I'm late to the party, so I'm reduced to replying to myself..:-)
One thing that struck is that neither of these fellows, Popowich or Rosen, actually do much coding nowadays. So it's easy for big-picture guys like these to forget the details that make open source work. One of those details is that coding open source is *easy*. At least in so far as the licensing of it goes. Once you understand the basics of, say, the GPL you don't think about its use any more. When you have patents in the mix, it starts to get really cumbersome. Why is it so hard for these guys to see this? Might it be because they don't actually code much themselves?
In the video Rosen draws a parallel between using copyright law against itself and using patent law against itself. That seems to be the crux of his argument for using patents in open source software. But for me, the genius of open source licenses like the GPL is that I don't need to involve an intellectual property attorney every time I release new code. Once you include patents in the mix, writing software starts involving the legal leeches. Say, for example, I improve or tweak an OSL licensed software involving the use of some patented technology. Does my improvement violate a patented improvement on the patent? I don't want to worry about this bullshit when writing code. I, for one, would never bother improving this kind of "open source" software.
-- You can't use turd against itself without getting some of it on your fingers.
The fact that 1% of users do 50% of the edits at wikipedia should not surprise anyone. There are 2 things that a "user" can do at a wiki: read or write. Reading is much easier and faster than writing (duh). So you'll expect a lot more reading to go on, than writing. The "surprise", apparently, is that this writing is not distributed evenly among users who both read and write. In fact, this one data point suggests a power law may be at work here, e.g. 1% of users do 50% of edits, 2% of users do 75% of edits, 4% of users do 87.5% of edits,... Now what would be so surprising about finding a power law in an organic, social phenomenon like a wiki?
Actually, I find this 1/50 statistic for wikipedia quite impressive. I would have thought--mod me down, I don't care--that there would be even fewer industrious wiki-heads doing even more of the editing. (And hey, don't forget, a lot of this editing *is* simply tedious work that most of us cannot bother with.)
-- Statistics? Sure, just tell me what you want me to prove..
For an interesting and entertaining experience with fractal art, see also http://www.polynomiography.com/ Bahman Kalantari, the creator of the site, has been exploring the artistic side of math for some time now. Have fun!
Give me a break.. Lose email? Could this happen at the company you work? Not if it's a company with a half-competent IT staff. To think the White House IT staff is so incompetent that they'd do this by mistake is unthinkable. No, it's not a technical mistake. If it were, White House officials would be running for cover and would hang it on the poor bastard who made the mistake.
-- They should subpoena the NSA. Surely *they* have copies..
You nailed it. I agree with the parent's answer completely. Think of the idea of the 3cm interface as a hardware interface, not as a remote access interface. I am a contributor to a Linux distro (FaunOS) that is specifically designed to boot from a USB. The idea is that this way you decouple your operating environment from the hardware it runs on. For us, at least, the idea that you might have your operating system get booted remotely because you happen to be standing in the wrong place, is a bit scary!
We have this article on why USB-based distos might be wave of the future.
Late to post, but thought sharing my experience might be useful. I'm not a premium goog aps user, but we do use the free version for my latest start up. The idea was to try and outsource as much of our IT infrastructure to goog and maybe in the process, develop a goog-boutique niche.
Gmail works great, no question about it. The rest of the office apps, on the other hand, leave a lot to be desired. The biggest hurdle to its practical business use is really easy to fix. The problem is that goog aps doesn't let you share arbitrary file formats with other users. It's nice that goog aps recognizes (or attempts to) a lot different file formats, but it should at least allow users to upload and share formats it doesn't recognize. So to share, for example, a zip file, we're reduced to emailing it to colleagues. This is clearly a messy solution for a business.
That is, for the thing to work, it's gotta have some semblance of a file system, for god's sake.. What on earth are these googs thinking? I wonder.
Adopting the viewpoint of the article, the web itself is a metaverse in which the laws of physics are suspended. I find it a little funny though that the article doesn't seem to acknowledge this obvious fact: it is as if the article takes as given that the web is more real, less virtual, than the virtual worlds it discusses. Wow! epistemologically, it would seem, we have come a long way in some 10 short years!!
The article doesn't assert anywhere that these amateurish Gitmo propaganda efforts were actually successful. (And they probably haven't been.) This doesn't look good, but few will likely follow this story: it'll likely be an occasional footnote in articles critiquing Gitmo's larger transgressions.
You can in fact run most any notebook off a USB key. FaunOS is a Linux distro specifically designed to run off a USB. In fact, I am using it as I write this now. I am using an Acer Aspire 5630: it worked with FaunOS out of the box. There are others (e.g. Mandriva), but my experience with FaunOS has been the best, so far.
As if anyone needs reminding, the caption in Dell's ideas in action page says "Dell recommends Windows Vista(TM) Business." Will Dell soon be recommending Novell's distro, together with its nonesensical patent-indemnification FUD?
muslix64's youtube demo linked from the original post has since been removed. Instead the page seems to claim that the content of his video is somehow owned by Warner Bros.:
This video has been removed at the request of copyright owner Warner Bros. Entertainment Inc. because its content was used without permission.
Sad, but funny...
It's easy to have a policy you don't implement. It's
even easier to say you have a policy that you
can quite implement. From the article:
AOL has a policy not to advertise using adware. To maintain that policy, the company has to keep close tabs on those companies that handle its advertising, Polonetsky said.
In other words, Polonetsky says, AOL keeps tabs on those who handle its advertising, but hey, you know, you can't catch'em all.
Already advertisers face pressure from consumers not to promote their products or services using adware or other software that consumers may not want on their PC, said Jules Polonetsky, vice president of integrity assurance at America Online.
"Increasingly advertisers are recognizing that this is not a minor issue," Polonetsky said. "There is already an environment out there where prominent advertisers' missteps are being written about."
How does he know this? From all the hate mail AOL receives for its annoying adware, may be?
Exactly. Google desktop search doesn't find anything that wasn't there before.
I agree with the gist of this thread... but the security issue is not just confined to computers in public places. If you download sensitive information to your own computer, should have easy-enough ways to destroy all evidence of it. Googling
google+desktop+cache, you can find people raising legitimate concerns about the so-called google cache.
Google could send Julian Bond the "Cease and Desist" email because he was posting the aggregated news to a public website. What if instead he had distributed an app that aggregated news on the client side (it could be as simple as a localhost web server)? In that event [IANAL but...] Google (or for that matter anyone else) couldn't claim that its content was being ripped because you could argue that the client-side aggregation is fair use, because the aggregated content is not itself redistributed by the client.
So does this mean that Julian Bond, or someone like of him, can turn this fair-use issue on its head by simply moving the aggregation point from the server to the client?
Slashdot Mirror
I'm late to the party, so I'm reduced to replying to myself.. :-)
One thing that struck is that neither of these fellows, Popowich or Rosen, actually do much coding nowadays. So it's easy for big-picture guys like these to forget the details that make open source work. One of those details is that coding open source is *easy*. At least in so far as the licensing of it goes. Once you understand the basics of, say, the GPL you don't think about its use any more. When you have patents in the mix, it starts to get really cumbersome. Why is it so hard for these guys to see this? Might it be because they don't actually code much themselves?
In the video Rosen draws a parallel between using copyright law against itself and using patent law against itself. That seems to be the crux of his argument for using patents in open source software. But for me, the genius of open source licenses like the GPL is that I don't need to involve an intellectual property attorney every time I release new code. Once you include patents in the mix, writing software starts involving the legal leeches. Say, for example, I improve or tweak an OSL licensed software involving the use of some patented technology. Does my improvement violate a patented improvement on the patent? I don't want to worry about this bullshit when writing code. I, for one, would never bother improving this kind of "open source" software.
--
You can't use turd against itself without getting some of it on your fingers.
The fact that 1% of users do 50% of the edits at wikipedia should not surprise anyone. There are 2 things that a "user" can do at a wiki: read or write. Reading is much easier and faster than writing (duh). So you'll expect a lot more reading to go on, than writing. The "surprise", apparently, is that this writing is not distributed evenly among users who both read and write. In fact, this one data point suggests a power law may be at work here, e.g. 1% of users do 50% of edits, 2% of users do 75% of edits, 4% of users do 87.5% of edits, ... Now what would be so surprising about finding a power law in an organic, social phenomenon like a wiki?
Actually, I find this 1/50 statistic for wikipedia quite impressive. I would have thought--mod me down, I don't care--that there would be even fewer industrious wiki-heads doing even more of the editing. (And hey, don't forget, a lot of this editing *is* simply tedious work that most of us cannot bother with.)
--
Statistics? Sure, just tell me what you want me to prove..
For an interesting and entertaining experience with fractal art, see also http://www.polynomiography.com/ Bahman Kalantari, the creator of the site, has been exploring the artistic side of math for some time now. Have fun!
I agree wholeheartedly--with one proviso. This /. story doesn't need an edit; it needs to be "kicked to the curb."
Give me a break.. Lose email? Could this happen at the company you work? Not if it's a company with a half-competent IT staff. To think the White House IT staff is so incompetent that they'd do this by mistake is unthinkable. No, it's not a technical mistake. If it were, White House officials would be running for cover and would hang it on the poor bastard who made the mistake.
--
They should subpoena the NSA. Surely *they* have copies..
We have this article on why USB-based distos might be wave of the future.
Nothing wrong with 3cms... it's not about size.Late to post, but thought sharing my experience might be useful. I'm not a premium goog aps user, but we do use the free version for my latest start up. The idea was to try and outsource as much of our IT infrastructure to goog and maybe in the process, develop a goog-boutique niche.
Gmail works great, no question about it. The rest of the office apps, on the other hand, leave a lot to be desired. The biggest hurdle to its practical business use is really easy to fix. The problem is that goog aps doesn't let you share arbitrary file formats with other users. It's nice that goog aps recognizes (or attempts to) a lot different file formats, but it should at least allow users to upload and share formats it doesn't recognize. So to share, for example, a zip file, we're reduced to emailing it to colleagues. This is clearly a messy solution for a business.
That is, for the thing to work, it's gotta have some semblance of a file system, for god's sake.. What on earth are these googs thinking? I wonder.
Adopting the viewpoint of the article, the web itself is a metaverse in which the laws of physics are suspended. I find it a little funny though that the article doesn't seem to acknowledge this obvious fact: it is as if the article takes as given that the web is more real, less virtual, than the virtual worlds it discusses. Wow! epistemologically, it would seem, we have come a long way in some 10 short years!!
The article doesn't assert anywhere that these amateurish Gitmo propaganda efforts were actually successful. (And they probably haven't been.) This doesn't look good, but few will likely follow this story: it'll likely be an occasional footnote in articles critiquing Gitmo's larger transgressions.
Can't seem to load the video: hangs. Is it possible that Google can be slashdotted?
You can in fact run most any notebook off a USB key. FaunOS is a Linux distro specifically designed to run off a USB. In fact, I am using it as I write this now. I am using an Acer Aspire 5630: it worked with FaunOS out of the box. There are others (e.g. Mandriva), but my experience with FaunOS has been the best, so far.
As if anyone needs reminding, the caption in Dell's ideas in action page says "Dell recommends Windows Vista(TM) Business." Will Dell soon be recommending Novell's distro, together with its nonesensical patent-indemnification FUD?
It's licensed under the Apache license. See the README at http://tesseract-ocr.cvs.sourceforge.net/tesseract -ocr/tesseract/README?revision=1.1&view=markup
It's easy to have a policy you don't implement. It's even easier to say you have a policy that you can quite implement. From the article:
In other words, Polonetsky says, AOL keeps tabs on those who handle its advertising, but hey, you know, you can't catch'em all.
How does he know this? From all the hate mail AOL receives for its annoying adware, may be?
Exactly. Google desktop search doesn't find anything that wasn't there before.
I agree with the gist of this thread... but the security issue is not just confined to computers in public places. If you download sensitive information to your own computer, should have easy-enough ways to destroy all evidence of it. Googling google+desktop+cache, you can find people raising legitimate concerns about the so-called google cache.
So does this mean that Julian Bond, or someone like of him, can turn this fair-use issue on its head by simply moving the aggregation point from the server to the client?