This information, if properly anonymized, is a useful commodity to other net firms as well, and helps them to provide us with better service.
Could you provide some examples of this "better service" you mention that tracking has provided us? I'm certainly having trouble finding it.
I agree. Sure the largest volume newgroups can be rife with crap, but that's generally the problem of alt.*. The big-8 is where most of the good stuff happens anyway, and an archive that left out alt.* wouldn't be missing much.
Why should a company be forced to provide a service to someone who obviously isn't happy with it?
The cable company shouldn't care as long as they're getting their money. I hardly think that they're monitoring all of their customers for satisfaction, lest they have to spend lots of time cutting people off or perhaps attenuating their charges. This whole issue is some kind of dance around hard bandwidth caps, so let's discuss why it's even possible for people to oversaturate their connection.
You are advocating one form of compulsion for another, implying that copyright protection is some kind of universal constant that is inalienable. Copyrights are a compromise to cut out a piece of commercial territory to creative people (or to the companies they've signed away and thus loaned their territory) in exchange for a restraint on random people from doing whatever they want with what they see and hear. Like it or not, the history of the arts carries a significant legacy of derivation and straight-up ripping off. This is how we got to where we are today (why don't similar sounding bands sue each other?) and copyrights are used to control that tendency.
The license created in contracts between labels and musicians (or other artists and their promotional designees) typically separate Mechanical rights and Performance rights. Mechanical rights govern the manufacturing of physical media, and Performance rights determine radio play, licensing for commercials, etc. The RIAA and related interests are trying to include Internet rights under existing contracts that don't include Internet-anything, and what I think Sen. Hatch is (perhaps unknowingly) inching toward is a new facet of copyright for nonphysical and nonbroadcast reproduction. Media conglomerates sure aren't going to want to renegotiate every contract they have to include Internet rights, so I think we can look forward to a lot of sick shit from them.
All of this "greed" and "American Way" stuff is really the aftereffects of the point you bring up about barn raisings threatening contractors. Mr. Allchin is being disingenuous by not using enough words to convey his meaning, and when he says that Free/Open software threatens innovation, he's partly right. What he doesn't mention is that it only threatens innovations based on *particular business models*. It's a territorial matter that has nothing to do with functionality or the ways that people use computers. Look at his language: the only concepts he refers to are ones of IP, business model survival, and lobbying the gov't - traditional Rich White Guy domains. He uses the word "innovation" without clarification, as if the process of programmers' creativity will be forced to a standstill by the shifting borders of commercial enterprise.
I heard another cliche'd Napster roundtable on NPR where the RIAA representative said something that really caught my ear as a succint representation of the RIAA's (and by extension to this issue via Microsoft's "threats to innovation" claim) stance on free music: "You can't compete with free." Now, this is really something to hear, and it really communicates the force by which they are committed to the elimination of personal choice and the retention of the commercial flows they've constructed by which they place products in front of our wallets. They've caught themselves in an inflexible position and have turned to prohibition rather than innovate in response to the changes taking place.
>It is an unfortunate state of affairs, but no one can claim to know that a paticular project is patent-free.
It's dangerous to surrender on this point, though. I don't think programmers should yield to Fraunhofer and their ilk based on probable intersections of original code and generalized patents. The Xiph crowd are proactive in determining that they have legs to stand on. You may not realize that commercial distribution of MP3 files encumbers upon the proprietor a royalty of not less than US$15,000 per year payable to Fraunhofer.
I can't support the nihilistic concept that independent media artists, producers, and disseminators should accept this barrier just because patent-holders would prefer we didn't try to get around it. Surely we shouldn't cast programmers as a hopeless bunch who will accept that the software they write should never approach the edges of a flat earth.
I have to wonder if the chickens hatched 4 or 5 years ago when people were registering trademarks to give domain registration some attention are now coming home to roost.
We are a smallish company who just moved into a new building. We have keycards for street-level perimeter entrance and glass-break sensors and contacts on the doors, but no motion-detectors. The entrance point was in a courtyard on the second floor, which required intruders to climb over entire buildings for access. It's a typical dot-com startup situation. Now, it's possible that street people around know ways of getting around the rooftops, and an extenuating coincidence is that the CIO's desk just happened to be the closest one to the window. I would think that it could be a street burglar, except for the fact that they went through his desk and snatched all of his floppies (!) and CDR's. There is expensive software laying around everywhere, as may be common in a development area, so it's odd that the grabbing was so specific. Anyway, there are many many companies who are more in this position than to have 24/7 security personnel. The undercurrent of my inquiry was that there is definitely a mercenary business envrionment out there, and lots of undersecured companies.
Bob Young diverts the argument by focusing on "big picture" type differences, the kinds of criticisms of the Microsoft vs. Everybody environment that were tired two years ago. This isn't about closed source vs. open source, trendy Slashdot-bashing "news" about Computerworld reporting the Sun memory NDA's a full week after it appeared on Slashdot, or whether gcc 2.96 criticism is wrong (whatever "wrong criticism" is). The computing industry demands that certain compromises be made by companies who want to be major players; those who might make the hated comparison are inevitably seeing those compromises being made.
My sense is that the problem is stated by Bob himself when he regales us with historical tales of billg vs. Homebrew computing club without considering whether RH is creating (or duplicating) the same problems Microsoft created for itself by RedHat's being motivated by a similar resentful reaction toward M$ as was presumably aimed at the Homebrewers. Specifically, there are trend with RH that closely mirrors the Redmonster, whether you see it or not. Alan Cox invoking the logic of the enemy in defending the gcc 2.96 decision as a question of "innovation," the nondisclosure pacts regarding the gcc thing, and the 3-week crash being from a utility to simplify administration (perhaps everything we do will be easier and more fun;-) are three of the most recent similarities. Faulting people for making observations is bad form, and to treat them as a vote of no confidence is a scary defensive move that maybe points to a lack of self-awareness in the corporate decisions RH is making.
Bob seems to think that the comparison implies that RH is seen to be trying to duplicate all of M$, which is silly. There's already one Microsoft, the most anybody else can do is to appropriate pieces of it when they want to. Do you know which pieces you're incorporating?
The article says that there is a checkbox during installation that governs this behavior. Aside from the "Opt-in/Opt-out" argument, do we really want to make excuses for people not to pay attention to what they're allowing the computer to do on their behalf?
Next, users who press the "return" key are asked if they would like to notify the people in their address book of a change in e-mail.
Gnutella, et al, notwithstanding, this isn't worth getting worked up over. Napster's recent VC rather convicingly points to their becoming a music delivery service. Napster users are already registering and logging in to access (listen, ultimately) to music, so all that's left is to charge people to connect to Napster servers. Once they completely firewall fans from the major labels they'll be able to control access to the major label content on a subscription basis. They only care about their stuff, not MP3's in general. Heck, pirating MP3's of independent labels reinforces the Majors' position since they're in a better position to absorb any ill financial effects from loss of sales until they figure out a distribution model. Then all they have to do is raise the price of admission by non-Big5 labels to institute the same distribution model that is used for brick and mortar retail.
"Better than nothing" isn't much, and like "as much as possible" it implies that there are facets of Open Sourcing that are valuable and some that are not (on a case-by-case basis). What benefits of OSS might Sun and Novell be attempting to take advantage of, and which liabilities are they avoiding? There seems to be a sense that OSS is synonymous with free software, but from a corporate perspective this would not hold a drop of water. Trimming the QA budget, perhaps?
Slashdot Mirror
This information, if properly anonymized, is a useful commodity to other net firms as well, and helps them to provide us with better service. Could you provide some examples of this "better service" you mention that tracking has provided us? I'm certainly having trouble finding it.
I agree. Sure the largest volume newgroups can be rife with crap, but that's generally the problem of alt.*. The big-8 is where most of the good stuff happens anyway, and an archive that left out alt.* wouldn't be missing much.
Why should a company be forced to provide a service to someone who obviously isn't happy with it? The cable company shouldn't care as long as they're getting their money. I hardly think that they're monitoring all of their customers for satisfaction, lest they have to spend lots of time cutting people off or perhaps attenuating their charges. This whole issue is some kind of dance around hard bandwidth caps, so let's discuss why it's even possible for people to oversaturate their connection.
You are advocating one form of compulsion for another, implying that copyright protection is some kind of universal constant that is inalienable. Copyrights are a compromise to cut out a piece of commercial territory to creative people (or to the companies they've signed away and thus loaned their territory) in exchange for a restraint on random people from doing whatever they want with what they see and hear. Like it or not, the history of the arts carries a significant legacy of derivation and straight-up ripping off. This is how we got to where we are today (why don't similar sounding bands sue each other?) and copyrights are used to control that tendency. The license created in contracts between labels and musicians (or other artists and their promotional designees) typically separate Mechanical rights and Performance rights. Mechanical rights govern the manufacturing of physical media, and Performance rights determine radio play, licensing for commercials, etc. The RIAA and related interests are trying to include Internet rights under existing contracts that don't include Internet-anything, and what I think Sen. Hatch is (perhaps unknowingly) inching toward is a new facet of copyright for nonphysical and nonbroadcast reproduction. Media conglomerates sure aren't going to want to renegotiate every contract they have to include Internet rights, so I think we can look forward to a lot of sick shit from them.
All of this "greed" and "American Way" stuff is really the aftereffects of the point you bring up about barn raisings threatening contractors. Mr. Allchin is being disingenuous by not using enough words to convey his meaning, and when he says that Free/Open software threatens innovation, he's partly right. What he doesn't mention is that it only threatens innovations based on *particular business models*. It's a territorial matter that has nothing to do with functionality or the ways that people use computers. Look at his language: the only concepts he refers to are ones of IP, business model survival, and lobbying the gov't - traditional Rich White Guy domains. He uses the word "innovation" without clarification, as if the process of programmers' creativity will be forced to a standstill by the shifting borders of commercial enterprise. I heard another cliche'd Napster roundtable on NPR where the RIAA representative said something that really caught my ear as a succint representation of the RIAA's (and by extension to this issue via Microsoft's "threats to innovation" claim) stance on free music: "You can't compete with free." Now, this is really something to hear, and it really communicates the force by which they are committed to the elimination of personal choice and the retention of the commercial flows they've constructed by which they place products in front of our wallets. They've caught themselves in an inflexible position and have turned to prohibition rather than innovate in response to the changes taking place.
>It is an unfortunate state of affairs, but no one can claim to know that a paticular project is patent-free.
It's dangerous to surrender on this point, though. I don't think programmers should yield to Fraunhofer and their ilk based on probable intersections of original code and generalized patents. The Xiph crowd are proactive in determining that they have legs to stand on. You may not realize that commercial distribution of MP3 files encumbers upon the proprietor a royalty of not less than US$15,000 per year payable to Fraunhofer.
I can't support the nihilistic concept that independent media artists, producers, and disseminators should accept this barrier just because patent-holders would prefer we didn't try to get around it. Surely we shouldn't cast programmers as a hopeless bunch who will accept that the software they write should never approach the edges of a flat earth.
I have to wonder if the chickens hatched 4 or 5 years ago when people were registering trademarks to give domain registration some attention are now coming home to roost.
We are a smallish company who just moved into a new building. We have keycards for street-level perimeter entrance and glass-break sensors and contacts on the doors, but no motion-detectors. The entrance point was in a courtyard on the second floor, which required intruders to climb over entire buildings for access. It's a typical dot-com startup situation. Now, it's possible that street people around know ways of getting around the rooftops, and an extenuating coincidence is that the CIO's desk just happened to be the closest one to the window. I would think that it could be a street burglar, except for the fact that they went through his desk and snatched all of his floppies (!) and CDR's. There is expensive software laying around everywhere, as may be common in a development area, so it's odd that the grabbing was so specific. Anyway, there are many many companies who are more in this position than to have 24/7 security personnel. The undercurrent of my inquiry was that there is definitely a mercenary business envrionment out there, and lots of undersecured companies.
Bob Young diverts the argument by focusing on "big picture" type differences, the kinds of criticisms of the Microsoft vs. Everybody environment that were tired two years ago. This isn't about closed source vs. open source, trendy Slashdot-bashing "news" about Computerworld reporting the Sun memory NDA's a full week after it appeared on Slashdot, or whether gcc 2.96 criticism is wrong (whatever "wrong criticism" is). The computing industry demands that certain compromises be made by companies who want to be major players; those who might make the hated comparison are inevitably seeing those compromises being made.
;-) are three of the most recent similarities. Faulting people for making observations is bad form, and to treat them as a vote of no confidence is a scary defensive move that maybe points to a lack of self-awareness in the corporate decisions RH is making.
My sense is that the problem is stated by Bob himself when he regales us with historical tales of billg vs. Homebrew computing club without considering whether RH is creating (or duplicating) the same problems Microsoft created for itself by RedHat's being motivated by a similar resentful reaction toward M$ as was presumably aimed at the Homebrewers. Specifically, there are trend with RH that closely mirrors the Redmonster, whether you see it or not. Alan Cox invoking the logic of the enemy in defending the gcc 2.96 decision as a question of "innovation," the nondisclosure pacts regarding the gcc thing, and the 3-week crash being from a utility to simplify administration (perhaps everything we do will be easier and more fun
Bob seems to think that the comparison implies that RH is seen to be trying to duplicate all of M$, which is silly. There's already one Microsoft, the most anybody else can do is to appropriate pieces of it when they want to. Do you know which pieces you're incorporating?
The article says that there is a checkbox during installation that governs this behavior. Aside from the "Opt-in/Opt-out" argument, do we really want to make excuses for people not to pay attention to what they're allowing the computer to do on their behalf? Next, users who press the "return" key are asked if they would like to notify the people in their address book of a change in e-mail.
Gnutella, et al, notwithstanding, this isn't worth getting worked up over. Napster's recent VC rather convicingly points to their becoming a music delivery service. Napster users are already registering and logging in to access (listen, ultimately) to music, so all that's left is to charge people to connect to Napster servers. Once they completely firewall fans from the major labels they'll be able to control access to the major label content on a subscription basis.
They only care about their stuff, not MP3's in general. Heck, pirating MP3's of independent labels reinforces the Majors' position since they're in a better position to absorb any ill financial effects from loss of sales until they figure out a distribution model. Then all they have to do is raise the price of admission by non-Big5 labels to institute the same distribution model that is used for brick and mortar retail.
"Better than nothing" isn't much, and like "as much as possible" it implies that there are facets of Open Sourcing that are valuable and some that are not (on a case-by-case basis). What benefits of OSS might Sun and Novell be attempting to take advantage of, and which liabilities are they avoiding? There seems to be a sense that OSS is synonymous with free software, but from a corporate perspective this would not hold a drop of water. Trimming the QA budget, perhaps?