Is this yet another case where benchmarks have been skewed severely to show a deficiency that doesn't exist? Or is this another area where Linux needs improvement?
We'll never really know, but let's have a purile 400 message discussion* while we don't find out!
"Closed media operate by permitting a handful of individuals to select information and distribute it, in the hopes that people will want and [to] buy it. "
I think this is really the crux of it. This is old media in a sentence. And, as I see it, there is no problem with this happily co-existing with Open Media. Sure, one or the other might lose or gain some mindshare, but it's not, as those Linux distro millionaires like to say, a zero sum game.
By permitting a handful of individuals to select information, you are doing most people a big favour. Compare the Camel book to c.l.p.m. Compare a well written Linux HowTo with a slashdot 'ask slashdot' thread.
Each of the Open forms has strengths and (severe) weaknesses, and likewise the Closed form. They complement each other.
I don't see the big conflict here, only a series of small ones as we work out just what kind of information is better handled in either an Open or Closed way.
I will continue to buy the writings of those individuals who have an unusual ability to select and present information and ideas. I will continue to read with interest my mailing lists, my slashdot posts, and my other sources of open discussion. There's no conflict.
The point is that while Jose may live in a republic, that republic has increasingly little control over Jose's society. The real control is held by corporations, and they are not democratic in any way.
Many corporations are richer than many countries now. General motors is richer than Denmark.
Increasingly, corporations are making decisions 'in partnership with' local government, because local government is poor and disorganised.
It is a true thing that increasingly, our lives are not blighted by fat, greedy mayors taking back handers in the town hall, but by greedy companies that simply walk all over the town hall.
The interesting parallel between the US Revolution and Jose is that both occassions were primarily about money. If the UK had been smart, they'd have cut taxes on the US, opened up the trade, and all would have been well.
And if people weren't so desperate to have tasty burgers with 0 effort required, there wouldn't be giant companies walking all over us so much.
I hardly think that's the right term for an editorial decision about what a private publisher chooses to publish. Oh shock horror, a media source promotes itself rather than its competitors. Help! Help! We live in a police state!
And, more importantly, it is ABSOLUTELY NOT the same as Slashdot deleting all references to kuro5hin. It might be analagous to slashdot not posting any stories about kuro5hin, which, to the best of my knowledge, is actually the case.
"Liberal Democracy? Sorry, we prefer Thatecherism which lives on in the persona of Jack Straw. Oh well, at least I don't live in NI."
This is your mistake. These bills result from Democracy. Face it, a large majority of people hate gypsies, ravers, crusties, tree huggers and the rest of them. So, most people are in favour of, or at least don't object to, laws that stamp on these people. That's the rule of the many. It bites for the few. The alternative is the rule of the few, which bites for the many.
That's interesting, because I see the trend as exactly the opposite.
About a year and a bit ago, with the then new Gimp being a flagship for GTK, things looked very good for Gnome. Then, as I saw it, there was a long period of real or perceived Gnome instability and people started looking at KDE. With KDevelop and KOffice starting to look like more than vapour, KDE seems to me to be on the ascendancy.
TT's business model seems quite straightforward to me. They are writing software that is so good that people will pay for it. However, no matter how good it is, those paying people won't want to use it if no one else does. So, TT creates a userbase by giving it away for free beer to those who wouldn't have paid anyway. However, free beer isn't good enough, because that user base cares about free speech, so TT give it away free beer and free speech, which is still fine because those people still weren't going to pay either way. Net result, TT makes money by selling QT to those who want a very good toolkit, TT gets some OS style help in the form of patches, and TT's paying customers feel good that there are lots of other developers keeping the toolkit popular.
And yes, GTK is a direct threat to this model, and Gnome's success is therefore a threat. This is all fine - it's a perfectly good business model, and no doubt TT will be trying hard to ensure GTKs failure, and no doubt the main way they'll do this is by making QT better and better. Sounds good to me.
Re:s/human genome project/nuclear energy/g
on
Frankenstein Time
·
· Score: 5
Hmmmm. I agree wholeheartedly with Jon on this, and I have not taken the luddite position on any other technologies to date.
The problem is two fold:
1. Genetics involves systems orders of magnitude more complex than the systems involved in nuclear power, space flight or anything else.
2. The problems are not technical ("We're fucked if this power station melts down") but social ("We don't the ability to do this because we will abuse it").
People are greedy. There is good evidence to support the notion that people will knowingly do immense and certain long-term harm to themselves and others in return for fairly slight short term gain. See drug addiction. See smoking. See cheating on you wife with that student. See buying a new dress when you know you can't afford it.
So, we can be fairly sure that if you give someone the ability to have children who are genetically modified to be good at sports, everyone will want to have children like that. No one is too worried about the process going wrong and producing wierd freak psycho killer mutants. Everyone is worried about the process going bang to plan and producing loads of children genetically modified to be good at sport.
It scares the shit out me, anyway.
Now, there are areas where people worry about tech disaster - in particular GM food, where some people think we'll cause some kind of genetic melt down. I tend to agree that there is an element of the doomsayer situation you mention above. However, I also say that we know even less about what we are doing with the genetics that we do with the nuclear power.
However, the real area of concern is not this tech disaster area. It's the social area. This is not a tech problem, it's a social one - but until now it's merely been a hypothetical social problem of interest to philosophers and sci fi writers. But most of all, it's been of interest to almost no-one, and no-one has been thinking about it hard enough. And here we are in a position to start acting on it.
I'm scared, so should you be.
Yesterday, they patented Bismati rice. Idle fuckers.
"In one area (PC) the best games are the ones left half, or completely, open"
REALLY??? Angband springs to mind as a game that benefited from OS development. Yes, there were some truly nice mods to Quake and Doom. But, Day of the Tentacle Dungeon Keeper Populous Elite X-com series Civ series billions of others
They were all very very very closed source. Games are imaginative. Committees don't have good imaginations. OS games generally suck unless they are simply feature-crammed implementations of tried and tested formulas.
People in London who are into such things should check out the reproduction blade of the Sutton Hoo sword in the British Museum. It's a nice example of Damascus steel work and gives an idea of why these things must have been so highly prized. The reproduction blade was made in Wisconsin, which is funny.
Also, while I know little about ancient weapons tech, there is a seemingly reliable account of the battle of Hastings that describes an axe blow delivered by a saxon housecarl that cut through a horse's neck and chopped the rider's leg off. One assumes that the foot soldiers of the time were wielding pretty heavy weapons...
"Mainstream media are fascinated with themselves."
And let me see, this daming criticism comes in the middle of an article that is part (we assume) of Jon's much heralded 'Open Media', and which - oh gosh and golly - does no more than spout on endlessly about how important and wonderful 'Open Media' is.
So - fair to say that even non-mainstream media is fascinated with itself, eh? In fact, I would have to say that Jon Katz spends rather alot of time talking about Old Media, New Media, Slashdot, Himself, etc etc. I'd say a case of leopards not changing spots.
You may be interested in a critique of the UI that I did:
http://www.snowdrift.org/computers/gimp-crit.htm l
The response was not entirely hostile, but the fact remains that 'code it or go shut up' still rules. Programmers are not willing to see themselves as implementing a good idea they didn't think of, certainly not willing to implement a good idea they don't agree with.
This is why non-free software doesn't have too much to fear yet. Meanwhile I've started to join in with KImageShop in the hope I can talk them round to at least thinking hard about the UI with UI hats on and not programmer hats on.
Um, since I wasn't using the net in 1989 I could be wrong, but RFC 1436 (1993) states:
"This document is adapted from the basic Internet Gopher protocol document first issued by the Microcomputer Center at the University of Minnesota in 1991. "
Which suggests to me that gopher is more recent than 1989.
If you have any combination of cordless phones, wireless ethernet, wireless video, or Bluetooth you could be having problems. Not only will your bank balance will be suffering a from the debhilitating effects of continuous expenditure on unecessary geeky networking technologies, but your health will be in sever danger.
An article to be published in the Lancet later this month will show how people can suffer serious side effects from replacing all the cables in their house.
"It started happening after I went to one of those underground Linux install parties" reports a young man, who we'll call 'Alf'.
"At first, it was just phones. You know, people passing around some Nokia's and Ericssons, and it felt really good to be cordless. It was like I was with the in-crowd."
"After a few weeks though, people started getting out the infra-red enabled PDAs out. I didn't think anything of it at the time."
But, as the report shows, cordlessness is an unpleasant and addictive activity, and it's only a matter of time before the serious health implications start. 'Ben' has been in re-hab for three months now, getting used to staying in the same place when he talks on the phone, and being re-trained in Cat5 cabling.
"I can't remember much towards the end" says Ben, "I was really out of it. There was like about 4 of us in this house in Shoreditch, you know with serious 802.11b right through. It was like a permanent trip. We used to have these wild parties at weekends with loads of girls and booze, it was pretty wild, people doing it with like Psion5's and i-mode phones, really f**cked up stuff."
But although Ben is recovering, it's a growing problem thoughout London and the whole of the West. Dissatisfied with their parents' strict ideas of free love, home grown dope, and long skirts, the young generation are turning to hardcore wireless technologies, with street names such as Bluetooth, WAP and i-mode.
Next: The Goverment launches "War on Wireless" to stop this disturbing trend in our young people.
As we know, humans have a remarkable ability to determine meaning and pattern where there is mere randmoness and co-incidence. Hence the shapes in clouds, and the pictures in ink blots.
The Haiku, being a very minimalist form, allows the brain of the reader to fill in so many gaps in the sense of the language that there is room to create entire meaning where none is intended.
Thus, as with Elisa, the cleverness of haiku generators lies less in the programming, and more in the linguistic observation regarding the nature of the text produced.
Not, of course, to say that writing haiku generators isn't fun and worthwhile. But's let's not call them intelligent, because firstly they aren't, and secondly we should marvel more at humans' ability to synthesise meaning and pattern and less at computers' ability to imitate it.
It's a really bad advert. It's the kind of thing a 19yr old CS student would think was good. I sure hope they didn't actually pay an ad agency to think it up.
As far as I can tell it simply makes Linux look like the favourite OS of young geeks who don't make decisions in companies. It says nothing about the product, it doesn't even say anything about MS products, it simply preaches to the converted, and looks juvenile and silly.
I said as much to Penguin Computing when it first came out and never got a reply. I make purchasing decisions for my company I wouldn't touch them with a barge pole. The advert just screams "Hi, we only really want to sell to 30-man companies full of geeks who will be wowed by our free T shirts".
I dunno, maybe it's just a US thing, the gung-ho anti-competitor advertising (adverts in th UK are not allowed to mention competitors).
Yes, this is offtopic, but this interview was a bridge too far. David Faure may not speak English as a first language, but didn't the interviewer either?
"I run the CVS version of KDE2, and I remember seeing an IRC thread in one of packages regarding not running a mail composer within Konqueror, but a mail viewer, so will the composing of documents mainly be launched by an external editor? "
"In terms of KOffice, what parts of KOffice are you working on? "
These are barely grammatical, and very hard to read, certainly not reviewed by whoever wrote them. We all get fed up with web sites that abuse HTML, so why should be stand for abusing English just as badly.
If anyone from linuxuk.co.uk is reading, I hereby volunteer for a job as a sub-editor so no-one else has to read this kind of stuff...
"One would presume that the European Parliament is in some fasion amenable to public pressure"
HA HA ha ha ha ha ha ha Ohhh ho ho ho ho ho tee hee heee heee *splutter* Oh my sides Ho ho ho ho ha Ha ha ha ha ha.
You don't live in Europe do you? The European Parliament is in some fashion amenable to corruption, large expense accounts, glorying in its own power and self importance and congratulating itself on being the driving force of the amazing new wonderful federal Europe.
That said, they sure don't like the U.S. because the EU to some extent defines itself as being not American. So yes, they may well put up a fight, and I hope they do, but don't for one moment think that it's because they listen to public opinion!
If the webhost believes that they know where the assualt comes from, it can't hurt to try to fight back.
Sure it can. First, off, what if the webhost believes wrongly, and they target an innocent machine.
If they correctly identify the attackers and give them a dose of their own medicine, the attack will quickly stop.
Maybe, but maybe not. Many hackers would simply take the challenge and escalate their attacks back. Any hacker doing anything remotely serious in this regard will be using a staging machine of an innocent third party. Wiping that machine won't help anyone - it will just make the hacker compromise another innocent third party machine to stage a revenge from.
If however the attacker is using computers that have been previously taken over, whats the damage? Those computers (more than likely only desktop's in some business or school) cant access the net for a small amount of time. No big deal. No one loses money and some college kid just can't check his email on that machine for a little bit. Big deal.
Oh come on, get serious. So some poor school teacher comes in to find that his classroom server has been thoroughly trashed, and he's got to spend his lunch time doing restores and explaining to the kids how yesterdays work got lost. Lovely. If, instead of being a gung-ho bastard the original victim had simply emailed the admin of the compromised machine and said 'BTW your box is being used to stage hack attacks on me' the teacher would have been able to do a backup and plan a sensible re-install of the box in an orderly fashion. - Plus may have been more willing to help find the real hacker. It looks to me like there is something to gain (the end of these attacks and such) and not very much to lose by striking back. It would be different if we were talkign about shooting at someone and hoping they were the real attacker, but we are talking about internet access.
Retaliating against hackers is simply stooping to their level, and innocent people are almost certain to get hurt in the process.
I couln't agree more. It's a very sensible thing to do and entirely in the spirit of the net.
As for the re-naming of files, that's a complete red herring. People find songs on Napster because the songs are filed under sensible names - i.e. the name of the song. Whatever filing mechanism you decide to use, if you don't want to use names, then software such as this will always be able to access that filing mechanism just as easily as the official client software.
Seems pretty reasonable to me - no better or worse than grepping usenet to see if people are sayig good or bad things about your company's products - which is itself no better or worse than kibo.
It's what you do in the real world next, that matters. Software is just software..
Yes, we all know who invented the lightbulb, because a lightbulb is a very useful thing.
We don't know who invented the technique to manufacture argon, or to create tungsten filament wire, or who figured out how to make a glass bulb that wouldn't shatter. All these were doubtless very important steps forward, but not in themselves useful.
Was inventing packet-switching all that important? More important than inventing the blast furnace? More important than inventing fractional distillation?
We know who invented TV, but few people know who invented the electron gun that it relies on, and few still the people who discovered the physical principles that the electron gun is based around.
Fame has never been that strongly linked to importance...
There are only three things I know of that work well from a boat in blue water:
1. Satellite comms, preferably Inmarsat or some other well established crowd with geostationary sats. Yes, it's expensive, but kitting a boat out for that kind of voyage is _really_ expensive anyway, so maybe another grand or so won't hurt. Check out:
http://www.inmarsat.com/suppliers/index.html
Inmarsat-B may be the one - 56kb modem equiv, fits in a suitcase.
2. SSB radio, but I've never heard of anyone running digital comms over it. And it depends on weather conditions how far it goes. But, it's nice to be able to hear real live crackly voices 1000 miles from land...
3. Set off the EPIRB and when the come to rescue you tell them you're fine but could they send this message for you?:-)
What boat is being used here? Are they looking for crew?!
The report doesn't actually indicate anything beyond the raw stats - it's kind of pointless.
Currently I find it hard to beleive Napster eats into profit mainly because its just a search engine, it's not a media format or a playback device. It's just not all that interesting a tool.
When and if mp3 or its replacement reaches a better sound quality, and can be used portably and easily (Rio sucks) then it's a threat.
MPAA or whoever needs to pay more attention to someone like Sony releasing high quality digital hi-fi hardware and standard tools and protocols for moving digital music between the hi-fi, the personal player and the car. That will change the industry FAR more than a bunch of college kids wasting their college's bandwidth on tunes.
The past history of a defendant cannot (and should not) be used as evidence. You try someone on the facts, not on their reputation or record.
Jurors are forbidden from looking up details of a defendant in public records etc, but that is not the point. Going to your local library and doing a newspaper article search to see if a defendant has a dubious past is:
1. Time consuming 2. Requires reasonable knowledge of how records offices work, how to use microfiche properly etc. 3. Involves a physical element that makes it easier to trace you, make it more apparent you're doing something wrong. 4. Essentially impractical since you'll be in court all day.
Doing the same on the internet, especially on a site that has been created for just such a purpose is:
1. Fast 2. Can be done at night/evening 3. Does not involve verifiable records - depending on the site it could be pure rumour that you're looking up. 4. Doesn't "feel" like you're doing anything wrong.
Overall, I think there's a good argument that such sites seriously impact the jury process, especially as they become better known.
Currently it is quite practical to stop jurors having access to this sort of information. The internet makes it harder, and while for high profile trials jurors are kept in hotels without access to t.v / newspapers etc no-one can afford to do that for every trial of every local criminal.
It would be a bad world indeed where a juror on a case of, say burglary and assault in their local town when home after the first day of the trial and read on www.tastelesscrimesite.com that the defendant had been 'implicated in a number of fraud cases involving pensioners in the area'. That would surely start to bias the average juror into thinking 'this person is wicked' despite the claim being 1. dubious and 2. irrelevant.
To do the same without the Internet the juror would have had to search maybe three years of the local free paper to find the two inch column that says 'local man implicated in recent pensioner scams'. Something that is unlikely to happen.
Yes, it would be nice if net access existed universally as an infrastructure layer in the same way as paved roads, electricity, gas, drainage, and freshwater do.
Net access isn't as important as these. Look how few people in the world have access to any of the above. Depressing, isn't it?
Furthermore, how would I like it if Ford provided me with electricity, Ford built the road between my house and the factory, and Ford supplied me with fresh water.
No f***ing way would I like it not one little bit. If net access really is this vital layer that like sanitation, street lighting, and chlorinated water will pull civilisation into the next era then I ABSOLUTLEY DO NOT WANT IT CONTROLLED BY CORPORATIONS.
On the other hand if net access is just a way for the rich and the poor of the west to waste their time and money on sterile information and pointless shopping, then hey roll on McAmerica, give the the huddled masses peecees and bandwidth, all for free, nothing to lose but your minds.
"Every computer user could shop globally, every retailer sell all over the planet. "
Yeah nice idea. This is where the rich people on the nice side of the world buy stuff made by the other side of the world. Then, they go on holiday to the poor side and come back to tell all their rich friends how much better the poor side is but what a shame its being spoilt by all those factories and poor people with no rights.
Slashdot Mirror
Is this yet another case where benchmarks have been skewed severely to show a deficiency that doesn't exist? Or is this another area where Linux needs improvement?
We'll never really know, but let's have a purile 400 message discussion* while we don't find out!
* In a very loose sense of the word
"Closed media operate by permitting a handful of individuals to select information and distribute it, in the hopes that people will want and [to] buy it. "
I think this is really the crux of it. This is old media in a sentence. And, as I see it, there is no problem with this happily co-existing with Open Media. Sure, one or the other might lose or gain some mindshare, but it's not, as those Linux distro millionaires like to say, a zero sum game.
By permitting a handful of individuals to select information, you are doing most people a big favour. Compare the Camel book to c.l.p.m. Compare a well written Linux HowTo with a slashdot 'ask slashdot' thread.
Each of the Open forms has strengths and (severe) weaknesses, and likewise the Closed form. They complement each other.
I don't see the big conflict here, only a series of small ones as we work out just what kind of information is better handled in either an Open or Closed way.
I will continue to buy the writings of those individuals who have an unusual ability to select and present information and ideas. I will continue to read with interest my mailing lists, my slashdot posts, and my other sources of open discussion. There's no conflict.
The point is that while Jose may live in a republic, that republic has increasingly little control over Jose's society. The real control is held by corporations, and they are not democratic in any way.
Many corporations are richer than many countries now. General motors is richer than Denmark.
Increasingly, corporations are making decisions 'in partnership with' local government, because local government is poor and disorganised.
It is a true thing that increasingly, our lives are not blighted by fat, greedy mayors taking back handers in the town hall, but by greedy companies that simply walk all over the town hall.
The interesting parallel between the US Revolution and Jose is that both occassions were primarily about money. If the UK had been smart, they'd have cut taxes on the US, opened up the trade, and all would have been well.
And if people weren't so desperate to have tasty burgers with 0 effort required, there wouldn't be giant companies walking all over us so much.
Censorship???
I hardly think that's the right term for an editorial decision about what a private publisher chooses to publish. Oh shock horror, a media source promotes itself rather than its competitors. Help! Help! We live in a police state!
And, more importantly, it is ABSOLUTELY NOT the same as Slashdot deleting all references to kuro5hin. It might be analagous to slashdot not posting any stories about kuro5hin, which, to the best of my knowledge, is actually the case.
"Liberal Democracy? Sorry, we prefer Thatecherism which lives on in the persona of Jack Straw. Oh well, at least I don't live in NI."
This is your mistake. These bills result from Democracy. Face it, a large majority of people hate gypsies, ravers, crusties, tree huggers and the rest of them. So, most people are in favour of, or at least don't object to, laws that stamp on these people. That's the rule of the many. It bites for the few. The alternative is the rule of the few, which bites for the many.
What's the problem?
That's interesting, because I see the trend as exactly the opposite.
About a year and a bit ago, with the then new Gimp being a flagship for GTK, things looked very good for Gnome. Then, as I saw it, there was a long period of real or perceived Gnome instability and people started looking at KDE. With KDevelop and KOffice starting to look like more than vapour, KDE seems to me to be on the ascendancy.
TT's business model seems quite straightforward to me. They are writing software that is so good that people will pay for it. However, no matter how good it is, those paying people won't want to use it if no one else does. So, TT creates a userbase by giving it away for free beer to those who wouldn't have paid anyway. However, free beer isn't good enough, because that user base cares about free speech, so TT give it away free beer and free speech, which is still fine because those people still weren't going to pay either way. Net result, TT makes money by selling QT to those who want a very good toolkit, TT gets some OS style help in the form of patches, and TT's paying customers feel good that there are lots of other developers keeping the toolkit popular.
And yes, GTK is a direct threat to this model, and Gnome's success is therefore a threat. This is all fine - it's a perfectly good business model, and no doubt TT will be trying hard to ensure GTKs failure, and no doubt the main way they'll do this is by making QT better and better. Sounds good to me.
Hmmmm. I agree wholeheartedly with Jon on this, and I have not taken the luddite position on any other technologies to date.
The problem is two fold:
1. Genetics involves systems orders of magnitude more complex than the systems involved in nuclear power, space flight or anything else.
2. The problems are not technical ("We're fucked if this power station melts down") but social ("We don't the ability to do this because we will abuse it").
People are greedy. There is good evidence to support the notion that people will knowingly do immense and certain long-term harm to themselves and others in return for fairly slight short term gain. See drug addiction. See smoking. See cheating on you wife with that student. See buying a new dress when you know you can't afford it.
So, we can be fairly sure that if you give someone the ability to have children who are genetically modified to be good at sports, everyone will want to have children like that. No one is too worried about the process going wrong and producing wierd freak psycho killer mutants. Everyone is worried about the process going bang to plan and producing loads of children genetically modified to be good at sport.
It scares the shit out me, anyway.
Now, there are areas where people worry about tech disaster - in particular GM food, where some people think we'll cause some kind of genetic melt down. I tend to agree that there is an element of the doomsayer situation you mention above. However, I also say that we know even less about what we are doing with the genetics that we do with the nuclear power.
However, the real area of concern is not this tech disaster area. It's the social area. This is not a tech problem, it's a social one - but until now it's merely been a hypothetical social problem of interest to philosophers and sci fi writers. But most of all, it's been of interest to almost no-one, and no-one has been thinking about it hard enough. And here we are in a position to start acting on it.
I'm scared, so should you be.
Yesterday, they patented Bismati rice. Idle fuckers.
"In one area (PC) the best games are the ones left half, or completely, open"
REALLY??? Angband springs to mind as a game that benefited from OS development. Yes, there were some truly nice mods to Quake and Doom.
But,
Day of the Tentacle
Dungeon Keeper
Populous
Elite
X-com series
Civ series
billions of others
They were all very very very closed source. Games are imaginative. Committees don't have good imaginations. OS games generally suck unless they are simply feature-crammed implementations of tried and tested formulas.
People in London who are into such things should check out the reproduction blade of the Sutton Hoo sword in the British Museum. It's a nice example of Damascus steel work and gives an idea of why these things must have been so highly prized. The reproduction blade was made in Wisconsin, which is funny.
Also, while I know little about ancient weapons tech, there is a seemingly reliable account of the battle of Hastings that describes an axe blow delivered by a saxon housecarl that cut through a horse's neck and chopped the rider's leg off. One assumes that the foot soldiers of the time were wielding pretty heavy weapons...
Writes Jon Katz:
"Mainstream media are fascinated with themselves."
And let me see, this daming criticism comes in the middle of an article that is part (we assume) of Jon's much heralded 'Open Media', and which - oh gosh and golly - does no more than spout on endlessly about how important and wonderful 'Open Media' is.
So - fair to say that even non-mainstream media is fascinated with itself, eh? In fact, I would have to say that Jon Katz spends rather alot of time talking about Old Media, New Media, Slashdot, Himself, etc etc. I'd say a case of leopards not changing spots.
Hi,
m l
You may be interested in a critique of the UI that I did:
http://www.snowdrift.org/computers/gimp-crit.ht
The response was not entirely hostile, but the fact remains that 'code it or go shut up' still rules. Programmers are not willing to see themselves as implementing a good idea they didn't think of, certainly not willing to implement a good idea they don't agree with.
This is why non-free software doesn't have too much to fear yet. Meanwhile I've started to join in with KImageShop in the hope I can talk them round to at least thinking hard about the UI with UI hats on and not programmer hats on.
Um, since I wasn't using the net in 1989 I could be wrong, but RFC 1436 (1993) states:
"This
document is adapted from the basic Internet Gopher protocol document
first issued by the Microcomputer Center at the University of
Minnesota in 1991.
"
Which suggests to me that gopher is more recent than 1989.
Heh - someone noticed :-)
It's even funnier with cheese.
If you have any combination of cordless phones, wireless ethernet, wireless video, or Bluetooth you could be having problems. Not only will your bank balance will be suffering a from the debhilitating effects of continuous expenditure on unecessary geeky networking technologies, but your health will be in sever danger.
An article to be published in the Lancet later this month will show how people can suffer serious side effects from replacing all the cables in their house.
"It started happening after I went to one of those underground Linux install parties" reports a young man, who we'll call 'Alf'.
"At first, it was just phones. You know, people passing around some Nokia's and Ericssons, and it felt really good to be cordless. It was like I was with the in-crowd."
"After a few weeks though, people started getting out the infra-red enabled PDAs out. I didn't think anything of it at the time."
But, as the report shows, cordlessness is an unpleasant and addictive activity, and it's only a matter of time before the serious health implications start. 'Ben' has been in re-hab for three months now, getting used to staying in the same place when he talks on the phone, and being re-trained in Cat5 cabling.
"I can't remember much towards the end" says Ben, "I was really out of it. There was like about 4 of us in this house in Shoreditch, you know with serious 802.11b right through. It was like a permanent trip. We used to have these wild parties at weekends with loads of girls and booze, it was pretty wild, people doing it with like Psion5's and i-mode phones, really f**cked up stuff."
But although Ben is recovering, it's a growing problem thoughout London and the whole of the West. Dissatisfied with their parents' strict ideas of free love, home grown dope, and long skirts, the young generation are turning to hardcore wireless technologies, with street names such as Bluetooth, WAP and i-mode.
Next: The Goverment launches "War on Wireless" to stop this disturbing trend in our young people.
As we know, humans have a remarkable ability to determine meaning and pattern where there is mere randmoness and co-incidence. Hence the shapes in clouds, and the pictures in ink blots.
The Haiku, being a very minimalist form, allows the brain of the reader to fill in so many gaps in the sense of the language that there is room to create entire meaning where none is intended.
Thus, as with Elisa, the cleverness of haiku generators lies less in the programming, and more in the linguistic observation regarding the nature of the text produced.
Not, of course, to say that writing haiku generators isn't fun and worthwhile. But's let's not call them intelligent, because firstly they aren't, and secondly we should marvel more at humans' ability to synthesise meaning and pattern and less at computers' ability to imitate it.
It's a really bad advert. It's the kind of thing a 19yr old CS student would think was good. I sure hope they didn't actually pay an ad agency to think it up.
As far as I can tell it simply makes Linux look like the favourite OS of young geeks who don't make decisions in companies. It says nothing about the product, it doesn't even say anything about MS products, it simply preaches to the converted, and looks juvenile and silly.
I said as much to Penguin Computing when it first came out and never got a reply. I make purchasing decisions for my company I wouldn't touch them with a barge pole. The advert just screams "Hi, we only really want to sell to 30-man companies full of geeks who will be wowed by our free T shirts".
I dunno, maybe it's just a US thing, the gung-ho anti-competitor advertising (adverts in th UK are not allowed to mention competitors).
But yeah, it sucks.
Yes, this is offtopic, but this interview was a bridge too far. David Faure may not speak English as a first language, but didn't the interviewer either?
"I run the CVS version of KDE2, and I remember seeing an IRC thread in one of packages regarding not running a mail composer within Konqueror, but a mail viewer, so will the composing of documents mainly be launched by an external editor? "
"In terms of KOffice, what parts of KOffice are you working on? "
These are barely grammatical, and very hard to read, certainly not reviewed by whoever wrote them. We all get fed up with web sites that abuse HTML, so why should be stand for abusing English just as badly.
If anyone from linuxuk.co.uk is reading, I hereby volunteer for a job as a sub-editor so no-one else has to read this kind of stuff...
"One would presume that the European Parliament is in some fasion amenable to public pressure"
HA HA ha ha ha ha ha ha Ohhh ho ho ho ho ho tee hee heee heee *splutter* Oh my sides Ho ho ho ho ha Ha ha ha ha ha.
You don't live in Europe do you? The European Parliament is in some fashion amenable to corruption, large expense accounts, glorying in its own power and self importance and congratulating itself on being the driving force of the amazing new wonderful federal Europe.
That said, they sure don't like the U.S. because the EU to some extent defines itself as being not American. So yes, they may well put up a fight, and I hope they do, but don't for one moment think that it's because they listen to public opinion!
Sure it can. First, off, what if the webhost believes wrongly, and they target an innocent machine.
If they correctly identify the attackers and give them a dose of their own medicine, the attack will quickly stop.
Maybe, but maybe not. Many hackers would simply take the challenge and escalate their attacks back. Any hacker doing anything remotely serious in this regard will be using a staging machine of an innocent third party. Wiping that machine won't help anyone - it will just make the hacker compromise another innocent third party machine to stage a revenge from.
If however the attacker is using computers that have been previously taken over, whats the damage? Those computers (more than likely only desktop's in some business or school) cant access the net for a small amount of time. No big deal. No one loses money and some college kid just can't check his email on that machine for a little bit. Big deal.
Oh come on, get serious. So some poor school teacher comes in to find that his classroom server has been thoroughly trashed, and he's got to spend his lunch time doing restores and explaining to the kids how yesterdays work got lost. Lovely. If, instead of being a gung-ho bastard the original victim had simply emailed the admin of the compromised machine and said 'BTW your box is being used to stage hack attacks on me' the teacher would have been able to do a backup and plan a sensible re-install of the box in an orderly fashion. - Plus may have been more willing to help find the real hacker.
It looks to me like there is something to gain (the end of these attacks and such) and not very much to lose by striking back. It would be different if we were talkign about shooting at someone and hoping they were the real attacker, but we are talking about internet access.
Retaliating against hackers is simply stooping to their level, and innocent people are almost certain to get hurt in the process.
I couln't agree more. It's a very sensible thing to do and entirely in the spirit of the net.
As for the re-naming of files, that's a complete red herring. People find songs on Napster because the songs are filed under sensible names - i.e. the name of the song. Whatever filing mechanism you decide to use, if you don't want to use names, then software such as this will always be able to access that filing mechanism just as easily as the official client software.
Seems pretty reasonable to me - no better or worse than grepping usenet to see if people are sayig good or bad things about your company's products - which is itself no better or worse than kibo.
It's what you do in the real world next, that matters. Software is just software..
That's not _quite_ fair is it!
Yes, we all know who invented the lightbulb, because a lightbulb is a very useful thing.
We don't know who invented the technique to manufacture argon, or to create tungsten filament wire, or who figured out how to make a glass bulb that wouldn't shatter. All these were doubtless very important steps forward, but not in themselves useful.
Was inventing packet-switching all that important? More important than inventing the blast furnace? More important than inventing fractional distillation?
We know who invented TV, but few people know who invented the electron gun that it relies on, and few still the people who discovered the physical principles that the electron gun is based around.
Fame has never been that strongly linked to importance...
There are only three things I know of that work well from a boat in blue water:
:-)
1. Satellite comms, preferably Inmarsat or some other well established crowd with geostationary sats. Yes, it's expensive, but kitting a boat out for that kind of voyage is _really_ expensive anyway, so maybe another grand or so won't hurt. Check out:
http://www.inmarsat.com/suppliers/index.html
Inmarsat-B may be the one - 56kb modem equiv, fits in a suitcase.
2. SSB radio, but I've never heard of anyone running digital comms over it. And it depends on weather conditions how far it goes. But, it's nice to be able to hear real live crackly voices 1000 miles from land...
3. Set off the EPIRB and when the come to rescue you tell them you're fine but could they send this message for you?
What boat is being used here? Are they looking for crew?!
The report doesn't actually indicate anything beyond the raw stats - it's kind of pointless.
Currently I find it hard to beleive Napster eats into profit mainly because its just a search engine, it's not a media format or a playback device. It's just not all that interesting a tool.
When and if mp3 or its replacement reaches a better sound quality, and can be used portably and easily (Rio sucks) then it's a threat.
MPAA or whoever needs to pay more attention to someone like Sony releasing high quality digital hi-fi hardware and standard tools and protocols for moving digital music between the hi-fi, the personal player and the car. That will change the industry FAR more than a bunch of college kids wasting their college's bandwidth on tunes.
IANAL
The past history of a defendant cannot (and should not) be used as evidence. You try someone on the facts, not on their reputation or record.
Jurors are forbidden from looking up details of a defendant in public records etc, but that is not the point. Going to your local library and doing a newspaper article search to see if a defendant has a dubious past is:
1. Time consuming
2. Requires reasonable knowledge of how records offices work, how to use microfiche properly etc.
3. Involves a physical element that makes it easier to trace you, make it more apparent you're doing something wrong.
4. Essentially impractical since you'll be in court all day.
Doing the same on the internet, especially on a site that has been created for just such a purpose is:
1. Fast
2. Can be done at night/evening
3. Does not involve verifiable records - depending on the site it could be pure rumour that you're looking up.
4. Doesn't "feel" like you're doing anything wrong.
Overall, I think there's a good argument that such sites seriously impact the jury process, especially as they become better known.
Currently it is quite practical to stop jurors having access to this sort of information. The internet makes it harder, and while for high profile trials jurors are kept in hotels without access to t.v / newspapers etc no-one can afford to do that for every trial of every local criminal.
It would be a bad world indeed where a juror on a case of, say burglary and assault in their local town when home after the first day of the trial and read on www.tastelesscrimesite.com that the defendant had been 'implicated in a number of fraud cases involving pensioners in the area'. That would surely start to bias the average juror into thinking 'this person is wicked' despite the claim being 1. dubious and 2. irrelevant.
To do the same without the Internet the juror would have had to search maybe three years of the local free paper to find the two inch column that says 'local man implicated in recent pensioner scams'. Something that is unlikely to happen.
Yes, it would be nice if net access existed universally as an infrastructure layer in the same way as paved roads, electricity, gas, drainage, and freshwater do.
Net access isn't as important as these. Look how few people in the world have access to any of the above. Depressing, isn't it?
Furthermore, how would I like it if Ford provided me with electricity, Ford built the road between my house and the factory, and Ford supplied me with fresh water.
No f***ing way would I like it not one little bit. If net access really is this vital layer that like sanitation, street lighting, and chlorinated water will pull civilisation into the next era then I ABSOLUTLEY DO NOT WANT IT CONTROLLED BY CORPORATIONS.
On the other hand if net access is just a way for the rich and the poor of the west to waste their time and money on sterile information and pointless shopping, then hey roll on McAmerica, give the the huddled masses peecees and bandwidth, all for free, nothing to lose but your minds.
"Every computer user could shop globally, every retailer sell all over the planet. "
Yeah nice idea. This is where the rich people on the nice side of the world buy stuff made by the other side of the world. Then, they go on holiday to the poor side and come back to tell all their rich friends how much better the poor side is but what a shame its being spoilt by all those factories and poor people with no rights.