And I trust that you have also asked them for a complete copy of the source, since they are required to make it available. They even tout the fact that it's "Open Source", apparently without a clue as to the obligations this puts them under. We should all enlighten them.
The mission of the STIX project has been the 'preparation of a comprehensive set of fonts that serve the scientific and engineering community in the process from manuscript creation through final publication, both in electronic and print formats.'
For many working scientists, manuscript creation is performed using a monospaced typeface.
I admit that I was initially quite excited when I downloaded these files a few days ago. (Yeah, I lead a sheltered life: a new typeface can excite me.) The excitement evaporated when I realised that there seems to be no monospaced typeface. I might consider using these files for final output -- I'll have to see how it looks in practice; the individual glyphs look quite nice -- but this announcement hardly supports the entire process as their mission statement suggests.
I've said it before, and I'll say it again, "Interpreting broken code is a security weakness." Yes it makes things easier for amateur
Which is exactly why I've always maintained that the Postel rule that one should "be conservative in what one sends and liberal in what one accepts" (or words to that effect) might possibly have made some sort of sense in the environment in which Postel first coined it but makes no sense whatsoever in today's Internet. In anything in which security matters (which pretty much means "everywhere") one should be as picky as possible in choosing what to accept. Yeah, it's inconvenient; yeah, it increases development time; yeah it means that one really has to think about what one is doing: but in the end, it's the only way to proceed if one wants security to be anything more than an illusion.
The trouble is, it's awfully hard to win any argument when one is contradicting Jon Postel. But in this case many years of experience have led me to the conclusion that he was simply wrong (or, to be kinder, it's simply an error to apply his words to the modern Internet).
As far an engineering and tech types, I think I agree with you. However, I think that there is a certain segment of the science industry that really ought to be government sponsored (fundamental and long-range research that may not be carried out in private industry due to no apparent profit to motivate).
Much though I have a knee-jerk reaction against anything to do with the governemt, I have found it to be depressing how uninterested for-profit competitive companies are in doing any kind of science. Engineering, yes; science, no. My experience is that many companies tout their R&D budgets and the number of engineers (rarely scientists) they have doing R&D. But it's almost never R&D: it's D, with occasional forays into highly-directed short-term R.
There may have been many things wrong with the old US phone monopoly, but Bell Labs was not one of them.
I'm sufficiently depressed by it all that I'm strongly considering getting out of it and going to work at poverty wages in some kind of post-doc research position (in quantum computation, maybe) at the local university. The money might suck, but at least my brain might stop atrophying through non-use.
Wouldn't the cable modem just need a firmware upgrade if plugged into a DOCSIS 3.x system?
No. The channel bonding feature of DOCSIS 3.0 requires new hardware. Basically, this is because bonding n channels requires n transmitters and receivers in the modem. Prior to DOCSIS 3.0 n was always equal to 1.
Today you use KUbuntu. You feel like a black sheep. Tomorrow you suddenly find that some other your friend uses . Then one more friend. Then one more. Then you just stop counting.
Yep. I have been telling people for years that Linux is where the future is. Mostly they've politely ignored me, but I have long felt that the main point has been made: each of those people has heard someone say good things about Linux. That sort of thing sticks.
Today I walked into a meeting room for an organisation with which I've worked off and on for years, many of whose employees have heard me praise Linux on various occasions. On the blackboard from the previous meeting was a list of bash commands. I asked someone what the meeting has been about. He broke into a grin and said, "You'll love this; we've decided to move to Linux instead of Vista". Obviously, they didn't just do this because of me. I was doubtless just one of many bricks in the wall. But the wall got build, though it took several years. I have a great deal of confidence that that story is going to be repeated so many times over the next decade that we'll eventually get bored of hearing how someone else has made the switch; it'll be an everyday occurrence. Even though it doesn't look like it, I believe Linux has already reached critical mass: the chain reaction has just started, and it's only going to get faster.
IANAL, but don't Comcast's actions jeopardize their common carrier status because they are monitoring traffic on their network in detail?
Comcast (when acting as an ISP) does not have common carrier status. If they did, this issue would never arise, precisely for the reason you suggest. They have very good lawyers who understand this kind of thing very well.
And I don't think that's a bad thing. I think I'd like nothing more than the complete breakdown of the music industry so that you'd actually have to go out to bars to hear people play.
I've never been one for going out to hear local musicians -- but in the past year I have been to several local concerts in bars and small theatres, and almost without exception I have immediately purchased one or more CDs (indie, of course -- often they're just burned CD-ROMs) from the artist. I have been frankly amazed at how good some of the these unknown local artists are. So the whole "having to go out to bars" thing has certainly worked for me.
Either their VoIP cable modem has better QoS than the horrible linksys router Vonage sent me or Comcast uses a different pipeline for their phone service.
Comcast VoIP is based on PacketCable (www.packetcable.com) -- in a nutshell, this means that they can use special high-quality bandwidth for their calls. Third parties such as Vonage don't have the capability to do the same, basically because the equipment that is needed to use the special bandwidth is owned by the cable company (it's a combination of the cable modem inside the subscriber's Multimedia Terminal Adapter [the "phone modem" that Comcast puts in the subscriber's home] and a device called a Cable Modem Termination System that sits at the operator's end of the access network).
Can you cite what leads you to believe that? If they have done that, I think it's a change from the past, and I can find no obvious statement to support you.
Mind you, I can't find a way to download the DVD version anyway. I must have the wrong kind of mind to grasp the organization of their site.
Their wiki says: "Mandriva Linux 2008 is available in three editions: One, Powerpack and Free, for both i586 and x86-64 architectures", but so far I have been unable to find the 64-bit version of either One or Free (One is the "free + proprietary" version; Free is the "free only" version).
I can't tell if my inability to find the 64-bit version of One or Free is due to their confusing site design, my incompetence, or because those versions don't actually exist. Several places on their site say that all versions are available from "the official download site":
http://www.mandriva.com/archives/ But there's no indication there at all of how to get the 64-bit versions (at least, not at the time I'm writing this). I can't say that I'm impressed by the apparent lack of internal coordination on their website for this release: several links point to the Spring 2007 edition as still being current.
I hate to draw the conclusion that this is (yet) one more sign of Mandriva's decreasing relevance, but I would be very surprised if Ubuntu's upcoming release exhibited any of these kinds of quirks.
It's every guitar player's nightmare: you step onstage, strike your rock-god pose, triumphantly strum the first chord of a song--and discover that your guitar is out of tune.
Excuse me? Firstly, this hardly qualifies as a nightmare. Secondly, any guitarist who steps on stage without having checked the tuning is either incredibly sloppy or is sufficiently rich and famous that he has roadies to check this stuff for him (and whose jobs depend on this 'nightmare' scenario never happening).
Much more likely is breaking a string. I can sort-of see the point of auto-tuning the remaining strings because it's a royal pain retuning a guitar to account for the change in tension after a string has broken. But still, when I shell out lots of cash for an instrument it's to get a superior sound, not to buy some fancy piece of technology (which will probably break just when I need it).
AMD has realized that there is value in not only having the right products rolling off the lines, but also having a greater mindshare.
Or, as you implicitly suggest later but don't actually say: greater mindshare amongst technologically literate and influential people. My opinion (which is worth what you're paying for it) is that such people wield widely-underestimated power in the mid and long term.
I o not know why people always go for the less polished distros, like ubuntu, over something supported nad stable like mandriva.
I can tell you why I switched to Kubuntu after six years with Mandr[ake,iva]:
1. 64-bits was relegated to very-low-priority (an inordinate number of supposedly-supported 64-bit packages had dependency failures)
2. A large percentage of bug reports would lie untouched not just for months, but for years. I have within the past couple of months received acknowledgements for bugs that I filed nearly two years ago -- and those acknowledgements basically came down to "this bug report is filed against a version that is no longer supported".
3. When a bug report was acknowledged in a timely manner, it was almost always to the effect of "this bug does not exist in 32-bit version; unable to test 64-bit" (or the fact that it was filed against 64-bit was simply ignored)
4. Official update mirrors would disappear for weeks at a time
5. Security updates would be made available weeks after exploits became known.
My experience with Kubuntu has not been painless, but I have found none of the above to be true for Kubuntu. It was with considerable reluctance that I switched, but in any case those were my reasons.
How does your organization work? Does it do this for its members as a service, protecting your copyrights? Do members grant permission for this? If not, they don't have the right to issue DMCA takedowns for copyrights they don't own. Did you have to sign some small print somewhere?
Well, like many organizations, the word "work" doesn't necessarily describe things very well:-)
Andrew Burt is currently VP, and I have just looked at the current copy of our journal of record, and I can find no hint in the records of Board meetings or in the reports submitted by the individual officers, that this action has been sanctioned as an official act.
And to (finally) answer your question: to the best of my knowledge there is no simple place to sign up for anything like this kind of "service". I could imagine people contacting the SFWA to ask them to help with removal of copyrighted works that that particular individual has found (and for which he owns the copyright), and I would expect the SFWA to help in such an (isolated) instance. But as far as I know, the SFWA has no standing to conduct the kind of sweeping action suggested in TFA, because members do not automatically give it that authority; as far as I know, members would have to do so explicitly, via some kind of definite communication with the SFWA.
I'm sure they will take you very seriously and alter their current policies lest you write another angry email.
Well, Mr AC: firstly it won't be angry; and secondly I have found the people at the helm of the SFWA to be very responsive to their electorate. So I believe that the tone and the content of your response are unnecessarily negative, at least until I receive evidence to the contrary from the SFWA. At this point I am quite prepared to believe that this is all just a misunderstanding or an error by one person.
As a paid-up lifetime member of SFWA, you can be sure that I will be asking for an explanation of this action (and clarification/confirmation as to whether this is being done in the name of the SFWA or whether Andrew Burt is simply acting as an individual).
According to Ms. Foster's motion papers (pdf), her attorneys received no response to their email inquiry about payment.
I have been involved in more cases than I would like, and I can't say that I am aware of any situation in which e-mail was regarded as reliable. If my lawyers wanted to make an on-the-record contact with representation for the opposing side, it was usually by courier, and occasionally by snail mail or fax, with back-up confirmation over the phone. I can't imagine the circumstances in which it would be reasonable to regard delivery of e-mail to a recipient's inbox as reliable.
The problem the RIAA is facing is that college students - as a demographic - have a combination of passionate beliefs, raging idealism, little to lose, and nothing but time.
And it's a fair bet that they actually understand how the Internet works, or at least have access to people who do, which ultimately is probably the thing that the MAFIAA should fear more than anything else.
And following that observation, it's never been clear to me whether the MAFIAA purposely hire clueless "experts" for deposition or whether they honestly don't understand the technology.
If I want 1/10, it's the same difference to the local cable loop.
I'm afraid that that's not even remotely true. The upstream bandwidth available on almost all US cable plant is a tiny fraction of the downstream bandwidth available. The system only became (theoretically) symmetrical with DOCSIS 2.0. But all the deployments I know of in the US are still at DOCSIS 1.1. Even if they have a fully DOCSIS-2.0-compliant network (which is no one I know of in the US, but there may be some) I believe that no US cable operator has actually turned on the 2.0 features.
There is some hope that deployment of DOCSIS 3.0 will be faster and more widespread than deployment of DOCSIS 2.0 has been, but I wouldn't recommend holding your breath.
Slashdot Mirror
And I trust that you have also asked them for a complete copy of the source, since they are required to make it available. They even tout the fact that it's "Open Source", apparently without a clue as to the obligations this puts them under. We should all enlighten them.
FireGPG. I haven't used it, but the blurb seems to indicate that that does the trick, at least for gmail.
For many working scientists, manuscript creation is performed using a monospaced typeface.
I admit that I was initially quite excited when I downloaded these files a few days ago. (Yeah, I lead a sheltered life: a new typeface can excite me.) The excitement evaporated when I realised that there seems to be no monospaced typeface. I might consider using these files for final output -- I'll have to see how it looks in practice; the individual glyphs look quite nice -- but this announcement hardly supports the entire process as their mission statement suggests.
Which is exactly why I've always maintained that the Postel rule that one should "be conservative in what one sends and liberal in what one accepts" (or words to that effect) might possibly have made some sort of sense in the environment in which Postel first coined it but makes no sense whatsoever in today's Internet. In anything in which security matters (which pretty much means "everywhere") one should be as picky as possible in choosing what to accept. Yeah, it's inconvenient; yeah, it increases development time; yeah it means that one really has to think about what one is doing: but in the end, it's the only way to proceed if one wants security to be anything more than an illusion.
The trouble is, it's awfully hard to win any argument when one is contradicting Jon Postel. But in this case many years of experience have led me to the conclusion that he was simply wrong (or, to be kinder, it's simply an error to apply his words to the modern Internet).
Much though I have a knee-jerk reaction against anything to do with the governemt, I have found it to be depressing how uninterested for-profit competitive companies are in doing any kind of science. Engineering, yes; science, no. My experience is that many companies tout their R&D budgets and the number of engineers (rarely scientists) they have doing R&D. But it's almost never R&D: it's D, with occasional forays into highly-directed short-term R.
There may have been many things wrong with the old US phone monopoly, but Bell Labs was not one of them.
I'm sufficiently depressed by it all that I'm strongly considering getting out of it and going to work at poverty wages in some kind of post-doc research position (in quantum computation, maybe) at the local university. The money might suck, but at least my brain might stop atrophying through non-use.
No. The channel bonding feature of DOCSIS 3.0 requires new hardware. Basically, this is because bonding n channels requires n transmitters and receivers in the modem. Prior to DOCSIS 3.0 n was always equal to 1.
Yep. I have been telling people for years that Linux is where the future is. Mostly they've politely ignored me, but I have long felt that the main point has been made: each of those people has heard someone say good things about Linux. That sort of thing sticks.
Today I walked into a meeting room for an organisation with which I've worked off and on for years, many of whose employees have heard me praise Linux on various occasions. On the blackboard from the previous meeting was a list of bash commands. I asked someone what the meeting has been about. He broke into a grin and said, "You'll love this; we've decided to move to Linux instead of Vista". Obviously, they didn't just do this because of me. I was doubtless just one of many bricks in the wall. But the wall got build, though it took several years. I have a great deal of confidence that that story is going to be repeated so many times over the next decade that we'll eventually get bored of hearing how someone else has made the switch; it'll be an everyday occurrence. Even though it doesn't look like it, I believe Linux has already reached critical mass: the chain reaction has just started, and it's only going to get faster.
Comcast (when acting as an ISP) does not have common carrier status. If they did, this issue would never arise, precisely for the reason you suggest. They have very good lawyers who understand this kind of thing very well.
I've never been one for going out to hear local musicians -- but in the past year I have been to several local concerts in bars and small theatres, and almost without exception I have immediately purchased one or more CDs (indie, of course -- often they're just burned CD-ROMs) from the artist. I have been frankly amazed at how good some of the these unknown local artists are. So the whole "having to go out to bars" thing has certainly worked for me.
Comcast VoIP is based on PacketCable (www.packetcable.com) -- in a nutshell, this means that they can use special high-quality bandwidth for their calls. Third parties such as Vonage don't have the capability to do the same, basically because the equipment that is needed to use the special bandwidth is owned by the cable company (it's a combination of the cable modem inside the subscriber's Multimedia Terminal Adapter [the "phone modem" that Comcast puts in the subscriber's home] and a device called a Cable Modem Termination System that sits at the operator's end of the access network).
Mind you, I can't find a way to download the DVD version anyway. I must have the wrong kind of mind to grasp the organization of their site.
I can't tell if my inability to find the 64-bit version of One or Free is due to their confusing site design, my incompetence, or because those versions don't actually exist. Several places on their site say that all versions are available from "the official download site": http://www.mandriva.com/archives/ But there's no indication there at all of how to get the 64-bit versions (at least, not at the time I'm writing this). I can't say that I'm impressed by the apparent lack of internal coordination on their website for this release: several links point to the Spring 2007 edition as still being current.
I hate to draw the conclusion that this is (yet) one more sign of Mandriva's decreasing relevance, but I would be very surprised if Ubuntu's upcoming release exhibited any of these kinds of quirks.
It's every guitar player's nightmare: you step onstage, strike your rock-god pose, triumphantly strum the first chord of a song--and discover that your guitar is out of tune.
Excuse me? Firstly, this hardly qualifies as a nightmare. Secondly, any guitarist who steps on stage without having checked the tuning is either incredibly sloppy or is sufficiently rich and famous that he has roadies to check this stuff for him (and whose jobs depend on this 'nightmare' scenario never happening).
Much more likely is breaking a string. I can sort-of see the point of auto-tuning the remaining strings because it's a royal pain retuning a guitar to account for the change in tension after a string has broken. But still, when I shell out lots of cash for an instrument it's to get a superior sound, not to buy some fancy piece of technology (which will probably break just when I need it).
In general, telco divisions/companies/business units are common carriers; ISP divisions/companies/business units are not.
Or, as you implicitly suggest later but don't actually say: greater mindshare amongst technologically literate and influential people. My opinion (which is worth what you're paying for it) is that such people wield widely-underestimated power in the mid and long term.
I can tell you why I switched to Kubuntu after six years with Mandr[ake,iva]:
1. 64-bits was relegated to very-low-priority (an inordinate number of supposedly-supported 64-bit packages had dependency failures)
2. A large percentage of bug reports would lie untouched not just for months, but for years. I have within the past couple of months received acknowledgements for bugs that I filed nearly two years ago -- and those acknowledgements basically came down to "this bug report is filed against a version that is no longer supported".
3. When a bug report was acknowledged in a timely manner, it was almost always to the effect of "this bug does not exist in 32-bit version; unable to test 64-bit" (or the fact that it was filed against 64-bit was simply ignored)
4. Official update mirrors would disappear for weeks at a time
5. Security updates would be made available weeks after exploits became known.
My experience with Kubuntu has not been painless, but I have found none of the above to be true for Kubuntu. It was with considerable reluctance that I switched, but in any case those were my reasons.
YMMV, of course (and probably does).
Well, like many organizations, the word "work" doesn't necessarily describe things very well :-)
Andrew Burt is currently VP, and I have just looked at the current copy of our journal of record, and I can find no hint in the records of Board meetings or in the reports submitted by the individual officers, that this action has been sanctioned as an official act.
And to (finally) answer your question: to the best of my knowledge there is no simple place to sign up for anything like this kind of "service". I could imagine people contacting the SFWA to ask them to help with removal of copyrighted works that that particular individual has found (and for which he owns the copyright), and I would expect the SFWA to help in such an (isolated) instance. But as far as I know, the SFWA has no standing to conduct the kind of sweeping action suggested in TFA, because members do not automatically give it that authority; as far as I know, members would have to do so explicitly, via some kind of definite communication with the SFWA.
Well, Mr AC: firstly it won't be angry; and secondly I have found the people at the helm of the SFWA to be very responsive to their electorate. So I believe that the tone and the content of your response are unnecessarily negative, at least until I receive evidence to the contrary from the SFWA. At this point I am quite prepared to believe that this is all just a misunderstanding or an error by one person.
As a paid-up lifetime member of SFWA, you can be sure that I will be asking for an explanation of this action (and clarification/confirmation as to whether this is being done in the name of the SFWA or whether Andrew Burt is simply acting as an individual).
Let me take this opportunity to thank you for all the work you do.
I have been involved in more cases than I would like, and I can't say that I am aware of any situation in which e-mail was regarded as reliable. If my lawyers wanted to make an on-the-record contact with representation for the opposing side, it was usually by courier, and occasionally by snail mail or fax, with back-up confirmation over the phone. I can't imagine the circumstances in which it would be reasonable to regard delivery of e-mail to a recipient's inbox as reliable.
Sigh.
Here we go again, wielding the language of Shakespeare with all the delicate sensitivity and purpose of a surgeon wielding a cosh.
And it's a fair bet that they actually understand how the Internet works, or at least have access to people who do, which ultimately is probably the thing that the MAFIAA should fear more than anything else.
And following that observation, it's never been clear to me whether the MAFIAA purposely hire clueless "experts" for deposition or whether they honestly don't understand the technology.
No they don't. They report that LG Philips has done so. How hard is it to at least get the name of the subject company right?
And it's not even right in the headline. Sometimes I despair.
I'm afraid that that's not even remotely true. The upstream bandwidth available on almost all US cable plant is a tiny fraction of the downstream bandwidth available. The system only became (theoretically) symmetrical with DOCSIS 2.0. But all the deployments I know of in the US are still at DOCSIS 1.1. Even if they have a fully DOCSIS-2.0-compliant network (which is no one I know of in the US, but there may be some) I believe that no US cable operator has actually turned on the 2.0 features.
There is some hope that deployment of DOCSIS 3.0 will be faster and more widespread than deployment of DOCSIS 2.0 has been, but I wouldn't recommend holding your breath.