Part of the problem is that people use the word "monopoly", which can be trivially debunked by showing that there are two companies. The correct term is "oligopoly".
When you have N companies that are in cahoots and dividing up the market or locking out independents, it can be just as bad as a monopoly. But when you use the term "monopoly" you are inviting people to pooh-pooh the problem by picking on your poorly chosen word.
If all you can hear when you twiddle your dial is N stations playing the same commercial schock music and a couple of identical-sounding right-wing talk shows, you have a problem. The fact that there are two or three companies who own them all doesn't mean that there's competition. It just means that they are cooperating to eliminate real competition and lock out what they've decided you don't need to hear.
My wife's favorite winter coat has a very traditional looking Navaho/Hopi design of a somewhat irregular-looking pastiche of vertical and horizontal brown and black bars against a gray background. She was somewhat bemused when I pointed out that portions of the design formed about 3/4 of a swastika. It's subtle, but once you notice it, you can't stop seeing it.
Of course, a full, isolated swastika isn't used any more, for obvious reasons. But if you're trying to make a traditional design from the general area of the American southwest or northern Mexico, it's difficult to avoid near-swastikas. It just happens as an artifact of the general design.
I've always thought that the main origin of this sort of design is that, like a plaid, it's fairly easy to weave. And over the centuries, a design will come to have cultural connotations, even if it was just a simple, pretty design at the start. Parts of the traditional Southwestern designs do have cultural meaning, though the swastika itself seems to be mostly just an artifact of the style.
Similarly, that traditional Greek zig-zag border design comes awfully close to a swastika at times, but it really is nothing more than a bit of attractive decoration.
Yeah, and above all, nobody should ever mention SCO's patent number(s). That would take half the fun out of it.
They did announce the patent numbers, didn't they?
Re:What the CIA needs:
on
IT at the CIA
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· Score: 1
One of the more interesting comments after the WTC attack was admissions that several US government agencies actually had some information about it, but the info hadn't been processed due to a lack of people who are fluent in Arabic.
And one of the more interesting comments on this is the people who tie it to the strong "English only" pressure in the US, especially in our school systems. The clear intent in this ongoing debate is that people don't want immigrant children to grow up fluent in their parents' languages. They should be Americanized as soon as possible, and this means learning only English, dammit.
So we now have a couple million Arab-Americans who learn Arabic only as a religious language, and are about as fluent in it as your average Catholic is fluent in Latin or your average Jew is fluent in Hebrew.
If we had a grain of sense, we'd be pushing immigrants to preserve their native languages and passing them on to their children, and we'd demand that our school systems encourage and support bilingualism in such families. We'd have millions of Arab-Americans who are fluent in Arabic, and a lot of them would be happy to work as translators for the CIA or other government agencies.
In a world that is becoming more and more internationalized, we have a serious need for people who are fluent in both English and another language. And it doesn't matter how important the other language is.
We paid severely for our English-only attitude on a certain Sept 11, and we will continue to pay for such willful ignorance and isolationism in the future.
I just don't understand why Microsoft didn't purchase this license years ago when the Services for UNIX was first started.
It makes sense to me.
For the purposes of their "Services for UNIX" effort, there is no need for a license whatsoever. They could just install linux and *BSD on a flock of development machines, with no license required. Software that runs on all these is going to be highly POSIX compliant, so porting it to other unix-like systems should be easy. Buying a few Solaris, HP-UX, OSX, AIX, etc. unix test machines would suffice for the rest of the market. They could even buy a few Caldera/SCO boxes to add to the test lab.
Unless they really want to muck around in the innards of SCO's commercial offerings, there's no need of a license at all. The only reason to do this is to supply non-portable apps that run only on SCO.
So what remains is the only reasonable explanation for their licensing SCO's stuff: They want to give SCO a big chunk of money for some purpose other than developing software for the unix market. One guess what this reason might be...
Last October,/. had an article on the topic. This described a fairly blatant case of "donating" a lot of software that couldn't run on the schools' computers unless the schools paid for expensive upgrades. The cost of the upgraded would have been much more than the claimed (i.e., retail) "value" of the donated software.
This is an old ruse. Before Microsoft, IBM used similar "gifts" to both tie schools into IBM hardware and make them pay for upgrades that the schools wouldn't have bought otherwise.
It's called "marketing".
Keeping the competition out is just part of it. Giving away freebies that require the mark to then buy something even more expensive is an old technique that long predates the existence of computers. When you buy a cheap laser or bubble-jet printer that then requires expensive ink cartridges every month, you are falling for the same tactic.
If this were done in Florida, they'd find a way to word the instructions in poorer districts so that the order of ranking is ambiguous. Half the voters would then assume that 10 is the top ranking and 1 is the lowest. They would then count the ballots with 1 as the top ranking. This would effectively neutralize that districts' votes, and there would be no way to prove it was fraudulent.
To see several examples of such an approach, look at the 2000 election in Florida.
I don't really like the idea of any sort of "seed" probing like that
Too late; it's been going on for a couple of billion years already.
In the 1960's (and probably earlier) a number of astronomers did detailed studies of the Earth's dust tail, which is formed by the solar wind blowing off the outermost atmosphere. It's pretty thin, but it's thick enough that it interferes with some sorts of astronomy.
They basically reported that the Earth's tail does contain particles of dust up to the size of bacterial spores. Tests had already shown that many bacterial spores can survive for long periods in space, the conclusion was obvious: The Earth has been spraying the outer solar system with bacterial spores for as long as bacteria have been making airborn spores, probably several billion years.
So there is life on all the outer planets in the solar system, and it came from Earth. Whether any of those spores can survive elsewhere isn't known. But conditions on Mars are not all that dissimilar to conditions in the dry valleys in Antarctica, and some bacteria do survive and grow there. So it's possible that some of the bacteria from Earth are surviving and growing there, though probably not very well. OTOH, some have been there for a couple billion years, so there has been time for natural selection to do its thing.
Some of the astronomers also pointed out back then that the Earth's dust tail doesn't stay within the solar system. It eventually reaches interstellar space. Considering that the Earth orbits the galaxy about 4 times per billion years, and bacteria have been here for around 4 billion years, the dust tail of Earth has pretty much permeated the galaxy with spores. Similar calculations would apply to any other Earth-like planet in the galaxy.
This sort of calculation is part of the basic of the "panspermia" hypothesis that has gotten a bit of discussion in some circles. Of course, it's a bit difficult to collect real evidence on such a topic. But if we do find living bacteria on Mars or Titan that have chemistry similar to bacteria on Earth, it will be weak supportive evidence.
This isn't the first time this topic has come up on/.
Wouldn't it be interesting if the "privately-funded" Mailblocks were to win and then refuse to license their patent to anyone? Or maybe offer to license it, but for exorbitant license fees. Then, 20 years from now, we'd find out that their private funding came from companies with an interest in Direct Marketing? Or that Mailblocks itself exists as a marketing tool, to collect email addresses and sell them?
One of the very real uses of patents is to prevent people from using the technology.
In any properly managed environment, developers don't get to [i]touch[/i] the production environment.
In the project that I'm working on, this is done. And it's the main reason that changes to the "live" web sites are usually disasters.
I develop something new, test it very thoroughly on my test machines. It all seems to be working, so I hand it over to the guys running the live systems. They install it in different directories than I did (and won't ever tell me where they plan to installl things, so I can't defend against this very well). They change the cgi scripts' search paths so they can't find some of the things they need (or find old versions). They install images in random new directories without changing the tags.
Then they complain that my stuff doesn't work, and was obviously not tested thoroughly.
Well, of course it wasn't. I have no way of knowing how it'll be mangled when its installed in the live systems. I can't find out the directory structures of the live systems. But I get the blame when it's installed all wrong.;-)
Not only that, but we'll have to modify the nslookup and host commands so they no longer tell you that a FQDN wasn't found, since that would be contributory infringement.
Also, all those browsers that have done URL completion for years will have to stop doing it, because it's also a (retroactive) violation of this patent.
So you'll have to specify whitehouse.gov or whitehouse.org; your browser won't be permitted to guess whether you want politics or porn.
The prospect that you--and you're not alone--are really this confused terrifies and depresses me.
I don't think I'm the least bit confused, and neither are the many musicians who consider the "industry standard" contract nothing more than legalized theft. The fact that the legal system is behind it doesn't make it moral or ethical.
As Woody Guthrie pointed out -
Some will rob you with a six-gun, some with a fountain pen.
One of the big issues with musicians is that for decades, the distribution channels have been held by a small groups of corporations that enforce a "standard contract" requiring that a musician assign the copyright to the corporation. This has meant only a handful of musicians can actually make any money selling recordings. This is also why so many people don't consider copying music to be stealing. After all, the music was already stolen from the musicians, and nobody who understands the issue has any sympathy for the thief, i.e., the recording industry corporations.
The Internet poses a serious threat to this. However, ISPs have been working to take control themselves. Most of them in the US now block port 80, so most musicians can't legally run a web site on their own machines. The ISPs then offer web space on their machines, but the license states that all files on such a web site belong to the ISP. The result is that, once again, musicians must give the copyright to the corporation that controls the distribution channel. The most notorious of these is msn.com, of course, but others have been doing the same thing.
If they succeed with this approach, it will mean the end of the recording industry, since the ISPs will own the copyrights to everything on the Web. But it will be just as big a financial disaster for musicians, who will still live in a world in which the local internet monopoly controls the distribution channels and can demand the copyright in exchange for making files available.
Google for "Newcastle Connection". It turns up "about 544" matches, including the original SP&E paper from back in Dec '82. Make sure you use the quotes, or you'll get 128,000 matches for "Newcastle" and/or "Connection". Nice if you're related to the Altrincham Balshaws, but not of much use if you're looking for distributed computer systems.
There were never any RFCs, of course, because it wasn't any sort of official Internet project. And it ran on networks that used several different protocols, not just IP. All the instances that I saw used IP, though.
It was sorta interesting that outside of UK academia, TNC was mostly seen inside corporations. For instance, it was in use at a number of Motorola sites, and there was a floating TNC system inside Digital as an easy way of linking multi-site projects together. But management never seemed to see it as anything that customers would be interested in. "People seem to want NFS or SMB, not a general-purpose distributed OS."
In academia, I think the usual reaction was "Cool; let's build something like that ourselves. How hard can it be?" So we saw lots of similar developments. Some, like Andrew, got a bit of publicity, though the public reaction seems to have lent support to the idea that customers didn't want any such thing, but preferred to use floppies to copy files around.
As I said, I was one who reverse engineered TNC on one project. Funny thing was, there was another fellow down the hall who did the same thing. We compared notes a lot, and had a friendly competition going. (Hi, Dave, if you're listening!) As with TNC, neither of our packages got any reaction at all from management, who didn't understand why we wasted our time with something so worthless.
Y'know; I'm really disappointed that nobody here has yet mentioned what is probably the granddaddy of distributed unix systems: TNC (The Newcastle Connection). It was publicly announced in SP&E back in '82.
It does something the writer requested that NFS doesn't: It provides a consistent directory tree on all systems. They were the folks who invented the rather elegant "/../" notation for getting out on the Net and accessing another computer's files, after all.
Also, unlike NFS, TNC hasn't ever required centralized security. Their scheme was to have a plugin module that mapped the id info (address, hostname, userid, etc.) into local ids. It was easy enough to just map all outsiders to "nobody/nogroup", thus blocking all access from outside while letting you see out. One of the useful features of this distributed system is that each machine's owner can control outside access independently, without being beholden to the whims of some network administrator
I worked with instances of TNC at several big corporations back in the 80's, and it was fairly slick. You literally had one network-wide tree that looked the same from everywhere. It was a real disappointment to see NFS get adopted as "standard", since one of its major problems all along has been the inability to pass file names around within distributed applications. You just get ENOENT on most of the machines, because the people setting up NFS never consider consistent directory trees to be anything important.
I also worked on one project where we decided to reverse engineer TNC's approach. "How difficult can it be?" It wasn't difficult. It took me about two weeks to get to the point that I could type "make" in a directory whose Makefile used source scattered across a collection of machines, and it worked. This included machines whose clocks weren't synchronized; solving this problem took me a morning, and didn't require any time servers or root permission anywhere.
... the band doesn't get even HALF the money (or even a quarter of it for some bands).
Most bands don't gen ANY money from a commercially-made recording.
There have been any number of analyses published that explain why, unless you sell a million or more albums, you end up in debt to the recording company.
I do wonder what sort of deal a n unknown musician or band needs to sign to get their stuff on iTunes. Do you have to sign the rights over to Apple? Or will they put your tracks up on terms that give you part of the money? So far, I haven't seen any comment on this, only that Apple was making the top-selling commercial music available. Any pointers to info on this topic?
If Apple will give us nobodies a reasonable cut of the income without having to sign away the rights to our music, we'll consider them heroes. If they go the way of the recording industry and require the same sort of "standard" contract, then they're just part of the problem.
Well, I dunno about that. I've worked on any number of "planned" projects, and in every one, the same thing has happened: The managment comes along and changes the requirements. So you have to kludge the plan to handle the new requirements. Then they do it again, and again...
I don't think I've ever seen a planned, commercial project that interoperated with anything else. Usually you even have to write new editors because all the file formats are proprietary. Just looking at the data in a file often requires a new program, because it's a new, proprietary format, and not even your vendor's software can read it.
OTOH, I have some "C/unix" programs that I wrote 20 years ago. I've reused them on dozens of different kinds of computers, and usually about the only problems are that the #include lines need to be rewritten. Sometimes I have to change a few variables to a different size int. But there is rarely any problem with my programs interoperating with other programs. This is shown by the fact that I always have a lot of scripts that combine my programs with other programs.
The project I'm working on now consists essentially of "raiding" the data at a big corporation, and extracting as much info as I can from their old, poorly-documented files that are in formats that can't be read on any new computer. My code converts them to plain text, mostly flat files, a few HTML and XML files. They can be read on any computer that we copy them to. They can be dropped into a web directory and read from any browser on any computer.
I'm doing all my work on linux boxes. I keep pointing out to them that my converted files no only work ("interoperate") with most any linux software, but will work on nearly any computer out there, and will continue to work for years. They believe me, because when they copy the files to their other random computers, their programmers don't seem to have problems with the file formats.
Of course, one of the things they really want is to take the data and stuff it into a commercial database. The result will be data that can only be used by a timy amount of software from that database supplier. Well, that and the perl DB package (which we will note is Open Source). But note that they are doing what corporate management always wants to do: Put the data into a format that can't be easly read by other programs.
In summary, I'd say that the Open Source environment, and more generally the non-proprietary parts of commercial unix systems, are by a large margin the best place to find interoperability. Closed, commercial systems can generally be summarized as "Your data won't work anywhere else, and won't even work on the same vendor's systems 5 years from now."
At least that's the history that I've seen so far.
Some of the comments that look like FUD may just be lack of understanding. Consider the author's comments:
Myth: Linux Is Free
"Supported versions of Linux are not free," Silver notes....
It's clear from his remarks that he doesn't understand the difference between "Free as in speech" and "Free as in beer". He obviously thinks the word "free" in linux comments always refers to price. Reading further makes it clear that he has little if any appreciation of the uses of "free as in speech" software, and why this might be of value to a paying customer.
Now if we could just debug the English language...
For another data point, you might find it interesting to check out the changed rules at Nature magazine. For some reason,/. wouldn't accept the usual html tag, so here's the URL:
In February, they basically dropped the old rule that you had to sign your paper over to them to get it published. Now their rule is that copyright must stay with the original author(s). To get it published, you assign to Nature a license that leaves you with ownership and the right to do essentially everything except give up ownership of your paper. You can use it freely in classroom material, make reprints, and put it up on web sites, as long as you maintain control. You can't hand it over to an employer, no matter what their rules may say.
If your employer already has a legal claim to your paper, Nature won't publish it. To get it published, your employer must first give you full rights.
And they are assigning ownership of all previously-published papers back to the authors under the same terms.
Their intent is to guarantee that any research that they publish can be made available to the public by the author(s), and that employers can't take any publication rights away from an author.
It'll be interesting to see what other tech publishers do.
Well, don't give up. Evan a "crappy little band" can help kill off the RIAA and their ilk. There are a lot of file-sharing programs out there now. Ask around and you'll probably find someone willing to make your stuff available online.
A couple years ago I wrote a little article about a case hereabouts. There's probably someone in your area doing the same sort of thing.
The more peope we can get involved in such things, the sooner we can tear down the wall (as Ronnie Reagan said) that the big corporations have built between musicians and their audiences.
A week or so ago when Madonna offered her "What the F*** do you think you are doing" mp3...
I wonder if Madonna got an IM from the RIAA for this?
Joking aside, this does bring up an especially interesting question: How many of you have been using p2p to distribute your own music? Let's see a show of hands from people who have received warnings from the RIAA after using p2p to share your own music.
This isn't a trivial point. One of the recording industry's real fears is that they are being made obsolete. In the past, they've had a stranglehold on music distribution channels. You and I couldn't distribute our own music; we had to sign it over to the corporations that control the distribution. This is ending, now that we can make our music available via the internet.
This is what has the RIAA and MPAA running scared. They want monopoly control over this new distribution medium. The only way they can get this is if they can prevent you from distributing your own copyrighted material via the internet. Then you'll have to sign your files over to them, and they'll take all the profits and stick you with a bill like they do with commercial recordings.
What we really need now is a few test cases in which the RIAA has threatened people who are putting their own music online. A few such cases could make for very useful legal precent...
Re:That's all very well but
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AAC vs. OGG vs. MP3
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· Score: 2, Interesting
Cool. So you can see polarized-type 3-D movies in 3-D without wearing the special glasses?:)
Heh; no. It doesn't seem to work that way, at least for me. I seem to know without thinking about it whether light is polarized, but I can't actually tell what the polarization is. If I think about it, I can, but that's from experience.
Zoologists have reported that some animals can detect the direction of polarization. One of them is the common pigeon. The doves apparently have a polarizing filter inside their eyes.
This was reported by people studying pigeons' direction finding, which they are notoriously good at. One thing was discovered was that they weren't as good on overcast days as on sunny days. They got good evidence that the birds used the sun's position and the time of day as a compass. Then they found that if there were a couple of spots of blue sky visible, the birds apparently knew where the sun was, even if it was hidden behind clouds. The explanation is that blue sky is polarized, and the polarization points away from (or towards) the sun. It's strongest 90 degrees from the sun, and weaker near the sun or near the horizon. So one patch of blue will give a pigeon a line that the sun lies on; two blue patches tell them where the sun is.
These birds also seem to be able to detect the planet's magnetic field, giving them a second compass (which has failure modes near some sorts of human artifacts). Lots of critters, including a lot of bacteria, have a magnetic sense based on tiny crystals of magnetite. We apparently don't have any magnetite in our heads. But I wouldn't be surprised to read about a weak magnetic sense in some humans. Who would have thought that the human eye could detect polarization?
Get yourself a polarizing filter and experiment with it. It's fun, and after a while, you'll find yourself knowing what it will do to a scene without thinking about it. You'll somehow know that some surfaces (and skies) are sending polarized light, and you'll know when you want to cancel or enhance the polarization with your filter.
I haven't read that the mechanism is known in humans. It's possible that the human eye really can't see the polarization. Rather, your brain might "just know" what surfaces produce polarization without any conscious thought.
Re:That's all very well but
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AAC vs. OGG vs. MP3
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· Score: 4, Informative
musicians are legendary for listening on poor equipment and filling in the rest of the music mentally
Yes, of course, but there's a different interpretation of this. It's not unusual for musicians to intentionally use low-quality equipment in order to make the music clearer. They aren't overcoming the limitations of the poor equipment; they are using it as a tool.
As an extreme example, I've known a number of musicians who have recordings of harpsichord music, but don't like the instrument itself. The reason is simple: They have good high-frequency hearing, and a live harpsichord is just a loud high-pitched buzz with barely-audible music in the background. But with a recording, especially on low-quality playback equipment, you can wipe out the high frequencies. This makes the music audible.
There are a fair number of people who have a similar reaction to violins. Although it's not as bad as a harpsichord, a violin has strong high-frequency harmonics that are often badly out of tune. If you clip off everything above 15 kHz or so, you eliminate this distracting noise and the music comes through.
I've made a lot of "very live" recordings of dance bands with a room full of dancers. One of the tricks that I've learned is to use fairly cheap mikes that don't hear the low or high frequencies. Then I don't have to do as much processing to get a good sound.
An interesting thing about this: I've occasionally made two recordings, one with good mikes and one with poor mikes that fall off around 12 or 14 kHz. When I play them for listeners who were there, they inevitably say that the "poor" recording sounds more live than the "good" one. What seems to be going on is that the human brain is fairly good at compensating for the low- and high-frequency noise in such situations. Participants don't hear all the background noise. But in a quiet room with the noise coming from a speaker, people do hear it.
This is similar to the phenomenon that photographers will tell you about: The human eye/brain system is very good at correcting for color cast. Cameras record the true color (within the bounds of the film type and latitude), so the cast is visible in the photo when it wasn't in the original scene. But photographers learn to see the full color and can't ignore a color cast, just a musicians learn to hear all the sound and can't easily ignore background noise.
(Similarly, after playing around with a polarizing filter for a few months, I found that I could "see" polarization. And now I can't turn it off.;-)
Slashdot Mirror
Part of the problem is that people use the word "monopoly", which can be trivially debunked by showing that there are two companies. The correct term is "oligopoly".
When you have N companies that are in cahoots and dividing up the market or locking out independents, it can be just as bad as a monopoly. But when you use the term "monopoly" you are inviting people to pooh-pooh the problem by picking on your poorly chosen word.
If all you can hear when you twiddle your dial is N stations playing the same commercial schock music and a couple of identical-sounding right-wing talk shows, you have a problem. The fact that there are two or three companies who own them all doesn't mean that there's competition. It just means that they are cooperating to eliminate real competition and lock out what they've decided you don't need to hear.
My wife's favorite winter coat has a very traditional looking Navaho/Hopi design of a somewhat irregular-looking pastiche of vertical and horizontal brown and black bars against a gray background. She was somewhat bemused when I pointed out that portions of the design formed about 3/4 of a swastika. It's subtle, but once you notice it, you can't stop seeing it.
Of course, a full, isolated swastika isn't used any more, for obvious reasons. But if you're trying to make a traditional design from the general area of the American southwest or northern Mexico, it's difficult to avoid near-swastikas. It just happens as an artifact of the general design.
I've always thought that the main origin of this sort of design is that, like a plaid, it's fairly easy to weave. And over the centuries, a design will come to have cultural connotations, even if it was just a simple, pretty design at the start. Parts of the traditional Southwestern designs do have cultural meaning, though the swastika itself seems to be mostly just an artifact of the style.
Similarly, that traditional Greek zig-zag border design comes awfully close to a swastika at times, but it really is nothing more than a bit of attractive decoration.
Yeah, and above all, nobody should ever mention SCO's patent number(s). That would take half the fun out of it.
They did announce the patent numbers, didn't they?
One of the more interesting comments after the WTC attack was admissions that several US government agencies actually had some information about it, but the info hadn't been processed due to a lack of people who are fluent in Arabic.
And one of the more interesting comments on this is the people who tie it to the strong "English only" pressure in the US, especially in our school systems. The clear intent in this ongoing debate is that people don't want immigrant children to grow up fluent in their parents' languages. They should be Americanized as soon as possible, and this means learning only English, dammit.
So we now have a couple million Arab-Americans who learn Arabic only as a religious language, and are about as fluent in it as your average Catholic is fluent in Latin or your average Jew is fluent in Hebrew.
If we had a grain of sense, we'd be pushing immigrants to preserve their native languages and passing them on to their children, and we'd demand that our school systems encourage and support bilingualism in such families. We'd have millions of Arab-Americans who are fluent in Arabic, and a lot of them would be happy to work as translators for the CIA or other government agencies.
In a world that is becoming more and more internationalized, we have a serious need for people who are fluent in both English and another language. And it doesn't matter how important the other language is.
We paid severely for our English-only attitude on a certain Sept 11, and we will continue to pay for such willful ignorance and isolationism in the future.
I just don't understand why Microsoft didn't purchase this license years ago when the Services for UNIX was first started.
...
It makes sense to me.
For the purposes of their "Services for UNIX" effort, there is no need for a license whatsoever. They could just install linux and *BSD on a flock of development machines, with no license required. Software that runs on all these is going to be highly POSIX compliant, so porting it to other unix-like systems should be easy. Buying a few Solaris, HP-UX, OSX, AIX, etc. unix test machines would suffice for the rest of the market. They could even buy a few Caldera/SCO boxes to add to the test lab.
Unless they really want to muck around in the innards of SCO's commercial offerings, there's no need of a license at all. The only reason to do this is to supply non-portable apps that run only on SCO.
So what remains is the only reasonable explanation for their licensing SCO's stuff: They want to give SCO a big chunk of money for some purpose other than developing software for the unix market. One guess what this reason might be
Last October, /. had an article on the topic. This described a fairly blatant case of "donating" a lot of software that couldn't run on the schools' computers unless the schools paid for expensive upgrades. The cost of the upgraded would have been much more than the claimed (i.e., retail) "value" of the donated software.
This is an old ruse. Before Microsoft, IBM used similar "gifts" to both tie schools into IBM hardware and make them pay for upgrades that the schools wouldn't have bought otherwise.
It's called "marketing".
Keeping the competition out is just part of it. Giving away freebies that require the mark to then buy something even more expensive is an old technique that long predates the existence of computers. When you buy a cheap laser or bubble-jet printer that then requires expensive ink cartridges every month, you are falling for the same tactic.
If this were done in Florida, they'd find a way to word the instructions in poorer districts so that the order of ranking is ambiguous. Half the voters would then assume that 10 is the top ranking and 1 is the lowest. They would then count the ballots with 1 as the top ranking. This would effectively neutralize that districts' votes, and there would be no way to prove it was fraudulent.
To see several examples of such an approach, look at the 2000 election in Florida.
I don't really like the idea of any sort of "seed" probing like that
/.
Too late; it's been going on for a couple of billion years already.
In the 1960's (and probably earlier) a number of astronomers did detailed studies of the Earth's dust tail, which is formed by the solar wind blowing off the outermost atmosphere. It's pretty thin, but it's thick enough that it interferes with some sorts of astronomy.
They basically reported that the Earth's tail does contain particles of dust up to the size of bacterial spores. Tests had already shown that many bacterial spores can survive for long periods in space, the conclusion was obvious: The Earth has been spraying the outer solar system with bacterial spores for as long as bacteria have been making airborn spores, probably several billion years.
So there is life on all the outer planets in the solar system, and it came from Earth. Whether any of those spores can survive elsewhere isn't known. But conditions on Mars are not all that dissimilar to conditions in the dry valleys in Antarctica, and some bacteria do survive and grow there. So it's possible that some of the bacteria from Earth are surviving and growing there, though probably not very well. OTOH, some have been there for a couple billion years, so there has been time for natural selection to do its thing.
Some of the astronomers also pointed out back then that the Earth's dust tail doesn't stay within the solar system. It eventually reaches interstellar space. Considering that the Earth orbits the galaxy about 4 times per billion years, and bacteria have been here for around 4 billion years, the dust tail of Earth has pretty much permeated the galaxy with spores. Similar calculations would apply to any other Earth-like planet in the galaxy.
This sort of calculation is part of the basic of the "panspermia" hypothesis that has gotten a bit of discussion in some circles. Of course, it's a bit difficult to collect real evidence on such a topic.
But if we do find living bacteria on Mars or Titan that have chemistry similar to bacteria on Earth, it will be weak supportive evidence.
This isn't the first time this topic has come up on
everyone with any real cred still uses HTTP 1.0.
/some/file.xml
Huh? To get real cred, you do:
: telnet foo.bar.com 80
GET
And you hit Return twice, of course, but you knew that.
HTTP 0.9 is the Real Thing.
Hey, anyone remember HTTP 0.5?
Wouldn't it be interesting if the "privately-funded" Mailblocks were to win and then refuse to license their patent to anyone? Or maybe offer to license it, but for exorbitant license fees. Then, 20 years from now, we'd find out that their private funding came from companies with an interest in Direct Marketing? Or that Mailblocks itself exists as a marketing tool, to collect email addresses and sell them?
One of the very real uses of patents is to prevent people from using the technology.
So am I paranoid enough yet?
In any properly managed environment, developers don't get to [i]touch[/i] the production environment.
;-)
In the project that I'm working on, this is done. And it's the main reason that changes to the "live" web sites are usually disasters.
I develop something new, test it very thoroughly on my test machines. It all seems to be working, so I hand it over to the guys running the live systems. They install it in different directories than I did (and won't ever tell me where they plan to installl things, so I can't defend against this very well). They change the cgi scripts' search paths so they can't find some of the things they need (or find old versions). They install images in random new directories without changing the tags.
Then they complain that my stuff doesn't work, and was obviously not tested thoroughly.
Well, of course it wasn't. I have no way of knowing how it'll be mangled when its installed in the live systems. I can't find out the directory structures of the live systems. But I get the blame when it's installed all wrong.
Nah, just post a link to the transcript (or mp3) of the program here. Then those of us who rarely watch tv will find out about it.
/. geeks will read it.
If it's on NPR, I might hear it, but probably not. But if there's a followup here that links to it, I and all the
Not only that, but we'll have to modify the nslookup and host commands so they no longer tell you that a FQDN wasn't found, since that would be contributory infringement.
Also, all those browsers that have done URL completion for years will have to stop doing it, because it's also a (retroactive) violation of this patent.
So you'll have to specify whitehouse.gov or whitehouse.org; your browser won't be permitted to guess whether you want politics or porn.
The prospect that you--and you're not alone--are really this confused terrifies and depresses me.
I don't think I'm the least bit confused, and neither are the many musicians who consider the "industry standard" contract nothing more than legalized theft. The fact that the legal system is behind it doesn't make it moral or ethical.
As Woody Guthrie pointed out -
Some will rob you with a six-gun, some with a fountain pen.
One of the big issues with musicians is that for decades, the distribution channels have been held by a small groups of corporations that enforce a "standard contract" requiring that a musician assign the copyright to the corporation. This has meant only a handful of musicians can actually make any money selling recordings. This is also why so many people don't consider copying music to be stealing. After all, the music was already stolen from the musicians, and nobody who understands the issue has any sympathy for the thief, i.e., the recording industry corporations.
The Internet poses a serious threat to this. However, ISPs have been working to take control themselves. Most of them in the US now block port 80, so most musicians can't legally run a web site on their own machines. The ISPs then offer web space on their machines, but the license states that all files on such a web site belong to the ISP. The result is that, once again, musicians must give the copyright to the corporation that controls the distribution channel. The most notorious of these is msn.com, of course, but others have been doing the same thing.
If they succeed with this approach, it will mean the end of the recording industry, since the ISPs will own the copyrights to everything on the Web. But it will be just as big a financial disaster for musicians, who will still live in a world in which the local internet monopoly controls the distribution channels and can demand the copyright in exchange for making files available.
Is there any solution to this?
Google for "Newcastle Connection". It turns up "about 544" matches, including the original SP&E paper from back in Dec '82. Make sure you use the quotes, or you'll get 128,000 matches for "Newcastle" and/or "Connection". Nice if you're related to the Altrincham Balshaws, but not of much use if you're looking for distributed computer systems.
There were never any RFCs, of course, because it wasn't any sort of official Internet project. And it ran on networks that used several different protocols, not just IP. All the instances that I saw used IP, though.
It was sorta interesting that outside of UK academia, TNC was mostly seen inside corporations. For instance, it was in use at a number of Motorola sites, and there was a floating TNC system inside Digital as an easy way of linking multi-site projects together. But management never seemed to see it as anything that customers would be interested in. "People seem to want NFS or SMB, not a general-purpose distributed OS."
In academia, I think the usual reaction was "Cool; let's build something like that ourselves. How hard can it be?" So we saw lots of similar developments. Some, like Andrew, got a bit of publicity, though the public reaction seems to have lent support to the idea that customers didn't want any such thing, but preferred to use floppies to copy files around.
As I said, I was one who reverse engineered TNC on one project. Funny thing was, there was another fellow down the hall who did the same thing. We compared notes a lot, and had a friendly competition going. (Hi, Dave, if you're listening!) As with TNC, neither of our packages got any reaction at all from management, who didn't understand why we wasted our time with something so worthless.
Y'know; I'm really disappointed that nobody here has yet mentioned what is probably the granddaddy of distributed unix systems: TNC (The Newcastle Connection). It was publicly announced in SP&E back in '82.
...
It does something the writer requested that NFS doesn't: It provides a consistent directory tree on all systems. They were the folks who invented the rather elegant "/../" notation for getting out on the Net and accessing another computer's files, after all.
Also, unlike NFS, TNC hasn't ever required centralized security. Their scheme was to have a plugin module that mapped the id info (address, hostname, userid, etc.) into local ids. It was easy enough to just map all outsiders to "nobody/nogroup", thus blocking all access from outside while letting you see out. One of the useful features of this distributed system is that each machine's owner can control outside access independently, without being beholden to the whims of some network administrator
I worked with instances of TNC at several big corporations back in the 80's, and it was fairly slick. You literally had one network-wide tree that looked the same from everywhere. It was a real disappointment to see NFS get adopted as "standard", since one of its major problems all along has been the inability to pass file names around within distributed applications. You just get ENOENT on most of the machines, because the people setting up NFS never consider consistent directory trees to be anything important.
I also worked on one project where we decided to reverse engineer TNC's approach. "How difficult can it be?" It wasn't difficult. It took me about two weeks to get to the point that I could type "make" in a directory whose Makefile used source scattered across a collection of machines, and it worked. This included machines whose clocks weren't synchronized; solving this problem took me a morning, and didn't require any time servers or root permission anywhere.
As I said; I've been disappointed
... the band doesn't get even HALF the money (or even a quarter of it for some bands).
Most bands don't gen ANY money from a commercially-made recording.
There have been any number of analyses published that explain why, unless you sell a million or more albums, you end up in debt to the recording company.
I do wonder what sort of deal a n unknown musician or band needs to sign to get their stuff on iTunes. Do you have to sign the rights over to Apple? Or will they put your tracks up on terms that give you part of the money? So far, I haven't seen any comment on this, only that Apple was making the top-selling commercial music available. Any pointers to info on this topic?
If Apple will give us nobodies a reasonable cut of the income without having to sign away the rights to our music, we'll consider them heroes. If they go the way of the recording industry and require the same sort of "standard" contract, then they're just part of the problem.
Well, I dunno about that. I've worked on any number of "planned" projects, and in every one, the same thing has happened: The managment comes along and changes the requirements. So you have to kludge the plan to handle the new requirements. Then they do it again, and again ...
I don't think I've ever seen a planned, commercial project that interoperated with anything else. Usually you even have to write new editors because all the file formats are proprietary. Just looking at the data in a file often requires a new program, because it's a new, proprietary format, and not even your vendor's software can read it.
OTOH, I have some "C/unix" programs that I wrote 20 years ago. I've reused them on dozens of different kinds of computers, and usually about the only problems are that the #include lines need to be rewritten. Sometimes I have to change a few variables to a different size int. But there is rarely any problem with my programs interoperating with other programs. This is shown by the fact that I always have a lot of scripts that combine my programs with other programs.
The project I'm working on now consists essentially of "raiding" the data at a big corporation, and extracting as much info as I can from their old, poorly-documented files that are in formats that can't be read on any new computer. My code converts them to plain text, mostly flat files, a few HTML and XML files. They can be read on any computer that we copy them to. They can be dropped into a web directory and read from any browser on any computer.
I'm doing all my work on linux boxes. I keep pointing out to them that my converted files no only work ("interoperate") with most any linux software, but will work on nearly any computer out there, and will continue to work for years. They believe me, because when they copy the files to their other random computers, their programmers don't seem to have problems with the file formats.
Of course, one of the things they really want is to take the data and stuff it into a commercial database. The result will be data that can only be used by a timy amount of software from that database supplier. Well, that and the perl DB package (which we will note is Open Source). But note that they are doing what corporate management always wants to do: Put the data into a format that can't be easly read by other programs.
In summary, I'd say that the Open Source environment, and more generally the non-proprietary parts of commercial unix systems, are by a large margin the best place to find interoperability. Closed, commercial systems can generally be summarized as "Your data won't work anywhere else, and won't even work on the same vendor's systems 5 years from now."
At least that's the history that I've seen so far.
Some of the comments that look like FUD may just be lack of understanding. Consider the author's comments:
...
...
Myth: Linux Is Free
"Supported versions of Linux are not free," Silver notes.
It's clear from his remarks that he doesn't understand the difference between "Free as in speech" and "Free as in beer". He obviously thinks the word "free" in linux comments always refers to price. Reading further makes it clear that he has little if any appreciation of the uses of "free as in speech" software, and why this might be of value to a paying customer.
Now if we could just debug the English language
For another data point, you might find it interesting to check out the changed rules at Nature magazine. For some reason, /. wouldn't accept the usual html tag, so here's the URL:
x ml /05_news.xml&style=xml/05_news.xsl
http://npg.nature.com/npg/servlet/Content?data=
In February, they basically dropped the old rule that you had to sign your paper over to them to get it published. Now their rule is that copyright must stay with the original author(s). To get it published, you assign to Nature a license that leaves you with ownership and the right to do essentially everything except give up ownership of your paper. You can use it freely in classroom material, make reprints, and put it up on web sites, as long as you maintain control. You can't hand it over to an employer, no matter what their rules may say.
If your employer already has a legal claim to your paper, Nature won't publish it. To get it published, your employer must first give you full rights.
And they are assigning ownership of all previously-published papers back to the authors under the same terms.
Their intent is to guarantee that any research that they publish can be made available to the public by the author(s), and that employers can't take any publication rights away from an author.
It'll be interesting to see what other tech publishers do.
Well, don't give up. Evan a "crappy little band" can help kill off the RIAA and their ilk. There are a lot of file-sharing programs out there now. Ask around and you'll probably find someone willing to make your stuff available online.
A couple years ago I wrote a little article about a case hereabouts. There's probably someone in your area doing the same sort of thing.
The more peope we can get involved in such things, the sooner we can tear down the wall (as Ronnie Reagan said) that the big corporations have built between musicians and their audiences.
A week or so ago when Madonna offered her "What the F*** do you think you are doing" mp3 ...
...
I wonder if Madonna got an IM from the RIAA for this?
Joking aside, this does bring up an especially interesting question: How many of you have been using p2p to distribute your own music? Let's see a show of hands from people who have received warnings from the RIAA after using p2p to share your own music.
This isn't a trivial point. One of the recording industry's real fears is that they are being made obsolete. In the past, they've had a stranglehold on music distribution channels. You and I couldn't distribute our own music; we had to sign it over to the corporations that control the distribution. This is ending, now that we can make our music available via the internet.
This is what has the RIAA and MPAA running scared. They want monopoly control over this new distribution medium. The only way they can get this is if they can prevent you from distributing your own copyrighted material via the internet. Then you'll have to sign your files over to them, and they'll take all the profits and stick you with a bill like they do with commercial recordings.
What we really need now is a few test cases in which the RIAA has threatened people who are putting their own music online. A few such cases could make for very useful legal precent
Cool. So you can see polarized-type 3-D movies in 3-D without wearing the special glasses? :)
Heh; no. It doesn't seem to work that way, at least for me. I seem to know without thinking about it whether light is polarized, but I can't actually tell what the polarization is. If I think about it, I can, but that's from experience.
Zoologists have reported that some animals can detect the direction of polarization. One of them is the common pigeon. The doves apparently have a polarizing filter inside their eyes.
This was reported by people studying pigeons' direction finding, which they are notoriously good at. One thing was discovered was that they weren't as good on overcast days as on sunny days. They got good evidence that the birds used the sun's position and the time of day as a compass. Then they found that if there were a couple of spots of blue sky visible, the birds apparently knew where the sun was, even if it was hidden behind clouds. The explanation is that blue sky is polarized, and the polarization points away from (or towards) the sun. It's strongest 90 degrees from the sun, and weaker near the sun or near the horizon. So one patch of blue will give a pigeon a line that the sun lies on; two blue patches tell them where the sun is.
These birds also seem to be able to detect the planet's magnetic field, giving them a second compass (which has failure modes near some sorts of human artifacts). Lots of critters, including a lot of bacteria, have a magnetic sense based on tiny crystals of magnetite. We apparently don't have any magnetite in our heads. But I wouldn't be surprised to read about a weak magnetic sense in some humans. Who would have thought that the human eye could detect polarization?
Get yourself a polarizing filter and experiment with it. It's fun, and after a while, you'll find yourself knowing what it will do to a scene without thinking about it. You'll somehow know that some surfaces (and skies) are sending polarized light, and you'll know when you want to cancel or enhance the polarization with your filter.
I haven't read that the mechanism is known in humans. It's possible that the human eye really can't see the polarization. Rather, your brain might "just know" what surfaces produce polarization without any conscious thought.
musicians are legendary for listening on poor equipment and filling in the rest of the music mentally
;-)
Yes, of course, but there's a different interpretation of this. It's not unusual for musicians to intentionally use low-quality equipment in order to make the music clearer. They aren't overcoming the limitations of the poor equipment; they are using it as a tool.
As an extreme example, I've known a number of musicians who have recordings of harpsichord music, but don't like the instrument itself. The reason is simple: They have good high-frequency hearing, and a live harpsichord is just a loud high-pitched buzz with barely-audible music in the background. But with a recording, especially on low-quality playback equipment, you can wipe out the high frequencies. This makes the music audible.
There are a fair number of people who have a similar reaction to violins. Although it's not as bad as a harpsichord, a violin has strong high-frequency harmonics that are often badly out of tune. If you clip off everything above 15 kHz or so, you eliminate this distracting noise and the music comes through.
I've made a lot of "very live" recordings of dance bands with a room full of dancers. One of the tricks that I've learned is to use fairly cheap mikes that don't hear the low or high frequencies. Then I don't have to do as much processing to get a good sound.
An interesting thing about this: I've occasionally made two recordings, one with good mikes and one with poor mikes that fall off around 12 or 14 kHz. When I play them for listeners who were there, they inevitably say that the "poor" recording sounds more live than the "good" one. What seems to be going on is that the human brain is fairly good at compensating for the low- and high-frequency noise in such situations. Participants don't hear all the background noise. But in a quiet room with the noise coming from a speaker, people do hear it.
This is similar to the phenomenon that photographers will tell you about: The human eye/brain system is very good at correcting for color cast. Cameras record the true color (within the bounds of the film type and latitude), so the cast is visible in the photo when it wasn't in the original scene. But photographers learn to see the full color and can't ignore a color cast, just a musicians learn to hear all the sound and can't easily ignore background noise.
(Similarly, after playing around with a polarizing filter for a few months, I found that I could "see" polarization. And now I can't turn it off.
It's all very complicted.