Mass media music and videos are not part of "the tech culture". They're associated with it, possibly, but not part of it. If we want media that's part of "the tech culture" we have to create it ourselves and make it available under a licensing model that's suitable to "the tech culture". Trying to assimilate media that belongs to mega-corporations whose only interest is how many of our hard-earned dollars they can take is not going to work. They have too much money and, consequently, political backing.
At its most basic level, source code is an expression of how to tell the computer to do something in a particular programming language. In the same regard, a cookie recipe is an expression of how to make cookies. Just because I choose to express something that's dry and analytical doesn't mean I'm not expressing something.
As for creativity, what you say is utter nonsense. If computing is a science with unalterable ways of doing things with no room for creativity, how come my programming professor taught us six ways to sort data? How come I went home and came up with another one? How come Linux runs so much more reliably than Windoze? If you can't understand the difference between code that is elegant and clean and code that is kludgy and hacked, that's your problem - but don't expect the rest of us to hire you as our sysadmins.
That's very nice... did they sniff the browser to ensure that the code would only run on browsers it's compatible with, and provide an alternative for others?
I work for a competitor of Razorfish, so you're welcome to take this with a grain of salt. These comments are made in a personal capacity, not as part of my work, and do not have my employer's blessing.
I looked at the code for the front page of the iam.com site, and I personally would never deliver such poor quality code to a client. I would be ashamed to put my name on it. At a quick glance, I saw errors in syntax, fundamental logic errors, and appallingly bad formatting of code. It doesn't work with browsers with Javascript turned off, it doesn't fail gracefully (it just dies without presenting a courteous message explaining the problem) and it doesn't work for a text-only browser (which means it could cause problems for the blind).
I know from experience that it's perfectly possible to make a modern, interactive web page with attractive DHTML features and still have it be compatible with Lynx and usable with a screen reader and deliver polite error messages to users with incompatible browsers. It's not even difficult.
If the iam.com site that I saw is the one they're suing over, I'm not surprised they're suing.
The legal problem with what they're doing is that they're deliberately making their software non-interoperable with published standards. This seems to indicate that they're trying to use their monopoly position to exclude competition, which is illegal.
No, probably not, it's a violation of the constitutional right to free speech, but the constitution doesn't seem to stop the government much these days...
Notice also that (according to the news I've been reading) the judge has said outright that she's trying to prevent him from being able to earn anything above minimum wage or do anything other than manual labor. I really think he ought to sue her for cruel and unusual punishment.
I think the problem with that (using Stephenson as a resource) is that it depends entirely too much on the idea that nanotech will be extremely powerful.
The implications of nanotech will depend highly on whether it is a powerful technology or a very limited one, and whether it can become cheap or will always be expensive. If it's cheap and powerful, it could change everything, as in The Diamond Age. If it's forever limited and expensive, it won't likely change much.
At least now when kids start suing Pinkerton because of the harassment they receive because of this system, Pinkerton can't claim they weren't aware of the problem.
In 1992, I worked at a company where we had a lot of people who either telecommuted or had irregular office schedules for varying reasons. Some were mothers who wanted to stay at home with children, one was a father who wanted to stay at home with his wife and new baby, another was still in college and was available at erratic hours, some were consultants who were always on the go.
I programmed the voice mail system with everyone's phone numbers. We hooked it to our LAN so it could know when someone was at home and when they were in the office and when they were on the road. The result was that clients could call our office and the calls would be seamlessly transferred to our staff wherever they were. Our computerized fax system would calmly route faxes through a receptionist who would place them in the recipient's email for retrieval wherever they were.
Nobody could tell that we didn't have everyone all in one place. In fact, our office didn't actually fit our whole staff. When we'd have staff meetings, we'd have to use a training center to fit everyone.
We realized many benefits from this. First of all, there was a substantial savings in office space. (In fact, if we had just installed an ISDN set at our receptionist's house, we could have eliminated the office entirely and just had a storage space for servers somewhere.) Second, we were able to retain extremely talented staff who otherwise would have had to leave us to pursue personal interests such as taking care of family. Third, we were able to keep our entire consulting staff on the road earning on-site commission yet still have them available when other clients needed them.
With notebook computers, palmpilots, lightweight portable color printers, and digital wireless phones, there's no reason a technology or professional services company couldn't eliminate its office entirely and let its people work wherever they want to whenever they want to, and save money and gain flexibility in the process.
The fundamental problem we have is that the political process doesn't lend itself to our sorts of issues.
Think about how electoral politics works: a candidate wants to get elected. To get elected they have to get a lot of votes. How do they get a lot of votes? By appealing to the majority of voters. Do the majority of voters have the technical savvy to even understand our issues? No, of course not. The majority of voters don't write code. They push paper or drive tractors or type letters in the word processor or ask if you want fries with that. (This isn't a negative coment about anyone, it's merely an observation of the reality of what the majority of any random modern population does.)
So our budding politician does what most politicians generally do, which is to try to appeal with issues that are more related to the ordinary life of the average person, such as to tell the voters their taxes will be lowered or that jobs will be created or government investment in the area will be increased, or preferably all three. Alternatively, the politician may try to appeal with vague social issues, such as to scare voters (and whip up bigotry) by claiming that an unpopular minority group is going to take over if they're not stopped, or by claiming that the politician's agenda will "protect the children". The latter seems to be the catch-all for all that is evil and loathsome in politics these days. (I personally have reached the point that anytime anyone claims anything is necessary for the good of "the children", I already suspect them of being liars and cheats.)
So we geeks turn out at the polls and vote against the idiot politician... but who are we voting for? Another politician, who knows nothing more about our issues than the first.
There are not enough of us in the world to sway the vote by direct votes yet. If we want to make a change now, other than by getting sued regularly (as a group) and going to court over and over to fight for issue after issue, we're going to have to embark on a massive education campaign to make the average voter *actually* understand these issues and *how* they effect the voter's life and *why* they should care enough to ensure that they only vote for politicians who will tow *our* party line on tech issues.
Anybody got a few million dollars to put up billboards all over the country that say "You could have had a free DVD player now but the movie industry won't let us make one for you"?
By blocking the sites that show how badly implemented the product is under all categories, the manufacturer is in effect expressing to its customers that these sites contain pornography, violence, drug info, gambling, etc.
So, couldn't the owners of these pages sue Mattel for defamation?
My father started to be able to tell me he loved me when he started to talk to me in email and didn't have to face saying it to me verbally.
My aunt and I, who used to get the chance to have a good long talk once or twice a year when I'd visit, now communicate by email two or more times a day. We email each other digital pictures all the time.
My friends are all either people I met through the net or people I met through friends I met through the net.
On my latest business trip, I sat in the taxi on the way to my client and wrote emails on my cell phone to arrange dinner with friends for that evening.
I emailed a picture to Ghana, where it was hand-dyed onto fabric which was later delivered to me.
I have faxed by email from the beach, and AT&T wasn't needed.
In 1990 I got my first Internet account. It was email-only. Yet, even that was enough to tell me this technology would change the world, and that this was the rising star to try to hook my career to. Today I live the Internet lifestyle. I'm a web developer, creating sites for both major corporations and tiny organizations. I make my phone calls on the net. I shop on the web. When I have new interests, I research them on the web. I spend at least 8 hours a day on the net for professional purposes, and often serveral more for personal reasons.
Isolated? I've never been more connected. The world is at my fingertips. Anything I want to learn, anyone I want to talk to, anything I need to buy, it's all right here. The people I love can reach me via the net any time, any place, and I leave my job in the office.
In the end I have to conclude that these pundits who ramble on about the destruction of society and disconectedness of netizens are not only confused, they're stupid. I live the Internet lifestyle and wouldn't trade it for the world.
You want to watch DVDs so you went and bought a player. Good for you. If I want to watch DVDs and I don't want to buy a player, the law says I'm fully within my rights to build one myself, and if doing so requires that I have to reverse engineer some other player to learn how, I'm allowed to do that too.
Just because people want do do things differently from you doesn't make them wrong.
I can not see how anyone in their right mind can imagine that one-size-fits-all censorware is reasonable.
Bluntly, I wouldn't mind if my kid wanted to go look at porn sites - if they're old enough to want to know, as far as I'm concerned they're old enough to learn. On the other hand I'd like my child protected from christian fundamentalists and their "family values".
The problem with putting censorware in a public library is that it is public. Doing so implies that you either know what everyone passing through the library wants, or that you consider yourself to be morally superior to everyone else, a position I can't condone.
Yes, but I think suing is the long, complicated, expensive way of dealing with it. I think getting the stores upset with the label for making nonstandard CDs is a much cheaper, easier, faster way of making the labels stop doing it. If the record labels all discover that every time they try to put out a "copy protected" CD half their retailers return all copies and demand a refund, pretty soon they'll stop doing it.
Besides, it just seems nicer to be honest with the store and ask them to please make good and give them the opportunity to do so first instead of just taking them to court. They may not even know there's something fraudulent about the CD until you tell them.
Yes, I too live in a college town where store return policies make returning CDs an interesting proposition, BUT:
If the store gives you a fresh copy of the CD and that doesn't work either, they will probably let you return it on the basis that they want to keep you as a customer and they don't want to give you a lot of hassle.
If you bought several CDs at once and you're only trying to return one, they can see that you're not just ripping them and trying to get your money back arbitrarily.
If a store gets several customers returning the same CD complaining that it's defective (and this is entirely possible in a college town) they're likely to start believing the customers and complain to the label, possibly even demanding that the label fix the problem if they're going to keep carrying the CD in question.
While this type of store policies exists for a reason, I speak from experience when I say that simple courtesy and reason often make someone in authority, such as a manager, willing to break the policy and do the right thing, at least at any reputable store.
This seems a simple enough thing to shoot down. The CD isn't redbook compliant? Return it and tell the store it's defective. That seems truthful enough to me.
My CD player happens to be my Macintosh. I choose to listen to my music as MP3's because that's a convenient method of playback for my lifestyle. If they've gone about making sure I can't play back my CD's in what is, to me, a normal method based on the standard format that has been in use for many years, then I simply have to consider their product to be unplayable and defective and demand my money back.
Look, I think we should basically not get too hyper about the individual happenings along the way of this battle. Think about it for a minute: the DVD association has oodles of money behind them and they clearly don't give a damn whose rights they step on in the process of getting whatever they want.
So where is this going to end up? The Supreme Court. They will not give up along the way, so ultimately that's where it's going to go. What does anything else that happens along the way matter? Nothing. Whatever the Supreme Court does will wipe out everything that came before.
So maybe we should start considering the constitutional aspects of the case and take the long road, and not get too upset about whatever some idiot judges do along the way.
Well, it has several potential benefits, problems, and purposes.
First, it makes for more expensive players which are - guess what - a new format! The industry loves new formats because it means everyone has to go out and buy all over again. That seems to be the big part of why DVD is here in the first place, because there's no money in VCR's any more because everyone already has one.
Second, it can provide higher audio fidelity. However, how many of us really care? Yes, I know that there are some people who want higher quality audio than CD, but most of us can't really hear the difference beyond 16bit 44khz audio.
Third, you could pack a lot more audio on one disc. Beyond the apparent uses for operas and audio books that were mentioned in an earlier comment, this doesn't have a lot of use. Most albums are 8-15 songs primarily because albums have been about that length for a long time - CD albums took after vinyl. The whole pricing structure is built mostly around that you pay a certain amount of money and get a certain amount of music. If you were to go to, say, Madonna and tell her that now to sell a $15 album she has to produce five times as much music, she'd laugh at you. Her contract no doubt gives some parameters to what an album consists of, and it's nothing like the amount of audio a DVD could potentially hold.
I remember J.Michael Straczynski saying on usenet that the reason videos of TV shows always have one or two episodes is because if they put more on, the royalties would start making the product too expensive. I expect the same would hold true for DVD audio.
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It took them years to get the plain white t-shirt declassified so they could remove it from the vault.
Mass media music and videos are not part of "the tech culture". They're associated with it, possibly, but not part of it. If we want media that's part of "the tech culture" we have to create it ourselves and make it available under a licensing model that's suitable to "the tech culture". Trying to assimilate media that belongs to mega-corporations whose only interest is how many of our hard-earned dollars they can take is not going to work. They have too much money and, consequently, political backing.
As for creativity, what you say is utter nonsense. If computing is a science with unalterable ways of doing things with no room for creativity, how come my programming professor taught us six ways to sort data? How come I went home and came up with another one? How come Linux runs so much more reliably than Windoze? If you can't understand the difference between code that is elegant and clean and code that is kludgy and hacked, that's your problem - but don't expect the rest of us to hire you as our sysadmins.
Great. Now we'll have to worry about macro viruses on Linux as well as Windoze.
That's very nice... did they sniff the browser to ensure that the code would only run on browsers it's compatible with, and provide an alternative for others?
I looked at the code for the front page of the iam.com site, and I personally would never deliver such poor quality code to a client. I would be ashamed to put my name on it. At a quick glance, I saw errors in syntax, fundamental logic errors, and appallingly bad formatting of code. It doesn't work with browsers with Javascript turned off, it doesn't fail gracefully (it just dies without presenting a courteous message explaining the problem) and it doesn't work for a text-only browser (which means it could cause problems for the blind).
I know from experience that it's perfectly possible to make a modern, interactive web page with attractive DHTML features and still have it be compatible with Lynx and usable with a screen reader and deliver polite error messages to users with incompatible browsers. It's not even difficult.
If the iam.com site that I saw is the one they're suing over, I'm not surprised they're suing.
Not to mention they got some of the CSS wrong.
Got it?
Notice also that (according to the news I've been reading) the judge has said outright that she's trying to prevent him from being able to earn anything above minimum wage or do anything other than manual labor. I really think he ought to sue her for cruel and unusual punishment.
The implications of nanotech will depend highly on whether it is a powerful technology or a very limited one, and whether it can become cheap or will always be expensive. If it's cheap and powerful, it could change everything, as in The Diamond Age. If it's forever limited and expensive, it won't likely change much.
Do you seriously think it's acceptable to harass kids just because they're powerless? Do you seriously think no adults disagree with that concept?
It's narrow-minded, self-centered idiocy like that causing these sorts of problems.
At least now when kids start suing Pinkerton because of the harassment they receive because of this system, Pinkerton can't claim they weren't aware of the problem.
I programmed the voice mail system with everyone's phone numbers. We hooked it to our LAN so it could know when someone was at home and when they were in the office and when they were on the road. The result was that clients could call our office and the calls would be seamlessly transferred to our staff wherever they were. Our computerized fax system would calmly route faxes through a receptionist who would place them in the recipient's email for retrieval wherever they were.
Nobody could tell that we didn't have everyone all in one place. In fact, our office didn't actually fit our whole staff. When we'd have staff meetings, we'd have to use a training center to fit everyone.
We realized many benefits from this. First of all, there was a substantial savings in office space. (In fact, if we had just installed an ISDN set at our receptionist's house, we could have eliminated the office entirely and just had a storage space for servers somewhere.) Second, we were able to retain extremely talented staff who otherwise would have had to leave us to pursue personal interests such as taking care of family. Third, we were able to keep our entire consulting staff on the road earning on-site commission yet still have them available when other clients needed them.
With notebook computers, palmpilots, lightweight portable color printers, and digital wireless phones, there's no reason a technology or professional services company couldn't eliminate its office entirely and let its people work wherever they want to whenever they want to, and save money and gain flexibility in the process.
Think about how electoral politics works: a candidate wants to get elected. To get elected they have to get a lot of votes. How do they get a lot of votes? By appealing to the majority of voters. Do the majority of voters have the technical savvy to even understand our issues? No, of course not. The majority of voters don't write code. They push paper or drive tractors or type letters in the word processor or ask if you want fries with that. (This isn't a negative coment about anyone, it's merely an observation of the reality of what the majority of any random modern population does.)
So our budding politician does what most politicians generally do, which is to try to appeal with issues that are more related to the ordinary life of the average person, such as to tell the voters their taxes will be lowered or that jobs will be created or government investment in the area will be increased, or preferably all three. Alternatively, the politician may try to appeal with vague social issues, such as to scare voters (and whip up bigotry) by claiming that an unpopular minority group is going to take over if they're not stopped, or by claiming that the politician's agenda will "protect the children". The latter seems to be the catch-all for all that is evil and loathsome in politics these days. (I personally have reached the point that anytime anyone claims anything is necessary for the good of "the children", I already suspect them of being liars and cheats.)
So we geeks turn out at the polls and vote against the idiot politician... but who are we voting for? Another politician, who knows nothing more about our issues than the first.
There are not enough of us in the world to sway the vote by direct votes yet. If we want to make a change now, other than by getting sued regularly (as a group) and going to court over and over to fight for issue after issue, we're going to have to embark on a massive education campaign to make the average voter *actually* understand these issues and *how* they effect the voter's life and *why* they should care enough to ensure that they only vote for politicians who will tow *our* party line on tech issues.
Anybody got a few million dollars to put up billboards all over the country that say "You could have had a free DVD player now but the movie industry won't let us make one for you"?
So, couldn't the owners of these pages sue Mattel for defamation?
My aunt and I, who used to get the chance to have a good long talk once or twice a year when I'd visit, now communicate by email two or more times a day. We email each other digital pictures all the time.
My friends are all either people I met through the net or people I met through friends I met through the net.
On my latest business trip, I sat in the taxi on the way to my client and wrote emails on my cell phone to arrange dinner with friends for that evening.
I emailed a picture to Ghana, where it was hand-dyed onto fabric which was later delivered to me.
I have faxed by email from the beach, and AT&T wasn't needed.
In 1990 I got my first Internet account. It was email-only. Yet, even that was enough to tell me this technology would change the world, and that this was the rising star to try to hook my career to. Today I live the Internet lifestyle. I'm a web developer, creating sites for both major corporations and tiny organizations. I make my phone calls on the net. I shop on the web. When I have new interests, I research them on the web. I spend at least 8 hours a day on the net for professional purposes, and often serveral more for personal reasons.
Isolated? I've never been more connected. The world is at my fingertips. Anything I want to learn, anyone I want to talk to, anything I need to buy, it's all right here. The people I love can reach me via the net any time, any place, and I leave my job in the office.
In the end I have to conclude that these pundits who ramble on about the destruction of society and disconectedness of netizens are not only confused, they're stupid. I live the Internet lifestyle and wouldn't trade it for the world.
Now, that's 5,368,709,120k for the movie.
Multiplied by 6,000,000,000 people.
That's 32,212,254,720,000,000,000k total.
Assume that a movie is 2 hours long, that's 120 minutes, times 60 seconds, is 7200 seconds.
Divide the data by the time and you get 4,473,924,266,666,666k/second. That's 4,266,666,666 gigs/second.
Anybody got a really fast net connection?
Just because people want do do things differently from you doesn't make them wrong.
Bluntly, I wouldn't mind if my kid wanted to go look at porn sites - if they're old enough to want to know, as far as I'm concerned they're old enough to learn. On the other hand I'd like my child protected from christian fundamentalists and their "family values".
The problem with putting censorware in a public library is that it is public. Doing so implies that you either know what everyone passing through the library wants, or that you consider yourself to be morally superior to everyone else, a position I can't condone.
Besides, it just seems nicer to be honest with the store and ask them to please make good and give them the opportunity to do so first instead of just taking them to court. They may not even know there's something fraudulent about the CD until you tell them.
While this type of store policies exists for a reason, I speak from experience when I say that simple courtesy and reason often make someone in authority, such as a manager, willing to break the policy and do the right thing, at least at any reputable store.
My CD player happens to be my Macintosh. I choose to listen to my music as MP3's because that's a convenient method of playback for my lifestyle. If they've gone about making sure I can't play back my CD's in what is, to me, a normal method based on the standard format that has been in use for many years, then I simply have to consider their product to be unplayable and defective and demand my money back.
So where is this going to end up? The Supreme Court. They will not give up along the way, so ultimately that's where it's going to go. What does anything else that happens along the way matter? Nothing. Whatever the Supreme Court does will wipe out everything that came before.
So maybe we should start considering the constitutional aspects of the case and take the long road, and not get too upset about whatever some idiot judges do along the way.
First, it makes for more expensive players which are - guess what - a new format! The industry loves new formats because it means everyone has to go out and buy all over again. That seems to be the big part of why DVD is here in the first place, because there's no money in VCR's any more because everyone already has one.
Second, it can provide higher audio fidelity. However, how many of us really care? Yes, I know that there are some people who want higher quality audio than CD, but most of us can't really hear the difference beyond 16bit 44khz audio.
Third, you could pack a lot more audio on one disc. Beyond the apparent uses for operas and audio books that were mentioned in an earlier comment, this doesn't have a lot of use. Most albums are 8-15 songs primarily because albums have been about that length for a long time - CD albums took after vinyl. The whole pricing structure is built mostly around that you pay a certain amount of money and get a certain amount of music. If you were to go to, say, Madonna and tell her that now to sell a $15 album she has to produce five times as much music, she'd laugh at you. Her contract no doubt gives some parameters to what an album consists of, and it's nothing like the amount of audio a DVD could potentially hold.
I remember J.Michael Straczynski saying on usenet that the reason videos of TV shows always have one or two episodes is because if they put more on, the royalties would start making the product too expensive. I expect the same would hold true for DVD audio.