The SCO "stand in" (as NewsForge calls him) was Jonathan Zittrain, from Harvard Law School. Zittrain debated Mark Radcliffe (representing IBM), who is an IP attorney for the Gray Cary law firm. Radcliffe is currently helping Sun open source Solaris.
You can download a recording of the entire SCO debate here.
The archivists should use a high-res data acquisition card to sample the 18.5 minutes on the tape, then make the data available online or on CD-ROMs so hackers can take a crack at it.
Yup. It's wartime. Americans know in their hearts that this is the first of many attacks. We need to get smart about the military and we need to crush the nations(s) that hold the terrorist that did this. For every act here, we atomize a nation there.
1) Intell failed us. CIA, NSA and FBI need to be seriously overhauled and probobly more funding.
2) Now is the time to forget about missle defense. Even if it worked, it wouldn't have been use yesterday and won't ever be for these kinds of attacks. We need to take that money and put it into stuff that we know works: neutron bombs, Tomahawk missles and Intell.
Re:pointless consumer culture
on
Paper Phones
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· Score: 1
Look at it another way: a massive reduction in consumed materials. Less plastic and circuits etched with toxic chemicals. This is good for the environment.
Most people get a new cell every year anyway. Better harmless paper getting thrown out then toxic chemicals and heavy metals.
Also, paper can be made from all sorts of products besides trees. You have to admit that paper is a much more renewable resource then plastic.
It could be with the Undernet attacks that there is an underlying agenda besides idle vandalism. Are these attacks really coming from one country? If so, that fact alone connotes at least some sort of nationalistic fervor behind the attacks. Diplomacy may be an option.
Creationist arguments are always pretty amusing. They're a constant backpeddaling of partially-informed responses to old news as the science constantly pushes back the frontiers of understanding. A chronological summary of such arguments over the centuries is an interesting, and amusing study (particularly, for juxtaposition, if you know some astronomical and other scientific history).
Many creationists (myself included) do not view scientific discoveries as a threat to their faith.
If you think about it, there is little difference between the Big Big and any other creation story: a concentrated point of pure energy was the source of everything we see today.
The only difference betweeen the Big Bang and creationIST stories is that in the creationist's story, the "bang" was a form of conscienceness and expression. Proving or disproving this theory is impossible. I mean, if I argue that every sub-atomic particle is a piece of a vast conscieness, explaining to me the scientific reasons for the particle's behavior doesn't disprove my theory. Just like explaining the latest discovery in biochemistry to a thinking person doesn't disprove their theory that they are a conscience being, but it does explains how.
Whoops, sorry one of our employees ripped GPL'ed code and used it in a binary-only release. But do we have a deal for you! We'll, (1) not release the source, (2) say "we're sorry" 500 times, (3) release a new closed-source binary sometime between tomorrow and the day of the flying swine.
Nivida hasn't done shit. They changed changed their PR spin and a bunch of nerds fell for it. Wake up people!
These things are costs passed on to the consumer. They are a tax on getting a computer.
Do you mean the price of MS software vs free software, or the price of MS software vs other non-free software? If you're comparing MS to free software then yeah, of course, free software is a better deal for the consumer and I'm certainly not arguing that it's not. I also believe it's fairly obvious that the MS monopoly had no negative effect on the free software movement.
Now, if you're comparing the cost of MS software to other non-free software, what you're really saying is that if MS had more competition, then they would be forced to charge less for their products and they would make them better.
Traditional ecconomists discussing traditional markets take this view and it's pretty much undisputable for most markets. But it's not true for the non-free software market. Here's why.
First off, MS's famed monopoly on "prime desktop real estate" doesn't help them sell more products. Sure they can use the space to unload all sorts of new gadgets and ads onto the user, but they can't ever charge them for it. Why? Because no matter how many extras MS packs into its Windows distribution the price is very inelastic. There is a threshold of what people will pay for an OS package and they won't pay more, no matter what it comes with. I'm not saying that MS can't profit from giving away all this stuff. I'm just saying that in order to control standards, MS has to give a lot of stuff away. So people get all this extra software without paying for it.
Of course this sucks for everyone else in the business. But that was my point. The consumer benifits while the rest of the industry gets their teeth kicked in.
Secondly, MS is powerless to control demand for new features. We both know that demand cannot be created. Look at the browser or streaming media. MS didn't envent these and played no significant role in popularizing them. But the company had to offer them to consumers-- they were forced to. So there's your competition: the new idea. It's something MS will always have to contend with. Sure they crushed Netscape and are savagly clawing at RealMedia but what's the difference? The consumer still gets the goods without having to pay for them and inovation still continues. Again: MS wins, consumer wins and the rest of the computer industry eats crow.
Finally, it's absurd to not consider Windows a natural monopoly. Because of the power of standards, there is no room in the market for 25 vastly different and incompatible non-free OSes competing for the desktop.
Of course this changes drasticly with GPL'ed Oses, because they're all compatible. They can compete for new features but at the same time adhere to standards. But we're not talking about free-software are we? It would be moot, because the MS monopoly doesn't harm OSS development.
Oh, so microsoft subverting web standards and java has no effect on the end user?
I guess you didn't understand my last post: I'm not arguing that MS has had no effect on the end user! What I'm saying is that there is little difference between one or 30 competing non-free desktops and office suites because only one can win. Any inovations get consolidated. In the non-free software market, the OS is a natural monopoly. The only way out is free (as in speech) software. Otherwise the MS cycle will repeat itself over and over.
I didn't say it doesn't affect the user I said it doesn't reduce existing freedoms.
None of your examples make MS's products more expensive or less stable or of less quality. Your complaints (which I totally agree with) aren't shared by people who just do word processing, email and web. They are the complaints of the computer industry and those that deal with MS in the business world.
Most computer users want something that is easy and cheap. Undoing your list of MS's sins wouldn't make their products cheaper or easier for the end user.
MS made its bucks off the backs of CEOs, not off the backs of the working or middle class. MS got sued because it pissed off a bunch of powerful corporations and the US government, not because its oppressing the home computer user.
If the government was really trying to protect consumers from monopoly power, they'd be suing corporations like Monsanto and AOL/TimeWarner. The US government is protecting its ass, not ours.
A socialist-libertarian state. This takes the libertarian minimalist approach to goverment, but flips it by configuring a goverment that has a primary goal of protecting individual (not corporate) liberty and basic human rights while repairing the roads, rather then simply protecting private property and filling potholes.
Of course, human rights and property can overlap, but this is more along the lines of personal property, which can be different then private property. (Your right to live in a safe house vs. your right to own a skyscraper. While the tower owner's wealth would be tolerated, it would not be the government's job to protect the property from theives or vandals, unless he/she lived there, as it would be the government's job to protect people's homes from thieves and vandals.)
In a socialist-liberterian state, the MS monopoly would be tolerated because it only affects corporate profits not individual freedoms. (It's true that MS has been unfair to other businesses, but Windows is actually a sweet deal for most computer users that aren't employed as sysadmins. It's the people that work in the computer industry that really hate MS because they have to deal with their crap on a daily basis.) If people were making illegal copies of MS products, it would not be the job of the government to punish these people. It would be MS's responsibility to make their products as hard as possible to copy.
The media monopoly we see today is an example of a monopoly that wouldn't be tolerated in a socialist-libertarian state, because it affects individual freedoms and human rights by offering a horribly skewed view of the news while giving people little choice for an alternative.
In a socialist-libertarian state, people are free to do what they want as long as they don't take away personal freedoms. (Your rights end where my nose begins.) It would be up to the record and software companies to prevent pirating or reverse engineering, but it would not be the government's job to punish copyright violators. However, violations of such things as the GPL would not be tolerated because it infringes on human rights and liberties.
you're right, sorry about that number. ~130 megs is more like it for an uncompressed tiff.
Depending on the shutter speed a camera taking pictures of this quality is going to need to write to ram at speeds from 1 to 3.9 gigaBYTES a second.
Of course, simple jpeg compression (no optimization at highest quality) can bring that image down to 30 megs easy. A neural array of compression chips should be able to do this.
That would allow the image to be written to a ram buffer before it is transfered to a 3 gig mini drive. When the drive is full the pictures can be saved onto a magnetic tape.
Expensive stuff today, but we'll see it in a few years.
For years the print industry has been using the following formula:
lines per inch * 1.5 = dots per inch
So according to print professionals, an image taken with film that can do 6350 lpi would lose resolution at any value below 9520 dpi.
I'm guessing that a negative is about an inch wide so we're looking at a horizontal res of 9520 pixels for a CCD that's going to compete with that kind of film.
Not too big a deal. At the rate the technology is advancing, CCDs should be able to match that res in a few years. And considering that a mini-DV cartridge can hold well over a gig in the space the size of a zipo, storage isn't really an issue. (A single 9520x4750 RGB uncompressed TIFF file is about 13 megs.)
Agreed. I'd say RH is a huge bargain at this point. Especially considering they own Cygnus. . .
Don't know what to say about what the average/.er thinks though. Seems like the discussions have been infested by vicious dogs howling for the death of linux companies. But yeah, I know there's some peeps such as myself who understand that RH is going to grow into a very profitable company.
Thanks for the financial analysis. I now know how I can best handle my money. Here's a little math for you: A strict minority of professional musicians make that kind of money. This issue goes much further than highly-successful acts such as Metallica. There are infinitely many more musicians that struggle to "feed their families" on what they are able to earn. Maybe Metallica is being greedy. You could also say that they're standing up for other artists who don't have the power, forum, or capital to do so themselves.
Napster has no music from artists "strugling to feed their families." Napster is full of mainstream pop artists. All the strugling artists are on mp3.com, offering their tunes for free legally.
Look, I'm a musician too and I would someday like to make a living from my art. The environment for artists today can't really get more hostile then what the MPAA and other corporate media thugs have created. Napster is helping forge a whole new distribution channel.
Standing up for Metallica is not standing up for strugling artists. If you want to support unsigned artists, you can start by listening to the thousands of legal mp3s on the web instead of using Napster.
I have yet to hear from ONE musician that is making *less* then $100,000 a year that feels they're getting ripped off by Napster or mp3s in general. But I know many artists who can only dream of having their music downloaded thousands of times a day. I agree that musicians should be payed more and that their skills are undervalued in todays society. but don't blame it on Napster and don't expect people to tolerate paying over $6 for a CD from artists who never go on tour more then two months a year.
. ..seeing as sony is also in the entertainment/music industry, i'm not sure they would like people using mp3. ..
Betcha Sony will figure out how to sell mp3s at 50 cents each and $1 indie movies. With the PS2 they have the distribution and with their records they have the content. Wham! This is the holy grail driving mergers like AOL and time/Warner.
which means you're stuck in the land of quicktime and mpeg, and your images get munged.
Not at all!! Bcast will do 980x540 frame sizes with RGB color, no compression. These files are huge, but there is no quality loss at all. Qucktime is a common format for professionals to exchange clips between software without loosing quality.
Of course mpeg is for delivery only.
I'm using an iMac to do my digitizing. Bcast can read the quicktime clips no problem.
Check out the post on this thread about the dvgrab util. I'm going to buy a 1394 card for my linux box and try it out. Should save me some time.
The makers of Broadcast2000 have some great mpeg-2 encoding tools as well.
Use Linux for your project! It gives you total access to your media, it's stable and cheap. I've been using it to edit my documentary and I'm really happy with it.
Cygnus - owned by RedHat. Stock dumping. Your statement in no way disproves the ecconomic viability of what Cygnus does. If they can do it, so can others.
O'Reilly - whoring off Open Source Is that the best you can do?
Cobalt - they MAKE HARDWARE SO DOES DELL, GATEWAY, COMPAQ, ETC. The only difference is that Cobalt has to release its OS changes back to the community, while Dell and it's cousins are at the mercy of whatever crap MS spews out.
Taos - not really Linux. They do Solaris, BSD and a little Linux. The point is that Taos's support model works, and easily applies to Linux. Taos makes no money from Sparc sales, they just benefit from it's popularity.
THIS IS MORE FUD SPREAD BY VA/ANDOVER/MALDA TO KEEP THEIR PATHETIC STOCK FROM DROPPING EVEN LOWER I see. Although my statements are entirely factual, they're all lies.
Cygnus-- This company gets paid by device makers to port the GCC to various archs. The software for a huge amount of devices out there was developed using the GNU compiler and libs. Cygnus was profitable years before RH purchased it.
Taos-- On-site support of commercial Unix, Linux and Free BSD systems. They have been extremely profitable over the past several years.
Oreilly-- Simple. They sell books about popular free software.
Cobalt-- These guys make Linux server appliances. Very popular.
Linux gadgets are sure to be a money maker. Already things like Palm, mp3 players and gaming consoles are selling well. Using Linux in these systems is good for the bottom line, because there's no royalty. A royalty can really add up when you're selling thousands of $50 devices.
If you don't believe me, read this interview I did with Metrowerk's CIO about Linux and devices. He makes a lot of sense.
Yeah, I believe there is a difference. Some software is utilitarian, like word processors. Some is for recreation, like games.
Recreational software has diminished marginal utility. (except Quake. Ecconomists should do a study.)
But utilitarian software never loses it's value, as long as it maintains its relevance, it is supported by the authors and if other people use it.
Game makers don't benefit from opening their source, because people play the game for a while and then move on. (Except Quake.) It may help them write their next game, if people are willing to send in source patches.
Game companies can make money from game sales or selling advertising space within the game, or by doing contract work for multimedia projects and giving away games as a type of advertisement/demonstration of their abilities.
The record companies are getting FREE promotion of their music. They couldn't pay radio stations for the promotion they are receiving by having people download MP3s and trade them to others. They should be GRATEFUL!
Heh! It's true. I hate the corporate record industry, which is why I'm boycotting their products, whether I pay for them or not. People who think they're sticking it to the record labels by trading mp3s are actually helping them. The companies are just to stupid to realize it.
Besides, I think the legal indie tunes are a hell of a lot better then the spew that comes out of my radio.
I think they are justified in wanting some compensation for their work, considering it's people's method of earning a living. How would you like your employer to withold your paycheck because information should be "free"?
Of course artists want to get payed for their work. But record contracts are a rotten deal for musicians! You make a fraction of what the record company does and you lose the rights to your music (in most cases, especially with the big labels).
Sites like mp3.com are a sweet deal! The most important thing for a musician, above all else, is to get your stuff heard. Geez, there's bands in LA that PAY clubs to let them play there. That's sick. Alternatively, mp3s are cheap and great for exposure.
But you gotta earn a living. I've made like $12 from my music on the net in the past two years, but I actually have an audience as compared to trying to sell the disks at indie music stores and pleading with college radio to play my music. (Read: no audience.) Besides, it's really weird stuff and I can understand why normal people wouldn't pay money for it.
Anyway I'm also not on tour, which is where the cash is. Bands that encourage people to freely trade their tunes and then put on a good performance can make a decent living through concert ticket sales. (Can't bootleg an experience. Not yet anyway.) The grateful dead is a perfect example of this model.
The record industry makes a few musicians rich and the rest poor. Then sells the good songs to Burger King 20 years later. Talk about a shitty deal!
Don't let your interpretation be too literal. Information "wants" to be free the same way water "wants" to flow down hill.
Humans share information. It may be rumors, jokes, bedtime stories, music or movies. Using the word "want" is useful here, because the medium is the human mind.
It is scientifically correct to say "Humans want information to be free." But this is less descriptive. "Information wants to be free" describes the big picture, the macro effect of this aspect of human psychology. As in the case of a funny joke that zips across the country in a few days, information does seem to have a mind of its own.
Slashdot Mirror
The SCO "stand in" (as NewsForge calls him) was Jonathan Zittrain, from Harvard Law School. Zittrain debated Mark Radcliffe (representing IBM), who is an IP attorney for the Gray Cary law firm. Radcliffe is currently helping Sun open source Solaris.
You can download a recording of the entire SCO debate here.
The archivists should use a high-res data acquisition card to sample the 18.5 minutes on the tape, then make the data available online or on CD-ROMs so hackers can take a crack at it.
Maybe I should write an XML theme engine that can generate themes for KDE, GTK, Mozilla, XMMS skins etc. Some sort modular library.
Yup. It's wartime. Americans know in their hearts that this is the first of many attacks. We need to get smart about the military and we need to crush the nations(s) that hold the terrorist that did this. For every act here, we atomize a nation there.
1) Intell failed us. CIA, NSA and FBI need to be seriously overhauled and probobly more funding.
2) Now is the time to forget about missle defense. Even if it worked, it wouldn't have been use yesterday and won't ever be for these kinds of attacks. We need to take that money and put it into stuff that we know works: neutron bombs, Tomahawk missles and Intell.
Look at it another way: a massive reduction in consumed materials. Less plastic and circuits etched with toxic chemicals. This is good for the environment.
Most people get a new cell every year anyway. Better harmless paper getting thrown out then toxic chemicals and heavy metals.
Also, paper can be made from all sorts of products besides trees. You have to admit that paper is a much more renewable resource then plastic.
It could be with the Undernet attacks that there is an underlying agenda besides idle vandalism. Are these attacks really coming from one country? If so, that fact alone connotes at least some sort of nationalistic fervor behind the attacks. Diplomacy may be an option.
I've seen that poster, it's a nice one.
Anybody know where I can find that vi poster, the one that has various commands in a helix?
Creationist arguments are always pretty amusing. They're a constant backpeddaling of partially-informed responses to old news as the science constantly pushes back the frontiers of understanding. A chronological summary of such arguments over the centuries is an interesting, and amusing study (particularly, for juxtaposition, if you know some astronomical and other scientific history).
Many creationists (myself included) do not view scientific discoveries as a threat to their faith.
If you think about it, there is little difference between the Big Big and any other creation story: a concentrated point of pure energy was the source of everything we see today.
The only difference betweeen the Big Bang and creationIST stories is that in the creationist's story, the "bang" was a form of conscienceness and expression. Proving or disproving this theory is impossible. I mean, if I argue that every sub-atomic particle is a piece of a vast conscieness, explaining to me the scientific reasons for the particle's behavior doesn't disprove my theory. Just like explaining the latest discovery in biochemistry to a thinking person doesn't disprove their theory that they are a conscience being, but it does explains how.
Whoops, sorry one of our employees ripped GPL'ed code and used it in a binary-only release. But do we have a deal for you! We'll, (1) not release the source, (2) say "we're sorry" 500 times, (3) release a new closed-source binary sometime between tomorrow and the day of the flying swine.
Nivida hasn't done shit. They changed changed their PR spin and a bunch of nerds fell for it. Wake up people!
These things are costs passed on to the consumer. They are a tax on getting a computer.
Do you mean the price of MS software vs free software, or the price of MS software vs other non-free software? If you're comparing MS to free software then yeah, of course, free software is a better deal for the consumer and I'm certainly not arguing that it's not. I also believe it's fairly obvious that the MS monopoly had no negative effect on the free software movement.
Now, if you're comparing the cost of MS software to other non-free software, what you're really saying is that if MS had more competition, then they would be forced to charge less for their products and they would make them better.
Traditional ecconomists discussing traditional markets take this view and it's pretty much undisputable for most markets. But it's not true for the non-free software market. Here's why.
First off, MS's famed monopoly on "prime desktop real estate" doesn't help them sell more products. Sure they can use the space to unload all sorts of new gadgets and ads onto the user, but they can't ever charge them for it. Why? Because no matter how many extras MS packs into its Windows distribution the price is very inelastic. There is a threshold of what people will pay for an OS package and they won't pay more, no matter what it comes with. I'm not saying that MS can't profit from giving away all this stuff. I'm just saying that in order to control standards, MS has to give a lot of stuff away. So people get all this extra software without paying for it.
Of course this sucks for everyone else in the business. But that was my point. The consumer benifits while the rest of the industry gets their teeth kicked in.
Secondly, MS is powerless to control demand for new features. We both know that demand cannot be created. Look at the browser or streaming media. MS didn't envent these and played no significant role in popularizing them. But the company had to offer them to consumers-- they were forced to. So there's your competition: the new idea. It's something MS will always have to contend with. Sure they crushed Netscape and are savagly clawing at RealMedia but what's the difference? The consumer still gets the goods without having to pay for them and inovation still continues. Again: MS wins, consumer wins and the rest of the computer industry eats crow.
Finally, it's absurd to not consider Windows a natural monopoly. Because of the power of standards, there is no room in the market for 25 vastly different and incompatible non-free OSes competing for the desktop.
Of course this changes drasticly with GPL'ed Oses, because they're all compatible. They can compete for new features but at the same time adhere to standards. But we're not talking about free-software are we? It would be moot, because the MS monopoly doesn't harm OSS development.
Oh, so microsoft subverting web standards and java has no effect on the end user?
I guess you didn't understand my last post: I'm not arguing that MS has had no effect on the end user! What I'm saying is that there is little difference between one or 30 competing non-free desktops and office suites because only one can win. Any inovations get consolidated. In the non-free software market, the OS is a natural monopoly. The only way out is free (as in speech) software. Otherwise the MS cycle will repeat itself over and over.
This doesn't affect the end user, how?
I didn't say it doesn't affect the user I said it doesn't reduce existing freedoms.
None of your examples make MS's products more expensive or less stable or of less quality. Your complaints (which I totally agree with) aren't shared by people who just do word processing, email and web. They are the complaints of the computer industry and those that deal with MS in the business world.
Most computer users want something that is easy and cheap. Undoing your list of MS's sins wouldn't make their products cheaper or easier for the end user.
MS made its bucks off the backs of CEOs, not off the backs of the working or middle class. MS got sued because it pissed off a bunch of powerful corporations and the US government, not because its oppressing the home computer user.
If the government was really trying to protect consumers from monopoly power, they'd be suing corporations like Monsanto and AOL/TimeWarner. The US government is protecting its ass, not ours.
A socialist-libertarian state. This takes the libertarian minimalist approach to goverment, but flips it by configuring a goverment that has a primary goal of protecting individual (not corporate) liberty and basic human rights while repairing the roads, rather then simply protecting private property and filling potholes.
Of course, human rights and property can overlap, but this is more along the lines of personal property, which can be different then private property. (Your right to live in a safe house vs. your right to own a skyscraper. While the tower owner's wealth would be tolerated, it would not be the government's job to protect the property from theives or vandals, unless he/she lived there, as it would be the government's job to protect people's homes from thieves and vandals.)
In a socialist-liberterian state, the MS monopoly would be tolerated because it only affects corporate profits not individual freedoms. (It's true that MS has been unfair to other businesses, but Windows is actually a sweet deal for most computer users that aren't employed as sysadmins. It's the people that work in the computer industry that really hate MS because they have to deal with their crap on a daily basis.) If people were making illegal copies of MS products, it would not be the job of the government to punish these people. It would be MS's responsibility to make their products as hard as possible to copy.
The media monopoly we see today is an example of a monopoly that wouldn't be tolerated in a socialist-libertarian state, because it affects individual freedoms and human rights by offering a horribly skewed view of the news while giving people little choice for an alternative.
In a socialist-libertarian state, people are free to do what they want as long as they don't take away personal freedoms. (Your rights end where my nose begins.) It would be up to the record and software companies to prevent pirating or reverse engineering, but it would not be the government's job to punish copyright violators. However, violations of such things as the GPL would not be tolerated because it infringes on human rights and liberties.
you're right, sorry about that number. ~130 megs is more like it for an uncompressed tiff.
Depending on the shutter speed a camera taking pictures of this quality is going to need to write to ram at speeds from 1 to 3.9 gigaBYTES a second.
Of course, simple jpeg compression (no optimization at highest quality) can bring that image down to 30 megs easy. A neural array of compression chips should be able to do this.
That would allow the image to be written to a ram buffer before it is transfered to a 3 gig mini drive. When the drive is full the pictures can be saved onto a magnetic tape.
Expensive stuff today, but we'll see it in a few years.
For years the print industry has been using the following formula:
lines per inch * 1.5 = dots per inch
So according to print professionals, an image taken with film that can do 6350 lpi would lose resolution at any value below 9520 dpi.
I'm guessing that a negative is about an inch wide so we're looking at a horizontal res of 9520 pixels for a CCD that's going to compete with that kind of film.
Not too big a deal. At the rate the technology is advancing, CCDs should be able to match that res in a few years. And considering that a mini-DV cartridge can hold well over a gig in the space the size of a zipo, storage isn't really an issue. (A single 9520x4750 RGB uncompressed TIFF file is about 13 megs.)
Agreed. I'd say RH is a huge bargain at this point. Especially considering they own Cygnus. . .
Don't know what to say about what the average /.er thinks though. Seems like the discussions have been infested by vicious dogs howling for the death of linux companies. But yeah, I know there's some peeps such as myself who understand that RH is going to grow into a very profitable company.
Thanks for the financial analysis. I now know how I can best handle my money. Here's a little math for you: A strict minority of professional musicians make that kind of money. This issue goes much further than highly-successful acts such as Metallica. There are infinitely many more musicians that struggle to "feed their families" on what they are able to earn. Maybe Metallica is being greedy. You could also say that they're standing up for other artists who don't have the power, forum, or capital to do so themselves.
Napster has no music from artists "strugling to feed their families." Napster is full of mainstream pop artists. All the strugling artists are on mp3.com, offering their tunes for free legally.
Look, I'm a musician too and I would someday like to make a living from my art. The environment for artists today can't really get more hostile then what the MPAA and other corporate media thugs have created. Napster is helping forge a whole new distribution channel.
Standing up for Metallica is not standing up for strugling artists. If you want to support unsigned artists, you can start by listening to the thousands of legal mp3s on the web instead of using Napster.
I have yet to hear from ONE musician that is making *less* then $100,000 a year that feels they're getting ripped off by Napster or mp3s in general. But I know many artists who can only dream of having their music downloaded thousands of times a day. I agree that musicians should be payed more and that their skills are undervalued in todays society. but don't blame it on Napster and don't expect people to tolerate paying over $6 for a CD from artists who never go on tour more then two months a year.
. . .seeing as sony is also in the entertainment/music industry, i'm not sure they would like people using mp3. . .
Betcha Sony will figure out how to sell mp3s at 50 cents each and $1 indie movies. With the PS2 they have the distribution and with their records they have the content. Wham! This is the holy grail driving mergers like AOL and time/Warner.
which means you're stuck in the land of quicktime and mpeg, and your images get munged.
Not at all!! Bcast will do 980x540 frame sizes with RGB color, no compression. These files are huge, but there is no quality loss at all. Qucktime is a common format for professionals to exchange clips between software without loosing quality.
Of course mpeg is for delivery only.
I'm using an iMac to do my digitizing. Bcast can read the quicktime clips no problem.
Check out the post on this thread about the dvgrab util. I'm going to buy a 1394 card for my linux box and try it out. Should save me some time.
BROADCAST2000!!
Everything you need to edit stuff from web content to film.
Don't forget the GIMP either. Works great for all sorts of effects if you know a little Perl.
Be sure and check out Sound & MIDI Software For Linux for a whole slew of audio tools.
The makers of Broadcast2000 have some great mpeg-2 encoding tools as well.
Use Linux for your project! It gives you total access to your media, it's stable and cheap. I've been using it to edit my documentary and I'm really happy with it.
Cygnus - owned by RedHat. Stock dumping.
Your statement in no way disproves the ecconomic viability of what Cygnus does. If they can do it, so can others.
O'Reilly - whoring off Open Source
Is that the best you can do?
Cobalt - they MAKE HARDWARE
SO DOES DELL, GATEWAY, COMPAQ, ETC. The only difference is that Cobalt has to release its OS changes back to the community, while Dell and it's cousins are at the mercy of whatever crap MS spews out.
Taos - not really Linux.
They do Solaris, BSD and a little Linux. The point is that Taos's support model works, and easily applies to Linux. Taos makes no money from Sparc sales, they just benefit from it's popularity.
THIS IS MORE FUD SPREAD BY VA/ANDOVER/MALDA TO KEEP THEIR PATHETIC STOCK FROM DROPPING EVEN LOWER
I see. Although my statements are entirely factual, they're all lies.
Try again dumbass.
Cygnus-- This company gets paid by device makers to port the GCC to various archs. The software for a huge amount of devices out there was developed using the GNU compiler and libs. Cygnus was profitable years before RH purchased it.
Taos-- On-site support of commercial Unix, Linux and Free BSD systems. They have been extremely profitable over the past several years.
Oreilly-- Simple. They sell books about popular free software.
Cobalt-- These guys make Linux server appliances. Very popular.
Linux gadgets are sure to be a money maker. Already things like Palm, mp3 players and gaming consoles are selling well. Using Linux in these systems is good for the bottom line, because there's no royalty. A royalty can really add up when you're selling thousands of $50 devices.
If you don't believe me, read this interview I did with Metrowerk's CIO about Linux and devices. He makes a lot of sense.
Recreational software has diminished marginal utility. (except Quake. Ecconomists should do a study.)
But utilitarian software never loses it's value, as long as it maintains its relevance, it is supported by the authors and if other people use it.
Game makers don't benefit from opening their source, because people play the game for a while and then move on. (Except Quake.) It may help them write their next game, if people are willing to send in source patches.
Game companies can make money from game sales or selling advertising space within the game, or by doing contract work for multimedia projects and giving away games as a type of advertisement/demonstration of their abilities.
The record companies are getting FREE promotion of their music. They couldn't pay radio stations for the promotion they are receiving by having people download MP3s and trade them to others. They should be GRATEFUL!
Heh! It's true. I hate the corporate record industry, which is why I'm boycotting their products, whether I pay for them or not. People who think they're sticking it to the record labels by trading mp3s are actually helping them. The companies are just to stupid to realize it.
Besides, I think the legal indie tunes are a hell of a lot better then the spew that comes out of my radio.
I think they are justified in wanting some compensation for their work, considering it's people's method of earning a living. How would you like your employer to withold your paycheck because information should be "free"?
Of course artists want to get payed for their work. But record contracts are a rotten deal for musicians! You make a fraction of what the record company does and you lose the rights to your music (in most cases, especially with the big labels).
Sites like mp3.com are a sweet deal! The most important thing for a musician, above all else, is to get your stuff heard. Geez, there's bands in LA that PAY clubs to let them play there. That's sick. Alternatively, mp3s are cheap and great for exposure.
But you gotta earn a living. I've made like $12 from my music on the net in the past two years, but I actually have an audience as compared to trying to sell the disks at indie music stores and pleading with college radio to play my music. (Read: no audience.) Besides, it's really weird stuff and I can understand why normal people wouldn't pay money for it.
Anyway I'm also not on tour, which is where the cash is. Bands that encourage people to freely trade their tunes and then put on a good performance can make a decent living through concert ticket sales. (Can't bootleg an experience. Not yet anyway.) The grateful dead is a perfect example of this model.
The record industry makes a few musicians rich and the rest poor. Then sells the good songs to Burger King 20 years later. Talk about a shitty deal!
Don't let your interpretation be too literal. Information "wants" to be free the same way water "wants" to flow down hill.
Humans share information. It may be rumors, jokes, bedtime stories, music or movies. Using the word "want" is useful here, because the medium is the human mind.
It is scientifically correct to say "Humans want information to be free." But this is less descriptive. "Information wants to be free" describes the big picture, the macro effect of this aspect of human psychology. As in the case of a funny joke that zips across the country in a few days, information does seem to have a mind of its own.