Torpedoes can be dropped by airplanes. A famous example is the sinking of the Yamato, the flagship of the Japanese Navy. The primary goal of the first wave of the attack was to damage the Yamato's anti-aircraft guns.
Then the torpedo planes came in and sank it.
I won't claim expertise in clinical psychology, but from everything I have seen, psychological disorders are varied, with causes ranging from factors controllable by the patient to severe stress caused by family, job, or other social factors to environmental factors. In some cases then it may be important for the patient to assume responsibility, but in others there is likely not much he or she can do, at least not without chemical assistance. In any case, in disorders where it is hard to get the patient to realize that he or she even has the disorder, a blood test could be an important tool.
Isn't it a fact that for many disorders, including anxiety, depression, and schizophrenia, drug treatment has proven to be far more effective than psychotherapy?
By the way, are you really a professional psychologist? Care to explain why a psychologist would be posting garbage like
this?
I don't think that we can simply say that the market has decided against software vendors accepting liability. Part of the problem is that so much software comes from Microsoft, which has refused to assume liability for its software. A company that tried to distinguish itself by selling a product that competed with Microsoft at a higher price in return for better quality assurance and a real warranty would probably not survive, not because people didn't like less buggy software with a warranty bug because of Microsoft's near monopology power.
It seems to me that a better approach would be for insurance companies to sell third-party insurance. They could test the software themselves, to whatever degree of rigor they considered appropriate, for whatever kinds of bugs they and their customers considered important.
This would have several advantages. First, it would not favor rich software vendors over poor ones, commercial products over free software. The insurers would evaluate the software and would set their premiums in accordance with their evaluation. The fact that the producer lacked the ability to stand behind a warranty would be irrelvant. If the software was of high quality, the insurance company would decide that it was not taking on a large risk by insuring it.
Another advantage is that software users could negotiate appropriate amounts of insurance at appropriate rates with the insurance company. One problem with asking the software producer to stand behind it is that users may have a vast range of uses and bugs may have vastly different consequences for different users. If a program crashing just means you have to go to Kinkos to make a poster or a greeting card, the damage is minor. If a security flaw reveals your company's strategy to a competitor it may cost you millions of dollars. Customizing the warranty that the producer gives to the customer is impossible outside of very specialized niches, but this is the sort of thing that insurance companies do all the time.
I agree about Tcl - it is really under-rated. I tried it a couple years ago because I wanted to try out Tk. There was a time when I thought that it wasn't well suited to larger-scale projects, but after a while I realized that that wasn't true. It's really a lot like Lisp, but with about the right amount of syntactic sugar.
By Warner's logic, publishers should be paid everytime one of their books comes up in a search on Google, or Amazon.com, or even in a library catalog. That's ridiculous. The publishers aren't providing the service here. In fact, they're the ones who benefit - they're getting free advertising. This is more than trying to get the most profit from what you own - now they're demanding handouts from their benefactors and customers.
One of the things that I often want to do with an image is annotate it.
That usually means adding text and/or shapes, e.g. drawing a circle or a box around something and adding a label, maybe with an arrow. For this shape-drawing tools are very handy. You can do this in the GIMP, but its harder than it needs to be.
In which of the Indian languages of BC does nagali mean "cougar".
That isn't what cougars are called in the languages I know, but I imagine
you're talking about a different area, most likely Vancouver Island.
Sorry, but my radio argument is exactly on the mark. The EU and UN are not as far as anything I have seen demanding that the US hand over any equipment, nor are they demanding that the US hand over complete control of net within the US. Obviously the US would retain control of.gov and.us just as other countries do. What they are proposing is very much along the lines of the current international systems for control of other forms of communication including radio. Those systems have worked quite well for decades.
My point about my US citizenship (which by the way is the one I was born with) was that I am not an inveterate US-hater. The fact that I am also a Canadian citizen doesn't change that. That Canadians are foreigners (from the point of view of an American) is obvious and of no discernible relevance. That Canadians are (in general) socialists, as you assert, merely shows your ignorance. Canada has a few characteristics that Americans, and almost noone but Americans, regard as socialist, notably the health care system. That is one of the nice things about Canada. That a country with the resources of the US would leave a large part of its population without regular decent medical care is just plain indecent. In general, Canadians are not socialists. The party in power at the national level is the Liberal party. The New Democratic Party, which is the democratic socialist party in Canada, has only 19 out of 308 seats and has such little power as it has because the Liberals do not have a majority and need the NDP's support. Until recently the Liberals had formed the government by themselves. Before the Liberals, the Conservatives were in power. The NDP has never formed a national government.
At the provincial level, again, NDP governments have been rare.
The Bush Administration should stop acting like spoiled brats and facilitate the transition from ICANN to an international governing body modelled on the Universal Postal Union and the International Telecommunications Union. Sure, the ARPAnet was developed by the United States, as was a lot of the other technology that underlies the net. So what? The web as we know it was created by CERN,
the European Organization for Nuclear Research, whose members are: Austria, Belgium, Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Italy, The Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Portugal, the Slovak Republic, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland and the United Kingdom. CERN is located in Switzerland. Does that mean that CERN or the EU should control everything to do with WWW and HTML? Of course not. Radio was invented by Gugliemo Marconi, an Italian with an Irish mother. Does that mean that Italy or Ireland should control radio communications? Of course not.
The regulation and standardization of an international communications medium is obviously something that should be done by an international body. Who invented it is irrelevant. I am amazed not only at the Bush administration's position but by the numerous/.ers who advance the position that whoever invented it should control it without any justification for this bizarre assumption, not to mention the lack of attention to the major non-American contributions. American jingoism never ceases to amaze me. (And before someone whines about me being an anti-American foreigner, I am a US citizen. I am also a Canadian citizen.)
My main concern about shifting control of the net is censorship. On several occasions third world countries have made noises about wanting to control communications so that they could control information. They use various euphemisms, but what they want is the ability to censor. I am therefore very pleased that the current effort to internationalize control is being led by the EU. If the US wants to foster freedom and democracy throughout the world, the best thing it can do is to cooperate and make sure that control passes to a technically competant non-political organization like the UPU and ITU rather than to a politicized disaster like the Commission on Human Rights.
Go to a canoe/kayak store. They sell heavy duty plastic bags with multiple-fold water-tight seals in a variety of sizes. These are much tougher than baggies or ziplocs and better sealed. Naturally, they're also terrific to have on canoe trips.
I agree in principle that software vendors ought to stand behind their software, but in practice there are a lot of problems. One is that even rather ordinary pieces of software are much more complex than most physical products and therefore much more difficult to test properly. Another is that only major companies would have the financial resources to bear much of a liability burden.
It seems to me that we can require a certain minimum level of performance because it is easy enough to test whether a product
does its basic job. What is much harder to require is that a program never crash or that it have no security flaws.
For these kinds of problems, I wonder if insurance wouldn't be a better solution. For one thing, the insurer would bear the basic financial burden, not the developer, so it wouldn't be a problem for small companies and free software. For another, insurance companies know a lot more about dealing with this kind of thing. They know how to estimate risks, how to find out who's telling the truth about what happened, etc. It would also make clear in advance what kinds of bugs are of concern.
What I'm thinking of would work something like this. Say you're a small business for which a database is important. You would go to your insurance company and say: "We're going to run Access on a 686 under Windows XP. We will lose X thousand dollars per day every day our database is down more than one hour." The insurance company will figure the odds and for a suitable premium insure you against that risk. This would also help to promote quality software since it would be cheaper to get insurance for better software.
RTF may well qualify, assuming that there aren't any licensing
restrictions on it. However, RTF is pretty low level, so it may not be a candidate for that reason. The same is probably true of other formats, such as DVI.
This is the one point that Prendergast made that looked to me like it might have some validity, so I'm interested to hear from someone who knows about the accessibility issues. Am I right in thinking that there is nothing about the OpenDocument format per se that prevents software using it from meeting accessibility requirements? In that case, in view of the legal (and moral) imperatives for accessibility, this just means that developers need to put in a bit of work on improving accessibility. What are the deficiencies of existing open software, and what would it take to remedy them?
Uh, PDF is "crackable" because there is a very detailed published specification. You can download yourself a copy from this site. The latest version is here.
Adobe owns the trademark, meaning that nobody can call something that deviates from Adobe's spec PDF, but its just as open as the Open Document format. There are no secrets about PDF (though it does take some work to grok the complex 1200 page spec) and no license or royalties are necessary to use it. Prendergast's claim that PDF is not open is nonsense. It is open in all ways that are important.
Microsoft Word format is both proprietary and an actual secret. There isn't a published spec. Furthermore, it is very complicated and changes frequently. We know that it is "crackable" because people have successfully reverse engineered it sufficiently to make MS Word documents readable in programs such as OpenOffice.org Writer, but the fact that talented reverse engineers can't get it quite right shows that it isn't easy.
The comparative method as applied in Indo-European has been shown to work quite nicely for non-European languages. The state of work on the Algonquian languages
(such as Massachusett, Cree, Ojibwe, Blackfoot, Arapaho, Micmac, Western and Eastern Abenaki) is comparable to that of Indo-European, as is that of Finno-Ugric (Hungarian, Finnish, Estonian, Mordvin, etc.), to take just two examples.
That Nature article is badly misleading in claiming that traditional historical linguistic methods are based on vocabulary and that it is an innovation to use grammar. It is true that amateurs' ideas about linguistic relationship are based almost entirely on vocabulary, but that isn't true of what professional historical linguists do.
To begin with, there are two different problems to be addressed. The first is, given a bunch of languages, are they related at all, where by "related", we mean "descended from a common ancestor". The second problem is, given that a bunch of languages are related, HOW are they related, that is, what is the family tree, in what order did they separate?
To determine whether languages are related, we look at "similarities". I put this in scare quotes because the relevant sorts of "similarities" are more accurately described as congruences, that is, systematic relationships between languages that may not necessarily be "similar" in the usual sense. For example, English and Armenian are distantly related members of the Indo-European language family. Proto-Indo-European *dw appears in English as/t/, as in "two", while in Armenian it appears as/erk/
as in/erku/ "two". Proto-Indo-European *dw -> Armenian erk is a regular sound change in that it happens in all of the attested cases in which that sequence of sounds is found. It is almost certainly the result of a series of less peculiar changes of which the intermediate stages happen not to be attested. The point is that this kind of systematic relationship is evidence of historical relationship between languages but is not a similarity in the usual sense.
Given some similarities or congruences between languages, the first question that arises is whether they might be due to chance. It is easy to find examples. For example, the Korean word for "language" is/mal/, as is the Icelandic word. There is no other reason to think that Korean and Icelandic are related, so this is written off as a coincidence. Amateurs tend not to realize how high the probability is of chance resemblences - there is a large crank literature in which people list words that they consider similar in sound and meaning in two languages and offer this as evidence of relationship.
One reason that historical linguists look for regular sound changes like Proto-Indo-European *dw -> Armenian erk, or less exotic, Proto-Indo-European *p -> English f (e.g. English "father", Latin "pater", Sanskrit "pitar") is that regular sound changes, which are reflected in regular sound correspondences among the daughter languages, greatly reduce the number of degrees of freedom and therefore provide evidence that the similarities observed are not merely coincidences.
A first point, then, is that even to the extent that historical linguists rely on vocabulary for establishing relationships, what they rely on are the regular sound correspondances, not raw similarities in words.
Now, given that we have reason to believe that there are similarities between two languages that are unlikely to be due to chance, we still have to determine their origin.One possibility is that they are due to common descent,in which case we have evidence of a genetic relationship. The alternative is that the similarities are due to diffusion. Diffusion can consist of outright borrowing, e.g. English acquiring karate from Japanese, or it can be less direct, e.g. Amharic and Tigrinya shifting away from the old Semitic verb-initial word order to verb-final word order under the influence of the neighboring languages in Ethiopia and Eriterea.
The problem is, how can we tell whether a given similarity is due to genetic relationship or to diffusion?
The answer is, sometimes we can, but often it is hard, maybe even
impossible. If you have multiple sets of regular sound correspondances, at most one of them can be genetic. The others must reflect borrowing. If the vocabulary that show
I'm surprised that nobody seems to have mentioned that one reason that MS Windows is so poorly modularized is that Microsoft's marketing strategy explicitly requires spaghetti code. In order to justify bundling everything but the kitchen sink with the OS, they have to integrate things that don't need to be, and shouldn't be, integrated.
I would be surprised if people who actually are employed by MS itself don't have access to all the code. They may not have check-in rights, but they should get viewing rights, because there is no credible (legal, management, or technical) reason to prohibit them from doing so.
I wouldn't be so sure. Companies vary quite a lot in how open they are even with their own employees. I'll give you an example from my own experience. Once upon a time, when the Microvax had just come out, a DEC salesman gave me a copy of the architecture manual. That was typical of DEC, who were beloved of techies for their willingness to provide information. One day a senior research staff member from Xerox PARC was in my office and noticed the Microvax architecture manual on my desk. He commented that not only would Xerox not give such a manual to a customer, he himself could not get access to the equivalent manual for a Xerox machine without demonstrating need-to-know.
There are presumably any number of/.-ers who work or have worked for Microsoft and actually know the answer to this. Maybe they'll tell us.
For audio, MP4 would seem the best choice - less loss of data, but more likely to be readable in the far future than Ogg Vorbis (which is a shame) or AIFF (yay! AIFF's gonna die!)
It would be better not to use lossy compression. Either use uncompressed linear PCM data with a nice, simple file format (e.g. snd, or if you must use WAVE, the minimal version) or if compression is necessary, use a lossless compression method like FLAC.
The First Amendment applies in the first instance to the federal government ("Congress shall make no law...") and by virtue of the 14th Amendment, to the states. It does not apply to private parties. Its only relevance to private parties is that contracts contrary to public policy are not enforceable, and the First Amendment is one piece of evidence bearing on public policy regarding freedom of speech. In fairly extreme cases, you can expect a court to void a contract on public policy freedom of speech grounds, but it has to be something really extreme, such as an employment contract forbidding the employee to speak about topics having nothing whatever to do with the company. It is very clear that contractual restrictions on speech, such as NDAs, are considered valid by the courts.
In the Network Associates case, the Attorney General of New York (Eliot Spitzer, running for Governor), sued Network Associates for fraud and deception. He argued that the specific wording of the restriction on reviews could falsely lead the consumer to believe that the restriction was not imposed by Network Associates but by state or federal law.
He also argued that because the clause was in some documents and not others (see the opinion if you want the details), it was not endorceable as a matter of contract law, and that for Network Associates to represent that it was constituted a deceptive practice. The court accepted these arguments. The First Amendment was not the basis for the ruling.
I've used ET Webhosting for several sites, both for hosting and domain registration, and have no complaints. They send notification of impending expiration well in advance.
If I had written such a poorly argued piece I wouldn't want to put my name to it, much less give my professional credentials. Take the argument about innovation. It's based on a single example! Yes, Linux is not particularly innovative. It originated as a clone, so of course it wasn't innovative. Insofar as open source attempts to replace proprietary software, there has to be a good deal of cloning. That doesn't mean that open source software is intrinsically non-innovative, just that there has been a lot of catching up to do.
Even so, software intended in the first instance to clone proprietary software has often been innovative. Many examples are to be found in the GNU project. GNU "clones" of standard Unix tools are often considered to be superior to the originals. Not only is the implementation superior (typically in having fewer bugs and fewer arbitrary limitations), but they often extend the capabilities of the original tool.
The other place in which innovation is readily seen is in areas in which there is little or no cloning activity because there is little or no proprietary software to catch up to. In my own field of linguistics, for example, there isn't a lot of proprietary software because there isn't much of a market for it. Linguists can't afford expensive software. The more interesting linguistic software that has been coming along is mostly free software. For example, the most advanced database for annotated text is emdros. It isn't a clone of anything. In phonetics the acoustic analysis program of choice currently is probably Praat.
It compares favorably to commercial products.
(Phonetics software is a bit different from linguistics in general in that it overlaps to a considerable extent with software for use in areas like speech pathology, where there is money to be made.) As a third example, I'll cite my own program redet, which is a regular expression search tool. It has a few features of particular interest to linguists, such as widgets for entering the International Phonetic Alphabet and the ability to intersect user-defined named character classes (which enables matching over feature matrices), but in most respects it is a regular expression tool of the same sort that programmers and various other non-linguists use. There are a number of similar free tools and at least one proprietary commercial product. However you may judge it in comparison to the others, it is unquestionably not a clone. Among its innovative features is the fact that it determines the properties of the regular expression engine that it uses empirically, by running a set of tests.
Basing a sweeping generalization on a single example is a poor practice in general, but in this case it is especially bad because Linux is an atypical example. Much open source software is innovative, and much proprietary software is not.
Up to a point I see this: you don't want to issue patches that screw up something else, possibly even worse, and things do interact in sometimes unexpected ways. But, if MS really has to do six months worth of testing to make sure that a patch doesn't do more harm than good, isn't that damning evidence of horrible software engineering? It means that their software is very poorly modularized. Of course, there's other evidence of exactly that being the case.
Slashdot Mirror
Torpedoes can be dropped by airplanes. A famous example is the sinking of the Yamato, the flagship of the Japanese Navy. The primary goal of the first wave of the attack was to damage the Yamato's anti-aircraft guns. Then the torpedo planes came in and sank it.
I won't claim expertise in clinical psychology, but from everything I have seen, psychological disorders are varied, with causes ranging from factors controllable by the patient to severe stress caused by family, job, or other social factors to environmental factors. In some cases then it may be important for the patient to assume responsibility, but in others there is likely not much he or she can do, at least not without chemical assistance. In any case, in disorders where it is hard to get the patient to realize that he or she even has the disorder, a blood test could be an important tool.
Isn't it a fact that for many disorders, including anxiety, depression, and schizophrenia, drug treatment has proven to be far more effective than psychotherapy?
By the way, are you really a professional psychologist? Care to explain why a psychologist would be posting garbage like this?
I don't think that we can simply say that the market has decided against software vendors accepting liability. Part of the problem is that so much software comes from Microsoft, which has refused to assume liability for its software. A company that tried to distinguish itself by selling a product that competed with Microsoft at a higher price in return for better quality assurance and a real warranty would probably not survive, not because people didn't like less buggy software with a warranty bug because of Microsoft's near monopology power.
It seems to me that a better approach would be for insurance companies to sell third-party insurance. They could test the software themselves, to whatever degree of rigor they considered appropriate, for whatever kinds of bugs they and their customers considered important.
This would have several advantages. First, it would not favor rich software vendors over poor ones, commercial products over free software. The insurers would evaluate the software and would set their premiums in accordance with their evaluation. The fact that the producer lacked the ability to stand behind a warranty would be irrelvant. If the software was of high quality, the insurance company would decide that it was not taking on a large risk by insuring it.
Another advantage is that software users could negotiate appropriate amounts of insurance at appropriate rates with the insurance company. One problem with asking the software producer to stand behind it is that users may have a vast range of uses and bugs may have vastly different consequences for different users. If a program crashing just means you have to go to Kinkos to make a poster or a greeting card, the damage is minor. If a security flaw reveals your company's strategy to a competitor it may cost you millions of dollars. Customizing the warranty that the producer gives to the customer is impossible outside of very specialized niches, but this is the sort of thing that insurance companies do all the time.
I agree about Tcl - it is really under-rated. I tried it a couple years ago because I wanted to try out Tk. There was a time when I thought that it wasn't well suited to larger-scale projects, but after a while I realized that that wasn't true. It's really a lot like Lisp, but with about the right amount of syntactic sugar.
By Warner's logic, publishers should be paid everytime one of their books comes up in a search on Google, or Amazon.com, or even in a library catalog. That's ridiculous. The publishers aren't providing the service here. In fact, they're the ones who benefit - they're getting free advertising. This is more than trying to get the most profit from what you own - now they're demanding handouts from their benefactors and customers.
One of the things that I often want to do with an image is annotate it. That usually means adding text and/or shapes, e.g. drawing a circle or a box around something and adding a label, maybe with an arrow. For this shape-drawing tools are very handy. You can do this in the GIMP, but its harder than it needs to be.
In which of the Indian languages of BC does nagali mean "cougar". That isn't what cougars are called in the languages I know, but I imagine you're talking about a different area, most likely Vancouver Island.
Sorry, but my radio argument is exactly on the mark. The EU and UN are not as far as anything I have seen demanding that the US hand over any equipment, nor are they demanding that the US hand over complete control of net within the US. Obviously the US would retain control of .gov and .us just as other countries do. What they are proposing is very much along the lines of the current international systems for control of other forms of communication including radio. Those systems have worked quite well for decades.
My point about my US citizenship (which by the way is the one I was born with) was that I am not an inveterate US-hater. The fact that I am also a Canadian citizen doesn't change that. That Canadians are foreigners (from the point of view of an American) is obvious and of no discernible relevance. That Canadians are (in general) socialists, as you assert, merely shows your ignorance. Canada has a few characteristics that Americans, and almost noone but Americans, regard as socialist, notably the health care system. That is one of the nice things about Canada. That a country with the resources of the US would leave a large part of its population without regular decent medical care is just plain indecent. In general, Canadians are not socialists. The party in power at the national level is the Liberal party. The New Democratic Party, which is the democratic socialist party in Canada, has only 19 out of 308 seats and has such little power as it has because the Liberals do not have a majority and need the NDP's support. Until recently the Liberals had formed the government by themselves. Before the Liberals, the Conservatives were in power. The NDP has never formed a national government. At the provincial level, again, NDP governments have been rare.
The Bush Administration should stop acting like spoiled brats and facilitate the transition from ICANN to an international governing body modelled on the Universal Postal Union and the International Telecommunications Union. Sure, the ARPAnet was developed by the United States, as was a lot of the other technology that underlies the net. So what? The web as we know it was created by CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, whose members are: Austria, Belgium, Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Italy, The Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Portugal, the Slovak Republic, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland and the United Kingdom. CERN is located in Switzerland. Does that mean that CERN or the EU should control everything to do with WWW and HTML? Of course not. Radio was invented by Gugliemo Marconi, an Italian with an Irish mother. Does that mean that Italy or Ireland should control radio communications? Of course not.
The regulation and standardization of an international communications medium is obviously something that should be done by an international body. Who invented it is irrelevant. I am amazed not only at the Bush administration's position but by the numerous /.ers who advance the position that whoever invented it should control it without any justification for this bizarre assumption, not to mention the lack of attention to the major non-American contributions. American jingoism never ceases to amaze me. (And before someone whines about me being an anti-American foreigner, I am a US citizen. I am also a Canadian citizen.)
My main concern about shifting control of the net is censorship. On several occasions third world countries have made noises about wanting to control communications so that they could control information. They use various euphemisms, but what they want is the ability to censor. I am therefore very pleased that the current effort to internationalize control is being led by the EU. If the US wants to foster freedom and democracy throughout the world, the best thing it can do is to cooperate and make sure that control passes to a technically competant non-political organization like the UPU and ITU rather than to a politicized disaster like the Commission on Human Rights.
Go to a canoe/kayak store. They sell heavy duty plastic bags with multiple-fold water-tight seals in a variety of sizes. These are much tougher than baggies or ziplocs and better sealed. Naturally, they're also terrific to have on canoe trips.
I agree in principle that software vendors ought to stand behind their software, but in practice there are a lot of problems. One is that even rather ordinary pieces of software are much more complex than most physical products and therefore much more difficult to test properly. Another is that only major companies would have the financial resources to bear much of a liability burden.
It seems to me that we can require a certain minimum level of performance because it is easy enough to test whether a product does its basic job. What is much harder to require is that a program never crash or that it have no security flaws. For these kinds of problems, I wonder if insurance wouldn't be a better solution. For one thing, the insurer would bear the basic financial burden, not the developer, so it wouldn't be a problem for small companies and free software. For another, insurance companies know a lot more about dealing with this kind of thing. They know how to estimate risks, how to find out who's telling the truth about what happened, etc. It would also make clear in advance what kinds of bugs are of concern.
What I'm thinking of would work something like this. Say you're a small business for which a database is important. You would go to your insurance company and say: "We're going to run Access on a 686 under Windows XP. We will lose X thousand dollars per day every day our database is down more than one hour." The insurance company will figure the odds and for a suitable premium insure you against that risk. This would also help to promote quality software since it would be cheaper to get insurance for better software.
RTF may well qualify, assuming that there aren't any licensing restrictions on it. However, RTF is pretty low level, so it may not be a candidate for that reason. The same is probably true of other formats, such as DVI.
This is the one point that Prendergast made that looked to me like it might have some validity, so I'm interested to hear from someone who knows about the accessibility issues. Am I right in thinking that there is nothing about the OpenDocument format per se that prevents software using it from meeting accessibility requirements? In that case, in view of the legal (and moral) imperatives for accessibility, this just means that developers need to put in a bit of work on improving accessibility. What are the deficiencies of existing open software, and what would it take to remedy them?
Uh, PDF is "crackable" because there is a very detailed published specification. You can download yourself a copy from this site. The latest version is here. Adobe owns the trademark, meaning that nobody can call something that deviates from Adobe's spec PDF, but its just as open as the Open Document format. There are no secrets about PDF (though it does take some work to grok the complex 1200 page spec) and no license or royalties are necessary to use it. Prendergast's claim that PDF is not open is nonsense. It is open in all ways that are important.
Microsoft Word format is both proprietary and an actual secret. There isn't a published spec. Furthermore, it is very complicated and changes frequently. We know that it is "crackable" because people have successfully reverse engineered it sufficiently to make MS Word documents readable in programs such as OpenOffice.org Writer, but the fact that talented reverse engineers can't get it quite right shows that it isn't easy.
Yes, it should. Some states have constitutional requirements to this effect. For example, the Missouri constitution contains the requirement that:
Unfortunately, there is no such requirement in the federal constitution.
The comparative method as applied in Indo-European has been shown to work quite nicely for non-European languages. The state of work on the Algonquian languages (such as Massachusett, Cree, Ojibwe, Blackfoot, Arapaho, Micmac, Western and Eastern Abenaki) is comparable to that of Indo-European, as is that of Finno-Ugric (Hungarian, Finnish, Estonian, Mordvin, etc.), to take just two examples.
That Nature article is badly misleading in claiming that traditional historical linguistic methods are based on vocabulary and that it is an innovation to use grammar. It is true that amateurs' ideas about linguistic relationship are based almost entirely on vocabulary, but that isn't true of what professional historical linguists do.
To begin with, there are two different problems to be addressed. The first is, given a bunch of languages, are they related at all, where by "related", we mean "descended from a common ancestor". The second problem is, given that a bunch of languages are related, HOW are they related, that is, what is the family tree, in what order did they separate?
To determine whether languages are related, we look at "similarities". I put this in scare quotes because the relevant sorts of "similarities" are more accurately described as congruences, that is, systematic relationships between languages that may not necessarily be "similar" in the usual sense. For example, English and Armenian are distantly related members of the Indo-European language family. Proto-Indo-European *dw appears in English as /t/, as in "two", while in Armenian it appears as /erk/
as in /erku/ "two". Proto-Indo-European *dw -> Armenian erk is a regular sound change in that it happens in all of the attested cases in which that sequence of sounds is found. It is almost certainly the result of a series of less peculiar changes of which the intermediate stages happen not to be attested. The point is that this kind of systematic relationship is evidence of historical relationship between languages but is not a similarity in the usual sense.
Given some similarities or congruences between languages, the first question that arises is whether they might be due to chance. It is easy to find examples. For example, the Korean word for "language" is /mal/, as is the Icelandic word. There is no other reason to think that Korean and Icelandic are related, so this is written off as a coincidence. Amateurs tend not to realize how high the probability is of chance resemblences - there is a large crank literature in which people list words that they consider similar in sound and meaning in two languages and offer this as evidence of relationship.
One reason that historical linguists look for regular sound changes like Proto-Indo-European *dw -> Armenian erk, or less exotic, Proto-Indo-European *p -> English f (e.g. English "father", Latin "pater", Sanskrit "pitar") is that regular sound changes, which are reflected in regular sound correspondences among the daughter languages, greatly reduce the number of degrees of freedom and therefore provide evidence that the similarities observed are not merely coincidences.
A first point, then, is that even to the extent that historical linguists rely on vocabulary for establishing relationships, what they rely on are the regular sound correspondances, not raw similarities in words.
Now, given that we have reason to believe that there are similarities between two languages that are unlikely to be due to chance, we still have to determine their origin.One possibility is that they are due to common descent,in which case we have evidence of a genetic relationship. The alternative is that the similarities are due to diffusion. Diffusion can consist of outright borrowing, e.g. English acquiring karate from Japanese, or it can be less direct, e.g. Amharic and Tigrinya shifting away from the old Semitic verb-initial word order to verb-final word order under the influence of the neighboring languages in Ethiopia and Eriterea. The problem is, how can we tell whether a given similarity is due to genetic relationship or to diffusion?
The answer is, sometimes we can, but often it is hard, maybe even impossible. If you have multiple sets of regular sound correspondances, at most one of them can be genetic. The others must reflect borrowing. If the vocabulary that show
I'm surprised that nobody seems to have mentioned that one reason that MS Windows is so poorly modularized is that Microsoft's marketing strategy explicitly requires spaghetti code. In order to justify bundling everything but the kitchen sink with the OS, they have to integrate things that don't need to be, and shouldn't be, integrated.
I wouldn't be so sure. Companies vary quite a lot in how open they are even with their own employees. I'll give you an example from my own experience. Once upon a time, when the Microvax had just come out, a DEC salesman gave me a copy of the architecture manual. That was typical of DEC, who were beloved of techies for their willingness to provide information. One day a senior research staff member from Xerox PARC was in my office and noticed the Microvax architecture manual on my desk. He commented that not only would Xerox not give such a manual to a customer, he himself could not get access to the equivalent manual for a Xerox machine without demonstrating need-to-know.
There are presumably any number of /.-ers who work or have worked for Microsoft and actually know the answer to this. Maybe they'll tell us.
It would be better not to use lossy compression. Either use uncompressed linear PCM data with a nice, simple file format (e.g. snd, or if you must use WAVE, the minimal version) or if compression is necessary, use a lossless compression method like FLAC.
The First Amendment applies in the first instance to the federal government ("Congress shall make no law...") and by virtue of the 14th Amendment, to the states. It does not apply to private parties. Its only relevance to private parties is that contracts contrary to public policy are not enforceable, and the First Amendment is one piece of evidence bearing on public policy regarding freedom of speech. In fairly extreme cases, you can expect a court to void a contract on public policy freedom of speech grounds, but it has to be something really extreme, such as an employment contract forbidding the employee to speak about topics having nothing whatever to do with the company. It is very clear that contractual restrictions on speech, such as NDAs, are considered valid by the courts.
In the Network Associates case, the Attorney General of New York (Eliot Spitzer, running for Governor), sued Network Associates for fraud and deception. He argued that the specific wording of the restriction on reviews could falsely lead the consumer to believe that the restriction was not imposed by Network Associates but by state or federal law. He also argued that because the clause was in some documents and not others (see the opinion if you want the details), it was not endorceable as a matter of contract law, and that for Network Associates to represent that it was constituted a deceptive practice. The court accepted these arguments. The First Amendment was not the basis for the ruling.
You can read Judge Shafer's opinion here.
I've used ET Webhosting for several sites, both for hosting and domain registration, and have no complaints. They send notification of impending expiration well in advance.
What music? There's no evidence that she has any music on her computer.
If I had written such a poorly argued piece I wouldn't want to put my name to it, much less give my professional credentials. Take the argument about innovation. It's based on a single example! Yes, Linux is not particularly innovative. It originated as a clone, so of course it wasn't innovative. Insofar as open source attempts to replace proprietary software, there has to be a good deal of cloning. That doesn't mean that open source software is intrinsically non-innovative, just that there has been a lot of catching up to do.
Even so, software intended in the first instance to clone proprietary software has often been innovative. Many examples are to be found in the GNU project. GNU "clones" of standard Unix tools are often considered to be superior to the originals. Not only is the implementation superior (typically in having fewer bugs and fewer arbitrary limitations), but they often extend the capabilities of the original tool.
The other place in which innovation is readily seen is in areas in which there is little or no cloning activity because there is little or no proprietary software to catch up to. In my own field of linguistics, for example, there isn't a lot of proprietary software because there isn't much of a market for it. Linguists can't afford expensive software. The more interesting linguistic software that has been coming along is mostly free software. For example, the most advanced database for annotated text is emdros. It isn't a clone of anything. In phonetics the acoustic analysis program of choice currently is probably Praat. It compares favorably to commercial products. (Phonetics software is a bit different from linguistics in general in that it overlaps to a considerable extent with software for use in areas like speech pathology, where there is money to be made.) As a third example, I'll cite my own program redet, which is a regular expression search tool. It has a few features of particular interest to linguists, such as widgets for entering the International Phonetic Alphabet and the ability to intersect user-defined named character classes (which enables matching over feature matrices), but in most respects it is a regular expression tool of the same sort that programmers and various other non-linguists use. There are a number of similar free tools and at least one proprietary commercial product. However you may judge it in comparison to the others, it is unquestionably not a clone. Among its innovative features is the fact that it determines the properties of the regular expression engine that it uses empirically, by running a set of tests.
Basing a sweeping generalization on a single example is a poor practice in general, but in this case it is especially bad because Linux is an atypical example. Much open source software is innovative, and much proprietary software is not.
Up to a point I see this: you don't want to issue patches that screw up something else, possibly even worse, and things do interact in sometimes unexpected ways. But, if MS really has to do six months worth of testing to make sure that a patch doesn't do more harm than good, isn't that damning evidence of horrible software engineering? It means that their software is very poorly modularized. Of course, there's other evidence of exactly that being the case.