>So I agree that swarms are unlike authoritarian communism. They're unlike authoritarian anything, >simply because swarms are anti-authoritarian and non-hierarchial - any structure involving a boss >or a "chain of command" cannot function as a swarm. However, they're definitely not behaving the >way a free market does, either....
Actualy they are very much more like a free market.
Communism is a tightly hierarchical system in which all decisions are made at the top and everyone has to do what they are told by the chain of command. In a free market system everyone can choose what they do, which means that on the one hand I can work in a team/part/company or other group if I decide that's best, or I can choose to split off and for my own group (political party, company, etc) if I see an opportunity. That is much more like the behaviour of colony insects because each insect makes it's own decisions. It doesn't make decisions just based on arbitrary desires, but then neither do we. Human beings in a free market make decisions based on the information we get from our interactions with others in society, and is self-optimizing in the same way colony insects are.
Communist societies are not self-optimizing at the micro-level and so are inflexible and inefficient.
Not all great ideas are equal. Goole's strengths are online services that leverage their search and advertising technologies. Google are proven to be very good at picking winners in this space. Combine this with the fact that many of those great ideas don't play strongly to Google's strengths.
So only a fraction of those great ideas are of real interest to Google, and Google have a high likelihood of picking the best that are. Google still can't lose. A lot of people will leave Google and found great, successful companies but that's not a bad thing for Google.
A competitor to Google or Microsoft has to be doing what Google or Microsoft does to be a threat. By the way, that's why Google isn't actually a threat to Microsoft. If only MS could see that, stop trying to be a second rate Google and get back to being a first rate Microsoft.
I worked for Ericsson until the end of 2006 and all of their corporate desktops, bar a very few specific exemptions, run Windows 200 to this very day. They're not alone either, the big corps are extremely conservative about these things and frankly 2000 does everything they need just fine. This is changing, it's harder and harder to get maintained drivers for the latest hardware, but frankly what special hardware do 90% of corporate desktops need to support? Not much.
Is this a disaster for Redmond? Are they gnashing their teeth at this awful failure at Ericsson? Of course not, it's really no big deal. The corporations pay just the same for 2000 as they do for XP. MS does need to keep maintain a fresh and modern code base to stay competitive in many niches (games, multimedia apps, development tools, servers, new specialist hardware, etc) but the fact that Windows 2000 is fine for the vast majority of users is no pain for them because the revenues still keep rolling in anyway.
With Vista there is a new element and that's Microsoft's efforts to advance the API so that new compelling multimedia and advanced communications enabled applications will provide a new lock-in to Vista. This will probably work. Vista already has a vastly greater market penetration than all the Linux desktops put together, and if it doesn't already surpass the Mac (like the one I'm writing this on) it will soon, so windows developers will have no qualms about adopting the new Vista APIs.
As a recent Mac convert this is one big difference between the design philosophies at Apple and MS. For example in iTunes wwhen you want to rip a CD it doesn't ask you what encoding and bitrate to use, it just does it. If you want to alter those settings, go to the options dialog. iPhoto takes a similar approach to importing photos. iTunes also assumes automatic synching with an iPod so you just don't need to select which songs to transfer, etc. If you want to manualy manage synching you got to the options and switch it on.
A typical windows program would throw up all the possible options every time, at the point at which you invoke the action - more powerful? Yes. More confusing and unintuitive to most consumers? Also yes. (Sure, there are exceptions to every rule.)
Google seems to take an apple-like approach. All the bells and whistles are there in advanced search and the specialist search tools such as Google Scholar, but most people don't want or need those, so they're hidden away behind a simple interface.
The different approaches to this will appeal to different classes of users. Photoshop users on a Mac wouldn't want all the powerful tools hidden away, they want them to be accessible. Perhaps innovations such as the Ribbons in Office 12 (yes, I know I'm asking for it using that word for a MS product - bring it on!) will help bridge the gap in the power versus usability stakes.
This is my assessment of RMS's possition. I've tried with bitter tennacity to maintain a considerable degree of respect for RMS obver the last few years, but here he's lost me.
If his possition realy is that it would better if these children had no laptop at all, than one that uses even a tiny seed of proprietary software, even temporarily, then he's he realy has lost the plot completely. Back when he started GNU he used proprietary platforms because nothing else existed. Now he's saying nobody should ever use proprietary systems even if they have no other alternative. This smacks of hypocrisy.
Their share price still seems horribly overblown. Yes I know they're aprofitable business, as I said in an earlier reply, none of this is realy a probelm for them as an operating company. They have plenty of cash and are very profitable, but their shares simply are not worth half what they currently stand at. The problem with cash though is that it's not earning anything (much), and any investment you do make with it has to earn at least as much as your current business or it will actualy make you look worse.
I think Google has a bright future. It's share holders (if buying at anything like this price) not so much.
>Yes because I'm sure this will be the only growth Google sees in the next 166 years.
They need to increase their profitability, from it's current doubled return, by another 10 to 15 times at least in order to become even nominaly worthwhile at this share price. They need to do this pretty fast too, because every year their shares give their current pitifuly low return means the eventual jump in profitability required to make up for it becomes even higher.
Of course none of this is realy a problem for Google. They're a profitable business and even if their share price collapsed by 10 times, that wouldn't materialy affect their business operations. It's only their shareholders that would suffer and that's not Google's fault. Nobody forced anyone to buy Google shares.
Simon
NOTE: I am not an investment advisor and this is all back-of-an-envelope.
$2.33 earnings per share, at a cost of $387 per share. That's a return of 0.6% per year on your investment so at this rate it will take about 166 years to get your investment back in earned value.
Yep, these Internet stocks sure are amazing value for money.
The first thing that popped into my head while watching this was that it could make even ten-thumbed fumblers like me into class-act poker dealers. That has obvious gaming connotations, but realy this would be a very nice interface for games where you're manipulating simulatioons of real-world object or resources. RTS games user interfaces are all about multiply-selecting different categories of objects and issuing commands, and the gestures displayed here would be ideal for that kind of game. I wonder if the Nintendo DS, with it's pen input, would be up to an interface like this? Probably not, as it's not realy designed for physics.
I think it's pretty clear that what Microsoft realy needs to do is pay attention to the advice of key decission makers. They need to immediately read Slashdot articles like this one and implement the wise, creative and well thought out strategic plans suggested by a bunch of no-life nerds... er, I mean Slashdot community.
It's the only strategy that is likely to rescue microsoft from imminent collapse and irrelevence.
>This isn't how a Communist country is supposed to be run.
Ah, but it's communism 'with chinese characteristics'. In other words their philosophy is for the Chinese government to run the country according to the principles of the government of China.
>standard laborer in China makes roughly $50-$100 USD per month. Can you expect >them to afford tuition rates of £200-400? Not really.
Chinese families are perfectly willing to spend as much as 50% of their household income on their children's education, living at subsistence level in order to invest in their family's future. Their expectations and willingness to make sacrifices exceed what most westerners would consider credible. It's a different world.
>All you're going to do is create more places that people can't afford to get into.
The fact that there is huge competition to get into higher education in China shows that grants and scholarships, while of course good ideas in principle, are not actualy required in order to simply boost attendance. For many Chinese, access to higher education for their children is the only way they can hope for a better future, and they will do whatever is necessery to get that chance.
I found Mediawiki pretty easy to set up. I used XAMPP http://www.apachefriends.org/en/xampp.html for the Apache/MySQL/PHP layer as it's an internal project on our LAN so security wasn't a major concern.
It's a huge improvement on any previous method we've used to organise our documentation - mostly FAQs, instructions, process documentation, links to external resources, screenshots, all sorts. Apart from backups (VBSCript to take a MYSQL dump and copy the images directory), I use HTTrack to take a 1 link deep HTML snapshot of the 'Special:AllPages' page. This can be copied to a laptop or flash drive for offline reference. The wiki pages cut-n-paste into word nicely too.
I've recently come across TiddlyWiki, which is very nice. I'd consider that for any future small scale projects.
>Q10: Why do you think other developers haven't done anything like this before?
FarCry had a very similar technology, which is what allowed it to render vast outdoor spaces at a time when DOOM3 was retricted to claustrophobic dungeon-type environments.
To be fair to Carmack I have read that he's aware of this and mentioned CryTek in an interview where MegaTexture technology was discussed.
>I'm fine with services too -- some people need them. I don't, usually.
The ISP you use to connect to the internet is a service. The utilities that supply water and electricity to your home are services. The entertainment you consume (TV, films, computer games, ad-supported web sites you visit including slashdot - the web page you are viewing now, and any software you buy) are services. The education system you were taught at was a service industry, the bank that holds your money and (maybe) lends your mortgage is a service. If you renyt, you do so from a service provider. Where do you work?
* There are mobile phone radio masts on tens of thousands of buildings all over the world, for almost a decade. * There has been no significant increase in the number of brain tumours since mobile phones became popular. * Why would people in one building sudenly have a greater chance of getting brain tumours from a radio mast, while the chances of the many (possibly hundreds of) thousands of people in other buildings with radio masts on them getting cancer stay the same? There's an antenna on the roof of a building next to the one I work in, I can see the antenna from here througn the window. Why don't I and all my colleagues have cancer?
Unless there is a huge difference in the way this mast is installed and operated, or the structure of the building from other similar installations, there's no reason to suppose this cluster of cancers has anything to do with the radio mast. There could be thousands of other factors that could be the cause.
Or there might be no cause. How many buildings are there in the world? How many random instances of cancer are there? Statisticaly, you'd expect to see the occasional fluke cluster of cancers in one building from time to time. If the odds against such a cluster in any given building were a million to one, in a survey of 10 million buildings you'd expect to see roughly 10 such clusters just by pure chance. Even if the chances were 10 million to 1, there's still no reason to suppose finding one such cluster in the sample is at all suspicious.
The idea that each country can just gaze at it's own navel and ignore what happens in other countries is a persistent one, but there are so many historical examples of why it's a very bad idea that it's hard to know where to begin.
I'll skip the obvious one by just saying "Godwin's Law", you know what I mean. In the case of Iraq, for the first war when one country invades another and threatent others you can nolonger say it's an internal matter. As for the second Iraq war, you know the first war never realy ended. We were still sending planes over Iraq, still occasionaly attacking their SAM batteries and enforcing UN sanctions. People were still dying, and that situation couldn't go on forever. Again, it wasn't an internal issue regardless of what you might think about how things turned out doing nothing wasn't an option and don't believe those who say otherwise. At least if you disagree with what was done (it was completely screwed up after all), say what you think should have been done instead and don't dodge the issue.
Opression within a country inevitably has knock-on effects beyond the borders of that country. How to treat refugees? Do you extradite people who are criminals in their own country even though their 'crimes' aren't punishable in your own? What about your own companies doing business over there? What about the freedoms of your own reporters in that country? Toes are going to be stepped on, whatever you do and if the situation does spill over into violence who do you side with? Perhaps the 'terrorists' in that country have at least some legitimate complaints.
Saying "It's just their culture" also doesn't wash, the Egyptian government is highly un-islamic. They aren't even operating uder their own normal 'laws of the land'. The government has been operating using emergency laws for decades. What emergency? It's one of the government's own making!
It is our business. That doesn't mean we should invade now, or any such rubbish. It means we (I'm British) do have freedoms and rights. We can make our views known to the Egyptian Embassy. We can write letters to our democratic representatives. We can even write to the newspapers in our country, or just blog about our opinions and write about them here. Expressing our opinions can and does make a difference. Egypt in particular is highly dependent on wester tourism (I've been there for buisness and on holiday myself), and can't afford too much negative press especialy in the wake of the bombings. We can make a difference.
Making choices is all very well, but those choices need to be made on information. The EA employees in question were at least decieved, and perhaps even intentionaly lied to. The conditions they worked under were extreme even for the games industry, and their willingness to 'go that extra mile' for the company was ruthlessly exploited. If they'd been told the truth about what would eventualy be expected of them, there's no way they would have accepted it. EA either exploted them, or at least totaly missmanaged the project and relid on thes people to make it good. Either way, EA owes them.
Simon Hibbs
>Perhaps google has decided to keep all their services seperate making it possible >to keep their pages clean and not wasting screen space on links that should be >in your bookmarks anyway.
I just went into Gmail to count the links at the bottom of the page and post a smart-allec reply along the lines of "They allready have 7 links at the footer anyway" and what do you know? Now there's a link to Google Homepage. How long has that been there? It must be pretty recent.
Plus in Home Page there's a widget you can add that holds user-defined bookmarks. Things are looking up in Google Land.
GooglePages offers a very basic set of editing tools and a bunch of pre-defined page templates. It's pretty similar in usability to the GeoCities tools I used a while back, but the big difference is that it's all in-browser editing. With GeoCities I had to download an editor app and fire it up if I wanted to work on my pages, whereas with GooglePages you can immediately start entering content which makes it much more user friendly. I almost gave up of GeoCities several times due to the initial configuration process.
I wish Google had better integration, or even just basic links between it's services. Logged into Gmail and want to edit your GooglePages? Tough, you might as well open a seperate browser tab and navigate there from scratch. Likewise if you have a personalised Google home page - you can load a widget into it linking to your gmail, but again if you're in Gmail there's no easy way to go to your Google homepage reliably.
I know these are 'beta' services and they're beign incrementaly improved - the chat client in Gmail is nice - but Gmail has been in beta for a year or so now and how difficult would it be to just put simple links in place?
Ever noticed how all the biggest, most successful OSS projects are basic computing infrastructure projects? They're software written by techies, for techies. Things like compilers, operating systems, networking infrastructure, web server platforms, languages, databases. To write these things all you need to know is protocols, fundamental software architectures and how to program. They are areas where competent techie developers have a large amount of 'domain knowledge' - experience and in-depth understanding of the problem at hand.
Open Source doesn't work well when the problem domain is an area that few techie developers have knowledge of. Then you need to bring in experts in the required area of expertise who have the time and motivation to contribute to an Open Source solution. Now this does happen, but it's much rarer. Take my employer. We produce engineering modeling design software for cellular mobile telephone networks. Our development team includes a group of very knowledgeable and experienced radio network engineers who do testig and write specs and requirements, include experts in 3G radio technology of which there are not many in the whole world. Without their contributions over the last decade, our software wouldn't be possible. You see a similar thing happening with computer games, which require a considerable, high-quality contribution of art assets.
Techies have an innate interest in developing technological solutions to problems - if they have an itch it's likely to be a technical one and they are likely to want to develop technical methods of scratching it, which often means software. Artists, radio engineers and specialists from many other disciplines such as accountancy, human resources, etc don't have the same compulsion to develop or contribute towards software based solutions to their problems. It seems to me that corporate integration platforms like those offered by SAP and Oracle fall into the same category. They aren't the sort of problem you average techie is likely to feel any compulsion to solve, and those specialists you'd need to have involved in the development process aren't likely to be interested in doing so. This is where heavy ammounts of corporate funding is required to bridge the gap.
Now of course this doesn't exclude OSS from the party. For example groups of companies could collaborate to fund an OSS solution to their common problem, but these are likely to be competing companies. We're talking about huge investments of cash here, invested over time spans of 5 to 10 years or more. I think OSS will eventualy start to penetrate into these areas as the software industry matures but I expect this will happen over the long term, like my lifetime for example.
You can only copyright the actual words you write. If someone expresses the same idea in different words it's not got anything to do with copyright. Ideas is what patents are for. This is why source code can be copyrighted, and the mechanism it implements can be patented (in the U.S.A and which I deplore, but that's another issue). Ideas, theories, etc cannot be patented though so this is a non-starter.
Names of characters and perhaps organisations and fictional places probably could be protected. Nobody could write Sherlock Holmes stories, or even have him appear as an incidental character in a story untill the copyright expired for example. However for this to work thay'd have to have orriginated the characters, names, etc which they could only do if they are fictional. Thus to win this case they'd have to decalre that they made it all up. Even this would probably not work though, because they claim in the book that it's all true.
The closest case to this I can think of is the Scientologist's actions against people publishing their 'revelations' as a violation of their copyright. This was successful in most countries they tried it in, which is fair enough to an extent I suppose.
Interestingly in Germany this held no water. the german court held that since the Scientologists claimed their teachings were historical and spiritual fact that therefore they weren't copyrightable.
Slashdot Mirror
>So I agree that swarms are unlike authoritarian communism. They're unlike authoritarian anything,
>simply because swarms are anti-authoritarian and non-hierarchial - any structure involving a boss
>or a "chain of command" cannot function as a swarm. However, they're definitely not behaving the
>way a free market does, either....
Actualy they are very much more like a free market.
Communism is a tightly hierarchical system in which all decisions are made at the top and everyone has to do what they are told by the chain of command. In a free market system everyone can choose what they do, which means that on the one hand I can work in a team/part/company or other group if I decide that's best, or I can choose to split off and for my own group (political party, company, etc) if I see an opportunity. That is much more like the behaviour of colony insects because each insect makes it's own decisions. It doesn't make decisions just based on arbitrary desires, but then neither do we. Human beings in a free market make decisions based on the information we get from our interactions with others in society, and is self-optimizing in the same way colony insects are.
Communist societies are not self-optimizing at the micro-level and so are inflexible and inefficient.
Simon Hibbs
I don't think it matters as much as he thinks.
Not all great ideas are equal. Goole's strengths are online services that leverage their search and advertising technologies. Google are proven to be very good at picking winners in this space. Combine this with the fact that many of those great ideas don't play strongly to Google's strengths.
So only a fraction of those great ideas are of real interest to Google, and Google have a high likelihood of picking the best that are. Google still can't lose. A lot of people will leave Google and found great, successful companies but that's not a bad thing for Google.
A competitor to Google or Microsoft has to be doing what Google or Microsoft does to be a threat. By the way, that's why Google isn't actually a threat to Microsoft. If only MS could see that, stop trying to be a second rate Google and get back to being a first rate Microsoft.
Simon Hibbs
I worked for Ericsson until the end of 2006 and all of their corporate desktops, bar a very few specific exemptions, run Windows 200 to this very day. They're not alone either, the big corps are extremely conservative about these things and frankly 2000 does everything they need just fine. This is changing, it's harder and harder to get maintained drivers for the latest hardware, but frankly what special hardware do 90% of corporate desktops need to support? Not much.
Is this a disaster for Redmond? Are they gnashing their teeth at this awful failure at Ericsson? Of course not, it's really no big deal. The corporations pay just the same for 2000 as they do for XP. MS does need to keep maintain a fresh and modern code base to stay competitive in many niches (games, multimedia apps, development tools, servers, new specialist hardware, etc) but the fact that Windows 2000 is fine for the vast majority of users is no pain for them because the revenues still keep rolling in anyway.
With Vista there is a new element and that's Microsoft's efforts to advance the API so that new compelling multimedia and advanced communications enabled applications will provide a new lock-in to Vista. This will probably work. Vista already has a vastly greater market penetration than all the Linux desktops put together, and if it doesn't already surpass the Mac (like the one I'm writing this on) it will soon, so windows developers will have no qualms about adopting the new Vista APIs.
Sorry, but it's the truth.
As a recent Mac convert this is one big difference between the design philosophies at Apple and MS. For example in iTunes wwhen you want to rip a CD it doesn't ask you what encoding and bitrate to use, it just does it. If you want to alter those settings, go to the options dialog. iPhoto takes a similar approach to importing photos. iTunes also assumes automatic synching with an iPod so you just don't need to select which songs to transfer, etc. If you want to manualy manage synching you got to the options and switch it on.
A typical windows program would throw up all the possible options every time, at the point at which you invoke the action - more powerful? Yes. More confusing and unintuitive to most consumers? Also yes. (Sure, there are exceptions to every rule.)
Google seems to take an apple-like approach. All the bells and whistles are there in advanced search and the specialist search tools such as Google Scholar, but most people don't want or need those, so they're hidden away behind a simple interface.
The different approaches to this will appeal to different classes of users. Photoshop users on a Mac wouldn't want all the powerful tools hidden away, they want them to be accessible. Perhaps innovations such as the Ribbons in Office 12 (yes, I know I'm asking for it using that word for a MS product - bring it on!) will help bridge the gap in the power versus usability stakes.
RMS: "Let them eat cake!"
This is my assessment of RMS's possition. I've tried with bitter tennacity to maintain a considerable degree of respect for RMS obver the last few years, but here he's lost me.
If his possition realy is that it would better if these children had no laptop at all, than one that uses even a tiny seed of proprietary software, even temporarily, then he's he realy has lost the plot completely. Back when he started GNU he used proprietary platforms because nothing else existed. Now he's saying nobody should ever use proprietary systems even if they have no other alternative. This smacks of hypocrisy.
Fair enough, and thanks for the correction.
Their share price still seems horribly overblown. Yes I know they're aprofitable business, as I said in an earlier reply, none of this is realy a probelm for them as an operating company. They have plenty of cash and are very profitable, but their shares simply are not worth half what they currently stand at. The problem with cash though is that it's not earning anything (much), and any investment you do make with it has to earn at least as much as your current business or it will actualy make you look worse.
I think Google has a bright future. It's share holders (if buying at anything like this price) not so much.
Simon Hibbs
>Yes because I'm sure this will be the only growth Google sees in the next 166 years.
They need to increase their profitability, from it's current doubled return, by another 10 to 15 times at least in order to become even nominaly worthwhile at this share price. They need to do this pretty fast too, because every year their shares give their current pitifuly low return means the eventual jump in profitability required to make up for it becomes even higher.
Of course none of this is realy a problem for Google. They're a profitable business and even if their share price collapsed by 10 times, that wouldn't materialy affect their business operations. It's only their shareholders that would suffer and that's not Google's fault. Nobody forced anyone to buy Google shares.
Simon
NOTE: I am not an investment advisor and this is all back-of-an-envelope.
$2.33 earnings per share, at a cost of $387 per share. That's a return of 0.6% per year on your investment so at this rate it will take about 166 years to get your investment back in earned value.
Yep, these Internet stocks sure are amazing value for money.
Simon hibbs
The first thing that popped into my head while watching this was that it could make even ten-thumbed fumblers like me into class-act poker dealers. That has obvious gaming connotations, but realy this would be a very nice interface for games where you're manipulating simulatioons of real-world object or resources. RTS games user interfaces are all about multiply-selecting different categories of objects and issuing commands, and the gestures displayed here would be ideal for that kind of game. I wonder if the Nintendo DS, with it's pen input, would be up to an interface like this? Probably not, as it's not realy designed for physics.
I think it's pretty clear that what Microsoft realy needs to do is pay attention to the advice of key decission makers. They need to immediately read Slashdot articles like this one and implement the wise, creative and well thought out strategic plans suggested by a bunch of no-life nerds... er, I mean Slashdot community.
It's the only strategy that is likely to rescue microsoft from imminent collapse and irrelevence.
>This isn't how a Communist country is supposed to be run.
Ah, but it's communism 'with chinese characteristics'. In other words their philosophy is for the Chinese government to run the country according to the principles of the government of China.
>standard laborer in China makes roughly $50-$100 USD per month. Can you expect
>them to afford tuition rates of £200-400? Not really.
Chinese families are perfectly willing to spend as much as 50% of their household income on their children's education, living at subsistence level in order to invest in their family's future. Their expectations and willingness to make sacrifices exceed what most westerners would consider credible. It's a different world.
>All you're going to do is create more places that people can't afford to get into.
The fact that there is huge competition to get into higher education in China shows that grants and scholarships, while of course good ideas in principle, are not actualy required in order to simply boost attendance. For many Chinese, access to higher education for their children is the only way they can hope for a better future, and they will do whatever is necessery to get that chance.
Simon
It's a huge improvement on any previous method we've used to organise our documentation - mostly FAQs, instructions, process documentation, links to external resources, screenshots, all sorts. Apart from backups (VBSCript to take a MYSQL dump and copy the images directory), I use HTTrack to take a 1 link deep HTML snapshot of the 'Special:AllPages' page. This can be copied to a laptop or flash drive for offline reference. The wiki pages cut-n-paste into word nicely too.
I've recently come across TiddlyWiki, which is very nice. I'd consider that for any future small scale projects.
Simon Hibbs
>Q10: Why do you think other developers haven't done anything like this before?
FarCry had a very similar technology, which is what allowed it to render vast outdoor spaces at a time when DOOM3 was retricted to claustrophobic dungeon-type environments.
To be fair to Carmack I have read that he's aware of this and mentioned CryTek in an interview where MegaTexture technology was discussed.
Simon Hibbs
>I'm fine with services too -- some people need them. I don't, usually.
The ISP you use to connect to the internet is a service. The utilities that supply water and electricity to your home are services. The entertainment you consume (TV, films, computer games, ad-supported web sites you visit including slashdot - the web page you are viewing now, and any software you buy) are services. The education system you were taught at was a service industry, the bank that holds your money and (maybe) lends your mortgage is a service. If you renyt, you do so from a service provider. Where do you work?
Simon Hibbs
* There are mobile phone radio masts on tens of thousands of buildings all over the world, for almost a decade.
* There has been no significant increase in the number of brain tumours since mobile phones became popular.
* Why would people in one building sudenly have a greater chance of getting brain tumours from a radio mast, while the chances of the many (possibly hundreds of) thousands of people in other buildings with radio masts on them getting cancer stay the same? There's an antenna on the roof of a building next to the one I work in, I can see the antenna from here througn the window. Why don't I and all my colleagues have cancer?
Unless there is a huge difference in the way this mast is installed and operated, or the structure of the building from other similar installations, there's no reason to suppose this cluster of cancers has anything to do with the radio mast. There could be thousands of other factors that could be the cause.
Or there might be no cause. How many buildings are there in the world? How many random instances of cancer are there? Statisticaly, you'd expect to see the occasional fluke cluster of cancers in one building from time to time. If the odds against such a cluster in any given building were a million to one, in a survey of 10 million buildings you'd expect to see roughly 10 such clusters just by pure chance. Even if the chances were 10 million to 1, there's still no reason to suppose finding one such cluster in the sample is at all suspicious.
Simon Hibbs
The idea that each country can just gaze at it's own navel and ignore what happens in other countries is a persistent one, but there are so many historical examples of why it's a very bad idea that it's hard to know where to begin.
I'll skip the obvious one by just saying "Godwin's Law", you know what I mean. In the case of Iraq, for the first war when one country invades another and threatent others you can nolonger say it's an internal matter. As for the second Iraq war, you know the first war never realy ended. We were still sending planes over Iraq, still occasionaly attacking their SAM batteries and enforcing UN sanctions. People were still dying, and that situation couldn't go on forever. Again, it wasn't an internal issue regardless of what you might think about how things turned out doing nothing wasn't an option and don't believe those who say otherwise. At least if you disagree with what was done (it was completely screwed up after all), say what you think should have been done instead and don't dodge the issue.
Opression within a country inevitably has knock-on effects beyond the borders of that country. How to treat refugees? Do you extradite people who are criminals in their own country even though their 'crimes' aren't punishable in your own? What about your own companies doing business over there? What about the freedoms of your own reporters in that country? Toes are going to be stepped on, whatever you do and if the situation does spill over into violence who do you side with? Perhaps the 'terrorists' in that country have at least some legitimate complaints.
Saying "It's just their culture" also doesn't wash, the Egyptian government is highly un-islamic. They aren't even operating uder their own normal 'laws of the land'. The government has been operating using emergency laws for decades. What emergency? It's one of the government's own making!
It is our business. That doesn't mean we should invade now, or any such rubbish. It means we (I'm British) do have freedoms and rights. We can make our views known to the Egyptian Embassy. We can write letters to our democratic representatives. We can even write to the newspapers in our country, or just blog about our opinions and write about them here. Expressing our opinions can and does make a difference. Egypt in particular is highly dependent on wester tourism (I've been there for buisness and on holiday myself), and can't afford too much negative press especialy in the wake of the bombings. We can make a difference.
Simon Hibbs
Making choices is all very well, but those choices need to be made on information. The EA employees in question were at least decieved, and perhaps even intentionaly lied to. The conditions they worked under were extreme even for the games industry, and their willingness to 'go that extra mile' for the company was ruthlessly exploited. If they'd been told the truth about what would eventualy be expected of them, there's no way they would have accepted it. EA either exploted them, or at least totaly missmanaged the project and relid on thes people to make it good. Either way, EA owes them. Simon Hibbs
Yep, pretty good. If they'd gone for Fortran on Rails or COBOL instead of SQL it would've been funnier but more obviously a gag.
LISP on rails though - that's where the action is!
Preston is well known for this. Simon
I suppose they're just counting on the fact that every Google Pages page is going to have addsense adverts for supporting revenue.
SmallFurryCreature:
>Perhaps google has decided to keep all their services seperate making it possible
>to keep their pages clean and not wasting screen space on links that should be
>in your bookmarks anyway.
I just went into Gmail to count the links at the bottom of the page and post a smart-allec reply along the lines of "They allready have 7 links at the footer anyway" and what do you know? Now there's a link to Google Homepage. How long has that been there? It must be pretty recent.
Plus in Home Page there's a widget you can add that holds user-defined bookmarks. Things are looking up in Google Land.
GooglePages offers a very basic set of editing tools and a bunch of pre-defined page templates. It's pretty similar in usability to the GeoCities tools I used a while back, but the big difference is that it's all in-browser editing. With GeoCities I had to download an editor app and fire it up if I wanted to work on my pages, whereas with GooglePages you can immediately start entering content which makes it much more user friendly. I almost gave up of GeoCities several times due to the initial configuration process.
I wish Google had better integration, or even just basic links between it's services. Logged into Gmail and want to edit your GooglePages? Tough, you might as well open a seperate browser tab and navigate there from scratch. Likewise if you have a personalised Google home page - you can load a widget into it linking to your gmail, but again if you're in Gmail there's no easy way to go to your Google homepage reliably.
I know these are 'beta' services and they're beign incrementaly improved - the chat client in Gmail is nice - but Gmail has been in beta for a year or so now and how difficult would it be to just put simple links in place?
Simon
I don't own an MP3 player, but occasionaly listen to 'podcasts' on my computer but I've no idea how representative I am.
How good a solution to general multimedia handling is iTunes? Why might a non-iPod user like me use it?
Simon Hibbs
Ever noticed how all the biggest, most successful OSS projects are basic computing infrastructure projects? They're software written by techies, for techies. Things like compilers, operating systems, networking infrastructure, web server platforms, languages, databases. To write these things all you need to know is protocols, fundamental software architectures and how to program. They are areas where competent techie developers have a large amount of 'domain knowledge' - experience and in-depth understanding of the problem at hand.
Open Source doesn't work well when the problem domain is an area that few techie developers have knowledge of. Then you need to bring in experts in the required area of expertise who have the time and motivation to contribute to an Open Source solution. Now this does happen, but it's much rarer. Take my employer. We produce engineering modeling design software for cellular mobile telephone networks. Our development team includes a group of very knowledgeable and experienced radio network engineers who do testig and write specs and requirements, include experts in 3G radio technology of which there are not many in the whole world. Without their contributions over the last decade, our software wouldn't be possible. You see a similar thing happening with computer games, which require a considerable, high-quality contribution of art assets.
Techies have an innate interest in developing technological solutions to problems - if they have an itch it's likely to be a technical one and they are likely to want to develop technical methods of scratching it, which often means software. Artists, radio engineers and specialists from many other disciplines such as accountancy, human resources, etc don't have the same compulsion to develop or contribute towards software based solutions to their problems. It seems to me that corporate integration platforms like those offered by SAP and Oracle fall into the same category. They aren't the sort of problem you average techie is likely to feel any compulsion to solve, and those specialists you'd need to have involved in the development process aren't likely to be interested in doing so. This is where heavy ammounts of corporate funding is required to bridge the gap.
Now of course this doesn't exclude OSS from the party. For example groups of companies could collaborate to fund an OSS solution to their common problem, but these are likely to be competing companies. We're talking about huge investments of cash here, invested over time spans of 5 to 10 years or more. I think OSS will eventualy start to penetrate into these areas as the software industry matures but I expect this will happen over the long term, like my lifetime for example.
Simon Hibbs
You can only copyright the actual words you write. If someone expresses the same idea in different words it's not got anything to do with copyright. Ideas is what patents are for. This is why source code can be copyrighted, and the mechanism it implements can be patented (in the U.S.A and which I deplore, but that's another issue). Ideas, theories, etc cannot be patented though so this is a non-starter.
Names of characters and perhaps organisations and fictional places probably could be protected. Nobody could write Sherlock Holmes stories, or even have him appear as an incidental character in a story untill the copyright expired for example. However for this to work thay'd have to have orriginated the characters, names, etc which they could only do if they are fictional. Thus to win this case they'd have to decalre that they made it all up. Even this would probably not work though, because they claim in the book that it's all true.
The closest case to this I can think of is the Scientologist's actions against people publishing their 'revelations' as a violation of their copyright. This was successful in most countries they tried it in, which is fair enough to an extent I suppose.
Interestingly in Germany this held no water. the german court held that since the Scientologists claimed their teachings were historical and spiritual fact that therefore they weren't copyrightable.
Simon Hibbs