You are expecting an email to confirm a massive contract. I send it. Your clever-fuzzy-friendly spam checker decides that it's spam, and bins it. We both lose a lot of money. Who do I sue?
Universalis is a site offering daily prayers and meditations according to the Catholic Liturgy of the Hours, via Web, WAP, and AvantGo. Recondite stuff, but it attracts a loyal following. Some experiences:
Promotion costs: Never paid a cent. Submitted it to a few search engines and people started finding it. Also emailed a few likely-looking sites and got reciprocal links. People recommend to each other, portals add links, traffic shoots up. Last week was 1.3GB in 223000 hits (almost all of it dynamically generated). Admittedly, a good proportion of this was Googlebot.
Hosting costs: Very moderate: roughly the cost of a cup of coffee per day (depending on your café).
Revenue: Not much needed (see above). It is very important to us that the users see us as being on their side, so this means no banner ads or other explicit commercialisation. The only revenue-earning item is a Books page which lists a few relevant books with Amazon links, plus a generic Amazon search button with the message "If you want to support us, use this button when you want to buy books, because we get a percentage". And people do, and it more or less pays for the site.
Universalis isn't necessarily very typical, because the cost of the content itself is zero (I do it, plus users write in and offer to help- inspiring in itself, since the email address is pretty well hidden); but it's worth noting that even nowadays, if you keep costs right down and get people on your side, you really can give a lot of benefit to a lot of people without it costing you too much.
Rivest, Shamir, and Adleman publish a paper on how to do public-key encryption. They then patent the method.
The rest of the world says that if you make something public before patenting it then it's public and not patentable. So everywhere except the USA, people can use RSA as much as they like.
Besides, algorithms aren't patentable in most of the world.
Encryption is dangerous munitions and can't be exported from the USA.
So if you live elsewhere, you're free not only to make those dangerous munitions but also to export them wherever you like (-ish) without American competition. Why do you think the world's first RSA chip was designed in the UK and made in Japan? (I know, I did it).
And so now you guys are shooting yourselves in the foot again. Please, never stop - it helps the rest of us so much, and it's such fun to watch!
The stars-during-an-eclipse test actually gave a wide range of results, including ones that disproved as well as proved General Relativity. Sir Arthur Eddington then wrote an article that dismissed the anti-GR results as being due to experimental error of various kinds, while saying that the pro-GR results had no errors).
Everyone believed him and no-one really minded because they all believed GR by then anyway. Later results have been even more confusing.
As described in the press release, this is, by definition, impossible.
The two enantiomers of a chiral (asymmetrical) molecule are identical in every respect, except that they are mirror-images of each other. Call the two enantiomers of this particular molecule L and R. If you add an electron to L you get L-plus-an-electron (call it L+e) which by definition cannot be any less stable than R+e - in other words, the flip from one to the other simply can't be caused by the addition of the electron by itself.
I'm sure that these research findings are genuine but they've been edited into meaninglessness in order to make a press release - rather like the recent "space is flat" story, which, by the time it was "explained" for the general public, made no sense at all. The rules of editing press releases are:
identify the crucial elements of the story
omit at least one of them.
One thing that might have been omitted:
these molecules are part of a larger complex, or a lattice, or are simply combined in pairs (dimers).
Anything like that does give the possibility of an electron causing a symmetry-flip, because you're not flipping a whole system, just one part of it, and there's nothing to stop a system where one part only is flipped being significantly different from one where it isn't. The system consisting of two left gloves is about as valuable as the system consisting of two right gloves (system flipped as a whole) but a lot less valuable than the system consisting of one left and one right glove!
But I wish someone would get hold of the real information and fill in the gaps...
several dozen monster gotchas on each platform, browser, and version
I don't want to use up too much of your time... and I don't want to clog up too much of Slashdot's valuable space... but the more I know of these 1.1 monster gotchas the better! Is there a web site somewhere, or is email permitted?
(When people try to use my applet, any problems they encounter will be my fault as far as they're concerned, not the platform's fault)
"The only person all this good news doesn't help is me, since I'm in the business of writing applets these days, not applications... Doh!"
In other words, if we're writing applets, most of the world isn't using 1.2 yet... and if a browser doesn't support 1.2, there's no point in telling users to download and install a JVM because they won't know how to do it (or won't be allowed to, in most web cafés) or can't be bothered to, and will go to another site...
One day the world will be wonderfully open-source, but just at the moment it isn't. And speaking as a user rather than as a programmer, I can say that once I've got used to software, I want it to run forever. I have better things to do than learn a new set of bugs. Now (as a user) I don't care what my hardware is, as long as it runs the long-obsolete programs that I bought 15 years ago from a long-defunct supplier. Strictly speaking, you can give me x86 in software if you prefer - but do give it to me, because I want to buy your chips without thinking whether they'll work with my particular accumulation of stuff...
As a programmer my views might very well be different, of course!
[Remember that even having source code doesn't necessarily help. The supplier, and even the community, may be disinclined to make any necessary patches to what they consider to be an out-of-date version of the software-- which means that they won't help with my Wordstar 4 (1987: 5 and 6 were a mess), my Eudora 3 (4 is horrible), my Netscape 3 (ditto)...]
But I admit that I do only run 8080 CP/M programs (1980) about once a month or so, by now (the Pentium quite likes them, I think: gives it a feeling of continuity).
Slashdot Mirror
I've got a biggish Win32 program and wonder about moving it to Qt. How big an effort? Any performance hits / gotchas? Any features that we'll lose?
Want to stop being dependent on MS before they collapse!
You are expecting an email to confirm a massive contract. I send it. Your clever-fuzzy-friendly spam checker decides that it's spam, and bins it. We both lose a lot of money.
Who do I sue?
Have you taken out a licence from Microsoft to redistribute their EULA? It is their copyright, and they spent a lot of money writing it.
- Promotion costs: Never paid a cent. Submitted it to a few search engines and people started finding it. Also emailed a few likely-looking sites and got reciprocal links. People recommend to each other, portals add links, traffic shoots up. Last week was 1.3GB in 223000 hits (almost all of it dynamically generated). Admittedly, a good proportion of this was Googlebot.
- Hosting costs: Very moderate: roughly the cost of a cup of coffee per day (depending on your café).
- Revenue: Not much needed (see above). It is very important to us that the users see us as being on their side, so this means no banner ads or other explicit commercialisation. The only revenue-earning item is a Books page which lists a few relevant books with Amazon links, plus a generic Amazon search button with the message "If you want to support us, use this button when you want to buy books, because we get a percentage". And people do, and it more or less pays for the site.
Universalis isn't necessarily very typical, because the cost of the content itself is zero (I do it, plus users write in and offer to help- inspiring in itself, since the email address is pretty well hidden); but it's worth noting that even nowadays, if you keep costs right down and get people on your side, you really can give a lot of benefit to a lot of people without it costing you too much.One Mogg, not two. William Rees-Mogg, former editor of The Times. If you have a silly name, it is some consolation to get it spelt right.
Remember encryption?
- Rivest, Shamir, and Adleman publish a paper on how to do public-key encryption. They then patent the method.
- The rest of the world says that if you make something public before patenting it then it's public and not patentable. So everywhere except the USA, people can use RSA as much as they like.
- Besides, algorithms aren't patentable in most of the world.
- Encryption is dangerous munitions and can't be exported from the USA.
- So if you live elsewhere, you're free not only to make those dangerous munitions but also to export them wherever you like (-ish) without American competition. Why do you think the world's first RSA chip was designed in the UK and made in Japan? (I know, I did it).
And so now you guys are shooting yourselves in the foot again. Please, never stop - it helps the rest of us so much, and it's such fun to watch!Everyone believed him and no-one really minded because they all believed GR by then anyway. Later results have been even more confusing.
For a fuller story, see The Golem : What You Should Know About Science by Collins & Pinch, which I read a couple of days ago for the second time and found riveting.
The two enantiomers of a chiral (asymmetrical) molecule are identical in every respect, except that they are mirror-images of each other. Call the two enantiomers of this particular molecule L and R. If you add an electron to L you get L-plus-an-electron (call it L+e) which by definition cannot be any less stable than R+e - in other words, the flip from one to the other simply can't be caused by the addition of the electron by itself.
I'm sure that these research findings are genuine but they've been edited into meaninglessness in order to make a press release - rather like the recent "space is flat" story, which, by the time it was "explained" for the general public, made no sense at all. The rules of editing press releases are:
One thing that might have been omitted:
Anything like that does give the possibility of an electron causing a symmetry-flip, because you're not flipping a whole system, just one part of it, and there's nothing to stop a system where one part only is flipped being significantly different from one where it isn't. The system consisting of two left gloves is about as valuable as the system consisting of two right gloves (system flipped as a whole) but a lot less valuable than the system consisting of one left and one right glove!But I wish someone would get hold of the real information and fill in the gaps...
I don't want to use up too much of your time... and I don't want to clog up too much of Slashdot's valuable space... but the more I know of these 1.1 monster gotchas the better! Is there a web site somewhere, or is email permitted?
(When people try to use my applet, any problems they encounter will be my fault as far as they're concerned, not the platform's fault)
"The only person all this good news doesn't help is me, since I'm in the business of writing applets these days, not applications... Doh!"
In other words, if we're writing applets, most of the world isn't using 1.2 yet... and if a browser doesn't support 1.2, there's no point in telling users to download and install a JVM because they won't know how to do it (or won't be allowed to, in most web cafés) or can't be bothered to, and will go to another site...
Is this a fair interpretation?
Yes!
One day the world will be wonderfully open-source, but just at the moment it isn't. And speaking as a user rather than as a programmer, I can say that once I've got used to software, I want it to run forever. I have better things to do than learn a new set of bugs.Now (as a user) I don't care what my hardware is, as long as it runs the long-obsolete programs that I bought 15 years ago from a long-defunct supplier. Strictly speaking, you can give me x86 in software if you prefer - but do give it to me, because I want to buy your chips without thinking whether they'll work with my particular accumulation of stuff...
As a programmer my views might very well be different, of course!
[Remember that even having source code doesn't necessarily help. The supplier, and even the community, may be disinclined to make any necessary patches to what they consider to be an out-of-date version of the software-- which means that they won't help with my Wordstar 4 (1987: 5 and 6 were a mess), my Eudora 3 (4 is horrible), my Netscape 3 (ditto)...]
But I admit that I do only run 8080 CP/M programs (1980) about once a month or so, by now (the Pentium quite likes them, I think: gives it a feeling of continuity).