When one of those thoughts doesn't fit the mindpixel world yet seems to be true, it is an original thought that extends the total corpus of human thought. And because it's your thinker,
that thought is your property.
Given the recent behavior of the US Patent Office, the DeCSS case, MPAA/RIAA & Napster... the general trends in IP law these last few years... this sounds positiviely scary to me!
Good point. MP3 removes the "lock" from music CDs, and consumers have shown that many cannot be "trusted" with this freedom.
However, the djini is out of the bottle already. There simply is no way to go back to the good ol' days when it was hard to copy/share music with digital perfection.
The original poster mentions DIVX, in this regard. The only way for the record companies to prevent Napster-type "theft" would be to stop releasing music in CD format. Sure, they can force manufacturers to make CD players with the latest boneheaded copy-protection scheme, but there are millions of "unsafe" players in the world, which aren't going to disappear anytime soon.
Owners of those players are going to demand new releases in CD format for years to come. The quality of CD music is already so good that the record companies don't really even have the option of enticing us to "upgrade" to a "protected" format because the quality is so much better.
CDs (and legacy players) will be with us for a long time. Ergo, MP3s will be with us for a long time. The record companies will simply have to learn to live with these cold hard facts.
Hell, why not just charge 10 cents per Napster download... and send the money directly to the artists (or to the record company, if the artist's contract requires it).
The whole idea of democracy is predicated on the notion that "the people" are capable of governing themselves. In order to ensure that "the people" can do this well, the freedom of speech was guaranteed (in the US Constitution), as a means of fostering an "intellectual commons".
Just to add a little extra incentive (to encourage "the people") to contribute to this commons, they also added a limited notion of copyright, so that people could reap a fair profit from innovative ideas -- for a limited time -- before those ideas pass into the public domain (to the benefit of all).
The key to all this, of course, is that time limit (14 years, originally, wasn't it?). Without that time limit, you essentially allow individuals to stake a claim on an idea. It's as if we've all become gold-rush prospectors, grabbing up choice real-estate in idea-space...
Think about it. You can't come anywhere close to mimicking a Disney cartoon character without risking a nasty lawyer-letter. The castle in the theme-park may be just a mock-up, but the one in idea-space is a very real barrier to the would-be trespasser on Disney's "intellectual" property.
Simply put: this has got to stop!
Allowing extra-long copyrights and patents smothers the free exchange of ideas, which turns that all-important "intellectual commons" into a no-trespassing zone.
> All of those people, me, you, your friend, and everyone else in the good ol' US of A who have done drugs Have done so illegally!!!
Damn right!
The two front-runners for US President (Gore and Bush) are BOTH former drug users, by their own admission. Despite the fact that they both seem to have done just fine without the "benefit" of correctional incarceration, they both still insist that more laws a stiffer penalties are the only way to address the problems associated with drug abuse.
The simple fact is that use != abuse. Abuse certainly happens, but it should be addressed through education (both preventive and theraputic) and treatment -- NOT incarceration.
-- TaiwanJohn
PS: I listed some worthy links on the subject in another post on this topic.
The problem is that we mistakenly view government as a "parent" of sorts, when we ought to think of it more as a "child" -- of which we, the people are the parents.
Obviously, our "child" is getting out of hand, and it's time to take him out behind the woodshed for a good thrashing.;-)
Really, in a democracy, the government is neither parent nor child... it is a tool. Like most tools, it can be damn useful if used properly -- and damn dangerous if used poorly...
When all you've got is a hammer, everything looks like a nail!
How true. And we've been using government for all sorts of goofy applications that the Founding Fathers never intended, like sending people to jail for activities that harm no one (except maybe the "user"). We see something we don't like, and we say, "There oughta be a law!"...and all too often, we get what we ask for.
I won't belabor the anti-DrugWar message... it's covered too well in other posts/sites/etc.. (Links below) But, it's time we woke up and took control of our lives and livelihoods back from this errant, power-addicted, Frankenstein-monster we call a "government".
-- TaiwanJohn
Links: Ain't Nobody's Business If You Do is the comprehensive guide to crappy, moralistic laws that crush freedom. Here is a tarballed/zipped version of the same book (for convenient downloading) The author of said bookrecently died awaiting sentencing for "medical marijuana" -- which is supposed to be LEGAL in California, after Prop-215 Finally, Common Sense Drug Policy has lots of great info... I'd suggest starting with the Ads section.
I feel like I could have written this myself. I had *exactly* the same experience/reaction with Applix, StarOffice, Nedit, AbiWord, AND WordPerfect.
I'm sure there are plenty of other people in the same situation.
Free (or OS) software meets enough of my computing needs that I only keep a Windoze box around for video editing. (And Linux is getting close enough that I should be able to abandon even that in the next year or so.)
But I do keep a VMware/Win setup at the office for those stubborn DOC and XLS files...
The good news is, OSS is already unstoppable. It's only a matter of time now.
Speaking as a "tech user with limited time on his/her hands" (as you put it so well), I must chime in here and say YES.
I love open-source software. I've been using Linux since '95 (almost exclusively since '97), but I've got a lot of irons in the fire and an active social life. I'm no "guru" but I've set up entire sites from scratch before (including hardware), so I'm no newbie, either. But I really wish I didn't have to *work* so hard at getting things running in Linux.
Once I do get things working, I almost always find that it was worth the effort to "learn" my way through the process. But sometimes I'd rather be out playing pool and drinking beer with friends. I enjoy tinkering and fiddling with things, but sometimes I just want the thing to WORK, without having to worry about which "bleeding-edge" library I've got to download and compile...
There's a place for FreeBeer software in the future of the open-source "space".
Bottom line: if the software gets the job done, it's a contender for my patronage. If I can get an OSS solution to work without too much grief, I'll always perfer that option. But if there were a program like good ol' Eudora 1.5x in Linux -- that I could install in 90 seconds with ZERO sweat, I'd be all over it, if it proved as reliable as that old standby from my Windoze days. (I was particularly fond of the "Auto-save Attachments feature that put incoming attachments in a separate directory, rather than keeping them in one huge mailbox file.) The only reason I don't still use it is because it doesn't run in Linux.
The only way a FreeBeer program could "change the direction" of the OSS movement would be if it turned out to be the "Next Killer-App"[tm]... something on the level of a paradigm-shift, that takes to a whole new level above the hardware->BIOS->OS->App hierarchy. In that case, the whole OS layer would go the way of the BIOS.
Remember the early 80s, when you had to check the BIOS manufacturer before buying a motherboard or system, because some were more compatible with BigBlue than others?
I'm getting off topic now. Better go drink some beer!;-)
The original point was that PS is weak as a "document" format because it was never intended as a such, but rather as a "page description language" used for talking to printers.
The classic example is hyphenation. Many PS tools insert hard hyphens and line-breaks, making it impossible to *reliably* reconstruct the original "flow" of text, for whatever purpose (searching, grepping, etc.).
Personally, I think XML with an embedded DTD and XSL/CSS formatting info would fill the needs of a "universal" document format.
What if this were a Monty Python member instead of a frequent Mel Brooks star? Would that be geek-newsworthy enough?
Although I work in a newspaper, I don't actually have time to read the thing much, and like some others have mentioned, I get most of my daily news from Slashdot/LWN/Freshmeat/Etc..
If you aren't interested in Madeline Kahn, skip the story, for chrissakes! Personally, I have no interest in computer games at all. None. But I don't mind downloading an extra couple-hundred bytes of game-related headlines along with all the other/. stuff I actually find interesting...
I was introduced to this book in college (1981) by an EE student/pal down the hall. He had the most amazing poster on his wall: an electronic "schematic" diagram that was "illuminated" in the style of those monastic scriptures from the middle-ages...
Once he explained it, I knew I had to read that book. Glad I did, too!
I suppose it wasn't a "great" book, but it was certainly "very good" at least. I haven't read it again since then, but maybe I will now.
Anyway, I still recommend it, whenever it comes up in conversation (which ain't too often)...
PS: Anyone know where I can get one of those posters?;-)
Re:A few trivial comments
on
Interface Zen
·
· Score: 1
Ditto for arrow keys. I use 'em without any pause at all. Finding my way back to the home-row is easy because of those little bumps on the F and J keys.
What really annoys the bejeezuz outa me is that Mac keyboards put those little bumps on D and K instead. What moron thought that one up? I simply can't type on a Mac, for this reason... I'm constantly getting my hands in the wrong position.
As for CAPSLOCK, what's the big deal? So you occasionally lock caps when you meant tohit the TAB key... better that than accidentally hitting ESC or another key that actually DOES something.
Just get rid of those damn WinKeys, make CTRL and ALT bigger with the reclaimed space, and I'll be fine...
While we're at it, give me a magic bullet that'll make ALL apps recognize both BKSP and DEL without setting Xresources for everything...
Oh yeah, any emacs gurus out there... when a long line wraps to multiple "rows" on the screen, how do you go down one "row" at a time (instead of hitting M-f about 15 times)???
Although the proper word for "monitor" in Chinese is xian3 shi4 qi4, in fact most people just say mo2 ni3 te4 -- a phonetic rendering of "monitor".
The original poster's grammar and vocabulary looked okay to me, though the spelling was atrocious. (For this reason, I suspect the poster was a native speaker of Chinese from someplace other than the PRC, where pinyin spelling is taught in schools.)
What I usually hear around the office here in Taiwan is more like this: Hey! Wo3 de ying3 mu4 zen3 ma dou1 bian4 lan2 se4 le la? ("Hey, how come my screen changed all blue?!)
a) A recurring theme in this topic is the economic factors which favor large families (lots of kids to help on the farm) in underdeveloped or agrarian countries and which mitigate against them in industrialized countries (because the family's subsistance -- and the economy as a whole -- is based on jobs in which children cannot contribute, due to educational requirements, etc.);
b) A recurring theme in/. overall is the commoditization and increased availability of the PC worldwide;
c) Another common theme in/. is the increase in economic opportunities afforded by the advent of the Open Source movement; and
d) Another frequent/. theme is the "grassroots" empowerment of poorer countries and peoples through the increased availability of information on the Internet and ever-cheaper hardware...
All this leads to a question: Will there come a day when PCs become cheap enough and 'net access becomes widespread enough (and cheap enough) that the economies that lead to smaller families (in point "a" above) will become available to rural villages in India, Africa, S. America, and other high-population-growth regions?
Slashdot Mirror
Is anyone else bothered by this quote?
Given the recent behavior of the US Patent Office, the DeCSS case, MPAA/RIAA & Napster... the general trends in IP law these last few years... this sounds positiviely scary to me!
--jrd
-J
Good point. MP3 removes the "lock" from music CDs, and consumers have shown that many cannot be "trusted" with this freedom.
However, the djini is out of the bottle already. There simply is no way to go back to the good ol' days when it was hard to copy/share music with digital perfection.
The original poster mentions DIVX, in this regard. The only way for the record companies to prevent Napster-type "theft" would be to stop releasing music in CD format. Sure, they can force manufacturers to make CD players with the latest boneheaded copy-protection scheme, but there are millions of "unsafe" players in the world, which aren't going to disappear anytime soon.
Owners of those players are going to demand new releases in CD format for years to come. The quality of CD music is already so good that the record companies don't really even have the option of enticing us to "upgrade" to a "protected" format because the quality is so much better.
CDs (and legacy players) will be with us for a long time. Ergo, MP3s will be with us for a long time. The record companies will simply have to learn to live with these cold hard facts.
Hell, why not just charge 10 cents per Napster download... and send the money directly to the artists (or to the record company, if the artist's contract requires it).
Go, micro-payments! (Check out PayPal.)
-- TaiwanJohn
The whole idea of democracy is predicated on the notion that "the people" are capable of governing themselves. In order to ensure that "the people" can do this well, the freedom of speech was guaranteed (in the US Constitution), as a means of fostering an "intellectual commons".
Just to add a little extra incentive (to encourage "the people") to contribute to this commons, they also added a limited notion of copyright, so that people could reap a fair profit from innovative ideas -- for a limited time -- before those ideas pass into the public domain (to the benefit of all).
The key to all this, of course, is that time limit (14 years, originally, wasn't it?). Without that time limit, you essentially allow individuals to stake a claim on an idea. It's as if we've all become gold-rush prospectors, grabbing up choice real-estate in idea-space...
Think about it. You can't come anywhere close to mimicking a Disney cartoon character without risking a nasty lawyer-letter. The castle in the theme-park may be just a mock-up, but the one in idea-space is a very real barrier to the would-be trespasser on Disney's "intellectual" property.
Simply put: this has got to stop!
Allowing extra-long copyrights and patents smothers the free exchange of ideas, which turns that all-important "intellectual commons" into a no-trespassing zone.
-- TaiwanJohn
Damn right!
The two front-runners for US President (Gore and Bush) are BOTH former drug users, by their own admission. Despite the fact that they both seem to have done just fine without the "benefit" of correctional incarceration, they both still insist that more laws a stiffer penalties are the only way to address the problems associated with drug abuse.
The simple fact is that use != abuse. Abuse certainly happens, but it should be addressed through education (both preventive and theraputic) and treatment -- NOT incarceration.
-- TaiwanJohn
PS: I listed some worthy links on the subject in another post on this topic.
Obviously, our "child" is getting out of hand, and it's time to take him out behind the woodshed for a good thrashing. ;-)
Really, in a democracy, the government is neither parent nor child... it is a tool. Like most tools, it can be damn useful if used properly -- and damn dangerous if used poorly...
When all you've got is a hammer, everything looks like a nail!
How true. And we've been using government for all sorts of goofy applications that the Founding Fathers never intended, like sending people to jail for activities that harm no one (except maybe the "user"). We see something we don't like, and we say, "There oughta be a law!" ...and all too often, we get what we ask for.
I won't belabor the anti-DrugWar message... it's covered too well in other posts/sites/etc.. (Links below) But, it's time we woke up and took control of our lives and livelihoods back from this errant, power-addicted, Frankenstein-monster we call a "government".
-- TaiwanJohn
Links:
Ain't Nobody's Business If You Do is the comprehensive guide to crappy, moralistic laws that crush freedom.
Here is a tarballed/zipped version of the same book (for convenient downloading)
The author of said bookrecently died awaiting sentencing for "medical marijuana" -- which is supposed to be LEGAL in California, after Prop-215
Finally, Common Sense Drug Policy has lots of great info... I'd suggest starting with the Ads section.
I've only seen it once or twice, and it was YEARS ago, when Linux was less stable. (Even then, you had to be doing something dangerous to see this...)
The Linux kernel would say "Aiieeeee!" and complain about not being able to access code-pages or something like that...
You could just tell that the coder figured, "If it ever gets this bad, the kernel is fscked... might as well be up-front about it..."
Just one more reason why I love Linux...
--jd
>> Q: What do computers have in common with air conditioners?
>> A: They both stop working when you open windows
The Real Microsoft Killer: Open File Formats
--jd
I feel like I could have written this myself. I had *exactly* the same experience/reaction with Applix, StarOffice, Nedit, AbiWord, AND WordPerfect.
I'm sure there are plenty of other people in the same situation.
Free (or OS) software meets enough of my computing needs that I only keep a Windoze box around for video editing. (And Linux is getting close enough that I should be able to abandon even that in the next year or so.)
But I do keep a VMware/Win setup at the office for those stubborn DOC and XLS files...
The good news is, OSS is already unstoppable. It's only a matter of time now.
--jd
I like the idea of comparing things in terms of *learning-curve* cost, instead of $$$ cost.
It's also an apt analogy, between Linux=SamAdams on the one side and Windoze=Bud on the other.
You get what you "pay" for...
--jd
Speaking as a "tech user with limited time on his/her hands" (as you put it so well), I must chime in here and say YES.
;-)
I love open-source software. I've been using Linux since '95 (almost exclusively since '97), but I've got a lot of irons in the fire and an active social life. I'm no "guru" but I've set up entire sites from scratch before (including hardware), so I'm no newbie, either. But I really wish I didn't have to *work* so hard at getting things running in Linux.
Once I do get things working, I almost always find that it was worth the effort to "learn" my way through the process. But sometimes I'd rather be out playing pool and drinking beer with friends. I enjoy tinkering and fiddling with things, but sometimes I just want the thing to WORK, without having to worry about which "bleeding-edge" library I've got to download and compile...
There's a place for FreeBeer software in the future of the open-source "space".
Bottom line: if the software gets the job done, it's a contender for my patronage. If I can get an OSS solution to work without too much grief, I'll always perfer that option. But if there were a program like good ol' Eudora 1.5x in Linux -- that I could install in 90 seconds with ZERO sweat, I'd be all over it, if it proved as reliable as that old standby from my Windoze days. (I was particularly fond of the "Auto-save Attachments feature that put incoming attachments in a separate directory, rather than keeping them in one huge mailbox file.) The only reason I don't still use it is because it doesn't run in Linux.
The only way a FreeBeer program could "change the direction" of the OSS movement would be if it turned out to be the "Next Killer-App"[tm]... something on the level of a paradigm-shift, that takes to a whole new level above the hardware->BIOS->OS->App hierarchy. In that case, the whole OS layer would go the way of the BIOS.
Remember the early 80s, when you had to check the BIOS manufacturer before buying a motherboard or system, because some were more compatible with BigBlue than others?
I'm getting off topic now. Better go drink some beer!
--jd
The original point was that PS is weak as a "document" format because it was never intended as a such, but rather as a "page description language" used for talking to printers.
The classic example is hyphenation. Many PS tools insert hard hyphens and line-breaks, making it impossible to *reliably* reconstruct the original "flow" of text, for whatever purpose (searching, grepping, etc.).
Personally, I think XML with an embedded DTD and XSL/CSS formatting info would fill the needs of a "universal" document format.
For most users, even HTML is overkill...
What if this were a Monty Python member instead of a frequent Mel Brooks star? Would that be geek-newsworthy enough?
/. stuff I actually find interesting...
Although I work in a newspaper, I don't actually have time to read the thing much, and like some others have mentioned, I get most of my daily news from Slashdot/LWN/Freshmeat/Etc..
If you aren't interested in Madeline Kahn, skip the story, for chrissakes! Personally, I have no interest in computer games at all. None. But I don't mind downloading an extra couple-hundred bytes of game-related headlines along with all the other
Whatever flips yer lid...
-- TJ
I was introduced to this book in college (1981) by an EE student/pal down the hall. He had the most amazing poster on his wall: an electronic "schematic" diagram that was "illuminated" in the style of those monastic scriptures from the middle-ages...
;-)
Once he explained it, I knew I had to read that book. Glad I did, too!
I suppose it wasn't a "great" book, but it was certainly "very good" at least. I haven't read it again since then, but maybe I will now.
Anyway, I still recommend it, whenever it comes up in conversation (which ain't too often)...
PS: Anyone know where I can get one of those posters?
Ditto for arrow keys. I use 'em without any pause at all. Finding my way back to the home-row is easy because of those little bumps on the F and J keys.
What really annoys the bejeezuz outa me is that Mac keyboards put those little bumps on D and K instead. What moron thought that one up? I simply can't type on a Mac, for this reason... I'm constantly getting my hands in the wrong position.
As for CAPSLOCK, what's the big deal? So you occasionally lock caps when you meant tohit the TAB key... better that than accidentally hitting ESC or another key that actually DOES something.
Just get rid of those damn WinKeys, make CTRL and ALT bigger with the reclaimed space, and I'll be fine...
While we're at it, give me a magic bullet that'll make ALL apps recognize both BKSP and DEL without setting Xresources for everything...
Oh yeah, any emacs gurus out there... when a long line wraps to multiple "rows" on the screen, how do you go down one "row" at a time (instead of hitting M-f about 15 times)???
-- TaiwanJohn
The original poster's grammar and vocabulary looked okay to me, though the spelling was atrocious. (For this reason, I suspect the poster was a native speaker of Chinese from someplace other than the PRC, where pinyin spelling is taught in schools.)
What I usually hear around the office here in Taiwan is more like this: Hey! Wo3 de ying3 mu4 zen3 ma dou1 bian4 lan2 se4 le la? ("Hey, how come my screen changed all blue?!)
Man4 zou3 la! -- JD
Given that:
/. overall is the commoditization and increased availability of the PC worldwide;
/. is the increase in economic opportunities afforded by the advent of the Open Source movement; and
/. theme is the "grassroots" empowerment of poorer countries and peoples through the increased availability of information on the Internet and ever-cheaper hardware...
a) A recurring theme in this topic is the economic factors which favor large families (lots of kids to help on the farm) in underdeveloped or agrarian countries and which mitigate against them in industrialized countries (because the family's
subsistance -- and the economy as a whole -- is based on jobs in which children cannot contribute, due to educational requirements, etc.);
b) A recurring theme in
c) Another common theme in
d) Another frequent
All this leads to a question: Will there come a day when PCs become cheap enough and 'net access becomes widespread enough (and cheap enough) that the economies that lead to smaller families (in point "a" above) will become available to rural villages in India, Africa, S. America, and other high-population-growth regions?