandwidth to download it with. I don't have to pay an annual subscription or 'software maintenance' fee unless I see the value in it.
Companies do not seem to want unbundling of their services, it makes their life more complicated, since they have to treat each customer individually. Telephone companies, and their obsoleted-by-VOIP 'settlement' process for sharing revenue among the originating, terminating, and 'long-distance' telephone company, will be used as a model for this kind of sharing.
I predict SBC and others' attempts to charge Internet 'information providers' such as Google will fail. However, if it appears to take hold, a community-based 'serverless' search engine will take it's place.
Pressure for 'unmetered' access will be constant, now that people have had a taste.
[I'm an unsatistifed Treo 180 owner - mine cracked in half twice.] PalmOS is a dead platform as far as phones are concerned. The treo 700 uses Windows. At least Linux has a lifetime longer than what the manufacturer will support with their native OS.
I think new classes of applications will be built for these things. And they'll run a lot faster than my Apple ][ or 386 PC ever ran anything.
I'm just not sure I want to be the first one to order a million units of a new product.
Just becaause it's linux doesn't mean you have to go with XFree86 and GCC. Some of the good work Apple did on the Newton and eMate could be resurrected, especially now that Dylan http://www.gwydiondylan.org/downloading.phtml implementations are open-sourced.
I just need to get 1000 of my friends to sign up 1000 of their friends, and we'll be ready.
Look, the whole point of the RFCs is that there are commonly accepted standards. If they aren't complying, then why on EARTH would you want to accomodate them? This shows that goDaddy didn't do an adequate job of testing, otherwise this would have shown up before they deployed it. You cannot 'outsource' testing to your vendors, that's a job you should be doing yourself. Back in the day, we even tested using AOL's browser, even though the clueful subscribers used the real deal. Now, I always put an RFC compliance clause in my vendor contracts, otherwise you could be forced to pay for crap. Even ICANN does that http://www.icann.org/cctlds/au/proposed-sponsorshi p-agmt-04sep01.htm
(Appendix F, section 3)
Next, they'll violate an RFC that is 'more' important. What will you do then?
As long as 'whois' information is available to anyone, anonymously, people will provide incorrect information. The privacy proxy should be required. The whois queries have to be replaced with an inquiry directly to me, through a mediated mechanism like my ISP's customer service, or a PGP-authenticated e-mail address. This will result in real-time blacklisting of bogus PGP-email addresses, etc. The Internet will develop a kind of 'immune system', eventually. Once that happens, I'm more likely to provide a mailbox that I actually check.
The risk to national security pales compared to the risk to our emerging digital economy. Imagine the anti-DRM schemes these aliens must have. We must outlaw ALL A/D converters, 'open' radio receivers, and software defined radio research! If anyone converts those alien signals from analog to digital form, we're done for!
Fortunately, it's easy to get compliant. Just click on the http://slashdot.org/relocate.pl?id=ac9f58e816ad004 50f94620496a5d529
Compare prices on Mozilla link in the right hand side of the browser...
Choices was an OS written in C++
I believe DEC WRL wrote operating systems in Modula-3 (type-safety helped here)
The Mayflower project (at MIT and elsewhere) planned to use CLU (a type-safe language from MIT) as a base.
The C# guys are adding dynamic language features to their VM, so Microsoft research can hire/distract/annoy a lot of Lisp and smalltalk fans.
It's all good!
The problem is really that people shouldn't have the mindset of writing raw GUI calls anymore.
Once you've build your web broswer or UIMS, you are then just sending message back and forth between your presentation layer and application. This should almost be a no-brainer, given the rich XML examples out there. Can anyone point to some examples?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UIMS (User Interface Mgmt system)
Comparisons with Star Wars aren't helpful. King Kong has more fur. Rendering fur is hard work.