"what Leander thinks are the takeaways..."
on
Inside Steve's Brain
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
"As with all of the chapters it ends with a summary of what Leander thinks are the takeaways from each of the anecdotes...."
I think it takes quite a bit of arrogance to assume that you can find out what's going on inside someone else's brain. I don't know what goes on inside my wife's brain, let alone my boss's, let alone that of any Fortune 500 CEO.
It takes even more to assume that you can explain the success of a man like Steve Jobs... and even more to assume that you can draw transferrable lessons that will enable others to replicate that success.
A couple of decades ago, a bestseller entitled "In Search of Excellence" purported to explain factors that made companies successful. If I recall correctly, their examples of some of the best-managed high-tech companies included Atari, Digital Equipment Corporation, and Wang Laboratories.
The big news here is that Dell is going to continue to sell the general public machines with XP preinstalled. That's quite a testament to what marketplace is saying.
Look, last year I thought I wanted/needed a laptop. Dell advertised one for $550 with Vista Home. I called and said I was interested, but I wanted the price with XP. After some discussion, Dell said it would be $900. After I recovered from the shock, I asked why they charged $350 extra for XP.
Dell's rep said "Oh, we don't charge anything extra at all for XP. $900 is simply our regular price for that laptop, with either XP or Vista Home. What you saw was a special promotional price for a specific configuration, which is one that includes Vista."
So another way to think about it is that $350 to $50 is one heck of an improvement.
In further news, Cuomo's office claims that some "Escort services" were providing underaged prostitutes. Verizon has announced that in future the yellow pages will contain only the "big 25" listings, A through D and F through Z.
The bad news: the site is down. "Safari can't open the page 'http://alex.kozinski.com/' because it could not connect to the server 'alex.kozinski.com'"
The bad news: the Wayback machine just shows "Ain't nothin' here. Y'all best be movin' on, compadre" on the main page, from 2004 through the last snapshot in 2005. (The news story saying that this is a recent change is apparently wrong).
The Replicator Industry Association of America cautions that all replicators are required, prior to creating the first device, to first replicate a EULA. By buying a replicator you are deemed to have agreed in advance to this EULA.
The EULA, rather like the United States Constitution, is a "living document" constructed of active replicator parts. It periodically downloads updates and constantly improves itself to keep up with modern jet-age progress, and the latest court decisions.
The RIAA suggests you keep the EULA posted in a conspicuous place where you can refer to it periodically to check for updates in the terms and conditions of use.
The EULA provides that you cannot use the Replicator to replicate itself, nor to replicate any patented or trademarked device.
To spare you the inconvenience of checking the patent database yourself, the EULA uses BlueTooth to communicate with the replicator and Wi-Fi to search the patent, trademark, and copyright databases. To increase customer satisfaction and continuously improve the product, it also keeps the RIAA updated on what all replicator users are doing with their replicators, so that the RIAA can better serve you.
Oh, misery. Been there, done that, got the phone bill. Let's hope this trial balloon blows up like the Hindenburg before anyone else gets any ideas.
I remember the bad old days of Compu$erve Information $ervices when the clock was ticking at, if I recall correctly, $6.00 an hour... and much more than that if you entered some of their "premium" services.
Plus, if you lived in Roysburg, Winnemac, their list of dialup telephone numbers might helpfully list one under "Roysburg" while not bothering to mention that the actual physical location of their modem was in the city of Zenith, fifteen miles and a local toll call away. So you were also racking up a hefty phone bill at the same time.
People may hate AOL now, but when they came charging in with a flat monthly rate they looked like knights in shining armor.
And at least with CI$ the clock was ticking at a steady rate. With the Time Warner plan, in a million households little Genevieve will run across some funny and age-appropriate penguin cartoon website and watch it for weeks, and neither her nor her folks will have any idea it cost them $82.19 until the bill comes in at the end of the month.
The funny thing is that the trend is toward flat pricing everywhere else. It seems odd to read that the genius at Time Warner are moving away from flat-rate pricing at exactly the same time as the cell phone companies are moving toward it?
The problem is, how will we ever know whether or not a particular provider is throttling traffic in a fair and neutral way for the overall benefit of its customers... or whether it is cutting deals to favor business partners... or certain industry segments (the RIAA and MPAA come to mind)... or even political parties?
If common carriers are allowed to do this, how will we know when they stop serving the public and start serving themselves... and how will we able to stop them?
They've chosen to solve their problem in a cheapjack, lazy, sloppy way that virtually guarantees future abuse.
We get story after story, month after month, about organizations like the Bank of New York or Los Alamos National Laboratories or the British Ministry of Defence losing tapes and disk drives and always, always, always the data is said to be unencrypted.
WHY don't all those centralized-configuration-managing IT departments check the FileVault or the BitLocker checkbox on every laptop that comes in the door?
That fancy automated remote configuration-management software keeps everyone's internal purchase-requisition application in sync... when they're doing the remote update why don't they install TrueCrypt at the same time?
Why don't their purchase orders to Dell for 10,000 new PC's say that as long as they're custom-preinstalling all that other crap anyway they might as well include a commercial encryption package?
Put indignation aside. What, exactly, is the real human organizational and managerial reasons why encryption just doesn't happen?
Are they more worried about employees keeping information from superiors than they are about losing sensitive information to outsiders? Or what?
Digital released the Microvax II which had, if memory serves me, virtually the same performance as a full-sized VAX at about a third or a quarter of the price. More to the point, it was significantly better than the VAX-11/750, better as in double the performance, for about half the price. Killed all the older lines dead, instantly.
Wang released the Wang 1200 WPS, its CRT-based word processing system, at a time when their previous non-CRT-based offering was still selling well. Killed the older line dead, instantly.
Apple released the iPod Nano about eighteen months after the introduction of the iPod Mini line, and barely six months after a major refresh of the iPod Mini line, killing the minis dead instantly.
(And, for the record, the Digital and Wang examples occurred during the upward trajectories of those companies and were major, major successes for them).
Companies don't have to put the customers' interests ahead of their own, but they need to put a high priority on it. Companies that concentrate too much on what's good for them instead of what's good for their customers... rationalizing product lines, avoiding cannibalization, holding back new features, and generally not producing the best products they know how to produce (e.g. IBM foot-dragging on the 80386) get in trouble. Their locked-in customers may go along for a while, but customers aren't stupid and they'll be steaming about it, and delighted to give the company its comeuppance.
I was looking at their"guarantee."; I'm not sure what, exactly, they actually are promising. It might not be very much.
In part: "We will pay up to $1,000,000 to cure the failure or defect in our service.... We will not reimburse special, incidental, indirect or consequential damages, such as lost wages or profits, loss of business, or lost opportunities.... If you are our member when someone accesses your personal identifying information and subsequently uses it without your authorization to commit a fraud, due to a failure or defect in our Service, and you have complied with this Agreement, subject to the terms herein, we will pay professionals to assist in restoring any such loss or recover such expenses, as required."
Any lawyers out there? What happens if the professionals' assistance, however well-meaning, fails to result in your recovering the loss? At that point would they have to pay for your loss themselves in order to "cure the defect" in the service?
And what's a "professional?" Naturally, one thinks of lawyers or licensed private detectives, but maybe it just means having their own paid staff call your credit-card companies to report the fraud... inform companies that the change of address they have for you was fraudulent and ask them to stop payment on the checks they mailed... trivial stuff like that...
If Negroponte had the integrity of... of... a Steve Ballmer, he wouldn't have talked about price. He would have made some mild self-deprecating joke about having been wrong before, and limited himself to giving reasons for price not being a problem, or price not being what OLPC was really about, or for it not costing more than the first-generation machine despite the fancier screen... and left it at that.
How about web articles that are split across a dozen pages, for no good reason other than to interrupt your reading a dozen times so that you can twiddle your thumbs while one measly paragraph of text downloads, framed by dozens of bloated, intrusive animated ads for ZDNet?
It's the normal Dilbert-PHB situation. Only nerds worry about silly details like the magnitude of a change.
PR is happy as long as they can spin it as movement in the right direction.
"See, this proves it: Vista is more secure than XP. Way more secure. 1197764 Scoville units better!"
In "The Quantitative Analysis of Visual Information" Tufte has a wonderful phrase for graphs that show direction while distorting magnitude; he calls it "the Pravda school of information presentation." He, of course, has real illustrations from Pravda, where some set of numbers, grain production or whatever, is illustrated with pictograms that increase steadily and evenly in size, while the printed numbers next to them show that the increase, while monotonic, was huge for earlier years in the series but minuscule for the more recent years.
"Computer solitaire propelled the revolution of personal computing."
Puhleez.
There were "games" directories in timesharing system distributions long before acquiring QDOS was a gleam in Bill Gates' avaricious eye.
Pioneers were wasting time playing Spacewar! on the PDP-1 in the sixties.
David Ahl's "101 BASIC Games" or whatever it was called was typed in by hand to everything in the known world that ran BASIC (Hunt the Wumpus, anyone?).
And when a FORTRAN version of Adventure hit the DECUS library, it caused work outages in DEC shops all across the nation.
And those are just the ones I personally have wasted time with.
This brings up what I think is the biggest potential for unfair use of DRM: restrictions that are built into the technology and acknowledged by fine print in the user agreement, but not enforced until after millions of consumers have already purchased the product.
There's nothing new about this. You can waste an awful lot of time reading contracts and discovering that you've agreed to obnoxious things... and that there's not an awful lot you can do about it because all the competitors have similar contracts... and that, surprise, surprise, the employee behind the car rental counter is not interested in striking out clauses and negotiating contracts with an individual customer with a line behind him.
What's new is the potential for cheap, automatic, mechanical enforcement at some later date.... and the consumer's inability to know the company's real intentions.
When you buy something with unenforced DRM you are truly buying a pig in a poke.
The free market can't operate in the absence of the buyer having reasonable information on what they're buying. In the case of unenforced DRM, that means not just the theoretical existence of restrictions, it means that companies should be required to disclose a policy on their intentions for future enforcement... a policy that must be included in the contract for the contract to be valid, and one which they can be held to in the future.
It should be use-it-or-lose-it. A company that fails to use automated restrictions for a long period of time, and has failed to disclose clearly its intention of using them in the future, ought to right to enforce them.
I've been disappointed and underwhelmed by Sugar in the form that it was delivered on the G1G1 units.
Now, I'm not a kid, and I've been brain-warped by decades of exposure to the Mac, but I really feel a lot of cognitive dissonance between Sugar's stated design goals and what's actually been delivered.
For example, one of Sugar's key design principles is "recoverability," and it says "However, the primary and essential means of recoverability remains the ability to undo one's actions."
Nevertheless, the keyboard has no marked "undo" key, and very, very few of the Sugar's activities appear to support any kind of "undo" facility.
Similarly, I've read the theory of how the Journal is supposed to work, and I may be wrong--I don't have any kids to try it on--but as nearly as I can tell, the only way you can find past Journal entries is by a very left-brained search capability that requires you to have labeled each Journal entry as you make it.
There's a long essay on how the Journal is supposed to work... revolutionary, non-hierarchical, etc. But I've found "tagging" to be a royal, royal pain. It's all very well to say that "Tagging will become a fundamental process for all types of data and activities on the laptops. Fortunately, children have a natural inclination to describe their world and the things they see and do." As I say, I haven't watched kids use the thing and maybe they "get" it, but I find it extremely hard to envision a ten-year old typing in tags every time he creates a journal entry.
While I'm intrigued by the idea of a GUI that is new from the ground up and informed by a fresh way of looking at things... to tell the truth my main motivation for participating in G1G1 was to experience Sugar... I'm quite disappointed by what's actually been achieved.
Right now, Sugar is a program launcher, no better than the Apple Dock or the Windows Tray... and to this aging brain, at least, the Journal simply doesn't work very well. Much less well than the Mac Finder as it existed in 1984, for example.
However, the problem is that I think open source is a key educational feature for OLPC. The concept of a "view source" button thrilled me. I grew up at a time when you could take the back off a TV set and see the tubes inside, and smash a tube in a vise and see the plate and filament and so forth inside. Maybe I couldn't build a TV or modify a vacuum tube, but just the conceptual readiness of looking inside was terribly important.
I was disappointed in the absence of a working "View Source" button in the G1G1 build. I think it's very important that all the code in the XO be open for inspection, and that definitely includes the GUI. So however bad Sugar is, I think it would be a disaster to replace it with a proprietary GUI.
This calls to mind a wonderful book by one Kees Boeke... who I assume is no longer alive... published in 1957 and entitled (in its English translation, anyway) Cosmic View: The Universe in Forty Jumps. The book is a series of more-or-less realistic drawings, starting with a girl sitting in a chair in a Dutch school playground, then zooming outward, picture by picture, each picture drawn on a tenfold smaller scale than the next.
The third or fourth picture shows a blue whale, which, for some reason, managed to beach itself in the school playground.
After ascending outward to show a cluster of galaxies, it then resumes in the schoolyard, zooming inward, tenfold larger each time. I recall that the girl has a small cut on her hand--to give later opportunity to zoom in on blood corpuscles--and, again for no good reason, there happens to be a copepod (of all things) lying on the edge of the cut!
Later, the same theme, with explicit acknowledgement to Boeke, was pursued by Charles Eames and Philip Morrison in a photographically illustrated book called Powers of Ten, and an animated movie of the same title by the Office of Charles and Ray Eames. The medium-scale shots are aerial photographs of Chicago's lakefront area, perhaps the Museum of Science and Industry, and I guess are undoctored photographs... no whale in it, anyway. Too bad.
Both books are absolutely marvellous, real mind-openers for nerdy kids of the right age... (Click, click) Can it really be that both are out of print? A shame...
"In collecting evidence for those takedown notices, Media Sentry investigators do not usually download suspect music files. Instead, the company uses special software to check the "hash," a sort of unique digital fingerprint, of each offered file to verify that it is identical to a copyrighted song file in the RIAA's database. In the rare cases in which the hashes don't match, the investigators download the song and use a software program sold by Audible Magic to compare the sound waves of the offered audio file against those of the song it may be infringing upon. If the Audible Magic software still doesn't turn up a match, then a live person will listen to the song."
In other words, they do not engage in unauthorized downloading and copyright infringement. Except when they do. Because they what sounds to them like a really good rationalization for their behavior.
Which is exactly what their victims do.
If the RIAA being straight arrows, they'd forego the downloading in those "rare" cases. Why is it so important to nail these "rare" that they will compromise their own principles?
Perhaps, if the truth were known, those "rare" cases aren't really all that rare.
Slashdot Mirror
"As with all of the chapters it ends with a summary of what Leander thinks are the takeaways from each of the anecdotes...."
I think it takes quite a bit of arrogance to assume that you can find out what's going on inside someone else's brain. I don't know what goes on inside my wife's brain, let alone my boss's, let alone that of any Fortune 500 CEO.
It takes even more to assume that you can explain the success of a man like Steve Jobs... and even more to assume that you can draw transferrable lessons that will enable others to replicate that success.
A couple of decades ago, a bestseller entitled "In Search of Excellence" purported to explain factors that made companies successful. If I recall correctly, their examples of some of the best-managed high-tech companies included Atari, Digital Equipment Corporation, and Wang Laboratories.
The big news here is that Dell is going to continue to sell the general public machines with XP preinstalled. That's quite a testament to what marketplace is saying.
Look, last year I thought I wanted/needed a laptop. Dell advertised one for $550 with Vista Home. I called and said I was interested, but I wanted the price with XP. After some discussion, Dell said it would be $900. After I recovered from the shock, I asked why they charged $350 extra for XP.
Dell's rep said "Oh, we don't charge anything extra at all for XP. $900 is simply our regular price for that laptop, with either XP or Vista Home. What you saw was a special promotional price for a specific configuration, which is one that includes Vista."
So another way to think about it is that $350 to $50 is one heck of an improvement.
"Do you want to spend the rest of your life selling sugared water or do you want a chance to change the world?"
There's more to a job than the salary.
Of course, we all know how well that worked out for John Sculley.
In further news, Cuomo's office claims that some "Escort services" were providing underaged prostitutes. Verizon has announced that in future the yellow pages will contain only the "big 25" listings, A through D and F through Z.
The bad news: the site is down. "Safari can't open the page 'http://alex.kozinski.com/' because it could not connect to the server 'alex.kozinski.com'"
The good news: it's in the Wayback machine.
The bad news: the Wayback machine just shows "Ain't nothin' here. Y'all best be movin' on, compadre" on the main page, from 2004 through the last snapshot in 2005. (The news story saying that this is a recent change is apparently wrong).
The Replicator Industry Association of America cautions that all replicators are required, prior to creating the first device, to first replicate a EULA. By buying a replicator you are deemed to have agreed in advance to this EULA.
The EULA, rather like the United States Constitution, is a "living document" constructed of active replicator parts. It periodically downloads updates and constantly improves itself to keep up with modern jet-age progress, and the latest court decisions.
The RIAA suggests you keep the EULA posted in a conspicuous place where you can refer to it periodically to check for updates in the terms and conditions of use.
The EULA provides that you cannot use the Replicator to replicate itself, nor to replicate any patented or trademarked device.
To spare you the inconvenience of checking the patent database yourself, the EULA uses BlueTooth to communicate with the replicator and Wi-Fi to search the patent, trademark, and copyright databases. To increase customer satisfaction and continuously improve the product, it also keeps the RIAA updated on what all replicator users are doing with their replicators, so that the RIAA can better serve you.
And we do mean "serve."
Oh, misery. Been there, done that, got the phone bill. Let's hope this trial balloon blows up like the Hindenburg before anyone else gets any ideas.
I remember the bad old days of Compu$erve Information $ervices when the clock was ticking at, if I recall correctly, $6.00 an hour... and much more than that if you entered some of their "premium" services.
Plus, if you lived in Roysburg, Winnemac, their list of dialup telephone numbers might helpfully list one under "Roysburg" while not bothering to mention that the actual physical location of their modem was in the city of Zenith, fifteen miles and a local toll call away. So you were also racking up a hefty phone bill at the same time.
People may hate AOL now, but when they came charging in with a flat monthly rate they looked like knights in shining armor.
And at least with CI$ the clock was ticking at a steady rate. With the Time Warner plan, in a million households little Genevieve will run across some funny and age-appropriate penguin cartoon website and watch it for weeks, and neither her nor her folks will have any idea it cost them $82.19 until the bill comes in at the end of the month.
The funny thing is that the trend is toward flat pricing everywhere else. It seems odd to read that the genius at Time Warner are moving away from flat-rate pricing at exactly the same time as the cell phone companies are moving toward it?
I hope they remember to dry it out before they put in the sodium.
I believe them.
The problem is, how will we ever know whether or not a particular provider is throttling traffic in a fair and neutral way for the overall benefit of its customers... or whether it is cutting deals to favor business partners... or certain industry segments (the RIAA and MPAA come to mind)... or even political parties?
If common carriers are allowed to do this, how will we know when they stop serving the public and start serving themselves... and how will we able to stop them?
They've chosen to solve their problem in a cheapjack, lazy, sloppy way that virtually guarantees future abuse.
We get story after story, month after month, about organizations like the Bank of New York or Los Alamos National Laboratories or the British Ministry of Defence losing tapes and disk drives and always, always, always the data is said to be unencrypted.
WHY don't all those centralized-configuration-managing IT departments check the FileVault or the BitLocker checkbox on every laptop that comes in the door?
That fancy automated remote configuration-management software keeps everyone's internal purchase-requisition application in sync... when they're doing the remote update why don't they install TrueCrypt at the same time?
Why don't their purchase orders to Dell for 10,000 new PC's say that as long as they're custom-preinstalling all that other crap anyway they might as well include a commercial encryption package?
Put indignation aside. What, exactly, is the real human organizational and managerial reasons why encryption just doesn't happen?
Are they more worried about employees keeping information from superiors than they are about losing sensitive information to outsiders? Or what?
Digital released the Microvax II which had, if memory serves me, virtually the same performance as a full-sized VAX at about a third or a quarter of the price. More to the point, it was significantly better than the VAX-11/750, better as in double the performance, for about half the price. Killed all the older lines dead, instantly.
Wang released the Wang 1200 WPS, its CRT-based word processing system, at a time when their previous non-CRT-based offering was still selling well. Killed the older line dead, instantly.
Apple released the iPod Nano about eighteen months after the introduction of the iPod Mini line, and barely six months after a major refresh of the iPod Mini line, killing the minis dead instantly.
(And, for the record, the Digital and Wang examples occurred during the upward trajectories of those companies and were major, major successes for them).
Companies don't have to put the customers' interests ahead of their own, but they need to put a high priority on it. Companies that concentrate too much on what's good for them instead of what's good for their customers... rationalizing product lines, avoiding cannibalization, holding back new features, and generally not producing the best products they know how to produce (e.g. IBM foot-dragging on the 80386) get in trouble. Their locked-in customers may go along for a while, but customers aren't stupid and they'll be steaming about it, and delighted to give the company its comeuppance.
NewswiseScience News.
(The link from the Rockefeller University main page is currently broken).
I was looking at their"guarantee."; I'm not sure what, exactly, they actually are promising. It might not be very much.
In part: "We will pay up to $1,000,000 to cure the failure or defect in our service.... We will not reimburse special, incidental, indirect or consequential damages, such as lost wages or profits, loss of business, or lost opportunities.... If you are our member when someone accesses your personal identifying information and subsequently uses it without your authorization to commit a fraud, due to a failure or defect in our Service, and you have complied with this Agreement, subject to the terms herein, we will pay professionals to assist in restoring any such loss or recover such expenses, as required."
Any lawyers out there? What happens if the professionals' assistance, however well-meaning, fails to result in your recovering the loss? At that point would they have to pay for your loss themselves in order to "cure the defect" in the service?
And what's a "professional?" Naturally, one thinks of lawyers or licensed private detectives, but maybe it just means having their own paid staff call your credit-card companies to report the fraud... inform companies that the change of address they have for you was fraudulent and ask them to stop payment on the checks they mailed... trivial stuff like that...
iwon.com was the first thing that crossed my mind when I read this.
If Negroponte had the integrity of ... of ... a Steve Ballmer, he wouldn't have talked about price. He would have made some mild self-deprecating joke about having been wrong before, and limited himself to giving reasons for price not being a problem, or price not being what OLPC was really about, or for it not costing more than the first-generation machine despite the fancier screen... and left it at that.
How about web articles that are split across a dozen pages, for no good reason other than to interrupt your reading a dozen times so that you can twiddle your thumbs while one measly paragraph of text downloads, framed by dozens of bloated, intrusive animated ads for ZDNet?
I find those pretty annoying.
It's the normal Dilbert-PHB situation. Only nerds worry about silly details like the magnitude of a change.
PR is happy as long as they can spin it as movement in the right direction.
"See, this proves it: Vista is more secure than XP. Way more secure. 1197764 Scoville units better!"
In "The Quantitative Analysis of Visual Information" Tufte has a wonderful phrase for graphs that show direction while distorting magnitude; he calls it "the Pravda school of information presentation." He, of course, has real illustrations from Pravda, where some set of numbers, grain production or whatever, is illustrated with pictograms that increase steadily and evenly in size, while the printed numbers next to them show that the increase, while monotonic, was huge for earlier years in the series but minuscule for the more recent years.
...must be high on the FBI's list of priorities.
Verizon: We'd love to help you, but, you know, if we do this for you, we'd have to do it for everyone.
FBI: Don't worry, we'll never tell.
"Computer solitaire propelled the revolution of personal computing."
Puhleez.
There were "games" directories in timesharing system distributions long before acquiring QDOS was a gleam in Bill Gates' avaricious eye.
Pioneers were wasting time playing Spacewar! on the PDP-1 in the sixties.
David Ahl's "101 BASIC Games" or whatever it was called was typed in by hand to everything in the known world that ran BASIC (Hunt the Wumpus, anyone?).
And when a FORTRAN version of Adventure hit the DECUS library, it caused work outages in DEC shops all across the nation.
And those are just the ones I personally have wasted time with.
Dear Dr. Negroponte
If you're getting in bed with someone you shouldn't be in bed with, then you're not staying pure, even if no payment is involved.
This brings up what I think is the biggest potential for unfair use of DRM: restrictions that are built into the technology and acknowledged by fine print in the user agreement, but not enforced until after millions of consumers have already purchased the product.
There's nothing new about this. You can waste an awful lot of time reading contracts and discovering that you've agreed to obnoxious things... and that there's not an awful lot you can do about it because all the competitors have similar contracts... and that, surprise, surprise, the employee behind the car rental counter is not interested in striking out clauses and negotiating contracts with an individual customer with a line behind him.
What's new is the potential for cheap, automatic, mechanical enforcement at some later date.... and the consumer's inability to know the company's real intentions.
When you buy something with unenforced DRM you are truly buying a pig in a poke.
The free market can't operate in the absence of the buyer having reasonable information on what they're buying. In the case of unenforced DRM, that means not just the theoretical existence of restrictions, it means that companies should be required to disclose a policy on their intentions for future enforcement... a policy that must be included in the contract for the contract to be valid, and one which they can be held to in the future.
It should be use-it-or-lose-it. A company that fails to use automated restrictions for a long period of time, and has failed to disclose clearly its intention of using them in the future, ought to right to enforce them.
Thanks.
I've been disappointed and underwhelmed by Sugar in the form that it was delivered on the G1G1 units.
Now, I'm not a kid, and I've been brain-warped by decades of exposure to the Mac, but I really feel a lot of cognitive dissonance between Sugar's stated design goals and what's actually been delivered.
For example, one of Sugar's key design principles is "recoverability," and it says "However, the primary and essential means of recoverability remains the ability to undo one's actions."
Nevertheless, the keyboard has no marked "undo" key, and very, very few of the Sugar's activities appear to support any kind of "undo" facility.
Similarly, I've read the theory of how the Journal is supposed to work, and I may be wrong--I don't have any kids to try it on--but as nearly as I can tell, the only way you can find past Journal entries is by a very left-brained search capability that requires you to have labeled each Journal entry as you make it.
There's a long essay on how the Journal is supposed to work... revolutionary, non-hierarchical, etc. But I've found "tagging" to be a royal, royal pain. It's all very well to say that "Tagging will become a fundamental process for all types of data and activities on the laptops. Fortunately, children have a natural inclination to describe their world and the things they see and do." As I say, I haven't watched kids use the thing and maybe they "get" it, but I find it extremely hard to envision a ten-year old typing in tags every time he creates a journal entry.
While I'm intrigued by the idea of a GUI that is new from the ground up and informed by a fresh way of looking at things... to tell the truth my main motivation for participating in G1G1 was to experience Sugar... I'm quite disappointed by what's actually been achieved.
Right now, Sugar is a program launcher, no better than the Apple Dock or the Windows Tray... and to this aging brain, at least, the Journal simply doesn't work very well. Much less well than the Mac Finder as it existed in 1984, for example.
However, the problem is that I think open source is a key educational feature for OLPC. The concept of a "view source" button thrilled me. I grew up at a time when you could take the back off a TV set and see the tubes inside, and smash a tube in a vise and see the plate and filament and so forth inside. Maybe I couldn't build a TV or modify a vacuum tube, but just the conceptual readiness of looking inside was terribly important.
I was disappointed in the absence of a working "View Source" button in the G1G1 build. I think it's very important that all the code in the XO be open for inspection, and that definitely includes the GUI. So however bad Sugar is, I think it would be a disaster to replace it with a proprietary GUI.
This calls to mind a wonderful book by one Kees Boeke... who I assume is no longer alive... published in 1957 and entitled (in its English translation, anyway) Cosmic View: The Universe in Forty Jumps. The book is a series of more-or-less realistic drawings, starting with a girl sitting in a chair in a Dutch school playground, then zooming outward, picture by picture, each picture drawn on a tenfold smaller scale than the next.
The third or fourth picture shows a blue whale, which, for some reason, managed to beach itself in the school playground.
After ascending outward to show a cluster of galaxies, it then resumes in the schoolyard, zooming inward, tenfold larger each time. I recall that the girl has a small cut on her hand--to give later opportunity to zoom in on blood corpuscles--and, again for no good reason, there happens to be a copepod (of all things) lying on the edge of the cut!
Later, the same theme, with explicit acknowledgement to Boeke, was pursued by Charles Eames and Philip Morrison in a photographically illustrated book called Powers of Ten, and an animated movie of the same title by the Office of Charles and Ray Eames. The medium-scale shots are aerial photographs of Chicago's lakefront area, perhaps the Museum of Science and Industry, and I guess are undoctored photographs... no whale in it, anyway. Too bad.
Both books are absolutely marvellous, real mind-openers for nerdy kids of the right age... (Click, click) Can it really be that both are out of print? A shame...
"In collecting evidence for those takedown notices, Media Sentry investigators do not usually download suspect music files. Instead, the company uses special software to check the "hash," a sort of unique digital fingerprint, of each offered file to verify that it is identical to a copyrighted song file in the RIAA's database. In the rare cases in which the hashes don't match, the investigators download the song and use a software program sold by Audible Magic to compare the sound waves of the offered audio file against those of the song it may be infringing upon. If the Audible Magic software still doesn't turn up a match, then a live person will listen to the song."
In other words, they do not engage in unauthorized downloading and copyright infringement. Except when they do. Because they what sounds to them like a really good rationalization for their behavior.
Which is exactly what their victims do.
If the RIAA being straight arrows, they'd forego the downloading in those "rare" cases. Why is it so important to nail these "rare" that they will compromise their own principles?
Perhaps, if the truth were known, those "rare" cases aren't really all that rare.