The debris results from a comet which intersects the path of the earth from the vicinity of the constellation Leo, thus the name. The shower emanates from this point in the sky and the meteors' trajectories can occur in any degree around this point. They are weighted E-W for the reason you mention. The path followed by the comet each go round is slightly different, as well, which makes for better viewing some years than others.
I heard one also. There were about four of us lying on a bank at my parents' cabin, up in the pine woods of N. Minnesota. It was bright as hell. I'll go to my grave swearing it illuminated the trees. We all just looked at each other. I don't think anyone even mentioned it; it seemed too nutty. It rustled like an instantaneous wind. And it sounded just the way the woods propagate any creak on a quite night. Turns out it was the woods. Cool.
In all, a hell of a show and well worth turning out at 4am.
1) I precisely agree that using is not the same as developing on a computer. But I end up at a converse conclusion and it hinges on how it is different. Using a computer, by your lights, interacting with a computer to satisfy a given task, is precisely what I'll be spending a lot of time doing in order to accomplish my task of publishing two hundred ten years' worth of census data. The difference is that a data entry professionals' interactions with the machine are rather simpler than mine and I don't think that it is inherently elitist to say that. Yes, the OS must accomodate that disparity. My point is that the natural progress from luser to user to power user, and particularly the leap to *developer*, is distorted under Windows by virtue of MS proprietary, profit-driven design choices.
You don't credit the users you claim to protect. My wife can automate a business process of considerable complexity using Access, Excel and a smattering of VBA and wouldn't dream of calling herself a developer. I happened to want to know what IE was doing when it said it would *probe my (her) network settings*. (Jesus Christ, Microsoft is probing my wife's settings!) Consulting Windows Help in order to satisfy this curiosity, I learn what the boxes look like that allow me to assign and modify those values. Instead of describing what DNS is and what it do, Windows offers to *probe my network settings* again, conveniently contributing to the aura and mystique surrounding these modern marvels. Not everyone wants access to this level of detail, but the number who do is sufficiently large and their interactions with the machine sufficiently more interesting as to make reading the source code and writing against an API desirable. For these users, MS' closed model represents a liability.
2) There's no such thing as a career that is not a computer-oriented career. Truck drivers use computers, friend. When they learn to right click, they want to continue to right click; whose stack intercepts this event is irrelevent to them.
3) I'm an average human. I would welcome more dumbed down GUIs on Linux/BSD/whatever. We are both welcome to do something about that and apparently have all the tools and resources of documentation we need to get started. Will you open a project on sourceforge or should I?
While we're at it, lets make Windows a little more forthcoming in the UI area.... Oh, bummer.
4) You're right, I completely missed your point. My error. But you missed mine, as well. I argue that the case for undergoing the headache of changing OS on hundreds of computers company-wide is to be made by amortizing that cost over five years and then comparing to the licensing and maintenance costs for your XP installation over the same time period. Don't forget that mandatory upgrade schedule. You'll be installing and paying for a *new* OS three times. And you will cynically kvetch about how painfully un-new it is as you sign each check, even as MS uses a chunk of your change to beat you over the head about how *new* it really is. But wait, there's more. For this low, low price, you not only control your upgrade schedule, you control your interfaces and source code. If Joe Maintainer takes the project in a different direction you can freeze or fork.
5)...after using Linux for 5 years, I am still amazed at how well documented it is (see 1 above). Compare it to the Knowledge Base whose interface and enumeration scheme are intentionally obfuscatory. And its not a hanging garden. I can verify resposes to my queries with alternative sources of information, sources or documentation.
I can't offer any hope for you. There must be something CAD-CAM cooking on freshmeat but it is not my area of expertise. As to Project, I can think of several free/Free groupware projects that approximate its functionality. Can't speak to their serviceability, however. I am congenitally allergic to Gantt charts. I can wholeheartedly recommend VMWare. Runs fast, very flexible. It's probably not talking to your 3-D card yet, I am afraid, but I used it at my last job in order to interface with their Notes installation.
I am thinking more of the SOHO user. Or gamers. My god, gamers get my goat. Feeding the beast just to run a stinking game is pathetic.
Most of the people posting against the settlement know not what they say.
Or not.
1) MS didn't sprinkle pixie dust on PC users and magically become a monopoly. You and I MADE them a monopoly.
Well, I didn't make them a monopoly. I didn't buy a PC for my home until about '96 and I've never run anything but Linux. Pardon, I'm on Solaris 8 now. The greatest contributor to MS current monopoly position was user fear and MS decisively built their system to manipulate, contribute to and console that fear. Users didn't want to be reminded at every turn that they didn't know anything about computers *I just want to do my job.* They were masterful, but they built a crippled OS that now dictates de facto standards across the industry, from UI to browsers to security, authentication, yada yada.
Face it, there is no OS on the planet that can go into schools that will get 100% endorsement even within the free/open-source software world. Period.
So what. Who needs 100% endorsement to achieve something bright and beautiful.
3) Let's see what's more benefitial[sic]...
4) I don't give half of a rat's ass if students learn to do word processing on Word instead of Abiword....
5) Windows is -- on the whole -- easier to use than Linux, *BSD, or UNIX....
What's most beneficial is not for people to learn to use computers: *I just want to do my job.* People should learn to work with computers: *What can I make the machine do, today.* You tell me the best way to learn to work with computers: a) closed APIs, thousand dollar development tools, total lack of system documentation, indifferent support; b) open system, open code-base, reams of documentation at every level, avid user support world-wide. Focus on the end-user experience means dumbed-down tools, closed interfaces to *protect users from themselves.* This is fundamentally wrong.
There is no way I would be in a position as a software developer today without OSS. I was asking my wife what a right-click was five years ago. Today I'm lead developer on a system to make 1.5 terrabytes of aggregate US census data available on the web. I'm in my mid-thirties. I have a few humanities credits. Am I painting the picture for you?
5) Windows experience is more marketable right now
Bullshit. The tidal wave of web services you anticipate means it doesn't make a hill of beans what I develop in/on and the focus on the browser means business can swap the OS out from under without disturbing functional business systems. MS is over and supporting this settlement means saddling the nations poorest with obsolete userland skills which will have no value in three years. It smells like public housing.
Uh, the alternative is not a lump sum payment to any government. This is a settlement of the *private*, class-action, civil suits brought againts the company by users purporting to have been materially harmed by the monopoly. The alternative is a lump payment to any SOB who wants in on the class. Wired says about $10 bucks a head after attorneys' fees.
This is eerily like big tobacco settling their suits by providing free cartons for distribution in schools. Locking in another generation of lusers.
The size of the MS monopoly is starting to generate a gravity-like field which distorts perception of reality in its presence. Even ostensibly unbiased media coverage of MS seems boggled as to how to speak about them. I can't imagine any other entity in any other industry even suggesting such a thing. And now MS is dictating security policy on Capital Hill. Its like GM setting emmissions standards. Thankfully, the Fates look askance at such hubris.
And lately I do too. Until a few months ago I liked to imagine that I understood peoples fear of the unknown, their reliance on the familiar; I took a gentle, only slightly patronizing tone with Windows users. Now I regard them all as moral beggars. If you run Windows you are wrong, and should be shunned from polite society.
Please keep in mind that a remarkably puny fraction of working artists make anything more than a living wage. The superstars get all the press, but there is a large army of one-hit wonders, session pros and weekend warriors out there; make no mention of all the adolescent strivers.
This calls to mind the disjunct between the shareware camps around Wintel and Apple, on the one hand, and the libre community grown up around the OSS *nix on the other.
Nomination for oxymoron of the month: Linux Shareware.
While I think OSX is the smartest thing Jobs and Co. has done since the first consumer GUI, I don't think its automatic by any means. The coifed, turned-out designer in Buddy Holly specs gets onboard the BSD bus, scores beaucoup street cred, but has to sit next to that smelly, hairy unix guy. The Mac community will find performance in spades, but polish is not often a value. On the projects I'm familiar with, even the most professional, the response to obnoxious support demands goes: You didn't pay for it and I'm not paid to listen.
You're more likely to be ignored, or firmly and politely (chrisp is an exception) invited to DIY and while you're at it send a patch.
Yes, yes, man! But you failed to mention Kurt Schwitters. Merz lives! Merz dies! Merz lives again!
Its always kind of spooky when you run into an artist so far ahead of his time. I am sure there is that sense among contemporaries and for himself, that he his pushing the boundaries, but oftentimes without knowing precisely how or in what direction. It is a remarkable thing to be able to watch a century old work of art grow into its significance; the zeitgeist coalescing around it like a growing crystal.
There are posts asking what this notice has to do with nerds and their news. I gotta say this is the hottest link I've pulled from/. in months. The material domain of this conference cuts right to the heart of what is important about software libre and the digitisation of cultural activity. The pragmatist coders here will say that its all about efficiency of algorithms, fast debugging, and software development models. Not so. What is at stake is not RIAA profits, closed Windows API's or top-down management models. What is at stake are fundamental assumptions the 20C capitalist West has made about the nature and outcomes of intellectual activity. There is a real revolution in the works and, as is so often the case, those at the forefront don't always realize what they're fighting for or what they are really achieving. I'm not wheezing about the digital future; there are real changes afoot in the way we think, create and work. The papers here begin the work of specifying those changes.
Considering that these materials were typically baked or kiln-fired to ensure permanency, it is unlikely that there is much in the way of doodles and annotation. Such ephemera were lost with the next rains.
Interestingly, the developers of cuneiform also developed the first envelopes. The main message was kiln-fired and then wrapped with a new layer of clay, the address incised and the result merely air-dried. The recipient then gave the lot a crack against a nearby stone and brushed away the *envelope* to read his mail.
Sick acronym, great idea. It is about time for our message to be heard clearly by world governing bodies. We are getting slagged as communists, anarchists, worse terrorists. The legal and just defense of our principles is clouded by these associations among the uninformed in media and policy circles. We need a lobby.
Model it on the NRA. A dues-driven organization focused on lobbying of legislative bodies worldwide, active PR wing, the whole nine yards. It will be a struggle to stay focused on the problem domain and avoid ideological entanglements, but it is worth a shot. This makes tremendous sense to me in the current political climate.
The acronym? Libre Software Developers/Users International.
I was struck by the same analogy. Each of the examples are of tangible products with an established consumer market. Where is the market for web standards? Royalty costs on tangible product development are rolled into the product's cost basis and passed on to the consumer. Viable, consumer-driven, web-based business models are pretty thin on the ground right now. If your cost basis is not vanishingly small, you are effectively doing charity.
W3C has two sources of credibility, without which their standards are not worth two bits: the continued participation of representatives of significant corporations and the goodwill of the web development community (developers, not consumers) who see standards as a Good Thing(TM). RAND dramatically upsets this balance. I will simply not be implementing or using RAND encumbered web standards. Not because I have a moral beef with paying for algorithms (I do), but because if I want to do any more charity I'll volunteer at the homeless shelter.
You are correct that this is a review of the preliminary injunction and that the real issue in this case is yet to be decided. But can you really say that the ability to watch some trite Hollywood bollocks on an unlicensed player, or the ability to skip the previews of next months iteration of same, is more significant than the establishment of a judicial precedent for the truth:
It's more like saying: "Don't build your house with sod." Perl is an abomination. I shouldn't have to consult tide charts to find out if the sun is shining.
Oh, and it took me about 40 minutes to learn to juggle.
This is ridiculous. This is precisely the remedy formulated after the last DOJ action. Billmer and Co. are going to make a mockery of this in its implementation. You can be sure only ISVs already fully onboard the MS train will get a glimpse of the code, after signing bulletproof NDAs.
A large number of otherwise intelligent posters would seem to have been hit by the runaway XML hype train. Examples culled from various posts:
...[not a] major advance in computer science.
...[bogus] contribution to programming language design (re: XSL)
...[transfer data between businesses,] which is the problem XML aims to solve.
But these are critiques directed at the hype machine, not the specification. This is really distressing me. The machine is so efficient that there are API's for XML (which shall remain nameless) being written and optimized for message passing which cannot handle mixed content as a matter of design. As though it were somehow so useful in this area that a section of the spec should be tossed to make it efficient. As though there weren't already gallons of ink being spilled on EDI, etc.
XML was not designed to replace S-expressions, to facilitate cross-platform communications, revolutionize EDI or DBMs, to theorize about language design, yada, yada. XML is just that, an Extensible bloody Markup Language, a document tagging scheme. In this regard it is a tremendous advance. It is 80% less suck, by volume, than what went before. If you think your XML parser is bloated, have a look at any SGML parser. Part of what gets stripped out is tag minimization, the absence of which another poster complained about.
Hey, its text and not binary because I need to write it and read it. Yes, Virginia, I've got 400 users tagging XML in flat-file editors. They complained about the loss of tag-minimization, too. But my svelte little Xerces needs a hand to stay so lean.
The goal is to get structural and semantic information into my documents. (Yes, it's data, but a special kind of data called a document. You can call the message your passing a document, and use XML to format it, but there is some overhead the hype machine may not have emphasised in their rush to market.) I also strive to eliminate formatting or presentation instructions from the document (or hide them in PIs) to facilitate multi-target outputs. This lets my typesetters typeset and my data-entry people enter data.
XML is designed to bring something of this model to the web. HTML is too presentation oriented. SGML is too bulky. That's what it do, babe. I take a single source file from somewhere on the filesystem, incorporate pieces from elsewhere (entity resolution, DB queries, etc.), turn it into one of five possible outputs. I use two different pagination engines with different proprietary formatting macros, XSL(T|FO), or a trap door on the bottom to dump pretty-printed ASCII. Its a publishing tool.
Yes, give it just as much thought as Senator Hollings gave the draft. A staffer scanned the MPAA's submission before translating it verbatim into legis-lingua. Probably mentioned it to him over breakfast.
of the phrase fair use anywhere in this legislation. One mention of *time-shifting* which apparently covers all conceivable aspects of fair use of digitized data. The idiocy of this bill beggars description.
This is the flavor we get from the small-government, get-the-Fed-out conservatives. A boycott of any devices/systems implementing any aspect of such a system is a moral imperative.
(Note that all discussion of this in connection with this incident is 100% theoretical anyway. If the bad guys used crypto, we don't know it yet - only grandstanding politicians have suggested anything of the kind.)
From former FBI director Freeh's testimony to the Senate Judiciary committee in September 1998: *We are very concerned, as this committee is, about the encryption situation, particularly as it relates to fighting crime and fighting terrorism. Not just bin Laden, but many other people who work against us in the area of terrorism, are becoming sophisticated enough to equip themselves with encryption devices.*
This link has been a staple of the move for key escrow and federal key management for as long as there has been a debate. That is, since the first WTC attack in 93. It is hotter now and even less likely for reasoned arguments to be heard.
Wadih El Hage, suspected in the 1998 bombing of U.S. embassies, sent encrypted e-mails under various names to associates in al Qaida according to the Oct. 25, 1998 indictment against him.
Ramzi Yousef, him of the 1993 WTC bombing, used encrypted files to hide details of a plot to destroy 11 U.S. airliners.
News that bin Laden was using stego to conceal communications within X-rated pics was all over the web in February of this year.
Slashdot Mirror
The debris results from a comet which intersects the path of the earth from the vicinity of the constellation Leo, thus the name. The shower emanates from this point in the sky and the meteors' trajectories can occur in any degree around this point. They are weighted E-W for the reason you mention. The path followed by the comet each go round is slightly different, as well, which makes for better viewing some years than others.
I heard one also. There were about four of us lying on a bank at my parents' cabin, up in the pine woods of N. Minnesota. It was bright as hell. I'll go to my grave swearing it illuminated the trees. We all just looked at each other. I don't think anyone even mentioned it; it seemed too nutty. It rustled like an instantaneous wind. And it sounded just the way the woods propagate any creak on a quite night. Turns out it was the woods. Cool.
In all, a hell of a show and well worth turning out at 4am.
The truth is something which may only be approached asymptotically.
More than implying, I am stating explicitly.
...after using Linux for 5 years, I am still amazed at how well documented it is (see 1 above). Compare it to the Knowledge Base whose interface and enumeration scheme are intentionally obfuscatory. And its not a hanging garden. I can verify resposes to my queries with alternative sources of information, sources or documentation.
1) I precisely agree that using is not the same as developing on a computer. But I end up at a converse conclusion and it hinges on how it is different. Using a computer, by your lights, interacting with a computer to satisfy a given task, is precisely what I'll be spending a lot of time doing in order to accomplish my task of publishing two hundred ten years' worth of census data. The difference is that a data entry professionals' interactions with the machine are rather simpler than mine and I don't think that it is inherently elitist to say that. Yes, the OS must accomodate that disparity. My point is that the natural progress from luser to user to power user, and particularly the leap to *developer*, is distorted under Windows by virtue of MS proprietary, profit-driven design choices.
You don't credit the users you claim to protect. My wife can automate a business process of considerable complexity using Access, Excel and a smattering of VBA and wouldn't dream of calling herself a developer. I happened to want to know what IE was doing when it said it would *probe my (her) network settings*. (Jesus Christ, Microsoft is probing my wife's settings!) Consulting Windows Help in order to satisfy this curiosity, I learn what the boxes look like that allow me to assign and modify those values. Instead of describing what DNS is and what it do, Windows offers to *probe my network settings* again, conveniently contributing to the aura and mystique surrounding these modern marvels. Not everyone wants access to this level of detail, but the number who do is sufficiently large and their interactions with the machine sufficiently more interesting as to make reading the source code and writing against an API desirable. For these users, MS' closed model represents a liability.
2) There's no such thing as a career that is not a computer-oriented career. Truck drivers use computers, friend. When they learn to right click, they want to continue to right click; whose stack intercepts this event is irrelevent to them.
3) I'm an average human. I would welcome more dumbed down GUIs on Linux/BSD/whatever. We are both welcome to do something about that and apparently have all the tools and resources of documentation we need to get started. Will you open a project on sourceforge or should I?
While we're at it, lets make Windows a little more forthcoming in the UI area.... Oh, bummer.
4) You're right, I completely missed your point. My error. But you missed mine, as well. I argue that the case for undergoing the headache of changing OS on hundreds of computers company-wide is to be made by amortizing that cost over five years and then comparing to the licensing and maintenance costs for your XP installation over the same time period. Don't forget that mandatory upgrade schedule. You'll be installing and paying for a *new* OS three times. And you will cynically kvetch about how painfully un-new it is as you sign each check, even as MS uses a chunk of your change to beat you over the head about how *new* it really is. But wait, there's more. For this low, low price, you not only control your upgrade schedule, you control your interfaces and source code. If Joe Maintainer takes the project in a different direction you can freeze or fork.
5)
Mr. Resistor,
I can't offer any hope for you. There must be something CAD-CAM cooking on freshmeat but it is not my area of expertise. As to Project, I can think of several free/Free groupware projects that approximate its functionality. Can't speak to their serviceability, however. I am congenitally allergic to Gantt charts. I can wholeheartedly recommend VMWare. Runs fast, very flexible. It's probably not talking to your 3-D card yet, I am afraid, but I used it at my last job in order to interface with their Notes installation.
I am thinking more of the SOHO user. Or gamers. My god, gamers get my goat. Feeding the beast just to run a stinking game is pathetic.
Most of the people posting against the settlement know not what they say.
Or not.
1) MS didn't sprinkle pixie dust on PC users and magically become a monopoly. You and I MADE them a monopoly.
Well, I didn't make them a monopoly. I didn't buy a PC for my home until about '96 and I've never run anything but Linux. Pardon, I'm on Solaris 8 now. The greatest contributor to MS current monopoly position was user fear and MS decisively built their system to manipulate, contribute to and console that fear. Users didn't want to be reminded at every turn that they didn't know anything about computers *I just want to do my job.* They were masterful, but they built a crippled OS that now dictates de facto standards across the industry, from UI to browsers to security, authentication, yada yada.
Face it, there is no OS on the planet that can go into schools that will get 100% endorsement even within the free/open-source software world. Period.
So what. Who needs 100% endorsement to achieve something bright and beautiful.
3) Let's see what's more benefitial[sic]...
4) I don't give half of a rat's ass if students learn to do word processing on Word instead of Abiword....
5) Windows is -- on the whole -- easier to use than Linux, *BSD, or UNIX....
What's most beneficial is not for people to learn to use computers: *I just want to do my job.* People should learn to work with computers: *What can I make the machine do, today.* You tell me the best way to learn to work with computers: a) closed APIs, thousand dollar development tools, total lack of system documentation, indifferent support; b) open system, open code-base, reams of documentation at every level, avid user support world-wide. Focus on the end-user experience means dumbed-down tools, closed interfaces to *protect users from themselves.* This is fundamentally wrong.
There is no way I would be in a position as a software developer today without OSS. I was asking my wife what a right-click was five years ago. Today I'm lead developer on a system to make 1.5 terrabytes of aggregate US census data available on the web. I'm in my mid-thirties. I have a few humanities credits. Am I painting the picture for you?
5) Windows experience is more marketable right now
Bullshit. The tidal wave of web services you anticipate means it doesn't make a hill of beans what I develop in/on and the focus on the browser means business can swap the OS out from under without disturbing functional business systems. MS is over and supporting this settlement means saddling the nations poorest with obsolete userland skills which will have no value in three years. It smells like public housing.
Uh, the alternative is not a lump sum payment to any government. This is a settlement of the *private*, class-action, civil suits brought againts the company by users purporting to have been materially harmed by the monopoly. The alternative is a lump payment to any SOB who wants in on the class. Wired says about $10 bucks a head after attorneys' fees.
This is eerily like big tobacco settling their suits by providing free cartons for distribution in schools. Locking in another generation of lusers.
The size of the MS monopoly is starting to generate a gravity-like field which distorts perception of reality in its presence. Even ostensibly unbiased media coverage of MS seems boggled as to how to speak about them. I can't imagine any other entity in any other industry even suggesting such a thing. And now MS is dictating security policy on Capital Hill. Its like GM setting emmissions standards. Thankfully, the Fates look askance at such hubris.
And lately I do too. Until a few months ago I liked to imagine that I understood peoples fear of the unknown, their reliance on the familiar; I took a gentle, only slightly patronizing tone with Windows users. Now I regard them all as moral beggars. If you run Windows you are wrong, and should be shunned from polite society.
for Dallas and Kojak reruns drove the shipbuilders of Gdansk to the barricades. Katz is our own Mrs. Malaprop.
Please keep in mind that a remarkably puny fraction of working artists make anything more than a living wage. The superstars get all the press, but there is a large army of one-hit wonders, session pros and weekend warriors out there; make no mention of all the adolescent strivers.
I don't know about anyone else, but reading your brave alternatives and matters of integrity makes my hair stand on end.
This calls to mind the disjunct between the shareware camps around Wintel and Apple, on the one hand, and the libre community grown up around the OSS *nix on the other.
Nomination for oxymoron of the month: Linux Shareware.
While I think OSX is the smartest thing Jobs and Co. has done since the first consumer GUI, I don't think its automatic by any means. The coifed, turned-out designer in Buddy Holly specs gets onboard the BSD bus, scores beaucoup street cred, but has to sit next to that smelly, hairy unix guy. The Mac community will find performance in spades, but polish is not often a value. On the projects I'm familiar with, even the most professional, the response to obnoxious support demands goes: You didn't pay for it and I'm not paid to listen.
You're more likely to be ignored, or firmly and politely (chrisp is an exception) invited to DIY and while you're at it send a patch.
Yes, yes, man! But you failed to mention Kurt Schwitters. Merz lives! Merz dies! Merz lives again!
Its always kind of spooky when you run into an artist so far ahead of his time. I am sure there is that sense among contemporaries and for himself, that he his pushing the boundaries, but oftentimes without knowing precisely how or in what direction. It is a remarkable thing to be able to watch a century old work of art grow into its significance; the zeitgeist coalescing around it like a growing crystal.
There are posts asking what this notice has to do with nerds and their news. I gotta say this is the hottest link I've pulled from /. in months. The material domain of this conference cuts right to the heart of what is important about software libre and the digitisation of cultural activity. The pragmatist coders here will say that its all about efficiency of algorithms, fast debugging, and software development models. Not so. What is at stake is not RIAA profits, closed Windows API's or top-down management models. What is at stake are fundamental assumptions the 20C capitalist West has made about the nature and outcomes of intellectual activity. There is a real revolution in the works and, as is so often the case, those at the forefront don't always realize what they're fighting for or what they are really achieving. I'm not wheezing about the digital future; there are real changes afoot in the way we think, create and work. The papers here begin the work of specifying those changes.
Considering that these materials were typically baked or kiln-fired to ensure permanency, it is unlikely that there is much in the way of doodles and annotation. Such ephemera were lost with the next rains.
Interestingly, the developers of cuneiform also developed the first envelopes. The main message was kiln-fired and then wrapped with a new layer of clay, the address incised and the result merely air-dried. The recipient then gave the lot a crack against a nearby stone and brushed away the *envelope* to read his mail.
John Berryman, Seamus Heaney, Wallace Stevens, in that order.
Sick acronym, great idea. It is about time for our message to be heard clearly by world governing bodies. We are getting slagged as communists, anarchists, worse terrorists. The legal and just defense of our principles is clouded by these associations among the uninformed in media and policy circles. We need a lobby.
Model it on the NRA. A dues-driven organization focused on lobbying of legislative bodies worldwide, active PR wing, the whole nine yards. It will be a struggle to stay focused on the problem domain and avoid ideological entanglements, but it is worth a shot. This makes tremendous sense to me in the current political climate.
The acronym? Libre Software Developers/Users International.
I was struck by the same analogy. Each of the examples are of tangible products with an established consumer market. Where is the market for web standards? Royalty costs on tangible product development are rolled into the product's cost basis and passed on to the consumer. Viable, consumer-driven, web-based business models are pretty thin on the ground right now. If your cost basis is not vanishingly small, you are effectively doing charity.
W3C has two sources of credibility, without which their standards are not worth two bits: the continued participation of representatives of significant corporations and the goodwill of the web development community (developers, not consumers) who see standards as a Good Thing(TM). RAND dramatically upsets this balance. I will simply not be implementing or using RAND encumbered web standards. Not because I have a moral beef with paying for algorithms (I do), but because if I want to do any more charity I'll volunteer at the homeless shelter.
You are correct that this is a review of the preliminary injunction and that the real issue in this case is yet to be decided. But can you really say that the ability to watch some trite Hollywood bollocks on an unlicensed player, or the ability to skip the previews of next months iteration of same, is more significant than the establishment of a judicial precedent for the truth:
equally_protected(source code, pure speech).
C'mon.
I'm with you. For practical extraction and reporting, Perl is the pet's purr. I still get cranky everytime I have to use it, tho.
It's more like saying: "Don't build your house with sod." Perl is an abomination. I shouldn't have to consult tide charts to find out if the sun is shining.
Oh, and it took me about 40 minutes to learn to juggle.
This is ridiculous. This is precisely the remedy formulated after the last DOJ action. Billmer and Co. are going to make a mockery of this in its implementation. You can be sure only ISVs already fully onboard the MS train will get a glimpse of the code, after signing bulletproof NDAs.
A large number of otherwise intelligent posters would seem to have been hit by the runaway XML hype train. Examples culled from various posts:
...[not a] major advance in computer science.
...[bogus] contribution to programming language design (re: XSL)
...[transfer data between businesses,] which is the problem XML aims to solve.
But these are critiques directed at the hype machine, not the specification. This is really distressing me. The machine is so efficient that there are API's for XML (which shall remain nameless) being written and optimized for message passing which cannot handle mixed content as a matter of design. As though it were somehow so useful in this area that a section of the spec should be tossed to make it efficient. As though there weren't already gallons of ink being spilled on EDI, etc.
XML was not designed to replace S-expressions, to facilitate cross-platform communications, revolutionize EDI or DBMs, to theorize about language design, yada, yada. XML is just that, an Extensible bloody Markup Language, a document tagging scheme. In this regard it is a tremendous advance. It is 80% less suck, by volume, than what went before. If you think your XML parser is bloated, have a look at any SGML parser. Part of what gets stripped out is tag minimization, the absence of which another poster complained about.
Hey, its text and not binary because I need to write it and read it. Yes, Virginia, I've got 400 users tagging XML in flat-file editors. They complained about the loss of tag-minimization, too. But my svelte little Xerces needs a hand to stay so lean.
The goal is to get structural and semantic information into my documents. (Yes, it's data, but a special kind of data called a document. You can call the message your passing a document, and use XML to format it, but there is some overhead the hype machine may not have emphasised in their rush to market.) I also strive to eliminate formatting or presentation instructions from the document (or hide them in PIs) to facilitate multi-target outputs. This lets my typesetters typeset and my data-entry people enter data.
XML is designed to bring something of this model to the web. HTML is too presentation oriented. SGML is too bulky. That's what it do, babe. I take a single source file from somewhere on the filesystem, incorporate pieces from elsewhere (entity resolution, DB queries, etc.), turn it into one of five possible outputs. I use two different pagination engines with different proprietary formatting macros, XSL(T|FO), or a trap door on the bottom to dump pretty-printed ASCII. Its a publishing tool.
Yes, give it just as much thought as Senator Hollings gave the draft. A staffer scanned the MPAA's submission before translating it verbatim into legis-lingua. Probably mentioned it to him over breakfast.
of the phrase fair use anywhere in this legislation. One mention of *time-shifting* which apparently covers all conceivable aspects of fair use of digitized data. The idiocy of this bill beggars description.
This is the flavor we get from the small-government, get-the-Fed-out conservatives. A boycott of any devices/systems implementing any aspect of such a system is a moral imperative.
From former FBI director Freeh's testimony to the Senate Judiciary committee in September 1998: *We are very concerned, as this committee is, about the encryption situation, particularly as it relates to fighting crime and fighting terrorism. Not just bin Laden, but many other people who work against us in the area of terrorism, are becoming sophisticated enough to equip themselves with encryption devices.*
This link has been a staple of the move for key escrow and federal key management for as long as there has been a debate. That is, since the first WTC attack in 93. It is hotter now and even less likely for reasoned arguments to be heard.
Wadih El Hage, suspected in the 1998 bombing of U.S. embassies, sent encrypted e-mails under various names to associates in al Qaida according to the Oct. 25, 1998 indictment against him.
Ramzi Yousef, him of the 1993 WTC bombing, used encrypted files to hide details of a plot to destroy 11 U.S. airliners.
News that bin Laden was using stego to conceal communications within X-rated pics was all over the web in February of this year.