Good for you. The government is not a business trying to make a profit, and the sooner a lot of gov't execs realize that, the better off the place will be.
Ditto on the plea for plain text. People should concentrate on what they're writing, not on the fonts they're using.
No Hollywood in 3 years seems a little histrionic. It won't happen.
What will happen is that some producer will get a clue and and start selling DVD's online: Take orders for a big release and guarantee overnight delivery of the DVD one week before theater release. The buzz generated for a good flick ought to boost ticket sales. The DVD sales would complement and contribute to ticket sales. Result" more money.
Everyone who depends on someone else for a product or service is a customer.
I've worked as resident geek, in management, and in staff positions, all in an IT environment. In my experience, many techies relish the isolation from other people that their jobs provide. They are not comfortable associating with people whose decisions often boil down to "I like it that way". In other words, they expect human behavior to be as logical as the code they write. It isn't, of course, and we often see that fact reflected in the bitterness and impatience of many techies who treat their fellows as "dumb" because they don't understand the difference between, say, a dangling pointer and a regular expression.
They can get away with that if they're locked up in a cubicle someplace, but that attitude will kill any business that depends on customer loyalty and return business.
Sure did. Used to run DesqView on a 386 Toshiba laptop: Brief (sigh...) in one window, Lotus Magellan (sigh...) in another, and a tiny command prompt in the third window. Need to go online? A couple keystrokes and you're there, in a new window.
Eventually, I installed the MKS ToolKit set of Unix tools for DOS -- KSH, vi, and clones of the usual GNU stuff. Very nice under DesqView.
My first experience with Minix was installing version one on a Zeos 286 laptop -- a ponderous black thing with, I think, exactly one meg of ram. No CD, of course, Just some floppies and a wing and a prayer. But, what you got in the end was a working OS with the core Unix tool set, even if some of the tools were a bit on the skinny side. Plus a great book to explain it all.
Hmmm... The only place I see "lose" consistently misspelled as "loose" is on Slashdot. That might be attributed to a lot of bouncing 'o' keys. Given the other spelling mistakes that show up regularly, though, I'm guessing it's one part sloppy typing and one part "These Guys Can't Spell".
I'm guessing you haven't read Tannenbaum's books. He never intended anyone to do "anything practical" with Minix. He wanted code to illustrate the OS design principles he was teaching. At that, the code had to work on XT's without a hard drive, fit on a 160k floppy, and run on a machine with less than 640k of memory.
Comparisons with Linux Miss the Point
on
The End Of Minix?
·
· Score: 3, Informative
Right. Measuring Minix against Linux or any OS with pretensions to be a production tool is inappropriate. For some, it probably reflects an unfamiliarity with the Tannenbaum book and a perspective that began sometime after the the code's initial appearance in 1987.
I own both the first and second editions of Tannenbaum's Minix book. They're both buried in boxes right now, so I can't post a quote, but Minix was written as a teaching tool, not with any intent that it would ever be used a production OS or, for that matter, as a hobbyist OS. At the time, the only way for Tannenbaum to legally use source code as a pedagogic device to illstrate the workings of a Unix-like OS was to write it himself. The typical PC box then -- remember, this is 1987 -- was an XT without a hard drive.
In other words, Minix code was written to illustrate the points Tannenbaum makes in the book and to work on 640k green-screen XT's with one tiny 5 & 1/4-inch floppy.
Ummm...Mosaic was the first graphical browser. (Other browsers predated it. I still remember trying to "browse" the CERN site on a 9-inch Mac Classic over a 14.4k line in '91 or '92.) If you want to learn how it sort of morphed into Netscape, the history must be somewhere on the Netscape site.
Some of the Mosaic code ended up in Spyglass. MS bought Spyglass and used the code in early versions of IE.
>>...t's the only way they're going to get support for answering stupid questions...
Not to be surly, but since when is something like "How do I send a picture through e-mail" a stupid question? If "small businesses" don't want to answer their customers' questions, odds are they'll remain small.
Bashing AOL and AOL users is just tech snobbery, pure and simple.
Most people are bored stiff by the technology that makes the Internet work. It's not that they're "stupid", it's just that they find all this geeky stuff about as interesting as dental science.
I've put AOL on laptops for traveling bosses for the same reason. Even set up the phone numbers for their destination so they'd only need to click on the AOL icon. They don't have/want/need a clue about Unix, don't have a Unix server to SSH into, and weren't going places where they'd have access to a PC anyway.
The mainstream public will never have a reason to stop pointing and clicking and get into the "innards" of Unix and the Internet. They'll use whatever capabilities someone (re-)packages in a nice, easy to use product, and that's just fine.
Well-prepared tech support scripts are a Good Thing. Tech support staffers need more people skills that they need tech skills. If you assume that the folks working the phones don't have the skills and experience to be elsewhere actually fixing problems, the script acts as a simple dialogue tree to get the right information from the caller. Without the script, you often have clueless users doing their best to describe a problem for a clueless tech support person.
Once upon a time, I saw a place put Actual Live Techies on the tech support frontlines. Disaster. The customers didn't understand them; they didn't understand the customers. Most callers just gave up after being told, in so many words, "Nothing's wrong. You're the problem."
If a company offered original and unique content of interest to me, if a company offered forums with intelligent, non-spammed dialogue, and if a company avoided locking users into a glitzy proprietary interface, I'd sign up. I might even be willing to pay a premium price.
Before the web happened, and before Usenet turned into a nest of raving loons, Compuserve approached this model. Maybe AOL, which bought Compuserve and promptly repackaged it as an AOL clone, ought to ponder what made online services work back in the stone age before Mosaic.
Doubtful that there's connection between this and lax parental responsibility. Different parents raise their kids differently.
This is about WalMart, et al, making a decision about what they'll sell or not sell, and also avoiding a great deal of bad publicity by carrying the games. The game section of these stores are meccas for kids; no store manager wants to explain to the local news folks why they let school kids buy the games.
I'm no more able to refute your assertions than you are able to document them, but it seems to me that such cynicism often provides cover for an unwillingness to enter the political process. Obviously, I can't pretend to speak for you, but I've certainly known a number of people who have made the quick jump into cynicism and inaction when the rest of the world failed to rise up to support their quest. Rather than consider that others may not agree with them, they simply assert that the game is fixed and stop playing.
Persuading Congress to repeal all or part of the DMCA will take years of organized, expensive effort by many people. Electing enough representatives to change the tone of legislation to be more aligned with the broader social ramifications of the free software and open source philosophies (somethig many posters on/. seem to be groping toward) will take even longer. It will takes years of grassroots efforts, starting at the school board and local elections level.
None of this will happen simply because a portion of the/. community wants it to happen, or because the nation's "geeks" believe it to be morally necessary.
>> And therein lies the problem. First, one would have to muster up enough people voting (hard in and of itself), and THEN convince them why the DMCA is bad.
Yep, that's the way the game is played. Didn't say it would be easy or cheap.
Frankly, I'm doubtful the DMCA and related issues will ever be more than a sideshow for most voters. Voters infrequently make a choice of candidate based on a single issue, especially an issue that involves spending discretionary income on luxury items like CD's and DVD's. ("Lemme see, buy dinner or buy that new Harry Potter DVD?")
So, if the mainstream public can't be convinced that the DMCA is a threat to their interests, then the possibility exists that they're right -- maybe it doesn't threaten them, at least sufficiently to change their vote. In that case, the/. community is just another single-issue special interest group.
Certainly, bread and butter issues like jobs, education, war vs peace, inflation, etc., will always sway votes more readily than issues like the DMCA.
Some of us don't think the DMCA is a trivial issue, regardless of our different opinions about copyright and intellectual property.
If you don't make sure your representatives know what you think, they have no option but to pay attention to the people who do make their wishes known. If everyone gives up and shuts up, then the corporations, special interests and lobbyists have the field all to themselves.
If your representative loses patience with you and shuffles you out of the office, write it up, send it to the local media, post it on a website, and make sure the other party knows about it.
>>...items many of us feel should be exempted are exactly the types of things that the DMCA was enacted to "protect"...unlikely that the government would do anything to change that.
There's a lot of cynicism expressed here about Congress being in the pocket of rich corporation, which ususally results in a "what's the use?" attitude.
Perhaps I'm naive, but it seems to me that the one thing even crooked politicians want more than money is to be reelected. If those of us who oppose the DMCA convince even a few incumbent Congresspersons that their reelection is at risk because of their stand on the DMCA, we might see some movement in the right direction. A few Libertarian candidate for House seats are speaking out against the DMCA, but we can expect their impact to be almost nil.
This would require demonstrating to mainstream voters -- those ordinary folks ofted derisively referred to as "users" -- why the DMCA threatens them and why this one issue, by itself, merits changing their vote.
Here's a passage from the Copyright Office's notice:
"The Copyright Office is preparing to conduct proceedings mandated by the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, which provides that the Librarian of Congress may exempt certain classes of works from the prohibition against circumvention of technological measures that control access to copyrighted works. The purpose of this rulemaking proceeding is to determine whether there are particular classes of works as to which users are, or are likely to be, adversely affected in their ability to make noninfringing uses due to the prohibition on circumvention."
The Copyright Office can, within a rather limited scope, define exceptions to the DMCA.
Actually, registration is not mandatory. Under U.S. law, copyright exists from the moment a work is created. However, you can't bring suit for infringement if you have not registered. Nor is publication necessary for copyright protection. (Publication is usually defined, in terms of copyright, as making copies available to the public.)
Renewal is not required for works created after January 1, 1978. The Bono Act extended copyright terms to what many consider a unjustifiable length. There is no 14-year term.
Of course the auto companies would steal the idea of there was no legislation protecting the inventor. That's the point: the absence of copyright law encourages theft.
1. No significant political constituency exists to support the kind of legislative changes needed to destroy the RIAA-affiliated companies. People will continue to buy CD's and DVD's, continue to go to movies, and continue to buy cable TV until a competitive distribution channel arises to provide the same product faster and/or cheaper. If you people won't "wake up" until it's too late, well, that's because most people don't have a reason to care.
2. Again, copying the data on a CD deprives someone of the gain and benefit due that person from the sale that may otherwise have taken place.
3. Unless they choose to place their creation in the public domain, people are entitled to derive benefits, financial and otherwise, from selling or licensing copies of their product. I have no problems with the morality of that. in fact, it seems morally superior to allowing the greater public to steal my product for their own use and benefit.
4. Yes, the copyright term is too long. But, even if it does change, it will not disappear. If you want to wai, oh, say, 50 years for recordings of this week's favorite band to enter the public domain, be my guest. Remember, copyright is only a means to an end for the entertainment industry.
5. Creators should benefit from their copywritten efforts as long as someone is willing to pay them. In a capitalistic society, that payment is how we measure how much society wants a product.
Slashdot Mirror
Good for you. The government is not a business trying to make a profit, and the sooner a lot of gov't execs realize that, the better off the place will be.
Ditto on the plea for plain text. People should concentrate on what they're writing, not on the fonts they're using.
>> WordStar rocks.
Sure did. Anyone else remember using it on one of those "portable" Kaypros with the 5-inch screen?
If there was a PC software hall of fame, WordStar would be there on the first ballot. So would Brief and Lotus Magellan. Oh yeah, Sidekick, too.
No Hollywood in 3 years seems a little histrionic. It won't happen.
What will happen is that some producer will get a clue and and start selling DVD's online: Take orders for a big release and guarantee overnight delivery of the DVD one week before theater release. The buzz generated for a good flick ought to boost ticket sales. The DVD sales would complement and contribute to ticket sales. Result" more money.
Everyone who depends on someone else for a product or service is a customer.
I've worked as resident geek, in management, and in staff positions, all in an IT environment. In my experience, many techies relish the isolation from other people that their jobs provide. They are not comfortable associating with people whose decisions often boil down to "I like it that way". In other words, they expect human behavior to be as logical as the code they write. It isn't, of course, and we often see that fact reflected in the bitterness and impatience of many techies who treat their fellows as "dumb" because they don't understand the difference between, say, a dangling pointer and a regular expression.
They can get away with that if they're locked up in a cubicle someplace, but that attitude will kill any business that depends on customer loyalty and return business.
Sure did. Used to run DesqView on a 386 Toshiba laptop: Brief (sigh...) in one window, Lotus Magellan (sigh...) in another, and a tiny command prompt in the third window. Need to go online? A couple keystrokes and you're there, in a new window.
Eventually, I installed the MKS ToolKit set of Unix tools for DOS -- KSH, vi, and clones of the usual GNU stuff. Very nice under DesqView.
My first experience with Minix was installing version one on a Zeos 286 laptop -- a ponderous black thing with, I think, exactly one meg of ram. No CD, of course, Just some floppies and a wing and a prayer. But, what you got in the end was a working OS with the core Unix tool set, even if some of the tools were a bit on the skinny side. Plus a great book to explain it all.
Hmmm... The only place I see "lose" consistently misspelled as "loose" is on Slashdot. That might be attributed to a lot of bouncing 'o' keys. Given the other spelling mistakes that show up regularly, though, I'm guessing it's one part sloppy typing and one part "These Guys Can't Spell".
Editor??
>> To do anything practical...
I'm guessing you haven't read Tannenbaum's books. He never intended anyone to do "anything practical" with Minix. He wanted code to illustrate the OS design principles he was teaching. At that, the code had to work on XT's without a hard drive, fit on a 160k floppy, and run on a machine with less than 640k of memory.
Right. Measuring Minix against Linux or any OS with pretensions to be a production tool is inappropriate. For some, it probably reflects an unfamiliarity with the Tannenbaum book and a perspective that began sometime after the the code's initial appearance in 1987.
I own both the first and second editions of Tannenbaum's Minix book. They're both buried in boxes right now, so I can't post a quote, but Minix was written as a teaching tool, not with any intent that it would ever be used a production OS or, for that matter, as a hobbyist OS. At the time, the only way for Tannenbaum to legally use source code as a pedagogic device to illstrate the workings of a Unix-like OS was to write it himself. The typical PC box then -- remember, this is 1987 -- was an XT without a hard drive.
In other words, Minix code was written to illustrate the points Tannenbaum makes in the book and to work on 640k green-screen XT's with one tiny 5 & 1/4-inch floppy.
...to put in back doors for their use?
Ummm...Mosaic was the first graphical browser. (Other browsers predated it. I still remember trying to "browse" the CERN site on a 9-inch Mac Classic over a 14.4k line in '91 or '92.) If you want to learn how it sort of morphed into Netscape, the history must be somewhere on the Netscape site.
Some of the Mosaic code ended up in Spyglass. MS bought Spyglass and used the code in early versions of IE.
>> ...t's the only way they're going to get support for answering stupid questions...
Not to be surly, but since when is something like "How do I send a picture through e-mail" a stupid question? If "small businesses" don't want to answer their customers' questions, odds are they'll remain small.
Bashing AOL and AOL users is just tech snobbery, pure and simple.
Most people are bored stiff by the technology that makes the Internet work. It's not that they're "stupid", it's just that they find all this geeky stuff about as interesting as dental science.
I've put AOL on laptops for traveling bosses for the same reason. Even set up the phone numbers for their destination so they'd only need to click on the AOL icon. They don't have/want/need a clue about Unix, don't have a Unix server to SSH into, and weren't going places where they'd have access to a PC anyway.
The mainstream public will never have a reason to stop pointing and clicking and get into the "innards" of Unix and the Internet. They'll use whatever capabilities someone (re-)packages in a nice, easy to use product, and that's just fine.
Well-prepared tech support scripts are a Good Thing. Tech support staffers need more people skills that they need tech skills. If you assume that the folks working the phones don't have the skills and experience to be elsewhere actually fixing problems, the script acts as a simple dialogue tree to get the right information from the caller. Without the script, you often have clueless users doing their best to describe a problem for a clueless tech support person.
Once upon a time, I saw a place put Actual Live Techies on the tech support frontlines. Disaster. The customers didn't understand them; they didn't understand the customers. Most callers just gave up after being told, in so many words, "Nothing's wrong. You're the problem."
If a company offered original and unique content of interest to me, if a company offered forums with intelligent, non-spammed dialogue, and if a company avoided locking users into a glitzy proprietary interface, I'd sign up. I might even be willing to pay a premium price.
Before the web happened, and before Usenet turned into a nest of raving loons, Compuserve approached this model. Maybe AOL, which bought Compuserve and promptly repackaged it as an AOL clone, ought to ponder what made online services work back in the stone age before Mosaic.
Doubtful that there's connection between this and lax parental responsibility. Different parents raise their kids differently.
This is about WalMart, et al, making a decision about what they'll sell or not sell, and also avoiding a great deal of bad publicity by carrying the games. The game section of these stores are meccas for kids; no store manager wants to explain to the local news folks why they let school kids buy the games.
I'm no more able to refute your assertions than you are able to document them, but it seems to me that such cynicism often provides cover for an unwillingness to enter the political process. Obviously, I can't pretend to speak for you, but I've certainly known a number of people who have made the quick jump into cynicism and inaction when the rest of the world failed to rise up to support their quest. Rather than consider that others may not agree with them, they simply assert that the game is fixed and stop playing.
/. seem to be groping toward) will take even longer. It will takes years of grassroots efforts, starting at the school board and local elections level.
/. community wants it to happen, or because the nation's "geeks" believe it to be morally necessary.
Persuading Congress to repeal all or part of the DMCA will take years of organized, expensive effort by many people. Electing enough representatives to change the tone of legislation to be more aligned with the broader social ramifications of the free software and open source philosophies (somethig many posters on
None of this will happen simply because a portion of the
>> And therein lies the problem. First, one would have to muster up enough people voting (hard in and of itself), and THEN convince them why the DMCA is bad.
/. community is just another single-issue special interest group.
Yep, that's the way the game is played. Didn't say it would be easy or cheap.
Frankly, I'm doubtful the DMCA and related issues will ever be more than a sideshow for most voters. Voters infrequently make a choice of candidate based on a single issue, especially an issue that involves spending discretionary income on luxury items like CD's and DVD's. ("Lemme see, buy dinner or buy that new Harry Potter DVD?")
So, if the mainstream public can't be convinced that the DMCA is a threat to their interests, then the possibility exists that they're right -- maybe it doesn't threaten them, at least sufficiently to change their vote. In that case, the
Certainly, bread and butter issues like jobs, education, war vs peace, inflation, etc., will always sway votes more readily than issues like the DMCA.
Huh? This isn't a failed attempt at irony, is it?
Some of us don't think the DMCA is a trivial issue, regardless of our different opinions about copyright and intellectual property.
If you don't make sure your representatives know what you think, they have no option but to pay attention to the people who do make their wishes known. If everyone gives up and shuts up, then the corporations, special interests and lobbyists have the field all to themselves.
If your representative loses patience with you and shuffles you out of the office, write it up, send it to the local media, post it on a website, and make sure the other party knows about it.
>> ...items many of us feel should be exempted are exactly the types of things that the DMCA was enacted to "protect"...unlikely that the government would do anything to change that.
There's a lot of cynicism expressed here about Congress being in the pocket of rich corporation, which ususally results in a "what's the use?" attitude.
Perhaps I'm naive, but it seems to me that the one thing even crooked politicians want more than money is to be reelected. If those of us who oppose the DMCA convince even a few incumbent Congresspersons that their reelection is at risk because of their stand on the DMCA, we might see some movement in the right direction. A few Libertarian candidate for House seats are speaking out against the DMCA, but we can expect their impact to be almost nil.
This would require demonstrating to mainstream voters -- those ordinary folks ofted derisively referred to as "users" -- why the DMCA threatens them and why this one issue, by itself, merits changing their vote.
Here's a passage from the Copyright Office's notice:
"The Copyright Office is preparing to conduct proceedings mandated by the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, which provides that the Librarian of Congress may exempt certain classes of works from the prohibition against circumvention of technological measures that control access to copyrighted works. The purpose of this rulemaking proceeding is to determine whether there are particular classes of works as to which users are, or are likely to be, adversely affected in their ability to make noninfringing uses due to the prohibition on circumvention."
The Copyright Office can, within a rather limited scope, define exceptions to the DMCA.
Actually, registration is not mandatory. Under U.S. law, copyright exists from the moment a work is created. However, you can't bring suit for infringement if you have not registered. Nor is publication necessary for copyright protection. (Publication is usually defined, in terms of copyright, as making copies available to the public.)
Renewal is not required for works created after January 1, 1978. The Bono Act extended copyright terms to what many consider a unjustifiable length. There is no 14-year term.
Of course the auto companies would steal the idea of there was no legislation protecting the inventor. That's the point: the absence of copyright law encourages theft.
1. No significant political constituency exists to support the kind of legislative changes needed to destroy the RIAA-affiliated companies. People will continue to buy CD's and DVD's, continue to go to movies, and continue to buy cable TV until a competitive distribution channel arises to provide the same product faster and/or cheaper. If you people won't "wake up" until it's too late, well, that's because most people don't have a reason to care.
2. Again, copying the data on a CD deprives someone of the gain and benefit due that person from the sale that may otherwise have taken place.
3. Unless they choose to place their creation in the public domain, people are entitled to derive benefits, financial and otherwise, from selling or licensing copies of their product. I have no problems with the morality of that. in fact, it seems morally superior to allowing the greater public to steal my product for their own use and benefit.
4. Yes, the copyright term is too long. But, even if it does change, it will not disappear. If you want to wai, oh, say, 50 years for recordings of this week's favorite band to enter the public domain, be my guest. Remember, copyright is only a means to an end for the entertainment industry.
5. Creators should benefit from their copywritten efforts as long as someone is willing to pay them. In a capitalistic society, that payment is how we measure how much society wants a product.