Even then, I could barely make out the cryptic scribbles. Sure didn't look like English to me.
There's a good reason for that: the Domesday Book wasn't written in English. It was written by Norman monks as the article mentions. They wrote it in Latin. That was the language of government, the arts, and bureaucracy in those days. Old French was a strong second. And Old English, as the language of a subjugated populace, came in a distant, distant third.
æ
And even if it had been written in English, you still wouldn't have been able to read it without special training. Here is an example of Old English (from memory, so if there are any mistakes, they're mine!):
Sume dæge hit gelamp æt an nunnan of æm ilcan mynstre geforon in on hire wyrt-tun. Ond ær heo gesawon an leahtric, and hit gelyste æs.
Translated roughly, that means:
It so happened that a nun of that same monastery went into their garden. And there she saw a particular lettuce, and she wanted it.
The language has changed substantially since those days, no? And as if that weren't bad enough, styles of handwriting have changed an awful lot too. Once you get into postgraduate-level medieval studies, you get special training in reading historical forms of handwriting, the study of which is called palaeography.
Lastly, the project is not a copy of the original Domesday Book: it was an effort to create a resource of similar utility for future historians by gathering interesting stuff from around the country and storing it in digital form. Videos, maps, and so on, as the article said. There have been some electronic editions of medieval texts, notably the sole remaining manuscript of the poem Beowulf, which was written down in the early 1100s. Alas, it is proprietary, and you have to pay a rather large sum to the British Library if you want a copy. Some of it is web accessible.
. . . but it doesn't seem like a great leap to apply it to the programming world.
No, it doesn't. Just ask the folks at Transgaming who have been developing WineX using the SPP model for some time now. I remember reading their licensing terms on their web site about a year ago, but when I went to look for them today I couldn't find them. ^.~ Hrrm. That's a bit disturbing.
where does the "guns drawn" bit come in? I don't see anything about guns in that article. The FBI seems to have been there, yes, but it only says:
"Members of the Toledo police computer crimes task force and FBI agents seized computers and modems after authorities received information that someone in the residences had reconfigured computer systems to access excessive amounts of bandwidth."
Still, it does seem a bit excessive to involve the FBI over an incident like this.
My favorite quote (emphasis added):
"There have been no indications that other high-speed Internet providers have taken such firm steps to prosecute for the theft of broadband theft," Mr. Shryock said.
Wha . . ? Oh, so actually what they stole was the theft of broadband theft?... How can you steal a theft? O_O
Well, MS got pretty much what they want. If they only have to disclose their APIs to other major corporations, the open source crowd is up the creek without a paddle.
Unless . .. we can get a major corporation to get the API and then release code under a free license. Like, say, IBM could set up a group to contribute code to the WINE project, or to the OpenOffice.org project's.doc filter. Of course, MS will almost certainly try to tie down anybody who gets the code with EULAs that say "you can't release any code based on this information under open source licenses." But we can always hope.
Little dedicated routers are cool, but if you need to do it on the cheap, Linux is the way to go.
It's not necessarily hard, either: Try
IPCop. It's a specialized distro that doesn't do anything but be a firewall/router. Web-based administration, similar to what you'd find in a Linksys or Netgear router. Average setup time is about 15 minutes. Runs great on older hardware.
Optimizing the kernel for a particular CPU model is almost certainly a win (I'm not a kernel hacker and don't know how much of a win); but it seems to me that the costs of producing and storing multiple optimized versions of an "average" app probably outweigh the benefits. And since i386 is the lowest common denominator, Debian may as well just continue building for that.
I suspect that you're probably right about the costs outweighing the benefits. (Sigh.) It's just that when I tried out Gentoo, the difference in execution time was noticeable, and not just in big applications like KDE. I had used custom compiles of KDE and XFree86 under Debian Woody for some time, but the underlying stuff must have slowed it down. Under Gentoo, it takes my machine about 22 seconds to start KDE, whereas under Debian Woody it took about 45. In my book, a 50% decrease in startup time is significant.
a processor architecture update would be good too. Currently, all Debian packages are compiled for use on a 386. I can't think of ANYONE who still uses a 386 for ANYTHING. So why do we need to continue supporting it?
At the least, I'd like to see the Debian compiles updated to i586. (That's the equivalent of a Pentium 1, in non-geek speak.) There are still quite a few of those in use.
Updating the targetted processor architecture would give a significant performance boost to Debian. I mean seriously, nobody is going to run KDE or Gnome on a 386 -- it'd take DAYS just to start a program.
It might also be possible to support multiple processor architectures; eg during installation you get a list of i386, i486, i586, and i686 (386, 486, Pentium 1, More Recent Stuff). Then apt would fetch the appropriate package flavor. Of course, this would require non-trivial amounts of storage space, not to mention all the time needed to re-compile everything.
Librarians do one heck of a lot more than we, as patrons, see them do. I never really appreciated how much until my mother got a job as a school librarian. She spends long hours working on catalogues, organizing book fairs, and doing research to help teachers find the best supplementary material for their classes.
Not only that, she is frequently coopted to help with IT problems, since the IT manager doesn't have a staff. One time, she had to manually recover three days worth of circulation info when some moron from the school district turned off the server without shutting everything down properly.
It scares me when she talks about how much she loves cataloguing, though.
Listen. All I know is it works. I deleted my 0.2 directory, put the new 0.3 dir in its place, fired it up, and it worked. I've been using it all day -- including posting on Slashdot, logging into a forum, and logging into Salon Premium -- and have seen no evidence of this putative bug. That's all.
. . . and I love it. It's great. I've tried similar projects before -- K-Meleon under Windows, Galeon under Linux -- and neither of them worked as well for me as Phoenix. Besides, K-Meleon's development seems to have stalled, and Galeon requires about a zillion different gnome things before it'll compile, not to mention the whole Mozilla codebase as well.
The ability to customize the interface *easily* is killer. I like having my Home button on the main toolbar, thank you, and getting it there in Mozilla is a serious pain, and requires 1) substituting a whole new theme, or 2) doing some XUL hacking. With Phoenix, you right click, select "Customize," and then you can drag and drop toolbar elements from the available selection. Absolutely terrific.
Oh! And the plugin installation stuff WORKS now. I never could get Java to work in Mozilla without manually copying files around (under windows) or making symlinks (under linux). With Phoenix, it just downloaded, installed itself, and started working. No user intervention required.
That said, it's not perfect. First off, there are a lot of features enabled by default that you can't disable because the preferences menu has been gutted. For example, I prefer to turn off the Password Manager . . . but I can't, unless I feel like opening up the preferences.js file and altering the preferences settings manually. Hopefully this will be remedied in later versions; on general principles, you should retain preferences settings for each feature.
I'm having a hard time coming up with other objections to it. But I'm sure I'll find some. And then I'll submit bugs to Bugzilla. Go you all and do likewise!
Let free trade and market forces determine which technology to choose, not some ideology.
As was pointed out in the article, Microsoft doesn't respect free trade or market forces.
And it's worth pointing out that "free trade" is itself an ideology. Most ideologies claim not to be ideologies. The preceding statement is not an ideology. Heh.
Yeah. The fact that their banner features mock 18th century Edo erotica and the words "Saucy Stories from Japan's Wild Weeklies" might also be an indicator.:-)
Right. Libraries. The publishing industry doesn't make much of a public fuss of it, but one of the goals that they are starting to consider reachable is using the growing copyright restrictions to shut down public libraries. In the eyes of publishers, libraries are nothing but open copyright violations. All the arguments being made about "piracy" apply directly to libraries.
In some quarters, yes, the above is true. (HarlanEllison, ^h^h^h.) However, the publishing industry is much more divided on the question of "piracy." The audio industry (the corporations, that is) all agree that song swapping is inherently bad for their business. But in the publishing industry you find people who actually encourage book swapping -- and not just some authors. Check out the Baen Free Library, an archive of freely available books. There are some non-trivial names on the author list there (Jerry Pournelle, Lois McMaster Bujold, Mercedes Lackey) and it has official sponsorship from Baen Books, which is one of the largest publishers of science fiction and fantasy.
The introductory page by Eric Flint, "Introducing the Baen Free Library" is an eloquent argument for the share-and-share-alike crowd. Anyone who is interested in this debate, regardless of which camp you prefer, would be well advised to read that essay. (It's fairly lengthy, but worth the effort.)
Open source is anathema to control freaks. Therefore they won't ever aid it.
Ha! I'm a control freak -- and I adore Linux. It lets me control my box right down to the level of individual bits!
There are two kinds of control freaks -- those who seek to control others, and those who seek to control themselves. The latter are those people who compulsively arrange their sock drawers. The former are those who compulsively arrange other people's sock drawers.
Is Bill Gates a control freak? Seems pretty likely. Is he the kind who compulsively regulates his own behavior? I don't know. I do know, however, that he (and his company) do seem pretty compulsive about wanting to regulate my behavior, particularly with regard to my computer. And that's scary; a computer is a hell of a lot more personal than a sock drawer. My sock drawer contain bits of cloth that I encase my feet in. My computer contains my financial records, my phone numbers and address, my schoolwork -- in short, all of my most private personal information. Controlling my computer is a short step away from controlling me, and is therefore completely unacceptable.
what the hell are you gonna use the cpu cycles for?
CPUs are getting faster and faster, and since processor intensive tasks are getting exported to cards what the hell do you need your cpu for.
The point is not to free up CPU cycles, it's to make video playable on older systems that have slower CPUs. This is one thing I object to in the review: they used a Duron 650 system, which is still pretty decent -- sure, it's not top of the line by a long shot, but Durons pack some decent power. I've got a couple of Duron 700 systems, both of which play back DivX perfectly without one of these cards. That's only 50 Mhz faster than the test system in the review.
The reviewer says in the conclusion, "Even with an Intel Pentium II/300 it is now possible to play a Divx-MPEG-4 film in full-screen mode smoothly." I'd like to see some actual tests to back that up. If true, it could be a boon to many people. My brother, for example, claims that his P II 266 does everything he wants it to -- except play back DivX smoothly. He's been thinking of getting a new box, but he can't really afford it right now. If this card could let him squeeze another year or two out of his aging comp, that would be a sound investment, since he doesn't really want or need a whole new system.
As it stands, however, the review doesn't really test out the card's usefulness on aging hardware. There are some other reviews listed on Sigma's Xcard website, but Tom's is the only English-language web-accessible one. There are several citations for reviews in hardcopy magazines, but the only other web-accessible reviews are in Japanese. (Handy if you speak Japanese.) The specifications say that it'll work with any Intel or AMD processor with a clock speed of 200 Mhz or higher. Anybody know of some other reviews?
Microsoft declined comment on how much of a threat it considers Mozilla, saying it cannot speak on rival products.
Eh? What's that? Is this the same company that called the GPL "pac-man like" and Linux "unamerican?" How is it that all of a sudden that can't speak on rival products?
Reading the article, it occurred to me that this might be a self-correcting problem; but then I thought a bit more and decided it wasn't.
My reasoning went like this: IIRC, patents granted in the U.S. provide protection from competition for 11 years, and may be renewed, but not indefinitely; hence the Unisys patent on LZW compression (used in.gif files) was filed in the mid-eighties, and will be expiring in another couple of years.
Once a patent has expired, that's it -- you can't re-patent it, and neither can anyone else. So logically, if people are currently filing zillions of frivolous patents now, that means in twenty years it will become considerably more difficult to file frivolous patents.
But then I sat back and thought "No, in twenty years they'll be filing a whole new set of frivolous patents on technologies that don't yet exist; and nobody will care about all those frivolous patents that they filed way-back-when."
A problem like this -- too many patents filed -- would be self correcting in an era with a more stable technological basis. When the innovation rate is slow it's a lot easier to make a patenting system work well; incremental changes are a whole lot easier to evaluate for patentability. This is why the USPTO did so well for its first couple of hundred years; innovation was definitely going on, and fairly rapidly compared to historical levels (eg the Middle Ages), but it was still occurring at a manageable pace. The car fulfills the same function as a cart; light bulbs are a light source, just like candles or lanterns. The technologies seen in the first couple of centuries of American history were, for the most part, logical extensions of and replacements for pre-existing devices.
But all that began to change when the pace of innovation really picked up. It's hard to assign a date, but for convenience you might pick the last years of World War II as the beginning of the rapid increase in the pace of innovation. Even then, it wasn't so bad at first. But as the rate of innovation picked up, two factors were greatly exacerbated: 1) the complexity of new devices, and 2) the increasing prevalence of new devices with little or no ancestral devices. Television, for example: a television is not only considerably more complex than it closest pre-existing analogue, the radio, but also performs a previously unknown function -- the transmission of images over distance. Evaluating the originality of the first TV is not hard; but what about all the subsidiary patents that soon follow? Patents on improved antennae and cathode ray tubes, channel selectors and so on. To seriously evaluate all of those, you basically need to be an electrical engineer, with lots of time to study each new application.
But when you're getting dozens of patents a day, and you have the same size staff as you had before, and the applications you get increasingly arcane, your ability to fairly evaluate each new app goes down the drain under the workload.
The current pace of innovation cannot be sustained indefinitely; eventually our tech base will settle down again. In the meantime, we need two things: more specialists at the USPTO charged with evaluating patents in a particular field, and stricter standards for what is patentable. Business methods should not be patentable, nor should software -- or compression algorithms like the LZW one mentiond above.
Unfortunately, these reforms are going to be difficult to implement. Stricter patent standards will not be practical until we have more specialists to fairly evaluate the influx of arcane high-tech patents. Unfortunately, those specialists are mostly the ones applying for patents. You can make a heck of a lot more money by getting patents than by granting them. In order to attract the specialists it needs, the USPTO is going to have to offer competitive salaries; and that, I think is going to take an act of God. Chances are slim to none that Congress would raise their budget without a pressing political reason, and the only other source of cash are the application fees and maintenance fees. Increasing the budget by soliciting and granting more patents would simply worsen the problem we're trying to avoid in the first place.
I sure hope this gets worked out, but I predict that the USPTO will continue more or less as it has been for the forseeable future.
"I've never seen a systematic study that showed open source to be more secure," said Dorothy Denning, a professor of computer science at Georgetown University who specializes in information warfare.
My first reaction to this was "Suuure." But then it occurred to me that the word "systematic" is key. Have there been any systematic studies of security in open- vs. closed-source programs? I mean academic quality research -- with control groups, a clearly defined method for testing the security, with the results published in a peer-reviewed journal.
Stenbit said the debate is academic and that what matters is how secure a given piece of software is. To that end, the Defense Department is now
prohibited from purchasing any software that has not undergone security testing by the NSA. Stenbit said he is unaware of any open-source software that has been tested.
Emphasis added.
So, the DoD can't purchase any untested software, hey? Well great! They can have all the open source stuff they want, no purchase necessary. Obviously the regulation is in place to keep the government from using untested software, but I'll bet it was written with the assumption that you can't legally use software you haven't paid for. Open source distribution schemes don't require payment, which opens up a loophole. I wonder, could that be why open source systems have come to play a "critical role" at the DoD, as the article mentioned?
I don't understand your logic. How can you be "good" for embracing open source??
Its quite simple, companies are embracing open standards and open source software because it makes the most business sense. They want to reduce their costs while increasing their utility... certain open source projects tend to do just that.
Ebays choice of technology does not make them good or evil, they are simply doing what they think is best for their company.. period. The concept of 'good' and 'evil' corporations is almost a laughable one.
Ah, now we're getting into philosophy. Here's a hypothetical for you: One day, you look up and see your worst enemy, whom you hate. He is backing over a cliff . . . in your brand-new Porsche. Do you shout a warning to him or not?
If you fail to warn him, most people would agree that you acted evilly. But even if you do warn him, it's still not clearly "good." Did you warn him because that is the right thing to do? Or did you warn him because you didn't want to lose your Porsche? Or maybe you warned him to preserve yourself from legal liability? Is it the action that counts, or the motivation, or a combination thereof? To my mind, action is more important than motivation.
Corporations -- not just Ebay, but all corporations -- perform actions that effect individuals, both those who are employed by the corporation, the investors, the customers, business partners, and sometimes the general public. I contend that corporations can be judged by their actions, every bit as much as any other human organization can be judged by theirs. I speak not merely of legal liability, but moral accountability as well.
Microsoft is a prime example. (Honestly, I am not trying to troll here, nor am I trying to make flamebait. Just bear with me.) Microsoft is extremely good at making good business decisions -- actions whose effect are to increase its market share, its bottom line, and its dominance in the industry. Some of those actions have had negative impact on others, both individuals and companies. The decisions that Microsoft has made regarding their course of action made the "most business sense." Does that absolve them of moral responsibility for the negative consequences of their actions?
As for open source, I would argue that it is morally superior to proprietary source. Open source code promotes the spread of knowledge; because anyone can view the source code, anyone can study real-world examples in order to learn about programming, or even for curiousity's sake. Proprietary technologies seek to restrict the spread of knowledge: figuring out how a closed program works is a thousand times more difficult, and may also be illegal. Which is better -- widespread knowledge, or widespread ignorance?
If open source software is morally superior to proprietary software, then logically embracing an open solution is an action which redounds to the credit of any company which does so. Their motivation for picking the software, be it because of "good business sense," because of approval of open source on general principles, or even because the CEO had indigestion and chose based on which representative had an antacid, is irrelevant. Consequences are derived from action, not motivation for that action.
You are right to point out that the concepts of "good" and "evil" are too narrow to be particularly useful in this context. Nothing human can be fully "good" or "evil." As a child, Saint Augustine stole a crop of pears, destroyed them, and felt guilty about it for most of his adult life. Hitler loved his dogs, trite but true.
Humans are complex, and may be good in some ways but not in others. Corporations are human institutions, and in exactly the same way they have both negative and positive aspects. Deciding what actions you approve or disapprove of in a corporation can help you establish how you, as an individual, will interact with any given corporation, but is basically a subjective decision.
Whew! That was a mouthful. But I think it needed to be said. If I get modded down for it, so be it.
This guy has waaaay too much time on his hands, but that wasp-sucker actually looks useful. (It's on the same page as the Jenga pistol.) Of course, once you've spent nine hours sucking up a nest of yellowjackets, what do you do with the buggers? I mean, most of those suckers are still alive, and it's not like they can't fly right back out once the suction is turned off. I suppose you'd have to figure out some way of killing the captured bugs en masse -- spray a can of wasp poison in there, submerge the capture box, something like that.
Of course, you could always package 'em up and mail them to your worst enemy . . .
As for that marble crossbow, that thing is SCARY! Marbles travelling at 150 miles per hour can do some serious damage!
Slashdot Mirror
There's a good reason for that: the Domesday Book wasn't written in English. It was written by Norman monks as the article mentions. They wrote it in Latin. That was the language of government, the arts, and bureaucracy in those days. Old French was a strong second. And Old English, as the language of a subjugated populace, came in a distant, distant third.
æ And even if it had been written in English, you still wouldn't have been able to read it without special training. Here is an example of Old English (from memory, so if there are any mistakes, they're mine!):
Translated roughly, that means: The language has changed substantially since those days, no? And as if that weren't bad enough, styles of handwriting have changed an awful lot too. Once you get into postgraduate-level medieval studies, you get special training in reading historical forms of handwriting, the study of which is called palaeography.Lastly, the project is not a copy of the original Domesday Book: it was an effort to create a resource of similar utility for future historians by gathering interesting stuff from around the country and storing it in digital form. Videos, maps, and so on, as the article said. There have been some electronic editions of medieval texts, notably the sole remaining manuscript of the poem Beowulf, which was written down in the early 1100s. Alas, it is proprietary, and you have to pay a rather large sum to the British Library if you want a copy. Some of it is web accessible.
Next question!
Phoneboots? You mean Maxwell Smart's shoe was pre-pay?
Astonishing how far ahead of the times spy gadgets can be, isn't it?
No, it doesn't. Just ask the folks at Transgaming who have been developing WineX using the SPP model for some time now. I remember reading their licensing terms on their web site about a year ago, but when I went to look for them today I couldn't find them. ^.~ Hrrm. That's a bit disturbing.
where does the "guns drawn" bit come in? I don't see anything about guns in that article. The FBI seems to have been there, yes, but it only says:
... How can you steal a theft? O_O
"Members of the Toledo police computer crimes task force and FBI agents seized computers and modems after authorities received information that someone in the residences had reconfigured computer systems to access excessive amounts of bandwidth."
Still, it does seem a bit excessive to involve the FBI over an incident like this.
My favorite quote (emphasis added):
"There have been no indications that other high-speed Internet providers have taken such firm steps to prosecute for the theft of broadband theft," Mr. Shryock said.
Wha . . ? Oh, so actually what they stole was the theft of broadband theft?
Well, MS got pretty much what they want. If they only have to disclose their APIs to other major corporations, the open source crowd is up the creek without a paddle.
. we can get a major corporation to get the API and then release code under a free license. Like, say, IBM could set up a group to contribute code to the WINE project, or to the OpenOffice.org project's .doc filter. Of course, MS will almost certainly try to tie down anybody who gets the code with EULAs that say "you can't release any code based on this information under open source licenses." But we can always hope.
Unless . .
Little dedicated routers are cool, but if you need to do it on the cheap, Linux is the way to go.
It's not necessarily hard, either: Try IPCop. It's a specialized distro that doesn't do anything but be a firewall/router. Web-based administration, similar to what you'd find in a Linksys or Netgear router. Average setup time is about 15 minutes. Runs great on older hardware.
I suspect that you're probably right about the costs outweighing the benefits. (Sigh.) It's just that when I tried out Gentoo, the difference in execution time was noticeable, and not just in big applications like KDE. I had used custom compiles of KDE and XFree86 under Debian Woody for some time, but the underlying stuff must have slowed it down. Under Gentoo, it takes my machine about 22 seconds to start KDE, whereas under Debian Woody it took about 45. In my book, a 50% decrease in startup time is significant.
a processor architecture update would be good too. Currently, all Debian packages are compiled for use on a 386. I can't think of ANYONE who still uses a 386 for ANYTHING. So why do we need to continue supporting it?
At the least, I'd like to see the Debian compiles updated to i586. (That's the equivalent of a Pentium 1, in non-geek speak.) There are still quite a few of those in use.
Updating the targetted processor architecture would give a significant performance boost to Debian. I mean seriously, nobody is going to run KDE or Gnome on a 386 -- it'd take DAYS just to start a program.
It might also be possible to support multiple processor architectures; eg during installation you get a list of i386, i486, i586, and i686 (386, 486, Pentium 1, More Recent Stuff). Then apt would fetch the appropriate package flavor. Of course, this would require non-trivial amounts of storage space, not to mention all the time needed to re-compile everything.
Librarians do one heck of a lot more than we, as patrons, see them do. I never really appreciated how much until my mother got a job as a school librarian. She spends long hours working on catalogues, organizing book fairs, and doing research to help teachers find the best supplementary material for their classes.
Not only that, she is frequently coopted to help with IT problems, since the IT manager doesn't have a staff. One time, she had to manually recover three days worth of circulation info when some moron from the school district turned off the server without shutting everything down properly.
It scares me when she talks about how much she loves cataloguing, though.
Listen. All I know is it works. I deleted my 0.2 directory, put the new 0.3 dir in its place, fired it up, and it worked. I've been using it all day -- including posting on Slashdot, logging into a forum, and logging into Salon Premium -- and have seen no evidence of this putative bug. That's all.
Capiche?
Easy. I saved my cookie from 0.2. :-
. . . and I love it. It's great. I've tried similar projects before -- K-Meleon under Windows, Galeon under Linux -- and neither of them worked as well for me as Phoenix. Besides, K-Meleon's development seems to have stalled, and Galeon requires about a zillion different gnome things before it'll compile, not to mention the whole Mozilla codebase as well.
The ability to customize the interface *easily* is killer. I like having my Home button on the main toolbar, thank you, and getting it there in Mozilla is a serious pain, and requires 1) substituting a whole new theme, or 2) doing some XUL hacking. With Phoenix, you right click, select "Customize," and then you can drag and drop toolbar elements from the available selection. Absolutely terrific.
Oh! And the plugin installation stuff WORKS now. I never could get Java to work in Mozilla without manually copying files around (under windows) or making symlinks (under linux). With Phoenix, it just downloaded, installed itself, and started working. No user intervention required.
That said, it's not perfect. First off, there are a lot of features enabled by default that you can't disable because the preferences menu has been gutted. For example, I prefer to turn off the Password Manager . . . but I can't, unless I feel like opening up the preferences.js file and altering the preferences settings manually. Hopefully this will be remedied in later versions; on general principles, you should retain preferences settings for each feature.
I'm having a hard time coming up with other objections to it. But I'm sure I'll find some. And then I'll submit bugs to Bugzilla. Go you all and do likewise!
Let free trade and market forces determine which technology to choose, not some ideology.
As was pointed out in the article, Microsoft doesn't respect free trade or market forces.
And it's worth pointing out that "free trade" is itself an ideology. Most ideologies claim not to be ideologies. The preceding statement is not an ideology. Heh.
Yeah. The fact that their banner features mock 18th century Edo erotica and the words "Saucy Stories from Japan's Wild Weeklies" might also be an indicator. :-)
In some quarters, yes, the above is true. (Harlan Ellison, ^h^h^h.) However, the publishing industry is much more divided on the question of "piracy." The audio industry (the corporations, that is) all agree that song swapping is inherently bad for their business. But in the publishing industry you find people who actually encourage book swapping -- and not just some authors. Check out the Baen Free Library, an archive of freely available books. There are some non-trivial names on the author list there (Jerry Pournelle, Lois McMaster Bujold, Mercedes Lackey) and it has official sponsorship from Baen Books, which is one of the largest publishers of science fiction and fantasy.
The introductory page by Eric Flint, "Introducing the Baen Free Library" is an eloquent argument for the share-and-share-alike crowd. Anyone who is interested in this debate, regardless of which camp you prefer, would be well advised to read that essay. (It's fairly lengthy, but worth the effort.)
This was, by the way, discussed multiple times on Slashdot.
My first thought was Bill Gates. But then, he and Voldemort are probably related.
Ha! I'm a control freak -- and I adore Linux. It lets me control my box right down to the level of individual bits!
There are two kinds of control freaks -- those who seek to control others, and those who seek to control themselves. The latter are those people who compulsively arrange their sock drawers. The former are those who compulsively arrange other people's sock drawers.
Is Bill Gates a control freak? Seems pretty likely. Is he the kind who compulsively regulates his own behavior? I don't know. I do know, however, that he (and his company) do seem pretty compulsive about wanting to regulate my behavior, particularly with regard to my computer. And that's scary; a computer is a hell of a lot more personal than a sock drawer. My sock drawer contain bits of cloth that I encase my feet in. My computer contains my financial records, my phone numbers and address, my schoolwork -- in short, all of my most private personal information. Controlling my computer is a short step away from controlling me, and is therefore completely unacceptable.
Blockquoth the poster:
The point is not to free up CPU cycles, it's to make video playable on older systems that have slower CPUs. This is one thing I object to in the review: they used a Duron 650 system, which is still pretty decent -- sure, it's not top of the line by a long shot, but Durons pack some decent power. I've got a couple of Duron 700 systems, both of which play back DivX perfectly without one of these cards. That's only 50 Mhz faster than the test system in the review.
The reviewer says in the conclusion, "Even with an Intel Pentium II/300 it is now possible to play a Divx-MPEG-4 film in full-screen mode smoothly." I'd like to see some actual tests to back that up. If true, it could be a boon to many people. My brother, for example, claims that his P II 266 does everything he wants it to -- except play back DivX smoothly. He's been thinking of getting a new box, but he can't really afford it right now. If this card could let him squeeze another year or two out of his aging comp, that would be a sound investment, since he doesn't really want or need a whole new system.
As it stands, however, the review doesn't really test out the card's usefulness on aging hardware. There are some other reviews listed on Sigma's Xcard website, but Tom's is the only English-language web-accessible one. There are several citations for reviews in hardcopy magazines, but the only other web-accessible reviews are in Japanese. (Handy if you speak Japanese.) The specifications say that it'll work with any Intel or AMD processor with a clock speed of 200 Mhz or higher. Anybody know of some other reviews?
Eh? What's that? Is this the same company that called the GPL "pac-man like" and Linux "unamerican?" How is it that all of a sudden that can't speak on rival products?
<snort>
Reading the article, it occurred to me that this might be a self-correcting problem; but then I thought a bit more and decided it wasn't.
.gif files) was filed in the mid-eighties, and will be expiring in another couple of years.
My reasoning went like this: IIRC, patents granted in the U.S. provide protection from competition for 11 years, and may be renewed, but not indefinitely; hence the Unisys patent on LZW compression (used in
Once a patent has expired, that's it -- you can't re-patent it, and neither can anyone else. So logically, if people are currently filing zillions of frivolous patents now, that means in twenty years it will become considerably more difficult to file frivolous patents.
But then I sat back and thought "No, in twenty years they'll be filing a whole new set of frivolous patents on technologies that don't yet exist; and nobody will care about all those frivolous patents that they filed way-back-when."
A problem like this -- too many patents filed -- would be self correcting in an era with a more stable technological basis. When the innovation rate is slow it's a lot easier to make a patenting system work well; incremental changes are a whole lot easier to evaluate for patentability. This is why the USPTO did so well for its first couple of hundred years; innovation was definitely going on, and fairly rapidly compared to historical levels (eg the Middle Ages), but it was still occurring at a manageable pace. The car fulfills the same function as a cart; light bulbs are a light source, just like candles or lanterns. The technologies seen in the first couple of centuries of American history were, for the most part, logical extensions of and replacements for pre-existing devices.
But all that began to change when the pace of innovation really picked up. It's hard to assign a date, but for convenience you might pick the last years of World War II as the beginning of the rapid increase in the pace of innovation. Even then, it wasn't so bad at first. But as the rate of innovation picked up, two factors were greatly exacerbated: 1) the complexity of new devices, and 2) the increasing prevalence of new devices with little or no ancestral devices. Television, for example: a television is not only considerably more complex than it closest pre-existing analogue, the radio, but also performs a previously unknown function -- the transmission of images over distance. Evaluating the originality of the first TV is not hard; but what about all the subsidiary patents that soon follow? Patents on improved antennae and cathode ray tubes, channel selectors and so on. To seriously evaluate all of those, you basically need to be an electrical engineer, with lots of time to study each new application.
But when you're getting dozens of patents a day, and you have the same size staff as you had before, and the applications you get increasingly arcane, your ability to fairly evaluate each new app goes down the drain under the workload.
The current pace of innovation cannot be sustained indefinitely; eventually our tech base will settle down again. In the meantime, we need two things: more specialists at the USPTO charged with evaluating patents in a particular field, and stricter standards for what is patentable. Business methods should not be patentable, nor should software -- or compression algorithms like the LZW one mentiond above.
Unfortunately, these reforms are going to be difficult to implement. Stricter patent standards will not be practical until we have more specialists to fairly evaluate the influx of arcane high-tech patents. Unfortunately, those specialists are mostly the ones applying for patents. You can make a heck of a lot more money by getting patents than by granting them. In order to attract the specialists it needs, the USPTO is going to have to offer competitive salaries; and that, I think is going to take an act of God. Chances are slim to none that Congress would raise their budget without a pressing political reason, and the only other source of cash are the application fees and maintenance fees. Increasing the budget by soliciting and granting more patents would simply worsen the problem we're trying to avoid in the first place.
I sure hope this gets worked out, but I predict that the USPTO will continue more or less as it has been for the forseeable future.
A couple of things spring to mind. First:
My first reaction to this was "Suuure." But then it occurred to me that the word "systematic" is key. Have there been any systematic studies of security in open- vs. closed-source programs? I mean academic quality research -- with control groups, a clearly defined method for testing the security, with the results published in a peer-reviewed journal.
Emphasis added.
So, the DoD can't purchase any untested software, hey? Well great! They can have all the open source stuff they want, no purchase necessary. Obviously the regulation is in place to keep the government from using untested software, but I'll bet it was written with the assumption that you can't legally use software you haven't paid for. Open source distribution schemes don't require payment, which opens up a loophole. I wonder, could that be why open source systems have come to play a "critical role" at the DoD, as the article mentioned?
Because it's *been* ported to Win32. Point your browser to:
http://main.mswinxp.net/~lpackham/smbclient/
Unfortunately, the site seems to be down at the moment . . . here's the Google cache. The package is also mentioned at the Cygwin Contributed Packages Page.
How do I know all this? I asked the same question last week. Thanks to ashpool7 for answering *my* question. Heh.
Blockquoth the responder:
Ah, now we're getting into philosophy. Here's a hypothetical for you: One day, you look up and see your worst enemy, whom you hate. He is backing over a cliff . . . in your brand-new Porsche. Do you shout a warning to him or not?
If you fail to warn him, most people would agree that you acted evilly. But even if you do warn him, it's still not clearly "good." Did you warn him because that is the right thing to do? Or did you warn him because you didn't want to lose your Porsche? Or maybe you warned him to preserve yourself from legal liability? Is it the action that counts, or the motivation, or a combination thereof? To my mind, action is more important than motivation.
Corporations -- not just Ebay, but all corporations -- perform actions that effect individuals, both those who are employed by the corporation, the investors, the customers, business partners, and sometimes the general public. I contend that corporations can be judged by their actions, every bit as much as any other human organization can be judged by theirs. I speak not merely of legal liability, but moral accountability as well.
Microsoft is a prime example. (Honestly, I am not trying to troll here, nor am I trying to make flamebait. Just bear with me.) Microsoft is extremely good at making good business decisions -- actions whose effect are to increase its market share, its bottom line, and its dominance in the industry. Some of those actions have had negative impact on others, both individuals and companies. The decisions that Microsoft has made regarding their course of action made the "most business sense." Does that absolve them of moral responsibility for the negative consequences of their actions?
As for open source, I would argue that it is morally superior to proprietary source. Open source code promotes the spread of knowledge; because anyone can view the source code, anyone can study real-world examples in order to learn about programming, or even for curiousity's sake. Proprietary technologies seek to restrict the spread of knowledge: figuring out how a closed program works is a thousand times more difficult, and may also be illegal. Which is better -- widespread knowledge, or widespread ignorance?
If open source software is morally superior to proprietary software, then logically embracing an open solution is an action which redounds to the credit of any company which does so. Their motivation for picking the software, be it because of "good business sense," because of approval of open source on general principles, or even because the CEO had indigestion and chose based on which representative had an antacid, is irrelevant. Consequences are derived from action, not motivation for that action.
You are right to point out that the concepts of "good" and "evil" are too narrow to be particularly useful in this context. Nothing human can be fully "good" or "evil." As a child, Saint Augustine stole a crop of pears, destroyed them, and felt guilty about it for most of his adult life. Hitler loved his dogs, trite but true.
Humans are complex, and may be good in some ways but not in others. Corporations are human institutions, and in exactly the same way they have both negative and positive aspects. Deciding what actions you approve or disapprove of in a corporation can help you establish how you, as an individual, will interact with any given corporation, but is basically a subjective decision.
Whew! That was a mouthful. But I think it needed to be said. If I get modded down for it, so be it.
On the one hand, Ebay's backend is now based on some very cool, open source technology.
On the other hand, they use Microsoft Passport, which raises a whole bunch of privacy and security issues.
Are they good or evil? Seems more like a shade of grey to me.
This guy has waaaay too much time on his hands, but that wasp-sucker actually looks useful. (It's on the same page as the Jenga pistol.) Of course, once you've spent nine hours sucking up a nest of yellowjackets, what do you do with the buggers? I mean, most of those suckers are still alive, and it's not like they can't fly right back out once the suction is turned off. I suppose you'd have to figure out some way of killing the captured bugs en masse -- spray a can of wasp poison in there, submerge the capture box, something like that.
Of course, you could always package 'em up and mail them to your worst enemy . . .
As for that marble crossbow, that thing is SCARY! Marbles travelling at 150 miles per hour can do some serious damage!