What we really need is open content movies (commercial or community projects) that are available with source materials, have no DRM, and can be freely edited, redistributed, etc.
It'd be a perfect project for theatre students, film students, etc. Write their own script, produce their own movie, and release it online. If small companies and community groups don't have the resources to create the next Hollywood blockbuster then surely they do have the resources to create something of the quality we may have seen from the 80's or before (pre-CGI). Possibly even explore ideas that Hollywood has ignored. This kind of grassroots movie is what independent films should be.
Breaking OOo into discrete component apps would go a long way towards me using it. Trying not to clone M$ would help too (the same goes for most GUI apps). OOo bugs me in that I'm a pretty advanced software user but for months OOo's UI font has been stuck to some weird font that is almost completely unreadable (one that looks like some weird cursive writing) and I've not been able to figure out how to change it (unreadable menus no doubt make this harder). No other app has this issue on my system. Very annoying.
Combined with it's bulk, slow load time, and poorly designed UI I almost never use it. I'd like to see them switch to implementing the UI in Gecko so that maybe we could get some UI innovation going on (due to the ease of working with XUL, Javascript, CSS, etc) for OOo. I'm sure that the backend logic is very functional and could be salvaged.
The big media companies have a strangle hold on their industries that keeps serious competition from forming. These companies don't really compete with each other so much as unite together to squish any upstart competition and to work to pass laws to protect their market. Yes, I think competition should be formed and will be formed but it probably won't be commercial due to the methods of these cartels to stamp out their enemies. More likely open content concepts will eventually worm into the minds of people who can produce such things and we'll begin to see commercial quality open/free media become more popular outside of software. Then these companies will begin to fight a war that makes their worry over copying and P2P seem laughable. That is no reason not to expect them to respect fair use rights though.
DRM robs future generations of their cultural heritage because there is no reason to think they'll have access to any of this media in the future as the machines to access them become phased out. Unlike sculpture, books, records, cds, etc it is not just going to be possible to find the needed information to access this media and even if you could build a player it still wouldn't work because it'd require a key. Combined with laws that make it illegal to reverse engineer DRM that is a kiss of death for future use of this media. That alone should disqualify DRM-protected media from deserving a copyright. Laws making defeating DRM should also be removed.
I guess you're example is perfect. Pro-choice, as always, is an excuse for lazy selfish people to destroy the life of others.:p
It's mere ranting to compare owning physical items with owning IP. If someone can figure out how to take a copy of my TV, clothing, etc without taking my copy then I have absolutely no problem with it. I wouldn't say I'm hoarding such things either as I find them little better than trash. Owned things can be useful and fun but they are not something to base your life around if you want to enjoy your life. If someone came and took my TV or other items I wouldn't throw a huge fit and start suing every which person I could come up with some complaint against.
What we should do is record several copies of every slightly important data to alumnium plates that could be read by an industrial-age culture written in simple binary. Include an etched howto picture guide to build a reading machine on a similar plate in every storage facility. Include an etched picture guide explaining the basics of binary. Include an etched picture guide to the language the directions will be written in. Include plates that gradually teach how to convert this written text into binary and vice versa. Then, as binary written on the plates, gradually build up directions for reading various other media types from binary and converting them to something usable by humans. THEN store your data.
I'd suggest being a little nuts and etching the most important directions into a large land mass that will likely be around for thousands of years at least. Maybe on the moon in large enough print that a telescope would make the directions readable? Maybe the aliens have had the right idea with their crop circles. It sounds silly but for truely making backups it'd be great.:)
In related news.. top pro fishermen gather to decide what is a lake. When is it a pond? When does it become a lake? Why isn't it a sea? What if a river runs through it - is it then a chubby river? What do you think?
Just think what we'd [not] leave for future generations if some massive fall of civilization were to happen right now. Even if they managed to climb back up to the modern day they'd then hit a road block thanks to DRM. Books, movies, music, software, and most every other record of our modern history totally locked up beyond recovery if you didn't manage to retain a copy of an original player and all the associated equipment that is needed. BANG we slam the door in the face of human kind as it tries to climb back up the ladder after disaster.
People laugh at this idea. It seems so impossible that our civilization could fall. Isn't that what every other civilization has thought before it happened? Funny.. every single one has eventually fallen! War, natural disaster, social changes, etc all eventually pose the risk of destroying even mighty civilizations. We climb forward and then fall back and then climb forward again. That is how we progress. With DRM they destroy a great number of the records that could help a future generation climb back up the ladder using what we've already learned for them. IMO that is nothing less than tragic.
DRM combined with laws that make it illegal to archive material or reverse engineer DRM are dooming future generations from recovery. Even if we could organize an effort to store this data for future recovery we couldn't do so because it's against the law. It's all very short sighted. Everything in our society is about instant gratification rather than planning for the future.
It's pretty well accepted that if mankind falls now and isn't able to recover quickly that it may never recover at all because we've used up more natural resources than we could afford to and we are only now starting to discover the possibilities that will let us save ourselves. If we suffer a fall and can't access our modern learning and culture we may simply never recover.
A related thought.. the best way to backup data in this age is to make lots of copies and spread them far and wide. Make new copies frequently so that no matter what the current medium is there will always be a recent copy. At least us open content fans can rest assured that long after the MPAA and RIAA has faded from memory our work will continue to live on somewhere in somebody's files.
I think a natural slow progression would be for apps to slowly change over to web-based but companies like Google might realize they have the chance to reinvent the market and take M$'s place of grand profit and if so it could happen much faster. The same profits that existed for being first and best on the block during the transition from mainframe to PC now exists for transition from PC to web-based. Worth doing?
Printing isn't to hard. I've written web-apps that do advanced printing on the client-side. Nothing more is needed than a client-side service that can accept the print requests and pass them to the local print drivers.
Mac Mini hardware would be great but I'd run Linux on it as Google doesn't need OSX functionality or price. A thin-client ver of Linux would be plenty. Run X w/ a Gecko-based desktop enviroment that downloaded it's own programming from Google. The OS itself could be in read-only flash even which would make it all but impossible to infect with anything. Just use the hdd to backup documents and cache online software and content.
They could give the units away with free broadband and still make a killing. That should scare Microsoft.
The size of the documents really only effects document access times and then only if they are saved online and the entire document needs to be transfered often.
The software itself can run both on the server and client - divided as best fits the program's needs. Client-side portions can be downloaded on demand and cached.
Already fairly large programs are done mostly this way. Everquest comes to mind. It downloads updates to software and content as needed and runs them locally as a custom client to the server. We'd just be using the browser as infrastructure for this use. Our (US) broadband is much slower than in many countries right now. Web-apps would just drive up demand for better broadband here.
The web is better because updates can be near-instant, security is easier to manage, resources are easier to manage and share, there is no need to install anything, software and files can be accessed from anywhere with Net access, network-enabled functionality (search, community features, etc) is easy, computers can be easier to use and cheaper with only web-based apps, and the software is often free. Overall, it's just cheaper and easier for the user and more flexible.
People are doing it. Just not with OOo (well someone probably is) as OOo doesn't seem to be well designed for handling thousands of concurrent users (I haven't tried 2 yet). Overall OOo is functional but seems just as bloated and ugly as M$ Office. Maybe 2.0 will fix this.
A lot of people are connected to broadband all the time - especially business users. For them Google Office would be ideal. If they use the same file formats as OOo then they could play nice with OOo users that need to work offline.
You might also note I mentioned Firefox. I'd not be surprised to see Google Office as a FF extension that could stay resident when offline. That'd fix a lot of the issues you raised.
I hope OOo 2.0 is cool. The UI in the older ver just sucks and it takes forever to load.
The difference being that Google and opensource are much harder to squash. M$ can't easily cut off their income sources, buy them out, or bully them out of existence. Also both have much stronger followings than Netscape ever did as Google and OSS are very community based.
These are prime reasons Microsoft should be afraid.
Their real fear should be Google Office. When Google implements a web-based Office Suite that uses open formats, has all the Office features, is free, and is available (including instant upgrades) from anywhere then Microsoft Office will seem laughable.
If Sun had more vision they'd morph OpenOffice into such a service but it seems that Sun just doesn't know what to do with itself either. To bad for them. They have everything then need to rise again if only they'd use it correctly.
This is plausible (not hard to do) and would be a strong win for Google (showing content-related ads along-side documents could be very profitable) and with features like intergrated search and cross-referencing they could really make such a tool worth switching to. Having Google-based document mgmt would be a serious power feature for users and especially to businesses.
That product alone could quickly unravel Microsoft. With that kind of max exodus of customers it'd shatter Microsoft's profits which would in turn cause investors and employees to flee. Without Office lock-in Windows lock-in would be seriously weakened and OS X and Linux would start making more serious gains which in turn makes Microsoft's other products less desirable. Office is really the cornerstone holding the Microsoft empire together. How long until Google attacks? Well.. they did hire some Firefox developers and Google Mail would be a good testing ground for Google Office technology. Everything they need is ready.
Except that CD players made no effort to keep you from recording from them. They didn't stop you from copying them should you actually have some method of doing so and they didn't try to encrypt their data to keep you from using it in any way they might think unprofitable to them. You had the reasonable use of what you'd paid for if you could afford the equipment to do it.
That isn't true with DRM at all. You can't go out and build your own DRM player from scratch if you really want to and play that media any more. They've made a serious effort to make media inaccessible and that would be illegal.
I'd bet that by 2007 we'll have Google's versions of PayPal and EBay. It wouldn't be at all hard to improve on their crappy interfaces. I'd guess Cafe Press / Yahoo Stores could be a target too.
DRM is evil. It controls how the consumer can use what they've fairly bought. It makes it more difficult for other artists to sample and extend works. It makes it less likely that content will still be accessible to future generations.
If not evil then at least short-sighted and selfish.
It depends on how they destroy competition. If they do it by making better products that everyone would rather use then great. If they do it by using their power and money to strangle the smaller companies then that is bad for customers and the economy.
It's also typically good to cooperate but it's not good to form a cartel which becomes much like a single big company. In this condition quality drops, prices climb, and it becomes difficult for new competition to form. This is essentially what the music industry has done and is why they've recently been charged with illegal price fixing.
Shareholders and CEOs with an eye on nothing but the almighty buck are idiots. Money is not the end-all of existence. Having a healthy society, healthy government, healthy economy, etc is important if they want anywhere to spend their money. Jacking these things up to make a profit is a game that can only be played so long before the system crashes.
It's exactly the kind of thing Microsoft would do. They've admitted to trying to find ways to break the community trust needed for opensource to work. Planting an infected binary or hacks into the codebase would be just the sort of thing. Their whole 'Get the Facts' project is disinformation just for that purpose.
Not that they did, but they would of and could of. Or the admin could just be an idiot.;)
That's nice and all but not realistic. Custom builds can be used for lots of purposes and in many cases users may need such customizations but not have the time or skill to compile the software themselves.
Mozilla doesn't have the time to try to envision every possibility and provide them but they could test custom builds and sign them with little effort.
Re:Don't use your distro tools to install it...
on
Firefox 1.0.7 Released
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· Score: 5, Informative
That's not such a good idea in general. Installs from the distro are tested and signed (pretty sure not to be infected with viruses) whereas Firefox's update system assumes behavior of crappy OS like Windows that doesn't auto-update all programs as needed. Auto-update is a good idea but they should strive to work with existing update infrastructures when those exist. There is to much conflict between apt/yum/rug/whatever and Firefox's own update system and it does cause bugs and odd behavior sometimes. That doesn't make it a good idea to abandon the update infrastructure provided by your distro.:)
On the other hand I think distros need to recognize the need of users to install software at the user-level and make their packages and package mgmt system work better for that. As it is they tend to make it difficult to install packages just for a single user.
I guess Mozilla needs to find some way to sign installers released by third parties. Maybe some sort of server they can upload copies to for testing and when tested for obvious viruses, trojans, dead executables, etc it could post a sig for the file.
It sounds like a deliberate plant to me. Either that or this site has horrible security. Linux viruses just don't spread without effort - especially in apps compiled from source. Possibly a pay off to discredit Mozilla?
I guess this proves that Mozilla needs to take more care in selecting who is allowed to act as major redistributors. Maybe start releasing code hashes for every version of Mozilla offically released so that all can be verified before install?
Is that why flame wars are so popular? "IE is more secure than Firefox!" or "Vista is cooler than OSX!" gets the brain boiling? Slashdot must really thrive off this whole effect. They should study us.
Slashdot Mirror
What we really need is open content movies (commercial or community projects) that are available with source materials, have no DRM, and can be freely edited, redistributed, etc.
It'd be a perfect project for theatre students, film students, etc. Write their own script, produce their own movie, and release it online. If small companies and community groups don't have the resources to create the next Hollywood blockbuster then surely they do have the resources to create something of the quality we may have seen from the 80's or before (pre-CGI). Possibly even explore ideas that Hollywood has ignored. This kind of grassroots movie is what independent films should be.
Breaking OOo into discrete component apps would go a long way towards me using it. Trying not to clone M$ would help too (the same goes for most GUI apps). OOo bugs me in that I'm a pretty advanced software user but for months OOo's UI font has been stuck to some weird font that is almost completely unreadable (one that looks like some weird cursive writing) and I've not been able to figure out how to change it (unreadable menus no doubt make this harder). No other app has this issue on my system. Very annoying.
Combined with it's bulk, slow load time, and poorly designed UI I almost never use it. I'd like to see them switch to implementing the UI in Gecko so that maybe we could get some UI innovation going on (due to the ease of working with XUL, Javascript, CSS, etc) for OOo. I'm sure that the backend logic is very functional and could be salvaged.
The big media companies have a strangle hold on their industries that keeps serious competition from forming. These companies don't really compete with each other so much as unite together to squish any upstart competition and to work to pass laws to protect their market. Yes, I think competition should be formed and will be formed but it probably won't be commercial due to the methods of these cartels to stamp out their enemies. More likely open content concepts will eventually worm into the minds of people who can produce such things and we'll begin to see commercial quality open/free media become more popular outside of software. Then these companies will begin to fight a war that makes their worry over copying and P2P seem laughable. That is no reason not to expect them to respect fair use rights though.
:p
DRM robs future generations of their cultural heritage because there is no reason to think they'll have access to any of this media in the future as the machines to access them become phased out. Unlike sculpture, books, records, cds, etc it is not just going to be possible to find the needed information to access this media and even if you could build a player it still wouldn't work because it'd require a key. Combined with laws that make it illegal to reverse engineer DRM that is a kiss of death for future use of this media. That alone should disqualify DRM-protected media from deserving a copyright. Laws making defeating DRM should also be removed.
I guess you're example is perfect. Pro-choice, as always, is an excuse for lazy selfish people to destroy the life of others.
It's mere ranting to compare owning physical items with owning IP. If someone can figure out how to take a copy of my TV, clothing, etc without taking my copy then I have absolutely no problem with it. I wouldn't say I'm hoarding such things either as I find them little better than trash. Owned things can be useful and fun but they are not something to base your life around if you want to enjoy your life. If someone came and took my TV or other items I wouldn't throw a huge fit and start suing every which person I could come up with some complaint against.
What we should do is record several copies of every slightly important data to alumnium plates that could be read by an industrial-age culture written in simple binary. Include an etched howto picture guide to build a reading machine on a similar plate in every storage facility. Include an etched picture guide explaining the basics of binary. Include an etched picture guide to the language the directions will be written in. Include plates that gradually teach how to convert this written text into binary and vice versa. Then, as binary written on the plates, gradually build up directions for reading various other media types from binary and converting them to something usable by humans. THEN store your data.
:)
I'd suggest being a little nuts and etching the most important directions into a large land mass that will likely be around for thousands of years at least. Maybe on the moon in large enough print that a telescope would make the directions readable? Maybe the aliens have had the right idea with their crop circles. It sounds silly but for truely making backups it'd be great.
What really is the difference between a creek and a stream anyway? Or as we down south called em.. criks. Does being in the south change what it is?
In related news.. top pro fishermen gather to decide what is a lake. When is it a pond? When does it become a lake? Why isn't it a sea? What if a river runs through it - is it then a chubby river? What do you think?
Just think what we'd [not] leave for future generations if some massive fall of civilization were to happen right now. Even if they managed to climb back up to the modern day they'd then hit a road block thanks to DRM. Books, movies, music, software, and most every other record of our modern history totally locked up beyond recovery if you didn't manage to retain a copy of an original player and all the associated equipment that is needed. BANG we slam the door in the face of human kind as it tries to climb back up the ladder after disaster.
People laugh at this idea. It seems so impossible that our civilization could fall. Isn't that what every other civilization has thought before it happened? Funny.. every single one has eventually fallen! War, natural disaster, social changes, etc all eventually pose the risk of destroying even mighty civilizations. We climb forward and then fall back and then climb forward again. That is how we progress. With DRM they destroy a great number of the records that could help a future generation climb back up the ladder using what we've already learned for them. IMO that is nothing less than tragic.
DRM combined with laws that make it illegal to archive material or reverse engineer DRM are dooming future generations from recovery. Even if we could organize an effort to store this data for future recovery we couldn't do so because it's against the law. It's all very short sighted. Everything in our society is about instant gratification rather than planning for the future.
It's pretty well accepted that if mankind falls now and isn't able to recover quickly that it may never recover at all because we've used up more natural resources than we could afford to and we are only now starting to discover the possibilities that will let us save ourselves. If we suffer a fall and can't access our modern learning and culture we may simply never recover.
A related thought.. the best way to backup data in this age is to make lots of copies and spread them far and wide. Make new copies frequently so that no matter what the current medium is there will always be a recent copy. At least us open content fans can rest assured that long after the MPAA and RIAA has faded from memory our work will continue to live on somewhere in somebody's files.
I think a natural slow progression would be for apps to slowly change over to web-based but companies like Google might realize they have the chance to reinvent the market and take M$'s place of grand profit and if so it could happen much faster. The same profits that existed for being first and best on the block during the transition from mainframe to PC now exists for transition from PC to web-based. Worth doing?
Printing isn't to hard. I've written web-apps that do advanced printing on the client-side. Nothing more is needed than a client-side service that can accept the print requests and pass them to the local print drivers.
Mac Mini hardware would be great but I'd run Linux on it as Google doesn't need OSX functionality or price. A thin-client ver of Linux would be plenty. Run X w/ a Gecko-based desktop enviroment that downloaded it's own programming from Google. The OS itself could be in read-only flash even which would make it all but impossible to infect with anything. Just use the hdd to backup documents and cache online software and content.
They could give the units away with free broadband and still make a killing. That should scare Microsoft.
The size of the documents really only effects document access times and then only if they are saved online and the entire document needs to be transfered often.
The software itself can run both on the server and client - divided as best fits the program's needs. Client-side portions can be downloaded on demand and cached.
Already fairly large programs are done mostly this way. Everquest comes to mind. It downloads updates to software and content as needed and runs them locally as a custom client to the server. We'd just be using the browser as infrastructure for this use. Our (US) broadband is much slower than in many countries right now. Web-apps would just drive up demand for better broadband here.
The web is better because updates can be near-instant, security is easier to manage, resources are easier to manage and share, there is no need to install anything, software and files can be accessed from anywhere with Net access, network-enabled functionality (search, community features, etc) is easy, computers can be easier to use and cheaper with only web-based apps, and the software is often free. Overall, it's just cheaper and easier for the user and more flexible.
People are doing it. Just not with OOo (well someone probably is) as OOo doesn't seem to be well designed for handling thousands of concurrent users (I haven't tried 2 yet). Overall OOo is functional but seems just as bloated and ugly as M$ Office. Maybe 2.0 will fix this.
A lot of people are connected to broadband all the time - especially business users. For them Google Office would be ideal. If they use the same file formats as OOo then they could play nice with OOo users that need to work offline.
You might also note I mentioned Firefox. I'd not be surprised to see Google Office as a FF extension that could stay resident when offline. That'd fix a lot of the issues you raised.
I hope OOo 2.0 is cool. The UI in the older ver just sucks and it takes forever to load.
The difference being that Google and opensource are much harder to squash. M$ can't easily cut off their income sources, buy them out, or bully them out of existence. Also both have much stronger followings than Netscape ever did as Google and OSS are very community based.
These are prime reasons Microsoft should be afraid.
Their real fear should be Google Office. When Google implements a web-based Office Suite that uses open formats, has all the Office features, is free, and is available (including instant upgrades) from anywhere then Microsoft Office will seem laughable.
If Sun had more vision they'd morph OpenOffice into such a service but it seems that Sun just doesn't know what to do with itself either. To bad for them. They have everything then need to rise again if only they'd use it correctly.
This is plausible (not hard to do) and would be a strong win for Google (showing content-related ads along-side documents could be very profitable) and with features like intergrated search and cross-referencing they could really make such a tool worth switching to. Having Google-based document mgmt would be a serious power feature for users and especially to businesses.
That product alone could quickly unravel Microsoft. With that kind of max exodus of customers it'd shatter Microsoft's profits which would in turn cause investors and employees to flee. Without Office lock-in Windows lock-in would be seriously weakened and OS X and Linux would start making more serious gains which in turn makes Microsoft's other products less desirable. Office is really the cornerstone holding the Microsoft empire together. How long until Google attacks? Well.. they did hire some Firefox developers and Google Mail would be a good testing ground for Google Office technology. Everything they need is ready.
Except that CD players made no effort to keep you from recording from them. They didn't stop you from copying them should you actually have some method of doing so and they didn't try to encrypt their data to keep you from using it in any way they might think unprofitable to them. You had the reasonable use of what you'd paid for if you could afford the equipment to do it.
That isn't true with DRM at all. You can't go out and build your own DRM player from scratch if you really want to and play that media any more. They've made a serious effort to make media inaccessible and that would be illegal.
I'd bet that by 2007 we'll have Google's versions of PayPal and EBay. It wouldn't be at all hard to improve on their crappy interfaces. I'd guess Cafe Press / Yahoo Stores could be a target too.
DRM is evil. It controls how the consumer can use what they've fairly bought. It makes it more difficult for other artists to sample and extend works. It makes it less likely that content will still be accessible to future generations.
If not evil then at least short-sighted and selfish.
Looks good in Safari, Opera, and Firefox. IE for Mac looks a bit funky but who cares.
It's not rocket science. Basic economics.
It depends on how they destroy competition. If they do it by making better products that everyone would rather use then great. If they do it by using their power and money to strangle the smaller companies then that is bad for customers and the economy.
It's also typically good to cooperate but it's not good to form a cartel which becomes much like a single big company. In this condition quality drops, prices climb, and it becomes difficult for new competition to form. This is essentially what the music industry has done and is why they've recently been charged with illegal price fixing.
Shareholders and CEOs with an eye on nothing but the almighty buck are idiots. Money is not the end-all of existence. Having a healthy society, healthy government, healthy economy, etc is important if they want anywhere to spend their money. Jacking these things up to make a profit is a game that can only be played so long before the system crashes.
It's exactly the kind of thing Microsoft would do. They've admitted to trying to find ways to break the community trust needed for opensource to work. Planting an infected binary or hacks into the codebase would be just the sort of thing. Their whole 'Get the Facts' project is disinformation just for that purpose.
;)
Not that they did, but they would of and could of. Or the admin could just be an idiot.
That's nice and all but not realistic. Custom builds can be used for lots of purposes and in many cases users may need such customizations but not have the time or skill to compile the software themselves.
Mozilla doesn't have the time to try to envision every possibility and provide them but they could test custom builds and sign them with little effort.
That's not such a good idea in general. Installs from the distro are tested and signed (pretty sure not to be infected with viruses) whereas Firefox's update system assumes behavior of crappy OS like Windows that doesn't auto-update all programs as needed. Auto-update is a good idea but they should strive to work with existing update infrastructures when those exist. There is to much conflict between apt/yum/rug/whatever and Firefox's own update system and it does cause bugs and odd behavior sometimes. That doesn't make it a good idea to abandon the update infrastructure provided by your distro. :)
On the other hand I think distros need to recognize the need of users to install software at the user-level and make their packages and package mgmt system work better for that. As it is they tend to make it difficult to install packages just for a single user.
I guess Mozilla needs to find some way to sign installers released by third parties. Maybe some sort of server they can upload copies to for testing and when tested for obvious viruses, trojans, dead executables, etc it could post a sig for the file.
It sounds like a deliberate plant to me. Either that or this site has horrible security. Linux viruses just don't spread without effort - especially in apps compiled from source. Possibly a pay off to discredit Mozilla?
I guess this proves that Mozilla needs to take more care in selecting who is allowed to act as major redistributors. Maybe start releasing code hashes for every version of Mozilla offically released so that all can be verified before install?
Is that why flame wars are so popular? "IE is more secure than Firefox!" or "Vista is cooler than OSX!" gets the brain boiling? Slashdot must really thrive off this whole effect. They should study us.
Okay, do I still get to use my hunting knives to protect my property? I promise not to call the cops if you won't.