And who is able to stand outside of the monetary influences and say that the farmer should be allowed to modify his environment so that he can get more money? And how much will it cost you to have your baldness and impotence cured, and what will you do to get the money to pay for it? What happens when the continent of Africa gets a few nuclear warheads and starts ransoming the planet for money (hey they are only applying some old tech). We have shat all over our ecosystem and enslaved 3/4 of the planets population in poverty. Of course everything is going to be alright.
if a student uses university computers for a personal project, the university owns the rights to all the work done
This is exactly why we should be making an issue of this, how long before the "Gates University of Seatlle" decides it should claim every GPL project that someone in the university has touched on one of their computers, and what sort of mess would it leave that GPL project in? Since when have Universities become corporate breading grounds instead of educational establishments for students ? I always thought Universities were about the raising of the education of a population. I guess this is really just the Americans starting to question the rampant coporatism they have embraced and tried to force on the rest of the world....does it seem like such a good plan now? How come you didn't start questioning these things when you started paying tens of thousands of dollars per annum to go to the college as opposed to us Europeans (I paid no University fees because I went to the UK but I would have paid about $2000 if I had stayed in Ireland).
As I was reading through the list of nominees I had a horrible thought, could there have been a motive to the overloaded server? Could they have been trying to modify the "demographics" of their voters? Now I know some one will say that they couldn't, but simply put if they had 10,000 members before people could register, and then they let in another 1,000 during the "overloaded server" period they would have essentially kept their original membership with a pretence of an open system. Alternatively, a firewall applying a few rules to decide if you get the "overloaded server" or the chance to register could be quite effective at tweaking the users to (for example) ensure that the voting balance is heavily distrorted to a geographical region (IP addresses means perfection would be impossible but.....).
When a nation has an election, and especially a nation under constant threat (they have only recently been put in power after the old guard was overthrown AND many of the countries are rebeling against them already) the U.N. or someone similar will be having a good close look to ensure the election is legit, and if they say it wasn't the new government will not be recognised. Who was watching ICANN? and where is their report?
Quake III Arena sales were not severly hampered by any technical problem (lets face it the average linux user is ready to face those far far easier than a windows user), they were hampered by the availability problems that you have described. Also, in Ireland (and I think the UK) the Linux version never appeared in retail shops that I could find. To anyone who knows Dublin and Belfast, I repeatedly tried Game, Electronic Boutique, HMV, Virgin and Easons and in every shop always asked at the counter if they had it, if they would have it and if they could get it. This is the sort of rubbish I got back (btw is/. failing to produce the comments from links? cause it is coming up blank on me though I'm pretty sure it is right).
It is not fair to knock the sales of Q]|[ for Linux when it was not given even the slightest chance (IMHO). I did what they wanted and drooled over the windows boxes waiting for the big pretty silver hunk of joy to arrive. I bought Quake I the Offering for Linux cause I found it on my travels. I was happy to pay double the windows price (e.g. IR£70 or about $100) to have a shop get it in for me (they never discussed price, I was always just sent to one of their rivals). End result, I haven't bought Quake III at all yet (though I bought the QI for win and linux and qII for win) and I am starting to wonder if I ever will. The only reason why I want the Linux box is (apart from to play the game, but to be honest I am game playing so little at the moment that it is no hardship for me to miss out even on this!) to register my vote with the entire industry, and not just Id. Unless I am influencing a shop so that next time they _might_ get a linux box without being jumped on I am not going to buy the Linux box, so I still refuse to mail order it (unless someone can tell me a retail store I can access that also does mail order that only has it on mail order at the moment). I'd also like to see just one copy sitting on the shelf of just one store in my country, if nothing else maybe a few people who had never heard of Quake for Linux will see Linux in a new light.
Before Linux, IBM's research group had lost its enthusiasm for operating system work, Goyal said. Linux, though, is ideal for research
environments because its open-source nature encourages innovation that's not hobbled by licensing negotiations, he said.
I adored this quote also. It shows exactly why gnu/linux is able to go further than any other system.....and why it will. IBM produces good products, maybe not outstanding but not often awful. They are a huge company and you know their researchers are good, and you know that IBM are not going to have too many licensing problems on this world (imagine IBM and RMS asking M$ for windows source, who would have the problems:-). Despite their position however, their researchers want to work with linux (if this is to be believed, and personally I do) because of the lack of licensing issues, so they obviously don't see the GPLs viral nature as a problem. If this attitude is not being discouraged, then IBM are shifting to a GPL based development (in the long term) where their code will be the worlds code and again they might be restored to their monopoly/top billing position (SGI might be fighting them for it though). To a company like IBM the decision of whether to "gamble" on GPLing code must be far far easier than to all the other small players in the market who do not have the resources to sacrifice any income.
Maybe they are simply going to research on gnu/linux and then rewrite everything to their current operating system of choice.......they wouldn't, would they?
It sounds like you are going to get your troll ass sued! And just in case you a stupid enough to think this could work, think about this,
you are collecting fees on a "anonymous distributed system" so where does the money go, cause that is where the lawyers will follow (if you really can hide the money I'm sure you'll find a far more worthwhile job in organised crime). I think we all know that RMS believes strongly in the use of copyright to prevent EXACTLY what you want to do and I'm sure he will still have enough friends in the world to pay more lawyers than you can handle.
Oh please!
I have been here to long to hold any hope for that to be worthwhile! The digital TV revolution has already been stalled in Ireland to assist the potential of RTE to make more money (hence they crippled the ability for Sky to sell their service here). The Cable-modem possibility is still waiting in the wings with at best guess another 2 years or so to go before maybe half the people with cable would be able to avail of internet access (and nobody knows how fast or slow etc this will be). ADSL etc. may save us because it is not crippled by preceeding legaslation.....oh sh*t it is hence we don't have it yet (but the local loop should open up in the next year, though at what price).
Considering the possibility of the terrestrial digital broadcasting you mention, do you expect it to have a decent amount of bandwidth? How do you expect it to be shared (multicast or encrypted to stop people sniffing), and what sort oif filtering do you think they will install on the backend to make sure the kiddies cant find out how to make bombs?
We are failing to legaslate at a rapid rate and I would regard the terrestrial broadcast system as the least likely to provide any real bandwidth and serious expansion of internet presence. We have a few years to wait......and thats not talking about the SYNCHRONOUS higher speed (I'm not even talking mbits) mobile access (i.e. higher bandwidth mobile phones).
To be honest I have NEVER heard a single Irish person dying for bandwidth mention the digital broadcasting scheme once (if you can supply some links I'll eat them:-) so personally I wonder who you are that you would even consider it? The rest of us are all just bitching that the local loop is still held by the (now private greedy shareholder feeding) Eircom and NTL have p*ssed in the wind since buying Cablelink who were p*ssing in the wind talking about cable modems to make sure they could screw whoever was buying them for the maximum amount, and hence left them without the ability to actually do anything with any urgency. If NTL had bought Cablelink for a realistic amount of money, I would suspect they would have tens of thousands of cable modems around Ireland right now and Eircom would be rolling out ADSL because the new era would have begun.
I live in what is currently one of the most lively economies in the world, and we have one of the highest take-ups of mobile phones in the world (I think it is the highest) yet we are only starting to decide how we will allocate "third generation" mobile licensces, we are all stuck on 9600 GSM mobiles and 57600 land lines (ok ISDN is available but at IR£35/month to rent the line and then IR£0.5/hour off-peak to use 64kbits of it). We want to be the "e-commerce hub" of the world yet we have a pathetic telecoms infrastructure and would all kill to be able to get near a cable modem or ADSL or a faster mobile link. You are bitching about the lack of standards you must endure but would you rather wait another 5-10 years for a unified system that is already out of date (ISDN is only just getting a push here now that it is only IR£100 to install instead of IR£350)? You have made your bed and enjoy the rewards so stop moaning about the innevitable downside or start the political reform to become a "socialist" country.
It is a sad sad state of affairs that governments are becoming so fearful of their populations access to wild information that (probably) the only government in the world that truly tries to claim freedom of speech and equality is going to censor the less well-off from any information they wouldn't like them to see. I would expect this from China, but the US! Perhaps it is simply to try and protect the government from lawsuits when someone kills with a chainsaw after seeing a Quake screenshot online, though if this is the case you can all through out you constituition and replace it with "He who makes the money in court makes the rules".
You know I'd say your right:-) I always think about this stuff simply by thinking of dynamic range and the fact that everything goes from -100 to 0db (CD-audio if I recollect correctly) is a bit silly to me.
That is the shortest story I think I have ever seen on slashdot!
I can't myself see how much detail can be garnered from the amplitude alone of the notes in a musical piece. I can see how heavy metal and jazz would be quite different, but how about jazz and drum'n'bass, they are incredibly similar forms that would be distiguishable by the underlying beat rythms (or perhaps more likely through the persistance of instruments). Would a fractal based on note amplitude grab this? I can imagine it might, but if you threw it the whole gamut of dance music (acid, trance, acid-trance, garage, girly garage, ambient, techno.....need I continue) I am sure it would fall apart as the large scale use of compression alone would bring these musical forms incredibly close together in terms of amplitude (if everything is at 100db post-compression as often happens with dance music).
Another useful bow in the arrow of anyone interested in categorising music, but I feel that a full quiver of tools is always going to be needed to even come close to trying to do this job.
If I am blind how do I read a printed book? I don't, but I could get my PC to read a text file to me, or I can wait until someone releases a recording (I have yet to see ESR reads the Cathedral and the Bazaar, never mind the poerty of Jim Morrision or...). How pleasurable this is is down to your software, but the real point is that receiving a book in an electronic format is about freedom (speech not beer) because now you have a choice about how you read the book, you are not just stuck with some patchily marked pages.
www.xlrecordings.com is not a member of the RIAA and they are not a subsidary of any big company. They are primarily a dance label which grew from a record shop, but they hit the big time with Liam Howlett and the Prodigy boys. They originally licensed tracks from artists (hence the bunch of "XL Recordings the nth Chapter" albums) but now they work a bit of everyway. The history on their website gives a good flavour of where they came from. I know I've bought plenty of their albums in the past, so can anyone find an RIAA tie with them? Or even a reason why they should be ignored?
I think you'll find that in fact it is nearly the exact opposite! The only people who have a serious predication for NT/IIS as a web server are the SMEs who have their own box. The larger companies run all sorts of boxes, from IIS to apache via netscape etc. etc. and the smaller companies run on their ISP/hosts server, and what do they run........oh yeah they mainly go for *nix (except the few poor b*stards who have had enough people looking for FsckdPage extensions and the like that they have been forced to add some NT boxes for them).
Because the article I had just read (the linked to article on the story which is obviously meant to serve as the center of the discussion) is on a games site. I would be just as happy to see a discussion on the exhibits from SGI (Performer), Houdini and Kinetix and what THEY all had to say about their products and markets vis-a-vis *nix. The work they could do for *nix would quickly be reflected through to the gaming sphere, and lets face it as the article discusses the gaming industry is about to overtake the film industry which is using more and more and more CGI. The fields they are a merging, but are they merging on Windows where games has lived for the past 10 years (along with dedicted hardware) or are they merging on *nix where the films had most of their CGI done for the past 20 years (wild guess, but SGI held this field for a long time)?
A lovely piece detailing some of the new developments, but lets face it, most of us would rather read a piece that simply had the reply of every exibitor to the question "What are your plans for the free nixes?" I'd even settle for a page of anything nix that was on show.
Seriously, one thing that most people forget is that to settle space in any serious way one of the first steps necessary is to settle the Moon. The moon has a gravity well that requires 1/20 the energy to climb out of.
The bane of space travel is the gravity well and simply settling the moon will make a minor difference to settling mars. The problem would remain that right now we have everything on earth, and to move to the moon we will need to shift large amounts of resources up there. If we were then to move on to mars, we would need to move large amounts of items from the earth to the moon to mars, or even create them on the moon, but ultimatley we will still have to drive large masses though gravity wells. The first step to any reasonable form of space exploration is the building of a space elevator here on earth. With this in place the earths gravity well is virtually removed from the equation (and will be as soon as we can start using the elevator to net shift nothing from the earth, i.e. put up and take down the same masses). The next step would be to arrive at the moon and build an elevator there, then mars. Once we have the practice at putting these up on remote worlds we can start to look at improving flight times (when we no longer have to design our craft to simply pull themselves and the mass of fuel out of our gravity well). As we learn to shift around space faster, the range of "planets" we can make home on expands. Let's not rush to the moon and Mars with a half-baked plan that simply strands humans on other planets (however much I want to go) and lets focus on setting up inter-planetary travel once and for all. This rocket stuff is madness.
Re:Not released yet, end of August
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SuSE 7.0
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· Score: 1
Forgive my ignorance, but do you have a link? Either for somewhere that can supply a box or somewhere I can download an iso (or the directories). There is no sign of it on suse.com (ftp or http). It looks like you may be able to order from the suse german site, is this the only location, and does anyone have enough German to tell if they are actaully shipping?
Not released yet, end of August
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SuSE 7.0
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· Score: 2
Thank you Slashdot for another beautifully misleading story! SUSE 7 is NOT OUT. SUSE 7 has been announced for the end of the month (though that probably means boxes, with the iso's waiting a while longer). We are providing SUSE with some of the early FUD publicity that MS is so famous for. If the story was "SUSE announces SUSE 7 using 2.4, X4, KDE2, mozilla, apache 2" and every other major release coming then it would be a story. All they have done is announce that they want to extract some more money from the market by doing an Intel/MS/AMD by selling a cut-down version for lusers that will truly cost as much to produce as the main version.
You raise some key points about the requirements for backing. However, there is no nead for the backing to be from a record company as such. The old act of patronage is not illegal, and I would suspect that we shall see many such arrangements arriving over the next few years. Take the large mega-star as an example, there are a number of musical superstars who have more money than they can ever need, who could easily afford the "risk" of not resigning with a record company and buying a server-farm. Then they can build a studio and tender for merchandisers (what lengerie manufacturer would not want to sell Madonna basques from her site). When they release their music (and especially videos) they "could" slow down the net enough to be noticed and get some free publicity there. The net will spread the word if the artist is sufficient. On the back of their resources they can help out other acts. Some would be gready, some would look for musical integretty and some would be straight rebelious about it, but they would use their wealth and resources to carry the little guys to their markets. Add in the potential for radio stations (WKRN the people who bring you RadioHead), computer companies, famous business men and sportsmen to help and the potential for no record companies is easy to see. All it takes is some communal effort from the people who can make it happen. Once any weight develops on the pile, the era of musical depravity (the 90s was the decade of the remix for fscks sake) will end as we all start to listen to the music we want to, and we will all help pay for the music we all listen to. I say buy-cot, the less use the label is to an artist the sooner they will bolt to the brave new world.
If I had any moderator points I'd give you +1 Informative for the link alone. I think what we (the concrned community) should do is to convert this linked page into a list of all the artists who would be covered by a buy-cot, and all the artists who are not! Then we should organise placing a voting system on the page so that we can mark all the artists who we have and will buy music from (preferably marking whether we would buy a $20, $10, , $5, $1 per album). Then every week we should forward our stats on each artist to the artist themselves along with the current number of supporters and the general trends. This issue can only be solved by the artists, when they realise that their own long-term interests will be best served by departing from the corporate arena and returning to the musical arena. Anyone got some space (processing time and bandwidth) for this?
In your discussions with the various entities of the computing industry, how do you expect to see software distributed in 5-10 years time? Should we expect to see a greater take-up of free speach || open source || free beer || restrictive licensing on the low and high level (drivers and word processors), low and high end (MS Paint and Adobe Photoshop) software? Do the current players believe that they should all be looking log-term into securing their positions through licensing agreements or that they should be selling a service? In particular have you heard any noises of hardware companies who are looking into OpenSourcing all their drivers (i.e. Windows) so as to achieve the maximum penetration of their products?
I agree we may be off-topic, but considering this story relates to a product which could also be viewed as a tool for illegal acts (and it is this aspect of the Napster issue I am trying to focus attention on) I'll continue. The intent of a product is clearly relevant to it's legality, but unfortunatly the intentions are never as clear as you would like to make them. A gun is designed and intended to shoot high velocity projectiles, not to kill. If you look at a uzi, it is extremely difficult to even start an argument that the intention is anything other than to injure/kill, however many guns have a far less clear purpose such as for hunting, and for these reasons the gun control argument is a complex issue. The question is does the potential for illegal use decide the legality of an item? The issue should not be about intent however, but about harm. Legislating (and enforcing) laws to prevent me making a nuclear warhead is obviously logical as I could potentially kill millions of people, my only loss is that I cannot do my nuclear research:-) Legislating to prevent me distributing files is obviously illogical however as the potential harm is that I may distribute copyrighted data, hardly a serious crime (illegal, immoral, wrong, abhorent....but not exactly life threatening), it is about the equivalent to throwing a flour bomb of your roof onto an unsuspecting passer by, the potential harm is minimal but if your caught you should be punished, the law shouldn't forbid the sale of flour in bags! Is a cd-r drive not designed and intended (as much as Gnutella is) to steal. How many of the CD-r owners that you know would have burnt more legal cds than illegal? How many have used them to make bit for bit (and hence better than mp3) copies of RIAA music but they are not trying to sue the cd-r manufacturers (drives or disks) because they can argue that these capabilities are supplied as a by-product to a logical extension of modern personal computing. They are also not fighting the cd-r battle as this is not a threat to their business model, the internet is and they are scared, not of copying music but that the whole business they have created and milked to the detriment of musical creativity and expression (IMHO) is coming to an end and a new business model with extremely low costs of entry is arriving to replace them. Basically, (IMHO) no open file distribution system can be illegal even if it is being used for illegal acts, if the system is not open (i.e. the mp3 restriction on Napster) the case can be made. The governments never considered shutting down IRC and then IM etc. for the wholesale usage as a distribution channel for child pornography where human lives are tortured for the sick perversions of the few. Now that a major business model is under threat from the new world order however, we are facing the prospect of losing services that are objectionable to a company. Where is the sense?
I think you have just demonstrated the problem and point of the whole issue with your one shout. Napster and Gnutella (forgive my ignorance on Scour) are not thieves! They may be aiding and abetting thieves but that is a very different issue, and if they are so are ISPs and backbone providers (to name a few) so why don't we just shut down the net and stop this thievery once and for all? While we're at it lets also ban:
Evolution, you can attach copyrighted material and route it over the internet to another mail user or a newsgroup.
Search Engines, they can help you find information on everything from cracking to explosions.
Baggy clothes, easier to shoplift in
Bags, easier to carry the takings from the bank job
Matches, easier to set your boss on fire
Newspapers, easier to discover where the President will be to assasinate him
Pure and simply, the problem is not about whether it is legal or not (and it is NOT) to download and/or distribute the copyrighted music of an artist with no permission. The problem is whether or not we will let a corporate industry dictate how we can use our computers, the US DOJ is rejecting the concept of Micosoft having this kind of control (and at least they are computer people), why are they considering handing it to a conglomerate monopoly instead? I guess it must be about the money again, either the massive revenues the RIAA members generate or the massive revenues the RIAA's lawyers generate.
Slashdot Mirror
And who is able to stand outside of the monetary influences and say that the farmer should be allowed to modify his environment so that he can get more money? And how much will it cost you to have your baldness and impotence cured, and what will you do to get the money to pay for it? What happens when the continent of Africa gets a few nuclear warheads and starts ransoming the planet for money (hey they are only applying some old tech). We have shat all over our ecosystem and enslaved 3/4 of the planets population in poverty. Of course everything is going to be alright.
As I was reading through the list of nominees I had a horrible thought, could there have been a motive to the overloaded server? Could they have been trying to modify the "demographics" of their voters? Now I know some one will say that they couldn't, but simply put if they had 10,000 members before people could register, and then they let in another 1,000 during the "overloaded server" period they would have essentially kept their original membership with a pretence of an open system. Alternatively, a firewall applying a few rules to decide if you get the "overloaded server" or the chance to register could be quite effective at tweaking the users to (for example) ensure that the voting balance is heavily distrorted to a geographical region (IP addresses means perfection would be impossible but.....).
When a nation has an election, and especially a nation under constant threat (they have only recently been put in power after the old guard was overthrown AND many of the countries are rebeling against them already) the U.N. or someone similar will be having a good close look to ensure the election is legit, and if they say it wasn't the new government will not be recognised. Who was watching ICANN? and where is their report?
Quake III Arena sales were not severly hampered by any technical problem (lets face it the average linux user is ready to face those far far easier than a windows user), they were hampered by the availability problems that you have described. Also, in Ireland (and I think the UK) the Linux version never appeared in retail shops that I could find. To anyone who knows Dublin and Belfast, I repeatedly tried Game, Electronic Boutique, HMV, Virgin and Easons and in every shop always asked at the counter if they had it, if they would have it and if they could get it. This is the sort of rubbish I got back (btw is /. failing to produce the comments from links? cause it is coming up blank on me though I'm pretty sure it is right).
It is not fair to knock the sales of Q]|[ for Linux when it was not given even the slightest chance (IMHO). I did what they wanted and drooled over the windows boxes waiting for the big pretty silver hunk of joy to arrive. I bought Quake I the Offering for Linux cause I found it on my travels. I was happy to pay double the windows price (e.g. IR£70 or about $100) to have a shop get it in for me (they never discussed price, I was always just sent to one of their rivals). End result, I haven't bought Quake III at all yet (though I bought the QI for win and linux and qII for win) and I am starting to wonder if I ever will. The only reason why I want the Linux box is (apart from to play the game, but to be honest I am game playing so little at the moment that it is no hardship for me to miss out even on this!) to register my vote with the entire industry, and not just Id. Unless I am influencing a shop so that next time they _might_ get a linux box without being jumped on I am not going to buy the Linux box, so I still refuse to mail order it (unless someone can tell me a retail store I can access that also does mail order that only has it on mail order at the moment). I'd also like to see just one copy sitting on the shelf of just one store in my country, if nothing else maybe a few people who had never heard of Quake for Linux will see Linux in a new light.
Maybe they are simply going to research on gnu/linux and then rewrite everything to their current operating system of choice.......they wouldn't, would they?
It sounds like you are going to get your troll ass sued! And just in case you a stupid enough to think this could work, think about this, you are collecting fees on a "anonymous distributed system" so where does the money go, cause that is where the lawyers will follow (if you really can hide the money I'm sure you'll find a far more worthwhile job in organised crime). I think we all know that RMS believes strongly in the use of copyright to prevent EXACTLY what you want to do and I'm sure he will still have enough friends in the world to pay more lawyers than you can handle.
Oh please! :-) so personally I wonder who you are that you would even consider it? The rest of us are all just bitching that the local loop is still held by the (now private greedy shareholder feeding) Eircom and NTL have p*ssed in the wind since buying Cablelink who were p*ssing in the wind talking about cable modems to make sure they could screw whoever was buying them for the maximum amount, and hence left them without the ability to actually do anything with any urgency. If NTL had bought Cablelink for a realistic amount of money, I would suspect they would have tens of thousands of cable modems around Ireland right now and Eircom would be rolling out ADSL because the new era would have begun.
I have been here to long to hold any hope for that to be worthwhile! The digital TV revolution has already been stalled in Ireland to assist the potential of RTE to make more money (hence they crippled the ability for Sky to sell their service here). The Cable-modem possibility is still waiting in the wings with at best guess another 2 years or so to go before maybe half the people with cable would be able to avail of internet access (and nobody knows how fast or slow etc this will be). ADSL etc. may save us because it is not crippled by preceeding legaslation.....oh sh*t it is hence we don't have it yet (but the local loop should open up in the next year, though at what price).
Considering the possibility of the terrestrial digital broadcasting you mention, do you expect it to have a decent amount of bandwidth? How do you expect it to be shared (multicast or encrypted to stop people sniffing), and what sort oif filtering do you think they will install on the backend to make sure the kiddies cant find out how to make bombs?
We are failing to legaslate at a rapid rate and I would regard the terrestrial broadcast system as the least likely to provide any real bandwidth and serious expansion of internet presence. We have a few years to wait......and thats not talking about the SYNCHRONOUS higher speed (I'm not even talking mbits) mobile access (i.e. higher bandwidth mobile phones).
To be honest I have NEVER heard a single Irish person dying for bandwidth mention the digital broadcasting scheme once (if you can supply some links I'll eat them
I live in what is currently one of the most lively economies in the world, and we have one of the highest take-ups of mobile phones in the world (I think it is the highest) yet we are only starting to decide how we will allocate "third generation" mobile licensces, we are all stuck on 9600 GSM mobiles and 57600 land lines (ok ISDN is available but at IR£35/month to rent the line and then IR£0.5/hour off-peak to use 64kbits of it). We want to be the "e-commerce hub" of the world yet we have a pathetic telecoms infrastructure and would all kill to be able to get near a cable modem or ADSL or a faster mobile link. You are bitching about the lack of standards you must endure but would you rather wait another 5-10 years for a unified system that is already out of date (ISDN is only just getting a push here now that it is only IR£100 to install instead of IR£350)? You have made your bed and enjoy the rewards so stop moaning about the innevitable downside or start the political reform to become a "socialist" country.
It is a sad sad state of affairs that governments are becoming so fearful of their populations access to wild information that (probably) the only government in the world that truly tries to claim freedom of speech and equality is going to censor the less well-off from any information they wouldn't like them to see. I would expect this from China, but the US! Perhaps it is simply to try and protect the government from lawsuits when someone kills with a chainsaw after seeing a Quake screenshot online, though if this is the case you can all through out you constituition and replace it with "He who makes the money in court makes the rules".
You know I'd say your right :-) I always think about this stuff simply by thinking of dynamic range and the fact that everything goes from -100 to 0db (CD-audio if I recollect correctly) is a bit silly to me.
That is the shortest story I think I have ever seen on slashdot!
I can't myself see how much detail can be garnered from the amplitude alone of the notes in a musical piece. I can see how heavy metal and jazz would be quite different, but how about jazz and drum'n'bass, they are incredibly similar forms that would be distiguishable by the underlying beat rythms (or perhaps more likely through the persistance of instruments). Would a fractal based on note amplitude grab this? I can imagine it might, but if you threw it the whole gamut of dance music (acid, trance, acid-trance, garage, girly garage, ambient, techno.....need I continue) I am sure it would fall apart as the large scale use of compression alone would bring these musical forms incredibly close together in terms of amplitude (if everything is at 100db post-compression as often happens with dance music).
Another useful bow in the arrow of anyone interested in categorising music, but I feel that a full quiver of tools is always going to be needed to even come close to trying to do this job.
If I am blind how do I read a printed book? I don't, but I could get my PC to read a text file to me, or I can wait until someone releases a recording (I have yet to see ESR reads the Cathedral and the Bazaar, never mind the poerty of Jim Morrision or ...). How pleasurable this is is down to your software, but the real point is that receiving a book in an electronic format is about freedom (speech not beer) because now you have a choice about how you read the book, you are not just stuck with some patchily marked pages.
www.xlrecordings.com is not a member of the RIAA and they are not a subsidary of any big company. They are primarily a dance label which grew from a record shop, but they hit the big time with Liam Howlett and the Prodigy boys. They originally licensed tracks from artists (hence the bunch of "XL Recordings the nth Chapter" albums) but now they work a bit of everyway. The history on their website gives a good flavour of where they came from. I know I've bought plenty of their albums in the past, so can anyone find an RIAA tie with them? Or even a reason why they should be ignored?
I think you'll find that in fact it is nearly the exact opposite! The only people who have a serious predication for NT/IIS as a web server are the SMEs who have their own box. The larger companies run all sorts of boxes, from IIS to apache via netscape etc. etc. and the smaller companies run on their ISP/hosts server, and what do they run........oh yeah they mainly go for *nix (except the few poor b*stards who have had enough people looking for FsckdPage extensions and the like that they have been forced to add some NT boxes for them).
Because the article I had just read (the linked to article on the story which is obviously meant to serve as the center of the discussion) is on a games site. I would be just as happy to see a discussion on the exhibits from SGI (Performer), Houdini and Kinetix and what THEY all had to say about their products and markets vis-a-vis *nix. The work they could do for *nix would quickly be reflected through to the gaming sphere, and lets face it as the article discusses the gaming industry is about to overtake the film industry which is using more and more and more CGI. The fields they are a merging, but are they merging on Windows where games has lived for the past 10 years (along with dedicted hardware) or are they merging on *nix where the films had most of their CGI done for the past 20 years (wild guess, but SGI held this field for a long time)?
A lovely piece detailing some of the new developments, but lets face it, most of us would rather read a piece that simply had the reply of every exibitor to the question "What are your plans for the free nixes?" I'd even settle for a page of anything nix that was on show.
The first step to any reasonable form of space exploration is the building of a space elevator here on earth. With this in place the earths gravity well is virtually removed from the equation (and will be as soon as we can start using the elevator to net shift nothing from the earth, i.e. put up and take down the same masses). The next step would be to arrive at the moon and build an elevator there, then mars. Once we have the practice at putting these up on remote worlds we can start to look at improving flight times (when we no longer have to design our craft to simply pull themselves and the mass of fuel out of our gravity well). As we learn to shift around space faster, the range of "planets" we can make home on expands.
Let's not rush to the moon and Mars with a half-baked plan that simply strands humans on other planets (however much I want to go) and lets focus on setting up inter-planetary travel once and for all. This rocket stuff is madness.
Forgive my ignorance, but do you have a link? Either for somewhere that can supply a box or somewhere I can download an iso (or the directories). There is no sign of it on suse.com (ftp or http). It looks like you may be able to order from the suse german site, is this the only location, and does anyone have enough German to tell if they are actaully shipping?
Thank you Slashdot for another beautifully misleading story! SUSE 7 is NOT OUT. SUSE 7 has been announced for the end of the month (though that probably means boxes, with the iso's waiting a while longer). We are providing SUSE with some of the early FUD publicity that MS is so famous for. If the story was "SUSE announces SUSE 7 using 2.4, X4, KDE2, mozilla, apache 2" and every other major release coming then it would be a story. All they have done is announce that they want to extract some more money from the market by doing an Intel/MS/AMD by selling a cut-down version for lusers that will truly cost as much to produce as the main version.
You raise some key points about the requirements for backing. However, there is no nead for the backing to be from a record company as such. The old act of patronage is not illegal, and I would suspect that we shall see many such arrangements arriving over the next few years.
Take the large mega-star as an example, there are a number of musical superstars who have more money than they can ever need, who could easily afford the "risk" of not resigning with a record company and buying a server-farm. Then they can build a studio and tender for merchandisers (what lengerie manufacturer would not want to sell Madonna basques from her site). When they release their music (and especially videos) they "could" slow down the net enough to be noticed and get some free publicity there. The net will spread the word if the artist is sufficient. On the back of their resources they can help out other acts. Some would be gready, some would look for musical integretty and some would be straight rebelious about it, but they would use their wealth and resources to carry the little guys to their markets.
Add in the potential for radio stations (WKRN the people who bring you RadioHead), computer companies, famous business men and sportsmen to help and the potential for no record companies is easy to see. All it takes is some communal effort from the people who can make it happen. Once any weight develops on the pile, the era of musical depravity (the 90s was the decade of the remix for fscks sake) will end as we all start to listen to the music we want to, and we will all help pay for the music we all listen to.
I say buy-cot, the less use the label is to an artist the sooner they will bolt to the brave new world.
Well then you must be Alanis Morrisette!
If I had any moderator points I'd give you +1 Informative for the link alone. I think what we (the concrned community) should do is to convert this linked page into a list of all the artists who would be covered by a buy-cot, and all the artists who are not! Then we should organise placing a voting system on the page so that we can mark all the artists who we have and will buy music from (preferably marking whether we would buy a $20, $10, , $5, $1 per album). Then every week we should forward our stats on each artist to the artist themselves along with the current number of supporters and the general trends. This issue can only be solved by the artists, when they realise that their own long-term interests will be best served by departing from the corporate arena and returning to the musical arena.
Anyone got some space (processing time and bandwidth) for this?
In your discussions with the various entities of the computing industry, how do you expect to see software distributed in 5-10 years time? Should we expect to see a greater take-up of free speach || open source || free beer || restrictive licensing on the low and high level (drivers and word processors), low and high end (MS Paint and Adobe Photoshop) software? Do the current players believe that they should all be looking log-term into securing their positions through licensing agreements or that they should be selling a service? In particular have you heard any noises of hardware companies who are looking into OpenSourcing all their drivers (i.e. Windows) so as to achieve the maximum penetration of their products?
I agree we may be off-topic, but considering this story relates to a product which could also be viewed as a tool for illegal acts (and it is this aspect of the Napster issue I am trying to focus attention on) I'll continue. :-) Legislating to prevent me distributing files is obviously illogical however as the potential harm is that I may distribute copyrighted data, hardly a serious crime (illegal, immoral, wrong, abhorent....but not exactly life threatening), it is about the equivalent to throwing a flour bomb of your roof onto an unsuspecting passer by, the potential harm is minimal but if your caught you should be punished, the law shouldn't forbid the sale of flour in bags! Is a cd-r drive not designed and intended (as much as Gnutella is) to steal. How many of the CD-r owners that you know would have burnt more legal cds than illegal? How many have used them to make bit for bit (and hence better than mp3) copies of RIAA music but they are not trying to sue the cd-r manufacturers (drives or disks) because they can argue that these capabilities are supplied as a by-product to a logical extension of modern personal computing. They are also not fighting the cd-r battle as this is not a threat to their business model, the internet is and they are scared, not of copying music but that the whole business they have created and milked to the detriment of musical creativity and expression (IMHO) is coming to an end and a new business model with extremely low costs of entry is arriving to replace them.
The intent of a product is clearly relevant to it's legality, but unfortunatly the intentions are never as clear as you would like to make them. A gun is designed and intended to shoot high velocity projectiles, not to kill. If you look at a uzi, it is extremely difficult to even start an argument that the intention is anything other than to injure/kill, however many guns have a far less clear purpose such as for hunting, and for these reasons the gun control argument is a complex issue.
The question is does the potential for illegal use decide the legality of an item? The issue should not be about intent however, but about harm. Legislating (and enforcing) laws to prevent me making a nuclear warhead is obviously logical as I could potentially kill millions of people, my only loss is that I cannot do my nuclear research
Basically, (IMHO) no open file distribution system can be illegal even if it is being used for illegal acts, if the system is not open (i.e. the mp3 restriction on Napster) the case can be made. The governments never considered shutting down IRC and then IM etc. for the wholesale usage as a distribution channel for child pornography where human lives are tortured for the sick perversions of the few. Now that a major business model is under threat from the new world order however, we are facing the prospect of losing services that are objectionable to a company. Where is the sense?
- Evolution, you can attach copyrighted material and route it over the internet to another mail user or a newsgroup.
- Search Engines, they can help you find information on everything from cracking to explosions.
- Baggy clothes, easier to shoplift in
- Bags, easier to carry the takings from the bank job
- Matches, easier to set your boss on fire
- Newspapers, easier to discover where the President will be to assasinate him
Pure and simply, the problem is not about whether it is legal or not (and it is NOT) to download and/or distribute the copyrighted music of an artist with no permission. The problem is whether or not we will let a corporate industry dictate how we can use our computers, the US DOJ is rejecting the concept of Micosoft having this kind of control (and at least they are computer people), why are they considering handing it to a conglomerate monopoly instead? I guess it must be about the money again, either the massive revenues the RIAA members generate or the massive revenues the RIAA's lawyers generate.