We come from YOUR country. Everybody here came from somewhere else, and frankly, the reason why we left was often because things were getting seriously messed up back in the Old Country.
We like having the chance to do things differently than you.
When you take technology out into the cold, hard world, things fall apart. If you want to even come close to the experience of using a book, look to the XO-1 for some lessons in utility and hardiness:
Make it TOUGH. I can't count the number of times I've dropped my XO-1. The Kindle looks rather fragile.
Make it CASELESS. If you have to carry around a case, you simply don't use the device as much. The XO-1's snap-and-go clamshell is a marvel. I'd be pretty hesitant to stuff a Kindle in between my other books and walk down the street.
Make it SPILL-PROOF. I found myself taking the XO-1 into all kinds of places I'd never taken a PC before, such as the kitchen. Of course I spilled sauce and flour all over it, right off the bat. So, I took the battery out and rinsed the XO-1 off in the sink. I'm not sure a Kindle would stand up to that kind of abuse.
Make screen refresh FAST. To even begin to reach the efficiency of flipping through a book, you need instantaneous screen updates. The XO-1 is no screamer, but it sure beats out the agony of 1-3 seconds per page refresh of e-ink.
This looks like a pretty well thought out plan. The fact that the entire application suite will be getting automatic upgrades is great; this is something that Linux users have enjoyed for many years. The "unhackable" claim is PR fluf, sure, but making such a claim should inspire their budding engineers to explore the edges of their new boxes. Since the boxes are tagged with RFID, I certainly hope no student keeps them after graduation (not that they're likely to -- 4 years is a long time to keep a netbook.)
For some reason people are clamoring for a "public option" with healthcare, but not a public option for wireless broadband. I hate to be cynical, but I predict that consumers will continue to be metered to death by the telcos. No doubt they will charge separate fees for 4G access in the home vs 4G on the street vs 4G roaming to 3G, and maybe even for every hand-off between cells. Every measurable event in the network is a possible source of revenue.
As with the data plans today, they will kill consumers on per-access charges for these network events, which of course no one in their right mind will pay. So, we'll take their "data plus" offer which tacks on an additional $20 per month fee for broadband to our existing data plan. Even though we will know that using the new network will actually reduce the telco's costs since new technology is always cheaper than old (Moore's Law), we will suck it up and pay. And pay, and pay.
Now is the time for municipalities to get back in the game and make sure our laws will allow cooperatives or local governments to build out public networks that are non-discriminatory and low cost.
Ask anyone who has used an OLPC, and they will tell you that not only is it possible to use an LCD in full, direct sunlight, the image quality actually improves; the stronger the light, the better. The OLPC's limitation, however, is that daylight-readable version is monochrome only.
The 3Qi is the commercialized next generation of the same screen technology. It adds EPaper, color, and video to the line up. Mary Lou Jepsen, the engineering genius behind the company, is trying to get the power requirements down far enough to allow 20-40 hours of run time, using current battery technology. The current version of the 3Qi is apparently not able to achieve that kind of power management without changes to the motherboard, but is still able to reduce power requirements by 20%.
Engadget did a series of side-by-side video comparisons with the Kindle earlier this year, and the results are very impressive.
As I see it, the point of this exercise isn't to critique the healthcare bill per se, it is to take some of the hard lessons learned from doing systems development and apply them to the legislative process.
Anybody who has ever tried to implement a big, complex system knows just how unbelievably hard it is to create working code that does what it supposed to do. It is ridiculously difficult it is to even get people to AGREE what a system is supposed to do in the first place, let alone code it.
From a systems development point of view, then, the author's thought experiment is a good one, and surely a valuable (and uncommon) one given all the shouting, etc.
One thing I would point out, however, is that Legislation != Source Code. Rather, Legislation = Requirements. The "source code" comes later, in the form of regulations written by the various agencies who are charged with execution of the law. This means, unfortunately, that the situation is even worse that we imagined.
Imagine if you were given a 1,000+ page set of requirements, with absolutely no guidance on intention, context, or usability.
"Cloud computing" is the next step in the commoditization of hosting. The economic benefits of adopting a virtualized, on-demand IT architecture are profound, and the technical people aren't going to have a lot to say about it when the VP of Finance tells the CEO that they can cut IT costs in half by outsourcing.
Better to get on board and live with what's coming. I've been very impressed with Amazon's Web Services offerings. Their latest idea is a virtual private cloud: cloud machine images hooked into your datacenter via VPN.
This story would have been a lot more appealing without the hyper-ventilated media fishbowl aspects (serious design flaws! total failure of web 2.0 principles! complete lack of transparency! they didn't respond to my wiki posts!).
As regards transparency, compared to what we had before, just having numbers like this up in the public puts government CIOs in a very hot seat, indeed. Just imagine if your own CIO had to do likewise with your own firm's numbers! Yow.
Let's help them out here, not bash them in for small coding errors.
My computer doesn't have to be hooked up to the interweb to work...
Since you are not a candidate for Internet-connected, virtualized, on-demand scalable computing resources (aka "cloud computing"), you are not attracted to cloud computing's value proposition.
For those of us who need these things, vendors such as Amazon, Microsoft, and Google are building services we definitely want to buy. Amazon's simple storage service, for example, had 40 billion objects in its repository as of February, 2009.
Ignore the nay sayers. Of course there is a lot of value in aggregating content and creating a compound page that blends your internal content with other sources.
From a usuability and authority-of-source perspective, however, I think it would be best to list each source in a separate section on the page, starting with your internal content at the top. You can get to the other content either by embedding links into your internal content, or by collecting the links in a separate section.
Wikipedia itself uses the embedded technique. When composing or editing an article, the author can embed markup for external references. On display, this markup is turned into a footnote link at the point of embedding, and a footnote at the bottom of the page. I don't see why you couldn't do something similar. In this case, however, you would be embedding references to Wikipedia articles.
I don't see why you couldn't do something similar. In your internal wiki templates, have a custom markup for embedding wikipedia queries related to the article. On display, turn this markup queries either into embedded links to footnotes, resolve the queries and deposit them at the bottom of the page, or toss them into iframes and let the user sort it out.
The other technique is to have a custom form in your internal wiki template where you collect the cross-references. On display, turn these queries into links or resolve them into content.
In any event, why limit yourself to Wikipedia? Include cross-references to patent search engines and other domain-specific sources.
A big word of caution, of course, is owed to the legal angle. Make sure you follow the law whenever reusing anyone else's content, even if it's just a link. Have your legal department sign off on your reuse policy. Don't distract them with technical aspects of what you want to do. They're lawyers; they only care about the law. Ask them a specific legal question, such as, "what is our legal exposure if we republish (links to or actual content from) Wikipedia on our internal wiki?".
There are many forms of authoritarianism. It is a belief system that is surprisingly "cross-platform"; you'll find examples in all kinds of communities, secular and religious, left-wing and right-wing, liberal and conservative.
What they have in common is a mis-trust in the governed. The governed must be repressed, and cannot be allowed to have free choice. There can be no tolerance for meaningful opposition, for that would "weaken" the community, resulting in "instability", i.e., loss of control by the governing class. It is a forced form of allegiance.
All truly free societies are built on the power of persuasion.
Imagine you are a staff attorney being asked to sign off on the legality of a secret government program. You read the legal analysis, written earlier by your successor, and realize that not only are parts of the analysis legally flawed, but some the facts aren't even right. Not only does the analysis set aside an entire act of Congress, it fails to describe accurately the program itself.
In its current state, there's no way you could sign off. Problem is, the President of the United States has already been using it to authorize the secret program for a long time, and the program is really useful. How do you tell the President that you think the program is probably illegal, and at least some parts of it should be stopped immediately?
The report reads like a novel. The clash between the White House, the FBI, and the Department of Justice is a classic balance-of-power struggle about who decides what is the meaning of the law.
It is ironic that HTML, originally developed precisely to make it easy to mark up academic and technical information for publication, has never moved beyond the extremely bare-bones specification of heading, list, term, and paragraph tags. I would have expected some elaboration over time, but HTML seems frozen in time.
What happened, I think, is that people basically ignored HTML and went straight for word processing, a far more complex beast from a specifications point of view. For the past 20 years, we have been letting HTML languish while we attempt to come up with a document specification. ODF is the just the most recent cycle on this effort.
It is unfair of the parent to pin the blame for this on Microsoft, however. Word processing was one of the "killer apps" at the time of the birth of the web, and Word was just a niche player at the time. No, we went straight for the jugular of word processing because we all wanted to print to paper.
The OP is absolutely correct to think about revisiting HTML as a specification. What I hate about all reader-dependent formats (DOC, ODF, PDF,...) is they force the user to completely leave the context of the web page just to view some data. The browser is the only "reader" I should need . If you can't at least embed on the page, fuggetaboutit. The gold standard is compound content with full document flow. Why oh why can't we come up with a simple way to blend content without drawing frames and putting scrollbars within scrollbars!?
Personally, I'd love to see some formality and general adoption of richer semantic markups such as the microformats hCard, hCalendar, etc. I'd also love to see some richer hierarchical markup; simple lists only take you so far! I'm imagining something with the hierarchy of XML but without the complexity of full extensibility, and all the definitional parts of a specification needed to support that (schemas).
The Atom Publishing Protocol is the perfect example of what I'm talking about: extensible, but easy to use because it comes with a well-chosen set of standard elements and attributes.
Love him or hate him, but at least listen to what he is actually saying.
He isn't saying that he doesn't "like" C#
He isn't saying that he is "against" C#
He isn't saying that Portable.NET is "better" than Mono
He isn't saying that "just because" it's.NET, it must be teh 3vil
All he is saying is that Microsoft has already publicly claimed that Linux violates a couple hundred MS patents. Recently, Microsoft invoked the Linux angle in a patent suit it filed against Tom Tom.
Therefore, he says, it should be obvious to all that MS intends to enforce its patents. So, the more one uses software based on MS technologies, the more likely it is that you may be impacted by a suit in the future. He calls this a "gratuitous" risk.
Or, in his words:
The problem is not in the C# implementations, but rather in Tomboy and other applications written in C#. If we lose the use of C#, we will lose them too. That doesn't make them unethical, but it means that writing them and using them is taking a gratuitous risk.
Yeah, you may need a few container hooks, but given that multiple backgrounds and other CSS3 properties aren't properly implemented in all browsers yet, I can live with it for now. (Though I don't know how much more I can take - I want my CSS3 fix now, damnit!)
I rest my case...take the frustration in this statement and multiply it by 10. That was our life.
The claimed copyright is probably valid, but it applies to that printed edition of the work.
The study points out very effectively that copyright applies only to original works. So no, a copyright does not apply to "the printed edition" if what is printed is already in the public domain.
The public domain is a room with a one-way door. Once something's in the public domain, it's, well, public.
Course, that doesn't stop publishers from claiming they have the copyright, and even collecting fees. But legally, they have no right to do so.
And, as the study points out, there really is no legal recourse. Only the government can bring a case of copyright fraud. Private citizens have no standing in this instance.
The study itself gives many examples of companies that are improperly putting a blanket copyright on works already in the public domain. Some of the examples of bogus claims are: copyrights on Shakespeare's plays, copyrights on historical documents (even the Constitution, if you can believe it!), copyrights on music by classical composers, etc.
The study also highlights the (very) few firms that get it right: Lexis/Nexis (spelling?) search engine, Library of Congress, and others.
There is a very useful section on the financial incentives for making improper copyright claims, and some great examples of just how very, very lucrative it can be to add a short introduction to a body of works in the public domain, slap a copyright notice on the whole of it, then collect fees.
The study is not at all too legal/technical, and though of course this is/. and nobody reads anything, but personally, I learned a tremendous amount in just the first 50 pages. Recommended.
Sure,/if/ your content is the type that can be presented in a text-oriented, page-by-page manner, then creating simple, barebones HTML pages is smart coding.
But every design has its limits. Try pushing at the edges of HTML, and it gets painful, fast. On one project I audited, we were spending 75% of our coding time on browser workarounds. Switching to a RIA was a huge time-saver. At the edges of user interface design, HTML compatibility is thoroughly broken.
However, your instinct that the simplest designs are usually the best is spot-on. This is exactly kind of back-to-the-basics thinking that is behind REST, Atom, JSON, and other web-centric techniques.
I'd have a permanent historical archive of everything I ever created or edited. My archive would be physically accessible to me and my designates alone.
On an automated schedule, a complete backup copy of my archive would be stored on another physical device, again accessible only to me.
Some subset of my archive would be synchronized to a cloud service, so I could get to my data from anywhere. Some smaller subset of that would be publicly available so I could share.
Getting data into my archival stream would rarely require explicit action on my part. The software I'm using would be aware of the existence of my archives, and would automatically forward version updates down the chain. No matter where the edit starts, eventually the data winds up in the private archive that I, alone, control.
Naturally, my historical archive includes every email I've ever written or replied to; every photo I've ever taken; every document or spreadsheet or memo; every comment on Slashdot; every journal entry; in short, my entire, digital record.
I predict that the 3qi technology is going to be a real game-changer. The daylight-readable screen means you will be taking your netbook into many more places and situations than you ever had before. The e-paper mode means that you can truly use your netbook as a Kindle-like device -- only better, because then it will be a true PC, and not a purpose-built appliance. The low power, full-motion color mode means you'll be able to use your netbook to watch video or play games without sucking down twice the cost of your netbook in extra batteries.
Combine this with very low cost (fabless) construction techniques, and you've got a real winner.
Oh, man, I LOVED my POQET PC. I ran Framework, an integrated office suite that gave you a database, word processor/outliner, contact manager, and spreadhseet all in one, coordinated application space. My whole world was on that thing.
Being able to run literally weeks off of 2 AA batteries was a stunner then and now. I looked for years for a replacement once they discontinued it, and not until last year did I see anything that I thought was its equal in portablity, price, and performance (the XO-1 from OLPC.)
OK, sure, the "cloud" buzzword is annoying and not very useful. That happens a lot in our wonderful business. But saying that EC2, GoogleApps, and Azure are all dead ends because they're the products of large corporations is a lot of fuss over nothing.
No doubt the definition of "cloud computing" will evolve. For today, it primarily means not having to know any details about specific servers anymore, or worrying about how to connect to them. That's not a terribly original notion, but it is a big step forward.
To those of use who remember life before ubiquitous networking, ubiquitous data protocols, and ubiquitous storage, we are hugely grateful for what little bit of cloud computing we've got.
As mentioned elsewhere, the different mental model of Windows and Unix is laid bare by the often cringe-inducing "mistakes" made by the author. Whenever I recommend Linux to a Windows user, I always take the time to warn them that the will need to adjust their thinking to remain sane during the switch-over:
In Linux, you never install just any old application from the web. You install software from a known repository. The repository has tens of thousands of applications to choose from, all of them completely free. No, really.
When you update in Linux, you are updating all the applications on your system at once, not just a single program here and there. You use a program called the update manager to update your system.
You should regularly run the update manager to keep your system up to date. Sometimes, there are big cycles of changes to the software repository, and an update may involve hundreds of items. That's a good thing; it means that people are fixing problems and making the software more secure. Don't worry, go ahead and let the system update itself.
The Linux update system is truly a wonder, and is by far one of the best things about the operating system. But Windows people really do need a few minutes of preparation to adjust their thinking, just like the author.
Slashdot Mirror
Where do you people come from?
We come from YOUR country. Everybody here came from somewhere else, and frankly, the reason why we left was often because things were getting seriously messed up back in the Old Country.
We like having the chance to do things differently than you.
When you take technology out into the cold, hard world, things fall apart. If you want to even come close to the experience of using a book, look to the XO-1 for some lessons in utility and hardiness:
This looks like a pretty well thought out plan. The fact that the entire application suite will be getting automatic upgrades is great; this is something that Linux users have enjoyed for many years. The "unhackable" claim is PR fluf, sure, but making such a claim should inspire their budding engineers to explore the edges of their new boxes. Since the boxes are tagged with RFID, I certainly hope no student keeps them after graduation (not that they're likely to -- 4 years is a long time to keep a netbook.)
For some reason people are clamoring for a "public option" with healthcare, but not a public option for wireless broadband. I hate to be cynical, but I predict that consumers will continue to be metered to death by the telcos. No doubt they will charge separate fees for 4G access in the home vs 4G on the street vs 4G roaming to 3G, and maybe even for every hand-off between cells. Every measurable event in the network is a possible source of revenue.
As with the data plans today, they will kill consumers on per-access charges for these network events, which of course no one in their right mind will pay. So, we'll take their "data plus" offer which tacks on an additional $20 per month fee for broadband to our existing data plan. Even though we will know that using the new network will actually reduce the telco's costs since new technology is always cheaper than old (Moore's Law), we will suck it up and pay. And pay, and pay.
Now is the time for municipalities to get back in the game and make sure our laws will allow cooperatives or local governments to build out public networks that are non-discriminatory and low cost.
Ask anyone who has used an OLPC, and they will tell you that not only is it possible to use an LCD in full, direct sunlight, the image quality actually improves; the stronger the light, the better. The OLPC's limitation, however, is that daylight-readable version is monochrome only.
The 3Qi is the commercialized next generation of the same screen technology. It adds EPaper, color, and video to the line up. Mary Lou Jepsen, the engineering genius behind the company, is trying to get the power requirements down far enough to allow 20-40 hours of run time, using current battery technology. The current version of the 3Qi is apparently not able to achieve that kind of power management without changes to the motherboard, but is still able to reduce power requirements by 20%.
Engadget did a series of side-by-side video comparisons with the Kindle earlier this year, and the results are very impressive.
As I see it, the point of this exercise isn't to critique the healthcare bill per se, it is to take some of the hard lessons learned from doing systems development and apply them to the legislative process.
Anybody who has ever tried to implement a big, complex system knows just how unbelievably hard it is to create working code that does what it supposed to do. It is ridiculously difficult it is to even get people to AGREE what a system is supposed to do in the first place, let alone code it.
From a systems development point of view, then, the author's thought experiment is a good one, and surely a valuable (and uncommon) one given all the shouting, etc.
One thing I would point out, however, is that Legislation != Source Code. Rather, Legislation = Requirements. The "source code" comes later, in the form of regulations written by the various agencies who are charged with execution of the law. This means, unfortunately, that the situation is even worse that we imagined.
Imagine if you were given a 1,000+ page set of requirements, with absolutely no guidance on intention, context, or usability.
Now go build your system.
"Cloud computing" is the next step in the commoditization of hosting. The economic benefits of adopting a virtualized, on-demand IT architecture are profound, and the technical people aren't going to have a lot to say about it when the VP of Finance tells the CEO that they can cut IT costs in half by outsourcing.
Better to get on board and live with what's coming. I've been very impressed with Amazon's Web Services offerings. Their latest idea is a virtual private cloud: cloud machine images hooked into your datacenter via VPN.
This story would have been a lot more appealing without the hyper-ventilated media fishbowl aspects (serious design flaws! total failure of web 2.0 principles! complete lack of transparency! they didn't respond to my wiki posts!).
As regards transparency, compared to what we had before, just having numbers like this up in the public puts government CIOs in a very hot seat, indeed. Just imagine if your own CIO had to do likewise with your own firm's numbers! Yow.
Let's help them out here, not bash them in for small coding errors.
Oh wait. What am I thinking? This is /. Nevermind.
Here's an illustration that explains it all in a glance.
My computer doesn't have to be hooked up to the interweb to work...
Since you are not a candidate for Internet-connected, virtualized, on-demand scalable computing resources (aka "cloud computing"), you are not attracted to cloud computing's value proposition.
For those of us who need these things, vendors such as Amazon, Microsoft, and Google are building services we definitely want to buy. Amazon's simple storage service, for example, had 40 billion objects in its repository as of February, 2009.
Ignore the nay sayers. Of course there is a lot of value in aggregating content and creating a compound page that blends your internal content with other sources.
From a usuability and authority-of-source perspective, however, I think it would be best to list each source in a separate section on the page, starting with your internal content at the top. You can get to the other content either by embedding links into your internal content, or by collecting the links in a separate section.
Wikipedia itself uses the embedded technique. When composing or editing an article, the author can embed markup for external references. On display, this markup is turned into a footnote link at the point of embedding, and a footnote at the bottom of the page. I don't see why you couldn't do something similar. In this case, however, you would be embedding references to Wikipedia articles.
I don't see why you couldn't do something similar. In your internal wiki templates, have a custom markup for embedding wikipedia queries related to the article. On display, turn this markup queries either into embedded links to footnotes, resolve the queries and deposit them at the bottom of the page, or toss them into iframes and let the user sort it out.
The other technique is to have a custom form in your internal wiki template where you collect the cross-references. On display, turn these queries into links or resolve them into content.
In any event, why limit yourself to Wikipedia? Include cross-references to patent search engines and other domain-specific sources.
A big word of caution, of course, is owed to the legal angle. Make sure you follow the law whenever reusing anyone else's content, even if it's just a link. Have your legal department sign off on your reuse policy. Don't distract them with technical aspects of what you want to do. They're lawyers; they only care about the law. Ask them a specific legal question, such as, "what is our legal exposure if we republish (links to or actual content from) Wikipedia on our internal wiki?".
But the days of quick-flip corporations and ingrate programmers making money on my software are over. My new motto is:
Open source to open source, corporation to corporation.
If you do open source, youâ(TM)re my hero and I support you. If youâ(TM)re a corporation, letâ(TM)s talk business.
A very sensible position, IMHO. Dual-licensing always seemed like a no-brainer to me.
There are many forms of authoritarianism. It is a belief system that is surprisingly "cross-platform"; you'll find examples in all kinds of communities, secular and religious, left-wing and right-wing, liberal and conservative.
What they have in common is a mis-trust in the governed. The governed must be repressed, and cannot be allowed to have free choice. There can be no tolerance for meaningful opposition, for that would "weaken" the community, resulting in "instability", i.e., loss of control by the governing class. It is a forced form of allegiance.
All truly free societies are built on the power of persuasion.
Imagine you are a staff attorney being asked to sign off on the legality of a secret government program. You read the legal analysis, written earlier by your successor, and realize that not only are parts of the analysis legally flawed, but some the facts aren't even right. Not only does the analysis set aside an entire act of Congress, it fails to describe accurately the program itself.
In its current state, there's no way you could sign off. Problem is, the President of the United States has already been using it to authorize the secret program for a long time, and the program is really useful. How do you tell the President that you think the program is probably illegal, and at least some parts of it should be stopped immediately?
The report reads like a novel. The clash between the White House, the FBI, and the Department of Justice is a classic balance-of-power struggle about who decides what is the meaning of the law.
It is ironic that HTML, originally developed precisely to make it easy to mark up academic and technical information for publication, has never moved beyond the extremely bare-bones specification of heading, list, term, and paragraph tags. I would have expected some elaboration over time, but HTML seems frozen in time.
What happened, I think, is that people basically ignored HTML and went straight for word processing, a far more complex beast from a specifications point of view. For the past 20 years, we have been letting HTML languish while we attempt to come up with a document specification. ODF is the just the most recent cycle on this effort.
It is unfair of the parent to pin the blame for this on Microsoft, however. Word processing was one of the "killer apps" at the time of the birth of the web, and Word was just a niche player at the time. No, we went straight for the jugular of word processing because we all wanted to print to paper.
The OP is absolutely correct to think about revisiting HTML as a specification. What I hate about all reader-dependent formats (DOC, ODF, PDF, ...) is they force the user to completely leave the context of the web page just to view some data. The browser is the only "reader" I should need . If you can't at least embed on the page, fuggetaboutit. The gold standard is compound content with full document flow. Why oh why can't we come up with a simple way to blend content without drawing frames and putting scrollbars within scrollbars!?
Personally, I'd love to see some formality and general adoption of richer semantic markups such as the microformats hCard, hCalendar, etc. I'd also love to see some richer hierarchical markup; simple lists only take you so far! I'm imagining something with the hierarchy of XML but without the complexity of full extensibility, and all the definitional parts of a specification needed to support that (schemas).
The Atom Publishing Protocol is the perfect example of what I'm talking about: extensible, but easy to use because it comes with a well-chosen set of standard elements and attributes.
Love him or hate him, but at least listen to what he is actually saying.
All he is saying is that Microsoft has already publicly claimed that Linux violates a couple hundred MS patents. Recently, Microsoft invoked the Linux angle in a patent suit it filed against Tom Tom.
Therefore, he says, it should be obvious to all that MS intends to enforce its patents. So, the more one uses software based on MS technologies, the more likely it is that you may be impacted by a suit in the future. He calls this a "gratuitous" risk.
Or, in his words:
The problem is not in the C# implementations, but rather in Tomboy and other applications written in C#. If we lose the use of C#, we will lose them too. That doesn't make them unethical, but it means that writing them and using them is taking a gratuitous risk.
Yeah, you may need a few container hooks, but given that multiple backgrounds and other CSS3 properties aren't properly implemented in all browsers yet , I can live with it for now. (Though I don't know how much more I can take - I want my CSS3 fix now, damnit!)
I rest my case...take the frustration in this statement and multiply it by 10. That was our life.
The claimed copyright is probably valid, but it applies to that printed edition of the work.
The study points out very effectively that copyright applies only to original works. So no, a copyright does not apply to "the printed edition" if what is printed is already in the public domain.
The public domain is a room with a one-way door. Once something's in the public domain, it's, well, public.
Course, that doesn't stop publishers from claiming they have the copyright, and even collecting fees. But legally, they have no right to do so.
And, as the study points out, there really is no legal recourse. Only the government can bring a case of copyright fraud. Private citizens have no standing in this instance.
The study itself gives many examples of companies that are improperly putting a blanket copyright on works already in the public domain. Some of the examples of bogus claims are: copyrights on Shakespeare's plays, copyrights on historical documents (even the Constitution, if you can believe it!), copyrights on music by classical composers, etc.
The study also highlights the (very) few firms that get it right: Lexis/Nexis (spelling?) search engine, Library of Congress, and others.
There is a very useful section on the financial incentives for making improper copyright claims, and some great examples of just how very, very lucrative it can be to add a short introduction to a body of works in the public domain, slap a copyright notice on the whole of it, then collect fees.
The study is not at all too legal/technical, and though of course this is /. and nobody reads anything, but personally, I learned a tremendous amount in just the first 50 pages. Recommended.
Sure, /if/ your content is the type that can be presented in a text-oriented, page-by-page manner, then creating simple, barebones HTML pages is smart coding.
But every design has its limits. Try pushing at the edges of HTML, and it gets painful, fast. On one project I audited, we were spending 75% of our coding time on browser workarounds. Switching to a RIA was a huge time-saver. At the edges of user interface design, HTML compatibility is thoroughly broken.
However, your instinct that the simplest designs are usually the best is spot-on. This is exactly kind of back-to-the-basics thinking that is behind REST, Atom, JSON, and other web-centric techniques.
I'd have a permanent historical archive of everything I ever created or edited. My archive would be physically accessible to me and my designates alone.
On an automated schedule, a complete backup copy of my archive would be stored on another physical device, again accessible only to me.
Some subset of my archive would be synchronized to a cloud service, so I could get to my data from anywhere. Some smaller subset of that would be publicly available so I could share.
Getting data into my archival stream would rarely require explicit action on my part. The software I'm using would be aware of the existence of my archives, and would automatically forward version updates down the chain. No matter where the edit starts, eventually the data winds up in the private archive that I, alone, control.
Naturally, my historical archive includes every email I've ever written or replied to; every photo I've ever taken; every document or spreadsheet or memo; every comment on Slashdot; every journal entry; in short, my entire, digital record.
I predict that the 3qi technology is going to be a real game-changer. The daylight-readable screen means you will be taking your netbook into many more places and situations than you ever had before. The e-paper mode means that you can truly use your netbook as a Kindle-like device -- only better, because then it will be a true PC, and not a purpose-built appliance. The low power, full-motion color mode means you'll be able to use your netbook to watch video or play games without sucking down twice the cost of your netbook in extra batteries.
Combine this with very low cost (fabless) construction techniques, and you've got a real winner.
Go, Mary Jo!
Oh, man, I LOVED my POQET PC. I ran Framework, an integrated office suite that gave you a database, word processor/outliner, contact manager, and spreadhseet all in one, coordinated application space. My whole world was on that thing.
Being able to run literally weeks off of 2 AA batteries was a stunner then and now. I looked for years for a replacement once they discontinued it, and not until last year did I see anything that I thought was its equal in portablity, price, and performance (the XO-1 from OLPC.)
OK, sure, the "cloud" buzzword is annoying and not very useful. That happens a lot in our wonderful business. But saying that EC2, GoogleApps, and Azure are all dead ends because they're the products of large corporations is a lot of fuss over nothing.
No doubt the definition of "cloud computing" will evolve. For today, it primarily means not having to know any details about specific servers anymore, or worrying about how to connect to them. That's not a terribly original notion, but it is a big step forward.
To those of use who remember life before ubiquitous networking, ubiquitous data protocols, and ubiquitous storage, we are hugely grateful for what little bit of cloud computing we've got.
As mentioned elsewhere, the different mental model of Windows and Unix is laid bare by the often cringe-inducing "mistakes" made by the author. Whenever I recommend Linux to a Windows user, I always take the time to warn them that the will need to adjust their thinking to remain sane during the switch-over:
The Linux update system is truly a wonder, and is by far one of the best things about the operating system. But Windows people really do need a few minutes of preparation to adjust their thinking, just like the author.