Business is inherently a moral activity. Its entire foundation is trading with other individuals/entities. If you beleive in any ethics or morality at all, you have to beleive that interaction with other individuals/entities -- trading included -- is subject to ethical/moral principles and constraints. A moral trade (and therefore a moral business) is one that is in line with said principles and constraints.
I appreciate your duly noting the good examples of business/moral issues; but the sentiment that business isn't a moral activity scares me. All too many fail to realize that the foundation of business is trade/intercourse, and adopt the abstraction of "revenue streams", "consumers", or even "war" and forget the foundation of trade.
Just because some people apply that equation doesn't make it correct. Good is good, evil is evil.
My mistake; my remark about "some people" was a rhetorical device rather than a logical one. The logical meat of the argument is that an amoral entity has no regard for good or evil, only for its own perceived utility. So: An amoral entity will wander a possible space of actions w/o regard to whether or not they are good or evil. Depending on what you think the ration of good and neutral to evil actions is in the space, the amoral entity will be evil that % of the time.
The problem is that generally, there's a wide set of actions that can lead to perceived utility that damage other people. This can be anything to withholding information in a transaction to out-n-out extortion. Without morals/ethics in place to tell it to tread with caution, an entity can easily be tempted to roam this space w/o looking for cooperative games.
One of my biggest pet peeves with reactions to 9/11 has been the large set of technological security solutions. Very little mention is made of efforts to step up human intelligence/security -- from the level of "who's going to analyze the intelligence gathered by the CIA?" to "How do we make sure the human process at the airport is intelligence?"
We have a serious illusion in the US that technology is going to solve everything. Especially those of us who don't actually work with technology. Write your senators and encourage them to work towards more human intelligence ('course, do we REALLY want Congress working that out?).
The job of a business is to generate revenue. It exists for no other purpose.
In other words, it's amoral. Which some people actually consider "evil".
Most folks would argue it's not actually as evil asactively seeking to destroy something of high value (human life, human choice) or causing pain for the hell of it. I would agree. But the problem is that there are so many ways to get revenue that hurt other people, that ANY entity whose main goal is revenue is going to quickly find itself tempted to hurt them. Not because it wants to, but because the ends begin to justify the means.
Does charging for MP4s count? probably not. Does neglecting safety measures out of complacency and eye for the bottom line count? Absolutely. Ask yourself what you think of the fact that airline pilots and stewards/stewardess' had lobbied airlines for at least 2 years before Sep 11 for secure cockpit doors, citing several cases where unstable passengers could have caused an unstable airplane. Or watch Erin Brokavich.
The sad thing is, it's not that capitalism has to be this way. If your mission as a business is to meet a real (service or product) need adequately -- or, more especially, better than anyone else can meet it -- you're set. It's why Google beats the pants off of the rest of the search engines, despite being a late comer: they do it better than anyone else. It's why there's zillions of restaurants, despite zillions of other established restaurants: people need food, and if you sell adequately tasty food at an affordable price, you survive. But most corps and people are lazy; they'd rather see if they can find a way to coast and just collect the cash. In essence, they'd love to drive a wedge into basic economics that ensures they can maximize profits beyond the utility they're actually givint back. They work at the expense of the system in general, and the individual consumer who depends on them.
Revenue can't be the only guide. Subscribe to that principle, and people get hurt.
Or as some people like to say it, the opposite of love isn't hate. It's apathy.
I just scrolled through the comments and I can't beleive I don't see at least one post legitimizing some restrictions.
Folks, this isn't MTVs "Real World in Space!" At least initially, anyone who goes up into a space station is going to part of a pretty small and isolated human community. It's going to be important that members of that community get along. Lying can be big impediment to that. Cheating on a spouse says that you're willing to break pretty some big promises. And while alcohol can provide some great bonding moments (camraderie from shedding some inhibitions, and later, maybe even sharing vomit and hangovers. I know people who've hooked up because of shared vomiting experiences), it also impairs judgement, sometimes makes people much more volatile than they'd normally be, and carries a temptation for abuse that's too strong for many people (especially when in isolated and stressful situations).
There's no guarantee, of course, that honest, sober, and relatively chaste people are going to get along. But it doesn't seem that odd to me that NASA would consider the human dimension of a space community and try to select out traits they think might doom a community to disintegrations.
Except that you leave out that the Palestinians spent the last 50 years trying to destroy Israel, so Israel has some reason to keep the Palestinians under control. Not to mention that the Israelis haven't yet tried to actually wipe out the Palestinians, though I can see the day coming when they might try it, or at least to expel them all into Jordan and Egypt.
Many Palestinians have spent the last 50 years trying to simply survive underneath an Israeli government that started its existence by dispossesing many of the non-Jewish peoples and using terrorist tactics. Not to mention that the state was, to some extent, established by fiat of the dominant (and still very colonial) world powers of the time.
This doesn't mean the suicide bombers are right, or that the very real crimes of the Israelis make the crimes of the Palestinian people any less real. What it does mean is that the Israeli State is just as much to blame for the situation there as any Arab or Palestinian organization. This biography provides some interesting insights.
And while he may not be striclty correct, I don't blame the poster for thinking the US is doing the wrong thing in Columbia. We have a fairly long history of doing the wrong thing, sometimes with good intentions, sometimes without. It's only too bad that in many cases, the opposition is equally corrupt, and ceasing US intervention wouldn't be enough to bring peace to the world.
Bottom line: the world is a complicated place, the good guys aren't easy to tell from the bad guys, and often, people and nations are a mix of both.
It is also my opinion that the best applications for sound recording (please read audio, not MIDI sequncing, not waveform generation ala Max/MSP,) but straight recording are available only for the PC
Um.... Pro Tools? Pretty much considered the industry standard for digital audio workstations?
And if you want, Cubasis, Digital Performer, PEAK's apps, and a whole host of others. To be fair, I've never used Sequoia or Samplitude. But there are plenty of quite serviceable audio recording solutions for the Mac.
Ban IPs or delete accounts if you must, but don't abuse the moderation system that you want your users to hold sacred.
Good heavens. You'd rather have an entire account deleted -- essentially kicking a user off the system -- than having them modded down? Render ALL their posts TOTALLY invisible rather than simply modded below someone elses reading threshold?
Remember, moding someone down DOESN'T make their comment invisible. It makes them invisible to those who've decided to trust the moderators (and, as everyone now knows, the "fascist" slashdot editors) and set their threshold higher than a certain level. And even then, the system reminds them there are comments below their threshold.
I think mostly people take their post visibility and karma WAY too seriously. I've only had one or two ever unfairly moderated by ANYONE, editor or average joe I know not. I've had lots of intelligent posts totally ignored. I've had a few fatuous ones moded up. The moderation system isn't perfect. But by and large, when I do my best to post intelligently, I find my comments eventually get noticed, no matter where they fall on the point spectrum, and more often than not, they get awarded a mod point or two.
The system works for me, and probably works for most slashdot readers, which is why they're still here.
Indiana Jones and Avacado Women in the Jungle of Death
"Piranha Women of the Avocado Jungle of Death" is apparently a real movie, parodied in a song by singer-songwriter Christine Lavin, whose aunt was (again, apparently) in the film. Christine Lavin is hilarious.
Search for the Missing Socks
As it turns out, I know where socks go. According to a friend whose ex-husband used to repair washing machines, there is usually a gap between the basin and the top of the machine. Socks (and other light items) are occasionally sloshed over the top and into the internals of the washing machine.
I know someone who has also written a song about this. He would not claim to be as funny as Christine Lavin.
It might be good to dig up that Gartner Group report on IIS from a few weeks/months back, and look up various other recommendations for free software from analysis firms. People who write checks listen to them.
If you get frustrated enough with them -- especially if you leave -- there are a lot of ways of bending the behavior of nonprofits. There's very strong language in the charters of most of them about wise use of funds (actually, that's in most "for profits" too, which is the foundation for shareholder lawsuits).
Of course, an actual suit is probably the wrong thing to do. But you can bring this up, and you can even talk to those who donate to the nonprofit (most nonprofits are set up that way because they receive donations, or to give limited liability to a volunteer organization); they may be interested to hear about organizational effeciency.
Finally, I think it's always interesting how much the culture of united states business and government tends to rely on technology these days, and overlook the value of human resources (which is now just a phrase for a mostly bureaucratic corporate department). Our intelligence organizations are prime example; we have great spy tech, but we're lacking in humint, which is partly to blame for those organizations failing to prevent Sep 11. But has anyone heard about a bill in congress to beef up human intelligence? Nope.... just spy tech on US citizenry.... sigh.
It's not suffectient for EVERY document, but nearly every word processor on the planet can read (and write) them, and you'd be surprised what can be captured in an RTF file.
The OmniWeb browser uses them for web archives (or did at one time), and I couldn't beleive how beautifully it kept the page appearance the first time I saw it.
I wonder that more people don't standardize on it.
I think the big problem with software as a service is that people think they own software right now. Most home users I know don't bother to read the license -- they think it's a combination of a warantee and a "do not copy" clause. Most corporate users I know think the same thing -- and some of them think that the license exists to protect THEM (this has come up in some of the Free Software conversations I've had: "but there's no license! Who can we hold responsible?").
They are, of course, wrong from a legal standpoint. But the interesting thing is that whatever reality is, perception affects buying just as much, and since buyers currently think they actually purchase the software, trying to get them to do something else is tricky.
It will, of course, be interesting to see what happens as technical efforts to drive the legal reality of not owning software home increase. I'm not sure if it'll result in people raising hell and a revolution, or if they'll just lowe a little and move along like so many cattle.
Disclaimer: the closest thing I've done to any real functional programming is a weird mix of logical and imperative programming in Prolog, so I may have a warped idea of what functional programming is.
But... a curious observation.... this last semester I was encouraged for a "Teaching with Technology Class" to develop an application using Excel with a limited number of Visual Basic macros thrown in. As I spent time working with the system, it occured to me I was actually doing functional programming. Each cell was a function call, which could only be fed results of other cells/function calls.... (any comments on whether this is actually true?)
It turned out to be a bit confining; iteration was a bit painful, and I ended up with a big state table that I was proud to simply have come up with, messy as it was. But it was also interesting to see what you can/have to come up with when confined. In the end, the application worked.
And of course, if Microsoft is too important to the country to be punished under anti-trust law, what're the chances they (or any other large corp with big bottom lines and lots of legal dollars) would be punished under security law?
BUT.... what if security _claims_ were regulated by a much tighter law -- say, much like SEC filings. I have never read a prospectus that was anything but pessimistic about a company's prospectus -- that's because they know that if they put anything that's hype in it, they may as well write a check out for the lawsuit that's coming and perhaps pack for a trip to white-collar jail. OK, unless you're Milliken(?. that one guy pardoned by Clinton who hid in Switzerland for 10 years).
Require an SEC like full disclosure of known vulnerabilities. Assess daily penalties for each week a known vulnerability is kept secret (if you like, only assessed from the day it's found in the wild). Make advertising about security a binding promise. Software companies would be a lot more careful about what they claim and more forthcoming about actual information. And in the presence of more perfect information, the market will serve ALL parties more effectively.
Given that a fair portion of Slashdot never tires of bashing apple and a fair portion never tires of bashing Jon Katz, what in the world is going to happen here?
Me, I'm getting as far away from this discussion board and Slashdot's servers as possible....
Having lived half of everywhere in LA (Cerritos, Compton, Harbor City, Inglewood, Long Beach, Santa Monica, South Gate, and Whittier), and with my brother just into Orange county in La Habra, I can testify that despite the fact that it is a seperate county, and as much as many Orange County residents would like to say it ain't so, OC is in fact drawn to the gravitational center that is LA. The glow of red tail lights east along the 91 freeway at quittin' time is one of the strongest indicators. Lots of OC'rs commute in. This is part of what makes a suburb a suburb. Lots of residences and necessary local services (gas stations, grocery stores, and pacifying consumer retail stores), with many of the other jobs that enable the creation of these things (agriculture, manufacturing, big financial services, etc) somewhere else.
OC does have local flavor, and the farther you get away from the county line, you do get a sense of independence from LA. But... if you're still only in Santa Ana, I think you're still in LA.
Boy, that should be the catchphrase here. That and "pot. kettle. black."
Guess what? Slashdot started life as a big weblog -- Taco's weblog. OK, it wasn't a "read my journal" blog, it was a "hey, look what I think is interesting in the science/technology world plus a few other things thrown in" blog. And it turned out to be so succesful that people like you hit reload on their browser at least 5 times a day while at work or wasting their lives in their parents basement, and feel some strange desire to post comments.
And then, at some point, the editorial staff of this glorified (and cool) weblog decided that movie reviews might matter to some people. So here's Katz's take on a movie. Perhaps you may have noticed he does the same thing every week. Repeat: It's not a journal entry. It's a movie review. It's a regular feature, too.
So what are you complaining about? That the editors decided to have weekly movie reviews? That the movies that Katz picks don't quite match up with your interests? That you don't like Katz's writing? That you might have to actually use your judgement and decide not to read some of these movie reviews yourself, rather than obsesive-compulsively reading every last slashdot article? Or that you might have to learn to use the topic/author filtering boxes in the preferences?
If so, perhaps you should start your own weblog, and read it instead of this one. That way, you won't have to be inconvenienced by the presence of any content that doesn't match your individual expectations.
Just thinking about this... all you really need in order to get a half-decent HUD would be a monitor/light source you can stick on your dash, and a driver that can enable you to correct for the deformation of the image that occurs because of the shape of the windshield.
Since LCD panels are now affordable, the first requirement is met. Now all we need is someone to
write the video driver....
I'm not sure it is a good thing. What benefits will we gain? Well, you can fit more on a disc, but most albums aren't longer than 60 minutes, let alone the 74/80 that can fit on current discs. OK, we might get 24 bit/96 Khz audio, too, which would be nice... but I'm not sure it's worth the copy protection difficulties that are sure to come with it....
The RIAA is already looking for another format. DVD-Audio or something. They know they can't pull the switcheroo quite yet -- not enough DVD players in homes. But at some point, they'll settle on something like that, and then do what they did to kill vinyl: tell distributors/retailers they won't accept their unsold copies of albums back.
Anyone know who holds the DVD standard? Not that it matters, plenty of provision for copy protection in that....
The Cato Institute (publisher of all those reports) is an apologist for all things laissez-faire and libertarian. One could accurately say they not only have a bias (like everyone else), they have a bent.
When these articles appear in the Quarterly Journal of Economics, then they'll be worth paying attention to. But in the meanwhile, they look an awful lot like sparks from a grinding axe.
I read an industry commentary a couple of years ago in Electronic Musician or something like that. There was one comment I thought was very perceptive. The author talked about the observation that most people will listen to a given 5 minute song they like MANY many more times than they would watch a favorite movie, television show, or even short or segment of a show.
Now, granted, this observation was made by a music fan/musician to music fans/musician. And you have to take into account that for every time you can watch "The Mummy Returns" or "O Brother Where Art Thou" you can listen to "Short Skirt, Long Jacket" or "Man of Constant Sorrow" about 30 times. however, I've listened to William Walton's "Belshazzar's Feast" which is about 30 minutes probably hundreds of times. Brandenburg Concerto #4, ditto. And most people will listen to a complete album (like, say, U2's Joshua Tree) over and over. So I think the generalization holds. People's interest in music holds longer (whether or not there's less material). The author of the article held it was because there's a mental/emotional participatory nature to music that isn't present in TV or movies. I think the way he said it was "In music, there's an 'us'. In TV, there's only 'them'."
Anyway, the point is, a Napster for video would work differently, and perhaps not as well. I think you'd have a smaller number of people constantly scouring the thing for files. Fewer people on as often reduces the value. Except for real film fans (you know, the people that actually BUY most of the movies they watch, rather than rent, or that work at blockbuster and/or majored in film at school), most people would have a small collection on their hard drive of a few favorites, and perhaps a season or two of their favorite show. So mostly, it'd be easy to find "E.T." and "The Simpsons". Films by Zhang Yimou might be available when the right people got on.
Yeah, that problem existed with Napster. But it'd be magnified for video... because fewer people I know are as anxious to make video a constant and repeated presence in their lives. Music just trumps it as an art form.
(Of course, it may just be that since I stopped watching the TV in the early 90's -- occasional exceptions for Animaniacs, Simpsons, the Tick, and the X-Files -- I haven't made friends with TV people, and am out of touch.)
Slashdot Mirror
Business isn't a moral activity
Business is inherently a moral activity. Its entire foundation is trading with other individuals/entities. If you beleive in any ethics or morality at all, you have to beleive that interaction with other individuals/entities -- trading included -- is subject to ethical/moral principles and constraints. A moral trade (and therefore a moral business) is one that is in line with said principles and constraints.
I appreciate your duly noting the good examples of business/moral issues; but the sentiment that business isn't a moral activity scares me. All too many fail to realize that the foundation of business is trade/intercourse, and adopt the abstraction of "revenue streams", "consumers", or even "war" and forget the foundation of trade.
Just because some people apply that equation doesn't make it correct. Good is good, evil is evil.
My mistake; my remark about "some people" was a rhetorical device rather than a logical one. The logical meat of the argument is that an amoral entity has no regard for good or evil, only for its own perceived utility. So: An amoral entity will wander a possible space of actions w/o regard to whether or not they are good or evil. Depending on what you think the ration of good and neutral to evil actions is in the space, the amoral entity will be evil that % of the time.
The problem is that generally, there's a wide set of actions that can lead to perceived utility that damage other people. This can be anything to withholding information in a transaction to out-n-out extortion. Without morals/ethics in place to tell it to tread with caution, an entity can easily be tempted to roam this space w/o looking for cooperative games.
One of my biggest pet peeves with reactions to 9/11 has been the large set of technological security solutions. Very little mention is made of efforts to step up human intelligence/security -- from the level of "who's going to analyze the intelligence gathered by the CIA?" to "How do we make sure the human process at the airport is intelligence?"
We have a serious illusion in the US that technology is going to solve everything. Especially those of us who don't actually work with technology. Write your senators and encourage them to work towards more human intelligence ('course, do we REALLY want Congress working that out?).
The job of a business is to generate revenue. It exists for no other purpose.
In other words, it's amoral. Which some people actually consider "evil".
Most folks would argue it's not actually as evil asactively seeking to destroy something of high value (human life, human choice) or causing pain for the hell of it. I would agree. But the problem is that there are so many ways to get revenue that hurt other people, that ANY entity whose main goal is revenue is going to quickly find itself tempted to hurt them. Not because it wants to, but because the ends begin to justify the means.
Does charging for MP4s count? probably not. Does neglecting safety measures out of complacency and eye for the bottom line count? Absolutely. Ask yourself what you think of the fact that airline pilots and stewards/stewardess' had lobbied airlines for at least 2 years before Sep 11 for secure cockpit doors, citing several cases where unstable passengers could have caused an unstable airplane. Or watch Erin Brokavich.
The sad thing is, it's not that capitalism has to be this way. If your mission as a business is to meet a real (service or product) need adequately -- or, more especially, better than anyone else can meet it -- you're set. It's why Google beats the pants off of the rest of the search engines, despite being a late comer: they do it better than anyone else. It's why there's zillions of restaurants, despite zillions of other established restaurants: people need food, and if you sell adequately tasty food at an affordable price, you survive. But most corps and people are lazy; they'd rather see if they can find a way to coast and just collect the cash. In essence, they'd love to drive a wedge into basic economics that ensures they can maximize profits beyond the utility they're actually givint back. They work at the expense of the system in general, and the individual consumer who depends on them.
Revenue can't be the only guide. Subscribe to that principle, and people get hurt.
Or as some people like to say it, the opposite of love isn't hate. It's apathy.
I just scrolled through the comments and I can't beleive I don't see at least one post legitimizing some restrictions.
Folks, this isn't MTVs "Real World in Space!" At least initially, anyone who goes up into a space station is going to part of a pretty small and isolated human community. It's going to be important that members of that community get along. Lying can be big impediment to that. Cheating on a spouse says that you're willing to break pretty some big promises. And while alcohol can provide some great bonding moments (camraderie from shedding some inhibitions, and later, maybe even sharing vomit and hangovers. I know people who've hooked up because of shared vomiting experiences), it also impairs judgement, sometimes makes people much more volatile than they'd normally be, and carries a temptation for abuse that's too strong for many people (especially when in isolated and stressful situations).
There's no guarantee, of course, that honest, sober, and relatively chaste people are going to get along. But it doesn't seem that odd to me that NASA would consider the human dimension of a space community and try to select out traits they think might doom a community to disintegrations.
Except that you leave out that the Palestinians spent the last 50 years trying to destroy Israel, so Israel has some reason to keep the Palestinians under control. Not to mention that the Israelis haven't yet tried to actually wipe out the Palestinians, though I can see the day coming when they might try it, or at least to expel them all into Jordan and Egypt.
Many Palestinians have spent the last 50 years trying to simply survive underneath an Israeli government that started its existence by dispossesing many of the non-Jewish peoples and using terrorist tactics. Not to mention that the state was, to some extent, established by fiat of the dominant (and still very colonial) world powers of the time.
This doesn't mean the suicide bombers are right, or that the very real crimes of the Israelis make the crimes of the Palestinian people any less real. What it does mean is that the Israeli State is just as much to blame for the situation there as any Arab or Palestinian organization. This biography provides some interesting insights.
And while he may not be striclty correct, I don't blame the poster for thinking the US is doing the wrong thing in Columbia. We have a fairly long history of doing the wrong thing, sometimes with good intentions, sometimes without. It's only too bad that in many cases, the opposition is equally corrupt, and ceasing US intervention wouldn't be enough to bring peace to the world.
Bottom line: the world is a complicated place, the good guys aren't easy to tell from the bad guys, and often, people and nations are a mix of both.
It is also my opinion that the best applications for sound recording (please read audio, not MIDI sequncing, not waveform generation ala Max/MSP,) but straight recording are available only for the PC
Um.... Pro Tools? Pretty much considered the industry standard for digital audio workstations?
And if you want, Cubasis, Digital Performer, PEAK's apps, and a whole host of others. To be fair, I've never used Sequoia or Samplitude. But there are plenty of quite serviceable audio recording solutions for the Mac.
During the Reagan era, the term "Evil Empire" generally meant something else....
'course, times change...
Ban IPs or delete accounts if you must, but don't abuse the moderation system that you want your users to hold sacred.
Good heavens. You'd rather have an entire account deleted -- essentially kicking a user off the system -- than having them modded down? Render ALL their posts TOTALLY invisible rather than simply modded below someone elses reading threshold?
Remember, moding someone down DOESN'T make their comment invisible. It makes them invisible to those who've decided to trust the moderators (and, as everyone now knows, the "fascist" slashdot editors) and set their threshold higher than a certain level. And even then, the system reminds them there are comments below their threshold.
I think mostly people take their post visibility and karma WAY too seriously. I've only had one or two ever unfairly moderated by ANYONE, editor or average joe I know not. I've had lots of intelligent posts totally ignored. I've had a few fatuous ones moded up. The moderation system isn't perfect. But by and large, when I do my best to post intelligently, I find my comments eventually get noticed, no matter where they fall on the point spectrum, and more often than not, they get awarded a mod point or two.
The system works for me, and probably works for most slashdot readers, which is why they're still here.
Indiana Jones and Avacado Women in the Jungle of Death
"Piranha Women of the Avocado Jungle of Death" is apparently a real movie, parodied in a song by singer-songwriter Christine Lavin, whose aunt was (again, apparently) in the film. Christine Lavin is hilarious.
Search for the Missing Socks
As it turns out, I know where socks go. According to a friend whose ex-husband used to repair washing machines, there is usually a gap between the basin and the top of the machine. Socks (and other light items) are occasionally sloshed over the top and into the internals of the washing machine.
I know someone who has also written a song about this. He would not claim to be as funny as Christine Lavin.
(Anyone wanna score this "-1, Frivolous" ?)
It might be good to dig up that Gartner Group report on IIS from a few weeks/months back, and look up various other recommendations for free software from analysis firms. People who write checks listen to them.
If you get frustrated enough with them -- especially if you leave -- there are a lot of ways of bending the behavior of nonprofits. There's very strong language in the charters of most of them about wise use of funds (actually, that's in most "for profits" too, which is the foundation for shareholder lawsuits).
Of course, an actual suit is probably the wrong thing to do. But you can bring this up, and you can even talk to those who donate to the nonprofit (most nonprofits are set up that way because they receive donations, or to give limited liability to a volunteer organization); they may be interested to hear about organizational effeciency.
Finally, I think it's always interesting how much the culture of united states business and government tends to rely on technology these days, and overlook the value of human resources (which is now just a phrase for a mostly bureaucratic corporate department). Our intelligence organizations are prime example; we have great spy tech, but we're lacking in humint, which is partly to blame for those organizations failing to prevent Sep 11. But has anyone heard about a bill in congress to beef up human intelligence? Nope.... just spy tech on US citizenry.... sigh.
Couldn't help but notice the "Redmond Linux" icon out of all those at the top of the page there.....
:)
http://www.redmondlinux.org/
Hmmmmm. I'm not sure what to think.
Rich Text Format, folks.
It's not suffectient for EVERY document, but nearly every word processor on the planet can read (and write) them, and you'd be surprised what can be captured in an RTF file.
The OmniWeb browser uses them for web archives (or did at one time), and I couldn't beleive how beautifully it kept the page appearance the first time I saw it.
I wonder that more people don't standardize on it.
I think the big problem with software as a service is that people think they own software right now. Most home users I know don't bother to read the license -- they think it's a combination of a warantee and a "do not copy" clause. Most corporate users I know think the same thing -- and some of them think that the license exists to protect THEM (this has come up in some of the Free Software conversations I've had: "but there's no license! Who can we hold responsible?").
They are, of course, wrong from a legal standpoint. But the interesting thing is that whatever reality is, perception affects buying just as much, and since buyers currently think they actually purchase the software, trying to get them to do something else is tricky.
It will, of course, be interesting to see what happens as technical efforts to drive the legal reality of not owning software home increase. I'm not sure if it'll result in people raising hell and a revolution, or if they'll just lowe a little and move along like so many cattle.
Not to mention the fact that _some_ courts impose computer related community service as a requirement.
But maybe that's only in large anti-trust cases where the defendant is a corporation and has something to gain from their sentence.
Disclaimer: the closest thing I've done to any real functional programming is a weird mix of logical and imperative programming in Prolog, so I may have a warped idea of what functional programming is.
But... a curious observation.... this last semester I was encouraged for a "Teaching with Technology Class" to develop an application using Excel with a limited number of Visual Basic macros thrown in. As I spent time working with the system, it occured to me I was actually doing functional programming. Each cell was a function call, which could only be fed results of other cells/function calls.... (any comments on whether this is actually true?)
It turned out to be a bit confining; iteration was a bit painful, and I ended up with a big state table that I was proud to simply have come up with, messy as it was. But it was also interesting to see what you can/have to come up with when confined. In the end, the application worked.
Everyone would be in violation....
And of course, if Microsoft is too important to the country to be punished under anti-trust law, what're the chances they (or any other large corp with big bottom lines and lots of legal dollars) would be punished under security law?
BUT.... what if security _claims_ were regulated by a much tighter law -- say, much like SEC filings. I have never read a prospectus that was anything but pessimistic about a company's prospectus -- that's because they know that if they put anything that's hype in it, they may as well write a check out for the lawsuit that's coming and perhaps pack for a trip to white-collar jail. OK, unless you're Milliken(?. that one guy pardoned by Clinton who hid in Switzerland for 10 years).
Require an SEC like full disclosure of known vulnerabilities. Assess daily penalties for each week a known vulnerability is kept secret (if you like, only assessed from the day it's found in the wild). Make advertising about security a binding promise. Software companies would be a lot more careful about what they claim and more forthcoming about actual information. And in the presence of more perfect information, the market will serve ALL parties more effectively.
Just my thoughts....
Given that a fair portion of Slashdot never tires of bashing apple and a fair portion never tires of bashing Jon Katz, what in the world is going to happen here?
Me, I'm getting as far away from this discussion board and Slashdot's servers as possible....
Having lived half of everywhere in LA (Cerritos, Compton, Harbor City, Inglewood, Long Beach, Santa Monica, South Gate, and Whittier), and with my brother just into Orange county in La Habra, I can testify that despite the fact that it is a seperate county, and as much as many Orange County residents would like to say it ain't so, OC is in fact drawn to the gravitational center that is LA. The glow of red tail lights east along the 91 freeway at quittin' time is one of the strongest indicators. Lots of OC'rs commute in. This is part of what makes a suburb a suburb. Lots of residences and necessary local services (gas stations, grocery stores, and pacifying consumer retail stores), with many of the other jobs that enable the creation of these things (agriculture, manufacturing, big financial services, etc) somewhere else.
OC does have local flavor, and the farther you get away from the county line, you do get a sense of independence from LA. But... if you're still only in Santa Ana, I think you're still in LA.
you should start your own weblog
Boy, that should be the catchphrase here. That and "pot. kettle. black."
Guess what? Slashdot started life as a big weblog -- Taco's weblog. OK, it wasn't a "read my journal" blog, it was a "hey, look what I think is interesting in the science/technology world plus a few other things thrown in" blog. And it turned out to be so succesful that people like you hit reload on their browser at least 5 times a day while at work or wasting their lives in their parents basement, and feel some strange desire to post comments.
And then, at some point, the editorial staff of this glorified (and cool) weblog decided that movie reviews might matter to some people. So here's Katz's take on a movie. Perhaps you may have noticed he does the same thing every week. Repeat: It's not a journal entry. It's a movie review. It's a regular feature, too.
So what are you complaining about? That the editors decided to have weekly movie reviews? That the movies that Katz picks don't quite match up with your interests? That you don't like Katz's writing? That you might have to actually use your judgement and decide not to read some of these movie reviews yourself, rather than obsesive-compulsively reading every last slashdot article? Or that you might have to learn to use the topic/author filtering boxes in the preferences?
If so, perhaps you should start your own weblog, and read it instead of this one. That way, you won't have to be inconvenienced by the presence of any content that doesn't match your individual expectations.
Just thinking about this... all you really need in order to get a half-decent HUD would be a monitor/light source you can stick on your dash, and a driver that can enable you to correct for the deformation of the image that occurs because of the shape of the windshield.
Since LCD panels are now affordable, the first requirement is met. Now all we need is someone to
write the video driver....
I'm not sure it is a good thing. What benefits will we gain? Well, you can fit more on a disc, but most albums aren't longer than 60 minutes, let alone the 74/80 that can fit on current discs. OK, we might get 24 bit/96 Khz audio, too, which would be nice... but I'm not sure it's worth the copy protection difficulties that are sure to come with it....
The RIAA is already looking for another format. DVD-Audio or something. They know they can't pull the switcheroo quite yet -- not enough DVD players in homes. But at some point, they'll settle on something like that, and then do what they did to kill vinyl: tell distributors/retailers they won't accept their unsold copies of albums back.
Anyone know who holds the DVD standard? Not that it matters, plenty of provision for copy protection in that....
The Cato Institute (publisher of all those reports) is an apologist for all things laissez-faire and libertarian. One could accurately say they not only have a bias (like everyone else), they have a bent.
When these articles appear in the Quarterly Journal of Economics, then they'll be worth paying attention to. But in the meanwhile, they look an awful lot like sparks from a grinding axe.
Anyone know of a translator that does Dutch -> English?
..... worldlingo.com does English->Dutch but not vice versa, at least, with machine translation...
The fish doesn't
I read an industry commentary a couple of years ago in Electronic Musician or something like that. There was one comment I thought was very perceptive. The author talked about the observation that most people will listen to a given 5 minute song they like MANY many more times than they would watch a favorite movie, television show, or even short or segment of a show.
Now, granted, this observation was made by a music fan/musician to music fans/musician. And you have to take into account that for every time you can watch "The Mummy Returns" or "O Brother Where Art Thou" you can listen to "Short Skirt, Long Jacket" or "Man of Constant Sorrow" about 30 times. however, I've listened to William Walton's "Belshazzar's Feast" which is about 30 minutes probably hundreds of times. Brandenburg Concerto #4, ditto. And most people will listen to a complete album (like, say, U2's Joshua Tree) over and over. So I think the generalization holds. People's interest in music holds longer (whether or not there's less material). The author of the article held it was because there's a mental/emotional participatory nature to music that isn't present in TV or movies. I think the way he said it was "In music, there's an 'us'. In TV, there's only 'them'."
Anyway, the point is, a Napster for video would work differently, and perhaps not as well. I think you'd have a smaller number of people constantly scouring the thing for files. Fewer people on as often reduces the value. Except for real film fans (you know, the people that actually BUY most of the movies they watch, rather than rent, or that work at blockbuster and/or majored in film at school), most people would have a small collection on their hard drive of a few favorites, and perhaps a season or two of their favorite show. So mostly, it'd be easy to find "E.T." and "The Simpsons". Films by Zhang Yimou might be available when the right people got on.
Yeah, that problem existed with Napster. But it'd be magnified for video... because fewer people I know are as anxious to make video a constant and repeated presence in their lives. Music just trumps it as an art form.
(Of course, it may just be that since I stopped watching the TV in the early 90's -- occasional exceptions for Animaniacs, Simpsons, the Tick, and the X-Files -- I haven't made friends with TV people, and am out of touch.)