>>this kind of crippling ignorance among professional astrophysicists is astonishing.
Isn't it rather an indication that they're doing their job? Data which challenge our current models are the most valuable things scientists can collect, because they give researchers chance to refine their theories.
If all the astrophysicists and satelite projects were returning information which merely fit their current theories, there would seem to be less need for such research. In scientific research, the known unknowns are difficult challenges, but the discovery of unknown unknowns are the wonderful bits. Definite Ignorance leads to Progress.
As has been pointed out, this essay isn't particularly unique. It's just stating the rather obvious point that lots of people are inspired by other people, and that when we make things, we often reshuffle bits of stuff we like. This practice is so common that it's not too interesting to point out. The article is clever, interesting, perhaps, but I wouldn't mod it insightful. The idea of creative reuse is the very basis of formal study of literature, music, and art-- why else spend hours, weeks, months reading, viewing, sampling, and arguing about the greats if not to enjoy them and learn how they work?
The Harper's article really isn't that much about plagiarism, and it also doesn't really address the questions of copyright very thoroughly-- he dismisses it as "rapacious" and makes some aside references to Jefferson.
A few years ago, in "Something Borrowed", Malcolm Gladwell looks at the personal story of a psychiatrist whose personal memoir is "plagiarized" by a playwright who writes a semi-successful play about the psychiatrist and her clients-- without consulting the psychiatrist or clients. Gladwell looks into issues about copyright, intellectual property, and the creative commons, but he also looks at the public and emotional effects in the lives of the psychiatrist (who feels "violated" by this appropriation of her life), and the playwright (who feels heartbroken, confused--devastated by the stigma and bad press). It's an awesome article.
This, of course, is why we need to keep the poor in their place. If they're living on subsistence, they won't patronize prostitutes.
Brilliant!
** ** ** Prostitution *nearly always* occurs in settings where large inequalities of wealth exist, in cultures where women have few opportunities. The solution here is not to eliminate jobs and lower the standard of living, but rather improve education and investment to raise the standard of living. The problem isn't that some men have too much money; the problem is that some women don't have enough.
Additionally, professionals are much, much better at documentary photojournalism as well as photojournalism for pre-organized events, such as sporting events and political events.
I suspect that amateur photography will continue to push the professionals to do yet better. This can only be a good thing.
Although these issues must be addressed thoughtfully, this suggestion is similar to previous generations' objections to literacy, suffrage, and property rights for "the masses."
1. Oh no! What will happen if we let the masses have (x)? 2. How can they know how to manage (x) responsibly? ( by responsibly, they mean: like we prefer them to ) 3. So let's not give it to them!
Honestly. It's silly to discourage the development of hardware on the basis that training isn't in place. Of course not. There's no hardware! The lack of expertise and training is a reason for developing the technology, not against it.
Without training, the OLPC experiment will fall flat with a lack of support staff and educational curricula integration. (from the olpc article)
If you put the equipment into the hands of the people, the street will find uses for things. Black and brown people are not stupid. Like all things in life, it's a choice involving certain levels of personal risk. If people will buy one of these laptops, they're going to want training, especially if they stretched themselves financially to obtain it. They're going to be willing to trade (social and material) goods and services for that training. With increased demand for expertise, people with initiative and talent will learn the needed information and skills. This allows a local tech economy to develop. Cost analysis can't explain this situation, which involves more than payouts into something with no return.
If you feel obligated to give everyone formal classes, not only are you insulting their intelligence and controlling what they can or ought to know, but you're pre-emptively aborting certain opportunities for local economic development.
Honestly -- I learned more about computers with Slackware on a 486 (and nothing but the howtos) than most people get in a lot of computer classes. Not everyone can do this (and I'm not suggesting we just throw people in the deep end), but that's the great thing about geeks. They can cut across the traditional socio-economic boundaries because their skills make them useful; it's definitely been the case for me.
If you look at the OLPC article suggesting $970 as the TCO for one of these machines, you see how silly this really is. Ignore, for the moment, their apparent confusion over whose expenses they're describing. Look instead at their actual figures. Where did they get the $108 for initial setup? Can't you just ghost all the machines automatically? Also, how do they get away with putting a dollar value to the effect of potential future political instability on the cost of internet services?
Note: In some developing settings, the introduction of mobile phones has been bittersweet, since not everyone makes wise choices (for people in the West, wealth is a blinding, useful buffer for waste and bad choices. The poor have a different margin of error). People will sometimes go into debt to obtain a mobile (they become a status symbol, or people misunderstand their role/value, or because people have a strong desire to stay connected).
Laptops are bound to create similar issues, but laptops are fundamentally different from mobile phones in their positive, versatile potential. And the introduction of new technology always introduces complex, bittersweet social change.
But mobile phones have been a positive development. According to an article in The Economist, "the London Business School found that, in a typical developing country, a rise of ten mobile phones per 100 people boosts GDP growth by 0.6 percentage points. Mobile phones are, in short, a classic example of technology that helps people help themselves."
Muhammad Yunus, one of this year's Nobel Prize winners, has said that "When you
Head mounted displays have *not* been fiction. Steve Mann has been building these things for decades. A number of commercial solutions, based on several generations of products exist. I count a total of 17 basic wearable display product lines at Tekgear, a distributor who focuses on wearable computing hardware. This sort of thing is so common that an Open Source toolkit has been developed to deal with the real problems with these displays -- not the graphics display, but the user input. The ArToolkit is an object-recognition system which allows easy, keyboard-less interaction with a computer mediated augmented reality display. It's rather far along.
IANAP, but when I studied some basic quantum theory, I thought that one of the issues that arose in the EPR/Bell research was that in order for entanglement to be valid, it could not be used to transmit information, except via quantum teleportation, which has strong limitations due to being a classical information channel.
Does anyone care to clarify for me?
(Mud Shell, now defunct, was featured on Slashdot in 2001.
There's also the New Adventure Shell, based on Doug Gwyn's Advshell, and John Cocker's Advsh, both written in 1984.
The basic concept also shows up in the adventure game found in Emacs.
But, playsh looks like it includes a special enhancement which I think is pretty cool. According to the article,
It treats the web and APIs as just more objects and places, and is a platform for writing and sharing your own code to manipulate those objects and places
I think you have misread Cuzality. Even though Cuzality cites Snopes properly, he runs his own comments together onto the end of the Snopes quote. This makes Snopes seem biased.
Snopes quote: "...it's hard to find any specific action of Gore's (such as his sponsoring a Congressional bill or championing a particular piece of legislation) that one could claim helped bring the Internet into being, much less validate Gore's statement of having taken the "initiative in creating the Internet.""
Cuzality's quote: But don't let that bother you -- after all, the entire premise of the Clinton administration was they wanted to be judged on how much they cared about people's problems, not what they could accomplish towards solving them. Gore undoubtedly gave many fine speeches talking about how important technology is (I just wish we could find a record of them), therefore he should get the credit for the Internet -- simple as that!
Try to be careful before judging Snopes by Cuzality's prejudice. There is nothing particular partisan about the Snopes entry. In fact, Snopes presents a balanced view of the debate.
Cuzality pulls one statement from Snopes and appends his own ideas after the end of the quote.
I got the following letters off the ultracade site before other members incited a slashdotting which only keeps people from reading Foley's statements on the issue. Does he have good intent? Perhaps. But the student of logic may wonder about statements like:
This is a complex case amongst companies that are trying to make it about UltraCade stealing something from the M.A.M.E. team. That is not what this is about. This is simply UltraCade Technologies and other publishers doing whatever it takes to protect our commercial interests
But you be the judge....
February 21, 2005
An open offer to the M.A.M.E. community.
Our recent actions to protect our products have met with a lot of controversy. Many people have been quick to judge and make accusations about what we are attempting to do, and what we have already done. It is my understanding that the spirit of the M.A.M.E. community is ""M.A.M.E.'s purpose is to preserve these decades of videogame history." It is further my understanding that "Selling either is not allowed" with regards to M.A.M.E.
Given this understanding, we are willing to help promote these goals and work to provide the original authors with the protection they deserve. Our goal is to prevent the commercial offering of machines with illegally obtained ROMs. I believe our goals can work in parallel.
Furthermore, we have a long standing relationship with many publishers of many games, and we are constantly working to obtain more and more licenses for these games. Our goal in filing the trademark for the name M.A.M.E. was simply to give us leverage against those companies that promote and sell machines with M.A.M.E. installed on it, and more importantly, provide their customers with the means to illegally obtain the ROMs. This doesn't help our sales of our products. This doesn't help the community in general.
We have no desire to use the M.A.M.E. name or logos; we simply wish to find ways to prevent illegal distribution of classic arcade games. We will be happy to cancel our application and work with the M.A.M.E. team to assign it to its rightful owners; however we do want to prevent it from being awarded to someone that intends to use it commercially.
I am available to work with the community to ensure that this happens, and to help get more games made available to the community at a reasonable price.
Like most things that are spread by rumor, the facts about me, UltraCade Technologies, and the M.A.M.E. emulation system are quite distorted. I will try and educate anyone who cares to listen about the reality of our marketplace and what we are doing and what we are not. Simply put, we are making an effort to stamp out the commercial sales of M.A.M.E. based systems that advertise the ability to play thousands of games while relying on the customer to obtain the ROMs which can not legally be obtained. What we are not doing is trying to claim ownership of the M.A.M.E. open source emulator or sue its authors. We are concerned about the commercial marketplace, and not the readers of the many M.A.M.E. user groups and forums.
I have been working on emulation technology since the mid 80's when I did work on an emulation project in college. In 1994, while working on games for companies like Sega and Williams, we developed an emulation of the arcade games Joust, Defender and Robotron that ran on a Sega Genesis. In 1996, we started the Lucky 8 project which turned into the UltraCade project. In 1998 we were one of the first companies to acquire the rights to classic arcade games from various publishers. We have licensed games from several manufacturers including Capcom,
The tone of the article is unfortunate. But it's also too bad that really good technology gets dissed by the tech community if it's well marketed. mSpace is a rather sophisticated system for storing and relating arbitrary unstructured information in meaningful ways. The interface doesn't do it full justice.
McGuffin and Schraefel's paper of mSpaces, polyarchies and zzStructures won the ACM Hypertext Conference's award for "Special Research Distinction for Excellent Presentation of Theoretical Concepts."
Schraefel is not only a good programmer, doing very cutting edge information technology stuff, but she and her team have managed to design a useful piece of software that uses it. Since when can the Academic world do this kind of thing?
*sigh* People diss Nelson when he comes up with incredibly good ideas and quality computer science. And now, when people like Schraefel produce a usable product, they get dissed too. Before you go snarking about how the Semantic Web won't come down from heaven and die on a cross for us, make sure you know what the Semantic Web is. Just like Harpers, this is a perfectly cool example.
What do I think about the Semantic Web? I will admit, I sometimes wonder if it's safe.
!!??!?!?!?!!? I don't get the callousness of Slashdotters any more. Well, maybe I do. We're all too focused on the latest technology to wake up and look at what's happening in the world.
You want to know what King Gyanendra is doing? Read the news. He's supressing thousands of protesters in Kathmandu who want their democracy back. You want to see human rights violations? Look at Nepal right now. http://www.nepalnews.com/
But no. The American election is too imporant. Iraq's all the rage, for the supporters and for the detractors of Bush. Get over it. The middle east isn't the world, no matter what CNN might tell you.
Aha, but it's not a question of the GPL being invalid. They're not arguing that. Rather, they, as licensor of nmap, are revoking the license. The original licensor of the software has more power than redistributors. This is why some organizations are able to provide multiple licenses for their software.
If you were a judge, the question of the GPL would be less pertinent than the question of whether or not Nmap.org has the right to revoke the license. And the answer is: yes.
Umm, where did you get that Free Software is socialistic? As Richard Stallman originally pointed out, Free Software is a great way to make money! In fact, most Free Software has been written by people who are working for profit.
Read the GNU Manifesto, and you will notice that Stallman has always suggested that people charge for their software. http://www.fsf.org/gnu/manifesto.html
Of course, since there is only a very specific socioeconomic subset of the world population weblogging, what real usefulness does this give us? Honestly, even if you did ranking based on the most popular weblogs, that wouldn't help you very much.
Furthermore, this thing isn't telling me anything I don't know. So it finds the word "Vietnam" during the Vietnam years. Hooray. I bet it finds the word Iraq today, or the phrase "Bin Ladin" last year.
Whoopdie-do. I'm impressed:P. Unless this thing actually can find out the things that people are excited about that aren't well-known, it's pretty much just another search tool limited to blogs.
In case you were wondering, the PCI SIG does have logo usage guidelines available on their site. They seem to be rather anal on the details. However, it looks like if you ask first, they let you use their logo and name.
Yeah. I know. It's a zip. But I don't feel like slashdotting my server today.
Open Source Flash Tools, Vector Tools, etc
on
Flash and Open Source
·
· Score: 5, Informative
There are a few tools for Flash and Open Source, but they are pretty much code oriented. The first is Ming, which can be found at:
http://www.opaque.net/ming/
The second is libswf, created by SGI. I'm not sure of the status of the license, but the source _is_ available.
ftp://ftp.sgi.com/sgi/graphics/grafica/flash/
Both libraries are accessible from PHP.
As far as vector tools, Sodipodi is an incredibly cool vector editor. Unfortunately, at this time it is only svg, but you may find it useful.People have for quite a while wanted flash for sodipodi, and all one has to do is tie the Open Source flash libs to the UI. But nobody has done it. Read a post about it on the Sodipodi web site.
I've been looking at 2d height maps in openGLfor my Open Racer project. During that time, I came across some people on mailing lists archives who are actually working on that kind of thing. I saw the info when reading the forums for http://www.terrainengine.com.
Within less than five days after engaging in discussion with the PLIB people on the mailing list, I had a cvs commit account as well as integration of the discussion of things. In the meantime, someone also working on the same PLIB-dependent project as I(who I got to help me through one of those project announcements) was able to integrate well with the people in the mailing list etc with his GUI work.
You can find PLIB, a 3d game development library, at http://plib.sourceforge.net
Slashdot Mirror
The post also links to the same news story twice. Come on, CowboyNeal. How carefully did you look at this?
>>this kind of crippling ignorance among professional astrophysicists is astonishing.
Isn't it rather an indication that they're doing their job? Data which challenge our current models are the most valuable things scientists can collect, because they give researchers chance to refine their theories.
If all the astrophysicists and satelite projects were returning information which merely fit their current theories, there would seem to be less need for such research. In scientific research, the known unknowns are difficult challenges, but the discovery of unknown unknowns are the wonderful bits. Definite Ignorance leads to Progress.
As has been pointed out, this essay isn't particularly unique. It's just stating the rather obvious point that lots of people are inspired by other people, and that when we make things, we often reshuffle bits of stuff we like. This practice is so common that it's not too interesting to point out. The article is clever, interesting, perhaps, but I wouldn't mod it insightful. The idea of creative reuse is the very basis of formal study of literature, music, and art-- why else spend hours, weeks, months reading, viewing, sampling, and arguing about the greats if not to enjoy them and learn how they work?
The Harper's article really isn't that much about plagiarism, and it also doesn't really address the questions of copyright very thoroughly-- he dismisses it as "rapacious" and makes some aside references to Jefferson.
A few years ago, in "Something Borrowed", Malcolm Gladwell looks at the personal story of a psychiatrist whose personal memoir is "plagiarized" by a playwright who writes a semi-successful play about the psychiatrist and her clients-- without consulting the psychiatrist or clients. Gladwell looks into issues about copyright, intellectual property, and the creative commons, but he also looks at the public and emotional effects in the lives of the psychiatrist (who feels "violated" by this appropriation of her life), and the playwright (who feels heartbroken, confused--devastated by the stigma and bad press). It's an awesome article.
This, of course, is why we need to keep the poor in their place. If they're living on subsistence, they won't patronize prostitutes.
Brilliant!
** ** **
Prostitution *nearly always* occurs in settings where large inequalities of wealth exist, in cultures where women have few opportunities. The solution here is not to eliminate jobs and lower the standard of living, but rather improve education and investment to raise the standard of living. The problem isn't that some men have too much money; the problem is that some women don't have enough.
For more information read "Pathologies of Power" by Paul Farmer.
Additionally, professionals are much, much better at documentary photojournalism as well as photojournalism for pre-organized events, such as sporting events and political events.
I suspect that amateur photography will continue to push the professionals to do yet better. This can only be a good thing.
Although these issues must be addressed thoughtfully, this suggestion is similar to previous generations' objections to literacy, suffrage, and property rights for "the masses."
1. Oh no! What will happen if we let the masses have (x)?
2. How can they know how to manage (x) responsibly? ( by responsibly, they mean: like we prefer them to )
3. So let's not give it to them!
Honestly. It's silly to discourage the development of hardware on the basis that training isn't in place. Of course not. There's no hardware! The lack of expertise and training is a reason for developing the technology, not against it.
Without training, the OLPC experiment will fall flat with a lack of support staff and educational curricula integration. (from the olpc article)
If you put the equipment into the hands of the people, the street will find uses for things. Black and brown people are not stupid. Like all things in life, it's a choice involving certain levels of personal risk. If people will buy one of these laptops, they're going to want training, especially if they stretched themselves financially to obtain it. They're going to be willing to trade (social and material) goods and services for that training. With increased demand for expertise, people with initiative and talent will learn the needed information and skills. This allows a local tech economy to develop. Cost analysis can't explain this situation, which involves more than payouts into something with no return.
If you feel obligated to give everyone formal classes, not only are you insulting their intelligence and controlling what they can or ought to know, but you're pre-emptively aborting certain opportunities for local economic development.
Honestly -- I learned more about computers with Slackware on a 486 (and nothing but the howtos) than most people get in a lot of computer classes. Not everyone can do this (and I'm not suggesting we just throw people in the deep end), but that's the great thing about geeks. They can cut across the traditional socio-economic boundaries because their skills make them useful; it's definitely been the case for me.
If you look at the OLPC article suggesting $970 as the TCO for one of these machines, you see how silly this really is. Ignore, for the moment, their apparent confusion over whose expenses they're describing. Look instead at their actual figures. Where did they get the $108 for initial setup? Can't you just ghost all the machines automatically? Also, how do they get away with putting a dollar value to the effect of potential future political instability on the cost of internet services?
Note: In some developing settings, the introduction of mobile phones has been bittersweet, since not everyone makes wise choices (for people in the West, wealth is a blinding, useful buffer for waste and bad choices. The poor have a different margin of error). People will sometimes go into debt to obtain a mobile (they become a status symbol, or people misunderstand their role/value, or because people have a strong desire to stay connected).
Laptops are bound to create similar issues, but laptops are fundamentally different from mobile phones in their positive, versatile potential. And the introduction of new technology always introduces complex, bittersweet social change.
But mobile phones have been a positive development. According to an article in The Economist, "the London Business School found that, in a typical developing country, a rise of ten mobile phones per 100 people boosts GDP growth by 0.6 percentage points. Mobile phones are, in short, a classic example of technology that helps people help themselves."
Muhammad Yunus, one of this year's Nobel Prize winners, has said that "When you
All other head-mounted displays are opaque; these are transparent.
That's not actually true. A transparent, in-glasses display was featured on Slashdot in 2001. Five Years Ago.
Head mounted displays have *not* been fiction. Steve Mann has been building these things for decades. A number of commercial solutions, based on several generations of products exist. I count a total of 17 basic wearable display product lines at Tekgear, a distributor who focuses on wearable computing hardware. This sort of thing is so common that an Open Source toolkit has been developed to deal with the real problems with these displays -- not the graphics display, but the user input. The ArToolkit is an object-recognition system which allows easy, keyboard-less interaction with a computer mediated augmented reality display. It's rather far along.
IANAP, but when I studied some basic quantum theory, I thought that one of the issues that arose in the EPR/Bell research was that in order for entanglement to be valid, it could not be used to transmit information, except via quantum teleportation, which has strong limitations due to being a classical information channel. Does anyone care to clarify for me?
It has already been done. Check out infodos.
(Mud Shell, now defunct, was featured on Slashdot in 2001.
There's also the New Adventure Shell, based on Doug Gwyn's Advshell, and John Cocker's Advsh, both written in 1984.
The basic concept also shows up in the adventure game found in Emacs.
But, playsh looks like it includes a special enhancement which I think is pretty cool. According to the article,
Now, that's pretty cool.
This is just an ad for Dynamism's USB products.
m l
Compare the items in the article to:
http://www.dynamism.com/solidalliance/pricing.sht
Having said that, I will say that the barbie USB port is just freaky. Wow.
EnronHaliburton2004:
I think you have misread Cuzality. Even though Cuzality cites Snopes properly, he runs his own comments together onto the end of the Snopes quote. This makes Snopes seem biased.
Snopes quote:
"...it's hard to find any specific action of Gore's (such as his sponsoring a Congressional bill or championing a particular piece of legislation) that one could claim helped bring the Internet into being, much less validate Gore's statement of having taken the "initiative in creating the Internet.""
Cuzality's quote:
But don't let that bother you -- after all, the entire premise of the Clinton administration was they wanted to be judged on how much they cared about people's problems, not what they could accomplish towards solving them. Gore undoubtedly gave many fine speeches talking about how important technology is (I just wish we could find a record of them), therefore he should get the credit for the Internet -- simple as that!
Try to be careful before judging Snopes by Cuzality's prejudice. There is nothing particular partisan about the Snopes entry. In fact, Snopes presents a balanced view of the debate.
Cuzality pulls one statement from Snopes and appends his own ideas after the end of the quote.
But you be the judge....
February 21, 2005
An open offer to the M.A.M.E. community.
Our recent actions to protect our products have met with a lot of controversy. Many
people have been quick to judge and make accusations about what we are attempting to
do, and what we have already done. It is my understanding that the spirit of the
M.A.M.E. community is ""M.A.M.E.'s purpose is to preserve these decades of videogame
history." It is further my understanding that "Selling either is not allowed" with
regards to M.A.M.E.
Given this understanding, we are willing to help promote these goals and work to provide
the original authors with the protection they deserve. Our goal is to prevent the
commercial offering of machines with illegally obtained ROMs. I believe our goals can
work in parallel.
Furthermore, we have a long standing relationship with many publishers of many games,
and we are constantly working to obtain more and more licenses for these games.
Our goal in filing the trademark for the name M.A.M.E. was simply to give us leverage
against those companies that promote and sell machines with M.A.M.E. installed on it,
and more importantly, provide their customers with the means to illegally obtain the
ROMs. This doesn't help our sales of our products. This doesn't help the community in
general.
We have no desire to use the M.A.M.E. name or logos; we simply wish to find ways to
prevent illegal distribution of classic arcade games. We will be happy to cancel our
application and work with the M.A.M.E. team to assign it to its rightful owners; however
we do want to prevent it from being awarded to someone that intends to use it
commercially.
I am available to work with the community to ensure that this happens, and to help get
more games made available to the community at a reasonable price.
David R. Foley
CEO
UltraCade Technologies
The other letter also attempts to clarify Foley's situation:
February 21, 2005
Like most things that are spread by rumor, the facts about me, UltraCade Technologies, and the M.A.M.E. emulation system are quite distorted. I will try and educate anyone who cares to listen about the reality of our marketplace and what we are doing and what we are not. Simply put, we are making an effort to stamp out the commercial sales of M.A.M.E. based systems that advertise the ability to play thousands of games while relying on the customer to obtain the ROMs which can not legally be obtained. What we are not doing is trying to claim ownership of the M.A.M.E. open source emulator or sue its authors. We are concerned about the commercial marketplace, and not the readers of the many M.A.M.E. user groups and forums.
I have been working on emulation technology since the mid 80's when I did work on an emulation project in college. In 1994, while working on games for companies like Sega and Williams, we developed an emulation of the arcade games Joust, Defender and Robotron that ran on a Sega Genesis. In 1996, we started the Lucky 8 project which turned into the UltraCade project. In 1998 we were one of the first companies to acquire the rights to classic arcade games from various publishers. We have licensed games from several manufacturers including Capcom,
I got the following letters off the ultracade site:
The tone of the article is unfortunate. But it's also too bad that really good technology gets dissed by the tech community if it's well marketed. mSpace is a rather sophisticated system for storing and relating arbitrary unstructured information in meaningful ways. The interface doesn't do it full justice.
McGuffin and Schraefel's paper of mSpaces, polyarchies and zzStructures won the ACM Hypertext Conference's award for "Special Research Distinction for Excellent Presentation of Theoretical Concepts."
Schraefel is not only a good programmer, doing very cutting edge information technology stuff, but she and her team have managed to design a useful piece of software that uses it. Since when can the Academic world do this kind of thing?
*sigh* People diss Nelson when he comes up with incredibly good ideas and quality computer science. And now, when people like Schraefel produce a usable product, they get dissed too. Before you go snarking about how the Semantic Web won't come down from heaven and die on a cross for us, make sure you know what the Semantic Web is. Just like Harpers, this is a perfectly cool example.
What do I think about the Semantic Web? I will admit, I sometimes wonder if it's safe.
>>doubles as a mirror.
:-)
Come on, folks. OGG is a nice bell and whistle, but a mirror? That's just chrome.
!!??!?!?!?!!?
I don't get the callousness of Slashdotters any more. Well, maybe I do. We're all too focused on the latest technology to wake up and look at what's happening in the world.
You want to know what King Gyanendra is doing? Read the news. He's supressing thousands of protesters in Kathmandu who want their democracy back. You want to see human rights violations? Look at Nepal right now. http://www.nepalnews.com/
But no. The American election is too imporant. Iraq's all the rage, for the supporters and for the detractors of Bush. Get over it. The middle east isn't the world, no matter what CNN might tell you.
Aha, but it's not a question of the GPL being invalid. They're not arguing that. Rather, they, as licensor of nmap, are revoking the license. The original licensor of the software has more power than redistributors. This is why some organizations are able to provide multiple licenses for their software.
If you were a judge, the question of the GPL would be less pertinent than the question of whether or not Nmap.org has the right to revoke the license. And the answer is: yes.
Umm, where did you get that Free Software is socialistic? As Richard Stallman originally pointed out, Free Software is a great way to make money! In fact, most Free Software has been written by people who are working for profit.
Read the GNU Manifesto, and you will notice that Stallman has always suggested that people charge for their software. http://www.fsf.org/gnu/manifesto.html
Of course, since there is only a very specific socioeconomic subset of the world population weblogging, what real usefulness does this give us? Honestly, even if you did ranking based on the most popular weblogs, that wouldn't help you very much.
:P. Unless this thing actually can find out the things that people are excited about that aren't well-known, it's pretty much just another search tool limited to blogs.
Furthermore, this thing isn't telling me anything I don't know. So it finds the word "Vietnam" during the Vietnam years. Hooray. I bet it finds the word Iraq today, or the phrase "Bin Ladin" last year.
Whoopdie-do. I'm impressed
In case you were wondering, the PCI SIG does have logo usage guidelines available on their site. They seem to be rather anal on the details. However, it looks like if you ask first, they let you use their logo and name.
o _Usage_Guide_and_License.zip.
Their logo usage guidelines are at:
http://www.pcisig.com/data/developers/PCI-SIG_Log
Yeah. I know. It's a zip. But I don't feel like slashdotting my server today.
There are a few tools for Flash and Open Source, but they are pretty much code oriented. The first is Ming, which can be found at:
http://www.opaque.net/ming/
The second is libswf, created by SGI. I'm not sure of the status of the license, but the source _is_ available.
ftp://ftp.sgi.com/sgi/graphics/grafica/flash/
Both libraries are accessible from PHP.
As far as vector tools, Sodipodi is an incredibly cool vector editor. Unfortunately, at this time it is only svg, but you may find it useful.People have for quite a while wanted flash for sodipodi, and all one has to do is tie the Open Source flash libs to the UI. But nobody has done it. Read a post about it on the Sodipodi web site.
I hope you find this helpful.
I've been looking at 2d height maps in openGLfor my Open Racer project. During that time, I came across some people on mailing lists archives who are actually working on that kind of thing. I saw the info when reading the forums for http://www.terrainengine.com.
Within less than five days after engaging in discussion with the PLIB people on the mailing list, I had a cvs commit account as well as integration of the discussion of things. In the meantime, someone also working on the same PLIB-dependent project as I(who I got to help me through one of those project announcements) was able to integrate well with the people in the mailing list etc with his GUI work.
You can find PLIB, a 3d game development library, at http://plib.sourceforge.net