Then there is another perspective, with the amount of artificially intelligent people we have running around, do we really need or want machines to emulate them?
It depends on the type of society you want to live in.
Any type of utopian society needs AI for moderation and assistance.
We as humans are too unreliable to be trusted with lots of power and
we are unable to keep any type of utopian experiment running for long.
The challenge I see is not so much about creating the intelligence, but
creating reliable, ethical trusty intelligence with love.
We probably don't want to create super intelligent liers who
are doing stuff in their self interest.
The question waiting to be answered is whether or not DRM free music will encourage/facilitate more "illegal" file sharing.
My simple guess is that DRM free music decreases "illegal" file sharing. Many people, like me, want to buy music. What is my option if I can not buy DRM free music? My only legal option then is to not buy music.
I have never, and will never buy DRM contaminated music.
How funny. What the hell for they need to put Linux into *this*? And who gonna buy it? Like... "I`m such a fan of Linux, that it even runs my portable dvd player"...
Would you rather prefer that it would run Vista then...?
Seriously, this is exactly that kind of device I have been waiting for since the middle of 90ies, when I started my wearable project, but... it seems as the displays never make it. I have bought endless amounts of displays several 800x600 only to find that they are unusable due to bad lenses, bad VGA to LCD converters etc.
I would really like a better resolution though, my 12" laptop screen has a 1400x1050 resolution and I would rather not have less resolution than that. I wonder if I will ever get my display, but I will anyway try with this for a while. It is great to have a real linux system together with the display.
Sorry I don't have mod points at the moment. Thanks for the essay link to http://deoxy.org/aip.htm
Our business plan is to soon provide an environment for free innovation (the customer is the inventor concept) and push the patent system into where it belongs, a harmless oblivion.
Copyright laws are still important though, as they care for software licences like GPL to not be abused.
Regarding creative art, DRM is evil (I don't purchase DRM stuff) and DMCA is pure insanity.
If their real goal is improving education and opportunity to developing nations why should it matter if there were more players involved?
To have more than one player inolved is certainly not the problem, but having a player that can come in conflict with their own commercial intersts I can't see as secure and beneficial for the project. Even though Intel may have the best intentions there may arise internal conflicts. And, there are certainly other actors being intersted in wiping out the OLPC project, like Microsoft, as the Classmate even runs XP. I think it would be very bad for the future if the OLPC would be based upon a proprietary operative system. There are also very important features in the OLPC like the Mesh routing (something I considered an essential feature in this type of computers in a school paper I wrote 1987) that could get lost if proprietary interests would get too much influence.
If I were in control of the OLPC project I would have stated the same requirements and therefore I consider that the OLPC board did the right thing. When mixing commercial interests with idealistic goals one have to be very careful.
Spencer is a person that made some significant contributions to open source, none OS related, and some pithy quotes. He barely qualifies to have an opinion on operating systems design.
If you consider his contributions to not be OS related I think you haven't qualified for a licence to have an opinion about his opinion regarding OS design.
Apart from that, someone who has designed and implemented regex deserves all my respect, I once tried in early 80ies and gave up.
And what do you then say to the concept of maglev?
You seem to have missed the fundamental point with AJWM's comment.
If you consider that e.g. maglev and rails solve the same fundamental problem that wheels do, then I wouldn't want you in my development team.
Maglev and rails are excellent for transport along not so flexible routes, energy efficient, fast etc, but they require quite a lot of investment and infrastructure to be implemented.
A wheel, is a simple cheap transportation device that manages heavy loads and works anywhere where there is a reasonable flat and hard surface available, deserts on Earth or March, forests, beaches etc. Legs that we are equipped with are more flexible though, but also usually less energy efficient and also considerable more complex to build and control.
You also mentioned sleds, but these are almost complementary to wheels, they work well on low friction surfaces which may not have a hard enough surface for wheels. When we have been able to implement simple efficient "antigravity" devices (like hoover boards) then these may solve the same fundamental problem as wheels, wings, as well as maglevs and rails do separately now, but we are yet far from solving that problem.
I also agree completely about the citiation from Henry Spencer. As Microsoft and many others have not understood UNIX and its clones, they have therefore not been able to reimplement it and can therefore neither attract people that do understand it.
Unix/Linux/BSD etc is a conceptual tool that solve fundamental problems in a reasonable simple way, but some time in the future we may see an "antigravity" solution also here. I wouldn't be too surprised if it will be based upon our second oldest programming language.
I could buy an argument as "there is a development bug, but we are fixing it soon and we are very sorry for this, but the faulty drives will be replaced".
There is no way in hell, I buy an argument like "Our drives are not supposed to work with Linux".
Either they hire complete idiots for their tech support, or this a sign of something really really bad smelling as the OOXML scandal or the SCO scandal.
Anyway, now I won't buy any more Seagate drives, at least not until Seagate has cleared this mess up.
I'm sad that I'll probably never be able to touch it unless I change my job as I've been told it would, quite literally, require an act of Congress to allow us to use anything other than SAS for our work.
Can't you hide it behind a "boss is coming" button?
OK, this may not be a long term solution, but if everyone would follow
what is centrally decided upon sw solution, not much progress would be
done, or at least, it would be less fun...
No boss would ever try to tell me what sw tools or OS I should use.
I don't save in either with Writer. I save in PDF. That way ANYONE can open my document, no matter who they are
I don't get this. I've seen several people here answering that they save in PDF instead. I think that was not the question. Of course I save in PDF if I send an end document to someone, something that is not intended for editing. I would only send in either DOC or ODF if someone is expected to continue editing the document.
If I get a document from somewhere I usually save it in the same format as originally, but all my own documents I save in ODF of course. If I'm sending a document to someone for editing I ask what format they want.
It is handy with editable PDF for forms, but it's a pity that no other software (I know about) than Acrobat Professional can save in this format, so I can't send PDF in that case either, if I want a PDF back. Anyone having a good solution? Maybe some later version of OO will be able to edit PDF forms as well, that would be great.
OpenOffice uses ODF which is a multi-platform ISO standard instead of that
OOXML crap. => you can exchange documents between many different platforms.
It runs natively on GNU/Linux, Mac, Solaris,
(soon FreeBSD) and many other systems, no need for e.g.
Wine.
It can generate LaTeX, which is good when you want to make a professional publishing of your text.
OO can generate
PDF natively even though I rarely use this option as the generated
PDF files are too big. I use to print to
PS and then run
ps2pdf instead
How is Microsoft holding free software innovation back?
How is this Office Suite or Open Office more innovative than MS Office?
At least they innovated the new Ribbons interface whereas OO seems
to be stuck on cloning the older versions.
The only better thing I've seen in OO was that it used a gzipped xml
compared to the opaque binary files that MS Office uses, but this
hardly matters for the business users out there.
Your questions are important ones and need good answers
for those who don't see the obvious. I don't know if you
read my blog entry
"SCO finally dead! MS next?"
even though I don't prove my statements there about Microsoft
having hold free innovation back, merely indicates the explanation
for those who have same type of insight as me, which is not rare,
about 50% of the people I know have this insight.
"There might also be a large gap in the historical record due to the myopic reliance on proprietary file formats for record-keeping by public authorities all round the world and the subsequent inability of future generations to read them."
A better punishment for Microsoft than
paying 690 million dollars
could be to let them convert all the world's documents being in MS proprietary formats into ISO/IEC 26300 (ODF).
Otherwise the same mistake may be repeated when we have all forgotten...
My serious and optimistic view: Soon we will see computing interoperability and software development flourish and we will look back upon the MS dominant time where they were holding free software innovation and interoperability back as an annoying historic paranthesis.
The next important step in the world of computing now is to Stop software patents!
To achieve the similar stimulance to software development as when
the
movie industry moved to California to avoid the film patents that were holding the film industry back on the east coast.
First I was shocked, then I believed that someone was pretending to be Miguel,
but when checking his profile and all it seems as it really was Miguel saying this.
I also had hard to imagine that he would have been paid by Microsoft to say this, so I really don't understand his motives.
Here in Sweden we are currently arguing with Klas Hammar, who is business area manager for Microsoft Sweden. Recently, in a a
debate article (7th Sept, in Swedish) he claimed that OOXML is "future safe" and in
another article (today 11th of Sept, also Swedish), he says "one could ask why it shouldn't become a standard".
For him and others I collected the documents I had studied before the decision to reject OOXML and
put them here (all in English). It is a collection of some documents from e.g. Google, Oracle, Spain FFII, Italian PLIO etc which very clearly describes the flaws of OOXML.
This page could probably be useful for Miguel to read as well.
This is not to compete with <NO>OOXML, it is just to illustrate how we have come to this conclusion on our own.
We are not opposing OOXML by principle just because it's Microsoft, in fact we looked forward to the Microsoft XML format a few years ago, but that was before we understood how bad an "XML" specification could be designed. OOXML is a rough draft, nothing to take seriously as it appears now. I also have a
blog entry about this
if you want to send me some comments. (I'm not a blogger, otherwise)
If a proposed standard is acceptable as it is, but during review you found points where it can still be improved, "yes with comments" is the appropriate vote.
Yeah, which was not the case with OOXML, as it had so many serious flaws that to consider it as an ISO standard as is, you had not understood what it was all about.
This is where Microsoft had deliberately fooled a lot of voting people to believe that it is OK, to vote yes with comments, even if there are technical issues to be corrected.
I have a hard time believing that MS would stack the deck so blatantly, but have no doubt that they would do so in a more covert manner. Long story short, don't be surprised if a number of the new voting members vote no initially.
They are marketing people, they don't understand more fine tuned issues like the technical or political ones. Technical issues they usually ignore, or only deal with them far enough to lock you in, to make the least possible interoperability. About political issues we see how bluntly they have acted in the PRO software patent debate, like when Bill G threthened the danish, that "if you don't say yes to software patents we will withdraw our research organization of 800 people in Denmark", this was in 2006.
That is, it would be scary if Microsoft really would be starting to act smart with their dirty methods, but I hope they stick to their usual blunt and arrogant methods.
Slashdot Mirror
Then there is another perspective, with the amount of artificially intelligent people we have running around, do we really need or want machines to emulate them?
It depends on the type of society you want to live in. Any type of utopian society needs AI for moderation and assistance.
We as humans are too unreliable to be trusted with lots of power and we are unable to keep any type of utopian experiment running for long.
The challenge I see is not so much about creating the intelligence, but creating reliable, ethical trusty intelligence with love. We probably don't want to create super intelligent liers who are doing stuff in their self interest.
The question waiting to be answered is whether or not DRM free music will encourage/facilitate more "illegal" file sharing.
My simple guess is that DRM free music decreases "illegal" file sharing. Many people, like me, want to buy music. What is my option if I can not buy DRM free music? My only legal option then is to not buy music.
I have never, and will never buy DRM contaminated music.DRM is Defective By Design
Duverger's law
A Mathematical Proof of Duverger's Law
only ref to paper, paper is unfortunately not directly accessible
How funny. What the hell for they need to put Linux into *this*? And who gonna buy it? Like... "I`m such a fan of Linux, that it even runs my portable dvd player"...
Would you rather prefer that it would run Vista then...?
Seriously, this is exactly that kind of device I have been waiting for since the middle of 90ies, when I started my wearable project, but... it seems as the displays never make it. I have bought endless amounts of displays several 800x600 only to find that they are unusable due to bad lenses, bad VGA to LCD converters etc.
I would really like a better resolution though, my 12" laptop screen has a 1400x1050 resolution and I would rather not have less resolution than that. I wonder if I will ever get my display, but I will anyway try with this for a while. It is great to have a real linux system together with the display.
Sorry I don't have mod points at the moment. Thanks for the essay link to http://deoxy.org/aip.htm
Our business plan is to soon provide an environment for free innovation (the customer is the inventor concept) and push the patent system into where it belongs, a harmless oblivion.
Copyright laws are still important though, as they care for software licences like GPL to not be abused. Regarding creative art, DRM is evil (I don't purchase DRM stuff) and DMCA is pure insanity.
support FFII.org, EFF.org and DefectiveByDesign.org
If their real goal is improving education and opportunity to developing nations why should it matter if there were more players involved?
To have more than one player inolved is certainly not the problem, but having a player that can come in conflict with their own commercial intersts I can't see as secure and beneficial for the project. Even though Intel may have the best intentions there may arise internal conflicts. And, there are certainly other actors being intersted in wiping out the OLPC project, like Microsoft, as the Classmate even runs XP. I think it would be very bad for the future if the OLPC would be based upon a proprietary operative system. There are also very important features in the OLPC like the Mesh routing (something I considered an essential feature in this type of computers in a school paper I wrote 1987) that could get lost if proprietary interests would get too much influence.
If I were in control of the OLPC project I would have stated the same requirements and therefore I consider that the OLPC board did the right thing. When mixing commercial interests with idealistic goals one have to be very careful.
I have been practising flying by levitation as long as I can remember and am now quite well trained.
Spencer is a person that made some significant contributions to open source, none OS related, and some pithy quotes. He barely qualifies to have an opinion on operating systems design.
If you consider his contributions to not be OS related I think you haven't qualified for a licence to have an opinion about his opinion regarding OS design.
Apart from that, someone who has designed and implemented regex deserves all my respect, I once tried in early 80ies and gave up.
What systems have you designed and implemented?You seem to have missed the fundamental point with AJWM's comment.
If you consider that e.g. maglev and rails solve the same fundamental problem that wheels do, then I wouldn't want you in my development team.
Maglev and rails are excellent for transport along not so flexible routes, energy efficient, fast etc, but they require quite a lot of investment and infrastructure to be implemented.
A wheel, is a simple cheap transportation device that manages heavy loads and works anywhere where there is a reasonable flat and hard surface available, deserts on Earth or March, forests, beaches etc. Legs that we are equipped with are more flexible though, but also usually less energy efficient and also considerable more complex to build and control.
You also mentioned sleds, but these are almost complementary to wheels, they work well on low friction surfaces which may not have a hard enough surface for wheels. When we have been able to implement simple efficient "antigravity" devices (like hoover boards) then these may solve the same fundamental problem as wheels, wings, as well as maglevs and rails do separately now, but we are yet far from solving that problem.
I also agree completely about the citiation from Henry Spencer. As Microsoft and many others have not understood UNIX and its clones, they have therefore not been able to reimplement it and can therefore neither attract people that do understand it.
Unix/Linux/BSD etc is a conceptual tool that solve fundamental problems in a reasonable simple way, but some time in the future we may see an "antigravity" solution also here. I wouldn't be too surprised if it will be based upon our second oldest programming language.
I could buy an argument as "there is a development bug, but we are fixing it soon and we are very sorry for this, but the faulty drives will be replaced".
There is no way in hell, I buy an argument like "Our drives are not supposed to work with Linux".
Either they hire complete idiots for their tech support, or this a sign of something really really bad smelling as the OOXML scandal or the SCO scandal.
Anyway, now I won't buy any more Seagate drives, at least not until Seagate has cleared this mess up.I'm sad that I'll probably never be able to touch it unless I change my job as I've been told it would, quite literally, require an act of Congress to allow us to use anything other than SAS for our work.
Can't you hide it behind a "boss is coming" button?
OK, this may not be a long term solution, but if everyone would follow what is centrally decided upon sw solution, not much progress would be done, or at least, it would be less fun... No boss would ever try to tell me what sw tools or OS I should use.I don't save in either with Writer. I save in PDF. That way ANYONE can open my document, no matter who they are
I don't get this. I've seen several people here answering that they save in PDF instead. I think that was not the question. Of course I save in PDF if I send an end document to someone, something that is not intended for editing. I would only send in either DOC or ODF if someone is expected to continue editing the document.
If I get a document from somewhere I usually save it in the same format as originally, but all my own documents I save in ODF of course. If I'm sending a document to someone for editing I ask what format they want.
It is handy with editable PDF for forms, but it's a pity that no other software (I know about) than Acrobat Professional can save in this format, so I can't send PDF in that case either, if I want a PDF back. Anyone having a good solution? Maybe some later version of OO will be able to edit PDF forms as well, that would be great.
free software => free unlimited innovation possible
=> you can exchange documents between many different platforms.
I use to print to PS and then run ps2pdf instead
How is Microsoft holding free software innovation back? How is this Office Suite or Open Office more innovative than MS Office? At least they innovated the new Ribbons interface whereas OO seems to be stuck on cloning the older versions. The only better thing I've seen in OO was that it used a gzipped xml compared to the opaque binary files that MS Office uses, but this hardly matters for the business users out there.
Your questions are important ones and need good answers for those who don't see the obvious. I don't know if you read my blog entry "SCO finally dead! MS next?" even though I don't prove my statements there about Microsoft having hold free innovation back, merely indicates the explanation for those who have same type of insight as me, which is not rare, about 50% of the people I know have this insight.
However, if you are very young and have grown up with the PC only, no Unix, no Lisa, no Mac, no Amiga then I don't expect you to have this insight. To achieve this you need to care a lot about computers and have been around them for a few decades. For my own I took my MSc in engineering physics with a enhanced focus on computer science 1981. After that I was working with software development and systems design the next ten years, teaching, research and development the next ten years, resulting in a PhD in computer science 2003 (my thesis, pdf) and I am now working as a researcher and research consultant in own company when at the same time developing a new business idea a mass innovation concept Wish-IT® to encourage free innovation, to give consumers, manufacturers and investors what they want.
To make a few brief statements about Microsoft.
"There might also be a large gap in the historical record due to the myopic reliance on proprietary file formats for record-keeping by public authorities all round the world and the subsequent inability of future generations to read them."
A better punishment for Microsoft than paying 690 million dollars could be to let them convert all the world's documents being in MS proprietary formats into ISO/IEC 26300 (ODF). Otherwise the same mistake may be repeated when we have all forgotten...
My serious and optimistic view: Soon we will see computing interoperability and software development flourish and we will look back upon the MS dominant time where they were holding free software innovation and interoperability back as an annoying historic paranthesis.
The next important step in the world of computing now is to Stop software patents! To achieve the similar stimulance to software development as when the movie industry moved to California to avoid the film patents that were holding the film industry back on the east coast.
Support FFII and EFF
I guess noone is seriously interested in OOXML any more, but I collected some arguments about our company's opinions about OOXML recently.
If you are interested in reading people's blogs, here is mine about SCO finally dead! MS next?
If someone is not too bored to read blogs about it, here is mine
SCO finally dead! MS next?
This sounds insane. Please tell which manufacturer, so we know that we should not to buy this brand!
Anyway, this can't be true anyway. No hardware manufacturer could be so abusive against its customers.First I was shocked, then I believed that someone was pretending to be Miguel, but when checking his profile and all it seems as it really was Miguel saying this. I also had hard to imagine that he would have been paid by Microsoft to say this, so I really don't understand his motives.
Here in Sweden we are currently arguing with Klas Hammar, who is business area manager for Microsoft Sweden. Recently, in a a debate article (7th Sept, in Swedish) he claimed that OOXML is "future safe" and in another article (today 11th of Sept, also Swedish), he says "one could ask why it shouldn't become a standard".
For him and others I collected the documents I had studied before the decision to reject OOXML and put them here (all in English). It is a collection of some documents from e.g. Google, Oracle, Spain FFII, Italian PLIO etc which very clearly describes the flaws of OOXML. This page could probably be useful for Miguel to read as well. This is not to compete with <NO>OOXML, it is just to illustrate how we have come to this conclusion on our own.
We are not opposing OOXML by principle just because it's Microsoft, in fact we looked forward to the Microsoft XML format a few years ago, but that was before we understood how bad an "XML" specification could be designed. OOXML is a rough draft, nothing to take seriously as it appears now. I also have a blog entry about this if you want to send me some comments. (I'm not a blogger, otherwise)
that I get sued by the spammer if I reject their spam
France, and I think some more, has suggested to split OOXML in two parts, one which is ODF compatible, one which deals with the old Office formats.
What is your view as being a MS developer, do you think Microsoft are able to do this?
(I don't mean technically, merely politically) For my own I think that is a great idea.If a proposed standard is acceptable as it is, but during review you found points where it can still be improved, "yes with comments" is the appropriate vote.
Yeah, which was not the case with OOXML, as it had so many serious flaws that to consider it as an ISO standard as is, you had not understood what it was all about. This is where Microsoft had deliberately fooled a lot of voting people to believe that it is OK, to vote yes with comments, even if there are technical issues to be corrected.
I have a hard time believing that MS would stack the deck so blatantly, but have no doubt that they would do so in a more covert manner. Long story short, don't be surprised if a number of the new voting members vote no initially.
They are marketing people, they don't understand more fine tuned issues like the technical or political ones. Technical issues they usually ignore, or only deal with them far enough to lock you in, to make the least possible interoperability. About political issues we see how bluntly they have acted in the PRO software patent debate, like when Bill G threthened the danish, that "if you don't say yes to software patents we will withdraw our research organization of 800 people in Denmark", this was in 2006.
That is, it would be scary if Microsoft really would be starting to act smart with their dirty methods, but I hope they stick to their usual blunt and arrogant methods.
The posting is not "funny", it should be modded "insightful"
mod me insightful!