I doubt that GIMP has hurt Photoshop's sales much, or MySQL is making a dent in Oracle.
I have mixed feelings about this. It's true that Gimp is unlikely to have much of an effect on Photoshop --- not unless it changes dramatically, at least. The existing Photoshop userbase is presumably weighted more towards the less technical people, and the entire Photoshop UI (which Gimp doesn't emulate) is something that its users seriously like it for.
Databases, on the other hand, I see as quite different. If Oracle does things successfully then it can probably do quite well, but there's a huge threat approaching from Open Source databases.
Mysql and PostgreSql (which I'm more familiar with) are not large commercial databases and they don't have the support of a massive corporation as Oracle does. They clearly can't compete on those grouds. But really, how many of Oracle's customers actually need all of Oracle's features to do the job that they're doing?
PostgreSQL has transactions. PostgreSQL supports SQL syntax. PostgreSQL is reasonably efficient, at least with medium sized databases. PostgreSQL supports stored procedures, albeit requiring at least minor adaption from any existing Oracle procedures. It doesn't support replication very well yet, although that's certainly in the pipeline. In essence, PostgreSQL is something that will probably do the job "quite well" if not perfectly, depending on the job. And it's free.
For the majority of jobs and with a competant administrator, which although not everywhere is more likely to be found near a database than an image editing program such as Photoshop, PostgreSql is completely sufficient for the majority of tasks. So with the exception of marketing and support, why would a business necessarily need to fork out and buy Oracle licences for most or possibly all tasks within their business, if it only needs Oracle for a few at most?
It's these smaller tasks that have the potential to really hit Oracle database market where it hurts. Oracle is selling in a marketplace where people are often competant enough to understand and deploy open source products. It hasn't entirely happened yet, but they are in a situation where open source developers might soon have the potential to pull much of the market out from under them if they're not careful.
Very interesting how (relatively) easy it is to uninstall all service packs from Win XP:
I was recently helping a friend to clean out her XP Home computer. Since she'd bought it no patches of any sort had been applied, and it was at the horrendous state where if she left it alone for a few hours, she'd come back to see a desktop popping full of porn advertisements.
I downloaded all of the available critical updates from Windows Update and showed her how to run AdAware, which on its own detected and removed something near a thousand suspicious objects. We then took a look around places like the add/remove software section.
At this point she got quite a shock because about half the listed programs were something called "HotFix". After everything that'd been frustrating her in the past months, she wanted to remove them all immediately. When you've spent the last hour removing porno popup and spyware programs from your computer, something called a "hotfix" does not look like it's supposed to be there. It took a lot of effort to convince her that a Hotfix is actually a Microsoft patch.
It hadn't occurred to me until then that it's not a particularly intelligent name for what's supposed to be a security patch. Now I start to wonder how many other people out there go ahead and remove the hot fixes because they don't realise that they're not spyware. It'd be very much in Microsoft's interests to consider renaming their critical updates.
That's certainly a fair comment. I guess my point is intended to be that Project Gutenberg is an active demonstration that some people do actually care about copyright expiring. Irrespective of its economic feasibility, it's a clear example of people getting up and doing something positive as a result of existing law.
It's only arguably directly useful for the economy, perhaps depending on your point of view. To that extent I don't suppose it would be a great example for politicians that have already decided to prioritise the corporate economy in their decisions. Not all politicians, especially outside the US, are in that frame of mind, however.
Where I live (New Zealand) to the best of my knowledge, there are some quite specific restrictions placed on how much money the members of parliament and those campaigning to be are allowed to receive from sponsors. The result appears to be that they do play to the people a lot more often. It could easily be a big misperception that everyone has, but they do tend to react to people at least as much as they react to corporations.
Here at least, if you can convince citizens, then the government will often follow. To be fair, of course, a country of 4 million people is probably a little easier to reach in a short time than the 300-odd million people distributed throughout the USA.
I'm not in the UK or anywhere in the EU, but for those who are I'd like to point out that about now would be a very good time to bring to the attention of your politicians things like Project Gutenberg, which directly benefit from the expiry of copyright.
Certainly part of the problem is that it's not always clear what possible benefits there could possibly be for ever letting works exit copyright. Gutenberg is an active project that's both becoming succesful, and demonstrates that people are out there trying to make an active effort to benefit from existing law.
If politicians don't realise that people are benefiting from existing law, they'll have far less reason to consider not changing it when lobbied by the corporates. It's a bonus that Gutenberg can quite correctly claim that rather than ripping off other people's work, it's saving and making accessible a lot of valuable resources that most likely would simply have vanished otherwise.... and without a reasonable expiry of copyright this simply coldn't happen.
For example, if you want to register at example.com for something, you give them the address me.example@yourdomain.com (or some structure which has a prefix or postfix, the 'me.', and the site name for which you are registering).
I've been doing this for several years now, although while still being reasonably careful about whom I give my address to. To date, the only site that I've personally noticed has leaked my address has been real.com, who leaked the address that I filled in before I was allowed to download the player several years back. It figures.
A lot of my other spam seems to go to my direct ISP account, which I presume resulted from a dictionary attack at one point. I have a three letter username, so it wouldn't be too hard to locate with brute force.
The main risk that was pointed out to me about what you're suggesting -- and this hasn't happened to me yet -- is that you run the risk of ending up on the same spam lists multiple times with different addresses. Most spammers will presumably be smart enough to weed the dupe addresses out of their list. But if you have a variety of addresses that get out, and once an address is on one list it'll probably propogate to all of them sooner or later, then you could end up getting every spam lots of times.
You can still filter them and if you're happy to do that then I guess it's okay. Personally I have a moral objection to filtering, even though I've had to resort to using it in the past year or so. Even if I can filter most of the spam, I'm still getting hammered with the traffic and I'm still paying for it. Up the line, my ISP has to charge me more because they have to deal with countless amounts of spam. As far as I'm concerned, the sooner we figure out a reliable solution to remove the spamming incentive (beyond simply filtering as much as possible), the better.
I'm using Firefox 0.8 with the RadialContext extension. That's the pie menu replacement for the right-click context menu.
If I scroll down the page with the mouse-wheel and right click, the pie menu appears at the top of the page. I have to scroll all the way back up in order to use it. ie. The context menu placement is for some reason confusing window-relative placement with page-relative placement.
It's possible that this is a bug in RadialContext, although this page with its odd combination of presentation, scripting and style attributes is the first place where I've ever seen it happen.
...but i'd say the way we communicate with each other has changed alot since then - text messages, email, mobile phones are a different way of communicating then what it was.
That's certainly true, although they're all still more digital/electronic, probably faster and more efficient variants of things that already existed.
Personally I think the very interesting side of communication via computers is with the enhanced parallel collaboration that's becoming possible.
Consider something like Wikipedia, for instance. It's a product of many thousands of people who've used modern technology to collaborate and create something bigger, more adaptive and quite different from anything that could probably have been achieved a few decades ago.
Another fantastic example is something like Distributed Proofreaders. Through the whole collaboration effort, it's created a very efficient and effective way for people to interact with each other and pool their resources together to do something that really couldn't have been done a few years ago.
Of course, Alan Kay's comments are about commercialisation. He may have a point considering that both of these examples are voluntary efforts. I stand to be corrected, but to me it seems that the main thing that most commercial organisations seem to have used computers for are the same things that they always did without computers. (Primarily publishing, processing of information, etc.)
Thanks for asking this question. I was recently at a conference where I presented an idea for a collaborative system for something where there doesn't seem to be one at the momemnt. I used a couple of examples to try and demonstrate my point of what genuine collaboration was on the web, moreso than just sending emails. One example was Wikipedia and the other was Distributed Proofreaders.
If you look at either of these websites in any detail, there are scores of devices and virtual rewards used to keep people interested, and to keep the regulars coming back to keep taking part in the community and continue building it.
I'd be very interested to know what the Wikipedia engineers believe are the most important and successful devices that they use to encourage people to continue contributing to the community.
Because, as the article pointed out, it is very difficult to get someone to change their browser. Once IE was integrated into Windows most users became very resistant to using anything else, they'd as soon adjust their virtual memory settings as use a non-standard OS component.
Perhaps Mozilla/Firefox should be marketed as a plug-in that somehow integrates into MSIE, and some people might be more open to installing it if and when required.:) (Of course, I'm not trying to suggest that it's a particularly polite or intelligent thing to do.)
It would just be amusing in many respects, but it's probably not possible for a plug-in to take over the IE rendering engine... then again...
Questions about point of view tend to be more difficult, but what is amazing is the open and public attempt to negotiate and resolve those questions on the "discussion" page for each entry.
This is a very important thing, I think. I can't find any references on short notice, but I've certainly heard accusations that Brittanica has on occasion published editions in different parts of the world that contain conflicting "facts" or at the very least conflicting biases and conclusions, depending on what the audience in that part of the world wants to read. (eg. For places where there are border conflicts and so on.) If anyone can point me to links to confirm this or refute it then I'm very interested.
One of the nice things about Wikipedia in any case, even if it isn't very authoritarian, is that it's at least consistent with itself and it's not as easy to argue for a potential commercial motivation from the central source of the publishers. Conflicts of information are probably more likely to be resolved through some compromise (such as stating outright that there's a dispute) than simply published differently to disagreeing audiences. There are different language editions but every one of them is at least easily available to everyone and open to review.
So, write a Distributed Computing Client which downloads weather-satellite data from a handful of sat-dish-connected servers and predicts the weather.
I don't think so. If it were that easy then you could guarantee that it'd be being done already. You could argue for a distributed client and in some way it might be useful. But more of a priority should be figuring out how to design a system that's actually intelligent enough both to make reliable predictions and trustworthy judgement calls about the weather in the first place.
Maybe it's different where you are, but in my location (New Zealand, which is admittedly not the US at all), having weather data and being able to make useful forecasts from it are two very different things. (To be fair, it is quite turbulent and changeable weather over here for a variety of geographical reasons.)
If your local environment means that 90% of days are identical to the day before, then simply having some data might be useful.... if for no other reason than to predict a possible change of some sort probably approching. But if that's your local situation, you probably don't really need satellite data in the first place --- you could use a telephone. The reason that we have meteorologists is because it does require some education and experience to look at the maps and understand properly what's actually happening, what's likely to happen, and (just as importantly) what we still don't know.
Re:IBM not OSS hero
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Wired on McBride
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· Score: 2, Interesting
Additionally, there are often question of why IBM did not buy out SCO. My belief is that we cannot assume they did not try. Until recently a majority of SCO stock was held by insiders, and much of the rest by institutional investors.
I don't know if you saw it on page 3 of the article or not, but even Anderer appears to've commented that he was expecting IBM to buy out SCO:
Anderer compares it to "being an archaeologist given the keys to an unexplored Egyptian museum basement." He expresses surprise that IBM didn't simply purchase SCO and donate the Unix code to the public domain; it would've been much cheaper than the current legal fracas.
He might be making things up, but his statement does seem to imply that it wouldn't have been too difficult for IBM to buy SCO if it had actually wanted to. I don't think anyone from outside can definitely say why IBM didn't buy SCO, but personally I'm glad that they didn't -- to buy SCO would be giving it credibility.
Who I am beginning to hope will start to react to this kind of thing is our governments.
I tend to agree with the other respondents who disagree that it should be the government's responsibility. That aside, I'd be very skeptical if any kind of summit between governments would have any useful effect. This is assuming that you mean an international summit, of course.
Going by experience from previous summits and similar events, it would probably result in most governments agreeing to do something about it. Almost certainly, however, the US government would decide to do nothing... and that would make the whole effort useless.
Microsoft is a US company. It brings money into the US economy by selling huge amounts of software vapour in what is effectively an international monopoly. In other words, it's yet another tool for the US to dominate other countries. With the possible exception of wanting to be nice, the US government has very little incentive to inhibit it from doing that.
Unfortunately, uploading means "sending data from your system", and downloading means "receiving data to your system".
It's lazy grammatical translation on the part of the slashdot submitter and editors. (Not terribly unusual at that, and conveniently arranged to provoke more flaming than what's warranted.) The actual terms of service say:
... Unlimited NationalAccess/BroadbandAccess cannot be used (1) for uploading, downloading or streaming of movies, music or games, (2) with server devices or with host computer applications, including, without limitation, Web camera posts or broadcasts, automatic data feeds, telemetry applications, automated functions or any other machine-to-machine applications, (3) as a substitute or backup for private lines or dedicated data connections....
Put in context, it quite clearly indicates to me at least that they only care about uploading and downloading of movies. Of course, it doesn't mean that the rest of the terms of service aren't also very restrictive and perhaps the "unlimited" in the name is misleading.
But essentially they don't want you using your connection to run a server, or to otherwise transfer anything that might end up hogging excessively high bandwidth compared with their regular customers. It doesn't rule out using the connection for general web browsing and email, which is probably all that 95% of their target market want anyway. In fact, the earlier parts of the terms of service (not quoted here) specifically state that those tasks are what it's intended for.
Well I don't know about anyone else but I'm certainly only speaking hypothetically. Obviously if anyone tried to switch between base 10 and 12 overnight, or even more slowly than that, there would be huge problems. Base 10's fine with me, as long as it's metric base 10. Metric in principle just makes conversions between all sorts of units so much easier.
But given the chance to start again, it would be interesting to compare the differences with building things on a base 12 metric instead of a base 10 metric. I doubt the advantages would be as much as those between imperial and metric, but there could still be interesting advantages.
I absolutely agree with you and I'm sorry if I implied that I didn't. The huge advantage of the metric system is definitely that it's so easy to convert between units... and this includes both converting different units of the same type, and converting between units of different types.
I've grown up and been educated in a country (New Zealand) that's almost completely metric with the very occasional leftover exception that you'd hardly notice without being here a while. Everything was imperial a long time ago, but not while I've been around. In all honesty, I have trouble imaging what it might be like if I'd had to deal with all the extra overheads of converting numbers instead of dealing with the actual problems that I want to figure out. The conversion advantages alone, I think, make metric hugely more preferable than imperial. They simply save so much time and reduce errors.
That said, it would be very interesting to be doing things in a metric system that used 12 as a base instead of 10. It might cause some of the minor complications to go away. You really have to get people counting in base 12 first, though.
Clearly the solution is to convert to a base 12 counting system. Then we can have the advantages of metric, and rarely have to use the dodecimal point.
Interestingly, there are at least a couple of groups that are trying to promote the use of base 12 over base 10 for exactly this reason.
I deal with a lot of spyware/adware at work, and one of the big problems is that the user usually has no idea why the advert windows are popping up, nor from where they're coming.
I recently helped a friend clean the spyware off her home computer. She certainly wasn't stupid. She'd just installed XP Home and expected it to work, trusting the people who sold it to her. (Well it said it would work on the box.) By the time I got to it, it was missing about the last 15-20 critical updates and it was hopelessly overrun.
She honestly didn't know what to do. She's constantly run off her feet working, studing by correspondence (for which she needs constant net access) and doing substantial amounts of charity work. Meanwhile whenever she turns on her computer she's bombarded with advertising -- much of it quite disgusting by normal standards. She's absolutely lost control of her web browser (yes, it's IE) which now constantly and randomly redirects her to websites that she clearly doesn't want to look at. If she leaves her computer unattended for more than an hour it's almost guaranteed that the desktop will be full of porn advertisments in a place where her kids can easily walk past and see them.
On an unpatched system, it'd collapsed to this state within the space of a couple of months. Presumably a spyware app or two had snuck in through security holes and proceeded to install massive amounts of additional spyware.
So I spent a couple of hours installing and running adaware, installing the past X number of critical updates, and doing what else I could. Even then it left all the crap on the start menu and desktop -- sometimes hidden in other program folders -- and we probably didn't pick up all of the applications. I'd have suggested a complete reinstallation except she simply doesn't have the time to spare right now.
We also went through the Add/Remove programs dialog and snared a couple of apps there, although some of them really didn't want to leave. I know this isn't going to get everything, but it's amazing how much we still found. Ironically she was very uneasy at leaving these things called "HotFixes" installed. To the uninformed who's frantically trying to recover from porn-promoting spyware, it looks just like more spyware. Microsoft seriously needs to reconsider its naming scheme.
Lots of people (especially on slashdot) seem to label others as stupid if they don't keep their system up-to-date, but I think that's completely unfair. Ignorant is a much fairer and more representative description, and it shouldn't be expected that everyone will take time out of their day to understand their computer any more than people might take time out to understand their microwave or their car.
I really do think that desktop computers have become too complex. The same box is expected to do a million different things, and because of that there's more to understand than most people are ever likely to comfortably learn.
Too many people (employees and employers) use things like certificates because they're too lazy to actually do the work needed to either advance their *real* skills or hire someone with real skills.
In my experience looking for IT work about 18 months ago, I had a frustrating enough time even actually getting to an employer who might look at my record. It was a difficult enough job getting through recruitment agents, most of whom had minimal (if any) background in IT training.
Their priority was to only present candidates who weren't "risky", and that usually meant going by certificates and buzzword-based experience more than anything else. I presume the reason was that they would have preferred to go with candidates whom they could justify presenting rather than take a risk on someone who had qualifications and experience that they didn't fully understand.
I discovered in the end that when coming from a background that's majority academic (even with commercial experience), it's much better to do everything possible to avoid recruitment agents like the plague, and just get to know prospective employers through other means, in the hope that they'll invite you for an interview when necessary.
It's a shame that there appears to be so much abuse of this programme. Sometimes I wonder if these types of programmes are really necessary, though. Mostly out of interest, what kinds of advantages do children actually get out of having computers in schools? By themselves the use of computers certainly doesn't cover the primary topics that schools are usually expected to teach, so presumably there's some expectation that having them there will either hugely benefit children in some other way, or will positively enhance the effects existing teaching.
I guess that in theory children can get used to having them around. To some extent it means that computers would be available for someone who might be able to learn from them extensively if they wouldn't have been able to otherwise. But is anyone out there aware of any actual research that demonstrates that computers in schools results in a verifiable positive return? (Keeping in mind that lots of people who never had computers in school were simply trained in the workplace.)
I don't mean to criticise, but I ask because I see a lot of people and governments claiming that it's a good thing. On the other hand, I haven't actually seen much evidence or that much that might convince me that we're much better off than we were a few years ago, when significantly fewer schools had access to computers.
I also don't mean to imply that maybe schools shouldn't have computers at all --- only that pouring vast amounts of money into actively supporting an infrastructure that deprecates so quickly might not be very effective. If the availability of technology means that most of people will already end up having reasonable computers in their homes within the next decade anyway, then pushing them so much in schools could be quite obsolete.
In the case of Antarctica, maybe that's a good thing - it's a nice lab, but it's pretty small and can't sustain a tourism industry.
As long as you mean small in terms of population and infrastructure then I agree with you. Antarctica is definitely not small in area, though. It also does have a tourism industry if you do want to go there, and think it's fair to say that Antarctica is much more hospitable than the Moon or Mars. (I know I'm nitpicking.)
It wouldn't take that much to change Antarctica from it's natural state, but the biggest irony is that its environment is (arguably) changing as a direct result of people who live in a relative minority of geographic locations around Earth... most not even on the same side of the planet.
It'd certainly be possible to completely mess up other planets by only touching a minor part of them, too. That's exactly why NASA goes to such great lengths to steralise spacecraft that go near places like Europa.
I guess whether or not a minority of private citizens should have a right to take the resources and change the state of somewhere like Mars or the asteroids overnight, after it's taken billions of years for them to get to where it is, is a separate issue. Personally I think we should be very careful before allowing it to happen. In a sense, though, short term profit at the expense of unreplacable resources is what spearheads colonisation in traditional western society. Going to the "new world" to terrorise and rob from existing civilisations is just one example throughout history.
I do think that it's premature to assume that private colonisation of these places won't create problems just because it'd take a long time to populate the entire surface. Once economies of scale got going in what is comparatively a small area of the Earth's surface, it didn't take that long to start having global negative consequences on the environment involving everyone and everything that either lives/exists in it or will in the future. Once the technology is available and cheap enough, I don't see any real reason why a minority of privateers won't start abusing all of the resources around the Solar System at the longer term expense. With the exception of a few token government-related expiditions, the people who would quickly destroy as much as possible in exchange for fast money are likely to be the first through the door.
Why would you trust any hosting company to keep the only copy of your data, if it were all that important to you?
I agree. I'm currently working on a website interfaced system that will store and organise data for a niche collection amateur astronomers, who often keep observing logs of what they're looking at. I'm not going to go out of my way to try and lose their data or step on it if and when they choose to enter it, but I also don't expect people to trust me with it. The data they store is likely to be quite valuable and important to them, even if not many other people, and simply trusting an anonoymous person to look after it isn't something that a lot of people will do easily.
For this reason, I'm quite keen to build in a feature that will let people export their data so they can download it and store it how they like. I think it's only when people are give the option to control their own copy that they'll risk entering something like this into another system... at which point it can be combined with other people's data to give everyone more interesting views of things that everyone else is doing.
I can't really understand the big hassle about this. I think that physical counterfeiting devices are banned as well, so why shouldn't this go with digital devices as well?
While it would be annoying, I don't think it'd be paralysing for open source developers to legally have to include such detection software in Europe. At worst it could probably be handled in the same way as the GIF patent issue, by providing a separate package and (in this case) saying "If you're in Europe then you must also install this package".
The problem will be if the EU requires it to be black box. The article doesn't seem to state this, but the slashdot headline does for whatever that's worth. Problems will be:
Open source simply isn't black box. If you have to include something with no source available, it defeats the whole philosophy.
It also may get legally dubious WRT the GPL if something like The Gimp has to be distributed with closed source software before it will work.
If the rest of an open source software package is open source, it would often be trivial for someone who knows what they're doing to remove the link to the counterfitting code in the first place... irrespective of whether it's black box or not. Where, then, does this place the legality of open source applications in the world of graphics editing?
Microsoft have an excellent record as far as I know, of never initiating a patent battle. MS' patent portfolio is used purely for defensive purposes.
This might be so, but regardless of whether they enforce it, Microsoft still has an unfair advantage over other companies.
You could as easily argue that competitors who might actually have a fair reason to take Microsoft to court could be unfairly put off by Microsoft's overly inflated defensive patent portfolio that could be unleashed on them at any time. That is what defensive patents are there to do, after all.
Slashdot Mirror
I have mixed feelings about this. It's true that Gimp is unlikely to have much of an effect on Photoshop --- not unless it changes dramatically, at least. The existing Photoshop userbase is presumably weighted more towards the less technical people, and the entire Photoshop UI (which Gimp doesn't emulate) is something that its users seriously like it for.
Databases, on the other hand, I see as quite different. If Oracle does things successfully then it can probably do quite well, but there's a huge threat approaching from Open Source databases.
Mysql and PostgreSql (which I'm more familiar with) are not large commercial databases and they don't have the support of a massive corporation as Oracle does. They clearly can't compete on those grouds. But really, how many of Oracle's customers actually need all of Oracle's features to do the job that they're doing?
PostgreSQL has transactions. PostgreSQL supports SQL syntax. PostgreSQL is reasonably efficient, at least with medium sized databases. PostgreSQL supports stored procedures, albeit requiring at least minor adaption from any existing Oracle procedures. It doesn't support replication very well yet, although that's certainly in the pipeline. In essence, PostgreSQL is something that will probably do the job "quite well" if not perfectly, depending on the job. And it's free.
For the majority of jobs and with a competant administrator, which although not everywhere is more likely to be found near a database than an image editing program such as Photoshop, PostgreSql is completely sufficient for the majority of tasks. So with the exception of marketing and support, why would a business necessarily need to fork out and buy Oracle licences for most or possibly all tasks within their business, if it only needs Oracle for a few at most?
It's these smaller tasks that have the potential to really hit Oracle database market where it hurts. Oracle is selling in a marketplace where people are often competant enough to understand and deploy open source products. It hasn't entirely happened yet, but they are in a situation where open source developers might soon have the potential to pull much of the market out from under them if they're not careful.
I was recently helping a friend to clean out her XP Home computer. Since she'd bought it no patches of any sort had been applied, and it was at the horrendous state where if she left it alone for a few hours, she'd come back to see a desktop popping full of porn advertisements.
I downloaded all of the available critical updates from Windows Update and showed her how to run AdAware, which on its own detected and removed something near a thousand suspicious objects. We then took a look around places like the add/remove software section.
At this point she got quite a shock because about half the listed programs were something called "HotFix". After everything that'd been frustrating her in the past months, she wanted to remove them all immediately. When you've spent the last hour removing porno popup and spyware programs from your computer, something called a "hotfix" does not look like it's supposed to be there. It took a lot of effort to convince her that a Hotfix is actually a Microsoft patch.
It hadn't occurred to me until then that it's not a particularly intelligent name for what's supposed to be a security patch. Now I start to wonder how many other people out there go ahead and remove the hot fixes because they don't realise that they're not spyware. It'd be very much in Microsoft's interests to consider renaming their critical updates.
That's certainly a fair comment. I guess my point is intended to be that Project Gutenberg is an active demonstration that some people do actually care about copyright expiring. Irrespective of its economic feasibility, it's a clear example of people getting up and doing something positive as a result of existing law.
It's only arguably directly useful for the economy, perhaps depending on your point of view. To that extent I don't suppose it would be a great example for politicians that have already decided to prioritise the corporate economy in their decisions. Not all politicians, especially outside the US, are in that frame of mind, however.
Where I live (New Zealand) to the best of my knowledge, there are some quite specific restrictions placed on how much money the members of parliament and those campaigning to be are allowed to receive from sponsors. The result appears to be that they do play to the people a lot more often. It could easily be a big misperception that everyone has, but they do tend to react to people at least as much as they react to corporations.
Here at least, if you can convince citizens, then the government will often follow. To be fair, of course, a country of 4 million people is probably a little easier to reach in a short time than the 300-odd million people distributed throughout the USA.
I'm not in the UK or anywhere in the EU, but for those who are I'd like to point out that about now would be a very good time to bring to the attention of your politicians things like Project Gutenberg, which directly benefit from the expiry of copyright.
Certainly part of the problem is that it's not always clear what possible benefits there could possibly be for ever letting works exit copyright. Gutenberg is an active project that's both becoming succesful, and demonstrates that people are out there trying to make an active effort to benefit from existing law.
If politicians don't realise that people are benefiting from existing law, they'll have far less reason to consider not changing it when lobbied by the corporates. It's a bonus that Gutenberg can quite correctly claim that rather than ripping off other people's work, it's saving and making accessible a lot of valuable resources that most likely would simply have vanished otherwise.... and without a reasonable expiry of copyright this simply coldn't happen.
I've been doing this for several years now, although while still being reasonably careful about whom I give my address to. To date, the only site that I've personally noticed has leaked my address has been real.com, who leaked the address that I filled in before I was allowed to download the player several years back. It figures.
A lot of my other spam seems to go to my direct ISP account, which I presume resulted from a dictionary attack at one point. I have a three letter username, so it wouldn't be too hard to locate with brute force.
The main risk that was pointed out to me about what you're suggesting -- and this hasn't happened to me yet -- is that you run the risk of ending up on the same spam lists multiple times with different addresses. Most spammers will presumably be smart enough to weed the dupe addresses out of their list. But if you have a variety of addresses that get out, and once an address is on one list it'll probably propogate to all of them sooner or later, then you could end up getting every spam lots of times.
You can still filter them and if you're happy to do that then I guess it's okay. Personally I have a moral objection to filtering, even though I've had to resort to using it in the past year or so. Even if I can filter most of the spam, I'm still getting hammered with the traffic and I'm still paying for it. Up the line, my ISP has to charge me more because they have to deal with countless amounts of spam. As far as I'm concerned, the sooner we figure out a reliable solution to remove the spamming incentive (beyond simply filtering as much as possible), the better.
I'm using Firefox 0.8 with the RadialContext extension. That's the pie menu replacement for the right-click context menu.
If I scroll down the page with the mouse-wheel and right click, the pie menu appears at the top of the page. I have to scroll all the way back up in order to use it. ie. The context menu placement is for some reason confusing window-relative placement with page-relative placement.
It's possible that this is a bug in RadialContext, although this page with its odd combination of presentation, scripting and style attributes is the first place where I've ever seen it happen.
That's certainly true, although they're all still more digital/electronic, probably faster and more efficient variants of things that already existed.
Personally I think the very interesting side of communication via computers is with the enhanced parallel collaboration that's becoming possible.
Consider something like Wikipedia, for instance. It's a product of many thousands of people who've used modern technology to collaborate and create something bigger, more adaptive and quite different from anything that could probably have been achieved a few decades ago.
Another fantastic example is something like Distributed Proofreaders. Through the whole collaboration effort, it's created a very efficient and effective way for people to interact with each other and pool their resources together to do something that really couldn't have been done a few years ago.
Of course, Alan Kay's comments are about commercialisation. He may have a point considering that both of these examples are voluntary efforts. I stand to be corrected, but to me it seems that the main thing that most commercial organisations seem to have used computers for are the same things that they always did without computers. (Primarily publishing, processing of information, etc.)
Thanks for asking this question. I was recently at a conference where I presented an idea for a collaborative system for something where there doesn't seem to be one at the momemnt. I used a couple of examples to try and demonstrate my point of what genuine collaboration was on the web, moreso than just sending emails. One example was Wikipedia and the other was Distributed Proofreaders.
If you look at either of these websites in any detail, there are scores of devices and virtual rewards used to keep people interested, and to keep the regulars coming back to keep taking part in the community and continue building it.
I'd be very interested to know what the Wikipedia engineers believe are the most important and successful devices that they use to encourage people to continue contributing to the community.
Perhaps Mozilla/Firefox should be marketed as a plug-in that somehow integrates into MSIE, and some people might be more open to installing it if and when required. :) (Of course, I'm not trying to suggest that it's a particularly polite or intelligent thing to do.)
It would just be amusing in many respects, but it's probably not possible for a plug-in to take over the IE rendering engine... then again...
This is a very important thing, I think. I can't find any references on short notice, but I've certainly heard accusations that Brittanica has on occasion published editions in different parts of the world that contain conflicting "facts" or at the very least conflicting biases and conclusions, depending on what the audience in that part of the world wants to read. (eg. For places where there are border conflicts and so on.) If anyone can point me to links to confirm this or refute it then I'm very interested.
One of the nice things about Wikipedia in any case, even if it isn't very authoritarian, is that it's at least consistent with itself and it's not as easy to argue for a potential commercial motivation from the central source of the publishers. Conflicts of information are probably more likely to be resolved through some compromise (such as stating outright that there's a dispute) than simply published differently to disagreeing audiences. There are different language editions but every one of them is at least easily available to everyone and open to review.
I don't think so. If it were that easy then you could guarantee that it'd be being done already. You could argue for a distributed client and in some way it might be useful. But more of a priority should be figuring out how to design a system that's actually intelligent enough both to make reliable predictions and trustworthy judgement calls about the weather in the first place.
Maybe it's different where you are, but in my location (New Zealand, which is admittedly not the US at all), having weather data and being able to make useful forecasts from it are two very different things. (To be fair, it is quite turbulent and changeable weather over here for a variety of geographical reasons.)
If your local environment means that 90% of days are identical to the day before, then simply having some data might be useful.... if for no other reason than to predict a possible change of some sort probably approching. But if that's your local situation, you probably don't really need satellite data in the first place --- you could use a telephone. The reason that we have meteorologists is because it does require some education and experience to look at the maps and understand properly what's actually happening, what's likely to happen, and (just as importantly) what we still don't know.
I don't know if you saw it on page 3 of the article or not, but even Anderer appears to've commented that he was expecting IBM to buy out SCO:
He might be making things up, but his statement does seem to imply that it wouldn't have been too difficult for IBM to buy SCO if it had actually wanted to. I don't think anyone from outside can definitely say why IBM didn't buy SCO, but personally I'm glad that they didn't -- to buy SCO would be giving it credibility.
I tend to agree with the other respondents who disagree that it should be the government's responsibility. That aside, I'd be very skeptical if any kind of summit between governments would have any useful effect. This is assuming that you mean an international summit, of course.
Going by experience from previous summits and similar events, it would probably result in most governments agreeing to do something about it. Almost certainly, however, the US government would decide to do nothing... and that would make the whole effort useless.
Microsoft is a US company. It brings money into the US economy by selling huge amounts of software vapour in what is effectively an international monopoly. In other words, it's yet another tool for the US to dominate other countries. With the possible exception of wanting to be nice, the US government has very little incentive to inhibit it from doing that.
It's lazy grammatical translation on the part of the slashdot submitter and editors. (Not terribly unusual at that, and conveniently arranged to provoke more flaming than what's warranted.) The actual terms of service say:
Put in context, it quite clearly indicates to me at least that they only care about uploading and downloading of movies. Of course, it doesn't mean that the rest of the terms of service aren't also very restrictive and perhaps the "unlimited" in the name is misleading.
But essentially they don't want you using your connection to run a server, or to otherwise transfer anything that might end up hogging excessively high bandwidth compared with their regular customers. It doesn't rule out using the connection for general web browsing and email, which is probably all that 95% of their target market want anyway. In fact, the earlier parts of the terms of service (not quoted here) specifically state that those tasks are what it's intended for.
Well I don't know about anyone else but I'm certainly only speaking hypothetically. Obviously if anyone tried to switch between base 10 and 12 overnight, or even more slowly than that, there would be huge problems. Base 10's fine with me, as long as it's metric base 10. Metric in principle just makes conversions between all sorts of units so much easier.
But given the chance to start again, it would be interesting to compare the differences with building things on a base 12 metric instead of a base 10 metric. I doubt the advantages would be as much as those between imperial and metric, but there could still be interesting advantages.
Maybe give it another thousand years or so.
I absolutely agree with you and I'm sorry if I implied that I didn't. The huge advantage of the metric system is definitely that it's so easy to convert between units... and this includes both converting different units of the same type, and converting between units of different types.
I've grown up and been educated in a country (New Zealand) that's almost completely metric with the very occasional leftover exception that you'd hardly notice without being here a while. Everything was imperial a long time ago, but not while I've been around. In all honesty, I have trouble imaging what it might be like if I'd had to deal with all the extra overheads of converting numbers instead of dealing with the actual problems that I want to figure out. The conversion advantages alone, I think, make metric hugely more preferable than imperial. They simply save so much time and reduce errors.
That said, it would be very interesting to be doing things in a metric system that used 12 as a base instead of 10. It might cause some of the minor complications to go away. You really have to get people counting in base 12 first, though.
Interestingly, there are at least a couple of groups that are trying to promote the use of base 12 over base 10 for exactly this reason.
I recently helped a friend clean the spyware off her home computer. She certainly wasn't stupid. She'd just installed XP Home and expected it to work, trusting the people who sold it to her. (Well it said it would work on the box.) By the time I got to it, it was missing about the last 15-20 critical updates and it was hopelessly overrun.
She honestly didn't know what to do. She's constantly run off her feet working, studing by correspondence (for which she needs constant net access) and doing substantial amounts of charity work. Meanwhile whenever she turns on her computer she's bombarded with advertising -- much of it quite disgusting by normal standards. She's absolutely lost control of her web browser (yes, it's IE) which now constantly and randomly redirects her to websites that she clearly doesn't want to look at. If she leaves her computer unattended for more than an hour it's almost guaranteed that the desktop will be full of porn advertisments in a place where her kids can easily walk past and see them.
On an unpatched system, it'd collapsed to this state within the space of a couple of months. Presumably a spyware app or two had snuck in through security holes and proceeded to install massive amounts of additional spyware.
So I spent a couple of hours installing and running adaware, installing the past X number of critical updates, and doing what else I could. Even then it left all the crap on the start menu and desktop -- sometimes hidden in other program folders -- and we probably didn't pick up all of the applications. I'd have suggested a complete reinstallation except she simply doesn't have the time to spare right now.
We also went through the Add/Remove programs dialog and snared a couple of apps there, although some of them really didn't want to leave. I know this isn't going to get everything, but it's amazing how much we still found. Ironically she was very uneasy at leaving these things called "HotFixes" installed. To the uninformed who's frantically trying to recover from porn-promoting spyware, it looks just like more spyware. Microsoft seriously needs to reconsider its naming scheme.
Lots of people (especially on slashdot) seem to label others as stupid if they don't keep their system up-to-date, but I think that's completely unfair. Ignorant is a much fairer and more representative description, and it shouldn't be expected that everyone will take time out of their day to understand their computer any more than people might take time out to understand their microwave or their car.
I really do think that desktop computers have become too complex. The same box is expected to do a million different things, and because of that there's more to understand than most people are ever likely to comfortably learn.
In my experience looking for IT work about 18 months ago, I had a frustrating enough time even actually getting to an employer who might look at my record. It was a difficult enough job getting through recruitment agents, most of whom had minimal (if any) background in IT training.
Their priority was to only present candidates who weren't "risky", and that usually meant going by certificates and buzzword-based experience more than anything else. I presume the reason was that they would have preferred to go with candidates whom they could justify presenting rather than take a risk on someone who had qualifications and experience that they didn't fully understand.
I discovered in the end that when coming from a background that's majority academic (even with commercial experience), it's much better to do everything possible to avoid recruitment agents like the plague, and just get to know prospective employers through other means, in the hope that they'll invite you for an interview when necessary.
It's a shame that there appears to be so much abuse of this programme. Sometimes I wonder if these types of programmes are really necessary, though. Mostly out of interest, what kinds of advantages do children actually get out of having computers in schools? By themselves the use of computers certainly doesn't cover the primary topics that schools are usually expected to teach, so presumably there's some expectation that having them there will either hugely benefit children in some other way, or will positively enhance the effects existing teaching.
I guess that in theory children can get used to having them around. To some extent it means that computers would be available for someone who might be able to learn from them extensively if they wouldn't have been able to otherwise. But is anyone out there aware of any actual research that demonstrates that computers in schools results in a verifiable positive return? (Keeping in mind that lots of people who never had computers in school were simply trained in the workplace.)
I don't mean to criticise, but I ask because I see a lot of people and governments claiming that it's a good thing. On the other hand, I haven't actually seen much evidence or that much that might convince me that we're much better off than we were a few years ago, when significantly fewer schools had access to computers.
I also don't mean to imply that maybe schools shouldn't have computers at all --- only that pouring vast amounts of money into actively supporting an infrastructure that deprecates so quickly might not be very effective. If the availability of technology means that most of people will already end up having reasonable computers in their homes within the next decade anyway, then pushing them so much in schools could be quite obsolete.
As long as you mean small in terms of population and infrastructure then I agree with you. Antarctica is definitely not small in area, though. It also does have a tourism industry if you do want to go there, and think it's fair to say that Antarctica is much more hospitable than the Moon or Mars. (I know I'm nitpicking.)
It wouldn't take that much to change Antarctica from it's natural state, but the biggest irony is that its environment is (arguably) changing as a direct result of people who live in a relative minority of geographic locations around Earth... most not even on the same side of the planet.
It'd certainly be possible to completely mess up other planets by only touching a minor part of them, too. That's exactly why NASA goes to such great lengths to steralise spacecraft that go near places like Europa.
I guess whether or not a minority of private citizens should have a right to take the resources and change the state of somewhere like Mars or the asteroids overnight, after it's taken billions of years for them to get to where it is, is a separate issue. Personally I think we should be very careful before allowing it to happen. In a sense, though, short term profit at the expense of unreplacable resources is what spearheads colonisation in traditional western society. Going to the "new world" to terrorise and rob from existing civilisations is just one example throughout history.
I do think that it's premature to assume that private colonisation of these places won't create problems just because it'd take a long time to populate the entire surface. Once economies of scale got going in what is comparatively a small area of the Earth's surface, it didn't take that long to start having global negative consequences on the environment involving everyone and everything that either lives/exists in it or will in the future. Once the technology is available and cheap enough, I don't see any real reason why a minority of privateers won't start abusing all of the resources around the Solar System at the longer term expense. With the exception of a few token government-related expiditions, the people who would quickly destroy as much as possible in exchange for fast money are likely to be the first through the door.
I agree. I'm currently working on a website interfaced system that will store and organise data for a niche collection amateur astronomers, who often keep observing logs of what they're looking at. I'm not going to go out of my way to try and lose their data or step on it if and when they choose to enter it, but I also don't expect people to trust me with it. The data they store is likely to be quite valuable and important to them, even if not many other people, and simply trusting an anonoymous person to look after it isn't something that a lot of people will do easily.
For this reason, I'm quite keen to build in a feature that will let people export their data so they can download it and store it how they like. I think it's only when people are give the option to control their own copy that they'll risk entering something like this into another system... at which point it can be combined with other people's data to give everyone more interesting views of things that everyone else is doing.
Do you mean like this one? It would have to be one of the most spammed and neglected discussion boards that I've ever come across.
While it would be annoying, I don't think it'd be paralysing for open source developers to legally have to include such detection software in Europe. At worst it could probably be handled in the same way as the GIF patent issue, by providing a separate package and (in this case) saying "If you're in Europe then you must also install this package".
The problem will be if the EU requires it to be black box. The article doesn't seem to state this, but the slashdot headline does for whatever that's worth. Problems will be:
This might be so, but regardless of whether they enforce it, Microsoft still has an unfair advantage over other companies.
You could as easily argue that competitors who might actually have a fair reason to take Microsoft to court could be unfairly put off by Microsoft's overly inflated defensive patent portfolio that could be unleashed on them at any time. That is what defensive patents are there to do, after all.