I suppose I wouldn't mind seeing one guy serve in the House for 10 years, then move to the senate for 12. That's a long time, but it is a different position. Then after that if they wanted to be President for 8, great. And after that if they wanted to serve on their city council that would be ok too...:)
When I advocate term limits I mean to limit the number of times you can hold a particular elected office not any elected office.
- Never mind that Swing is just plain ugly too, at least the metal style. - Swing is SLOW (someone has mentioned this, but I'll say it again because it's that slow). - 3D Graphics are a JOKE if you want to use any high end rendering engine (e.g. TGS or TSA).
In the last year I programmed Swing for 3 months and then dumped it over the 3D limitation. I then spent about 1 and 1/2 months reimplementing my Swing GUI in Qt. The difference was astounding.
After that Qt was the obvious decesion. It is actively developed, there is good support, the GUIs are responsive, and in many cases the API is much better than Swing, and only in a few cases more difficult.
Signals and Slots are a god send.
In the end my use of Qt made me switch to KDE too.:) That after using GNOME since its Alpha days.
It's unthinkable that anyone would use anything but Qt for GUI development. It is by far the most mature cross platform toolkit out there. The only two that can even come close are GNOME and wxWindows, but really who wants to write in plain C? It takes three times as much code to accomplish the same task as in C++.
You could start your own company, but the "networking" thing would be important if you were to do that. Remember it's not what you know, but who you know that oftentimes matters.
Why would any company in their right mind, after winning such a law suit, sell their cash cow? All InterTrust would have to do is sit around, do nothing except drop an occasional law suit on someone and then collect money. What could be easier? What could be more despicable?
I think the more likely possibility is that MS buys them out as part of the settlement.
Actually in principal the whole patent/copyright system is a mess. This is just another symptom of it. What would be nice is if Microsoft woke up to that reality and began lobbying for some changes. Certainly they have some pull in Washington...
However, algorithms should be patentable. For example mp3 encoding or the gif format. Algorithms and file formats can be specified very stringently. Business models, and some of the other vague notions that get patented are just that, vague, and they shouldn't be patentable.
We also need to get nuclear powered spaceships into orbit. That is we need to build them in orbit because that is the only way we're going to create anything that we'd want to fly to mars or eurpoa in.
Say I want to stream two different songs to two different rooms? Maybe the speakers have different channels, but how many are possible? If only one channel is possible then the wireless solution is unworkable, unless you did it for just one of the rooms, maybe the most remote...
And yes, if the signal is digital it's surely much better than a wireless analog signal, which is what I was talking about. Wireless speakers that have an analog signal are of poor quality. I wanted to buy some once, but was quickly talked out of it for that reason.
Do you think Tolkein didn't copy mythical monsters from the oldest legends? Everyone borrows from everyone else. This is a fact of life.
You are correct though, derivation is the way literature advances. A derivative work could be itself more innovative than the original. Certainly Weird Al does a better job on some songs than the original artists did.:)
The larger question though is, is copyright and patent law broken. Of course I know that will get a resounding yes on Slashdot, but what can be done to fix it?
It seems no matter what limits are put on an author's monopoly of their work it will be arbitary, but many of the kids reading Harry Potter today will never see the day they can legally create derivative works. This is a total disservice to the culture for the benefit of a very small group of people. The temporary monopoly of copyright was given as an incentive to create. When it becomes something that discourages innovation and creativity it has gone too far.
The whole concept of intellectual property in this country has gone too far. It's unfortunate though, that I don't see anyone fixing it. The people who could fix it (the senators etc...) have too many hands in their pockets to come up with something fair for the public. Moreover, I don't believe they really understand technology that well to begin with, and techonology is a large part of why intellectual property laws are so screwed up. I don't know what it's going to take to get these people to open their eyes.
More piracy could have many effects, one could be a huge clamp down and further extension of ridiculous copyright and patent laws. It could also have the opposite effect, but that is unlikely. I wonder what kind of activism could be used successfully to make the powers that be realize this particular branch of law is entirely broken?
[sigh] We're in for a ride the next 20 or so years.
well I'm assuming you are removing mozilla, emacs, ctwm
I'll give you mozilla. Emacs is a developer tool, and I thank god for it everyday, but my girlfriend or mom would give a shit about it. Virtual desktops are nice. So, yes, there is some innovation.:)
Windows isn't terribly innovative, but I never said they were. However, there are many games on XP where you could say "look at that". Never the less I think that OSS has really moved to copy windows when maybe it should copy Apple.:) I'll repeat what I said about coherence. No one has it like Apple has it, and coherence makes for a wonderful user experience.
Yeah I'll second that thing about JuK's website. Ouch!
Rhythmbox actually looks like the best one of the bunch, but damn it's a clone and is much less pretty than its inspiration. JuK looked pretty clunky and liteamp is alpha like hell. You didn't mention XMMS.... interesting.
It's good people are doing what the like to do, but like I said in a different post on this thread, the programs are mediocre clones and they exist in a vacuum. I would bet that none of these programs can interoperate with OSS Photo programs like iTunes does with iPhoto.
What your saying is valid if having the source means so much to you.
I don't think it matters to much though. I would rather not have the hassles of needing the source code.
My time is more valuable in that respect. Meaning, I have better things to do with my time than hack another ssh client for example. I would rather compose some music than write the music software, and yeah I'll pay someone for the convenince and I don't care if they keep the source as long as the product works, and if it doesn't I won't buy the new version.
I used to think like you though, so I know where your coming from. It's gratifying to think you could change the source code, but in practice I've only done that a few times. I'm very thankful for Linux and the OSS movement. There is potential to learn a lot by reading the code. Someday it may even "win", but its a dowside of the "bazaar" method that there is no one up above saying, "look all of this needs to work together seamlessly". Apple can do that and it's really a blessing for the user.
Take Drag and Drop. I have a pdf document on my desktop. I open mail, drag it in, it attaches. I drag web addresses to the desktop, the link is made. I drag the web address to my bookmark bar, the bookmark is made. You get the idea. OS X is not just a collection of applications its a coherent evironment and that can not be downplayed. It creates an experience for you that you want to keep reliving and that your happy about. So many times I've been like it would be cool if I could do "X" and I try it and it works! This does not happen under Redhat, or if it does, rarely.
The OSS movement has no coherence. You have a lot of duplicate efforts. It's why there are 5 different web browsers and only one of them (Mozilla/Firebird) is worth using and it can't even do Flash 90% of the time. It's why there are as many mail clients and all of them are lacking and can't interoperate with even the Web Browsers much less the mp3 player or the photo programs. It's the reason there are 4 half-assed word processors instead of one really good one.
Another thing about OSS is that it is so hell bent on copying Windoze that it rarely innovates. I've seen very little non-clone applications come out of the OSS movement. I dare you to name any desktop applications that are innovative. Certainly I can name quite a few server ones, but we are not talking about serving apps here. OSS has no "killer" desktop apps, just mediocre clones.
I don't think OSS will ever produce a Final Cut Pro or any such high-end software. Even copying MS Word is a tall order. However, at the end of the day it is the lack of coherence between apps that makes Linux such a pain in the ass to work with.
I stopped using Linux at home when I bought my OS X box almost 2 years ago. I'll never go back to Linux.
Everything on OS X just works. No fucking with X, no wondering why Evolution can't play nice with Mozilla. There is a well-integrated set of Applications. You can drag and drop from anything to anything. It just works.
GNOME and KDE have gotten better. I use Redhat 9.0 at work and it's definitely the best Linux box I've ever had, and I've had alot. Starting with Slackware 3, I've used Debian, Mandrake and Redhat.
None of them even touch OS X in terms of usability.
Plus no one has anything like iTunes.
Combine all of that with Fink and the Developer Tools and what more could you possibly ask for? Ahh yes, more games. It'll happen, albiet probably slowly.
If Apple can stay competitive in terms of hardware speeds I don't see why OS X can't become the leading OS. It is certainly better than any other OS around right now.
And frankly spam isn't high on my set of priorities either.:) I only get about 5-10 pieces of day on my three email addresses combined.
For spam an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure though. Don't put your email address where the idiots can get to it. As for the cure, I have found that clicking unsubscribe does work usually. E-Lucky Day being an exception here, and that when you unsubscribe from any of them you don't actually become unsubscribed for like three days.
The tax thing is bad, but requring that any email have a valid return address would be nice for reverse spamming. I've been known to send many copies of huge binaries to people who won't quit spamming me.
Now allowing me, the receiver of spam, to charge the spammer $0.01 for every piece I receive could work.
For example I get spam from that idiot in Africa who wants me to transfer $1 million dollars to some bank account. I hit reply, and say "you owe me a penny. Feel free to transfer it to my paypal account or alternatively you can send me a check."
If you opted for them to send you a check it would cost them probably close to $0.50/email for anyone who requested the penny. Someone who sends millions of emails simply couldn't afford it. Someone who sends just a few, i.e. targets their audience better would be better off, and hell you might even begin to enjoy receiving spam. Even if you opted for the paypal transfer though spamming could become very expensive for them.
This could all work in conjuction with an international spammer registry. You would have to be licensed to spam, provide return addresses, and sign a contract, which would be obligate you to pay the penny in a timely manner upon request.
None of this works without a valid return address though.:)
Slashdot Mirror
I suppose I wouldn't mind seeing one guy serve in the House for 10 years, then move to the senate for 12. That's a long time, but it is a different position. Then after that if they wanted to be President for 8, great. And after that if they wanted to serve on their city council that would be ok too... :)
When I advocate term limits I mean to limit the number of times you can hold a particular elected office not any elected office.
Vote out the incumbant!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Could techies rally around term limits for Congressmen? Maybe two terms for senators and three for reps?
- Never mind that Swing is just plain ugly too, at least the metal style.
:) That after using GNOME since its Alpha days.
:)
- Swing is SLOW (someone has mentioned this, but I'll say it again because it's that slow).
- 3D Graphics are a JOKE if you want to use any high end rendering engine (e.g. TGS or TSA).
In the last year I programmed Swing for 3 months and then dumped it over the 3D limitation. I then spent about 1 and 1/2 months reimplementing my Swing GUI in Qt. The difference was astounding.
After that Qt was the obvious decesion. It is actively developed, there is good support, the GUIs are responsive, and in many cases the API is much better than Swing, and only in a few cases more difficult.
Signals and Slots are a god send.
In the end my use of Qt made me switch to KDE too.
It's unthinkable that anyone would use anything but Qt for GUI development. It is by far the most mature cross platform toolkit out there. The only two that can even come close are GNOME and wxWindows, but really who wants to write in plain C? It takes three times as much code to accomplish the same task as in C++.
That's my two cents...
-Craig.
You could start your own company, but the "networking" thing would be important if you were to do that. Remember it's not what you know, but who you know that oftentimes matters.
the Playstation was inovative as being the first _useable_ CD based console
No way! 3DO rocked!
Why would any company in their right mind, after winning such a law suit, sell their cash cow? All InterTrust would have to do is sit around, do nothing except drop an occasional law suit on someone and then collect money. What could be easier? What could be more despicable?
I think the more likely possibility is that MS buys them out as part of the settlement.
Actually in principal the whole patent/copyright system is a mess. This is just another symptom of it. What would be nice is if Microsoft woke up to that reality and began lobbying for some changes. Certainly they have some pull in Washington...
However, algorithms should be patentable. For example mp3 encoding or the gif format. Algorithms and file formats can be specified very stringently. Business models, and some of the other vague notions that get patented are just that, vague, and they shouldn't be patentable.
Yes please let's colonize the moon.
We also need to get nuclear powered spaceships into orbit. That is we need to build them in orbit because that is the only way we're going to create anything that we'd want to fly to mars or eurpoa in.
-Craig.
What about the interference issues?
Say I want to stream two different songs to two different rooms? Maybe the speakers have different channels, but how many are possible? If only one channel is possible then the wireless solution is unworkable, unless you did it for just one of the rooms, maybe the most remote...
And yes, if the signal is digital it's surely much better than a wireless analog signal, which is what I was talking about. Wireless speakers that have an analog signal are of poor quality. I wanted to buy some once, but was quickly talked out of it for that reason.
Do you think Tolkein didn't copy mythical monsters from the oldest legends? Everyone borrows from everyone else. This is a fact of life.
:)
You are correct though, derivation is the way literature advances. A derivative work could be itself more innovative than the original. Certainly Weird Al does a better job on some songs than the original artists did.
The larger question though is, is copyright and patent law broken. Of course I know that will get a resounding yes on Slashdot, but what can be done to fix it?
It seems no matter what limits are put on an author's monopoly of their work it will be arbitary, but many of the kids reading Harry Potter today will never see the day they can legally create derivative works. This is a total disservice to the culture for the benefit of a very small group of people. The temporary monopoly of copyright was given as an incentive to create. When it becomes something that discourages innovation and creativity it has gone too far.
The whole concept of intellectual property in this country has gone too far. It's unfortunate though, that I don't see anyone fixing it. The people who could fix it (the senators etc...) have too many hands in their pockets to come up with something fair for the public. Moreover, I don't believe they really understand technology that well to begin with, and techonology is a large part of why intellectual property laws are so screwed up. I don't know what it's going to take to get these people to open their eyes.
More piracy could have many effects, one could be a huge clamp down and further extension of ridiculous copyright and patent laws. It could also have the opposite effect, but that is unlikely. I wonder what kind of activism could be used successfully to make the powers that be realize this particular branch of law is entirely broken?
[sigh] We're in for a ride the next 20 or so years.
Wireless speakers are considered by most audiophiles to be of poor sound quality.
This of course assumes an analog signal.
Also if you wanted to run one song in one room and another song in another room there could be interference issues.
well I'm assuming you are removing mozilla, emacs, ctwm
:)
:) I'll repeat what I said about coherence. No one has it like Apple has it, and coherence makes for a wonderful user experience.
I'll give you mozilla. Emacs is a developer tool, and I thank god for it everyday, but my girlfriend or mom would give a shit about it. Virtual desktops are nice. So, yes, there is some innovation.
Windows isn't terribly innovative, but I never said they were. However, there are many games on XP where you could say "look at that". Never the less I think that OSS has really moved to copy windows when maybe it should copy Apple.
Yeah I'll second that thing about JuK's website. Ouch!
Rhythmbox actually looks like the best one of the bunch, but damn it's a clone and is much less pretty than its inspiration. JuK looked pretty clunky and liteamp is alpha like hell. You didn't mention XMMS.... interesting.
It's good people are doing what the like to do, but like I said in a different post on this thread, the programs are mediocre clones and they exist in a vacuum. I would bet that none of these programs can interoperate with OSS Photo programs like iTunes does with iPhoto.
What your saying is valid if having the source means so much to you.
;)
I don't think it matters to much though. I would rather not have the hassles of needing the source code.
My time is more valuable in that respect. Meaning, I have better things to do with my time than hack another ssh client for example. I would rather compose some music than write the music software, and yeah I'll pay someone for the convenince and I don't care if they keep the source as long as the product works, and if it doesn't I won't buy the new version.
I used to think like you though, so I know where your coming from. It's gratifying to think you could change the source code, but in practice I've only done that a few times. I'm very thankful for Linux and the OSS movement. There is potential to learn a lot by reading the code. Someday it may even "win", but its a dowside of the "bazaar" method that there is no one up above saying, "look all of this needs to work together seamlessly". Apple can do that and it's really a blessing for the user.
Take Drag and Drop. I have a pdf document on my desktop. I open mail, drag it in, it attaches. I drag web addresses to the desktop, the link is made. I drag the web address to my bookmark bar, the bookmark is made. You get the idea. OS X is not just a collection of applications its a coherent evironment and that can not be downplayed. It creates an experience for you that you want to keep reliving and that your happy about. So many times I've been like it would be cool if I could do "X" and I try it and it works! This does not happen under Redhat, or if it does, rarely.
The OSS movement has no coherence. You have a lot of duplicate efforts. It's why there are 5 different web browsers and only one of them (Mozilla/Firebird) is worth using and it can't even do Flash 90% of the time. It's why there are as many mail clients and all of them are lacking and can't interoperate with even the Web Browsers much less the mp3 player or the photo programs. It's the reason there are 4 half-assed word processors instead of one really good one.
Another thing about OSS is that it is so hell bent on copying Windoze that it rarely innovates. I've seen very little non-clone applications come out of the OSS movement. I dare you to name any desktop applications that are innovative. Certainly I can name quite a few server ones, but we are not talking about serving apps here. OSS has no "killer" desktop apps, just mediocre clones.
I don't think OSS will ever produce a Final Cut Pro or any such high-end software. Even copying MS Word is a tall order. However, at the end of the day it is the lack of coherence between apps that makes Linux such a pain in the ass to work with.
That's my rant.
-Craig.
I stopped using Linux at home when I bought my OS X box almost 2 years ago. I'll never go back to Linux.
Everything on OS X just works. No fucking with X, no wondering why Evolution can't play nice with Mozilla. There is a well-integrated set of Applications. You can drag and drop from anything to anything. It just works.
GNOME and KDE have gotten better. I use Redhat 9.0 at work and it's definitely the best Linux box I've ever had, and I've had alot. Starting with Slackware 3, I've used Debian, Mandrake and Redhat.
None of them even touch OS X in terms of usability.
Plus no one has anything like iTunes.
Combine all of that with Fink and the Developer Tools and what more could you possibly ask for? Ahh yes, more games. It'll happen, albiet probably slowly.
If Apple can stay competitive in terms of hardware speeds I don't see why OS X can't become the leading OS. It is certainly better than any other OS around right now.
Not really. Scary yes. I'll make my own decisions thank you.
-Craig.
if you want that content
Big IF there considering about 99% of what is produced isn't fit for the trash.
I don't like that option at all
Yeah you've got a point, but if no one buys it... blah blah blah. Like the American Sheeple will ever wake up.
Just ask any artist who has sold millions of records... they'll tell you two things: 1, that they're happy they signed with a major label
I've got one word for you, NOFX.
So quit grousing and don't buy em.
You know you're right.
:) I only get about 5-10 pieces of day on my three email addresses combined.
And frankly spam isn't high on my set of priorities either.
For spam an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure though. Don't put your email address where the idiots can get to it. As for the cure, I have found that clicking unsubscribe does work usually. E-Lucky Day being an exception here, and that when you unsubscribe from any of them you don't actually become unsubscribed for like three days.
The tax thing is bad, but requring that any email have a valid return address would be nice for reverse spamming. I've been known to send many copies of huge binaries to people who won't quit spamming me.
:)
Now allowing me, the receiver of spam, to charge the spammer $0.01 for every piece I receive could work.
For example I get spam from that idiot in Africa who wants me to transfer $1 million dollars to some bank account. I hit reply, and say "you owe me a penny. Feel free to transfer it to my paypal account or alternatively you can send me a check."
If you opted for them to send you a check it would cost them probably close to $0.50/email for anyone who requested the penny. Someone who sends millions of emails simply couldn't afford it. Someone who sends just a few, i.e. targets their audience better would be better off, and hell you might even begin to enjoy receiving spam. Even if you opted for the paypal transfer though spamming could become very expensive for them.
This could all work in conjuction with an international spammer registry. You would have to be licensed to spam, provide return addresses, and sign a contract, which would be obligate you to pay the penny in a timely manner upon request.
None of this works without a valid return address though.
-Craig.
Walkout but make sure you have the next job ready
Unless its real bad, but having another job lined up before quitting your current one can not be stressed enough.
-Craig.
No, it's an issue of market economics. Only when you don't buy the notion of a free-market does it become a geographic or political issue.
I got a solution for that family. Move, or pay the price by paying your fair share of the telephone bill.
-Craig