What would happen if other things in the world were free? What if budding designers and contractors demostrated their skills by building free pubic buildings?
Perhaps I misunderstand, but my impression was that one of the main points behind the whole free (speech) software movement is that most other forms of information already are free.
That is to say: Software is in quite an unusual situation, because the machine instructions are not nearly as useful as the source code from which they were derived. This is not the same as something like a book or a song, because even though there may be copyright restrictions on the distribution, those who do get it can still see and manipulate the actual building blocks of the information once they have it... at the very least for their own personal use.
What the GPL and "free" software movement does among other things is to make sure that if someone distributes the software, then they must distribute the source version at the very least, to ensure that the person getting it has all the same rights and abilities that they would normally have with other types of information.
An architect or builder probably won't build a free building as you've suggested, because a building isn't information in the traditional sense. (At least if they do, we're talking about something on a fundamentally different level.) But if an architect were to design plans for a building and sell them to a developer, the developer would naturally be able to adjust and perhaps continue re-distribute those plans... at which point whoever gets them can continue to do the same. Something like this isn't automatically possible with software, because it can be distributed in a form that can be used but not easily changed.
Similarly, some artists are giving their work away under a variety of free licenses, but those licenses aren't revolutionary to art in the same way that the GPL is revolutionary to software... (although perhaps they are in other ways). With or without those licenses, it's still naturally possible (legal or not) to obtain a song or an artwork, and derive something else from it. This is not so easy with closed source software.
I think the difference is that software information is directly used by computers whereas other blocks of information (at least those that are normally associated with distribution and trading) are directly used by people. You have to understand the words in a book to make use of it, but you don't have to understand the machine instructions in a software application... so the readable edition can be held back. Many software developers/businesses take advantage of the extra control-by-obscurity over the information that this technicality gives them. If we all had logic brains and could easily understand and manipulate the compiled software that was bought off the shelves, it wouldn't be as much of an issue. Among other things, the GPL attempts to remove that technicality and make software like most other types of information.
I'm not exactly a strong advocate of free software besides using it for most things. If anyone thinks I've missed something important, please elaborate.
Why? Being deprived of a sense *does* make things more dangerous. If you don't believe me, then put on a blindfold and try to run around in an unfamiliar area.
I've spent significant amounts of time and effort campaigning about light pollution to local governments. For the most part, even amateur astronomers (like me) aren't claiming that no light is a good thing. Even astronomers need light to do things at night. What we'd really like, though, is more intelligent lighting.
Most street lights and outdoor residence lights are very lazily installed and don't have adequate fixtures. Very few are actually full cut-off lights, meaning that substantial amounts of the light that they're producing is simply going up into the sky where it's wasted anyway. That part of it is a simple waste of energy, and reducing the waste should benefit everyone.
Besides that though, there's a huge mis-perception that simply flooding an area with more light at night makes it safer. I won't even get into the implications this often has on local wildlife, because there's already enough evidence and rational argument that such lighting frequently, causes accidents, creates security issues or assists criminals.
Many lights are essentially glare bombs, meaning they're bright but they're more likely to blind someone than to actually light what they're intended to. The brightness eminating from these can give the false impression that there's lots of useful light, when it's actually not lighting much at all and if anything has the potential to blind people (including motorists) and create accidents.
Furthermore, if the light fails to properly direct like (and keep in mind that most fixtures are already badly installed), there's a likeliness that it's simply increasing the contrast between the lighted areas and the shaded areas. If you happen to be concerned about criminal activity, it's not likely to help by providing more places for criminals to hide, stalk around and drag victims to. Personally when I'm walking home at night, I consider myself safer in the relative dark. At least that way I'm not as visible and standing out to someone who might want to attack me for some reason.
Plus, shining your lights onto a neighbour's property without their permission... which many many people do... is just plain bad manners.
Even amateur astronomers who campaign against light pollution have plenty of arguments to use that have no relation with astronomy or dark skies whatsoever. We're not claiming that people should have to walk around as if they were wearing blindfolds --- only that lights can be handled much better and more efficiently than they currently are.
Realistically, better designed and more intelligently installed lighting should benefit everyone. It's more a matter of getting past people's flawed perceptions that turning night into day surely must be a good thing... not to mention the ulterior motives that some government officials have. (Imagine what more efficient energy use could to to the Bush administration's energy policies.)
I agree with another response to your post. Someone has to pay for research, and sometimes an impartial study just isn't feasible because impartial people have no stake or interest in the outcome.
For instance, I'm personally in a group that has a particular interest in reducing the amount of light pollution that's produced by populated areas. There's little or no existing interest outside of our own group. About the only way we'd be able to get the attention of city planners and legislators is to produce our own study about the positive effects that more efficient and lower levels of lighting might have on safety and crime and so on, counter-intuitive to most people.
If such a study was simply thrown out by others on the grounds that we might be biased, it'd be extremely frustrating. If everyone took that approach, it would be difficult for anyone to argue anything. It would make much more sense and be more productive if people would simply argue with us based on the objective information that we provide with the study, and if necessary point out any flaws in our methodology.
This way we can either prove to people that we're right, accept that we're wrong, or go back and improve our methodology for another attempt. Perhaps it would be decided that the results we've presented aren't even important enough to warrant a change, but at least everyone knows where they stand based on honest, objective information.
You should accept research on its merits based on the information presented. If relevant information is missing, or if what's available shows that a sponsor is hiding or manipulating information to skew the results, then point it out and treat it accordingly. But please don't simply throw it out because it supports the view of whomever sponsored it.
I don't have words to express how angry this IP grab makes me - and I'm not even an American!
I'm not American either and it irritates me. If it were an internal US issue then it wouldn't bother me so much, but the reality is that the USA is the leader in forcing its legislative ideals onto other countries, flawed or not.
If a patent is recognised in the USA, then lots of other countries are required by international agreements (or soon will be) to recognise it, or at the very least go through mountains of legislative process to discredit it.
It'd be nice if other countries could just ignore the US and go about their business, but unfortunately they can't.
You know, my lease with my landlord has never been tested in court either, but I don't think anyone would reasonably presume that I don't need to pay rent, or that I can be kicked out without a reason.
I more or less agree with the principle of what you've said, but I'm not sure if this is a great example. Even if you and your landlord have never been to court, chances are that the lease agreement is either a clone or a very close copy of a standard and legally scrutinised agreement. It's likely that a similar template agreement has been used in thousands or more lease agreements, and probably that template has been tested in court many many times already.
Although the GPL is clear, concise and (we would hope) very straightforward, it's still out on it's own to a large extent. It's quite a different way of doing things from any software agreements that came before it (to the best of my knowledge, anyway), and it hasn't been tested. There seems to be quite an incentive to have it tested in court, too, if only to silence the people who might publicly dispute its validity for their own reasons.
What might be at least as good would be a boot CD that would let someone bot into a restricted environment with network access, and then download and apply the latest updates.
This would potentially let people update their PC's completely without needing to risk having their computer taken over immediately or during the update process. There's still a chance that the update software on the CD might be compromised, but if it's minimalist enough then there's nowhere near as much chance as with a fully blown windows system.
This type of thing should be distributed with Windows automatically, in the box.
On-going from my previous reply, I should also point out for all those existing python programmers who are concerned they might miss a particular module that they really really need:
ruby-python:
Ruby/Python is a Ruby extension library to embed Python interpreter in Ruby. With this library, you can use the libraries written for Python in your Ruby scripts.
I've never used it so can't comment on its effectiveness, but would be interested if anyone has any comments.
That example seems a bit selective to me. Code blocks are nice given the rest of the way that Ruby is designed to make them useful and handy, but I don't think it's necessarily superior. Personally I'm a great fan of Ruby for it's consistency, which I suppose it inherited from Smalltalk. I really like being able to deal with anything in the same way, without having to worry that there might be exceptions.
I've been using Python as my favourite scripting language for several years -- it's a neat language to code in. Recently though, I had a situation where I wanted to make adjustments to the String metaclass, and I hit a brick wall. Python's consistent in most places, and getting even moreso over time, but there are some bits of it that completely conflict with everything else. If you hit one of them it can be quite frustrating.
Switching to try the same thing in Ruby, I found that the consistency between standard library classes and everything else made it so much easier. In my Python version, I had to design a wrapper around a string, which is very yucky because I really want all strings to act a certain way - not just those that I remember to put a wrapper around. With Ruby it was just a matter of re-declaring the String and adding the methods I wanted.
On one hand, it would be nice to have those controls. However, let's be realistic -- the standard can't include every single control that everyone thinks is an essential part of a form.
The point that I was originally intending to make earlier is that dates and times are very common data types, but they're not supported at all by existing HTML forms. People have been trying to code around that literally for years. We know what the most important problems are likely to be, specifically dates, times and simple data validation (integer , etc). But the original standard hasn't been updated to reflect that.
XForms are great and I don't want to claim that they're silly or unnecessary, but implementing them will be a massive hurdle for user agent developers, and realistically that's what's been holding them up for so long already. During the past few years it would've eased so much frustration if only a few adjustments had been made to HTML4 forms to reflect what was learned after their initial design and implementation.
A recommendation which no doubt will shortly split into 'mobile' 'standard' and 'full', each available at 'level 1' or 'level 2', each in three simultaneously maintained versions called 'Original W3C recommendation', '1.0', and '1.1b'?
I think it's great that Mozilla's looking to finally implement this. I've been watching the bug (97806) for about six months, and it's been very contriversial, at least partly for the reasons you mention.
Having said that, XForms do seem like absolute overkill for a lot of tasks, and it'd be a shame to see them deprecate and presumably replace the limited (but simple) forms that HTML has at the moment.
My own gripe is that in my own experience, existing forms could be so much more convenient to use if only there was an accepted standard for a couple of extra data types.
Specifically, I'd very much have liked to see <input type="date"/>. and <input type="time">. (Browser pops up a relevant calendar selection dialogue as appropriate.)
Those two inputs alone, if designed with appropriate properties for things like time zones and granularity, could prevent a huge number of headaches in web programming. Offering some very simple client end type checks for other types of inputs could prevent even more headaches.
XForms is just overkill for a lot of this, but javascript is a very yucky and unreliable alternative. Oh well.
If you invented something completely new and revolutionary, such as Bell's telephone, or the Wright brothers' plane, would you want to earn money from it for some time- or let anyone and everyone produce it and make the money (instead of you).
It's interesting that you should bring this up, because so many inventions are as much a product of their time as of a particular inventor. I'd contend that the aeroplane wasn't a particularly unique invention, although it was probably hard to tell at the time due to communication issues. The telephone and the electric light bulb most likely weren't, either. If they hadn't been invented then someone else likely would have invented them within a short span of time.
The Wright Brothers most likely invented their own powered flying device without help, and clearly got the most recognition for it. But there were several other people elsewhere doing exactly the same thing independently. eg. Richard Pearse is one example who arguably flew before the Wright Brothers. There are several others in different parts of the world.
The point isn't so much that someone did it first, but that several people were able to independently do it at the same time. Why should only one inventor or otherwise capable person be able to profit just because they were the first to independently extend what was already known?
Unfortunately I think that's what's happening quite frequently in today's world. It's particularly an issue now that improved communication can mean several people independently invent almost the same thing weeks apart, simply as an extention of existing knowledge and a reaction to something they needed or wanted more than any revolutionary business goal. Yet if the first person happened to file a patent on it, it's too bad for everyone else. They're not allowed to earn without paying up.
I agree with most of what you say, but I disagree with this.
What could possibly be a more basic usability requirement for a web browser than that it properly display content? That is the sole function of a web browser, and any failure in that area must be regarded as a usability disaster.
Microsoft's products may fail to display content to standards, but this isn't a usability disaster because the authors of the content go to great lengths to adjust it to "fit" Microsoft's products. The consequence is that the end user experience isn't hugely affected, at least in a direct way, as they still get the content that they wanted.
There's still a huge problem, though. Microsoft is a blatant beneficiary of the free rider problem: at the moment it doesn't have to be considerate because everyone else will make up for it's negligence anyway.
A magazine called "Choice", which reviews and tests products, reviewed all available steering wheel locks and claimed that the Club Lock could be defeated in less than 30 seconds by someone with no experience at car theft.
But in the world of PHB-controlled e-commerce sites and the typical demographic that visit their sites, PNG and universal CSS come second (or third, or forth,...) to a host of other concerns. Those concerns are what Iliad are talking about.
There's an analogy here to do with Xerox and the photocopier, which I think is quite relevant:
When the photocopier was first developed and Xerox began marketing it to businesses, it took a lot of effort because the bosses couldn't see the point. From a PHB's perspective, there's not a lot of point in having a machine to duplicate documents. After all, whenever a boss wanted a copy of a document they would hand it to the secretary who would re-type it, perhaps with a few sheets of carbon paper.
Xerox eventually sold it to businesses by proposing to simply install the photocopier for free, and only charge for the copies that were made using it. Many more PHB's then accepted it, and it immediately became a fantastic tool for the secretaries who no longer had to struggle through typing and re-typing entire documents just to make identical copies. It was only at this point that its usefulness really became apparent to a lot of bosses, who realised that the availability of a photocopier was letting their staff spend time on other things. Really the end customer (PHB) wasn't interested in the photocopier, but by providing it they made someone else's job much easier which resulted in a better service.
I guess if Microsoft wants to market standards compliant CSS and PNG support, they should be marketing it at the people to whom it'll mean the most. ie. The developers. Those are the people whom it's going to benefit most immediately, after all: not the end customer. If there are enough websites and web applications out there that require IE7 and assuming Microsoft makes it easy to get, it really shouldn't be much of a problem.
Where Microsoft suceeds is giving the consumer what they WANT. For stuff to work, even if it means that their computer is riddled with spyware and viruses. As long as their credit card number doesn't get swiped or find kiddee pr0n on their computer and everything else works, they are satisfied.
I'm not sure I agree with this. With few exceptions, I rarely meet anyone who is happy with their Windows PC. They are certainly not satisfied, but merely have no alternative. At least in my experience, most people use Windows and its software because they have to, not because they want to, and they're no afraid to express it if asked. The problem, however, is that you can't complain to Microsoft and expect to get any meaningful reaction. You simply have to accept what Microsoft provides you and then deal with it.
The reasons I've encountered frequently involve not knowing about any alternative. If they're aware of something like Linux, they have no idea of how to switch, or have the perception that they're too locked into Windows already to even seriously consider it. Most people have no way to reliably back up their data and simply zap windows without the fear of not being able to get it back. There are some great open source ideas such as Knoppix that may work towards this, but right now at least there's still not a lot of interest or publicity out there.
My own conclusion is that Microsoft isn't successful today because it offers satisfaction or just working. In many cases there are superior alternatives to Microsoft products, even within Windows. It's successful because it's engineered a world of ignorance and despair, in which people aren't confident that they're expert enough to understand anything different from The Microsoft Experience (tm), and don't want to take the risk of falling off.
Kinda of a cop out, if you ask me, and sidestepping the issue discussed in the article about her lawyer trying to intimidate Katie Jones to hand over katie.com for free.
On that note, if anyone wants to email the lawyer directly, KatieJ publishes the name and address on her "How can I help" page.
The address for Parry Aftab (her lawyer) is parry@aftab.com.
Ironically, Parry Aftab describes herself as "one of the leading experts worldwide on cyber-crime, Internet privacy and cyber-abuse issues.
Well I wasn't meaning to suggest that it would be the black box doing the judging. It's there as a tool to provide more data, to be judged by an actual person.
Computers do a much better job than any human could in collecting accurate data, though I don't (yet) trust a computer (more specifically, the AI logic currently available) to make an important judgement on the data it collects. That can be left to someone qualified who can determine the merit and meaning of the data provided.
One might argue that we're not yet able to trust people to implement and interpret data from a black box effectively, so we shouldn't try. That may be a fair comment, but I don't think it's the same as arguing that we shouldn't let a black box judge people. The black box is there to provide accurate data about what's happening.
We already use tools all the time to help people make judgements. This happens in road safety as much as anything else. Is this any different?
I'm undecided on whether this is a good idea or not. (I don't actually live in the US, for that matter.) I'm curious about this comment, though:
I'm all for this idea provided that it usage or data can never be used to incfluence insurance premiums or acceptance.
To play a devil's advocate: If I happen to be a driver who always drives safely and at recommended speed limits and undangerously for the roads on which I'm driving... and a black box can help to reasonably prove that, why should I be required to subsidise people who don't drive safely by paying higher insurance premiums myself? That's what currently happens in today's world, because there isn't an easy way to objectively measure how dangerously particular people drive, no doubt partly because no records are kept.
I guess this argument assumes that a black box could help to provide an objective assessment of dangerous driving. I doubt that would be possible on its own, but it could certainly help experts to assess driving patterns more easily and compare with ones known to be more likely to cause accidents.
Well certainly it is theft, and you'd obviously have a case against whoever stole your car assuming you could figure that out.
But insurance companies aren't there to mimic the law and to pay up simply because you were a victim of theft. I'd never agree to insure you if I knew you left your car unlocked with keys in the ignition all the time, and why should an insurance company? You get an agreement when you take out your policy about what's covered, and it's completely reasonable for an agreement like this to say that you should be taking reasonable steps to protect your property.
If you looked hard enough then you'd definitely be able to find a company that would insure you under the terms you're suggesting, but you'd be paying one hell of a lot in premiums. Not unreasonably, either. It would simply reflect the fact that you car is much more likely to be stolen if you constantly leave it unlocked with the keys in it.
If the insurance company's going to lose billions of dollars per year from paying out to people who can't be bothered to protect their own property, they clearly wouldn't be in business.
I've certainly downloaded music, and personally if I like it I usually end up buying the album... otherwise it doesn't last long. Usually I prefer the entire album over a couple of tracks, because I don't really listen much to the trashy radio music where artists apparently only have one or two good singles. If that's all that an artist can produce then they're probably not worth listening to anyway.
Having said that, I do often find downloading to be a hassle --- being stuck with a dialup isn't the entire cause but it doens't help. It's easier to be able to borrow the full album on an actual CD. With that in mind, my local library actually stocks quite a lot of music CD's, both of popular music and a lot of music that's rarely promoted or sold by local music stores. With perhaps a few exceptions, it's no more legal to keep or copy the CD's from the library than it is to download, but it's great for sampling albums and deciding if they're something I'd like to buy more permanently.
For those who rarely visit their library or who stay in the book sections, check to see if there's also a music section. You might find that borrowing music from the library to sample it is much more convenient than downloading.
One of my favorite thing about postgres is it's support of plpythonu (python stored procedures)....
Do you have them working at the moment? Last time I checked, the whole python side of postgres's stored procedures was broken (at least with recent python releases) due to Python's rexec module being disabled for security concerns.
I guess you could hack around this as long as you trust the code that you're going to be running, but it seems a bit ugly. Fortunately I'm happy enough with plpgsql for the stored procedures that I write.
7) Getting people involved - by Anonymous Coward
What methods have you found that work best for getting people not only involved in contributing, but also keeping them contributing to the Wiki?
I was really looking forward to the answer for this question. There are so many cool social and technical devices in wikipedia that could potentially be talked about, and I was very interested to get a better idea of how the wikipedia operators saw it from their point of view.
Jimy doesn't seem to've answered the question by simply saying that "love for what they're doing" is what keeps people involved. Believing in wikipedia would be important, but I don't personally think that it's something that would keep people coming back.
For instance, what about the following?
Placing edit links on every page, making it incredibly easy to change information without any overheads. (One doesn't even need to log in.)
Supporting an infrastructure where people can take responsibility for the pages they're interested in. Watchlists, in particular.
Defaulting to making people more involved. eg. Any edit you make on a page causes it to be added to your watchlist by default, meaning everyone can keep in touch with how others have adjusted their edits in the future.
Providing a tidy presentation and a relatively easy-to-understand editing system, making people feel proud of what they've produced with an incentive to do more.
There are only starters. There are heaps of devices in wikipedia that seek to hook and involve people and give them every possible excuse to keep contributing once they've started. Jimmy's answer about "make them love what they're doing" just struck me as quite shallow.
Oh well; the rest of the interview was interesting. Thanks to Jimmy and the slashdot editors for producing it.
Perhaps your experiences have differed, but I've managed to quite successfully import mail into Mozilla from Netscape 7. (I haven't specifically tried Thunderbird.)
There's no explicit import-netscape-7-mail option on the Mozilla import menu which I found a little strange, but the mail formats are the same, or at least very similar. As long as you can locate the correct mail directory, it's a matter of updating the paths in your assorted prefs.js (or whatever other preferences files are lying around). It's slightly technical and ideally it really shouldn't be that complicated, but it's not impossible if you know how to look around your disk and edit a text file here and there.
Failing that, there are several less direct ways that you could move mail between most formats. One that comes to mind might be to find an IMAP server to run locally that supports an open format, connect to it using Netscape and copy all of your existing mail to the IMAP folders. Then you can use whatever utility is appropriate to go from the open format behind the IMAP server to Mozilla.
Personally I prefer to just do everything through my IMAP server, since it gives me a much wider choice of what mail client to use at any given time, and I can run a couple on different workstations without serious complications if I really want to.
Slashdot Mirror
Perhaps I misunderstand, but my impression was that one of the main points behind the whole free (speech) software movement is that most other forms of information already are free.
That is to say: Software is in quite an unusual situation, because the machine instructions are not nearly as useful as the source code from which they were derived. This is not the same as something like a book or a song, because even though there may be copyright restrictions on the distribution, those who do get it can still see and manipulate the actual building blocks of the information once they have it... at the very least for their own personal use.
What the GPL and "free" software movement does among other things is to make sure that if someone distributes the software, then they must distribute the source version at the very least, to ensure that the person getting it has all the same rights and abilities that they would normally have with other types of information.
An architect or builder probably won't build a free building as you've suggested, because a building isn't information in the traditional sense. (At least if they do, we're talking about something on a fundamentally different level.) But if an architect were to design plans for a building and sell them to a developer, the developer would naturally be able to adjust and perhaps continue re-distribute those plans... at which point whoever gets them can continue to do the same. Something like this isn't automatically possible with software, because it can be distributed in a form that can be used but not easily changed.
Similarly, some artists are giving their work away under a variety of free licenses, but those licenses aren't revolutionary to art in the same way that the GPL is revolutionary to software... (although perhaps they are in other ways). With or without those licenses, it's still naturally possible (legal or not) to obtain a song or an artwork, and derive something else from it. This is not so easy with closed source software.
I think the difference is that software information is directly used by computers whereas other blocks of information (at least those that are normally associated with distribution and trading) are directly used by people. You have to understand the words in a book to make use of it, but you don't have to understand the machine instructions in a software application... so the readable edition can be held back. Many software developers/businesses take advantage of the extra control-by-obscurity over the information that this technicality gives them. If we all had logic brains and could easily understand and manipulate the compiled software that was bought off the shelves, it wouldn't be as much of an issue. Among other things, the GPL attempts to remove that technicality and make software like most other types of information.
I'm not exactly a strong advocate of free software besides using it for most things. If anyone thinks I've missed something important, please elaborate.
I've spent significant amounts of time and effort campaigning about light pollution to local governments. For the most part, even amateur astronomers (like me) aren't claiming that no light is a good thing. Even astronomers need light to do things at night. What we'd really like, though, is more intelligent lighting.
Most street lights and outdoor residence lights are very lazily installed and don't have adequate fixtures. Very few are actually full cut-off lights, meaning that substantial amounts of the light that they're producing is simply going up into the sky where it's wasted anyway. That part of it is a simple waste of energy, and reducing the waste should benefit everyone.
Besides that though, there's a huge mis-perception that simply flooding an area with more light at night makes it safer. I won't even get into the implications this often has on local wildlife, because there's already enough evidence and rational argument that such lighting frequently, causes accidents, creates security issues or assists criminals.
Many lights are essentially glare bombs, meaning they're bright but they're more likely to blind someone than to actually light what they're intended to. The brightness eminating from these can give the false impression that there's lots of useful light, when it's actually not lighting much at all and if anything has the potential to blind people (including motorists) and create accidents.
Furthermore, if the light fails to properly direct like (and keep in mind that most fixtures are already badly installed), there's a likeliness that it's simply increasing the contrast between the lighted areas and the shaded areas. If you happen to be concerned about criminal activity, it's not likely to help by providing more places for criminals to hide, stalk around and drag victims to. Personally when I'm walking home at night, I consider myself safer in the relative dark. At least that way I'm not as visible and standing out to someone who might want to attack me for some reason.
Plus, shining your lights onto a neighbour's property without their permission ... which many many people do ... is just plain bad manners.
Even amateur astronomers who campaign against light pollution have plenty of arguments to use that have no relation with astronomy or dark skies whatsoever. We're not claiming that people should have to walk around as if they were wearing blindfolds --- only that lights can be handled much better and more efficiently than they currently are.
Realistically, better designed and more intelligently installed lighting should benefit everyone. It's more a matter of getting past people's flawed perceptions that turning night into day surely must be a good thing... not to mention the ulterior motives that some government officials have. (Imagine what more efficient energy use could to to the Bush administration's energy policies.)
I agree with another response to your post. Someone has to pay for research, and sometimes an impartial study just isn't feasible because impartial people have no stake or interest in the outcome.
For instance, I'm personally in a group that has a particular interest in reducing the amount of light pollution that's produced by populated areas. There's little or no existing interest outside of our own group. About the only way we'd be able to get the attention of city planners and legislators is to produce our own study about the positive effects that more efficient and lower levels of lighting might have on safety and crime and so on, counter-intuitive to most people.
If such a study was simply thrown out by others on the grounds that we might be biased, it'd be extremely frustrating. If everyone took that approach, it would be difficult for anyone to argue anything. It would make much more sense and be more productive if people would simply argue with us based on the objective information that we provide with the study, and if necessary point out any flaws in our methodology.
This way we can either prove to people that we're right, accept that we're wrong, or go back and improve our methodology for another attempt. Perhaps it would be decided that the results we've presented aren't even important enough to warrant a change, but at least everyone knows where they stand based on honest, objective information.
You should accept research on its merits based on the information presented. If relevant information is missing, or if what's available shows that a sponsor is hiding or manipulating information to skew the results, then point it out and treat it accordingly. But please don't simply throw it out because it supports the view of whomever sponsored it.
I'm not American either and it irritates me. If it were an internal US issue then it wouldn't bother me so much, but the reality is that the USA is the leader in forcing its legislative ideals onto other countries, flawed or not.
If a patent is recognised in the USA, then lots of other countries are required by international agreements (or soon will be) to recognise it, or at the very least go through mountains of legislative process to discredit it.
It'd be nice if other countries could just ignore the US and go about their business, but unfortunately they can't.
I more or less agree with the principle of what you've said, but I'm not sure if this is a great example. Even if you and your landlord have never been to court, chances are that the lease agreement is either a clone or a very close copy of a standard and legally scrutinised agreement. It's likely that a similar template agreement has been used in thousands or more lease agreements, and probably that template has been tested in court many many times already.
Although the GPL is clear, concise and (we would hope) very straightforward, it's still out on it's own to a large extent. It's quite a different way of doing things from any software agreements that came before it (to the best of my knowledge, anyway), and it hasn't been tested. There seems to be quite an incentive to have it tested in court, too, if only to silence the people who might publicly dispute its validity for their own reasons.
What might be at least as good would be a boot CD that would let someone bot into a restricted environment with network access, and then download and apply the latest updates.
This would potentially let people update their PC's completely without needing to risk having their computer taken over immediately or during the update process. There's still a chance that the update software on the CD might be compromised, but if it's minimalist enough then there's nowhere near as much chance as with a fully blown windows system.
This type of thing should be distributed with Windows automatically, in the box.
Not to mention literacy, which presumably sustains sales of books in the long term. Imagine what it'd be like if anyone who wanted to read had to pay.
On-going from my previous reply, I should also point out for all those existing python programmers who are concerned they might miss a particular module that they really really need:
ruby-python: Ruby/Python is a Ruby extension library to embed Python interpreter in Ruby. With this library, you can use the libraries written for Python in your Ruby scripts.I've never used it so can't comment on its effectiveness, but would be interested if anyone has any comments.
That example seems a bit selective to me. Code blocks are nice given the rest of the way that Ruby is designed to make them useful and handy, but I don't think it's necessarily superior. Personally I'm a great fan of Ruby for it's consistency, which I suppose it inherited from Smalltalk. I really like being able to deal with anything in the same way, without having to worry that there might be exceptions.
I've been using Python as my favourite scripting language for several years -- it's a neat language to code in. Recently though, I had a situation where I wanted to make adjustments to the String metaclass, and I hit a brick wall. Python's consistent in most places, and getting even moreso over time, but there are some bits of it that completely conflict with everything else. If you hit one of them it can be quite frustrating.
Switching to try the same thing in Ruby, I found that the consistency between standard library classes and everything else made it so much easier. In my Python version, I had to design a wrapper around a string, which is very yucky because I really want all strings to act a certain way - not just those that I remember to put a wrapper around. With Ruby it was just a matter of re-declaring the String and adding the methods I wanted.
The point that I was originally intending to make earlier is that dates and times are very common data types, but they're not supported at all by existing HTML forms. People have been trying to code around that literally for years. We know what the most important problems are likely to be, specifically dates, times and simple data validation (integer , etc). But the original standard hasn't been updated to reflect that.
XForms are great and I don't want to claim that they're silly or unnecessary, but implementing them will be a massive hurdle for user agent developers, and realistically that's what's been holding them up for so long already. During the past few years it would've eased so much frustration if only a few adjustments had been made to HTML4 forms to reflect what was learned after their initial design and implementation.
I think it's great that Mozilla's looking to finally implement this. I've been watching the bug (97806) for about six months, and it's been very contriversial, at least partly for the reasons you mention.
Having said that, XForms do seem like absolute overkill for a lot of tasks, and it'd be a shame to see them deprecate and presumably replace the limited (but simple) forms that HTML has at the moment.
My own gripe is that in my own experience, existing forms could be so much more convenient to use if only there was an accepted standard for a couple of extra data types.
Specifically, I'd very much have liked to see <input type="date" />. and <input type="time">. (Browser pops up a relevant calendar selection dialogue as appropriate.)
Those two inputs alone, if designed with appropriate properties for things like time zones and granularity, could prevent a huge number of headaches in web programming. Offering some very simple client end type checks for other types of inputs could prevent even more headaches.
XForms is just overkill for a lot of this, but javascript is a very yucky and unreliable alternative. Oh well.
It's interesting that you should bring this up, because so many inventions are as much a product of their time as of a particular inventor. I'd contend that the aeroplane wasn't a particularly unique invention, although it was probably hard to tell at the time due to communication issues. The telephone and the electric light bulb most likely weren't, either. If they hadn't been invented then someone else likely would have invented them within a short span of time.
The Wright Brothers most likely invented their own powered flying device without help, and clearly got the most recognition for it. But there were several other people elsewhere doing exactly the same thing independently. eg. Richard Pearse is one example who arguably flew before the Wright Brothers. There are several others in different parts of the world.
The point isn't so much that someone did it first, but that several people were able to independently do it at the same time. Why should only one inventor or otherwise capable person be able to profit just because they were the first to independently extend what was already known?
Unfortunately I think that's what's happening quite frequently in today's world. It's particularly an issue now that improved communication can mean several people independently invent almost the same thing weeks apart, simply as an extention of existing knowledge and a reaction to something they needed or wanted more than any revolutionary business goal. Yet if the first person happened to file a patent on it, it's too bad for everyone else. They're not allowed to earn without paying up.
I agree with most of what you say, but I disagree with this.
Microsoft's products may fail to display content to standards, but this isn't a usability disaster because the authors of the content go to great lengths to adjust it to "fit" Microsoft's products. The consequence is that the end user experience isn't hugely affected, at least in a direct way, as they still get the content that they wanted.
There's still a huge problem, though. Microsoft is a blatant beneficiary of the free rider problem: at the moment it doesn't have to be considerate because everyone else will make up for it's negligence anyway.
Here's the online documentation of the original test.
There's an analogy here to do with Xerox and the photocopier, which I think is quite relevant:
When the photocopier was first developed and Xerox began marketing it to businesses, it took a lot of effort because the bosses couldn't see the point. From a PHB's perspective, there's not a lot of point in having a machine to duplicate documents. After all, whenever a boss wanted a copy of a document they would hand it to the secretary who would re-type it, perhaps with a few sheets of carbon paper.
Xerox eventually sold it to businesses by proposing to simply install the photocopier for free, and only charge for the copies that were made using it. Many more PHB's then accepted it, and it immediately became a fantastic tool for the secretaries who no longer had to struggle through typing and re-typing entire documents just to make identical copies. It was only at this point that its usefulness really became apparent to a lot of bosses, who realised that the availability of a photocopier was letting their staff spend time on other things. Really the end customer (PHB) wasn't interested in the photocopier, but by providing it they made someone else's job much easier which resulted in a better service.
I guess if Microsoft wants to market standards compliant CSS and PNG support, they should be marketing it at the people to whom it'll mean the most. ie. The developers. Those are the people whom it's going to benefit most immediately, after all: not the end customer. If there are enough websites and web applications out there that require IE7 and assuming Microsoft makes it easy to get, it really shouldn't be much of a problem.
I'm not sure I agree with this. With few exceptions, I rarely meet anyone who is happy with their Windows PC. They are certainly not satisfied, but merely have no alternative. At least in my experience, most people use Windows and its software because they have to, not because they want to, and they're no afraid to express it if asked. The problem, however, is that you can't complain to Microsoft and expect to get any meaningful reaction. You simply have to accept what Microsoft provides you and then deal with it.
The reasons I've encountered frequently involve not knowing about any alternative. If they're aware of something like Linux, they have no idea of how to switch, or have the perception that they're too locked into Windows already to even seriously consider it. Most people have no way to reliably back up their data and simply zap windows without the fear of not being able to get it back. There are some great open source ideas such as Knoppix that may work towards this, but right now at least there's still not a lot of interest or publicity out there.
My own conclusion is that Microsoft isn't successful today because it offers satisfaction or just working. In many cases there are superior alternatives to Microsoft products, even within Windows. It's successful because it's engineered a world of ignorance and despair, in which people aren't confident that they're expert enough to understand anything different from The Microsoft Experience (tm), and don't want to take the risk of falling off.
On that note, if anyone wants to email the lawyer directly, KatieJ publishes the name and address on her "How can I help" page.
The address for Parry Aftab (her lawyer) is parry@aftab.com.
Ironically, Parry Aftab describes herself as "one of the leading experts worldwide on cyber-crime, Internet privacy and cyber-abuse issues.
Well I wasn't meaning to suggest that it would be the black box doing the judging. It's there as a tool to provide more data, to be judged by an actual person.
Computers do a much better job than any human could in collecting accurate data, though I don't (yet) trust a computer (more specifically, the AI logic currently available) to make an important judgement on the data it collects. That can be left to someone qualified who can determine the merit and meaning of the data provided.
One might argue that we're not yet able to trust people to implement and interpret data from a black box effectively, so we shouldn't try. That may be a fair comment, but I don't think it's the same as arguing that we shouldn't let a black box judge people. The black box is there to provide accurate data about what's happening.
We already use tools all the time to help people make judgements. This happens in road safety as much as anything else. Is this any different?
I'm undecided on whether this is a good idea or not. (I don't actually live in the US, for that matter.) I'm curious about this comment, though:
To play a devil's advocate: If I happen to be a driver who always drives safely and at recommended speed limits and undangerously for the roads on which I'm driving... and a black box can help to reasonably prove that, why should I be required to subsidise people who don't drive safely by paying higher insurance premiums myself? That's what currently happens in today's world, because there isn't an easy way to objectively measure how dangerously particular people drive, no doubt partly because no records are kept.
I guess this argument assumes that a black box could help to provide an objective assessment of dangerous driving. I doubt that would be possible on its own, but it could certainly help experts to assess driving patterns more easily and compare with ones known to be more likely to cause accidents.
Well certainly it is theft, and you'd obviously have a case against whoever stole your car assuming you could figure that out.
But insurance companies aren't there to mimic the law and to pay up simply because you were a victim of theft. I'd never agree to insure you if I knew you left your car unlocked with keys in the ignition all the time, and why should an insurance company? You get an agreement when you take out your policy about what's covered, and it's completely reasonable for an agreement like this to say that you should be taking reasonable steps to protect your property.
If you looked hard enough then you'd definitely be able to find a company that would insure you under the terms you're suggesting, but you'd be paying one hell of a lot in premiums. Not unreasonably, either. It would simply reflect the fact that you car is much more likely to be stolen if you constantly leave it unlocked with the keys in it.
If the insurance company's going to lose billions of dollars per year from paying out to people who can't be bothered to protect their own property, they clearly wouldn't be in business.
I've certainly downloaded music, and personally if I like it I usually end up buying the album... otherwise it doesn't last long. Usually I prefer the entire album over a couple of tracks, because I don't really listen much to the trashy radio music where artists apparently only have one or two good singles. If that's all that an artist can produce then they're probably not worth listening to anyway.
Having said that, I do often find downloading to be a hassle --- being stuck with a dialup isn't the entire cause but it doens't help. It's easier to be able to borrow the full album on an actual CD. With that in mind, my local library actually stocks quite a lot of music CD's, both of popular music and a lot of music that's rarely promoted or sold by local music stores. With perhaps a few exceptions, it's no more legal to keep or copy the CD's from the library than it is to download, but it's great for sampling albums and deciding if they're something I'd like to buy more permanently.
For those who rarely visit their library or who stay in the book sections, check to see if there's also a music section. You might find that borrowing music from the library to sample it is much more convenient than downloading.
Do you have them working at the moment? Last time I checked, the whole python side of postgres's stored procedures was broken (at least with recent python releases) due to Python's rexec module being disabled for security concerns.
Looking at the current online Python documentation, it appears that the latest python release still has rexec disabled.
I guess you could hack around this as long as you trust the code that you're going to be running, but it seems a bit ugly. Fortunately I'm happy enough with plpgsql for the stored procedures that I write.
Co-sponsored by IBM, perhaps quite appropriately.
I was really looking forward to the answer for this question. There are so many cool social and technical devices in wikipedia that could potentially be talked about, and I was very interested to get a better idea of how the wikipedia operators saw it from their point of view.
Jimy doesn't seem to've answered the question by simply saying that "love for what they're doing" is what keeps people involved. Believing in wikipedia would be important, but I don't personally think that it's something that would keep people coming back.
For instance, what about the following?
There are only starters. There are heaps of devices in wikipedia that seek to hook and involve people and give them every possible excuse to keep contributing once they've started. Jimmy's answer about "make them love what they're doing" just struck me as quite shallow.
Oh well; the rest of the interview was interesting. Thanks to Jimmy and the slashdot editors for producing it.
Perhaps your experiences have differed, but I've managed to quite successfully import mail into Mozilla from Netscape 7. (I haven't specifically tried Thunderbird.)
There's no explicit import-netscape-7-mail option on the Mozilla import menu which I found a little strange, but the mail formats are the same, or at least very similar. As long as you can locate the correct mail directory, it's a matter of updating the paths in your assorted prefs.js (or whatever other preferences files are lying around). It's slightly technical and ideally it really shouldn't be that complicated, but it's not impossible if you know how to look around your disk and edit a text file here and there.
Failing that, there are several less direct ways that you could move mail between most formats. One that comes to mind might be to find an IMAP server to run locally that supports an open format, connect to it using Netscape and copy all of your existing mail to the IMAP folders. Then you can use whatever utility is appropriate to go from the open format behind the IMAP server to Mozilla.
Personally I prefer to just do everything through my IMAP server, since it gives me a much wider choice of what mail client to use at any given time, and I can run a couple on different workstations without serious complications if I really want to.