If I buy a book, and want to give it to someone else when I am finished so that they can read it, I can because it is mine. How can this be applied to a file I downloaded, and how can you copyright protect it? I suppose that if I only let one person at a time borrow the file, then it would be ok, but this seems to be something that will turn into another Napster Nightmare to control and regulate.
Perhaps we need a new copyright law for electronic media. New ideas on how to sell the content and new pricing structures that reflect the risk that someone takes today to publically release their information. Any ideas that would be fair to both the consumer and the originator?
The problem with that is that companies are not going to scrap their investments in MS products and compatible applications. Whether MS is in Canada, the US, or their own death star, they have a "death grip" on the industry. Arbitrarily speaking, this is not completely a bad thing. Even being a big Mac advocate/ windows hater, I can recognize the benefitsd of having a homogeneous computing platform. It may not be ideal in all cases, but it works for most people. Safe to say, even if they leave, MS isn't going anywhere.
Who knows how these talks could have started. Maybe Microsoft initiated them with the thinking that many sports teams adopt when they are having trouble getting public funding for a new stadium. Threaten to move, show you have a few offers, and wait for the politicians to back down. We've seen it in Boston with the Patriots, and potentially the Red Sox. Its another strong arm tactic.
Think about it...M$ knows they are great for the US economy. They provide 20,000ish jobs, and those jobs provide so much per annum in income tax dollars. Add onto that all of the other monies they spend in R&D, other taxes paid, etc., and you have a pretty strong case to make for wanting them to stay. Its an interesting ploy...
It is generally a sign of deterioration when a company brings its fights public...especially among senior management. ID makes great games. Paul Steed may be a great programmer, but it takes more than that to succeed. ID might replace him with the most talented person in the world, but it will take more than that to succeed. John Carmack might be the ultimate "Game God", but even that isn't enough to ensure success. Basic business must prevail. Provide your customers with what they want and more at a price that's equal to or less than they expect to pay. If ID focuses on that, great. Otherwise...can someone play Queen's "Another One Bites The Dust"?
The documentary "Walking with Dinosaurs" has some interesting insights on this problem of weight support. In depth studies were done not only on the fossil records, but on living creatures to determine how they deal with similar problems. The interesting point about elephants is that in order to be able to support their own weight, they walk with three legs on the ground at all times and not with the two leg at a time step we are accustomed to seeing in other 4 legged creatures. This allows for maximum weight support. The scientists that were involved in the making of Walking with Dinosaurs used this theory to help model the motions in their animation.
One other thing to consider in this equation, and I beleive this to be a little known fact...Pound for pound, muscle and bone have higher tensile and compressive strength than steel. Also, legs are fairly impressive levers and capable of moving lots of weight. Its been many years since I did any mechanics calculations, but I think some interesting analysis could be done on proportunate strength when it comes to dionosaur legs.
I am not sure that what Metallica is doing can be equated to a testosterone-laden pissing contest. I think Lars stated, acurately if not eloquently, that the members of Metallica feel that wholesale distribution of their music by an unauthorized corporate entity is wrong, and that they choose to fight it. This is about distribution channels and how Metallica's music travels through them. Its about their right to prohibit a company like Napster from reaping the rewards of Metallica's hard work without any accountability to the people that generated the product in the first place. Equating this to people making mix tapes for their car has no relevance here. If Record Town decided to open up a bunch of Metallica CD's in their store and allow anyone who purchased blank tapes to tape them in the store without paying, that would be a similar situation and I'm sure the band would take action. They aren't interested in getting into anyone's livingroom and stopping their fans from enjoying the music. They are attacking the corporation facilitating mass copyright violation.
I understand and agree that there is more to do than develop MS office at $499 per copy. Custom development is great, but it doesn;t work for most companies. It is extrememly expensive compared to buying off the shelf solutions. I think my point is that the major economic theme in the industry today it pay per license software. If someone can suggest a business plan that allows companies to generate ALL of that revenue and go to an open source model, then speak forth. Otherwise, stop dreaming. Businesses are in business to make money, not cool stuff. People want to make cool stuff, but they want money for it. Do the math.
You are absolutely right...without copyright nobody could stop you from using or sharing software and ther would be no protection against having your hard work stolen. If we eliminated pay per copy, there would be there would be no motivation to not share source code, and no motivation for most people to actually do the work in the first place. Maybe we could start by giving copper cups intead of diplomas to computer science graduates. That way, programmers could sit on the street and rattle their cups for change while they pounded away open source programs on their laptops. Oh...they couldn't afford laptops. Open source software is a great thing and can accomplish a lot in the right context (ie. operating system dependance), but in the end we need pay per copy software. There is more at stake here than software. In the U.S., people work because they get paid, and companies that can't make a profit can't get paid. There has been no long standing evidence that a company can survive on an open source model without huge amounts of venture capital and a ringingly successful IPO. When someone can answer the question of "How does producing open source software fit into the model of capitalism?", then come and talk about eliminating pay per copy licensing.
The MacOS may have been behind the curve technologically for a while, but they are catching up quickly. Regardless of what has been in BeOS for 10 years, the MacOS has one feature that Be will never have...market share.
In a discussion I had with a friend of mine, he basically said the following with respect to Apple and thier open source efforts:
Reasons to open all of MacOS X: 1: Open Source R001z! 2: Intel support gives Apple a potentially less expensive platform, gives PC makers a Microsoft alternative, and keeps Motorola and IBM honest. 3: It's not that tough to recompile anymore and ship fat binaries - in fact, Apple has experience. The MacOS is pretty well abstracted from the hardware as is. 4: See #1.
Reasons to not open anything but Darwin: 1: The only thing Apple has to differentiate itself from all the other Unix vendors is the Mac UI. Give that away? What are you, nuts? 2: Official OS X support for Intel would dilute Apple's support and development resources - not every company has $18 billion in the bank. 3: Intel hardware is much more varied - see reason number 2. 4: The previous 2 reasons are a good deal of why Windows sucks so hard - they have so much hardware to support and no control over most drivers. 5: How does giving away OS X make money?
It is really the last question that is important. Who has the business plan that is going to make Apple a fortune by giving away this OS, when all it would really do is create tremendous competition against their hardware platform?
Look, Folks... I'm a geek. I'm proud of it. I play D&D, and Vampire, Chess, computer games, blah, blah, blah. I think that the observations about advertising targets are right on. They are sexist. They might even alienate women gamers. The true question here should be "So?" If any of you have ever been to GenCon, or to Origins, or a computer show with a big game tournament section, and I know you have, you KNOW that these events are dominated by young men, ages 15-30+. Its not that no women attend, but the population is heavily weighted toward the male side. The game companies know this and that's a big part of how they determine their target markets. I suppose being a geek that has worked in the Advertising industry for 7+ years might give me a unique perspective here, but I would think this would be easy to see. Those stats on what percentage of gamers are women are BOGUS. It is easy to do a study and come up with the results you want to come up with. It happens all the time. Someone wants to prove red wine is good for you, they will. Someone wants to prove it has harmful effects, they will. If you want to make a point about almost anything, you can come up with a lucid argument from some weird angle. I once had an assignment in a Dale Carnagie course to convince a room full of people that I knew that we should abolish men's and ladies public restrooms in favor of coed restrooms. I got most of them to vote in my favor. Truthfully, I would never want that, but I could argue it. To any women reading this...please realize that the companies aren't trying to alienate you. They are competeing for the limited resources of what their core market is. Young men with little to no money. It takes persuasiveness to make someone buy a game just from an ad, and the only thing more likely to persuade these young men than the games themselves is the prospect of you.
The Newton OS had some great handwriting recognition software. This could pave the way for Apple to get some of that technology licenced by 3COM, if they prefer not to pay licensing fees to Xerox...
Chaos Rules, and perfection is unattainable. These things we all know. Genetic engineering can maybe even out the playing field of life by helping people all have roughly the same starting chance. It can't change the fact that the world and all of its craziness is still here and will influence the genetically engineered babies as much as it influences "traditionally formulated" babies. Before anyone laments too long about the loss of society's laborers due to everyone's supreme genetic make-up, remember that things like work ethic, laziness, thoughtfulness, hatefulness, and all of the other qualities that make us what human are learned qualities. They can't be genetically engineered. They are born of what we are subjected to as we form our personalities. They are influenced by our parents, our grandparents, our teachers, etc., etc., etc.. The thing about this article that makes me shiver is the discussion of chip implants in the brain so that we can be programmed electronically as children (or later in life...). THAT could be ugly...and effect our freedom and humanity. Keep your implants...whatever kind they may be!!
Slashdot Mirror
Napster, Napster, great disaster,
;)
with MP3 downloads.
Profits to hell if CDs don't sell,
and tons of lawsuits all in a row!
(I wonder if the reference is clear
If I buy a book, and want to give it to someone else when I am finished so that they can read it, I can because it is mine. How can this be applied to a file I downloaded, and how can you copyright protect it? I suppose that if I only let one person at a time borrow the file, then it would be ok, but this seems to be something that will turn into another Napster Nightmare to control and regulate.
Perhaps we need a new copyright law for electronic media. New ideas on how to sell the content and new pricing structures that reflect the risk that someone takes today to publically release their information. Any ideas that would be fair to both the consumer and the originator?
I do not like crack backs or spam
I would not try it from my box,
I would not try it in my sox,
I wouldn't use your subnet,
I despise the cracks and spam and yet,
you ask would I do it if I thought I could,
you ask would I do it whether I thought I should,
The 'puter in the middle is just a little pawn,
They don't like it either, the damage that is spawned.
they are witless, a helpless little lamb,
and so I do not like crack backs and spam!
The problem with that is that companies are not going to scrap their investments in MS products and compatible applications. Whether MS is in Canada, the US, or their own death star, they have a "death grip" on the industry. Arbitrarily speaking, this is not completely a bad thing. Even being a big Mac advocate/ windows hater, I can recognize the benefitsd of having a homogeneous computing platform. It may not be ideal in all cases, but it works for most people. Safe to say, even if they leave, MS isn't going anywhere.
Who knows how these talks could have started. Maybe Microsoft initiated them with the thinking that many sports teams adopt when they are having trouble getting public funding for a new stadium. Threaten to move, show you have a few offers, and wait for the politicians to back down. We've seen it in Boston with the Patriots, and potentially the Red Sox. Its another strong arm tactic.
Think about it...M$ knows they are great for the US economy. They provide 20,000ish jobs, and those jobs provide so much per annum in income tax dollars. Add onto that all of the other monies they spend in R&D, other taxes paid, etc., and you have a pretty strong case to make for wanting them to stay. Its an interesting ploy...
Hey, it worked in "Monty Python's The Holy Grail". Besides...Windows was already a "Fart in your general direction". Silly American K-nig-ht!
It is generally a sign of deterioration when a company brings its fights public...especially among senior management. ID makes great games. Paul Steed may be a great programmer, but it takes more than that to succeed. ID might replace him with the most talented person in the world, but it will take more than that to succeed. John Carmack might be the ultimate "Game God", but even that isn't enough to ensure success. Basic business must prevail. Provide your customers with what they want and more at a price that's equal to or less than they expect to pay. If ID focuses on that, great. Otherwise...can someone play Queen's "Another One Bites The Dust"?
The documentary "Walking with Dinosaurs" has some interesting insights on this problem of weight support. In depth studies were done not only on the fossil records, but on living creatures to determine how they deal with similar problems. The interesting point about elephants is that in order to be able to support their own weight, they walk with three legs on the ground at all times and not with the two leg at a time step we are accustomed to seeing in other 4 legged creatures. This allows for maximum weight support. The scientists that were involved in the making of Walking with Dinosaurs used this theory to help model the motions in their animation.
One other thing to consider in this equation, and I beleive this to be a little known fact...Pound for pound, muscle and bone have higher tensile and compressive strength than steel. Also, legs are fairly impressive levers and capable of moving lots of weight. Its been many years since I did any mechanics calculations, but I think some interesting analysis could be done on proportunate strength when it comes to dionosaur legs.
I am not sure that what Metallica is doing can be equated to a testosterone-laden pissing contest. I think Lars stated, acurately if not eloquently, that the members of Metallica feel that wholesale distribution of their music by an unauthorized corporate entity is wrong, and that they choose to fight it. This is about distribution channels and how Metallica's music travels through them. Its about their right to prohibit a company like Napster from reaping the rewards of Metallica's hard work without any accountability to the people that generated the product in the first place. Equating this to people making mix tapes for their car has no relevance here. If Record Town decided to open up a bunch of Metallica CD's in their store and allow anyone who purchased blank tapes to tape them in the store without paying, that would be a similar situation and I'm sure the band would take action. They aren't interested in getting into anyone's livingroom and stopping their fans from enjoying the music. They are attacking the corporation facilitating mass copyright violation.
I understand and agree that there is more to do than develop MS office at $499 per copy. Custom development is great, but it doesn;t work for most companies. It is extrememly expensive compared to buying off the shelf solutions. I think my point is that the major economic theme in the industry today it pay per license software. If someone can suggest a business plan that allows companies to generate ALL of that revenue and go to an open source model, then speak forth. Otherwise, stop dreaming. Businesses are in business to make money, not cool stuff. People want to make cool stuff, but they want money for it. Do the math.
You are absolutely right...without copyright nobody could stop you from using or sharing software and ther would be no protection against having your hard work stolen. If we eliminated pay per copy, there would be there would be no motivation to not share source code, and no motivation for most people to actually do the work in the first place. Maybe we could start by giving copper cups intead of diplomas to computer science graduates. That way, programmers could sit on the street and rattle their cups for change while they pounded away open source programs on their laptops. Oh...they couldn't afford laptops. Open source software is a great thing and can accomplish a lot in the right context (ie. operating system dependance), but in the end we need pay per copy software. There is more at stake here than software. In the U.S., people work because they get paid, and companies that can't make a profit can't get paid. There has been no long standing evidence that a company can survive on an open source model without huge amounts of venture capital and a ringingly successful IPO. When someone can answer the question of "How does producing open source software fit into the model of capitalism?", then come and talk about eliminating pay per copy licensing.
It's all a matter of scale...but your analogy is roughly the same as mine.
The MacOS may have been behind the curve technologically for a while, but they are catching up quickly. Regardless of what has been in BeOS for 10 years, the MacOS has one feature that Be will never have...market share.
In a discussion I had with a friend of mine, he basically said the following with respect to Apple and thier open source efforts:
Reasons to open all of MacOS X:
1: Open Source R001z!
2: Intel support gives Apple a potentially less expensive platform, gives PC
makers a Microsoft alternative, and keeps Motorola and IBM honest.
3: It's not that tough to recompile anymore and ship fat binaries - in fact,
Apple has experience. The MacOS is pretty well abstracted from the hardware
as is.
4: See #1.
Reasons to not open anything but Darwin:
1: The only thing Apple has to differentiate itself from all the other Unix
vendors is the Mac UI. Give that away? What are you, nuts?
2: Official OS X support for Intel would dilute Apple's support and
development resources - not every company has $18 billion in the bank.
3: Intel hardware is much more varied - see reason number 2.
4: The previous 2 reasons are a good deal of why Windows sucks so hard -
they have so much hardware to support and no control over most drivers.
5: How does giving away OS X make money?
It is really the last question that is important. Who has the business plan that is going to make Apple a fortune by giving away this OS, when all it would really do is create tremendous competition against their hardware platform?
(credit to JHT for the thoughts...)
Look, Folks... I'm a geek. I'm proud of it. I play D&D, and Vampire, Chess, computer games, blah, blah, blah. I think that the observations about advertising targets are right on. They are sexist. They might even alienate women gamers. The true question here should be "So?" If any of you have ever been to GenCon, or to Origins, or a computer show with a big game tournament section, and I know you have, you KNOW that these events are dominated by young men, ages 15-30+. Its not that no women attend, but the population is heavily weighted toward the male side. The game companies know this and that's a big part of how they determine their target markets. I suppose being a geek that has worked in the Advertising industry for 7+ years might give me a unique perspective here, but I would think this would be easy to see. Those stats on what percentage of gamers are women are BOGUS. It is easy to do a study and come up with the results you want to come up with. It happens all the time. Someone wants to prove red wine is good for you, they will. Someone wants to prove it has harmful effects, they will. If you want to make a point about almost anything, you can come up with a lucid argument from some weird angle. I once had an assignment in a Dale Carnagie course to convince a room full of people that I knew that we should abolish men's and ladies public restrooms in favor of coed restrooms. I got most of them to vote in my favor. Truthfully, I would never want that, but I could argue it. To any women reading this...please realize that the companies aren't trying to alienate you. They are competeing for the limited resources of what their core market is. Young men with little to no money. It takes persuasiveness to make someone buy a game just from an ad, and the only thing more likely to persuade these young men than the games themselves is the prospect of you.
The Newton OS had some great handwriting recognition software. This could pave the way for Apple to get some of that technology licenced by 3COM, if they prefer not to pay licensing fees to Xerox...
Chaos Rules, and perfection is unattainable. These things we all know. Genetic engineering can maybe even out the playing field of life by helping people all have roughly the same starting chance. It can't change the fact that the world and all of its craziness is still here and will influence the genetically engineered babies as much as it influences "traditionally formulated" babies. Before anyone laments too long about the loss of society's laborers due to everyone's supreme genetic make-up, remember that things like work ethic, laziness, thoughtfulness, hatefulness, and all of the other qualities that make us what human are learned qualities. They can't be genetically engineered. They are born of what we are subjected to as we form our personalities. They are influenced by our parents, our grandparents, our teachers, etc., etc., etc.. The thing about this article that makes me shiver is the discussion of chip implants in the brain so that we can be programmed electronically as children (or later in life...). THAT could be ugly...and effect our freedom and humanity. Keep your implants...whatever kind they may be!!