The lack of creativity comment is annoying. NetTrek was one of the early pioneers of realtime online gaming. A lot of the ideas now appearing in current online games started in NetTrek. This runs the gamut from networking tricks to how to deal with hostile clients. There have been other excellent, creative Open Source games. I remember xtank fondly, and xpilot is a lot of fun.
Open Source games have typically lacked artists, which has made them look bad. This is starting to change.
I don't see games as a 'killer app' that will draw people to the Linux platform, but it will help people who've decided to come to the Linux platform do away witht heir Windows installations. It will also help Linux be taken more seriously as a consumer level OS.
I can't run anything but Linux now. My primary computer, and the only one fast enough for decent games, has been turned into a server. The only commercial quality games I can play on it are from Loki. I own practically every single one of their games.:-) If it isn't out for Linux, it doesn't exist for me.
I totally agree with part of this statement. And if someone is really concerned with free copies floating around, they shouldn't publish it digitally, and that's that.
On the other hand, in 10-20 years when that's how everyone publishes things, an author who does that will find themselves with no exposure or distribution. It will be considered quaint and old fashioned, and the author will be considered to be a bit of a crank. Sorry to burst your bubble, but publication of everything is moving online, and copyright is dead.
HTML and XML can be printed. Perhaps they're not terribly precise right now, but most books (especially fiction) don't have very complicated layout requirements.
PDAs have nice, easy-on-the-eyes LCD screens. They're much nicer than CRTs for reading stuff. I still like actual books better, but if I could have 50 books in my PDA vs. in my backpack, I'd pick my PDA. In other words, they are good enough to be competition for books in some ways.
Since this is true they are a good platform to keep in mind when writing books.
As far as PDF goes... As someone else pointed out, PDF isn't terribly open, it's harder to extract the raw text from if you want to do searches and stuff, and it can't be easily reformatted for mediums other than the one the publisher originally created it for. Sadly, all its disadvantages are disadvantages for the reader, not for the publisher.:-( For this reason, I think publishers should avoid the format unless it's economically infeasible to use a different format (i.e. wholesale conversion of legacy postscript) or don't care what their readers think.
I think, if they're going to have a law like this, it should also apply to biological viruses so it will have a context that people understand. Is coming into work when you know you have a cold intentionally spreading a virus?
Also, is Microsoft liable under this law because of the defaults settings on their software?
Publish the first couple of chapters and then tell people you'll publish the remaining ones when you get a certain amount of money. Keep a counter of how much money you have on your site. If you can't publish, make sure you return the money to people who gave it to you, and go to a dead-tree publisher.
When you get the amount of money you're asking for, still charge a small fee per download. People who gave you money and registered with an e-mail address get it mailed to them for free. A lot of people would prefer to download it from you for $2-$10 than copy it from a friend. Don't encourage, or discourage copying. Just make it clear that you need money to keep on publishing stuff.
Copyright is largely dead. If you publish online, you have to accept this as a fact of life and work around it. People want books and stories. It'll all work out in the end.
As far as format goes... Don't use PDF. That's silly for a book unless it has lots of figures and tables in it. Use HTML or XML. That way, even someone with a PDA can probably read it.
Sadly, reviewing the chemistry database, I see this reaction for Calcium Carbonate (limestone) and HCl (hydrochloric acid): CaCO3 + 2HCl -> CaCl2 + H2O + CO2
So, no resulting hydrogen, just water and CO2. Completely impossible premise unless the dragon's digestive track had a good way of taking care of the CO3 (carbonate) part of Calcium Carbonate.
It comes from the HCl used to 'digest' the limestone. The Cl likes the Ca (Calcium) lots better than the H, and gloms onto it, leaving the H's free to combine to make H2.
We could get together and apply for a bunch of stupid, overly broad patents, then sue the patent office repeatedly for violating them. It would make for great press.:-)
Dickinson was being a disrespectful jerk. He wasn't interested in having a dicussion, he was interested in cutting down this upstart who was stirring up so much trouble. He never once bothered to listen to a thing Tim O'Reilly said, and Tim made every effort to listen to what he said.
What a stupid jerk. I wish we had enough political power to rip him out of his office and leave him penniless on the streets.
I'm tired of hearing this stupid old saw about copyright law being necessary to enforce the GPL. If you'd actually bother to listen and read, Stallman himself says that in the absence of copyright law, he wouldn't consider the GPL necessary.
Thinking of copyright as enforcing ownership rights as being the only valid viewpoint is incredibly misinformed and pig-headed of you. Intellectual 'property' is not property. Go out and read a few things about it and start arguing intelligently for a change.
If you need help in modifying you ill-thought out opinion of what copyright really means, perhaps a trip through this website or this website will help open your mind a little.
I don't think anyone has the answer to this question yet. I would like to see the current system dismantled, and wait to see what conventions people come up with, and then build a structure of law to support that.
I think the current system needs to be destroyed because otherwise the unimaginative will continue to doggedly cling to it and cause a lot of problems.:-)
I largely agree with you. The whole idea of intellectual 'property' needs to be rethought. Copyrights and patents are not natural rights. It behooves our society to encourage people to create works of art and useful inventions, but I think copyrights and patents are no longer very helpful in serving this purpose. This is something I've thought about at great length. The conclusion has not been reached lightly.
I've change my mind many times over the years. First I wanted to do games, but I found myself really enjoying learning the intricate details of how things worked inside. I taught myself all about the Atari internals, and was even going to get into the intracacies of some of the programmable signal generators and the tape drive before I discovered the ST.
The ST had languages like Pascal and C to learn, and by the time I had learned those, I had discovered Unix, and it's wealth of things, including sockets. That lead to distributed computing, then asynchronous I/O. In the meantime, I tought myself about X and C++, and wrote a thing C++ wrapper around XLib (that some idiot deleted a long time ago to save disk space on a gigantic writeable CD jukebox that wasn't anywhere _close_ to full). I then delved into middleware, and have learned some things about CORBA and Java. I've recently become interested in the Linux kernel...
Basically, anything that presented itself as an interesting problem is what I learned. That approach has served me well, and I have a fairly broad base of knowledge. There are useful things to learn at almost all levels.
I will say that experience has taught me that I'm generally not interested in the UI/Application level because what people wants changes so quickly and time-to-delivery is so short that I'm rarely allowed to excersize the attention to detail that I pride myself on in my other work.
He's right, the system is fundamentally flawed. The existence of the Internet, and digital copying technology in general, destroys the utility of copyright law as it stands.
Some new system needs to evolve. Some guy up above ran an interesting thought experiment to try to determine the price of a song. I'd prefer to go about it from the other direction.
How much should a top artist be paid?
As a means of sort of arriving at a number in a vaguely plausible fashion, try this: A top programmer (who's not the owner of a business with employees besides themselves and their immediate family) can make as much as, say, $200k per year. Lets say an album of 12 songs takes about 3 years to produce. Lets say that music is twice as valuable to society as the program the programmer would produce. And, lets say being a 'top artist' means they're popular. Say, selling above 1 million albums qualifies you as a top artist. And, finally, lets say a band is on average about 5 members.
Working through the numbers on this looks like this: ($400k/yr * 5 members * 0.25yr/song) / (1e6 copies) = 50 cents / song
Hmm, and songs cost about $1.25 apiece on a standard CD. That can't all be production and distribution costs. There's a whole HUGE amount of money going somewhere it shouldn't. Over the net, I would guess that product and distribution costs would add at most 25% to the cost.
The $0.50 result was not a target. Perhaps, subconciously that's what I was doing, but I think the number just fell out. Of course, I don't know how much an artist who sells a million copies makes from the album. I'd be interested to know though. I bet, despite the incredible price, that the artist actually makes a lot less.
As I said, I think the system is broken. I don't know exactly how to fix it, I just know that RIAA needs to die, and for me Napster is a means to that end.
Although, strangely enough, Napster has also induced me (against my better judgement) to buy CDs of interesting artists.:-)
Shouldn't 'everyone loves TLAs' be shortened to 'ELT'?
Of course, some might argue that ELT means 'everyone loves three' which I don't think is true, but I do believe the new standard provides for recursive macro expansion, which neatly solves this problem.
He said that it would be published if response remained as positive after posting the articles in Slashdot. I think this is an excellent idea, and largely adresses most of the difficulties of the people who were upset.
I think publishing after the 'unscientific' survey would give more fuel to the people who were upset.
I think the people who are upset about it are making more of a deal out of things than they should. OTOH, it's annoying to see large corps trample on people while trying to enforce their copyrights while individual's copyright rights are largely ignored, so I can understand why they were upset.
I don't watch TV, or listen to the radio, and advertising is a big reason why.
Also, trying to extend concept of a Slashdot banner ad to e-mail spam is ridiculous. I pay for my e-mail account. I pay for my bandwidth. The spam is not because I'm gettin something for 'free'. There is no service being provided to me.
If micropayments were possible, I might actually be willing to pay for Slashdot. Maybe I could pay $15/yr (ala JenniCam) for a banner ad free subscription or something. *grin* The banner ads do annoy me, even though I ignore them unless they're a Linux company I don't know about yet. Some of the animated gifs actually cause Netscape and X to use a fair amount of CPU and take it away from mpg123, or setiathome.
Oh, gee, you've noticed then when people write about similar things, often similar wording emerges.
And heaven forbid that facts be the same when two people write about them. Why, someone might think that there's an objective reality behind all those words and numbers.
This is a troll, and you should be moderated to -1 for it. It contains no useful content, and merely demonstrates how far you're willing to reach to try to throw a bad light on someone you don't like.
Well, I'm cheering for Open Source for two reasons.
One, the bug was found within weeks of the release of the software in question, not years.
Two, the bug was nearly instantly fixed and a patch available that doesn't involve deleting things to reduce the functionality of Pirahna.
So yeah, Hurray for Open Source in both instances.
Yes, RedHat should've caught this one before it made it out the door, but they didn't. Stuff like that shouldn't happen, and you should do what you can to prevent it, but no matter what you do, it always will. It's very easy to prove software has a bug, very hard to prove that it doesn't.
The conclusion that any admission that somehow technology is inadequate to the task of guaranteeing rights is a shift from being a libertarian seems unjustified. Libertarianism existed long before than was any hope of trying to guarantee rights through the use of technology. In fact, one of its tenants is that one of government's rightful functions is to protect us from the use of force or fraud by another.
The documentation for PGP explicitly mentions the idea of 'the web of trust'. If you trust your neighbor, sign their key. If you trust their trust of others, accept their signature of another's key as a mark the key is trustworthy. This is a social construct, not a technological one. It is a social construct whose existence is supported by technology.
As for realizing that corporations can be evil, and that libertarianism != support for corporatism... Well, I think this is a healthy change in libertarianism. Corporations have long been a blind spot of libertarians. They are a government supported (i.e. by laws supporting their existence, and providing some immunity for top management for laws broken by the corporation) entity that has none of the controls that might normally be applied to such an entity, such as the requirement to act in accordance with the constitution.
Even the idea of a labor union is not contrary to the spirit of libertarianism. Government enforcement of collective bargaining laws is.
People getting together to support eachother is actually very libertarian IMHO.:-)
As for libraries, I would gladly pay out of my own pocket to help support libraries if such payment were not already forcibly extracted from me.
In conclusion, I think you are finding that aspects of a political ideology you treasure have something in common with the ethos of the people who've helped build the net. Very different from them changing their ideology to be closer to yours.
Unfortunately, I have to disagree with you on this. *grin*
When I go to my local mom & pop computer store, I immediately see someone who knows what they're talking about, can help me with my problem, and can provide good, solid recommendations for components based on real-world experience. I've had very good luck, in general, buying and building computers from such places. At my favorite one, many of the employees run Linux at home. That kind of personal service is something you won't find from any of the big companies, especially if you don't also represent a big company.
The only one of the three you mention who's R&D department I have any respect for is IBM. It's actually hard for me to believe that DELL or GATEWAY have R&D departments. Of course, I have a lot of respect for IBMs R&D, but I think they're better served by buying other things from IBM than computers. Unless you're buying mainframes that is.:-)
Slashdot Mirror
The lack of creativity comment is annoying. NetTrek was one of the early pioneers of realtime online gaming. A lot of the ideas now appearing in current online games started in NetTrek. This runs the gamut from networking tricks to how to deal with hostile clients. There have been other excellent, creative Open Source games. I remember xtank fondly, and xpilot is a lot of fun.
Open Source games have typically lacked artists, which has made them look bad. This is starting to change.
I don't see games as a 'killer app' that will draw people to the Linux platform, but it will help people who've decided to come to the Linux platform do away witht heir Windows installations. It will also help Linux be taken more seriously as a consumer level OS.
I can't run anything but Linux now. My primary computer, and the only one fast enough for decent games, has been turned into a server. The only commercial quality games I can play on it are from Loki. I own practically every single one of their games. :-) If it isn't out for Linux, it doesn't exist for me.
Thanks. I didn't have the link handy when I wrote what I wrote, and was too lazy/busy to look it up.
I totally agree with part of this statement. And if someone is really concerned with free copies floating around, they shouldn't publish it digitally, and that's that.
On the other hand, in 10-20 years when that's how everyone publishes things, an author who does that will find themselves with no exposure or distribution. It will be considered quaint and old fashioned, and the author will be considered to be a bit of a crank. Sorry to burst your bubble, but publication of everything is moving online, and copyright is dead.
I repeat... Copyright is dead, get over it!
HTML and XML can be printed. Perhaps they're not terribly precise right now, but most books (especially fiction) don't have very complicated layout requirements.
PDAs have nice, easy-on-the-eyes LCD screens. They're much nicer than CRTs for reading stuff. I still like actual books better, but if I could have 50 books in my PDA vs. in my backpack, I'd pick my PDA. In other words, they are good enough to be competition for books in some ways.
Since this is true they are a good platform to keep in mind when writing books.
As far as PDF goes... As someone else pointed out, PDF isn't terribly open, it's harder to extract the raw text from if you want to do searches and stuff, and it can't be easily reformatted for mediums other than the one the publisher originally created it for. Sadly, all its disadvantages are disadvantages for the reader, not for the publisher. :-( For this reason, I think publishers should avoid the format unless it's economically infeasible to use a different format (i.e. wholesale conversion of legacy postscript) or don't care what their readers think.
I think, if they're going to have a law like this, it should also apply to biological viruses so it will have a context that people understand. Is coming into work when you know you have a cold intentionally spreading a virus?
Also, is Microsoft liable under this law because of the defaults settings on their software?
Publish the first couple of chapters and then tell people you'll publish the remaining ones when you get a certain amount of money. Keep a counter of how much money you have on your site. If you can't publish, make sure you return the money to people who gave it to you, and go to a dead-tree publisher.
When you get the amount of money you're asking for, still charge a small fee per download. People who gave you money and registered with an e-mail address get it mailed to them for free. A lot of people would prefer to download it from you for $2-$10 than copy it from a friend. Don't encourage, or discourage copying. Just make it clear that you need money to keep on publishing stuff.
Copyright is largely dead. If you publish online, you have to accept this as a fact of life and work around it. People want books and stories. It'll all work out in the end.
As far as format goes... Don't use PDF. That's silly for a book unless it has lots of figures and tables in it. Use HTML or XML. That way, even someone with a PDA can probably read it.
Sadly, reviewing the chemistry database, I see this reaction for Calcium Carbonate (limestone) and HCl (hydrochloric acid):
CaCO3 + 2HCl -> CaCl2 + H2O + CO2
So, no resulting hydrogen, just water and CO2. Completely impossible premise unless the dragon's digestive track had a good way of taking care of the CO3 (carbonate) part of Calcium Carbonate.
It comes from the HCl used to 'digest' the limestone. The Cl likes the Ca (Calcium) lots better than the H, and gloms onto it, leaving the H's free to combine to make H2.
Kind of a silly and amusing premise. :-)
We could get together and apply for a bunch of stupid, overly broad patents, then sue the patent office repeatedly for violating them. It would make for great press. :-)
Dickinson was being a disrespectful jerk. He wasn't interested in having a dicussion, he was interested in cutting down this upstart who was stirring up so much trouble. He never once bothered to listen to a thing Tim O'Reilly said, and Tim made every effort to listen to what he said.
What a stupid jerk. I wish we had enough political power to rip him out of his office and leave him penniless on the streets.
I'm tired of hearing this stupid old saw about copyright law being necessary to enforce the GPL. If you'd actually bother to listen and read, Stallman himself says that in the absence of copyright law, he wouldn't consider the GPL necessary.
Thinking of copyright as enforcing ownership rights as being the only valid viewpoint is incredibly misinformed and pig-headed of you. Intellectual 'property' is not property. Go out and read a few things about it and start arguing intelligently for a change.
If you need help in modifying you ill-thought out opinion of what copyright really means, perhaps a trip through this website or this website will help open your mind a little.
I'm going to refuse to moderate from now on because of its negative effect on my karma.
I don't think anyone has the answer to this question yet. I would like to see the current system dismantled, and wait to see what conventions people come up with, and then build a structure of law to support that.
I think the current system needs to be destroyed because otherwise the unimaginative will continue to doggedly cling to it and cause a lot of problems. :-)
I largely agree with you. The whole idea of intellectual 'property' needs to be rethought. Copyrights and patents are not natural rights. It behooves our society to encourage people to create works of art and useful inventions, but I think copyrights and patents are no longer very helpful in serving this purpose. This is something I've thought about at great length. The conclusion has not been reached lightly.
Here's an excellent article on this: The Libertarian Case Against Intellectual Property Rights
LVM support, and USB support is enough for me. LVM makes disk partitioning and administration MUCH easier. Hello, to playing with new filesystems!
Experiment, play, find out for yourself.
I've change my mind many times over the years. First I wanted to do games, but I found myself really enjoying learning the intricate details of how things worked inside. I taught myself all about the Atari internals, and was even going to get into the intracacies of some of the programmable signal generators and the tape drive before I discovered the ST.
The ST had languages like Pascal and C to learn, and by the time I had learned those, I had discovered Unix, and it's wealth of things, including sockets. That lead to distributed computing, then asynchronous I/O. In the meantime, I tought myself about X and C++, and wrote a thing C++ wrapper around XLib (that some idiot deleted a long time ago to save disk space on a gigantic writeable CD jukebox that wasn't anywhere _close_ to full). I then delved into middleware, and have learned some things about CORBA and Java. I've recently become interested in the Linux kernel...
Basically, anything that presented itself as an interesting problem is what I learned. That approach has served me well, and I have a fairly broad base of knowledge. There are useful things to learn at almost all levels.
I will say that experience has taught me that I'm generally not interested in the UI/Application level because what people wants changes so quickly and time-to-delivery is so short that I'm rarely allowed to excersize the attention to detail that I pride myself on in my other work.
He's right, the system is fundamentally flawed. The existence of the Internet, and digital copying technology in general, destroys the utility of copyright law as it stands.
Some new system needs to evolve. Some guy up above ran an interesting thought experiment to try to determine the price of a song. I'd prefer to go about it from the other direction.
How much should a top artist be paid?
As a means of sort of arriving at a number in a vaguely plausible fashion, try this: A top programmer (who's not the owner of a business with employees besides themselves and their immediate family) can make as much as, say, $200k per year. Lets say an album of 12 songs takes about 3 years to produce. Lets say that music is twice as valuable to society as the program the programmer would produce. And, lets say being a 'top artist' means they're popular. Say, selling above 1 million albums qualifies you as a top artist. And, finally, lets say a band is on average about 5 members.
Working through the numbers on this looks like this:
($400k/yr * 5 members * 0.25yr/song) / (1e6 copies) = 50 cents / song
Hmm, and songs cost about $1.25 apiece on a standard CD. That can't all be production and distribution costs. There's a whole HUGE amount of money going somewhere it shouldn't. Over the net, I would guess that product and distribution costs would add at most 25% to the cost.
The $0.50 result was not a target. Perhaps, subconciously that's what I was doing, but I think the number just fell out. Of course, I don't know how much an artist who sells a million copies makes from the album. I'd be interested to know though. I bet, despite the incredible price, that the artist actually makes a lot less.
As I said, I think the system is broken. I don't know exactly how to fix it, I just know that RIAA needs to die, and for me Napster is a means to that end.
Although, strangely enough, Napster has also induced me (against my better judgement) to buy CDs of interesting artists. :-)
It could also be read to say that you can't release the generated assembly language, or libraries.
IMHO, it's a worrisome clause and should be repaired.
Shouldn't 'everyone loves TLAs' be shortened to 'ELT'?
Of course, some might argue that ELT means 'everyone loves three' which I don't think is true, but I do believe the new standard provides for recursive macro expansion, which neatly solves this problem.
He said that it would be published if response remained as positive after posting the articles in Slashdot. I think this is an excellent idea, and largely adresses most of the difficulties of the people who were upset.
I think publishing after the 'unscientific' survey would give more fuel to the people who were upset.
I think the people who are upset about it are making more of a deal out of things than they should. OTOH, it's annoying to see large corps trample on people while trying to enforce their copyrights while individual's copyright rights are largely ignored, so I can understand why they were upset.
I don't watch TV, or listen to the radio, and advertising is a big reason why.
Also, trying to extend concept of a Slashdot banner ad to e-mail spam is ridiculous. I pay for my e-mail account. I pay for my bandwidth. The spam is not because I'm gettin something for 'free'. There is no service being provided to me.
If micropayments were possible, I might actually be willing to pay for Slashdot. Maybe I could pay $15/yr (ala JenniCam) for a banner ad free subscription or something. *grin* The banner ads do annoy me, even though I ignore them unless they're a Linux company I don't know about yet. Some of the animated gifs actually cause Netscape and X to use a fair amount of CPU and take it away from mpg123, or setiathome.
Oh, gee, you've noticed then when people write about similar things, often similar wording emerges.
And heaven forbid that facts be the same when two people write about them. Why, someone might think that there's an objective reality behind all those words and numbers.
This is a troll, and you should be moderated to -1 for it. It contains no useful content, and merely demonstrates how far you're willing to reach to try to throw a bad light on someone you don't like.
Well, I'm cheering for Open Source for two reasons.
One, the bug was found within weeks of the release of the software in question, not years.
Two, the bug was nearly instantly fixed and a patch available that doesn't involve deleting things to reduce the functionality of Pirahna.
So yeah, Hurray for Open Source in both instances.
Yes, RedHat should've caught this one before it made it out the door, but they didn't. Stuff like that shouldn't happen, and you should do what you can to prevent it, but no matter what you do, it always will. It's very easy to prove software has a bug, very hard to prove that it doesn't.
The conclusion that any admission that somehow technology is inadequate to the task of guaranteeing rights is a shift from being a libertarian seems unjustified. Libertarianism existed long before than was any hope of trying to guarantee rights through the use of technology. In fact, one of its tenants is that one of government's rightful functions is to protect us from the use of force or fraud by another.
The documentation for PGP explicitly mentions the idea of 'the web of trust'. If you trust your neighbor, sign their key. If you trust their trust of others, accept their signature of another's key as a mark the key is trustworthy. This is a social construct, not a technological one. It is a social construct whose existence is supported by technology.
As for realizing that corporations can be evil, and that libertarianism != support for corporatism... Well, I think this is a healthy change in libertarianism. Corporations have long been a blind spot of libertarians. They are a government supported (i.e. by laws supporting their existence, and providing some immunity for top management for laws broken by the corporation) entity that has none of the controls that might normally be applied to such an entity, such as the requirement to act in accordance with the constitution.
Even the idea of a labor union is not contrary to the spirit of libertarianism. Government enforcement of collective bargaining laws is.
People getting together to support eachother is actually very libertarian IMHO. :-)
As for libraries, I would gladly pay out of my own pocket to help support libraries if such payment were not already forcibly extracted from me.
In conclusion, I think you are finding that aspects of a political ideology you treasure have something in common with the ethos of the people who've helped build the net. Very different from them changing their ideology to be closer to yours.
Unfortunately, I have to disagree with you on this. *grin*
When I go to my local mom & pop computer store, I immediately see someone who knows what they're talking about, can help me with my problem, and can provide good, solid recommendations for components based on real-world experience. I've had very good luck, in general, buying and building computers from such places. At my favorite one, many of the employees run Linux at home. That kind of personal service is something you won't find from any of the big companies, especially if you don't also represent a big company.
The only one of the three you mention who's R&D department I have any respect for is IBM. It's actually hard for me to believe that DELL or GATEWAY have R&D departments. Of course, I have a lot of respect for IBMs R&D, but I think they're better served by buying other things from IBM than computers. Unless you're buying mainframes that is. :-)