What's the point of preventing people from copying shitty music?
Cool line! I think I need a t-shirt or bumper sticker with that on it. Though perhaps it might be
better as "bad music" (though that doesn't have quite the same rhythm).
I've used ViaVoice for dictation and it was very good indeed. One of the serious lacks at this point in the linux community has been speech recognition software - opening this up will make lots of cool things possible.
The new firefox looks great and seems to run great.
Just two quibbles from me.
Firstly the tab extensions does not seem to be a supported extension. Now I've read often enough about how it is horrible and ugly and all, but I use it for everyday browsing. I'd really like the default to be "open link in new tab" for just about everything with the middle mouse button set to "open link in this tab". The tab groups are also nice, but could be managed outside the standard tab extensions.
Secondly, SVG does not seem to be supported yet and I'd quite like it to be. Once a couple of major browsers support SVG, I think it will take off and become a very powerful web tool - but it is going to take that support in some browser.
Thomas Pynchon's novel "Gravity's Rainbow" deserves a mention here as it is kind of all about the V2. Sort of.
I think fair use will stretch enough to allow me to quote one of his "Rocket Limericks" :
There once was a thing called a V2
To pilot which you did not need to
You just pushed a button
And it would leave nothing
But stiffs and big holes and debris too
I thought your post was serious till I got to the "slave to France" bit. Then I realized that it had to be a put on - nobody literate enough to write could be that stupid.
A few years back I wrote some scripts for web input processing. I knew a smattering of Perl so wrote them in Perl. They worked ok as far as I could tell . I had other things to do so stopped working on them, then went back after a while to add some functionality and discovered that I had no idea what I had done or how. Eventually I worked it out and added the functionality I wanted (and comments, yup) and went away again. The next time I went back I had to learn the whole thing again and my comments and cleaned up code didn't help.
So I'd heard about Python and that it was good, so (since I like the process of learning new languages) I decided to try rewriting the scripts in python. In about two days I had them doing everything the perl had done and the added functionality as well and with remarkably few bugs.
Eventually I went back to add on more functionality and "Lo!" I had no trouble reading my Python code and even better adding in the new stuff was simple.
The biggest problem with Python has been the lack of a good book, I'll be considering "Dive into Python" carefully - being in the education biz I'm looking for a really good Python book for students.
"So tell me, whats more believable, that 200+ people are willing to risk their good names, and possibly fortunes to get Bush elected, or Kerry is hiding somthing?"
I find both believable. The Republicans certainly have a rather patchy record of honesty and I'm not sure how much I trust Kerry. But given a choice between them I rather think I'll prefer someone who may have (to put in a rather geeky metaphor) has edited his memory a bit sloppily over a group that seems to be willing to groupthink themselves into what looks like deliberate lying.
So now John Cage's estate will be able to sue anyone who has any amount of silence in their music, since it could be argued that they'd sampled his piece
4' 33". OK, its a stretch, but with decisions like this, who knows?
Univac's Exec 8 (I think), its been quite a while since I used it, had versioning integrated into the files themselves - at least for some files. That is, they marked changes to the files as part of the file content up to 5 (I think) levels deep.
This did mean that you had to use the right tools to get into the files or you had to cope with the changes in programs that worked on them.
VMS also had file revision numbers on files as a couple of posters have noted.
Both of these were nice in some ways, but relatively difficult to deal with in other ways. By comparison unix is straight-jacketed but easy to use.
Yup, there is something arbitrary, but it turns out not to matter much (just a constant factor, if I remember correctly). The ultimate representation though is not as (say) lisp, but as a TM.
And a "random" bit string that turns out to be easily computable isn't really random, is it? (And since this was brought up in a crypto context, think crypto here.)
There is a definition of random that seems fairly convincing to me (and to others). In that definition a bit string is defined as random when the smallest program (turing machine, lisp program) needed to compute it is longer than it is.
See Greg Chaitin's work for more info, or this wikipedia page . And this kind of work seems to have some practical implications for cryptography as well.
Worse yet, I knew that and thought to myself, "Its not called 'Things Fall Apart', that's the novel by Chinua Acheba' and still managed to forget. And I'd been going to check the exact wording of the quote and managed to forget that too.
The worst are full of passionate intensity
And the best lack all conviction...
But I suspect that that is always true - the best are by their nature capable of empathising with people on both sides of a question, and capable of seeing the logic on both sides. Hence they find it hard to be passionate.
True passion, I fear, probably comes from ignorance stoked by fear and testosterone.
A book in the same kind of vein is "A handbook of Software and Systems Engineering -- Empirical Observations, Laws and Theories". In it, "laws" are stated and discussed with emphasis on experiments or studies that back up the law, or that tend to falsify it.
As an example, one of the laws mentioned in this discussion is given as "Individual developer performance varies considerably." (Law 31) Then some statistics are given showing the variability. Finally there is a comment on if we should or should not trust the numbers given.
I knew someone was going to use this article to bring up the same old complaints about XML being inappropriate.
While the size of some 3D data sets is a concern with XML, XML is otherwise very well suited for such data. It is often irregular (which makes relational databases tough) and hierarchical (with elements sitting at different places in a scene graph). So it fits XML almost perfectly.
Furthermore, with XSLT, or any of the bindings that enable XML structures to be reflected as objects in a programming language, processing the data becomes easy.
Finally, you can always edit it manually.
Binary descriptions are nice, usually compact (not always). But with binary descriptions you always have to worry about floating point formats, endianness and how to represent the data in your program - so for every binary data description you have to write a reader for the data, a writer and a new converter for every output format you might choose. With XML, libraries for reading, writing and converting (XSL is very powerful for that) are being written for most languages so you can use one of those that is already there, or if you do have to write one, you can reuse it for other types of data in the future.
I've written programs to read and write binary data of more types than I'd care to admit, and I've stared at hex dumps of the data files for way too long. I've had to look at un-documented or under-documented binary formatted files and puzzle out what every bit did more than a few times. (Of course since the DMCA I would never puzzle out undocumented binary data files.)
Finally you say, "XML is fine for configuration files and office documents" but there are those who say that XML is precisely wrong for those kinds of files. In fact, every time someone mentions XML as being used for "Purpose X" on slashdot, you can expect the immediate response "XML is completely inappropriate for Purpose X" comments.
I'm also a bit curious - for the 3D descriptions, how does bzipped XML compare to an equivalent binary file for size?
Barry Lyndon is actually quite an interesting movie. It is indeed very, very slow, but I believe that is deliberate. Think of it as a kind of cinematic tone poem instead of a grand symphony.
I will admit it took a couple watchings, and one of those was a deliberate attempt to see what was going on and try to figure it all out.
I don't know about "Eyes Wide Shut" as I've not put that kind of effort into it.
I have worked on the distributed proofing of a couple of texts and found that the accuracy of a page after the second proofing was often close to perfect.
One of the books I worked on was the "Anatomy of Melancholy" and I (conveniently) have a copy myself. There were often more differences between the scanned image of the page and my copy than between the scanned image and the proofread text.
Don't underestimate the amount of work people put into this too - for "Anatomy of Melancholy" it often took 30 minutes to proof a single page because the page often had latin and very small footnotes.
It seems to me that
MS could easily take linux code and fork it off as it is using the code to build a windows enhancement toolkit. I don't think they could add it in so it was part of their OS, but they could follow the cygwin direction. They would have to release any code they produced (including patches and bug fixes) but they would not have to release their Windows (proprietary) code.
Actually I'm not sure why they have not already done something like this. It would gain them support, provide a huge base of freeware that would run on their systems (though they might have to build in a "run x86 linux executable" module of some sort), and generally be good public relations. And, if they did it right (like by building the right kind of virtual machine) they'd probably discover that it would improve their own systems.
This is the kind of problem that XML solves perfectly.
XML would allow you to define
(in a DTD/Schema...) the kinds of data that the form should be collecting and do it in a format neutral way.
Then you could use web pages (translate the XML automatically to XHTML, grab the data and translate back). This can be fairly easily automated as could other methods to handle the input. PDF and DOC (and its cousins) are poor substitutes as you can't as easily identify the important information in the document, you can't store it concisely and you can't then do semantic level searches on it. Furthermore, in XML processing you can do consistency checks and so on.
In a web setting (or similarly "connected" kind of configuration) you could pre-populate much of the data for the user. You could even "compile" the xml to a set of online forms (XML -> GLADE or the MS.NET XML window description thing).
Once the data is entered into XML it can be massaged and output in any needed format (I don't know of any free XML to DOC format converter, but I suspect that the XML enabled MS Office stuff can do it if needed).
By the way, while that first step is easy to say, actually defining the DTD/Schema/... is likely to be rather difficult. (Look up sometime what it takes to specify an address.) But this difficulty pays off immensely in that you know much more about your data, and much more about the ways it might be used. Once this is done though, the other parts are really pretty straightforward.
It might take a bit of work, but in the long term coding this up in XML is likely to save far more work and money.
Juris Hartmanis said in his Turing award lecture, and perhaps partly in jest, that computer science and its associated fields might be called the "Engineering of Mathematics". I think the name works nicely. I suspect though that that name would scare anyone not serious away from the field in an instant. Though as someone who gets to teach more than a few of the people who want to do computer stuff without having any real interest or talent in the field, thats not really a Bad Thing.
I played around with Self a while back and was very impressed by the potential of prototype languages. There are some problems, but so many possibilities.
Now there are several such languages available (other than slate). Once they're all a bit more stable (some are stable now) it will be interesting to do a bake-off and see how they compare.
These seem to be the most influential and active (at least at the moment) :
I believe you've misinterpreted the song. I do not believe it is about violins at all.
The relevant verse goes :
Holly came from Miami, F.L.A.
Hitch-hiked her way across the USA
Plucked her eyebrows on the way
Shaved her legs and then he was a she
She says, Hey babe
Take a walk on the wild side
She said, Hey honey
Take a walk on the wild side
It is, I believe, about Holly Woodlawn, a noted transvestite who appeared in some Andy Warhol films.
The whole song is about gay men going to New York back in the days when living anywhere else and being open about being gay was at the very least hazardous. Not that New York was all that friendly, but it beat most other places.
I agree that it is/should be the parents responsibility to figure out what their kids are/should be reading or watching or browsing. But then too I had good parents who encouraged me to read most anything. (They even borrowed "Ulysses" from the library for me - the library thought I was too young for the books in the "adult" section. It was not an easy read, I'll admit.)
One of the problems is that parents all too often have the idea that their (and usually everyone elses) kids should be protected from almost everything. For instance, all too many parents would find "The Origin of Species" a serious problem for their kids and even (by extension) "The voyage of the Beagle". Or "Ulysses", or the Koran.
This spills over into libraries too. Such things end up in the "adult" area or are even removed entirely.
If you're homeschooling your children, it does them no favors to censor thir reading as long as what they're reading isn't flat out raw porn.
And personally I'd rather have kids reading "Ulysses" for all of its (however brief) adult content than Danielle Steel.
All very true, but legislators are far too fond of being paid off (however indirectly). And far too often our choices in legislatorial candidates is between the republican who will vote for law x and the democrat who will vote the same way and the third-party candidate who won't get elected. The judiciary, since they don't have to run for office, tend to be a bit more careful about the ways laws are implemented and this is particularly true in the supreme court.
The basic problem lies in the constitution - in Article 1, section 8 we have :
To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries;
The copyright extension law was judged constitutional because of the "limited time" bit, but a thousand years, even a million years, is still a "limited time" so there is no reason why congress should not extend copyright that long if they wanted. And there is no effective way for anyone to stop them as far as I can tell.
Slashdot Mirror
Cool line! I think I need a t-shirt or bumper sticker with that on it. Though perhaps it might be better as "bad music" (though that doesn't have quite the same rhythm).
I've used ViaVoice for dictation and it was very good indeed. One of the serious lacks at this point in the linux community has been speech recognition software - opening this up will make lots of cool things possible.
Just two quibbles from me.
Firstly the tab extensions does not seem to be a supported extension. Now I've read often enough about how it is horrible and ugly and all, but I use it for everyday browsing. I'd really like the default to be "open link in new tab" for just about everything with the middle mouse button set to "open link in this tab". The tab groups are also nice, but could be managed outside the standard tab extensions.
Secondly, SVG does not seem to be supported yet and I'd quite like it to be. Once a couple of major browsers support SVG, I think it will take off and become a very powerful web tool - but it is going to take that support in some browser.
I think fair use will stretch enough to allow me to quote one of his "Rocket Limericks" :
There once was a thing called a V2
To pilot which you did not need to
You just pushed a button
And it would leave nothing But stiffs and big holes and debris too
I thought your post was serious till I got to the "slave to France" bit. Then I realized that it had to be a put on - nobody literate enough to write could be that stupid.
So I'd heard about Python and that it was good, so (since I like the process of learning new languages) I decided to try rewriting the scripts in python. In about two days I had them doing everything the perl had done and the added functionality as well and with remarkably few bugs.
Eventually I went back to add on more functionality and "Lo!" I had no trouble reading my Python code and even better adding in the new stuff was simple.
The biggest problem with Python has been the lack of a good book, I'll be considering "Dive into Python" carefully - being in the education biz I'm looking for a really good Python book for students.
I find both believable. The Republicans certainly have a rather patchy record of honesty and I'm not sure how much I trust Kerry. But given a choice between them I rather think I'll prefer someone who may have (to put in a rather geeky metaphor) has edited his memory a bit sloppily over a group that seems to be willing to groupthink themselves into what looks like deliberate lying.
So now John Cage's estate will be able to sue anyone who has any amount of silence in their music, since it could be argued that they'd sampled his piece 4' 33". OK, its a stretch, but with decisions like this, who knows?
This did mean that you had to use the right tools to get into the files or you had to cope with the changes in programs that worked on them.
VMS also had file revision numbers on files as a couple of posters have noted.
Both of these were nice in some ways, but relatively difficult to deal with in other ways. By comparison unix is straight-jacketed but easy to use.
And a "random" bit string that turns out to be easily computable isn't really random, is it? (And since this was brought up in a crypto context, think crypto here.)
There is a definition of random that seems fairly convincing to me (and to others). In that definition a bit string is defined as random when the smallest program (turing machine, lisp program) needed to compute it is longer than it is. See Greg Chaitin's work for more info, or this wikipedia page . And this kind of work seems to have some practical implications for cryptography as well.
Sigh again.
Incipient Alzheimers, perhaps.
The worst are full of passionate intensity
And the best lack all conviction...
But I suspect that that is always true - the best are by their nature capable of empathising with people on both sides of a question, and capable of seeing the logic on both sides. Hence they find it hard to be passionate.
True passion, I fear, probably comes from ignorance stoked by fear and testosterone.
As an example, one of the laws mentioned in this discussion is given as "Individual developer performance varies considerably." (Law 31) Then some statistics are given showing the variability. Finally there is a comment on if we should or should not trust the numbers given.
While the size of some 3D data sets is a concern with XML, XML is otherwise very well suited for such data. It is often irregular (which makes relational databases tough) and hierarchical (with elements sitting at different places in a scene graph). So it fits XML almost perfectly.
Furthermore, with XSLT, or any of the bindings that enable XML structures to be reflected as objects in a programming language, processing the data becomes easy.
Finally, you can always edit it manually.
Binary descriptions are nice, usually compact (not always). But with binary descriptions you always have to worry about floating point formats, endianness and how to represent the data in your program - so for every binary data description you have to write a reader for the data, a writer and a new converter for every output format you might choose. With XML, libraries for reading, writing and converting (XSL is very powerful for that) are being written for most languages so you can use one of those that is already there, or if you do have to write one, you can reuse it for other types of data in the future.
I've written programs to read and write binary data of more types than I'd care to admit, and I've stared at hex dumps of the data files for way too long. I've had to look at un-documented or under-documented binary formatted files and puzzle out what every bit did more than a few times. (Of course since the DMCA I would never puzzle out undocumented binary data files.)
Finally you say, "XML is fine for configuration files and office documents" but there are those who say that XML is precisely wrong for those kinds of files. In fact, every time someone mentions XML as being used for "Purpose X" on slashdot, you can expect the immediate response "XML is completely inappropriate for Purpose X" comments.
I'm also a bit curious - for the 3D descriptions, how does bzipped XML compare to an equivalent binary file for size?
I will admit it took a couple watchings, and one of those was a deliberate attempt to see what was going on and try to figure it all out.
I don't know about "Eyes Wide Shut" as I've not put that kind of effort into it.
One of the books I worked on was the "Anatomy of Melancholy" and I (conveniently) have a copy myself. There were often more differences between the scanned image of the page and my copy than between the scanned image and the proofread text.
Don't underestimate the amount of work people put into this too - for "Anatomy of Melancholy" it often took 30 minutes to proof a single page because the page often had latin and very small footnotes.
It seems to me that MS could easily take linux code and fork it off as it is using the code to build a windows enhancement toolkit. I don't think they could add it in so it was part of their OS, but they could follow the cygwin direction. They would have to release any code they produced (including patches and bug fixes) but they would not have to release their Windows (proprietary) code.
Actually I'm not sure why they have not already done something like this. It would gain them support, provide a huge base of freeware that would run on their systems (though they might have to build in a "run x86 linux executable" module of some sort), and generally be good public relations. And, if they did it right (like by building the right kind of virtual machine) they'd probably discover that it would improve their own systems.
XML would allow you to define (in a DTD/Schema...) the kinds of data that the form should be collecting and do it in a format neutral way. Then you could use web pages (translate the XML automatically to XHTML, grab the data and translate back). This can be fairly easily automated as could other methods to handle the input. PDF and DOC (and its cousins) are poor substitutes as you can't as easily identify the important information in the document, you can't store it concisely and you can't then do semantic level searches on it. Furthermore, in XML processing you can do consistency checks and so on.
In a web setting (or similarly "connected" kind of configuration) you could pre-populate much of the data for the user. You could even "compile" the xml to a set of online forms (XML -> GLADE or the MS .NET XML window description thing).
Once the data is entered into XML it can be massaged and output in any needed format (I don't know of any free XML to DOC format converter, but I suspect that the XML enabled MS Office stuff can do it if needed).
By the way, while that first step is easy to say, actually defining the DTD/Schema/... is likely to be rather difficult. (Look up sometime what it takes to specify an address.) But this difficulty pays off immensely in that you know much more about your data, and much more about the ways it might be used. Once this is done though, the other parts are really pretty straightforward.
It might take a bit of work, but in the long term coding this up in XML is likely to save far more work and money.
Juris Hartmanis said in his Turing award lecture, and perhaps partly in jest, that computer science and its associated fields might be called the "Engineering of Mathematics". I think the name works nicely. I suspect though that that name would scare anyone not serious away from the field in an instant. Though as someone who gets to teach more than a few of the people who want to do computer stuff without having any real interest or talent in the field, thats not really a Bad Thing.
Now there are several such languages available (other than slate). Once they're all a bit more stable (some are stable now) it will be interesting to do a bake-off and see how they compare.
These seem to be the most influential and active (at least at the moment) :
Are there other major/active languages in this vein?
The relevant verse goes :
It is, I believe, about Holly Woodlawn, a noted transvestite who appeared in some Andy Warhol films.
The whole song is about gay men going to New York back in the days when living anywhere else and being open about being gay was at the very least hazardous. Not that New York was all that friendly, but it beat most other places.
One of the problems is that parents all too often have the idea that their (and usually everyone elses) kids should be protected from almost everything. For instance, all too many parents would find "The Origin of Species" a serious problem for their kids and even (by extension) "The voyage of the Beagle". Or "Ulysses", or the Koran. This spills over into libraries too. Such things end up in the "adult" area or are even removed entirely.
If you're homeschooling your children, it does them no favors to censor thir reading as long as what they're reading isn't flat out raw porn.
And personally I'd rather have kids reading "Ulysses" for all of its (however brief) adult content than Danielle Steel.
The basic problem lies in the constitution - in Article 1, section 8 we have :
The copyright extension law was judged constitutional because of the "limited time" bit, but a thousand years, even a million years, is still a "limited time" so there is no reason why congress should not extend copyright that long if they wanted. And there is no effective way for anyone to stop them as far as I can tell.