For gnome to be usable in our environment, you need to allow the sysadmin to override the default spooling environment.
For example, we use rlpr and manage printcap files on only a couple of servers (one primary, one backup). The print command should be as easy to override as it is in netscape ("rlpr" instead of "lpr", etc.), and preferably also settable to a default by the system administrator in a central configuration file.
This feature is IMHO much more important than providing a gui to the end user to manage their own queue (although having both would be ideal). In other words, if providing a GUI queue management interface shoudl require sacrificing this customizability, then the GUI should go.
DeCSS/CPHack Mirrors send logs to /dev/null please
on
'Battling Censorware'
·
· Score: 2
Lawyers have a tendancy to ask for everything they could possibly have a cliam to, and are asking for the logs of all the people who downloaded the thing, probably in order to track down more people to target.
If you are mirroring software which is now illegal under the American DMCA, please consider redirecting your logs to/dev/null (via symlinks,.conf files, or whatever).
You cannot be forced to turn over information to lawyerly thugs if you do not possess it. As for those of us living in the United States, we need to begin comming to terms with the unpleasant fact that, for many intents and purposes, we now live in an extremely authoritarian, draconian state, and begin organizing our lives accordingly.
In short:
Mirror sites: please send your logs to/dev/null to protect the identity (and anonymouty) of your "customers" - i.e. those who download the files you are mirroring.
Get involved politically - we have a moral duty to ourselves and our forfathers to make every effort to win our country back. While you can couch this obligation in whatever terms apply to whatever country you are in, I think it goes without saying that we all need to be involved, wherever we are, and fight these trends with all of the political weapons our democratic systems provide us, wherever we are. You can be certain the extremely well-financed opposition is doing so.
Tell your friends and neighbors - Yes, you will be mocked by many of them. Thanks to the popular media apathy is very fashionable. Anyone expressing a passionate political view will be labelled a radical. Get over it, and express those views anyway. Peer pressure to remain silent and pretend not to care is one of the most insidious forms of censorship and social engineering, and we need to start standing up to it.
Fight these trends on the grass-roots level (which most of us are doing anyway). In my case, I and a couple of friends are working on the open content concept of a new, free culture mentioned earlier here on slashdot. In a very real sense, every open source project is a grass roots effort in this respect. Get involved.
Have a way out. We have a moral duty to ourselves and our families to have a an escape route, if and when things degenerate further. The notion of an Amercian needing to seek political asylum in Canada or Europe may sound (and seem) absurd, but remember that it has happened before (remember Oppenheimer? Not to mention thousands of conscientious objectors during the Vietnam war) and will most certainly happen again. Quite possibly to us, given the current state of technical and IP legislation.
Thank god my airplane will get me to Canada on less than one tank of fuel.
As is obvious to everybody with one or more neurons firing, the previous poster was not Linus Torvalds, but YADTAST (Yet Another Dummer Than A Stump Troll).
That having been said, the original poster is probably referring to the 'THIS_MODULE' undeclared here error message a number of us ran into, the solution to which is here.
In short, you need to #include linux/modules.h just before the first #include asm/.. statement. An annoying buglet in the pre-release code, but easy enough to find the answer at deja.com, altavista.com, or by grepping on the contents of/usr/include.
At the very least, a bug report gets (at this point, has gotten) the bug fixed.
His comments are spot on.
on
More on LinDVD
·
· Score: 3
I wonder how you intend to stop EVERYONE from buying DVDs.
This is just silly. Nowhere in his "60's rant" did he claim to be able to "stop EVERYONE from buying DVDs." You can't even stop everyone from espousing completely rediculous points of view such as neo-nazism or pro-Microsoft FUD, much less take on a huge, well entrenched and well financed trust of media conglomerates.
The poster is encouraging those of us who care enough about this issue to be concerned to not fall for a closed-source trap which will allow the aforementioned trust of conglomerates to deflect public interest from the issues at hand, quite possibly undermine the DeCSS defense, and allow them to continue to dictate terms of usage to consumers in violation of the law[1].
Whether or not you agree with the views espoused, your characterization of his comments to mean he is out to force EVERYONE to abide by his views is simply absurd. He is trying to convince, not coerce. And an ever growing number of us are convinced.
[1]See previously posted legal arguments regarding how (a) the DVD CCA is an illegal trust, (b) how region coding is in violation of international trade law, and (c) how CSS prevents fair use, in direct violation of law in several countries including Germany.
Most of the bandwidth of this group is generated by various cross-posting ASSHOLES beating the drum of their causes in a group that doesn't give a shit.
As I mentioned in another post, we should be seeking technical solutions to these problems. This is an excellent example.
It shouldn't be too hard to design or configure a news reader to automagically filter articles that are crossposted to more than one newsgroup, irrespective of content. I haven't hacked a.kill file in several years, but at one time one could filter out nearly all of the noise in any number of clever ways. Making this feature available in a user-friendly (read: GUI I suppsoe) fashion for an average USENET app shouldn't be all that difficult.
While I don't routinely read USENET newsgroups the way I do slashdot, technocrat, and others, I do use deja.com and altavista.com quite often to look up answers to questions I have. These USENET search engines are an invaluable source of information, with a much higher signal to noise ratio than the web as a whole.
So, ironically, USENET as an archive of information is much more useful than the web IMHO, despite the fact that as a forum it is being murdered by the spammers and trollers.
Unfortunately, if USENT truly does die as you and others predict, some ugly consiquences will emerge:
deja.com and similar sites will become much less useful as repositories of knowledge
on-line censorship goes from nearly impossible to trivial. We have seen both how difficult it is to censor something once it hits USENET (which is why spam and trolls propogate so well) and how easy it is to shut down a web page such as slashdot (etoy.com anyone?).
knowledge pools become fragment and shrunken in size. Slashdot has many fewer readers than USENET even today, ditto for any other web-based forum you'll find. The entire discussion is diminished by such fragmentation, and the odds of a question and a knowledgable answer comming together are correspondingly diminished.
It is in all of our interests to keep USENET alive. If the signal to noise ratio has grown so bad that it is difficult to use, and moderation is unacceptable, perhaps some kind of slashdot-style rating of posts, or other tweak is necessary. I believe it would be a mistake to simply dismiss what is still, even today, a valuable resource and simply allow it to die.
Unless, of course, none of us want to be able to quickly look up answers to our questions anymore on deja.com, or to post an opinion safely and anonymously that might otherwise be supressed (and no, I don't thing slashdots anonymouty is secure enough to use for anything other than the most casual purposes).
Instead of throwing our hands up and shrugging, we should be looking for solutions to the signal to noise problem which preseves USENETs overall strengths of decentralized authority, resistence to censorship, and anonymouty.
It's just that most people are afraid of expressing such a view because the 1337 bandwagon-jumpers will flame them to death with shit like "L1NUX R00LZ, D00D! MIRCO$OFT SUX0RZZ!!".
What an absolute crock of shit. The only people posting that kind of idiocy are anonymous cowardly trolls, which anyone with an IQ of two digits or more recongizes for what they are and ignores (or never reads, if one's threshhold is set at +1), and the paid Microsoft Astroturfers and FUDders who substitute ad hominim attacks against slashdot readers for well reasoned arguments.
The latter may be a result of the fact, obvious even to the most casual observer, that Microsoft's behavior has been reprehensible, harmful to the consumer, the technology, and the industry, and above all illegal.
You can inundate our threads with hoards of underpaid (or well paid) Microsoft public relations droids and attempt to distort the public dialogue of slashdot and other technical forums all you like. What you fail to realize is, there is only a vanishingly small minority of people here stupid enough to believe your propoganda.
Face it. Microsoft broke the law, harmed millions in the process, and is now (finally) beginning to reap the natural consiquences of their behavior. Get over it already.
What, you`re telling me that if you posted a message selling drugs (or whatever) on a Republican party/Big Company site chat room/message board, then they`d be responsible?
That was one of the aspects of the CDA: if you excersize editorial control over what people are posting, then you are responsible for what people post there, and do bear some liability if someone does, in fact, try to sell drugs from one of your discussion forums. On the other hand, if you excersize no editorial control (a la' slashdot), you cannot be held accountable for what others say and do.
Of course, running a discussion forum is arguably different from running a flea market or auction site, so the argument may not hold anyway. If I were the defense I'd argue the auction site is simply a discussion forum with a couple of fancy features (like storing bids and offers). If I were the prosecution, I'd compare it to a bar, which cities do close down if illegal activity is going on. On the other hand, yanking a liquor license is a coercive activity, not a penalty for criminal wrongdoing resulting from a judgement, so the prosecution could lose on that argument as well.
Either way, it is by no means a slam dunk against Yahoo. Perhaps quite the opposite, in fact...
Internet Regulation by the US...will end up like the Prohibition. The Prohibition was canceled shortly after it was enacted because it was seriously flawed.
You may well be right, but if so, that is hardly good news. Prohibition was in force for something like ten years. Hundreds if not thousands were killed, either by government thugs (coast guard, police, FBI) or gangsters (nongovernment thugs), and hundreds if not thousands more were imprisoned, lost their homes, and so forth. Not to mention the social ramifications (higher rates of alcoholism due to the near absence of low-alcoholic content beverages such as beer and whine coupled with the plethora of more profitable high-alcoholic content moonshine liquors of various types, and the emergence of an organized crime syndicate financed from profits made possible by the criminalization of alcohol which we still have with us today, 70 years later).
How many of us will lose our homes, our livelihoods, our freedoms, and even our lives, before this "regulation is slowly lifted?" How many evil, destructive policies will be enacted, how many evil, destructive people and organizations will benefit financially, gaining even more power, before it is over.
Finally, with the full-scale assualt on nearly every aspect of our democracy and our constitutional rights, how do you know the mechanisms will even still be in place for the situation to correct itself at all? Just because the United States has flirted with constitutional disaster before and had the good fortune to emerge relatively intact, doesn't mean we'll be so lucky again.
I suppose that if I wanted to, I could redirect an internet brodacast to a file, kill the ads, and listen at my pleasure.
You mean, kind of like you do with a VCR when you're not going to be home for that season premier of Deep Space Nine?
You can do precisely the same thing with a hauppauge card and a traditional radio broadcast, namely record any broadcast you like with no appreciable quality loss between what your ears hear the first time (listening to the live braodcast) and the second time (listening to the recording on your hard drive, assuming a lossless storage format).
The digital vs. analogue argument is simple misdirection, an effort for entities like the MPAA and the RIAA to gain even more draconian authority over the products they sell us, and how we are permitted to use them in our own homes, using the spectre of "perfect" recording capabilities by the masses as a boogeyman.
Casual users have had an effective means of making "perfect" copies for 20 years now, namely cassette tapes. For most poeple's purposes these constitute "perfect" copies, and are used (and traded) as such. The internet hasn't changed that fact appreciably, even if it has made trading a little more convinient.
Big time commercial pirates do benefit, but then, they too have had the means of making "perfect" copies for nigh unto 20 years, using prosumer and professional studio and CD pressing equipment.
The laws prior to the DMCA were more than sufficient to deal with both, and still are. Big time (or even small time) commercial pirates get busted, have their assets seized, spend time in jail, and so on. Casual users share music and, as often as not, go ahead and buy the CD anyway, either for convinience sake, as a collector, as gifts, or simply because they want the the cover art along with the music.
Whether someone records a song (complete with DJ talkover) or other braodcast from traditional radio or from internet radio makes absolutely no difference, either in terms of the final storage medium (tape vs. hard drive), format (analogue,.wav,.mp3,...), or behavior (to share or not to share).
It is only a few technophiles like us that really get excited about DIGITAL storage -- everyone else is perfectly happy with lossy mp3 format, lossy cassette tapes, and lossy VHS, and no amount of posturing on the part of the RIAA or the MPAA is going to change that.
Yes, it is. An excellent book - I just finished reading it last night (and made a note of the title and author to post this morning, but you beat me to it.:-))
It offers an excellent, laypersons explaination for Special and General Relativity, Quantum Mechanics, String Theory, Superstring Theory, and M-Theory. It explains these theories and their ramifications in terms easilly understood, as well as their limitations.
You may not like Quantum Theory (Einstein didn't like it either), but it has been demonstrated to be correct, as far as it goes, as has General Relativity.
I too wish there was some way off this rock in our lifetimes, and there may well be if we get off our butts and build a space habitat or two. But, alas, unless M-Theory contains some interesting suprises for us over the next few decades (and it very well could), while we may make it into space, it is unlikely any of us will have the pleasure of walking beneath an alien sun, unless medical science delivers that immortality serum I've been asking for for years now, and we're willing to make a journey of hundreds or even thousands of years.
While slashdot can hardly be expected to be an expert in all areas of science, or to be a perfect, much less final, judge on the merits of specific scientific or pseudoscientific theories, I do think some common sense can be excersized in seperating speculative pseudo-science from hard science.
Perhaps a pseudo-science category, with an appropriate x-files or flying saucer logo, would be in order for articles such as this, which are on (or beyond) the fringe of conventional science. Save the scientific icon and category for hard, well established scientific articles.
This would IMHO boost slashdots credibility when publishing headlines for scientific articles, without censoring the more speculative (and often nonsensical) stories which, while having perhaps little scientific merit, do give some wonderful ideas for science fiction/fantasy stories...
Of course, there would be the incessant "this belonged in the other category!" arguments, but at least a nominal effort to seperate the wheat from the chaff would be a net positive, IMHO.
i cant see it being too hard to flag messages that contain certain words (warez, backup, cdr etc) for manual inspection, provide a `complain about this item` option, etc...
Unfortunately, according to portions of the CDA which were not overturned by the supreme court AFAIK, once a content providor starts excersizing editorial control of any content, they become liable for all content on their site, regardless of whoever posted. By doing absolutely nothing, Yahoo may well have protected themselves legally, despite what this lawsuit purports. Certainly in terms of criminal law this appears to be the case.
Of course, the civil courts could go the other way, putting all ISPs and content providors in the ugly position of being vulnerable criminally if they do excersize editorial control, and being liable civilly if they do not. Given the vagaries of our so-called justice system, this kind of absurd result would not suprise me one bit.
Here is an ignorant and off the cuff question...we can "create" antimatter...does antimatter imply antigravity?
Alas, no.
Antimatter has positive mass, and is gravitationally attractive the same way normal matter is. For example, while a positron and electron have opposite charges and will annihilate one another upon contact, they both exhibit positive gratitational attraction to one another, proportional to their mass.
Still, this doesn't mean antigravity is dead. Who knows what we'll be able to do in 50 or 100 years, if we should learn how to strum superstrings in 11 dimensions...
I was going to suggest an excellent book on the subject of superstring theory and how it relates to quantum physics and relativity, but alas, the book is at home and for some reason I can't recall the exact title. It is an outstanding, non-mathematical explaination of these theories, what they imply, and what questions they do (and do not) answer. Email me if you're interested and I'll try and dig it up.
That's bs. The plain fact is that to average users to much power is _frightening_. To much flexibility is _confusing_. A command line is _scary_. People don't _wan't_ to have so much power that they are loaded with the responsibility of not accidentally wiping things out or unrecoverably breaking their system. It doesn't help Linux at all to ignore this painful facts. It doesn't matter what/we/ think. It matters what the user thinks.
*sigh*
No, it is not BS, although your comment and underlying assumption certainly are.
It is far too late to be replying to this thread, but I simply cannot let this silliness continue.
As I have personally demonstrated, users such as my sister, my mother, a friend of mine (who is a pilot and completely computer illiterate), another friend's grandmother, and other far too numerous examples to mention, do not need or require the commandline to do what they need to do using Linux. They click on an icon to run Word Perfect or Star Office, they click on another icon to run netscape, yet another to run tkrat, still another to run xcdroast, and so on.
They don't even see a command line when installing the operating system! Why? Because, in the two cases where I just handed them a CD and said "Have Fun!" I gave them Mandrake 7.0. Most modern Linux distributions have a GUI install from beginning to end: the user never see's a command line.
It is only when they have to do serious maintenance that they might be confronted with a command line, which is a very unusual situation for most users. "Power" users are the exception, but then, they are also far more open than most in learning how to type "./config" and "make" than the average user I've turned on to Linux. Even then, with Mandrake or Red Hat many of the issues can be dealt with using a GUI. In only one case have I had to tell the user to go to the command line to do something.
Yes, if the user has to do high level system maintenance they will probably be confronted with a command line. One guy I know had to deal with this when he bought a sound card which required ALSA. And guess what. He had little trouble reading the README and installing the driver himself, even though he had never so much as compiled a kernel before (which ALSA more or less requires).
Most users in my experience, once shown how to do things from the commandline (and again, I reiterate, this in my experience is almost never necessary), are far more comfortable cutting and pasting a "mknod" command from a README or HOWTO file than they are editing a misbegotten Register. Furthermore, I have had several people comment that they had a much easier time figuring out what they had to do, even knowing almost nothing about Linux and even less about UNIX in general from the online HOWTOs, than they did trying to navigate the disorganized GUI windows users are afflicted with.
These aren't computer geeks I'm talking about, these are users with below-average cluefulness (my friend's grandmother, for crying out loud!)
It has gotten to the point now where people are asking me, sometimes completely out of the blue, "can you show me how to setup Linux, I want to try it." I do not see any of the hesitency or unwillingness to use Linux on the part of users that you and others keep alluding to.
then that agreement presumably gets torn up and they find themselves back in the firing line. Skala will have to give Mattel their $1 back as well. What an unholy mess...
If it should turn out that the the agreement is torn up and the authors have to give the dollar back to mattel, I hope one of them uses it to wipe their ass with first.
More likely, the Mattel lawyers simply never grokked open source and were smartly outmaneuvered by the authors and their lawyers. If so, the Mattel lawyers have dug their own graves, for which I weep not a single tear.
It doesn't matter how crappy Windows is from our perspective, if a user has to reboot twice a day, but still can get his work done, they will certainly use Windows over a Linux machine on which they either have to go through a steep learning curve or where the applications they use (regardless of equivalents) simply aren't present or don't work. That's the facts.
Except that you have some of your "facts" wrong:
they [... ] have to go through a steep learning curve Users do not need to go through a steep learning curve to use Linux at all, or even to install if they are using a modern distribution. The only learning curve applies when trying to do something fancy maintenance-wise, which is no more difficult (and usually quite a bit easier) than learning to do the same thing under Windows.
where the applications they use (regardless of equivalents) simply aren't present or don't work. It is very rare for applications to not be present on Linux, and even rarer for them to not work properly. Users are far more married to file formats than they are applications. I have found that, without exception, when a user says "I need to have application x" what they really mean is "I need to have an application as easy to use as x, with the same capabilities and able to read and write the same file format as x," which applications are present under Linux for nearly every task these days.
Even in the case where there are one or two applications the user cannot live without, for which there is no Linux alternative (videocapture and certain games come to mind), most users I have dealt with have preferred running dual boot machines and running Linux where possible to running windows. At least this way they have more control over when and where, and for what reason, their machine is being rebooted, and the frequency of system crashes and hangs is dramatically reduced. Contrary to popular myth here, users do care about stability and reliability very, very much.
Did you ever consider your parents' reluctance to consider Linux as an alternative might be a reflection of your own pro-Microsoft bias?
While there are a (very) few applications for which Linux simply isn't an ideal solution (video capture for the nonce being one, running some games being another), I challenge any reader here to consider the following:
What is the most common question you are asked by friends and acquaintances, when the find out that you study/work in the computing field?
Four out of Five computer professionals surveyed say: "Can you fix my [Windows] computer?" (While the comment is a little toung in cheeck, among the rather large number of computer professionals I know, the statistic would be 37 out of 37 surveyed).
The only reason users consider Windows to be "easier" to use than, for example, Linux, is that it comes preinstalled on their computer. Using just about anything which is already installed is, by definition, easier than installing something new.
However, once users are confronted with installing Windows again themselves (and this happens to anyone who uses their system with any regularity sooner or later, c.f. bitrot and MS IE or Office's behavior with respect to DLLs shared by non-microsoft products like Netscape and Word Perfect), they are amazed to discover how much more difficult it is to install the latest release of windows 98 than, say, Linux Mandrake. How does one demonstrate this to them? By sitting back and letting them do the work, and being present to provide moral and technical support, and consume their beer in the process.
Once installed, Linux is just as easy to use as Windows, as far as the end user is concerned. When it comes to maintenance, it is even easier, especially if you run Mandrake and use their "update" feature. What's more, it doesn't break on them again in six months! In fact, herein lies one very huge advantage to turning ones non-techie friends onto Linux, where possible: the amount of time you'll spend helping them fix their system yet again will go down dramatically.
I have turned more non-technical people on to Linux than I can count. Not one has returned to using Windows. Not one. These aren't geeks. These are artists, pilots, teachers, authors, and musicians. I haven't done this by "preaching about Linux's robustness" as you put it, but by simpy handing them a Mandrake or Red Hat CD and offering to help them install it. As I said, my "help" for the most part has been to sit back, drink one of their beers, and watch them do the work, answering an occiasional question here or there.
Oh, by the way, the average "clueless" user is much smarter than you arrogantly give them credit for. They do give far more than "two shits" about the robustness and reliablity of their system. They don't care nearly as much whether they are using Microsoft Word, StarOffice, Word Perfect, Abiword, or whatever, as long as they can get to know the interface quickly, and can read and write files in the same filke format their friends and collegues use (usually either Word or Word Perfect). They may lack the technical jargon to express their desire for reliability and robustness, but it is readilly aparent in every sigh of disgust when they lose an hours work due to a system hang, and every frustrated plea upon meeting me: "Can you please fix my broken [Windows] computer?" and in every instance when I diffidently suggest they might want to try Linux and am met with an enthusiastic "Yes!"
Wow, the Microsoft paid moderators appear to be out in force. Lest we forget, and be drawn in by the many reasonable-sounding platitudes of forgiveness, lets debunk a few myths:
Microsoft can never take Linux away from us, even if they crush it commercially. Not True. Remember Win-modems? Win-printers. Microsoft had embarked on a strategy to get hardware manufacturers to produce hardware "optimized" for Microsoft operating systems (where "optimized" was defined as "usable only by thier (approved) OSes"). MS was hard at work creating a world where developers of emerging operating systems, such as Linux and FreeBSD, would not have been able to get programming specs for device drivers at any price. Fortunately for the proponents of Open Source, being put under a microscope and subjected to public view forced Microsoft to suspend this strategy, at least temporarilly.
Microsoft didn't do anything wrong, it is a company's fudiciary responsibility to make as much money as they can, any way they can. Not True. It is not a company's fudiciary responsiblity to violate federal anti-trust legislation in order to maximize profits, or, indeed, to violate any law whatsoever. In fact, a company has a fudiciary responsibility to abide by the law, lest shareholders lose money as a result of legal consiquences, such as, say, an anti-trust trial brought against them by the Department of Justice.
Forcing Microsoft to release Windows Souce would remedy their behavior. Not True. Others have commented on the quality of the code, and the (lack of) value in having it avialable. More to the point, Microsoft could simply relelase the source to Windows 9x, then simpy turn around and push win2k or some other product, in much the same way they de-emphasized DOS once the Consent Decree was reached in the mid-nineties.
Breaking up Microsoft would be bad for computing. Not True. Whether MS were broken up vertically, such that multiple companies were competing with one another in offering Win 9x/NT/2k, Office, etc., or horizontally, such that one entity markets the OS, another Office products, another internet products, and so on, the end result would be a more competative, and hence more robust, marketplace. This is good for the consumer, good for the competition, and ultimately good for the technology. Ironically, if the breakup of AT&T and subsequent boom in the telephony industry is any indication, it would also be very good for MSFT stockholders.
Microsoft can be trusted to abide by whatever agreement (if any) they come to with the DOJ or the court. Not True. The Consent Decree clearly demonstrates the lack of good faith Microsoft has brought to the table in all of these negotiations. How many people remember the original reason the current anti-trust trial came into being in the first place? It was because the DOJ was accusing Microsoft of (gross) violations of the Consent Decree, in which they agreed (among other things) to stop requiring vendors to pay for a copy of the OS on each computer shipped, whether or not the OS was actually installed. Microsoft's response was that "this is Windows 95, not DOS, and therefor not covered in the consent decree." Caldera later proved that Windows 95 was nothing more than a fancy program running on top of DOS 7.0. Interstingly enough, shortly thereafter, hardware manufacturers started offering other operating systems in addition to Windows.
Microsoft is popular because it is easier for non-techies to use. Not True. I personally have several examples (a pilot friend, a sister, a mother, and a friend's grandmother) of people who were very uncomfortable with computers running windows because, whenever it would crash, they felt they were making mistakes. The result - they were afraid to use the machine much for fear of "breaking" it. In all cases they found Linux running X and gnome or KDE to be far easier to use, because it works reliably and consistently. They work in confidence that, unless they are doing something as root (and teaching them to understand what that means took all of about 30 seconds), they cannot break the machine. Net result - they are using their machines more, with greater confidence, and, though still illiterate by our standards, they are picking a few things up while being able to get the work done they need to. Most of all, they are no longer afraid of their machines.
Microsoft is committed to Open Specifications. Not True. Examples far too numerous to mention (Java, W3C, etc.) left to the reader. ("Embrace and Extend", etc.)
Whatever the solution the judge comes up with, I think the absurd platitudes from the hoards of paid Microsoft astroturfers hear have every reason to fall upon deaf ears. We've heard it all before, and most of us see as clearly through the lies and propoganda today as we did when this all started a few years ago. If you must insult our intelligence by spewing such nonsense here, don't come crying to daddy when the followup posts are a little hot under the collar.
I've been using checkfree for about six years now, originally as a Compuserve-based add on to Quicken, now as a software-agnostic web interface. The cost is $10/month, and I only use the basic bill-paying features, but I have been very pleased with their product.
I have changed banks twice, with no difficulties, and migrated from the Quicken/MS centric dialup interface (compuserve) to the web interface, also with no difficulties.
If a payment goes astray, they will track it down for you (every time this has happened it has been an accounting error on the creditor's side - Ameritech and Commonwealth Eddison (typical old-school monopoly utility companies) were notorious for this, but the folks of checkfree did the legwork in getting the issues resolved.
The web login insists that you be 128-bit capable, which is reassuring (as there were a couple of times I would have unknowingly connected using 40-bit encryption).
All in all very nice, especially when you are travelling for seven months strait (as I used to do), or have decided to take a month off and go on safari with no possible contact to the western world. Even just residing in the States, one gets very used to the convenience of having those recurring payments (loan and mortgage, for example) queued up automatically each month.
f you start cutting those others costs down, you're going to attract lower skilled workers, using weaker desktop machines along with much less rendering power, so in the end your film is going to need an extra 12-18 months to reach distribution, all so you can save $15,000 on the software.
In 18 months the average desktop machine will likely have enough horsepower to do what you are demanding.
More importantly, to those who are making movies and storyboards as hobbies, an extra few months of rendering is OK if it means they can make their movie, the alternative being simply out of their pricerange. We can facilitate a renaissance of creativity by making the tools available to those the media mogules do not, and let the quality of what they produce stand (or fall) on its own.
Of course, with enough content already in an open commons of GPL/BSD open content, any number of people could shoot scenes against a green-screen and overlay already rendered scenery, vastly reducing time-to-market. More likely, most projects would use a mix of their own product and other material, at no cost, with little penalty in time.
Yes, the first projects might go slow, just as the first year Linux development went rather slow, compared to today's breakneck pace. But, unlike commercial efforts, each project would be free to draw on the fruits of other open projects, leading to a synergy of effort and a plethora of products the so-called culture industry could never dream of matching.
In the end, I think the amount of $$$ spent on proprietary software and formats is SUCH A SMALL SLICE of the actual production costs, that it really just isn't worth it. Talent and hardware cost so much more than the software.
Talent is expensive because everyone wants a "big name" in the credits of their movie, be it a well known acter, director, special effects house, or whatever. This is endemic to hollywood, not to smaller outfits wanting to get their product out. Distribution and marketing costs are high, unless, of course, one uses the internet instead.
Most of the dreck on TV, using such expensive "talent" (using the term very liberally), could be produced by teenagers with a camera, a set, and the right editing tools, and would probably have more interesting content to boot.[1] By providing the tools and licensing infrastructure to young talent to do just that, we unleash a whole slew of talented people who are empowered to create their own content and show it to others. A BSD/GPL[2] open content license would give each successive project a growing wealth of ideas and content to draw on. Very quickly we would see the best ideas move forward and improve, in ways that would, in a suprisingly short time, surpass the efforts of large studios and the expensive "talent" they employ. The Actors Union may not like this, but just about everyone else will.
[1]As an example, a show I loved (until its last, dismal season), sliders, suffered from some severly bad acting even in its best days. With the exception of one character, any high school thespian club would be able to provide as much if not more acting talent. Most shows on television don't even rate as highly as that one did, in either content (writing, directing) or acting.
Even with everything you need being free, you'll find a few roadblocks in your path... Movies, music, television, newspapers, books, and magazines, as trashy as some of them are, are art. Programming is much more of a science.
First, I think programming is much more of an art than you give it credit for, and many programmers have artistic leanings in other areas (music, video, painting, whatever).
I guess I didn't make myself clear in my original point, however. The Open Source community could develope free and open tools, protocols, and storage standards for creating and packaging the media. Artists would have access to these tools, and would be facilitated in creating content. Open source projects of this kind could reduce the production costs to a low enough level (effectively zero, modula the artist's time, if "virtual casting" technology were to ever reach a point where human actors become secondary or superfulous -- not something that will happen this decade probably, but will happen eventually). With production costs near zero, many artists would likely release some of their material under an open, collaborative license, for exposure and marketing if nothing else (much like the mp3.com phenominon). Hobbiests would be even more so inclined. As for wizardry, I would submit that for every "discovered" wizard who has "sold out" (as a theater friend of mine put it), there are probably hundreds of equally if not more talented "wizards" who would contribute their talents, if only they had the tools and channels available to them.
One of the real problems right now is that content is rather expensive to create, and this is an area open source could address directly.
And who knows, with a growing wealth of open, free (as in speach) content, we might very well not need to rely on the media moguls as heavilly for our entertainment. Over time Open Content quality would no doubt improve, much as it has in the open source movement, probably surpassing that which is produced in hollywood rather quickly (though that may not be saying much) and hollywood et. al. would find themselves marginalized in popular culture.
I once read that once a movie or song becomes 50 years old, it automatically turns public domain. Is this true? Does that mean that copying and distributing "Citizen Kane" or "It's a Wonderful Life" is perfectly legal? What about the VHS or DVD?
May I suggest rereading the article posted?
The short answer is (asuming you live in the United States) your congress was bought cheap by media intersts, including Disney and Time-Warner, and copyright has been extended retroactively from 75 to 95 years (for corporate held copyrights), and from life+50 to life+70 for individual copyright holders.
Instead of writing fan fiction, get together with other people and create your own setting, that you can write about and do whatever you want with.
This is an excellent point.
Not to long ago I posted a proposal to forego the products of Hollywood altogether and return to fireside chats and more traditional, noncontrolled forms of entertainment. However, while I have had little trouble boycotting Hollywood (indeed, they have lost hundreds of dollars in DVD sales in the last couple of months from me alone), most of my friends are unable to tear themselves away from their bread and circuses, even knowing the harm the publishers of the material they consume are causing.
Your suggestion is I think much more powerful and interesting. Create our own content and take back our popular culture from the media moguls! With the open video disc project working toward a fully unencumbered digitial media standard, and ever larger storage media emerging (making patented video encoding and compression methods possibly obsolete altogether), the logical next step is to create our own content and completely divorce ourselves from hollywood altogether.
The open source community could take the lead in developing free software which would allow anyone to create digital special effects, and perhaps even digital casting (computer animation instead of acting, with the ultimate goal to be rendering of scenes where one could not tell the difference). Coupled with one of the open content licenses, this could become a very powerful counter-cultural medium which would do to Hollywood, the MPAA, the DVD-Forum, and the RIAA what open source is doing to the likes of Microsoft - obliterating them from the grass roots.
Slashdot Mirror
For gnome to be usable in our environment, you need to allow the sysadmin to override the default spooling environment.
For example, we use rlpr and manage printcap files on only a couple of servers (one primary, one backup). The print command should be as easy to override as it is in netscape ("rlpr" instead of "lpr", etc.), and preferably also settable to a default by the system administrator in a central configuration file.
This feature is IMHO much more important than providing a gui to the end user to manage their own queue (although having both would be ideal). In other words, if providing a GUI queue management interface shoudl require sacrificing this customizability, then the GUI should go.
If you are mirroring software which is now illegal under the American DMCA, please consider redirecting your logs to
You cannot be forced to turn over information to lawyerly thugs if you do not possess it. As for those of us living in the United States, we need to begin comming to terms with the unpleasant fact that, for many intents and purposes, we now live in an extremely authoritarian, draconian state, and begin organizing our lives accordingly.
In short:
- Mirror sites: please send your logs to
/dev/null to protect the identity (and anonymouty) of your "customers" - i.e. those who download the files you are mirroring.
- Get involved politically - we have a moral duty to ourselves and our forfathers to make every effort to win our country back. While you can couch this obligation in whatever terms apply to whatever country you are in, I think it goes without saying that we all need to be involved, wherever we are, and fight these trends with all of the political weapons our democratic systems provide us, wherever we are. You can be certain the extremely well-financed opposition is doing so.
- Tell your friends and neighbors - Yes, you will be mocked by many of them. Thanks to the popular media apathy is very fashionable. Anyone expressing a passionate political view will be labelled a radical. Get over it, and express those views anyway. Peer pressure to remain silent and pretend not to care is one of the most insidious forms of censorship and social engineering, and we need to start standing up to it.
- Fight these trends on the grass-roots level (which most of us are doing anyway). In my case, I and a couple of friends are working on the open content concept of a new, free culture mentioned earlier here on slashdot. In a very real sense, every open source project is a grass roots effort in this respect. Get involved.
- Have a way out. We have a moral duty to ourselves and our families to have a an escape route, if and when things degenerate further. The notion of an Amercian needing to seek political asylum in Canada or Europe may sound (and seem) absurd, but remember that it has happened before (remember Oppenheimer? Not to mention thousands of conscientious objectors during the Vietnam war) and will most certainly happen again. Quite possibly to us, given the current state of technical and IP legislation.
Thank god my airplane will get me to Canada on less than one tank of fuel.As is obvious to everybody with one or more neurons firing, the previous poster was not Linus Torvalds, but YADTAST (Yet Another Dummer Than A Stump Troll).
/usr/include.
That having been said, the original poster is probably referring to the 'THIS_MODULE' undeclared here error message a number of us ran into, the solution to which is here.
In short, you need to #include linux/modules.h just before the first #include asm/.. statement. An annoying buglet in the pre-release code, but easy enough to find the answer at deja.com, altavista.com, or by grepping on the contents of
At the very least, a bug report gets (at this point, has gotten) the bug fixed.
I wonder how you intend to stop EVERYONE from buying DVDs.
This is just silly. Nowhere in his "60's rant" did he claim to be able to "stop EVERYONE from buying DVDs." You can't even stop everyone from espousing completely rediculous points of view such as neo-nazism or pro-Microsoft FUD, much less take on a huge, well entrenched and well financed trust of media conglomerates.
The poster is encouraging those of us who care enough about this issue to be concerned to not fall for a closed-source trap which will allow the aforementioned trust of conglomerates to deflect public interest from the issues at hand, quite possibly undermine the DeCSS defense, and allow them to continue to dictate terms of usage to consumers in violation of the law[1].
Whether or not you agree with the views espoused, your characterization of his comments to mean he is out to force EVERYONE to abide by his views is simply absurd. He is trying to convince, not coerce. And an ever growing number of us are convinced.
[1]See previously posted legal arguments regarding how (a) the DVD CCA is an illegal trust, (b) how region coding is in violation of international trade law, and (c) how CSS prevents fair use, in direct violation of law in several countries including Germany.
Most of the bandwidth of this group is generated by various cross-posting ASSHOLES beating the drum of their causes in a group that doesn't give a shit.
.kill file in several years, but at one time one could filter out nearly all of the noise in any number of clever ways. Making this feature available in a user-friendly (read: GUI I suppsoe) fashion for an average USENET app shouldn't be all that difficult.
As I mentioned in another post, we should be seeking technical solutions to these problems. This is an excellent example.
It shouldn't be too hard to design or configure a news reader to automagically filter articles that are crossposted to more than one newsgroup, irrespective of content. I haven't hacked a
So, ironically, USENET as an archive of information is much more useful than the web IMHO, despite the fact that as a forum it is being murdered by the spammers and trollers.
Unfortunately, if USENT truly does die as you and others predict, some ugly consiquences will emerge:
It is in all of our interests to keep USENET alive. If the signal to noise ratio has grown so bad that it is difficult to use, and moderation is unacceptable, perhaps some kind of slashdot-style rating of posts, or other tweak is necessary. I believe it would be a mistake to simply dismiss what is still, even today, a valuable resource and simply allow it to die.
Unless, of course, none of us want to be able to quickly look up answers to our questions anymore on deja.com, or to post an opinion safely and anonymously that might otherwise be supressed (and no, I don't thing slashdots anonymouty is secure enough to use for anything other than the most casual purposes).
Instead of throwing our hands up and shrugging, we should be looking for solutions to the signal to noise problem which preseves USENETs overall strengths of decentralized authority, resistence to censorship, and anonymouty.
It's just that most people are afraid of expressing such a view because the 1337 bandwagon-jumpers will flame them to death with shit like "L1NUX R00LZ, D00D! MIRCO$OFT SUX0RZZ!!".
What an absolute crock of shit. The only people posting that kind of idiocy are anonymous cowardly trolls, which anyone with an IQ of two digits or more recongizes for what they are and ignores (or never reads, if one's threshhold is set at +1), and the paid Microsoft Astroturfers and FUDders who substitute ad hominim attacks against slashdot readers for well reasoned arguments.
The latter may be a result of the fact, obvious even to the most casual observer, that Microsoft's behavior has been reprehensible, harmful to the consumer, the technology, and the industry, and above all illegal.
You can inundate our threads with hoards of underpaid (or well paid) Microsoft public relations droids and attempt to distort the public dialogue of slashdot and other technical forums all you like. What you fail to realize is, there is only a vanishingly small minority of people here stupid enough to believe your propoganda.
Face it. Microsoft broke the law, harmed millions in the process, and is now (finally) beginning to reap the natural consiquences of their behavior. Get over it already.
What, you`re telling me that if you posted a message selling drugs (or whatever) on a Republican party/Big Company site chat room/message board, then they`d be responsible?
That was one of the aspects of the CDA: if you excersize editorial control over what people are posting, then you are responsible for what people post there, and do bear some liability if someone does, in fact, try to sell drugs from one of your discussion forums. On the other hand, if you excersize no editorial control (a la' slashdot), you cannot be held accountable for what others say and do.
Of course, running a discussion forum is arguably different from running a flea market or auction site, so the argument may not hold anyway. If I were the defense I'd argue the auction site is simply a discussion forum with a couple of fancy features (like storing bids and offers). If I were the prosecution, I'd compare it to a bar, which cities do close down if illegal activity is going on. On the other hand, yanking a liquor license is a coercive activity, not a penalty for criminal wrongdoing resulting from a judgement, so the prosecution could lose on that argument as well.
Either way, it is by no means a slam dunk against Yahoo. Perhaps quite the opposite, in fact...
Internet Regulation by the US...will end up like the Prohibition. The Prohibition was canceled shortly after it was enacted because it was seriously flawed.
You may well be right, but if so, that is hardly good news. Prohibition was in force for something like ten years. Hundreds if not thousands were killed, either by government thugs (coast guard, police, FBI) or gangsters (nongovernment thugs), and hundreds if not thousands more were imprisoned, lost their homes, and so forth. Not to mention the social ramifications (higher rates of alcoholism due to the near absence of low-alcoholic content beverages such as beer and whine coupled with the plethora of more profitable high-alcoholic content moonshine liquors of various types, and the emergence of an organized crime syndicate financed from profits made possible by the criminalization of alcohol which we still have with us today, 70 years later).
How many of us will lose our homes, our livelihoods, our freedoms, and even our lives, before this "regulation is slowly lifted?" How many evil, destructive policies will be enacted, how many evil, destructive people and organizations will benefit financially, gaining even more power, before it is over.
Finally, with the full-scale assualt on nearly every aspect of our democracy and our constitutional rights, how do you know the mechanisms will even still be in place for the situation to correct itself at all? Just because the United States has flirted with constitutional disaster before and had the good fortune to emerge relatively intact, doesn't mean we'll be so lucky again.
I suppose that if I wanted to, I could redirect an internet brodacast to a file, kill the ads, and listen at my pleasure.
.wav, .mp3, ...), or behavior (to share or not to share).
You mean, kind of like you do with a VCR when you're not going to be home for that season premier of Deep Space Nine?
You can do precisely the same thing with a hauppauge card and a traditional radio broadcast, namely record any broadcast you like with no appreciable quality loss between what your ears hear the first time (listening to the live braodcast) and the second time (listening to the recording on your hard drive, assuming a lossless storage format).
The digital vs. analogue argument is simple misdirection, an effort for entities like the MPAA and the RIAA to gain even more draconian authority over the products they sell us, and how we are permitted to use them in our own homes, using the spectre of "perfect" recording capabilities by the masses as a boogeyman.
Casual users have had an effective means of making "perfect" copies for 20 years now, namely cassette tapes. For most poeple's purposes these constitute "perfect" copies, and are used (and traded) as such. The internet hasn't changed that fact appreciably, even if it has made trading a little more convinient.
Big time commercial pirates do benefit, but then, they too have had the means of making "perfect" copies for nigh unto 20 years, using prosumer and professional studio and CD pressing equipment.
The laws prior to the DMCA were more than sufficient to deal with both, and still are. Big time (or even small time) commercial pirates get busted, have their assets seized, spend time in jail, and so on. Casual users share music and, as often as not, go ahead and buy the CD anyway, either for convinience sake, as a collector, as gifts, or simply because they want the the cover art along with the music.
Whether someone records a song (complete with DJ talkover) or other braodcast from traditional radio or from internet radio makes absolutely no difference, either in terms of the final storage medium (tape vs. hard drive), format (analogue,
It is only a few technophiles like us that really get excited about DIGITAL storage -- everyone else is perfectly happy with lossy mp3 format, lossy cassette tapes, and lossy VHS, and no amount of posturing on the part of the RIAA or the MPAA is going to change that.
Brian Greene - The Elegant Universe?
:-))
Yes, it is. An excellent book - I just finished reading it last night (and made a note of the title and author to post this morning, but you beat me to it.
May I suggest The Elegant Universe by Brian R Greene?
It offers an excellent, laypersons explaination for Special and General Relativity, Quantum Mechanics, String Theory, Superstring Theory, and M-Theory. It explains these theories and their ramifications in terms easilly understood, as well as their limitations.
You may not like Quantum Theory (Einstein didn't like it either), but it has been demonstrated to be correct, as far as it goes, as has General Relativity.
I too wish there was some way off this rock in our lifetimes, and there may well be if we get off our butts and build a space habitat or two. But, alas, unless M-Theory contains some interesting suprises for us over the next few decades (and it very well could), while we may make it into space, it is unlikely any of us will have the pleasure of walking beneath an alien sun, unless medical science delivers that immortality serum I've been asking for for years now, and we're willing to make a journey of hundreds or even thousands of years.
While slashdot can hardly be expected to be an expert in all areas of science, or to be a perfect, much less final, judge on the merits of specific scientific or pseudoscientific theories, I do think some common sense can be excersized in seperating speculative pseudo-science from hard science.
Perhaps a pseudo-science category, with an appropriate x-files or flying saucer logo, would be in order for articles such as this, which are on (or beyond) the fringe of conventional science. Save the scientific icon and category for hard, well established scientific articles.
This would IMHO boost slashdots credibility when publishing headlines for scientific articles, without censoring the more speculative (and often nonsensical) stories which, while having perhaps little scientific merit, do give some wonderful ideas for science fiction/fantasy stories...
Of course, there would be the incessant "this belonged in the other category!" arguments, but at least a nominal effort to seperate the wheat from the chaff would be a net positive, IMHO.
i cant see it being too hard to flag messages that contain certain words (warez, backup, cdr etc) for manual inspection, provide a `complain about this item` option, etc...
Unfortunately, according to portions of the CDA which were not overturned by the supreme court AFAIK, once a content providor starts excersizing editorial control of any content, they become liable for all content on their site, regardless of whoever posted. By doing absolutely nothing, Yahoo may well have protected themselves legally, despite what this lawsuit purports. Certainly in terms of criminal law this appears to be the case.
Of course, the civil courts could go the other way, putting all ISPs and content providors in the ugly position of being vulnerable criminally if they do excersize editorial control, and being liable civilly if they do not. Given the vagaries of our so-called justice system, this kind of absurd result would not suprise me one bit.
Here is an ignorant and off the cuff question...we can "create" antimatter...does antimatter imply antigravity?
...
Alas, no.
Antimatter has positive mass, and is gravitationally attractive the same way normal matter is. For example, while a positron and electron have opposite charges and will annihilate one another upon contact, they both exhibit positive gratitational attraction to one another, proportional to their mass.
Still, this doesn't mean antigravity is dead. Who knows what we'll be able to do in 50 or 100 years, if we should learn how to strum superstrings in 11 dimensions
I was going to suggest an excellent book on the subject of superstring theory and how it relates to quantum physics and relativity, but alas, the book is at home and for some reason I can't recall the exact title. It is an outstanding, non-mathematical explaination of these theories, what they imply, and what questions they do (and do not) answer. Email me if you're interested and I'll try and dig it up.
That's bs. The plain fact is that to average users to much power is _frightening_. To much flexibility is _confusing_. A command line is _scary_. People don't _wan't_ to have so much power that they are loaded with the responsibility of not accidentally wiping things out or unrecoverably breaking their system. It doesn't help Linux at all to ignore this painful facts. It doesn't matter what /we/ think. It matters what the user thinks.
*sigh*
No, it is not BS, although your comment and underlying assumption certainly are.
It is far too late to be replying to this thread, but I simply cannot let this silliness continue.
As I have personally demonstrated, users such as my sister, my mother, a friend of mine (who is a pilot and completely computer illiterate), another friend's grandmother, and other far too numerous examples to mention, do not need or require the commandline to do what they need to do using Linux. They click on an icon to run Word Perfect or Star Office, they click on another icon to run netscape, yet another to run tkrat, still another to run xcdroast, and so on.
They don't even see a command line when installing the operating system! Why? Because, in the two cases where I just handed them a CD and said "Have Fun!" I gave them Mandrake 7.0. Most modern Linux distributions have a GUI install from beginning to end: the user never see's a command line.
It is only when they have to do serious maintenance that they might be confronted with a command line, which is a very unusual situation for most users. "Power" users are the exception, but then, they are also far more open than most in learning how to type "./config" and "make" than the average user I've turned on to Linux. Even then, with Mandrake or Red Hat many of the issues can be dealt with using a GUI. In only one case have I had to tell the user to go to the command line to do something.
Yes, if the user has to do high level system maintenance they will probably be confronted with a command line. One guy I know had to deal with this when he bought a sound card which required ALSA. And guess what. He had little trouble reading the README and installing the driver himself, even though he had never so much as compiled a kernel before (which ALSA more or less requires).
Most users in my experience, once shown how to do things from the commandline (and again, I reiterate, this in my experience is almost never necessary), are far more comfortable cutting and pasting a "mknod" command from a README or HOWTO file than they are editing a misbegotten Register. Furthermore, I have had several people comment that they had a much easier time figuring out what they had to do, even knowing almost nothing about Linux and even less about UNIX in general from the online HOWTOs, than they did trying to navigate the disorganized GUI windows users are afflicted with.
These aren't computer geeks I'm talking about, these are users with below-average cluefulness (my friend's grandmother, for crying out loud!)
It has gotten to the point now where people are asking me, sometimes completely out of the blue, "can you show me how to setup Linux, I want to try it." I do not see any of the hesitency or unwillingness to use Linux on the part of users that you and others keep alluding to.
then that agreement presumably gets torn up and they find themselves back in the firing line. Skala will have to give Mattel their $1 back as well. What an unholy mess...
If it should turn out that the the agreement is torn up and the authors have to give the dollar back to mattel, I hope one of them uses it to wipe their ass with first.
More likely, the Mattel lawyers simply never grokked open source and were smartly outmaneuvered by the authors and their lawyers. If so, the Mattel lawyers have dug their own graves, for which I weep not a single tear.
Except that you have some of your "facts" wrong:
Even in the case where there are one or two applications the user cannot live without, for which there is no Linux alternative (videocapture and certain games come to mind), most users I have dealt with have preferred running dual boot machines and running Linux where possible to running windows. At least this way they have more control over when and where, and for what reason, their machine is being rebooted, and the frequency of system crashes and hangs is dramatically reduced. Contrary to popular myth here, users do care about stability and reliability very, very much.
Did you ever consider your parents' reluctance to consider Linux as an alternative might be a reflection of your own pro-Microsoft bias?
While there are a (very) few applications for which Linux simply isn't an ideal solution (video capture for the nonce being one, running some games being another), I challenge any reader here to consider the following:
What is the most common question you are asked by friends and acquaintances, when the find out that you study/work in the computing field?
Four out of Five computer professionals surveyed say: "Can you fix my [Windows] computer?" (While the comment is a little toung in cheeck, among the rather large number of computer professionals I know, the statistic would be 37 out of 37 surveyed).
The only reason users consider Windows to be "easier" to use than, for example, Linux, is that it comes preinstalled on their computer. Using just about anything which is already installed is, by definition, easier than installing something new.
However, once users are confronted with installing Windows again themselves (and this happens to anyone who uses their system with any regularity sooner or later, c.f. bitrot and MS IE or Office's behavior with respect to DLLs shared by non-microsoft products like Netscape and Word Perfect), they are amazed to discover how much more difficult it is to install the latest release of windows 98 than, say, Linux Mandrake. How does one demonstrate this to them? By sitting back and letting them do the work, and being present to provide moral and technical support, and consume their beer in the process.
Once installed, Linux is just as easy to use as Windows, as far as the end user is concerned. When it comes to maintenance, it is even easier, especially if you run Mandrake and use their "update" feature. What's more, it doesn't break on them again in six months! In fact, herein lies one very huge advantage to turning ones non-techie friends onto Linux, where possible: the amount of time you'll spend helping them fix their system yet again will go down dramatically.
I have turned more non-technical people on to Linux than I can count. Not one has returned to using Windows. Not one. These aren't geeks. These are artists, pilots, teachers, authors, and musicians. I haven't done this by "preaching about Linux's robustness" as you put it, but by simpy handing them a Mandrake or Red Hat CD and offering to help them install it. As I said, my "help" for the most part has been to sit back, drink one of their beers, and watch them do the work, answering an occiasional question here or there.
Oh, by the way, the average "clueless" user is much smarter than you arrogantly give them credit for. They do give far more than "two shits" about the robustness and reliablity of their system. They don't care nearly as much whether they are using Microsoft Word, StarOffice, Word Perfect, Abiword, or whatever, as long as they can get to know the interface quickly, and can read and write files in the same filke format their friends and collegues use (usually either Word or Word Perfect). They may lack the technical jargon to express their desire for reliability and robustness, but it is readilly aparent in every sigh of disgust when they lose an hours work due to a system hang, and every frustrated plea upon meeting me: "Can you please fix my broken [Windows] computer?" and in every instance when I diffidently suggest they might want to try Linux and am met with an enthusiastic "Yes!"
Whatever the solution the judge comes up with, I think the absurd platitudes from the hoards of paid Microsoft astroturfers hear have every reason to fall upon deaf ears. We've heard it all before, and most of us see as clearly through the lies and propoganda today as we did when this all started a few years ago. If you must insult our intelligence by spewing such nonsense here, don't come crying to daddy when the followup posts are a little hot under the collar.
I've been using checkfree for about six years now, originally as a Compuserve-based add on to Quicken, now as a software-agnostic web interface. The cost is $10/month, and I only use the basic bill-paying features, but I have been very pleased with their product.
I have changed banks twice, with no difficulties, and migrated from the Quicken/MS centric dialup interface (compuserve) to the web interface, also with no difficulties.
If a payment goes astray, they will track it down for you (every time this has happened it has been an accounting error on the creditor's side - Ameritech and Commonwealth Eddison (typical old-school monopoly utility companies) were notorious for this, but the folks of checkfree did the legwork in getting the issues resolved.
The web login insists that you be 128-bit capable, which is reassuring (as there were a couple of times I would have unknowingly connected using 40-bit encryption).
All in all very nice, especially when you are travelling for seven months strait (as I used to do), or have decided to take a month off and go on safari with no possible contact to the western world. Even just residing in the States, one gets very used to the convenience of having those recurring payments (loan and mortgage, for example) queued up automatically each month.
f you start cutting those others costs down, you're going to attract lower skilled workers, using weaker desktop machines along with much less rendering power, so in the end your film is going to need an extra 12-18 months to reach distribution, all so you can save $15,000 on the software.
In 18 months the average desktop machine will likely have enough horsepower to do what you are demanding.
More importantly, to those who are making movies and storyboards as hobbies, an extra few months of rendering is OK if it means they can make their movie, the alternative being simply out of their pricerange. We can facilitate a renaissance of creativity by making the tools available to those the media mogules do not, and let the quality of what they produce stand (or fall) on its own.
Of course, with enough content already in an open commons of GPL/BSD open content, any number of people could shoot scenes against a green-screen and overlay already rendered scenery, vastly reducing time-to-market. More likely, most projects would use a mix of their own product and other material, at no cost, with little penalty in time.
Yes, the first projects might go slow, just as the first year Linux development went rather slow, compared to today's breakneck pace. But, unlike commercial efforts, each project would be free to draw on the fruits of other open projects, leading to a synergy of effort and a plethora of products the so-called culture industry could never dream of matching.
In the end, I think the amount of $$$ spent on proprietary software and formats is SUCH A SMALL SLICE of the actual production costs, that it really just isn't worth it. Talent and hardware cost so much more than the software.
Talent is expensive because everyone wants a "big name" in the credits of their movie, be it a well known acter, director, special effects house, or whatever. This is endemic to hollywood, not to smaller outfits wanting to get their product out. Distribution and marketing costs are high, unless, of course, one uses the internet instead.
Most of the dreck on TV, using such expensive "talent" (using the term very liberally), could be produced by teenagers with a camera, a set, and the right editing tools, and would probably have more interesting content to boot.[1] By providing the tools and licensing infrastructure to young talent to do just that, we unleash a whole slew of talented people who are empowered to create their own content and show it to others. A BSD/GPL[2] open content license would give each successive project a growing wealth of ideas and content to draw on. Very quickly we would see the best ideas move forward and improve, in ways that would, in a suprisingly short time, surpass the efforts of large studios and the expensive "talent" they employ. The Actors Union may not like this, but just about everyone else will.
[1]As an example, a show I loved (until its last, dismal season), sliders, suffered from some severly bad acting even in its best days. With the exception of one character, any high school thespian club would be able to provide as much if not more acting talent. Most shows on television don't even rate as highly as that one did, in either content (writing, directing) or acting.
[2]Both philosophies would probably flurish
Even with everything you need being free, you'll find a few roadblocks in your path... Movies, music, television, newspapers, books, and magazines, as trashy as some of them are, are art. Programming is much more of a science.
First, I think programming is much more of an art than you give it credit for, and many programmers have artistic leanings in other areas (music, video, painting, whatever).
I guess I didn't make myself clear in my original point, however. The Open Source community could develope free and open tools, protocols, and storage standards for creating and packaging the media. Artists would have access to these tools, and would be facilitated in creating content. Open source projects of this kind could reduce the production costs to a low enough level (effectively zero, modula the artist's time, if "virtual casting" technology were to ever reach a point where human actors become secondary or superfulous -- not something that will happen this decade probably, but will happen eventually). With production costs near zero, many artists would likely release some of their material under an open, collaborative license, for exposure and marketing if nothing else (much like the mp3.com phenominon). Hobbiests would be even more so inclined. As for wizardry, I would submit that for every "discovered" wizard who has "sold out" (as a theater friend of mine put it), there are probably hundreds of equally if not more talented "wizards" who would contribute their talents, if only they had the tools and channels available to them.
One of the real problems right now is that content is rather expensive to create, and this is an area open source could address directly.
And who knows, with a growing wealth of open, free (as in speach) content, we might very well not need to rely on the media moguls as heavilly for our entertainment. Over time Open Content quality would no doubt improve, much as it has in the open source movement, probably surpassing that which is produced in hollywood rather quickly (though that may not be saying much) and hollywood et. al. would find themselves marginalized in popular culture.
I once read that once a movie or song becomes 50 years old, it automatically turns public domain. Is this true? Does that mean that copying and distributing "Citizen Kane" or "It's a Wonderful Life" is perfectly legal? What about the VHS or DVD?
May I suggest rereading the article posted?
The short answer is (asuming you live in the United States) your congress was bought cheap by media intersts, including Disney and Time-Warner, and copyright has been extended retroactively from 75 to 95 years (for corporate held copyrights), and from life+50 to life+70 for individual copyright holders.
Instead of writing fan fiction, get together with other people and create your own setting, that you can write about and do whatever you want with.
This is an excellent point.
Not to long ago I posted a proposal to forego the products of Hollywood altogether and return to fireside chats and more traditional, noncontrolled forms of entertainment. However, while I have had little trouble boycotting Hollywood (indeed, they have lost hundreds of dollars in DVD sales in the last couple of months from me alone), most of my friends are unable to tear themselves away from their bread and circuses, even knowing the harm the publishers of the material they consume are causing.
Your suggestion is I think much more powerful and interesting. Create our own content and take back our popular culture from the media moguls! With the open video disc project working toward a fully unencumbered digitial media standard, and ever larger storage media emerging (making patented video encoding and compression methods possibly obsolete altogether), the logical next step is to create our own content and completely divorce ourselves from hollywood altogether.
The open source community could take the lead in developing free software which would allow anyone to create digital special effects, and perhaps even digital casting (computer animation instead of acting, with the ultimate goal to be rendering of scenes where one could not tell the difference). Coupled with one of the open content licenses, this could become a very powerful counter-cultural medium which would do to Hollywood, the MPAA, the DVD-Forum, and the RIAA what open source is doing to the likes of Microsoft - obliterating them from the grass roots.