yahoo's not dumping BSD for the sake of dumping BSD. Google is the best (in my opinion and many other people's as well) search service. Yahoo wants to offer Google to their visitors, so they don't lose the hits to Google. And since Google runs on Linux that's what google.yahoo.com needs to use as well.
That's their strength. Don't take this wrong, but Microsoft's strength isn't in innovation. It's in the fact that they relentlessly try over and over and over again until they get things right.
So, they tried moving hotmail to NT 4 a few years back. That failed. Now they're trying again with Win2000. That may or may not fail, we haven't seen yet. But even if it does, they'll try again until eventually, Hotmail WILL run on exclusively Microsoft products...
The banned countries are banned because we have embargoes against them... They can't buy anything we produce, and our government won't let us buy anything of theres, except oil sometimes, i think... (isn't iraq on that list somewhere?).
It's not that the government is saying "ha ha! you still can't have the code", they're sticking by their stance of not allowing any commercial or other transactions with them.
Because there isn't one. This company is sadly mistaken if they think they think they can skirt the issue saying that they rely on users to supply the material. That's what Napster does... They have no mp3's on their servers, but what they're getting in trouble for is facilitating the copying of music. Same thing applies here, just as if you buy a house and say "well, i'm not going to give you drugs, but come on over and share them with everyone", you're going to be in hot water if you either encouraged the activity or knew of it and looked the other way.
The only difference i can see is maybe, since many games aren't being distributed or made anymore, that the copyright holders would look the other way, or even better, step forward and say "hi. we own these. we're not making a dime off of them anymore, so go ahead, trade away".
BUT, if they'ed say that, why even make a distributed network full of 1/2 downloaded games and such? Why not just house them on a webserver somewhere and say "hi! here they are".
The crux of the matter is that if Napster's the example, anyone founding a company on the premise of trading IP they don't own is going to end up in a lot of hot water, fast, unless they work BEFORE HAND with the owners of the property and work out an arrangement of some sort.
If i'm not mistaken, this is about distributing music online, not via CD. Napster fans for ages have been saying "we want to be able to get our music online, without having to buy a CD"... Well, this is their next attempt at an answer. And individually watermarking downloaded music is not at all that unfeasible.
Or maybe it is... There would probaby be some way that 10 people could buy a song, and then average all the bits together to get rid of the watermark, or something like that. I'm not a programmer, so i don't know the terminology... Food for thought...
Just remember, they're not talking about watermarking CD's and tracking CD sales, they're talking about fingerprinting downloads...
Those complaints all seem to be lodged in the CLI mindset. If you can remember just a couple of commonly used keyboard commands, you won't need to touch the mouse nearly as often as you make it sound like.
When you're typing, you're typing. If you need to bold, italicize, indent, copy, paste, or anything else, those are all just a keyboard shortcut away. No need to take you hands off that precious home row.
But more and more, computers are being used for things besides typing. Browsing the web doesn't require hands on the keyboard. Neither does editting photo's or video. And again, it's not like there's any application that requires you to make repeated menu selections while simulateously typing without offering keyboard shortcuts so that you can keep your hands in one place...
What's wrong with a button for copy and a button for paste? Sure beats the piss out of one button for copy, then move the mouse, then *KEY IN* ctrl-v or open-apple-v.
There is no "copy" button, for one. You select something, and either control click it and choose copy, or else you click something then type "command-c"... Keep in mind, too, that on a Mac keyboard, the command key is where the alt key is. Most commonly used operations seem to be consolidated around the left side of the keyboard, so you can keep one hand over ASDF and another on the mouse and be just as efficient as anyone with a 3 button mouse.
This whole onebutton versus three button mouse thing is just absurd. You can't envision workingin an and environment with one mouse button because all your apps and your OS have been tailored to use 3 buttons. It's that simple. IF you can change your mindset just by one degree, though you might not "like" it, you'll see that a one button mouse is just as useful as a three button mouse when people build their apps around that. You won't even miss those extra buttons...
Then when an app crashes every hour, at least your system doesn't ever go down with it. You haven't used a Mac since system 7.1 apparently... 8.5 ---> 9.0 have been godsends for stability... even 8.0 and.1 were fantastic. Granted we're not talking month long uptimes, but the days of crashing every hour have long since been gone away. Now it's like every few days, and that's with leaving the machine on all night long running Seti, no less....
That's the windows and linux mentallity... it shows in the software as well, as their are generally buttons on screen for every concievable operation, rather than just displaying what most people will actually use and allowing people that need the extra features the ability to use keyboard shortcuts...
You want one button to select something, a separte button to open something. Why not add another one that closes something, and another that deletes something, and another to move things and another to copy things... why not just have two keyboards, while we're at it?
The concept of double clicking versus single clicking just isn't THAT hard to explain to a user, no matter how novice they are. Sure, they might not get it in the first or second time around, but how do you know they'll grasp the idea of clicking a different button depending on what they want to do?
But DAT was and is inferior for consumers compared to CD's. It's got a shorter lifespan, is linear (you'd have to fastforward and rewind, rather than just hit skip, and forget about random playing), and is more subject to things like heat and humidity. Just for a very SLIGHT increase in quality. The tapes are more expensive to produce than CD's as well.
DAT belongs in the recording studio, where quality counts a lot more for mastering, but only a very small percentage of consumers would have actually wanted it... and those people are better served by vinyl than they ever would have been by DAT's.
Yes, the recording industry destroyed any potential for DAT's, but even if they hadn't stepped in, it would have been a doomed format since it would have had to compete against the much for "user-friendly" CD's.
platform version Win 3.1 4.08 Win 9x, NT 4.08 Mac 68k 4.03 Mac PPC 4.08 AIX 3 3.04 AIX 4 4.08 AIX 4.1 4.74 AIX 4.2 4.74 BSD 2.1 3.04 BSDI 2.0 4.74 Digital Unix 3.2 4.04 FreeBSD 2.2 4.74 ...
I'm actually not going to type them all in, but suffice it to say that not everyone has the choice to use the most current version of Navigator... Some of us (windows and mac) users need to use the full Communicator...
We'll see how ballsy AOL can be come then... They'ed be giving up a LOT of free promotion (AOL icon on every windows desktop, or at least in the Online Services folder) by switching to Mozilla. What would they gain by doing that? A little bit of pride by bashing Microsoft for no reason other than the fact that they could? I can't think of much else, really... If Microsoft will renew their deal with AOL, i'd expect AOL take take it again and stick with IE.
Afterall, in the merger, AOL seemed primarily interested in the traffic to Netscapes portal, while Sun seemed mostly interested in Netscapes actual technologies.
That's all I wanted. A rock solid light weight browser, a la Opera. I don't want integrated mail, news, chat, and whatever else they're piling in there. Just a standards compliant web browser. It's rather funny that the one of the consistent complaints about Microsoft is their code bloat, and here comes Mozilla out of the gate with just about every feature imaginable integrated into the one application... Where's the modularity?
Given that they started out with complete access to all of Netscapes source code, there really seems to be no reason why it should take two years to clean up the code and deliver something that the majority of the world can find useful, rather than the relatively small percentage of oss users...
One could argue that "iMac" is a much more original name than "Qube", being that "qube" is pronounced excatly the same as "cube" in english, which means that they're trying to tradmark a word in the english language... not a phrase, but a word... and they're not even Microsoft.
I don't think that apple calling their computer the power mac cube or g4 cube or anything like that at all dilutes cobalts trademark at all, though...
Regardless as to one way or the other, artists and bands literally crawl over one another in order to get signed by the labels. Obviously they offer something that the artists can't provide fot themselves. Advertising, production, channels of distribution are all the results of massive investments by the labels. And the plight of the artist versus the label has been well aired. There's no one holding guns to their heads or anything, they're (the artists) are willfully siging up with labels in order to get a smaller piece of a potentially much larger pie.
Respect their decisions. The only major label artists that are very vocal about speaking out against labels (Courtney Love, Phish) have already reaped the rewards of what the labels offered them, or else they've essentially been paid off by napster (Limp Bizkit).
You have to wonder what will happen to limp bizkit come their next contract re-negotiation. Why should the labels forward them tons of money in order to produce their CDs, promote them, as well as give them advances agaist their royaltees when they're out and out advising their fans to take the music nad not pay for it?
Will it be the labels faults that limp bizkit disappears, or will it be their own?
Mp3.com is basically a record label, for all inents and purposes.
To me, this is the crux of Napster's case: they should demonstrate that the RIAA, by refusing to embrace on-line distribution, is denying the Artists the legitimate opportunity to earn income from their work.
Uhhh.. before Napster could spout about anything like that, they'ed first need to device a way to pay artists AT LEAST wht they're earning from the major labels, no?
MP3.com pays artists. Labels pay artists. Napster doesn't.
my vote goes to Meg Lee Chin, Shellac, Lard, Wesley Willis, old butt hole surfrs, old sebadoh, pigface, jesus lizard, unsane, the list goes on but they might not be of your genre...
In short, there are plenty of bands that aren't signed onto major labels, you just haven't heard of them. My question to you is, if you haven't heard of them now, how do you think that the next generation of bands will be heard of if not for the labels?
I was buying twice as many CD's since the advent of napster simply because I was able to download and listen to music. Shareware. Try before you buy.
The problem is, from what i've observed here and in real life, is that for every 1 of you there are , there are 25 people who consider Mp3's to be "good enough" as replacements for CD's and records, and therefor, once they've downloaded the mp3 version of an album, even though they listen to it every day, they have no desire to go buy the real thing, because all theye'd do with that is rip it onto their hard drives and end with the same exact thing as they got for free...
No.... they're not against mp3 as a file format, they're agaist mp3 because it has become synonomous with music piracy. It's only the accutely paranoid that would think that they would go after MP3.com and others who are distributing some arists' songs WITH their permision... Or start going after google, yahoo, and altavista for inavertetly indexing mp3's...
(mymp3.om, that's a different story than this matter as well..)
So, what's the compromise going to be? I forsee a new patronage system coming out of all this. Back in the early days of the first artistic revolution, just after the Renaissance, artists would be supported by wealthy patrons. These patrons would support the artist and many of them allowed them a great latitude in what they could produce. Look at VA Linux and Slashdot... VA Linux is a patron to Slashdot, they foot the bill in the interest of the community, and they give them editorial freedom.
That's exactly what we have right now... They're called "record labels".
A pet store's not going to stop you from buying a gerbil a week, because you can just say that you have a snake and need food for it... my and a few friends once bought a slew of cute little gerbils and told the sales clerk we were going to feed them to some boa's and video tape the ordeal and they just shrugged their shoulders and said "it's your money..."
However... Say you walk into an S&M shop and see a cage full of gerbils and books about shoving them up your ass (an urban legend, I'm hoping!), that store is not going to be selling them for long. If you look at their display and see that their obviously advocating one thing, even if they turn around and say "we can sell gerbils, it's our right, besides, we have no responsibility to what happens to those gerbils once they leave here" to avoid prosecution for animal cruelty, you're mistaken.
Same goes for Napster. They're BLATANTLY violating copyright laws... Sharing with your friends is one thing, sharing with the world is another. sharing for the sake of sharing is one thing, enabling sharing and hoping to squeeze a profit out of it is a whole other thing.
The only way Napster can and should hope to survive is to make their service an opt-in service rather than an opt-out one like it is right now... Let musicians CHOOSE whether or not they want to have their music distributed via their service... No matter how hard people here try to make it sound, it really would not be that much effort or expense to create a workable solution only allowed the transfer of files that the OWNERS (creators) wanted to have shared.
Slashdot Mirror
yahoo's not dumping BSD for the sake of dumping BSD. Google is the best (in my opinion and many other people's as well) search service. Yahoo wants to offer Google to their visitors, so they don't lose the hits to Google. And since Google runs on Linux that's what google.yahoo.com needs to use as well.
That's hardly a "loss" for BSD.
That's their strength. Don't take this wrong, but Microsoft's strength isn't in innovation. It's in the fact that they relentlessly try over and over and over again until they get things right.
So, they tried moving hotmail to NT 4 a few years back. That failed. Now they're trying again with Win2000. That may or may not fail, we haven't seen yet. But even if it does, they'll try again until eventually, Hotmail WILL run on exclusively Microsoft products...
it's rather hilarious that the overall sentiment on slashdot is that
1 - Spam should be outlawed, while source code is speech.
2 - Music is just bits, and should not afforded any protection, yet again, source code is a constitutional right.
As long as the mentality is so lopsided like that, anyone who looks in to the community will think that everyone is utterly confused.
The banned countries are banned because we have embargoes against them... They can't buy anything we produce, and our government won't let us buy anything of theres, except oil sometimes, i think... (isn't iraq on that list somewhere?).
It's not that the government is saying "ha ha! you still can't have the code", they're sticking by their stance of not allowing any commercial or other transactions with them.
Because there isn't one. This company is sadly mistaken if they think they think they can skirt the issue saying that they rely on users to supply the material. That's what Napster does... They have no mp3's on their servers, but what they're getting in trouble for is facilitating the copying of music. Same thing applies here, just as if you buy a house and say "well, i'm not going to give you drugs, but come on over and share them with everyone", you're going to be in hot water if you either encouraged the activity or knew of it and looked the other way.
The only difference i can see is maybe, since many games aren't being distributed or made anymore, that the copyright holders would look the other way, or even better, step forward and say "hi. we own these. we're not making a dime off of them anymore, so go ahead, trade away".
BUT, if they'ed say that, why even make a distributed network full of 1/2 downloaded games and such? Why not just house them on a webserver somewhere and say "hi! here they are".
The crux of the matter is that if Napster's the example, anyone founding a company on the premise of trading IP they don't own is going to end up in a lot of hot water, fast, unless they work BEFORE HAND with the owners of the property and work out an arrangement of some sort.
If i'm not mistaken, this is about distributing music online, not via CD. Napster fans for ages have been saying "we want to be able to get our music online, without having to buy a CD"... Well, this is their next attempt at an answer. And individually watermarking downloaded music is not at all that unfeasible.
Or maybe it is... There would probaby be some way that 10 people could buy a song, and then average all the bits together to get rid of the watermark, or something like that. I'm not a programmer, so i don't know the terminology... Food for thought...
Just remember, they're not talking about watermarking CD's and tracking CD sales, they're talking about fingerprinting downloads...
Those complaints all seem to be lodged in the CLI mindset. If you can remember just a couple of commonly used keyboard commands, you won't need to touch the mouse nearly as often as you make it sound like.
When you're typing, you're typing. If you need to bold, italicize, indent, copy, paste, or anything else, those are all just a keyboard shortcut away. No need to take you hands off that precious home row.
But more and more, computers are being used for things besides typing. Browsing the web doesn't require hands on the keyboard. Neither does editting photo's or video. And again, it's not like there's any application that requires you to make repeated menu selections while simulateously typing without offering keyboard shortcuts so that you can keep your hands in one place...
What's wrong with a button for copy and a button for paste? Sure beats the piss out of one button for copy, then move the mouse, then *KEY IN* ctrl-v or open-apple-v.
There is no "copy" button, for one. You select something, and either control click it and choose copy, or else you click something then type "command-c"... Keep in mind, too, that on a Mac keyboard, the command key is where the alt key is. Most commonly used operations seem to be consolidated around the left side of the keyboard, so you can keep one hand over ASDF and another on the mouse and be just as efficient as anyone with a 3 button mouse.
This whole onebutton versus three button mouse thing is just absurd. You can't envision workingin an and environment with one mouse button because all your apps and your OS have been tailored to use 3 buttons. It's that simple. IF you can change your mindset just by one degree, though you might not "like" it, you'll see that a one button mouse is just as useful as a three button mouse when people build their apps around that. You won't even miss those extra buttons...
Then when an app crashes every hour, at least your system doesn't ever go down with it. .1 were fantastic. Granted we're not talking month long uptimes, but the days of crashing every hour have long since been gone away. Now it's like every few days, and that's with leaving the machine on all night long running Seti, no less....
You haven't used a Mac since system 7.1 apparently... 8.5 ---> 9.0 have been godsends for stability... even 8.0 and
Just thought I'd share.
That's the windows and linux mentallity... it shows in the software as well, as their are generally buttons on screen for every concievable operation, rather than just displaying what most people will actually use and allowing people that need the extra features the ability to use keyboard shortcuts...
You want one button to select something, a separte button to open something. Why not add another one that closes something, and another that deletes something, and another to move things and another to copy things... why not just have two keyboards, while we're at it?
The concept of double clicking versus single clicking just isn't THAT hard to explain to a user, no matter how novice they are. Sure, they might not get it in the first or second time around, but how do you know they'll grasp the idea of clicking a different button depending on what they want to do?
But DAT was and is inferior for consumers compared to CD's. It's got a shorter lifespan, is linear (you'd have to fastforward and rewind, rather than just hit skip, and forget about random playing), and is more subject to things like heat and humidity. Just for a very SLIGHT increase in quality. The tapes are more expensive to produce than CD's as well.
DAT belongs in the recording studio, where quality counts a lot more for mastering, but only a very small percentage of consumers would have actually wanted it... and those people are better served by vinyl than they ever would have been by DAT's.
Yes, the recording industry destroyed any potential for DAT's, but even if they hadn't stepped in, it would have been a doomed format since it would have had to compete against the much for "user-friendly" CD's.
From their web site:
platform version
Win 3.1 4.08
Win 9x, NT 4.08
Mac 68k 4.03
Mac PPC 4.08
AIX 3 3.04
AIX 4 4.08
AIX 4.1 4.74
AIX 4.2 4.74
BSD 2.1 3.04
BSDI 2.0 4.74
Digital Unix 3.2 4.04
FreeBSD 2.2 4.74
...
I'm actually not going to type them all in, but suffice it to say that not everyone has the choice to use the most current version of Navigator... Some of us (windows and mac) users need to use the full Communicator...
We'll see how ballsy AOL can be come then... They'ed be giving up a LOT of free promotion (AOL icon on every windows desktop, or at least in the Online Services folder) by switching to Mozilla. What would they gain by doing that? A little bit of pride by bashing Microsoft for no reason other than the fact that they could? I can't think of much else, really... If Microsoft will renew their deal with AOL, i'd expect AOL take take it again and stick with IE.
Afterall, in the merger, AOL seemed primarily interested in the traffic to Netscapes portal, while Sun seemed mostly interested in Netscapes actual technologies.
But Navigator has been abandoned at 4.0.x, where as Communicator at least makes slight progress and to 4.73 in two years...
That's all I wanted. A rock solid light weight browser, a la Opera. I don't want integrated mail, news, chat, and whatever else they're piling in there. Just a standards compliant web browser. It's rather funny that the one of the consistent complaints about Microsoft is their code bloat, and here comes Mozilla out of the gate with just about every feature imaginable integrated into the one application... Where's the modularity?
Given that they started out with complete access to all of Netscapes source code, there really seems to be no reason why it should take two years to clean up the code and deliver something that the majority of the world can find useful, rather than the relatively small percentage of oss users...
One could argue that "iMac" is a much more original name than "Qube", being that "qube" is pronounced excatly the same as "cube" in english, which means that they're trying to tradmark a word in the english language... not a phrase, but a word... and they're not even Microsoft.
I don't think that apple calling their computer the power mac cube or g4 cube or anything like that at all dilutes cobalts trademark at all, though...
so if you don"t like the band, why do you complain that they're being paid diddly by the labels, then???
Maybe i wouldn't lump you in with the slashdot mentallity except you're an AC, so i have no points of refernce of you...
Regardless as to one way or the other, artists and bands literally crawl over one another in order to get signed by the labels. Obviously they offer something that the artists can't provide fot themselves. Advertising, production, channels of distribution are all the results of massive investments by the labels. And the plight of the artist versus the label has been well aired. There's no one holding guns to their heads or anything, they're (the artists) are willfully siging up with labels in order to get a smaller piece of a potentially much larger pie.
Respect their decisions. The only major label artists that are very vocal about speaking out against labels (Courtney Love, Phish) have already reaped the rewards of what the labels offered them, or else they've essentially been paid off by napster (Limp Bizkit).
You have to wonder what will happen to limp bizkit come their next contract re-negotiation. Why should the labels forward them tons of money in order to produce their CDs, promote them, as well as give them advances agaist their royaltees when they're out and out advising their fans to take the music nad not pay for it?
Will it be the labels faults that limp bizkit disappears, or will it be their own?
WHAT?!?
Mp3.com is basically a record label, for all inents and purposes.
To me, this is the crux of Napster's case: they should demonstrate that the RIAA, by refusing to embrace on-line distribution, is denying the
Artists the legitimate opportunity to earn income from their work.
Uhhh.. before Napster could spout about anything like that, they'ed first need to device a way to pay artists AT LEAST wht they're earning from the major labels, no?
MP3.com pays artists. Labels pay artists. Napster doesn't.
my vote goes to Meg Lee Chin, Shellac, Lard, Wesley Willis, old butt hole surfrs, old sebadoh, pigface, jesus lizard, unsane, the list goes on but they might not be of your genre...
In short, there are plenty of bands that aren't signed onto major labels, you just haven't heard of them. My question to you is, if you haven't heard of them now, how do you think that the next generation of bands will be heard of if not for the labels?
I was buying twice as many CD's since the advent of napster simply because I was able to download and listen to music. Shareware. Try
before you buy.
The problem is, from what i've observed here and in real life, is that for every 1 of you there are , there are 25 people who consider Mp3's to be "good enough" as replacements for CD's and records, and therefor, once they've downloaded the mp3 version of an album, even though they listen to it every day, they have no desire to go buy the real thing, because all theye'd do with that is rip it onto their hard drives and end with the same exact thing as they got for free...
No.... they're not against mp3 as a file format, they're agaist mp3 because it has become synonomous with music piracy. It's only the accutely paranoid that would think that they would go after MP3.com and others who are distributing some arists' songs WITH their permision... Or start going after google, yahoo, and altavista for inavertetly indexing mp3's...
(mymp3.om, that's a different story than this matter as well..)
How can we track them today? We can't... We're just allowing much less skilled people the ability to exploit our systems...
So, what's the compromise going to be? I forsee a new patronage system coming out of all this. Back in the early days of the first artistic revolution, just after the Renaissance, artists would be supported by wealthy patrons. These patrons would support the artist and many of them allowed them a great latitude in what they could produce. Look at VA Linux and Slashdot... VA Linux is a patron to Slashdot, they foot the bill in the interest of the community, and they give them editorial freedom.
That's exactly what we have right now... They're called "record labels".
A pet store's not going to stop you from buying a gerbil a week, because you can just say that you have a snake and need food for it... my and a few friends once bought a slew of cute little gerbils and told the sales clerk we were going to feed them to some boa's and video tape the ordeal and they just shrugged their shoulders and said "it's your money..."
However... Say you walk into an S&M shop and see a cage full of gerbils and books about shoving them up your ass (an urban legend, I'm hoping!), that store is not going to be selling them for long. If you look at their display and see that their obviously advocating one thing, even if they turn around and say "we can sell gerbils, it's our right, besides, we have no responsibility to what happens to those gerbils once they leave here" to avoid prosecution for animal cruelty, you're mistaken.
Same goes for Napster. They're BLATANTLY violating copyright laws... Sharing with your friends is one thing, sharing with the world is another. sharing for the sake of sharing is one thing, enabling sharing and hoping to squeeze a profit out of it is a whole other thing.
The only way Napster can and should hope to survive is to make their service an opt-in service rather than an opt-out one like it is right now... Let musicians CHOOSE whether or not they want to have their music distributed via their service... No matter how hard people here try to make it sound, it really would not be that much effort or expense to create a workable solution only allowed the transfer of files that the OWNERS (creators) wanted to have shared.