Slashdot Mirror

By me in response ro "Virgle", including a bit on the two worlds at Google: http://www.pdfernhout.net/a-ra...
----
"But given what Gatto and Ellul say, that action may be a long time coming because the wealthy get so much emotional reward out of believing the propaganda of elites deserving abundance amidst scarcity for the many and spreading that propaganda further (even via Virgle).
"The Mythology of Wealth"
http://www.democraticundergrou...
"The cheap-labor conservative "minimalist government" social Darwinian world view is just plain bullshit. It builds a new class structure, which just like the ancient class structures, is based on a set of mythological concepts. In fact, those mythological concepts like "property rights", "contract rights", "corporations", "stocks", "bonds", and even "money" itself are socially created to regulate distribution and access to resources. The "market place" is a human creation. The details of how it operates are determined by the particulars of the institutions on which it is built. It is "instituted among men", and if its workings become destructive of the lives, liberty and pursuit of happiness of people subject to it, it may be "altered or abolished"."
For example, Google contractors get no Segways and massages?
http://www.google-watch.org/go...
Or second class badges?
http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/...
"I used to work at Google as a Contractor. Let me tell you, it wasn't the greatest place for a contractor. First, you have red badges, so anyone with a Google badge looks down on you. Already you feel left out, and you don't feel like enjoying all the benefits Googler's have. ... I don't miss working there. The people arn't really all that friendly, people have arrogance and MBA, PHD attitudes."
And ultimately, aren't even the people in sweatshops in, say, China who build component used in Google servers in some sense Google contractors? Definitely no Segways or massages for them. :-(
http://www.monthlyreview.org/m...
"Well over 150 million migrant workers from rural areas have crowded into the cities over the past decade in search of economic survival. They may regularly not get paid for months at a time. Public healthcare across the economy is declining to the point where many millions of working families cannot afford to seek medical care or risk huge debt if they do. Migrant workers are at especial risk. Large numbers of workers in the toy industry have now lost their jobs directly as a result of the Mattel recall, and its fallout continues. They are the direct victims of their local bosses' abuses and the lack of safety control. But of course they and their stories and suffering, literally inscribed in the toys they make, remain invisible."
So what is Google Headquarters in Mountain View, California but a little temporary space habitat bubble of happiness for regular employees, but floating on a sea of relative misery for everyone else planetwide who supports it? Can't we as a society or Google/Virgle as an aspiration do better that that? And even within that bubble are emerging issues. How long can a company expect to run on twenty-somethings without kids?"
----

We've been watching "Manor House" and "Downton Abbey" and it is perhaps interesting to think about the upstairs/downstairs distinction in relation to Google employees vs. contractors and other supporters (including suppliers and users).

Personally, I feel Google (including its top management) i

They're too busy chasing after precocious people with libertarian ideals that could threaten the establishment and bullying them into suicide.

As well as going after Aaron Swartz and bullying him into suicide. (Or by "libertarian ideals" do you mean "ideals supportive of civil liberties" rather than "free-market ideals"?)

If it were, then it would be responsible for any suicide for someone with an impending prosecution.

Justice is not responsible for Swartz illegally downloading millions of documents in the JSTOR case, nor for his similar behavior two years prior in the PACER case. His reaction in the former case is still posted:

Wanted by the FBI

I got my FBI file today. (Request yours!) As I hoped, it’s truly delightful.

So, you're saying you're in favor of ridiculously high punishments that have no relationship to what the accused did?

The consequence of what Carmen Ortiz did was that a man died.

Harassing someone to the point of suicide is a crime, there are precedents for that.

A man who had previously written about his struggles with depression. There's no evidence that Ortiz' actions pushed him to suicide, so you're really asking for ridiculously high punishments without any evidence that the person is guilty and without due process, a far cry from justice.

In fact, the exact same argument you're making could be made about Swartz' own lawyers, who said that he was facing 30 years in prison and that the minimum cost to defend himself would be $1.5 million. Neither of those are statistically true, particularly in this case where there was no breaking and entering, no trade secret theft, and most importantly, no factual disputes: Swartz certainly wasn't going to argue that he never downloaded those documents from JSTOR, that he didn't change his MAC address when he was blocked, and that he didn't hook his laptop up to one of MITs network closets. So, right there, all of your major discovery costs disappear, and you're simply making a legal argument. The cost would be closer to $50-100 thousand, still not a drop in the bucket, but an order of magnitude different from what his own lawyer was scaring him with. Similarly, those 30 years would be applied only if the court didn't impose the sentences concurrently, and statistically, he'd be more likely to get 3-5 years tops. Again, an order of magnitude different.

Ortiz certainly scared Swartz, but that's her job. His own attorneys, who actually had a duty to protect him, were the ones who failed to reassure him. Why aren't you calling for their disbarment?

When someone speculates, "citation needed" doesn't usually make sense.

But if it adds something, his occasional bouts of depression were no secret. In the way of a citation, I offer his own words: http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/verysick

What the summary doesn't mention, I didn't see on the petitions, and haven't seen the comments so far, is that they offered six months, instead. I'd be interested in knowing if that's accurate. Anyone?

How's this?

As a reader of Hacker News I'm getting a bit sick of this coverage myself. Last night, 9 of the 10 top stories were in relation to Aaron and the whole situation. The guy did some great work, but he never even got into a courtroom to see how things would play out. The other thing to note is that it was known even publicly that he suffered from depression. A high-stress situation plus depression is the recipe for this type of situation.

I'm not say either side (the people making him into a martyr or prosecutor for going after him) is right or wrong with what they are doing. But to me, the reaction I've been seeing so far from those on sites like Hacker News seems to be a little far out there.

He very clearly struggled with depression for a long time. After he got fired from Wired, he made a blog post about someone committing suicide. He changed the person's name to "Alex" later, but it said Aaron when he wrote it. His friends took this to be a suicide note and called the cops to intervene. Afterwards, he denied that it was a suicide note, but admitted he wasn't in a good state of mind at the time.

He also posted an online 'will' of sorts back in 2002 when he was only 16. For a 16 year old kid to be making such concrete plans in case of his death speaks to his own expectations about his life.

He very clearly struggled with depression for a long time. After he got fired from Wired, he made a blog post about someone committing suicide. He changed the person's name to "Alex" later, but it said Aaron when he wrote it. His friends took this to be a suicide note and called the cops to intervene. Afterwards, he denied that it was a suicide note, but admitted he wasn't in a good state of mind at the time.

He also posted an online 'will' of sorts back in 2002 when he was only 16. For a 16 year old kid to be making such concrete plans in case of his death speaks to his own expectations about his life.

So far, the only information found is ultimately sourced back to his uncle - no other confirmation.

Then we have this from his last blog entry:

Thus Master Wayne is left without solutions. Out of options, it’s no wonder the series ends with his staged suicide.

Not saying this is fake, just that I'd like to see something from an official source .

Hey, at least the GNAA -- er -- Goatse Security didn't steal 1.5 million dollars worth of free information by "hacking" a public library computer with that malware called Perl that was already installed on it.

Sometimes it's hard to be mad at the FBI, though -- they're just like the bumbling idiots who play them on TV -- except that the ones on TV are at least somewhat lovable. Actually, I'm kinda surprised, because I thought they just trolled Torrents and Limewire all day looking for CP and other i.p.'s to refer to the RIAA's litigation machine. Actually, I'm not at all surprised, because they wouldn't have cared if it weren't their spying buddy ATT.

This article reminds me of a Blog Post from last year where the Pretty-Well-Regarded Hosting Company rimuhosting.com, gained root access (broke in) to a customers Virtual Machine when the customer explicitly stated that he would not give them root access.

A long discussion ensued where people said such silly comments suggesting that you should not expect privacy for a $20 server. If you get no privacy for $20, what kind of privacy should you expect from Google's Free Cloud...?

The summary paints 'publicly display aggregate and non-personally identifiable statistics about particular shortened links' in a negative light, but this is actually a feature of su.pr.

'Su.pr is the only URL shortener that also helps your content get discovered! Every Su.pr URL exposes your content to StumbleUpon's nearly 8 million users!'. Yes well now it isn't the only one :p.

Google does some bad shit, but I'm getting a little tired of people pretending they are clever because they 'out' google for doing some nefarious value-adding or reasonable activity.

Article on hacker news yesterday:
'If Microsoft had Google’s market share in search, is there any doubt that they’d be systematically demoting or even banning their competitors in the search results? Demoting someone in Google is a virtual death sentence, and yet not only has Google never been accused of using this vast power, the idea itself is almost unimaginable.'

Who writes Wikipedia?

That story was on /. about a month ago. My thought is that what TFA refers to as "Wikipedia Insiders" is the same 500 or so nuts detailed my linked article.

It might not be a bad thing but a lot of things I have gone to "the pedia", as I call it, have been items that are changing quite often at the time. The fact the Wikipedia can stay up with recent events and discoveries means I get the best information available. Even if I found some other site with relevant information on any given subject it is very likely the information is stale at best.

Plus if I am not sure how current info is the pedia gives me a way to check exactly when it was added, who added it, and mostly cites credible static pages or articles.

Why go from that level of usefulness to a (possible) 20+ day delay governed by a group that (presumably) is not the best or most knowledgeable on the subject matter?

This guy, peeled from the Wikipedia list of comments, seems to summarize the real problem here better than I'd guessed:

At least folks could build an alternative to OCLC. So that's what I and others have been doing -- Open Library provides a free collection of over 20 million book records that anyone can browse, download, contribute to, and reuse for absolutely free. Naturally, OCLC hasn't been a fan. They've been trying to kill it from the beginning -- threatening its funders with lawsuits, insulting it in the press, and putting pressure on member libraries not to cooperate. (Again, notice the reversal: an organization libraries create to help them has now become so powerful that it is forcing libraries to help it.)

But recently, it's gone one step way too far. Not satisfied with controlling the world's largest source of book information, it wants to take over all the smaller ones as well. It's now demanding that every library that uses WorldCat give control over all its catalog records to OCLC. It literally is asking libraries to put an OCLC policy notice on every book record in their catalog. It wants to own every library.

Basically, they're feeling threatened by the Internet, they've locked Google and Yahoo out of their web-based records, and they don't want the records (which member libraries actually paid them to contribute to) being given away to anybody else.

Pooh on them. If this keeps up, it looks like they're liable to be replaced by something smaller, faster, and free-er that uses the Internet. Like the RIAA, they're being dangerously slow to embrace the new technology so widely used by their own customers. Unlike the RIAA, they stand a good chance of being completely circumvented if small libraries decide they'd rather share their records with someone like Google.

I think this somewhat relates to the "activeness-on-wikipedia" problem. Of course, there are differences, but in terms of "introducing bugs and backing them out", "minor unrelated changes", "quality of commits" it is comparable.

http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/whowriteswikipedia

Actually - the 1% are the users who hang around and correct grammar and punctation mistakes, they clearly make many edits because each edit is only a few chars. The majority of NEW content on the other hand is added by users who may make few other edits. Aaron writes more on this: http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/whowriteswikipedia

And as we've seen, the in crowd are not the ones who really contribute in the first place.

So what are these people good for, again?

The US completely ignored copyright from other countries up into the 60ties.

I agree with that if by "the 60ties", you mean the 1860s.

the United States was a pirate nation that ignored copyrights for its first 100 years.
Source: http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/000859

In the 1800's, when the americans were a developing nation, they had no qualms in pirating foreign intellectual properties and technologies. People like Charles Dickens (British) etc., complained that this practice was hurting them, but the US did not see it to their benefit to respect foreign claims and piracy thrived. When the U.S. had developed more and there was a local market for their own authors etc., they came up with copyright protection for their own citizens while still not extending the same protection to foreign works. Only, when there was a significant market in Europe etc. for American works, did the U.S. move towards international copyrights. In a nutshell, when they were developing, they ignored copyrights; and when the role was reversed, they sought to protect their works.
Source: http://wccftech.com/forum/america-and-piracy-some- history-t9724.html

In any case, more and more of the world's economies are moving towards intellectual property, rather than tangible property. That makes comparisons to past history a little difficult. Take a piece of software, for example. Software can involve the involvement of millions of man-hours. It results in no physical product at all. In contrast, historically, the products of labor have been a mixture of intellectual property and physical property. Cars are designed, but they also have to be built. Books lean a little more towards intellectual property, but you still have to physically create them. Contrast that with something like software. Even drugs (while being a physical product) spend much more on development than actual production. As the developed world moves to heavy intellectual property development, countries like China are not only stealing the intellectual property, but doing it at a time when developed countries' economies are built much more heavily on intellectual property and while China maintains large trade surpluses over those same developed countries because they produce physical products (rather than intellectual property).

Also, while intellectual property is a big deal to me (as a software developer, who produces absolutely NOTHING except for intellectual property), I think it's also important to maintain a distinction between what type of intellectual property these countries are stealing. If they steal drug recipes in order to save lives, well, it's stealing, but it's understandable to a certain degree (it's about life or death, like stealing from a pharmacy in order to save someone's life if you really can't afford the price). If they steal a spreadsheet or wordprocessor, it's less understandable and more about economics. If they steal the viagra recipe, video games, or cartoon characters, it's more about greed and shafting the 1st world developers. Why the distinction? Because entertainment is not some essential product that makes a life-or-death difference. In many cases (like entertainment products), there isn't much of a reason they could give that mitigates the stealing itself.

...and if you don't feel like reading through 32 pages, then Aaron Swartz boiled it down:

Edward R. Tufte's "The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint" Presented in the Form of a PowerPoint Presentation

Whether someone is honest or a liar is, in fact, irrelevant to their contributions as a rank and file Wikipedian. Indeed, that is why anonymous contributions make up the bulk of Wikipedia content. (See - http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/whowriteswikipedia -). However, Essjay was not a rank and file Wikipedian: He pursued and acquired positions of trust and authority, and his fraudulent credentials were used to bolster his credibility, the credibility of his contributions to Wikipedia, and the credibility of Wikipedia. As such, the use of credentials -- which should be irrelevant -- has become the crux of the issue.

• Oust your co-founder and start claiming that you are the sole founder. It's okay if your organization's own past press releases contradict what you are now saying. No one will notice!
• Claim that the majority of work is done by a group of people who actually don't really contribute that much.

1. AJAX uses 1 item from MS. The rest is based on Netscape work. For a fairly accurate description of it without the MS re-writing of history (which seems to happen on the time).
2. NT Kernel is nothing more than a stolen version of VMS. In fact, BG went into DEC and literally bought a number of the key ppl during a shake-up within the CEO. So, no, that is not innovation on MS's part, but DECs. And further, the kernel was not really all that innovative.
3. Win32 API? What is innovative about creating an API? Absolutely NOTHING. It is the internal working code that becomes innovative. And nothing in the libs was innovative.
4. ACPI? it was developed by a consortium of HP, Intel, Microsoft, Phoenix and Toshiba. Notice that all but 2 are hardware companies. 1 is the BIOS writer. Considering that ACPI is nearly 100% hardware, bios thing, how much do you think that MS contributed?
5. COM? Funny thing. IIRC, there was a good link that showed the real history of COM and its influences, but I can not find it. Perhaps, this was one of MS's innovations.

Building a community is pretty tough; it requires just the right combination of technology and rules and people. And while it's been clear that [online] communities are at the core of many of the most interesting things on the Internet, we're still at the very early stages of understanding what it is that makes them work.

But Wikipedia isn't even a typical community. Usually Internet communities are groups of people who come together to discuss something, like cryptography or the writing of a technical specification. Perhaps they meet in an IRC channel, a web forum, a newsgroup, or on a mailing list, but the focus is always something "out there", something outside the discussion itself.

But with Wikipedia, the goal is building Wikipedia. It's not a community set up to make some other thing, it's a community set up to make itself. And since Wikipedia was one of the first sites to do it, we know hardly anything about building communities like that.

What Sanger is counting on is that the Citizendium will attract the large community of experts and people who care about accuracy who have already been driven away from Wikipedia - because it [Wikipedia] neither cares about nor makes any attempt to retain either kind of person. In fact, to some degree the Wikipedia is openly hostile to both types of people.

Three quick points- one, you're right in that this is Sanger's explicit wish. Two, I think it's very likely this project will draw existing wikipedians to it. Third, I think you may be unfairly stereotyping Wikipedia. Those hostile tendencies toward experts do exist, but to say they dominate Wikipedia is a pretty strong assertion.

Why is [preventing non-credentialed people from contributing] bad? I personally have no problem with non experts being prevented from contributing. The importance and value of an encyclopedia lies in its completeness and authoritativenes, not its eglatarianism.

This is the million-dollar question. I think Wikipedia benefits from accepting contribution from a very wide set of people. In fact, the majority of content is generated by them- have you read http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/whowriteswikipedia ?
 
If some of that broad audience moves to Citizendium and can't contribute, that could be bad.

Citizendium has a lot going for it as a project. And it's definitely worth doing. But it has some potential side-effects (as I've argued) and nobody really knows how things'll turn out- untested social are pretty darn unpredictable. Larry Sanger, for instance, has commented that "[Wikipedia] is a project that shouldn't work, but does." Maybe Citizendium is a project that should work, but doesn't.

How will it confuse people? What will it confuse them about?

What Sanger is counting on is that the Citizendium will attract the large community of experts and people who care about accuracy who have already been driven away from Wikipedia - because it [Wikipedia] neither cares about nor makes any attempt to retain either kind of person. In fact, to some degree the Wikipedia is openly hostile to both types of people.

Why is [preventing non-credentialed people from contributing] bad? I personally have no problem with non experts being prevented from contributing. The importance and value of an encyclopedia lies in its completeness and authoritativenes, not its eglatarianism.

According to some preliminary research by Aaron Swartz about who write Wikipedia, while it's true that most of the editing is done by regulars of the sort who would have karma, most of the original content is added by people with few other contributions to Wikipedia. The regulars just go back and put everything into Wiki format, add tags, make things follow style guides, etc. Since the real work is done by anonymous people who may never come back to the site, it's important to keep the process as open as possible for people who are still new to Wikipedia.

According to some preliminary research by Aaron Swartz about who write Wikipedia, while it's true that most of the editing is done by regulars of the sort who would have karma, most of the original content is added by people with few other contributions to Wikipedia. The regulars just go back and put everything into Wiki format, add tags, make things follow style guides, etc. Since the real work is done by anonymous people who may never come back to the site, it's important to keep the process as open as possible for people who are still new to Wikipedia.

yes, that's an issue between the artist and the publisher, so how does that give you the right to steal the artist's work, because sony's a bitch?

The artist and Sony have a contract. Sony and I (as a member of society) have a contract. The artist and I do not have a contract (since the artist assigned the social contract to Sony). Therefore, nothing I do can affect the artist.

Look, the artist charged Sony with distributing the music. If the artist has an issue with that, then the artist has to take it up with Sony. If Sony, in turn, wants to take it up with me, then it can because it's the one that was responsible for handling that sort of thing. In fact, unless I'm mistaken if the artist has assigned copyright he can't sue anyone for infringment anymore.

that's a horrible analogy. (unless you're only refering to sony's root-kit-shit) they're not damaging you with DRM, they're just not letting you have some entertainment in the fasion that you should have it.

By trying to lock up all media, the DRM thugs are damaging culture itself. You know how the ancient world has the Library of Alexandria, and when it burned down thousands of scrolls containing priceless knowledge were lost? Well, the same thing is going to happen again today if all media becomes DRM'd! Indeed, it's even happening without DRM, because copyright keeps getting extended (which effectively makes it permanant, which is unconstitutional). There are lots of movies from the 30s and such rotting away in warehouses because they're not in the Public Domain (so interested hobbyists can't preserve them) and not profitable enough for the rights holder to preserve.

(Incidentally, although I've only particularly mentioned DRM so far, just the sheer length of copyright is, in my opinion, a violation of the social contract.)

your response assumes that what your doing is actually moral, which is not the case. though it does do a great job of averting my point. you should try to argue your opinion, no?

As should you, since you just only asserted that it's not moral also.

I think the fundamental problem here is that we're arguing from such different perspectives that our basic assumptions are incompatible. In particular, you reason from the axiom that a person's ideas are inherently his property, and that he deserves to be rewarded just for expressing them. I, on the other hand, reject that axiom and instead posit that ideas are inherently the property of society because, unlike physical property, ideas become more valuable when given away. Thomas Jefferson said "He who receives an idea from me, receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me." I completely agree with him.

Incidentally, you might want to read this (which is referenced by both this and this, which I ran across while looking up the quote) in order to better understand my position.

actually your reponce was amazing. you should become press-fucking-secretary or something, that was amazing. you just said something that sounded really intelligent, but really was nothing more than being a pompus jack-ass saying "I'm right".

What did you expect me to say? I couldn't answer either "yes" or "no" to your question, because it would require me to implicitly confirm your assumption.

How would you appreciate it if I asked you "have you stopped beating your wife yet?" when you had never beaten her to begin with (or were not married, or any other condition that would render the assuption invalid)? The answer to the question cannot be yes or no; in fact, the only single word to describe it is mu (See: "Mu in hacker culture").

"It's really dangerous to design for a technical elite. We have to design for a broad majority of users."

By "dangerous", he means just to the corporate bottom line. by "we", he just means businesses.

The rest of us "elite" are being designed for just fine, thanks.

He does have a point about the difference between email and rss. That's why I swear by rss2email. it scans feeds, and wraps up items into my email inbox. best of both worlds.

I think this kid is a pansy. I mean, look at what this kid did when he was 14 (he co-wrote the RSS 1.0 specification).

I'll second this feature, just to emphasize it.

I'm operating on a bare bones life support income, so I can afford to be picky and think long-term for the position I really want. That means having data in one place: a folder of my inbox (I use rss2email for my feed reading).

They should just switch to RSS 3.0.
;)

That's funny, reddit.com just switched to Python (http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/rewritingreddit). And Google uses Python extensively inside the company, and just hired Guido van Russom, Python's creator. There are many more examples out there if you bothered to look.

http://www.aaronsw.com/2002/rss2email/

Great little app.

Set it up as a cron, use your normal email filters to sort all the RSS feeds.

Don't think I've ever seen CmdrTaco reply in comments, but I'd love to hear his reasons for this. I've gone the hardcore geeky route with rss2email and also the true standalone desktop aggregator route. What I've settled on is Bloglines, because I use 4 machines in different locations quite frequently. Bloglines simply makes this easiest and maintains state perfectly between all 4. I'm on win2k, XP, and OSX on those 4 machines. The Bloglines notifier extension for Firefox is quite handy as well.

FeedDemon - yeah, to get your $25 worth it helps to OPML and how to transform XML, but that's what I like about it.

Straw - for when I'm in the Gnome .

BlogLines - web-native but with an API to die for.

AmphetaDesk - around for a while, great if you like shooting your foot of in Perl.

NewsGator - for Outlook - still, you can tweak it to feed event-extended RSS into your task calendar.

rss2Email - for when my Knoppix install has nothing better to do.

SharpReader - not as good as FeedDemon, but less expensive. There are a few others, the WikiPedia has a good handle on that - point is, how is the IBM tool different than all of the above? Are they not going to use RSS or ATOM feeds?

Actually, everything I said there is basically common sense, but said in a particularly fancy way. RSS wins because it was the first to become widely used, and for the huge majority of uses (millions of random users with their feed-readers), switching to Atom would just break compatibility and offer no technical merits. Why is it any wonder that RSS won?

And by technical merits, I mean those observable to normal users. If J. Random Blogger can't see how switching to Atom makes things better, then why would he do it? Maybe the underlying architecture of Atom is much better. (I don't know; I haven't actually read an explanation of its improvements, aside from being standardized.) But if the RSS feeds of the present work just fine, which they do, then nobody's going to switch. I mean, if the Internet community made their protocol/format choices solely on technical merit, then not only would JSON-RPC have superseded XML-RPC, but I should also think thatwe'd be using a variant of Aaron Swartz's RSS 3.0 instead of the XML-based formats by now. It would save bandwidth, make it easier for humans to read and write feeds, and make it easier to parse and generate. (Yes, to parse it you'll have to write a a few custom regexes or something, but you won't need to include a 3MB XML-parsing library.) And we wouldn't need to worry about internationalisation issues like encoding, because RSS 3.0 feeds are UTF-8 by definition. Unfortunately, this is not about technical merits, just like capitalistic competition is never entirely about offering higher-quality goods or services. It's all about marketing, really -- marketing just enough for your product to get a foothold.

Google didn't choose the "wrong" specification. They chose a doomed one, maybe, but that doesn't make it bad.

My, my, RSS is really balkanizing right in front of my eyes. Especially since there's now two formats called RSS 3; one is not serious though, the other pretends not to, both are a great big comedic circus.

How long, oh Lord Berners-Lee, you let our children wait? When shall your Consortium and your TaskForce drop us the blessed Atom 1.0? Already allow the Drafts to turn into Standards! Soon! Oh so very soon!

The funniest thing, though, is that RSS 3 apparently exists, here. I canvassed the web quite thoroughly, or so I thought, before starting this. I didn't find a thing. Well, luckily enough, that dialect of RSS has been around for 3 years and still no takers. And that's because it's an entirely new format, text based rather than XML based. (I wonder if I'll find this funny if the author demands that I change the name of this site...)

I do not see a reason to patch up RSS 2.0. (No, really!). It is working as is and there are formats that'll replace it.

One of them is RSS 1.0 - although it is often perceived as predecessor of RSS 2.0, it is a different branch of evolution, based on W3C standards. What RSS 1.0 allows for is to combine and mix different kinds of information - rich information about the author of a post, etc ...

Sadly it has been perceived at too difficult (but now they say even RSS 2.0 is too complex...) and it has been only recently when the benefits of RDF based feed format are being really used.

And then there is Atom 1.0, which has just been released.

Yeah, I've heard of YAML, and I like it very much. But just so you know, this isn't "my" format. Aaron Swartz (who is also responsible for the RDF-based RSS 1.0) specified it in 2002.

I get the feeling that this is a practical joke/troll by Jonathan Avidan - the person who is editing this new specification, the person who maintains the website linked to, and who submitted this article to Slashdot.

Agreed. It's highly unusual that no blogs in the Technorati index (of apparently 15.4 million sites) link to it. If this was a real community effort, you would expect to find some discussion/rumours on the new "standard".

Perhaps it's just somebody trying to irritate Dave Winer or somebody suffering from severe "not invented here" syndrome. Either way, this is not the first time that a RSSv3 has been proposed.

Five? There are nine different versions of RSS. Not counting this new RSS 3.0, or the previous RSS 3.0 that has been around for years.

The thing about RSS is, anyone can decide to make the next version. I doubt Dave had anything to do with this.

Besides, RSS 3.0 is already taken:
http://www.aaronsw.com/2002/rss30

Robert Sayre

But it already exists!. Has for almost three years!

Hmm. I've thought about this before. I don't know how difficult this should be. In my (long) past experience with graphing and charting software, this amounts to at least two separate problems. The first and easiest is the drawing library - the pure graphics capability. The second, hardest, most complicated and usually least well done part is the interface and presentation capability. In other words, it's easy to draw a pie chart. Making it pretty, providing enough feature variety (but not too much), and making it easy to use is hard. A classic "90% rule of software" problem. But there should be some good libraries (based on OpenGL?) that provide the charting tools. So many scientific disciplines have their own unique preferred ways of charting their data!

A link or two, for whomever else might be reading this:
Graphical Data Presentation, Chapter 12 of an online text, Introduction to Data Collection and Analysis by Albert Goodman, provides a short overview of the basics of charting. I only glanced at it but it seems to be well written.

Edward Tufte's Visual Display of Quantitative Information is widely regarded as the most respected book on graphic presentation of data. He conducts workshops around the country. Tufte's Poster page has a pic of the "Napoleon's March" map by Charles J Minard, a triumph of multivariate data representation.

Tufte also provides a forum on data presentation. This multi-year thread discusses dozens of free, open source and commercial graphing tools. He has also published an essay on The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint (or lack thereof). It's not available for free, so here's a synopsis and a review.

I am running MacOS X 10.3.5 behind a Belkin DSL router. I followed the instructions here. I then tried 'ping6 www.kame.net', to which I get 'ping6: UDP connect: No route to host'. I then follow the instructions here, and then trying ping6 again I get:

[localhost:~] userx% ping6 www.ipv6.digital.com
PING6(56=40+8+8 bytes) 2002:0:0:1::1 --> 3ffe:1200:2001:1:8000::2
ping6: sendmsg: Network is down
ping6: wrote www.ipv6.digital.com 16 chars, ret=-1

If I play around too much I get a kernel panic. Anyone have any ideas?

28 pages is a bit hefty. Where can I find the executive summary?

"The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint" Presented in the Form of a PowerPoint Presentation

I can't recommend anything for Windows, but @ centericq has support for RSS feeds (and a whack of LiveJournal support, not to mention irc/ICQ/ypager/MSN plus some other protocols I don't use, and it's text-based).

Unfortunately, I haven't been successful in getting it to send newsitems via e-mail (although I did succeed with all the chat protocols), so I have a crontab running @ rss2email. (the reason I like sending all this via e-mail is because I have a @ Motorola T900)