Smorgasbord for Friday, July 8, 2005
Innocent Media, the website for O-Joe Taylor (of Undercover fame) is here.
Here's an article that details how Microsoft is trying to lock the open source people out of accessing Word files. The key point from the Office 2003 XML Reference Schema Patent License is the following:
You are not licensed to distribute a Licensed Implementation under license terms and conditions that prohibit the terms and conditions of this license.
As Richard M. Stallman notes:
Free software is defined as software that respects four fundamental freedoms: (0) freedom to run the software as you wish, (1) freedom to study the source code and modify it to do what you wish, (2) freedom to make and redistribute copies, and (3) freedom to publish modified versions. Only programmers can directly exercise freedoms 1 and 3, but all users can exercise freedoms 0 and 2, and all users benefit from the modifications that programmers write and publish.
Distributing an application under Microsoft's patent license applies license terms that prohibit most possible modifications of the software. Lacking freedom 3, the freedom to publish modified versions, it would not be free software....
Some free software licenses, such as the most popular GNU General Public License, forbid publication of a modified version if it isn't free software in the same way. (We call that the "liberty or death" clause, since it ensures the program will remain free or die.) To apply Microsoft's license to a program under the GNU GPL would violate the program's license; it would be illegal. Many other free software licenses permit non-free modified versions. It wouldn't be illegal to modify such a program and publish the modified version under Microsoft's patent license. But that modified version, with its modified license, wouldn't be free software.
On a semi-related topic, I found this:
Besides being extraordinarily wealthy and influential, the co-founders of [Apple and Microsoft] have one other important life event in common.
Now before you think I'm talking of Bill Gates and Steve Jobs, you might have to revise that thought. The lesser known co-founder of Microsoft, Paul Allen, is whom I have in mind, and I'm surprised not to have seen others make the same comparison I am going make between Allen, and Apple co-founders Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak.
In some respects, Allen has more in common with the other Steve (Wozniak) as both left the companies they co-founded many years ago after seeing themselves enjoy considerable financial success.
But the fact is that Paul Allen and Steve Jobs have both faced and survived life-threatening cancers, Hodgkin's Lymphoma in the case of Allen and panreatic cancer (islet cell neuroendocrine tumor) in the form of Jobs. Wozniak also faced a life-threatening event in the form of an aircraft crash....
From the same source, idle speculation:
[W]e talked about podcasting, and Steve Jobs' apparent embrace of it with the imminent release of iTunes 4.9....
Naturally, talk turned to Microsoft's place in these rapid developments. We seemed to agree that where Apple goes, Microsoft is sure to follow. But, I suggested, Microsoft surely faces a dilemma.
Can it really be seen to be giving its imprimatur to the use of "pod" in podcasting thus giving its 90% of the desktop PC market, brand awareness of an Apple product. As much as podcasting might become a genericised term, much like Kleenex or Xerox, I cannot see Bill Gates giving Steve Jobs the pleasure of seeing Microsoft adopt an Apple brand.
So, bearing in mind Gates' assumption that the iPod is enjoying a meteoric rise, and ready for an ignominious fall - perhaps at the hands of Microsoft-powered WMA playing devices from Creative and its ilk - he will shortly introduce his own version of podcasting, and use a more Microsoft-centric term. He'll do it in the knowledge that it's still early days, and eventually MS will wear us all down through sheer marketing saturation.
And what will he call this new genre for which he will likely take credit for bringing to the masses, the hoi polloi with their Rios, and iRivers connecting to gray boring boxes and complicated for-the-sake-of-it-software? Since it will be based on Windows Media Player, logically it will be called WiMPcasting, a most suitable moniker for what is likely to be an anemic setup which will fall well short of iTunes 4.9....
I don't know what motiviated me to bookmark this link. Here's a taste:
An example provided by Hutchins (1995) of a distributed cognition analysis of a cognitive system is the navigation of a ship. Here, his focus is on the cultural-cognitive processes that take place when steering a ship into harbour. At a micro-level of analysis, Hutchins describes the detailed coordination of representational states across media that take place for the relatively simple, but critical coordinating activity of plotting a fix. This involves several members of the navigation team taking and plotting bearings of the ship as it comes into the harbour at regular intervals of every 3 minutes or so. It is a highly routinized activity, requiring the complex coordination of people and artefacts - all of which is crucial for ensuring the ship is on course. At a macro level of analysis, Hutchins also describes how these coordinated activities of plotting a fix provide a structured experience for the team members enabling more generally, individual learning of procedures and the cultural practices of the navy. As noted by Hutchins (1995, p374):
"...since most learning in this setting happens in the doing, the changes to internal media that permit them to be coordinated with external media happen in the same processes that bring the media into coordination with one another. The changes to the quartermasters’ skills and the knowledge produced by this process are the mental residua of the process".
Hutchins goes into great detail analysing how the various representational state are propagated across media for this collective navigation activity and in so doing show how ‘the properties of this computational system are as much determined by the nature of the representational media and the pattern of interconnection among representations as they are by the cognitive properties of the individual actors". (Hutchins, 1992, p.2).
This distinction is critical for the distributed cognition approach, emphasising again the importance of focusing on the distribution of cognition through analysing the interactions between the different ‘components’ (i.e. the changes in representational state) of the system over time and place.
To prove that musicians are dedicated:
So I've been in the planning stages of my Rockstar Youth Hostel tour in which I take classical music to the lobbies of hostels all across our fine nation.
One of my first trips was going to be a "Burnin' Through the Carolinas" tour.
That just changed.
But Burning Carolinas give you so much more.
Still trying to figure this out.
Danny Bonaduce's real first name is Dante. Here are some stories.
And, last but least, Ken Auletta references David Gergen:
In his 2000 book “Eyewitness to Power,” David Gergen, who has worked for three Republican Presidents and one Democratic President, and is now the director of the Center for Public Leadership at the Kennedy School, at Harvard, summed up his experience with truthtelling: “In my experience over the past thirty years, every White House—save one”—the Gerald Ford White House—“has on occasion willfully misled or lied to the press.”
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