Through/. in the 90s I learned about linux, learned to play with other OSes, tools and programming languages, which all made me better at my job back then running machines for nonprofit cancer research. When I followed the link to Old Man Murray, I hung out on their forums and made friends I've watched spread throughout the game industry (not just Valve). For years this place was what we'd now think of as reddit&the reg&hackernews combined.
Art's value in an early society would be the capacity to express, prior to any scientific method or reasoned understanding of that capacity, ideas that could not be framed using early simple language alone. The later discovery that certain art is pleasing to our visual or auditory senses is not the advantage, but a refinement on the advantage I get from the very practical ability to discuss something in detail without actually standing next to it.
You and I are in a small tribe. I need to describe to you how to stalk a mammoth, and I can't explain it while we're actually dodging the mammoth's tusks. Everything in my life and your life we've learned by watching other people do and by our own painful trial and error, so either you come along on the hunt but can't participate the first time, or I have to coach you in advance. We need every hand we can get to have a chance of bringing these monsters down, so I will coach you, but I don't have military tactical theory, survey maps, anatomy books, video recordings of other hunts, watches, geometry, more than two dozen words, or even a hard count of how many spears it will take to kill a mammoth.
I make a mark on a stone to be the mammoth, and I draw marks to be you, and I indicate with my hands how you are to move and when it is best to throw your spear. I do this in plain sight of the tribe, so even children too young to come on the hunt can see how it is done. Not everyone will understand right away, but I will do it before every hunt, again and again. I'm not good at describing it and you're not smart enough to get even 25% of what I'm saying. However, if this gives us even a slightly improved chance of being successful, or more likely reduces the number of our fellow tribesmen I lose to the mammoth by even one, then our tribe has a huge advantage in those situations where the extra tribesmen becomes useful in a communal tribe: all labor is divided by the total number of hands. That one preserved tribesman becomes one less woman I have to send out to hunt, which is one more who will likely live long enough to breed one more child, and in the tough times, the extra people are the difference between our small tribe breeding and inbreeding. My simple, practical 'art' has given us a non-inherited but biologically meaningful advantage.
If our early social nature was expressed in no other way than 'human see, human do' then being able to see a representation of a thing as the thing itself for the purpose of discussion is both an emergent property of our neurological biology and the most significant adaptation in our cultural history, as we can have no continuous culture without it.
I'm going to turn the tables on you a bit with a later cultural adaptation. Between the above and what's next you can infer which parts of our heritage are biological and which are social, sometimes you can make these inferences in a testable way, but I'll leave it to you to learn the science.
Our tribe is fat and happy, but there's other tribes near our territory and resources won't hold out forever. Thanks to my aggressive nature, I stay in charge of the tribe by being pretty much the most dangerous, and I have my brother and a few cousins to back me up. Now when I go to raid the next tribe over to take their women, I normally have to leave my brother or two of my cousins behind to keep the women I took last week from running off. I need more spears against the enemy, but I don't want to risk losing women.
So I tell a lie about the other tribe I was in before this one. I draw the angry face of a mammoth, and say how a few women ran off when the men were gone, and an angry mammoth stomped all over the children who had been left behind. My lie is ridiculous, but since 75% of my tribe is functionally retarded by modern standards, and the picture's pretty angry looking, now I only have to leave one cousin behind instead of two. We can fight better, and will be more successful taking women (or whatever else we want). More valuable is that the extra spears and our
"Can I just release the client (complete with full source code and under the GPL) while never releasing any bit of the server?"
Yes, this is one of the points they discussed before. The source sharing currently only applies to distribution of an application. Some people would like to see the source distributed for the server-hosted application, but that isn't likely to end up in GPL3, and it would only apply to your hypothetical MMORPG server software if you had used some other GPL3'd code to construct it.
If you wrote the software without using other code, it's yours to do whatever you wanted with, including modifying whatever license you release it with. If you believe modified hosted software should have its source shared, you can always release your own code under "the GPL3 plus an additional requirement that you share the source if you modify and host the application without distributing said application."
I think something like Mambo/Joomla! might be a good example of the type of code where such a license may have a strong effect. Personally I'm on the fence over whether people should be able to host modified GPL apps without sharing it back to the community. It would be nice if everyone saw the long-term benefits of sharing (net acceleration in code improvement, reduced redundancy of labor) but for the most part, I think that since the original source would still be available, someone could just clone the new feature pretty easily.
If a user submits a lot of stories, but his personal link is 'mediocre', you should cap the number of times he can have that his personal link included in a story. Try once a week to start. Let the story through, just have the slashcode tell the editor how many times he's been on the front page that week, and then the editor can decide if the personal link is worth retaining.
By keeping the decision in the hands of the editor, good story submissions that include quality analysis at the personal link can still be posted, while those who are just in there to get links back to their websites can find somewhere else to spam.
If this is that big a deal, you can add a moderator checkbox for "ad hominem attack versus submitter" and let readers filter those out. Speaking of which, increasing the flexibility of the filters (maybe implementing more user-controlled boolean logic or even tools for naive bayesian filters) would probably help a lot of readers feel they were getting more benefit for the time they spend reading.
Not that I've spent a lot of time reading this site since you started it or anything.
...it wasn't welcomed on the PC version, either. Yet there it is, patching itself uselessly every time I played FFXI. Maybe they felt bad FFXI didn't have as many bugs as SWG so they thought they'd get as much of their quota of MMO annoyance out of the way as early as possible.
I had to get all the way to the ultra-tedious resource gathering and tracking which stores were open when before I remembered what kind of game it was.
The massive changes they're planning will eliminate a lot of people's characters. The extensive crafting system is being scaled back, so specialists crafters are going to lose a lot.
I haven't played in a year. I may go in and check out the new version of the game on Test Center, but I can't imagine it's going to be worth buying expansions for.
It would have been a pretty interesting game without the Star Wars license confusing people. Of course then no one would have played it, but Star Wars evokes something this game isn't capable of delivering. They could start over with a Knights of the Old Republic MMO and people would have goten what they wanted from this game.
That was my first thought, for a change the AC was useful and I'd give him points if I could. I think it was an episode of Nova or something, they found an isolated community in Britain where half of the town had survived a plague outbreak, and had then not seen a lot of migration since, so they could test the descendants of the survivors.
They tested the people whose ancestors had lived, and it turned out that you could have three situations: If you did not have this mutated gene, you would die. If you had inherited it from one parent, you would get very sick, but survive. If you had inherited it from both parents you wouldn't get the black plague at all.
They talked about how the plague spread, and the areas where it had hit most often over the past couple thousand years (there's evidence of it sweeping through Europe in the dark ages) had the highest incidence of this delta-32 gene, and so would have a higher percentage of the population immune to it. They estimated that up to 14% of Europeans had this gene and if they were right, that same number would also be completely uninfectable by HIV. They didn't speculate as to what would happen to the people who were partially immune to the plague, but we hear of people who are infected with HIV and 10-15 years later haven't developed AIDS symptoms.
I brought the documentary to the attention of the HIV researchers at my office, and they said there wasn't an easy method of introducing that gene into people affected by this. I know people who work at Genzyme, they use genetic samples to grow new skin cells for burn victims and new cartilage for knee surgeries. It's not completely out of the realm of possibility that they could figure out a way to grow some white blood cells to match the patient, but with that delta 32 gene introduced. It's unlikely that they'll work it out sooner than 10-20 years from now, though, so it's science fiction until then.
You can make a case for this without worrying about impinging on the right to make free software. Peopleware really isn't worth the thousands of dollars it runs you. Solomon Accounting isn't worth the $100K it costs for a companywide install, Great Plains and larger packages like Deltek's Costpoint (actual install cost: $450K) are no better.
They have weak or no APIs, the built-in tools aren't able to perform the most basic tasks the users want, and the customized workaround take as much work as rewriting the software.
I think the guy from the article has a point, as there are many businesses that spend many times any of our salaries running commercial software, and the people involved in the purchase have no idea they're throwing bad money at subpar products. I'm not sure he's talking about something relevant to most slashdotters: even those of us who work in IT don't really get to pick the accounting software people use, the CFOs pretty much run what they know and we have to build accounting their own network around that package.
Because you can't show them your driver's license or photo ID over the internet. The only way they can even try to check for age is to see if you have a credit card (you can only get your own if you're 18 in most states). I'm sure collecting the card lets them verify your ID, but it's useful marketing data for them, too. They can match you wherever you put in that card # and see what you're interested in.
I'm not thrilled about putting my credit card number in online when there's nothing to buy, but I don't think this is for them to charge it - imagine them treating the card like a doubleclick cookie and you see where they may be able to gather a little bit of data about their users. I'm not as paranoid about personal data as some, so it's not much of a concern to me, but if we had some other unique form of ID I'd be more comfortable with this.
I had the same experience. If the Commonwealth posts everything in OpenDocument and says "anyone submitting documents, resumes, etc. will do so in OpenDocument format" then there'll be a trickle-down effect as companies who work with state agencies start adopting OOo, or at least start lobbying MS for an easy converter. (Yeah, I know OOo reads Word Docs, sometimes better than Word does, but that's no guarantee anyone in state govt knows it.)
In more substantial news, the NCI is pushing organizations who use clinical trials to develop those trial protocols in DocuMart, which is a Java app built around OpenOffice 1. We did a thorough test and you can run both DocuMart and OOo2 on the same computer without problems, but I asked them to explore moving the next version to OOo2 because the interoperability with other apps and databases is better.
Now if only we could get the pyUNO project back on track...
I went through the flash tutorial, eDonkey and Limewire were in there, but not BT? Also it doesn't say how it determines which mp3s or mpeg movies to delete.
Near as I can tell it just nukes the ones that anti-spyware programs would disable anyway.
In that last paragraph, s/sense to avoid/good fortune to not need/. It isn't always that simple.
You're right, it isn't always simple. Some people here say "The NCI put a gun to our head and forced us to use Oracle Clinical," and some say "we could have used whatever we wanted, and the million dollars they gave us ended up costing us more than we gained."
As tough as it is to see an alternative sometimes, there's always a a choice.
It's certainly possible that they choose to do this, but everything they've done recently has made what you're describing more difficult. The next version of Red Hat ES is Fedora, and not just the kernel, but pretty much throughout. Their major new "innovations" which I guess would be GFS or this rebuilt Directory Server are open source (GFS is built on the LVM code).
Redhat's developers see Fedora and Redhat as the same OS. They've been open and direct with the community, even when parts of their company have not. From talking to both their devs and some of their community relations (ie marketing) people face to face, I got the impression that they had been focused so much on getting the ES distros and future projects in order that they'd left community development in the wrong hands internally.
We run Fedora 3 servers here (we're a US Gov-funded nonprofit, so I will never pay a license fee for support I'll never use. No $400 screwdrivers up this way.) and with one exception, I get all the functionality I require:
So far the major issue we have run into is that what little proprietary software my users need requires Redhat 7.2 or a set of compat-libs that are not available as part of Fedora. This does make some sense for Redhat: If you want an Oracle, SAS or Splus support plan, they expect you to have a support plan for your OS, too, at which point you may as well be paying for Redhat.
If your company, unlike mine, has the sense to avoid expensive proprietary software like this, there's no reason not to use Fedora. FC3 is much faster on Intel hardware than FC2 was, and the FC4 prerelease I've been running on amd64 has been realy impressive - though the package changes they've made in the extras repo seems to lean towards more Sun java support, much like the recent OpenOffice 2 Beta. This suits my dev group just fine, but I think the python devs might be gettign short shrift.
Most of the time you're signing up with a smaller provider and it isn't obvious that two or three up the chain you'd find a company like ev1. What is your problem with them, exactly? If I find any of my stuff hosted with them, I'd like to know what I'm into.
"inside RH engineering we find it very bizarre that people consider RH Linux and Fedora to be different."
Install Oracle 8i, Lotus Domino or SAS on RHEL, then on Fedora. Let me know if you still think they are the same.
I was at FUDCon, too. The major complaint was no contribution method for non-RH employees. No one has access to submit to the CVS server(s?). The problem itself is easily fixed, but the decisions that led to the problem were iffy at best:
Let's: - Make a distro of completely free software. - Protect Red Hat from lawsuits by not supporting mp3s. - Make no accomodation for other people to offer extras that integrate into fedora's yum dowload process.
You don't just need to open Fedora Core to accept submissions from people like Eric Raymond, you need to have an easy method for other people to maintain the parts of a complete distro that your company doesn't have the balls to.
Fedora Core maintained internally? Fine. Fedora Extras only open (someday) to celebrity contributors? Fine. Now put in a templating system for people to plug in layers 3, 4 and 5 on their own websites so the end user can just drop yum-livna.conf into the repos directory and move on with making a useable OS.
Eric had it right. YOU need to come to US, not the other way around.
Well, you need to consider that the UN can't really pass anything without the US getting a chance to veto it. The Security Council members can block anything, not just military stuff.
Kyoto, right or wrong, is the kind of thing the UN was made for, to oversee the interaction between nations when it affects third parties. These days even conversations between companies require teams of lawyers on both sides, negotiations on the part of 100+ countries is requires armies of lawyers and an organized language translation system that borders on miraculous.
All the people there do is talk out these accords which are used to set a precedent for actual treaties and handshake agreements between leaders to create similar laws so international organizations can't skirt them, and so the behavior of countries is kept in the open where the 1930s and 1940s in Europe can hopefully be avoided. It seems to have worked for the larger countries involved, though clearly the power gap between first and third world nations is still pretty broad.
It's possible that some Hebrew faiths would not allow such a thing, something about not altering the body you were given, even after death. No tattoos, no piercings, no autopsies. No idea what they do for appendicitis.
There's some disturbing parallels in the structure and order of Waldo's text to that of Clay Shirky's "AN OPEN LETTER TO JAKOB NIELSEN". The Shirky article is old, but the link to it was on the front page of his site recently...
Clay's pretty well known, too. This isn't as blatant as seeing Erik Wolpaw's game reviews reappear on other websites under different bylines, but it certainly calls into question Mr. Waldo's integrity...
Wait, what am I saying, this is the internet, that article is some engineer's blog, journalistic integrity is dead anyway. Carry on.
I learned a lot when there were still a lot of techs around. And when that was the focus of the stories.
I've submitted a few stories (all but one rejected I think, I never said I was GOOD), and I got my karma honestly, back when I cared to spend time in the threads here. I took the karma hits I deserved, too, for being a fool, or when I voiced my (relatively moderate and reasonable) opinion on given subjects and someone disagreed with me and had mod points that day. I have read your site for a long time, I was ALWAYS reading threads at -1, and I have never used any of your author filters, or anything.
And it isn"t like I can't afford to pay for your services. When OMM had their little "forum naming rights" game I bought two, which is $100, for a site that never even updates. So it's not like I feel like I should be getting the things I value for free. I don't steal with napster or whatever, either.
But now here it is:
- For continuing to allow Jon Katz to post stories to this website...
- For wasting your time half-coding a lameness filter that's yet to work, and would be better off without anyway...
- For using a fucking phone company "buy shit in advance" model...
...you're fired. Clean out your desk, these gentlemen will escort you to your car. Thanks for the GPLd code and the heads up about a bunch of stuff back when I needed a clue. Thanks for defending the anime discussions back when we first started, and eventually branching it off into a whole other website. Thanks for not showing bias against folks at other sites when they clearly called you the enemy (...kuro5hin). Thanks for the moments of clarity when you had people like Clay Shirky or the occasional other good QA post.
I will now join the ranks of your 1000s of former readers who will not come here unless a link is offered specifically, and even then I'll have to think about it. With or without harsh economics, in the end you and yours are no better than IGN, and no one sucks like IGN.
They're a company, they're no longer in a situation where they are being handed free money whenever they need it, and all these downloads cost them money. MS can afford not to charge because they take all their money up front. RH gives you the stuff for free to begin with, but that auto-update service must be a real killer for bandwidth, so you pay for the privilege. I'm guessing this isn't a profit-generating move so much as a play to break even on the bandwidth costs for this service.
I wouldn't be surprised if the institutions we use as mirrors for distros didn't mirror this service as well, eventually, some of them for free, because it's still legal for them to do so, but you know how crowded their connections get. So you'll be paying for speed with your big bad ten bucks.
The local trolls are right, the wording of the story is a classic troll itself: social engineering to incite a negative reaction.
The RIAA and ASCAP/BMI - the songwriters' organizations, have had this strange relationship forever. A lot of what we know as the concept of intellectual property came from them dealing with each other and with broadcasters and such. Each has a sort of domain over which it has near-caveat authority to set prices and pay artists: When you buy a record at the store, the money goes back to whoever made the record, but not the songwriter or lyricist (unless they performed on the album and are owed a piece of the retail net). In the case of the recording artist/company, the important intellectual property is the performance placed on the album, that's the copyright that they sell to make money.
For ASCAP/BMI/(I forget the third), the important copyright is the sheet music and lyrics. They gained power in the early 1900s with the advent of radio, since songwriters wanted to be paid per broadcast. Anyway, they didn't have computers then, so they just have a flat fee for each radio station, bar w/jukebox, nightclub, elevator, etc. They just listen to a station for 6 hours, then multiply that over a year, and that's how they determine how much to pay an artist. So the little bands you liked in college never make a dime, but Britney's songwriters a rolling in it.
It gets real dicey in nightclubs: who owns the performance? ASCAP charges the nightclub a flat fee and then pays the bands using the same proportional setup they use for radio broadcasts. Again, no computers, and no exact counts of who gets played how much. It's all statistics, and the low end gets cut out consistently. The bands at a little club like the Middle East probably never see a dime from the songwriter's fee. They get paid for the performance, though, which belongs to them (any record made from it is their copyright).
This streaming media stuff is a real problem for us as webmasters/computer filesharing types as well as for the courts. If you stream the music, you're broadcasting a written song, but if you transmit it for HD storage, you're distributing a copyrighted recording. Thus you are going to get billed twice, and the RIAA and ASCAP/BMI are going to try to bill each other.
Like Clay said in his interview here the other day, the likely long-term outcome is that bands that write their own music will hire engineers to produce their records and then just let ASCAP deal with the licensing, cutting the RIAA out of the licensing business altogether (ASCAP would manage both copyrights, the song as written and performed).
In the short, term, though, these record companies (who are the RIAA) aren't going to give up so easily, and this is just them starting to open their eyes to the internet's potential re: their products. They'll probably lose this case because of the quasi-broadcasting nature of music file distribution, but ASCAP's fee isn't so high, and the RIAA will certainly find a way to leverage what they have while they still have it.
Actually, the record companies were prepared to partner with Napster, but were unable to agree on a price for their new service. Napster suggested they divvy up $5 per month per user between them, the record companies wanted more like $5/month/user/record company, which is $35 from you, I think.
Now I buy records at a rate that would justify $35 a month, IF the music quality on Napster was that of a CD, but I don't buy most of my records from these big companies, I buy them from little labels like Kranky. They'd get nothing.
Most people like the big labels' music but don't buy three CDs a month, so $35 isn't worth it to them. They should start at $5 and see how it evolves, but they won't.
That's enough, Jon, OK? It's fine when they have any fucking relevance at all, but don't you see these "issue films" are manufactured for this purpose? The hint of controversy starts conversations among those who rarely think, creating buzz for the film.
You once said you'd quit whatever your last job was because the ethics of it got to you. Doesn't it bother you to be your own boss and still just phone it in? Wouldn't you like to write something a little more relevant and meaningful than we could find in Rolling Stone or some other worthless hype machine?
I know you got burned in here with the few technical articles you tried, and frankly I've heard enough about what we all had to suffer through in HS, but I never supported people blocking your stories or getting on you for anything you put up here before. Seriously, though, I cringe everytime I see one of these movie stories by you. They're just weak.
-jpowers
no question it's better to use a database, but...
on
ESR On XML-RPC
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· Score: 2
...transmission is a different story. We send lab data back and forth between locations, no one wants to link the databases at different locations, they use Oracle, we use Ingres, etc...
I write a perl script that calls Ingres and assembles the data into an XML document, using a DTD we both agree to, then send them the document, their VB script uses the DTD to drop the data into their database and we're done. The only common dictionary is the DTD, a w3c standard one if possible. We can add as many people to this as necessary without having to force everyone else to conform to our dictionaries.
In the last year we tried both the old way and using XML. The latter turned out to be much easier for the developers.
As far as involving it in apps goes, I"d never store anything in XML, maybe config files or user settings or something. It MIGHT be useful for web stuff, we've been shifting our new pages over to xhtml trans ("mini-XML w/current browser compatibility").
Also, our documentation people write the manuals in DocBook now, which is XML as well. What was nice about it was how easy it was to convert the whole archive of old Word Perfect documents into it, given a few tools and a nice scripting language. Since there are already a number of applications to handle it, I set them up to use the generic docbook DTD so if they want to try another application instead, they can do it without the WP->Word games we had to play up to this point.
Since you like java, you should know that java's XML stuff is pretty decent, and the core of it got reused in perl's, I use it there. I think the real innovation wasn't the standard, but in convincing so many people to get their apps to support it. It certainly has the potential to make a few things a little easier (not easy, just easier).
Anyway, it's not the be-all end-all solution to every problem ever, but it has been pretty useful for the few things we've used it with so far. I look forward to the day when the Mozilla/IE browsers are fully compliant with XML 1.0 so we can move the web page up to it.
Slashdot Mirror
Through /. in the 90s I learned about linux, learned to play with other OSes, tools and programming languages, which all made me better at my job back then running machines for nonprofit cancer research. When I followed the link to Old Man Murray, I hung out on their forums and made friends I've watched spread throughout the game industry (not just Valve). For years this place was what we'd now think of as reddit&the reg&hackernews combined.
Happy retirement Rob
Art's value in an early society would be the capacity to express, prior to any scientific method or reasoned understanding of that capacity, ideas that could not be framed using early simple language alone. The later discovery that certain art is pleasing to our visual or auditory senses is not the advantage, but a refinement on the advantage I get from the very practical ability to discuss something in detail without actually standing next to it.
You and I are in a small tribe. I need to describe to you how to stalk a mammoth, and I can't explain it while we're actually dodging the mammoth's tusks. Everything in my life and your life we've learned by watching other people do and by our own painful trial and error, so either you come along on the hunt but can't participate the first time, or I have to coach you in advance. We need every hand we can get to have a chance of bringing these monsters down, so I will coach you, but I don't have military tactical theory, survey maps, anatomy books, video recordings of other hunts, watches, geometry, more than two dozen words, or even a hard count of how many spears it will take to kill a mammoth.
I make a mark on a stone to be the mammoth, and I draw marks to be you, and I indicate with my hands how you are to move and when it is best to throw your spear. I do this in plain sight of the tribe, so even children too young to come on the hunt can see how it is done. Not everyone will understand right away, but I will do it before every hunt, again and again. I'm not good at describing it and you're not smart enough to get even 25% of what I'm saying. However, if this gives us even a slightly improved chance of being successful, or more likely reduces the number of our fellow tribesmen I lose to the mammoth by even one, then our tribe has a huge advantage in those situations where the extra tribesmen becomes useful in a communal tribe: all labor is divided by the total number of hands. That one preserved tribesman becomes one less woman I have to send out to hunt, which is one more who will likely live long enough to breed one more child, and in the tough times, the extra people are the difference between our small tribe breeding and inbreeding. My simple, practical 'art' has given us a non-inherited but biologically meaningful advantage.
If our early social nature was expressed in no other way than 'human see, human do' then being able to see a representation of a thing as the thing itself for the purpose of discussion is both an emergent property of our neurological biology and the most significant adaptation in our cultural history, as we can have no continuous culture without it.
I'm going to turn the tables on you a bit with a later cultural adaptation. Between the above and what's next you can infer which parts of our heritage are biological and which are social, sometimes you can make these inferences in a testable way, but I'll leave it to you to learn the science.
Our tribe is fat and happy, but there's other tribes near our territory and resources won't hold out forever. Thanks to my aggressive nature, I stay in charge of the tribe by being pretty much the most dangerous, and I have my brother and a few cousins to back me up. Now when I go to raid the next tribe over to take their women, I normally have to leave my brother or two of my cousins behind to keep the women I took last week from running off. I need more spears against the enemy, but I don't want to risk losing women.
So I tell a lie about the other tribe I was in before this one. I draw the angry face of a mammoth, and say how a few women ran off when the men were gone, and an angry mammoth stomped all over the children who had been left behind. My lie is ridiculous, but since 75% of my tribe is functionally retarded by modern standards, and the picture's pretty angry looking, now I only have to leave one cousin behind instead of two. We can fight better, and will be more successful taking women (or whatever else we want). More valuable is that the extra spears and our
"This is not a tool for downloading copied music."
"Can I just release the client (complete with full source code and under the GPL) while never releasing any bit of the server?"
Yes, this is one of the points they discussed before. The source sharing currently only applies to distribution of an application. Some people would like to see the source distributed for the server-hosted application, but that isn't likely to end up in GPL3, and it would only apply to your hypothetical MMORPG server software if you had used some other GPL3'd code to construct it.
If you wrote the software without using other code, it's yours to do whatever you wanted with, including modifying whatever license you release it with. If you believe modified hosted software should have its source shared, you can always release your own code under "the GPL3 plus an additional requirement that you share the source if you modify and host the application without distributing said application."
I think something like Mambo/Joomla! might be a good example of the type of code where such a license may have a strong effect. Personally I'm on the fence over whether people should be able to host modified GPL apps without sharing it back to the community. It would be nice if everyone saw the long-term benefits of sharing (net acceleration in code improvement, reduced redundancy of labor) but for the most part, I think that since the original source would still be available, someone could just clone the new feature pretty easily.
If a user submits a lot of stories, but his personal link is 'mediocre', you should cap the number of times he can have that his personal link included in a story. Try once a week to start. Let the story through, just have the slashcode tell the editor how many times he's been on the front page that week, and then the editor can decide if the personal link is worth retaining.
By keeping the decision in the hands of the editor, good story submissions that include quality analysis at the personal link can still be posted, while those who are just in there to get links back to their websites can find somewhere else to spam.
If this is that big a deal, you can add a moderator checkbox for "ad hominem attack versus submitter" and let readers filter those out. Speaking of which, increasing the flexibility of the filters (maybe implementing more user-controlled boolean logic or even tools for naive bayesian filters) would probably help a lot of readers feel they were getting more benefit for the time they spend reading.
Not that I've spent a lot of time reading this site since you started it or anything.
...it wasn't welcomed on the PC version, either. Yet there it is, patching itself uselessly every time I played FFXI. Maybe they felt bad FFXI didn't have as many bugs as SWG so they thought they'd get as much of their quota of MMO annoyance out of the way as early as possible.
I had to get all the way to the ultra-tedious resource gathering and tracking which stores were open when before I remembered what kind of game it was.
The massive changes they're planning will eliminate a lot of people's characters. The extensive crafting system is being scaled back, so specialists crafters are going to lose a lot.
I haven't played in a year. I may go in and check out the new version of the game on Test Center, but I can't imagine it's going to be worth buying expansions for.
It would have been a pretty interesting game without the Star Wars license confusing people. Of course then no one would have played it, but Star Wars evokes something this game isn't capable of delivering. They could start over with a Knights of the Old Republic MMO and people would have goten what they wanted from this game.
That was my first thought, for a change the AC was useful and I'd give him points if I could. I think it was an episode of Nova or something, they found an isolated community in Britain where half of the town had survived a plague outbreak, and had then not seen a lot of migration since, so they could test the descendants of the survivors.
They tested the people whose ancestors had lived, and it turned out that you could have three situations: If you did not have this mutated gene, you would die. If you had inherited it from one parent, you would get very sick, but survive. If you had inherited it from both parents you wouldn't get the black plague at all.
They talked about how the plague spread, and the areas where it had hit most often over the past couple thousand years (there's evidence of it sweeping through Europe in the dark ages) had the highest incidence of this delta-32 gene, and so would have a higher percentage of the population immune to it. They estimated that up to 14% of Europeans had this gene and if they were right, that same number would also be completely uninfectable by HIV. They didn't speculate as to what would happen to the people who were partially immune to the plague, but we hear of people who are infected with HIV and 10-15 years later haven't developed AIDS symptoms.
I brought the documentary to the attention of the HIV researchers at my office, and they said there wasn't an easy method of introducing that gene into people affected by this. I know people who work at Genzyme, they use genetic samples to grow new skin cells for burn victims and new cartilage for knee surgeries. It's not completely out of the realm of possibility that they could figure out a way to grow some white blood cells to match the patient, but with that delta 32 gene introduced. It's unlikely that they'll work it out sooner than 10-20 years from now, though, so it's science fiction until then.
You can make a case for this without worrying about impinging on the right to make free software. Peopleware really isn't worth the thousands of dollars it runs you. Solomon Accounting isn't worth the $100K it costs for a companywide install, Great Plains and larger packages like Deltek's Costpoint (actual install cost: $450K) are no better.
They have weak or no APIs, the built-in tools aren't able to perform the most basic tasks the users want, and the customized workaround take as much work as rewriting the software.
I think the guy from the article has a point, as there are many businesses that spend many times any of our salaries running commercial software, and the people involved in the purchase have no idea they're throwing bad money at subpar products. I'm not sure he's talking about something relevant to most slashdotters: even those of us who work in IT don't really get to pick the accounting software people use, the CFOs pretty much run what they know and we have to build accounting their own network around that package.
Because you can't show them your driver's license or photo ID over the internet. The only way they can even try to check for age is to see if you have a credit card (you can only get your own if you're 18 in most states). I'm sure collecting the card lets them verify your ID, but it's useful marketing data for them, too. They can match you wherever you put in that card # and see what you're interested in.
I'm not thrilled about putting my credit card number in online when there's nothing to buy, but I don't think this is for them to charge it - imagine them treating the card like a doubleclick cookie and you see where they may be able to gather a little bit of data about their users. I'm not as paranoid about personal data as some, so it's not much of a concern to me, but if we had some other unique form of ID I'd be more comfortable with this.
I had the same experience. If the Commonwealth posts everything in OpenDocument and says "anyone submitting documents, resumes, etc. will do so in OpenDocument format" then there'll be a trickle-down effect as companies who work with state agencies start adopting OOo, or at least start lobbying MS for an easy converter. (Yeah, I know OOo reads Word Docs, sometimes better than Word does, but that's no guarantee anyone in state govt knows it.)
In more substantial news, the NCI is pushing organizations who use clinical trials to develop those trial protocols in DocuMart, which is a Java app built around OpenOffice 1. We did a thorough test and you can run both DocuMart and OOo2 on the same computer without problems, but I asked them to explore moving the next version to OOo2 because the interoperability with other apps and databases is better.
Now if only we could get the pyUNO project back on track...
I went through the flash tutorial, eDonkey and Limewire were in there, but not BT? Also it doesn't say how it determines which mp3s or mpeg movies to delete.
Near as I can tell it just nukes the ones that anti-spyware programs would disable anyway.
In that last paragraph, s/sense to avoid/good fortune to not need/. It isn't always that simple.
You're right, it isn't always simple. Some people here say "The NCI put a gun to our head and forced us to use Oracle Clinical," and some say "we could have used whatever we wanted, and the million dollars they gave us ended up costing us more than we gained."
As tough as it is to see an alternative sometimes, there's always a a choice.
It's certainly possible that they choose to do this, but everything they've done recently has made what you're describing more difficult. The next version of Red Hat ES is Fedora, and not just the kernel, but pretty much throughout. Their major new "innovations" which I guess would be GFS or this rebuilt Directory Server are open source (GFS is built on the LVM code).
Redhat's developers see Fedora and Redhat as the same OS. They've been open and direct with the community, even when parts of their company have not. From talking to both their devs and some of their community relations (ie marketing) people face to face, I got the impression that they had been focused so much on getting the ES distros and future projects in order that they'd left community development in the wrong hands internally.
We run Fedora 3 servers here (we're a US Gov-funded nonprofit, so I will never pay a license fee for support I'll never use. No $400 screwdrivers up this way.) and with one exception, I get all the functionality I require:
So far the major issue we have run into is that what little proprietary software my users need requires Redhat 7.2 or a set of compat-libs that are not available as part of Fedora. This does make some sense for Redhat: If you want an Oracle, SAS or Splus support plan, they expect you to have a support plan for your OS, too, at which point you may as well be paying for Redhat.
If your company, unlike mine, has the sense to avoid expensive proprietary software like this, there's no reason not to use Fedora. FC3 is much faster on Intel hardware than FC2 was, and the FC4 prerelease I've been running on amd64 has been realy impressive - though the package changes they've made in the extras repo seems to lean towards more Sun java support, much like the recent OpenOffice 2 Beta. This suits my dev group just fine, but I think the python devs might be gettign short shrift.
Most of the time you're signing up with a smaller provider and it isn't obvious that two or three up the chain you'd find a company like ev1. What is your problem with them, exactly? If I find any of my stuff hosted with them, I'd like to know what I'm into.
"inside RH engineering we find it very bizarre that people consider RH Linux and Fedora to be different."
Install Oracle 8i, Lotus Domino or SAS on RHEL, then on Fedora. Let me know if you still think they are the same.
I was at FUDCon, too. The major complaint was no contribution method for non-RH employees. No one has access to submit to the CVS server(s?). The problem itself is easily fixed, but the decisions that led to the problem were iffy at best:
Let's:
- Make a distro of completely free software.
- Protect Red Hat from lawsuits by not supporting mp3s.
- Make no accomodation for other people to offer extras that integrate into fedora's yum dowload process.
You don't just need to open Fedora Core to accept submissions from people like Eric Raymond, you need to have an easy method for other people to maintain the parts of a complete distro that your company doesn't have the balls to.
Fedora Core maintained internally? Fine. Fedora Extras only open (someday) to celebrity contributors? Fine. Now put in a templating system for people to plug in layers 3, 4 and 5 on their own websites so the end user can just drop yum-livna.conf into the repos directory and move on with making a useable OS.
Eric had it right. YOU need to come to US, not the other way around.
Well, you need to consider that the UN can't really pass anything without the US getting a chance to veto it. The Security Council members can block anything, not just military stuff.
Kyoto, right or wrong, is the kind of thing the UN was made for, to oversee the interaction between nations when it affects third parties. These days even conversations between companies require teams of lawyers on both sides, negotiations on the part of 100+ countries is requires armies of lawyers and an organized language translation system that borders on miraculous.
All the people there do is talk out these accords which are used to set a precedent for actual treaties and handshake agreements between leaders to create similar laws so international organizations can't skirt them, and so the behavior of countries is kept in the open where the 1930s and 1940s in Europe can hopefully be avoided. It seems to have worked for the larger countries involved, though clearly the power gap between first and third world nations is still pretty broad.
It's possible that some Hebrew faiths would not allow such a thing, something about not altering the body you were given, even after death. No tattoos, no piercings, no autopsies. No idea what they do for appendicitis.
There's some disturbing parallels in the structure and order of Waldo's text to that of Clay Shirky's "AN OPEN LETTER TO JAKOB NIELSEN". The Shirky article is old, but the link to it was on the front page of his site recently...
Clay's pretty well known, too. This isn't as blatant as seeing Erik Wolpaw's game reviews reappear on other websites under different bylines, but it certainly calls into question Mr. Waldo's integrity...
Wait, what am I saying, this is the internet, that article is some engineer's blog, journalistic integrity is dead anyway. Carry on.
I learned a lot when there were still a lot of techs around. And when that was the focus of the stories.
I've submitted a few stories (all but one rejected I think, I never said I was GOOD), and I got my karma honestly, back when I cared to spend time in the threads here. I took the karma hits I deserved, too, for being a fool, or when I voiced my (relatively moderate and reasonable) opinion on given subjects and someone disagreed with me and had mod points that day. I have read your site for a long time, I was ALWAYS reading threads at -1, and I have never used any of your author filters, or anything.
And it isn"t like I can't afford to pay for your services. When OMM had their little "forum naming rights" game I bought two, which is $100, for a site that never even updates. So it's not like I feel like I should be getting the things I value for free. I don't steal with napster or whatever, either.
But now here it is:
- For continuing to allow Jon Katz to post stories to this website...
- For wasting your time half-coding a lameness filter that's yet to work, and would be better off without anyway...
- For using a fucking phone company "buy shit in advance" model...
...you're fired. Clean out your desk, these gentlemen will escort you to your car. Thanks for the GPLd code and the heads up about a bunch of stuff back when I needed a clue. Thanks for defending the anime discussions back when we first started, and eventually branching it off into a whole other website. Thanks for not showing bias against folks at other sites when they clearly called you the enemy (...kuro5hin). Thanks for the moments of clarity when you had people like Clay Shirky or the occasional other good QA post.
I will now join the ranks of your 1000s of former readers who will not come here unless a link is offered specifically, and even then I'll have to think about it. With or without harsh economics, in the end you and yours are no better than IGN, and no one sucks like IGN.
/jpowers/jeep/etc/
They're a company, they're no longer in a situation where they are being handed free money whenever they need it, and all these downloads cost them money. MS can afford not to charge because they take all their money up front. RH gives you the stuff for free to begin with, but that auto-update service must be a real killer for bandwidth, so you pay for the privilege. I'm guessing this isn't a profit-generating move so much as a play to break even on the bandwidth costs for this service.
I wouldn't be surprised if the institutions we use as mirrors for distros didn't mirror this service as well, eventually, some of them for free, because it's still legal for them to do so, but you know how crowded their connections get. So you'll be paying for speed with your big bad ten bucks.
The local trolls are right, the wording of the story is a classic troll itself: social engineering to incite a negative reaction.
-jpowers
The RIAA and ASCAP/BMI - the songwriters' organizations, have had this strange relationship forever. A lot of what we know as the concept of intellectual property came from them dealing with each other and with broadcasters and such. Each has a sort of domain over which it has near-caveat authority to set prices and pay artists: When you buy a record at the store, the money goes back to whoever made the record, but not the songwriter or lyricist (unless they performed on the album and are owed a piece of the retail net). In the case of the recording artist/company, the important intellectual property is the performance placed on the album, that's the copyright that they sell to make money.
For ASCAP/BMI/(I forget the third), the important copyright is the sheet music and lyrics. They gained power in the early 1900s with the advent of radio, since songwriters wanted to be paid per broadcast. Anyway, they didn't have computers then, so they just have a flat fee for each radio station, bar w/jukebox, nightclub, elevator, etc. They just listen to a station for 6 hours, then multiply that over a year, and that's how they determine how much to pay an artist. So the little bands you liked in college never make a dime, but Britney's songwriters a rolling in it.
It gets real dicey in nightclubs: who owns the performance? ASCAP charges the nightclub a flat fee and then pays the bands using the same proportional setup they use for radio broadcasts. Again, no computers, and no exact counts of who gets played how much. It's all statistics, and the low end gets cut out consistently. The bands at a little club like the Middle East probably never see a dime from the songwriter's fee. They get paid for the performance, though, which belongs to them (any record made from it is their copyright).
This streaming media stuff is a real problem for us as webmasters/computer filesharing types as well as for the courts. If you stream the music, you're broadcasting a written song, but if you transmit it for HD storage, you're distributing a copyrighted recording. Thus you are going to get billed twice, and the RIAA and ASCAP/BMI are going to try to bill each other.
Like Clay said in his interview here the other day, the likely long-term outcome is that bands that write their own music will hire engineers to produce their records and then just let ASCAP deal with the licensing, cutting the RIAA out of the licensing business altogether (ASCAP would manage both copyrights, the song as written and performed).
In the short, term, though, these record companies (who are the RIAA) aren't going to give up so easily, and this is just them starting to open their eyes to the internet's potential re: their products. They'll probably lose this case because of the quasi-broadcasting nature of music file distribution, but ASCAP's fee isn't so high, and the RIAA will certainly find a way to leverage what they have while they still have it.
-jpowers
Actually, the record companies were prepared to partner with Napster, but were unable to agree on a price for their new service. Napster suggested they divvy up $5 per month per user between them, the record companies wanted more like $5/month/user/record company, which is $35 from you, I think. Now I buy records at a rate that would justify $35 a month, IF the music quality on Napster was that of a CD, but I don't buy most of my records from these big companies, I buy them from little labels like Kranky. They'd get nothing. Most people like the big labels' music but don't buy three CDs a month, so $35 isn't worth it to them. They should start at $5 and see how it evolves, but they won't.
-jpowers
That's enough, Jon, OK? It's fine when they have any fucking relevance at all, but don't you see these "issue films" are manufactured for this purpose? The hint of controversy starts conversations among those who rarely think, creating buzz for the film.
You once said you'd quit whatever your last job was because the ethics of it got to you. Doesn't it bother you to be your own boss and still just phone it in? Wouldn't you like to write something a little more relevant and meaningful than we could find in Rolling Stone or some other worthless hype machine?
I know you got burned in here with the few technical articles you tried, and frankly I've heard enough about what we all had to suffer through in HS, but I never supported people blocking your stories or getting on you for anything you put up here before. Seriously, though, I cringe everytime I see one of these movie stories by you. They're just weak.
-jpowers
...transmission is a different story. We send lab data back and forth between locations, no one wants to link the databases at different locations, they use Oracle, we use Ingres, etc...
I write a perl script that calls Ingres and assembles the data into an XML document, using a DTD we both agree to, then send them the document, their VB script uses the DTD to drop the data into their database and we're done. The only common dictionary is the DTD, a w3c standard one if possible. We can add as many people to this as necessary without having to force everyone else to conform to our dictionaries.
In the last year we tried both the old way and using XML. The latter turned out to be much easier for the developers.
As far as involving it in apps goes, I"d never store anything in XML, maybe config files or user settings or something. It MIGHT be useful for web stuff, we've been shifting our new pages over to xhtml trans ("mini-XML w/current browser compatibility").
Also, our documentation people write the manuals in DocBook now, which is XML as well. What was nice about it was how easy it was to convert the whole archive of old Word Perfect documents into it, given a few tools and a nice scripting language. Since there are already a number of applications to handle it, I set them up to use the generic docbook DTD so if they want to try another application instead, they can do it without the WP->Word games we had to play up to this point.
Since you like java, you should know that java's XML stuff is pretty decent, and the core of it got reused in perl's, I use it there. I think the real innovation wasn't the standard, but in convincing so many people to get their apps to support it. It certainly has the potential to make a few things a little easier (not easy, just easier).
Anyway, it's not the be-all end-all solution to every problem ever, but it has been pretty useful for the few things we've used it with so far. I look forward to the day when the Mozilla/IE browsers are fully compliant with XML 1.0 so we can move the web page up to it.
-jpowers