handed out advice: avoid patent thickets. If an area of technology is covered by many patents held by various patent holders, just give up. All the patent holders will believe that their own one is the key patent that deserves the lions share of the royalties and you will never be able to complete the multiway patent negotiations on reasonable terms.
When the people with the money say "we are not investing in areas covered by patent thickets" that is exactly the phenomen of patents holding back technical progress.
However the original post mentions two patents, so that is not a thicket. Nevertheless the sole power that a patent grants is the power to prevent others from using the invention. Patent holders make their money two ways. First by playing hardball, pay the royalty we demand or do without the invention. Second by making the product themselves, refusing to let any-one else make it, and charging monopoly prices. MobyDisk is very confused about patents if he doubts that the companies held the patents to prevent other from practising the invention.
The economic question about patents is whether there is a public benefit to offset the undoubted cost of granting monopolies. The theory is that private companies can invest serious money of research that is unsuitable to be held as a trade secret because they can earn a return using the patent system.
It clearly didn't work out here, because the invention hasn't been practised. Understand the theoretical problem. If you invest money researching and developing wave energy machines and you get a patent on a half-solution to the problem, engineers will want to spend more money on research and development to complete the solution to the problem. If the half-solution is covered by a patent, the engineers are going to have serious trouble with their bankers. The bankers will realise that the holder of the patent on the first half of the solution has them by the balls. A patent on part of an invention tends to kill it, blocking research funding to bring the invention to completion.
If the petition had asked the prime minister to confine himself to city centre entry tolls with limited
geographical scope, and to forget about GPS, the petition would have exerted much more political pressure. Voters in big cities who are sick of being stuck in traffic jams and want something done could have got behind
the petition with enthusiasm because it would be saying "Don't waste public money on ambitious hi-tech, use that money on something small and practical".
Another better petition would have said "We ask the prime minister to realise that the hitech scheme will be very expensive and he would reduce traffic congestion for half the price by subsidising public transport".
You cannot oppose bad solutions to real problems just by saying "No" because you are not reaching out to those who want something done.
There is a problem of traffic congestion. Call it market failure because the price you pay in taxes is the same
whether you drive in busy places at peak times and get in each others way or not. Some kind of road pricing
might help. Or the politicians could knock down houses to widen roads. Or they could limit the total number of cars allowed in Britain. When the limit is reached, join the queue or buy second hand.
Given that there is a real problem how do you expect politicians to respond to the rejection of what they have already guessed is the least bad option. Shrug and sigh? Pick a worse option? Fail to act?
Signing a petition against software patents was much more promising. We already have copyright for software. There is not really a problem for software patents to solve, so asking politicians to reject them is worth the effort.
The core of the offence is that the poster is being paid to mouth other people's opinions. That is
miserable work, most people want to give voice to their own opinions. So they move on and talk in the
pub about their old job. It all comes out.
Also UK law says that there is no confidentially in iniquity. If the conduct is illegal it is automatically not
confidential, which makes it all the more likely to leak out.
I needed an Allen Key in a small size that I didn't have.
I took a nail and filed one end to make a hexagon of the correct size.
I bent it to the traditional L shape. Nails are "tough as nails" so it bent without breaking.
I attempted to undo the socket cap screw. The edges of my hexagon got squished. Nails are "hard as nails"?
Wood thinks so, but socket cap screws are unimpressed.
Plan B: file a hexagon on the end of a piece of "silver" steel. Heat to cherry red on gas stove. Quench. Bake at gas mark 9 for
twenty minutes to anneal. Use on socket cap screw. Success!
If "hard" is what you need, "hard" is what you have to get, "tough" will not unscrew it.
I was responding to the suggesting that the sample was so small that another sample could easily be the other way round:
onset at 71.4 years for bilingual and onset at 75.5 for monolingual. Putting it abstractly, I was responding to the question of
statistical significance.
I posted to encourage readers to take a cavalier attitude to statistical significance. Don't get hung up on difficult mathematics, t-test, F-test, etc.
Just code up a simple simulation and get a feel for the kind of variability you should expect to be inevitable due to random chance.
Two big reasons for being cavalier about statistical significance are:
Non-significance tells you sod-all. Perhaps the phenomena is real and important but your sample size is too small,
or perhaps there is nothing there at all.
Significance gets you nowhere on the all important question of causality
I'm painfully aware that one cannot deduce causality from correlation.
The deeper reason for being casual about statistical significance is that one needs to save ones mental energy for thinking about causality.
My guess would be that even if bilingualism came easily in childhood, it often requires effort to retain the less used language through adult life.
So life long bilingualism is likely to work reasonably well as a proxy for being healthy and vigorous: one is checking if persons have done something
that requires effort. Seeing that healthy and vigorous people have a later onset of Alzheimer's disease is unsurprising.
It would be much more interesting to compare life long bilingualism with those who have run a marathon after the age of 50. Then one might get some sense
of whether robust health is protective or whether there is something specific to mental exertion.
You quickly see that the average sticks pretty much between 74 and 76. The article is reporting 71.4 versus 75.5. Even without understanding statistics I can see that that didn't happen by pure chance, something is going on.
Code it in your own favourite language and see the kind of variability at issue with your own eyes/mind
Evil monster molests child and takes photographs. Then he sells the photographs to wannabe-evil sicko's who don't molest children
themselves but jerk off to kiddy porn.
Why do we punish the users of kiddy porn? The users are not molesting children. It is only the creators who are doing that. The reason
for punishing the users of kiddy porn is that we want to protect children and they are undermining our efforts by giving money to child molesters.
Paying money for kiddy porn gives the creators cash to move on, cover their tracks, and find new victims.
The punishment of users of kiddy porn is intended to turn up the heat on the creators/molesters by cutting off their source of funding, much like
using "money laundering" laws to obstruct funding of terrorists. If the law prohibits real child porn and permits computer generated child porn, and if the
consequence is that wannabe-evil sicko's spend their cash on photo-shopped adult porn and CGI instead of the real thing, then we have won that won that particular battle
and made life harder for child molesters.
Banning Computer-Generated Child Porn is an actively evil policy that defends the child molesters source of candy money from competition
that doesn't involve harming children.
There is another perspective, from the theory of bureaucratic infighting. If you want to undermine your organisations performance of function X, you
can widen the remit of the department responsible for X. This undermines it four ways.
Distracts management with a wider range of responsibilities
Spreads the budget over more activities
Makes the budget harder to justify because the remit has been diluted with less worthwhile activities
Creates a 'downhill' dynamic in which effort shifts to easier or less umpleasant areas
The current focus is on the protection of children. Widening that to include computer generated porn widens it to
include the investigation and prosecution of creators of pornography who have no access to children and are unable to harm them.
Such a loss of focus could almost have been designed to undermine child protection.
John Reid's idea of banning computer generated child porn has a Belgium spell to it, as though child molesters have friends in high places
who are deliberately doing a poor job of protecting children.
The interest in the article is that they have found a single sediment with both the K-T boundary marked by loss of marine plankton species and
debris from the impact at the same level. So they can look at date difference without needing absolute dates and without the errors possible in isotopic geochemistry.
In the 1950's Jazz and Swing were popular and many Jazz musicians made good money and saved very little because they thought that there was plenty more
to come. Then came the 60's and Rock and Roll. The second string Jazz musicians and swing bands lost their jobs, just when they needed the money to put in a pension plan.
Their records were not selling any more so looking to royalties to sustain them in old age was no longer realistic.
I've singled out Jazz because I heard a radio program in which elderly Jazz musicians reminisced about the good old days (the 50's) and giving up music
in the lean times (the 60's). Surely it is only a handful of big name artists in any genre who can expect the royalty checks to keep coming after ten or twenty years.
If copyright was cut back to 20 years some big names would not be quite so rich, but copyright is not bankable.
Ordinary musicians have to save some money from their early royalty cheques, because the cheques don't keep coming, no matter how long copyright lasts for.
I don't get why banks are trying to do money stuff with a domestic grade operating system.
I would expect to collect a CD ROM in person from the Bank. Then I would do my internet banking by booting my machine from
the Bank's CD ROM, connecting to my bank account with a client program that was on the CD and runs on the bare metal.
There is a general problem here. Any communication medium with a person on the receiving end is going
to end up being trashed by people unleasing advertising robots on it.
In the longer term there need to be laws designating communication channels as person-to-person with
criminal penalties for allowing robots to intrude.
...played the game ''obsessively'' for several months before he shot his father, stepmother and stepsister in July 2004.
GTA is notorious. If the kid was playing it obsessively, his parents must have seen the nature of the game. Their child was sinking deeper into
disturbed weirdness and they didn't care.
If you want to criticise a journalist's choice of words, you have to offer an alternative.
Since the article referred to a Digital Restriction being added to unrestricted material and poisoning further use, "infection" looks like a well chosen word.
A friend's 10 year old got the hang of it and two years later he is teaching himself Perl out of a book. Well
not all by himself, his father writes a lot of Perl code.
The family visited this year and I showed him how to write directly to the sound card to make funny noises. This might be
the modern equivalent of buying a child a drum:-)
Quoting from the Xlib Programming Manual by Adrian Nye
A protocol reply is sent from the server to Xlib in response to certain requests. Not all
requests are answered by replies --- only the ones that request infromation. Requests that
specify drawing,for example, do not generate replies. When Xlib receives a reply, it places
the requested data into the arguments or returned value of the Xlib routine that generated the
request. An Xlib routine that requires a reply is called a round-trip request. Round-trip
requests have to be minimized in clients becasue they lower perfomance when there are network delays.
The designers of the X protocol were aware that round-tripping would make the protocol perform poorly in the
presence of network delays and only put in the replies that are logically necessary.
I think there are two weak spots.
First, there is no provision for local echoing. You press a key, the event goes to the client,
the client says:draw a character. Now the events and the requests are all queued, so several key presses can be
in flight at the same time, but it is undesirable to have a round trip delay before a character appears in response to
a key press.
Second, it is tempting to knock together a crude client that responds to every event by redrawing its entire window.
This is easy to code, just update the clients internal state, clear the window, and call the GreatBigDisplayRoutine.
Much easier than working out what changes need to be made to the window and just doing that. It works OK locally, but generates lots
of network traffic. There is a case to be made that X11 is not at fault at all here. X servers are designed to support oodles of sub-windows, nested as
deep as you want. If you take advantage of this much of the client code is simple, an event goes to a little sub-window that can quite reasonably
be re-drawn in its entirety.
I've actually been studying (and writing about) CLX, which is
the native Common Lisp binding to the X protocol. The native C binding to the X protocol is called Xlib.
Notice that X11 is an old protocol, from the
bad old days when computers were small and slow, and Ethernet ran at 10 Megabits per second. It is reasonable efficient because it had
to be.
Writing for the plurality, Justice William Brennan reasoned that the First Amendment right to express ideas must be supported by an implied right to receive information and ideas.
As a parent, a tax payer, and a voter I want to know what is happening at school.
If I am unhappy about the tales that my child is bringing home from school,
I would naturally ask other parents what their children are saying about what is happening at school.
In the internet age I can also look at what other children are saying in their blogs. I know what I expect to see: age-appropriate humor, whining, angst, bad poetry, etc. As an adult I know how to read between the lines of what children are writing. If the children are complaining that the teachers make them learn things, that is good. If the children are complaining that the teachers are strict and punishing them for larking about when they are supposed to be studying that is good too.
Conversely, if the children are complaining that they are bored because the lessons are too easy, that is bad. If the children are complaining that bullying is on the increase because the teachers are not strict enough that is bad too. I expect something to be done. Obviously I do not mean that the school should suppress the children's blogs in order to conceal the problem from me.
As a parent, a tax payer, and a voter, it is unacceptably for government employees to be suppressing information that is useful to be me in assessing how good a job they are doing, and the constitution forbids them from doing so.
You need to think of the CPU as like an employee with a really bad passive-aggressive personality disorder. He does exactly what you ask him to, except that he always manages to find an interpretation of your instructions that frustrate your intentions.
When you get to the point that you realise that you have to sack him and hire somebody else, there is no way to get him to do the job right, you find out that he is the boss's son and you are stuck with him. You have to hire lots more staff to give him ever more detailed instructions, until there is no loop hole left and no way to screw up by doing what you say rather than what you mean.
Trouble with FreeBSD too. I installed Firefox painlessly using the package system, but it came without Java because of some licensing issue that I didn't understand. My response has been to ignore websites that depend on Java. It is not as though I have read all the non-Java websites on the web and now have spare time to piss about with Sun's license SNAFU:-)
The issue is the credibility of a page on the topic of website design. It is easy enough to say that a web page is a bit like an ink on paper page and to translate print layout ideas to the web by analogy. So there is no need to read other persons vague analogies.
The reason for reading somebody else's views on website design is the hope that they might have attempted to do the hard stuff, responding to the web as something new and thinking the principles of layout through from first principles. An obvious first principle is that font sizes should be set at the browsers end of the link not the server. How else are you to cater for the varied needs of many different readers?
A writer on website design who fails this basic test cannot expect readers to go to the trouble of using ctrl+ to read his pathetic drivel.
Take a look at the medical journal The Lancet. Its paper version is mailed all over the world and the publishers economise on mail costs by using small type on thin, high quality paper. Obviously one uses abbreviations to avoid wasting paper and incurring avoidable transport costs.
What are abbreviations doing on web pages? Literate adults tend to recognise whole words or even whole phrases. Decoding the abbreviations slows us down. Sometimes we don't recognise the abbreviation, which brings us to a halt. Other times abbreviations clash. I frequently get slowed down by CVS. How did a mention of the Concurrent Version System get into my non-geek mailing list. Oh! It is the American pharmacy chain. There are not enough Three Letter Acronyms to go round.
Many people believe that the spirit of the GNU project is that you should not charge money for distributing copies of software, or that you should charge as little as possible -- just enough to cover the cost.
Actually we encourage people who redistribute free software to charge as much as they wish or can. If this seems surprising to you, please read on.
The word ``free'' has two legitimate general meanings; it can refer either to freedom or to price. When we speak of ``free software'', we're talking about freedom, not price. (Think of ``free speech'', not ``free beer''.) Specifically, it means that a user is free to run the program, change the program, and redistribute the program with or without changes......
Contrast this with the copyright terms of this Buddhist website.
In their faq they explain that they do not use the GNU license because they do not wish to permit resale. They go into further detail, making it clear that their philosphy differs from that of the FSF because they are opposed to charging money for dharma texts. If you wish to redistribute their translations you must do so for free.
Stallman's philosophy stands in opposition to unbundling the various legal rights: Sell or don't sell. One or the other. Don't try to join the rentier class by selling a limited licence. Charge a fee for a service, like a doctor or a lawyer.
It is not that hard to grasp that Stallman encourages people to charge money for software. Other worldly Buddhist monks can reject the GNU GPL because it permits resale. I expect posters on slashdot to have at least this minimum grasp of the financial side of software licensing.
From what can be said by a review of the Technnical Documentation in the limited time that was available because of the deadline set by the Commission, what I have seen leads me to conclude that Microsoft did the best that could reasonably be expected by normal industry standards to provide the necessary information, as far as it is currently not publicly available, to enable third parties to implement work group servers that are interoperable in the broad sense defined by the Commission - that is, substitutable.
The standard by which Prof. Broy is judging Microsoft is the normal industry standard for the quality of information in these circumstances: A company makes two products that talk to each other using a protocol and the customer wishes to buy one product from the company and the other from a third party. That is to say, Professor Broy has answered affirmatively to the question "Did Microsofts efforts reach the level of being grudging and inadequate."
I do not see how Prof. Broy's report is going to help Microsoft in court. The Judge must have heard in evidence that computer software is often let down by poor documentation. Producing documentation is a cost and companies will skimp as much as the market place permits. He will expect to hear that in response to a court order the company made a special effort to produce documentation the way it is supposed to be done, as taught in academic courses on software engineering. The judge might conclude that normal industry standards are what the company would have done anyway and understand Prof. Broy's evidence as saying that Microsoft made no effort to comply with the court order.
There are two rulings at issue. First they were ordered to produce documentation. They attempted to comply. Second their documentation was ruled to be inadquate and they were fined. It is this second ruling that is being appealed.
The difficulties of producing the documentation speak about the harshness of the penalty. The harder it is to produce documentation, the more burdensome the penalty of being ordered to produce it. This is relevant to the first ruling and was presumably resolved in the appeals to the original 2004 ruling.
Now that Microsoft are experiencing difficulty complying with the first ruling they are asking the court to revisit the penalty. One can see how a court, hearing an appeal on the second ruling, might listen to evidence that new and unexpected difficulties had arisen in attempting to comply with the penalty. The court might be persuaded to revisit the penalty.
One the other hand, evidence that the likely burden imposed by the penalty was known at the time at which the penalty was imposed and was available to the appeals to the first ruling will dissuade the court from revisiting the issue in the appeal to the second ruling. The court is likely to say that the issue of the appropriateness of the penalty is already decided and concern itself solely with whether of not Microsoft has complied.
Slashdot Mirror
handed out advice: avoid patent thickets. If an area of technology is covered by many patents held by various patent holders, just give up. All the patent holders will believe that their own one is the key patent that deserves the lions share of the royalties and you will never be able to complete the multiway patent negotiations on reasonable terms. When the people with the money say "we are not investing in areas covered by patent thickets" that is exactly the phenomen of patents holding back technical progress.
However the original post mentions two patents, so that is not a thicket. Nevertheless the sole power that a patent grants is the power to prevent others from using the invention. Patent holders make their money two ways. First by playing hardball, pay the royalty we demand or do without the invention. Second by making the product themselves, refusing to let any-one else make it, and charging monopoly prices. MobyDisk is very confused about patents if he doubts that the companies held the patents to prevent other from practising the invention.
The economic question about patents is whether there is a public benefit to offset the undoubted cost of granting monopolies. The theory is that private companies can invest serious money of research that is unsuitable to be held as a trade secret because they can earn a return using the patent system.
It clearly didn't work out here, because the invention hasn't been practised. Understand the theoretical problem. If you invest money researching and developing wave energy machines and you get a patent on a half-solution to the problem, engineers will want to spend more money on research and development to complete the solution to the problem. If the half-solution is covered by a patent, the engineers are going to have serious trouble with their bankers. The bankers will realise that the holder of the patent on the first half of the solution has them by the balls. A patent on part of an invention tends to kill it, blocking research funding to bring the invention to completion.
If the petition had asked the prime minister to confine himself to city centre entry tolls with limited geographical scope, and to forget about GPS, the petition would have exerted much more political pressure. Voters in big cities who are sick of being stuck in traffic jams and want something done could have got behind the petition with enthusiasm because it would be saying "Don't waste public money on ambitious hi-tech, use that money on something small and practical".
Another better petition would have said "We ask the prime minister to realise that the hitech scheme will be very expensive and he would reduce traffic congestion for half the price by subsidising public transport".
You cannot oppose bad solutions to real problems just by saying "No" because you are not reaching out to those who want something done.
There is a problem of traffic congestion. Call it market failure because the price you pay in taxes is the same whether you drive in busy places at peak times and get in each others way or not. Some kind of road pricing might help. Or the politicians could knock down houses to widen roads. Or they could limit the total number of cars allowed in Britain. When the limit is reached, join the queue or buy second hand.
Given that there is a real problem how do you expect politicians to respond to the rejection of what they have already guessed is the least bad option. Shrug and sigh? Pick a worse option? Fail to act?
Signing a petition against software patents was much more promising. We already have copyright for software. There is not really a problem for software patents to solve, so asking politicians to reject them is worth the effort.
The core of the offence is that the poster is being paid to mouth other people's opinions. That is miserable work, most people want to give voice to their own opinions. So they move on and talk in the pub about their old job. It all comes out.
Also UK law says that there is no confidentially in iniquity. If the conduct is illegal it is automatically not confidential, which makes it all the more likely to leak out.
I needed an Allen Key in a small size that I didn't have.
I took a nail and filed one end to make a hexagon of the correct size.
I bent it to the traditional L shape. Nails are "tough as nails" so it bent without breaking.
I attempted to undo the socket cap screw. The edges of my hexagon got squished. Nails are "hard as nails"? Wood thinks so, but socket cap screws are unimpressed.
Plan B: file a hexagon on the end of a piece of "silver" steel. Heat to cherry red on gas stove. Quench. Bake at gas mark 9 for twenty minutes to anneal. Use on socket cap screw. Success!
If "hard" is what you need, "hard" is what you have to get, "tough" will not unscrew it.
I was responding to the suggesting that the sample was so small that another sample could easily be the other way round: onset at 71.4 years for bilingual and onset at 75.5 for monolingual. Putting it abstractly, I was responding to the question of statistical significance.
I posted to encourage readers to take a cavalier attitude to statistical significance. Don't get hung up on difficult mathematics, t-test, F-test, etc. Just code up a simple simulation and get a feel for the kind of variability you should expect to be inevitable due to random chance.
Two big reasons for being cavalier about statistical significance are:
I'm painfully aware that one cannot deduce causality from correlation. The deeper reason for being casual about statistical significance is that one needs to save ones mental energy for thinking about causality. My guess would be that even if bilingualism came easily in childhood, it often requires effort to retain the less used language through adult life. So life long bilingualism is likely to work reasonably well as a proxy for being healthy and vigorous: one is checking if persons have done something that requires effort. Seeing that healthy and vigorous people have a later onset of Alzheimer's disease is unsurprising.
It would be much more interesting to compare life long bilingualism with those who have run a marathon after the age of 50. Then one might get some sense of whether robust health is protective or whether there is something specific to mental exertion.
Here and here
The study had about equal numbers for monolingual and bilingual,
132 in total when then focussed on lzheimer's.
It is easy to code a simulation.
Making a guess that Alzheimers comes on between 65 and 85 we write
(defun onset ()
(+ 65 (random 21)))
Then we can simulate computing the average for 66 patients like this
(/ (reduce (function +)
(loop repeat 66 collect (onset)))
66.0)
You quickly see that the average sticks pretty much between 74 and 76.
The article is reporting 71.4 versus 75.5. Even without understanding
statistics I can see that that didn't happen by pure chance, something
is going on.
Code it in your own favourite language and see the kind of variability
at issue with your own eyes/mind
Evil monster molests child and takes photographs. Then he sells the photographs to wannabe-evil sicko's who don't molest children themselves but jerk off to kiddy porn.
Why do we punish the users of kiddy porn? The users are not molesting children. It is only the creators who are doing that. The reason for punishing the users of kiddy porn is that we want to protect children and they are undermining our efforts by giving money to child molesters. Paying money for kiddy porn gives the creators cash to move on, cover their tracks, and find new victims.
The punishment of users of kiddy porn is intended to turn up the heat on the creators/molesters by cutting off their source of funding, much like using "money laundering" laws to obstruct funding of terrorists. If the law prohibits real child porn and permits computer generated child porn, and if the consequence is that wannabe-evil sicko's spend their cash on photo-shopped adult porn and CGI instead of the real thing, then we have won that won that particular battle and made life harder for child molesters.
Banning Computer-Generated Child Porn is an actively evil policy that defends the child molesters source of candy money from competition that doesn't involve harming children.
There is another perspective, from the theory of bureaucratic infighting. If you want to undermine your organisations performance of function X, you can widen the remit of the department responsible for X. This undermines it four ways.
- Distracts management with a wider range of responsibilities
- Spreads the budget over more activities
- Makes the budget harder to justify because the remit has been diluted with less worthwhile activities
- Creates a 'downhill' dynamic in which effort shifts to easier or less umpleasant areas
The current focus is on the protection of children. Widening that to include computer generated porn widens it to include the investigation and prosecution of creators of pornography who have no access to children and are unable to harm them. Such a loss of focus could almost have been designed to undermine child protection.John Reid's idea of banning computer generated child porn has a Belgium spell to it, as though child molesters have friends in high places who are deliberately doing a poor job of protecting children.
The interest in the article is that they have found a single sediment with both the K-T boundary marked by loss of marine plankton species and debris from the impact at the same level. So they can look at date difference without needing absolute dates and without the errors possible in isotopic geochemistry.
In the 1950's Jazz and Swing were popular and many Jazz musicians made good money and saved very little because they thought that there was plenty more to come. Then came the 60's and Rock and Roll. The second string Jazz musicians and swing bands lost their jobs, just when they needed the money to put in a pension plan. Their records were not selling any more so looking to royalties to sustain them in old age was no longer realistic.
I've singled out Jazz because I heard a radio program in which elderly Jazz musicians reminisced about the good old days (the 50's) and giving up music in the lean times (the 60's). Surely it is only a handful of big name artists in any genre who can expect the royalty checks to keep coming after ten or twenty years.
If copyright was cut back to 20 years some big names would not be quite so rich, but copyright is not bankable. Ordinary musicians have to save some money from their early royalty cheques, because the cheques don't keep coming, no matter how long copyright lasts for.
I don't get why banks are trying to do money stuff with a domestic grade operating system.
I would expect to collect a CD ROM in person from the Bank. Then I would do my internet banking by booting my machine from the Bank's CD ROM, connecting to my bank account with a client program that was on the CD and runs on the bare metal.
There is a general problem here. Any communication medium with a person on the receiving end is going to end up being trashed by people unleasing advertising robots on it.
In the longer term there need to be laws designating communication channels as person-to-person with criminal penalties for allowing robots to intrude.
GTA is notorious. If the kid was playing it obsessively, his parents must have seen the nature of the game. Their child was sinking deeper into disturbed weirdness and they didn't care.
If you want to criticise a journalist's choice of words, you have to offer an alternative.
Since the article referred to a Digital Restriction being added to unrestricted material and poisoning further use, "infection" looks like a well chosen word.
A friend's 10 year old got the hang of it and two years later he is teaching himself Perl out of a book. Well not all by himself, his father writes a lot of Perl code.
The family visited this year and I showed him how to write directly to the sound card to make funny noises. This might be the modern equivalent of buying a child a drum :-)
Quoting from the Xlib Programming Manual by Adrian Nye
The designers of the X protocol were aware that round-tripping would make the protocol perform poorly in the presence of network delays and only put in the replies that are logically necessary.I think there are two weak spots.
First, there is no provision for local echoing. You press a key, the event goes to the client, the client says:draw a character. Now the events and the requests are all queued, so several key presses can be in flight at the same time, but it is undesirable to have a round trip delay before a character appears in response to a key press.
Second, it is tempting to knock together a crude client that responds to every event by redrawing its entire window. This is easy to code, just update the clients internal state, clear the window, and call the GreatBigDisplayRoutine. Much easier than working out what changes need to be made to the window and just doing that. It works OK locally, but generates lots of network traffic. There is a case to be made that X11 is not at fault at all here. X servers are designed to support oodles of sub-windows, nested as deep as you want. If you take advantage of this much of the client code is simple, an event goes to a little sub-window that can quite reasonably be re-drawn in its entirety.
I've actually been studying (and writing about) CLX, which is the native Common Lisp binding to the X protocol. The native C binding to the X protocol is called Xlib.
Notice that X11 is an old protocol, from the bad old days when computers were small and slow, and Ethernet ran at 10 Megabits per second. It is reasonable efficient because it had to be.
There is a right to receive information. In the Pico case
As a parent, a tax payer, and a voter I want to know what is happening at school. If I am unhappy about the tales that my child is bringing home from school, I would naturally ask other parents what their children are saying about what is happening at school.
In the internet age I can also look at what other children are saying in their blogs. I know what I expect to see: age-appropriate humor, whining, angst, bad poetry, etc. As an adult I know how to read between the lines of what children are writing. If the children are complaining that the teachers make them learn things, that is good. If the children are complaining that the teachers are strict and punishing them for larking about when they are supposed to be studying that is good too.
Conversely, if the children are complaining that they are bored because the lessons are too easy, that is bad. If the children are complaining that bullying is on the increase because the teachers are not strict enough that is bad too. I expect something to be done. Obviously I do not mean that the school should suppress the children's blogs in order to conceal the problem from me.
As a parent, a tax payer, and a voter, it is unacceptably for government employees to be suppressing information that is useful to be me in assessing how good a job they are doing, and the constitution forbids them from doing so.
You need to think of the CPU as like an employee with a really bad passive-aggressive personality disorder. He does exactly what you ask him to, except that he always manages to find an interpretation of your instructions that frustrate your intentions.
When you get to the point that you realise that you have to sack him and hire somebody else, there is no way to get him to do the job right, you find out that he is the boss's son and you are stuck with him. You have to hire lots more staff to give him ever more detailed instructions, until there is no loop hole left and no way to screw up by doing what you say rather than what you mean.
Trouble with FreeBSD too. I installed Firefox painlessly using the package system, but it came without Java because of some licensing issue that I didn't understand. My response has been to ignore websites that depend on Java. It is not as though I have read all the non-Java websites on the web and now have spare time to piss about with Sun's license SNAFU :-)
The issue is the credibility of a page on the topic of website design. It is easy enough to say that a web page is a bit like an ink on paper page and to translate print layout ideas to the web by analogy. So there is no need to read other persons vague analogies.
The reason for reading somebody else's views on website design is the hope that they might have attempted to do the hard stuff, responding to the web as something new and thinking the principles of layout through from first principles. An obvious first principle is that font sizes should be set at the browsers end of the link not the server. How else are you to cater for the varied needs of many different readers?
A writer on website design who fails this basic test cannot expect readers to go to the trouble of using ctrl+ to read his pathetic drivel.
Take a look at the medical journal The Lancet. Its paper version is mailed all over the world and the publishers economise on mail costs by using small type on thin, high quality paper. Obviously one uses abbreviations to avoid wasting paper and incurring avoidable transport costs.
What are abbreviations doing on web pages? Literate adults tend to recognise whole words or even whole phrases. Decoding the abbreviations slows us down. Sometimes we don't recognise the abbreviation, which brings us to a halt. Other times abbreviations clash. I frequently get slowed down by CVS. How did a mention of the Concurrent Version System get into my non-geek mailing list. Oh! It is the American pharmacy chain. There are not enough Three Letter Acronyms to go round.
Abbreviations are a total loss on webpages.
Richard Stallman encourages seeking payment for software.
Contrast this with the copyright terms of this Buddhist website. In their faq they explain that they do not use the GNU license because they do not wish to permit resale. They go into further detail, making it clear that their philosphy differs from that of the FSF because they are opposed to charging money for dharma texts. If you wish to redistribute their translations you must do so for free.Stallman's philosophy stands in opposition to unbundling the various legal rights: Sell or don't sell. One or the other. Don't try to join the rentier class by selling a limited licence. Charge a fee for a service, like a doctor or a lawyer.
It is not that hard to grasp that Stallman encourages people to charge money for software. Other worldly Buddhist monks can reject the GNU GPL because it permits resale. I expect posters on slashdot to have at least this minimum grasp of the financial side of software licensing.
The standard by which Prof. Broy is judging Microsoft is the normal industry standard for the quality of information in these circumstances: A company makes two products that talk to each other using a protocol and the customer wishes to buy one product from the company and the other from a third party. That is to say, Professor Broy has answered affirmatively to the question "Did Microsofts efforts reach the level of being grudging and inadequate."
I do not see how Prof. Broy's report is going to help Microsoft in court. The Judge must have heard in evidence that computer software is often let down by poor documentation. Producing documentation is a cost and companies will skimp as much as the market place permits. He will expect to hear that in response to a court order the company made a special effort to produce documentation the way it is supposed to be done, as taught in academic courses on software engineering. The judge might conclude that normal industry standards are what the company would have done anyway and understand Prof. Broy's evidence as saying that Microsoft made no effort to comply with the court order.
There are two rulings at issue. First they were ordered to produce documentation. They attempted to comply. Second their documentation was ruled to be inadquate and they were fined. It is this second ruling that is being appealed.
The difficulties of producing the documentation speak about the harshness of the penalty. The harder it is to produce documentation, the more burdensome the penalty of being ordered to produce it. This is relevant to the first ruling and was presumably resolved in the appeals to the original 2004 ruling.
Now that Microsoft are experiencing difficulty complying with the first ruling they are asking the court to revisit the penalty. One can see how a court, hearing an appeal on the second ruling, might listen to evidence that new and unexpected difficulties had arisen in attempting to comply with the penalty. The court might be persuaded to revisit the penalty.
One the other hand, evidence that the likely burden imposed by the penalty was known at the time at which the penalty was imposed and was available to the appeals to the first ruling will dissuade the court from revisiting the issue in the appeal to the second ruling. The court is likely to say that the issue of the appropriateness of the penalty is already decided and concern itself solely with whether of not Microsoft has complied.