Interestingly the two news sources you mention (BBC and Guardian) are amoung the few big news sources without normal style mega-company owning them. The BBC is funded by a licence fee payed by everyone with a TV in the UK and the Guardian is backed by a trust (see http://www.gmgplc.co.uk/gmg/scotttrust/inscottwetr ust/) set up to maintain its editorial independence.
The whole OS software will leave programmers unemployed reminds me of something I read a while back (I think it was on/. but I haven't got the time to look up the reference. Some OSS advocate asked at a conference how many people in the audience worked for a company that made its money by selling the software they wrote and hardly anyone was. The vast majority of developers are creating in house tools, web systems and the like rather than software for sale.
If you really want to read about the universal nature of myths try 'Hero with a Thousand Faces' by Joseph Cambell. It is a pretty old book and a bit Christianity centric in places but it is an interesting take on mythological stories in general (Star Wars rather than LOTR being the most obvious direct lift from it).
I've had a similar problem trying to pipe a pdf through an access rights system, the fix was to hack an extra parameter onto the end of the URL so you end up with something like
Actually this is probably a symptom of the most irritating thing about IE from a development standpoint. With NS or anything else you can have many versions installed on one machine, with IE I haven't found a way of installing multiple versions (I don't believe there is one due to integration with the OS) hence you need multiple systems to test with multiple browsers before you even start testing with multiple OS.
>I am putting together rules for a micro version >of the game for SF Conventions.
A micro version of Scrapheap/Junkyard is effectively an old, but very similar UK TV series called 'The Great Egg Race', basically the same thing but on a smaller scale.
No, with this sort of device you do not have to iterate over the frequencies. If the 'on' bits of the modulator retard the light passing through them by, 2n-1/1 wavelengths and the off bits have no effect then when the beam is recombined you can just bounce it of a grating/prism into a linear array of detectors and there's your answer. The slow bit is reading the detectors, ie. as usual its the optical->electronic bit thats slow.
A quick disclaimer, I work for an academic publisher but these are not their views.....
On the whole as an ex scientist this seems a good idea but there are a few problems and the concept is not as revolutionary as it seems.
Firstly there is not one single type of scientific publishing there are three, I will deal with each in turn.
1) Primary publishing.
This is where journals publish papers written by authors. This is not, from a scientists PoV, the main task, these hournals also organise peer review of papers submitted for publication. It is the nature of peer review that makes publication in a major journal worthwhile. Peer reviewed articles have effectively been checked for errors etc. and are therefore of much more value than unreviewed articles. Organising the peer review process takes resources and this is primarily what you pay for when you buy a peer reviewed journal.
A second point about primary publishing is that when you buy a subscription to a journal you almost always get online access to all its back issues anyway. Even so a fair proportion of such a journals income comes from reprints.
2) Secondary publishing (wow).
These are products made up from abstracts of articles in a wide range of primary journals with complex indices making it easy to find relevant articles (eg medline). The major cost here is generating the indices.
3) Tertiary publishing
Articles summing up the state of the art in certain fields, these are often contracted and paid for.
In conclusion, an archive of primary published articles would be a problem for some primary journals dependant on their publishing schedule. They are relied upon to provide peer review in the academic community and the requirement for this would have to be taken into account.
For secondary publishing an archive of full text articles would be a real bonus allowing them to link directly to a copy of the full text of articles found using their indices.
Tertiary publishing resembles normal (non academic) publishing and is a completely different subject.
I work in exactly the field they pick some of the examples from here (publishing academic journals on the WWW) and although we are a bit careful here there are few major problems, this is how it works. To see the full text you need a username, library subscribers get a few of these because we like them. We know they will hand these out to a fair few users each (ie. multiple people will use each username) but making the system sessional ie. one logon per username at a time, basically makes it almost exactly the same as having the journal in the library. OK people can print the articles, send the PDF's (which are watermarked with a do not copy thingy) around etc. but this is not to different from using a photocopier.
If someone is found republishing the data on another site then its lawyer time but this has only happened a couple of times in the past few years.
Complete books may be another matter but who wants to read a whole book of the screen anyway?
This sort of thing is probably a good idea as long as it has one simple feature. If you press a specific key during the start up sequence the nice pretty image disappears and is replaced by the useful messages. Then you have the picture that doesn't scare non-technical users and the text available if there is a major problem.
Usual lack of knowledge disclaimers but I have scanned the thing briefly....
This mightn't be as bad as it looks initially,
The wording of Article 6 Illegal Devices includes the phrase...
with intent that it be used for the purpose of committing the offences established in Articles 2 - 5;
Where Articles 2-5 are about Illegal access, interception, data interference and system interference and all contain the words 'without right'.
In other words, a security professional would have the right to do any of items 2-5 and could therefore own the tools described in 6 legally. In the case of an amateur owning tools the prosecuting authority would have to prove that the person intended to use the tools on systems he/she did not have the right to use them on, ie. other peoples.
On another part of the draft about copyright, the treaty actually seems to be better than the existing legal situation. It requires legislation about distributing copyright material 'on a commercial scale' which would seem to get a lot of the P-P systems, or at least their users, off the hook.
On the other hand articles 14-15 seems to require a way of forcing people to hand over encryption keys to authorities.
Can you change a copyright agreement after the fact when under the original agreement you where not the holder of the copyright? I'm pretty sure you shouldn't be able to do this without the consent of the original copyright holder. From my reading of these agreements the original version gave dmoz the right to do pretty much anything with the information except stopping you from using it, whereas the new version is claiming to transfer the rights completely to them.
I suspect their reasoning behind this is to reduce the difficulty of challenging someone who copies their data but it seems to raise more problems than it fixes.
Having used all 3 I'd say it was pretty much a case of using the DB that is most suitable for your application and environment. Mysql - speed, especially when running on older hardware, I switched some systems from Postgresql to Mysql some time back and the increase in speed was significant. Postgresql - solid and reliable, does precisely what it says it will. Oracle - nice if you can afford it and the system to run it on, it would be my choice for bigger systems and/or critical data.
As an organiser of off line interactive games(LRP/LARP) I can understand the problem they are having, at least in part. The problem seems to be that there are many types of gamer who want different styles of game and in trying to cater for one style they are causing problems for all the rest. From my experience gamers break into a few general categories (OK these are not all embracing and have all the problems of all categorisations).
1) Hard roleplayers - people who want to play characters within a cohesive and realistic world, these people want the rules to be upheld in spirit as well as to the letter and for all characters to fit into the world designed for the game.
2) Powergamers - I want the big sword of everything death. Play the game with the objective of creating the most powerful character possible. In this category there are people who will do this entirely within the game world and also people who will do out of game actions eg. buying items with real world cash. to gain power.
3) Fun players - people who just want to have fun, play the game in a semi-serious to humourous way. In this category fit the characters with silly names etc.
The problem arises when you try to cater for all three categories in one game and, in this case, add in a few people who want to make some real world cash. In the offline equivalent of these games most groups are much smaller and still contain a mix of these types of player BUT the wide variety of games out there mean that certain types of player tend to gravitate towards games that cater for their playing style. I don't know this particular game at all but my feeling is that in order to cater for the different playing styles it would be better to run two or possibly three instances of the online game at once. One where the rules are applied solidly and rigorously and one which is much more open, this would provide a place for the hard core roleplayers (who I suspect are the people who have complained about this game) and a place for everyone else. With a bit of thought you could even work this into the game world....
Slashdot Mirror
Interestingly the two news sources you mention (BBC and Guardian) are amoung the few big news sources without normal style mega-company owning them. The BBC is funded by a licence fee payed by everyone with a TV in the UK and the Guardian is backed by a trust (see http://www.gmgplc.co.uk/gmg/scotttrust/inscottwetr ust/) set up to maintain its editorial independence.
I'll give you one guess who runs scirus.......
thats right....
Reed Elsevier
The whole OS software will leave programmers unemployed reminds me of something I read a while back (I think it was on /. but I haven't got the time to look up the reference.
Some OSS advocate asked at a conference how many people in the audience worked for a company that made its money by selling the software they wrote and hardly anyone was. The vast majority of developers are creating in house tools, web systems and the like rather than software for sale.
If you really want to read about the universal nature of myths try 'Hero with a Thousand Faces' by Joseph Cambell. It is a pretty old book and a bit Christianity centric in places but it is an interesting take on mythological stories in general (Star Wars rather than LOTR being the most obvious direct lift from it).
I've had a similar problem trying to pipe a pdf through an access rights system, the fix was to hack an extra parameter onto the end of the URL so you end up with something like
http://abc.def.ghi/dostuff?zxy=123&x=x.pdf
which is horrible, but works.
Actually this is probably a symptom of the most irritating thing about IE from a development standpoint. With NS or anything else you can have many versions installed on one machine, with IE I haven't found a way of installing multiple versions (I don't believe there is one due to integration with the OS) hence you need multiple systems to test with multiple browsers before you even start testing with multiple OS.
>I am putting together rules for a micro version >of the game for SF Conventions.
A micro version of Scrapheap/Junkyard is effectively an old, but very similar UK TV series called 'The Great Egg Race', basically the same thing but on a smaller scale.
No, with this sort of device you do not have to iterate over the frequencies. If the 'on' bits of the modulator retard the light passing through them by, 2n-1/1 wavelengths and the off bits have no effect then when the beam is recombined you can just bounce it of a grating/prism into a linear array of detectors and there's your answer. The slow bit is reading the detectors, ie. as usual its the optical->electronic bit thats slow.
A quick disclaimer, I work for an academic publisher but these are not their views.....
On the whole as an ex scientist this seems a good idea but there are a few problems and the concept is not as revolutionary as it seems.
Firstly there is not one single type of scientific publishing there are three, I will deal with each in turn.
1) Primary publishing.
This is where journals publish papers written by authors. This is not, from a scientists PoV, the main task, these hournals also organise peer review of papers submitted for publication. It is the nature of peer review that makes publication in a major journal worthwhile. Peer reviewed articles have effectively been checked for errors etc. and are therefore of much more value than unreviewed articles. Organising the peer review process takes resources and this is primarily what you pay for when you buy a peer reviewed journal.
A second point about primary publishing is that when you buy a subscription to a journal you almost always get online access to all its back issues anyway. Even so a fair proportion of such a journals income comes from reprints.
2) Secondary publishing (wow).
These are products made up from abstracts of articles in a wide range of primary journals with complex indices making it easy to find relevant articles (eg medline). The major cost here is generating the indices.
3) Tertiary publishing
Articles summing up the state of the art in certain fields, these are often contracted and paid for.
In conclusion, an archive of primary published articles would be a problem for some primary journals dependant on their publishing schedule. They are relied upon to provide peer review in the academic community and the requirement for this would have to be taken into account.
For secondary publishing an archive of full text articles would be a real bonus allowing them to link directly to a copy of the full text of articles found using their indices.
Tertiary publishing resembles normal (non academic) publishing and is a completely different subject.
If someone is found republishing the data on another site then its lawyer time but this has only happened a couple of times in the past few years.
Complete books may be another matter but who wants to read a whole book of the screen anyway?
This sort of thing is probably a good idea as long as it has one simple feature. If you press a specific key during the start up sequence the nice pretty image disappears and is replaced by the useful messages. Then you have the picture that doesn't scare non-technical users and the text available if there is a major problem.
Usual lack of knowledge disclaimers but I have scanned the thing briefly....
This mightn't be as bad as it looks initially,
The wording of Article 6 Illegal Devices includes the phrase...
with intent that it be used for the purpose of committing the offences established in Articles 2 - 5;
Where Articles 2-5 are about Illegal access, interception, data interference and system interference and all contain the words 'without right'.
In other words, a security professional would have the right to do any of items 2-5 and could therefore own the tools described in 6 legally. In the case of an amateur owning tools the prosecuting authority would have to prove that the person intended to use the tools on systems he/she did not have the right to use them on, ie. other peoples.
On another part of the draft about copyright, the treaty actually seems to be better than the existing legal situation. It requires legislation about distributing copyright material 'on a commercial scale' which would seem to get a lot of the P-P systems, or at least their users, off the hook.
On the other hand articles 14-15 seems to require a way of forcing people to hand over encryption keys to authorities.
A question for any copyright experts out there.
Can you change a copyright agreement after the fact when under the original agreement you where not the holder of the copyright? I'm pretty sure you shouldn't be able to do this without the consent of the original copyright holder. From my reading of these agreements the original version gave dmoz the right to do pretty much anything with the information except stopping you from using it, whereas the new version is claiming to transfer the rights completely to them.
I suspect their reasoning behind this is to reduce the difficulty of challenging someone who copies their data but it seems to raise more problems than it fixes.
Having used all 3 I'd say it was pretty much a case of using the DB that is most suitable for your application and environment.
Mysql - speed, especially when running on older hardware, I switched some systems from Postgresql to Mysql some time back and the increase in speed was significant.
Postgresql - solid and reliable, does precisely what it says it will.
Oracle - nice if you can afford it and the system to run it on, it would be my choice for bigger systems and/or critical data.
As an organiser of off line interactive games(LRP/LARP) I can understand the problem they are having, at least in part. The problem seems to be that there are many types of gamer who want different styles of game and in trying to cater for one style they are causing problems for all the rest. From my experience gamers break into a few general categories (OK these are not all embracing and have all the problems of all categorisations).
1) Hard roleplayers - people who want to play characters within a cohesive and realistic world, these people want the rules to be upheld in spirit as well as to the letter and for all characters to fit into the world designed for the game.
2) Powergamers - I want the big sword of everything death. Play the game with the objective of creating the most powerful character possible. In this category there are people who will do this entirely within the game world and also people who will do out of game actions eg. buying items with real world cash. to gain power.
3) Fun players - people who just want to have fun, play the game in a semi-serious to humourous way. In this category fit the characters with silly names etc.
The problem arises when you try to cater for all three categories in one game and, in this case, add in a few people who want to make some real world cash.
In the offline equivalent of these games most groups are much smaller and still contain a mix of these types of player BUT the wide variety of games out there mean that certain types of player tend to gravitate towards games that cater for their playing style.
I don't know this particular game at all but my feeling is that in order to cater for the different playing styles it would be better to run two or possibly three instances of the online game at once. One where the rules are applied solidly and rigorously and one which is much more open, this would provide a place for the hard core roleplayers (who I suspect are the people who have complained about this game) and a place for everyone else. With a bit of thought you could even work this into the game world....