I understand that many people base the argument like that "Newspapers offer content we like, but can only be funded by ads. Now people use craigslist for ads instead of papers, so papers have no money to publish other content with". While this may seem more indirect, I don't see why this is any more valid than the earlier example. If people are not willing to pay for the content on its own (via newspaper sales), then maybe you should move out of the market, or actually make your content worthwhile.
The danger is that that's exactly what will happen: high-quality newspapers will "move out of the market." For instance, I live in LA, and subscribe to both the LA Times and the NY Times. Their content is worthwhile to me, but that doesn't guarantee that they'll continue to stay in business, because plenty of people are happy getting their predigested, dumbed-down news from the TV. The LA Times has traditionally been one of the best papers in the U.S., but has gone through some very tough times, and morale in the newsroom has been sinking, according to someone I know who works there. The paper was just bought by a real-estate mogul named Sam Zell. He's announced that he thinks the paper "lectures" its readers too much, and that they "don't like that." In other words, he wants to dumb down the content. The deal also put the paper heavily in debt, and there's serious doubt as to whether its revenues will ever be able to pay off the debt. In other words, one of the U.S.'s best papers could end up going out of business.
I'm a libertarian, so in general I'm in sympathy with your free-market approach. But that doesn't mean that the free market always has a single, predetermined outcome, which is the best possible outcome.
One possibility that seems reasonable to me would be if e-ink technology eventually got good enough that it would be just as pleasurable to read my paper electronically while drinking my morning coffee as it currently is to read it on paper. Maybe that could save a lot of money on the costs of paper, printing, and delivery, and make newspapers more profitable.
Another possibility is that we'll become a nation in which the only source of news is the TV, in which case all I can say is Heaven help the republic.
I think calculation of the Hagedorn temperature at 10^30 K should be taken with a massive grain of salt. String theory has an adjustable parameter, which is the length scale on which the extra dimensions are curled up. Since string theory is supposed to be a model of quantum gravity, and there is only one fundamental length scale in quantum gravity -- the Planck scale -- the general assumption is that if string theory is right, that length scale should be the Planck scale. Converting that length to a temperature, you get the Planck temperature, 10^32 K. If there's a maximum temperature that's 100 times less than that, then that unitless factor of 1/100 has to come from some model-dependent calculation, and the NOVA article carefully notes that it's just this one guy's model that gives 1/100. I think all we can reasonably say at this stage is that if there is any natural scale beyond the scales that have been explored with current particle physics observations, we can only guess that it's the Planck scale, which corresponds to the Planck temperature.
The article doesn't explain very well why there should be any maximum temperature scale, but it's not really that hard to understand. There are model-independent, fairly plausible reasons for believing that there is a limit on the amount of information that a given amount of space can contain. If spacetime was really continuous rather than discrete, then it could contain an infinite amount of information in any volume, so it's reasonable to conclude that spacetime must be discrete. (Lee Smolin's Three Roads to Quantum Gravity spells out this argument in a lot more detail.) If spacetime is discrete, then the only reasonable distance scale for the minimum distance is the Planck scale. That means that a particle can't have a wavelength less than the Planck scale, and therefore it can't have an energy greater than the Planck energy. That means that a gas can't get hotter than the temperature at which every particle has an energy equal to the Planck energy, and that's the Planck temperature.
The answer is simple, copy it over frequently.
Yeah, from the article, are several silly things are going on here:
They're stuck in a 1985 mindset where the internet doesn't exist, and hard disks are very small, so everything has to be archived on tape, and the tapes have to be preserved in a salt mine in Kansas.
They're stuck in a 1985 mindset where computer formats aren't documented, or the documentation gets thrown out because someone retires and cleans out his file cabinets. Welcome to the 21st century: you document the format digitally, and preserve the digital document. People keep on bringing up this silly old chestnut about NASA tapes; in this article: "Thus, NASA scientists found in 1999 that they were unable to read digital data saved from a Viking space probe in 1975; the format had long been obsolete." Welcome to 2007: you save the documentation for the format in, say, html, and write it to the same archive where the actual data reside.
They're stuck in a mindset where file formats are secret and proprietary. Solution: use a nonproprietary file format.
They're not just talking about preserving the equivalent of the digital theater release of some bomb like The Golden Compass, they're talking about preserving vast amounts of ancillary cruft, like the time when the director left the (digital) cameras running between takes while he complained that his double frappucino was too sweet. The colossal Hollywood ego believes that this kind of stuff will one day be seen as a vitally important historical document.
Acutally, you may want to take a look at Flex. Adobe open-sourced their compiler, and the SDK to create SWF files. Flex (starting with version 3), is open source,/and/ fully supported by Adobe on Linux, Mac and Windows.
Thanks for the info -- that's very interesting. However, there's some pretty objectionable stuff in the EULA, including "2.6.1 No Modifications, No Reverse Engineering." That really doesn't fit my definition of OSS.
The EULA for the SWF spec also states that "You may not use the Specification in any way to create or develop a runtime, client, player, executable or other program that reads or renders SWF files." That would be my definition of proprietary.
There are open source implementations of the Flash protocol; I'm running Gnash as my SWF player on Ubuntu 64, and it works just fine. Your mileage may vary.
I tried Gnash, and it didn't work on the flash pages I tried it on. Although there are open-source development tools for flash, such as mtasc and haxe, there are a lot of obstacles, both legal and technological, that anyone will encounter if they try to do OSS development on the flash platform. If you want to generate AS3, the only OSS compiler is haxe, which doesn't implement the standard AS3 language. The Version 2 Components (flash's standard gui widget set) are under a license that prevents you from using them unless you own the Flash IDE. There are also patent issues with codecs; I believe Adobe is implementing some new audio and video codecs in the new versions of flash whose licensing is somewhat less problematic than the ones that used to be available, but you still can't use ogg or theora. Realistically, if you want to learn to develop flash using an OSS toolchain, you have a long, hard road ahead of you. You can't just buy a book on Flash and do what it says, because there are way too many bits and pieces that you can't reproduce without using the Adobe development tools.
A preprint of the paper is available from arxiv.org.
The general idea seems to be this. We observe that distant galaxies have an anomalously low redshift relative to the expectations of the linear Hubble relation, and we interpret this as evidence that the expansion of the universe has been accelerating. General relativity allows you to interpret a redshift as a difference in the rate of passage of time, so then an anomalously low redshift correponds to an anomalously low rate of passage of time, for us, compared to the distant galaxies, which were in the ancient universe where time was passing more quickly.
A couple of things leave me scratching my head:
In general, if there's going to be a change from Lorentzian to Euclidean spacetime, you would think there would have to be some pretty dramatic event that marked the end of time. This is not just a change in the global properties of the universe (which might not be obvious to a local observer), it's a change in the local properies of spacetime. An observer who's sitting around at the moment of the changeover would have to have his worldline terminate. But in this paper, they don't seem to discuss any dramatic future event, such as a Big Crunch. The caption of Fig. 1 refers to something called a "little bang," but I don't know what they mean by that.
It's not clear to me whether they're proposing an unrealistic model that has interesting mathematical properties, or a realistic model of our own universe. Our universe has a repulsive cosmological constant, but they're talking about anti-de Sitter spaces, where it's attractive. I think they may be saying that the bulk of the brane is anti-de Sitter, but observers on the brane who believe in general relativity misinterpret their universe as de Sitter.
I test-drove Google Docs the other day, and the basic impression I got was, "What they're trying to do, you just can't do, because JS isn't fast enough." The word processor was reasonably usable on fast hardware, but the spreadsheet was just ridiculously slow. I wonder how this kind of thing will perform in Tamarin. It would be very cool if Firefox became the clear browser of choice for AJAX, and IE was left in the dust because MS wasn't agile enough to catch up:-)
May I direct you to g oo g l e. Or even checking thinkgeek which was discussed earlier in the thread.
Note that the links google turns up for 100 W lasers are not things you can just buy by mail order. It is interesting that ThinkGeek is selling 10 mW lasers, which presumably would be IIIb, to individuals who don't have any special FDA approval. Unless the regulations have changed since the FDA put up that web page in 2005, I don't see how that can be legal.
Green lasers are more powerful, you can see the beam in clear conditions, they cost an awful lot more ( somewhere between 100 - 200), are much larger, closer to say, a couple of coke cans stood on end, and can cut through a polystyrene cup....
Please get your facts right. The highest power laser you can buy off the shelf in a consumer product is 5 mW. I have a 5 mW green laser, and it's the size of a dry-erase whiteboard marker, not the size of 2 coke cans. No, it cannot cut through a polystyrene cup. No, you cannot buy a laser powerful enough to cut through a polystyrene cup for $200; it would be *much* more expensive, and it would be illegal to sell it over the counter.
There is nothing intrinsically "more powerful" about green lasers. However, the eye is far more sensitive to green light than to red light, so 5 mW of green appears much brighter than 5 mW of red. Also, when you buy a green laser that's marketed for its brightness (creating a visible beam in the air, etc.), part of what you're paying for is that they test all the lasers that come off the assembly line (they're solid-state devices), and put aside the ones that came out very near the legal limit of 5 mW to sell at a higher price. With $10 red pen-pointer lasers, there's a huge amount of variation in the manufacturing process, and all they do is make sure to test them and not sell any that are over the legal limit.
It's been amusing over the past 10 years to see young-earth creationists squirm about the fact that cosmology has become a high-precision science, with the age of the universe going from having 50% error bars to 1.5% error bars. Now these folks have apparently measured the age of the solar system to within.05%. For a long time, young-earth creationists (YECs) were trying to say that the science was all very uncertain, so you couldn't trust the science. Hmm...now it appears that Archbishop Ussher's date for creation is off by 2000 standard deviations. Oops!
It's unfortunate that the authors don't seem to be in the habit of posting preprints on arxiv, or on their university web site. TFA doesn't really explain very well, for example, how they know the primordial Mn/Cr ratio so precisely, and why the Mn/Cr ratio in the universe as a whole wouldn't change at the same rate as the ratio in asteroids. As a California taxpayer, is it too unreasonable of me to expect research funded by my tax money to be available freely?
XHTML failed to replace HTML because a browser with a dominating market share doesn't support it [...]
Right.
[...] and using it in a backwards-compatible way confers very few advantages over HTML and none whatsoever for typical developers.
Wrong -- or at least it depends on what you mean by "typical." Technologies like SVG and MathML are XML-based, so there is a big advantage to having xhtml support in browsers: it lets you use inline SVG and MathML according to the w3c standards. Because MS doesn't support xhtml, SVG and MathML have basically been killed as practical browser technologies. Instead of SVG, we get Flash, which is proprietary (full of patent-encumbered and license-encumbered parts, controlled only by Adobe). Instead of MathML, we get horrible-looking bitmap renderings of mathematics on web pages.
Why yes, because linux and bsd code have never been ripped off.
I didn't say that linux and bsd code had never been ripped off.
Nor does the author talk about taking the software closed source; if you read the article he talks about distributing part of the project as a binary, the bits that people can easily use to just change the copyright messages, the installer and other small bits. The removal of the current source is a stopgap until he decides which option to take.
Here I agree that you have more of a point. However, if you cripple the source code distribution so that it's no longer possible to compile the whole thing from source, to me that indicates that the software is no longer open source. Pick any high-profile OSS project such as the Gimp or gcc, and ask yourself what would happen if the leaders annouced that they were taking just a little of the code closed source. Nobody would say, "Oh, that's all right, gcc is still 90% open source." They would say, "That's ridiculous -- I'm switching to llvm," or maybe "That's ridiculous, I'm forking the fully open-source version."
Yeah. I think this is an interesting example of how underdeveloped and pathetic the OSS scene on Windows is. It's like going back in a time machine to 1988, when nobody had ever heard of the Gnu Project, nobody had ever heard of copyleft, and "free" software meant a mixture of illegally copied closed-source software and legally downloaded closed-source nagware, tipware, and crippleware. I sympathize with the author of Paint.NET, but he's fighting against a culture where most people have no idea what OSS is, and where all the social mechanisms the Linux/BSD community has developed don't exist. It's as though some British banker showed up in the Trobriand Islands in 1880 and announced that he was going to build a stock exchange. This whole thing would be a nonissue if this was Linux rather than Windows. Paint.NET is apparently a very popular piece of software with an active user community, so if it was Linux software, it would certainly have been packaged for Debian by now. People would be getting the latest version by doing an "apt-get install paint-dot-net." Imagine if someone made a backspaceware version of The Gimp -- obviously it just wouldn't work.
I used to be interested in the idea of spreading the word about OSS by making cross-platform apps available on both Windows and Linux -- the kind of thing that theopencd.org used to do. I had a a GUI app I'd written for my own use on Linux, and while I was at it, I made sure it ran on Windows. On the one hand, it was surprisingly successful. Judging by the emails I was getting, the vast majority of my users were on Windows. On the other hand, it was a huge amount of work to support those Windows users, and I started to question whether I was really accomplishing anything useful. When you write OSS that runs on Linux, you get that warm fuzzy feeling of belonging to a community and building something big and exciting. When you write OSS that runs on Windows, the users are not a community that has the same philosophical goals and is working toward the same ends; the users are people who typically couldn't care less about OSS (that's why they run Windows) but who simply want something for free. I ended up putting a notice on the web site saying that I would no longer provide support for Windows users; the source is still open, and they're welcome to try running it, but if it doesn't work, I don't have any motivation anymore to put in time helping a community that doesn't care about the things I care about. I don't think I'm alone in having this kind of experience. For instance, theopencd.org's site now says they're no longer actively developing the CD, and just has links to ubuntu, etc.
What's sad about the Paint.NET story is that the author seems genuinely pained and bewildered by the situation he's in, and since he doesn't seem to care about free information per se, it's like he doesn't have a compass to guide him. He runs up against this issue, and his reaction is, "oh well, I'll take the software closed-source." That's what the whole Windows OSS scene is like -- a bunch of people wandering around without any common vision of what they're trying to accompish. It's like watching the Israelites wandering around in the desert without Moses.
SO in other words someone else's edits got through and yours didnt so you took your ball and went home.
I was a happy, active Wikipedian for several years. Yeah, there were times when my edits didn't survive, but that was something I just had to accept. There's a reason why I edited for several years, and then quit -- it's that things changed for the worse. The barn-raising phase was over, and the efficiency of working on WP (defined as results divided by effort) was getting lower and lower.
All they're basically proposing is that you write an article as best as you can and they host it,
If you look at the sample, you'll notice that they're going to allow readers to rate articles with 1-5 stars. They also say "Our job in Search Quality will be to rank the knols appropriately when they appear in Google search results. We are quite experienced with ranking web pages, and we feel confident that we will be up to the challenge." That is very different from just offering free web hosting, which would be a one-way mode of communication from the author (who is possibly a crackpot) to the reader.
giving you a tiny share of the revenue it generates.
Yeah, this is the key question, which they don't answer: how much of the revenue does the author get? If it's less than you'd get by hosting your own content and putting up adsense ads, then I think my motivation for participating would be very low.
So instead of watching edit wars and being able to check out multiple opinions you now have to take the whole article as it is.
In the article, they say they want to build a setup where there are competing articles on the same topic.
There might even be small errors in there that would otherwise have been fixed by peers.
If you look at the sample article, it has a byline, and the author's academic affiliation is given.
I just don't understand how this is anything worth talking about or worth comparing to wikipedia.
The real problem is that the barn-raising stage of wikipedia is over, the quality of wikipedia is no longer getting any better over time, and the structure of wikipedia is inappropriate for its current stage of development. That's why I, like many former hard-core wikipedians, have quit editing. Wikipedia has turned into a giant energy-wasting machine like the one in The Matrix. You have millions of people all over the world, all undoing each other's edits, while most articles remain at the same low level of quality. I'm a physicist, and when I look at a physics article on WP, I don't typically say "that's wrong," I say "that's so poorly written that I don't believe anyone could ever read it and follow what it's trying to explain." You can try till you're blue in the face to improve the quality of the writing on WP, and it just won't work, because your hard work will succumb to random, uncoordinated edits by well-intentioned people.
I know a chemistry professor at the school where I teach who's an Ethiopian immigrant, and he used to organize textbook donation drives every few years. People would give him books, and he would send them to Ethiopia. He eventually stopped doing it, however, because it was too difficult to get the books to the students due to political corruption. Assuming the OLPC machines really do get to the kids (rather than being sold to enrich politically connected adults) in places like Nigeria, a big advantage would be that it would give the kids direct access to books that can't easily be interfered with.
OTOH, I maintain a catalog of free books (see my sig), and AFAIK there is essentially nothing out there as far as free elementary school books, and almost nothing for high school either. I do know of a South African project to produce a high school physics text (http://www.fhsst.org/), for example, but the project seems to have been moving along extremely slowly. Something like Wikibooks would seem like a natural vehicle for creating such books (ease of use + ease of translation), but Wikibooks has turned out to be a failure at its original goal of producing university-level textbooks (much better at producing gaming guides). In general, I don't think group authoring has been at all successful as a model for creating free textbooks. Authoring by an individual teacher scratching his/her own itch has been much more successful, but virtually all of that activity has been (a) in English, (b) in rich, industrialized countries, and (c) at the university level.
The Viking missions sampled soil on-site with the tools that were built into the landers.
To amplify a little on what you said: the results from the Viking experiments were ambiguous. They set criteria in advance, and said, "If the experiment does X, it means there's life, otherwise there's no evidence for life in the sample." The experiment actually did X, but some other aspects of the results were different than anything that was anticipated, which made the entire thing hard to interpret. At the time, the official announcement was that the results of the experiment were negative, but it's still pretty unclear. It could have been weird soil chemistry, or it could have been weird microbes.
The main problem, IMHO, is not even Joe Newbie who re-formats his GNU PC. It is the mentality of PC vendors itself who do not even configure their GNU/Linuxes correctly on their hardware.
I think you're right about the phenomenon, but wrong about the reasons. I've bought a lot of $200 PCs with preinstalled Linux over the years, including a gPC, which my daughter is probably using right now to play Neopets. When you look at the stuff that doesn't work as configured from the vendor, it's usually not the vendor's fault. My gPC, for instance, came with a slip packed in the box explaining that the modem wouldn't work. That's not because Everex is stupid or lazy, it's because the mobo they chose had a winmodem onboard, and winmodem support in Linux sucks. Another common problem is that I buy an LCD monitor, and xorg doesn't automagically configure itself correctly for that monitor -- it defaults to very low resolution, or uses an inappropriate geometry for the screen. This is not a misconfiguration by the vendor, because the vendor didn't get a chance to check that the configuration worked properly with the particular LCD monitor I bought.
The gPC is an interesting example of vendor behavior that's the complete opposite of what you're describing. Apparently, they were concerned that Gnome would be too slow on their hardware, and that was the reason they developed a heavily customized Enlightenment setup for it. That seems to me like an extremely conscientious effort on their part to try to configure the OS properly for the hardware.
I think the basic problem is that vendors of wifi chipsets, video cards, onboard video chipsets, winmodems, inkjet printers, LCD monitors, etc. are not yet convinced that it's to their advantage to work hard to provide good Linux support. This is not entirely crazy behavior on their part, because Linux is still a ridiculously small sliver of the desktop market. In addition, I think a lot of the Taiwanese manufacturers would actually like to have better Linux compatibility, but there is simply a language barrier that makes it more difficult and expensive for them to produce decent docs. Since they can cover 99% of their market just by supplying binary-blob Windows drivers, they decide not to put the effort into writing docs at all.
If the utilities really want help balancing the grid here in California, they should change how they handle photovoltaics. I have photovoltaics, and there's a strong disincentive to buy more than enough capacity to handle 80% or so of your annual use. If you overproduce over the course of a 12-month billing period, they just take your extra electricity for free, and say thank you very much. If they would pay for excess production, I'd have a strong incentive to add more panels on my roof, and those panels would produce a lot of electricity on those hot Southern California days when everybody's using their AC.
The WP article on Maxthon says it uses Trident, the same layout engine as IE. I know nothing about the world of closed-source Windows development, but this seems odd to me. Does MS license the source to Trident, or does it just expose a binary API for it? Since MS wants IE to win the new browser wars, what's their motivation to make Trident available to developers who might create competing browsers such as Maxthon? Does the licensing deal for Trident mean that MS gets a slice of revenue out of Maxthon's donations? Since Maxthon has a 30% market share in China compared to Firefox's 15% in the West, I assume that means that Chinese users have some very strong reason to prefer Maxthon to IE -- even stronger than the obvious reasons to prefer Firefox over IE. What would those reasons be? Does Maxthon have better support for Chinese text?
Not all schools that are doing laptops are doing it with tax dollars. There are two public elementary schools in my neighborhood in Fullerton, CA. One of them (not the one my kids go to, thank god) tried to require every student to buy a laptop. A lawsuit resulted, and AFAIK the plan has not been implemented, but there are other schools that are trying the same thing.
Personally, I didn't mind buying $200 Linux desktop boxes for my kids, but standard laptops are a ridiculously bad choice for young kids. They cost two to four times as much as a desktop system with the same specs, and they tend to die or become obsolete much more quickly, so you end up with something that's an order of magnitude more money for the same amount of use. With kids, you just add onto that the fact that it will get beat on more severely. It's also fairly difficult to buy a laptop without paying the Windows tax, so most of these programs end up being Windows-only -- yech, yet more favored treatment for MS by government, None of my arguments apply to the XO, however; the price is low, and they're designed to be durable enough so kids won't destroy them.
As a physics prof, I can see both sides of the argument about the educational appropriateness of computers. On the one hand, it would be silly to require my students to do long division on tests. On the other hand, not all calculators are created equal. Some, for instance, can do algebra and calculus. I think there's a reasonable argument to be made that it's unfair for one student to use a $300 calculator that can do algebra and calculus, while the other student can't afford that, and has to get by with an ordinary scientific calculator. Personally, my experience is that the student who is incompetent at algebra is also incompetent at setting up an algebra problem on a calculator, but I don't think it's quite as clearcut a luddite versus non-luddite issue as you're making out. If you talk to calculus teachers about why students fail first-semester calculus, they'll all say the same thing: it's because they haven't mastered arithmetic and algebra. You also can't completely separate things cleanly into important concepts versus unimportant details of technique. Knowing how to divide fractions by hand isn't a completely separate skill from understanding what it means to divide fractions, knowing when you should do it, knowing how to interpret the results, knowing how the result would change when you changed the inputs,...
Yeah, reading the article, I had the same impression, that it was just a honeypot. And in fact, I don't even think it's a useful generalization of a honeypot. A honeypot is an address that receives 100% spam. This method is supposed to look at accounts that receive low levels of spam as well, but how is that useful? I receive essentially 0% spam, mainly because I change my address every year. Even if I was willing to share my data with this company, what would it tell them? I get an email from my wife telling me to pick up milk on the way home from work. Well, nobody else gets that email, so it doesn't do them any good to classify it as non-spam. The technique also seems vulnerable to countermeasures. For instance, the spammer can put random stuff in every email it sends out, so that no two spams are identical. AFAIK the point of a honeypot is that you can build a blacklist of machines that send spam, not that you're trying to build a blacklist of known spam *messages*.
I guess this can be taken as good news, since the alternative was presumably some DRM'd format.
On the other hand, mp3 is
still patent-encumbered, and in fact the patent situation is such a mess that nobody even knows for sure when the last patent will expire.
You can get a royalty-free license to use a decoder, or to use an encoder for noncommercial use, but...
The lack of support for open audio and video codecs is a real problem now, because essentially flash is shaping up to be a completely necessary part of people's ability to do things with their computers, and one of the many ways that adobe is keeping flash proprietary is that they only support proprietary audio and video codecs for flash. Now matter how much java applets may have sucked in various ways, at least the technology was always free as in beer (and is now becoming free as in speech).
Even though buying music downloads in a DRM-free format like mp3 is a step up from buying them in a DRM'd format, there are still a lot of issues. You may have to agree to a license that forbids you from reselling the music, and takes away your fair use rights as well.
Personally, what works for me is buying CDs. There's no DRM, and no license. I can resell them. I don't need to back them up, because the disks *are* the backup. If I feel like it, I can copy them onto my mp3 player for personal use, and it's legal. If I feel like it, I can copy them onto my computer's hard disk, and put the actual optical disks somewhere else as backups. The only reason I'd really be interested in buying music digitally would be in cases where the music is out of print. Why buy it as a download, when my very first act after downloading it would be to burn it onto a CD as a backup?
Slashdot Mirror
I understand that many people base the argument like that "Newspapers offer content we like, but can only be funded by ads. Now people use craigslist for ads instead of papers, so papers have no money to publish other content with". While this may seem more indirect, I don't see why this is any more valid than the earlier example. If people are not willing to pay for the content on its own (via newspaper sales), then maybe you should move out of the market, or actually make your content worthwhile.
The danger is that that's exactly what will happen: high-quality newspapers will "move out of the market." For instance, I live in LA, and subscribe to both the LA Times and the NY Times. Their content is worthwhile to me, but that doesn't guarantee that they'll continue to stay in business, because plenty of people are happy getting their predigested, dumbed-down news from the TV. The LA Times has traditionally been one of the best papers in the U.S., but has gone through some very tough times, and morale in the newsroom has been sinking, according to someone I know who works there. The paper was just bought by a real-estate mogul named Sam Zell. He's announced that he thinks the paper "lectures" its readers too much, and that they "don't like that." In other words, he wants to dumb down the content. The deal also put the paper heavily in debt, and there's serious doubt as to whether its revenues will ever be able to pay off the debt. In other words, one of the U.S.'s best papers could end up going out of business.
I'm a libertarian, so in general I'm in sympathy with your free-market approach. But that doesn't mean that the free market always has a single, predetermined outcome, which is the best possible outcome.
One possibility that seems reasonable to me would be if e-ink technology eventually got good enough that it would be just as pleasurable to read my paper electronically while drinking my morning coffee as it currently is to read it on paper. Maybe that could save a lot of money on the costs of paper, printing, and delivery, and make newspapers more profitable.
Another possibility is that we'll become a nation in which the only source of news is the TV, in which case all I can say is Heaven help the republic.
I think calculation of the Hagedorn temperature at 10^30 K should be taken with a massive grain of salt. String theory has an adjustable parameter, which is the length scale on which the extra dimensions are curled up. Since string theory is supposed to be a model of quantum gravity, and there is only one fundamental length scale in quantum gravity -- the Planck scale -- the general assumption is that if string theory is right, that length scale should be the Planck scale. Converting that length to a temperature, you get the Planck temperature, 10^32 K. If there's a maximum temperature that's 100 times less than that, then that unitless factor of 1/100 has to come from some model-dependent calculation, and the NOVA article carefully notes that it's just this one guy's model that gives 1/100. I think all we can reasonably say at this stage is that if there is any natural scale beyond the scales that have been explored with current particle physics observations, we can only guess that it's the Planck scale, which corresponds to the Planck temperature.
The article doesn't explain very well why there should be any maximum temperature scale, but it's not really that hard to understand. There are model-independent, fairly plausible reasons for believing that there is a limit on the amount of information that a given amount of space can contain. If spacetime was really continuous rather than discrete, then it could contain an infinite amount of information in any volume, so it's reasonable to conclude that spacetime must be discrete. (Lee Smolin's Three Roads to Quantum Gravity spells out this argument in a lot more detail.) If spacetime is discrete, then the only reasonable distance scale for the minimum distance is the Planck scale. That means that a particle can't have a wavelength less than the Planck scale, and therefore it can't have an energy greater than the Planck energy. That means that a gas can't get hotter than the temperature at which every particle has an energy equal to the Planck energy, and that's the Planck temperature.
The answer is simple, copy it over frequently.
Yeah, from the article, are several silly things are going on here:
Does anyone know if this will end up making the widgets in perl/tk apps look better/more modern at some point?
Acutally, you may want to take a look at Flex. Adobe open-sourced their compiler, and the SDK to create SWF files. Flex (starting with version 3), is open source, /and/ fully supported by Adobe on Linux, Mac and Windows.
Thanks for the info -- that's very interesting. However, there's some pretty objectionable stuff in the EULA, including "2.6.1 No Modifications, No Reverse Engineering." That really doesn't fit my definition of OSS.
The EULA for the SWF spec also states that "You may not use the Specification in any way to create or develop a runtime, client, player, executable or other program that reads or renders SWF files." That would be my definition of proprietary.
There are open source implementations of the Flash protocol; I'm running Gnash as my SWF player on Ubuntu 64, and it works just fine. Your mileage may vary.
I tried Gnash, and it didn't work on the flash pages I tried it on. Although there are open-source development tools for flash, such as mtasc and haxe, there are a lot of obstacles, both legal and technological, that anyone will encounter if they try to do OSS development on the flash platform. If you want to generate AS3, the only OSS compiler is haxe, which doesn't implement the standard AS3 language. The Version 2 Components (flash's standard gui widget set) are under a license that prevents you from using them unless you own the Flash IDE. There are also patent issues with codecs; I believe Adobe is implementing some new audio and video codecs in the new versions of flash whose licensing is somewhat less problematic than the ones that used to be available, but you still can't use ogg or theora. Realistically, if you want to learn to develop flash using an OSS toolchain, you have a long, hard road ahead of you. You can't just buy a book on Flash and do what it says, because there are way too many bits and pieces that you can't reproduce without using the Adobe development tools.
A preprint of the paper is available from arxiv.org.
The general idea seems to be this. We observe that distant galaxies have an anomalously low redshift relative to the expectations of the linear Hubble relation, and we interpret this as evidence that the expansion of the universe has been accelerating. General relativity allows you to interpret a redshift as a difference in the rate of passage of time, so then an anomalously low redshift correponds to an anomalously low rate of passage of time, for us, compared to the distant galaxies, which were in the ancient universe where time was passing more quickly.
A couple of things leave me scratching my head:
I test-drove Google Docs the other day, and the basic impression I got was, "What they're trying to do, you just can't do, because JS isn't fast enough." The word processor was reasonably usable on fast hardware, but the spreadsheet was just ridiculously slow. I wonder how this kind of thing will perform in Tamarin. It would be very cool if Firefox became the clear browser of choice for AJAX, and IE was left in the dust because MS wasn't agile enough to catch up :-)
I think you're mistaken about the 5mw limit. Lasers more powerful than IIIa are indeed available for sale. AFAICT, they just have more strongly worded warning labels on them.
I didn't say they weren't available for sale. I just said they weren't available for unrestricted over the counter sale. "Class IIIb and class IV laser light show projectors may be sold only by or to individuals or firms that have obtained approval from the FDA." Anything over 5 mW is IIIb or higher. Protective eyewear is typically required where direct viewing of a class 3B laser beam may occur. Class-3B lasers must be equipped with a key switch and a safety interlock.
May I direct you to g oo g l e. Or even checking thinkgeek which was discussed earlier in the thread.
Note that the links google turns up for 100 W lasers are not things you can just buy by mail order. It is interesting that ThinkGeek is selling 10 mW lasers, which presumably would be IIIb, to individuals who don't have any special FDA approval. Unless the regulations have changed since the FDA put up that web page in 2005, I don't see how that can be legal.
Green lasers are more powerful, you can see the beam in clear conditions, they cost an awful lot more ( somewhere between 100 - 200), are much larger, closer to say, a couple of coke cans stood on end, and can cut through a polystyrene cup....
Please get your facts right. The highest power laser you can buy off the shelf in a consumer product is 5 mW. I have a 5 mW green laser, and it's the size of a dry-erase whiteboard marker, not the size of 2 coke cans. No, it cannot cut through a polystyrene cup. No, you cannot buy a laser powerful enough to cut through a polystyrene cup for $200; it would be *much* more expensive, and it would be illegal to sell it over the counter. There is nothing intrinsically "more powerful" about green lasers. However, the eye is far more sensitive to green light than to red light, so 5 mW of green appears much brighter than 5 mW of red. Also, when you buy a green laser that's marketed for its brightness (creating a visible beam in the air, etc.), part of what you're paying for is that they test all the lasers that come off the assembly line (they're solid-state devices), and put aside the ones that came out very near the legal limit of 5 mW to sell at a higher price. With $10 red pen-pointer lasers, there's a huge amount of variation in the manufacturing process, and all they do is make sure to test them and not sell any that are over the legal limit.
It's been amusing over the past 10 years to see young-earth creationists squirm about the fact that cosmology has become a high-precision science, with the age of the universe going from having 50% error bars to 1.5% error bars. Now these folks have apparently measured the age of the solar system to within .05%. For a long time, young-earth creationists (YECs) were trying to say that the science was all very uncertain, so you couldn't trust the science. Hmm...now it appears that Archbishop Ussher's date for creation is off by 2000 standard deviations. Oops!
It's unfortunate that the authors don't seem to be in the habit of posting preprints on arxiv, or on their university web site. TFA doesn't really explain very well, for example, how they know the primordial Mn/Cr ratio so precisely, and why the Mn/Cr ratio in the universe as a whole wouldn't change at the same rate as the ratio in asteroids. As a California taxpayer, is it too unreasonable of me to expect research funded by my tax money to be available freely?
Anyone thinking of clicking on the parent's link (to vumit.com) should realize that it's a goatsex-style shocker page.
XHTML failed to replace HTML because a browser with a dominating market share doesn't support it [...]
Right.
[...] and using it in a backwards-compatible way confers very few advantages over HTML and none whatsoever for typical developers.
Wrong -- or at least it depends on what you mean by "typical." Technologies like SVG and MathML are XML-based, so there is a big advantage to having xhtml support in browsers: it lets you use inline SVG and MathML according to the w3c standards. Because MS doesn't support xhtml, SVG and MathML have basically been killed as practical browser technologies. Instead of SVG, we get Flash, which is proprietary (full of patent-encumbered and license-encumbered parts, controlled only by Adobe). Instead of MathML, we get horrible-looking bitmap renderings of mathematics on web pages.
Why yes, because linux and bsd code have never been ripped off.
I didn't say that linux and bsd code had never been ripped off.
Nor does the author talk about taking the software closed source; if you read the article he talks about distributing part of the project as a binary, the bits that people can easily use to just change the copyright messages, the installer and other small bits. The removal of the current source is a stopgap until he decides which option to take.
Here I agree that you have more of a point. However, if you cripple the source code distribution so that it's no longer possible to compile the whole thing from source, to me that indicates that the software is no longer open source. Pick any high-profile OSS project such as the Gimp or gcc, and ask yourself what would happen if the leaders annouced that they were taking just a little of the code closed source. Nobody would say, "Oh, that's all right, gcc is still 90% open source." They would say, "That's ridiculous -- I'm switching to llvm," or maybe "That's ridiculous, I'm forking the fully open-source version."
Yeah. I think this is an interesting example of how underdeveloped and pathetic the OSS scene on Windows is. It's like going back in a time machine to 1988, when nobody had ever heard of the Gnu Project, nobody had ever heard of copyleft, and "free" software meant a mixture of illegally copied closed-source software and legally downloaded closed-source nagware, tipware, and crippleware. I sympathize with the author of Paint.NET, but he's fighting against a culture where most people have no idea what OSS is, and where all the social mechanisms the Linux/BSD community has developed don't exist. It's as though some British banker showed up in the Trobriand Islands in 1880 and announced that he was going to build a stock exchange. This whole thing would be a nonissue if this was Linux rather than Windows. Paint.NET is apparently a very popular piece of software with an active user community, so if it was Linux software, it would certainly have been packaged for Debian by now. People would be getting the latest version by doing an "apt-get install paint-dot-net." Imagine if someone made a backspaceware version of The Gimp -- obviously it just wouldn't work.
I used to be interested in the idea of spreading the word about OSS by making cross-platform apps available on both Windows and Linux -- the kind of thing that theopencd.org used to do. I had a a GUI app I'd written for my own use on Linux, and while I was at it, I made sure it ran on Windows. On the one hand, it was surprisingly successful. Judging by the emails I was getting, the vast majority of my users were on Windows. On the other hand, it was a huge amount of work to support those Windows users, and I started to question whether I was really accomplishing anything useful. When you write OSS that runs on Linux, you get that warm fuzzy feeling of belonging to a community and building something big and exciting. When you write OSS that runs on Windows, the users are not a community that has the same philosophical goals and is working toward the same ends; the users are people who typically couldn't care less about OSS (that's why they run Windows) but who simply want something for free. I ended up putting a notice on the web site saying that I would no longer provide support for Windows users; the source is still open, and they're welcome to try running it, but if it doesn't work, I don't have any motivation anymore to put in time helping a community that doesn't care about the things I care about. I don't think I'm alone in having this kind of experience. For instance, theopencd.org's site now says they're no longer actively developing the CD, and just has links to ubuntu, etc.
What's sad about the Paint.NET story is that the author seems genuinely pained and bewildered by the situation he's in, and since he doesn't seem to care about free information per se, it's like he doesn't have a compass to guide him. He runs up against this issue, and his reaction is, "oh well, I'll take the software closed-source." That's what the whole Windows OSS scene is like -- a bunch of people wandering around without any common vision of what they're trying to accompish. It's like watching the Israelites wandering around in the desert without Moses.
SO in other words someone else's edits got through and yours didnt so you took your ball and went home.
I was a happy, active Wikipedian for several years. Yeah, there were times when my edits didn't survive, but that was something I just had to accept. There's a reason why I edited for several years, and then quit -- it's that things changed for the worse. The barn-raising phase was over, and the efficiency of working on WP (defined as results divided by effort) was getting lower and lower.
All they're basically proposing is that you write an article as best as you can and they host it,
If you look at the sample, you'll notice that they're going to allow readers to rate articles with 1-5 stars. They also say "Our job in Search Quality will be to rank the knols appropriately when they appear in Google search results. We are quite experienced with ranking web pages, and we feel confident that we will be up to the challenge." That is very different from just offering free web hosting, which would be a one-way mode of communication from the author (who is possibly a crackpot) to the reader.
giving you a tiny share of the revenue it generates.
Yeah, this is the key question, which they don't answer: how much of the revenue does the author get? If it's less than you'd get by hosting your own content and putting up adsense ads, then I think my motivation for participating would be very low.
So instead of watching edit wars and being able to check out multiple opinions you now have to take the whole article as it is.
In the article, they say they want to build a setup where there are competing articles on the same topic.
There might even be small errors in there that would otherwise have been fixed by peers.
If you look at the sample article, it has a byline, and the author's academic affiliation is given.
I just don't understand how this is anything worth talking about or worth comparing to wikipedia.
The real problem is that the barn-raising stage of wikipedia is over, the quality of wikipedia is no longer getting any better over time, and the structure of wikipedia is inappropriate for its current stage of development. That's why I, like many former hard-core wikipedians, have quit editing. Wikipedia has turned into a giant energy-wasting machine like the one in The Matrix. You have millions of people all over the world, all undoing each other's edits, while most articles remain at the same low level of quality. I'm a physicist, and when I look at a physics article on WP, I don't typically say "that's wrong," I say "that's so poorly written that I don't believe anyone could ever read it and follow what it's trying to explain." You can try till you're blue in the face to improve the quality of the writing on WP, and it just won't work, because your hard work will succumb to random, uncoordinated edits by well-intentioned people.
I know a chemistry professor at the school where I teach who's an Ethiopian immigrant, and he used to organize textbook donation drives every few years. People would give him books, and he would send them to Ethiopia. He eventually stopped doing it, however, because it was too difficult to get the books to the students due to political corruption. Assuming the OLPC machines really do get to the kids (rather than being sold to enrich politically connected adults) in places like Nigeria, a big advantage would be that it would give the kids direct access to books that can't easily be interfered with.
OTOH, I maintain a catalog of free books (see my sig), and AFAIK there is essentially nothing out there as far as free elementary school books, and almost nothing for high school either. I do know of a South African project to produce a high school physics text (http://www.fhsst.org/), for example, but the project seems to have been moving along extremely slowly. Something like Wikibooks would seem like a natural vehicle for creating such books (ease of use + ease of translation), but Wikibooks has turned out to be a failure at its original goal of producing university-level textbooks (much better at producing gaming guides). In general, I don't think group authoring has been at all successful as a model for creating free textbooks. Authoring by an individual teacher scratching his/her own itch has been much more successful, but virtually all of that activity has been (a) in English, (b) in rich, industrialized countries, and (c) at the university level.
The Viking missions sampled soil on-site with the tools that were built into the landers.
To amplify a little on what you said: the results from the Viking experiments were ambiguous. They set criteria in advance, and said, "If the experiment does X, it means there's life, otherwise there's no evidence for life in the sample." The experiment actually did X, but some other aspects of the results were different than anything that was anticipated, which made the entire thing hard to interpret. At the time, the official announcement was that the results of the experiment were negative, but it's still pretty unclear. It could have been weird soil chemistry, or it could have been weird microbes.
The main problem, IMHO, is not even Joe Newbie who re-formats his GNU PC. It is the mentality of PC vendors itself who do not even configure their GNU/Linuxes correctly on their hardware.
I think you're right about the phenomenon, but wrong about the reasons. I've bought a lot of $200 PCs with preinstalled Linux over the years, including a gPC, which my daughter is probably using right now to play Neopets. When you look at the stuff that doesn't work as configured from the vendor, it's usually not the vendor's fault. My gPC, for instance, came with a slip packed in the box explaining that the modem wouldn't work. That's not because Everex is stupid or lazy, it's because the mobo they chose had a winmodem onboard, and winmodem support in Linux sucks. Another common problem is that I buy an LCD monitor, and xorg doesn't automagically configure itself correctly for that monitor -- it defaults to very low resolution, or uses an inappropriate geometry for the screen. This is not a misconfiguration by the vendor, because the vendor didn't get a chance to check that the configuration worked properly with the particular LCD monitor I bought.
The gPC is an interesting example of vendor behavior that's the complete opposite of what you're describing. Apparently, they were concerned that Gnome would be too slow on their hardware, and that was the reason they developed a heavily customized Enlightenment setup for it. That seems to me like an extremely conscientious effort on their part to try to configure the OS properly for the hardware.
I think the basic problem is that vendors of wifi chipsets, video cards, onboard video chipsets, winmodems, inkjet printers, LCD monitors, etc. are not yet convinced that it's to their advantage to work hard to provide good Linux support. This is not entirely crazy behavior on their part, because Linux is still a ridiculously small sliver of the desktop market. In addition, I think a lot of the Taiwanese manufacturers would actually like to have better Linux compatibility, but there is simply a language barrier that makes it more difficult and expensive for them to produce decent docs. Since they can cover 99% of their market just by supplying binary-blob Windows drivers, they decide not to put the effort into writing docs at all.
If the utilities really want help balancing the grid here in California, they should change how they handle photovoltaics. I have photovoltaics, and there's a strong disincentive to buy more than enough capacity to handle 80% or so of your annual use. If you overproduce over the course of a 12-month billing period, they just take your extra electricity for free, and say thank you very much. If they would pay for excess production, I'd have a strong incentive to add more panels on my roof, and those panels would produce a lot of electricity on those hot Southern California days when everybody's using their AC.
The WP article on Maxthon says it uses Trident, the same layout engine as IE. I know nothing about the world of closed-source Windows development, but this seems odd to me. Does MS license the source to Trident, or does it just expose a binary API for it? Since MS wants IE to win the new browser wars, what's their motivation to make Trident available to developers who might create competing browsers such as Maxthon? Does the licensing deal for Trident mean that MS gets a slice of revenue out of Maxthon's donations? Since Maxthon has a 30% market share in China compared to Firefox's 15% in the West, I assume that means that Chinese users have some very strong reason to prefer Maxthon to IE -- even stronger than the obvious reasons to prefer Firefox over IE. What would those reasons be? Does Maxthon have better support for Chinese text?
Not all schools that are doing laptops are doing it with tax dollars. There are two public elementary schools in my neighborhood in Fullerton, CA. One of them (not the one my kids go to, thank god) tried to require every student to buy a laptop. A lawsuit resulted, and AFAIK the plan has not been implemented, but there are other schools that are trying the same thing.
Personally, I didn't mind buying $200 Linux desktop boxes for my kids, but standard laptops are a ridiculously bad choice for young kids. They cost two to four times as much as a desktop system with the same specs, and they tend to die or become obsolete much more quickly, so you end up with something that's an order of magnitude more money for the same amount of use. With kids, you just add onto that the fact that it will get beat on more severely. It's also fairly difficult to buy a laptop without paying the Windows tax, so most of these programs end up being Windows-only -- yech, yet more favored treatment for MS by government, None of my arguments apply to the XO, however; the price is low, and they're designed to be durable enough so kids won't destroy them.
As a physics prof, I can see both sides of the argument about the educational appropriateness of computers. On the one hand, it would be silly to require my students to do long division on tests. On the other hand, not all calculators are created equal. Some, for instance, can do algebra and calculus. I think there's a reasonable argument to be made that it's unfair for one student to use a $300 calculator that can do algebra and calculus, while the other student can't afford that, and has to get by with an ordinary scientific calculator. Personally, my experience is that the student who is incompetent at algebra is also incompetent at setting up an algebra problem on a calculator, but I don't think it's quite as clearcut a luddite versus non-luddite issue as you're making out. If you talk to calculus teachers about why students fail first-semester calculus, they'll all say the same thing: it's because they haven't mastered arithmetic and algebra. You also can't completely separate things cleanly into important concepts versus unimportant details of technique. Knowing how to divide fractions by hand isn't a completely separate skill from understanding what it means to divide fractions, knowing when you should do it, knowing how to interpret the results, knowing how the result would change when you changed the inputs, ...
Yeah, reading the article, I had the same impression, that it was just a honeypot. And in fact, I don't even think it's a useful generalization of a honeypot. A honeypot is an address that receives 100% spam. This method is supposed to look at accounts that receive low levels of spam as well, but how is that useful? I receive essentially 0% spam, mainly because I change my address every year. Even if I was willing to share my data with this company, what would it tell them? I get an email from my wife telling me to pick up milk on the way home from work. Well, nobody else gets that email, so it doesn't do them any good to classify it as non-spam. The technique also seems vulnerable to countermeasures. For instance, the spammer can put random stuff in every email it sends out, so that no two spams are identical. AFAIK the point of a honeypot is that you can build a blacklist of machines that send spam, not that you're trying to build a blacklist of known spam *messages*.
I guess this can be taken as good news, since the alternative was presumably some DRM'd format.
On the other hand, mp3 is still patent-encumbered, and in fact the patent situation is such a mess that nobody even knows for sure when the last patent will expire. You can get a royalty-free license to use a decoder, or to use an encoder for noncommercial use, but ...
The lack of support for open audio and video codecs is a real problem now, because essentially flash is shaping up to be a completely necessary part of people's ability to do things with their computers, and one of the many ways that adobe is keeping flash proprietary is that they only support proprietary audio and video codecs for flash. Now matter how much java applets may have sucked in various ways, at least the technology was always free as in beer (and is now becoming free as in speech).
Even though buying music downloads in a DRM-free format like mp3 is a step up from buying them in a DRM'd format, there are still a lot of issues. You may have to agree to a license that forbids you from reselling the music, and takes away your fair use rights as well.
Personally, what works for me is buying CDs. There's no DRM, and no license. I can resell them. I don't need to back them up, because the disks *are* the backup. If I feel like it, I can copy them onto my mp3 player for personal use, and it's legal. If I feel like it, I can copy them onto my computer's hard disk, and put the actual optical disks somewhere else as backups. The only reason I'd really be interested in buying music digitally would be in cases where the music is out of print. Why buy it as a download, when my very first act after downloading it would be to burn it onto a CD as a backup?