At the moment it's not quite cost-effective
for me to install a photovoltaic system on my
house in suburban Sydney (even with the quite
decent government rebates), but it's not far
off. I'm tempted for non-commercial reasons,
simply because I like the idea. Check out Pacific Solar for details of one Australian company
with a nice system.
Barr tries to cover the full range of reasons
people "rant at Microsoft" (in his chapter "Evil
Empire"). While the FSF "freedom" argument
is indeeed something I support personally, I
believe it's important and widespread enough to
warrant treatment in such a context.
Your mileage may vary.
As for pushing my personal agenda... that's
quite normal in book reviews, and I probably
do less of it than most reviewers.
The problem is that I want some companies
to continue following (what I consider to be)
ethical "rules". In particular, I want Red Hat
to continue to release code they develop themselves (e.g. RPM) under the GPL, and I want
them to continue not including proprietary
software in their distribution. And I don't
want Google to start selling search result
rankings. And so forth.
Sure, owning a little stock won't give me much
say individually, but possibly if a lot of users
owned a little stock...
With banner ads (identical in appearance and
usually placed in similar locations) it may be possible to directly
compare performance. But with sites running different kind of text ads in different locations
on the page - there was no way to make the
results directly comparable.
In any event, my writeup is really more about
the ethics and effects of
advertising than an evaluation of particular forms. Is there always going to be a trade-off between ad effectiveness and either editorial
compromise or page functionality?
(But maybe I should have made that clearer.)
The vast majority of Linux users could no more
spot a trojan in an SRPM than in an RPM.
Trying to convince them to use SRPMs is only
going to make things worse. Also, what about
systems that don't have compilers?
The right thing to do is to fix
any problems with package signing, and to
make the system transparent. (So if I install
a Redhat system out of the box, it should come
with a Redhat public key, and rpm should warn
me if I install anything not signed with that key.)
A lot of recent fantasy seems to be effectively
serialised, albeit it at the granularity of the book - Robert Jordan's The Wheel of Time is just the biggest and highest profile example.
I think I'd actually prefer a novel that was serialised more in the manner of Dickens, because it will
avoid the long wait between volumes, which
can be as much as two years with a high quality work like George RR Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire.
Anyway, I enjoyed Memory, Sorrow, Thorn, so I'll definitely give this a look. (I might even change my mind about not reviewing e-books...
Looking past my computer, I can see several
thousand books. Almost none of those are
available online. But I'll pick a few at random,
just to illustrate this.
E.R. Eddison's The Worm Ouroboros (great pre-Tolkien fantasy)
James Gleick's Chaos (or any similar introduction to chaos)
John McPhee's Annals of the Former World
. . .
There's huge amounts of stuff in libraries that's not available online.
Google used to spider my sites almost twice
a month, but it seems to have reduced its crawl
frequency since it started indexing dynamic
content. Another problem with the latter is
that e.g. book pages at Amazon can appear multiple
times in search results, as Google follows
links from different associate programs.
The US has consistently opposed the creation
of an international court to try war crimes
(the International Criminal Court), or worked
to have it as weak as possible. (Geoffrey
Robertson describes this in his book
Crimes Against Humanity.) So how come they are now pushing for an international
treaty on terrorism?
In Australia, not only must computer games
be classified, but there is no adult
classification! That is to say, the
classifications jump straight from MA (not suitable for children under 15) to RC (banned).
Anthony Larme has a site with the details.
Some "canonical tomes" are canonical within
narrow disciplines, while others have much
broader appeal - some are specialised textbooks
while others are popularisations. I suspect
these become known in different ways, but word
of mouth must surely be important in both.
One problem with canonicaltomes.org is that without any
way to judge the background or competence of the people providing information about the books it will be hard to evaluate it - I think Gravitation is a great volume, but it's
not going to be a useful intro to general relativity for the non-mathematical reader.
Another approach is posting to Usenet - when I was after a book on meteorology, I posted to sci.geo.meteorology (explaining my background and what I was
looking for) and three different people from different universities recommended Wallace and Hobbs' Atmospheric Science, which turned out to be just what I was after.
I used to be a firm believer that the major
extinctions were caused by impacts. Then I
read Vincent Courtillot's Evolutionary Catastrohes and now I'm not so sure. That book makes the case for volcanism as the explanation of the seven major extinctions.
It is simply not true that mammals are better
designed than amphibians. As Gould is fond
of pointing out, by any of the obvious criteria -
biomass, number of species, number of individual
organisms, robustness against disasters, etc. -
single-celled diatoms are vastly more successfull
than mammals. Gould's book Full House (Life's Grandeur outside the US) tackles
this subject.
Certainly chaos theory may be applicable to
development and genetics, but it's
not a magic
wand. Also, the
systems involved may not be deterministic enough for
chaos theory to be applicable (people like Lewontin would argue for a significant
role for randomness).
Slashdot Mirror
Danny.
Danny.
As for pushing my personal agenda... that's quite normal in book reviews, and I probably do less of it than most reviewers.
Danny.
Danny.
Sure, owning a little stock won't give me much say individually, but possibly if a lot of users owned a little stock...
Danny.
In any event, my writeup is really more about the ethics and effects of advertising than an evaluation of particular forms. Is there always going to be a trade-off between ad effectiveness and either editorial compromise or page functionality? (But maybe I should have made that clearer.)
Danny.
Danny.
Danny.
Danny.
My own site has some details of takedown notices and classifications.
Danny.
Danny.
Danny.
Danny.
The right thing to do is to fix any problems with package signing, and to make the system transparent. (So if I install a Redhat system out of the box, it should come with a Redhat public key, and rpm should warn me if I install anything not signed with that key.)
Danny.
I think I'd actually prefer a novel that was serialised more in the manner of Dickens, because it will avoid the long wait between volumes, which can be as much as two years with a high quality work like George RR Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire.
Anyway, I enjoyed Memory, Sorrow, Thorn, so I'll definitely give this a look. (I might even change my mind about not reviewing e-books...
Danny.
- E.R. Eddison's The Worm Ouroboros (great pre-Tolkien fantasy)
- James Gleick's Chaos (or any similar introduction to chaos)
- John McPhee's Annals of the Former World
- . . .
There's huge amounts of stuff in libraries that's not available online.Danny.
I've also been kicked from first to sixth on a search for "book reviews" :-(.
Danny.
Danny.
Danny (my own Australian censorship pages).
Another approach is posting to Usenet - when I was after a book on meteorology, I posted to sci.geo.meteorology (explaining my background and what I was looking for) and three different people from different universities recommended Wallace and Hobbs' Atmospheric Science , which turned out to be just what I was after.
Danny.
Danny.
Danny.
Danny.
Danny.