I'll ask you as one of a few old(ish) regulars saying that the Oracle slideshow is bad.
Why exactly is Java itself a "trap"? I thought it was just a language like any other language. And I thought Sun was a nice company that tried to give some things back to the community. So was Sun really concocting a lethal secret trap or did Oracle just notice a devastating re-application of the I.P. when used in evil hands?
"Blah blah blah infringe blah blah steal" etc, daily fare, but Trap?! I'm at least two steps above Newbie and I've never seen that theory.
Sorry, I cry foul. While I'm not up on the Canadian side, good for them to shake up the field. After all, the big Corps "buy" politicians, so why not throw a little leverage on the Free Music side for once!
I'll remark that the chief resource against economies of scale is Disruption. "Sure! Build a 100 Million dollar photo processing plant! I'll work on Digital Cameras." Oops - Bye Bye Kodak.
The "smart monopolies" use some of that existing cash to enter the new market. If they can play the politics right and avoid cheap traps, then they shift entire industries. I think GE did this with Jack Welch. If memory of my readings serves, they used to have a small hand in *everything*. Jack Welch cut them down to some 12 product lines down from over 50.
So "the game as it's played" today is our old friend Microsoft, joined by Apple, Google, and Facebook sorta in that order. We need a good new 5th player to really shake it up. I really don't want that to be the state of tech 5 years from now!
But how many of the professors are viciously examining text versions and reworking their classes to only use the new pages?
I had a fun variant of this one time when I got hold of a free copy of an older version of a text book (like V2 vs V4) and it was BETTER than the current version! I am a Preface & Introduction junkie, so I compared. The 2nd Ed that I acquired was all "Thanks for da luv in the first edition, here's the second, off you go". The 4th ed went "We have trimmed and tightened the material for maximum educational impact by reducing the extraneous material that might distract from the topic at hand. Then we added more big pictures and huge 3 inch margins on the page."
I used the older copy, kept the new one only to watch for sneak shots, and an hour extra per week I had better context than anyone else in the class because my copy was 5 pages longer per chapter.
Then just keep uploading new iterations of the page.
And I figured out part of what was bothering me. You're asking for "data for research" but your initial article is "shadowed" - it reads like "give us data and we'll figure out what we want to write about".
Write two versions of your story: the Mass Market one "Look, it's 2012, we found all these cookies! They're evil!" and the other with a FAR More rigorous approach. (I'll let you off for not being a PHD academic, but tell us something we don't know - but remember your audience! I'm in the LOWER 50% and I already run Adblock and Ghostery and Collusion (from 2 months ago!) with screen shots of who Ghostery blocks. Chops that you said you want to do some "old time journalism" - then dig into the meat! "Obfuscated flash objects, zombie cookies, Firefox's Do Not Track vs it actually being followed, etc."
So if we're talking about devices vs incorrect settings due to various causes, what about if the driver himself has a video camera trained on the road (and maybe even his speedometer?). Police device reports "you did X". Driver device reports "I did Y."
Is that enough to get the ticket thrown out, or will they take the second short cut and say "Nah, our device is foolproof and you fudged yours"?
Interesting approach, but there is also a theme that some learners need a guide so that the 5 stunning ideas they never thought of don't become warps to their understanding.
You said "don't spend money" - some of the new languages have free mini intro books. We can decide later in Language Wars about Python vs Ruby but for example Why The Lucky Stiff's Poignant Guide To Ruby looks stunning to capture the attention of an 11 year old with humor. That kind of thing is sorely lacking in most texts that feel they have to impress other academics. I have the programming aptitude of a gnat but I'll glance over that just because the sidebars are fun. From what I gather the programming content is well done, and a couple people have praised some of the language design mechanics of Ruby.
After the first steps that bring the corners to the opposite sides, and crease, and flip, when you uncrease the paper you have two diagonal creases suggesting a square bounded on 3 sides by the paper and the 4th by an un-drawn line where the diagonal creases hits the paper edges. (There's a little bit of paper "unassigned" because those diagonal folds essentially mark off a square, and of course 8x11 paper is rectangular.)
So with your paper at portrait orientation with a big X crease in it, fold the top edge horozontally down *behind and away* from you to form a horozontal crese in the middle of the X crease, and try not to physically re-orient the paper. (Then unfold- it was just a crease)
Then when you unfold it, if I explained this right, the concept will explode into your mind with one more sentence. Very slowly, for didactic effect,
push the sides of the horozontal crease *inward to touch each other and down along the diagonals so both lay flat on the base of the paper*.
That's the reason I had you do the horozontal crease back and away, because it makes the paper almost want to go right where you need it. Then jut flatten the top down which (hopefully) should be obvious by now because there's nowhere else for it to go.
Does that help?
Later on if you get bored and want to kill an hour, that "flap creator" is a lynchpin of oragami, so you can make yourself 10 big square sheets of paper and fiddle with it.
I'll reply to you because you're high up enough to be noticed.
Absolutely no one in the thread has noted my favorite design. Sorry, no pics. This is a stunt design, not about distance.
1. Typical 8x11, vertical/portrait 2. Bottom left corner to 3/4 right side. 3. Bottom right corner to match = "Inverted house". Crease hard. (I flip 180 degrees here for ease on next step.) 4. Buckle the two sides in so that you get another "house" but this time with two extra flaps.
Protip: Slight variations in this step lead to different tricks. 5. Fold Nose Half to 2/3 of the way to the base of the "triangle". (Created by the cross folds.) 6. Fold directly in half along the base to connect both wings. 7. Fold each wing down making a fuselage 8. Fold wingtips up or down as desired.
It's a slow heavy design but it can do about 4 tricks depending on mods: Yoyo Loops (Right back to your feet), Circle Patrols, Short-Direct flights 15 feet away, or "Ditzy" where it completely loses its balance and goes haywire.
Is that another way of saying that with Canonical's push to new UI front ends and Stores and stuff, that support for the KDE side languished?
The summary feels like one of those "tip of the iceberg" ones, where there's a massive lurch beneath the scenes here. Anyone know where the problems are expected to arise in this?
IANAMM (I am not a Master's in Math). I find the calculations in tax law rather evil-hard. It's a different kind of hard that "higher math" - it's the numerical interlocks that are brutal. I'm rusty so I'm making this up as pseudo-taxcode, but stuff like the sentence below are typical *easy* tax law!
"You own a rental building and rent 2 units out to tenants and live in the third. You bought the building first as part of a partnership then later acquired the whole thing, so your basis calculations are already a little strange. You run two small businesses out of your house. One of them qualifies for the Office In the Home forms. Your truck is 40% business one year and 60% business the other year because you have obligations that only arise every second year. Because you took accelerated depreciation on your truck, you cannot also take accelerated depreciation on some of your office in the home assets. For six months you also ran a day care service in that office-in-home. You are divorced but you won stock in the divorce settlement as substitute for alimony. That stock has split twice and then merged separately."
I personally got trapped in a Moebius Loop of the transfer credits game. I quote: "We'll give you the numerical quantity of credits from your night school, but we won't give you the credit for actually having taken the intro class." Wait for it... "You now must declare a major because you have too many credits, but you are not allowed to declare a major because you're missing the Intro prerequisite class for your major."
I have a different theory, that I call the Age of Classics.
Those same items wouldn't be nearly as legendary/famous as they are if they were built today. Sure, they'd be neat, but not the symbolic representations of culture. It's because they were created in former ages, when civilization as a whole was less advanced, so that one truly memorable monument stood out. The same thing has happened on the literature side - the 20's century produced the greatest span of books the world has ever seen, yet a lot of classes spend lots of time on the same 25 "classics".
While I couldn't put my finger on it at the time, I had a slow inkling that education in the traditional school curriculum is actually producing a very narrow education. Somewhere past grade school once you get beyond dinosaurs and space shuttles, the topics all lock down into "classics", especially in the literature side.
Sure, you pinpointed one of the really eerie parts of this.
Let's even say it's not hackers, can you imagine if the company itself messed up its update, even just on the install? You're going 65 miles down the road, then the car freezes for two seconds while the update installs?!
But congrats to you for finding a fourth engine of tracking that I hadn't yet fully realized - sales. So then all that info is around "to make your shopping experience better". Yet you insightfully put the quotes around "shop keeper" because besides the actual shop keepers, there's tons of room for any two bit mall kiosk operator (I'm not even counting the total fakers) to apply for that info, then they have less obligation to keep up a good name than the big name shops. Then of course are the really sleazy operators, who fake the shop part entirely and social-engineer their way into the data for black hat reasons.
And yes, then that info will be cross sold to the.gov crowd to "help keep us safer from terrorists".
I'll reply to you, because besides all the usual textbook games, you hinted at the *really nasty* copyright theme brewing - one so ugly the media has managed to distract us from even talking about it!
Entry Level Lectures in College/University.
Those are famously just "3d Videocasts" with Talking Heads writing things on White/Black boards. A "Class" consists of 25 "Episodes", plus the 1-3 course books, plus a "certification that you know the material". Price: Some $10,000.
If you can just get an alternative certification process down to validate people knowing their materials, then parts of the educational engine will crash, badly. I know, there's other parts of the "experience", but from the content side, Big-Ed has a really wrenching shakedown coming, maybe in five-seven years.
As I peruse the article, especially the updates, I don't think each and every one of those patents was exactly hand picked and of equal worth. My guess is that there's a couple of gems in there and a good deal of padding. Yet unfortunately those gems are probably worth more than the Billion.
AOL got slammed as one of the reasons for "Eternal September" yet that influx of users also helped end the "Revenge of the Nerds" attitude towards computing. They deserved what they had at the time, it was fair money earned. Then of course, the rest of the web caught up and passed them, etc. etc. So then the techies laughed at them for being has-beens.
So what's a "Has-Been" to do? Suppose they have a couple killer patents on something related to chat rooms for example. They'll never regain that former glory, so that patent is useless to them because it would take 30 billion and a marketing genius to do a turn-around. So heck, why not sell that killer patent? Maybe it and the 100 related ones are worth $500 million. Then a little last hour negotiating collected a little more cash by requiring that some lesser patents be bundled in there. MS has the money, so they just shrug, and maybe they don't even begrudge AOL the cash - I don't think I've ever heard of *AOL* threatening Microsoft in any year.
So maybe AOL can do something with the cash if they don't run out of time.
I think part of the problem is that there is no hierarchy of copyrighted works.
A "Work" is everything from an icon picture to a superhero movie. Let's just say it takes someone at most two days to create a good icon, vs it can take years before a movie gels together after all the script wrangling and then all the effects. There's also a kind of curve or equation relating the initial investment vs the ease of copying.
Let's ignore the cheap "the creative decisions suk" and look at something like Superman Returns. It was a typical imperfect but competent movie. It drifted around in the creative stages for easily ten years, but apparently the end was finally worth it. So I can see how the MPAA gets grouchy when people copy it.
On the other hand, something like an icon is... just a little picture. Yet the Shareware crowd likes to charge these $29.95 prices for stuff - more than the price of a movie! (Though maybe not much longer with the 3d fad! Yeesh!)
So take a draft law that was designed for a movie, and one that was designed for an ICanHazCheezburger picture and you get absurdities.
Okay, we've seen the real problems of locking up IP for a century in US copyright law. Here come the Chinese to say "Hai. You have 3 months to sell it, then it's fair game."
That creates a rapid promulgation of culture. (I didn't read the article) but it doesn't prevent the original artist from using it. Same thing, you can grab someone else's stuff for your own project 3 months later.
It's a hyper-accelerated sharing cycle.
The final end is unknown. They "claim to want to educate children" (in the US) but after the stock basics of who was who in the civil war, "education" gets all tied up in Journal fees.
Slashdot Mirror
I'll ask you as one of a few old(ish) regulars saying that the Oracle slideshow is bad.
Why exactly is Java itself a "trap"? I thought it was just a language like any other language. And I thought Sun was a nice company that tried to give some things back to the community. So was Sun really concocting a lethal secret trap or did Oracle just notice a devastating re-application of the I.P. when used in evil hands?
"Blah blah blah infringe blah blah steal" etc, daily fare, but Trap?! I'm at least two steps above Newbie and I've never seen that theory.
This article is going to spawn about 40 attempts at +1 Funny and another 40 Troll results.
Sorry, I cry foul. While I'm not up on the Canadian side, good for them to shake up the field. After all, the big Corps "buy" politicians, so why not throw a little leverage on the Free Music side for once!
They don't WANT a better image! They LIKE being the deadly copyright police!
"Steal a loaf of bread - $50 fine and 40 hours comm service and 1 night in jail. Steal a song, pay up $150,000!"
Nice note.
I'll remark that the chief resource against economies of scale is Disruption. "Sure! Build a 100 Million dollar photo processing plant! I'll work on Digital Cameras." Oops - Bye Bye Kodak.
The "smart monopolies" use some of that existing cash to enter the new market. If they can play the politics right and avoid cheap traps, then they shift entire industries. I think GE did this with Jack Welch. If memory of my readings serves, they used to have a small hand in *everything*. Jack Welch cut them down to some 12 product lines down from over 50.
So "the game as it's played" today is our old friend Microsoft, joined by Apple, Google, and Facebook sorta in that order. We need a good new 5th player to really shake it up. I really don't want that to be the state of tech 5 years from now!
But how many of the professors are viciously examining text versions and reworking their classes to only use the new pages?
I had a fun variant of this one time when I got hold of a free copy of an older version of a text book (like V2 vs V4) and it was BETTER than the current version! I am a Preface & Introduction junkie, so I compared. The 2nd Ed that I acquired was all "Thanks for da luv in the first edition, here's the second, off you go". The 4th ed went "We have trimmed and tightened the material for maximum educational impact by reducing the extraneous material that might distract from the topic at hand. Then we added more big pictures and huge 3 inch margins on the page."
I used the older copy, kept the new one only to watch for sneak shots, and an hour extra per week I had better context than anyone else in the class because my copy was 5 pages longer per chapter.
Sure, why can't you host your notes at something like http://www.guardian.co.uk/JGeary/CookieStudy.html?
Then just keep uploading new iterations of the page.
And I figured out part of what was bothering me. You're asking for "data for research" but your initial article is "shadowed" - it reads like "give us data and we'll figure out what we want to write about".
Write two versions of your story: the Mass Market one "Look, it's 2012, we found all these cookies! They're evil!" and the other with a FAR More rigorous approach. (I'll let you off for not being a PHD academic, but tell us something we don't know - but remember your audience! I'm in the LOWER 50% and I already run Adblock and Ghostery and Collusion (from 2 months ago!) with screen shots of who Ghostery blocks. Chops that you said you want to do some "old time journalism" - then dig into the meat! "Obfuscated flash objects, zombie cookies, Firefox's Do Not Track vs it actually being followed, etc."
Regards,
--Tao
You know already who the "Big Players" are - Google, Facebook, Microsoft, your choice of a couple more related ones.
Then it descends into all these little companies. I would expect that some of them are subsidiaries of the big guys etc.
The ideal goal of each of these "thingies" (cookies, flash objects, etc etc) is to nail down who visits down to a unique user if possible.
So just copy the Ghostery block list, maybe the AdBlock block list, your choice of a couple more tools.
If you want a "market share per ad company" report then get one of those.
There's something bothering me with your study design but it's not clear yet.
"Leave Facebook Alone!"
I'll reply to you.
So if we're talking about devices vs incorrect settings due to various causes, what about if the driver himself has a video camera trained on the road (and maybe even his speedometer?). Police device reports "you did X". Driver device reports "I did Y."
Is that enough to get the ticket thrown out, or will they take the second short cut and say "Nah, our device is foolproof and you fudged yours"?
Yep.
Microsoft Corporation Station Q.
(What's Station Q?)
Interesting approach, but there is also a theme that some learners need a guide so that the 5 stunning ideas they never thought of don't become warps to their understanding.
You said "don't spend money" - some of the new languages have free mini intro books. We can decide later in Language Wars about Python vs Ruby but for example Why The Lucky Stiff's Poignant Guide To Ruby looks stunning to capture the attention of an 11 year old with humor. That kind of thing is sorely lacking in most texts that feel they have to impress other academics. I have the programming aptitude of a gnat but I'll glance over that just because the sidebars are fun. From what I gather the programming content is well done, and a couple people have praised some of the language design mechanics of Ruby.
Hi there!
After the first steps that bring the corners to the opposite sides, and crease, and flip, when you uncrease the paper you have two diagonal creases suggesting a square bounded on 3 sides by the paper and the 4th by an un-drawn line where the diagonal creases hits the paper edges. (There's a little bit of paper "unassigned" because those diagonal folds essentially mark off a square, and of course 8x11 paper is rectangular.)
So with your paper at portrait orientation with a big X crease in it, fold the top edge horozontally down *behind and away* from you to form a horozontal crese in the middle of the X crease, and try not to physically re-orient the paper. (Then unfold- it was just a crease)
Then when you unfold it, if I explained this right, the concept will explode into your mind with one more sentence. Very slowly, for didactic effect,
push the sides of the horozontal crease *inward to touch each other and down along the diagonals so both lay flat on the base of the paper*.
That's the reason I had you do the horozontal crease back and away, because it makes the paper almost want to go right where you need it. Then jut flatten the top down which (hopefully) should be obvious by now because there's nowhere else for it to go.
Does that help?
Later on if you get bored and want to kill an hour, that "flap creator" is a lynchpin of oragami, so you can make yourself 10 big square sheets of paper and fiddle with it.
I'll reply to you because you're high up enough to be noticed.
Absolutely no one in the thread has noted my favorite design. Sorry, no pics. This is a stunt design, not about distance.
1. Typical 8x11, vertical/portrait
2. Bottom left corner to 3/4 right side.
3. Bottom right corner to match = "Inverted house". Crease hard. (I flip 180 degrees here for ease on next step.)
4. Buckle the two sides in so that you get another "house" but this time with two extra flaps.
Protip: Slight variations in this step lead to different tricks.
5. Fold Nose Half to 2/3 of the way to the base of the "triangle". (Created by the cross folds.)
6. Fold directly in half along the base to connect both wings.
7. Fold each wing down making a fuselage
8. Fold wingtips up or down as desired.
It's a slow heavy design but it can do about 4 tricks depending on mods:
Yoyo Loops (Right back to your feet), Circle Patrols, Short-Direct flights 15 feet away, or "Ditzy" where it completely loses its balance and goes haywire.
Is that another way of saying that with Canonical's push to new UI front ends and Stores and stuff, that support for the KDE side languished?
The summary feels like one of those "tip of the iceberg" ones, where there's a massive lurch beneath the scenes here. Anyone know where the problems are expected to arise in this?
IANAMM (I am not a Master's in Math). I find the calculations in tax law rather evil-hard. It's a different kind of hard that "higher math" - it's the numerical interlocks that are brutal. I'm rusty so I'm making this up as pseudo-taxcode, but stuff like the sentence below are typical *easy* tax law!
"You own a rental building and rent 2 units out to tenants and live in the third. You bought the building first as part of a partnership then later acquired the whole thing, so your basis calculations are already a little strange. You run two small businesses out of your house. One of them qualifies for the Office In the Home forms. Your truck is 40% business one year and 60% business the other year because you have obligations that only arise every second year. Because you took accelerated depreciation on your truck, you cannot also take accelerated depreciation on some of your office in the home assets. For six months you also ran a day care service in that office-in-home. You are divorced but you won stock in the divorce settlement as substitute for alimony. That stock has split twice and then merged separately."
Blecch.
IRC!
"Iran Relay Chat!"
Heh - funny/insightful analogy!
I personally got trapped in a Moebius Loop of the transfer credits game. I quote: "We'll give you the numerical quantity of credits from your night school, but we won't give you the credit for actually having taken the intro class." Wait for it ... "You now must declare a major because you have too many credits, but you are not allowed to declare a major because you're missing the Intro prerequisite class for your major."
I have a different theory, that I call the Age of Classics.
Those same items wouldn't be nearly as legendary/famous as they are if they were built today. Sure, they'd be neat, but not the symbolic representations of culture. It's because they were created in former ages, when civilization as a whole was less advanced, so that one truly memorable monument stood out. The same thing has happened on the literature side - the 20's century produced the greatest span of books the world has ever seen, yet a lot of classes spend lots of time on the same 25 "classics".
While I couldn't put my finger on it at the time, I had a slow inkling that education in the traditional school curriculum is actually producing a very narrow education. Somewhere past grade school once you get beyond dinosaurs and space shuttles, the topics all lock down into "classics", especially in the literature side.
Sure, you pinpointed one of the really eerie parts of this.
Let's even say it's not hackers, can you imagine if the company itself messed up its update, even just on the install? You're going 65 miles down the road, then the car freezes for two seconds while the update installs?!
Yeesh.
Minority Report, here we come!
But congrats to you for finding a fourth engine of tracking that I hadn't yet fully realized - sales. So then all that info is around "to make your shopping experience better". Yet you insightfully put the quotes around "shop keeper" because besides the actual shop keepers, there's tons of room for any two bit mall kiosk operator (I'm not even counting the total fakers) to apply for that info, then they have less obligation to keep up a good name than the big name shops. Then of course are the really sleazy operators, who fake the shop part entirely and social-engineer their way into the data for black hat reasons.
And yes, then that info will be cross sold to the .gov crowd to "help keep us safer from terrorists".
I'll reply to you, because besides all the usual textbook games, you hinted at the *really nasty* copyright theme brewing - one so ugly the media has managed to distract us from even talking about it!
Entry Level Lectures in College/University.
Those are famously just "3d Videocasts" with Talking Heads writing things on White/Black boards. A "Class" consists of 25 "Episodes", plus the 1-3 course books, plus a "certification that you know the material". Price: Some $10,000.
If you can just get an alternative certification process down to validate people knowing their materials, then parts of the educational engine will crash, badly. I know, there's other parts of the "experience", but from the content side, Big-Ed has a really wrenching shakedown coming, maybe in five-seven years.
As I peruse the article, especially the updates, I don't think each and every one of those patents was exactly hand picked and of equal worth. My guess is that there's a couple of gems in there and a good deal of padding. Yet unfortunately those gems are probably worth more than the Billion.
AOL got slammed as one of the reasons for "Eternal September" yet that influx of users also helped end the "Revenge of the Nerds" attitude towards computing. They deserved what they had at the time, it was fair money earned. Then of course, the rest of the web caught up and passed them, etc. etc. So then the techies laughed at them for being has-beens.
So what's a "Has-Been" to do? Suppose they have a couple killer patents on something related to chat rooms for example. They'll never regain that former glory, so that patent is useless to them because it would take 30 billion and a marketing genius to do a turn-around. So heck, why not sell that killer patent? Maybe it and the 100 related ones are worth $500 million. Then a little last hour negotiating collected a little more cash by requiring that some lesser patents be bundled in there. MS has the money, so they just shrug, and maybe they don't even begrudge AOL the cash - I don't think I've ever heard of *AOL* threatening Microsoft in any year.
So maybe AOL can do something with the cash if they don't run out of time.
I think part of the problem is that there is no hierarchy of copyrighted works.
A "Work" is everything from an icon picture to a superhero movie. Let's just say it takes someone at most two days to create a good icon, vs it can take years before a movie gels together after all the script wrangling and then all the effects. There's also a kind of curve or equation relating the initial investment vs the ease of copying.
Let's ignore the cheap "the creative decisions suk" and look at something like Superman Returns. It was a typical imperfect but competent movie. It drifted around in the creative stages for easily ten years, but apparently the end was finally worth it. So I can see how the MPAA gets grouchy when people copy it.
On the other hand, something like an icon is ... just a little picture. Yet the Shareware crowd likes to charge these $29.95 prices for stuff - more than the price of a movie! (Though maybe not much longer with the 3d fad! Yeesh!)
So take a draft law that was designed for a movie, and one that was designed for an ICanHazCheezburger picture and you get absurdities.
Okay, we've seen the real problems of locking up IP for a century in US copyright law.
Here come the Chinese to say "Hai. You have 3 months to sell it, then it's fair game."
That creates a rapid promulgation of culture. (I didn't read the article) but it doesn't prevent the original artist from using it. Same thing, you can grab someone else's stuff for your own project 3 months later.
It's a hyper-accelerated sharing cycle.
The final end is unknown. They "claim to want to educate children" (in the US) but after the stock basics of who was who in the civil war, "education" gets all tied up in Journal fees.