One thing to remember about Lemelson: he did start out actually inventing new toys, and soon discovered that toy companies would rather steal ideas than buy them. Some of the early lawsuits seemed reasonable from what I heard. (You didn't really expect Fortune to publish something that makes a big corporation look bad in a dispute with an individual, rather than another big corporation?) On the other hand, when he patented an idea that turned out to be anything but new (a mask-cutout on a cardboard cereal box), instead of shrugging and going to work on the next idea, he went to court and kept fighting for over 20 years! Apparently somewhere along the way, he discovered that he could make more money by writing patent applications on things he could not actually build, and then harassing the companies that did eventually figure out to to make them. Bad news for the real innovators. What we really need in the USA is to make it easier for courts to rule that the loser pays the winner's lawyers. More knowledge and spine in the patent office would help, but if they hadn't granted Lemelson questionable patents, he just would have sued them instead of corporations...
I can assure you that the rockets from Chistmas Island will not pass over Indonesia... Ian Bryce, Chief Engineer, Asia Pacific Space Centre. Ian, thanks for the link to the flight paths. I didn't realize rockets started shedding stages so early. Flight path A (just south of east, for near-equatorial orbits) drops several pieces in the strait between Indonesia/New Guinea and Australia. This is indeed deep ocean, but not very wide if those Russian guidance systems malfunction. Of course, the control center does have self-destruct options when a rocket starts to go off course. I think most American launches pass pretty close to but not quite over the Bahamas, and although our systems are far from 100% reliability they have never killed any Bahamians... The other flight paths are pretty safe: B (southeast over western Australia, dropping all the pieces before the land) and C (SSW over one of the emptiest parts of the ocean), but is there any advantage to an equatorial launch point if the orbit is not going to the east?
10% yearly mortality rate? That's nothing. Less than half of the Pilgrims survived the first year. The real record in mortality on a successful mission might belong to Magellan's around the world expedition: 5 ships went out, 1 came home, with only about 20 crewmen left. (Magellan himself died in the Phillipines.) I'm not sure how many men were in the original crews or in those who crossed into the Pacific. If I remember right, 2 ships turned back -- one empty supply ship by plan, the other because the crew mutinied (and were eventually hung), so I guess you should only count the 3 crews that crossed the Straits of Magellan. I'm guessing that these ships had crews of 50 to 100 originally, which makes the mortality rate 90% or more.
As there was no indigenous population, a work force had to be imported[to work in the phosphate mines] If I understand the source of the "phosphate" correctly, the main industry there is mining well-aged bird poop. In a tropical climate. Tourism may be a significant industry also -- but I grew up in a town that lived on tourism, and shoveling bird poop might be preferable to the tourist trade. So I think the residents are likely to consider a few minutes of loud noise every few days as an good trade off for new jobs.
Indonesia will be in the path of the launches, but I think too close to be in danger from dropped boosters and first stages. There is a chance that a malfunctioning rocket could come down in a populated area of Indonesia. Other island groups might be under the launch path also, but past Indonesia there's a lot of ocean and not much land, so if the rocket is under control they can make sure nothing comes down anywhere near land.
Losing old articles is nothing new, and it has nothing to do with deliberate purging. I know of several writers who started writing science fiction for the pulp magazines in the 1920's and 30's, and later on wanted to publish complete sets of their early work. Unless they obsessively kept manuscripts themselves (difficult to do the way most people move around), they were often unable to locate any copy at all of several early stories they considered significant. It was published in hard-copy in 5 or 6 digit quantities -- but nobody bothered to keep a complete collection of those old magazines, least of all the publishers... I suspect the modern day equivalent in on-line archives would be those files you can't read from the backup tape when the hard drive crashes and you have to rebuild it
If you want to protect your own work against disappearing, you better back it up in a format that you can preserve, and every so often look at updating it so it stays useful. E.g. right now, unless you can persuade someone your work is important enough to be etched in durable metals or printed on acid-free paper and kept in a vault, your best bet is probably good-quality CD-R's. Don't store them in a hot and humid climate, pull them out and check them once a year, and in five or ten years, you'll need to buy new media (DVD or whatever comes next) and copy them to it so the physical media stays up to date. Keeping the file formats up to date is a whole other problem -- but those whose work is adequately represented in plain ASCII probably don't have much to worry about.
Sounds hard? It sure beats what medieval monks had to do when the parchments in their possession started coming apart from age: kill a sheep, take the skin, scrape it and treat it to make new parchment, grind your own ink, then copy the old works by hand... And it's better than what you have to do to properly re-publish a 1930 SF story, if you can find someone who kept a copy all these years: type the whole darn thing in over again, because it's not legible enough to scan.
While I agree that Intellectual Property laws need some revision (especially the ridiculously long copyright period in the USA), Son May Records and their customers are parasites. They are benefiting from others work without paying up. This is not to imply that an American company that sells CD's for $15 and up while paying out $1.50/CD to all the musicians involved in creating it isn't also a parasite...
In an earlier post, I theorized that the free-lancers would get together and set up something like this. (Basically, it's a 1-stop shop for republication rights, so a magazine wanting to put it's pre-94 archives on the web would not have to track down and negotiate with every free-lancer they ever used. I suspect that the phone bills and salary for the guys doing the negotiating might cost more than the payouts to the authors.) Nice to see it happening so fast.
the major database holders will negotiate a settlement with the free lancers I'm sure they are working on it now. There are two problems that will slow this down and leave a few holes in regards to things from 1994 back to whenever they stopped keeping paper copies:
I doubt that maintaining an internet database generates all that much money, so they might have to crank their rates up a lot to be able to pay each freelancer a few bucks. And if you set the rates too high, most people just stay away...
To cover everything in some publications, you have to contact hundreds of freelancers. Even if you've got their phone #'s, this still takes quite a lot of time. And then there are the ones that retired or died -- tracking down people that have moved several times since they last sent you an article can be difficult and expensive, finding the heirs if the guy died is even harder.
It's possible that now that cash is in sight, the freelancers & their heirs will form an organization or hire an agency to represent them, to give the database makers one place (or a small number of agencies) to deal with, and to establish standard rates that are not so high as to kill the business. But freelancers being rather independent, you aren't going to see 100% of them joining...
1) You can now tell your PHB that Star Office (and by implication, open source) is "Good enough for government work."
2)If some DOD offices are using Star Office, corporations dealing with those offices will feel it's a good idea to install Star Office also. That 25K seats in DOD will probably multiply to over 100K seats in large and small corporations. I'm hoping that some of those corps will discover that Star Office is about as good as MS Office, and adopt it on a wider scale. Whether or not that happens, that many gov't and corporate seats will ensure the Star Office developers will hear what is needed to make it _better_ than MS Office. I think the chances just improved that my employer will let me move to Linux/Star Office in a couple of years instead of buying the lastest MS upgrades -- and from what I've heard, MS's present product line is really a downgrade from Win98 + Office97 which I use now, so I expect the 2003 version will be even lamer...
IMO, the recent public statements by Mundie and other Microsofties have been attempts to make executives believe two things that are not true:
1. Open Source = GPL. They'll start with general statements about open source being viral. When challenged, they say "Oh, that only referred to the GPL." So go re-read to the original statement: "Open source" was in the prominent position; if "GPL" was mentioned at all, it was in a subordinate clause where execs who don't know much about it will assume it is a synonym for "Open Source." This makes Mundie's rebuttal "There is more than one Microsoft license" rather humorous: We knew that Craig, do you know there's more than one open source license? Obviously, MS has no objection at all to the BSD license, because they can copy that code right into their proprietary code, modify it to create incompatibilities and copyright or even patent the result -- but you won't see discussion of even BSD out where it non-techies might see it and get distracted from learning "Open source bad"...
2. Use of GPL tools will infect your program and require that it become GPL'd. That is exactly what the Microsoft beta license discussed in the forum was intended to imply. Not so. You can write proprietary code using Gnu tools running on Linux and LGPL + proprietary libraries, and it stays proprietary. What you cannot do is incorporate the GPL source into your code, or modify the LGPL library without releasing the modifications. If you want to write proprietary library code, you just have to put it in a separate library (and of course, not start with open-source code). So where is the problem? Unless it's the sort of problem that a thief has with an unpickable lock?
Now, don't get me wrong here. MS has the right to keep its source code secret, release it with a ban on copying or modifying it at all, require the development team to sacrifice a fatted calf to Lord Gates before starting work, or to specify which tools can be used. No problem there, if you don't like it just don't work with MS code. I could easily understand if they required the use of MS tools only on beta code, or even released code. But the coincidence between the wording in the license and Mundie's misleading public statements make me rather suspect that paragraph of the license is just another attempt to imply something which anyone who reads the (L)GPL licenses knows just isn't so.
There does indeed seem to be an anti-intellectual property strain among the open-sourcers. But even the GPL does not cancel intellectual property rights, it only (very aggressively) keeps others from claiming GPL'd work as their own. Mundie is trying to confound the "information should be free" rhetoric of some open-sourcers with the much more limited actual effect of the licenses -- and he is too smart to make this mistake by accident.
if our company ever goes belly up - the whole software will be released open source.. That is a guarantee to their customers: you won't get left high and dry in case something happens to the supplier of your mission critical software, at worst you'll just have to hire someone to maintain the code.
Not fair to creditors? Maybe, but if they did their homework, they know the risk. If they didn't do their homework -- one of the better aspects of capitalism is its habit of taking money away from fools and giving it to those who know what to do with it. Also, this policy should improve sales, making it less likely that the loans will fall into default. I think the creditors would much rather have their cash in hand than be trying to figure out what to do with a bunch of proprietary software that didn't sell well enough to keep the developers solvent...
The IQ test scoring was designed so it did give a bell curve, with the center, median, average, and highest point of the curve all being the same. That is, your IQ score is not just your test score times a scale factor, but rather they look up the test score in a table, which "corrects" it so the resulting curve from testing a large number of people looks "right". When a new test is written, they re-figure the table for it so as to match the IQ curve from the old tests. Originally, the average was at 100 for the American population (or maybe it was only middle-class whites?), but the average IQ in America has been climbing slowly but steadily ever since the first test was written (about a century ago), and I think it's close to 110 now. But IMHO, you don't need a 3-digit IQ to learn to use a computer, you just need an open mind and willingness to put in some effort.
computers are extremely complex and most people do not understand them even a little. Frankly I don't see that this is any different between Windows and Linux, both are pretty hard to use when you can't find the "any" key or you plug the power strip into itself. This is what I mean by "open mind"; the people who have trouble with computers are those that _panic_ and won't use what they already know (the power strip...) or try anything (hit _some_ key -- oh, that's what it meant!). I am not particularly experienced with Linux, but in 14 years of using DOS and Windows, and doing incidental training, it never seemed that DOS was that hard to learn, or Windows that easy. Windows does _look_ friendlier (pictures and warm colors instead of monochrome text), so it may not induce so many panic reactions, but it's really far more complicated, and how in heck is double-clicking on an icon or through a series of menus more intuitive than typing in what you want the computer to do? Okay, you've got to learn a special language to type in commands, but is that worse than learning to click Start to stop? (Maybe it is for *nix, the geeks who created it seem to have an aversion to using anything resembling an actual English word.)
IMO, the real usability advantage of a GUI comes later, _after_ you've learned the basics of using the interface: you don't have to memorize how things are spelled, you don't have to do all that typing, and when your hard drive starts clogging up you can see the files on the screen, just point and delete or drag and drop the "keepers" to a proper location. Finally, you will find more applications that use graphics well when there is a good GUI underneath.
Apparently Digital Angel combines a muscle-activated power supply, a GPS receiver, and some sort of transmitter. (If it didn't have a transmitter, it couldn't broadcast your location.) For most civilian purposes, that could be a cell-phone transmitter. But remember, holding a cell phone near your head for a half-hour a day has been neither proven safe nor proven dangerous. Having it implanted under your skin and on 24x7 is rather more likely to be dangerous. And it will need a little extra transmitting power to get the signal out.
But for military applications, this thing has to work where there is no cell-phone network (or the USAF has just targeted all the towers to make sure the other guys aren't using encrypted cell-phones to communicate or even to tie together detection networks). So you need a transmitter powerful enough to reach a satellite. I don't know, but I suspect that is quite a few watts, as compared to the 5mW peak signal of a cell phone. That burning sensation? It's your tracking device cooking your biceps...
Do I even need to comment on the stupidity of having our troops walking through the woods while broadcasting a signal anyone with a $25 radio receiver can home in on?
That's a very good question. Although the article purports to answer it:
The business, which is based in California, plans to break even before the end of the year, while analysts forecast annual revenues of about $50m by 2002.
Google has built its revenues from advertising and also from licensing its proprietary search technology to other websites and portals.
I hope this is better researched than the article's description of the servers! If I needed to buy a search engine, Google would be one of the first places I'd look, but how much can they get for that? And what happens when someone puts a better search engine on the market? The worst aspect of an IPO (in the USA at least) is that now the company is pretty much committed to showing a profit every quarter, and most software sells irregularly.
I guess they do sell some advertising, but internet advertising is not a great revenue stream either. It's too easy for the advertisers to confirm that their advertisements are being ignored, so they put the big money into TV ads where they don't get direct confirmation of all the mute buttons going on & tapes being fast-forwarded... For another example of what's wrong with advertising, Google's own quite successful "advertising strategy" was to rely on word of mouth rather than paid advertising. Apparently you still don't have to advertise a product that stands out on its own merits!
You should never have to tell the computer something it already knows.
But if you are going to work with a wide variety of hardware and software from many different vendors, you have to have a way to tell the computer when what it "knows" is _wrong_.
This wasn't much of an issue with the Mac, because Apple kept tight control of almost everything, and if their OS couldn't figure out the configuration, then by gum it must be unsupported... But MS spent a few thousand man-months trying to test Win95 on all possible PC configurations, and still missed quite a few; a volunteer operation like Linux _cannot_ maintain a database of video cards, network cards, modems, motherboards, and BIOS's large enough to automatically configure for more than a few percent of the PC's out there.
Yes, this is one of the things that is holding Linux back from wider acceptance. On the other hand, once the machine is configured right, it won't mutate on its own. Windows does. So if you hire some guru to fix your machine, in Linux it should stay fixed, in Windows he _will_ be back. brIn Windows it's quite likely that you will not be able to find any documentation that relates to your problem, short of paying MS tech support to look it up for you. Linux documentation may leave much to be desired, but you can get all of it quite inexpensively and if you do enough reading it does seem to be possible to understand the entire OS. No one at MS understands the entirety of any Windows or Office program.
I have had far too much trouble with computers that didn't come out of stand-by mode. It's like the mfgs put in "power saving" to get a green star, but didn't feel any obligation to make it work right. At the worst, there was a box we bought as a small server in '95 where even putting the monitor in standby would take the mainframe off-line!
Maybe it's improved on the newer models, but disabling power control in CMOS setup is already a reflexive action for me. I do let my 21" spaceheater, I mean monitor, go into standby, but unless the mainframe is running on batteries, I don't want it to go down until I shutdown the OS.
If a fungus is tough enough to eat a CD, imagine what it could do to disks, tapes, film, or paper. You just can't store the CD in a non-air-conditioned or humidity-controlled environment in the tropics, at least until something mutates to take better advantage of the new "food" source. But expect anything like that to work it's way up the chain and eat all floppies, tapes, hard copy, microfilm, and electronic circuit boards first. (BTW, in tropical climates, fungus _will_ eat the circuit boards unless extraordinary measures are taken to protect them.)
If you put enough food out there, something will evolve to eat it. I just didn't expect it to happen so fast. And the form it takes is a little unusual, I was expecting something to eat the plastic itself. Aluminum can't be nutritious; theoretically you can get energy by oxidizing it, but existing lifeforms do not have the chemical pathways to use this, and the fungus must have other substances to grow. I'm guessing that the fungus eats the glue between the two layers of plastic, and the aluminum is just an innocent bystander. It may also have been primarily growing on something else (like the cardboard label on the case) and just reached down to the glue layer to get some trace element. If it is eating the glue, those gold disks probably won't fare any better, assuming they use the same glue -- the gold foil will still be there, but as the fungus eats the glue on one side and tries to push holes through to the other side I don't think the gold will stay flat and shiny enough to read. But a CD with a different glue would be safe for now, and it is quite likely that only a few spots in the tropic will have the combination of heat, humidity, and the right species of fungus spores to do this -- for now. In a century, we'll probably evolve something that eats the entire CD case and all, and to keep them safe you'll need either a humidity and temperature controlled room, or to bury them in a land-fill where almost nothing ever decomposes. 8-/
Porting Office to Linux or BSD would cut into their Windows sales. However, they probably get 5 times as much per copy of Office as of Windows, so making Office sales at the expense of Windows might not be such a bad idea. Has anyone got data on OEM costs of the various versions of Office or Windows? Or MS's gross in-take from OS and Applications separately?
I am guessing that Win98 & Me are probably costing OEMs well under $100, or else they couldn't be selling boxes with Windows installed at around $500. And not far over $100, it would become economically attractive to sell Linux boxes instead. MS may try to prevent this by threatening to raise the price of Windows or delay shipment if the OEM's push Linux too hard. (They in fact did delay shipment of the next Windows release to IBM when IBM last put on a sales push for OS/2.) But these sort of arrangements make (anti-trust judge) Jackson foam at the mouth and try to bite someone, and an anti-trust suit based on them would be far more likely to stand up in appeals court than the stupid Internet Explorer tie-in case.
Umm, you're joking, right? Blimps don't rise at anywhere near the miles/second speed needed. Disposable balloons were once used to aid small research rocket launches. I don't rememver at what altitude they lit the rocket, I think 30,00 feet or more. Anyway, a higher start point meant the rocket could go higher, and besides that rockets worked more efficiently in thin air. A balloon large enough to lift the shuttle would be quite a sight! Trouble is, I think it would either have to be disposable or you'd have to drop the shuttle a couple thousand feet before lighting off, so the exhause wouldn't rip up the balloon.
inflation has been virtually non existent through history with gold based currencies. One instance I know of was 14th Century Europe. The Black Death killed around half the population. The survivors of the upper classes often inherited fortunes -- but when they went to re-model their castle or whatever, labor was very difficult to find and often insisted on twice the pay as before. Buying food was even worse. This apparently led to much preaching and passing of price-freeze laws, with little effect: if the workers couldn't get a competitive wage in one barony, they could go to another one.
Population halved, money/person doubled, value of money halved. Not to imply that our republican government would handle a similar problem any better...
Theoretically, big gold discoveries could similarly inflate a gold based currency, but it hasn't happened in the industrial age. They mined a lot of gold in California, but the US economy was growing faster -- for instance, more value was harvested from the timber in Michigan than was mined from CA. The problem was _deflation_, when the economy grew much faster than gold production later in the 19th century. This meant that prices dropped and farmers often couldn't make their loan payments, while the bankers grew richer. Hence, William Jennings Bryan and his campaign to temporarily inflate the currency by basing it on gold and silver both. (If he'd won, no doubt a few years later he'd have been trying to get copper declared a coinage metal also, then iron and lead.)
What happened instead was an unannounced change in the currency systems. Originally, paper money was just a deposit receipt declaring that someone was holding the equivalent amount of gold, and you could go to them and exchange the paper for gold. This made commerce considerably easier, instead of carrying 100 pounds of gold across the countryside, you deposited it and carried a note from your banker. So paper money was initially issued by a private bank. Some of those bankers in the early 19th century US were less than honest, and discovered that since all the paper money wouldn't come back at once, you didn't have to hold the full amount of gold in the vault. Well, that worked until word got out, and then everyone was rushing to the bank to try to cash in before they ran out... So the US government took over the job of holding the gold and printing paper money in exchange. Most of the time before 1900 they did it honestly, but in the Revolutionary and Civil Wars, American governments were issuing greenbacks with nothing to back them except a promise that someday they would raise enough real money from taxes to redeem them. I'm sure European governments often made the same compromise.
Around 1900, what had been temporary expedients during wars began to become a permanent situation governments started printing the amount of money needed to keep the economy flowing, even though the gold backing was insufficient. The US probably stayed close to a gold standard longer than most, because in WWI much of Europe's gold went into Fort Knox, but by 1935 we abandoned the gold standard while pretending not to: the dollar was theoretically redeemable at $35/ounce (compared to $16/ounce in 1900), but American citizens were not allowed to own gold.
I guess the moral here is: even gold currency is not a panacea, and politicians will f* up any system when the heat is on...
Getting to the asteroid is expensive. Once you've put the necessary processing plants in space, getting the asteroid materials back to earth may be pretty cheap. (1) Put a nuke reactor and a catapult on the asteroid. Start processing gold and iron. (Most rocks are partly iron oxide; if you are lucky enough to find gold in an iron-nickel asteroid instead of a rocky one, even better. And if there is titanium in the rocks, smelt that also...) Build a catapult to throw the waste materials away -- this serves as a slow orbital transfer drive to bring the asteroid to earth orbit. (2) Use a few thousand tons of asteroid iron to build a _big_ glider. Load up the gold and other trade goods. Re-enter the atmosphere and land in water -- for example, Lake Michigan, close to the ironworks around Chicago. Besides the cargo, the glider itself is sold as raw metal.
The initial investment is huge, but so is the potential payback -- from the steel, because it won't take many hundred-ton shipments of gold to run the price way down.
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One thing to remember about Lemelson: he did start out actually inventing new toys, and soon discovered that toy companies would rather steal ideas than buy them. Some of the early lawsuits seemed reasonable from what I heard. (You didn't really expect Fortune to publish something that makes a big corporation look bad in a dispute with an individual, rather than another big corporation?) On the other hand, when he patented an idea that turned out to be anything but new (a mask-cutout on a cardboard cereal box), instead of shrugging and going to work on the next idea, he went to court and kept fighting for over 20 years! Apparently somewhere along the way, he discovered that he could make more money by writing patent applications on things he could not actually build, and then harassing the companies that did eventually figure out to to make them. Bad news for the real innovators. What we really need in the USA is to make it easier for courts to rule that the loser pays the winner's lawyers. More knowledge and spine in the patent office would help, but if they hadn't granted Lemelson questionable patents, he just would have sued them instead of corporations...
I can assure you that the rockets from Chistmas Island will not pass over Indonesia... Ian Bryce, Chief Engineer, Asia Pacific Space Centre. Ian, thanks for the link to the flight paths. I didn't realize rockets started shedding stages so early. Flight path A (just south of east, for near-equatorial orbits) drops several pieces in the strait between Indonesia/New Guinea and Australia. This is indeed deep ocean, but not very wide if those Russian guidance systems malfunction. Of course, the control center does have self-destruct options when a rocket starts to go off course. I think most American launches pass pretty close to but not quite over the Bahamas, and although our systems are far from 100% reliability they have never killed any Bahamians... The other flight paths are pretty safe: B (southeast over western Australia, dropping all the pieces before the land) and C (SSW over one of the emptiest parts of the ocean), but is there any advantage to an equatorial launch point if the orbit is not going to the east?
10% yearly mortality rate? That's nothing. Less than half of the Pilgrims survived the first year. The real record in mortality on a successful mission might belong to Magellan's around the world expedition: 5 ships went out, 1 came home, with only about 20 crewmen left. (Magellan himself died in the Phillipines.) I'm not sure how many men were in the original crews or in those who crossed into the Pacific. If I remember right, 2 ships turned back -- one empty supply ship by plan, the other because the crew mutinied (and were eventually hung), so I guess you should only count the 3 crews that crossed the Straits of Magellan. I'm guessing that these ships had crews of 50 to 100 originally, which makes the mortality rate 90% or more.
As there was no indigenous population, a work force had to be imported[to work in the phosphate mines] If I understand the source of the "phosphate" correctly, the main industry there is mining well-aged bird poop. In a tropical climate. Tourism may be a significant industry also -- but I grew up in a town that lived on tourism, and shoveling bird poop might be preferable to the tourist trade. So I think the residents are likely to consider a few minutes of loud noise every few days as an good trade off for new jobs.
Indonesia will be in the path of the launches, but I think too close to be in danger from dropped boosters and first stages. There is a chance that a malfunctioning rocket could come down in a populated area of Indonesia. Other island groups might be under the launch path also, but past Indonesia there's a lot of ocean and not much land, so if the rocket is under control they can make sure nothing comes down anywhere near land.
If you want to protect your own work against disappearing, you better back it up in a format that you can preserve, and every so often look at updating it so it stays useful. E.g. right now, unless you can persuade someone your work is important enough to be etched in durable metals or printed on acid-free paper and kept in a vault, your best bet is probably good-quality CD-R's. Don't store them in a hot and humid climate, pull them out and check them once a year, and in five or ten years, you'll need to buy new media (DVD or whatever comes next) and copy them to it so the physical media stays up to date. Keeping the file formats up to date is a whole other problem -- but those whose work is adequately represented in plain ASCII probably don't have much to worry about.
Sounds hard? It sure beats what medieval monks had to do when the parchments in their possession started coming apart from age: kill a sheep, take the skin, scrape it and treat it to make new parchment, grind your own ink, then copy the old works by hand... And it's better than what you have to do to properly re-publish a 1930 SF story, if you can find someone who kept a copy all these years: type the whole darn thing in over again, because it's not legible enough to scan.
While I agree that Intellectual Property laws need some revision (especially the ridiculously long copyright period in the USA), Son May Records and their customers are parasites. They are benefiting from others work without paying up. This is not to imply that an American company that sells CD's for $15 and up while paying out $1.50/CD to all the musicians involved in creating it isn't also a parasite...
In an earlier post, I theorized that the free-lancers would get together and set up something like this. (Basically, it's a 1-stop shop for republication rights, so a magazine wanting to put it's pre-94 archives on the web would not have to track down and negotiate with every free-lancer they ever used. I suspect that the phone bills and salary for the guys doing the negotiating might cost more than the payouts to the authors.) Nice to see it happening so fast.
I doubt that maintaining an internet database generates all that much money, so they might have to crank their rates up a lot to be able to pay each freelancer a few bucks. And if you set the rates too high, most people just stay away...
To cover everything in some publications, you have to contact hundreds of freelancers. Even if you've got their phone #'s, this still takes quite a lot of time. And then there are the ones that retired or died -- tracking down people that have moved several times since they last sent you an article can be difficult and expensive, finding the heirs if the guy died is even harder.
It's possible that now that cash is in sight, the freelancers & their heirs will form an organization or hire an agency to represent them, to give the database makers one place (or a small number of agencies) to deal with, and to establish standard rates that are not so high as to kill the business. But freelancers being rather independent, you aren't going to see 100% of them joining...
2)If some DOD offices are using Star Office, corporations dealing with those offices will feel it's a good idea to install Star Office also. That 25K seats in DOD will probably multiply to over 100K seats in large and small corporations. I'm hoping that some of those corps will discover that Star Office is about as good as MS Office, and adopt it on a wider scale. Whether or not that happens, that many gov't and corporate seats will ensure the Star Office developers will hear what is needed to make it _better_ than MS Office. I think the chances just improved that my employer will let me move to Linux/Star Office in a couple of years instead of buying the lastest MS upgrades -- and from what I've heard, MS's present product line is really a downgrade from Win98 + Office97 which I use now, so I expect the 2003 version will be even lamer...
1. Open Source = GPL. They'll start with general statements about open source being viral. When challenged, they say "Oh, that only referred to the GPL." So go re-read to the original statement: "Open source" was in the prominent position; if "GPL" was mentioned at all, it was in a subordinate clause where execs who don't know much about it will assume it is a synonym for "Open Source." This makes Mundie's rebuttal "There is more than one Microsoft license" rather humorous: We knew that Craig, do you know there's more than one open source license? Obviously, MS has no objection at all to the BSD license, because they can copy that code right into their proprietary code, modify it to create incompatibilities and copyright or even patent the result -- but you won't see discussion of even BSD out where it non-techies might see it and get distracted from learning "Open source bad"...
2. Use of GPL tools will infect your program and require that it become GPL'd. That is exactly what the Microsoft beta license discussed in the forum was intended to imply. Not so. You can write proprietary code using Gnu tools running on Linux and LGPL + proprietary libraries, and it stays proprietary. What you cannot do is incorporate the GPL source into your code, or modify the LGPL library without releasing the modifications. If you want to write proprietary library code, you just have to put it in a separate library (and of course, not start with open-source code). So where is the problem? Unless it's the sort of problem that a thief has with an unpickable lock?
Now, don't get me wrong here. MS has the right to keep its source code secret, release it with a ban on copying or modifying it at all, require the development team to sacrifice a fatted calf to Lord Gates before starting work, or to specify which tools can be used. No problem there, if you don't like it just don't work with MS code. I could easily understand if they required the use of MS tools only on beta code, or even released code. But the coincidence between the wording in the license and Mundie's misleading public statements make me rather suspect that paragraph of the license is just another attempt to imply something which anyone who reads the (L)GPL licenses knows just isn't so.
There does indeed seem to be an anti-intellectual property strain among the open-sourcers. But even the GPL does not cancel intellectual property rights, it only (very aggressively) keeps others from claiming GPL'd work as their own. Mundie is trying to confound the "information should be free" rhetoric of some open-sourcers with the much more limited actual effect of the licenses -- and he is too smart to make this mistake by accident.
Not fair to creditors? Maybe, but if they did their homework, they know the risk. If they didn't do their homework -- one of the better aspects of capitalism is its habit of taking money away from fools and giving it to those who know what to do with it. Also, this policy should improve sales, making it less likely that the loans will fall into default. I think the creditors would much rather have their cash in hand than be trying to figure out what to do with a bunch of proprietary software that didn't sell well enough to keep the developers solvent...
computers are extremely complex and most people do not understand them even a little. Frankly I don't see that this is any different between Windows and Linux, both are pretty hard to use when you can't find the "any" key or you plug the power strip into itself. This is what I mean by "open mind"; the people who have trouble with computers are those that _panic_ and won't use what they already know (the power strip...) or try anything (hit _some_ key -- oh, that's what it meant!). I am not particularly experienced with Linux, but in 14 years of using DOS and Windows, and doing incidental training, it never seemed that DOS was that hard to learn, or Windows that easy. Windows does _look_ friendlier (pictures and warm colors instead of monochrome text), so it may not induce so many panic reactions, but it's really far more complicated, and how in heck is double-clicking on an icon or through a series of menus more intuitive than typing in what you want the computer to do? Okay, you've got to learn a special language to type in commands, but is that worse than learning to click Start to stop? (Maybe it is for *nix, the geeks who created it seem to have an aversion to using anything resembling an actual English word.)
IMO, the real usability advantage of a GUI comes later, _after_ you've learned the basics of using the interface: you don't have to memorize how things are spelled, you don't have to do all that typing, and when your hard drive starts clogging up you can see the files on the screen, just point and delete or drag and drop the "keepers" to a proper location. Finally, you will find more applications that use graphics well when there is a good GUI underneath.
If you want to rate art by its commercial value, then obviously Van Gogh's work didn't become "art" until he was dead.
Apparently Digital Angel combines a muscle-activated power supply, a GPS receiver, and some sort of transmitter. (If it didn't have a transmitter, it couldn't broadcast your location.) For most civilian purposes, that could be a cell-phone transmitter. But remember, holding a cell phone near your head for a half-hour a day has been neither proven safe nor proven dangerous. Having it implanted under your skin and on 24x7 is rather more likely to be dangerous. And it will need a little extra transmitting power to get the signal out.
But for military applications, this thing has to work where there is no cell-phone network (or the USAF has just targeted all the towers to make sure the other guys aren't using encrypted cell-phones to communicate or even to tie together detection networks). So you need a transmitter powerful enough to reach a satellite. I don't know, but I suspect that is quite a few watts, as compared to the 5mW peak signal of a cell phone. That burning sensation? It's your tracking device cooking your biceps...
Do I even need to comment on the stupidity of having our troops walking through the woods while broadcasting a signal anyone with a $25 radio receiver can home in on?
The business, which is based in California, plans to break even before the end of the year, while analysts forecast annual revenues of about $50m by 2002.
Google has built its revenues from advertising and also from licensing its proprietary search technology to other websites and portals.
I hope this is better researched than the article's description of the servers! If I needed to buy a search engine, Google would be one of the first places I'd look, but how much can they get for that? And what happens when someone puts a better search engine on the market? The worst aspect of an IPO (in the USA at least) is that now the company is pretty much committed to showing a profit every quarter, and most software sells irregularly.
I guess they do sell some advertising, but internet advertising is not a great revenue stream either. It's too easy for the advertisers to confirm that their advertisements are being ignored, so they put the big money into TV ads where they don't get direct confirmation of all the mute buttons going on & tapes being fast-forwarded... For another example of what's wrong with advertising, Google's own quite successful "advertising strategy" was to rely on word of mouth rather than paid advertising. Apparently you still don't have to advertise a product that stands out on its own merits!
You should never have to tell the computer something it already knows. But if you are going to work with a wide variety of hardware and software from many different vendors, you have to have a way to tell the computer when what it "knows" is _wrong_.
This wasn't much of an issue with the Mac, because Apple kept tight control of almost everything, and if their OS couldn't figure out the configuration, then by gum it must be unsupported... But MS spent a few thousand man-months trying to test Win95 on all possible PC configurations, and still missed quite a few; a volunteer operation like Linux _cannot_ maintain a database of video cards, network cards, modems, motherboards, and BIOS's large enough to automatically configure for more than a few percent of the PC's out there.
Yes, this is one of the things that is holding Linux back from wider acceptance. On the other hand, once the machine is configured right, it won't mutate on its own. Windows does. So if you hire some guru to fix your machine, in Linux it should stay fixed, in Windows he _will_ be back.
brIn Windows it's quite likely that you will not be able to find any documentation that relates to your problem, short of paying MS tech support to look it up for you. Linux documentation may leave much to be desired, but you can get all of it quite inexpensively and if you do enough reading it does seem to be possible to understand the entire OS. No one at MS understands the entirety of any Windows or Office program.
I have had far too much trouble with computers that didn't come out of stand-by mode. It's like the mfgs put in "power saving" to get a green star, but didn't feel any obligation to make it work right. At the worst, there was a box we bought as a small server in '95 where even putting the monitor in standby would take the mainframe off-line!
Maybe it's improved on the newer models, but disabling power control in CMOS setup is already a reflexive action for me. I do let my 21" spaceheater, I mean monitor, go into standby, but unless the mainframe is running on batteries, I don't want it to go down until I shutdown the OS.
Yep, I expect the aluminum would arc and burn, but the fungus will be dead! 8-)
If a fungus is tough enough to eat a CD, imagine what it could do to disks, tapes, film, or paper. You just can't store the CD in a non-air-conditioned or humidity-controlled environment in the tropics, at least until something mutates to take better advantage of the new "food" source. But expect anything like that to work it's way up the chain and eat all floppies, tapes, hard copy, microfilm, and electronic circuit boards first. (BTW, in tropical climates, fungus _will_ eat the circuit boards unless extraordinary measures are taken to protect them.)
If you put enough food out there, something will evolve to eat it. I just didn't expect it to happen so fast. And the form it takes is a little unusual, I was expecting something to eat the plastic itself. Aluminum can't be nutritious; theoretically you can get energy by oxidizing it, but existing lifeforms do not have the chemical pathways to use this, and the fungus must have other substances to grow. I'm guessing that the fungus eats the glue between the two layers of plastic, and the aluminum is just an innocent bystander. It may also have been primarily growing on something else (like the cardboard label on the case) and just reached down to the glue layer to get some trace element. If it is eating the glue, those gold disks probably won't fare any better, assuming they use the same glue -- the gold foil will still be there, but as the fungus eats the glue on one side and tries to push holes through to the other side I don't think the gold will stay flat and shiny enough to read. But a CD with a different glue would be safe for now, and it is quite likely that only a few spots in the tropic will have the combination of heat, humidity, and the right species of fungus spores to do this -- for now. In a century, we'll probably evolve something that eats the entire CD case and all, and to keep them safe you'll need either a humidity and temperature controlled room, or to bury them in a land-fill where almost nothing ever decomposes. 8-/
Porting Office to Linux or BSD would cut into their Windows sales. However, they probably get 5 times as much per copy of Office as of Windows, so making Office sales at the expense of Windows might not be such a bad idea. Has anyone got data on OEM costs of the various versions of Office or Windows? Or MS's gross in-take from OS and Applications separately?
I am guessing that Win98 & Me are probably costing OEMs well under $100, or else they couldn't be selling boxes with Windows installed at around $500. And not far over $100, it would become economically attractive to sell Linux boxes instead. MS may try to prevent this by threatening to raise the price of Windows or delay shipment if the OEM's push Linux too hard. (They in fact did delay shipment of the next Windows release to IBM when IBM last put on a sales push for OS/2.) But these sort of arrangements make (anti-trust judge) Jackson foam at the mouth and try to bite someone, and an anti-trust suit based on them would be far more likely to stand up in appeals court than the stupid Internet Explorer tie-in case.
Umm, you're joking, right? Blimps don't rise at anywhere near the miles/second speed needed. Disposable balloons were once used to aid small research rocket launches. I don't rememver at what altitude they lit the rocket, I think 30,00 feet or more. Anyway, a higher start point meant the rocket could go higher, and besides that rockets worked more efficiently in thin air. A balloon large enough to lift the shuttle would be quite a sight! Trouble is, I think it would either have to be disposable or you'd have to drop the shuttle a couple thousand feet before lighting off, so the exhause wouldn't rip up the balloon.
inflation has been virtually non existent through history with gold based currencies. One instance I know of was 14th Century Europe. The Black Death killed around half the population. The survivors of the upper classes often inherited fortunes -- but when they went to re-model their castle or whatever, labor was very difficult to find and often insisted on twice the pay as before. Buying food was even worse. This apparently led to much preaching and passing of price-freeze laws, with little effect: if the workers couldn't get a competitive wage in one barony, they could go to another one.
Population halved, money/person doubled, value of money halved. Not to imply that our republican government would handle a similar problem any better...
Theoretically, big gold discoveries could similarly inflate a gold based currency, but it hasn't happened in the industrial age. They mined a lot of gold in California, but the US economy was growing faster -- for instance, more value was harvested from the timber in Michigan than was mined from CA. The problem was _deflation_, when the economy grew much faster than gold production later in the 19th century. This meant that prices dropped and farmers often couldn't make their loan payments, while the bankers grew richer. Hence, William Jennings Bryan and his campaign to temporarily inflate the currency by basing it on gold and silver both. (If he'd won, no doubt a few years later he'd have been trying to get copper declared a coinage metal also, then iron and lead.)
What happened instead was an unannounced change in the currency systems. Originally, paper money was just a deposit receipt declaring that someone was holding the equivalent amount of gold, and you could go to them and exchange the paper for gold. This made commerce considerably easier, instead of carrying 100 pounds of gold across the countryside, you deposited it and carried a note from your banker. So paper money was initially issued by a private bank. Some of those bankers in the early 19th century US were less than honest, and discovered that since all the paper money wouldn't come back at once, you didn't have to hold the full amount of gold in the vault. Well, that worked until word got out, and then everyone was rushing to the bank to try to cash in before they ran out... So the US government took over the job of holding the gold and printing paper money in exchange. Most of the time before 1900 they did it honestly, but in the Revolutionary and Civil Wars, American governments were issuing greenbacks with nothing to back them except a promise that someday they would raise enough real money from taxes to redeem them. I'm sure European governments often made the same compromise.
Around 1900, what had been temporary expedients during wars began to become a permanent situation governments started printing the amount of money needed to keep the economy flowing, even though the gold backing was insufficient. The US probably stayed close to a gold standard longer than most, because in WWI much of Europe's gold went into Fort Knox, but by 1935 we abandoned the gold standard while pretending not to: the dollar was theoretically redeemable at $35/ounce (compared to $16/ounce in 1900), but American citizens were not allowed to own gold.
I guess the moral here is: even gold currency is not a panacea, and politicians will f* up any system when the heat is on...
Getting to the asteroid is expensive. Once you've put the necessary processing plants in space, getting the asteroid materials back to earth may be pretty cheap. (1) Put a nuke reactor and a catapult on the asteroid. Start processing gold and iron. (Most rocks are partly iron oxide; if you are lucky enough to find gold in an iron-nickel asteroid instead of a rocky one, even better. And if there is titanium in the rocks, smelt that also...) Build a catapult to throw the waste materials away -- this serves as a slow orbital transfer drive to bring the asteroid to earth orbit. (2) Use a few thousand tons of asteroid iron to build a _big_ glider. Load up the gold and other trade goods. Re-enter the atmosphere and land in water -- for example, Lake Michigan, close to the ironworks around Chicago. Besides the cargo, the glider itself is sold as raw metal.
The initial investment is huge, but so is the potential payback -- from the steel, because it won't take many hundred-ton shipments of gold to run the price way down.