I think the "explosion" is in the article writers population: "The number of new articles posted daily has increased 75% from the week before". 75% growth in a week is big. And 25K articles isn't such a small base. I expect that the new contributions are mostly from old contributors waiting for the ban to drop.
China is so big, and so ready to consume such cheap/open services as Wikipedia, that "explosive" isn't going to describe real growth in that market.
Again, I think the first 5 days after the ban is lifted, when people are probably still gunshy from using what could be a government trap, is too soon to judge. We'll see after the New Year in late February just what has exploded, and how much.
To the contrary, I believe that communists are much more geared towards voluntarily donating to nonprofit community activities than are capitalists.
I pointed out that population explosions aren't necessarily entirely good, when they don't support themselves, and pointed out the mechanism to watch for that support.
I don't think they won't. I just want to know whether they will. What makes you think I don't?
How will they catalog all the natural resonant frequencies of all the millions of different molecules in humans and other organisms, including bacteria? How will they keep harmonics, which undergo distortion, and other leakage, from flooding the rooms with high-powered noise that can be reabsorbed by in/organic matter?
Who are they going to test this on? Are they going to get the cellphone and electrical plant testing people to certify this stuff?
Bush's government pissed off a lot of people, including Google and the ACLU (and me), by requisitioning these private search records. They tried to get all of the records, rationalized by "fighting kiddie porn". Now that they got the records, they found that the records undercut their case, as most reasonable people expected.
So all the time and money we let Bush's government spend creating, enforcing and defending the COPA was a waste, while surely unnecessarily hassling people.
Of course, Bush's government did get a copy of all that private data (though probably not from Google), even if their cover story ran out after they got the cat out of the bag.
What will be the next privacy invasion our government tries that backfires (on all of us), but delivers more info their Republican Party can use to spy on us?
Actually, the BIOS keeps company with lots of proprietary drivers and codecs that are distributed only in binary, protected by either copyrights or even patents. The BIOS can be seen as a driver for the entire OS on the PC HW. The codecs can be seen as drivers for the transmission HW.
So there is a whole layer of Linux that remains outside the Open Source domain. There are plenty of open drivers and codecs, proving that it's entirely possible to open them, probably to open them all.
Opening the BIOS is a big chip away at the critical dependency path to run Linux at all, and Google deserves lots of credit for helping to get the basic platform in the clear. There's a lot of other closed components that need opening. Most of them can be opened by their owners. And others can be replaced by alternatives. I hope Google's move pushes more momentum into that movement, until it's all open.
Activity on nonprofit Wikimedia Foundation's Chinese Wikipedia site has skyrocketed since its release
How about donation activity? OK, it's only 5 days into the popularity explosion. But if Chinese support of the nonprofit doesn't also explode by, say, Feb 18, 2007, then how will Wikipedia accommodate the huge demand increase that Chinese popularity represents?
Will the "capitalists" now paying to operate Wikipedia have to give the "Communists" a free ride? Just how does Chinese Communism cooperate with global nonprofits when their government isn't managing the process?
Do you really believe that patents are only for a limited time? You do know that the patent on the microprocessor, invented in 1969, to which I linked, was granted only in 1990, right? And that's just one guy. Intel has the patent army of Genghis Khan.
And even if they didn't, that's all the more reason that the 4004 schematics etc shouldn't be secret or private. They'd be public domain by now.
Though your story about documenting/dating work prior to filing a patent is wrong. Only if that documentation is either published or entered in certified notebooks obtained in advance from the PTO can the work prior to filing be counted as prior art defending from a later filing (but earlier than one's own filing).
Trade secrets are unnecessary when that info is patented. That's the entire point of a patent.
Intel patented the 4004, which they tried to use to enforce a patent on the "microprocessor" generally - though Gilbert Hyatt eventually won it, 20 years later.
Does Intel still have a working patent protecting the 4004? And doesn't that patent include the schematics? What's the point of patenting an invention if other inventors can't tell whether they're reinventing what you've protected from "infringement"?
Thank you for your post-ironic comment. Anonymous Republican Cowards have finally gone so insane, you're spewing the truth while crying the bitter tears of the beaten minority.
Don't worry, the Democrats will make sure you're not sacrificed to an angry god just because you're peculiar.
I figured we're on the same page about Korea. I just don't believe that mediators are automatically neutral, especially in politics/war.
I do think that the US remaining in Korea while negotiating all kinds of other drawdowns from the mid-1950s Cold War stalemates shows at least equal interest in US politicians and military in staying there. Among the various other geopolitics, some of which you and I mentioned, I believe that Bush wants a nuke missle armed N Korea to justify Bush's biggest project since he first took office: Star Wars missile defense.
I prefer no nukes, democratic unification, feeding Koreans, return of US troops. And I think Japan (as well as practically all Koreans, of course) wants that, too. But I fault Japan for not leveraging its 1980s power to help move in that direction. Instead, Japan has let both N Korea and the US work against Japanese and mutual regional interests in peace and prosperity.
If there's a robocop here, it's the US. Not the one played by Peter Weller, but the bezerk automaton that the cyborg eventually trashed. I think of myself as more like Weller;).
So what you're saying is that drug corporations should have to open up their IP, too. That their patents create artificial monopolies built on investments by the public, often from traditional development of material and techniques. That their corporate profits compete with the lives and health of the world that supports their corporations.
Funny how you pronounced that as "all that essential science should stay in monopoly hands, away from the public good".
Democrats now controlling the Congress (in January, anyway) are driving out the antiscience, pro-pollution bureaucrats who the Bush Republicans stuffed into their offices. With at least 6-12 years of lies under the bridge, the new bureaucrats have a lot of shoveling to get to their desks.
The ice in the Greenland and West Antarctic ice sheets alone contain enough water to raise global ocean levels by an average of 35 feet.
The main scenario for their meltwater not drowning >50% of humans and driving the rest into refugees of a collapsed civilization is also bad. That's the collapse of the Thermohaline circulation currently keeping Europe temperate. When it collapses, as has already begun, the icy Scandinavian climate will spread southward, covering probably everything down to the Alps. That regional Ice Age will freeze a lot of water on the surface, keeping the seas from their maximum rise.
But then, the Himalayan and Andean ice sheets will melt, and more from Antarctica and Canada. So the resulting "rebalance" will be chaos, anyway.
Those OS'es were a long time ago, and had other limits. Mainly just "not Linux". Now the "remix culture" has fully arrived, and Linux is the hothouse.
There are several ways to subclass OS objects. One is by just wrapping the OS object in a container object with extra/override/overload method/properties. Classes implementing public handles to members let other apps replace members at will, even dynamically.
Another strategy is to actually subclass the superclass at design time, recompiling the source code for a true subclass for the custom app. That's a benefit of Linux that neither BeOS nor OS/2 offered. And benefit of open source that is largely untapped, though potentially among the biggest competitive advantages.
Every programmer I've ever known has dreamed of writing their own "ultimate programmer's text editor", from scratch. That's why EMACS is so huge. But today's architectures let us mix/match so widely that "scratch" is rarely engaged, except by real fanatics.
If OpenDesktop.org specified a comprehensive set of basic office component APIs with strict functionality definitions, we could install whichever style components under the hood we that prefer, knowing that whichever apps we installed under the dash would work with each other, the way we want.
Without backwards compatibility, however incomplete, different versions of Windows would be different platforms. Which would compete with each other, and especially with new releases of apps and OS. And interfere with Microsoft's claims to represent 90% of installed computers/users/whatever. Which claims are the main factor when most people decide whether to buy/install/develop MS apps.
Backwards compatibility, even if not extensive enough to make all installed MS hosts (including WinCE) into a single platform for the largest imagined application scale economies, is enough to create the illusion of those benefits. Which keeps people buying and building MS at the large scales which actually do deliver those lesser, but still extremely competitive, scale economies.
I've now seen all the TV talking heads stake their claims to their preferred 2008 Republican. The media generally wants McCain, Joe "Schmoe" Scarborough wants Giuliani (maybe just to piss off Pat Buchanan), others fall in line. The only one they're not talking about is Jeb, though he's totally obvious, so he's obviously being protected from last week's fallout. That kind of power to work the media, especially when Republicans have just taken the biggest beating in a century or more, wins elections. And especially if he (or Rove, or Jeb's Rovelet) didn't explicitly coordinate with those bootlickers, he's got by far the most upper hand. His pet "Schiavo" Martinez will lead the Republican House contingent, so he'll have a hand preparing the 2008 campaign ground, driving Democrats into positions he can better run against.
The real question is whether the Republican Party can run a "base" election again, picking a "Conservative", though the country is trending away from that brand. If not, Schwarzenegger is perfect for them. He can act like his inner fascist if that's the brand campaign, or he can act like a "bipartisan", or he can act like a Bloomberg - whatever the national mood, and change with it. That pesky Constitution means he'd have to run as VP, then force a Constitutional Amendment "just in case". A longshot, at least for 2008. Though Jeb/Schwarznazi atop a Republican 111th (or 112, 113 or 114th) Congress would fix that.
BTW, I just got a little kick looking up the specific rule keeping Schwarzenegger from occupying the Kennedy Suite:
the Congress may by Law provide for the Case of Removal, Death, Resignation or Inability, both of the President and Vice President, declaring what Officer shall then act as President, and such Officer shall act accordingly, until the Disability be removed, or a President shall be elected.
I might try debugging your CSS if I could look at it myself.
I don't code Ruby, despite my userID, so I can't grok your pseudo problem. Brooklyn rocks, but I don't know any other Ruby programmers in the boro. So it looks like you're on your own.
"If it weren't for China, the Soviets, Japan..." Before you even get to "America", your hypothetical is pure dreamworld. How about "if Koreans had sailed for California in 1200, their global empire would still rule the world"?
I didn't say that the Korean civil war was the fault of the Koreans, or anyone else. But I will certainly insist on my right to describe the 40,000 US troops, who've kept that DMZ (and most of South Korea) demilitarized, instead of overrun by Korean "Communists", as "mediating". That doesn't mean the mediation was done well, or that military mediation was more sustainable than diplomatic. It doesn't mean the US hasn't avoided integration and reconciliation in favor of perpetuating its role and its forward basing troops that close to China, Russia, and the rest of Asia/Pacific. It doesn't mean anything but what I said: the US has mediated the Korean conflict.
The most common mediation is between conflicting family members - literal family members.
So yeah, I'm talking about the Crazy Olympics. I said that "we", the US side, is winning the Crazy Olympics. That makes us crazier.
I understand that you feel strongly. I lived with a roommate who had just been demobilized from a duty tour inside the DMZ. He was nuts, and I learned all kinds of ways that the US mediation drives everyone insane. So I'm prepared to hear your anxiety and anger. But that doesn't mean I have to accept you getting my post completely wrong, since we agree about the historical, strategic, diplomatic and human problems with the American "solution" that's kept everyone stuck in a war there for over a half-century.
Sorry, you're just going to have to try just a little harder to win the gold in this event.
That's a good point. Though the distance is so long that cars need de/accelerate only at the ends, and cruise together at constant velocity through most of the middle 50-90Mm.
Another option is multiple strands anchoring the stalk. It seems a good idea anyway, for anchor redundancy where weather and humans are most interactive with the system, and much simpler engineering of the anchor and the ground. Probably hundreds of cars could climb "ramps" at an angle towards the central stalk, accelerating to the convergence. At about 200-1000K:h in the thicker atmosphere if outside the ramps, or even faster if protected from turbulence enclosed inside the ramps. The middle of the stalk has to be much stronger, therefore probably thicker, than the ends, to support the tension of the full weight as it increases away from the middle. So there's lots of capacity for independent tracks where velocities are most inconsistent.
Or they could build a nanodiamond car, upholstered in stemcell leather and feathers, just for me to commute to the stars. I'll move my tinfoil hat south, and make popcorn all the way up to the greatest show "on" Earth.
The point of including the basic superclasses in the OS is that every user, any program they use, gets the same, consistent interface (if the developers want to use it). This is not a question of whether office apps are available to users, but whether developers can rely on the same classes and interfaces, to reuse the same code and skills for the same use patterns across any apps.
Users don't need to understand RDBMS or anything else. That's the job of the developers who reuse the OS office components.
At this stage it would be great for Linux for OO.o to factor out their components into 3 tiers, and allow other apps' install packages to depend on installing the office components. OO.o apps themselves could be lightweight glue/shells, a reference platform. The reuse of their components in most other apps (like a wordproc in this panel in which I'm editing this post in Firefox) would increase the userbase for their dedicated office apps.
If OO.o can deploy reusable components like that in the next 18-24 months, before desktop Linux gets defined in the market with a fragmented office base, Linux could jump way past Windows, OSX and other competitors. And we'd all be a lot less schizo as we jump between different apps with similar features but which use different components.
Those Soviet Olympic training programs have clearly paid off. The People can be very proud. South Korea has a firm grasp on "Honorable Mention", though.
Slashdot Mirror
I think the "explosion" is in the article writers population: "The number of new articles posted daily has increased 75% from the week before". 75% growth in a week is big. And 25K articles isn't such a small base. I expect that the new contributions are mostly from old contributors waiting for the ban to drop.
China is so big, and so ready to consume such cheap/open services as Wikipedia, that "explosive" isn't going to describe real growth in that market.
Again, I think the first 5 days after the ban is lifted, when people are probably still gunshy from using what could be a government trap, is too soon to judge. We'll see after the New Year in late February just what has exploded, and how much.
To the contrary, I believe that communists are much more geared towards voluntarily donating to nonprofit community activities than are capitalists.
I pointed out that population explosions aren't necessarily entirely good, when they don't support themselves, and pointed out the mechanism to watch for that support.
I don't think they won't. I just want to know whether they will. What makes you think I don't?
How will they catalog all the natural resonant frequencies of all the millions of different molecules in humans and other organisms, including bacteria? How will they keep harmonics, which undergo distortion, and other leakage, from flooding the rooms with high-powered noise that can be reabsorbed by in/organic matter?
Who are they going to test this on? Are they going to get the cellphone and electrical plant testing people to certify this stuff?
Bush's government pissed off a lot of people, including Google and the ACLU (and me), by requisitioning these private search records. They tried to get all of the records, rationalized by "fighting kiddie porn". Now that they got the records, they found that the records undercut their case, as most reasonable people expected.
So all the time and money we let Bush's government spend creating, enforcing and defending the COPA was a waste, while surely unnecessarily hassling people.
Of course, Bush's government did get a copy of all that private data (though probably not from Google), even if their cover story ran out after they got the cat out of the bag.
What will be the next privacy invasion our government tries that backfires (on all of us), but delivers more info their Republican Party can use to spy on us?
Actually, the BIOS keeps company with lots of proprietary drivers and codecs that are distributed only in binary, protected by either copyrights or even patents. The BIOS can be seen as a driver for the entire OS on the PC HW. The codecs can be seen as drivers for the transmission HW.
So there is a whole layer of Linux that remains outside the Open Source domain. There are plenty of open drivers and codecs, proving that it's entirely possible to open them, probably to open them all.
Opening the BIOS is a big chip away at the critical dependency path to run Linux at all, and Google deserves lots of credit for helping to get the basic platform in the clear. There's a lot of other closed components that need opening. Most of them can be opened by their owners. And others can be replaced by alternatives. I hope Google's move pushes more momentum into that movement, until it's all open.
How about donation activity? OK, it's only 5 days into the popularity explosion. But if Chinese support of the nonprofit doesn't also explode by, say, Feb 18, 2007, then how will Wikipedia accommodate the huge demand increase that Chinese popularity represents?
Will the "capitalists" now paying to operate Wikipedia have to give the "Communists" a free ride? Just how does Chinese Communism cooperate with global nonprofits when their government isn't managing the process?
How about a citation of this article? That's a lot more useful than unaccompanied political innuendo.
Do you really believe that patents are only for a limited time? You do know that the patent on the microprocessor, invented in 1969, to which I linked, was granted only in 1990, right? And that's just one guy. Intel has the patent army of Genghis Khan.
And even if they didn't, that's all the more reason that the 4004 schematics etc shouldn't be secret or private. They'd be public domain by now.
That's what I said.
Though your story about documenting/dating work prior to filing a patent is wrong. Only if that documentation is either published or entered in certified notebooks obtained in advance from the PTO can the work prior to filing be counted as prior art defending from a later filing (but earlier than one's own filing).
Trade secrets are unnecessary when that info is patented. That's the entire point of a patent.
Intel patented the 4004, which they tried to use to enforce a patent on the "microprocessor" generally - though Gilbert Hyatt eventually won it, 20 years later.
Does Intel still have a working patent protecting the 4004? And doesn't that patent include the schematics? What's the point of patenting an invention if other inventors can't tell whether they're reinventing what you've protected from "infringement"?
Thank you for your post-ironic comment. Anonymous Republican Cowards have finally gone so insane, you're spewing the truth while crying the bitter tears of the beaten minority.
Don't worry, the Democrats will make sure you're not sacrificed to an angry god just because you're peculiar.
I figured we're on the same page about Korea. I just don't believe that mediators are automatically neutral, especially in politics/war.
;).
I do think that the US remaining in Korea while negotiating all kinds of other drawdowns from the mid-1950s Cold War stalemates shows at least equal interest in US politicians and military in staying there. Among the various other geopolitics, some of which you and I mentioned, I believe that Bush wants a nuke missle armed N Korea to justify Bush's biggest project since he first took office: Star Wars missile defense.
I prefer no nukes, democratic unification, feeding Koreans, return of US troops. And I think Japan (as well as practically all Koreans, of course) wants that, too. But I fault Japan for not leveraging its 1980s power to help move in that direction. Instead, Japan has let both N Korea and the US work against Japanese and mutual regional interests in peace and prosperity.
If there's a robocop here, it's the US. Not the one played by Peter Weller, but the bezerk automaton that the cyborg eventually trashed. I think of myself as more like Weller
So what you're saying is that drug corporations should have to open up their IP, too. That their patents create artificial monopolies built on investments by the public, often from traditional development of material and techniques. That their corporate profits compete with the lives and health of the world that supports their corporations.
Funny how you pronounced that as "all that essential science should stay in monopoly hands, away from the public good".
Democrats now controlling the Congress (in January, anyway) are driving out the antiscience, pro-pollution bureaucrats who the Bush Republicans stuffed into their offices. With at least 6-12 years of lies under the bridge, the new bureaucrats have a lot of shoveling to get to their desks.
The ice in the Greenland and West Antarctic ice sheets alone contain enough water to raise global ocean levels by an average of 35 feet.
The main scenario for their meltwater not drowning >50% of humans and driving the rest into refugees of a collapsed civilization is also bad. That's the collapse of the Thermohaline circulation currently keeping Europe temperate. When it collapses, as has already begun, the icy Scandinavian climate will spread southward, covering probably everything down to the Alps. That regional Ice Age will freeze a lot of water on the surface, keeping the seas from their maximum rise.
But then, the Himalayan and Andean ice sheets will melt, and more from Antarctica and Canada. So the resulting "rebalance" will be chaos, anyway.
What climber have you seen? These machines are decades in the future.
Those OS'es were a long time ago, and had other limits. Mainly just "not Linux". Now the "remix culture" has fully arrived, and Linux is the hothouse.
There are several ways to subclass OS objects. One is by just wrapping the OS object in a container object with extra/override/overload method/properties. Classes implementing public handles to members let other apps replace members at will, even dynamically.
Another strategy is to actually subclass the superclass at design time, recompiling the source code for a true subclass for the custom app. That's a benefit of Linux that neither BeOS nor OS/2 offered. And benefit of open source that is largely untapped, though potentially among the biggest competitive advantages.
Every programmer I've ever known has dreamed of writing their own "ultimate programmer's text editor", from scratch. That's why EMACS is so huge. But today's architectures let us mix/match so widely that "scratch" is rarely engaged, except by real fanatics.
If OpenDesktop.org specified a comprehensive set of basic office component APIs with strict functionality definitions, we could install whichever style components under the hood we that prefer, knowing that whichever apps we installed under the dash would work with each other, the way we want.
Without backwards compatibility, however incomplete, different versions of Windows would be different platforms. Which would compete with each other, and especially with new releases of apps and OS. And interfere with Microsoft's claims to represent 90% of installed computers/users/whatever. Which claims are the main factor when most people decide whether to buy/install/develop MS apps.
Backwards compatibility, even if not extensive enough to make all installed MS hosts (including WinCE) into a single platform for the largest imagined application scale economies, is enough to create the illusion of those benefits. Which keeps people buying and building MS at the large scales which actually do deliver those lesser, but still extremely competitive, scale economies.
The real question is whether the Republican Party can run a "base" election again, picking a "Conservative", though the country is trending away from that brand. If not, Schwarzenegger is perfect for them. He can act like his inner fascist if that's the brand campaign, or he can act like a "bipartisan", or he can act like a Bloomberg - whatever the national mood, and change with it. That pesky Constitution means he'd have to run as VP, then force a Constitutional Amendment "just in case". A longshot, at least for 2008. Though Jeb/Schwarznazi atop a Republican 111th (or 112, 113 or 114th) Congress would fix that.
BTW, I just got a little kick looking up the specific rule keeping Schwarzenegger from occupying the Kennedy Suite:
I might try debugging your CSS if I could look at it myself.
I don't code Ruby, despite my userID, so I can't grok your pseudo problem. Brooklyn rocks, but I don't know any other Ruby programmers in the boro. So it looks like you're on your own.
Thank you for your entry.
"If it weren't for China, the Soviets, Japan..." Before you even get to "America", your hypothetical is pure dreamworld. How about "if Koreans had sailed for California in 1200, their global empire would still rule the world"?
I didn't say that the Korean civil war was the fault of the Koreans, or anyone else. But I will certainly insist on my right to describe the 40,000 US troops, who've kept that DMZ (and most of South Korea) demilitarized, instead of overrun by Korean "Communists", as "mediating". That doesn't mean the mediation was done well, or that military mediation was more sustainable than diplomatic. It doesn't mean the US hasn't avoided integration and reconciliation in favor of perpetuating its role and its forward basing troops that close to China, Russia, and the rest of Asia/Pacific. It doesn't mean anything but what I said: the US has mediated the Korean conflict.
The most common mediation is between conflicting family members - literal family members.
So yeah, I'm talking about the Crazy Olympics. I said that "we", the US side, is winning the Crazy Olympics. That makes us crazier.
I understand that you feel strongly. I lived with a roommate who had just been demobilized from a duty tour inside the DMZ. He was nuts, and I learned all kinds of ways that the US mediation drives everyone insane. So I'm prepared to hear your anxiety and anger. But that doesn't mean I have to accept you getting my post completely wrong, since we agree about the historical, strategic, diplomatic and human problems with the American "solution" that's kept everyone stuck in a war there for over a half-century.
Sorry, you're just going to have to try just a little harder to win the gold in this event.
That's a good point. Though the distance is so long that cars need de/accelerate only at the ends, and cruise together at constant velocity through most of the middle 50-90Mm.
Another option is multiple strands anchoring the stalk. It seems a good idea anyway, for anchor redundancy where weather and humans are most interactive with the system, and much simpler engineering of the anchor and the ground. Probably hundreds of cars could climb "ramps" at an angle towards the central stalk, accelerating to the convergence. At about 200-1000K:h in the thicker atmosphere if outside the ramps, or even faster if protected from turbulence enclosed inside the ramps. The middle of the stalk has to be much stronger, therefore probably thicker, than the ends, to support the tension of the full weight as it increases away from the middle. So there's lots of capacity for independent tracks where velocities are most inconsistent.
Or they could build a nanodiamond car, upholstered in stemcell leather and feathers, just for me to commute to the stars. I'll move my tinfoil hat south, and make popcorn all the way up to the greatest show "on" Earth.
The point of including the basic superclasses in the OS is that every user, any program they use, gets the same, consistent interface (if the developers want to use it). This is not a question of whether office apps are available to users, but whether developers can rely on the same classes and interfaces, to reuse the same code and skills for the same use patterns across any apps.
Users don't need to understand RDBMS or anything else. That's the job of the developers who reuse the OS office components.
At this stage it would be great for Linux for OO.o to factor out their components into 3 tiers, and allow other apps' install packages to depend on installing the office components. OO.o apps themselves could be lightweight glue/shells, a reference platform. The reuse of their components in most other apps (like a wordproc in this panel in which I'm editing this post in Firefox) would increase the userbase for their dedicated office apps.
If OO.o can deploy reusable components like that in the next 18-24 months, before desktop Linux gets defined in the market with a fragmented office base, Linux could jump way past Windows, OSX and other competitors. And we'd all be a lot less schizo as we jump between different apps with similar features but which use different components.
Those Soviet Olympic training programs have clearly paid off. The People can be very proud. South Korea has a firm grasp on "Honorable Mention", though.
Finally, science to back up the art of "kiss it to make it better".
Love is the drug for me!
I guess after a half-century mediation by America and China, the Korean Peninsula conflict has degenerated into the Crazy Olympics.