OS/2 had applications, you just had to turn a few stones to find them. But it had a "nutritionally complete" set of applications, if you looked.
But to most people, a word processor isn't a Word Processor unless it's MS Word, and a spreadsheet isn't a Spreadsheet unless it's MS Excel. MS once said that they would produce Office for OS/2 once it had 2,000,000 sales/users. At it's peak, OS/2 was between 10 and 15 million users, but MS never produced Office/2.
Comparing OS/2 to Linux for a moment on this front, both past and future is interesting.
While OS/2 had commercial apps, they were hard to find until you'd become an insider. Linux apps are the same, except that the Web has become better developed to help people become insiders.
On the applications front, MS apps were considerably more trim in the OS/2 days, and were thus more formidable. They've put on a lot of fat since then, so I suspect people are more willing to consider non-MS alternatives.
One way OS/2 has contributed to the current situation is to become, "legendary," one of those "superior" things mowed over by the MS marketing machine.
That's true, IMHO.
It has helped set the stage for MS' current woes. It helps highlight how their "innovation" isn't technical, it's in business practices.
I used to push the WPS concepts on the GNOME mailing lists. But as far as I could tell, GNOME just kept trying to look as much as possible like Windows.
I agree 100%. I thought I said that in my post. You bring up a good point, that Coke/Pepsi may well be about the worst abuser out there.
Arguments against Monopoly are easy, and it's fairly easy to construct legal litmus tests to 'find' them. (legally find, that is) I'm not sure how you legally 'find' a Duopoly. How about a Trioploy.
Aren't there Conspiracy and Racketeering laws, and shouldn't they apply to N>1_Opolies?
If a "Micrsoft Standard" dominates some sector, the it should be FORCED to be opened, with complete documentation. This includes file formats as well as protocols.
2. No exclusionary contracts. We should also study why the 1995 consent decree failed, because it was supposed to stop this, and didn't.
3. No gag orders in the license. If a product is #$%^, the knowledge needs to flow in order to allow the market to correct.
The foundation of capitalism is the free market. The foundation of the free market is the informed consumer who can choose. Restraining either the information or the choice is bad for the free market, and turns the economic system into something other than capitalism. It both proves and disproves Karl Marx, because it leads to the fate he describes, but I assert that it's no longer capitalism.
My suggested remedies apply to Microsoft at the moment, but they are equally applicable to any business. Consider the market dominance AOL is achieving, yet at the same time their wire protocols are closed. They are now big enough that this may need to change.
But then again, there'd be other changes, as well, if I were IN CHARGE.
and MP3 is currently under HEAVY attack from the RIIA, in various forms, the Napster attack being the latest.
Yes, you can always capture the audio output, but that isn't considered the threat that capturing the digital stream is.
And I'll agree that you can capture the digital stream, as well, by hook or by crook. But it's a bit harder, and at the moment isn't mainstream. Heck, at the worst grab the RealAudio ipchains proxy and hack it to put the stream capture code there.
If surreptitious stream capture techniques were to rise to the general consciousness, I'm sure the RIAA (and MPAA, where relevant) would be after them.
AFAIK, the only "standards" to have taken off are Real Audio, Windows Media Player, and Quicktime, all of which have proprietary codecs. But isn't the real issue that they also are able to enforce end-to-end stream control?
This is what prevents one from capturing a stream and saving it. Use an open codec, and the codec can be replaced/subverted to capture the stream, and then everyone in the world will immediately pirate the precious content.
IMHO, a free codec won't help. We've got to crack the nut of organizations who want to retain intimate and complete control over content delivery.
It's not really a software problem, it's a greed and political problem.
is in it's optimistic view of the human race that we have a future at all.
We are in what I call, "The Bomb to Starship gap". We have sufficient power to destroy ourselves, lack the wisdom, as a species, to control our breeding to match our resources. Finally, we don't have enough power to improve our resources through space travel/exploitation. IE, for the near future, it's a zero-sum game, we've got one heck of a deficit, and it's getting worse.
People criticized later Star Trek series' for talking their way out of problems. I look at it differently. ANY species, us included, with the power to travel to the stars MUST be able to control its impulses to kill its own kind, or it just plain won't survive. We've survived the A Bomb - so far, but that's primarily because a few Superpowers restricted distribution of the technology. The genie is slowly escaping from the bottle, getting in the hands of more desparate people, more likely to use it.
At the same time, we're also getting more knowledge at the small scale, both biological and nanotech. These are perhaps more dangerous than the Bomb, if only because the barrier to entry is lower.
So in a fundamental fashion, the people of Star Trek: TNG are different from us. They are mature homo sapients, much less prone to the brash, kill-you-own-kind impulses that we have. But for this very reason, a lot of people felt that TNG was boring.
One could argue that the people of Star Trek: TOS were somewhere in between us and TNG.
Personally, I was hoping for a new series to take place in between TOS and TNG, so it would be more relevant to action-oriented audiences without compromising the principle of a mature society. I guess going even before TOS still fulfills that wish. I suspect that a purist picture of Star Trek a century after TNG would be considered too boring for TV.
On the side, I don't consider a 'Mature Society' to mean that they never fight, have conflicts, etc. Just that they don't do those things over petty little things. (like money or power)
Where do you get your information?
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Homebrew S/ADSL
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DSL we all know, but then it becomes acronym soup with DLC, SLIC, etc. I found some of the information on DLSReports, but not enough. Someday I hope to get Bandwidth. Today I can't even get V.90. According to DSLReports I'm about 42,000 feet from my Central Office. But only 1.5 miles from my house is this little tan shed owned by the phone company. It may be pertinant to my situation, in either good (remote DSLAM) or bad (limited-bandwidth fiber) ways. But before I can figure out what the future holds, I need more education on this. Sources, anyone?
For insurance purposes, the swimming pool has to have a fence, it has to be a non-trivial fence, and it has to be locked. You have to have demonstrated not just intent, but reasonable measures to prevent accidental drowning by unauthorized swimmers.
Now apply it to the anticircumvention measures of the DMCA. They haven't said how hard the electronic publishers have to try to protect their art. Can they encrypt the data by XORing with "DMCARulz" and call the data 'protected'?
From what I see, they can. One could argue that the CSS key used to develop deCSS was 'trivially' protected, almost as bad as the XOR encryption example.
One could also argue that the owner of a swimming pool that lightly protected would be readily open to lawsuit.
There, I've just Rot13'ed my data. Now I consider it encrypted and protected. By pressing the Rot13 button on your newsreader after October, you're breaking the law. Those who write and distribute newsreaders are breaking the law, now.
I suppose maybe this is a good idea, but...
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it does nothing about the basic idiocy of CSS, and the ability of the MPAA to dictate where you watch movies, and what players you watch on.
Look at the basics of CSS, and you'll also realize that DIVX isn't dead it's just hiding. All you need is an Internet-connected DVD player with a RAM-based key.
Someone else speaks of "Whining Geeks". There are certainly lots of us in there. But there are also librarians, teachers, and even Alladin. (Ghostscript) It turns out that the anti-circumvention measures, misapplied, limit their ability to render fonts.
Herein lies the crux:
Other than the Library of Congress review, there is no check and balance for the anti-circumvention measure. Other than the "Whining Geeks", there are clearly some other problems and groups of people and business with problems.
This is the mechanism. Now is the time.
I prefer the Motley Fool's (financial newsletter) take on this: How many other industries treat their customers as their enemies? My take: Could it be that they feel that they are ripping us off, and are afraid of the treatment they deserve? IMHO, the cost to price ratio of the audio CD compared to that of the audio cassette tape certainly supports this view.
Remember "Cities in Flight" by James Blish? Every time I hear of Scranton, PA, I think of the second section of the book, where it's taking off. In the book, the spindizzy came about because of a Nasa Breakthrough - type project. The thought of spinning superconducting disks is kind of reminiscant of that. I wonder if the Dirac-Blackett equations apply? As someone else says, extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof. But quantum mechanics and relativity didn't turn up until we looked under small enough or fast enough stones. Perhaps we need to just be looking under the right rocks for antigravity, and realize that it has to be a new realm, because existing theories do just too good a job explaining the current one.
In order to get their music onto a CD and into a "record" store, musicians sign a contract. THAT's why they can't put their music out on MP3, and all of this distribution stuff is illegal. Let's say I come up with a company called "Net Music Distributers" and sign some musicians to a contract, then the terms of payment and distribution can be named in that contract - including (obviously) Net distribution.
Music is being considered an idea, and placed on a similar plane to software, which is also an idea. But there's a rub, and you have to go to ESR's "The Magic Cauldron" to get it. 95% of software work is in-house, not for sale. Those 95% of the programmers are being payed for solving problems, not putting software on the shelf. (or other distribution medium.) Inasmuch as they may use, and thereby contribute to free software, it becomes a win-win situation. Their job is done, and there's more free software.
But music is a bit different. While there is some 'captive music', like weddings and parties, most of the money in the music industry appears to be in the sales of recordings. From what I've heard, even/especially concert tours don't really pay, because they're so expensive to run. They essentially act as non-profit (for the musician, any way) advertisements for the recordings.
We need a way to pay artists. We just can't lump them in with programmers. The same applies to games, along the ID software model. The engines have been released under GPL, but the artwork is still owned.
Once we come up with a way to pay artists, and once some artists buy into it, the existing system is just legacy. It's in the contract.
It's also interesting to note that the RIAA and MPAA are both downright paranoid about electronic distribution. Could it be because they know that they're ripping us off? How about that cassette tape that costs $10, and the CD that's CHEAPER to produce, but costs $16? The movie industry had a clue, once, when they reduced the price of movies from the $80 range down to the $20 range. But they appear to have lost it. The DVDs appear to be taking the lead from the audio CD. When the infrastructure is fully in place, I expect DVDs to cost less than VHS, but the price to always be a premium. How about taking the old computer price/performance curve and applying it the music/movie recording industries? They're bootstrapping off of our technology, and walking a different price/performance line.
You know why ATI went Open Source? (IMHO, and reading between the lines.)
ATI went Open Source because they lost a big design-in at a PC maker (forgot which) who wanted to make sure their boxes could run Linux. At the time, nVidia was making pursuasive Linux noises, and they got the contract.
So the fastest way to enable the Linux market, especially for a company not known for being the performance leader, was to embrace Open Source. It sure sped ATI's ramp.
The big question is whether PC makers will listen to the Open Source message, or nVidia's binary driver message. At the moment, unfortunately I suspect the latter. Though by funding Precision Insight, Matrox, ATI, and 3dfx have the best of both worlds - Open Source and "corporate-tuned" device drivers.
I finally got off the dime and bought a Matrox G400. Not the fastest 3D, but I'm not a hardcore gamer. The main selling factors to me were:
1: Linux and Open Source support 2: Image quality 3: Decent 3D performance 4: Legacy support (liftime for THIS card)
Some card based on the nVidia TNT2 would have been a STRONG contender, and a great price/performance choice. I might even have tried to spring for a GeForce, especially an SDR after DDR became The Next Great Thing.
But I want Open Source drivers. I want the responsiveness of the community. I want the chance to fix it myself. (If/when my employer clears up the IP issues.) I don't want drivers coming out on/behind the Windows driver schedule.
Precisely because of Open Source, nVidia just lost a sale, and Matrox gained one.
Obviously I agree with the sentiment. But it also means going underground, and that's kind of like cracking someone's system. Nobody believes that their security is completely ironclad, it just makes it too hard to bother cracking. (or slows the cracker down enough that humans can intervene.) By the same token, trying to take the free Net underground might well expend so much energy that we'd forget what we wanted to be free with. Kind of like if the British had kept shoving tea boxes at the original Patriots to throw overboard, so they'd never get past the Tea Party. There was already an effort to do what you speak of announced in the past week or two, to distribute 'free speech data' in a pinch-point free fashion so it can be accessed, but not rooted out and deleted. (URL forgotten)
As unpopular as this will be/has been on Slashdot, I must continue to say that the Net, as it has been, is a terribly fragile and endangered thing. The freedoms we have been accustomed to can be easily taken away, and the erosion has already been done.
The heritage of the Net has always been free, probably because it was born of the University setting. But now it's a largely commercial place, like it or not. There are many, many points of control where the freewheeling days of the past can get shut down, cold.
To begin with, the Law has come down against linking to deCSS code. The Law has also gone to ISPs to enforce this situation. This comes VERY close to turning ISPs from common carriers into content providers - potentially putting AOL-like Terms of Service on all of us. (in the US - to begin with)
Beyond that, in the old days anyone could buy a bank of modems and become an ISP. In these days where we all crave bandwidth, the rules have shifted. So far cable modem users end up having the cable provider as their ISP. DSL is a little more diversified, but not far from the same boat. Becoming a DSL ISP requires co-located equipment, and has become a higher bar to jump over. Forget about satellite - the sky's the limit on requirements, there.
So the very infrastructure has shifted - become less diffuse and has better defined points of control. Money has been speaking, and freedom eroded. We're not that many steps from being forced into AOL-like user status, TOS and all.
We can scream to our representatives, but we're also a small minority. As long as content flows TV-like along the pipes to the majority (AOL-like) we lack the clout needed to stop this trend. Note that none of these legal moves do a thing to hinder TV-like delivery of content from big providers.
At present, outside of the Geek Community and a few other niche (such as library) players, people just don't care about the DMCA. It doesn't appear to affect them directly, and they really aren't concerned about their Constitutional Rights. We have to take this battle to them.
If I Understand Correctly, as of next October, more provisions of the DMCA come into force. About that time, again IIUC, it may well become illegal to videotape information off of the air/cable/satellite, particularly if it's off of a scrambled (HBO, etc) channel.
Next October, someone needs to "illegally tape off of the air/cable/satellite" and force themselves to get charged for the "crime". Then they need to do a reasonably incompetent job in court, and LOSE. Then they need to get the story out - that VCRs are now illegal, except for playing back rental tapes. This involves the rest of the poplulation.
Obviously, first someone needs to review the DMCA and see if I do understand the DMCA correctly.
The strategy here is to force the right lawsuit, and show exactly how BAD some provisions of the DMCA really are, and how they hurt EVERYONE's rights. Right now, the general population really doesn't have much sympathy for 'some hacker kid in Norway.' General ignorance about hacker vs cracker doesn't help, either.
I'm waiting for XFree4, because until the support and performance picture becomes clear, it's awfully easy to make a serious purchasing mistake. As I see it, there are several dimensions to this problem.
For my part, I'm SuperSocket7, MediumCPU, MostlyGames. In that current environment, I believe that puts me in line for one of the ATI Rage128-based cards. (It would seem that non-game use suffers on 3dfx, correct me i I'm wrong.) It would be nice to see this matrix fully fleshed out.
I read this article several weeks back, and was interested to see the part about individual programmers taking the initiative on adding features. I had expected a much more hierarchical, dictatorial setting. I've also read other articles that picture Microsoft as a much more contentious shop. Perhaps there are soem major differences between the Campus and the Field.
But it leaves on wondering, where's the overriding vision? Who keeps track of the interactions between all the nifty little pieces. It can be good for a program to be done piecemeal this way, but it's necessary for there to be some unity, too. It's a careful line to walk.
History, in the form of bugs and security holes, suggests that Microsoft doesn't walk that line as well as perhaps they ought to.
Didn't you read last Friday's/. interview with Gore's webmaster? According to one of the questions, algore2000 began its life all-Microsoft. It was converted to Linux as a cost saving measure at the same time they were moving their campaign headquarters, also to save costs. He went into some detail about how the ASPs were moved to PHP.
It's probably fair to say that some of this cruft is an artifact of platform conversion, some due to the original composition software, and of course, the author. But they did solicit feedback. Have you sent any?
This isn't just an online forum. The Library of Congress was designated by law as the controlling body of this aspect of the DMCA. They have solicited comments, and this is the mechanism they have chosen. They are also accepting contents by snail mail, but this is their preferred method. Welcome to the digital age.
This is the mechanism, let's use it.
I already have. My comment went in a few days ago.
With respect to the current deCSS mess:
Looking on the Library of Congress DMCA pages, I see that the anti-circumvention measures go into effect on October 28, 2000. If that's true, I don't know how a judge could have made any ruling now based on that part of the law. Effectively, it isn't law, yet.
Has nothing to do with trumping. Even now, AMD is shipping their top sorts, and from what I've heard, Intel isn't. It appears that AMD has the top stuff you can actually buy in X86.
I suspect it has more to do with selling the slower stuff. There is a group of people that will buy the fastest, whatever speed it is, whatever price it is. There is also a perceived permissible price curve between fastest and slowest.
Besides, this gives them headroom in the race with Intel, as well as keeping the slower chips more salable. It may well signal to the overclockers out there, "Start your engines!"
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OS/2 had applications, you just had to turn a few stones to find them. But it had a "nutritionally complete" set of applications, if you looked.
But to most people, a word processor isn't a Word Processor unless it's MS Word, and a spreadsheet isn't a Spreadsheet unless it's MS Excel. MS once said that they would produce Office for OS/2 once it had 2,000,000 sales/users. At it's peak, OS/2 was between 10 and 15 million users, but MS never produced Office/2.
Comparing OS/2 to Linux for a moment on this front, both past and future is interesting.
While OS/2 had commercial apps, they were hard to find until you'd become an insider. Linux apps are the same, except that the Web has become better developed to help people become insiders.
On the applications front, MS apps were considerably more trim in the OS/2 days, and were thus more formidable. They've put on a lot of fat since then, so I suspect people are more willing to consider non-MS alternatives.
One way OS/2 has contributed to the current situation is to become, "legendary," one of those "superior" things mowed over by the MS marketing machine.
That's true, IMHO.
It has helped set the stage for MS' current woes. It helps highlight how their "innovation" isn't technical, it's in business practices.
I used to push the WPS concepts on the GNOME mailing lists. But as far as I could tell, GNOME just kept trying to look as much as possible like Windows.
I agree 100%. I thought I said that in my post. You bring up a good point, that Coke/Pepsi may well be about the worst abuser out there.
Arguments against Monopoly are easy, and it's fairly easy to construct legal litmus tests to 'find' them. (legally find, that is) I'm not sure how you legally 'find' a Duopoly. How about a Trioploy.
Aren't there Conspiracy and Racketeering laws, and shouldn't they apply to N>1_Opolies?
If a "Micrsoft Standard" dominates some sector, the it should be FORCED to be opened, with complete documentation. This includes file formats as well as protocols.
2. No exclusionary contracts.
We should also study why the 1995 consent decree failed, because it was supposed to stop this, and didn't.
3. No gag orders in the license.
If a product is #$%^, the knowledge needs to flow in order to allow the market to correct.
The foundation of capitalism is the free market.
The foundation of the free market is the informed consumer who can choose. Restraining either the information or the choice is bad for the free market, and turns the economic system into something other than capitalism. It both proves and disproves Karl Marx, because it leads to the fate he describes, but I assert that it's no longer capitalism.
My suggested remedies apply to Microsoft at the moment, but they are equally applicable to any business. Consider the market dominance AOL is achieving, yet at the same time their wire protocols are closed. They are now big enough that this may need to change.
But then again, there'd be other changes, as well, if I were IN CHARGE.
and MP3 is currently under HEAVY attack from the RIIA, in various forms, the Napster attack being the latest.
Yes, you can always capture the audio output, but that isn't considered the threat that capturing the digital stream is.
And I'll agree that you can capture the digital stream, as well, by hook or by crook. But it's a bit harder, and at the moment isn't mainstream. Heck, at the worst grab the RealAudio ipchains proxy and hack it to put the stream capture code there.
If surreptitious stream capture techniques were to rise to the general consciousness, I'm sure the RIAA (and MPAA, where relevant) would be after them.
AFAIK, the only "standards" to have taken off are Real Audio, Windows Media Player, and Quicktime, all of which have proprietary codecs. But isn't the real issue that they also are able to enforce end-to-end stream control?
This is what prevents one from capturing a stream and saving it. Use an open codec, and the codec can be replaced/subverted to capture the stream, and then everyone in the world will immediately pirate the precious content.
IMHO, a free codec won't help. We've got to crack the nut of organizations who want to retain intimate and complete control over content delivery.
It's not really a software problem, it's a greed and political problem.
is in it's optimistic view of the human race that we have a future at all.
We are in what I call, "The Bomb to Starship gap". We have sufficient power to destroy ourselves, lack the wisdom, as a species, to control our breeding to match our resources. Finally, we don't have enough power to improve our resources through space travel/exploitation. IE, for the near future, it's a zero-sum game, we've got one heck of a deficit, and it's getting worse.
People criticized later Star Trek series' for talking their way out of problems. I look at it differently. ANY species, us included, with the power to travel to the stars MUST be able to control its impulses to kill its own kind, or it just plain won't survive. We've survived the A Bomb - so far, but that's primarily because a few Superpowers restricted distribution of the technology. The genie is slowly escaping from the bottle, getting in the hands of more desparate people, more likely to use it.
At the same time, we're also getting more knowledge at the small scale, both biological and nanotech. These are perhaps more dangerous than the Bomb, if only because the barrier to entry is lower.
So in a fundamental fashion, the people of Star Trek: TNG are different from us. They are mature homo sapients, much less prone to the brash, kill-you-own-kind impulses that we have. But for this very reason, a lot of people felt that TNG was boring.
One could argue that the people of Star Trek: TOS were somewhere in between us and TNG.
Personally, I was hoping for a new series to take place in between TOS and TNG, so it would be more relevant to action-oriented audiences without compromising the principle of a mature society. I guess going even before TOS still fulfills that wish. I suspect that a purist picture of Star Trek a century after TNG would be considered too boring for TV.
On the side, I don't consider a 'Mature Society' to mean that they never fight, have conflicts, etc. Just that they don't do those things over petty little things. (like money or power)
DSL we all know, but then it becomes acronym soup with DLC, SLIC, etc. I found some of the information on DLSReports, but not enough. Someday I hope to get Bandwidth. Today I can't even get V.90. According to DSLReports I'm about 42,000 feet from my Central Office. But only 1.5 miles from my house is this little tan shed owned by the phone company. It may be pertinant to my situation, in either good (remote DSLAM) or bad (limited-bandwidth fiber) ways. But before I can figure out what the future holds, I need more education on this. Sources, anyone?
remind me of each other.
For insurance purposes, the swimming pool has to have a fence, it has to be a non-trivial fence, and it has to be locked. You have to have demonstrated not just intent, but reasonable measures to prevent accidental drowning by unauthorized swimmers.
Now apply it to the anticircumvention measures of the DMCA. They haven't said how hard the electronic publishers have to try to protect their art. Can they encrypt the data by XORing with "DMCARulz" and call the data 'protected'?
From what I see, they can. One could argue that the CSS key used to develop deCSS was 'trivially' protected, almost as bad as the XOR encryption example.
One could also argue that the owner of a swimming pool that lightly protected would be readily open to lawsuit.
There, I've just Rot13'ed my data. Now I consider it encrypted and protected. By pressing the Rot13 button on your newsreader after October, you're breaking the law. Those who write and distribute newsreaders are breaking the law, now.
it does nothing about the basic idiocy of CSS, and the ability of the MPAA to dictate where you watch movies, and what players you watch on.
Look at the basics of CSS, and you'll also realize that DIVX isn't dead it's just hiding. All you need is an Internet-connected DVD player with a RAM-based key.
How about yours?
Someone else speaks of "Whining Geeks". There are certainly lots of us in there. But there are also librarians, teachers, and even Alladin. (Ghostscript) It turns out that the anti-circumvention measures, misapplied, limit their ability to render fonts.
Herein lies the crux:
Other than the Library of Congress review, there is no check and balance for the anti-circumvention measure. Other than the "Whining Geeks", there are clearly some other problems and groups of people and business with problems.
This is the mechanism.
Now is the time.
I prefer the Motley Fool's (financial newsletter) take on this: How many other industries treat their customers as their enemies? My take: Could it be that they feel that they are ripping us off, and are afraid of the treatment they deserve? IMHO, the cost to price ratio of the audio CD compared to that of the audio cassette tape certainly supports this view.
Remember "Cities in Flight" by James Blish? Every time I hear of Scranton, PA, I think of the second section of the book, where it's taking off. In the book, the spindizzy came about because of a Nasa Breakthrough - type project. The thought of spinning superconducting disks is kind of reminiscant of that. I wonder if the Dirac-Blackett equations apply? As someone else says, extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof. But quantum mechanics and relativity didn't turn up until we looked under small enough or fast enough stones. Perhaps we need to just be looking under the right rocks for antigravity, and realize that it has to be a new realm, because existing theories do just too good a job explaining the current one.
In order to get their music onto a CD and into a "record" store, musicians sign a contract. THAT's why they can't put their music out on MP3, and all of this distribution stuff is illegal. Let's say I come up with a company called "Net Music Distributers" and sign some musicians to a contract, then the terms of payment and distribution can be named in that contract - including (obviously) Net distribution.
Music is being considered an idea, and placed on a similar plane to software, which is also an idea. But there's a rub, and you have to go to ESR's "The Magic Cauldron" to get it. 95% of software work is in-house, not for sale. Those 95% of the programmers are being payed for solving problems, not putting software on the shelf. (or other distribution medium.) Inasmuch as they may use, and thereby contribute to free software, it becomes a win-win situation. Their job is done, and there's more free software.
But music is a bit different. While there is some 'captive music', like weddings and parties, most of the money in the music industry appears to be in the sales of recordings. From what I've heard, even/especially concert tours don't really pay, because they're so expensive to run. They essentially act as non-profit (for the musician, any way) advertisements for the recordings.
We need a way to pay artists. We just can't lump them in with programmers. The same applies to games, along the ID software model. The engines have been released under GPL, but the artwork is still owned.
Once we come up with a way to pay artists, and once some artists buy into it, the existing system is just legacy. It's in the contract.
It's also interesting to note that the RIAA and MPAA are both downright paranoid about electronic distribution. Could it be because they know that they're ripping us off? How about that cassette tape that costs $10, and the CD that's CHEAPER to produce, but costs $16? The movie industry had a clue, once, when they reduced the price of movies from the $80 range down to the $20 range. But they appear to have lost it. The DVDs appear to be taking the lead from the audio CD. When the infrastructure is fully in place, I expect DVDs to cost less than VHS, but the price to always be a premium. How about taking the old computer price/performance curve and applying it the music/movie recording industries? They're bootstrapping off of our technology, and walking a different price/performance line.
You know why ATI went Open Source? (IMHO, and reading between the lines.)
ATI went Open Source because they lost a big design-in at a PC maker (forgot which) who wanted to make sure their boxes could run Linux. At the time, nVidia was making pursuasive Linux noises, and they got the contract.
So the fastest way to enable the Linux market, especially for a company not known for being the performance leader, was to embrace Open Source. It sure sped ATI's ramp.
The big question is whether PC makers will listen to the Open Source message, or nVidia's binary driver message. At the moment, unfortunately I suspect the latter. Though by funding Precision Insight, Matrox, ATI, and 3dfx have the best of both worlds - Open Source and "corporate-tuned" device drivers.
I finally got off the dime and bought a Matrox G400. Not the fastest 3D, but I'm not a hardcore gamer. The main selling factors to me were:
1: Linux and Open Source support
2: Image quality
3: Decent 3D performance
4: Legacy support (liftime for THIS card)
Some card based on the nVidia TNT2 would have been a STRONG contender, and a great price/performance choice. I might even have tried to spring for a GeForce, especially an SDR after DDR became The Next Great Thing.
But I want Open Source drivers. I want the responsiveness of the community. I want the chance to fix it myself. (If/when my employer clears up the IP issues.) I don't want drivers coming out on/behind the Windows driver schedule.
Precisely because of Open Source, nVidia just lost a sale, and Matrox gained one.
Obviously I agree with the sentiment. But it also means going underground, and that's kind of like cracking someone's system. Nobody believes that their security is completely ironclad, it just makes it too hard to bother cracking. (or slows the cracker down enough that humans can intervene.) By the same token, trying to take the free Net underground might well expend so much energy that we'd forget what we wanted to be free with. Kind of like if the British had kept shoving tea boxes at the original Patriots to throw overboard, so they'd never get past the Tea Party. There was already an effort to do what you speak of announced in the past week or two, to distribute 'free speech data' in a pinch-point free fashion so it can be accessed, but not rooted out and deleted. (URL forgotten)
As unpopular as this will be/has been on Slashdot, I must continue to say that the Net, as it has been, is a terribly fragile and endangered thing. The freedoms we have been accustomed to can be easily taken away, and the erosion has already been done.
The heritage of the Net has always been free, probably because it was born of the University setting. But now it's a largely commercial place, like it or not. There are many, many points of control where the freewheeling days of the past can get shut down, cold.
To begin with, the Law has come down against linking to deCSS code. The Law has also gone to ISPs to enforce this situation. This comes VERY close to turning ISPs from common carriers into content providers - potentially putting AOL-like Terms of Service on all of us. (in the US - to begin with)
Beyond that, in the old days anyone could buy a bank of modems and become an ISP. In these days where we all crave bandwidth, the rules have shifted. So far cable modem users end up having the cable provider as their ISP. DSL is a little more diversified, but not far from the same boat. Becoming a DSL ISP requires co-located equipment, and has become a higher bar to jump over. Forget about satellite - the sky's the limit on requirements, there.
So the very infrastructure has shifted - become less diffuse and has better defined points of control. Money has been speaking, and freedom eroded. We're not that many steps from being forced into AOL-like user status, TOS and all.
We can scream to our representatives, but we're also a small minority. As long as content flows TV-like along the pipes to the majority (AOL-like) we lack the clout needed to stop this trend. Note that none of these legal moves do a thing to hinder TV-like delivery of content from big providers.
Oh, well.
At present, outside of the Geek Community and a few other niche (such as library) players, people just don't care about the DMCA. It doesn't appear to affect them directly, and they really aren't concerned about their Constitutional Rights. We have to take this battle to them.
If I Understand Correctly, as of next October, more provisions of the DMCA come into force. About that time, again IIUC, it may well become illegal to videotape information off of the air/cable/satellite, particularly if it's off of a scrambled (HBO, etc) channel.
Next October, someone needs to "illegally tape off of the air/cable/satellite" and force themselves to get charged for the "crime". Then they need to do a reasonably incompetent job in court, and LOSE. Then they need to get the story out - that VCRs are now illegal, except for playing back rental tapes. This involves the rest of the poplulation.
Obviously, first someone needs to review the DMCA and see if I do understand the DMCA correctly.
The strategy here is to force the right lawsuit, and show exactly how BAD some provisions of the DMCA really are, and how they hurt EVERYONE's rights. Right now, the general population really doesn't have much sympathy for 'some hacker kid in Norway.' General ignorance about hacker vs cracker doesn't help, either.
I'm waiting for XFree4, because until the support and performance picture becomes clear, it's awfully easy to make a serious purchasing mistake. As I see it, there are several dimensions to this problem.
SlotA -- Slot1/Socket370 -- SuperSocket7
FastCPU -- MediumCPU -- SlowCPU
PureGames -- MostlyGames -- MostlySerious -- PureSerious
For my part, I'm SuperSocket7, MediumCPU, MostlyGames. In that current environment, I believe that puts me in line for one of the ATI Rage128-based cards. (It would seem that non-game use suffers on 3dfx, correct me i I'm wrong.) It would be nice to see this matrix fully fleshed out.
I read this article several weeks back, and was interested to see the part about individual programmers taking the initiative on adding features. I had expected a much more hierarchical, dictatorial setting. I've also read other articles that picture Microsoft as a much more contentious shop. Perhaps there are soem major differences between the Campus and the Field.
But it leaves on wondering, where's the overriding vision? Who keeps track of the interactions between all the nifty little pieces. It can be good for a program to be done piecemeal this way, but it's necessary for there to be some unity, too. It's a careful line to walk.
History, in the form of bugs and security holes, suggests that Microsoft doesn't walk that line as well as perhaps they ought to.
Didn't you read last Friday's /. interview with Gore's webmaster? According to one of the questions, algore2000 began its life all-Microsoft. It was converted to Linux as a cost saving measure at the same time they were moving their campaign headquarters, also to save costs. He went into some detail about how the ASPs were moved to PHP.
It's probably fair to say that some of this cruft is an artifact of platform conversion, some due to the original composition software, and of course, the author. But they did solicit feedback. Have you sent any?
kind of makes one ashamed to hold patents. (I have 15 issued, but at least they're all hardware. No software, no "methodology" stuff.)
This isn't just an online forum. The Library of Congress was designated by law as the controlling body of this aspect of the DMCA. They have solicited comments, and this is the mechanism they have chosen. They are also accepting contents by snail mail, but this is their preferred method. Welcome to the digital age.
This is the mechanism, let's use it.
I already have. My comment went in a few days ago.
With respect to the current deCSS mess:
Looking on the Library of Congress DMCA pages, I see that the anti-circumvention measures go into effect on October 28, 2000. If that's true, I don't know how a judge could have made any ruling now based on that part of the law. Effectively, it isn't law, yet.
Wouldn't a proper sysadmin also have reported this to someone like CERT?
Has nothing to do with trumping. Even now, AMD is shipping their top sorts, and from what I've heard, Intel isn't. It appears that AMD has the top stuff you can actually buy in X86.
I suspect it has more to do with selling the slower stuff. There is a group of people that will buy the fastest, whatever speed it is, whatever price it is. There is also a perceived permissible price curve between fastest and slowest.
Besides, this gives them headroom in the race with Intel, as well as keeping the slower chips more salable. It may well signal to the overclockers out there, "Start your engines!"