Aaaaaah, but if Mrs. Rosen and friends have it their way, you don't buy immaterial goods, you acquire a license to them. Just like you do with proprietary software. You don't own your copy of Windows; Microsoft does. You don't own your Metallica album; Polygram or Universal or EMI or whoever does. Yes, goodbye to the first sale doctrine; "how much do I pay for breathing" corporate dictatorship, here we come!
A lot of people (including Hillary Rosen) are saying things to the effect that just because online MP3 distribution doesn't hurt CD sales doesn't make it right. Well, they're missing the point.
The point, of course, is that copyright is (or at least should be, depending on what country you are) a social contract. The public gives up their freedom to copy "owned" works in exchange for the assurance that, if they buy it instead, the people who make it will be able to continue producing more of it. This concept evidently depends on the idea that treating your work as material property - i.e., jealously protecting it from unauthorised copying - is the only way to make money from intellectual goods.
Well, this report is proof to the contrary. If the public is no longer willing to keep up with the current copyright system, and the producers can still make enough money without it, then there's really no reason to continue with the current system: it's in the best interests of everyone to just come up with a new agreement.
Of course, to the record companies (as for all middlemen), the issue isn't really money; they have enough of that already. It's about power. For a long time they've had a virtually unbeatable monopoly on recorded music, and now they're losing it. That's unacceptable. So you can fully expect that, to the detriment of everyone, they'll keep fighting to retain the current system where they alone dictate the rules.
I'd bet money that it is based on that early work (Even if it was a "Gee, look at that! we should do that!")
No, it's based on the even earlier work by Xerox PARC. There is no evidence whatsoever of this Lisa-X connection. And I don't see what would prompt someone to claim this connection, seeing that the two pieces of software are completely different. Not everything in the software world was copied from Unix, y'know:)
I do think before I post, I expect others to think when they read, and that is my downfall.
Note that it wasn't me who told you to think before you post. You yourself should pay a little more attention when replying, then, eh?:)
Wow, cool! I want to see it! I heard about asciiMac, from MacHack, which ASCIIfies the whole screen, but it has the side effect of freezing my box:P This sounds cool... when you're done with that scheme, let me know.
And I can can write HTML with the best of them so I don't need the composer.
You mean there are "the best of them" in HTML sk1llz?
Seriously, now. It's a bloody mark-up language. And a poor, limited one at that. It's been a long time since I've seen someone gloat at their LaTeX sk1llz, y'know what I mean?
What the heck, at least you're not trying to claim that it's a programming language...
I've been trying to get the NIC story posted for days. And that's not the first time they did this to me either: last April 1st, the editors thought it was somehow funny to run entire articles through crappy automated translators and post them. They happened to choose Portuguese, so, being a good sport and a native speaker, I posted a translation of the article text. So they simply copied the whole thing, verbatim, and posted it under the Portuguese text, on the main article body. Without any kind of attribution.
This is only one out of several episodes. Just goes to show how much we can trust Slashdot. At least on this Slashback they bothered to give me credit on one out of two stories.
Are you James Glassman, or are you just trolling for him?
On one of the most recent columns that OSOpinion (for what reason I don't know) republished from Glassman's crappy securities site TechCentralStation, he told that exact same joke. In the exact same words.
So, are you him, or are you just a market-enamored troll who happened to read Glassman's article, liked the joke and decided to go around spreading this stupid meme?
Could it be because *ahem* Slashdot is a corporate site?
Rob and the gang may still run the editorial aspect of it (for now, at least), but otherwise, Slashdot is submitted to the interests of Andover.net/VA Linux, a BigCorp. And, like all BigCorps, it's got one goal in life: appease its shareholders. Which traditionally translates to "make mo' money".
And this is just a wild guess, but I figure, from all the banner ad networks, Doubleclick is the one that pays the best.
So Slashdot's party line may be "personal privacy forever"... until, that is, the bottom line comes into question. Then, Doubleclick's privacy policies suddenly become wholly irrelevant compared to the fact, pure and simple, that it's the best, quickest way to *ahem* appease the shareholders.
I mean, MOSR never had a real reputation to begin with. They knew nobody would really believe that ridiculous story. So they decided to blow it up, and make a nice mess while they're at it.
After this whole embarassing mess, they remain an untrustworthy rumour site - but now they're an untrustworthy site that's on Slashdot twice, an untrustworthy site that's got a lot of people talking about it, an untrustworthy site with a shitload of page views.
Whether it's true or not, Ryan Meader can only win from this. Evidently, he did.
(Makes me wonder about the Alan Smithee who allegedly denounced him... if Ryan can make up the story, he can sure call himself a liar and put it up for display on homepage.mac.com.)
If you're interested in learning more about the topic, a good place to start are the Classical Music Pages, light reading with the "layman" in mind. You can even try your hand at composition: here is a rather complete list of introductory sites on the topic.
Oooooh. Good pick - it's my favourite from The Planets, which is admittedly uneven - but I think the following are also contenders:
Bruckner's Symphony no. 5. Almost Baroque in pomp; an architectural masterpiece.
Berlioz's Requiem. The work because of which he became known for writing for 500 performers.
Mahler's Symphony no. 8. Written for an orchestra of 150 performers, two choirs and organ. Mahler was the ultimate musical megalomaniac. Fits perfectly.
Yeah, he was actually a baroque composer, actually one of the first.
Um, no. Although Bach's music bears much more resemblance to what's usually thought of as "Baroque art" than his predecessors' (one might point to Nietzsche's thesis regarding the perpetual delay between music and other art forms), he was certainly not one of the first composers of the period. The first important Baroque composer preceded Bach by more than an entire century, in fact: Claudio Monteverde lived from 1567 to 1643. And, as opposed to the Protestant polyphony of Bach's work, Monteverde composed nothing but vocal music, and took homophony to its limits, both in strongly Catholic sacred music and in profane pieces.
even if now his pieces seem somewhat simplistic in their patterns
There's nothing simplistic in the Art of the Fugue. Just listen to the Ricercare (or better yet, play it yourself; the full extent of its grandeur can't be comprehended if not by reading the piece. It's abstract music, like that of Beethoven's last works.)
But back then, this was the new thing. It was rebel territory. "Wow! Tonality!"
You have your history backwards. The tonal system was established in the late sixteenth century; all production since then (and, indeed, until Schoenberg methodised atonality with dodecaphony) was tonal. (What Bach did create was equal temperament - admittedly a great innovation, at least for instrumentists, although even Wendy Carlos has re-recorded the classic Switched-On Bach in uneven temperament - and what later came to be called the Bach-Rameau tonal system.)
When I mentioned classical music, I was including baroque composers in that category as well, even if they're a bit too early. For the purposes of this article, the same thing applies to Bach as it does to all other composers for the organ. Whatever.
My point was that neither Bach nor Mozart nor Beethoven nor Mahler thought of their music as "classical" at the time; it was simply contemporary music. The distinction between the "popular" or "contemporary" and the "classical" only came into being recently, with the rise of much simpler and shorter forms: jazz, blues, rock, whatnot, which differ significantly from the much more complex "classical music". (And although the relative number of musicians proficient in this style has never really suffered from a significant drop, it evidently hasn't been able to accompany the growth of the populational explosion of the 20th century; therefore, most music done today is the much "trendier" "popular music".)
Ol' J. S. Bach was a late Baroque composer (1685-1750), not Renaissance (~1400-1500).
In those days, there was no classical music. Bach composed contemporary music... for his day. (Heck, a lot of people think he was avant-garde even then... although the next generation was already obsessed with the Rococo and left J. S.'s Baroque heritage behind... none more so than his son C. P. E.) So, if Bach had a MIDI-fied Large Hot Pipe Organ... he would have probably written "Art of the MIDI-fied Fugue", that's all.;)
Suggestion to the Slashcode developers: add something like this in the next release!
$rh = $db->query("SELECT s FROM stories WHERE s.category = $newArticle{category}"); while ($rh->fetch()) { $c = isect(@{$newArticle{keywords}}, @{$_{keywords}}); warnMsg("This article looks like $_{name} (at $_{url}), with $c matched keywords.\n") if $c >= $SOME_ARBITRARY_CONSTANT; }
(Ghod, I still remember some of this stupid database programming... I've been trying to forget the horrible memories for half a year now. Urgh.)
Being a good Lisp Machine fanatic, I will now proceed to tell you about Genera.:)
(let ((rhapsody #t));; in Scheme: it's the Lisp of the future:)
Aaaaaah, the Lisp Machine. The forgotten ideal.
The Lisp Machine. The first personal workstation. Bleeding-edge technology under your fingertips and yours alone. The programmer, the user, the administrator: the master of your system.
The Lisp Machine. From user interface specification all the way down to on-chip microcode, all is Lisp. Everything is an s-expression, always so wonderfully manipulable.
The Lisp Machine. A great vision of software and hardware working together in the perfect harmony of the Tao.
The Lisp Machine. Often envisioned, often imitated, never surpassed.
#t)
Anyway, Genera is still alive and well, thank you very much. (Well, perhaps not well, but alive nonetheless.) Symbolics, the new company which acquired the assets of its long-dead namesake, is still at hard work: amongst other things, on Genera 8.5/Open Genera 2.0, which runs on the Compaq (once Digital (once DEC)) Alpha as well as natively on the remaining Lisp Machines.
And last but not least, here's a full-fledged Introduction to Genera, written by the MIT for internal use in 1990. Have fun!
There seems to be a steadily growing number of those. At the last course I took (a summer two-monther on linear algebra), at least half of the 80-student class was female.
OTOH, in my department, out of around 50 PhDs, only two are women.
What's the factor that makes women less attracted to the academic career than males? I wonder.
Please. It's irritating enough as it is, with people are shouting at cell phones all the time, discussing their personal lives for the world and their parrot to hear. Now you want us to have to go through that even when we're not talking to anyone?
A speech-based interface only makes sense in environments that require hands-off operation (e.g. driving a car, fixing a spaceship in orbit). Otherwise, speech recognition should remain as an useful but not essential add-on in otherwise more developed UIs.
Besides, think of the impacts of this in young geeks' lives:
Little John to his computer, circa 2005: "Download hotanalsex.jpg... rotate windows... click on 'Free Asian Teens'... rotate windows... tell H0+Ch1x on #h4x0rz 'yeah b4b3, I'm a l33+ h4x0r d00d!'"
Little John's Mom: "John, I know what you're doing in there! I can hear you! Put your... uh, both your hands in plain sight! Onanism is a sin against Ghod!"
Squeak, a Smalltalk-based language/OS/IDE/VM developed by Disney. Specifically, try to find stuff about Morphic there; it was born in Self, a prototype-based (classless) relative of Smalltalk, but it's been adopted officially as Squeak's UI system. It's pretty innovative, taking the approach of representing all objects graphically on screen through the notion of "morphs".
ETH Oberon, another integrated language/OS hybrid, with a very different UI with some interesting ideas.
Gentner and Nielsen's amazing article The Anti-Mac, which, by starting out with the goal of violating all the reasoning behind Apple's Human Interface Design Guidelines, ends up with a very interesting - and very implementable in the near future - UI design for high-performance workstations.
So, no, GUI research ain't dead. ("It's pining for the fjords.":))
The PalmOS feature you describe is called orthogonal persistence, and it's anything but new: it's been around since the old days of raw-disk, pointer-oriented databases.
Thing is, it's very much incompatible with a file-oriented paradigm (and therefore with the Unix philosophy, amongst others). This is why it really didn't catch up in most environments. (Not to mention the fact that it can be really horrible to implement, especially in a limited environment and language combination such as the one provided by Unix/C.)
I tell myself not to nitpick, but I can't help it. Here we go.
Basically, a relationship between two living beings is categorised as parasitical (sp? I took Bio in Portuguese, not English) when one of them survives at the detriment of the other. It's a +/- relationship. Therefore, a disgusting nematelmynt (again, sp?) that lives inside your stomach qualifies parasite. So does an unemployed divorcee who lives off the ex-spouse's hard-earned pay.:)
However, the MOD^H^H^Hmidichlorians (BTW, what a stupid damned name! It tries to be scientific, while ignoring that "a long long time ago in a galaxy far far away" nobody spoke Latin!) don't. I mean, think about it. They get to float around in your cells. You get premonition, supernatural agility and speed, and the right to wear damned cool robes and use those awesome lightsabers (in five fruity colours!). I'd say it's a +/+ relationship, no doubt about it.
Perhaps the word you were looking for is "symbiosis", not "parasitism", eh?
Slashdot Mirror
Aaaaaah, but if Mrs. Rosen and friends have it their way, you don't buy immaterial goods, you acquire a license to them. Just like you do with proprietary software. You don't own your copy of Windows; Microsoft does. You don't own your Metallica album; Polygram or Universal or EMI or whoever does. Yes, goodbye to the first sale doctrine; "how much do I pay for breathing" corporate dictatorship, here we come!
:)
I guess I'm just bitter.
A lot of people (including Hillary Rosen) are saying things to the effect that just because online MP3 distribution doesn't hurt CD sales doesn't make it right. Well, they're missing the point.
The point, of course, is that copyright is (or at least should be, depending on what country you are) a social contract. The public gives up their freedom to copy "owned" works in exchange for the assurance that, if they buy it instead, the people who make it will be able to continue producing more of it. This concept evidently depends on the idea that treating your work as material property - i.e., jealously protecting it from unauthorised copying - is the only way to make money from intellectual goods.
Well, this report is proof to the contrary. If the public is no longer willing to keep up with the current copyright system, and the producers can still make enough money without it, then there's really no reason to continue with the current system: it's in the best interests of everyone to just come up with a new agreement.
Of course, to the record companies (as for all middlemen), the issue isn't really money; they have enough of that already. It's about power. For a long time they've had a virtually unbeatable monopoly on recorded music, and now they're losing it. That's unacceptable. So you can fully expect that, to the detriment of everyone, they'll keep fighting to retain the current system where they alone dictate the rules.
I'd bet money that it is based on that early work (Even if it was a "Gee, look at that! we should do that!")
:)
:)
No, it's based on the even earlier work by Xerox PARC. There is no evidence whatsoever of this Lisa-X connection. And I don't see what would prompt someone to claim this connection, seeing that the two pieces of software are completely different. Not everything in the software world was copied from Unix, y'know
I do think before I post, I expect others to think when they read, and that is my downfall.
Note that it wasn't me who told you to think before you post. You yourself should pay a little more attention when replying, then, eh?
Wow, cool! I want to see it! I heard about asciiMac, from MacHack, which ASCIIfies the whole screen, but it has the side effect of freezing my box :P This sounds cool... when you're done with that scheme, let me know.
Development on the Lisa UI started in 1979; the Macintosh was released in 1984. X was invented in 1985. Get the picture?
And I can can write HTML with the best of them so I don't need the composer.
You mean there are "the best of them" in HTML sk1llz?
Seriously, now. It's a bloody mark-up language. And a poor, limited one at that. It's been a long time since I've seen someone gloat at their LaTeX sk1llz, y'know what I mean?
What the heck, at least you're not trying to claim that it's a programming language...
I've been trying to get the NIC story posted for days. And that's not the first time they did this to me either: last April 1st, the editors thought it was somehow funny to run entire articles through crappy automated translators and post them. They happened to choose Portuguese, so, being a good sport and a native speaker, I posted a translation of the article text. So they simply copied the whole thing, verbatim, and posted it under the Portuguese text, on the main article body. Without any kind of attribution.
This is only one out of several episodes. Just goes to show how much we can trust Slashdot. At least on this Slashback they bothered to give me credit on one out of two stories.
Are you James Glassman, or are you just trolling for him?
On one of the most recent columns that OSOpinion (for what reason I don't know) republished from Glassman's crappy securities site TechCentralStation, he told that exact same joke. In the exact same words.
So, are you him, or are you just a market-enamored troll who happened to read Glassman's article, liked the joke and decided to go around spreading this stupid meme?
Could it be because *ahem* Slashdot is a corporate site?
Rob and the gang may still run the editorial aspect of it (for now, at least), but otherwise, Slashdot is submitted to the interests of Andover.net/VA Linux, a BigCorp. And, like all BigCorps, it's got one goal in life: appease its shareholders. Which traditionally translates to "make mo' money".
And this is just a wild guess, but I figure, from all the banner ad networks, Doubleclick is the one that pays the best.
So Slashdot's party line may be "personal privacy forever"... until, that is, the bottom line comes into question. Then, Doubleclick's privacy policies suddenly become wholly irrelevant compared to the fact, pure and simple, that it's the best, quickest way to *ahem* appease the shareholders.
(Sorry for the rant.)
I mean, MOSR never had a real reputation to begin with. They knew nobody would really believe that ridiculous story. So they decided to blow it up, and make a nice mess while they're at it.
After this whole embarassing mess, they remain an untrustworthy rumour site - but now they're an untrustworthy site that's on Slashdot twice, an untrustworthy site that's got a lot of people talking about it, an untrustworthy site with a shitload of page views.
Whether it's true or not, Ryan Meader can only win from this. Evidently, he did.
(Makes me wonder about the Alan Smithee who allegedly denounced him... if Ryan can make up the story, he can sure call himself a liar and put it up for display on homepage.mac.com.)
If you're interested in learning more about the topic, a good place to start are the Classical Music Pages, light reading with the "layman" in mind. You can even try your hand at composition: here is a rather complete list of introductory sites on the topic.
Well, the unfortunate side effect of all this erudition is that all too often I sound like a pompous git... that's the price you pay :)
Yeah, he was actually a baroque composer, actually one of the first.
Um, no. Although Bach's music bears much more resemblance to what's usually thought of as "Baroque art" than his predecessors' (one might point to Nietzsche's thesis regarding the perpetual delay between music and other art forms), he was certainly not one of the first composers of the period. The first important Baroque composer preceded Bach by more than an entire century, in fact: Claudio Monteverde lived from 1567 to 1643. And, as opposed to the Protestant polyphony of Bach's work, Monteverde composed nothing but vocal music, and took homophony to its limits, both in strongly Catholic sacred music and in profane pieces.
even if now his pieces seem somewhat simplistic in their patterns
There's nothing simplistic in the Art of the Fugue. Just listen to the Ricercare (or better yet, play it yourself; the full extent of its grandeur can't be comprehended if not by reading the piece. It's abstract music, like that of Beethoven's last works.)
But back then, this was the new thing. It was rebel territory. "Wow! Tonality!"
You have your history backwards. The tonal system was established in the late sixteenth century; all production since then (and, indeed, until Schoenberg methodised atonality with dodecaphony) was tonal. (What Bach did create was equal temperament - admittedly a great innovation, at least for instrumentists, although even Wendy Carlos has re-recorded the classic Switched-On Bach in uneven temperament - and what later came to be called the Bach-Rameau tonal system.)
When I mentioned classical music, I was including baroque composers in that category as well, even if they're a bit too early. For the purposes of this article, the same thing applies to Bach as it does to all other composers for the organ. Whatever.
My point was that neither Bach nor Mozart nor Beethoven nor Mahler thought of their music as "classical" at the time; it was simply contemporary music. The distinction between the "popular" or "contemporary" and the "classical" only came into being recently, with the rise of much simpler and shorter forms: jazz, blues, rock, whatnot, which differ significantly from the much more complex "classical music". (And although the relative number of musicians proficient in this style has never really suffered from a significant drop, it evidently hasn't been able to accompany the growth of the populational explosion of the 20th century; therefore, most music done today is the much "trendier" "popular music".)
"We have all been here before..."
Dammit, you got me whistling a CSN song!
Anyway, this story has already been posted, as "The Challenges of Integrating Unix and Mac OS".
Suggestion to the Slashcode developers: add something like this in the next release!
$rh = $db->query("SELECT s FROM stories WHERE s.category = $newArticle{category}");
while ($rh->fetch()) {
$c = isect(@{$newArticle{keywords}}, @{$_{keywords}});
warnMsg("This article looks like $_{name} (at $_{url}), with $c matched keywords.\n") if $c >= $SOME_ARBITRARY_CONSTANT;
}
(Ghod, I still remember some of this stupid database programming... I've been trying to forget the horrible memories for half a year now. Urgh.)
(let ((rhapsody #t))
#t)
Anyway, Genera is still alive and well, thank you very much. (Well, perhaps not well, but alive nonetheless.) Symbolics, the new company which acquired the assets of its long-dead namesake, is still at hard work: amongst other things, on Genera 8.5/Open Genera 2.0, which runs on the Compaq (once Digital (once DEC)) Alpha as well as natively on the remaining Lisp Machines.
And last but not least, here's a full-fledged Introduction to Genera, written by the MIT for internal use in 1990. Have fun!
Pros:
Cons:
As you can see, my situation is very unfavourable... whether I'm in Rio or not
There seems to be a steadily growing number of those. At the last course I took (a summer two-monther on linear algebra), at least half of the 80-student class was female.
OTOH, in my department, out of around 50 PhDs, only two are women.
What's the factor that makes women less attracted to the academic career than males? I wonder.
Hey, I'm a person, and I haven't had sex in ages! Stop the discrimination!
:)
Maybe I should start an organisation called "GUFOGEL" (Geeks United For the Objective of Getting Laid)...
It might as well be a for-profit org.
Ah well.
Please. It's irritating enough as it is, with people are shouting at cell phones all the time, discussing their personal lives for the world and their parrot to hear. Now you want us to have to go through that even when we're not talking to anyone?
A speech-based interface only makes sense in environments that require hands-off operation (e.g. driving a car, fixing a spaceship in orbit). Otherwise, speech recognition should remain as an useful but not essential add-on in otherwise more developed UIs.
Besides, think of the impacts of this in young geeks' lives:
Little John to his computer, circa 2005: "Download hotanalsex.jpg... rotate windows... click on 'Free Asian Teens'... rotate windows... tell H0+Ch1x on #h4x0rz 'yeah b4b3, I'm a l33+ h4x0r d00d!'"
Little John's Mom: "John, I know what you're doing in there! I can hear you! Put your... uh, both your hands in plain sight! Onanism is a sin against Ghod!"
Some counterproof: The Anti-Mac (by Gentner and Nielsen, so you'd better listen!)
So, no, GUI research ain't dead. ("It's pining for the fjords."
The PalmOS feature you describe is called orthogonal persistence, and it's anything but new: it's been around since the old days of raw-disk, pointer-oriented databases.
Thing is, it's very much incompatible with a file-oriented paradigm (and therefore with the Unix philosophy, amongst others). This is why it really didn't catch up in most environments. (Not to mention the fact that it can be really horrible to implement, especially in a limited environment and language combination such as the one provided by Unix/C.)
I tell myself not to nitpick, but I can't help it. Here we go.
:)
:)
Basically, a relationship between two living beings is categorised as parasitical (sp? I took Bio in Portuguese, not English) when one of them survives at the detriment of the other. It's a +/- relationship. Therefore, a disgusting nematelmynt (again, sp?) that lives inside your stomach qualifies parasite. So does an unemployed divorcee who lives off the ex-spouse's hard-earned pay.
However, the MOD^H^H^Hmidichlorians (BTW, what a stupid damned name! It tries to be scientific, while ignoring that "a long long time ago in a galaxy far far away" nobody spoke Latin!) don't. I mean, think about it. They get to float around in your cells. You get premonition, supernatural agility and speed, and the right to wear damned cool robes and use those awesome lightsabers (in five fruity colours!). I'd say it's a +/+ relationship, no doubt about it.
Perhaps the word you were looking for is "symbiosis", not "parasitism", eh?
(BTW: It's spelled "Anakin".