You are making a common mistake. Just because someone is not skilled in the areas that you are, doesn't mean that they aren't skilled in other areas. Just because they have a hard time learning what you find easy doesn't mean that that don't easily learn many things that you find difficult to impossible. That this happens between different areas of the techie-sphere (let alone real life), and will happen more and more in future is inevitable. You can only understand so much (no matter who you are), and there is much more than you can understand out there (no matter who you are.)
E.g.: My wife has, after years of sporadic effort... The ideas about 'spacial user interfaces' arose from considerations about how best to use the innate intuition of the average human being to make user interfaces more efficient, and structure computer systems so that they are easier to learn. The level of 'abstract understanding' needed by current systems, and the way that techies take this for granted (and indeed often never notice the need for it) is a big problem, partly because those that have the ability to produce solutions to it tend (from their own POV) not to see the need.
The problem is that, as the amount of software increases, the ability of a techie to handle everything in detail will be diminished, and thus he/she will have to specialise more. When handling something that is not your speciality, you are far closer to Joe SixPack user (maybe we should say Joe SixPackDeveloperPerson or something,) and a setup that helps you get on with your specialisation more easily is helpful.
It is here that thinking about 'brainless user computing' can be helpful. Not for the purpose of addind a dancing paperclip everywhere, or a dumbed down 'have a nice day' user interface, but for the process of minimising how much 'thinking' is necessary to get some everyday operation done, and how much 'learning' is necessary for a specialist from one area to get to grips with the basic tools of another area.
The fallacy is to assume that it is indeed a simple marketshare vs flexibility tradeoff. It is not.
The problem with flexibility is always a question of 'how much'. It is not a case of more=better (for then surely a simple framebuffer in which every application can write at will is the best option, allowing every possible graphical behaviour.) On the other hand, not flexibility is another losing hand. The problem as I see it with X is: too much flexibility in the wrong places.
It is like choosing your programming language: there are many different languages, each with a different level of flexibility and different traits, each of which has their strengths and weaknesses. For example, FORTRAN is excellent for writing high performance numerical codes, where performance is important. It lacks flexibility in places precisely so that the compilers and compiler designers have plenty of flexibility in optimising the code. But from the point of view of coding with it, it can be a PITA. On the other hand, machine code gives you total freedom, total flexibility, but makes things far too complicated to do in practice (for project of significant size.) Then, VB lets you knock up a quick Windows app in no time, and Delphi has similar advantages. In every case, there is a variable amount of flexibility, and where it is varies. In the case of language, there is the tradeoff in programmer flexibility vs. compiler-designer flexibility.
In the case of GUI's, again there is a choice of flexibility between application programmers and GUI-system programmers. Getting the right choice is all important. To do this, you need to see the problem in its entirety (what I describe as the total user experience.)
(A similar situation is faced by mathematicians when choosing their area of mathematical machinery with which to approach a given problem. Different solutions, some more elegant than others, appear given different levels and arrangements of abstration.)
And one of the worst things about X is the way that it gets people to think about how the window system goes together. You are shoehorned into the X does the rectangles and hardware; the toolkit is selected per application, and does the buttons and menus and stuff; making local storage and network storage integrate with the user environment is a {network/application/someoneElse(TM)'s}-problem-so -don't-blame-us affair; sound is similar.
I've said this before, and I'll say it again. The decomposition of the various aspects of the user interface experience forced by the use of X is one of the biggest problems, and the most important thing to rethink before designing a replacement.
A network-aware framebuffer may be all very well for research prototyping, but for constructing an efficient implementation of a good user experience, it leaves much to be desired.
It is the total user experience that matters. What does it matter if the 'window-open' noise isn't graphical? It's part of how the desktop works. The way storage appears to the user is part of how their desktop works. Many other things are, similarly, part of the experience of how the desktop works, and the technology used to give the user a desktop over a network should contain the glue that binds all these things together, if not the implementation itself.
This is not to say that modular design principles shouldn't be used to allow things to evolve as time goes on: they should. Thinking this out is another prat of the design process. We have plenty of development history to look back on to get this right, the only problem is the collective motivation to do so.
I remember the first time I sat down and used a Citrix Winframe client (on our maths departments's NT server.) They were set up on old PC's which still had floppy drives. What struck me was the way that, once you had logged in, the (Win 3.1 style) file manager showed the floppy drives on the terminal as floppy drives to the user and allowing them to be used as such. Essentially they were mounted as network drives from the point of view of the terminal session running on the NT server (I think) but for all intents and purposes, the disk drive felt like a local one.
Simple little feature, maybe, but an important one to consider when thinking about replacing X. The imporant thing to think of is not this feature in isolation (nor how one should implement it in X), but the idea of taking the best parts of the user experience when running on e.g. a PC, and merging that with the advantages of a client/server network GUI/terminal/whatever system.
I'll give some examples.
If I am running an application on a server, in a terminal session and the application wants to make a sound, it should come out of the terminal. This may not be part of the 'graphical' part of the GUI, and many would argue that it is beyond the scope of e.g. X, I would argue that it is clearly part of the user experience of the person using the terminal, and this experience is what the 'GUI' should really be aimed at capturing.
(Echoing the thing I said about Windows terminals.) Local removable (e.g. floppy/zip/CD-ROM) storage is useful.
In practice, what is needed, is a more-than-X replacement that encompasses (by design) the various aspects of the user experience, so that the whole sit-down-and-use aspect of using network terminals is a seamless as possible, as portably-uniform as possible (i.e. I can go to any terminal, log on and get essentially the same experience), and yet with as few limitations as possible (compared to having a networked bunch of PC's.)
Networked terminals vs. PC's is essentially an easy-administration+maintainence vs. user control+features+convenience tradeoff (or something like that) and the ideal for which user interface people should be aiming is the best of both worlds. As to what is 'user interface' and what is not: everything to do with the user _using_ the system (whatever it is) should be considered 'user interface', from the on/off switch to boot times to how sound and removable disks work through to where to stick the menus on the screen.
In short, the 'graphical UI for the graphics part, all else is someone else's problem' attitude that is so engrained in X is one of X's biggest (and apparently hardest to see) problems. Some people look at what X is designed to do, whilst others look at what is needed for the role in which X is used today.
Actually yes, telling stories requires effort. If I want to tell a good story I have to get the story in order, get a good audience, set the mood, etc.. it takes work. You can't just tell stories in a monotonous voice to anyone you find off the street...
So does copying. Furthermore, copying a good record involves the effort of picking it out of all the rubbish that gets marketed nowadays. How many times have you bought a current 'in' record that's been over hyped only to find yourself thinking a few months later "That's crap! How on earth did I think about buying that!?" (In practice, with pop records, I almost always leave it til well after a year after release before deciding to buy something... call me cheapskate but that way it's easy to see what's survived the periods of hype. It also allows me to get it cheaper.)
I find "sharing" to mean that you are going out of your way to give something to someone else. E.g. sharing your time by helping move someone to a new home. Sharing your money by donating to charities, sharing your wisdom by giving guidance to troubled youth, etc, etc.
That's almost always called giving. You 'give to charity', 'give your time' etc. When you put yourself out to help someone else, that is giving. That said, one can use the word sharing here, its meaning is rather fuzzy when it comes to defining it precisely.
I find nothing altruistic about setting up a P2P application in the tray and walking away. That isn't charitable nor "sharing". It's just plain piracy.
Others may find something altruistic. It isn't charitable, because you're not 'giving to the needy'. But we've not been discussing something charitable. It is sharing, because you're letting others have access to something that you have access to, simple as that. (Right or wrong is a different matter, as is how absolute the question of copying and sharing needs to be.)
The only kind of 'plain piracy', so far as I'm concerned is the kind that happened on the high seas --- the word's only other meaning is the result of corporate propoganda, (as is 'software theft' --- lawyers always call it infringement, but lobbyists like the word theft since it sounds words.)
This kind of thing reminds me of Brave New World. (Three hundred repetitions, twice a week, from 6 years to 12 years.) If you repeat it to people enough, and get them repeating it, it becomes true (to them.) Before looking at things from a moral perspective (if that is what you wish), you must distance yourself from the effects of sustained lobbying. People have the idea that, e.g. 'sharing=good, piracy=bad', so there was a massive corporate lobbying campaign to encourage the idea that 'copying=piracy=bad.' That was done by those with the most to gain by getting rid of copying. Other examples of corporations manipulating the belief of the general public are the De Beers diamond campaigns (diamonds are rare and very valuable, are 'forever', are the ideal gem for an engagement present (which must be a diamond ring costing two months wages), should be kept as hierlooms (to get rid of the second hand market for diamonds), etc., etc.) A lot of the general public beliefs are shaped this way, though I'll not go on any longer here.
What's worse is all you stupid jackasses
Who are you calling stupid? At least I aim to think as freely and objectively as I can given the daily bombardment of different entrenched positions, each with their own motives.
really make it harder for legitimate uses of P2P technology to shine through.
I see your point here. The 'we're doing it 'cause it's cool to be a bit of a rebel' group of people are a real problem. But they exist in all areas of society, and aren't going to go away, so we need to be able to get by in spite of them.
Every time some jackass says "sending the latest [riaa] tune is sharing, information was meant to be free!" gives more fuel for the RIAA fodder.
True. Fact is, lik
Silly point: a tyre blowout at 110km/h is far more dangerous than at 50km/h.
The driver of a car at 110km/h needs to be more alert than one at 50km/h for a comparable level of safety (stopping times, amount of manoeverability, etc.)
The point about health and distractions is valid. It is not ONLY speed that kills. This should be the retort to the 'speed kills' campaigners. But the fact is, if something goes wrong, than high speed can make the difference between a risky situation and a catastrophe.
Since the formatting that the word processor user uses makes no difference (in the cases we are discussing), one would surely want to be editing in a type that looks easiest to work with on screen, and with an interface that hides any notion of formatting, with the possible exception of chapter/section headings and a few forms of emphasis.
The point about cutting down on those 'pointless formatting decisions' is that the average user forced to use e.g. vi, won't think 'Wow... look at what I can play with...' as we all do when faced with a new piece of software.
The biggest problem is the amount of overcomplication and obscure workarounds in the inner workings of LaTeX in order to get things working as LaTeX wants them. This makes it hell to change what happens if the standard stuff and packages doesn't do what you want it to. (e.g. having labels and references store and retrieve extra metadata, doing layout of theorem+proof environments slightly differently, etc.)
Separation of the programming stuff from the document markup stuff from the document appearance stuff is an essential missing bit of LaTeX.
(And yes... I do (pure) maths, wrote my MSci and MPhil theses in LaTeX and am currently doing my PhD thesis in LaTeX. I've done various bits of hacking around to get it to do what I want, but have generally got tired of doing so.)
"It looks like you're writing a letter... do you need help?"
...SMASH SCREEN...
"It looks like you're trying to rob an ATM. Options:" 1.) Optimal method for breaking in. 2.) Writing letters. 3.) Calling for help. 4.) Writing a letter. 5.) Printing multiple copies. 6.) Writing a letter. --BOX TO TYPE SOMETHING IN--
The basic problem with RMS's positions on many things is that his views are based on idealism: the kind of 'right thing for society' that intellectuals like to debate. The problem is that idealism is not that great a motivator. Marxism may have been the starting point for the Soviet Union, but it took the arrogance of the Tzar and the mess being created by the Tzarina during WW1 for the people to get sufficiently motivated to ovethrow the previous rulers. (This is a gross oversimplification I know.)
So far as the software itself being free, that is a different, but still confusing way to explain the concept. What exactly freedom means for a human being is hard enough for interested parties to debate as it is. What does freedom mean for a computer program? Does a free piece of software have the right to refuse to be installed on a particular computer? (I know it often appears that GPL'd C sources have a right to refuse to compile, and the free will to exercise that right when they feel like it, but I suspect the cause of this is technical rather than political or philosophical...)
People think, ok China moving to linux big deal. Or they say, ok big deal, but not anything amazing. China moving to linux is huge.
Maybe. Many (myself included) will reserve judgement.
Think about it, over 1 billion people will use linux isntead of Windows. Microsoft could have potentially sold a billion copies of windows for $100-$200 each. Now, much much less will be the case.
You're falling into the erroneous thinking that the BSA likes to use in its marketing campaigns. (Blindly translating numbers into potential $$'s)
Firstly, many in China cannot afford enough clothesto go round the family. Many are only slightly better off. How on earth can these be included in the 1billion potential computer users? (Only when a country gets the general populous up to the levels seen in the West will computers become so ubiquitous.)
Of the millions in China with computers (the components are built over there, or in Taiwan, in most cases...) many will not pay for the software. 'Piracy' is rampant (as US software corporations like to shout about.)
In the end, you're down to a potential few million copies of Windows being sold. It's probably not that much bigger than one of the European countries.
Now, with a billion linux users I'm sure at least a few of them will have technical problems. Someone who offers linux support in Chinese for a reasonable price could stand to profit considerably...
And speaks the language natively, is familiar with the culture, grew up in it, etc. Basically it's a pretty closed market so far as money is concerned. What China wants out of Linux is to be sending less money to the US on account of running Windows, whilst still enjoying its trade principles (which is why it can't simply say Windows copyrights are null and void in China.)
What Linux has to gain from China is more open source software being written. The comments will probably be engrish, ASCII being to prodominant in programming languages to change in a hurry. With the way the GPL and friends work, it only takes someone to upload code to the internet for the OSS community to get hold of it.
In short, China, along with many other countries, does not present a market in quite as straightforward a way as you suggest.
IANAP either, though I did a year of it at university before dropping it for maths...
Of the things you describe, the second is fusion, and I'm not sure what the first is. (Essentially, in the first you are describing a neutron being formed out of the energy and the hydrogen atom being ionised.)
Fission involving H and He nuclei would look something like
He + energy --> D + D
where D is heavy hydrogen. In such a reaction energy is absorbed in order for the helium nuclie to split. (This is to do with needing to overcome the binding energy.)
Commonly, fission refers to the nuclear reactions that occur with heavy elements (only ones heavier than iron can liberate energy by fission.) Essentially some large and unstable nuclei like uranium or plutonium absorbs a neutron that happens to be flying past, plus its kinetic energy, and the resulting mix cannot hold itself together, to it breaks into two (or more?) smaller neuclei. Energy is released in this process because the binding energy of the smaller nuclei is greater than that of the original heavy element (more binding energy == more missing mass ==> energy left over).
Binding energy, in a nutshell, is the energy of the missing mass in composite nuclei. Basically, an atom such as Carbon-12 has 6 protons and 6 neutrons in its nucleus, but the mass of the nucleus is slightly less than that of 6 protons and 6 neutrons. The missing energy (given by the famous e=mc^2) is given out when the nucleus is formed, and must be put back in order to break it apart again.
I don't understand DNS all that well, but I see the following workaround for VeriSign.
1.) Have the verisign nameserver return sitefinder for all missed domain names.
2.) Direct all failed DNS queries for.com and.net names to the verisign server.
(i.e. return the verisign nameserver whenever there is no registered domain name holder.) How will this either a.) not work in (normal pre-BIND-patch) practice, or b.) be stopped by the BIND patch?
Besides, if 80% of the internet stops people accessing Verisign's search page, maybe they'll think about doing something about it.
Basically the go-here-on-DNS-failure should be a browser feature (as it is with IE.) What Verisign is trying to do is to usurp M$IE's feature of trying an M$N search if the DNS search fails.
If you recall, a failed DNS query in M$IE will result in the search being sent to MSN. I guess this is Verisign trying to get to toe into the same market.
Re:Yes, while in reality you have less information
on
Can You Raed Tihs?
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If someone had written a compression algorithm which took advantage of how scrambled text is readable, it'd compress better than the normal text since you no longer need to store the order of some of the characters.
The obvious problem with such an algorithm is that it would be unusable when the source text contained words that are 'scramble-equivalent' but which the context in insufficient to distinguish between.
This is not a good example given more context, but just consider: He feels like the wind. vs. He flees like the wind.
Reference to it as an 'escalator' comes from the original term ('space escalator') coined for the idea. It seems to have stuck, irrespective of the fact that there won't be moving stairs anywhere on this thing.
Think about it. If it breaks at the centre of gravity, you're left with the bits being pulled down ONLY, and nothing to tension the cable from above. The outer part of the cable will indeed fly off into space, but the rest will still present a problem. Similar considerations will apply if the cable breaks somewhere else: the bit on the earth side will no longer be pulled away from the earth strongly enough.
A post in the middle of/. is not the best place for this. It needs form part of a collective response from the Open Source and Free Software communities, that will not stop being read after the/. story is approx. 48 hours old.
It would be nice if this were to be published on the same LinuxWorld website as a counterpoint, after being looked over and agreed to by a few more of the big names in the Open Source community. Alternatively stick it somewhere reasonably permanent on the web and stick a comment onto the LinuxWorld website pointing to it.
That's the foot in the door. Once large corporations are using that, it is possible for DRM to be trickled down so that it is an invisible component of the home versions.
It's like saying "I like stealing cars to joy ride rather than having to take the bus".
In some cases, e.g. if you are downloading everything without buying anything yourself. On the other hand, if it's more like, e.g. you have an album or two by a given artist and download a single that isn't there, or a B-side from the single of a song in your album, or something like that you should technically pay but there is a better case for 'turning a blind' eye to the copying in this case. Here it's more like saying 'I've already used this train ticket into the city centre, but it wasn't stamped by the inspector and will be accepted as valid if I use it again.'
What you should look at is the percentage of your ('buyable') music that you buy. For example, if its only 10% or less, then it's more like 'I don't buy train tickets and try to get away with it.' On the other hand, if its more like 80-90%, then there is less of a problem. Record execs aren't doing their job if they're not lobbying 110% for anything less than buying 100% of your music to be labelled criminal.
Besides, if you buy a single in a shop, your money isn't all going to the people who produced it. Most of the money goes into the large company's coffers, and the bits left over are usually what goes to the artist (except for the big artists, which act as lures for the other artists to aspire to.)
To conclude, arguing things based on whether a single should by bought or not may make sense, but the issues of what is right should be looked at from the point of view of society as a whole, and from that point of view, the behaviour of the music industry is inexcusable. The act (and are even encouraged to act) as if what makes profit for the corporation is all that matters. The good of the artist is secondary (and only tended to enough to ensure that the corporations get the sound and looks etc. out of them that they need.) What is convenient for the customer is only tended to as much as is needed to get sales up. The customers don't matter, people don't matter, artists don't matter, only money flowing through the corporation matters, and all else should be manipulated towards that goal.
If you're sat using the same computer with the same mouse and the ball's not getting dirty, etc. then it may well work ok.
But, you cannot, e.g. sign something when using a friends laptop if there isn't a mouse attached. You can't sign if the mouse is dirty and jumps around a little.
I bet the 99% accuracy was when using identical equipment for each of the test 'signings'.
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You are making a common mistake. Just because someone is not skilled in the areas that you are, doesn't mean that they aren't skilled in other areas. Just because they have a hard time learning what you find easy doesn't mean that that don't easily learn many things that you find difficult to impossible.
That this happens between different areas of the techie-sphere (let alone real life), and will happen more and more in future is inevitable. You can only understand so much (no matter who you are), and there is much more than you can understand out there (no matter who you are.)
E.g.: My wife has, after years of sporadic effort...
The ideas about 'spacial user interfaces' arose from considerations about how best to use the innate intuition of the average human being to make user interfaces more efficient, and structure computer systems so that they are easier to learn.
The level of 'abstract understanding' needed by current systems, and the way that techies take this for granted (and indeed often never notice the need for it) is a big problem, partly because those that have the ability to produce solutions to it tend (from their own POV) not to see the need.
The problem is that, as the amount of software increases, the ability of a techie to handle everything in detail will be diminished, and thus he/she will have to specialise more. When handling something that is not your speciality, you are far closer to Joe SixPack user (maybe we should say Joe SixPackDeveloperPerson or something,) and a setup that helps you get on with your specialisation more easily is helpful.
It is here that thinking about 'brainless user computing' can be helpful. Not for the purpose of addind a dancing paperclip everywhere, or a dumbed down 'have a nice day' user interface, but for the process of minimising how much 'thinking' is necessary to get some everyday operation done, and how much 'learning' is necessary for a specialist from one area to get to grips with the basic tools of another area.
Nice soundbyte... clear, simple, and wrong.
The fallacy is to assume that it is indeed a simple marketshare vs flexibility tradeoff. It is not.
The problem with flexibility is always a question of 'how much'. It is not a case of more=better (for then surely a simple framebuffer in which every application can write at will is the best option, allowing every possible graphical behaviour.) On the other hand, not flexibility is another losing hand. The problem as I see it with X is: too much flexibility in the wrong places.
It is like choosing your programming language: there are many different languages, each with a different level of flexibility and different traits, each of which has their strengths and weaknesses. For example, FORTRAN is excellent for writing high performance numerical codes, where performance is important. It lacks flexibility in places precisely so that the compilers and compiler designers have plenty of flexibility in optimising the code. But from the point of view of coding with it, it can be a PITA. On the other hand, machine code gives you total freedom, total flexibility, but makes things far too complicated to do in practice (for project of significant size.) Then, VB lets you knock up a quick Windows app in no time, and Delphi has similar advantages. In every case, there is a variable amount of flexibility, and where it is varies. In the case of language, there is the tradeoff in programmer flexibility vs. compiler-designer flexibility.
In the case of GUI's, again there is a choice of flexibility between application programmers and GUI-system programmers. Getting the right choice is all important. To do this, you need to see the problem in its entirety (what I describe as the total user experience.)
(A similar situation is faced by mathematicians when choosing their area of mathematical machinery with which to approach a given problem. Different solutions, some more elegant than others, appear given different levels and arrangements of abstration.)
The buttons will look like GTK+ buttons, but that's as far as it goes. GTK does little to help the cause of application consistency.
And one of the worst things about X is the way that it gets people to think about how the window system goes together. You are shoehorned into the X does the rectangles and hardware; the toolkit is selected per application, and does the buttons and menus and stuff; making local storage and network storage integrate with the user environment is a {network/application/someoneElse(TM)'s}-problem-so -don't-blame-us affair; sound is similar.
I've said this before, and I'll say it again. The decomposition of the various aspects of the user interface experience forced by the use of X is one of the biggest problems, and the most important thing to rethink before designing a replacement.
A network-aware framebuffer may be all very well for research prototyping, but for constructing an efficient implementation of a good user experience, it leaves much to be desired.
It is the total user experience that matters. What does it matter if the 'window-open' noise isn't graphical? It's part of how the desktop works. The way storage appears to the user is part of how their desktop works. Many other things are, similarly, part of the experience of how the desktop works, and the technology used to give the user a desktop over a network should contain the glue that binds all these things together, if not the implementation itself.
This is not to say that modular design principles shouldn't be used to allow things to evolve as time goes on: they should. Thinking this out is another prat of the design process. We have plenty of development history to look back on to get this right, the only problem is the collective motivation to do so.
I remember the first time I sat down and used a Citrix Winframe client (on our maths departments's NT server.)
They were set up on old PC's which still had floppy drives. What struck me was the way that, once you had logged in, the (Win 3.1 style) file manager showed the floppy drives on the terminal as floppy drives to the user and allowing them to be used as such. Essentially they were mounted as network drives from the point of view of the terminal session running on the NT server (I think) but for all intents and purposes, the disk drive felt like a local one.
Simple little feature, maybe, but an important one to consider when thinking about replacing X. The imporant thing to think of is not this feature in isolation (nor how one should implement it in X), but the idea of taking the best parts of the user experience when running on e.g. a PC, and merging that with the advantages of a client/server network GUI/terminal/whatever system.
I'll give some examples.
If I am running an application on a server, in a terminal session and the application wants to make a sound, it should come out of the terminal. This may not be part of the 'graphical' part of the GUI, and many would argue that it is beyond the scope of e.g. X, I would argue that it is clearly part of the user experience of the person using the terminal, and this experience is what the 'GUI' should really be aimed at capturing.
(Echoing the thing I said about Windows terminals.) Local removable (e.g. floppy/zip/CD-ROM) storage is useful.
In practice, what is needed, is a more-than-X replacement that encompasses (by design) the various aspects of the user experience, so that the whole sit-down-and-use aspect of using network terminals is a seamless as possible, as portably-uniform as possible (i.e. I can go to any terminal, log on and get essentially the same experience), and yet with as few limitations as possible (compared to having a networked bunch of PC's.)
Networked terminals vs. PC's is essentially an easy-administration+maintainence vs. user control+features+convenience tradeoff (or something like that) and the ideal for which user interface people should be aiming is the best of both worlds. As to what is 'user interface' and what is not: everything to do with the user _using_ the system (whatever it is) should be considered 'user interface', from the on/off switch to boot times to how sound and removable disks work through to where to stick the menus on the screen.
In short, the 'graphical UI for the graphics part, all else is someone else's problem' attitude that is so engrained in X is one of X's biggest (and apparently hardest to see) problems. Some people look at what X is designed to do, whilst others look at what is needed for the role in which X is used today.
Actually yes, telling stories requires effort. If I want to tell a good story I have to get the story in order, get a good audience, set the mood, etc.. it takes work. You can't just tell stories in a monotonous voice to anyone you find off the street...
So does copying. Furthermore, copying a good record involves the effort of picking it out of all the rubbish that gets marketed nowadays. How many times have you bought a current 'in' record that's been over hyped only to find yourself thinking a few months later "That's crap! How on earth did I think about buying that!?" (In practice, with pop records, I almost always leave it til well after a year after release before deciding to buy something... call me cheapskate but that way it's easy to see what's survived the periods of hype. It also allows me to get it cheaper.)
I find "sharing" to mean that you are going out of your way to give something to someone else. E.g. sharing your time by helping move someone to a new home. Sharing your money by donating to charities, sharing your wisdom by giving guidance to troubled youth, etc, etc.
That's almost always called giving. You 'give to charity', 'give your time' etc. When you put yourself out to help someone else, that is giving. That said, one can use the word sharing here, its meaning is rather fuzzy when it comes to defining it precisely.
I find nothing altruistic about setting up a P2P application in the tray and walking away. That isn't charitable nor "sharing". It's just plain piracy.
Others may find something altruistic. It isn't charitable, because you're not 'giving to the needy'. But we've not been discussing something charitable. It is sharing, because you're letting others have access to something that you have access to, simple as that. (Right or wrong is a different matter, as is how absolute the question of copying and sharing needs to be.)
The only kind of 'plain piracy', so far as I'm concerned is the kind that happened on the high seas --- the word's only other meaning is the result of corporate propoganda, (as is 'software theft' --- lawyers always call it infringement, but lobbyists like the word theft since it sounds words.)
This kind of thing reminds me of Brave New World. (Three hundred repetitions, twice a week, from 6 years to 12 years.) If you repeat it to people enough, and get them repeating it, it becomes true (to them.) Before looking at things from a moral perspective (if that is what you wish), you must distance yourself from the effects of sustained lobbying. People have the idea that, e.g. 'sharing=good, piracy=bad', so there was a massive corporate lobbying campaign to encourage the idea that 'copying=piracy=bad.' That was done by those with the most to gain by getting rid of copying. Other examples of corporations manipulating the belief of the general public are the De Beers diamond campaigns (diamonds are rare and very valuable, are 'forever', are the ideal gem for an engagement present (which must be a diamond ring costing two months wages), should be kept as hierlooms (to get rid of the second hand market for diamonds), etc., etc.) A lot of the general public beliefs are shaped this way, though I'll not go on any longer here.
What's worse is all you stupid jackasses
Who are you calling stupid? At least I aim to think as freely and objectively as I can given the daily bombardment of different entrenched positions, each with their own motives.
really make it harder for legitimate uses of P2P technology to shine through.
I see your point here. The 'we're doing it 'cause it's cool to be a bit of a rebel' group of people are a real problem. But they exist in all areas of society, and aren't going to go away, so we need to be able to get by in spite of them.
Every time some jackass says "sending the latest [riaa] tune is sharing, information was meant to be free!" gives more fuel for the RIAA fodder. True. Fact is, lik
Silly point: a tyre blowout at 110km/h is far more dangerous than at 50km/h.
The driver of a car at 110km/h needs to be more alert than one at 50km/h for a comparable level of safety (stopping times, amount of manoeverability, etc.)
The point about health and distractions is valid. It is not ONLY speed that kills. This should be the retort to the 'speed kills' campaigners. But the fact is, if something goes wrong, than high speed can make the difference between a risky situation and a catastrophe.
Since the formatting that the word processor user uses makes no difference (in the cases we are discussing), one would surely want to be editing in a type that looks easiest to work with on screen, and with an interface that hides any notion of formatting, with the possible exception of chapter/section headings and a few forms of emphasis.
The point about cutting down on those 'pointless formatting decisions' is that the average user forced to use e.g. vi, won't think 'Wow... look at what I can play with...' as we all do when faced with a new piece of software.
The biggest problem is the amount of overcomplication and obscure workarounds in the inner workings of LaTeX in order to get things working as LaTeX wants them. This makes it hell to change what happens if the standard stuff and packages doesn't do what you want it to. (e.g. having labels and references store and retrieve extra metadata, doing layout of theorem+proof environments slightly differently, etc.)
Separation of the programming stuff from the document markup stuff from the document appearance stuff is an essential missing bit of LaTeX.
(And yes... I do (pure) maths, wrote my MSci and MPhil theses in LaTeX and am currently doing my PhD thesis in LaTeX. I've done various bits of hacking around to get it to do what I want, but have generally got tired of doing so.)
...Press $40...
"It looks like you're writing a letter... do you need help?"
...SMASH SCREEN...
"It looks like you're trying to rob an ATM. Options:"
1.) Optimal method for breaking in.
2.) Writing letters.
3.) Calling for help.
4.) Writing a letter.
5.) Printing multiple copies.
6.) Writing a letter.
--BOX TO TYPE SOMETHING IN--
The basic problem with RMS's positions on many things is that his views are based on idealism: the kind of 'right thing for society' that intellectuals like to debate. The problem is that idealism is not that great a motivator. Marxism may have been the starting point for the Soviet Union, but it took the arrogance of the Tzar and the mess being created by the Tzarina during WW1 for the people to get sufficiently motivated to ovethrow the previous rulers. (This is a gross oversimplification I know.)
So far as the software itself being free, that is a different, but still confusing way to explain the concept. What exactly freedom means for a human being is hard enough for interested parties to debate as it is. What does freedom mean for a computer program? Does a free piece of software have the right to refuse to be installed on a particular computer? (I know it often appears that GPL'd C sources have a right to refuse to compile, and the free will to exercise that right when they feel like it, but I suspect the cause of this is technical rather than political or philosophical...)
I'll not go on. Others can add thougts to this.
Hmmm... where to start....
People think, ok China moving to linux big deal. Or they say, ok big deal, but not anything amazing. China moving to linux is huge.
Maybe. Many (myself included) will reserve judgement.
Think about it, over 1 billion people will use linux isntead of Windows. Microsoft could have potentially sold a billion copies of windows for $100-$200 each. Now, much much less will be the case.
You're falling into the erroneous thinking that the BSA likes to use in its marketing campaigns.
(Blindly translating numbers into potential $$'s)
Firstly, many in China cannot afford enough clothesto go round the family. Many are only slightly better off. How on earth can these be included in the 1billion potential computer users?
(Only when a country gets the general populous up to the levels seen in the West will computers become so ubiquitous.)
Of the millions in China with computers (the components are built over there, or in Taiwan, in most cases...) many will not pay for the software.
'Piracy' is rampant (as US software corporations like to shout about.)
In the end, you're down to a potential few million copies of Windows being sold. It's probably not that much bigger than one of the European countries.
Now, with a billion linux users I'm sure at least a few of them will have technical problems.
Someone who offers linux support in Chinese
for a reasonable price could stand to profit considerably...
And speaks the language natively, is familiar with the culture, grew up in it, etc. Basically it's a pretty closed market so far as money is concerned. What China wants out of Linux is to be sending less money to the US on account of running Windows, whilst still enjoying its trade principles (which is why it can't simply say Windows copyrights are null and void in China.)
What Linux has to gain from China is more open source software being written. The comments will probably be engrish, ASCII being to prodominant in programming languages to change in a hurry. With the way the GPL and friends work, it only takes someone to upload code to the internet for the OSS community to get hold of it.
In short, China, along with many other countries, does not present a market in quite as straightforward a way as you suggest.
IANAP either, though I did a year of it at university before dropping it for maths...
Of the things you describe, the second is fusion, and I'm not sure what the first is. (Essentially, in the first you are describing a neutron being formed out of the energy and the hydrogen atom being ionised.)
Fission involving H and He nuclei would look something like
He + energy --> D + D
where D is heavy hydrogen. In such a reaction energy is absorbed in order for the helium nuclie to split. (This is to do with needing to overcome the binding energy.)
Commonly, fission refers to the nuclear reactions that occur with heavy elements (only ones heavier than iron can liberate energy by fission.) Essentially some large and unstable nuclei like uranium or plutonium absorbs a neutron that happens to be flying past, plus its kinetic energy, and the resulting mix cannot hold itself together, to it breaks into two (or more?) smaller neuclei. Energy is released in this process because the binding energy of the smaller nuclei is greater than that of the original heavy element (more binding energy == more missing mass ==> energy left over).
Binding energy, in a nutshell, is the energy of the missing mass in composite nuclei. Basically, an atom such as Carbon-12 has 6 protons and 6 neutrons in its nucleus, but the mass of the nucleus is slightly less than that of 6 protons and 6 neutrons. The missing energy (given by the famous e=mc^2) is given out when the nucleus is formed, and must be put back in order to break it apart again.
I don't understand DNS all that well, but I see the following workaround for VeriSign.
.com and .net names to the verisign server.
1.) Have the verisign nameserver return sitefinder for all missed domain names.
2.) Direct all failed DNS queries for
(i.e. return the verisign nameserver whenever there is no registered domain name holder.)
How will this either a.) not work in (normal pre-BIND-patch) practice, or b.) be stopped by the BIND patch?
Besides, if 80% of the internet stops people accessing Verisign's search page, maybe they'll think about doing something about it.
Basically the go-here-on-DNS-failure should be a browser feature (as it is with IE.) What Verisign is trying to do is to usurp M$IE's feature of trying an M$N search if the DNS search fails.
If you recall, a failed DNS query in M$IE will result in the search being sent to MSN. I guess this is Verisign trying to get to toe into the same market.
If someone had written a compression algorithm which took advantage of how scrambled text is readable, it'd compress better than the normal text since you no longer need to store the order of some of the characters.
The obvious problem with such an algorithm is that it would be unusable when the source text contained words that are 'scramble-equivalent' but which the context in insufficient to distinguish between.
This is not a good example given more context, but just consider: He feels like the wind. vs. He flees like the wind.
Whoops. Sorry. BrainNotWorkingException();
Indeed, the article should be talking about space elevators, not escalators.
Reference to it as an 'escalator' comes from the original term ('space escalator') coined for the idea. It seems to have stuck, irrespective of the fact that there won't be moving stairs anywhere on this thing.
Think about it. If it breaks at the centre of gravity, you're left with the bits being pulled down ONLY, and nothing to tension the cable from above. The outer part of the cable will indeed fly off into space, but the rest will still present a problem. Similar considerations will apply if the cable breaks somewhere else: the bit on the earth side will no longer be pulled away from the earth strongly enough.
A post in the middle of /. is not the best place for this. It needs form part of a collective response from the Open Source and Free Software communities, that will not stop being read after the /. story is approx. 48 hours old.
It would be nice if this were to be published on the same LinuxWorld website as a counterpoint, after being looked over and agreed to by a few more of the big names in the Open Source community. Alternatively stick it somewhere reasonably permanent on the web and stick a comment onto the LinuxWorld website pointing to it.
That's the foot in the door. Once large corporations are using that, it is possible for DRM to be trickled down so that it is an invisible component of the home versions.
In some cases, e.g. if you are downloading everything without buying anything yourself.
On the other hand, if it's more like, e.g. you have an album or two by a given artist and download a single that isn't there, or a B-side from the single of a song in your album, or something like that you should technically pay but there is a better case for 'turning a blind' eye to the copying in this case. Here it's more like saying 'I've already used this train ticket into the city centre, but it wasn't stamped by the inspector and will be accepted as valid if I use it again.'
What you should look at is the percentage of your ('buyable') music that you buy. For example, if its only 10% or less, then it's more like 'I don't buy train tickets and try to get away with it.' On the other hand, if its more like 80-90%, then there is less of a problem. Record execs aren't doing their job if they're not lobbying 110% for anything less than buying 100% of your music to be labelled criminal.
Besides, if you buy a single in a shop, your money isn't all going to the people who produced it. Most of the money goes into the large company's coffers, and the bits left over are usually what goes to the artist (except for the big artists, which act as lures for the other artists to aspire to.)
To conclude, arguing things based on whether a single should by bought or not may make sense, but the issues of what is right should be looked at from the point of view of society as a whole, and from that point of view, the behaviour of the music industry is inexcusable. The act (and are even encouraged to act) as if what makes profit for the corporation is all that matters. The good of the artist is secondary (and only tended to enough to ensure that the corporations get the sound and looks etc. out of them that they need.) What is convenient for the customer is only tended to as much as is needed to get sales up. The customers don't matter, people don't matter, artists don't matter, only money flowing through the corporation matters, and all else should be manipulated towards that goal.
If you're sat using the same computer with the same mouse and the ball's not getting dirty, etc.
then it may well work ok.
But, you cannot, e.g. sign something when using a friends laptop if there isn't a mouse attached. You can't sign if the mouse is dirty and jumps around a little.
I bet the 99% accuracy was when using identical equipment for each of the test 'signings'.