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Great Idea

I think that if you modified the code that runs http://www.advogato.org/ you could have a peer baised ratings system that would be close to what you are looking for... you would just need to change some of the verbage so people make associations on style, genere.

The diary sections and peer voting sections of the site would need little change. The site could help people find music they like... help people find other musicians to play with... and maybe put a dent in the "Industries" marketshare.

I understand that the trust metric of advogato is GPL and if I understand it correctly (it has been awhile since I used the site) You could use a similar method for rating styles of music. It would take a bit of hacking but I think it might be a worhy project.

I have no desire to do a solitary tech blog either, and it would seem like a waste for me, but something like Advogato I do have a sort of blog on. The last time I wrote a lot there was when I switched my desktop from Windows to Linux. I also posted an entry asking for recommendations for web hosting that needed MySQL, PHP, PERL etc. and got some good replies. So that type of collaborative thing makes more sense to me, especially being I rarely post. But my stuff runs alongside people like Bram Cohen there, so people tend to read it.

Who needs grand conspiracy theories when garden-variety white-collar crime, venality, and regulatory restructuring suffice?

Banking regulation and oversight were gutted in the Reagan years, directly bringing about the "savings and loan scandal", thence the bailout which you and I are still paying off. It's a matter of public record that the Bushes were deeply and lucratively involved. Neil Bush's indictment (successfully buried during the war) is an embarrassing footnote.

During the Clinton years -- the Newt Gingrich years -- securities regulation and enforcement were similarly gutted. The subsequent "scandals" -- the dot-com bubble, MCI, Global Crossing, Enron, Tyco -- were trivially predictable, albeit not in detail. Anyone not committing securities or accounting fraud was leaving money on the table, a much greater crime. Bush's connections with Enron make another footnote.

Here's a page tracking one of those toady CEOs installed at startups, this the one who gutted LinuxCare. The CEO installed at Cygnus Solutions, just a year before it was sold out to Red Hat, waltzed away with $100M, more than all the founders combined.

The conspiracy theorist would say that enabling what they did (and what most got away with) was the whole point, but extremist ideology must be as large a factor as ordinary greed. However, it's not always so easy to tell the difference: an idiot ideologist and a clever crook may promote the same policies. Most ideologists aren't habitual idiots, but don't care to examine too carefully what benefits them and their friends at the expense of people they don't know. It's an easy habit, and it works better than actually conspiring.

"Indeed, Cohen, 29, recently relocated from Seattle to San Francisco, and he and his chief operating officer are making the rounds on Sand Hill Road looking for venture capital for their new company, BitTorrent. They've forged a partnership with paid-search provider Ask Jeeves, and recently the duo flew to Burbank for high-level talks with the Motion Picture Association of America."

Whatever your opinion is of torrents or Bram, you have to be in awe of just how "hobby" coding can make you filthy rich (granted, this probably is a very rare exception to the rule). Now I realize that congratulations to Bram are pre-mature, but I think he's very much on his way. And when he does get rich, with a head for numbers and the stock market, I'm sure he'll stay that way. I do suppose, however, it's a bit too early to take down that paypal-donation link on the bittorrent site (http://www.bittorrent.com/donate.html).

Since this topic creeps up again, let me share what I wrote some time ago; I kept it hidden in the hope that it would mature, but it did not by itself ;-) Its fancy name is:
Tractatus Arcanae

I'm going to suggest a combination of measures to improve the stealth and integrity of peer-to-peer communication.

Preface:

The exchange of personal information and forbidden secrets is facing the nosyness of governments and intellectual property 0wners. Allow me to add a sidenote here:

I believe there is such a thing as intellectual property, but that it only exists as long as you actually keep the information secret.

Steps in securing a P2P network are already implemented by Freenet (http://freenet.sourceforge.net/).
The steps are encryption of traffic and obfuscating the origin of a file to the extent that the author of the file looses control over the file and stays anonymous, while the file is duplicated across the network in the cache of the nodes.

This leaves a bad feeling, because one might end up storing content that one does not condone, like bad pornography. Fortunately, a network such as Freenet has a property which puts the extra traffic and routing to good use:
Computation of network flow.

As Advogato explains (http://www.advogato.org/trust-metric.html), network flow has the property that in a network containing "good" information, say good music, and "bad information"(everything else..), the flow between the good part of the network and the bad part is restricted by the throughput rate of the "confused" notes, who don't know the difference between good and bad information.

This means that if the nodes, instead of keeping the information anonymous, instead specialize on knowing about and storing such information as is liked and considered good by the user, then nodes that "like each other" will automatically cluster. However, many P2P systems are very generous in giving away information, something that is very dangerous in a police state or when the traffic is otherwise under scrutinity. It does not help that traffic is encrypted since the source of the file, or at least the identity of the last one to pass the file is known. Therefore, restricting the flow of information only to between nodes that trust each other therefore is essential to the operation of a network that can hide the identity of at least some users of the network.

How is the trust relationship between nodes with good information established? This closes the circle with the aliens I mentioned in the beginning: if you trade information with them, you will initially have to consider them untrustworthy, and you will only want to give information if you get information back.

Therefore the mechanism to establish trust is not unlike a conversation: You talk with someone and when have something in common to talk about, like soccer or baseball, you will talk more with the person. In a peer-to-peer network, this can work by requesting a information(a file) from the unknown, and if you get back good information, which you can verify either because you have the file already, or because you got the hash from 3rd parties, then you add this node to the list of nodes that can be trusted and increase the trust rating. Initially, you will have to trade public information to determine common interests, information like a copy of a GPL licensed software, or a list of prime numbers(that is, if you talk to aliens). When exchanging new information, the quality of the information would have to be manually evaluated, just like two hackers who don't know each other will evaluate their knowledge for e-quality. Gradually, the trust level of the conversation between the nodes will rise and the the nodes will concentrate on handling traffic between trusted nodes.

I am aware that these methods require a lot of traffic for transferring some new information, but these are necessary

Ah wikipedia, the incorrect encylopedia, how do you amuse me ...

There was no letter. There was a phone call from a programmer who worked at Microsoft in the Windows Media group. Said programmer told the VirtualDub author that the ASF format was protected by patents, and suggested an alternative method that the author could use that didn't violate the patent.

Given that GPL code is supposed to be unincumbered by patented technology, you would think that the community would have appreciated the heads up. However, that doesn't appear to be as fun as bashing someone trying to do the right thing ...

http://www.advogato.org/article/101.html

As a side note, if this is the only 'evidence' you can find of a 25+ year old company "enforcing" its patents, you are doing more to further arguements counter to your point than for it ...

LinuxCare was a company that did do Linux support. They went bankrupt. They failed. It didn't work. So, apparently, you can't "make more money selling off the software and support."

Actually, they went bankrupt because the CEO and CIO spent millions of dollars on an enormously over-engineered server infrastructure to power Linuxcare in the early days. You can see that Doug Nassaur has pretty much done the same thing at every company he's burned.

They also had the most clueless Program and Project Managers on-staff, who would simply agree to outrageous contracts with vendors (such as writing a Linux-based 3Com WinModem driver for 3Com, in a weekend, without any specs or API documentation. Of course we lost that one too.).

They burned through so much money because 80% of their staff were completely non-technical people who didn't have the most basic understanding of Linux and where it fits.

After their 4th CEO and 5th round of layoffs in 18 months, they finally decided to turn the company into a 100% proprietary, non-Linux company and persue "Bank Provisioning Software". That too failed. 2 or 3 more CEOs later and now they're doing Linux appliances.

When I was there, I saw literally hundreds of brilliant, talented people get laid off, just so a clueless project manager could continue making $240k/year while working 4 days a week. Most of the rest of us were lucky to get 1/2 of that and we were working 20+ hour days, 6 and 7 days a week to meet absolutely unreal deadlines that some PM agreed to with the client/vendor.

Rasmus, Tridge, Paulus, Anton, Hugh, the rest of Ozlabs, dozens of very smart technical support people. Basically everybody underneath the cushy "management" layer were the people who could have made Linuxcare the "Google" of the Linux services environment.

They were all ignored, suppressed, and their ideas quashed before they were finally released from the hell by being laid off.

So the problem wasn't that "you can't make more money selling software and support", its that you can't make more money when you have completely clueless idiots driving the ship. If we fired 2/3 of the clueless management types and had the board actually listen to their engineers, Linuxcare would probably still be around today.. and still doing Linux in a community-responsible way.

http://www.advogato.org/proj/DougNassaurWatch/

intersting reading

MS, on the other hand, has not (to my knowledge) used a single patent offensively.

Here you go: Microsoft patents ASF media file format, stops reverse engineering.

Microsoft is also demanding that people buy licenses to use their FAT file system: Wikipedia article

http://www.advogato.org/person/vorlon/

There has also been some discussion about all this n the p2p-hackers mailing list.

actually, gtkhtml was originally a fork of the khtml codebase, just like webkit. It has since mostly withered and died, but there are a few projects using it.

http://www.advogato.org/proj/Monkey%20Nutsack%20Li nux/

Well, not exactly suing, but..
http://www.advogato.org/article/101.html

A Modest Proposal, or not

The upshot is that (1) the rootkits will close the holes they use, (2) the vulnerable machines will be tucked behind firewalls, infected via the web and e-mail, and (3) the bad guys can send bad e-mail to victims, but the honeymonkeys can't.

Each member has an "OpenUsability Peer Rating" (borrowed from Advogato) and a Skills Profile. Not every member takes advantage of this but it seems like a good framework.

http://www.advogato.org/trust-metric.html
Is Google implementing the same algorithm?

This sounds very similar to Advogato's trust metric, which uses a "seed" of trusted accounts to filter out trolls/spammers. The difference might be that it should be even easier to implement in the case of web pages, because they already have links to each other, avoiding the reliance on users to manually "certify" other user accounts in order to build the graph.

The Mentifex AI solution bypasses the famous Turing Test in favor of primitive AI Minds that must speciate and evolve.

The Association for Computing Machinery has reported twice (in 1998 and in 2004) on the Mentifex progress towards True AI.

AI has been solved but the claim of an AI solution *in* *theory* *only* arouses intense hostility on the 'Net.

Amazon Book Reviews are an example of vicious Mentifex-bashing where Slashdotters are invited to intervene with the well-known and widely admired Slashdot traditions of open-mindedness, fair play, and gentlemanly respect for the opinions of others.

Your name may shine forever in AI history if you read AI4U on line for free and write the definitive review of the solution to AI on Amazon.

Latina -- lingua Amoris -- vivit in aeternum post hunc splendidum eventum.

Vita Immortalis est tua si habueris bounum karma.

AI soluta est (Q.E.D.) quod erat demonstrandum -- educatio classica est melior quam diploma in scientia!

A friend of Larry McVoy's (yes, I'm told he has those) once told me that "Everyone I know who has had anything to do with Larry has eventually either been sued or threatened with a lawsuit by him." By contrast, while Monotone is arguably not yet ready for prime time, Graydon Hoare is a smart, nice, reasonable person who I trust to do the right thing. Thank goodness BitKeeper is out of the picture: maybe now kernel developers like myself who wouldn't touch BK with a 10 foot pole can soon sync their source with Linus' repositories.

The news has recently been announced -- just in time for the emergence of AI-ready robots -- that the sideways integration of sensory input with a conceptual mindgrid is the solution to artificial intelligence.

The solution to AI qua problem -- qua grand challenge to humanity -- exists at first in theory only.

The Association for Computing Machinery has reported in ACM Sigplan Notices 33(12):25-31 (1998) and in ACM Sigplan Notices 39(12):11-16 (2004) on progress in implementing the AI solution as open-source AI software evolving into Mind.Forth for robots. There is an implicit contest involved here of who can keep the date-stamped robot AI Mind running the longest, as if for the Guiness Book of World Records. Since Mentifex AI is in the public domain, programmers are free to customize special AI Minds in any programming language and to offer their artificial intelligence for sale on eBay in the Computers and Networking software marketplace.

Please do not point to the primitive Mentifex software as proof that the claim of an AI solution is false. The only claim made here is that AI has been solved in theory, not yet (please stand by) successfully implemented in software or hardware. The Artificial General Intelligence Research Institute (AGIRI) is creating powerful Novamente software but is handicapped for lack of funding and for disregard of the Mentifex AI theory. Mentifex has a secret plan to locate funding for AGIRI if the AGI team either hires Mentifex or agrees to implement the Theory of Cognitivity.

Microsoft patents ASF media file format, stops reverse engineering.

Sadly, while virtually every other browser allows you to have per-site Javascript settings (even Internet Explorer!), it seems the Firefox developers consider it to be unnecessary.

Search this page for "per-URL" to get some relevant information.

Sven Neumann AKA neo is working on real Colour Management as one of the many, many plates he has in the air. Expect to see it surface before GIMP 2.4.

Arbitrary colour channel depths is something of an elephant in the room at the moment. It was supposed to be inherent in a particular supporting library, but development on that library seems ot have petered out.

The people who are actually doing stuff do have this in mind, though, and regularly get asked about it, so it will happen, even if only to stop the whining.

"Time to buy a fixed IP service, people."

This really shouldn't be something that we have to buy now should it?

I really dislike that game. If I want a static and my machine is on all the time (except for frequent BEC [local power monopoly] outages) I should just be given one. I am using an IP address all the time anyway. That eliminates the reason usually given for a static costing more.

all the best,

drew

http://www.advogato.org/person/zotz/

"About a year and a half ago, I brought in some source code that I had worked on prior to working here; after receiving verbal OKs that the code would remain mine.

My code was derived from code I got from IBM's Developer Works website and also ActiveState's website; all of which was released under the GPL. I made a lot of additions to the software of my own, but the parts from the above sources were integral pieces and without them, my code wouldn't work."

We can break this down into seperate areas. First though, some clarification...

"My code was derived from code I got from IBM's Developer Works website and also ActiveState's website; all of which was released under the GPL."

Are you saying that you developed some code starting from a GPL code base owned by others and subsequesntly distributed the new code under the GPL. Then later, you got a job. Then later you brought that code into work? (With the written agreement on getting the job and the verbal agreement before bringing the code in to work.)

There are two issues (at least):

1. Who owns the code?

2. What impact does the fact that it was developed from a GPL base owned by others have?

1 would depend on if a subsequent verbal agreement superseeds a prior written agreement if the verbal agreement can be proved and if so, on if the verbal agreement can be proved.

2 works like this, since the new was developed from a GPL code base owned by others, if this code is to be distributed as opposed to used in house, it must be distributed under the GPL unless a seperate agreement is reached with the owners of the original code base or all of that code is removed and replaced.

Right?

http://www.advogato.org/person/zotz/

all the best,

drew

"Sounds like communism to me. Get him!"

More like division of labour don't you know? isn't that one of the key underpinings of capitalism?

http://www.advogato.org/person/zotz/

all the best,

drew

If you're a gnome user you should probably check up on Planet Gnome. Here's one blog in particular that may be of interrest.

Microsoft patents ASF media file format, stops reverse engineering
Posted 5 Jun 2000 by atai ...

5/12/2000: VirtualDub 1.3d released; ASF support removed at request of Microsoft ...

5/13/2000: VirtualDub and ASF further explained ...

Maybe not yet, but it would would seem that it would not be entirely out of character for them to do so. Forgive me if I believe that they have it in them to do so again.

... Maybe we would need an "apprentice" system in free software. ...

Advogato. Check it! Not exacly "apprentice" but appears somewhat related in nature.

[ mission statement ]
[ trust ]

... Maybe we would need an "apprentice" system in free software. ...

Advogato. Check it! Not exacly "apprentice" but appears somewhat related in nature.

[ mission statement ]
[ trust ]

... Maybe we would need an "apprentice" system in free software. ...

Advogato. Check it! Not exacly "apprentice" but appears somewhat related in nature.

[ mission statement ]
[ trust ]

eliminating user-visible preferences to an extreme)

Not quite right. It is about eliminating *useless* preferences, for things which should be autodetected or depending on current state. See this insightful piece why and how eliminate obsolete preferences.

This is one _monster_ big deal for Free Software.

This is the code that allows big companies such as IBM, Fujitsu, Entegrity etc. to bid for £500m contracts.

We have FreeDCE already, which is the DCE 1.1 Reference implementation autoconf'd and updated...

• 1. What do you do with the sensory inputs?
  [ ] Nothing goes into memory.
  
  • [ ] (If you pick this path, you may elaborate here.)
  [X] Each sense feeds into a sensory memory channel.
  
  • 2. Specify a process of integrating sensory input with the rest of the mind.
    [ ] Have each sensory memory channel lead further to a mysterious "CPU" --
    a "central processing unit" (homunculus, anyone?) that begs the question of
    how a mind conceptualizes sensory input and thinks about what it perceives.
    [ ] (Go on to describe the nature of the CPU -- central processing unit.)

• [X] Each sensory memory channel associates
• sideways to the mechanisms of
  emotion, thought, and free will -- interspersed amid, not terminating, the channels.
  
  • 3. Create a self-perceiving, maspar associative, auditory memory channel.
    [ ] Implement the auditory short-term memory (audSTM) channel
    with a database of English words known to the system.
    
  • [X] Emulate a true,
  • recycling if not diachronic (life-long), acoustic (phonemic), neuronal (i.e., associative) short-term auditory memory with an array or other data structure to record multiple, content-addressable memory engrams.
    

And so facts, like opinions, largely become either trusted or untrusted, rather than verified. Wikipedia should implement a ratings system somewhat like that of slashdot, with these features:

• Everyone can rate any entry at any time, rather than by dint of being granted mod points
• More than one entry can exist for a given topic in Wikipedia, potentially conflicting directly with other entries on the same subject
• In addition to being able to rate entries, everyone can rate everyone else in terms of how much a given person trusts another person

For an example of a trust metric, check out Advogato.

I do not mean to say that there is no such thing as objective truth or reality, there indeed is such a thing. But geographical distance, time passed, lack of measuring equipment, and other factors mean that in a very practical and real sense, "knowing" truth in many cases is reduced to a matter of trust and intuition. There is such a thing as expertise, but qualifying expertise is, in the end, a matter of trust.

Debating this point is worthwhile, because it can be difficult to grasp and should not be accepted lightly. But neither should we go around in circles never acknowledging this point or moving past it. In the end, filtering reality through a sytem of trust, tailored to the individual, is something that should be reflected in entities such as wikipedia.

It sounds like an artificial intelligence (AI).

An AI is really sophisticated when it can ask its own questions of the user.

I hear QT is good stuff. This isn't a slam on QT in particular.

However, I'm still waiting for the day when mainstream GUI libraries catch up to where BeOS was ten years ago, and put drawing in a separate thread from everything else.

There is absolutely no reason why GUI applications need to become sluggish when they are doing something computationally intensive. There's no reason that an application should stop posting redraws every time it makes a blocking call (like, for example, doing file i/o).

My eyes were opened to this shortcoming of "modern" GUI libraries by an entry in Bram's diary a while ago.

"I printed a test pattern on a piece of plain paper, and taped it to the outside of my south-facing window, so it would be subject to the full measure of California sun and the elements. A month later, the test pattern is still there. In particular, the cyan+magenta+yellow patches show no sign of color shift. Believe me, neither commercial offset printing nor ordinary color prints wouldn hold up nearly so well under these conditions. In fact, the paper is starting to show some signs of degrading, including a slight yellowing and a more brittle-feeling texture."

"So, it's not exactly a scientific test, but I think you can make prints on the 2200 with confidence that your grandchildren will still be able to enjoy them. Highly recommended."

Anyone care that Orasis (the story author) = Justin Chapweske?

http://www.advogato.org/person/orasis/

-c

As RSS [becomes] more known to the mainstream users and press, the bandwidth issue reported by many sites . . . related to feeds is becoming a reality. Stats from sites like Boing Boing are showing a real concern regarding feeds bandwidth usage. Possible solutions to this problem are emerging slowly, like RSScache (feed caching proxy) and KnowNow (even-driven syndication). RSScache seems to offer a realistic solution to the problem, but [will it] be enough . . . ?

Slashdot user GaryM posted a related question elsewhere about 20 months ago. At that time, in that forum, commenters dismissed his proposed solution, the use of NNTP, on the grounds that NNTP is deficient, but others continue to see NNTP as a possible solution nevertheless.

The Japanese robots -- or any kind of robots -- may be made truly intelligent by means of artificial intelligence based on a collaboratively worked out theory of mind for AI.

At Advogato: http://www.advogato.org/article/780.html - about FOSS harnessing the multitudes to perform UI design.

I probably went too far in directly equating the two, but this critique of Sun's JRL mentions some of the ways IP protection can effectively freeze research.

"I printed a test pattern on a piece of plain paper, and taped it to the outside of my south-facing window, so it would be subject to the full measure of California sun and the elements. A month later, the test pattern is still there. In particular, the cyan+magenta+yellow patches show no sign of color shift. Believe me, neither commercial offset printing nor ordinary color prints wouldn hold up nearly so well under these conditions. In fact, the paper is starting to show some signs of degrading, including a slight yellowing and a more brittle-feeling texture."

"So, it's not exactly a scientific test, but I think you can make prints on the 2200 with confidence that your grandchildren will still be able to enjoy them. Highly recommended."

Browsing metadata is the next frontier in the evolution of the web. Some of the other RDF browsers popping up include Gnowsis, MIT Haystack, and Fenfire.

With the growth of the Internet, the value of data itself is dropping, while the value of metadata (i.e. "data about data") increases, introducing a need for tools that can manipulate metadata. That is what RDF is all about - standardizing a way to represent metadata. It is not a standard for the metadata itself...those standards will be determined the same way everything else is on the Internet: with the best solutions rising to the top.

The most common objections to this scenario?
a) "Nobody will bother entering metadata". Wrong...it's already happening. Users are voluntarily generating metadata all the time. Just check out sites like flickr (photo blogging) and del.icio.us (collaborative bookmarks), not to mention Amazon reviews and Ebay ratings.
b) "RDF tags will just be abused with spam, trolls, and other useless info". A variety of techniques are emerging that are designed to protect the integrity of user-contributed data, including trust metrics like Slashdot's own distributed moderation (PDF) or Advogato.

You're quoting a 6 year old memo; how about pointing to some actual instances of MS using their patents offensively?

Didn't you read my reply the last time you insinuated that Microsoft wouldn't use patents offensively? They've tried to do so at least twice already, once successfully to prevent other programs (even other Windows programs!) from using "their" patented file format, and once unsuccessfully (although that hasn't got them to take the threat off their webpage yet) to try and squeeze money from anyone who wants to format a Windows-compatible filesystem with long filenames.

Open Source Definition vs. SCSL

Free Redistribution

Nope.

Source Code

Doesn't allow free redistribution, so redistribution in source code fails, too.

Derived Works

Nope.

Integrity of The Author's Source Code

Doesn't allow free distribution of separate modifications either.

No Discrimination Against Persons or Groups

I guess it passes that one, yay!

No Discrimination Against Fields of Endeavor

Nope. Explicitely limits fields of endeavor to research, commercial use, or internal use.

Distribution of License

Nope. The TCK license comes with what's effectively a NDA.

License Must Not Be Specific to a Product

I guess it passes that one, yay!

License Must Not Restrict Other Software

Nope. Once you've agreed to SCSL, you can't distribute non-compliant software. So you couldn't redistribute kaffe, gcj, or even more up-to-date versions of Xerces if they break tests in the TCK.

License Must Be Technology-Neutral

Nope. It's a click-wrap license. It even has a pointless [ACCEPT] [REJECT] at the bottom

Total: 2 out of 10.

In summary, it's not open source. It's not even close.