Certainly only punishing the guilty is important, but in this case I'm not worried. The standard of proof in an honor trial at UVa is "beyond a shadow of a doubt." I was on an honor trial once and the jurors, judge, and advocates take it all very seriously. I think conviction of innocent people is very rare.
One revant question here is "What is software?" At one time, say 1980 or earlier, this set of characters:
public class JustWeirdProse {
static void main(String[] args)
{
System.out.println("RIAA is your friend. Trust RIAA.");
}
}
would have been nothing more than some really weird prose. Today, however, it can be compiled by a Java compiler, and later executed by a Java runtime system (supported by an operating system and a bunch of hardware).
Clearly, if it had existed in 1980 (for example), there would have been no reason to treat it as legally different from any other prose and it would have received 1st Amendment protection. Sinc e it is now "software", is it no longer protected?
If the answer is "yes, it's no longer protected", then does that mean any set of characters that can be interpreted by a computer is not protected?
This seems to me the fundamental philosophical issue. (The pragmatic issue has been well covered already, so I won't bother with it.) Under traditional US copyright, authors had the right to restrict how other people used their work in certain ways, but not in others. For example, because of fair use the author of a large work does not have the right to prevent me from quoting a small part of the work to criticize it.
The restrictions that Adobe has in PDF do prevent (or at least discourage) unauthorized uses of works, and that's good. However, they also prevent (or discourage) authorized uses, and that's bad. Most of the people reading this don't care because they can hack it and get around the protection, but there are people who have a legitimate right to use the document in ways that the protection bits disallow who don't have the technical sophistication to get around the protection bits. (Then there's the issue of the DMCA, but that's more than I want to get into here.)
In short, these protection bits are bad because they remove rights that readers have with traditional media.
If you're interested in building multimedia apps on Linux (or FreeBSD or Windows), you might want to check out Open Mash. It started as a grad student research project at Berkeley and is now run by a consortium (kind of like the old X Consortium). The short description (from the web site) is:
Mash is a comprehensive toolkit for multimedia communication and
collaboration over the Internet using IP multicast. Mash supports live
media broadcasting, N-way conferencing, and session capture and
replay.
Mash is an outgrowth of the Internet MBone tools developed to
support streaming audio and video applications. Mash includes versions
of MBone tools like sdr, vic, and vat.
For most people collaboration is about the management of documents.
Document management is something I've become more and more interested in over the years, and I think it would be great if my computer helped me do it better. For an interesting approach to document management, I recommend checking out Placeless Documents, a project at Xerox PARC.
You've brought up some important points about the implemenation of this kind of system. However, one thing you said really concerns me:
Once we've defined the back end, it should be as simple as building a wrapper around the
technology that we select. (I know that's a major
oversimplification.)
It sounds like you want to start with the technology and figure out how to let people use it later. I think this approach is exactly backwards. If you want to build something that people want to use, first figure out what people want. Start not with the technology but with the tasks/activities/scenarios that users engage in that you want your system to support. Then decide what technology would best support those tasks.
Sorry if I misunderstood you. But I think it's very important to start with the focus on what people want, because then you're more likely to end up with something that will help them and they'll actually use.
A system like this has been implemented at Xerox PARC. It's called Placeless Documents. It seems to have ended, but there's a follow-on project called Harland that provides an attribute-based storage mechanism for Java (and is available "for trial use", whatever that means).
I've seen presentations about Placeless Documents and it's really cool.
I think it's great that you're asking potential users what they'd like in your software.
The user interface and CSCW research communities have done a lot of work on shared calendars. I strongly recommend you look through it. A good place to start is ACM's digital library.
Does anyone know how much power a typical laptop consumes overall? I think Crusoe sounds great, but I'd like a idea of whether reducing the CPU power usage from 29W to 4-5W reduces overall system power usage by 10% or 80% (or whatever it is).
But the occasional scripter is irrelevant. That's like saying "Korean is easier to read for the occasional Western tourist than Japanese". It's a meaningless statement.
I disagree. It is important to the tourist whether Korean or Japanese is easier and if there are thousands (or millions) of potential tourists, it should be important to people who care about how many tourists visit their country. Also, I think the analogy would be better if it were business people instead of tourists, since I was thinking of people who script on a regular but infrequent basis (and to me tourist implies a one or two-time visitor, not a regular visitor).
I don't know how many webmasters (to pick a particular application domain) become power users as opposed to occasional users, but I believe that there are a substantial number of both.
As for which is more intuitive, I guess it depends on what you're used to and on your own personality/perceptions. I find Python's synatx for data structures much more similar than Perl's to languages I know best (C/C++, Java).
For an occasional scripter, I think Python is hands down easier to read than Perl (and not because of indentation).
Maybe the problem is that I only use Perl infrequently and haven't written anything really big in it, but I often have trouble remembering how to build and access data structures the way I want to. I don't have this problem in Python, C++ (not that I use it often, either), Java, or awk. I often want to do things like make an array of hash tables or a hash table of arrays. In Python these things compose in the obvious way. In Perl, they do not.
I can't agree more strongly with the above comments about Tolkien's and Lewis's books. They're must-reads. And Ender's Game is great fun. I don't know anyone who read it and didn't like it.
In fact, I pretty much agree with all the suggestions I've seen here, but want to put in a few of my own that I haven't seen mentioned and that I think deserve it:
The Deed of Paksenarrion, by Elizabeth Moon. A trilogy in one volume about a woman coming to be a paladin and fighting against evil. Yes, it may sound formulaic, but the story and the characters are extremely compelling. After the first third or so, I couldn't put it down.
A Game of Thrones and A Clash of Kings, by George R.R. Martin. The first two of his Song of Fire and Ice series (trilogy?). Political intrigue the likes of which I haven't seen since Dune (although in a fantasy rather than sci fi setting). Compelling story and characters, in part because things happen that just do not happen in most novels.
Across Realtime, by Vernor Vinge. He has some of the coolest ideas of anyone. I like everything I've read by him, but some of his books are a bit slow at times (like A Fire Upon the Deep). This one is a compilation of two novellas and a short story and is very cool.
Sabriel, by Garth Nix. Fantasy story about a good, teenage necromancer. Engrossing.
The Left Hand of Darkness, by Ursula LeGuin. An Earthman journeys to a planet where the people do not have (permanent) gender. An interesting story and a great exploration of the importance we place on gender in all our interpersonal interactions.
The Belgariad, by David Eddings. Fluffy, fun fantasy series. If you want to read it again with just a few words changed, read the Mallorian.
Finally, a comment about Niven. I like his books for his amazingly inventive ideas, but the story and characters I often find lacking. His books with Pournelle, like The Mote in God's Eye, are his best ones (and that one I would actively recommend).
Heinlien is one of my all-time favorite authors, but I feel compelled to say that his last few books (specifically _The Cat Who Walks Through Walls_ and _To Sail Beyond the Sunset_) were a waste of the paper and ink consumed in printing them and should not be read under any circumstances. _I Will Fear No Evil_ was pretty bad as well.
OTOH, _Stranger in a Strange Land_ and _The Moon is a Harsh Mistress_ are two of the finest sci fi novels I've ever read.
I disagree that recommendations should not come with any editoral remarks about their content. Although it's not very helpful just to say "This book isn't appropriate for X-year-olds", I think it is helpful to parents to say a bit about *why* you think the book *might* not be appropriate for non-adults. Then the parents can make up their own minds.
It would be useful, but it wouldn't solve the problem of designing a good UI in the first place. BTW, it's a very hard problem to design a system like that for building UIs, and it's an active area of research in the HCI community. If you're interested in reading about the state of the art, I recommend looking at a university library for proceedings of ACM SIGCHI and/or UIST conferences. (What you're talking about is called "model-based UI" in the field, so look for that in the proceedings.) You might also be able to find some papers on-line at ACM's digital library.
I realize this isn't directly applicable to the comment I'm replying to, but as long as I'm posting, I want to emphasize that, in general, programmers are not users. If people want to write compilers, IDEs, sysadmin tools, etc., for themselves and other techies to use, I think that's fantastic. (I love emacs, gcc, etc.) But they shouldn't fool themselves into thinking that people who aren't technically sophisticated can use their program just because they and their 10 geeky friends can. If OSS authors want their software to appeal to and be usable by "the masses", they will have to do real HCI work: design, prototyping, evaluation, and iterate until it's good enough. Designing good UIs is hard and saying it's easy or calling users stupid doesn't make it so.
I agree that more docs would be helpful, esp. when Something Goes Wrong. However, it's not sufficient, esp. for newbies, because the truth is that people don't read documentation (and not just newbies).
I think the tools need to be smarter about figuring out reasonable defaults and making the common cases trivial. We *have* a solution for experts working in bizarro conditions: edit stuff in/etc manually.
Writing config programs that are smart and make things really easy for someone who has never seen Unix before is difficult and (IMHO) is for many hackers not as sexy as lots of other projects out there, thus it hasn't been done before. (Perhaps an even more important reason is that the people most competant to write such tools probably don't need them.)
If Linux is going to "conquer the world", it has to be more acceptable to the people whose VCRs still blink "12:00". (Ok, maybe it doesn't have to be literally easy enough for exactly that group, but it does need to move *much* more in that direction.)
There's a project at Berkeley called MASH that has an OSS toolkit (also called MASH) for building streaming video applications. It uses open standards like RTP and MBONE.
Recently the NSF agreed to fund the MASH Consortium, which will maintain and develop the MASH toolkit. I think it's going to be modeled after the X Consortium.
For more info, see:
MASH Project home page The toolkit and several apps built with it are available now. (FYI, I am a grad student at Berkeley, but have never worked on the MASH project.)
I agree that some people feel the need to preach at times and in places that are entirely inappropriate. Likewise, I agree that there seem to be scientists and Christians alike who seem unable to reconcile the Bible with science. (I'm not sure all the scientists are atheists, though.)
However, I would like disagree with some of your implications. One is that a belief in Christianity is something can should (or even can) be an entirely private affair. It is not appropriate to talk explicitly about one's faith everywhere all the time. Christian faith entails a relationship with God that is very private. But what you believe in has consequences in your actions, whether that is Christianity, or sportsmanship, fairness, compassion, justice, etc. Your belief or disbeleif in Christianity, whether stated or not, will affect your decisions about politics, education, etc. and there is nothing wrong with that.
As to whether it's real or not is imporant, I believe that what is true about the world is important and has consequences. If, for example, there is an omnipotent, omniscient, omnibenevolent God who sacrificed his Son so that people who weren't worthy could be redeemed, I think that is an important thing. I can well understand and respect that many people don't believe that that is in fact the case, but it seems to me that it's an important question.
SO's file conversion isn't perfect, but it would be great for the free software community to get its hands on it. I despise M$ Word, but my coworkers use it so I often have to read its files.
I agree that we don't want physical devices to be categorized as free speech. But I think it's also undesirable to say "no source code is free speech". Suppose I put code in a textbook I'm writing, because it helps the reader learn. I was doing some Perl hacking last week and found the source code examples in the O'Reilly book invaluable. In that context, the source code looks to me a lot like the English text surrounding it.
But suppose that we do decide that source code should not be called free speech. What about pseudocode that isn't compilable/interpretable/runnable on any known computer/virtual machine/etc.? Should that be protected? Suppose not. Then what about instructions for how to do something written in plain English (or pick your favorite natural language), like a recipe for brownies?
Where do we draw the line? Are all things that describe how to do things not free speech? Should we say that if a computer can interpret it it isn't free speech and otherwise it is? What if some such list of instructions is not now but is someday interpretable by a computer? Does its status change from free speech to not?
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Certainly only punishing the guilty is important, but in this case I'm not worried. The standard of proof in an honor trial at UVa is "beyond a shadow of a doubt." I was on an honor trial once and the jurors, judge, and advocates take it all very seriously. I think conviction of innocent people is very rare.
Clearly, if it had existed in 1980 (for example), there would have been no reason to treat it as legally different from any other prose and it would have received 1st Amendment protection. Sinc e it is now "software", is it no longer protected?
If the answer is "yes, it's no longer protected", then does that mean any set of characters that can be interpreted by a computer is not protected?
"Oh, Lisa, that's a load of rich creamery butter." - Homer Simpson
The restrictions that Adobe has in PDF do prevent (or at least discourage) unauthorized uses of works, and that's good. However, they also prevent (or discourage) authorized uses, and that's bad. Most of the people reading this don't care because they can hack it and get around the protection, but there are people who have a legitimate right to use the document in ways that the protection bits disallow who don't have the technical sophistication to get around the protection bits. (Then there's the issue of the DMCA, but that's more than I want to get into here.)
In short, these protection bits are bad because they remove rights that readers have with traditional media.
- Mash is a comprehensive toolkit for multimedia communication and
collaboration over the Internet using IP multicast. Mash supports live
media broadcasting, N-way conferencing, and session capture and
replay.
- Mash is an outgrowth of the Internet MBone tools developed to
support streaming audio and video applications. Mash includes versions
of MBone tools like sdr, vic, and vat.
See the web site for more info.For most people collaboration is about the management of documents.
Document management is something I've become more and more interested in over the years, and I think it would be great if my computer helped me do it better. For an interesting approach to document management, I recommend checking out Placeless Documents, a project at Xerox PARC.
Once we've defined the back end, it should be as simple as building a wrapper around the technology that we select. (I know that's a major oversimplification.)
It sounds like you want to start with the technology and figure out how to let people use it later. I think this approach is exactly backwards. If you want to build something that people want to use, first figure out what people want. Start not with the technology but with the tasks/activities/scenarios that users engage in that you want your system to support. Then decide what technology would best support those tasks.
Sorry if I misunderstood you. But I think it's very important to start with the focus on what people want, because then you're more likely to end up with something that will help them and they'll actually use.
I've seen presentations about Placeless Documents and it's really cool.
The user interface and CSCW research communities have done a lot of work on shared calendars. I strongly recommend you look through it. A good place to start is ACM's digital library.
Does anyone know how much power a typical laptop consumes overall? I think Crusoe sounds great, but I'd like a idea of whether reducing the CPU power usage from 29W to 4-5W reduces overall system power usage by 10% or 80% (or whatever it is).
I disagree. It is important to the tourist whether Korean or Japanese is easier and if there are thousands (or millions) of potential tourists, it should be important to people who care about how many tourists visit their country. Also, I think the analogy would be better if it were business people instead of tourists, since I was thinking of people who script on a regular but infrequent basis (and to me tourist implies a one or two-time visitor, not a regular visitor).
I don't know how many webmasters (to pick a particular application domain) become power users as opposed to occasional users, but I believe that there are a substantial number of both.
As for which is more intuitive, I guess it depends on what you're used to and on your own personality/perceptions. I find Python's synatx for data structures much more similar than Perl's to languages I know best (C/C++, Java).
For an occasional scripter, I think Python is hands down easier to read than Perl (and not because of indentation).
Maybe the problem is that I only use Perl infrequently and haven't written anything really big in it, but I often have trouble remembering how to build and access data structures the way I want to. I don't have this problem in Python, C++ (not that I use it often, either), Java, or awk. I often want to do things like make an array of hash tables or a hash table of arrays. In Python these things compose in the obvious way. In Perl, they do not.
"We done that one already." - Monty Python, "Self Defense" sketch
I can't agree more strongly with the above comments about Tolkien's and Lewis's books. They're must-reads. And Ender's Game is great fun. I don't know anyone who read it and didn't like it.
In fact, I pretty much agree with all the suggestions I've seen here, but want to put in a few of my own that I haven't seen mentioned and that I think deserve it:
The Deed of Paksenarrion, by Elizabeth Moon. A trilogy in one volume about a woman coming to be a paladin and fighting against evil. Yes, it may sound formulaic, but the story and the characters are extremely compelling. After the first third or so, I couldn't put it down.
A Game of Thrones and A Clash of Kings, by George R.R. Martin. The first two of his Song of Fire and Ice series (trilogy?). Political intrigue the likes of which I haven't seen since Dune (although in a fantasy rather than sci fi setting). Compelling story and characters, in part because things happen that just do not happen in most novels.
Across Realtime, by Vernor Vinge. He has some of the coolest ideas of anyone. I like everything I've read by him, but some of his books are a bit slow at times (like A Fire Upon the Deep). This one is a compilation of two novellas and a short story and is very cool.
Sabriel, by Garth Nix. Fantasy story about a good, teenage necromancer. Engrossing.
The Left Hand of Darkness, by Ursula LeGuin. An Earthman journeys to a planet where the people do not have (permanent) gender. An interesting story and a great exploration of the importance we place on gender in all our interpersonal interactions.
The Belgariad, by David Eddings. Fluffy, fun fantasy series. If you want to read it again with just a few words changed, read the Mallorian.
Finally, a comment about Niven. I like his books for his amazingly inventive ideas, but the story and characters I often find lacking. His books with Pournelle, like The Mote in God's Eye, are his best ones (and that one I would actively recommend).
Heinlien is one of my all-time favorite authors, but I feel compelled to say that his last few books (specifically _The Cat Who Walks Through Walls_ and _To Sail Beyond the Sunset_) were a waste of the paper and ink consumed in printing them and should not be read under any circumstances. _I Will Fear No Evil_ was pretty bad as well.
OTOH, _Stranger in a Strange Land_ and _The Moon is a Harsh Mistress_ are two of the finest sci fi novels I've ever read.
I disagree that recommendations should not come with any editoral remarks about their content. Although it's not very helpful just to say "This book isn't appropriate for X-year-olds", I think it is helpful to parents to say a bit about *why* you think the book *might* not be appropriate for non-adults. Then the parents can make up their own minds.
I realize this isn't directly applicable to the comment I'm replying to, but as long as I'm posting, I want to emphasize that, in general, programmers are not users. If people want to write compilers, IDEs, sysadmin tools, etc., for themselves and other techies to use, I think that's fantastic. (I love emacs, gcc, etc.) But they shouldn't fool themselves into thinking that people who aren't technically sophisticated can use their program just because they and their 10 geeky friends can. If OSS authors want their software to appeal to and be usable by "the masses", they will have to do real HCI work: design, prototyping, evaluation, and iterate until it's good enough. Designing good UIs is hard and saying it's easy or calling users stupid doesn't make it so.
I agree that more docs would be helpful, esp. when Something Goes Wrong. However, it's not sufficient, esp. for newbies, because the truth is that people don't read documentation (and not just newbies).
/etc manually.
I think the tools need to be smarter about figuring out reasonable defaults and making the common cases trivial. We *have* a solution for experts working in bizarro conditions: edit stuff in
Writing config programs that are smart and make things really easy for someone who has never seen Unix before is difficult and (IMHO) is for many hackers not as sexy as lots of other projects out there, thus it hasn't been done before. (Perhaps an even more important reason is that the people most competant to write such tools probably don't need them.)
If Linux is going to "conquer the world", it has to be more acceptable to the people whose VCRs still blink "12:00". (Ok, maybe it doesn't have to be literally easy enough for exactly that group, but it does need to move *much* more in that direction.)
Recently the NSF agreed to fund the MASH Consortium, which will maintain and develop the MASH toolkit. I think it's going to be modeled after the X Consortium.
For more info, see:
MASH Project home page The toolkit and several apps built with it are available now. (FYI, I am a grad student at Berkeley, but have never worked on the MASH project.)
I agree that some people feel the need to preach at times and in places that are entirely inappropriate. Likewise, I agree that there seem to be scientists and Christians alike who seem unable to reconcile the Bible with science. (I'm not sure all the scientists are atheists, though.)
However, I would like disagree with some of your implications. One is that a belief in Christianity is something can should (or even can) be an entirely private affair. It is not appropriate to talk explicitly about one's faith everywhere all the time. Christian faith entails a relationship with God that is very private. But what you believe in has consequences in your actions, whether that is Christianity, or sportsmanship, fairness, compassion, justice, etc. Your belief or disbeleif in Christianity, whether stated or not, will affect your decisions about politics, education, etc. and there is nothing wrong with that.
As to whether it's real or not is imporant, I believe that what is true about the world is important and has consequences. If, for example, there is an omnipotent, omniscient, omnibenevolent God who sacrificed his Son so that people who weren't worthy could be redeemed, I think that is an important thing. I can well understand and respect that many people don't believe that that is in fact the case, but it seems to me that it's an important question.
SO's file conversion isn't perfect, but it would be great for the free software community to get its hands on it. I despise M$ Word, but my coworkers use it so I often have to read its files.
I agree that we don't want physical devices to be categorized as free speech. But I think it's
also undesirable to say "no source code is free speech". Suppose I put code in a textbook I'm writing, because it helps the reader learn. I was doing some Perl hacking last week and found the source code examples in the O'Reilly book invaluable. In that context, the source code looks to me a lot like the English text surrounding it.
But suppose that we do decide that source code should not be called free speech. What about pseudocode that isn't compilable/interpretable/runnable on any known computer/virtual machine/etc.? Should that be protected? Suppose not. Then what about instructions for how to do something written in plain English (or pick your favorite natural language), like a recipe for brownies?
Where do we draw the line? Are all things that describe how to do things not free speech? Should we say that if a computer can interpret it it isn't free speech and otherwise it is? What if some such list of instructions is not now but is someday interpretable by a computer? Does its status change from free speech to not?
This is a very thorny issue, IMHO.