I think the worst of all possible worlds would be the one where the high and mighty are allowed to have privacy, but the rest of us are not.
{big snip}
I propose instead that we support monitoring for judges and elected officials until such time as they get off their duffs and take steps to assure privacy protection for all of us.
Well said. We've come a long way from the time when the law was applied equally to all. We're not quite down the tubes yet; a DuPont was convicted of murder a few years ago. Of course, there's always the Kennedy clan as counterexample to that; maybe I'm being too optimistic.
Re:Fiorina is more than just your average exec...
on
HP Buys Compaq
·
· Score: 2
[Quotes from the NYTIMES article, no registration required.]
Lucent's stock price has been tanking for a while now, starting before the big downturn. HP has seemed a bit unclear about its direction for a while. Now this? I am afraid that genius is not the word that springs to mind to describe Fiona. Still, she does seem to be adept at leaving before the house of cards comes crashing down; she got out of Lucent in time.
I guess that the one good thing about this is that the two companies, between them, have two of everything.
When announced job reductions, of 8,500 jobs at Compaq and 9,000 at Hewlett-Packard, are completed, employment at the companies will be about 62,800 at Compaq and 87,000 at Hewlett-Packard. Further reductions seem likely, as executives said that they expect annual cost savings of $2.5 billion within several years.
When the dust settles, the best engineers will have gotten disgusted and left, and the folks who couldn't scrape up a decent job elsewhere will be trying to design whatever clever disaster marketing has dreamed up most recently.
I guess I'm not optimistic right now for the future of H-Paq. Even under a rosy scenario, there should be problems and dropped balls as they try to merge the companies. Sun and IBM (and to a lesser extent SGI) should benefit a bit as H-Paq bobbles repeatedly in the server market.
Why are they trying to switch horses in midstream? I suspect that this had a lot to do with the timing:
Investors in both Compaq and Hewlett-Packard have suffered in the current decline in technology stocks, although Compaq's woes have taken a greater toll. That stock is down 76 percent from its peak, reached in early 1999, while Hewlett- Packard is off 66 percent from its peak, reached last summer.
They're both hurting, but Compaq seems to be hurting worse. I suspect that the HP exec's saw a chance to expand their empires, and the Compaq execs saw a chance to ward off a worse fate.
Getting the agent's (in this case, the corporate officers) interests aligned with the principle's (in this case, the stockholders) interests is an old problem, which we obviously haven't solved yet. I'm going to guess that when we see this merger in hindsight, we'll see this as another example of management serving management instead of stockholders, at least at HP. The Compaq shareholders are being offered an out:
They said, however, that a premium is being offered for Compaq's stock, which closed Friday at $12.35, down 34 cents, while Hewlett-Packard shares fell 19 cents to $23.21
By the way, is is normal for the aquiring company's stock to fall adnd the aquired company's stock to rise.
I'm all for MS Windows as a client, to be honest. It works good [enough] for the end user and it's damned easy.
T'aint so.
If what you mean is "Windows is easy for a non-technical user to use (with a skilled sysadmin handling the problems of keeping things running).", I think you're wrong. Windows is HARD, and unintuitive. So is KDE. The only difference is that most folks who've been forced to work with computers for a while have learned what buttons to push on the Windows aplications they use regularly, to do the things they do regularly. When a non-technical user gets that same "what button" knowlege on a Unix system, Unix is easy.
The secretaries in the Statistics department here have windows PCs on their desks, and use them largely to run xservers so they can connect to the Unix compute server. After training, they find it easier to get their work done using vi and plain-TeX than using Windows applications. They do use IE for web surfing, since it works much better than Netscape 4.7X. They use other windows applications too, where they find it easier than Unix (it's AIX, when I was there), but much of their time is spent using vi.
If you mean something like: "Windows makes lower demands on non-technical sysadmins", you might be right, though I'm not sure. I have had a hard time getting up to speed on managing my own machine at home, but it works far better now than when I ran windows. The learning time has been well spent, in my case.
I am firmly convinced that, given a competent sysadmin to set things up right and keep them humming, and users with the same level of experience on the system, a *nix system will be at least as easy to use to accomplish useful work as a Windows system. It may well be harder to do the things that you did on a MS system, such as automatically running viruses, but I'm talking about getting work done.
So I'd like to see some follow-up like knowing more specifics such as what company this is, when it happened and such. Who from RedHat can confirm this story?
I also would like to see some specifics, but the City of Largo Adopts KDE 2.1.1 story shows that it is indeed possible to put Linux on the desktop, and the back end, of a fair-sized organization. They weren't switching from NT, but If you wanted to badly enough, I think this shows that you could. I would especially like to find out what Linux support and training are costing them.
Any company is all sweetness and light with a new customer, until you buy. At that point, you're no longer a new customer, you're one of the people who get screwed to subsidise the sweetheart deals for the prospective new customers. MS and Pitney Bowes (and Friden-Alcatel, and Postalia, and...) can play this game in a particularly mean way, since they get you locked in with a large investment which becomes worthless if you stop leasing (or purchasing upgrades for) their product. The great thing about Linux is that RedHat, SUSE, etc can't get that kind of lockin. If this story isn't true, I bet there's one just like it that is.
would (1) have something like a 486 single-board computer mounted in a flat-panel display;
(2) be able to boot from ethernet via an optional ethernet card;
(3) be able to boot from optional CD or HD.
(4) use standard wireless keyboard and mouse
(5) be reasonably cheap.
What's reasonably cheap? Since it's INSIDE a flat panel, it would be worth more to me than a standard computer plus monitor. It would FIT! I could wall mount one in the living room to control music, etc, and have a way to check email (if I sat quite nearby...).
Why a 486? cheap, low-power so no fan, and quiet.
I think that if it were priced in the $400 to $500 range for the panel with one option (ethernet or HD) and keyboard, it would sell quite a few units.
I used to do component level repair of computers and peripherals back when you could still afford to do that. I took a look at a web page which purports to detail the actual damage which is being sued over. They show a picture of a chip with a melted case. Pretty obviously, it was not a static discharge which melted it. The sort of lightning bolt which could do that would most likely have cooked the computer owner's finger too. That does not mean that static didn't cause the problem.
A static discharge could fry a sensitive control chip, which might fail short, and cause another chip, "downstream" of it, to overheat and bubble its plastic casing. I have seem similar problems on the old Epson dot-matrix printers, where a $45 control chip would periodically fail, causing the printhead to fail, and usually taking some of the power transistors which drove it along. Fortunately, the $60 (?it's been a long time) printhead and the $3 transistors would fail so quickly that they would save the $0.25 fuses.
The point? Yes, static could have caused the failure. How to prevent that? Ground things properly. Make sure that the case of each machine is grounded ("earthed" if you are in Britain), but that the cables connecting peripherals to computer have the ground wire connected at one end only (that's case ground, not signal ground). This prevents ground loops, which can also melt chips in houses with wiring problems.
Reading further down that page, we can see how Palm turned an upset customer into an extremely upset customer. He tells us that he got the run-around, that the story kept changing, and that Palm made it quite clear that they didn't care about keeping a customer happy; it wasn't their fault, and he couldn't prove it. On this page, he concludes his story. He's bitter but resigned. I have to wonder, now, whether I want to spend hundreds of dollars to buy something from a company whose service and products leave one bitter and resigned, and hundreds of dollars poorer. HP, on the other hand, has promised him a check for $100, to help defray the cost of a new motherboard. I wonder which company will get better word-of-mouth out of this epsiode?
I don't think that in general we should assign right to IP. But there are specific cases in which it is best to do so, and when we do assign such rights, it must be possible for corporations to own them.
There is a common misconception in the old Soviet Union: we'll have a free market, we just won't let anyone have property rights, because that's not good socialism. Of course, you can't have a market without property rights.
The problem with the suggestion that...corporations cannot have patent and IP rights, they can only be assinged to real people. is that if you can't sell your rights, they have no value. Period. If you can only trade these "rights" among individuals, then you restrict the market to folks like you and me. I certainly wouldn't pay $400 for the rights to paper clips under that scenario. The only way that a corporation could justify paying for IP would be if it was assigned to someone who is a majority stock-holder. As you point out, why buy your engineer a patent if he can walk off with it? Buying the patent for someone who is contractually bound to stay or sell the patent back seems pretty shady. If that doesn't violate our hypothetical law, it should.
But one could license the rights to a corp, you respond. Fine, how about exclusive rights to use and sub-license, irrevocable, for the term of the patent? How is that different from an outright sale? It seems to me that this is really all-or-nothing: either you are free to dispose of your invention as you see fit (assuming that we are going to assign property rights at all) and it has value, or you aren't, and it doesn't.
You point out that
truly brilliant people who are inventive would be rewarded. These people would become like athletes as they became more desirable as the number of core patents they hold increases.
This would work fine for folks who could innovate on their own, but how about engineers and geneticists who need multimillion dollar facilities? How could a corp justify paying out tens of millions for someone to develop a patentable invention, which they could then walk off with? Again, contractual ties which bind the rights-holder to the corp are no different than outright assignment to the corp.
I believe that there is no natural right to intellectual property. That's exactly opposite to the situation with physical property, where there certainly is such a natural right. The difference, of course, is that physical property doesn't copy well: if I eat your hamburger, you can't. If I use your idea, you can too. All you have lost is the monopoly.
For all of human history, we have built on the intellectual shoulders of those who came before. It is right and natural that we should share ideas, and we are all better off when that happens. In order to encourage that, the US constitution (Article 1, Section 8)gives Congress permission
To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries
This was obviously to work in the public interest, by encouraging productive work and its public disclosure. Enriching inventors is plainly not the aim. Nor does it suggest any pre-existing natural right.
if this goes away. He's optimistic, though. In his column 250,July 23, 2001, he tells us
I can't get cable modem here: Adelphia has a monopoly, and while they offer cable modem in many parts of their L.A. franchise area, they haven't seen fit to bring it to Studio City. I can't get DSL because I am a couple of thousand feet too far from the switch.
SNIP
That left Ricochet, a spread-spectrum radio link; and that worked, and is again working. Of course, Ricochet filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection about a week after I got it running, but that doesn't worry me as much as it might. The service works and works well, the physical facilities have been built in a number of cities (alas not in Las Vegas; I'd love to have it for Comdex), and someone will pick up the pieces and keep it operational.
He's been trying to get broadband into his middle-of-downtown home forever, and Ricochet was the first thing to come through for him, so maybe tht was just wishfull thinking.
It really is a pity that the maze of regulations of phone and airwaves have strangled competition and prevented good (actually, any) broadband service from being extended to most of the US. The lesson here is that we can't afford to regulate things; regulation may seem to fix a current problem, but it will cause MUCH worse problems down the road, and be politically impossible to remove when it has proven itself disasterously bad (think California electricity).
There has been a LOT of well-informed criticism of the Numerical Recepies books. It seems to center around the idea that the recipes don't scale well, and are more useful as teaching tools than for serious scientific work. There is a wonderful page at one of the big government labs which explains in detail, along with some alternate sources of examples. If I can find the link, I'll post it as a reply to this. I like Numerical Analysis for Statisticians, by Lange. It's aimed right at my field, and it comes highly recommended by an eminent numerical analyst and theoretician.
You might want to check out this link, which I stumbled across while trying to find that page about (against, really) Numerical Recipes. Cannonical Tomes, they call themselves. Looks good.
I didn't see anyone suggesting Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs. Another good book is A Gentle Introduction to Lisp, by Touretzsky. Another book which I think is essential for computer science (as opposed to banging out code by guess-and-by-gosh) is Knuth's Concrete Math (find it at Amazon, I don't think it's on the web). This is for discrete math what a REALLY good calculus text would be for infinitesimals. A final suggestion is the Handbook of applied Cryptography.
Except for Concrete Math, all of these are available on the web free of charge, and all of them are of lasting value, and well worth the cost.
Take a look at the keyboard in this picture. It looks like a membrane keyboard from a cash register! Somehow I don't think that's aimed at programmers. Or anyone else who can type.
When are we going to be able to get one of these things in a beige case for a sane price? That box will run $2000 and up. I just put together a 1GHz Athlon for about $800. Notice too that there are only two ram slots (see here) and only 1Gig of ram max. Pretty weak. I guess cool sells better than performance at a sensible price; that's why the Apple Cube sold so many millions.
I would really like to be able to put together a good, non-intel machine for doing simulations, but this doesn't seem to be it. I DO think that these things would sell like hotcakes, if they didn't cost much more than pc's, say, not more than a 10% premium for the motherboard, and all else straight pc hardware. Unfortunately, these guys seem to be trying to compete with Apple on their home turf, without the Apple OS. It worked so well for Franklin (remember the Apple][ clones?), and BEos, I'm sure it will work equally well for these guys. I wish them luck, but I'm not holding my breath.
Should be plenty of UV to generate ozone, right down to the surface, I guess. And low partial pressure might mean that tri-atomic oxygen is less likely to form? Anyway, this was apparently inside the lander, so who knows what it was exposed to. If you're right, it's another good story down the tubes. Darn.
For when this gets slashdotted, the gist of the story is that the petri dishes shows signs of activity for nine weeks, far too long to be explained by the chemical story. The bacteria's activity was cycling with the temperature, and we know today but didn't know then that that sort of cycle points to cellular activity (so say the reporters at the EurekaAlert!).
I guess the only quibble left to be hashed out is: "Could this be earth bacteria which hitched a ride and survived the trip?" I seem to recall that NASA tried to prevent that from happening, but I was only 15 that year, and easily distracted.
One other thing springs to mind after reading this: DOCUMENT YOUR CODE! The article says:
It took a number of calls?and a good four months?to uncover what Miller was looking for. And when NASA found it, there was a problem. "The data were on magnetic tapes, and written in a format so old that the programmers who knew it had died," Miller said.
If they had documented their work properly, someone could have figured out how to read that tape, even after they kicked the bucket.
How about a link to that $4.5/lb coffee? I've been getting the decent stuff here in Lafayette for about twice that at the grocery store, so I'm really interested.
I looked into this a few years ago. What I found was that the models predict a lot of stuff that just isn't happening; changes in weather patterns, huge increases in daytime high temperatures (up to 5 degrees C!), and so on. That suggests that the models suck, and there seemed to be no reason to think they'd work on the stuff we can't observe, when they don't work on what we can observe. I dount that the situation has changed remarkably since then. One thing that I'm sure hasn't changed is that there is no shortage of really solid data to support both sides: that the temperature really has risen, and that it really hasn't. There are thousands of temperature time series, some direct and some inferred, some are climbing, some are falling, and most aren't changing significantly after controlling for all the relevant sources of variance.
Globally it is likely that the 1990s was the warmest decade and 1998 the warmest year recorded (since 1861). Certainly this seems to be the case in the northern hemisphere not simply since 1861 but for the last ten centuries.
Yep, I hope so. We are still coming out of a little ice age, returning to the higher temperatures which were the norm when the Vikings grew grapes in Newfoundland. The scary thought is that we might find out, in 100 years, that the temperatures are really going down.
You point out that the EPA and UN-funded scientists have found evidence of global warming. Notice where their funding comes from. If Exxon was paying the bill, these same guys would no doubt have found the opposite. Government and industry researchers don't get tenure.
There are literally thousands of responsible scientists who work in these fields who believe that any sort of costly action to "avert global warming" is a bad, irresponsible idea. Some of them are Exxon employees, but certainly not all. Here and here (loosely related) are a couple of random links which might help make the point that it isn't a settled issue in the minds of people who understand it and aren't funded by the Government or Greenpeace (HINT: both these groups find it easier to get money from the public if they can claim that the sky is falling.)
In short, ad homenim arguments are less productive than usual here, since we see the usual suspects on each side of the issue. The energy companies are pushing their issue, Greenpeace is pushing theirs, and so on. We need to consider the consequences of being wrong. Seeing the global temperature rise by 1 to 2 degrees C is probably going to make the world a better place to live in the long run. That's the maximum likelihood prediction from most of the models that folks on either side take seriously. The doomsday 5+degree C senarios have very low probabilities under most models. Consider the cost of "taking action": Millions of people around the world, most of them already desperately poor, will die earlier and more miserably if we do anything to limit energy use. The only thing I can think of to reduce greenhouse gasses without causing disaster is replacing coal with nuclear power. That isn't going to happen anytime soon, unfortunately, because of the same agenda that is driving the "its getting hotter" side of the issue.
After a quick skim, it appears that the entire distribution is covered. Of course, they can't keep anyone from redistributing the GPL'ed portions, and I don't think they're trying. They point out that they have some proprietary stuff, and some other non-GPL'ed stuff:
Although OpenLinux Workstation contains the Linux kernel and a variety of open source software, there are a wide variety of licenses, each with different distribution restrictions Additionally, Caldera includes some of its own proprietary software as well as other Copyrighted material." (Quoted from this on LinuxToday)
So what's it all mean? This shows pretty conclusively that you can indeed build a proprietary product on top of Linux. If they've done it right, they'll show that you can do it without getting tripped up the the GPL. Nyah nyah MS. Whether they can sell it is another question. I wish them luck.
I think that MS has pretty well made a fool of its collective self with the GPL=cancer nonsense. This kind of thing can only help point up the essential absurdity of that position.
Yes, that was my point exactly: today's underdog can get a pass only as long as it stays an underdog. While AMD is small and weak, it needs building up, so that Intel is forced (very much against their will) to give us more and better for less and less money. Once AMD gets big, they have to be pressured by some new underdog (maybe Intel).
We see that in the operating system field: IBM, the old monopolist, is keeping some pressure on Microsoft, the once-upon-a-time underdog, by funding development in and lending respectability to Linux.
I'll say again what I said in my orignal post: Worrying about monopoly and the evils thereof isn't a once-and-for-all sort of thing, and we can't divide the world into the evil and the good. Intel
and MS are antitrust threats because they are NOT the underdogs, and thus can smother competition with FUD and dollars. AMD and Sun can't,
yet, so we don't worry about them. Yet. [Emphasis added to the "yet"s.]
I love how when a big company like Intel/Microsoft/Sun/ make a move to potentially give themselves a better product or enhance an existing
product, it's a violation of anti-trust or they're going to blow up the world! We hackers/programmers/lovers of free speech need to unite and
destroy! Yet when an underdog/open source/free software company pulls something like this it's viewed as a triumph for the community and
we all should rejoice!
There is a reason for the double standard: AMD really _is_ different than Intel. It isn't because they're nice guys, it's because they are the underdog. Their continued success, and their very existence, is in doubt from year to year. If AMD were to buy the Alpha, that would give them some additional technology resources and another product line which is solidly positioned at the high end of the pc market where they are weakest. AMD+Alpha would be a better competitor to Intel, and we would all benefit as Intel scrambled to raise quality and production and lower costs.
Intel is already stiff, possibly insurmountable, competition to AMD. Intel+Alpha lets Intel assimilate any valuable elements of the Alpha which can overcome the NIH syndrome, and strengthens their lead in the high end, high margin pc market where AMD really needs to catch up.
Intel+Alpha = less competition in the future, AMD+Alpha = more competition in the future. This isn't because of any moral superiority of AMD, but because AMD isn't yet big enough to screw us as effectively as Intel. If AMD "wins the war" and displaces Intel, they will of course try to do the same sort of damage that Microsoft did when they "won the war" against IBM. But remember, if you're old enough, that IBM was an evil empire too, before MS cut them down to size.
Worrying about monopoly and the evils thereof isn't a once-and-for-all sort of thing, and we can't divide the world into the evil and the good. Intel and MS are antitrust threats because they are NOT the underdogs, and thus can smother competition with FUD and dollars. AMD and Sun can't, yet, so we don't worry about them. Yet.
Trust me, if you make some data available, there are hordes of statisticians and econometricians who would be thrilled to do rigorous, meaningful analysis. Some of it would be suitable for publication in scholarly journals, and some of it would be worth reading.
As other replies said, we'd need (ideally) quantities sold per album per year, price at which it sold, and other events taking place during that year (events like changes in copyright law, formation of industry associations, etc) which could affect record sales and or prices. And of course, anything else under the sun that you can find. For goodness sake, never record summaries when there is raw data to be had! I guess you know that now...
Price data would be pretty important for most sorts of econometric analysis, but it might be possible to do some imaginative stuff without it, if the quantity data was fairly good (I'm just talking through my hat... don't ask me what). Of course, there are also other approaches which don't lean on economic theory. Data miners and statisticians could hunt down correlations between sales and events and tell you whether they are statistically meaningful.
I guess that my point is that you probably have a lot more ability to do the world a favor by compiling data than by trying to analyse it. If your aim is to show that the RIAA is doing us wrong, or a bunch of fools, or something along those lines, you will really need a Ph.D in an appropriate field if you want anyone important (like a judge or a bureaucrat) to take you seriously. The years that it would take to learn to do valid analysis could probably be better spent, unless you want to start a new career.
The problem with the GPV is that it is not a true form of sharing, but a coercive one. Sharing at gunpoint isn't sharing, it's theft.
Right. There is no element of force in the GPL. If you don't want to share your work with the world, don't use GPL'd code in your work. That seems pretty simple to me. If you want MS or Apple to make monopoly profits from your efforts, then use something like the BSD license for your work. That seems pretty simple too.
Use whatever license you please for your own work. Don't whine when others don't see it your way, and use some other license for their work.
There's room in the Open Source movement for lots of different licenses.
There is lots of room in the opensource movement for different licenses, but some of us want more than just opensource. The people who don't like liberty don't have to have it. The rest of us will continue to lean towards the GPL.
When I give you a copy of free software that I've written, I lost nothing. SNIP When I write and release software, trust doesn't enter into it. It's my gift to the world. SNIP This sort of unconditional gift isn't possible with the GPL, so I use the BSD license.
Very true: that's why I won't use BSD and will use GPL, if any of the little things I'm working on grow up to get released. I wouldn't want to make an unconditional gift to the world. I want any gift I make to carry the condition that it can only be used in programs which offer the same sort of liberty to the user that I have enjoyed with programs like R and Maxima. One of the reasons that I like to use these packages is that the code is freely available to all, and that will always be true. That gives me some extra assurance that any investment of time I make in these programs will always be open, to me and everyone else.
Nobody takes anything from me, and parasites do not damage or weaken the host in any way.
This is again true, as far as it goes. The reason that we have come to different conclusions about which license to use may lie around here. Yes, if someone uses my work in a closed program, I haven't been harmed directly. But what if that's part of an "embrace and extend and extinguish" strategy?
Furthermore, there may be some serious problems with allowing someone to incorporate your work in a closed system. Could a company with deep pockets use your work in a closed program, then use some of the recent laws (think DCMA), or laws yet to be passed, to lock you out of using your own work in libre programs? Things like the DMCA are so new that none of this has been tested in court, so we can't say it's impossible. Remember, they don't have to win, they just have to sue and sue and sue... That scenario seems unlikely, but it seems that the risk must be smaller if we use the GPL.
Finally, I have no objection to someone making a profit from my work. I would have a strong objection to seeing someone making monopoly profits from work that I did. Remember, the reason behind allowing copyright and patent holders a monopoly is to encourage them to work. Letting someone else have a monopoly on my work seems a real perversion of that.
By all means use whatever license you like for your work. I'll use the GPL if I give such a gift to the world, because I think that will make the gift more valuable in the long run.
I'm another econ Ph.D. student, and of course facing the same problem. I ran into an interesting fellow a few days ago who told me that he is the editor of an on-line, peer-reviewed journal. He's a general equilibrium theorist, so I'd guess that's the slant of the journal. He said that it is intended to be a "letters" sort of journal, in which one can write up preliminary results, report small findings, and generally air stuff too small for the mainline journals. His suggestion was that we could write up preliminary results in his journal and get the benefits of refereeing, then publish a complete paper in a traditional journal. Can't find any link to it online, so I'll see if I can find and send it along to you later. Don't know if this will solve our problem, but getting some prelininary results published sounds like a good start on something...
You thought that you were joking about electronic porn getting an early start? Back before bitmapped graphics, students with too much time and not enought homework used to write Fortran 4 routines which would make suggestive plots on the Textronics vector terminals (it was a Honeywell mainframe). And before that, there was ascii art.
Here is an example of ascii porn, which probably could have been printed by Univac. This stuff is still popular; a quick search on Google turned up lots of sites which are stocked. And it downloads quickly!
The University of Alaska Geophysical Institute's Aurora page , and a link to the allsky camera at the Poker Flats rocket range, the only university owned rocket range in the world. Finally, here's a direct link to a mpg. Enjoy!
No preview on this attempt, since the post seemed to get lost during preview on the first try.
An amateur rocket builder today would be arrested as a terrorist as soon as he tried to buy the oxidiser... After making bail for this, he'd be arrested again for disturbing the peace, and launching a rocket without a permit. Finally, the neighbors would sue for violating the covenants in the subdivision. Seriously, the world is a very different place, and trying to do something like what Goddard did could land you in a lot of trouble, even if you were behaving responsibly.
A good friend of mine told me a story about when he was a teenager, between WWII and the Korean war. He was visiting a distant cousin who lived on a farm. The two teenagers spent a morning drinking beer and trying to dig a stump out of the ground. Finally, the cousin's father sent my friend into town to buy a case of dynamite at the hardware store. My friend was a stranger in town. The only question the store clerk asked was "Do you need some blasting caps with that?"
This happened less than 50 years ago. If a strange, tipsy teenager tried to buy dynamite today, what kind of reaction do you think he'd get? How long would it take to get him out of jail? The world has changed for the worse, and it has changed recently. That's the point I want to make with this little story: a lot of the bad things we take for granted today are very recent developments.
I don't think that anyone would want to go back to the world of 50 years ago, in which Jim Crow laws were accepted, but the changes between then and now weren't all for the better. Remember Billy the Kid? He's famous because he was so unusual then. He wouldn't stand out the same way today.
Slashdot Mirror
{big snip}
Well said. We've come a long way from the time when the law was applied equally to all. We're not quite down the tubes yet; a DuPont was convicted of murder a few years ago. Of course, there's always the Kennedy clan as counterexample to that; maybe I'm being too optimistic.
Lucent's stock price has been tanking for a while now, starting before the big downturn. HP has seemed a bit unclear about its direction for a while. Now this? I am afraid that genius is not the word that springs to mind to describe Fiona. Still, she does seem to be adept at leaving before the house of cards comes crashing down; she got out of Lucent in time.
I guess that the one good thing about this is that the two companies, between them, have two of everything. When the dust settles, the best engineers will have gotten disgusted and left, and the folks who couldn't scrape up a decent job elsewhere will be trying to design whatever clever disaster marketing has dreamed up most recently.
I guess I'm not optimistic right now for the future of H-Paq. Even under a rosy scenario, there should be problems and dropped balls as they try to merge the companies. Sun and IBM (and to a lesser extent SGI) should benefit a bit as H-Paq bobbles repeatedly in the server market.
Why are they trying to switch horses in midstream? I suspect that this had a lot to do with the timing:
They're both hurting, but Compaq seems to be hurting worse. I suspect that the HP exec's saw a chance to expand their empires, and the Compaq execs saw a chance to ward off a worse fate.Getting the agent's (in this case, the corporate officers) interests aligned with the principle's (in this case, the stockholders) interests is an old problem, which we obviously haven't solved yet. I'm going to guess that when we see this merger in hindsight, we'll see this as another example of management serving management instead of stockholders, at least at HP. The Compaq shareholders are being offered an out: By the way, is is normal for the aquiring company's stock to fall adnd the aquired company's stock to rise.
pryzqxgl
If what you mean is "Windows is easy for a non-technical user to use (with a skilled sysadmin handling the problems of keeping things running).", I think you're wrong. Windows is HARD, and unintuitive. So is KDE. The only difference is that most folks who've been forced to work with computers for a while have learned what buttons to push on the Windows aplications they use regularly, to do the things they do regularly. When a non-technical user gets that same "what button" knowlege on a Unix system, Unix is easy.
The secretaries in the Statistics department here have windows PCs on their desks, and use them largely to run xservers so they can connect to the Unix compute server. After training, they find it easier to get their work done using vi and plain-TeX than using Windows applications. They do use IE for web surfing, since it works much better than Netscape 4.7X. They use other windows applications too, where they find it easier than Unix (it's AIX, when I was there), but much of their time is spent using vi.
If you mean something like: "Windows makes lower demands on non-technical sysadmins", you might be right, though I'm not sure. I have had a hard time getting up to speed on managing my own machine at home, but it works far better now than when I ran windows. The learning time has been well spent, in my case.
I am firmly convinced that, given a competent sysadmin to set things up right and keep them humming, and users with the same level of experience on the system, a *nix system will be at least as easy to use to accomplish useful work as a Windows system. It may well be harder to do the things that you did on a MS system, such as automatically running viruses, but I'm talking about getting work done.
I also would like to see some specifics, but the City of Largo Adopts KDE 2.1.1 story shows that it is indeed possible to put Linux on the desktop, and the back end, of a fair-sized organization. They weren't switching from NT, but If you wanted to badly enough, I think this shows that you could. I would especially like to find out what Linux support and training are costing them.
Any company is all sweetness and light with a new customer, until you buy. At that point, you're no longer a new customer, you're one of the people who get screwed to subsidise the sweetheart deals for the prospective new customers. MS and Pitney Bowes (and Friden-Alcatel, and Postalia, and ...) can play this game in a particularly mean way, since they get you locked in with a large investment which becomes worthless if you stop leasing (or purchasing upgrades for) their product. The great thing about Linux is that RedHat, SUSE, etc can't get that kind of lockin. If this story isn't true, I bet there's one just like it that is.
(1) have something like a 486 single-board computer mounted in a flat-panel display;
(2) be able to boot from ethernet via an optional ethernet card;
(3) be able to boot from optional CD or HD.
(4) use standard wireless keyboard and mouse
(5) be reasonably cheap.
What's reasonably cheap? Since it's INSIDE a flat panel, it would be worth more to me than a standard computer plus monitor. It would FIT! I could wall mount one in the living room to control music, etc, and have a way to check email (if I sat quite nearby...).
Why a 486? cheap, low-power so no fan, and quiet.
I think that if it were priced in the $400 to $500 range for the panel with one option (ethernet or HD) and keyboard, it would sell quite a few units.
Doesn't FWEB already do this? In arbitrary languages?
A static discharge could fry a sensitive control chip, which might fail short, and cause another chip, "downstream" of it, to overheat and bubble its plastic casing. I have seem similar problems on the old Epson dot-matrix printers, where a $45 control chip would periodically fail, causing the printhead to fail, and usually taking some of the power transistors which drove it along. Fortunately, the $60 (?it's been a long time) printhead and the $3 transistors would fail so quickly that they would save the $0.25 fuses.
The point? Yes, static could have caused the failure. How to prevent that? Ground things properly. Make sure that the case of each machine is grounded ("earthed" if you are in Britain), but that the cables connecting peripherals to computer have the ground wire connected at one end only (that's case ground, not signal ground). This prevents ground loops, which can also melt chips in houses with wiring problems.
Reading further down that page, we can see how Palm turned an upset customer into an extremely upset customer. He tells us that he got the run-around, that the story kept changing, and that Palm made it quite clear that they didn't care about keeping a customer happy; it wasn't their fault, and he couldn't prove it. On this page, he concludes his story. He's bitter but resigned. I have to wonder, now, whether I want to spend hundreds of dollars to buy something from a company whose service and products leave one bitter and resigned, and hundreds of dollars poorer. HP, on the other hand, has promised him a check for $100, to help defray the cost of a new motherboard. I wonder which company will get better word-of-mouth out of this epsiode?
There is a common misconception in the old Soviet Union: we'll have a free market, we just won't let anyone have property rights, because that's not good socialism. Of course, you can't have a market without property rights.
The problem with the suggestion that
But one could license the rights to a corp, you respond. Fine, how about exclusive rights to use and sub-license, irrevocable, for the term of the patent? How is that different from an outright sale? It seems to me that this is really all-or-nothing: either you are free to dispose of your invention as you see fit (assuming that we are going to assign property rights at all) and it has value, or you aren't, and it doesn't.
This would work fine for folks who could innovate on their own, but how about engineers and geneticists who need multimillion dollar facilities? How could a corp justify paying out tens of millions for someone to develop a patentable invention, which they could then walk off with? Again, contractual ties which bind the rights-holder to the corp are no different than outright assignment to the corp.You point out that
I believe that there is no natural right to intellectual property. That's exactly opposite to the situation with physical property, where there certainly is such a natural right. The difference, of course, is that physical property doesn't copy well: if I eat your hamburger, you can't. If I use your idea, you can too. All you have lost is the monopoly.
This was obviously to work in the public interest, by encouraging productive work and its public disclosure. Enriching inventors is plainly not the aim. Nor does it suggest any pre-existing natural right.For all of human history, we have built on the intellectual shoulders of those who came before. It is right and natural that we should share ideas, and we are all better off when that happens. In order to encourage that, the US constitution (Article 1, Section 8)gives Congress permission
He's been trying to get broadband into his middle-of-downtown home forever, and Ricochet was the first thing to come through for him, so maybe tht was just wishfull thinking.
It really is a pity that the maze of regulations of phone and airwaves have strangled competition and prevented good (actually, any) broadband service from being extended to most of the US. The lesson here is that we can't afford to regulate things; regulation may seem to fix a current problem, but it will cause MUCH worse problems down the road, and be politically impossible to remove when it has proven itself disasterously bad (think California electricity).
There has been a LOT of well-informed criticism of the Numerical Recepies books. It seems to center around the idea that the recipes don't scale well, and are more useful as teaching tools than for serious scientific work. There is a wonderful page at one of the big government labs which explains in detail, along with some alternate sources of examples. If I can find the link, I'll post it as a reply to this. I like Numerical Analysis for Statisticians, by Lange. It's aimed right at my field, and it comes highly recommended by an eminent numerical analyst and theoretician.
You might want to check out this link, which I stumbled across while trying to find that page about (against, really) Numerical Recipes. Cannonical Tomes, they call themselves. Looks good.
Except for Concrete Math, all of these are available on the web free of charge, and all of them are of lasting value, and well worth the cost.
When are we going to be able to get one of these things in a beige case for a sane price? That box will run $2000 and up. I just put together a 1GHz Athlon for about $800. Notice too that there are only two ram slots (see here) and only 1Gig of ram max. Pretty weak. I guess cool sells better than performance at a sensible price; that's why the Apple Cube sold so many millions.
I would really like to be able to put together a good, non-intel machine for doing simulations, but this doesn't seem to be it. I DO think that these things would sell like hotcakes, if they didn't cost much more than pc's, say, not more than a 10% premium for the motherboard, and all else straight pc hardware. Unfortunately, these guys seem to be trying to compete with Apple on their home turf, without the Apple OS. It worked so well for Franklin (remember the Apple][ clones?), and BEos, I'm sure it will work equally well for these guys. I wish them luck, but I'm not holding my breath.
Should be plenty of UV to generate ozone, right down to the surface, I guess. And low partial pressure might mean that tri-atomic oxygen is less likely to form? Anyway, this was apparently inside the lander, so who knows what it was exposed to. If you're right, it's another good story down the tubes. Darn.
For when this gets slashdotted, the gist of the story is that the petri dishes shows signs of activity for nine weeks, far too long to be explained by the chemical story. The bacteria's activity was cycling with the temperature, and we know today but didn't know then that that sort of cycle points to cellular activity (so say the reporters at the EurekaAlert!).
I guess the only quibble left to be hashed out is: "Could this be earth bacteria which hitched a ride and survived the trip?" I seem to recall that NASA tried to prevent that from happening, but I was only 15 that year, and easily distracted.
One other thing springs to mind after reading this: DOCUMENT YOUR CODE! The article says:
If they had documented their work properly, someone could have figured out how to read that tape, even after they kicked the bucket.How about a link to that $4.5/lb coffee? I've been getting the decent stuff here in Lafayette for about twice that at the grocery store, so I'm really interested.
Nels
I dount that the situation has changed remarkably since then. One thing that I'm sure hasn't changed is that there is no shortage of really solid data to support both sides: that the temperature really has risen, and that it really hasn't. There are thousands of temperature time series, some direct and some inferred, some are climbing, some are falling, and most aren't changing significantly after controlling for all the relevant sources of variance.
Globally it is likely that the 1990s was the warmest decade and 1998 the warmest year recorded (since 1861). Certainly this seems to be the case in the northern hemisphere not simply since 1861 but for the last ten centuries.
Yep, I hope so. We are still coming out of a little ice age, returning to the higher temperatures which were the norm when the Vikings grew grapes in Newfoundland. The scary thought is that we might find out, in 100 years, that the temperatures are really going down.
You point out that the EPA and UN-funded scientists have found evidence of global warming. Notice where their funding comes from. If Exxon was paying the bill, these same guys would no doubt have found the opposite. Government and industry researchers don't get tenure.
There are literally thousands of responsible scientists who work in these fields who believe that any sort of costly action to "avert global warming" is a bad, irresponsible idea. Some of them are Exxon employees, but certainly not all. Here and here (loosely related) are a couple of random links which might help make the point that it isn't a settled issue in the minds of people who understand it and aren't funded by the Government or Greenpeace (HINT: both these groups find it easier to get money from the public if they can claim that the sky is falling.)
In short, ad homenim arguments are less productive than usual here, since we see the usual suspects on each side of the issue. The energy companies are pushing their issue, Greenpeace is pushing theirs, and so on.
We need to consider the consequences of being wrong. Seeing the global temperature rise by 1 to 2 degrees C is probably going to make the world a better place to live in the long run. That's the maximum likelihood prediction from most of the models that folks on either side take seriously. The doomsday 5+degree C senarios have very low probabilities under most models.
Consider the cost of "taking action": Millions of people around the world, most of them already desperately poor, will die earlier and more miserably if we do anything to limit energy use. The only thing I can think of to reduce greenhouse gasses without causing disaster is replacing coal with nuclear power. That isn't going to happen anytime soon, unfortunately, because of the same agenda that is driving the "its getting hotter" side of the issue.
Although OpenLinux Workstation contains the Linux kernel and a variety of open source software, there are a wide variety of licenses, each with different distribution restrictions Additionally, Caldera includes some of its own proprietary software as well as other Copyrighted material." (Quoted from this on LinuxToday)
So what's it all mean? This shows pretty conclusively that you can indeed build a proprietary product on top of Linux. If they've done it right, they'll show that you can do it without getting tripped up the the GPL. Nyah nyah MS. Whether they can sell it is another question. I wish them luck.
I think that MS has pretty well made a fool of its collective self with the GPL=cancer nonsense. This kind of thing can only help point up the essential absurdity of that position.
We see that in the operating system field: IBM, the old monopolist, is keeping some pressure on Microsoft, the once-upon-a-time underdog, by funding development in and lending respectability to Linux.
I'll say again what I said in my orignal post: Worrying about monopoly and the evils thereof isn't a once-and-for-all sort of thing, and we can't divide the world into the evil and the good. Intel and MS are antitrust threats because they are NOT the underdogs, and thus can smother competition with FUD and dollars. AMD and Sun can't, yet, so we don't worry about them. Yet. [Emphasis added to the "yet"s.]
There is a reason for the double standard: AMD really _is_ different than Intel. It isn't because they're nice guys, it's because they are the underdog. Their continued success, and their very existence, is in doubt from year to year. If AMD were to buy the Alpha, that would give them some additional technology resources and another product line which is solidly positioned at the high end of the pc market where they are weakest. AMD+Alpha would be a better competitor to Intel, and we would all benefit as Intel scrambled to raise quality and production and lower costs.
Intel is already stiff, possibly insurmountable, competition to AMD. Intel+Alpha lets Intel assimilate any valuable elements of the Alpha which can overcome the NIH syndrome, and strengthens their lead in the high end, high margin pc market where AMD really needs to catch up.
Intel+Alpha = less competition in the future, AMD+Alpha = more competition in the future. This isn't because of any moral superiority of AMD, but because AMD isn't yet big enough to screw us as effectively as Intel. If AMD "wins the war" and displaces Intel, they will of course try to do the same sort of damage that Microsoft did when they "won the war" against IBM. But remember, if you're old enough, that IBM was an evil empire too, before MS cut them down to size.
Worrying about monopoly and the evils thereof isn't a once-and-for-all sort of thing, and we can't divide the world into the evil and the good. Intel and MS are antitrust threats because they are NOT the underdogs, and thus can smother competition with FUD and dollars. AMD and Sun can't, yet, so we don't worry about them. Yet.
Trust me, if you make some data available, there are hordes of statisticians and econometricians who would be thrilled to do rigorous, meaningful analysis. Some of it would be suitable for publication in scholarly journals, and some of it would be worth reading.
As other replies said, we'd need (ideally) quantities sold per album per year, price at which it sold, and other events taking place during that year (events like changes in copyright law, formation of industry associations, etc) which could affect record sales and or prices. And of course, anything else under the sun that you can find. For goodness sake, never record summaries when there is raw data to be had! I guess you know that now...
Price data would be pretty important for most sorts of econometric analysis, but it might be possible to do some imaginative stuff without it, if the quantity data was fairly good (I'm just talking through my hat... don't ask me what). Of course, there are also other approaches which don't lean on economic theory. Data miners and statisticians could hunt down correlations between sales and events and tell you whether they are statistically meaningful.
I guess that my point is that you probably have a lot more ability to do the world a favor by compiling data than by trying to analyse it. If your aim is to show that the RIAA is doing us wrong, or a bunch of fools, or something along those lines, you will really need a Ph.D in an appropriate field if you want anyone important (like a judge or a bureaucrat) to take you seriously. The years that it would take to learn to do valid analysis could probably be better spent, unless you want to start a new career.
Right. There is no element of force in the GPL. If you don't want to share your work with the world, don't use GPL'd code in your work. That seems pretty simple to me.
If you want MS or Apple to make monopoly profits from your efforts, then use something like the BSD license for your work. That seems pretty simple too.
Use whatever license you please for your own work. Don't whine when others don't see it your way, and use some other license for their work.
There's room in the Open Source movement for lots of different licenses.
There is lots of room in the opensource movement for different licenses, but some of us want more than just opensource. The people who don't like liberty don't have to have it. The rest of us will continue to lean towards the GPL.
Very true: that's why I won't use BSD and will use GPL, if any of the little things I'm working on grow up to get released. I wouldn't want to make an unconditional gift to the world. I want any gift I make to carry the condition that it can only be used in programs which offer the same sort of liberty to the user that I have enjoyed with programs like R and Maxima.
One of the reasons that I like to use these packages is that the code is freely available to all, and that will always be true. That gives me some extra assurance that any investment of time I make in these programs will always be open, to me and everyone else.
Nobody takes anything from me, and parasites do not damage or weaken the host in any way.
This is again true, as far as it goes. The reason that we have come to different conclusions about which license to use may lie around here. Yes, if someone uses my work in a closed program, I haven't been harmed directly. But what if that's part of an "embrace and extend and extinguish" strategy?
Furthermore, there may be some serious problems with allowing someone to incorporate your work in a closed system. Could a company with deep pockets use your work in a closed program, then use some of the recent laws (think DCMA), or laws yet to be passed, to lock you out of using your own work in libre programs? Things like the DMCA are so new that none of this has been tested in court, so we can't say it's impossible. Remember, they don't have to win, they just have to sue and sue and sue... That scenario seems unlikely, but it seems that the risk must be smaller if we use the GPL.
Finally, I have no objection to someone making a profit from my work. I would have a strong objection to seeing someone making monopoly profits from work that I did. Remember, the reason behind allowing copyright and patent holders a monopoly is to encourage them to work. Letting someone else have a monopoly on my work seems a real perversion of that.
By all means use whatever license you like for your work. I'll use the GPL if I give such a gift to the world, because I think that will make the gift more valuable in the long run.
I'm another econ Ph.D. student, and of course facing the same problem. I ran into an interesting fellow a few days ago who told me that he is the editor of an on-line, peer-reviewed journal. He's a general equilibrium theorist, so I'd guess that's the slant of the journal. He said that it is intended to be a "letters" sort of journal, in which one can write up preliminary results, report small findings, and generally air stuff too small for the mainline journals. His suggestion was that we could write up preliminary results in his journal and get the benefits of refereeing, then publish a complete paper in a traditional journal. Can't find any link to it online, so I'll see if I can find and send it along to you later. Don't know if this will solve our problem, but getting some prelininary results published sounds like a good start on something...
Here is an example of ascii porn, which probably could have been printed by Univac. This stuff is still popular; a quick search on Google turned up lots of sites which are stocked. And it downloads quickly!
No preview on this attempt, since the post seemed to get lost during preview on the first try.
A good friend of mine told me a story about when he was a teenager, between WWII and the Korean war. He was visiting a distant cousin who lived on a farm. The two teenagers spent a morning drinking beer and trying to dig a stump out of the ground. Finally, the cousin's father sent my friend into town to buy a case of dynamite at the hardware store. My friend was a stranger in town. The only question the store clerk asked was "Do you need some blasting caps with that?"
This happened less than 50 years ago. If a strange, tipsy teenager tried to buy dynamite today, what kind of reaction do you think he'd get? How long would it take to get him out of jail? The world has changed for the worse, and it has changed recently. That's the point I want to make with this little story: a lot of the bad things we take for granted today are very recent developments.
I don't think that anyone would want to go back to the world of 50 years ago, in which Jim Crow laws were accepted, but the changes between then and now weren't all for the better. Remember Billy the Kid? He's famous because he was so unusual then. He wouldn't stand out the same way today.