The thread is probably dead, but...
I whole-heartedly agree with you. What I really meant to say applies to a debate about attempting to accomodate the common browsers out there, and adopting CSS before it's widely and (well) supported across all common browsers.
I'm assuming that it's a given that CSS should be adopted. However there is a real contest between producing a page that works in most all browsers and one that is standards compliant. The arguments I listed above tend to offer practical reasons for adopting these standards before they are well supported across all browsers.
I appreciate the argument that a lot of CSS advocates make about moving to CSS/box layouts and away from tables in order to a) force people to upgrade their old browsers, and b) encourage browser developers to better and more consistantly implement the standards. Seperation between content, presentation, and style becomes all the more important when working with web applications and making the content available for multiple platforms (pc, wireless devices, etc).
However, I'm also a strong believer in not locking anyone out or throwing up roadblocks for people to get at your content. I truly am beginning to feel that it's best to aim for as simple a layout as possible -- look at google or gnu.org. No headaches and everyone can easily read it.
Perhaps that just isn't an option for a large content mill like ESPN, although another poster did mention that there's an ESPN mirror that removes all the cruft...makes me wonder how much bandwidth they could save by just simplifying. I wonder if anyone's done an analysis to show the bandwidth cost for transfering all the unnecessary image files in a typical commercial site.
I recall reading about this in the NY Times in '98 or '99 (in newsprint). From what I can recall from he story, the tablet pc idea was one that has been attempted and aborted by many big hardware players for a long time, and the view taken by the story was that MS's success was a long-shot, tempered, however, by the fact that the product was seen has a very high priority within the company.
The thing that stood out in my mind, however, was that the story indicated that the general wisdom of the time was that consumers could care less about a "tablet" PC, but it was being persued because technologists thought it was a cool thing to do.
Personally, I think it sounds cool, but I'd rather use a laptop: I hate using styli for anything other than 'point-and-click'.
A couple of years ago, when I was in production support, I had to respond to our VP level concerning complaints from our clients who could not use our site with the standard screen readers. This was a novel issue to me at the time and I quickly familiarized myself with screen reader technology and the W3C's accessibility quidelines.
I suggested that it would not be a terribly huge undertaking to bring our site into a minimum level of compliance. Nope, this was deemed too costly relative to the small segment of our clientele who were disabled. Failing that, I suggested that we could simply ensure that all new development going forward implemented the accessibiltiy guidelines.
Well, two years and a new redesign later, and this still hasn't been implemented. I mean, how hard is it to include accessibility in the business requirements for the new development being farmed out?
Here's a web app that validates a URL against the W3C's accessibiltiy guidelines.Most sites will generate a ton of errors, but you'll also notice that this accessibility boils down to simple things like using *correct* html, making sure you supply text in alt and title tags, etc.
I'm not certain, but I think accessibility concerns was a reason that has caused the W3C to want to deprecate the use of framesets: screenreaders have a hell of a time trying to present essentially two different documents at the same time with any level of coherance.
Literature/fiction as open source
on
Eldred vs. Ashcroft
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
The case of HP Lovecraft's fiction seems to confirm that current copyright laws do defeat the aim of promoting new works.
Lovecraft wrote wierd ficton up to his death in 1937. In his fiction, he develops what has become known as the "Cthulhu Mythos", an outlook and setting for cosmic horror. During his lifetime, he actively sought collaboration with others to work with this "mythos", and extend it.
Because of when he wrote much of his fiction, and due to details concerning how his estate handled the copyright of his body of work, much, if not all, of his fiction is today in public domain.
Partly because of how he actively sought other authors of wierd fiction to participate and extend his mythos, and partly because of the fact that his work is still in public domain, there have been very tangible results:
Authors are still contributing to and developing his mythos,
A pnp game company has based an RPG on his works (Call of Cthulhu), which has inducted so many new people to HPL's works (including me),
Movies are made (though poorly), based on his works,
and most importanly, people are still reading Lovecraft's fiction -- and it's available online, and in print.
Many years ago, I loaned out all my Lovecraft books, and inevitably, no longer have them. When I recently underwent a hankering to re-read these great stories, I downloaded them into my visor using Plucker. I've also gone out and restocked my library with printed versions of Lovecraft's works.
From this small sampling, I think it's very clear that Lovecraft's openess and the copyright status of his works have truly encouraged people to keep creating and building on his foundation.
There is a staggering number of books which are under copyright, but have long since gone out of print. How much knowledge is unavailable because of this, and how many new works which could have been built or inspired by them were never created?
I shudder to think that it would be quite possible that Lovecraft could today be out of print because of copyright. Had others not built on his work, I doubt as many people who are fans of his work would have had the chance to be exposed to him, and thus preclude demand for his fiction.
Microsoft's Eric Rudder is quoted as saying that Linux is a "formidable" challenge and that "IBM is our greatest competitor. In the way they sell products and compete in corporate accounts."
Anyone think this is a strategic shift to get people think that if MS says they have stong competitors, they are not, therefore, a monopoly?
I watched the Russian adaption of Solaris a number of years ago, though I haven't read the novel. To be honest, I do not remember a lot of details from the movie. But here are some highlights and impressions:
Space monkeys
Midgets
Rather philosophical dialogue which hinted at revealing something of immense proportions, but at certain turns could seem like the rantings of a schizophrenic.
It was a wonderfully puzzling movie. The only US movie I can actually think of that puzzled me as much after seeing it for the first time was 2001. To me, the differences between the movies come down to 2001 attempting philosophy in a purely *visual* medium, whereas I had the impression that Solaris would have been better as a book, being a very verbal exploration of ideas (a symptom of being a film adaption of a novel).
Can someone who has read the novel and watched the Russian film adaption comment on how the novel and the film compare?
...is perhaps more interesting and is becoming more widespread.
Reuters recently announced that it's market news aggregation system (RMDS) is being ported to run on Linux servers. The system currently is running on Solaris and was ported to Windows (but the Windows port is no longer support/persued)
This is just the latest example of the financial industry turning to Linux. Morgan Stanely, Credit Suisse, E-Trade, the NYSE have
all started to move to Linux.
It's true that the migrations are generally coming out of the hide of Solaris and AIX. IBM is coming to terms with Linux, and recent signs look hopeful that Sun will follow suite as well.
I suspect that the economy has had a hand to play in the receptiveness of the big players in the financial industry to start looking to Linux-based solutions: everyone is looking to save money right now, and I think it's no accident that the financial industry seems to be taking the lead in terms of being early adopters of Linux in the enterprise.
I can only hope that with the trend towards moving systems over to Linux, these business will
be exposed to open source ideals, which -- who knows -- might one day lead to MSFTs fall from dominance.
Isn't it plausible that while Linux may be eating Unix's lunch, this gives it a better chance to spread open source/free software ideals in a new environment, which -- in the long run -- might be what takes the *big* chunk out of MSFT's hide...
see they're using the word 'Druid' instead of 'Wizard'
And that is why free software is failing on the desktop; if each package uses different terms for the same functionality is it any wonder that users are put off.
I work for an online brokerage firm, and a new feature slated to me rolled out is a "trading wizard". That's a generic enough term, you'd guess. Guess again.
We had to figure out a different name for it as the term has been trademarked/copywritten by another firm.
I don't know if this is the case here, but in addition to product differentiation, it's a good strategy to call a feature something other than the generic term that might first come to mind -- an open source project really can't afford lawsuits.
Exactly right.OFX is slated for inclusion into Gnucash.
There is one hitch, however: download method. Some financial institutions require your application (MS Money/Quicken) to download the information from your bank, while others provide a browser-based hyperlink download of the qif/ofx file for you to import into your application. As long as your app supports the file formats provided, no vendor/financial institution is needed.You can curently import qif files into Gnucash.
The setup in which you download the files with your fincance application requires your app to first connect to the vendor's "branding" server, which then redirects you to your financial institution to begin the download -- this is where vendor involvement with the financial institution gets involved.
I suppose that if someone knew the address to their FI's download servlet, their application could be written to go directly there and bypass the branding servers. However, I don't think that FI's usually publish the URI for their download servlets so getting this info could be a challenge (though tech support should be able to tell you).
I've found that this interactive download method is more error-prone and resource-intensive (for the FI) than the browser-based options.
There are two ways to build an OFX parser. One way is to build a compile-time DTD parser that treats the DTD as if it were an IDL, and generates C language stubs for a parser. This approach was attempted and abandoned because it leads to fragile C code and a very large binary.
The parser is fragile because minor DTD non-compliances are hard to parse, handle and recover from.
The parser is huge because the DTD results in hundreds of (C++) objects being generated.
The other method would be to perform run-time DTD parsing. This is attractive particularly because it is a more commonly-used approach; there are a variety of XML tools available that provide this function.
No, it's time for people to actually *use* the ID system we currently have.
I too had some checks stolen over a year ago. The people who were racking up the thousands of dollars with my checks were apparently never even *asked* for ID from the merchants.
This is increadible. Someone writes a check for a thousand bucks at Audio King or Best Buy, and the forged check is accepted without being requested to present ID. Then, of course, *I* get nasty letters from these merchants asking to me submit a notarized affidavit attesting to the claim that these checks were fraudulent.
I sympathise to an extent with the merchants who were defrauded, but then again, had they bothered to verify someone's ID using our *current* system, they (and I) would not have suffered any loss.
The people who were using my checks were eventually caught, and by golly, none of them had gone through the trouble to forge a Driver's Licence in my name. Go figure.
Our current system is good enough. We just need to start actually using it.
BTW, I take the blame for not securing my own checks well enough, though I believe that they were inadvertantly thrown out by my girlfriend (long story).
I think you need to realize that advertizers are aware that not all ads run will be seen by everyone. You might assume a higher rate of your market seeing/hearing/reading your ads in one media versus another, and this is factored into the cost they the advertizer is willing to pay for an ad in that media.
There is never a guarantee that your market will actually see your ad.
The only thing that PVR will do is affect *price* of advertizing in one specific medium -- assuming that it becomes widespread enough to actually matter.
Television has no inherent right to be entitled for perpituity a fixed rate of revenue from advertising. Television is a business and therefore entails risk.
What iritates me to no end are business people who spout off endlessly about the efficiency of the free market and getting government off of our backs, yet when the market changes and threatens to make them obsolete, they go running to government for intervention and aid.
...which may or may not apply to your situation, but is something to think about if you are not a) totally married to Windows, b)it's not a huge network, and c) the network is otherwise well secured:
You can use old x486s as semi-dumb/thin clients to an app server using xdm -- the app server's X server just redirects the output to the users monitor.
I've set this up before and the performance is really very good. The x486s can have the OS installed locally so that they don't bog down the server booting from the network. Administration is centralized. Also, you can probably just keep using the workstation you have, otherwise, old boxes are cheap to find.
The downside of course is that it should only be done on a trusted network, etc. Again, if you need Windows, this is probably a useless idea.
True, there is the potential here for both constructive and destructive applications based on this technology. However, the mindset here might be similar to one involving Biological weapons.
The best situation is one in which war is so expensive, no one can afford it. Second best is if it is so expensive only *we* can afford it. A strong reason that chemical/biological weapons research was discontinued is that the *research* into how to create agents was the most expensive part. Given that, do we want to make it possible to simply let that expensive research fall into the wrong hands -- in which case, our economic advantage is simply lost.
If the bio/chem analogy holds, it might imply that the thinking is that the economic barrier is so high, only we (or our allies) could afford to carry out the research, in which case, there would be little incentive, and much dissinsentive in producing such a weapon.
Once a technology is actually developed, the genie is already out of the bottle. The risk needs to be weighed against the benefit. For instance, does the benefit of nuclear energy offset the risk of nuclear war?
I just installed Slackware on a Pentium 75Mhz with 32 MB RAM.
No problems. In the past I had Red Hat running on that box as well. My advice:
Install in text mode, and while you can install the KDE/Gnome libraries, if you *must* use a GUI desktop, use something like Blackbox, AfterStep, Icewm, whatever, just so long as it's lightweight.
That box makes a great NFS/SSH/FTP server, BTW...
Each simulation used more than 6.6 million CPU hours, which would take home machines 1000 years to complete.
Could someone explain this conversion? Does it seem arbitrary that 6.6 million CPU years will take 1000 years to cycle on a "home computer"?
What exactly is a "CPU year" anyway? The term seems like it should be intuitive, but if the conversion noted in the article is accurate, it would seem to be a counter-intuitive measure.
If a program is used to generate music, and the situation is further complicated by seeding the program with a DNA sequence, who has actually composed the music, and who, therefore is actually entitled to receive a copyright for it?
The author of the program? The person or plant/animal from whom the DNA sequence was extracted? Or the person who merely loaded the DNA info and clicked the button?
Numerous programs have been created that create music -- some in the style of a specified composer. It might be worth finding how the copyright issue were handled on the output of these programs.
In either case, it strikes me as clearly nonsensicle for the user of an application to be permitted to copyright the output of a program where the program's output is determined without consequential input from the user, and in this case, the user is not performing any creative act by feeding in an already predetermined string of data which is found in nature.
My feeling would be that if anyone has a right to the copyright of the output of this program, it would be the program's author, not the user.
I have a degree in music theory and composition, and this sort of arrangement is not very much different than much of the "avant guard" work produced in the 20th century -- i.e. composers like Stockhausen, Babbit, Reich, Cage, et alii, often were more concerned with the *methodology* they constructed which then generated the musical work, than the actually work itself.
In other words, in this sort of "post-modern"
art music, the act of composing became more about the creation of a methodology (or algorithm) to create a work of art in liue of a common practice, and allowing the resulting work to be partially or totally controlled by the process originally established -- like setting up a system in which samples on tape loops are phase-shifted according to a set of rules, or tossing i-ching coins to randomly produce data that controlls all aspects of the composition.
In light of the history and practice of musical composition in the last century, there is really little doubt that the author of the program should be the only person to have rights to the works output by his program. He has done nothing very different than John Cage -- just substitute tossing the i-ching to generate data with using DNA information which controll the salient aspects of the composition.
The act of composition was in defining the process by which the work was created.
I'm an AvantGo user and am happy with the free service. I don't use custom pages anymore -- page size and link depth are a problem when trying to get a multipage article. However, I think that our reliance on a service like AvantGo points out a problem that's only going to get worse, unless we look to consientiously follow standards.
The increasing popularity of PDAs of all kinds will start to pose a problem in terms of conveying content in a useable way usable for these devices. Until now, we've been getting by with various hacks like AvantGo, but I thnk we are starting to come to a breaking point. There are probably as many ways to retrieve web content as there are PDAs these days, and I'm sure some will do a better job than others.
Before we start to go the way of designing multiple pages for each browser and PDA (which will *still* lock some people out), maybe we should actually start thinking about standards.
Today's standards/recommendations from
W3C basically are tilted at separating style/layout from content. If site designers as well as web-client programmers work to implement the standards, then there would be no reason to creat alternate versions of a page for each device. Since content and style/layout is seperated at a structural level in the markup, then it will be easy for any client to serve up the content and display it according to its own necessities (screen size, colors, etc).
This does mean that we have to disabuse ourselves of the notion that a webpage must look the same on all browser, or that it's okay to make a webpage that can only be displayed in one type of browser, or only if certain plugins, etc are present.
The web, and the net, for that matter is not about, style, it's about content. Let's focus on content.
If we would have been doing this all along, chances are that services like AvantGo wouldn't be necessary in the first place.
I think it's nice to see a study validate the anecdotal evidence given by the arbitration firm mentioned in the/. story. What's odd to me is that in this system of arbitration, the parties, in essence, get to choose the judges. It makes me think of the whole wrong-headed style of journalism that's pervasive today that assumes that to do a fair story, you interview people at the extremes of an issue, and decide that the truth is somewhere in the middle, without ever considering that one or both sides are simply wrong.
Isn't this precisely why judges (int he US) are assigned to cases based on a lottery system?
Well, IIRC, the actual cost to press a cd is about a dollar. However, the process for making CDs is patented, and the royalty for using the process is quite hefty. I don't recall the actual royalty cost, these days, though.
But you are still right. I remember when CDs were the new thing, and were kinda pricey. At the time, everyone figured that when they became more mainstream, the price would eventually come down, though this has for the most part turned out to not be the case.
When Gen. George Squier patented the transmission of background music in the 1920s, that is music from phonograph records delivered over electrical lines...
I recall reading a long time ago that telephone lines were actually used for the transmissions. Companies paid a subscription for this service.
So how is SightSound's claim in any way novel or innovative over what Muzak corp. did in the 20s?
Slashdot Mirror
The thread is probably dead, but... I whole-heartedly agree with you. What I really meant to say applies to a debate about attempting to accomodate the common browsers out there, and adopting CSS before it's widely and (well) supported across all common browsers. I'm assuming that it's a given that CSS should be adopted. However there is a real contest between producing a page that works in most all browsers and one that is standards compliant. The arguments I listed above tend to offer practical reasons for adopting these standards before they are well supported across all browsers.
I appreciate the argument that a lot of CSS advocates make about moving to CSS/box layouts and away from tables in order to a) force people to upgrade their old browsers, and b) encourage browser developers to better and more consistantly implement the standards. Seperation between content, presentation, and style becomes all the more important when working with web applications and making the content available for multiple platforms (pc, wireless devices, etc).
However, I'm also a strong believer in not locking anyone out or throwing up roadblocks for people to get at your content. I truly am beginning to feel that it's best to aim for as simple a layout as possible -- look at google or gnu.org. No headaches and everyone can easily read it.
Perhaps that just isn't an option for a large content mill like ESPN, although another poster did mention that there's an ESPN mirror that removes all the cruft...makes me wonder how much bandwidth they could save by just simplifying. I wonder if anyone's done an analysis to show the bandwidth cost for transfering all the unnecessary image files in a typical commercial site.
You know, my girlfriend went to see this movie last night with her friends and actually did fall asleep in the theater.
I recall reading about this in the NY Times in '98 or '99 (in newsprint). From what I can recall from he story, the tablet pc idea was one that has been attempted and aborted by many big hardware players for a long time, and the view taken by the story was that MS's success was a long-shot, tempered, however, by the fact that the product was seen has a very high priority within the company.
The thing that stood out in my mind, however, was that the story indicated that the general wisdom of the time was that consumers could care less about a "tablet" PC, but it was being persued because technologists thought it was a cool thing to do.
Personally, I think it sounds cool, but I'd rather use a laptop: I hate using styli for anything other than 'point-and-click'.
A couple of years ago, when I was in production support, I had to respond to our VP level concerning complaints from our clients who could not use our site with the standard screen readers. This was a novel issue to me at the time and I quickly familiarized myself with screen reader technology and the W3C's accessibility quidelines.
I suggested that it would not be a terribly huge undertaking to bring our site into a minimum level of compliance. Nope, this was deemed too costly relative to the small segment of our clientele who were disabled. Failing that, I suggested that we could simply ensure that all new development going forward implemented the accessibiltiy guidelines.
Well, two years and a new redesign later, and this still hasn't been implemented. I mean, how hard is it to include accessibility in the business requirements for the new development being farmed out?
Here's a web app that validates a URL against the W3C's accessibiltiy guidelines.Most sites will generate a ton of errors, but you'll also notice that this accessibility boils down to simple things like using *correct* html, making sure you supply text in alt and title tags, etc.
I'm not certain, but I think accessibility concerns was a reason that has caused the W3C to want to deprecate the use of framesets: screenreaders have a hell of a time trying to present essentially two different documents at the same time with any level of coherance.
The case of HP Lovecraft's fiction seems to confirm that current copyright laws do defeat the aim of promoting new works.
Lovecraft wrote wierd ficton up to his death in 1937. In his fiction, he develops what has become known as the "Cthulhu Mythos", an outlook and setting for cosmic horror. During his lifetime, he actively sought collaboration with others to work with this "mythos", and extend it.
Because of when he wrote much of his fiction, and due to details concerning how his estate handled the copyright of his body of work, much, if not all, of his fiction is today in public domain.
Partly because of how he actively sought other authors of wierd fiction to participate and extend his mythos, and partly because of the fact that his work is still in public domain, there have been very tangible results:
Many years ago, I loaned out all my Lovecraft books, and inevitably, no longer have them. When I recently underwent a hankering to re-read these great stories, I downloaded them into my visor using Plucker. I've also gone out and restocked my library with printed versions of Lovecraft's works.
From this small sampling, I think it's very clear that Lovecraft's openess and the copyright status of his works have truly encouraged people to keep creating and building on his foundation.
There is a staggering number of books which are under copyright, but have long since gone out of print. How much knowledge is unavailable because of this, and how many new works which could have been built or inspired by them were never created?
I shudder to think that it would be quite possible that Lovecraft could today be out of print because of copyright. Had others not built on his work, I doubt as many people who are fans of his work would have had the chance to be exposed to him, and thus preclude demand for his fiction.
Anyone think this is a strategic shift to get people think that if MS says they have stong competitors, they are not, therefore, a monopoly?
I watched the Russian adaption of Solaris a number of years ago, though I haven't read the novel. To be honest, I do not remember a lot of details from the movie. But here are some highlights and impressions:
It was a wonderfully puzzling movie. The only US movie I can actually think of that puzzled me as much after seeing it for the first time was 2001. To me, the differences between the movies come down to 2001 attempting philosophy in a purely *visual* medium, whereas I had the impression that Solaris would have been better as a book, being a very verbal exploration of ideas (a symptom of being a film adaption of a novel).
Can someone who has read the novel and watched the Russian film adaption comment on how the novel and the film compare?
...is perhaps more interesting and is becoming more widespread.
Reuters recently announced that it's market news aggregation system (RMDS) is being ported to run on Linux servers. The system currently is running on Solaris and was ported to Windows (but the Windows port is no longer support/persued)
This is just the latest example of the financial industry turning to Linux. Morgan Stanely, Credit Suisse, E-Trade, the NYSE have all started to move to Linux.
It's true that the migrations are generally coming out of the hide of Solaris and AIX. IBM is coming to terms with Linux, and recent signs look hopeful that Sun will follow suite as well.
I suspect that the economy has had a hand to play in the receptiveness of the big players in the financial industry to start looking to Linux-based solutions: everyone is looking to save money right now, and I think it's no accident that the financial industry seems to be taking the lead in terms of being early adopters of Linux in the enterprise.
I can only hope that with the trend towards moving systems over to Linux, these business will be exposed to open source ideals, which -- who knows -- might one day lead to MSFTs fall from dominance.
Isn't it plausible that while Linux may be eating Unix's lunch, this gives it a better chance to spread open source/free software ideals in a new environment, which -- in the long run -- might be what takes the *big* chunk out of MSFT's hide...
I work for an online brokerage firm, and a new feature slated to me rolled out is a "trading wizard". That's a generic enough term, you'd guess. Guess again.
We had to figure out a different name for it as the term has been trademarked/copywritten by another firm.
I don't know if this is the case here, but in addition to product differentiation, it's a good strategy to call a feature something other than the generic term that might first come to mind -- an open source project really can't afford lawsuits.
Exactly right.OFX is slated for inclusion into Gnucash.
There is one hitch, however: download method. Some financial institutions require your application (MS Money/Quicken) to download the information from your bank, while others provide a browser-based hyperlink download of the qif/ofx file for you to import into your application. As long as your app supports the file formats provided, no vendor/financial institution is needed.You can curently import qif files into Gnucash.
The setup in which you download the files with your fincance application requires your app to first connect to the vendor's "branding" server, which then redirects you to your financial institution to begin the download -- this is where vendor involvement with the financial institution gets involved.
I suppose that if someone knew the address to their FI's download servlet, their application could be written to go directly there and bypass the branding servers. However, I don't think that FI's usually publish the URI for their download servlets so getting this info could be a challenge (though tech support should be able to tell you).
I've found that this interactive download method is more error-prone and resource-intensive (for the FI) than the browser-based options.
Here's a comment on building an OFX parser found on the Gnucash project goals pags:
No, it's time for people to actually *use* the ID system we currently have.
I too had some checks stolen over a year ago. The people who were racking up the thousands of dollars with my checks were apparently never even *asked* for ID from the merchants.
This is increadible. Someone writes a check for a thousand bucks at Audio King or Best Buy, and the forged check is accepted without being requested to present ID. Then, of course, *I* get nasty letters from these merchants asking to me submit a notarized affidavit attesting to the claim that these checks were fraudulent.
I sympathise to an extent with the merchants who were defrauded, but then again, had they bothered to verify someone's ID using our *current* system, they (and I) would not have suffered any loss.
The people who were using my checks were eventually caught, and by golly, none of them had gone through the trouble to forge a Driver's Licence in my name. Go figure.
Our current system is good enough. We just need to start actually using it.
BTW, I take the blame for not securing my own checks well enough, though I believe that they were inadvertantly thrown out by my girlfriend (long story).
I think you need to realize that advertizers are aware that not all ads run will be seen by everyone. You might assume a higher rate of your market seeing/hearing/reading your ads in one media versus another, and this is factored into the cost they the advertizer is willing to pay for an ad in that media. There is never a guarantee that your market will actually see your ad. The only thing that PVR will do is affect *price* of advertizing in one specific medium -- assuming that it becomes widespread enough to actually matter. Television has no inherent right to be entitled for perpituity a fixed rate of revenue from advertising. Television is a business and therefore entails risk. What iritates me to no end are business people who spout off endlessly about the efficiency of the free market and getting government off of our backs, yet when the market changes and threatens to make them obsolete, they go running to government for intervention and aid.
...which may or may not apply to your situation, but is something to think about if you are not a) totally married to Windows, b)it's not a huge network, and c) the network is otherwise well secured:
You can use old x486s as semi-dumb/thin clients to an app server using xdm -- the app server's X server just redirects the output to the users monitor.
I've set this up before and the performance is really very good. The x486s can have the OS installed locally so that they don't bog down the server booting from the network. Administration is centralized. Also, you can probably just keep using the workstation you have, otherwise, old boxes are cheap to find.
The downside of course is that it should only be done on a trusted network, etc. Again, if you need Windows, this is probably a useless idea.
True, there is the potential here for both constructive and destructive applications based on this technology. However, the mindset here might be similar to one involving Biological weapons.
The best situation is one in which war is so expensive, no one can afford it. Second best is if it is so expensive only *we* can afford it. A strong reason that chemical/biological weapons research was discontinued is that the *research* into how to create agents was the most expensive part. Given that, do we want to make it possible to simply let that expensive research fall into the wrong hands -- in which case, our economic advantage is simply lost.
If the bio/chem analogy holds, it might imply that the thinking is that the economic barrier is so high, only we (or our allies) could afford to carry out the research, in which case, there would be little incentive, and much dissinsentive in producing such a weapon.
Once a technology is actually developed, the genie is already out of the bottle. The risk needs to be weighed against the benefit. For instance, does the benefit of nuclear energy offset the risk of nuclear war?
I just installed Slackware on a Pentium 75Mhz with 32 MB RAM. No problems. In the past I had Red Hat running on that box as well. My advice: Install in text mode, and while you can install the KDE/Gnome libraries, if you *must* use a GUI desktop, use something like Blackbox, AfterStep, Icewm, whatever, just so long as it's lightweight. That box makes a great NFS/SSH/FTP server, BTW...
Could someone explain this conversion? Does it seem arbitrary that 6.6 million CPU years will take 1000 years to cycle on a "home computer"?
What exactly is a "CPU year" anyway? The term seems like it should be intuitive, but if the conversion noted in the article is accurate, it would seem to be a counter-intuitive measure.
If a program is used to generate music, and the situation is further complicated by seeding the program with a DNA sequence, who has actually composed the music, and who, therefore is actually entitled to receive a copyright for it?
The author of the program? The person or plant/animal from whom the DNA sequence was extracted? Or the person who merely loaded the DNA info and clicked the button?
Numerous programs have been created that create music -- some in the style of a specified composer. It might be worth finding how the copyright issue were handled on the output of these programs.
In either case, it strikes me as clearly nonsensicle for the user of an application to be permitted to copyright the output of a program where the program's output is determined without consequential input from the user, and in this case, the user is not performing any creative act by feeding in an already predetermined string of data which is found in nature.
My feeling would be that if anyone has a right to the copyright of the output of this program, it would be the program's author, not the user.
I have a degree in music theory and composition, and this sort of arrangement is not very much different than much of the "avant guard" work produced in the 20th century -- i.e. composers like Stockhausen, Babbit, Reich, Cage, et alii, often were more concerned with the *methodology* they constructed which then generated the musical work, than the actually work itself.
In other words, in this sort of "post-modern" art music, the act of composing became more about the creation of a methodology (or algorithm) to create a work of art in liue of a common practice, and allowing the resulting work to be partially or totally controlled by the process originally established -- like setting up a system in which samples on tape loops are phase-shifted according to a set of rules, or tossing i-ching coins to randomly produce data that controlls all aspects of the composition.
In light of the history and practice of musical composition in the last century, there is really little doubt that the author of the program should be the only person to have rights to the works output by his program. He has done nothing very different than John Cage -- just substitute tossing the i-ching to generate data with using DNA information which controll the salient aspects of the composition.
The act of composition was in defining the process by which the work was created.
I'm an AvantGo user and am happy with the free service. I don't use custom pages anymore -- page size and link depth are a problem when trying to get a multipage article. However, I think that our reliance on a service like AvantGo points out a problem that's only going to get worse, unless we look to consientiously follow standards.
The increasing popularity of PDAs of all kinds will start to pose a problem in terms of conveying content in a useable way usable for these devices. Until now, we've been getting by with various hacks like AvantGo, but I thnk we are starting to come to a breaking point. There are probably as many ways to retrieve web content as there are PDAs these days, and I'm sure some will do a better job than others.
Before we start to go the way of designing multiple pages for each browser and PDA (which will *still* lock some people out), maybe we should actually start thinking about standards.
Today's standards/recommendations from W3C basically are tilted at separating style/layout from content. If site designers as well as web-client programmers work to implement the standards, then there would be no reason to creat alternate versions of a page for each device. Since content and style/layout is seperated at a structural level in the markup, then it will be easy for any client to serve up the content and display it according to its own necessities (screen size, colors, etc).
This does mean that we have to disabuse ourselves of the notion that a webpage must look the same on all browser, or that it's okay to make a webpage that can only be displayed in one type of browser, or only if certain plugins, etc are present.
The web, and the net, for that matter is not about, style, it's about content. Let's focus on content.
If we would have been doing this all along, chances are that services like AvantGo wouldn't be necessary in the first place.
Why does this story sound familiar?
Fair Domain-Dispute Arbitration Firm Quits the Business (Slashdot 12/05)
Here's the story the /. article links to:
Arbitration Firm Quits Domain-Dispute Business
I think it's nice to see a study validate the anecdotal evidence given by the arbitration firm mentioned in the /. story. What's odd to me is that in this system of arbitration, the parties, in essence, get to choose the judges. It makes me think of the whole wrong-headed style of journalism that's pervasive today that assumes that to do a fair story, you interview people at the extremes of an issue, and decide that the truth is somewhere in the middle, without ever considering that one or both sides are simply wrong.
Isn't this precisely why judges (int he US) are assigned to cases based on a lottery system?
Well, IIRC, the actual cost to press a cd is about a dollar. However, the process for making CDs is patented, and the royalty for using the process is quite hefty. I don't recall the actual royalty cost, these days, though.
But you are still right. I remember when CDs were the new thing, and were kinda pricey. At the time, everyone figured that when they became more mainstream, the price would eventually come down, though this has for the most part turned out to not be the case.