Jon, I think you could do well by examining age issues in online communication.
Most of my recreational online time is spent with people older than myself (and I'm a couple weeks short of 40) and I notice that there are some major differences between online styles between the older and the younger.
The people older than myself with whom I communicate tend to use plain text media a great deal. Email lists, and, to a lesser degree, IRC. Some of them create web sites, but those are typicaly highly targeted. They exist primarily to display graphics to a very particular audience. By "particular" I mean that the author can probably list the names (at least online nicknames) of the intended viewers, with possibly an email list or two as secondary targets, and any others somewhere between nice bonus hits and unwelcome.
The signal/noise ratio tends to be extremely high.
The attraction of cool technology tends to be minimal. They use what they find works, and are not easily swayed by advertizing.
The bottom line, though, is that these people are using technology very effectively, and on their own terms. It could be something for you to take a look at.
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The applicability of probability theory to certain real-world situations is not well demonstrated.
The classic examples are one-shots like "at what dollar figure X does Russian Roulette with a revolver having Y chambers become reasonable?"
If you look at poverty that you can't save your way out of - stashing away $1 per week won't ever raise your standard of living significantly in the US - the low but non-zero odds move from stupid to questionable.
And if you consider the asset limits on welfare recipients, playing the lottery is downright clever. You can't save/invest your way out of welfare - you lose too much income - but hitting the lottery will do it.
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Indeed, she was in idiot to claim that, essentialy, there is no such thing as fair use in that context.
If Sen. Hatch really wants something to be fair use, it will be. The Senate is a paleocracy, and he's been there since about the time the reptiles learned the "lay eggs on land" trick. He's on pretty much every comittee there is. Unless the President (doesn't matter who) is absolutely opposed, he'll sign whatever Sen. Hatch asks him to. You just don't mess with the guy.
I don't like him. But this makes me smile:
''I'd be willing to try it,'' said Hatch, who said that his CDs, seven of which are available at his Web site, typically sell about 2,000 copies.
So (and I didn't know this about him) he's a recording artist, as well as a Senator, and he's on the digital side.
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he has examined what he has to offer and realizes the most valuable asset he has is his computer skills, and he wants to share the best he has.
That soup kitchen probably has an ancient 386 just barely handling the admin stuff, and twenty minutes spent running CHKDSK/F and explaining how to shut down Win 3.1 might make it work for another year. Or maybe somebody has donated an old '486, but it isn't even plugged in because the admin person doen't have the time and computer skills to plug it in and transfer the records.
So he could be a noble, hands-dirty good guy and serve for an evening, donating maybe $20-50 worth of service, or (as he suggests) he could do what he's good at, donating several hundred dollars worth of service, maybe giving access to resources worth even more.
Our secret is gamma-irradiated cow manure Mitsubishi ad
It isn't always employers who push for the life-destroying schedule. I've been in it a few times myself, sometimes as a result of a deadline crunch, occasionaly as a result of a boss wanting more than I could do in reasonable hours, more often as a result of my own greed or fear of layoffs. My bosses have occasionaly had to tell me not to take the work so seriously or to go home. I currently report to a woman in Canada who constantly encourages me to take vacation time.
We very often do it to ourselves.
And it isn't even good for the employer.
I find that, in my case, I have to cultivate an emotional distance from what I'm working on, to keep my productivity up. I have to remind myself that it's just a corporate web site, important enough to do right, not important enough to break my brain over. And even if it were that important, the stressed-out version would not be as well done.
And when the fear of layoffs hits, I have to remind myself that the quality or sincerity or masochism of my efforts isn't going to be a major factor in the decisions.
For some of us, the stress is warranted. For others, we are doing it to ourselves in an attempt to control things that we can't control.
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Too many people say "oh, well, a real hacker can break into any system, so it isn't fair to criticize the security on Windows 95 - people just hack it because they hate how sucessfull Microsoft is."
Besides - the kiddies are feeding their egos off the mythology. The more people realize that the exploits are pathetic, the less incentive.
Our secret is gamma-irradiated cow manure Mitsubishi ad
As of this week, quality control is truly possible for humans. Parents invevitably, even understandably, will seek perfect children.
No. Having the map doesn't mean knowing what it all means. It is a great accomplishment, and moves genetics foreward.
We know what all the numbers are. We have a readable copy of the executable code. That doesn't mean we have commented source. That doesn't mean we know what this line does (we do, in some cases, but we did last week, too) or whether it is a good thing or not.
No, we don't have quality control, except, perhaps in the sense of being able to measure how far a product differs from the standard. But we still don't know how to make a better or worse copy, we just have a standard model. Parents want excellent children, not standard children.
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With web applications becoming more common, the public performance part could be more important than the actual distribution.
If I provide the functionality of a GPL program over the web, but do not distribute the program itself, what are my rights and obligations under the GPL? It is becoming a common and important scenario, and I don't see the answers as being very clear.
Our secret is gamma-irradiated cow manure Mitsubishi ad
The range of human skin color isn't really all that wide.
You take burnt sienna (that's a type of brown) and mix in varying quantities of black and white. Sometimes you need just a trace of red or yellow to fine-tune the color, but almost all human skin colors, regardless of race, are mostly burnt sienna and white.
The range is amazingly small when you sit down and work with it.
Our secret is gamma-irradiated cow manure Mitsubishi ad
A long time ago, I had to record some information in a way that would prevent it being found by my cow orkers. Since I was part of an insanely close technology startup at the time, just having it on my own machine at home was no guarantee.
I considered keeping it at the end of a cassette tape of really crappy music, but in the end I built a lame game that would display the information if you died in a particularly stupid way that would never happen by accident.
So, was that spreadsheet an easter egg?
Our secret is gamma-irradiated cow manure Mitsubishi ad
Same situation as with learning on the job. You will probably end up walking out the door of your current job with lots of valuable experience. Nothing you can do about it even if you wanted to.
There are details, though. You can walk out a better {whatever} than you walked in. You can't walk out with the customer list or the specs to the next big project. And you can't "learn" GPL code by copy and paste.
Use it to improve yourself, use it to see how things work. But write your own non-GPL code.
Our secret is gamma-irradiated cow manure Mitsubishi ad
OK, you got me there. I have both the Wrangler patch (which is mostly covered by my belt) and a logo on the sole of my shoe. But I wear cheap shoes, so no logo on the top or side.
I just don't see the coercion either.
Just don't do it unless you want to.
Um, actually, there is one place where logos are hard to avoid: good athletic shoes. Store brand athletic shoes really aren't as good as some of the name brands. Doesn't matter much to me - I'm not much of an athlete and the cheapos are good enough for general walking around. I have an old pair of very nice shoes with my previous employer's logo (trade show uniform) that I use for raquetball, and in another 10 years they might wear out. Could be a marketing op there - a decent athletic shoe that is conspicuously blank.
By the way - you can safely remove the Wrangler thing. The stitching is seperate from the structural stitching. I wouldn't take off the tiny red fabric label, though.
Our secret is gamma-irradiated cow manure Mitsubishi ad
But as Marie Antoinette discovered and two hundred years of semi-sort-of-Constitutional govornment in the essentialy ungovornable United States (no serious revolutions, and only one major civil war - an impressive record!) have demonstrated, internal checks and balances are nicer than external ones.
The WTO, as far as I can tell, has deficient internal checks and balances.
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If A makes it look like B has committed a crime against C, then B has been violated. Even if C should be smart enough to know, hell, even if C DOES know, that B is probably innocent.
Our secret is gamma-irradiated cow manure Mitsubishi ad
There is very little out there that wasn't covered in my Comp Sci classes back in the early 1980s.
The changes are almost all (except for voice and language translation) in what is practical. There are lots of things being done that weren't feasable back then. Lots of things that were discussed but then the prof would say "of course, you would never do this, because nobody could afford that much RAM/CPU time/Disk space".
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But I'd try that first. The publisher's marketing channel is still the best way to get money for writing.
Unfortunately, you probably won't get a publisher. You aren't a commodity like Stephen King.
Once you put the book out in digital format, you've blown the most salable right. Now, you might be able to promote it enough to make a publisher notice and offer to buy the remaining rights, but the chances are slim.
Multiple platform downloadable formats that aren't easy to pirate are kind of a contradiction. Sure, it is probably possible, but very difficult and likely to annoy the customers. I work for a software company, and our copy-protection system is the single biggest source of tech support calls.
What might work is to make a value-added CD. Fill a CD with your book, including illustrations, and maybe a sound file of you reading it. The point is, the CD ends up with too much content to be a reasonable download. Sure, some people might copy it, but burning a CD is enough of a chore that a significant number of people would rather pay. Burning a CD seems to trigger the concience in some people who wouldn't think twice about sharing a file over the net.
Our secret is gamma-irradiated cow manure Mitsubishi ad
All my beer is open source. I include the recipe and production notes on the label, and anyone that I give a beer to is welcome to produce their own version based on mine.
Unfortunately, I have a personal policy as a technical writer. I test a product, and test it hard, while documenting it. So my beer labels are often about as comprehensible as code comments written at 3 A.M.
Our secret is gamma-irradiated cow manure Mitsubishi ad
What this is about is: Apogee is granting rights that you don't have by default, in exchange for certain terms.
You don't, by default, have the right to, say, put the Duke Nukem logo on your web site. But if you agree to the terms, Apogee will let you do it. And if you break the agreement, you no longer have permission.
With a bit of GPL software, you are granted certain rights that you wouldn't have otherwise. The owner of the copyright on the software (GPL is a license based on copyright - GPLed software is copyrighted) gives you permission to make and give away copies, if you agree to the terms. And if you break the agreement (by, for example, selling a copy-protected binary version without making source code) you no longer have permission.
Our secret is gamma-irradiated cow manure Mitsubishi ad
The IP problem is that yet another item is covered by trademark, restricting design decisions even more than they already are. But that's not really such a big deal - this only applies to artificial scents applied in order to create brand awareness. Not, IMHO, a significant field of artistic expression.
And it is a very, very old thing. Animals have used scent to mark things for millions of years. When you take your dog for a walk and he has to lift a leg at every single tree and post, that isn't a bladder problem, that's his way of saying to the other dogs "This is a {insert dog's name}(tm) Tree" Your dog is basicaly applying his own branding to that tree.
The bad part isn't that this is carving out yet another chunk of IP to be claimed by corporate slime.
The bad part is that this has made every marketing executive in the world aware of a new way to build brand identity and mindshare. And scent is a very direct hardware tweak on the human brain. If the story I heard is correct, the entire frontal lobe is an overgrown organ that was originaly a filter scent signals.
So, while for now all we are getting is a bit of grass and beer aroma in the sporting goods section of the store (kind of odd - neither of those is a distinctive aroma in the product's use arena - tennis courts already smell like grass, and pubs like beer) the potential is that once this catches on, every shop will be as smelly as it now is loud and gaudy, with the marketers trying to blast their new scent-logos into your nose as hard as they now blast your eyes and ears with logos and jingles.
I think this bodes well for Internet shopping.
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This means that a company can use a scent as part of the brand identification. A smell-logo.
Look around you. Tell me, how many of the trademarked things that you see (and I can just about guarantee you can see at least five right now without moving your head) are pleasing to the eye or ear? How many are subtle? How many contribute to a harmonious personal environment without massive effort on your part? Pleasing you isn't what it's all about. Grabbing your attention and invading your mindshare with brand identification is.
Be afraid. Be very afraid. The idea is out there now, and every marketer will be trying to use it. The tennis court or pub isn't where these are aimed - the sporting goods store is. But once this catches on, every shop will be as smelly as it now is loud and gaudy.
My defective sinuses suddenly feel less like a liability.
Our secret is gamma-irradiated cow manure Mitsubishi ad
Body odor is, at least in part, a "design feature" (I know evolved systems don't exactly have design features, but...) not a bug. And the purpose of that feature is to identify individuals. The fact that we don't, in this culture, tend to know people by scent, is beyond the point. The biology is set up for it, we just don't use it much, at least not conciously.
Our secret is gamma-irradiated cow manure Mitsubishi ad
Slashdot Mirror
Jon, I think you could do well by examining age issues in online communication.
Most of my recreational online time is spent with people older than myself (and I'm a couple weeks short of 40) and I notice that there are some major differences between online styles between the older and the younger.
The people older than myself with whom I communicate tend to use plain text media a great deal. Email lists, and, to a lesser degree, IRC. Some of them create web sites, but those are typicaly highly targeted. They exist primarily to display graphics to a very particular audience. By "particular" I mean that the author can probably list the names (at least online nicknames) of the intended viewers, with possibly an email list or two as secondary targets, and any others somewhere between nice bonus hits and unwelcome.
The signal/noise ratio tends to be extremely high.
The attraction of cool technology tends to be minimal. They use what they find works, and are not easily swayed by advertizing.
The bottom line, though, is that these people are using technology very effectively, and on their own terms. It could be something for you to take a look at.
Our secret is gamma-irradiated cow manure
Mitsubishi ad
The applicability of probability theory to certain real-world situations is not well demonstrated.
The classic examples are one-shots like "at what dollar figure X does Russian Roulette with a revolver having Y chambers become reasonable?"
If you look at poverty that you can't save your way out of - stashing away $1 per week won't ever raise your standard of living significantly in the US - the low but non-zero odds move from stupid to questionable.
And if you consider the asset limits on welfare recipients, playing the lottery is downright clever. You can't save/invest your way out of welfare - you lose too much income - but hitting the lottery will do it.
Our secret is gamma-irradiated cow manure
Mitsubishi ad
If Sen. Hatch really wants something to be fair use, it will be. The Senate is a paleocracy, and he's been there since about the time the reptiles learned the "lay eggs on land" trick. He's on pretty much every comittee there is. Unless the President (doesn't matter who) is absolutely opposed, he'll sign whatever Sen. Hatch asks him to. You just don't mess with the guy.
I don't like him. But this makes me smile:
So (and I didn't know this about him) he's a recording artist, as well as a Senator, and he's on the digital side.Our secret is gamma-irradiated cow manure
Mitsubishi ad
he has examined what he has to offer and realizes the most valuable asset he has is his computer skills, and he wants to share the best he has.
/F and explaining how to shut down Win 3.1 might make it work for another year. Or maybe somebody has donated an old '486, but it isn't even plugged in because the admin person doen't have the time and computer skills to plug it in and transfer the records.
That soup kitchen probably has an ancient 386 just barely handling the admin stuff, and twenty minutes spent running CHKDSK
So he could be a noble, hands-dirty good guy and serve for an evening, donating maybe $20-50 worth of service, or (as he suggests) he could do what he's good at, donating several hundred dollars worth of service, maybe giving access to resources worth even more.
Our secret is gamma-irradiated cow manure
Mitsubishi ad
It isn't always employers who push for the life-destroying schedule. I've been in it a few times myself, sometimes as a result of a deadline crunch, occasionaly as a result of a boss wanting more than I could do in reasonable hours, more often as a result of my own greed or fear of layoffs. My bosses have occasionaly had to tell me not to take the work so seriously or to go home. I currently report to a woman in Canada who constantly encourages me to take vacation time.
We very often do it to ourselves.
And it isn't even good for the employer.
I find that, in my case, I have to cultivate an emotional distance from what I'm working on, to keep my productivity up. I have to remind myself that it's just a corporate web site, important enough to do right, not important enough to break my brain over. And even if it were that important, the stressed-out version would not be as well done.
And when the fear of layoffs hits, I have to remind myself that the quality or sincerity or masochism of my efforts isn't going to be a major factor in the decisions.
For some of us, the stress is warranted. For others, we are doing it to ourselves in an attempt to control things that we can't control.
Our secret is gamma-irradiated cow manure
Mitsubishi ad
Too many people say "oh, well, a real hacker can break into any system, so it isn't fair to criticize the security on Windows 95 - people just hack it because they hate how sucessfull Microsoft is."
Besides - the kiddies are feeding their egos off the mythology. The more people realize that the exploits are pathetic, the less incentive.
Our secret is gamma-irradiated cow manure
Mitsubishi ad
We know what all the numbers are. We have a readable copy of the executable code. That doesn't mean we have commented source. That doesn't mean we know what this line does (we do, in some cases, but we did last week, too) or whether it is a good thing or not.
No, we don't have quality control, except, perhaps in the sense of being able to measure how far a product differs from the standard. But we still don't know how to make a better or worse copy, we just have a standard model. Parents want excellent children, not standard children.
Our secret is gamma-irradiated cow manure
Mitsubishi ad
The usual compelling content that drives every new technology.
Our secret is gamma-irradiated cow manure
Mitsubishi ad
(I'm not a lawyer either, but...)
With web applications becoming more common, the public performance part could be more important than the actual distribution.
If I provide the functionality of a GPL program over the web, but do not distribute the program itself, what are my rights and obligations under the GPL? It is becoming a common and important scenario, and I don't see the answers as being very clear.
Our secret is gamma-irradiated cow manure
Mitsubishi ad
Max Headroom and that girl in the William Gibson episode of the X-Files used cyperspace to avoid it.
You may note, though, that each of those is a fictional character.
Our secret is gamma-irradiated cow manure
Mitsubishi ad
The range of human skin color isn't really all that wide.
You take burnt sienna (that's a type of brown) and mix in varying quantities of black and white. Sometimes you need just a trace of red or yellow to fine-tune the color, but almost all human skin colors, regardless of race, are mostly burnt sienna and white.
The range is amazingly small when you sit down and work with it.
Our secret is gamma-irradiated cow manure
Mitsubishi ad
A long time ago, I had to record some information in a way that would prevent it being found by my cow orkers. Since I was part of an insanely close technology startup at the time, just having it on my own machine at home was no guarantee.
I considered keeping it at the end of a cassette tape of really crappy music, but in the end I built a lame game that would display the information if you died in a particularly stupid way that would never happen by accident.
So, was that spreadsheet an easter egg?
Our secret is gamma-irradiated cow manure
Mitsubishi ad
It is OK to use what you learn. Absolutely.
Same situation as with learning on the job. You will probably end up walking out the door of your current job with lots of valuable experience. Nothing you can do about it even if you wanted to.
There are details, though. You can walk out a better {whatever} than you walked in. You can't walk out with the customer list or the specs to the next big project. And you can't "learn" GPL code by copy and paste.
Use it to improve yourself, use it to see how things work. But write your own non-GPL code.
Our secret is gamma-irradiated cow manure
Mitsubishi ad
I bet I can get a decent pair of Battlefield Earth pajamas on clearance.
Our secret is gamma-irradiated cow manure
Mitsubishi ad
OK, you got me there. I have both the Wrangler patch (which is mostly covered by my belt) and a logo on the sole of my shoe. But I wear cheap shoes, so no logo on the top or side.
I just don't see the coercion either.
Just don't do it unless you want to.
Um, actually, there is one place where logos are hard to avoid: good athletic shoes. Store brand athletic shoes really aren't as good as some of the name brands. Doesn't matter much to me - I'm not much of an athlete and the cheapos are good enough for general walking around. I have an old pair of very nice shoes with my previous employer's logo (trade show uniform) that I use for raquetball, and in another 10 years they might wear out.
Could be a marketing op there - a decent athletic shoe that is conspicuously blank.
By the way - you can safely remove the Wrangler thing. The stitching is seperate from the structural stitching. I wouldn't take off the tiny red fabric label, though.
Our secret is gamma-irradiated cow manure
Mitsubishi ad
There are always checks and balances.
But as Marie Antoinette discovered and two hundred years of semi-sort-of-Constitutional govornment in the essentialy ungovornable United States (no serious revolutions, and only one major civil war - an impressive record!) have demonstrated, internal checks and balances are nicer than external ones.
The WTO, as far as I can tell, has deficient internal checks and balances.
Our secret is gamma-irradiated cow manure
Mitsubishi ad
If A makes it look like B has committed a crime against C, then B has been violated. Even if C should be smart enough to know, hell, even if C DOES know, that B is probably innocent.
Our secret is gamma-irradiated cow manure
Mitsubishi ad
This slogan available for rent.
Our secret is gamma-irradiated cow manure
Mitsubishi ad
There is very little out there that wasn't covered in my Comp Sci classes back in the early 1980s.
The changes are almost all (except for voice and language translation) in what is practical. There are lots of things being done that weren't feasable back then. Lots of things that were discussed but then the prof would say "of course, you would never do this, because nobody could afford that much RAM/CPU time/Disk space".
Our secret is gamma-irradiated cow manure
Mitsubishi ad
It is notoriously hard to get a book published.
But I'd try that first. The publisher's marketing channel is still the best way to get money for writing.
Unfortunately, you probably won't get a publisher. You aren't a commodity like Stephen King.
Once you put the book out in digital format, you've blown the most salable right. Now, you might be able to promote it enough to make a publisher notice and offer to buy the remaining rights, but the chances are slim.
Multiple platform downloadable formats that aren't easy to pirate are kind of a contradiction. Sure, it is probably possible, but very difficult and likely to annoy the customers. I work for a software company, and our copy-protection system is the single biggest source of tech support calls.
What might work is to make a value-added CD. Fill a CD with your book, including illustrations, and maybe a sound file of you reading it. The point is, the CD ends up with too much content to be a reasonable download. Sure, some people might copy it, but burning a CD is enough of a chore that a significant number of people would rather pay. Burning a CD seems to trigger the concience in some people who wouldn't think twice about sharing a file over the net.
Our secret is gamma-irradiated cow manure
Mitsubishi ad
All my beer is open source.
I include the recipe and production notes on the label, and anyone that I give a beer to is welcome to produce their own version based on mine.
Unfortunately, I have a personal policy as a technical writer. I test a product, and test it hard, while documenting it. So my beer labels are often about as comprehensible as code comments written at 3 A.M.
Our secret is gamma-irradiated cow manure
Mitsubishi ad
What this is about is:
Apogee is granting rights that you don't have by default, in exchange for certain terms.
You don't, by default, have the right to, say, put the Duke Nukem logo on your web site. But if you agree to the terms, Apogee will let you do it. And if you break the agreement, you no longer have permission.
With a bit of GPL software, you are granted certain rights that you wouldn't have otherwise. The owner of the copyright on the software (GPL is a license based on copyright - GPLed software is copyrighted) gives you permission to make and give away copies, if you agree to the terms. And if you break the agreement (by, for example, selling a copy-protected binary version without making source code) you no longer have permission.
Our secret is gamma-irradiated cow manure
Mitsubishi ad
Much worse than that.
The IP problem is that yet another item is covered by trademark, restricting design decisions even more than they already are. But that's not really such a big deal - this only applies to artificial scents applied in order to create brand awareness. Not, IMHO, a significant field of artistic expression.
And it is a very, very old thing. Animals have used scent to mark things for millions of years. When you take your dog for a walk and he has to lift a leg at every single tree and post, that isn't a bladder problem, that's his way of saying to the other dogs "This is a {insert dog's name}(tm) Tree" Your dog is basicaly applying his own branding to that tree.
The bad part isn't that this is carving out yet another chunk of IP to be claimed by corporate slime.
The bad part is that this has made every marketing executive in the world aware of a new way to build brand identity and mindshare. And scent is a very direct hardware tweak on the human brain. If the story I heard is correct, the entire frontal lobe is an overgrown organ that was originaly a filter scent signals.
So, while for now all we are getting is a bit of grass and beer aroma in the sporting goods section of the store (kind of odd - neither of those is a distinctive aroma in the product's use arena - tennis courts already smell like grass, and pubs like beer) the potential is that once this catches on, every shop will be as smelly as it now is loud and gaudy, with the marketers trying to blast their new scent-logos into your nose as hard as they now blast your eyes and ears with logos and jingles.
I think this bodes well for Internet shopping.
Our secret is gamma-irradiated cow manure
Mitsubishi ad
the opposite effect is likely.
This means that a company can use a scent as part of the brand identification. A smell-logo.
Look around you. Tell me, how many of the trademarked things that you see (and I can just about guarantee you can see at least five right now without moving your head) are pleasing to the eye or ear? How many are subtle? How many contribute to a harmonious personal environment without massive effort on your part? Pleasing you isn't what it's all about. Grabbing your attention and invading your mindshare with brand identification is.
Be afraid. Be very afraid. The idea is out there now, and every marketer will be trying to use it. The tennis court or pub isn't where these are aimed - the sporting goods store is. But once this catches on, every shop will be as smelly as it now is loud and gaudy.
My defective sinuses suddenly feel less like a liability.
Our secret is gamma-irradiated cow manure
Mitsubishi ad
A very, very old one.
Body odor is, at least in part, a "design feature" (I know evolved systems don't exactly have design features, but...) not a bug. And the purpose of that feature is to identify individuals. The fact that we don't, in this culture, tend to know people by scent, is beyond the point. The biology is set up for it, we just don't use it much, at least not conciously.
Our secret is gamma-irradiated cow manure
Mitsubishi ad