Reform patents by ensuring good review processes up front is a step in the right direction, but it's the process of overturning patents that most needs reform. Preventing future damage is not enough. We need a way to repair the immense damage that has already occurred.
Record all of your complaints in wav format, copywrite your own words, and email them to the RIAA.
Better yet, play devil's advocate. Make statemens in favor of the RIAA's positions. Lots of statements. Worded as many different ways as you can think of. Copyright and publish every one. If enough people do this, it will become nearly impossible for the RIAA to state its own case without violating someone's copyright. They won't be able to legally speak in public without breaking one or more of the laws that they helped pass. And that would serve them right.
Valve amps (the original name for tube amplifiers) are basically voltage driven, so when they distort, even-order harmonics are produced (2nd, 4th, 6th, etc...) while transistor amps are current driven and produce odd-order harmonics (3rd, 5th, 7th, etc....)
Bipolar transistors are controlled by current. MOSFET's are controlled by voltage. Most reasonably modern high-power solid-state amps use MOSFETS in the output stage.
Oddly enough, some seem to think that bipolar transistors sound better than MOSFETs. Go figure.
This whole tubes vs. transistors thing reminds me of some other debates over the years. Moving magnet vs. moving coil phono cartridges. Direct-to-disc vs. tape mastering. Linear tracking vs. radial tracking tone arms. And of course, analog vs. digital.
All much ado about nothing, IMHO. Each with a small but vocal cadre of fanatics extolling the virtues of their favored "underdog" technology. Usually that was whichever one was older, or more costly, or percieved as more exotic. Whether it was actually better was largely a matter of personal taste, and was rarely supported, and sometimes even contradicted, by any kind of objective tests.
The tube nuts need to come to grips with the fact that just because they prefer the sound of tubes doesn't mean that everyone else will prefer it too. That it's different is something we can establish objectively. That it's better is entirely subjective. Use whatever you like. It's no skin off of my back.
BTW, back in my vinyl days I had a moderately high end (350 1982 dollars) electret phono cartridge. That's a technology that was rarely taken seriously by those on either side of the MM/MC debate because it was generally associated with very cheap low-end equipment. But just as is true with both tube and solid state amps, a well designed and well built implementation can yield excellent results.
I'm not sure what the solution is yet, but I do know one thing: we need a different system for separating the wheat from the chaff. Traditional thinking says that School Degree == Knows His Stuff. Yet the reality is that you have a lot of people who go to school, but aren't really qualified for the job. At the other end of the spectrum, you have a lot of people who've made use of today's information mediums to become qualified without a degree. It's all a very confused situation.
That is something that's been prominent in my thoughs for many years. It's true. Degrees are poor indicators of ability.
The two primary functions of any school are to teach and to evaluate. Oh, they perform other functions too, but these two are the reason for their existence. It may seem that those two functions naturally go together, but I think it would be a very good thing to separate them.
Imagine institutions who test, but do not teach, and who place no requirements on where or how you acquired your knowlege. And I'm not just talking about the filling in circles with a #2 pencil kind of testing. That would be part of it, but it would also involve designing and completing actual projects, and evaluation of that by peers who are further along than you. And at the highest levels, evaluation by people with actual experience and recognized expertise in the field of interest.
Imagine something like a web of trust for reviewers, in which the reviewers are also subject to the scrutiny of their peers.
Imagine that this rigorous system eventually earns such trust that it becomes the standard against which traditional degrees are measured.
Imagine a system of evaluation that has no degrees, no majors, no grade levels. Instead, it uses separate variable metrics for each of a number of subject areas, which might themselves be composites of separate metrics for smaller specialties within each of those areas. No one would ever be denied credit they've earned in one area due to a deficiency in another. But neither would those deficiencies be hidden.
Self-learners would benefit by being able to get full and credible recognition of their abilities. And they would also benefit by gaining additional incentive and direction for progressing further.
The formally educated would benefit by having something that really proves that they know their stuff.
Employers would benefit in both cases by having a way of "separating the wheat from the chaff", as you say. Neither falling for credentialed fakers, nor missingo out on the talented ones among the informally educated.
And because of the separate metrics, employers could decide for themselves whether they care more about a "well rounded" education, or more about performance in specific areas.
The only losers are the fakers in the present system who somehow manage to acquire credentials without posessing the ability that those credetials are supposed to represent.
One percent wouldn't mean much over a year, but this is one percent in one month, and a 26% gain for alternative browsers, mostly Mozilla/Firebird. Not a big shift in the balance of power, but very significant as trend. Continue at the same rate for a year and you have a 12% decline for IE, and a 312% gain for Mozilla.
Of course, it probably won't sustain that same rate. But half, or even 1/4, of that would be enough to get noticed. A 3% decline in IE would be a 78% increase in alternative browser usage. And given the significant advantages these browsers offer, the increased visibility may accelerate the trend. It may have spent a long time playing catch-up, but now Mozilla blows IE away. And unlike IE, Mozilla/Firebird/Opera/Safari/etc. show no signs of stopping to rest on their laurels.
Apparently Microsoft campaign spending is down, and is pretty biased towards the Democrats right now, reversing a previous trend of biasing towards the Republicans.
Maybe they're expecting the Democrats to make some gains this time around. In an article I read some time ago about MS's campaign donation strategy, I got the distinct impression that it was more about winning favor with whoever they expect to win rather than supporting who they would want to win.
... or even better - they should be legally required to ship a CD containing the patches to every registered user.
Be careful what you wish for. MS itself might back such a law if they can be sure that anyone distributing a free OS is forced to meet the same requirement. Bye-bye free Linux downloads and cheap Linux CDs.
You must be a young'un. In my day, most equipment was operated by knobs and toggle switches. Long pointy sticks would not become practical for many years.
Disney did not reject the movie after it was made. They rejected it before it was even a fair bit done. They did not reject it because of "Bush funding". Maybe they just want to not bash the President of the United States. Take off your tin foil hat please.
Maybe that. Or maybe just that they didn't want to be associated with anything quite this controversial, regardless of what position it was taking. That just wouldn't fit with Disney's image. But if that were their intent, it backfired in a big way because now their name is more strongly associated with it than it would have otherwise been.
and then tries to bash him for the most stupid things (staying with the children for 7 minutes after learning about the attack).
Unless he had much better information than the rest of us, it wasn't clear at the beginning whether it was a terrorist act or just a terrible accident. It wouldn't have been the first time that a plane had accidentally crashed into a tall building in NYC. But all uncertainty was removed when the 2nd plane hit.
customer: My geek friends are always telling me how great Linux is, and how they hate Windows. This machine with Linux pre-loaded looks like it comes with more software and seems to be a pretty good deal.
salesman: Yes, but will it be able to play the games you like? You can be certain that this Windows machine can.
customer: I read an article about a software called "Cedega" that allows "Windows ® games to seamlessly and transparently run under Linux, out-of-the-box, with outstanding performance and equivalent game-play"
salesman: Yes, but can it run Windows games out-of-the box? And what about performance and game play?
Obviously you're joking, but still the possibility of the Gmail invites tripping over a spam filter does not seem too far fetched. For example, if their system looks for patterns such as when a large number of very similar emails are observed in a short period of time, then the Gmail invites might appear very spam-like in their behavior even if their content doesn't look spammish. This is pure speculation, of course. I have no idea if their spam filtering looks for patterns of that nature. But it's conceivable.
We all just seem to assume that if you offered your property for $1/track, that piracy would vanish. Well, they took us up on that challenge, and piracy hasn't vanished.
No, they didn't. What they're offering for $1/track is a product grossly inferior to what we were getting for a similar price on old-fashioned CD's (before they started screwing those up with copy protection). How can there be any hope of a new product catching on when it's significantly worse than what people are already accustomed to?
There are lots of songs I'd happily pay a buck for if it had the same quality and versatility as what I'm used to from CD's. And that means lossless compression and no DRM. And I'd happily buy songs with a lossy compression but at a good bitrate and with no DRM for.50/track. But the DRM infested garbage they're selling now? That's worth exactly 0$ to me.
Far better to use the GPL. If AOL wants to use the SW they paid for, they can do so. If they want to improve it, they can do that too, but they must distribute their source, so they can't create a huge "incompatibilty-hole" amongst the people who originally paid to produce the software.
That's it exactly. A company that is dominant in some market can effectively destroy the value of PD software by ensuring that only their proprietary derivative will work with their dominant product or service. So even though they can't take the PD code away from anyone, they can take most of the value of that code for themselves, and effectively deny it to everyone else. And that has very nearly the same effect as if they could steal the PD code outright.
As for some posters comments about granting companies, who are also taxpayers, the same benefits as everyone else, I believe the GPL does that just fine. Under the GPL they have the same rights to use, modify, and distribute as individuals do. It just prevents them from gaining any special advantages compared to individual taxpayers or even other companies. And while PD would not prevent individuals from comitting such abuses, it would still produce a very unlevel playing field because large corporations are in an inherently better position to benefit from such practices.
So I believe that GPL is a much better choice for Government developed software than PD or BSD style licenses. Being able to reap some of the benefits of your tax dollars is good. Being able to destroy the value of those benefits for all other taxpayers is not.
Are your popups opened automatically by onload or onunload, or are they opened by clicking or mousing over something? Popup blockers usually block the former (unrequested popups), but not the latter.
Marketers are increasingly becoming for the internet what ticks are to a dog.
Around 1996 or so, a friend was lamenting the increasing commercialization of the Internet. I remember thinking that he was maybe overreacting a bit, and that the trend was maybe even a good thing since it didn't take away any of the other uses of the net, but just added to it. And at the time, it was in fact quite benign, and often even positive. But now, spammers and web marketers are abusing and undeniably damaging the medium. When users have to criple features to stem the deluge of marketing, those features are rendered unviable for desireable uses as well. It isn't benign at all anymore. The cancer of Internet commercialization is now malignant.
I get it now. This 40lb malnourished chimp has decided that taking on the 800lb gorilla was a bad idea, and has now chosen to taunt the 600lb gorilla instead.
An apples-to-oranges comparison if ever I saw one. It is the openness of open source that gives it some accountability. This service pack clearly lacks that. And no one has claimed that all sources of open source software are equally trustworthy, or that you should automatically trust it all because of openness alone. I think everyone recognizes that just because something can be inspected doesn't mean that it has been. And many, possibly most, open-source advocates will tell you not to trust binaries from just anybody because there's no guarantee that they're compiled from same source that's provided. Some even advocate compiling everything yourself. So where is this hypocrisy of which you speak?
A friend once said "Bigotry against bigots is still bigotry." The same can be said of zealotry.
Ah the dot com boom days. Seems like every business plan involved giving stuff away. In 1999 my wife visited a web site that was giving away address labels in the hopes that people would like them enough to buy more in the future. She filled out the online form, and in a few days a shiny new roll of address labels appeared in the mail box exactly as promised.
And fine address labels they are. Their mistake was sending such a large roll. It's now 2004 and we're still using those same labels.
If this makes employers consider better spam-filtering mechanisms, surely that's a good thing for everyone.
The more likely response is an increased prevalence of "obscene" content filtering, without regard to whether the offending mail is spam. That is not such a good thing.
It's true that that kind of thing shouldn't be going on at work anyway, but such filters lack human judgement and therefore usually have to be a bit over agressive if they're to be effective at all.
A trick that is sometimes used to lend false credibility to unscientific claims is to state that x% of scientists and engineers believe y (y being biblical creationism, young earth, Noah's Ark, etc.). Saying only that a lot of engineers believe such things wouldn't be very convincing, so it's pretty obvious that the intent is to lead the reader to think that that a large percentage of scientists believe it. Few scientists fall for such bunk. But since they're outnumbered by engineers, mixing the two together can give you just what you need to lead someone to a false conclusion without actually making any false statements. But it still counts as lying in my book.
Slashdot Mirror
Reform patents by ensuring good review processes up front is a step in the right direction, but it's the process of overturning patents that most needs reform. Preventing future damage is not enough. We need a way to repair the immense damage that has already occurred.
Oddly enough, some seem to think that bipolar transistors sound better than MOSFETs. Go figure.
This whole tubes vs. transistors thing reminds me of some other debates over the years. Moving magnet vs. moving coil phono cartridges. Direct-to-disc vs. tape mastering. Linear tracking vs. radial tracking tone arms. And of course, analog vs. digital.
All much ado about nothing, IMHO. Each with a small but vocal cadre of fanatics extolling the virtues of their favored "underdog" technology. Usually that was whichever one was older, or more costly, or percieved as more exotic. Whether it was actually better was largely a matter of personal taste, and was rarely supported, and sometimes even contradicted, by any kind of objective tests.
The tube nuts need to come to grips with the fact that just because they prefer the sound of tubes doesn't mean that everyone else will prefer it too. That it's different is something we can establish objectively. That it's better is entirely subjective. Use whatever you like. It's no skin off of my back.
BTW, back in my vinyl days I had a moderately high end (350 1982 dollars) electret phono cartridge. That's a technology that was rarely taken seriously by those on either side of the MM/MC debate because it was generally associated with very cheap low-end equipment. But just as is true with both tube and solid state amps, a well designed and well built implementation can yield excellent results.
The two primary functions of any school are to teach and to evaluate. Oh, they perform other functions too, but these two are the reason for their existence. It may seem that those two functions naturally go together, but I think it would be a very good thing to separate them.
Imagine institutions who test, but do not teach, and who place no requirements on where or how you acquired your knowlege. And I'm not just talking about the filling in circles with a #2 pencil kind of testing. That would be part of it, but it would also involve designing and completing actual projects, and evaluation of that by peers who are further along than you. And at the highest levels, evaluation by people with actual experience and recognized expertise in the field of interest.
Imagine something like a web of trust for reviewers, in which the reviewers are also subject to the scrutiny of their peers.
Imagine that this rigorous system eventually earns such trust that it becomes the standard against which traditional degrees are measured.
Imagine a system of evaluation that has no degrees, no majors, no grade levels. Instead, it uses separate variable metrics for each of a number of subject areas, which might themselves be composites of separate metrics for smaller specialties within each of those areas. No one would ever be denied credit they've earned in one area due to a deficiency in another. But neither would those deficiencies be hidden.
Self-learners would benefit by being able to get full and credible recognition of their abilities. And they would also benefit by gaining additional incentive and direction for progressing further.
The formally educated would benefit by having something that really proves that they know their stuff.
Employers would benefit in both cases by having a way of "separating the wheat from the chaff", as you say. Neither falling for credentialed fakers, nor missingo out on the talented ones among the informally educated.
And because of the separate metrics, employers could decide for themselves whether they care more about a "well rounded" education, or more about performance in specific areas.
The only losers are the fakers in the present system who somehow manage to acquire credentials without posessing the ability that those credetials are supposed to represent.
One percent wouldn't mean much over a year, but this is one percent in one month, and a 26% gain for alternative browsers, mostly Mozilla/Firebird. Not a big shift in the balance of power, but very significant as trend. Continue at the same rate for a year and you have a 12% decline for IE, and a 312% gain for Mozilla.
Of course, it probably won't sustain that same rate. But half, or even 1/4, of that would be enough to get noticed. A 3% decline in IE would be a 78% increase in alternative browser usage. And given the significant advantages these browsers offer, the increased visibility may accelerate the trend. It may have spent a long time playing catch-up, but now Mozilla blows IE away. And unlike IE, Mozilla/Firebird/Opera/Safari/etc. show no signs of stopping to rest on their laurels.
You must be a young'un. In my day, most equipment was operated by knobs and toggle switches. Long pointy sticks would not become practical for many years.
customer: My geek friends are always telling me how great Linux is, and how they hate Windows. This machine with Linux pre-loaded looks like it comes with more software and seems to be a pretty good deal.
salesman: Yes, but will it be able to play the games you like? You can be certain that this Windows machine can.
customer: I read an article about a software called "Cedega" that allows "Windows ® games to seamlessly and transparently run under Linux, out-of-the-box, with outstanding performance and equivalent game-play"
salesman: Yes, but can it run Windows games out-of-the box? And what about performance and game play?
Obviously you're joking, but still the possibility of the Gmail invites tripping over a spam filter does not seem too far fetched. For example, if their system looks for patterns such as when a large number of very similar emails are observed in a short period of time, then the Gmail invites might appear very spam-like in their behavior even if their content doesn't look spammish. This is pure speculation, of course. I have no idea if their spam filtering looks for patterns of that nature. But it's conceivable.
There are lots of songs I'd happily pay a buck for if it had the same quality and versatility as what I'm used to from CD's. And that means lossless compression and no DRM. And I'd happily buy songs with a lossy compression but at a good bitrate and with no DRM for
As for some posters comments about granting companies, who are also taxpayers, the same benefits as everyone else, I believe the GPL does that just fine. Under the GPL they have the same rights to use, modify, and distribute as individuals do. It just prevents them from gaining any special advantages compared to individual taxpayers or even other companies. And while PD would not prevent individuals from comitting such abuses, it would still produce a very unlevel playing field because large corporations are in an inherently better position to benefit from such practices.
So I believe that GPL is a much better choice for Government developed software than PD or BSD style licenses. Being able to reap some of the benefits of your tax dollars is good. Being able to destroy the value of those benefits for all other taxpayers is not.
Oh. I thought it was "Those who can't teach, manage."
Are your popups opened automatically by onload or onunload, or are they opened by clicking or mousing over something? Popup blockers usually block the former (unrequested popups), but not the latter.
Marketers are increasingly becoming for the internet what ticks are to a dog.
Around 1996 or so, a friend was lamenting the increasing commercialization of the Internet. I remember thinking that he was maybe overreacting a bit, and that the trend was maybe even a good thing since it didn't take away any of the other uses of the net, but just added to it. And at the time, it was in fact quite benign, and often even positive. But now, spammers and web marketers are abusing and undeniably damaging the medium. When users have to criple features to stem the deluge of marketing, those features are rendered unviable for desireable uses as well. It isn't benign at all anymore. The cancer of Internet commercialization is now malignant.
"Operation: Footbullet"?
Heh, just wait 'til they pull out the big guns.
I get it now. This 40lb malnourished chimp has decided that taking on the 800lb gorilla was a bad idea, and has now chosen to taunt the 600lb gorilla instead.
An apples-to-oranges comparison if ever I saw one. It is the openness of open source that gives it some accountability. This service pack clearly lacks that. And no one has claimed that all sources of open source software are equally trustworthy, or that you should automatically trust it all because of openness alone. I think everyone recognizes that just because something can be inspected doesn't mean that it has been. And many, possibly most, open-source advocates will tell you not to trust binaries from just anybody because there's no guarantee that they're compiled from same source that's provided. Some even advocate compiling everything yourself. So where is this hypocrisy of which you speak?
A friend once said "Bigotry against bigots is still bigotry." The same can be said of zealotry.
Ah the dot com boom days. Seems like every business plan involved giving stuff away. In 1999 my wife visited a web site that was giving away address labels in the hopes that people would like them enough to buy more in the future. She filled out the online form, and in a few days a shiny new roll of address labels appeared in the mail box exactly as promised.
And fine address labels they are. Their mistake was sending such a large roll. It's now 2004 and we're still using those same labels.
It's true that that kind of thing shouldn't be going on at work anyway, but such filters lack human judgement and therefore usually have to be a bit over agressive if they're to be effective at all.
A trick that is sometimes used to lend false credibility to unscientific claims is to state that x% of scientists and engineers believe y (y being biblical creationism, young earth, Noah's Ark, etc.). Saying only that a lot of engineers believe such things wouldn't be very convincing, so it's pretty obvious that the intent is to lead the reader to think that that a large percentage of scientists believe it. Few scientists fall for such bunk. But since they're outnumbered by engineers, mixing the two together can give you just what you need to lead someone to a false conclusion without actually making any false statements. But it still counts as lying in my book.