This piece of machinery is amazing, and if publisher's are smart, they'll jump on this. Of course, I'm not going to argue that publishers of any kind of medium are smart, so we'll have to wait and see.
The publishers who believe in objects -- the books themselves, as opposed to 'pure' content, so to speak -- are smart not to jump on this.
Why? Because such books have no archive value whatsoever.
Unlike printing ink, most POD uses toner -- carbon with heat glue -- like any laser printer. From text to illustration, a POD book deteriorates fairly rapidly. Try putting your favorite laminated bookmark in one and watch the toner peel off the page onto the bookmark a few days or weeks later. Furthermore, the illustrations are irregular in density and the choice of paper is limited (and is never acid-free quality unless that is specified and paid handsomely for... impossible if you're going to your local Barnes & Noble for a copy).
Your typical paperback from 1971 will be around longer than your POD book from 2001.
This gives publishers a niche marketplace for presentation quality which they can exploit. So long as the electronic original remains in print, you can get a new POD copy to replace the tatty mess your POD book will soon become.
But that is changing as current publishers are putting most of their new stock into electornic format that would be suitable, and places like iUniverse build libraries of titles available on demand.
The concept of iUniverse is a good one, because publishers have been old-boy clubs for a long time. But there's much more to publishing a book -- and giving it credibility -- than having machinery to make copies.
Disclaimer: I'm a writer and an editor.
A few months ago, a local publisher put out -- using POD via the printing company for one of the iUniverse-type front operations -- a book with a quirky take on the U.S. Civil War. It was the result of six years of research, but the book was unreadable.
It took two more years of working with the author to smooth the flow and architecture, enhance the color of the writing, make the style consistent (right down to consistent spelling of place-names), patch holes in the story, get permissions for illustrations, develop cover artwork, and have the book reviewed by experts to uncover factual errors.
Had this author (who, like most authors, think they have a finished book when they complete the last sentence) gone right to a POD operation, the results wouldn't have been close to the remarkable and captivating book it is today -- selling very well, too.
In so many/. discussions outside the realm of technology, there's a lack of understanding that creative efforts to not burst fully mature from the womb of the mind!
The 75-year change was pushed for by media companies, and traded for the loss of rights to incidental restaurant play that that industry had lobbied for.
The composers (like me) were, as usual, pushed to the back of the discussion.
But hey, the media companies are certainly enjoying the smokescreen that discussions like this on/. provide. It takes the focus away from the WTO, the media companies, and other large-scale organizations who are re-thinking and re-writing laws of all sorts to the advantage of large corporations, with the enthusiastic assistance of governments falling all over themselves to make their nations "competitive" in a capitalism-driven world.
Do you think they care if you copy a buddy's CD? Of course not. Ultimately, the corporate influence and technology will be so pervasive that the hardware and software needed to copy whatever you want to copy will be locked up. Distribution will move away from the plastic object as soon as secure methods start working for 99% of the population, and the rest of you be damned. (A friend I hadn't heard from in 20 years called last night, having found my name on the web. He wanted to know how he could listen to my "station", having no clue how to use anything but AOL. Old paradigms in new technologies. It works for them.)
Anyway -- sorry to rant here -- all they have to do is keep all of us arguing long enough to have an easy, secure method in place before we do. And it's working! We're just arguing instead of building an alternative method to deconstruct protection, clickwrap, EULAs, etc., en masse.
And furthermore, like Bertelsmann and Napster, the industry can provide a large enough bribe to shut up any threats, or fight anyone else to a legal draw and drain their resources, such as MP3.com.
The best news for the industry? Discussions like this one, which quickly devolve into "hey, what if I want to copy my old vinyl?"
Thanks for bringing out these important points -- but Jefferson alone was not the author nor the only source of authority.
Since much of the precedent is from European law and practice, it's useful to recall that the concept of intellectual property and copyright arose when publication -- that is, the separation of art and object -- came about, especially through printing.
Previously, each copy was in effect an original, copied by hand and differently illuminated, set out, and even changed. The idea of clarifying and enforcing what could be done by the purchasers of the object made it possible for commercial publishing to succeed. Artists applauded that trend because -- and this is important to remember in the case of writing and composition -- the object is not the art, it is only a set of instructions (even, now, digital ones) for presenting a version of that art.
So the Constitution's granted right may appear more restrictive than Europe's, but it's also crucial to realize that this is so important that it is the only right granted in the body of the Constitution itself, and not in the later amendments.
It's best to go right to the sources at the Copyright Office, ASCAP, BMI, RIAA, etc. The restaurant info, the who-owns-the-copyright info, etc., are wrong in implication if not in detail.
And if the legalese is too much, then go here or (when it's back up) here.
Good grief. I suppose I should stay out of this, but I've been a professional composer using orchestral and electronic media for more than 30 years, and the PC has always provided the breadth of tools and configurability that I need, especially if I need to quickly build up a control device of some kind.
Look, I know those who started with Macs are happy with their stuff. That's fine. But I can't be tied to an Apple corporate stamp of approval for a product. For example, I'd not likely see an AudioMulch for Mac -- unless you consider Max, priced at 10 times the cost for similar functionality (and with Max lacking the ability to produce techno quickly, for example). And Sound Forge, Cool Edit Pro, Cakewalk, Finale, Graphire Music Press... all (and hundreds of other programs and advanced plugins) are wonderful and flexible PC software. Finale and Graphire both started on Macs, and Finale's first PC port was terrible. But once they started writing from the ground up for PC, the results were stunning. And according to users on both platforms, the Graphire PC version leaves the Mac version behind for ease and speed of use.
As for professional results, legacy studios with Mac equipment do not a case for Macs make. My CD was produced with PCs alone, as have been thousands of others. Likewise, as an editor and book designer, I have had no trouble accommodating the needs of legacy print houses who still use Macs.
I have no problem with Macs and those who love them, but you are presenting a bogus argument from the computer world of a decade past.
ClayJar said: Or G'Kar, a flat, one-dimensional character who wanted nothing more or less than to see the Centauri exterminated, who by the end of the series not only had forged a lasting peace between their two races but had also grown strong enough to turn down the chance to be ruler of his entire world.
G'Kar exemplified Babylon 5 at its best. Andreas Katsulas gave a portrayal that was Shakespearian. G'Kar gave Londo meaning as well. Their moments when G'Kar was chained in the cell were extraordinary television.
Jerry Doyle's Garibaldi was always convincing, as was Walter Koenig's Bester, and Jeff Conaway's wonderfully underplayed Zack Allen. The only character that really fell apart was the cheap hippie imitation psi guy... mercifully, I forget both his character and actor...
And everything was dirty on B5. I loved it. You know that people actually pissed and shat in that show!
AC said, Yup... I know I got a lot more out of the five minutes for which I understood Galois than the hour I was subjected to Schönberg... seriously.
And you've studied and understand and speak both languages? Galois Theory and Serial Harmony? If your grasp of serial harmony is even at the mathematical level of algebra, then you should be able to whistle the Moses und Aron row... yes?
hypergeek wrote: That's where the fuzzy gray area of "speech with functional significance" comes in...
This is so true. Remember that source and object code were validated as speech in the early 1980s during the copyright debate.
I'm baffled about this decision alters existing law, or if it merely reaffirms it -- or even if it limits it, because "speech with functional significance" is not what object code is. Yet object code is protected by copyright and was defended as speech.
Yes, copyright itself doesn't define speech, but its implementation has paralleled the Constitutional concept of speech for decades.
Perhaps the implications of tech have so befuddled (and broken down) the legal system that each turn and twist in the tech road has to be adjudicated individually to arrive at the same old conclusions.
We had the same problem back a while ago when making a site for kids, where we had ALT tags on the graphics, but the tags popping up when on the menu text, ended up hiding the actual roll-over text that we were putting in an adjacent image.
Huh? If you had done your design homework to start with you would have (1) known this and (2) not put important information in rollovers anyway.
Well done. That's one of our first accessibility tests... in fact, I started doing accessibility testing when blind and deaf users started complaining about my Kalvos & Damian site. We hardly miss an ALT now and are transcribing our interviews as fast as we can!
The Coward sez: I'm sorry, the burden is on the user. I'm not going to dumb-down the graphics on my sites for anyone!
Dumb-down, eh? I'd like to poke your eyes out. Go try browsing blind. Download a nice speech browser like IBM Home Page Reader and go to one of these sites. Find your way around. No wonder laws are needed. "Dumb-down". The pits of bigotry.
We did the first of our accessibility 'white papers' on the presidential candidate sites. Nobody passed nuthin! (And didn't care when we contacted them. Vote for nobody?)
Please add two important factors: formats and applications.
I'm a Windows user now that I'm out of the programming world. Windows was there when I needed a cheap and functional GUI. Nobody else was. I've got no universities or big companies behind me. I'm an individual person with a family of computer users, and numerous clients.
Unlike our "suit" friend, I don't have time to explore document properties and chuckle at others' ignorance. I've got to exchange documents with sometimes a dozen colleagues or clients at different locations, all of whom expect a Word or Finale or Cakewalk document for the round-robin editing. I had to teach all (read: every one) of them what FTP was because the documents were too big for email! Some couldn't even get the hang of that, so I had to create web links for download/upload.
Would I like Linux? Personally? As a person who likes to have a machine configured to my taste, probably yes. But -- call me unimaginative -- there's not a whole lot of non-technie stuff that I haven't been able to do in Windows.
So what about format exchange? As a composer, I'd love to use other scoring applications, regardless of the computing environment. Why can't I? Because I have eight years of score production, representing over 30 years of compositions, in one file format. Even Windows applications have trouble importing/exporting readable files -- Unix has, what, Lilypond? It reads nobody else, nobody else reads it. Last I heard I couldn't even export a Midi demo with it. At least the major scoring programs come with Win/Mac file exchange and Midi output. So will a niche OS get attention from a niche field like musical scoring? Not likely, not until the niche OS is mainstream.
And applications? Even after 15 years in machine/assembly programming, I decided on Windows in 1992 because I had to get work done. I know Linux users hate that Neanderthal-sounding argument, but folks, I have a complete DAW running so I can do music production and scoring. The applications are install-and-run, with very little configuration, which most of them do automatically. Manual configuration is available for the tweaking. It's stable. It never crashes. That is what I need... and it runs under Windows.
Example: I have an upcoming piece for string orchestra. From a single keyboard and screen I'm running four computers (all Win95b) with the desktop-in-screen (VNC Viewer). Each computer is running different sound/scoring apps (Finale, Cakewalk, Cool Edit, Audiomulch...) and hardware (one with two 24-bit 96KHz sound cards, another with a 32-channel Midi card...), graphical apps (Photoshop, Paint Shop, screen recorders...) Most of the hardware doesn't even have Linux drivers, by the way.
One computer is also being used by my wife, another by my stepdaughter. So -- back to the example -- in a single day I produced the score and parts from my pencil sketches, output from it a General Midi demo which was then massaged by using audio samples and sequenced, produced PDF files of the score and parts, burned a CD of the demo for the reviewers, created an mp3 file for the conductor, edited my web pages to make the score and demo available, and uploaded it all. The conductor could then download and print the PDFs while listening to the demo, as I continued working on the score for another composer whose music was to be premiered in the same concert. The only time I had to leave my keyboard was to take a break or load a CD to burn into the machine in the next room.
The rest of the family continued working, writing, doing homework, browsing, checking email, etc., never noticing that I was using their spare CPU time for audio processing. I have a full four-track sound setup (no Linux drivers), a networked Palm V, and in the background I'm running SETI at Home, as well as FTGate mail server and Wingate networking over Linksys (no Linux drivers) cards. I run IRC, telnet, FTP, chat, and HTTP servers on a sporadic basis when friends or clients need stuff. Only one application -- the Java chat -- needs command-line configuration.
Some of this may be no big deal for Linux power users. But when I got hot for Linux, I went searching and couldn't locate even a fraction of the applications and drivers I'd need to do my daily work.
My point is this: Our "suit" was a clever and computer-savvy business user calling on commonplace applications. I could do what he does. But my day involves much more than text and spreadsheets and even images. I need easy movement from application to application, file to file, and client to client -- and I mean people, not software. My family and clients have never seen a command-line process!
I would love to get out of the MS world. MS is distasteful to me as a company. But those of you who are pioneers have much to do -- including making Linux (or any successor OS) work effortlessly (yes, appliance-level), and enticing companies (read: payback) to create drivers and software for it... beyond a few commonplace applications.
We do have the technology now, as the poster says, to migrate our data ever forwards into new storage, assuming no cataclysm occurs
But we don't have the time. You can increase data density and processor speeds, but not the human time to make the decisions on what to migrate where, when, and how. Not to mention you're only talking about digital data here, not the real world.
Heck, I was gone to a rehearsal one day and come back to find comments to this topic essentially over. With that kind of attention span, who's gonna do this stuff?
It is coherent but not deep enough. I read with some horror the narrow use and time views, such as when you said, "Modern word processing still opens really old file formats like Windows.WRI and Word 1.0". Old? I have books in TRS-80 Model I Electric Pencil format!
But it's so much broader than that. We have created a society of ephermal materials, increasingly so each year. As we moved from stone to paper to magnetic and optical media, we gave up durability for fluidity and speed. But I won't repeat your arguments, only point to some other examples and questions...
Who has time for this? Every year there is more data to back up, more information to get in order. As a composer, I have scores in software now six versions old. The ability to understand the meaning of the data is compromised with each upgrade, so I have to re-work as well as convert and transfer them. And there are sequences created as far back as my hand-built digital box. Some I've brought forward through a TRS-80 Model I all the way into Cakewalk 9. So I'm a composer whose time is split between creating the new and re-archiving the old!
Sure, who cares if I can't recover my KIM-1 data (even now)? As an artist, I do care, especially if great works are lost. The breakthrough music of David Behrmann was done on a KIM-1. Frozen documents (CDs) of them have been released, but his music was interactive as far back as 1977. Behrmann is one of the last century's musical lights. His work will be lost unless some hardware is kept up or some software moved to another system. Who will do it? I may not come up to Behrman's genius, but I have several dozen interactive works starting in 1978, and some of these technologies are long lost already.
As an individual artist with a body of work spanning nearly 40 years, I have a room full of decaying and obsolete media... artistic creations that only function on KIM-1 and TRS-80 or OSI or Color Computer with dozens of data formats and custom interfaces. Paper tapes, wafer tapes, 8-inch and 5-inch and 3-inch disks. 4-channel Dolby-B tapes. 2 channel 4-track dbx-1 tapes. 2-channel dbx-2 cassettes. Fostex 4-channel cassettes. DAT tapes. Minidiscs. 8mm and 16mm film. Beta video. 2-inch slides. Mylar overlays. Negatives in many formats. Even a bloody set of endless-loop Elcassettes and 8-tracks for a sound installation! And I'm just one guy.
But it's not just media decay. It's knowledge and understanding. Someone else pointed to a tricorder of the future, which could read the data and determine its purpose. A good idea, if such a tricorder could contain the historical thought of each individual. But even from Beethoven's sketchbooks, who could determine the 'correct' ending for a symphony? Reconstructing data might be possible; understanding it will be impossible.
ever notice the computers in Star Trek never have cross platform communication problems?
And they never have to pee, and they all speak English to each other.
Actually, I like your premise. Just the way -- from carbon dating through DNA testing -- we've advanced archaeological and historical sleuthing, the future will likely have more methods than we do.
The problem is the near future more than the distant one: What to do with the data I can no longer read that's younger than my kids.
When I originally submitted this Bill Gates piece to/. I provided some commentary, but the focus was on how my piece No Money (Lullaby for Bill) came about, being derived from Gates's voice.
Then I turned up the full interview transcript. It was more interesting for/. and so I was asked to write a new preface for the interview. Alas, the original brief article didn't make it. Instead, I posted it here on my Malted/Media site:
He is arguing the case for copyright protection. There's nothing paternalistic about wanting copyright protection ( which musicians and artists had for years )
If "years" means since 1972, that is! Printed music had protection, but recorded music did not until then. It's not simple. And realize I conducted this interview in 1980, only eight years after analog music recordings could be copyrighted. Furthermore, the issue hadn't yet been resolved. Datacash vs. JS&A really made 'em nuts in 1979, and the Copyright Office was refusing object code.
The real philosophical question (which he avoided, and all 300+ posts on/. have avoided) is about object code. Regardless of the creativity required to produce its source, the object code is indeed a machine part. This was never settled in the courts; it was settled by legislation that granted copyright to object code, and messed up even more later with patents granted to software. It made a mess of copyright and patent concepts... and we're seeing those roosting ramifications in the whole DVD nightmare.
The fact is that code is like art or literature, you spend your time and energy to create something, and you would like it to be protected from some loozer coming along and claiming it as his.
This was not a fact at the time with respect to object code -- read the quote I included up front about the Datacase decision. Here's more in Judge Flaum's decision:
Normally, a computer program consists of several phases [...] The first phase is the development of a flow chart [...]. It sets forth the logical steps involved in solving a given problem. The second phase is the development of a "source program" which is a translation of the flow chart into computer programming language [...] The third phase is the development of an "assembly program" which is a translation of the programming language into machine language, i.e., mechanically readable computer language. Unlike source programs, which are readable by trained programmers, assembly programs are virtually unintelligible except by the computer itself. Finally, the fourth phase is the development of the "object program" which is a conversion of the machine language into a device commanding a series of electrical impulses. Object programs, which enter into the mechanical process itself, cannot be read without the aid of special equipment and cannot be understood by even the most highly trained programmers...
And here is what he decided:
2. The Copyright Act of 1976 applies to computer programs in their flow chart, source and assumbly phases, but not in their object phase.
4. The object phase of a computer program was not a "copy" within meaning of the Copyright Act of 1909 or common law, since the object phase is not in a form which one can see and read witht he naked eye but a mechanical tool or machine part.
This is precisely why Gates and 20 others were contacted for this article. It all seems so obvious 20 years later, doesn't it?
The original article was an extensively researched overview of copyright -- in fact, it was the first significant piece on the topic to appear in the small computer press. (Remember that the Datacash decision had only been made a few months earlier, and the Copyright Office was still refusing object code).
Although quite a few of Gates's comments made it into the final piece, he was only one of many quoted. And no (outside the context of two decades of history!), Gates really sounded like a minor player, as everyone was in the days when small computer were still viewed as toys.
Actually, I wasn't looking for him to 'succumb to an answer', but I was hoping that he would spend some time on the concept of copyright and its basis in the idea of encouraging the creation of new work, and so forth. Copyright was not originally conceived of as strictly an economic tool, although most interpretation and practice have employed it that way. So I was looking for some marrow of philosophy from Gates, and kept gnawing on that bone.
The letter I received from John Hersey, for example, discussed the distinction between human and machine readability. Other interviewees tossed around the balance between adapted ideas and stolen ideas.
A sidebar discussed the idea of the re-organization of bits in a non-human-readable form (object code) by rotation would in fact result in a different yet executable (even if flawed) piece of code. Would that be protected by copyright? And if the user observed the rotation and reversed it? What law would be broken? By whom? And so forth... none of it was clear two decades ago.
Unfortunately, I don't have the original article in electronic form, but there are still many thousands of copies of 80 Microcomputing from that era floating around!
Slashdot Mirror
Kashmir also Cashmere. A historical region of northwest India and northeast Pakistan.
This piece of machinery is amazing, and if publisher's are smart, they'll jump on this. Of course, I'm not going to argue that publishers of any kind of medium are smart, so we'll have to wait and see.
The publishers who believe in objects -- the books themselves, as opposed to 'pure' content, so to speak -- are smart not to jump on this.
Why? Because such books have no archive value whatsoever.
Unlike printing ink, most POD uses toner -- carbon with heat glue -- like any laser printer. From text to illustration, a POD book deteriorates fairly rapidly. Try putting your favorite laminated bookmark in one and watch the toner peel off the page onto the bookmark a few days or weeks later. Furthermore, the illustrations are irregular in density and the choice of paper is limited (and is never acid-free quality unless that is specified and paid handsomely for ... impossible if you're going to your local Barnes & Noble for a copy).
Your typical paperback from 1971 will be around longer than your POD book from 2001.
This gives publishers a niche marketplace for presentation quality which they can exploit. So long as the electronic original remains in print, you can get a new POD copy to replace the tatty mess your POD book will soon become.
But then, that brings us back to rights...
DennisBut that is changing as current publishers are putting most of their new stock into electornic format that would be suitable, and places like iUniverse build libraries of titles available on demand.
The concept of iUniverse is a good one, because publishers have been old-boy clubs for a long time. But there's much more to publishing a book -- and giving it credibility -- than having machinery to make copies.
Disclaimer: I'm a writer and an editor.
A few months ago, a local publisher put out -- using POD via the printing company for one of the iUniverse-type front operations -- a book with a quirky take on the U.S. Civil War. It was the result of six years of research, but the book was unreadable.
It took two more years of working with the author to smooth the flow and architecture, enhance the color of the writing, make the style consistent (right down to consistent spelling of place-names), patch holes in the story, get permissions for illustrations, develop cover artwork, and have the book reviewed by experts to uncover factual errors.
Had this author (who, like most authors, think they have a finished book when they complete the last sentence) gone right to a POD operation, the results wouldn't have been close to the remarkable and captivating book it is today -- selling very well, too.
In so many /. discussions outside the realm of technology, there's a lack of understanding that creative efforts to not burst fully mature from the womb of the mind!
DennisIt used to be 28 years, renewable.
The 75-year change was pushed for by media companies, and traded for the loss of rights to incidental restaurant play that that industry had lobbied for.
The composers (like me) were, as usual, pushed to the back of the discussion.
But hey, the media companies are certainly enjoying the smokescreen that discussions like this on /. provide. It takes the focus away from the WTO, the media companies, and other large-scale organizations who are re-thinking and re-writing laws of all sorts to the advantage of large corporations, with the enthusiastic assistance of governments falling all over themselves to make their nations "competitive" in a capitalism-driven world.
Do you think they care if you copy a buddy's CD? Of course not. Ultimately, the corporate influence and technology will be so pervasive that the hardware and software needed to copy whatever you want to copy will be locked up. Distribution will move away from the plastic object as soon as secure methods start working for 99% of the population, and the rest of you be damned. (A friend I hadn't heard from in 20 years called last night, having found my name on the web. He wanted to know how he could listen to my "station", having no clue how to use anything but AOL. Old paradigms in new technologies. It works for them.)
Anyway -- sorry to rant here -- all they have to do is keep all of us arguing long enough to have an easy, secure method in place before we do. And it's working! We're just arguing instead of building an alternative method to deconstruct protection, clickwrap, EULAs, etc., en masse.
And furthermore, like Bertelsmann and Napster, the industry can provide a large enough bribe to shut up any threats, or fight anyone else to a legal draw and drain their resources, such as MP3.com.
The best news for the industry? Discussions like this one, which quickly devolve into "hey, what if I want to copy my old vinyl?"
DennisThanks for bringing out these important points -- but Jefferson alone was not the author nor the only source of authority.
Since much of the precedent is from European law and practice, it's useful to recall that the concept of intellectual property and copyright arose when publication -- that is, the separation of art and object -- came about, especially through printing.
Previously, each copy was in effect an original, copied by hand and differently illuminated, set out, and even changed. The idea of clarifying and enforcing what could be done by the purchasers of the object made it possible for commercial publishing to succeed. Artists applauded that trend because -- and this is important to remember in the case of writing and composition -- the object is not the art, it is only a set of instructions (even, now, digital ones) for presenting a version of that art.
So the Constitution's granted right may appear more restrictive than Europe's, but it's also crucial to realize that this is so important that it is the only right granted in the body of the Constitution itself, and not in the later amendments.
DennisThis article is filled with misinformation.
It's best to go right to the sources at the Copyright Office, ASCAP, BMI, RIAA, etc. The restaurant info, the who-owns-the-copyright info, etc., are wrong in implication if not in detail.
And if the legalese is too much, then go here or (when it's back up) here.
Dennis
Good grief. I suppose I should stay out of this, but I've been a professional composer using orchestral and electronic media for more than 30 years, and the PC has always provided the breadth of tools and configurability that I need, especially if I need to quickly build up a control device of some kind.
Look, I know those who started with Macs are happy with their stuff. That's fine. But I can't be tied to an Apple corporate stamp of approval for a product. For example, I'd not likely see an AudioMulch for Mac -- unless you consider Max, priced at 10 times the cost for similar functionality (and with Max lacking the ability to produce techno quickly, for example). And Sound Forge, Cool Edit Pro, Cakewalk, Finale, Graphire Music Press ... all (and hundreds of other programs and advanced plugins) are wonderful and flexible PC software. Finale and Graphire both started on Macs, and Finale's first PC port was terrible. But once they started writing from the ground up for PC, the results were stunning. And according to users on both platforms, the Graphire PC version leaves the Mac version behind for ease and speed of use.
As for professional results, legacy studios with Mac equipment do not a case for Macs make. My CD was produced with PCs alone, as have been thousands of others. Likewise, as an editor and book designer, I have had no trouble accommodating the needs of legacy print houses who still use Macs.
I have no problem with Macs and those who love them, but you are presenting a bogus argument from the computer world of a decade past.
Dennis
MaltedMedia
Kalvos & Damian's New Music Bazaar
Erzsébet the Vampire
ClayJar said: Or G'Kar, a flat, one-dimensional character who wanted nothing more or less than to see the Centauri exterminated, who by the end of the series not only had forged a lasting peace between their two races but had also grown strong enough to turn down the chance to be ruler of his entire world.
G'Kar exemplified Babylon 5 at its best. Andreas Katsulas gave a portrayal that was Shakespearian. G'Kar gave Londo meaning as well. Their moments when G'Kar was chained in the cell were extraordinary television.
Jerry Doyle's Garibaldi was always convincing, as was Walter Koenig's Bester, and Jeff Conaway's wonderfully underplayed Zack Allen. The only character that really fell apart was the cheap hippie imitation psi guy ... mercifully, I forget both his character and actor...
And everything was dirty on B5. I loved it. You know that people actually pissed and shat in that show!
Dennis
http://maltedmedia.com/
And you've studied and understand and speak both languages? Galois Theory and Serial Harmony? If your grasp of serial harmony is even at the mathematical level of algebra, then you should be able to whistle the Moses und Aron row... yes?
Dennis
http://maltedmedia.com/
No Money (Lullaby for Bill)
http://www.mp3.com/bathory/
hypergeek wrote: That's where the fuzzy gray area of "speech with functional significance" comes in...
This is so true. Remember that source and object code were validated as speech in the early 1980s during the copyright debate.
I'm baffled about this decision alters existing law, or if it merely reaffirms it -- or even if it limits it, because "speech with functional significance" is not what object code is. Yet object code is protected by copyright and was defended as speech.
Yes, copyright itself doesn't define speech, but its implementation has paralleled the Constitutional concept of speech for decades.
Perhaps the implications of tech have so befuddled (and broken down) the legal system that each turn and twist in the tech road has to be adjudicated individually to arrive at the same old conclusions.
Dennis
http://maltedmedia.com/
No Money (Lullaby for Bill)
http://www.mp3.com/bathory/
Hi all,
We released our report on the candidates' sites on December 9. The Associated Press picked it up, but also not Slashdot! We updated it a month later.
For a more comprehensive accessibility report than Dad's, check here: http://orbitaccess.com/presidential/
Dennis
If anyone wants to check it, do it.
I did. It is fine with the ALT tags, and works in Lynx as well as IBM Home Page Reader (which also switches to Spanish on the subsequent text pages).
Dennis
http://orbitaccess.com/presidential/
We had the same problem back a while ago when making a site for kids, where we had ALT tags on the graphics, but the tags popping up when on the menu text, ended up hiding the actual roll-over text that we were putting in an adjacent image.
Huh? If you had done your design homework to start with you would have (1) known this and (2) not put important information in rollovers anyway.
So you put in "d" links instead, right? Right?
The excuses are gettin' pretty deep around here.
Dennis
http://orbitaccess.com/presidential/
went out and got the IBM HomePage Reader
Well done. That's one of our first accessibility tests ... in fact, I started doing accessibility testing when blind and deaf users started complaining about my Kalvos & Damian site. We hardly miss an ALT now and are transcribing our interviews as fast as we can!
Dennis
http://orbitaccess.com/presidential/
The Coward sez: I'm sorry, the burden is on the user. I'm not going to dumb-down the graphics on my sites for anyone!
Dumb-down, eh? I'd like to poke your eyes out. Go try browsing blind. Download a nice speech browser like IBM Home Page Reader and go to one of these sites. Find your way around. No wonder laws are needed. "Dumb-down". The pits of bigotry.
Dennis
http://orbitaccess.com/presidential/
We did the first of our accessibility 'white papers' on the presidential candidate sites. Nobody passed nuthin! (And didn't care when we contacted them. Vote for nobody?)
http://orbitaccess.com/presidential/
Dennis
Please add two important factors: formats and applications.
I'm a Windows user now that I'm out of the programming world. Windows was there when I needed a cheap and functional GUI. Nobody else was. I've got no universities or big companies behind me. I'm an individual person with a family of computer users, and numerous clients.
Unlike our "suit" friend, I don't have time to explore document properties and chuckle at others' ignorance. I've got to exchange documents with sometimes a dozen colleagues or clients at different locations, all of whom expect a Word or Finale or Cakewalk document for the round-robin editing. I had to teach all (read: every one) of them what FTP was because the documents were too big for email! Some couldn't even get the hang of that, so I had to create web links for download/upload.
Would I like Linux? Personally? As a person who likes to have a machine configured to my taste, probably yes. But -- call me unimaginative -- there's not a whole lot of non-technie stuff that I haven't been able to do in Windows.
So what about format exchange? As a composer, I'd love to use other scoring applications, regardless of the computing environment. Why can't I? Because I have eight years of score production, representing over 30 years of compositions, in one file format. Even Windows applications have trouble importing/exporting readable files -- Unix has, what, Lilypond? It reads nobody else, nobody else reads it. Last I heard I couldn't even export a Midi demo with it. At least the major scoring programs come with Win/Mac file exchange and Midi output. So will a niche OS get attention from a niche field like musical scoring? Not likely, not until the niche OS is mainstream.
And applications? Even after 15 years in machine/assembly programming, I decided on Windows in 1992 because I had to get work done. I know Linux users hate that Neanderthal-sounding argument, but folks, I have a complete DAW running so I can do music production and scoring. The applications are install-and-run, with very little configuration, which most of them do automatically. Manual configuration is available for the tweaking. It's stable. It never crashes. That is what I need ... and it runs under Windows.
Example: I have an upcoming piece for string orchestra. From a single keyboard and screen I'm running four computers (all Win95b) with the desktop-in-screen (VNC Viewer). Each computer is running different sound/scoring apps (Finale, Cakewalk, Cool Edit, Audiomulch ...) and hardware (one with two 24-bit 96KHz sound cards, another with a 32-channel Midi card ...), graphical apps (Photoshop, Paint Shop, screen recorders ...) Most of the hardware doesn't even have Linux drivers, by the way.
One computer is also being used by my wife, another by my stepdaughter. So -- back to the example -- in a single day I produced the score and parts from my pencil sketches, output from it a General Midi demo which was then massaged by using audio samples and sequenced, produced PDF files of the score and parts, burned a CD of the demo for the reviewers, created an mp3 file for the conductor, edited my web pages to make the score and demo available, and uploaded it all. The conductor could then download and print the PDFs while listening to the demo, as I continued working on the score for another composer whose music was to be premiered in the same concert. The only time I had to leave my keyboard was to take a break or load a CD to burn into the machine in the next room.
The rest of the family continued working, writing, doing homework, browsing, checking email, etc., never noticing that I was using their spare CPU time for audio processing. I have a full four-track sound setup (no Linux drivers), a networked Palm V, and in the background I'm running SETI at Home, as well as FTGate mail server and Wingate networking over Linksys (no Linux drivers) cards. I run IRC, telnet, FTP, chat, and HTTP servers on a sporadic basis when friends or clients need stuff. Only one application -- the Java chat -- needs command-line configuration.
Some of this may be no big deal for Linux power users. But when I got hot for Linux, I went searching and couldn't locate even a fraction of the applications and drivers I'd need to do my daily work.
My point is this: Our "suit" was a clever and computer-savvy business user calling on commonplace applications. I could do what he does. But my day involves much more than text and spreadsheets and even images. I need easy movement from application to application, file to file, and client to client -- and I mean people, not software. My family and clients have never seen a command-line process!
I would love to get out of the MS world. MS is distasteful to me as a company. But those of you who are pioneers have much to do -- including making Linux (or any successor OS) work effortlessly (yes, appliance-level), and enticing companies (read: payback) to create drivers and software for it ... beyond a few commonplace applications.
Dennis
http://maltedmedia.comWe do have the technology now, as the poster says, to migrate our data ever forwards into new storage, assuming no cataclysm occurs
But we don't have the time. You can increase data density and processor speeds, but not the human time to make the decisions on what to migrate where, when, and how. Not to mention you're only talking about digital data here, not the real world.
Heck, I was gone to a rehearsal one day and come back to find comments to this topic essentially over. With that kind of attention span, who's gonna do this stuff?
Dennis
http://maltedmedia.comIs this just an incoherent rant ?
It is coherent but not deep enough. I read with some horror the narrow use and time views, such as when you said, "Modern word processing still opens really old file formats like Windows .WRI and Word 1.0". Old? I have books in TRS-80 Model I Electric Pencil format!
But it's so much broader than that. We have created a society of ephermal materials, increasingly so each year. As we moved from stone to paper to magnetic and optical media, we gave up durability for fluidity and speed. But I won't repeat your arguments, only point to some other examples and questions...
Who has time for this? Every year there is more data to back up, more information to get in order. As a composer, I have scores in software now six versions old. The ability to understand the meaning of the data is compromised with each upgrade, so I have to re-work as well as convert and transfer them. And there are sequences created as far back as my hand-built digital box. Some I've brought forward through a TRS-80 Model I all the way into Cakewalk 9. So I'm a composer whose time is split between creating the new and re-archiving the old!
Sure, who cares if I can't recover my KIM-1 data (even now)? As an artist, I do care, especially if great works are lost. The breakthrough music of David Behrmann was done on a KIM-1. Frozen documents (CDs) of them have been released, but his music was interactive as far back as 1977. Behrmann is one of the last century's musical lights. His work will be lost unless some hardware is kept up or some software moved to another system. Who will do it? I may not come up to Behrman's genius, but I have several dozen interactive works starting in 1978, and some of these technologies are long lost already.
As an individual artist with a body of work spanning nearly 40 years, I have a room full of decaying and obsolete media ... artistic creations that only function on KIM-1 and TRS-80 or OSI or Color Computer with dozens of data formats and custom interfaces. Paper tapes, wafer tapes, 8-inch and 5-inch and 3-inch disks. 4-channel Dolby-B tapes. 2 channel 4-track dbx-1 tapes. 2-channel dbx-2 cassettes. Fostex 4-channel cassettes. DAT tapes. Minidiscs. 8mm and 16mm film. Beta video. 2-inch slides. Mylar overlays. Negatives in many formats. Even a bloody set of endless-loop Elcassettes and 8-tracks for a sound installation! And I'm just one guy.
But it's not just media decay. It's knowledge and understanding. Someone else pointed to a tricorder of the future, which could read the data and determine its purpose. A good idea, if such a tricorder could contain the historical thought of each individual. But even from Beethoven's sketchbooks, who could determine the 'correct' ending for a symphony? Reconstructing data might be possible; understanding it will be impossible.
A rant for a rant!
Dennis
http://maltedmedia.com/ever notice the computers in Star Trek never have cross platform communication problems?
And they never have to pee, and they all speak English to each other.
Actually, I like your premise. Just the way -- from carbon dating through DNA testing -- we've advanced archaeological and historical sleuthing, the future will likely have more methods than we do.
The problem is the near future more than the distant one: What to do with the data I can no longer read that's younger than my kids.
Dennis
Hey, the best name for a kid named after oil is a little girl called Valvoline !
Kalv
When I originally submitted this Bill Gates piece to /. I provided some commentary, but the focus was on how my piece No Money (Lullaby for Bill) came about, being derived from Gates's voice.
Then I turned up the full interview transcript. It was more interesting for /. and so I was asked to write a new preface for the interview. Alas, the original brief article didn't make it. Instead, I posted it here on my Malted/Media site:
http://maltedmedia.com/books/pape rs/sf-gates.html
Dennis
He is arguing the case for copyright protection. There's nothing paternalistic about wanting copyright protection ( which musicians and artists had for years )
If "years" means since 1972, that is! Printed music had protection, but recorded music did not until then. It's not simple. And realize I conducted this interview in 1980, only eight years after analog music recordings could be copyrighted. Furthermore, the issue hadn't yet been resolved. Datacash vs. JS&A really made 'em nuts in 1979, and the Copyright Office was refusing object code.
The real philosophical question (which he avoided, and all 300+ posts on /. have avoided) is about object code. Regardless of the creativity required to produce its source, the object code is indeed a machine part. This was never settled in the courts; it was settled by legislation that granted copyright to object code, and messed up even more later with patents granted to software. It made a mess of copyright and patent concepts ... and we're seeing those roosting ramifications in the whole DVD nightmare.
Dennis
The fact is that code is like art or literature, you spend your time and energy to create something, and you would like it to be protected from some loozer coming along and claiming it as his.
This was not a fact at the time with respect to object code -- read the quote I included up front about the Datacase decision. Here's more in Judge Flaum's decision:
And here is what he decided:
This is precisely why Gates and 20 others were contacted for this article. It all seems so obvious 20 years later, doesn't it?
Dennis
The original article was an extensively researched overview of copyright -- in fact, it was the first significant piece on the topic to appear in the small computer press. (Remember that the Datacash decision had only been made a few months earlier, and the Copyright Office was still refusing object code).
Although quite a few of Gates's comments made it into the final piece, he was only one of many quoted. And no (outside the context of two decades of history!), Gates really sounded like a minor player, as everyone was in the days when small computer were still viewed as toys.
Actually, I wasn't looking for him to 'succumb to an answer', but I was hoping that he would spend some time on the concept of copyright and its basis in the idea of encouraging the creation of new work, and so forth. Copyright was not originally conceived of as strictly an economic tool, although most interpretation and practice have employed it that way. So I was looking for some marrow of philosophy from Gates, and kept gnawing on that bone.
The letter I received from John Hersey, for example, discussed the distinction between human and machine readability. Other interviewees tossed around the balance between adapted ideas and stolen ideas.
A sidebar discussed the idea of the re-organization of bits in a non-human-readable form (object code) by rotation would in fact result in a different yet executable (even if flawed) piece of code. Would that be protected by copyright? And if the user observed the rotation and reversed it? What law would be broken? By whom? And so forth... none of it was clear two decades ago.
Unfortunately, I don't have the original article in electronic form, but there are still many thousands of copies of 80 Microcomputing from that era floating around!
Dennis