LCDs also take up less desktop space, have more screen real estate, and use less power. Sometimes, what you think of as the most important feature is not what others think of as important. Not everyone needs the better color reproduction of CRT monitors.
I have been looking for a good, easy to use front end to TeX for quite some time. I'd love to use one. It doesn't even need to do much. If it can do hierarchical document creation (outline-based, the one feature that as far as I can tell only Word has) and hierarchical styles I would be there.
I try every new TeX/LaTeX front end that comes out for the Mac. LyX is close, but isn't reliable (for me) and appears to be a one-document application.
It could be just publicity, but more likely Apple decided that there were getting to be too many leaks and decided to clamp down again. Yes, it may acknowledge that the current leak is true, but it probably also discourages future leaks.
Really, what are the leaks about? The breakout box and Tiger? So what? I'm sure that what this really means is that Apple has something so incredible ready to come out at WWDC that they had to make sure no one considers leaking it. Thus, the lawsuits over minor leaks now.
The rumor I heard is that there's going to be a tie-in with Zooey Deschanel's upcoming movie, a new sub-ethanet receiver shaped like an O'Reilly book and with only two words on the cover.
You're assuming that keeping people under the speed limit is the purpose of speed limits. It's always been cheap to do that, at least in areas I drive. Just have one minimum-wage driver per lane, driving abreast. A whole lot cheaper than police officers and it'll keep traffic backed up for miles.
Speeding violation income is an important part of state and city budgets around here. (SoSoCal)
The point is that everything is data and that a particular piece of data can be considered a program in the context of a particular interpreter. This is not a bastardization of the noun program, but an elegant description of it.:)
But you've made "program" be absolutely any thing which could be a file. If the act of displaying a file turns it into a program, every file is a program. By making even straight data files such as MP3 files into "programs", you've turned everything into a "program", making the word "program" for all practical purposes worthless.
You might as well just call everything "thing" and every person "Bruce".
If you're going to call an audio file a program, or a zipped text novel a program, then you've bastardized the noun "program" to the point that it means nothing. A newspaper opinion piece written on paper could be a "program" in that sense. It makes the word pointless.
Certainly you would not argue this point if it had been the last paragraph of a couple pages of op-ed journalism right?
Of course I would: as I stated previously, if the paragraph states an obvious thing in the standard way of stating that obvious thing, then it cannot be copyrighted.
I can't write "John Doe is a poor candidate. Do not vote for John Doe." and then forbid anyone else from writing that because I wrote it first. If someone wants to say that John Doe is a poor candidate, those are the words they're going to use. They're not copyrightable.
By publishing an opaque binary while keeping the source secret, you obtain both copyright protection and trade secret protection on the same work -- and perhaps patent protection as well. This is an abuse of the system, which was never intended to provide such double or triple coverage. This abuse destroys the careful balance that was established between society and creators, at the expense of the society that is then tasked with enforcing the imbalance!
Dammit, I modded his one up and then posted a reply to a different message here, losing mod point privileges on this discussion. Someone else hit this one, it is an extremely important point in my opinion. If the source code is not available, the purpose of copyright has been completely subverted. The whole point of copyright is that works be made public!
No, an MP3 file is not a program. That would be pretty dangerous if it were.
In general, though, instructions are not copyrightable. Neither are the normal way of saying things. Your paragraph about "Intellectual property laws are broken" is not copyrightable either (imo), because it's so short and so obvious that it is the way people will normally say it.
The question really is why that code you listed would be any *more* copyrightable than a short paragraph that is probably *not* copyrightable.
In general, *nothing* is copyrightable. The natural state of any new thing is that it is not copyrightable. Things become copyrightable because congress makes them copyrightable.
Instructions, and the text of instructions normally, are not copyrightable. You can't copyright a recipe, for example. You can't copyright game rules. You can't copyright chord progressions. You can copyright sheet music, because congress specifically made music copyrightable (in 1909, as I understand it).
If you meant to analogize larger works of computer instruction code to larger works of prose, the reason that the code should be less protected than the prose is that the former is pure instruction, and the latter is not.
The flash-based market is important for Apple because it is where most sales will eventually be. When the first iPod came out, it was, what, 5 GB for $400? Flash memory is rapidly approaching that size.
There will come a time, probably fairly soon, when flash memory will have enough storage for most people's portable music collection for reasonable prices.
When that happens, flash has some important advantages over hard drives besides size and weight (two things which Apple clearly also feels are important).
durability: flash memory should be much longer-lasting than compact hard drives
robustness: flash memory should be much more forgiving of the kind of shocks some of us put our personal devices through...
battery-time: flash memory-based players should last a lot longer on the same battery, or require a much smaller battery, than hard-drive-based players.
reliability: flash memory has no movable parts (at least, compared with hard drives)
Given two players of the same memory, one hard disk and one flash, the flash memory player will be longer lasting, more reliable, and more functional. The question is going to be the cost. Flash memory is getting a lot cheaper, and one or two gigabytes is no longer an unreasonable amount.
Yes, Apple currently has drives that go up to 60 GB, and as they move towards combining several media types (sound, pictures, video) those iPods will remain viable. But for people who just listen to music, flash memory is very close to being a viable alternative to hard drive storage on portables.
There you go again, switching contexts. You first used her statement as proof that, in your words, "PJ definitely doesn't seem happy about this". When in fact, as I quoted, PJ said "I'm crazy wild to read everything."
Just in case your reading comprehension truly is this poor, the second part of her statement, which you quote, is absolutely right even though it is not relevant to whether or not PJ will be happy to read the sealed documents: being sued by someone should not mean that you give up all privacy. Even if you are a corporation. And even if PJ would prefer to be able to read everything about the case.
Groklaw accused Maureen O'Gara of lying about the court proceedings a while back, so I guess now we'll find out what really happened.
More specifically, Pam Jones on Groklaw pointed out that what Maureen O'Gara said happened either (a) did not happen, or (b) happened behind a screen so that no one in the audience could see it, and that (c) the transcript was sealed, so that O'Gara could not have found out what was said from the transcript. Finally, (d) what O'Gara says happened contradicts other things that the audience did see.
This does not mean that O'Gara was necessarily wrong, but it does mean that either the other people in the audience weren't paying atention, or O'Gara was provided with information that she shouldn't have been provided with, or O'Gara simply made it up.
Your second paragraph is taken completely out of context. Jones is, and says so, happy about seeing more documents become unsealed:
Naturally, I am of two minds. One, I hope she wins and some things at least get unsealed, because I'm crazy wild to read everything
What Pam was laughing at was the "extra" information in the request that the judge is likely not to take very well. Such as telling the judge, in the request, what the significance of the case is.
Jerry
Groklaw appears to be slow, so here's relevant portions of the article you linked to:
=====
A Bit of the Blarney -- or Worse? -- About "Lost" Code
Saturday, October 23 2004 @ 03:38 PM EDT
It used to be funny pointing out mistakes in reporters' stories.
But when a reporter prints something that isn't just misinformed but hurtfully inaccurate, I think it's more serious. As you likely know, Maureen O'Gara printed a story about what allegedly was said in the last court hearing between IBM and SCO. That, in and of itself, is ethically problematic, to me, since the court ordered the transcript sealed. The source of her "information" would be whom, would you guess?
It wouldn't surprise me if IBM follows up on that aspect of the matter. I would.
Groklaw had eyewitnesses at the hearing. None of them reports seeing Ms. O'Gara there. Furthermore, none of them heard what she "reports" about IBM supposedly claiming not to be able to find code it was supposed to turn over. Let me repeat that. IBM never said anything like that, according to our eyewitnesses. I absolutely can tell you that the O'Gara story does not match what they heard. They also told me that the screen was placed in such a way that no one in the audience could see it. How then does Ms. O'Gara know what was shown on the screen?
Nor does it make any sense. For starters, IBM said at the hearing that they have produced all the code they have been ordered to produce to date. They have produced all released versions of AIX which they were told to turn over. That isn't even in dispute. The hearing was about whether IBM should now be required to produce more code, now that SCO couldn't find any infringing code in the millions of lines it already received. The judge hasn't decided that issue. Second, SCO's Third Amended Complaint has not yet, to my knowledge, been accepted by the court. Even if we posit that it will be, IBM has not yet even answered it, let alone been found in violation of anything having to do with it or even been accused of such.
I therefore conclude that Ms. O'Gara has been provided with some misinformation, or she has decided to spread a bit of the Blarney sua sponte.
I'm not sure I agree with you there. I can smudge a pencil mark off with my sweaty finger,
Fair enough. "Unless the detection device is a wad of rubber or a sweaty finger..."
Again, your system allows someone to mark both candidate A and candidate B, and doesn't alert them to this, and essentially throws their vote away as spoiled. I don't think it would be biased to warn the voter that their choice is
It doesn't "essentially" throw away their vote as spoiled. It literally does throw away their vote as spoiled. Their vote is spoiled. They couldn't follow the extraordinarily simple instructions not to vote for two candidates for the same office. I do not lament the loss of their vote. I worry that a system which does, makes our ballot system less useful.
What do your exection boards do when someone marks an X in BOTH spots? What if someone puts a slash in one, and a slash in the other? What if someone circles a candidate's name, and doesn't put an X? What if they put an X over the whole name? What if on the 10th counting, the light pencil marks on a ballot have been smudged off completely? What if they just put a tiny dot in the middle of the first candidate's box (like they rested the pencil there), then didn't mark anything else in either? I'm asking because this is the kind of nonsense that put Florida on the map 4 years ago.
Pencil marks don't smudge. Ink does. That's why we use pencils. Unless the detection device is a wad of rubber, the pencil marks will remain, if they were put there correctly.
Having watched people follow "idiot-proof" input methods, I don't think that having input methods that disallow invalid entries solves the problem. All it does is make the problem less easy to see, because now we have what looks like a valid ballot. An invalid ballot is an indication of some other problem, and forcing the voter to create a valid ballot only hides that problem.
It is impossible for an input method to disallow certain choices without also assisting the user in making a choice. That assistance will always bias towards some result.
The more I hear about the crazy things people do to their ballots, the more I think that having simple instructions which anyone who perceives can follow, but which are possible to not follow, is a good idea, or at least a better idea than the alternatives.
It's even worse: recipes cannot be copyrighted! Instructions are not able to copyrighted, and that includes recipes. If there's extra text around it that is not really the recipe, that descriptive text might be able to be copyrighted. But the instructions to make food a specific way? That cannot be copyrighted.
The same is true of games. You can copyright a certain presentation of, say, Monopoly. But you can't copyright the rules that describe how to play the game Monopoly. (Trademark, of course, may forbid you from using the name 'Monopoly' if you choose to sell your version of the rules. But neither trademark nor copyright can stop you from selling your version of the Monopoly rules under a different name.)
You can read this at the copyright office web site.
So, no, I never did understand how computer code could be copyrighted.
In general, things cannot be copyrighted unless copyright-ability has been specifically extended to that kind of thing. The natural state of things is assumed not to be able to be copyrighted. So, you can't copyright a cheesecake, or a chair, or a scarf, unless Congress specifically says that you can.
It's amazing, sometimes, how often people will say that news reports do a very poor job of reporting on the things the speaker knows about--and then the speaker will go ahead and trust news reports on things the speaker doesn't know about.
In an "Evaluating Information" tutorial that I used to teach several years ago, I wrote in the manual: === Newspapers are one of the worst places to go for source information. Few newspapers research any more than their biggest features. The rest are reproduced nearly verbatim from press releases, press wires, and, believe it or not, e-mail chain letters.
Even those feature articles which are researched by reporters are tainted by the newspaper's need for controversy. The official policy will usually mention "balance", but the way balance works usually makes evaluation of the information difficult. "Balance" means finding the same number of experts in opposition as are in support.
For example, suppose a newspaper decides to do a feature article about standing beneath doors in earthquakes. There are about a thousand experts in the field of earthquake survival, suppose, and two of them oppose standing beneath doorways. In the name of balance, most newspaper articles will present an interview with no more than two supporting experts to 'balance' the only two opposing experts they could find.
Suppose, now, that no earthquake survival experts oppose standing in doorways. In the interests of balance, the newspaper reporter will find a non-expert and treat this person as an expert, in order to balance the report. They might, for example, choose a doctor at a hospital. This doctor will claim that everyone who has presented themselves at the hospital for standing in a doorway has been injured. You might think this sounds silly, but the next time you're reading a newspaper or watching a news show in which a doctor is being interviewed for something other than their specialty, look at it in this perspective. Is the doctor basically saying that everyone who comes to the emergency room has an emergency? ===
This is a long-standing problem. It's become quite a bit more obvious now that it is easier to hear from experts who complain about bias--but even that can become a russian doll-like nest of "balance" acts.
Dashboard is an inevitable result of Apple providing the webkit for easy use of HTML, Javascript, and other web technologies. I doubt very much that it is a response to Konfabulator. The three similarities usually cited are:
1) it looks like a bunch of little apps 2) they're programmed in Javascript 3) they're called widgets
The third one is just silly. They're called widgets because they *are* widgets. Konfabulator did not invent the name.
The first one is something apple's been doing; they want developers to be able to create quick little things that enhance the user experience. For example, applescript studio, services, docklets, scriptmenu. Some of them disappear--I haven't seen a docklet for quite a while. But this is clearly a direction Apple has shown interest in from the beginning of Mac OS X.
That Dashboard widgets are programmed in Javascript appears to be a slight misstatement. Konfabulator does use Javascript; as I understand it, it uses the open source javascript renderer from Mozilla. While Dashboard's widgets are for the most part going to be programmed in Javascript, simply because it's the programming language that's available, they are really programmed in WebKit.
WebKit is the underlying web rendering engine that powers Safari; it is based on an open source rendering system and Apple makes its version available to all Mac OS X developers; so we've seen lots of webkit-enabled applications, such as HyperEdit (a text editor that automatically renders HTML as you type it) and web browsers (I believe OmniPage now uses WebKit). I haven't upgraded to Panther yet, but I understand that Apple's Mail program also uses webkit.
Apple has been trying to make their scripting languages easier to use to create quick and dirty apps. They've made AppleScript Studio for Applescript; in Tiger they are also coming out with Automator, which appears to also be for AppleScript, making it even easier to use.
Dashboard appears to be the same thing for WebKit: something that jumps it from being a way to enable other apps to display web pages; to something that lets web developers create apps.
It may well be that Apple was influenced by Konfabulator; but I think that something like Dashboard from Apple was inevitable from the moment Apple came out with webkit.
On Safari 1.0.3 on Jaguar it is sort of but not really affected. My moving the mouse around the link, I see either "Open http://www.microsoft.com/ in a new window" or "Open http://www.google.com/ in a new window" in the status bar.
But whichever one I see in the status bar, that's the one Safari goes to when I click.
"The parties acknowledge that certain goods and services within the Apple Computer Field of Use are capable of delivering content within the Apple Corps Field of Use. In such case, even though Apple Corps shall have the exclusive right to use or authorise others to use the Apple Corps Marks on or in connection with content within subsection 1.3(i) or (ii), Apple Computer shall have the exclusive right to use or authorise others to use the Apple Computer Marks on or in connection with goods or services within subsection 1.2 (such as software, hardware or broadcasting services) used to reproduce, run, play or otherwise deliver such content provided it shall not use or authorise others to use the Apple Computer Marks on or in connection with physical media delivering pre-recorded content within subsection 1.3(i) or (ii) (such as a compact disc of the Rolling Stones music)."
Since we don't see the rest of the contract, it could well be more clear than this that Apple Computer has violated the contract. But the above certainly look as though a reasonable person would conclude that the iTMS does not violate the contract.
>That's just silly. A person who has a 1000 downloaded >albums clearly loves music and would have VERY >PROBABLY bought at least a few of them if that was the >only way to get them.
a) the RIAA's studies count every single one of those 1,000 downloaded albums as a lost sale. This is clearly silly.
b) it is not clear that someone who downloads 1,000 albums "loves music". In my experience, they are "collectors" who want to be able to say that they have all this stuff but rarely listen to it.
Back when people were still trading VCDs of movies, someone brought me a two-CD copy of Star Wars: The Phantom Menace, and asked if I could make some copies for them. I didn't, but I did borrow their copy just because I wanted to see what the quality was like. I played it on my DVD player, and did what I always do when I buy new DVDs, I put the VCD in and played the first several minutes.
The quality was crap, but more interesting to me was that the second CD did not play after about three minutes! Further testing on computer VCD players and other DVD players was 100%: the second CD simply would not play anywhere after that same early point in the movie.
Somewhere in the chain of copiers, the copy had become corrupted, and nobody noticed--until I, someone who "clearly loves movies" thought to actually view the VCD. The collector who brought it to me, and possibly other collectors in the copying chain depending on when it became corrupted, had never done so.
The people I know who download music in the thousands of albums almost never listen to it, and if they somehow could no longer download those albums would simply, imo, find some other geeky thing to collect and not use.
(I, on the other hand, have bought hundreds of albums on CD precisely because CD is easily copied to computer where it becomes much easier to listen to and use.)
I never found it interesting; I found how people *used* it interesting. The numbers had no meaning, and people put meaning into them in various ways.
Those numbers were absolutely worthless in and of themselves; they had no units. Unless we know how Google compiled those numbers and what they measured, they measured nothing useful. Do they measure all files? Images too? Just searches? Repeat searches? Look-aheads? Agents? Other search engines trolling Google? Without knowing how they came to those percentages, all they were were numbers with no meaning beyond "numbers appearing in a chart."
I suspect that Google realized that if they left it up, they were going to have to start providing information about how they arrived at those numbers. And that was more work than it was worth. (Or less likely, would have provided competitors with information about how Google works.)
>First, understand that Real's music "format" is really >irrelevant. What they're doing is converting it into >something very similar to Apple's format.
"Very similar" is exactly where the problem lies. Back before the Internet made it easy to find APIs, I did a lot of hacking of file formats for things like the TRS-80, OS/9, and Commodore. It is very, very easy (for me, at least) to create a file that works with someone else's software, but which fails in the next upgrade--even though the software continues to read old files made by that software.
Even after the Internet, lack of documentation has sometimes made it easy for me to make the same mistakes. I'm looking at my reverse-created documentation on AppleEvent format that I wrote up several years ago, and seeing statements like "the second four bytes are always zero; I don't know why," "the fourth four characters have always been zero in my experience", "it looks like it might be paragraph delimited".
I was able to write osax that took advantage of my "knowledge" about that format; but I always knew that if I did find out what those bytes meant, it would have probably been preceded by "why isn't this working any more?" (And, under OS 9, "why is this script freezing my computer?")
Looking at what works, and then modeling your own format on what works, can be fun. But it does not guarantee that you've found the format that was *meant* to work. It could easily be just an accident, or an unused feature that has already been abandoned.
Yes, it is possible for Real to work around those sudden new pieces of inspiration when they happen. It will probably be easy. But this will still mean that an *Apple* update will have inadvertently resulted in people's music no longer playing correctly, and it will mean that some of those people will (a) blame Apple for doing it on purpose, and (b) have to go back to Real for a new version of their music.
When Apple adds new features that conflict with Real's version, or worse, completely redoes the underlying code and Real-sold songs no longer play, who do you think is going to get the blame? Even if it were not deliberate at all, Real and their customers will blame Apple for deliberately breaking Real's Harmony.
If Real's format survives, every update Apple does will have to be evaluated against the possibility of breaking Real's version weighed with the PR flack this would cause.
Slashdot Mirror
LCDs also take up less desktop space, have more screen real estate, and use less power. Sometimes, what you think of as the most important feature is not what others think of as important. Not everyone needs the better color reproduction of CRT monitors.
Jerry
I have been looking for a good, easy to use front end to TeX for quite some time. I'd love to use one. It doesn't even need to do much. If it can do hierarchical document creation (outline-based, the one feature that as far as I can tell only Word has) and hierarchical styles I would be there.
I try every new TeX/LaTeX front end that comes out for the Mac. LyX is close, but isn't reliable (for me) and appears to be a one-document application.
Jerry
One of its other names in the books is "nicotiana" herb.
Jerry
It could be just publicity, but more likely Apple decided that there were getting to be too many leaks and decided to clamp down again. Yes, it may acknowledge that the current leak is true, but it probably also discourages future leaks.
Really, what are the leaks about? The breakout box and Tiger? So what? I'm sure that what this really means is that Apple has something so incredible ready to come out at WWDC that they had to make sure no one considers leaking it. Thus, the lawsuits over minor leaks now.
The rumor I heard is that there's going to be a tie-in with Zooey Deschanel's upcoming movie, a new sub-ethanet receiver shaped like an O'Reilly book and with only two words on the cover.
Jerry
You're assuming that keeping people under the speed limit is the purpose of speed limits. It's always been cheap to do that, at least in areas I drive. Just have one minimum-wage driver per lane, driving abreast. A whole lot cheaper than police officers and it'll keep traffic backed up for miles.
Speeding violation income is an important part of state and city budgets around here. (SoSoCal)
Jerry
The point is that everything is data and that a particular piece of data can be considered a program in the context of a particular interpreter. This is not a bastardization of the noun program, but an elegant description of it. :)
But you've made "program" be absolutely any thing which could be a file. If the act of displaying a file turns it into a program, every file is a program. By making even straight data files such as MP3 files into "programs", you've turned everything into a "program", making the word "program" for all practical purposes worthless.
You might as well just call everything "thing" and every person "Bruce".
If you're going to call an audio file a program, or a zipped text novel a program, then you've bastardized the noun "program" to the point that it means nothing. A newspaper opinion piece written on paper could be a "program" in that sense. It makes the word pointless.
Certainly you would not argue this point if it had been the last paragraph of a couple pages of op-ed journalism right?
Of course I would: as I stated previously, if the paragraph states an obvious thing in the standard way of stating that obvious thing, then it cannot be copyrighted.
I can't write "John Doe is a poor candidate. Do not vote for John Doe." and then forbid anyone else from writing that because I wrote it first. If someone wants to say that John Doe is a poor candidate, those are the words they're going to use. They're not copyrightable.
JerryBy publishing an opaque binary while keeping the source secret, you obtain both copyright protection and trade secret protection on the same work -- and perhaps patent protection as well. This is an abuse of the system, which was never intended to provide such double or triple coverage. This abuse destroys the careful balance that was established between society and creators, at the expense of the society that is then tasked with enforcing the imbalance!
Dammit, I modded his one up and then posted a reply to a different message here, losing mod point privileges on this discussion. Someone else hit this one, it is an extremely important point in my opinion. If the source code is not available, the purpose of copyright has been completely subverted. The whole point of copyright is that works be made public!
No, an MP3 file is not a program. That would be pretty dangerous if it were.
In general, though, instructions are not copyrightable. Neither are the normal way of saying things. Your paragraph about "Intellectual property laws are broken" is not copyrightable either (imo), because it's so short and so obvious that it is the way people will normally say it.
The question really is why that code you listed would be any *more* copyrightable than a short paragraph that is probably *not* copyrightable.
In general, *nothing* is copyrightable. The natural state of any new thing is that it is not copyrightable. Things become copyrightable because congress makes them copyrightable.
Instructions, and the text of instructions normally, are not copyrightable. You can't copyright a recipe, for example. You can't copyright game rules. You can't copyright chord progressions. You can copyright sheet music, because congress specifically made music copyrightable (in 1909, as I understand it).
If you meant to analogize larger works of computer instruction code to larger works of prose, the reason that the code should be less protected than the prose is that the former is pure instruction, and the latter is not.
Jerry
The flash-based market is important for Apple because it is where most sales will eventually be. When the first iPod came out, it was, what, 5 GB for $400? Flash memory is rapidly approaching that size.
There will come a time, probably fairly soon, when flash memory will have enough storage for most people's portable music collection for reasonable prices.
When that happens, flash has some important advantages over hard drives besides size and weight (two things which Apple clearly also feels are important).
Given two players of the same memory, one hard disk and one flash, the flash memory player will be longer lasting, more reliable, and more functional. The question is going to be the cost. Flash memory is getting a lot cheaper, and one or two gigabytes is no longer an unreasonable amount.
Yes, Apple currently has drives that go up to 60 GB, and as they move towards combining several media types (sound, pictures, video) those iPods will remain viable. But for people who just listen to music, flash memory is very close to being a viable alternative to hard drive storage on portables.
JerryThere you go again, switching contexts. You first used her statement as proof that, in your words, "PJ definitely doesn't seem happy about this". When in fact, as I quoted, PJ said "I'm crazy wild to read everything."
Just in case your reading comprehension truly is this poor, the second part of her statement, which you quote, is absolutely right even though it is not relevant to whether or not PJ will be happy to read the sealed documents: being sued by someone should not mean that you give up all privacy. Even if you are a corporation. And even if PJ would prefer to be able to read everything about the case.
Jerry
Groklaw accused Maureen O'Gara of lying about the court proceedings a while back, so I guess now we'll find out what really happened.
More specifically, Pam Jones on Groklaw pointed out that what Maureen O'Gara said happened either (a) did not happen, or (b) happened behind a screen so that no one in the audience could see it, and that (c) the transcript was sealed, so that O'Gara could not have found out what was said from the transcript. Finally, (d) what O'Gara says happened contradicts other things that the audience did see.
This does not mean that O'Gara was necessarily wrong, but it does mean that either the other people in the audience weren't paying atention, or O'Gara was provided with information that she shouldn't have been provided with, or O'Gara simply made it up.
Your second paragraph is taken completely out of context. Jones is, and says so, happy about seeing more documents become unsealed:
What Pam was laughing at was the "extra" information in the request that the judge is likely not to take very well. Such as telling the judge, in the request, what the significance of the case is.
Jerry
Groklaw appears to be slow, so here's relevant portions of the article you linked to:
=====
A Bit of the Blarney -- or Worse? -- About "Lost" Code
Saturday, October 23 2004 @ 03:38 PM EDT
It used to be funny pointing out mistakes in reporters' stories.
But when a reporter prints something that isn't just misinformed but hurtfully inaccurate, I think it's more serious. As you likely know, Maureen O'Gara printed a story about what allegedly was said in the last court hearing between IBM and SCO. That, in and of itself, is ethically problematic, to me, since the court ordered the transcript sealed. The source of her "information" would be whom, would you guess?
It wouldn't surprise me if IBM follows up on that aspect of the matter. I would.
Groklaw had eyewitnesses at the hearing. None of them reports seeing Ms. O'Gara there. Furthermore, none of them heard what she "reports" about IBM supposedly claiming not to be able to find code it was supposed to turn over. Let me repeat that. IBM never said anything like that, according to our eyewitnesses. I absolutely can tell you that the O'Gara story does not match what they heard. They also told me that the screen was placed in such a way that no one in the audience could see it. How then does Ms. O'Gara know what was shown on the screen?
Nor does it make any sense. For starters, IBM said at the hearing that they have produced all the code they have been ordered to produce to date. They have produced all released versions of AIX which they were told to turn over. That isn't even in dispute. The hearing was about whether IBM should now be required to produce more code, now that SCO couldn't find any infringing code in the millions of lines it already received. The judge hasn't decided that issue. Second, SCO's Third Amended Complaint has not yet, to my knowledge, been accepted by the court. Even if we posit that it will be, IBM has not yet even answered it, let alone been found in violation of anything having to do with it or even been accused of such.
I therefore conclude that Ms. O'Gara has been provided with some misinformation, or she has decided to spread a bit of the Blarney sua sponte.
=====
Journalists don't just write what they think, they investigate, meet people and travel to visit their subject.
Unless, of course, you work for the New York Times... or the Washington Post... or the New Republic...
This traditional journalism thing sounds awfully useful. Maybe after we've built that windmill on the knoll, some space could be set aside for it?
JerryI'm not sure I agree with you there. I can smudge a pencil mark off with my sweaty finger,
Fair enough. "Unless the detection device is a wad of rubber or a sweaty finger..."
Again, your system allows someone to mark both candidate A and candidate B, and doesn't alert them to this, and essentially throws their vote away as spoiled. I don't think it would be biased to warn the voter that their choice is
It doesn't "essentially" throw away their vote as spoiled. It literally does throw away their vote as spoiled. Their vote is spoiled. They couldn't follow the extraordinarily simple instructions not to vote for two candidates for the same office. I do not lament the loss of their vote. I worry that a system which does, makes our ballot system less useful.
JerryI vote for "aint". I've recompiled my Python source accordingly.
(Okay, maybe tomorrow.)
Jerry
It's even worse: recipes cannot be copyrighted! Instructions are not able to copyrighted, and that includes recipes. If there's extra text around it that is not really the recipe, that descriptive text might be able to be copyrighted. But the instructions to make food a specific way? That cannot be copyrighted.
The same is true of games. You can copyright a certain presentation of, say, Monopoly. But you can't copyright the rules that describe how to play the game Monopoly. (Trademark, of course, may forbid you from using the name 'Monopoly' if you choose to sell your version of the rules. But neither trademark nor copyright can stop you from selling your version of the Monopoly rules under a different name.)
You can read this at the copyright office web site.
So, no, I never did understand how computer code could be copyrighted.
In general, things cannot be copyrighted unless copyright-ability has been specifically extended to that kind of thing. The natural state of things is assumed not to be able to be copyrighted. So, you can't copyright a cheesecake, or a chair, or a scarf, unless Congress specifically says that you can.
I rant further about this at http://www.hoboes.com/Mimsy/?ART=9.
Jerry
It's amazing, sometimes, how often people will say that news reports do a very poor job of reporting on the things the speaker knows about--and then the speaker will go ahead and trust news reports on things the speaker doesn't know about.
In an "Evaluating Information" tutorial that I used to teach several years ago, I wrote in the manual:
===
Newspapers are one of the worst places to go for source information. Few newspapers research any more than their biggest features. The rest are reproduced nearly verbatim from press releases, press wires, and, believe it or not, e-mail chain letters.
Even those feature articles which are researched by reporters are tainted by the newspaper's need for controversy. The official policy will usually mention "balance", but the way balance works usually makes evaluation of the information difficult. "Balance" means finding the same number of experts in opposition as are in support.
For example, suppose a newspaper decides to do a feature article about standing beneath doors in earthquakes. There are about a thousand experts in the field of earthquake survival, suppose, and two of them oppose standing beneath doorways. In the name of balance, most newspaper articles will present an interview with no more than two supporting experts to 'balance' the only two opposing experts they could find.
Suppose, now, that no earthquake survival experts oppose standing in doorways. In the interests of balance, the newspaper reporter will find a non-expert and treat this person as an expert, in order to balance the report. They might, for example, choose a doctor at a hospital. This doctor will claim that everyone who has presented themselves at the hospital for standing in a doorway has been injured. You might think this sounds silly, but the next time you're reading a newspaper or watching a news show in which a doctor is being interviewed for something other than their specialty, look at it in this perspective. Is the doctor basically saying that everyone who comes to the emergency room has an emergency?
===
This is a long-standing problem. It's become quite a bit more obvious now that it is easier to hear from experts who complain about bias--but even that can become a russian doll-like nest of "balance" acts.
Jerry
Dashboard is an inevitable result of Apple providing the webkit for easy use of HTML, Javascript, and other web technologies. I doubt very much that it is a response to Konfabulator. The three similarities usually cited are:
1) it looks like a bunch of little apps
2) they're programmed in Javascript
3) they're called widgets
The third one is just silly. They're called widgets because they *are* widgets. Konfabulator did not invent the name.
The first one is something apple's been doing; they want developers to be able to create quick little things that enhance the user experience. For example, applescript studio, services, docklets, scriptmenu. Some of them disappear--I haven't seen a docklet for quite a while. But this is clearly a direction Apple has shown interest in from the beginning of Mac OS X.
That Dashboard widgets are programmed in Javascript appears to be a slight misstatement. Konfabulator does use Javascript; as I understand it, it uses the open source javascript renderer from Mozilla. While Dashboard's widgets are for the most part going to be programmed in Javascript, simply because it's the programming language that's available, they are really programmed in WebKit.
WebKit is the underlying web rendering engine that powers Safari; it is based on an open source rendering system and Apple makes its version available to all Mac OS X developers; so we've seen lots of webkit-enabled applications, such as HyperEdit (a text editor that automatically renders HTML as you type it) and web browsers (I believe OmniPage now uses WebKit). I haven't upgraded to Panther yet, but I understand that Apple's Mail program also uses webkit.
Apple has been trying to make their scripting languages easier to use to create quick and dirty apps. They've made AppleScript Studio for Applescript; in Tiger they are also coming out with Automator, which appears to also be for AppleScript, making it even easier to use.
Dashboard appears to be the same thing for WebKit: something that jumps it from being a way to enable other apps to display web pages; to something that lets web developers create apps.
It may well be that Apple was influenced by Konfabulator; but I think that something like Dashboard from Apple was inevitable from the moment Apple came out with webkit.
Jerry
On Safari 1.0.3 on Jaguar it is sort of but not really affected. My moving the mouse around the link, I see either "Open http://www.microsoft.com/ in a new window" or "Open http://www.google.com/ in a new window" in the status bar.
But whichever one I see in the status bar, that's the one Safari goes to when I click.
Jerry
>That was the contract.
6 8/apple-v-apple.htm
Really? Show me the terms.
As far as I know, the contract is still secret. But the bits I've seen are a little more complex:
http://www.courtservice.gov.uk/judgmentsfiles/j24
"The parties acknowledge that certain goods and services within the Apple Computer Field of Use are capable of delivering content within the Apple Corps Field of Use. In such case, even though Apple Corps shall have the exclusive right to use or authorise others to use the Apple Corps Marks on or in connection with content within subsection 1.3(i) or (ii), Apple Computer shall have the exclusive right to use or authorise others to use the Apple Computer Marks on or in connection with goods or services within subsection 1.2 (such as software, hardware or broadcasting services) used to reproduce, run, play or otherwise deliver such content provided it shall not use or authorise others to use the Apple Computer Marks on or in connection with physical media delivering pre-recorded content within subsection 1.3(i) or (ii) (such as a compact disc of the Rolling Stones music)."
Since we don't see the rest of the contract, it could well be more clear than this that Apple Computer has violated the contract. But the above certainly look as though a reasonable person would conclude that the iTMS does not violate the contract.
(Link found at http://www.appleturns.com/)
>That's just silly. A person who has a 1000 downloaded
>albums clearly loves music and would have VERY
>PROBABLY bought at least a few of them if that was the
>only way to get them.
a) the RIAA's studies count every single one of those 1,000 downloaded albums as a lost sale. This is clearly silly.
b) it is not clear that someone who downloads 1,000 albums "loves music". In my experience, they are "collectors" who want to be able to say that they have all this stuff but rarely listen to it.
Back when people were still trading VCDs of movies, someone brought me a two-CD copy of Star Wars: The Phantom Menace, and asked if I could make some copies for them. I didn't, but I did borrow their copy just because I wanted to see what the quality was like. I played it on my DVD player, and did what I always do when I buy new DVDs, I put the VCD in and played the first several minutes.
The quality was crap, but more interesting to me was that the second CD did not play after about three minutes! Further testing on computer VCD players and other DVD players was 100%: the second CD simply would not play anywhere after that same early point in the movie.
Somewhere in the chain of copiers, the copy had become corrupted, and nobody noticed--until I, someone who "clearly loves movies" thought to actually view the VCD. The collector who brought it to me, and possibly other collectors in the copying chain depending on when it became corrupted, had never done so.
The people I know who download music in the thousands of albums almost never listen to it, and if they somehow could no longer download those albums would simply, imo, find some other geeky thing to collect and not use.
(I, on the other hand, have bought hundreds of albums on CD precisely because CD is easily copied to computer where it becomes much easier to listen to and use.)
Jerry
I never found it interesting; I found how people *used* it interesting. The numbers had no meaning, and people put meaning into them in various ways.
Those numbers were absolutely worthless in and of themselves; they had no units. Unless we know how Google compiled those numbers and what they measured, they measured nothing useful. Do they measure all files? Images too? Just searches? Repeat searches? Look-aheads? Agents? Other search engines trolling Google? Without knowing how they came to those percentages, all they were were numbers with no meaning beyond "numbers appearing in a chart."
I suspect that Google realized that if they left it up, they were going to have to start providing information about how they arrived at those numbers. And that was more work than it was worth. (Or less likely, would have provided competitors with information about how Google works.)
Jerry
>First, understand that Real's music "format" is really
>irrelevant. What they're doing is converting it into
>something very similar to Apple's format.
"Very similar" is exactly where the problem lies. Back before the Internet made it easy to find APIs, I did a lot of hacking of file formats for things like the TRS-80, OS/9, and Commodore. It is very, very easy (for me, at least) to create a file that works with someone else's software, but which fails in the next upgrade--even though the software continues to read old files made by that software.
Even after the Internet, lack of documentation has sometimes made it easy for me to make the same mistakes. I'm looking at my reverse-created documentation on AppleEvent format that I wrote up several years ago, and seeing statements like "the second four bytes are always zero; I don't know why," "the fourth four characters have always been zero in my experience", "it looks like it might be paragraph delimited".
I was able to write osax that took advantage of my "knowledge" about that format; but I always knew that if I did find out what those bytes meant, it would have probably been preceded by "why isn't this working any more?" (And, under OS 9, "why is this script freezing my computer?")
Looking at what works, and then modeling your own format on what works, can be fun. But it does not guarantee that you've found the format that was *meant* to work. It could easily be just an accident, or an unused feature that has already been abandoned.
Yes, it is possible for Real to work around those sudden new pieces of inspiration when they happen. It will probably be easy. But this will still mean that an *Apple* update will have inadvertently resulted in people's music no longer playing correctly, and it will mean that some of those people will (a) blame Apple for doing it on purpose, and (b) have to go back to Real for a new version of their music.
Jerry
When Apple adds new features that conflict with Real's version, or worse, completely redoes the underlying code and Real-sold songs no longer play, who do you think is going to get the blame? Even if it were not deliberate at all, Real and their customers will blame Apple for deliberately breaking Real's Harmony.
If Real's format survives, every update Apple does will have to be evaluated against the possibility of breaking Real's version weighed with the PR flack this would cause.
Jerry