Are they trying to stop governments switching to open document standards by inventing their own? Or has the "binary dump" fileformat meant that they just can't achieve some future functionality that they want to implement? Or both?
Office file format don't lend themselves to datacentre operations: to "manufactured" documents, such as invoice processing, or gas and electricity bills. Are they doing the right thing because they're finally choking on the hairball?
Often computers are just thrown into a classroom expected to do miracles on their own.... Add to that teachers that know less about them than the students and you get a nice mess....
But the authorities are under pressure to as much computer equipment into as many schools and classrooms as possible, so most of the money is spent on procurement rather than deployment.
So the schools get no say in whether they want the money spent on computers or not: it is top-sliced from their budgets before it ever gets into the schools. Instead they get asked if they want the computers or... nothing.
And the deployment is always half baked. A bunch of kit is delivered to the schools, and they get insufficient technician time to properly set it up, little or no training ("we must spend the money on getting the kit into as many schools a possible").
So you end up with a geek spending his weekend in his primary school teacher wife's classroom trying to set up an interactive whiteboard which isn't properly mounted with a projector on a wobbly stand (no budget for a ceiling mounting for the projector) with the teacher's planning and assignment laptop which has to be plugged in and removed several times a week, trying to work out how the smartboard software works, then show the teacher/wife, then work out what the class could usefully do with this stuff when the inspector comes round.
The correct way to do it:
Ask the schools if they want to surrender part of their budget for the computers. And if they don't, let them spend the money on books or extra staff.
Make sure the classroom ceiling doesn't leak before putting in more electrical equipment
Don't expect children in an overcrowded classroom never to knock a projector on a trolley in the middle of the room
Train the teachers. Properly. Not just half a day in another school watching another teacher, unable to ask questions.
I've not made it through "High Tech Heretic" - it's heavy going - but one question stuck in my mind, which any parent should ask when they are shown the smart computer suite in a school:
"What was this room before it was the computer suite?"
Incredibly, many schools are turning part or all of their libraries into computer suites, even primary schools.
But on a P2P network the cost to the downloader of the infrastructure is zero.
The problem isn't with the distribution medium costing too much, it's with the choice of distribution medium. If I were to record music which I wanted to share, I wouldn't put it on a server for download, I'd put ed2k links onto a server. After a few downloads it would be seeded through the network.
There are Dynamic System Domains: which are hardware isolated from each other, but you can add hardware into/remove it from domains. Each domain runs its own Solaris image, and its own kernel.
Then, within each OS image you can run multiple zones. You can use the resource manager to allocate shares between zones.
Then, within each zone you can use the resource manager to share resources between processes.
The granularity is pretty darned good, and you get the benefit of fault isolated domains if you need it.
That's not actually true, but it is true that conditions in the far North weren't as bad 1,000 years ago. Indeed, it's thought that the vikings had colonies across Newfoundland and down into Maine which were lost when the Arctic extended southwards.
But our lack of understanding of how our climate works and of how ocean current affect both local and global climates means that we can all argue about this for years t come.
Kyoto may be a start, but one of the fastest growing sources of greenhouse emissions is aviation. Yet Kyoto specifically excludes international aviation.
This favours small countries (such as GB) with little domestic aviation over large countries (such as the US, Russia, China, etc) where much of the aviation is domestic.
Personally I would have all aviation, domestic or internation, included.
Interesting set of threads... "it's not Microsoft's fault that EDS pushed the update out wrongly".
The fundamental error here is deep seated and architectural - they have 80,000 user interface devices which are stateful. By putting the wrong device on the desktop they have set this situation up.
In the olden days when clerks in government agencies used green screens this problem wouldn't happen. If a green screen failed, it would be replaced as a FRU. Today's equivalent is something like a SunRay - the user interface device holds only enough configuration to bootstrap itself and, again, is a FRU.
The situation at the DWP is different: the user interface device is a stateful device which holds configuration itself, and requires this configuration to be consistent before it gets enough connecticity to be remotely managed. The toolkits discussed, which are used to push config around these UI devices, are probably most excellent, but there should be no need for this sort of mularky.
So while I don't necessarily blame Microsoft for this incident, I do blame them for creating a monoculture where this sort of architecture is deployed. I expect the trials underway in government using SunRay devices as the user interface will be watched with more interest after this debacle.
A final question - how on earth do DWP recover 60,000 unbootable PCs?
No, I think it was just that the penny dropped. CC is just like Copyleft: an author/creator asserts their rights under copyright law and uses those rights to specify how their work should be shared. Both those who copyleft or CC and those who assert "all rights reserved" are expecting copyright law to be complied with, even though we don't like many aspects of copyright law, particularly the excessive terms.
Yeah, I know it's a term in such widespread use that it is hard to question it. It's actually quite a useful term in that it describes a person or an organisation's ability to make money in the future by exercising their rights under patent, copyright or trademark law. And indeed, this potential future royalty income is given a notional capital value and appears on corporate balance sheets as "intellectual property".
But the use of the term "Property" makes it a misleading term, because it encourages people to view this potential future royalty income as being equivalent to physical property, which it is not. Towards the bottom of the BPI press release they actually state clearly the clauses under which they are prosecuting, and keen eyed readers will have noted that these clauses don't mention theft - rather, they mention infringement of the rights of copyright holders.
If the BPI are going to sue people who are illegally copying copyright material that's one thing. But the attributable comments on the end of the press release makes me want to throw:
"... all that many of those musicians and songwriters are trying to do, is to make the world the rest of us live in, a much more valuable, much brighter place."Feargal Sharkey
No, Feargal, if all you were trying to do was make the world a brighter place then you wouldn't mind people copying your music. I try to make the world a brighter place by making music, the difference between us is that I'm not trying to make money at it. What you're trying to do is make the world a brighter place and make yourself money - absolutely fine, but there's a difference.
"Record companies are the biggest investors in new music in the UK..."Martin Mills, Chairman, Beggars Group
No, the people who invest time and money in learning to make music are the biggest investors. What the record companies "invest" in is recorded music which you can buy in shops. I hate the way they talk as if the entirety of music is the stuff you buy in shops, it's so dismissive of the people who invest in being able to make music.
"Piracy is theft - pure and simple... I hope it will stop in their tracks the habitual offender who uploads to make a quick buck out of other people's talent."Arts Minister, Estelle Morris
Remember, this is a government minister who shold know better: firstly, the obligatory comments about misuse of the terms "piracy" and "theft". Secondly, does anyone make money out of participating in a P2P network?
"The serial uploaders who post thousands of music files free of charge onto the Internet are stealing this product in exactly the same way as a shoplifter in a Music store. Theft on this scale cannot be allowed to continue unchecked."Steve Knott, Managing Director, HMV Europe, and Chairman, British Association of Record Dealers
No they're not. A shoplifter in a Music store is committing property theft while a serial [?] uploader is committing copyright infringement.
"The internet has changed all our lives. It is revolutionising the way music is consumed. What it doesn't change are the fundamentals of the concept of intellectual property. Unauthorised filesharing is against the law. After several years of seeing it eat into our livelihoods, we reluctantly and finally have to resort to the law to protect our business."Tony Wadsworth, Chairman & CEO, EMI Recorded Music UK & Ireland
This one is much closer to reality (except the use of the term "Intellectual Property" in place of "copyright law").
"There is a worrying lack of understanding of the value and meaning and intellectual property. We need to move very swiftly from a climate of ignorance to one in which people understand that illegal uploading is fundamentally no different from shoplifting."Jeremy Lascelles, Chief Executive, Chrysalis Music
Surely the "worrying lack of understanding" is someone so close to the issue not recognising the difference between property theft and copyright infringement.
Please use the correct terms: this isn't stealing music, it's illegally copying copyrighted material.
This is not just a semantic argument - the natural state for music is to be free (libre), whoever can hear it can enjoy it. When I play the organ in church on Sundays, the music isn't mine, it's just the music I'm making. If people come to the church not to worship God, but just to hear me playing the organ, that doesn't fall outside the "Acceptable Use Policy" of my organ playing, it's just a bunch of people in the church listening to some music [they don't, BTW]. And if the service is taped so that people who couldn't get to church can hear what went on, that doesn't get a whole lot of boilerplate attached to it: it's just people hearing the service as it was.
Now, there are a bunch of people out there who've decided to use the legal artifice of copyright to stop people listening to the music they make unless they are given money. But please, please don't write as if the only way to enjoy music is to give somebody money, because 99.9% of the people in the world who make music don't do it for money, they do it because they like to do so, and if other people enjoy listening to them it gives them even greater pleasure.
This isn't about music, it's about copyright. You can't steal music, but you can infringe copyright.
This is an incredibly important precedent which has been set here, and the defendants have got off lightly because no damages were sought.
Essentially the defendants were trying to use law to suppress an internal email trail which was embarassing to them and, not knowing how the stuff got out, tried to bully ISPs to take the stuff down (yes, I know the section of the DMCA is supposed to be a "get out" clause for ISPs, but does anyone really think that was ever how it was intended to be used?).
Now that this has been judged an unlawful act, I would like to think that the bar has been raised for any potential future litigants.
Personally I find the term "Intellectual Property" offensive. As the parent article says, what is widely referred to as IP is actually patents, trademarks and copyrights.
Now, it *is* the case that holding the legal conch on a patent gives you the right under certain circumstances in a particular country to charge someone for making something in a certain way, but I still refute the idea that that amounts to "property". However, the accountants assign some notional capital value to the money they can charge people because of this legal artifice, and call that "Intellectual Property": just because something can be bought and sold doesn't make it property. By the same token, most corporate acquisitions result in the transfer of a balance sheet item called "Goodwill" - I suppose that goodwill is a form of property as well?
Good call. Which raises the question, are they going to open up the whole of the Solaris OE, and where will the boundary between open and proprietary be put?
There's more to implementing stuff in your kernel than just lifing a bit of source code from elsewhere.
The way the Solaris kernel is so scaleable across over 100 processors is not some clever hack, it's taken years of refinement of the kernel. I'm not a kernel hacker, but you won't just be able to lift bits of Solaris kernel code and drop them into a Linux kernel.
What I would expect to see fairly quickly is a "GNU/Solaris" distribution, where (as many of us have been doing for years) you get a Solaris kernel and basic libraries, and then put a GNU based set of tools on top of it. Couple this with the Niagara processors and you have an awesome edge appliance.
Slashdot Mirror
A number of artists have twigged that the distribution of illegal copies can have a positive effect on their album sales.
...
I'm waiting for one of them to sue their record company for artificially depressing their sales by prosecuting illegal distributors
Are they trying to stop governments switching to open document standards by inventing their own? Or has the "binary dump" fileformat meant that they just can't achieve some future functionality that they want to implement? Or both?
Office file format don't lend themselves to datacentre operations: to "manufactured" documents, such as invoice processing, or gas and electricity bills. Are they doing the right thing because they're finally choking on the hairball?
Is this because Sun decided to place an icon called "This Computer" in the Java Desktop?
But the answer isn't to replace poor teachers with computers, it's to replace poor teachers with good teahers.
But the authorities are under pressure to as much computer equipment into as many schools and classrooms as possible, so most of the money is spent on procurement rather than deployment.
So the schools get no say in whether they want the money spent on computers or not: it is top-sliced from their budgets before it ever gets into the schools. Instead they get asked if they want the computers or
And the deployment is always half baked. A bunch of kit is delivered to the schools, and they get insufficient technician time to properly set it up, little or no training ("we must spend the money on getting the kit into as many schools a possible").
So you end up with a geek spending his weekend in his primary school teacher wife's classroom trying to set up an interactive whiteboard which isn't properly mounted with a projector on a wobbly stand (no budget for a ceiling mounting for the projector) with the teacher's planning and assignment laptop which has to be plugged in and removed several times a week, trying to work out how the smartboard software works, then show the teacher/wife, then work out what the class could usefully do with this stuff when the inspector comes round.
The correct way to do it:
Ask the schools if they want to surrender part of their budget for the computers. And if they don't, let them spend the money on books or extra staff.
Make sure the classroom ceiling doesn't leak before putting in more electrical equipment
Don't expect children in an overcrowded classroom never to knock a projector on a trolley in the middle of the room
Train the teachers. Properly. Not just half a day in another school watching another teacher, unable to ask questions.
I've not made it through "High Tech Heretic" - it's heavy going - but one question stuck in my mind, which any parent should ask when they are shown the smart computer suite in a school:
"What was this room before it was the computer suite?"
Incredibly, many schools are turning part or all of their libraries into computer suites, even primary schools.
You're assuming that the API/file formats/wire protocols are freestanding items. Two things
1) They change the APIs within major versions. Anybody remember how everything except MS products broke with NT SP3?
2) They don't have an unblemished record for publishing *all* the API
But on a P2P network the cost to the downloader of the infrastructure is zero.
The problem isn't with the distribution medium costing too much, it's with the choice of distribution medium. If I were to record music which I wanted to share, I wouldn't put it on a server for download, I'd put ed2k links onto a server. After a few downloads it would be seeded through the network.
It's cooler than that.
There are Dynamic System Domains: which are hardware isolated from each other, but you can add hardware into/remove it from domains. Each domain runs its own Solaris image, and its own kernel.
Then, within each OS image you can run multiple zones. You can use the resource manager to allocate shares between zones.
Then, within each zone you can use the resource manager to share resources between processes.
The granularity is pretty darned good, and you get the benefit of fault isolated domains if you need it.
Interesting slip-up. That's Xenon arc, of course.
You'd have thought that a hacker would have released the pictures under a Creative Commons licence, but then perhaps he has to pay the glazier.
That's not actually true, but it is true that conditions in the far North weren't as bad 1,000 years ago. Indeed, it's thought that the vikings had colonies across Newfoundland and down into Maine which were lost when the Arctic extended southwards.
But our lack of understanding of how our climate works and of how ocean current affect both local and global climates means that we can all argue about this for years t come.
Kyoto may be a start, but one of the fastest growing sources of greenhouse emissions is aviation. Yet Kyoto specifically excludes international aviation.
This favours small countries (such as GB) with little domestic aviation over large countries (such as the US, Russia, China, etc) where much of the aviation is domestic.
Personally I would have all aviation, domestic or internation, included.
Interesting set of threads ... "it's not Microsoft's fault that EDS pushed the update out wrongly".
The fundamental error here is deep seated and architectural - they have 80,000 user interface devices which are stateful. By putting the wrong device on the desktop they have set this situation up.
In the olden days when clerks in government agencies used green screens this problem wouldn't happen. If a green screen failed, it would be replaced as a FRU. Today's equivalent is something like a SunRay - the user interface device holds only enough configuration to bootstrap itself and, again, is a FRU.
The situation at the DWP is different: the user interface device is a stateful device which holds configuration itself, and requires this configuration to be consistent before it gets enough connecticity to be remotely managed. The toolkits discussed, which are used to push config around these UI devices, are probably most excellent, but there should be no need for this sort of mularky.
So while I don't necessarily blame Microsoft for this incident, I do blame them for creating a monoculture where this sort of architecture is deployed. I expect the trials underway in government using SunRay devices as the user interface will be watched with more interest after this debacle.
A final question - how on earth do DWP recover 60,000 unbootable PCs?
No, I think it was just that the penny dropped. CC is just like Copyleft: an author/creator asserts their rights under copyright law and uses those rights to specify how their work should be shared. Both those who copyleft or CC and those who assert "all rights reserved" are expecting copyright law to be complied with, even though we don't like many aspects of copyright law, particularly the excessive terms.
It was there in their press release! They've left it as the same URL and changed it without adding an edit history to the page.
Did anybody capture the article before they changed it?
Yeah, I know it's a term in such widespread use that it is hard to question it. It's actually quite a useful term in that it describes a person or an organisation's ability to make money in the future by exercising their rights under patent, copyright or trademark law. And indeed, this potential future royalty income is given a notional capital value and appears on corporate balance sheets as "intellectual property".
But the use of the term "Property" makes it a misleading term, because it encourages people to view this potential future royalty income as being equivalent to physical property, which it is not. Towards the bottom of the BPI press release they actually state clearly the clauses under which they are prosecuting, and keen eyed readers will have noted that these clauses don't mention theft - rather, they mention infringement of the rights of copyright holders.
When I was growing up, sharing was a term which described doing something good. Sharing your sweets with other children at school was A Good Thing.
Now sharing has become a word which describes doing something bad. "Don't you go sharing things now". I think this has made us worse as a society.
No, Feargal, if all you were trying to do was make the world a brighter place then you wouldn't mind people copying your music. I try to make the world a brighter place by making music, the difference between us is that I'm not trying to make money at it. What you're trying to do is make the world a brighter place and make yourself money - absolutely fine, but there's a difference.
No, the people who invest time and money in learning to make music are the biggest investors. What the record companies "invest" in is recorded music which you can buy in shops. I hate the way they talk as if the entirety of music is the stuff you buy in shops, it's so dismissive of the people who invest in being able to make music.
Remember, this is a government minister who shold know better: firstly, the obligatory comments about misuse of the terms "piracy" and "theft". Secondly, does anyone make money out of participating in a P2P network?
No they're not. A shoplifter in a Music store is committing property theft while a serial [?] uploader is committing copyright infringement.
This one is much closer to reality (except the use of the term "Intellectual Property" in place of "copyright law").
Surely the "worrying lack of understanding" is someone so close to the issue not recognising the difference between property theft and copyright infringement.
Please use the correct terms: this isn't stealing music, it's illegally copying copyrighted material.
This is not just a semantic argument - the natural state for music is to be free (libre), whoever can hear it can enjoy it. When I play the organ in church on Sundays, the music isn't mine, it's just the music I'm making. If people come to the church not to worship God, but just to hear me playing the organ, that doesn't fall outside the "Acceptable Use Policy" of my organ playing, it's just a bunch of people in the church listening to some music [they don't, BTW]. And if the service is taped so that people who couldn't get to church can hear what went on, that doesn't get a whole lot of boilerplate attached to it: it's just people hearing the service as it was.
Now, there are a bunch of people out there who've decided to use the legal artifice of copyright to stop people listening to the music they make unless they are given money. But please, please don't write as if the only way to enjoy music is to give somebody money, because 99.9% of the people in the world who make music don't do it for money, they do it because they like to do so, and if other people enjoy listening to them it gives them even greater pleasure.
This isn't about music, it's about copyright. You can't steal music, but you can infringe copyright.
This is an incredibly important precedent which has been set here, and the defendants have got off lightly because no damages were sought.
Essentially the defendants were trying to use law to suppress an internal email trail which was embarassing to them and, not knowing how the stuff got out, tried to bully ISPs to take the stuff down (yes, I know the section of the DMCA is supposed to be a "get out" clause for ISPs, but does anyone really think that was ever how it was intended to be used?).
Now that this has been judged an unlawful act, I would like to think that the bar has been raised for any potential future litigants.
Personally I find the term "Intellectual Property" offensive. As the parent article says, what is widely referred to as IP is actually patents, trademarks and copyrights.
Now, it *is* the case that holding the legal conch on a patent gives you the right under certain circumstances in a particular country to charge someone for making something in a certain way, but I still refute the idea that that amounts to "property". However, the accountants assign some notional capital value to the money they can charge people because of this legal artifice, and call that "Intellectual Property": just because something can be bought and sold doesn't make it property. By the same token, most corporate acquisitions result in the transfer of a balance sheet item called "Goodwill" - I suppose that goodwill is a form of property as well?
Good call. Which raises the question, are they going to open up the whole of the Solaris OE, and where will the boundary between open and proprietary be put?
Well, DTrace might be implemented, but you also need all the data collection points in the kernel.
There's more to implementing stuff in your kernel than just lifing a bit of source code from elsewhere.
The way the Solaris kernel is so scaleable across over 100 processors is not some clever hack, it's taken years of refinement of the kernel. I'm not a kernel hacker, but you won't just be able to lift bits of Solaris kernel code and drop them into a Linux kernel.
What I would expect to see fairly quickly is a "GNU/Solaris" distribution, where (as many of us have been doing for years) you get a Solaris kernel and basic libraries, and then put a GNU based set of tools on top of it. Couple this with the Niagara processors and you have an awesome edge appliance.