but I would highly doubt that it would be something so lenient as to let people go running their mouths about everything that went on while they worked there
All of the information that the White House wanted redacted is already in the public sphere. If anyone was "running their mouths," it was administration officials. Please read this (note the citations for all of the redacted information, on the left of the page):
Indeed, the deleted portions of the original draft reveal no classified material. These passages go into aspects of American-Iranian relations during the Bush administration's first term that have been publicly discussed by Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice; former Secretary of State Colin Powell; former Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage; a former State Department policy planning director, Richard Haass; and a former special envoy to Afghanistan, James Dobbins.(emphasis mine)
These aspects have been extensively reported in the news media, and one of us, Mr. Leverett, has written about them in The Times and other publications with the explicit permission of the review board. We provided the following citations to the board to demonstrate that all of the material the White House objected to is already in the public domain. Unfortunately, to make sense of much of our Op-Ed article, readers will have to read the citations for themselves. (See links at left.)
In other words, the Times showed the White House that all of the information in the article was in the public domain already, yet the White House still wouldn't allow it to be published in its complete form--even after the CIA had already cleared the article. Why do you think this might be?
Also, please note, the government is not a corporation, so your analogies to corporate NDAs and corporate espionage are not relevant.
You know, there's a rumor going around that "Al" got elected as VP in 1992, not 1994, and was inaugurated as VP on January 20, 1993. If only there were a way to verify this... Maybe in the distant future we'll be able to look up these things from the comfort of our living room.
This isn't really relevant anyway, since (unbeknownst to you and your Internet research powers) he had served for many years in the Congress previous to his election as VP. It was in the Congress that he started pushing for Internet funding. He continued to be a champion of the Internet while VP. Please read about this in another new and exciting research source on the Internet, Wikipedia:
Now that the Internet is here, you should try using it sometime.
I am now going to flagellate myself for wasting some precious minutes of my life writing this post, and for wasting more time writing this sentence telling you this.
Table of Contents and sample chapter
on
In Search of Stupidity
·
· Score: 2, Informative
The current SpiderMonkey JavaScript engine (used in Firefox, etc.) will not be replaced, as it does more than just provide a virtual machine; rather the Tamarin code will be integrated into SpiderMonkey. On compilers, the current SpiderMonkey engine can convert JavaScript to byte code, but does not have the ability to convert byte code to native machine instructions; this is a major feature that Tamarin provides. I don't know enough to comment on relative code quality; I'll leave this to others who've actually had experience with both code bases.
MEXICO CITY -- One morning last July Alejandro Sanchez got a worried phone call from the branch manager at his bank.
There had been some unusual activity on his account.
"She asked if I had made some transfers," said Sanchez, 46. "She told me not to worry and she would call me back."
A few hours later somber bank officials showed up at his office to advise him that his company accounts, totaling almost $300,000, had been temporarily blocked for security reasons. Sanchez says he was assured it was all "a misunderstanding."
It wasn't until a week later that the bank told him he had been a victim of Internet fraud. All his money was gone.
But the bank still insisted he shouldn't worry. "They said it was being investigated and I would get my money back," said Sanchez, a father of three and the Mexico representative for a large North Carolina electrical engineering firm, Reliance Electric.
But almost a year later Sanchez hasn't seen a cent. And his bank -- Spanish-owned BBVA Bancomer and Latin America's second-largest financial institution -- says he won't get any.
Such is the fate, it seems, of Mexican victims of online bank fraud. Whereas banks in the United States and Europe guarantee the security of client accounts, in Mexico the rules are reversed.
"The banks simply deny any responsibility," said Enrique Arias, director of financial analysis for the National Commission for the Protection and Defense of Financial Service Users, CONDUSEF. "Unfortunately there is a lack of regulation and clients have little recourse."
You've got a point there. It took me a while to figure out how to write that "gibberish", since the syntax isn't exactly straightforward (as you noted). Thought maybe someone who doesn't have pf might find it useful, so they don't have to start from scratch like I did.
Something similar with iptables
on
FreeBSD 6.1 Released
·
· Score: 4, Informative
## throttles SSH connnection requests to 3/minute from same IP ## $RED_DEV is Internet-connected interface, CUSTOMFORWARD is the chain being processed
iptables -A CUSTOMFORWARD -i $RED_DEV -p tcp --destination-port 22 \ -m state --state NEW -m recent --set
iptables -A CUSTOMFORWARD -i $RED_DEV -p tcp --destination-port 22 \ -m state --state NEW -m recent --update --seconds 60 --hitcount 4 -j DROP
They show the time with one hand, as well as digitally on the face. The face also shows daytime and nighttime by shading in the face of the watch to indicate when the sun is down, depending on the city you're in. Also shows moonset/moonrise/moon phase. Take a look, it's easier to understand from the pictures on the site...
The "Cozmo" line seems to be the least expensive, at about $400, although there is a "Zulu" model on eBay right now for about $300.
Why get your news from the BBC when Microsoft released this information yesterday?
Probably for the same reason that I get most of my news about the White House from sources other than whitehouse.gov and Scott McClellan. From the first paragraph of the MS press release:
Microsoft Corp. today announced the product lineup of its upcoming Windows Vista(TM) operating system. Scheduled for release later this year, the Microsoft® Windows Vista product lineup will bring clarity to customers' digital world by helping them easily accomplish everyday tasks, instantly find what they want, enjoy the latest in entertainment, improve the safety of their personal information, stay connected at home or on the go, and help ensure PCs are up-to-date, more secure and running smoothly.
What a bunch of BS. Granted, the BBC story was very thin on details, and your link to the MS press release was quite helpful. But the idea of not getting your info "straight from the horse's mouth" is often to avoid the horse's spin. (Of course, other reports will often have spin of their own, so...)
You might be thinking of this story from last October...
Speaker of the House Starts Blogging Posted by CowboyNeal on Thu Oct 27, '05 06:48 PM from the grass-roots-politics dept. Bjimba writes "Denny Hastert, the Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives, has just started his own blog on the official speaker.gov site. I don't know if he'll keep up with it, but from reading his initial post, it seems clear that he's not employing ghostbloggers."
I completely agree with everything you said. The publishers certainly aren't doing this out of the goodness of their hearts... Thanks for the great post, really shows what's involved for the three parties (publisher, store, and student).
The one I am most familiar with is Wiley. They have a program called WileySelect that allows an instructor to create a custom textbook with only the chapters they will use. They have a demo you can check out. Of course, they don't let a student create one of these for themselves... "Your custom courseware product can be delivered to your students in print format with digital access, or as an online-only product with one-time personal printing rights. You can also bundle your printed product with a leading Wiley textbook."
Here's another one--Pearson Custom Publishing, which allows an instructor to create a custom textbook made up of pages of different texts. It looks like they are charging $6.00 plus $0.06/page, with a minumum order of 25 copies. So, I guess if you just needed 200 pages, that would be $18. Not bad.
Sen. Barack Obama (D-IL) is the junior senator from the same state as Hastert. He doesn't seem to feel the need to write at a 6th grade level. This post, "Tone, Truth, and the Democratic Party," was written for the crowd over at Daily Kos, and cross-posted on his own blog. The folks over at Daily Kos seemed to be up to the "challenge" of reading it; Obama's post generated over 800 comments.
I'm not saying that this is because the Kossacks are a "sophisticated" audience, like the New York Times or WSJ audience that you mention. It's just that they didn't seem to have any problem with it. Also, I'm not sure which style is ultimately better at getting one's message across to the people; Hastert's simple, direct style, or Obama's more sophisticated one. President Bush seems to have been very successful with a simple, direct style. Maybe, as you say, that is ultimately the best way to communicate with the "or'nary American".
I guess if people really don't want to read at more than a 6th grade level, Obama's got 'em covered with his podcast. If what you say is true, maybe political podcasts will become more and more common, since even a poor reader can just listen instead. Talk radio would be the example here...
Rep. Tom Tancredo (R-CO) has a blog that allows comments. I found that out while reading this Washington Post article posted on Sen. Barack Obama's (D-IL) site. According to the article, Tancredo is the only federal lawmaker with his own blog that accepts comments.
Even though a lot of lawmakers don't have their own blogs with comments, many will post at other blogs and receive comments there. Obama posted a diary about the Roberts nomination over at Daily Kos, and got over 800 responses. His followup diary got over 400 more.
MaGIC is a protocol introduced by Gibson (the guitar guys) to move audio/video over Cat 5 back in 1999. I don't know much about it, but I think it was designed precisely to address some of the concerns you mention, such as latency. It's also supposed to allow plug-and-play and some other features, to make interconnections easy. Supposedly. IANAM (I Am Not A Musician)
What you say is absolutely true. One thing I would mention, though, is that for the most part the email traveling to your GMail account is riding with a sea of other email, taking various routes. It is not always interesting to a listener along one of those routes, since they don't necessarily care about what you are saying in your email.
However, at a public hotspot, it is more likely that people *do* care about what you are saying in your email. Conferences are one example where people are using public wi-fi with many of their competitors within wireless earshot, so to speak. Using SSL to encrypt the last hop is quite useful in this case. This is why Google created the new Google VPN; reading your email with SSL is the same idea, with a less general usage.
Plextor Press Release, March 8, 2005 Plextor PVRs Now Support Linux "...Plextor is strongly committed to supporting the Open Source Software movement with free development tools that help speed the creation of next-generation Linux-based video software," said Dirk Peters, director of marketing, Plextor. "The release of this SDK was a direct response to requests from the user community for an easier way to work with Plextor ConvertX video capture devices on computers running Linux..."
"Plextor's new Linux SDK provides developers with a free GPL-based full-source driver to support all of the popular V4L2 applications," said, Tom Luax, vice president of sales, WISchip International. "The combination of low-cost MPEG4/DivX Video compression hardware and Linux OSS software is a great solution for anyone who wants to build a high-quality and low-cost personal video recorder for their PC..."
Yes, I realize this is for PVR stuff, not DVD burners, but one would think their strategy would be a bit broader than product-by-product. Maybe they think their PVR offerings need more help, while their DVD burners don't.
Is it just a coincidence Verizon is expanding its EV-DO in New York at the same time?
Obviously not, if you read the article in your own link.
"A lot has changed over the past two years in terms of wireless access," said Henson. "Everybody's trying to look for a business model around (Wi-Fi).... But the better business model in our mind is the EV-DO network."
Posted by timothy on Mon Jan 24, '05 01:49 AM from the thinking-ahead dept.
jarich writes "According to this news article, Google may be preparing to offer free Voice Over IP telephone service in the UK. This sounds related to a previous Slashdot article about Google starting to buy dark fiber. So what are they planning? A free service like Skype (computer to computer only) or more along the lines of Lingo or Vonage?"
Posted by michael on Thursday October 14, @08:25AM from the win-win-situation dept.
Raindance writes "RollingStone.com has a revealing article detailing how retail giant Wal-Mart is making loud noises about throwing its weight around in order to get significantly better bulk prices on CDs. Says one industry executive, 'This wasn't framed as a gentle negotiation, it's a line in the sand -- you don't do this, then the threat is [your product is dropped].' This is the first time a big player has attempted this sort of hardball move on the labels, and the labels may be forced to deal, as Wal-Mart sells 1 out of every 5 retail CDs. Monopoly one, meet monopoly two."
Telling quote from the linked Rolling Stone article:
Tensions are not as high now as they were last winter, but making sure Wal-Mart is happy remains one of the music industry's major priorities. That's because if Wal-Mart cut back on music, industry sales would suffer severely -- though Wal-Mart's shareholders would barely bat an eye. While Wal-Mart represents nearly twenty percent of major-label music sales, music represents only about two percent of Wal-Mart's total sales. "If they got out of selling music, it would mean nothing to them," says another label executive. "This keeps me awake at night."
So, it seems as though Wal-Mart is playing chicken with the music labels, betting the labels will blink first. I would suppose if they can do this with physical media, they can do it with downloads as well.
The "source code" in this case consists of information, facts, leads, investigations, opinions, arguments, etc. etc. All of these things are out in the open for anyone to read and critique, just as open source code is free for anyone to read and critique.
With open source software, the product is a program. With open source journalism, the product is a story. In both cases, the input to the development process is there for all to see. You don't have to rely on a source that won't let you see how their product is developed, whether that product is Microsoft Windows or the New York Times.
In the Gannon case, DailyKos is being used almost like a "Sourceforge" for journalism; an organizing site that acts as a repository for the output of the project. Leaders organize assignments, and create "diaries" that are used to organize facts uncovered so far. These leaders are not the people who run the site; they are just users who have stepped up and shown the ability to organize things, motivate people, and move things forward. Sound familiar?
I think it's clear that the parallels with open source software development are many. The people at DailyKos working on the Gannon case are not developing open source software, but they are using open source development processes.
I believe Markos is making the point that open source development processes are applicable to more than just software development; they work pretty well for journalism as well. "Bloggers and their opinions might be mildly interesting, but the ability to pool our efforts on issues that capture the collective imagination is what really gets me excited."
Maybe "v" is the version number (.1 for the beta)
on
Mapping Google Maps
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· Score: 1
From the article:
Each tile URL is of the following form:
http://mt.google.com/mt?v=.1&x={x tile index}&{y tile index}=2&zoom={zoom level} I'm not sure what the 'v' argument specifies, but it never seems to change.
Maybe "v" is the version number, which is why it never changes. Version.1 makes sense for a beta.
Slashdot Mirror
All of the information that the White House wanted redacted is already in the public sphere. If anyone was "running their mouths," it was administration officials. Please read this (note the citations for all of the redacted information, on the left of the page):
In other words, the Times showed the White House that all of the information in the article was in the public domain already, yet the White House still wouldn't allow it to be published in its complete form--even after the CIA had already cleared the article. Why do you think this might be?
Also, please note, the government is not a corporation, so your analogies to corporate NDAs and corporate espionage are not relevant.
You might try using the Internet to do some research now... I hear it is a lot easier now that this World Wide Web thing is built on top of it.
d
http://www.snopes.com/quotes/internet.asp
You know, there's a rumor going around that "Al" got elected as VP in 1992, not 1994, and was inaugurated as VP on January 20, 1993. If only there were a way to verify this... Maybe in the distant future we'll be able to look up these things from the comfort of our living room.
http://www.google.com/search?q=al+gore+inaugurate
This isn't really relevant anyway, since (unbeknownst to you and your Internet research powers) he had served for many years in the Congress previous to his election as VP. It was in the Congress that he started pushing for Internet funding. He continued to be a champion of the Internet while VP. Please read about this in another new and exciting research source on the Internet, Wikipedia:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Al_Gore#Gore_bill
Now that the Internet is here, you should try using it sometime.
I am now going to flagellate myself for wasting some precious minutes of my life writing this post, and for wasting more time writing this sentence telling you this.
From Frank Hecker, executive director of the Mozilla Foundation, at http://www.hecker.org/mozilla/adobe-mozilla-and-ta marin:
In Mexico, bankers may make fraud your problem
by DAVID ADAMS and GINA MANFREDO
St. Petersburg (Florida) Times, June 17, 2006
MEXICO CITY -- One morning last July Alejandro Sanchez got a worried phone call from the branch manager at his bank.
There had been some unusual activity on his account.
"She asked if I had made some transfers," said Sanchez, 46. "She told me not to worry and she would call me back."
A few hours later somber bank officials showed up at his office to advise him that his company accounts, totaling almost $300,000, had been temporarily blocked for security reasons. Sanchez says he was assured it was all "a misunderstanding."
It wasn't until a week later that the bank told him he had been a victim of Internet fraud. All his money was gone.
But the bank still insisted he shouldn't worry. "They said it was being investigated and I would get my money back," said Sanchez, a father of three and the Mexico representative for a large North Carolina electrical engineering firm, Reliance Electric.
But almost a year later Sanchez hasn't seen a cent. And his bank -- Spanish-owned BBVA Bancomer and Latin America's second-largest financial institution -- says he won't get any.
Such is the fate, it seems, of Mexican victims of online bank fraud. Whereas banks in the United States and Europe guarantee the security of client accounts, in Mexico the rules are reversed.
"The banks simply deny any responsibility," said Enrique Arias, director of financial analysis for the National Commission for the Protection and Defense of Financial Service Users, CONDUSEF. "Unfortunately there is a lack of regulation and clients have little recourse."
You've got a point there. It took me a while to figure out how to write that "gibberish", since the syntax isn't exactly straightforward (as you noted). Thought maybe someone who doesn't have pf might find it useful, so they don't have to start from scratch like I did.
## throttles SSH connnection requests to 3/minute from same IP
## $RED_DEV is Internet-connected interface, CUSTOMFORWARD is the chain being processed
iptables -A CUSTOMFORWARD -i $RED_DEV -p tcp --destination-port 22 \
-m state --state NEW -m recent --set
iptables -A CUSTOMFORWARD -i $RED_DEV -p tcp --destination-port 22 \
-m state --state NEW -m recent --update --seconds 60 --hitcount 4 -j DROP
This watch is not super cheap (starts at about $400), but it's not too expensive either considering what it does:
c h_specs.html
Yes watch (tech specs page)
http://www.yeswatch.com/wrist-watch/timekeeper/te
They show the time with one hand, as well as digitally on the face. The face also shows daytime and nighttime by shading in the face of the watch to indicate when the sun is down, depending on the city you're in. Also shows moonset/moonrise/moon phase. Take a look, it's easier to understand from the pictures on the site...
The "Cozmo" line seems to be the least expensive, at about $400, although there is a "Zulu" model on eBay right now for about $300.
Why get your news from the BBC when Microsoft released this information yesterday?
Probably for the same reason that I get most of my news about the White House from sources other than whitehouse.gov and Scott McClellan. From the first paragraph of the MS press release:
Microsoft Corp. today announced the product lineup of its upcoming Windows Vista(TM) operating system. Scheduled for release later this year, the Microsoft® Windows Vista product lineup will bring clarity to customers' digital world by helping them easily accomplish everyday tasks, instantly find what they want, enjoy the latest in entertainment, improve the safety of their personal information, stay connected at home or on the go, and help ensure PCs are up-to-date, more secure and running smoothly.
What a bunch of BS. Granted, the BBC story was very thin on details, and your link to the MS press release was quite helpful. But the idea of not getting your info "straight from the horse's mouth" is often to avoid the horse's spin. (Of course, other reports will often have spin of their own, so...)
http://www.saila.com/journalism/thirty.shtml
You might be thinking of this story from last October...
Speaker of the House Starts Blogging
Posted by CowboyNeal on Thu Oct 27, '05 06:48 PM
from the grass-roots-politics dept.
Bjimba writes "Denny Hastert, the Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives, has just started his own blog on the official speaker.gov site. I don't know if he'll keep up with it, but from reading his initial post, it seems clear that he's not employing ghostbloggers."
I completely agree with everything you said. The publishers certainly aren't doing this out of the goodness of their hearts... Thanks for the great post, really shows what's involved for the three parties (publisher, store, and student).
The one I am most familiar with is Wiley. They have a program called WileySelect that allows an instructor to create a custom textbook with only the chapters they will use. They have a demo you can check out. Of course, they don't let a student create one of these for themselves... "Your custom courseware product can be delivered to your students in print format with digital access, or as an online-only product with one-time personal printing rights. You can also bundle your printed product with a leading Wiley textbook."
Here's another one--Pearson Custom Publishing, which allows an instructor to create a custom textbook made up of pages of different texts. It looks like they are charging $6.00 plus $0.06/page, with a minumum order of 25 copies. So, I guess if you just needed 200 pages, that would be $18. Not bad.
There seem to be a bunch of others too...
Sen. Barack Obama (D-IL) is the junior senator from the same state as Hastert. He doesn't seem to feel the need to write at a 6th grade level. This post, "Tone, Truth, and the Democratic Party," was written for the crowd over at Daily Kos, and cross-posted on his own blog. The folks over at Daily Kos seemed to be up to the "challenge" of reading it; Obama's post generated over 800 comments.
I'm not saying that this is because the Kossacks are a "sophisticated" audience, like the New York Times or WSJ audience that you mention. It's just that they didn't seem to have any problem with it. Also, I'm not sure which style is ultimately better at getting one's message across to the people; Hastert's simple, direct style, or Obama's more sophisticated one. President Bush seems to have been very successful with a simple, direct style. Maybe, as you say, that is ultimately the best way to communicate with the "or'nary American".
I guess if people really don't want to read at more than a 6th grade level, Obama's got 'em covered with his podcast. If what you say is true, maybe political podcasts will become more and more common, since even a poor reader can just listen instead. Talk radio would be the example here...
Rep. Tom Tancredo (R-CO) has a blog that allows comments. I found that out while reading this Washington Post article posted on Sen. Barack Obama's (D-IL) site. According to the article, Tancredo is the only federal lawmaker with his own blog that accepts comments.
Even though a lot of lawmakers don't have their own blogs with comments, many will post at other blogs and receive comments there. Obama posted a diary about the Roberts nomination over at Daily Kos, and got over 800 responses. His followup diary got over 400 more.
A W E S O M E !
NATION WOWED BY TREMENDOUS HINDENBURG EXPLOSION
Gay Ball of Flame Warms Hearts Chilled by Depression
"Oh, the Luminosity!" Radio Announcer Says
MaGIC is a protocol introduced by Gibson (the guitar guys) to move audio/video over Cat 5 back in 1999. I don't know much about it, but I think it was designed precisely to address some of the concerns you mention, such as latency. It's also supposed to allow plug-and-play and some other features, to make interconnections easy. Supposedly. IANAM (I Am Not A Musician)
Gibson MaGIC
http://www.gibsonmagic.com/
What you say is absolutely true. One thing I would mention, though, is that for the most part the email traveling to your GMail account is riding with a sea of other email, taking various routes. It is not always interesting to a listener along one of those routes, since they don't necessarily care about what you are saying in your email.
However, at a public hotspot, it is more likely that people *do* care about what you are saying in your email. Conferences are one example where people are using public wi-fi with many of their competitors within wireless earshot, so to speak. Using SSL to encrypt the last hop is quite useful in this case. This is why Google created the new Google VPN; reading your email with SSL is the same idea, with a less general usage.
Frequent Slashdot readers no doubt remember recent articles on Fusion induced by sonic compression and more recently by pyroelectric effect.
This obviously excludes the editors.
As mentioned in this /. article, Plextor PVRs Now Support Linux
Plextor Press Release, March 8, 2005
Plextor PVRs Now Support Linux
"...Plextor is strongly committed to supporting the Open Source Software movement with free development tools that help speed the creation of next-generation Linux-based video software," said Dirk Peters, director of marketing, Plextor. "The release of this SDK was a direct response to requests from the user community for an easier way to work with Plextor ConvertX video capture devices on computers running Linux..."
"Plextor's new Linux SDK provides developers with a free GPL-based full-source driver to support all of the popular V4L2 applications," said, Tom Luax, vice president of sales, WISchip International. "The combination of low-cost MPEG4/DivX Video compression hardware and Linux OSS software is a great solution for anyone who wants to build a high-quality and low-cost personal video recorder for their PC..."
Yes, I realize this is for PVR stuff, not DVD burners, but one would think their strategy would be a bit broader than product-by-product. Maybe they think their PVR offerings need more help, while their DVD burners don't.
Is it just a coincidence Verizon is expanding its EV-DO in New York at the same time?
Obviously not, if you read the article in your own link.
"A lot has changed over the past two years in terms of wireless access," said Henson. "Everybody's trying to look for a business model around (Wi-Fi).... But the better business model in our mind is the EV-DO network."
Google Plans Free VoIP In the UK
Posted by timothy on Mon Jan 24, '05 01:49 AM
from the thinking-ahead dept.
jarich writes "According to this news article, Google may be preparing to offer free Voice Over IP telephone service in the UK. This sounds related to a previous Slashdot article about Google starting to buy dark fiber. So what are they planning? A free service like Skype (computer to computer only) or more along the lines of Lingo or Vonage?"
Wal-Mart Squeezing Record Labels to Cut CD Prices
Posted by michael on Thursday October 14, @08:25AM
from the win-win-situation dept.
Raindance writes "RollingStone.com has a revealing article detailing how retail giant Wal-Mart is making loud noises about throwing its weight around in order to get significantly better bulk prices on CDs. Says one industry executive, 'This wasn't framed as a gentle negotiation, it's a line in the sand -- you don't do this, then the threat is [your product is dropped].' This is the first time a big player has attempted this sort of hardball move on the labels, and the labels may be forced to deal, as Wal-Mart sells 1 out of every 5 retail CDs. Monopoly one, meet monopoly two."
Telling quote from the linked Rolling Stone article:
Tensions are not as high now as they were last winter, but making sure Wal-Mart is happy remains one of the music industry's major priorities. That's because if Wal-Mart cut back on music, industry sales would suffer severely -- though Wal-Mart's shareholders would barely bat an eye. While Wal-Mart represents nearly twenty percent of major-label music sales, music represents only about two percent of Wal-Mart's total sales. "If they got out of selling music, it would mean nothing to them," says another label executive. "This keeps me awake at night."
So, it seems as though Wal-Mart is playing chicken with the music labels, betting the labels will blink first. I would suppose if they can do this with physical media, they can do it with downloads as well.
The "source code" in this case consists of information, facts, leads, investigations, opinions, arguments, etc. etc. All of these things are out in the open for anyone to read and critique, just as open source code is free for anyone to read and critique.
With open source software, the product is a program. With open source journalism, the product is a story. In both cases, the input to the development process is there for all to see. You don't have to rely on a source that won't let you see how their product is developed, whether that product is Microsoft Windows or the New York Times.
In the Gannon case, DailyKos is being used almost like a "Sourceforge" for journalism; an organizing site that acts as a repository for the output of the project. Leaders organize assignments, and create "diaries" that are used to organize facts uncovered so far. These leaders are not the people who run the site; they are just users who have stepped up and shown the ability to organize things, motivate people, and move things forward. Sound familiar?
I think it's clear that the parallels with open source software development are many. The people at DailyKos working on the Gannon case are not developing open source software, but they are using open source development processes.
I believe Markos is making the point that open source development processes are applicable to more than just software development; they work pretty well for journalism as well. "Bloggers and their opinions might be mildly interesting, but the ability to pool our efforts on issues that capture the collective imagination is what really gets me excited."
From the article:
.1 makes sense for a beta.
Each tile URL is of the following form:
http://mt.google.com/mt?v=.1&x={x tile index}&{y tile index}=2&zoom={zoom level}
I'm not sure what the 'v' argument specifies, but it never seems to change.
Maybe "v" is the version number, which is why it never changes. Version