The question isn't whether BSD is dying but whether people keep going back and realizing/appreciating all the elegance and cleverness in BSD's evolution. Sure, its dying, but it's constantly reincarnating too, isn't it!
Post a reply if you would like me to send you an RPM for a Red Hat compatible PORTS tree...
No really: I have lots of old FreeBSD CDROMs with a veritable history of (the best) GNU software and MD5 sums. I can go back to FreeBSD 2.2.2. Check your timeline. BSD subscribers save the day HA!
I mean attatchment and awareness are two discrete perspectives. You can be aware and attached, unaware and attatched, aware and unattatched, or unaware and unattatched. I mean that zen is aware and unattatched.
Recursion is a word that the Slashdot crowd might find helpful. In mindfulness, your perceptual scope recurses on itself. You are aware of your awareness as opposed to only being aware of the sensations of other things that you are aware of. Instead of awareness travelling in a linear fashion from the physical things in your environment through your mind and into your awareness, your awareness is aware of itself beoming aware of the physical phenomena in your environment and the perceptual process. Your awareness is recursive.
Being aware is not being attatched. Things come and go and the recursive awareness adjusts. You can enjoy your immediate experience as it arises, but it is also caused by changing physical phenomena. It will also pass, and attatchment always causes suffering because it is not aware of impermanence.
Personally, I derive the same benefits from my Scotch-and-Cigar breaks, without the added mystic baggage. Fortunately, I work from home.
But, hey, whatever floats your boat. If sitting in the Lotus Position and intoning chants from the Vedas is what we have to do to keep jobs from going to India, I'm all for it.
Mystic baggage: mystic means uncommunicable personal experience (the essential facts cannot be understood by representative symbols), and baggage means stuff you carry around from your past (karma).
I highly doubt that you have actually experienced meditation if you think a cigar (personally can't stand em) and scotch (depends on the particular scotch for me) provide the same benefits. I have reasons for this, and I hope you understand that I am not criticising you, but rather I want you to understand that what you say is confusing to me.
Meditation is a process of simplifying your immediate experience to (and past) the point that the sphere of what you are immediately aware of surpasses the immediate sensory experiences. Scotch and cigars are complex immediate sensory experiences. These are opposite.
Old metaphor: If you pick up a hammer and drive a hundred nails, somewhere between nail 2 and nail 100 you will stop thinking about how to hold and swing the hammer. You will simply will the nail to drive through the wood, and then you will feel your arm strike the blow. The nail will glide into the wood under the direct force. The hammer has been absorbed into the way you feel your arm that it is a natural extension of your hand.
If you just sit and breathe (nothing mystic or baggage about that), your brain may stretch out and connect with all the things in your immediate surroundings. Your brain may try to glom onto the minor bodily irritations caused by sitting crooked or breathing too fast or slow. Mediation is the practice of nipping these irritations and distractions in the bud: noticing its root cause, and dealing with that until the distraction passes. You will pass from distraction to distraction, and each will linger in the periphery. Eventually your brain will calm down and stop trying to be distracted/entertained if you are comfortable enough to stay awake without pain. (The lotus position is just a way to train your body to support itself --eventually-- without discomfort for long periods of time. This protracted sitting period will give you more opportunity to train your brain.)
When your brain stops chasing distractions, you will gain a broad, unfocused perspective that includes everything in your surroundings. Not much is going on, but you will realize what is going on, and you will understand the chain of cause and effect in those things, and you will know how things are going to happen as they are happening and not afterwards, without thinking about them.
The more you practice (your brain must be trained to go into this mode at will), the easier it will be to apply this consciousness outside of sitting meditation. Eventually you will be able to function in everyday life "in the zone" all the time. Assholes at work will not phase you. Stupidity at work will not phase you. You will see what is happening, and know what to do, and do it without any wondering about anything.
It is HARD to do this. If you do, then people will glom onto you because you are a calm person in the middle of a storm. They will get emotional security from being around you. This has a positive effect on the work that gets done even if only a few people are "in the zone". You are perfectly capable of doing great or terrible things without any emotional reservations or baggage. Sometimes you will kick yourself out of the zone. Cigars and scotch probably cannot be enjoyed in the zone.
Zen is about detatching from the things in your immediate experience so that you can connect and disconnect without any greif. Nothing
If an artist/group keeps putting out good music to the point that people want to collect it, then they can recover the recording and distribution costs. However, there is no huge potential for the mere recording artist no matter how good the music is. The real money comes from touring, in lieu of the huge-ass rock-icon tour bus that sucks all your money out of the deal.
A better way to use MP3s is to *let* people collect them for free. Just go on the road and record everything to beat the bootleggers' quality. Sell recordings less than the bootleggers. Make your money off ticket sales.
The problem with this is your typical rock band is dreaming of becoming stinking rich off their hypothetical fans. Stick with musicians who appreciate the opportunity to make a comfortable living working hard doing what they love to do.
Selling MP3s isn't going to get anyone rich, and everyone will be disappointed. Stop thinking that recordings are "product" that has "distribution costs" which MP3s reduce. Start thinking recordings are advertisement and people sharing MP3s will do it for free if there's any money to be made headlining a tour.
Take money and jobs out of the picture. People take their problems overseas for a cheap fix. It's trendy. It's sexy. It's how you get ahead in the shady world of business management: because you have to get ahead to get out from under all the unsavory problems you leave behind.
You can make all kinds of arguments about eating your own dog food and self-sufficience, but how many of those 90 programmers can improve their own quality of life practicing their craft without some corporation to pay for their services? The real problem is the 10% who stay on to help leverage the substandard material produced by the overseas sweatshops.
Do you really need management to make those kinds of decisions? Maybe those 90 programmers could have regular meetings and figure something out. Maybe not. Maybe they need those managers. Part of the problem is the thought that you are competing aginst the overseas programmers for coding dollars. This is not so. You are competing aginst outsourcing managers for influence on the corporate bottom line and leadership status. Those 90 programmers need to become better managers than the people who fired them.
The thing is: if the name of the game is cut out the middleman, first don't be a middleman, and second cut out the middleman! Admittedly, you can't do everything so you will have to rely on a middleman here or there. The thing is, you will either have to form a strong trust relationship (Go watch the "Words of life and death" scene in Clint Eastwood's "Outlaw Josey Wales"), or you will have to strategise a way to limit your weak trust relationship with the middlemen like having a high turnover rate.
Every problem states its own inherent solution. The 90 people keep programming and ditch their crappy management! Try to take the other 10 programmers with you. Try to imagine the few enlightened dot-com startups in absence of all the greed and bullshit of the others.
If you represent a legal interest and also represent a conflicting legal interest, this is called "conflict of interest," and you are required by strict ethics to drop one of the conflicting interests. Failure to do so is pretty much racketeering.
Free software developers don't pay for DoJ or law-enforcement lobbying. So when a big software company claims the free software infringes on a patent, the DoJ will come in like the A-Team and break stuff like a bunch of crazed chimpanzees. If the big software company has to enforce its own IP rights, then the thuggery is much more difficult. Basically this is like giving Uzi submachine guns and riot suits to the BSA.
The only way certain corporations can get out from under the economic pressure caused by free software is to somehow "make people pay." The strategy is to transfer as much of their operations to tax-funded agencies as possible, and pay 10% of the operational cost to lobbying to support keeping it taxed/funded by legislators.
Intellectual Property law has historically been civil Law. Only recently has it been a matter of criminal law. Historically, copyright enforcement has been the sole responsibility of the copyright holder, and now taxpayers are responsible to bear the burden of protecting private (intellectual) property. Given that most people believe that the private sector has failed to effectively enforce its copyrights in the wake of digital media, how can you assure conservative taxpayers that we are not throwing good money after bad? What can you do that the private sector (independant programmers, big and small software development shops, and BSA type organizations) could not?
Thanks, but I apologise. I was trolling for comments like yours to get a point across. I just wanted to plant the relationship between a ridiculously overbroad patent like this and some kind of invalidation that joe slashdot will doubtlessly recognise.
Point taken on your Asimov references, but more people have seend the movie, so I went with it.
Actually, I wanted to draw the relationship between programmed ethics and control of humanity that Robocop was based on.
Unless you already know what you want, you basically need something thats interesting to tell a story about. Just randomly throw some right-sounding syllables together, and then add some random details.
Since its harder to think of random stuff than stuff that somehow makes sense, try a free online name generator
Do the Q&D version TO THE LETTER of whatever precious little requirements documentation you can scrape into a manila folder. Press them to tell you in their own terms from their own perspective exactly what their expectations are. You must surrender your priorities and divine theirs. Enumerate them in writing and make them choose to agree, disagree, or ignore them. Only do good and right work where it is explicitly necessary to fit the requirements in whatever form they are written down.
When they come back whining about what else they want (in the form of "you should have known to do this"), politely thank them for their new requirements (getting a statement of expectations is good), but remind them that new requirements make the sorting order of the old and new priorities ambiguous. Explain that you don't want to waste your time and their money doing things that are less important than other things which are more important to them.
All of this communiction should happen as informally as possible while still retaining a record of what people said. A good rule of thumb is to refuse to conclude (officially acknowledge) any oral discussion of expectations/requirements without email. Try to start the discussion on email, and keep face-to-face discussions SHORT to limit their scope down to something which is trivial to reiterate in email.
You must accept life in between the Q&D and good and right solutions. Be equally aware of the opportunities and consequences of both strategies in each moment. The better your awareness, the easier it will be to communicate those dilemmas to the customer. Tell the customer a choice must be made, and tell them your recommendations and reasons, but refuse to make those choices on your own. Doubtless your customer fails to understand the nuances of their own problems, you must be dillegent to help them understand as opportunities present themselves.
Try to couch your presentation as a progress report: "We passed the last sticking point thanks to your direction, and we have arrived at a new fork in the road."
Techie has a ring to it: I agree. It's actually derogatory to the "techies" while implying a derogatory context "non-techies." I'm a highly skilled Unix System Administrator. Nobody calls me a "techie" to my face. That makes light of all the hard work I've put into learning the systems and subsystems, scraping away layer after layer of abstractions upon abstractions. My job is to bridge the needs of the users with the raw capabilities of machines. Every day I alleviate the suffering of thoughtless mechanically repetitive paperwork.
I think you struck a chord: "techie" implies that the technology is trivial like a toy, with marginal useful application. It also sounds like a title for a supplicant, hurrying around to serve the master's needs. In my world, computers are robots that serve humans. In my world, humans should have minimal responsibilities to the machines. A "techie" or "tech" or "technician" is only there because of the machines they service. I'm more of a master than a servant, and I make sure my machines meet a high standard of performance.
Maybe its the trivialization of technical problems that happens when you distribute the technology to personal desktops as in PCs. The central organization has less compulsion to immediately rectify any particular machine failure because each failure is most often confined to the business impact of one person. Now that I think about it, "techies" are usually expected to deal with routine technical problems. Routine problems indicate a problem with your routine. If those problems aren't worth solving in a long-term way, then why not just ignore them? On one hand people know that they can't just ignore these problems, but they refuse to invest in a long-term solution. Microsoft viruses, for example, are met with a frown and a shrug.
As I see it, the real issue here is responsibility. There is responsibility to the real-world problems that technology intends to solve, and there is responsibility for the incidental problems created in the attempt. Microsoft computing culture is an abdication of responsibility. Get a support contract so you can say you have one, even though the enumerated set of risks it alleviates is about the same or higher cost than the premiums you must pay to get it it.
First, I am not a techie, and then let's see what I understand:
Techies don't seem to understand that businesses want to have a support contract with their usual supplier before they will buy Linux, even though the likelihood is that they may never need support
What is this support contract supposed to cover? Why must a business prefer their "usual supplier?" Who are these businesses and who are their "usual suppliers?" Based on the questions I have recieved from businesses (small to medium business operators without a dedicated IT staff) about the viability of the WalMart $200-300 Lindows PCs tells me that a vendor who can undercut the up-front costs of a Microsoft PC using FREE software can get customers to ignore the question of medium to long term hidden costs. This price pressure will prevent Microsoft from implementing their subscription model, and when the numbers start to show in their stock price, the blanket confidence that the above quote alludes to will evaporate with Microsoft's economic dominance.
I also edited out the paragraph about my experience collecting shamefully worthless shells/mobo-CPU-RAM-Video-combos of past PCs. I can only justfy powering a couple of old boxes running network services. Example: my old Athlon 600 FIC SD11 mobo system is plenty fast enough to do almost everything on my network. The case is a new Antec quiet case (nice), but what will I do with it when I upgrade my current desktop machine (Athlon XP 2100)?
Ebay is even almost too much of a hassle. I like the prospect of selling my system outright when it is upgrade time. TCO of PCs makes Mac up-front prices look more reasonable.
Its obvious that the new PowerMacs are aimed at early adopters doing things that people have not really caught up with. DVD burners are cheap now. Make your own movie. Play with the iMovie effects plugins. I'd like to see (later) DV/HDTV rendering performance compared on different systems: AFTER the iMovie plugins crowd has a chance to catch up.
Oh, and in case you don't understand where games are going or you never saw "The Matrix" or any other VR sci-fi, convincing virtual reality relies on MASSIVE databases of objects filtering out the things that would get obscured by other objects, and streaming them to a rendering engine/GPU. I could just say CG animated movies, but really we will be playing *in* the CG scene and not just watching it play. I want to see the NEXT game made for the PowerMac.
Also, benchmarks are putting the cart before the horse. A new architecture or platform is a challenge to programmers: Saturate THIS! Imagine as a programmer if you took turns completely exploiting a machine at a time and simply reported the results. If you do a test that is a greatest common denominator of two platforms, you ignore the value of the incompatible feature sets of each respective platform. A real benchmark illustrates the full potential of each compared system, which provides an illustration of their differences. What happens when there isn't really any software to exploit the potentials of either/both of the platforms?
PCs are cheap and fast, but not really that advanced. There isn't much unexplored potential to attract the early adopters and the fatter profit margin supplying their hardware. I understand if you want to get the most for your money, but for some people, money isn't the top criterion.
Consider as a side note that after a year, top end Mac computers only lose half of their market value. So, after a year, you can almost trade-in your old high-end Mac whereas you're stuck with the comparative PC model. What can you get with a $1500/year budget over 5 years? Can you push the envelope on a PC? That's a tough question.
You can't blame MP3s. All of my MP3s are either ripped and encoded by me from CDs that I bought, or recordings that are only available as download (live recordings by fans). I would just rather listen to my my own 10GB collection than pay $20+ for a CD.
You can't blame ripped DVD content on the Internet for spoiling DVD sales. It costs $3 to rent a DVD. I usually don't care to watch that same movie again for 6 months at least. Most movies I will never watch again. Any movie that I never want to see again costs $20 on DVD. Any movie that I DO want to see again costs $30-40. I will spend $18 per movie-that-I-want-to-watch-again over a span of 9+ years. In that time, I expect the purchase price of a DVD to be near zero.
<rant>
The empire of entertainment DISTRIBUTION is obsolete. Hahahaha, the makers of the VCR and 8-Track tape got bitten by UNPLANNED OBSOLECENSE. They want to whine and cry about how their business will go away and all the consumers' needs will go wanting, but that is pure bullshit. They are on the way out, and they know it, and they are cutting some legislators in on the profit while they engineer an exit from the business. TAXPAYERS SHOULD NOT PROVIDE BUSINESS INSURANCE TO OBSOLETE INDUSTRIES.
GPRS has several "channels" that can carry packet data in either direction. I have an unlocked T68i that I use on T-Mobile service, and it shows me that there are idle GPRS channels that could be used to boost the download speed. Right now I'm paying for megabytes (I never get half of them) because I have DSL at home, and I only really use the GPRS data service to check my email or get weather/directions on the road.
If I could get rid of the xfer limit on my GPRS connection, and I could activate more of the GPRS downstream channels, I would use it more. Otherwise it is painful compared to my 382k DSL, despite using T-Mobile's very-cool lossy-compressing transparent http proxy to compress image file size on web pages viewed over GPRS.
Does anyone have experience with GPRS service that does >56k??
This thread was weird. We started out with a minor disagreement. It seemed to escalate as we both illustrated our respective take on the differences. Then we discovered our common ground and the controversy dissipated. No trolls. No flames. Weiird.. like Usenet before the Internet was taken from the NSF.
Microsoft can require the bootstrap call routines from a separate DMCA/Patent protected, Microsoft branded, bootstrap ROM, and can control motherboard vendors through licensing for that chip.
Nasty Microsoft if they try that. Someone better get some prior-art out there and QUICK!
Maybe now that PCs have increased in power by several magnitudes since Be last tried this, Microsoft may actually be able to pull it off.
CORRECTION: Now that PCs... anyone may actually be able to pull it off.
What I don't see addressed here is the added complexity of the bootstrap required to support RDBMS based files. Where are you going to stick this bootstrap? I see a tightly controlled licensing arrangement between motherboard suppliers and MS. "Thou shalt not boot except through WinFS bootstrap code which is licensed to you for this purpose. We will revoke your license to distribute WinFS bootstrap if you make us cry. We will take OUR ball and go home, and you will not be able to sell any PCs to our captive users."
That sounds good, but I don't think other people should need you or I to help them cover their asses. That creates a conflict of interest for you or I. If they demand that very situation, then it is a foolishness, possibly more significant than any accomplishment they could make.
Honestly, I have trouble finding sympathy for people who don't really care, and then whine about the consequences later. If this continues, I'm going to have to draw a dichotomy of people: black and white terms. However I admit that everyone lapses across the line from one category to the other. My point was the responsibility is on the dupes for being dupes (as we all are from time to time).
If the dupes say "I realize my mistake and the connection to these consequences" then it takes the onus from the worm programmer. Only a fool thinks "I have accomplished something" when they dupe someone else who is simply not even aware of what is going on until it is too late.
If the dupes say "Damn that worm programmer" and shake their fists, that is yet another foolish mistake. The worm programmers can claim responsibility for that. They can feel a sense of authentic accomplishment. The psychological "manipulation motive" is reinforced. Things are set to repeat. If you or I enter as "savior and champion" then we are actually escalating the situation, supporting the dupe and his shaking fist.
I say "stop being angry at the worm programmers, and go find the extent of your own involvement in the debacle. When and if you get stuck, come to me with a specific question, and I will do my best to get you unstuck."
Slashdot Mirror
The question isn't whether BSD is dying but whether people keep going back and realizing/appreciating all the elegance and cleverness in BSD's evolution. Sure, its dying, but it's constantly reincarnating too, isn't it!
Post a reply if you would like me to send you an RPM for a Red Hat compatible PORTS tree...
No really: I have lots of old FreeBSD CDROMs with a veritable history of (the best) GNU software and MD5 sums. I can go back to FreeBSD 2.2.2. Check your timeline. BSD subscribers save the day HA!
Not sure if they were using SaMBa or SMBfs when they were having their problems, but MS Networking is a quagmire of interoperability problems.
I mean attatchment and awareness are two discrete perspectives. You can be aware and attached, unaware and attatched, aware and unattatched, or unaware and unattatched. I mean that zen is aware and unattatched.
Recursion is a word that the Slashdot crowd might find helpful. In mindfulness, your perceptual scope recurses on itself. You are aware of your awareness as opposed to only being aware of the sensations of other things that you are aware of. Instead of awareness travelling in a linear fashion from the physical things in your environment through your mind and into your awareness, your awareness is aware of itself beoming aware of the physical phenomena in your environment and the perceptual process. Your awareness is recursive.
Being aware is not being attatched. Things come and go and the recursive awareness adjusts. You can enjoy your immediate experience as it arises, but it is also caused by changing physical phenomena. It will also pass, and attatchment always causes suffering because it is not aware of impermanence.
This is from the zen perspective I have achieved.
Mystic baggage: mystic means uncommunicable personal experience (the essential facts cannot be understood by representative symbols), and baggage means stuff you carry around from your past (karma).
I highly doubt that you have actually experienced meditation if you think a cigar (personally can't stand em) and scotch (depends on the particular scotch for me) provide the same benefits. I have reasons for this, and I hope you understand that I am not criticising you, but rather I want you to understand that what you say is confusing to me.
Meditation is a process of simplifying your immediate experience to (and past) the point that the sphere of what you are immediately aware of surpasses the immediate sensory experiences. Scotch and cigars are complex immediate sensory experiences. These are opposite.
Old metaphor: If you pick up a hammer and drive a hundred nails, somewhere between nail 2 and nail 100 you will stop thinking about how to hold and swing the hammer. You will simply will the nail to drive through the wood, and then you will feel your arm strike the blow. The nail will glide into the wood under the direct force. The hammer has been absorbed into the way you feel your arm that it is a natural extension of your hand.
If you just sit and breathe (nothing mystic or baggage about that), your brain may stretch out and connect with all the things in your immediate surroundings. Your brain may try to glom onto the minor bodily irritations caused by sitting crooked or breathing too fast or slow. Mediation is the practice of nipping these irritations and distractions in the bud: noticing its root cause, and dealing with that until the distraction passes. You will pass from distraction to distraction, and each will linger in the periphery. Eventually your brain will calm down and stop trying to be distracted/entertained if you are comfortable enough to stay awake without pain. (The lotus position is just a way to train your body to support itself --eventually-- without discomfort for long periods of time. This protracted sitting period will give you more opportunity to train your brain.)
When your brain stops chasing distractions, you will gain a broad, unfocused perspective that includes everything in your surroundings. Not much is going on, but you will realize what is going on, and you will understand the chain of cause and effect in those things, and you will know how things are going to happen as they are happening and not afterwards, without thinking about them.
The more you practice (your brain must be trained to go into this mode at will), the easier it will be to apply this consciousness outside of sitting meditation. Eventually you will be able to function in everyday life "in the zone" all the time. Assholes at work will not phase you. Stupidity at work will not phase you. You will see what is happening, and know what to do, and do it without any wondering about anything.
It is HARD to do this. If you do, then people will glom onto you because you are a calm person in the middle of a storm. They will get emotional security from being around you. This has a positive effect on the work that gets done even if only a few people are "in the zone". You are perfectly capable of doing great or terrible things without any emotional reservations or baggage. Sometimes you will kick yourself out of the zone. Cigars and scotch probably cannot be enjoyed in the zone.
Zen is about detatching from the things in your immediate experience so that you can connect and disconnect without any greif. Nothing
If an artist/group keeps putting out good music to the point that people want to collect it, then they can recover the recording and distribution costs. However, there is no huge potential for the mere recording artist no matter how good the music is. The real money comes from touring, in lieu of the huge-ass rock-icon tour bus that sucks all your money out of the deal.
A better way to use MP3s is to *let* people collect them for free. Just go on the road and record everything to beat the bootleggers' quality. Sell recordings less than the bootleggers. Make your money off ticket sales.
The problem with this is your typical rock band is dreaming of becoming stinking rich off their hypothetical fans. Stick with musicians who appreciate the opportunity to make a comfortable living working hard doing what they love to do.
Selling MP3s isn't going to get anyone rich, and everyone will be disappointed. Stop thinking that recordings are "product" that has "distribution costs" which MP3s reduce. Start thinking recordings are advertisement and people sharing MP3s will do it for free if there's any money to be made headlining a tour.
Hi sterno!
Take money and jobs out of the picture. People take their problems overseas for a cheap fix. It's trendy. It's sexy. It's how you get ahead in the shady world of business management: because you have to get ahead to get out from under all the unsavory problems you leave behind.
You can make all kinds of arguments about eating your own dog food and self-sufficience, but how many of those 90 programmers can improve their own quality of life practicing their craft without some corporation to pay for their services? The real problem is the 10% who stay on to help leverage the substandard material produced by the overseas sweatshops.
Do you really need management to make those kinds of decisions? Maybe those 90 programmers could have regular meetings and figure something out. Maybe not. Maybe they need those managers. Part of the problem is the thought that you are competing aginst the overseas programmers for coding dollars. This is not so. You are competing aginst outsourcing managers for influence on the corporate bottom line and leadership status. Those 90 programmers need to become better managers than the people who fired them.
The thing is: if the name of the game is cut out the middleman, first don't be a middleman, and second cut out the middleman! Admittedly, you can't do everything so you will have to rely on a middleman here or there. The thing is, you will either have to form a strong trust relationship (Go watch the "Words of life and death" scene in Clint Eastwood's "Outlaw Josey Wales"), or you will have to strategise a way to limit your weak trust relationship with the middlemen like having a high turnover rate.
Every problem states its own inherent solution. The 90 people keep programming and ditch their crappy management! Try to take the other 10 programmers with you. Try to imagine the few enlightened dot-com startups in absence of all the greed and bullshit of the others.
If you represent a legal interest and also represent a conflicting legal interest, this is called "conflict of interest," and you are required by strict ethics to drop one of the conflicting interests. Failure to do so is pretty much racketeering.
Free software developers don't pay for DoJ or law-enforcement lobbying. So when a big software company claims the free software infringes on a patent, the DoJ will come in like the A-Team and break stuff like a bunch of crazed chimpanzees. If the big software company has to enforce its own IP rights, then the thuggery is much more difficult. Basically this is like giving Uzi submachine guns and riot suits to the BSA.
The only way certain corporations can get out from under the economic pressure caused by free software is to somehow "make people pay." The strategy is to transfer as much of their operations to tax-funded agencies as possible, and pay 10% of the operational cost to lobbying to support keeping it taxed/funded by legislators.
Intellectual Property law has historically been civil Law. Only recently has it been a matter of criminal law. Historically, copyright enforcement has been the sole responsibility of the copyright holder, and now taxpayers are responsible to bear the burden of protecting private (intellectual) property. Given that most people believe that the private sector has failed to effectively enforce its copyrights in the wake of digital media, how can you assure conservative taxpayers that we are not throwing good money after bad? What can you do that the private sector (independant programmers, big and small software development shops, and BSA type organizations) could not?
Thanks, but I apologise. I was trolling for comments like yours to get a point across. I just wanted to plant the relationship between a ridiculously overbroad patent like this and some kind of invalidation that joe slashdot will doubtlessly recognise.
Point taken on your Asimov references, but more people have seend the movie, so I went with it.
Actually, I wanted to draw the relationship between programmed ethics and control of humanity that Robocop was based on.
http://www.igsgames.com/Utilities/NameGenerator/
Help those who are lazier than you! (maybe even yourself at a later time.. ). Provide a link!
Shameless Plug: IGS Games
Unless you already know what you want, you basically need something thats interesting to tell a story about. Just randomly throw some right-sounding syllables together, and then add some random details.
Since its harder to think of random stuff than stuff that somehow makes sense, try a free online name generator
Do the Q&D version TO THE LETTER of whatever precious little requirements documentation you can scrape into a manila folder. Press them to tell you in their own terms from their own perspective exactly what their expectations are. You must surrender your priorities and divine theirs. Enumerate them in writing and make them choose to agree, disagree, or ignore them. Only do good and right work where it is explicitly necessary to fit the requirements in whatever form they are written down.
When they come back whining about what else they want (in the form of "you should have known to do this"), politely thank them for their new requirements (getting a statement of expectations is good), but remind them that new requirements make the sorting order of the old and new priorities ambiguous. Explain that you don't want to waste your time and their money doing things that are less important than other things which are more important to them.
All of this communiction should happen as informally as possible while still retaining a record of what people said. A good rule of thumb is to refuse to conclude (officially acknowledge) any oral discussion of expectations/requirements without email. Try to start the discussion on email, and keep face-to-face discussions SHORT to limit their scope down to something which is trivial to reiterate in email.
You must accept life in between the Q&D and good and right solutions. Be equally aware of the opportunities and consequences of both strategies in each moment. The better your awareness, the easier it will be to communicate those dilemmas to the customer. Tell the customer a choice must be made, and tell them your recommendations and reasons, but refuse to make those choices on your own. Doubtless your customer fails to understand the nuances of their own problems, you must be dillegent to help them understand as opportunities present themselves. Try to couch your presentation as a progress report: "We passed the last sticking point thanks to your direction, and we have arrived at a new fork in the road."
Does it count as prior art if it was in a work of (science) fiction?
Techie has a ring to it: I agree. It's actually derogatory to the "techies" while implying a derogatory context "non-techies." I'm a highly skilled Unix System Administrator. Nobody calls me a "techie" to my face. That makes light of all the hard work I've put into learning the systems and subsystems, scraping away layer after layer of abstractions upon abstractions. My job is to bridge the needs of the users with the raw capabilities of machines. Every day I alleviate the suffering of thoughtless mechanically repetitive paperwork.
I think you struck a chord: "techie" implies that the technology is trivial like a toy, with marginal useful application. It also sounds like a title for a supplicant, hurrying around to serve the master's needs. In my world, computers are robots that serve humans. In my world, humans should have minimal responsibilities to the machines. A "techie" or "tech" or "technician" is only there because of the machines they service. I'm more of a master than a servant, and I make sure my machines meet a high standard of performance.
Maybe its the trivialization of technical problems that happens when you distribute the technology to personal desktops as in PCs. The central organization has less compulsion to immediately rectify any particular machine failure because each failure is most often confined to the business impact of one person. Now that I think about it, "techies" are usually expected to deal with routine technical problems. Routine problems indicate a problem with your routine. If those problems aren't worth solving in a long-term way, then why not just ignore them? On one hand people know that they can't just ignore these problems, but they refuse to invest in a long-term solution. Microsoft viruses, for example, are met with a frown and a shrug.
As I see it, the real issue here is responsibility. There is responsibility to the real-world problems that technology intends to solve, and there is responsibility for the incidental problems created in the attempt. Microsoft computing culture is an abdication of responsibility. Get a support contract so you can say you have one, even though the enumerated set of risks it alleviates is about the same or higher cost than the premiums you must pay to get it it.
First, I am not a techie, and then let's see what I understand:
What is this support contract supposed to cover? Why must a business prefer their "usual supplier?" Who are these businesses and who are their "usual suppliers?" Based on the questions I have recieved from businesses (small to medium business operators without a dedicated IT staff) about the viability of the WalMart $200-300 Lindows PCs tells me that a vendor who can undercut the up-front costs of a Microsoft PC using FREE software can get customers to ignore the question of medium to long term hidden costs. This price pressure will prevent Microsoft from implementing their subscription model, and when the numbers start to show in their stock price, the blanket confidence that the above quote alludes to will evaporate with Microsoft's economic dominance.I also edited out the paragraph about my experience collecting shamefully worthless shells/mobo-CPU-RAM-Video-combos of past PCs. I can only justfy powering a couple of old boxes running network services. Example: my old Athlon 600 FIC SD11 mobo system is plenty fast enough to do almost everything on my network. The case is a new Antec quiet case (nice), but what will I do with it when I upgrade my current desktop machine (Athlon XP 2100)? Ebay is even almost too much of a hassle. I like the prospect of selling my system outright when it is upgrade time. TCO of PCs makes Mac up-front prices look more reasonable.
Its obvious that the new PowerMacs are aimed at early adopters doing things that people have not really caught up with. DVD burners are cheap now. Make your own movie. Play with the iMovie effects plugins. I'd like to see (later) DV/HDTV rendering performance compared on different systems: AFTER the iMovie plugins crowd has a chance to catch up.
Oh, and in case you don't understand where games are going or you never saw "The Matrix" or any other VR sci-fi, convincing virtual reality relies on MASSIVE databases of objects filtering out the things that would get obscured by other objects, and streaming them to a rendering engine/GPU. I could just say CG animated movies, but really we will be playing *in* the CG scene and not just watching it play. I want to see the NEXT game made for the PowerMac.
Also, benchmarks are putting the cart before the horse. A new architecture or platform is a challenge to programmers: Saturate THIS! Imagine as a programmer if you took turns completely exploiting a machine at a time and simply reported the results. If you do a test that is a greatest common denominator of two platforms, you ignore the value of the incompatible feature sets of each respective platform. A real benchmark illustrates the full potential of each compared system, which provides an illustration of their differences. What happens when there isn't really any software to exploit the potentials of either/both of the platforms?
PCs are cheap and fast, but not really that advanced. There isn't much unexplored potential to attract the early adopters and the fatter profit margin supplying their hardware. I understand if you want to get the most for your money, but for some people, money isn't the top criterion.
Consider as a side note that after a year, top end Mac computers only lose half of their market value. So, after a year, you can almost trade-in your old high-end Mac whereas you're stuck with the comparative PC model. What can you get with a $1500/year budget over 5 years? Can you push the envelope on a PC? That's a tough question.
You can't blame MP3s. All of my MP3s are either ripped and encoded by me from CDs that I bought, or recordings that are only available as download (live recordings by fans). I would just rather listen to my my own 10GB collection than pay $20+ for a CD.
You can't blame ripped DVD content on the Internet for spoiling DVD sales. It costs $3 to rent a DVD. I usually don't care to watch that same movie again for 6 months at least. Most movies I will never watch again. Any movie that I never want to see again costs $20 on DVD. Any movie that I DO want to see again costs $30-40. I will spend $18 per movie-that-I-want-to-watch-again over a span of 9+ years. In that time, I expect the purchase price of a DVD to be near zero.
<rant>The empire of entertainment DISTRIBUTION is obsolete. Hahahaha, the makers of the VCR and 8-Track tape got bitten by UNPLANNED OBSOLECENSE. They want to whine and cry about how their business will go away and all the consumers' needs will go wanting, but that is pure bullshit. They are on the way out, and they know it, and they are cutting some legislators in on the profit while they engineer an exit from the business. TAXPAYERS SHOULD NOT PROVIDE BUSINESS INSURANCE TO OBSOLETE INDUSTRIES.
</rant>GPRS has several "channels" that can carry packet data in either direction. I have an unlocked T68i that I use on T-Mobile service, and it shows me that there are idle GPRS channels that could be used to boost the download speed. Right now I'm paying for megabytes (I never get half of them) because I have DSL at home, and I only really use the GPRS data service to check my email or get weather/directions on the road.
If I could get rid of the xfer limit on my GPRS connection, and I could activate more of the GPRS downstream channels, I would use it more. Otherwise it is painful compared to my 382k DSL, despite using T-Mobile's very-cool lossy-compressing transparent http proxy to compress image file size on web pages viewed over GPRS.
Does anyone have experience with GPRS service that does >56k??
Is Excel still a Multi-Level-Marketing (Network Marketing) company?
This thread was weird. We started out with a minor disagreement. It seemed to escalate as we both illustrated our respective take on the differences. Then we discovered our common ground and the controversy dissipated. No trolls. No flames. Weiird.. like Usenet before the Internet was taken from the NSF.
Thanks!
Oh, that's right. I forgot. I guess the idea of a lawsuit made no sense without some kind of court reporting. My brain must have thrown it out.
Microsoft can require the bootstrap call routines from a separate DMCA/Patent protected, Microsoft branded, bootstrap ROM, and can control motherboard vendors through licensing for that chip.
Nasty Microsoft if they try that. Someone better get some prior-art out there and QUICK!
CORRECTION: Now that PCs ... anyone may actually be able to pull it off.
What I don't see addressed here is the added complexity of the bootstrap required to support RDBMS based files. Where are you going to stick this bootstrap? I see a tightly controlled licensing arrangement between motherboard suppliers and MS. "Thou shalt not boot except through WinFS bootstrap code which is licensed to you for this purpose. We will revoke your license to distribute WinFS bootstrap if you make us cry. We will take OUR ball and go home, and you will not be able to sell any PCs to our captive users."
That sounds good, but I don't think other people should need you or I to help them cover their asses. That creates a conflict of interest for you or I. If they demand that very situation, then it is a foolishness, possibly more significant than any accomplishment they could make.
Honestly, I have trouble finding sympathy for people who don't really care, and then whine about the consequences later. If this continues, I'm going to have to draw a dichotomy of people: black and white terms. However I admit that everyone lapses across the line from one category to the other. My point was the responsibility is on the dupes for being dupes (as we all are from time to time).
If the dupes say "I realize my mistake and the connection to these consequences" then it takes the onus from the worm programmer. Only a fool thinks "I have accomplished something" when they dupe someone else who is simply not even aware of what is going on until it is too late.
If the dupes say "Damn that worm programmer" and shake their fists, that is yet another foolish mistake. The worm programmers can claim responsibility for that. They can feel a sense of authentic accomplishment. The psychological "manipulation motive" is reinforced. Things are set to repeat. If you or I enter as "savior and champion" then we are actually escalating the situation, supporting the dupe and his shaking fist.
I say "stop being angry at the worm programmers, and go find the extent of your own involvement in the debacle. When and if you get stuck, come to me with a specific question, and I will do my best to get you unstuck."