If it's really the infrastructure that's giving Napster its value, then the people contributing their computing power and bandwidth to the project are really the source of Napster's strength. If that's the case, shouldn't those who offer music on Napster get paid? (Or at least get a substantial discount on their subscription)
At the same time, if Napster is making money off people's transfers, and the computers of people all around the world are the resources that make those transfers possible... does that make the people serving up music a part of the Napster company in any way? Surely this would mean something bizzare for tax purposes.
This is the real news value in this story. For the first time, ordinary, joe-user people are going to be moving from a closed source commercial program, to an open source freely available program (provided we as the open source community market ourselves properly).
Once we open that door, and show people that there's an effective, open, free solutution to their music needs, they'll start to think, "Hey, that's cool... I can do that for free, and it even works better. I wonder what else I can do with this Open Source thing?"
Once this happens (again, provided that we have effective open solutions available for them) the percieved supply of software skyrockets. All those little open-source leaders who haven't really been threatening the big name commercial providers start having "customers" drop into their lap. At the same time, the increase in supply brings the prices of software down, as a real, competitive market forces the quality of software up.
The next couple of decades should be very interesting.:)
It doesn't sound like a bad idea. Especially considering that the money from subscription charges will (supposedly) go to the artists:
Mr Barry also said royalties would be paid to artists whose material is swapped over the internet with the help of Napster software.
However, this raises some interesting questions:
1: Who actually gets the money? The artist (which the subscribers are being led to believe WILL get the money) or the labels who have absolutely nothing to do with this particular distribution mechanism?
2: Given a random mp3 off of Napster, how will the Napster staff be able to track down the author with any amount of accuracy? I'll admit this is partially due to a defficiency in the use of ID3 tags, but at the same time, without having artists sign on to authorize particular works, it's really a guessing game. And if we have authors specifically authorizing and uploading their own works, the benifits of a distributed music sharing service is more or less destroyed.
Yeah, these "researchers" put the postal workers through a little grief. But from the looks of it, the workers themselves were more often amused.:)
Also, they took the time after the whole thing was over to buy chocolates for everyone they tortured. That seems to me to be fairly respectful.
Oddly enough, N2H2's "Bess" censoring system allows users to submit sites for "approval", at which point they're immediatly blacklisted. (Any site that ONE user finds offense must be offensive to EVERYBODY, right?)
Imagine my suprise when a friend of mine submitted the N2H2 site for approval, and the web site that allows people to purchase the censoring service suddenly become rated "Obscene" for about 24 hours.:p
I know it's the case with my University that by submitting an application for admission, and subsequently accepting an offer of admission, you agree to a lofty "University Code of Behavior". Tucked in between a number of moral clauses advovating tolerance to other nationalities, anti-plagerism, etc, is a clause stating that all work done as a student falls under the scope of the U's "Intellectual Property Policy". The policy itself has to be obtained seperately from our "Industrial Internship Office." As long as this contract is legally binding, you could be stuck with handing over copyright ownership and/or licensing rights. The bottom line though is that this contract is so far removed from the University's admission process that very few students ever realise it applies to them.
In the case of N2H2 at least, there's a process by which every page is stamped with an N2H2 header. On this header, there's a 'submit for review' button, which anyone can press if they think they've gotton to a site they shouldn't be able to. This all sounds good in theory, except that by submitting the page for review, it automatically adds the site to the "naughty" list until someone actually gets around to testing it. Proof of point, www.n2h2.com was (briefly) added to the naughty list by a friend of mine... very amusing.
The point is, very little intelegence, machine or otherwise, goes into the censoring of pages. On N2H2's defence however, i'd point out that every "blocked-site" page is also given a header, so that joe-average-user can submit a censored page for reavaluation. This usually takes several days, but I was able to get the "Hacker Anti-Defamation League" un-censored.
I've experienced far worse than the tetris dream. It's been over 7 years now, and I'm still recovering. I've told others, and now I'm telling you:
You don't know true horror until you've dreamed in QBasic.
"This next song is brand new, it's not on any of our albums, nobody's heard it [sarcasm]execpt those of you who are bootlegging our songs by mp3, and lip-syncing to songs that haven't been released yet! DAMN YOU![/sarcasm]"
Isn't that exactly the point? CPU companies are shipping products that aren't used to their full potential. With the right equipement and a little care, we can get "professional or gaming use" power out of the "I-Just-Want-to-Buy-The-Internet" hardware. We just want to be able to get every possible bit of power out of our machines.
Figures... I wait a month for apt-able packages to show up so I can download them with my cable modem. Within a week of moving to my University's 28.8 service, BOOM, 56megs of debian updates. Ah well.:)
Here, the official X debian package maintainer has some pre-beta debs of X4 waiting for you, if you're feeling adventurous. Apt-able packages are due to follow soon.
Hah! This wouldn't be paying nearly enough respect to the people who spent YEARS developing the concept of bar codes! What you should really be doing is designing your own way to universally and effectively identify a product based on a small printed region!
Oh, and on that note, did you know that you have to pay licensing fees to Uniform Code Council for permission to make and sell products with UPC codes? I'm not sure how or if this applies to private, non-commericial use of the system, but it's something to think about nonetheless.
The only reason you need TrollTech's develpment toolkit to write QT apps for windows is that they're the only ones writing a toolkit. If you want to go out and make your own set of tools and parts for QT apps in windows, nobody's stopping you. This should be particularly obvious in the wake of QT's recent GPL'ing.
All TrollTech is saying is that they spent alot of time and money on making QT display itself properly in Windows. While they've given up _most_ of QT to the community, they want to charge money for that little part. That's just fine. If there's a significant demand for a Free version of QT for windows, the GPL'd version will find its way there.
The problem being, that the number of people who understand, or (arguably) CAN understand the depth of this problem represent an overwhelmingly small percentage of the registered voters. There are probably more people EMPLOYED by the MPAA and it's members than people who are as concerned about this case as we are. The democratic process, as a prerequisite, calls for an INFORMED ELECTORATE. That means that the masses who run the country must be educated with regards to the issues they're deceiding. The average voter couldn't care less about DeCSS, let alone take the time required to form an educated opinion. Put simply, democracy cannot function in this situation, unless we find a way to teach more than half of the American population how this case effects them, and I'm not optimistic about that happening.
This is illegal, yes. Now AMD should be trying to prosecute people who are mismarking these CPU's. Instead, they implement a locking mechanism which places restrictions on _all_ it's customers, when other options (CPU id'ing, or in this case, just an obvious override to the laser-marked settings) exist. There's simply too many unanswered questions to presume that they're doing this for legitimate reasons.
Think about your dream world of printing... you'd have a postscript compatable printer, and you'd print everything as ghostscript, it would trod neatly through the spool, into a corresponding parrallel or usb port, out into the printer, and magicaly appear on paper, just the way you wanted.
Of course, this rarely happens in real life. If you want to print postscript information from unix to any "affordable" (read: spent the money you were going to spend on a real printer on Diablo II) printer, you need to convert it. Oddly enough, we've got GhostScript to do just that. And while it has some difficulty with particular printers, these difficulties are isolated, and are generally the fault of the printer manufacturer, for not releasing proper (read: complete) specs.
Now, with the advent of another globally accepted standard in printing, we've got a chance to turn things around. If the standard gets itself a snazzy name (V.Print2000, LaserScript, etc) it'll be accepted by the mainstream printer manufacturers. This means that they will have to choose A) to provide software to convert IPP-compliant information to each of their proprietary formats, or B) to make all of their printers understand IPP-compliant information.
And the moral of the story? IPP is this year's version of postscript. It may be new enough to sneak itself past the PHB's who run printing companies, or it may just end up being another fringe technology nobody ever talks about.
That's exactly what's GREAT about this... if there's one thing cranky, over-zealous, greedy insurance companies are good for, it's forcing it's clients to cover their bases. If idiot clients aren't paying attention to their security issues, they'll be charged up the yin-yang for high-risk insurance, or left behind by corporate customers who see coverage as a high-priority element in choosing an IS provider. My only concern is in making sure that the little guy, who actually puts a significant amount of effort into properly securing their services, gets a fair rate for eye-candy "reassurance" insurance.
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If it's really the infrastructure that's giving Napster its value, then the people contributing their computing power and bandwidth to the project are really the source of Napster's strength. If that's the case, shouldn't those who offer music on Napster get paid? (Or at least get a substantial discount on their subscription)
At the same time, if Napster is making money off people's transfers, and the computers of people all around the world are the resources that make those transfers possible... does that make the people serving up music a part of the Napster company in any way? Surely this would mean something bizzare for tax purposes.
Once we open that door, and show people that there's an effective, open, free solutution to their music needs, they'll start to think, "Hey, that's cool... I can do that for free, and it even works better. I wonder what else I can do with this Open Source thing?"
Once this happens (again, provided that we have effective open solutions available for them) the percieved supply of software skyrockets. All those little open-source leaders who haven't really been threatening the big name commercial providers start having "customers" drop into their lap. At the same time, the increase in supply brings the prices of software down, as a real, competitive market forces the quality of software up.
The next couple of decades should be very interesting.
1: Who actually gets the money? The artist (which the subscribers are being led to believe WILL get the money) or the labels who have absolutely nothing to do with this particular distribution mechanism?
2: Given a random mp3 off of Napster, how will the Napster staff be able to track down the author with any amount of accuracy? I'll admit this is partially due to a defficiency in the use of ID3 tags, but at the same time, without having artists sign on to authorize particular works, it's really a guessing game. And if we have authors specifically authorizing and uploading their own works, the benifits of a distributed music sharing service is more or less destroyed.
Yeah, these "researchers" put the postal workers through a little grief. But from the looks of it, the workers themselves were more often amused. :)
Also, they took the time after the whole thing was over to buy chocolates for everyone they tortured. That seems to me to be fairly respectful.
Oddly enough, N2H2's "Bess" censoring system allows users to submit sites for "approval", at which point they're immediatly blacklisted. (Any site that ONE user finds offense must be offensive to EVERYBODY, right?)
Imagine my suprise when a friend of mine submitted the N2H2 site for approval, and the web site that allows people to purchase the censoring service suddenly become rated "Obscene" for about 24 hours. :p
I know it's the case with my University that by submitting an application for admission, and subsequently accepting an offer of admission, you agree to a lofty "University Code of Behavior". Tucked in between a number of moral clauses advovating tolerance to other nationalities, anti-plagerism, etc, is a clause stating that all work done as a student falls under the scope of the U's "Intellectual Property Policy". The policy itself has to be obtained seperately from our "Industrial Internship Office." As long as this contract is legally binding, you could be stuck with handing over copyright ownership and/or licensing rights. The bottom line though is that this contract is so far removed from the University's admission process that very few students ever realise it applies to them.
In the case of N2H2 at least, there's a process by which every page is stamped with an N2H2 header. On this header, there's a 'submit for review' button, which anyone can press if they think they've gotton to a site they shouldn't be able to. This all sounds good in theory, except that by submitting the page for review, it automatically adds the site to the "naughty" list until someone actually gets around to testing it. Proof of point, www.n2h2.com was (briefly) added to the naughty list by a friend of mine... very amusing.
The point is, very little intelegence, machine or otherwise, goes into the censoring of pages. On N2H2's defence however, i'd point out that every "blocked-site" page is also given a header, so that joe-average-user can submit a censored page for reavaluation. This usually takes several days, but I was able to get the "Hacker Anti-Defamation League" un-censored.
I'll know I'll be holding my breath for Death Race 2000. :)
I've experienced far worse than the tetris dream. It's been over 7 years now, and I'm still recovering. I've told others, and now I'm telling you: You don't know true horror until you've dreamed in QBasic.
Ah ah ah...
That's '31337 h4xx0r d00dz'
Isn't that exactly the point? CPU companies are shipping products that aren't used to their full potential. With the right equipement and a little care, we can get "professional or gaming use" power out of the "I-Just-Want-to-Buy-The-Internet" hardware. We just want to be able to get every possible bit of power out of our machines.
Figures... I wait a month for apt-able packages to show up so I can download them with my cable modem. Within a week of moving to my University's 28.8 service, BOOM, 56megs of debian updates. Ah well. :)
http://www.debian.org/~branden/
Here, the official X debian package maintainer has some pre-beta debs of X4 waiting for you, if you're feeling adventurous. Apt-able packages are due to follow soon.
Hah! This wouldn't be paying nearly enough respect to the people who spent YEARS developing the concept of bar codes! What you should really be doing is designing your own way to universally and effectively identify a product based on a small printed region!
Oh, and on that note, did you know that you have to pay licensing fees to Uniform Code Council for permission to make and sell products with UPC codes? I'm not sure how or if this applies to private, non-commericial use of the system, but it's something to think about nonetheless.
The only reason you need TrollTech's develpment toolkit to write QT apps for windows is that they're the only ones writing a toolkit. If you want to go out and make your own set of tools and parts for QT apps in windows, nobody's stopping you. This should be particularly obvious in the wake of QT's recent GPL'ing.
All TrollTech is saying is that they spent alot of time and money on making QT display itself properly in Windows. While they've given up _most_ of QT to the community, they want to charge money for that little part. That's just fine. If there's a significant demand for a Free version of QT for windows, the GPL'd version will find its way there.
You mean like a playstation II?
Perhaps not. But they seem to be smart enough to massage the judicial/legislative systems into giving them their way.
The problem being, that the number of people who understand, or (arguably) CAN understand the depth of this problem represent an overwhelmingly small percentage of the registered voters. There are probably more people EMPLOYED by the MPAA and it's members than people who are as concerned about this case as we are.
The democratic process, as a prerequisite, calls for an INFORMED ELECTORATE. That means that the masses who run the country must be educated with regards to the issues they're deceiding. The average voter couldn't care less about DeCSS, let alone take the time required to form an educated opinion.
Put simply, democracy cannot function in this situation, unless we find a way to teach more than half of the American population how this case effects them, and I'm not optimistic about that happening.
Under XFree 3, a process needs root permissions in order to use Direct Rendering. It's that simple.
No. As the readme tells, the programmers like to eat. :)
This is illegal, yes. Now AMD should be trying to prosecute people who are mismarking these CPU's. Instead, they implement a locking mechanism which places restrictions on _all_ it's customers, when other options (CPU id'ing, or in this case, just an obvious override to the laser-marked settings) exist. There's simply too many unanswered questions to presume that they're doing this for legitimate reasons.
Eck. Tired. Replace IPP with your favorite printed information format, as opposed to a network document delivery protocol.
Simple. Wrapping.
Think about your dream world of printing... you'd have a postscript compatable printer, and you'd print everything as ghostscript, it would trod neatly through the spool, into a corresponding parrallel or usb port, out into the printer, and magicaly appear on paper, just the way you wanted.
Of course, this rarely happens in real life. If you want to print postscript information from unix to any "affordable" (read: spent the money you were going to spend on a real printer on Diablo II) printer, you need to convert it. Oddly enough, we've got GhostScript to do just that. And while it has some difficulty with particular printers, these difficulties are isolated, and are generally the fault of the printer manufacturer, for not releasing proper (read: complete) specs.
Now, with the advent of another globally accepted standard in printing, we've got a chance to turn things around. If the standard gets itself a snazzy name (V.Print2000, LaserScript, etc) it'll be accepted by the mainstream printer manufacturers. This means that they will have to choose A) to provide software to convert IPP-compliant information to each of their proprietary formats, or B) to make all of their printers understand IPP-compliant information.
And the moral of the story? IPP is this year's version of postscript. It may be new enough to sneak itself past the PHB's who run printing companies, or it may just end up being another fringe technology nobody ever talks about.
That's exactly what's GREAT about this... if there's one thing cranky, over-zealous, greedy insurance companies are good for, it's forcing it's clients to cover their bases. If idiot clients aren't paying attention to their security issues, they'll be charged up the yin-yang for high-risk insurance, or left behind by corporate customers who see coverage as a high-priority element in choosing an IS provider.
My only concern is in making sure that the little guy, who actually puts a significant amount of effort into properly securing their services, gets a fair rate for eye-candy "reassurance" insurance.