And the replies to your post aren't much better. For the really deep researchers, here's a link to the tech specs for AppleTV which I found after FORTY FIVE SECONDS of looking. Perhaps less. I wasn't timing it.
Among the shocking newses to report, Apple claims the little white brick will play: MPEG-4: Up to 3 Mbps, Simple Profile with AAC-LC audio up to 160 Kbps (maximum resolution: 720 by 432 pixels at 30 fps).
I don't know what all that AAC-LC part means, but it sure sounds to me like it will play non-DRM MPEG4 files. Anyone with a clue and a foam-free mouth care to clarify?
Better still, anyone want to tell us how we can stream video from Linux to this thing? Because $300 sounds pretty good to me. Hell, a SqueezeBox costs $250 and only plays music.
We'd be much better off if the USPTO followed our example and started giving anonymous members of the public the ability to assign mod-points to patents.
In fact, the WaPo article sounds to me like the USPTO intends something much closer to Slashdot than a Wiki:
The Patent and Trademark Office is starting a pilot project that will not only post patent applications on the Web and invite comments but also use a community rating system designed to push the most respected comments to the top of the file, for serious consideration by the agency's examiners.
I've been surprised not to see a comment about this "pushed to the top of the file" here.
Stroustrup writes "This illustrates the most significant proposed C++0x language extension that is likely to be accepted: concepts. Basically, a concept is the type of a type;..."
Templates brought considerable power to the class idea in C++, but templates are fundamentally a static, compile-time issue, while many things can happen to classes during runtime. For a while now, I've been working on a simulation application (remember when everyone seemed to point to simulation as the major application for C++?) where the type of the input file data elements (e.g. long list of integers, floats, shorts, etc) isn't known until runtime. The simulator uses a pipe and filter architecture, so you'd love to have templates Pipe<D> and Filter<D> where D is the data type, but oooh you won't know that until runtime. And you'd love to make the software future proof for arbitrary types of D. The concepts uh concept discussed in the article look like they could fix this problem. And if they don't, the committee should keep working until they do.
adéu, Mateu
PS why, when I say the post is plain old text, does <D> still require me to use < and so forth?
Many posters noted that the Outlook calendar is as important as the email client.
But to answer your "What the hell do any of those things have to do with email?!"
question, I guess I would ask you whether email discussion has ever led you to
decide it was time to set up a meeting? Or a meeting on your calendar ever led
to email discussions?
I'm going to go ahead and guess that the answer is "uh, yes."
So I'll go one step further and argue that if the open source world wants to rock
the corporate world, they should reframe the debate. Outlook emails and meeting
requests look pretty similar. You can send and receive both. Emails can have
"respond by" dates. Meeting can be forwarded to invite others. Why not accept
this flow of work and make a communication client that accepts how close to
interchangeable these two events are? Why can't I add a date & time to an email
and have the To list receive a meeting request? Why can't I reply to a meeting
request and have everyone receive it? Why do counter-proposals for time/venue
work so badly in Outlook when they happen so often?
I also think considerable opportunity exists to add rules to email & calendar,
but that's a rant for another time.
Eric S. Raymond's Homesteading the Noosphere. Am I the only one who likes this essay more than The Cathedral and the Bazaar? Don't get me wrong, I like both essays, but Cathedral was primarily about one person realizing the promise of open development. Noosphere was his plunge into the why of it. Raymond argues that open source operates as a gift culture, where status comes from giving the best gift instead of acquiring the best toys.
Sounds like the academic world is starting to think along the same lines.
Okay, I know this is Slashdot and only 1% of us care about
grammar, but this Forbes article starts with a split infinitive
in the first sentence. Does it take any particular journalistic
ability to work there?
"AC Propulsion's tzero roadster is a reason to not give up on the electric vehicle."
"The Panther!" wrote:
Do you know how to read? Try reading the GPL. It requires any derivative works to also be GPL. That's a restriction, because it means you can never make software that is available for sale from anything that has been opened as GPL.
Ironic that you appear not to read much either.
Here is
a whole page on the details of how you can sell GPL software.
You will be interested to discover that the FSF encourages you
to sell your GPL'd software.
I'm sure what you mean is "nobody will pay." But a crack software
engineer like you is no doubt providing manuals & support, and I'm
sure your customers will be glad to pay for that. Yes, derivative
works have to be GPL. But if you only change 20-lines, why do you
think you should be paid for the whole app? No author will let me
slap a new cover on her book with my name & charge for that, either.
enjoy your reading,
Matt
I develop simulation software at work. Runs on Linux, HP-UX and Windows (with Cygwin for now). Some of the intermediate steps involve really huge datasets. If a cheap, fast Opteron/Linux system works well for my software, I'd buy one in a second. You're probably right about volume sales, but what Microsoft does will have no effect on me--other than some of our users will buy Opteron/GNU/Linux systems for now.
That's a bummer because that trash can was an interesting innovation.
No no no, you are missing the point. Read the post you replied to again. The patent only covers Apple's design of the trash can icon, not it's functionality. I normally wouldn't resort to bold in such a sentence, but you appear to have completely misread the parent post...
Okay, absolutely nothing in this post has anything to do with the Movimiento Estudiantil Chicano de Aztlan. Where do you people get these digressions? Sheesh. If you want to know about MEChA, try here:
Mateub suggests that Google could make a magazine out of the blogs, complete with ads.
But they can do that already. Have a close look at news.google.com. Search for, hmm, Google At the right side, there's enough space for ads. Google could index just the weblogs, like Daypop, and make a new product out of it (without buying Pyra).
True enough, but I think Google could do a much more planned, coherent version with some actual cooperation from the bloggers.
For example, Google could tell their "preferred" bloggers they want to do an editorial section on, say, Afghanistan--$50 to anyone who writes a piece we use. Or perhaps change blogger.com to use RDF so that Google can more knowledgeably (sp?) format a "Blogzine" page.
It's easier for Google to do this when 500 newspapers go online with a story, but blogger interests are more diverse. I think Google would need something more than their current news system to place, for example, the talking points memo series on the GOP Marketplace trying to swamp Democrat phone banks with calls. Interesting story (to me at least), but apparently only 1 newspaper was reporting it. How would a Google blog news service know what to do with that series today?
In any case, you're probably right in the sense that I think the odds of Google doing something like what I imagine are slim. I still think it could work, but they'll probably come up with something more clever than this. Must be a joy to work in their research lab...
adéu
Mateu
Buying and selling the wisdom of the masses
on
Google buys Pyra Labs
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
Google seems to be establishing a pattern with this purchase.
They bought Deja News, or whatever it was called, giving them direct access to the wisdom of the masses, as encoded in newsgroups. Except that newsgroups seem to be a fading concept, supplanted by mailing lists and blogs. Well, Google can't very well buy mailing lists (from whom would you buy them?) but they just bought most of the blogs. Note that they haven't bought or apparently even tried to buy any traditional mass-media company (CNN, NY Times, Knight-Ridder, etc). In the business world, nobody has placed much value so far on the collected, shared knowledge of the masses, so Google can buy Deja and Pyra for cheap.
The big question is what owning the major information conduits of the masses gets Google. Google didn't just buy Atrios or Dave Barry, they bought the medium everyone is using to blog.
This kind of gets me back to an idea I blogged about a little while back--that you could
probably make a business out of aggregating blogs into an ersatz
net magazine and selling advertising space on the result. Google
presents the advertisers with the combined traffic of the top 20
blogs, shows them a prototype of a salon-style magazine and asks
how much they'd pay for ad space, then goes to those top 20 blogs
and asks them whether they'd agree to publish regularly in exchange
for some (smallish) cut of the ad revenue.
Makes me wonder how long we have until Google buys LiveJournal...
I would not like to have MS stock if they don't succeed, and the investors will begin to ask the wisodm in relying on shares (which is basically a bettin system) in place of getting dividends to obtain a return on their investment...
Well, I don't believe that stock investing is just a betting system, but I completely agree that MS stock seems like a bad investment at this point. Open source software is a disruptive innovation and I think they have missed the window for getting in on it. My point was that if XBox were their only product, they could still afford its burn rate for another half a century.
Let's see, IIRC, Microsoft has $40,000,000,000 in cash.
If we call the "average" of the last 2 quarters a loss
of about $200,000,000, that means Microsoft only has 50
years to turn this product around, or they're history.
If you took a whole bunch of airplane parts and all the Boeing engineers and put them in a room, the result would not be an airplane, because the Boeing company and the things it does in the way of managing/coordinating/research are indeed necessary for the production of airplanes.
If you took a whole bunch of signed recording artists, and left them in a room with the appropriate tools, the result *would* be music, because the marketing/distribution/hyping done by record companies is *not* necessary for the production of music.
Excellent point. Clay Shirky just wrote an interesting article on this, pointing out that music recording and distribution are both digital, but humans decide who gets recorded and promoted. My spin on his article is that the music industry teeters on a precipice and that the first P2P client to include a decent system for finding and rating new music will drive a serious spike in the record companies...
Then you must use your dual-boot setup very differently than I do.
When I'm in Windows, I consistently think about the things I could rather be doing in Linux.
...
"It's so great that I've got tabs in Mozilla. Why can't I have them on my windows too like I do in Linux?"
I can't help but think the same thing about this comment--why don't you just install Mozilla for Windows? It seems to be a memory pig on my laptop at work compared to IE, but I love the tabs, and the popup blocking, and the ad blocking--why shouldn't I have that on Windows?
But for the rest, I agree with cookiepus--until I can use my Omnibook 6000 modem, until I the laptop going to sleep doesn't hang Linux without me trying a dozen scattered patches, until Nortel makes a Linux client to get me inside my company's firewall, I'll keep needing to boot into Windows.
adeu,
Mateu
PS when did accented letters stop working? Like é?
Probably vastly too late for the submitter to see, but the NY Times today had a nice article about the numerous countries leaning more toward open source...
Open source is clearly hampered by patents, viz GIF, MP3, etc. So if your country wants to move toward open source, supporting software patents is not the way to do it.
Somehow when I first read the headline, I thought it said "Too Many Parents As Bad As Too Few" and I was thinking "sure, probably, but what does Slashdot know about this? And Forbes? Oh, patents...
Slashdot Mirror
And the replies to your post aren't much better. For the really deep researchers, here's a link to the tech specs for AppleTV which I found after FORTY FIVE SECONDS of looking. Perhaps less. I wasn't timing it.
Among the shocking newses to report, Apple claims the little white brick will play: MPEG-4: Up to 3 Mbps, Simple Profile with AAC-LC audio up to 160 Kbps (maximum resolution: 720 by 432 pixels at 30 fps).
I don't know what all that AAC-LC part means, but it sure sounds to me like it will play non-DRM MPEG4 files. Anyone with a clue and a foam-free mouth care to clarify?
Better still, anyone want to tell us how we can stream video from Linux to this thing? Because $300 sounds pretty good to me. Hell, a SqueezeBox costs $250 and only plays music.
adéu,Mateu
adéu,
Mateu
At least they should negotiate to get Exene Cervenka to come on for a guest appearance occasionally...
adéu,
Mateu
Google will continue to roll out new products and services
RTFA and dream of the day you are this good.
adéu,
Mateu
PS I predict that Cringely will continue to roll out new predictions and columns
Stroustrup writes "This illustrates the most significant proposed C++0x language extension that is likely to be accepted: concepts. Basically, a concept is the type of a type; ..."
Templates brought considerable power to the class idea in C++, but templates are fundamentally a static, compile-time issue, while many things can happen to classes during runtime. For a while now, I've been working on a simulation application (remember when everyone seemed to point to simulation as the major application for C++?) where the type of the input file data elements (e.g. long list of integers, floats, shorts, etc) isn't known until runtime. The simulator uses a pipe and filter architecture, so you'd love to have templates Pipe<D> and Filter<D> where D is the data type, but oooh you won't know that until runtime. And you'd love to make the software future proof for arbitrary types of D. The concepts uh concept discussed in the article look like they could fix this problem. And if they don't, the committee should keep working until they do.
adéu,
Mateu
PS why, when I say the post is plain old text, does <D> still require me to use < and so forth?
But to answer your "What the hell do any of those things have to do with email?!" question, I guess I would ask you whether email discussion has ever led you to decide it was time to set up a meeting? Or a meeting on your calendar ever led to email discussions?
I'm going to go ahead and guess that the answer is "uh, yes."
So I'll go one step further and argue that if the open source world wants to rock the corporate world, they should reframe the debate. Outlook emails and meeting requests look pretty similar. You can send and receive both. Emails can have "respond by" dates. Meeting can be forwarded to invite others. Why not accept this flow of work and make a communication client that accepts how close to interchangeable these two events are? Why can't I add a date & time to an email and have the To list receive a meeting request? Why can't I reply to a meeting request and have everyone receive it? Why do counter-proposals for time/venue work so badly in Outlook when they happen so often?
I also think considerable opportunity exists to add rules to email & calendar, but that's a rant for another time.
adéu,
Mateu
The Hewlett-Packard site responsible for the DeskJet is in Vancouver, too.
Sounds like the academic world is starting to think along the same lines.
adeu,
Mateu
...where's the video!?!?
"AC Propulsion's tzero roadster is a reason to not give up on the electric vehicle."
>> The ChangeLog is impressive though. Sure, just removing all those SCO copyrights took days! :-)
Matt
"The Panther!" wrote: Do you know how to read? Try reading the GPL. It requires any derivative works to also be GPL. That's a restriction, because it means you can never make software that is available for sale from anything that has been opened as GPL. Ironic that you appear not to read much either. Here is a whole page on the details of how you can sell GPL software. You will be interested to discover that the FSF encourages you to sell your GPL'd software. I'm sure what you mean is "nobody will pay." But a crack software engineer like you is no doubt providing manuals & support, and I'm sure your customers will be glad to pay for that. Yes, derivative works have to be GPL. But if you only change 20-lines, why do you think you should be paid for the whole app? No author will let me slap a new cover on her book with my name & charge for that, either. enjoy your reading, Matt
"apropos" means "being both relevant and opportune"
it is not a smart person word for "appropriate"
But then, I live in Portland, so maybe the dictionaries are localized specially for us...
adeu,
Mateu
I develop simulation software at work. Runs on Linux, HP-UX and Windows (with Cygwin for now). Some of the intermediate steps involve really huge datasets. If a cheap, fast Opteron/Linux system works well for my software, I'd buy one in a second. You're probably right about volume sales, but what Microsoft does will have no effect on me--other than some of our users will buy Opteron/GNU/Linux systems for now.
adéu,
Mateu
That's a bummer because that trash can was an interesting innovation.
No no no, you are missing the point. Read the post you replied to again. The patent only covers Apple's design of the trash can icon, not it's functionality. I normally wouldn't resort to bold in such a sentence, but you appear to have completely misread the parent post...
adéu
Mateu
http://www.panam.edu/orgs/mecha/MECHAlnk.HTM
tee hee... Okay, seriously, this is the only MEChA I knew about before now...
adeu
Mateu
Mateub suggests that Google could make a magazine out of the blogs, complete with ads.
But they can do that already. Have a close look at news.google.com. Search for, hmm, Google At the right side, there's enough space for ads. Google could index just the weblogs, like Daypop, and make a new product out of it (without buying Pyra).
True enough, but I think Google could do a much more planned, coherent version with some actual cooperation from the bloggers.
For example, Google could tell their "preferred" bloggers they want to do an editorial section on, say, Afghanistan--$50 to anyone who writes a piece we use. Or perhaps change blogger.com to use RDF so that Google can more knowledgeably (sp?) format a "Blogzine" page.
It's easier for Google to do this when 500 newspapers go online with a story, but blogger interests are more diverse. I think Google would need something more than their current news system to place, for example, the talking points memo series on the GOP Marketplace trying to swamp Democrat phone banks with calls. Interesting story (to me at least), but apparently only 1 newspaper was reporting it. How would a Google blog news service know what to do with that series today?
In any case, you're probably right in the sense that I think the odds of Google doing something like what I imagine are slim. I still think it could work, but they'll probably come up with something more clever than this. Must be a joy to work in their research lab...
adéu
Mateu
They bought Deja News, or whatever it was called, giving them direct access to the wisdom of the masses, as encoded in newsgroups. Except that newsgroups seem to be a fading concept, supplanted by mailing lists and blogs. Well, Google can't very well buy mailing lists (from whom would you buy them?) but they just bought most of the blogs. Note that they haven't bought or apparently even tried to buy any traditional mass-media company (CNN, NY Times, Knight-Ridder, etc). In the business world, nobody has placed much value so far on the collected, shared knowledge of the masses, so Google can buy Deja and Pyra for cheap.
The big question is what owning the major information conduits of the masses gets Google. Google didn't just buy Atrios or Dave Barry, they bought the medium everyone is using to blog.
This kind of gets me back to an idea I blogged about a little while back--that you could probably make a business out of aggregating blogs into an ersatz net magazine and selling advertising space on the result. Google presents the advertisers with the combined traffic of the top 20 blogs, shows them a prototype of a salon-style magazine and asks how much they'd pay for ad space, then goes to those top 20 blogs and asks them whether they'd agree to publish regularly in exchange for some (smallish) cut of the ad revenue.
Makes me wonder how long we have until Google buys LiveJournal...
adeu,
Mateu
I would not like to have MS stock if they don't succeed, and the investors will begin to ask the wisodm in relying on shares (which is basically a bettin system) in place of getting dividends to obtain a return on their investment...
Well, I don't believe that stock investing is just a betting system, but I completely agree that MS stock seems like a bad investment at this point. Open source software is a disruptive innovation and I think they have missed the window for getting in on it. My point was that if XBox were their only product, they could still afford its burn rate for another half a century.
adeu,
Mateu
Let's see, IIRC, Microsoft has $40,000,000,000 in cash. If we call the "average" of the last 2 quarters a loss of about $200,000,000, that means Microsoft only has 50 years to turn this product around, or they're history.
They're probably quivering at my math right now.
adeu,
Mateu
If you took a whole bunch of airplane parts and all the Boeing engineers and put them in a room, the result would not be an airplane, because the Boeing company and the things it does in the way of managing/coordinating/research are indeed necessary for the production of airplanes.
If you took a whole bunch of signed recording artists, and left them in a room with the appropriate tools, the result *would* be music, because the marketing/distribution/hyping done by record companies is *not* necessary for the production of music.
Excellent point. Clay Shirky just wrote an interesting article on this, pointing out that music recording and distribution are both digital, but humans decide who gets recorded and promoted. My spin on his article is that the music industry teeters on a precipice and that the first P2P client to include a decent system for finding and rating new music will drive a serious spike in the record companies...
adeu,
Mateu
People can't "pirate" subs, gyros, or muffulettas.
sorry, couldn't resist...
adeu,
Mateu
I can't help but think the same thing about this comment--why don't you just install Mozilla for Windows? It seems to be a memory pig on my laptop at work compared to IE, but I love the tabs, and the popup blocking, and the ad blocking--why shouldn't I have that on Windows?
But for the rest, I agree with cookiepus--until I can use my Omnibook 6000 modem, until I the laptop going to sleep doesn't hang Linux without me trying a dozen scattered patches, until Nortel makes a Linux client to get me inside my company's firewall, I'll keep needing to boot into Windows.
adeu,
Mateu
PS when did accented letters stop working? Like é?
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/09/05/technology/05COD E.html
Open source is clearly hampered by patents, viz GIF, MP3, etc. So if your country wants to move toward open source, supporting software patents is not the way to do it.
adéu,
Mateu
Okay, well, same question I guess. ;-)
adéu,
Mateu