How about DVD software that reads a standarized XML edit list and edits the stream in real-time during playback. Yet another great fair-use example for DeCSS that would help shoot down DMCA in the courts.. Perhaps there could also be stand-alone players that would read the users' edit lists from a smart media card. Then have a PC utility that makes it easy to edit the movie, produce the edit list, and add it to an online database. The file format could even contain alternative sound clips to be inserted in place of profanity, instruction to use video filters (ie. mosaics), etc. It might look something like this:
<!-- remove excessive blood and gore on wall after BadGuy(tm) is shot through the head --> <edit start="01:54:23.55" end="01:54:57.50">
<filter type="blur">
<region x="10" y="30" xs="56" ys="120" amount="1.8">
<motion start="01:54:30.32" x="1.5" y="0.3">
<eq brightness="+1.5" red="-0.2">
</region>
</filter> </edit>
How about DVD software that reads a standarized XML edit list and edits the stream in real-time during playback. Yet another great fair-use example for DeCSS that would help shoot down DMCA in the courts.. Perhaps there could also be stand-alone players that would read the users' edit lists from a smart media card. Then have a PC utility that makes it easy to edit the movie, produce the edit list, and add it to an online database. The file format could even contain alternative sound clips to be inserted in place of profanity, instruction to use video filters (ie. mosaics), etc. It might look something like this:
not unless the director is ok with it. That's just straight-forward misrepresentation.
No, you're wrong. It would be misrepresentation if they were distributing modified versions and not telling people they were modified. People who buy from Clean Flicks do so with full knowledge that they are not getting the directors original cut. And that's their right to do so. Cut the crap about artists and directors deserving some sort of ultimate control over how people experience their work. A free society is infinitely more important than somebody's artistic vision being portrayed identically to every viewer.
Having a secondary tuner would not work as that would break the "trusted" display chain that Hollywood is seeking to establish.
I guarantee that people are not going to upgrade their perfectly good existing TV's just to get the new HDTV copy-protected signals. Either there will be external tuners or this whole thing will flop faster than DIVX. Maybe the top 10% income bracket in America will consider, but the rest will raise hell if their existing equipment becomes useless one day. The FCC will then have no choice but to listen to the masses.
Either way, TV is worthless. Cancel your cable or satellite and stop supporting the media monopolists. Your brain cells will thank you.
You'd think that the likes of Suse, Turbo, SCO, and Conectiva would get the point by now..
Well, these are folks who actually believed there was money in Linux distros in the first place.. so go figure. GPL violation or not, UL is an unnecessary muddying of the waters. Why don't they do something intelligent with their resources instead of re-inventing the same old wheel yet again. You know, like.. providing consulting services, developing custom software, improving existing OSS projects.. things that would actually do something for the cause of Linux and Free Software and maybe help our struggling economy! Instead, they're still daydreaming of dot-bomb companies that sell (branded) free software. Give it up guys. Learn from your mistakes and move on.
No GPL-based GUI installer available for "production" meets the requirements for Debian: *mostly* the 11 architectures Debian supports (all spinoffs concentrated mostly on i386), but some other things too, like being able to scale between newbie and guru. Most GUI installers cater to the needs of the newbies, or the ones that don't need absolute control, but some people need more and they can find it in the current installer.
Right on, man. I fully expect the GUI debian installer to be the best around once completed. All those whiners who claim the Debian project is elitist are gonna wind up with their foot in their mouths. Maybe this will also put an end to some of the worthless Linux distros once even an idiot can install Debian.
There's nothing stopping NVidia from releasing full specs for their cards so that the DRI people can make their own attempts at developing drivers. They may not be as good, but at least they'll be open and allow development for as long as Xfree86 exists. Or if NVidia was non-lame, they'd help develop the DRI drivers using the non-SGI-licensed Mesa libraries.
When I buy a piece of hardware, I have every reasonable expectation to get full register level documentation on how to interface with the hardware. I don't care if the chipset itself is a black box. Disclosing how to talk to the hardware does not give up any trade secrets--it's just giving the customer what they paid for.
Nvidia is full of crap. Of course, it'd be nice if ATI would actually help/fund the DRI people too so we don't have to wait a year or more for 3D support on each new Radeon card.
I hear this conspiracy theory alot, but in the real world, how could they prevent a better technology? Do you actually see a law being written that forces you into a gas combustion engine?
Simple. It's called our modern, unfair patent system. Go look at how many alternative energy related patents the oil and big-3 auto companies own.
There are plenty of other transportation technologies where hybrid fuel cells just don't apply, and wont for a long long time (planes, trains, ships, semis, buses). Electric wheels just dont turn as hard as gas-driven ones. (torque)
Buzzzz.. wrong. Electric motors have far more low-end torque than IC engines. That's why hybrids available today use electric for initial acceleration. And ever hear of the diesel-electric locomotive? (the most popular design today) Yep, electric motors. Busses? Already been done. Ships and subs? Yep, also using diesel-electric. (and done so for a very long time.. think WW2). Planes? Currently being researched. So the next step is logically to replace the diesel generators with fuel cells.
people who prefer to [run] Quake on the best OS available.
*BSD isn't the best OS available. Neither is Linux. They each have their strengths and weaknesses. Neither OS is inherently more secure. Neither OS has an absolute performance advantage over the other. Silly trolls. (:
People should cut the crap about "well, all operating systems are just as vulnerable if you don't patch regularly.." This is not a Linux issue, nor even an Apache issue. It's a flaw in OpenSSL which, using Apache and Linux as a vehicle, exploits systems with poor basic security. If this worm actually causes any significant impact on your machines / network, you haven't done a good job configuring them to begin with. Lets start with the "duh" issues:
- The firewall should not generically allow outbound connections originating from the web server.
- The user/group that Apache runs as should not have sufficient permissions to access stuff like the compiler, unneeded utilities, shells, etc. that make a worm even possible.
So now, people with outstanding felony warrants will no longer saunter down city streets and peruse the shopping malls in broad daylight. What a relief.
So how long until this wasteful tech spending becomes re-justified by using it instead to harass folks with outstanding parking tickets?
As evil as Palladium/TCPA is, there's one really big factor going for us: the economy is in the toilet. People (and certainly not businesses) are not going to rush out to buy all new 'compliant' computers just so they can be test subjects in corporate America's latest marketing experiment. Neither are they going to rush out to buy a successor to DVD, which is only now starting to really catch on as a mainstream format. And how many people have broadband internet? Or for that matter, how many have RELIABLE broadband internet?! So now, you're left with early adopters with deep pockets. And why would they want a piece of the action when the technology sucks and is a step backwards. Go pick up a copy of any Hi-Fi or videophile enthusiast magazine and see how many articles warn of the dangers of Hollywood's latest power grabs. On the other hand, these DRM systems are going to be pushed hard and shoved down many unexpecting consumer throats--components pieced together like a puzzle that will form a jail cell for information when the last piece is placed.
This whole thing could be defeated in much the same way that caused the rapid demise of Circuit City's DIVX format. (also heavily criticized by A/V enthusiasts) But because this is an industry-wide effort, it's going to take a bit more to cripple. We need massive campaigns to inform the public. We need to write our legislators and explain why this movement is bad for the consumer and for small business. We need to boycott all companies and products that support these DRM systems. We need to get Open Source solutions into the marketplace as fast as possible to strengthen the competition and increase the voices of dissent.
These companies are trying to take away basic freedoms paid for us with the bloodshed of brave men and women who fought to make this a free country and an just, open society. We must not let greed take these freedoms away from us. That's not what capitalism is all about.
Quite simply, foster community. The web on it's own is too sterile, anonymous, bland, and impersonal. Any band can put up a web site and call themselves a cutting edge indie group. The real trick is getting your audience involved and coming back for more. Assuming your music itself doesn't suck (which I didn't judge for myself because I automatically ignore any site that breaks when Macromedia Flash is unavailable), try to make your money entirely by live concerts. If you're really that good, people will spread the word and your popularity will continue to grow. Sometimes, do free or benefit concerts to draw new crowds. Sell well-recorded CD's for $5, but encourage online trading. (In fact, don't even try to host your own downloads! Let the P2P crowd handle that.) Encourage people to tape your shows and put them online. But of course, other bands have done all these, so this is all old hat. That's where *you* have to innovate. Find new ways to be interactive with the live crowd or online fanbase. Musically, try to make each performance a little different. Maybe even invite some audience members to participate, assuming there are other musicians in the crowd. Or how about use some really wild on-stage effects, lighting, etc. Do unusual stuff that people aren't expecting. (but unlike the Doors, keep it legal:-) Ultimately, have fun and gauge the enthusiasm of the crowd so you can do better next time.
The basic idea is sound, but if you want a really cheap 3D projection system, use a couple of old LCD projection panels + overhead projectors. You can find a lot of these things on Ebay. Proxima made the best ones AFAIK. Overhead projectors are big and heavy so you might want to look at a local auction instead. So now, you're looking at a cost of perhaps..
The reasons against software patents are pretty much the same reasons against patents on mathematics or scientific discovery or language/grammar (all of which currently are disallowed). A most basic case is one where that which is discovered is something that always existed and was not 'invented.' This would be the most "low level" of knowledge. The next level would perhaps be two or more pieces of basic knowledge combined for some purpose. For example, we know that friction produces heat, that sticks rubbed together have a high coefficient of friction, and that wood burns when it reaches a certain temperature. So perhaps a second level "idea" would be rubbing sticks together to make a fire. Still not an invention. Note: I believe this is the level at which most software patents exist--trivial discovery or the application of basic facts to accomplish a basic goal. For example, the mathematics of bandpass filtering and the fast fourier transform have existed for a long time. So has the physiological knowledge of how our ears work and the psychological knowledge of perceptual hearing. Put this body of past knowledge together in a formalized algorithm and you have MP3, which Frahnhofer has a software patent for. Bogus? I surely think so. Especially when alternative psycho-acoustic algorithms superior to theirs are available. Furthermore, you don't even need psycho-acoustic algorithms to decode MP3.. yet they still claim they have patent rights on decoders! If this is not a clear cut case of software patents inhibiting innovation, I don't know what is. LZH compression, another trivial (but patented) mathematical algorithm, is perhaps even more obvious.
So what should be patentable? Consider first that patent law is only good if it is good for society as a whole. All ideas are ultimately composed of previous ideas--nothing is new under the sun. So to imply that anyone truly owns an idea is ludicrous. There is no way to absolutely prove an idea is truly original, either. Someone else may have had the same idea a hundred years ago and simply never expressed it, or perhaps wrote it down but never shared it. So to begin, we must realize that patents are an economic compromise, not "property" as some would have us believe. Patents allow the first person that implements a significant idea to be the sole player in the market for a limited time, so that there is an incentive to try new things and explore new ideas while recouping production costs. With the case of software, however, there are no manufacturered goods and no overhead costs. Anyone can write software. And software doesn't even need to be a commercial enterprise. Furthermore, no one idea used in software is truly significant. Software development is an evolutionary art and science. It requires small ideas, small advancements. Such progress is impossible if those small ideas can be patented and restricted from use by the general public and software developers worldwide. Where would computers be today if say.. the linked-list, quick sort, or memory register had been patented.
Patent systems must ultimately weigh the economic incentives granted against the net result on society as a whole. Software patents fail this test consistently.
True, it would depend on the number of users.. I've seen large variance of the admin:user ratio in differnet shops. Perhaps an interesting study in the future will be how many users an admin can support with stable, well configured free software. Think diskless clients too, perhaps. Manage one server, replicate to branch servers, clients network boot. So then you're looking at answering dumb questions and managing user accounts.. of which the former, admittedly, is gonna be a big factor. (:
Nope. One competent 50k/year *nix savvy employee is easily worth more than 3 MCSE's. And that free software enthusiast you hire is bound to do a much better job all around because his/her work ethic is aligned with doing a job he/she loves.
Video Editing? Yeah, I use Cinelerra. The 1.0 release is halfway decent. Blender also rocks for doing both 3D and minor video editing. It's a little goofy to work with, but it covers my needs adequately. A gamer? Not really, I enjoy thinking / puzzle games and the like mostly. A 3D fps is fun once in a blue moon, but I've mostly outgrown that stuff. Desktop publishing? There is a lot of excellent free software for this. Try the latest KOffice beta. Gobe Productive will soon be open source. Or there are some non-free offerings from the Kompany that might suit you right now.
But still you miss the point. Most business users are not graphic designers. And playing video games is not exactly a top enterprise priority. It's possible that many businesses, in converting to free software solutions, may have to retain a few Windows boxes for specialized applications. But the vast majority of systems have no need of the Microsoft tax.
I've not met one person so far who has had trouble transitioning from Windows to KDE. Yes, there are a few questions to answer here and there, but nothing unreasonable. Stop spreading FUD.
They don't need RedHat.. all they need to do is upgrade their IT staff. Find people who are competent with Linux (specifically Debian), know how to program well, and are plugged in to the Open Source community. Linux is ready for the desktop. And with KDE3, it's arguably the best solution. It just takes a little bit of expertise to configure all the great software now available so it's convenient for daily use by business types. But hey, that's what System Administrators are for right? The expectation of a turn-key desktop is silly. Even Windows needs a bit of configuration So listen up CIO's, fire your MSCE's and hire some Linux gurus in their place. There are lots of us out here.
I can understand where Cisco might have a market in really huge routers that are beyond what PC architecture can handle, but it seems the vast majority of their product line is equalled or even bested by a well built PC running Linux / netfilter. Why would anyone want to build an cheap knock-off of an inferior, proprietary design? And illegal to boot! (pun intended). If you want technilogical freedom, use free technology. Somebody should start marketing linux-based routers and firewalls and use a large percentage of the profits to further the iptables / netfilter project.
You know, this is actually pretty cheap. I had no idea how inexpensive this was
Which part? The $0.75 per decoder or the MINIMUM $50,000 per year license fee. Either way, software patents are bad at a very basic personal-freedom level. (Not to mention they're destructive to the entire industry.)
Sure, they're profiteering, but they're profiteering off of a format they helped produce and thought to patent. MP3 encoding isn't exactly no duh stuff like hyperlinks or LZW compression.
Maybe to you it's "not exactly no duh stuff" but to most mathematicians and computer scientists, the MP3 encoding process is pretty trivial. Fraunhaufer took a bunch of old ideas, threw them together, added their own psychoacoustic / statistic model, and called it a standard. And MP3 is not even cutting edge anymore. Free software developers have come up with superior psychoacoustic models both for MP3 and for the unpatented Ogg Vorbis codec, which is more advanced anyhow. So supporting this stupid patent is supporting old, inferior technology just so that some greedy jerks can get their money for nothing. Take a look at any software patent and you'll find the same scenario.
What it means, though, is that GPL'd and other free decoders are going to have to ammend the license to be sure Fraunhoffer gets its money. This is a perfect time to test whether or not the GPL can play nice in the IP pool.
Bullcrap. Fraunhoffer does not have a legitimate case for being paid ANYTHING by developers / distributers of free software. Instead, this is the perfect time to see whether or not Open Source coders and businesses have the balls to stand up against bad, anti-free-market laws.
As for me, I'll use OGG Vorbis regardless, simply because it is the superior lossy algorithm. Otherwise, with hard drives so large and cheap these days, FLAC (Free Lossless Audio Codec) may be a better option for archiving my albums anyhow.
Slashdot Mirror
How about DVD software that reads a standarized XML edit list and edits the stream in real-time during playback. Yet another great fair-use example for DeCSS that would help shoot down DMCA in the courts.. Perhaps there could also be stand-alone players that would read the users' edit lists from a smart media card. Then have a PC utility that makes it easy to edit the movie, produce the edit list, and add it to an online database. The file format could even contain alternative sound clips to be inserted in place of profanity, instruction to use video filters (ie. mosaics), etc. It might look something like this:
not unless the director is ok with it. That's just straight-forward misrepresentation.
No, you're wrong. It would be misrepresentation if they were distributing modified versions and not telling people they were modified. People who buy from Clean Flicks do so with full knowledge that they are not getting the directors original cut. And that's their right to do so. Cut the crap about artists and directors deserving some sort of ultimate control over how people experience their work. A free society is infinitely more important than somebody's artistic vision being portrayed identically to every viewer.
Having a secondary tuner would not work as that would break the "trusted" display chain that Hollywood is seeking to establish.
I guarantee that people are not going to upgrade their perfectly good existing TV's just to get the new HDTV copy-protected signals. Either there will be external tuners or this whole thing will flop faster than DIVX. Maybe the top 10% income bracket in America will consider, but the rest will raise hell if their existing equipment becomes useless one day. The FCC will then have no choice but to listen to the masses.
Either way, TV is worthless. Cancel your cable or satellite and stop supporting the media monopolists. Your brain cells will thank you.
You'd think that the likes of Suse, Turbo, SCO, and Conectiva would get the point by now..
Well, these are folks who actually believed there was money in Linux distros in the first place.. so go figure. GPL violation or not, UL is an unnecessary muddying of the waters. Why don't they do something intelligent with their resources instead of re-inventing the same old wheel yet again. You know, like.. providing consulting services, developing custom software, improving existing OSS projects.. things that would actually do something for the cause of Linux and Free Software and maybe help our struggling economy! Instead, they're still daydreaming of dot-bomb companies that sell (branded) free software. Give it up guys. Learn from your mistakes and move on.
I suppose.. but how could you leave your mark to let all the other warskydrivers know where you found the good networks.. hmm.. Ah yes.. WarCratering!
No GPL-based GUI installer available for "production" meets the requirements for Debian: *mostly* the 11 architectures Debian supports (all spinoffs concentrated mostly on i386), but some other things too, like being able to scale between newbie and guru. Most GUI installers cater to the needs of the newbies, or the ones that don't need absolute control, but some people need more and they can find it in the current installer.
Right on, man. I fully expect the GUI debian installer to be the best around once completed. All those whiners who claim the Debian project is elitist are gonna wind up with their foot in their mouths. Maybe this will also put an end to some of the worthless Linux distros once even an idiot can install Debian.
There's nothing stopping NVidia from releasing full specs for their cards so that the DRI people can make their own attempts at developing drivers. They may not be as good, but at least they'll be open and allow development for as long as Xfree86 exists. Or if NVidia was non-lame, they'd help develop the DRI drivers using the non-SGI-licensed Mesa libraries.
When I buy a piece of hardware, I have every reasonable expectation to get full register level documentation on how to interface with the hardware. I don't care if the chipset itself is a black box. Disclosing how to talk to the hardware does not give up any trade secrets--it's just giving the customer what they paid for.
Nvidia is full of crap. Of course, it'd be nice if ATI would actually help/fund the DRI people too so we don't have to wait a year or more for 3D support on each new Radeon card.
I hear this conspiracy theory alot, but in the real world, how could they prevent a better technology? Do you actually see a law being written that forces you into a gas combustion engine?
Simple. It's called our modern, unfair patent system. Go look at how many alternative energy related patents the oil and big-3 auto companies own.
There are plenty of other transportation technologies where hybrid fuel cells just don't apply, and wont for a long long time (planes, trains, ships, semis, buses). Electric wheels just dont turn as hard as gas-driven ones. (torque)
Buzzzz.. wrong. Electric motors have far more low-end torque than IC engines. That's why hybrids available today use electric for initial acceleration. And ever hear of the diesel-electric locomotive? (the most popular design today) Yep, electric motors. Busses? Already been done. Ships and subs? Yep, also using diesel-electric. (and done so for a very long time.. think WW2). Planes? Currently being researched. So the next step is logically to replace the diesel generators with fuel cells.
people who prefer to [run] Quake on the best OS available.
*BSD isn't the best OS available. Neither is Linux. They each have their strengths and weaknesses. Neither OS is inherently more secure. Neither OS has an absolute performance advantage over the other. Silly trolls. (:
People should cut the crap about "well, all operating systems are just as vulnerable if you don't patch regularly.." This is not a Linux issue, nor even an Apache issue. It's a flaw in OpenSSL which, using Apache and Linux as a vehicle, exploits systems with poor basic security. If this worm actually causes any significant impact on your machines / network, you haven't done a good job configuring them to begin with. Lets start with the "duh" issues:
- The firewall should not generically allow outbound connections originating from the web server.
- The user/group that Apache runs as should not have sufficient permissions to access stuff like the compiler, unneeded utilities, shells, etc. that make a worm even possible.
Would anyone besides me argue that they should be using Qmail and Courier-IMAP instead? They seem to be the superior solutions.
So now, people with outstanding felony warrants will no longer saunter down city streets and peruse the shopping malls in broad daylight. What a relief.
So how long until this wasteful tech spending becomes re-justified by using it instead to harass folks with outstanding parking tickets?
As evil as Palladium/TCPA is, there's one really big factor going for us: the economy is in the toilet. People (and certainly not businesses) are not going to rush out to buy all new 'compliant' computers just so they can be test subjects in corporate America's latest marketing experiment. Neither are they going to rush out to buy a successor to DVD, which is only now starting to really catch on as a mainstream format. And how many people have broadband internet? Or for that matter, how many have RELIABLE broadband internet?! So now, you're left with early adopters with deep pockets. And why would they want a piece of the action when the technology sucks and is a step backwards. Go pick up a copy of any Hi-Fi or videophile enthusiast magazine and see how many articles warn of the dangers of Hollywood's latest power grabs. On the other hand, these DRM systems are going to be pushed hard and shoved down many unexpecting consumer throats--components pieced together like a puzzle that will form a jail cell for information when the last piece is placed.
This whole thing could be defeated in much the same way that caused the rapid demise of Circuit City's DIVX format. (also heavily criticized by A/V enthusiasts) But because this is an industry-wide effort, it's going to take a bit more to cripple. We need massive campaigns to inform the public. We need to write our legislators and explain why this movement is bad for the consumer and for small business. We need to boycott all companies and products that support these DRM systems. We need to get Open Source solutions into the marketplace as fast as possible to strengthen the competition and increase the voices of dissent.
These companies are trying to take away basic freedoms paid for us with the bloodshed of brave men and women who fought to make this a free country and an just, open society. We must not let greed take these freedoms away from us. That's not what capitalism is all about.
Quite simply, foster community. The web on it's own is too sterile, anonymous, bland, and impersonal. Any band can put up a web site and call themselves a cutting edge indie group. The real trick is getting your audience involved and coming back for more. Assuming your music itself doesn't suck (which I didn't judge for myself because I automatically ignore any site that breaks when Macromedia Flash is unavailable), try to make your money entirely by live concerts. If you're really that good, people will spread the word and your popularity will continue to grow. Sometimes, do free or benefit concerts to draw new crowds. Sell well-recorded CD's for $5, but encourage online trading. (In fact, don't even try to host your own downloads! Let the P2P crowd handle that.) Encourage people to tape your shows and put them online. But of course, other bands have done all these, so this is all old hat. That's where *you* have to innovate. Find new ways to be interactive with the live crowd or online fanbase. Musically, try to make each performance a little different. Maybe even invite some audience members to participate, assuming there are other musicians in the crowd. Or how about use some really wild on-stage effects, lighting, etc. Do unusual stuff that people aren't expecting. (but unlike the Doors, keep it legal :-) Ultimately, have fun and gauge the enthusiasm of the crowd so you can do better next time.
The basic idea is sound, but if you want a really cheap 3D projection system, use a couple of old LCD projection panels + overhead projectors. You can find a lot of these things on Ebay. Proxima made the best ones AFAIK. Overhead projectors are big and heavy so you might want to look at a local auction instead. So now, you're looking at a cost of perhaps..
100x2 lcd panels
50x2 overhead projectors
30-50 quality polarizing filters
5ea polarized glasses
50 old silver screen
150 dual-head radeon 8500
Around $500-600. Much better. Now it's truly a 'poor man's' 3D projector. And to think some people would spend that much on a 32" television!
The reasons against software patents are pretty much the same reasons against patents on mathematics or scientific discovery or language/grammar (all of which currently are disallowed). A most basic case is one where that which is discovered is something that always existed and was not 'invented.' This would be the most "low level" of knowledge. The next level would perhaps be two or more pieces of basic knowledge combined for some purpose. For example, we know that friction produces heat, that sticks rubbed together have a high coefficient of friction, and that wood burns when it reaches a certain temperature. So perhaps a second level "idea" would be rubbing sticks together to make a fire. Still not an invention. Note: I believe this is the level at which most software patents exist--trivial discovery or the application of basic facts to accomplish a basic goal. For example, the mathematics of bandpass filtering and the fast fourier transform have existed for a long time. So has the physiological knowledge of how our ears work and the psychological knowledge of perceptual hearing. Put this body of past knowledge together in a formalized algorithm and you have MP3, which Frahnhofer has a software patent for. Bogus? I surely think so. Especially when alternative psycho-acoustic algorithms superior to theirs are available. Furthermore, you don't even need psycho-acoustic algorithms to decode MP3.. yet they still claim they have patent rights on decoders! If this is not a clear cut case of software patents inhibiting innovation, I don't know what is. LZH compression, another trivial (but patented) mathematical algorithm, is perhaps even more obvious.
So what should be patentable? Consider first that patent law is only good if it is good for society as a whole. All ideas are ultimately composed of previous ideas--nothing is new under the sun. So to imply that anyone truly owns an idea is ludicrous. There is no way to absolutely prove an idea is truly original, either. Someone else may have had the same idea a hundred years ago and simply never expressed it, or perhaps wrote it down but never shared it. So to begin, we must realize that patents are an economic compromise, not "property" as some would have us believe. Patents allow the first person that implements a significant idea to be the sole player in the market for a limited time, so that there is an incentive to try new things and explore new ideas while recouping production costs. With the case of software, however, there are no manufacturered goods and no overhead costs. Anyone can write software. And software doesn't even need to be a commercial enterprise. Furthermore, no one idea used in software is truly significant. Software development is an evolutionary art and science. It requires small ideas, small advancements. Such progress is impossible if those small ideas can be patented and restricted from use by the general public and software developers worldwide. Where would computers be today if say.. the linked-list, quick sort, or memory register had been patented.
Patent systems must ultimately weigh the economic incentives granted against the net result on society as a whole. Software patents fail this test consistently.
True, it would depend on the number of users.. I've seen large variance of the admin:user ratio in differnet shops. Perhaps an interesting study in the future will be how many users an admin can support with stable, well configured free software. Think diskless clients too, perhaps. Manage one server, replicate to branch servers, clients network boot. So then you're looking at answering dumb questions and managing user accounts.. of which the former, admittedly, is gonna be a big factor. (:
Nope. One competent 50k/year *nix savvy employee is easily worth more than 3 MCSE's. And that free software enthusiast you hire is bound to do a much better job all around because his/her work ethic is aligned with doing a job he/she loves.
Video Editing? Yeah, I use Cinelerra. The 1.0 release is halfway decent. Blender also rocks for doing both 3D and minor video editing. It's a little goofy to work with, but it covers my needs adequately. A gamer? Not really, I enjoy thinking / puzzle games and the like mostly. A 3D fps is fun once in a blue moon, but I've mostly outgrown that stuff. Desktop publishing? There is a lot of excellent free software for this. Try the latest KOffice beta. Gobe Productive will soon be open source. Or there are some non-free offerings from the Kompany that might suit you right now.
But still you miss the point. Most business users are not graphic designers. And playing video games is not exactly a top enterprise priority. It's possible that many businesses, in converting to free software solutions, may have to retain a few Windows boxes for specialized applications. But the vast majority of systems have no need of the Microsoft tax.
I've not met one person so far who has had trouble transitioning from Windows to KDE. Yes, there are a few questions to answer here and there, but nothing unreasonable. Stop spreading FUD.
They don't need RedHat.. all they need to do is upgrade their IT staff. Find people who are competent with Linux (specifically Debian), know how to program well, and are plugged in to the Open Source community. Linux is ready for the desktop. And with KDE3, it's arguably the best solution. It just takes a little bit of expertise to configure all the great software now available so it's convenient for daily use by business types. But hey, that's what System Administrators are for right? The expectation of a turn-key desktop is silly. Even Windows needs a bit of configuration So listen up CIO's, fire your MSCE's and hire some Linux gurus in their place. There are lots of us out here.
2-3 Corporate Apps
Those 2-3 corporate apps are what we need to target with free software. Consultants? Get busy!
I can understand where Cisco might have a market in really huge routers that are beyond what PC architecture can handle, but it seems the vast majority of their product line is equalled or even bested by a well built PC running Linux / netfilter. Why would anyone want to build an cheap knock-off of an inferior, proprietary design? And illegal to boot! (pun intended). If you want technilogical freedom, use free technology. Somebody should start marketing linux-based routers and firewalls and use a large percentage of the profits to further the iptables / netfilter project.
You know, this is actually pretty cheap. I had no idea how inexpensive this was
Which part? The $0.75 per decoder or the MINIMUM $50,000 per year license fee. Either way, software patents are bad at a very basic personal-freedom level. (Not to mention they're destructive to the entire industry.)
Sure, they're profiteering, but they're profiteering off of a format they helped produce and thought to patent. MP3 encoding isn't exactly no duh stuff like hyperlinks or LZW compression.
Maybe to you it's "not exactly no duh stuff" but to most mathematicians and computer scientists, the MP3 encoding process is pretty trivial. Fraunhaufer took a bunch of old ideas, threw them together, added their own psychoacoustic / statistic model, and called it a standard. And MP3 is not even cutting edge anymore. Free software developers have come up with superior psychoacoustic models both for MP3 and for the unpatented Ogg Vorbis codec, which is more advanced anyhow. So supporting this stupid patent is supporting old, inferior technology just so that some greedy jerks can get their money for nothing. Take a look at any software patent and you'll find the same scenario.
What it means, though, is that GPL'd and other free decoders are going to have to ammend the license to be sure Fraunhoffer gets its money. This is a perfect time to test whether or not the GPL can play nice in the IP pool.
Bullcrap. Fraunhoffer does not have a legitimate case for being paid ANYTHING by developers / distributers of free software. Instead, this is the perfect time to see whether or not Open Source coders and businesses have the balls to stand up against bad, anti-free-market laws.
As for me, I'll use OGG Vorbis regardless, simply because it is the superior lossy algorithm. Otherwise, with hard drives so large and cheap these days, FLAC (Free Lossless Audio Codec) may be a better option for archiving my albums anyhow.