Re:... at the same time as the IPv6 upgrade! ???
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Replacing SMTP?
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· Score: 1
[Snopes]... has a hidden agenda to muddy the waters of discourse for their own political ends.
Well, of course. Injecting historical fact and rational analysis is a highly political act with an obvious bias. They've never hidden their agenda, though; it's right out there in the open. And it's a serious threat to most kinds of political discourse.
Because then they'd be testing how KDE users acclimatised to Windows XP (or XP users to KDE), which wasn't the point of the study.
Right. So what they did was a study of how Windows/ME and Windows/2000 (and maybe a few Windows/95) users acclimatized to W/XP or to KDE.
That's the way such studies are usually done, y'know.
I wonder which MS front funded this study? Maybe we should see if RedHat or Suse is interested in doing the followup study.
Re:... at the same time as the IPv6 upgrade! ???
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Replacing SMTP?
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· Score: 4, Informative
You'll find some good commentary on this particular bit of mythology at:
http://www.snopes.com/history/american/gauge.htm
Their best comment on it is probably:
Marvelling that the width of modern roadways is similar to the width of ancient roadways is sort of like getting excited over a notion such as "modern clothes sizes are based upon standards developed by medieval tailors." Well, duh.
Then they go into a rather detailed explanation of why it's basically an uninteresting historical semi-truth for exactly this sort of reason.
Still, the modern "standard" railway gauge does go back at least a few centuries. And the early railroad equipment was derived from the sort of horse-drawn vehicles (carriages and carts), so of course it was about the same size.
But in the "standards" sense, the current American rail gauge doesn't really trace back to anything Roman, or much before around 1800. Before that, it's just vague copying, with sizes coming out nearly the same because the job (carrying people and their luggage) was about the same.
The Space Shuttle tie-in is completely bogus.
Re:What loopholes in SMTP?
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Replacing SMTP?
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· Score: 4, Insightful
Well, I think those "loopholes" are all the zillions of features that people want, but they aren't good enough software designers to realize that the features belong in the layer above SMTP.
In particular, lack of authentication is a strength of SMTP, just as it is with IP. It means, for example, that I can implement my own authentication (or plug in PGP or whatever), and don't have to use the mail-transfer layer's after it turns out to have a serious hole that lets the spammers and con-men through.
Protocols that try to do everything for you have the inherent problem that, when a serious problem arises, you have to put up with it until the idiots at the vendor decide to solve it.
SMTP is simple enough that even a relatively incompetent programmer can do it correctly. You can type it yourself via a telnet connection.
This scheme is an important part of the old UUCP package. Part of its handshake protocol is a message that lists all the protocols that the caller understands, in the order the caller would prefer to use them. The recipient goes through the list, picks its favorite, and sends back a message saying "Let's use X."
The advantage to this is that you can introduce new protocols completely painlessly. You pick a new name (after asking around on the newsgroup if anyone is using it), link your new protocol module into the protocol tables on the systems where you want to use it, and start using it. If you connect to a machine that doesn't have your protocol, it will simply tell you to use one of the others on your list. If your protocol is good, it will spread and will be early in the table for a lot of software. It can then slowly supplant the older protocols.
And you stay compatible with older systems by merely keeping the old protocol modules in your tables.
This is 1970's technology. So I suppose we'll soon read that Microsoft has just patented it.
... at the same time as the IPv6 upgrade! ???
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Replacing SMTP?
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· Score: 4, Interesting
C'mon now; the IPv6 upgrade will be spread out over at least several decades. And both Microsoft systems and many US Government installations will still be using it a century from now, because it's "standard".
After all, it's now past the death of typewriters, and we're still using the typewriter keyboard from nearly two centuries ago. And we use a ridiculous rail gauge, because the standard was set centuries ago.
And here in the US, we're still using inches and feet, measurements based on the lengths of the thumb and foot of a long-dead king. And we call them "standard".
We will be stuck with IPv4 for long past the final download of anyone reading this.
SMTP will probably be around even longer. But that's OK; it's fun to impress friends by a "telnet 25", followed by typing in a message directly to the server. I like to use "MAIL From: dubya@whitehouse.gov", and ask them if they'd be interested in a nice job in the TIA program. Then I challenge them to prove from the message they get who actually sent it.
Only a minor number of artists give their music away for free...
True, if by "artist" you mean "someone bound by a contract to a major distributor".
However, it is also true, twisting your words only slightly, that a great number of minor artists give their music away for free. By "minor artists", we of course mean someone NOT bound by a contract to a major distribbutor.
There are zillions of web sites offering the music of independent artists for free. Take a look around.
The major distributors, of course, are trying to stop this end run around their oligarchical control. We can hope they fail. But they do have funds to buy a lot of legislators.
Interesting comments, but not to the point. I'll quote the original poster's definition:
I define open content as content possible for others to improve and redistribute and/or content that is produced without any consideration of immediate financial reward -- often collectively within a virtual community.
This EXACTLY fits the online-sheet-music example that I was talking about. For others to improve? Sure. If I put a tune online, say as a "fake book" transcription that's just melody and chords, several others may pick it up, and convert it into arrangements for whatever instruments they have available. They can put those arrangements up on their web site. They could also send them back to me (if they don't have a web site, or are just being friendly). But I won't replace my transcription with theirs; I'll add them in as new files. This obviously qualifies for the "improve and redistribute" part of the definition.
Also, most of these online sites are free, and the owner isn't making money from them. There are many sites advertising sheet music, of course, but won't let you view them until you've paid (and then they send the music by snail mail;-). These don't qualify. I'm talking about the sites that have the music itself available for download (in abc or nwc or lilypond or musicxml or gif or jpeg or pdf or whatever format). There are a lot of these sites now that aren't charging money.
They just understand that if N people each do 1/Nth of the job, then everyone has the entire effort availabe free.
Not really free, of course. You need volunteers to do 1/Nth of the job.
I do have a notice on my own sheet-music collection, to the effect that users are now required to transcribe some of their own favorite music and put it online. I get some friendly email from that. Sometimes I get an apology that the writer doesn't have a web site, but they'll send the music to me if I like.
So we have a virtual community that is providing the content free of charge, of people who consider themselves "paid" when they can use others' content in the same way. We can all modify the content and put the resulting content online. This seems to exactly fit the definition that the original article gave.
The main worry is that the publishing industry will do to us what the recording industry is trying to do to independent artists, and get laws passed that make it illegal for us to even put PD music online without going through them. In the past they did this through control of the (very expensive) printing presses. Now we don't need a printing press; we have video screens. But it's entirely possible that they'll bribe governments to outlaw it anyway. You can see this with the attempts to block file sharing of music, even by bands that want their material distributed this way, and who aren't signed by any corporations.
On the contrary. There is a fair amount of free "sheet music" available online now, in a number of open formats. It's mostly of older (pre-1930's) music, of course, for the obvious copyright reasons. You can find both classical and traditional (folk) music.
There's a clear benefit for the musicians who do it. I started doing it so I could access my music quickly from anywhere on the Net. I've even had cases where I was in a fairly remote area, and someone asked "Can you play...?" With my wireless portable computer, I could quickly get on the Net, find the sheet music, bring it up on the screen, and say "Yeah, we can play that."
And it doesn't take a lot of brains to realize that the more people doing this, the better it is for all of us. You can get at my sheet music, I can get at yours, and we all benefit. Your average 8-year-old should understand this (though your average politician and CEO probably won't).
Now if we could do something about the copyright laws that prevent working musicians from doing such useful things with music from the past 80 years or so. Then we could dispense with the bulky binders and fake books, and just use our wireless portable. But I can't see this happening soon.
If the music publishers had a grain of sense, they'd do the obvious thing here. Set up web sites like the iTunes site, but for "sheet music", that charge a very small amount per page or per score. Encourage wireless coverage so that musicians will stop carrying around (copies of;-) books of music and pay the $0.05 per page or whatever to get it on their screen. This could quickly put an end to the illicit copying of printed books, because it's so much more convenient.
But, of course, publishers will have to be dragged kicking and screaming (and suing) into the 21st century. We're watching the RIAA attacks on file sharers very closely, and we expect that the publishers will do the same thing to musicians in the near future. Musicians playing recent material will be in trouble. We classical and trad folk musicians mostly won't, because our material is public domain. You can't copyright Bach's or O'Carolan's music. (Yeah, publishers do claim copyright on these, but unless they make it clear that it's only their edition that's covered, their claim is fraudulent.)
The fact that musicians are doing this freely while publishers can't see the profit opportunity says a lot about economic theories based on a rational market...
Hey, where's this OS "universal access control panel"? I've never heard of it, and the finder doesn't seem to be able to find it.
Also, I've found that disk ejection is not just a problem on linux; I've seen people having problems getting the box to release the CD on every kind of system. Usually when this happens, you have to find the program that has grabbed the CD and kill it. This can be difficult if the app has closed its window but is still running windowless in the background. On Windows, often a reboot is the only solution. On linux, a kill -9 will do it, but you have to first discover the right pid. On OSX, I've found that opening a few CD/DVD apps at random and telling them to eject will eventually do the job, but it often takes a lot of tries before something works.
Does any of these have an uncondition "Eject the CD right now, dammit!" command? Sure would be useful.
Also, is there any way to learn these things other than by asking in a public forum like this?
So how do you make it work? I'm typing this on a new Powerbook with OSX, and I have sorta figured out how to change the font sizes (though they don't always seem to stay changed). But this applies only to text. The writer was asking about such things as menus, images, etc. Nothing I do changes any of these at all.
Actually, I have the opposite problem: People are always complaining about the tiny fonts that I use. This is because I try to use the smallest font that I can read, so I can get more info on the screen. On a laptop, there's less screen space, but I'm even closer, so I can use 9- and 10-point fonts.
But there's still a lot of screen space taken up by the menu bar, and all the things that apps like to string across the top of their window. This is wasted space that could be radically condensed and I'd still be able to read it. But there don't seem to be any controls for this.
On my linux box, I do things like turn off the title bars in most apps, tell KDE to use tiny icons, and so on. Other people can do turn off the title bars but use large fonts and icons. But with OSX, it seems to be one size fits all for menus, titles, icons, etc. Only the font in the "content" window can be configured.
I could well be wrong, of course. If so, where is it documented?
What? Windows has a mechanism to send an error report to Microsoft? I have a Windoze box, unfortunately, since I need to test my web stuff against IE. It rarely survives as long as half an hour when I'm doing the testing. But I've never seen any hint about sending an error report. I've certainly never gotten a box with buttons to send or cancel.
(Well, I have gotten them, but only from the mozilla that I installed.;-)
It's not obvious how this could work anyway. When the thing crashes, the main symptoms are that all input events from the keyboard and mouse are ignored. Something is alive, because the mouse can move the pointer. But clicking on things has no effect, and no keyboard input (include CTL-ALT-DEL) has any effect. So even if there were a box with a Send button, it wouldn't work. And after a power cycle, it would be gone, so it won't work there.
I wonder how Bill Gates is measuring how many times my machine crashes? Does he list it as zero crashes per day?
But then the other box that's running linux is probably listed in his statistics as a Windows sale, because that's what was on it when Dell shipped it.
Actually, MIT has a long history of vigorously defending their people against legal attacks. They also strictly enforce rules like the one about turning down funding that doesn't give the researcher and MIT total control of publication. They have won a lot of power struggles against the US government, while simultaneously taking lots of funding money from Federal agencies at the same time. You can do things like that when you have the prestige that MIT has. Too bad other schools' administrations get cowed by legal bullies. If they had the guts to stand up and resist, they'd probably have the same prestige that MIT does.
And they do have strong ties to Harvard, with access to lots of the Harvard Law folks. An MIT ID card will get you into almost any place at Harvard, and vice versa. This isn't all that special, though; ties to Tufts, BU and BC are nearly as strong.
... does this mean that sweet little old lady at the checkout desk is a PIRATE???
Actually, yes, it does. One of the things that the publishing and recording industry has been discussing for years now is the growing possibility of limiting the number of readers/viewers to only the original purchaser. It's difficult to do with printed books. But anything in electronic form has a very real possibility of DRM that can implement such a limit.
At least 10 years ago, when the first prospects of electronic publishing were reaching the media, one of the interesting quotes that I read from several sources in the publishing industry was that on the average, each book sold is read by four people. This was followed by the suggestion that they should be seriously looking at ways to solve this problem.
Now, of the books in your home, how many have been read by four or more people? Hardly any of them, right? So where does this average of four readers come from? One place: libraries. The publishing industry does consider libraries to be a serious sales problem, and they are discussing solutions.
This isn't only about electronic books, CDs or DVDs. Part of the discussion has been ways of using political connections to cut back on funding of public libraries.
And a lot of publications already have a much higher subscription price for libraries than for individuals, though they don't really give the libraries anything more for their money.
Here in the US, a lot of the small-town public libraries have closed down in the past decade.
What I want to see is an ad featuring an artist explaining that he/she is starving because of the "take it or leave it" standard industry contract that they signed, which puts them in debt to the Company although the recording sold over a million copies.
Some years ago, I read an article by a French scientist who explained why he wrote all his papers in English rather than in his native French.
He explained that, as a scientist, one of his important tasks was helping devise good scientific terminology. The scientific community has come up with a very effective approach: If someone has good terminology for what you need, you use it rather than inventing your own. But if you can give a good reason why preceding terminology doesn't work well, you are not only allowed but expected to propose better terminology, and explain it in your paper.
He went on to explain that, if he were to publish in French, any new terminology would have to get the approval of the government's language commission. It's highly unlikely that anyone in that body will understand his area of technical expertise, so their decision will almost always be wrong (in the scientific sense).
But there is no such government angency in any English-speaking country. In English, there are no legal barriers to inventing your own terminology. So when he sees the need for a new word (or redefinition of an old word), he can just use it (and explain it) in his English paper. His colleagues in his area of research will be the judges of whether his new word (or redefinition) will be adopted.
He also commented that he was far from the only researcher who used this approach, and the same argument is often heard in German. He suggested that, as long as the English-speaking world remains so open and free about "corruption" of the English language, it will remain the World's primary scientific language.
So those who like the idea of English becoming the world's dominant language should applaud and encourage anti-English actions such as what the French are doing.
A linguistics prof in one class that I once took illustrated this with a tome published several centuries ago by a Japanese scholar who was upset by the widespread "corruption" of the Japanese language by borrowings from Chinese. So he wrote a major work that documented the old Japanese language very thoroughly. His work is considered quite valuable by linguists today. The fun part was that his title consisted entirely of loan words from Chinese.
The prof pointed out that this is difficult to do in English. Despite all the borrowings, it's still difficult to write more than 2 or 3 words in English without using a word of Anglo-Saxon origin. English is still at heart a West Germanic language, and all the "little" words are Germanic.
And it is true that the Japanese continue this approach, but now with heavy borrowings from English. They mangle the pronunciation badly, but look at what English does to Latin or Greek words. And our borrowings from Hebrew and Arabic are hardly recognizable.
Japanese and English are far from the only such cases. Swahili and Malay are both artificial "trade" languages that were constructed from several other languages of their respective areas, and they're about as much a mish-mash as is English.
Why can't we (in the western world) get this type of soft-spoken wisdom to be the face of OSS, and not the curmudgeonly off-putting geekazoidness of RMS?
But we do have such a person. Have you read anything from Linus Torvalds in the past 5 years?
Up until this point, Linux has competed mostly on price. Now it appears to have graduated to competing on value.
I'm not sure that's really true. In any number of discussions, I've seen that people repeatedly bring up variants of the question:
"Do you want your data to be under the control of a big American corporation that doesn't have your interests at heart?"
This is a really scary question to a lot of people in the world (including quite a lot of Americans). It has nothing to do with price; it's all about control.
For government agencies in particular, which have to function on longer terms than the current fiscal year, proprietary data formats are a serious problem. If you can't read your own files 10 or 20 years from now, you will be in bad trouble.
The fact that linux (and BSD) solve these problems very nicely is much of their appeal. The fact that, over the long run, you can save a lot of money is nice, too, but it's not the clincher.
Funny, yeah, but also a useful approach, if done right.
When I'm faced with "Get it running fast", I try to make sure that I toss in terms like "prototype" and "proof of concept" at every opportunity. Especially when dealing with PHBs or customers.
Then, when they complain about bugs or missing features, I say "Yeah, and here's a list of some others I know about." And I add that I'll be happy to work on improving the prototype into a useful tool.
It helps a lot if you know how to do "prototype" programming. Write the prototype with the idea constantly in mind that you're writing hooks on which to hang all the things that people will want in the future. Plan on extending it. Call small functions that don't seem to do much, but you've realized that a useful program will want a lot of extending there, so you encapsulate it now. And so on.
If you keep hitting them with the idea that you consider the quick-and-dirty version to be just a prototype, they're a lot more likely to be happy with it despite its limitations, and to want to pay you to add all the things that you didn't have time for during the prototype phase.
You can also preempt a lot of criticism by constantly complaining about how it should be done now, but they keep bringing up new things that they want it to do. And when a new feature means you have to radically rewrite something you did earlier, complain about it, but let them know that if they really want it, you're willing to spend the time to make it work right.
Slashdot Mirror
[Snopes] ... has a hidden agenda to muddy the waters of discourse for their own political ends.
... Do I need a ;-) here? Nah ...)
Well, of course. Injecting historical fact and rational analysis is a highly political act with an obvious bias. They've never hidden their agenda, though; it's right out there in the open. And it's a serious threat to most kinds of political discourse.
(Hmm
Eh? Why not have them all do it on each?
Because then they'd be testing how KDE users acclimatised to Windows XP (or XP users to KDE), which wasn't the point of the study.
Right. So what they did was a study of how Windows/ME and Windows/2000
(and maybe a few Windows/95) users acclimatized to W/XP or to KDE.
That's the way such studies are usually done, y'know.
I wonder which MS front funded this study? Maybe we should see if RedHat or Suse is interested in doing the followup study.
You'll find some good commentary on this particular bit of mythology at:
m
http://www.snopes.com/history/american/gauge.ht
Their best comment on it is probably:
Marvelling that the width of modern roadways is similar to the width of ancient roadways is sort of like getting excited over a notion such as "modern clothes sizes are based upon standards developed by medieval tailors." Well, duh.
Then they go into a rather detailed explanation of why it's basically an uninteresting historical semi-truth for exactly this sort of reason.
Still, the modern "standard" railway gauge does go back at least a few centuries. And the early railroad equipment was derived from the sort of horse-drawn vehicles (carriages and carts), so of course it was about the same size.
But in the "standards" sense, the current American rail gauge doesn't really trace back to anything Roman, or much before around 1800. Before that, it's just vague copying, with sizes coming out nearly the same because the job (carrying people and their luggage) was about the same.
The Space Shuttle tie-in is completely bogus.
Well, I think those "loopholes" are all the zillions of features that people want, but they aren't good enough software designers to realize that the features belong in the layer above SMTP.
In particular, lack of authentication is a strength of SMTP, just as it is with IP. It means, for example, that I can implement my own authentication (or plug in PGP or whatever), and don't have to use the mail-transfer layer's after it turns out to have a serious hole that lets the spammers and con-men through.
Protocols that try to do everything for you have the inherent problem that, when a serious problem arises, you have to put up with it until the idiots at the vendor decide to solve it.
SMTP is simple enough that even a relatively incompetent programmer can do it correctly. You can type it yourself via a telnet connection.
And adding features in the higher layers is easy.
This scheme is an important part of the old UUCP package. Part of its handshake protocol is a message that lists all the protocols that the caller understands, in the order the caller would prefer to use them. The recipient goes through the list, picks its favorite, and sends back a message saying "Let's use X."
The advantage to this is that you can introduce new protocols completely painlessly. You pick a new name (after asking around on the newsgroup if anyone is using it), link your new protocol module into the protocol tables on the systems where you want to use it, and start using it. If you connect to a machine that doesn't have your protocol, it will simply tell you to use one of the others on your list. If your protocol is good, it will spread and will be early in the table for a lot of software. It can then slowly supplant the older protocols.
And you stay compatible with older systems by merely keeping the old protocol modules in your tables.
This is 1970's technology. So I suppose we'll soon read that Microsoft has just patented it.
C'mon now; the IPv6 upgrade will be spread out over at least several decades. And both Microsoft systems and many US Government installations will still be using it a century from now, because it's "standard".
After all, it's now past the death of typewriters, and we're still using the typewriter keyboard from nearly two centuries ago. And we use a ridiculous rail gauge, because the standard was set centuries ago.
And here in the US, we're still using inches and feet, measurements based on the lengths of the thumb and foot of a long-dead king. And we call them "standard".
We will be stuck with IPv4 for long past the final download of anyone reading this.
SMTP will probably be around even longer. But that's OK; it's fun to impress friends by a "telnet 25", followed by typing in a message directly to the server. I like to use "MAIL From: dubya@whitehouse.gov", and ask them if they'd be interested in a nice job in the TIA program. Then I challenge them to prove from the message they get who actually sent it.
Nah; it should be a length of yellow cable, with a vampire tap for the connection.
If you're gonna be retro, why stop at only 4 or 5 years back?
Only a minor number of artists give their music away for free ...
True, if by "artist" you mean "someone bound by a contract to a major distributor".
However, it is also true, twisting your words only slightly, that a great number of minor artists give their music away for free. By "minor artists", we of course mean someone NOT bound by a contract to a major distribbutor.
There are zillions of web sites offering the music of independent artists for free. Take a look around.
The major distributors, of course, are trying to stop this end run around their oligarchical control. We can hope they fail. But they do have funds to buy a lot of legislators.
Interesting comments, but not to the point. I'll quote the original poster's definition:
;-). These don't qualify. I'm talking about the sites that have the music itself available for download (in abc or nwc or lilypond or musicxml or gif or jpeg or pdf or whatever format). There are a lot of these sites now that aren't charging money.
I define open content as content possible for others to improve and redistribute and/or content that is produced without any consideration of immediate financial reward -- often collectively within a virtual community.
This EXACTLY fits the online-sheet-music example that I was talking about. For others to improve? Sure. If I put a tune online, say as a "fake book" transcription that's just melody and chords, several others may pick it up, and convert it into arrangements for whatever instruments they have available. They can put those arrangements up on their web site. They could also send them back to me (if they don't have a web site, or are just being friendly). But I won't replace my transcription with theirs; I'll add them in as new files. This obviously qualifies for the "improve and redistribute" part of the definition.
Also, most of these online sites are free, and the owner isn't making money from them. There are many sites advertising sheet music, of course, but won't let you view them until you've paid (and then they send the music by snail mail
They just understand that if N people each do 1/Nth of the job, then everyone has the entire effort availabe free.
Not really free, of course. You need volunteers to do 1/Nth of the job.
I do have a notice on my own sheet-music collection, to the effect that users are now required to transcribe some of their own favorite music and put it online. I get some friendly email from that. Sometimes I get an apology that the writer doesn't have a web site, but they'll send the music to me if I like.
So we have a virtual community that is providing the content free of charge, of people who consider themselves "paid" when they can use others' content in the same way. We can all modify the content and put the resulting content online. This seems to exactly fit the definition that the original article gave.
The main worry is that the publishing industry will do to us what the recording industry is trying to do to independent artists, and get laws passed that make it illegal for us to even put PD music online without going through them. In the past they did this through control of the (very expensive) printing presses. Now we don't need a printing press; we have video screens. But it's entirely possible that they'll bribe governments to outlaw it anyway. You can see this with the attempts to block file sharing of music, even by bands that want their material distributed this way, and who aren't signed by any corporations.
On the contrary. There is a fair amount of free "sheet music" available online now, in a number of open formats. It's mostly of older (pre-1930's) music, of course, for the obvious copyright reasons. You can find both classical and traditional (folk) music.
...?" With my wireless portable computer, I could quickly get on the Net, find the sheet music, bring it up on the screen, and say "Yeah, we can play that."
;-) books of music and pay the $0.05 per page or whatever to get it on their screen. This could quickly put an end to the illicit copying of printed books, because it's so much more convenient.
...
There's a clear benefit for the musicians who do it. I started doing it so I could access my music quickly from anywhere on the Net. I've even had cases where I was in a fairly remote area, and someone asked "Can you play
And it doesn't take a lot of brains to realize that the more people doing this, the better it is for all of us. You can get at my sheet music, I can get at yours, and we all benefit. Your average 8-year-old should understand this (though your average politician and CEO probably won't).
Now if we could do something about the copyright laws that prevent working musicians from doing such useful things with music from the past 80 years or so. Then we could dispense with the bulky binders and fake books, and just use our wireless portable. But I can't see this happening soon.
If the music publishers had a grain of sense, they'd do the obvious thing here. Set up web sites like the iTunes site, but for "sheet music", that charge a very small amount per page or per score. Encourage wireless coverage so that musicians will stop carrying around (copies of
But, of course, publishers will have to be dragged kicking and screaming (and suing) into the 21st century. We're watching the RIAA attacks on file sharers very closely, and we expect that the publishers will do the same thing to musicians in the near future. Musicians playing recent material will be in trouble. We classical and trad folk musicians mostly won't, because our material is public domain. You can't copyright Bach's or O'Carolan's music. (Yeah, publishers do claim copyright on these, but unless they make it clear that it's only their edition that's covered, their claim is fraudulent.)
The fact that musicians are doing this freely while publishers can't see the profit opportunity says a lot about economic theories based on a rational market
Interesting? Interesting???
Jeez; whaddaya gotta do to get a funny rating around here?
I wonder if any of these "DO NOT RECALL" statements were on thier resume when they applied for the $500 million jobs.
Yes, of course they are. It's a requirement for a $500 million job. If they can't trust you in court, why would they give you the job?
... is the Morse-Code column (after the oct, dec and hex columns) in the UniCode docs. We need Morse encodings for at least utf-16.
Hey, where's this OS "universal access control panel"? I've never heard of it, and the finder doesn't seem to be able to find it.
Also, I've found that disk ejection is not just a problem on linux; I've seen people having problems getting the box to release the CD on every kind of system. Usually when this happens, you have to find the program that has grabbed the CD and kill it. This can be difficult if the app has closed its window but is still running windowless in the background. On Windows, often a reboot is the only solution. On linux, a kill -9 will do it, but you have to first discover the right pid. On OSX, I've found that opening a few CD/DVD apps at random and telling them to eject will eventually do the job, but it often takes a lot of tries before something works.
Does any of these have an uncondition "Eject the CD right now, dammit!" command? Sure would be useful.
Also, is there any way to learn these things other than by asking in a public forum like this?
So how do you make it work? I'm typing this on a new Powerbook with OSX, and I have sorta figured out how to change the font sizes (though they don't always seem to stay changed). But this applies only to text.
The writer was asking about such things as menus, images, etc. Nothing I do changes any of these at all.
Actually, I have the opposite problem: People are always complaining about the tiny fonts that I use. This is because I try to use the smallest font that I can read, so I can get more info on the screen. On a laptop, there's less screen space, but I'm even closer, so I can use 9- and 10-point fonts.
But there's still a lot of screen space taken up by the menu bar, and all the things that apps like to string across the top of their window. This is wasted space that could be radically condensed and I'd still be able to read it. But there don't seem to be any controls for this.
On my linux box, I do things like turn off the title bars in most apps, tell KDE to use tiny icons, and so on. Other people can do turn off the title bars but use large fonts and icons. But with OSX, it seems to be one size fits all for menus, titles, icons, etc. Only the font in the "content" window can be configured.
I could well be wrong, of course. If so, where is it documented?
What? Windows has a mechanism to send an error report to Microsoft? I have a Windoze box, unfortunately, since I need to test my web stuff against IE. It rarely survives as long as half an hour when I'm doing the testing. But I've never seen any hint about sending an error report. I've certainly never gotten a box with buttons to send or cancel.
;-)
(Well, I have gotten them, but only from the mozilla that I installed.
It's not obvious how this could work anyway. When the thing crashes, the main symptoms are that all input events from the keyboard and mouse are ignored. Something is alive, because the mouse can move the pointer. But clicking on things has no effect, and no keyboard input (include CTL-ALT-DEL) has any effect. So even if there were a box with a Send button, it wouldn't work. And after a power cycle, it would be gone, so it won't work there.
I wonder how Bill Gates is measuring how many times my machine crashes? Does he list it as zero crashes per day?
But then the other box that's running linux is probably listed in his statistics as a Windows sale, because that's what was on it when Dell shipped it.
Methinks Billy is just making up his numbers.
Sob! I'm not there! How could they have missed me?
Oh. All the "names" end with @Kazaa. I don't use kazaa.
Never mind.
Actually, MIT has a long history of vigorously defending their people against legal attacks. They also strictly enforce rules like the one about turning down funding that doesn't give the researcher and MIT total control of publication. They have won a lot of power struggles against the US government, while simultaneously taking lots of funding money from Federal agencies at the same time. You can do things like that when you have the prestige that MIT has. Too bad other schools' administrations get cowed by legal bullies. If they had the guts to stand up and resist, they'd probably have the same prestige that MIT does.
And they do have strong ties to Harvard, with access to lots of the Harvard Law folks. An MIT ID card will get you into almost any place at Harvard, and vice versa. This isn't all that special, though; ties to Tufts, BU and BC are nearly as strong.
... does this mean that sweet little old lady at the checkout desk is a PIRATE???
Actually, yes, it does. One of the things that the publishing and recording industry has been discussing for years now is the growing possibility of limiting the number of readers/viewers to only the original purchaser. It's difficult to do with printed books. But anything in electronic form has a very real possibility of DRM that can implement such a limit.
At least 10 years ago, when the first prospects of electronic publishing were reaching the media, one of the interesting quotes that I read from several sources in the publishing industry was that on the average, each book sold is read by four people. This was followed by the suggestion that they should be seriously looking at ways to solve this problem.
Now, of the books in your home, how many have been read by four or more people? Hardly any of them, right? So where does this average of four readers come from? One place: libraries. The publishing industry does consider libraries to be a serious sales problem, and they are discussing solutions.
This isn't only about electronic books, CDs or DVDs. Part of the discussion has been ways of using political connections to cut back on funding of public libraries.
And a lot of publications already have a much higher subscription price for libraries than for individuals, though they don't really give the libraries anything more for their money.
Here in the US, a lot of the small-town public libraries have closed down in the past decade.
What I want to see is an ad featuring an artist explaining that he/she is starving because of the "take it or leave it" standard industry contract that they signed, which puts them in debt to the Company although the recording sold over a million copies.
Some years ago, I read an article by a French scientist who explained why he wrote all his papers in English rather than in his native French.
He explained that, as a scientist, one of his important tasks was helping devise good scientific terminology. The scientific community has come up with a very effective approach: If someone has good terminology for what you need, you use it rather than inventing your own. But if you can give a good reason why preceding terminology doesn't work well, you are not only allowed but expected to propose better terminology, and explain it in your paper.
He went on to explain that, if he were to publish in French, any new terminology would have to get the approval of the government's language commission. It's highly unlikely that anyone in that body will understand his area of technical expertise, so their decision will almost always be wrong (in the scientific sense).
But there is no such government angency in any English-speaking country. In English, there are no legal barriers to inventing your own terminology. So when he sees the need for a new word (or redefinition of an old word), he can just use it (and explain it) in his English paper. His colleagues in his area of research will be the judges of whether his new word (or redefinition) will be adopted.
He also commented that he was far from the only researcher who used this approach, and the same argument is often heard in German. He suggested that, as long as the English-speaking world remains so open and free about "corruption" of the English language, it will remain the World's primary scientific language.
So those who like the idea of English becoming the world's dominant language should applaud and encourage anti-English actions such as what the French are doing.
A linguistics prof in one class that I once took illustrated this with a tome published several centuries ago by a Japanese scholar who was upset by the widespread "corruption" of the Japanese language by borrowings from Chinese. So he wrote a major work that documented the old Japanese language very thoroughly. His work is considered quite valuable by linguists today. The fun part was that his title consisted entirely of loan words from Chinese.
The prof pointed out that this is difficult to do in English. Despite all the borrowings, it's still difficult to write more than 2 or 3 words in English without using a word of Anglo-Saxon origin. English is still at heart a West Germanic language, and all the "little" words are Germanic.
And it is true that the Japanese continue this approach, but now with heavy borrowings from English. They mangle the pronunciation badly, but look at what English does to Latin or Greek words. And our borrowings from Hebrew and Arabic are hardly recognizable.
Japanese and English are far from the only such cases. Swahili and Malay are both artificial "trade" languages that were constructed from several other languages of their respective areas, and they're about as much a mish-mash as is English.
Why can't we (in the western world) get this type of soft-spoken wisdom to be the face of OSS, and not the curmudgeonly off-putting geekazoidness of RMS?
But we do have such a person. Have you read anything from Linus Torvalds in the past 5 years?
Up until this point, Linux has competed mostly on price. Now it appears to have graduated to competing on value.
I'm not sure that's really true. In any number of discussions, I've seen that people repeatedly bring up variants of the question:
"Do you want your data to be under the control of a big American corporation that doesn't have your interests at heart?"
This is a really scary question to a lot of people in the world (including quite a lot of Americans). It has nothing to do with price; it's all about control.
For government agencies in particular, which have to function on longer terms than the current fiscal year, proprietary data formats are a serious problem. If you can't read your own files 10 or 20 years from now, you will be in bad trouble.
The fact that linux (and BSD) solve these problems very nicely is much of their appeal. The fact that, over the long run, you can save a lot of money is nice, too, but it's not the clincher.
"Quick 'n Dirty" == "Correct and Proper"
Funny, yeah, but also a useful approach, if done right.
When I'm faced with "Get it running fast", I try to make sure that I toss in terms like "prototype" and "proof of concept" at every opportunity. Especially when dealing with PHBs or customers.
Then, when they complain about bugs or missing features, I say "Yeah, and here's a list of some others I know about." And I add that I'll be happy to work on improving the prototype into a useful tool.
It helps a lot if you know how to do "prototype" programming. Write the prototype with the idea constantly in mind that you're writing hooks on which to hang all the things that people will want in the future. Plan on extending it. Call small functions that don't seem to do much, but you've realized that a useful program will want a lot of extending there, so you encapsulate it now. And so on.
If you keep hitting them with the idea that you consider the quick-and-dirty version to be just a prototype, they're a lot more likely to be happy with it despite its limitations, and to want to pay you to add all the things that you didn't have time for during the prototype phase.
You can also preempt a lot of criticism by constantly complaining about how it should be done now, but they keep bringing up new things that they want it to do. And when a new feature means you have to radically rewrite something you did earlier, complain about it, but let them know that if they really want it, you're willing to spend the time to make it work right.