I'm actually going at things from the other direction. For most of the time I was in college I was a GUI snob and preferred things like the NeXT and Mac OS GUI's over the power tool OS's (Sequent and IBM Unix). True, I have a Mac OS X box today that I use a lot, but I find myself looking longingly over at the Linux side of the world and I'm even prepping a couple of spare boxes that I can use just to toy with Linux.
I used to be a HyperCard wizzard, a FileMaker consultant, and an AppleScript guru, but lately the limitation of these tools is really chafing against me. I've found it necessary to learn C. Of course I've tried to learn Cocoa and GnuStep but it's not nearly as easy as what I'm able to whip up with the kindergarten graphical tools. But now I've started really understanding the elegance of pipes and the simple syntax of C and the GUI things are really getting on my nerves.
There are still many things that I hate with the experiments that I've played with Linux. I despise all of the confusion over the package managers and libraries (I just don't understand it). And I get frustrated by the way one handles memory management in C (though I do understand why one do it; it's just like filling out my taxes each year... frustratingly monotonous).
I know that the way this topic started off there will probably be a slew of flame wars starting from people who feel that the integrity of Linux and BSD has been insulted by saying that Mac OS X is easier. I'm not interested in those flame wars but if there are any lessons that can be learned from each camp, there could be a really good symbiosis that comes from Linux users wanting more simplicity and Mac users wanting more power.
Bill has thrown down the gauntlet. Better get the patent for these ideas now. Or perhaps make or round up proof that these ideas aren't unique and sui generis.
Perhaps the ideas are only interface patents with a rigged intelligence behind the front. "Handwriting" patents have been issued for broad, simplistic, rigged demos that make sure that the people who are smart enough to think of how to really pull off the interface will have to bow to your "idea".
I know that innumerable Rich Tennant comics and other geek 'leet humor poke fun at those people who think having a faster processor speeds up the download process, but (I know this is heretical) but it does, doesn't it?
It doesn't increase the transmission speed since the limits there are often not processor related (maybe with soft-modems), but it does help with faster decryption / decoding / and decompression significantly. So if you include the time of this post-processing in the complete circuit of time taken to get a true copy of the original file then a faster processor does help shorten the download cycle.
I realize that people who think the faster chip helps download speeds are incorrectly thinking it helps transmission speed, but people are rather viciously ridiculed for a rather simple mistake that isn't really a mistake. A better chip will abbreviate the time it takes to get or send your files even if it doesn't effect the transmission time.
The quick succession of the ROBOlympics following on the heels of the unsuccessful Darpa Grand Challenge reminds me of the way Hanna Barbara tried to resurect the fervor of the fizzled Wacky Races with the even more miserable Scooby Doo All Star Laff Olympics.
Even when I was young the predictable slapstick and farce made the Yogi Yahooies, the Scooby Doobies, and the Really Rottens all seem like very poorly programmed robots (and I'm not referring solely to Dyno-Mutt).
Whether this is a harbinger of doom or an off-topic free association rant from the demented mind of a Saturday morning Crunchberry adict is left for the future to pass judgement.
Both programmers and lawyers deal with logic as their bread and butter. But law relies on a vague language (English), an obscure syntax (18th century customs), and bases it's procedures and algorithms on an foundation that's very volatile, hard to track, and subject to forking with almost each ruling.
Computer professionals had to deal with trying to figure out reliable ways to deal with similar problems even when it wasn't in their power to change things. The waterfall development models of the sixites, and the trial-and-error bumbling of the hobbyists have developed some workable procedures (extreme programming, pragmatic programming, etc) that have made the computer world accessible and observable to all who want to participate.
I don't see the legal community even wanting to pursue such ideas. A senator introducing a bill into congress can offer all sorts of flowery comments to his "legal code", but it's the code that matters and affects people once codified into law. So much irrelevant crap gets worked into law each year on the state and federal level by being hidden in other work, it's depressing. When a court writes a verdict to set a legal precedent, all hell seems to break loose. It's like you have been told that the memory management routines in the standard C library are deprecated and you're left wondering whether that impacts your string library.
I know that English stinks as a language for expressing logic, but why can't lawyers depend on something English-like such as Lisp, Scheme, Prolog, or a special legal dialect that could be reduced to clear answers and effects. Lawmakers and judges could continue to write English comments with flowery and awe-inspiring prose, but their code would be clear what the result of this change would be. Imagine the Supreme Court running their rulings through regression tests before they are released so that they can fully understand the impact the changes will have. The results may still be ground-breaking but at least such tests would ensure that there are no unexpected results and loopholes created by a sloppy ruling.
Of course, this is an absurd idea. But it's even more absurd that the governed allow politicians, lawyers, and judges to play so fast and loose with the rules that govern their own lives. Is it a matter of power having corrupted those in charge? The legal community has all sorts of institutions to preserve their power ("passing the bar", etc).
Is it just that only recently have the techniques and ability to deal with such a huge system become available? I could be wrong, but wasn't it Blaise Pascal who dreamed of a time when courts could be run with the logic of algebra? Today we machines that can hold the volumous data from the legal world. Our understanding of logic and (more importantly) the consequences of making exceptions are much better understood. Artificial Intelligence tools do exactly this sort of logical "if this then this" sort of reasoning that humans are so bad at doing when we really don't want to come to the logical conclusion.
These days, the debate over gay marriage for example gives me the willies with overzealous lawmakers spreading diatribes about their legal changes to the definition of marriage. Of course CNN would never carry the actual patches, but if I could go to a website and see for myself different positions. Group A was arguing to simply remove definition of husband and wife as male and female. Group B was coding a subclass of marriage called gay_union. And Group C was making changes to define marriage as a couple capable of producing offspring. Regression tests may tell us more about their intents than their 30 second commercial spots. Group B's gay_union subclass might not hold up as constitutionally valid as marriage and would be subject to court challenge. Group C's fertility requirement might keep certain old or infertile heterosexual couples from getting married. While Group A's dropping the gender definition might make for some funny changes to a 1913 New York subway law th
Perhaps Nasa will announce that they have discovered a mysterious 10th planet at coordinates xeno=9, yako=9, zabo=9 with the use of an old space simulator in use since 1982. While the name is currently under debate the current favorites are Brittish, Antos, and Minax.
In an effort to try and recoup some of it's losses in the OS marketplace, SCO is opening their legal team to any slashdotter, geek, or leet script kiddies. These unpaid volunteers will be given access to all 232 versions of IBM's AIX. Because the response is expected to be tremendous, they'll have to submit a shipping and handling fee of $99.95 and sign a non-gpl-compatible, non-disclosure, non-sense agreement before they're allowed to see the code.
Of course the above is in jest, but I bet it will be quite a challenge to keep the source of all those AIX versions confidential from the eager eyes of the geek community. Is this stuff of any value today to IBM? Would sloppy court handling or an "accidental" publication by SCO possibly release anything of value to the tech community?
(I'm not talking about copyrights of course, that's a whole circle of hell Dante and I don't want to know anything about).
I wouldn't recommend Firefox or anything other than MSIE for a commercial environment using Windows. Reason? IE IS integral to the OS - it needs to be supported and updated ANYWAY even if not used. SO - most commercial companies can't have the extra effort of supporting a second browser.
That's exactly the reason I'd recommend using Firefox on Windows because it doesn't use the IE libraries.
Though IE is convenient, it's also built into windows and is a fragile system component liable to jeaopordize many more things in my OS if it breaks or becomes corrupted. It's seemingly constant updates, standards tweaking, and security fixes mean that the code base is quite volitile.
For the sake of the security and functionality of my system, I've found things run much better if I intentionally do NOT use IE (or a similar program that just calls the IE libraries) and instead use something independent like Firefox.
I'm not saying that IE is broken, but like a child that isn't ready to deal with all of the diversity seen on the world wide web I'd prefer to use it only when called to work it's magic by other apps for things on my machine. I'll keep using another browser like Firefox that's more mature in its development and can handle the deviant standards people use to write their html code more gracefully.
The propogation of code is worrisome, but I'm also unsure of the legal implications of allowing your code to accept the code and restrictions of others by automatically allowing it to run.
This may be a neat new way to logically propogate code, but once all the kinks are worked out it seems like it simply opens new doors for lawyers to battle out THEIR logic.
Out of curiosity, am I the only one who hadn't heard of "Wireless USB" before this article?
Don't worry, it will probably have a less technical sounding name before it's rolled out to consumers. Probably "USB peak-speed" to join "USB full-speed" and "USB high-speed".
I worked for a check printing company that had many scanners, printers, and film output devices that had been stripped of their anti-counterfieting devices. This was a must have since people were routinely designing watermarks, elaborate borders, and color washes that would set off the criminal circuits and freeze he device.
I actually saw these devices as marketshare protection devices. My company and its handful of competitors were rapidly having the marketshare for high quality printing eaten away by good commercial printers. The marketing department may have made all sorts of blather about "finer attention to detail" and "knowing the banking industry" but the process of MICR printing on 2400dpi presses from Macs using Adobe Illustrator could honestly have been done by anyone willing to follow standards.
But it would have been a bit of a problem if this low-end competition were trying to output a check prototype with a watermark, color wash, and elaborate border that continuously set off their anti-counterfieting software. The high end check and document printing business wasn't a monopoly, but I strongly suspect that these were devices strongly desired by every player in the market to keep the sellers from expanding.
Are these measures the same way? They surely sound motivated by similar private market interests.
Dan Geer... has just been
written up by AP for his warnings about the widespread use of Microsoft products...
When I read this sentence, I thought that the Associated Press had disciplined Dan Greer. Not that they had authored an article about Dan's diciplinary actions. The implications of censorship in an organization like the AP are huge to me. After frantically reading the article, I just find that the AP is reporting on Dan's discipline by a former employer. Big news, but not quite as big as I originally thought.
I know that English is a screwed up language to begin with. But additionally, idioms like "push the envelope" and "developing solutions" would have different meanings to office secretaries and film processors than aircraft designers and anyone subjected to the marketing rhetoric of most computer companies.
I actually thought the article was pretty good when I read it, but I'm just asking people to be a bit more careful when mixing idioms of different domains.
I think my difficulties at understanding my electromagnetism classes were partially because of my preconceptions caused by my understanding of light from Green Lantern comics.
Light can be both a particle and a wave... and a big boxing glove or baseball bat depending on the controlling thoughts.
Quantum mechanics dictates that the observer can effect the observed... but only if you have a ring on your finger, otherwise you'll just get your head beaten in by a big green boxing glove or baseball bat.
Color can be emissive (from the light wavelength itself) or reflective (from interacting with something it hits)... but nothing will change, interact, or stop green light unless it happens to be yellow.
The perception of color itself is really just an evolved way humans measure different wavelengths of light but there's nothing particularly special about the range of light we see... except that we can see the two most useful wavelengths: green and yellow.
It's been a while. I don't read Green Lantern nor perform emag calculations so perhaps I've misstated something from continuity or text. C'est La Vie.
The browser battles may have fought to a stand still but there are some other issues that still bug me. The biggest is the Intellectual Property battle.
Web pages are copyrightable code and content. There have been features around for years to take this bundle and automatically put it into something else (a PDF file, a archive folder, etc.). What hasn't been addressed are the legal implications of doing that.
If I go to a sight that says it's pages are protected (for example) what happens if I send the page in an HTML email to my boss. It may even make a differnence if the pages claimed to be copyrighted, gpl'ed, or click-through-licensed.
Where Microsoft can win this game is by making everything on Windows locked down tight in Longhorn. They then make sure that every author can set their price per page on the Microsoft web: "Downloading a page out of Internet Explorer isn't allowed unless you pay $0.001 cents per byte." (or some such nonsense).
Why would anyone use a non-free browser in this manner? They wouldn't unless they were forced to. Microsoft can do this by convincing every blogger and Parent Teacher Association that they're losing money by not exclusively using Microsoft technologies. For the insurgents who write out of some (un-American!) sense other than profit, they can probably stir up enough noise and uncertainty in the court rooms (whether they do the suing or a puppet) that makes people just feel like the "web" was the equivalent of some sort of sixties commune. Groovy and completely unsustainable.
The fact that free software has a pair of good tools (apache and firefox) is still barely into this game.
What else can be done? Legally I don't know. I'm not a lawyer.
But for the coders and writers and web users of today, get them using standards and free software and realize they're using it is a very good thing.
Second, maybe get something like source forge set up for people to GPL web sites. I'm not talking people's blogs here, but major site redesigns that have become standard compliant and how they did it. Heck, get volunteers to do site redesigns if the code becomes GPL and open to all. People need to realize that not only is it important to redesign their sites to be standards compliant, but it's also cheap to do so. The site probably won't convince the CitiBanks of the world to do anything special, but it will hopefully show and convince the community colleges and small businesses and non-profit organizations that this is really a do-able thing.
Greed is still a strong factor. If Microsoft ever does release a secure OS, then there will be a lot of people who succumb to greed. But if their whole stream of server, database, & browser is already Microsoft proprietary they'll certainly not see any advantage to going open and standards compliant at that point.
But that shouldn't take away from the great progress that Mozilla has made. It's been a fantastic thing to watch.
Heck, I'd be glad to knight him if, in exchange, I were to get complimentary copies of Windows XP, Office 2003, and various server softwares in bulk for all of my royal palaces.
What's next?
Maybe some improvements in handling of Italian and Latin can get Bill beatification.:-)
When I feel that a 1024x768 display is "Too Confining" I put the machine in 800x600 mode and force myself to work that way for at least two days.
Forcing myself to use a smaller space and then reverting to a bigger one can feel like you have a huge display, but it's not just psychological.
Because most Mac programs remember the toolbar settings and window positions, when I've adjusted things for the smaller display these settings stick when I come back to the big one. I really force myself to decide which toolbars to hide. What's a useful size for my spreadsheets. Whether or not to use certain floating palletes that always gobble screen real estate.
Additionally, I get more used to using the space saving tools like Expose and Dock hiding that I don't really find myself unless I've felt really constrained for a while.
Of course that's not to say that I feel that I can get by all the time with 800x600. It's just a useful garden to force myself to use for a while before moving to the huge rolling fields.
My idea that requires some sort of micro-payment system to be viable is a service that does auto-translation of file formats for you.
Sent the service an AbiWord document and it sends back a real 100% Microsoft Word document in a ZIP file. Instead of thousands of people with their own copies of Microsoft Word, thousands of people use this service occasionally for those rare cases they must have a TRUE file.
The interesting part is when the service changes polarity and everyone starts insisting on receiving files in open source formats. "Write your resume in any word processor you like, but send it to us in XMLRESUME format"
If secure connections get usable for the average joe, then perhaps a non-partisan government could get in on things. Define a standard that anyone could implement for things like tax filings and public bids (or maybe just death notices and zoning changes to start on a local level)
Anyway, it's not a service that can be done without a lot of bandwitdth, good hardware, security, and trust from your customers so it looks like something that has to be funded somehow. Micropayments? I hope something makes this financially feasible.
Back when Spindler ruled as Steward of Apple (well before the return of Jobs), I signed an NDA for an evaluation period with a piece of Apple hardware that was supposedly about 10-12 months from release.
The specs of the machine have been outclassed by modern standards, and the neat software features not made irrelevant by Mac OS X have surfaced in Mac OS X Server. But there were two very cool things about the case though that I thought were of the "Geez, that seems so obviously handy!" variety.
The gotcha was that it has never been released. I keep expecting new Mac hardware to one day come out with these two features but until that time I guess I'm still under NDA. Arrggghhhh!!!!!
Be glad your NDA expired with the release of the product. Otherwise you'd be burning with the image of that cool speedometer in your mind and unable to tell anyone about it.:-)
There will be more viruses and worms that silently exploit holes in Microsoft Windows... These are the offspring of virus writers hired by organised crime.
There will also be more "phishing" scams... These too are from computer experts working for organised crime.
Legal music downloading stores will arrive properly...
I remember hearing that rhymes, rhythmn, and songs were used as part of keeping the oral versions consistent. In fact, I think it using verbal techniques ensures better long term accuracy than transcription to paper. They're kind of like sonic checksums.
So, in the song "Hark the Herald Angels Sing", is herald a noun or an adjective? (As in, 'Harken our local herald, angels are singing' or 'Hark, a flock of angels are announcing something'). I've seen both versions punctuated in print this season. One is probably more accepted than the other, but it's still vague.
Is the gift on the fourth day of Christmas, Calling Birds or Colly birds? Google this for a variety of arguments on this topic that seem to indicate calling is a corruption of something else (whether it was cauli/colley/colly is not clear though).
While rhyme and meter can help preserve stories, it can also be justification for "improving" them. I wrote a poem in high school that I was forced to read aloud to the class. People liked the poem and it was reprinted in a magazine, but someone replaced my use of the term "enthalpy" in my original with the slightly more poetic sounding term "entropy". It made my poem sound more poetic, but it was far less thermodynamically correct and bugged me no end.
This is a greater liability over long centuries when language and pronunciation can change. Certainly the use of such tools can be a great help to keep an oral tradition alive, but staying alive and staying the same aren't quite the same thing.
I suspect (perhaps incorrectly) that the adaptation of the stories of a WWI veteran to movies in New Zealand was given the greenlight because of the success of another WWI vet (JRR Tolkien), but this brings up a question that I've had in my mind for a while "Do good allegorical stories make for good movies?"
An allegory (at least as I use the term) is a subject that is described by using another subject in it's place (sort of like an extended metaphor).
Tolkien and Lewis are on opposite sides of the fence when it comes to allegory. Tolkein despising it and Lewis making heavy use of it. On the written page, I think that the use or avoidence of allegory is fine, but I'm not sure that it works on film.
Film is just such an overwhelmingly visual medium and allegory is such an abstract tool. It may be possible to depict the Lion Aslan as an allegory of Jesus on the written page, but on film you will see such an overwhelming embodiment of "big cat" that unless there's a narrator or someone hitting you over the head with "Lion = Jesus" the allegory will just be overwhelmed.
The only example of strict allegory that I recall in a modern film was Battlefield Earth but that may be an unfair example (as there were many other reasons why that movie was so poorly received).
Of course, many people already know the allegory that Lewis used in his tales and no doubt it will be brought up again and again by movie critics and sunday school teachers before the movie debuts, but if people didn't go in already having been told what to expect, would the allegory have been obvious?
How much do you want to bet that 5 years from now, the record industry will all love the internet because this year they finally figure out how to make money by selling music at a reasonable price?
Personally, I don't think they will figure this out. Even if they find out that DRMed distribution can be profitable they'll keep selling CDs because there is still a great deal of profit from distribution in physical media that doesn't have anything to do with a media sale. Unless the internet is so wildly successful that it replaces the profits from these secondary contracts as well, the RIAA will always portray online as a poor runner-up for their most profitable, lucrative, and monopolistic contracts.
In terms of being a union of artists, the RIAA does a pretty horrible job of representing the average joe in their ranks. There is definitely room to usurp their monopoly.
Pure speculation, but my guess is that the online distribution services are doing what they can to get profitable sales right now for the RIAA. When they've shored up their business model and have negotiated their next round of iron-clad, longer-term contracts, the online distributors may go into the business of replacing the RIAA with contracts directly with studios or artists directly.
(Of course the big puzzle piece that doesn't fit is Apple Computer's contract with Apple Music. This would be a big problem for Apple in ever becoming a music distributor, but either that's just one more hurdle for Apple to capitalize out of but it doesn't effect the other online distributors).
The common (rather than legal) understanding of copyright seems to be what Darl's ghost writer (right-wraith?) is declaring:
"There can only be one Lord of the [Rights].
Only one who can bend others to his will.
And he does not share power!"
The fact that there are people who are not succumbing to it's greed and wielding these rights to oppress and profit from the work of others was an unexpected way to defend against the corrupting influence of the instrument of power.
But one should be cautious...
[The GPL] is a gift. A gift to the foes of [Closed Source]! Why not use this [right]?... Give [the FSF] the weapon of the enemy. Let us use it against him!"
While the SCO menace may be simply a minor diversion (akin to Lurtz) the true menaces may be more corrupting and more difficult to fight.
Defending or defeating attacks from the closed source enemy means a need to unite and to pool the copyrights we each develop individually. But such power placed in any one man is a difficult thing to manage, to defend, and to resist the corrupting greed that arises from it.
Of course there doesn't seem to be much alternative:
Stay low, hidden in the woods while others feed the corruption of the ruling closed source
Unmake the power and release all copyright into the public domain. This destroys the corrupting influence, but it strenghthens the enemy as well.
Continue to weild the GPL until the problems and corrupting influence of the intellectual property system can be worked out and the evil truly unmade.
Sorry, if the above arguments are a bit muddled. I guess I have something else weighing on my mind.
One of my friends in college was an electrical engineer. In the early nineties, as a fun diversion, he built a cell phone blocking device. He'd have another friend go driving with him and the box and whenever they saw a guy using a cell phone while driving, they'd zap him. Their reward was two-fold: they thought they were making the streets safer with this batman and robin vigilante enforcement, and they just loved the looks on these people's faces when they'd get zapped.
As my friend got closer to graduation, he gave up on the jammer though. He wasn't sure about the legalities of what he was doing and the cell phone population took off geometrically.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm actually going at things from the other direction. For most of the time I was in college I was a GUI snob and preferred things like the NeXT and Mac OS GUI's over the power tool OS's (Sequent and IBM Unix). True, I have a Mac OS X box today that I use a lot, but I find myself looking longingly over at the Linux side of the world and I'm even prepping a couple of spare boxes that I can use just to toy with Linux.
I used to be a HyperCard wizzard, a FileMaker consultant, and an AppleScript guru, but lately the limitation of these tools is really chafing against me. I've found it necessary to learn C. Of course I've tried to learn Cocoa and GnuStep but it's not nearly as easy as what I'm able to whip up with the kindergarten graphical tools. But now I've started really understanding the elegance of pipes and the simple syntax of C and the GUI things are really getting on my nerves.
There are still many things that I hate with the experiments that I've played with Linux. I despise all of the confusion over the package managers and libraries (I just don't understand it). And I get frustrated by the way one handles memory management in C (though I do understand why one do it; it's just like filling out my taxes each year... frustratingly monotonous).
I know that the way this topic started off there will probably be a slew of flame wars starting from people who feel that the integrity of Linux and BSD has been insulted by saying that Mac OS X is easier. I'm not interested in those flame wars but if there are any lessons that can be learned from each camp, there could be a really good symbiosis that comes from Linux users wanting more simplicity and Mac users wanting more power.
Bill has thrown down the gauntlet. Better get the patent for these ideas now. Or perhaps make or round up proof that these ideas aren't unique and sui generis.
Perhaps the ideas are only interface patents with a rigged intelligence behind the front. "Handwriting" patents have been issued for broad, simplistic, rigged demos that make sure that the people who are smart enough to think of how to really pull off the interface will have to bow to your "idea".
I know that innumerable Rich Tennant comics and other geek 'leet humor poke fun at those people who think having a faster processor speeds up the download process, but (I know this is heretical) but it does, doesn't it?
It doesn't increase the transmission speed since the limits there are often not processor related (maybe with soft-modems), but it does help with faster decryption / decoding / and decompression significantly. So if you include the time of this post-processing in the complete circuit of time taken to get a true copy of the original file then a faster processor does help shorten the download cycle.
I realize that people who think the faster chip helps download speeds are incorrectly thinking it helps transmission speed, but people are rather viciously ridiculed for a rather simple mistake that isn't really a mistake. A better chip will abbreviate the time it takes to get or send your files even if it doesn't effect the transmission time.
The quick succession of the ROBOlympics following on the heels of the unsuccessful Darpa Grand Challenge reminds me of the way Hanna Barbara tried to resurect the fervor of the fizzled Wacky Races with the even more miserable Scooby Doo All Star Laff Olympics.
Even when I was young the predictable slapstick and farce made the Yogi Yahooies, the Scooby Doobies, and the Really Rottens all seem like very poorly programmed robots (and I'm not referring solely to Dyno-Mutt).
Whether this is a harbinger of doom or an off-topic free association rant from the demented mind of a Saturday morning Crunchberry adict is left for the future to pass judgement.
Both programmers and lawyers deal with logic as their bread and butter. But law relies on a vague language (English), an obscure syntax (18th century customs), and bases it's procedures and algorithms on an foundation that's very volatile, hard to track, and subject to forking with almost each ruling.
Computer professionals had to deal with trying to figure out reliable ways to deal with similar problems even when it wasn't in their power to change things. The waterfall development models of the sixites, and the trial-and-error bumbling of the hobbyists have developed some workable procedures (extreme programming, pragmatic programming, etc) that have made the computer world accessible and observable to all who want to participate.
I don't see the legal community even wanting to pursue such ideas. A senator introducing a bill into congress can offer all sorts of flowery comments to his "legal code", but it's the code that matters and affects people once codified into law. So much irrelevant crap gets worked into law each year on the state and federal level by being hidden in other work, it's depressing. When a court writes a verdict to set a legal precedent, all hell seems to break loose. It's like you have been told that the memory management routines in the standard C library are deprecated and you're left wondering whether that impacts your string library.
I know that English stinks as a language for expressing logic, but why can't lawyers depend on something English-like such as Lisp, Scheme, Prolog, or a special legal dialect that could be reduced to clear answers and effects. Lawmakers and judges could continue to write English comments with flowery and awe-inspiring prose, but their code would be clear what the result of this change would be. Imagine the Supreme Court running their rulings through regression tests before they are released so that they can fully understand the impact the changes will have. The results may still be ground-breaking but at least such tests would ensure that there are no unexpected results and loopholes created by a sloppy ruling.
Of course, this is an absurd idea. But it's even more absurd that the governed allow politicians, lawyers, and judges to play so fast and loose with the rules that govern their own lives. Is it a matter of power having corrupted those in charge? The legal community has all sorts of institutions to preserve their power ("passing the bar", etc).
Is it just that only recently have the techniques and ability to deal with such a huge system become available? I could be wrong, but wasn't it Blaise Pascal who dreamed of a time when courts could be run with the logic of algebra? Today we machines that can hold the volumous data from the legal world. Our understanding of logic and (more importantly) the consequences of making exceptions are much better understood. Artificial Intelligence tools do exactly this sort of logical "if this then this" sort of reasoning that humans are so bad at doing when we really don't want to come to the logical conclusion.
These days, the debate over gay marriage for example gives me the willies with overzealous lawmakers spreading diatribes about their legal changes to the definition of marriage. Of course CNN would never carry the actual patches, but if I could go to a website and see for myself different positions. Group A was arguing to simply remove definition of husband and wife as male and female. Group B was coding a subclass of marriage called gay_union. And Group C was making changes to define marriage as a couple capable of producing offspring. Regression tests may tell us more about their intents than their 30 second commercial spots. Group B's gay_union subclass might not hold up as constitutionally valid as marriage and would be subject to court challenge. Group C's fertility requirement might keep certain old or infertile heterosexual couples from getting married. While Group A's dropping the gender definition might make for some funny changes to a 1913 New York subway law th
Perhaps Nasa will announce that they have discovered a mysterious 10th planet at coordinates xeno=9, yako=9, zabo=9 with the use of an old space simulator in use since 1982. While the name is currently under debate the current favorites are Brittish, Antos, and Minax.
In an effort to try and recoup some of it's losses in the OS marketplace, SCO is opening their legal team to any slashdotter, geek, or leet script kiddies. These unpaid volunteers will be given access to all 232 versions of IBM's AIX. Because the response is expected to be tremendous, they'll have to submit a shipping and handling fee of $99.95 and sign a non-gpl-compatible, non-disclosure, non-sense agreement before they're allowed to see the code.
Of course the above is in jest, but I bet it will be quite a challenge to keep the source of all those AIX versions confidential from the eager eyes of the geek community. Is this stuff of any value today to IBM? Would sloppy court handling or an "accidental" publication by SCO possibly release anything of value to the tech community?
(I'm not talking about copyrights of course, that's a whole circle of hell Dante and I don't want to know anything about).
That's exactly the reason I'd recommend using Firefox on Windows because it doesn't use the IE libraries.
Though IE is convenient, it's also built into windows and is a fragile system component liable to jeaopordize many more things in my OS if it breaks or becomes corrupted. It's seemingly constant updates, standards tweaking, and security fixes mean that the code base is quite volitile.
For the sake of the security and functionality of my system, I've found things run much better if I intentionally do NOT use IE (or a similar program that just calls the IE libraries) and instead use something independent like Firefox.
I'm not saying that IE is broken, but like a child that isn't ready to deal with all of the diversity seen on the world wide web I'd prefer to use it only when called to work it's magic by other apps for things on my machine. I'll keep using another browser like Firefox that's more mature in its development and can handle the deviant standards people use to write their html code more gracefully.
The propogation of code is worrisome, but I'm also unsure of the legal implications of allowing your code to accept the code and restrictions of others by automatically allowing it to run.
This may be a neat new way to logically propogate code, but once all the kinks are worked out it seems like it simply opens new doors for lawyers to battle out THEIR logic.
Brrrr
Don't worry, it will probably have a less technical sounding name before it's rolled out to consumers. Probably "USB peak-speed" to join "USB full-speed" and "USB high-speed".
I worked for a check printing company that had many scanners, printers, and film output devices that had been stripped of their anti-counterfieting devices. This was a must have since people were routinely designing watermarks, elaborate borders, and color washes that would set off the criminal circuits and freeze he device.
I actually saw these devices as marketshare protection devices. My company and its handful of competitors were rapidly having the marketshare for high quality printing eaten away by good commercial printers. The marketing department may have made all sorts of blather about "finer attention to detail" and "knowing the banking industry" but the process of MICR printing on 2400dpi presses from Macs using Adobe Illustrator could honestly have been done by anyone willing to follow standards.
But it would have been a bit of a problem if this low-end competition were trying to output a check prototype with a watermark, color wash, and elaborate border that continuously set off their anti-counterfieting software. The high end check and document printing business wasn't a monopoly, but I strongly suspect that these were devices strongly desired by every player in the market to keep the sellers from expanding.
Are these measures the same way? They surely sound motivated by similar private market interests.
I know that English is a screwed up language to begin with. But additionally, idioms like "push the envelope" and "developing solutions" would have different meanings to office secretaries and film processors than aircraft designers and anyone subjected to the marketing rhetoric of most computer companies.
I actually thought the article was pretty good when I read it, but I'm just asking people to be a bit more careful when mixing idioms of different domains.
I think my difficulties at understanding my electromagnetism classes were partially because of my preconceptions caused by my understanding of light from Green Lantern comics.
Light can be both a particle and a wave... and a big boxing glove or baseball bat depending on the controlling thoughts.
Quantum mechanics dictates that the observer can effect the observed... but only if you have a ring on your finger, otherwise you'll just get your head beaten in by a big green boxing glove or baseball bat.
Color can be emissive (from the light wavelength itself) or reflective (from interacting with something it hits)... but nothing will change, interact, or stop green light unless it happens to be yellow.
The perception of color itself is really just an evolved way humans measure different wavelengths of light but there's nothing particularly special about the range of light we see... except that we can see the two most useful wavelengths: green and yellow.
It's been a while. I don't read Green Lantern nor perform emag calculations so perhaps I've misstated something from continuity or text. C'est La Vie.
The browser battles may have fought to a stand still but there are some other issues that still bug me. The biggest is the Intellectual Property battle.
Web pages are copyrightable code and content. There have been features around for years to take this bundle and automatically put it into something else (a PDF file, a archive folder, etc.). What hasn't been addressed are the legal implications of doing that.
If I go to a sight that says it's pages are protected (for example) what happens if I send the page in an HTML email to my boss. It may even make a differnence if the pages claimed to be copyrighted, gpl'ed, or click-through-licensed.
Where Microsoft can win this game is by making everything on Windows locked down tight in Longhorn. They then make sure that every author can set their price per page on the Microsoft web: "Downloading a page out of Internet Explorer isn't allowed unless you pay $0.001 cents per byte." (or some such nonsense).
Why would anyone use a non-free browser in this manner? They wouldn't unless they were forced to. Microsoft can do this by convincing every blogger and Parent Teacher Association that they're losing money by not exclusively using Microsoft technologies. For the insurgents who write out of some (un-American!) sense other than profit, they can probably stir up enough noise and uncertainty in the court rooms (whether they do the suing or a puppet) that makes people just feel like the "web" was the equivalent of some sort of sixties commune. Groovy and completely unsustainable.
The fact that free software has a pair of good tools (apache and firefox) is still barely into this game.
What else can be done? Legally I don't know. I'm not a lawyer.
But for the coders and writers and web users of today, get them using standards and free software and realize they're using it is a very good thing.
Second, maybe get something like source forge set up for people to GPL web sites. I'm not talking people's blogs here, but major site redesigns that have become standard compliant and how they did it. Heck, get volunteers to do site redesigns if the code becomes GPL and open to all. People need to realize that not only is it important to redesign their sites to be standards compliant, but it's also cheap to do so. The site probably won't convince the CitiBanks of the world to do anything special, but it will hopefully show and convince the community colleges and small businesses and non-profit organizations that this is really a do-able thing.
Greed is still a strong factor. If Microsoft ever does release a secure OS, then there will be a lot of people who succumb to greed. But if their whole stream of server, database, & browser is already Microsoft proprietary they'll certainly not see any advantage to going open and standards compliant at that point.
But that shouldn't take away from the great progress that Mozilla has made. It's been a fantastic thing to watch.
There used to be a number of good books out there but in light of Excel's dominance of the market, it's hard to find any good book on Locus 1-2-3.
(Personally, I tended to favored Lotus Improv anyway.)
Heck, I'd be glad to knight him if, in exchange, I were to get complimentary copies of Windows XP, Office 2003, and various server softwares in bulk for all of my royal palaces.
:-)
What's next?
Maybe some improvements in handling of Italian and Latin can get Bill beatification.
When I feel that a 1024x768 display is "Too Confining" I put the machine in 800x600 mode and force myself to work that way for at least two days.
Forcing myself to use a smaller space and then reverting to a bigger one can feel like you have a huge display, but it's not just psychological.
Because most Mac programs remember the toolbar settings and window positions, when I've adjusted things for the smaller display these settings stick when I come back to the big one. I really force myself to decide which toolbars to hide. What's a useful size for my spreadsheets. Whether or not to use certain floating palletes that always gobble screen real estate.
Additionally, I get more used to using the space saving tools like Expose and Dock hiding that I don't really find myself unless I've felt really constrained for a while.
Of course that's not to say that I feel that I can get by all the time with 800x600. It's just a useful garden to force myself to use for a while before moving to the huge rolling fields.
My idea that requires some sort of micro-payment system to be viable is a service that does auto-translation of file formats for you.
Sent the service an AbiWord document and it sends back a real 100% Microsoft Word document in a ZIP file. Instead of thousands of people with their own copies of Microsoft Word, thousands of people use this service occasionally for those rare cases they must have a TRUE file.
The interesting part is when the service changes polarity and everyone starts insisting on receiving files in open source formats. "Write your resume in any word processor you like, but send it to us in XMLRESUME format"
If secure connections get usable for the average joe, then perhaps a non-partisan government could get in on things. Define a standard that anyone could implement for things like tax filings and public bids (or maybe just death notices and zoning changes to start on a local level)
Anyway, it's not a service that can be done without a lot of bandwitdth, good hardware, security, and trust from your customers so it looks like something that has to be funded somehow. Micropayments? I hope something makes this financially feasible.
Back when Spindler ruled as Steward of Apple (well before the return of Jobs), I signed an NDA for an evaluation period with a piece of Apple hardware that was supposedly about 10-12 months from release.
:-)
The specs of the machine have been outclassed by modern standards, and the neat software features not made irrelevant by Mac OS X have surfaced in Mac OS X Server. But there were two very cool things about the case though that I thought were of the "Geez, that seems so obviously handy!" variety.
The gotcha was that it has never been released. I keep expecting new Mac hardware to one day come out with these two features but until that time I guess I'm still under NDA. Arrggghhhh!!!!!
Be glad your NDA expired with the release of the product. Otherwise you'd be burning with the image of that cool speedometer in your mind and unable to tell anyone about it.
Draw your own conclusions about the RIAA
Is the gift on the fourth day of Christmas, Calling Birds or Colly birds? Google this for a variety of arguments on this topic that seem to indicate calling is a corruption of something else (whether it was cauli/colley/colly is not clear though).
While rhyme and meter can help preserve stories, it can also be justification for "improving" them. I wrote a poem in high school that I was forced to read aloud to the class. People liked the poem and it was reprinted in a magazine, but someone replaced my use of the term "enthalpy" in my original with the slightly more poetic sounding term "entropy". It made my poem sound more poetic, but it was far less thermodynamically correct and bugged me no end.
This is a greater liability over long centuries when language and pronunciation can change. Certainly the use of such tools can be a great help to keep an oral tradition alive, but staying alive and staying the same aren't quite the same thing.
I suspect (perhaps incorrectly) that the adaptation of the stories of a WWI veteran to movies in New Zealand was given the greenlight because of the success of another WWI vet (JRR Tolkien), but this brings up a question that I've had in my mind for a while "Do good allegorical stories make for good movies?"
An allegory (at least as I use the term) is a subject that is described by using another subject in it's place (sort of like an extended metaphor).
Tolkien and Lewis are on opposite sides of the fence when it comes to allegory. Tolkein despising it and Lewis making heavy use of it. On the written page, I think that the use or avoidence of allegory is fine, but I'm not sure that it works on film.
Film is just such an overwhelmingly visual medium and allegory is such an abstract tool. It may be possible to depict the Lion Aslan as an allegory of Jesus on the written page, but on film you will see such an overwhelming embodiment of "big cat" that unless there's a narrator or someone hitting you over the head with "Lion = Jesus" the allegory will just be overwhelmed.
The only example of strict allegory that I recall in a modern film was Battlefield Earth but that may be an unfair example (as there were many other reasons why that movie was so poorly received).
Of course, many people already know the allegory that Lewis used in his tales and no doubt it will be brought up again and again by movie critics and sunday school teachers before the movie debuts, but if people didn't go in already having been told what to expect, would the allegory have been obvious?
Just idle wondering I suppose...
In terms of being a union of artists, the RIAA does a pretty horrible job of representing the average joe in their ranks. There is definitely room to usurp their monopoly.
Pure speculation, but my guess is that the online distribution services are doing what they can to get profitable sales right now for the RIAA. When they've shored up their business model and have negotiated their next round of iron-clad, longer-term contracts, the online distributors may go into the business of replacing the RIAA with contracts directly with studios or artists directly.
(Of course the big puzzle piece that doesn't fit is Apple Computer's contract with Apple Music. This would be a big problem for Apple in ever becoming a music distributor, but either that's just one more hurdle for Apple to capitalize out of but it doesn't effect the other online distributors).
But one should be cautious...
While the SCO menace may be simply a minor diversion (akin to Lurtz) the true menaces may be more corrupting and more difficult to fight.Defending or defeating attacks from the closed source enemy means a need to unite and to pool the copyrights we each develop individually. But such power placed in any one man is a difficult thing to manage, to defend, and to resist the corrupting greed that arises from it.
Of course there doesn't seem to be much alternative:
- Stay low, hidden in the woods while others feed the corruption of the ruling closed source
- Unmake the power and release all copyright into the public domain. This destroys the corrupting influence, but it strenghthens the enemy as well.
- Continue to weild the GPL until the problems and corrupting influence of the intellectual property system can be worked out and the evil truly unmade.
Sorry, if the above arguments are a bit muddled. I guess I have something else weighing on my mind.One of my friends in college was an electrical engineer. In the early nineties, as a fun diversion, he built a cell phone blocking device. He'd have another friend go driving with him and the box and whenever they saw a guy using a cell phone while driving, they'd zap him. Their reward was two-fold: they thought they were making the streets safer with this batman and robin vigilante enforcement, and they just loved the looks on these people's faces when they'd get zapped.
As my friend got closer to graduation, he gave up on the jammer though. He wasn't sure about the legalities of what he was doing and the cell phone population took off geometrically.
Anyway, I think there's a fun aspect to jamming