...a smart hacker would attack the update process that's used to harden the system
This is slightly offtopic, but that statement brought to my mind a poignant biological example of this principle: the HIV Virus. Two things made HIV so scary:
It attacks and slowly destroys the immune system. Imagine a computer virus that somehow disabled your ability to contact and download from Windows Update. What a mess that could cause!
It mutates incredibly fast within the host organism. This makes it a "moving target" for the immune system (and for whatever vaccines are used). Imagine a computer virus that could change its appearance and exploit mechanism so as to bypass filter-based detection schemes.
I'm not a computer security or virus expert. For all I know, there could be virii out there that do these two things, or something like them.
P.S. Please don't reply with any message saying that HIV and AIDS only affects homosexuals and drug users. That simply isn't true. Read the Wikipedia article for a refutation of this myth.
I wonder if we'll see SCO-like attempts to quickly produce as many databases of as many facts as possible. Anyone using any facts whatsoever could be extorted for license fees or subject to lawsuits by rabid hordes of attorneys.
The bill is for copyright-like protections, not patent-like protections. The scenario you described above is more like a patented database situation - where the facts are protected regardless of their use (much as patents apply to alternate implementations of the same idea). Copyrights protect the "finished product" as it were, and not the "internals." In other words, you wouldn't be in violation by using facts from a database - only by making unlicensed copies of the original database.
But this underscores a serious problem with modern notions of "intellectual property." As MarkusQ said earlier today:
"(Our second big loss has been the "IP" fudge, which is blurring the distinctions between patents, copyrights, trademarks, trade secrets, competative advantages, wishful thinking, bull*, and marketing babble into one vague pile of lawyer poo)."
So what do we DO about all of this? I attended a lecture given by Lawrence Lessig at my university's law school last fall. He seemed rather pessimistic about the prospects of legal reform - going about making changes from within the system (mainly due to his defeat in Elred Vs. Ashcroft). He spoke quite a bit about his work on the Creative Commons, and his views on the "Some Rights Reserved" middle ground. I think he's right, for the time being. The system is failing in many ways to serve the good of the people. Contributing to a copyleft commons is an important way to stand up for freedom of information, whether your contribution is sotware, music, the Creative Commons Logo rendered in SVG, ad infinitum.
I was startled by one point that he made, mainly because I had recently been thinking along the same lines. My version is here. The point is that the trend of increased scope an enforcement of intellectual property has the potential to create a new feudal system based on the perpetual ownership of information and ideas. The old European feudal system was based on perpetual ownership of land. The implications of such a system for those who are left out of the ownership are easy to see, and are well-documented in the pages of history. There is a reason those years are known as "The Dark Ages."
Use " " instead of "/" to get unbroken phrases. This method doesn't seem to be working from inside a Slashdot comment, however. You'll have to copy and paste:
Same here, but even less. We don't even have a TV in the house. No need.
Not only does the internet give you "the content we want, when we want it, where we want it," but it also makes it much easier to avoid the content you don't want, when you don't want it, and where you don't want it. There is a lot more violence and sex on TV now than there was just a few years ago when I was a teenager, and a lot of it is in commercials. That's not as big of a problem on the web, especially if you use Mozilla with AdBlock, and have it set to block popups. I almost never see anything I don't want to see while browsing around.
Until last year, it was the record labels that were widely viewed as the stumbling blocks to taking the music industry into the digital age...
...the focus on digital licensing has switched to scattered music publishers and songwriters, which typically receive between 7 and 8 cents for each physical copy of a song sold. Ordinarily wielding far less power, and commanding far fewer financial resources than the record labels, this scattered group of individuals and associations now is proving a more potent force in the digital transformation.
The music industry has been saying over and over again that piracy hurts the artists. Their crackdown on p2p filesharing, their use of DRM schemes (such as the copy-protected CD's in question), and their public relations FUD are all supposedly motivated by their uncompromising zeal to protect the livelihood of artists.
Really? No foolin'? Well, this is a golden opportunity to show us all that you really meant it. If all of these efforts are about protecting artists, then you would never think to violate a publishing contract over it. Right?
Am I seeing this correctly? (screenshot #6 Does The GIMP 2.0 support SVG? HALLELUJAH!!! That's fantastic! I Googled around and found this article (translated from German).
This is wonderful, but a bit strange. I once inquired around about why The GIMP was so lacking in vector art tools. Why wasn't there a tool for making basic shapes, for instance? The answer I found (by Googling around) was that The GIMP is based on the old Unix philosphy, which focuses on small, reusable components. Designing in this way made components highly portable, and separated the work of creating a GUI from the core work. The GIMP did not support vector art because that was the job of a vector art authoring tool. The GIMP was a rastor image manipulation tool. This answer didn't satisfy me, because the GIMP itself is a huge conglomerate of tools, some of which are hardly related. The GIMP is the GUI wrapper which coordinates all of the little components (which are individually accessible through script-fu). So why insist that it was only for rastor image manipulations?
OpenOffice.org Draw can import/export SVG, but I don't like the interface very well. I prefer the spartan interface of a text editor for SVG.:) But I'd be willing ot try a GIMP tool.
There was a GNU project (which apparently failed) that was trying to create a vector art authoring tool. I can't remember the name of it.
The programs are for use on the Linux operating system, which is a free alternative to the Windows operating system.
OpenOffice is a cross-platform suite. It's not just for Linux. I use the Windows version all the time.
Free software for the win32 platform is (I think) an important front of the F/OSS movement. Most people are unwilling to take the plunge straight into Linux. Using free software on win32 is a way to wade in and test the waters before jumping in. The win32 port of The GIMP was the first thing that got me really excited about free software, and I have since migrated to more free and open source applications and operating systems. For those of you running windows who would like to check out some free software, follow the links below:
This is the parting of the ways between the Free Software and Open Source camps. It seems to me that the technical excellency of classic GNU software (like emacs, gcc, GIMP, etc) was really just a consequence of RMS and his gang being really great programmers. But that was not their primary reason for making the software - that was secondary. Their primary reason was to have freedom to use, distribute, derivitize, and otherwise maximize the usefulness of software. While they were at it, they may as well make the code excellent, just because they can and because it makes the software more useful. There are also some inherent advantages to the collaborative development model.
The Open Source camp has been described as "The Free Software Foundation with a politics-ectomy." They don't agree with every radical idea that RMS spouts forth, but they see that the collaborative development model has many strengths and advantages over closed-source development. Consequently, they place emphasis on the software and its development rather than the philosophical ideals it is built upon. This is more akin to the "right tool for the job" mentality.
The biggest weakness of the Free Software camp is that extremism is generally repulsive to most people. It's hard for average people to warm up to their ideas and give them full support. Their recruitment methods rely heavily on propaganda.
The biggest weakness of the Open Source camp is that they tend to paint themselves in a corner with licensing issues. Remember the big fuss over KDE and Qt?
Whether you want better operating systems or free operating systems probably depends on which camp you're in. WinXP is definately a "better" operating system than Win95, but it is much less free. WMA is a "better" audio codec than mp3, but is much less free.
Now I ask you at home: which is more important to you? Freedom or technical superiority? Which camp are you in? I think the Free Software camp has shown us time and time again that if you choose freedom, technical superiority almost always follows in its wake. Examples: gcc, ogg vorbis, png, W3C technologies (such as CSS, XML, HTML), etc.
There were places to get indie music before iTMS (like mp3 com). Their (lack of) success ought to tell you something.
I don't think the downfall of Mp3.com can be explained away so easily. To say that their demise was purely a result of their hosting indie bands is just plain wrong.
I'm an oldschool Mp3.commie. Do you remember Don't Eat Pete and the DeCSS song? I was a member of that band. We were just plodding along, trying to get a playlist and get some local gigs. Then Joe announed to the band that he had written the DeCSS song and that it was world-famous in geek culture, all over the internet. He put the song on Mp3.com (as well as a few of our other recordings) and we had several hundred dollars of payback-for-playback accumulated within a couple of days. Then Mp3.com pulled the song because they were scared of litigation (and who could really blame them, you know?). Then Joe got interviewed for all kinds of tech magazines, a clip of the song was on 60 minutes, we got invited to play at GeekFest (which was cancelled, unfortunately), etc. That was a golden time. Mp3.com (and Slashdot) had a lot to do with it.
That was in the golden age of Mp3.com. Their big problems came with the big lawsuit over the my.mp3.com thing. It just went downhill from there. The resources and opportunities for free artists were slowly eroded. First it was no payback-for-playback, then it was no tech support, then it was waiting weeks to get new songs approved, etc. I stopped maintaining my page there and built my own site.
No matter how specific I made my search query, my Mp3.com pages would NEVER show up in the results at Google. That was a fundamental problem. One of the tenets of web design is that content is king. If you have useful content, you will get traffic, links, and pagerank. That didn't work on Mp3.com because search engines couldn't find you there.
Supporting indie musicians was not the reason for the demise. It was bad decisions and poor site design. Yeah, there was a lot of rubbish there. But have you ever read Slashdot at -1? Yet Slashdot is one of the most useful sites on the web for getting tech news and commentary. Mp3.com, designed properly, could have been the same for indie bands. I think it used to be, but fell from grace.
Better luck to MuSeeks.com and the other sites trying to succeed where Mp3.com failed.
If you've not read it before, please follow the link above and spend a few minutes there. It is a must-read for anyone who wishes to understand the free / open source software development model, and why it works so well.
I use Yahoo! mail as well, and I like it much better than Hotmail. I was impressed with their spam-catching until recently. It seems that I've been getting more and more spam in my inbox ever since they set up their new anti-spam interface. Has anyone else noticed this?
I did an assingment this week for my comparative vertebrate morphology class. It was about scaling and allometry - a very interesting subject. The assignment was to take some measurements from various lagomorph (rabbits and hares) skulls and to plot them against one another to see what sorts of scaling relationships there are between characters in different ages of the same species (ontogenetic allometry) and between different related species (phylogenetic allometry).
The instructor showed us how to do the plots in Excel. I was planning to do my assignment in OpenOffice Calc, and to let the instructor know that there is a free alternative for impoverished students to use, but Calc doesn't do everything that I needed it to do. Calc will add a trendline using various types of functions, but it will not show the equation or the R squared value on the graph. After digging through OpenOffice Help I found a discussion on the OpenOffice forum about it. It's issue #4509, and it's not scheduled to be fixed in 1.1. So I grudgingly used Excel and Word to make my report, and lost a good opportunity to spread the word.
In defense of OpenOffice: I have used it for months now and I dig it. This is the first time I've had any problems with it, and this is actually a pretty minor thing. I especially like OpenOffice's style tools, which have really changed the way I author documents.
The description in the article sounds analogous to the way muscle fibers work. Mother nature is a great structural engineer, and she's been at it a lot longer than we have. Human technology has been inspired repeatedly by nature. One easy example is the Wright Brothers. Others may follow in replies. (I hope so, anyway. I'm sort of in the mood to hear a few more...)
18 For I testify unto every man that heareth the words of the prophecy of this book, If any man shall add unto these things, God shall add unto him the plagues that are written in this book:
19 And if any man shall take away from the words of the book of this prophecy, God shall take away his part out of the book of life, and out of the holy city, and from the things which are written in this book.
Now, what we need is some sort of powerful mechanism for allowing people to be introduced to music they'd like, but don't know the name of. I've often thought a moderation-style system similar to what Slashdot has would be useful.
There's a few groups out there trying, but it's really a difficult thing to do. One attempt (that I wasted a lot of time on ARGGG!) was Band-Mates.com. It was basically a review exchange for Mp3.com artists. You would review and rate songs from 1-5, in exchange for other artists doing the same with your songs. The more you review, the more reviews you get. Sounds good?
But there were some big problems with it:
For starters, I think the main creator guy got in a bit over his head. The site was always really buggy and it's never really been fixed. He didn't foresee the site growing so quickly, and it didn't scale very well.
The site desperately needed a meta-moderation system. I would get reviews that said something like "Your song is rubbish." How helpful is that? And the next review might be really positive. A meta-mod system would make the signal:noise ratio a lot more manageable.
(Related to 2) It was too easy to write terrible reviews. There were no consequences for writing bad ones. The review page asks you to write at least 25 words, but it doesn't check to make sure that you did.
It would be nice if you could link to your songs anywhere, not just Mp3.com. They only let you have a few song for free anyway. And only mp3 files allowed. Linking to an ogg on my personal website would be a good way to introduce random music lovers to better, more open formats.
Emergent Music was another one that didn't seem to be going anywhere. Sigh.
No need to capture. Just save the playlist from a hi-fi stream as a *.m3u file and open it in a text editor. There you have the url of the 128 kb/s mp3. Copy and paste into your browser address bar and tell the dialog box where to save the file to. It's that easy.
Agreed. As a greenie geek I spent a lot of time just getting up to speed. To save you some Googling (which is a great way to learn about OS/FS), let me post some links for you. These were articles that I've found particularly helpful.
Philosophy section of the GNU Project - This is the extreme left wing of free software. I personally prefer a more moderate approach, but the ideas are engaging.
Legal Concepts section of CreativeCommons.org - Masterminded by Lawrence Lessig, the legal champion of the public commons. One of the greatest minds working for the cause of FS/OS. He also has a couple of books that you might consider reading. I've read the first one and found it quite interesting.
Some of these weren't around when I was getting into things. Creative Commons came a bit later. Most of my earliest reading was from GNU. You've already found Slashdot, which is one of the best resources for learning about FS/OS, especially as it relates to current developments.
One word of caution: FS/OS is a religion. People can be very zealous about their views on it. Be careful as you formulate your own opinions, which will likely change over time. When in doubt, choose a more moderate approach. (If you're interested, my personal views can be found here.)
I hope this is helpful. Well, off to more reading myself...
Not just another kingdom - but a taxonomic level above kingdom has been added. This is the domain level, and was introduced because of the research of Carl Woese. He found, through genetic sequence comparisons, that non eukaryotic organisms (prokaryotes) are comprised of two groups (bacteria and archae) that are as different from one another as both are to eukaryotes. A good picture and explanation can be found here.
The strength of the old taxonomic systm is that it is extensible, but it depends on a few suppositions which have been shown to be false. One of the suppositions is that there are a finite number of well-definable species which were created and will always remain exactly the same. Charles Darwin questioned this supposition by pointing out species which appeared to be transitional, and which were extremely difficult to classify in one category to the exclusion of another. Such were usually called "subspecies" and were presented as evidence for the theory of natural selection in The Origin of Species. Darwin theorized that these subspecies were in the process of changing from one form to another.
Evolution poses a serious problem to a finite taxonomic system. After Darwin's theory was widely accepted, biologist began viewing biological diversity as a spectrum rather than as quantized sets. So how do you classify a spectral array? The electromagnetic spectrum is broken into regions, like IR, UV, microwaves, radio waves, the visible spectrum, etc. These boundary regions are not well-defined and tend to change from textbook to textbook. That's sort of what phylogenists are doing these days. Most have given up on unambiguous categorization, and are concentrating instead on making taxonomy consistent with evolutionary descent. Each taxonomic group should (theoretically) descend from a common ancestor. That's harder than it sounds, but genetic data is a powerful tool in figuring out lines of descent. Genetic data has provided quite a few surprises so far about who's related to whom.
Does unauthorized copying of copyrighted works fit the legal definition of theft? The UK laws define theft as "the dishonest appropriation of property belonging to another with the intention of permanently depriving that person of it (reference)."
If US laws are similar, it seems that "theft" is the wrong term to be using for the act. Similar questions could be asked about other terms such as "piracy."
Thanks in advance for your answers.
I'm bothered by the abuse of language for purposes of propaganda. It is deceitful and dishonest, and therefore I despise it.
Yeah, they're including new security features. That's cool and all, but how often do people really check them?
That's the most troublesome thing about it, IMO. From the article:
Thomas Ferguson, director of the Bureau of Engraving and Printing, acknowledged the new bill would not discourage counterfeiters from this process [leaching], but he said there would still be features that, with a quick look, could distinguish a "leached" note as counterfeit.
"It will still have a different watermark and security strip. You could tell the difference in about 15 seconds," Ferguson said. (emphasis mine)
15 seconds?! Imagine how long you would be standing in line at Wal-Mart if the checkers took 15 seconds on every $20 bill they saw! 15 seconds adds up quickly, especially the day after Thanksgiving or Boxing Day. Another thing is that this guy is an expert. He's probably among the most knowledgeable white hat money makers out there. If it takes him 15 seconds, it's bound to take Suzy Dropout, the Wal-Mart checker, a bit longer (if she does it properly, that is).
As an aside, I spent a couple of years in the UK and learned to really appreciate their money system. US notes are BORING. It's good to see more colors on our new ones. Maybe they'll also change the relative sizes of the notes? (Not that changing the sizes would necessarily thwart counterfeiting, but it was a nice touch to the UK system, IMO.)
Several months ago I read a post here that got me thinking about my SSN. According to the post, the SSN was not intended to be an ID number, but has gradually evolved into one. (Anyone who can post a reference to confirm this would be appreciated. I Googled around for a while but could only find references that equated SSN with ID). So I started noticing how often people ask me for it. I've been quite surprised at how often it is asked for. Exam registration, scholarship application, research conference registration, volunteer application, etc. I've started writing "available upon request" when it asked for my SSN, and no one has complained. But it makes me wonder how many times I've given it out without thinking twice about it?
There was a really good discussion about privacy issues in Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace by Lawrence Lessig. It gave a clear description of the problem and proposed some alternative solutions. One of his points was that privacy was formerly the default simply because no one was capable of maintaining a practical and useable database of the size that would be necessary. Because of this former impossibility, there was no need for legislation or other guidelines to address it. That makes the problem unique to our day and age because only recently have we had the technology to do these sorts of things. Lessig argues that in such cases we have two options:
Interpret the Constitution as literally as possible. If the costitution says it's okay (or fails to say that it's not), then go for it.
Determine a solution based upon the same principles that the founding fathers used.
Lessig tends to lean toward the second option, and he's very persuasive in arguing his viewpoint. One possible solution that he proposed was for database owners to blind themselves to personal information and to only use the data for statistical analyses. From the article: "IBM, for instance, is tinkering with "randomizing" data, which involves fatally altering data in a database. Number-crunchers can subsequently use the randomized data to study trends in the numbers, but can never reconstruct the original data--an improvement over using encrypted data." That sounds like a good solution to some of the problems. Companies can use their database to improve marketing research but can't use them to invade your privacy.
The topics of the questions weren't bad. Indeed, they are important questions. I was objecting to the tone of her questioning. She was belligerent, manipulative, rude. "While it is easy for a user to install the needed codec manually (if he/she knows where to get them) and while it is known the GPL incompatibility with mp3, don't you think that 'making it less convienient [for the user] and with less functionality only reduces the prospect of a pulling force for more users' as a Red Hat Linux user said recently?" Is that the most diplomatic way of asking that? I would have worded it something like this: "Some users have complained about Red Hat's 'missing' mp3 codec. Could you explain your resoning for leaving it out? Will this change in future RH releases?"
Another: "Why isn't Red Hat working together with NVidia to resolve kernel crashes and bugs that happen very often when running the accelerated Nvidia drivers on many PCs (e.g. with some VIA chipsets)? (A strategic alliance of a sort, similar in the way Apple does it, which ensures highest compatibility and testing.)" And a more diplomatic way of asking: "There have been lots of problems with NVidia drivers for linux. As the leading Linux distro, are you working at all with NVidia to improve their drivers? Wording it this way aknowledges that it's not RH's fault if NVidia drivers are rubbish.
This was the tone of the whole interview. The questions were important. I'm glad Mike answered the questions instead of the attitude.
What was up with that interviewer? The interviewer was either being a little too confrontational or just had an overall lack of tact.
Some Examples:
Don't you think leaving out the mp3 codec makes it less convienient [for the user] and less functionality only reduces the prospect of a pulling force for more users? Is there any way around this limitation of Red Hat Linux 9 for future releases?
Why was there no RandR GUI tool shipped with Red Hat 9?
Why is Red Hat Linux 9 still uses ext3 while more feature-rich filesystems like ReiserFS and XFS are out and about?
Why isn't Red Hat working together with NVidia to resolve kernel crashes and bugs?
Modern desktop/workstation OSes buy the needed licenses (e.g. Apple, QNX, BeIA) and they even create their own DVD applications (closed source). How about including DVD playback support on a future Red Hat Linux? And what about licensing Microsoft's Web Fonts too?
Currently, no matter how I turn it, downloading RPMs from the web can create many dependancy problems most of the time.
Where did they learn their interviewing skills? This is terrible. "Why don't you do blah and blah? Your software doesn't do blah. I always have problems with blah. Blah blah blah." I was very impressed with Matt's answers, though. He didn't get mad and say, "Well, why don't you fork the project then?!!" He just cordially and politely explained the concepts of open source and their development efforts. Nice work.
"We hope that these suits serve as a stiff deterrent to anyone who is operating or considering setting up a similar system."
The RIAA's president also praised the higher education community for the steps that many colleges and universities are taking proactively to address the problem of peer-to-peer infringement on campus.
They don't really care how these lawsuits turn out. They just want to scare individuals and get more universities to do this. I think illegal copying is a rather unfortunate way to use university bandwidth, especially publicly-funded institutions.
<QUOTE>It's interesting to note that since their discovery of DNA's double-helical structure, neither Watson nor Crick have discovered or published anything significant since then.</QUOTE>
RUBBISH. Francis Crick proposed the Central Dogma of Molecular Biology, which is at least as important as his proposed model of DNA. In a nutshell, the central dogma states that the information encoded in the linear sequence of nucleotides in genomic DNA is transcribed into the linear sequence of nucleotides in RNA, and that the linear sequence of nucleotides in RNA is translated into the linear sequence of amino acids in proteins. At the time Crick postulated this, the link between RNA and the other two was very poorly understood. This was a remarkable contribution to the field. Crick did a whole lot more than just model building.
Slashdot Mirror
This is slightly offtopic, but that statement brought to my mind a poignant biological example of this principle: the HIV Virus. Two things made HIV so scary:
- It attacks and slowly destroys the immune system. Imagine a computer virus that somehow disabled your ability to contact and download from Windows Update. What a mess that could cause!
- It mutates incredibly fast within the host organism. This makes it a "moving target" for the immune system (and for whatever vaccines are used). Imagine a computer virus that could change its appearance and exploit mechanism so as to bypass filter-based detection schemes.
I'm not a computer security or virus expert. For all I know, there could be virii out there that do these two things, or something like them.P.S. Please don't reply with any message saying that HIV and AIDS only affects homosexuals and drug users. That simply isn't true. Read the Wikipedia article for a refutation of this myth.
The bill is for copyright-like protections, not patent-like protections. The scenario you described above is more like a patented database situation - where the facts are protected regardless of their use (much as patents apply to alternate implementations of the same idea). Copyrights protect the "finished product" as it were, and not the "internals." In other words, you wouldn't be in violation by using facts from a database - only by making unlicensed copies of the original database.
But this underscores a serious problem with modern notions of "intellectual property." As MarkusQ said earlier today:
So what do we DO about all of this? I attended a lecture given by Lawrence Lessig at my university's law school last fall. He seemed rather pessimistic about the prospects of legal reform - going about making changes from within the system (mainly due to his defeat in Elred Vs. Ashcroft). He spoke quite a bit about his work on the Creative Commons, and his views on the "Some Rights Reserved" middle ground. I think he's right, for the time being. The system is failing in many ways to serve the good of the people. Contributing to a copyleft commons is an important way to stand up for freedom of information, whether your contribution is sotware, music, the Creative Commons Logo rendered in SVG, ad infinitum.
I was startled by one point that he made, mainly because I had recently been thinking along the same lines. My version is here. The point is that the trend of increased scope an enforcement of intellectual property has the potential to create a new feudal system based on the perpetual ownership of information and ideas. The old European feudal system was based on perpetual ownership of land. The implications of such a system for those who are left out of the ownership are easy to see, and are well-documented in the pages of history. There is a reason those years are known as "The Dark Ages."
Use " " instead of "/" to get unbroken phrases. This method doesn't seem to be working from inside a Slashdot comment, however. You'll have to copy and paste:
http://www.sco.com/We smoke crack/
Be creative and have fun!
Same here, but even less. We don't even have a TV in the house. No need.
Not only does the internet give you "the content we want, when we want it, where we want it," but it also makes it much easier to avoid the content you don't want, when you don't want it, and where you don't want it. There is a lot more violence and sex on TV now than there was just a few years ago when I was a teenager, and a lot of it is in commercials. That's not as big of a problem on the web, especially if you use Mozilla with AdBlock, and have it set to block popups. I almost never see anything I don't want to see while browsing around.
The music industry has been saying over and over again that piracy hurts the artists . Their crackdown on p2p filesharing, their use of DRM schemes (such as the copy-protected CD's in question), and their public relations FUD are all supposedly motivated by their uncompromising zeal to protect the livelihood of artists.
Really? No foolin'? Well, this is a golden opportunity to show us all that you really meant it. If all of these efforts are about protecting artists, then you would never think to violate a publishing contract over it. Right?
[Silence... A leaf blows by...]
Oh. Well, that's what we all suspected, I guess.
Am I seeing this correctly? (screenshot #6 Does The GIMP 2.0 support SVG? HALLELUJAH!!! That's fantastic! I Googled around and found this article (translated from German).
This is wonderful, but a bit strange. I once inquired around about why The GIMP was so lacking in vector art tools. Why wasn't there a tool for making basic shapes, for instance? The answer I found (by Googling around) was that The GIMP is based on the old Unix philosphy, which focuses on small, reusable components. Designing in this way made components highly portable, and separated the work of creating a GUI from the core work. The GIMP did not support vector art because that was the job of a vector art authoring tool. The GIMP was a rastor image manipulation tool. This answer didn't satisfy me, because the GIMP itself is a huge conglomerate of tools, some of which are hardly related. The GIMP is the GUI wrapper which coordinates all of the little components (which are individually accessible through script-fu). So why insist that it was only for rastor image manipulations?
OpenOffice.org Draw can import/export SVG, but I don't like the interface very well. I prefer the spartan interface of a text editor for SVG. :) But I'd be willing ot try a GIMP tool.
There was a GNU project (which apparently failed) that was trying to create a vector art authoring tool. I can't remember the name of it.
OpenOffice is a cross-platform suite. It's not just for Linux. I use the Windows version all the time.
Free software for the win32 platform is (I think) an important front of the F/OSS movement. Most people are unwilling to take the plunge straight into Linux. Using free software on win32 is a way to wade in and test the waters before jumping in. The win32 port of The GIMP was the first thing that got me really excited about free software, and I have since migrated to more free and open source applications and operating systems. For those of you running windows who would like to check out some free software, follow the links below:
This is the parting of the ways between the Free Software and Open Source camps. It seems to me that the technical excellency of classic GNU software (like emacs, gcc, GIMP, etc) was really just a consequence of RMS and his gang being really great programmers. But that was not their primary reason for making the software - that was secondary. Their primary reason was to have freedom to use, distribute, derivitize, and otherwise maximize the usefulness of software. While they were at it, they may as well make the code excellent, just because they can and because it makes the software more useful. There are also some inherent advantages to the collaborative development model.
The Open Source camp has been described as "The Free Software Foundation with a politics-ectomy." They don't agree with every radical idea that RMS spouts forth, but they see that the collaborative development model has many strengths and advantages over closed-source development. Consequently, they place emphasis on the software and its development rather than the philosophical ideals it is built upon. This is more akin to the "right tool for the job" mentality.
The biggest weakness of the Free Software camp is that extremism is generally repulsive to most people. It's hard for average people to warm up to their ideas and give them full support. Their recruitment methods rely heavily on propaganda.
The biggest weakness of the Open Source camp is that they tend to paint themselves in a corner with licensing issues. Remember the big fuss over KDE and Qt?
Whether you want better operating systems or free operating systems probably depends on which camp you're in. WinXP is definately a "better" operating system than Win95, but it is much less free. WMA is a "better" audio codec than mp3, but is much less free.
Now I ask you at home: which is more important to you? Freedom or technical superiority? Which camp are you in? I think the Free Software camp has shown us time and time again that if you choose freedom, technical superiority almost always follows in its wake. Examples: gcc, ogg vorbis, png, W3C technologies (such as CSS, XML, HTML), etc.
I don't think the downfall of Mp3.com can be explained away so easily. To say that their demise was purely a result of their hosting indie bands is just plain wrong.
I'm an oldschool Mp3.commie. Do you remember Don't Eat Pete and the DeCSS song? I was a member of that band. We were just plodding along, trying to get a playlist and get some local gigs. Then Joe announed to the band that he had written the DeCSS song and that it was world-famous in geek culture, all over the internet. He put the song on Mp3.com (as well as a few of our other recordings) and we had several hundred dollars of payback-for-playback accumulated within a couple of days. Then Mp3.com pulled the song because they were scared of litigation (and who could really blame them, you know?). Then Joe got interviewed for all kinds of tech magazines, a clip of the song was on 60 minutes, we got invited to play at GeekFest (which was cancelled, unfortunately), etc. That was a golden time. Mp3.com (and Slashdot) had a lot to do with it.
That was in the golden age of Mp3.com. Their big problems came with the big lawsuit over the my.mp3.com thing. It just went downhill from there. The resources and opportunities for free artists were slowly eroded. First it was no payback-for-playback, then it was no tech support, then it was waiting weeks to get new songs approved, etc. I stopped maintaining my page there and built my own site.
No matter how specific I made my search query, my Mp3.com pages would NEVER show up in the results at Google. That was a fundamental problem. One of the tenets of web design is that content is king. If you have useful content, you will get traffic, links, and pagerank. That didn't work on Mp3.com because search engines couldn't find you there.
Supporting indie musicians was not the reason for the demise. It was bad decisions and poor site design. Yeah, there was a lot of rubbish there. But have you ever read Slashdot at -1? Yet Slashdot is one of the most useful sites on the web for getting tech news and commentary. Mp3.com, designed properly, could have been the same for indie bands. I think it used to be, but fell from grace.
Better luck to MuSeeks.com and the other sites trying to succeed where Mp3.com failed.
Isn't this exactly what ESR said in The Cathedral and the Bazaar?
If you've not read it before, please follow the link above and spend a few minutes there. It is a must-read for anyone who wishes to understand the free / open source software development model, and why it works so well.
I use Yahoo! mail as well, and I like it much better than Hotmail. I was impressed with their spam-catching until recently. It seems that I've been getting more and more spam in my inbox ever since they set up their new anti-spam interface. Has anyone else noticed this?
I did an assingment this week for my comparative vertebrate morphology class. It was about scaling and allometry - a very interesting subject. The assignment was to take some measurements from various lagomorph (rabbits and hares) skulls and to plot them against one another to see what sorts of scaling relationships there are between characters in different ages of the same species (ontogenetic allometry) and between different related species (phylogenetic allometry).
The instructor showed us how to do the plots in Excel. I was planning to do my assignment in OpenOffice Calc, and to let the instructor know that there is a free alternative for impoverished students to use, but Calc doesn't do everything that I needed it to do. Calc will add a trendline using various types of functions, but it will not show the equation or the R squared value on the graph. After digging through OpenOffice Help I found a discussion on the OpenOffice forum about it. It's issue #4509, and it's not scheduled to be fixed in 1.1. So I grudgingly used Excel and Word to make my report, and lost a good opportunity to spread the word.
In defense of OpenOffice: I have used it for months now and I dig it. This is the first time I've had any problems with it, and this is actually a pretty minor thing. I especially like OpenOffice's style tools, which have really changed the way I author documents.
The description in the article sounds analogous to the way muscle fibers work. Mother nature is a great structural engineer, and she's been at it a lot longer than we have. Human technology has been inspired repeatedly by nature. One easy example is the Wright Brothers. Others may follow in replies. (I hope so, anyway. I'm sort of in the mood to hear a few more...)
An explanation here: UIC
A cool animation here: San Diego S.U.
Actually....
There's a few groups out there trying, but it's really a difficult thing to do. One attempt (that I wasted a lot of time on ARGGG!) was Band-Mates.com. It was basically a review exchange for Mp3.com artists. You would review and rate songs from 1-5, in exchange for other artists doing the same with your songs. The more you review, the more reviews you get. Sounds good?
But there were some big problems with it:
Emergent Music was another one that didn't seem to be going anywhere. Sigh.
No need to capture. Just save the playlist from a hi-fi stream as a *.m3u file and open it in a text editor. There you have the url of the 128 kb/s mp3. Copy and paste into your browser address bar and tell the dialog box where to save the file to. It's that easy.
Agreed. As a greenie geek I spent a lot of time just getting up to speed. To save you some Googling (which is a great way to learn about OS/FS), let me post some links for you. These were articles that I've found particularly helpful.
Some of these weren't around when I was getting into things. Creative Commons came a bit later. Most of my earliest reading was from GNU. You've already found Slashdot, which is one of the best resources for learning about FS/OS, especially as it relates to current developments.
One word of caution: FS/OS is a religion. People can be very zealous about their views on it. Be careful as you formulate your own opinions, which will likely change over time. When in doubt, choose a more moderate approach. (If you're interested, my personal views can be found here.)
I hope this is helpful. Well, off to more reading myself...
Not just another kingdom - but a taxonomic level above kingdom has been added. This is the domain level, and was introduced because of the research of Carl Woese. He found, through genetic sequence comparisons, that non eukaryotic organisms (prokaryotes) are comprised of two groups (bacteria and archae) that are as different from one another as both are to eukaryotes. A good picture and explanation can be found here.
The strength of the old taxonomic systm is that it is extensible, but it depends on a few suppositions which have been shown to be false. One of the suppositions is that there are a finite number of well-definable species which were created and will always remain exactly the same. Charles Darwin questioned this supposition by pointing out species which appeared to be transitional, and which were extremely difficult to classify in one category to the exclusion of another. Such were usually called "subspecies" and were presented as evidence for the theory of natural selection in The Origin of Species. Darwin theorized that these subspecies were in the process of changing from one form to another.
Evolution poses a serious problem to a finite taxonomic system. After Darwin's theory was widely accepted, biologist began viewing biological diversity as a spectrum rather than as quantized sets. So how do you classify a spectral array? The electromagnetic spectrum is broken into regions, like IR, UV, microwaves, radio waves, the visible spectrum, etc. These boundary regions are not well-defined and tend to change from textbook to textbook. That's sort of what phylogenists are doing these days. Most have given up on unambiguous categorization, and are concentrating instead on making taxonomy consistent with evolutionary descent. Each taxonomic group should (theoretically) descend from a common ancestor. That's harder than it sounds, but genetic data is a powerful tool in figuring out lines of descent. Genetic data has provided quite a few surprises so far about who's related to whom.
I'm bothered by the abuse of language for purposes of propaganda. It is deceitful and dishonest, and therefore I despise it.
That's the most troublesome thing about it, IMO. From the article:
15 seconds?! Imagine how long you would be standing in line at Wal-Mart if the checkers took 15 seconds on every $20 bill they saw! 15 seconds adds up quickly, especially the day after Thanksgiving or Boxing Day. Another thing is that this guy is an expert. He's probably among the most knowledgeable white hat money makers out there. If it takes him 15 seconds, it's bound to take Suzy Dropout, the Wal-Mart checker, a bit longer (if she does it properly, that is).
As an aside, I spent a couple of years in the UK and learned to really appreciate their money system. US notes are BORING. It's good to see more colors on our new ones. Maybe they'll also change the relative sizes of the notes? (Not that changing the sizes would necessarily thwart counterfeiting, but it was a nice touch to the UK system, IMO.)
Several months ago I read a post here that got me thinking about my SSN. According to the post, the SSN was not intended to be an ID number, but has gradually evolved into one. (Anyone who can post a reference to confirm this would be appreciated. I Googled around for a while but could only find references that equated SSN with ID). So I started noticing how often people ask me for it. I've been quite surprised at how often it is asked for. Exam registration, scholarship application, research conference registration, volunteer application, etc. I've started writing "available upon request" when it asked for my SSN, and no one has complained. But it makes me wonder how many times I've given it out without thinking twice about it?
There was a really good discussion about privacy issues in Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace by Lawrence Lessig. It gave a clear description of the problem and proposed some alternative solutions. One of his points was that privacy was formerly the default simply because no one was capable of maintaining a practical and useable database of the size that would be necessary. Because of this former impossibility, there was no need for legislation or other guidelines to address it. That makes the problem unique to our day and age because only recently have we had the technology to do these sorts of things. Lessig argues that in such cases we have two options:
- Interpret the Constitution as literally as possible. If the costitution says it's okay (or fails to say that it's not), then go for it.
- Determine a solution based upon the same principles that the founding fathers used.
Lessig tends to lean toward the second option, and he's very persuasive in arguing his viewpoint. One possible solution that he proposed was for database owners to blind themselves to personal information and to only use the data for statistical analyses. From the article: "IBM, for instance, is tinkering with "randomizing" data, which involves fatally altering data in a database. Number-crunchers can subsequently use the randomized data to study trends in the numbers, but can never reconstruct the original data--an improvement over using encrypted data." That sounds like a good solution to some of the problems. Companies can use their database to improve marketing research but can't use them to invade your privacy.Anyway, just some things to think about...
The topics of the questions weren't bad. Indeed, they are important questions. I was objecting to the tone of her questioning. She was belligerent, manipulative, rude. "While it is easy for a user to install the needed codec manually (if he/she knows where to get them) and while it is known the GPL incompatibility with mp3, don't you think that 'making it less convienient [for the user] and with less functionality only reduces the prospect of a pulling force for more users' as a Red Hat Linux user said recently?" Is that the most diplomatic way of asking that? I would have worded it something like this: "Some users have complained about Red Hat's 'missing' mp3 codec. Could you explain your resoning for leaving it out? Will this change in future RH releases?"
Another: "Why isn't Red Hat working together with NVidia to resolve kernel crashes and bugs that happen very often when running the accelerated Nvidia drivers on many PCs (e.g. with some VIA chipsets)? (A strategic alliance of a sort, similar in the way Apple does it, which ensures highest compatibility and testing.)" And a more diplomatic way of asking: "There have been lots of problems with NVidia drivers for linux. As the leading Linux distro, are you working at all with NVidia to improve their drivers? Wording it this way aknowledges that it's not RH's fault if NVidia drivers are rubbish.
This was the tone of the whole interview. The questions were important. I'm glad Mike answered the questions instead of the attitude.
What was up with that interviewer? The interviewer was either being a little too confrontational or just had an overall lack of tact.
Some Examples:
- Don't you think leaving out the mp3 codec makes it less convienient [for the user] and less functionality only reduces the prospect of a pulling force for more users? Is there any way around this limitation of Red Hat Linux 9 for future releases?
- Why was there no RandR GUI tool shipped with Red Hat 9?
- Why is Red Hat Linux 9 still uses ext3 while more feature-rich filesystems like ReiserFS and XFS are out and about?
- Why isn't Red Hat working together with NVidia to resolve kernel crashes and bugs?
- Modern desktop/workstation OSes buy the needed licenses (e.g. Apple, QNX, BeIA) and they even create their own DVD applications (closed source). How about including DVD playback support on a future Red Hat Linux? And what about licensing Microsoft's Web Fonts too?
- Currently, no matter how I turn it, downloading RPMs from the web can create many dependancy problems most of the time.
Where did they learn their interviewing skills? This is terrible. "Why don't you do blah and blah? Your software doesn't do blah. I always have problems with blah. Blah blah blah." I was very impressed with Matt's answers, though. He didn't get mad and say, "Well, why don't you fork the project then?!!" He just cordially and politely explained the concepts of open source and their development efforts. Nice work.From the Article:
"We hope that these suits serve as a stiff deterrent to anyone who is operating or considering setting up a similar system."
The RIAA's president also praised the higher education community for the steps that many colleges and universities are taking proactively to address the problem of peer-to-peer infringement on campus.
They don't really care how these lawsuits turn out. They just want to scare individuals and get more universities to do this. I think illegal copying is a rather unfortunate way to use university bandwidth, especially publicly-funded institutions.
<QUOTE>It's interesting to note that since their discovery of DNA's double-helical structure, neither Watson nor Crick have discovered or published anything significant since then.</QUOTE>
RUBBISH. Francis Crick proposed the Central Dogma of Molecular Biology, which is at least as important as his proposed model of DNA. In a nutshell, the central dogma states that the information encoded in the linear sequence of nucleotides in genomic DNA is transcribed into the linear sequence of nucleotides in RNA, and that the linear sequence of nucleotides in RNA is translated into the linear sequence of amino acids in proteins. At the time Crick postulated this, the link between RNA and the other two was very poorly understood. This was a remarkable contribution to the field. Crick did a whole lot more than just model building.