I thank you for expressing your views on the matter, and it pleases me that the KDE team are not daunted by publicity and commercial backing of Gnome, indeed - I would be somewhat dissappointed if they were. I think that a major push for Gnome will have the effect of 'raising all ships' for *nix's so KDE could well see a nice boost in developers and users as well.
I am rather dissappointed in your numerous backhanded slaps that you have made at Gnome - it is true that the 'old tech' that is KDE 1.2 compares quite favorably with Gnome 1.2, and that KDE 2.0 looks like it has a lot of great stuff going for it. However Gnome has some great stuff going for it to - have a look at Evolution, Gnumeric, or Nautilus - these are wonderful tools that KDE has nothing that really compares. And these are all in the early stages, I fully expect them to blow away ANY commercial offerings not long after 1.0.
So again, both teams have a lot going for them and both have different strengths and weaknesses.
It should not be an either/or choice - because neither are a complete solution.
I'll give you five billion reasons why they are porting to linux. Most of the world has not chosen it's OS. Linux comes with a ton of free software and zero license fees, it is also auditable, so foreign countries can make sure that their competitor the US isn't slipping in any whammies. If they don't port office to Linux - it will get killed three to five years from now - that is why they are porting, they can't afford to wait. (In reality, they could wait for WINE, which should be able to run windows by that time, but they don't want their fate controled by Open Source/Free Software, any more than they absolutely have to.)
Actually StarOffice and the Gnome Office are probably merging behind the scenes, note that SO 6.0 is the one that will be GPLed, and it is supposed to be a fairly complete rewrite of 5.0 (which is free beer, but not GPL). Also, from the early stages, they were in talks with Miguel. They are probably Bonoboizing and GTKing the original SO so it can play nicely and run faster with the Gnome Desktop. So in fact, they are concentrating their efforts - call it 'GnomeStar Office' if you wish.
Also, note that Helixcode is focusing its efforts where Star Office is pretty Lame - 1) Contact/Email manager 2) Gnumeric (and other) Macro/ VB script compatibility with Excel
"Gnome needs to be excessively difficult to install"
Gnome is excessively easy to install. Just to helixcode, get helix updater, and it automagically does it for you. Even installing by hand (via./configure, make && make install), isn't all that difficult. Just read the README, and follow it...)
as I've been writing this, a bugfix release of evolution has been put out -.3.1 (bandaged jellyfish), so I'm gonna go install the newest version,
"Maybe I'm a dinosuar, but I do not at all understand why people want a mail program, calendar, et, all in one application."
The main reason, is that it gives context to your appointments and todos. Thus, you email me a request to add feature foo to project bar. I schedule a todo and due date for it, with action needing to be taken one month from now (scheduling a reminder in calendar...). One month from now a reminder pops up to work on foo. With a single click, the original message pops up, giving me complete information on what I am supposed to do.
If you only have one or two tasks, deal only with a few people, and they are all fairly long term, then your method works fine. If you coordinate with a couple of hundered people a month (or more), tasks are scheduled days, weeks, months and even years in advance, and the time commitments for tasks varies from half an hour to weeks or months, then a more advanced and integrated methodology is prefered.
One of the hackers already has GnuPG mostly working 'automagically' with Evolution, it might even be integrated by the next release. (See the mailing list archive of evolution-hackers@helixcode.com)
You are quite right - if you desire to have targeted advertising based on your preferences and desires, than you should certainly have the right to allow that. However, there are those that find the collection of information about themselves, whether relativly trivial or fairly intimate (ie medical history, birthdate...), to be an invasion of their privacy.
There is a world of difference between opt-in, opt-out, and not having a choice one way or the other.
Mike Monkowski - One of the engineers for via-voice recently asked why via-voice had so few developers using it.
I replied with the following-
I would suspect, that the primary reason [there are so few developers of via-voice] is the desire of (free software) programmers to not make their code dependent on non-free (as in speech) software. For better or worse, many Linux programmers will reject, out of hand, any library or software that is not based upon one of the standard free licenses (GPL, LGPL, BSD, NPL, Artistic, etc.).
Given that IBM is unlikely to change it's licensing terms in the near future, and that (free) programmers are unlikely to change their moral stance on using 'non-free' software. Development with viavoice will likely be limited to commercial programmers, or those situations where STT/VTS are a necessity such as applications for the blind.
Tom M. TomM@pentstar.com
In a latter post he asked our opinion on the IBM Public License. My reply was thus...
"I did a search on the web for discussions on the IBM Public License (IPL). According to Bruce Perens, (and the general consensus...)- the IPL is OSD (Open Source Definition) compliant, but not GPL compatible. Being OSD compliant will certainly encourage more developers, however, how many is the big question. Of the free software developers out there, my guess would be that 80% (likely more?) will only develop (in their free time) with software that is GPL compatible (i.e. GPL, LGPL, BSD, and a few others). However, for 'work' stuff, the IPL is less problematic, and thus would lead to more commercial development (not as much as the GPL, BSD, LGPL - but mostly for 'religious' reasons).
Personally, I would recommend going with the GPL, which would result in full and quick integration with all of the Linux distributions, and allow source from many useful GPL and LGPL projects to be integrated/merge with it. I'm guessing that the developer good will from such an action would be Phenomenal. The suggestion of another poster that viavoice should be viewed as infrastructure is very valid. However, I'm a realist. There is almost zero chance of IBM doing that unless they come out with their own Linux distribution, and tout complete voice integration as the big selling point, or, the dollar value of developer good will is high enough to justify whatever future lost revenue would be. (I'd bet that it certainly would be- having a 'truly free' voice software solution would be rather impressive. The fact that viavoice isn't considered a drowning/dying product (I.e. Netscape) or (in the case of Apple) one that was previously free - would be all the more impressive.
So, given the above, I would say that changing to the IPL might well give vv a strong pull for more developers, certainly enough to justify the change. Of course, as suggested above, an even stronger case can be made for the GPL.
Tom M. TomM@pentstar.com "
If you would care to contribute to the conversation, you can join by sending email to join-viavoice@laser.sparklist.com
"Even a split MS may not port MSOffice to unix (try to make the business case for a linux MSOffice port...) "
Challenge accepted...
With a split MS, The apps division no longer needs tie itself to MS Windows operating systems. Thus they can feel free to improve API compatibility tool kits - for instance Wine. Once that is done, they have a fully operational MS Office that is available to any/all of the unixes with minimal effort. The cost of improving wine to where it would fully operate with most/all of the MS Apps, might well be fairly insignificant (with proper knowledge of the Apps and MS OS internals, something that the Apps division will have plenty of.) Thus they suddenly gain massive market opportunity for minimal investment capital.
When one 'takes' in terms of the GPL, it is a case of 'raising all ships'. If/when Star Office (SO) becomes GPLed it will be able to take advantage of a large number of resources that it otherwise would not have available. Those that use SO code to help the open office projects, will almost certainly contribute back bug fixes to the SO code base. There will also be those that will help Sun to get rid of many of the problems that are currently experienced with SO.
As to your comments as to 'vultures of commercial software'. True, there is a great deal of immitation in free software - but largely, this is making available equivalent software on Operating Systems for which that software is not available (and thus provide potential users with one less objection as to why they cannot use said operating system...). Or, it is providing software for those who have moral qualms with using nonfree software (as in speech and/or as in beer.)
You state "The majority [...] think only in terms of raiding, and pillaging, out of some staunch anticommercialism, even when the company supports your cause."
While it is true that there are those who are "staunch[ly] anticommercial". I don't feel you have a basis for claiming a majority of those interested in free software/linux/slashdot readers, fall into this category. If you were to characterize as "staunchly antifree" then I'd be more inclined to agree, but those are not one and the same. Incidentally, I am neither, but given a choice I prefer free (mostly as in speech) software, because I have the potential/opportunity to fix and/or enhance that software as the need arises. Something that I can rarely do with commercial software.
"1. Sun is now admitting that the idea of giving away a free office suite is non-viable and they are opening the source as a way to divest their engineering resources. Don't expect help from Sun in this area."
It is likely true that they see they can gain engineering resources that they wouldn't otherwise have because of usage of the GPL. Whether or not Sun will help, remains to be seen.
"2. Cross-platform support will die. Open Source projects of significant magnitude just don't happen on the major GUI OSes. StarOffice for Windows will lag far enough behind StarOffice for Linux that it won't be the cross-platform solution that it is touted as today."
Hmm.. you mean - like Mozilla, Crystal Space, GCC, and Abiword? These are all cross platform, and all major projects, the non Unix versions may sometimes lag in the features, but they tend to propogate to all of the differnt platforms with significant speed.
"3. This might even spell the death of StarOffice. GPL has produces a whole bunch of useful code, but the inevitable branching of the project will kill the corporate acceptability of StarOffice. Branching has proven inevitable on all but the simplest of projects."
Yes projects do fork, but there tend to be major official branches, and if support is offered for a specific branch, that is the one that the suits will go with. Also, forks can, and often do remerge. Whether forking is corporately acceptable, remains to be seen.
"4. If all that's not enough, GPL'd projects don't generally produce good end user software in terms of UI. Granted StarOffice pretty well sucks now in this regard, GPL won't help."
That is a traditional failing, one that is being addressed in both KDE and Gnome. Traditional Unix/Linux GUI's were difficult to make and modify, and handrolled by each new programming needing a GUI. With programs like Glade, good GUI design and prototyping become much easier and consistant. Thus we are likely to see Linux apps become more user freindly and usable as things progress.
". It doesn't work because there's WAY too much crap on mp3.com. I've spent hours and hours searching the HUGE archives of indie content on that site, and I've come away with maybe 3 bands that I actually found worth listening to. "
Just use repuatation managers - ala slashdot and preference managers ala amazon - thus you quickly can get the cream of the crop to the top (although I would certainly use a more sophisticated and powerful rep manager than that used by/.), and quickly find music that fits your tastes...
Thus it is a really simple problem to solve, hopefully something that will be added to Gnutella or some such...
What opensource OCR have you found? And how "intelligent" is it?
What I'd like to do is enhance the intelligence of OCR, for things like forms. The three things that would be useful is thus...
The ability to define rectangles and lines before OCR happens, so that it will interprete them as graphics as opposed to part of the text.
The ability to Define columns and groups better, and what type of information the column has. For instance Phone numbers, addresses, etc. (and thus quit translating 6 to b...).
A list of frequent mistranslations pairs - OCR tends to make consistant mistakes - if the spell checker were to substitute for the mistranslation with the alternative character pair, I would recieve a lot fewer misspells.
I figure that those three options would increase the accuracy of the OCR software that I've been using by 95% easily. (The other five percent is from "Fax noise", photocopy fade, and handwritten notes...)
I posted this in the thread on Metallica, it applies here as well.. I would add to the below the following - A recipricative editorial process - you edit three pieces of similar length in a similar genre and in return three people edit yours. You give feedback, those with consistently high feedback (and who begin totransform non-selling authors to selling authors) can begin to charge for their services (ie a percentage of profits, or flat fee...). Similar relationships can be worked out for art work- although it may be less relevant to online versions...
Here is my original statement in regards to music, replace music with books, Record companies with publishers etc.
Lars mentioned the single download of a nonsigned artist, and the fact that he feels that a small band could never make it without the record industry. However, with a reputation manager, and shared interest manager, his point could quickly be invalidated. Ie, I go through a slection chart listing my likes, dislikes, yada yada, just as is done with amazon. Then, each song can be rated by the individual similar to slashdot, with an added field for additional comments (and possibly multiple rating categories.) This would allow a method for finding quality music by relatively unknowns. Giving them the full power of network effects/pulbicity without the costs.
Lars mentioned the single download of a nonsigned artist, and the fact that he feels that a small band could never make it without the record industry. However, with a reputation manager, and shared interest manager, his point could quickly be invalidated. Ie, I go through a slection chart listing my likes, dislikes, yada yada, just as is done with amazon. Then, each song can be rated by the individual similar to slashdot, with an added field for additional comments (and possibly multiple rating categories.) This would allow a method for finding quality music by relatively unknowns. Giving them the full power of network effects/pulbicity without the costs.
LetterRip
Flip it back over- was: the other side of the coin
on
Do Patents Still Work?
·
· Score: 2
"I will point out that even in our current system the megacorp will always win. I've personally worked at smaller companies that have had valid patents that were infrindged on by very large companies."
Did they purchase patent insurance? There are policies that the Insurance company pays all of your lawyer fees, but gets to recover their costs, plus a percentage of the damages.
It seems much less likely that the big company is going to infringe in such a situation...
While the value to the targeted students won't be all that great. The fact that a complete CS course of apparently exceptionally good quality is going to be made available under an Open Content License is Tremendous.
I'd be interested in forming a site for positive teacher reviews only. This would be to find the highest quality instructors and lecturers in the nation. This information could then be used to form video lecture series and course material for the free university project.
"If this were true then Sony would actually be encouraging sales of Bleem because it means there is another person out there with reason to buy the overpriced games and Sony wouldn't have to sell a loss leader console in the first place."
Sony's concerns over Bleem are not the lost funds due to lost playstation sales, but that Bleem will become ubiquitous. Then, Software producers can say their product is Bleem compatible. The playstation owners would know that it meant playstation compatibility as well, thus no need to get a license from Sony and Sony's marketing model evaporates.
"familiarity with the scientific method" - I would suggest doing replication studies. Each student would be required to do two. This would require some presorting of a lot of scientific literature- perhaps professors from the various fields could reccommend studies that should be replicated, and put an associated difficulty rating with them. The rep. study would need to be thuroughly researched and planned out (similarly to a Research Methods class....), and then reviewed by an expert. This will be costly in terms of expert time (six hours per student... likely more). Experimental design/planning software could greatly improve the effectiveness of the experimental design, and significantly reduce the burden on the expert.
I've given the creation of online and open Universitys (and other educational facilities...) a significant amount of thought. Here are some suggestions...
These course should be for memorization/lecture intensive courses where direct classroom experience is of limited value. Many of the prerequisite 100/200 level course are of this sort.
There should be a legal requirement for all schools/colleges to accept these as course equivalents (Each school can base it's cut off level on comparitive scores for typical students of that school, but if the cut off is met, credit transfer is cumpulsory for equivalent courses...)
For lab work - a significant (2/3? 3/4?) amount of lab time for 300 and lower Physics, Chemistry, and Biology is a waste. The reason- few students prepare for the lab, their understanding of the principles behind the experiment are often dismal, the experiments are often trivial in nature and execution, there is a great deal of duplication of effort/course material for each lab taken.
Introductory (and often higher level) lab courses often have as primary purposes- familiarity with the scientific method, and familiarity with lab equipment. For the familiarity with lab equipment, I would suggest a certification process with local labs. With emulation software to gain familiarity with the apparatus ahead of time. Those who have completed the required lecture material, and scored a prerequisite score on a familiarity exam could sign up to come in and be tested on the equipment (either individually or as a group).
For exams - there are already computer based testing facilities located around the world. Likely a 'cost only' solution could be negotiated with these facilitys, this would reduce the likely hood of cheating.
All multiple choice based exams should be free, but material requiring essays etc., should have a nominal fee associated with them. This should only be for creative essays, - subject matter/content essays can be accurately and successfully graded with software.
Classes that are oral intensive can be done by having central meeting places that travel is required to for the occassional presentation. Much of the discussion and critique can be done by a virtual audience (via webcasting the presentation, and portion of the future presenters could be signed up to be a live audience... plus interested outsiders can attend the lectures etc...)
I have more to say on the logistics of distributed grading of essays and many other topic, but I'll leave that for another post.
The article states that he is planning on taping new lecture series, why not purchase the rights to some of the quality previously taped lecture series out there? There are some of very high quality, and he'd save a year of time immediately off the bat...
If he would support the creation of open/free text books and instructional software that would be wonderful. I've been planning to start a project along those lines for some time now.
I wonder if we can get a Slashdot interview with him?
Slashdot Mirror
I thank you for expressing your views on the matter, and it pleases me that the KDE team are not daunted by publicity and commercial backing of Gnome, indeed - I would be somewhat dissappointed if they were. I think that a major push for Gnome will have the effect of 'raising all ships' for *nix's so KDE could well see a nice boost in developers and users as well.
I am rather dissappointed in your numerous backhanded slaps that you have made at Gnome - it is true that the 'old tech' that is KDE 1.2 compares quite favorably with Gnome 1.2, and that KDE 2.0 looks like it has a lot of great stuff going for it. However Gnome has some great stuff going for it to - have a look at Evolution, Gnumeric, or Nautilus - these are wonderful tools that KDE has nothing that really compares. And these are all in the early stages, I fully expect them to blow away ANY commercial offerings not long after 1.0.
So again, both teams have a lot going for them and both have different strengths and weaknesses.
It should not be an either/or choice - because neither are a complete solution.
Tom M.
TomM@pentstar.com
"it will get killed" - the it is ambiguos- I meant it to refer to MS Office
I'll give you five billion reasons why they are porting to linux. Most of the world has not chosen it's OS. Linux comes with a ton of free software and zero license fees, it is also auditable, so foreign countries can make sure that their competitor the US isn't slipping in any whammies. If they don't port office to Linux - it will get killed three to five years from now - that is why they are porting, they can't afford to wait. (In reality, they could wait for WINE, which should be able to run windows by that time, but they don't want their fate controled by Open Source/Free Software, any more than they absolutely have to.)
LetterRip
Tom M.
TomM@pentstar.com
Actually StarOffice and the Gnome Office are probably merging behind the scenes, note that SO 6.0 is the one that will be GPLed, and it is supposed to be a fairly complete rewrite of 5.0 (which is free beer, but not GPL). Also, from the early stages, they were in talks with Miguel. They are probably Bonoboizing and GTKing the original SO so it can play nicely and run faster with the Gnome Desktop. So in fact, they are concentrating their efforts - call it 'GnomeStar Office' if you wish.
Also, note that Helixcode is focusing its efforts where Star Office is pretty Lame - 1) Contact/Email manager 2) Gnumeric (and other) Macro/ VB script compatibility with Excel
Tom M.
TomM@pentstar.com
"Gnome needs to be excessively difficult to install"
./configure, make && make install), isn't all that difficult. Just read the README, and follow it...)
.3.1 (bandaged jellyfish), so I'm gonna go install the newest version,
Gnome is excessively easy to install. Just to helixcode, get helix updater, and it automagically does it for you. Even installing by hand (via
as I've been writing this, a bugfix release of evolution has been put out -
LetterRip
"Maybe I'm a dinosuar, but I do not at all understand why people want a mail program, calendar, et, all in one application."
The main reason, is that it gives context to your appointments and todos. Thus, you email me a request to add feature foo to project bar. I schedule a todo and due date for it, with action needing to be taken one month from now (scheduling a reminder in calendar...). One month from now a reminder pops up to work on foo. With a single click, the original message pops up, giving me complete information on what I am supposed to do.
If you only have one or two tasks, deal only with a few people, and they are all fairly long term, then your method works fine. If you coordinate with a couple of hundered people a month (or more), tasks are scheduled days, weeks, months and even years in advance, and the time commitments for tasks varies from half an hour to weeks or months, then a more advanced and integrated methodology is prefered.
LetterRip
One of the hackers already has GnuPG mostly working 'automagically' with Evolution, it might even be integrated by the next release. (See the mailing list archive of evolution-hackers@helixcode.com)
LetterRip
You are quite right - if you desire to have targeted advertising based on your preferences and desires, than you should certainly have the right to allow that. However, there are those that find the collection of information about themselves, whether relativly trivial or fairly intimate (ie medical history, birthdate...), to be an invasion of their privacy.
There is a world of difference between opt-in, opt-out, and not having a choice one way or the other.
LetterRip
Mike Monkowski - One of the engineers for via-voice recently asked why via-voice had so few developers using it.
I replied with the following-
I would suspect, that the primary reason [there are so few developers of via-voice] is the desire of (free software) programmers to not make their code dependent on non-free (as in speech) software. For better or worse, many Linux programmers will reject, out of hand, any library or software that is not based upon one of the standard free licenses (GPL, LGPL, BSD, NPL, Artistic, etc.).
Given that IBM is unlikely to change it's licensing terms in the near future, and that (free) programmers are unlikely to change their moral stance on using 'non-free' software. Development with viavoice will likely
be limited to commercial programmers, or those situations where STT/VTS are a necessity such as applications for the blind.
Tom M.
TomM@pentstar.com
In a latter post he asked our opinion on the IBM Public License. My reply was thus...
"I did a search on the web for discussions on the IBM Public License (IPL).
According to Bruce Perens, (and the general consensus...)- the IPL is OSD
(Open Source Definition) compliant, but not GPL compatible. Being OSD
compliant will certainly encourage more developers, however, how many is the
big question. Of the free software developers out there, my guess would be
that 80% (likely more?) will only develop (in their free time) with software
that is GPL compatible (i.e. GPL, LGPL, BSD, and a few others). However,
for 'work' stuff, the IPL is less problematic, and thus would lead to more
commercial development (not as much as the GPL, BSD, LGPL - but mostly for
'religious' reasons).
Personally, I would recommend going with the GPL, which would result in full
and quick integration with all of the Linux distributions, and allow source
from many useful GPL and LGPL projects to be integrated/merge with it. I'm
guessing that the developer good will from such an action would be
Phenomenal. The suggestion of another poster that viavoice should be viewed
as infrastructure is very valid. However, I'm a realist. There is almost
zero chance of IBM doing that unless they come out with their own Linux
distribution, and tout complete voice integration as the big selling point,
or, the dollar value of developer good will is high enough to justify
whatever future lost revenue would be. (I'd bet that it certainly would be-
having a 'truly free' voice software solution would be rather impressive.
The fact that viavoice isn't considered a drowning/dying product (I.e.
Netscape) or (in the case of Apple) one that was previously free - would be
all the more impressive.
So, given the above, I would say that changing to the IPL might well give vv
a strong pull for more developers, certainly enough to justify the change.
Of course, as suggested above, an even stronger case can be made for the
GPL.
Tom M.
TomM@pentstar.com
"
If you would care to contribute to the conversation, you can join by sending email to
join-viavoice@laser.sparklist.com
Thanks,
LetterRip
Tom M.
"Even a split MS may not port MSOffice to unix (try to make the business case for a linux MSOffice port...) "
Challenge accepted...
With a split MS, The apps division no longer needs tie itself to MS Windows operating systems. Thus they can feel free to improve API compatibility tool kits - for instance Wine. Once that is done, they have a fully operational MS Office that is available to any/all of the unixes with minimal effort. The cost of improving wine to where it would fully operate with most/all of the MS Apps, might well be fairly insignificant (with proper knowledge of the Apps and MS OS internals, something that the Apps division will have plenty of.) Thus they suddenly gain massive market opportunity for minimal investment capital.
LetterRip
When one 'takes' in terms of the GPL, it is a case of 'raising all ships'. If/when Star Office (SO) becomes GPLed it will be able to take advantage of a large number of resources that it otherwise would not have available. Those that use SO code to help the open office projects, will almost certainly contribute back bug fixes to the SO code base. There will also be those that will help Sun to get rid of many of the problems that are currently experienced with SO.
As to your comments as to 'vultures of commercial software'. True, there is a great deal of immitation in free software - but largely, this is making available equivalent software on Operating Systems for which that software is not available (and thus provide potential users with one less objection as to why they cannot use said operating system...). Or, it is providing software for those who have moral qualms with using nonfree software (as in speech and/or as in beer.)
You state "The majority [...] think only in terms of raiding, and pillaging, out of some staunch anticommercialism, even when the company supports your cause."
While it is true that there are those who are "staunch[ly] anticommercial". I don't feel you have a basis for claiming a majority of those interested in free software/linux/slashdot readers, fall into this category. If you were to characterize as "staunchly antifree" then I'd be more inclined to agree, but those are not one and the same. Incidentally, I am neither, but given a choice I prefer free (mostly as in speech) software, because I have the potential/opportunity to fix and/or enhance that software as the need arises. Something that I can rarely do with commercial software.
LetterRip
"1. Sun is now admitting that the idea of giving away a free office suite is non-viable and they are opening the source as a way to divest their engineering resources. Don't expect help from Sun in this area."
It is likely true that they see they can gain engineering resources that they wouldn't otherwise have because of usage of the GPL. Whether or not Sun will help, remains to be seen.
"2. Cross-platform support will die. Open Source projects of significant magnitude just don't happen on the major GUI OSes. StarOffice for Windows will lag far enough behind StarOffice for Linux that it won't be the cross-platform solution that it is touted as today."
Hmm.. you mean - like Mozilla, Crystal Space, GCC, and Abiword? These are all cross platform, and all major projects, the non Unix versions may sometimes lag in the features, but they tend to propogate to all of the differnt platforms with significant speed.
"3. This might even spell the death of StarOffice. GPL has produces a whole bunch of useful code, but the inevitable branching of the project will kill the corporate acceptability of StarOffice. Branching has proven inevitable on all but the simplest of projects."
Yes projects do fork, but there tend to be major official branches, and if support is offered for a specific branch, that is the one that the suits will go with. Also, forks can, and often do remerge. Whether forking is corporately acceptable, remains to be seen.
"4. If all that's not enough, GPL'd projects don't generally produce good end user software in terms of UI. Granted StarOffice pretty well sucks now in this regard, GPL won't help."
That is a traditional failing, one that is being addressed in both KDE and Gnome. Traditional Unix/Linux GUI's were difficult to make and modify, and handrolled by each new programming needing a GUI. With programs like Glade, good GUI design and prototyping become much easier and consistant. Thus we are likely to see Linux apps become more user freindly and usable as things progress.
LetterRip
". It doesn't work because there's WAY too much crap on mp3.com. I've spent hours and hours searching the HUGE archives of indie content on that site, and I've come away with maybe 3 bands that I actually found worth listening to. "
/.), and quickly find music that fits your tastes...
Just use repuatation managers - ala slashdot and preference managers ala amazon - thus you quickly can get the cream of the crop to the top (although I would certainly use a more sophisticated and powerful rep manager than that used by
Thus it is a really simple problem to solve, hopefully something that will be added to Gnutella or some such...
LetterRip
What opensource OCR have you found? And how "intelligent" is it?
...).
What I'd like to do is enhance the intelligence of OCR, for things like forms. The three things that would be useful is thus...
The ability to define rectangles and lines before OCR happens, so that it will interprete them as graphics as opposed to part of the text.
The ability to Define columns and groups better, and what type of information the column has. For instance Phone numbers, addresses, etc. (and thus quit translating 6 to b
A list of frequent mistranslations pairs - OCR tends to make consistant mistakes - if the spell checker were to substitute for the mistranslation with the alternative character pair, I would recieve a lot fewer misspells.
I figure that those three options would increase the accuracy of the OCR software that I've been using by 95% easily. (The other five percent is from "Fax noise", photocopy fade, and handwritten notes...)
LetterRip
I posted this in the thread on Metallica, it applies here as well.. I would add to the below the following - A recipricative editorial process - you edit three pieces of similar length in a similar genre and in return three people edit yours. You give feedback, those with consistently high feedback (and who begin totransform non-selling authors to selling authors) can begin to charge for their services (ie a percentage of profits, or flat fee...). Similar relationships can be worked out for art work- although it may be less relevant to online versions...
Here is my original statement in regards to music, replace music with books, Record companies with publishers etc.
Lars mentioned the single download of a nonsigned artist, and the fact that he feels that a small band could never make it without the record industry. However, with a reputation manager, and shared interest manager, his point could quickly be invalidated. Ie, I go through a slection chart listing my likes, dislikes, yada yada, just as is done with amazon. Then, each song can be rated by the individual similar to slashdot, with an added field for additional comments (and possibly multiple rating categories.) This would allow a method for finding quality music by relatively unknowns. Giving them the full power of network effects/pulbicity without the costs.
LetterRip
Lars mentioned the single download of a nonsigned artist, and the fact that he feels that a small band could never make it without the record industry. However, with a reputation manager, and shared interest manager, his point could quickly be invalidated. Ie, I go through a slection chart listing my likes, dislikes, yada yada, just as is done with amazon. Then, each song can be rated by the individual similar to slashdot, with an added field for additional comments (and possibly multiple rating categories.) This would allow a method for finding quality music by relatively unknowns. Giving them the full power of network effects/pulbicity without the costs.
LetterRip
"I will point out that even in our current system the megacorp will always win. I've personally worked at smaller companies that have had valid patents that were infrindged on by very large companies."
Did they purchase patent insurance? There are policies that the Insurance company pays all of your lawyer fees, but gets to recover their costs, plus a percentage of the damages.
It seems much less likely that the big company is going to infringe in such a situation...
LetterRip
While the value to the targeted students won't be all that great. The fact that a complete CS course of apparently exceptionally good quality is going to be made available under an Open Content License is Tremendous.
LetterRip
I'd be interested in forming a site for positive teacher reviews only. This would be to find the highest quality instructors and lecturers in the nation. This information could then be used to form video lecture series and course material for the free university project.
LetterRip
fstmm@yahoo.com
"If this were true then Sony would actually be encouraging sales of Bleem because it means there is another person out there with reason to buy the overpriced games and Sony wouldn't have to sell a loss leader console in the first place."
Sony's concerns over Bleem are not the lost funds due to lost playstation sales, but that Bleem will become ubiquitous. Then, Software producers can say their product is Bleem compatible. The playstation owners would know that it meant playstation compatibility as well, thus no need to get a license from Sony and Sony's marketing model evaporates.
LetterRip
It's unfortunate that you are posting as an AC, I'd be interested in continuing the conversation, please feel free to email me
LetterRip
Tom M.
fstmm@yahoo.com
A few things I skipped..
"familiarity with the scientific method" - I would suggest doing replication studies. Each student would be required to do two. This would require some presorting of a lot of scientific literature- perhaps professors from the various fields could reccommend studies that should be replicated, and put an associated difficulty rating with them. The rep. study would need to be thuroughly researched and planned out (similarly to a Research Methods class....), and then reviewed by an expert. This will be costly in terms of expert time (six hours per student... likely more). Experimental design/planning software could greatly improve the effectiveness of the experimental design, and significantly reduce the burden on the expert.
LetterRip
fstmm@yahoo.com
I've given the creation of online and open Universitys (and other educational facilities...) a significant amount of thought. Here are some suggestions...
These course should be for memorization/lecture intensive courses where direct classroom experience is of limited value. Many of the prerequisite 100/200 level course are of this sort.
There should be a legal requirement for all schools/colleges to accept these as course equivalents (Each school can base it's cut off level on comparitive scores for typical students of that school, but if the cut off is met, credit transfer is cumpulsory for equivalent courses...)
For lab work - a significant (2/3? 3/4?) amount of lab time for 300 and lower Physics, Chemistry, and Biology is a waste. The reason- few students prepare for the lab, their understanding of the principles behind the experiment are often dismal, the experiments are often trivial in nature and execution, there is a great deal of duplication of effort/course material for each lab taken.
Introductory (and often higher level) lab courses often have as primary purposes- familiarity with the scientific method, and familiarity with lab equipment. For the familiarity with lab equipment, I would suggest a certification process with local labs. With emulation software to gain familiarity with the apparatus ahead of time. Those who have completed the required lecture material, and scored a prerequisite score on a familiarity exam could sign up to come in and be tested on the equipment (either individually or as a group).
For exams - there are already computer based testing facilities located around the world. Likely a 'cost only' solution could be negotiated with these facilitys, this would reduce the likely hood of cheating.
All multiple choice based exams should be free, but material requiring essays etc., should have a nominal fee associated with them. This should only be for creative essays, - subject matter/content essays can be accurately and successfully graded with software.
Classes that are oral intensive can be done by having central meeting places that travel is required to for the occassional presentation.
Much of the discussion and critique can be done by a virtual audience (via webcasting the presentation, and portion of the future presenters could be signed up to be a live audience... plus interested outsiders can attend the lectures etc...)
I have more to say on the logistics of distributed grading of essays and many other topic, but I'll leave that for another post.
LetterRip
fstmm@yahoo.com
The article states that he is planning on taping new lecture series, why not purchase the rights to some of the quality previously taped lecture series out there? There are some of very high quality, and he'd save a year of time immediately off the bat...
LetterRip
If he would support the creation of open/free text books and instructional software that would be wonderful. I've been planning to start a project along those lines for some time now.
I wonder if we can get a Slashdot interview with him?
LetterRip
fstmm@yahoo.com