But none of the patiently waiting fellas will chip in a little cash to provide a purse for someone to find the time and spend the energy. But will pay whatever the comerical software company asks. And it will ask (your_switching_costs - epsilon), epsilon tending to zero. But don't let that stop from ranting on slashdot.
Does Gimp suck so much that people are willing to go and beg Adobe for a 17 year old version, while they would not take the source code and compile Gimp in whatever platform they are working on?
Most likely people have simply given up taking the source code and building it themselves. If a prebuilt binary is not available they will simply give up.
That is why I have told all my acquaintances to always hibernate their computers instead of shutting down. Glad science is finally catching up to my powers of casual observations and inferences.
wait, it is not about the computer memory, is it? Darn it.
Hey, You, a student of Dr Swaminathan too? He too would give a D for any lab sheet turned in without calculating the estimate of experimental error, or if the reported result had too many significant digits. But he was doing freshman Physics at IIT-M, not chemistry.
Long time ago, in a country fair, I saw a kid playing Whack-a-mole. That boy took the large cushioned mallet and bopped the head of the first mole that popped up. Then immediately he dropped the mallet started yelling an running around "I won! I won!! I whacked the mole!!!". It is nice to hear that boy did well, is all growned up now, becoming chief lawyer for some on line retailer. Good boy! Now go whack another mole.
Then what's the democratic, free market way to most efficiently discover who has talent and who has the potential to develop talent? Or to discover talent that appeals to a niche even if it doesn't appeal to the mass market?
Now that the cost of reproduction and distribution has fallen next to nothing, niche markets can be very effectively served by talent scounts/editorial services/play list makers etc. People who spend their time unearthing talent should be paid/rewarded. If there is a reward, if there is a way to monetize it, free market will find a way. It always does.
As long as gatekeepers hold overly broad patents, there will be no free market in gatekeeping. The market is trying to choose Google and Amazon, but Apple is trying to use the legal system to make sure it is the only gatekeeper.
Proximity distorts perspective. We are too close to these events and they loom large in our field of vision. Over the long run things will change. Who would have thunk back in 2000, WinTel monopoly would be broken and Internet Explorer would be reduced to a third level bit player? Look back to 1900. There was this AMMA, American Motor Manufacturer's Association that claimed to have patented the automobile. It held a stranglehold on American manufacturing. There were about 4000 or so car makers all straining under the yoke of this completely unreasonable claim of patent rights to a car. Doesn't the situation look similar to present day where millions of content makers are struggling under the yoke of unreasonable patents by $your_favorite_monster_company ? Let us chill out,. Things will work out fine.
This is not new. For 2 million years Homo sapiens made stone tools, each for him/herself. Probably 75000 years ago, tool makers started making just tools and started trading the tools for other necessities. This is probably one of the "Great Leap Forward", trading/language/tool specialists, one reinforcing the other has taken it this far. The period 1960-1990 was essentially stone age in the computers. 1990-2005 would probably be the period between 75000 years ago till the domestication of plants, animals and the adaptation of sedentism. Post 2005 is probably analogous to societies with trade specialists.
Yes, in the present situation the barrier to entry for a truly gifted artist is low, but such artists are buried in million other mediocre wannabes and there is no
incentive model to discover truly great talent or promote them. yeah, yeah, Democracy is good. But Democracy with Free Market is better. I have lived in both
Democracy without free markets (India pre 1990s) and the one with it, (USA pre 2008 oct).
So it is not very bad. Look, it is better for millions of people who have no talent to stop creating content and reducing the signal-to-noise ratio in the contetnt universe. If someone has talent, free market will find a way for them get the tools they need to produce content. Yes, the people who discover and promote talent will take their cut. It is only fair, they save me so much of time in not having to trudge through millions of youtube videos and garage band submissions. If they take too much of a cut, or if they abuse their gate-keeper status, trust the free market to find cheaper better gate-keepers.
This goes deep in time. Most of the computer users in the early 1990s who were reared in character terminals and Unix have always had a clear separation in their mind, between content and presentation. Clear enough for them to create documents that post script pinters print at 300 dpi, using plain VT100 terminals. HTML files created in ASCII editors. Graceful degradation of the presentation quality etc etc. But Microsoft pushed WYSIWYG and came up with heavily dumbed down word processors.
This time is content creation vs content consumption. Everything from typing a quick memo to video editing falls under the content creation. They usually need a full complement of input devices, a full keyboard, a good mouse, larger the screen it is better. But content consumption does not need all these user input devices. Oftentimes, a tap, a touch, a click is all that is required to passively consume content. Ch+ , Ch-, Vol+ and Vol- buttons cover 99% of the usage in a TV remote!
Microsoft first missed the boat in creating a simpler device for content consumption. It had been shipping WindowsCE and other such "simpler" devices for ages. But its idea of simple was less functional PC. It never understood the split was content creation vs content consumption. Eventually Apple got on to that divide, with at least some of its managers who came from deep unix background.
Then it decides to attach OS with two completely different goals (consumption vs creation) with some band-aid and baling wire to create a rickety contraption and call it Win8. Consumers of one do not want to pay for the other. I would not touch, literally, a touchscreen and smudge it up if I am also typing a doc or code on it.
The hardware makers also remember the days when 90% of their revenue came from WinTel boxes and how Microsoft walked roughshod all over them. They eviscerated the hardware vendors and danced on their entrails with hob-nailed boots, to conjure up a vision from PGWodehouse. Now WinTel accounts for a much smaller percentage of their sales and even lower percentage of their profits. Now it is payback time for Microsoft from these vendors. What went around is coming around to Microsoft.
I think credit card companies charging 2 to 3% fees from the retailers for credit card transactions is fair, I think. They advance unsecured loans and assume the liability. But what is so unfair is these banks charge the retailers the same fees even when the buyers use debit card. This is practically cash, and there is no risk of default. The only cost to the banks is cost of collection and fund transfer. That is pennies at most. But still the banks converted the debit cards through credit card processing systems and charged the retailers this unreasonable fees. When there is no difference in cost most consumers scratch a signature on the Point of Sale terminals rather than punching in their 4 digit PIN.
With this change, the retailers are going to give a 1 or 2% discount for people who use pin instead of signatures. Or even if they retain the savings themselves I would like the profit to go to my local retailer, not the too-big-to-jail banksters.
Imagine what would happen if a precocious ten year old with enough skills to hack together a protocol droid out of junkyard parts or capable of building a pod racer decides to build a scanner to locate the invisible scanner hidden inside a living organism... It could happen? Right?
Compared to the good old days of 1990s to 2000, the quality of Indians seeking H1B have fallen dramatically. None of the graduates from IITs seek jobs in USA. Their prospects in India has soared. The IITian applicant stream to my company dried up some time back. I never get IIT resumes anymore. Then the REC/NIT grads also stopped coming. I see resumes from these colleges once in a while now a days. Now the only the engg stream from India is from very mediocre engg colleges, unknown even to even Indian - Americans like me. Who has heard of P.T. Lee Chengalvaraya Naicker College of Engineering and Technology?
The American companies have invested so much in out sourcing, it has achieved a critical mass in India and most of the good ones do not want to emigrate. The only thing that can save the goose here in USA, is the number of world class high quality engg grads in India is quite limited. I would put it at about just 10K to 20K grads per year. Most the rest are no better than a bright high school grad in USA in terms of basic intelligence, skill, perseverance and work ethics. I expect the companies to reverse the out sourcing trend soon. They are losing money in out sourcing to India.
Well, if you drop a hunk of sodium in a pool of water exposed to air, yes, the H2 explodes. Actually H2 can be ignited by just light, heat not required. But in a fuel tank application, we would not have oxygen there for H2 to react immediately. The H2 generation vessel will have a coating that resists reaction with H2, and the H2 will be transported to a fuel cell or something where it will be exposed to oxygen under
controlled circumstances. And we won't be dropping large hunks of sodium into the tank either. To control the heat.
Users want to protect their assets. Often, they don't know what their assets are. For the biomedical researcher, the assets are her experimental results and literature survey etc. Does not even know that these credentials are valuable to some other people in a different universe.
This is common even in other walks of life. I see a few of my colleagues routinely bringing their passports in their brief ases they lug to work. They constantly open it to retrieve reading materials, music players, etc in the bus. Many fellow commuters would have noticed the prominently placed passport in one of the pouches. They don't seem to realize a valid US passport fetches thousands of dollars in the black market. It is not that they would be asked to undertake a foreign trip without a chance to go home to pack the toothbrush and grab the passport. Then why do they casually carry around the passport? They don't see it the way a criminal would. The biology major does not look at her $home files the way a hacker would.
Silicon is orders of magnitude more abundant than sodium. Half the mass of earth is silicon dioxide. But sodium is abundant enough too, about 1% of the mass of the sea water is NaCl. Electolysing sodium from saline solutions might be easier. And we might not even need sodium to be a nano particle to react with water. Dont know why anyone would mod this funny, though.
Back in the days when I was the root (of all evil according my fellow grad students) of our lab, one of the constant problems was people blindly doing chmod 777.* on the $home. They have.emacs or.profile or.cshrc that was customized ages ago by some grad student, and they want to share it with a new student. Somehow they stumbled on to "chmod 777.*" as a solution to all their file sharing problems. Now this "magic command" was also being blindly passed around without worrying about security implications. Oh, yeah, they think they are clever and tape the login credentials to the underside of the keyboard and laugh at secretaries who tape it to their monitors.
Looks like these grad students have all growned up and uploading it all to the cloud.
USPS will disclose the registration details of its P O Boxes. That is more than headers/addresses, that is registration info. In most cases USPS addresses are physical structures with public ownership records. Rental records can be subpoenaed from the owner. Even if the address is a maildrop like Mail Boxes Etc, they can be forced to disclose the registration info. So header information and chain leading all the way to the recipient of the communication is not covered by privacy laws. Only the actual communications is protected.
There is another interesting possibility. The contents of your letters sent through USPS is specifically protected by law. But I am not sure if the law extends to private couriers. Technically I am not sure you are guaranteed privacy of contents, if you use FedEx or UPS. What gmail is doing is exactly what UPS/FedEx are doing. What it can and cant do, what is protected and what is not all will depend on the precedents set for these private couriers.
OK registration info on gmail is like the address on the envelop of a letter. It is not private, the mail man has to read it to deliver the letter. So yes, ok, google shares registration freely.
Contents are private, post office does not read it, and you need a warrant from a court to intercept and read mail, so google demands a warrant for contents of email. OK fine.
Now, in each letter, the from address and the to address are open in the public. Technically the post office could build a graph of who communicates with who and how frequently using just the public information. But it is expensive, painful and so USPS does not do it. Or I think it does not do it. But it is trivial for gmail to build all people who correspond with me, and rank them by the frequency of communication. In fact it already does, it suggests a CC list based on the addresses in the To list. Is it considered public information? Would google share it with the government without warrant? Or would it require a warrant?
Basically they are arguing, the new service from Netflix requires lots of investments and upgrades to the network, and they will pass it on to all the customers because FCC prohibits charging more for Netflix customers alone, even if they are the only ones benefiting by these upgrades.
To me it is a stretch. The ISPs are not fools. If the Netflix customers want special high speed access, they will be forced to cough extra cash for that privilege. And that money will upgrade the network for all customers. They may not be able to tack on a "fee for being a netflix customer". But they surely will tack on a fee for "50 Mbps service with guaranteed network latency of less than 200 millisecond" or whatever is the technical spec.
Look, the code is not all that valuable or secret or great or not-repeatable or anything. Republicans with their friendly corporations can hire better programmers and put together equal or better code.
What made OFA better was that people were willing to let Obama For America get access to their friend's list,.mailrc, gmail contact list etc etc. I, for one, would be very terribly upset if OFA shares the contact graph created by me allowing OFA access to my private list of friends shared willy-nilly and every Tom-Dick-or-Harry politician starts calling my contact list pretending to have my approval or endorsement. I gave Obama access to my contact list. I don't want it shared with DNC without my explicit approval.
I trust Congressional democrats less than I trust Obama. In fact I trust Congressional Republicans less only by a slim margin compared to congressional Democrats. Looks like Harry Reid is preparing to cry uncle and surrender everything in the filibuster reform.
Microsoft can't release the study. It has deep proprietary data about how much they would have reduced the price once they learned City of Munich is going Linux.
OK, OK I miscounted. After Rama, it is Balarama, Krishna and Kalki according for the South Indian denominations. North Indians count Buddha as the ninth and drop Balarama out. Truth be told, Lord Vishnu has come to the Earth many more times, at least 26 times according to one count through the scriptures. Further He has promised to come whenever and wherever Evil threatens the righteous. So the Ten Incarnations of Vishnu is something like the Ten Commandments. Different denominations count a different set of 10. Catholics, for example, drop the "graven image" commandment and split one of the later ones (thous shalt not covet?) into two commandments. BTW most Hindus consider Buddhism and Jainism as denominations of Hinduism.
I think USA is due for a visit by Vishnu. Both the NRA and the Democrats will agree that here Evil is threatening the righteous. The only disagreement between them is which is evil and which is righteous.
We'd like your smartphone or smartcard-embedded finger ring to authorize a new computer via a tap on the computer, even in situations in which your phone might be without cellular connectivity."
The smartcard can be embedded in the finger itself, instead of a ring on the finger. In fact it could be embedded anywhere in the body and it could be used identify you uniquely and track you. For your own safety and to provide for the completely unbreakable security, you would not be able to find the embedded smartcard yourself. (no, not even your ten year old son, who could build protocol droids from scrap parts, could build a scanner to find it). This is what the future is going to bring to us, it is as clear as the two suns on the sky.
Slashdot Mirror
But none of the patiently waiting fellas will chip in a little cash to provide a purse for someone to find the time and spend the energy. But will pay whatever the comerical software company asks. And it will ask (your_switching_costs - epsilon), epsilon tending to zero. But don't let that stop from ranting on slashdot.
Any one using any Google product, picasa, gmail, youtune, google apps, anything, are being roped in as google+ users.
Most likely people have simply given up taking the source code and building it themselves. If a prebuilt binary is not available they will simply give up.
wait, it is not about the computer memory, is it? Darn it.
Hey, You, a student of Dr Swaminathan too? He too would give a D for any lab sheet turned in without calculating the estimate of experimental error, or if the reported result had too many significant digits. But he was doing freshman Physics at IIT-M, not chemistry.
yeah, I know, I know. I felt a twinge of regret when I hit the submit button. I was being grossly unfair. Sorry about that.
Long time ago, in a country fair, I saw a kid playing Whack-a-mole. That boy took the large cushioned mallet and bopped the head of the first mole that popped up. Then immediately he dropped the mallet started yelling an running around "I won! I won!! I whacked the mole!!!". It is nice to hear that boy did well, is all growned up now, becoming chief lawyer for some on line retailer. Good boy! Now go whack another mole.
Then what's the democratic, free market way to most efficiently discover who has talent and who has the potential to develop talent? Or to discover talent that appeals to a niche even if it doesn't appeal to the mass market?
Now that the cost of reproduction and distribution has fallen next to nothing, niche markets can be very effectively served by talent scounts/editorial services/play list makers etc. People who spend their time unearthing talent should be paid/rewarded. If there is a reward, if there is a way to monetize it, free market will find a way. It always does.
As long as gatekeepers hold overly broad patents, there will be no free market in gatekeeping. The market is trying to choose Google and Amazon, but Apple is trying to use the legal system to make sure it is the only gatekeeper.
Proximity distorts perspective. We are too close to these events and they loom large in our field of vision. Over the long run things will change. Who would have thunk back in 2000, WinTel monopoly would be broken and Internet Explorer would be reduced to a third level bit player? Look back to 1900. There was this AMMA, American Motor Manufacturer's Association that claimed to have patented the automobile. It held a stranglehold on American manufacturing. There were about 4000 or so car makers all straining under the yoke of this completely unreasonable claim of patent rights to a car. Doesn't the situation look similar to present day where millions of content makers are struggling under the yoke of unreasonable patents by $your_favorite_monster_company ? Let us chill out,. Things will work out fine.
Yes, in the present situation the barrier to entry for a truly gifted artist is low, but such artists are buried in million other mediocre wannabes and there is no incentive model to discover truly great talent or promote them. yeah, yeah, Democracy is good. But Democracy with Free Market is better. I have lived in both Democracy without free markets (India pre 1990s) and the one with it, (USA pre 2008 oct).
So it is not very bad. Look, it is better for millions of people who have no talent to stop creating content and reducing the signal-to-noise ratio in the contetnt universe. If someone has talent, free market will find a way for them get the tools they need to produce content. Yes, the people who discover and promote talent will take their cut. It is only fair, they save me so much of time in not having to trudge through millions of youtube videos and garage band submissions. If they take too much of a cut, or if they abuse their gate-keeper status, trust the free market to find cheaper better gate-keepers.
This time is content creation vs content consumption. Everything from typing a quick memo to video editing falls under the content creation. They usually need a full complement of input devices, a full keyboard, a good mouse, larger the screen it is better. But content consumption does not need all these user input devices. Oftentimes, a tap, a touch, a click is all that is required to passively consume content. Ch+ , Ch-, Vol+ and Vol- buttons cover 99% of the usage in a TV remote!
Microsoft first missed the boat in creating a simpler device for content consumption. It had been shipping WindowsCE and other such "simpler" devices for ages. But its idea of simple was less functional PC. It never understood the split was content creation vs content consumption. Eventually Apple got on to that divide, with at least some of its managers who came from deep unix background.
Then it decides to attach OS with two completely different goals (consumption vs creation) with some band-aid and baling wire to create a rickety contraption and call it Win8. Consumers of one do not want to pay for the other. I would not touch, literally, a touchscreen and smudge it up if I am also typing a doc or code on it.
The hardware makers also remember the days when 90% of their revenue came from WinTel boxes and how Microsoft walked roughshod all over them. They eviscerated the hardware vendors and danced on their entrails with hob-nailed boots, to conjure up a vision from PGWodehouse. Now WinTel accounts for a much smaller percentage of their sales and even lower percentage of their profits. Now it is payback time for Microsoft from these vendors. What went around is coming around to Microsoft.
With this change, the retailers are going to give a 1 or 2% discount for people who use pin instead of signatures. Or even if they retain the savings themselves I would like the profit to go to my local retailer, not the too-big-to-jail banksters.
Imagine what would happen if a precocious ten year old with enough skills to hack together a protocol droid out of junkyard parts or capable of building a pod racer decides to build a scanner to locate the invisible scanner hidden inside a living organism... It could happen? Right?
The American companies have invested so much in out sourcing, it has achieved a critical mass in India and most of the good ones do not want to emigrate. The only thing that can save the goose here in USA, is the number of world class high quality engg grads in India is quite limited. I would put it at about just 10K to 20K grads per year. Most the rest are no better than a bright high school grad in USA in terms of basic intelligence, skill, perseverance and work ethics. I expect the companies to reverse the out sourcing trend soon. They are losing money in out sourcing to India.
Well, if you drop a hunk of sodium in a pool of water exposed to air, yes, the H2 explodes. Actually H2 can be ignited by just light, heat not required. But in a fuel tank application, we would not have oxygen there for H2 to react immediately. The H2 generation vessel will have a coating that resists reaction with H2, and the H2 will be transported to a fuel cell or something where it will be exposed to oxygen under controlled circumstances. And we won't be dropping large hunks of sodium into the tank either. To control the heat.
This is common even in other walks of life. I see a few of my colleagues routinely bringing their passports in their brief ases they lug to work. They constantly open it to retrieve reading materials, music players, etc in the bus. Many fellow commuters would have noticed the prominently placed passport in one of the pouches. They don't seem to realize a valid US passport fetches thousands of dollars in the black market. It is not that they would be asked to undertake a foreign trip without a chance to go home to pack the toothbrush and grab the passport. Then why do they casually carry around the passport? They don't see it the way a criminal would. The biology major does not look at her $home files the way a hacker would.
Silicon is orders of magnitude more abundant than sodium. Half the mass of earth is silicon dioxide. But sodium is abundant enough too, about 1% of the mass of the sea water is NaCl. Electolysing sodium from saline solutions might be easier. And we might not even need sodium to be a nano particle to react with water. Dont know why anyone would mod this funny, though.
Looks like these grad students have all growned up and uploading it all to the cloud.
There is another interesting possibility. The contents of your letters sent through USPS is specifically protected by law. But I am not sure if the law extends to private couriers. Technically I am not sure you are guaranteed privacy of contents, if you use FedEx or UPS. What gmail is doing is exactly what UPS/FedEx are doing. What it can and cant do, what is protected and what is not all will depend on the precedents set for these private couriers.
Contents are private, post office does not read it, and you need a warrant from a court to intercept and read mail, so google demands a warrant for contents of email. OK fine.
Now, in each letter, the from address and the to address are open in the public. Technically the post office could build a graph of who communicates with who and how frequently using just the public information. But it is expensive, painful and so USPS does not do it. Or I think it does not do it. But it is trivial for gmail to build all people who correspond with me, and rank them by the frequency of communication. In fact it already does, it suggests a CC list based on the addresses in the To list. Is it considered public information? Would google share it with the government without warrant? Or would it require a warrant?
Time to sledgehammer every PC in sight at your work.
To me it is a stretch. The ISPs are not fools. If the Netflix customers want special high speed access, they will be forced to cough extra cash for that privilege. And that money will upgrade the network for all customers. They may not be able to tack on a "fee for being a netflix customer". But they surely will tack on a fee for "50 Mbps service with guaranteed network latency of less than 200 millisecond" or whatever is the technical spec.
What made OFA better was that people were willing to let Obama For America get access to their friend's list, .mailrc, gmail contact list etc etc. I, for one, would be very terribly upset if OFA shares the contact graph created by me allowing OFA access to my private list of friends shared willy-nilly and every Tom-Dick-or-Harry politician starts calling my contact list pretending to have my approval or endorsement. I gave Obama access to my contact list. I don't want it shared with DNC without my explicit approval.
I trust Congressional democrats less than I trust Obama. In fact I trust Congressional Republicans less only by a slim margin compared to congressional Democrats. Looks like Harry Reid is preparing to cry uncle and surrender everything in the filibuster reform.
Microsoft can't release the study. It has deep proprietary data about how much they would have reduced the price once they learned City of Munich is going Linux.
I think USA is due for a visit by Vishnu. Both the NRA and the Democrats will agree that here Evil is threatening the righteous. The only disagreement between them is which is evil and which is righteous.
We'd like your smartphone or smartcard-embedded finger ring to authorize a new computer via a tap on the computer, even in situations in which your phone might be without cellular connectivity."
The smartcard can be embedded in the finger itself, instead of a ring on the finger. In fact it could be embedded anywhere in the body and it could be used identify you uniquely and track you. For your own safety and to provide for the completely unbreakable security, you would not be able to find the embedded smartcard yourself. (no, not even your ten year old son, who could build protocol droids from scrap parts, could build a scanner to find it). This is what the future is going to bring to us, it is as clear as the two suns on the sky.