As I said, don't agree to it if you don't like it. I for one will never buy DRM-enabled content unless it is drastically overhauled to give me greater control, but I don't believe we have any right to dictate through legislation how a company distributes content, any more than they have the right to dictate to us how it is used.
That's the salient point of your position, but I'm not clear on how that colors your opinion of the DMCA.
I agree; if a company wants to produced DRM-enabled content, good for them. However, once you've licensed the content from them (purchased a copy) should it be legal for you to break the protection on that content, so long as you do not violate their copyright in the process?
That's the _real_ anti-DRM position, not the "Save us, Uncle Sam, Ban DRM!" idiocy;-)
How do you resolve the contamination problem, at least for crops?
Can't rememeber the name of that big agro-biotech firm, (Monsanto?) but they developed a bug and pesiticide resistant strain of corn.
Farmer A, who is adjacent to Farmer B, decides to license the super-corn. Farmer B doesn't, and is happy with his current grade of natural corn.
Well, nature does what it does best, and cross-pollinates Farmer A's corn with Farmer B's corn. Next season, Farmer B is unintentionally growing super corn. Under the current system, Farmer B is infringing Monsanto's patent, and either has to destroy his crop, or license the super-corn.
Don't you think that's a bit unfair? People bitch enough about the viral nature of the GPL; but for godsakes, genetic engineering is the _real_ thing, in terms of "infection". How do you make nature and patens cooperate?
You can see the next step, too. Company X develops human gene for 100% resistance to the common cold. Company X sells this service, permitting you to artificially splice that gene into your children.
Company X then insists that your children must license their patent if they produce offspring. Of course, the current patent term precludes this from happening, but given the way copyright protections have been extended I wouldn't be surprised to see patent protections extended either.
FIVE YEARS??? They're insane. It can take five years for a band to work their way up from garage band to being noteworthy enough to get a recording contract. This would mean that all of their early works would be unprotected right as they became popular enough to actually make money off them.
For individually-owned copyrights, give them lifetime rights, plus five or ten years (as opposed to 75...this allows their unreleased works to be profitable for their heirs). If at any time copyrights are transfered from the creator to another individual or corporation, give them the same 5-10 years the family would get if the author died. This would encourage more creators to hang on to their rights rather than give them to corporations.
Totally unnecessary.
1. For the most part, bands make money of performances, not record distribution. It's different for the top 1%, but that's not the majority of the music industry, and heaven forbid, I think the needs of the many outweight the needs of the few.
2. Lyrics != Performance. You've got a gig at Joe's Podunk Bingo Bar. You play a new song, "Song X". 5 years later, _that_ specific performance of the song, and the lyrics of the song become public domain. However, each individual performance of the song (not to mention studio recording) is covered under copyright protection from the date it was played.
3. Part of the idea here is to break the "recording industry" model. The recording industry is for shit. Seriously. It burns out most artists, it produces a lot of crap, and the "sponsored" industry-raised bands generally suck quite a bit more than the garage bands that fight their way up from the trenches. In this day and age, as a garage band, you'll have difficult selling your material via online distribution, or the variety of weird music kiosk-like (on demand TV?) systems out there. With online distribution, and CD labeling/packaging produced on demand, even if you refuse to touch a computer (and hate the internet), there's no reason your local record store couldn't produce what you wanted, at any given time, without caring about what they had in stock.
Why don't we have this now? The music industry cartel. Frankly, I couldn't care less if copyright rules were changed that gutted the cartel, and gutted the top 1% of artists. Break indefinite grant of monopoly protection to these companies, and you won't have to worry about them stealing your music.
Oh, and if you can't sell your stuff in an internet-only world after 5 years of protection, your probably going to have to change something:(
I'd be very, very, very careful with your idea of lifetime grants -> 5 years if transferred to a corportation. Unless you write the law incredibly well, you'll end up with the current system re-establishing itself somehow. For example, without a doubt, you'd have to make it so that the 5-10 year expiration is retroactive; otherwise, one could imagine all kinds of interesting loan/grant schemes coming up.
But try looking at it my way. What would happen if _every_ work of music was only protected by 5 years of protection? Other than the immediate collapse of the RIAA-style recording industry as their investors run screaming into the sunset, what do you think would happen? This isn't a rhetorical question, I'm honestly asking you what you think would go wrong. Part of the solution might be covering various aspects of the work for a variety of periods; live performances for 10 years, studio performances for 5 years, lyrics for 20 years, that kind of thing.
Oh, and I agree with you on patents. However, there's no reason not to shorten the life of patents from the 14(20?) years they currently are, depending upon the application. Software patents should last more than 1-2 years. DNA patents shouldn't last long either. Complex industrial processes, however, which require years of research & development, even by the big boys, would be different.
Without copyright, companies could fork GPL software and make it closed source . . . . . . .
The real answer to resolving patent/copyright issues is radically reducing the length of protection. As technology makes it easier and easier to commercialize your idea/IP, and as society fundamentally becomes more wealthy, it should take less time to bring products to market, reap monopoly profits, and then maintain a strong position in the market by issue of being allowed in first.
If you can't turn your idea into something productive within a few years, you don't need protection. Patent's are almost sort of reasonable in this regard, but even the current 14 year term is a bit much.
Copyright has become truly inane; what is it, 40 years after the death of the original creator? Preposterous in an age of internet distribution, where time-to-market is ~1 week, and distribution costs nil (in comparison to the days of old).
You're right; the government should protect IP producers. However, once the government has established enough of a benefit such that IP producers choose to continue to sell their wares, why should the government grant them indefinite monopoly profits? Also, precisely why does the government continue to protect the IP of products which are not distributed. If a company isn't distributing it, and is merely sitting on the IP in order to stall the market, we aren't seeing advancement of the arts & sciences.
Well, yes and no. In a small enough company, the few primary shareholders can (and often will) consider giving away their own shares in order to strength the company.
I've seen it done. And in many situations it works out well.
Scenario: You run a small company. You need a significant amount of financing to go from development -> production. You've secured a purchaser, but for whatever reason can't use standard banking channels.
You hold 95% of the company. Two small investors hold 2.25% each. You're a small business; you don't have a lot of employees, you're mainly a tech company, and you're the primary inventor.
Someone offers to toss $10 million into your company for 30% ownership.
*shrug*. Why not give them 33% of your holdings? Giving up some of your shares is functionally equivalent to "investing" into the company. It be no different from selling your shares, and then pouring that money into the company. Frankly, it'd be no different from investing your time and effort, either. Of course, we aren't talking Fortune 500; I mean a small startup company that's comprised of your blood, sweat, and tears.
This would be especially true when those 5% investors are close friends, or family, or are somehow socially tied to you (professor you are close to, wife, child, someone who offered some small, but crucial asset, etc. ..) The 5% in this example is to some degree symbolic; you don't really want to cut them out of the deal.
Where do you draw the line between small enough and big enough? I personally know someone who held a 60% share in a moderate sized entity (his startup, ~$10 million in revenue annually) who traded 5% of his personal holdings in exchange for "purchasing" the right to another investors royalties on earnings, which made the difference on per-unit production costs. Could he have worked out a different solution with the board of directors?
Possibly; but as the CEO and main shareholder, not to mention a very good friend of the shareholder with the royalty right, it was more convenient and more practical to simply resolve the issue immediately. This action directly resulted in the resumption of some contract negotiations, which helped the company to succeed that year.
In private companies of moderate size and smaller, you'll often see these kinds of arrangements that aren't strictly financially optimal to everyone involved, but it can significantly reduce the amount of headache involved, and permit the business to move forward as fast as possible without bogging it down in tedious negiotiations.
*shrug* It happens, but its probably not the norm. Dilution probably occurs more often, but one should be aware of arrangements like this.
Usually founders of a company start with around 5% or so, and leave the rest for investors, and stock awards for employees.
Stock dilution.
Here's how it works:
You (General Alcazar) have a company. GA Enterprises. You hold 100% of the shares. Lets say you want to raise money from an investor. Investor Bob offers you $50 for 20% of the company. Since you are the only stock holder, you can easily give him 20% of the stock, for a $50 investment. There are two ways you can do this, however. 1) Lets assume there are 100 shares at incorporation. You have 100 shares. You transfer 20 shares to Bob, so that you have 80 shares, and bob gets 20 shares. That's 20 %. 2) Lets assum 100 shares. You hold all of them. Instead of transferring 20 shares, however, you create additional shares. It's your company, after all; all you have to do is pass a resolution issuing 25 additional shares, and granting them to Bob. You have 100 shares, Bob has 25 shares. This once again works out to a 80/20% split. You haven't devalued your shares, because the assets of the company those shares represent have increase by $50, and if you are agreeing to Bob's proposal, you believe that $50 = 20% of the value of the company.
Now, lets say you, me, and 8 other people have equal shares in your company, GA enterprises. We each hold 10% of the shares. Bob offers you $50 for 20% of the company.
There are two ways to do this; each of the investors could give up 2 of their shares, through a fairly painful process of negotiation. Or, the board of directors (probably just you, see you started the company, and are a greedy bastard (just kidding, but it makes the example easier;-) ) passes a resolution issuing 25 additional shares. Each original investor still holds 10 shares, and Bob gets 25. Each original investor will hold 8% of the company after the shares are issued; but they still have 10 shares each.
Make sense?
Of course, during incorporation, different companies establish different policies on the issuance of new shares. Some require unanimous approval of all investors, some require a majority decision, some require voting (2/3? 1/2? 3/4?) by the board of directors.
I hope this clarifies things:) Usually, startup companies don't hold shares in "storage" for the purpose of raising money. A company may issue additional shares at various points in order to seek investors, but it doesn't really serve any purpose to have 'unowned' shares hanging out there, and it can lead to additional complications.
Of course, most companies don't use pure stock dilution, either; because that devalues the founders shares too much. They'll often use a combination of dilution and stock splits, as you can dilute to create %% of new shares, and than stock splits to allow finer granulity in ownership.
I think they do need to be more upfront about their capping policies, but they also do make sense.
If you have a 30 Mbps connection, and you max it out 24/7, even if you are paying $100-200 a month you are definitely getting way more than you paid for:). Assuming that other people on your ISP's network are underutilizing their connection, it balances out. However, if they are NOT underutilizing their connections, you'll get a scenario where the ISP doesn't have enough bandwidth for all its customers; after all, every single ISP out there assumes some degree of idle time on each customers connection, which allows them to oversubscribe (that's why getting a residential connection is cheaper than an always-on backbone connection).
I'm not sure how to make that transparent, but there must be a way. I suspect even Verzion would ask you to throttle your usage if you and everyone else in your neighborhood were running your 30 Mbps connections 24/7; there's simply no way ANY ISP could afford to allow that situation to continue, at least without localizing various portions of that content.
Of course, Verizon's Fiber network doesn't have the additional level of bottlenecks represented by the cable companies' node structure. . . .
Go Verizon:) Too bad we've got SBC, not Verzion, in the Chicagoland area. Makes me wanna cry:)
I agree with you 98%. And Bravo Verizon, and shame on SBC(AT&T) for implementing the worst possible fiber rollout anyone could imagine.
But I don't think you should underestimate coax:)
Coax the way Comcast (and other cable providers) is deploying it bring to life the dream that SBC(AT&T) is chasing with project lightspeed. The primary limitation with coax isn't line capacity; its node capacity. If you run fiber intelligently and maintain a small number of users/node you can get an "almost" fiber network at significantly lower cost.
That's why the cable providers have "dynamic" speed caps. It sucks, but they actually do what they say; if your usage significantly degrades other people's speeds, you get booted. Otherwise, you don't. As they continue to break nodes apart and rollout more and more fiber, the invisible caps become less and less relevant.
And you're right; we *should* laugh at companies that say we don't need the speed. But don't knock companies that try and come up with innovative ways of leveraging current infrastructure, that's the beauty of capitalism.
Still, for the most part, fiber is the answer. And Verizon truly is doing it the Right Way(TM).
Shame on SBC for limiting households to 1 HD stream each.
I regularly download at 800 KBytes/sec. Occasionally, on a good day, I'll get 1100 KBytes/sec. This is on Comcast's home cable modem service. I also easily burst at 1600 KBytes/sec before their service settles down to the standard 11 KBytes/sec (they give you 5 seconds at 16 Mbps before it shapes down to 8 Mbps).
I see these speeds with many servers (specifically SuSE RPM mirrors and a wide variety of video download services).
And to your second reply, yes, I video conference on regular basis, and with multiple participants. iChatAV works beautifully.
From the reliable way Comcast's speed bursting works, I don't doubt I could get 16 Mbps downloads from a variety of servers I use regularly. Frankly, if I see anything download below 500 KBytes/sec, I tend to cancel the download; I figure I can find it faster elsewhere. Interestingly enough, this doesn't even include Bittorrent or P2P stuff, which easily max out my download. In terms of download capacity, I'm far more worried about ACKs saturating my upload (especially when the 16/1 Mbps service rolls out in my area) that poorly performing nodes on the backbone.
*shrug* I've seen this throughout the country. The long and the short of it is that if you see slower speeds on your "supposedly" faster connection, your ISP isn't purchasing enough bandwidth. There are plenty of servers on the internet that can max out a 16 Mbps download.
Remainder split up among a maximum of 3 SD streams, and phone service. Yes, this means you can't have more than 1 HD stream on project lightspeed. And you can't have more than 4 video streams, total.
Exactly how do I run a two browser life? And while Linux's desktop marketshare may be limited (this is arguable), it's indisputable that OS X has a small, but economically and socially significant portion of the desktop market.
Windows come with some driver archives. The notorious INF cabs/directory, for one, as well as previously install drivers that are maintained in the driver cache. As new hardware is put into the system, those drivers are added and removed from the system as needed. This can be a time consuming process, and if it involves "system critical" drivers, like ACPI stuff, or motherboard stuff, can easily cripple a system.
Linux comes with 99% of the modules you'll need precompiled and ready to load. Selection of which modules are needed (for the most part, some distributions rely upon overrides, as do some filesystems) is done dynamically on bootup. Swap motherboards, and your boot time is the same as before. No "installing drivers", no disk thrashing; that's because there is no such thing as an uninstalled "cached" driver on linux. Either the module is present, or it isn't. Loading a module is something the various hotplug systems do automatically, and instantaneously. There's no "list" of which are the relevant drivers, and which aren't. Notice that on Windows when you pull out a piece of hardware you can often see the "old" driver on the "hidden" tab of the device manager?
On Linux, you don't "install" drivers for the hardware you have in your system. You keep a modules collection for every piece of hardware that linux supports. As additional hardware supported is added, and becomes "stable", its integrated into the Linux kernel (ATI and Nvidia are notable exceptions). Once a driver is in the kernel, there is no "driver install" process; they are already there, all the time, on most every distribution's standard kernel build. Plug in the hardware, and it just works on next bootup. No install process, no nothing. Replace your ethernet card, the new card simply takes the same spot at eth0 in your network stack. No "installing" during bootup, no reconfiguration, no nothing.
You don't install drivers on linux. If a module you want is not included in your kernel's default build, you can compile the module; but this process has nothing to do with whether or not you actually have that piece of hardware on your system. It's really quite different....
Why stop at your kids? Reroute google.com -> 127.0.0.1 (and all google IPs, as well) at all the Microsoft Campuses.
Institute a new "security" policy. All non-Mac business unit employees may no longer bring iPods to work. They'll be confiscated on sight and destroyed.
You're the CEO. You can do stuff like that. After all, Windows Live search is a superior product. You'd be doing your staff a favor by redirecting them from Google.
Of course, you can setup a Google compatibility lab, where your employees do research on Google in a carefully controlled, monitored setting.
It's your company, and your dog food. Put 2 and 2 together, monkey-buddy.
This is true; and if I have to tweak the drivers, I'll log in as root.
But otherwise, I should be able to just plug in hardware, and have it work. No configuration, no nothing. Just work.
Like on Linux, and OS X. Plug in supported hardware, and it just works. Unlike Windows, where every piece of hardware you might purchase involves installing a manufacturer's driver CD.
Stop using Windows 98. I have moved harddrives between different Windows XP systems using different motherboard/chipsets and even CPUs. And I only had to reboot once at most.
BS
Turn ACPI off. Watch the system crash and burn. The windows driver model is no where near as dynamic as the Linux one.
Re:Besides Apple lacking legacy support...
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Why Windows is Slow
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Neither does MS.
Both rely upon hardware manufacturers to produce drivers. They both supply driver development kits.
I betcha the Apple one is easier to work with, too.
Maybe I'm an idiot and misunderstand who you are replying to.... but,
The article is talking about MS Windows, the development process, not Windows, the OS. More code, more legacy code = more developer hours to "rewrite" it, or whatever MS calls its current development process.
No need to make the decision that high up on the upstream. And legacy device support can be useful in the embedded space, or in military systems, or a variety of strange places (aerospace).
Distribution makers need to make this decision. And if you look around, you can find distros that ship kernels that are incompatible with anything pre i586 (and some are now i686)
There really isn't much of a performance benefit to be had from removing that stuff in the kernel. The maintainers for those branches keep stuff working, and new development/optimization goes into the newer stuff.
Strangely, the kernel development process actually works quite well.
Linux and OS X come with all drivers they'll ever need (well, most all. ATI and NVIDIA are big exceptions).
The Windows notion of drivers doesn't really work the same way on Linux. On Linux, you install everything you can possibly imagine. The kernel does some probing on bootup, and a variety of kernel-space services handle module dependancies, and it will load whatever is needed (and only what's needed) as the system boots up.
Ever try taking a hard drive with Windows on it and booting it on a system with a different motherboard? Or even just trying turning ACPI off in the BIOS? BSoD, most likely. At a minimum, you'll get 10 minutes of "Finding drivers", and a couple reboots.
Linux doesn't even blink, and modern distributions won't even mess up things like network bindings (the first ethernet card in the system remains eth0, regardless of the chipset).
Shared libraries (the linux equivalent of DLLs) work similarly. There is FAR more library dependancy on linux than Windows; few things on Linux are statically compiled. Instead, the dynamic linker does an excellent job of pulling everything together as needed. You normally don't see performance impacts from compiling in everything including the kitchen sink; and tricks like preloading and prelinking can speed things up more.
Even in terms of services, I think you'd be surprised the stuff that comes with Linux by default. With a slightly more than basic install you'll get a webserver, various network servers, and a full fledged SQL database running. Of course, most distributions also turn the firewall on by default, and block these ports (a very good thing).
I honestly think that architecture has more to do with it than you may think. Few people build a Linux kernel with only the bare essentials. Rather, most everyone builds a slim "main" kernel, and than compiles boat loads of crap into modules, which are then loaded on an as needed basis, for nearly every piece of hardware out there.
Drop an ATI or Happenhauge TV tuner into your system, and the relevant module will be loaded on demand, without user intervention, on the next reboot. Pull it out, and the module will not be loaded on the following reboot.
It presents a very streamlined vision to the user, at least when the drivers are from the mainline kernel tree (the development beta/alpha stuff is much more difficult to use).
Quite a few Window 95 apps break on XP. Especially XP SP2. And this list doesn't include weird obscure things.
Classic runs in virtualization, but that's actually a better solution. Application isolation means a malfunctioning classic app won't bring down the whole system, and the fact that classic is a complete OS 9 environment means no obscure bugs will get in the way of running applications.
There's really only a minor performance impact on the apps, anyways, and this is more than made up for by the vast increases in processor speed since OS 9.
Microsoft would do well to rely upon virtualization for backwards compatibility. Make a clean break with the past, wrap XP/Vista up in a virtual machine, and start fresh. The minor performance impact is worth the security/compatibility and code maintainability benefits.
Try installing latest Fedora Core, SUSE, or Ubuntu, and not only will the space they take up greatly exceed that of a proper Windows 2000/XP install Does Windows come with an Office Suite? CD Burning software? Image editing software? A development IDE? A variety of games? How about vector graphics software? Or a database?
What do you think takes up those 5 CDs in the SuSE install? The kernel? , but they will be much slower, because while hardware advanced, Linux still uses technology from 20 years ago to talk with the graphics card (X11), Those who do not understand X11 are doomed to reinvent it, poorly. X11 is a high speed, fully network transparent architecture. The Xfree86 people let it languish on the vine, but the Xorg fork has gotten things into gear again, and we're seeing the API move forward at a breakneck pace. Xorg 7.0 is really far more sophisticated than anything else on the market, including WGF/DirectX 10 or whatever MS is calling it, and even my beloved OS X's Aqua/Quartz.
Don't underestimate the extensibility of Xorg, and don't underestimate its performance. It's a lean, mean, high-performance and full featured windowing environment. still lacks kernel audio mixing Bzzzt.... dmix runs at the kernel level. Modern linux distributions enable it by default for all users. You can turn it off if you want lower latency audio. AFAIK, you have to call dmix from userspace, but the plugin is running directly "on the metal" of the alsa subsystem.
still lacks in PnP department (removing a "mounted" USB flash stick anyone?) Huh? Go to media:// (or click on the "Desktop" icon in Gnome, or click on the "Drives" icon in KDE, or go to the file browser). Right-click on the USB stick icon. Press "Eject" in the context menu.
Nay, Windows lacks in the PnP department. What the _hell_ is this concept of drivers, where I have to log in as administrator to install new hardware on my system? On Linux, I just plug it in, and the device node just appears, be it USB stick, WLAN card, ethernet card, or whatever. With a proper desktop environment I get a nice little pop-up asking if I want to configure it.
Oh, and Windows is braindead in the filesystem support department, as well. NTFS, and FAT32 are NOT enough for everyone's needs. Some people use modern journaling filesystems. Some people need to access HFS+ (that's the OS X file system). Some people need to access a wide variety of filesystems (don't forget the commercial UNIXes, which have a substantial marketshare in the server/workstation market). Perhaps someday MS will find the cash to hire a few more developers, and maybe even add a filesystem driver or two. Then again, given the ugly nature of the Windows Driver Model, this might not happen.....
still has abysmal support for various multimedia devices (no, the few tens reverse-engineered audio/video capture/etc drivers don't really count), etc etc This one is half true. Unless, of course, your a professional, and use firewire. Firewire, of course, works perfectly. I capture whatever I want directly from my HDV camcorder, or from my cable box. Oh, and my ATI and Happenhauge TV tuners work out-of-box, too. Without installing drivers.
But yes, you do have to be careful with what capture cards you purchase on Linux. Stick with good name brand stuff, however, and you'll do okay. Sorry if your crap-o-matic generic capture card doesn't work; shell out the $35 to go get a supported one. Here is a short list to get you started. None of these require drivers; they are integrated into the kernel. You can get other stuff that's not integrated into the kernel, but I wouldn't recommend messing with that.
Sadly, ATI and Nvidia have not released their VIVO (All-in-wonder) drivers for Linux yet. Both have committed to do so, however. All-in-wonder and VIVO (nvidia) support are avaliable, but only for older card
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As I said, don't agree to it if you don't like it. I for one will never buy DRM-enabled content unless it is drastically overhauled to give me greater control, but I don't believe we have any right to dictate through legislation how a company distributes content, any more than they have the right to dictate to us how it is used.
;-)
That's the salient point of your position, but I'm not clear on how that colors your opinion of the DMCA.
I agree; if a company wants to produced DRM-enabled content, good for them. However, once you've licensed the content from them (purchased a copy) should it be legal for you to break the protection on that content, so long as you do not violate their copyright in the process?
That's the _real_ anti-DRM position, not the "Save us, Uncle Sam, Ban DRM!" idiocy
How do you resolve the contamination problem, at least for crops?
Can't rememeber the name of that big agro-biotech firm, (Monsanto?) but they developed a bug and pesiticide resistant strain of corn.
Farmer A, who is adjacent to Farmer B, decides to license the super-corn. Farmer B doesn't, and is happy with his current grade of natural corn.
Well, nature does what it does best, and cross-pollinates Farmer A's corn with Farmer B's corn. Next season, Farmer B is unintentionally growing super corn. Under the current system, Farmer B is infringing Monsanto's patent, and either has to destroy his crop, or license the super-corn.
Don't you think that's a bit unfair? People bitch enough about the viral nature of the GPL; but for godsakes, genetic engineering is the _real_ thing, in terms of "infection". How do you make nature and patens cooperate?
You can see the next step, too. Company X develops human gene for 100% resistance to the common cold. Company X sells this service, permitting you to artificially splice that gene into your children.
Company X then insists that your children must license their patent if they produce offspring. Of course, the current patent term precludes this from happening, but given the way copyright protections have been extended I wouldn't be surprised to see patent protections extended either.
FIVE YEARS??? They're insane. It can take five years for a band to work their way up from garage band to being noteworthy enough to get a recording contract. This would mean that all of their early works would be unprotected right as they became popular enough to actually make money off them.
:(
For individually-owned copyrights, give them lifetime rights, plus five or ten years (as opposed to 75...this allows their unreleased works to be profitable for their heirs). If at any time copyrights are transfered from the creator to another individual or corporation, give them the same 5-10 years the family would get if the author died. This would encourage more creators to hang on to their rights rather than give them to corporations.
Totally unnecessary.
1. For the most part, bands make money of performances, not record distribution. It's different for the top 1%, but that's not the majority of the music industry, and heaven forbid, I think the needs of the many outweight the needs of the few.
2. Lyrics != Performance. You've got a gig at Joe's Podunk Bingo Bar. You play a new song, "Song X". 5 years later, _that_ specific performance of the song, and the lyrics of the song become public domain. However, each individual performance of the song (not to mention studio recording) is covered under copyright protection from the date it was played.
3. Part of the idea here is to break the "recording industry" model. The recording industry is for shit. Seriously. It burns out most artists, it produces a lot of crap, and the "sponsored" industry-raised bands generally suck quite a bit more than the garage bands that fight their way up from the trenches. In this day and age, as a garage band, you'll have difficult selling your material via online distribution, or the variety of weird music kiosk-like (on demand TV?) systems out there. With online distribution, and CD labeling/packaging produced on demand, even if you refuse to touch a computer (and hate the internet), there's no reason your local record store couldn't produce what you wanted, at any given time, without caring about what they had in stock.
Why don't we have this now? The music industry cartel. Frankly, I couldn't care less if copyright rules were changed that gutted the cartel, and gutted the top 1% of artists. Break indefinite grant of monopoly protection to these companies, and you won't have to worry about them stealing your music.
Oh, and if you can't sell your stuff in an internet-only world after 5 years of protection, your probably going to have to change something
I'd be very, very, very careful with your idea of lifetime grants -> 5 years if transferred to a corportation. Unless you write the law incredibly well, you'll end up with the current system re-establishing itself somehow. For example, without a doubt, you'd have to make it so that the 5-10 year expiration is retroactive; otherwise, one could imagine all kinds of interesting loan/grant schemes coming up.
But try looking at it my way. What would happen if _every_ work of music was only protected by 5 years of protection? Other than the immediate collapse of the RIAA-style recording industry as their investors run screaming into the sunset, what do you think would happen? This isn't a rhetorical question, I'm honestly asking you what you think would go wrong. Part of the solution might be covering various aspects of the work for a variety of periods; live performances for 10 years, studio performances for 5 years, lyrics for 20 years, that kind of thing.
Oh, and I agree with you on patents. However, there's no reason not to shorten the life of patents from the 14(20?) years they currently are, depending upon the application. Software patents should last more than 1-2 years. DNA patents shouldn't last long either. Complex industrial processes, however, which require years of research & development, even by the big boys, would be different.
*shrug* just my 2 cents.
Without copyright, companies could fork GPL software and make it closed source . . . . . . .
The real answer to resolving patent/copyright issues is radically reducing the length of protection. As technology makes it easier and easier to commercialize your idea/IP, and as society fundamentally becomes more wealthy, it should take less time to bring products to market, reap monopoly profits, and then maintain a strong position in the market by issue of being allowed in first.
If you can't turn your idea into something productive within a few years, you don't need protection. Patent's are almost sort of reasonable in this regard, but even the current 14 year term is a bit much.
Copyright has become truly inane; what is it, 40 years after the death of the original creator? Preposterous in an age of internet distribution, where time-to-market is ~1 week, and distribution costs nil (in comparison to the days of old).
You're right; the government should protect IP producers. However, once the government has established enough of a benefit such that IP producers choose to continue to sell their wares, why should the government grant them indefinite monopoly profits? Also, precisely why does the government continue to protect the IP of products which are not distributed. If a company isn't distributing it, and is merely sitting on the IP in order to stall the market, we aren't seeing advancement of the arts & sciences.
Well, yes and no. In a small enough company, the few primary shareholders can (and often will) consider giving away their own shares in order to strength the company.
.) The 5% in this example is to some degree symbolic; you don't really want to cut them out of the deal.
I've seen it done. And in many situations it works out well.
Scenario: You run a small company. You need a significant amount of financing to go from development -> production. You've secured a purchaser, but for whatever reason can't use standard banking channels.
You hold 95% of the company. Two small investors hold 2.25% each. You're a small business; you don't have a lot of employees, you're mainly a tech company, and you're the primary inventor.
Someone offers to toss $10 million into your company for 30% ownership.
*shrug*. Why not give them 33% of your holdings? Giving up some of your shares is functionally equivalent to "investing" into the company. It be no different from selling your shares, and then pouring that money into the company. Frankly, it'd be no different from investing your time and effort, either. Of course, we aren't talking Fortune 500; I mean a small startup company that's comprised of your blood, sweat, and tears.
This would be especially true when those 5% investors are close friends, or family, or are somehow socially tied to you (professor you are close to, wife, child, someone who offered some small, but crucial asset, etc. .
Where do you draw the line between small enough and big enough? I personally know someone who held a 60% share in a moderate sized entity (his startup, ~$10 million in revenue annually) who traded 5% of his personal holdings in exchange for "purchasing" the right to another investors royalties on earnings, which made the difference on per-unit production costs. Could he have worked out a different solution with the board of directors?
Possibly; but as the CEO and main shareholder, not to mention a very good friend of the shareholder with the royalty right, it was more convenient and more practical to simply resolve the issue immediately. This action directly resulted in the resumption of some contract negotiations, which helped the company to succeed that year.
In private companies of moderate size and smaller, you'll often see these kinds of arrangements that aren't strictly financially optimal to everyone involved, but it can significantly reduce the amount of headache involved, and permit the business to move forward as fast as possible without bogging it down in tedious negiotiations.
*shrug* It happens, but its probably not the norm. Dilution probably occurs more often, but one should be aware of arrangements like this.
Usually founders of a company start with around 5% or so, and leave the rest for investors, and stock awards for employees.
;-) ) passes a resolution issuing 25 additional shares. Each original investor still holds 10 shares, and Bob gets 25. Each original investor will hold 8% of the company after the shares are issued; but they still have 10 shares each.
:) Usually, startup companies don't hold shares in "storage" for the purpose of raising money. A company may issue additional shares at various points in order to seek investors, but it doesn't really serve any purpose to have 'unowned' shares hanging out there, and it can lead to additional complications.
Stock dilution.
Here's how it works:
You (General Alcazar) have a company. GA Enterprises. You hold 100% of the shares. Lets say you want to raise money from an investor. Investor Bob offers you $50 for 20% of the company. Since you are the only stock holder, you can easily give him 20% of the stock, for a $50 investment. There are two ways you can do this, however.
1) Lets assume there are 100 shares at incorporation. You have 100 shares. You transfer 20 shares to Bob, so that you have 80 shares, and bob gets 20 shares. That's 20 %.
2) Lets assum 100 shares. You hold all of them. Instead of transferring 20 shares, however, you create additional shares. It's your company, after all; all you have to do is pass a resolution issuing 25 additional shares, and granting them to Bob. You have 100 shares, Bob has 25 shares. This once again works out to a 80/20% split. You haven't devalued your shares, because the assets of the company those shares represent have increase by $50, and if you are agreeing to Bob's proposal, you believe that $50 = 20% of the value of the company.
Now, lets say you, me, and 8 other people have equal shares in your company, GA enterprises. We each hold 10% of the shares. Bob offers you $50 for 20% of the company.
There are two ways to do this; each of the investors could give up 2 of their shares, through a fairly painful process of negotiation. Or, the board of directors (probably just you, see you started the company, and are a greedy bastard (just kidding, but it makes the example easier
Make sense?
Of course, during incorporation, different companies establish different policies on the issuance of new shares. Some require unanimous approval of all investors, some require a majority decision, some require voting (2/3? 1/2? 3/4?) by the board of directors.
I hope this clarifies things
Of course, most companies don't use pure stock dilution, either; because that devalues the founders shares too much. They'll often use a combination of dilution and stock splits, as you can dilute to create %% of new shares, and than stock splits to allow finer granulity in ownership.
I think they do need to be more upfront about their capping policies, but they also do make sense.
:). Assuming that other people on your ISP's network are underutilizing their connection, it balances out. However, if they are NOT underutilizing their connections, you'll get a scenario where the ISP doesn't have enough bandwidth for all its customers; after all, every single ISP out there assumes some degree of idle time on each customers connection, which allows them to oversubscribe (that's why getting a residential connection is cheaper than an always-on backbone connection).
:) Too bad we've got SBC, not Verzion, in the Chicagoland area. Makes me wanna cry :)
If you have a 30 Mbps connection, and you max it out 24/7, even if you are paying $100-200 a month you are definitely getting way more than you paid for
I'm not sure how to make that transparent, but there must be a way. I suspect even Verzion would ask you to throttle your usage if you and everyone else in your neighborhood were running your 30 Mbps connections 24/7; there's simply no way ANY ISP could afford to allow that situation to continue, at least without localizing various portions of that content.
Of course, Verizon's Fiber network doesn't have the additional level of bottlenecks represented by the cable companies' node structure. . . .
Go Verizon
I agree with you 98%. And Bravo Verizon, and shame on SBC(AT&T) for implementing the worst possible fiber rollout anyone could imagine.
:)
But I don't think you should underestimate coax
Coax the way Comcast (and other cable providers) is deploying it bring to life the dream that SBC(AT&T) is chasing with project lightspeed. The primary limitation with coax isn't line capacity; its node capacity. If you run fiber intelligently and maintain a small number of users/node you can get an "almost" fiber network at significantly lower cost.
That's why the cable providers have "dynamic" speed caps. It sucks, but they actually do what they say; if your usage significantly degrades other people's speeds, you get booted. Otherwise, you don't. As they continue to break nodes apart and rollout more and more fiber, the invisible caps become less and less relevant.
And you're right; we *should* laugh at companies that say we don't need the speed. But don't knock companies that try and come up with innovative ways of leveraging current infrastructure, that's the beauty of capitalism.
Still, for the most part, fiber is the answer. And Verizon truly is doing it the Right Way(TM).
Shame on SBC for limiting households to 1 HD stream each.
You're full of shit..... :)
I regularly download at 800 KBytes/sec. Occasionally, on a good day, I'll get 1100 KBytes/sec. This is on Comcast's home cable modem service. I also easily burst at 1600 KBytes/sec before their service settles down to the standard 11 KBytes/sec (they give you 5 seconds at 16 Mbps before it shapes down to 8 Mbps).
I see these speeds with many servers (specifically SuSE RPM mirrors and a wide variety of video download services).
And to your second reply, yes, I video conference on regular basis, and with multiple participants. iChatAV works beautifully.
From the reliable way Comcast's speed bursting works, I don't doubt I could get 16 Mbps downloads from a variety of servers I use regularly. Frankly, if I see anything download below 500 KBytes/sec, I tend to cancel the download; I figure I can find it faster elsewhere. Interestingly enough, this doesn't even include Bittorrent or P2P stuff, which easily max out my download. In terms of download capacity, I'm far more worried about ACKs saturating my upload (especially when the 16/1 Mbps service rolls out in my area) that poorly performing nodes on the backbone.
*shrug* I've seen this throughout the country. The long and the short of it is that if you see slower speeds on your "supposedly" faster connection, your ISP isn't purchasing enough bandwidth. There are plenty of servers on the internet that can max out a 16 Mbps download.
AFAIK, they did.
IBM's Workplace.
It's a (supposedly) light-weight, run-everywhere java client.
*shrug*. I dunno, haven't played with it myself, but the concept sound damn good.
Your wrong, but only slightly.
Here's AT&T's project lightspeed in a nutshell:
25 MBit/sec service to the home.
1.5-6 MBit/sec reserved for internet.
12 MBit/sec reserved for 1 HD stream.
Remainder split up among a maximum of 3 SD streams, and phone service. Yes, this means you can't have more than 1 HD stream on project lightspeed. And you can't have more than 4 video streams, total.
I regulary get downloads in the 900 KBytes/sec range.
On occasion, I've see downloads in the 1100 KBytes/sec range. This is on comcast's 8 mbit service.
Works as advertised, for me.
AT&T, you suck. I can't wait to see the cable providers quoting your CEO on their advertising literature.
Oh, and I believe their service maxes out at one HD stream per residence.
Huh, you say?
I've got 3 HD boxes at my house right now. I can get 3 HD on demand streams at any given time. Project Lightspeed = already outdated.
Exactly ;)
:)
Voting with your dollar. I'm with ya
IE doesn't run on my systems.
Linux or OS X.
Exactly how do I run a two browser life? And while Linux's desktop marketshare may be limited (this is arguable), it's indisputable that OS X has a small, but economically and socially significant portion of the desktop market.
No, there's really quite a big difference.
Windows come with some driver archives. The notorious INF cabs/directory, for one, as well as previously install drivers that are maintained in the driver cache. As new hardware is put into the system, those drivers are added and removed from the system as needed. This can be a time consuming process, and if it involves "system critical" drivers, like ACPI stuff, or motherboard stuff, can easily cripple a system.
Linux comes with 99% of the modules you'll need precompiled and ready to load. Selection of which modules are needed (for the most part, some distributions rely upon overrides, as do some filesystems) is done dynamically on bootup. Swap motherboards, and your boot time is the same as before. No "installing drivers", no disk thrashing; that's because there is no such thing as an uninstalled "cached" driver on linux. Either the module is present, or it isn't. Loading a module is something the various hotplug systems do automatically, and instantaneously. There's no "list" of which are the relevant drivers, and which aren't. Notice that on Windows when you pull out a piece of hardware you can often see the "old" driver on the "hidden" tab of the device manager?
On Linux, you don't "install" drivers for the hardware you have in your system. You keep a modules collection for every piece of hardware that linux supports. As additional hardware supported is added, and becomes "stable", its integrated into the Linux kernel (ATI and Nvidia are notable exceptions). Once a driver is in the kernel, there is no "driver install" process; they are already there, all the time, on most every distribution's standard kernel build. Plug in the hardware, and it just works on next bootup. No install process, no nothing. Replace your ethernet card, the new card simply takes the same spot at eth0 in your network stack. No "installing" during bootup, no reconfiguration, no nothing.
You don't install drivers on linux. If a module you want is not included in your kernel's default build, you can compile the module; but this process has nothing to do with whether or not you actually have that piece of hardware on your system. It's really quite different....
Ballmer:
Why stop at your kids? Reroute google.com -> 127.0.0.1 (and all google IPs, as well) at all the Microsoft Campuses.
Institute a new "security" policy. All non-Mac business unit employees may no longer bring iPods to work. They'll be confiscated on sight and destroyed.
You're the CEO. You can do stuff like that. After all, Windows Live search is a superior product. You'd be doing your staff a favor by redirecting them from Google.
Of course, you can setup a Google compatibility lab, where your employees do research on Google in a carefully controlled, monitored setting.
It's your company, and your dog food. Put 2 and 2 together, monkey-buddy.
This is true; and if I have to tweak the drivers, I'll log in as root.
But otherwise, I should be able to just plug in hardware, and have it work. No configuration, no nothing. Just work.
Like on Linux, and OS X. Plug in supported hardware, and it just works. Unlike Windows, where every piece of hardware you might purchase involves installing a manufacturer's driver CD.
Stop using Windows 98. I have moved harddrives between different Windows XP systems using different motherboard/chipsets and even CPUs. And I only had to reboot once at most.
BS
Turn ACPI off. Watch the system crash and burn. The windows driver model is no where near as dynamic as the Linux one.
Neither does MS.
Both rely upon hardware manufacturers to produce drivers. They both supply driver development kits.
I betcha the Apple one is easier to work with, too.
Maybe I'm an idiot and misunderstand who you are replying to.... but,
;-)
The article is talking about MS Windows, the development process, not Windows, the OS. More code, more legacy code = more developer hours to "rewrite" it, or whatever MS calls its current development process.
This, I believe, it true
No need to make the decision that high up on the upstream. And legacy device support can be useful in the embedded space, or in military systems, or a variety of strange places (aerospace).
Distribution makers need to make this decision. And if you look around, you can find distros that ship kernels that are incompatible with anything pre i586 (and some are now i686)
There really isn't much of a performance benefit to be had from removing that stuff in the kernel. The maintainers for those branches keep stuff working, and new development/optimization goes into the newer stuff.
Strangely, the kernel development process actually works quite well.
Errr ... not really
Linux and OS X come with all drivers they'll ever need (well, most all. ATI and NVIDIA are big exceptions).
The Windows notion of drivers doesn't really work the same way on Linux. On Linux, you install everything you can possibly imagine. The kernel does some probing on bootup, and a variety of kernel-space services handle module dependancies, and it will load whatever is needed (and only what's needed) as the system boots up.
Ever try taking a hard drive with Windows on it and booting it on a system with a different motherboard? Or even just trying turning ACPI off in the BIOS? BSoD, most likely. At a minimum, you'll get 10 minutes of "Finding drivers", and a couple reboots.
Linux doesn't even blink, and modern distributions won't even mess up things like network bindings (the first ethernet card in the system remains eth0, regardless of the chipset).
Shared libraries (the linux equivalent of DLLs) work similarly. There is FAR more library dependancy on linux than Windows; few things on Linux are statically compiled. Instead, the dynamic linker does an excellent job of pulling everything together as needed. You normally don't see performance impacts from compiling in everything including the kitchen sink; and tricks like preloading and prelinking can speed things up more.
Even in terms of services, I think you'd be surprised the stuff that comes with Linux by default. With a slightly more than basic install you'll get a webserver, various network servers, and a full fledged SQL database running. Of course, most distributions also turn the firewall on by default, and block these ports (a very good thing).
I honestly think that architecture has more to do with it than you may think. Few people build a Linux kernel with only the bare essentials. Rather, most everyone builds a slim "main" kernel, and than compiles boat loads of crap into modules, which are then loaded on an as needed basis, for nearly every piece of hardware out there.
Drop an ATI or Happenhauge TV tuner into your system, and the relevant module will be loaded on demand, without user intervention, on the next reboot. Pull it out, and the module will not be loaded on the following reboot.
It presents a very streamlined vision to the user, at least when the drivers are from the mainline kernel tree (the development beta/alpha stuff is much more difficult to use).
Quite a few Window 95 apps break on XP. Especially XP SP2. And this list doesn't include weird obscure things.
Classic runs in virtualization, but that's actually a better solution. Application isolation means a malfunctioning classic app won't bring down the whole system, and the fact that classic is a complete OS 9 environment means no obscure bugs will get in the way of running applications.
There's really only a minor performance impact on the apps, anyways, and this is more than made up for by the vast increases in processor speed since OS 9.
Microsoft would do well to rely upon virtualization for backwards compatibility. Make a clean break with the past, wrap XP/Vista up in a virtual machine, and start fresh. The minor performance impact is worth the security/compatibility and code maintainability benefits.
Ah, I love the smell of MS-fanboi in the morning.
Try installing latest Fedora Core, SUSE, or Ubuntu, and not only will the space they take up greatly exceed that of a proper Windows 2000/XP install
Does Windows come with an Office Suite? CD Burning software? Image editing software? A development IDE? A variety of games? How about vector graphics software? Or a database?
What do you think takes up those 5 CDs in the SuSE install? The kernel?
, but they will be much slower, because while hardware advanced, Linux still uses technology from 20 years ago to talk with the graphics card (X11),
Those who do not understand X11 are doomed to reinvent it, poorly. X11 is a high speed, fully network transparent architecture. The Xfree86 people let it languish on the vine, but the Xorg fork has gotten things into gear again, and we're seeing the API move forward at a breakneck pace. Xorg 7.0 is really far more sophisticated than anything else on the market, including WGF/DirectX 10 or whatever MS is calling it, and even my beloved OS X's Aqua/Quartz.
Don't underestimate the extensibility of Xorg, and don't underestimate its performance. It's a lean, mean, high-performance and full featured windowing environment.
still lacks kernel audio mixing
Bzzzt.... dmix runs at the kernel level. Modern linux distributions enable it by default for all users. You can turn it off if you want lower latency audio. AFAIK, you have to call dmix from userspace, but the plugin is running directly "on the metal" of the alsa subsystem.
still lacks in PnP department (removing a "mounted" USB flash stick anyone?)
Huh? Go to media:// (or click on the "Desktop" icon in Gnome, or click on the "Drives" icon in KDE, or go to the file browser). Right-click on the USB stick icon. Press "Eject" in the context menu.
Nay, Windows lacks in the PnP department. What the _hell_ is this concept of drivers, where I have to log in as administrator to install new hardware on my system? On Linux, I just plug it in, and the device node just appears, be it USB stick, WLAN card, ethernet card, or whatever. With a proper desktop environment I get a nice little pop-up asking if I want to configure it.
Oh, and Windows is braindead in the filesystem support department, as well. NTFS, and FAT32 are NOT enough for everyone's needs. Some people use modern journaling filesystems. Some people need to access HFS+ (that's the OS X file system). Some people need to access a wide variety of filesystems (don't forget the commercial UNIXes, which have a substantial marketshare in the server/workstation market). Perhaps someday MS will find the cash to hire a few more developers, and maybe even add a filesystem driver or two. Then again, given the ugly nature of the Windows Driver Model, this might not happen.....
still has abysmal support for various multimedia devices (no, the few tens reverse-engineered audio/video capture/etc drivers don't really count), etc etc
This one is half true. Unless, of course, your a professional, and use firewire. Firewire, of course, works perfectly. I capture whatever I want directly from my HDV camcorder, or from my cable box. Oh, and my ATI and Happenhauge TV tuners work out-of-box, too. Without installing drivers.
But yes, you do have to be careful with what capture cards you purchase on Linux. Stick with good name brand stuff, however, and you'll do okay. Sorry if your crap-o-matic generic capture card doesn't work; shell out the $35 to go get a supported one. Here is a short list to get you started. None of these require drivers; they are integrated into the kernel. You can get other stuff that's not integrated into the kernel, but I wouldn't recommend messing with that.
Sadly, ATI and Nvidia have not released their VIVO (All-in-wonder) drivers for Linux yet. Both have committed to do so, however. All-in-wonder and VIVO (nvidia) support are avaliable, but only for older card
So you go months without patching or driver updates?
AFAIK, XP requires reboots nearly every patch cycle, and at MOST those are monthly.