In case you haven't heard, Microsoft (MSFT) has been deeply unprofitable since 1996, when it began to rely on holes in the GAAP accounting standards that allowed it to report historic profits in its NASDAQ filings up until this very day, so making it look like the hottest business since ACME, Inc.. Large fund managers bought into it to the tune of hundreds of billions of dollars, making MS at its peak ($700B) which for comparison made it the largest component of the S&P 500, the equivalent of the 16th largest country or ~1.5% of the GDP of Earth. Heh, and we thought it was Windows.
Who cares? The biggest funds involved were retirement funds of large social programs across the US, who automatically invest in S&P components at rates proportional to the components' value. MS paid for its bottom line with those peoples' money, so much so that pentioners are majority owners of MS today. Too bad for them that the bottom fell out of MS stock and their savings are worthless. But it did help create two of the richest personal accounts on Earth.
You could argue that this was all legal and that they won the king of the hill prize. Perhaps. But is it ethical to block GAAP reforms via corporate shills in Congress (e.g. Joe Lieberman) so your huge losses won't be exposed? Enron execs are being hung out to dry for being only slightly on the other side of that thin line in the sand. No, it's likely MS knew what it was up to. As Bill Parish, who broke the story, tells:
"Microsoft's perspective is best reflected by Bob Herbold, Chief Operating Officer, to whom the CFO reports. Bob very sincerely replied, "Bill, everyone is doing it.""
Since there's no Reply button on the Ad...
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SCO's Lawyers Analyzed
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· Score: -1, Offtopic
What happened to my beautiful slashdot? 2 banner ads when I first hit the site... no more "Older Stuff".. lots of little googies to click on, etc. now I see an Ad. Great.
The paper says the method used to calculate temperature trends is called "multi-proxy", where a number of observational sources are combinded to estimate a temperature, e.g. tree ring growth and coral calcification presumably happen at known rates with certain temperatures, so you can merge the indicated temperature from both observations (perhaps with some Bayesian component?).
Well ironically, it looks like we're witnessing a meta application of that methodology. Where 1 reserach team yields one time series, and another yields another, both based on different calculations of multi-proxy estimates and different levels of certainty, we the public/policy-makers must yield another multi-proxy estimate on these results.
Perhaps after a few teams have reviewed the results we can just pick a point in the middle and go with it. Scientific method 2.0?;)
In case you don't know, UNIX CLIs are cool too
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Microsoft's new CLI
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· Score: 2, Interesting
I'm all for trying new things in new ways, but it's also good to take stock of old ways. Here's 2 examples that come to mind:
1) I've recently talked to a friend about a problem he was trying to solve. He's on OSX and perl hacker. He wanted a utility to find all the duplicate files on his machine, and was considering writing it in perl or maybe java. We talked about it a bit, and I said I'd approach it by writing the shell script first as a prototype. I wrote it into our IM conversation off the top of my head:
We looked around and found lots of programs on OSX to do this.. some even for $. But I don't think he even went ahead with coding it... this was good enough.
2) Once I talked to Brewster Kahle, director of the Internet Archive, about their choice of OS/tools (Linux/ext2 and GNU, respectively). Mr. Kahle said GNU tools in bash were the only technology they had found that could process the data at the IA, i.e 300TB+ rolling snapshot of the internet. They'd found some problems in sort I think, but sumitted patches.
So sure, you can do this all again, but somebody is going to have to find that bug in MSH's sort, and they probably won't be able to submit a patch because MS is a proprietary shop.
The UNIX shell is a great inheritance. It's cryptic when you first get into it, but basically, it's that way for terseness.. you can find out how to do almost anything by reading the f'ing manual, or searching the web.
"DUDE! MSH ROXORS! It's got for loops and, get this: COMMANDLETS! and and.. you can map things as drives! NO WAY! d000dz0rs! and it lets us use unix-style flags instead of the lame slash flags.. no way mang! i can finally show up at my friend's hax0r meetings and get mad g33k points.. aw yeah.. i'm gonna script-DOS the shiznit outta some lunix site.. watch out lam3rs!"
The Center for Responsive Politics runs this great site called Open Secrets, which tracks who's giving and who's getting the publically-trackable $ in D.C.. This is their overview of the Software/Internet industry.
Notice the part below about law that was passed by virtue of the the interests of big software companies. Does GPL sound very interesting next to trade relations with China? Or, right next to "passage of Y2K liability reform" imagine the addition of "passage of GPL liability reform".
The past decade saw the computer industry rise from the back benches of the American economy to become one of its major players - so important that it's now a driving force in the economy's overall health. The industry's breathtaking success has produced an equally stunning rise in political activity, particularly through campaign contributions. In 1990, the computer industry ranked 55th out of the roughly 80 industries the Center tracks, with about $1.3 million in contributions to federal candidates and parties. Just 10 years later in the 2000 elections, the industry cracked the top 10 list, with more than $30 million in contributions.
Not surprisingly, the high-tech companies that are responsible for the largest amounts of campaign contributions also have netted the biggest profits during the Internet boom: Microsoft, America Online, Cisco, Dell, and Oracle. Their generosity helped win several big victories in the 106th Congress. Among them were passage of permanent trade relations with China, an increase in the number of visas issued to foreign high-tech workers, passage of Y2K liability reform, an increase in federal funding for research, and enactment of a tax credit for research and development. The industry also met with success in what Congress did not do - namely, advance plans to tax Internet commerce.
The computer industry's strategy for the current Congress resembles that of a sports team with a large lead: play defense and preserve the status quo. The industry wants to prevent any attempts to reverse its recent successes, focusing in particular on preserving the moratorium on Internet taxes and limiting the federal government's role in Internet privacy issues.
Microsoft has an additional concern all its own: the federal government's attempts to declare it an illegal monopoly and break the company into pieces. President Clinton's Justice Department vigorously pursued its antitrust case against the software giant, and company executives are hoping to fare better under President Bush's administration.
Overall, the industry has been scrupulously bipartisan in its contributions, giving nearly equal amounts to Democrats and Republicans, and thus ensuring broad support on both sides of the political aisle in Congress.
Feel free to distribute or cite this material, but please credit the Center for Responsive Politics. "
I think you can drop the One Company and IBM lawyers part.. it doesn't really matter who's behind the effort, these interests are, unfortunately, shared far and wide.
But yes.. there will be new law passed.. I expect not so subtlety. After all, who's paying the politicians? Free software geeks or corporations? (hint: not geeks)
Licenses are agreements, made on the own terms of the parties involved, yes. But ask yourself.. what happens when people want to exit an agreement?
Typically, the answer is litigation. What happens in contract litigation? Contracts are brutally picked apart, word for word. If the contract is found to be problematic, parts of it may be void. e.g. if the GPL violates contract law, it's out in the cold. The (ugly) beauty of it is, a single case that breaks the GPL is all that's really needed for anyone else to present the same arguments and get out of that same agreement.
Now, the main purpose of all that obscure language in a contract is to protect each side's interests against that. But its mere presence demonstrates why it's needed.
I knew a pretty good IP lawyer once. He said 90% of the protection against litigation is outside the contract.. i.e. not getting in bad relationships in the first place. Once it's down to litigation, it's very much a question of time and money how it turns out.
Now, the GPL, at least to my eye, is a fine contract with a lot of attention to detail. We should be very grateful to the FSF for making it so well.
However, the vested interests of the software industry have had the GPL in their sites for some time now. Even at the small companies I've worked for, there's kind of a underground rumor mill between the execs and general counsel about possibilities for breaking it. The few times I've had the oppportunity to talk to execs at larger companies, it's positively hated. This isn't conspiracy, it's competition... even *ideological* competition. There would be a huge sigh of relief in the old business community if the GPL could be ignored. I have some choice epithets in mind to describe this kind of thinking, but we've heard them all before.
I think it would be very unwise for the free software community to underestimate the risks involved here. The more this story develops, the more it looks like SCO will be the first concerted, and possibly successful effort, to kill the GPL.
We want to say "but it does the right thing in the right way". They want to say "find a way to break it so we can make money." This goes back to not getting in bad relationships in the first place.
So, think damage control. Don't be surprised to see a GPL version 3 in the works. We'd have to get it out en force to keep things honest.
I'm not one to cry over things like this, but it's happening with surprising regularity these days. What follows is pathetic wallowing in my own tears. I'm just going to blurt out all my ideas so I can do a "see, I said it back then". I claim no originality in these ideas, as it's obvious many people come up with them independently. In the open-source spirit of things, anyone should feel free to use these ideas.
1) City as canvas. Some of the first talk of digital paper got me thinking about it. I figured everything would be covered in DP when it became cheap.. sidewalks, streets, buildings, clothes, etc.. Even better, these surfaces would be wired up to the net.. finally making use of the supposed 1k IP addresses/square foot that IPv6 is supposed to give us. For what use? P2P Advertising, of course. Use your video-cell phone, visit the GPS-located webpage for the wall you're standing next to, micro-pay for 5 minutes of time an hour for now, record your marriage proposal over your phone, play it back on the wall for QA, and then show up later with your soon to be wife.
2) Star-booths. I live near a park. It's really a lovely place.. largely maintained by the neighbors, not city-hall. I'd like to give something to it. Well, I've been toying with the idea of making a "star booth". Take celestia (shatters.net/celestia), a laptop computer, microphone, some as-yet-non-existent voice-recognition program, a digital projector, and some cleverly shaped/coated hard plastic. Erect a stand with the computer closed, but running celestia. Video out to the projector, which projects up at a bubble of half-shpere plastic. The plastic serves as umbrella and screen. Voice commands a floating cursor. "Left, Right" or "30 degrees declination,..." until you highlight the object you're interested in. "Zoom" and you see Mars change from a glimmering star to a full red orb which the wonderful Celestia allows you to circle around. The passive script would be to auto-highlight "interesting" objects, or perhaps timely phenomena, with 3D models regularly downloaded from the net over the shared wireless in the park.
3) Massively parallel computing -- hardback edition. At CMU, freshmen CS students have a course where you design a CPU on paper out of NAND gates. You build up complex circuits a unit at a time. The professor starts you off with something like a multiplexer, and you get to do the rest.. up to about 4, single byte-wide instructions. Neat course. Anyways.. you're looking at the circuits, thinking how f'ing beautiful it all is, how simple. Then you find out about digital paper. Aha! Why not just print a circuit that really works? You could almost start doing gates as letters in a font. Just type the damn thing in. I have a fontographer friend, and my goal was to blow his mind by showing him a real A-Z font-set that was designed in such a way as to actually compute the words you typed in it, e.g. "AND" would have leads on the left side of the A, and a single output on the right side of the D, and it would literally compute the AND function when electrified. NAND, MUX, etc. etc. And then just use a page-layout program to make a kind of word painting/circuit. Stacks of pages, joined by the spine/bus, all working in parallel. The real trick would then be...
4) Computing as art. Take this a step further by designing a font set/phraseology/circuit that allowed you to write poetry that actually computes something associated with the meaning of the poem. Take this a step further and render something in digital paper, framed as a classical painting. Basically, I thought you'd have a museum installation where you'd have a pedastal with a book on it. The book would be most finely wrought, goldleaf, gorgeous colorings, leather-bound. And plugged into the wall (store the power 'lectrics in the spine). Behind the book on the wall, a large canvas, gorgeously framed. But no painting. The book has a fine, lacely thread leading to the canvas.
I must say that I see some good in applying the licensing model to traditionally owned physical products. Not for consumer rights, but for productivity and environmental benefit.
Licensed products represent a possible mechanism for "cradle-to-cradle" manufacturing techniques, wherein the products can be taken back by the manufacturer, de-manufactured and materials reused by the company. The book "Crade to Cradle" is a full development of this idea.
This is, of course, trying to make lemonande out of these lemons. A just as likely outcome, if not moreso, is that physical-good EULAs could be used to encourage, and possibly force, more consumption, by artificially limiting the use and or reuse of products. With the additional concern of the restrictions on property ownership, this would be particularly bad.
I just talked to the US Trade rep responsible for the IP section of the FTAA. She says she's new to that position, and so didn't know a lot about it, but that the general policy for negotiating the language the U.S. wants is to simply mirror domestic law. And sure enough, at least for one of the points, that seems to be the case, namely criminalization of "significant" non-commercial copyright infringement and imprisonment as a penalty. For proof, compare this (from the FTAA):
"[4.1. Each Party shall provide criminal procedures and penalties to be applied at least in cases of willful trademark counterfeiting or infringement of copyrights or neighboring rights on a commercial scale. Each Party shall provide that significant willful infringements of copyrights or neighboring rights that have no direct or indirect motivation of financial gain shall be considered willful infringement on a commercial scale.
In criminal procedures, remedies available shall include imprisonment and/or monetary fines sufficiently high to deter future acts of infringement and with a policy to remove the monetary incentive to the infringer. Each Party shall further ensure that such fines are imposed by judicial authorities at levels that actually deter future infringements.]"
to this (Title 18, Section 2319 of the US Code):
"Any person who commits an offense under section 506(a)(1) of title 17 -
(1) shall be imprisoned not more than 5 years, or fined in the
amount set forth in this title, or both, if the offense consists
of the reproduction or distribution, including by electronic
means, during any 180-day period, of at least 10 copies or
phonorecords, of 1 or more copyrighted works, which have a total
retail value of more than $2,500;"
So, by her logic, the FTAA section isn't the issue. The issue lies in U.S. domestic federal law. I saw similar language about decoding scrambled satellite TV signals. It looks like IP Justice is skewing this.
However, it is shocking that what millions of people call "sharing music" has been criminalized, punishable by up to 5 years in prison. Do we want this kind of government?
That jumped out at me too. Had to read it twice to make sure that's what it said.
I want to know who wrote this. If the author[s] were sent to jail for a while for a crime they didn't commit, it would surely help them understand this better.
Me too! We need a good dose of communism (read "community").
I'm as big a fan of Capitalism and the American way as the next guy, but man 'o man, let's shelve it.
I've tried to study economics, game theory, politics. I've read everything from the Communist Manifesto and Chomsky to Kissinger and Friedman. And man, those are some smart people, and I would love to see them in a celebrity death-match.
But you know? When it comes to economics or business practices.. nobody knows anything for sure. Chomsky said it best:
"Well, I guess one thing that's unattractive to me about "Marxism" is the very idea that there
is such a thing. It's a rather stiking fact that you doun't find things like "Marxism" in the sciences -- like, there isn't any part of physics which is "Einsteinianism," let's say, or "Planckianism" or something like that. It doesn't make any sense -- because peeople aren't gods: they just discover things, and they make mistakes, and their graduate students tell them why they're wrong, and then they go on and do things better the next time. But there are no gods around. I mean, scientists do use the terms "Newtonianism" and "Darwinism," but nobody thinks of those as doctrines that you've got to somehow be loyal to, and figure out what the Master thought, and what he would have said in this new circumstance and so on. That sort of thing is just completely alient to rational existence, it only shows up in irrational domains."
He goes on to talk about how economics is, and always has been used as a weapon in class struggles, and really, I think that's right. Look at the Forbes article demonstrates this very well. The economics of Microsoft, and yes, the tactics of the FSF are further examples.
Capitalism as an ideology is fine, just so long as it does good things. Does it make people thrifty and hard working? Then keep it. Does it make people selfish and craven? Throw it away.
Same with Communism. Does it help people work together? Keep it. Does it discourage free thought and experimentation? Throw it away.
Free Software is good, right now, because it's helping us break free of a horrible selfishness that we see exemplified in companies like Microsoft (how selfish? Real selfish). In our lives, we have a hard time being unselfish, since we live in a mechanism of selfishness.. being unselfish means tempting the reaper.. there's just not much room in our lives for it.
That's why we need Free Software right now. We need to take the visceral medium of the Internet and Computers and experiment with what would otherwise be a vast waste of time. Free Software when Stallman started was only really useful at a utility level. As Stallman says, he was just trying to fix a printer problem.
What that experiment has grown to, though, is a real potential to start working together again. Given that the Internet is global, that has deep implications. Free, Open Software may become Free, Open *. We've just gotta keep on nurturing it.
Will Free, Open * remain good? Probably not... but I doubt we'll see it in our lifetimes. But really, keep it while it's good, throw it away when it's not. Focus on the good, not the ideology.
Two tests were run.. one a while ago with a smaller group, and one now with a larger group and more rigorous conditions. Ok, but I'm wondering how the discrepancy is being accounted for?
Remember people, the scientific method doesn't favor any particular hypothesis over any other.
I'd like to know why the first test succeeded and the second failed. Maybe we can learn what happened in the first and do that more and help people recover from sickness more effictively.
Is this proposal legal? Probably not within any given country. Unless, of course, it were legalized by legislation.
Consider that you're not clicking on the email to see what it is, or judge if it's spam, but coordinating with others to coerce the spammer into stopping once you know it is spam. As a rule, coercion within your nation is the right of your government only. If you want to uphold this, you should use the justice system to combat spam within your country.
When it is international spam, it is warranted that we can protect ourselves and each other. The strange state this leads to is that ideally the attacks would be organized so that you only attack foreigners. e.g. I could spider-back a Chinese e-mail from the U.S. and vice-versa.
Alternatively, guidance or validation from an international standards body, either political, like the U.N., or communications-oriented, like Intl. Telco. would be needed. But this is only thinly more legitimate, unless that is, you've voted for representatives to these groups;)
But this all makes sense only if the bugs can be ironed out, meaning NO COLLATERAL DAMAGE. If so, then I, for one, am all for it.
I am interested in licensing all available rights to your "Web Application Platform" (U.S. Patent 5,838,906) technology, aka "plug-ins", for use by the entire Internet community via a free, transferable, commercial license, e.g. the LGPL, for the rest of the term of your patent.
Many products would potentially use this license, including all versions of every web browser, possibly including every browser listed here:
http://www.browserlist.browser.org/
The license would also be extended to any group or individual for any new product or technology development, including but not limited to web browsers.
The market size is difficult to estimate, though you may already have some internal estimates. Since it would be available under a maximally flexible license, e.g. the LGPL, my estimate is that the first year market size in number of users may be in the 10 to 100 million range, possibly approaching a billion or more during the term of the license period.
There are great benefits to this licensing agreement. The plug-in technology would inevitably do the public as much good as it has already. Your company would enjoy the high praise of the Internet commons. The technology would maintain an historically important place in your patent portfolio. And, I must add, you would have my deep thanks.
I think you will see that this situation is very exciting and so agree to engage in this most promising of licensing opportunities.
Well, I thank the EFF for this analysis, but I think they've missed an important tactic. Let Microsoft and Co. lock out non-MS software all they want. They're at a fundamental disadvantage. If they wish to exacerbate their tenuous position vis-a-vis monopoly, fine. If they want to gamble shareholder confidence on a risky offensive against the general good will of the net public, we should help them.
The EFF warns that Microsoft's IIS web-server could block web-browsers other than Microsoft's IE. Well, Apache can just as easily be made to block IE. After all, Apache has run the majority of Internet web-sites since 1996. In other words, if MS doesn't play nice, we shouldn't reward them by rolling out the red carpet. Kick MS off the net (maybe for just a year or so.. mercy and all). You can start sending the message now.
Sound quality isn't the best, but it's not bad either considering the cost. They're also stereo.
I use my typical guitar setup, and use the line-out from my amp to go to my laptop.
I use Audacity (free, open, here) to record.. multi-track, fx, etc.
I need to reduce the noise of the entire system though.. Audacity's built-in noise reduction plugin doesn't work so well (harsh clipping and a digital buzz are left over). I think it's a grounding issue, but I probably need those iron cuffs for my cords as well.
Other than that, I think the whole setup is just rad.
If HL2 works in Wine, I'll buy it. If not, I won't.
Using Wine, I'm able to play Counter-Strike (without sound, which makes it difficult to own). With ePSXe, I'm able to play Wipout 3 (a great PS1 game). I could do both of these on Windows, but then I'm missing 1 full-time Linux box as a trade... simply not worth it. A friend of mine pointed out that some folks, including both of us, use UNIX *for the apps*. I'm OK using cygwin on windows if I have to, but it's only a short matter of time before I grab SecureCRT or JavaSSH to connect back to my home machine, and sanity. Emulated Bash&Emacs on Windows feels like emulated Counter-Strike in Linux. I guess Bash&Emacs are more important.
With Windows, I really feel like I'm wasting my time. If I use it, and spend money to get games for it that I like, I'm postponing the day when I get what I want. Not to mention that it feels like a clunking mess, the Standard XP install using much more RAM and FS than my standard Lin install.
So, I just deleted it. I fretted a bit about it, as I now really need to be serious about Office compatibility, but man, I feel 100% better. There's no MS in my house. Except the open win32 implementation in Wine, of course, which is... ironic, to say the least.
Artificial Grav, from "The Case for Mars". The chapter is called "Killing the Dragons, Avoiding the Sirens":
"ZERO GRAVITY
Another dragon barring the path to Mars is the menace of zero gravity. Long-duration exposure to ZG carries the risk of serious deterioration to human muscles annd bone tissue, we are told, and, therefore, before astronauts go to Mars we must undertake a long-term prodgram of experimentation with human subjects exposed to extended periods of ZG on board the Space Station. This program will require several decades, many billions of dollars in "microgravity life science research," and a few dozen human beings willing to sacrifice their health to "scientific research".
I find this argument bizarre."
And goes on to explain why. Then:
"But in fact we don't need to fly to Mars in a zero-gravity mode at all. A Mars-bound spacecraft can be provided with artificial gravity.... the equation that governs this effect can be written:
F = (0.0011)W^2R
where F is the centrifugal force measured in Earth gravities; W is the spin rate in RPM; and R is the length of the spin arm in meters. I offer this equation because by looking at it you can see that for a given level of gravity produced, the larger W is, the smaller R can be... Thus, there are two ways to producee AG; you can either go with fast spin rates and short spin arms, or slow spin rates and long spin arms."
He goes into advantages and disadvantages of each. Then:
"While excellent in principle, in the past such tethered AG systems were generally frowned upon because in traditional "Battlestar Galactica"-type spacecraft designs, the only thing massive enough to serve as a useful counterweight on the other end of the tether from one functinoal part of the spacecraft would be another functional part of the spacecraft... a good portion of your propellant tanks on the other end... would be an invitation to disaster in practice [with some example reasons]. In the Mars Direct plan, however, this is not a problem. Because the crew is flying to Mars in a relatively lightweight habitat and not in an interplanetary Battlestar, their spacecraft is light enough to be counterbalanced on the thether's other end by the burnt-out upper stage booster that threw them toward Mars."
He goes on to talk about maneuvering the spinning ship. Then:
"In short, using AG on the Mars Direct spacecraft is thoroughly practical, and completely kills the ZG dragon. At a conference a few years back I quizzed a NASA official who advocated a multidecade program investigating ZG health effects on humans prior to a piloted Mars mission. "Why not just employ artificial gravity?" I asked. "We can't do that," he said -- "all our data is giong to be for zero gravity." Get the picture?"
but I can read Robert Zubrin's "The Case for Mars", a famous book that tells of the plan he prestend to Congress years ago. In it, he describes how to use Saturn VII rockets to launch a 2 phase, conjunction-class mission to Mars. The first phase carries no humans, instead carrying a machine to create rocket fuel, air and water out of the martian atmosphere. Once the return fuel is ready, you launch the second trip, with scientists. They get there after 9 months of artificial grav (tether-linked comparments set spinning) and set down to a full supply of oxygen and water, maybe even a backup supply.
They then do a many month investigation of the area surrounding the landing site, find life, invent martian versions geology, climatology, etc., and return home.
His estimated cost: somewhere around $10B, $20B and up for variations.
Repeat, repeat, repeat: settlement.
That was 10 years ago, and that's all off the top of my head.
You need the full GDP of the $US ($10T, or 1/5th of the money in the entire world) to do the same? I hope this isn't how the whole of JPL thinks, but if it is, perhaps that's why our space program is stagnant.
Now tell me what's wrong and ludicrous with his ideas (if you care to investigate them) and I'll find someone who can help you understand them.
If it turns out you're right, write a letter to these poor, misguided chumps in Congress.
Slashdot Mirror
Some reasons why Microsoft owes many of us money.
In case you haven't heard, Microsoft (MSFT) has been deeply unprofitable since 1996, when it began to rely on holes in the GAAP accounting standards that allowed it to report historic profits in its NASDAQ filings up until this very day, so making it look like the hottest business since ACME, Inc.. Large fund managers bought into it to the tune of hundreds of billions of dollars, making MS at its peak ($700B) which for comparison made it the largest component of the S&P 500, the equivalent of the 16th largest country or ~1.5% of the GDP of Earth. Heh, and we thought it was Windows.
Who cares? The biggest funds involved were retirement funds of large social programs across the US, who automatically invest in S&P components at rates proportional to the components' value. MS paid for its bottom line with those peoples' money, so much so that pentioners are majority owners of MS today. Too bad for them that the bottom fell out of MS stock and their savings are worthless. But it did help create two of the richest personal accounts on Earth.
You could argue that this was all legal and that they won the king of the hill prize. Perhaps. But is it ethical to block GAAP reforms via corporate shills in Congress (e.g. Joe Lieberman) so your huge losses won't be exposed? Enron execs are being hung out to dry for being only slightly on the other side of that thin line in the sand. No, it's likely MS knew what it was up to. As Bill Parish, who broke the story, tells:
"Microsoft's perspective is best reflected by Bob Herbold, Chief Operating Officer, to whom the CFO reports. Bob very sincerely replied, "Bill, everyone is doing it.""
What happened to my beautiful slashdot? 2 banner ads when I first hit the site... no more "Older Stuff".. lots of little googies to click on, etc. now I see an Ad. Great.
The paper says the method used to calculate temperature trends is called "multi-proxy", where a number of observational sources are combinded to estimate a temperature, e.g. tree ring growth and coral calcification presumably happen at known rates with certain temperatures, so you can merge the indicated temperature from both observations (perhaps with some Bayesian component?).
;)
Well ironically, it looks like we're witnessing a meta application of that methodology. Where 1 reserach team yields one time series, and another yields another, both based on different calculations of multi-proxy estimates and different levels of certainty, we the public/policy-makers must yield another multi-proxy estimate on these results.
Perhaps after a few teams have reviewed the results we can just pick a point in the middle and go with it. Scientific method 2.0?
I'm all for trying new things in new ways, but it's also good to take stock of old ways. Here's 2 examples that come to mind:
1) I've recently talked to a friend about a problem he was trying to solve. He's on OSX and perl hacker. He wanted a utility to find all the duplicate files on his machine, and was considering writing it in perl or maybe java. We talked about it a bit, and I said I'd approach it by writing the shell script first as a prototype. I wrote it into our IM conversation off the top of my head:
find / -type f -exec md5sum \{\} \; | gawk '{print $2" "$1}' | sort -k 2 | uniq -D -f 1
We looked around and found lots of programs on OSX to do this.. some even for $. But I don't think he even went ahead with coding it... this was good enough.
2) Once I talked to Brewster Kahle, director of the Internet Archive, about their choice of OS/tools (Linux/ext2 and GNU, respectively). Mr. Kahle said GNU tools in bash were the only technology they had found that could process the data at the IA, i.e 300TB+ rolling snapshot of the internet. They'd found some problems in sort I think, but sumitted patches.
So sure, you can do this all again, but somebody is going to have to find that bug in MSH's sort, and they probably won't be able to submit a patch because MS is a proprietary shop.
The UNIX shell is a great inheritance. It's cryptic when you first get into it, but basically, it's that way for terseness.. you can find out how to do almost anything by reading the f'ing manual, or searching the web.
dude.. that's pretty funny. You're right of course.
"DUDE! MSH ROXORS! It's got for loops and, get this: COMMANDLETS! and and.. you can map things as drives! NO WAY! d000dz0rs! and it lets us use unix-style flags instead of the lame slash flags.. no way mang! i can finally show up at my friend's hax0r meetings and get mad g33k points.. aw yeah.. i'm gonna script-DOS the shiznit outta some lunix site.. watch out lam3rs!"
User-agent: * /
Disallow:
So much for open government.
Just ignore it. That's a little bit of civil disobediance I can live with.
The Center for Responsive Politics runs this great site called Open Secrets, which tracks who's giving and who's getting the publically-trackable $ in D.C.. This is their overview of the Software/Internet industry.
Notice the part below about law that was passed by virtue of the the interests of big software companies. Does GPL sound very interesting next to trade relations with China? Or, right next to "passage of Y2K liability reform" imagine the addition of "passage of GPL liability reform".
http://www.opensecrets.org/industries/backgroun
"Background: Computers/Internet
The past decade saw the computer industry rise from the back benches of the American economy to become one of its major players - so important that it's now a driving force in the economy's overall health. The industry's breathtaking success has produced an equally stunning rise in political activity, particularly through campaign contributions. In 1990, the computer industry ranked 55th out of the roughly 80 industries the Center tracks, with about $1.3 million in contributions to federal candidates and parties. Just 10 years later in the 2000 elections, the industry cracked the top 10 list, with more than $30 million in contributions.
Not surprisingly, the high-tech companies that are responsible for the largest amounts of campaign contributions also have netted the biggest profits during the Internet boom: Microsoft, America Online, Cisco, Dell, and Oracle. Their generosity helped win several big victories in the 106th Congress. Among them were passage of permanent trade relations with China, an increase in the number of visas issued to foreign high-tech workers, passage of Y2K liability reform, an increase in federal funding for research, and enactment of a tax credit for research and development. The industry also met with success in what Congress did not do - namely, advance plans to tax Internet commerce.
The computer industry's strategy for the current Congress resembles that of a sports team with a large lead: play defense and preserve the status quo. The industry wants to prevent any attempts to reverse its recent successes, focusing in particular on preserving the moratorium on Internet taxes and limiting the federal government's role in Internet privacy issues.
Microsoft has an additional concern all its own: the federal government's attempts to declare it an illegal monopoly and break the company into pieces. President Clinton's Justice Department vigorously pursued its antitrust case against the software giant, and company executives are hoping to fare better under President Bush's administration.
Overall, the industry has been scrupulously bipartisan in its contributions, giving nearly equal amounts to Democrats and Republicans, and thus ensuring broad support on both sides of the political aisle in Congress.
Feel free to distribute or cite this material, but please credit the Center for Responsive Politics. "
I think you can drop the One Company and IBM lawyers part.. it doesn't really matter who's behind the effort, these interests are, unfortunately, shared far and wide.
But yes.. there will be new law passed.. I expect not so subtlety. After all, who's paying the politicians? Free software geeks or corporations? (hint: not geeks)
Licenses are agreements, made on the own terms of the parties involved, yes. But ask yourself.. what happens when people want to exit an agreement?
Typically, the answer is litigation. What happens in contract litigation? Contracts are brutally picked apart, word for word. If the contract is found to be problematic, parts of it may be void. e.g. if the GPL violates contract law, it's out in the cold. The (ugly) beauty of it is, a single case that breaks the GPL is all that's really needed for anyone else to present the same arguments and get out of that same agreement.
Now, the main purpose of all that obscure language in a contract is to protect each side's interests against that. But its mere presence demonstrates why it's needed.
I knew a pretty good IP lawyer once. He said 90% of the protection against litigation is outside the contract.. i.e. not getting in bad relationships in the first place. Once it's down to litigation, it's very much a question of time and money how it turns out.
Now, the GPL, at least to my eye, is a fine contract with a lot of attention to detail. We should be very grateful to the FSF for making it so well.
However, the vested interests of the software industry have had the GPL in their sites for some time now. Even at the small companies I've worked for, there's kind of a underground rumor mill between the execs and general counsel about possibilities for breaking it. The few times I've had the oppportunity to talk to execs at larger companies, it's positively hated. This isn't conspiracy, it's competition... even *ideological* competition. There would be a huge sigh of relief in the old business community if the GPL could be ignored. I have some choice epithets in mind to describe this kind of thinking, but we've heard them all before.
I think it would be very unwise for the free software community to underestimate the risks involved here. The more this story develops, the more it looks like SCO will be the first concerted, and possibly successful effort, to kill the GPL.
We want to say "but it does the right thing in the right way". They want to say "find a way to break it so we can make money." This goes back to not getting in bad relationships in the first place.
So, think damage control. Don't be surprised to see a GPL version 3 in the works. We'd have to get it out en force to keep things honest.
I'm not one to cry over things like this, but it's happening with surprising regularity these days. What follows is pathetic wallowing in my own tears. I'm just going to blurt out all my ideas so I can do a "see, I said it back then". I claim no originality in these ideas, as it's obvious many people come up with them independently. In the open-source spirit of things, anyone should feel free to use these ideas.
..." until you highlight the object you're interested in. "Zoom" and you see Mars change from a glimmering star to a full red orb which the wonderful Celestia allows you to circle around. The passive script would be to auto-highlight "interesting" objects, or perhaps timely phenomena, with 3D models regularly downloaded from the net over the shared wireless in the park.
1) City as canvas. Some of the first talk of digital paper got me thinking about it. I figured everything would be covered in DP when it became cheap.. sidewalks, streets, buildings, clothes, etc.. Even better, these surfaces would be wired up to the net.. finally making use of the supposed 1k IP addresses/square foot that IPv6 is supposed to give us. For what use? P2P Advertising, of course. Use your video-cell phone, visit the GPS-located webpage for the wall you're standing next to, micro-pay for 5 minutes of time an hour for now, record your marriage proposal over your phone, play it back on the wall for QA, and then show up later with your soon to be wife.
2) Star-booths. I live near a park. It's really a lovely place.. largely maintained by the neighbors, not city-hall. I'd like to give something to it. Well, I've been toying with the idea of making a "star booth". Take celestia (shatters.net/celestia), a laptop computer, microphone, some as-yet-non-existent voice-recognition program, a digital projector, and some cleverly shaped/coated hard plastic. Erect a stand with the computer closed, but running celestia. Video out to the projector, which projects up at a bubble of half-shpere plastic. The plastic serves as umbrella and screen. Voice commands a floating cursor. "Left, Right" or "30 degrees declination,
3) Massively parallel computing -- hardback edition. At CMU, freshmen CS students have a course where you design a CPU on paper out of NAND gates. You build up complex circuits a unit at a time. The professor starts you off with something like a multiplexer, and you get to do the rest.. up to about 4, single byte-wide instructions. Neat course. Anyways.. you're looking at the circuits, thinking how f'ing beautiful it all is, how simple. Then you find out about digital paper. Aha! Why not just print a circuit that really works? You could almost start doing gates as letters in a font. Just type the damn thing in. I have a fontographer friend, and my goal was to blow his mind by showing him a real A-Z font-set that was designed in such a way as to actually compute the words you typed in it, e.g. "AND" would have leads on the left side of the A, and a single output on the right side of the D, and it would literally compute the AND function when electrified. NAND, MUX, etc. etc. And then just use a page-layout program to make a kind of word painting/circuit. Stacks of pages, joined by the spine/bus, all working in parallel. The real trick would then be...
4) Computing as art. Take this a step further by designing a font set/phraseology/circuit that allowed you to write poetry that actually computes something associated with the meaning of the poem. Take this a step further and render something in digital paper, framed as a classical painting. Basically, I thought you'd have a museum installation where you'd have a pedastal with a book on it. The book would be most finely wrought, goldleaf, gorgeous colorings, leather-bound. And plugged into the wall (store the power 'lectrics in the spine). Behind the book on the wall, a large canvas, gorgeously framed. But no painting. The book has a fine, lacely thread leading to the canvas.
The museum visit
I must say that I see some good in applying the licensing model to traditionally owned physical products. Not for consumer rights, but for productivity and environmental benefit.
Licensed products represent a possible mechanism for "cradle-to-cradle" manufacturing techniques, wherein the products can be taken back by the manufacturer, de-manufactured and materials reused by the company. The book "Crade to Cradle" is a full development of this idea.
This is, of course, trying to make lemonande out of these lemons. A just as likely outcome, if not moreso, is that physical-good EULAs could be used to encourage, and possibly force, more consumption, by artificially limiting the use and or reuse of products. With the additional concern of the restrictions on property ownership, this would be particularly bad.
Pay-per-view sunlight. Bleh.
I just talked to the US Trade rep responsible for the IP section of the FTAA. She says she's new to that position, and so didn't know a lot about it, but that the general policy for negotiating the language the U.S. wants is to simply mirror domestic law. And sure enough, at least for one of the points, that seems to be the case, namely criminalization of "significant" non-commercial copyright infringement and imprisonment as a penalty. For proof, compare this (from the FTAA):
"[4.1. Each Party shall provide criminal procedures and penalties to be
applied at least in cases of willful trademark counterfeiting or infringement
of copyrights or neighboring rights on a commercial scale. Each Party shall
provide that significant willful infringements of copyrights or neighboring
rights that have no direct or indirect motivation of financial gain shall be
considered willful infringement on a commercial scale.
In criminal procedures, remedies available shall include imprisonment and/or
monetary fines sufficiently high to deter future acts of infringement and
with a policy to remove the monetary incentive to the infringer. Each Party
shall further ensure that such fines are imposed by judicial authorities at
levels that actually deter future infringements.]"
to this (Title 18, Section 2319 of the US Code):
"Any person who commits an offense under section 506(a)(1) of title 17 -
(1) shall be imprisoned not more than 5 years, or fined in the
amount set forth in this title, or both, if the offense consists
of the reproduction or distribution, including by electronic
means, during any 180-day period, of at least 10 copies or
phonorecords, of 1 or more copyrighted works, which have a total
retail value of more than $2,500;"
You can search the U.S. Code here.
So, by her logic, the FTAA section isn't the issue. The issue lies in U.S. domestic federal law. I saw similar language about decoding scrambled satellite TV signals. It looks like IP Justice is skewing this.
However, it is shocking that what millions of people call "sharing music" has been criminalized, punishable by up to 5 years in prison. Do we want this kind of government?
That jumped out at me too. Had to read it twice to make sure that's what it said.
I want to know who wrote this. If the author[s] were sent to jail for a while for a crime they didn't commit, it would surely help them understand this better.
Me too! We need a good dose of communism (read "community").
I'm as big a fan of Capitalism and the American way as the next guy, but man 'o man, let's shelve it.
I've tried to study economics, game theory, politics. I've read everything from the Communist Manifesto and Chomsky to Kissinger and Friedman. And man, those are some smart people, and I would love to see them in a celebrity death-match.
But you know? When it comes to economics or business practices.. nobody knows anything for sure. Chomsky said it best:
He goes on to talk about how economics is, and always has been used as a weapon in class struggles, and really, I think that's right. Look at the Forbes article demonstrates this very well. The economics of Microsoft, and yes, the tactics of the FSF are further examples.
Capitalism as an ideology is fine, just so long as it does good things. Does it make people thrifty and hard working? Then keep it. Does it make people selfish and craven? Throw it away.
Same with Communism. Does it help people work together? Keep it. Does it discourage free thought and experimentation? Throw it away.
Free Software is good, right now, because it's helping us break free of a horrible selfishness that we see exemplified in companies like Microsoft (how selfish? Real selfish). In our lives, we have a hard time being unselfish, since we live in a mechanism of selfishness.. being unselfish means tempting the reaper.. there's just not much room in our lives for it.
That's why we need Free Software right now. We need to take the visceral medium of the Internet and Computers and experiment with what would otherwise be a vast waste of time. Free Software when Stallman started was only really useful at a utility level. As Stallman says, he was just trying to fix a printer problem.
What that experiment has grown to, though, is a real potential to start working together again. Given that the Internet is global, that has deep implications. Free, Open Software may become Free, Open *. We've just gotta keep on nurturing it.
Will Free, Open * remain good? Probably not... but I doubt we'll see it in our lifetimes. But really, keep it while it's good, throw it away when it's not. Focus on the good, not the ideology.
Two tests were run.. one a while ago with a smaller group, and one now with a larger group and more rigorous conditions. Ok, but I'm wondering how the discrepancy is being accounted for?
Remember people, the scientific method doesn't favor any particular hypothesis over any other.
I'd like to know why the first test succeeded and the second failed. Maybe we can learn what happened in the first and do that more and help people recover from sickness more effictively.
Is this proposal legal? Probably not within any given country. Unless, of course, it were legalized by legislation.
;)
Consider that you're not clicking on the email to see what it is, or judge if it's spam, but coordinating with others to coerce the spammer into stopping once you know it is spam. As a rule, coercion within your nation is the right of your government only. If you want to uphold this, you should use the justice system to combat spam within your country.
When it is international spam, it is warranted that we can protect ourselves and each other. The strange state this leads to is that ideally the attacks would be organized so that you only attack foreigners. e.g. I could spider-back a Chinese e-mail from the U.S. and vice-versa.
Alternatively, guidance or validation from an international standards body, either political, like the U.N., or communications-oriented, like Intl. Telco. would be needed. But this is only thinly more legitimate, unless that is, you've voted for representatives to these groups
But this all makes sense only if the bugs can be ironed out, meaning NO COLLATERAL DAMAGE. If so, then I, for one, am all for it.
One of the nice thing about the Net is that we don't have a single authority that polices us.
Policing on our own is thus necessary. Done right, it can even be a boon.
However, any failure to be extremely fair and as gentle as possible will add credence to those who would call for a single authority.
I'd rather have spam than the FBI, or Regional Bureau of Concern, in my affairs.
Fight the spammers, but don't go overboard. Mistaking innocents for spammers would be overboard.
Hi,
I see here:
http://eolas.com/licensing.html
that you engage in licensing your technologies.
I am interested in licensing all available rights to your "Web Application
Platform" (U.S. Patent 5,838,906) technology, aka "plug-ins", for use by the
entire Internet community via a free, transferable, commercial license, e.g.
the LGPL, for the rest of the term of your patent.
Many products would potentially use this license, including all versions of
every web browser, possibly including every browser listed here:
http://www.browserlist.browser.org/
The license would also be extended to any group or individual for any new
product or technology development, including but not limited to web browsers.
The market size is difficult to estimate, though you may already have some
internal estimates. Since it would be available under a maximally flexible
license, e.g. the LGPL, my estimate is that the first year market size in
number of users may be in the 10 to 100 million range, possibly approaching a
billion or more during the term of the license period.
There are great benefits to this licensing agreement. The plug-in technology
would inevitably do the public as much good as it has already. Your company
would enjoy the high praise of the Internet commons. The technology would
maintain an historically important place in your patent portfolio. And, I
must add, you would have my deep thanks.
I think you will see that this situation is very exciting and so agree to
engage in this most promising of licensing opportunities.
Cheers,
Pablo Mayrgundter
freality.com
Well, I thank the EFF for this analysis, but I think they've missed an important tactic. Let Microsoft and Co. lock out non-MS software all they want. They're at a fundamental disadvantage. If they wish to exacerbate their tenuous position vis-a-vis monopoly, fine. If they want to gamble shareholder confidence on a risky offensive against the general good will of the net public, we should help them.
The EFF warns that Microsoft's IIS web-server could block web-browsers other than Microsoft's IE. Well, Apache can just as easily be made to block IE. After all, Apache has run the majority of Internet web-sites since 1996. In other words, if MS doesn't play nice, we shouldn't reward them by rolling out the red carpet. Kick MS off the net (maybe for just a year or so.. mercy and all). You can start sending the message now.
Sound quality isn't the best, but it's not bad either considering the cost. They're also stereo.
I use my typical guitar setup, and use the line-out from my amp to go to my laptop.
I use Audacity (free, open, here) to record.. multi-track, fx, etc.
I need to reduce the noise of the entire system though.. Audacity's built-in noise reduction plugin doesn't work so well (harsh clipping and a digital buzz are left over). I think it's a grounding issue, but I probably need those iron cuffs for my cords as well.
Other than that, I think the whole setup is just rad.
Here's a mutli-track voice test song I did recently.
If HL2 works in Wine, I'll buy it. If not, I won't.
Using Wine, I'm able to play Counter-Strike (without sound, which makes it difficult to own). With ePSXe, I'm able to play Wipout 3 (a great PS1 game). I could do both of these on Windows, but then I'm missing 1 full-time Linux box as a trade... simply not worth it. A friend of mine pointed out that some folks, including both of us, use UNIX *for the apps*. I'm OK using cygwin on windows if I have to, but it's only a short matter of time before I grab SecureCRT or JavaSSH to connect back to my home machine, and sanity. Emulated Bash&Emacs on Windows feels like emulated Counter-Strike in Linux. I guess Bash&Emacs are more important.
With Windows, I really feel like I'm wasting my time. If I use it, and spend money to get games for it that I like, I'm postponing the day when I get what I want. Not to mention that it feels like a clunking mess, the Standard XP install using much more RAM and FS than my standard Lin install.
So, I just deleted it. I fretted a bit about it, as I now really need to be serious about Office compatibility, but man, I feel 100% better. There's no MS in my house. Except the open win32 implementation in Wine, of course, which is... ironic, to say the least.
Artificial Grav, from "The Case for Mars". The chapter is called "Killing the Dragons, Avoiding the Sirens":
.... the equation that governs this effect can be written:
... Thus, there are two ways to producee AG; you can either go with fast spin rates and short spin arms, or slow spin rates and long spin arms."
... a good portion of your propellant tanks on the other end ... would be an invitation to disaster in practice [with some example reasons]. In the Mars Direct plan, however, this is not a problem. Because the crew is flying to Mars in a relatively lightweight habitat and not in an interplanetary Battlestar, their spacecraft is light enough to be counterbalanced on the thether's other end by the burnt-out upper stage booster that threw them toward Mars."
"ZERO GRAVITY
Another dragon barring the path to Mars is the menace of zero gravity. Long-duration exposure to ZG carries the risk of serious deterioration to human muscles annd bone tissue, we are told, and, therefore, before astronauts go to Mars we must undertake a long-term prodgram of experimentation with human subjects exposed to extended periods of ZG on board the Space Station. This program will require several decades, many billions of dollars in "microgravity life science research," and a few dozen human beings willing to sacrifice their health to "scientific research".
I find this argument bizarre."
And goes on to explain why. Then:
"But in fact we don't need to fly to Mars in a zero-gravity mode at all. A Mars-bound spacecraft can be provided with artificial gravity
F = (0.0011)W^2R
where F is the centrifugal force measured in Earth gravities; W is the spin rate in RPM; and R is the length of the spin arm in meters. I offer this equation because by looking at it you can see that for a given level of gravity produced, the larger W is, the smaller R can be
He goes into advantages and disadvantages of each. Then:
"While excellent in principle, in the past such tethered AG systems were generally frowned upon because in traditional "Battlestar Galactica"-type spacecraft designs, the only thing massive enough to serve as a useful counterweight on the other end of the tether from one functinoal part of the spacecraft would be another functional part of the spacecraft
He goes on to talk about maneuvering the spinning ship. Then:
"In short, using AG on the Mars Direct spacecraft is thoroughly practical, and completely kills the ZG dragon. At a conference a few years back I quizzed a NASA official who advocated a multidecade program investigating ZG health effects on humans prior to a piloted Mars mission. "Why not just employ artificial gravity?" I asked. "We can't do that," he said -- "all our data is giong to be for zero gravity." Get the picture?"
but I can read Robert Zubrin's "The Case for Mars", a famous book that tells of the plan he prestend to Congress years ago. In it, he describes how to use Saturn VII rockets to launch a 2 phase, conjunction-class mission to Mars. The first phase carries no humans, instead carrying a machine to create rocket fuel, air and water out of the martian atmosphere. Once the return fuel is ready, you launch the second trip, with scientists. They get there after 9 months of artificial grav (tether-linked comparments set spinning) and set down to a full supply of oxygen and water, maybe even a backup supply.
They then do a many month investigation of the area surrounding the landing site, find life, invent martian versions geology, climatology, etc., and return home.
His estimated cost: somewhere around $10B, $20B and up for variations.
Repeat, repeat, repeat: settlement.
That was 10 years ago, and that's all off the top of my head.
You need the full GDP of the $US ($10T, or 1/5th of the money in the entire world) to do the same? I hope this isn't how the whole of JPL thinks, but if it is, perhaps that's why our space program is stagnant.
Now tell me what's wrong and ludicrous with his ideas (if you care to investigate them) and I'll find someone who can help you understand them.
If it turns out you're right, write a letter to these poor, misguided chumps in Congress.
Otherwise submit a proposal for their funding.
Or, get out of JPL and join me at McDonalds.