Let's see, a few quick word substitutions, and the article read like this:
The recent invention of the mammal is trivial compared to other recent innovations, such as tricerotops, stegasaurus, and of course, tyranosaurus rex...
*sigh*
Ever notice that historians loath to talk about the present or recent history? There's a reason for that...
The problem is that inventions are almost never created fully realized. Usually invididual parts with limited utility are created seperately; their impact isn't realized until someone later puts them together in just the right way to make a transforming invention. And of course, there are social or business issues that are independent of the technology. I'm thinking here of the car, which was a toy for the rich until Ford found a way to sell them to the mass public.
It's a little soon to be writing the obituary of this Internet.
How did Mozart and Beethoven survive? Afterall, they weren't paid for CD sales either.
In their chatroom appearance recently, Metallica said that one of their goals was to educate fans. [The chat was a lame PR pitty-party which avoided any clued-in questions from the other participants.] More likely, they're receiving a crash course in techology. So I'm hardly surprised that they blew off Slashdot.
Perhaps they're starting to realize that their "Let's fight for Good(tm) by suing pirates" crusade is hopelessly misdirected. Their industry is changing with technology--viewing these technological shifts as a simple piracy issue is hopelessly misguided.
The current model only works because CDs are expensive to produce and distribute. But as music becomes trivially cheap to exchange, is that the end of professional music? Will the artists starve?
Hardly. Painful though it is to use the names Mozart and Metallica in the same post, an even cursory look at history shows that artists have flourished for a very long time without expensive, monopolistic distribution schemes and lawsuit bullying.
Musicians of the future will be supported in the same way Mozart and Beethoven were:
Patronage. In the modern case, it may be corporate or governmental support, perhaps like auto-racing teams, in echange for logo or ad messages. Or think of it like an investment: companies put money into talent in the hope their tours will be profitable. (Isn't this what the record companies do now?)
Comissioned works. Poets and sculptors are often hired to create works for the public. Increasingly, popular bands write ad jingles, for instance. It's easy to imagine a CD sponsored by a company.
Performances. Of course, popular acts already make a good portion of their money from tours.
The new technology kills the costs that necessitated the big companies: 1) access to fans via printing and advertising, and 2) manufacture and distribution of the music. Both are now effectively costless.
Smart bands will figure out that CDs aren't just art, they're also ads for their band. They'll get their word out as far as possible with the Napsters and Gnutellas, then reap the rewards of name recognition and touring fees.
How can MS make any claims about this information as a trade secret? They released it in a completely insecure format.
If I install a fancy alarm on my front door, but leave the back door wide open, can I sue you for "bypassing" my security when you walk in the back?
In this case, they released the spec in a common compression format that is easily opened in several ways. If you open the self-extracting archive, you see the EULA. But if you open it with any of dozens of common compression programs, you can read the document without ever seeing the EULA. How can they claim that this is a secret when it's released without any reasonable security?
To think about the question, you might want to consider a few issues:
1. Language is AI complete.
There's a common naive assumption that you can analyze a text in isolation and figure out what it means based on the definitions of words and the structures of language. But that forgets about the tremendous amount of knowledge that you bring to the text before you read it.
Forget Littleton, the real problem is 1984.
Think about what you have to know to understand that sentence. It's not just a simple matter of encoding more definitions, either.
The refrigerator slipped and he jerked his foot too late.
You know what happened, but only if you know something about gravity and where feet go, which isn't mentioned anywhere in the sentence... In fact, it's estimated that 3 year olds know some 50,000 facts about the way the world works physically. Naturally, language is designed to for such an environment. Without the complete understanding of intelligence as practiced by people, it's unlikely that you'll have much success writing code to understand human language.
2. There are different kinds of knowledge.
When you talk about knowledge, you often mean "facts." But there are other kinds of knowledge not so easily described. Playing music, for example, involves kinds of knowledge that skilled artists may not be able to describe, although it's obvious that they have it.
3. There are different kinds of understanding.
When you ask about the state of language understanding, realize that there are different kinds of understanding. Answering questions about characters in a story may be a very different task from deciding the grade level of the writer, for example. You could probably sort advertisements in any language, so your understanding is based on other cues.
4. Languages depend on domain.
It's also important to realize that progress will probably be made in limited domains. Typically, email uses only a few thousand words (~22,000 in my research) and covers a small range of topics. Success in an email sorting task that recognizes and discards spam can be said to represent some kind of understanding, though its considerably more limited than a human's reading and understanding of the text.
So instead of horse-racing winners and losers, let's think about what really changes.
Tomorrow, MS will still control 95% of the desktop market.
Legal machinations are entertaining for us propeller-heads, but they don't put code in our editors or binaries on our users' desktops.
Even the worst remedies being talked about, such as breaking MS into baby-Bills, don't change any fundamentals. Each of the babies will still have real products on real desktops in obscene amounts compared to any competitor. Sure, the stock will be beat around, but unless you're an MS stockholder, it doesn't affect you.
What might effect you is if IT decision makers flee MS. But remember, others are invested in MS products. They're not about to toss hundreds of millions of their dollars in licenses, support, staff, and training to switch to companies whose only claims are fewer legal problems. The court loss won't make anyone switch.
Copycat lawsuits? So what? They don't write code. They don't install software.
MS/DOJ: Entertaining. But I've yet to hear of a measurable effect or an outcome that actually changes the industry.
Slashdot Mirror
The recent invention of the mammal is trivial compared to other recent innovations, such as tricerotops, stegasaurus, and of course, tyranosaurus rex...
*sigh*
Ever notice that historians loath to talk about the present or recent history? There's a reason for that...
The problem is that inventions are almost never created fully realized. Usually invididual parts with limited utility are created seperately; their impact isn't realized until someone later puts them together in just the right way to make a transforming invention. And of course, there are social or business issues that are independent of the technology. I'm thinking here of the car, which was a toy for the rich until Ford found a way to sell them to the mass public.
It's a little soon to be writing the obituary of this Internet.
In their chatroom appearance recently, Metallica said that one of their goals was to educate fans. [The chat was a lame PR pitty-party which avoided any clued-in questions from the other participants.] More likely, they're receiving a crash course in techology. So I'm hardly surprised that they blew off Slashdot.
Perhaps they're starting to realize that their "Let's fight for Good(tm) by suing pirates" crusade is hopelessly misdirected. Their industry is changing with technology--viewing these technological shifts as a simple piracy issue is hopelessly misguided.
The current model only works because CDs are expensive to produce and distribute. But as music becomes trivially cheap to exchange, is that the end of professional music? Will the artists starve?
Hardly. Painful though it is to use the names Mozart and Metallica in the same post, an even cursory look at history shows that artists have flourished for a very long time without expensive, monopolistic distribution schemes and lawsuit bullying.
Musicians of the future will be supported in the same way Mozart and Beethoven were:
Patronage. In the modern case, it may be corporate or governmental support, perhaps like auto-racing teams, in echange for logo or ad messages. Or think of it like an investment: companies put money into talent in the hope their tours will be profitable. (Isn't this what the record companies do now?)
Comissioned works. Poets and sculptors are often hired to create works for the public. Increasingly, popular bands write ad jingles, for instance. It's easy to imagine a CD sponsored by a company.
Performances. Of course, popular acts already make a good portion of their money from tours.
The new technology kills the costs that necessitated the big companies: 1) access to fans via printing and advertising, and 2) manufacture and distribution of the music. Both are now effectively costless.
Smart bands will figure out that CDs aren't just art, they're also ads for their band. They'll get their word out as far as possible with the Napsters and Gnutellas, then reap the rewards of name recognition and touring fees.
If I install a fancy alarm on my front door, but leave the back door wide open, can I sue you for "bypassing" my security when you walk in the back?
In this case, they released the spec in a common compression format that is easily opened in several ways. If you open the self-extracting archive, you see the EULA. But if you open it with any of dozens of common compression programs, you can read the document without ever seeing the EULA. How can they claim that this is a secret when it's released without any reasonable security?
1. Language is AI complete.
There's a common naive assumption that you can analyze a text in isolation and figure out what it means based on the definitions of words and the structures of language. But that forgets about the tremendous amount of knowledge that you bring to the text before you read it.
Forget Littleton, the real problem is 1984.
Think about what you have to know to understand that sentence. It's not just a simple matter of encoding more definitions, either.
The refrigerator slipped and he jerked his foot too late.
You know what happened, but only if you know something about gravity and where feet go, which isn't mentioned anywhere in the sentence... In fact, it's estimated that 3 year olds know some 50,000 facts about the way the world works physically. Naturally, language is designed to for such an environment. Without the complete understanding of intelligence as practiced by people, it's unlikely that you'll have much success writing code to understand human language.
2. There are different kinds of knowledge.
When you talk about knowledge, you often mean "facts." But there are other kinds of knowledge not so easily described. Playing music, for example, involves kinds of knowledge that skilled artists may not be able to describe, although it's obvious that they have it.
3. There are different kinds of understanding.
When you ask about the state of language understanding, realize that there are different kinds of understanding. Answering questions about characters in a story may be a very different task from deciding the grade level of the writer, for example. You could probably sort advertisements in any language, so your understanding is based on other cues.
4. Languages depend on domain.
It's also important to realize that progress will probably be made in limited domains. Typically, email uses only a few thousand words (~22,000 in my research) and covers a small range of topics. Success in an email sorting task that recognizes and discards spam can be said to represent some kind of understanding, though its considerably more limited than a human's reading and understanding of the text.
Tomorrow, MS will still control 95% of the desktop market.
Legal machinations are entertaining for us propeller-heads, but they don't put code in our editors or binaries on our users' desktops.
Even the worst remedies being talked about, such as breaking MS into baby-Bills, don't change any fundamentals. Each of the babies will still have real products on real desktops in obscene amounts compared to any competitor. Sure, the stock will be beat around, but unless you're an MS stockholder, it doesn't affect you.
What might effect you is if IT decision makers flee MS. But remember, others are invested in MS products. They're not about to toss hundreds of millions of their dollars in licenses, support, staff, and training to switch to companies whose only claims are fewer legal problems. The court loss won't make anyone switch.
Copycat lawsuits? So what? They don't write code. They don't install software.
MS/DOJ: Entertaining. But I've yet to hear of a measurable effect or an outcome that actually changes the industry.