One of the programs that was really the visual inspiration behind the framework presented in my doctoral thesis was 3Dtop http://www.majorgeeks.com/download186.html
A review is given at the link I have provided, but this program was really the marvel of simplicity. It is only 356 KB (yes k), and truly converts all the files and folders on you computer into a 3D space.
If you are ready to re-INTERPRET what you normally store in a folder of file, so that it now fits this visual space, it is extrememly powerful.
For a person just starting off, the novelty of 3Dtop wears off pretty quickly because you easily get lost, and it looks just like eye candy, but if you REinterpret what the folders and files should contain, it becomes a very very powerful cognitive space.
Please don't flame me if you don't understand what I am saying, but as a last point, I would like to mention that as our cognitive space (displayed in the electronic space on the desktop) has no real correspondence to physical 3D space, it becomes hard to impose "laws" (like physical laws) and hence the electronic space almost becomes infinite, and really disorienting. One way to build laws is to recognize that (in Windows) the Desktop itself is a folder, which contains My Computer, which has the C:\ drive, which has windows, which has Desktop again... it is this Russian Doll like relationship between two Desktop views that provides the backbone for building the laws that are equivalent of the "physical space" for the electronic and cognitive space....
Localisation is the process by which software and computing systems are adapted to a particular language and the specific cultural habits of a region. However, before the process of localisation can begin, the software has to be internationalised to support multiple languages and local customs.
More so than the particular languages, and the multiple languages, what I believe is more important and rather difficult to implement are the elements of specific cultural habits and local customs
For this, it truly has to be a bottom-up process. It cannot be imposed from top in a top-down process.
As the article says, In the first successful project of localisation of Indian languages, Ankur, an initiative of a group of academicians, students, professionals, linguists and techies - all volunteers and without any financial backing
and the fact that the government's much-flaunted government-to-citizen effort - Banglar Mukh (the face of Bengal) - has fallen flat on its face
When the product emerged from the grassroots, it rose and stood up, and when it it was imposed from the tree-top it fell flat on its face.
My question is whether this means that we are doomed to wait for something successful to emerge on its own, rather than being able to drive its creation in well-articulated plans ?
For example, I have been wanting to create a community site for a National Olympic Committee (NOC, with about 60 sub organizations who will be the ones contributing material), and also one for a national political party to organize a Poll Information Management System, (PIMS)
but I am finding that it is not enough to push a few people with money to select and customize software like slash, scoop, Drupal, Geeklog, PHPNuke or PostNuke, to satisfy the local needs for the NOC or PIMS, and definitely not enough to attact an active community
and that maybe the successful programs for the NOC and PIMS have to emerge from not a few people pushed to achieve them but a larger group of people who come together, driven not by money but a bigger sense of purpose....
In other words, when it really matters, I find that the profit motive arguemnt of McBride and SCO is not only cynical, it is increasingly not borne out by reality.
When McBride argues about the legal underpinnings and defending it by court decisions, he is backward looking. Courts are restricted to only looking at the past and existing laws and legislations in making decisions.
On the temporal scale the Judiciary has control over the past. The legislature is forward looking and has control over the future. So, any law that the legislature passes now, will become the touchstone by which the courts will judge later. And on the temporal Scale the Executive has control over the present. I beleive in this case, the Execution should be done by the Market forces, rather than by an arm of the Government. (And SCO must be executed too.)
Based on the results of the market forces, the legislature should then frame "forward looking legislations" that then become the laws which the courts must address. Currently, and in all the arguements that McBride advances, the fact is that the courts were restricted to INTERPRETING "Progress of Science and useful Arts" in the LEGAL sense only - obviously the legal framework is vvery restrictive in identifying what really "Progress" means, and is it must be understood that the courts had their hands toed behind their backs - thier's is a legal interpretation of Progress and not a broader economic, social, cultural, and political meaning of Progress.
The meat of my comment is above - the rest of the comment is just trying to build my case more...
However, the issue is clear: do you support copyrights and ownership of intellectual property as envisioned by our elected officials in Congress and the European Union, or do you support ?free? ? as in free from ownership ? intellectual property envisioned by the Free Software Foundation, Red Hat and others?
There really is no middle ground. The future of the global economy hangs in the balance.
The global economy is not hanging in the balance, waiting breathlessly for SCO/McBride to vulturize millions so the "global economy" can breathe a sigh of relief. This is just another bluster from the McBride. McBride is nothing but a fly on the wall in terms of the current efforts and "real work" that are really advancing the state of the global economy. I highlight this McBride quote, because it captures bluster of the rest of his sophomoric argument.
Constitutional authority to enact patent and copyright laws was granted to Congress by the Founding Fathers under Article I, 8 of the United States Constitution:
Congress shall have Power ? [t]o promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries...... This Constitutional declaration gave rise to our system of copyrights and patents.... (later he writes) Thus, SCO is confident that the legal underpinning of our arguments is sound.... But we believe that we will prevail through the legal system...
It is interesting that he talks about the "legal underpinnings" being sound. If tomorrow the Legislature passes a law (legislations are forward looking), that makes it clear that there is no room for interopretation, and SCO is wrong and stupid, that will be the easy end to the SCO/McBride Extortion story. Like McBride says " Internet chat boards are filled with attacks against SCO, its management and its lawyers," and I think they are filled with attacks for a good reason. And since the chatboarders are also voters, it would be possible for them to choose the right representatives, who would go and legislate, and then carry the legal "attacks" on SCO rather than just have flame wars.
In Eldred , the petitioner argued that the Copyright Term Extension Act enacted by Congress in 1998 was unconstitutional. The U.S. Supreme Court disagreed, ruling that Congress had full
With so many eyes looking at the info, any hacking should be easily detected. So, I guess except for an occasional scare for a few unsuspecting people, the system should work fine.
The danger in the sytem is not really that laws will be broken to ensnare innocent people. These things are easily rectified.
The danger in the system is when people take their eyes of the legislative intention of the law, and the executive branch starts applying the law more broadly, slowly inching towards scaring, if not ensnaring, the innocent. The danger is when the law is whacked out line with what is what supposed to do. In whacking no laws need be broken. In Hacking laws are broken, but in whacking they need not be broken...
It is the worst when the Judiciary shows a blind eye to the actions of the Executive, and refuses to call judgement on the Legislative intention and Executive implementation of the law.... Then, it is possible to scare, if not ensnare, all the good people, whom the law was framed to protect to begin with...
I am not saying that it will happen, but in the land where the Patriot Law can be expanded the way it has to non-terrorism related issues, anything is possible...
The Road to Hell is paved with good intentions ..
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Interview with Jim Griffin
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· Score: 3, Insightful
We can replace the entire music business worldwide for less than it costs to complain about the fee, and all media can be compensated for at a fee that integrates well with monthly wireless or wired fees. This is hardly revolutionary:
I might sound simplistic, but isn't this the road to socialism - Compensating all media when most of them deserve to die an unsung death?
On this road the first step in the journey of a thousand steps is day n when it will be "at a cost less than it costs to complain."
The second step is on day n+1 when some wiseguy will come up and talk about not leaving money on the table and making it "cost just about equal to what it costs to complain."
On day n+m another high flyer will come and say let us test the market and make it "cost just a little more than it costs to complain."
On day n+m+1 a MBA will come and say let us just "let those who can pay pay more than it costs to complain."
Then the RIAA will come....
And waiting like a Vulture for his day, Darl McBride will come and say....
This should be AC but WTF ....
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Mafia Tech Support
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· Score: 4, Interesting
This should be AC but WTF....
So what's a nice techie like me doing in a place like this? I gotta be honest. For starters, I don't think there's anything wrong with gambling - it's a private, symmetrical transaction between consenting adults. By another name - lottery, casino, offtrack betting - this sort of operation is completely legal. And it's not like I'm shaking people down for protection money. Besides, I tried the dotcom thing and failed. Plus, here I'm appreciated:
Here is what I would like to get published in the next issue of Wired...
So what's a nice techie like me doing in a place like this? I gotta be honest. For starters, I don't think there's anything wrong with
drugs - it's a private, symmetrical transaction between an adult and his/her body. By another name - alcohol, tobacco, junk food - this sort of operation is completely legal. And it's not like I'm shaking people down for drug money. Besides, I tried the dotcom thing and failed. Plus, here I'm appreciated...
Re:50 thumbs on a page is too few ...
on
News at a Glance
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· Score: 2, Insightful
The basic diffrence in our conception is that you want to convey as clearly as possible what needs to be conveyed as if it is being done to a machine, or a machine-like human. I assume the communication is between people who are looking for more than just unambiguous clear-cut instructions. Ambiguities do not have to be resolved in human communication. And things don't have to be made "lighter." They just have to be made as light as possible, but not lighter than that.... (with apoogies to e=mc2)
I am assuming that people want to convey many more shades when they are communicating, and ambiguities should not be resolved if they don't have to be resolved. My comment was in context of communication between people and other people, and encompasses more things than just instructional.
Also, letters communicate sparingly and that is why they are used in programming. But there are a lot of people who prefer the GUI IDE even for programming because when info is spread in the XY plane is it more natural to grasp the underlying framework - as that is how we see the world. To insist that all that must be reduced to "lighter" characters is unreasonable.
There is a generation that still likes the command line, and thinks that the GUI is a waste.. I don't. I believe the GUI is a move from the "lighter" characters to the "heavier" graphics - and people skinning their interfaces are making this even "heavier."
The world wide web is all about "images and text".. not text only... if it were, people would be happy with ftp and telnet... maybe you are happy in that world but I wasn't specifically speaking about you..
50 thumbs on a page is too few ...
on
News at a Glance
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· Score: 3, Interesting
I do believe that we will some day move to a more pictorial language where the alphabets will be replaced by pics... (no, we will not all be chinese then though chinese has 10-20,000 pictorial characters)
and just like we look at combinations of alphabets to grasp words, and combinations of words to grasp phrases, and combinations of phrases to grasp paras... we will look at cluster of pics to grasp the articles....
Looking with that analogy, 50 stock thumbs means that we could either look at it as 50 alphabets on that page, or if there is a little caption beneath the pic, then there are an equivalent of 50 words on that home page....
this is too few as it is the equivalent of a page with 50 words at the most...
this is too few as it means that each topic like Business, Sports,etc is created by stringing 6 words (pics) which does not even begin to capture a headline let alone a summary....
I think the density of information could be increased here, and we could have many more pics. In addition if the pics are arranged according to some reasonable criteria, even more info can be conveyed...
In purely intellectual proporty terms, there is validity in patenting the idea that helped evade.. something.. something. The reason is that there are many applications that can be derived from this concept, and currently the one that is being used as "proof-of-concept" is as a spam-filter evader.
In time, as new applications are developed, AT&T would have a better hold on the foundations of this new market.... So, I think is is wise for them to have patented it.
And after all, who knows when the levers of power grate into the next set of positions i know, i know and spamming becomes the business to be in, AT&T might even be able to make a mint in the spam-invader-evader business....
I think in essence the problem is similar to that which is being faced in designing "fool-proof" electronic-voting systems.
Each one of the steps in the electronic voting has an analogue to the problem of how to "tie" the computer to the user...
Specifically: 1. How do you know that the intended voter really did make the selections and was actually the one interacting with the machine?
2. How do you know that the instructions of the intended voter were fairly transmitted ?
3. How do you make sure that the instructions that were transmitted were faithfully acted upon by the machine....
4. How do you know the person who read the results from the machine faithfully read the intentions of the intended voter....
So, any attempt to work at solutions on this problem, is also work in the direction of preserving democracy.... Just a thought for incentive to useful comments from/.'s....
Bounties, Bounties everywhere, And I am loosing my Counties of how many there are.
Every Mountie must now be getting this idea, that if they can't catch the Evilers Dead or Alive - Make an Announcie of "X" Million Dollar Reward.
X is 25 for Osama, and 0.25 for MSBlatie, 10 for Saddamie, and 10 for his baby boys.
Some you will catchie and some will get away.
No Osama, but M$ might catchy MSBlastie, No Saddam, but they got his progeny.
When will someone get the idea, of Putting up X for the Lunactic, or X for the Dubya who sammed the Iron Door shut, or X for entry into the Pearly Gates...
so that friendy turns on friendy, and all Evilers become suiciders and deadenders leaving rest of the worldie as a nice place,
when friends have turned on friendies, and hacker on hackers, and evil file sharers on eviler file sharers, when Open Source Nigerian Scammers have turned in their Princeton buddies....
what is left of the world, I hope I am not around to see....
When I hosted some of my earlier sites, web hosting resellers were advocating Windows hosting. They charged more for it, and also most of the technical help they had was for Windows and IIS...
After the worm season of Microsoft, I actually had the same resellers begging me not to buy Windows hosting but go for Linux, even though it was cheaper (and hence their margins lower). Most of them were putting forward the reasoning that it was cheaper (but that was never a selling point earlier) and they said that there are so many free goodies available with it... Finally one of the ladies confided... "My techies are going nuts just keeping up with the patches after patches.. so please, go for Linux.... please.."
I have always wondered if there was a business model - conceptually similar to Akamai speeding up the "last hop" delivery - where all the computation intensive files for 3D modelling etc could be sent, and the the end product shipped back.
A lot of my friends doing 3D modeliing would do the stuff and then have to let the rendering take place for 24 plus hours... maybe a service where computation power, which is routinely available in most universities, can be made available to non-students may have a business value. They ship the files to the computation center which can then do the rendering and ship it back in a few minutes (rather than 24 hours) to the graphic artist...
Of course the business will disappear if grid computing, or something based on the P2P infrastructure can be succesfully established, but till that time maybe there is a business model here.
Now that we are discussing suicide, and how we had a whole messed up definition of what the suicider-lemmings were doing, I wonder if we have a similarly messed up understanding of the suiciders...
I know that POTUS has defined it in pretty much black and white, and the LUNATIC calls them the deadenders, the military calls them operatives... but whatever... basically the question that pops in my head is whether the operating definition of a suicide-bomber that is currently in vogue is comprehensive or not.
And the analogy with the lemmings is whether the use of a suicide-bomber as a strategic and assymetric weapon of war is something that may make sense when the analysis is done at the level of survival of not individuals or groups but at the level of cultures... or at some other level that is atleast higher than that of a boot in the face.
Mike Malone has made some sweeping remarks and some of the questions that come to my mind immediately are:
If someone could guesstimate the number of the online-community game subscriptions sold in last quarter (or last year) and compare it with the drop that the TV viewership has experienced, I think we would get a better sense of the correlation between the two. What percentage of one is the other ?
There is a difference between recorded-TV and broadcast-TV and it is possible for there to be a decline in broadcast-TV viewership but not in the overall-TV viewership. People may be watching more recorded-TV (i.e dvd's, videos, avi's) rather than the broadcast-TV (which has experienced ratings decline). So knowing how Netflix et al are doing would be nice...
Another point is whether it is possible that the increase in the online-game-community members is pretty much because of the decline in the offline-game-community - i.e fewer people are playing baseball or hanging out at the malls. If one increase can be explained by the decrease in the other, then the contribution of the online-game-community might not be that significant to the decline in TV-viewership.
In addition to the extremeties of passive TV and dynamic online-games, there is a spectrum of other activities that are somewhat passive-somewhat active. For example, watching a dvd filled with goodies is more active than TV but passive compared to online-games. Or even answering email which is less active than online-games and less passive than TV - after all the time for checking and answering email has to come from somewhere in the time-space of 25 hours....
In addition, on a macroscopic level, it would be interesting to see if there is enough about the TV shows online (plotlines, episodes, forums, flames, etc.) so that the desire to watch the most of the actual show is minimized rather than heightened. Afterall, it is probably much more satisfying to keep the fantasy of imagination about most-of-shows-on-TV-today, rather than actually watch it to confirm the hash the director and studios have made of it....
The idea is not too far-fetched if you decide to model the consumer, or in my analogy the node of a network, as-if the node is a computer with the 5 parts,
input, output, storage, MEMORY & CPU
Ignore the input, ouput, and the storage which are primarily determined by the initial conditions of the node.... and you are left with MEMORY & CPU.
In MEMORY the SYMBOLS remain the same while we flow thru the symbol-space, and in CPU the symbol-space remains the same while the SYMBOLS flow thru the it... This is the essential duality that is at the core of the nature of reality - of timelessness and temporality; of static and dynamic; of data and methods; of intuition and logic.... and we are always flipping from one part of the duality to the other, and never fully reaching the other because along the way we find ourselves in the third state of the duality which makes it a trinity but it essentially at the higher level reveals itself as the duality...
In this duality it is hard to determine the logic or the CPU aspect of the node, and it is hard to model the the third state that is the meta-state MEMORY-CPU... but we are still left with the MEMORY.
It is this memory that we are now able to model using the fMRI... although we are using a black-box and perturbation method to model our MEMORY-center. In the larger picture the errors that are introduced by dropping the CPU-aspect, and the MEMORY-CPU aspect of the node embedded in a network, can overwhelm the hypothesis that are derived from the MEMORY modelling by black-box-perturbation, but that is all we really have to start with....
The key aspect now is that though we can only probabilistically model the node, or consumer, in the network, the probabilities tend towards deterministic as the networks get larger and larger.... meaning that no matter how small the probabilities of a certain behavior based on the studies of memories, there is a good chance that in the large network a group of exhibiting that behavior exists...
Anyway, the point that I wanted to develop was that in adition to having a certain number of people whose behavior can be predicted by MEMORY, there is a lot of us whose behavior deliberately tends towards this automatic bypassing of CPU, i.e. thinking... and no less a person than A.N. Whitehead said that "Civilization advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking about them. " So, I guess the more advanced we get, the more we will be suseptible to the fMRI.....
In the latest news, since the PMCA (Printed Millenium Copyright Act) has passed in the last few hours, the BIAA (Book-ing Industry Association of America) has started printing on books that "books printed in other regions of the world are not to be imported in the USA. First offence is punishable with a reprimand letter, and if the felony is repeated, the crime is punishable with 10 years in prison."
The guidelines for one relevant section invoking Non-Patriotic Book-ing Transactions in the drafting the PMCA had been lifted from the MPAA strategy of dividing the world into "regions" so that products were deliberately crippled to work in only one region out of many that had been drawn up by the MPAA. In addition, the redrawing of the printed-book regions drew upon the recent legislative successes in the re-districting of Texas, also called Xtreme GerryMandering.
In an other related development, the Patriot Act has been invoked to open and check all book packages coming into the US. Additionally, the Ashcroftian-Feds have started entering public libraries and private libraries (i.e. book collections in the homes or dorms) to enforce these laws. As they do not have to intimate the suspects before and after the act, most people are unaware that the feds have been rummaging thru their books. Some private diaries have been exposed, and a clique of people referring themselves as/.'s (WTF) have especially been targeted for subversive reading of "filtered" news that has been the special target of the POTUS.
It is the singular focus of the current Administration, and it seems to have percolated down the whole law enforcement system - to decide first what to do and then figure out how to Bend and Twist laws till they have a fig leaf of a defense.... As the Justice Department Spokeswoman put it in a different situation, but relevant to what is happening " Our policy is to use all legal tools available... meaning, we will throw the book at you if we could just find something that.... We know what we want to do with your sorry a*** and if you give em a few moments I will find something the the law book that I can intrepret to justify what I have already decided to do...
The department itself was unapologetic. "Our policy," said Barbara Comstock, a spokeswoman, "is to use all legal tools available to protect innocent Americans from terrorist attacks." The aggressive tactics used against people held on minor immigration violations were, civil libertarians said, a natural result of the department's new approach. "When it's in this preventive mode," David D. Cole, a law professor at Georgetown University, said of the Justice Department, "it by definition sweeps very broadly and ends up harming hundreds if not thousands of people."
"'I say to you that the VCR is to the American film producer and the American public as the Boston strangler is to the woman home alone.' Jack Valenti said this in 1982 in testimony to the House of Representatives on why the VCR should be illegal. He also called the VCR an "avalanche" and a "tidal wave", and said it would make the film industry "bleed and bleed and hemorrhage". From Older Slashdot discussion http://slashdot.org/articles/02/05/31/1622232.shtm l?tid=97
This was a blunder that he made in 1982. Twenty one years later he is still around, smoking his fat cigar, and calling "Wolf Wolf" (aka "Boston Strangler, Boston Strangeler") again.
He survived then, he will survive again. He ate his words then, and he will eat his words again, of that I am confident. But while he can, he is going to make life hell for everyone, and enjoy the spectacle from a distance.
If these corporate types, aka fat cats, were interested in consistency, they wouldn't be fat - they would be roadkill. But God, how much I would love for Jack "The Boston Ripper" Valenti to be roadkill, just this one time....
On Sept. 23, after the association issued its first subpoenas to Charter in St. Louis, a Charter spokesman said the company would "fully cooperate." However, Hearity said that statement meant only that the company would "cooperate in the sense that we're going to operate within the legal process."
This is a very insightful comment because it reflects that Charter top-brass probably understands that the legal system is an essentially incomplete system.
If they are smart enough, and can raise the higher-level-than-legal-level issue of social good using the statutes provided by the legal system, they might be able to create an assertion in the legal system that talks about its own unprovability in court, in which case the court might - not fully comprehending the incompleteness of formal systems - look for the validity of the assertion in the social system, wherein they will discover that it is ridiculous for the RIAA to claim no legitimate uses of the P2P.
And Equally ridiculous for the RIAA to claim that by supressing all economic activity not under its control it has somehow raised the total level of economic activity. Reflecting upon how patently untrue the RIAA has been so far, may cause the courts to self-reflect upon their own behavior, in which case there may be a spark of intelligence... upon which my sig will come alive. As my current sig is Die Die Metallica, Die Die RIAA, Die Die My Darling , its coming alive will cause the death of the RIAA, and Charter may never have to prove the assertions it made fully understanding the unprovability of its assertions....
Sorry, if have been caught up in some strange loops. I was just rereading Hofstadter's GEB and could not help but...
It could also be that MS is moving out of the business of pleasing the geek market and now aiming for lower pickings.... for example in parts of Europe Baywatch was the "coolest" show for the longest time... burnt out bands end up touring Japan... Madonna and Michael Jackson still dominate headlines in many parts of the world.... and so does Britney...
Those are probably the parts that MS is trying to influence in its business of world domination. That is what they do every night - try to take over the world... it's just that they world is bigger than geekdom now.....
"They show that, for the first time, our climate models can be run at resolutions capable of...
I have always heard that the flapping of a butterfly here can cause a storm in China....
Just wondering whether someday the resolution will be so good that out of the millions of butterflies flapping, they will be able to track down that culprit whose flapping caused the storm in china...
because if they can do it, you won't find me posting to slashdot, but on the run trying to kill that damn butterfly before I am blamed for it all... The TIA and CAPPS goons shoot horses, don't they... or is it people that they shoot...
Thanks for pointing out how to avoid these Trillian crashes....
It happened to my laptop at work, and my home computer did the same. And because i have generally thought Yahoo! was less "commercial" than MS (i.e. no auto deleting your inbox.. no pain-in-the-**** things like "activation" etc etc etc) I never never suspected that it was the Yahoo autologin that was causing this trouble...
But now I am back on IM using Trillina... thanks...
God, I just love slashdot for all these timely tips...
I think this strategy of a "predictable" pricing is not going to work for software, esp. this late in the game of the battle of the Operating systems for desktops and severs.
In software, there are many factors that have to be considered before you buy it. And software is not individualistic like music, but has to work with the software of others in and out of your ecosystem. Therein lies the biggest hurdle for getting enough traction.
Simplistic pricing is just one factor to be considered in the evaluation. Sun is essentially betting that there is a segment of the market that is so perturbed by the M$ pricing that they will switch to Sun - even though the fact is that Sun may turn out to be more monopolistic that M$ if given a chance. Look at all the song and dance, and smoke and mirrors, Sun did when Java was young and had tremendous potential.....
My gut feeling is that people would see Superman McNealy for who he is.. just another closet Bill Gates.
I agree with you, and because of their installed base it would be possible for them to make encryption a default for the majority of the population. This is critical for generating a critical mass that is needed to be able to sustain encryption as a routine practice.
Trying to send encrypted files all of a sudden to a few people somehow seems to give the wrong impression, because it seems that you have something to hide. It is as if your communication stands out as a needle in the haystack, and someone using a "magnet" can just suck you off the system....
But, if Yahoo, hotmail, etc started encrypting by default, then a huge number of emails, I believe enough for the critical mass, shall use encrytion. And so now your desire to send encrypted encrytion is no longer looked at with suspicion. You are now like hay in a hay stack and no magnet can suck you off the system...
So, I believe, in the spirit of Standing Up against such obscenities as the Patriot Act, companies like Yahoo.com, M$ Hotmail.com, Mail.com, Verizonmail.com, Myrealbox.com, etc. should start provinding encryption by default.
Slashdot Mirror
One of the programs that was really the visual inspiration behind the framework presented in my doctoral thesis was 3Dtop http://www.majorgeeks.com/download186.html
A review is given at the link I have provided, but this program was really the marvel of simplicity. It is only 356 KB (yes k), and truly converts all the files and folders on you computer into a 3D space.
If you are ready to re-INTERPRET what you normally store in a folder of file, so that it now fits this visual space, it is extrememly powerful.
For a person just starting off, the novelty of 3Dtop wears off pretty quickly because you easily get lost, and it looks just like eye candy, but if you REinterpret what the folders and files should contain, it becomes a very very powerful cognitive space.
Please don't flame me if you don't understand what I am saying, but as a last point, I would like to mention that as our cognitive space (displayed in the electronic space on the desktop) has no real correspondence to physical 3D space, it becomes hard to impose "laws" (like physical laws) and hence the electronic space almost becomes infinite, and really disorienting. One way to build laws is to recognize that (in Windows) the Desktop itself is a folder, which contains My Computer, which has the C:\ drive, which has windows, which has Desktop again ... it is this Russian Doll like relationship between two Desktop views that provides the backbone for building the laws that are equivalent of the "physical space" for the electronic and cognitive space ....
- As the article says, In the first successful project of localisation of Indian languages, Ankur, an initiative of a group of academicians, students, professionals, linguists and techies - all volunteers and without any financial backing
- and the fact that the government's much-flaunted government-to-citizen effort - Banglar Mukh (the face of Bengal) - has fallen flat on its face
- When the product emerged from the grassroots, it rose and stood up, and when it it was imposed from the tree-top it fell flat on its face.
My question is whether this means that we are doomed to wait for something successful to emerge on its own, rather than being able to drive its creation in well-articulated plans ? For example, I have been wanting to create a community site for a National Olympic Committee (NOC, with about 60 sub organizations who will be the ones contributing material), and also one for a national political party to organize a Poll Information Management System, (PIMS)- but I am finding that it is not enough to push a few people with money to select and customize software like slash, scoop, Drupal, Geeklog, PHPNuke or PostNuke, to satisfy the local needs for the NOC or PIMS, and definitely not enough to attact an active community
- and that maybe the successful programs for the NOC and PIMS have to emerge from not a few people pushed to achieve them but a larger group of people who come together, driven not by money but a bigger sense of purpose
....
In other words, when it really matters, I find that the profit motive arguemnt of McBride and SCO is not only cynical, it is increasingly not borne out by reality.When McBride argues about the legal underpinnings and defending it by court decisions, he is backward looking. Courts are restricted to only looking at the past and existing laws and legislations in making decisions.
On the temporal scale the Judiciary has control over the past. The legislature is forward looking and has control over the future. So, any law that the legislature passes now, will become the touchstone by which the courts will judge later. And on the temporal Scale the Executive has control over the present. I beleive in this case, the Execution should be done by the Market forces, rather than by an arm of the Government. (And SCO must be executed too.)
Based on the results of the market forces, the legislature should then frame "forward looking legislations" that then become the laws which the courts must address. Currently, and in all the arguements that McBride advances, the fact is that the courts were restricted to INTERPRETING "Progress of Science and useful Arts" in the LEGAL sense only - obviously the legal framework is vvery restrictive in identifying what really "Progress" means, and is it must be understood that the courts had their hands toed behind their backs - thier's is a legal interpretation of Progress and not a broader economic, social, cultural, and political meaning of Progress.
The meat of my comment is above - the rest of the comment is just trying to build my case more ...
The global economy is not hanging in the balance, waiting breathlessly for SCO/McBride to vulturize millions so the "global economy" can breathe a sigh of relief. This is just another bluster from the McBride. McBride is nothing but a fly on the wall in terms of the current efforts and "real work" that are really advancing the state of the global economy. I highlight this McBride quote, because it captures bluster of the rest of his sophomoric argument.
It is interesting that he talks about the "legal underpinnings" being sound. If tomorrow the Legislature passes a law (legislations are forward looking), that makes it clear that there is no room for interopretation, and SCO is wrong and stupid, that will be the easy end to the SCO/McBride Extortion story. Like McBride says " Internet chat boards are filled with attacks against SCO, its management and its lawyers," and I think they are filled with attacks for a good reason. And since the chatboarders are also voters, it would be possible for them to choose the right representatives, who would go and legislate, and then carry the legal "attacks" on SCO rather than just have flame wars.
With so many eyes looking at the info, any hacking should be easily detected. So, I guess except for an occasional scare for a few unsuspecting people, the system should work fine.
The danger in the sytem is not really that laws will be broken to ensnare innocent people. These things are easily rectified.
The danger in the system is when people take their eyes of the legislative intention of the law, and the executive branch starts applying the law more broadly, slowly inching towards scaring, if not ensnaring, the innocent. The danger is when the law is whacked out line with what is what supposed to do. In whacking no laws need be broken. In Hacking laws are broken, but in whacking they need not be broken ...
It is the worst when the Judiciary shows a blind eye to the actions of the Executive, and refuses to call judgement on the Legislative intention and Executive implementation of the law .... Then, it is possible to scare, if not ensnare, all the good people, whom the law was framed to protect to begin with ...
I am not saying that it will happen, but in the land where the Patriot Law can be expanded the way it has to non-terrorism related issues, anything is possible...
I might sound simplistic, but isn't this the road to socialism - Compensating all media when most of them deserve to die an unsung death?
This should be AC but WTF ....
Here is what I would like to get published in the next issue of Wired ...
The basic diffrence in our conception is that you want to convey as clearly as possible what needs to be conveyed as if it is being done to a machine, or a machine-like human. I assume the communication is between people who are looking for more than just unambiguous clear-cut instructions. Ambiguities do not have to be resolved in human communication. And things don't have to be made "lighter." They just have to be made as light as possible, but not lighter than that .... (with apoogies to e=mc2)
.. I don't. I believe the GUI is a move from the "lighter" characters to the "heavier" graphics - and people skinning their interfaces are making this even "heavier."
.. not text only ... if it were, people would be happy with ftp and telnet ... maybe you are happy in that world but I wasn't specifically speaking about you ..
I am assuming that people want to convey many more shades when they are communicating, and ambiguities should not be resolved if they don't have to be resolved. My comment was in context of communication between people and other people, and encompasses more things than just instructional.
Also, letters communicate sparingly and that is why they are used in programming. But there are a lot of people who prefer the GUI IDE even for programming because when info is spread in the XY plane is it more natural to grasp the underlying framework - as that is how we see the world. To insist that all that must be reduced to "lighter" characters is unreasonable.
There is a generation that still likes the command line, and thinks that the GUI is a waste
The world wide web is all about "images and text"
I do believe that we will some day move to a more pictorial language where the alphabets will be replaced by pics ... (no, we will not all be chinese then though chinese has 10-20,000 pictorial characters)
and just like we look at combinations of alphabets to grasp words, and combinations of words to grasp phrases, and combinations of phrases to grasp paras ... we will look at cluster of pics to grasp the articles ....
Looking with that analogy, 50 stock thumbs means that we could either look at it as 50 alphabets on that page, or if there is a little caption beneath the pic, then there are an equivalent of 50 words on that home page ....
- this is too few as it is the equivalent of a page with 50 words at the most
...
- this is too few as it means that each topic like Business, Sports,etc is created by stringing 6 words (pics) which does not even begin to capture a headline let alone a summary
....
I think the density of information could be increased here, and we could have many more pics. In addition if the pics are arranged according to some reasonable criteria, even more info can be conveyedIn purely intellectual proporty terms, there is validity in patenting the idea that helped evade .. something .. something. The reason is that there are many applications that can be derived from this concept, and currently the one that is being used as "proof-of-concept" is as a spam-filter evader.
.... So, I think is is wise for them to have patented it.
....
In time, as new applications are developed, AT&T would have a better hold on the foundations of this new market
And after all, who knows when the levers of power grate into the next set of positions i know, i know and spamming becomes the business to be in, AT&T might even be able to make a mint in the spam-invader-evader business
I think in essence the problem is similar to that which is being faced in designing "fool-proof" electronic-voting systems.
...
....
....
.... Just a thought for incentive to useful comments from /.'s ....
Each one of the steps in the electronic voting has an analogue to the problem of how to "tie" the computer to the user
Specifically:
1. How do you know that the intended voter really did make the selections and was actually the one interacting with the machine?
2. How do you know that the instructions of the intended voter were fairly transmitted ?
3. How do you make sure that the instructions that were transmitted were faithfully acted upon by the machine
4. How do you know the person who read the results from the machine faithfully read the intentions of the intended voter
So, any attempt to work at solutions on this problem, is also work in the direction of preserving democracy
Bounties, Bounties everywhere,
...
....
....
And I am loosing my Counties of how many there are.
Every Mountie must now be getting this idea,
that if they can't catch the Evilers Dead or Alive -
Make an Announcie of "X" Million Dollar Reward.
X is 25 for Osama, and 0.25 for MSBlatie,
10 for Saddamie, and 10 for his baby boys.
Some you will catchie and some will get away.
No Osama, but M$ might catchy MSBlastie,
No Saddam, but they got his progeny.
When will someone get the idea,
of Putting up X for the Lunactic,
or X for the Dubya who sammed the Iron Door shut,
or X for entry into the Pearly Gates
so that friendy turns on friendy,
and all Evilers become suiciders and deadenders
leaving rest of the worldie as a nice place,
when friends have turned on friendies,
and hacker on hackers,
and evil file sharers on eviler file sharers,
when Open Source Nigerian Scammers
have turned in their Princeton buddies
what is left of the world,
I hope I am not around to see
When I hosted some of my earlier sites, web hosting resellers were advocating Windows hosting. They charged more for it, and also most of the technical help they had was for Windows and IIS ...
... Finally one of the ladies confided ... "My techies are going nuts just keeping up with the patches after patches .. so please, go for Linux .... please .."
... .but I think very widespread ..
After the worm season of Microsoft, I actually had the same resellers begging me not to buy Windows hosting but go for Linux, even though it was cheaper (and hence their margins lower). Most of them were putting forward the reasoning that it was cheaper (but that was never a selling point earlier) and they said that there are so many free goodies available with it
It's anecdotal
I have always wondered if there was a business model - conceptually similar to Akamai speeding up the "last hop" delivery - where all the computation intensive files for 3D modelling etc could be sent, and the the end product shipped back.
... maybe a service where computation power, which is routinely available in most universities, can be made available to non-students may have a business value. They ship the files to the computation center which can then do the rendering and ship it back in a few minutes (rather than 24 hours) to the graphic artist ...
A lot of my friends doing 3D modeliing would do the stuff and then have to let the rendering take place for 24 plus hours
Of course the business will disappear if grid computing, or something based on the P2P infrastructure can be succesfully established, but till that time maybe there is a business model here.
Now that we are discussing suicide, and how we had a whole messed up definition of what the suicider-lemmings were doing, I wonder if we have a similarly messed up understanding of the suiciders ...
... but whatever ... basically the question that pops in my head is whether the operating definition of a suicide-bomber that is currently in vogue is comprehensive or not.
... or at some other level that is atleast higher than that of a boot in the face.
I know that POTUS has defined it in pretty much black and white, and the LUNATIC calls them the deadenders, the military calls them operatives
And the analogy with the lemmings is whether the use of a suicide-bomber as a strategic and assymetric weapon of war is something that may make sense when the analysis is done at the level of survival of not individuals or groups but at the level of cultures
The idea is not too far-fetched if you decide to model the consumer, or in my analogy the node of a network, as-if the node is a computer with the 5 parts,
.... and you are left with MEMORY & CPU.
.... and we are always flipping from one part of the duality to the other, and never fully reaching the other because along the way we find ourselves in the third state of the duality which makes it a trinity but it essentially at the higher level reveals itself as the duality ...
... but we are still left with the MEMORY.
... although we are using a black-box and perturbation method to model our MEMORY-center. In the larger picture the errors that are introduced by dropping the CPU-aspect, and the MEMORY-CPU aspect of the node embedded in a network, can overwhelm the hypothesis that are derived from the MEMORY modelling by black-box-perturbation, but that is all we really have to start with ....
.... meaning that no matter how small the probabilities of a certain behavior based on the studies of memories, there is a good chance that in the large network a group of exhibiting that behavior exists ...
... and no less a person than A.N. Whitehead said that "Civilization advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking about them. " So, I guess the more advanced we get, the more we will be suseptible to the fMRI .....
....
input,
output,
storage,
MEMORY &
CPU
Ignore the input, ouput, and the storage which are primarily determined by the initial conditions of the node
In MEMORY the SYMBOLS remain the same while we flow thru the symbol-space, and in CPU the symbol-space remains the same while the SYMBOLS flow thru the it... This is the essential duality that is at the core of the nature of reality - of timelessness and temporality; of static and dynamic; of data and methods; of intuition and logic
In this duality it is hard to determine the logic or the CPU aspect of the node, and it is hard to model the the third state that is the meta-state MEMORY-CPU
It is this memory that we are now able to model using the fMRI
The key aspect now is that though we can only probabilistically model the node, or consumer, in the network, the probabilities tend towards deterministic as the networks get larger and larger
Anyway, the point that I wanted to develop was that in adition to having a certain number of people whose behavior can be predicted by MEMORY, there is a lot of us whose behavior deliberately tends towards this automatic bypassing of CPU, i.e. thinking
just a thought
In the latest news, since the PMCA (Printed Millenium Copyright Act) has passed in the last few hours, the BIAA (Book-ing Industry Association of America) has started printing on books that "books printed in other regions of the world are not to be imported in the USA. First offence is punishable with a reprimand letter, and if the felony is repeated, the crime is punishable with 10 years in prison."
The guidelines for one relevant section invoking Non-Patriotic Book-ing Transactions in the drafting the PMCA had been lifted from the MPAA strategy of dividing the world into "regions" so that products were deliberately crippled to work in only one region out of many that had been drawn up by the MPAA. In addition, the redrawing of the printed-book regions drew upon the recent legislative successes in the re-districting of Texas, also called Xtreme GerryMandering.
In an other related development, the Patriot Act has been invoked to open and check all book packages coming into the US. Additionally, the Ashcroftian-Feds have started entering public libraries and private libraries (i.e. book collections in the homes or dorms) to enforce these laws. As they do not have to intimate the suspects before and after the act, most people are unaware that the feds have been rummaging thru their books. Some private diaries have been exposed, and a clique of people referring themselves as /.'s (WTF) have especially been targeted for subversive reading of "filtered" news that has been the special target of the POTUS.
It is the singular focus of the current Administration, and it seems to have percolated down the whole law enforcement system - to decide first what to do and then figure out how to Bend and Twist laws till they have a fig leaf of a defense .... As the Justice Department Spokeswoman put it in a different situation, but relevant to what is happening " Our policy is to use all legal tools available ... meaning, we will throw the book at you if we could just find something that .... We know what we want to do with your sorry a*** and if you give em a few moments I will find something the the law book that I can intrepret to justify what I have already decided to do ...
From NY Times article archived http://www.commondreams.org/headlines03/0603-10.ht m
This was a blunder that he made in 1982. Twenty one years later he is still around, smoking his fat cigar, and calling "Wolf Wolf" (aka "Boston Strangler, Boston Strangeler") again.
He survived then, he will survive again. He ate his words then, and he will eat his words again, of that I am confident. But while he can, he is going to make life hell for everyone, and enjoy the spectacle from a distance.
If these corporate types, aka fat cats, were interested in consistency, they wouldn't be fat - they would be roadkill. But God, how much I would love for Jack "The Boston Ripper" Valenti to be roadkill, just this one time ....
This is a very insightful comment because it reflects that Charter top-brass probably understands that the legal system is an essentially incomplete system.
If they are smart enough, and can raise the higher-level-than-legal-level issue of social good using the statutes provided by the legal system, they might be able to create an assertion in the legal system that talks about its own unprovability in court, in which case the court might - not fully comprehending the incompleteness of formal systems - look for the validity of the assertion in the social system, wherein they will discover that it is ridiculous for the RIAA to claim no legitimate uses of the P2P.
And Equally ridiculous for the RIAA to claim that by supressing all economic activity not under its control it has somehow raised the total level of economic activity. Reflecting upon how patently untrue the RIAA has been so far, may cause the courts to self-reflect upon their own behavior, in which case there may be a spark of intelligence ... upon which my sig will come alive. As my current sig is Die Die Metallica, Die Die RIAA, Die Die My Darling , its coming alive will cause the death of the RIAA, and Charter may never have to prove the assertions it made fully understanding the unprovability of its assertions ....
Sorry, if have been caught up in some strange loops. I was just rereading Hofstadter's GEB and could not help but ...
It could also be that MS is moving out of the business of pleasing the geek market and now aiming for lower pickings .... for example in parts of Europe Baywatch was the "coolest" show for the longest time ... burnt out bands end up touring Japan ... Madonna and Michael Jackson still dominate headlines in many parts of the world .... and so does Britney ...
Those are probably the parts that MS is trying to influence in its business of world domination. That is what they do every night - try to take over the world ... it's just that they world is bigger than geekdom now .....
"They show that, for the first time, our climate models can be run at resolutions capable of ...
I have always heard that the flapping of a butterfly here can cause a storm in China ....
Just wondering whether someday the resolution will be so good that out of the millions of butterflies flapping, they will be able to track down that culprit whose flapping caused the storm in china ...
because if they can do it, you won't find me posting to slashdot, but on the run trying to kill that damn butterfly before I am blamed for it all ... The TIA and CAPPS goons shoot horses, don't they ... or is it people that they shoot ...
Thanks for pointing out how to avoid these Trillian crashes ....
It happened to my laptop at work, and my home computer did the same. And because i have generally thought Yahoo! was less "commercial" than MS (i.e. no auto deleting your inbox .. no pain-in-the-**** things like "activation" etc etc etc) I never never suspected that it was the Yahoo autologin that was causing this trouble ...
But now I am back on IM using Trillina ... thanks ...
God, I just love slashdot for all these timely tips ...
I think this strategy of a "predictable" pricing is not going to work for software, esp. this late in the game of the battle of the Operating systems for desktops and severs.
In software, there are many factors that have to be considered before you buy it. And software is not individualistic like music, but has to work with the software of others in and out of your ecosystem. Therein lies the biggest hurdle for getting enough traction.
Simplistic pricing is just one factor to be considered in the evaluation. Sun is essentially betting that there is a segment of the market that is so perturbed by the M$ pricing that they will switch to Sun - even though the fact is that Sun may turn out to be more monopolistic that M$ if given a chance. Look at all the song and dance, and smoke and mirrors, Sun did when Java was young and had tremendous potential .....
My gut feeling is that people would see Superman McNealy for who he is .. just another closet Bill Gates.
I agree with you, and because of their installed base it would be possible for them to make encryption a default for the majority of the population. This is critical for generating a critical mass that is needed to be able to sustain encryption as a routine practice.
Trying to send encrypted files all of a sudden to a few people somehow seems to give the wrong impression, because it seems that you have something to hide. It is as if your communication stands out as a needle in the haystack, and someone using a "magnet" can just suck you off the system ....
But, if Yahoo, hotmail, etc started encrypting by default, then a huge number of emails, I believe enough for the critical mass, shall use encrytion. And so now your desire to send encrypted encrytion is no longer looked at with suspicion. You are now like hay in a hay stack and no magnet can suck you off the system ...
So, I believe, in the spirit of Standing Up against such obscenities as the Patriot Act, companies like Yahoo.com, M$ Hotmail.com, Mail.com, Verizonmail.com, Myrealbox.com, etc. should start provinding encryption by default.
It is the "right" thing to do.