I think this might depend on the definition of "copy". As far as I'm concerned, scanning isn't copying. If you scan and then print or display the entire book, then it's copying. Scanning is only half of the process.
In the case of Google print, only small fair-use-size bits of the book are every actually displayed. Note that this is clearly distinct from other examples of electronic copying (say pirating movies) where the intent is to display the entire work in a way that's obviously not fair use.
I don't pretend to be a hardware expert, but I figure that Sony has been in this business for a long time and put a lot of R&D resources into the a processor optimized for gaming. Microsoft is using basically off-the-shelf parts.
If Sony, will all that experience and money, can't create a specialized gaming machine that beats an off-the-shelf general purpose processor, then they're seriously incompetant. Since I don't have any reason to think they're incompentant, I'm inclined to believe that the PS3 will kick some serious gaming ass.
Presumably yes, but I believe drive performance is dominated by seek time, not transfer rate. If the disk is smaller and rotates faster, the head can make it to a random piece of data more quickly.
Patents don't work for software for the same reason they don't work for literature. A computer program, like a novel, is a collection of a great many ideas taken from all over the place. The value isn't in any specific solution, but rather in the way the whole package is combined.
Imagine if a novelist had to look up every metaphore or interesting sentence structure in a patent database somewhere. On top of that, the database would be organized in such a way that the novelist could never really be sure that he'd found all the relevent patents. If you compare something to an apple, does the patent that mentions comparisons to oranges apply? They're both fruit, after all. The only way to gain reasonable assurance that a given sentence doesn't infringe would be to ask a lawyer, and even the lawyer could only give an opinion - with the final decision to be made by a court.
If novelists had to work that way, only large companies with defensive patent portfolios of their own could write books. Individuals could never afford the legal staff needed to make sure their work wasn't infringing.
Software works much the same way. You encounter a problem and you try to solve it. Every time you solve something, even the smallest issue, you might be infringing on somebody's patent. Anybody with a patent portfolio and a lot of lawyers can put you out of business.
The patent system was meant to encourage people to publish scientific discoveries rather than keeping them as trade secrets. But most software problems are such that the effort to find the patented solution in a database is more than would be required to just solve the problem yourself. There are a few rare exceptions (RSA, for example), but there's no way the handful of gems can outweigh the harm done by patents.
IANAC (I am not a climatologist), but I do live in Finland. It's cold here, but not nearly as cold as the same latitude in Canada.
If I were at the same latitude in Canada as I am now in Finland, I'd be somewhere around the level of Hudson's Bay, with only a few Inuit to keep me company.
I don't have a globe in front of me, but I'm pretty sure that Barcelona is at about the same latitude as New York City. I've spent some summer days in both, and the difference is huge.
Something is keeping Europe relatively warm, and I'm pretty sure the Gulf Stream has a lot to do with it.
Now, taking a step back for a minute I have to ask myself about this incongruence; bad data with good authority; it seems like I must be faulty in (at least) one of my ideas.
"Authoritative" news sources are full of bad data. If you've ever seen any issue that you're close to reported, you get a clear sense of this.
The media buys into Gartner because 1) they give lots of "data", 2) they act like they know what they're talking about, 3) their positions are fairly mainstream.
Wish I could edit my own posts - just as after I sent this I found an interesting article by Tim O'Reilly. He suggests using book sales to measure market trends.
I don't know if this will turn out to be accurate, but it's at least somewhat objective. A neat idea.
They're a pet peeve of mine. It seems like what they do is interview CIO types about their opinions on various technologies and then turn that information into speculation about where the industry is going.
The result is a bunch of very credible sounding propoganda that reflects all the biases prevalent among their target audience: CIOs who need backing for their opinions. The CIOs naturally buy the reports and use them to pursuade other people in the company that the CIO's favourite pet project or technology is "industry best practices".
Gartner reports tell a lot about what people who worked in technology ten years ago (and have since moved to management) think. They consistently overlook trends that are bubbling under the surface, obvious practitioners, but not yet noticed by management.
If you want to know what your boss thinks about the industry, read Gartner. If you want to know about what's really happening, read the Usenet group that deals with the specific technology you're interested in.
Indeed, it did have a lot to do with the Soviet economy being in the tank, but it would have been in the tank regardless of who was president in the U.S.
The changes in the Soviet Union were a natural outcome of the shortcomings of communism. U.S. Republicans taking credit for it is evidence of an inflated sense of self-importance on their part.
Hmm. To me it seems a bit of revisionist history to credit Reagan with ending the cold war. It was Gorby who made all the peace overtures and changed things in the Soviet Union. Remember "Perestroika"?
Reagan, reluctantly, went along for the ride.
Here's an interesting article by Gorby in The International Herald Tribune. It's very generous to Reagan, but even in saying nice things about the late president, you can read between the lines that Reagan's attitude to the Soviets changed fundamentally between his first and second term. It was Gorby's reforms that forced the U.S. to acknowledge that the Soviets really wanted peace.
Re:Can you please explain "third world"?
on
Software Livre, Anyone?
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· Score: 3, Insightful
I think you're being a little too sensitive about the term "Third World". Granted, it's developed all sorts of strange connotations over the years and maybe is best avoided, but it might be useful to go back to the original definition before you get all worked up.
The point is that all media does this. Some try harder than others to present a balanced view, but in the end it's impossible. You cannot help but reflect your own biases in your work.
It's informative to watch mainstream news broadcasts from different countries as an example. I've seen news from the U.S., Canada, France, Finland, U.K., and India. Mainstream reporters who pride themselves on being objective (and are perceived as objective by most viewers) can end up putting a very different slant on the same story.
Now, apart from the above, I believe (based on lots of different inputs) that the current climate in the U.S. makes objective reporting even more difficult. There's a fear of being seen to be unpatriotic if you question U.S. policies. The result is that the whole debate has shifted far to the right: views that would normally be confined to right-wing-nut magazines are appearing in the mainstream, whereas moderate views are pushed out of the mainstream media and confined to the left-wing-nut magazines.
Moore is definately a left-wing-nut, but he presents an interesting viewpoint in an engaging way.
Funny you mention genology programs. It's amazing what's available for Free (beer and freedom).
Obviously you have a point about the reams of third party software that exist only for Windows. But there's a large segment of users who would never wander into a software store and pick up a random program. It would just never occur to them. Their software universe consists of whatever they bought with the machine. In that market Linux can compete exceptionally well.
I think that most OSS programmers are happy that their software is getting wider distribution. Whatever motivated them to start the project in the first place can only be enhanced by having more users.
I think it depends somewhat on what kind of book you're reading. Novels are read slowly and sequentially. Reference material is flipped through quickly and often - hence the importance of a search facility.
Think about how you look through a dictionary: flip through pages quickly, focusing on the index word at the top of the page. The pages flipping by are just a blur until you get close and then flip page by page.
But honestly, I would rather read reference material on-line anyway. But a small e-book novel that I could take with me to the beach - that would be cool.
The company that does security for us (and probably for Nokia - I work about two km from their headquarters) uses little barcode readers. As the guard does her rounds, she swipes a little bar-code in each room. Presumably the security company logs that info and thereby knows exactly when each room in the building was checked.
I bet somebody at Nokia saw their security guards doing the same thing and got a bright idea...
It's interesting that you believe so strongly in the rule of law, but your.sig quotes one of the heroes of civil disobedience.
You have to reconcile your belief in the rule of law with your admiration for great men and women who changed the world for the better by breaking laws.
The simple answer is to take one of the extremist views that either 1) the law must always be followed and civil disobendience is wrong, or 2) the law is an ass and we should all just do what we want.
The more sensible approach (IMHO) is that you have to obey the law in general, because that's what's needed in order to function in society. Occasionally you break the law when you feel it's important enough and you're willing to accept the consequences. This is a tough position for moral absolutists because it doesn't give a clear guideline for what's right and wrong. Too bad - life is full of grey areas.
Say 40k employees look at the site an average of once a month (I'd probably check it out once a week myself, so I think this is a low estimate).
Each time you log in you probably do five or so hits, for 200k hits a month, or over 6000hits/day.
750 extra hits a day should be noticed, but I doubt anybody cares enough about the traffic on an internal web site to find out why it's gone up by 12% or so. If it happened suddenly on our public site, I'd definately care, but if it happens on our Intranet it's just an interesting statistic.
Of course, somebody did notice eventually. But it doesn't surprize me that it took a long time to figure out.
Do a 'time machine' demonstration. Throttle the bandwidth to, say, 56k and explain that this was 'The Internet' ten or twelve years ago. Demonstrate some moderately taxing application for the time (like a large download).
Take the audience forward in time by increasing the bandwidth slightly. Note how the previous application just zips by now, but start a new application that's still slow.
Repeat a few times going through a sequence something like: download large file, surf web, audio, tiny little image of fuzzy movie, voice-over-ip, real-time video with crappy quality, real-time high-quality video.
End the presentation with a question mark: every new level of bandwidth made previous uses easy, and enabled new applications that really needed the bandwidth. What will be the new application that makes you glad you have 2.5Gb?
Not all jobs are equal, but all jobs are valuable, whether filled by illegal immigrants or not.
Immigrants and other low-wage earners tend to live from paycheck-to-paycheck, so they don't save much money and don't really take much out of the economy. The money they spend creates jobs for somebody else - it's called the 'multiplier effect'. Higher paid jobs are good, but those individuals tend to save a greater proportion of their salary, resulting in 'leakage' and a smaller multiplier.
So three low-skill, low-wage jobs are actually better than one high-skill, high-wage job (assuming the salaries add up to the same). But of course, three high-skill, high wage jobs beat that.
I have no idea if Linux is better than Symbian for smart-phones, but it's clearly adequate, and technical issues aren't everything. Cost and politics play an important role. Phone vendors have seen what happened to the PC market and don't want to be owned by any software vendor - Microsoft or Nokia. Linux provides an alternative.
I'd be really surpised in Linux doesn't take at least a 10% of the smart-phone market over the next several years. Symbian will dominate for the forseeable future, MS and Palm will fight it out for second and third place, and Linux will slowly build a following among vendors who want to do something different.
Um, the idea of controlling quality and maintaining old code isn't what Open Source or Free Software have traditionally been about at all.
The original drivers were:
The desire to share code (and with GPL-style licenses, the desire to have others return the favour by sharing back)
"Free as in Freedom"
Not getting locked-in to proprietary companies
Doing something useful with software you would have written anyway, but don't want to commercialize
I'm sure there are more, but controlling quality and maintaining abandonware have never been very high on my list and I'm surprised you think they were ever what Open Source was about.
Slashdot Mirror
I think this might depend on the definition of "copy". As far as I'm concerned, scanning isn't copying. If you scan and then print or display the entire book, then it's copying. Scanning is only half of the process.
In the case of Google print, only small fair-use-size bits of the book are every actually displayed. Note that this is clearly distinct from other examples of electronic copying (say pirating movies) where the intent is to display the entire work in a way that's obviously not fair use.
I don't pretend to be a hardware expert, but I figure that Sony has been in this business for a long time and put a lot of R&D resources into the a processor optimized for gaming. Microsoft is using basically off-the-shelf parts.
If Sony, will all that experience and money, can't create a specialized gaming machine that beats an off-the-shelf general purpose processor, then they're seriously incompetant. Since I don't have any reason to think they're incompentant, I'm inclined to believe that the PS3 will kick some serious gaming ass.
Thanks for the links. I read the second one and it's really interesting. The president really does sound like a decent man.
Presumably yes, but I believe drive performance is dominated by seek time, not transfer rate. If the disk is smaller and rotates faster, the head can make it to a random piece of data more quickly.
Patents don't work for software for the same reason they don't work for literature. A computer program, like a novel, is a collection of a great many ideas taken from all over the place. The value isn't in any specific solution, but rather in the way the whole package is combined.
Imagine if a novelist had to look up every metaphore or interesting sentence structure in a patent database somewhere. On top of that, the database would be organized in such a way that the novelist could never really be sure that he'd found all the relevent patents. If you compare something to an apple, does the patent that mentions comparisons to oranges apply? They're both fruit, after all. The only way to gain reasonable assurance that a given sentence doesn't infringe would be to ask a lawyer, and even the lawyer could only give an opinion - with the final decision to be made by a court.
If novelists had to work that way, only large companies with defensive patent portfolios of their own could write books. Individuals could never afford the legal staff needed to make sure their work wasn't infringing.
Software works much the same way. You encounter a problem and you try to solve it. Every time you solve something, even the smallest issue, you might be infringing on somebody's patent. Anybody with a patent portfolio and a lot of lawyers can put you out of business.
The patent system was meant to encourage people to publish scientific discoveries rather than keeping them as trade secrets. But most software problems are such that the effort to find the patented solution in a database is more than would be required to just solve the problem yourself. There are a few rare exceptions (RSA, for example), but there's no way the handful of gems can outweigh the harm done by patents.
What is it about that article that you feel has been butchered? I just looked over it briefly, but it looks reasonable to me.
IANAC (I am not a climatologist), but I do live in Finland. It's cold here, but not nearly as cold as the same latitude in Canada.
If I were at the same latitude in Canada as I am now in Finland, I'd be somewhere around the level of Hudson's Bay, with only a few Inuit to keep me company.
I don't have a globe in front of me, but I'm pretty sure that Barcelona is at about the same latitude as New York City. I've spent some summer days in both, and the difference is huge.
Something is keeping Europe relatively warm, and I'm pretty sure the Gulf Stream has a lot to do with it.
"Authoritative" news sources are full of bad data. If you've ever seen any issue that you're close to reported, you get a clear sense of this.
The media buys into Gartner because 1) they give lots of "data", 2) they act like they know what they're talking about, 3) their positions are fairly mainstream.
Wish I could edit my own posts - just as after I sent this I found an interesting article by Tim O'Reilly. He suggests using book sales to measure market trends.
I don't know if this will turn out to be accurate, but it's at least somewhat objective. A neat idea.
They're a pet peeve of mine. It seems like what they do is interview CIO types about their opinions on various technologies and then turn that information into speculation about where the industry is going.
The result is a bunch of very credible sounding propoganda that reflects all the biases prevalent among their target audience: CIOs who need backing for their opinions. The CIOs naturally buy the reports and use them to pursuade other people in the company that the CIO's favourite pet project or technology is "industry best practices".
Gartner reports tell a lot about what people who worked in technology ten years ago (and have since moved to management) think. They consistently overlook trends that are bubbling under the surface, obvious practitioners, but not yet noticed by management.
If you want to know what your boss thinks about the industry, read Gartner. If you want to know about what's really happening, read the Usenet group that deals with the specific technology you're interested in.
Indeed, it did have a lot to do with the Soviet economy being in the tank, but it would have been in the tank regardless of who was president in the U.S.
The changes in the Soviet Union were a natural outcome of the shortcomings of communism. U.S. Republicans taking credit for it is evidence of an inflated sense of self-importance on their part.
Hmm. To me it seems a bit of revisionist history to credit Reagan with ending the cold war. It was Gorby who made all the peace overtures and changed things in the Soviet Union. Remember "Perestroika"?
Reagan, reluctantly, went along for the ride.
Here's an interesting article by Gorby in The International Herald Tribune. It's very generous to Reagan, but even in saying nice things about the late president, you can read between the lines that Reagan's attitude to the Soviets changed fundamentally between his first and second term. It was Gorby's reforms that forced the U.S. to acknowledge that the Soviets really wanted peace.
I think you're being a little too sensitive about the term "Third World". Granted, it's developed all sorts of strange connotations over the years and maybe is best avoided, but it might be useful to go back to the original definition before you get all worked up.
Here's what a quick Google turned up.
The point is that all media does this. Some try harder than others to present a balanced view, but in the end it's impossible. You cannot help but reflect your own biases in your work.
It's informative to watch mainstream news broadcasts from different countries as an example. I've seen news from the U.S., Canada, France, Finland, U.K., and India. Mainstream reporters who pride themselves on being objective (and are perceived as objective by most viewers) can end up putting a very different slant on the same story.
Now, apart from the above, I believe (based on lots of different inputs) that the current climate in the U.S. makes objective reporting even more difficult. There's a fear of being seen to be unpatriotic if you question U.S. policies. The result is that the whole debate has shifted far to the right: views that would normally be confined to right-wing-nut magazines are appearing in the mainstream, whereas moderate views are pushed out of the mainstream media and confined to the left-wing-nut magazines.
Moore is definately a left-wing-nut, but he presents an interesting viewpoint in an engaging way.
Funny you mention genology programs. It's amazing what's available for Free (beer and freedom).
Obviously you have a point about the reams of third party software that exist only for Windows. But there's a large segment of users who would never wander into a software store and pick up a random program. It would just never occur to them. Their software universe consists of whatever they bought with the machine. In that market Linux can compete exceptionally well.
I think that most OSS programmers are happy that their software is getting wider distribution. Whatever motivated them to start the project in the first place can only be enhanced by having more users.
I think it depends somewhat on what kind of book you're reading. Novels are read slowly and sequentially. Reference material is flipped through quickly and often - hence the importance of a search facility.
Think about how you look through a dictionary: flip through pages quickly, focusing on the index word at the top of the page. The pages flipping by are just a blur until you get close and then flip page by page.
But honestly, I would rather read reference material on-line anyway. But a small e-book novel that I could take with me to the beach - that would be cool.
You're probably right, but think there's something wrong when you're compelled to spend money on a lawyer every time somebody makes a stupid threat.
If he's confidident enough about his position to write the response himself then more power to him.
The company that does security for us (and probably for Nokia - I work about two km from their headquarters) uses little barcode readers. As the guard does her rounds, she swipes a little bar-code in each room. Presumably the security company logs that info and thereby knows exactly when each room in the building was checked.
I bet somebody at Nokia saw their security guards doing the same thing and got a bright idea...
It's interesting that you believe so strongly in the rule of law, but your .sig quotes one of the heroes of civil disobedience.
You have to reconcile your belief in the rule of law with your admiration for great men and women who changed the world for the better by breaking laws.
The simple answer is to take one of the extremist views that either 1) the law must always be followed and civil disobendience is wrong, or 2) the law is an ass and we should all just do what we want.
The more sensible approach (IMHO) is that you have to obey the law in general, because that's what's needed in order to function in society. Occasionally you break the law when you feel it's important enough and you're willing to accept the consequences. This is a tough position for moral absolutists because it doesn't give a clear guideline for what's right and wrong. Too bad - life is full of grey areas.
Say 40k employees look at the site an average of once a month (I'd probably check it out once a week myself, so I think this is a low estimate).
Each time you log in you probably do five or so hits, for 200k hits a month, or over 6000hits/day.
750 extra hits a day should be noticed, but I doubt anybody cares enough about the traffic on an internal web site to find out why it's gone up by 12% or so. If it happened suddenly on our public site, I'd definately care, but if it happens on our Intranet it's just an interesting statistic.
Of course, somebody did notice eventually. But it doesn't surprize me that it took a long time to figure out.
Do a 'time machine' demonstration. Throttle the bandwidth to, say, 56k and explain that this was 'The Internet' ten or twelve years ago. Demonstrate some moderately taxing application for the time (like a large download).
Take the audience forward in time by increasing the bandwidth slightly. Note how the previous application just zips by now, but start a new application that's still slow.
Repeat a few times going through a sequence something like: download large file, surf web, audio, tiny little image of fuzzy movie, voice-over-ip, real-time video with crappy quality, real-time high-quality video.
End the presentation with a question mark: every new level of bandwidth made previous uses easy, and enabled new applications that really needed the bandwidth. What will be the new application that makes you glad you have 2.5Gb?
Not all jobs are equal, but all jobs are valuable, whether filled by illegal immigrants or not.
Immigrants and other low-wage earners tend to live from paycheck-to-paycheck, so they don't save much money and don't really take much out of the economy. The money they spend creates jobs for somebody else - it's called the 'multiplier effect'. Higher paid jobs are good, but those individuals tend to save a greater proportion of their salary, resulting in 'leakage' and a smaller multiplier.
So three low-skill, low-wage jobs are actually better than one high-skill, high-wage job (assuming the salaries add up to the same). But of course, three high-skill, high wage jobs beat that.
I'm not 100% sure, but I think most of the phone software is developed using Java APIs that should be cross-platform (at least in theory).
But you're right, the fact that these phones run Linux/Symbian/Palm/MS is of no interest at all to the user. They're all locked down anyway.
Like Motorola perhaps?
I have no idea if Linux is better than Symbian for smart-phones, but it's clearly adequate, and technical issues aren't everything. Cost and politics play an important role. Phone vendors have seen what happened to the PC market and don't want to be owned by any software vendor - Microsoft or Nokia. Linux provides an alternative.
I'd be really surpised in Linux doesn't take at least a 10% of the smart-phone market over the next several years. Symbian will dominate for the forseeable future, MS and Palm will fight it out for second and third place, and Linux will slowly build a following among vendors who want to do something different.
Um, the idea of controlling quality and maintaining old code isn't what Open Source or Free Software have traditionally been about at all.
The original drivers were:
I'm sure there are more, but controlling quality and maintaining abandonware have never been very high on my list and I'm surprised you think they were ever what Open Source was about.