For those interested, Palm OS Cobalt (a.k.a. Palm OS 6) is taking a similar direction, using relational-style databases to hold address book data, appointments, etc. etc.
Plus, someone mentioned WinFS. Everything old is new again.
From what I can see, it's a USB microphone with a built-in radio tuner. The tuner would be sending audio all the time, just like how a microphone sends audio all the time. The remainder is software to record what's coming down the USB pipe at any given time, and play it back.
Whilst it's all well and good to discuss "the perfect online music store" from the point of the consumer (or, more accurately, the Slashdotter), you have to realise that it's only one side of the story. The other side, of course, is the record industry.
So, here I present, the perfect online music store for the RIAA.
The ability to track the songs that consumers listen to, for advertising purposes
The ability to charge consumers every time they listen to a song
Only one music device at a time
The ability to revoke consumers' access to songs
Songs for $2 each, or better yet, a subscription
Not allowed to listen to non-RIAA songs
Now, you may think, pffft, that's meaningless. But it's no more or less meaningless than "the perfect online music store for Slashdotters". OK, I realise that the list given is an extreme example, but I'm trying to make a point here.
Most music stores today are a compromise between what consumers want and what the record industry want. It's fun and informative to come up with ideas for that perfect store, but remember that the real world is out there.
We sought some advice from a Melbourne barrister and contributor to these pages, Simon Minahan, who practises in the area of intellectual property.
His opinion: "There's probably nothing to stop the individual from downloading this material for private use. For end users, the issue is a basic question relevant to acquiring a reproduction of any copyright work: has the rights owner consented?"
Even if allofmp3.com's asserted licence is bogus, says Minahan, "the end user would seem to have a good basis to argue that he is an innocent infringer, which would mean he isn't liable to damages, although he would still be liable to an order requiring him to destroy or deliver up any copies and an order requiring him to refrain from doing it again."
"There's no way in hell SMT gives you an 80% speedup; on the P4's it gives 10-15% at best. Thankfully, it comes at little-to-no-cost in terms of silicon, IIRC."
Well, there you go. I'd rather pay 2% more for a 10-15% speedup, that stacks with other speedups.
"However, considering that ATi is better at DirectX and nVidia is better at OpenGL (at least right now), you'd think they would use nVidia in all their computers."
That's more a driver issue than anything else. I wouldn't infer anything about Mac OpenGL performance from Windows OpenGL or DirectX performance.
Half the people here are saying that 3 months is too short. But if they increased it to 6 months, you'd effectively get paid at half the rate - and who wants that? (The other half are saying that the rate is too low already, so the time should be decreased.)
I'm holding the $5812 sum fixed, not going up or down. The reason is because that's the price that Treo 600 owners have committed for a driver. Whether this is too high or too low is debatable, however, at the end of the day, that's the dollar value.
"A sequence of primes broadcast on radio waves would be picked up by any civilization as at mid-20th-century-earth advancement or higher."
Right. Let's say we're broadcasting to a target audience of aliens at our level of civilization, say, between mid-20th-century and 10,000 years in the future (any more advanced, and they're not going to even bother... more important things to do).
So we're looking for aliens in a 10,000 year window. The universe is 15 billion years old, give or take. It sounds unlikely to me.
Most people think that distance is the limiting factor between alien civilizations. I don't - I think it's time.
"Counting off prime numbers is pretty neutral, an advanced civilization should recognize that this would be a quite improbable natural phenomena."
What's neutral to us may be either way beyond the comprehension of aliens (OK, so they're not intelligent), or so basic to them as to be meaningless (they're way, way, way more intelligent than we are).
In terms of evolution and intelligence, aliens could be to humans what humans are to bacteria. Consider what it's like to explain prime numbers to bacteria... that's what it could be like for aliens to attempt "talking down" to us. Or, they could just see us as insignificant (but populous) little micro-organisms who just spread everywhere and reproduce in plague proportions with no other meaningful purpose...
I've always thought of The Baroque Cycle as Stephenson's masterpiece. Much like other masterpieces, it's long, inscrutable, and not meant to be read by mere mortals (insofar as a mass-market novel can be). It's long-winded, but if you can slow down and relax enough to read it, it's rewarding. However, readers of Snow Crash and Cryptonomicon have reflexes of lightning (as do Slashdotters), which is why they don't tend to like it.
As some sort of thought experiment, I gave Quicksilver to one of my friends, with the intention of giving her Cryptonomicon later (since most people have read them the other way around). She got bored and gave up on it.
I found Quicksilver to be long and tedious, but The Confusion lifted things; Stephenson even wrote a half-decent ending! So here's hoping that The System of the World is as good or better.
I could be mistaken, but I think that window is there so you get a menu bar. On every platform except Mac OS X, Mozilla has its own menu bar for each window. The Mac is different: it has one menu bar for the entire application. The small window is there so that when no windows are open, there's still a menu bar on the Mac.
First, a disclaimer. I'm a software engineering graduate from ANU, so I know Dr Clive Boughton quite well. Any ANU student who's been through his courses will have had eVACS burned into their brain, since he uses it as a case study for just about everything... So, having sat through endless hours of lectures on eVACS, I offer the following executive summary:
eVACS is two things: a voting system, and a counting system (the 'V' and the 'C', respectively). As I understand it, the counting system was the open-source portion, although my memory could be foggy in that regard. It's ironic that many posts to this topic refer to the voting system (security of votes, etc.).
From what I recall, eVACS was developed under software engineering best practices (since Clive is a software engineering teacher). I can't remember the exact methodology, but it was an object-oriented analysis and design method, perhaps Executable UML. This is what enabled them to complete the project on time and with a good level of correctness. (For anybody who's ever worked to a "hard" deadline, they don't come much harder than the date of an election!) Hmm. Now I recall, it could have been that two versions were developed in parallel: one using the object-oriented stuff, and the other using traditional structured analysis and design. Maybe I should have paid more attention in lectures...
I guess the question is, did eVACS ever gain anything from being GPL? I doubt that many people have contributed changes back to it, since Software Improvements was able to change the licence, implying that they hold all the copyrights. People may have looked at it and said 'Cool', and of those people, maybe a small fraction have analysed it in detail.
The problem, however, is that it's hard to quantify who's taken a serious look at the code and found it to be correct. Now, Clive is a software engineer, so quantifying things is important. Of course, there's the usual bunch of auditors, election officials and ANU software engineering students who have been willing to look, but that doesn't require the GPL. In fact, all it requires is a licence akin to what they're changing it to...
If we (as the wider community) can convince Software Improvements that a GPL'd version will be more correct than the closed version, then I'll bet that they'll open it back up again. (I'll even petition Clive directly.) However, we actually need eyeballs on that code, so who's up for it? You'll may need to know Executable UML and the intricacies of the Hare-Clark voting system... You could also convince them that a GPL'd version is better on the grounds that software should be free (as in... free software), but I'm not sure how well that will go down.
A better way of thinking of this is, do what the GPL has done to the concept of copyright. As I understand it, the FSF isn't a huge fan of copyright and intellectual property as it currently is, so it's twisted copyright into "copyleft", using it to further its goals within the framework of law.
We need something similar for patents. I'm not smart enough to think of how, but the parent poster is.
As to the money needed: the FSF seems to have done fairly well to raise the money needed to chase GPL violations.
The fact that you can't handle the existence of homographs in the English language is not a problem for the FSF.
Many people can't handle homographs in the English language. OK, not the FSF's problem. It's not their problem either that few people subscribe to their philosophies.
I went through it with the Marathon series. Then with the original Halo.
For me, the thrill is knowing that Bungie still cares about dropping cryptic, inscrutable clues into the mix, and giving us something with meaning to tease apart, not just a game. I'm too tired these days to follow it, myself. When they did this back in the old days, it was to a core of Mac fans. But now everybody can get a taste. I find that exciting.
He doesn't like drop-down lists because you're required to use the mouse for them. You're in the middle of filling out a form, typing things up and pressing Tab to move to the next field. When you get to the country field, you need to reach for the mouse to choose your country.
The alternative is typing "US" and selecting "Ukraine", then "Saudi Arabia", which doesn't give you what you want (but which is the way Internet Explorer does it), or hitting the down arrow many times until you get to the entry that says "USA".
(He says, and I paraphrase, "When you're using the mouse, you don't want to reach for the keyboard; when you're using the keyboard, you don't want to reach for the mouse".)
'...and three zipfiles named Bruce-someversionnumbers.zip.'
From their site (index.php?id=30):
'Bruce is a small time-stamping program that generates a SHA-512 hash of the content of any file you choose on your system. The hash is sent to CAcert to be digitally signed and time stamped. This enables you to prove, at a later date, that you created (or at least had in your possesion) that particular data. This is like a form of "electronic witnessing".'
Over the next few years, there's going to be a huge market for redio jammers to block RFID chips. If I had some money to invest, I would start looking there. Just a thought.
You can already get jammers to block police radar guns, the type where they check your speed and mail you your speeding ticket. You can also get that spray-on lacquer for your licence plates so that they can't take photos of it.
Guess what. They're illegal (well, mostly illegal). You can get them, you can use them, and the police will be happy to bust you for it if they notice. Same with RFID jammers.
Slashdot Mirror
For those interested, Palm OS Cobalt (a.k.a. Palm OS 6) is taking a similar direction, using relational-style databases to hold address book data, appointments, etc. etc.
Plus, someone mentioned WinFS. Everything old is new again.
From what I can see, it's a USB microphone with a built-in radio tuner. The tuner would be sending audio all the time, just like how a microphone sends audio all the time. The remainder is software to record what's coming down the USB pipe at any given time, and play it back.
And you pay $70 for it.
Whilst it's all well and good to discuss "the perfect online music store" from the point of the consumer (or, more accurately, the Slashdotter), you have to realise that it's only one side of the story. The other side, of course, is the record industry.
So, here I present, the perfect online music store for the RIAA.
Now, you may think, pffft, that's meaningless. But it's no more or less meaningless than "the perfect online music store for Slashdotters". OK, I realise that the list given is an extreme example, but I'm trying to make a point here.
Most music stores today are a compromise between what consumers want and what the record industry want. It's fun and informative to come up with ideas for that perfect store, but remember that the real world is out there.
There's an article about the legality of allofmp3 in the Sydney Morning Herald, at http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2004/04/26/10828314 75556.html (registration probably required). Note that it's in the context of Australian law.
Quote from it follows:
We sought some advice from a Melbourne barrister and contributor to these pages, Simon Minahan, who practises in the area of intellectual property.
His opinion: "There's probably nothing to stop the individual from downloading this material for private use. For end users, the issue is a basic question relevant to acquiring a reproduction of any copyright work: has the rights owner consented?"
Even if allofmp3.com's asserted licence is bogus, says Minahan, "the end user would seem to have a good basis to argue that he is an innocent infringer, which would mean he isn't liable to damages, although he would still be liable to an order requiring him to destroy or deliver up any copies and an order requiring him to refrain from doing it again."
"There's no way in hell SMT gives you an 80% speedup; on the P4's it gives 10-15% at best. Thankfully, it comes at little-to-no-cost in terms of silicon, IIRC."
Well, there you go. I'd rather pay 2% more for a 10-15% speedup, that stacks with other speedups.
"However, considering that ATi is better at DirectX and nVidia is better at OpenGL (at least right now), you'd think they would use nVidia in all their computers."
That's more a driver issue than anything else. I wouldn't infer anything about Mac OpenGL performance from Windows OpenGL or DirectX performance.
Half the people here are saying that 3 months is too short. But if they increased it to 6 months, you'd effectively get paid at half the rate - and who wants that? (The other half are saying that the rate is too low already, so the time should be decreased.)
I'm holding the $5812 sum fixed, not going up or down. The reason is because that's the price that Treo 600 owners have committed for a driver. Whether this is too high or too low is debatable, however, at the end of the day, that's the dollar value.
"A sequence of primes broadcast on radio waves would be picked up by any civilization as at mid-20th-century-earth advancement or higher."
Right. Let's say we're broadcasting to a target audience of aliens at our level of civilization, say, between mid-20th-century and 10,000 years in the future (any more advanced, and they're not going to even bother... more important things to do).
So we're looking for aliens in a 10,000 year window. The universe is 15 billion years old, give or take. It sounds unlikely to me.
Most people think that distance is the limiting factor between alien civilizations. I don't - I think it's time.
"Counting off prime numbers is pretty neutral, an advanced civilization should recognize that this would be a quite improbable natural phenomena."
What's neutral to us may be either way beyond the comprehension of aliens (OK, so they're not intelligent), or so basic to them as to be meaningless (they're way, way, way more intelligent than we are).
In terms of evolution and intelligence, aliens could be to humans what humans are to bacteria. Consider what it's like to explain prime numbers to bacteria... that's what it could be like for aliens to attempt "talking down" to us. Or, they could just see us as insignificant (but populous) little micro-organisms who just spread everywhere and reproduce in plague proportions with no other meaningful purpose...
Somewhat ironically, Telstra runs their own online music store.
I've always thought of The Baroque Cycle as Stephenson's masterpiece. Much like other masterpieces, it's long, inscrutable, and not meant to be read by mere mortals (insofar as a mass-market novel can be). It's long-winded, but if you can slow down and relax enough to read it, it's rewarding. However, readers of Snow Crash and Cryptonomicon have reflexes of lightning (as do Slashdotters), which is why they don't tend to like it.
As some sort of thought experiment, I gave Quicksilver to one of my friends, with the intention of giving her Cryptonomicon later (since most people have read them the other way around). She got bored and gave up on it.
I found Quicksilver to be long and tedious, but The Confusion lifted things; Stephenson even wrote a half-decent ending! So here's hoping that The System of the World is as good or better.
"Doesn't change the fact that it's a DRM system and restricts Fair Use."
So, are all DRM systems equally bad? Or are some worse than others? Is it worth trying to "encourage" the "good" DRM systems?
I'm not supplying answers, just the root disagreement here.
I could be mistaken, but I think that window is there so you get a menu bar. On every platform except Mac OS X, Mozilla has its own menu bar for each window. The Mac is different: it has one menu bar for the entire application. The small window is there so that when no windows are open, there's still a menu bar on the Mac.
First, a disclaimer. I'm a software engineering graduate from ANU, so I know Dr Clive Boughton quite well. Any ANU student who's been through his courses will have had eVACS burned into their brain, since he uses it as a case study for just about everything... So, having sat through endless hours of lectures on eVACS, I offer the following executive summary:
eVACS is two things: a voting system, and a counting system (the 'V' and the 'C', respectively). As I understand it, the counting system was the open-source portion, although my memory could be foggy in that regard. It's ironic that many posts to this topic refer to the voting system (security of votes, etc.).
From what I recall, eVACS was developed under software engineering best practices (since Clive is a software engineering teacher). I can't remember the exact methodology, but it was an object-oriented analysis and design method, perhaps Executable UML. This is what enabled them to complete the project on time and with a good level of correctness. (For anybody who's ever worked to a "hard" deadline, they don't come much harder than the date of an election!) Hmm. Now I recall, it could have been that two versions were developed in parallel: one using the object-oriented stuff, and the other using traditional structured analysis and design. Maybe I should have paid more attention in lectures...
I guess the question is, did eVACS ever gain anything from being GPL? I doubt that many people have contributed changes back to it, since Software Improvements was able to change the licence, implying that they hold all the copyrights. People may have looked at it and said 'Cool', and of those people, maybe a small fraction have analysed it in detail.
The problem, however, is that it's hard to quantify who's taken a serious look at the code and found it to be correct. Now, Clive is a software engineer, so quantifying things is important. Of course, there's the usual bunch of auditors, election officials and ANU software engineering students who have been willing to look, but that doesn't require the GPL. In fact, all it requires is a licence akin to what they're changing it to...
If we (as the wider community) can convince Software Improvements that a GPL'd version will be more correct than the closed version, then I'll bet that they'll open it back up again. (I'll even petition Clive directly.) However, we actually need eyeballs on that code, so who's up for it? You'll may need to know Executable UML and the intricacies of the Hare-Clark voting system... You could also convince them that a GPL'd version is better on the grounds that software should be free (as in... free software), but I'm not sure how well that will go down.
A better way of thinking of this is, do what the GPL has done to the concept of copyright. As I understand it, the FSF isn't a huge fan of copyright and intellectual property as it currently is, so it's twisted copyright into "copyleft", using it to further its goals within the framework of law.
We need something similar for patents. I'm not smart enough to think of how, but the parent poster is.
As to the money needed: the FSF seems to have done fairly well to raise the money needed to chase GPL violations.
Seriously though, if Apple keeps this up they should be prosecuted for attempting to maintain an illegal monopoly.
This point had been made elsewhere, but bears repeating:
Monopolies are on markets, not products. It doesn't make sense to say that Apple has a monopoly on the Apple iPod.
The fact that you can't handle the existence of homographs in the English language is not a problem for the FSF.
Many people can't handle homographs in the English language. OK, not the FSF's problem. It's not their problem either that few people subscribe to their philosophies.
I went through it with the Marathon series. Then with the original Halo.
For me, the thrill is knowing that Bungie still cares about dropping cryptic, inscrutable clues into the mix, and giving us something with meaning to tease apart, not just a game. I'm too tired these days to follow it, myself. When they did this back in the old days, it was to a core of Mac fans. But now everybody can get a taste. I find that exciting.
" It only does that (a really annoying behavior, imho) in Internet Explorer, as far as I know."
That's right!
However, 90% of people (or whatever) use Internet Explorer, so you gotta take Nielsen's point.
He says that useit.com isn't a paragon of usability because he doesn't have a huge budget, and that it's quite good for the money he spends on it.
Yes, but you're missing the point he was making.
He doesn't like drop-down lists because you're required to use the mouse for them. You're in the middle of filling out a form, typing things up and pressing Tab to move to the next field. When you get to the country field, you need to reach for the mouse to choose your country.
The alternative is typing "US" and selecting "Ukraine", then "Saudi Arabia", which doesn't give you what you want (but which is the way Internet Explorer does it), or hitting the down arrow many times until you get to the entry that says "USA".
(He says, and I paraphrase, "When you're using the mouse, you don't want to reach for the keyboard; when you're using the keyboard, you don't want to reach for the mouse".)
'...and three zipfiles named Bruce-someversionnumbers.zip.'
From their site (index.php?id=30):
'Bruce is a small time-stamping program that generates a SHA-512 hash of the content of any file you choose on your system. The hash is sent to CAcert to be digitally signed and time stamped. This enables you to prove, at a later date, that you created (or at least had in your possesion) that particular data. This is like a form of "electronic witnessing".'
Then they give download links.
If you think Apple owns the legal download market already, think about the Mac legal download market. Ownage multiple times over.
Other companies may think that they have a chance in the PC space, but nobody's going to try selling to Mac users. That's commercial suicide.
There are thousands of differences between C# and C, between C# and Perl, or C# and assembly language.
If you can only come up with a few dozen differences between C# and Java, then relatively speaking, they're almost exactly the same.
Over the next few years, there's going to be a huge market for redio jammers to block RFID chips. If I had some money to invest, I would start looking there. Just a thought.
You can already get jammers to block police radar guns, the type where they check your speed and mail you your speeding ticket. You can also get that spray-on lacquer for your licence plates so that they can't take photos of it.
Guess what. They're illegal (well, mostly illegal). You can get them, you can use them, and the police will be happy to bust you for it if they notice. Same with RFID jammers.