Sure, that could happen in the near future. Free products with the comittment their processing power will be available for distributed projects. Much like how iOpeners are given away (sold below cost) in exchange for guaranteed ad exposure.
The difference with the real implementation and your suggestion would be that the utilities side of it would HAVE to be paid for by the consumer. Otherwise it would be more effective to simply build a server farm. The consumers would obviously have to pay for the electricity, but no doubt microsoft would be quick to help cover the hardware costs so long as ths consumers subscribe to msn.
Hmm.. Let's couple this idea with advertising. Perhaps the future will see refrigerators that are free, but are constantly flashing messages on LCD panels saying "You're low on margarine, HEB has Fleischman's for 98 credits." Undoubtedly, someone will port MAME to the free fridges, someone else will figure out some way to install linux on them, and some AC will ponder the notion of building a beowulf cluster of them.
If microsoft really had a case against slashdot on this issue, they would have filed a lawsuit. They didn't, and that's why slashdot didn't get sued over this. Sure, your interpretation may be that this was intellectual property, but that's not how a judge would have perceived it. Fair use. Plain and simple.
If I remember correctly, I think Slashdot left those posts up and basically told Microsoft legal to 'bring it on'.
This is essentially what slashdot also did when the MPAA sent cease-and-desist letters out to all the websites with links to the DeCSS code. Had they and the other defendants (2600, etc) acquiesced and removed the links, then this case would have been tried and our freedom of speech would have been reduced another notch.
Perhaps it would have been better had Apple sent a cease-and-desist letter over to Microsoft back when Win 3.0 was released ordering them to cut-out marketing of graphical user interfaces because Apple had a copyright on it... Oh, I guess that's not such a good example. Sorry.
A cease-and-desist letter is a formality. A bullying tactic. In that sentiment you quoted, CmdrTaco is encouraging resistance to this bullying tactic. I can assure you that before the RIAA sued Diamond multimedia over the Rio being marketed, there was a flurry of cease-and-desist orders mailed. When you are the target of a complaint as laughable as this or the RIAA v. Diamond Multimedia lawsuit, you have a decision to make, are you going to bow down and submit to the lawyers' demands or are you going to say 'put up or shut up'? All Slashdot is advocating is that people stand up against this tyranny.
Slashdot covers the Napster v. Metallica issue because it's a fascinating battle of morons (ok, so I'm flattering Lars' intellect with that description) against technology. In this instance, the morons have chosen to attack a service provider (Napster) with a lawsuit, whereas legal precedent has demonstrated that a service provider cannot be held liable for the traffic it routes because to filter it would make it impossible to provide the service. This is roughly akin to Yahoo or Google having to be responsible for purging links in their indexes to illicit content hosted on other people's servers. For Google to police the fourteen bazillion pages they've got indexed to make sure there's no photo scanned in from Life magazine (or an mp3 file containing any song off Master of Puppets) would be impossible. Likewise, it's impossible for Napster to ensure that the clients aren't providing copyrighted songs for download. This is precisely why AT&T and those other service providers filed a brief on behalf of Napster earlier this week.
The correct route for Metallica to have taken on this issue would have been to file lawsuits against the individuals providing the files for download on their servers. Because that's a publicly messy solution and also costly- the loser in such a case shoulders the court costs, and how many 14 year-old defendants can afford to pay for Metallica's lawyers? - Metallica has chosen to sue Napster.
I've never seen Taco or any other staff of Slashdot advocate people pirating intellectual property. The debate here is whether or not a 'design' for a website can be considered intellectual property.
The 'look and feel' theft is going to be difficult to litigate should a battle like this go to court. An obvious defense to this might be to say that a website's interface is the same as a song. The actual recording of an artist performing a song belongs to that artist (or the behemoth record company). But for Weird Al Yankovic to do a cover, that's a parody and is protected by the first ammendment. Even if it's not Weird Al, but instead is Poison Idea doing a cover of 'We Got the Beat' by the Go-Go's, that's perfectly legal, too. Even though the words and song structure are exactly the same (read: the html formatting is the same), it's a different rendition because it's different musicians (read: the text / graphics of the website are different).
So if you're the Eddie Van Halen of the html design world, how do you turn your back to the audience during live performances of 'Eruption' so that those young upstarts don't steal your guitar riffs? I guess you could obfuscate things with javascript that does a server origination validation routine before outputting some page-critical component.
Don't forget all the internet-related apps like better telnet (replaced by >telnet), Netprezens (replaced by Apache, ftp, etc), fetch (replaced by >ftp),and probably Vicom Internet Gateway (don't know what the BSD equivalent to ipchains is, but I'm sure it's in there somewhere).
I'd bet Norton's Disk Doctor will still find demand. Although people's disks might not crash as often under the new OS, they're still gonna need the restoration capabilities for deleted files.
Napster is a file transfer service. It is the functional equivalent to portal websites that allow visitors to search their indexes of html docs stored on computers scattered around the world. As a service provider, the portal website search engines bear no responsibility to police these third-party servers to ensure that copyright laws aren't being violated. There have been precedents set that absolve the service providers from responsibility of the content sent through their pipes. To police this content would make it impossible to provide the service in the first place.
The responsible parties are the people running the servers where the illicit material is stored. If this is on a home computer running a server app (webstar, netprezens, napster, etc.), then that person can be prosecuted for piracy. The ISP providing service to that individual may be notified and their account may be terminated according to the DMCA, but the ISP is not held accountable. The reason AT&T et. al are involved is that they don't want to see this case undermine the current precedents that govern their operations.
As I said earlier, you are correct. There is reason enough for this article to be on slashdot due to its connection to the Mozilla code base.
From your various other responses, I can tell that you're not one bit concerned about microsoft co-opting net w3c standards and convincing people to abandon alternative OS's in favor of windows because IE works best on it and renders all bastardly coded html properly.
I know. I know. You don't care because you're absorbed in convincing developers to swarm over to the Be platform (which I truly admire). Enjoy the galopagos islands while the venture capital is still keeping them afloat. As the OS fails to be embraced by the masses, both developer support and venture funding will evaporate, thanks in part to IE not being available on beOS. It's something I hope doesn't happen, but the more people I meet with your perspective, I can't see anything else occurring.
IE (fortunately or unfortunately) runs on Mac OS. It's in beta for Solaris.
Wow. be-fan, you sound like you're excited about beOS, but at the same time you're spouting off Microsoft marketing objectives as if they're your own, unique thoughts.
Powerpoint slide perpetually projected on redmondian walls:
1. Dominate the browser market
2. Get all web developers to code to our bastardized specs, ignoring w3c standards.
3. Only make IE work well on the Windows platform
4. We win. All others lose.
This is not the voice of a linux zealot. Be-fan, by placing yourself at stage three of this process, you're surrendering to Microsoft. Your beautiful, elegant beOS won't stand a chance.
Actually, Run DMC got a sponsorship deal with Addidas after that song came out.
That Abercrombie song you were talking about was by a boy-band called LFO and it's called 'Summertime girls'.. Considering the members of this band are carrying out the orders of their business managers, it's highly probable the group is getting promotional money from AF.
A more interesting sponsorship came to that band Veruca Salt after their Levollure song got really popular. The blind maker actually sponsored their tour!
Ok. So this article is for you and others who use NT, love NT over Linux, but read slashdot and sympathize with linux users as a matter of principle and don't think "it's right for them". I'm not criticizing that crowd. I just think there are better sites out there catering to people who have decided to stand on the sidelines.
I agree with you. This is tangetially related to Mozilla, so it probably has a place here on Slashdot. I probably was drawing the line a little sharply based on it's dependence on MFC and lack of cross-platform availability.
Before you go home tonight, I'd encourage you to read Baka Boy's comment lower in this thread. It sort of crystalizes my earlier comment about those people standing on the sidelines. I guess it's sort of that whole thing about 'if you don't vote, then don't complain about who gets elected'. If you're not complaining, then nevermind.
I get it. They're trying to suppress the 'talent' (I'm using that term loosely- esp. regarding the 'Making the Band' tv show) from cutting outside sponsorship deals... hmm.. This is probably the strongest explanation I've heard. Probably someone in Manhattan was watching that Run-DMC video for 'My Addidas' and was thinking, "Damn! Run-DMC is getting paid! We can't get a cut of it, so we better squash this kinda thing in the future."
This brings up a question that has been pestering me for a couple years now.
It seems that every piece of video shot by or broadcast by MTV has the clothing logos (actually all logos) blurred out. This is especially prevalent in their dumb REAL WORLD tv show and the MAKING THE BAND show they have sold to ABC that plays on friday nights. Every single clothing article they're wearing will have the logos blurred out. When the kids walk into a room with posters on the walls, bang!, everything's blurred. Sometimes it's as if the people's faces are the only thing in focus. They'll even blurr the triple stripe pattern on a kid's addidas sweat pants.
I always thought this was strange considering no other networks do this. I interpreted it as a step MTV had taken in order to try to get money from companies to have their logos featured in the content.
I was talking to my roommate about this as we watched those poor, sodomized, teen boys get modelled into the next 'N Synch. He suggested that perhaps MTV has some clause in their advertising contracts that says no competing products will be featured during the shows (i.e. the dorks on Making the Band won't be shown wearing Addidas baseball caps right after a Nike commercial airs). Since the network has no idea what advertising is going to get picked up, they're just blurring everything that pops in camera.
Perhaps this is unrelated, but does anyone know why Beavis and Butthead were always wearing Metallica and AC/DC shirts on their show, but every piece of merchandizing (keyrings, posters, mugs, etc) had them wearing 'Deathrock' and 'Skullz' shirts? I suspect the merchandizing couldn't feature the logo because of trademark law while the show was considered 'fair use'... You'd think Metallica would be rushing to sign a licensing agreement with MTV in order to promote themselves via such a lucrative medium. Oh, whoops! I forgot. I'm talking about Metallica here. Never mind.
On the consoles, there's a different evolution going on simply because these machines are largely un-networked. Perhaps the popularity of the FPS genre on computers is due to the networked nature of gameplay there. On consoles up until now (perhaps the PSX 2 or Dreamcast will change this) games are all conceived at most as featuring one to 4 people all playing on the same machine and looking at the same screen (unfortunately, the PlayStation link cable never convinced developers that enough people would connect two playstations and have two tv's and there really aren't any games out there supporting the link cable).
Without networked play, FPS's are much more limited in appeal, so console game developers have really had to seek out new genre's. And there have been some good developments in the last few years. I've marvelled at some of the innovations coming out on the PlayStation. Here are some games I think have really broken ground:
Tenchu- Stealth ninja game. This was the first game I ever played where patience and cunning were really rewarded over quick reflexes and pattern memorization.
Tony Hawk Pro Skater- Skateboarding game built from a 3rd-person action game engine. Tremendous skateboard simulation game with very fluid and realistic movements. 1000's of hours of replayability here.
Puzzle Games- The growth of this genre is probably due to the creativity and diverse tastes found in the japanese game development community. Some of the amazing games that have fleshed out the puzzle genre in recent years are: Devil Dice, Mr. Domino, and Roll Away.
Rhythm Games- Obviously Parrapa the Rapper is the standout innovator here. Behind him came Bust-A-Move (Japanese title), Um Jammer Lammy, and Vib Ribbon.
Not to admit to my true luddite affiliation here, but as console gaming platforms evolve to more closely mirror computer gaming platforms (ala the XBox), we're going to see less and less differences in the games that are released on the two types of platforms. Unfortunately, I think, this is going to mean more FPS's and fewer breakout innovations like Vib Ribbon that don't leverage networked play or high-octane graphics.
It could very well be that they are in need of more money to follow through and ship their chips. An IPO is a great way to generate needed capital.
I'd agree with the other poster, though. It's more lucrative to launch an IPO to a speculative investor market rather than have a track record that people will be buying into. Look at all the.com money that was plundered because speculators thought a site like mine would eventually generate gobs of revenue.
The point here isn't that everyone needs to convert their MP3's to Vorbis. They'll just need to start encoding their music files from CD using the Vorbis codec. The value-add is the quality and size. It's much more believable that the Vorbis codec will gain widespread acceptance as a format whereas with a proprietary format like SMDI, where's the value-add for the consumers? On top of this, the value-add for software publishers is that this is a free codec, so the only cost of adding it to MusicMatch Jukebox or AudioCatalyst is the development. Thanks to competition in the market, I'd bet that the developers will be quick to add this to their encoders so their marketing materials can boast that the product supports the superior Ogg Vorbis format.
As for hardware support (portables, DVD players), I'd bet the manufacturers like Diamond and Apex are salivating over the widespread embrace of a new format like Ogg Vorbis. There's no way they'd just provide a flash upgrade to enable OV support! To them, a new format is a new hardware purchase. For something like the Empeg, they'd probably be happy to provide a software patch that would bring support for a new format like Ogg Vorbis.
Providing this is an intel-based chipset (as opposed to the cooler-running PPC G3/G4 architecture), computer hardware could also provide the following funtionality:
grilling on the heatsink
hair drying (hook a hose up to the exhaust fan)
space heating in the winter (exhaust fan again)
and to beat a dead horse- cup holder (cd rom tray)
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Re:Good start. Use it to identify spammers.
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This list idea would be good because it would alleviate the overhead of each client dynamically building its own spam filters.
One potential problem / benefit of using distributed indexes (or lists) rather than each client dynamically generating them is that they're susceptible to manipulation. Remember that list of 300k Napster users that Metallica compiled? They could just as easily append it to the "KnownSpammers.txt" file. This may be a benefit as it would enable people to protect their intellectual property within the Gnutella system. The problem is that entities like the Scientologists could also add entries to the "KnownSpammers.txt" lists for each host offering their texts, or whatever it is they keep hassling ISP's about.
The other challenge of such a list-based system is that it may not scale well (especially with Lars Ulrich appending 300k entries each week). It's really only essential for each client to be aware of the spammers operating on nodes near it on the Gnutella network. A list would have to be comprehensive for the entire network and would be a little overkill.
Perhaps a good implementation of the list would be if there were some sort of moderation system. It would have to be very similar to the slashdot system (automatic, logrithm based round-robin) because if there were official moderators in the system, then that give someone a target to sue. If these moderators were building the list, then that would help keep Lars Ulrich under control.
PacoVore's other good suggestion here is that the list be generated by the client, then offered as a search result. This would be great because users could gather up a bunch of lists, then experiment with searches to find which lists are an effective balance of no spam and no Lars Ulrich entries.(i.e. The goal being large results sets returned with little or no spam results returned).
1. When each Gnutella client connects to the network, it issues a user-configureable search for a non-existent file. Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious.mov for example.
2. The client then checks the results and chops the appended text string from the original search term and adds it to a filter list.
3. The filter list is used both to screen out spam results the client receives and also refuses to route them as results of other people's searches.
4. For performance, the client purges filter text entries that are over x days old.
At first glance, it might seem that these extraneous queries are going to add an excessive amount of traffic to Gnutella.net, but this additional traffic will be minimal compared to the amount of spam traffic this technique will silence. ShareZilla's defense against this strategy would likely be to add a dynamic variable to the returned text, such as a timestamp. There are methods available to deal with that, though.
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I agree, but it could be exploited..
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I'd love to see www.flatplanet.com hardcoded into this Ddos retaliation scheme. But if we followed through with your suggestion, the sword could be turned on us. Paul Allen could purchase a copy of the ShareZilla client, then start spamming Gnutella clients with SlashDot.org-EnterSandman.mp3 responses. Everyone's modified Gnutella client would then Ddos attack slashdot...
Just because there's this whole new technology available to unsigned bands (mp3, digital recording equipment, the rest of the stuff you mentioned), doesn't mean it poses a threat to the record industry. No more than html editing software threatens the new york times by providing a new publishing opportunity for would-be journalists. What we would need is the equivalent of a lot of Stephen Kings choosing to release their next few works exclusively on mp3.com or something to that effect. What Stephen King is doing with his current experiment is a much bigger risk than any recording artist is willing to take. Of course, he's got umpteen best-selling books already filling his bank account. How many musicians can depend on that kind of safety net?
But I digress.
What if there was no copyright?
I don't know. What if there were no locks on bicycles. What if there were no keys for cars? Outright theft of someone's property is not the solution here. Dislodging the stagnant record industry behemoths by govt. action would do wonders to restore competition to this arena and would get true innovation back into music distribution.
I know of no case filed by the RIAA that has touched on patent issues.
What is it that 'SOMEONE' will come up with that will take market share away from the current record company behemoths and FORCE a reaction? I suppose you are suggesting that some enterprising startup will offer an alternative music distribution system that will be so compelling that hundreds of entertainers will each be willing to sacrifice millions of dollars worth of potential sales in order to jumpstart this new system.
What you're expecting is that Britney Spears will decide "Hey, I wanna fight this stranglehold the big record companies (who pay me millions of dollars) have on consumers. I'm putting out my next four albums on some untested internet distribution model. Bring me a Zima, Claude."
And simultaneously, dozens of millions of consumers must decide they're going to not purchase the Cristina Aquillera CD because it's on Warner and isn't available as a digital download.
Rather than waiting for this unlikely alignment of the planets to occur, wouldn't it be more effective if the government stepped in as a matter of principle and corrected the imbalance?
Slashdot Mirror
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This list idea would be good because it would alleviate the overhead of each client dynamically building its own spam filters.
One potential problem / benefit of using distributed indexes (or lists) rather than each client dynamically generating them is that they're susceptible to manipulation. Remember that list of 300k Napster users that Metallica compiled? They could just as easily append it to the "KnownSpammers.txt" file. This may be a benefit as it would enable people to protect their intellectual property within the Gnutella system. The problem is that entities like the Scientologists could also add entries to the "KnownSpammers.txt" lists for each host offering their texts, or whatever it is they keep hassling ISP's about.
The other challenge of such a list-based system is that it may not scale well (especially with Lars Ulrich appending 300k entries each week). It's really only essential for each client to be aware of the spammers operating on nodes near it on the Gnutella network. A list would have to be comprehensive for the entire network and would be a little overkill.
Perhaps a good implementation of the list would be if there were some sort of moderation system. It would have to be very similar to the slashdot system (automatic, logrithm based round-robin) because if there were official moderators in the system, then that give someone a target to sue. If these moderators were building the list, then that would help keep Lars Ulrich under control.
PacoVore's other good suggestion here is that the list be generated by the client, then offered as a search result. This would be great because users could gather up a bunch of lists, then experiment with searches to find which lists are an effective balance of no spam and no Lars Ulrich entries.(i.e. The goal being large results sets returned with little or no spam results returned).
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