If the poster's at Brum Uni, he's probably working under Professor John Barnden, who's doing plenty of research into the use of AI in responding to metaphors. So yeah, the whole Autonomy/Bayesian/remembrance thing: being able to deal with the fuzziness of human language and concepts, to get beyond the rather geekish world of the algorithm and of mathematical certainty.
How come it's the toy corporations which come across as the worst offenders in this type of legislation? We've had eToys vs etoy, Hasbro vs Clue Computing, and now Mattel. Honestly, I'd be worried about the influence these companies have on kids...
Trademarks have to be policed; which is why IDG's actions are just as necessary, in legal terms, as the ones that Linus Torvalds took against unscrupulous types who grabbed *linux* domain names a few years ago. Yes, it's ridiculous, but it's a reflection of the law as it stands...
There was a particularly silly case not so long ago, when McDonald's launched a trademark case in Scotland against a restaurant run by (you guessed it) someone called McDonald. The press had a field day, of course.
You're looking at it from the wrong side: the "repackaging" argument applies to the music itself. Look at what you've said: "MP3.com is making life easier for me." It's a service, and that doesn't affect the music as intellectual property.
Now if MP3.com were ripping these CDs to WAVs, and running them through SoundForge to boost the bass, or to provide vocal-free versions for karaoke, then converting them to MP3s, then that would count as repackaging...
They're a bit silly, really: and they miss out on the synergies between innovations, which is what turned invention into achievement.
For instance, "the Automobile" on the one hand refers to a 19th century innovation: the internal combustion engine. But the 20th century achievement isn't the car itself, but the technologies around it. It took Ford's mass production techniques to make automobiles affordable; it took refrigeration (that is, air conditioning) and electrification to make it possible to run assembly lines.
Having a "top 20" is completely wrong. We should think of the interconnections -- the hyperlinks -- between these categories, rather than a lazy hierarchy.
Not quite: the latest case arose from the fact that the Pink Paper's lawyers told Netbenefit that they'd be held responsible for any potential defamations at unspecified times in the future on the Outcast site. So Netbenefit wanted a signed undertaking from Outcast to the effect that they would never, ever, publish anything considered defamatory on their site: on a three-hour deadline. Which Outcast's lawyers advised them not to sign, as it's a ridiculous restriction. So the site went down.
After Demon were left having to splash out £1/4m, would you want to be the next ISP to test the law? So the practice is always going to be much more extreme than the letter of the law.
Exactly. What's the point in making the effort to submit stuff that's hot off the press, when it gets declined in favour of reheated leftovers?
Story-by-story moderation is the way forward: it shouldn't necessarily knock stuff off the front page, but be there in the background to let the editors know when they've posted something truly lame.
This really is a non-story. If Lucas wants to sit on TPM until people have forgotten how awful it was, then he's well within his rights. At least by that time, we'll have won the war against DeCSS.
When do we get to moderate stories as well as posts, so that I can give Star Wars guff a -1?
Simply because they assume, from Samba's being "based" in Australia, that all the dev-team are Australians too. Which, in this world of global connectivity, is no longer a valid assumption!
(linux.com is based in the US, but Linus isn't an American. Nor is Alan Cox.)
One of the most interesting comments is from some of the Library of Congress's archivists (staff of the Motion Picture, Broadcasting, and Recorded Sound Division and the National Digital Library Program):
The Library of Congress audio-visual-collection preservation team believes that it may be necessary for the Library to circumvent technological controls on access to copyrighted works in order to preserve digital audio-visual works for the long term...
The Library has not made a definitive study of the copyright protection technology in use or proposed for use in digital sound recordings, DVD disks, and other formats. Coverage in the press indicates, however, that several protection technologies are designed to prevent copying or repeated copying in certain circumstances. This may mean that it will necessary for the Library and other legitimate archives to circumvent protective technology in order to preserve important content for the future.
In short, if CSS gets in the way of their mission to archive important material, they're going to crack it. That's the sort of thing we want to hear, since it acknowledges CSS as "access control", rather than an anti-piracy measure.
Turntables with laser "styli" have been around for at least ten years. (And we're not talking about CD players here.) But they've never caught on, and not just because of the price.
The reason? Simple: while a contact stylus does produce gradual, minimal wear on the vinyl, it also does a great job of shifting dust, hairs and other crap out of the grooves, without the need for ridiculously expensive vacuum cleaners to blow it out of the way.
Go retro. You can find high quality turntables really cheaply these days in junk shops. And if your vinyl's of decent quality (the disc, not its contents), you won't notice the wear anyway.
"In the meantime, RISC chips happened, and some of them are running at over 100 MIPS. Speeds of 200 MIPS and more are likely in the coming years. These things are not going to suddenly vanish. What is going to happen is that they will gradually take over from the 80x86 line. They will run old MS-DOS programs by interpreting the 80386 in software... I think it is a gross error to design an OS for any specific architecture, since that is not going to be around all that long."
-- Andy Tannenbaum, "Linux is obsolete", January 1992
"Transmeta has pioneered a revolutionary new approach to microprocessor design. Rather than implementing the entire x86 processor in hardware, the Crusoe processor solution consists of a compact hardware engine surrounded by a software layer. The hardware component is a very simple, high-performance, low-power VLIW (Very Long Instruction Word) engine with an instruction set that bears no resemblance to that of x86 processors. Instead, it is the surrounding software layer that gives programs the impression that they are running on x86 hardware. This innovative software layer is called the Code Morphing software because it dynamically "morphs" (that is, translates) x86 instructions into the hardware engine's native instruction set."
It's a little surprising that the Professor suggests that the file/folder metaphor is alien to Indian culture, given that India is reputed to have the world's most impenetrable democracy, cursed by endless red tape and form-filling. (That certainly was the case when I was there some years ago!)
But that's slightly beside the point: English has always been important as a unifying factor within the Indian nation, given the huge cultural and linguistic variations across the states. It's also meant that Indian programmers have been responsible for some highly significant work: whatever you think of MS, a glance at their credits list gives away the fact that a fair number of their developers come from the sub-continent.
What's important now is to gain leverage from this state of affairs: perhaps it would be useful for the big Linux vendors to start recruiting bilingual programmers to push on the development process. It should be a case of "English AND local language" rather than a XOR.
The brilliant STAND campaign against draconian encryption laws came across the same problem. MPs' email addresses aren't public domain; most of them bounce, and their offices won't give out contact details to non-constituents.
There's a real schism in the Government's attitude to technology here. Tony Blair makes well-publicised speeches about Britain leading the m-commerce revolution (m for mobile), and his ministers have pagers, mobile phones and laptops linked to a central database of stats and policy details, but most MPs have understaffed offices, no desk space, and no direct access via email, in spite of the fact that most of them spend their weeks miles away from their constituencies.
It's about time that politicians woke up to the opportunities of the Net. Of all the parties, only the minority Liberal Democrats have attempted to harness the technology, which is in keeping with their radical approach.
The parable holds true. The objection to Nestlé's distribution of milk powder is partly that it encourages dilution with polluted water, but mainly that it robs mothers of their self-sufficiency: the ability to breast-feed.
While the distribution of free software may seem misguided, when there are more immediate issues to address in the world's poorest countries, doing so provides people with the means to empower themselves through technology.
The promotion of shared technology is at the heart of most aid agencies' work: the provision of food, clothing and shelter may be more visible, but that's usually a last-ditch attempt to stave off a human disaster. If we're happy to encourage the building of wells and schools, and training in agriculture and manufacture, then why not computers?
Wenger have traditionally supplied the soldiers from the German-speaking cantons, Victorinox from the French-speaking areas. They've done a very Swiss thing to share the business: Wenger is the "Genuine Swiss Army Knife"; Victorinox is the "Original Swiss Army Knife". So no-one loses out.
UK Cable companies should make things better...
on
ISP War in the UK
·
· Score: 1
UK phone bills tend to include a quarterly "line rental" charge of around UKP30 ($50); in the US, that would be used to pay for local calls, and for additional services such as caller ID and call waiting. They all come at a premium here. Since BT are refusing to put substantial investment in the local copper loop until their licence is reassessed in 2001, there's no justification for customers having to pay by the minute to support an obsolete network.
Fortunately, we're finally seeing the cable companies make a national impact. And one thing US readers should remember is that UK cable subscribers tend to get a phone line as well: once NTL rolls out cable modem access, BT will have to make changes.
Re:Bill Gates Invented the Computer Industry!
on
ENIAC Story on NPR
·
· Score: 1
If you look at the "history" of computing on Encarta, you get an Orwellian timeline which suggests just that. Scary.
I'm not alone here: I answered RINGO's questions, and once or twice, it actually came up with an artist that was a) new to me, and b) good. I read about Patti Maes and the culture of Firefly in WIRED. And slowly but surely, the "cool site of 96" became a ubiquitous technology.
But now that collaborative filtering and its cousins have become ubiquitous, Firefly is simply obsolete. For sure, I don't like the idea of that kind of community-based (or rather, community-built) enterprise coming with a price-tag, but the people behind its innovation took the money and ran years ago.
In the meantime, have a look at this project: the Remembrance Agent. It's a smarter data-mine; it locks into Emacs; it's open-source; and it's part of a cool project for wearable computers. I like it lots.
It'll do spectacularly well in the first few months until the novelty of paying 16 cents a minute for email wears off.
Um, this is Britain, remember? Where even if you use an ISP with no monthly charge, you still have to pay local call charges by the minute (4p minimum, then about 2p/min). The alternatives, if you're on the move, are even more expensive: using a mobile to call your ISP looks cool but costs the earth.
Sir Clive has said a few times that he thinks the "bit-part" nature of the PC (mobo + RAM + vidcard etc) has held back hardware development: in short, it trades in efficiency for upgradeability. He's always preferred on-the-board solutions (hardware OS, anyone?)
I'm sceptical about this rumour, but if he were to return to computer design, I'd imagine it would be with something along those lines. Sadly, that's what killed the Z88, the first real laptop: worked like a dream, no upgrade path. Alas.
Slashdot Mirror
If the poster's at Brum Uni, he's probably working under Professor John Barnden, who's doing plenty of research into the use of AI in responding to metaphors. So yeah, the whole Autonomy/Bayesian/remembrance thing: being able to deal with the fuzziness of human language and concepts, to get beyond the rather geekish world of the algorithm and of mathematical certainty.
How come it's the toy corporations which come across as the worst offenders in this type of legislation? We've had eToys vs etoy, Hasbro vs Clue Computing, and now Mattel. Honestly, I'd be worried about the influence these companies have on kids...
Trademarks have to be policed; which is why IDG's actions are just as necessary, in legal terms, as the ones that Linus Torvalds took against unscrupulous types who grabbed *linux* domain names a few years ago. Yes, it's ridiculous, but it's a reflection of the law as it stands...
There was a particularly silly case not so long ago, when McDonald's launched a trademark case in Scotland against a restaurant run by (you guessed it) someone called McDonald. The press had a field day, of course.
You're looking at it from the wrong side: the "repackaging" argument applies to the music itself. Look at what you've said: "MP3.com is making life easier for me." It's a service, and that doesn't affect the music as intellectual property.
Now if MP3.com were ripping these CDs to WAVs, and running them through SoundForge to boost the bass, or to provide vocal-free versions for karaoke, then converting them to MP3s, then that would count as repackaging...
They're a bit silly, really: and they miss out on the synergies between innovations, which is what turned invention into achievement.
For instance, "the Automobile" on the one hand refers to a 19th century innovation: the internal combustion engine. But the 20th century achievement isn't the car itself, but the technologies around it. It took Ford's mass production techniques to make automobiles affordable; it took refrigeration (that is, air conditioning) and electrification to make it possible to run assembly lines.
Having a "top 20" is completely wrong. We should think of the interconnections -- the hyperlinks -- between these categories, rather than a lazy hierarchy.
ZDNet have it all worked out. Generate Slashdot-traffic for the troll, and then do it again for the right of reply. Double the hits, double the fun.
Now, of course, they'll have satisfied their ad hits for the second quarter, so they'll ignore us again until July.
It's tabloid journalism, pure and simple. Ignore.
What's in the pipeline for The Digital Village? Another game, to follow on from the success of Starship Titanic, or something web-based, like H2G2?
Oh, and tangentially: are you still a Mac advocate after all these years?
Not quite: the latest case arose from the fact that the Pink Paper's lawyers told Netbenefit that they'd be held responsible for any potential defamations at unspecified times in the future on the Outcast site. So Netbenefit wanted a signed undertaking from Outcast to the effect that they would never, ever, publish anything considered defamatory on their site: on a three-hour deadline. Which Outcast's lawyers advised them not to sign, as it's a ridiculous restriction. So the site went down.
After Demon were left having to splash out £1/4m, would you want to be the next ISP to test the law? So the practice is always going to be much more extreme than the letter of the law.
Exactly. What's the point in making the effort to submit stuff that's hot off the press, when it gets declined in favour of reheated leftovers?
Story-by-story moderation is the way forward: it shouldn't necessarily knock stuff off the front page, but be there in the background to let the editors know when they've posted something truly lame.
This really is a non-story. If Lucas wants to sit on TPM until people have forgotten how awful it was, then he's well within his rights. At least by that time, we'll have won the war against DeCSS.
When do we get to moderate stories as well as posts, so that I can give Star Wars guff a -1?
Simply because they assume, from Samba's being "based" in Australia, that all the dev-team are Australians too. Which, in this world of global connectivity, is no longer a valid assumption!
(linux.com is based in the US, but Linus isn't an American. Nor is Alan Cox.)
http://lcweb.loc.gov/copyright /1201/comments/175.pdf
This paragraph in particular:
In short, if CSS gets in the way of their mission to archive important material, they're going to crack it. That's the sort of thing we want to hear, since it acknowledges CSS as "access control", rather than an anti-piracy measure.Turntables with laser "styli" have been around for at least ten years. (And we're not talking about CD players here.) But they've never caught on, and not just because of the price.
The reason? Simple: while a contact stylus does produce gradual, minimal wear on the vinyl, it also does a great job of shifting dust, hairs and other crap out of the grooves, without the need for ridiculously expensive vacuum cleaners to blow it out of the way.
Go retro. You can find high quality turntables really cheaply these days in junk shops. And if your vinyl's of decent quality (the disc, not its contents), you won't notice the wear anyway.
"In the meantime, RISC chips happened, and some of them are running at over 100 MIPS. Speeds of 200 MIPS and more are likely in the coming years. These things are not going to suddenly vanish. What is going to happen is that they will gradually take over from the 80x86 line. They will run old MS-DOS programs by interpreting the 80386 in software... I think it is a gross error to design an OS for any specific architecture, since that is not going to be around all that long."
-- Andy Tannenbaum, "Linux is obsolete", January 1992
"Transmeta has pioneered a revolutionary new approach to microprocessor design. Rather than implementing the entire x86 processor in hardware, the Crusoe processor solution consists of a compact hardware engine surrounded by a software layer. The hardware component is a very simple, high-performance, low-power VLIW (Very Long Instruction Word) engine with an instruction set that bears no resemblance to that of x86 processors. Instead, it is the surrounding software layer that gives programs the impression that they are running on x86 hardware. This innovative software layer is called the Code Morphing software because it dynamically "morphs" (that is, translates) x86 instructions into the hardware engine's native instruction set."
--www.transmeta.com, January 2000
spooky, eh?
It's a little surprising that the Professor suggests that the file/folder metaphor is alien to Indian culture, given that India is reputed to have the world's most impenetrable democracy, cursed by endless red tape and form-filling. (That certainly was the case when I was there some years ago!)
But that's slightly beside the point: English has always been important as a unifying factor within the Indian nation, given the huge cultural and linguistic variations across the states. It's also meant that Indian programmers have been responsible for some highly significant work: whatever you think of MS, a glance at their credits list gives away the fact that a fair number of their developers come from the sub-continent.
What's important now is to gain leverage from this state of affairs: perhaps it would be useful for the big Linux vendors to start recruiting bilingual programmers to push on the development process. It should be a case of "English AND local language" rather than a XOR.
The brilliant STAND campaign against draconian encryption laws came across the same problem. MPs' email addresses aren't public domain; most of them bounce, and their offices won't give out contact details to non-constituents.
There's a real schism in the Government's attitude to technology here. Tony Blair makes well-publicised speeches about Britain leading the m-commerce revolution (m for mobile), and his ministers have pagers, mobile phones and laptops linked to a central database of stats and policy details, but most MPs have understaffed offices, no desk space, and no direct access via email, in spite of the fact that most of them spend their weeks miles away from their constituencies.
It's about time that politicians woke up to the opportunities of the Net. Of all the parties, only the minority Liberal Democrats have attempted to harness the technology, which is in keeping with their radical approach.
The parable holds true. The objection to Nestlé's distribution of milk powder is partly that it encourages dilution with polluted water, but mainly that it robs mothers of their self-sufficiency: the ability to breast-feed.
While the distribution of free software may seem misguided, when there are more immediate issues to address in the world's poorest countries, doing so provides people with the means to empower themselves through technology.
The promotion of shared technology is at the heart of most aid agencies' work: the provision of food, clothing and shelter may be more visible, but that's usually a last-ditch attempt to stave off a human disaster. If we're happy to encourage the building of wells and schools, and training in agriculture and manufacture, then why not computers?
PR masquerading as news. Read the release:
http://www.graphon.com/News/pr-chin a991102.html
Wenger have traditionally supplied the soldiers from the German-speaking cantons, Victorinox from the French-speaking areas. They've done a very Swiss thing to share the business: Wenger is the "Genuine Swiss Army Knife"; Victorinox is the "Original Swiss Army Knife". So no-one loses out.
UK phone bills tend to include a quarterly "line rental" charge of around UKP30 ($50); in the US, that would be used to pay for local calls, and for additional services such as caller ID and call waiting. They all come at a premium here. Since BT are refusing to put substantial investment in the local copper loop until their licence is reassessed in 2001, there's no justification for customers having to pay by the minute to support an obsolete network.
Fortunately, we're finally seeing the cable companies make a national impact. And one thing US readers should remember is that UK cable subscribers tend to get a phone line as well: once NTL rolls out cable modem access, BT will have to make changes.
If you look at the "history" of computing on Encarta, you get an Orwellian timeline which suggests just that. Scary.
I'm not alone here: I answered RINGO's questions, and once or twice, it actually came up with an artist that was a) new to me, and b) good. I read about Patti Maes and the culture of Firefly in WIRED. And slowly but surely, the "cool site of 96" became a ubiquitous technology.
But now that collaborative filtering and its cousins have become ubiquitous, Firefly is simply obsolete. For sure, I don't like the idea of that kind of community-based (or rather, community-built) enterprise coming with a price-tag, but the people behind its innovation took the money and ran years ago.
In the meantime, have a look at this project: the Remembrance Agent. It's a smarter data-mine; it locks into Emacs; it's open-source; and it's part of a cool project for wearable computers. I like it lots.
It'll do spectacularly well in the first few months until the novelty of paying 16 cents a minute for email wears off.
Um, this is Britain, remember? Where even if you use an ISP with no monthly charge, you still have to pay local call charges by the minute (4p minimum, then about 2p/min). The alternatives, if you're on the move, are even more expensive: using a mobile to call your ISP looks cool but costs the earth.
Let's face it, who wants to set their watches to PMT?
Sir Clive has said a few times that he thinks the "bit-part" nature of the PC (mobo + RAM + vidcard etc) has held back hardware development: in short, it trades in efficiency for upgradeability. He's always preferred on-the-board solutions (hardware OS, anyone?)
I'm sceptical about this rumour, but if he were to return to computer design, I'd imagine it would be with something along those lines. Sadly, that's what killed the Z88, the first real laptop: worked like a dream, no upgrade path. Alas.