I would point out that another interesting condition is that you cannot run Glassbook when a debugger is running. This is presumably to prevent something like DeCSS where the key was stored unmunged in a variable. However, how could they ever hope to be considered for technical books with this restriction. Besides the obvious problems with detecting a debugger, what about having an O'Reilly book open in the reader at the same time as debugging some code? You'd have to close one before being able to open the other. It's a tremendous pain in the ass, especially since EBX'll probably get broken anyway.
>Non-citizens (businesses, institutions) may not provide to a third party information specific to a private citizen without the express written consent of the private citizen.
The good thing about this one is that it simply removes the profit motive (or at least drives it into the criminal underground). The two problems I see: First, identity theives are not restricted in what they can do. However, I think this is mostly solved by the fact that there are no institutions that have access to the info theives need. So with regard to individual theives, the situation is not a whole lot better.
Second problem: it drives the collection of personal data underground. I can forsee the time when, "If personal data is outlawed, only outlaws will have personal data." Underground TRW? Maybe, although I admit that it would be a lot harder for them to get data.
Overall a good idea. In fact, maybe if we could get this passed in California, we could start forcing all businesses in CA to abide by it. Until then, keep polluting those databases. "Why yes, I'm a PhD Inuit with 8 children and an annual income of US$200,000."
C'mon people, a code of ethics is a great idea! That would be at least a starting point for a way to enforce the fact that you own information about you. Code a project that takes inadequate steps to protect privacy? Tweeet, you've been sentenced to work for the EFF for a week. We could start it with "First, reveal no one's personal data."
I think that in this day and age, "I just work here" has ceased to be an adequate excuse.
This person is the first to point out that abysmally low response rate isn't a problem if you have a large enough number of contacts. In the direct mail (junk mail) industry, a 1% response rate is completely reasonable. Distributing a million CDs might yield 10,000 customers, a pretty big jump, especially if 1,000 of those end up buying support services from you.
Plus, people who are already linux users might choose Turbo from among the masses just because they happen to have seen them around on the CD. That's why Cheerios advertises, not to compel people to shell out for the cereal right then, but to get them to think twice when they pass up Cheerios on the cereal aisle.
AOL established themselves by making it as easy as possible to get started (note that long-term ease of use isn't quite as important to this equation because of how hard it is to change ISP's, move home pages, etc. for the newbie). They even made it free to get started, for pete's sake. Their ads were so ubiquitous that people began to think of them as the Internet. Recall Scary Spice's "I want an Internet. Can I have that one?"
The fact is that most of the infrastructure for real-world utilities is owned by the government or otherwise substantially controlled by it. This comes about either through the incredible investment needed (e.g. interstate highway) or some need to have a monopoly control (e.g. broadband spectrum). This infrastructure is absolutely critical to the functioning of American business. Imagine if a large section of the country lost electrical power: the consequences would be horrific. Like it or not, the Net has become almost as important as electricity to corporations. The government, for once, does not have control over a vital resource, which I think is a good thing. However, the government is not used to not having control, and in any case its corporate constituents are very concerned that no one has control. Thus the government is going to take steps to try and reassure themselves and the corporations that someone is taking care of it. I say let them have their little bunker, and let the Net and the admins use their own protective measures.
This reminds me of the article posted a while ago on the original Unix source code being available. Something like "Open source in history"? Ah , here it is. Anyway, kind of sad that it took this long for one of the best shells to be released. I'm not blaming David Korn, it's a great shell and I'm sure he did what he thought was most responsible for AT&T to do with it. Heck, I'm completely willing to believe that it took this long to convince his bosses that it would be a good idea from a standpoint of actual improvement to the code. I don't see anything on the web site as to why they decided to release , although "free for non-commercial and educational use" is not exactly what I'd call "free source"...
I would point out that this was a PG-13 movie, even if they both need to be censored in order to appeal to network audiences. Wouldn't this be an actual real use of 500 channels, to broadcast two audio streams, one sanitized and one uncut? Hell, with enough synchronization, I bet you could do it through WebTV.
Actaully, their entire case on the "commission patent" is based on the fact that it has not been done before. They claim that doing it electronically through links is different from what's been done before with sales commissions. Otherwise it would not be original and would not qualify for a patent. Now, I happen to believe that the affiliate program is not original, but that won't stop Amazon from arguing that it is.
I would say that Tim is simply working in the world of business. The fact is you have to work with people that you have violent disagreement. If Tim joined the boycott, posted an angry letter to Bezos, do you think this dialog could have happened? It would have been an attack rather than a discussion. I know business nowadays is run by committee, but never underestimate the value of the CEO taking a firm stand on an issue. I just think it's far more valuable to convince on principle than use the clumsy club that is a boycott.
The school I went to for middle school took only the top few hundred children in the school district, and then put them in special classes, etc. We generally had better computers and more access to them than the children in the other schools in the district, at least in Montgomery County, MD.
I also enjoyed it a great deal, saw it with a packed theatre on opening night, but I disagree that they stayed away from computer animation. First, almost all of the coloring in Disney films is done on computer, but they also use computers a lot as a tool to help artists create neat stuff. I'm pretty sure that the Beethoven, the Respighi, the Shostakovich, and the Stravinsky use computers heavily. But I guess that's the point, that they be able to use the computers to make stuff that doesn't look like it was stolen from The Mind's Eye.
Anyway, lots of fun to see, hope everyone can find an IMAX showing it nearby.
I was told while on a site visit to IBM Alamden research center (inventors of the MicroDrive) that the most serious impediment to further progress is the fact that the head must be at least as close to the disk as the bits are spaced apart. When the bits get really close, you're only looking at a few atoms space to fit the lubricant, air bearing, protective coating on the platter, etc. This will happen when the bit density approaches 1 terabyte on the currently 340MB, quarter-sized platter of the Microdrive. At current bit densities, the MicroDrive holds about 1GB, so we're only looking at a factor of 1000 between now and what looks to be a serious wall. On the other hand, they said that a lot about transistors, and it hasn't happened yet.
I would say what is valuable about this article is that it shows us that MS is just like any other hugely successful company. That leads to conclusions which should be obvious, but turn out to be a lot more obvious when someone goes to the trouble of finding them and pointing them out. *Of course* they have a lot of smart people, and of course they don't kill them with work. So, my question is, someone is in charge of all those competition killing marketing maneuvers; who is it? Does the average employee even know that MS is trying to crush the very competition they are trying to outdo?
The above post is so riddled with fallacy that I will just skim off the biggest ones. First, the real reason for the brain drain has been that universities are now allowed to hold and profit from patents. Before, they were not allowed, but in the 80s public universities were given the right to make profits. That is when the cost of sharing your idea with someone else became the risk that he or she would steal it and sell it. As long as academia is the realm of ideas, where giving your idea to someone else does not deprive you of it, then things work fine. When you depend on the profitability of your idea to fund your department, then you are in trouble.
However, this is not the same as not making a profit. Rather, companies need to let the basic research over the long term be done by people who don't have to profit. Then, after the groundwork is laid, the company can begin putting together products to sell. Does anyone believe that we would have given up ARPAnet if MS had invented and controlled the Web? Of course not, so MS, and everyone else who likes to embrace and extend research should not even bother.
Walt
P.S. 30 million people died of famine and disease in the nationalization of soviet farms. Please do not try to tell me that communism led to the same level of innovation shown by, say, Monsanto.
This is a troll, not the real JonKatz, please moderate it down, etc., etc. God these wannabes are getting tedious. Hell, I could be encouraging them just by making even this brief, half-hearted reply.
I know this is a joke (gram and meter are Greek, second is Babylonian, I believe), but lots of the scientists with units named after them *are* well known. Gauss and Newton both get used quite a bit, and most people know what Newton did, and have heard of Gauss. Tesla, while arguably the one who enabled the entire information revolution, does not get recognized in favor of Edison. It's sad when heroes like Edison and Tesla don't get equal and substantial recognition in our society. Why don't we put his picture on a dollar bill?;)
The fact of the matter is that the stake of the founder is most likely less than 50% by now. That's the nature of VC, especially when you've had to raise as much first-tier and private placement financing as Transmeta. Furthermore, the actual amount of stock sold to the public is typically less than 10%. Thus there is no way to "gobble up" a company on the open market. Make offers to those who hold large blocks, sure. But those who are holding the stock and are expecting a great IPO followed by stellar profit growth and a commesurate increase in valuation will be loath to give up their chance. Especially just before the moment of truth.
Eye-candy over content? How could this happen?!?! Easy, most web designers don't know squat about their craft or what their assignment is. Professional marketing people do, and thus can produce stuff that informs while selling. Your average web designer is someone who took a class to learn HTML and then printed up a bunch of business cards. They have no idea about what makes a good web page, and they don't care. They know clients will look at flashy graphics and be impressed, so that's what the client gets: crap. Until people realize that good web design is as hard as good code, things will never get better, and web designers will just propogate themselves like script kiddies.
It is very unfortunate that there is no longer a copy kept. I have a friend who works at the Library of Congress in their copyright section, and she told me that now they charge a fee for storing your work. Can you believe it, they want money from you to keep your work until it enters the public domain?! But I like the idea of a digital copy. For art it would be difficult, but for all the books that are published and lost, it would be great!
Wow. I came into this discussion ready to post about how Disney should keep their copyright, since it was still in active use. Even assuming that it qualifies as active, you make a strong argument that they shouldn't get to keep it. Because really, what would happen if you let the owners of the copyright keep it until they were no longer using it? You'd get lots of people selling 10 t-shirts a year just to keep it "active".
However, the limit on the copyright in some sense bothers me too. One might think of a copyright as a contract: I'll let you buy a copy of my work and do certain things with it as long as you don't reproduce my original work for others. Hell, it sounds a lot like a software license, which makes sense. Would anyone here argue that software should pass into the public domain after a certain number of years? Should that include source?;)
As I recall from the LinuxOne articles, Delaware is the place to incorporate. The key is not the friendliness to corporations, but the friendliness to those who own corporations. Delaware has nice regular disclosure requirements for all companies, and VC likes that, since they know that you cannot be lying to them under penalty of law.
I just installed Mozilla this morning, so I have no cookies, etc. Unless they're detecting my IP, there is no more login. Honestly, even a small barrier to reading like registration probably scared away lots of people.
I'd say the argument here is whether you want a PL to be "user-friendly" in the same way as a GUI. For me, the sole purpose of the interface (graphical or not) is to get out of my way when I know what I'm doing and help me otherwise. I would regard the primary purpose of the PL to be allowing me to write a working program in the least amount of time. In a lot of ways, these are similar goals.
I just want the window to go away when I'm done using it. I don't care how it does that, as long as it doesn't go away when I don't want it to. In a PL I don't really care what the syntax looks like as long as I can write my program correctly. Thus I want things like type checking (and in SML, all the wonderful other things that it checks, like making sure my if statements make sense) and don't really care about how much it looks like English.
In both, I want to get my task done quickly above all else, but in a PL the intuitiveness of the interface is not so much a concern due to the higher level of knowledge required to use it anyway. However, for those of us who are programmers, we understand programming and syntax, etc., and thus we want our interfaces to act like programming languages. For us, it's honestly easier that way. Now, when I'm using, say, WebTV, I don't want to bother with total control, I'd just rather surf. I'm not sure what this has to do with Aqua, but I do think it speaks to the disagreement between the text and GUI folks.
It's wonderful that the Slash code can be released, but isn't it interesting that Andover.net, with/. as one of its main properties, has already gone public whilst running beta software? I wonder what'll happen when Slash 1.0 is in use. Secondary offering anyone?
Slashdot Mirror
I would point out that another interesting condition is that you cannot run Glassbook when a debugger is running. This is presumably to prevent something like DeCSS where the key was stored unmunged in a variable. However, how could they ever hope to be considered for technical books with this restriction. Besides the obvious problems with detecting a debugger, what about having an O'Reilly book open in the reader at the same time as debugging some code? You'd have to close one before being able to open the other. It's a tremendous pain in the ass, especially since EBX'll probably get broken anyway.
Walt
>Non-citizens (businesses, institutions) may not provide to a third party information specific to a private citizen without the express written consent of the private citizen.
The good thing about this one is that it simply removes the profit motive (or at least drives it into the criminal underground). The two problems I see: First, identity theives are not restricted in what they can do. However, I think this is mostly solved by the fact that there are no institutions that have access to the info theives need. So with regard to individual theives, the situation is not a whole lot better.
Second problem: it drives the collection of personal data underground. I can forsee the time when, "If personal data is outlawed, only outlaws will have personal data." Underground TRW? Maybe, although I admit that it would be a lot harder for them to get data.
Overall a good idea. In fact, maybe if we could get this passed in California, we could start forcing all businesses in CA to abide by it. Until then, keep polluting those databases. "Why yes, I'm a PhD Inuit with 8 children and an annual income of US$200,000."
Walt
C'mon people, a code of ethics is a great idea! That would be at least a starting point for a way to enforce the fact that you own information about you. Code a project that takes inadequate steps to protect privacy? Tweeet, you've been sentenced to work for the EFF for a week. We could start it with "First, reveal no one's personal data."
I think that in this day and age, "I just work here" has ceased to be an adequate excuse.
Walt
This person is the first to point out that abysmally low response rate isn't a problem if you have a large enough number of contacts. In the direct mail (junk mail) industry, a 1% response rate is completely reasonable. Distributing a million CDs might yield 10,000 customers, a pretty big jump, especially if 1,000 of those end up buying support services from you.
Plus, people who are already linux users might choose Turbo from among the masses just because they happen to have seen them around on the CD. That's why Cheerios advertises, not to compel people to shell out for the cereal right then, but to get them to think twice when they pass up Cheerios on the cereal aisle.
AOL established themselves by making it as easy as possible to get started (note that long-term ease of use isn't quite as important to this equation because of how hard it is to change ISP's, move home pages, etc. for the newbie). They even made it free to get started, for pete's sake. Their ads were so ubiquitous that people began to think of them as the Internet. Recall Scary Spice's "I want an Internet. Can I have that one?"
Walt
The fact is that most of the infrastructure for real-world utilities is owned by the government or otherwise substantially controlled by it. This comes about either through the incredible investment needed (e.g. interstate highway) or some need to have a monopoly control (e.g. broadband spectrum). This infrastructure is absolutely critical to the functioning of American business. Imagine if a large section of the country lost electrical power: the consequences would be horrific. Like it or not, the Net has become almost as important as electricity to corporations. The government, for once, does not have control over a vital resource, which I think is a good thing. However, the government is not used to not having control, and in any case its corporate constituents are very concerned that no one has control. Thus the government is going to take steps to try and reassure themselves and the corporations that someone is taking care of it. I say let them have their little bunker, and let the Net and the admins use their own protective measures.
Walt
This reminds me of the article posted a while ago on the original Unix source code being available. Something like "Open source in history"? Ah , here it is. Anyway, kind of sad that it took this long for one of the best shells to be released. I'm not blaming David Korn, it's a great shell and I'm sure he did what he thought was most responsible for AT&T to do with it. Heck, I'm completely willing to believe that it took this long to convince his bosses that it would be a good idea from a standpoint of actual improvement to the code. I don't see anything on the web site as to why they decided to release , although "free for non-commercial and educational use" is not exactly what I'd call "free source"...
Walt
Walt
I would point out that this was a PG-13 movie, even if they both need to be censored in order to appeal to network audiences. Wouldn't this be an actual real use of 500 channels, to broadcast two audio streams, one sanitized and one uncut? Hell, with enough synchronization, I bet you could do it through WebTV.
Walt
Actaully, their entire case on the "commission patent" is based on the fact that it has not been done before. They claim that doing it electronically through links is different from what's been done before with sales commissions. Otherwise it would not be original and would not qualify for a patent. Now, I happen to believe that the affiliate program is not original, but that won't stop Amazon from arguing that it is.
Walt
I would say that Tim is simply working in the world of business. The fact is you have to work with people that you have violent disagreement. If Tim joined the boycott, posted an angry letter to Bezos, do you think this dialog could have happened? It would have been an attack rather than a discussion. I know business nowadays is run by committee, but never underestimate the value of the CEO taking a firm stand on an issue. I just think it's far more valuable to convince on principle than use the clumsy club that is a boycott.
Walt
The school I went to for middle school took only the top few hundred children in the school district, and then put them in special classes, etc. We generally had better computers and more access to them than the children in the other schools in the district, at least in Montgomery County, MD.
Walt
I also enjoyed it a great deal, saw it with a packed theatre on opening night, but I disagree that they stayed away from computer animation. First, almost all of the coloring in Disney films is done on computer, but they also use computers a lot as a tool to help artists create neat stuff. I'm pretty sure that the Beethoven, the Respighi, the Shostakovich, and the Stravinsky use computers heavily. But I guess that's the point, that they be able to use the computers to make stuff that doesn't look like it was stolen from The Mind's Eye.
Anyway, lots of fun to see, hope everyone can find an IMAX showing it nearby.
Walt
Wow, the people who own these actually could fill out the poll using the number of processors they have!
Walt
I was told while on a site visit to IBM Alamden research center (inventors of the MicroDrive) that the most serious impediment to further progress is the fact that the head must be at least as close to the disk as the bits are spaced apart. When the bits get really close, you're only looking at a few atoms space to fit the lubricant, air bearing, protective coating on the platter, etc. This will happen when the bit density approaches 1 terabyte on the currently 340MB, quarter-sized platter of the Microdrive. At current bit densities, the MicroDrive holds about 1GB, so we're only looking at a factor of 1000 between now and what looks to be a serious wall. On the other hand, they said that a lot about transistors, and it hasn't happened yet.
Walt
I would say what is valuable about this article is that it shows us that MS is just like any other hugely successful company. That leads to conclusions which should be obvious, but turn out to be a lot more obvious when someone goes to the trouble of finding them and pointing them out. *Of course* they have a lot of smart people, and of course they don't kill them with work. So, my question is, someone is in charge of all those competition killing marketing maneuvers; who is it? Does the average employee even know that MS is trying to crush the very competition they are trying to outdo?
Walt
The above post is so riddled with fallacy that I will just skim off the biggest ones. First, the real reason for the brain drain has been that universities are now allowed to hold and profit from patents. Before, they were not allowed, but in the 80s public universities were given the right to make profits. That is when the cost of sharing your idea with someone else became the risk that he or she would steal it and sell it. As long as academia is the realm of ideas, where giving your idea to someone else does not deprive you of it, then things work fine. When you depend on the profitability of your idea to fund your department, then you are in trouble.
However, this is not the same as not making a profit. Rather, companies need to let the basic research over the long term be done by people who don't have to profit. Then, after the groundwork is laid, the company can begin putting together products to sell. Does anyone believe that we would have given up ARPAnet if MS had invented and controlled the Web? Of course not, so MS, and everyone else who likes to embrace and extend research should not even bother.
Walt
P.S. 30 million people died of famine and disease in the nationalization of soviet farms. Please do not try to tell me that communism led to the same level of innovation shown by, say, Monsanto.
This is a troll, not the real JonKatz, please moderate it down, etc., etc. God these wannabes are getting tedious. Hell, I could be encouraging them just by making even this brief, half-hearted reply.
Walt
I know this is a joke (gram and meter are Greek, second is Babylonian, I believe), but lots of the scientists with units named after them *are* well known. Gauss and Newton both get used quite a bit, and most people know what Newton did, and have heard of Gauss. Tesla, while arguably the one who enabled the entire information revolution, does not get recognized in favor of Edison. It's sad when heroes like Edison and Tesla don't get equal and substantial recognition in our society. Why don't we put his picture on a dollar bill? ;)
Walt
The fact of the matter is that the stake of the founder is most likely less than 50% by now. That's the nature of VC, especially when you've had to raise as much first-tier and private placement financing as Transmeta. Furthermore, the actual amount of stock sold to the public is typically less than 10%. Thus there is no way to "gobble up" a company on the open market. Make offers to those who hold large blocks, sure. But those who are holding the stock and are expecting a great IPO followed by stellar profit growth and a commesurate increase in valuation will be loath to give up their chance. Especially just before the moment of truth.
Walt
Eye-candy over content? How could this happen?!?! Easy, most web designers don't know squat about their craft or what their assignment is. Professional marketing people do, and thus can produce stuff that informs while selling. Your average web designer is someone who took a class to learn HTML and then printed up a bunch of business cards. They have no idea about what makes a good web page, and they don't care. They know clients will look at flashy graphics and be impressed, so that's what the client gets: crap. Until people realize that good web design is as hard as good code, things will never get better, and web designers will just propogate themselves like script kiddies.
Walt
It is very unfortunate that there is no longer a copy kept. I have a friend who works at the Library of Congress in their copyright section, and she told me that now they charge a fee for storing your work. Can you believe it, they want money from you to keep your work until it enters the public domain?! But I like the idea of a digital copy. For art it would be difficult, but for all the books that are published and lost, it would be great!
Walt
Wow. I came into this discussion ready to post about how Disney should keep their copyright, since it was still in active use. Even assuming that it qualifies as active, you make a strong argument that they shouldn't get to keep it. Because really, what would happen if you let the owners of the copyright keep it until they were no longer using it? You'd get lots of people selling 10 t-shirts a year just to keep it "active".
;)
However, the limit on the copyright in some sense bothers me too. One might think of a copyright as a contract: I'll let you buy a copy of my work and do certain things with it as long as you don't reproduce my original work for others. Hell, it sounds a lot like a software license, which makes sense. Would anyone here argue that software should pass into the public domain after a certain number of years? Should that include source?
Walt
As I recall from the LinuxOne articles, Delaware is the place to incorporate. The key is not the friendliness to corporations, but the friendliness to those who own corporations. Delaware has nice regular disclosure requirements for all companies, and VC likes that, since they know that you cannot be lying to them under penalty of law.
Walt
I just installed Mozilla this morning, so I have no cookies, etc. Unless they're detecting my IP, there is no more login. Honestly, even a small barrier to reading like registration probably scared away lots of people.
Walt
I'd say the argument here is whether you want a PL to be "user-friendly" in the same way as a GUI. For me, the sole purpose of the interface (graphical or not) is to get out of my way when I know what I'm doing and help me otherwise. I would regard the primary purpose of the PL to be allowing me to write a working program in the least amount of time. In a lot of ways, these are similar goals.
I just want the window to go away when I'm done using it. I don't care how it does that, as long as it doesn't go away when I don't want it to. In a PL I don't really care what the syntax looks like as long as I can write my program correctly. Thus I want things like type checking (and in SML, all the wonderful other things that it checks, like making sure my if statements make sense) and don't really care about how much it looks like English.
In both, I want to get my task done quickly above all else, but in a PL the intuitiveness of the interface is not so much a concern due to the higher level of knowledge required to use it anyway. However, for those of us who are programmers, we understand programming and syntax, etc., and thus we want our interfaces to act like programming languages. For us, it's honestly easier that way. Now, when I'm using, say, WebTV, I don't want to bother with total control, I'd just rather surf. I'm not sure what this has to do with Aqua, but I do think it speaks to the disagreement between the text and GUI folks.
Walt
It's wonderful that the Slash code can be released, but isn't it interesting that Andover.net, with /. as one of its main properties, has already gone public whilst running beta software? I wonder what'll happen when Slash 1.0 is in use. Secondary offering anyone?
Walt