You can't claim there's anything wrong with making money by creating a better product that does the same thing as something already out there. Lets say i buy a copy of Clarisworks 4.0. It does most of the same things Microsoft Word does. It reads most Microsoft Word documents. I no longer have a reason to buy Microsoft Word. Well, that's certainly a lost sale for Microsoft. Is that piracy?
Copying a creation is bad. Copying a functionality is not bad. The second implies, as the parent post said, you have created something. You have possibly created something for "immoral" [making money off others' work?] purposes, and it's possible the thing "created" is merely a creation in the form of a reimplementation of something that someone else created. But you _did_ something, at least, and almost certainly in the process added [created] some sort of functionality that was not there in the first place. [even is said functionality is just a nifty cheat mode that is nothing more than a modified version of a thing you used for debugging.]
You may notice my arguments are slightly contradictory. That's because the _situation_ is contradictory. _There Is No Right Answer Here!_ No matter how the laws are set up, there WILL be a way for someone to get screwed who does not deserve to get screwed.
Because when you buy something like a playstation, you aren't paying for a creation. You're paying for a functionality, the functionality of whatever it is the program/console does. You probably bought Clarisworks for a functionality [writing documents] as well, but that's different, because there there are other factors _besides_ functionality to consider-- implementation, interface, etc. You can't say the same thing with a PSX. These days, making a console is _selling_ an API-- yeah, yeah, you're selling hardware, sure. But kickass specialised hardware is easy to come by these days. These days the important part is constructing a good, powerful, usable API, making it available and attractive to developers and the public, and recruiting and organising and orchistrating developers and basically just building a _community_. This is where all your expenses go, not into constructing the hardware it runs on. And when you're reverse-engineering a piece of hardware, you just have to worry about the reverse engineering and the piece of hardware; the community is just, well, already there. Sure, Sony makes money off the community [developer liscences == very very lucrative] and not the actual hardware PSX itself, but at some point when the hardware becomes irrelivant because things like Connectix VGS have become so mainstreamed and the costs of emulation can be so easily absorbed by just using a faster or specialised chip.. well, you start to get to the point where you can question the point of creating the API in the first place since it will just be used, and then, well, what are the console developers going to sell?
But see, there isn't anything you can _do_ about it. You can't prevent someone from reimplementing the PSX as a different piece of hardware with the same functionality without simultaneously preventing things like Wine [which i don't think anyone would call immoral unless they sucked] because they do the same thing at the core-- it's just that one is bad because it replaces the PSX hardcore and serves no purpose beyond making money for its creators, and the other , while it is possible to use it _in place of_ windows, does not replace windows itself, and actually creates something by allowing you to do something not possible before, running windows apps run without having to use linux. There's a difference here, between compatibility and replacement, which is subtle, hard to define, and impossible to make into a law. Are you going to start saying people should be not allowed to use certain functionality no matter how they do it? Are you going to start saying nobody should be allowed to make something that does the same thing as something already existing? That's pretty foreign to current patent law, which doesn't allow you to patent an _idea_-- just a _process_. You can't patent the solution, just the steps you took to get there from the problem. You can't stop someone else from taking a different path. And you shouldn't be able to. The reverse engineering exception in the patent laws are there for a reason, to prevent people from using their control over their product to hurt people based on their dependance on what the product does, or doing things like purposefully breeding incompatibility just to hurt a competitor. Note that the patent exception states "for compatibility reasons", which neatly leaves out anything that would actually simply stealing an idea in most cases.
Any action which is designed to make compatibility more difficult will in the end remove choice, and lack of choice very rarely [and NEVER in this context] does _anything_ to consumers other than hurt them.
"Not illegal" != "moral" may be true, but so is ("not moral" != "could be illegalized" || "not moral" != "should be illegalized")...
OH GOD, I FEEL THEIR PAIN!!! i mentioned i was a McClure, no? For about three years, "mcclure" or "mcclure111" (depending on letter limit) was my handle on various chat and message board forums. -- EVERY -- --SINGLE-- --F******-- [does anyone mind if i curse here? better safe than sorry, i guess] --TIME-- i would go into a room.. SOMEBODY would make a joke that went like "Hi, i'm Troy McClure. You may remember me from such channels as #macintosh, #macdev, #bjork..." Yeh, sure, it's just a joke. That's how i looked at it first. You start looking at things like that differently once you've heard them more than fifty times. guess why i use the nick "mcc" now. -_-
Take notice, none of the following is terribly ontopic, but it's interesting. And before i start, i would like to note that the name "MRJ" is already registered and MRJ-1s is going to have to surrender their mrjones.com domain.
I saw this thing on 60 minutes once. Some tiny restaurant had opened up in the middle of scotland. LIke, one single building in the middle of a town that didn't look exactly overly urban. They named themselves "McMunchies". McDonalds sued the shit out of them. You can guess what for. This despite the fact that only an idiot would mistake the one for the other or think that the McMunchies resteraunt was in any way connected to McDonalds. And that the prefix "Mc" or "Mac" is a very common traditional prefix to scottish surnames meaning "the son of" [i think]. [this post is, btw, being made by a McClure, so i have some amount of personal interest in this, seeing as it may end with my surname being owned by a corporation..]
Lord MacDonald of MacDonald, who if ANYONE can "own" the name MacDonald, "owns" it in the sense that he is the clan leader, it is his title and his family has owned it for, what, a thousand years? was rather upset by this [understandably.. McDonalds didn't feel like they had to ask _his_ permission to name their resteraunt, but then feel like the name..] and set up some sort of legal defense fund. And then he decided to open a restaurant. He called it "MacDonalds." So if you feel like it, you can go to Scotland and go to a McDonalds where they serve rather nice steak, pheasant, etc., in a rather old building surrounded by rolling green hills..
If anyone would like to fill in details, or if you'd like to look for yourself or something.
Or rather look at http://www.mcspotlight.org/media/press/telegraph _24sep96.html http://www.mcspotlight.org/media/press/herald_7o ct96.html
"Mr Ronald McDonald, retired teacher, said the use of the name Ronald McDonald for the clown used by the company to entertain children was an insult to the Scottish clan system. " Now if that isn't a good quote i don't know what is.
The opinion that Ghost in the Shell was rushed/shallow/had a bad ending seems to be shared by quite a lot of people i've talked to.. but then again all of those people also said that the manga was much , much better than the anime, especially in those three respects. So i suggest you find the manga.. i'm sorry to say i have not yet managed to find a copy, and can't comment myself..
I believe the object of the parent post was to point out that "existing or proposed storage technologies" are holding back technological progress by, well, more or less your logic of "it doesn't work with what everyone's using now, so why bother"? In other words, that new ways of thinking at the problem are needed, and that if someone, somewhere, _really_, _really_ wanted to, and that someone just happened to have a whole bunch of money to throw at researching the problem, they could probably at the least come up with some ideas which would _lead_ to a way of resolving the problems you bring up with leaving the "paradigm" or whatever... but nobody's going to _do_ that unless for some wierd reason the conventional "paradigm" becomes unusable.. people are lazy and will always want to just build more heavy-duty versions of the old tools rather than trying to find a new tool for the same task.
While i apologize deeply for the mispelling of "definitely", i take issue with your to complain about my usage of the word "i".
The word "i" was deliberately placed into lowercase despite a full awareness of the proper usage. I purposefully put "i" into lowercase when it is not the beginning of the sentance out of choice. I fail to see why "I" is uppercased, but not "you"; if anything this odd capitalisation exception [which is not seen in almost any other language] is indicitave of the almost rediculous emphasis on self-importance and deemphasis on self-sacrifice that pervades american culture so deeply. In effect, it is either saying that the person writing is important enough to be capitalized when they are the subject of the sentance, but not the listener, or it is saying nothing at all. Thus as i am unhappy with the general mindset of our culture that self must be promoted at all costs, i am unhappy with the pronoun pronunciation rules and do not take part in them. The non-capitalisation of "i" was not a mistake, it was a form of protest.
I realize this may not have been obvious because of the posting's other grammar mistakes-- namely the failure to begin sentances with capital letters three out of four times or so and the beginning of a sentance with a conjunction-- but it is the case. Understand that the post you replied to was meant to be a quick sidenote, not something meaningful. I am aware this post contains at least one mispelled word and possibly unclear syntax. This is not purposeful; however, i do not care enough to fix them.
> and the bad ass evil dude is a humanoid, not a nasty green-eyed bug alien.
A racist humanoid, no less. The whole allegory to the nazi-style "master race" motif gets a lot more emphasized if you'll read the books, but still the Empire was very "anti-alien" and believed all other species to be below humans. Pretty much the opposite of what Katz said.. _we_ are the race doing the ravaging, everyone else is being victimised. The humans are the evil power, not because we have the better technology but because we set up a political structure and then betrayed the galaxy..
i would like to point out for anyone reading that [even though i haven't seen the movie and can't comment], the _book_ for "the rats of NIMH" was amazing, and probably better than the movie [based solely on the fact that, well, it always is]. It really is kind of a kid's book, and probably won't take you long [i think, i don't remember, been year..] but it's creative enough you can put up with that. Just find a library or something. In short, if you're bored enough to rent "rats of NIMH" you're definately bored enough to read it and you should. And if it comes down to reading NIMH or watching, say, the movie "boys and girls" in theaters now.. you want NIMH.
btw.. quick question.. am i the only person who every time i see the phrase "NIH syndrome" [Not Invented Here] i automatically think of NIMH..?
Blah. American animated movies funded by large companies.. useless. Who cares. Well, at least it wasn't a musical.
I suggest we use this thread to suggest to people some _real_, _creative_, maybe even *gasp* _deep_, *cough cough* ANIME *cough* animation they could be seeing if they want some kind of vaguely scifi-ish "edgy" thing.
There is, of course, the obvious [Ghost in the Shell, Nuku Nuku, Evangelon].. and i hear Lain is pretty good but i haven't gotten around to seeing it yet.. anyone want to suggest for me any really freaky/obscure anime i've never heard of?
Is there actually _any_ american animation of this type that doesn't suck? Lets see, there's Daria and South Park, but they're really something else.. i guess there's always Aeon Flux/Power Puff Girls/Space ghost or whatever.. i'm sure there's something good i'm missing.. is there? There was an ad i saw for something on the scifi channel that looked kind of nifty, any idea what that might have been? Is there any american animation that is truly and completely tripped out, not just "edgy"..?
Umm, ok, that's really wierd. Bungie, the one game company i had been aware of that would prioritize the mac version _ahead_ of the windows version.
_Why_ did MS choose _bungie_, of all companies? Yes, Halo and Oni look like they will be maybe two of the best games ever made, but still, MS could have just _liscensed_ those to port them to xbox, the way Loki or whoever ported Myth to linux did. And it says this way, they dont even get Oni..??
Seems awfully suspicious, just as the mac and linux begins getting some decent support in terms of games, microsoft finds the most crossplatformly open-minded company out there and buys it. I mean, the only reasons i can think of that MS would choose _them_ to buy would be.. well, really really paranoid conspiracy-theorist, to say the least.
Which brings me to the question: What about directx? Because buying Bungie would kind of imply MS is abandoning Directx. Unless, of course, Bungies games start _using_ directx.. in which case we'll know that my most absurdly paranoid assumptions in the previous paragraph were completely right.
I know one thing though, MS isn't taking this whole breakup thing very seriously if they're still buying companies-- esp. since it seems to me if you're going to split OS from Apps, a game console hardware developer would sound a lot like OS and a game developer would sound a lot like Apps..
"clickable mpegs that link to URLs of affiliate programs, so movie companies can release movies for free and then make their money by taking a percentage of the profits from all the consumption they induce"
"Extend this file format to support something similar to HTML image maps. Then take product placement in movies to the next level: Everything in the movie is clickable. If you're watching a movie and you see a shirt you think is totally fly, you click right on the shirt, and it opens a browser and links to a website that sells that very shirt."
Quicktime has structures capable of doing this very thing already. This may mean you can do it in MPEG-4.
I'm not sure of the technical details. I think quicktime does it using its sprite system, and i don't think the sprite system is in MPEG-4. But MPEG-4 has at the least quicktime's track system right..? So it would be relatively easy to reimplement whatever apple uses to handle links in quicktime movies into MPEG-4 as an extention, right? Or you could just actually use quicktime [you could even make the video compressor in the quicktime movie be MPEG if that's important to you], but i realize that isn't an option for most of you.
please excuse any ignorance in this post. anyway, this whole shouldexist.org thing looks unbelievably cool. i've been wishing someone would make something like this for a long time.
ugh.. in my opinion, anything that allows this unholy format to become entrenched even further only hurts us all in the end, because if we do not allow it to sink quietly and naturally into the night it will torment us for years with its presence. But i shouldn't have just said that, becuase i fear i will start a flamewar. Ah well.
however, my question is: since DivX is, in some bastardised way, related to MPEG-4, once the real MPEG-4 is finalised will it be possible to adapt the XMPS code as a base for an MPEG-4 codec? Seems like if this is the case, then the time spent developing the DivX codec will have been very very useful. I can't access the page; what liscence is it released under? GPL or LGPL i assume? [go lgpl!]
<font size=-2>note: i'm sorry if i've offended anyone who thinks that DivX is a very useful and effective format for pirating movies or whatever. if you've gotten good use out of the codec, i'm happy for you. i just myself have no use for the thing and think you'd be better off reverse-engineering.doc or trying to apply political pressure on apple/sorensen to let xanim NDA or something. </font>
[and now watch as slashdot, in its typical fashion, responds to everything in this post _except_ the one thing i _want_ responded to..]
Re:Which consumers asked for this feature?
on
Mattel Spyware
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· Score: 1
> Did Mattel honestly think that they wouldn't get caught?
Apparently yes.. but since it took so long for anyone to notice, it would appear that that was really more or less a valid assumption to make.
> Did they think that no one would care?
Apparently yes.. and you know what? They're probably right. Watch as over the next couple of days as a massive mainstream consumer and media backlash against Mattell/broderbund fails to happen.
Watch over the next couple of months as Mattell/broderbund fails to lose substantial amounts of sales from the relatively small number of people for whom all of "reads salon.com or websites that link to articles on salon.com", "has children or a job that involves administering children's software", and "pays enough attention to the world that they actually react to this sort of thing" apply.
Well.. not neccicarily. I don't know if i agree with you or not because i don't know exactly what you mean.
The question becomes, _who is "they"?_ OK, so they should be held responsible. But who?
If someone who has entered into a beta liscence breaks the terms of that liscence, he has broken a contract and therefore the company he broke the contract with has every right to seek appropriate damages. [note that a statement like this does not neccicarily indicate i agree with shrinkwrap EULAs-- after all the way i see it, a beta tester is practically an employee of the company in question]
But if you ask me, if someone breaks a beta contract by giving out information, and someone else redistributes that information, the redistributor should __NOT__ be legally liable. They should have the basic right to release that information/screenshot, unless like they're violating copyright or something, and copyright does and should make exceptions for people "quoting" for review/journalism purposes.
I really believe MacNN should __NOT__ be held liable for violating a beta liscence unless they themselves violated the beta liscence. OK, i guess i'm a long-haired anti-IP extremist or something, but i see something inherently wrong with holding someone to the terms of a contract they were not parties to.
In short, the _person who wrote the article_, since they were the ones who entered and therefore the ones who violated the beta liscence, should be the one held liable, __NOT__ macnn. Macnn should be guiltless here and were if you ask me acting totally within their rights. The illegal act here should be the violation of the liscence, not the article about Photoshop 6. Of course were the guy who wrote the article the liable one, i'd probably argue Macnn should pay his legal expenses out of common courtesy and because if they don't they'll never get another beta tester to trust them again, but it's all moot anyway because the whole thing will almost certainly be settled out of court.
Oh, btw, i thought this quote was funny from the article. ""It's rare that type of information is acquired by someone outside the company," MWAHAHAHAA!! Someone find the person who did this quote and introduce him to appleinsider.com, where you see things saying "we had screenshots of clarisworks 7 here, but apple legal made us take them down" on a regular basis.. "rare"? it's unbelievably common. [and please do not mention MOSR in this place. MOSR _never_ says _anything_ that turns out to be accurate unless it can be attributed to the Thousand Monkeys With Typewriters Effect.]
But keep in mind the loophole these people find-- appleinsider almost invariably uses UNPAID, ANONYMOUS sources, therefore meaning that they themselves could not be said to be directly involved in the violation of the liscence; they just have some pictures and they're posting it. THe actual criminal is the source, who is anonymous and therefore never has anything done to them. The anonymous defence doesn't stop people from suing these sites, of course, but it should.
>> or the more dated-but-implimented macintosh applescript
umm.. aren't you thinking of OpenDoc? i mean, maybe i'm misunderstanding what you mean, but it seems like OpenDoc would make a lot more sense in that context. Applescript is, um, a scripting language, and not really that "dated" [depending on your perspective] seeing as [unlike opendoc] it is still being updated.
If you split it into apps and os as far as the company goes, keeping the api secret doesn't make any sense since Microsoft will want to draw as many developers as possible.
The answer is even simpler than this. All the government has to do is decree that any and all communication between the two MS chunks should be open. The thing about doing things this way rather than telling MS to openly document all APIs is that it's infinately easier to police. How the hell is the government supposed to ensure that all the APIs circulating within redmond are totally open? Communications between two companies, meanwhile, are a lot easier to police.
So what you wind up with is that even if the MS-apps company gets access to source code, ability to rewrite parts of the OS at will, access to lower-level APIs, hooks to insert a web browser into the OS, etc., so does everyone else, and it's done in a way you can actually tell what's going on to some extent.
Trusting MS to go along with their punishment is a big mistake.. remember the whole Netscape lawsuit only started because MS refused to abide by a settlement where they agreed not to tie anything to the OS.. you've got to be totally certain MS isn't trusted to do anything on their own or it won't work.
i was really hoping this would go all the way to the end of the trial..
we really, really need a test case that enshrines in legal precedent the idea that i have the right to download material over the internet assuming i already own it. in other words, if i buy an album, i am buying the right to use the content, not just the physical media. Therefore i should have the right to download it over the internet, and no copyright violation is taking place if i download mp3s of it because i've already paid. in other words, all these ROMs i have on my computer are legal since i have the original cartriges gathering dust upstairs. in other words, if i buy some software and then accidentally drop the package on the way home and a truck runs over it and crushes it, i should have the right to warez a copy because i paid to use it..
you get the idea. this needs to somehow be embedded into the legal system or law or whatever. it's important, i think. but a settlement means that you can't really point to this case as a legal precedent in other cases..
you forgot to mention that all the lyrics, instead of being given to you as text, were wrapped inside a "java applet".. which failed to work 90% of the time. In fact, it never worked for me at all. Maybe because i'm a mac user? I'll assume it was sluggy and semifunctional the rest of the time, but since i never witnessed it working i can't really comment.
..as well as a number of other changes in site layout and such which had no concievable reason for being added except to prevent anyone from being able to easily use the site..
but yes, your analysis was completely correct.. lyrics.ch is dead. so i must stick to http://www.ohhla.com/ and google.com..
the funny thing is that in its former self, lyrics.ch was actually getting money for the record companies. the reason being that if people heard a song they'd never heard of, they could search for a snippet of the lyrics and would get the song name returned to them.. which meant they knew what to buy..
Apple can't sue them. Apple is as much a whore as anyone else. Apple has to do whatever the dvd consortum wants them to for the simple reason they need all those new imacs to be able to play dvds. The dvd consortum has _complete_ control-- if apple DARES defy them in the slightest way, apple is screwed. And if ANYONE, especially APPLE (with their lowly market share) would even CONSIDER the INSOLENCE of **SUING** the dvd consortum-- well then, let's just say some nasty things would happen to that person's dvd liscensing and css key. I doubt they'd still have any.
"whatever the dvd consortum wants them to" is a pretty large number of things. The "apple dvd player" software disables screen captures [something which as far as i can gather would have to be done in the OS, NOT the player itself-- implying the restrictions of the dvd consortum extend to ALL apple's operations, not just the isolated dvd decoder app], refuses to run at the same time as macsbug*, and refuses to play MPEG-2 off the disk [although hacks exist to make it]
*something which is TOTALLY rediculous if you know what that macsbug is, something which prevents anyone who is halfway to a programmer (including me) from using the apple DVD player without a horribly inconvenient restart first, but something which is totally neccicary when you consider macsbug will let you *gasp* take screen captures without the OS's consent!!..as well as about, well, ANYTHING else you want. of course it's also futile, since if you REALLY wanted to you there IS some way to run macsbug anyway. you just have to try. as always, this doesn't injure any actual PIRATES since THEY will simply take whatever means neccicary and cannot be stopped. It only injures random people who use Macsbug so they can recover work after a crash, or because they write software, and suddenly have to turn it off if they want to watch DVDs.
Oh, and did it ever occur to you to wonder why Quicktime does not have an MPEG-2 decoder? It isn't because apple doesn't have one written, i'll tell you that. The ONLY conceivable reason for the lack of MPEG-2 video codecs in quicktime 4 is that the dvd forum is preventing it. Here I am being directly hurt, because a technology apple could have provided to me, as a mac user, is being denied me because of something i have no use for. I am sitting here typing on a G4. It has a DVD. It wasn't that i wanted a dvd drive, just that by the time i bought this thing apple was no longer selling g4s WITHOUT a DVD drive, so i had no choice. I still own no dvds and have no real plan to buy any in the near future. I do, however, have great interest in MPEG-2, and would very much like to play m2vs i download off the internet (NO, these are NOT of pirated content). Yet the dvd forum attempts to prevent me from doing this even though they themselves are not the ones who created or own MPEG-2.
At first, the reason i thought dvd would be cool was that i _could_ open the movies in quicktime, and do cool things, things like watch parts of the movies backward, or clip bits of sound and export them as AIFF to use as system sounds, or take screenshots and use them as my desktop pattern. These things seem COMPLETELY "fair use" to me, and seem to me to cause no damage the movie companies. However if i owned any dvds, i would be prevented from doing these perfectly ethical things, because the dvd forum commands it is so and apple obeys their every whim. Meanwhile the piracy continues unabated, because there is ALWAYS a way to pirate. If the 31337 W4R3Z3RZ can make vcds of movies _still in the theaters_, they can make vcds of dvds. This isn't what the MPAA cares about. The restrictions they force on apple are not to prevent me from pirating dvds; it's to prevent me from doing exactly the things i described above, like screenshots for desktop patterns. This is content control to prevent USAGE of the content by people who legally paid for the content in any way the dvd forum does not specifically allow, NOT to prevent piracy by other persons.
yup, that's about right. Blake. It was mentioned in my post, but my writing was so dense and rambling that i don't think anyone noticed it:) More people might have used blake, of course, if it hadn't been for the fact it was $30 shareware, and until you paid that $30 every single browser window blake created had a huge nagware panel saying to pay for Blake. This is really really wierd when you consider all Blake did was fuse two free pieces of software together.. and you were expected to pay $30 for it.
Cyberdog's web browser was always awful, but the mail and newsgroup parts were wonderful-- so good that i continued to use cyberdog as my mail/news reader for years.. unfortunately it had a couple small bugs that were serious problems to me, and since apple had locked down the code they would never get fixed. Had apple had one engineer spend about a day fixing problems in Cyberdog-- problems being things like it's lack of inherent Internet Config modularity support, which would have been rediculously easy to code in, or its inability to send non-GIF pasted images, or its totally inexplicable inability to send files without binhexing them first, or a way to translate opendoc images into normal JPEGs [since an "opendoc image" was just a wrapper around the original JPEG], or the tiny bit of work to make it compatible with the newer versions of the Macintosh Runtime for Java-- i might still be using it today. But apple refused to do even the tiniest bit of maintenence work on it, and so it's small but serious problems caused me to finally flee to Outlook Express 4.. *sob* oh god the memories
an interesting project would be reimplementing Mozilla as a cyberdog-style opendoc thing. [i'd suggest doing the same to Bettertelnet or Mactelnet as replacements for cyberdog's telnet part, now that they're opensourced, but i don't know how opendoc-compatible the GPL is..] Unfortunately i don't think opendoc still works in the mac os, and i don't think the windows port was ever finished. Pity.
Believe this or not, apple originally intended to have integrated their file browser with a web browser by now, but consumers rejected the technology behind it.
The technology behind it was OpenDoc, a wierd but really interesting technology that shattered the traditional view of applications by making the document, not the application, the focus. The idea was you'd launch the document, not an application, and you would kind of pull in different parts of different applications as they were needed. It was the complete triumph of modularity-- if you didn't like, say, the spell checker, you could rip it out and replace it with another one, and any type of information could be edited the way it was intended no matter where it was-- if you were, say, writing an e-mail, since that was really a text document you could pull in that spell checker from the word processor. At least in theory.
One of the few apps ever written to take advantage of OpenDoc was apple's web browser, CyberDog. Originally apple planned to eventually [in the second or third revision of Copland.. Copland!! ha ha!!] make the Finder an opendoc container and have cyberdog integrated into it by default.
Unfortunately OpenDoc was released and hyped before it was truly finished (some very wierd things happened to your RAM in the early versions whenever an opendoc part launched), apple never made it exactly clear to the end user what opendoc meant to them or how to use it, nobody [least of all apple] supported it, and it came out at a VERY inconvenient time (around the time of businessweeks' "fall of an american icon" article that put apple firmly in the graveyard in the public mind) and as thus just as it finally became a polished, usable, mature technology, it was killed.
The interesting difference though between Windows 98 and Finder w/cyberdog is that apple's version of web-browser-as-file-browser would have been flexible-- i.e. respectful of the needs and wants of the actual user rather than the needs and wants of Microsoft's PR department. The user would be able to swap out cyberdog, or just parts of cyberdog-- i.e. just the HTML engine, or just the toolbar interface, or just the mailer-- completely at the user's discretion, and even [windows 98 users will be amazed by this feature] turn the web browser off if they decided they did not need it!. Unfortunately the alternate browser parts never actually surfaced-- netscape never released the Navigator part. Eventually someone managed to hack the Outlook Express libraries in such a way that they actually managed to make a browser part called Blake that let cyberdog use the IE html engine, but by then it was much, much too late. Nevertheless if netscape had ever come through cyberdog might have lived and apple might have had an integrated web browser first..
BTW, the current "network browser" thingy in the mac os looks like a very prototypical setup which [if it matures the way it looks like it will] will eventually allow FTP servers to be treated as if they were simply drives being shared over a network, accessible in the FInder and everything, something which to me makes a hell of a lot more sense than making a program to view web pages an omnipresent part of the file browser.
But still, if microsoft really cares about being "innovative" and not just about taking any means to destroy a competitor, once the breakup comes they will do what apple originally planned to do-- make not a web browser welded inside the file browser, but a built-in place for a user-chosen web browser to plug into and integrate into the file browser such that yes, IE would be integrated into the OS, but so would Mozilla and Opera and Lynx, and thus competition would be fostered and the DOJ's breakup terms will not be violated.
Yes. We were also kind of sort of having a bit of a problem with Vietnam in the sixties. they now have most favored nation status. I can't comment on whether vietnam is any better in terms of human rights and protecting its citizens, but it doesn't look like they really are from where i'm standing, and at least Cuba has no nike sweatshops..
Cuba is probably not a shining example of how to fairly treat your citizens, but the way Cuba is treated by the U.S.-- trying to bully the entire world into barracading the country off-- is almost insane if you look at it in actual _context_ of how many other countries out there are so much worse than Cuba in terms of treatment of citizens and workers. I know almost nothing about the current state inside of Cuba, but i know at least to tell that our treatment of them is disproportionate when compared to how we treat the rest of the world. Even historic precedent is rediculous to point at; Castro, unlike North Vietnam, never actually tortured any americans, i don't think. The embargo is based on nothing more than hatred by political pressure groups in Miami.. if the embargo is based on any actual respect for human rights, then why don't we react the same way to, oh, say, Burma?
the difference is that with the chineese government getting pissed off at it, CFInet loses $1800 and 15 days of revenue. Quick but painful slap on the wrist, and the whole thing is more or less over 15 days later, however long the damage to the psychological state of the employees lasts.
if it had been an american corporation pissed off at a small american website, meanwhile, it would be a lot more drawn out. The small website would have had to deal with either a crippling "settlement", or legal bills costing thousands and thousands of dollars stretching years into the future with no determinate end to the hassle, except that it will more than likely end with the small website running out of money to pay for the legal bills because the corporation is doing nothing but stall tactics for the sole purpose of making the small website run out of money to pay for the legal bills, finally giving up and entering a crippling "settlement", and probably quietly going out of business a month later.
On the other hand, there's a good chance the people running the small american website would become instant celebrities, getting posted on Slashdot [meaning they get some pretty huge exposure from the whole thing, and probably a lot of banner ad hits as they get slashdotted]. If they get lucky, they may even get an offer to have the legal bills handled by the ACLU, and if they get really really lucky (or if the small website is really impressive and the large corporation is really hypocritical) they may even get a benefit album or hundreds of people mirroring their information. At any rate, unless the small american website slips underneath everyone's radar (which does happen, a LOT, and in which case the small website is simply fucked over) the information the corporation doesn't want to let out will get a LOT of attention that it wouldn't have gotten otherwise.
Meanwhile in China if you say something to piss off the government you have nothing protecting you. No one will help you, no one will organize massive campaigns in your name, slashdot will not notice your existence unless there is some kind of major vote in the american congress that day or your company uses linux or something, and you will simply become another victim of the government very, very quietly, with no outcry or notice because, hey, these things happen every day, no one is paying attention, and what's the use of protest anyway? it's not like you're going to change anything.
Slashdot Mirror
You can't claim there's anything wrong with making money by creating a better product that does the same thing as something already out there. Lets say i buy a copy of Clarisworks 4.0. It does most of the same things Microsoft Word does. It reads most Microsoft Word documents. I no longer have a reason to buy Microsoft Word. Well, that's certainly a lost sale for Microsoft. Is that piracy?
...
Copying a creation is bad.
Copying a functionality is not bad.
The second implies, as the parent post said, you have created something. You have possibly created something for "immoral" [making money off others' work?] purposes, and it's possible the thing "created" is merely a creation in the form of a reimplementation of something that someone else created. But you _did_ something, at least, and almost certainly in the process added [created] some sort of functionality that was not there in the first place. [even is said functionality is just a nifty cheat mode that is nothing more than a modified version of a thing you used for debugging.]
You may notice my arguments are slightly contradictory. That's because the _situation_ is contradictory. _There Is No Right Answer Here!_ No matter how the laws are set up, there WILL be a way for someone to get screwed who does not deserve to get screwed.
Because when you buy something like a playstation, you aren't paying for a creation. You're paying for a functionality, the functionality of whatever it is the program/console does. You probably bought Clarisworks for a functionality [writing documents] as well, but that's different, because there there are other factors _besides_ functionality to consider-- implementation, interface, etc. You can't say the same thing with a PSX. These days, making a console is _selling_ an API-- yeah, yeah, you're selling hardware, sure. But kickass specialised hardware is easy to come by these days. These days the important part is constructing a good, powerful, usable API, making it available and attractive to developers and the public, and recruiting and organising and orchistrating developers and basically just building a _community_. This is where all your expenses go, not into constructing the hardware it runs on. And when you're reverse-engineering a piece of hardware, you just have to worry about the reverse engineering and the piece of hardware; the community is just, well, already there. Sure, Sony makes money off the community [developer liscences == very very lucrative] and not the actual hardware PSX itself, but at some point when the hardware becomes irrelivant because things like Connectix VGS have become so mainstreamed and the costs of emulation can be so easily absorbed by just using a faster or specialised chip.. well, you start to get to the point where you can question the point of creating the API in the first place since it will just be used, and then, well, what are the console developers going to sell?
But see, there isn't anything you can _do_ about it. You can't prevent someone from reimplementing the PSX as a different piece of hardware with the same functionality without simultaneously preventing things like Wine [which i don't think anyone would call immoral unless they sucked] because they do the same thing at the core-- it's just that one is bad because it replaces the PSX hardcore and serves no purpose beyond making money for its creators, and the other , while it is possible to use it _in place of_ windows, does not replace windows itself, and actually creates something by allowing you to do something not possible before, running windows apps run without having to use linux. There's a difference here, between compatibility and replacement, which is subtle, hard to define, and impossible to make into a law. Are you going to start saying people should be not allowed to use certain functionality no matter how they do it? Are you going to start saying nobody should be allowed to make something that does the same thing as something already existing? That's pretty foreign to current patent law, which doesn't allow you to patent an _idea_-- just a _process_. You can't patent the solution, just the steps you took to get there from the problem. You can't stop someone else from taking a different path. And you shouldn't be able to. The reverse engineering exception in the patent laws are there for a reason, to prevent people from using their control over their product to hurt people based on their dependance on what the product does, or doing things like purposefully breeding incompatibility just to hurt a competitor. Note that the patent exception states "for compatibility reasons", which neatly leaves out anything that would actually simply stealing an idea in most cases.
Any action which is designed to make compatibility more difficult will in the end remove choice, and lack of choice very rarely [and NEVER in this context] does _anything_ to consumers other than hurt them.
"Not illegal" != "moral" may be true, but so is ("not moral" != "could be illegalized" || "not moral" != "should be illegalized")
OH GOD, I FEEL THEIR PAIN!!! i mentioned i was a McClure, no? For about three years, "mcclure" or "mcclure111" (depending on letter limit) was my handle on various chat and message board forums. -- EVERY -- --SINGLE-- --F******-- [does anyone mind if i curse here? better safe than sorry, i guess] --TIME-- i would go into a room.. SOMEBODY would make a joke that went like "Hi, i'm Troy McClure. You may remember me from such channels as #macintosh, #macdev, #bjork..." Yeh, sure, it's just a joke. That's how i looked at it first. You start looking at things like that differently once you've heard them more than fifty times. guess why i use the nick "mcc" now. -_-
Take notice, none of the following is terribly ontopic, but it's interesting.
h _24sep96.html o ct96.html
And before i start, i would like to note that the name "MRJ" is already registered and MRJ-1s is going to have to surrender their mrjones.com domain.
I saw this thing on 60 minutes once.
Some tiny restaurant had opened up in the middle of scotland. LIke, one single building in the middle of a town that didn't look exactly overly urban.
They named themselves "McMunchies".
McDonalds sued the shit out of them. You can guess what for. This despite the fact that only an idiot would mistake the one for the other or think that the McMunchies resteraunt was in any way connected to McDonalds.
And that the prefix "Mc" or "Mac" is a very common traditional prefix to scottish surnames meaning "the son of" [i think].
[this post is, btw, being made by a McClure, so i have some amount of personal interest in this, seeing as it may end with my surname being owned by a corporation..]
Lord MacDonald of MacDonald, who if ANYONE can "own" the name MacDonald, "owns" it in the sense that he is the clan leader, it is his title and his family has owned it for, what, a thousand years? was rather upset by this [understandably.. McDonalds didn't feel like they had to ask _his_ permission to name their resteraunt, but then feel like the name..] and set up some sort of legal defense fund.
And then he decided to open a restaurant. He called it "MacDonalds."
So if you feel like it, you can go to Scotland and go to a McDonalds where they serve rather nice steak, pheasant, etc., in a rather old building surrounded by rolling green hills..
If anyone would like to fill in details, or if you'd like to look for yourself or something.
Or rather look at
http://www.mcspotlight.org/media/press/telegrap
http://www.mcspotlight.org/media/press/herald_7
"Mr Ronald McDonald, retired teacher, said the use of the name Ronald McDonald for the clown used by the company to entertain children was an insult to the Scottish clan system. "
Now if that isn't a good quote i don't know what is.
The opinion that Ghost in the Shell was rushed/shallow/had a bad ending seems to be shared by quite a lot of people i've talked to.. but then again all of those people also said that the manga was much , much better than the anime, especially in those three respects. So i suggest you find the manga.. i'm sorry to say i have not yet managed to find a copy, and can't comment myself..
Anyway, Reboot was AWESOME. -_-
I believe the object of the parent post was to point out that "existing or proposed storage technologies" are holding back technological progress by, well, more or less your logic of "it doesn't work with what everyone's using now, so why bother"? In other words, that new ways of thinking at the problem are needed, and that if someone, somewhere, _really_, _really_ wanted to, and that someone just happened to have a whole bunch of money to throw at researching the problem, they could probably at the least come up with some ideas which would _lead_ to a way of resolving the problems you bring up with leaving the "paradigm" or whatever...
but nobody's going to _do_ that unless for some wierd reason the conventional "paradigm" becomes unusable.. people are lazy and will always want to just build more heavy-duty versions of the old tools rather than trying to find a new tool for the same task.
While i apologize deeply for the mispelling of "definitely", i take issue with your to complain about my usage of the word "i".
The word "i" was deliberately placed into lowercase despite a full awareness of the proper usage. I purposefully put "i" into lowercase when it is not the beginning of the sentance out of choice. I fail to see why "I" is uppercased, but not "you"; if anything this odd capitalisation exception [which is not seen in almost any other language] is indicitave of the almost rediculous emphasis on self-importance and deemphasis on self-sacrifice that pervades american culture so deeply. In effect, it is either saying that the person writing is important enough to be capitalized when they are the subject of the sentance, but not the listener, or it is saying nothing at all. Thus as i am unhappy with the general mindset of our culture that self must be promoted at all costs, i am unhappy with the pronoun pronunciation rules and do not take part in them. The non-capitalisation of "i" was not a mistake, it was a form of protest.
I realize this may not have been obvious because of the posting's other grammar mistakes-- namely the failure to begin sentances with capital letters three out of four times or so and the beginning of a sentance with a conjunction-- but it is the case. Understand that the post you replied to was meant to be a quick sidenote, not something meaningful.
I am aware this post contains at least one mispelled word and possibly unclear syntax. This is not purposeful; however, i do not care enough to fix them.
> and the bad ass evil dude is a humanoid, not a nasty green-eyed bug alien.
A racist humanoid, no less. The whole allegory to the nazi-style "master race" motif gets a lot more emphasized if you'll read the books, but still the Empire was very "anti-alien" and believed all other species to be below humans. Pretty much the opposite of what Katz said.. _we_ are the race doing the ravaging, everyone else is being victimised. The humans are the evil power, not because we have the better technology but because we set up a political structure and then betrayed the galaxy..
i would like to point out for anyone reading that [even though i haven't seen the movie and can't comment], the _book_ for "the rats of NIMH" was amazing, and probably better than the movie [based solely on the fact that, well, it always is].
It really is kind of a kid's book, and probably won't take you long [i think, i don't remember, been year..] but it's creative enough you can put up with that. Just find a library or something. In short, if you're bored enough to rent "rats of NIMH" you're definately bored enough to read it and you should. And if it comes down to reading NIMH or watching, say, the movie "boys and girls" in theaters now.. you want NIMH.
btw.. quick question.. am i the only person who every time i see the phrase "NIH syndrome" [Not Invented Here] i automatically think of NIMH..?
Blah. American animated movies funded by large companies.. useless. Who cares. Well, at least it wasn't a musical.
..?
I suggest we use this thread to suggest to people some _real_, _creative_, maybe even *gasp* _deep_, *cough cough* ANIME *cough* animation they could be seeing if they want some kind of vaguely scifi-ish "edgy" thing.
There is, of course, the obvious [Ghost in the Shell, Nuku Nuku, Evangelon].. and i hear Lain is pretty good but i haven't gotten around to seeing it yet.. anyone want to suggest for me any really freaky/obscure anime i've never heard of?
Is there actually _any_ american animation of this type that doesn't suck? Lets see, there's Daria and South Park, but they're really something else.. i guess there's always Aeon Flux/Power Puff Girls/Space ghost or whatever.. i'm sure there's something good i'm missing.. is there? There was an ad i saw for something on the scifi channel that looked kind of nifty, any idea what that might have been? Is there any american animation that is truly and completely tripped out, not just "edgy"
Umm, ok, that's really wierd.
Bungie, the one game company i had been aware of that would prioritize the mac version _ahead_ of the windows version.
_Why_ did MS choose _bungie_, of all companies? Yes, Halo and Oni look like they will be maybe two of the best games ever made, but still, MS could have just _liscensed_ those to port them to xbox, the way Loki or whoever ported Myth to linux did. And it says this way, they dont even get Oni..??
Seems awfully suspicious, just as the mac and linux begins getting some decent support in terms of games, microsoft finds the most crossplatformly open-minded company out there and buys it. I mean, the only reasons i can think of that MS would choose _them_ to buy would be.. well, really really paranoid conspiracy-theorist, to say the least.
Which brings me to the question: What about directx? Because buying Bungie would kind of imply MS is abandoning Directx.
Unless, of course, Bungies games start _using_ directx.. in which case we'll know that my most absurdly paranoid assumptions in the previous paragraph were completely right.
I know one thing though, MS isn't taking this whole breakup thing very seriously if they're still buying companies-- esp. since it seems to me if you're going to split OS from Apps, a game console hardware developer would sound a lot like OS and a game developer would sound a lot like Apps..
*shrugs* alright, works for me.
"clickable mpegs that link to URLs of affiliate programs, so movie companies can release movies for free and then make their money by taking a percentage of the profits from all the consumption they induce"
"Extend this file format to support something similar to HTML image maps. Then take product placement in movies to the next level: Everything in the movie is clickable. If you're watching a movie and you see a shirt you think is totally fly, you click right on the shirt, and it opens a browser and links to a website that sells that very shirt."
Quicktime has structures capable of doing this very thing already. This may mean you can do it in MPEG-4.
I'm not sure of the technical details. I think quicktime does it using its sprite system, and i don't think the sprite system is in MPEG-4. But MPEG-4 has at the least quicktime's track system right..? So it would be relatively easy to reimplement whatever apple uses to handle links in quicktime movies into MPEG-4 as an extention, right? Or you could just actually use quicktime [you could even make the video compressor in the quicktime movie be MPEG if that's important to you], but i realize that isn't an option for most of you.
please excuse any ignorance in this post.
anyway, this whole shouldexist.org thing looks unbelievably cool. i've been wishing someone would make something like this for a long time.
ugh.. in my opinion, anything that allows this unholy format to become entrenched even further only hurts us all in the end, because if we do not allow it to sink quietly and naturally into the night it will torment us for years with its presence. But i shouldn't have just said that, becuase i fear i will start a flamewar. Ah well.
.doc or trying to apply political pressure on apple/sorensen to let xanim NDA or something. </font>
however, my question is: since DivX is, in some bastardised way, related to MPEG-4, once the real MPEG-4 is finalised will it be possible to adapt the XMPS code as a base for an MPEG-4 codec? Seems like if this is the case, then the time spent developing the DivX codec will have been very very useful. I can't access the page; what liscence is it released under? GPL or LGPL i assume? [go lgpl!]
<font size=-2>note: i'm sorry if i've offended anyone who thinks that DivX is a very useful and effective format for pirating movies or whatever. if you've gotten good use out of the codec, i'm happy for you. i just myself have no use for the thing and think you'd be better off reverse-engineering
[and now watch as slashdot, in its typical fashion, responds to everything in this post _except_ the one thing i _want_ responded to..]
> Did Mattel honestly think that they wouldn't get caught?
Apparently yes.. but since it took so long for anyone to notice, it would appear that that was really more or less a valid assumption to make.
> Did they think that no one would care?
Apparently yes.. and you know what? They're probably right.
Watch as over the next couple of days as a massive mainstream consumer and media backlash against Mattell/broderbund fails to happen.
Watch over the next couple of months as Mattell/broderbund fails to lose substantial amounts of sales from the relatively small number of people for whom all of "reads salon.com or websites that link to articles on salon.com", "has children or a job that involves administering children's software", and "pays enough attention to the world that they actually react to this sort of thing" apply.
Well.. not neccicarily. I don't know if i agree with you or not because i don't know exactly what you mean.
The question becomes, _who is "they"?_ OK, so they should be held responsible. But who?
If someone who has entered into a beta liscence breaks the terms of that liscence, he has broken a contract and therefore the company he broke the contract with has every right to seek appropriate damages. [note that a statement like this does not neccicarily indicate i agree with shrinkwrap EULAs-- after all the way i see it, a beta tester is practically an employee of the company in question]
But if you ask me, if someone breaks a beta contract by giving out information, and someone else redistributes that information, the redistributor should __NOT__ be legally liable. They should have the basic right to release that information/screenshot, unless like they're violating copyright or something, and copyright does and should make exceptions for people "quoting" for review/journalism purposes.
I really believe MacNN should __NOT__ be held liable for violating a beta liscence unless they themselves violated the beta liscence. OK, i guess i'm a long-haired anti-IP extremist or something, but i see something inherently wrong with holding someone to the terms of a contract they were not parties to.
In short, the _person who wrote the article_, since they were the ones who entered and therefore the ones who violated the beta liscence, should be the one held liable, __NOT__ macnn. Macnn should be guiltless here and were if you ask me acting totally within their rights. The illegal act here should be the violation of the liscence, not the article about Photoshop 6.
Of course were the guy who wrote the article the liable one, i'd probably argue Macnn should pay his legal expenses out of common courtesy and because if they don't they'll never get another beta tester to trust them again, but it's all moot anyway because the whole thing will almost certainly be settled out of court.
Oh, btw, i thought this quote was funny from the article.
""It's rare that type of information is acquired by someone outside the company,"
MWAHAHAHAA!! Someone find the person who did this quote and introduce him to appleinsider.com, where you see things saying "we had screenshots of clarisworks 7 here, but apple legal made us take them down" on a regular basis.. "rare"? it's unbelievably common.
[and please do not mention MOSR in this place. MOSR _never_ says _anything_ that turns out to be accurate unless it can be attributed to the Thousand Monkeys With Typewriters Effect.]
But keep in mind the loophole these people find-- appleinsider almost invariably uses UNPAID, ANONYMOUS sources, therefore meaning that they themselves could not be said to be directly involved in the violation of the liscence; they just have some pictures and they're posting it. THe actual criminal is the source, who is anonymous and therefore never has anything done to them. The anonymous defence doesn't stop people from suing these sites, of course, but it should.
-mcc-baka
INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY IS THEFT
>> or the more dated-but-implimented macintosh applescript
umm.. aren't you thinking of OpenDoc?
i mean, maybe i'm misunderstanding what you mean, but it seems like OpenDoc would make a lot more sense in that context.
Applescript is, um, a scripting language, and not really that "dated" [depending on your perspective] seeing as [unlike opendoc] it is still being updated.
Whatever.
If you split it into apps and os as far as the company goes, keeping the api secret doesn't make any sense since Microsoft will want to draw as many developers as possible.
The answer is even simpler than this.
All the government has to do is decree that any and all communication between the two MS chunks should be open.
The thing about doing things this way rather than telling MS to openly document all APIs is that it's infinately easier to police. How the hell is the government supposed to ensure that all the APIs circulating within redmond are totally open? Communications between two companies, meanwhile, are a lot easier to police.
So what you wind up with is that even if the MS-apps company gets access to source code, ability to rewrite parts of the OS at will, access to lower-level APIs, hooks to insert a web browser into the OS, etc., so does everyone else, and it's done in a way you can actually tell what's going on to some extent.
Trusting MS to go along with their punishment is a big mistake.. remember the whole Netscape lawsuit only started because MS refused to abide by a settlement where they agreed not to tie anything to the OS.. you've got to be totally certain MS isn't trusted to do anything on their own or it won't work.
-mcc-baka
CHINESE-WALL!
i was really hoping this would go all the way to the end of the trial..
we really, really need a test case that enshrines in legal precedent the idea that i have the right to download material over the internet assuming i already own it.
in other words, if i buy an album, i am buying the right to use the content, not just the physical media. Therefore i should have the right to download it over the internet, and no copyright violation is taking place if i download mp3s of it because i've already paid.
in other words, all these ROMs i have on my computer are legal since i have the original cartriges gathering dust upstairs.
in other words, if i buy some software and then accidentally drop the package on the way home and a truck runs over it and crushes it, i should have the right to warez a copy because i paid to use it..
you get the idea. this needs to somehow be embedded into the legal system or law or whatever. it's important, i think. but a settlement means that you can't really point to this case as a legal precedent in other cases..
you forgot to mention that all the lyrics, instead of being given to you as text, were wrapped inside a "java applet".. which failed to work 90% of the time. In fact, it never worked for me at all. Maybe because i'm a mac user?
I'll assume it was sluggy and semifunctional the rest of the time, but since i never witnessed it working i can't really comment.
..as well as a number of other changes in site layout and such which had no concievable reason for being added except to prevent anyone from being able to easily use the site..
but yes, your analysis was completely correct.. lyrics.ch is dead. so i must stick to http://www.ohhla.com/ and google.com..
the funny thing is that in its former self, lyrics.ch was actually getting money for the record companies. the reason being that if people heard a song they'd never heard of, they could search for a snippet of the lyrics and would get the song name returned to them.. which meant they knew what to buy..
Apple can't sue them. Apple is as much a whore as anyone else. Apple has to do whatever the dvd consortum wants them to for the simple reason they need all those new imacs to be able to play dvds. The dvd consortum has _complete_ control-- if apple DARES defy them in the slightest way, apple is screwed. And if ANYONE, especially APPLE (with their lowly market share) would even CONSIDER the INSOLENCE of **SUING** the dvd consortum-- well then, let's just say some nasty things would happen to that person's dvd liscensing and css key. I doubt they'd still have any.
..as well as about, well, ANYTHING else you want. of course it's also futile, since if you REALLY wanted to you there IS some way to run macsbug anyway. you just have to try. as always, this doesn't injure any actual PIRATES since THEY will simply take whatever means neccicary and cannot be stopped. It only injures random people who use Macsbug so they can recover work after a crash, or because they write software, and suddenly have to turn it off if they want to watch DVDs.
"whatever the dvd consortum wants them to" is a pretty large number of things. The "apple dvd player" software disables screen captures [something which as far as i can gather would have to be done in the OS, NOT the player itself-- implying the restrictions of the dvd consortum extend to ALL apple's operations, not just the isolated dvd decoder app], refuses to run at the same time as macsbug*, and refuses to play MPEG-2 off the disk [although hacks exist to make it]
*something which is TOTALLY rediculous if you know what that macsbug is, something which prevents anyone who is halfway to a programmer (including me) from using the apple DVD player without a horribly inconvenient restart first, but something which is totally neccicary when you consider macsbug will let you *gasp* take screen captures without the OS's consent!!
Oh, and did it ever occur to you to wonder why Quicktime does not have an MPEG-2 decoder? It isn't because apple doesn't have one written, i'll tell you that. The ONLY conceivable reason for the lack of MPEG-2 video codecs in quicktime 4 is that the dvd forum is preventing it. Here I am being directly hurt, because a technology apple could have provided to me, as a mac user, is being denied me because of something i have no use for. I am sitting here typing on a G4. It has a DVD. It wasn't that i wanted a dvd drive, just that by the time i bought this thing apple was no longer selling g4s WITHOUT a DVD drive, so i had no choice. I still own no dvds and have no real plan to buy any in the near future. I do, however, have great interest in MPEG-2, and would very much like to play m2vs i download off the internet (NO, these are NOT of pirated content). Yet the dvd forum attempts to prevent me from doing this even though they themselves are not the ones who created or own MPEG-2.
At first, the reason i thought dvd would be cool was that i _could_ open the movies in quicktime, and do cool things, things like watch parts of the movies backward, or clip bits of sound and export them as AIFF to use as system sounds, or take screenshots and use them as my desktop pattern. These things seem COMPLETELY "fair use" to me, and seem to me to cause no damage the movie companies. However if i owned any dvds, i would be prevented from doing these perfectly ethical things, because the dvd forum commands it is so and apple obeys their every whim. Meanwhile the piracy continues unabated, because there is ALWAYS a way to pirate. If the 31337 W4R3Z3RZ can make vcds of movies _still in the theaters_, they can make vcds of dvds. This isn't what the MPAA cares about. The restrictions they force on apple are not to prevent me from pirating dvds; it's to prevent me from doing exactly the things i described above, like screenshots for desktop patterns. This is content control to prevent USAGE of the content by people who legally paid for the content in any way the dvd forum does not specifically allow, NOT to prevent piracy by other persons.
it's name is Quesa
yup, that's about right. Blake. It was mentioned in my post, but my writing was so dense and rambling that i don't think anyone noticed it :)
More people might have used blake, of course, if it hadn't been for the fact it was $30 shareware, and until you paid that $30 every single browser window blake created had a huge nagware panel saying to pay for Blake. This is really really wierd when you consider all Blake did was fuse two free pieces of software together.. and you were expected to pay $30 for it.
Cyberdog's web browser was always awful, but the mail and newsgroup parts were wonderful-- so good that i continued to use cyberdog as my mail/news reader for years.. unfortunately it had a couple small bugs that were serious problems to me, and since apple had locked down the code they would never get fixed. Had apple had one engineer spend about a day fixing problems in Cyberdog-- problems being things like it's lack of inherent Internet Config modularity support, which would have been rediculously easy to code in, or its inability to send non-GIF pasted images, or its totally inexplicable inability to send files without binhexing them first, or a way to translate opendoc images into normal JPEGs [since an "opendoc image" was just a wrapper around the original JPEG], or the tiny bit of work to make it compatible with the newer versions of the Macintosh Runtime for Java-- i might still be using it today. But apple refused to do even the tiniest bit of maintenence work on it, and so it's small but serious problems caused me to finally flee to Outlook Express 4.. *sob* oh god the memories
an interesting project would be reimplementing Mozilla as a cyberdog-style opendoc thing. [i'd suggest doing the same to Bettertelnet or Mactelnet as replacements for cyberdog's telnet part, now that they're opensourced, but i don't know how opendoc-compatible the GPL is..] Unfortunately i don't think opendoc still works in the mac os, and i don't think the windows port was ever finished. Pity.
Believe this or not, apple originally intended to have integrated their file browser with a web browser by now, but consumers rejected the technology behind it.
The technology behind it was OpenDoc, a wierd but really interesting technology that shattered the traditional view of applications by making the document, not the application, the focus. The idea was you'd launch the document, not an application, and you would kind of pull in different parts of different applications as they were needed. It was the complete triumph of modularity-- if you didn't like, say, the spell checker, you could rip it out and replace it with another one, and any type of information could be edited the way it was intended no matter where it was-- if you were, say, writing an e-mail, since that was really a text document you could pull in that spell checker from the word processor. At least in theory.
One of the few apps ever written to take advantage of OpenDoc was apple's web browser, CyberDog. Originally apple planned to eventually [in the second or third revision of Copland.. Copland!! ha ha!!] make the Finder an opendoc container and have cyberdog integrated into it by default.
Unfortunately OpenDoc was released and hyped before it was truly finished (some very wierd things happened to your RAM in the early versions whenever an opendoc part launched), apple never made it exactly clear to the end user what opendoc meant to them or how to use it, nobody [least of all apple] supported it, and it came out at a VERY inconvenient time (around the time of businessweeks' "fall of an american icon" article that put apple firmly in the graveyard in the public mind) and as thus just as it finally became a polished, usable, mature technology, it was killed.
The interesting difference though between Windows 98 and Finder w/cyberdog is that apple's version of web-browser-as-file-browser would have been flexible-- i.e. respectful of the needs and wants of the actual user rather than the needs and wants of Microsoft's PR department. The user would be able to swap out cyberdog, or just parts of cyberdog-- i.e. just the HTML engine, or just the toolbar interface, or just the mailer-- completely at the user's discretion, and even [windows 98 users will be amazed by this feature] turn the web browser off if they decided they did not need it!. Unfortunately the alternate browser parts never actually surfaced-- netscape never released the Navigator part. Eventually someone managed to hack the Outlook Express libraries in such a way that they actually managed to make a browser part called Blake that let cyberdog use the IE html engine, but by then it was much, much too late. Nevertheless if netscape had ever come through cyberdog might have lived and apple might have had an integrated web browser first..
BTW, the current "network browser" thingy in the mac os looks like a very prototypical setup which [if it matures the way it looks like it will] will eventually allow FTP servers to be treated as if they were simply drives being shared over a network, accessible in the FInder and everything, something which to me makes a hell of a lot more sense than making a program to view web pages an omnipresent part of the file browser.
But still, if microsoft really cares about being "innovative" and not just about taking any means to destroy a competitor, once the breakup comes they will do what apple originally planned to do-- make not a web browser welded inside the file browser, but a built-in place for a user-chosen web browser to plug into and integrate into the file browser such that yes, IE would be integrated into the OS, but so would Mozilla and Opera and Lynx, and thus competition would be fostered and the DOJ's breakup terms will not be violated.
-mcc-baka
INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY IS THEFT
Yes. We were also kind of sort of having a bit of a problem with Vietnam in the sixties. they now have most favored nation status. I can't comment on whether vietnam is any better in terms of human rights and protecting its citizens, but it doesn't look like they really are from where i'm standing, and at least Cuba has no nike sweatshops..
Cuba is probably not a shining example of how to fairly treat your citizens, but the way Cuba is treated by the U.S.-- trying to bully the entire world into barracading the country off-- is almost insane if you look at it in actual _context_ of how many other countries out there are so much worse than Cuba in terms of treatment of citizens and workers. I know almost nothing about the current state inside of Cuba, but i know at least to tell that our treatment of them is disproportionate when compared to how we treat the rest of the world. Even historic precedent is rediculous to point at; Castro, unlike North Vietnam, never actually tortured any americans, i don't think. The embargo is based on nothing more than hatred by political pressure groups in Miami.. if the embargo is based on any actual respect for human rights, then why don't we react the same way to, oh, say, Burma?
the difference is that with the chineese government getting pissed off at it, CFInet loses $1800 and 15 days of revenue. Quick but painful slap on the wrist, and the whole thing is more or less over 15 days later, however long the damage to the psychological state of the employees lasts.
if it had been an american corporation pissed off at a small american website, meanwhile, it would be a lot more drawn out. The small website would have had to deal with either a crippling "settlement", or legal bills costing thousands and thousands of dollars stretching years into the future with no determinate end to the hassle, except that it will more than likely end with the small website running out of money to pay for the legal bills because the corporation is doing nothing but stall tactics for the sole purpose of making the small website run out of money to pay for the legal bills, finally giving up and entering a crippling "settlement", and probably quietly going out of business a month later.
On the other hand, there's a good chance the people running the small american website would become instant celebrities, getting posted on Slashdot [meaning they get some pretty huge exposure from the whole thing, and probably a lot of banner ad hits as they get slashdotted]. If they get lucky, they may even get an offer to have the legal bills handled by the ACLU, and if they get really really lucky (or if the small website is really impressive and the large corporation is really hypocritical) they may even get a benefit album or hundreds of people mirroring their information.
At any rate, unless the small american website slips underneath everyone's radar (which does happen, a LOT, and in which case the small website is simply fucked over) the information the corporation doesn't want to let out will get a LOT of attention that it wouldn't have gotten otherwise.
Meanwhile in China if you say something to piss off the government you have nothing protecting you. No one will help you, no one will organize massive campaigns in your name, slashdot will not notice your existence unless there is some kind of major vote in the american congress that day or your company uses linux or something, and you will simply become another victim of the government very, very quietly, with no outcry or notice because, hey, these things happen every day, no one is paying attention, and what's the use of protest anyway? it's not like you're going to change anything.
You decide who's better off.