Not to denigrate his efforts... it's just that some business entities prefer a less risky (from their point of view... I'm not claiming it is any more or less valid) process than relying on an individual (single point of failure). Historically this was illustrated by Postel's untimely passing away which some would say let some undeserving groups seize control of the Internet domain names in the transition. Similarly markets get very nervous about companies which don't have a successor policy for their key executives. While OSS projects do benefit from benevolent dictators, even entire city-states (e.g. Lee clan in Singapore), in general it is hard to guarentee a consistent level of performance across long-timer period or even multiple generations (cough*US presidency*cough). However, in this case, given the relatively small size of Australia, I would find it hard to see where a committee/board/bureau would have any significant advantages over a single technically competent individual (apart from having some way of accessing their memories for prosterity). In some ways, a compromise might be to offer to fund an apprentice (padawan?) to help document his policies for greater transparency and generally record the historical underpinnings.
... just to remind people why stealth was originally developed. The Soviet tactics was to advance their tanks underneath a SAM umbrella (c.f. 6 day war, etc). The stealth concept was to reduce radar cross-section and turn the overlapping fields of acquisition radars into more point-sources. This was to enable the US AirLand attack concept where you strike simultaneously at targets in the rear. e.g. if you expect a major tank tank in n days, you hit their reinforcements at n-1 day, their air support at n-0.5 day, etc... The stealth aircraft are not wonder woman invisible planes, designed to penetrate high urban density regions (use cruise missiles for those). Mobile C3I posts yes..., deep surprise raids OK, maybe some photo-reconaisance. Trying to enter a firezone... most definitionly NO as they're subsonic and would be toast for any interceptor squadron with look-down/up radar. Any idiot wanting to use their stealth fighters as CNN cannon fodder (flying down streets to wow armchair generals) should be court martialed (3rd world countries with no tech (cough*sudan*cough) excepted). Now that the emphasis is moving towards infowar, expect to see stealth applied to small semi-intelligent observation planes. Afterall, if you can see a target you can usually nuke/gass/bomb it.
Realistically... who in the world wants to pick a fight with the US? Are you expecting the chinese to row across the pacific (bypassing Hawaii with a non-existant blue-water carrier fleet)just to prevent the hordes wanting a green card? Or do you expect the Arabs to suddenly become outright stupid in killing off their biggest customers. If the Qubecans dediced to take over Canada and make war on the Hollywood english, it might be a shock but anyone else has got to first build a navy and space network. What is much more likely (as shown with Australian refugees) is for a major disaster to happen (drough in Mexico, volcano in caribean, etc) and the borders get swamped by panicked survivors (the US social system is not exactly reknown for being robust). Buying a bunch of mobile phones to ward off stealth plane ad-spams to go home is likely to be the least of their worries.
In summary, the stealth concept was to solve a specific problem of penetrating SAM envelops. Creating a defnce against a non-existant threat sounds like a marketing tactic than hard-nosed military thinking. and the US should be more worried about other matters (cough*Kyoto*cough) such as global reputation before junking a valuable asset on the basis of a defense manufacturer with evident self-interests in propagating an arms race.
... if according to this this article they are not willing to sell you the rights to broadcast it outside a secure device in a private home? While it is a little far fetched, as soon as you open the door or blast it out on a trunk-sized ghetto blaster, it could cross the line into a public performance of a recording. It's bad enough having police seize cars for even a scent of a weed but giving radio companies (most likely losers from streaming MP3 car stereos) an excuse to hassle your habits is getting a little rich.
Stuff like Wedgetail (www.wedgetail.com) which supports a subset of a Pulic Key Infrastructure will likely become embedded once the right cost-performance point is reached. Think mobility, fly into an airport, rent/lease a mobile phone, and access your normal documents/email using a smart-card. It would just like a subscription service, possibly even generating random access keys. Sun already supports smart cards for its SunRay applications.
As for open source applications, think what a combination of Kerberos client, PGP, s/key etc on a smart card. Combine with a filesystem that supports multiple levels of security and you offer a graduation of services. If you want, you can even tie a range of personnae into each smart card, have a generic anon@mous for general use but a me@work for more confidential stuff.
Nobody has calimed that MS doesn't have some very asute business minds. There was this article on The Economist a week ago that described that MS did a strategic analysis ofwhat software would be universally required and came up with 7 broad thematic thrusts. While the article didn't say what they were (probably a corporate trade secret), you can expect MS to be formulating their product offerings to extend their dominance into these areas. The tactical concept is very similar to the fact that there are only a few choke points on the high seas and by dominating the technological passes, you can extract gate-keeper fees. It's not just a matter of where you want to go today but see this shiny new tool-road we've erected just for you with an express lane to this strip mall that oh... bypasses that inconvenient and unsightly bazaar.
Unfortunately these are areas which anti-trust laws will find very hard to address as they are not an industry sector (or market as such) but intrinsic to our human nature of interaction. My guess (completely wild-assed) but based on what they're pushing are:
1) Identity (Passport) - most people take their nationality or wider concept of self for granted but this defines your affiliations. Some might even claim you are what you buy in which case your credit card is your life as far as companies are concerned.
2) Memory = smart tags - unless you're Einstein, there is no way of remebering all the interesting bits and pieces. By outsourcing this function to bookmarks, PIDs, or external reminders, you relinquish control over your records and cues. Frankly, given how busy most professionals are, the convenience of someone else offering you a pre-defined sales channel (e.g. travel) is very alluring.
3) Communications - social connectivity. The network effect only works if there is a network. Your address book, your pal email list, your club-membership are all targets. Because most people have learnt to tune out active marketing, direct marketing via inserted/prompted recommendations with friends (cough*Amway*cough) is a less intrusive but more effective mechanism. This IMHO destorys social capital as your level of trust declines if there is a hidden financial consideration (cough*Payola*cough).
4) Learning (Learning Resource Interchange - aka mindshare). Not so much universities but borrowing their perceived authority and historical independence and (supposedly) unbiased opinion. Ubfortunately dogma and doctrine are too easily propagated via this vector, especially if it can reinforce specific habits.
5) Entertainment packaging (MS MEdia) you don't need the content if you have control over the packaging. Afterall, if everything comes in a brown paper bag, do you really worry about the source? Whether it is codecs, IP control, or distribution/usage rights, using a few high profile sites and platforms (cough*Xbox*cough) will bring the rest of the industry flocking to your "standard"
There are probably some others (e.g. financial history but this is closely related to memory). How can laws impact on something which is effectly nebulous such as your habits? Do people realise the risks they are taking when outsourcing their family photo album or exposing their pal-list? (social connections). It is bad enough if individual companies tried dominating each of the above leading to potential monoculturism, but to have a bunch of very very talented people aiming to dominate all these intangibles is a slight matter of concern.
[material excerpted from Alphabet to email by N.S. Baron]
Just to give a historical perspective, around 1550 the stationers (shopkeepers repsonsible for arranging and distributing customer books) received a royal charter for exclusive rights to print editions of registered works. However, the Crown's main intention was a quid-pro-quo where they required the stationers to censor works before printing. Both the Church and State feared proliferation of blasphemous or seditios works with the widespread availability of printing. This monopoly (that no Man shall print any Book or Ballard, unless he be authorised thereunto by the King and Queen's Majesties Licence) led to a century of acts of censorship enforced through the willing complicity of the Stationers.
Historically the only thing authors/playwrights owned was the physical manuscript and originally copyright derived from the exclusive rights associated with producing a fair copy of this manuscript in the printer's possession. Since the traditional stationers and booksellers had a monpoly in printing they kept publishing rights rather than devolving back to author after a period to cover print-runs. However, the licensing act of 1662 for "preventing Abuses in Printing Seditious, Treasonable and Unlicensed Books and Pamphlets and for Regulating of Printing and Printing Presses" lapsed by the end of that century, dissolving the implicit contract between state and book industry. The Statute of Anne (~1710) though essentially a book-sellers bill, was the first legal document where authors got even a brief mention, but at least it recognsed authors as the original holders of rights. Progressively the concept that authors "owned" the original ideas in their heads and words were just descriptive clothing became widely accepted. This was a far cry from medieval era where divine inspiration was considered an expressive gift of god and thus and not controlled by an individual. However, the shift towards private property of published works also implied an obligation of truthfulness or more strictly speaking, authority. In fact, modern book contracts may have clauses asking the author to affirm that the written (non-fiction) text is "truthful". Of course the concept of "truth" can be rather debatable, e.g. with Samuel Johnson in compiling a "definitive" dictionary of English words.
However, though it is easy to "borrow" the gravitas of authority by quoting snippets from famous people and classics. Rearrangement and lack of context cues can quite often prove misleading. Libel, defamation, etc are direct consequences as with the cost of physically printing goes down, the effort is checking and verification goes up. If you look at top-notch journals (e.g. medical) the effort of cross-checking and insistance of independent peer review often meas it can be 2 or more years fore a submitted article gets finally published. Contrast this with the tabloid press and CNN and you can predict the disconnects, especially when you bring such written fluff into one of the most stringent semantic standards and investigatory spotlight of the law. Suffice to say that if truth in advertising and other academic standards (cough*bnchcrafting*cough) were imposed on the popular press, the volume of discourse would probably be significantly reduced. It is a rather tricky situation, when you have so many stages in the production process to ascertain precisely who deliberately (or otherwise) originated a piece of opinion. This may have a rather interesting analogy in GPL works as since you are required to put your name down to affirm copyright, people can trace you back if necessary (cough*sapam*cough). Contrast this with popular press which at times ressemble a gigantic Chinese whisper. Given that a lot of modern crap... err.. brands are built on a reputation (do XYZ to be richer/sexier/famous) then you can see incentives for people controlling the spin. However, you have to be a little careful in applying historical cases as the situation can often be quite different from the basic facts which may resemble modern situations.
Historically before the age of universal education and cheap mass distribution, cultural lore was a stronger basis for "regulating" society than any single dictate. For example, the role of the church in the Middle Ages was definitely (if not deliberately) a mechanism for keeping the peasants under control. For example, if you were feamle and unmarried by a certain age, you could be chastised by shaving your head, wearing a straw plait and being placed outside church gates to be mocked. The power of such social persistence is shown by reflections in the modern world many centuries after the fact that surplus land has ceased to be a major economic factor (as cf retail) by the fact that there are still customs in germany where if you reach 30, your friends drag you outside to the burgher's office (mayor) and you have to stand around until kissed by a virgin of opposite gender! By this standard, a code release every 6 months hardly stacks up:-).
The point I'm trying to make is that every sub-culture has their norms, or alternatively signals which members can recognised each other. ESR points out that hackers in fact do recognised property rights in that they wait for a period when a project has become inactive (abandonment) before forking/refactoring it (with permission of original author if possible). While professions have been built around a single concept, the doctor's Hippocratic Oath, the lawyer's client-attorney priviledge, the Church's core belief in the divinity of XYZ. Each group has strong social punishments for transgression ranging from excommunication to disbarment.
The question for hackers is not which laws or even code can encourage a suitably civilised level of behaviour. One of the West's great triumps is our judicial system which has some very fine granualities, having shifted over the centuries from retributive measures (eye for eye) to punitive (fine) or corrective (community service, etc). What is the computer equivalent of breaking ettiquette (spamming on newsgroup) or undesired economic conduct (spamming)? Denial of service is a rather extreme measure and blacklists tend to be rather heavy handded. Unless you count legal "polite" injunctions, there is a lack of suitable incentives or mild mental refactoring. For example, clubs often have black-balling (where existing members can vote against undesired candidates) but due to the GPL, Linux has no way of white-balling (snow-balling for YuX:-)) people/companies who abuse the concept. USENET can cut off feeds but a system designed to be viral and self-contained retransmission is not exactly a mechanisms to encourage exclusion (as a punishment). In reality, hackers make up too small a segment of the population (developers aside) to exert market force and moral rights (another nifty feature of Australian legistlation) where the architecture (of a web-site) has some say in the long-term design use is not recognised globally.
While it is difficult to "force" a single socio-economic stand onto everyone (cough*.NET*cough) people do need to evolve protective and predictive mechanisms (e.g. IETF RFC) just to function. Transgression against such social norms also needs to be discouraged or at least tolerated if self-contained/self-controlled. Law is only the formal recognition of any such cultural lore (some would claim ossification) and preempting it with half-baked code without understanding the philosophical (cough*RMScough) or social norms is a recipe for mental disconnects (and resulting flouting of said-code/law).
Nobody can deny that MS has some very savvy managers. After cheery picking the high volume desktop applications (despite adobe/PDF, MP3), they are now seeking other high growth markets. The question is will it justify the risks? Plumbing is safe because it is boring plus you need it for every single house plus you don't have the high labor costs of support/maintenance. Copyright (90 year protection) is much better than patent (20 years) and they've already got the distribution channels in place (OEM + Hotmail). The alternative (Enterprise Java Beans) is supported by its competitors but given that destop sales are slowing and MS are pushing C# and consumer toys, it is debateable whether it will enter consumer mainstream (lockout from XBox + control of cable head). In short, with enough control points, MS is in the position of raining on everyone else's parade.
LL
whever two or more people have conflicts (or at the very least differing social goals) then there has to be a resolution process. The IETF have refined their RFC system for multiple vendors to nominate technical "solutions" in a fairly transparent process. The courts have another one for resolving property rights and criminal behaviour.
The problem is that a statutory authority (effectively the address of IP resources) is also trying to act in a commercial role. There is a reason why regulatory/investigation arms of sharemarkets are separate from their operational arm. Another is that when Postel passed away, there wasn't any impartial authority with vision trusted by everyone for an alternative to evolve. For example, in a practical sense there is no scarce resource in the names (once IPv6 comes along). What is missing is someone smart enough to nominate a sensible name scoping extension to the BIND. When the new technological frontiers are interpreted by old rules, there is a serious disconnect with reality. In this case whoever was flogging street addresses for a namespace saw an opportunity to become a virtual real-estate agent. In the quest for an easy buck, the politics was probably not carefully thought out and now you have a situation where enough people are unhappy that mud is continually flying.
Is there a better solution? Well the AARNET was originally isolated islands trying to communicate. There's no reason why the same can't happen when you embed IPv6 subdomains within the wider scheme and have a suitable killer app.
It seems that what we are seeing is that traditional employment practices are becoming increasingly inappropriate for IT work. What people are (or at least traditionally were happy with) was 9-5 for 5-6 years. However, given that a project (e.g. gaming) might require several programmers, artists, UI specialists, modellers, you increasingly need multiple specialists (especially when developing really complex horizontally integrated stuff XFS->CXFS->HSM). There is just no way that a single company can keep all those experts on tap. Instead I forsee increasingly a gen/spec division like doctors where companies focus on immediate goals but second specialist staff onto strategic initiatives. While some people may decry the breakdown between corporate loywalty and personal security. in the longer term, professional societies will evolve that will cater for these highly knowledgeable specialists. Thus while you have medical colleges of XYZ, you will expect to see clusters of IJK, most probably centered around a strong academic research core. While computer complexity has yet to reach the levels of within a cell, sooner or later IT practices will have to become less proprietary (unless you're a market gorilla large enough to have all in-house talent) simply because you'll be falling behind state of the art by not keeping up with your peers.
What will this mean for employment? Well, I suspect that the traditional continuous employment is going to be less of an incentive. Instead people will have a mix of income streams ranging from retainer (emergency response to crisis such as PHB mail-server dying), royalties (software on-sale), and development contracts (companies outsourcing non-core R&D akak paid opensource). If you look at the big motor compnaies, all they do is beat on the component suppliers and integration/design-marketing/lifestyle-branding. Already you are seeing similar differentiation between the computer companies with SGI tragetting scientific-technical/media-broadband, IBM eBusiness, Sun Infrastructure, etc... They in turn (if they are smart) will look at creating contracts, almost like visiting professorship where they invite specialists in to achieve a certain technical goal (paid with combination of cash+options). OpenSource then becomes a way of advertising your skills as once you've gain a reputation in a specific area (e.g. ReisferFS (sp?)) people will know where to go to for improvements.
This is good as I forsee more people in places like India benefiting from this broadening and deeping of the talent pool. Who will lose out (comparatively)? The marketing and management class as there will be less need to create MicroSerfs to reach impossible goals and then trying to flog useless products (*cough*DiVX*cough).
There's nothing new here which hasn't been considered for years in the haptics research community (haptics == feel/touch). Basically it comes down to our neurological wiring... we've trained our brain to accept a certain combination of inputs occuring within a certain time-threshold to be "simulatenous" or help us guage our sense of space/distance. This impacts our motor coordination (close your eyes, stretch out your arm, can you guess how far away it is?). Why can't we hear underwater? Because our ears are tuned to the directional differential in sound reaching separate ears based on the permeability of air. Underwater we don't have the software/(wetware:-)?) to recalibrate so it appears diffuse and non-directional. Motion sickness where the sight of moving objects is in disequilibrium with our inner ear balance is another example. Psychological experiments (your research dollars at work:-)) show that people can tickle themselves if them interpose a variable delay between anticipation (e.g. pushing a button on a feater machine) and the sensation.
Quake is just another domain whether eye-hand coordination is important enough that any perceptual delay seriously screws up our processing unit. Research in graphics, especially VR, indicate that 0.1 delay is esseential for interactivity. Quake as a wanna-be VR experience is starting to hit these issues.
I predict a new wave of jargon including
- Quake-second (fraction of second delay to get fragged)
- Java-minute (amount of compilation needed to fetch/drink can of coke)
- Cray-hour (amount of CPU needed to solve a problem over a lunch break)
One parent I chatted with noted that instead of going out to play with other kids, they were much more likely to become self-absorbed in a computer game. While this may build up some good motor skills (OK expect neuro-surgeons with amazing kinestic coordination), the lack of social interaction (learning how to negotiate, compormise, etc) was distrubing. When it easier to copy (plagerise) than to think, to accept than to question, to spam/flame than to craft a reflective response, then extrapolate to wider society, it makes you think what the next generation will evolve. Already you see situations where people accept evidence of bank statements just because it comes out on a screen than if they went through the effort of checking the outcome. Where people ignore the fine print (e.g. prepaid mobile phone cards disguised as actually an unsecured loan) and outsource your memory (familiy photos hosted on external sites) or rely on hot stock tips instead of creating your own opportunities.
Unfortunately education (aka school of hard knocks) is about learning from your mistakes. The computer is not a nnay, it is not a wise teacher, and it most certainly is not a magical fountain of wisdom. As with all technogical devices, people are finding new social interactions, from MUDs to chatrooms. Dabbling in the cocktail circuit is quit different from a formal acquisition of valuable skills (understanding regular expressions and finite state machines for pattern searching). Mental discipline, inner curiosity and creative energies are traits which can be enahnced, but never replaced by a computer. Any school that considers otherwise is only fooling themselves and their charges. If you really want to learn, go visit another country, ask your parents to read to you at night, volunteer for social programs, discuss world events over dinner, or just randomly select non-fiction books from your library.
Never ever let formal schooling get in the way of an education.
I believe the relationship (w.r.t sports and other lethal matters) can be summed up as
"NZ will fight anyone in the world to be the first to beat Australia"
Great moments of esteem and affection:-) can be found by periodic (every day or so) reference to underarm bowling, west island, etc...
... with the Halloween documents? Because they were copyrighted by Microsoft, he deliberately structured them as commentary (annotations). Given that governments usually release draft versions of bills for public commentary, I would say historical evidence is on their side. The only situation where it might be improper is if they misrepresent the source or deliberately alter the text. What I think people might object to is deliberately copyrighting a document with the intent of never releaseing it (ie using the legal protection as a tax-payer supported veil) or barrier to revision. In this case whistle-bblower or anti-competition legistlation might take precendence.
The other approach is to treat the passed law as a fact. Sports commentary have established that a fact is common/public (though the database schema can be protected) and decomposing the document as a series of legal facts and rearranging hte order (sorted by relevance) might be another way around it.
When the spirit of the law gets twisted by the letter, then it is time to start worrying about the system. A tyrancy of compelled behaviour (whether criminal case, civil code or ecnomic conduct) is no less for being promoted by a group than a dictator. Given that special interests are much more motivated to pass/support/write bad legistlation, it seems that greater transparency is needed, not less.
You're not refering to the unified memory model are you? The concept was valid but only a small portion of people would use streaming video continuously. Given that latency caused issues in the other 95% of tasks (compilation etc), then the trade-offs was not worth it.
If you wanted to process video off a server or have continuous video streaming overlay on textures, an O2 was perfect... but not otherwise.
email! Seriously, because this encourages asynchronous activities and so long as you can embed links to a web-site containing the uplaoded work. However, if you are looking for specific code, google Groupkit, NCSA Habanero (sp?), and NPACI scientific workbenches (still under dev). My observation is that there is a wide gap between what is state of the art (effectively compsci R&D) and what is widely used. You are much more likely to find shared tools amongs projects such as genome markup/annotation, community weather model, etcs... anywahere which there is a shared common task and people cna break it down into smaller parts. Generic conferencing tools tend to be inadequately utilitarian compared with their setup and learning costs.
Identify the tasks, then give your tools and help them refine what they want.
Sony, MS, Fox and who know what other 800 pound market gorilla knows that the console is the key digital well-head into the home as whoever controls the entry point, controls the gate and thus has a high degree of influence as to the network entry point. Whehter Fox with its satellite console, Sony with its consumer edutainment box, or MS with its PC-centric Xbox want to get their foot in the door and leverage that wide open as much as possible to get a slice of the transaction stream.
Licensing a category killer is a lower risk approach than actually trying something innovative (CD carpet bombing... hey it worked!) as once you've got a repeat customer base (whether MechWarrior or Matrix), then you can offer access to "partners" to cross-sell products and services. This is the difference between buying a mailbox and leasing a post-office private bag. Why should you outsource your communications, Guess which you have more control over? MSNBC wants interaction and multiplayer rights on the Internet as its a lower cost distribution channel (in terms of capital expended to build an addictive buyer). And MSNBC is not unique as every other content provider wants to do the same (cough*Netscape-AOL/FoxSports*cough).
As the Russians found out with their fighter planes, it's not the airframe which is important but the electronics and software. Ditto for the hardware entry point which is why MS is using its PC experience of controlling the APIs to reimpose their vision onto game developers.
These horizontally integrated companies are going to be a royal challenge for competitors.
What makes people tick? (in the sense of why choose a particular course of action). If we take a leaf out of the spy business, money is actually one of the least effective motivators. GNU appeals to ideology of "free software" whereas ESR notes the power of the ego in scratching an itch. Example of conviction motivated work (citatioation anyone?) was hersay about someone who released some gee-whiz tools (implmeneted nearly single-handedly) just for genomic analysis purely because he didn't want the for-profit group to do it first and fence off that intellectual common. Looking at this example shows the destructive tendences of choosing a task for the wrong reason (stock options + geek-lek comparison with superstar programmer).
One thing you have to admire about Bill Gates is his ability to motivate a bunch of geeks. Yes, it is possible to produce a bunker mentality (cough*North Korea*cough) and studies have shown that you can accomplish superhuman feats. However, our psychology is not designed to be running in war-zone 24 hours a day. There are reasons why troops are rotated out. The problem is that complex software often requires really convoluted linkages and the optimal unit for holding it is one brain. However smart you are, you have a finit working memory unless you encode stuff at higher abstractions (one of the tricks mathsmatics train you). This leads to dimishing returns in that to progress software (shorter release cycles) more work can only be accomplished by concentrating the thinking into a smaller group of people which naturally leads to burn-out. So managers have to continually come up with tricks or one-upmanship to motivatae the microserfs to stay committed... whether stock options, coolness factor, kudos or just appeal to ego, increasing use of these psychological tricks is likely to be an indicator of dysfunctional companies. One prof once said that the difference between normal engineering and software engineering is that you can look at a bridge design and say you can't build it in 90 days with 6 people but customers expect otherwise with software (even though the complexity may be equivalent).
So given the horror stories and even web-sites describing the non-living (former employeees of Intetel, Amazon, Microserf, etc), why do people continue to act this way? Why become an economic slave for an absentee landlord (Wall Street sentiment)? How many talents will leave the industry because their bodies can't handle the stress? What is so difficult about the software industry that it eats up people like this?
What is driving this change is the shrinking cost of storage, and subsequent improvement in bandwidth, both of which significantly reduces search costs. Traditionally in any media enterprise it was economical to archive all the masters and intermediate processing steps internally. Given the 90 years + life of author of artistic works, it made sense for companies to recycle old recordings and push recompilations rather than going through the hassle of actually supporting existing artists. The internet makes this store and forward model (record and broadcast for mass media) less attractive as compared with a publish and subscribe model. Unfortunately many businesses are in incredible debt due to buying up large content houses and they are seeing the value (and thus shareholder support) erode due to this fundamental shift in the economic landscape (P2P matcheses personal tastes better than radio). So Caute-like they are busily erecting legal sandcastles and counter-flooding the trenches in the hope that their exclusive hold (and subsequent control) on the store and fetch paradigm can be retained.
However, those people with a half-a-clue are realising that alternative distribution models exists as software moves the relative power back to the artists and performers away from promoters and managers (unless they consolidate their distirbution channels and demand payola aka gateway fees). So what is likely to happen? I nthe long run you'll probably see more variety and different intermediatories but in the short term, its likely to be a scorched earth policy with ISPs being in the front line trenches squeezed between content holders (who want to pass the cost of enforcement onto someone else... e.g. public law) and communications infrastructure providers who want to extract every last cent from providing bandwidth. In short the mom and pop UUCP and message boards are going to disappear as they don't have the intellectual or financial firepower to survive the coming firestorm (MS.NET initiative notwithstanding).
Note that this is not new. Whenever a scarce resource becomes cheap, whoever's interest buildt on faulty assumptions starts screaming. For example, when radio stations were limited in NZ several decades ago, some entrepreneurs put raio masts on a ship outside the nautical exclusion zones and beamed "pirate" broadcsts inland. The internet is even easier as the infrastructure is outside the immediate juristiction and you cannot restrict people moving around except through controlling their access software (cough*AOL-AIM*cough).
Maybe, just maybe, companies will actually support grass-roots artistic development instead of flogging over-hyped teenage boppers or overpriced dead rockers. On the other hand, cynics would note that money talks, bullshit walks.
Essentially the mouse has 2.5 degrees of freedom (relative x,y + activate mouse). A stylus is absolute x,y + tap code (morse code?) There are other devices which goes up to 6 (3D + twist, turn, roll). However this basically mirrors the major axes of your forearm. Imagine extending your forearm away from chest clenching a fist and moving or rotating the fist. Some other devices (e.g. wand) have been invented to mirror broad gestures but I don't think the tech is quite there yet to do real-time sign language which relies on alignment/spacing of the fingers. The problem is as always software applications which can recognise the gestures. Anywhich which is 2.5 degrees can be adapted to map to a mouse based input but you are really limiting yourself once you go to higher degrees of freedom. It would be easier to work out the complexity of the system you want to control, then work out the dimensions you can partition it into, then work out the type of device which best suits your needs. Note that even a high-end stylus can add extra levels of complexity such as angle, pressure, acceleration... think caligraphy. The other factor is human support in that it is tiring to continously hold up your pinkie all the time. Tricks are to mount any coordinate device on something like glasses or helmet.
... is to see whether your employor is willing to subsidise (partially) to cost of further education. Many universities, especially distance education, would support Open Source projects as it is in their interests to rely on something non-proprietary. Given that any work undertaken is for non-profit educational use (building up your skills), it would be difficult for the company to claim any IP. Any cutting-edge research is likely to be so complicated that it would be covered in a seaparate contract. Despite arsDigita startup mode of 12x6 hour working weeks, no company can sustain a bunker mentality forever and there are likely to be periods of slack/cash-flow poor where there's just not enough work. Using the university system as a buffer to soak up the dead-time without going through the disruption and expense of head-hunting . Better still choose a place/project that even the most hard-nosed corporate lawyer will admit has zero commercial bearing (e.g. SETI) and they'd be less liable to argue the point. What you are talking about here is a corporate culture change and those take time.
Can people nominate distant-learning unis which are both technically excellent and support OSS development?
Perhaps we need some better distinction between the boundaries of our personal space and other humans. Privacy is a rather broad term, perhaps we need to think about what the definition is. To take an example, consider a hypothetical 4 stage division
- Personal (I) - inner beliefs, personality, DNA
- Private (C) - habits, likes/dislikes,
- Profile (B) - perferences, purchases
- Public (P) - wider society, politics
So far the eCommerce hype has been focusing on B2C and B2B. However, I suspect that what people are (rightly or wrongly) concerned about is the invasion of the I space and the contamination of the P space. Psychologists note that we we form the major precepts of our identy by late teens/early 20s. As kids, most of us have that isolated playhouse, the hidden cave, or that secret garden where we imagine the world as it could be. As adults, we are rightly concerned about overbearing laws and corruption of the politcal process. As consumers we have learned to negotiate or establish natural boundaries. we don't expect religious institutions to be flogging indulgances (B2I) for sale (cough*Scientology*cough) or desire friendships (I-I) to be colored by pecuniary factors (cough*Amway*cough). With IT we can try to codify some of the interactions (think information waveguides), for example motor vehicle registration where you have to accept responsibility for personal care of a dangerous ton of metal and explosions in a public space. But for someone to use that and influence/divine your B2C behaviour is what we object to. Similarly doctor-patient reationship (P2I) is not something most want to leak into the B-space.
People forget that before our Western concept of civil laws (slowly replaced by commercial lures), we had social lores which were a tribe way of minimising social friction. The legal system is still a codification of social codes (along with economic incentives) which are proving to be increasingly imperfect as more splinter groups object to over-broad provisions. The concept of privacy which was evolved for P2I matters (freedom from trump charges corpus habeus?), torture, self-expression are not keeping up with technology as the I-C-B-P space fragments and wierd combinations undermine traditional assumptions. If you read Lessig books, you'd understand that the concept of privacy as interpreted by courts has morphed over the decades.
In short, the world is becoming a little bit more complex so you're probably seeing new intermeiatories forming (data aggregators, accumulators, agents) forming between B2C plus others (e.g. grass-roots lobby groups (astroturf campaigns notwithstanding) are just I2P intermeiatories. Once we think about it, you can probably be more precise in what you can define as privacy.
An official from the Australian Competitive Commission (???) once said that their job was to ensure n+1 companies existed in any market where n was defined to be the minimum necessary for a stable system. The general rule of thumb seems to be around 5+/-2 mega providers with a host of niche specialists. As Murdoch once noted, the only way to make money is to own both the content and control the distribution mechanism. Some groups cough*MS*cough) seem to concenetrate just fine on the control aspects so long as they can restrict the content providers.
What media representatives are forgetting is that people are quite able to create their own forms of amusement and reality distorting fields. With software and half-decent hardware you can blend your own tracks, publish your own local rag, and propagate generic gossip on your personal grapevine. People have always been able to practice their own instruments and can exist quite independently of external providers. The NGOs have shown it is possible to exert pressure independent of governments and political activists hav ebeen enobled by the internet. I believe figures are showing a drop in total hours of TV watched as people substitute the net (reference anyone?).
Sometimes you just have to have faith that the invisible hand will self-correct.
Can you care to nominate some examples? Generating UIs on the fly? VR? Voice activation? Has cosmocode (or whatever new label) or Eazel really offer such as compelling advantage that people are willing to pay a premium (whether price or CPU wise) for their supposedly non-tedious or non-traditional approaches? As others have reasoned, the cost of unlearning QWERTY (or whatever your GUI equivalent is) is not worth the advantages of changing over to an alternative once a technology is widely adopted, suboptimal as it may be. That has always been a trap that coders have fallen into, in supposing we can dictate what the unwashed masses want. It is really hard to come up with GUI features that are met with universal popular acclaim so if you have any superior insight, please enlighten the rest of us.
Perhaps a less emotionally laden phrase would be cherry picking? TV production is a very very long chain of events from the script writerrs to the actors to the distribution. Basically baby-boomer execs are trying to guess at shows that will appeal from kids to granniess (of course their kids and grannies). Naturally, this means that you get the odd dud or million (if you think US is bad look at C grades in 3rd world countries). Now being the pragmatic capitalists the studios are, they like to pass off the sunk costs of failures onto the consumer (shock, horror, you don't expect their shareholders to take the risk do you?) so that means that when they offer a good show, they suggest (OK arm-twist) the distributor to also take some crappy failure. Now given finite bandwidth and cable connections, you have to squeeze as much ad revenue out of the system as possible which means that Tivo which puts the slection back onto the consumer bypasses the crud. Hence by picking the killer-franchises, the cross-subsidies become rather glaringly obvious. Problem, quality costs which is why cheap reality-TV is being pushed. A small niche outfit can make a killing by being better targetted which means the biggies have to take it out to avoid losing a captive audience.
I think mainstream media is reaching the point of diminishing returns which is usually indicated by a wave of mergers and acqusitions. What I expect to see now is virtual actors replacing overpaid celluoid celebrities, more reliance on the public to provide their own material (which the studies kindly grant you a spotlight of 15 minutes fame), and more onerous licensing terms as they try to improve their return on footage by flogging anything and everything (cough*Planet Hollywood*cough) starting with reputation (cough*WWF*cough) and morals (though some might claim that was lost long ago).
Stealing is a bit harsh but the reality is that people don't (or more accurately) can't pay $1K to watch a hour of quality production. Street theatre, OK but there's not the same variety of choice unless you live in a big big city.
Slashdot Mirror
Not to denigrate his efforts ... it's just that some business entities prefer a less risky (from their point of view ... I'm not claiming it is any more or less valid) process than relying on an individual (single point of failure). Historically this was illustrated by Postel's untimely passing away which some would say let some undeserving groups seize control of the Internet domain names in the transition. Similarly markets get very nervous about companies which don't have a successor policy for their key executives. While OSS projects do benefit from benevolent dictators, even entire city-states (e.g. Lee clan in Singapore), in general it is hard to guarentee a consistent level of performance across long-timer period or even multiple generations (cough*US presidency*cough). However, in this case, given the relatively small size of Australia, I would find it hard to see where a committee/board/bureau would have any significant advantages over a single technically competent individual (apart from having some way of accessing their memories for prosterity). In some ways, a compromise might be to offer to fund an apprentice (padawan?) to help document his policies for greater transparency and generally record the historical underpinnings.
LL
... just to remind people why stealth was originally developed. The Soviet tactics was to advance their tanks underneath a SAM umbrella (c.f. 6 day war, etc). The stealth concept was to reduce radar cross-section and turn the overlapping fields of acquisition radars into more point-sources. This was to enable the US AirLand attack concept where you strike simultaneously at targets in the rear. e.g. if you expect a major tank tank in n days, you hit their reinforcements at n-1 day, their air support at n-0.5 day, etc ... The stealth aircraft are not wonder woman invisible planes, designed to penetrate high urban density regions (use cruise missiles for those). Mobile C3I posts yes ..., deep surprise raids OK, maybe some photo-reconaisance. Trying to enter a firezone ... most definitionly NO as they're subsonic and would be toast for any interceptor squadron with look-down/up radar. Any idiot wanting to use their stealth fighters as CNN cannon fodder (flying down streets to wow armchair generals) should be court martialed (3rd world countries with no tech (cough*sudan*cough) excepted). Now that the emphasis is moving towards infowar, expect to see stealth applied to small semi-intelligent observation planes. Afterall, if you can see a target you can usually nuke/gass/bomb it.
... who in the world wants to pick a fight with the US? Are you expecting the chinese to row across the pacific (bypassing Hawaii with a non-existant blue-water carrier fleet)just to prevent the hordes wanting a green card? Or do you expect the Arabs to suddenly become outright stupid in killing off their biggest customers. If the Qubecans dediced to take over Canada and make war on the Hollywood english, it might be a shock but anyone else has got to first build a navy and space network. What is much more likely (as shown with Australian refugees) is for a major disaster to happen (drough in Mexico, volcano in caribean, etc) and the borders get swamped by panicked survivors (the US social system is not exactly reknown for being robust). Buying a bunch of mobile phones to ward off stealth plane ad-spams to go home is likely to be the least of their worries.
Realistically
In summary, the stealth concept was to solve a specific problem of penetrating SAM envelops. Creating a defnce against a non-existant threat sounds like a marketing tactic than hard-nosed military thinking. and the US should be more worried about other matters (cough*Kyoto*cough) such as global reputation before junking a valuable asset on the basis of a defense manufacturer with evident self-interests in propagating an arms race.
LL
LL
Stuff like Wedgetail (www.wedgetail.com) which supports a subset of a Pulic Key Infrastructure will likely become embedded once the right cost-performance point is reached. Think mobility, fly into an airport, rent/lease a mobile phone, and access your normal documents/email using a smart-card. It would just like a subscription service, possibly even generating random access keys. Sun already supports smart cards for its SunRay applications.
As for open source applications, think what a combination of Kerberos client, PGP, s/key etc on a smart card. Combine with a filesystem that supports multiple levels of security and you offer a graduation of services. If you want, you can even tie a range of personnae into each smart card, have a generic anon@mous for general use but a me@work for more confidential stuff.
LL
Nobody has calimed that MS doesn't have some very asute business minds. There was this article on The Economist a week ago that described that MS did a strategic analysis ofwhat software would be universally required and came up with 7 broad thematic thrusts. While the article didn't say what they were (probably a corporate trade secret), you can expect MS to be formulating their product offerings to extend their dominance into these areas. The tactical concept is very similar to the fact that there are only a few choke points on the high seas and by dominating the technological passes, you can extract gate-keeper fees. It's not just a matter of where you want to go today but see this shiny new tool-road we've erected just for you with an express lane to this strip mall that oh ... bypasses that inconvenient and unsightly bazaar.
Unfortunately these are areas which anti-trust laws will find very hard to address as they are not an industry sector (or market as such) but intrinsic to our human nature of interaction. My guess (completely wild-assed) but based on what they're pushing are:
1) Identity (Passport) - most people take their nationality or wider concept of self for granted but this defines your affiliations. Some might even claim you are what you buy in which case your credit card is your life as far as companies are concerned.
2) Memory = smart tags - unless you're Einstein, there is no way of remebering all the interesting bits and pieces. By outsourcing this function to bookmarks, PIDs, or external reminders, you relinquish control over your records and cues. Frankly, given how busy most professionals are, the convenience of someone else offering you a pre-defined sales channel (e.g. travel) is very alluring.
3) Communications - social connectivity. The network effect only works if there is a network. Your address book, your pal email list, your club-membership are all targets. Because most people have learnt to tune out active marketing, direct marketing via inserted/prompted recommendations with friends (cough*Amway*cough) is a less intrusive but more effective mechanism. This IMHO destorys social capital as your level of trust declines if there is a hidden financial consideration (cough*Payola*cough).
4) Learning (Learning Resource Interchange - aka mindshare). Not so much universities but borrowing their perceived authority and historical independence and (supposedly) unbiased opinion. Ubfortunately dogma and doctrine are too easily propagated via this vector, especially if it can reinforce specific habits.
5) Entertainment packaging (MS MEdia) you don't need the content if you have control over the packaging. Afterall, if everything comes in a brown paper bag, do you really worry about the source? Whether it is codecs, IP control, or distribution/usage rights, using a few high profile sites and platforms (cough*Xbox*cough) will bring the rest of the industry flocking to your "standard"
There are probably some others (e.g. financial history but this is closely related to memory). How can laws impact on something which is effectly nebulous such as your habits? Do people realise the risks they are taking when outsourcing their family photo album or exposing their pal-list? (social connections). It is bad enough if individual companies tried dominating each of the above leading to potential monoculturism, but to have a bunch of very very talented people aiming to dominate all these intangibles is a slight matter of concern.
LL
[material excerpted from Alphabet to email by N.S. Baron]
... err.. brands are built on a reputation (do XYZ to be richer/sexier/famous) then you can see incentives for people controlling the spin. However, you have to be a little careful in applying historical cases as the situation can often be quite different from the basic facts which may resemble modern situations.
...
Just to give a historical perspective, around 1550 the stationers (shopkeepers repsonsible for arranging and distributing customer books) received a royal charter for exclusive rights to print editions of registered works. However, the Crown's main intention was a quid-pro-quo where they required the stationers to censor works before printing. Both the Church and State feared proliferation of blasphemous or seditios works with the widespread availability of printing. This monopoly (that no Man shall print any Book or Ballard, unless he be authorised thereunto by the King and Queen's Majesties Licence) led to a century of acts of censorship enforced through the willing complicity of the Stationers.
Historically the only thing authors/playwrights owned was the physical manuscript and originally copyright derived from the exclusive rights associated with producing a fair copy of this manuscript in the printer's possession. Since the traditional stationers and booksellers had a monpoly in printing they kept publishing rights rather than devolving back to author after a period to cover print-runs. However, the licensing act of 1662 for "preventing Abuses in Printing Seditious, Treasonable and Unlicensed Books and Pamphlets and for Regulating of Printing and Printing Presses" lapsed by the end of that century, dissolving the implicit contract between state and book industry. The Statute of Anne (~1710) though essentially a book-sellers bill, was the first legal document where authors got even a brief mention, but at least it recognsed authors as the original holders of rights. Progressively the concept that authors "owned" the original ideas in their heads and words were just descriptive clothing became widely accepted. This was a far cry from medieval era where divine inspiration was considered an expressive gift of god and thus and not controlled by an individual. However, the shift towards private property of published works also implied an obligation of truthfulness or more strictly speaking, authority. In fact, modern book contracts may have clauses asking the author to affirm that the written (non-fiction) text is "truthful". Of course the concept of "truth" can be rather debatable, e.g. with Samuel Johnson in compiling a "definitive" dictionary of English words.
However, though it is easy to "borrow" the gravitas of authority by quoting snippets from famous people and classics. Rearrangement and lack of context cues can quite often prove misleading. Libel, defamation, etc are direct consequences as with the cost of physically printing goes down, the effort is checking and verification goes up. If you look at top-notch journals (e.g. medical) the effort of cross-checking and insistance of independent peer review often meas it can be 2 or more years fore a submitted article gets finally published. Contrast this with the tabloid press and CNN and you can predict the disconnects, especially when you bring such written fluff into one of the most stringent semantic standards and investigatory spotlight of the law. Suffice to say that if truth in advertising and other academic standards (cough*bnchcrafting*cough) were imposed on the popular press, the volume of discourse would probably be significantly reduced. It is a rather tricky situation, when you have so many stages in the production process to ascertain precisely who deliberately (or otherwise) originated a piece of opinion. This may have a rather interesting analogy in GPL works as since you are required to put your name down to affirm copyright, people can trace you back if necessary (cough*sapam*cough). Contrast this with popular press which at times ressemble a gigantic Chinese whisper. Given that a lot of modern crap
Enough blabbing for now
LL
Historically before the age of universal education and cheap mass distribution, cultural lore was a stronger basis for "regulating" society than any single dictate. For example, the role of the church in the Middle Ages was definitely (if not deliberately) a mechanism for keeping the peasants under control. For example, if you were feamle and unmarried by a certain age, you could be chastised by shaving your head, wearing a straw plait and being placed outside church gates to be mocked. The power of such social persistence is shown by reflections in the modern world many centuries after the fact that surplus land has ceased to be a major economic factor (as cf retail) by the fact that there are still customs in germany where if you reach 30, your friends drag you outside to the burgher's office (mayor) and you have to stand around until kissed by a virgin of opposite gender! By this standard, a code release every 6 months hardly stacks up :-).
:-)) people/companies who abuse the concept. USENET can cut off feeds but a system designed to be viral and self-contained retransmission is not exactly a mechanisms to encourage exclusion (as a punishment). In reality, hackers make up too small a segment of the population (developers aside) to exert market force and moral rights (another nifty feature of Australian legistlation) where the architecture (of a web-site) has some say in the long-term design use is not recognised globally.
The point I'm trying to make is that every sub-culture has their norms, or alternatively signals which members can recognised each other. ESR points out that hackers in fact do recognised property rights in that they wait for a period when a project has become inactive (abandonment) before forking/refactoring it (with permission of original author if possible). While professions have been built around a single concept, the doctor's Hippocratic Oath, the lawyer's client-attorney priviledge, the Church's core belief in the divinity of XYZ. Each group has strong social punishments for transgression ranging from excommunication to disbarment.
The question for hackers is not which laws or even code can encourage a suitably civilised level of behaviour. One of the West's great triumps is our judicial system which has some very fine granualities, having shifted over the centuries from retributive measures (eye for eye) to punitive (fine) or corrective (community service, etc). What is the computer equivalent of breaking ettiquette (spamming on newsgroup) or undesired economic conduct (spamming)? Denial of service is a rather extreme measure and blacklists tend to be rather heavy handded. Unless you count legal "polite" injunctions, there is a lack of suitable incentives or mild mental refactoring. For example, clubs often have black-balling (where existing members can vote against undesired candidates) but due to the GPL, Linux has no way of white-balling (snow-balling for YuX
While it is difficult to "force" a single socio-economic stand onto everyone (cough*.NET*cough) people do need to evolve protective and predictive mechanisms (e.g. IETF RFC) just to function. Transgression against such social norms also needs to be discouraged or at least tolerated if self-contained/self-controlled. Law is only the formal recognition of any such cultural lore (some would claim ossification) and preempting it with half-baked code without understanding the philosophical (cough*RMScough) or social norms is a recipe for mental disconnects (and resulting flouting of said-code/law).
LL
Nobody can deny that MS has some very savvy managers. After cheery picking the high volume desktop applications (despite adobe/PDF, MP3), they are now seeking other high growth markets. The question is will it justify the risks? Plumbing is safe because it is boring plus you need it for every single house plus you don't have the high labor costs of support/maintenance. Copyright (90 year protection) is much better than patent (20 years) and they've already got the distribution channels in place (OEM + Hotmail). The alternative (Enterprise Java Beans) is supported by its competitors but given that destop sales are slowing and MS are pushing C# and consumer toys, it is debateable whether it will enter consumer mainstream (lockout from XBox + control of cable head). In short, with enough control points, MS is in the position of raining on everyone else's parade. LL
whever two or more people have conflicts (or at the very least differing social goals) then there has to be a resolution process. The IETF have refined their RFC system for multiple vendors to nominate technical "solutions" in a fairly transparent process. The courts have another one for resolving property rights and criminal behaviour.
The problem is that a statutory authority (effectively the address of IP resources) is also trying to act in a commercial role. There is a reason why regulatory/investigation arms of sharemarkets are separate from their operational arm. Another is that when Postel passed away, there wasn't any impartial authority with vision trusted by everyone for an alternative to evolve. For example, in a practical sense there is no scarce resource in the names (once IPv6 comes along). What is missing is someone smart enough to nominate a sensible name scoping extension to the BIND. When the new technological frontiers are interpreted by old rules, there is a serious disconnect with reality. In this case whoever was flogging street addresses for a namespace saw an opportunity to become a virtual real-estate agent. In the quest for an easy buck, the politics was probably not carefully thought out and now you have a situation where enough people are unhappy that mud is continually flying.
Is there a better solution? Well the AARNET was originally isolated islands trying to communicate. There's no reason why the same can't happen when you embed IPv6 subdomains within the wider scheme and have a suitable killer app.
LL
It seems that what we are seeing is that traditional employment practices are becoming increasingly inappropriate for IT work. What people are (or at least traditionally were happy with) was 9-5 for 5-6 years. However, given that a project (e.g. gaming) might require several programmers, artists, UI specialists, modellers, you increasingly need multiple specialists (especially when developing really complex horizontally integrated stuff XFS->CXFS->HSM). There is just no way that a single company can keep all those experts on tap. Instead I forsee increasingly a gen/spec division like doctors where companies focus on immediate goals but second specialist staff onto strategic initiatives. While some people may decry the breakdown between corporate loywalty and personal security. in the longer term, professional societies will evolve that will cater for these highly knowledgeable specialists. Thus while you have medical colleges of XYZ, you will expect to see clusters of IJK, most probably centered around a strong academic research core. While computer complexity has yet to reach the levels of within a cell, sooner or later IT practices will have to become less proprietary (unless you're a market gorilla large enough to have all in-house talent) simply because you'll be falling behind state of the art by not keeping up with your peers.
... They in turn (if they are smart) will look at creating contracts, almost like visiting professorship where they invite specialists in to achieve a certain technical goal (paid with combination of cash+options). OpenSource then becomes a way of advertising your skills as once you've gain a reputation in a specific area (e.g. ReisferFS (sp?)) people will know where to go to for improvements.
What will this mean for employment? Well, I suspect that the traditional continuous employment is going to be less of an incentive. Instead people will have a mix of income streams ranging from retainer (emergency response to crisis such as PHB mail-server dying), royalties (software on-sale), and development contracts (companies outsourcing non-core R&D akak paid opensource). If you look at the big motor compnaies, all they do is beat on the component suppliers and integration/design-marketing/lifestyle-branding. Already you are seeing similar differentiation between the computer companies with SGI tragetting scientific-technical/media-broadband, IBM eBusiness, Sun Infrastructure, etc
This is good as I forsee more people in places like India benefiting from this broadening and deeping of the talent pool. Who will lose out (comparatively)? The marketing and management class as there will be less need to create MicroSerfs to reach impossible goals and then trying to flog useless products (*cough*DiVX*cough).
LL
There's nothing new here which hasn't been considered for years in the haptics research community (haptics == feel/touch). Basically it comes down to our neurological wiring ... we've trained our brain to accept a certain combination of inputs occuring within a certain time-threshold to be "simulatenous" or help us guage our sense of space/distance. This impacts our motor coordination (close your eyes, stretch out your arm, can you guess how far away it is?). Why can't we hear underwater? Because our ears are tuned to the directional differential in sound reaching separate ears based on the permeability of air. Underwater we don't have the software/(wetware :-)?) to recalibrate so it appears diffuse and non-directional. Motion sickness where the sight of moving objects is in disequilibrium with our inner ear balance is another example. Psychological experiments (your research dollars at work :-)) show that people can tickle themselves if them interpose a variable delay between anticipation (e.g. pushing a button on a feater machine) and the sensation.
Quake is just another domain whether eye-hand coordination is important enough that any perceptual delay seriously screws up our processing unit. Research in graphics, especially VR, indicate that 0.1 delay is esseential for interactivity. Quake as a wanna-be VR experience is starting to hit these issues.
I predict a new wave of jargon including
- Quake-second (fraction of second delay to get fragged)
- Java-minute (amount of compilation needed to fetch/drink can of coke)
- Cray-hour (amount of CPU needed to solve a problem over a lunch break)
LL
One parent I chatted with noted that instead of going out to play with other kids, they were much more likely to become self-absorbed in a computer game. While this may build up some good motor skills (OK expect neuro-surgeons with amazing kinestic coordination), the lack of social interaction (learning how to negotiate, compormise, etc) was distrubing. When it easier to copy (plagerise) than to think, to accept than to question, to spam/flame than to craft a reflective response, then extrapolate to wider society, it makes you think what the next generation will evolve. Already you see situations where people accept evidence of bank statements just because it comes out on a screen than if they went through the effort of checking the outcome. Where people ignore the fine print (e.g. prepaid mobile phone cards disguised as actually an unsecured loan) and outsource your memory (familiy photos hosted on external sites) or rely on hot stock tips instead of creating your own opportunities.
Unfortunately education (aka school of hard knocks) is about learning from your mistakes. The computer is not a nnay, it is not a wise teacher, and it most certainly is not a magical fountain of wisdom. As with all technogical devices, people are finding new social interactions, from MUDs to chatrooms. Dabbling in the cocktail circuit is quit different from a formal acquisition of valuable skills (understanding regular expressions and finite state machines for pattern searching). Mental discipline, inner curiosity and creative energies are traits which can be enahnced, but never replaced by a computer. Any school that considers otherwise is only fooling themselves and their charges. If you really want to learn, go visit another country, ask your parents to read to you at night, volunteer for social programs, discuss world events over dinner, or just randomly select non-fiction books from your library.
Never ever let formal schooling get in the way of an education.
LL
I believe the relationship (w.r.t sports and other lethal matters) can be summed up as
:-) can be found by periodic (every day or so) reference to underarm bowling, west island, etc ...
"NZ will fight anyone in the world to be the first to beat Australia"
Great moments of esteem and affection
LL
The other approach is to treat the passed law as a fact. Sports commentary have established that a fact is common/public (though the database schema can be protected) and decomposing the document as a series of legal facts and rearranging hte order (sorted by relevance) might be another way around it.
When the spirit of the law gets twisted by the letter, then it is time to start worrying about the system. A tyrancy of compelled behaviour (whether criminal case, civil code or ecnomic conduct) is no less for being promoted by a group than a dictator. Given that special interests are much more motivated to pass/support/write bad legistlation, it seems that greater transparency is needed, not less.
Quid custodit ipsos custodes?
LL
You're not refering to the unified memory model are you? The concept was valid but only a small portion of people would use streaming video continuously. Given that latency caused issues in the other 95% of tasks (compilation etc), then the trade-offs was not worth it.
... but not otherwise.
If you wanted to process video off a server or have continuous video streaming overlay on textures, an O2 was perfect
LL
email! Seriously, because this encourages asynchronous activities and so long as you can embed links to a web-site containing the uplaoded work. However, if you are looking for specific code, google Groupkit, NCSA Habanero (sp?), and NPACI scientific workbenches (still under dev). My observation is that there is a wide gap between what is state of the art (effectively compsci R&D) and what is widely used. You are much more likely to find shared tools amongs projects such as genome markup/annotation, community weather model, etcs ... anywahere which there is a shared common task and people cna break it down into smaller parts. Generic conferencing tools tend to be inadequately utilitarian compared with their setup and learning costs.
Identify the tasks, then give your tools and help them refine what they want.
LL
Sony, MS, Fox and who know what other 800 pound market gorilla knows that the console is the key digital well-head into the home as whoever controls the entry point, controls the gate and thus has a high degree of influence as to the network entry point. Whehter Fox with its satellite console, Sony with its consumer edutainment box, or MS with its PC-centric Xbox want to get their foot in the door and leverage that wide open as much as possible to get a slice of the transaction stream.
... hey it worked!) as once you've got a repeat customer base (whether MechWarrior or Matrix), then you can offer access to "partners" to cross-sell products and services. This is the difference between buying a mailbox and leasing a post-office private bag. Why should you outsource your communications, Guess which you have more control over? MSNBC wants interaction and multiplayer rights on the Internet as its a lower cost distribution channel (in terms of capital expended to build an addictive buyer). And MSNBC is not unique as every other content provider wants to do the same (cough*Netscape-AOL/FoxSports*cough).
Licensing a category killer is a lower risk approach than actually trying something innovative (CD carpet bombing
As the Russians found out with their fighter planes, it's not the airframe which is important but the electronics and software. Ditto for the hardware entry point which is why MS is using its PC experience of controlling the APIs to reimpose their vision onto game developers.
These horizontally integrated companies are going to be a royal challenge for competitors.
LL
What makes people tick? (in the sense of why choose a particular course of action). If we take a leaf out of the spy business, money is actually one of the least effective motivators. GNU appeals to ideology of "free software" whereas ESR notes the power of the ego in scratching an itch. Example of conviction motivated work (citatioation anyone?) was hersay about someone who released some gee-whiz tools (implmeneted nearly single-handedly) just for genomic analysis purely because he didn't want the for-profit group to do it first and fence off that intellectual common. Looking at this example shows the destructive tendences of choosing a task for the wrong reason (stock options + geek-lek comparison with superstar programmer).
... whether stock options, coolness factor, kudos or just appeal to ego, increasing use of these psychological tricks is likely to be an indicator of dysfunctional companies. One prof once said that the difference between normal engineering and software engineering is that you can look at a bridge design and say you can't build it in 90 days with 6 people but customers expect otherwise with software (even though the complexity may be equivalent).
One thing you have to admire about Bill Gates is his ability to motivate a bunch of geeks. Yes, it is possible to produce a bunker mentality (cough*North Korea*cough) and studies have shown that you can accomplish superhuman feats. However, our psychology is not designed to be running in war-zone 24 hours a day. There are reasons why troops are rotated out. The problem is that complex software often requires really convoluted linkages and the optimal unit for holding it is one brain. However smart you are, you have a finit working memory unless you encode stuff at higher abstractions (one of the tricks mathsmatics train you). This leads to dimishing returns in that to progress software (shorter release cycles) more work can only be accomplished by concentrating the thinking into a smaller group of people which naturally leads to burn-out. So managers have to continually come up with tricks or one-upmanship to motivatae the microserfs to stay committed
So given the horror stories and even web-sites describing the non-living (former employeees of Intetel, Amazon, Microserf, etc), why do people continue to act this way? Why become an economic slave for an absentee landlord (Wall Street sentiment)? How many talents will leave the industry because their bodies can't handle the stress? What is so difficult about the software industry that it eats up people like this?
LL
However, those people with a half-a-clue are realising that alternative distribution models exists as software moves the relative power back to the artists and performers away from promoters and managers (unless they consolidate their distirbution channels and demand payola aka gateway fees). So what is likely to happen? I nthe long run you'll probably see more variety and different intermediatories but in the short term, its likely to be a scorched earth policy with ISPs being in the front line trenches squeezed between content holders (who want to pass the cost of enforcement onto someone else ... e.g. public law) and communications infrastructure providers who want to extract every last cent from providing bandwidth. In short the mom and pop UUCP and message boards are going to disappear as they don't have the intellectual or financial firepower to survive the coming firestorm (MS .NET initiative notwithstanding).
Note that this is not new. Whenever a scarce resource becomes cheap, whoever's interest buildt on faulty assumptions starts screaming. For example, when radio stations were limited in NZ several decades ago, some entrepreneurs put raio masts on a ship outside the nautical exclusion zones and beamed "pirate" broadcsts inland. The internet is even easier as the infrastructure is outside the immediate juristiction and you cannot restrict people moving around except through controlling their access software (cough*AOL-AIM*cough).
Maybe, just maybe, companies will actually support grass-roots artistic development instead of flogging over-hyped teenage boppers or overpriced dead rockers. On the other hand, cynics would note that money talks, bullshit walks.
LL
Essentially the mouse has 2.5 degrees of freedom (relative x,y + activate mouse). A stylus is absolute x,y + tap code (morse code?) There are other devices which goes up to 6 (3D + twist, turn, roll). However this basically mirrors the major axes of your forearm. Imagine extending your forearm away from chest clenching a fist and moving or rotating the fist. Some other devices (e.g. wand) have been invented to mirror broad gestures but I don't think the tech is quite there yet to do real-time sign language which relies on alignment/spacing of the fingers. The problem is as always software applications which can recognise the gestures. Anywhich which is 2.5 degrees can be adapted to map to a mouse based input but you are really limiting yourself once you go to higher degrees of freedom. It would be easier to work out the complexity of the system you want to control, then work out the dimensions you can partition it into, then work out the type of device which best suits your needs. Note that even a high-end stylus can add extra levels of complexity such as angle, pressure, acceleration ... think caligraphy. The other factor is human support in that it is tiring to continously hold up your pinkie all the time. Tricks are to mount any coordinate device on something like glasses or helmet.
LL
... is to see whether your employor is willing to subsidise (partially) to cost of further education. Many universities, especially distance education, would support Open Source projects as it is in their interests to rely on something non-proprietary. Given that any work undertaken is for non-profit educational use (building up your skills), it would be difficult for the company to claim any IP. Any cutting-edge research is likely to be so complicated that it would be covered in a seaparate contract. Despite arsDigita startup mode of 12x6 hour working weeks, no company can sustain a bunker mentality forever and there are likely to be periods of slack/cash-flow poor where there's just not enough work. Using the university system as a buffer to soak up the dead-time without going through the disruption and expense of head-hunting . Better still choose a place/project that even the most hard-nosed corporate lawyer will admit has zero commercial bearing (e.g. SETI) and they'd be less liable to argue the point. What you are talking about here is a corporate culture change and those take time.
Can people nominate distant-learning unis which are both technically excellent and support OSS development?
LL
Perhaps we need some better distinction between the boundaries of our personal space and other humans. Privacy is a rather broad term, perhaps we need to think about what the definition is. To take an example, consider a hypothetical 4 stage division
- Personal (I) - inner beliefs, personality, DNA
- Private (C) - habits, likes/dislikes,
- Profile (B) - perferences, purchases
- Public (P) - wider society, politics
So far the eCommerce hype has been focusing on B2C and B2B. However, I suspect that what people are (rightly or wrongly) concerned about is the invasion of the I space and the contamination of the P space. Psychologists note that we we form the major precepts of our identy by late teens/early 20s. As kids, most of us have that isolated playhouse, the hidden cave, or that secret garden where we imagine the world as it could be. As adults, we are rightly concerned about overbearing laws and corruption of the politcal process. As consumers we have learned to negotiate or establish natural boundaries. we don't expect religious institutions to be flogging indulgances (B2I) for sale (cough*Scientology*cough) or desire friendships (I-I) to be colored by pecuniary factors (cough*Amway*cough). With IT we can try to codify some of the interactions (think information waveguides), for example motor vehicle registration where you have to accept responsibility for personal care of a dangerous ton of metal and explosions in a public space. But for someone to use that and influence/divine your B2C behaviour is what we object to. Similarly doctor-patient reationship (P2I) is not something most want to leak into the B-space.
People forget that before our Western concept of civil laws (slowly replaced by commercial lures), we had social lores which were a tribe way of minimising social friction. The legal system is still a codification of social codes (along with economic incentives) which are proving to be increasingly imperfect as more splinter groups object to over-broad provisions. The concept of privacy which was evolved for P2I matters (freedom from trump charges corpus habeus?), torture, self-expression are not keeping up with technology as the I-C-B-P space fragments and wierd combinations undermine traditional assumptions. If you read Lessig books, you'd understand that the concept of privacy as interpreted by courts has morphed over the decades.
In short, the world is becoming a little bit more complex so you're probably seeing new intermeiatories forming (data aggregators, accumulators, agents) forming between B2C plus others (e.g. grass-roots lobby groups (astroturf campaigns notwithstanding) are just I2P intermeiatories. Once we think about it, you can probably be more precise in what you can define as privacy.
LL
An official from the Australian Competitive Commission (???) once said that their job was to ensure n+1 companies existed in any market where n was defined to be the minimum necessary for a stable system. The general rule of thumb seems to be around 5+/-2 mega providers with a host of niche specialists. As Murdoch once noted, the only way to make money is to own both the content and control the distribution mechanism. Some groups cough*MS*cough) seem to concenetrate just fine on the control aspects so long as they can restrict the content providers.
What media representatives are forgetting is that people are quite able to create their own forms of amusement and reality distorting fields. With software and half-decent hardware you can blend your own tracks, publish your own local rag, and propagate generic gossip on your personal grapevine. People have always been able to practice their own instruments and can exist quite independently of external providers. The NGOs have shown it is possible to exert pressure independent of governments and political activists hav ebeen enobled by the internet. I believe figures are showing a drop in total hours of TV watched as people substitute the net (reference anyone?).
Sometimes you just have to have faith that the invisible hand will self-correct.
LL
> new paradigms already sneaking into real apps.
Can you care to nominate some examples? Generating UIs on the fly? VR? Voice activation? Has cosmocode (or whatever new label) or Eazel really offer such as compelling advantage that people are willing to pay a premium (whether price or CPU wise) for their supposedly non-tedious or non-traditional approaches? As others have reasoned, the cost of unlearning QWERTY (or whatever your GUI equivalent is) is not worth the advantages of changing over to an alternative once a technology is widely adopted, suboptimal as it may be. That has always been a trap that coders have fallen into, in supposing we can dictate what the unwashed masses want. It is really hard to come up with GUI features that are met with universal popular acclaim so if you have any superior insight, please enlighten the rest of us.
LL
Perhaps a less emotionally laden phrase would be cherry picking? TV production is a very very long chain of events from the script writerrs to the actors to the distribution. Basically baby-boomer execs are trying to guess at shows that will appeal from kids to granniess (of course their kids and grannies). Naturally, this means that you get the odd dud or million (if you think US is bad look at C grades in 3rd world countries). Now being the pragmatic capitalists the studios are, they like to pass off the sunk costs of failures onto the consumer (shock, horror, you don't expect their shareholders to take the risk do you?) so that means that when they offer a good show, they suggest (OK arm-twist) the distributor to also take some crappy failure. Now given finite bandwidth and cable connections, you have to squeeze as much ad revenue out of the system as possible which means that Tivo which puts the slection back onto the consumer bypasses the crud. Hence by picking the killer-franchises, the cross-subsidies become rather glaringly obvious. Problem, quality costs which is why cheap reality-TV is being pushed. A small niche outfit can make a killing by being better targetted which means the biggies have to take it out to avoid losing a captive audience.
I think mainstream media is reaching the point of diminishing returns which is usually indicated by a wave of mergers and acqusitions. What I expect to see now is virtual actors replacing overpaid celluoid celebrities, more reliance on the public to provide their own material (which the studies kindly grant you a spotlight of 15 minutes fame), and more onerous licensing terms as they try to improve their return on footage by flogging anything and everything (cough*Planet Hollywood*cough) starting with reputation (cough*WWF*cough) and morals (though some might claim that was lost long ago).
Stealing is a bit harsh but the reality is that people don't (or more accurately) can't pay $1K to watch a hour of quality production. Street theatre, OK but there's not the same variety of choice unless you live in a big big city.
LL