Yeah, if anybody wants to read more about Friendster and what they've done with MySQL, etc., InfoWorld recently ran a feature package about the subject. Check it out if you have the time.
Fine, but who owns the work until it's published? Right now, copyright is automatic. If you write a novel, you own it. If publication is the benchmark, who has the right to publish? Until the work is published, there is no copyright... so, in theory, if you left your manuscript in the back seat of my taxi cab, I could make a copy of it and rush it to press. If I immediately applied for copyright, would I then own it?
To get a copyright for a work, you should have to register a highest-possible-quality unencrypted digital copy of the work with the copyright office.
No, that's just to register a copyright. Something doesn't actually have to be registered to be copyrighted. Any work is automatically copyrighted at the time of completion, whether or not it's registered or even published.
Actually, if you read Penenberg's report, he only looked at a sample of 160 of Delio's articles. Of those, 24 had sources Penenberg's team could not confirm. I don't know where you get your four number.
I was the editor of the "Enterprise Blogs and Wikis" story for InfoWorld that Penenberg talks about in his report and I can confirm that Ms. Delio similarly did not respond to requests that she identify the partial sources she cited in that article. Other editors at InfoWorld followed up on sources in other stories independently and were unable to confirm those sources.
Tempest in a teapot? Maybe. To tell the truth, if there were fabricated quotes in the articles Ms. Delio wrote for me, I really don't think they did a whole lot of damage to the stories themselves. Barring the unconfirmed sources I mentioned, I do believe that her articles were meant to be factual stories written in good faith. That's why InfoWorld, like Wired, has not actually retracted any of Ms. Delio's stories; in some cases we have excised certain portions of those stories from the online versions, but all of the stories are still available (though it's only about four stories total for us, if I remember right).
That's kind of the shame of this whole thing, too. It doesn't give me any joy to see Ms. Delio dragged out in front of the court of public opinion for what may have been nothing more than a pattern of very poor judgment. But anytime a writer may have fabricated something in an otherwise ostensibly factual story, that's the kind of tempest in a teapot you want your media sources to jump all over. You just can't let it slide.
InfoWorld won't be able to use Ms. Delio's services anymore, but for myself I wish her the best of luck and hope she can move on from this episode in a way that is satisfying for her both personally and professionally. (Note that these statements are my own and do not represent the official opinion of InfoWorld magazine or its parent company, IDG.)
Speaking as somebody who works in the media, I have to disagree with you. I regularly make decisions about what does or does not go into the magazine I work for, and no advertiser has a wire into my brain to change my mind. Every now and then an advertiser will call up and ask why we ran a story with a certain slant, and even more rarely will they threaten to pull their advertising, but my response to them is generally, "tough shit." You're right to question the sources of the information you read, but if the end result is that you stick your head in a bucket and say "I can't trust anybody," then you're doing yourself a disservice. Advertisers don't control the press to the level you describe -- not even the trade press.
Plus, if your argument is "follow the money," then I can say that I certainly got paid a lot more to write Java applets than I do to write articles, and the entire editorial staff of LinuxWorld apparently works for free (something I'm still trying to get my head around). A lot of people work very hard to bring you every one of the publications that Slashdot links to, and believe it or not, most of them really aren't evil androids working for Da Man. Maybe you want to do a little research and know what you're talking about before you disparage them.
I've read a few of these "advertisers are what matters" comments now, and while you're correct to an extent, I think you're looking at this a bit too cynically. Advertisers are quite often the only source of revenue for magazines, particularly trade magazines. But don't kid yourself. Nobody thinks they can print 72 pages of ads and get away with it.
One way that trade magazines stay afloat is that they offer advertisers the value proposition of having a carefully targeted readership. If you're selling consulting services around MySQL and you advertise in LinuxWorld, you can safely assume that you're reaching an audience with a much higher likelihood of being receptive to your message than if you were advertising in the Daily Mirror. That's not just an assumption advertisers make -- it's a fact that's aggressively promoted by the sales force of any trade magazine.
If your magazine is losing readers, however, or even perceived as losing readers, rest assured that the advertisers will realize it even before your CEO does. This kind of bad publicity isn't worth it for any magazine, even if some evil corporate brain behind LinuxWorld had a secret agenda to destroy Linux. You can't push a secret agenda if you go out of business, and it sounds like the salespeople at Sys-Con wisely saw that this was the way this was heading if the bad press lasted much longer or got much more inflated.
There was a book I read recently which was written as if narrated by a teenage boy with Asperger's Syndrome. It's called "The curious incident of the dog in the night time"
Whoah! That's a weird name for a Star Trek novel. What's the cover look like?
MS wants these startup to use MS-only tech and be locked in. Do you think MS is just giving this stuff away to startups with no strings attached? NO. MS will have their hooks in the deal one way or another.
Ummm... try to keep a little perspective, please. Microsoft has a little bit of technology around that they aren't actively doing anything with and don't foresee doing anything with in the near future. They're hoping some peppy entrepreneur comes along and does something with it. Then, when that poor little guy isn't looking, provided what he does with the technology is interesting enough, big bad Microsoft will come along and... swallow him up! That's right, they'll pay that peppy lil' entrepreneur a ton of money for the company he put together and he'll walk away a rich man. In other words, this is sort of the equivalent of a song writing contest, where the prize is significantly more than a couple hundred bucks. Again, what's wrong with it?
It's a fact. What you've been putting up your nose comes from the leaves. The extract used in Coca-Cola came from the beans. In fact, the trademark shape of the original Coca-Cola bottle was supposed to be taken from the shape of the coca bean, but the researcher got it wrong due to a typo; it actually looks more like a cocao bean, the kind you make chocolate from.
That's a slippery slope you're heading down. Public funds are often used to promote things that are ostensibly in the public interest, but may not hold up to individual scrutiny 100 percent of the time. You might not like it that your local public library keeps copies of "Mein Kampf" and "Huckleberry Finn," but I would argue that a library system that doesn't carry those books on principle is not a library system at all. I might not agree that teaching abstinence is the best way to prevent pregnancy and transmission of STDs among teenagers, but I'm willing to have my tax dollars support groups that teach abstinence to teens, regardless of my opinion of their underlying political slant, because the benefits of teaching abstinence probably outweigh the negatives. (In other words, it's worth a try.) Similarly, you might not agree with everything the Boy Scouts teach, but as an institution it's probably done more good for more boys than it has done harm. It seems a little harsh to suggest pulling public funding on the basis of your personal opinions about the organization's ideology. That way of thinking isn't too far from the idea of withholding public arts funding from art that isn't to your personal taste (something else I disagree with). The world just isn't binary like that. Very few things are "all good" or "all bad," so why insist on trying to impose all-or-nothing solutions on them?
...and it was the only movie I've walked out on in recent memory. I lasted about 45 minutes, most of them excruciating. Even if they did include some of Adams' funnier bits, they seemed to have abridged them in just the right way to lose the punchline, or curtail them when they started getting truly absurd (and absurdism, I thought, was the whole point of Adams' stuff). I couldn't figure out what the rest of the people in the theater were laughing at. Groupthink? Honestly, I'd compare the experience to watching a big-budget, Hollywood remake of "Monty Python and the Holy Grail." Why on Earth would I subject myself to such a thing? (Well, as I mentioned... I didn't.)
Actually, now that I think about it, maybe the movie was actually much better than I realized, and the subtlety of it was just lost on me until now. Adams, in writing the screenplay, was subjecting the audience to a kind of protracted version of a Vogon poetry reading! It was life imitating art...
But of course, Tom Baker was only ever in two Dalek serials: "Genesis" and the relatively awful "Destiny of the Daleks." In fact, in the last 30 years there have only been five stories featuring Daleks, total.
Not here in Japan. I'm not sure whether I want to say "mainstream" quite yet, but the vast majority of TVs being sold these days are HD
Worth pointing out at this juncture that the Japanese HDTV standard is incompatible with the American one -- perhaps another reason for slow uptake with consumers worldwide.
Mandrake's partitioning tool was the best, too, last time I had a need for a good one. I'll use it to resize NTFS partitions and the like, even when my ultimate goal is to install something other than Mandrake Linux.
I hear Ubuntu praised a lot for its approach, but it doesn't really do much to discourage users from running shell commands as root. Every user has access to the "Root Terminal" application, right in the Gnome menus. All it takes is your password (that's your own password, assuming you were the default user created during install, because that user is automatically placed on the sudo list) and you're free to do whatever you want as root. Get into lazy habits (i.e. choosing "Root Terminal" instead of the regular terminal when you want to do system maintenance tasks that might require root privileges) and the supposed no-root-account protections of Ubuntu are out the window.
AppleShare over IP was just becoming available in the mid-90s, and it wasn't available *to us* until pretty much the end of the decade. We were running our fileservers on a Sun SPARC 10 running Helios EtherShare. The EtherShare upgrade that brought AppleShare IP capabilities arrived around 1998, but it wasn't something our CFO was willing to budget for until the present setup pretty much keeled over dead. Moving to 100Base-T would have been a bigger help, but much of our hardware was not 100Base capable and it was questionable whether the low-budget wiring job we did would have supported it. 10/100 base switches were pretty expensive at the time. As you are maybe beginning to realize, funding for IT was an issue at this company. One week I'd say I needed to replace a broken CD-ROM drive for $140 and get denied. The next week I'd suggest spending $40,000 on a color copier with a Fiery RIP and that would get the go-ahead. You might imagine it got pretty frustrating.
...does Senator Palpatine turn out to be Darth Sidious? Does he? Damn, I bet he does. You guys just wait! You'll be saying you heard it here first, mark my words...
Fonts aren't "other content." They are software. You may be confusing a font with a typeface. A typeface is just a certain way of rendering the letters of the alphabet and these, generally speaking, cannot be copyrighted. GPL license or some other license, it doesn't matter; you cannot copyright them. What you can copyright, however, are the PostScript instructions that render the font on a computer. Those are considered programs like any other. When you use an Adobe font without paying for it, you're not violating the copyright on the letterforms -- you're pirating software.
On Competition -- I spoke to Allchin
on
Longhorn Preview
·
· Score: 1
Believe it or not, while most of Allchin's talk focused on client-side stuff (the UI, desktop search, etc.) he opened with an overview of the Windows market in general. When discussing the server, he characterized the two leaders as Windows and Linux.
Linux, he said, is "expected to be the winner with its lineage from Unix, but we're happy because we're winning market share."
On a stack of Bibles, that is from the horse's mouth.
Where the client side is concerned, however, he pointed to charts showing Windows desktop growth year-over-year being somewhere in the realm of 10 percent, and said, "our growth is bigger than the whole Mac installed base."
Slashdot Mirror
The problem is that the site you link to says MSIs are "easy to use, but difficult to create" and it does not itself host an MSI for Firefox 1.04.
Yeah, if anybody wants to read more about Friendster and what they've done with MySQL, etc., InfoWorld recently ran a feature package about the subject. Check it out if you have the time.
Age old question: How can you tell if the movie/show you're watching is science fiction or fantasy?
Easy. If it's fantasy, there will be dwarfs and men with beards in the cast.
If it's sci-fi, the script will talk about mercenaries a lot. If it calls them "mercs," it's a dead giveaway.
Fine, but who owns the work until it's published? Right now, copyright is automatic. If you write a novel, you own it. If publication is the benchmark, who has the right to publish? Until the work is published, there is no copyright ... so, in theory, if you left your manuscript in the back seat of my taxi cab, I could make a copy of it and rush it to press. If I immediately applied for copyright, would I then own it?
No, that's just to register a copyright. Something doesn't actually have to be registered to be copyrighted. Any work is automatically copyrighted at the time of completion, whether or not it's registered or even published.
Actually, if you read Penenberg's report, he only looked at a sample of 160 of Delio's articles. Of those, 24 had sources Penenberg's team could not confirm. I don't know where you get your four number.
I was the editor of the "Enterprise Blogs and Wikis" story for InfoWorld that Penenberg talks about in his report and I can confirm that Ms. Delio similarly did not respond to requests that she identify the partial sources she cited in that article. Other editors at InfoWorld followed up on sources in other stories independently and were unable to confirm those sources.
Tempest in a teapot? Maybe. To tell the truth, if there were fabricated quotes in the articles Ms. Delio wrote for me, I really don't think they did a whole lot of damage to the stories themselves. Barring the unconfirmed sources I mentioned, I do believe that her articles were meant to be factual stories written in good faith. That's why InfoWorld, like Wired, has not actually retracted any of Ms. Delio's stories; in some cases we have excised certain portions of those stories from the online versions, but all of the stories are still available (though it's only about four stories total for us, if I remember right).
That's kind of the shame of this whole thing, too. It doesn't give me any joy to see Ms. Delio dragged out in front of the court of public opinion for what may have been nothing more than a pattern of very poor judgment. But anytime a writer may have fabricated something in an otherwise ostensibly factual story, that's the kind of tempest in a teapot you want your media sources to jump all over. You just can't let it slide.
InfoWorld won't be able to use Ms. Delio's services anymore, but for myself I wish her the best of luck and hope she can move on from this episode in a way that is satisfying for her both personally and professionally. (Note that these statements are my own and do not represent the official opinion of InfoWorld magazine or its parent company, IDG.)
Speaking as somebody who works in the media, I have to disagree with you. I regularly make decisions about what does or does not go into the magazine I work for, and no advertiser has a wire into my brain to change my mind. Every now and then an advertiser will call up and ask why we ran a story with a certain slant, and even more rarely will they threaten to pull their advertising, but my response to them is generally, "tough shit." You're right to question the sources of the information you read, but if the end result is that you stick your head in a bucket and say "I can't trust anybody," then you're doing yourself a disservice. Advertisers don't control the press to the level you describe -- not even the trade press.
Plus, if your argument is "follow the money," then I can say that I certainly got paid a lot more to write Java applets than I do to write articles, and the entire editorial staff of LinuxWorld apparently works for free (something I'm still trying to get my head around). A lot of people work very hard to bring you every one of the publications that Slashdot links to, and believe it or not, most of them really aren't evil androids working for Da Man. Maybe you want to do a little research and know what you're talking about before you disparage them.
Censorship is something a government does. Private companies can opt to not publish anything they wish.
I've read a few of these "advertisers are what matters" comments now, and while you're correct to an extent, I think you're looking at this a bit too cynically. Advertisers are quite often the only source of revenue for magazines, particularly trade magazines. But don't kid yourself. Nobody thinks they can print 72 pages of ads and get away with it.
One way that trade magazines stay afloat is that they offer advertisers the value proposition of having a carefully targeted readership. If you're selling consulting services around MySQL and you advertise in LinuxWorld, you can safely assume that you're reaching an audience with a much higher likelihood of being receptive to your message than if you were advertising in the Daily Mirror. That's not just an assumption advertisers make -- it's a fact that's aggressively promoted by the sales force of any trade magazine.
If your magazine is losing readers, however, or even perceived as losing readers, rest assured that the advertisers will realize it even before your CEO does. This kind of bad publicity isn't worth it for any magazine, even if some evil corporate brain behind LinuxWorld had a secret agenda to destroy Linux. You can't push a secret agenda if you go out of business, and it sounds like the salespeople at Sys-Con wisely saw that this was the way this was heading if the bad press lasted much longer or got much more inflated.
Ba-dump-bump.
It's a fact. What you've been putting up your nose comes from the leaves. The extract used in Coca-Cola came from the beans. In fact, the trademark shape of the original Coca-Cola bottle was supposed to be taken from the shape of the coca bean, but the researcher got it wrong due to a typo; it actually looks more like a cocao bean, the kind you make chocolate from.
That's a slippery slope you're heading down. Public funds are often used to promote things that are ostensibly in the public interest, but may not hold up to individual scrutiny 100 percent of the time. You might not like it that your local public library keeps copies of "Mein Kampf" and "Huckleberry Finn," but I would argue that a library system that doesn't carry those books on principle is not a library system at all. I might not agree that teaching abstinence is the best way to prevent pregnancy and transmission of STDs among teenagers, but I'm willing to have my tax dollars support groups that teach abstinence to teens, regardless of my opinion of their underlying political slant, because the benefits of teaching abstinence probably outweigh the negatives. (In other words, it's worth a try.) Similarly, you might not agree with everything the Boy Scouts teach, but as an institution it's probably done more good for more boys than it has done harm. It seems a little harsh to suggest pulling public funding on the basis of your personal opinions about the organization's ideology. That way of thinking isn't too far from the idea of withholding public arts funding from art that isn't to your personal taste (something else I disagree with). The world just isn't binary like that. Very few things are "all good" or "all bad," so why insist on trying to impose all-or-nothing solutions on them?
...and it was the only movie I've walked out on in recent memory. I lasted about 45 minutes, most of them excruciating. Even if they did include some of Adams' funnier bits, they seemed to have abridged them in just the right way to lose the punchline, or curtail them when they started getting truly absurd (and absurdism, I thought, was the whole point of Adams' stuff). I couldn't figure out what the rest of the people in the theater were laughing at. Groupthink? Honestly, I'd compare the experience to watching a big-budget, Hollywood remake of "Monty Python and the Holy Grail." Why on Earth would I subject myself to such a thing? (Well, as I mentioned... I didn't.)
Actually, now that I think about it, maybe the movie was actually much better than I realized, and the subtlety of it was just lost on me until now. Adams, in writing the screenplay, was subjecting the audience to a kind of protracted version of a Vogon poetry reading! It was life imitating art...
But of course, Tom Baker was only ever in two Dalek serials: "Genesis" and the relatively awful "Destiny of the Daleks." In fact, in the last 30 years there have only been five stories featuring Daleks, total.
Wait a minute... blogosphere? Where is that, exactly? And can I get there from cyberspace?
Mandrake's partitioning tool was the best, too, last time I had a need for a good one. I'll use it to resize NTFS partitions and the like, even when my ultimate goal is to install something other than Mandrake Linux.
No ISOs available for 9.3 yet. Only 9.2.
I hear Ubuntu praised a lot for its approach, but it doesn't really do much to discourage users from running shell commands as root. Every user has access to the "Root Terminal" application, right in the Gnome menus. All it takes is your password (that's your own password, assuming you were the default user created during install, because that user is automatically placed on the sudo list) and you're free to do whatever you want as root. Get into lazy habits (i.e. choosing "Root Terminal" instead of the regular terminal when you want to do system maintenance tasks that might require root privileges) and the supposed no-root-account protections of Ubuntu are out the window.
AppleShare over IP was just becoming available in the mid-90s, and it wasn't available *to us* until pretty much the end of the decade. We were running our fileservers on a Sun SPARC 10 running Helios EtherShare. The EtherShare upgrade that brought AppleShare IP capabilities arrived around 1998, but it wasn't something our CFO was willing to budget for until the present setup pretty much keeled over dead. Moving to 100Base-T would have been a bigger help, but much of our hardware was not 100Base capable and it was questionable whether the low-budget wiring job we did would have supported it. 10/100 base switches were pretty expensive at the time. As you are maybe beginning to realize, funding for IT was an issue at this company. One week I'd say I needed to replace a broken CD-ROM drive for $140 and get denied. The next week I'd suggest spending $40,000 on a color copier with a Fiery RIP and that would get the go-ahead. You might imagine it got pretty frustrating.
...does Senator Palpatine turn out to be Darth Sidious? Does he? Damn, I bet he does. You guys just wait! You'll be saying you heard it here first, mark my words...
Novell Linux Desktop doesn't have a default desktop. It explicitly asks you whether you want Gnome or KDE during the install.
Fonts aren't "other content." They are software. You may be confusing a font with a typeface. A typeface is just a certain way of rendering the letters of the alphabet and these, generally speaking, cannot be copyrighted. GPL license or some other license, it doesn't matter; you cannot copyright them. What you can copyright, however, are the PostScript instructions that render the font on a computer. Those are considered programs like any other. When you use an Adobe font without paying for it, you're not violating the copyright on the letterforms -- you're pirating software.
Believe it or not, while most of Allchin's talk focused on client-side stuff (the UI, desktop search, etc.) he opened with an overview of the Windows market in general. When discussing the server, he characterized the two leaders as Windows and Linux.
Linux, he said, is "expected to be the winner with its lineage from Unix, but we're happy because we're winning market share."
On a stack of Bibles, that is from the horse's mouth.
Where the client side is concerned, however, he pointed to charts showing Windows desktop growth year-over-year being somewhere in the realm of 10 percent, and said, "our growth is bigger than the whole Mac installed base."
For what it's worth.