You know why I hate Microsoft? They can't follow standards. Or they declare themselves a de facto standards body, even over things they have no rights to dictate standards on. Like C++. I had forgotten that MSVS has a broken version of std::copy(). It doesn't work on simple char arrays. Works fine on VxWorks and Linux. Fucking Microsoft.
The advantages of a digital library over a traditional book repository are tremendous. No more need for multiple copies of popular books, no reason to have late fees, due dates, charges for lost or damaged books, or indeed the entire system built around library cards and records for tracking who has which books and when they are due. Anyone could download a copy of anything, anytime, and do so without interfering with anyone else's access. Stacks and shelves filled with tons of paper books would all be replaced with computers. This would take less space, and perhaps less maintenance. And it would allow all sorts of extra functionality, such as the ability to search, and have hyperlinks to related works. Card catalogs and cumbersome indexes of magazine and journal articles would not be needed. Also, can handle different sorts of data, such as books and movies, with the same system. Cities could save a bundle.
Currently, though technically doable, this magnificent vision is politically impossible. Copyright law stands squarely in the way. I cannot see any way to have a digital library that is freely accessible, and copyright law. It is the ability to copy any info quickly that makes a digital library so much more powerful, useful, and cheaper than a print library. We should abandon copyright law, and compensate and encourage artists with other means. The benefits of public digital libraries, and of the free exchange of ideas they could promote, are worth much more than copyright law. But because we do have this antiquated legal regime, the few digital libraries that exist are mostly behind paywalls or are private, and contain very small, highly specific collections, and we cannot see the full benefits. Copyright law must be retired.
The foe/friend limit is ridiculous, even with subscription. 400 friends/foes is simply not enough to foe all the people who post baseless assertions and get modded to +5, and simultaneously friend people who who get modded troll for posting an informative link that blows the moderators' beliefs out of the water. Pls fx, kthxbye.
No, not the racial kind. This has to do with code efficiency. I was recently writing patch acceptance guidelines, and was trying to explain that maintainability matters far more than efficiency. I was trying to be polite about people who harp on "efficiency", but my basic feelings boil down to: "People who talk about software efficiency, yet aren't familiar with software profiling, are idiots." Discuss.
Just a quick thought before I have to go into work today: so China is possibly looking at cutting back their rare earth metal exports, but that doesn't seem to stop them putting them in children's toys and/or jewelry. So, why not this: don't chastise China for bad behavior; just buy up all the heavy metal toys as they are imported and melt them down! Heck, it even says in the article that the jewelry "easily sheds" cadmium.
I mean, lead was one thing, we're not in need of that (apparently we use something else for our pipes now). But cadmium? Last I checked, that was good for electronics, and we *always* need more of those.
Some people instead advocate reforms such as limiting the length of these monopolies (to something like 5 years), not granting so many frivolous patents, not allowing the patenting of software, and reducing the penalties for violations. All those are good reforms to Intellectual Property (IP) law. But I think they don't go far enough, and the root of the problem can be summed up with one word: monopoly. Anti-trust efforts aim to eliminate monopolies, not mitigate them.
Even very short duration monopolies are enough to retard progress. That still provides grounds for expensive lawsuits and threats over alleged violations. By removing patents and copyrights altogether, we remove all basis for these complaints, and save us all a lot of legal expenses. We also save hugely on enforcement and the costs of a larger justice system. If anything should anger us, it is the misuse of our own police forces, paid for by us, in support of these businesses highly dubious ends. And most of all, we stop what has become the primary uses of IP, the blocking of competition and the robbery and extortion of the disadvantaged. People who want less government should support the abolishment of current IP law. As matters stand, many businesses have realized that building a portfolio of patents for defensive purposes is less costly than having an "IP gap". The quality of the patents does not matter, all that matters is that they have some of this peculiar form of currency, and so the quality has lately been poor. The least costly route is total disarmament, where no one need budget for patent portfolios.
Supporters of IP display a blind religious fervor that these laws are a net benefit, that they achieve the intent of advancing science and promoting art enough to justify the costs of these monopolies. I have never seen a reasoned argument, with honest statistics, in support of this position. Of the rational studies I have seen, most focus on one aspect, and conclude that the status quo is indeed bad. We need a study of the real costs and benefits of the current system, versus some alternatives.
What replacements do I propose? Nothing, or patronage. Nothing is of course the easiest, but the intent of the patent system was to buy off inventors-- give them something in exchange for revealing their secrets, and if there is no incentive of any sort for that, many will keep as many secrets as possible. A worse outcome is that people won't bother inventing or creating art. This fear is perhaps overblown. Nevertheless, we can strike a balance to encourage the creating of as much art as we can stomach. A patronage system can provide the incentive. A payment is a far less damaging thing to give inventors and artists than a monopoly. The next problems are valuation and collection. We can surely work out ways of figuring compensation amounts that are as fair as possible, given the huge difficulties in guessing how valuable an idea will turn out to be. Collection is the other big problem, with the first notion being a tax. But there are other ways. A levy can be agreed upon. And it need not be government that does the collecting, valuation, or disbursement, nor the people who pay directly, it could be quasi-governmental private entities managing the system. And paying into it would be advertisers and manufacturers of equipment that benefited from the knowledge, and charities.
"China's Internet is open," said Jiang. "China has tried creating a favorable environment for Internet," said Jiang while responding to a question on Google's possible retreat.
"China welcomes international Internet companies to conduct business within the country according to law," she said. "China's law prohibits cyber crimes including hacker attacks."
And also on that day, they seemed to write off the hacker attacks on Google as a global problem while quoting an unnamed 'senior Chinese information official' (later given only as 'Wang') as saying:
"China's Internet is open to the world.... China is a victim of and firmly opposes cyber attacks," he said, noting the number of overseas cyber attacks on Chinese mainland websites in 2008 had increased by 148 percent over the previous year.
This last article is quite interesting in that it shifts the attention back to pornography and illicit materials, blaming those squarely on other countries. It is assumed this is to reinforce their stated right to enforce censorship on Google. And even placing the onus on other countries to:
"take active and effective measures to strengthen management of the Internet and make sure their problems do not affect other countries' cyber order."
Of course, the China Daily article ends with verbage like 'providing a favorable environment for the healthy development of minors' and calls on the government to 'ensure that information flow on the Internet is smooth and timely, and secure and orderly.'
Now, on to today, the fifteenth of January. It seems the goal here is to deflate the impact that Google's exit would have. China Daily has a story of none other than Steve Ballmer's compliance saying:
"I don't understand how that helps anything. I don't understand how that helps us and I don't understand how that helps China," Ballmer said.
Earlier on Thursday, Ballmer told CNBC Microsoft had no plans to exit China: "We've been quite clear, we're going to operate in China, we're going to abide by the law."
Really, this article is a consolidation of American news reports on Microsoft's plans in China. A clear sign that Microsoft is willing to play ball, why can't Google?
Then later, the Ministry of Commerce attempts to take the wind out of Google's sails by saying that not only have they not heard anything from Google yet but:
"Foreign investors should have confidence in China's market as China has the world's biggest Internet population," said Yao. "Any decision by Google to withdraw from China will not affect Sino-U.S. trade relations."
China Daily also appears to call Google's bluff and curiously offers new quotes from the prior day's briefing with Jian Yu:
"Relevant measures taken by the Chinese government are consistent with international conventions."
China Daily paraphrases experts as saying that the 'government will by no means compromise.' Another news article shows no support from the twenty other victims of the attack (aside from Yahoo, who hasn't been mentioned until now) that Google reported and they wrap that up with concerns that an exit from China will hurt Google's stock.
The best part might be the sour grapes editorial from a reader that claims 'Google.cn simply cannot compete with its main domestic rival, Baidu.com' which is completely true in search. But overlooks the previous day's comments from users as saying they were concerned about their Google mail, their access to Google Maps, Google docs and the slough of other services Google provides aside from search.
All of this sounds like a pretty firm "We're shocked you would consider this and don't understand why you are making such a mistake. We will continue to censor to protect our citizens and will not budge an inch for you. Ball's in your court." Well? Will Google act, stall or fold?
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There are now at least five Mystery Science Theater 3000 episodes up on Hulu! They are "The Starfighters (Mike)," "Secret Agent Super Dragon (Joel)," "Monster A-Go-Go (Joel)," "The Rebel Set (Joel)," and "The Giant Gila Monster (Joel)." Could we be lucky enough to enjoy the rest of MST3K on Hulu in the future?
Recently there was a discussion about how Linux cell phones are basically DOA, and within that discussion was a thread on a stable driver interface in Linux. Rather than respond to every comment as to why this is a bad idea, I figured I would just post the original response to this request for a stable driver API which was put together the first time people noticed it was hard to ship binary drivers for Linux:
Let me just point out that this approach *works* and *has worked* quite well for quite sometime. These days, when I buy a new piece of hardware, I throw out the driver CD without even looking at it. I plug in the hardware to my Linux box fully expecting it to work; if it doesn't, I figure it's broken. Occasionally, it's not broken hardware but rather I have made a mistake and invested in a piece of hardware from a company that has not seen the light and open sourced their drivers. I make a point never to buy from that company again, and I get a refund for the hardware. I might point out that this is a very rare occurrence. Most of the time there is support for hardware out of the box under Linux - no driver CDs, no install and no reboot required - just plug and go.
Implementing a stable API for drivers would lead to bloat, insecurity and instability; we've seen it happen in Windows, and even starting to happen with binary drivers under Linux! The technical argument is that Linus (and his kernel devs) reserve the right to rip out or reimplement anything they please in the kernel, with no regard whatsoever to backwards compatibility. This model has worked very well so far, as evidenced by the fact that you can plug in 99% of hardware into a Linux box and have it just work, no driver CD, download or install required.
Still, some people argue this is a political issue, not a technical one. I would agree, on one point: the hardware vendors are the ones making this a political issue. By refusing to release their source code, they limit how well their device can be supported. For what purpose do they need to keep their drivers closed? They sell hardware, not software, therefore they don't even have an economical reason. The arguments for releasing source are legion: support in ALL distros on ALL architectures by default; more stable and better tuned drivers; no need to ship driver CDs; no worry about having to support your drivers as they are now in the kernel, etc. I can think of no reason other than petty greed to keep drivers closed. And it's greed that doesn't even function properly at that, as it doesn't gain the greedy companies anything.
Is there any *technical* reason to keep drivers closed source? Please elucidate, and remember that even if there is, it must somehow outweigh all the benefits of having the same driver as an open source driver in the kernel in order to argue that there should be a stable driver API. This isn't an ideological, or even political issue; open source drivers have been shown *in practice* to work better, and provide all of the benefits I've listed. Why should we throw out one model that works for one that has been shown to not work nearly as well?
Like a lot of countries, Australia doesn't quite know what to make of Scientologists. Okay, some Aussies just can't stand 'em. Australia's Daily Telegraph sends about an effort called Youth for Human Rights, a thinly veiled Scientologist front launched to teach kids about human rights. So, if L. Ron Hubbard (scifi author and founder of the Church of Scientology) made your list of Human Rights leaders, where would you put him? This "informative" resource puts him ahead of Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr. I little bit of legwork casts more evidence of Youth for Human Rights real motives. With a whois turning up registration at 1332 L Ron Hubbard Way. Are you familiar with that address? Xenu-Directory is. So what's the problem? Well, these videos and booklets are being distributed and aimed at Year 6 students and there's absolutely no indication in the material that this is linked to the Church of Scientology. In fact, a warning has gone out to not use any of these materials inside the classroom. Perhaps Australia's inquiry by Senator Xenu
So what am I missing here? Has MRT lost it? Is this a marketing tactic where they receive a DMCA take down, adhere to it and send e-mails to users asking them to delete their MP3s as their ToS says they can do? And from there just keep hosting songs that labels are too lazy to DMCA away? Something stinks but if you bought 100 songs for 25 dollars from BlueBeat and then kept using them, who would be breaking the law? You or BlueBeat?
*Sigh*, I'm still waiting on my 1TB HDDs for the file server, which I will use to replace the 250GB drive, which I can then put in the web and email server. For now, that means I still post journal/blog entries here, as I don't see the point of upgrading the software on the web/email server until I have the drive available for it. Anyway, my pointless rambling is all a preface for this:
http://www.archive.org/details/Snu-op025-Caravan
I found it while looking for recordings of sheet music we play in our Big Band (guess which song I was looking for
So, I was going through the links on BBSpot today, and I found what I can only describe as one of the most lucid, well-written articles on Free culture I've seen in a long time: Thank you for giving me the opportunity to explain this to you. It's so fan-fucking-tastically good that I'm severely tempted to make my new signature on slashdot a link to that article with the title "Free Software doesn't have end users".
Every time I see some whiny bastard say "but Linux will never take over the desktop! you have to pay attention to MEEEE -*- cough -*- I mean, you have to pay attention to the end users!" I just want to bitchslap the little schmuck. What have these so-called "end users" done for Linux? Fuck them! The end users of Linux and Free Software have always been the same people who created it: the developers. If you "just want it to work", and you can't even be arsed to file a bug report, fuck you. It works for us; you should be grateful we decided to share the source with you.
Ranting aside, this really cuts to the heart of why I use Free Software: even if it wasn't technologically superior (which it is, precisely because it is Free Software), I would still use it because it is the only software I can modify and use however I want without having to say the equivalent of "please sir, may I have another?" to some big corp. whose only concern is next quarter's earnings.
Free Software doesn't have end users; that's kind of the point. You can either participate and contribute a little something back or you can pay some company to tell you what you are not allowed to do. We welcome your input, but if all you can do is say "your software sucks! do what I say or I'll use someone else's software!" then all I can say is farewell and peace be to you.
He has not acquired a fortune; the fortune has acquired him. -- Bion
