I've recently been at IRCAM, where I could hear their wave field synthesis sound reproduction system:
Using a wall of flat panels as speakers, they have the ability to turn a room into a sonic landscape, where the audience can walk around multiple moving sound sources as if virtual speakers where spread in the room. In a way it's a kind of analog to lightfield rendering in image synthesis.
The effect has to be heard to fully grasp how this represents the next step beyond X.1 sound reproduction. If you get a chance to go to an exhibition that uses this technology, I strongly recommend you go just to immerse yourself in such a soundscape.
Perhaps the poster's technology could help make this technology affordable ?
David Byrne's article is well thought out, but quite unimaginative. There are many other ways to produce music and make a living with it.
For instance, since 2001, Einstuerzende Neubauten has been exploring new ways to produce records and interact with their public while producing the album. Their last 3 albums were produced by a subscription (like Mozart used to do in the 19th century!). As supporters, we could attend the recording sessions via webcam, chat online with the band members, or use the forums to discuss about the directions taken by the band ; we obtained early versions of the songs, and attended private concerts. Unanimously agreed as a great experience!
This is the legislation in France, where the iPhone will be sold by Orange before the end of the year.
The legislation says that "linked sale" (vente lie'e) is forbidden: if you offer some good for sale, you are not allowed to force the buyer to buy a service together with this good.
There has been a debate in the press about whether Apple would renounce selling iPhones in France or find a workaround.
The trick Orange will use is to propose the iPhone at a prohibitive price (1000 euros?) and offer a massive discount for any plan purchased with it. But consumer watch organizations are quite powerful here, and they could sue if they show the price is too high and the scheme is actually a disguised "vente lie'e". The consumer watch organization are allowed to use surveys and statistical analyses to show this, so Orange and Apple will have to play tight at this game.
BTW. I'm surprised so many of you in the US have plans around $60/month. I pay 14 euros/month for basic service, but it's plenty enough airtime.
This was when they used Sony as a distributor, and Sony was experimenting with DRMs on small bands that could not say no to any distribution proposal. It's over now.
Go read the interview: you'll see their approach is much more elaborated than this. Among other things:
PP: Do you think that the reason for the fewer sales had to do with the advance of the internet and illegal downloading or with bad management on behalf of the record company? BB: Downloading is good for Einsturzende Neuabuten. Downloading is bad for Robbie Williams, not for me.
PP: What is your view about current copyright laws and open source media? Moreover, would you consider Neubauten's radical production process, especially in "Alles Wieder Offen" to be an installment in the debate about copyright? BB: It is definitely an installment in the said debate. I don't want to go too far into the details of this but, if the record industry wants to survive somehow, they need to change their policies. [...] The future of the music industry is subscriptions. Sony has acquired so many record companies over the decades so that now there are only three big companies left. Imagine that you can have access to the whole catalogue and the whole back catalogue - for instance of the old 78s from the jazz labels... Count me in... I like that!
> Another straw in the wind: Nine Inch Nails has now followed Radiohead in ridding themselves of the labels > and going independent.
Since 2001, Einstürzende Neubauten has been exploring new ways to produce records and interact with their public while producing the album. Their last 3 albums were produced by a subscription. As supporters, we could attend the recording sessions via webcam, chat online with the band members, or use the forums to discuss about the directions taken by the band ; we obtained early versions of the songs, and attended private concerts. Unanimously agreed as a great experience!
When working in the domain of haptic interfaces and experimental psychology, we have to make some subtle distinctions as to what are the receptors our interface or experiment are addressing.
Most of the time, we split the sense of touch into those categories:
* tactile sense: addresses the pressure receptors placed underneath the skin, which are denser at the tip of the fingers, in the palms and on the lips and the tongue. * proprioceptive sense: our internal hear receptors that give us a sense of balance. Also, the joints in our bones have ligaments that send tension signals and enable our brain to reconstruct a mental image of our body and limbs relative position. * kinesthetic sense: the same bone joints provide use information about movement and external forces, not just position. Kinesthetic sense is our ability to figure this out.
We could also consider separately othe receptors such as those that give us a sense of temperature and pain, but I've never worked on a
So, in our domains (HCI and exp. psychology) we use "haptics" as a shortcut for the tactilo-proprio-kinesthetic senses, while "tactile" is reserved to refer to the signals sent by the skin receptors.
3rd question: the trick lies in using the address space to hold the information on the 1st digits of the phone numbers, which allows you to strip down the 8 digits phone numbers to a number of bits that is small enough to make them all fit (i.e., 16 bits of storage per phone number).
You have 100M possible phone numbers. To hold a phone number, you need a 27 bits integer. So, as you read the phone numbers you start by converting them to 27 bit integers.
Next, you need to get rid of 11 bits in each phone number to be able to hold them all, by storing each phone number in a block that corresponds to its 11 first bits: it is the address of the phone number that gives you the 11 first bits.
The first section of your memory (the first 40kb) are arranged in a table of 2048 (2^11) entries of 20 bit pointers each that point to the address in memory of the block of phone numbers that start with 0x0,0x07ff... up to 0x07ff^2 (=2^27-2^11).
As you receive each phone number and convert it in its 27 bits representation, you perform:
++blocktable[curnumber>>0xff]=curnumber
plus some bookkeeping on the blocktable to avoid overflows between neighbouring blocks.
Once you've absorbed the whole data set, you can output them by first sorting each block using a "inplace-guaranteed" sorting algorithm such as shell sort on each block:
for i in 0..2048 {
shellsort(blocktable[i],blocktable[i+1]);
for j in blocktable[i]..blocktable[i+1]
out << convertToNumber((i<<16) + blocktable[j]); }
This means you have a tad more than 8kb left in memory to store your program and the program's stack... seems enough to me, if you know assembly language...
PS: it occurs to me you don't have to use a split 11/16, a split 14/13 would let you save more memory...
Flow reminds me a lot the game "tranquility" found on SGI workstations as early as 1993. A modern version is available at tqworld even though this was originally a single player game.
I find it strange that the PhD thesis does not reference this game at all, as the concepts are very similar. I guess if I was the author's advisor, I'd point this out as a correction to make...
This informal study has a nice description of how a single good driver can actual reverse the trend by single-handedly "breaking the soliton".
In other words, if you're caught in a traffic jam, let a wide space build in front of you, and try to adopt a constant (slow) speed. While you may not directly benefit from it, the jam will resorb itself for those who follow you.
This page includes simulations in a variety of contexts. While the study is informal, it is still quite convincing from a fluid-dynamics perspective.
Using datagloves, I did quite a bit of work in 1993 to see how the sort of UIs that we see in the Minority Report could work.
It turns out that there are 2 issues to overcome: - Fatigue: the gesture vocabulary had to consist only of short sequences. - "immersion syndrome": whatever I do can be interpreted against my will.
By designing the gesture vocabulary so that it would require alternating tense postures and relaxed aiming gestures, it was possible to overcome those issues in a pretty satisfactory way. Tension is particularly important, as it conveys intention: if you stress "Go There", people (and machines) can detect the fact that you want something to happen, as compared to using a monocord voice.
MS is one of the few technological companies whose corporate culture has succeeded in empowering the business-oriented types at the expense of the techies-types.
At Apple, in free-software projects or even HP and IBM (and remember DEC, SGI...?), engineers and scientists can be quite successful at pushing their own agenda forward, often at the expense of growth, revenue or margin.
This is good for the sense of aesthetics and fulfilments of the techies, but quite suboptimal for pragmatic business purposes.
This is how Microsoft has become the "Emperor", and how, by subordinating the techies to the business guys, it attracts so much hate from us techies, specially on/. : it forces its competition to align to their corporate culture practices, and thus makes us lose some power at our workplace.
In contrast, I'm sure most technology-neutral people pretty much don't care as much about MS monopoly.
While I hope Google succeeds and keeps it company motto, it's clear that companies that are driven by revenue and growth have more chances, by definition, of "growing and be profitable" than those companies that also try to drive other agendas in parallel.
The Free Software Movement is not really driven by idealistic motives, but rather by a simple economic fact: because its marginal cost (i.e. the asymptotic cost of producing an extra copy) is null, free market forces and competition are bound to make all useful pieces of software freely available.
Note this is different from music or art in general: in art, the novelty/originality of a piece of work has an intrinsic value, which is not the case for software.
Actually, in large chains such as Leclerc or Carrefour, they don't need the customer to stock their shelves: they have the producers of the goods sold do it for them. This has its advantages:
- cuts costs on permanent employees - the producer has a keen interest in doing the job well and create an attractive shelf.
So the store ends up acts as a broker and supervisor between the producers and customers, keeping headcount to a minimum: a few supervisors and managers who just have to dispatch and monitor.
I should add: I support the mandatory disclosure of source code and a form of executable for any software patent that is filed.
1) it is possible to make this a requirement without changing the law, only new regulations need to be put in place 2) that would make applying for a patent a tough decision:
- are you so sure that your patent will be granted that you can release its source code (and then let anyone take advantage of it should the patent not be granted) ? - is the true and full disclosure of your invention in source code form really worth the temporary protection you will get from a granted patent ?
? It will definitely be in the interest of an "inventor"'s competitors to help the patent office *reject* a patent. But then, the "inventor" would have the opportunity to reply, and an exchange could form, long before the patent is actually examined.
Both sides will have to be very persuasive and very clear in order to get the examiner's attention. The patent examiner's job would become less an evaluator's job and more like an arbitrator between two opposing sides. Presumably his job should be easier, faster, and he would be able to base his opinion on far more evidence and opinions from contradicting sides.
I can tell you I will watch patent applications in my area much more closely if this system is ever put in place. I will certainly try to help debunking some of those, sometimes with success, sometimes not. At least it won't be a dumb lawyer who will decide of the fate of an "invention".
While not being overtly optimistic about its chances of success, the Peer to patent project is an initiative that has good support from the industry, seems able to lobby the USPTO efficiently and could drastically reduce the number of obvious patents actually granted.
In two words, they propose to use web tools such as wiki and comment areas to let anyone involved in the patent world (inventors, lawyers, competitors...) comment and annotate patent applications before they are reviewed by the patent examiner.
This seems a nice balance to me between ease of implementation (very few changes to the law and practice of the patent office are required to implement this initiative) and likelyhood of improving the situation.
While not over-optimistic on its capability to solve the problem, the Peer to patent project is an initiative that has good support from the industry, seems able to lobby the USPTO efficiently and could drastically reduce the number of obvious patents actually granted.
In two words, they propose to use web tools such as wiki and comment areas to let anyone involved in the patent world (inventors, lawyers, competitors...) comment and annotate patent applications before they are reviewed by the patent examiner.
This seems a nice balance to me between ease of implementation (very few changes to the law and practice of the patent office are required to implement this initiative) and likelyhood of improving the situation.
The point of IBM, which seems inescapable, is that any software that has been released as OSS can't be reverted back to an non-OSS business model: as some version of the source and some user base exist on the market, any company with IBM's-like muscle can branch a free version and make it evolve anytime they want.
This follows the predicate: Any useful software is bound to become free (as in beer) once the cost of its development has been amortized. The free (as in speech) software movement is not much more than the social expression of this basic economical fact. Some still imperfect demonstration.
Einstuerzende Neubauten has been using its supporters base to help them produce 2 albums already, and they are in their third round now.
Basically, by prepaying for the album, you get access to webcasts of the band rehearsing, live chat during the rehearsals, a monthly download, an exclusive live concert and access to the band's opinion.
The model is apparently viable with 2000 or more supporters, hence it doesn't need a big marketing hype to produce high quality music.
I'm not sure this first step will be fully successful, but it seems to me that Microsoft has no choice but to release sooner or later its control of the lower level layers of Windows:
Assuming a competitive, market-based, economy, any software of sufficiently broad usage is bound to become free, as its marginal production cost is null. The free software movement is nothing more than the social expression of this basic economical fact. As a consequence, the software industry is bound to live on the margins generated by software innovation and specialization.
Indeed, it shows I'm not a native English speaker. I meant planning if that wasn't clear. I'm sure you had figured it out, but it's yet another challenge for speech recognition and translation: pretty much everything we say or write follows a loose and approximate grammar that our listeners can only get through common understanding of the context...
As it has been the case for the past thirty years, the description of the prowesses of the system are still written in the conditional form: "...IBM technology can be used to control computers and devices..." rather than the active form: "is being used"...
One of my favorite phrases to explain this issue is: "You don't want to speak to a computer, because you can't speak and think at the same time". More precisely, speech utterance makes use of some modules in our brain which are required for planification too. Hence, you can't plan as well what to do next when you speak, which is a big hurdle in the type of intellectual activities one carries with a computer.
Well, I'm very surprised to see that all this debate revolves about the control of the DNS, while it seems to me the real problem would be the distribution and control of IP address space.
In fact anyone can setup their own toplevel domains, with or without the consent of ICANN: it suffice that enough name servers accept to cache and relay your zone definitions, which already happens if I'm not wrong.
Now, it does not go so well for the IP address space: many universities and large corporations trust A and B class networks, leaving whole countries and regions having to share modest size C networks (256 IP adresses for 10M or more people !).
While I live in a country that has its fair share of the IP address space, I would be very ready to understand that other countries, particularly developing ones, ask for more control and a fairer redistribution of the dwindling IPv4 address space, even with the advent of IPv6 (which also will have its limitation, I'm told).
Someone knowledgeable has an answer (why is the focus on DNS control rather than IP addresses control) ? Google did not help.
This is definitely a good answer to my original post about google-watch. I felt there was too much rant into google-watch for it to be very reliable.
Nevertheless, google-watch is right in that to get a good pagerank, it is currently better to be linked from one highly ranked page (in a TrustRank fashion) than from 10 low ranked pages, which was favored by the original PageRank scoring method.
Slashdot Mirror
I've recently been at IRCAM, where I could hear their wave field synthesis sound reproduction system:
Using a wall of flat panels as speakers, they have the ability to turn a room into a sonic landscape, where the audience can walk around multiple moving sound sources as if virtual speakers where spread in the room. In a way it's a kind of analog to lightfield rendering in image synthesis.
The effect has to be heard to fully grasp how this represents the next step beyond X.1 sound reproduction. If you get a chance to go to an exhibition that uses this technology, I strongly recommend you go just to immerse yourself in such a soundscape.
Perhaps the poster's technology could help make this technology affordable ?
Seriously. US customs are among the most paranoid bureaucrats on earth.
I know of a respectable French old lady in her 60's who is banned from traveling to the US.
Her crime ? At the customs inspection, as the officer checked her purse, she inconspicuously
hushered "boom" (it was in 2002).
She was sent back to France on the next flight after 24h in custody.
David Byrne's article is well thought out, but quite unimaginative. There are many other ways to produce music and make a living with it.
For instance, since 2001, Einstuerzende Neubauten has been exploring new ways to produce records and interact with their public while producing the album. Their last 3 albums were produced by a subscription (like Mozart used to do in the 19th century!). As supporters, we could attend the recording sessions via webcam, chat online with the band members, or use the forums to discuss about the directions taken by the band ; we obtained early versions of the songs, and attended private concerts. Unanimously agreed as a great experience!
They've been fairly successful so far, though they still want to polish their formula. There is a nice interview about their latest album and the issues they face in going "label-free".
This is the legislation in France, where the iPhone will be sold by Orange before the end of the year.
The legislation says that "linked sale" (vente lie'e) is forbidden: if you offer some good for sale, you are not allowed to force the buyer to buy a service together with this good.
There has been a debate in the press about whether Apple would renounce selling iPhones in France or find a workaround.
The trick Orange will use is to propose the iPhone at a prohibitive price (1000 euros?) and offer a massive discount for any plan purchased with it. But consumer watch organizations are quite powerful here, and they could sue if they show the price is too high and the scheme is actually a disguised "vente lie'e". The consumer watch organization are allowed to use surveys and statistical analyses to show this, so Orange and Apple will have to play tight at this game.
BTW. I'm surprised so many of you in the US have plans around $60/month. I pay 14 euros/month for basic service, but it's plenty enough airtime.
Go read the interview: you'll see their approach is much more elaborated than this. Among other things:
> Another straw in the wind: Nine Inch Nails has now followed Radiohead in ridding themselves of the labels
> and going independent.
Since 2001, Einstürzende Neubauten has been exploring new ways to produce records and interact with their public while producing the album. Their last 3 albums were produced by a subscription. As supporters, we could attend the recording sessions via webcam, chat online with the band members, or use the forums to discuss about the directions taken by the band ; we obtained early versions of the songs, and attended private concerts. Unanimously agreed as a great experience!
They've been fairly successful so far, though they still want to polish their formula. There is
a nice interview about their latest album and the issues they face in going "label-free".
When working in the domain of haptic interfaces and experimental psychology, we have to make some subtle distinctions as to what are the receptors our interface or experiment are addressing.
Most of the time, we split the sense of touch into those categories:
* tactile sense: addresses the pressure receptors placed underneath the skin, which are denser at the tip of the fingers, in the palms and on the lips and the tongue.
* proprioceptive sense: our internal hear receptors that give us a sense of balance. Also, the joints in our bones have ligaments that send tension signals and enable our brain to reconstruct a mental image of our body and limbs relative position.
* kinesthetic sense: the same bone joints provide use information about movement and external forces, not just position. Kinesthetic sense is our ability to figure this out.
We could also consider separately othe receptors such as those that give us a sense of temperature and pain, but I've never worked on a
So, in our domains (HCI and exp. psychology) we use "haptics" as a shortcut for the tactilo-proprio-kinesthetic senses, while "tactile" is reserved to refer to the signals sent by the skin receptors.
3rd question: the trick lies in using the address space to hold the information on the 1st digits of the phone numbers, which allows you to strip down the 8 digits phone numbers to a number of bits that is small enough to make them all fit (i.e., 16 bits of storage per phone number).
You have 100M possible phone numbers. To hold a phone number, you need a 27 bits integer. So, as you read the phone numbers you start by converting them to 27 bit integers.
Next, you need to get rid of 11 bits in each phone number to be able to hold them all, by storing each phone number in a block that corresponds to its 11 first bits: it is the address of the phone number that gives you the 11 first bits.
The first section of your memory (the first 40kb) are arranged in a table of 2048 (2^11) entries of 20 bit pointers each that point to the address in memory of the block of phone numbers that start with 0x0,0x07ff... up to 0x07ff^2 (=2^27-2^11).
As you receive each phone number and convert it in its 27 bits representation, you perform:
++blocktable[curnumber>>0xff]=curnumber
plus some bookkeeping on the blocktable to avoid overflows between neighbouring blocks.
Once you've absorbed the whole data set, you can output them by first sorting each block using a "inplace-guaranteed" sorting algorithm such as shell sort on each block:
for i in 0..2048 {
shellsort(blocktable[i],blocktable[i+1]);
for j in blocktable[i]..blocktable[i+1]
out << convertToNumber((i<<16) + blocktable[j]);
}
This means you have a tad more than 8kb left in memory to store your program and the program's stack... seems enough to me, if you know assembly language...
PS: it occurs to me you don't have to use a split 11/16, a split 14/13 would let you save more memory...
Flow reminds me a lot the game "tranquility" found on SGI workstations as early as 1993. A modern version is available at tqworld even though this was originally a single player game.
I find it strange that the PhD thesis does not reference this game at all, as the concepts are very similar. I guess if I was the author's advisor, I'd point this out as a correction to make...
This informal study has a nice description of how a single good driver can actual reverse the trend by single-handedly "breaking the soliton".
In other words, if you're caught in a traffic jam, let a wide space build in front of you, and try to adopt a constant (slow) speed. While you may not directly benefit from it, the jam will resorb itself for those who follow you.
This page includes simulations in a variety of contexts. While the study is informal, it is still quite convincing from a fluid-dynamics perspective.
Using datagloves, I did quite a bit of work in 1993 to see how the sort of UIs that we see in the Minority Report could work.
It turns out that there are 2 issues to overcome:
- Fatigue: the gesture vocabulary had to consist only of short sequences.
- "immersion syndrome": whatever I do can be interpreted against my will.
By designing the gesture vocabulary so that it would require alternating tense postures and relaxed aiming gestures, it was possible to overcome those issues in a pretty satisfactory way. Tension is particularly important, as it conveys intention: if you stress "Go There", people (and machines) can detect the fact that you want something to happen, as compared to using a monocord voice.
see Charade: Remote Control Of Objects Using Free-Hand Gestures published in Communications of the ACM in 1994 for more details.
MS is one of the few technological companies whose corporate culture has succeeded in empowering the business-oriented types at the expense of the techies-types.
/. : it forces its competition to align to their corporate culture practices, and thus makes us lose some power at our workplace.
At Apple, in free-software projects or even HP and IBM (and remember DEC, SGI...?), engineers and scientists can be quite successful at pushing their own agenda forward, often at the expense of growth, revenue or margin.
This is good for the sense of aesthetics and fulfilments of the techies, but quite suboptimal for pragmatic business purposes.
This is how Microsoft has become the "Emperor", and how, by subordinating the techies to the business guys, it attracts so much hate from us techies, specially on
In contrast, I'm sure most technology-neutral people pretty much don't care as much about MS monopoly.
While I hope Google succeeds and keeps it company motto, it's clear that companies that are driven by revenue and growth have more chances, by definition, of "growing and be profitable" than those companies that also try to drive other agendas in parallel.
Parent poster definitely gets it right:
The Free Software Movement is not really driven by idealistic motives, but rather by a simple economic fact: because its marginal cost (i.e. the asymptotic cost of producing an extra copy) is null, free market forces and competition are bound to make all useful pieces of software freely available.
Note this is different from music or art in general: in art, the novelty/originality of a piece of work has an intrinsic value, which is not the case for software.
Some more elaboration of the idea: Software is meant to be free
Actually, in large chains such as Leclerc or Carrefour, they don't need the customer to stock their shelves: they have the producers of the goods sold do it for them. This has its advantages:
- cuts costs on permanent employees
- the producer has a keen interest in doing the job well and create an attractive shelf.
So the store ends up acts as a broker and supervisor between the producers and customers,
keeping headcount to a minimum: a few supervisors and managers who just have to dispatch and monitor.
I should add: I support the mandatory disclosure of source code and a form of executable for any software patent that is filed.
1) it is possible to make this a requirement without changing the law, only new regulations need to be put in place
2) that would make applying for a patent a tough decision:
- are you so sure that your patent will be granted that you can release its source code (and then let anyone take advantage of it should the patent not be granted) ?
- is the true and full disclosure of your invention in source code form really worth the temporary protection you will get from a granted patent ?
? It will definitely be in the interest of an "inventor"'s competitors to help the patent office *reject* a patent. But then, the "inventor" would have the opportunity to reply, and an exchange could form, long before the patent is actually examined.
Both sides will have to be very persuasive and very clear in order to get the examiner's attention. The patent examiner's job would become less an evaluator's job and more like an arbitrator between two opposing sides. Presumably his job should be easier, faster, and he would be able to base his opinion on far more evidence and opinions from contradicting sides.
I can tell you I will watch patent applications in my area much more closely if this system is ever put in place. I will certainly try to help debunking some of those, sometimes with success, sometimes not. At least it won't be a dumb lawyer who will decide of the fate of an "invention".
While not being overtly optimistic about its chances of success, the Peer to patent project is an initiative that has good support from the industry, seems able to lobby the USPTO efficiently and could drastically reduce the number of obvious patents actually granted.
In two words, they propose to use web tools such as wiki and comment areas to let anyone involved in the patent world (inventors, lawyers, competitors...) comment and annotate patent applications before they are reviewed by the patent examiner.
This seems a nice balance to me between ease of implementation (very few changes to the law and practice of the patent office are required to implement this initiative) and likelyhood of improving the situation.
While not over-optimistic on its capability to solve the problem, the Peer to patent project is an initiative that has good support from the industry, seems able to lobby the USPTO efficiently and could drastically reduce the number of obvious patents actually granted.
In two words, they propose to use web tools such as wiki and comment areas to let anyone involved in the patent world (inventors, lawyers, competitors...) comment and annotate patent applications before they are reviewed by the patent examiner.
This seems a nice balance to me between ease of implementation (very few changes to the law and practice of the patent office are required to implement this initiative) and likelyhood of improving the situation.
The point of IBM, which seems inescapable, is that any software that has been released as OSS can't be reverted back to an non-OSS business model: as some version of the source and some user base exist on the market, any company with IBM's-like muscle can branch a free version and make it evolve anytime they want.
This follows the predicate: Any useful software is bound to become free (as in beer) once the cost of its development has been amortized. The free (as in speech) software movement is not much more than the social expression of this basic economical fact. Some still imperfect demonstration.
Einstuerzende Neubauten has been using its supporters base to help them produce 2 albums already, and they are in their third round now.
Basically, by prepaying for the album, you get access to webcasts of the band rehearsing, live chat during the rehearsals, a monthly download, an exclusive live concert and access to the band's opinion.
The model is apparently viable with 2000 or more supporters, hence it doesn't need a big marketing hype to produce high quality music.
I'm not sure this first step will be fully successful, but it seems to me that Microsoft has no choice but to release sooner or later its control of the lower level layers of Windows:
Assuming a competitive, market-based, economy, any software of sufficiently broad usage is bound to become free, as its marginal production cost is null. The free software movement is nothing more than the social expression of this basic economical fact. As a consequence, the software industry is bound to live on the margins generated by software innovation and specialization.
Read more...
Indeed, it shows I'm not a native English speaker. I meant planning if that wasn't clear. I'm sure you had figured it out, but it's yet another challenge for speech recognition and translation: pretty much everything we say or write follows a loose and approximate grammar that our listeners can only get through common understanding of the context...
As it has been the case for the past thirty years, the description of the prowesses of the system are still written in the conditional form: "...IBM technology can be used to control computers and devices..." rather than the active form: "is being used"...
Ben Shneiderman is the person who, in my opinion, articulates the best the limits of speech recognition.
One of my favorite phrases to explain this issue is: "You don't want to speak to a computer, because you can't speak and think at the same time". More precisely, speech utterance makes use of some modules in our brain which are required for planification too. Hence, you can't plan as well what to do next when you speak, which is a big hurdle in the type of intellectual activities one carries with a computer.
Well, I'm very surprised to see that all this debate revolves about the control of the DNS, while it seems to me the real problem would be the distribution and control of IP address space.
In fact anyone can setup their own toplevel domains, with or without the consent of ICANN: it suffice that enough name servers accept to cache and relay your zone definitions, which already happens if I'm not wrong.
Now, it does not go so well for the IP address space: many universities and large corporations trust A and B class networks, leaving whole countries and regions having to share modest size C networks (256 IP adresses for 10M or more people !).
While I live in a country that has its fair share of the IP address space, I would be very ready to understand that other countries, particularly developing ones, ask for more control and a fairer redistribution of the dwindling IPv4 address space, even with the advent of IPv6 (which also will have its limitation, I'm told).
Someone knowledgeable has an answer (why is the focus on DNS control rather than IP addresses control) ? Google did not help.
This is definitely a good answer to my original post about google-watch. I felt there was too much rant into google-watch for it to be very reliable.
Nevertheless, google-watch is right in that to get a good pagerank, it is currently better to be linked from one highly ranked page (in a TrustRank fashion) than from 10 low ranked pages, which was favored by the original PageRank scoring method.