Thanks to the DMCA [...] you don't actually have to be infringing on any copyright to be accused of it. Being accused is enough to force you to remove said content until a resolution is reached.
However, the cited legal point re: copyright abuse could act as a check and balance w.r.t. DMCA. Abuse of your copyright via DMCA, could result in the loss of that copyright. I.e. if the legal notice under penalty of perjury required by DMCA to the alleged infringer turned out to be bogus and/or filed for anti-competitive purposes, you could lose your copyright
I think work on a properly optimizing compiler is important, since the speed gains attained through those optimizations may be the deciding factor in a close fight between Itanium and AMD's chip.
You understate the case. Every modern general purpose CPU implementation is "design symbiotic" with a targeted modern compiler(s). The primary distinction between RISC/CISC/VLIW/etc. architectures is the tradeoff of work between the CPU and the compiler. (Go dig around in the technical documentation at the TI 'C6x DSP web site for a fascinating view of how a modern VLIW architecture impacts processor and compiler design.)
The architectural decisions in hardware must be borne out by a compiler that leverages these features to the fullest. Likewise, the implementation of a CPU must actively enable the compiler to take maximum advantage of hardware bandwidth. Once the chips tape out, both Intel and AMD MUST ensure that the compilers measure up -- or else they've run half the race and given up.
My wrists aren't in the greatest shape after typing pretty much non-stop for the last few years, so it's time to try a new keyboard.
Ergo Keyboards are tempting, but are not a magic bullet solution to RSI. The very statement above makes a strong statement: "I've been treating my body in a manner inconsistent with its design." This can be as simple as bad posture, typing technique, and/or insufficient breaks. It may also point towards a need for a more physically active lifestyle in addition to the above. (Kudos to the poster who recommended Aikido or some other physical activity -- sedentary life is the bane of the geek.)
I strongly suggest that anyone exhibiting symptoms of RSI, or who feels they may be at risk, read Repetitive Strain Injury: A Computer User's Guide by Emil Pascarelli, M.D. and Deborah Quilter. This book can help you identify many common bad habits related to extended keyboard use. This includes posture while at the computer, wrist position, taking breaks, relevant stretching and exercise, and more.
RSI needn't be localized to the wrists, even if it feels like it is. The entire upper body musculature (shoulders, neck, upper arms, lower arms, wrists, hands) is involved in providing support as you type. Double-crush syndrome is where nerves are pinched at multiple locations such as at the shoulders and at the elbow. Each individual nerve impingement is not enough to cause a problem, but the two in conjunction can impair hand/wrist function. The problem can often seem to be a "wrist problem" when it is actually more insidious than that.
To use myself as a case study, I was feeling wrecked in the wrists after writing and defending my Ph.D. proposal. The above book helped me to identify many problems. E.g. I'd gotten away for years with bad upper body posture while at the keyboard, not taking enough (or any) breaks, bad mousing habits, and more. The above book helped me to identify these problems and learn to correct them. Even with that knowledge, recovery was a long and uncertain time. Since then, I have made it a point to become more active, including a whole-body approach to strengthening and stretching.
That said, this book can also help you determine if you require medical help. At its worst, RSI can permenantly and severely impair your ability to use your hands, leaving you weak and in pain.
If anyone would like more details, other book references, etc. please reply via email, removing all 'spam' from my email address.
Better yet, how about the GNOME/KDE developers get someone on board with real, hard-core HCI design experience who can do a comprehensive analysis of usability issues within these environments? Then follow it up by writing a professional-grade book documenting User Interface programmer's guidelines, ala the similar documents from Apple, (the defunct) Go Corp., and so on.
Realistically, those involved in designing user interfaces for Open Source projects should take it upon themselves to invest in some good UI books. Ben Shneiderman's Designing the User Interface, 3rd Ed. is a good starting point. Harold Thimbleby's User Interface Design, out of print, is a good book for the quantitative side of HCI, e.g. Fitt's Law and other known metrics relating to user interfaces, if you can find it. Wander through the HCI stacks of your local university library, raid graduate level HCI professors' web sites for other suggested papers and books to read. Shell out for a membership to the ACM SIGCHI -- surf through the CHI conference proceedings for good UI nuggets and broad-based UI design principles.
I also find it amusing how these great Linux user environment projects got started off -- with noone seemingly having any understanding of UI design at the helm. What sort of user experience are we really building for Linux? The problem is that no one really knows. This business of "built by hackers, for hackers" doesn't wash, as few hackers I've known have any clue whatsoever about user interface design issues. This is a substantial field, with many solved problems, yet instead of Using The Source (i.e. doing the readily available background reading) many Open Source projects continue to reinvent the UI wheel -- badly.
That said, there have been some successes, but mostly in individual isolated projects. Nothing on the scale of providing a comprehensive, flexible, yet unified user experience..
Presto: the protection is compromised, and the DVD coalition is vulnerable to their (erstwhile) partner's legal fury. The content owners could sue the DVD makers right into their pockets for failure to come through on the protection of their content if the DVD coalition doesn't nip this in the bud..
Please be careful on statements like this. The protection WAS NOT compromised by DeCSS. There was simply no protection in the first place. As the OpenDVD fact sheet indicates, CSS' has no copy protection functionality -- it only controlled who could produce player software/hardware for legitimately owned DVDs. Anyone with a DVD-ROM drive, no player software, a hideously expensive DVD-R burner ($5-6k), and equally uneconomical blank DVD-R media (~$50 ea) can copy a DVD. (Oh, yeah, and Linux too.;-)
That said, the essence of your comments takes on a different light. The DVD coalition made copy protection assurances to the content producers that were not broken by Evil-{Cr,H}acker-People, but rather, were never true in the first place. "Liability Is."
No trademark is beloved as far as I'm concerned, and I think this says something about the community. People are starting to care a whole lot more about names and labels, and I think it is a shame.
Well, this Computer Scientist's take is that namespace pollution is a Bad Thing(tm). 8-) Names are especially important to understand who the 'speaker' is in a name-related claim. While there may be problems with the implementation of trademark law, clarity with respect to identity does serve a lofty goal: that of rational, informed discourse.
For me, it's a community of people, and to a lesser extend a community of software. When it starts to be a community of 'OS friendly companies' or 'Trademark owners' or 'Approved cool people as voted by the/. mob' then I'll wave good bye to the lot of it.
You make the implicit assertion that the presence of trademark owners and corporate activity related to the various free software communities is a problem. As if corpratism will somehow Borg-ify all of the developers of free software projects, or that we'll all wake up one day to discover that there are no people in the community, only corporations?!?
I, for one, don't buy it. The presence of "trademarks and IPO's" in no way detracts from my computing and free software interests. If anything, I find it invigorating that people are exploring ways to pursue the goals of free software as well as make a living doing it. Why is this a good thing? Because in creating such new business and social models, we will hopefully teach the world that free software can ultimately be not only a viable choice, but a better alternative for all involved parties.
I've been aware of this issue since before this case was even filed, having read the original Unistrokes papers. Xerox, unsurprisingly, really did some innovative and interesting HCI research w.r.t. Unistrokes. A few of these papers (including one from INTERCHI) are available here.
FWIW, Xerox informed 3Com of the violation presented by Graffiti and did attempt to negotiate terms in good faith. Negotiations broke down (I heard that 3Com essentially told Xerox to bugger off), so Xerox took 'em to court.
I've heard of unofficial Unistrokes packages floating around for various PDAs -- anyone with direct experience with both Graffiti and Unistrokes care to compare the two? (Tho, IMO, the Newton MP2x00 handwriting recognition has yet to be met or exceeded.)
IMO, The Star Wars Crap Made Out of Legos is clearly some of the most interesting and best made of the new generation of Star Wars Crap.
The mark of a good operating system is not "tight code" but "tight design." What follows is a list of design points, with OSes having interesting solutions in parentheses where relevant.
Does the kernel manage system resources properly? [Win9x and MacOS What security model does the kernel present? [EROS]
Does the kernel manage time well? N.B. "Time" means both "latencies" as well as "handing events and doing work over time." [BeOS]
What namespace abstraction is presented to software in a system and/or to a user of a system? [Plan 9, Lifestreams]
And the list goes on... but this should get the idea across. While this system may be free, what does it offer that the community needs?
When you start community-building, what you need to be able to present is a plausible promise. Your program doesn't have to work particularly well. It can be crude, buggy, incomplete, and poorly documented. What it must not fail to do is (a) run, and (b) convince potential co-developers that it can be evolved into something really neat in the foreseeable future.
This brings up some thoughts on the whole "Mozilla as a failure of Open Source development" threads that have been kicked around in past months.
For a project on the scale of Mozilla, can we realistically expect non-core developers to be useful in "early" stages?
Is the previous question just a fancy way of asking: What does "plausible promise" really mean in context of various projects?
How many open source developers really have the skill sets required to participate in Mozilla (a large OO design and implementation project) in the early stages?
... which in turn begs another important question: what are the "skill and competence" demographics of open source developers?
What are all of the project characteristics (stage of development, project scale, community perception of project, community perception of core developer(s), PR, licensing, etc.) that affect the success of drawing in qualified developers to the project?
-- John
P.S. Your homework is to find all of the Ph.D.'s you can in the above, and convince competent grads in the appropriate fields to write them. 8-)
The author of the "sweat-equity" article fails to understand a critical point. Both Win NT and Unix have non-trivial learning curves. But NT has numerous user interface and system design problems that cause frustration, even for experienced users, on some quite simple tasks.
Furthermore, consider the point that MS marketing has "hurt" Win NT by portraying an ease of use greater than what actually is. I would argue that, for once, the marketing people have it right-on: Win NT should be much easier to use. The fact that it isn't boils down to rank incompetence on the part of MS development management.
This article has a flawed premise: that the only need (or even pressing need) for IPv6 is a lack of address space in IPv4.
For a quick introduction to some of the issues in the design of IPv6, I recommend RFC 1752 "The Recommendation for the IP Next Generation Protocol". Also peruse the RFC Index for some of the whitepapers submitted as input to the IPng process, which led to the current IPv6 Proposed Standard.
So you've got a ~90gb solid state drive on a single chip. What's going to be my bit error rate?
The article does state that this is 90gb storage, plus error correction, but gives no details. Note that modern hard drives would be useless without all sorts of error correction going on internally -- the native media error rates are already high enough to render them unusable in a "raw" state. The question ask about any high-density storage is: How much storage is left after applying error correction sufficient to the intended application?
This is the same Vannevar Bush that said something about the ICBM being impossible, and that we should leave it out of our thinking?
I've no idea if Vannevar Bush said that, but to paraphrase another poster "no one is perfect." More to the point, Bush didn't see through to the ultimate connection between the digital computer (remember, this was only 1945!) and his vision of the Memex. That fact doesn't detract from the value of his original insights.
Bill Gates is not a visionary figure. If you want a glimpse of a real visionary, consider instead Vannevar Bush. Bush was the Director of the Office of Scientific Research and Development during WWII. Go read Bush's article As We May Think, keeping in mind that Bush wrote this in 1945, the pre-dawn of the computing age. Bush foretold of the age of hypertext in the form of his "Memex" device. His Memex writings are to this day required reading for human-computer interaction and hypertext researchers.
On the other hand, Bill Gates can only dream of being a technology visionary. The most important quality of such a tech visionary is not the foresight of new technology. Bush's ideas on the implementation of the Memex device are quaint by today's standards, to say the least. Yet his view of the problem and its solution persists. On this basis, I would suggest that the principal quality of the visionary is the ability to clearly isolate important problems.
It is on this last point that I see Gates' greatest failing as visionary. His problems are simply not that profound, which makes his solutions necessarily lackluster. Furthermore, the management figures who read Gates' book should also read RISKS-related writings to temper their image of a rosy digital future.
As a parting shot, I am sorely disappointed in the quality of these two reviews. Would a review of The Artists' Guide to the Gimp have flown that freely admitted to never having read the book?
Slashdot Mirror
You understate the case. Every modern general purpose CPU implementation is "design symbiotic" with a targeted modern compiler(s). The primary distinction between RISC/CISC/VLIW/etc. architectures is the tradeoff of work between the CPU and the compiler. (Go dig around in the technical documentation at the TI 'C6x DSP web site for a fascinating view of how a modern VLIW architecture impacts processor and compiler design.)
The architectural decisions in hardware must be borne out by a compiler that leverages these features to the fullest. Likewise, the implementation of a CPU must actively enable the compiler to take maximum advantage of hardware bandwidth. Once the chips tape out, both Intel and AMD MUST ensure that the compilers measure up -- or else they've run half the race and given up.
Ergo Keyboards are tempting, but are not a magic bullet solution to RSI. The very statement above makes a strong statement: "I've been treating my body in a manner inconsistent with its design." This can be as simple as bad posture, typing technique, and/or insufficient breaks. It may also point towards a need for a more physically active lifestyle in addition to the above. (Kudos to the poster who recommended Aikido or some other physical activity -- sedentary life is the bane of the geek.)
I strongly suggest that anyone exhibiting symptoms of RSI, or who feels they may be at risk, read Repetitive Strain Injury: A Computer User's Guide by Emil Pascarelli, M.D. and Deborah Quilter. This book can help you identify many common bad habits related to extended keyboard use. This includes posture while at the computer, wrist position, taking breaks, relevant stretching and exercise, and more.
RSI needn't be localized to the wrists, even if it feels like it is. The entire upper body musculature (shoulders, neck, upper arms, lower arms, wrists, hands) is involved in providing support as you type. Double-crush syndrome is where nerves are pinched at multiple locations such as at the shoulders and at the elbow. Each individual nerve impingement is not enough to cause a problem, but the two in conjunction can impair hand/wrist function. The problem can often seem to be a "wrist problem" when it is actually more insidious than that.
To use myself as a case study, I was feeling wrecked in the wrists after writing and defending my Ph.D. proposal. The above book helped me to identify many problems. E.g. I'd gotten away for years with bad upper body posture while at the keyboard, not taking enough (or any) breaks, bad mousing habits, and more. The above book helped me to identify these problems and learn to correct them. Even with that knowledge, recovery was a long and uncertain time. Since then, I have made it a point to become more active, including a whole-body approach to strengthening and stretching.
That said, this book can also help you determine if you require medical help. At its worst, RSI can permenantly and severely impair your ability to use your hands, leaving you weak and in pain.
If anyone would like more details, other book references, etc. please reply via email, removing all 'spam' from my email address.
Realistically, those involved in designing user interfaces for Open Source projects should take it upon themselves to invest in some good UI books. Ben Shneiderman's Designing the User Interface, 3rd Ed. is a good starting point. Harold Thimbleby's User Interface Design, out of print, is a good book for the quantitative side of HCI, e.g. Fitt's Law and other known metrics relating to user interfaces, if you can find it. Wander through the HCI stacks of your local university library, raid graduate level HCI professors' web sites for other suggested papers and books to read. Shell out for a membership to the ACM SIGCHI -- surf through the CHI conference proceedings for good UI nuggets and broad-based UI design principles.
I also find it amusing how these great Linux user environment projects got started off -- with noone seemingly having any understanding of UI design at the helm. What sort of user experience are we really building for Linux? The problem is that no one really knows. This business of "built by hackers, for hackers" doesn't wash, as few hackers I've known have any clue whatsoever about user interface design issues. This is a substantial field, with many solved problems, yet instead of Using The Source (i.e. doing the readily available background reading) many Open Source projects continue to reinvent the UI wheel -- badly.
That said, there have been some successes, but mostly in individual isolated projects. Nothing on the scale of providing a comprehensive, flexible, yet unified user experience..
Well, this Computer Scientist's take is that namespace pollution is a Bad Thing(tm). 8-) Names are especially important to understand who the 'speaker' is in a name-related claim. While there may be problems with the implementation of trademark law, clarity with respect to identity does serve a lofty goal: that of rational, informed discourse.
You make the implicit assertion that the presence of trademark owners and corporate activity related to the various free software communities is a problem. As if corpratism will somehow Borg-ify all of the developers of free software projects, or that we'll all wake up one day to discover that there are no people in the community, only corporations?!?
I, for one, don't buy it. The presence of "trademarks and IPO's" in no way detracts from my computing and free software interests. If anything, I find it invigorating that people are exploring ways to pursue the goals of free software as well as make a living doing it. Why is this a good thing? Because in creating such new business and social models, we will hopefully teach the world that free software can ultimately be not only a viable choice, but a better alternative for all involved parties.
FWIW, Xerox informed 3Com of the violation presented by Graffiti and did attempt to negotiate terms in good faith. Negotiations broke down (I heard that 3Com essentially told Xerox to bugger off), so Xerox took 'em to court.
I've heard of unofficial Unistrokes packages floating around for various PDAs -- anyone with direct experience with both Graffiti and Unistrokes care to compare the two? (Tho, IMO, the Newton MP2x00 handwriting recognition has yet to be met or exceeded.)
And the list goes on... but this should get the idea across. While this system may be free, what does it offer that the community needs?
-- John
P.S. Your homework is to find all of the Ph.D.'s you can in the above, and convince competent grads in the appropriate fields to write them. 8-)
Furthermore, consider the point that MS marketing has "hurt" Win NT by portraying an ease of use greater than what actually is. I would argue that, for once, the marketing people have it right-on: Win NT should be much easier to use. The fact that it isn't boils down to rank incompetence on the part of MS development management.
For a quick introduction to some of the issues in the design of IPv6, I recommend RFC 1752 "The Recommendation for the IP Next Generation Protocol". Also peruse the RFC Index for some of the whitepapers submitted as input to the IPng process, which led to the current IPv6 Proposed Standard.
The article does state that this is 90gb storage, plus error correction, but gives no details. Note that modern hard drives would be useless without all sorts of error correction going on internally -- the native media error rates are already high enough to render them unusable in a "raw" state. The question ask about any high-density storage is: How much storage is left after applying error correction sufficient to the intended application?
I've no idea if Vannevar Bush said that, but to paraphrase another poster "no one is perfect." More to the point, Bush didn't see through to the ultimate connection between the digital computer (remember, this was only 1945!) and his vision of the Memex. That fact doesn't detract from the value of his original insights.
On the other hand, Bill Gates can only dream of being a technology visionary. The most important quality of such a tech visionary is not the foresight of new technology. Bush's ideas on the implementation of the Memex device are quaint by today's standards, to say the least. Yet his view of the problem and its solution persists. On this basis, I would suggest that the principal quality of the visionary is the ability to clearly isolate important problems.
It is on this last point that I see Gates' greatest failing as visionary. His problems are simply not that profound, which makes his solutions necessarily lackluster. Furthermore, the management figures who read Gates' book should also read RISKS-related writings to temper their image of a rosy digital future.
As a parting shot, I am sorely disappointed in the quality of these two reviews. Would a review of The Artists' Guide to the Gimp have flown that freely admitted to never having read the book?