I have recently completed a book for Addison-Wesley. Well, almost completed--it needs to make it through copyediting and indexing still, which will probably (unfortunately) mean several more months until it is printed.
One thing that I did--with permission of my publisher--is make the text of the book completely available during writing, and it will remain so into the future. Shameless plug, you can find it at http://gnosis.cx/TPiP/. I cannot say honestly that being allowed to provide it this way was a deciding issue in choosing a publisher; but it certainly does make me feel better about writing the book.
Admittedly, this is not quite the same thing as an OpenContent license. You are free to read the book at the URL listed, and print yourself a personal copy. But the book is under copyright, and you cannot reproduce and sell the text yourself. Still, I believe it is a step in the right direction... maybe my next book will manage to go a step farther.
This bad advice has become a real pet peeve of mine. I guess because it is so absurd for me personally... but I share that trait with 90% of people who actually work for a living.
In particular, I am a writer, and publish on "the Internet." For example (in which I discuss the need for email disclosure along with spam filtering techniques):
In other words, it is my -business- to disclose my email address. Email is not, and should not be, restricted to a little clubby thing with your family and close friends. It is an important and legitimate purpose to allow previously unknown parties to contact you (individually, and relevantly, not as a generic member of a list of 14 million address). People sell things, we work on free software projects, we are interested in discussing topics of interest in our lives, and so on... strangers aren't -per se- spammers, and should not be treated as such automatically.
Following that, I got into a discussion with a reader who ran an ISP, and wanted to implement some filtering techniques on his SMTP server. My reaction--and the more I think about it, the more convinced I am--is that actual filtering is heavier than is needed for this purpose.
I believe that a great deal of the problem with SMTP servers is NOT ENOUGH latency. If you were to add a few seconds extra latency to for every "RCTP TO:" field, there would be little effect for regular email usage. But such a couple seconds latency would make spamming impossible through that server. This latency can be a simple timer on the server, starting from a connection opened with a MAIL FROM: message.
There are a few details to handle here. To prevent multi-threaded spammers who open many sockets, you'd have to add a semaphore to each connection that limited connections from the same IP address. And as a general principle, you should not accept connections from every IP in the world (don't open relay). Moreover, demonstrated legitimate mailing lists could perhaps be granted special connections without the extra latency (but there should be a real procedure to prove you have a real mailing list in the ISP contract)
I'm sure much leakage is because of underhanded ISPs, companies selling email, and the like.
But in my case--and many people's--the main problem is that I am a public personality. I do things where there is good reason to disclose my email address to strangers (in my case, because I am a writer). A lot of those strangers write me for very legitimate reasons, but obviously once an email is made public you cannot keep it to only the good guys.
It doesn't apply so much to me personally, but a similar situation is where email addresses are listed in directories--company, organizations, and so on. In those cases also, you need to publish your email to let legitimate correspondence contact you.
I've always been a little puzzled by the (somewhat naive) folks who think to answer the spam problem by hiding their email from everywhere it might leak. There are various tricks for doing this, false addresses, complex usernames, different accounts, etc. That only really works for people--typically college kids or younger--who never need to DO anything in the world. For the rest of us, hiding an email address would be like hiding our snailmail address from business contacts, because we might get junk mail from releasing it.
ahaile has already pointed largely the same point, but it is worth reiterating. Back when Sokal published his paper, the whole right-wing "Cultural Literacy" schtick was a current "debate." For the most part, the "debate" consisted of a bunch of right-wingers like E.D.Hirsch and the truly deplorable William Bennet bemoaning the teaching of non-white authors in college and/or teachers who are leftists (they never admitted that's quite what they are about, but it is).
Sokal is not nearly such a bad guy as those right-wingers. He's actually a decent liberal, but one raised in a particular scientistic, positivist intellectual tradition. Alan Sokal is a physicist, after all (although that is not sufficient, many in the occupation understand humanities better). But caught in that anti-Postmodernism ferver of the early 1990s, Sokal decided to make fun of the journal _Social Text_ (and the general field, by implication)
_Social Text_ is not really the most prestigious journal in that general area, but it's not bad. It is refereed, but that doesn't mean as much in any journal as what outside people tend to think. You don't have to be RIGHT, or even original, to right for "good" academic journals... just write well enough, and pick a topic the editor are interested in. For a lot of them, you also have to wait years for publication to roll around... they are behind schedule by huge amounts.
But even for what moderation means at _Social Text_, Sokal did not go through it. He knew some editors, and approached them saying "I'm a well known physicist, and I'd like you to fast track something I want to write." The _Social Text_ editors liked the idea of reaching out to that other academic community, so they agreed. But the refereeing in this case consisted of making sure the sentences were grammatical, the words spelled right, and the subject matter generally what Sokal had suggested informally. The same paper WOULD NOT have been published if submitted for blind review.
So the hoax basically amounts to this: people tend to grant some leeway to their friends. True enough, but hardly an indictment of cultural studies, the humanities, postmodernism, multiculturalism, or whatever it is that is supposed to have been shown to be foolish.
Kelso Lundden commented in a fashion similar to a number of other posters:
Child pornography, of course, is a terrible,
terrible thing...
I agree with the general sentiment of Lundden's note, but I think the above needs to be questioned. It is not a simple thing to determine what it is that is "child pornography".
-MOST- of what is prosecuted as "child pornography" really IS NOT a terrible thing. Under US Federal law--and I am sure PA is no better--a 24 y.o. dressed in a "schoolgirl" outfit to "simulate" a minor makes for child porn. You might say that that's not "really" child porn... but on the LAW, you'd be plain wrong. Likewise, parent taking pictures of their small children bathing, swimming, or running around the lawn, have been prosecuted and imprisoned for producing "child pornography." Or even in the case that is -borderline- reasonable, a 16-17 y.o. who is of the age-of-consent to have sex in his/her state, becomes the "victim" of child pornographers if her/his partner (who might be 16-17 too) takes a picture of the act. I might say that this last case is maybe, slightly bad--but certainly also far short of "terrible." Or still more: someone who draws a picture--entirely from imagination--of kids having sex, produces child porn... and likewise even if those drawings are just "suggestive."
Moreover, even by the incredibly loose standard that images (and words) get classified as "child porn"... the PA action doesn't bother to demonstrate that the banned sites ACTUALLY meet the weak threshhold. They just order material banned... no hearing, no trial, no evidentiary trail. Just a lone declaration by an AG that "I know that's what it is."
The job LWN does is quite excellent--and this sort of excellence requires real effort. You don't get that kind of quality and coverage from dilettante's who spend an hour here or there. $12k/month barely pays two IT salaries, once you count insurance, social security contribution, workers comp, and similar expenses. I own a business, I know this.
Moreover, I am also a professional writer, so I probably have a lot better idea than AirLace about just how much work goes into LWN's summaries. I don't write quite the same thing--but there is some similarity (my name is Mertz, btw, you can find what I do at IBM dW, Intel IDS, and elsewhere). I often write about a certain library or software product, and it really is a good week of work to become familiar enough with something to write a helpful 2500 words on the topic. Doing 52 such research projects a year is about what I could handle (and I'm a bright person).
What LWN does is in some respects similar. True, they only write a couple sentences about each given product... but those couple sentences are consistently accurate, clear, and informative. Each one of those sentences represents probably an hour of work. LWN covers dozens or hundreds of topics each week! Each one of them requires just this kind of research... and, well, that's a few full time workers.
I have written a Python utility for converting "smart ASCII" to HTML (and another one for XML). I plan to adapt this to LaTex, but it hasn't happened just yet. The format I call "smart ASCII" is probably even simpler than that used by aft, but the idea is the same. Basically, just use the same simple conventions you would in writing email or a newsgroup post.
I've written about this utility in several IBM developerWorks articles (most using it just as a touchstone). Probably the best starting place is:
http://gnosis.cx/publish/programming/txt2dw_tip. tx t
Links to related articles (and to the source) can be followed from there.
There are a number of ways that the ZeoSync press release tips its hand as the nonsense it is. One just needs to read carefully.
Rhetorically, the reference to unnamed "experts" from Harvard, MIT, Berkeley, etc. is quite telling. If someone at those places had genuinely done this research, they would be named with credentials. The absense of that speaks loudly. I suspect the actual collaboration amounts to some former undergraduate of those schools calling a professor and asking some innane question ("Hi Dr. Jones, what do you think of Claude Shannon?").
But even more telling than the rhetorical lacunae are the ten-dollar words they include to try to wow the reader. In an allegedly lossless compression algorithm, the release brags about advancements of fractal, wavelet, FFT etc. techniques... in other words, a bunch of LOSSY compression techniques. Put simply, if you are happy with lossy compression (which you often are, but there is a clear difference), you can get whatever compression ratio you want (at the cost of correspondingly reduced fidelity).
So the ZeoSync claim is either directly false, or it is about lossy compression, and is worth a big yawn.
Advancing my general theory that Reuters reporters are idiots, the article took 10 years off the life of the estimable Claude Shannon. Sadly enough--and well known to/. readers, Dr. Shannon died last year (2001), not in 1991. This obscure bit of knowledge was buried away in technical journals like the _NYT_ and _Entertainment Weekly_, so one can see how Reuters missed it.
This is not really meant as a spelling flame, but as cautionary advice. Almost every sort of computer work is about communication skills to a greater degree than it is about programming skills, or narrow technical knowledge.
Mipsledding a number of obvious words in a post proclaiming oneself a "star employee" belies the claim ("devicive", "incompetance", "immidiate"). Obviously enough, I wouldn't fire someone for a couple typos, but they do dull the luster somewhat.
I am David Mertz, the author of the referenced (but somewhat mis-described) article on IBM developerWorks about anygui. Some other folks have posted several clarifications, but let me try putting them together in one place.
1. I am not the lead developer of Anygui. That honor belongs to Magnus Lie Hetland, who has been doing a wonderful job. As indicated in the article, or on the project page, I -did- volunteer to lead one tiny aspect (but have not yet done any work, for which I apologize).
2. Anygui is not sponsored by IBM. I just write columns for IBM, and found the project interesting enough to devote an installment to.
3. Anygui does not "repeat the mistakes of AWT", nor does it aim to replace another toolkit like GTK or Fox. Anygui is a *wrapper* around lower-end toolkits. The idea is that you can distribute *identical* source code to different users, on different platforms, and have it run with *some* available backend.
4. Anygui will never be as feature-rich as many of its backend toolkits. It is not trying to be. The aim of Anygui is to provide a minimal, but -universal-, GUI API. If you want the full sophistication of, e.g. Swing, don't use Anygui. If you want users of Jython, MacOS native, Win32, and PyGTK (and others) to all be able to receive and run (without modification) your common Python code, Anygui is a brilliant project.
I used to think ESR was an idiot. I think I have to revise that opinion: now I think he is a *dangerous* idiot. Or maybe it is worse still, and he actually -knows- how stupid his argument as, and he is promoting it anyway.
In what ESR writes about "choosing" a license, he brings in a huge range of naturalizing assumptions about the legal framework of intellectual property which give meaning to choosing a license. There is nothing natural or inevitable about all these laws. They can and should be changed.... and if the unfreedom of existing bad laws is removed, what we are left with is the FSF's vision (or something close to it).
Let's try an obvious transposition. I won't play with silly anagrams for names though. Suppose that in the future, a chemical company creates a substance that reduces the harmful effects of pollutants in the air. They release this chemical into the air of big cities. In the meanwhile, the "Big Chemical Company IP Protection Act" has been passed to "clarify" the IP rights of patent holders. As a matter of ESR's style of freedom (or cabbage, or whatever he wants to call it), the chemical company should be allowed to "license" the breathing of their chemical (which is in all the air) on whatever terms they -freely- choose. Obviously, violators of their intellectual property rights will be dealt with by the police and the courts and the prisons.
RMS--and the Free Breathing Foundation (OK, I can't resist one fictional name)--according to ESR are confused and misleading in advocating the "freedom" to breath the air. Actually, the FBF now threatens the poor chemical company with all sort of restrictions on the terms on which they can license breathing (says ESR). Surely -freedom- would let them license on whatever terms they want.
Back to the real world, away from ESR's. Being able to breath without facing criminal sanction is a basic matter of genuine freedom. Just because there are unjust laws, it doesn't mean acting within the law is real freedom--Kant's "arbeit macht frei" to the side. Actual freedom is not facing restriction and violence for doing what one should be able to do. Likewise--and in this very world--a law restricting my reuse of software code is an unjust law. Obedience to this law is not freedom, but exactly its contrary. In the FSF's ideal world, it is not that the GPL would be imposed, but that no license restriction would be allowed at all. That is, less restrictions rather than more, versus the current unjust and unfree system. As a strategy and a compromise, the FSF have made a "viral" license that turns copyright laws against themselves in a certain way. The GPL is better that proprietary licenses, but far worse than the world in which licenses on software would be considered as absurd as licenses on breathing.
She did, quoting a classmate as saying: "We
want to kill people; we're sick of them."
(If I or anyone reading this called the
police everytime we came across that
comment online, a lot of teenage boys
would be in jail.) She said the boy later
threatened her for reporting his remarks.
A lot of teenage boys ARE in jail (or more likely, prison). Actually a hell or a lot of teenage boys are in prison.
What may have blinded Katz is that these hundreds of thousands of teenage boys in prison are not what you call... white. In the U.S., being black or hispanic, male, and teenaged is effectively enough to put you in prison, quite absent anything else except cops who don't like you (and cops do not like black teenage boys, by their nature).
Katz' concern is good... but their are even larger ones being ablated.
I would make two points. (1) I would urge with an earlier poster that DocBook really is the best choice for open and portable documentation content (or at least some similar SGML/XML format); (2) You are absolutely right about the deplorable state of documentation and (friendly) tools for working with DocBook. I wish it were better, and have had many of the frustrations you express (even though I have the good O'Rielly book to help me).
On the second part however, I have myself made certain efforts to improve the situation. I have written several articles on IBM developerWorks (ibm.com/developer) relating to DocBook/XML. A forthcoming one looks at some XML-editing tools that are suited to prose-oriented XML dialects (look for it soon). As well, at least one other dW author has addressed some other aspects of working with DocBook. I recommend you check out dW, at least as a starting point for this information. I do not claim what you find there will be everything you want, but it will be a small part of it.
Yours, David Mertz...
Lots of languages for JVM
on
Perl and .NET
·
· Score: 1
The article makes the very inaccurate claim that.NET differs from JVM's in being cross-language. JVM's allegedly only support Java as a language, according to the writer.
This is nonsense. There are literally dozens of languages you can use to target JVM's right now. Two of my favorites are JPython (Jython) and NetRexx. But there are plenty of others, such as functional languages, Jacl (a version of TCL), Basics, and various other special things. About the only thing missing from the list of languages that target JVM's is Perl (perhaps this informs a bias of the articles).
I am the author of the interviews in question here. As pointed to in the first interview, I also did interviews about J(P)ython and Python for.NET developers. Those have not made it to IBM developerWorks yet (they are a bit slow with publication schedules), but it all can be found at my own website already. (As well, certain manglings by IBM editors are not present in my home versions [says the spoiled artist:-)])
> Never attribute to malice that which can be
> explained by simple incompitence.
^^^^^^^^^^^^
Is this deliberate for the self-referentiality? Or just embarrassing?
What about populations (of investors)
on
Saga Of TriStrata
·
· Score: 4
I'll admit that I did not actually read the article very carefully... mostly because my first reaction was so strongly "So what!"
As far as I can tell, the story is that some guy said that he wanted to invest in X, wound up investing in Y; X made a bunch of money and Y lost money... and the guy has sour grapes (but still wants to toot his own horn). Of course, some *other* investor *did* invest in Priceline, and now they want to convince you they have a crystal ball into the "new economy".
Y'know I *could have* invested in VA Linux the day of the IPO, and made a zillion dollars. In fact, I even mentioned to a couple friends that I thought it was worth watching... but in real life, I didn't buy that, and I'm no more precient than the next guy.
Actually, it's kinda like the birthday paradox, and other cognitive limits that people seem to suffer about large numbers, groups, and probabilities.
Here's two related examples. I was having a talk recently where these came up. Someone suggested that I should play one of those "online investment games"; the idea of such is that each "player" gets a certain amount of make-believe money, and for a certain time each player makes imaginary stock trades. At the end of a period of time, the player with the most make-believe money "wins". Of course, what they win isn't all the real money, but just gloating rights... or maybe in a few cases a token prize like some free trades on an online brokerage that sponsors the game.
My observation is that it will *ALWAYS* be an extremely high-risk investor who wins these contests. The reason is simple. Say 100 players join the contest. 20 of those might take extremely high-risk strategies. The other 80 take comparatively low-risk strategies. Of the 20 high-riskers, 19 do worse than the overall average, probably half of them actually wind up losing (make-believe) money. But still, one of the high-risk choices proves right. At the end of the "game" the winner is always a high-risk players... but the "winningness" of a high-risk strategy is still probably less than that of a low-risk one. The result of the game really doesn't show you anything about what is best to do with real money... although a lot of people will be lulled into thinking it does.
My conversant pointed out a old scam related to this principle. Here's the scam (don't actually do it, it's illegal and wrong... but it does show the way people misunderstand the groups they belong to and their probabilities). (e)Mail a predication to a sufficiently large group of people. Could be a stock pick, could be a racetrack result, something where picking the right answer could actually make money. But don't mail the same prediction to the whole group, instead split the prediction by subgroups. For simplicity, say your group is 4096 people (easy with all those spam email lists), and your prediction is just Stock X goes up or Stock X goes down. You've just emailed 2048 people the wrong predication, and they think you're an idiot. OK, fine. Now take the 2048 people you "predicted" the right thing for, and repeat the procedure: 1024 get one prediction, the other 1024 get the opposite. Same thing again. Whittle down as you go.
Now let's say you do ten runs of this. The remaining 4 people have just seen you make an accurate prediction *TEN* times in a row. That's quite a record for something hard to predict, no?! Now you need a story about your secret method that outwits the economists/horse-racers/whatever, and is sure to keep picking the right results. But sadly, all your money is tied up right now in blah-blah-blah (all the winnings from the previous rounds). So you really just need some people to invest in your next round of prediction, and you will take only a small cut of the big winnings.
Now take the money and disappear. Hope the cops don't catch you. People want to believe certain things, especially when it's a way to get money for nothing (you should see me filtered-spam archive with hundreds of similar offers... or look at your own INBOX, most likely). And surely anyone who can make *TEN* successful predictions without fail must be on to *something*.
In other words, a stopped clock is right twice a day.
If I wanted, I could run the very alpha Opera/2, or several versions of Netscape/W16, Opera/W16, or (rumor has it), IE3/W16.
Also, using XFree/OS2 provides a platform on which a number of browsers have been ported (and the GIMP, which is about all I use XFree/OS2 for myself).
So there are quite a few web-browsing options under OS/2. And even most unix shells, shell tools, good editors, ports of all my favorite compilers. Overall, a nice place to work.
It is clear that Wall Street is in a huge speculative bubble when it comes to so-called 'new economy' stocks. And pretty much the same thing for companies and assets that are privately held. Despite various prognosticators, this bubble is hardly the first one in US or European history... and eventually, it will be clear that basic economic principles of capitalism will not be reversed or thrown out.
So to the basic principles: The point of owning a company, or an asset generally, is to make money off it. The idea of liquidity of capital says that money should go where the most money is to be made. That is, if my $1M invested in Foo Corp is likely to make me $100K/year, and my same $1M invested in Bar Partners is likely to make me $50k/year... the good money is on the latter. Of course, that principle has indeed gotten a bit muddied in internet stocks where huge *losses* attract investors.
But I still think that in selling your website, you really should try to sell its likelihood of making money for investors, not some indirect concept like page-clicks. Lots of (e.g. non-commercial) sites have more page-clicks than yours does (whatever it is) without making a dime, or having any hope of ever making a dime. On the plus side, you have actual revenue to point to. On the other hand, it also appears you have actual costs (i.e. labor in maintaining the site). The buyer presumably wants actual profit, not just revenue... if you have $20k/year in ad revenue, but it will cost them $25k/year to keep the site running, that isn't all that appealing.
On the plus side for your sale, you don't have to sell only your past profits (in fact, that's not *really* what you are selling at all), but rather your *future* profits. If you can make a good case that next year (or the one after that) will have $100k/year in revenue, that seems a lot more valuable.
So in the end, it seems to me that here's what you have to argue:
1. My site is *likely* to make $X in actual profits (revenue - costs) in the future. 2. The going rate for other investments is a Y% annual return on capital. 3. If you pay me $Z for the website, then $X/$Z is more than Y%.
Of course, the one other wrinkle is that some investments are riskier than others. Your buyers could buy T-Bills which pay quite a bit less than Y%, but have very little likelihood of becoming worthless. So realistically, you have to argue not just that you are likely to make $Z, but show *how* likely this is.
Yours, Lulu (I am not an economists, but I sometimes play one at academic conferences)...
Unfortunately (or fortunately, for other reasons, in the eyes of the FSF), releasing a modified CPhack as public domain is not possible. The GPL makes certain requirements upon derived works that excludes the public domain (by design). As long as you use the original CPhack as a basis, every derivative work must either be under GPL, or be under whatever other license terms its actual owner (now Mattel) offers it under (yeah, right!).
On the other hand, someone would be free to reverse engineer CPhack based on the principles set forth in the original authors' essays, and release that functionally similar but source-independent version to the public domain.
This is a great action by the poet. It sounds like she understands what is going on with the "land grab" by the biotech corporations, and it is a semi-serious political action, not just a joke.
The thing about this is that maybe if she gets the patent, she can use it againt the m**f** biotech corporations who are trying to charge rent on future medical treatements (and worse even, when it comes to privacy, bio-screening, and stuff like that). If Biopatents-Are-Us starts marketing some new gene-based treatment (or more likely, starts putting muscle on a company actually making a treatment), MacLean can counter-sue them with prior ownership of that same gene (assuming that particular one is in her own genome).
Maybe this is what a lot of people should start doing... just to make sure of good coverage of all the possible genes (although almost all human genes are actually common to all humans... or for that matter, to all primates... so you don't get much additional coverage in the second patents).
Slashdot Mirror
I have recently completed a book for Addison-Wesley. Well, almost completed--it needs to make it through copyediting and indexing still, which will probably (unfortunately) mean several more months until it is printed.
One thing that I did--with permission of my publisher--is make the text of the book completely available during writing, and it will remain so into the future. Shameless plug, you can find it at http://gnosis.cx/TPiP/. I cannot say honestly that being allowed to provide it this way was a deciding issue in choosing a publisher; but it certainly does make me feel better about writing the book.
Admittedly, this is not quite the same thing as an OpenContent license. You are free to read the book at the URL listed, and print yourself a personal copy. But the book is under copyright, and you cannot reproduce and sell the text yourself. Still, I believe it is a step in the right direction... maybe my next book will manage to go a step farther.
Yours, David...
> Don't post your email address on the internet
p amf.html
This bad advice has become a real pet peeve of mine. I guess because it is so absurd for me personally... but I share that trait with 90% of people who actually work for a living.
In particular, I am a writer, and publish on "the Internet." For example (in which I discuss the need for email disclosure along with spam filtering techniques):
http://www-106.ibm.com/developerworks/library/l-s
In other words, it is my -business- to disclose my email address. Email is not, and should not be, restricted to a little clubby thing with your family and close friends. It is an important and legitimate purpose to allow previously unknown parties to contact you (individually, and relevantly, not as a generic member of a list of 14 million address). People sell things, we work on free software projects, we are interested in discussing topics of interest in our lives, and so on... strangers aren't -per se- spammers, and should not be treated as such automatically.
I shouldn't need to try this many times to convey a useful URL :-(. Anyway, I reliable URL is the copy at my own site:
s pa m.html
http://gnosis.cx/publish/programming/filtering-
Tee hee... your corrected link is identical to the one I posted. dW seems to honor the URL erratically. Strange. Anyway, try the first hit at:
e rt z
http://www.google.com/search?q=spam+filtering+m
I wrote an article on spam filtering techniques at:
- sp amf.html
http://www-106.ibm.com/developerworks/library/l
Following that, I got into a discussion with a reader who ran an ISP, and wanted to implement some filtering techniques on his SMTP server. My reaction--and the more I think about it, the more convinced I am--is that actual filtering is heavier than is needed for this purpose.
I believe that a great deal of the problem with SMTP servers is NOT ENOUGH latency. If you were to add a few seconds extra latency to for every "RCTP TO:" field, there would be little effect for regular email usage. But such a couple seconds latency would make spamming impossible through that server. This latency can be a simple timer on the server, starting from a connection opened with a MAIL FROM: message.
There are a few details to handle here. To prevent multi-threaded spammers who open many sockets, you'd have to add a semaphore to each connection that limited connections from the same IP address. And as a general principle, you should not accept connections from every IP in the world (don't open relay). Moreover, demonstrated legitimate mailing lists could perhaps be granted special connections without the extra latency (but there should be a real procedure to prove you have a real mailing list in the ISP contract)
I'm sure much leakage is because of underhanded ISPs, companies selling email, and the like.
But in my case--and many people's--the main problem is that I am a public personality. I do things where there is good reason to disclose my email address to strangers (in my case, because I am a writer). A lot of those strangers write me for very legitimate reasons, but obviously once an email is made public you cannot keep it to only the good guys.
It doesn't apply so much to me personally, but a similar situation is where email addresses are listed in directories--company, organizations, and so on. In those cases also, you need to publish your email to let legitimate correspondence contact you.
I've always been a little puzzled by the (somewhat naive) folks who think to answer the spam problem by hiding their email from everywhere it might leak. There are various tricks for doing this, false addresses, complex usernames, different accounts, etc. That only really works for people--typically college kids or younger--who never need to DO anything in the world. For the rest of us, hiding an email address would be like hiding our snailmail address from business contacts, because we might get junk mail from releasing it.
ahaile has already pointed largely the same point, but it is worth reiterating. Back when Sokal published his paper, the whole right-wing "Cultural Literacy" schtick was a current "debate." For the most part, the "debate" consisted of a bunch of right-wingers like E.D.Hirsch and the truly deplorable William Bennet bemoaning the teaching of non-white authors in college and/or teachers who are leftists (they never admitted that's quite what they are about, but it is).
Sokal is not nearly such a bad guy as those right-wingers. He's actually a decent liberal, but one raised in a particular scientistic, positivist intellectual tradition. Alan Sokal is a physicist, after all (although that is not sufficient, many in the occupation understand humanities better). But caught in that anti-Postmodernism ferver of the early 1990s, Sokal decided to make fun of the journal _Social Text_ (and the general field, by implication)
_Social Text_ is not really the most prestigious journal in that general area, but it's not bad. It is refereed, but that doesn't mean as much in any journal as what outside people tend to think. You don't have to be RIGHT, or even original, to right for "good" academic journals... just write well enough, and pick a topic the editor are interested in. For a lot of them, you also have to wait years for publication to roll around... they are behind schedule by huge amounts.
But even for what moderation means at _Social Text_, Sokal did not go through it. He knew some editors, and approached them saying "I'm a well known physicist, and I'd like you to fast track something I want to write." The _Social Text_ editors liked the idea of reaching out to that other academic community, so they agreed. But the refereeing in this case consisted of making sure the sentences were grammatical, the words spelled right, and the subject matter generally what Sokal had suggested informally. The same paper WOULD NOT have been published if submitted for blind review.
So the hoax basically amounts to this: people tend to grant some leeway to their friends. True enough, but hardly an indictment of cultural studies, the humanities, postmodernism, multiculturalism, or whatever it is that is supposed to have been shown to be foolish.
Kelso Lundden commented in a fashion similar to a number of other posters:
Child pornography, of course, is a terrible,
terrible thing...
I agree with the general sentiment of Lundden's note, but I think the above needs to be questioned. It is not a simple thing to determine what it is that is "child pornography".
-MOST- of what is prosecuted as "child pornography" really IS NOT a terrible thing. Under US Federal law--and I am sure PA is no better--a 24 y.o. dressed in a "schoolgirl" outfit to "simulate" a minor makes for child porn. You might say that that's not "really" child porn... but on the LAW, you'd be plain wrong. Likewise, parent taking pictures of their small children bathing, swimming, or running around the lawn, have been prosecuted and imprisoned for producing "child pornography." Or even in the case that is -borderline- reasonable, a 16-17 y.o. who is of the age-of-consent to have sex in his/her state, becomes the "victim" of child pornographers if her/his partner (who might be 16-17 too) takes a picture of the act. I might say that this last case is maybe, slightly bad--but certainly also far short of "terrible." Or still more: someone who draws a picture--entirely from imagination--of kids having sex, produces child porn... and likewise even if those drawings are just "suggestive."
Moreover, even by the incredibly loose standard that images (and words) get classified as "child porn"... the PA action doesn't bother to demonstrate that the banned sites ACTUALLY meet the weak threshhold. They just order material banned... no hearing, no trial, no evidentiary trail. Just a lone declaration by an AG that "I know that's what it is."
The job LWN does is quite excellent--and this sort of excellence requires real effort. You don't get that kind of quality and coverage from dilettante's who spend an hour here or there. $12k/month barely pays two IT salaries, once you count insurance, social security contribution, workers comp, and similar expenses. I own a business, I know this.
Moreover, I am also a professional writer, so I probably have a lot better idea than AirLace about just how much work goes into LWN's summaries. I don't write quite the same thing--but there is some similarity (my name is Mertz, btw, you can find what I do at IBM dW, Intel IDS, and elsewhere). I often write about a certain library or software product, and it really is a good week of work to become familiar enough with something to write a helpful 2500 words on the topic. Doing 52 such research projects a year is about what I could handle (and I'm a bright person).
What LWN does is in some respects similar. True, they only write a couple sentences about each given product... but those couple sentences are consistently accurate, clear, and informative. Each one of those sentences represents probably an hour of work. LWN covers dozens or hundreds of topics each week! Each one of them requires just this kind of research... and, well, that's a few full time workers.
I have written a Python utility for converting "smart ASCII" to HTML (and another one for XML). I plan to adapt this to LaTex, but it hasn't happened just yet. The format I call "smart ASCII" is probably even simpler than that used by aft, but the idea is the same. Basically, just use the same simple conventions you would in writing email or a newsgroup post.
. tx t
I've written about this utility in several IBM developerWorks articles (most using it just as a touchstone). Probably the best starting place is:
http://gnosis.cx/publish/programming/txt2dw_tip
Links to related articles (and to the source) can be followed from there.
There are a number of ways that the ZeoSync press release tips its hand as the nonsense it is. One just needs to read carefully.
Rhetorically, the reference to unnamed "experts" from Harvard, MIT, Berkeley, etc. is quite telling. If someone at those places had genuinely done this research, they would be named with credentials. The absense of that speaks loudly. I suspect the actual collaboration amounts to some former undergraduate of those schools calling a professor and asking some innane question ("Hi Dr. Jones, what do you think of Claude Shannon?").
But even more telling than the rhetorical lacunae are the ten-dollar words they include to try to wow the reader. In an allegedly lossless compression algorithm, the release brags about advancements of fractal, wavelet, FFT etc. techniques... in other words, a bunch of LOSSY compression techniques. Put simply, if you are happy with lossy compression (which you often are, but there is a clear difference), you can get whatever compression ratio you want (at the cost of correspondingly reduced fidelity).
So the ZeoSync claim is either directly false, or it is about lossy compression, and is worth a big yawn.
Advancing my general theory that Reuters reporters are idiots, the article took 10 years off the life of the estimable Claude Shannon. Sadly enough--and well known to /. readers, Dr. Shannon died last year (2001), not in 1991. This obscure bit of knowledge was buried away in technical journals like the _NYT_ and _Entertainment Weekly_, so one can see how Reuters missed it.
This is not really meant as a spelling flame, but as cautionary advice. Almost every sort of computer work is about communication skills to a greater degree than it is about programming skills, or narrow technical knowledge.
Mipsledding a number of obvious words in a post proclaiming oneself a "star employee" belies the claim ("devicive", "incompetance", "immidiate"). Obviously enough, I wouldn't fire someone for a couple typos, but they do dull the luster somewhat.
I am David Mertz, the author of the referenced (but somewhat mis-described) article on IBM developerWorks about anygui. Some other folks have posted several clarifications, but let me try putting them together in one place.
1. I am not the lead developer of Anygui. That honor belongs to Magnus Lie Hetland, who has been doing a wonderful job. As indicated in the article, or on the project page, I -did- volunteer to lead one tiny aspect (but have not yet done any work, for which I apologize).
2. Anygui is not sponsored by IBM. I just write columns for IBM, and found the project interesting enough to devote an installment to.
3. Anygui does not "repeat the mistakes of AWT", nor does it aim to replace another toolkit like GTK or Fox. Anygui is a *wrapper* around lower-end toolkits. The idea is that you can distribute *identical* source code to different users, on different platforms, and have it run with *some* available backend.
4. Anygui will never be as feature-rich as many of its backend toolkits. It is not trying to be. The aim of Anygui is to provide a minimal, but -universal-, GUI API. If you want the full sophistication of, e.g. Swing, don't use Anygui. If you want users of Jython, MacOS native, Win32, and PyGTK (and others) to all be able to receive and run (without modification) your common Python code, Anygui is a brilliant project.
I used to think ESR was an idiot. I think I have to revise that opinion: now I think he is a *dangerous* idiot. Or maybe it is worse still, and he actually -knows- how stupid his argument as, and he is promoting it anyway.
In what ESR writes about "choosing" a license, he brings in a huge range of naturalizing assumptions about the legal framework of intellectual property which give meaning to choosing a license. There is nothing natural or inevitable about all these laws. They can and should be changed.... and if the unfreedom of existing bad laws is removed, what we are left with is the FSF's vision (or something close to it).
Let's try an obvious transposition. I won't play with silly anagrams for names though. Suppose that in the future, a chemical company creates a substance that reduces the harmful effects of pollutants in the air. They release this chemical into the air of big cities. In the meanwhile, the "Big Chemical Company IP Protection Act" has been passed to "clarify" the IP rights of patent holders. As a matter of ESR's style of freedom (or cabbage, or whatever he wants to call it), the chemical company should be allowed to "license" the breathing of their chemical (which is in all the air) on whatever terms they -freely- choose. Obviously, violators of their intellectual property rights will be dealt with by the police and the courts and the prisons.
RMS--and the Free Breathing Foundation (OK, I can't resist one fictional name)--according to ESR are confused and misleading in advocating the "freedom" to breath the air. Actually, the FBF now threatens the poor chemical company with all sort of restrictions on the terms on which they can license breathing (says ESR). Surely -freedom- would let them license on whatever terms they want.
Back to the real world, away from ESR's. Being able to breath without facing criminal sanction is a basic matter of genuine freedom. Just because there are unjust laws, it doesn't mean acting within the law is real freedom--Kant's "arbeit macht frei" to the side. Actual freedom is not facing restriction and violence for doing what one should be able to do. Likewise--and in this very world--a law restricting my reuse of software code is an unjust law. Obedience to this law is not freedom, but exactly its contrary. In the FSF's ideal world, it is not that the GPL would be imposed, but that no license restriction would be allowed at all. That is, less restrictions rather than more, versus the current unjust and unfree system. As a strategy and a compromise, the FSF have made a "viral" license that turns copyright laws against themselves in a certain way. The GPL is better that proprietary licenses, but far worse than the world in which licenses on software would be considered as absurd as licenses on breathing.
A lot of teenage boys ARE in jail (or more likely, prison). Actually a hell or a lot of teenage boys are in prison.
What may have blinded Katz is that these hundreds of thousands of teenage boys in prison are not what you call... white. In the U.S., being black or hispanic, male, and teenaged is effectively enough to put you in prison, quite absent anything else except cops who don't like you (and cops do not like black teenage boys, by their nature).
Katz' concern is good... but their are even larger ones being ablated.
I would make two points. (1) I would urge with an earlier poster that DocBook really is the best choice for open and portable documentation content (or at least some similar SGML/XML format); (2) You are absolutely right about the deplorable state of documentation and (friendly) tools for working with DocBook. I wish it were better, and have had many of the frustrations you express (even though I have the good O'Rielly book to help me).
On the second part however, I have myself made certain efforts to improve the situation. I have written several articles on IBM developerWorks (ibm.com/developer) relating to DocBook/XML. A forthcoming one looks at some XML-editing tools that are suited to prose-oriented XML dialects (look for it soon). As well, at least one other dW author has addressed some other aspects of working with DocBook. I recommend you check out dW, at least as a starting point for this information. I do not claim what you find there will be everything you want, but it will be a small part of it.
Yours, David Mertz...
The article makes the very inaccurate claim that .NET differs from JVM's in being cross-language. JVM's allegedly only support Java as a language, according to the writer.
This is nonsense. There are literally dozens of languages you can use to target JVM's right now. Two of my favorites are JPython (Jython) and NetRexx. But there are plenty of others, such as functional languages, Jacl (a version of TCL), Basics, and various other special things. About the only thing missing from the list of languages that target JVM's is Perl (perhaps this informs a bias of the articles).
Take a look at: Languages for the Java VM for more information.
I am the author of the interviews in question here. As pointed to in the first interview, I also did interviews about J(P)ython and Python for .NET developers. Those have not made it to IBM developerWorks yet (they are a bit slow with publication schedules), but it all can be found at my own website already. (As well, certain manglings by IBM editors are not present in my home versions [says the spoiled artist :-)])
Take a look at:
http://gnosis.cx/publish/tech_index.html
> Never attribute to malice that which can be
> explained by simple incompitence.
^^^^^^^^^^^^
Is this deliberate for the self-referentiality? Or just embarrassing?
I'll admit that I did not actually read the article very carefully... mostly because my first reaction was so strongly "So what!"
As far as I can tell, the story is that some guy said that he wanted to invest in X, wound up investing in Y; X made a bunch of money and Y lost money... and the guy has sour grapes (but still wants to toot his own horn). Of course, some *other* investor *did* invest in Priceline, and now they want to convince you they have a crystal ball into the "new economy".
Y'know I *could have* invested in VA Linux the day of the IPO, and made a zillion dollars. In fact, I even mentioned to a couple friends that I thought it was worth watching... but in real life, I didn't buy that, and I'm no more precient than the next guy.
Actually, it's kinda like the birthday paradox, and other cognitive limits that people seem to suffer about large numbers, groups, and probabilities.
Here's two related examples. I was having a talk recently where these came up. Someone suggested that I should play one of those "online investment games"; the idea of such is that each "player" gets a certain amount of make-believe money, and for a certain time each player makes imaginary stock trades. At the end of a period of time, the player with the most make-believe money "wins". Of course, what they win isn't all the real money, but just gloating rights... or maybe in a few cases a token prize like some free trades on an online brokerage that sponsors the game.
My observation is that it will *ALWAYS* be an extremely high-risk investor who wins these contests. The reason is simple. Say 100 players join the contest. 20 of those might take extremely high-risk strategies. The other 80 take comparatively low-risk strategies. Of the 20 high-riskers, 19 do worse than the overall average, probably half of them actually wind up losing (make-believe) money. But still, one of the high-risk choices proves right. At the end of the "game" the winner is always a high-risk players... but the "winningness" of a high-risk strategy is still probably less than that of a low-risk one. The result of the game really doesn't show you anything about what is best to do with real money... although a lot of people will be lulled into thinking it does.
My conversant pointed out a old scam related to this principle. Here's the scam (don't actually do it, it's illegal and wrong... but it does show the way people misunderstand the groups they belong to and their probabilities). (e)Mail a predication to a sufficiently large group of people. Could be a stock pick, could be a racetrack result, something where picking the right answer could actually make money. But don't mail the same prediction to the whole group, instead split the prediction by subgroups. For simplicity, say your group is 4096 people (easy with all those spam email lists), and your prediction is just Stock X goes up or Stock X goes down. You've just emailed 2048 people the wrong predication, and they think you're an idiot. OK, fine. Now take the 2048 people you "predicted" the right thing for, and repeat the procedure: 1024 get one prediction, the other 1024 get the opposite. Same thing again. Whittle down as you go.
Now let's say you do ten runs of this. The remaining 4 people have just seen you make an accurate prediction *TEN* times in a row. That's quite a record for something hard to predict, no?! Now you need a story about your secret method that outwits the economists/horse-racers/whatever, and is sure to keep picking the right results. But sadly, all your money is tied up right now in blah-blah-blah (all the winnings from the previous rounds). So you really just need some people to invest in your next round of prediction, and you will take only a small cut of the big winnings.
Now take the money and disappear. Hope the cops don't catch you. People want to believe certain things, especially when it's a way to get money for nothing (you should see me filtered-spam archive with hundreds of similar offers... or look at your own INBOX, most likely). And surely anyone who can make *TEN* successful predictions without fail must be on to *something*.
In other words, a stopped clock is right twice a day.
I'm running OS/2 Warp 4 right now (and most of the time). My Web-browsers directory has in it:
Netscape Communicator 4.61
Netscape Communicator 4.04
Netscape Navigator 2.02
HotJava 3.0
HotJava 1.15
Lynx/2
WebExplorer 1.2
Sslurp! 1.6 (site downloader)
If I wanted, I could run the very alpha Opera/2, or several versions of Netscape/W16, Opera/W16, or (rumor has it), IE3/W16.
Also, using XFree/OS2 provides a platform on which a number of browsers have been ported (and the GIMP, which is about all I use XFree/OS2 for myself).
So there are quite a few web-browsing options under OS/2. And even most unix shells, shell tools, good editors, ports of all my favorite compilers. Overall, a nice place to work.
It is clear that Wall Street is in a huge speculative bubble when it comes to so-called 'new economy' stocks. And pretty much the same thing for companies and assets that are privately held. Despite various prognosticators, this bubble is hardly the first one in US or European history... and eventually, it will be clear that basic economic principles of capitalism will not be reversed or thrown out.
So to the basic principles: The point of owning a company, or an asset generally, is to make money off it. The idea of liquidity of capital says that money should go where the most money is to be made. That is, if my $1M invested in Foo Corp is likely to make me $100K/year, and my same $1M invested in Bar Partners is likely to make me $50k/year... the good money is on the latter. Of course, that principle has indeed gotten a bit muddied in internet stocks where huge *losses* attract investors.
But I still think that in selling your website, you really should try to sell its likelihood of making money for investors, not some indirect concept like page-clicks. Lots of (e.g. non-commercial) sites have more page-clicks than yours does (whatever it is) without making a dime, or having any hope of ever making a dime. On the plus side, you have actual revenue to point to. On the other hand, it also appears you have actual costs (i.e. labor in maintaining the site). The buyer presumably wants actual profit, not just revenue... if you have $20k/year in ad revenue, but it will cost them $25k/year to keep the site running, that isn't all that appealing.
On the plus side for your sale, you don't have to sell only your past profits (in fact, that's not *really* what you are selling at all), but rather your *future* profits. If you can make a good case that next year (or the one after that) will have $100k/year in revenue, that seems a lot more valuable.
So in the end, it seems to me that here's what you have to argue:
1. My site is *likely* to make $X in actual profits (revenue - costs) in the future.
2. The going rate for other investments is a Y% annual return on capital.
3. If you pay me $Z for the website, then $X/$Z is more than Y%.
Of course, the one other wrinkle is that some investments are riskier than others. Your buyers could buy T-Bills which pay quite a bit less than Y%, but have very little likelihood of becoming worthless. So realistically, you have to argue not just that you are likely to make $Z, but show *how* likely this is.
Yours, Lulu (I am not an economists, but I sometimes play one at academic conferences)...
Unfortunately (or fortunately, for other reasons, in the eyes of the FSF), releasing a modified CPhack as public domain is not possible. The GPL makes certain requirements upon derived works that excludes the public domain (by design). As long as you use the original CPhack as a basis, every derivative work must either be under GPL, or be under whatever other license terms its actual owner (now Mattel) offers it under (yeah, right!).
On the other hand, someone would be free to reverse engineer CPhack based on the principles set forth in the original authors' essays, and release that functionally similar but source-independent version to the public domain.
This is a great action by the poet. It sounds like she understands what is going on with the "land grab" by the biotech corporations, and it is a semi-serious political action, not just a joke.
The thing about this is that maybe if she gets the patent, she can use it againt the m**f** biotech corporations who are trying to charge rent on future medical treatements (and worse even, when it comes to privacy, bio-screening, and stuff like that). If Biopatents-Are-Us starts marketing some new gene-based treatment (or more likely, starts putting muscle on a company actually making a treatment), MacLean can counter-sue them with prior ownership of that same gene (assuming that particular one is in her own genome).
Maybe this is what a lot of people should start doing... just to make sure of good coverage of all the possible genes (although almost all human genes are actually common to all humans... or for that matter, to all primates... so you don't get much additional coverage in the second patents).