Despite the (simultaneously amusing and frustrating) schedule slippage that the STIX project became infamous for, they deserve tremendous praise for the work they have done here. They have created a monumental work, stuck with the project for well over a decade despite all the setbacks, and released the results free to the world as an open source font. To understand the magnitude of this task, consider how long it would take to design a good quality font for just the standard character set (which isn't easy, as witnessed by the large number of bad fontsets floating around...). Now, scale that up to 8,000+ characters. Not only that, but many of these characters are obscure to any outside of specific scientific fields, and hence the font designers won't immediately know how the characters are supposed to look - the background research must be done, the results organized into some coherent framework, and a LOT of characters have to be created more or less from scratch. This work was being funded by scientific publishing houses who wanted a font for high quality consistent output, so the goal wasn't met by "partial" success - it had to be judged a finished work before any benefit could be realized. They couldn't use the TeX approach of allowing the user to custom-roll their own solution to strange characters - everything had to be handled "up-front" and built into the font.
That is an ENORMOUS task, and the result is a VERY significant contribution to the open source world. I have nothing but admiration and gratitude for the people behind this who persevered and succeeded, not just technically and organizationally but also in working through the legal questions raised by the open source community when selecting an open font license. The publishing houses could have decided that "done and usable in journal paper printing" was "good enough", but the project elected to listen to and work with the community to arrive at the OFL, which is a little odd but apparently workable both for the companies involved and the open source community. So, to those who worked on this project: Thanks!
Yeah, sorry about that. Unfortunately, I don't know of a really good one. The middle column of this website has some images of math rendered using the Beta fonts (not final, although they are close - plain descriptive text looks a little larger in the final version): https://www.eyeasme.com/Joe/MathML/MathML_browser_test - those are good math examples but I'm not sure they're comprehensive over the whole font (odds are not - STIX is big).
If someone has a place they can host a pdf of the glyph page as pdf that might be helpful, but unfortunately I'm not up on how to coax open source tools to generate pdfs with embedded fonts (up until now I always used LaTeX for serious math) - anybody know of a good way? Also be warned that offering up such a page for a slashdotting will be inviting a beating for a server and bandwidth - that'll most likely be a pdf with over 400 pages plus the embedded font payload.
Sorry about that - I didn't/don't know of a good image based overview of the fonts. I really wish the STIX group did have something like that, but if they do I haven't been able to find it and creating a good overview of 8000+ glyphs with images was more time than I had available.
The purpose of that page is to have SOMETHING that will let you see the font after you have it installed, since even creating an example page to show all of the glyphs is a bit of a chore.
The problem, in the simplest terms, is that there are too many IE6 only sites and applications that are currently working "well enough", particularly internal to companies, and mucking with something that works already is a non-starter for many management types. No matter how much sense it makes to us, to them it's just money spent and risk taken to get back to where they currently are, functionality wise.
Could IE introduce a sort of "browser virtual machine" where IE9 would start up what would internally amount to a sandboxed version of IE6 if it ran into an IE6 only site? (Of course, that begs the question of recognizing such a site, but presumably Microsoft would stand some chance of recognizing such behaviors since they created IE6 to begin with.) If you can't kill the old applications, you've got to work with them if you want to kill IE6 - perhaps IE9 could borrow a page from the VMWare/VirtualBox world and sort of do a "browser within a browser" to try and maintain compatibility while isolating the IE6 badness from any sane webpage? OSX provided a bridge for old Mac applications when they appeared on the scene which amounted to an old Mac within the new environment, so perhaps that's another possible model.
Dunno if it's workable even in principle, but I don't see how else to move stubborn IE6 users.
If that's the NPR story I heard, the simple refutation was given by an administration official, something along the lines of "there isn't a different response to a 1,000 barrels per day vs. a 5,000 barrels per day leak - either way its a disaster that must be contained, and the priority is to contain it."
Decisions driven by good scientific data are extremely important, but if there is only one possible decision (big oil disaster and major huge oil disaster both require an all-out response) then the details can wait until AFTER the bugger has been capped.
The problem is, interpreting the legal language of the constitution in that fashion is something that can only be usefully done in two ways - either a) from the standpoint of legal history and how the American legal system has put the broad statements of the Constitution into effect, which is a study topic where only specialized legal training will provide a student with enough background information (I certainly don't have anything like the necessary training, and I graduated high school), or b) in light of the impact of separation of church and state (or lack thereof) on broader society and the potential long term consequences of strengthening or weakening that legal principle in the United States. To discuss this intelligently, people need a great deal of background information both on US society through time and world history (ancient and current) and the impact of state religion on individuals within the systems.
I would not expect K-12 students to be able to handle either of these approaches, except perhaps as a last-year-of-highschool sort of class. Broaching the topic at earlier levels, when critical thinking skills are either absent or just beginning to form, is not likely to result in either better critical thinking skills or reasoned arguments for and against. Indeed, the fact that so few adults can objectively consider these questions makes them dangerous to discuss at young ages, because unless the teacher is superbly skilled at hiding their own opinion the result is far more likely to be indoctrination than education.
I've wondered about this for a while now - couldn't universities ban together and commit some resources (a small contribution from a large number of schools) to create a K-12 series of texts on major subjects, that is designed by the best available experts and freely available for all districts to use? Creative Commons licensing (oddly enough, CC has a link right now to Virginia's Department of Education and some work they are doing) and (insofar as is humanly possible) a focus on just the facts of history and their documentable consequences. To enforce some objective standard of what constitutes a fact, require documented citations to primary historical sources for all parts of the book asserting facts - preferably citations with links to the source material. The final form of the textbook delivered to students wouldn't necessarily include those references, but they would be present online and mandatory for anything that reached the "final" version. Let the broader college professor community decide on the acceptability of/validity of any particular cited source.
Not only would this provide a mechanism for creation and distribution of textbooks that wouldn't be easily influenced by political agendas (tenured professors are about as pressure-proof as we're likely to get and still have sufficient domain knowledge to do useful work) but it would make good quality teaching materials universally and cheaply available. If school districts didn't have to pony up so much money for textbooks, what else could they do with the money?
"We need to have students compare and contrast this current view of separation of church and state with the actual language in the First Amendment," said McLeroy, who like other social conservatives contends that separation of church and state was established in the law only by activist judges and not by the Constitution or Bill of Rights.
I don't suppose this and statements like "Christian land governed by Christian principles" would provide ammunition for a lawsuit that the State Board of Education is itself guilty of a violation of the separation of church and state? It's not evolution, to be sure, but the motivation sounds, based on these accounts, to be highly suspect.
How does that help? Is VP8 acknowledged by other major players to not infringe on any other patents? Would Google agree to shield all users of VP8 from any legal attacks by patent holders?
I rather expect that the holders of these patents feel that any possible implementation of video on a computer infringes on SOME patent they hold, and if there exists some hypothetical codec that does not infringe I'd guess some team of lawyers didn't do their job right. Sort of like how SCO was claiming that no possible modern operating system could exist without violating SCO intellectual property rights, except using the patent system for the fence-building process. Even if there are codes that are completely free and clear, can you imaging how long it would take a the legal system to sort out such a lawsuit? SCO has dragged their action on for YEARS, and that's without thousands of patents to use as clubs.
If they pick on the developers of Ogg Theora, what happens? Do they stand any chance of carrying on such a lawsuit, as an open source effort? Would various interested companies back them and support them in a fight to the finish? The most frightening interpretation of that email suggests we may actually find out.
I know it sucks by modern standards, but the claim that "all video codecs are covered by patents" is a bold one to make - surely MPEG 1 is either at or close to the end of its patent life (at least in the US)?
First off, thank you for the work you're doing here - WiX and now CoApp look very very interesting in terms of reaching potential users of OSS apps on Windows more easily, which is definitely a worthy goal in my book. So thank you for working to help this happen!
I know for a lot of applications to be taken seriously as possibilities for Real Use in Real Environments (e.g. commercial) running on Windows is a check box that has to be checked. So since it has to be tackled by a lot of OSS devs, anything that makes that more straightforward is awesome.
My question may not actually be an "appropriate" question for the CoApp level of focus, but I'll try it out - you mention in your blog article the use of autoconf on Linux style systems. There has been some interesting progress on the CMake system towards generating cross-platform compile logic from a single "control file" - is there any work that could be done on either CMake, CoApp, or both to make a CMake defined build stand a good chance of cleanly fitting into the CoApp world, as well as the Linux autoconf world?
As the technology to collect and manage information becomes ever more inexpensive, it becomes more and more of an effort to AVOID having data available to the government in such a way that it can be abused. When things get to the point where the drivers-license level data for every person in the USA can be causally tossed onto a thumb drive and taken to the next meeting, it becomes VERY hard to NOT use that data.
Well intentioned uses of such data abound, and some will be not only well intentioned but actually helpful (it is quite probable, for example, that correct use of a national DNA database WOULD allow many crimes to be solved that are not currently solved, just as fingerprint databases have been so useful.) Abuse of this data (particularly if the correctness of the data is trusted too much) by those in power is the counterpoint, and that is equally real (and equally scary). The problem is, the easier it gets to collect data the harder it is to be SURE it's thrown away if its intended to be thrown away. From some of the stores Slashdot has run about Britain, once they get ahold of your DNA they hang onto it, period. From their point of view, it might be useful in the future and its harmless sitting there in a database if its never used. If the agents of the system and those making the laws could be fully trusted, this might even be true. The problem is neither requirement holds. Law enforcement isn't perfect, and laws aren't either.
The balance of society is between empowering enforcers of the law to catch criminals and limiting the damage they can do when those enforcers go astray. My guess is given technological trends, the balance in the information game is going to have to shift from restriction of available information to stronger punishment for misuse and weaker assumptions about the automatic correctness of any personal info database. It's going to become too easy to collect too much information, and once collected it's very hard to uncollect it. Eventually, things will reach the point where a desire to NOT have your information on record will be an automatic flag, kinda like how the fuzzy areas on Google Maps are an automatic flag of "hey, there might be something interesting there." No idea were all this will lead, but I have a feeling technology will compel us to find out.
One though that might be worth thinking about - if there has to be a national database of all this stuff, have it widely distributed and copied at many locations, so that it's extremely difficult to push a universal change through any mechanism except one that makes records of the change (sort of a subversion database for law enforcement records - no anonymous changes and every change logged, as well as all historical database states being preserved. If records are ever changed erroneously, make it extremely difficult to do this without it being clear WHO did it)
I have to admire what these guys are doing and the good it will do for the open source community as a whole (at least in the US). I've seen this case pop up off and on over the years, and it always struck me as a scary plight for an open source developer to be in.
(Not affiliated with the project in any way and nobody asked me to post the link - I just think a slashdot effect is in order here given what they're doing and what he's been up against.)
I have to admire what these guys are doing and the good it will do for the open source community as a whole (at least in the US). I've seen this case pop up off and on over the years, and it always struck me as a scary plight for an open source developer to be in.
(Not affiliated with the project in any way and nobody asked me to post the link - I just think a slashdot effect is in order here given what they're doing and what he's been up against.)
I read that as "for the sole purpose of creating jobs in their districts, regardless of the actual merits of the programs in question." I.e., if we're doing a space program there's gotta be an actual good reason for it, not just vote buying for one congressional district. That makes perfect sense to me. Fund results creation, and job creation occurs as a natural (and healthy) bi-product. If you fund jobs but not results, guess how sustainable and healthy for the economy that is?
This raises an interesting question - whether a PC like this, which purports to use hardware that is fully documented, is sufficiently "free" for every possible scenario. A "more free" approach would be to use "open source hardware" (insofar as is legally possible, I believe things like GPS hardware have disclosure limits imposed by the legal system). By "open source", I'm referring to hardware that includes not only API documentation but hardware descriptions usable for chip production - things like OpenSparc and the OpenGraphics card. I doubt there are enough such pieces to form a fully functional PC (particularly when it comes to things like monitors) but for the sake of argument let's assume there are.
In theory, of course, the fewer restrictions on any IP related to making the computer work the better, but in practice modern PC hardware is not something that can be realistically produced (at least today) by any hobbyist. The physical hardware also doesn't benefit from the "cheap copy" properties of software, so the in-depth knowledge of how to make the hardware is hard to apply even when present. Also, such designs are (to my knowledge without exception, at least in the PC hardware arena) well behind the maximally performing hardware developed in non-open contexts. So the price to pay for full hardware knowledge is quite steep in terms of performance. The only real end-user applicable argument is that full hardware knowledge means the potential for better software support.
So a question for those in the open hardware community - is there potential for driver development using information of the kind available from OpenSparc and OpenGraphics to develop better performing drivers than can be achieved with the information (say) considered sufficient to permit inclusion of hardware in a product like the one in this article? If not, are there any other benefits (aside from the admittedly non-trivial one of being able to learn anything you want to about your computer) to an "open source" hardware platform?
Of course if you look at this from a strict price/performance standpoint, it's not going to win - the point is solid support of the hardware is possible with fully open source code. How does this play out? Hard to say. I'd like to see a review geared to evaluation of points such as stability, responsiveness, usability of major open source programs (Blender, anyone?) and how/whether a fully open driver stack impacts that experience.
Apple wins in the market because they create a smooth, integrated experience that has view technical "gotchas" waiting to pounce on the consumer. The point of projects such as this (IMHO anyway) is to try to achieve something similar with open source - a hardware/software stack that can be tuned for a performance that, while perhaps not the fastest possible, is "smooth".
Realistically, how much horsepower is actually needed for anything not involving heavy duty graphics or video editing? Wouldn't it perhaps be worth trading off a bit of the "latest and greatest" hardware performance for something that was quality components, solid support and would run reliably for a long time? I know I'd be interested.
It'll be interesting to see if they can find a way to illustrate the benefits of such an experience, even if they can create it - and whether the open source audience will be sufficiently impressed to buy it or not. I know that if my machine were to croak tomorrow, I would at least be curious - a Walmart PC or Dell might have better specs for a cheaper price but I'd be scared of component quality and assembly QC - that's one reason folks still build their own boxes, after all. My current machine was assembled from parts years ago, and has been quite reliable (as well as fast enough) through years of building Gentoo updates and other fairly intense desktop tasks - that's what I want for my next machine, because this month's hardware will be slow next month anyway and I want my $$ to last. Is this it? Who knows, but I'd be curious to see what a real in-depth review has to say.
Here are the sections that were addressed by the order, according to the linked article:
Section 2(c), which provided officials immunity from their property and assets being searched and confiscated; including their archives;
the portions of Section 2(d) and Section 3 relating to customs duties and federal internal-revenue importation taxes;
Section 4, dealing with federal taxes;
Section 5, dealing with Social Security; and
Section 6, dealing with property taxes.
Whether or not they have criminal immunity (don't know offhand), there doesn't seem to be ANYTHING in the above executive order addressing such matters. Might have FOIA implications, but doesn't seem to have anything to do with punishment of crimes committed by agents. Summary is wrong.
Because to remain a compassionate society we have to soak up the medical costs associated with the problems it causes. If we want to decrease those costs without throwing people to the wolves, the only alternative is to encourage/compel healthier behaviors.
It's a balancing act, but in human social systems "no man is an island", however much some of its members might wish they could be.
and frankly, I don't see much reason for the city to exist currently (in an economic sense) except for the presence of its universities. Generally, in that situation, the approach to take is to offer every incentive you can to get businesses and industries INTO the city. And one thing those businesses will need, especially in a modern economy, is well educated students. Pittsburgh seems to have suffered something of a "brain drain" effect in that (naturally enough) folks who would be the foundation and building blocks of economic activity have fled elsewhere for better opportunity. Investment capital appears to have done much the same. The ONE strong asset left to the city is high quality education which brings smart people into geographic proximity with Pittsburgh, and heaping burdens on it strikes me as exactly the wrong approach (ESPECIALLY the students.) Students in higher education ARE a special category - they are the ONLY realistic chance for economic success for both Pittsburgh and the US as a whole in a world economy. They are a limited resource both locally and globally. Education follows good teachers and researchers, just as academic reputation does - make things bad enough and even universities can lose their edge. More to the point, Pittsburgh needs a complete economic overhaul. It might be hard to kill CMU's reputation as long as good people come to the school for the reputation, but if Pittsburgh wants them to STAY and actually start to recreate a new economy from the ruins left by the steel industry they have to make people WANT to stay.
Pittsburgh is in a tough situation, and I understand resentment of any "special" status of students, but they have to realize that a student tax isn't even addressing their larger problems and will do exactly nothing to effect the turnaround Pittsburgh really needs if it is to revitalize itself. Pittsburgh needs to try and KEEP those students, not give them one less reason to be there, because young educated people are the one irreplaceable necessity in any serious drive to build competitive industries.
and the comment system that was put in place for that discussion. I wonder if paring such a system with a version control system would be a very interesting way to manage reviewing diffs between versions of legislation. Apparently the code for the GPLv3 draft debate isn't maintained any more, but the discontinued project recommends: http://www.co-ment.net/ which looks interesting.
I've actually asked that question myself - whether some sort of version control system could be very useful in handling and understanding the making of and changes to the law.
Unfortunately, expecting to get such a process actually adopted is probably unrealistic at the present time - there are FAR too many people and interests who would object to the transparency implied by being able to track changes to laws (although they would doubtless find some other way to justify it - say by claiming it would raise the costs of the lawmaking process to unreasonable levels and slow down emergency bills which would Harm The Children In Need, etc...)
My suggestion on how to approach such a system is as follows: Begin with the available online resources (thomas.loc.gov, Carl Malamud's work at http://public.resource.org/, etc.) and start a non-profit, wikipedia style effort to import existing and historical legislation (and whatever other material may be relevant) into a version control system. It would be an EXCELLENT project for students of political history - perhaps some university departments could be persuaded to get behind it. Initial import would be quite difficult in that change sets and ordering probably couldn't start "from the beginning", so some sort of preliminary work might have to be done in either a specialized or new type of VCS. Such a project would help shake out what is needed for such a system and how to make it robust.
Once a system is up that can display historical changes in legislation and has as its contents the history of such legislation, begin to use it and continually update it with new legislation as it appears. If the utility of the system is demonstrated (as it probably would be by media and interest groups using it to decode the process) you might begin to compel the actual legislative process to look at using it.
But in the meantime it would help the public understand the end results and the history of its development, which is already a massively worthwhile goal.
Slashdot Mirror
Despite the (simultaneously amusing and frustrating) schedule slippage that the STIX project became infamous for, they deserve tremendous praise for the work they have done here. They have created a monumental work, stuck with the project for well over a decade despite all the setbacks, and released the results free to the world as an open source font. To understand the magnitude of this task, consider how long it would take to design a good quality font for just the standard character set (which isn't easy, as witnessed by the large number of bad fontsets floating around...). Now, scale that up to 8,000+ characters. Not only that, but many of these characters are obscure to any outside of specific scientific fields, and hence the font designers won't immediately know how the characters are supposed to look - the background research must be done, the results organized into some coherent framework, and a LOT of characters have to be created more or less from scratch. This work was being funded by scientific publishing houses who wanted a font for high quality consistent output, so the goal wasn't met by "partial" success - it had to be judged a finished work before any benefit could be realized. They couldn't use the TeX approach of allowing the user to custom-roll their own solution to strange characters - everything had to be handled "up-front" and built into the font.
That is an ENORMOUS task, and the result is a VERY significant contribution to the open source world. I have nothing but admiration and gratitude for the people behind this who persevered and succeeded, not just technically and organizationally but also in working through the legal questions raised by the open source community when selecting an open font license. The publishing houses could have decided that "done and usable in journal paper printing" was "good enough", but the project elected to listen to and work with the community to arrive at the OFL, which is a little odd but apparently workable both for the companies involved and the open source community. So, to those who worked on this project: Thanks!
Yeah, sorry about that. Unfortunately, I don't know of a really good one. The middle column of this website has some images of math rendered using the Beta fonts (not final, although they are close - plain descriptive text looks a little larger in the final version): https://www.eyeasme.com/Joe/MathML/MathML_browser_test - those are good math examples but I'm not sure they're comprehensive over the whole font (odds are not - STIX is big).
If someone has a place they can host a pdf of the glyph page as pdf that might be helpful, but unfortunately I'm not up on how to coax open source tools to generate pdfs with embedded fonts (up until now I always used LaTeX for serious math) - anybody know of a good way? Also be warned that offering up such a page for a slashdotting will be inviting a beating for a server and bandwidth - that'll most likely be a pdf with over 400 pages plus the embedded font payload.
Sorry about that - I didn't/don't know of a good image based overview of the fonts. I really wish the STIX group did have something like that, but if they do I haven't been able to find it and creating a good overview of 8000+ glyphs with images was more time than I had available.
The purpose of that page is to have SOMETHING that will let you see the font after you have it installed, since even creating an example page to show all of the glyphs is a bit of a chore.
The problem, in the simplest terms, is that there are too many IE6 only sites and applications that are currently working "well enough", particularly internal to companies, and mucking with something that works already is a non-starter for many management types. No matter how much sense it makes to us, to them it's just money spent and risk taken to get back to where they currently are, functionality wise.
Could IE introduce a sort of "browser virtual machine" where IE9 would start up what would internally amount to a sandboxed version of IE6 if it ran into an IE6 only site? (Of course, that begs the question of recognizing such a site, but presumably Microsoft would stand some chance of recognizing such behaviors since they created IE6 to begin with.) If you can't kill the old applications, you've got to work with them if you want to kill IE6 - perhaps IE9 could borrow a page from the VMWare/VirtualBox world and sort of do a "browser within a browser" to try and maintain compatibility while isolating the IE6 badness from any sane webpage? OSX provided a bridge for old Mac applications when they appeared on the scene which amounted to an old Mac within the new environment, so perhaps that's another possible model.
Dunno if it's workable even in principle, but I don't see how else to move stubborn IE6 users.
If that's the NPR story I heard, the simple refutation was given by an administration official, something along the lines of "there isn't a different response to a 1,000 barrels per day vs. a 5,000 barrels per day leak - either way its a disaster that must be contained, and the priority is to contain it."
Decisions driven by good scientific data are extremely important, but if there is only one possible decision (big oil disaster and major huge oil disaster both require an all-out response) then the details can wait until AFTER the bugger has been capped.
Sounded like a non-issue to me.
The problem is, interpreting the legal language of the constitution in that fashion is something that can only be usefully done in two ways - either a) from the standpoint of legal history and how the American legal system has put the broad statements of the Constitution into effect, which is a study topic where only specialized legal training will provide a student with enough background information (I certainly don't have anything like the necessary training, and I graduated high school), or b) in light of the impact of separation of church and state (or lack thereof) on broader society and the potential long term consequences of strengthening or weakening that legal principle in the United States. To discuss this intelligently, people need a great deal of background information both on US society through time and world history (ancient and current) and the impact of state religion on individuals within the systems.
I would not expect K-12 students to be able to handle either of these approaches, except perhaps as a last-year-of-highschool sort of class. Broaching the topic at earlier levels, when critical thinking skills are either absent or just beginning to form, is not likely to result in either better critical thinking skills or reasoned arguments for and against. Indeed, the fact that so few adults can objectively consider these questions makes them dangerous to discuss at young ages, because unless the teacher is superbly skilled at hiding their own opinion the result is far more likely to be indoctrination than education.
I've wondered about this for a while now - couldn't universities ban together and commit some resources (a small contribution from a large number of schools) to create a K-12 series of texts on major subjects, that is designed by the best available experts and freely available for all districts to use? Creative Commons licensing (oddly enough, CC has a link right now to Virginia's Department of Education and some work they are doing) and (insofar as is humanly possible) a focus on just the facts of history and their documentable consequences. To enforce some objective standard of what constitutes a fact, require documented citations to primary historical sources for all parts of the book asserting facts - preferably citations with links to the source material. The final form of the textbook delivered to students wouldn't necessarily include those references, but they would be present online and mandatory for anything that reached the "final" version. Let the broader college professor community decide on the acceptability of/validity of any particular cited source.
Not only would this provide a mechanism for creation and distribution of textbooks that wouldn't be easily influenced by political agendas (tenured professors are about as pressure-proof as we're likely to get and still have sufficient domain knowledge to do useful work) but it would make good quality teaching materials universally and cheaply available. If school districts didn't have to pony up so much money for textbooks, what else could they do with the money?
"We need to have students compare and contrast this current view of separation of church and state with the actual language in the First Amendment," said McLeroy, who like other social conservatives contends that separation of church and state was established in the law only by activist judges and not by the Constitution or Bill of Rights.
I don't suppose this and statements like "Christian land governed by Christian principles" would provide ammunition for a lawsuit that the State Board of Education is itself guilty of a violation of the separation of church and state? It's not evolution, to be sure, but the motivation sounds, based on these accounts, to be highly suspect.
How does that help? Is VP8 acknowledged by other major players to not infringe on any other patents? Would Google agree to shield all users of VP8 from any legal attacks by patent holders?
I rather expect that the holders of these patents feel that any possible implementation of video on a computer infringes on SOME patent they hold, and if there exists some hypothetical codec that does not infringe I'd guess some team of lawyers didn't do their job right. Sort of like how SCO was claiming that no possible modern operating system could exist without violating SCO intellectual property rights, except using the patent system for the fence-building process. Even if there are codes that are completely free and clear, can you imaging how long it would take a the legal system to sort out such a lawsuit? SCO has dragged their action on for YEARS, and that's without thousands of patents to use as clubs.
If they pick on the developers of Ogg Theora, what happens? Do they stand any chance of carrying on such a lawsuit, as an open source effort? Would various interested companies back them and support them in a fight to the finish? The most frightening interpretation of that email suggests we may actually find out.
I know it sucks by modern standards, but the claim that "all video codecs are covered by patents" is a bold one to make - surely MPEG 1 is either at or close to the end of its patent life (at least in the US)?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MPEG-1
First off, thank you for the work you're doing here - WiX and now CoApp look very very interesting in terms of reaching potential users of OSS apps on Windows more easily, which is definitely a worthy goal in my book. So thank you for working to help this happen!
I know for a lot of applications to be taken seriously as possibilities for Real Use in Real Environments (e.g. commercial) running on Windows is a check box that has to be checked. So since it has to be tackled by a lot of OSS devs, anything that makes that more straightforward is awesome.
My question may not actually be an "appropriate" question for the CoApp level of focus, but I'll try it out - you mention in your blog article the use of autoconf on Linux style systems. There has been some interesting progress on the CMake system towards generating cross-platform compile logic from a single "control file" - is there any work that could be done on either CMake, CoApp, or both to make a CMake defined build stand a good chance of cleanly fitting into the CoApp world, as well as the Linux autoconf world?
As the technology to collect and manage information becomes ever more inexpensive, it becomes more and more of an effort to AVOID having data available to the government in such a way that it can be abused. When things get to the point where the drivers-license level data for every person in the USA can be causally tossed onto a thumb drive and taken to the next meeting, it becomes VERY hard to NOT use that data.
Well intentioned uses of such data abound, and some will be not only well intentioned but actually helpful (it is quite probable, for example, that correct use of a national DNA database WOULD allow many crimes to be solved that are not currently solved, just as fingerprint databases have been so useful.) Abuse of this data (particularly if the correctness of the data is trusted too much) by those in power is the counterpoint, and that is equally real (and equally scary). The problem is, the easier it gets to collect data the harder it is to be SURE it's thrown away if its intended to be thrown away. From some of the stores Slashdot has run about Britain, once they get ahold of your DNA they hang onto it, period. From their point of view, it might be useful in the future and its harmless sitting there in a database if its never used. If the agents of the system and those making the laws could be fully trusted, this might even be true. The problem is neither requirement holds. Law enforcement isn't perfect, and laws aren't either.
The balance of society is between empowering enforcers of the law to catch criminals and limiting the damage they can do when those enforcers go astray. My guess is given technological trends, the balance in the information game is going to have to shift from restriction of available information to stronger punishment for misuse and weaker assumptions about the automatic correctness of any personal info database. It's going to become too easy to collect too much information, and once collected it's very hard to uncollect it. Eventually, things will reach the point where a desire to NOT have your information on record will be an automatic flag, kinda like how the fuzzy areas on Google Maps are an automatic flag of "hey, there might be something interesting there." No idea were all this will lead, but I have a feeling technology will compel us to find out.
One though that might be worth thinking about - if there has to be a national database of all this stuff, have it widely distributed and copied at many locations, so that it's extremely difficult to push a universal change through any mechanism except one that makes records of the change (sort of a subversion database for law enforcement records - no anonymous changes and every change logged, as well as all historical database states being preserved. If records are ever changed erroneously, make it extremely difficult to do this without it being clear WHO did it)
whoops, sorry, browser misbehave - please mod down the dup posting above
Here's the link to their donations page:
http://jmri.sourceforge.net/donations.shtml
I have to admire what these guys are doing and the good it will do for the open source community as a whole (at least in the US). I've seen this case pop up off and on over the years, and it always struck me as a scary plight for an open source developer to be in.
(Not affiliated with the project in any way and nobody asked me to post the link - I just think a slashdot effect is in order here given what they're doing and what he's been up against.)
Here's the link to their donations page:
http://jmri.sourceforge.net/donations.shtml
I have to admire what these guys are doing and the good it will do for the open source community as a whole (at least in the US). I've seen this case pop up off and on over the years, and it always struck me as a scary plight for an open source developer to be in.
(Not affiliated with the project in any way and nobody asked me to post the link - I just think a slashdot effect is in order here given what they're doing and what he's been up against.)
I read that as "for the sole purpose of creating jobs in their districts, regardless of the actual merits of the programs in question." I.e., if we're doing a space program there's gotta be an actual good reason for it, not just vote buying for one congressional district. That makes perfect sense to me. Fund results creation, and job creation occurs as a natural (and healthy) bi-product. If you fund jobs but not results, guess how sustainable and healthy for the economy that is?
This raises an interesting question - whether a PC like this, which purports to use hardware that is fully documented, is sufficiently "free" for every possible scenario. A "more free" approach would be to use "open source hardware" (insofar as is legally possible, I believe things like GPS hardware have disclosure limits imposed by the legal system). By "open source", I'm referring to hardware that includes not only API documentation but hardware descriptions usable for chip production - things like OpenSparc and the OpenGraphics card. I doubt there are enough such pieces to form a fully functional PC (particularly when it comes to things like monitors) but for the sake of argument let's assume there are.
In theory, of course, the fewer restrictions on any IP related to making the computer work the better, but in practice modern PC hardware is not something that can be realistically produced (at least today) by any hobbyist. The physical hardware also doesn't benefit from the "cheap copy" properties of software, so the in-depth knowledge of how to make the hardware is hard to apply even when present. Also, such designs are (to my knowledge without exception, at least in the PC hardware arena) well behind the maximally performing hardware developed in non-open contexts. So the price to pay for full hardware knowledge is quite steep in terms of performance. The only real end-user applicable argument is that full hardware knowledge means the potential for better software support.
So a question for those in the open hardware community - is there potential for driver development using information of the kind available from OpenSparc and OpenGraphics to develop better performing drivers than can be achieved with the information (say) considered sufficient to permit inclusion of hardware in a product like the one in this article? If not, are there any other benefits (aside from the admittedly non-trivial one of being able to learn anything you want to about your computer) to an "open source" hardware platform?
Of course if you look at this from a strict price/performance standpoint, it's not going to win - the point is solid support of the hardware is possible with fully open source code. How does this play out? Hard to say. I'd like to see a review geared to evaluation of points such as stability, responsiveness, usability of major open source programs (Blender, anyone?) and how/whether a fully open driver stack impacts that experience.
Apple wins in the market because they create a smooth, integrated experience that has view technical "gotchas" waiting to pounce on the consumer. The point of projects such as this (IMHO anyway) is to try to achieve something similar with open source - a hardware/software stack that can be tuned for a performance that, while perhaps not the fastest possible, is "smooth".
Realistically, how much horsepower is actually needed for anything not involving heavy duty graphics or video editing? Wouldn't it perhaps be worth trading off a bit of the "latest and greatest" hardware performance for something that was quality components, solid support and would run reliably for a long time? I know I'd be interested.
It'll be interesting to see if they can find a way to illustrate the benefits of such an experience, even if they can create it - and whether the open source audience will be sufficiently impressed to buy it or not. I know that if my machine were to croak tomorrow, I would at least be curious - a Walmart PC or Dell might have better specs for a cheaper price but I'd be scared of component quality and assembly QC - that's one reason folks still build their own boxes, after all. My current machine was assembled from parts years ago, and has been quite reliable (as well as fast enough) through years of building Gentoo updates and other fairly intense desktop tasks - that's what I want for my next machine, because this month's hardware will be slow next month anyway and I want my $$ to last. Is this it? Who knows, but I'd be curious to see what a real in-depth review has to say.
Here are the sections that were addressed by the order, according to the linked article:
Section 2(c), which provided officials immunity from their property and assets being searched and confiscated; including their archives;
the portions of Section 2(d) and Section 3 relating to customs duties and federal internal-revenue importation taxes;
Section 4, dealing with federal taxes;
Section 5, dealing with Social Security; and
Section 6, dealing with property taxes.
Whether or not they have criminal immunity (don't know offhand), there doesn't seem to be ANYTHING in the above executive order addressing such matters. Might have FOIA implications, but doesn't seem to have anything to do with punishment of crimes committed by agents. Summary is wrong.
Because to remain a compassionate society we have to soak up the medical costs associated with the problems it causes. If we want to decrease those costs without throwing people to the wolves, the only alternative is to encourage/compel healthier behaviors.
It's a balancing act, but in human social systems "no man is an island", however much some of its members might wish they could be.
and frankly, I don't see much reason for the city to exist currently (in an economic sense) except for the presence of its universities. Generally, in that situation, the approach to take is to offer every incentive you can to get businesses and industries INTO the city. And one thing those businesses will need, especially in a modern economy, is well educated students. Pittsburgh seems to have suffered something of a "brain drain" effect in that (naturally enough) folks who would be the foundation and building blocks of economic activity have fled elsewhere for better opportunity. Investment capital appears to have done much the same. The ONE strong asset left to the city is high quality education which brings smart people into geographic proximity with Pittsburgh, and heaping burdens on it strikes me as exactly the wrong approach (ESPECIALLY the students.) Students in higher education ARE a special category - they are the ONLY realistic chance for economic success for both Pittsburgh and the US as a whole in a world economy. They are a limited resource both locally and globally. Education follows good teachers and researchers, just as academic reputation does - make things bad enough and even universities can lose their edge. More to the point, Pittsburgh needs a complete economic overhaul. It might be hard to kill CMU's reputation as long as good people come to the school for the reputation, but if Pittsburgh wants them to STAY and actually start to recreate a new economy from the ruins left by the steel industry they have to make people WANT to stay.
Pittsburgh is in a tough situation, and I understand resentment of any "special" status of students, but they have to realize that a student tax isn't even addressing their larger problems and will do exactly nothing to effect the turnaround Pittsburgh really needs if it is to revitalize itself. Pittsburgh needs to try and KEEP those students, not give them one less reason to be there, because young educated people are the one irreplaceable necessity in any serious drive to build competitive industries.
Maybe they could make some use of the GPL code from the SUMO project? http://sumo.sourceforge.net/
Thank you for setting up a very interesting repository. Mod parent up!
and the comment system that was put in place for that discussion. I wonder if paring such a system with a version control system would be a very interesting way to manage reviewing diffs between versions of legislation. Apparently the code for the GPLv3 draft debate isn't maintained any more, but the discontinued project recommends: http://www.co-ment.net/ which looks interesting.
I've actually asked that question myself - whether some sort of version control system could be very useful in handling and understanding the making of and changes to the law.
Unfortunately, expecting to get such a process actually adopted is probably unrealistic at the present time - there are FAR too many people and interests who would object to the transparency implied by being able to track changes to laws (although they would doubtless find some other way to justify it - say by claiming it would raise the costs of the lawmaking process to unreasonable levels and slow down emergency bills which would Harm The Children In Need, etc...)
My suggestion on how to approach such a system is as follows: Begin with the available online resources (thomas.loc.gov, Carl Malamud's work at http://public.resource.org/, etc.) and start a non-profit, wikipedia style effort to import existing and historical legislation (and whatever other material may be relevant) into a version control system. It would be an EXCELLENT project for students of political history - perhaps some university departments could be persuaded to get behind it. Initial import would be quite difficult in that change sets and ordering probably couldn't start "from the beginning", so some sort of preliminary work might have to be done in either a specialized or new type of VCS. Such a project would help shake out what is needed for such a system and how to make it robust.
Once a system is up that can display historical changes in legislation and has as its contents the history of such legislation, begin to use it and continually update it with new legislation as it appears. If the utility of the system is demonstrated (as it probably would be by media and interest groups using it to decode the process) you might begin to compel the actual legislative process to look at using it.
But in the meantime it would help the public understand the end results and the history of its development, which is already a massively worthwhile goal.