I admin a couple Gallery2 instances, and we've had good luck with its dcraw-based RAW support, from a variety of cameras (mainly Nikons, IIRC; I'm not one of the photographers, I just admin the app).
I've been poking around with Krita 1.6, and I'm impressed. The Krita developers seem to have a much better understanding of how a simple-yet-effective FLOSS raster graphics app should work and look like. The GIMP has always seemed too complex for the casual user, but too shaggy and feature-poor for the serious graphics person.
The Krita developers are doing a laudable effort to grow their application carefully and intentionally, just like the Scribus has done, adding high priority features and implementing them well (Krita's new layer-groups implementation worked very well for me without getting in the way).
If it continues this way, Krita is likely to grab significant mindshare from the GIMP.
As an employee of the company, you most certainly are responsible for corporate policy -- at the very least, to the continuation of said policies.
That alone doesn't justify the use of violent resistance against said company or its employees. Other things might, in utterly extreme and rare cases. More imaginative strategies, informed by creativity and imaginative forms of nonviolent resistance, are often far more effective and more ethically defensible.
I work as an activist on the southside of Chicago, and one of the things I work on is police brutality. Lately, we've been had a couple of surprising successes in pushing reform, mainly due to precise and dispassionate factual evidence, a sophisticated analysis, careful targeting of officials with our message, an upcoming mayoral election, and alliances with elite lawyers who sometimes take them on. We haven't planted any bombs or threatened any officers. To the contrary, I respect and admire many of the police I known socially or dealt with in the course of this work, even officers that I have had deep disagreements with or who stop me for being a white guy in a black neighborhood. In fact, we have never tried to do anything big or dramatic, even in the tone of the narrative and design of the site.
You can be effective by being dead-serious, factual, clear, and strategic in your interventions, without ever having to resort to violence.
As DHH from the Ruby on Rails project says: "Beauty leads to happiness. Happiness leads to productivity. Therefore beauty leads to productivity." That's a bit trite, but the principle has some truth to it. Similarly, a beautiful, clear UI that balances respect for the user's intelligence with an emphasis on simplicity means that as a community, FLOSS developers are taking other human beings seriously, taking themselves seriously, and care about the social impact of their work. Shuttleworth is dead on.
And, at least vis-a-vis MS, the FLOSS community is in a position to kick their condescending, wizard-riddled, FUD spinning, Aero-enabled asses right back to Redmond if we all take some initiative because of the massive mistakes MS has made in the past 4-5 years.
I'm not an AI person in the least, but my academic research has been into applying classification algorithms from information science (like the Bayes algorithm your spam filter uses) to the social sciences, particularly with respect to ranking and evaluating rape-prevention and response program efficacy on college campuses. I doubt that advances in AI will come out of this. There are far more sophisticated and accurate content-classification mechanisms. Classification algorithms all try to reduce the uncertainty (defined by a variety of measures, such as Shannon entropy) in classification of some discrete thing (a "scene" in this case).
What's interesting is that none of these techniques generalize very well -- our brains seem to have this flexible classifying mechanism that can handle dozens of "one of these things is not like the other" tests with great ease while a decision tree classifier that I develop to help in evaluating anti-rape measures, or a probability tree used for handwriting recognition, or a Bayes classifier for determining spam will almost certainly yield comepletely worthless results when applied to some other data. Flagging a bitmap of an oak tree out of a set of tree photos as spam is an inane operation.
In any event, I'd bet it's unlikely that anything that is developed by MythTV will be a major contribution to generic machine intelligence (of course, you never know) but will improve or draw on more domain-specific machine learning (including machine vision and a range of video-specific cues, such as the ones they outline in TFA) to make refined binary classifications of advertising and content.
I've had more success doing Ubuntu dist-upgrades than Debian dist-upgrades (I always do them out of a perverse curiosity, planning for the worst) but had the most trouble with Hoary to Dapper. So farthe three Dapper to Edgy dist-upgrades I've run have gone pretty well, and I did a clean install of Xubuntu Edgy that has to be one of the nicer installations I've ever done.
Slate ran a better Yankovich essay
on
An Ode To Al
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· Score: 5, Interesting
Slate's Weird Al essay by Sam Anderson is infinitely more insightful and thoughtful than the Globe's coverage: "He's not like them, he's like us. To the millions of us flitting around the edges of hipness, he is our Geek Bard, our Troubadork. Unlike his prey--the rappers and the rockers, the folk-pop shamans and the techno wizards--Weird Al is, in the only meaningful sense of the phrase, keeping it real."
While I agree that, yes, in fact, there are tolerant and thoughtful troops out there, the company line is pretty much bad news all-around. That's important, because it gives room for the whackos in the organization to move even further into forms of extremism and intolerance, and as policy it defines the enterprise as a whole.
Similarly, while there are traditions of intellectual rigor, humanism, and kindness in most of the major world religions -- in some cases, vocal and prevalent strains -- in any critical analysis those traditions cannot be said to exemplify the historical practice, social significance or general outlines of those religions. Just as you must look at mainstream forms of a religion for socially relevant analysis, a look at mainstream Scouting shows it has really pushed into depressing and dangerous territory.
Certainly TFA isn't surprising per se. But it goes a long way towards revealing the specific mechanisms that make WoW addictive, and the writer's own responsibility for helping perpetuate the personal problems caused by the game. Imagine you had an addictive personality and got into something bad. Do you care if those around you are surprised? Do you care if they are woefully unaware of the specific dynamics of your addiction and the options available to help you? If you realized you were a collaborator in hurting a lot of people, wouldn't you want to tell folks about it?
This whole "people wreck their own lives" trope is such a simplistic load of crap that seems to act more as a way of ignoring real human dilemmas and divorcing oneself of any responsibility for anyone else in any circumstances.
TFA isn't saying he did this under duress or that Blizzard are a bunch of assholes. He's showing the specific harm (in his case, relatively minimal to him personally) done by the game and describing the mechanism by which it does harm. Useful to know and discuss. The problem with your formulation is that you left out the "with". People wreck their own lives with something, be it drugs or overeating or WoW.
And, unlike you and countless others in this thread, he has the balls to own up to his own culpability as an in-game leader for not helping others deal with their addiction, which is the deeper point of his post.
Uh, WTF does this have to do with "News for Nerds"?
The full tagline is "News for nerds. Stuff that matters.". Doesn't this -- and news and discussions like it -- fall squarely into the "stuff that matters" category?
Apple fans are overconfident in the iPod because Apple once commanded 92% of music player market share, a number that has since fallen to around 70%.
How does Apple's market share have anything to do with Apple fanboy overconfidence? Never stopped them in the PC market.
Anyway, there was a time, not so long ago, that Apple commanded 0% of the mobile music player market. Not only did they crush their competition, they redefined and expanded the entire category.
Another question along these lines is whether it is even remotely cost effective to build general-purpose OS architectures that can handle your proposition, and how much overhead is required for your OS/meta-OS to supervise the whole affair. I've got a buddy who does some of this kind of work at a big research lab, but they are not writing a general OS kernel; they've been writing software to model a teeny sliver of quantum-scale physical phenomena, and they've been working on it for 10-15 years.
My hunch is that the only way we'll see an OS that could really intelligently and creatively do what you propose on the desktop is if it comes out of academic or defense research in pursuit of some other goal.
It sure would be personally convenient for me if the country was run by people who catered to people just like me. Unfortuantely, I don't get that luxury, and neither do you. The purpose of government is to represent all of the people: black, red, yellow and white; male and female; smart and stupid; rich and poor; everyone.
Of late, I've been thinking on the idea that in a properly functioning democratic system, one advantage of such blanket voting-rights is that it means that people like the parent poster here have a stake in the intelligence and well-being of their fellow citizens, to the extent that those folks actually vote. If you think people of (insert class/ethnicity/region/IQ/random demographic) are crazy to be voting for (insert candidate/party/Lieberman/referendum number), and those people can vote and do vote, then it is in your self interest to persuade them to come over to your position. If you don't want illiterate people voting, then you have to make sure that there are less illiterate people in the country. Obviously, this doesn't work for people who want to categorically discriminate based on race or gender. Even there, however, the flip side is true -- it is in my interest as a person who cares and works on issues of racial discrimination to persuade racists otherwise, particularly in their voting. Under the right circumstances, generous voting rights help globalize and extend voter self-interest.
hile I largely agree with your point about helmets, I was really surprised to see this research, which showed that drivers in the study drove closer to the cyclist and generally increased the likelihood of a collision when the cyclist was wearing a helmet. This could have some safety implications in an high-density urban environment, where a cost/benefit analysis needs to be made that looks at the safety tradeoffs. Particularly because helmets are really necessarily all that good at helping in a collision with a moving vehicle, and become significantly less effective at higher speeds (I often hit 22mph for short periods in my daily commute, even in heavy traffic)
To get back on topic, I'm deeply saddened to learn of Mr. Levin's death -- Freenode is a fantastic resource.
TV has always had a very large amount of swill. These days, I'm involved with market research for TV on mobile devices, and there's stuff that people love that I didn't even believe could be real TV shows -- the titles were so dumb, I thought it was a joke.
On the other hand, the premium channels are doing unbelievable, daring stuff these days -- stuff with movie-level production values but the freedom and space to develop compelling, novelistic serials. The Sopranos (until recently) is a good example of this, as is Six Feet Under and the incredibly wild use of language on Deadwood. My personal favorite is The Wire on HBO, which I would argue is the best single document of post-9/11 urban life in America we've managed as a culture, is the best journalism (though it is thinly fictional) about the war on drugs, is the deepest analysis and critique of institutional corruption and craziness, and is perhaps the best dramatic English-language TV series ever. The show is simply that good. The quality of the acting and writing on these shows is top-notch, and they are stealing a ton of writing and acting talent from both theatre and film, and even well-renowned novelists and writers. Even regular ol' cable channels have been doing some cool stuff -- both Firefly and Battlestar Galactica are superlative examples of TV sci-fi, and despite its fascist tendencies, 24 is tautly constructed and compellingly written.
TV has always had several internal tensions swirling around the mass-nature of the medium and the creative possibilities, and there's always been a small proportion of good TV work. However, these days, a handful of dramas and a couple of comedies, mainly on premium channels, aren't just very good. They're most intelligent, sophisticated, creative, and relevant mass media in American society.
I have to say I agree 100%. In my own little social sphere, I'm a big supporter of FOSS (just did a Chicago cable access TV interview about the subject, as a matter of fact). But I'm not religious, and I think there are limits to free software, particularly for the desktop. I've used this example before, but the GIMP is a perfect example of this: as a designer (mainly web, but also for fine-art photography printing and print design), it really doesn't cut the mustard. Indeed, the amount of intellectual capital that is required to make a design or photo editing program such as InDesign or Photoshop is substantial. Now, Adobe profits significantly from this intellecual input by forcing new versions on users on a regular basis that may or may not add much in the way of functionality. However, Adobe is also pretty okay about maintaining application compatibility across versions, so my legal version of Photoshop 7 is all I ever need to get 95% of my work done, and if I ever need InDesign instead of Scribus (which is rare, but happens, mainly with typographically complex layouts, like posters) I just use my roommate's legal version of InDesign CS2.
Here's the thing -- I would pay good money to be able to run Adobe's products natively on my Linux desktop instead of via CrossOver Office. Those applications have significant value to me that I think it is hard (not impossible, but structurally very very difficult) for the free software development model to provide. Now, while I want Adobe to be governed by a sane and resonable copyright and patent regime that doesn't let them own their ideas for all eternity, I would assert that they should have the right to profit off their significant intellectual investment within certain limits. Therefore, I would pay -- be really delighted, in fact -- to be able to run legal versions of the Adobe CS2 applications natively on a Linux desktop without resorting to CrossOver Office.
I think many of us (rightly) believe in the whole the utility of all non-free software approaches zero over time argument. But this entire discussion, and that maxim, is primarily predicated on the current patent and copyright system, which allows intellectual property holders to withhold their work from the commons essentially forever. In a saner climate for intellectual property law, with some specific thought given to information technology, I think that free and proprietary software could coexist pretty well, with significant UI and development investments having the possibility of creating profit for the creators without screwing the rest of us in perpetuity. In fact, such a coexistence might be a healthy thing, because these debates on some level come down to making binary choices between business models that, given the broader ecology, are in conflict.
The big caveat here lot of corporate power is arrayed very much against such a scenario, which means that this is an even steeper uphill battle than the acceptance of FOSS generally. It isn't an easy argument to make, while it is very easy for corporate lobbyists and their lackeys in various governments (Congresscritters where I'm from) to keep things swinging in their favor. Their favor isn't just profits and money, but a legal environment that essentially denies the possibilities for hybrid combinations of free and proprietary software, which in turn lends fuel to the (understandable) hardline stance of the FSF and others.
Interesting. I think Ubuntu is an okay name, myself. It means something and reflects the software's lineage. All the Kubuntu/Xubuntu/Edubuntu names grate me to no end -- meaningless and cutesy. Why not just call it Ubuntu: Education Edition? The flip side is that Apple, being brilliant, called their operating system "OS TEN", just like they call their mail program Mail and so forth. The Ubuntu project does get this, to some degree, with entries like "Web (Firefox)" in their menus.
Ultimately, groups like the MPAA and RIAA have to adapt to the demands of the market or work very hard to regulate that market in such a way as to keep them filthy stinking rich. So they'll do both, with varying degrees of success. The latter will always be the default strategy. The former will usually be slow and more-or-less half-assed (which allows the wiggle room to say, "see, we tried that, it didn't work... back to plan A").
What's depressing about Iraq is precisely the death of nuance in American politics and foreign policy -- as well as the erosion of any trust in the middle east. George Friedman's book highlights how the initial effects of the moves in Iraq meant countries were suddenly worried about the US and coming to the table to talk. In the early days of the conflict, it did achieve key strategic goals in terms of projecting US power in a very unstable region. I'd argue that it Bush's insane policies and bullheadedness in the face of ya know, facts, that have actually made the middle east worse in the ensuing time period. The current Israeli situation would've been a good opportunity for a smart, dead serious, and limited intervention against Hezbollah, except for the fact that between American public opinion and global public opinion has so turned against Bush (and because we're so overextended in Iraq) that we've seen middle eastern governments turn from being angry at Hezbollah to being angry that Israel seems bent on bombing Lebanon to rubble (which is, I think, exactly the kind of ammunition that Al Qaeda and Hezbollah can use to further their causes). The result is a weird sort of wish-fulfillment process in which the US and the terrorists mutually create exactly the world they anticipated in their skewed, paranoid fantasies. Fatally, civil liberties here and a lot of lives (of American soldiers, Iraqi civilians, Lebanese civilians, Israeli civilians, Israeli soldiers, shoot, even the poor saps who buy into the terrorist fantasies of Hezbollah) are wasted in the process.
I recently left a gig at a non-profit, and I could find no rhyme nor reason to WGA's piracy reporting based on my experience there. We have a 75-seat volume license, which is a shade more than double the number of office-owned PCs that run XP. However, two of the workstations (and note, all of these boxes use the same friggin' system image). I re-imaged the boxes, had the same problem. Next update/imaging cycle, they went away. Who knows, maybe they'll come back again. The whole business is so wonky and opaque.
Anyway, if WGA blows up on the same friggin' image using a VL, how is it ever going to be used in the courts to pursue pirates? If they come after people like my former employer, who can show the number of boxes they own and hold up the VLAs and receipts and so forth, MS is going to get laughed out of court. I suppose in such a scenario, MS could claim that someone stole the media or whatever, but we didn't keep media lying around: just a few CDs in the always-locked server closet (even the janitors and building maintenance folks don't have keys to that room) and a slipstreamed ISO on a server that only the acting sysadmin has access to. Anyway, if MS pursues the wrong folks often enough, it will be that much harder to make cases against real pirates.
I'd hypothesize that the cost/benefit ratio of these sorts of schemes is pretty much barking mad.
Yup, I agree. I couldn't guess the size of this market, but definitely small businesses and orgs who have gone the FF/Tbird on Windows desktops and Linux-for-servers route could really use such a solution -- Vista is definitely a long way off for a lot of small businesses.
Mod parent up. Apple seems really smart about allocating resources wisely in terms of getting at critical user-experience factors. Sure, everybody has been bandying around this "digital hub" idea for years, but I remember playing with iMovie on a friend's Mac a few years ago and realizing Apple actually made it work. Not a system that could do anything and everything, but a system that I could plug a digital camcorder into, download the video, and start editing. There's lots I find distasteful and frustrating about Apple, but for most everyday users, I don't really hestitate to recommend a Mac simply because Apple seems to understand better than anybody what people want to do with their computers and present it in a cogent, understandable, and respectful way. Somehow, Apple has escaped the gizmo-ism that pervades most of their competitors products. The iPod is another good example -- instead of a gizmo with more features and blinky lights and smoke and mirrors, it feels more like a limited but effective tool. What is it in the water that lets Apple make lean products that work well end-to-end while MS toils at exploding feature sets that never really work the way you want them to?
I find this aspect of PHP really interesting. Given a chance, I'd much rather be working in Python, but honestly, all the cool free software web apps -- not just cool as in cool computer science-y features, but cool as in this really makes my work easier, better, richer -- seem to be written in PHP. Those are primarily WordPress, Gallery2, Drupal, and MediaWiki. My hypothesis is that in the past ten or fifteen years, a good number of people have seem various problems that they wanted to solve with a web app. They go ahead and start hacking away in a language that's easy to jump into and start spitting out pages. The nearest language at hand for that in many environments is PHP. People like the application and start hacking away themselves, not really thinking "this would be way more enjoyable in Python/Ruby/whatever".
I worked closely with one of the guys who built Plone earlier this year on povertylaw.org who is working on a cool system called Entransit that uses Plone for content management and spits out XML on the filesystem for content delivery via the language/framework of your choice. One of the philosophies he said they were shooting for with Plone originally and Entransit now was to make the impossible possible. The danger there, I think, is that for many of us, we don't need to accomplish impossible tasks, but to make the already-possible relatively painless and enjoyable. Seems like PHP has become the de-facto language for web applications with that philosophy of suffiency.
Personally, I'm more interested in seeing justice served than a particular outcome (i.e., Microsoft getting slapped). That's how the game is supposed to work. If we don't like the outcome, we need to examine the rules.
That's a commendable sentiment, but I can find no fault in calmly asserting one's vision of a just outcome prior to a court's finding. The "game" in this case is fundamentally adversarial, with various parties pushing for particular outcomes. Members of the public can and often should be party to cases in that sense, so long as they don't tamper with the court to achieve a particular outcome via unethical means. Threatening a judge or a witness would be unethical; voting for a judge who you think would do a good job would be ethical.
Slashdot Mirror
I admin a couple Gallery2 instances, and we've had good luck with its dcraw-based RAW support, from a variety of cameras (mainly Nikons, IIRC; I'm not one of the photographers, I just admin the app).
I've been poking around with Krita 1.6, and I'm impressed. The Krita developers seem to have a much better understanding of how a simple-yet-effective FLOSS raster graphics app should work and look like. The GIMP has always seemed too complex for the casual user, but too shaggy and feature-poor for the serious graphics person.
The Krita developers are doing a laudable effort to grow their application carefully and intentionally, just like the Scribus has done, adding high priority features and implementing them well (Krita's new layer-groups implementation worked very well for me without getting in the way).
If it continues this way, Krita is likely to grab significant mindshare from the GIMP.
As an employee of the company, you most certainly are responsible for corporate policy -- at the very least, to the continuation of said policies. That alone doesn't justify the use of violent resistance against said company or its employees. Other things might, in utterly extreme and rare cases. More imaginative strategies, informed by creativity and imaginative forms of nonviolent resistance, are often far more effective and more ethically defensible. I work as an activist on the southside of Chicago, and one of the things I work on is police brutality. Lately, we've been had a couple of surprising successes in pushing reform, mainly due to precise and dispassionate factual evidence, a sophisticated analysis, careful targeting of officials with our message, an upcoming mayoral election, and alliances with elite lawyers who sometimes take them on. We haven't planted any bombs or threatened any officers. To the contrary, I respect and admire many of the police I known socially or dealt with in the course of this work, even officers that I have had deep disagreements with or who stop me for being a white guy in a black neighborhood. In fact, we have never tried to do anything big or dramatic, even in the tone of the narrative and design of the site. You can be effective by being dead-serious, factual, clear, and strategic in your interventions, without ever having to resort to violence.
As DHH from the Ruby on Rails project says: "Beauty leads to happiness. Happiness leads to productivity. Therefore beauty leads to productivity." That's a bit trite, but the principle has some truth to it. Similarly, a beautiful, clear UI that balances respect for the user's intelligence with an emphasis on simplicity means that as a community, FLOSS developers are taking other human beings seriously, taking themselves seriously, and care about the social impact of their work. Shuttleworth is dead on.
And, at least vis-a-vis MS, the FLOSS community is in a position to kick their condescending, wizard-riddled, FUD spinning, Aero-enabled asses right back to Redmond if we all take some initiative because of the massive mistakes MS has made in the past 4-5 years.
I'm not an AI person in the least, but my academic research has been into applying classification algorithms from information science (like the Bayes algorithm your spam filter uses) to the social sciences, particularly with respect to ranking and evaluating rape-prevention and response program efficacy on college campuses. I doubt that advances in AI will come out of this. There are far more sophisticated and accurate content-classification mechanisms. Classification algorithms all try to reduce the uncertainty (defined by a variety of measures, such as Shannon entropy) in classification of some discrete thing (a "scene" in this case).
What's interesting is that none of these techniques generalize very well -- our brains seem to have this flexible classifying mechanism that can handle dozens of "one of these things is not like the other" tests with great ease while a decision tree classifier that I develop to help in evaluating anti-rape measures, or a probability tree used for handwriting recognition, or a Bayes classifier for determining spam will almost certainly yield comepletely worthless results when applied to some other data. Flagging a bitmap of an oak tree out of a set of tree photos as spam is an inane operation.
In any event, I'd bet it's unlikely that anything that is developed by MythTV will be a major contribution to generic machine intelligence (of course, you never know) but will improve or draw on more domain-specific machine learning (including machine vision and a range of video-specific cues, such as the ones they outline in TFA) to make refined binary classifications of advertising and content.
I've had more success doing Ubuntu dist-upgrades than Debian dist-upgrades (I always do them out of a perverse curiosity, planning for the worst) but had the most trouble with Hoary to Dapper. So farthe three Dapper to Edgy dist-upgrades I've run have gone pretty well, and I did a clean install of Xubuntu Edgy that has to be one of the nicer installations I've ever done.
Slate's Weird Al essay by Sam Anderson is infinitely more insightful and thoughtful than the Globe's coverage: "He's not like them, he's like us. To the millions of us flitting around the edges of hipness, he is our Geek Bard, our Troubadork. Unlike his prey--the rappers and the rockers, the folk-pop shamans and the techno wizards--Weird Al is, in the only meaningful sense of the phrase, keeping it real."
While I agree that, yes, in fact, there are tolerant and thoughtful troops out there, the company line is pretty much bad news all-around. That's important, because it gives room for the whackos in the organization to move even further into forms of extremism and intolerance, and as policy it defines the enterprise as a whole. Similarly, while there are traditions of intellectual rigor, humanism, and kindness in most of the major world religions -- in some cases, vocal and prevalent strains -- in any critical analysis those traditions cannot be said to exemplify the historical practice, social significance or general outlines of those religions. Just as you must look at mainstream forms of a religion for socially relevant analysis, a look at mainstream Scouting shows it has really pushed into depressing and dangerous territory.
Certainly TFA isn't surprising per se. But it goes a long way towards revealing the specific mechanisms that make WoW addictive, and the writer's own responsibility for helping perpetuate the personal problems caused by the game. Imagine you had an addictive personality and got into something bad. Do you care if those around you are surprised? Do you care if they are woefully unaware of the specific dynamics of your addiction and the options available to help you? If you realized you were a collaborator in hurting a lot of people, wouldn't you want to tell folks about it?
This whole "people wreck their own lives" trope is such a simplistic load of crap that seems to act more as a way of ignoring real human dilemmas and divorcing oneself of any responsibility for anyone else in any circumstances. TFA isn't saying he did this under duress or that Blizzard are a bunch of assholes. He's showing the specific harm (in his case, relatively minimal to him personally) done by the game and describing the mechanism by which it does harm. Useful to know and discuss. The problem with your formulation is that you left out the "with". People wreck their own lives with something, be it drugs or overeating or WoW. And, unlike you and countless others in this thread, he has the balls to own up to his own culpability as an in-game leader for not helping others deal with their addiction, which is the deeper point of his post.
The full tagline is "News for nerds. Stuff that matters.". Doesn't this -- and news and discussions like it -- fall squarely into the "stuff that matters" category?
Another question along these lines is whether it is even remotely cost effective to build general-purpose OS architectures that can handle your proposition, and how much overhead is required for your OS/meta-OS to supervise the whole affair. I've got a buddy who does some of this kind of work at a big research lab, but they are not writing a general OS kernel; they've been writing software to model a teeny sliver of quantum-scale physical phenomena, and they've been working on it for 10-15 years.
My hunch is that the only way we'll see an OS that could really intelligently and creatively do what you propose on the desktop is if it comes out of academic or defense research in pursuit of some other goal.
Of late, I've been thinking on the idea that in a properly functioning democratic system, one advantage of such blanket voting-rights is that it means that people like the parent poster here have a stake in the intelligence and well-being of their fellow citizens, to the extent that those folks actually vote. If you think people of (insert class/ethnicity/region/IQ/random demographic) are crazy to be voting for (insert candidate/party/Lieberman/referendum number), and those people can vote and do vote, then it is in your self interest to persuade them to come over to your position. If you don't want illiterate people voting, then you have to make sure that there are less illiterate people in the country. Obviously, this doesn't work for people who want to categorically discriminate based on race or gender. Even there, however, the flip side is true -- it is in my interest as a person who cares and works on issues of racial discrimination to persuade racists otherwise, particularly in their voting. Under the right circumstances, generous voting rights help globalize and extend voter self-interest.
hile I largely agree with your point about helmets, I was really surprised to see this research, which showed that drivers in the study drove closer to the cyclist and generally increased the likelihood of a collision when the cyclist was wearing a helmet. This could have some safety implications in an high-density urban environment, where a cost/benefit analysis needs to be made that looks at the safety tradeoffs. Particularly because helmets are really necessarily all that good at helping in a collision with a moving vehicle, and become significantly less effective at higher speeds (I often hit 22mph for short periods in my daily commute, even in heavy traffic)
To get back on topic, I'm deeply saddened to learn of Mr. Levin's death -- Freenode is a fantastic resource.
TV has always had a very large amount of swill. These days, I'm involved with market research for TV on mobile devices, and there's stuff that people love that I didn't even believe could be real TV shows -- the titles were so dumb, I thought it was a joke.
On the other hand, the premium channels are doing unbelievable, daring stuff these days -- stuff with movie-level production values but the freedom and space to develop compelling, novelistic serials. The Sopranos (until recently) is a good example of this, as is Six Feet Under and the incredibly wild use of language on Deadwood. My personal favorite is The Wire on HBO, which I would argue is the best single document of post-9/11 urban life in America we've managed as a culture, is the best journalism (though it is thinly fictional) about the war on drugs, is the deepest analysis and critique of institutional corruption and craziness, and is perhaps the best dramatic English-language TV series ever. The show is simply that good. The quality of the acting and writing on these shows is top-notch, and they are stealing a ton of writing and acting talent from both theatre and film, and even well-renowned novelists and writers. Even regular ol' cable channels have been doing some cool stuff -- both Firefly and Battlestar Galactica are superlative examples of TV sci-fi, and despite its fascist tendencies, 24 is tautly constructed and compellingly written.
TV has always had several internal tensions swirling around the mass-nature of the medium and the creative possibilities, and there's always been a small proportion of good TV work. However, these days, a handful of dramas and a couple of comedies, mainly on premium channels, aren't just very good. They're most intelligent, sophisticated, creative, and relevant mass media in American society.
I have to say I agree 100%. In my own little social sphere, I'm a big supporter of FOSS (just did a Chicago cable access TV interview about the subject, as a matter of fact). But I'm not religious, and I think there are limits to free software, particularly for the desktop. I've used this example before, but the GIMP is a perfect example of this: as a designer (mainly web, but also for fine-art photography printing and print design), it really doesn't cut the mustard. Indeed, the amount of intellectual capital that is required to make a design or photo editing program such as InDesign or Photoshop is substantial. Now, Adobe profits significantly from this intellecual input by forcing new versions on users on a regular basis that may or may not add much in the way of functionality. However, Adobe is also pretty okay about maintaining application compatibility across versions, so my legal version of Photoshop 7 is all I ever need to get 95% of my work done, and if I ever need InDesign instead of Scribus (which is rare, but happens, mainly with typographically complex layouts, like posters) I just use my roommate's legal version of InDesign CS2.
Here's the thing -- I would pay good money to be able to run Adobe's products natively on my Linux desktop instead of via CrossOver Office. Those applications have significant value to me that I think it is hard (not impossible, but structurally very very difficult) for the free software development model to provide. Now, while I want Adobe to be governed by a sane and resonable copyright and patent regime that doesn't let them own their ideas for all eternity, I would assert that they should have the right to profit off their significant intellectual investment within certain limits. Therefore, I would pay -- be really delighted, in fact -- to be able to run legal versions of the Adobe CS2 applications natively on a Linux desktop without resorting to CrossOver Office.
I think many of us (rightly) believe in the whole the utility of all non-free software approaches zero over time argument. But this entire discussion, and that maxim, is primarily predicated on the current patent and copyright system, which allows intellectual property holders to withhold their work from the commons essentially forever. In a saner climate for intellectual property law, with some specific thought given to information technology, I think that free and proprietary software could coexist pretty well, with significant UI and development investments having the possibility of creating profit for the creators without screwing the rest of us in perpetuity. In fact, such a coexistence might be a healthy thing, because these debates on some level come down to making binary choices between business models that, given the broader ecology, are in conflict.
The big caveat here lot of corporate power is arrayed very much against such a scenario, which means that this is an even steeper uphill battle than the acceptance of FOSS generally. It isn't an easy argument to make, while it is very easy for corporate lobbyists and their lackeys in various governments (Congresscritters where I'm from) to keep things swinging in their favor. Their favor isn't just profits and money, but a legal environment that essentially denies the possibilities for hybrid combinations of free and proprietary software, which in turn lends fuel to the (understandable) hardline stance of the FSF and others.
Interesting. I think Ubuntu is an okay name, myself. It means something and reflects the software's lineage. All the Kubuntu/Xubuntu/Edubuntu names grate me to no end -- meaningless and cutesy. Why not just call it Ubuntu: Education Edition? The flip side is that Apple, being brilliant, called their operating system "OS TEN", just like they call their mail program Mail and so forth. The Ubuntu project does get this, to some degree, with entries like "Web (Firefox)" in their menus.
Ultimately, groups like the MPAA and RIAA have to adapt to the demands of the market or work very hard to regulate that market in such a way as to keep them filthy stinking rich. So they'll do both, with varying degrees of success. The latter will always be the default strategy. The former will usually be slow and more-or-less half-assed (which allows the wiggle room to say, "see, we tried that, it didn't work... back to plan A").
What's depressing about Iraq is precisely the death of nuance in American politics and foreign policy -- as well as the erosion of any trust in the middle east. George Friedman's book highlights how the initial effects of the moves in Iraq meant countries were suddenly worried about the US and coming to the table to talk. In the early days of the conflict, it did achieve key strategic goals in terms of projecting US power in a very unstable region. I'd argue that it Bush's insane policies and bullheadedness in the face of ya know, facts, that have actually made the middle east worse in the ensuing time period. The current Israeli situation would've been a good opportunity for a smart, dead serious, and limited intervention against Hezbollah, except for the fact that between American public opinion and global public opinion has so turned against Bush (and because we're so overextended in Iraq) that we've seen middle eastern governments turn from being angry at Hezbollah to being angry that Israel seems bent on bombing Lebanon to rubble (which is, I think, exactly the kind of ammunition that Al Qaeda and Hezbollah can use to further their causes). The result is a weird sort of wish-fulfillment process in which the US and the terrorists mutually create exactly the world they anticipated in their skewed, paranoid fantasies. Fatally, civil liberties here and a lot of lives (of American soldiers, Iraqi civilians, Lebanese civilians, Israeli civilians, Israeli soldiers, shoot, even the poor saps who buy into the terrorist fantasies of Hezbollah) are wasted in the process.
I recently left a gig at a non-profit, and I could find no rhyme nor reason to WGA's piracy reporting based on my experience there. We have a 75-seat volume license, which is a shade more than double the number of office-owned PCs that run XP. However, two of the workstations (and note, all of these boxes use the same friggin' system image). I re-imaged the boxes, had the same problem. Next update/imaging cycle, they went away. Who knows, maybe they'll come back again. The whole business is so wonky and opaque.
Anyway, if WGA blows up on the same friggin' image using a VL, how is it ever going to be used in the courts to pursue pirates? If they come after people like my former employer, who can show the number of boxes they own and hold up the VLAs and receipts and so forth, MS is going to get laughed out of court. I suppose in such a scenario, MS could claim that someone stole the media or whatever, but we didn't keep media lying around: just a few CDs in the always-locked server closet (even the janitors and building maintenance folks don't have keys to that room) and a slipstreamed ISO on a server that only the acting sysadmin has access to. Anyway, if MS pursues the wrong folks often enough, it will be that much harder to make cases against real pirates.
I'd hypothesize that the cost/benefit ratio of these sorts of schemes is pretty much barking mad.
Yup, I agree. I couldn't guess the size of this market, but definitely small businesses and orgs who have gone the FF/Tbird on Windows desktops and Linux-for-servers route could really use such a solution -- Vista is definitely a long way off for a lot of small businesses.
Mod parent up. Apple seems really smart about allocating resources wisely in terms of getting at critical user-experience factors. Sure, everybody has been bandying around this "digital hub" idea for years, but I remember playing with iMovie on a friend's Mac a few years ago and realizing Apple actually made it work. Not a system that could do anything and everything, but a system that I could plug a digital camcorder into, download the video, and start editing. There's lots I find distasteful and frustrating about Apple, but for most everyday users, I don't really hestitate to recommend a Mac simply because Apple seems to understand better than anybody what people want to do with their computers and present it in a cogent, understandable, and respectful way. Somehow, Apple has escaped the gizmo-ism that pervades most of their competitors products. The iPod is another good example -- instead of a gizmo with more features and blinky lights and smoke and mirrors, it feels more like a limited but effective tool. What is it in the water that lets Apple make lean products that work well end-to-end while MS toils at exploding feature sets that never really work the way you want them to?
I find this aspect of PHP really interesting. Given a chance, I'd much rather be working in Python, but honestly, all the cool free software web apps -- not just cool as in cool computer science-y features, but cool as in this really makes my work easier, better, richer -- seem to be written in PHP. Those are primarily WordPress, Gallery2, Drupal, and MediaWiki. My hypothesis is that in the past ten or fifteen years, a good number of people have seem various problems that they wanted to solve with a web app. They go ahead and start hacking away in a language that's easy to jump into and start spitting out pages. The nearest language at hand for that in many environments is PHP. People like the application and start hacking away themselves, not really thinking "this would be way more enjoyable in Python/Ruby/whatever".
I worked closely with one of the guys who built Plone earlier this year on povertylaw.org who is working on a cool system called Entransit that uses Plone for content management and spits out XML on the filesystem for content delivery via the language/framework of your choice. One of the philosophies he said they were shooting for with Plone originally and Entransit now was to make the impossible possible. The danger there, I think, is that for many of us, we don't need to accomplish impossible tasks, but to make the already-possible relatively painless and enjoyable. Seems like PHP has become the de-facto language for web applications with that philosophy of suffiency.
That's a commendable sentiment, but I can find no fault in calmly asserting one's vision of a just outcome prior to a court's finding. The "game" in this case is fundamentally adversarial, with various parties pushing for particular outcomes. Members of the public can and often should be party to cases in that sense, so long as they don't tamper with the court to achieve a particular outcome via unethical means. Threatening a judge or a witness would be unethical; voting for a judge who you think would do a good job would be ethical.