QG, Bruce knows all about Ubuntu (I hate to play the "do you know who Bruce Perens is?" card, but do you?). In fact, it's a pretty safe bet that he personally knows most of the principle people involved in Ubuntu.
His point about the difference between Ubuntu and UL is that UL operates within Debian, that is, if UL people want to make a change and they can't get it into Debian, then they won't do it.
But Ubuntu takes Debian and then makes their own changes to it. They always try really hard to get those changes back into Debian. But if they can't, then they'll still go ahead if they think it's important.
I'm over-simplifying a bit and I'm not saying which approach is right or wrong, but there is a difference in philosophy and approach between Ubuntu and UL.
You probably couldn't find the interview because it was with Nora Denzel:-) Slashdot even did a story linking to it. I highly recommend re-reading... It makes for a good laugh:-)
Ah, the only/. story that I submitted that ever made it to the front page. Good times.
The idea that the TV networks provide any necessary service is contradicted by the fact that no other entertainment medium has a similar role. For movies, books, and music, there is no equivalent to the TV network.
And yet, these other forms of entertainment seem to do just fine in allocating resources (or, at least, no worse than TV).
Well, actually, most countries that signed it are not going to meet their targets, and they knew that going in (the few that do are going to do so only on technicalities, like Russia whose carbon levels were set before a steep industrial decline).
So why, you ask, did they sign, knowing that they wouldn't meet the targets? Well, because they know that nobody else is going to meet them either. And if everybody fails, nobody gets punished.
What will happen is that in a few years, at one of the Kyoto target dates, there will be a conference, there will be speeches about how carbon emissions have gone down, but not by the amount pledged and everyone will claim to try really hard to meet the next target, really this time, we promise.
It's all just hypocrisy, really. But, in the end, it might be useful hypocrisy.
Now why did the USA government decide not to go along with the nudge-nudge, wink-wink Kyoto ruse like everyone else. I'd like to claim that it was because they were more principled, but really it was just pandering to domestic political interests.
My Best analogy for true globalization is osmosis or diffusion. Currently America has an extremely high concentration of money. Without some way to keep that money in the states, the money will diffuse out across the world to the point where we are at a more equal distribution.
Well, you do seem to be making the assumption that the global economy is a zero-sum game. Which of course it isn't. Every victory doesn't require a defeat in this game.
Now, I'm not necessarily saying that massive outsourcing is the way to go, the issue is complex. But if we work at it and make the right choices we can all get richer.
Read any book put out by Microsoft Press and it's plain there are a number of people there that are as or more capable than most open source programmers.
It's not all that important, I suppose, but just in case you don't know, Microsoft Press books are not written by Microsoft developers (well, a few are, but not most). Microsoft Press is just a regular publisher and their authors come from the same pool of writers as every other technical publisher. So the quality of books from MS Press says nothing, good or bad, about the company's software products or practices.
I think that you're basically right, but that the Linux core should take it one step furthur. A lot of the complaints actually boil down to the fact that linux is using the x.y.z versioning system in a completely non-standard way (specifically, that "z" increments shouldn't add new features, only fix bugs).
Linus, et al. should simply stop using x.y.z entirely and just date releases (eg. linux-20040816). This makes it completely explicit that the version number is just a timestamp and makes no claim about relations to previous releases.
I think that one point to make on this is to compare Daggerfall to Morrowind. All the problems that you talk about were much, much worse in Daggerfall. So Bethesda did learn from their mistakes and tried to address them in Morrowind.
True, they weren't entirely successful. But if you take the big step made from Daggerfall to Morrowind, and then extrapolate the same size of step from Morrowind to Fallout 3, I think that you just might have something good.
Does anyone know if you can get addresses in your LDAP server onto the junkmail whitelist?
I mean the part in the junkmail configuration screen where you can say "don't mark mail from people in my address book as junk" and pick either your personal address book or your collected addresses (but not both, wtf?). But there doesn't seem to be any way to specify an LDAP server that you have configured.
This objection (concerns about the end of "public" frequencies) could be handled by having the government own some frequency bands. The analogy is to government parks. The government buys up some land, makes it a park, and sets down rule by which the public can use the parkland. Similarly, before the abolishment of the FCC (as it is now) the public frequencies could be placed under the control of the new National Frequency Service which manages the public frequencies.
One thing I've always wondered about SS1, the other X-prize entries, and the X-prize itself is whether there is a clear series of steps which lead to some goal like regular space travel.
By this I mean questions like: can the design used for SS1 (and the other X-prize teams) be scaled to orbital operations, more people/cargo, etc; or is it just a special purpose vehicle designed to win the X-prize?
Sure, it's inevitable that we'll learn something when doing a complicated engineering project like this. But at times it feels like the X-prize is being treated like an end goal instead of an early step on a journey.
As soon as we started programming, we found to our surprise that it wasn't as easy to get programs right as we had thought. Debugging had to be discovered. I can remember the exact instant when I realized that a large part of my life from then on was going to be spent in finding mistakes in my own programs. -- Maurice Wilkes
Your argument would carry weight only if 12 were used consistantly throughout the system.
You convieniently picked a couple of relationships that are 12s (feet and inches, gallons and quarts), but you ignored all the other relationships that aren't multiples of 12 (e.g. feet to miles, pounds in a ton).
So yes, I agree with you in part. If imperial used powers of 12 throughout, I could get on board. But a mixed bag of conversion ratios that can't be deduced, only memorized? Count me out.
Your point about lead-in show affecting ratings is true, but only to a point. And not far enough to overcome my "people watch shows, not networks".
First, only to a point because while lead-in can help a bit, it's not all that effective (as compared to the quality of the show itself). It can only help the ratings of a show a little bit (the prime example: NBC's inability to get any show to work after Friends; if lead-in were a really big factor, then that 8:30 slot would be trivially easy to fill).
Second, only to a point because, again, the viewer doesn't care about the network, only the shows. A good lead-in can cause people to be lazy, but nobody turns on their TV and says "I'm going to watch CBS, no matter what they're showing."
So, through programming tricks, like careful choice of lead-in, network programming executives can make small bumps in ratings. But I think that the vast majority of viewers would prefer to give the finger to the network programming executive and do their own programming using an a-la-carte show selection technology (if it were easy enough to use).
As an aside, the TV show production companies in my brave new world could still use the lead-in factor a bit. For example, they could offer bundles of shows that take advantage of popular shows to push sales of less popular shows.
Not exactly. The key point to remember is that people watch shows *not* networks/channels. I watch The Sopranos, I don't watch HBO. I watch The West Wing, I don't watch NBC. Etc.
What the grandparent was getting at is that we currently have the technology to completely eliminate channels and simply offer shows. The current setup where shows are offered on channels is technologically obsolete.
We want to change from the model where networks broadcast shows on channels to one where the network-type companies are more like movie production companies. Where they finance the production of new shows and then send them to the distributor (probably the cable/satellite companies) who stores them for purchase by the viewer (then the shows are streamed/downloaded).
Of course, networks are going to fight this all the way. But the continued evolution of tivo-like devices makes it technologically inevitable.
While the k5 article was almost incoherent. I've often felt that game designers were making mistakes in trying to adapt PnP rules to CRPGs. But more for the simple reason that different game mediums have different design requirements, strengths and limitations. And a set of rules designed for one medium will obviously struggle in another. For example, try to make a card game out of the Monopoly rules.
The game-rule parts of CRPGs generally work much better if the designers create a whole new system which plays to the strengths of CRPGs. (That's not to say that the game will necessarily be better, there are more factors to a game than just the rule systems.)
Off topic, but I read somewhere that the Swiss Guards to actually train quite a bit with their halberds (in addition to training with modern weapons). The idea being that they might at some point have to engage in combat while wearing their ceremonial outfit so they'd better damn well know how to use it.
I'm glad we've cleared up your objection to the EFF plan.
I think that the main "but" to your auction idea is what the EFF plan makes as their second premise:
Second, file sharing is here to stay. Killing Napster only spawned more decentralized networks. Most evidence suggests that file sharing is at least as popular today as it was before the lawsuits began.
Now, do you disagree with the premise that, pretty much right after the seller sells a few copies of their work in your digital art auction, the work will then be available for free on the file sharing networks? Or do you have some plan to kill the file sharing networks that the RIAA has overlooked?
Oh, wait a minute. I (and I think the others that responded to you) have misunderstood what you've been saying. I apologize.
It looked to me like you were saying something like: creative works that people put more effort into should be worth more than creative works that were quick/easy/stupidly popular to produce. Now to be fair to me, it was easy to come to this conclusion as you made statements like this (from your original post in this thread):
Why should a quick tinkle on a xylophone be better rewarded than months of work on an orchestral masterpiece?
But now I understand that your criticism of the EFF proposal is that it removes the ability of the seller to set their sale price. Not that you necessarily expect anyone to buy at the price the seller might set (that's up to the market). But you're objecting to taking the price setting option from the seller.
So you don't think that the orchestral masterpiece should necessarily sell for more than the xylophone tinkle, just that the creator of the orchestral masterpiece should be allowed to try to sell their work for whatever price they want (and the buyers should be free to accept or reject that price). Right?
If that's your point, then I theoretically agree. But practically, I go back to my point about great being the enemy of good.
It's not a market, it's a popularity reward system.
As others have pointed out, a market is a popularity reward system. Everything is worth exactly what you can get people to pay for it, no more no less. And abstract concepts of "worth" that are divorced from you can get people to pay for something have no meaning. Wishing the world worked otherwise is pointless.
And in regards to having more than one concurrently operating system of paying for music, I don't see any problem with that. It's impossible that we will ever design a system that literally everyone agrees is perfect (because people have contradictory requirements). So what we have to do is find a system that the vast majority of people accept as "good enough", but which doesn't prevent the minority from using a different system if they want (and doesn't force the minority to use the "good enough" solution, if they don't want).
Well, there's nothing in the EFF's plan (or even in the current system) that prevents individuals (or small groups) to go directly to artists and comission them the produce particular music (which then may, or may not, go into the general distribution system).
So I think you're talking apples and oranges. The EFF's proposed system, or for that matter, the current system, don't preclude other systems from operating concurrently.
Basically, the artist could simply hire a publicist.
Right now, the big record companies perform a whole list of functions for the artist: publicist, manufactuer, distributor, loan shark, etc. But there is no particular reason why an artist has to go to a single company for all these functions, it's just habit.
So, the artist, they might go to one company that will give them a loan (but won't demand copyright ownership in exchange). They then spend some of this money at another company to cover the recording costs of the music (again, not giving up copyright). Then they'll put the music on the filesharing networks. Then the artist will hire a publicist to make the public aware of the new music (again, the artist retains copyright).
Basically, the artist becomes the employer and hires people to do the functions that the record companies do now. Rather than the artist essentially being an employee of the record company, as the current state of affairs sort of is.
Slashdot Mirror
QG, Bruce knows all about Ubuntu (I hate to play the "do you know who Bruce Perens is?" card, but do you?). In fact, it's a pretty safe bet that he personally knows most of the principle people involved in Ubuntu.
His point about the difference between Ubuntu and UL is that UL operates within Debian, that is, if UL people want to make a change and they can't get it into Debian, then they won't do it.
But Ubuntu takes Debian and then makes their own changes to it. They always try really hard to get those changes back into Debian. But if they can't, then they'll still go ahead if they think it's important.
I'm over-simplifying a bit and I'm not saying which approach is right or wrong, but there is a difference in philosophy and approach between Ubuntu and UL.
You probably couldn't find the interview because it was with Nora Denzel :-) Slashdot even did a story linking to it. I highly recommend re-reading... It makes for a good laugh :-)
/. story that I submitted that ever made it to the front page. Good times.
Ah, the only
The idea that the TV networks provide any necessary service is contradicted by the fact that no other entertainment medium has a similar role. For movies, books, and music, there is no equivalent to the TV network.
And yet, these other forms of entertainment seem to do just fine in allocating resources (or, at least, no worse than TV).
Television networks are obsolete.
Well, actually, most countries that signed it are not going to meet their targets, and they knew that going in (the few that do are going to do so only on technicalities, like Russia whose carbon levels were set before a steep industrial decline).
So why, you ask, did they sign, knowing that they wouldn't meet the targets? Well, because they know that nobody else is going to meet them either. And if everybody fails, nobody gets punished.
What will happen is that in a few years, at one of the Kyoto target dates, there will be a conference, there will be speeches about how carbon emissions have gone down, but not by the amount pledged and everyone will claim to try really hard to meet the next target, really this time, we promise.
It's all just hypocrisy, really. But, in the end, it might be useful hypocrisy.
Now why did the USA government decide not to go along with the nudge-nudge, wink-wink Kyoto ruse like everyone else. I'd like to claim that it was because they were more principled, but really it was just pandering to domestic political interests.
My dog seems to like to learn new tricks. Is my dog human?
My Best analogy for true globalization is osmosis or diffusion. Currently America has an extremely high concentration of money. Without some way to keep that money in the states, the money will diffuse out across the world to the point where we are at a more equal distribution.
Well, you do seem to be making the assumption that the global economy is a zero-sum game. Which of course it isn't. Every victory doesn't require a defeat in this game.
Now, I'm not necessarily saying that massive outsourcing is the way to go, the issue is complex. But if we work at it and make the right choices we can all get richer.
Read any book put out by Microsoft Press and it's plain there are a number of people there that are as or more capable than most open source programmers.
It's not all that important, I suppose, but just in case you don't know, Microsoft Press books are not written by Microsoft developers (well, a few are, but not most). Microsoft Press is just a regular publisher and their authors come from the same pool of writers as every other technical publisher. So the quality of books from MS Press says nothing, good or bad, about the company's software products or practices.
I think that you're basically right, but that the Linux core should take it one step furthur. A lot of the complaints actually boil down to the fact that linux is using the x.y.z versioning system in a completely non-standard way (specifically, that "z" increments shouldn't add new features, only fix bugs).
Linus, et al. should simply stop using x.y.z entirely and just date releases (eg. linux-20040816). This makes it completely explicit that the version number is just a timestamp and makes no claim about relations to previous releases.
Your information is incorrect. GP coverage in Canada is very uneven. Some areas are very well served, some are embarassingly underserved.
I think that one point to make on this is to compare Daggerfall to Morrowind. All the problems that you talk about were much, much worse in Daggerfall. So Bethesda did learn from their mistakes and tried to address them in Morrowind.
True, they weren't entirely successful. But if you take the big step made from Daggerfall to Morrowind, and then extrapolate the same size of step from Morrowind to Fallout 3, I think that you just might have something good.
Does anyone know if you can get addresses in your LDAP server onto the junkmail whitelist?
I mean the part in the junkmail configuration screen where you can say "don't mark mail from people in my address book as junk" and pick either your personal address book or your collected addresses (but not both, wtf?). But there doesn't seem to be any way to specify an LDAP server that you have configured.
This objection (concerns about the end of "public" frequencies) could be handled by having the government own some frequency bands. The analogy is to government parks. The government buys up some land, makes it a park, and sets down rule by which the public can use the parkland. Similarly, before the abolishment of the FCC (as it is now) the public frequencies could be placed under the control of the new National Frequency Service which manages the public frequencies.
One thing I've always wondered about SS1, the other X-prize entries, and the X-prize itself is whether there is a clear series of steps which lead to some goal like regular space travel.
By this I mean questions like: can the design used for SS1 (and the other X-prize teams) be scaled to orbital operations, more people/cargo, etc; or is it just a special purpose vehicle designed to win the X-prize?
Sure, it's inevitable that we'll learn something when doing a complicated engineering project like this. But at times it feels like the X-prize is being treated like an end goal instead of an early step on a journey.
As soon as we started programming, we found to our surprise that it wasn't as easy to get programs right as we had thought. Debugging had to be discovered. I can remember the exact instant when I realized that a large part of my life from then on was going to be spent in finding mistakes in my own programs.
-- Maurice Wilkes
Your argument would carry weight only if 12 were used consistantly throughout the system.
You convieniently picked a couple of relationships that are 12s (feet and inches, gallons and quarts), but you ignored all the other relationships that aren't multiples of 12 (e.g. feet to miles, pounds in a ton).
So yes, I agree with you in part. If imperial used powers of 12 throughout, I could get on board. But a mixed bag of conversion ratios that can't be deduced, only memorized? Count me out.
Your point about lead-in show affecting ratings is true, but only to a point. And not far enough to overcome my "people watch shows, not networks".
First, only to a point because while lead-in can help a bit, it's not all that effective (as compared to the quality of the show itself). It can only help the ratings of a show a little bit (the prime example: NBC's inability to get any show to work after Friends; if lead-in were a really big factor, then that 8:30 slot would be trivially easy to fill).
Second, only to a point because, again, the viewer doesn't care about the network, only the shows. A good lead-in can cause people to be lazy, but nobody turns on their TV and says "I'm going to watch CBS, no matter what they're showing."
So, through programming tricks, like careful choice of lead-in, network programming executives can make small bumps in ratings. But I think that the vast majority of viewers would prefer to give the finger to the network programming executive and do their own programming using an a-la-carte show selection technology (if it were easy enough to use).
As an aside, the TV show production companies in my brave new world could still use the lead-in factor a bit. For example, they could offer bundles of shows that take advantage of popular shows to push sales of less popular shows.
Does anyone know what the most tuners people have placed in computers running the open source PVR projects (such as MythTv or Freevo)?
I've heard of people running three tuners and I guess that theoretically you could run as many as you have PCI ports.
Not exactly. The key point to remember is that people watch shows *not* networks/channels. I watch The Sopranos, I don't watch HBO. I watch The West Wing, I don't watch NBC. Etc.
What the grandparent was getting at is that we currently have the technology to completely eliminate channels and simply offer shows. The current setup where shows are offered on channels is technologically obsolete.
We want to change from the model where networks broadcast shows on channels to one where the network-type companies are more like movie production companies. Where they finance the production of new shows and then send them to the distributor (probably the cable/satellite companies) who stores them for purchase by the viewer (then the shows are streamed/downloaded).
Of course, networks are going to fight this all the way. But the continued evolution of tivo-like devices makes it technologically inevitable.
While the k5 article was almost incoherent. I've often felt that game designers were making mistakes in trying to adapt PnP rules to CRPGs. But more for the simple reason that different game mediums have different design requirements, strengths and limitations. And a set of rules designed for one medium will obviously struggle in another. For example, try to make a card game out of the Monopoly rules.
The game-rule parts of CRPGs generally work much better if the designers create a whole new system which plays to the strengths of CRPGs. (That's not to say that the game will necessarily be better, there are more factors to a game than just the rule systems.)
Off topic, but I read somewhere that the Swiss Guards to actually train quite a bit with their halberds (in addition to training with modern weapons). The idea being that they might at some point have to engage in combat while wearing their ceremonial outfit so they'd better damn well know how to use it.
I'm glad we've cleared up your objection to the EFF plan.
I think that the main "but" to your auction idea is what the EFF plan makes as their second premise:
Second, file sharing is here to stay. Killing Napster only spawned more decentralized networks. Most evidence suggests that file sharing is at least as popular today as it was before the lawsuits began.
Now, do you disagree with the premise that, pretty much right after the seller sells a few copies of their work in your digital art auction, the work will then be available for free on the file sharing networks? Or do you have some plan to kill the file sharing networks that the RIAA has overlooked?
Oh, wait a minute. I (and I think the others that responded to you) have misunderstood what you've been saying. I apologize.
It looked to me like you were saying something like: creative works that people put more effort into should be worth more than creative works that were quick/easy/stupidly popular to produce. Now to be fair to me, it was easy to come to this conclusion as you made statements like this (from your original post in this thread):
Why should a quick tinkle on a xylophone be better rewarded than months of work on an orchestral masterpiece?
But now I understand that your criticism of the EFF proposal is that it removes the ability of the seller to set their sale price. Not that you necessarily expect anyone to buy at the price the seller might set (that's up to the market). But you're objecting to taking the price setting option from the seller.
So you don't think that the orchestral masterpiece should necessarily sell for more than the xylophone tinkle, just that the creator of the orchestral masterpiece should be allowed to try to sell their work for whatever price they want (and the buyers should be free to accept or reject that price). Right?
If that's your point, then I theoretically agree. But practically, I go back to my point about great being the enemy of good.
It's not a market, it's a popularity reward system.
As others have pointed out, a market is a popularity reward system. Everything is worth exactly what you can get people to pay for it, no more no less. And abstract concepts of "worth" that are divorced from you can get people to pay for something have no meaning. Wishing the world worked otherwise is pointless.
And in regards to having more than one concurrently operating system of paying for music, I don't see any problem with that. It's impossible that we will ever design a system that literally everyone agrees is perfect (because people have contradictory requirements). So what we have to do is find a system that the vast majority of people accept as "good enough", but which doesn't prevent the minority from using a different system if they want (and doesn't force the minority to use the "good enough" solution, if they don't want).
Well, there's nothing in the EFF's plan (or even in the current system) that prevents individuals (or small groups) to go directly to artists and comission them the produce particular music (which then may, or may not, go into the general distribution system).
So I think you're talking apples and oranges. The EFF's proposed system, or for that matter, the current system, don't preclude other systems from operating concurrently.
Basically, the artist could simply hire a publicist.
Right now, the big record companies perform a whole list of functions for the artist: publicist, manufactuer, distributor, loan shark, etc. But there is no particular reason why an artist has to go to a single company for all these functions, it's just habit.
So, the artist, they might go to one company that will give them a loan (but won't demand copyright ownership in exchange). They then spend some of this money at another company to cover the recording costs of the music (again, not giving up copyright). Then they'll put the music on the filesharing networks. Then the artist will hire a publicist to make the public aware of the new music (again, the artist retains copyright).
Basically, the artist becomes the employer and hires people to do the functions that the record companies do now. Rather than the artist essentially being an employee of the record company, as the current state of affairs sort of is.