Every file you create is tagged with three new, additional pieces of metadata: latitude, longitude and altitude. That's on top of the date and time data we already attach to every file.
I certainly understand what meta-data is and I use it all the time. When I first read your post I was quite inspired by the possibilities. A lot of my mobile computing is location based. The Mac locations help, but don't go far enough.
However, I'm reminded how hard it is to get rid of meta-data. People tend to just copy documents and then edit them. That's fine if everyone's word processor is very smart, but the reality is they're not.
I've got many documents on my network that all have the same title in the meta-data. Most people don't ever update document meta-data. Eventually that will change (I hope). Another example is how people start "new" threads in email by simply repying and changing the subject never realizing the "References" aren't erased.
My other concern is privacy. Imagine some whistleblower writes a document exposing the government for some terrible offense only to be arrested at the location they wrote the document.
I have no doubt there are lots of smart people thinking about these things. I'm hopeful that as Apple takes meta-data to the next level they'll do it in a consumer friendly way.
My problem is that I don't have an interface to it. I'd love to see Apple release an iTunes for Linux. Short of that, I'd like to see a web interface to iTunes that supported Mozilla well. Short of that, I'd like to see someone license iTMS and build a third-party web interface to iTMS.
I think we'd all agree that you can't put a EULA on the screen with the words "If you blink in the next 30 seconds, you affirm acceptance of the follwing terms and conditions." Right? So why is "by clicking, you agree" considered legally binding?
Are you saying that clicking the "I Agree" button is an involuntary action?
For the record, Christianity was not treated well by the Romans. Emporer Nero used to use Christians as human torches at his lawn parties. Killing Christians (men, women, and children) in the arena was common sport. They were crucified, beheded, used as slave labor, and generally discriminated against at every opportunity. In short, there was no incentive to become a Christian in the first and second centry other than believing the message of Christianity.
We got Roman Catholicism (and all that entails) several centuries later when Emporer Constantine was converted to Christianity. He made Christianity the official religion and the rest is history (until someone rewrites it).
DirectPlay - A high level networking API. DirectPlay is independent of the underlying protocol, and encapsulates high level networking concepts like meeting places and session management.
I don't know anything about DirectX or DirectPlay. Admittedly, I'm a server programmer; not a client programmer. However, it's interesting that this comment was made nearly the same day as Joel "MicroSerf" Spolsky bemoans that all non-trivial abstractions, to some degree, leak and it's dragging us down.
The problem is, even if your code is portable the compiler may not be. Or the linker. Not everyone is up to full ANSI compliance still.
This is why almost every shop I've worked in (which is several in a variety of industries) uses gcc. Even when I worked for a company that was actually antagonistic towards free software the projects that were Unix based use gcc.
This is also why it seems like most of the shops are closing down their compiler teams. Maybe I'm wrong. I know Sun used to have their own compiler (that cost extra), HP used to have their own (that was extra), IBM had their own as well (what do you know, it cost extra). I don't know how many companies still sell their own compiler; however, I don't see how they can afford to any more.
Embedding Perl in HTML with Mason, written by Ken Williams and me, is now available at booksellers of distinction.
Do you think he chose to announce his book in this fashion because it was a slashdot submission or do you think the entire book is filled with grammar like this? Maybe he should have run this submission through his editor.
I don't think I've talked to a UNIX guy (and I'm talking about serious sorts, not the type churned out with an IS degree and little idea what they're doing) yet who's talked about this and said "No, I've never pirated software/cracked software/broken into someone's server".
I consider myself a Unix guy. I started as a sysadmin on SunOS boxes when I was in college over a dozen years ago. I don't have an IS degree. I have an electrical engineering degree. I started using Linux when you had to patch your kernel to get ATAPI cd-rom support. I've been paid as a professional Unix programmer since 1996. I've ben paid to develop for Linux since 2000. Right now I'm being paid to develop a Linux device driver. I think I have an idea what I'm doing.
All that to say, "No, I've never pirated software/cracked software/broken into someone's server."
I couldn't understand from your post if you have a wife and three kids or not. I do. My wife and I have been married 10 years. I have a 4 year old boy, a 20 month old boy and a 8 month old girl. I think 14 - 18 hours a week that is purely personal discretionary time is a little optimistic. If I totally cut out all TV I would still only be getting about half that.
Even still, the reality is not quite what you paint. You're forgetting all the other responsibilities of life. I do more than sleep, have a full-time job, play with kids, and have a hoby. Even with my wife as a full-time mother there is still lots of time-killers: cooking, shoping, cleaning, home maintenance. These things take on par of 20 hours of my time a week. That doesn't include stuff like personal study (philosophical, religous, technical, or other academic) or physical fitness which don't qualify as a hobby for me.
The other thing your time slicing doesn't take into account is the affects of low sleep on aged people. I'm only 30, but I still don't function very well with less than 7 hours of sleep. Even with over 7 hours of sleep, it still doesn't do me as much good when it's interrupted by babies in the night. Anyway, going to bed at Midnight or 1:00am and getting up at 6:00am or 7:00am doesn't cut it for me. To get up at those hours, I need to be in bed by 10:00pm or 11:00pm.
Why don't we atheists go around looting and pillaging and generally being bad? Answer: because doing so leads to bad things in this lifetime. This is independent of any afterlife.
The problem here is an implicit assumption. That assumption is "Only God is fit to decide what is good." If God suddenly decided that it's your moral duty to commit a murder a month would you do it? This is not as silly as it sounds. God is commonly held to be omnipotent. This includes the ability to reverse the meanings of "good" and "evil". If God does not define what is good and evil then those meanings are accessible even to those who are not Judeo Christians. Again, most Christians seem to grok this. I've even sat in sermons that made the point that morality requires the exercise of judgement.
God is not some arbitrary individual jerking strings to see what happens. God is good. Evil can not stand in the presence of God. We base many of our measurements based on standards at NIST. I can't argue that my arm is a mile long because of those standards. I believe morality is the same way. Morality isn't arbitrary. It doesn't change with each generation. It doesn't change based on your geographical location. It isn't determined by a vote. God is the standard of morality. He is the unchanging Truth.
The problem comes in that God is not revealed to us perfectly. There are a lot of things God has done that I don't understand. What I do understand is that we have the Bible as God's Word. Each of us as individuals (not as some corporate body that meets once a year) have the responsibility to read and understand what God is saying to us and follow it.
Yes, people have abused God's name to justify horrible acts. It continues today. I apologize for those acts. I hope and believe that one day God will set all things Right.
BTW, please don't lump OBL and Muslims in with Judeo-Christians. Yes, all of us are monotheist. But that doesn't make Alah == God. The Muslims think that we have perverted what Alah has said to the point of being infidels. The words of the Koran have very little in common with the words of my Bible. It is my belief that Mohomad selected one of the many gods of the ancient Arabic polytheistic beliefs and declared him the "one true god". This has no intersection with Judaism or Christianity.
Inplicit in your posts is the idea that only your belief system contains the key to moral and ethical behaivor. Everybody else must be on a greased slicky slide to Hell.
Yes, I believe the only way to gain eternal life is through Jesus the Christ. That's what He claimed and that's what I believe. Jesus said, "I am the way, the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me." He didn't say "a way, a truth, and a life."
Does that mean I think everyone else is going to be in some place of eternal torment and pain and suffering. Actually, no. I believe that life apart from God is impossible. My reading of the Bible does not support the idea that all men have immortal souls that will live forever. I believe that after the Day of Judgement those not saved through Christ will be destroyed forever and permanently. They will simply cease to exist. Those found to be "in" Christ will be given eternal life with God.
If I shared your viewpoint I could logically conclude that atheists/agnostics are all homicidal libertines who just haven't been caught yet. If you don't believe this then you're engaging in some rather confusing philosophizing. Since atheists are no more murderous or larcenous than anybody else then what do you suggest keeps them in check? I think they'll take some exception to "afraid of getting caught".
If you don't believe in some kind of god or higher authority, how do you decide what is moral? Just what "feels right"? It may "feels right" to have an extra-marital affair. Does that make it right or wrong? Who's to say that some murderers don't "feel bad" about their killings. Who are you to tell them they are wrong? Without God how do you decide what is moral? Even if murder, rape, and general abuse of others is deemed immoral, who cares? If you have no consequences, who cares if you're immoral? Why not just serve yourself and get as much as you can from this life? From that stand-point, what's wrong with Bill Gates? He's just living for himself. Why should he care about his community? What price will he pay if he uses his billions to just screw the planet for the next 30 or 40 years until he dies?
Yes, it does seem ironic. The difference is that SomaFM (and many other independent web radio stations) don't play the exact singles the record companies want them to.
So when record company X wants to push some new boy band, Soma says "up yours". It stands to reason that if the record companies want to get some band played that sucks they'll have to pay someone to do it. If the band/song were good, then you wouldn't have to pay anyone to play it. They would just want to.
Whoever has control has to pay. If the record companies want to control the playlist, then they have to pay. If the radio stations want to control the playlist, then they have to pay.
Ralph Nader already has his moment at the top of the world. His clout has long been exhausted and now he only sits on the top of the sun, melting away like Frosty the Snowman.
This is why 7000 people showed up in Tampa to hear him speak
Those 7000 people probably thought they were showing up for some other event but due to faulty invitations got confused.
Maybe the increase in sales he noticed late in term is a result of exactly what he suggests elsewhere in his essay -- the fact that he's gained more publicity as a writer since the book first came out.
He explains there is a very predictable curve describing sales of books. I imagine if pressed he could produce empirical examples of books from other authors that show little to no sales a year or two out after release. I'm sure there are exceptions to this rule. Obviously The Hobbit has consistently sold well. However, I'm sure on average books follow the trend he explains.
Once every single author in existence is giving away books for free, we'll be at exactly the point we're at now, where the only people who get publicity are the ones who pay for it
Giving away books isn't a publicity stunt. It's a product sample. Taking his automotive example, he's giving readers a "test drive". An automotive publicity stunt is having the dealership owner live for a week in one of his cars hoisted by a large crane. The advantage of giving the books away isn't that it makes him an odd-ball in the industry. The advantage is that readers get to know his work with zero investment on their part.
What's more, he could say the same if he was sending out promo copies of the dead tree version.
The difference is that giving away electronic copies cost him almost nothing per copy. Giving away dead tree copies affects his bottom line.
I'd like to see it reproduced by someone else -- maybe a few someones -- before really take any of it seriously.
It would be harder to argue with if the experiment was repeatable. There are more authors than Flint published in his free library. I would like to see some of them either affirm or deny his results.
If you had read the article you would have seen that they claim to not have blocked his address. His messages were blocked because he was mailing attachements to the mailing list.
While this is a "good" bug and I'm all for getting it fixed, I don't think it's the most popular. The View Source bug probably is. It's certainly the most duplicated. In fact, there are really two bugs filed. I'm not sure which one is getting enough attention. I'm just glad there are murmurings of a fix soon.
My overall feeling is that privacy for privacy's sake is never going to be a reality. GET OVER IT.
Is your name really Scott McNeally?
Your argument holds water as long as you hold that only humans will parse the data. Computers are marvelous at generating reports. Rather than saying a single purchase gets lost in the sea of purchases, what if a computer were to summarize every product you've ever bought (only listing each item once or maybe with a count of how many times you had purchased it or possibly the total dollars you had spent on that item)? How long would that list be? How long would it take a prospective employer to read it? Further let's assume your ribbed condoms were just lumped in with "Sex Paraphernalia" and shown with the total dollars you had spent on that category?
Certainly Jews and Christians worship the same God. However, I think there is considerable evidense that Muslims do not. Mohomad was a prophet in a polytheistic Arab culture. I think there is significant evidence that he simply declared that one of the gods (whose name in Arabic is actually "Sin") and claimed he was the only true god. The Koran has little in common with the Bible. I personally believe the only think Islam and Christianity have in common is that they are monotheistic. Just because two religions are both monotheistic does not make their respective gods the same.
I don't find this to be true at all. The Muslims say, "There is one God and Mohomad is his prophet." The Jews say there is one God. Christians say there is one God who sent his son Jesus as a sacrifice to redeem the world. The difference between these statements is quite large. It's not just in "the details." The idea that all three are similar is really just political spin. The fact is that America is at war with Muslims (admittedly not all Muslims). The press and the political system wants us to believe that Islam and Christianity are cousins. That is simply not the case. Muslims view Christians as infidels and vice versa.
The GNU license is open-ended in such a way that you could set your "command structure" any way you want it. By its very nature, the code/document it protects is public-domain, and no "admin power" is give to anybody.
This isn't true. Even if you fork the project the "original author" still has copyright on their work. He's just not able to revoke the license as long as you comply with the terms of the GPL.
So, if you decided to do something like change the license it would still require approval of the "original author". Or if someone way down the line violates the GPL with your fork, the "original author" still has rights to enforce copyright law on the portions he wrote.
Slashdot Mirror
I certainly understand what meta-data is and I use it all the time. When I first read your post I was quite inspired by the possibilities. A lot of my mobile computing is location based. The Mac locations help, but don't go far enough.
However, I'm reminded how hard it is to get rid of meta-data. People tend to just copy documents and then edit them. That's fine if everyone's word processor is very smart, but the reality is they're not.
I've got many documents on my network that all have the same title in the meta-data. Most people don't ever update document meta-data. Eventually that will change (I hope). Another example is how people start "new" threads in email by simply repying and changing the subject never realizing the "References" aren't erased.
My other concern is privacy. Imagine some whistleblower writes a document exposing the government for some terrible offense only to be arrested at the location they wrote the document.
I have no doubt there are lots of smart people thinking about these things. I'm hopeful that as Apple takes meta-data to the next level they'll do it in a consumer friendly way.
Nice talk from an anonymous coward.
My problem is that I don't have an interface to it. I'd love to see Apple release an iTunes for Linux. Short of that, I'd like to see a web interface to iTunes that supported Mozilla well. Short of that, I'd like to see someone license iTMS and build a third-party web interface to iTMS.
Are you saying that clicking the "I Agree" button is an involuntary action?
Despite popular opinion, some things aren't funny to joke about.
I strongly disagree. Krispy Kreme can hook you after a single use.
For the record, Christianity was not treated well by the Romans. Emporer Nero used to use Christians as human torches at his lawn parties. Killing Christians (men, women, and children) in the arena was common sport. They were crucified, beheded, used as slave labor, and generally discriminated against at every opportunity. In short, there was no incentive to become a Christian in the first and second centry other than believing the message of Christianity.
We got Roman Catholicism (and all that entails) several centuries later when Emporer Constantine was converted to Christianity. He made Christianity the official religion and the rest is history (until someone rewrites it).
Why do I care a game has been ported to GNU/Linux? Because I like playing games and don't have any MS-Windows boxes.
I don't dedicate the time to play a lot of games, but if a good title becomes available to me I'll probably buy it.
Of course, this also means the two programmers have to be on the same
LAN segment. Rendezvous doesn't route.
I don't know anything about DirectX or DirectPlay. Admittedly, I'm a server programmer; not a client programmer. However, it's interesting that this comment was made nearly the same day as Joel "MicroSerf" Spolsky bemoans that all non-trivial abstractions, to some degree, leak and it's dragging us down.
This is why almost every shop I've worked in (which is several in a variety of industries) uses gcc. Even when I worked for a company that was actually antagonistic towards free software the projects that were Unix based use gcc.
This is also why it seems like most of the shops are closing down their compiler teams. Maybe I'm wrong. I know Sun used to have their own compiler (that cost extra), HP used to have their own (that was extra), IBM had their own as well (what do you know, it cost extra). I don't know how many companies still sell their own compiler; however, I don't see how they can afford to any more.
Do you think he chose to announce his book in this fashion because it was a slashdot submission or do you think the entire book is filled with grammar like this? Maybe he should have run this submission through his editor.
I consider myself a Unix guy. I started as a sysadmin on SunOS boxes
when I was in college over a dozen years ago. I don't have an IS
degree. I have an electrical engineering degree. I started using
Linux when you had to patch your kernel to get ATAPI cd-rom support.
I've been paid as a professional Unix programmer since 1996. I've ben
paid to develop for Linux since 2000. Right now I'm being paid to
develop a Linux device driver. I think I have an idea what I'm doing.
All that to say, "No, I've never pirated software/cracked
software/broken into someone's server."
I couldn't understand from your post if you have a wife and three kids
or not. I do. My wife and I have been married 10 years. I have a 4
year old boy, a 20 month old boy and a 8 month old girl. I think 14 -
18 hours a week that is purely personal discretionary time is a little
optimistic. If I totally cut out all TV I would still only be getting
about half that.
Even still, the reality is not quite what you paint. You're
forgetting all the other responsibilities of life. I do more than
sleep, have a full-time job, play with kids, and have a hoby. Even
with my wife as a full-time mother there is still lots of
time-killers: cooking, shoping, cleaning, home maintenance. These
things take on par of 20 hours of my time a week. That doesn't
include stuff like personal study (philosophical, religous, technical,
or other academic) or physical fitness which don't qualify as a hobby
for me.
The other thing your time slicing doesn't take into account is the
affects of low sleep on aged people. I'm only 30, but I still don't
function very well with less than 7 hours of sleep. Even with over 7
hours of sleep, it still doesn't do me as much good when it's
interrupted by babies in the night. Anyway, going to bed at Midnight
or 1:00am and getting up at 6:00am or 7:00am doesn't cut it for me.
To get up at those hours, I need to be in bed by 10:00pm or 11:00pm.
So it is just a fear of getting caught?
God is not some arbitrary individual jerking strings to see what happens. God is good. Evil can not stand in the presence of God. We base many of our measurements based on standards at NIST. I can't argue that my arm is a mile long because of those standards. I believe morality is the same way. Morality isn't arbitrary. It doesn't change with each generation. It doesn't change based on your geographical location. It isn't determined by a vote. God is the standard of morality. He is the unchanging Truth.
The problem comes in that God is not revealed to us perfectly. There are a lot of things God has done that I don't understand. What I do understand is that we have the Bible as God's Word. Each of us as individuals (not as some corporate body that meets once a year) have the responsibility to read and understand what God is saying to us and follow it.
Yes, people have abused God's name to justify horrible acts. It continues today. I apologize for those acts. I hope and believe that one day God will set all things Right.
BTW, please don't lump OBL and Muslims in with Judeo-Christians. Yes, all of us are monotheist. But that doesn't make Alah == God. The Muslims think that we have perverted what Alah has said to the point of being infidels. The words of the Koran have very little in common with the words of my Bible. It is my belief that Mohomad selected one of the many gods of the ancient Arabic polytheistic beliefs and declared him the "one true god". This has no intersection with Judaism or Christianity.
Yes, I believe the only way to gain eternal life is through Jesus the Christ. That's what He claimed and that's what I believe. Jesus said, "I am the way, the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me." He didn't say "a way, a truth, and a life."
Does that mean I think everyone else is going to be in some place of eternal torment and pain and suffering. Actually, no. I believe that life apart from God is impossible. My reading of the Bible does not support the idea that all men have immortal souls that will live forever. I believe that after the Day of Judgement those not saved through Christ will be destroyed forever and permanently. They will simply cease to exist. Those found to be "in" Christ will be given eternal life with God.
If you don't believe in some kind of god or higher authority, how do you decide what is moral? Just what "feels right"? It may "feels right" to have an extra-marital affair. Does that make it right or wrong? Who's to say that some murderers don't "feel bad" about their killings. Who are you to tell them they are wrong? Without God how do you decide what is moral? Even if murder, rape, and general abuse of others is deemed immoral, who cares? If you have no consequences, who cares if you're immoral? Why not just serve yourself and get as much as you can from this life? From that stand-point, what's wrong with Bill Gates? He's just living for himself. Why should he care about his community? What price will he pay if he uses his billions to just screw the planet for the next 30 or 40 years until he dies?
Yes, it does seem ironic. The difference is that SomaFM (and many other independent web radio stations) don't play the exact singles the record companies want them to.
So when record company X wants to push some new boy band, Soma says "up yours". It stands to reason that if the record companies want to get some band played that sucks they'll have to pay someone to do it. If the band/song were good, then you wouldn't have to pay anyone to play it. They would just want to.
Whoever has control has to pay. If the record companies want to control the playlist, then they have to pay. If the radio stations want to control the playlist, then they have to pay.
Those 7000 people probably thought they were showing up for some other event but due to faulty invitations got confused.
He explains there is a very predictable curve describing sales of books. I imagine if pressed he could produce empirical examples of books from other authors that show little to no sales a year or two out after release. I'm sure there are exceptions to this rule. Obviously The Hobbit has consistently sold well. However, I'm sure on average books follow the trend he explains.
Giving away books isn't a publicity stunt. It's a product sample. Taking his automotive example, he's giving readers a "test drive". An automotive publicity stunt is having the dealership owner live for a week in one of his cars hoisted by a large crane. The advantage of giving the books away isn't that it makes him an odd-ball in the industry. The advantage is that readers get to know his work with zero investment on their part.
The difference is that giving away electronic copies cost him almost nothing per copy. Giving away dead tree copies affects his bottom line.
It would be harder to argue with if the experiment was repeatable. There are more authors than Flint published in his free library. I would like to see some of them either affirm or deny his results.
If you had read the article you would have seen that they claim to not have blocked his address. His messages were blocked because he was mailing attachements to the mailing list.
While this is a "good" bug and I'm all for getting it fixed, I don't think it's the most popular. The View Source bug probably is. It's certainly the most duplicated. In fact, there are really two bugs filed. I'm not sure which one is getting enough attention. I'm just glad there are murmurings of a fix soon.
Is your name really Scott McNeally?
Your argument holds water as long as you hold that only humans will parse the data. Computers are marvelous at generating reports. Rather than saying a single purchase gets lost in the sea of purchases, what if a computer were to summarize every product you've ever bought (only listing each item once or maybe with a count of how many times you had purchased it or possibly the total dollars you had spent on that item)? How long would that list be? How long would it take a prospective employer to read it? Further let's assume your ribbed condoms were just lumped in with "Sex Paraphernalia" and shown with the total dollars you had spent on that category?
Certainly Jews and Christians worship the same God. However, I think there is considerable evidense that Muslims do not. Mohomad was a prophet in a polytheistic Arab culture. I think there is significant evidence that he simply declared that one of the gods (whose name in Arabic is actually "Sin") and claimed he was the only true god. The Koran has little in common with the Bible. I personally believe the only think Islam and Christianity have in common is that they are monotheistic. Just because two religions are both monotheistic does not make their respective gods the same.
I don't find this to be true at all. The Muslims say, "There is one God and Mohomad is his prophet." The Jews say there is one God. Christians say there is one God who sent his son Jesus as a sacrifice to redeem the world. The difference between these statements is quite large. It's not just in "the details."
The idea that all three are similar is really just political spin. The fact is that America is at war with Muslims (admittedly not all Muslims). The press and the political system wants us to believe that Islam and Christianity are cousins. That is simply not the case. Muslims view Christians as infidels and vice versa.