Please someone intelligently defend the right to trade music you don't own the rights to. There's some good reasons and legitimate reasons to do it but I'm wondering if any slashdrones are capable enough of rational thought to come up with any.
I don't feel equal to the challenge, but I did recently end up doing some work on P2P music sharing, so I guess it's worth going over what I found (I commented on it previously, here).
If you start by thinking about what music actually is, what it represents to people (bear with me... this is somewhat relevant) you find that it has more uses than one might think, particularly in mood regulation, identity formation and what you might call social bonding... my point being that whilst it presumably isn't absolutely necessary, music in general does have a number of relatively important roles to play in any community or individual's life. Which I suppose is not all that shocking, but which is nonetheless frequently ignored, particularly by those who think more in the 'music is an unnecessary luxury' direction.
This being the case - music being something of some actual subjective importance - one might ask why people don't make their own music. It is an uncomfortable position to know that aspects of your shared culture, your chosen method of mood regulation, or the tune that sparks off your favourite memories, do not belong to you - even though the meaning of the music to you is yours and yours alone. People might not have the talent, or the patience to train for years to play a musical instrument, or - more probably - most people don't see the need.
In general that there has been a shift in Western culture, in the last few centuries, towards the establishment of this 'intellectual property' idea. Shakespeare borrowed his plots from previous work, and he didn't even bother to change the names. Jane Austen copied music manuscript by hand, changing the lyrics of songs to suit her taste. Gilbert and Sullivan hired bouncers to prowl through the audience looking for covert transcribers of their work.
Now, we're at the apex of this trend - it is less commonplace than ever for people to make their own music, and 'homemade' music, due to our sudden and almost total reliance on TV/radio for guidance on virtually everything, is also apparently considered less professional and therefore in some way valueless... and more fundamentally, that homemade music, unless it's somebody singing a song they stole themselves, is not music that most people consider relevant. In other words, most of the mindshare has been taken by the TV/radio. Obvious exception - pub/club/independant bands, who have an excellent platform to gain some mindshare of their own...
Finally, it comes down to this; our values have changed. We've been somehow shifted away from the idea that music is something we make (eg, with a piano, ourselves) and towards the idea that it is something we play (with a CD...), but we have not changed in terms of our reactions to music. These have not changed because they are deeply grounded in human psychology/ neurophysiology/ biology. So here we are, today, with the same uses for music as we ever had, and the indoctrinated belief that the only way to make real 'professional', relevant music is to hit the 'play' button.
Moving on, it's also evident that to some extent, people have always shared music, for various reasons. There's massive historical evidence for this, really, principally the amount of this music that still survives today and their subject matter, as well as documentary evidence. Going further back there's only archaeological evidence, of course.
So to me, the fundamental question is not 'why do people share music via P2P', but more 'why do we ignore the vast importance of music?' I appreciate that it isn't as important as, say, basic bread and water - you won't die without it - but the fact is that shared music is literally the way in which generations and subcultures define themselves. This being the case, it would be difficult to imagine how subcultures could develop across the Internet without shared experience. So one might even suggest that the sharing of music is part of a way to ensure that shared experience. Here on Slashdot, of course, the unifying factor is generally not music (like the web page says, it's 'News for Nerds').
Most people use music in so many ways that they seldom notice they're doing it, consciously. I consider that the fuss over P2P music sharing is best solvable, not by technology, nor by legislation (nor by terror) but by considering that people share music because it is in some way important to them. Taking this ability from them in law leads to something like Prohibition. Which, as we know, was all rather a joke really.
P2P is just a symptom, and one with many layers; some P2P users are just following the collector instinct. Some are actually trying to be good citizens as they see it, and share something that legitimately makes them happy. Some are pretty unbothered either way. People looking for music are doing so because of curiosity, the habit of collecting, the wish to feel a particular way or be reminded of a happy memory, amongst other reasons.
I wish I had a coherent conclusion to this - in a way, I don't, other than the suggestion that we re-evaluate our habit of considering music as the personal property of the artist and his/her managers. The level on which the RIAA operate - ownership -payment -property - is irrelevant to the motivations of most music listeners, whose personal motivations are, conversely, utterly unimportant to the RIAA.
Eventually, the best solution might come from reintroducing 'non-professional' music into our lives, rather than attempting copyright reform via legality. The implications of that path, however, go further than just throwing away your Sony CDs - most of our media is set up to reinforce the unhealthy, schizophrenic status quo.
To rephrase; you're right that Outlook is a perfectly useful solution for, as you put it, 'the modern enterprise'. However, I suspect that it is not the only solution for 'the modern enterprise' - and that, furthermore, 'the modern enterprise' is an extremely broad category in which to work. You probably mean 'the place where foobar104 works'.
I find that there are many enterprises out there - modern or otherwise - that for various reasons including the ones you so adeptly identified, have concluded that making use of Windows, Outlook, and Unix is not altogether an effective solution. Rather than throwing, as it were, the baby out with the bathwater, they have instead chosen to avoid Outlook, or buy themselves a fix. And they have managed it too - I have thus far worked with only one company that made use of Outlook, and I have worked in a number of multinational corporations. I agree that it is a shame that Outlook is so spectacularly incapable of use in a 'hybrid' environment, since, as Slashdot has previously covered, there are few software options that approach its functionality - but not, oddly, none. Notes is still frequently used, though I personally am not a fan of either Outlook or Notes; both are a little buzzword- ridden and neither provide more than a fraction of the real potential that groupware has. Mostly they don't seem to be used for anything but filesharing, calendar, and email - so much for collaborative work.
Of course, if the status quo is Outlook, hostile to Unix, and it works with the organisation, there is no reason to change - but often, the status quo does not include Outlook.
Really, it's this that annoyed me so much with your original comment - the assumption that because Outlook was 'a solution', it must be 'the solution' - the one and only possible answer to a well-specified question. It's just a glorified mail server + database + calendar + contacts + so on... there are other ways of managing this information, and frankly, Outlook is no closer to the 'one and only solution' for groupware than Microsoft Research is, and it must be said that research in the field of collaborative work is generally pretty much stumbling in the dark right now. Marketing would have you believe it to be a magic bullet, but it's just an answer to some of the possible problems that some companies might face - to paraphrase Douglas Adams, Microsoft "know the answer, but they don't really know what the question is", in any particular case.
I agree, in your case, it works 'really well', at least, by your definition of 'really well' and for your definition of 'modern enterprise' - case studies would be really easy if all cases were identical, don't you think? One can put together an all-Microsoft solution and train one's company to work in such a way that their methods approach those that the software engineers were expecting when they designed their groupware. However, one might be losing out - maybe the methods the company already had were better?
It happens. I am reminded of a pilot groupware solution implemented for social workers in the UK - long on groupware/computer-supported collaborative work, and short on understanding of the original paper-based system. It replaced a two-computer-per-office system that was used to summarise information and a lot of paper; in practice, the paper was still used (try making notes on a laptop in rainy weather after six hours' travel) and the groupware was only touched when the manager was around - even though that groupware was being successfully implemented in other environments. Equally, people felt 'wrong' about it - choosing descriptions of human frailties from pull-down menus, having to learn how to inform the system when a client died - it was the wrong solution for their working environment. Read 'Plans and Situated Actions' - Suchman, 1987. "Ethnography allows us... to account for the situated and organisational aspects of work. These social, contextual and artefactual contexts of work, and the interactions between them, accounts for much of people's behaviour in the real world" - in other words, it's very difficult to explain how people work without being there. It depends very much on environment.
The Microsoft engineers are not in my office; they might be correct by default, or their software might be so flexible that it can be used for any situation; the second is demonstrably false given the lack of clients for so-called 'alternative OS's', and the first is only true for a small proportion of the number of enterprises out there, apparently including yours. Heck, a music studio where I worked still uses a system based around the Atari ST... and they seem pretty happy with it. It fulfils their requirements; their organisation is richer with it than without, and that is, after all, the point of a groupware solution.
As for decent GUI file manager, it has been my experience that whilst the fact of the matter is that information is stored centrally, many people are more comfortable doing rough work in an environment that is perceived to be separate from the group/shared/public environment. I concede that the Outlook package may support said illusion, though putting your private drafts in 'public folders' is a little counter-intuitive. Furthermore, I note that the actual mechanics behind a UNIX form of 'public folders' is a very short shell script... really, all I'd like to see is a nice clear graphical analogue of/home/user [conceptually private] and/mnt/share/user/, and nothing irrelevant, but haven't seen anything graphical for UNIX for file management that I would describe as particularly usable... It's a small complaint, of course.
And yes, I have not found Outlook to be effective, particularly due to viruses (but I'm not afraid of it - nor uncertain - nor do I doubt that it will irritate me again!). Though I am not working as a sysadmin, being in R&D, I have spent vastly too much of my time helping out colleagues, idiots from other companies, and family members, with various Windows - particularly Outlook - related issues. Of course, most of these cases were due to either human idiocy or dumb MCSEs, and if we all hired you, o wonderful one, instead of the tame MCSE (and if so much on NT/XP didn't require admin rights...), I'm sure we'd all become immune. I'd recommend you, except for your colourful language:-)
Hey, I've been in that same situation with Blueyonder. Here's what you do, if they really insist on using Windows;
You lie.
I've had some great conversations like that.
Techie: "Now reboot"
Me: "Right, just rebooting now." Pause to drink some coffee, stare at wallpaper, whatever, until a reasonable sounding amount of time has passed. "Done"
The trick is to just say "Okay" and "Right" and "Done" a lot, write down the settings they give you (if any) and then do your own thing entirely. Better; unless you need action on their part don't call them at all, and if you do, tell them what to do directly, like so: "See the big red button on that router? Press it".
Basically the problem they seem to have is they've been taught to follow a script, and if you confuse them they have to start it all over again. You get similar problems if any actual physical faults occur on the line - eg, no signal/broken cable - if you start your call by telling them the problem they get pretty confused.
eg.
Me: "Hi, the cable's down and the modem isn't able to connect. It's not receiving or sending anything at all according to the LED indicators."
Techie: "Uhh, okay, have you tried rebooting your computer?"
Me: "Why would I do that? The modem isn't receiving anything! The computer is not the problem."
Techie: "Okay, well, can you reboot your computer?"
Me: Sigh, pretend to reboot computer.
Techie: "Does it work now?"
Me: "No! There is no signal!"
Techie: "Right, well, please reinstall your drivers, do you have your driver disk with you?"
Me: "It's an external modem, I think my network drivers are just fine"
Techie: "Please reinstall your drivers"
Me: "Oh, very well" I pretend to reinstall my drivers.
Techie: "Does it work now?"
Me: "No!"
Techie: "Did you reboot?"
Me: Pretend to reboot the machine again.
Techie "Does it work now?"
Me: "No!"
Techie: "Ah. Are all of the LEDs on the modem turned off?"
Me: "YES!"
Techie: "Okay, your cable's down, so the modem can't connect. Sorry"
How is Linux going to make the PC cheaper? Or are you just talking about the cost of purchase, not the TCO? In the enterprise, Linux is more expensive to run on the desktop than Windows is, because the most basic tools for Windows (Outlook, for one) don't exist in a usable form on Linux.
Okay, I've heard some bullshit today but this comment is utterly priceless. You really claim that:
1) Outlook is the most basic tool for windows
2) Outlook has no Linux analogue
and 3) The TCO of Linux is higher because it has no Outlook???
You're a dreamer, you are. That's precious.
Now if you'd said 'a decent GUI based file manager', that might have been different.
I'm now expecting an essay validating each of these points, please. Particularly interesting to me is your explanation as to why Outlook requires automatic execution of unsigned scripts from untrusted sources in multiple languages. Also, the exact cost of all the email viruses associated with Outlook use compared to those of every other mailer (TCO does include all that time spent dealing with virus infestations, you realise? And the money/time from all that virus scanning requirement. And so on). I'd also like you to explain to me how, if Outlook is a necessary 'basic' tool for 'the enterprise', how all those other companies that go for Lotus solutions, or indeed pure-Unix solutions, manage to survive. I worked for years at an R&D centre that used nothing but Suns. Gosh, no Outlook! No WINDOWS! How did we survive? Discuss.
If you really believe that Linux makes PCs more expensive, I'll tell you what, we'll test it. My father and I use Linux, my mother and little brother use Windows; I'll record the time I spend doing tech support on each of them, and if Windows costs less time for me than Linux, I'll pay you. However, based on last year, with three serious Windows file corruptions, trojans, and Sircam (bro' disabled the virus checker on Windows because 'it works faster switched off', and started using Outlook instead of the slightly safer alternatives because 'all of his friends do, and it's Microsoft, innit? ' - no, user stupidity is no excuse - it is a part of TCO too), versus, um, a few apt-gets and I believe one reboot, you're in with a good chance of owing me money.
Which is fascinating, but I think you're picking up all those pr0n sites who use Britney Spears' name as a generic keyword in order to get google links, rather than actual bona-fide Britney Spears fan links (although some might say that the difference between Britney Spears and soft-porn posing is getting smaller by the hour).
I guess if being well-known implies getting the most search results on Google, it also implies being a favourite target for pr0n merchants - this being the case, I guess I think the better of Janis Ian for not being that well-known. If you actually examine your search results, you only have to go a few tens of results from the top before getting stuff like 'Britney's Breast Tribute' and 'Nude Pictures of the Hot Teen' etc, whereas with Janis Ian you get tab, reviews, and articles all the way until I got bored and stopped looking. Maybe it's a sign of the times that we're tempted to measure fame by sex site.
Re:Piracy is Constitutional.
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Want Freedom?
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· Score: 1
And as to whether it's "speech", it's not the infringer's own speech to give. I doubt there are people so inarticulate that they can communicate effectively only by sharing.MP3s of other peoples' songs.
You're being very shortsighted, and you're ignoring the reality - what music is.
What you refer to as 'other peoples' songs' aren't just useless, valueless tokens. I don't want to go into the psychology/biology side of it in detail, though as soon as I have time I'm really going to have to write it up somewhere, but suffice it to say that music has a greater role in peoples' lives (and interactions) than it's currently given credit for. Its effects on the brain are only partially documented, but they are many:
Music as loud noise can cause hypertension, stress, and release chemicals in the brain associated with psychopathic behaviour in individuals.
Rythmns are perceived by humans in relation to their own bodies (motor theory of rythmn).
Music affects certain hormone levels, such as testosterone (aggression, arousal), cortisol (arousal, stress), oxytocin (nurturing behaviour, bonding). Also endorphins (natural opiates).
Music's strong relation to social functions and community is therefore explicable, particularly given the oxytocin release mentioned above - oxytocin is released in traumatic or ecstatic situations, and assists the erasure of certain memories and replacement with newly encoded memories (thus strong emotions are related to music). It plays a role in identity formation and development.
Also, music may stimulate the release of the drug naloxone, an opiate receptor antagonist. In other words, listening to music activates the brain's opiate receptors...
As a result or otherwise, it's popularly used as a form of mood regulation (perhaps another explanation as to why people might want to 'communicate by mp3').
Let alone Dennet's identification of music, say the first few notes of Beethoven's Fifth, as a tremendously successful meme.
In effect, you identify with music. It is instrumental in community, not to mention personal associations (never had a 'special song'?). Often, music like the popular, still copyrighted, 'Happy Birthday' can be identified as very definitely part of the culture you live in - what's a kid's party without 'Happy Birthday', after all? Sure, there are other ways to communicate the message behind it, but none with the same power as the music you remember from your own birthdays - that's the power of music, and biologically speaking, it's not without cause.
So as to who 'owns' a piece of intellectual property, I guess legally speaking it's the author. As to whether there's anybody so inarticulate that they can communicate effectively only by sharing.MP3s of other peoples' songs - yes, most of us. There's even a tribe in Siberia who each have a short tune they use to identify themselves.
Music is not to be taken as lightly as Pinker suggests (auditory cheesecake, indeed). It's somewhere between 45,000 and 82,000 years old, minimally, and it dates from pre-Homo Sapiens - Neanderthals played bone flutes, you know. So don't underestimate its importance with glib phrases like 'nobody needs music', because it does serve several useful functions. It probably isn't indispensable, but bear in mind that it is important - and piracy probably reflects that fact. Charging arbitrarily high prices for something that has such a pivotal role in cultural identity and mood is possibly not acceptable; in the sense that, whilst it is one person/band's music, it is the peoples' culture that makes it relevant, and it is the peoples' culture that use it, yes, to communicate effectively.
Or are there others wandering around anywhere? (something official, or at least written by Douglas Adams???)
I'd like to find a decent alternative ending; call me sentimental, but I don't think MH really suits the feel of the first four... although I realise that authors have the right to be depressed, I think I just prefer reading things he wrote when he wasn't feeling like sh*t.
"The OS should be totally transparent to the user"
Much as I hate to answer an off-topic AC, this sort of uninformed thoughtless comment bugs me. So...
This comment, whilst in itself utterly true, is - when taken in context - indicative of a common misconception. The command line interface may well be 'user friendly'. It all depends on the system's intended users.
A command line interface generally (though not always) is designed to be flexible, programmable and internally consistent; it is often very successfully twinned with text-based configuration files and 'anal retentive directory layout'. These things work, because they provide the class of user for whom they are intended the ability to perform suitable tasks quickly and effectively. Note that I do not necessarily claim that bash is the perfect CLI nor that *nix has the perfect directory layout - I merely claim that these things, in an ideal world, may exist.
A graphical interface, on the other hand, is seldom designed for these users. Usually, the intention is to provide a metaphor with which the users can interact. The usefulness of this, granted that it can work, is limited; when dealing with a word processor, perhaps a metaphor (say, of a typewriter) is useful, but when dealing with a 'load file' option, a less intuitive metaphor is introduced (folders and C: substitute for the hierarchical file system).
Sometimes metaphors are useful. Sometimes they're just a distraction. In many cases they confuse people - then it's easier to explain the original metaphor than to explain why the Microsoft designer decided to paint icons all over it and call it something completely unrelated.
Bottom line: If it was simple in the first place, don't introduce graphical complexity unless you really, really think it's helpful. Sheer window dressing will not help a user. A consistent design, well thought out, targeted at the people who'll use it, will. And sometimes - why am I bothering telling this to an Anonymous Coward? oh well - good design will mean command line interfaces.
Re:Waves of light
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Time Travel
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· Score: 2, Informative
Beware; it's a little drier than the Boston Globe would like to make it...
I say the actual paper; in fact, this particular paper naturally doesn't make any suggestions of the "Hey, look, this research gives me a way to go back in time and save my father from the evils of cigarettes" type - if it did, it would never have made it into any serious journals. Mallett mentions two papers on his site, one on Bose-Einstein condensation and dark matter, one on this...
He has done other work - this , for example, not to mention work on Hawking radiation and probably a bunch of other stuff. His newest one is apparently "Gravitational Perturbations of a Radiating Spacetime", which looks relevant, not to mention full of terrifying maths. "The principal aim of our study is to understand how gravitational waves are scattered by a background radiating spacetime".
As I recall, cloning does not cause GATTACA. The belief that the genes you carry define your usefulness to the human race has more to do with it - if you don't have healthy enough genes you're not held to be worth the effort.
Therefore, genetic engineering and screening are the causes of it, and as I understand it these are already being given more credence than they probably deserve. I suspect that things like compulsory medical/genetic screening to determine eligibility for jobs, insurance and so on, probably already occur and are likely to become more popular in future.
I refer to these techniques as somewhat doubtful, since it seems to me that the effects of any given gene are not on the whole well understood. Some have very visible results, but when it's claimed that the presence of certain genes increases one's courage or problem-solving ability or tendancy to steal, then we're getting into the realms of emergent phenomena, statistics, environmental factors and pure fantasy.
On the other hand, it doesn't look like this particular experiment has been thought out very well. Just think, if this stuff had more legitimate research, we would probably know for sure what would happen... but ignorance is bliss and high moral ground, all in one.
The principle difficulty with using Microsoft products is that they seem barely capable of communicating with anything but other Microsoft products. I'd like MS to consider putting all libraries useful for interoperability available in open-source (without the useless licence) form. That way, well, if their software was better than the free version one could use them, and MS and non-MS software could be used together...
Basically it doesn't seem that Microsoft can totally change to an open-source strategy now. Even if they weren't too embarassed/unrepentantly monopolistic to want to.
I don't really see that they would open-source the entirety of Office, but it'd be nice if Microsoft were to make owning Office an option rather than a restrictive locked-in technology (yeah, I know. Word viewer available, inconsistent specs available. Not quite the same as working source code).
In any case, if the arguments about Linux's unsuitability for the desktop are correct, they have nothing to fear - if Linux users were to create Word documents or WMV or whatever with the code they were graciously permitted to use, the average human being would prefer to buy a nice user-friendly copy of Windows and view them on that.
Of course, if somebody were to create a piece of word processing software that happened to be better than Word and utterly interoperable, they'd lose out, but we all know that'd never happen (yeah, right).
Quite: somebody needs to point out to Katz that if it's about globalisation, then it's safe not to mistitle it. It's okay to mention 11/9 in passing, in the text, without paying homage to it in the title (it seems rather irrelevant to the argument).
Most people are probably fairly happy with the idea of reading articles that don't mention a well-known terrorist attack, from time to time. If only for novelty value.
Perhaps what is meant is 'post-11/9, we noticed that a number of people appeared to be irritated with us. Then we blamed it on globalisation'.
Now, onto the text:
Why anybody should seek unified government, political system or economy, let alone religion, escapes me entirely. Shared, yes. Unified, certainly not. In fact, why anybody should believe it to be possible is a mysterious question in itself. It's quite difficult to find any two people who think the same way about anything (it's the notorious 'common ground' issue).
Why anybody should suggest that countries 'choose between globalism and religious fanaticism' is even less clear.
The whole idea of a common culture is based on an oversimplification. To prove this, try to design an experiment to quantify American [or any other] society. Choosing Sealand as your test subject is cheating. Make sure you don't leave anything out - leave no subculture unmentioned. Hm. Not so easy. Most discussions involving the term 'globalism' tend to ignore this issue, preferring to point out symbols of a culture (like Coke and movies).
Basically, what seems to upset most people about America is not the fact that a certain amount of globalization may occur- hey, these things happen. In context, some events that could be considered 'steps towards globalization' could be a good thing, though there are sure to be those who object to any change. It's more the concept of forced globalization that gets people upset. Sure, invasive American culture has 'highlighted political and religious differences'. But I think there's a significant difference between saying 'look! people are upset because we offered to export various bits of our culture to them, if they wanted it!' and saying 'look! people are upset because we rammed our culture down their throats with complete disregard to their own!'.
Forcing this sort of issue does indeed create a certain amount of consternation. Mainly because everybody's wondering who'll be on the receiving end next. Viewed like this, no wonder the US is occasionally seen as a little aggressive; the attitude often displayed by America makes it look like the Microsoft of international trade and politics. This could be because many American citizens, and notably politicians, have the tendancy to think of their own ideals as being 'right', this despite the fact that said ideals are dominant but seldom universal within the US. Now, so do citizens of any country. But the US is in the unusual position of being, apparently, able to impose these ideals on others through fair means or foul, and being in no doubt that this is the right thing to do, tend to do so more often than is advisable. This is not the same issue as globalization of financial markets... more manipulation, less equality.
To my eyes, associating 11/9 with Soros' view of globalism is a strange thing to do. But with all these oversimplifications already, why not add another?
First hit that comes up is a 1996 paper Location-based Authentication: Grounding cyberspace for better security, by Dorothy E. Denning and Peter F. MacDoran. Reading the paper, the idea looks to be that by knowing the location of a computer user one can define whether they are authorised to perform a particular action.
This makes marginal sense (if somebody who isn't in a bank office is playing with computer codes then they're probably not really permitted to play with them). However, to me this article reads like, 'Hey, if I mention copyright protection, I'll get funding'. And the whole idea reads like that - after all, for the person in the above example to perform an unauthorised action on bank accounts, they must already have broken through the protection placed around the system. Simply adding another authentication isn't going to magically fix that problem (hey, you want me to tell the system I'm in the White House? OK. It's no different to telling the system that I'm Bob, financial manager).
As for the use of said technology to control music distribution... what?!. If this woman is 'America's Cyberwarrior' then... be afraid. Very afraid. I'm sorry to say it, but whilst there are some very valid uses for GPS technology (something like HP's Cooltown project, mobile computing in general, augmented reality, etc), I don't think this is it.
On the one side, it's valid to argue that including un-spoofable - if that's a word - location data in all internet communication would help in some cases (finding malicious hackers, absolving the innocent) but given that it also destroys the whole concept of anonymity, it's plain not worth it. Location information has to be optional. This is just another step in the 'media programs phoning home'/WinXP DRM direction, and it's not a good one.
If I sound irritated, it's because I am; I have no idea what Denning's politics are or whether the spin on this story is merely unfortunate, but the article linked to in this story (somewhat unlike the paper) sounds like something the EFF will eventually find themselves fighting.
I particularly like the part of that paper marked 'privacy considerations', where they note "The use of location signatures has the potential of being used to track the physical locations of individuals."
Their solution?
"Access to [this information] should be strictly limited." And, um, "Privacy can also be protected by using and retaining only that information which is needed for a particular application." Or you can "opt-out" of giving your information, although of course "some actions may be prohibited if location is not supplied".
You mean the MPAA/RIAA are only going to retain as much information on me as they need for marketing purposes, and I can opt out if I don't mind never listening to another RIAA-produced CD? Thank you, Denning and MacDoran.
But anyway, according to SGI's site, Shrek was produced using '168 SGI 1200 2U dual-processor Linux OS-based machines'... and some SGI Origin 200 servers... though the characters were designed using Silicon Graphics® O2® desktop workstations. Excuse the trademarks. I haven't got the faintest idea why they used Linux, though they say it was 'to bring more horsepower to the making of great films', which of course ought to explain everything(?).
As a matter of fact, the Queen Mother (no, the Queen and the Queen Mother are in fact separate people) indeed died on Saturday. Also as a matter of fact, you're not funny.
English royalty may not mean a very great deal to your average slashdotter but I would sincerely hope that you could manage a little bit more respect than a Stephen King Is Dead troll lookalike.
I should imagine a number of people will indeed miss her, yes.
He's difficult to listen to, and difficult to talk to.
One time at a trade show I went to listen to him speak (speech: Why He Decided To Start Building The GNU Tools etc).
It was an interesting speech and he gets extra marks for doing at least half of it in the local language rather than English - but on the other hand, all the people he impressed during the speech went away rather fast when the questions began. This is because the first question involved the term 'Linux' - so he advanced on the poor questioner yelling 'GNU/LINUX!' and pointing at them in an accusatory manner.
This is painful to see when you know that co-workers of yours are in the crowd and are almost certainly wondering whether to call Security or not...
He also has something of a 1970s viewpoint on software that he doesn't seem able to see past. But it's just an opinion... I think the worst thing is that, whilst his essays are generally very sensibly written, realtime conversation with him is just painful. Semantics suddenly become the only thing standing between the other participant in the conversation and a headache bought on by RMS.
So I don't know about raving nutter, but he certainly gives that impression to people in general.
Firstly I have to disagree with your assessment... I frequently make use of network transparency at home, particularly for:
1) Other machines on the LAN (it's either remote access GUIs or make ridiculously excessive use of NFS, unfortunately).
2) Getting local access on the University computers (very difficult to do everything in lynx when you're talking about accessing a somewhat patchily-written Java-based website).
One of the strangest things about task analysis on computer users (or users of any other complex system such as planes) is that few people make use of most of the features that the system makes possible. Furthermore, the procedure said users have for completing any problem is almost certainly different to that which the software designers expected. It's not surprising that many people don't make use of such an abstract concept as network transparency, given the above; however, many others do.. Now it's always tempting for a designer to look at any five random users of a system and shout 'Eureka! They do not use this feature and therefore it is useless!' but it's really not a very good way of designing a piece of software. It is probably better to design a rather flexible architecture, such that other users (or those same users, in five years' time) do not have to cope with their crippled system.
Think of this example: Bob, who lives in a nice warm town with flat roads and year-round good weather, takes on the job of redesigning cars. He checks out the opinions of several friends (who also live locally) before making any decisions, but eventually learns that two features on this car that nobody uses are the auto-de-icing windows and snow chain attachments. "Well, that's it", he says, "Those features are a waste of money".
I'll give you a clue; Bob is wrong, in the sense that a mass-manufactured item should present an acceptable profile to as large a proportion of customers as possible. Although of course, if the locally unused extensions are actually degrading the performance of the system, it's always nice to be able to switch them off and reclaim that waste.
It says that crypt implements a one-rotor machine designed along the lines of the
German Enigma, but with a 256-element rotor. Methods of attack on such
machines are known, but not widely; moreover the amount of work required
is likely to be large.
I just tried a search on 'scientology' and got, not only www.xeno.net as result 4 in the listing, also a news story from the Philadephia Enquirer and no less than three sponsored links in green down the right side, all from Operation Clambake: What is Scientology? read the other side of the story? Curious about Scientology? and a third link 'Xenu.net is the definitive guide to scientology'.If I didn't know better I'd think somebody at Google is taking a little revenge;-)
Go Google!
The news story claims that removing xenu.net in the first place was an error and that the actual copyrighted pages are still censored. So the decision was presumably taken that leaving the homepage link uncensored but censoring the specific bits that were copyright violations was enough to provide immunity from prosecution.
Granted, Laika died. On the other hand, Belka, Strelka, Kometa, Shutka, Chernushka, and Zvezdochka all made it back;-)
Talking about insecurity, I happened to read the other day in a totally unrelated book about hill figures, the white horses (and other patterns) cut into chalk hillsides in the UK - yeah, I know, whatever - about a 'hill panda'. Some bunch of students from the University College of South Wales decided to cut the design of a panda onto a piece of common ground visible from the road, and did, without bothering to mention it to anybody first.
Result? Local panic, since it was 1969 at the time and everybody assumed that it must be some sort of homing device for Soviet satellites.
Strange, but true.
Re:Its funny our attitude about success...
on
Soviet Moon Rocket
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
The whole 'Soviets considered human life unimportant' myth really doesn't have that much grounding in reality. It's quite true, on the other hand, that their technology has always tended towards the functional rather than the hi-tech frilly electronics preferred by the US.
For an example of this in action, take a look at this link. It's a description of the events at Le Bourget airshow, Paris, a few years back, when a prototype Sukhoi SU-30mk crashed pretty much due to pilot error (too low altitude, full-power descent)... I mention it because, despite the fact that they were at an extremely low altitude and unable to gain height prior to the crash, the pilots were able to eject safely - rather amazing, in the circumstances, and utterly down to the same Soviet technology that a lot of people here are happy to ignore (amazingly well-designed safety mechanisms).
In fact, there's another page on that site discussing the Soviet airforce's opinions on safety in the 1960s (versus the US's) which concludes that While the Soviet Air Force postulated demanding requirements for the ejection seats, the US Air Force for some reasons did not do likewise. This determined the Russian advantage in ejection seat technologies.
So I would say that on the whole, the Soviets could see the value of preserving the lives of their (highly trained) pilots, and probably felt the same about their astronauts. Yes, there seem to have been a number of fatal accidents, but hey, it's not like the US didn't accidentally fry a few pilots - and interestingly, there's a lot of opposing opinion as to just how many fatalities there were in the Soviet space program. It's just propaganda. Don't perpetuate it.
Well, that's somewhat less than optimal for those of us with lousy slow upload.
Additionally, maxing out my upload kills downloads entirely, all the way to timeouts (cable connection) - turns out that if I cap uploads at about 5/6 max upload speed, I get normal looking download speed. But another 2k upload and downloads die completely. Looking at the comments further up this page, I can see that other people have had this problem and some have found solutions, so I'll take a look at some of those. But perhaps it wouldn't be an entirely bad idea to consider allowing people to cap uploads at something less than the absolute maximum speed, since otherwise, at least in my case, this software is about as much use as a DOS attack.
Actually, a couple of years ago I ended up at CeBiT demonstrating some useless bit of hardware for some electronics company or other. I mention it only because the stand the electronics company had designed included both:
1) an open bar
and
2) not quite lapdancers, but masseuses (massage-giving tall blonde female types, you know).
I couldn't see what it had to do with the useless electronic gizmo, either, though it was certainly relaxing.
Slashdot Mirror
Please someone intelligently defend the right to trade music you don't own the rights to. There's some good reasons and legitimate reasons to do it but I'm wondering if any slashdrones are capable enough of rational thought to come up with any.
I don't feel equal to the challenge, but I did recently end up doing some work on P2P music sharing, so I guess it's worth going over what I found (I commented on it previously, here).
If you start by thinking about what music actually is, what it represents to people (bear with me... this is somewhat relevant) you find that it has more uses than one might think, particularly in mood regulation, identity formation and what you might call social bonding... my point being that whilst it presumably isn't absolutely necessary, music in general does have a number of relatively important roles to play in any community or individual's life. Which I suppose is not all that shocking, but which is nonetheless frequently ignored, particularly by those who think more in the 'music is an unnecessary luxury' direction.
This being the case - music being something of some actual subjective importance - one might ask why people don't make their own music. It is an uncomfortable position to know that aspects of your shared culture, your chosen method of mood regulation, or the tune that sparks off your favourite memories, do not belong to you - even though the meaning of the music to you is yours and yours alone. People might not have the talent, or the patience to train for years to play a musical instrument, or - more probably - most people don't see the need.
In general that there has been a shift in Western culture, in the last few centuries, towards the establishment of this 'intellectual property' idea. Shakespeare borrowed his plots from previous work, and he didn't even bother to change the names. Jane Austen copied music manuscript by hand, changing the lyrics of songs to suit her taste. Gilbert and Sullivan hired bouncers to prowl through the audience looking for covert transcribers of their work.
Now, we're at the apex of this trend - it is less commonplace than ever for people to make their own music, and 'homemade' music, due to our sudden and almost total reliance on TV/radio for guidance on virtually everything, is also apparently considered less professional and therefore in some way valueless... and more fundamentally, that homemade music, unless it's somebody singing a song they stole themselves, is not music that most people consider relevant. In other words, most of the mindshare has been taken by the TV/radio. Obvious exception - pub/club/independant bands, who have an excellent platform to gain some mindshare of their own...
Finally, it comes down to this; our values have changed. We've been somehow shifted away from the idea that music is something we make (eg, with a piano, ourselves) and towards the idea that it is something we play (with a CD...), but we have not changed in terms of our reactions to music. These have not changed because they are deeply grounded in human psychology/ neurophysiology/ biology. So here we are, today, with the same uses for music as we ever had, and the indoctrinated belief that the only way to make real 'professional', relevant music is to hit the 'play' button.
Moving on, it's also evident that to some extent, people have always shared music, for various reasons. There's massive historical evidence for this, really, principally the amount of this music that still survives today and their subject matter, as well as documentary evidence. Going further back there's only archaeological evidence, of course.
So to me, the fundamental question is not 'why do people share music via P2P', but more 'why do we ignore the vast importance of music?' I appreciate that it isn't as important as, say, basic bread and water - you won't die without it - but the fact is that shared music is literally the way in which generations and subcultures define themselves. This being the case, it would be difficult to imagine how subcultures could develop across the Internet without shared experience. So one might even suggest that the sharing of music is part of a way to ensure that shared experience. Here on Slashdot, of course, the unifying factor is generally not music (like the web page says, it's 'News for Nerds').
Most people use music in so many ways that they seldom notice they're doing it, consciously. I consider that the fuss over P2P music sharing is best solvable, not by technology, nor by legislation (nor by terror) but by considering that people share music because it is in some way important to them. Taking this ability from them in law leads to something like Prohibition. Which, as we know, was all rather a joke really.
P2P is just a symptom, and one with many layers; some P2P users are just following the collector instinct. Some are actually trying to be good citizens as they see it, and share something that legitimately makes them happy. Some are pretty unbothered either way. People looking for music are doing so because of curiosity, the habit of collecting, the wish to feel a particular way or be reminded of a happy memory, amongst other reasons.
I wish I had a coherent conclusion to this - in a way, I don't, other than the suggestion that we re-evaluate our habit of considering music as the personal property of the artist and his/her managers. The level on which the RIAA operate - ownership -payment -property - is irrelevant to the motivations of most music listeners, whose personal motivations are, conversely, utterly unimportant to the RIAA.
Eventually, the best solution might come from reintroducing 'non-professional' music into our lives, rather than attempting copyright reform via legality. The implications of that path, however, go further than just throwing away your Sony CDs - most of our media is set up to reinforce the unhealthy, schizophrenic status quo.
Man, you are such an asshole.
:-)
/home/user [conceptually private] and /mnt/share/user/, and nothing irrelevant, but haven't seen anything graphical for UNIX for file management that I would describe as particularly usable... It's a small complaint, of course.
:-)
And you, sweetheart
To rephrase; you're right that Outlook is a perfectly useful solution for, as you put it, 'the modern enterprise'. However, I suspect that it is not the only solution for 'the modern enterprise' - and that, furthermore, 'the modern enterprise' is an extremely broad category in which to work. You probably mean 'the place where foobar104 works'.
I find that there are many enterprises out there - modern or otherwise - that for various reasons including the ones you so adeptly identified, have concluded that making use of Windows, Outlook, and Unix is not altogether an effective solution. Rather than throwing, as it were, the baby out with the bathwater, they have instead chosen to avoid Outlook, or buy themselves a fix. And they have managed it too - I have thus far worked with only one company that made use of Outlook, and I have worked in a number of multinational corporations. I agree that it is a shame that Outlook is so spectacularly incapable of use in a 'hybrid' environment, since, as Slashdot has previously covered, there are few software options that approach its functionality - but not, oddly, none. Notes is still frequently used, though I personally am not a fan of either Outlook or Notes; both are a little buzzword- ridden and neither provide more than a fraction of the real potential that groupware has. Mostly they don't seem to be used for anything but filesharing, calendar, and email - so much for collaborative work.
Of course, if the status quo is Outlook, hostile to Unix, and it works with the organisation, there is no reason to change - but often, the status quo does not include Outlook.
Really, it's this that annoyed me so much with your original comment - the assumption that because Outlook was 'a solution', it must be 'the solution' - the one and only possible answer to a well-specified question. It's just a glorified mail server + database + calendar + contacts + so on... there are other ways of managing this information, and frankly, Outlook is no closer to the 'one and only solution' for groupware than Microsoft Research is, and it must be said that research in the field of collaborative work is generally pretty much stumbling in the dark right now. Marketing would have you believe it to be a magic bullet, but it's just an answer to some of the possible problems that some companies might face - to paraphrase Douglas Adams, Microsoft "know the answer, but they don't really know what the question is", in any particular case.
I agree, in your case, it works 'really well', at least, by your definition of 'really well' and for your definition of 'modern enterprise' - case studies would be really easy if all cases were identical, don't you think? One can put together an all-Microsoft solution and train one's company to work in such a way that their methods approach those that the software engineers were expecting when they designed their groupware. However, one might be losing out - maybe the methods the company already had were better?
It happens. I am reminded of a pilot groupware solution implemented for social workers in the UK - long on groupware/computer-supported collaborative work, and short on understanding of the original paper-based system. It replaced a two-computer-per-office system that was used to summarise information and a lot of paper; in practice, the paper was still used (try making notes on a laptop in rainy weather after six hours' travel) and the groupware was only touched when the manager was around - even though that groupware was being successfully implemented in other environments. Equally, people felt 'wrong' about it - choosing descriptions of human frailties from pull-down menus, having to learn how to inform the system when a client died - it was the wrong solution for their working environment. Read 'Plans and Situated Actions' - Suchman, 1987. "Ethnography allows us... to account for the situated and organisational aspects of work. These social, contextual and artefactual contexts of work, and the interactions between them, accounts for much of people's behaviour in the real world" - in other words, it's very difficult to explain how people work without being there. It depends very much on environment.
The Microsoft engineers are not in my office; they might be correct by default, or their software might be so flexible that it can be used for any situation; the second is demonstrably false given the lack of clients for so-called 'alternative OS's', and the first is only true for a small proportion of the number of enterprises out there, apparently including yours. Heck, a music studio where I worked still uses a system based around the Atari ST... and they seem pretty happy with it. It fulfils their requirements; their organisation is richer with it than without, and that is, after all, the point of a groupware solution.
As for decent GUI file manager, it has been my experience that whilst the fact of the matter is that information is stored centrally, many people are more comfortable doing rough work in an environment that is perceived to be separate from the group/shared/public environment. I concede that the Outlook package may support said illusion, though putting your private drafts in 'public folders' is a little counter-intuitive. Furthermore, I note that the actual mechanics behind a UNIX form of 'public folders' is a very short shell script... really, all I'd like to see is a nice clear graphical analogue of
And yes, I have not found Outlook to be effective, particularly due to viruses (but I'm not afraid of it - nor uncertain - nor do I doubt that it will irritate me again!). Though I am not working as a sysadmin, being in R&D, I have spent vastly too much of my time helping out colleagues, idiots from other companies, and family members, with various Windows - particularly Outlook - related issues. Of course, most of these cases were due to either human idiocy or dumb MCSEs, and if we all hired you, o wonderful one, instead of the tame MCSE (and if so much on NT/XP didn't require admin rights...), I'm sure we'd all become immune. I'd recommend you, except for your colourful language
Hey, I've been in that same situation with Blueyonder. Here's what you do, if they really insist on using Windows;
You lie.
I've had some great conversations like that.
Techie: "Now reboot"
Me: "Right, just rebooting now." Pause to drink some coffee, stare at wallpaper, whatever, until a reasonable sounding amount of time has passed. "Done"
The trick is to just say "Okay" and "Right" and "Done" a lot, write down the settings they give you (if any) and then do your own thing entirely. Better; unless you need action on their part don't call them at all, and if you do, tell them what to do directly, like so: "See the big red button on that router? Press it".
Basically the problem they seem to have is they've been taught to follow a script, and if you confuse them they have to start it all over again. You get similar problems if any actual physical faults occur on the line - eg, no signal/broken cable - if you start your call by telling them the problem they get pretty confused.
eg.
Me: "Hi, the cable's down and the modem isn't able to connect. It's not receiving or sending anything at all according to the LED indicators."
Techie: "Uhh, okay, have you tried rebooting your computer?"
Me: "Why would I do that? The modem isn't receiving anything! The computer is not the problem."
Techie: "Okay, well, can you reboot your computer?"
Me: Sigh, pretend to reboot computer.
Techie: "Does it work now?"
Me: "No! There is no signal!"
Techie: "Right, well, please reinstall your drivers, do you have your driver disk with you?"
Me: "It's an external modem, I think my network drivers are just fine"
Techie: "Please reinstall your drivers"
Me: "Oh, very well" I pretend to reinstall my drivers.
Techie: "Does it work now?"
Me: "No!"
Techie: "Did you reboot?"
Me: Pretend to reboot the machine again.
Techie "Does it work now?"
Me: "No!"
Techie: "Ah. Are all of the LEDs on the modem turned off?"
Me: "YES!"
Techie: "Okay, your cable's down, so the modem can't connect. Sorry"
Sod that.
How is Linux going to make the PC cheaper? Or are you just talking about the cost of purchase, not the TCO? In the enterprise, Linux is more expensive to run on the desktop than Windows is, because the most basic tools for Windows (Outlook, for one) don't exist in a usable form on Linux.
Okay, I've heard some bullshit today but this comment is utterly priceless. You really claim that:
1) Outlook is the most basic tool for windows
2) Outlook has no Linux analogue
and 3) The TCO of Linux is higher because it has no Outlook???
You're a dreamer, you are. That's precious.
Now if you'd said 'a decent GUI based file manager', that might have been different.
I'm now expecting an essay validating each of these points, please. Particularly interesting to me is your explanation as to why Outlook requires automatic execution of unsigned scripts from untrusted sources in multiple languages. Also, the exact cost of all the email viruses associated with Outlook use compared to those of every other mailer (TCO does include all that time spent dealing with virus infestations, you realise? And the money/time from all that virus scanning requirement. And so on). I'd also like you to explain to me how, if Outlook is a necessary 'basic' tool for 'the enterprise', how all those other companies that go for Lotus solutions, or indeed pure-Unix solutions, manage to survive. I worked for years at an R&D centre that used nothing but Suns. Gosh, no Outlook! No WINDOWS! How did we survive? Discuss.
If you really believe that Linux makes PCs more expensive, I'll tell you what, we'll test it. My father and I use Linux, my mother and little brother use Windows; I'll record the time I spend doing tech support on each of them, and if Windows costs less time for me than Linux, I'll pay you. However, based on last year, with three serious Windows file corruptions, trojans, and Sircam (bro' disabled the virus checker on Windows because 'it works faster switched off', and started using Outlook instead of the slightly safer alternatives because 'all of his friends do, and it's Microsoft, innit? ' - no, user stupidity is no excuse - it is a part of TCO too), versus, um, a few apt-gets and I believe one reboot, you're in with a good chance of owing me money.
Which is fascinating, but I think you're picking up all those pr0n sites who use Britney Spears' name as a generic keyword in order to get google links, rather than actual bona-fide Britney Spears fan links (although some might say that the difference between Britney Spears and soft-porn posing is getting smaller by the hour).
I guess if being well-known implies getting the most search results on Google, it also implies being a favourite target for pr0n merchants - this being the case, I guess I think the better of Janis Ian for not being that well-known. If you actually examine your search results, you only have to go a few tens of results from the top before getting stuff like 'Britney's Breast Tribute' and 'Nude Pictures of the Hot Teen' etc, whereas with Janis Ian you get tab, reviews, and articles all the way until I got bored and stopped looking. Maybe it's a sign of the times that we're tempted to measure fame by sex site.
And as to whether it's "speech", it's not the infringer's own speech to give. I doubt there are people so inarticulate that they can communicate effectively only by sharing
You're being very shortsighted, and you're ignoring the reality - what music is.
What you refer to as 'other peoples' songs' aren't just useless, valueless tokens. I don't want to go into the psychology/biology side of it in detail, though as soon as I have time I'm really going to have to write it up somewhere, but suffice it to say that music has a greater role in peoples' lives (and interactions) than it's currently given credit for. Its effects on the brain are only partially documented, but they are many:
Music as loud noise can cause hypertension, stress, and release chemicals in the brain associated with psychopathic behaviour in individuals.
Rythmns are perceived by humans in relation to their own bodies (motor theory of rythmn).
Music affects certain hormone levels, such as testosterone (aggression, arousal), cortisol (arousal, stress), oxytocin (nurturing behaviour, bonding). Also endorphins (natural opiates).
Music's strong relation to social functions and community is therefore explicable, particularly given the oxytocin release mentioned above - oxytocin is released in traumatic or ecstatic situations, and assists the erasure of certain memories and replacement with newly encoded memories (thus strong emotions are related to music). It plays a role in identity formation and development.
Also, music may stimulate the release of the drug naloxone, an opiate receptor antagonist. In other words, listening to music activates the brain's opiate receptors...
As a result or otherwise, it's popularly used as a form of mood regulation (perhaps another explanation as to why people might want to 'communicate by mp3').
Let alone Dennet's identification of music, say the first few notes of Beethoven's Fifth, as a tremendously successful meme.
In effect, you identify with music. It is instrumental in community, not to mention personal associations (never had a 'special song'?). Often, music like the popular, still copyrighted, 'Happy Birthday' can be identified as very definitely part of the culture you live in - what's a kid's party without 'Happy Birthday', after all? Sure, there are other ways to communicate the message behind it, but none with the same power as the music you remember from your own birthdays - that's the power of music, and biologically speaking, it's not without cause.
So as to who 'owns' a piece of intellectual property, I guess legally speaking it's the author. As to whether there's anybody so inarticulate that they can communicate effectively only by sharing
Music is not to be taken as lightly as Pinker suggests (auditory cheesecake, indeed). It's somewhere between 45,000 and 82,000 years old, minimally, and it dates from pre-Homo Sapiens - Neanderthals played bone flutes, you know. So don't underestimate its importance with glib phrases like 'nobody needs music', because it does serve several useful functions. It probably isn't indispensable, but bear in mind that it is important - and piracy probably reflects that fact. Charging arbitrarily high prices for something that has such a pivotal role in cultural identity and mood is possibly not acceptable; in the sense that, whilst it is one person/band's music, it is the peoples' culture that makes it relevant, and it is the peoples' culture that use it, yes, to communicate effectively.
Do you mean these?
Or are there others wandering around anywhere? (something official, or at least written by Douglas Adams???)
I'd like to find a decent alternative ending; call me sentimental, but I don't think MH really suits the feel of the first four... although I realise that authors have the right to be depressed, I think I just prefer reading things he wrote when he wasn't feeling like sh*t.
"The OS should be totally transparent to the user"
Much as I hate to answer an off-topic AC, this sort of uninformed thoughtless comment bugs me. So...
This comment, whilst in itself utterly true, is - when taken in context - indicative of a common misconception. The command line interface may well be 'user friendly'. It all depends on the system's intended users.
A command line interface generally (though not always) is designed to be flexible, programmable and internally consistent; it is often very successfully twinned with text-based configuration files and 'anal retentive directory layout'. These things work, because they provide the class of user for whom they are intended the ability to perform suitable tasks quickly and effectively. Note that I do not necessarily claim that bash is the perfect CLI nor that *nix has the perfect directory layout - I merely claim that these things, in an ideal world, may exist.
A graphical interface, on the other hand, is seldom designed for these users. Usually, the intention is to provide a metaphor with which the users can interact. The usefulness of this, granted that it can work, is limited; when dealing with a word processor, perhaps a metaphor (say, of a typewriter) is useful, but when dealing with a 'load file' option, a less intuitive metaphor is introduced (folders and C: substitute for the hierarchical file system).
Sometimes metaphors are useful. Sometimes they're just a distraction. In many cases they confuse people - then it's easier to explain the original metaphor than to explain why the Microsoft designer decided to paint icons all over it and call it something completely unrelated.
Bottom line: If it was simple in the first place, don't introduce graphical complexity unless you really, really think it's helpful. Sheer window dressing will not help a user. A consistent design, well thought out, targeted at the people who'll use it, will. And sometimes - why am I bothering telling this to an Anonymous Coward? oh well - good design will mean command line interfaces.
Incidentally, here's the actual paper, the one referred to from the guy's own web site (minimal), published in Phys. Lett. A... Gravitational Field of Circulating Light Beams.
Beware; it's a little drier than the Boston Globe would like to make it...
I say the actual paper; in fact, this particular paper naturally doesn't make any suggestions of the "Hey, look, this research gives me a way to go back in time and save my father from the evils of cigarettes" type - if it did, it would never have made it into any serious journals. Mallett mentions two papers on his site, one on Bose-Einstein condensation and dark matter, one on this...
He has done other work - this , for example, not to mention work on Hawking radiation and probably a bunch of other stuff. His newest one is apparently "Gravitational Perturbations of a Radiating Spacetime", which looks relevant, not to mention full of terrifying maths. "The principal aim of our study is to understand how gravitational waves are scattered by a background radiating spacetime".
As I recall, cloning does not cause GATTACA. The belief that the genes you carry define your usefulness to the human race has more to do with it - if you don't have healthy enough genes you're not held to be worth the effort.
Therefore, genetic engineering and screening are the causes of it, and as I understand it these are already being given more credence than they probably deserve. I suspect that things like compulsory medical/genetic screening to determine eligibility for jobs, insurance and so on, probably already occur and are likely to become more popular in future.
I refer to these techniques as somewhat doubtful, since it seems to me that the effects of any given gene are not on the whole well understood. Some have very visible results, but when it's claimed that the presence of certain genes increases one's courage or problem-solving ability or tendancy to steal, then we're getting into the realms of emergent phenomena, statistics, environmental factors and pure fantasy.
On the other hand, it doesn't look like this particular experiment has been thought out very well. Just think, if this stuff had more legitimate research, we would probably know for sure what would happen... but ignorance is bliss and high moral ground, all in one.
*sigh* Brave New World, here we come.
The principle difficulty with using Microsoft products is that they seem barely capable of communicating with anything but other Microsoft products. I'd like MS to consider putting all libraries useful for interoperability available in open-source (without the useless licence) form. That way, well, if their software was better than the free version one could use them, and MS and non-MS software could be used together...
Basically it doesn't seem that Microsoft can totally change to an open-source strategy now. Even if they weren't too embarassed/unrepentantly monopolistic to want to.
I don't really see that they would open-source the entirety of Office, but it'd be nice if Microsoft were to make owning Office an option rather than a restrictive locked-in technology (yeah, I know. Word viewer available, inconsistent specs available. Not quite the same as working source code).
In any case, if the arguments about Linux's unsuitability for the desktop are correct, they have nothing to fear - if Linux users were to create Word documents or WMV or whatever with the code they were graciously permitted to use, the average human being would prefer to buy a nice user-friendly copy of Windows and view them on that.
Of course, if somebody were to create a piece of word processing software that happened to be better than Word and utterly interoperable, they'd lose out, but we all know that'd never happen (yeah, right).
Whoops. Good point. Can never remember which way round those go :-)
Quite: somebody needs to point out to Katz that if it's about globalisation, then it's safe not to mistitle it. It's okay to mention 11/9 in passing, in the text, without paying homage to it in the title (it seems rather irrelevant to the argument).
Most people are probably fairly happy with the idea of reading articles that don't mention a well-known terrorist attack, from time to time. If only for novelty value.
Perhaps what is meant is 'post-11/9, we noticed that a number of people appeared to be irritated with us. Then we blamed it on globalisation'.
Now, onto the text:
Why anybody should seek unified government, political system or economy, let alone religion, escapes me entirely. Shared, yes. Unified, certainly not. In fact, why anybody should believe it to be possible is a mysterious question in itself. It's quite difficult to find any two people who think the same way about anything (it's the notorious 'common ground' issue).
Why anybody should suggest that countries 'choose between globalism and religious fanaticism' is even less clear.
The whole idea of a common culture is based on an oversimplification. To prove this, try to design an experiment to quantify American [or any other] society. Choosing Sealand as your test subject is cheating. Make sure you don't leave anything out - leave no subculture unmentioned. Hm. Not so easy. Most discussions involving the term 'globalism' tend to ignore this issue, preferring to point out symbols of a culture (like Coke and movies).
Basically, what seems to upset most people about America is not the fact that a certain amount of globalization may occur- hey, these things happen. In context, some events that could be considered 'steps towards globalization' could be a good thing, though there are sure to be those who object to any change. It's more the concept of forced globalization that gets people upset. Sure, invasive American culture has 'highlighted political and religious differences'. But I think there's a significant difference between saying 'look! people are upset because we offered to export various bits of our culture to them, if they wanted it!' and saying 'look! people are upset because we rammed our culture down their throats with complete disregard to their own!'.
Forcing this sort of issue does indeed create a certain amount of consternation. Mainly because everybody's wondering who'll be on the receiving end next. Viewed like this, no wonder the US is occasionally seen as a little aggressive; the attitude often displayed by America makes it look like the Microsoft of international trade and politics. This could be because many American citizens, and notably politicians, have the tendancy to think of their own ideals as being 'right', this despite the fact that said ideals are dominant but seldom universal within the US. Now, so do citizens of any country. But the US is in the unusual position of being, apparently, able to impose these ideals on others through fair means or foul, and being in no doubt that this is the right thing to do, tend to do so more often than is advisable. This is not the same issue as globalization of financial markets... more manipulation, less equality.
To my eyes, associating 11/9 with Soros' view of globalism is a strange thing to do. But with all these oversimplifications already, why not add another?
Do a google search for 'Denning GPS'.
First hit that comes up is a 1996 paper Location-based Authentication: Grounding cyberspace for better security, by Dorothy E. Denning and Peter F. MacDoran. Reading the paper, the idea looks to be that by knowing the location of a computer user one can define whether they are authorised to perform a particular action.
This makes marginal sense (if somebody who isn't in a bank office is playing with computer codes then they're probably not really permitted to play with them). However, to me this article reads like, 'Hey, if I mention copyright protection, I'll get funding'. And the whole idea reads like that - after all, for the person in the above example to perform an unauthorised action on bank accounts, they must already have broken through the protection placed around the system. Simply adding another authentication isn't going to magically fix that problem (hey, you want me to tell the system I'm in the White House? OK. It's no different to telling the system that I'm Bob, financial manager).
As for the use of said technology to control music distribution... what?!. If this woman is 'America's Cyberwarrior' then... be afraid. Very afraid. I'm sorry to say it, but whilst there are some very valid uses for GPS technology (something like HP's Cooltown project, mobile computing in general, augmented reality, etc), I don't think this is it.
On the one side, it's valid to argue that including un-spoofable - if that's a word - location data in all internet communication would help in some cases (finding malicious hackers, absolving the innocent) but given that it also destroys the whole concept of anonymity, it's plain not worth it. Location information has to be optional. This is just another step in the 'media programs phoning home'/WinXP DRM direction, and it's not a good one.
If I sound irritated, it's because I am; I have no idea what Denning's politics are or whether the spin on this story is merely unfortunate, but the article linked to in this story (somewhat unlike the paper) sounds like something the EFF will eventually find themselves fighting.
I particularly like the part of that paper marked 'privacy considerations', where they note "The use of location signatures has the potential of being used to track
the physical locations of individuals."
Their solution?
"Access to [this information] should be strictly limited." And, um, "Privacy can also be protected by using and retaining only that information which is needed for a particular application." Or you can "opt-out" of giving your information, although of course "some actions may be prohibited if location is not supplied".
You mean the MPAA/RIAA are only going to retain as much information on me as they need for marketing purposes, and I can opt out if I don't mind never listening to another RIAA-produced CD? Thank you, Denning and MacDoran.
You'd get more variety if you went out first:
/pub; find /pub -iname 'blonde'
/pub; more beer; find /pub -iname '*blonde*'
cd
And you might get more results if you tried the old T-shirt trick
cd
You can probably ignore the 'talk' command in this case - it won't increase your chances after all that beer.
Karma-hungry? Never :-)
But anyway, according to SGI's site, Shrek was produced using '168 SGI 1200 2U dual-processor Linux OS-based machines'... and some SGI Origin 200 servers... though the characters were designed using Silicon Graphics® O2® desktop workstations. Excuse the trademarks.
I haven't got the faintest idea why they used Linux, though they say it was 'to bring more horsepower to the making of great films', which of course ought to explain everything(?).
Lethyos: You idiot.
As a matter of fact, the Queen Mother (no, the Queen and the Queen Mother are in fact separate people) indeed died on Saturday. Also as a matter of fact, you're not funny.
English royalty may not mean a very great deal to your average slashdotter but I would sincerely hope that you could manage a little bit more respect than a Stephen King Is Dead troll lookalike.
I should imagine a number of people will indeed miss her, yes.
He's difficult to listen to, and difficult to talk to.
One time at a trade show I went to listen to him speak (speech: Why He Decided To Start Building The GNU Tools etc).
It was an interesting speech and he gets extra marks for doing at least half of it in the local language rather than English - but on the other hand, all the people he impressed during the speech went away rather fast when the questions began. This is because the first question involved the term 'Linux' - so he advanced on the poor questioner yelling 'GNU/LINUX!' and pointing at them in an accusatory manner.
This is painful to see when you know that co-workers of yours are in the crowd and are almost certainly wondering whether to call Security or not...
He also has something of a 1970s viewpoint on software that he doesn't seem able to see past. But it's just an opinion... I think the worst thing is that, whilst his essays are generally very sensibly written, realtime conversation with him is just painful. Semantics suddenly become the only thing standing between the other participant in the conversation and a headache bought on by RMS.
So I don't know about raving nutter, but he certainly gives that impression to people in general.
Firstly I have to disagree with your assessment... I frequently make use of network transparency at home, particularly for:
1) Other machines on the LAN (it's either remote access GUIs or make ridiculously excessive use of NFS, unfortunately).
2) Getting local access on the University computers (very difficult to do everything in lynx when you're talking about accessing a somewhat patchily-written Java-based website).
One of the strangest things about task analysis on computer users (or users of any other complex system such as planes) is that few people make use of most of the features that the system makes possible. Furthermore, the procedure said users have for completing any problem is almost certainly different to that which the software designers expected. It's not surprising that many people don't make use of such an abstract concept as network transparency, given the above; however, many others do.. Now it's always tempting for a designer to look at any five random users of a system and shout 'Eureka! They do not use this feature and therefore it is useless!' but it's really not a very good way of designing a piece of software. It is probably better to design a rather flexible architecture, such that other users (or those same users, in five years' time) do not have to cope with their crippled system.
Think of this example: Bob, who lives in a nice warm town with flat roads and year-round good weather, takes on the job of redesigning cars. He checks out the opinions of several friends (who also live locally) before making any decisions, but eventually learns that two features on this car that nobody uses are the auto-de-icing windows and snow chain attachments. "Well, that's it", he says, "Those features are a waste of money".
I'll give you a clue; Bob is wrong, in the sense that a mass-manufactured item should present an acceptable profile to as large a proportion of customers as possible. Although of course, if the locally unused extensions are actually degrading the performance of the system, it's always nice to be able to switch them off and reclaim that waste.
Yup, the man page is here.
It says that crypt implements a one-rotor machine designed along the lines of the
German Enigma, but with a 256-element rotor. Methods of attack on such
machines are known, but not widely; moreover the amount of work required
is likely to be large.
I just tried a search on 'scientology' and got, not only www.xeno.net as result 4 in the listing, also a news story from the Philadephia Enquirer and no less than three sponsored links in green down the right side, all from Operation Clambake: What is Scientology? read the other side of the story? Curious about Scientology? and a third link 'Xenu.net is the definitive guide to scientology'.If I didn't know better I'd think somebody at Google is taking a little revenge ;-)
Go Google!
The news story claims that removing xenu.net in the first place was an error and that the actual copyrighted pages are still censored. So the decision was presumably taken that leaving the homepage link uncensored but censoring the specific bits that were copyright violations was enough to provide immunity from prosecution.
Granted, Laika died. On the other hand, Belka, Strelka, Kometa, Shutka, Chernushka, and Zvezdochka all made it back ;-)
Talking about insecurity, I happened to read the other day in a totally unrelated book about hill figures, the white horses (and other patterns) cut into chalk hillsides in the UK - yeah, I know, whatever - about a 'hill panda'. Some bunch of students from the University College of South Wales decided to cut the design of a panda onto a piece of common ground visible from the road, and did, without bothering to mention it to anybody first.
Result? Local panic, since it was 1969 at the time and everybody assumed that it must be some sort of homing device for Soviet satellites.
Strange, but true.
The whole 'Soviets considered human life unimportant' myth really doesn't have that much grounding in reality. It's quite true, on the other hand, that their technology has always tended towards the functional rather than the hi-tech frilly electronics preferred by the US.
For an example of this in action, take a look at this link. It's a description of the events at Le Bourget airshow, Paris, a few years back, when a prototype Sukhoi SU-30mk crashed pretty much due to pilot error (too low altitude, full-power descent)... I mention it because, despite the fact that they were at an extremely low altitude and unable to gain height prior to the crash, the pilots were able to eject safely - rather amazing, in the circumstances, and utterly down to the same Soviet technology that a lot of people here are happy to ignore (amazingly well-designed safety mechanisms).
In fact, there's another page on that site discussing the Soviet airforce's opinions on safety in the 1960s (versus the US's) which concludes that While the Soviet Air Force postulated demanding requirements for the ejection seats, the US Air Force for some reasons did not do likewise. This determined the Russian advantage in ejection seat technologies.
So I would say that on the whole, the Soviets could see the value of preserving the lives of their (highly trained) pilots, and probably felt the same about their astronauts. Yes, there seem to have been a number of fatal accidents, but hey, it's not like the US didn't accidentally fry a few pilots - and interestingly, there's a lot of opposing opinion as to just how many fatalities there were in the Soviet space program. It's just propaganda. Don't perpetuate it.
Well, that's somewhat less than optimal for those of us with lousy slow upload.
Additionally, maxing out my upload kills downloads entirely, all the way to timeouts (cable connection) - turns out that if I cap uploads at about 5/6 max upload speed, I get normal looking download speed. But another 2k upload and downloads die completely. Looking at the comments further up this page, I can see that other people have had this problem and some have found solutions, so I'll take a look at some of those. But perhaps it wouldn't be an entirely bad idea to consider allowing people to cap uploads at something less than the absolute maximum speed, since otherwise, at least in my case, this software is about as much use as a DOS attack.
Cheers.
Actually, a couple of years ago I ended up at CeBiT demonstrating some useless bit of hardware for some electronics company or other. I mention it only because the stand the electronics company had designed included both:
1) an open bar
and
2) not quite lapdancers, but masseuses (massage-giving tall blonde female types, you know).
I couldn't see what it had to do with the useless electronic gizmo, either, though it was certainly relaxing.