This is a terrible decision. Inbox on the desktop and mobile are terrific products. I don't see ANYTHING wrong with them. I wonder what sort of shitty data-driven decision making was behind this.
Seymour Papert is a true hero for the fields of computer science and education. To hear him at a lecture was a true intelectual delight. We old-school programmers owe him a lot; I learned to program using Logo and now my son is learning to program using Scratch which is like a third-generation descendant of Logo. His books should be required reading for teachers of all levels and sorts.
I've noticed that the Project Gutenberg site has a rather straightforward interface, you get the database queries you need but I've noticed that's not very friendly for some users; computer illiterate users that I've recommended your website to and children, for instance.
I've also noticed that all texts are available as text-only and I understand your decision behind this.
So, my question has two sides: Are there any plans to build a front-end for PG that is more user-friendly; by this I mean, for instance, profiles of major authors and new acquisitions, featured writings each week, a section for children, personalization features so that the site recommends books for me, and so on. Are there any plans to, while always having text-only versions, also have automatically generated versions in other formats (pdf, postscript, and especially some of the new formats for eBooks or PDAs)??
I think some of these changes, just having a front page that changes everyday with new reading suggestions and lures the visitors to go and read (in the same fashion that makes people go to BN or Amazon to buy books) could make your site much more popular than it already is but how high is this on your list of priorities, if at all?
ps. Kudos on the excellent work you've done through the years!
Has someone done the math? How many images that would be? How much should each image weight (in kbytes) so that it would be worth the effort?
I'm thinking about how nice it would be for a web server hosting all these images to exist? But how expensive would such effort would be? I understand that MS's Terraserver has several terabytes of images but it seems that this project wouldn't need such a massive storage available. It would be so incredible to see such a thing, though.
Yes I agree. I would also add that, in my opinion, these sort of articles calculate a product's "vaporwareness" as a function of how late they are AND how much they are expected. So even when you can say that OSX or kernel 2.4 are not THAT late, they are hugely expected by a lot of people. That's why, aside from the usual delays in its development, games always appear on these sort of lists, because thousands of fans ara anxiously waiting for Black&White and Warcraft III. That's why OSX entry on Wired's list is accompanied by comments from several people stating hoy badly they need the software.
Darwin came to mind when you said this: "Some would say that this would destroy culture, but if a culture is so weak it cannot survive the "loss" of its language, I'd say that people weren't really serious about it anyway". So I suppose people colonized all over America weren't really being "serious" about their own cultures since they let their native languages disappear and be substituted by english, spanish or portuguese. The loss of those languages and their corresponding cultures was a very painful process fo those people, it's not something we can talk about in terms of one language being weaker than the other, you just can't say "well they weren't being serious about it, too bad".
Indeed, stuff in general (ideas, jokes, etc.) doesn't get better just because it's mine. A fact too many people ignore. I would never say better but I would certainly would say very valuable because of its uniqueness
Wouldn't it be so much nicer if everyone had spoken the same language back then? then you, too, could read these authors in their native language! Yes it would but let's be realistic. The fact is that there is a very strong interdependence between language and culture. An universal language would need an universal culture, that's impossible. We would have to live in the same latitude, grow up eating the same things, watching the same landscapes, thinking, discussing, joking in the same fashion, everything, everywhere would be homogeneous. Is that your notion of an ideal world?
And talking pragmatically, about the fact that most of the available literature worldwide is inaccessible to me, well, it's inaccesible to me anyway because I have a finite amount of time to spend reading it.
Let's forget the example of computer languages; it wasn't obviously the perfect analogy, what I was trying to do is to convey a sense of loss of diversity. But when you say: "most any language is completely sufficient to say anything you want provided you speak that language well enough.", I have to disagree, and I would have thought it would be obvious why. If what you say were true, perfect translations would exist, they don't.
Don't you see that your are making my case for me? If everyone spoke the same language, those friends of yours wouldn't have had to "go to greath lengths" to learn a new language. But don't you see, they WANTED to, they didn't HAVE to, no one forced them to. And the interesting and extremely valuable part is not the outcome (fluently knowing a new language) but the learning process.I've learn a great deal about my own native language (Spanish) by learning other similar languages such as French and Italian and some not so similar as English
Finally, I think we're diverting from the one point where I believe we agree, as expressed in my earlier post, it would be VERY convenient if people knew one same language to communicate on a global basis but I see many disadvantages extrapolating that to every daily activity that happens anywhere worldwide.
Totally disagree. You're taking darwinian logic too far. There's a BIG difference between everyone knowing one same language to communicate between each other on a global basis (this, I agree it's necessary) and everyone speaking it on a daily basis. Why on Earth would you want to do that?, losing your very own metaphors, potential jokes, songs, hidden meanings.
I think you ought to have more respect for your own language; there's got to be great literature produced for it that no one else can enjoy as much as you danish-speaking people do. That's important; that's part of your culture and defines who you are.
It is NOT unproductive or stupid for everyone not to speak the same language.
Let us translate your example to computer programming. "However, I woudln't mind if Perl was removed from the face of the earth. In fact, I woudln't mind of Lisp was removed from the earth (my programming language of choice). " That statement would instantly get you flamed by thousands of Perl and Lisp programmers who, although they know there are other options, choose to use this way to express themselves. And yes, it might be a real pain to read this guy's code when you have to mantain it or if it's been OS'd and you wish to modificate it. Or it may be frustrating because the program is written on Python and you don't know Python. BUT if it really mattered to you, you could learn that new language as many people I know who've gone to great lenghts to learn foreign languages so they can enjoy local literature without the distortions of translation. And yes, it's much harder to learn Portuguese than C (or maybe not) but it's a rewarding, culturally enriching experience.
I agree. For instance, how many websites.aero are there going to be, even if it includes the aerospace and the commercial airlines? Is it really worth the effort of porting existing apps to recognize domains like this.
And what's up with.coop and.pro?.web at least make a lot of sense as, in my opinion.health or.sex or.xxx, even.kids
It also would be interesting for non-admins like me to know what would it take to have an unlimited gTLDs. I'm surprised the registrars didn't came up with that idea as there would be a whole lot of money involved in selling any kind of domain name, people would go nuts buying all sorts of combinations. Not that that would be a good thing but it would surely be interesting to watch.
Exactly, there are clearly situations when this information should not be publicly available.
Imagine you live in China or some country like that and you're trying to criticize the government on your website. Oh, but you really can't do that because they can easily know where you live and that can be dangerous for your life! Or imagine you're a writer running a weblog, showing some of your provocative writing to the world, infuriating by chance members of some conservative community. Now they too know where you live, they can surely drive down to pay you a visit, harrass you, throw things at your house, nice stuff like that.
I see a lot of posts talking about how this is useful for network admins (for spam or DoS issues, for instance). It is. But think about how the Internet is being used today; this is NOT your academic environment of yore when you used the Whois DB to get in touch with your fellow hackers, talk about routers while getting a beer. The Net is being used for many other activities, some of which need and deserve some amount of privacy. And I also think the get-yourself-a-geocities-account-then answer is not acceptable.
SlideShow
A method that allows a computer user to view screens of information ("slides") without interacting with the computer via keyboard, mouse or by any other means. The slides can be shown consecutively or in a random fashion. The set of all slides shown in a certain fashion will be called "slideshow". The slideshow can repeat itself indefinitely or a set amount of times. The user indicates which slides will be included in the slide show. The user also indicates when the slide show will start. The user is responsible of setting up the medium that will transmit the slideshow, be it a TV, LCD screen or CRT computer monitor. This patent does not propose any method to create the slides. This patent does not deal with the problem of printing any of the slides composing the slideshow nor any solution to transmit the slideshow to others using electronic means. It can be implemented as a function of a executable application or using web browser scripting languages.
p.s. Yes, there's prior art available but who's gonna notice, certainly not the patent examiners.
Well, my ignorance is bigger so my question would not be "How accurate is it?" but "How does it do that kind of simulation?". I've been looking at the Popular Power website and their explanation of the influenza project is too brief. I think that a lot of people would like to know what is it that their machines are running. This may not be possible in commercial projects but this one is non-profit, so, guys at Popular Power, how about some additional info and/or links about how the simulation is performed, what kind of algorithm is used, how does this fit in the whole search fot the yearly vaccinations, how doctors use the info my machine produces, etcetera? Take example fromn distributed.net, they give plenty of additional references to consult.
I could get into the philosophical reasons why Napster shouldn't be shut down, but a lof of you know them already.
Now, I think we have a major education problem in front of us. How many of the alleged 20 million Napster users know (I mean, really understand) these philosophical reasons? I spent a few hours on napster's chat rooms yesterday trying to do a little explaining on these same reasons and it was very difficult to get my point understood (there's of course the highly likely possibility that I wasn't very good at explaining myself). What I saw instead was a lot of people doing what you just mentioned: flaming, acting like little children whose parents have just confiscated this wonderful toy, people were talking like well it was good while it lasted, so what are the alternatives to Napster?. And it's of course very nice that people are finding out about Gnutella or Freenet, but there's a huge and complicated intellectual property issue that needs to be addressed. Anyway, my point is that an important part of a boycott is to talk to people about the REASONS BEHIND that boycott.
Why are most of us interested in Napster, despite the lower sound quality of MP3? Because we don't want to pay $18+ for one or two songs we like off of an album.
Well, I can think of a few extra reasons why people is so interested in Napster. For instance, think for a moment about the Latin American market (or European, whatever). The other day I went to MixUp, which is like the largest record store in Mexico City, to get myself the Prodigy's DirtChamber Ssessions. They wanted me to pay more than $30 US dollars for the CD. WTF? I downloaded it entirely using Napster. So, it's not that I don't WANT to pay for the music but that I CAN'T even if I wanted to, and when I can the price is just absurd. There was just one copy of Moby's Play, and the latest by Lo-Fidelity All Stars, William Orbit or Fatboy Slim just wasn't there. And this store is supposed to be the most avant-garde, we-have-it-all-we're-better-than-Tower-Records record store. Come on! Using Napster the last six months, I've known so many artists that you wouldn't even imagine. So, I've read a lot of complaints like Where are micropayments? Why can't I buy just the songs I like? etc etc. But in the rest of the world outside the US, the problem is different and bigger: where are the fabulous distribution mechanism that the record industry puts in place in exchange for the money we pay for CDs? It's a joke, it doesn't exist! Oh, and before you say, dude, stop moaning you can get that on Amazon (or whatever) and have them send it to your home, try explaining that to the guys at customs that charged me almost 45% of the cost of 4 CDs I ordered the other day.
Well, that was just my extra reason for using Napster.
First, you people are mising the point when you say that why bother, there are alternatives to Napster. Yes, of course there are but the point here is that Napster is just a file-sharing program that happens to specialize in Mp3 (but can be used for everything as Wrapster has proven). This is what the Internet is about!!!, file sharing, we share HTML files, PNG images, Java applets, files of ALL kinds!!! We should NOT be talking about whether Napster has two faces or whether there are other (allegedly better) alternatives. Sheesh, of course there are other alternatives, centralized and distributed, but that's not the point. This is what Chomsky talks about, our discourse is now between two poles and they're NOT the proper ones, think outside your little box, people: we talk about two choices, one, what Napster does is legal and, two, what Napster does is illegal, "a monster" as the judge so eloquently said. But the point, that Davies Boies and the other Napster attorneys have been trying to make is that users are NOT trading songs for a profit. They are giving away this music. Someone out there DID BUY the record and began giving it away; it is completely legal. So there is NO contributory copyright infringement! Napster is just helping people what they're entitled to, give music away without making a single dime. Napster is helping them to do what they can do via ICQ, IRC, email!, there're so many options. That IS the real point, that's what we should be making people understand. Somewhere, sometime, we, the press, the judge, were lead to believe giving away copyright works to friends or WHOEVER we feel like was illegal. Maybe at some point the law was modified so it actually was illegal, but it's not. The argument Boies et al. are using is so simple that nobody is buying it, but it's true!
Second, right now I feel very frustrated because I'm not an American citizen (not that I wanted to be one, no offense). This not some judge from my government who is doing this, I don't have a congressmen to write to make him understand what's wrong with DMCA. What can we all, non-US citizens living around the world, do?? I'm not trying to start a flame war US vs. Rest of the world, BUT you US citizens have now a greater responsibility because this is happening in your country (and the same goes to many other issues, like what's been happening with Network Solutions, an American company, misbehaving). Sure, we outside the US could start our own Napster service, maybe we will, but right now the problem is on your side of the court, we can only help with our opinions.
Third and last, I believe the RIAA has such a big problem with Napster because it's now a commercial venture. That's what Lars Ulrich said, they are being the middlemen and they, of course, want a piece of it, that's not fair from their point of view. Now, this is just a vague idea, but don't we all need a Napster-like public service?; what if Shawn Fanning decided to ask for volunteer contributions to support Napster servers instead of basically selling all his share of the company to some greedy investors? Would that have made any difference? I think it would, what happened today it would be more like closing a public library, which is not like closing a bookstore at all.
Anyway, I should probably stop ranting. Sorry, can't help it.
From the mission statement: "The other major focus of this site is a peer certification system. The members of this site certify each other, specifying one of three skill levels. Then, I've got a trust metric that takes the whole pile of certificates and decides a trust level for each member. What makes the system interesting is that it's attack resistant. If a bunch of attackers were to create lots of accounts and mutually certify each other, only a very few would be accepted by the trust metric, assuming there were only a few certificates from legitimate members to the hackers."
Note that I'm not saying that this is better than the/. moderation system, it's just a different option.
To me, we should be talking about this in the same manner we do when someone says or asks "Where's Mozilla?" or "Mozilla sucks". We often answer back, well, if you think you know so much about browsers, stop complaining, you can help, start writing some code or collaborate in some way with the Mozilla project.
Well, instead of talking about what is wrong with script kiddies and moaning about how sad is that the Internet (parts of it) can be brought to his knees so relatively easy, we should be finding ways to protect it against that. I believe this is a job the IETF should pursue, so in the scope of our possibilities, we should be more in contact with this organization, helping them out, proposing new solutions. I don't know much about this but we may need some architectural solutions to deal with these attacks. It turns out that the future of the Internet (as for instance, the future of Mozilla) is potentially in our hands via IETF and organizations like that, isn't it?
No human-run organization operates with Borg-like singlemindedness. People are incapable of that kind of groupthink.
I believe this is exactly the problem, that there may be no (central) direction on the actions of some organization. There's no conspiracy in the way that top executives at a company or a bunch of employees sit around a table and say "Hey!, let's put this new crappy product down everyone's throat by having it appear on (and only on) media that's been favorable to us in the past" or "Why don't start forcing OEMs to only install the software we want?". So what's perceived as a Borg-like organization (MS, DOJ, the FMI, World Bank, you name it) conspiring to take over the world, may just be a bunch of single individuals pursuing its own best interests (like the PR example Roblimo gave). And because what exists is just a set of local behaviors, no one is actually responsible of the global behavior. And that may be a problem when, for instance, a company is accused of illegally enforcing a monopoly. Following this line of thought, if no collective decision (that is, a conspiracy) was made, whether aroung a table or via email or whatever, no one is actually responsible if the whole company misbehaves. That, I think, is a problem, specialy when faced with a court, where a responsible has to be found. But if the alleged guilt is distributed, what do you do?
I realize this logic has many holes but the general idea is that, imho, it may be more dangerous (and harder to correct) if an organization behaves like a conspiracy is going on when actually there isn't (no decision to do so was explicitly made). It may be the case that the organization doesn't even know (or can't understand) why it's being accused of conspiring, it's not being conscious of its own acts and can't stop itself even if it wanted to (or were forced to do so by law). That's why, if this phenomenon is not a conspiracy, we may need to use another term to refer to it.
Or maybe I'm just further along the conspiracy theory way of thinking =)
Somewhat offtopic, but does anyone know whether there's a radio equivalent for the Tivo? There are several radio programs that I would love to record to hear afterwards, how can I do this? Could you, maybe, hack the Tivo to record audio? (and later convert the audio to MP3) Is there a computer solution for doing this? Please advise
In conclusion, Sony remains evil, but at least the forces of evil have been held at bay... for now.
Not anymore. According to this C|Net piece: "Sony said today that it has refiled a suit against Connectix alleging that the company's software that allows PCs to run games developed for the PlayStation violates Sony patents. A Sony representative said the company dismissed its lawsuit a day before a hearing in the case on the judge's advice to avoid "procedural issues that may have been appealable."" So, Sony it's at it again. We have to restart this whole/. thread with a twist.
You know, this kind of stuff would have never had this kind of attention paid to it had it not been for the linux use of the penguin logo
Yes, so maybe there should be more open source projects using endangered animals (whales, seals) as their mascots if that's what it takes to be Slashdot-worthy. Last time I checked, camels and Gnus were doing just fine =)
Seriously though, I believe being environment-conscious is quite compatible with the geek nature so maybe we could have these environmental posts more often. Who better and more capable than the/. community to raise awareness and maybe donate some money for these good causes?
That's the title of a small piece Erik Davis wrote on the February issue of Wired Magazine.
I quote:
"The more we go digital, the less of a foothold pinball has, because the game is still sunk waist-deep in the old electromechanical biome. [...]In essence, the preferred playspace is no longer physical space at all, but the increasingly immersive digital space. Ironically, it was pinball that first seduced us into exploring a world behind glass, a world we could touch only by fusing our fingers with control devices. In retrospect, pinball was only a bridge between the machine age and the digital age. Like it or not, we have reached the farther shore."
You may want to take a look at this, it's has some insights on pinball history and it's of course very well written.
Slashdot Mirror
Why is /. even discussing this bullshit?
This is a terrible decision. Inbox on the desktop and mobile are terrific products. I don't see ANYTHING wrong with them. I wonder what sort of shitty data-driven decision making was behind this.
Seymour Papert is a true hero for the fields of computer science and education. To hear him at a lecture was a true intelectual delight. We old-school programmers owe him a lot; I learned to program using Logo and now my son is learning to program using Scratch which is like a third-generation descendant of Logo. His books should be required reading for teachers of all levels and sorts.
This is still happening today.
Interesting. Thanks for the info!
I've noticed that the Project Gutenberg site has a rather straightforward interface, you get the database queries you need but I've noticed that's not very friendly for some users; computer illiterate users that I've recommended your website to and children, for instance.
I've also noticed that all texts are available as text-only and I understand your decision behind this.
So, my question has two sides: Are there any plans to build a front-end for PG that is more user-friendly; by this I mean, for instance, profiles of major authors and new acquisitions, featured writings each week, a section for children, personalization features so that the site recommends books for me, and so on. Are there any plans to, while always having text-only versions, also have automatically generated versions in other formats (pdf, postscript, and especially some of the new formats for eBooks or PDAs)??
I think some of these changes, just having a front page that changes everyday with new reading suggestions and lures the visitors to go and read (in the same fashion that makes people go to BN or Amazon to buy books) could make your site much more popular than it already is but how high is this on your list of priorities, if at all?
ps. Kudos on the excellent work you've done through the years!
Has someone done the math? How many images that would be? How much should each image weight (in kbytes) so that it would be worth the effort?
I'm thinking about how nice it would be for a web server hosting all these images to exist? But how expensive would such effort would be? I understand that MS's Terraserver has several terabytes of images but it seems that this project wouldn't need such a massive storage available. It would be so incredible to see such a thing, though.
Yes I agree. I would also add that, in my opinion, these sort of articles calculate a product's "vaporwareness" as a function of how late they are AND how much they are expected. So even when you can say that OSX or kernel 2.4 are not THAT late, they are hugely expected by a lot of people. That's why, aside from the usual delays in its development, games always appear on these sort of lists, because thousands of fans ara anxiously waiting for Black&White and Warcraft III. That's why OSX entry on Wired's list is accompanied by comments from several people stating hoy badly they need the software.
Darwin came to mind when you said this: "Some would say that this would destroy culture, but if a culture is so weak it cannot survive the "loss" of its language, I'd say that people weren't really serious about it anyway". So I suppose people colonized all over America weren't really being "serious" about their own cultures since they let their native languages disappear and be substituted by english, spanish or portuguese. The loss of those languages and their corresponding cultures was a very painful process fo those people, it's not something we can talk about in terms of one language being weaker than the other, you just can't say "well they weren't being serious about it, too bad".
Indeed, stuff in general (ideas, jokes, etc.) doesn't get better just because it's mine. A fact too many people ignore.
I would never say better but I would certainly would say very valuable because of its uniqueness
Wouldn't it be so much nicer if everyone had spoken the same language back then? then you, too, could read these authors in their native language!
Yes it would but let's be realistic. The fact is that there is a very strong interdependence between language and culture. An universal language would need an universal culture, that's impossible. We would have to live in the same latitude, grow up eating the same things, watching the same landscapes, thinking, discussing, joking in the same fashion, everything, everywhere would be homogeneous. Is that your notion of an ideal world?
And talking pragmatically, about the fact that most of the available literature worldwide is inaccessible to me, well, it's inaccesible to me anyway because I have a finite amount of time to spend reading it.
Let's forget the example of computer languages; it wasn't obviously the perfect analogy, what I was trying to do is to convey a sense of loss of diversity. But when you say: "most any language is completely sufficient to say anything you want provided you speak that language well enough.", I have to disagree, and I would have thought it would be obvious why. If what you say were true, perfect translations would exist, they don't.
Don't you see that your are making my case for me? If everyone spoke the same language, those friends of yours wouldn't have had to "go to greath lengths" to learn a new language.
But don't you see, they WANTED to, they didn't HAVE to, no one forced them to. And the interesting and extremely valuable part is not the outcome (fluently knowing a new language) but the learning process.I've learn a great deal about my own native language (Spanish) by learning other similar languages such as French and Italian and some not so similar as English
Finally, I think we're diverting from the one point where I believe we agree, as expressed in my earlier post, it would be VERY convenient if people knew one same language to communicate on a global basis but I see many disadvantages extrapolating that to every daily activity that happens anywhere worldwide.
Totally disagree. You're taking darwinian logic too far. There's a BIG difference between everyone knowing one same language to communicate between each other on a global basis (this, I agree it's necessary) and everyone speaking it on a daily basis. Why on Earth would you want to do that?, losing your very own metaphors, potential jokes, songs, hidden meanings.
I think you ought to have more respect for your own language; there's got to be great literature produced for it that no one else can enjoy as much as you danish-speaking people do. That's important; that's part of your culture and defines who you are. It is NOT unproductive or stupid for everyone not to speak the same language.
Let us translate your example to computer programming. "However, I woudln't mind if Perl was removed from the face of the earth. In fact, I woudln't mind of Lisp was removed from the earth (my programming language of choice). " That statement would instantly get you flamed by thousands of Perl and Lisp programmers who, although they know there are other options, choose to use this way to express themselves. And yes, it might be a real pain to read this guy's code when you have to mantain it or if it's been OS'd and you wish to modificate it. Or it may be frustrating because the program is written on Python and you don't know Python. BUT if it really mattered to you, you could learn that new language as many people I know who've gone to great lenghts to learn foreign languages so they can enjoy local literature without the distortions of translation. And yes, it's much harder to learn Portuguese than C (or maybe not) but it's a rewarding, culturally enriching experience.
Also found urinal.net via memepool
I agree. For instance, how many websites .aero are there going to be, even if it includes the aerospace and the commercial airlines? Is it really worth the effort of porting existing apps to recognize domains like this.
.coop and .pro? .web at least make a lot of sense as, in my opinion .health or .sex or .xxx, even .kids
And what's up with
It also would be interesting for non-admins like me to know what would it take to have an unlimited gTLDs. I'm surprised the registrars didn't came up with that idea as there would be a whole lot of money involved in selling any kind of domain name, people would go nuts buying all sorts of combinations. Not that that would be a good thing but it would surely be interesting to watch.
Exactly, there are clearly situations when this information should not be publicly available.
Imagine you live in China or some country like that and you're trying to criticize the government on your website. Oh, but you really can't do that because they can easily know where you live and that can be dangerous for your life! Or imagine you're a writer running a weblog, showing some of your provocative writing to the world, infuriating by chance members of some conservative community. Now they too know where you live, they can surely drive down to pay you a visit, harrass you, throw things at your house, nice stuff like that.
I see a lot of posts talking about how this is useful for network admins (for spam or DoS issues, for instance). It is. But think about how the Internet is being used today; this is NOT your academic environment of yore when you used the Whois DB to get in touch with your fellow hackers, talk about routers while getting a beer. The Net is being used for many other activities, some of which need and deserve some amount of privacy. And I also think the get-yourself-a-geocities-account-then answer is not acceptable.
SlideShow A method that allows a computer user to view screens of information ("slides") without interacting with the computer via keyboard, mouse or by any other means.
The slides can be shown consecutively or in a random fashion.
The set of all slides shown in a certain fashion will be called "slideshow".
The slideshow can repeat itself indefinitely or a set amount of times.
The user indicates which slides will be included in the slide show.
The user also indicates when the slide show will start.
The user is responsible of setting up the medium that will transmit the slideshow, be it a TV, LCD screen or CRT computer monitor.
This patent does not propose any method to create the slides.
This patent does not deal with the problem of printing any of the slides composing the slideshow nor any solution to transmit the slideshow to others using electronic means.
It can be implemented as a function of a executable application or using web browser scripting languages.
p.s. Yes, there's prior art available but who's gonna notice, certainly not the patent examiners.
Well, my ignorance is bigger so my question would not be "How accurate is it?" but "How does it do that kind of simulation?". I've been looking at the Popular Power website and their explanation of the influenza project is too brief. I think that a lot of people would like to know what is it that their machines are running. This may not be possible in commercial projects but this one is non-profit, so, guys at Popular Power, how about some additional info and/or links about how the simulation is performed, what kind of algorithm is used, how does this fit in the whole search fot the yearly vaccinations, how doctors use the info my machine produces, etcetera? Take example fromn distributed.net, they give plenty of additional references to consult.
Now, I think we have a major education problem in front of us. How many of the alleged 20 million Napster users know (I mean, really understand) these philosophical reasons? I spent a few hours on napster's chat rooms yesterday trying to do a little explaining on these same reasons and it was very difficult to get my point understood (there's of course the highly likely possibility that I wasn't very good at explaining myself). What I saw instead was a lot of people doing what you just mentioned: flaming, acting like little children whose parents have just confiscated this wonderful toy, people were talking like well it was good while it lasted, so what are the alternatives to Napster?. And it's of course very nice that people are finding out about Gnutella or Freenet, but there's a huge and complicated intellectual property issue that needs to be addressed. Anyway, my point is that an important part of a boycott is to talk to people about the REASONS BEHIND that boycott.
Well, I can think of a few extra reasons why people is so interested in Napster. For instance, think for a moment about the Latin American market (or European, whatever). The other day I went to MixUp, which is like the largest record store in Mexico City, to get myself the Prodigy's DirtChamber Ssessions. They wanted me to pay more than $30 US dollars for the CD. WTF? I downloaded it entirely using Napster. So, it's not that I don't WANT to pay for the music but that I CAN'T even if I wanted to, and when I can the price is just absurd. There was just one copy of Moby's Play, and the latest by Lo-Fidelity All Stars, William Orbit or Fatboy Slim just wasn't there. And this store is supposed to be the most avant-garde, we-have-it-all-we're-better-than-Tower-Records record store. Come on! Using Napster the last six months, I've known so many artists that you wouldn't even imagine. So, I've read a lot of complaints like Where are micropayments? Why can't I buy just the songs I like? etc etc. But in the rest of the world outside the US, the problem is different and bigger: where are the fabulous distribution mechanism that the record industry puts in place in exchange for the money we pay for CDs? It's a joke, it doesn't exist! Oh, and before you say, dude, stop moaning you can get that on Amazon (or whatever) and have them send it to your home, try explaining that to the guys at customs that charged me almost 45% of the cost of 4 CDs I ordered the other day.
Well, that was just my extra reason for using Napster.
First, you people are mising the point when you say that why bother, there are alternatives to Napster. Yes, of course there are but the point here is that Napster is just a file-sharing program that happens to specialize in Mp3 (but can be used for everything as Wrapster has proven). This is what the Internet is about!!!, file sharing, we share HTML files, PNG images, Java applets, files of ALL kinds!!! We should NOT be talking about whether Napster has two faces or whether there are other (allegedly better) alternatives. Sheesh, of course there are other alternatives, centralized and distributed, but that's not the point. This is what Chomsky talks about, our discourse is now between two poles and they're NOT the proper ones, think outside your little box, people: we talk about two choices, one, what Napster does is legal and, two, what Napster does is illegal, "a monster" as the judge so eloquently said. But the point, that Davies Boies and the other Napster attorneys have been trying to make is that users are NOT trading songs for a profit. They are giving away this music. Someone out there DID BUY the record and began giving it away; it is completely legal. So there is NO contributory copyright infringement! Napster is just helping people what they're entitled to, give music away without making a single dime. Napster is helping them to do what they can do via ICQ, IRC, email!, there're so many options. That IS the real point, that's what we should be making people understand. Somewhere, sometime, we, the press, the judge, were lead to believe giving away copyright works to friends or WHOEVER we feel like was illegal. Maybe at some point the law was modified so it actually was illegal, but it's not. The argument Boies et al. are using is so simple that nobody is buying it, but it's true!
Second, right now I feel very frustrated because I'm not an American citizen (not that I wanted to be one, no offense). This not some judge from my government who is doing this, I don't have a congressmen to write to make him understand what's wrong with DMCA. What can we all, non-US citizens living around the world, do?? I'm not trying to start a flame war US vs. Rest of the world, BUT you US citizens have now a greater responsibility because this is happening in your country (and the same goes to many other issues, like what's been happening with Network Solutions, an American company, misbehaving). Sure, we outside the US could start our own Napster service, maybe we will, but right now the problem is on your side of the court, we can only help with our opinions.
Third and last, I believe the RIAA has such a big problem with Napster because it's now a commercial venture. That's what Lars Ulrich said, they are being the middlemen and they, of course, want a piece of it, that's not fair from their point of view. Now, this is just a vague idea, but don't we all need a Napster-like public service?; what if Shawn Fanning decided to ask for volunteer contributions to support Napster servers instead of basically selling all his share of the company to some greedy investors? Would that have made any difference? I think it would, what happened today it would be more like closing a public library, which is not like closing a bookstore at all.
Anyway, I should probably stop ranting. Sorry, can't help it.
You might want to take a look at Advogato, specially their so-called trusted metric.
/. moderation system, it's just a different option.
From the mission statement: "The other major focus of this site is a peer certification system. The members of this site certify each other, specifying one of three skill levels. Then, I've got a trust metric that takes the whole pile of certificates and decides a trust level for each member. What makes the system interesting is that it's attack resistant. If a bunch of attackers were to create lots of accounts and mutually certify each other, only a very few would be accepted by the trust metric, assuming there were only a few certificates from legitimate members to the hackers."
Note that I'm not saying that this is better than the
To me, we should be talking about this in the same manner we do when someone says or asks "Where's Mozilla?" or "Mozilla sucks". We often answer back, well, if you think you know so much about browsers, stop complaining, you can help, start writing some code or collaborate in some way with the Mozilla project.
Well, instead of talking about what is wrong with script kiddies and moaning about how sad is that the Internet (parts of it) can be brought to his knees so relatively easy, we should be finding ways to protect it against that. I believe this is a job the IETF should pursue, so in the scope of our possibilities, we should be more in contact with this organization, helping them out, proposing new solutions. I don't know much about this but we may need some architectural solutions to deal with these attacks. It turns out that the future of the Internet (as for instance, the future of Mozilla) is potentially in our hands via IETF and organizations like that, isn't it?
I believe this is exactly the problem, that there may be no (central) direction on the actions of some organization. There's no conspiracy in the way that top executives at a company or a bunch of employees sit around a table and say "Hey!, let's put this new crappy product down everyone's throat by having it appear on (and only on) media that's been favorable to us in the past" or "Why don't start forcing OEMs to only install the software we want?". So what's perceived as a Borg-like organization (MS, DOJ, the FMI, World Bank, you name it) conspiring to take over the world, may just be a bunch of single individuals pursuing its own best interests (like the PR example Roblimo gave). And because what exists is just a set of local behaviors, no one is actually responsible of the global behavior. And that may be a problem when, for instance, a company is accused of illegally enforcing a monopoly. Following this line of thought, if no collective decision (that is, a conspiracy) was made, whether aroung a table or via email or whatever, no one is actually responsible if the whole company misbehaves. That, I think, is a problem, specialy when faced with a court, where a responsible has to be found. But if the alleged guilt is distributed, what do you do?
I realize this logic has many holes but the general idea is that, imho, it may be more dangerous (and harder to correct) if an organization behaves like a conspiracy is going on when actually there isn't (no decision to do so was explicitly made). It may be the case that the organization doesn't even know (or can't understand) why it's being accused of conspiring, it's not being conscious of its own acts and can't stop itself even if it wanted to (or were forced to do so by law). That's why, if this phenomenon is not a conspiracy, we may need to use another term to refer to it.
Or maybe I'm just further along the conspiracy theory way of thinking =)
Somewhat offtopic, but does anyone know whether there's a radio equivalent for the Tivo? There are several radio programs that I would love to record to hear afterwards, how can I do this? Could you, maybe, hack the Tivo to record audio? (and later convert the audio to MP3) Is there a computer solution for doing this? Please advise
In conclusion, Sony remains evil, but at least the forces of evil have been held at bay... for now.
/. thread with a twist.
Not anymore. According to this C|Net piece: "Sony said today that it has refiled a suit against Connectix alleging that the company's software that allows PCs to run games developed for the PlayStation violates Sony patents. A Sony representative said the company dismissed its lawsuit a day before a hearing in the case on the judge's advice to avoid "procedural issues that may have been appealable.""
So, Sony it's at it again. We have to restart this whole
Yes, so maybe there should be more open source projects using endangered animals (whales, seals) as their mascots if that's what it takes to be Slashdot-worthy. Last time I checked, camels and Gnus were doing just fine =)
Seriously though, I believe being environment-conscious is quite compatible with the geek nature so maybe we could have these environmental posts more often. Who better and more capable than the
I quote:
You may want to take a look at this, it's has some insights on pinball history and it's of course very well written.