The problem is that Linux development cannot survive on the efforts of unpaid programmers.
How long have YOU been using Linux? I experimented with Slackware in the days before RedHat was even incorporated. Back then, things were different. Nobody, and I mean nobody, was paid to work on this stuff. The very idea was laughable. This was a toy project, of interest only to "students of rich parents" like I was at that time. Nobody expected it to ever amount to anything, not even the people who used it. Heck, even I gave up on it for a while after Windows 95 was released, and I'm the biggest geek I know. I'm not proud to admit this now, but at that time I fully expected Linux to fade away, never to be heard from again.
But it didn't.
Linux not only survived during that period when even a geek like me could give up on it, it actually thrived. When I heard about Redhat, I decided to give Linux a second chance, and I was astounded to see what progress had been made in my absence. I have been running Linux ever since.
A lot of things have changed since those days, like IBM spending one billion dollars on Linux. That is like pouring lighter fluid on an already-lit barbecue: sure the whoosh of flames is gratifying, but the coals would still stay hot if you stopped doing it. Linux is not going to disappear because a kernel developer got laid off, or if a few linux-based companies go out of business. Linux has long ago proven that it can survive with only the help of a few motivated people working in their spare time, whether or not it will ever need to again.
Call me what you will (a troll, probably), but am I the only one here noticing how people are equating the legitimacy of AudioGalaxy with the end of its usefulness?
You are putting the cart before the horse: The end of AudioGalaxy's usefulness is evident to anyone who tries to actually use it. Those of you who equate the end of AudioGalaxy with the beginning of it's "legitimacy" are the ones who suffer from some kind of delusion. If legitimacy means obeying obsolete laws that don't make sense anymore (assuming they ever did) so that corporate fat cats can screw both the artists and the customers, I choose to be illegitimate. Obeying stupid laws only perpetuates injustice: defying them is the first step towards getting them repealed. Would you have told Rosa Parks to sit in the back of the bus? After all, that would have been the legal, "legitimate" thing for her to do...
P2P vs Machine guns: a comparison
on
KaZaA Collapses
·
· Score: 1
A machine gun can punch holes through internal organs, causing painful and near-instantaneous death. A file sharing program merely allows people to make copies of data, without even damaging the original data, much less anyone's internal organs. There is no comparison. If P2P networks really did as much damage as a machine gun to the members of the RIAA, they would be too busy dying in pools of their own blood to file lawsuits. Maybe then I would feel sorry for them.
Apparently there was a study [216.239.39.100] done in 1997 that showed high school students from the 1950s had an average vocabulary of 25,000 words, while students from 1997 had an average vocabulary of only 10,000.
Strangely, a similar study in 1997 also showed that high school students from 1800s had a vocabulary of 0 words.
If we absolutely MUST pass some sort of legislation, why don't we repeal all intellectual property laws and dis-incorporate all of the big "content provider" companies?
Homeopathy involves taking substances so diluted with water that, according to modern chemistry, not even a single molecule of the original substance actually remains. Quinine, on the other hand, is taken in large enough concentrations that you can easily taste the impurities in the water. Thus, Quinine is not nearly dilute enough to work according to the theory of homeopathy... but it works just fine according to the practice of conventional medicine.
I agree that these guys would sound like neo-facist pinheads if they simply said "all we have to do is get rid of all the bad guys and society will become perfect." But they wrote a computer program to make that statement for them, with colored lights and everything. Computers take the rules they are given (like the fact that only corrupt people get arrested, and arrested people are always rehabilitated) and follow these rules to their logical conclusion. How can you possibly argue with that?
Technology firms did not want to testify in the hearing, did not offer input while the bill was being drafted, and have offered plenty of criticism but little helpful suggestions since, a Hollings aide said.
So, Hollings wants us to give him helpful suggestions? how about... GIVE UP!
We are not talking about every single binary in a distribution, we are talking specifically about server software that accepts connections from the internet, or at least a local network. You should be able to count the number of programs that do that on one hand. If any of those programs are not important enough to you to maintain, you shouldn't be running them anyway.
I have no problem with it. Anyone who has the brains to hunt through the source and remove the time limit should also be smart enough to understand the consequences of such an action. People who are not smart enough to do it themselves (or hire someone who is) should be grateful for whatever they get. If they whine about it, you can always offer to refund the purchase price.
I hate this new-fangled "printing press" thing that people keep talking about in Church. It serves only the needs of a few cloistered monks who know how to "read". Instead of something boring like that, why can't it be more like the plow?
The plow is simple: You stick it in the ground, and pull. Then after a while food comes up, and you eat it. That is the kind of invention I like. Everything should be like a plow.
Printing presses fill people up with crazy, heretical ideas, like "the earth is round". Plows fill us up with grainy goodness that makes us grow big and strong. Strike two against printing presses.
Finally, and in conclusion: Food good. Literacy bad.
If the banner ad server refused to serve annoying ads to viewers referred by slashdot, that would mean we would have to see the stories without the ads! That would be terrible!
Another possible explanation is that there are a small group of whiny people who are tired of Linus controlling the linux development process just because he happens to have invented it in the first place, and are waging a propaganda campaign to replace him with a committee that will rubber-stamp every ill-concieved patch submitted from anywhere on the internet, with little or no review. Goodness knows, any time any random undergrad or script kiddie changes a few lines of code in the linux kernel, it must be an incredible improvement that we cannot live without. What does Linus know about kernel development, anyway?
Note that I care not one iota for the legal aspects of anything. The moral and the ethical aspects are my only concerns, and those are sometimes at odds with the legal framework. I won't live long enough even if I reach extreme old age to change unjust laws in the courts, but i do honor any and all contracts that I have assented to, and if Blizzard wants me in grannie's nightdress with peanut butter on my cock and I want to play Warcraft III bad enough, move over granny and hello, Jif.
I can never understand the typically libertarian attitude that the government is stupid and the law is irrelevant, but even the most flimsy and unenforcable contracts between individuals and private interests are completely sacred and should be obeyed no matter how stupid they are. In other words, we should not let the government force us to obey laws that were passed through an open and democratic process: instead, the government should only force us to obey contracts drawn up by weasely lawyers working for international mega-conglomerates that answer only to greedy stockholders who want nothing but money.
Well I say, screw that! I may not trust the government to do the right thing all of the time, but I would not trust a corporate lawyer any further than I could stab him in the eye with an ice-pick. If some corporate lawyer wants to enforce the twenty-third paragraph of fine print on a legal contract that I cannot even read until after I pay for the product, that is his problem. If I didn't sign the contract, then as far as I'm concerned, I didn't agree to it: all I did was pay money for a product. If I see someone sneaking around my house, peeking in the windows to make sure I am wearing the right dress and jacking off into the right brand of peanut butter, I will call the police and have him hauled away for trespassing. It's a good thing I can do that without first having a contract with every potential trespasser that defines the terms under which they can be kicked off my property.
It allows a widow and orphaned children to be provided in case the copyright holder dies early.
When most people die they stop making money, no matter how many widows and orphans they leave behind. Why should the widows and orphans of authors get better treatment than "ordinary" widows and orphans?
It also keeps people from knocking off a copyright holder to open up his exclusive use rights to the public.
I can't really imagine anyone killing an author just to enrich the public domain. That is far too abstract and selfless a goal to inspire cold-blooded murderer. A far more likely scenario is for one of the author's spoiled, greedy, talentless children to kill the author for a few decades of free income. If there is any plausible copyright-related motive for killing an author, that would be it.
Of course, you can't be too hard on people who murder their parents: they are always recently orphaned, poor things.
If you buy a new Macintosh, you will find that it is really a BSD Unix machine under the hood. People who would never knowingly install BSD will be getting it anyway, and maybe they will grow to like it. Even if they don't, geeks like me will be able to sit down in front of their computers and get something done. Sure, BSD lets companies "steal" work that was never written to make money in the first place, but in exchange, YOU GET MACHINES RUNNING BSD SOFTWARE. Adoption and use of software is a sign of success, not of failure.
Is there really any important distinction between "corporate bullying" and "law mumbo jumbo crap"? I think anything that violates common sense as flagarently as this is corporate bullying, whether or not they went through the trouble of making it legal corporate bullying. The real question is, are you violating the law, or is the law violating you?
I am so sick of people who think we should consult a lawyer about every little thing. "You say you want to go to the bathroom now? That is a very serious decision, with legal ramifications your puny little mind cannot possibly comprehend. You better ask a lawyer..." I cannot help suspect that many of the people who spout these opinions so frequently on slashdot are in fact lawyers themselves, trying desperately to increase our already dangerous over-reliance on their services.
My advice is, if you have a contract with these people, read the rules of the contract and obey them, whatever they may be. If you did not have a contract, or if they are asking for something that is clearly not specified in the contract, you don't owe them squat. I am not a lawyer, but I don't need to be a lawyer to tell you something this simple.
If I want to pave my own road, I don't have to pay anyone for the right to do it. It's my land and my asphalt, I can do whatever I want with it.
However, if I want to implement my own mp4 player on my own computer, I WILL have to pay a fee.
Never confuse the ownership of physical property with "intellectual" property. When people are allowed to own the very ideas you think, they might as well own YOU.
I am glad that that shuffling animated corpse of a show will finally be given the long-overdue burial it deserves. It hasn't had anything new to say since the last millenium.
You will never seen a Microsoft or AOL exec talking about how cool the their companies or products are, only how useful and easy to use.
What planet are you from? Microsoft might not BE cool, but that does not stop them from trying to act like they are. They pay millions to associate their brand name with hip songs like "start me up" and "quicker than a ray of light". The fact that they are so desperate to be seen as cool is part of the reason they aren't.
I am so sick of people bad-mouthing Apple for commiting the crime of not being the market leader. I am not even a Mac user, much less an advocate, and I am still sick of it. How slow a news day is it on slashdot, if we have to read yet another person whine about how Apple is too cool to stay in business. I've been hearing that for nearly twenty years, and it's getting old!
Re:For those interested in the Singularity
on
True Names
·
· Score: 1
Artificial intelligence is always thirty years into the future. Thirty years ago, people expected to have it by the year 2000; now people expect it by the year 2030. I am sure that in 2030, they will expect it in 2060, and so on.
You can buy a DVD without owning a player, and if you do you can't sue about not being able to watch it.
In other words, you are saying that the manufacturers are ultimatly not responsible for seeing that the interests of the consumers are met: the consumer bears this responsibility. I can agree with that, so far...
Likewise, you can't write a program that lets you watch it on something the makers don't want you to watch it on. Because if they knew you were doing that, they wouldn't sell you the movie.
Now you are saying that "likewise", consumers ARE responsible for seeing that the interests of the manufacturer are satisfied. Manufacturers don't have to make something we can use, but they CAN keep us from using the products we paid for in ways they didn't intend or approve of.
Well, screw you. If manufacturers are not obliged to consider my interests, why should I be obliged to consider theirs? I will use any product I buy any damned way I please, and if that makes their business plan unprofitable, they can go ahead and go out of business. I would no sooner feel sorry for them than they would feel sorry for me buying a DVD without something to play it on: That's what you get for being an idiot.
Capitalism is supposed to be about mutually benificial transactions between self-interested parties: if an industry cannot survive without artificial legal obligations placed apon the consumer, it does not deserve to exist. In any case, I think that is an empty threat: I have faith that millions of people who have money and want movies will find some way to satisfy their desires. You don't need laws to enforce supply and demand.
If your foresight had been half as good as your hindsight, you'd all be billionaires right now from the companies you shorted in '99.
In other words, "my GET RICH QUICK scheme blew up in my face, but if you guys were so smart you would have thought of a better way to MAKE MONEY FAST!!!"
Sorry, I have better things to do than get rich. As a smart programmer, I can make as much money as I need the old fashioned way, by earning it. I could probably double my salary in a month if I wanted to, but I would have to work harder, and that is not a price I am willing to pay.
As long as I can afford to buy computers and beer, I would rather do less work than make more money. While you are running around like a hamster in an exercise wheel, chasing after money that is always just beyond your reach, I am actually enjoying my life. Whoever said "time is money" got it wrong: time is more important than money.
Slashdot Mirror
The problem is that Linux development cannot survive on the efforts of unpaid programmers.
How long have YOU been using Linux? I experimented with Slackware in the days before RedHat was even incorporated. Back then, things were different. Nobody, and I mean nobody, was paid to work on this stuff. The very idea was laughable. This was a toy project, of interest only to "students of rich parents" like I was at that time. Nobody expected it to ever amount to anything, not even the people who used it. Heck, even I gave up on it for a while after Windows 95 was released, and I'm the biggest geek I know. I'm not proud to admit this now, but at that time I fully expected Linux to fade away, never to be heard from again.
But it didn't.
Linux not only survived during that period when even a geek like me could give up on it, it actually thrived. When I heard about Redhat, I decided to give Linux a second chance, and I was astounded to see what progress had been made in my absence. I have been running Linux ever since.
A lot of things have changed since those days, like IBM spending one billion dollars on Linux. That is like pouring lighter fluid on an already-lit barbecue: sure the whoosh of flames is gratifying, but the coals would still stay hot if you stopped doing it. Linux is not going to disappear because a kernel developer got laid off, or if a few linux-based companies go out of business. Linux has long ago proven that it can survive with only the help of a few motivated people working in their spare time, whether or not it will ever need to again.
On the plus side, imagine winning the hand and getting all that porn...
Call me what you will (a troll, probably), but am I the only one here noticing how people are equating the legitimacy of AudioGalaxy with the end of its usefulness?
You are putting the cart before the horse: The end of AudioGalaxy's usefulness is evident to anyone who tries to actually use it. Those of you who equate the end of AudioGalaxy with the beginning of it's "legitimacy" are the ones who suffer from some kind of delusion. If legitimacy means obeying obsolete laws that don't make sense anymore (assuming they ever did) so that corporate fat cats can screw both the artists and the customers, I choose to be illegitimate. Obeying stupid laws only perpetuates injustice: defying them is the first step towards getting them repealed. Would you have told Rosa Parks to sit in the back of the bus? After all, that would have been the legal, "legitimate" thing for her to do...
A machine gun can punch holes through internal organs, causing painful and near-instantaneous death. A file sharing program merely allows people to make copies of data, without even damaging the original data, much less anyone's internal organs. There is no comparison. If P2P networks really did as much damage as a machine gun to the members of the RIAA, they would be too busy dying in pools of their own blood to file lawsuits. Maybe then I would feel sorry for them.
...but only maybe.
Apparently there was a study [216.239.39.100] done in 1997 that showed high school students from the 1950s had an average vocabulary of 25,000 words, while students from 1997 had an average vocabulary of only 10,000.
Strangely, a similar study in 1997 also showed that high school students from 1800s had a vocabulary of 0 words.
If we absolutely MUST pass some sort of legislation, why don't we repeal all intellectual property laws and dis-incorporate all of the big "content provider" companies?
Homeopathy involves taking substances so diluted with water that, according to modern chemistry, not even a single molecule of the original substance actually remains. Quinine, on the other hand, is taken in large enough concentrations that you can easily taste the impurities in the water. Thus, Quinine is not nearly dilute enough to work according to the theory of homeopathy... but it works just fine according to the practice of conventional medicine.
I agree that these guys would sound like neo-facist pinheads if they simply said "all we have to do is get rid of all the bad guys and society will become perfect." But they wrote a computer program to make that statement for them, with colored lights and everything. Computers take the rules they are given (like the fact that only corrupt people get arrested, and arrested people are always rehabilitated) and follow these rules to their logical conclusion. How can you possibly argue with that?
Technology firms did not want to testify in the hearing, did not offer input while the bill was being drafted, and have offered plenty of criticism but little helpful suggestions since, a Hollings aide said.
So, Hollings wants us to give him helpful suggestions? how about... GIVE UP!
We are not talking about every single binary in a distribution, we are talking specifically about server software that accepts connections from the internet, or at least a local network. You should be able to count the number of programs that do that on one hand. If any of those programs are not important enough to you to maintain, you shouldn't be running them anyway.
I have no problem with it. Anyone who has the brains to hunt through the source and remove the time limit should also be smart enough to understand the consequences of such an action. People who are not smart enough to do it themselves (or hire someone who is) should be grateful for whatever they get. If they whine about it, you can always offer to refund the purchase price.
I hate this new-fangled "printing press" thing that people keep talking about in Church.
It serves only the needs of a few cloistered monks who know how to "read".
Instead of something boring like that, why can't it be more like the plow?
The plow is simple: You stick it in the ground, and pull.
Then after a while food comes up, and you eat it.
That is the kind of invention I like.
Everything should be like a plow.
Printing presses fill people up with crazy, heretical ideas, like "the earth is round".
Plows fill us up with grainy goodness that makes us grow big and strong.
Strike two against printing presses.
Finally, and in conclusion: Food good. Literacy bad.
If the banner ad server refused to serve annoying ads to viewers referred by slashdot, that would mean we would have to see the stories without the ads! That would be terrible!
Another possible explanation is that there are a small group of whiny people who are tired of Linus controlling the linux development process just because he happens to have invented it in the first place, and are waging a propaganda campaign to replace him with a committee that will rubber-stamp every ill-concieved patch submitted from anywhere on the internet, with little or no review. Goodness knows, any time any random undergrad or script kiddie changes a few lines of code in the linux kernel, it must be an incredible improvement that we cannot live without. What does Linus know about kernel development, anyway?
Note that I care not one iota for the legal aspects of anything. The moral and the ethical aspects are my only concerns, and those are sometimes at odds with the legal framework. I won't live long enough even if I reach extreme old age to change unjust laws in the courts, but i do honor any and all contracts that I have assented to, and if Blizzard wants me in grannie's nightdress with peanut butter on my cock and I want to play Warcraft III bad enough, move over granny and hello, Jif.
I can never understand the typically libertarian attitude that the government is stupid and the law is irrelevant, but even the most flimsy and unenforcable contracts between individuals and private interests are completely sacred and should be obeyed no matter how stupid they are. In other words, we should not let the government force us to obey laws that were passed through an open and democratic process: instead, the government should only force us to obey contracts drawn up by weasely lawyers working for international mega-conglomerates that answer only to greedy stockholders who want nothing but money.
Well I say, screw that! I may not trust the government to do the right thing all of the time, but I would not trust a corporate lawyer any further than I could stab him in the eye with an ice-pick. If some corporate lawyer wants to enforce the twenty-third paragraph of fine print on a legal contract that I cannot even read until after I pay for the product, that is his problem. If I didn't sign the contract, then as far as I'm concerned, I didn't agree to it: all I did was pay money for a product. If I see someone sneaking around my house, peeking in the windows to make sure I am wearing the right dress and jacking off into the right brand of peanut butter, I will call the police and have him hauled away for trespassing. It's a good thing I can do that without first having a contract with every potential trespasser that defines the terms under which they can be kicked off my property.
It allows a widow and orphaned children to be provided in case the copyright holder dies early.
When most people die they stop making money, no matter how many widows and orphans they leave behind. Why should the widows and orphans of authors get better treatment than "ordinary" widows and orphans?
It also keeps people from knocking off a copyright holder to open up his exclusive use rights to the public.
I can't really imagine anyone killing an author just to enrich the public domain. That is far too abstract and selfless a goal to inspire cold-blooded murderer. A far more likely scenario is for one of the author's spoiled, greedy, talentless children to kill the author for a few decades of free income. If there is any plausible copyright-related motive for killing an author, that would be it.
Of course, you can't be too hard on people who murder their parents: they are always recently orphaned, poor things.
If you buy a new Macintosh, you will find that it is really a BSD Unix machine under the hood. People who would never knowingly install BSD will be getting it anyway, and maybe they will grow to like it. Even if they don't, geeks like me will be able to sit down in front of their computers and get something done. Sure, BSD lets companies "steal" work that was never written to make money in the first place, but in exchange, YOU GET MACHINES RUNNING BSD SOFTWARE. Adoption and use of software is a sign of success, not of failure.
Is there really any important distinction between "corporate bullying" and "law mumbo jumbo crap"? I think anything that violates common sense as flagarently as this is corporate bullying, whether or not they went through the trouble of making it legal corporate bullying. The real question is, are you violating the law, or is the law violating you?
I am so sick of people who think we should consult a lawyer about every little thing. "You say you want to go to the bathroom now? That is a very serious decision, with legal ramifications your puny little mind cannot possibly comprehend. You better ask a lawyer..." I cannot help suspect that many of the people who spout these opinions so frequently on slashdot are in fact lawyers themselves, trying desperately to increase our already dangerous over-reliance on their services.
My advice is, if you have a contract with these people, read the rules of the contract and obey them, whatever they may be. If you did not have a contract, or if they are asking for something that is clearly not specified in the contract, you don't owe them squat. I am not a lawyer, but I don't need to be a lawyer to tell you something this simple.
If I want to pave my own road, I don't have to pay anyone for the right to do it. It's my land and my asphalt, I can do whatever I want with it.
However, if I want to implement my own mp4 player on my own computer, I WILL have to pay a fee.
Never confuse the ownership of physical property with "intellectual" property. When people are allowed to own the very ideas you think, they might as well own YOU.
I am glad that that shuffling animated corpse of a show will finally be given the long-overdue burial it deserves. It hasn't had anything new to say since the last millenium.
You will never seen a Microsoft or AOL exec talking about how cool the their companies or products are, only how useful and easy to use.
What planet are you from? Microsoft might not BE cool, but that does not stop them from trying to act like they are. They pay millions to associate their brand name with hip songs like "start me up" and "quicker than a ray of light". The fact that they are so desperate to be seen as cool is part of the reason they aren't.
I am so sick of people bad-mouthing Apple for commiting the crime of not being the market leader. I am not even a Mac user, much less an advocate, and I am still sick of it. How slow a news day is it on slashdot, if we have to read yet another person whine about how Apple is too cool to stay in business. I've been hearing that for nearly twenty years, and it's getting old!
Artificial intelligence is always thirty years into the future. Thirty years ago, people expected to have it by the year 2000; now people expect it by the year 2030. I am sure that in 2030, they will expect it in 2060, and so on.
You can buy a DVD without owning a player, and if you do you can't sue about not being able to watch it.
In other words, you are saying that the manufacturers are ultimatly not responsible for seeing that the interests of the consumers are met: the consumer bears this responsibility. I can agree with that, so far...
Likewise, you can't write a program that lets you watch it on something the makers don't want you to watch it on. Because if they knew you were doing that, they wouldn't sell you the movie.
Now you are saying that "likewise", consumers ARE responsible for seeing that the interests of the manufacturer are satisfied. Manufacturers don't have to make something we can use, but they CAN keep us from using the products we paid for in ways they didn't intend or approve of.
Well, screw you. If manufacturers are not obliged to consider my interests, why should I be obliged to consider theirs? I will use any product I buy any damned way I please, and if that makes their business plan unprofitable, they can go ahead and go out of business. I would no sooner feel sorry for them than they would feel sorry for me buying a DVD without something to play it on: That's what you get for being an idiot.
Capitalism is supposed to be about mutually benificial transactions between self-interested parties: if an industry cannot survive without artificial legal obligations placed apon the consumer, it does not deserve to exist. In any case, I think that is an empty threat: I have faith that millions of people who have money and want movies will find some way to satisfy their desires. You don't need laws to enforce supply and demand.
If your foresight had been half as good as your hindsight, you'd all be billionaires right now from the companies you shorted in '99.
In other words, "my GET RICH QUICK scheme blew up in my face, but if you guys were so smart you would have thought of a better way to MAKE MONEY FAST!!!"
Sorry, I have better things to do than get rich. As a smart programmer, I can make as much money as I need the old fashioned way, by earning it. I could probably double my salary in a month if I wanted to, but I would have to work harder, and that is not a price I am willing to pay.
As long as I can afford to buy computers and beer, I would rather do less work than make more money. While you are running around like a hamster in an exercise wheel, chasing after money that is always just beyond your reach, I am actually enjoying my life. Whoever said "time is money" got it wrong: time is more important than money.