Hear Ye, Hear Ye, citizens of the world, be it known to all present, Her Majesty's System Administrator has spoken - Free *nix is hereby declared the "Better Value Proposition"(tm); therefore and forthwith, let all who would misrepresent for greedy promulgation of false doctrine and profit thereby on the unsuspecting, henceforth be quiet and quit their arrogant boasting of the inferior OS and seek instead to improve upon their products untill it should be of goodly quality, and then return to the arena of competition.
these escalating technological lock/crack games remind me of the early home computer days when software houses would come up with some copy protection scheme - which is just putting up a big sign that says, "Crack Me" in the first place - and inevitably someone in the rest of the world finds a way around it. Like someone said, most movies get old after one or two viewings anyway; the real prob is people who want to make and *SELL* unofficial copies, and they can be prosecuted in other ways than inconveniencing the mostly innocent law abiding rest of us over fear of what a very few would do.
well, slugs are nice and slow and easy pickings for a small 'bot - make something that'll patrol my kitchen and snap up La Cocka Roachas all night and I'll be impressed - that would take some sensor-actuator coordination:))
The digester is a neat idea, but since it has to 'return to base' to ferment the biomass is it really more effecient that just tapping into the mains to recharge? Then there's the post-ferment waste to deal with - fertilizer?
I guess since NT4 & Win98, enough suckers have been born to fall for the upgrade snobbery that most of this is. About the only thing I'm looking for in W2K is an actual directory service - again, in true Microsoft® tradition, finally releasing something that has been in existance for the past 15 years, and a majority of people will come to beleive that M$ 'innovated' it.
Naturally they'll not only want to charge what the market will bear, but also continue to drive competitors out of business. Predatory: If there is competition, the products will be agressivly priced, 'dumped', untill competitors file for chapter 11. Once this occurs, consumers become dependant upon a single, lone monopoly vendor - they can charge whatever is necessary to satisfy Microsoft employees, stockholders and other dependants and interests. A steep demand curve is like gasoline or drug addiction - the price can go up sharply but demand remains strong because you 'gotta have it' to survive and thus will pay high prices untill you find an alternative, which takes time.
Maybe this is the best thing that could happen to Microsoft® - maybe they're just letting it happen or quietly encouraging the rise of alternatives - maybe then they can focus on quality speciality software like Office2K and leave "Windows Everywhere!" and World Dominion(TM) behind and let the monopoly charges fade away THE SAME WAY that the monopoly case aginst IBM was just dropped in the early 80's when it was patently obvious that the rise of PC's made monopoly charges irrevelent.
There's a complex of issues surrounding whether to 'do it' inhouse or farm it out to a contractor - it's just competition for jobs - I keep a stock of spare parts to fix our PC's, known tested, good parts, often run everyday in the shop, to do *quick* swaps outs and minimize down time - but I'm expecting this to become more difficult as more and more people WILL buy 'prefab-warrentied' PC's as they succumb to the vendors sales pitch of how great it's going to be. A few examples of the difficulties on this path: One vendor offered system boards with CPU's and fans pre-installed, all under a 'warrenty' - what happened in reality is that their cheap fans crapped out, and I couldn't change the $10 things w/o voiding a warrenty sticker! We had to suffer days of down to to ship the whole mobo back just to get a stinkin' fan replaced. Another brand of pre-fab showed up with 'no disks present' and we had to wait a day for a tech to drive over and pull off the "Warrenty Void if removed!" sticker and plug it in. There are other considerations.
some prominant people have economic sense - from what I understand the monarchy has been under some pressure to justify their existance, some people would like to establish a republic and the royals trying to clean up their media image, hiring media public relations consultants. This is certainly a good way to show good will towards their people, i.e., we're willing to do some work for you, not just take your taxes and ship 'em off to buy tacky faux-luxuries from foreign window shops to assuage some venal, banal vanity.
Our 401k provider, Franklin Templeton just put up their web interface, http://www.valuselect.com/ and our personnal mgr was having problems - I tried it on one perfectly good browser machine and watched it thrash the hard disk for 4 hours before I cancelled it. Just checked Netcraft and sho 'nuff, it's coming from the IIS/NT4 mentality. I would LIKE to tell them if they design a site the only works with you-know-what I will take my $$$ elsewhere - but for the employer match and my vested interest.
on a list far away in another time, some catholic mother suggested: "Adults should not be allowed to do anything that children aren't" - I didn't even bother to replay that if that were the case, there wouldn't BE any children:))
that *real* people in various walks of life are not portayed accurately in any media - this goes not only for computer professionals of various degrees but doctors, lawyers, policemen, cooks, etc. I'm sure most police officers go thru each day dealing with at lease one person with TV/Movie inspired misconceptions and takes it in stride. It's gets DRAMATIZED for your entertainment enjoyment, exaggerated, caricaturized beyond recognition. In return I like to imagine all Hollywood producers as something like a Mel Brooks but not as clever.:))
I Think the cliche' media types are trying to promote w/ 'hackerz' is something like an updated plain ol' espianoge spy thriller, cloak and dagger intrigue stuff, smuggling messages thru enemy lines, etc, etc, etc.
I was there and still have the Altair - it was an aweful machine, and MITS had lots of problems keeping up with demand. Two things: 4K BASIC for the altair cost $150! That's almost 4 cents a byte! No wonder all us hardware hackers just pirated copies so we could play 'startrek'. Also, when MITS was tanking, Pertec bought them out under the mistaken impression that they were also buying the MITS Basic software - wrongo! It's been a career of backstab, slash & burn ever since. Boy, it must be nice to have lawers and bankers in the immediate family - you could screw up anybody you want. Both MITS and pertec made the mistake of trusting the boy genie-ass enfant-terrible.
"... how can this be with your companies' track record of pressuring small, innovative companies to either not compete or be absorbed into M$? Your currently on trial just for the behavior of leveraging a near monopoly in one area, and the vast profits derived from that monopoly, to effectively squelch anyone who could conceviably challange that monopoly? So far the pattern has been M$ finds themselves behind in some area, such as Internetworking, which was barely mentioned in your book "The Road Ahead", and then scrambles to catch up and take over. Companies such as Netscape and AOL's Instant Messaging come to mind as OTHER people's innovations re-appropriated by leveraging your desktop monopoly, and creating the misleading impression amongst non-computer industry customers that there were somehow M$ creations. By the way, Bill - how come our accounts payable PC suddenly can't read email due to a registry error? Do you think the time and costs spent by customers cleaning up M$ 'bit rot' unfairly contributes to the profits of your company, especially considering that your products are 'closed-proprietary' making them even more difficult to troubleshoot and repair?"
it maybe too way out, and depends on your definition of 'exists', but as for objective reality you will find things changing but you can't find a thing or process you can label 'time'. So lets differentiate between 'rates of change' and some subjective metaphysical framework of measuring that change and comparing it with other changes. Part of this confusion, which seems to be rampant here, is the use of 'distance' in physical space as an ANALOGY of change, which we call time, which includes Einsteins use of the "4th dimension", which has some very good uses, but also creates some problems, notably the perennial problem of 'time travel' - which is clearly confusing traveling thru space with something that, uh, doesn't exist! That also relates to the physics problem of the 'direction' of the arrow of time. I can move back and forth in space, but 'time' just inexorably chugs on like an unstoppable juggernaught. Why CAN'T I 'travel' in time? This is also such a fundamental conception (space as an analogy of rates of change) that I suspect it is wired into the brain to happen automatically w/o consciously thinking, maybe related to motor function as an animal moving or running must look ahead and plan for 'future' movements, as in a few movements I'll be over there and must act accordingly, perhaps to escape a predator. Those that couldn't see the near 'future' were eaten. Anyway, those of a more religious or metaphysical persuasion will understand (probably why it isn't flying here, heh) - there's been books with names like The Eternal Now etc. (it doesn't exist in print either:)
In sum, memories exist, the past doesn't; everything is changing, but tomorrow never comes. Time exists in natural reality as much as centimeters, yen, or yardsticks do. If 'time' existed as an objective reality independant of the human (or animal for that matter) brain why would the bureau of standards have to erect expensive radio stations linked to extremely stable regularly changing events like cesium atoms to tell us what it is? Why would there be so many different calendars pegged to largely arbitrary events, like some dude's birthday or the founding of Rome or whatever.
BTW, be sure to get NIST's Internet Time Synchronizer and bug them to make a Linux version. I use it all the, ahem, time to keep these lousy PC clocks somewhere in the vicinty (isn't that a spacial term meaning close?) of a standard. And another thing: why do we keep having to add leap years and leap seconds to keep us earthlings synchronized with astronomical events like the transit of a particular star on a slowly slowing earth if the time we're so familiar with actually is an absolute?
This is the same group that also says to not roll out W2K untill it's up to service pack 3 - unless you want your office to pay good $$$ to be a Microsoft® crash test dummy and donate your time and effort to helping out poor Redmond millionaires. We'll see just how much patience ordinary office workers trying to do a job have with the next paradigm shift!
Monsanto made seeds that germinate only when fertilized by other Monsanto GM'd plants - kind of a genetic 'embrace, extend and privitize'. And if they could make some sort of Monsanto logo grow on each leaf, perhaps GM'd so that advertising shows up on each corn stalk like "Use only genuine Monsanto products" or "Best grown with Monsanto!".
Slashdot Mirror
Hear Ye, Hear Ye, citizens of the world, be it known to all present, Her Majesty's System Administrator has spoken - Free *nix is hereby declared the "Better Value Proposition"(tm); therefore and forthwith, let all who would misrepresent for greedy promulgation of false doctrine and profit thereby on the unsuspecting, henceforth be quiet and quit their arrogant boasting of the inferior OS and seek instead to improve upon their products untill it should be of goodly quality, and then return to the arena of competition.
Sir Chuck
On whose chest read the prices of ale
whereas on her behind
for the sake of the blind
were the same, except printed in braile.
Chuck
(probably mangled the 2nd line)
these escalating technological lock/crack games remind me of the early home computer days when software houses would come up with some copy protection scheme - which is just putting up a big sign that says, "Crack Me" in the first place - and inevitably someone in the rest of the world finds a way around it. Like someone said, most movies get old after one or two viewings anyway; the real prob is people who want to make and *SELL* unofficial copies, and they can be prosecuted in other ways than inconveniencing the mostly innocent law abiding rest of us over fear of what a very few would do.
Chuck
well, slugs are nice and slow and easy pickings for a small 'bot - make something that'll patrol my kitchen and snap up La Cocka Roachas all night and I'll be impressed - that would take some sensor-actuator coordination :))
The digester is a neat idea, but since it has to 'return to base' to ferment the biomass is it really more effecient that just tapping into the mains to recharge? Then there's the post-ferment waste to deal with - fertilizer?
Chuck
W2K - act now! While supplies last!
I guess since NT4 & Win98, enough suckers have been born to fall for the upgrade snobbery that most of this is. About the only thing I'm looking for in W2K is an actual directory service - again, in true Microsoft® tradition, finally releasing something that has been in existance for the past 15 years, and a majority of people will come to beleive that M$ 'innovated' it.
Chuck
Naturally they'll not only want to charge what the market will bear, but also continue to drive competitors out of business. Predatory: If there is competition, the products will be agressivly priced, 'dumped', untill competitors file for chapter 11. Once this occurs, consumers become dependant upon a single, lone monopoly vendor - they can charge whatever is necessary to satisfy Microsoft employees, stockholders and other dependants and interests. A steep demand curve is like gasoline or drug addiction - the price can go up sharply but demand remains strong because you 'gotta have it' to survive and thus will pay high prices untill you find an alternative, which takes time.
Chuck
Maybe this is the best thing that could happen to Microsoft® - maybe they're just letting it happen or quietly encouraging the rise of alternatives - maybe then they can focus on quality speciality software like Office2K and leave "Windows Everywhere!" and World Dominion(TM) behind and let the monopoly charges fade away THE SAME WAY that the monopoly case aginst IBM was just dropped in the early 80's when it was patently obvious that the rise of PC's made monopoly charges irrevelent.
Chuck
There's a complex of issues surrounding whether to 'do it' inhouse or farm it out to a contractor - it's just competition for jobs - I keep a stock of spare parts to fix our PC's, known tested, good parts, often run everyday in the shop, to do *quick* swaps outs and minimize down time - but I'm expecting this to become more difficult as more and more people WILL buy 'prefab-warrentied' PC's as they succumb to the vendors sales pitch of how great it's going to be. A few examples of the difficulties on this path: One vendor offered system boards with CPU's and fans pre-installed, all under a 'warrenty' - what happened in reality is that their cheap fans crapped out, and I couldn't change the $10 things w/o voiding a warrenty sticker! We had to suffer days of down to to ship the whole mobo back just to get a stinkin' fan replaced. Another brand of pre-fab showed up with 'no disks present' and we had to wait a day for a tech to drive over and pull off the "Warrenty Void if removed!" sticker and plug it in. There are other considerations.
Chuck
that's where everyone Incorporates for lower taxes.
Chuck
I thought he was talking about Michael J. Fox in Back to the Future in which case it IS Marty. Who's George?
Chuck
he used to play this apropos song
(from memory, parts may be wrong)
----------------------------------
Oh mi God! You little geek
get away before I freak
I'm the queen of babe's supreme
and you'll only see me in your dreams
I'm too hot too hot too hot for you!
Ha ha ha don't make me laugh
I want a whole man, not a half
You wet your pant, I'm so sure
too bad wimpitis has no cure
I'm too hot too hot too hot for you!
You ugly, stupid, zippy scum,
you ask me out, you MUST be dumb!
You can beg until your blue
but your not even fit to like my shoe
I'm too hot too hot too hot for you!
-----------------------------------------
Chuck
some prominant people have economic sense - from what I understand the monarchy has been under some pressure to justify their existance, some people would like to establish a republic and the royals trying to clean up their media image, hiring media public relations consultants. This is certainly a good way to show good will towards their people, i.e., we're willing to do some work for you, not just take your taxes and ship 'em off to buy tacky faux-luxuries from foreign window shops to assuage some venal, banal vanity.
Chuck
{ my thesarus is wearing out }
Our 401k provider, Franklin Templeton just put up their web interface, http://www.valuselect.com/ and our personnal mgr was having problems - I tried it on one perfectly good browser machine and watched it thrash the hard disk for 4 hours before I cancelled it. Just checked Netcraft and sho 'nuff, it's coming from the IIS/NT4 mentality. I would LIKE to tell them if they design a site the only works with you-know-what I will take my $$$ elsewhere - but for the employer match and my vested interest.
Chuck
on a list far away in another time, some catholic mother suggested: "Adults should not be allowed to do anything that children aren't" - I didn't even bother to replay that if that were the case, there wouldn't BE any children :))
Chuck
that *real* people in various walks of life are not portayed accurately in any media - this goes not only for computer professionals of various degrees but doctors, lawyers, policemen, cooks, etc. I'm sure most police officers go thru each day dealing with at lease one person with TV/Movie inspired misconceptions and takes it in stride. It's gets DRAMATIZED for your entertainment enjoyment, exaggerated, caricaturized beyond recognition. In return I like to imagine all Hollywood producers as something like a Mel Brooks but not as clever. :))
I Think the cliche' media types are trying to promote w/ 'hackerz' is something like an updated plain ol' espianoge spy thriller, cloak and dagger intrigue stuff, smuggling messages thru enemy lines, etc, etc, etc.
Chuck
the DOJ still uses WordPerfect. Vee have vays of making things, um, deeficult eef you do not cooperate, hmmmm?
Chuck
I was there and still have the Altair - it was an aweful machine, and MITS had lots of problems keeping up with demand. Two things: 4K BASIC for the altair cost $150! That's almost 4 cents a byte! No wonder all us hardware hackers just pirated copies so we could play 'startrek'. Also, when MITS was tanking, Pertec bought them out under the mistaken impression that they were also buying the MITS Basic software - wrongo! It's been a career of backstab, slash & burn ever since.
Boy, it must be nice to have lawers and bankers in the immediate family - you could screw up anybody you want. Both MITS and pertec made the mistake of trusting the boy genie-ass enfant-terrible.
Chuck
"... how can this be with your companies' track record of pressuring small, innovative companies to either not compete or be absorbed into M$? Your currently on trial just for the behavior of leveraging a near monopoly in one area, and the vast profits derived from that monopoly, to effectively squelch anyone who could conceviably challange that monopoly? So far the pattern has been M$ finds themselves behind in some area, such as Internetworking, which was barely mentioned in your book "The Road Ahead", and then scrambles to catch up and take over. Companies such as Netscape and AOL's Instant Messaging come to mind as OTHER people's innovations re-appropriated by leveraging your desktop monopoly, and creating the misleading impression amongst non-computer industry customers that there were somehow M$ creations. By the way, Bill - how come our accounts payable PC suddenly can't read email due to a registry error? Do you think the time and costs spent by customers cleaning up M$ 'bit rot' unfairly contributes to the profits of your company, especially considering that your products are 'closed-proprietary' making them even more difficult to troubleshoot and repair?"
....
I could go on and on
Chuck
it maybe too way out, and depends on your definition of 'exists', but as for objective reality you will find things changing but you can't find a thing or process you can label 'time'. So lets differentiate between 'rates of change' and some subjective metaphysical framework of measuring that change and comparing it with other changes. Part of this confusion, which seems to be rampant here, is the use of 'distance' in physical space as an ANALOGY of change, which we call time, which includes Einsteins use of the "4th dimension", which has some very good uses, but also creates some problems, notably the perennial problem of 'time travel' - which is clearly confusing traveling thru space with something that, uh, doesn't exist! That also relates to the physics problem of the 'direction' of the arrow of time. I can move back and forth in space, but 'time' just inexorably chugs on like an unstoppable juggernaught. Why CAN'T I 'travel' in time? This is also such a fundamental conception (space as an analogy of rates of change) that I suspect it is wired into the brain to happen automatically w/o consciously thinking, maybe related to motor function as an animal moving or running must look ahead and plan for 'future' movements, as in a few movements I'll be over there and must act accordingly, perhaps to escape a predator. Those that couldn't see the near 'future' were eaten. Anyway, those of a more religious or metaphysical persuasion will understand (probably why it isn't flying here, heh) - there's been books with names like The Eternal Now etc. (it doesn't exist in print either :)
In sum, memories exist, the past doesn't; everything is changing, but tomorrow never comes.
Time exists in natural reality as much as centimeters, yen, or yardsticks do. If 'time' existed as an objective reality independant of the human (or animal for that matter) brain why would the bureau of standards have to erect expensive radio stations linked to extremely stable regularly changing events like cesium atoms to tell us what it is? Why would there be so many different calendars pegged to largely arbitrary events, like some dude's birthday or the founding of Rome or whatever.
BTW, be sure to get NIST's Internet Time Synchronizer and bug them to make a Linux version. I use it all the, ahem, time to keep these lousy PC clocks somewhere in the vicinty (isn't that a spacial term meaning close?) of a standard. And another thing: why do we keep having to add leap years and leap seconds to keep us earthlings synchronized with astronomical events like the transit of a particular star on a slowly slowing earth if the time we're so familiar with actually is an absolute?
Chuck
Anyone?
Chuck
Venture Capitalist - Backer
Breaks into other peoples systems to damage them - Cracker
Enjoys exploring as a learning experience - Hacker
Picks up dead animals - Knacker
Puts things in boxes - Packer
Member of religious sect - Quaker
Content to run 'setup' and use all defaults - Slacker
That should clear things up!
Chuck
This is the same group that also says to not roll out W2K untill it's up to service pack 3 - unless you want your office to pay good $$$ to be a Microsoft® crash test dummy and donate your time and effort to helping out poor Redmond millionaires. We'll see just how much patience ordinary office workers trying to do a job have with the next paradigm shift!
RHAT ^1/16
Chuck
nice to hear Apple is still innovating - for a while there I thought Microsoft® was going to run out of new ideas to copy.
Chuck
Monsanto made seeds that germinate only when fertilized by other Monsanto GM'd plants - kind of a genetic 'embrace, extend and privitize'. And if they could make some sort of Monsanto logo grow on each leaf, perhaps GM'd so that advertising shows up on each corn stalk like "Use only genuine Monsanto products" or "Best grown with Monsanto!".
Chuck
Well, IANAF but do know it is possible to clone at least some plants.
Chuck