Okay, help me out here. Canonical will sell people a copy of Opera if they want it. That means Ubuntu is bad. So we don't want to have anything to do with Ubuntu. So we want to install gNewStep, which is pure and virtuous... and is based on Ubuntu Hardy Heron...?
Or:
If I install Ubuntu Hardy Heron and make my own decision to leave Flash and Lame and off of my system, then I'm making a choice that's morally inferior to installing gNewStep, which is a version of Ubuntu Hardy Heron where somebody else has made the decision to leave Flash and Lame off of the CDs and repositories...? Is it sort of like being an ultraorthodox Jew and hiring somebody else to turn off the light switches on the Sabbath, so you don't have to touch them yourself?
But this way, the distro supports hardware manufacturers who release their drivers under a free license (because their user don't have any problems!).
Wow, that's some pretty tortured logic. If that logic was going to work, we'd need two groups of users: group A using gNewSense with supported hardware, and group B using gNewSense with unsupported hardware and having "problems." I'm straining my brain to understand why this is a good thing. Group A could have just used Ubuntu, which would have installed OSS drivers by default. Group B is sad, because their wifi on their laptop doesn't work or whatever, and at this point they're probably thinking, "Oh my god, why was I so stupid? Why the hell did I install gNewStep without checking hardware compatibility?" Why is it a good thing that group B is sad? More to the point, what is group B going to do now? I guess they could toss their laptop in the garbage and write a stern letter to Linksys complaining that their wifi doesn't work, but that doesn't seem very realistic. I guess they could replace their Linksys wifi card with an Atheros one, but hey, did they really need to install gNewSense in order to get that experience? Couldn't they just have installed Ubuntu, found that OSS drivers weren't available, and made their own decision to buy a different card rather than installing the binary blob? Wouldn't that have rewarded Atheros just as much? And how exactly is this going to deter Linksys? Linksys already made a sale.
Certainly any laptop with Atheros wireless, Intel graphics and sound is going to work nicely.
So rather than run GNewSense, why not just get yourself a laptop with Atheros wireless and Intel graphics, install Ubuntu, and go with the OSS drivers, which are the defaults?
If this is something that some people want, then that's great, more power to them. But I'm left with a lot of misgivings:
If I was really serious about running a system with no binary blobs, I think I'd probably run OpenBSD. The level of hassles you encounter with an OS basically depends on how big its audience is and how many resources it has available. When it comes to something that's even more obscure than OpenBSD, I'm chicken. And I'm not clear on what advantages GNewSense would have over OpenBSD.
If you have hardware whose only linux support is via binary blobs, then you can't use GNewSense, because your hardware won't work. If you
have hardware that has linux support via OSS drivers, then you don't need GNewSense, you can just install ubuntu and select OSS drivers rather than any binary drivers that are also available.
All other things being equal, I'd love to buy only hardware that's got good OSS support, and run only OSS drivers. Unfortunately, doing that is much, much harder than it should be. For example, I bought my kids $200 Linux boxes to put in their rooms, and we don't want to drill holes and run cables, so we're using wifi for those machines. The wifi cards I bought had Rt61 and Rt2500 chipsets. The FSF says that the Rt2500 has support from open-source drivers, whereas the Rt61 doesn't. But actually, the OSS drivers for the Rt2500 don't really work in my experience. That is, if you install the Linksys binary-blob drivers via ndiswrapper, and you start Gnome, you get a little logo that shows you you've automatically established an internet connection, it shows you the power level, everything works. If you install the OSS driver, then apparently none of that works. No, my kids are not going to open a terminal window every time they want internet access and type cryptic commands. If you search on ubuntuforums.org, you'll find dozens of threads about getting Rt2500 wifi to work using ndiswrapper, with lots of discussion of the various pitfalls, etc. Why would people be putting that amount of effort into installing the binary blobs if the OSS support actually worked well, as the FSF claims?
Their faq sort of makes it sound like other distros are toilet seats in public restrooms; they have lots of invisible germs that you'll get on you, and you won't know it. Realistically, I think Ubuntu and Debian make it reasonably clear when you're installing closed-source software. The faq mentions GLX as an example where you can inadvertently installed non-OSS software on Debian or Ubuntu. Rather than installing a very obscure distro, wouldn't it be easier just to install something like Ubuntu, do the research to find out that GLX isn't free (by someone's definition of free, which may or may not agree with yours), and then make a choice not to install it?
The LA Times, which has historically been one of the best papers in the US, has recently been through a lot of management shakeups, layoffs, and a change of ownership, and its relationship to the web has been a big point of controversy. WP says, 'In December 2006, a team of Times reporters delivered management with a critique of the paper's online news efforts known as the Spring Street Project. The report, which condemned the Times as a "web-stupid" organization," was followed by a shakeup in management of the paper's Web site, latimes.com, and a rebuke of print staff who have "treated change as a threat."' Some of the reporters feel that journalistic standards are lower on the paper's web site than they are in the printed paper. Their circulation is way down.
Burying them underground isn't a great solution. The "parkway" (strip of land between the sidewalk and the street) in front of my house has a fairly small above-ground utility box for POTS, and the neighbors have some more of the local POTS equipment underground in their parkway. For years now, the phone company has been struggling with flooding of the underground stuff, which often causes multiple-day service outages. (People worry about the reliability of VOIP, but we have Vonage, and have kept on being able to use our phone during all those POTS outages that affected our neighbors.)
The slashdot summary seems a little misleading when it refers to "lawns." The photo in the article, for instance, shows one that's in a concrete strip between the sidewalk and the street. Granted, I wouldn't want something that huge and graffiti-covered in front of my house.
Someone should show this document to Sun's OOo team. If you download the source on any given day and try to compile it, there's about a 75% chance that something is broken on that day.
The copyleft=no copyright group seems to believe that anybody who doesn't do copyright the exact same way they do doesn't do copyright at all. Hence this group's lack of respect for the terms of the GPL and similar.
Yeah. I was just talking to a colleague at the school where I teach who is the author of a textbook. We were discussing ways of keeping costs down for students, and he said it ought to be easy these days to get figures from Wikipedia, so the publisher wouldn't have to pay per-copy royalties to photographers, or pay so much to illustrators. I told him that Wikipedia was under a license, and that most of the illustrations were also under that license (or a similar one), so he probably couldn't do that unless his book was under a compatible license (which it isn't). He kept insisting for quite a while that everything on WP was free, until I bombarded him with enough information. Copyleft is a completely foreign concept to most people, so they try to shoehorn it into concepts they know, like "copyrighted" or "public domain." It's like the story about the hillbilly who came to the big city and visited the zoo, saw a giraffe, turned away, and said, to no one in particular, "There ain't no such animal."
The community college where I teach has 22 IT workers out of a total staff of 706, for a ratio of 32:1. I think they stay pretty busy. One of the side-effects is that in order to simplify things, they push hard for supporting only one OS, which is Windows. The campus is extremely reluctant to provide macs, and when it comes to my linux box that I brought from home to put on my desk, they barely tolerate it on their network.
What do you consider to be the problem with JavaScript as a general-purpose programming language? I think it's a sweet language. Just because a lot of people learn it as a set of cookbook recipes for doing little things on web pages, that doesn't mean the language isn't a good language. The only really serious problem with JavaScript, IMO, is the lack of standardization of the DOM, and that's not even a real language issue, it's just a problem with the way the language gets interfaced to browsers.
Ditto for old versions of MacOS X. My wife was an early adopter of MacOS X, but we got tired of paying $130 to Apple for every point upgrade. There's more and more software that won't run on her machines now. I tried installing ff3, and it didn't run.
If theres no copyright issue , most of these opensource books could be printed for $20-30 a copy for a large hardcover book. Private companies could even make a small profit selling the equivalent of "thrift editions" of these text books. They do it already for books in the public domain and furthermore most universities already have on-campus printers.
The most practical, hassle-free way to do this right now is to use lulu.com, which is a print-on-demand company started by one of the founders of Red Hat. What differentiates them from a lot of the other vanity presses and POD companies is that they have setups you can get without paying them any money. I use lulu to handle the printed copies of my nonprofit, open-source physics textbooks.
Actually, the CalTech prof who's most prominently featured in the article makes his book available in PDF and MS Word format. He has the link to the Word file labeled "Source Code," so he obviously groks the open-source concept and is trying to do something similar. Of course Word is a proprietary format, but it's a proprietary format with pretty darn good OSS support.
Quite a few free textbooks do come with latex source code. Examples: [1],
[2],
[3],
[4].
I am sure that Google has good security policies, good backups, good admins. But I stand by myself not wanting to risk the added exposure and possibility of being shut down by events outside of my control.
I'm sure you're highly competent. But there is a general human psychological tendency to discount risks that they believe they have some control over, and overestimate their own level of control. That's what's going on with the SUV tailgating you at 80 mph in the carpool lane -- the SUV's driver is psychologically biased to believe that this huge, hurtling mass of metal is under the control of his hands and feet, and he can make it do whatever he wants it to do. When airbags and antilock brakes came in, they were supposed to reduce the number of deaths, but actually what happened was that people started driving faster, because the safety features made it feel safe. It's utterly predictable that every IT staff will believe itself to be more competent than the other guy, will want to keep everything in-house, will want to maintain control, and will overestimate the level of quality and uptime they can provide. Every time a manager outsources something like this, it's because the manager has come to the opposite conclusion.
Another issue is web/network attacks. They are going up big time and are even state-sponsored. Look at what Russia is, and has been doing to Georgia. [...]
I don't understand how anyone in this day and age can justify going with remotely-hosted applications. The ability to reach remote servers can be taken away even by morons and botnets who might not like your company.
What you're saying makes sense for something like google apps, but it's exactly backwards for something like gmail. A small organization is much more vulnerable to a DOS attack than google is.
Maybe I'm missing the huge economic advantages that justify the unknown and growing risk, but I see network (Internet) applications as being at huge risk for outages, a security risk, a data privacy risk, etc.
This is more complicated than it might seem at first glance. Google, for example, has a published privacy policy. It may or may not be acceptable to a particular organization, but I'd expect Google to do a pretty good job of following it competently. On the other hand, many organizations that manage their own IT services do a really lousy job of managing security and privacy. For instance, Ameritrade had a problem for years where people would sign up for accounts, and immediately start getting pump and dump spam. Ameritrade tried to blame it on dictionary attacks, viruses, etc., but users thoroughly and publicly documented the fact that it was happening to single-purpose email accounts that were not vulnerable to dictionary attacks and were not on Windows boxes. Years later, Ameritrade finally admitted that there was a problem, and said it looked like it must have been an inside job -- some employee selling the addresses to spammers. You also get issues with employees bringing home laptops with sensitive data. Realistically, most of the security issues that IT departments deal with on a day to day basis are issues with users getting their machines infected with malware. I would expect that kind of thing to be less of a problem if your apps are remotely hosted. Your machine is probably less likely to get infected from clicking on a malware attachment, and if worst comes to worst, you can always do a clean install on the infected machine, meanwhile using a different machine to access the web app. No downtime, no lost data.
Prosecutors in a German state have announced they will refuse to entertain the majority of file-sharing lawsuits in future
In the U.S., copyright infringement is a civil matter, not a criminal one, although I think that may be different in Europe...? But what really doesn't make sense to me is the reference to "prosecutors" vis a vis "lawsuits." In a lawsuit, there isn't any prosecutor, is there?
My guess is that it is criminal in Germany rather than civil, and that the word "lawsuits" is incorrect. If that's the case, then where's the news here? Of course police and prosecutors aren't going to spend time going after small-time file sharers. Same deal in the US with small-time white-collar crime. Hell, cops in the US typically won't even do much about the theft of a laptop or a ten-speed bike, even if it's theoretically grand larceny. It's just a matter of resources. They're more concerned with violent crime.
I have a server running stable, and I don't have physical access to it. Does anyone have any practical advice on the safest way to handle the upgrade? Is a debian "stable" really stable when it first comes out, or is it better to wait a while? Basically, what I understand of the procedure is something like this:
Read the readme -- where do I find it?
apt-get update
apt-get dist-upgrade
I'm a little leery of this, since I've rendered ubuntu desktop systems unbootable by doing 2 and 3 -- and was told that it was because I should have done 1.
I think Linux has gotten to a level of equilibrium where it's probably not going to improve vastly in any ways that will be obvious to users. There are some things that are just design decisions, and aren't going to change. E.g., for audio applications, it can sometimes be a problem that linux doesn't have a lot of real-time support; there are real-time patches, but they don't look like they'll ever make it into the mainstream kernel, and in any case linux was never intended as a hard real-time system like qnx. There are some things that aren't going to change because of economics. Currently, we have decent hardware support for many devices, but it's still often a hassle, the quality is often lousy, and the drivers are often binary blobs; even if linux increases its share of the desktop significantly in the next four years, it will still be a tiny niche compared to Windows, so we'll still probably have a lot of the same hassles. Similar situation for availability of more preinstalled systems through more retail channels -- there just aren't enough people interested, for example, to allow linux boxes to be sold at places like Circuit City, and I don't think that will change in 4 years.
Ease of installation is already pretty good, and I think the low-hanging fruit has already been picked. The vast majority of users will never be able to handle installing an OS on their own, and that's not going to change. I'm still experiencing problems like x.org not being able to handle odd-sized flatscreen monitors, and I kind of doubt that's going to improve vastly, because it's like whack-a-mole with the low-end hardware manufacturers in Asia who basically want to sell as many widgets as possible to Windows users in its 1-year product lifetime.
As far as codecs... well, you can already pay for codecs, so if you can pay for codecs in 2012, how does that qualify as a change? For mp3, decoding is already royalty-free, and as far as encoding it kind of depends on which patents you really think are valid and which are just trolls, but I've seen statements that encoding will be patent-free by 2010.
Apps? Firefox is already a browser, and in 2012 it will still be a browser. I think OOo has already long since reached a state of equilibrium in which the codebase is such a mess, and the developer community so closed, that there is basically no more improvement going on. E.g., users (myself included) have been begging for years now for better curve fitting, and better integration of curve fitting into the GUI; the result is that over all those years there has been marginal improvement in this area, but it's still way behind what my students are used to in Excel.
These things are generally used for very low-security applications. My bank doesn't use them, stock trading sites don't use them, etc.
I have retirement accounts at two different major financial companies and both use these kinds of questions.
Scary! What other safeguards, if any, did they have in place to keep someone who knew your dog's name from stealing your retirement fund? It's frightening how clueless about security some of these sites are. Ameritrade was infamous for years for leaking email addresses to pump-and-dump scammers, and not only would they not fix the security breach, they wouldn't even admit that it was happening.
I know this because I forgot my passwords recently, because their "more secure" password rules wouldn't allow me to use my normal password-generation formula.
Yeah, that's annoying. My employer has a site I need to use, and they only allow you to use 6-digit numerical passwords. Normally I use software to generate an 8-character base-64 hash for each web site, but I can't use it for their site.
These things are generally used for very low-security applications. My bank doesn't use them, stock trading sites don't use them, etc. And in many cases it would still be hard for a bad guy to take over your account this way. For instance, they may send you an email every time the password recovery feature is used on your account. A well designed site won't actually let you recover your old password, it will generate a link with a hash code in it that allows you to pick a new one; so the bad guy can't find out what your password used to be (which would be especially scary if you were in the habit of using the same password for lots of things), and if it's an account that you use frequently, you'll also find out quickly that something is wrong, because your password will no longer work. And I would guess they also have a limited number of times you can guess your dog's name wrong. But okay, suppose someone manages to get access to my amazon.com account this way. Is it really that horrible? I suppose they can set up a new shipping address, order some CDs, and have them sent there. So I just turn around and call my credit card company, and they reverse all the charges.
The typical slashdot user is really into using high-tech toys in sophisticated ways, but for the average person there really are severe usability issues with maintaining login and password combos, and these "what was your first pet's name" questions are a a not entirely unreasonable attempt to make things easier for that type of user. My mother in law visited us recently for a few weeks. She's had a history of dysfunctional relationships with her Windows machines (viruses, etc.), so I got her started on Linux. Her main application is that she plays an online scrabble game (not the famous facebook one). She'd been unable to use her virus-infested computer for a long time, so it had been a long time since she'd been able to play scrabble. I got her set up on a spare linux box in the family room, and the very first thing she wanted to do was get scrabble working. Well, she just couldn't remember her username and password for this server. Tried a bunch of things, no luck. She was bummed out, too, because she'd had a high rating, and creating a new account with a zero rating meant it would be hard for her to get games. It would have been a lot better, from her point of view, if she'd been able to tell them her dog's name and recover her password. Who the heck cares if it leaves her vulnerable to having her scrabble account taken over by evil Russian hackers with handlebar moustaches?
All of this might seem ridiculously easy to handle to us, but I could easily imagine myself having the same problem 10-15 years ago. It's not obvious to her how her email is nested inside her yahoo account, her yahoo account is inside her browser, and her browser is inside her OS. It's not obvious to her that the username and password she uses on yahoo are different from the ones she uses to log in to her linux account.
Interesting -- thanks for the info on copyright law! The law on sound recordings really sounds like a horrible muddle.
It looks like the site is dead now. I'm getting a 508 error. Here is the google cache of his main page. Most likely he went over his webhost's quota due to the slashdot effect, or maybe his webhost already got a DMCA takedown notice, since most of the music on his page was actually still in copyright and still commercially available. As an experiment, I picked the following random sample of seven tunes from his page (scrolling down the list, and taking one line per screenful):
A GOOD MAN IS HARD TO FIND Muggsy Spanier COMMODORE 1504B 12in A THOUSAND KISSES International Novelty Orch VICTOR 19351-A AFTER YOUVE GONE Turk Murphys Jazz Band GOOD TIME JAZZ 39 ALL THE CATS JOIN IN Roy Eldridge DECCA 23532-A AND HER TEARS FLOWED LIKE WINE Ella Fitzgerald DECCA 18633 A ARTISTRY IN RYTHYM Stan Kenton CAPITOL 159 AWAY OUT ON THE MOUNTAIN Jimmie Rodgers VICTOR 21142-B
The Muggsy Spanier tune dates to the 50's, is still in copyright, and is available on a 2006 CD reissue. "A Thousand Kisses" was recorded around 1924, so it's probably still copyrighted, but it doesn't seem to be commercially available now. "After You've Gone" was recorded in 1947, it's still copyrighted, and it's still commercially available. "All the Cats Join In" was recorded in 1936, is still copyrighted, and is still commercially available. "And Her Tears Flowed Like Wine," still in copyright, still available. "Artistry in Rhythm", ditto. "Away Out on the Mountain", ditto.
The claim in the slashdot summary that the music is out of print is wildly misleading, since 6 out of 7 songs from my sample are commercially available. The Wired article's statement that "The copyright situation surrounding some of these songs is as murky as their sound quality" is likewise pretty silly -- it doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure out that recordings from the 1950's by famous jazz artists are still in copyright.
The same music isn't there in CD or MP3. That's the whole point. This stuff is out of print, never been released in CD. It's the in summary for god's sake!
Well, that isn't exactly what the summary says. The summary says the 78s are out of print, which is no surprise because 78s aren't produced anymore. There's definitely a ton of music on there that is available commercialy in modern formats. For instance, he has "Caravan," by Duke Ellington. That's an extremely famous jazz tune, and I can't imagine there's ever a time when you couldn't buy a commercial recording of it. You can buy it right now on Amazon in mp3 format for 99 cents, or on a CD reissue. I don't know if it's exactly the same performance or not.
The Wired article also has a discussion of the copyright status of these songs, which basically amounts to, "nobody's sued him so far." I guarantee you that the composition of Caravan, for instance, is still in copyright -- Tizol and Ellington wrote it in 1936, so the only way it would have passed into the public domain would have been if the copyright owner had failed to renew it -- but it was a valuable commercial property (still is), and I'm sure they did renew it. (Nothing from after 1922 has expired in the US except by failure to do the renewal that used to be required.) I don't know about the copyright on the sound recording (is the duration different?), but I'd guess it's still also in copyright.
If copyright law in the US was sane, a composition from 1936 would be in the public domain, but that doesn't change the fact that the law is not sane, it is what it is, and these recordings are not all out of print or out of copyright.
Yep, yer darn right that cooking stimulates a big leap in human cognition. I can verify this from personal experience. First they see the pot of boiling water, and they're like, "What the hell?" You can see them start thinking real hard at that point. Of course, they're still not quite certain what's going to happen, but you can tell they're listening hard to what you're saying, and watching what you're doing, trying to figure it out for sure. There's so much cognition going on, you can practically see the sweat popping off of their foreheads. Eventually they really start to believe it, and usually then the cognition drops off due to panic. Beyond that point, they're mostly just shrieking and straining at their bonds and stuff. And of course once you put them in the pot, pretty soon there's no more cognition at all. I haven't RTFA, but I think the slashdot summary is probably a little inaccurate -- should be more like, "prospect of imminent cooking stimulates a big leap in human cognition."
Another option is to do your searches using a search engine such as clusty.com that has a better privacy policy. I find that the quality of clusty's results is typically indistinguishable from google's.
Slashdot Mirror
Okay, help me out here. Canonical will sell people a copy of Opera if they want it. That means Ubuntu is bad. So we don't want to have anything to do with Ubuntu. So we want to install gNewStep, which is pure and virtuous ... and is based on Ubuntu Hardy Heron...?
Or:
If I install Ubuntu Hardy Heron and make my own decision to leave Flash and Lame and off of my system, then I'm making a choice that's morally inferior to installing gNewStep, which is a version of Ubuntu Hardy Heron where somebody else has made the decision to leave Flash and Lame off of the CDs and repositories...? Is it sort of like being an ultraorthodox Jew and hiring somebody else to turn off the light switches on the Sabbath, so you don't have to touch them yourself?
Wow, that's some pretty tortured logic. If that logic was going to work, we'd need two groups of users: group A using gNewSense with supported hardware, and group B using gNewSense with unsupported hardware and having "problems." I'm straining my brain to understand why this is a good thing. Group A could have just used Ubuntu, which would have installed OSS drivers by default. Group B is sad, because their wifi on their laptop doesn't work or whatever, and at this point they're probably thinking, "Oh my god, why was I so stupid? Why the hell did I install gNewStep without checking hardware compatibility?" Why is it a good thing that group B is sad? More to the point, what is group B going to do now? I guess they could toss their laptop in the garbage and write a stern letter to Linksys complaining that their wifi doesn't work, but that doesn't seem very realistic. I guess they could replace their Linksys wifi card with an Atheros one, but hey, did they really need to install gNewSense in order to get that experience? Couldn't they just have installed Ubuntu, found that OSS drivers weren't available, and made their own decision to buy a different card rather than installing the binary blob? Wouldn't that have rewarded Atheros just as much? And how exactly is this going to deter Linksys? Linksys already made a sale.
So rather than run GNewSense, why not just get yourself a laptop with Atheros wireless and Intel graphics, install Ubuntu, and go with the OSS drivers, which are the defaults?
If this is something that some people want, then that's great, more power to them. But I'm left with a lot of misgivings:
The LA Times, which has historically been one of the best papers in the US, has recently been through a lot of management shakeups, layoffs, and a change of ownership, and its relationship to the web has been a big point of controversy. WP says, 'In December 2006, a team of Times reporters delivered management with a critique of the paper's online news efforts known as the Spring Street Project. The report, which condemned the Times as a "web-stupid" organization," was followed by a shakeup in management of the paper's Web site, latimes.com, and a rebuke of print staff who have "treated change as a threat."' Some of the reporters feel that journalistic standards are lower on the paper's web site than they are in the printed paper. Their circulation is way down.
Burying them underground isn't a great solution. The "parkway" (strip of land between the sidewalk and the street) in front of my house has a fairly small above-ground utility box for POTS, and the neighbors have some more of the local POTS equipment underground in their parkway. For years now, the phone company has been struggling with flooding of the underground stuff, which often causes multiple-day service outages. (People worry about the reliability of VOIP, but we have Vonage, and have kept on being able to use our phone during all those POTS outages that affected our neighbors.)
The slashdot summary seems a little misleading when it refers to "lawns." The photo in the article, for instance, shows one that's in a concrete strip between the sidewalk and the street. Granted, I wouldn't want something that huge and graffiti-covered in front of my house.
Someone should show this document to Sun's OOo team. If you download the source on any given day and try to compile it, there's about a 75% chance that something is broken on that day.
Yeah. I was just talking to a colleague at the school where I teach who is the author of a textbook. We were discussing ways of keeping costs down for students, and he said it ought to be easy these days to get figures from Wikipedia, so the publisher wouldn't have to pay per-copy royalties to photographers, or pay so much to illustrators. I told him that Wikipedia was under a license, and that most of the illustrations were also under that license (or a similar one), so he probably couldn't do that unless his book was under a compatible license (which it isn't). He kept insisting for quite a while that everything on WP was free, until I bombarded him with enough information. Copyleft is a completely foreign concept to most people, so they try to shoehorn it into concepts they know, like "copyrighted" or "public domain." It's like the story about the hillbilly who came to the big city and visited the zoo, saw a giraffe, turned away, and said, to no one in particular, "There ain't no such animal."
The community college where I teach has 22 IT workers out of a total staff of 706, for a ratio of 32:1. I think they stay pretty busy. One of the side-effects is that in order to simplify things, they push hard for supporting only one OS, which is Windows. The campus is extremely reluctant to provide macs, and when it comes to my linux box that I brought from home to put on my desk, they barely tolerate it on their network.
What do you consider to be the problem with JavaScript as a general-purpose programming language? I think it's a sweet language. Just because a lot of people learn it as a set of cookbook recipes for doing little things on web pages, that doesn't mean the language isn't a good language. The only really serious problem with JavaScript, IMO, is the lack of standardization of the DOM, and that's not even a real language issue, it's just a problem with the way the language gets interfaced to browsers.
Ditto for old versions of MacOS X. My wife was an early adopter of MacOS X, but we got tired of paying $130 to Apple for every point upgrade. There's more and more software that won't run on her machines now. I tried installing ff3, and it didn't run.
The most practical, hassle-free way to do this right now is to use lulu.com, which is a print-on-demand company started by one of the founders of Red Hat. What differentiates them from a lot of the other vanity presses and POD companies is that they have setups you can get without paying them any money. I use lulu to handle the printed copies of my nonprofit, open-source physics textbooks.
Actually, the CalTech prof who's most prominently featured in the article makes his book available in PDF and MS Word format. He has the link to the Word file labeled "Source Code," so he obviously groks the open-source concept and is trying to do something similar. Of course Word is a proprietary format, but it's a proprietary format with pretty darn good OSS support.
Quite a few free textbooks do come with latex source code. Examples: [1], [2], [3], [4].
I'm sure you're highly competent. But there is a general human psychological tendency to discount risks that they believe they have some control over, and overestimate their own level of control. That's what's going on with the SUV tailgating you at 80 mph in the carpool lane -- the SUV's driver is psychologically biased to believe that this huge, hurtling mass of metal is under the control of his hands and feet, and he can make it do whatever he wants it to do. When airbags and antilock brakes came in, they were supposed to reduce the number of deaths, but actually what happened was that people started driving faster, because the safety features made it feel safe. It's utterly predictable that every IT staff will believe itself to be more competent than the other guy, will want to keep everything in-house, will want to maintain control, and will overestimate the level of quality and uptime they can provide. Every time a manager outsources something like this, it's because the manager has come to the opposite conclusion.
What you're saying makes sense for something like google apps, but it's exactly backwards for something like gmail. A small organization is much more vulnerable to a DOS attack than google is.
This is more complicated than it might seem at first glance. Google, for example, has a published privacy policy. It may or may not be acceptable to a particular organization, but I'd expect Google to do a pretty good job of following it competently. On the other hand, many organizations that manage their own IT services do a really lousy job of managing security and privacy. For instance, Ameritrade had a problem for years where people would sign up for accounts, and immediately start getting pump and dump spam. Ameritrade tried to blame it on dictionary attacks, viruses, etc., but users thoroughly and publicly documented the fact that it was happening to single-purpose email accounts that were not vulnerable to dictionary attacks and were not on Windows boxes. Years later, Ameritrade finally admitted that there was a problem, and said it looked like it must have been an inside job -- some employee selling the addresses to spammers. You also get issues with employees bringing home laptops with sensitive data. Realistically, most of the security issues that IT departments deal with on a day to day basis are issues with users getting their machines infected with malware. I would expect that kind of thing to be less of a problem if your apps are remotely hosted. Your machine is probably less likely to get infected from clicking on a malware attachment, and if worst comes to worst, you can always do a clean install on the infected machine, meanwhile using a different machine to access the web app. No downtime, no lost data.
In the U.S., copyright infringement is a civil matter, not a criminal one, although I think that may be different in Europe...? But what really doesn't make sense to me is the reference to "prosecutors" vis a vis "lawsuits." In a lawsuit, there isn't any prosecutor, is there?
My guess is that it is criminal in Germany rather than civil, and that the word "lawsuits" is incorrect. If that's the case, then where's the news here? Of course police and prosecutors aren't going to spend time going after small-time file sharers. Same deal in the US with small-time white-collar crime. Hell, cops in the US typically won't even do much about the theft of a laptop or a ten-speed bike, even if it's theoretically grand larceny. It's just a matter of resources. They're more concerned with violent crime.
I'm a little leery of this, since I've rendered ubuntu desktop systems unbootable by doing 2 and 3 -- and was told that it was because I should have done 1.
I think Linux has gotten to a level of equilibrium where it's probably not going to improve vastly in any ways that will be obvious to users. There are some things that are just design decisions, and aren't going to change. E.g., for audio applications, it can sometimes be a problem that linux doesn't have a lot of real-time support; there are real-time patches, but they don't look like they'll ever make it into the mainstream kernel, and in any case linux was never intended as a hard real-time system like qnx. There are some things that aren't going to change because of economics. Currently, we have decent hardware support for many devices, but it's still often a hassle, the quality is often lousy, and the drivers are often binary blobs; even if linux increases its share of the desktop significantly in the next four years, it will still be a tiny niche compared to Windows, so we'll still probably have a lot of the same hassles. Similar situation for availability of more preinstalled systems through more retail channels -- there just aren't enough people interested, for example, to allow linux boxes to be sold at places like Circuit City, and I don't think that will change in 4 years.
Ease of installation is already pretty good, and I think the low-hanging fruit has already been picked. The vast majority of users will never be able to handle installing an OS on their own, and that's not going to change. I'm still experiencing problems like x.org not being able to handle odd-sized flatscreen monitors, and I kind of doubt that's going to improve vastly, because it's like whack-a-mole with the low-end hardware manufacturers in Asia who basically want to sell as many widgets as possible to Windows users in its 1-year product lifetime.
As far as codecs ... well, you can already pay for codecs, so if you can pay for codecs in 2012, how does that qualify as a change? For mp3, decoding is already royalty-free, and as far as encoding it kind of depends on which patents you really think are valid and which are just trolls, but I've seen statements that encoding will be patent-free by 2010.
Apps? Firefox is already a browser, and in 2012 it will still be a browser. I think OOo has already long since reached a state of equilibrium in which the codebase is such a mess, and the developer community so closed, that there is basically no more improvement going on. E.g., users (myself included) have been begging for years now for better curve fitting, and better integration of curve fitting into the GUI; the result is that over all those years there has been marginal improvement in this area, but it's still way behind what my students are used to in Excel.
Scary! What other safeguards, if any, did they have in place to keep someone who knew your dog's name from stealing your retirement fund? It's frightening how clueless about security some of these sites are. Ameritrade was infamous for years for leaking email addresses to pump-and-dump scammers, and not only would they not fix the security breach, they wouldn't even admit that it was happening.
Yeah, that's annoying. My employer has a site I need to use, and they only allow you to use 6-digit numerical passwords. Normally I use software to generate an 8-character base-64 hash for each web site, but I can't use it for their site.
These things are generally used for very low-security applications. My bank doesn't use them, stock trading sites don't use them, etc. And in many cases it would still be hard for a bad guy to take over your account this way. For instance, they may send you an email every time the password recovery feature is used on your account. A well designed site won't actually let you recover your old password, it will generate a link with a hash code in it that allows you to pick a new one; so the bad guy can't find out what your password used to be (which would be especially scary if you were in the habit of using the same password for lots of things), and if it's an account that you use frequently, you'll also find out quickly that something is wrong, because your password will no longer work. And I would guess they also have a limited number of times you can guess your dog's name wrong. But okay, suppose someone manages to get access to my amazon.com account this way. Is it really that horrible? I suppose they can set up a new shipping address, order some CDs, and have them sent there. So I just turn around and call my credit card company, and they reverse all the charges.
The typical slashdot user is really into using high-tech toys in sophisticated ways, but for the average person there really are severe usability issues with maintaining login and password combos, and these "what was your first pet's name" questions are a a not entirely unreasonable attempt to make things easier for that type of user. My mother in law visited us recently for a few weeks. She's had a history of dysfunctional relationships with her Windows machines (viruses, etc.), so I got her started on Linux. Her main application is that she plays an online scrabble game (not the famous facebook one). She'd been unable to use her virus-infested computer for a long time, so it had been a long time since she'd been able to play scrabble. I got her set up on a spare linux box in the family room, and the very first thing she wanted to do was get scrabble working. Well, she just couldn't remember her username and password for this server. Tried a bunch of things, no luck. She was bummed out, too, because she'd had a high rating, and creating a new account with a zero rating meant it would be hard for her to get games. It would have been a lot better, from her point of view, if she'd been able to tell them her dog's name and recover her password. Who the heck cares if it leaves her vulnerable to having her scrabble account taken over by evil Russian hackers with handlebar moustaches?
All of this might seem ridiculously easy to handle to us, but I could easily imagine myself having the same problem 10-15 years ago. It's not obvious to her how her email is nested inside her yahoo account, her yahoo account is inside her browser, and her browser is inside her OS. It's not obvious to her that the username and password she uses on yahoo are different from the ones she uses to log in to her linux account.
The really annoying thing about it is that on a shared Windows box, it demands that every user click through the license.
Interesting -- thanks for the info on copyright law! The law on sound recordings really sounds like a horrible muddle.
It looks like the site is dead now. I'm getting a 508 error. Here is the google cache of his main page. Most likely he went over his webhost's quota due to the slashdot effect, or maybe his webhost already got a DMCA takedown notice, since most of the music on his page was actually still in copyright and still commercially available. As an experiment, I picked the following random sample of seven tunes from his page (scrolling down the list, and taking one line per screenful):
The Muggsy Spanier tune dates to the 50's, is still in copyright, and is available on a 2006 CD reissue. "A Thousand Kisses" was recorded around 1924, so it's probably still copyrighted, but it doesn't seem to be commercially available now. "After You've Gone" was recorded in 1947, it's still copyrighted, and it's still commercially available. "All the Cats Join In" was recorded in 1936, is still copyrighted, and is still commercially available. "And Her Tears Flowed Like Wine," still in copyright, still available. "Artistry in Rhythm", ditto. "Away Out on the Mountain", ditto.
The claim in the slashdot summary that the music is out of print is wildly misleading, since 6 out of 7 songs from my sample are commercially available. The Wired article's statement that "The copyright situation surrounding some of these songs is as murky as their sound quality" is likewise pretty silly -- it doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure out that recordings from the 1950's by famous jazz artists are still in copyright.
Well, that isn't exactly what the summary says. The summary says the 78s are out of print, which is no surprise because 78s aren't produced anymore. There's definitely a ton of music on there that is available commercialy in modern formats. For instance, he has "Caravan," by Duke Ellington. That's an extremely famous jazz tune, and I can't imagine there's ever a time when you couldn't buy a commercial recording of it. You can buy it right now on Amazon in mp3 format for 99 cents, or on a CD reissue. I don't know if it's exactly the same performance or not.
The Wired article also has a discussion of the copyright status of these songs, which basically amounts to, "nobody's sued him so far." I guarantee you that the composition of Caravan, for instance, is still in copyright -- Tizol and Ellington wrote it in 1936, so the only way it would have passed into the public domain would have been if the copyright owner had failed to renew it -- but it was a valuable commercial property (still is), and I'm sure they did renew it. (Nothing from after 1922 has expired in the US except by failure to do the renewal that used to be required.) I don't know about the copyright on the sound recording (is the duration different?), but I'd guess it's still also in copyright.
If copyright law in the US was sane, a composition from 1936 would be in the public domain, but that doesn't change the fact that the law is not sane, it is what it is, and these recordings are not all out of print or out of copyright.
Yep, yer darn right that cooking stimulates a big leap in human cognition. I can verify this from personal experience. First they see the pot of boiling water, and they're like, "What the hell?" You can see them start thinking real hard at that point. Of course, they're still not quite certain what's going to happen, but you can tell they're listening hard to what you're saying, and watching what you're doing, trying to figure it out for sure. There's so much cognition going on, you can practically see the sweat popping off of their foreheads. Eventually they really start to believe it, and usually then the cognition drops off due to panic. Beyond that point, they're mostly just shrieking and straining at their bonds and stuff. And of course once you put them in the pot, pretty soon there's no more cognition at all. I haven't RTFA, but I think the slashdot summary is probably a little inaccurate -- should be more like, "prospect of imminent cooking stimulates a big leap in human cognition."
Another option is to do your searches using a search engine such as clusty.com that has a better privacy policy. I find that the quality of clusty's results is typically indistinguishable from google's.