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In fact, Raskin opposed many of the features that eventually distinguished the Macintosh. He opposed for instance: the graphical user interface, the mouse (he wanted to use navigation keys).

What a load of absolute revisionist bullcrap. The one-button mouse was Raskin's idea; he was opposed to the THREE button mouse that the original design included. In Raskin's own words:

I eventually wrote a memo that showed, point by point, that the one-button mouse could do everything that PARCs three-button mouse could do and with the same number or fewer user actions. It was faster and more efficient, and much easier to learn and remember how to use. I had observed that people (including myself) at PARC often made wrong-button errors in using the mouse, which was part of my impetus for doing better. -- Jef Raskin

Also you claim he opposed graphical interfaces?

My thesis in Computer Science, published in 1967, argued that computers should be all-graphic, that we should eliminate character generators and create characters graphically and in various fonts, that what you see on the screen should be what you get, and that the human interface was more important than mere considerations of algorithmic efficiency and compactness. This was heretical in 1967, half a decade before PARC started. -- Jef Raskin

I ask again, you claim he opposed graphical interfaces?

Mac OS was NOT an unremarkable OS, it was completely remarkable for its time. ... The computer only had 64K ROM and 128K ram, so some aspects of the OS would certainly be considered primitive by today's standards (but not from 80's standards,

Even by 80s standards it was unremarkable. UNIX managed to fit a multiuser multitasking preemptive kernel into less RAM using a less capable processor more than a decade before MacOS came to market. The operating system within MacOS was a relic of the stone age, even for the 80s.

I'll just close with this -- anyone who wants to know if what Apple does to produce a new product is more like R&D or more like integration should peruse www.folklore.org or, equivalently, read the book "Revolution in the Valley" by Andy Hertzfeld and then decide whether the Mac team was just throwing a bunch of preexisting ideas together or if they were really inventing something.

Of course I've read them, and I reject the idea that because Hertzfeld says Raskin was a liar on his personal blog, somehow that trumps the factual record of a thesis that Raskin published when Hertzfeld was still in daipers. I much prefer Raskin's own words which supports my claim that the original Mac was the culmination of 1000s of man years of R&D going back for decades.

As I said in my history of the Mac Project (the one currently being serialized in CHAC), the Mac was by no means the work of one person, but the combined efforts of thousands in hundreds of companies large and small. -- Jef Raskin

Now seeing as you've rudely told me to read the pulp fiction of history - folklore.org, sheesh - I'm going to throw you some real meat to digest. Go read Raskin's own words and for bonus points go read his thesis "A Hardware-Independent Computer Drawing System Using List-Structured Modeling: The Quick-Draw Graphics System". Once you've read all that I'll at least take you seriously.

I help a friend of mine with his band's music.

Does anybody in his band pay for composer liability insurance in case the songwriter goes and decides to pull a George Harrison?

he's not gonna wanna release his entire album under a CC license

CC by-nd-nc should provide enough freedom to get a work shared but not enough to get it commercially exploited without separate permission.

http://blaklion.best.vwh.net/images/UniMind.jpg

Also remember the mental transaction costs

What have I been telling you people for at least the last ten years? Why haven't you been paying attention?

To the apologists who claim that a contract is created between Lexmark and the purchaser, I ask: Where is the informed disclosure? Where is the manifestation of informed assent? Where are the signed copies of the "contract"?

The reason retail markets are so valuable is because a regular set of rules that is common to all states governs how transactions in the market take place. This regularity is what enables an accelerated transfer of goods and services, which lets money flow around the economy that much faster, benefiting everyone. If you want special terms or conditions you, by definition, are not trading in a retail market. For you to sell your goods in a retail venue is therefore, at best, misleading ("bait-and-switch," anyone?).

If you want special terms and conditions, get a signed contract. Oh, that's too much trouble? Well, tough shit. And if you try sneaking a contract in under the radar, well, that doesn't prove you have any kind of rights or moral authority, all it proves is you're sneaky.

This is a crap decision, following on twenty years of previous crap decisions (ProCD vs. Zeidenberg being but one of them).

Schwab

It must depend on the company. Or perhaps it is an East Coast/West Coast thing. I work for a large East Coast tech company, and I can't think of anyone with so much as a visible tattoo. On the otherhand, my job has entailed spending a lot of time in Silicon Valley - especially at Apple Computer. It's definitely not an issue there I assure you: Sam

Mind you, I managed to keep my Prince Albert secret, until that fateful day when I was using the bulk eraser on the backup tapes...

How about, "Apple bought some ideas from Xerox for millions in cash and stock?"

Bzzt. Still wrong.

The accurate statement would be that some things started at Xerox, some at Apple, and some occured simultaneously. One common thread is the late Jef Raskin. Raskin's Computer Science thesis (in 1967) took the position that computer interfaces should be graphical. Note that would be some 17 YEARS before the Mac appeared and some time before much of the work at Palo Alto.

As a professor at UCSD, Raskin was a visiting scholar at PARC where one would expect there was a bit of a mutual admiration society. Raskin and the folks at PARC were on the same wavelength. To be fair, one might wonder if the work at PARC may have owed something both to Raskin's thesis, and also to his occasional presence in the labs.

Following his move to Apple, Raskin apparently curtailed his visits to PARC. But it was Raskin who got Jobs interested in things UI and the work at PARC. For more on this, check out this article by Raskin.

Positing that "Proerty is Theft."

The sales jerk at Fry's was trying to get me to buy a higher priced Sharp branded monitor, but I stuck to my guns. He lied to me about the speed and the warranty.

Yes, because you know for a fact that the same people who defend downloading the latest Madonna MP3 are the same ones up in arms over this.

There is a difference between software and music. With software, it's trivial to avoid infringement: don't read anybody else's code. On the other hand, everybody is exposed to music every day, whether he or she likes it or not. In addition, the space of legally distinct melodies is so small that if you write a song, odds are that it will be similar to another song by pure coincidence. And if it happens to be similar to a song that you happen to have heard on the radio over a decade ago, you can be found liable of copyright infringement and ordered to pay damages in excess of six figures USD.

I hear what you are saying on application design, but I've NEVER met anyone confused by two mouse buttons.

You should see my 77 yeard old father in front of a computer, then. And you'd be even more surprised how many Windows users don't even know about the right-click.

"Unsophisticated' users represent 99.9% of all computer owners, so it makes sense to cater to them."

That was not the case when the decission to go with one button was made. You can't go back and change your reasoning/justification to suit the current climate! Unless you are the US Gov. re. Iraq!! ;-)

I remember when first the Lisa and then the first Mac came out. There was much talk about why they went with one button, and Apple's explanation was ease of use for novice computer users. Maybe most users at the time were relatively 'sophisticated', but those weren't the people Apple was trying to sell computers to. They wanted the other 99.9% of the population to want and buy a computer. To quote the man himself:
"Working on the Apple I at the time, they weren't interested in human factors. While I was the first PARC-savvy person at Apple, Larry Tesler was the first PARC employee to join the company. At first he was strongly opposed to the Mac's easier-to-use mouse methods, and I eventually wrote a memo that showed, point by point, that the one-button mouse could do everything that PARCs three-button mouse could do and with the same number or fewer user actions. It was faster and more efficient, and much easier to learn and remember how to use."

Where do you work?

Are you sure? Raskin claims to at least have created 'click and drag.'

Sorry to say this, but you've been beaten to it by DSN

According to Bruce Horn: "Smalltalk had a three-button mouse and pop-up menus, in contrast to the Mac's menu bar and one-button mouse."

You forgot working at Fry's. Whoops! That is actually the worst shopping experience in technology.

But-but-but... That's not how I learned it in "The Pirates of Silicon Valley"!

Man, I had put off seeing that movie until I discovered a VHS copy in the G/F's brother's old apartment. Watched it a couple weeks ago for the first time.

It dawned on me why so many nerfherders out here on the internets are so obstreperously clueless about the MS/Apple investment deal, not to mention how the development of the mainstream GUI actually transpired...

Horn is correct that click-and-drag methods were invented at Apple and not at PARC (or elsewhere, as far as I know). I created this method for moving objects and making selections after finding the Xerox click-move-click method prone to error. Bill Atkinson extended the paradigm to pull-down menus...

My thesis in Computer Science, published in 1967, argued that computers should be all-graphic, that we should eliminate character generators and create characters graphically and in various fonts, that what you see on the screen should be what you get, and that the human interface was more important than mere considerations of algorithmic efficiency and compactness. This was heretical in 1967, half a decade before PARC started. Many of the basic principles of the Mac were firmly entrenched in my psyche. By the way, the name of my thesis was the "Quick-Draw Graphics System", which became the name of (and part of the inspiration for) Atkinson's graphics package for the Mac.

-Jef Raskin

Raskin was the guy who initiated the Macintosh program at Apple and even talked to Jobs and Woz, in their garage, while they were working on the Apple I, about how they should be doing a graphical computer.

'Macintosh' as a name came about due to Jef Raskin. He liked the apples but didn't want to conflict with McIntosh stereo equipment.

Isn't Apple legally prohibited from becoming a content provider because of their agreement with the Beatles-type Apple music company? I know they "got in trouble" with iTunes for this, but I forget how it was all resolved...

I guess it hasn't been.

"intellectual property" is always robbery - never forget.

Intellectual? It's simpler, Property is Robbery.

Here's my take of the eclipse as seen by people with refractor eyes.

Taken with a Sony DSC-V1 at 4x optical zoom @ 5 megapixels, and then cropped; so you're seeing exact pixels. A nice big telescope would've been nice though, sorry for the wrong take.

Pictures range from 1/60 second exposure to 10 seconds at f4.0.

Up until it's entirely Slashdot'd eclipse mosiac

Be sure to check out the analog computer museum, among others

And don't forget about relay logic

Get a hold of Blender for 3D animation and rendering. You can use Terragen to create photorealistic landscapes. You can grab a kick-ass free model of the martian tripod, or if you've got $65 to spare, you could buy a pre-made model of a martian tripod. I don't recall what type of ship the Thunderchild was supposed to be, so I can't provide a link to that, but there are lots of free models you can find for that, too. That should just about do it... all you need for a CGI recreation of the scene, on a budget of $0.

If you don't like CGI, you could just make a paper model of the martian tripod and shoot it on video in your kitchen sink. The quality might suffer a bit, though.

There's a really cool collection of various WotW artwork here that should help inspire you.

Totally agree. But why limit it to IP? Why is it bad to horde IP, and not bad to horde money or physical property? Shouldn't freely given, freely received apply to everything else?

Property is theft.

At first glance I thought you said Fry's something [I'll leave the other word up to other imaginations]

If you're looking for a job, here's their online app.

No they didn't.

No they didn't.

First of all, to say that "Yugoslavia" caused the Bosnian war is as meaningless as saying that the United States caused the (U.S.) Civil War.

The Bosnian war started because some leaders of the Bosnian Muslims-- who as a people had historically been pro-Yugoslav-- wanted to secede from Yugoslavia and start their own Islamic state, and to impose Islamic law on all the people living there-- including the ethnic Serbs and Croats who made up a majority of the population. This was all detailed in their president Izetbegovic's "Islamic Declaration". Along with taking advantage of all the usual Muslim suspects-- including Osama's right-hand man al-Harbi-- who flocked there to fight the jihad, the Bosnian president also recreated a WWII-era SS Division to help in the fight.

A history lesson, since falcon5768 and probably others need it: hundreds of thousands of Serbian civilians were murdered in concentration camps during WWII, when they were on the Allied side while the Bosnians and Croats were allied with the Nazis. Memories are long in that part of the world, and Islamic law is not much fun either-- so is it any wonder that not just Serbs but moderate Muslims like took up arms to prevent the secession of Bosnia, or at least keep their own land out from under the thumb of Izetbegovic and his cronies?

I am confused why you say that the Bosnian war "DID kill US and UN troops". What US or UN troops were in the region? And as for the "mass slaughter" of Muslims at Srebrenica, the story is now starting to leak out that it's not so clear-cut as that-- most of the bodies have never shown up, and many of the dead turned out to be the troops of Muslim warlord Nasr Oric, who would use the UN-protected "safe areas" as a base from which to launch raids involving beheadings of prisoners... sound familiar?

The most laughable part of your post (and, by extension, the US's case against Bobby Fischer) is when you go on about how the sanctions were meant to prevent the world from contributing to the war. Of course, as the Guardian newspaper in England documented (much later after it was no longer inconvenient for the facts to come out), the US government was violating the embargo all along:

...the Pentagon had incurred debts to Islamist groups and their Middle Eastern sponsors. By 1993 these groups, many supported by Iran and Saudi Arabia, were anxious to help Bosnian Muslims fighting in the former Yugoslavia and called in their debts with the Americans. Bill Clinton and the Pentagon were keen to be seen as creditworthy and repaid in the form of an Iran-Contra style operation - in flagrant violation of the UN security council arms embargo against all combatants in the former Yugoslavia.

The result was a vast secret conduit of weapons smuggling though Croatia. This was arranged by the clandestine agencies of the US, Turkey and Iran...

The reason you, and so many other people, hold this inaccurate and deluded view of the Bosnian war, is attributable mostly to the really top-notch propaganda war waged in the U.S. and U.K. media, making the Bosnian Muslims out to be the wonderful, multicultural good guys and the Serbs the baddies. It doesn't matter that so much of the lies have now been exposed-- like

Then you might like these links:

Gun aiming computer
nother
US and Japanese versions
a list with links

Thus Horn is more correct than he knew when he wrote that the world has generally overestimated the influence of PARC on the Mac, as even some of the concepts that he attributes to PARC's influence predated PARC.

no

analog computers of old. IIRC they were used for ballistics calculations and similar by the military.

Here is an example.

Look into what kind of mathematical operations can be realized with multiplying DACs.

... with Tom Cruise as KillRaven.

Well, maybe not.

Garg

"There have been several film and television versions of the novel"

The television series got some interesting reviews here and here

Although I don't think I'd want to collect every single orginal paper novel.

It seems my report and analysis from August 2001 was closer to the mark than I dared believe. To wit:

...the evidence in this case is very sparse with respect to whether the offending program was actually created by improper means. Reverse engineering alone is not improper means. (See footnote 7 ante.) Here the creator is believed to be a Norwegian resident who probably had to breach a Xing license in order to access the information he needed.
-- Court ruling, page 12 [emphasis mine]

I essentially said the same thing in my analysis: That DVD CCA's entire case hinged on whether the end-user "license" was valid and binding.

My opinion remains unchanged: end-user "licenses" are unethical, and should not be allowed to stand. See my old-ish editorial on the subject for more detail.

Schwab

I thought he did?

Sounds like someone read my fictitious news story and mistook it for a good idea.

*sigh*,
Schwab

IMHO anyone interested in this case should read the George Harrison vs the Chiffon's copyright judgment over the song My Sweet Lord and He's so fine

You can find it here THE "MY SWEET LORD"/"HE'S SO FINE" PLAGIARISM SUIT

First off - I did not pay any attention to this when it was in the news. I am not a beatle fan nor a Chiffon fan. So probably I'm impartial.

To summarize the summary, the judge in the case held that Harrison may have "subconciously" copied the notes. Personally I think the judge had a grudge. I see so little similarity between these songs that noone will convince me there is plagerism here.

Music is a combination of structure, rhythm and lyrics and in this case, there are differences in all three areas.

So the case basically illustrates the nature of an artist being permanently tainted by something he inavertantly hears. The question that must be asked is if a programmer can be permanently tainted by what he sees.

If as is claimed, many of the programmers who worked on Linux also worked on unix then one might be able to argue that some of their ideas were a subconcious memory of the code they saw before and that hense, the new work is really derived.

This would mean that any programmer who takes a job jeopardises his freedom to write programs for as long as he lives. This would mean that any writer who reads might somehow jeopardise his freedom to write since his new works might somehow bear some obscure resemblance to something he might inadvertantly have read perhaps years before.

This issue here is that the programmer has a much harder problem to contend with because not only must he NOT write the same code as he might have seen before, that code must in fact work in a similar or identical fashion as the code that came before.

On the other hand, this hypothesis brings into question the issue of whether SCO's System V code is in fact plagerizm free. Clearly as ESR has demonstrated large portions of System V were derived from BSD and not only this, AT&T blatently removed the attributions from a lot of BSD code and ignored the BSD copyrights when they included it into System V. Effectivly AT&T tried to steal other people's Intellectual Property.

So what SCO has to understand is that it cuts both ways. If SCO has any claim on Linux then it will be perfectly clear that the developers of UNIX who did not work for AT&T have the same claim on SCO's claimed Intellectual Property.

This means that SCO should be vulnerable to law suits where they claim IP in derived works of others and these claims should be enforcable even though the code was released under the BSD license.

If you go to ESR's website and read the analysis of the example code that SCO released, then you can see very clearly that as ESR says, the code in System V was derived from a common ancestor. Since this is the case SCO cannot control it. Authors have the right to control the character of the derived works as well as what it is used for. This right prevents people from perverting the intended purpose of the original work. An example of a pervertion might be to turn Mickey Mouse into a porn star.

Clearly SCO is trying to pervert the intent of the BSD licening with this law suit. The free nature of the software the original Unix developers created is part of their intellectual property. That SCO is attempting to do now what AT&T tried to do years ago is blatently apparent.

Part of the reason AT&T lost is because they tried to steal other people's work and present it as their own (through the removal of the attributions). Not only this, AT&T then tried to prevent the original authors from being able to use their own work. How is this any different here? If any significant amount of the code SCO lays claim to is in fact derived from other people's work, then SCO lays themselves wide open. Perhaps this is why they won't release any "evidence".

Uh, no.

Judging from your bile, I doubt that you'd likely ever care to be educated concerning the actual development of the Macintosh, but just in case, you can read about Jef Raskin's role in the development of the Macintosh here.

And you can read Jef's comments on the incredible amount of published "history" of the Xerox trip and its relation to the Macintosh here.

Where you got the notion that Jobs' "ideas" (whether you believe stolen or not) have anything to do with the Macintosh is beyond me. He took over the project, but he was not an engineer.

The guy you knew in middle school who hated Macs for no apparent reason.

Middle school? Hell, when I was in middle school, the Mac wasn't even a twinkle in Jef Raskin's eye yet. Steve and Steve were still living high on the Apple ][ hog. The ill-fated Apple III and Lisa hadn't even embarrassed the company yet. The Mac finally shipped during my junior year of high school, and the only reason to hate it then was it cost so damn much.

Come to think of it, annoying Apple zealotry aside, price is still the only reason I haven't bought a Mac.

That's why Mike Jittlov, creator of one the Best Damn Movies Ever Made, wrote his own birthday jingle and expressly entered it into the public domain.

Schwab

Well yes, Esperanto has not been around for a thousand years, but it does however have more than a hundred years of history. It is indeed a stupid idea that languages are written down in stone and do not evolve. That's probably why Esperanto evolves. A former UN translator, Claude Piron, wrote a few notes on the evolution of Esperanto in his article: Evolution is Proof of Life.

Don't forget you're talking about a greedy middleman that ensures artists get pennies on the dollars for their music.

Well at least getting pennies on the dollar and access to musicologists is better than going independent and inevitably getting sued by a music publisher and losing for seven figures.

Here's my lengthy editorial on the subject of shrinkwrap "licenses", and why they're pharmaceutically-pure bullshit. I'm disappointed to see that, in the years since I wrote it, the situation has gotten worse, not better.

Schwab

The next obvious stop is the Federal Circuit, which is where Constitutional matters such as Free Speech get decided.

Trade "secrets", once released into the retail marketplace, essentially cease to be so, since reverse-engineering is a legitimate practice, and always has been. License "agreements", which are a legal fiction anyway, do not change this fact. The idea that such compromised "secrets" can still trump Free Speech is ludicrous on its face.

Don't think for one nanosecond that this is over.

Oh, and to head off the foolish remarks ahead of time:

• Copying is not theft, and never was.
  Copying a thing is not the same as taking a thing. They are morally, economically, and legally distinct acts. Conflation of the two will merely confuse you and lead you to the wrong conclusions.
• EULAs are bullshit.
  See this editorial for a primer as to why you should view any such "agreement" as highly suspect.
• Yes, there are legitimate reasons for getting at the raw data.
  Merely because you can't think of a reason why anyone should examine the unencrypted data on DVDs doesn't mean good reasons don't exist (wacky screen blankers and realtime integration with video games are but two examples). Therefore, cutting off all access to that data shows a remarkably foolish lack of foresight; you have no idea what you'll be depriving yourself of later.
• The Law is not the be-all end-all authority of moral behavior.
  Merely chanting, "It's illegal!" will win you no new followers. There are plenty of foolish, self-serving laws on the books, and many others are violated on a daily basis without threat to the Republic. You must describe why you believe such illegality is a social benefit, not just for you, but for your audience as well.
• "Property" cuts both ways.
  Copyright extremists like to bleat that creators' rights should be protected, and that creators should have absolute control over their creations. Apart from the fact that this point of view is completely unrealistic, it also fails to take into account that, by virtue of having sold (not licensed) their goods in the retail marketplace, their "properties" are now subject to the whims of a new owner -- namely, the person who purchased it, and who may have very different ideas about what should and shouldn't be done with it. S/he is every bit the legitimate owner as the creator. So who calls the shots, and how do you justify that?

Schwab

You begin from the endpoint. Software belongs to the copyright owners and is licensed to the users. This is the starting point.

That is incorrect.

The correct starting point is to look around yourself and notice reality.

Reality is that computers are designed to copy data, without prejudice. This is how it always has been; this is how it always will be. This is fundamentally incompatible with the notion of copyright. So one of them needs to be fundamentally reexamined.

Perhaps I am wrong for doing so, but I value very highly the near-infinite flexibility and power afforded by computers and their ability to transform numbers and information into new forms. I do not want to see these abilities limited in any way whatsoever.

So I choose to reexamine copyright. I choose to deconstruct and analyze what social benefits copyright tries to accomplish, and see if there are different ways to achieve the same (or better!) social benefits with a different structure. And I discover, to my delight, that the existing copyright regime probably can be junked and replaced with a new construct, and still keep most everyone happy.

The alternative viewpoint -- to reexamine computers -- in my opinion would cause far too much social damage and give even more power to unaccountable, already-entrenched interests.

My editorial, though it does not directly address the issue of unsanctioned copying in a world where copying is ubiquitous and cheap (although see this essay for some thoughts on that issue), is possibly the most detailed introduction I have yet written into the idea that, just maybe, the "social bargain" of copyright -- at least as applied to computer software -- might be just the slightest bit out of whack.

Schwab

Software has every right to phone home. It's what software does, i.e. it executes code that it was told to execute. If you believe (as I believe) that software has the right to be Free (as in Freedom), then you have to be in favor of software publishers reserving the right to verify that you are not using their software in violation of agreement [ ... ].

What a load of fetid rabbit droppings.

As a software developer, your "rights" extend exactly as far as the computer's owner decides they should. You are a guest in another person's castle. Your presence there is a privilege, and you will respect the sanctity of their castle and all that goes on there.

This is all part of a nearly-forgotten code of behavior known as, "Common Courtesy."

As for these "agreements" of which you speak, I commend you to the editorial I wrote on the subject.

Schwab

Cells cost me $7.50 a set at Frys, charger about $14 at another shop. Never look back.

I wrote this in a fit of pique some years back. I've never tried actually putting into practice, though.

If, using nothing more than a, "license," these companies can absolve themselves of social responsibility with the stroke of a pen -- or the tap of a key -- then surely you can drag them back to civilized behavior using the same methods.

Schwab