What you say is true for some large journal publishers, but certainly not for all. Remember that while many major journals are for-profit and have the interests you describe, many other journals (possibly more) are actually published by non-profit academic societies who have more interest in disseminating their information than in profit (although many of them still have serious issues with the control of their content, of course).
In fact, as it happens, LOCKSS is being worked on in association with HighWire Press at Stanford (disclosure: also my employer:), which publishes the online versions of nearly 200 major scientific journals and has a _very_ good relationship with a large number of publishers. They also list the Journal of Biological Chemistry and Science Online as "partners".
I wouldn't be so quick to dismiss the interest that the non-profit academic societies have in preserving this information.
If it were really too personal, then it shouldn't have been posted to a public forum like Slashdot. Pure and simple.
Anyone who wants to can go back to the original Hellmouth articles; they're still featured in a Slashbox. All the comments are there to be read. Archiving is part of Slashdot, and posters are not given a choice on whether or not their posts are archived.
Anything that has been said in a public forum is fair game to be quoted -- many cases of that are covered by "fair use." The only question is whether the book-producers had the right to quote without attributing the quotations.
I think that's perfectly reasonable in this case. Anyone who's really interested can go back to the original articles and find the comments there anyway.
As Jon said, requests not to reproduce the comments were honored. So in future, if you don't want what you say in a public forum to be reproduced for charity or for anything else, then ask for it not to be.
There is a project that has started recently here at Stanford to investigate the possibility of using distributed web caches as a means of preserving information on the Web. The project is called "LOCKSS" (Lots Of Copies Keep Stuff Safe), and more information can be found at lockss.stanford.edu.
This project definitely does not address all the issues with digital-document preservation; it definitely does _not_ solve the document-format problem. Its goal is to make digital publishing "immutable" so that publishers cannot modify or withdraw their work after it is published.
Disclaimer: I work for one of the groups which is participating with the LOCKSS project, but I'm not working directly with it.
I read the San Jose Mercury News on paper nearly every morning. I find it pretty decent in most respects, and given that I don't pay that much attention to the news in the late evening, it often _does_ report things I don't know, or at least in more depth than I previously knew.
But of course, the Merc is available completely online, including the comics. But it takes a lot longer to download & skim the articles online; with the paper, I can skim the front page, skim the comics (which take _forever_ to download online), skim the sports section, etc.
It's just a matter of speed, really. I certainly check online news sources through the day, but it's much easier to eat breakfast with a newspaper at my side than with my laptop.
Stanford University has also been working on a RedHat-based distro -- in fact, it's basically RedHat plus three packages: one to access the campus Kerberos authentication infrastructure, one to access the campus AFS filesystem, and one to plug the security holes that come in RH6 by default.
So it basically comes down to a local mirror of the OS plus software to access campus systems. I think it's a wonderful idea as long as it doesn't stray too far from the primary distro.
Last I checked, most college students are over the age of 18, which makes them adults for all purposes other than drinking alcohol. Are there any tenant-privacy laws that would prevent this sort of thing from happening? Seems to me that for housing purposes, at least, the students are simply renting rooms from the university (which is owned by the state), so the relationship is tenant-landlord.
So the legality of this would depend on whether it's legal for landlords to prohibit these kinds of activities through a lease. Which, unfortunately, I believe it is. Still pretty damn lame, though.
On the bright side, perhaps this will wake up Arizona college students and get them to vote in large numbers...:)
In theory, this kinda makes sense -- the academic version costs less than half of what the standard version does (like $200 instead of $500 or thereabouts). But it's still kinda silly, since the workaround is so obvious...
Well, in theory, the whole purpose of wiring dorms with high-bandwidth connectivity is to promote _academic_ use, not for commercial/business purposes. At Stanford, for instance, students pay like $80 for a _year_ of 10/100BaseT connectivity to the campus backbone. That's subsidized for academic reasons, not so students can share MP3s. So the situation is even a little different from that with @Home.
But the fact is, you give high bandwidth to a bunch of people who generally don't have a lot of money (as most students don't), you're going to see a lot of piracy: software, games, music, videos, whatever.
Interestingly, a student I know told me just last night that apparently the academic version of Office 2000 sends a serial number to Microsoft over the net, and if you disconnect from the net on installation, it requires you to call an 800 number before it lets you install the software. This is apparently not true of the non-academic version. This is obviously to prevent an entire dorm from just copying one copy of the academic version of O2K.
Question is, would the science community really like being "moderated" in this way, even if it is by their own selves?
Actually, this is basically how the scientific publication process works now. Scientists submit papers to journals, then those articles are reviewed by other scientists ("peer review"), and the papers are either rejected (usually with comments on what it would take to get the paper accepted) or accepted, in which case they get posted. The big problem is that this process takes way too long, which is one of the reasons why preprint archives like arXiv.org (the premier online physics archive, formerly xxx.lanl.gov) have become popular.
In any case, I know a lot of journals (at least in the biological sciences, which is where my familiarity is) are working on ways to speed up the review and publication process. Some interesting stuff is happening very soon.
Disclaimer/info: I work for an organization that does online publishing for biological journals: see HighWire Press for more info...
Actually, they probably didn't adopt Linux for the kernel because MacOS X is basically NeXTStep 5.0.
NeXTStep, for those of you who haven't been around that long, was the Mach/BSD-based OS that Jobs' previous company, NeXT, created in the late 80's. NeXTStep was way, way ahead of its time, but the developers made some choices which ended up being different from what the rest of the world did -- using Objective-C instead of C++ was the biggest one. Of course, the _incredible_ GUI development libraries and utilities of NeXTStep were later retooled into "OpenStep", and there is now at least one free-software project to reimplement it (GNUStep).
I have no doubt that the "advanced OO development environment" called "Cocoa" is actually just another retooling of the NeXTStep libraries/utilities. Which is fine, 'cuz they really are good.
Huh -- I've returned stuff to Fry's plenty of times and the only "hoop" I've had to jump through was to wait in a freakishly long line.
I buy stuff there all the time, even consumer electronics, phones, whatever. But I definitely advise people not to go there if they're not extremely clear on what they're looking for -- they treat their employees like crap, so expecting one to be clueful is likely to cause disappointment.
Mine arrived via UPS just this morning, just in time for my trip down to LA this weekend.
The current program is a beta: you pay $299, you get the modem and free service through the end of March (and now, according to this web page, through the end of April -- cool!), and a 15% discount on their normal service.
I've never actually used a Palm VII, but as far as I can tell this really does work like one, except with unlimited service for the next couple of months. Certainly I've downloaded a bunch of web clipping apps from palm.net (the service provider for the PVII) and they mostly work. OmniSky doesn't know yet how much the permanent fees will be (they said a max of $50/month).
I honestly don't know if I'm going to keep this. It's really cool, but so was the Ricochet I had a couple of years ago, until I realized that I hadn't used it in four months and I was paying $40/month for the service. Fortunately OmniSky is also offering a full refund within 30 days, and a $199 refund within 60 days. Or, I suppose, I could just sell it in March or something.
Well, of course, 3Com has announced that they're spinning off Palm as a separate subsidiary, complete with its own IPO next year sometime. So that may affect the dynamic a bit.
But to get at the meat of this post: Palm seems to be starting to move more in the direction of the business market (see also this article), while Handspring definitely seems to be targetting the home/personal user market with the possibility of MP3/GPS/other interesting Springboard modules.
I think there's plenty of room for different sorts of palmtop devices running PalmOS, and in the future probably some version(s) of Linux, perhaps even PalmOS running on the Linux kernel, as this interview seems to indicate is possible (it says that the PalmOS is designed to run on top of different kernels, specifically in this case the Symbian EPOC32 kernel in the context of the new agreement with Nokia).
Well, this article from Wired talks about Palm's new synchronization cradle and server software which will allow you to plug a cradle directly into an Ethernet network and sync remotely. It's designed for businesses who want to issue Palms to their employees to synchronize with corporate databases/calendar systems/email systems/etc.
But that probably isn't the question you're asking. What you have to keep in mind is that the Palm was really designed as a desktop adjunct, _not_ as a self-sustaining portable computer. The reason is that most people who use Palms have desktop PCs, and don't need a self-sustaining palmtop.
This is distinct from the story of the Newton, which was designed to be a self-contained, self-sustaining "palmtop" computer. This meant that the Newton developers had to worry about natively supporting different printer drivers, network protocols, etc. from day one, which dramatically increased the complexity of the system. With Palm, you originally had nothing but a serial interface (although they've since added TCP/IP over serial), and you didn't have to worry about printing or other data transfer because that all takes place on the PC. This makes for a very simple OS and UI.
Under the 1st amendment, one is free to say anything one wants. That doesn't mean I have to listen to you.
I generally browse Slashdot at +2, with highly-moderated posts sorted at the top. I find that when I bother to look below +2, I find much less worth reading. Sure, there's the occasional overlooked post that really should be moderated up, but generally, especially with a day-old discussion, the good stuff has been noticed.
One of the wonderful things about/. is that the "censorship" really tends to be more on style than on opinions. I see plenty of posts which express alternate opinions than the "community norm" moderated up -- but those posts tend to be well-written and polite. The post to which I am replying ("Another nail in the coffin of free speech") is a perfect example of this.
If you want to be listened to, then express your opinions politely and with respect for your opponents as well as for your friends. If you want to be an asshole, don't expect to be listened to. This goes for all of life, not just/.
I'll have to agree with what's being said elsewhere. We've been using Java for two years to run some fairly high-use sites (http://highwire.stanford.edu/ and all the sites linked from there), and although it's not perfect, it has given us very acceptable performance even when under heavy load.
Our system is currently using only Apache with mod_jserv (running on Solaris 2.6); we will probably be moving some of the code to an application server environment within the next year.
The most important thing for getting good Java performance is to use the right VM. We were using the Javasoft reference VM when we first started our switchover, and the performance was terrible. When we switched to the tuned Solaris production VM, everything magically started working acceptably. I expect we'll get another speed boost when we upgrade to HotSpot sometime soon.
Make sure that your VM has a JIT. If you're on Linux, I'd recommend looking at the new IBM JDK; I don't believe the standard Blackdown JVM has a JIT.
This is not true. ESR misses a very important and commonly stated reason: a company may believe that exclusive access to a piece of proprietary software provides the company with a competitive advantage.
...
It is odd that ESR missed this point, because I think it is the fundamental reason behind the difference between the GPL and BSD-style licenses. RMS realized that there is a large incentive for companies to "take software proprietary", and went to great lengths to prevent it in the GPL. If "taking software proprietary" were wholly irrational, there would be little reason for going out of one's way to prevent it.
I don't think this is quite accurate. I recall that one of the big issues RMS had as the Netscape Public License was being discussed was that its initial draft required all changes to be submitted back to Netscape; RMS argued that an essential part of software freedom was the freedom not to distribute one's own private changes. So in your example, the company would be under no obligation to publish their changes outside their own organization; however, they couldn't then distribute their code to anyone outside their organization without triggering the GPL provisions.
What RMS wants to prevent (and the GPL is therefore designed to prevent) is not an organization taking GPL'd code and making it internal and secret, but having them then go out and resell the software without providing their new product under the GPL as well.
My problem with this is that the odds that most commercial software houses would choose to redistribute GPL software because a GPL library already exists is MUCH lower than the odds that they'd simply reimplement the functionality themselves, causing more proprietary differences between code that really should be doing the same thing. RMS cited a couple of counterexamples in his paper on why the LGPL was worse than the GPL (http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/why-not-lgpl.html), but frankly, I just don't buy it.
So basically, RMS argues that because it is easy to copy software, and because it is nice to be able to modify it on occasion and fix bugs, etc., that everybody has a _moral obligation_ to produce free software.
That's what I don't buy. ESR argues that open source software is good because it enables a development model which produces high-quality, extensible, flexible software. (The business models are essentially justifications of these basic premises.)
Frankly, if Microsoft software were high-quality, if developing using VB and COM and ASP were a dream, if NT were scalable for enterprise-level tasks, I wouldn't care that it wasn't free software.
But none of these are true, and the evidence shows that open-source/free software is better. I choose the tools that will let me do what I want to do as quickly and efficiently as possible. I find the moral argument of "it's easy to do, so we should have the right to do it!" to be silly.
Disclaimer/information point: I work for an organization which publishes over 120 biomedical journals on the Web (Highwire Press, http://highwire.stanford.edu/ )
The archive issue is a real one. One of the biggest problems in scientific publishing right now (and the reason that Highwire was started here at Stanford) is that it's getting too damn expensive for libraries to subscribe to all these journals -- not just the subscription costs, but also the storage costs, etc. So the solution of simply continuing to publish paper journals isn't necessarily the best one. More and more stuff gets published every year, and there just isn't enough money to support the entire print publication cycle -- even the cost of paper is a huge issue.
Tapes degrade over time, as do CDs and other current electronic media, so even these aren't long-term solutions. I know of groups (dunno how much more I can say:) who are working on solutions which take these issues into account. But it's a hard problem, and one which libraries and publishers are taking very seriously.
IMHO, the main feature of journals that deserves to survive is the peer review process. I'm very interested by the rise of eprint servers in physics and now in biomedicine; it'll be really interesting to see how it ends up happening.
Anyway, here's some articles from the British Medical Journal which discuss this further, for one view from journals:
I have to agree 100%. Katz, I usually agree with you, but this time you're on the wrong side. WB has the right to do what they want with their show, and the folks who are bootlegging it may be demonstrating the power of the Net, but they're also violating the law.
The most important point, as I understand it from my friend the Buffy fan, is that WB has NOT, in fact, cancelled the season finale, but rather has _postponed_ it a month or two longer. There's a HUGE difference.
Real Networks "squashed like a mosquito"? Um, then why has their stock gone up 1500% in the last year? They're still very much alive, and in fact still have a majority of streaming media on the Web last I checked. Even broadcast.com, which has obviously been paid a HUGE amount of money by M$ to push NetShow, still has a lot of Real-format content.
I totally agree that Microsoft is much, much too powerful, but I think you're exaggerating a bit here. Microsoft can't simply "shut down" Amazon or eBay any more than they were able to "shut down" AOL when they started MSN.
I've set my default threshold to 2 so that I normally only see stuff that _somebody_ thought was worth reading. However, I don't like the idea that one moderator can override another's decision to bump one up.
If you really, really want to keep the possibility of voting -1, maybe that should be limited to a small number of moderators (i.e. Rob and a couple of others). Presumably Rob can override a moderator's vote manually anyway if he really wants to.
Heh -- if you'd posted this four days ago, we would've still had a room available in my house in PA...:)
The market actually appears to be a little softer in the past couple of months than it has been the last few times I've tried to find a place. It actually took us two months to find a roommate (the house is nice, but small, and only has one bathroom for three people).
Besides www.mercurycenter.com's classifieds, I'd check Yahoo Classifieds as well as the Palo Alto Weekly (www.paweekly.com). And RentNet. And, of course, ba.market.housing. Location-wise, Palo Alto is great if you can find a place; Menlo Park and Redwood City might be good places to the north (towards San Francisco), and Mountain View and Sunnyvale to the south (towards San Jose).
The main thing to remember is that, as others have mentioned, you should expect to pay a LOT more rent for a LOT less space anywhere in the South Bay or on the Peninsula than you would anywhere else in the country except probably Manhattan. It ain't cheap to live here, but I love it anyway.
Side note: East Palo Alto is not as bad as it used to be (was the per-capita murder capital of the country in 1989 or thereabouts), but there are still parts where I definitely wouldn't want to live. And it's still got a very bad reputation among Bay Area denizens...
Feel free to email me (aelman@alumni.stanford.org) if you have any other questions!
Slashdot Mirror
In fact, as it happens, LOCKSS is being worked on in association with HighWire Press at Stanford (disclosure: also my employer :), which publishes the online versions of nearly 200 major scientific journals and has a _very_ good relationship with a large number of publishers. They also list the Journal of Biological Chemistry and Science Online as "partners".
I wouldn't be so quick to dismiss the interest that the non-profit academic societies have in preserving this information.
If it were really too personal, then it shouldn't have been posted to a public forum like Slashdot. Pure and simple.
Anyone who wants to can go back to the original Hellmouth articles; they're still featured in a Slashbox. All the comments are there to be read. Archiving is part of Slashdot, and posters are not given a choice on whether or not their posts are archived.
Anything that has been said in a public forum is fair game to be quoted -- many cases of that are covered by "fair use." The only question is whether the book-producers had the right to quote without attributing the quotations.
I think that's perfectly reasonable in this case. Anyone who's really interested can go back to the original articles and find the comments there anyway.
As Jon said, requests not to reproduce the comments were honored. So in future, if you don't want what you say in a public forum to be reproduced for charity or for anything else, then ask for it not to be.
Adam
There is a project that has started recently here at Stanford to investigate the possibility of using distributed web caches as a means of preserving information on the Web. The project is called "LOCKSS" (Lots Of Copies Keep Stuff Safe), and more information can be found at lockss.stanford.edu.
This project definitely does not address all the issues with digital-document preservation; it definitely does _not_ solve the document-format problem. Its goal is to make digital publishing "immutable" so that publishers cannot modify or withdraw their work after it is published.
Disclaimer: I work for one of the groups which is participating with the LOCKSS project, but I'm not working directly with it.
I read the San Jose Mercury News on paper nearly every morning. I find it pretty decent in most respects, and given that I don't pay that much attention to the news in the late evening, it often _does_ report things I don't know, or at least in more depth than I previously knew.
But of course, the Merc is available completely online, including the comics. But it takes a lot longer to download & skim the articles online; with the paper, I can skim the front page, skim the comics (which take _forever_ to download online), skim the sports section, etc.
It's just a matter of speed, really. I certainly check online news sources through the day, but it's much easier to eat breakfast with a newspaper at my side than with my laptop.
Adam
Stanford University has also been working on a RedHat-based distro -- in fact, it's basically RedHat plus three packages: one to access the campus Kerberos authentication infrastructure, one to access the campus AFS filesystem, and one to plug the security holes that come in RH6 by default.
So it basically comes down to a local mirror of the OS plus software to access campus systems. I think it's a wonderful idea as long as it doesn't stray too far from the primary distro.
Last I checked, most college students are over the age of 18, which makes them adults for all purposes other than drinking alcohol. Are there any tenant-privacy laws that would prevent this sort of thing from happening? Seems to me that for housing purposes, at least, the students are simply renting rooms from the university (which is owned by the state), so the relationship is tenant-landlord.
So the legality of this would depend on whether it's legal for landlords to prohibit these kinds of activities through a lease. Which, unfortunately, I believe it is. Still pretty damn lame, though.
On the bright side, perhaps this will wake up Arizona college students and get them to vote in large numbers...:)
Exactly.
In theory, this kinda makes sense -- the academic version costs less than half of what the standard version does (like $200 instead of $500 or thereabouts). But it's still kinda silly, since the workaround is so obvious...
Adam
Well, in theory, the whole purpose of wiring dorms with high-bandwidth connectivity is to promote _academic_ use, not for commercial/business purposes. At Stanford, for instance, students pay like $80 for a _year_ of 10/100BaseT connectivity to the campus backbone. That's subsidized for academic reasons, not so students can share MP3s. So the situation is even a little different from that with @Home.
But the fact is, you give high bandwidth to a bunch of people who generally don't have a lot of money (as most students don't), you're going to see a lot of piracy: software, games, music, videos, whatever.
Interestingly, a student I know told me just last night that apparently the academic version of Office 2000 sends a serial number to Microsoft over the net, and if you disconnect from the net on installation, it requires you to call an 800 number before it lets you install the software. This is apparently not true of the non-academic version. This is obviously to prevent an entire dorm from just copying one copy of the academic version of O2K.
Adam
Actually, this is basically how the scientific publication process works now. Scientists submit papers to journals, then those articles are reviewed by other scientists ("peer review"), and the papers are either rejected (usually with comments on what it would take to get the paper accepted) or accepted, in which case they get posted. The big problem is that this process takes way too long, which is one of the reasons why preprint archives like arXiv.org (the premier online physics archive, formerly xxx.lanl.gov) have become popular.
In any case, I know a lot of journals (at least in the biological sciences, which is where my familiarity is) are working on ways to speed up the review and publication process. Some interesting stuff is happening very soon.
Disclaimer/info: I work for an organization that does online publishing for biological journals: see HighWire Press for more info...
Actually, they probably didn't adopt Linux for the kernel because MacOS X is basically NeXTStep 5.0.
NeXTStep, for those of you who haven't been around that long, was the Mach/BSD-based OS that Jobs' previous company, NeXT, created in the late 80's. NeXTStep was way, way ahead of its time, but the developers made some choices which ended up being different from what the rest of the world did -- using Objective-C instead of C++ was the biggest one. Of course, the _incredible_ GUI development libraries and utilities of NeXTStep were later retooled into "OpenStep", and there is now at least one free-software project to reimplement it (GNUStep).
I have no doubt that the "advanced OO development environment" called "Cocoa" is actually just another retooling of the NeXTStep libraries/utilities. Which is fine, 'cuz they really are good.
I buy stuff there all the time, even consumer electronics, phones, whatever. But I definitely advise people not to go there if they're not extremely clear on what they're looking for -- they treat their employees like crap, so expecting one to be clueful is likely to cause disappointment.
The current program is a beta: you pay $299, you get the modem and free service through the end of March (and now, according to this web page, through the end of April -- cool!), and a 15% discount on their normal service.
I've never actually used a Palm VII, but as far as I can tell this really does work like one, except with unlimited service for the next couple of months. Certainly I've downloaded a bunch of web clipping apps from palm.net (the service provider for the PVII) and they mostly work. OmniSky doesn't know yet how much the permanent fees will be (they said a max of $50/month).
I honestly don't know if I'm going to keep this. It's really cool, but so was the Ricochet I had a couple of years ago, until I realized that I hadn't used it in four months and I was paying $40/month for the service. Fortunately OmniSky is also offering a full refund within 30 days, and a $199 refund within 60 days. Or, I suppose, I could just sell it in March or something.
Definitely a fun toy for now, though!
Adam
Well, of course, 3Com has announced that they're spinning off Palm as a separate subsidiary, complete with its own IPO next year sometime. So that may affect the dynamic a bit.
But to get at the meat of this post: Palm seems to be starting to move more in the direction of the business market (see also this article), while Handspring definitely seems to be targetting the home/personal user market with the possibility of MP3/GPS/other interesting Springboard modules.
I think there's plenty of room for different sorts of palmtop devices running PalmOS, and in the future probably some version(s) of Linux, perhaps even PalmOS running on the Linux kernel, as this interview seems to indicate is possible (it says that the PalmOS is designed to run on top of different kernels, specifically in this case the Symbian EPOC32 kernel in the context of the new agreement with Nokia).
But that probably isn't the question you're asking. What you have to keep in mind is that the Palm was really designed as a desktop adjunct, _not_ as a self-sustaining portable computer. The reason is that most people who use Palms have desktop PCs, and don't need a self-sustaining palmtop.
This is distinct from the story of the Newton, which was designed to be a self-contained, self-sustaining "palmtop" computer. This meant that the Newton developers had to worry about natively supporting different printer drivers, network protocols, etc. from day one, which dramatically increased the complexity of the system. With Palm, you originally had nothing but a serial interface (although they've since added TCP/IP over serial), and you didn't have to worry about printing or other data transfer because that all takes place on the PC. This makes for a very simple OS and UI.
Under the 1st amendment, one is free to say anything one wants. That doesn't mean I have to listen to you.
I generally browse Slashdot at +2, with highly-moderated posts sorted at the top. I find that when I bother to look below +2, I find much less worth reading. Sure, there's the occasional overlooked post that really should be moderated up, but generally, especially with a day-old discussion, the good stuff has been noticed.
One of the wonderful things about /. is that the "censorship" really tends to be more on style than on opinions. I see plenty of posts which express alternate opinions than the "community norm" moderated up -- but those posts tend to be well-written and polite. The post to which I am replying ("Another nail in the coffin of free speech") is a perfect example of this.
/.
If you want to be listened to, then express your opinions politely and with respect for your opponents as well as for your friends. If you want to be an asshole, don't expect to be listened to. This goes for all of life, not just
Adam
Am I the only person who remembers this story?
8 5.html
http://www.wired.com/news/news/culture/story/86
The main difference, of course, is that AntiOnline wasn't shut down because of derogatory statements. But it does seem rather ironic.
Adam
I'll have to agree with what's being said elsewhere. We've been using Java for two years to run some fairly high-use sites (http://highwire.stanford.edu/ and all the sites linked from there), and although it's not perfect, it has given us very acceptable performance even when under heavy load.
Our system is currently using only Apache with mod_jserv (running on Solaris 2.6); we will probably be moving some of the code to an application server environment within the next year.
The most important thing for getting good Java performance is to use the right VM. We were using the Javasoft reference VM when we first started our switchover, and the performance was terrible. When we switched to the tuned Solaris production VM, everything magically started working acceptably.
I expect we'll get another speed boost when we upgrade to HotSpot sometime soon.
Make sure that your VM has a JIT. If you're on Linux, I'd recommend looking at the new IBM JDK; I don't believe the standard Blackdown JVM has a JIT.
I don't think this is quite accurate. I recall that one of the big issues RMS had as the Netscape Public License was being discussed was that its initial draft required all changes to be submitted back to Netscape; RMS argued that an essential part of software freedom was the freedom not to distribute one's own private changes. So in your example, the company would be under no obligation to publish their changes outside their own organization; however, they couldn't then distribute their code to anyone outside their organization without triggering the GPL provisions.
What RMS wants to prevent (and the GPL is therefore designed to prevent) is not an organization taking GPL'd code and making it internal and secret, but having them then go out and resell the software without providing their new product under the GPL as well.
My problem with this is that the odds that most commercial software houses would choose to redistribute GPL software because a GPL library already exists is MUCH lower than the odds that they'd simply reimplement the functionality themselves, causing more proprietary differences between code that really should be doing the same thing. RMS cited a couple of counterexamples in his paper on why the LGPL was worse than the GPL (http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/why-not-lgpl.html), but frankly, I just don't buy it.
Adam
So basically, RMS argues that because it is easy to copy software, and because it is nice to be able to modify it on occasion and fix bugs, etc., that everybody has a _moral obligation_ to produce free software.
That's what I don't buy. ESR argues that open source software is good because it enables a development model which produces high-quality, extensible, flexible software. (The business models are essentially justifications of these basic premises.)
Frankly, if Microsoft software were high-quality, if developing using VB and COM and ASP were a dream, if NT were scalable for enterprise-level tasks, I wouldn't care that it wasn't free software.
But none of these are true, and the evidence shows that open-source/free software is better. I choose the tools that will let me do what I want to do as quickly and efficiently as possible. I find the moral argument of "it's easy to do, so we should have the right to do it!" to be silly.
Adam
Disclaimer/information point: I work for an organization which publishes over 120 biomedical journals on the Web (Highwire Press, http://highwire.stanford.edu/ )
:) who are working on solutions which take these issues into account. But it's a hard problem, and one which libraries and publishers are taking very seriously.
4 /a
The archive issue is a real one. One of the biggest problems in scientific publishing right now (and the reason that Highwire was started here at Stanford) is that it's getting too damn expensive for libraries to subscribe to all these journals -- not just the subscription costs, but also the storage costs, etc. So the solution of simply continuing to publish paper journals isn't necessarily the best one. More and more stuff gets published every year, and there just isn't enough money to support the entire print publication cycle -- even the cost of paper is a huge issue.
Tapes degrade over time, as do CDs and other current electronic media, so even these aren't long-term solutions. I know of groups (dunno how much more I can say
IMHO, the main feature of journals that deserves to survive is the peer review process. I'm very interested by the rise of eprint servers in physics and now in biomedicine; it'll be really interesting to see how it ends up happening.
Anyway, here's some articles from the British Medical Journal which discuss this further, for one view from journals:
http://www.bmj.com/cgi/content/full/318/7186/75
Later,
Adam
I have to agree 100%. Katz, I usually agree with you, but this time you're on the wrong side. WB has the right to do what they want with their show, and the folks who are bootlegging it may be demonstrating the power of the Net, but they're also violating the law.
The most important point, as I understand it from my friend the Buffy fan, is that WB has NOT, in fact, cancelled the season finale, but rather has _postponed_ it a month or two longer. There's a HUGE difference.
Adam
Real Networks "squashed like a mosquito"? Um, then why has their stock gone up 1500% in the last year? They're still very much alive, and in fact still have a majority of streaming media on the Web last I checked. Even broadcast.com, which has obviously been paid a HUGE amount of money by M$ to push NetShow, still has a lot of Real-format content.
I totally agree that Microsoft is much, much too powerful, but I think you're exaggerating a bit here. Microsoft can't simply "shut down" Amazon or eBay any more than they were able to "shut down" AOL when they started MSN.
Adam
I really like this idea.
I've set my default threshold to 2 so that I normally only see stuff that _somebody_ thought was worth reading. However, I don't like the idea that one moderator can override another's decision to bump one up.
If you really, really want to keep the possibility of voting -1, maybe that should be limited to a small number of moderators (i.e. Rob and a couple of others). Presumably Rob can override a moderator's vote manually anyway if he really wants to.
Adam
Um, click "Panel: This Panel Properties" -- Autohide is the first option there. Works quite nicely.
Adam
Heh -- if you'd posted this four days ago, we would've still had a room available in my house in PA...:)
The market actually appears to be a little softer in the past couple of months than it has been the last few times I've tried to find a place. It actually took us two months to find a roommate (the house is nice, but small, and only has one bathroom for three people).
Besides www.mercurycenter.com's classifieds, I'd check Yahoo Classifieds as well as the Palo Alto Weekly (www.paweekly.com). And RentNet. And, of course, ba.market.housing. Location-wise, Palo Alto is great if you can find a place; Menlo Park and Redwood City might be good places to the north (towards San Francisco), and Mountain View and Sunnyvale to the south (towards San Jose).
The main thing to remember is that, as others have mentioned, you should expect to pay a LOT more rent for a LOT less space anywhere in the South Bay or on the Peninsula than you would anywhere else in the country except probably Manhattan. It ain't cheap to live here, but I love it anyway.
Side note: East Palo Alto is not as bad as it used to be (was the per-capita murder capital of the country in 1989 or thereabouts), but there are still parts where I definitely wouldn't want to live. And it's still got a very bad reputation among Bay Area denizens...
Feel free to email me (aelman@alumni.stanford.org) if you have any other questions!
Adam