...and I've been waiting for the right place to post this. I doubt I'll ever see a place where it will be more on-topic.
I use TiVo at work and have very specific reasons to turn off profiling: I never want it to record something I didn't tell it to record. It's not that I don't think it's a perfectly good feature. I just don't ever need it.
A couple of weeks of thumbing TiVo's suggestions up and down and profiling gets pretty good. Other than that, just remember it's not really profiling you. It's just filling the empty space on your hard drive with stuff that's somehow like stuff you've said you like (or stuff you've watched, if you haven't told it anything).
But I've got a different problem. My TiVo doesn't think I'm gay. I think it's gay. I leave it on CSPAN every night because I like to watch "Washington Journal" in the morning when I come in early to work. I don't want CSPAN cluttering up my hard disk, but (since TiVo auto-records the last 30 minutes of whatever the channel is set to) I'd prefer to have it record something interesting.
Recently, though, it's been watching The Discovery Channel when I get in to work. It hasn't recorded anything on Discovery; I don't have anything programmed to be recorded on Discovery; I don't even think I've ever watched a Discovery Channel show on it. But there it is: happily watching "Interior Motives" on The Discovery Channel. The only explanation I can come up with: It's got a crush on the host.
...if this number takes into account valid accounting procedures?
If they are not expensing stock options, this number could be much higher (unless the depressed stock price has also depressed their accounting gimmickry). It would be interesting to know what the real numbers are.
It will also be interesting to know if the Enron-WorldCom scandals will result in shutting down this phony accounting scheme, especially since MS is the foremost practitioner. It could really send their stock into a tailspin if the people holding their stock found out their "profits" are often really losses.
The distinction between browsers and OSes is pointless, technologically speaking? Do you have any idea what you're talking about? The key to stable, maintainable code is enforcing layers (especially in this kind of case). Bundling is fine, but integrating was a technological solution to a marketing problem not a user's problem. It was needed for world domination, nothing else.
Why negative attacks DO work for OSS
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Halloween VII
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· Score: 3, Insightful
I dislike negative attacks as much as the next guy and I hope we see less of them and more positive Linux-building comments, but I do believe there is a case to be made that they work better for Open Source advocates.
Almost anyone who has ever used MS products has had at least one nightmarish experience with their products. Many newbies assume these experiences are their fault (especially when they were told such by a lying error message deliberately written to blame it on them). Many people just blame computers when this happens to them. Others carry it as a secret guilt.
When such a person hears an anti-MS rant, it can be a revelation giving them the "right" to question their own assumptions about Microsoft. (Remember: They have been told this is a great company which makes good products.)
If you include a positive Linux message at the end of your rant, you may even make an OSS sale.
Wittgenstein walked away from the Tractatus and was eventually vindicated when Goedel brought the whole logical-positivist enterprise to a halt. But Wittgenstein failed to see the importance of Goedel because he misinterpreted Goedel. Turing was unable to convince Wittgenstein of the importance of Goedel's theorem.
Turing tried to do a end-run around Goedel's proof and ended up inventing computer science as a way of proving the Halting Problem theorem. Of course, computers hadn't been invented, even though CS had. Eventually Turing actually built the computers which had been implied by his science (motivated by a war against evil or something).
That's the history of how computing came to be. And you don't get much more post-modern than that.
...contribution when that "contribution" is in the form of Fox News and relentless bias in favor of the Republicans.
Hughes Electronics was the object of a bidding war between Charlie Ergen and Rupert Murdoch. There are four reasons:
DirecTV (US) -- Combined with Echostar's holdings, would give the merged company 90% of the US satellite TV market, but the government looks at it as a broader market which includes cable (the merged company would probably be less than 20% of that market). Combined with NewsCorp's holdings, it would fill a big gap because Murdoch has been unable to get a toehold in US satellite markets (he has coverage just about everywhere else).
DirecTV Latin America -- Fills the other big hole in NewsCorp's satellite coverage. With this and DirecTV (US), Murdoch would have the ability to broadcast anything he wanted anywhere in the world. (This has political as well as economic value to Rupert.)
Hughes Network Systems -- Provides hardware for the other divisions as well as for other companies. Every satellite company needs this in-house because of the prevalence of industrial espionage in this industry with some companies accused to helping crackers break other companies' systems.
PanAmSat -- Satellite capacity which all these guys know how to use. They've all got it. They all want more. Echostar gets more out of these parts of the deal because they're putting up signal that duplicates Hughes signal. So, Charlie Ergen (who desperately wants more bandwidth) not only gets additional birds, but also could use more of the bandwidth for new products).
Many were surprised when Murdoch walked out of negotiations with DirecTV's board when the board member from GM seemed to be persuaded (by his boss) to side with Echostar. Given the vital importance to NewsCorp of getting a US satellite property, it didn't make sense that he would just give up.
Now it is pretty clear he walked out of that meeting thinking he could buy DirecTV for less after his cronies in Washington shot down the Echostar merger. It's much easier to buy something you want badly when there are no other bidders.
I have a feeling this is not aimed at the/. crowd. How many geeks would put a neon light inside a overclocking box so hot it needs water cooling?
To paraphrase Robin Williams: "Double XX boxen are God's way of telling you you have too much money." The target market is the same as the average Wall Street cocaine dealer: Guys who want to impress their friends with their electronics purchases (but limited to those with gullible friends).
...the stock market is in the process of getting rid of the practice of not expensing stock options. With that gone, MS will be exposed as a Ponzi scheme, right at the point where corporate America needs to save some money. Microsoft's cash reserves are going to go to defense, not offense.
HP's going to go the way of other MS partners, but not the buyout way. By the time this is over, no one's going to want MS stock any more than they want HP stock today. Probably less.
...obviously start with Startide Rising, a much better book set in the same universe (The Uplift Saga, which has six volumes). The Uplift War is just as good, even though I suspect it was conceived as a giant pun. It may also appeal to your Libertarian instincts.
Then you're faced with a choice. If you just can't get enough Uplift, the last three books of the saga are really one story or trilogy and introduce many new and interesting ideas. But the climax is not as satisfying as Startide or Uplift War.
If you liked the eco-libertarian side of The Uplift War and (especially) Startide Rising, Earth develops these ideas much more fully, but it may not be entirely non-unsettling to a true believer in the Libertarian Cause.
If you liked the puns in The Uplift War, Kiln People delivers puns at a rate which has to be seen to be believed. This book also does a lot better job of transferring the mystery genre to sci-fi than Sundiver. And he even explains why his gumshoe maintains a running dialog in his head.
If you like Asimov's Foundation, then Foundation's Triumph will be of interest. Otherwise ignore it.
Perhaps his most interesting book was written with Gregory Benford -- Heart of the Comet, biological sci-fi set in deep space.
It's only anal retentive if you hyphenate anal-retentiveness.
An excellent example...
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Open Source TV
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· Score: 3, Informative
...of why you shouldn't use/. for legal advice.
Almost everything in this post is factually wrong.
"But PBS is inherently owned by the public..."
I am not aware of any sense in which PBS is legally owned by the public. I'm not sure what "inherent" ownership means. But it is not a concept which would likely get you far in a court of law.
I believe the ownership structure of PBS is as follows: PBS is a nonprofit corporation owned by all of the local PBS stations, which are usually nonprofit corporations themselves. Most of these local stations were originally associated with colleges or universities, some of which may still maintain some ownership of the local station. Also part of the picture is CPB, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. I think CPB is responsible for the distribution of federal funds to PBS and NPR. I don't know if there is any sense in which it owns or is owned by PBS. It is also a nonprofit.
"...so any copyrights they hold, I hold."
The absurdity of this statement is demonstrated (partially) by translating it to the private sector: "I own shares of GE stock, so any copyrights NBC holds, I hold."
But it also inaccurate to imply that PBS "holds" a large number of copyrights. Unlike the three major private networks, PBS does not originate most of its programming (if any, at all). Most PBS programming originates with local PBS stations. The network exists primarily to distribute those local programs of national interest to other PBS stations.
Nor does this imply, necessarily, that the local station which originates a particular show owns the copyright, either. Usually these shows are produced by independent contractors which own the copyrights. I believe PBS guarantees to its members that most of the shows which go out on their network feed can be broadcast by the local stations for up to five years after the original time it went out on the feed.
There are probably exceptions to this: If you watch The Wall Street Journal Report on your local ABC or NBC or CBS or Fox affiliate, that station may have picked it up from the PBS network feed. The Wall Street Journal Report is an independent production (now owned by CNBC) which may rent time on the PBS feed late at night on the weekends. Your local network affiliate can purchase the rights to broadcast it on Sunday. If they do so they may get the broadcast by pointing one of their satellite dishes at the PBS bird and recording the half-hour program for broadcast on Sunday.
The contracts under which local PBS stations acquire the rights to broadcast (and offer the show for network broadcast) are usually patterned on book publishing contracts. This means the creator maintains ownership of the copyright and that all rights revert to the creator at some point. In book publishing, this is when the book is out of print. For PBS it's usually five years.
You can't get busted, AFAIK, for trading Nova episodes online.
NOVA is an excellent example of the ownership pattern described above. WGBH distributes the show and is often listed as the producer. But, if you look carefully at the credits, they often list a separate company as the producer of an individual episode.
PBS Home Video has the rights to sell the videos of NOVA, but they do so only for three years after the original broadcast. Of course, anyone who buys such a video copy has the fair-use right to resell it, but not to reproduce it and resell the reproductions. AFAIK, it is not legal to sell tapes of NOVA you have recorded off the air on the Internet.
Of course, all warnings about using/. for legal opinions apply to this post as well.
Frontline has a similar, but different, approach..
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Open Source TV
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· Score: 3, Interesting
...raw footage is not made available, but much of the material not used in a particular show is put on their web site.
For instance: If a number of experts were interviewed for a show, with excerpts from those interviews included in the actual broadcast, the web site not only includes transcripts of the broadcast but also transcripts of the complete interviews. This is very useful if you're wondering if the excerpts were taken out of context.
I think it's the future of broadcast-related web sites: all the info from the show...and more.
I have my doubts about the usefulness of the Cringely experiment, but it is interesting. At the very least.
...there is a place for intelligent discussion on TV.
Anybody know anything about the rumor...
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Layoffs at WotC
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· Score: 2
...Hasbro faked the accounting irregularities because WotC was meeting their financial projections? It's being suggested there was a contract which said Hasbro couldn't meddle inside the company unless they missed certain numbers.
Hasbro's quarterly reports seem to indicate that Wizards were hitting their numbers, keeping their parent afloat, but not turning in big enough profits (Pokemon or Magic levels) to pull Hasbro out of its disastrous tailspin.
Looks pretty suspicious: Layoffs at the profitable division.
Anyone know the scoop? Surely someone recently laid off can post anonymously.
This "You can't" guy has got the right answer...
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How to Test Your T1?
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· Score: 2
...even though many of the other answers are correct in their own ways. This is the one that counts.
Say you live in an affluent neighborhood on the shores of Lake Washington in Seattle. Many of your neighbors are Microsofties who compete with each other on who can say their home has the highest bandwidth (hell, they look down their noses at any coworker who has only 220-volt electric service). They don't use all that bandwidth on a continuous basis. But they get great download times as long as the other end is fast. Your provider serves all these sites and has only enough backbone access to handle 50% of the bandwidth he promises if they all use it at once.
Now imagine your brother lives in a seedier section of town where all his neighbors are running pr0n sites in their spare bedrooms. He uses a telco provider which has the system wired to handle 90% of what they promise. But his neighbors use near 100% of their T1s 18 hours a day.
The result: The massively oversold ISP gives you better bandwidth than the not-oversold telco gives your brother.
You can test for this in any number of ways (lots of suggestions have been posted). But you still don't know the answer to the really important question: Am I getting what I'm paying for?
The reason: Suppose the kids of the MS employees one day discover P2P file-swapping, how to replace their overpriced OSes with Linux, and how they can make MP3s of every CD they own, set up an Icebox server, and listen to their music anywhere, anytime. All of a sudden, they are using all of that bandwidth which was just a status symbol for their parents.
The real question for an ISP is how fast do they realize this is happening and add capacity to their backbone connection to prevent bottlenecks. The only way to know is to watch your actual throughput over time and see how it holds up. It's easier for a telco to do it, sure. But whether they do or not is unclear until you have lived with them for a while.
I have a very long story about how my small ISP was bought out by a backbone provider who then bought out a telco. In the end, I practically had to maintain their router network myself by hand.
You can ask all your prospective providers how they monitor and how often and how quickly they respond to bottlenecks (do so, they may give you better service if they know you care). But ultimately careful monitoring of your throughput (particularly as you come to use your whole T1) is the only way to know for sure.
I buy Internet access for my small business the same way I buy phone service (local and long distance). Once a year, I ask for bids (including from my current provider). The telcos tell me their competitors will give me poorer quality service. I tell them that's been the exact opposite of my experience. If I don't get the service I've been promised, I go elsewhere. You're only bound by a contract if the other guy lives up to his side of the agreement.
If you really care about the degree to which you are getting your money's worth, monitor constantly, ask for bids regularly, and don't be afraid to switch providers. I have been constantly amazed by how much better my service is (and how much less I'm paying) as a direct result of doing this.
By the way, if the telco telling you the small guys don't deliver is Qwest, laugh in their faces.
As a committed user of Ruby, I find this question just plain silly. Perl has an enormous library and an enormous user-base. For many things I still use Perl. When swagr's ported all of CPAN to Ruby, I won't need to anymore.
But some people may still prefer Perl. Grow up.
How dynamic is OOP in Perl?
on
Ask Larry Wall
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· Score: 2
Any time someone tells you OOP has an absolute definition (with pillars, requirements etc.) they're probably lying to you. Object oriented programming has an evolving definition (which is starting to solidify, but could still change). The problem with many languages that implement OOP is that they implement a static view of OOP (as perceived by the language designer at the time of the implementation).
Actually, because Perl's object orientation is "bolted on" it is possible to implement any view of OOP as appropriate to your own current opinions. Or (perhaps more correctly) as appropriate to the problem you are tackling. If encapsulation is all you need, implement encapsulation all by its lonesome. If you need it all, implement it all. If you have some experimental ideas about an expanded definition of OOP, implement them for a single project.
With the caveat that strong typing != OOP, type is another example of Perl's dynamic nature. With object typing, you can implement exactly the parts of strong typing that you need.
Perhaps the right questions is: "How dynamic is OOP in Perl? Can it be expanded to include aspect-oriented programming?
...if you define "minute fraction" as "less than 99 percent, but greater 0 percent."
The truth is we won't know whether it was easier to solve or harder until either:
somebody solves it and writes a program which beats the best human Go players
we have spent the same amount of (and quality of) effort trying to play Go that we did to get to Deep Blue and failed to get close to a solution
It has been my observation that this kind of article is written about each hard game as programmers try to get a grip on the strategy. I can remember 25 years ago when similar things were said about chess: too many combinations for brute force; too much of great play was intuitive; chess players cannot describe just what they do.
Ten years ago we heard similar things about bridge. Now, it's Go. As in most journeys, we won't know what it's like until we get there.
As far as Reading The Fine Article, the poster may well have read the article, WHICH DID NOT DEAL WITH HIS POINT to any significant degree. Chess proved to be a very hard problem, which required decades of concentrated effort by some of the best programmers in the world. It was a classic problem which attracted huge amounts of effort. While Bridge and Go afficiados may love to think of their games as more difficult that Chess, neither has had a fraction of the theoretical effort lavished on it that Chess had.
The article was a very superficial treatment. Not only did it fail to deal adequately with the question of the relative amount of effort put into Chess and Go, but many of the facts it presented are either wrong or misleading.
Take the combinatorial questions, for instance: At the beginning of a game of Go, there are 19^2(=319) possible legal moves. If a programmer uses brute force, the combinations go up very quickly (319 x 318 x 317...). However, a Go master only considers four of those legal moves for his first stone.
At the beginning of a chess game, there are 20 possible moves, but a good chess player must have a thoroughgoing understanding of at least six of them, with another six being in the realm of possibility. So, over half of the moves must be considered in any brute-force algorithm. Most chess-playing programs do not consider all branches of all trees to the same depth. The ratio of likely-to-be-considered-moves-to-legal-moves is much higher in Chess than Go. Indeed, in Go there are many situations when only one possibility need be considered as the consequences of failure to respond to a particular attack can be so catastrophic.
Another difference between Go and Chess is the degree to which moves open up new possibilities. Most moves in Chess create the possibility of new moves on the following turn which were not legal on the present turn. Indeed, one could argue that one of the key strategies in Chess is opening up as many possible moves as possible. Most moves in Go reduce the number of legal moves (for both players).
Go players are much more likely than Chess players to follow out long sequences of moves without considering alternatives at each step along the way. Chess players find they must consider branches as they think ahead in most such situations unless responses are forced.
I find it interesting that Danny Hillis thinks Go is more intuitive than Chess. But we may be talking about an intuition about intuition. Hillis' intuitions about how computers can be taught intuitive processes are probably worth considering. Other than that, the article offered very little accurate information about programming Go.
This is something almost every developer has had to deal with.
Actually, 90 percent of the programmers haven't experienced the problem of being in the 10 percent who do most of the work. They have, by definition, been in the 90 percent who do 10 percent of the work.
...is actually quite funny. The following comes directly from the article.
"The practice, called 'wardriving,' is easier if the victim has not taken the simple step of activating the security features to encrypt the airwaves.
"Essentially, wardrivers use the wireless signals to ride into the computer network, which is what Puffer did to the one being operated by Bacarisse's office."
The fact that this writer could actually talk about "encrypting the airwaves" and "rid[ing] into the network" after researching this story says something. I'm not sure what, but I'm sure it's hysterical. In both senses of "hysterical."
...to my very first non-anonymous/. post: a conspiracy theory with BillG held captive by a Ballmer-Myhrvold-led cabal.
And now I'm stuck with a nick which nobody can understand except in about every 100 posts (like this one!).
Thanks, I needed that.
So, Bill Gates spent a week...
on
Microsoft Freon
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· Score: 2
...playing videogames on non-MS consoles. I wish I could justify that as a "think week." He should have spent it contemplating the following sequence of events:
Slashdot Mirror
...and I've been waiting for the right place to post this. I doubt I'll ever see a place where it will be more on-topic.
I use TiVo at work and have very specific reasons to turn off profiling: I never want it to record something I didn't tell it to record. It's not that I don't think it's a perfectly good feature. I just don't ever need it.
A couple of weeks of thumbing TiVo's suggestions up and down and profiling gets pretty good. Other than that, just remember it's not really profiling you. It's just filling the empty space on your hard drive with stuff that's somehow like stuff you've said you like (or stuff you've watched, if you haven't told it anything).
But I've got a different problem. My TiVo doesn't think I'm gay. I think it's gay. I leave it on CSPAN every night because I like to watch "Washington Journal" in the morning when I come in early to work. I don't want CSPAN cluttering up my hard disk, but (since TiVo auto-records the last 30 minutes of whatever the channel is set to) I'd prefer to have it record something interesting.
Recently, though, it's been watching The Discovery Channel when I get in to work. It hasn't recorded anything on Discovery; I don't have anything programmed to be recorded on Discovery; I don't even think I've ever watched a Discovery Channel show on it. But there it is: happily watching "Interior Motives" on The Discovery Channel. The only explanation I can come up with: It's got a crush on the host.
...if this number takes into account valid accounting procedures?
If they are not expensing stock options, this number could be much higher (unless the depressed stock price has also depressed their accounting gimmickry). It would be interesting to know what the real numbers are.
It will also be interesting to know if the Enron-WorldCom scandals will result in shutting down this phony accounting scheme, especially since MS is the foremost practitioner. It could really send their stock into a tailspin if the people holding their stock found out their "profits" are often really losses.
...and about the fact that code is law.
The distinction between browsers and OSes is pointless, technologically speaking? Do you have any idea what you're talking about? The key to stable, maintainable code is enforcing layers (especially in this kind of case). Bundling is fine, but integrating was a technological solution to a marketing problem not a user's problem. It was needed for world domination, nothing else.
I dislike negative attacks as much as the next guy and I hope we see less of them and more positive Linux-building comments, but I do believe there is a case to be made that they work better for Open Source advocates.
Almost anyone who has ever used MS products has had at least one nightmarish experience with their products. Many newbies assume these experiences are their fault (especially when they were told such by a lying error message deliberately written to blame it on them). Many people just blame computers when this happens to them. Others carry it as a secret guilt.
When such a person hears an anti-MS rant, it can be a revelation giving them the "right" to question their own assumptions about Microsoft. (Remember: They have been told this is a great company which makes good products.)
If you include a positive Linux message at the end of your rant, you may even make an OSS sale.
...that Goedel was right.
Wittgenstein walked away from the Tractatus and was eventually vindicated when Goedel brought the whole logical-positivist enterprise to a halt. But Wittgenstein failed to see the importance of Goedel because he misinterpreted Goedel. Turing was unable to convince Wittgenstein of the importance of Goedel's theorem.
Turing tried to do a end-run around Goedel's proof and ended up inventing computer science as a way of proving the Halting Problem theorem. Of course, computers hadn't been invented, even though CS had. Eventually Turing actually built the computers which had been implied by his science (motivated by a war against evil or something).
That's the history of how computing came to be. And you don't get much more post-modern than that.
...contribution when that "contribution" is in the form of Fox News and relentless bias in favor of the Republicans.
Hughes Electronics was the object of a bidding war between Charlie Ergen and Rupert Murdoch. There are four reasons:
Many were surprised when Murdoch walked out of negotiations with DirecTV's board when the board member from GM seemed to be persuaded (by his boss) to side with Echostar. Given the vital importance to NewsCorp of getting a US satellite property, it didn't make sense that he would just give up.
Now it is pretty clear he walked out of that meeting thinking he could buy DirecTV for less after his cronies in Washington shot down the Echostar merger. It's much easier to buy something you want badly when there are no other bidders.
...a window in the case.
/. crowd. How many geeks would put a neon light inside a overclocking box so hot it needs water cooling?
I have a feeling this is not aimed at the
To paraphrase Robin Williams: "Double XX boxen are God's way of telling you you have too much money." The target market is the same as the average Wall Street cocaine dealer: Guys who want to impress their friends with their electronics purchases (but limited to those with gullible friends).
Notice that line forming at the copy machine? Get out while the gettin's good. It's never fun to be on a big ship while it's going down.
...the stock market is in the process of getting rid of the practice of not expensing stock options. With that gone, MS will be exposed as a Ponzi scheme, right at the point where corporate America needs to save some money. Microsoft's cash reserves are going to go to defense, not offense.
HP's going to go the way of other MS partners, but not the buyout way. By the time this is over, no one's going to want MS stock any more than they want HP stock today. Probably less.
...obviously start with Startide Rising, a much better book set in the same universe (The Uplift Saga, which has six volumes). The Uplift War is just as good, even though I suspect it was conceived as a giant pun. It may also appeal to your Libertarian instincts.
Then you're faced with a choice. If you just can't get enough Uplift, the last three books of the saga are really one story or trilogy and introduce many new and interesting ideas. But the climax is not as satisfying as Startide or Uplift War.
If you liked the eco-libertarian side of The Uplift War and (especially) Startide Rising, Earth develops these ideas much more fully, but it may not be entirely non-unsettling to a true believer in the Libertarian Cause.
If you liked the puns in The Uplift War, Kiln People delivers puns at a rate which has to be seen to be believed. This book also does a lot better job of transferring the mystery genre to sci-fi than Sundiver. And he even explains why his gumshoe maintains a running dialog in his head.
If you like Asimov's Foundation, then Foundation's Triumph will be of interest. Otherwise ignore it.
Perhaps his most interesting book was written with Gregory Benford -- Heart of the Comet, biological sci-fi set in deep space.
...enormous amounts of money for a next-generation digital recording device that couldn't record ordinary TV.
This should be a good selling point.
It's only anal retentive if you hyphenate anal-retentiveness.
...of why you shouldn't use /. for legal advice.
Almost everything in this post is factually wrong.
I am not aware of any sense in which PBS is legally owned by the public. I'm not sure what "inherent" ownership means. But it is not a concept which would likely get you far in a court of law.
I believe the ownership structure of PBS is as follows: PBS is a nonprofit corporation owned by all of the local PBS stations, which are usually nonprofit corporations themselves. Most of these local stations were originally associated with colleges or universities, some of which may still maintain some ownership of the local station. Also part of the picture is CPB, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. I think CPB is responsible for the distribution of federal funds to PBS and NPR. I don't know if there is any sense in which it owns or is owned by PBS. It is also a nonprofit.
The absurdity of this statement is demonstrated (partially) by translating it to the private sector: "I own shares of GE stock, so any copyrights NBC holds, I hold."
But it also inaccurate to imply that PBS "holds" a large number of copyrights. Unlike the three major private networks, PBS does not originate most of its programming (if any, at all). Most PBS programming originates with local PBS stations. The network exists primarily to distribute those local programs of national interest to other PBS stations.
Nor does this imply, necessarily, that the local station which originates a particular show owns the copyright, either. Usually these shows are produced by independent contractors which own the copyrights. I believe PBS guarantees to its members that most of the shows which go out on their network feed can be broadcast by the local stations for up to five years after the original time it went out on the feed.
There are probably exceptions to this: If you watch The Wall Street Journal Report on your local ABC or NBC or CBS or Fox affiliate, that station may have picked it up from the PBS network feed. The Wall Street Journal Report is an independent production (now owned by CNBC) which may rent time on the PBS feed late at night on the weekends. Your local network affiliate can purchase the rights to broadcast it on Sunday. If they do so they may get the broadcast by pointing one of their satellite dishes at the PBS bird and recording the half-hour program for broadcast on Sunday.
The contracts under which local PBS stations acquire the rights to broadcast (and offer the show for network broadcast) are usually patterned on book publishing contracts. This means the creator maintains ownership of the copyright and that all rights revert to the creator at some point. In book publishing, this is when the book is out of print. For PBS it's usually five years.
NOVA is an excellent example of the ownership pattern described above. WGBH distributes the show and is often listed as the producer. But, if you look carefully at the credits, they often list a separate company as the producer of an individual episode.
PBS Home Video has the rights to sell the videos of NOVA, but they do so only for three years after the original broadcast. Of course, anyone who buys such a video copy has the fair-use right to resell it, but not to reproduce it and resell the reproductions. AFAIK, it is not legal to sell tapes of NOVA you have recorded off the air on the Internet.
Of course, all warnings about using /. for legal opinions apply to this post as well.
...raw footage is not made available, but much of the material not used in a particular show is put on their web site.
For instance: If a number of experts were interviewed for a show, with excerpts from those interviews included in the actual broadcast, the web site not only includes transcripts of the broadcast but also transcripts of the complete interviews. This is very useful if you're wondering if the excerpts were taken out of context.
I think it's the future of broadcast-related web sites: all the info from the show...and more.
I have my doubts about the usefulness of the Cringely experiment, but it is interesting. At the very least.
...there is a place for intelligent discussion on TV.
...Hasbro faked the accounting irregularities because WotC was meeting their financial projections? It's being suggested there was a contract which said Hasbro couldn't meddle inside the company unless they missed certain numbers.
Hasbro's quarterly reports seem to indicate that Wizards were hitting their numbers, keeping their parent afloat, but not turning in big enough profits (Pokemon or Magic levels) to pull Hasbro out of its disastrous tailspin.
Looks pretty suspicious: Layoffs at the profitable division.
Anyone know the scoop? Surely someone recently laid off can post anonymously.
...even though many of the other answers are correct in their own ways. This is the one that counts.
Say you live in an affluent neighborhood on the shores of Lake Washington in Seattle. Many of your neighbors are Microsofties who compete with each other on who can say their home has the highest bandwidth (hell, they look down their noses at any coworker who has only 220-volt electric service). They don't use all that bandwidth on a continuous basis. But they get great download times as long as the other end is fast. Your provider serves all these sites and has only enough backbone access to handle 50% of the bandwidth he promises if they all use it at once.
Now imagine your brother lives in a seedier section of town where all his neighbors are running pr0n sites in their spare bedrooms. He uses a telco provider which has the system wired to handle 90% of what they promise. But his neighbors use near 100% of their T1s 18 hours a day.
The result: The massively oversold ISP gives you better bandwidth than the not-oversold telco gives your brother.
You can test for this in any number of ways (lots of suggestions have been posted). But you still don't know the answer to the really important question: Am I getting what I'm paying for?
The reason: Suppose the kids of the MS employees one day discover P2P file-swapping, how to replace their overpriced OSes with Linux, and how they can make MP3s of every CD they own, set up an Icebox server, and listen to their music anywhere, anytime. All of a sudden, they are using all of that bandwidth which was just a status symbol for their parents.
The real question for an ISP is how fast do they realize this is happening and add capacity to their backbone connection to prevent bottlenecks. The only way to know is to watch your actual throughput over time and see how it holds up. It's easier for a telco to do it, sure. But whether they do or not is unclear until you have lived with them for a while.
I have a very long story about how my small ISP was bought out by a backbone provider who then bought out a telco. In the end, I practically had to maintain their router network myself by hand.
You can ask all your prospective providers how they monitor and how often and how quickly they respond to bottlenecks (do so, they may give you better service if they know you care). But ultimately careful monitoring of your throughput (particularly as you come to use your whole T1) is the only way to know for sure.
I buy Internet access for my small business the same way I buy phone service (local and long distance). Once a year, I ask for bids (including from my current provider). The telcos tell me their competitors will give me poorer quality service. I tell them that's been the exact opposite of my experience. If I don't get the service I've been promised, I go elsewhere. You're only bound by a contract if the other guy lives up to his side of the agreement.
If you really care about the degree to which you are getting your money's worth, monitor constantly, ask for bids regularly, and don't be afraid to switch providers. I have been constantly amazed by how much better my service is (and how much less I'm paying) as a direct result of doing this.
By the way, if the telco telling you the small guys don't deliver is Qwest, laugh in their faces.
...Perl6.
As a committed user of Ruby, I find this question just plain silly. Perl has an enormous library and an enormous user-base. For many things I still use Perl. When swagr's ported all of CPAN to Ruby, I won't need to anymore.
But some people may still prefer Perl. Grow up.
Any time someone tells you OOP has an absolute definition (with pillars, requirements etc.) they're probably lying to you. Object oriented programming has an evolving definition (which is starting to solidify, but could still change). The problem with many languages that implement OOP is that they implement a static view of OOP (as perceived by the language designer at the time of the implementation).
Actually, because Perl's object orientation is "bolted on" it is possible to implement any view of OOP as appropriate to your own current opinions. Or (perhaps more correctly) as appropriate to the problem you are tackling. If encapsulation is all you need, implement encapsulation all by its lonesome. If you need it all, implement it all. If you have some experimental ideas about an expanded definition of OOP, implement them for a single project.
With the caveat that strong typing != OOP, type is another example of Perl's dynamic nature. With object typing, you can implement exactly the parts of strong typing that you need.
Perhaps the right questions is: "How dynamic is OOP in Perl? Can it be expanded to include aspect-oriented programming?
The truth is we won't know whether it was easier to solve or harder until either:
It has been my observation that this kind of article is written about each hard game as programmers try to get a grip on the strategy. I can remember 25 years ago when similar things were said about chess: too many combinations for brute force; too much of great play was intuitive; chess players cannot describe just what they do.
Ten years ago we heard similar things about bridge. Now, it's Go. As in most journeys, we won't know what it's like until we get there.
As far as Reading The Fine Article, the poster may well have read the article, WHICH DID NOT DEAL WITH HIS POINT to any significant degree. Chess proved to be a very hard problem, which required decades of concentrated effort by some of the best programmers in the world. It was a classic problem which attracted huge amounts of effort. While Bridge and Go afficiados may love to think of their games as more difficult that Chess, neither has had a fraction of the theoretical effort lavished on it that Chess had.
The article was a very superficial treatment. Not only did it fail to deal adequately with the question of the relative amount of effort put into Chess and Go, but many of the facts it presented are either wrong or misleading.
Take the combinatorial questions, for instance: At the beginning of a game of Go, there are 19^2(=319) possible legal moves. If a programmer uses brute force, the combinations go up very quickly (319 x 318 x 317 ...). However, a Go master only considers four of those legal moves for his first stone.
At the beginning of a chess game, there are 20 possible moves, but a good chess player must have a thoroughgoing understanding of at least six of them, with another six being in the realm of possibility. So, over half of the moves must be considered in any brute-force algorithm. Most chess-playing programs do not consider all branches of all trees to the same depth. The ratio of likely-to-be-considered-moves-to-legal-moves is much higher in Chess than Go. Indeed, in Go there are many situations when only one possibility need be considered as the consequences of failure to respond to a particular attack can be so catastrophic.
Another difference between Go and Chess is the degree to which moves open up new possibilities. Most moves in Chess create the possibility of new moves on the following turn which were not legal on the present turn. Indeed, one could argue that one of the key strategies in Chess is opening up as many possible moves as possible. Most moves in Go reduce the number of legal moves (for both players).
Go players are much more likely than Chess players to follow out long sequences of moves without considering alternatives at each step along the way. Chess players find they must consider branches as they think ahead in most such situations unless responses are forced.
I find it interesting that Danny Hillis thinks Go is more intuitive than Chess. But we may be talking about an intuition about intuition. Hillis' intuitions about how computers can be taught intuitive processes are probably worth considering. Other than that, the article offered very little accurate information about programming Go.
Actually, 90 percent of the programmers haven't experienced the problem of being in the 10 percent who do most of the work. They have, by definition, been in the 90 percent who do 10 percent of the work.
The fact that this writer could actually talk about "encrypting the airwaves" and "rid[ing] into the network" after researching this story says something. I'm not sure what, but I'm sure it's hysterical. In both senses of "hysterical."
...don't sound anything like Raymond Feist.
I'm sorry. I know that was a bad pun. But it's the only way I can get back at him for all the puns he's perpetrated on me through the years.
...to my very first non-anonymous /. post: a conspiracy theory with BillG held captive by a Ballmer-Myhrvold-led cabal.
And now I'm stuck with a nick which nobody can understand except in about every 100 posts (like this one!).
Thanks, I needed that.
...playing videogames on non-MS consoles. I wish I could justify that as a "think week." He should have spent it contemplating the following sequence of events: