This caused some thought last week: what happens if a someone publishes something on the net for free and for the whole world to dowload, and then decides to finally put it behind the firewall again. A few years ago I downloaded a whole bunch of very interesting articles from the research journal of this large IT company - well very interesting if you are an IT historian, and I noticed they are for sale for $27.99 apiece now from the same website. I see I made an incredible amount of money in that short time, almost as much as my uncle who went on that boat trip where the booze was cheap.
Now if we take the copyright notices seriously, I cannot put these articles up on a website. I could have linked to them earlier, but those links are worthless for people that are not going to buy them. My thought here is that the content has been put into the public domain years earlier. I could search the net and look if the content behind the links was archived earlier. I can freely link to that. The large company should have issued takedown notices; and not exercised copyright is - well, not exercised.
Now if I was in the business of having an internet archive, I would have put them online. Actually I can start being an internet archive any day, and use anything that I have ever downloaded for free. I can put up anything that I did not receive takedown notices for - yet. The interesting part here is that it is not the thoughts here that are copyrighted - they could have been patented but that is a different ballgame. If I re-tell the content of these articles, I can put it in wikipedia without consequence. It is only the media, in this case a bunch of ones and zeroes following the structure of a file containing pdf, which is fortunately as open as something that is patented and copyrighted can be. If I watermark these files with my own IP, I have added content of my own. I will offer to cross-licence that to everyone sending me a takedown notice. If they send me a takedown notice, they must have knowledge of that content.
It is time to end this madness. We have paid already for all of this. If it is research done with public funding, it is ours. If it was produced by a company, we have paid for it by buying the products of that company. If we did not do that, the company would have gone under. Most of those companies' early research was done under US defense sponsorship anyway. When I started out in IT, thought was free and operating systems were given out on tape and microfiche. We would learn from each others work. Programmers from different companies exchanged ideas and programs. This was to the benefit of all. Now knowledge is closed and people in my trade have to be 'certified' by paid for teaching programs of which the content offends the intellect.
Ironically, government regulation forced IBM to close down operating system source and government regulation forced Microsoft to abandon their everything-will-be-Unix strategy. Picture and music companies are now stifling intellectual development - by putting out dumb pictures and bad music and protecting them so vigourously that there is a knock-on effect on intellectual history. This certainly is a lose-lose scenario. The dumbing down works both ways, and the governments have, as always, no clue. Here is a novel idea: let's spend a fortune of our defense budget on fundamental research like in the fifties and sixties, planning for the next war - and then just not have that war, stay home, and call it win-win.
This, by the way, is the difference between the true left and right. The true left should be OK with spending a fortune on defense budgets as long as it is not spent on war. The true right wants to go to war, accuses the government of socialism and then pockets the government industry crisis bail-out money.
Saturday, March 6, 2010
Tuesday, June 16, 2009
Kuyaviak goes funky
Too stingy to buy stuff recorded on LP records anew on digital media - rather spending countless more expensive hours on digitizing them, I have made an exception for stuff I only have on cassette tape. The straightforward reasoning here is that I do not have any working cassette tape player anymore - and what does one do when waking up with a song in ones head?
iTunes to the rescue. Damn. Dayem! The music was so much better then. I downloaded some Jeff Beck group albums. "Rough and Ready" is a masterpiece, never mind the proto-hardrock vocals (they would have been Rod Stewards if Jeff did not have that car crash that broke up his first Group). The solo in Train Train was clearly the reason I started playing.
But this morning, for no apparent reason I woke up with a song that I did not hear for - well - 30 years? - which is Chinatown by Michal Urbaniak, the Polish Jazz Fusion Violinist. It is from Fusion III of 1975, but that took some Googling while on a phone conference. What a great album, why don't they make such music anymore, weird and way out, but melodic and full of drive and energy. Zbigniev Namyslovksy's Kuyaviak Goes Funky is also on there, as are some hardcore wordless vocals from Urszula Duziak.
It seems that my music processing has caught up till at least the early seventies. Odd that hardcore fusion stuff pops up in your head after an evening of hardcore coding. Well, my head, maybe not yours. Fusion III is playing now and pages in most of the seventies and early eighties. Next will probably be Herbie Hancock, Jean-Luc Ponty and Mahavishnu.
iTunes to the rescue. Damn. Dayem! The music was so much better then. I downloaded some Jeff Beck group albums. "Rough and Ready" is a masterpiece, never mind the proto-hardrock vocals (they would have been Rod Stewards if Jeff did not have that car crash that broke up his first Group). The solo in Train Train was clearly the reason I started playing.
But this morning, for no apparent reason I woke up with a song that I did not hear for - well - 30 years? - which is Chinatown by Michal Urbaniak, the Polish Jazz Fusion Violinist. It is from Fusion III of 1975, but that took some Googling while on a phone conference. What a great album, why don't they make such music anymore, weird and way out, but melodic and full of drive and energy. Zbigniev Namyslovksy's Kuyaviak Goes Funky is also on there, as are some hardcore wordless vocals from Urszula Duziak.
It seems that my music processing has caught up till at least the early seventies. Odd that hardcore fusion stuff pops up in your head after an evening of hardcore coding. Well, my head, maybe not yours. Fusion III is playing now and pages in most of the seventies and early eighties. Next will probably be Herbie Hancock, Jean-Luc Ponty and Mahavishnu.
Tuesday, June 2, 2009
rm -rf
This is why you should make backups. I was at the International Rexx Language Symposium. I was messing with the symbolic links in /usr/bin. Somehow my rm -rf rx*.dylib gained an extra space, just before the splat. I was root. And I was tired.
The amazing thing is that the machine kept on running, but died slowly over the next few days. This is no big surprise, because there is some essential Unix stuff like pam in there. So I could not switch screens anymore, nor mount usb stick discs or start applications that did not run yet. Keynote failed after a few hours, but Adobe reader kept on trucking, to the level I could hold my second presentation using it and a previously saved-as-pdf Keynote.
I make time machine backups - so when at home after the flight from the UK I mounted the backup disc on another machine, and used zip-y (after I found there was a number of symbolic links in that directory) and unzip to restore. I had to repair the permissions on the volume, then repair the disc structure. After that the machine ran like before.
This is why you should make backups.
The amazing thing is that the machine kept on running, but died slowly over the next few days. This is no big surprise, because there is some essential Unix stuff like pam in there. So I could not switch screens anymore, nor mount usb stick discs or start applications that did not run yet. Keynote failed after a few hours, but Adobe reader kept on trucking, to the level I could hold my second presentation using it and a previously saved-as-pdf Keynote.
I make time machine backups - so when at home after the flight from the UK I mounted the backup disc on another machine, and used zip-y (after I found there was a number of symbolic links in that directory) and unzip to restore. I had to repair the permissions on the volume, then repair the disc structure. After that the machine ran like before.
This is why you should make backups.
Friday, April 3, 2009
Compressing expectations
The key to keep from being dissatisfied is lowering expectations. In this vein, I was happy to hear that modern youths prefer the sound quality of MP3 over uncompressed or real sound. They will be so very happy.
From the very start of MP3, at least after finding out what it did, I was worried that the approach would mess with heads. Apparently it did, because I have all my media in an Apple TV, with a laptop external disc backup of the library for travel. I do know better of course, but in the laziness versus quest for optimum sound equation, this won out.
And maybe it is OK. One of my grandfathers was obsessed with sound quality, partly from a professional stance, due to his work correcting LP records at Philips and tuning concert grand piano's at Concertgebouw. He was never happy with the sound, at least not for long. An endless stream of prototype Philips gear passed through his house, and I was always duly impressed until the next generation of Hi-Fi came around.
And I remember being touched by the sound of the Eagles "One of these nights" from the tiniest transistor radio on my return to home after being held in Eastern Europe for a month. So go on, compress. Although I might succumb to vinyl and tube amplifiers any time, due to genetic predisposition.
From the very start of MP3, at least after finding out what it did, I was worried that the approach would mess with heads. Apparently it did, because I have all my media in an Apple TV, with a laptop external disc backup of the library for travel. I do know better of course, but in the laziness versus quest for optimum sound equation, this won out.
And maybe it is OK. One of my grandfathers was obsessed with sound quality, partly from a professional stance, due to his work correcting LP records at Philips and tuning concert grand piano's at Concertgebouw. He was never happy with the sound, at least not for long. An endless stream of prototype Philips gear passed through his house, and I was always duly impressed until the next generation of Hi-Fi came around.
And I remember being touched by the sound of the Eagles "One of these nights" from the tiniest transistor radio on my return to home after being held in Eastern Europe for a month. So go on, compress. Although I might succumb to vinyl and tube amplifiers any time, due to genetic predisposition.
Saturday, June 23, 2007
Metadata
So when is data metadata? It is all very relative. I even tend to see the word as something that does not really help a lot of people and actually fuzzes more up than it clears up.
Firstly, it is an absolutely relative concept. When you are dealing in data from customers, their products, customers and contracts are represented by data in applications. Your (and their) metadata is the model of that application, which, if we and they are lucky, represents and corresponds to something in the real world.
If you are part of a data modelling department that supports data modellers and application builders working for different customers, your data are their models. Your meta data is their meta model, and if you and them are lucky, your meta data corresponds to their models out their in the real world.
If you are thinking about the meta data of that modelling support department, the language you do that in is of the meta meta model. There are different meta meta models, although not a lot because it becomes quite abstract. This is the place where the shortcuts are taken, where we say the meta class of a class is class. Evidently wrong but very usable.
So what does it mean - a level above the level we are talking about? But wait, it becomes less clear when we consider self reference. Let's look at an example.
When we hear a song on the radio, we know what is the song and what is the songs metadata. With the latter we mean who performs it, who has written it, who produced it and which label it is on, for example. Also the genre and, for some genres, the beats per minute are song metadata.
Somewhere in the nineties it became customary to name the composer or the performer in the songs lyrics itself. We had some 'Darkchild' in a lot of hits, for example Tony Braxtons song. (I always misheard that as 'dogchild'). A Beautiful Liar starts with the word "Beyonce, Beyonce, Shakira, Shakira" - now is that song metadata or not? Obviously the DJ slacked and did not mention the song metadata enough, which should be his core business.
To be strict, and there is no reason not to, I would say that as a part of the song, the names of these lovely persons (I suppose, I do not really know them) are data. Only if you know that these are the names of singers, and actually the names of the performers of the current song, they also become part of the song metadata. (As opposed to the song in which the singer professes his eagerness to 'know' Kylie 'in the backseat of the car', where the descriptors are just part of the song lyric data).
So metadata is a concept classification based on context and viewpoint. Everything can be metadata. It is everywhere. We have difficulty to talk about the higher levels, and two levels up are already problematic for most of us. And as such not a very useful concept, except when defining the services of certain companies, like mine.
Firstly, it is an absolutely relative concept. When you are dealing in data from customers, their products, customers and contracts are represented by data in applications. Your (and their) metadata is the model of that application, which, if we and they are lucky, represents and corresponds to something in the real world.
If you are part of a data modelling department that supports data modellers and application builders working for different customers, your data are their models. Your meta data is their meta model, and if you and them are lucky, your meta data corresponds to their models out their in the real world.
If you are thinking about the meta data of that modelling support department, the language you do that in is of the meta meta model. There are different meta meta models, although not a lot because it becomes quite abstract. This is the place where the shortcuts are taken, where we say the meta class of a class is class. Evidently wrong but very usable.
So what does it mean - a level above the level we are talking about? But wait, it becomes less clear when we consider self reference. Let's look at an example.
When we hear a song on the radio, we know what is the song and what is the songs metadata. With the latter we mean who performs it, who has written it, who produced it and which label it is on, for example. Also the genre and, for some genres, the beats per minute are song metadata.
Somewhere in the nineties it became customary to name the composer or the performer in the songs lyrics itself. We had some 'Darkchild' in a lot of hits, for example Tony Braxtons song. (I always misheard that as 'dogchild'). A Beautiful Liar starts with the word "Beyonce, Beyonce, Shakira, Shakira" - now is that song metadata or not? Obviously the DJ slacked and did not mention the song metadata enough, which should be his core business.
To be strict, and there is no reason not to, I would say that as a part of the song, the names of these lovely persons (I suppose, I do not really know them) are data. Only if you know that these are the names of singers, and actually the names of the performers of the current song, they also become part of the song metadata. (As opposed to the song in which the singer professes his eagerness to 'know' Kylie 'in the backseat of the car', where the descriptors are just part of the song lyric data).
So metadata is a concept classification based on context and viewpoint. Everything can be metadata. It is everywhere. We have difficulty to talk about the higher levels, and two levels up are already problematic for most of us. And as such not a very useful concept, except when defining the services of certain companies, like mine.
Tuesday, February 6, 2007
Emulation and experiencing time
Now some experiments purport to show that time is not linear, it does not exist, or worse. It might be that not our world is emulated (think matrix) but that our own OS (HS, for Homo Sapiens) is running on older foundations foisted upon us by evolution.
Think of what people do: they build emulators. Actually the whole of computing is mostly building simulators or emulators. You might think your Core 2 Dual is fast, but actually it is mostly a simulator for some old electronic calculator instruction set. What it actually can do is shown by other processors, but the fact that they are not popular underscores my point in a way.
Now what can we learn if we reflect upon emulators, simulators and other layered implementations? Some things run bad because they are constrained by the underlying layer, like I/O and access to other serialized resources. Emulators greatly benefit from some hardware assist. Especially timing issues identify running in the emulation layer. Aha.
Now it would be interesting to devise how our conscience runs on a lower layer inherited from the primates and earlier, how we employ our own abstractions and how we are limited by the platform. We should also specify what can run on our platform and how to get rid of the constraints it puts upon future systems.
Think of what people do: they build emulators. Actually the whole of computing is mostly building simulators or emulators. You might think your Core 2 Dual is fast, but actually it is mostly a simulator for some old electronic calculator instruction set. What it actually can do is shown by other processors, but the fact that they are not popular underscores my point in a way.
Now what can we learn if we reflect upon emulators, simulators and other layered implementations? Some things run bad because they are constrained by the underlying layer, like I/O and access to other serialized resources. Emulators greatly benefit from some hardware assist. Especially timing issues identify running in the emulation layer. Aha.
Now it would be interesting to devise how our conscience runs on a lower layer inherited from the primates and earlier, how we employ our own abstractions and how we are limited by the platform. We should also specify what can run on our platform and how to get rid of the constraints it puts upon future systems.
Monday, December 4, 2006
Wrap Rage
Some packaging is so impenetrable that you can either open it by using tools and destroying the content or, alternatively, using your hands and hurting yourself. Some batteries and ethernet cables are so tightly sealed that you have to ask yourself if they really are meant to be used.
There used to be a flu medicine called AntiGrippine that was so hard to open that in case you really had the flu, you could not do it. Some mouthwash bottles have childproof caps that are so hard to twist off that they rightly can be considered adultproof.
I was so happy to discover that ER units in hospitals coined the word Wrap Rage for the process in which people hurt themselves because they cannot open packaging. We are not alone.
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