IBM reminds me a lot of Space Invaders. Rows and rows of identical things with no discernable personality of their own, very slowly walking in lock-step with each other. Yup, that works.
Anyone got any others? What video game characters do M$ and Apple remind you of?
Couldn't he have come up with a better metaphor? Pac Man is cute, lovable, and heroic. Everyone wants to be Pac Man. Get a clue, Bill. If you want to say bad things about the GPL, say it's like the Mafia. "Once you sign the GPL blood pact, you can never get out. If you try, ESR will send goons to whack you," or some blather.
Do you think radio stations across the world would adapt to mp3's?
Actually, it would make quite a bit of sense. A 128 kbit MP3 exceeds stereotypical 'FM quality', so why not? Also, many stations these days (think 'Clear Channel' here) are centralizing studios, using hard-drive based storage at the individual stations for what goes out over the airwaves. The information has to get to these hard drives somehow, and in some format... I have no idea how it's done (is there a station engineer that wants to jump in here?) but leased lines (fractional T-1) or satelite makes sense.
It doesn't make sense, however, if anyone connected to the internet can connect to a multitude of servers and download the.mp3 for themselves, listening to it when *they* choose to.
Radio plays what the labels payola them to play, telling you in effect what to like and what to listen to. Sometimes their suggestions aren't all that bad, but increasingly we're finding that they suck as they strive more and more to make the entire world conform to the tastes of the typical corn-fed 9-14 year old girl demographic. If people can find and listen to whatever they want, whenever they want, that will destroy radio's ability to dictate tastes to the masses and control what's popular.
Radio has basically two options:
Act as a "news" site that puts the spotlight on emerging acts and unknown material. They look for stuff that's cool and share their discoveries with the masses. Many people are too lazy/don't have time to find unknown acts, but they might like them if they knew about them.
This is *sortof* what the whole "alternative" thing in the early 90's was about, until it denegrated into a contest to find the least popular band and let them have their 15 minutes of fame, adjusted for inflation to 15 seconds.
Provide more than just canned content and prepackaged heat-up-and-serve stuff that you can find anywhere else. That is to say, focus on the DJ's and on-air talent/personality. By this, I don't just mean hire a bunch of smart-mouthed jackasses to act offensive and provocative in the name of ratings, a la Howard Stern, but provide useful and interesting content. Anyone can put on a hit single and listen to it, but tell me who can do a career-spanning retrospective, offering insight into the stories behind the songs, contrasting one artist with another, etc? VH1 does this to some extent with their "Behind the Music" series, although they're glossier and fluffier and gossipy and not very indepth, scholarly, or insightful. But maybe this is a bit much to ask for in the days when the paradigm seems to be an automated DJ machine pumping out a focus-marketed top-30 list.
I'm not sure if this is right, but I think that the systme works something like this:
1964 Beatles release "Help!" (not sure if that's the right year, but for the sake of argument)
1964 Album goes platinum. Score +1 for the Beatles.
1984 Album sells in platinum numbers *again*. (Don't know if this actually happened, but for sake of argument.) Beatles are still very popular. Score +20 for the Beatles.
This seems somewhat reasonable if you're trying to gauge the "actual" level of interest in an album independant of the "artificial" influence of promotional efforts by record labels and mega-hyping. There are a number of assumptions made by this, however, so it's really only a very rough way of measuring.
For one, whether an album is being "promoted" or not is not a binary sort of thing. Albums and artists are promoted at varying levels. New albums quite understandably need a bit more promotion, especially if they are from unknown artists who need to break in and compete against established acts.
Looking back at the fictionalized Beatles example, I would be very surprised to hear that the Beatles *weren't* being promoted during all this time in some form or other. It's *quite* likely that if a special, 20th anniversary release of "Help!" had been issued, perhaps for the first time on CD since it *is* 1984 we're talking about, that this would have been somewhat heavily hyped. But the study probably would have looked at the CD sales in 1984 as the same item as the vinyl sales in 1964, even though in some sense the 1984 CD version is a "new" product.
For another thing, it's somewhat debatable how "articial" promotion is. *Some* promotional efforts are more obviously artificial than others. Trying to give Vanilla Ice "street credibility" when he was some rich kid whose name ended in "the third" reeks of inauthenticity, for example. But if an artist self-promotes, say, plays local gigs at coffeehouses, sells home-made t-shirts and demo tapes, doing interviews with Rolling Stone and Spin, etc. This is clearly "promotion" which contributes to interest in the artist, too, but we think of this as "honest" and "authentic" promotion, even if the artist is flat-out lying about their life story, etc. so that people will think that they're more interesting/glamorous/etc. Obviously, any artist who completely eschews promotion of any sort will never be heard by anyone. They'll sit in their house playing music that only they hear.
Still I think that long-term interest is a valid indicator of "real" public interest as opposed to hype-generated interest. But it would be nice to see a less didactic picture than "promotion=fake and therefore bad".
PHB: I took a 1-day seminar on technology so that I could "interface" with you "techies" better.
Dilbert: So what do you think we should do to prevent the competition from stealing our code?
PHB: Well, I thought if we rewrote the GPL somewhat...
Dilbert: I'll humor you. What did you have in mind?
PHB: Well, the GPL is based on trust.
Dilbert: I can see how that would be a problem.
PHB: So I was thinking we need to emphasize this point on trust more. Can you try capitalizing it?
Dilbert: Sure. It's a computer related thing, so do you want me to capitalize the sEcond letter, or the last letteR?
PHB: Hmm, that might be getting too technical. Could you just, I don't know, italicize it?
Dilbert: [click] [click] Done. You want fries with that?
PHB: Ah, no. This should do it, I think.
Two weeks go by
PHB: Dilbert, I thought you fixed that GPL problem.
Dilbert: I did what you thought would fix it. Strange that it didn't work.
PHB: Yeah, I know... I was thinking... Maybe we need to do something more radical. Could you maybe boldface it? No, no, no wait I have a better idea. A bigger font! That should do it!
I would like to trust other businesses to fuck me at every opportunity, but in dealing with them I know that they will unless I have tall walls, miles of barbed wire, loud dogs, barking lawyers, "access" to key politicians, and my own private military.
Animation would be impossible if it weren't for plagiarism. The animation artists are all crooks. It's an inherent part of their process.
First, they start with a single drawing, a stil image known as a "cell". Then, they make another that looks almost exactly like it, only it's a little bit different. Then they do this again, and again, thousands and thousands of times.
Then, once their "movie" is completed, they show each of these images, each essentially a ripoff of the previous image, in sequence very quickly. By pulling this fast switcheroo, the audience is fooled into thinking that it sees a "motion picture" and not thousands of repeated images, each of which varies very little from the ones immediately preceeding it.
Yet in spite of the obvious similarity of one cell of animation to the one preceeding it, the masses just seem to love it. If only they knew the real goings-on behind the scenes.
Desktop OS diversity is important and it depends strongly on the availability of software for each platform in question.
I guess they just don't see the Linux community as profitable. Maybe they'll change their minds if their site gets slashdotted... But they probably have some M$ shill whispering in their ear: "These guys paid nothing for their OS. How much do you think they're going to want to pay you for your products?"
It'll help my case against the keyboard industry when I sue them. Let's learn from the tobacco lawsuits -- when They try cover up something harmful, your eyeballs shoult turn to dollar signs.
The article is talking about anti-censorship, and what do they do? They censor themselves!
Re-read the passage. The author was telling his friend that Entertainment Weekly was apt to print "fuck" as "F___". Salon prints the f-word all the time.
The Court previously took judicial notice that every computer is manufactured with an on/off switch, that parents may utilize, in the end, to control the information which comes into their home via the Internet.
Dear Judge,
I wish to turn myself in. I am in possession of a circumvention device which is in violation of the Digital Millenium Copyright Act. As a human being, I was born with fingers. These devices, also known in some circles as digits, are capable of circumventing the Power Switch Content Protection measures that are installed on most computational devices, allowing me to gain access to information which I am not supposed to have.
I can no longer live with the guilt of knowing that I may someday break the law. Please, for the love of God, lock me up somewhere so that I won't hurt anyone or myself.
Cool things have some practical usefulness (at least most of the time)
Cool things differentiate you from the rest of the masses, elevating you to special status ("you're cool")
Once a cool thing saturates a market (or culture, if you prefer that term, though functionally there's little difference in the two terms) it no longer serves to differentiate you from the rest of the masses. ("Whoa, color TV!" turns to "Yawn, when are you getting cable?" turns to "Big deal, my satellite pulls down 3000 channels" turns to "I got a TiVo!" turns to "Ha, ha, you got a TiVo!")
Therefore you must constantly be moving in the direction of the New Cool. If you become enlightened you may realize the futility of this, and instead choose to seek a personal cool. This doesn't help you in terms of your status, but it may make you happier.
Some people attain enlightenment and realize that this pursuit is empty in itself, and also pointless.
Others realize that money can be used to influence the public perception of what's cool and that this can be leveraged to generate more money. The 90% who isn't cool can be kept in a perpetual game of catch-up trying to be like the truly cool they want to emulate. This will make you ever richer and therefore in an ever-increasingly better position to define coolness by fiat. You just have to keep that carrot on the end of that stick just out of the reach of the 90% while simultaneously making them feel like they're getting something of value each time they reach for it. It's a foolproof plan that works great. And as we all know from high school it's perfectly ethical to exploit the uncool for personal gain, especially if you are one of the elites in charge of defining cool.
We've been sounding the alarm that this sort of thing could happen for a long time now. Now it's happening. What, you thought that the megacorps would play nice and try to get along with everyone?
Unfortunately, sensationalism like this doesn't do much to help the anti-M$ cause. Likening Bill Gates to Frankenstein's monster might be good for a chuckle, but without presenting a strong case based on facts and evidence, articles like this are only going to preach to the converted, and alienate those who sit on the fence. People who might be sympathetic to the Open Source movement if they were better informed are not well-served by this sort of shrill invective.
Slashdot Mirror
Hmm, let's think about this...
IBM reminds me a lot of Space Invaders. Rows and rows of identical things with no discernable personality of their own, very slowly walking in lock-step with each other. Yup, that works.
Anyone got any others? What video game characters do M$ and Apple remind you of?
Couldn't he have come up with a better metaphor? Pac Man is cute, lovable, and heroic. Everyone wants to be Pac Man. Get a clue, Bill. If you want to say bad things about the GPL, say it's like the Mafia. "Once you sign the GPL blood pact, you can never get out. If you try, ESR will send goons to whack you," or some blather.
Wait a minute... Forty dollars! D'oh!
I think I'll wait till it's down to like $10-12...
I'm not sure if this is right, but I think that the systme works something like this:
1964 Beatles release "Help!" (not sure if that's the right year, but for the sake of argument)
1964 Album goes platinum. Score +1 for the Beatles.
1984 Album sells in platinum numbers *again*. (Don't know if this actually happened, but for sake of argument.) Beatles are still very popular. Score +20 for the Beatles.
This seems somewhat reasonable if you're trying to gauge the "actual" level of interest in an album independant of the "artificial" influence of promotional efforts by record labels and mega-hyping. There are a number of assumptions made by this, however, so it's really only a very rough way of measuring.
For one, whether an album is being "promoted" or not is not a binary sort of thing. Albums and artists are promoted at varying levels. New albums quite understandably need a bit more promotion, especially if they are from unknown artists who need to break in and compete against established acts.
Looking back at the fictionalized Beatles example, I would be very surprised to hear that the Beatles *weren't* being promoted during all this time in some form or other. It's *quite* likely that if a special, 20th anniversary release of "Help!" had been issued, perhaps for the first time on CD since it *is* 1984 we're talking about, that this would have been somewhat heavily hyped. But the study probably would have looked at the CD sales in 1984 as the same item as the vinyl sales in 1964, even though in some sense the 1984 CD version is a "new" product.
For another thing, it's somewhat debatable how "articial" promotion is. *Some* promotional efforts are more obviously artificial than others. Trying to give Vanilla Ice "street credibility" when he was some rich kid whose name ended in "the third" reeks of inauthenticity, for example. But if an artist self-promotes, say, plays local gigs at coffeehouses, sells home-made t-shirts and demo tapes, doing interviews with Rolling Stone and Spin, etc. This is clearly "promotion" which contributes to interest in the artist, too, but we think of this as "honest" and "authentic" promotion, even if the artist is flat-out lying about their life story, etc. so that people will think that they're more interesting/glamorous/etc. Obviously, any artist who completely eschews promotion of any sort will never be heard by anyone. They'll sit in their house playing music that only they hear.
Still I think that long-term interest is a valid indicator of "real" public interest as opposed to hype-generated interest. But it would be nice to see a less didactic picture than "promotion=fake and therefore bad".
PHB: This GPL is broken.
Dilbert: What's wrong with it?
PHB: People keep ripping off our code.
Dilbert: Impressive. You know the word "code".
PHB: I took a 1-day seminar on technology so that I could "interface" with you "techies" better.
Dilbert: So what do you think we should do to prevent the competition from stealing our code?
PHB: Well, I thought if we rewrote the GPL somewhat...
Dilbert: I'll humor you. What did you have in mind?
PHB: Well, the GPL is based on trust.
Dilbert: I can see how that would be a problem.
PHB: So I was thinking we need to emphasize this point on trust more. Can you try capitalizing it?
Dilbert: Sure. It's a computer related thing, so do you want me to capitalize the sEcond letter, or the last letteR?
PHB: Hmm, that might be getting too technical. Could you just, I don't know, italicize it?
Dilbert: [click] [click] Done. You want fries with that?
PHB: Ah, no. This should do it, I think.
Two weeks go by
PHB: Dilbert, I thought you fixed that GPL problem.
Dilbert: I did what you thought would fix it. Strange that it didn't work.
PHB: Yeah, I know... I was thinking... Maybe we need to do something more radical. Could you maybe boldface it? No, no, no wait I have a better idea. A bigger font! That should do it!
I would like to trust other businesses to fuck me at every opportunity, but in dealing with them I know that they will unless I have tall walls, miles of barbed wire, loud dogs, barking lawyers, "access" to key politicians, and my own private military.
Animation would be impossible if it weren't for plagiarism. The animation artists are all crooks. It's an inherent part of their process.
First, they start with a single drawing, a stil image known as a "cell". Then, they make another that looks almost exactly like it, only it's a little bit different. Then they do this again, and again, thousands and thousands of times.
Then, once their "movie" is completed, they show each of these images, each essentially a ripoff of the previous image, in sequence very quickly. By pulling this fast switcheroo, the audience is fooled into thinking that it sees a "motion picture" and not thousands of repeated images, each of which varies very little from the ones immediately preceeding it.
Yet in spite of the obvious similarity of one cell of animation to the one preceeding it, the masses just seem to love it. If only they knew the real goings-on behind the scenes.
I never bought a congressman... Should I cry when they don't support my interests?
Desktop OS diversity is important and it depends strongly on the availability of software for each platform in question. I guess they just don't see the Linux community as profitable. Maybe they'll change their minds if their site gets slashdotted... But they probably have some M$ shill whispering in their ear: "These guys paid nothing for their OS. How much do you think they're going to want to pay you for your products?"
on how much toilet paper you have left, I guess...
It'll help my case against the keyboard industry when I sue them. Let's learn from the tobacco lawsuits -- when They try cover up something harmful, your eyeballs shoult turn to dollar signs.
Re-read the passage. The author was telling his friend that Entertainment Weekly was apt to print "fuck" as "F___". Salon prints the f-word all the time.
Dear Judge,
I wish to turn myself in. I am in possession of a circumvention device which is in violation of the Digital Millenium Copyright Act. As a human being, I was born with fingers. These devices, also known in some circles as digits, are capable of circumventing the Power Switch Content Protection measures that are installed on most computational devices, allowing me to gain access to information which I am not supposed to have.
I can no longer live with the guilt of knowing that I may someday break the law. Please, for the love of God, lock me up somewhere so that I won't hurt anyone or myself.
Insincerely,
Junior J. Junior III
Stupidity, however, appears to be protected by law.
Forbid them from touching or even looking at the computer. Then leave them unattended. They should be experts by the time you get back.
Ha, actually that's the last line of my saying, but due to the 120 char limit on .sigs I couldn't get it in.
Digital copyright protection is like a fishnet condom.
Is bugnosis open-source?
And if it's not, how do I know that it's not spying on me?
Being cool has two aspects to it:
Once a cool thing saturates a market (or culture, if you prefer that term, though functionally there's little difference in the two terms) it no longer serves to differentiate you from the rest of the masses. ("Whoa, color TV!" turns to "Yawn, when are you getting cable?" turns to "Big deal, my satellite pulls down 3000 channels" turns to "I got a TiVo!" turns to "Ha, ha, you got a TiVo!")
Therefore you must constantly be moving in the direction of the New Cool. If you become enlightened you may realize the futility of this, and instead choose to seek a personal cool. This doesn't help you in terms of your status, but it may make you happier.
Some people attain enlightenment and realize that this pursuit is empty in itself, and also pointless.
Others realize that money can be used to influence the public perception of what's cool and that this can be leveraged to generate more money. The 90% who isn't cool can be kept in a perpetual game of catch-up trying to be like the truly cool they want to emulate. This will make you ever richer and therefore in an ever-increasingly better position to define coolness by fiat. You just have to keep that carrot on the end of that stick just out of the reach of the 90% while simultaneously making them feel like they're getting something of value each time they reach for it. It's a foolproof plan that works great. And as we all know from high school it's perfectly ethical to exploit the uncool for personal gain, especially if you are one of the elites in charge of defining cool.
I think in the case of my parents the cool-chasing gene must have skipped a generation. ;P
We've been sounding the alarm that this sort of thing could happen for a long time now. Now it's happening. What, you thought that the megacorps would play nice and try to get along with everyone?
When did Microsoft ever go away?
Unfortunately, sensationalism like this doesn't do much to help the anti-M$ cause. Likening Bill Gates to Frankenstein's monster might be good for a chuckle, but without presenting a strong case based on facts and evidence, articles like this are only going to preach to the converted, and alienate those who sit on the fence. People who might be sympathetic to the Open Source movement if they were better informed are not well-served by this sort of shrill invective.
All your ciphertext are belong to... yadda yadda you know the drill.