This is a bad book, unlearned in its titular subject, petulant, and poorly argued. It is tempting simply to dismiss it and move on. Despite its shoddy quality, however,
Cyberselfish: A Critical Romp Through the Terribly Libertarian Culture of High-Tech is not irrelevant. Far from it. The book is fascinating as a case study in the reasoning and psychology behind opposition to the mix of individualism and anti-statism that characterizes contemporary libertarian thought.
RPMs, and other packaging formats, should have install scripts, especially if they're not part of a particular distro. Most source tarballs have reasonably good configure scripts, why don't RPMs? I'm not a programmer, either, but I'd think that RPM is capable of doing everything that the author wants it to do, if it's used right.
The Napster lawsuit is only one example of a disturbing trend in America -- that of "legislation by civil suit".
Basically, we have reached the point of law saturation. The average American cannot go through a day without breaking some sort of law. As a result, we no longer even try. Want to hear a bit of Metallica before deciding to buy the album? Fine -- download a song or two off Napster.
Of course, you've just broken the law. No matter how innocent your intentions, you are a criminal.
When we reach this point, people begin to have a lack of respect for the law. We KNOW not to commit murder. We KNOW not to steal. But when you tell me that I'm a crook for trying to be an informed consumer, well how am I supposed to respond?
This is where we are today. Laws no longer effectively control people's behavior. There are just too many to keep track of.
You're mixing your complaints. Yes, lawmaking by lawsuit is bad. This lawsuit won't make new law unless Napster wins big. Yes, there are too many laws, and that excess makes it easy to control people by criminalizing them. However, this fight is over an old law colliding with new technology. We'd have some kind of copyright law in an ideal world.
The real fight here is over the limits of the DCMA and common sense. Napster will lose, because the language of the DCMA is clearly against it. The issue is whether the DCMA restricts fair use unreasonably, and how copyright law should reasonably balance the interests of copyright owners and copyright material users. Unfortunately, the courtroom is not the appropriate place for this fight, Congress is. Start writing your congresscritter now, to let them know that the DMCA went way too far, and to suggest how it should be scaled back to remain reasonable. Otherwise, the copyright owners will end up winning the war, not just the Napster battle.
Local post offices will make paper printouts of e-mail messages and deliver them with the snail mail, charging the sender about 41 cents for a two-page document -- an eight-cent premium to first-class mail.
Who will pay 41c for the privilege of relieving the USPS of a significant part of their burden? Is the cost of mass printing and mass envelope-stuffing really about 20 cents per piece?
I can see for a small-time marketing operation, or other small-volume users, the price being worth the effort, but for the mass-mail spammers who send out millions of pieces, and only pay about 20c a piece postage right now, is it worthwhile? After all, will you be able to get decent graphics? You'll only get two pages, and most solicitations run longer these days.
The more(1) command has been replaced by less(1), although it can still be run as more(1).
I consider this a mistake. On my Linux system at home, less is more useful than more, but more has its place. In particular, ls -l --color | less is ugly on the terminal and various xterms, while ls -l --color | more looks like it's supposed to.
I suppose that trying to keep the distribution compact is a justification for some of these replacements, but the old commands should be kept around, even if not installed by default. Someone, somewhere, may need to use both csh and tcsh, without the one substituted for the other. What's next, dropping vi for emacs?
I love this bit. "Rich and Powerful" used back to back. Ahhh, I get it now. These are the folks that are making my life rotten. Feel free to replace that phrase with "Jews", "Whites", or even "Japanese" and I think we all get a much clearer picture of the ideology here. He's gotten himself an enemy on which to focus, but only in the abstract. No, examples out of context don't count as getting specific either.
This guy is a Marxist zealot. There are a number of very good run downs on the weaknesses of our current IP structure. This is not one of them.
The whole analysis is written in typical socialist fashion. Pick on abuses of the current system, of which there are many; then conflate the abuses, which favor an easy hate-group, with the legitimate uses, to invalidate the legitimate uses of the system. There are plenty of changes that should be made to the IP system in the US and other countries, and there are many abuses to correct. There are even sound arguments that IP in general is detrimental. But "Intellectual Property allows people to get rich and I don't like that." is not a legitimate argument against IP, and never has been.
So when is slashdot going to post a link to a capitalist analysis of what's wrong with our current system of IP?
Why choose one distro? Because it's not a moving target. Many of the people that are the first to bitch about how Slackware, Debian, SuSE (I'm a SuSE user) aren't supported probably haven't ever used an application of this class.
Funny thing is, I've had better luck installing RPMs to SuSE than to RedHat...
Do you think that a head in a jar would think in the same was as when it was attached to the rest of the body?
If the head had grown up attached to a body, the basic thought patterns and capacities would be similar, though would change in ways similar to those who grow up normal, then become quadraplegic through accident. A head in a jar (BIV for you h.p.o readers) raised that way would likely think in very different ways, though.
Big Three, and many specialists. Why? Economics.
on
CNET Buys Ziff-Davis
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· Score: 2
Will the day come when there are just three major online news sources -- AOL.com, News.com, and MSN.com -- and all the rest (including Slashdot) are just barking dogs chasing their wheels? Or will enough new, independent sources spring up and gain enough readers (and credibility) to keep the biggies from getting too much power?
Just as there are three main TV networks, and three main print news sources (AP/UPI, Reuters, New York Times), there will probably be only the three main news sources on-line, because of economics. It takes a lot of money to keep reporters who actually go out and find a story, or follow up a tip and flesh it out into a story. If there end up being less than three sources, someone with other media experience will be able to buy their way in, but more than 4 or 5 will end up with such cutthroat competition that some will die or be absorbed.
However, there will always be a place for specialists, whether under the control of the big 3 or not. Most "General Interest" magazines are owned by one of a few big publishers, but there are thousands of specialist magazines, both technical and non-technical. Many of them are owned by smaller publishers, because there is enough interest to support the expense of publishing a magazine, but not enough profit to interest the big guys.
The web will see something similar. Specialist sites, including computer-geek sites, will survive, though some will be acquired by the big guys. Sites like Slashdot will survive, but not because they're good news sources. Slashdot (and technocrat and their imitators) will survive because they give people a place to intelligently discuss the news with people of similar interests. This is a different need than plain old news, and one which attracts different advertisers. It is possible to make money doing what Slashdot does, and the biggies are adding slashdot-like features to their news sites, but those won't work as well; the S-N ratio gets too low.
Company A is suing group B to prevent group B from adding company A to a list. Once you distill it that far, it is an obvious restraint on free speech.
You're right. But the courts may not see it that way. The First Amendment doesn't apply terribly much these days. The Supreme Court has explicitly ruled that "commercial speech" is afforded a lesser protection than political speech. Even political speech is under attack these days, and the courts are only slowing down "campaign finance reform", not stopping it.
In this particular case, YesMail can claim that MAPS will be committing a fraud upon the public (potential and actual YesMail customers) which will damage YesMail, if MAPS puts YesMail on the RBL. The judge has to grant the TRO if there is any possibility that YesMail can prove MAPS' statements about YesMail to be false and therefore fraudulent. A permanent injunction would require YesMail to actually prove that MAPS' statements are false.
At home, to prevent unauthorized access? If you're that worried about the wife or kids finding your porn collection, encrypt it.
At work, to prevent unauthorized access? If you're the sysadmin, this might be a good security measure for your terminal, but do you really want to make things that much harder for Joe Temp to work at whatever desk is available?
What I really see it being used for is tracking users, in a way which can provide legally binding evidence.
In fact, I think the way foward here is for the Internet to be restricted to those who have the brains to pass a test on basic technical skills (such as what is UDP or what port does HTTP use) and general net etiqutte.
The system talked about will be useful only to send out previews of unreleased music - once the CD hits the shelves, MP3s will become readily available, and unstoppable. For that matter, high bandwidth connections will soon become common enough to make practical downloading uncompressed CD audio - 1.2 Mbit/sec allows real-time transmission.
Near the bottom of the article was mentioned a token that could be moved from device to device, but that would be customized for each user's devices, so it couldn't be loaned out. It also couldn't be used on any new hardware you buy without reprogramming, making it even less convenient than Circuit City's DivX. This is one idea for a consumer app that's going to sink without a trace.
The cryptosystem may have a useful application, but preventing music trading isn't it. Maybe it would be good for high-bandwidth military applications.
I look on Corel's website and notice that the same software for Windows costs $495 or $149 for upgrade. A quick glance and one might think 'hey, why pay $500 for the windows version when I can get the linux version for free?'.
Prices for many of these programs seem steep for home use, but the main market for these programs is professional users, who can write off the cost of the program as a business expense (saving 28% or more in the US), and who will use the program to make money. $700 is a lot of money, but if the program saves you 7 to 14 hours over time, it's paid for itself.
Since, according to an article in Ars Technica, modern processors will effectively rewrite code at execution time, can any program or OS running on a recent processor be considered a "trusted system" by the definitions used by Dr. Spafford and others?
The Gimp's real competition is Corel's Photo-Paint, which, interestingly enough, will be available for free once released, or at least so says the article. Evidently Corel feels that the Gimp is good enough a free competitor to make selling Photo-Paint alone useless!
If the GIMP's real competition is Photo-Paint, then the GIMP has already won. Photo-Paint has all the ease of learning and use of Photoshop, with all the features of older versions of Paint Shop Pro. Even in the Windows World, Photo-Paint is almost always acquired with CorelDRAW. It's just not worth getting separately. Someone doing only web graphics, or editing and printing their digital photos, can do quite well with Paint Shop Pro or Ulead's PhotoImpact, and anyone doing serious pre-press work will still want Photoshop.
I wish somebody at Opera could please answer me this though: why, oh why use an MDI interface for a web browser?
I like the MD interface. Instead of minimizing or closing all my netscape windows one at a time, I minimize or closeone window, and it all goes away. This is really nice if you've hit a site with many popup windows, and want to get rid of them all at once. A nice side-effect is that all popup windows have a full set of controls, unlike in Netscape.
Tord is about to become another victim of the idiocy that is software patents. The Fraunhofer Institute ought to have the right to copyright its own software, both source and binary, just as Tord Jansson ought to. But to patent an algorithm, which is essentially what happened, really defeats the purpose of patents and copyrights, just as we saw with the Unisys LZW/GIF patent. If the Fraunhofer Institute developed a chip that used its algorithm for encoding MP3, that should be patentable, since anyone else could create their own chip using their own code.
The one silver lining here is that Sweden, where Tord lives, doesn't recognize patents on algorithms, so he may should be able to defend himself legally.
Meanwhile, this is kind of old news - the binaries were pulled on February 24th.
The story makes it sound like the center is using patents to protect the availability of their hybrids, which is sensible.
I'm still not sure how anyone can get a patent on a specific set of genes. My understanding of patents would allow a breeder or researcher to patent a particular new hybrid, or at least the process for generating that hybrid, but specific genes are things that already exist in nature, and should be unpatentable. Patenting of genes is more evidence of a deep intellectual confusion in IP law, and people's attempts to make rational decisions in an irrational environment.
C|Net's fundamental error was to try to say "This OS is better", not "This OS is better for this type of user". Granted, at the end, they make a money issue, saying that OS 9 wins, unless you're a cheapskate, but the whole article is flawed by the approach.
A much more useful article would have been "What users should get Linux, MacOS, or Windows". For my wife, Windows is still the best choice (we don't have the money to buy Macs), and I couldn't do my job at work with Linux (and the company would rather not spend the money on Macs), though it's on my home machine.
Slashdot Mirror
RPMs, and other packaging formats, should have install scripts, especially if they're not part of a particular distro. Most source tarballs have reasonably good configure scripts, why don't RPMs? I'm not a programmer, either, but I'd think that RPM is capable of doing everything that the author wants it to do, if it's used right.
You mean: Salaries in the DC area are unrealistically low for 19,000 unfilled positions.
Basically, we have reached the point of law saturation. The average American cannot go through a day without breaking some sort of law. As a result, we no longer even try. Want to hear a bit of Metallica before deciding to buy the album? Fine -- download a song or two off Napster.
Of course, you've just broken the law. No matter how innocent your intentions, you are a criminal.
When we reach this point, people begin to have a lack of respect for the law. We KNOW not to commit murder. We KNOW not to steal. But when you tell me that I'm a crook for trying to be an informed consumer, well how am I supposed to respond?
This is where we are today. Laws no longer effectively control people's behavior. There are just too many to keep track of.
You're mixing your complaints. Yes, lawmaking by lawsuit is bad. This lawsuit won't make new law unless Napster wins big. Yes, there are too many laws, and that excess makes it easy to control people by criminalizing them. However, this fight is over an old law colliding with new technology. We'd have some kind of copyright law in an ideal world.
The real fight here is over the limits of the DCMA and common sense. Napster will lose, because the language of the DCMA is clearly against it. The issue is whether the DCMA restricts fair use unreasonably, and how copyright law should reasonably balance the interests of copyright owners and copyright material users. Unfortunately, the courtroom is not the appropriate place for this fight, Congress is. Start writing your congresscritter now, to let them know that the DMCA went way too far, and to suggest how it should be scaled back to remain reasonable. Otherwise, the copyright owners will end up winning the war, not just the Napster battle.
Who will pay 41c for the privilege of relieving the USPS of a significant part of their burden? Is the cost of mass printing and mass envelope-stuffing really about 20 cents per piece?
I can see for a small-time marketing operation, or other small-volume users, the price being worth the effort, but for the mass-mail spammers who send out millions of pieces, and only pay about 20c a piece postage right now, is it worthwhile? After all, will you be able to get decent graphics? You'll only get two pages, and most solicitations run longer these days.
I consider this a mistake. On my Linux system at home, less is more useful than more, but more has its place. In particular, ls -l --color | less is ugly on the terminal and various xterms, while ls -l --color | more looks like it's supposed to.
I suppose that trying to keep the distribution compact is a justification for some of these replacements, but the old commands should be kept around, even if not installed by default. Someone, somewhere, may need to use both csh and tcsh, without the one substituted for the other. What's next, dropping vi for emacs?
This guy is a Marxist zealot. There are a number of very good run downs on the weaknesses of our current IP structure. This is not one of them.
The whole analysis is written in typical socialist fashion. Pick on abuses of the current system, of which there are many; then conflate the abuses, which favor an easy hate-group, with the legitimate uses, to invalidate the legitimate uses of the system. There are plenty of changes that should be made to the IP system in the US and other countries, and there are many abuses to correct. There are even sound arguments that IP in general is detrimental. But "Intellectual Property allows people to get rich and I don't like that." is not a legitimate argument against IP, and never has been.
So when is slashdot going to post a link to a capitalist analysis of what's wrong with our current system of IP?
Funny thing is, I've had better luck installing RPMs to SuSE than to RedHat...
If the head had grown up attached to a body, the basic thought patterns and capacities would be similar, though would change in ways similar to those who grow up normal, then become quadraplegic through accident. A head in a jar (BIV for you h.p.o readers) raised that way would likely think in very different ways, though.
The thread "MAPS/above.net monopoly is damaging SPAM-preventio" can be accessed at http://x70.deja.com/ viewthread.xp?thitnum=20&mhitnum=0&toffset=0&CONTE XT=964021144.53477398&frpage=threadmsg_i f.xp&back=news.admin.net-abuse.email&rok=1, or one can go to news://news.admin.net-abuse.email on your friendly local news server. The thread begins 10 July 2000.
Just as there are three main TV networks, and three main print news sources (AP/UPI, Reuters, New York Times), there will probably be only the three main news sources on-line, because of economics. It takes a lot of money to keep reporters who actually go out and find a story, or follow up a tip and flesh it out into a story. If there end up being less than three sources, someone with other media experience will be able to buy their way in, but more than 4 or 5 will end up with such cutthroat competition that some will die or be absorbed.
However, there will always be a place for specialists, whether under the control of the big 3 or not. Most "General Interest" magazines are owned by one of a few big publishers, but there are thousands of specialist magazines, both technical and non-technical. Many of them are owned by smaller publishers, because there is enough interest to support the expense of publishing a magazine, but not enough profit to interest the big guys.
The web will see something similar. Specialist sites, including computer-geek sites, will survive, though some will be acquired by the big guys. Sites like Slashdot will survive, but not because they're good news sources. Slashdot (and technocrat and their imitators) will survive because they give people a place to intelligently discuss the news with people of similar interests. This is a different need than plain old news, and one which attracts different advertisers. It is possible to make money doing what Slashdot does, and the biggies are adding slashdot-like features to their news sites, but those won't work as well; the S-N ratio gets too low.
It's better than the Oldsmobile (under)Acheiva.
You're right. But the courts may not see it that way. The First Amendment doesn't apply terribly much these days. The Supreme Court has explicitly ruled that "commercial speech" is afforded a lesser protection than political speech. Even political speech is under attack these days, and the courts are only slowing down "campaign finance reform", not stopping it.
In this particular case, YesMail can claim that MAPS will be committing a fraud upon the public (potential and actual YesMail customers) which will damage YesMail, if MAPS puts YesMail on the RBL. The judge has to grant the TRO if there is any possibility that YesMail can prove MAPS' statements about YesMail to be false and therefore fraudulent. A permanent injunction would require YesMail to actually prove that MAPS' statements are false.
IANAL, but I am smarter than most lawyers.
Why would I want one of these?
At home, to prevent unauthorized access? If you're that worried about the wife or kids finding your porn collection, encrypt it.
At work, to prevent unauthorized access? If you're the sysadmin, this might be a good security measure for your terminal, but do you really want to make things that much harder for Joe Temp to work at whatever desk is available?
What I really see it being used for is tracking users, in a way which can provide legally binding evidence.
The "StupidaMouse" from Dumbentia in 1998. (Warning - it's a pdf file.)
Are you thinking of the sort of test that you needed to retake about 48 times before successfully posting to slashdot?
Thank God I live in Europe, where the kind of rampant capitalism the US practices is tempered with a more humane socialist brand of politics.
The kind of humane socialist politics which lets the people do what they want unless it offends their betters?
The system talked about will be useful only to send out previews of unreleased music - once the CD hits the shelves, MP3s will become readily available, and unstoppable. For that matter, high bandwidth connections will soon become common enough to make practical downloading uncompressed CD audio - 1.2 Mbit/sec allows real-time transmission.
Near the bottom of the article was mentioned a token that could be moved from device to device, but that would be customized for each user's devices, so it couldn't be loaned out. It also couldn't be used on any new hardware you buy without reprogramming, making it even less convenient than Circuit City's DivX. This is one idea for a consumer app that's going to sink without a trace.
The cryptosystem may have a useful application, but preventing music trading isn't it. Maybe it would be good for high-bandwidth military applications.
Anyone who pays $500 for PhotoPaint is getting rooked big-time. The suggested price for the full CorelDraw suite is $695, and I don't think anyone sells it at full retail. The CorelDRAW suite is worth spending money on, but PhotoPaint is not. For far less money one can buy Paint Shop Pro which takes care of almost everything PhotoPaint can do, and if you're looking for full Photoshop compatibility for your service bureau, Photoshop is only $114 more through Adobe and cheaper on the street.
Prices for many of these programs seem steep for home use, but the main market for these programs is professional users, who can write off the cost of the program as a business expense (saving 28% or more in the US), and who will use the program to make money. $700 is a lot of money, but if the program saves you 7 to 14 hours over time, it's paid for itself.
Since, according to an article in Ars Technica, modern processors will effectively rewrite code at execution time, can any program or OS running on a recent processor be considered a "trusted system" by the definitions used by Dr. Spafford and others?
If the GIMP's real competition is Photo-Paint, then the GIMP has already won. Photo-Paint has all the ease of learning and use of Photoshop, with all the features of older versions of Paint Shop Pro. Even in the Windows World, Photo-Paint is almost always acquired with CorelDRAW. It's just not worth getting separately. Someone doing only web graphics, or editing and printing their digital photos, can do quite well with Paint Shop Pro or Ulead's PhotoImpact, and anyone doing serious pre-press work will still want Photoshop.
I like the MD interface. Instead of minimizing or closing all my netscape windows one at a time, I minimize or closeone window, and it all goes away. This is really nice if you've hit a site with many popup windows, and want to get rid of them all at once. A nice side-effect is that all popup windows have a full set of controls, unlike in Netscape.
Opera is the browser worth paying for.
The one silver lining here is that Sweden, where Tord lives, doesn't recognize patents on algorithms, so he may should be able to defend himself legally.
Meanwhile, this is kind of old news - the binaries were pulled on February 24th.
From their 1998 gallery.
The story makes it sound like the center is using patents to protect the availability of their hybrids, which is sensible.
I'm still not sure how anyone can get a patent on a specific set of genes. My understanding of patents would allow a breeder or researcher to patent a particular new hybrid, or at least the process for generating that hybrid, but specific genes are things that already exist in nature, and should be unpatentable. Patenting of genes is more evidence of a deep intellectual confusion in IP law, and people's attempts to make rational decisions in an irrational environment.
C|Net's fundamental error was to try to say "This OS is better", not "This OS is better for this type of user". Granted, at the end, they make a money issue, saying that OS 9 wins, unless you're a cheapskate, but the whole article is flawed by the approach.
A much more useful article would have been "What users should get Linux, MacOS, or Windows". For my wife, Windows is still the best choice (we don't have the money to buy Macs), and I couldn't do my job at work with Linux (and the company would rather not spend the money on Macs), though it's on my home machine.