Yeah, I noticed that glossing over of the difference between applications that run on text streams like cat, ls, grep and frieds, and those applications that want a little more in the way of plumbing than is provided by a plain old "|".
So, then, presumably if you want change mozilla to use qt graphical componentry instead of gtk (assuming mozilla had a "generic" layer instead of hardwiring one of two competitive but similar GUI toolkits), would it be as easy as changing
mozilla % gtk
to
mozilla % qt
I don't think so. And besides, the sheer number of types of valves and pipefittings that would be required to express the relations for each kind of interaction would proliferate so fast that even a puntuation-hardened Perl programmer would start to weep.
But then I got to thinking (dangerous, I know)- why not just robustify the text stream concept to being 2-way XML with some high level publishing and querying of services that are offered/desired and letting the ends of the pipes (applications, components) negotiate the best fit. Kind of like pipes with glop on the ends?
Loading up the apps and the components with pipe end feelers would surely make then heavier, but at least they would fit more often and more easily than they do now. Some kind of testing and negotiation about what is offered and desired would probably provide some mechanism for resolving things like DLL-hell, too.
The idea probably isn't new. I kept thinking of autoconf feature tests:)
Also, while I haven't researched it, some of these ideas must lurk in either Jini or SOAP.
I've been very interested in massive archival for digital video applications on my Linux computer for the ability to edit and store home movies (assuming I get IEEE 1394 connector for my computer, or a MiniDV tape reader), for recordings from TV (assuming I ever get hold of the MPEG from my dish receiver; or tolerate NTSC resolution frame grabbing via some bttv mechanism; or get an Ethernet ported TiVo), etc.
I was interested that DVD+RW is supposed to lack the offending case of DVD-RAM that enables it to be read/written more backward compatibly, but can I write the disk so as to make it readable by my (or anyone's) DVD player? (Is this tantamount to doing a CSS encoding?)
You mean DVD+RW is still not out?
How open/closed is the specification of the +RW vs -RAM?
Media cost comparison between DVD-RAM and DVD+RW?
How's the transfer rate for writing?
I thought there was recently some DVD-Multi standard one ring to bind them.. Any truth or substance to such rumours?
(A thousand pardons for drifting off topic here, but this key binding issue irritates a pet peeve...)
Now that I have hardwired the default Emacs key bindings between brain and fingers, I find that editing inside of Word *extremely* frustrating, since the keymaps are different. (Usually I stay out of that app, but the Forces of Darkness continue to expect me to do battle with a.doc from time to time.)
Is there any way to remap key functionality inside of Word to capitalize on my Emacs investment?
</offtopic>
Regarding development on Linux and Windows, I'd say that your friend may well be satisfied with the tight embrace of his IDE - it can be efficient for the things it was designed to do and if he's already climbed the learning curve for that particular IDE.
What I like about Linux, though, is that development is based on the idea of simple tools that can be put together to do a wide range of projects and tasks quite easily. Eg, once you get used to make and grep and a few other tools, you get the feeling that you can do just about anything.
The philosophy of interoperability under Linux and Unix in general is illustrated by thinking of cubes (applications) with faces (interfaces) - the number of combinations of ways that they can be put together to do things increases dramatically as the number of cubes - and you don't really need that many.
Under Windows, the market economic advantages to vendor lock-in are barely outweighed by customer demand for interoperability with other applications, so the apps try to keep you inside whenever possible. Rather than let you escape to another application for a feature you want, the tendency is to eventually bloat up the app with the feature in the next rev. And while the new feature will serve 90% of your uses, there might be occassions where you might have wanted to do things differently. Tough.
I think the IDEs tend to be fast for a particular task only (and, again, only after you've learned the quirks of that highly integrated tool.) And people really do get work done fast under them (need that quickie VB script done yesterday), so don't think I'm against them.
The right tool for the right job.
So there's a different philosophy to tool use, re-use and interoperability that your friend might find refreshing.
[But beware - if you do try it out and you're like me you'll begin to insist on bringing Cygwin to every Windows systems you have to work on!]
I'm trying Python out right now trying to teach my 11 year old nephew programming. (Meanwhile, yes, at work, I struggle with C++ and hope to get it to "do what I mean" in a few months...sigh)
The nice thing about Python is that it's so easy and intuitive that I can teach it as I learn it, not being a proficient Python programmer by any stretch of the imagination, but having plenty of background in C.
There are two things I'd like to see, though:
a nice fat stack of simple-minded viewgraphs that even an 11 year old can understand (the usual intro's are slanted towards folks with programming experience in another language, like C.) So far, the closest I found was Josh Cogliati's page
a nice easy way to get some graphics done so I would not be limited to text applications. An earlier poster mentioned this as well - that
Like many kids, the games he plays on his computer these days are so flashy, boomy and interactive that his first attempts with a programming language can not hope to compete with "Joystick controlled maneuvering of a skateboarder with sound effects and moving, pseudo 3D scenery."
Any suggestions for addressing either of these 2 issues would be most appreciated.
Well, since I usually don't make it to any meetings or appointments unless I'm in front of my 60 lb. always-on, 300W, desktop box getting beeps from Thomas Dreimeyer's plan, I've been thinking I'd like to buy one of these portable alarm clock/computers.
Has anyone had experiences with this iPAQ, the Palm, etc. that would indicate pros and cons, with regards to:
state of open connectivity software (to Linux, *nix, `doze)
Customers have demonstrated that they may be manipulated into spending choices by playing upon their emotions, anxieties, and desires.
The sad corollary to Mr Lincoln's observation
"You can fool
all of the people some of time and you can fool some of the people all of time, but you can not fool all of the people all of the time."
is that
"You can fool
enough of the people enough of the time."
This is as true for the political and governmental choices that you think you are making independently, as it is true for spending and buying decisions, as it is true for decisions of how you spend your leisure time (plugged into the TV/Matrix perhaps?).
For some interesting perspectives on this theme, see, for example Adbusters., which is typically available at one of your more complete magazine racks.
Next time you watch or read a slick ad for a computer product, pay a little closer attention and watch which of your buttons (or your bosses) they're pushing -- it's interesting in that they're not the dreary objective ones!
I think it has been demonstrated that free distribution of PDF via the net of rapidly evolving versions concurrent with a for-fee version that is bound and sold as a book can be done.
I'm thinking here of Bruce Eckel's Thinking in Java, for example.
I originally downloaded the monstrous PDF file and viewed some of it on-line, but didn't seriously consider printing it out myself because:
it takes a long time
I do a poorer job binding and packaging x00 pages of 8.5x11 paper than a real publisher.
the versions released on the net were typically 0.9x rather than 1.x
I felt enough goodwill toward the author, who is not obviously in it just for the money, that I opted to pay what I felt a reasonable price for the published and bound work rather than actively subverting a source of his livelihood.
I really do like a bathroom book.
I don't know how much of hit on profitability, if any, that Bruce E. takes using this approach. I'm certain that some folks that could not afford the in-print book but really wanted it have burned some trees and toner, and that some folks that could afford the book have opted for the looo...budget lifestyle, but I have to believe that he's sold copies of his book. I fervently hope that no one has been sleazy enough to download the PDF and republish the work for further sale.
On the other side, the free web access may have provided some nice publicity and advertising that could have helped improve sales compared to not doing the net distro route.
All this does is to suggest that traveling both roads has been done in the past. Maybe it would work for you, too.
Practically, I would bet that ultimately andover.net might end up having to remove those quoted, very specific posts that have, after the dust settles on a judicial time scale and have been proven to be actual copyright violations.
The important precedent to establish, however, would be that the burden of protecting the "copyrighted material" is on the copyright holder. The copyright holder should be the one that culls through newsgroups, etc., constantly searching for such infringement.
The reverse situation of requiring owners of forums and relays to cross-check every contributed post against the known universe of copyrighted material is patently ridiculous.
The best legal step I see is for/. in the future is to enable the individual poster, even an AC, to remove a post. Then, when presented with a validate legal claim that a copyright was violated,/. can request to the AC (via public post) that they remove the offending post. Then, the burden is back onto the original AC that committed the violation, which is where the burden should be.
Even a general purpose protective boilerplate at the top would go a long way: something like "Don't post copyrighted works. We cannot be responsible for your misbehavior."
Any claim in court that, practically speaking, AC's act unresponsible (hoo, me?) and are not be responsive is tough nuggies; if you establish carriers as responsible, then it should follow that any and every ISP, phone company, Postal Service is responsible for any violation carried over their medium. Last I heard it was not possible to hold the postoffice responsible for Bad mail, but it was possible to convict the sender of a crime if the sender could be established.
These arguments should extend to MP3 as well.
Were the initial photocopier companies besieged with any suits about their enabling copyright violations of printed matter by unscrupulous users and were those companies held reponsible?
I'd be very interested in your experiences with them.
A decently-priced, high-performance hardware accelerated OpenGL on Linux is what I have waited years for.
It would have been nice if the high quality high performance SGI workmanship could have been encapsulated in video card with an open source driver, patch to DRI+XFree86 4.x that worked in more user-customized situations too.
For example, say I'm inclined to wait for a 1 GHz Thunderbird with DDR SDRAM. I'm guessing the chipset and motherboard are part of a tuned package that is not easily swapped in and out at will.
Still, it is a tempting machine, especially for a user
accustomed to Unix
not willing to do NT
liking the price less than $10K
seeing more free apps and packages coming out first for Linux than for Solaris or Irix these days.
The question is whether the performance limitations are noticeable compared to the high end solution for common usage. Since the performance is proportional to the log(performance), there's a true decision to be made.
I don't know of any GPL'd ware, but Linux Journal has advertised the CCVS system for some time that is supposed to work on Linux. They might have been bought out by a larger firm lately, IIRC. Don't know how much it costs.
No, thanks, I've seen firsthand what damage group calendaring can do.
Your mandatory, 2 hour
Safety with Fire Extinguishers Meeting starts right after your Equal Employment Opportunity Corporate Feel Good Statement Meeting ends.
Needless to say, though, the costs of handling virii that exploit innovations that help the consumer were not to be seen anywhere in the sales pitch or product brochures -- only pictures of Happy, Productive workers Being Profitably Busy for Your Company.
Yeah, but Heinlein was a visionary and idealist like Stallman.
We all know in Real Life the unwritten precepts of law that include
The fat cats exude the lard that greases the squeaky wheels.
There's no doubt the genie is out of the bottle as far as costless digital copies.
One solution I can suggest comes out the 17th century. That is, assume that once a copy is made of an original score that the cost will rapidly spiral down to zero. Given that's the case, let musicians, visual artists, movie producers, provide a command performance at their pleasure to the highest bidder or group of bidders at an accumulated auction site.
This is more like the model that supported music originally, like nobility of Vienna supporting Mozart (not implying that Mozart got the money he deserved). Then, once the initial price is overcome, anyone possessing a copy may provide it to others at whatever cost (free, for example) they want to charge.
In this model, the renumeration for already-released works rapidly dwindles to nothing, so artists past their prime will suffer. But, artists that are prolific and in demand should be able to release a 10 second snippet and be able to hold the rest of the song hostage until they get as much as they deem needed, whatever that amount happens to be.
Want the next release of a new Metallica song?
Click on "I promise to contribute $1 for its production", along with 10000 other metalheads.
Then, if Metallica gets enough subscribers/patrons, they can release the song. Or not.
I had forgotten that Windows was suitably large so that 65K bugs is not that many bugs/line of source code.
The endemic EEE culture could be really interesting in a post-breakup future with two behemoth software companies in Redmond (call them OS Products and Everything Else).
Care to speculate what would happen if Windows 2003 came out with a new "innovation", such as a swallowed version of something that looked a lot like Word+Excel+Access+Outlook? Hey, if it can eat IE, it's got a pretty good-sized mouth!
It's great reading, even if you're not a direct kernel hacker, being something of an education as to what the issues are, the pro's and the con's and plenty of subjective opinion about the what's "beautiful" and what's not.
As far as I'm concerned, this is like reading about the Chronicles of the Mightiest, but sadly, I never expect to see a terse laudatory Alan Cox comment with my name on it, though I much admire those other names that do get put in the parentheses.
Fixed a long-standing bug. (Little Ole Me)
Cured subtle race on 8-way SMP (Me Again)
Speeded up khttpd by 5x. (Aint I Great)
Implemented VMware like win32 interpreter. (You Know Who)
I live in a typical.gov installation where there are email attachments rife with.doc,.xls,.ppt extensions that the senders expect to be understood as if they are Standard Formats. Web pages, too, constantly refer to such binary proprietary formats, with the occassional helpful tag that clicking on the link
will launch Word
Not if you don't pay all of your taxes to MS it won't launch Word.
When I try to explain that I can't read their attachment I usually get blank stares, mystified befuddlement, confused silence (they're thinking "Oh! You're computer must be broken just now. It happens to me and My Computer all the time, too!") and attempts to resend the exact same document as if it would be OK after my computer was fixed and rebooted like happens so often to theirs!
Any attempt to explain the difference between formats dictated and hidden by a profit-making corporation and those that are documented in a publicly accessible RFC are usually met with polite impatience.
StarOffice has been some practical help, but it doesn't solve the fundamental problem -- that virtually all of the business of the U. S. Government would cease if their MS licences were to suddenly expire.
Certainly patents do their work of encouraging innovation by extending a window of potentially lucrative protection to the holder of the patent. But, I think 17 years is beyond generous given the current rate at which technology is implemented and used. Despite a modicum of computer literacy, 10 years ago I didn't even know what HTTP was and today half the country has been using it for several years already. I think it's fair to say that patent protections should expire sooner than they do now. It would tend to encourage compound technologies more than the current system (where I would have to get a lawyer to enable me to file a patent B that significantly improves upon and is completely contingent on the existance of patented technology A.) Lower barriers to entry for competitors to produce the patented technology would tend to increase competition, potentially improving quality and lowering prices sooner than happens now.
Obviously you forgot to fill out and mail in your household viewing habits card.
If you had done that, then you wouldn't have been inflicted with that "Getting to Know You" anti-privacy commercial that is so anathema to your sensibilities.
Can we interest you to a free trial subscription to Privacy Today?
The recent success of GNU/Linux and various other Free Software projects based upon the GPL has probably vindicated your ideals to a much greater extent than those of other idealists that, for the most part, toil in obscurity, crying out to an indifferent crowd that does not listen.
However, it would seem to me that the GPL was only one ingredient in driving the widespread proliferation of Free Software. I would submit that there have been latent forces in the market place for software that have resented the strictures posed by closed proprietary and profit-driven "standards" and which just became enough of a driving force to encourage the spread of free software given enough of the other ingredients. Unfortunately, that awareness seems fleeting and transitory in the sense that IT decision makers and casual home computer users, like moths near a flame, are still willing to succumb to "convenient" integrated solutions that compromise their fundamental freedoms, essentially replacing the Old Boss with the New Boss. As long as they're not bled too fast they seem to put up with a sorry state of affairs.
Even if Free Software gains important footholds and commoditizes the OS, the API and the data file formats, there will eventually be some future innovation (O-O protocol, interfaces, etc.) that will lure the unsuspecting into a different set of shackles.
Do you foresee means for breaking out of the cycle of this amazing propensity for people to relinquish their freedom for a small piece of convenience? Is a Bill of Rights in order?
I don't know why you guys don't just lay back, relax some, and Feel Good.
After I saw Bill in his Just-Folks Sweater-- just like the one worn by the friendly spokesman for the 125% home equity loans that zAP Credit Card Debt dead-- I said to myself:
"Yes, Bill, I Feel Good about your small computer company that should have the freedom to innovate 25 years ago and Be the technology Winner that represents America and Working Families (TM) that is the Envy of the World and of other Wimps Without Money.
I agree with Bill. Let's all pull together and Feel Good and approve Elian Gonzales' father the political asylum that he desperately needs for Working Families that Save for a Better Future with the Freedom to Innovate and avoid Excessive Government Regulatory Burdens and Costly Bureaucracy of ThatDamnJanetReno that killed children in Waco.
Look how they have messed with the (all stand) Private Marketplace already and it's depressed the NASDAQ this week. Didn't I tell ya?
I think Bill is misunderstood. He needs Paul Harvey to help him express his important role to the American People. Even though I can't see Paul on the radio, his gravely voice is sooo comfortable that it is even more comfortable than the sweater that Bill wears on his TV commercial.
I sure know that Paul has helped me to Feel Good about the Supermarket to the Genetically-Engineered World of my Good Neighbored small town Just-Folks Walmart Store, powered by clean burning Nuclear Ethanol that reduces America's dependence on Furrin Oil.
For some applications in server clusters it might be OK, but for supercomputing applications the latency of everything CPU-memory, CPU-NIC, etc. starts to get in the way of efficiency. GigE alone is no panacea for this.
People I know choose customized network fabrics, like Myrinet, for example, and have eliminated some, but not all, of those network limitations.
The battleground then moves to improving the situation between main memory and the NIC, which is full of latencies and gratuitous copies.
...the problem is large numbers of unneccessarily insecure machines on the net -- in this case *nix boxes -- that act as hosts or agents for staging the attack. CERT has been warning about this general topic for many months,
I'd suggest a little ProActive Vaccination Campaign. If warning user-sysadmin-part-time-copier-repair-person's about the dangers of not updating their security precautions does not prompt them to adequately secure themselves from common infections and being mis-used as a DDoS launch site, then h4X in and do the job for them! Call it Hacking in the Public Interest. Shutdown the holes. Shoot, launch a distributed daemon to automatically probe and shut em down in case they quizzically "rebuild" after a mysterious halt. Eventually they'll get the message.
It might sound radical, but I'm sure the first people in London aware of the need to prevent the spread of water-borne illness back in the 17th century were looked upon as quite mad, too, as were efforts to test food service workers for TB.
If you don't need it and your angels don't care - fine. But don't come crying to me when your life is like a pig on ice skates...
Very good advice (hire good CFO, have a good corporate attorney, etc.) has already been written by others above, the only thing I'd add, that I heard from someone that was managing a $10M startup, was to know your market, as in the names of people who would actually really be willing to plunk down money for your product. Anything else is just wishful thinking.
The next time you use your Frequent Preferred Dug Shopper Card at Dugmart you'll be eligible to obtain a 10 percent discount on that Jack Daniel's and Hemorrhoid Creme (you know, like the stuff you bought last weekend at 12AM after your car was spotted leaving the Adult Bookstore by the Crime Prevention Control Camera System that was installed for your protection against terrorists.)
P.S. Don't forget to enter our free drawing by filling out the 10 page questionnaire on you "to help us serve you better."
Given that the data is Mitnick's property as far as is known, the government should be required to return his property.
And, following the analogy of the coat with the possible pistol, Kevin should be trusted to have learned not to use pistols, rather than be required to demonstrate that he has no pistols.
At least, that's the society in which I'd prefer to live.
Trying to pry off pre-installed applications that more or less do the job is a true Herculean feat, requiring much brute force.
Without a truly revolutionary new feature that makes it different from all other pre-installed software, it's an uphill battle. Even the mighty MS had to cheat by using the pre-installation tactic girded up with some "it's part of the OS" flimflam.
No, I'm afraid the only way to win this game for Mozilla is to resort to pre-installing it on new "computers".
That is, unless any of you are creative enough to think of a clever tweak to it that would make it the Next Big Thing. Internet Telephony, net Games, Home Security System, whatever...
P.S. If it's any consolation, the price paid for relying on the crutch of user inertia regarding pre-installed software is some backward-compatibility nightmare's that you might recognize as part and parcel of the Bloatware. While you already see it big time in M$ products, you even see it poking it's head up in Linux (a la a.out, libc5) etc.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, I noticed that glossing over of the difference between applications that run on text streams like cat, ls, grep and frieds, and those applications that want a little more in the way of plumbing than is provided by a plain old "|".
So, then, presumably if you want change mozilla to use qt graphical componentry instead of gtk (assuming mozilla had a "generic" layer instead of hardwiring one of two competitive but similar GUI toolkits), would it be as easy as changing
toI don't think so. And besides, the sheer number of types of valves and pipefittings that would be required to express the relations for each kind of interaction would proliferate so fast that even a puntuation-hardened Perl programmer would start to weep.
But then I got to thinking (dangerous, I know)- why not just robustify the text stream concept to being 2-way XML with some high level publishing and querying of services that are offered/desired and letting the ends of the pipes (applications, components) negotiate the best fit. Kind of like pipes with glop on the ends?
Loading up the apps and the components with pipe end feelers would surely make then heavier, but at least they would fit more often and more easily than they do now. Some kind of testing and negotiation about what is offered and desired would probably provide some mechanism for resolving things like DLL-hell, too.The idea probably isn't new. I kept thinking of autoconf feature tests :)
Also, while I haven't researched it, some of these ideas must lurk in either Jini or SOAP.
Speed read
Questions for the Professor...
I've been very interested in massive archival for digital video applications on my Linux computer for the ability to edit and store home movies (assuming I get IEEE 1394 connector for my computer, or a MiniDV tape reader), for recordings from TV (assuming I ever get hold of the MPEG from my dish receiver; or tolerate NTSC resolution frame grabbing via some bttv mechanism; or get an Ethernet ported TiVo), etc.
- I was interested that DVD+RW is supposed to lack the offending case of DVD-RAM that enables it to be read/written more backward compatibly, but can I write the disk so as to make it readable by my (or anyone's) DVD player? (Is this tantamount to doing a CSS encoding?)
- You mean DVD+RW is still not out?
- How open/closed is the specification of the +RW vs -RAM?
- Media cost comparison between DVD-RAM and DVD+RW?
- How's the transfer rate for writing?
- I thought there was recently some DVD-Multi standard one ring to bind them.. Any truth or substance to such rumours?
TIA.< offtopic>
(A thousand pardons for drifting off topic here, but this key binding issue irritates a pet peeve...)
Now that I have hardwired the default Emacs key bindings between brain and fingers, I find that editing inside of Word *extremely* frustrating, since the keymaps are different. (Usually I stay out of that app, but the Forces of Darkness continue to expect me to do battle with a .doc from time to time.)
Is there any way to remap key functionality inside of Word to capitalize on my Emacs investment?
</offtopic>
Regarding development on Linux and Windows, I'd say that your friend may well be satisfied with the tight embrace of his IDE - it can be efficient for the things it was designed to do and if he's already climbed the learning curve for that particular IDE.
What I like about Linux, though, is that development is based on the idea of simple tools that can be put together to do a wide range of projects and tasks quite easily. Eg, once you get used to make and grep and a few other tools, you get the feeling that you can do just about anything.
The philosophy of interoperability under Linux and Unix in general is illustrated by thinking of cubes (applications) with faces (interfaces) - the number of combinations of ways that they can be put together to do things increases dramatically as the number of cubes - and you don't really need that many.
Under Windows, the market economic advantages to vendor lock-in are barely outweighed by customer demand for interoperability with other applications, so the apps try to keep you inside whenever possible. Rather than let you escape to another application for a feature you want, the tendency is to eventually bloat up the app with the feature in the next rev. And while the new feature will serve 90% of your uses, there might be occassions where you might have wanted to do things differently. Tough.
I think the IDEs tend to be fast for a particular task only (and, again, only after you've learned the quirks of that highly integrated tool.) And people really do get work done fast under them (need that quickie VB script done yesterday), so don't think I'm against them.
So there's a different philosophy to tool use, re-use and interoperability that your friend might find refreshing.
[But beware - if you do try it out and you're like me you'll begin to insist on bringing Cygwin to every Windows systems you have to work on!]
I'm trying Python out right now trying to teach my 11 year old nephew programming. (Meanwhile, yes, at work, I struggle with C++ and hope to get it to "do what I mean" in a few months...sigh)
The nice thing about Python is that it's so easy and intuitive that I can teach it as I learn it, not being a proficient Python programmer by any stretch of the imagination, but having plenty of background in C.
There are two things I'd like to see, though:
Like many kids, the games he plays on his computer these days are so flashy, boomy and interactive that his first attempts with a programming language can not hope to compete with "Joystick controlled maneuvering of a skateboarder with sound effects and moving, pseudo 3D scenery."
Any suggestions for addressing either of these 2 issues would be most appreciated.
Well, since I usually don't make it to any meetings or appointments unless I'm in front of my 60 lb. always-on, 300W, desktop box getting beeps from Thomas Dreimeyer's plan, I've been thinking I'd like to buy one of these portable alarm clock/computers.
Has anyone had experiences with this iPAQ, the Palm, etc. that would indicate pros and cons, with regards to:
- state of open connectivity software (to Linux, *nix, `doze)
- usefulness of applications
- user interface sux/rox evaluation
- color screen readability
- storage limitations
- battery life
- upgradability
- wireless connectivity,
- etc.
TIA.Customers have demonstrated that they may be manipulated into spending choices by playing upon their emotions, anxieties, and desires.
The sad corollary to Mr Lincoln's observation
is thatThis is as true for the political and governmental choices that you think you are making independently, as it is true for spending and buying decisions, as it is true for decisions of how you spend your leisure time (plugged into the TV/Matrix perhaps?).
For some interesting perspectives on this theme, see, for example Adbusters., which is typically available at one of your more complete magazine racks.
Next time you watch or read a slick ad for a computer product, pay a little closer attention and watch which of your buttons (or your bosses) they're pushing -- it's interesting in that they're not the dreary objective ones!
I'm thinking here of Bruce Eckel's Thinking in Java, for example.
They used to be over here, for example.
I originally downloaded the monstrous PDF file and viewed some of it on-line, but didn't seriously consider printing it out myself because:
I don't know how much of hit on profitability, if any, that Bruce E. takes using this approach. I'm certain that some folks that could not afford the in-print book but really wanted it have burned some trees and toner, and that some folks that could afford the book have opted for the looo...budget lifestyle, but I have to believe that he's sold copies of his book. I fervently hope that no one has been sleazy enough to download the PDF and republish the work for further sale.
On the other side, the free web access may have provided some nice publicity and advertising that could have helped improve sales compared to not doing the net distro route.
All this does is to suggest that traveling both roads has been done in the past. Maybe it would work for you, too.
Practically, I would bet that ultimately andover.net might end up having to remove those quoted, very specific posts that have, after the dust settles on a judicial time scale and have been proven to be actual copyright violations.
The important precedent to establish, however, would be that the burden of protecting the "copyrighted material" is on the copyright holder. The copyright holder should be the one that culls through newsgroups, etc., constantly searching for such infringement.
The reverse situation of requiring owners of forums and relays to cross-check every contributed post against the known universe of copyrighted material is patently ridiculous.
The best legal step I see is for /. in the future is to enable the individual poster, even an AC, to remove a post. Then, when presented with a validate legal claim that a copyright was violated, /. can request to the AC (via public post) that they remove the offending post. Then, the burden is back onto the original AC that committed the violation, which is where the burden should be.
Even a general purpose protective boilerplate at the top would go a long way: something like "Don't post copyrighted works. We cannot be responsible for your misbehavior."
Any claim in court that, practically speaking, AC's act unresponsible (hoo, me?) and are not be responsive is tough nuggies; if you establish carriers as responsible, then it should follow that any and every ISP, phone company, Postal Service is responsible for any violation carried over their medium. Last I heard it was not possible to hold the postoffice responsible for Bad mail, but it was possible to convict the sender of a crime if the sender could be established.
These arguments should extend to MP3 as well.
Were the initial photocopier companies besieged with any suits about their enabling copyright violations of printed matter by unscrupulous users and were those companies held reponsible?
I'd be very interested in your experiences with them.
A decently-priced, high-performance hardware accelerated OpenGL on Linux is what I have waited years for.
It would have been nice if the high quality high performance SGI workmanship could have been encapsulated in video card with an open source driver, patch to DRI+XFree86 4.x that worked in more user-customized situations too.
For example, say I'm inclined to wait for a 1 GHz Thunderbird with DDR SDRAM. I'm guessing the chipset and motherboard are part of a tuned package that is not easily swapped in and out at will.
Still, it is a tempting machine, especially for a user
- accustomed to Unix
- not willing to do NT
- liking the price less than $10K
- seeing more free apps and packages coming out first for Linux than for Solaris or Irix these days.
The question is whether the performance limitations are noticeable compared to the high end solution for common usage. Since the performance is proportional to the log(performance), there's a true decision to be made.I don't know of any GPL'd ware, but Linux Journal has advertised the CCVS system for some time that is supposed to work on Linux. They might have been bought out by a larger firm lately, IIRC. Don't know how much it costs.
No, thanks, I've seen firsthand what damage group calendaring can do.
Needless to say, though, the costs of handling virii that exploit innovations that help the consumer were not to be seen anywhere in the sales pitch or product brochures -- only pictures of Happy, Productive workers Being Profitably Busy for Your Company.
Yeah, but Heinlein was a visionary and idealist like Stallman.
We all know in Real Life the unwritten precepts of law that include
There's no doubt the genie is out of the bottle as far as costless digital copies.
One solution I can suggest comes out the 17th century. That is, assume that once a copy is made of an original score that the cost will rapidly spiral down to zero. Given that's the case, let musicians, visual artists, movie producers, provide a command performance at their pleasure to the highest bidder or group of bidders at an accumulated auction site.
This is more like the model that supported music originally, like nobility of Vienna supporting Mozart (not implying that Mozart got the money he deserved). Then, once the initial price is overcome, anyone possessing a copy may provide it to others at whatever cost (free, for example) they want to charge.
In this model, the renumeration for already-released works rapidly dwindles to nothing, so artists past their prime will suffer. But, artists that are prolific and in demand should be able to release a 10 second snippet and be able to hold the rest of the song hostage until they get as much as they deem needed, whatever that amount happens to be.Want the next release of a new Metallica song?
Click on "I promise to contribute $1 for its production", along with 10000 other metalheads.
Then, if Metallica gets enough subscribers/patrons, they can release the song. Or not.I had forgotten that Windows was suitably large so that 65K bugs is not that many bugs/line of source code.
The endemic EEE culture could be really interesting in a post-breakup future with two behemoth software companies in Redmond (call them OS Products and Everything Else).
Care to speculate what would happen if Windows 2003 came out with a new "innovation", such as a swallowed version of something that looked a lot like Word+Excel+Access+Outlook? Hey, if it can eat IE, it's got a pretty good-sized mouth!
It's great reading, even if you're not a direct kernel hacker, being something of an education as to what the issues are, the pro's and the con's and plenty of subjective opinion about the what's "beautiful" and what's not.
As far as I'm concerned, this is like reading about the Chronicles of the Mightiest, but sadly, I never expect to see a terse laudatory Alan Cox comment with my name on it, though I much admire those other names that do get put in the parentheses.
Fixed a long-standing bug. (Little Ole Me)Cured subtle race on 8-way SMP (Me Again)
Speeded up khttpd by 5x. (Aint I Great)
Implemented VMware like win32 interpreter. (You Know Who)
Practically you've got a long way to go.
I live in a typical .gov installation where there are email attachments rife with .doc, .xls, .ppt extensions that the senders expect to be understood as if they are Standard Formats. Web pages, too, constantly refer to such binary proprietary formats, with the occassional helpful tag that clicking on the link
Not if you don't pay all of your taxes to MS it won't launch Word.
When I try to explain that I can't read their attachment I usually get blank stares, mystified befuddlement, confused silence (they're thinking "Oh! You're computer must be broken just now. It happens to me and My Computer all the time, too!") and attempts to resend the exact same document as if it would be OK after my computer was fixed and rebooted like happens so often to theirs!
Any attempt to explain the difference between formats dictated and hidden by a profit-making corporation and those that are documented in a publicly accessible RFC are usually met with polite impatience.
StarOffice has been some practical help, but it doesn't solve the fundamental problem -- that virtually all of the business of the U. S. Government would cease if their MS licences were to suddenly expire.
Hmmmm... that might not be such a bad idea!.
Certainly patents do their work of encouraging innovation by extending a window of potentially lucrative protection to the holder of the patent. But, I think 17 years is beyond generous given the current rate at which technology is implemented and used. Despite a modicum of computer literacy, 10 years ago I didn't even know what HTTP was and today half the country has been using it for several years already. I think it's fair to say that patent protections should expire sooner than they do now. It would tend to encourage compound technologies more than the current system (where I would have to get a lawyer to enable me to file a patent B that significantly improves upon and is completely contingent on the existance of patented technology A.) Lower barriers to entry for competitors to produce the patented technology would tend to increase competition, potentially improving quality and lowering prices sooner than happens now.
Obviously you forgot to fill out and mail in your household viewing habits card.
If you had done that, then you wouldn't have been inflicted with that "Getting to Know You" anti-privacy commercial that is so anathema to your sensibilities.
Can we interest you to a free trial subscription to Privacy Today?Consume! And Feel Good!
The recent success of GNU/Linux and various other Free Software projects based upon the GPL has probably vindicated your ideals to a much greater extent than those of other idealists that, for the most part, toil in obscurity, crying out to an indifferent crowd that does not listen.
However, it would seem to me that the GPL was only one ingredient in driving the widespread proliferation of Free Software. I would submit that there have been latent forces in the market place for software that have resented the strictures posed by closed proprietary and profit-driven "standards" and which just became enough of a driving force to encourage the spread of free software given enough of the other ingredients. Unfortunately, that awareness seems fleeting and transitory in the sense that IT decision makers and casual home computer users, like moths near a flame, are still willing to succumb to "convenient" integrated solutions that compromise their fundamental freedoms, essentially replacing the Old Boss with the New Boss. As long as they're not bled too fast they seem to put up with a sorry state of affairs.
Even if Free Software gains important footholds and commoditizes the OS, the API and the data file formats, there will eventually be some future innovation (O-O protocol, interfaces, etc.) that will lure the unsuspecting into a different set of shackles.
Do you foresee means for breaking out of the cycle of this amazing propensity for people to relinquish their freedom for a small piece of convenience? Is a Bill of Rights in order?
I don't know why you guys don't just lay back, relax some, and Feel Good.
After I saw Bill in his Just-Folks Sweater-- just like the one worn by the friendly spokesman for the 125% home equity loans that zAP Credit Card Debt dead-- I said to myself:
"Yes, Bill, I Feel Good about your small computer company that should have the freedom to innovate 25 years ago and Be the technology Winner that represents America and Working Families (TM) that is the Envy of the World and of other Wimps Without Money.
I agree with Bill. Let's all pull together and Feel Good and approve Elian Gonzales' father the political asylum that he desperately needs for Working Families that Save for a Better Future with the Freedom to Innovate and avoid Excessive Government Regulatory Burdens and Costly Bureaucracy of ThatDamnJanetReno that killed children in Waco.
Look how they have messed with the (all stand) Private Marketplace already and it's depressed the NASDAQ this week. Didn't I tell ya?
I think Bill is misunderstood. He needs Paul Harvey to help him express his important role to the American People. Even though I can't see Paul on the radio, his gravely voice is sooo comfortable that it is even more comfortable than the sweater that Bill wears on his TV commercial.
I sure know that Paul has helped me to Feel Good about the Supermarket to the Genetically-Engineered World of my Good Neighbored small town Just-Folks Walmart Store, powered by clean burning Nuclear Ethanol that reduces America's dependence on Furrin Oil.
Feel Good America!
[My apologies--I just lost it.]
For some applications in server clusters it might be OK, but for supercomputing applications the latency of everything CPU-memory, CPU-NIC, etc. starts to get in the way of efficiency. GigE alone is no panacea for this.
People I know choose customized network fabrics, like Myrinet, for example, and have eliminated some, but not all, of those network limitations.
The battleground then moves to improving the situation between main memory and the NIC, which is full of latencies and gratuitous copies.
I'd suggest a little ProActive Vaccination Campaign. If warning user-sysadmin-part-time-copier-repair-person's about the dangers of not updating their security precautions does not prompt them to adequately secure themselves from common infections and being mis-used as a DDoS launch site, then h4X in and do the job for them! Call it Hacking in the Public Interest. Shutdown the holes. Shoot, launch a distributed daemon to automatically probe and shut em down in case they quizzically "rebuild" after a mysterious halt. Eventually they'll get the message.
It might sound radical, but I'm sure the first people in London aware of the need to prevent the spread of water-borne illness back in the 17th century were looked upon as quite mad, too, as were efforts to test food service workers for TB.
Absolutely is a business plan important.
If you don't need it and your angels don't care - fine. But don't come crying to me when your life is like a pig on ice skates...
Very good advice (hire good CFO, have a good corporate attorney, etc.) has already been written by others above, the only thing I'd add, that I heard from someone that was managing a $10M startup, was to know your market, as in the names of people who would actually really be willing to plunk down money for your product. Anything else is just wishful thinking.
Dug, here's your present!
The next time you use your Frequent Preferred Dug Shopper Card at Dugmart you'll be eligible to obtain a 10 percent discount on that Jack Daniel's and Hemorrhoid Creme (you know, like the stuff you bought last weekend at 12AM after your car was spotted leaving the Adult Bookstore by the Crime Prevention Control Camera System that was installed for your protection against terrorists.)
P.S. Don't forget to enter our free drawing by filling out the 10 page questionnaire on you "to help us serve you better."
Given that the data is Mitnick's property as far as is known, the government should be required to return his property.
And, following the analogy of the coat with the possible pistol, Kevin should be trusted to have learned not to use pistols, rather than be required to demonstrate that he has no pistols.
At least, that's the society in which I'd prefer to live.
Trying to pry off pre-installed applications that more or less do the job is a true Herculean feat, requiring much brute force.
Without a truly revolutionary new feature that makes it different from all other pre-installed software, it's an uphill battle. Even the mighty MS had to cheat by using the pre-installation tactic girded up with some "it's part of the OS" flimflam.
No, I'm afraid the only way to win this game for Mozilla is to resort to pre-installing it on new "computers".
That is, unless any of you are creative enough to think of a clever tweak to it that would make it the Next Big Thing. Internet Telephony, net Games, Home Security System, whatever...
P.S. If it's any consolation, the price paid for relying on the crutch of user inertia regarding pre-installed software is some backward-compatibility nightmare's that you might recognize as part and parcel of the Bloatware. While you already see it big time in M$ products, you even see it poking it's head up in Linux (a la a.out, libc5) etc.