That ShareAlike clause is interesting in this context. If the case were to go to court, and the plaintiffs entered their copy of the blog as evidence, would they be legally bound by the ShareAlike clause to release their accompanying court documents under a BY-NC-SA license as well?
Of course, since they're in this to make money, they've already violated the license...
Intellectual Ventures, a patent firm [and alleged patent troll] started by former Microsoft chief scientist Nathan Myhrvold, was staffed with fairly renowned scientists who didn't fit the profile of people trying to make a quick buck in court.
Why isn't that a persuasive argument?
Technically? Because it's not an argument, it's an unsubstantiated claim. He says that the staff were "fairly renowned scientists who [don't] fit the profile of people trying to make a quick buck in court." But he doesn't give any evidence to that effect. He does give a link to another article discussing which scientists the company has hired. But what exactly is a "fairly renowned" scientist? Renowned by whom, for what? As for not fitting this "profile of people trying to make a quick buck in court" - what exactly is that profile? How do you distinguish between people trying to make a quick buck and legitimate businessmen? There could well be a distinction, but he doesn't say what it is.
Isn't that kind of argument used all the time around here?
Why, yes! Most of the "argument" on Slashdot consists of unsubstantiated claims. As evidence of this claim, I point to basically any post on Slashdot.
I've always hated the saying "Those who can, do, those who can't, teach." It's trite. Plenty of my teachers have both taught and practiced their respective disciplines. The saying makes no provision for those sorts of teachers.
Furthermore, sometimes you'll run across somebody who's really amazingly good at teaching a skill - but only a mediocre practitioner of it. And vice versa: you can be a staggeringly good artist, say, and still be lousy at teaching the skills you've mastered. The saying doesn't fit those scenarios, either.
I'm not a lawyer, but I'd hope that the judge wouldn't award costs against you if the final bill is the same as the amount you offered to settle. If your offer is totally unreasonable, you might end up paying the opposition's legal bills.
I'm not a lawyer either. But I do know that the UK has a "loser pays" judicial system - if you go to court and lose your case, then you pay both your costs and your opponent's costs anyway.
I'm a writing teacher, and I like to grade electronically. I've been using OpenOffice.org for all my own writing projects for years (since build 643C, back in the pre-1.0 days), but I can't use it for grading my students' papers. Although it is possible to make and read comments using OpenOffice, the UI for doing so is atrocious.
In Word, when I comment on something, I select the phrase that I want, and insert a new comment. The phrase I've commented on is given a different background color, the ends are marked by extra-tall-and-thin parentheses, and the comment itself appears in the margin as a balloon shape tied to the sentence by a dashed line. It's very easy to see and read the comments, and to see what all the comment pertains to.
In Writer, when I comment on something, I select the phrase that I want and insert a new comment. The comment is represented on the screen using a minuscule yellow box at the end of the section I highlighted. It gives the reader no indication where the beginning of my selection was. The yellow is so light that under some circumstances it's difficult even to see that there's a comment there. And in order to actually get the text of the comment, I have to hover the mouse over that tiny little yellow box, and then the text will pop up in an equally tiny box like the "alt" or "title" attributes in an HTML document. It's almost illegible.
Yuck! Given the terrible UI for comments, I cannot use OpenOffice.org to grade papers. Which is irritating, because several of my students want to turn papers in that were written using OpenOffice, and I can't let them. It really irritates me to have to support Microsoft in that way.
Please, OO.o developers - get a usability expert and turn her attention towards your commenting UI!
It's actually really bizarre that they didn't pay even after the software's author emailed them to say "Hey, no fair, pay up." I mean, the MPAA represents an industry making billions of dollars a year... and they couldn't be bothered to cough up a measly 25 quid? The British pound may be one of the strongest currencies in the world, but twenty five of them ain't gonna break the MPAA's bank. I guarantee, the cost of this public relations snafu is gonna be way more than that.
Their stats are updated regularly, they've got a reasonable level of detail, and lots of pretty graphs.
However, as others have pointed out, you need to be worrying about your particular audience more than anything else. A site like the one I've just given isn't all that useful unless you've got a really huge web site. So here's a three step plan for YOUR web site:
1) At first, design it to work smoothly with as many browsers as you possibly can.
2) Build up a profile on the types of users who visit your site. There are lots of programs that can help you do this. Google Analytics does a decent job, and it's free of charge. Another one is Mint, which some people swear by (it costs $30 USD). There are lots of others out there, of varying quality and abilities. Take your pick.
3) Once you've got a profile built up, tune your web site to suit the abilities of the browsers that most of YOUR particular users favor. You might discover that only 0.002% of your visitors are using Safari, meaning perfect compatibility with Safari is not a major concern for you. Or you might discover that the Opera users of the world swarm your web site like ants swarm spilled sugar, in which case Opera becomes a priority for you.
Taking issue with the idea that any work is 'untainted' by others' ideas.
Um, have you ever heard anyone express this idea? Me neither, it's completely absurd.
Absurd it may be, but that doesn't stop people from suing one another over such 'taints.' I direct your attention to the case of Alice Randall. In 2001 she published a novel "The Wind Done Gone," a parodic re-telling of "Gone With the Wind." Margaret Mitchell's estate sued Randall, alleging plagiarism. Her book was too similar to Mitchell's; it was, in fact, "tainted." The case was eventually settled out of court.
And again, consider Kaavya Viswanathan. Last year she published a romance novel, "How Opal Mehta Got Kissed, Got Wild and Got a Life." Then it was alleged that substantial portions of the novel had been adapted from Megan McCafferty's novels "Sloppy Firsts" and "Second Helpings." The publisher recalled "Opal Mehta" and canceled Viswanathan's contract. Viswanathan claimed she had internalized McCafferty's work so thoroughly that she reproduced the passages unconsciously and unintentionally. Regardless of whether the "plagiarism" was intentional or not, Viswanathan's gained a reputation as a plagiarist that's going to follow her for years. You might say she's "tainted."
And finally, may I point out that Shakespeare ripped off basically everything he ever wrote? He plundered everything he could lay his hands on. Macbeth came straight out of Holinshed's "Chronicles." In Midsummer Night's Dream, the play that the rustics put on mid-way through derives from Ovid's "Metamorphoses." Romeo and Juliet was taken from a contemporary poem, "The Tragical Historie of Romeus and Juliet" by Arthur Brookes. Yup - all "tainted."
This is what Lethem is talking about: our greatest artists routinely rip off their predecessors. That's just how it works. Or rather, how it always has. These days, we're more likely to see a corporate lawyer drive a copyright through the heart of the next Shakespeare. Lovely.
Back when I was a whippersnapper, we had these crazy things called "quizzes." The teacher would show us some information, and then later on we'd have to answer questions about it, just to be sure we'd understood it.
Of course, when my teachers did it, the point was to teach me stuff that would be useful later on. Like being able to spell words so I don't sound like an idiot, or add up numbers reliably. With this, the point is to boost some corporation's profit margin by pushing products on impressionable kids. Yuck!
"The visitors said it was likely against university policy"
Could they not be bothered with actually checking the policy since they were there to enforce it?
In fact, they brought a printout of the policy to the meeting with the professor. The reason they weren't sure is that when the policy was written, Tor didn't exist yet. It might violate the policy, but they hadn't faced this kind of thing before, so they weren't certain.
I bought both the Definitive Guide and also the Pocket Reference. They're both by Meyer - the Pocket Reference packs all the vital info into 128 pages. And it really IS a pocket reference, in that it literally fits in my back pocket.
The index in the pocket reference is good. It's got everything I need. But if it didn't, I could give them feedback: there's a line at the bottom saying "We'd like to hear your suggestions for improving our indexes. Send email to index@oreilly.com."
I think I'll send them an email saying that the correct plural of "index" is "indices." Mwa ha ha ha.
BrowserCam is lovely if all you care about is whether the page looks okay. If you want something more complicated - like, say, testing a JavaScript - then it's useless. Still a good tool, but with definite limits.
If you take the time to read Gutmann's actual analysis, rather than just the summary on the Inquirer, you'll note that he gives several reasons to object to Vista's DRM requirements even if you never use a single DRM-protected file. For example:
The specs for DRM support in Vista specify that the OS has to encrypt any protected video data sent to the video card. "Ah HA," you say. "I'll just never use any protected video." Fair enough. But consider this: in the future, any new video card you buy will have to be capable of decrypting stuff even if you yourself never send it any encrypted content. That means that the company that makes the video card has to integrate cryptography capabilities into the video card. Which requires space on the video card's circuit board. That same circuit board space could have been, say, another pixel pipeline or two for faster video rendering - oh well. Congratulations, you're getting less bang for the same buck.
Except, of course, it's NOT the same buck; it's more buck. Integrating cryptography into a video card will require expertise (expensive), development (expensive), and testing (expensive). And naturally, some cryptography technologies are covered by patents, so the video card company will have to purchase more patent licenses (expensive). Guess who's going to wind up footing the bill for these new expenses? That's right: you, the end user.
Some of the patent expenses can probably be reduced. nVidia has patents of its own, as does ATI, and SGI for that matter. They can offer to swap patent permissions with companies who hold patents for cryptographic technology. (Assuming that the cryptography companies have any interest in graphics patents.) What's that you say? You're a small company? You don't have a massive portfolio of patents to bargain with? And your budget is limited? Sorry, friend, you're in the wrong line of work. Try McDonald's, I hear they need highly-skilled cash-register operators. (Not that there are very many small upstart video-card companies; breaking into that market is damn hard. Throwing in all this DRM stuff just makes the impossible a teensy bit harder.)
Slower development times, higher hardware costs, decreased competition... all those affect you even if you never sully your system with a DRM-protected file. And that's just scratching the surface. Open source drivers are going to get harder to write; the DRM spec breaks Microsoft's own unified driver scheme, requiring a completely unique driver for every possible variant of every possible device; massively increases the required system specs; decreases system reliability; and on and on. It doesn't even do a damn bit of good in the long run; all it takes is one bright hacker with a compiler (and possibly a soldering gun) to figure out some way around it. One compromised system means that Hollywood's precious copies of Soccer Dog: the Movie will be smeared all over the net. And meanwhile, the rest of us poor schmucks will be paying more for hardware that does less. Great.
Online renderers (which basically take a screenshot of the page in a particular browser and then show it to you) can be very useful for seeing how your page looks in a particular browser.
However, they're useless at determining how your page functions in a particular browser. If you're using, say, menus that appear/disappear using CSS, you can't test them in one of those. Ditto for any JavaScript - and with more and more sites developing AJAX-based pages that update only particular portions of the page, that's an increasing concern.
So basically, they're a useful tool if you're concerned about basic appearances, but any more advanced testing will require a real copy of the browser you want to test.
Shouldn't various students of various abilities be judged to their level by what the market needs? Shouldn't education be partially based on what will be required of the student if they were to enter the industry at a certain knowledge level?
It's an awfully good thing you chose to put the word "partially" in there. As I see it, education is supposed to produce people who can:
Make reasonably informed decisions on a wide range of issues.
Recognize when they're not sufficiently informed, and take steps to fix that (including finding information and assessing its relevance and reliability).
Work in and do well at a variety of jobs.
Acquire new skills when necessary.
So yes, the needs of the market need to be taken into consideration (see point 3). I'm not even marginally convinced that "the market" could or would want to promote the other three qualities. As far as I can tell, businesses like having a small number of active, engaged people, and a large number of sheep to support them. Businesses want people who will support the business, and if they controlled education, they'd promote that ideal at the expense of all others, including the ideal of an "informed citizen."
The article seems rather naive to me, in several ways.
Updegrove writes:
If such is the case, certainly there must be some better way to preserve the reality of modern existence, thereby avoiding the future need to use trowels and screens, laboratory analysis and intuition to recreate what has so recently been real?
(Emphasis added.)
Mr. Updegrove then goes on to suggest that Wikipedia (or a similar project) is the best way to accomplish this goal. He seems to be confusing "reality" and "a written record", which seems rather naive. A written record contains a representation of reality. Writing is a representation in that the word "spoon" cannot be used to eat soup. The word is just a label attached to the concept (and the concept still is not the thing itself). And writing itself is a representation of perception, in that the writer always writes based on preconceived notions of how to understand reality (or at any rate sensory input, which is probably still not quite the same thing as reality).
In short, there's one heck of a lot of difference between reading about a spoon and actually holding one in your hand.
And even if words offered a direct and unambiguous channel to reality, we'd still be faced only with the reality that people chose to write about. What if you're interested in studying something that nobody wrote about? Or that only got written about a tiny bit? Authors are human, and therefore invariably write from a limited perspective: sometimes they're biased, sometimes they're stupid, and even when they're even-handed and intelligent, they routinely have blind spots that they're not even aware of. Written records are only one source of information about the past. If you want to construct a full picture, it takes more than just that.
Wikipedia is a terrific resource. But it's not the fount of all knowledge and wisdom. Count on it: archeology ain't going to die off because we now have an online encyclopedia.
... is FAR too large to post in its entirety. Here's a link. You're looking for section 1076. You may also be interested in President Bush's signing statement.
Here's the full text of section 1076:
SEC. 1076. USE OF THE ARMED FORCES IN MAJOR PUBLIC EMERGENCIES.
(a) Use of the Armed Forces Authorized-
(1) IN GENERAL- Section 333 of title 10, United States Code, is amended to read as follows:
`Sec. 333. Major public emergencies; interference with State and Federal law
`(a) Use of Armed Forces in Major Public Emergencies- (1) The President may employ the armed forces, including the National Guard in Federal service, to--
`(A) restore public order and enforce the laws of the United States when, as a result of a natural disaster, epidemic, or other serious public health emergency, terrorist attack or incident, or other condition in any State or possession of the United States, the President determines that--
`(i) domestic violence has occurred to such an extent that the constituted authorities of the State or possession are incapable of maintaining public order; and
`(ii) such violence results in a condition described in paragraph (2); or
`(B) suppress, in a State, any insurrection, domestic violence, unlawful combination, or conspiracy if such insurrection, violation, combination, or conspiracy results in a condition described in paragraph (2).
`(2) A condition described in this paragraph is a condition that--
`(A) so hinders the execution of the laws of a State or possession, as applicable, and of the United States within that State or possession, that any part or class of its people is deprived of a right, privilege, immunity, or protection named in the Constitution and secured by law, and the constituted authorities of that State or possession are unable, fail, or refuse to protect that right, privilege, or immunity, or to give that protection; or
`(B) opposes or obstructs the execution of the laws of the United States or impedes the course of justice under those laws.
`(3) In any situation covered by paragraph (1)(B), the State shall be considered to have denied the equal protection of the laws secured by the Constitution.
`(b) Notice to Congress- The President shall notify Congress of the determination to exercise the authority in subsection (a)(1)(A) as soon as practicable after the determination and every 14 days thereafter during the duration of the exercise of that authority.'.
(2) PROCLAMATION TO DISPERSE- Section 334 of such title is amended by inserting `or those obstructing the enforcement of the laws' after `insurgents'.
(3) HEADING AMENDMENT- The heading of chapter 15 of such title is amended to read as follows:
`CHAPTER 15--ENFORCEMENT OF THE LAWS TO RESTORE PUBLIC ORDER'.
(4) CLERICAL AMENDMENTS- (A) The tables of chapters at the beginning of subtitle A of title 10, United States Code, and at the beginning of part I of such subtitle, are each amended by striking the item relating to chapter 15 and inserting the following new item:
331'.
(B) The table of sections at the beginning of chapter 15 of such title is amended by
... you open your non-default browser, browse to a website, click a link, and it launches your default browser? No.
Of course not. That would indeed be counter-intuitive, not to mention silly. What I said was that he can INSTALL AN EXTENSION that gives him the ability to DELIBERATELY CHOOSE to have a link open in IE by RIGHT-CLICKING and selecting (ahem) "Open link target in IE."
Here is a screen shot showing the extra entry on the context menu that the "IE View" extension adds:
Hmm. I was assuming that he's using a web-based email client - in which case, IE View is exactly what he needs.
You're assuming that he's using a standalone email client. In which case, having IE as the system default is what he needs.
It just didn't occur to me that he might not be using webmail. Probably this is because I myself haven't used a standalone email client for at least eight years, and I've got a bad habit of making hasty generalizations about other people's behavior based on my own behavior.
Now that I read the parent a little more carefully, there's actually no good way to tell whether his email client is web-based or standalone. How annoying.
I never got a good feeling of community at Active Worlds, which Second Life has in spades. There's a huge academic community within Second Life as well who seem fairly convinced that the educational possibilities of Second Life are immense.
I joined Active Worlds years ago -- 1998, God, has it really been that long? -- and I got a terrific feeling of community. There were teachers to help you learn to build, storytelling groups, role-players, assorted card/board game worlds. There were thousands of users online at any given time back then. And there was a good deal of academic interest in it, too. Heck, I joined up because a guy in the dorm I was living in then asked for my help in figuring out an Active Worlds assignment in one of his business classes.
And all was great. For about a year. Then the company screwed up and pissed off the majority of their most loyal fans, with inflated rhetoric, poorly realized promises about the program's capabilities, and (the killer) rapidly inflating the price for a "full citizenship." The idea of making "virtual malls" fell through. "3D Homepages" fell through. The academic interest dissolved once they figured out that the thing AW was best suited to teaching was AW itself.
These days, the Active Worlds community consists of a fairly small group of extraordinarily dedicated users hanging on despite years of neglect and outright abuse by the company. I'm one; most of the others can be found a SW City.
So far, I've seen nothing to convince me that Second Life isn't going to follow the same trajectory as Active Worlds: start small, spark buzz, build up a decent user base... and then fizzle.
1) Second Life has over-stated its number of active users by counting every registered account as an active user.
2) Second Life suffers from reliability problems.
3) "... there is no actual utility in Second Life for anyone who isn't there for the sake of feeling as if they're on some sort of cutting edge (or who are among the 10 people or so who manage to make some decent money via the virtual world by selling custom dildos and virtual prostitution services." (Emphasis added.)
As for the first claim, big deal. So there are roughly a million "registered users" and roughly 10,000 users online at any given time. That's a difference of a hundred-fold. But it's not worth getting worked up about; it's just a standard PR tactic. See also: hard drive manufacturers whose advertised hard drive capacities are slightly higher than the actual capacity of the drive, due to counting a "Gigabyte" as 1,000 MB instead of 1,024 MB.
For the second, outages are pretty common in most services. This, too, is pretty much par for the course. Nothing to get worked up about.
The third objection is the most interesting, since the blogger seems to think that "actual utility" means "everybody makes money." Which is just silly. Second Life was never intended to make money for anyone but 1) the company, and 2) a small number of exceptionally diligent users, maybe, if they're lucky. Most of the users -- particularly the active ones -- seem to be more interested in using Second Life for social activities (e.g. chat), and building their own dream-environments, lovingly decked out with elaborate houses, swimming pools, trees, etc. That's a "utility" that has nothing to do with making money for yourself.
If the Rah Rah Second Life rhetoric irritates the blogger, there's a simple solution: stop reading it.
To hear governments tell it, happiness and atomic bombs go hand in hand. Have for a long time. Just a few decades ago, the Department of Defense made a brief attempt to rename the strontium unit, a measurement of how much radioactive fallout (specifically, strontium-90) has been incorporated into an individual's skeletal structure in place of calcium. Guess what our defense boys called it? That's right, the "sunshine unit."
I resolve the difference in the same way that copyright law does: by recognizing that the idea itself and the expression of the idea are two different things.
So, for example. No one "owns" that proprietary software restricts the user's rights. However, the phrase "The licenses for most software are designed to take away your freedom to share and change it" was written by Richard Stallman as part of the GPL preamble. I cannot legitimately claim to have written that particular expression of the idea. If I did so claim, I would be lying, which is wrong. So, although Richard Stallman does not "own" the idea itself, I need to quote and acknowledge him if I want to use his particular expression of the idea.
The principle works out differently in cases of influence. Suppose I were to write "Using proprietary software to create government documents causes preservation problems, because the government needs to preserve documents for the long-term, but the company needs to ensure an ongoing revenue stream, and the two interests conflict." This idea has been discussed by many people, in many ways. This particular expression of it is mine. But I've been influenced by those other expressions of the same idea, particularly John Stone's essay Keeping Stuff. So, although I am not strictly required to provide a reference to that essay, it is polite to do so. In two ways. First, it's polite to acknowledge Stone's work in creating that particularly excellent essay. Second, it's polite to my readers, because it gives them the option to explore the subject further if they'd like. If all we're talking about is "influence," then there is no moral imperative to give a citation but it's still a good thing to do.
The obvious weakness in this is paraphrasing. What happens when somebody takes a direct quotation, changes a few words, and claims it as their own? Is that plagiarism or influence? In that case, I'd argue it's the degree of alteration that's important. If it's only changed a little bit, then that's probably not legit. If it's changed substantially, then it's probably legit. I refuse to draw a hard line on that one; this is an area where the only sensible way to proceed is to evaluate each case individually.
In most of the cases I've encountered, the judgement is usually pretty obvious. And the "paraphrasing" thing doesn't come up all that often. Most of the students I work with have much, MUCH more basic problems to deal with. Like writing sentences that are comprehensible. Frequently, students will hand me essays containing sentences that go on for a quarter of a page and remain incomprehensible even after I've read them three or four times. That's what I spend the most time working on, along with "clue fairy" duties. (I get to play "clue fairy" over all sorts of things. Like pointing out that I-got-drunk-at-a-party-last-night is not a good excuse for missing class. And suggesting that it would be a good idea to track assignment due dates in a calendar or a to-do list or something. The poor dears. They're so charmingly clueless, and they're completely unaware of their own cluelessness. As I'm sure I was, ten years ago.)
Slashdot Mirror
That ShareAlike clause is interesting in this context. If the case were to go to court, and the plaintiffs entered their copy of the blog as evidence, would they be legally bound by the ShareAlike clause to release their accompanying court documents under a BY-NC-SA license as well?
...
Of course, since they're in this to make money, they've already violated the license
Technically? Because it's not an argument, it's an unsubstantiated claim. He says that the staff were "fairly renowned scientists who [don't] fit the profile of people trying to make a quick buck in court." But he doesn't give any evidence to that effect. He does give a link to another article discussing which scientists the company has hired. But what exactly is a "fairly renowned" scientist? Renowned by whom, for what? As for not fitting this "profile of people trying to make a quick buck in court" - what exactly is that profile? How do you distinguish between people trying to make a quick buck and legitimate businessmen? There could well be a distinction, but he doesn't say what it is.
Why, yes! Most of the "argument" on Slashdot consists of unsubstantiated claims. As evidence of this claim, I point to basically any post on Slashdot.
Glad we got that straightened out. ^_^
I've always hated the saying "Those who can, do, those who can't, teach." It's trite. Plenty of my teachers have both taught and practiced their respective disciplines. The saying makes no provision for those sorts of teachers.
Furthermore, sometimes you'll run across somebody who's really amazingly good at teaching a skill - but only a mediocre practitioner of it. And vice versa: you can be a staggeringly good artist, say, and still be lousy at teaching the skills you've mastered. The saying doesn't fit those scenarios, either.
I'm not a lawyer either. But I do know that the UK has a "loser pays" judicial system - if you go to court and lose your case, then you pay both your costs and your opponent's costs anyway.
I'm a writing teacher, and I like to grade electronically. I've been using OpenOffice.org for all my own writing projects for years (since build 643C, back in the pre-1.0 days), but I can't use it for grading my students' papers. Although it is possible to make and read comments using OpenOffice, the UI for doing so is atrocious.
In Word, when I comment on something, I select the phrase that I want, and insert a new comment. The phrase I've commented on is given a different background color, the ends are marked by extra-tall-and-thin parentheses, and the comment itself appears in the margin as a balloon shape tied to the sentence by a dashed line. It's very easy to see and read the comments, and to see what all the comment pertains to.
In Writer, when I comment on something, I select the phrase that I want and insert a new comment. The comment is represented on the screen using a minuscule yellow box at the end of the section I highlighted. It gives the reader no indication where the beginning of my selection was. The yellow is so light that under some circumstances it's difficult even to see that there's a comment there. And in order to actually get the text of the comment, I have to hover the mouse over that tiny little yellow box, and then the text will pop up in an equally tiny box like the "alt" or "title" attributes in an HTML document. It's almost illegible.
Yuck! Given the terrible UI for comments, I cannot use OpenOffice.org to grade papers. Which is irritating, because several of my students want to turn papers in that were written using OpenOffice, and I can't let them. It really irritates me to have to support Microsoft in that way.
Please, OO.o developers - get a usability expert and turn her attention towards your commenting UI!
Question: which of the following is worse?
Call me crazy, but I'd rather read an honest writer who reveals his bias than a dishonest writer who conceals it.
It's actually really bizarre that they didn't pay even after the software's author emailed them to say "Hey, no fair, pay up." I mean, the MPAA represents an industry making billions of dollars a year ... and they couldn't be bothered to cough up a measly 25 quid? The British pound may be one of the strongest currencies in the world, but twenty five of them ain't gonna break the MPAA's bank. I guarantee, the cost of this public relations snafu is gonna be way more than that.
For a snapshot of the web population at large, check this site:
http://marketshare.hitslink.com/
Their stats are updated regularly, they've got a reasonable level of detail, and lots of pretty graphs.
However, as others have pointed out, you need to be worrying about your particular audience more than anything else. A site like the one I've just given isn't all that useful unless you've got a really huge web site. So here's a three step plan for YOUR web site:
1) At first, design it to work smoothly with as many browsers as you possibly can.
2) Build up a profile on the types of users who visit your site. There are lots of programs that can help you do this. Google Analytics does a decent job, and it's free of charge. Another one is Mint, which some people swear by (it costs $30 USD). There are lots of others out there, of varying quality and abilities. Take your pick.
3) Once you've got a profile built up, tune your web site to suit the abilities of the browsers that most of YOUR particular users favor. You might discover that only 0.002% of your visitors are using Safari, meaning perfect compatibility with Safari is not a major concern for you. Or you might discover that the Opera users of the world swarm your web site like ants swarm spilled sugar, in which case Opera becomes a priority for you.
Lather, rinse, repeat.
The parent poster said:
Absurd it may be, but that doesn't stop people from suing one another over such 'taints.' I direct your attention to the case of Alice Randall. In 2001 she published a novel "The Wind Done Gone," a parodic re-telling of "Gone With the Wind." Margaret Mitchell's estate sued Randall, alleging plagiarism. Her book was too similar to Mitchell's; it was, in fact, "tainted." The case was eventually settled out of court.
And again, consider Kaavya Viswanathan. Last year she published a romance novel, "How Opal Mehta Got Kissed, Got Wild and Got a Life." Then it was alleged that substantial portions of the novel had been adapted from Megan McCafferty's novels "Sloppy Firsts" and "Second Helpings." The publisher recalled "Opal Mehta" and canceled Viswanathan's contract. Viswanathan claimed she had internalized McCafferty's work so thoroughly that she reproduced the passages unconsciously and unintentionally. Regardless of whether the "plagiarism" was intentional or not, Viswanathan's gained a reputation as a plagiarist that's going to follow her for years. You might say she's "tainted."
And finally, may I point out that Shakespeare ripped off basically everything he ever wrote? He plundered everything he could lay his hands on. Macbeth came straight out of Holinshed's "Chronicles." In Midsummer Night's Dream, the play that the rustics put on mid-way through derives from Ovid's "Metamorphoses." Romeo and Juliet was taken from a contemporary poem, "The Tragical Historie of Romeus and Juliet" by Arthur Brookes. Yup - all "tainted."
This is what Lethem is talking about: our greatest artists routinely rip off their predecessors. That's just how it works. Or rather, how it always has. These days, we're more likely to see a corporate lawyer drive a copyright through the heart of the next Shakespeare. Lovely.
Back when I was a whippersnapper, we had these crazy things called "quizzes." The teacher would show us some information, and then later on we'd have to answer questions about it, just to be sure we'd understood it.
Of course, when my teachers did it, the point was to teach me stuff that would be useful later on. Like being able to spell words so I don't sound like an idiot, or add up numbers reliably. With this, the point is to boost some corporation's profit margin by pushing products on impressionable kids. Yuck!
In fact, they brought a printout of the policy to the meeting with the professor. The reason they weren't sure is that when the policy was written, Tor didn't exist yet. It might violate the policy, but they hadn't faced this kind of thing before, so they weren't certain.
I bought both the Definitive Guide and also the Pocket Reference. They're both by Meyer - the Pocket Reference packs all the vital info into 128 pages. And it really IS a pocket reference, in that it literally fits in my back pocket.
The index in the pocket reference is good. It's got everything I need. But if it didn't, I could give them feedback: there's a line at the bottom saying "We'd like to hear your suggestions for improving our indexes. Send email to index@oreilly.com."
I think I'll send them an email saying that the correct plural of "index" is "indices." Mwa ha ha ha.
BrowserCam is lovely if all you care about is whether the page looks okay. If you want something more complicated - like, say, testing a JavaScript - then it's useless. Still a good tool, but with definite limits.
If you take the time to read Gutmann's actual analysis, rather than just the summary on the Inquirer, you'll note that he gives several reasons to object to Vista's DRM requirements even if you never use a single DRM-protected file. For example:
... all those affect you even if you never sully your system with a DRM-protected file. And that's just scratching the surface. Open source drivers are going to get harder to write; the DRM spec breaks Microsoft's own unified driver scheme, requiring a completely unique driver for every possible variant of every possible device; massively increases the required system specs; decreases system reliability; and on and on. It doesn't even do a damn bit of good in the long run; all it takes is one bright hacker with a compiler (and possibly a soldering gun) to figure out some way around it. One compromised system means that Hollywood's precious copies of Soccer Dog: the Movie will be smeared all over the net. And meanwhile, the rest of us poor schmucks will be paying more for hardware that does less. Great.
The specs for DRM support in Vista specify that the OS has to encrypt any protected video data sent to the video card. "Ah HA," you say. "I'll just never use any protected video." Fair enough. But consider this: in the future, any new video card you buy will have to be capable of decrypting stuff even if you yourself never send it any encrypted content. That means that the company that makes the video card has to integrate cryptography capabilities into the video card. Which requires space on the video card's circuit board. That same circuit board space could have been, say, another pixel pipeline or two for faster video rendering - oh well. Congratulations, you're getting less bang for the same buck.
Except, of course, it's NOT the same buck; it's more buck. Integrating cryptography into a video card will require expertise (expensive), development (expensive), and testing (expensive). And naturally, some cryptography technologies are covered by patents, so the video card company will have to purchase more patent licenses (expensive). Guess who's going to wind up footing the bill for these new expenses? That's right: you, the end user.
Some of the patent expenses can probably be reduced. nVidia has patents of its own, as does ATI, and SGI for that matter. They can offer to swap patent permissions with companies who hold patents for cryptographic technology. (Assuming that the cryptography companies have any interest in graphics patents.) What's that you say? You're a small company? You don't have a massive portfolio of patents to bargain with? And your budget is limited? Sorry, friend, you're in the wrong line of work. Try McDonald's, I hear they need highly-skilled cash-register operators. (Not that there are very many small upstart video-card companies; breaking into that market is damn hard. Throwing in all this DRM stuff just makes the impossible a teensy bit harder.)
Slower development times, higher hardware costs, decreased competition
Online renderers (which basically take a screenshot of the page in a particular browser and then show it to you) can be very useful for seeing how your page looks in a particular browser.
However, they're useless at determining how your page functions in a particular browser. If you're using, say, menus that appear/disappear using CSS, you can't test them in one of those. Ditto for any JavaScript - and with more and more sites developing AJAX-based pages that update only particular portions of the page, that's an increasing concern.
So basically, they're a useful tool if you're concerned about basic appearances, but any more advanced testing will require a real copy of the browser you want to test.
The parent wrote:
It's an awfully good thing you chose to put the word "partially" in there. As I see it, education is supposed to produce people who can:
So yes, the needs of the market need to be taken into consideration (see point 3). I'm not even marginally convinced that "the market" could or would want to promote the other three qualities. As far as I can tell, businesses like having a small number of active, engaged people, and a large number of sheep to support them. Businesses want people who will support the business, and if they controlled education, they'd promote that ideal at the expense of all others, including the ideal of an "informed citizen."
The article seems rather naive to me, in several ways.
Updegrove writes:
(Emphasis added.)Mr. Updegrove then goes on to suggest that Wikipedia (or a similar project) is the best way to accomplish this goal. He seems to be confusing "reality" and "a written record", which seems rather naive. A written record contains a representation of reality. Writing is a representation in that the word "spoon" cannot be used to eat soup. The word is just a label attached to the concept (and the concept still is not the thing itself). And writing itself is a representation of perception, in that the writer always writes based on preconceived notions of how to understand reality (or at any rate sensory input, which is probably still not quite the same thing as reality).
In short, there's one heck of a lot of difference between reading about a spoon and actually holding one in your hand.
And even if words offered a direct and unambiguous channel to reality, we'd still be faced only with the reality that people chose to write about. What if you're interested in studying something that nobody wrote about? Or that only got written about a tiny bit? Authors are human, and therefore invariably write from a limited perspective: sometimes they're biased, sometimes they're stupid, and even when they're even-handed and intelligent, they routinely have blind spots that they're not even aware of. Written records are only one source of information about the past. If you want to construct a full picture, it takes more than just that.
Wikipedia is a terrific resource. But it's not the fount of all knowledge and wisdom. Count on it: archeology ain't going to die off because we now have an online encyclopedia.
Here's the full text of section 1076:
Of course not. That would indeed be counter-intuitive, not to mention silly. What I said was that he can INSTALL AN EXTENSION that gives him the ability to DELIBERATELY CHOOSE to have a link open in IE by RIGHT-CLICKING and selecting (ahem) "Open link target in IE."
Here is a screen shot showing the extra entry on the context menu that the "IE View" extension adds:
http://ieview.mozdev.org/screenshots.html
And yes, it was rude of the Firefox developers to take system default status without asking.
Hmm. I was assuming that he's using a web-based email client - in which case, IE View is exactly what he needs.
You're assuming that he's using a standalone email client. In which case, having IE as the system default is what he needs.
It just didn't occur to me that he might not be using webmail. Probably this is because I myself haven't used a standalone email client for at least eight years, and I've got a bad habit of making hasty generalizations about other people's behavior based on my own behavior.
Now that I read the parent a little more carefully, there's actually no good way to tell whether his email client is web-based or standalone. How annoying.
You need IE View. It's a Firefox extension that adds a new entry to the context menu: "Open link target in IE".
So, your user sends you an approval email, you right click the link and select "Open in IE", and boom. There you go.
I joined Active Worlds years ago -- 1998, God, has it really been that long? -- and I got a terrific feeling of community. There were teachers to help you learn to build, storytelling groups, role-players, assorted card/board game worlds. There were thousands of users online at any given time back then. And there was a good deal of academic interest in it, too. Heck, I joined up because a guy in the dorm I was living in then asked for my help in figuring out an Active Worlds assignment in one of his business classes.
And all was great. For about a year. Then the company screwed up and pissed off the majority of their most loyal fans, with inflated rhetoric, poorly realized promises about the program's capabilities, and (the killer) rapidly inflating the price for a "full citizenship." The idea of making "virtual malls" fell through. "3D Homepages" fell through. The academic interest dissolved once they figured out that the thing AW was best suited to teaching was AW itself.
These days, the Active Worlds community consists of a fairly small group of extraordinarily dedicated users hanging on despite years of neglect and outright abuse by the company. I'm one; most of the others can be found a SW City.
So far, I've seen nothing to convince me that Second Life isn't going to follow the same trajectory as Active Worlds: start small, spark buzz, build up a decent user base
These objections seem to rest on three claims:
1) Second Life has over-stated its number of active users by counting every registered account as an active user.
2) Second Life suffers from reliability problems.
3) "... there is no actual utility in Second Life for anyone who isn't there for the sake of feeling as if they're on some sort of cutting edge (or who are among the 10 people or so who manage to make some decent money via the virtual world by selling custom dildos and virtual prostitution services." (Emphasis added.)
As for the first claim, big deal. So there are roughly a million "registered users" and roughly 10,000 users online at any given time. That's a difference of a hundred-fold. But it's not worth getting worked up about; it's just a standard PR tactic. See also: hard drive manufacturers whose advertised hard drive capacities are slightly higher than the actual capacity of the drive, due to counting a "Gigabyte" as 1,000 MB instead of 1,024 MB.
For the second, outages are pretty common in most services. This, too, is pretty much par for the course. Nothing to get worked up about.
The third objection is the most interesting, since the blogger seems to think that "actual utility" means "everybody makes money." Which is just silly. Second Life was never intended to make money for anyone but 1) the company, and 2) a small number of exceptionally diligent users, maybe, if they're lucky. Most of the users -- particularly the active ones -- seem to be more interested in using Second Life for social activities (e.g. chat), and building their own dream-environments, lovingly decked out with elaborate houses, swimming pools, trees, etc. That's a "utility" that has nothing to do with making money for yourself.
If the Rah Rah Second Life rhetoric irritates the blogger, there's a simple solution: stop reading it.
To hear governments tell it, happiness and atomic bombs go hand in hand. Have for a long time. Just a few decades ago, the Department of Defense made a brief attempt to rename the strontium unit, a measurement of how much radioactive fallout (specifically, strontium-90) has been incorporated into an individual's skeletal structure in place of calcium. Guess what our defense boys called it? That's right, the "sunshine unit."
I resolve the difference in the same way that copyright law does: by recognizing that the idea itself and the expression of the idea are two different things.
So, for example. No one "owns" that proprietary software restricts the user's rights. However, the phrase "The licenses for most software are designed to take away your freedom to share and change it" was written by Richard Stallman as part of the GPL preamble. I cannot legitimately claim to have written that particular expression of the idea. If I did so claim, I would be lying, which is wrong. So, although Richard Stallman does not "own" the idea itself, I need to quote and acknowledge him if I want to use his particular expression of the idea.
The principle works out differently in cases of influence. Suppose I were to write "Using proprietary software to create government documents causes preservation problems, because the government needs to preserve documents for the long-term, but the company needs to ensure an ongoing revenue stream, and the two interests conflict." This idea has been discussed by many people, in many ways. This particular expression of it is mine. But I've been influenced by those other expressions of the same idea, particularly John Stone's essay Keeping Stuff. So, although I am not strictly required to provide a reference to that essay, it is polite to do so. In two ways. First, it's polite to acknowledge Stone's work in creating that particularly excellent essay. Second, it's polite to my readers, because it gives them the option to explore the subject further if they'd like. If all we're talking about is "influence," then there is no moral imperative to give a citation but it's still a good thing to do.
The obvious weakness in this is paraphrasing. What happens when somebody takes a direct quotation, changes a few words, and claims it as their own? Is that plagiarism or influence? In that case, I'd argue it's the degree of alteration that's important. If it's only changed a little bit, then that's probably not legit. If it's changed substantially, then it's probably legit. I refuse to draw a hard line on that one; this is an area where the only sensible way to proceed is to evaluate each case individually.
In most of the cases I've encountered, the judgement is usually pretty obvious. And the "paraphrasing" thing doesn't come up all that often. Most of the students I work with have much, MUCH more basic problems to deal with. Like writing sentences that are comprehensible. Frequently, students will hand me essays containing sentences that go on for a quarter of a page and remain incomprehensible even after I've read them three or four times. That's what I spend the most time working on, along with "clue fairy" duties. (I get to play "clue fairy" over all sorts of things. Like pointing out that I-got-drunk-at-a-party-last-night is not a good excuse for missing class. And suggesting that it would be a good idea to track assignment due dates in a calendar or a to-do list or something. The poor dears. They're so charmingly clueless, and they're completely unaware of their own cluelessness. As I'm sure I was, ten years ago.)