Yeah, I'll buy it too and thanks for pointing it out. I suppose the main thing that would concern me is that so far the technology is still radically un-tested in commercial terms. For what it's worth, I hope it all goes well.
Translation: They didn't hire enough consultants from SAP.
I used to write code for a small company that directly competed with SAP in a niche market for particular activities of (often small) governments. It was started and run by some former government employees who knew what they were doing from past experience inside out.
Every time our marketing consultant came back from overseas, he'd be ranting for days about how moronic the SAP marketers were and how unsuitable their product was. This wasn't market-speak, it was coming from an expert in the business who'd taken on a marketing role in a small company. SAP would attack government officials and essentially shower them with FUD and aim to sell them a system that was 10 times bigger than what was actually needed and one that didn't really do the job.
Because there were often small governments and didn't always have the necessary expertise, they'd often simply cave in to SAP, pay millions of dollars and regret it later.
The SAP quote in the article might be right in that they needed more SAP consultants to help make a big transition to using SAP software. I wouldn't doubt it for a second. On the other hand, SAP probably never developed the software appropriately in the first place for what was actually needed.
Management often has no clue what they are doing in terms of managing a technical project so they make decisions about things like the exact features, and they often fight to get things a certain way -- unwittingly forcing programmers to code all the way around the block to get to the house next door, leaving problems in the wake.
I think the more fundamental issue is that nobody really knows how to properly design large scale software projects successfully. The whole concept of software development is extremely new in terms of any sort of science or engineering study.
If there was reliable and tested evidence and procedures about how to design and develop any software perfectly and effectively, you could bet that people would be doing it. There are things that definitely work and they often get ignored or looked over, but that's as much because the profession still hasn't developed enough to know who should be in what places, what they should be doing and how they should do it.
This is undoubtedly one of the reasons why so much software is built in such dodgy circumstances, because realistically nobody accurately and decisively knows how to do it any better with formal and properly tested evidence. You can certainly argue that programmers doing it themselves could produce a better product, but there's still more to the process than simply developing a product that doesn't crash. It has to be the correct product, it has be sold to someone (usually), it usually has to be done on time, there's normally money involved and often lots of it.
We're still in very early days, but hopefully it'll improve over time. Don't be surprised if it takes on the order of decades rather than years, however.
Until the first craft explodes. I mean this quite seriously.
This is something I was wondering about myself. When NASA developed the Apollo missions, they were designed in anticipation of about a 90% success rate for each mission. (I believe it was about this and someone can correct me if they know otherwise, but it certainly wasn't incredibly safe.)
I'd be interested to know what the safety goals of Scaled Composites were with their design, what can be done if something goes wrong, and how it relates to commercial viability. Presumably it's much higher than 9 in 10 successes, and there are likely to be plans to work a lot on safety before any serious potential commercial partners would want to be involved. But does this translate to 99/100 successful flights, 999/1000 successful flights, or even better?
So far we've seen two properly successful test flights. That's less than 1/50th of what we've seen of the US Space Shuttle. (Granted that it's far less complicated.)
Homer: America, take a good look at your beloved candidates. They're nothing but hideous space reptiles. [unmasks them]
[audience gasps in terror]
Kodos: It's true, we are aliens. But what are you going to do about it? It's a two-party system; you have to vote for one of us. [murmurs] Man1: He's right, this is a two-party system. Man2: Well, I believe I'll vote for a third-party candidate. Kang: Go ahead, throw your vote away.
To me it seems that rather than focus on whether or not a two party system is democratic (or even if the US system is a real democracy as others have pointed out), it would be much more useful to focus on the point that third party candidates simply have no realistic chance in the current system, consequently denying voters of that much more choice.
Many people can't vote for the candidate they really want without being accused of throwing away their vote and possibly dividing the vote count for a main candidate who they may still consider to be the lesser of two evils. Consequently, many people are voting primarily to try and keep someone out rather than to vote someone in.
Even though the President is not directly responsible for changing the system, having a current President showing general support for such a change would likely generate some momentum for change. So it'd be very interesting to know what the candidates' attitudes are towards reforming the system so that votes for third parties aren't seen as destructive or wasted votes.
DIsclaimer: I'm not actually a US citizen myself, but I find the whole process very interesting to watch. We've recently undergone some similar reform in New Zealand (admittedly a smaller scale) that's moved things away from a two party system, and it seems to be working quite nicely.
It wouldn't be that bad if you did it with a bootable read-only CD a la Knoppix.
But technical security of the voting system is hardly the only problem. You're also opening the door for people to complain that the voting didn't work for them at some point after the election. (eg. Connection was cut, display showed incorrect colours, keyboard was mapped badly, or whatever.) With no authorised officials present at voting to monitor the process, equipment, and help anyone who's having problems, there's no reliable way to guarantee that each person is equally capable of voting.
Another problem that's at least as big in a serious election is that there's no way to audit that every vote was cast anonymously and without coersion by third parties. eg. Pointing a gun at someone to name an extreme example, as is threatening someone of repurcussions if they don't return from the voting procedure with the "correct receipt".
Voting in national elections is one of the few places where I personally think that computer-technical solutions should be avoided unless they're really needed. As well as the problems above, 99% of the population simply aren't qualified to understand a counting process when it's done by a computer, and are forced to trust a small minority.
Compared with the concept of people counting pape votes that were deposited in a box while watched by representatives of all sides, the abstract nature of how digital voting and counting works is very difficult for most people to grasp. At the very least there should always be a simple variant of a paper trail produced at voting time, so the option for a mass-understood recount is always available. If a voting system is to be fair and representative, there have to be reasonable grounds for those using it to be able to trust that their votes are being counted properly to produce the result.
Letting people boot into something like a Knoppix-based system might make sure they're not infected by the Windows virus of the month, but it wouldn't solve any real problems with computer-based elections.
Specifically, I found Thunderbird very happy to deal with my POP3 and IMAP accounts, interface very easily with GnuPG (via Enigmail)
I agree withh this. I've used Thunderbird for maybe 6 months now, having first migrated through Pegasus (for Windows) to KMail to Sylpheed.
I think that one of the best moves I made was finding an IMAP server and converting all my mail to live behind that. IMAP is well enough supported by mail clients that I can now use whatever client I prefer at any time without having to deal with (for instance):
Folder format incompatabilities.
Corrupted mail boxes through inconsistent or unsuccessful locking techniques.
Having to have separate mailboxes or folders for different clients.
And, of course, it also allows remote access to mail folders although I don't personally configure or use it that way.
I'm unsure what free IMAP servers are available for Windows -- I currently use Dovecot in linux. For those who are in a position to run an IMAP server rather than letting their mail client handle the mailboxes directly, I'd recommend investigating the possibility. It means a lot more freedom to easily move between different clients for different preferences and tasks.
From the forum: "We are not a one man distro. Currently we have hundreds of users and several people on the development team and also a new commercial team that does the commercial side here in NZ."
For what it's worth, I'm in New Zealand and this is the first that I've ever heard of these people -- and it's not exactly a big country to miss something like this. I personally run Debian, and nearly everyone I know with linux uses either Debian, Fedora/RedHat or Suse.
It's possible (if not probable) that they only deal with businesses and are never see outside of that community, but I'd hardly consider them the company that "does the commercial side [of linux] in New Zealand".
To say so would have to be nothing more than market-speak. There are plenty local companies and organisations running other distros, and plenty of other companies and consultants who support other distros, most of which have probably never heard of Yoper.
How soon before the bad guys set up a dummy corporation and start running nuclear bomb or protein folding simulations on this cluster? I'd be very interested (probably along with some governments) in Weta's and Gen-i screening processes. Will anyone who can foot the bill get access?
I think it would depend on how open it is. The New Zealand government is strongly anti-nuclear (however rational or irrational that may be). eg. US nuclear vessels aren't allowed within the NZ economic zone. This type of stance is mostly on principle based on popular opinion (rational or otherwise), much to the country's disadvantage in things like trade deals. New Zealand is small enough that popular opinion can still have quite a knee-jerk effect on most government policy.
If you're referring to businesses or other governments when you say "bad guys", it wouldn't be unexpected for the NZ government to step in and say "you can't do that", irrespective of what WETA might want to do.
If there's some way to run such simulations without making it clear what's being done, then it might be possible. With something that's so high profile, though, it'd be very difficult to get away with it, without at least some people having an idea of what's going on, or at least being suspicious enough to enquire further.
The filename cited was X-Files1.21b.tar.gz, and the directory containing it had a similar naming convention. It's almost certainly the "1.21" in the filename that triggered the season, and maybe even made their software think it was so likely to be an X Files episode.
In common TV series terminology among studios and fans, "1.21" would often translate to season 1, episode 21. Their spidering script, or whatever it is, probably looks for patterns in a filename that match an episode. Something that looks like a series name could perhaps be doubted as infringing material on its own, but being followed by something that looks like an episode number might be appear to a lazily written script as confirmation that it is an infringement. It's too bad they don't check their facts.
The complete name of the infringing work that they've cited in the letter (X Files, Season 1-7) would have come from mapping this name and episode number back to their database of whatever copyrights they hold. It's probably just been generalised to all seven seasons because they control copyright over all of them anyway, and don't feel the need to be more specific.
It looks, technologically, like it will be at least a hundred years before we can make an extra-planetary colony financially self-sufficient.
I'd also be surprised if governments have much to do with self sufficiency in the end. Historically, a lot of exploration to new places has been carried out by privateers, sometimes in collaboration with governments but also motivated by their own excessive profits.
Once realistic technology is available, new places are profitable because they don't have governments to impose restrictions on what you can do there. (Or at the very least, there are no "recognised" governments that prevent one from killing, raping and pillaging any native populations and resources.)
Personally I think it's most likely that early sustainable colonisation will begin with privateers who will basically tear up and destroy the bulk of the resources of other planets while taking as small-amount as is easy for their own personal profits. Later on there may be more migration to those places, and governments will be created to impose restrictions forcing privateers to operate in sustainable ways.
Thanks for all the effort. I actually discovered last night (after posting my earlier comment) that I'd been pointing apt at the testing build instead of the unstable one. The latter was a CVS snapshot from April (instead of about January), and at the very least the newer one didn't crash as much.
I'll certainly keep watching it, and hopefully use it a bit more consistently as time goes on.
According to iRATE's sourceforge statistics, it has had 15,344 downloads.
I used iRate a while ago, but I let it lapse because there were certain issues with the version I had that made it a bit awkward to use, and the Debian package hasn't been updated for a very long time. (I attempted compiling it myself a couple of times, but without success.)
It's a neat idea in principle, but there are at least a couple of problems that caused me not to bother using it after a while. (Actually three if you count that it crashed and burned every time I hit the 'next track' button.)
It doesn't allow for several profiles with one person. The music that I like listening to varies depending on all sorts of things to do with mood, circumstances and so on. iRate simply forces you to rate whatever you're listening to in one dimension, without taking into account that preferences might depend on other variable factors besides the music itself.
The playback selection algorithm was lacking. The version that I ended up stuck with would play recent downloads over and over again if they were rated highly, even if it had a database of hundreds of other tracks. Presumably it was trying to get them to the same number of plays as other long-ago-downloaded tracks that had been rated the same. Hearing the same four or five tracks over and over again -- even if I'd originally liked them -- was very testing and I eventually got sick of it. The fact that iRate would crash if I hit the next-track button didn't help.
I really do like the concept behind iRate, and I hope it does well. Undoubtedly part of my problem is that I wasn't motivated to jump into the developer community and be more vocal about the problems I was having. Perhaps it's changed a lot since the version 0.3 which I have, but there's still no new debian package, so I haven't had an easy opportunity to update it.
Non-profit doesn't necessarily mean good
on
Disney Goes Boom!
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· Score: 1
Considering that they have decided to donate the patents on this invention to a non-profit group I would say that we should all like/respect Disney at least a tad. That's a great move.
It may be, but I'd want a bit more information about the details before making such an assumption. If they were donating the techniques to the public domain, then it'd probably b okay to assume it's a good thing.
The Business Software Alliance is a non-profit group, but that doesn't necessarily make it "good" in any way... at least as accepted by Slashdot readers for whatever that's worth.
One of the articles states that Disney hasn't yet decided who to give the patents to. For all we know, it might be a dummy organisation set up by Disney and its partners to protect Disney's interests. Or it could easily be the opposite, which would be great.
My solution has been to use wpd2sxw to convert them, which seems to work fine for most stuff (at the very least, I can figure out what the memo is about).
Speaking of which, could anyone suggest a good script or program to convert.doc files to.sxw files from the command line? I'd like something that I can run all at once over a hierarchy of folders containing lots of old documents, and ideally report whatever problems it has during the conversion process.
But seriously folks... Is a grammar checker really that important a feature? I find that in Word, I turn it off because it drives me crazy.
It doesn't seem to be common among slashdot readers at least, but personally I've found that the grammar checker is one of the features that I really miss since moving away from Windows.
Certainly it makes mistakes, and I turn it off when I'm working on some text where Word's grammar isn't particularly important. It'd be silly to trust it with pirate grammar. But when I'm proofreading a large document, I've found it very useful, just for its ability to locate places where there might be problems.
I can check them and I don't have to agree with them, it's often found things that I agree with in hindsight but wouldn't have noticed otherwise. In my case it's especially good for things like locating passive statements where active ones would do a better job, and so on. On many occasions it really has helped me to improve my writing style.
If OpenOffice or AbiWord had a grammar checker at least as good as MS Word, I'd use them all the time. The closest I've managed to find in the open source world is style and diction. They find a few things, but are relatively primitive to what Word does.
Shouldn't this become easier in the Future with new Versions of Office (2003+)
To the best of my knowledge, it's already not that difficult to read.doc formats, if you overlook that Microsoft can change them at any time. An XML transition might or might not help with this, but personally I don't know if it'll make that much difference. (I'm not an expert, however.)
Much if not most of the work has already been done in project like OpenOffice, and the AbiWord people could simply adapt that code if then needed to. I think the really big problem is writing the code to adapt someone else's native document object model to your own native document object model. If MS Word happens to store table information in a dramatically different way from how AbiWord likes to think of it, there will be a lot of possibly complicated translation code that will need to be written and maintained by someone. Or perhaps one vendor simply decides to add a simple feature that doesn't fit into the other vendor's object model at all well.
If the XML is understandable, then perhaps it will make it easier for someone to write transformation style sheets between Microsoft and other formats that will do the conversions properly before the alternative software has to even think about loading them. We'll have to wait and see.
That's all true, but I think the most relevant thing that you seem to have missed is:
If the cognac glasses break, you can still have the cognac. You can purchase new glasses, put it into the remaining glasses, or just drink it from the bottle.
Apparently not so with a DVD or CD, according to the MPAA and RIAA. They're trying to present the information as being tied to the media, which it isn't.
I haven't used Windows for some time, but the main reasons I disabled FastFind (is it still called that?) quickly were:
My hardware was noisy -- frequently hearing the disk churning round and round at all sorts of random times was just annoying, especially when it'd often suddenly jump into action when I wasn't doing much and the room was otherwise quiet.
All of the extra junk that gets left around -- fastfind had a habit of storing its indexes as hidden files inside the directories it was indexing, which is annoying if you like to have control of what goes where.
These days good (and quiet) hardware is easier to obtain, and it shouldn't be too hard for a system to store data in its own repository instead of scattering it everywhere. If such a system could work in a way that I really didn't have to notice or care about it, it'd be fine.
He is able to do this because of a "so called" loophole in the anti spam law that allows political parties, not for profit and charity organisations to send unsolicited emails.
I'm at least as interested in where he acquired the email addresses that received the spam, and how they were filtered for the location of his electorate. None of the articles that I've seen so far have been specific about this, but I think it'd be quite telling.
Perhaps someone in Australia could fill us in. Is there a government database somewhere of local people's email addresses that he used, or has he been scraping and purchasing addresses from the web and other spammers?
I think you've missed my point, which was that a builder (or anyone else) still can understand the plans and change them simply by having the plans, even if copyright put limitations on whether they're allowed to do so legally. ie. They're not usable in any type of encrypted state. If plans were somehow distributed in a machine-only readable format, it could be different. Copyright might prevent this, just as it usually prevents re-performing of songs and re-publishing of books.
The GPL goes further than what I commented on (I did say "among other things"), so it doesn't make software exactly the same as other types of information. In addition to ensuring that source code is always available during distribution, the GPL also allows people to redistribute what they have under certain conditions without needing to get explicit permission from the copyright holder.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, I'll buy it too and thanks for pointing it out. I suppose the main thing that would concern me is that so far the technology is still radically un-tested in commercial terms. For what it's worth, I hope it all goes well.
I used to write code for a small company that directly competed with SAP in a niche market for particular activities of (often small) governments. It was started and run by some former government employees who knew what they were doing from past experience inside out.
Every time our marketing consultant came back from overseas, he'd be ranting for days about how moronic the SAP marketers were and how unsuitable their product was. This wasn't market-speak, it was coming from an expert in the business who'd taken on a marketing role in a small company. SAP would attack government officials and essentially shower them with FUD and aim to sell them a system that was 10 times bigger than what was actually needed and one that didn't really do the job.
Because there were often small governments and didn't always have the necessary expertise, they'd often simply cave in to SAP, pay millions of dollars and regret it later.
The SAP quote in the article might be right in that they needed more SAP consultants to help make a big transition to using SAP software. I wouldn't doubt it for a second. On the other hand, SAP probably never developed the software appropriately in the first place for what was actually needed.
I think the more fundamental issue is that nobody really knows how to properly design large scale software projects successfully. The whole concept of software development is extremely new in terms of any sort of science or engineering study.
If there was reliable and tested evidence and procedures about how to design and develop any software perfectly and effectively, you could bet that people would be doing it. There are things that definitely work and they often get ignored or looked over, but that's as much because the profession still hasn't developed enough to know who should be in what places, what they should be doing and how they should do it.
This is undoubtedly one of the reasons why so much software is built in such dodgy circumstances, because realistically nobody accurately and decisively knows how to do it any better with formal and properly tested evidence. You can certainly argue that programmers doing it themselves could produce a better product, but there's still more to the process than simply developing a product that doesn't crash. It has to be the correct product, it has be sold to someone (usually), it usually has to be done on time, there's normally money involved and often lots of it.
We're still in very early days, but hopefully it'll improve over time. Don't be surprised if it takes on the order of decades rather than years, however.
This is something I was wondering about myself. When NASA developed the Apollo missions, they were designed in anticipation of about a 90% success rate for each mission. (I believe it was about this and someone can correct me if they know otherwise, but it certainly wasn't incredibly safe.)
I'd be interested to know what the safety goals of Scaled Composites were with their design, what can be done if something goes wrong, and how it relates to commercial viability. Presumably it's much higher than 9 in 10 successes, and there are likely to be plans to work a lot on safety before any serious potential commercial partners would want to be involved. But does this translate to 99/100 successful flights, 999/1000 successful flights, or even better?
So far we've seen two properly successful test flights. That's less than 1/50th of what we've seen of the US Space Shuttle. (Granted that it's far less complicated.)
Homer: America, take a good look at your beloved candidates. They're nothing but hideous space reptiles. [unmasks them]
[audience gasps in terror]
Kodos: It's true, we are aliens. But what are you going to do about it? It's a two-party system; you have to vote for one of us. [murmurs]
Man1: He's right, this is a two-party system.
Man2: Well, I believe I'll vote for a third-party candidate.
Kang: Go ahead, throw your vote away.
[Kang and Kodos laugh out loud]
To me it seems that rather than focus on whether or not a two party system is democratic (or even if the US system is a real democracy as others have pointed out), it would be much more useful to focus on the point that third party candidates simply have no realistic chance in the current system, consequently denying voters of that much more choice.
Many people can't vote for the candidate they really want without being accused of throwing away their vote and possibly dividing the vote count for a main candidate who they may still consider to be the lesser of two evils. Consequently, many people are voting primarily to try and keep someone out rather than to vote someone in.
Even though the President is not directly responsible for changing the system, having a current President showing general support for such a change would likely generate some momentum for change. So it'd be very interesting to know what the candidates' attitudes are towards reforming the system so that votes for third parties aren't seen as destructive or wasted votes.
DIsclaimer: I'm not actually a US citizen myself, but I find the whole process very interesting to watch. We've recently undergone some similar reform in New Zealand (admittedly a smaller scale) that's moved things away from a two party system, and it seems to be working quite nicely.
But technical security of the voting system is hardly the only problem. You're also opening the door for people to complain that the voting didn't work for them at some point after the election. (eg. Connection was cut, display showed incorrect colours, keyboard was mapped badly, or whatever.) With no authorised officials present at voting to monitor the process, equipment, and help anyone who's having problems, there's no reliable way to guarantee that each person is equally capable of voting.
Another problem that's at least as big in a serious election is that there's no way to audit that every vote was cast anonymously and without coersion by third parties. eg. Pointing a gun at someone to name an extreme example, as is threatening someone of repurcussions if they don't return from the voting procedure with the "correct receipt".
Voting in national elections is one of the few places where I personally think that computer-technical solutions should be avoided unless they're really needed. As well as the problems above, 99% of the population simply aren't qualified to understand a counting process when it's done by a computer, and are forced to trust a small minority.
Compared with the concept of people counting pape votes that were deposited in a box while watched by representatives of all sides, the abstract nature of how digital voting and counting works is very difficult for most people to grasp. At the very least there should always be a simple variant of a paper trail produced at voting time, so the option for a mass-understood recount is always available. If a voting system is to be fair and representative, there have to be reasonable grounds for those using it to be able to trust that their votes are being counted properly to produce the result.
Letting people boot into something like a Knoppix-based system might make sure they're not infected by the Windows virus of the month, but it wouldn't solve any real problems with computer-based elections.
Why?
I agree withh this. I've used Thunderbird for maybe 6 months now, having first migrated through Pegasus (for Windows) to KMail to Sylpheed.
I think that one of the best moves I made was finding an IMAP server and converting all my mail to live behind that. IMAP is well enough supported by mail clients that I can now use whatever client I prefer at any time without having to deal with (for instance):
And, of course, it also allows remote access to mail folders although I don't personally configure or use it that way.
I'm unsure what free IMAP servers are available for Windows -- I currently use Dovecot in linux. For those who are in a position to run an IMAP server rather than letting their mail client handle the mailboxes directly, I'd recommend investigating the possibility. It means a lot more freedom to easily move between different clients for different preferences and tasks.
For what it's worth, I'm in New Zealand and this is the first that I've ever heard of these people -- and it's not exactly a big country to miss something like this. I personally run Debian, and nearly everyone I know with linux uses either Debian, Fedora/RedHat or Suse.
It's possible (if not probable) that they only deal with businesses and are never see outside of that community, but I'd hardly consider them the company that "does the commercial side [of linux] in New Zealand".
To say so would have to be nothing more than market-speak. There are plenty local companies and organisations running other distros, and plenty of other companies and consultants who support other distros, most of which have probably never heard of Yoper.
I've just listened to it now and it sounds exactly the same to me. It's essentially a collection of miscellaneous clips spliced together.
I think it would depend on how open it is. The New Zealand government is strongly anti-nuclear (however rational or irrational that may be). eg. US nuclear vessels aren't allowed within the NZ economic zone. This type of stance is mostly on principle based on popular opinion (rational or otherwise), much to the country's disadvantage in things like trade deals. New Zealand is small enough that popular opinion can still have quite a knee-jerk effect on most government policy.
If you're referring to businesses or other governments when you say "bad guys", it wouldn't be unexpected for the NZ government to step in and say "you can't do that", irrespective of what WETA might want to do.
If there's some way to run such simulations without making it clear what's being done, then it might be possible. With something that's so high profile, though, it'd be very difficult to get away with it, without at least some people having an idea of what's going on, or at least being suspicious enough to enquire further.
The filename cited was X-Files1.21b.tar.gz, and the directory containing it had a similar naming convention. It's almost certainly the "1.21" in the filename that triggered the season, and maybe even made their software think it was so likely to be an X Files episode.
In common TV series terminology among studios and fans, "1.21" would often translate to season 1, episode 21. Their spidering script, or whatever it is, probably looks for patterns in a filename that match an episode. Something that looks like a series name could perhaps be doubted as infringing material on its own, but being followed by something that looks like an episode number might be appear to a lazily written script as confirmation that it is an infringement. It's too bad they don't check their facts.
The complete name of the infringing work that they've cited in the letter (X Files, Season 1-7) would have come from mapping this name and episode number back to their database of whatever copyrights they hold. It's probably just been generalised to all seven seasons because they control copyright over all of them anyway, and don't feel the need to be more specific.
I'd also be surprised if governments have much to do with self sufficiency in the end. Historically, a lot of exploration to new places has been carried out by privateers, sometimes in collaboration with governments but also motivated by their own excessive profits.
Once realistic technology is available, new places are profitable because they don't have governments to impose restrictions on what you can do there. (Or at the very least, there are no "recognised" governments that prevent one from killing, raping and pillaging any native populations and resources.)
Personally I think it's most likely that early sustainable colonisation will begin with privateers who will basically tear up and destroy the bulk of the resources of other planets while taking as small-amount as is easy for their own personal profits. Later on there may be more migration to those places, and governments will be created to impose restrictions forcing privateers to operate in sustainable ways.
It's strange how things work.
Thanks for all the effort. I actually discovered last night (after posting my earlier comment) that I'd been pointing apt at the testing build instead of the unstable one. The latter was a CVS snapshot from April (instead of about January), and at the very least the newer one didn't crash as much.
I'll certainly keep watching it, and hopefully use it a bit more consistently as time goes on.
I used iRate a while ago, but I let it lapse because there were certain issues with the version I had that made it a bit awkward to use, and the Debian package hasn't been updated for a very long time. (I attempted compiling it myself a couple of times, but without success.)
It's a neat idea in principle, but there are at least a couple of problems that caused me not to bother using it after a while. (Actually three if you count that it crashed and burned every time I hit the 'next track' button.)
I really do like the concept behind iRate, and I hope it does well. Undoubtedly part of my problem is that I wasn't motivated to jump into the developer community and be more vocal about the problems I was having. Perhaps it's changed a lot since the version 0.3 which I have, but there's still no new debian package, so I haven't had an easy opportunity to update it.
It may be, but I'd want a bit more information about the details before making such an assumption. If they were donating the techniques to the public domain, then it'd probably b okay to assume it's a good thing.
The Business Software Alliance is a non-profit group, but that doesn't necessarily make it "good" in any way... at least as accepted by Slashdot readers for whatever that's worth.
One of the articles states that Disney hasn't yet decided who to give the patents to. For all we know, it might be a dummy organisation set up by Disney and its partners to protect Disney's interests. Or it could easily be the opposite, which would be great.
Speaking of which, could anyone suggest a good script or program to convert .doc files to .sxw files from the command line? I'd like something that I can run all at once over a hierarchy of folders containing lots of old documents, and ideally report whatever problems it has during the conversion process.
It doesn't seem to be common among slashdot readers at least, but personally I've found that the grammar checker is one of the features that I really miss since moving away from Windows.
Certainly it makes mistakes, and I turn it off when I'm working on some text where Word's grammar isn't particularly important. It'd be silly to trust it with pirate grammar. But when I'm proofreading a large document, I've found it very useful, just for its ability to locate places where there might be problems.
I can check them and I don't have to agree with them, it's often found things that I agree with in hindsight but wouldn't have noticed otherwise. In my case it's especially good for things like locating passive statements where active ones would do a better job, and so on. On many occasions it really has helped me to improve my writing style.
If OpenOffice or AbiWord had a grammar checker at least as good as MS Word, I'd use them all the time. The closest I've managed to find in the open source world is style and diction. They find a few things, but are relatively primitive to what Word does.
To the best of my knowledge, it's already not that difficult to read .doc formats, if you overlook that Microsoft can change them at any time. An XML transition might or might not help with this, but personally I don't know if it'll make that much difference. (I'm not an expert, however.)
Much if not most of the work has already been done in project like OpenOffice, and the AbiWord people could simply adapt that code if then needed to. I think the really big problem is writing the code to adapt someone else's native document object model to your own native document object model. If MS Word happens to store table information in a dramatically different way from how AbiWord likes to think of it, there will be a lot of possibly complicated translation code that will need to be written and maintained by someone. Or perhaps one vendor simply decides to add a simple feature that doesn't fit into the other vendor's object model at all well.
If the XML is understandable, then perhaps it will make it easier for someone to write transformation style sheets between Microsoft and other formats that will do the conversions properly before the alternative software has to even think about loading them. We'll have to wait and see.
That's all true, but I think the most relevant thing that you seem to have missed is:
If the cognac glasses break, you can still have the cognac. You can purchase new glasses, put it into the remaining glasses, or just drink it from the bottle.
Apparently not so with a DVD or CD, according to the MPAA and RIAA. They're trying to present the information as being tied to the media, which it isn't.
Perhaps a better description of Microsoft is as a Consolidator. That's essentially what it does.
I haven't used Windows for some time, but the main reasons I disabled FastFind (is it still called that?) quickly were:
These days good (and quiet) hardware is easier to obtain, and it shouldn't be too hard for a system to store data in its own repository instead of scattering it everywhere. If such a system could work in a way that I really didn't have to notice or care about it, it'd be fine.
I'm at least as interested in where he acquired the email addresses that received the spam, and how they were filtered for the location of his electorate. None of the articles that I've seen so far have been specific about this, but I think it'd be quite telling.
Perhaps someone in Australia could fill us in. Is there a government database somewhere of local people's email addresses that he used, or has he been scraping and purchasing addresses from the web and other spammers?
I think you've missed my point, which was that a builder (or anyone else) still can understand the plans and change them simply by having the plans, even if copyright put limitations on whether they're allowed to do so legally. ie. They're not usable in any type of encrypted state. If plans were somehow distributed in a machine-only readable format, it could be different. Copyright might prevent this, just as it usually prevents re-performing of songs and re-publishing of books.
The GPL goes further than what I commented on (I did say "among other things"), so it doesn't make software exactly the same as other types of information. In addition to ensuring that source code is always available during distribution, the GPL also allows people to redistribute what they have under certain conditions without needing to get explicit permission from the copyright holder.