Naah. Look: they want cash for it, making money off the RIP act! Despicable!
How much will m-o-o-t cost? We want it to be free, we don't yet know if it will be, it will be shareware price at most and a paid user (if there are any) can burn a CD for his friends to communicate with him. Apart from our time we have put in money and would like to get it back. Also the havens have to be paid for somehow
Much better to just encrypt your mail with the spam mimic(tm)!...and you never know if your recipient will also buy some printer toner or start working from home for you, to earn $$$ in 3 weeks.
But seriously: it's good to see a quick response to this, but a single point of weakness lying in a central owner of a haven leads me to seek additional resources.
There are implications in a "battle with the natural": the more we try to kill bacteria the more they develop resistances to them, but what must not be forgotten is that we are also nature.
Even though we operate at a different level, our technological "evolution" is not that different from the evolution of bacteria. After all, from their point of view, we're just big masses of bacteria-like things anyway.
On a side note, this has something to do with the ongoing battles between sysadmins and script kiddies. Even though each side fights in different ways and for different reasons, in the end each side has more or less equal power.
So what can be done to ensure one or the other's victory? A security expert might say "increased security"(which goes for bacteria too: if you kill them all off, or don't let them in in the first place, how can they evolve?), a casual observer might say "increased awareness and more sensible people".
Maybe the microbes are not that different from people. If there was no fight there would be no improvement of either.
This guy obviously has some very idealistic ideas about the way the internet should be run. I appreciate his youthful spirit and determined words. In particular I start to see quite a novel way of seeing the way the ICANN could go, although IMO it is quite hard to get to where I think he's going:
For example, he is saying (Round the bottom of the page) that "Even the suits can have their own domains" in his "garden of bytes". He also says:
"The job of the government will otherwise comprise the creation of interconnected parallel universes through the coexistence of different cultures with separate rules. And then everybody will do what they want."
I don't understand here if he means the US government should do it, or if he's meaning that that's what ideally the government should do. If that's what he means, I don't see too many problems with the technical side of things getting done. Already in 10 years of having the internet, we have enough technological structures around us for like minded people to use them to, say, build an operating system, start companies, chat, discuss...etc etc. So it's not hard to imagine that in maybe 10 more years we'll be able to govern ourselves from it, at least for some aspects, in some completely different way from how modern geographically based governments do. So maybe he means that the ICANN is going to be that brave new government (or set of domains, as he'd probably like to call them) so that each person can be free to do what they wish. I think that at least with copyright, patent, free speach and software laws this could be technically possible already today.
And I stress technically, because it's not the technology that automagically changes the world around us. It is us, the people in it who change things. And this only comes from us changing. The closed minded people who can't concieve of it have to change. The open minded people who can, and want to actively do it, have to change, and go through whatever difficulties will get them ready to get it done. It's only through our maturity as a society that we can ready ourselves for changes like that. If the people aren't ready for this, Müller-Maguhn's ICANN isn't going to work.
I totally agree with bob on this letter. Comparisons with microsoft & stuff like that are just echoes of the way people sometimes do this stuff simply to "play catch up to microsoft", ie, see themselves as something that can be compared with it, and limit themselves and their software by seeing proprietary versions of what they do as some kind of perfect and unobtainable goal.
Open source is a completely different thing, from the nature of the software to the way it's made and you can't compare the ideal microsoft world to the ideal open source world, because they are in many ways complete opposites.
Red hat is only trying to do what open source stuff is meant to do: release early and often, get the eyeballs to report (and maybe fix) the bugs, and release a followup version with less bugs. It's not the same as when a commercial company that writes proprietary softwear releases something like that, where in some cases you could argue that they are meant to deliver a working product. Red hat 7.0 users are taking part in the actual process of delivering a good followup to 6.2
On the other hand, it can sometimes be worthwhile to use our knowledge of the workings of proprietary methodologies when working on oss: that mention of bob's of microsoft's bug database made me think: if microsoft's bug db is consistent with the way they usually write apps, they probably share a lot of the core stuff they're made up of. I'm sure their bug db, and the internal communication tools they have between programmers, and the content revision system they use must be integrated to some extent. Maybe it's all the one app? I have no idea.
I heard somewhere that cvs is 10 years behind it's commercial equivalent. ALso bugzilla has no strong integration with developer mailing lists or the cvs tree (but please prove I'm wrong here) so when are people like red hat, with large scale stuff going on like distros, going to have a suitable tool to make the debugging process more manageable. I wonder if the tools available now are adequate for things like distros?
Maybe the communication between developers should be integrated with the code itself somehow, so that people can have an easy way to find out about design decisions and how bits of code evolved over time.... But I ramble...
"What we need is a Free Software alternative that uses a similar approach to.NET Internet-distributed applications and components), but without the subscriptions and restrictions (how information is shared using Gnutella, for example).
With such a system...
You won't have to pay a subscription when you can use free resources available on the Internet, akin to the way you can access most web pages for free.
You won't have to rely on one (guess who) company for access to the infrastructure and resources, and be held hostage by its whims.
You can copy, modify, and re-distribute resources as you please.
You can run local copies of resources and keep your information local, under your own control!
Piper is an effort to bring "The Unix Way" to the GUI, "connect-the-dots" to the CLI, and to distribute interconnected application components (not just whole applications) throughout the Internet.
The basic idea behind Piper is that anything and everything should be buildable by linking small components.
This is "The UNIX Way" and even how object-oriented programming works."
I can only imagine using this kind of stuff once it gets completely themable in our wearable gnome (or equivalent) huds. The research and implementation will be done already, so it will be easier to spot mistakes that ms might have made and not repeat them.
All in all the article is very good at showing a new direction taken by microsoft, maybe hinting at the post-PC future envisioned by.NET. Here is a related story btw.
I get the idea that there's nothing there that couldn't be replicated by free software, and it would be simple to start a system that did it. Perhaps it's important to get started soon though: there is a dire lack of GPL'ed software for embedded systems and whatever else MS's.net future will use.
"Most Internet entrepreneurs treat the users' attention as a Third World country to be strip-mined"
Classic words on ui design, seen especially on websites with lots of javascript... I wish they could be symbiotic not parasitic!
Work doesn't always have to be on the front lines when it's IT: People tend to think of volunteer work as IT courses, Admin, etc, for whoever the "end users" of the charity are, or at least I get that idea from a lot of the postings here.
The problem in Italy with volunteer work not availability, it's beurocracy: Volunteer work can be easily found, especially because it's a great and useful alternative to the military service, so everybody has the chance to do 10 months of it by law. You simply go the the council and get their list of organisations. The problem was that the organisation was financed in very complicated ways, and the whole system was very complicated and messy, and hard to understand for the volunteers.
It all got in the way of what they were trying to do, which was welcome immigrants into the country and try to inform them about laws, places, rights and whatnot that they needed to know in order to get a job, get a place to stay, get their nationality, and send money home, etc.
All of these were very important, and at the base of this they needed a web based database so members all around the region could bring up people's details from their old offices and outdated computers.
Good system design and good technology is a really good way to combat bureocracy, and a lot of the times, people behind these organisations have good intentions, and getting cheap old computers can be doable, but they need the help an IT volunteer can give.
Also, free software means they don't have to buy anything other than the hardware: I've seen GNU software that does all kinds of small office work. These things are indispensible to any kind of charity or volunteer organisation, and the man hours and support you can give by doing this is tremendously valuable to them.
Apologies accepted, no prob: but I wonder where this saying comes from? I always used to hear it from my (catholic) religion teacher in middle school in Italy, so I always assumed it was from somewhere in the bible.
Also: How do you know it has no basis: could it be somehow implied from somewhere? Has anyone ever written about it? Hmmm. I wish I knew a sufficiently studious person...
I agree, especially with your second point, and it's really been pissing me off in fact, that amongst the general public there is this passive assumption about god.
I think there are too many people who probably wouldn't admit to being religeous, yet come up with this stuff whenever they have a problem. The sad part is that it's usually a deep and serious problem, like a death in the family, that brings back the god thing.
Gods are *not* the only solution to what you don't know! There is a whole world out there on the horizon that we don't know about, and yes, it is confusing, and it can look like magic, but even magic isn't everything, or to paraphrase as you have done: whatever it is you don't understand is not reason for a god. If I were a god I would probably be offended to be seen in such a limited way: the thing you don't understand is just one small part of all of this world.
To try and explain better, look at the example of a web page: you might have a designer, who might write the site in a certain way, and plan the site's ending for a certain date, but that designer also has a life, and a home to go to, and a host of other things, each of which *also* make that person unique.
Similarly, the designer might one day decide to shut down the web site, but the users will just go on and make another, if the content is good enough, so even the designer loses control over it all.
GOd based stuff is like microsoft.com: they decide what goes up & down and you can't change it. I'd rather be like slashdot.org: you can change anything you want about the site (or even more in themes.org!), and if they one day sadly close, you can make your own!
It's the same with all this. If you really believe in god then understand that gods need all the help they can get, so please go out and do your bit for the world: be strong and creative and believe in what you can contribute, but it's *not* about gods! They are just designers.
You, the observer are the person who is responsible for the things you see and can't explain, or for the problems and good things in your life: not someone else! I wish all these people who turn to god in hard moments could understand this. Even christianity teaches something like this: help to those who help themselves. Well, it's more than that. You won't get help from anyone BUT yourself. It's when you take responsibility for your world that you become like a god yourself!
With this responsibility comes a good side though: you decide where to go to from here.
Any serious comments on this, please write me directly: I feel very strongly about this, but there's not enough space to explain it all here.
This bbc article is more biased toward the move being linked to the legal stuff going on with the DOJ.
It seems like a predicatable move: if everything microsoft does is net-centric, then it gets harder to meaningfully split it. And by the time the split gets implemented, the decision will be out of date.
Most of microsoft's whitepaper on this is centered around the "mainframe" a centralised model that http operates on. The internet is more than just the web however, but that's what the FUD is about here. Personalised stuff on other computers is a job for ssh, telnet, rlogin, all that stuff.
If this is the direction MS is going to take, any competitors are going to have to find ways of doing ssh, etc, but in a way that's as user friendly as the dot net method. Somehow, I think this will accelerate the development and evolution of remote login programs..
Hmm, maybe the battle will be fought on the command line after all, but it might go GUI in the process...:)
First time I've seen how this stuff really works, and the implications are really amazing:
All these technologies are just DNS all over again. DNS was created to make host information available all over the internet. Here's the difference:
When DNS was set up, it was probably just as easy to try and pirate stuff, and who knows? Maybe people did use the early internet for illicit purposes, but only the few people who were in the know could actually do so. And not much was available on the net anyway. But DNS was created for the exact same purpose as napster and freenet: to make it easy to share information.
Nowadays, the internet is so big that there are lots of people into it only to make money. The possibility of a scam makes people run to see how they can get their share of it, and a technology like this, however innocent, will make the headlines when everyone rushes over to see what scam (and related lawsuit) they can pull off.
All these technologies: freenet, napster-likes, all sorts of things, are incredibly valuable extensions of what already provides structure for the wired world. If someone had thought of them in 1980, we would have a much tighter, distributed internet today.
Well, we've thought of them now. I hope they are allowed to flourish, and that people don't keep just thinking about the negative implications of them. This is the first time I've seen a concrete example of putting it to good use.
I think we should have the right and the possibility to choose to share what we want to:
Imagine all the information that our governments gather from us a la enemy of the state for example: with this kind of network idea, peer to peer, we could all be gathering and sharing that information already, and maybe even doing something positive with it!
I think the problem is quite different from actually providing that information in this instance.
If we just moved the contents of those comments somewhere else, sure we'd put slashdot off the hook, but it would escape this important opportunity to oppose the dmca.
If slashdot removes those comments, the DMCA has a precedent, and this site will be the place that set that precedent. I think it is of utmost importance not to do that.
You can take all the controversial stuff you want, and hide it in another country, but if you keep running and hiding, soon there will be no country free enough to hide that information in. Someone needs to turn around and oppose the DMCA head on. That's what will stop it.
While Tolkien steadfastly denied any metaphor for WWII politics, many scholars tied the Shire to England, the Elves to France, Mordor to Germany, Saruman's Orthanc to Japan, and the Rohirrim/Gondor pair as USA's two-fronted war.
May be a bit off topic, but I've heard that LOTR is a favorite read among neonazis. Probably a result of the very clear differences between wrong and right, good and bad etc...
It might also have to do with the obvious skin colour of elves and orcs, but I've never asked a neonazi...
I wish staroffice, or any project whose objectives include compatibility with ms products could have some form of lister, even in/var/log/, doesn't matter how wonderful, raw data is great...
..Something to list what hasn't been imported or exported correctly after a file has been loaded or changed.
If I were sure for example that starcalc supported comments in cells, I would probably use it to edit the big executive spreadsheet i have to edit each week for my bosses.
But even then, what guarantee do I have that it's not ruining this or that other little "enhancement" from excel that soffice doesn't support??
I couldn't help noticing that one of the possible options shown on the bbc's news item was the possibility of open sourcing their code...
Is this really still an option?
How probable is it that it will happen?
Even if it doesn't, it's interesting to think of the effects on the entire world of IT...
For one thing, all those 65k bugs in y2k shouldn't take long to be corrected. New products would all work seamlessly with MS stuff, you'd also get some interesting code forks... Perhaps it's a move that would even guarantee microsoft a longer life span than any of the other options.
But seriously, can anyone let me know what the main effects would be?
Is there a european alternative, or even just within the uk? If not, why? The only reason I can think of is a large phone monopoly stopping it.
Something very wrong on slashdot today
on
Interface Zen
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· Score: 1
About 3 stories for half the day with no comments to their name... Strange, even for us UK people, who have to wait until 2 for the USA to wake up...
Then this story with the middle bit repeated about 5 times... Then I reload and it's gone! I hope the problem gets sorted, looks like an ugly bug!
Anyway, I think the fitt's law stuff is good if applied as one more generic rule, but it doesn't convince me the way it's put in the fitt's law link. Design concepts are sometimes so so prone to waffle, that I really need good proof before I believe that keeping the size equal is the solution to all design ills.
Answering all the questions with the same answer ldos not give sufficent credit to all the other aspects of design, like clutter and metaphor, or how intuitive it all is.
But it's good for/. people to hear about this stuff from a respectable source like this, because good design (versus complicated configurability) is what all the various software writers need to create a good desktop for the masses.
1) Find niche market for space travel. Not cruises, maybe more like minerals or fuel more easily found on close by planets etc.
2) expand into more useful stuff, like supporting human life for long periods of time.
3) we can go off to some of these planets. Jupiter size is big, but not enough. We can float around in their atmospheres with cheap & cheerful outfits to make the air breathable, liquidise the water, move around in the more gasseous surroundings suggested by the article.
Because we are going to outgrow the earth. And the earth's lifespan is not limitless. It's a race between technology, time, pollution, and our belief that we deserve to do so.
It may seem strange to say it, but the very question of asking who is responsible says a lot about only assigning guilt and blame on selected parties, which is *not* constructive.
Einstein came up with atomic theory, and I think he felt quite guilty for it's main application. But the people who actually turned generic theory to bomb were also to blame, as are the people who still seek to acquire nuclear weapons, and anyone else involved.
All of them were responsible, although it's also up to each individual involved to also make up for it by trying to put a stop to it. Einstein by making public statements, the government by facing up to stuff and stopping production of nukes, and everyone else by doing whatever they can too.
It's the same in this case: everyone who has something to do with it is responsible for things being used in a negative way. And the way to put a stop to it is to realise how much we ourselves are responsible and then create value through what we do.
I don't think it's okay to stop once you have found the person who is legally responsible, and then think, ok, none of my business now. I think if anyone really values the work they are doing on computers nowadays or whatever the hell you are doing, then you will still try to assume as much responsibility as possible, and then try to put things right again!
The key to this argument is that by being responsible for something legally means that you can be punished for it. People shy away from responsiblility precisely because they associate it only with guilt and punishment! But morally and also economically, it means that you are actually one of the people who has what it takes to deal with the problem constructively!
Assuming responsibility for the harmful uses of technology can only benefit technology.
What cards would MS be able to pull in order to stop a possible open sourcing of it's software?
And in economic terms, what would this bring about? ie, is it possible to speculate that microsoft would lose a lot and very quickly were this to happen?
I can imagine the streets of people, the mobile phone factory train carriages in europe, the continuous buzzing of stupid tunes from mozart's to 10 to the theme from the what's it called? Um..
On our way to becoming a species with a J shaped population curve, the first to go must be the long term memory, although I think I remember other drugs of society known to cause similar problems...
What was I just talking about?
Long term memory being lost may not neccessarily be a bad thing though. In a fast paced society it may well be that the changes in our memory imposed by our use of mobile coms actually make us better at remembering the short term stuff we really need. Face it, we now have shorter times to spend (ie less than a lifetime) on our jobs, our partners, our friends, even in the places where we live. The importance of each one is great in the present, but wanes a bit a year from then.
Who cares why I came here, or about the dreams I had when I arrived. No, really, maybe we have to harden ourselves and lose those things. Maybe that's what databases are for.
The synergy resulting from the simple feeling you get from using and helping develop open source software is what drives it on. It's like asian firms giving shares(which quickly caught on elsewhere...), except it's that idea cubed!
It's the nurturing feeling you get when you toil and labour with something but see it grow and know that you were a part of it all. Not many people can say that about closed source, except CTOs.
And it could well be applied to a lot of other things we do today. All it needs is visionaries.
eg: SSADM. Anyone else ever seen how closed and proprietary systems design can be? But no-one's stepped in yet to make it better, because all the attempts at bettering it start from the closed frame of mind.
I think the internet should have it's own form of information hunting, farming and gathering:
Journalists just have to accept that one person writing information is always going to be less informative that a thousand people putting together their collective knowledge on that piece.
Paper journalism has evolved from the idea of just giving information, to becoming political, or as a tool of the individual journalist. But if people with access to the internet want something closer to straight facts, they'll go for faqs, ask slashdots, usenet discussions and the like. Of course they are still biased, but they do offer a wider opinion space than individually made work.
I've recently volunteered to put together something on the web about an important educator. It took me about half an hour to work out that if I write it all myself, it'll be like a high school essay: ultimately biased, incorrect, and limited to what I can do and what time I have to do it.
So I went open source, and said. Ok, it's a faq. Start asking questions, start answering them. The work will build on it's own (with some help from me) and will be much more complete than what I'd have come up with after studying for ages.
That's the functionality the internet has. It's pointless not to use it. Paper Journalism should stay on paper.
Slashdot Mirror
Naah. Look: they want cash for it, making money off the RIP act! Despicable!
...and you never know if your recipient will also buy some printer toner or start working from home for you, to earn $$$ in 3 weeks.
How much will m-o-o-t cost? We want it to be free, we don't yet know if it will be, it will be shareware price at most and a paid user (if there are any) can burn a CD for his friends to communicate with him. Apart from our time we have put in money and would like to get it back. Also the havens have to be paid for somehow
Much better to just encrypt your mail with the spam mimic(tm)!
But seriously: it's good to see a quick response to this, but a single point of weakness lying in a central owner of a haven leads me to seek additional resources.
There are implications in a "battle with the natural": the more we try to kill bacteria the more they develop resistances to them, but what must not be forgotten is that we are also nature.
Even though we operate at a different level, our technological "evolution" is not that different from the evolution of bacteria. After all, from their point of view, we're just big masses of bacteria-like things anyway.
On a side note, this has something to do with the ongoing battles between sysadmins and script kiddies. Even though each side fights in different ways and for different reasons, in the end each side has more or less equal power.
So what can be done to ensure one or the other's victory? A security expert might say "increased security"(which goes for bacteria too: if you kill them all off, or don't let them in in the first place, how can they evolve?), a casual observer might say "increased awareness and more sensible people".
Maybe the microbes are not that different from people. If there was no fight there would be no improvement of either.
This guy obviously has some very idealistic ideas about the way the internet should be run. I appreciate his youthful spirit and determined words. In particular I start to see quite a novel way of seeing the way the ICANN could go, although IMO it is quite hard to get to where I think he's going:
For example, he is saying (Round the bottom of the page) that "Even the suits can have their own domains" in his "garden of bytes". He also says:
"The job of the government will otherwise comprise the creation of interconnected parallel universes through the coexistence of different cultures with separate rules. And then everybody will do what they want."
I don't understand here if he means the US government should do it, or if he's meaning that that's what ideally the government should do. If that's what he means, I don't see too many problems with the technical side of things getting done. Already in 10 years of having the internet, we have enough technological structures around us for like minded people to use them to, say, build an operating system, start companies, chat, discuss...etc etc. So it's not hard to imagine that in maybe 10 more years we'll be able to govern ourselves from it, at least for some aspects, in some completely different way from how modern geographically based governments do. So maybe he means that the ICANN is going to be that brave new government (or set of domains, as he'd probably like to call them) so that each person can be free to do what they wish. I think that at least with copyright, patent, free speach and software laws this could be technically possible already today.
And I stress technically, because it's not the technology that automagically changes the world around us. It is us, the people in it who change things. And this only comes from us changing. The closed minded people who can't concieve of it have to change. The open minded people who can, and want to actively do it, have to change, and go through whatever difficulties will get them ready to get it done. It's only through our maturity as a society that we can ready ourselves for changes like that. If the people aren't ready for this, Müller-Maguhn's ICANN isn't going to work.
I totally agree with bob on this letter. Comparisons with microsoft & stuff like that are just echoes of the way people sometimes do this stuff simply to "play catch up to microsoft", ie, see themselves as something that can be compared with it, and limit themselves and their software by seeing proprietary versions of what they do as some kind of perfect and unobtainable goal.
Open source is a completely different thing, from the nature of the software to the way it's made and you can't compare the ideal microsoft world to the ideal open source world, because they are in many ways complete opposites.
Red hat is only trying to do what open source stuff is meant to do: release early and often, get the eyeballs to report (and maybe fix) the bugs, and release a followup version with less bugs. It's not the same as when a commercial company that writes proprietary softwear releases something like that, where in some cases you could argue that they are meant to deliver a working product. Red hat 7.0 users are taking part in the actual process of delivering a good followup to 6.2
On the other hand, it can sometimes be worthwhile to use our knowledge of the workings of proprietary methodologies when working on oss: that mention of bob's of microsoft's bug database made me think: if microsoft's bug db is consistent with the way they usually write apps, they probably share a lot of the core stuff they're made up of. I'm sure their bug db, and the internal communication tools they have between programmers, and the content revision system they use must be integrated to some extent. Maybe it's all the one app? I have no idea.
I heard somewhere that cvs is 10 years behind it's commercial equivalent. ALso bugzilla has no strong integration with developer mailing lists or the cvs tree (but please prove I'm wrong here) so when are people like red hat, with large scale stuff going on like distros, going to have a suitable tool to make the debugging process more manageable. I wonder if the tools available now are adequate for things like distros?
Maybe the communication between developers should be integrated with the code itself somehow, so that people can have an easy way to find out about design decisions and how bits of code evolved over time.... But I ramble...
Ale
http://news.gnome.org/gnome-news/969680451/index_h tml
.NET Internet-distributed applications and components), but without the subscriptions and restrictions (how information is shared using Gnutella, for example).
http://bioinformatics.org/piper/
From their announcement on gnome-news:
"What we need is a Free Software alternative that uses a similar approach to
With such a system...
You won't have to pay a subscription when you can use free resources available on the Internet, akin to the way you can access most web pages for free.
You won't have to rely on one (guess who) company for access to the infrastructure and resources, and be held hostage by its whims.
You can copy, modify, and re-distribute resources as you please.
You can run local copies of resources and keep your information local, under your own control!
Piper is an effort to bring "The Unix Way" to the GUI, "connect-the-dots" to the CLI, and to distribute interconnected application components (not just whole applications) throughout the Internet.
The basic idea behind Piper is that anything and everything should be buildable by linking small components.
This is "The UNIX Way" and even how object-oriented programming works."
So microsoft is doing it, so let them!
.NET. Here is a related story btw.
.net future will use.
I can only imagine using this kind of stuff once it gets completely themable in our wearable gnome (or equivalent) huds. The research and implementation will be done already, so it will be easier to spot mistakes that ms might have made and not repeat them.
All in all the article is very good at showing a new direction taken by microsoft, maybe hinting at the post-PC future envisioned by
I get the idea that there's nothing there that couldn't be replicated by free software, and it would be simple to start a system that did it. Perhaps it's important to get started soon though: there is a dire lack of GPL'ed software for embedded systems and whatever else MS's
"Most Internet entrepreneurs treat the users' attention as a Third World country to be strip-mined"
Classic words on ui design, seen especially on websites with lots of javascript... I wish they could be symbiotic not parasitic!
Work doesn't always have to be on the front lines when it's IT: People tend to think of volunteer work as IT courses, Admin, etc, for whoever the "end users" of the charity are, or at least I get that idea from a lot of the postings here.
The problem in Italy with volunteer work not availability, it's beurocracy: Volunteer work can be easily found, especially because it's a great and useful alternative to the military service, so everybody has the chance to do 10 months of it by law. You simply go the the council and get their list of organisations. The problem was that the organisation was financed in very complicated ways, and the whole system was very complicated and messy, and hard to understand for the volunteers.
It all got in the way of what they were trying to do, which was welcome immigrants into the country and try to inform them about laws, places, rights and whatnot that they needed to know in order to get a job, get a place to stay, get their nationality, and send money home, etc.
All of these were very important, and at the base of this they needed a web based database so members all around the region could bring up people's details from their old offices and outdated computers.
Good system design and good technology is a really good way to combat bureocracy, and a lot of the times, people behind these organisations have good intentions, and getting cheap old computers can be doable, but they need the help an IT volunteer can give.
Also, free software means they don't have to buy anything other than the hardware: I've seen GNU software that does all kinds of small office work. These things are indispensible to any kind of charity or volunteer organisation, and the man hours and support you can give by doing this is tremendously valuable to them.
Apologies accepted, no prob: but I wonder where this saying comes from? I always used to hear it from my (catholic) religion teacher in middle school in Italy, so I always assumed it was from somewhere in the bible.
Also: How do you know it has no basis: could it be somehow implied from somewhere? Has anyone ever written about it? Hmmm. I wish I knew a sufficiently studious person...
I agree, especially with your second point, and it's really been pissing me off in fact, that amongst the general public there is this passive assumption about god.
I think there are too many people who probably wouldn't admit to being religeous, yet come up with this stuff whenever they have a problem. The sad part is that it's usually a deep and serious problem, like a death in the family, that brings back the god thing.
Gods are *not* the only solution to what you don't know! There is a whole world out there on the horizon that we don't know about, and yes, it is confusing, and it can look like magic, but even magic isn't everything, or to paraphrase as you have done: whatever it is you don't understand is not reason for a god. If I were a god I would probably be offended to be seen in such a limited way: the thing you don't understand is just one small part of all of this world.
To try and explain better, look at the example of a web page: you might have a designer, who might write the site in a certain way, and plan the site's ending for a certain date, but that designer also has a life, and a home to go to, and a host of other things, each of which *also* make that person unique.
Similarly, the designer might one day decide to shut down the web site, but the users will just go on and make another, if the content is good enough, so even the designer loses control over it all.
GOd based stuff is like microsoft.com: they decide what goes up & down and you can't change it. I'd rather be like slashdot.org: you can change anything you want about the site (or even more in themes.org!), and if they one day sadly close, you can make your own!
It's the same with all this. If you really believe in god then understand that gods need all the help they can get, so please go out and do your bit for the world: be strong and creative and believe in what you can contribute, but it's *not* about gods! They are just designers.
You, the observer are the person who is responsible for the things you see and can't explain, or for the problems and good things in your life: not someone else! I wish all these people who turn to god in hard moments could understand this. Even christianity teaches something like this: help to those who help themselves. Well, it's more than that. You won't get help from anyone BUT yourself. It's when you take responsibility for your world that you become like a god yourself!
With this responsibility comes a good side though: you decide where to go to from here.
Any serious comments on this, please write me directly: I feel very strongly about this, but there's not enough space to explain it all here.
This bbc article is more biased toward the move being linked to the legal stuff going on with the DOJ.
:)
It seems like a predicatable move: if everything microsoft does is net-centric, then it gets harder to meaningfully split it. And by the time the split gets implemented, the decision will be out of date.
Most of microsoft's whitepaper on this is centered around the "mainframe" a centralised model that http operates on. The internet is more than just the web however, but that's what the FUD is about here. Personalised stuff on other computers is a job for ssh, telnet, rlogin, all that stuff.
If this is the direction MS is going to take, any competitors are going to have to find ways of doing ssh, etc, but in a way that's as user friendly as the dot net method. Somehow, I think this will accelerate the development and evolution of remote login programs..
Hmm, maybe the battle will be fought on the command line after all, but it might go GUI in the process...
First time I've seen how this stuff really works, and the implications are really amazing:
All these technologies are just DNS all over again. DNS was created to make host information available all over the internet. Here's the difference:
When DNS was set up, it was probably just as easy to try and pirate stuff, and who knows? Maybe people did use the early internet for illicit purposes, but only the few people who were in the know could actually do so. And not much was available on the net anyway. But DNS was created for the exact same purpose as napster and freenet: to make it easy to share information.
Nowadays, the internet is so big that there are lots of people into it only to make money. The possibility of a scam makes people run to see how they can get their share of it, and a technology like this, however innocent, will make the headlines when everyone rushes over to see what scam (and related lawsuit) they can pull off.
All these technologies: freenet, napster-likes, all sorts of things, are incredibly valuable extensions of what already provides structure for the wired world. If someone had thought of them in 1980, we would have a much tighter, distributed internet today.
Well, we've thought of them now. I hope they are allowed to flourish, and that people don't keep just thinking about the negative implications of them. This is the first time I've seen a concrete example of putting it to good use.
I think we should have the right and the possibility to choose to share what we want to:
Imagine all the information that our governments gather from us a la enemy of the state for example: with this kind of network idea, peer to peer, we could all be gathering and sharing that information already, and maybe even doing something positive with it!
I think the problem is quite different from actually providing that information in this instance.
If we just moved the contents of those comments somewhere else, sure we'd put slashdot off the hook, but it would escape this important opportunity to oppose the dmca.
If slashdot removes those comments, the DMCA has a precedent, and this site will be the place that set that precedent. I think it is of utmost importance not to do that.
You can take all the controversial stuff you want, and hide it in another country, but if you keep running and hiding, soon there will be no country free enough to hide that information in. Someone needs to turn around and oppose the DMCA head on. That's what will stop it.
Ale
While Tolkien steadfastly denied any metaphor for WWII politics, many scholars tied the Shire to England, the Elves to France, Mordor to Germany, Saruman's Orthanc to Japan, and the Rohirrim/Gondor pair as USA's two-fronted war.
May be a bit off topic, but I've heard that LOTR is a favorite read among neonazis. Probably a result of the very clear differences between wrong and right, good and bad etc...
It might also have to do with the obvious skin colour of elves and orcs, but I've never asked a neonazi...
I wish staroffice, or any project whose objectives include compatibility with ms products could have some form of lister, even in /var/log/, doesn't matter how wonderful, raw data is great...
..Something to list what hasn't been imported or exported correctly after a file has been loaded or changed.
If I were sure for example that starcalc supported comments in cells, I would probably use it to edit the big executive spreadsheet i have to edit each week for my bosses.
But even then, what guarantee do I have that it's not ruining this or that other little "enhancement" from excel that soffice doesn't support??
I couldn't help noticing that one of the possible options shown on the bbc's news item was the possibility of open sourcing their code...
Is this really still an option?
How probable is it that it will happen?
Even if it doesn't, it's interesting to think of the effects on the entire world of IT...
For one thing, all those 65k bugs in y2k shouldn't take long to be corrected. New products would all work seamlessly with MS stuff, you'd also get some interesting code forks... Perhaps it's a move that would even guarantee microsoft a longer life span than any of the other options.
But seriously, can anyone let me know what the main effects would be?
For those interested in a little more bacground on the interviewee, here's her page on linuxchix (the link on oswg.org is wrong)
http://www.linuxchix.org/docs/chix/deb. html
Ale
Is there a european alternative, or even just within the uk? If not, why? The only reason I can think of is a large phone monopoly stopping it.
About 3 stories for half the day with no comments to their name... Strange, even for us UK people, who have to wait until 2 for the USA to wake up...
/. people to hear about this stuff from a respectable source like this, because good design (versus complicated configurability) is what all the various software writers need to create a good desktop for the masses.
Then this story with the middle bit repeated about 5 times... Then I reload and it's gone! I hope the problem gets sorted, looks like an ugly bug!
Anyway, I think the fitt's law stuff is good if applied as one more generic rule, but it doesn't convince me the way it's put in the fitt's law link. Design concepts are sometimes so so prone to waffle, that I really need good proof before I believe that keeping the size equal is the solution to all design ills.
Answering all the questions with the same answer ldos not give sufficent credit to all the other aspects of design, like clutter and metaphor, or how intuitive it all is.
But it's good for
1) Find niche market for space travel. Not cruises, maybe more like minerals or fuel more easily found on close by planets etc.
2) expand into more useful stuff, like supporting human life for long periods of time.
3) we can go off to some of these planets. Jupiter size is big, but not enough. We can float around in their atmospheres with cheap & cheerful outfits to make the air breathable, liquidise the water, move around in the more gasseous surroundings suggested by the article.
Because we are going to outgrow the earth. And the earth's lifespan is not limitless. It's a race between technology, time, pollution, and our belief that we deserve to do so.
It may seem strange to say it, but the very question of asking who is responsible says a lot about only assigning guilt and blame on selected parties, which is *not* constructive.
Einstein came up with atomic theory, and I think he felt quite guilty for it's main application. But the people who actually turned generic theory to bomb were also to blame, as are the people who still seek to acquire nuclear weapons, and anyone else involved.
All of them were responsible, although it's also up to each individual involved to also make up for it by trying to put a stop to it. Einstein by making public statements, the government by facing up to stuff and stopping production of nukes, and everyone else by doing whatever they can too.
It's the same in this case: everyone who has something to do with it is responsible for things being used in a negative way. And the way to put a stop to it is to realise how much we ourselves are responsible and then create value through what we do.
I don't think it's okay to stop once you have found the person who is legally responsible, and then think, ok, none of my business now. I think if anyone really values the work they are doing on computers nowadays or whatever the hell you are doing, then you will still try to assume as much responsibility as possible, and then try to put things right again!
The key to this argument is that by being responsible for something legally means that you can be punished for it. People shy away from responsiblility precisely because they associate it only with guilt and punishment! But morally and also economically, it means that you are actually one of the people who has what it takes to deal with the problem constructively!
Assuming responsibility for the harmful uses of technology can only benefit technology.
What cards would MS be able to pull in order to stop a possible open sourcing of it's software?
And in economic terms, what would this bring about? ie, is it possible to speculate that microsoft would lose a lot and very quickly were this to happen?
Right I'll explain:
-Oh excuse me, my phone's ringing...
Ok. Now what was I on about?
Ummm...
I can imagine the streets of people, the mobile phone factory train carriages in europe, the continuous buzzing of stupid tunes from mozart's to 10 to the theme from the what's it called? Um..
On our way to becoming a species with a J shaped population curve, the first to go must be the long term memory, although I think I remember other drugs of society known to cause similar problems...
What was I just talking about?
Long term memory being lost may not neccessarily be a bad thing though. In a fast paced society it may well be that the changes in our memory imposed by our use of mobile coms actually make us better at remembering the short term stuff we really need. Face it, we now have shorter times to spend (ie less than a lifetime) on our jobs, our partners, our friends, even in the places where we live. The importance of each one is great in the present, but wanes a bit a year from then.
Who cares why I came here, or about the dreams I had when I arrived. No, really, maybe we have to harden ourselves and lose those things. Maybe that's what databases are for.
The synergy resulting from the simple feeling you get from using and helping develop open source software is what drives it on. It's like asian firms giving shares(which quickly caught on elsewhere...), except it's that idea cubed!
It's the nurturing feeling you get when you toil and labour with something but see it grow and know that you were a part of it all. Not many people can say that about closed source, except CTOs.
And it could well be applied to a lot of other things we do today. All it needs is visionaries.
eg: SSADM. Anyone else ever seen how closed and proprietary systems design can be? But no-one's stepped in yet to make it better, because all the attempts at bettering it start from the closed frame of mind.
I think the internet should have it's own form of information hunting, farming and gathering:
Journalists just have to accept that one person writing information is always going to be less informative that a thousand people putting together their collective knowledge on that piece.
Paper journalism has evolved from the idea of just giving information, to becoming political, or as a tool of the individual journalist. But if people with access to the internet want something closer to straight facts, they'll go for faqs, ask slashdots, usenet discussions and the like. Of course they are still biased, but they do offer a wider opinion space than individually made work.
I've recently volunteered to put together something on the web about an important educator. It took me about half an hour to work out that if I write it all myself, it'll be like a high school essay: ultimately biased, incorrect, and limited to what I can do and what time I have to do it.
So I went open source, and said. Ok, it's a faq. Start asking questions, start answering them. The work will build on it's own (with some help from me) and will be much more complete than what I'd have come up with after studying for ages.
That's the functionality the internet has. It's pointless not to use it. Paper Journalism should stay on paper.
Ale
A: It's the world's smallest guitar playing for wannabe rock stars in science labs.