I think Gutenberg is very much there... Have you ever looked at the amount of material in Gutenberg's archives? When it comes to books and material written in english, that is in the public domain, I have to say, that Gutenberg offers almost everything of interest already.
The 'vision' that the author of the Wired article had was somewhat different: To be able to access all texts electronically. Something that everybody who had to hunt down old magazine articles has dreamt of (I still have nightmares from that one dark and dusty university library cellar, *shudder*). While Gutenberg is a great project, to come closer to full availability of all texts via electronic media, there will have to be initiative from governmental organizations as well as commercial entities. Obviously, not all texts will be available for free. But even a somewhat unified way of searching and finding these texts will be huge task.
There is CiteSeer for articles on computer science, there is IEEExplore if you happen to be looking for something from IEEE. But you have to know these places. Even with better search engines like Google it's still quite a task to get your hands on a text, even if you have some time to do the search and are willing to spend money.
A large database of text references (maybe including abstracts) would also be nice to just see what's available while you are still doing research.
The reason the Gutenberg project isn't hugely succesful is not the lack of text. Part of it might be the lack of formatting. Nobody want's to read 600 pages of a classic work on a computer screen in ASCII.
GutenMark does that (almost) automatically. Uses LaTeX.
If I'm correct, there is an initial.torrent file for each file to be downloaded. Everybody who wants the data needs the torrent file first. Not sure about the size of these.torrent files (they always seem to be below 15 KB), but everybody would have to get them from the news story server - and your average news story isn't much larger than the torrent file. From my understanding, Bittorrent is only useful for files that are relatively large.
So what? I went to www.google.com.au, it looks the same as regular Google, by default it still searches the entire Internet....
Great, but the German version, google.de, does not always give you the same results as google.com, although it also defaults to searching the complete web. This sucks.
Fortunately, when I use Opera's search text field (which I use almost exclusively for search) I still get the international Google version.
The average joe, not just the computer geeks who uses KaZaA now.
Kazaa is used by many non-geeks. With the millions of people running it, they can't all be geeks. The program is somewhat idiot-proof and has something nice to offer (free stuff), so your average Joe runs it.
..., and we knew that their scientists were well on the way there.
Actually, they weren't. There was research, of course, but they never came very far on the long, complicated way of building a working bomb. First the Nazis were convinced to win the war easily by conventional means (in 1939 and 40 it looked pretty good for them). In 1942, there was a request by the military on a nuclear bomb. The scientists agreed that it could be done, but would need several more years. See this page on the Uran-Projekt if you can understand German. When the German scientists, already interned after Germany's defeat in May '45, learned about Hiroshima and Nagasaki, they refused to believe it.
My point is that people who make statements like "US is not free" never had to live in the unfree countries that they are comparing the US to, or they wouldn't make those comparisons in the first place. Even if there are problems - as you point out - people in general are much better off in the US. If you fail to see that, I'm afraid I can't explain it any better.
Live a bit in China, as a dissident, and not as a visitor or part of the nomenclatura. The US won't look so bad after that.
And yes, there's all kinds of reasons to disagree with George W. But this has nothing to do with the fact that the US is basically a free country, while China is not.
I guess linuxking means some sort of CPU-ID thing that could help track people. After all the People's Republic of China is still ruled by a totalitarian regime.
If the proposed protocol is entirely new, why unilaterally declare it the new Gnutella protocol by calling it Gnutella2? What if I propose something that is called Gnutella3 and is crap, from a technical point of view (I don't suggest Gnutella2 is)?
If the protocol is really that good, why not give it an entirely new name and let it become popular by its technical merits?
Just as the Limewire and Bearshare developers shouldn't be the ones to decide what becomes the next Gnutella, nobody else should do that on their own.
Froogle adwords, on the other hand, could likely command a premium price and thus it would make good business sense to roll out Froogle as soon as possible.
On the other hand, people who are visiting Froogle are less likely to click on advertisements. They are using Froogle because they want the best price / best availability. Why go to an online shop just because it advertizes on the same page as the query results? Unless ads are not labeled as ads anymore, but Google had to make a major policy change first.
In the normal web search results, advertisements make more sense, because - depending on what you searched for - there are not so many competing commercial offerings.
But if it's a good idea and decent implementation then someone can use it and it might make someone's day more pleasant. Multiply that by the number of people whose days are made more pleasant, and you have something to remind yourself of if you ever wonder if your life was worthwhile.
Sigh. My point was: A lot of people working for free and one person getting USD 10000 from Google - the for-profit-organization Google - is not too smart from the point of view of the contestants. It's great for Google. If you want to do something for your fellow man on the field of software development, write good open source software. Don't give your ideas and work away for free to a company.
Then again, if you're a selfish jerk this probably won't appeal to you. Too bad, if that describes you.
It doesn't strike me as especially clever. If I give something away for free, I give it to people who need it. Google can pay for their employees.
$10000 for a week or so worth of work isn't that great?
A mere chance of getting USD 10000 for a week of work is great? In a competition that is held world-wide? I don't think so.
If their ideas were worth so much more, why would they submit them in the first place and why aren't they already millionaires?
In this particular case you'd first have to build up the Google infrastructure. That's a bit of work. Also, I'm not talking about a million-dollar-idea. Just about the fact that working a long time for - potentially, most likely, whatever you want to call it - nothing doesn't sound so good. If this was volunteer work or writing OSS or something like that, my opinion would differ. But Google is a for-profit-organization.
I'm willing to bet the guy who won is plenty happy with his $10000 even though he likely doesn't need it given his past employment history and current position.
Sure, if you do get the USD 10000 it's fine. But most people didn't.
A competition where you have to deliver a very good idea and a decent implementation of it to have a mere chance to get USD 10000 isn't that great from a financial point of view.
I doubt it. It's long known that title and h1 elements are very important for Google (and recently, more and more of its competitors). Still, people often put nothing in those two HTML elements, or crap, or leave predefined values in there (like Untitled1). These people never seem to check if their own pages are in a search engine and what a query result on their pages looks like.
A lot of people just don't know or care about good webauthoring.
there's a reason people are still using.doc and.pdf instead of HTML,
HTML and PDF serve different purposes. HTML is a mere markup language that leaves interpretation to user agents, while PDF is a format with exact layout and font information. Even in combination with CSS HTML is not equal to PDF in that regard (and not supposed to).
In some comments of this discussion it was proposed to have an internal file-sharing system for the university's (and I don't mean UCI specifically) students so that people have access to a variety of interesting files while no external traffic is generated (well, some people will have to get fresh content by other means, but everything needs to be retrieved only once).
Anyway, while this is beneficial for all participants (those paying the traffic bills and the students), can the network people allow this? They must assume that copyright-infringing material is shared if internal transfers rise to giga- or terabytes per day... Can they be legally held responsible for looking the other way?
Nice... Although I wonder why people with external IP addresses (like me) are allowed to use the search engine to find out that a lot of copyright-infringing material is shared. I can't download the actual files, but RIAA / MPAA might want to use this to put pressure on those responsible for running the network.
My suggestion: put some IP-level restriction on the search as well.
One guy there believed, and I agree with him, that the future of television advertisement is in-show advertising, tought it would be more subtle than having Buffy drink a Montain Dew and saying "After a slay, there's nothing like a good Montain Dew, right Xander?"
Actually, according to Faith, slaying "makes you hungry and horny". So instead of soft drinks you could advertise for all kinds of other things, food, and whatever else crosses your mind!;-)
Slashdot Mirror
I think Gutenberg is very much there... Have you ever looked at the amount of material in Gutenberg's archives? When it comes to books and material written in english, that is in the public domain, I have to say, that Gutenberg offers almost everything of interest already.
The 'vision' that the author of the Wired article had was somewhat different: To be able to access all texts electronically. Something that everybody who had to hunt down old magazine articles has dreamt of (I still have nightmares from that one dark and dusty university library cellar, *shudder*). While Gutenberg is a great project, to come closer to full availability of all texts via electronic media, there will have to be initiative from governmental organizations as well as commercial entities. Obviously, not all texts will be available for free. But even a somewhat unified way of searching and finding these texts will be huge task.
There is CiteSeer for articles on computer science, there is IEEExplore if you happen to be looking for something from IEEE. But you have to know these places. Even with better search engines like Google it's still quite a task to get your hands on a text, even if you have some time to do the search and are willing to spend money.
A large database of text references (maybe including abstracts) would also be nice to just see what's available while you are still doing research.
The reason the Gutenberg project isn't hugely succesful is not the lack of text. Part of it might be the lack of formatting. Nobody want's to read 600 pages of a classic work on a computer screen in ASCII.
GutenMark does that (almost) automatically. Uses LaTeX.
If I'm correct, there is an initial .torrent file for each file to be downloaded. Everybody who wants the data needs the torrent file first. Not sure about the size of these .torrent files (they always seem to be below 15 KB), but everybody would have to get them from the news story server - and your average news story isn't much larger than the torrent file. From my understanding, Bittorrent is only useful for files that are relatively large.
...we'll no longer need a bigger boat?
So what? I went to www.google.com.au, it looks the same as regular Google, by default it still searches the entire Internet....
Great, but the German version, google.de, does not always give you the same results as google.com, although it also defaults to searching the complete web. This sucks.
Fortunately, when I use Opera's search text field (which I use almost exclusively for search) I still get the international Google version.
.iq is the country domain for Iraq. See the official list.
.iq seems to be a good choice.
The Spiegel Almanach entry for Iraq has Al-Jumhuriya al-Iraqiya as the country's offical name (in Arab, I guess). So
The average joe, not just the computer geeks who uses KaZaA now.
Kazaa is used by many non-geeks. With the millions of people running it, they can't all be geeks. The program is somewhat idiot-proof and has something nice to offer (free stuff), so your average Joe runs it.
..., and we knew that their scientists were well on the way there.
Actually, they weren't. There was research, of course, but they never came very far on the long, complicated way of building a working bomb. First the Nazis were convinced to win the war easily by conventional means (in 1939 and 40 it looked pretty good for them). In 1942, there was a request by the military on a nuclear bomb. The scientists agreed that it could be done, but would need several more years. See this page on the Uran-Projekt if you can understand German. When the German scientists, already interned after Germany's defeat in May '45, learned about Hiroshima and Nagasaki, they refused to believe it.
My point is that people who make statements like "US is not free" never had to live in the unfree countries that they are comparing the US to, or they wouldn't make those comparisons in the first place. Even if there are problems - as you point out - people in general are much better off in the US. If you fail to see that, I'm afraid I can't explain it any better.
Sure... and you think the US is free nowadays?
Live a bit in China, as a dissident, and not as a visitor or part of the nomenclatura. The US won't look so bad after that.
And yes, there's all kinds of reasons to disagree with George W. But this has nothing to do with the fact that the US is basically a free country, while China is not.
I guess linuxking means some sort of CPU-ID thing that could help track people. After all the People's Republic of China is still ruled by a totalitarian regime.
If the proposed protocol is entirely new, why unilaterally declare it the new Gnutella protocol by calling it Gnutella2? What if I propose something that is called Gnutella3 and is crap, from a technical point of view (I don't suggest Gnutella2 is)?
If the protocol is really that good, why not give it an entirely new name and let it become popular by its technical merits?
Just as the Limewire and Bearshare developers shouldn't be the ones to decide what becomes the next Gnutella, nobody else should do that on their own.
Froogle adwords, on the other hand, could likely command a premium price and thus it would make good business sense to roll out Froogle as soon as possible.
On the other hand, people who are visiting Froogle are less likely to click on advertisements. They are using Froogle because they want the best price / best availability. Why go to an online shop just because it advertizes on the same page as the query results? Unless ads are not labeled as ads anymore, but Google had to make a major policy change first.
In the normal web search results, advertisements make more sense, because - depending on what you searched for - there are not so many competing commercial offerings.
But if it's a good idea and decent implementation then someone can use it and it might make someone's day more pleasant. Multiply that by the number of people whose days are made more pleasant, and you have something to remind yourself of if you ever wonder if your life was worthwhile.
Sigh. My point was: A lot of people working for free and one person getting USD 10000 from Google - the for-profit-organization Google - is not too smart from the point of view of the contestants. It's great for Google. If you want to do something for your fellow man on the field of software development, write good open source software. Don't give your ideas and work away for free to a company.
Then again, if you're a selfish jerk this probably won't appeal to you. Too bad, if that describes you.
It doesn't strike me as especially clever. If I give something away for free, I give it to people who need it. Google can pay for their employees.
$10000 for a week or so worth of work isn't that great?
A mere chance of getting USD 10000 for a week of work is great? In a competition that is held world-wide? I don't think so.
If their ideas were worth so much more, why would they submit them in the first place and why aren't they already millionaires?
In this particular case you'd first have to build up the Google infrastructure. That's a bit of work. Also, I'm not talking about a million-dollar-idea. Just about the fact that working a long time for - potentially, most likely, whatever you want to call it - nothing doesn't sound so good. If this was volunteer work or writing OSS or something like that, my opinion would differ. But Google is a for-profit-organization.
I'm willing to bet the guy who won is plenty happy with his $10000 even though he likely doesn't need it given his past employment history and current position.
Sure, if you do get the USD 10000 it's fine. But most people didn't.
Ah, world domination. If only I wasn't allergic to cats...
A competition where you have to deliver a very good idea and a decent implementation of it to have a mere chance to get USD 10000 isn't that great from a financial point of view.
I doubt it. It's long known that title and h1 elements are very important for Google (and recently, more and more of its competitors). Still, people often put nothing in those two HTML elements, or crap, or leave predefined values in there (like Untitled1). These people never seem to check if their own pages are in a search engine and what a query result on their pages looks like.
A lot of people just don't know or care about good webauthoring.
there's a reason people are still using .doc and .pdf instead of HTML,
HTML and PDF serve different purposes. HTML is a mere markup language that leaves interpretation to user agents, while PDF is a format with exact layout and font information. Even in combination with CSS HTML is not equal to PDF in that regard (and not supposed to).
German news magazine Der Spiegel has an article on the same topic, with a bit more background information. Also in German.
In some comments of this discussion it was proposed to have an internal file-sharing system for the university's (and I don't mean UCI specifically) students so that people have access to a variety of interesting files while no external traffic is generated (well, some people will have to get fresh content by other means, but everything needs to be retrieved only once).
Anyway, while this is beneficial for all participants (those paying the traffic bills and the students), can the network people allow this? They must assume that copyright-infringing material is shared if internal transfers rise to giga- or terabytes per day... Can they be legally held responsible for looking the other way?
Nice... Although I wonder why people with external IP addresses (like me) are allowed to use the search engine to find out that a lot of copyright-infringing material is shared. I can't download the actual files, but RIAA / MPAA might want to use this to put pressure on those responsible for running the network.
My suggestion: put some IP-level restriction on the search as well.
It's erased now that he didn't race Needles.
Actually there are a lot of speeed limits on the autobahn these days. And if there are none, traffic is so crowded that you can't go fast anyway.
JOrbis is a GPL'ed Ogg decoder. Maybe the developers and Sun can work something out to reuse that code (GPL probably won't be OK with Sun for JMF).
One guy there believed, and I agree with him, that the future of television advertisement is in-show advertising, tought it would be more subtle than having Buffy drink a Montain Dew and saying "After a slay, there's nothing like a good Montain Dew, right Xander?"
;-)
Actually, according to Faith, slaying "makes you hungry and horny". So instead of soft drinks you could advertise for all kinds of other things, food, and whatever else crosses your mind!