I tried to think my way through M$'s GPL attack... and ended up writing a song about the GPL instead. It's at http://www.ackley.net/~mike/songs
Who the hell's ever going to write a song about another EULA?
There are a few easy ways to compile apps for Linux on the ipaq. You can rlogin to the skiffcluster compile farm setup by the wonderful folk at handhelds.org. They also have a cross compiler available. MontaVista's (www.mvista.com) free cross development environment for strongarm is binary compatible with handhelds.org, and just works. Lastly, www.developonline.com is providing a compilefarm environment as well. There are already tons of applications built for the ipaq.
The L&F issues are a problem. Most applications out there expect a much larger display than the ipaq provides. GTK itself has several widgets (notably the fileselection widget) that do not work well on the ipaq. That's an easy fix, though, just change the library's widgets (and defaults for borders, etc) to reflect the smaller screen area, and walla! you have an app that with few changes working on the smaller screen. You can certainly optimize further - but it is much easier to alter minor aspects of the GUI to work well at lowres than it is to rewrite the entire app to work under palmos or pocketPC!
I've been squashing GTK to work better on the small screen. I hope to post that to: (http://mvista.sourceforge.net/projects/squashedgt k) sometime after Comdex.
The article by Michael Hall is incomplete. MontaVista IS demoing a wireless 802.11 ipaq, with applications running over X11 from a remote server. Just what cmdrtaco wanted. And what I wanted. Things like Mozilla "just work" over X to the ipaq and require next to no ram to use. MontaVista is wirelessly controlling a plotter via a custom drawing program via the ipaq.
(author's note: I'm one of the guys that did the ipaq and legoplotter demo for MontaVista for this comdex)
There are some advantages to X (and for that matter, Linux) on a handheld that are not immediately obvious to a palm or PocketPC user. The first is - unless you are connected to the net, it makes no sense to be carrying your net enabled applications around with you. With Linux (NFS or X)... just leave your net apps at home or at the office, and display them on your ipaq when you're on the net. Makes sense, no?
Mozilla M18 over X to the ipaq seems to me be much "sweeter" than PocketPC IE, less screen update problems, better formatting. Compare them side by side if you're at the show....
Two is - carrying the wireless ipaq around with a whole bunch of mp3's NFS mounted or shoutcasted is a real trip! - the ipaq or an ipaq-like device is the boom box of the future!
Three is - even with X installed, several apps, the ice window manager, GTK, rsh, ssh, etc - there's still 2MB of (compressible) flash on the usr partition of the ipaqs, and 3MB or so of user rewritable/storable on/usr/local. Plenty of room for apps and data! Xterm/icewm/xclock/Xfb fit into about 16MB of ram when running.
Last - fitting Linux onto devices this size -it's just really cool. And a harbringer of things to come. Linux is much more appropo to your handheld than palmos - palmos isn't going to scale, neither is pocketpc, while with linux we can keep porting down from a unified source code development tradition into ever more capable handheld devices.
Some specs on the ipaq: 32MB RAM, 16MB flash, 206Mhz strongarm processor. 12 Bit deep display (viewed as 16 by the X server)
Principal source of kernel development and basic apps: www.handhelds.org, irc: irc.gimp.org #ipaq
Radio stations pay a fee to ASCAP and BMI for the songs that are played on the air.
Most of my music is on MP3. I don't listen to the radio... but I realize, now, that I am my own radio station, with an audience of one, available 24 hours a day without commercial interruption!! (It's a great station. The DJ is deeply rooted in my subconcious...) If I'm a radio station... how do I support the artists I'm playing?
For non-profit stations the yearly fee from ASCAP is some negotiable amount less than 450 dollars.
Now 450 dollars a year is a bit pricy. I'm trying to find out what a non-commercial radio station pays in fees as I write.
ASCAP fees are unfairly divided between the record company and the songwriter. (So far as I know, bandmembers get nothing if they don't have songwriting credit)
ASCAP also requires you to complete and submit a playlist so that the proper authors get reimbursed.
Anyway, the key here is that a mechanism already exists that reimburses artists and publishers for their works without having to have purchased their media (cds,records,tapes). It sorta works. Perhaps it can be improved on.
Anyone who has worked in the music industry knows that the labels and the big 5, whup 4, music companies treat their talent like sh*t. It's not music, it's product. If you don't believe me, read Moses Avalon's book "Confessions of a Record Producer".
Now that we've established that, take a look at the history of copyright and authors vs publishers at: http://dvd.picketwyre.com/~hthor eau/css.html#history. Copyright was first established as a right of publishers over the authors and public. It didn't work. Copyright was established in the US to be a bargain between author and public, not between publisher and public.
Online distribution of music will completely homogenize music...
Like having 4 record companies and 5 radio station chains hasn't?
because it is so expensive to deliver music...
The typical "big label deal" costs about 250k-1m to produce. 19 times out of 20 the deal ends up with the artist in debt to the label - the album must sell more the 2m copies! Basically musicians are forced into indentured servitude for two or more albums more by the legalize in their contracts at that point. Ever wonder why the 2nd album sucks? It's because the artist is broke and still has to fill his contract.
The odds of success and profits are much better at the indies. An album might cost 50k to produce, and is manufactured in small quantities. A working musician like Christine Lavin can tour, fill small halls, sell a few dozen CDs a day, and make an honest living. With the decline in price of a good home studio (you can build a good 24 track home studio for less than 10k these days), it is perfectly feasible to self produce your own albums. MP3 cuts the labels and distributors and radio stations out of the distribution problem entirely - with MP3 there is no dependence on airplay, bribes, distribution, at all!! And I for one, and every last musician I know that has had the music industry suck on their tit - say - "Good Riddance, Music Industry. Don't let technology's revolving door hit you on the way out. Have a nice day. Don't call us, we'll call you."
I think with the advent of MP3s homogenized music such as the Backstreet Boys and Nine Inch Nails will go the way of the dodo. Instead of a few dozen mega-stars we will see tens of thousands of musicians finally able to make a modest living in music.
As for the delivery costs of radio stations... who cares? They can go the way of the dodo, too....
Say goodbye to creative and innovative acts...
The creative and innovative acts will always get produced. An artist is not driven by money but by the need to creat art. Further, widespread MP3 availability will make it possible for these acts to be heard and to get gigs.
Say goodbye to creativity...
We've already said goodbye to creativity. Albums using sampled music are so dangerous to produce due to various claims to copyright on "licks" that it's amazing any new music is being produced at all in the United States. This is a case where music as property has been taken too far. Can you imagine a world where every time you play a lick from Professor Longhair or Eric Clapton you have to pay a royalty?
Usher in a new era of commoditized downloads... I admit that I'm bugged by the sites that destroy or cut various Mp3s that they are distributing in the name of advertising. This is destroying art. This is treating art as property. I have to point out that LONG before mp3s existed there was the informal concert taping community (DAT-Heads) - who've been trading tapes for a long time and many bands support our efforts!!
It is the labels that are against concert taping and MP3s because they believe in a law of artificial scarcity, that somehow there being one and only one copy of "Sensitive New Age Guy" somehow increases its value, which is dead wrong. Music evolves. Every live performance is different.
As for your last point about the future of recorded classical music, do you have any idea how much money recordings net most orchestras? Zip. Nada. Nothing. Zilch. I think high quality MP3s of classical music will do more to open up peoples ears to classical and into attending classical concerts than any number of snooty PBS shows.
A future where good music is distributed commercial free via MP3s, where an artist can make a decent living playing live and from selling albums at shows - that is the world I want to live in.
(I buy CDs at every show I go to - why? because I can get them autographed, I always find CDs I had never heard of, and I'm supporting the artist)
The NYT article itself was predictable - more measures to increase the supply of practitioners, improve the supply of drugs, lower the costs of treatment, streamline the health care system...
I mean, do you ever expect a group of special interests to publish something along the lines of: "Number of shrinks exceeds demand, other careers suggested"? Can you imagine a group of lawyers publishing something like that?
But I want to touch on some larger issues involving mental illness here. OK, it's a bit of a rant. Do we want a world where children can be medicated by the state without the consent of their parents? And thus made "normal"?
Do we want a world where mental health professionals are called in to consult on the innocence or guilt of 1/5 the crimes committed - "he was just on the down side of his cycle your honor, we've upped his dosage, he won't be murdering grannies anymore."
And do we want a world where everyone just a little bit different is diagnosed and medicated so that they become "normal"? Oh brave new world that has such creatures in it!
Why can't johnny read? Well, he can't focus and is disruptive in class! Drug him! At least if he still doesn't learn to read he won't bother anyone, sitting there, drooling in the back.
If in school today I probably would have been diagnosed with ADD and given ritalin. I would have spent my days drooling in the back of a classroom, instead of asleep, and my nights asleep, instead of hacking on a computer. I probably would have grown up to be a perfectly malleable consumer type. Just the sort of citizen this government wants. (oh, no, he's showing signs of paranoia, better prescribe navane!)
The declaration of independence gives Americans the right to "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness". Note the word "pursuit". Happiness comes in part from the pursuit thereof. Great art, literature, culture, & invention have sprung largely from the minds of the disturbed and the unhappy. No doubt many of these individuals would have benefited from "treatment". And yet... Our culture would suffer with the loss of our more extreme elements. A world without Van Gogh and Van Morrison would be a much sadder place for "the rest of us" to live in.
I'm totally against compulsory treatment for mental illness.
I'm all in favor of making it easier for our citizens to seek out treatment. I'm against the state drugging anyone without their consent. The question of the insanity defense in the case of a crime remains a difficult one.
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I tried to think my way through M$'s GPL attack... and ended up writing a song about the GPL instead. It's at http://www.ackley.net/~mike/songs Who the hell's ever going to write a song about another EULA?
There are a few easy ways to compile apps for Linux on the ipaq. You can rlogin to the skiffcluster compile farm setup by the wonderful folk at handhelds.org. They also have a cross compiler available. MontaVista's (www.mvista.com) free cross development environment for strongarm is binary compatible with handhelds.org, and just works. Lastly, www.developonline.com is providing a compilefarm environment as well. There are already tons of applications built for the ipaq.
t k) sometime after Comdex.
The L&F issues are a problem. Most applications out there expect a much larger display than the ipaq provides. GTK itself has several widgets (notably the fileselection widget) that do not work well on the ipaq. That's an easy fix, though, just change the library's widgets (and defaults for borders, etc) to reflect the smaller screen area, and walla! you have an app that with few changes working on the smaller screen. You can certainly optimize further - but it is much easier to alter minor aspects of the GUI to work well at lowres than it is to rewrite the entire app to work under palmos or pocketPC!
I've been squashing GTK to work better on the small screen. I hope to post that to: (http://mvista.sourceforge.net/projects/squashedg
The article by Michael Hall is incomplete. MontaVista IS demoing a wireless 802.11 ipaq, with applications running over X11 from a remote server. Just what cmdrtaco wanted. And what I wanted. Things like Mozilla "just work" over X to the ipaq and require next to no ram to use. MontaVista is wirelessly controlling a plotter via a custom drawing program via the ipaq.
/usr/local. Plenty of room for apps and data! Xterm/icewm/xclock/Xfb fit into about 16MB of ram when running.
(author's note: I'm one of the guys that did the ipaq and legoplotter demo for MontaVista for this comdex)
There are some advantages to X (and for that matter, Linux) on a handheld that are not immediately obvious to a palm or PocketPC user. The first is - unless you are connected to the net, it makes no sense to be carrying your net enabled applications around with you. With Linux (NFS or X)... just leave your net apps at home or at the office, and display them on your ipaq when you're on the net. Makes sense, no?
Mozilla M18 over X to the ipaq seems to me be much "sweeter" than PocketPC IE, less screen update problems, better formatting. Compare them side by side if you're at the show....
Two is - carrying the wireless ipaq around with a whole bunch of mp3's NFS mounted or shoutcasted is a real trip! - the ipaq or an ipaq-like device is the boom box of the future!
Three is - even with X installed, several apps, the ice window manager, GTK, rsh, ssh, etc - there's still 2MB of (compressible) flash on the usr partition of the ipaqs, and 3MB or so of user rewritable/storable on
Last - fitting Linux onto devices this size -it's just really cool. And a harbringer of things to come. Linux is much more appropo to your handheld than palmos - palmos isn't going to scale, neither is pocketpc, while with linux we can keep porting down from a unified source code development tradition into ever more capable handheld devices.
Some specs on the ipaq: 32MB RAM, 16MB flash, 206Mhz strongarm processor. 12 Bit deep display (viewed as 16 by the X server)
Principal source of kernel development and basic apps: www.handhelds.org, irc: irc.gimp.org #ipaq
That the MPAA wants us all to agree to is here.
Radio stations pay a fee to ASCAP and BMI for the songs that are played on the air.
Most of my music is on MP3. I don't listen to the radio... but I realize, now, that I am my own radio station, with an audience of one, available 24 hours a day without commercial interruption!! (It's a great station. The DJ is deeply rooted in my subconcious...) If I'm a radio station... how do I support the artists I'm playing?
For non-profit stations the yearly fee from ASCAP is some negotiable amount less than 450 dollars.
Now 450 dollars a year is a bit pricy. I'm trying to find out what a non-commercial radio station pays in fees as I write.
ASCAP fees are unfairly divided between the record company and the songwriter. (So far as I know, bandmembers get nothing if they don't have songwriting credit)
ASCAP also requires you to complete and submit a playlist so that the proper authors get reimbursed.
Anyway, the key here is that a mechanism already exists that reimburses artists and publishers for their works without having to have purchased their media (cds,records,tapes). It sorta works. Perhaps it can be improved on.
I, Rhysling
Now that we've established that, take a look at the history of copyright and authors vs publishers at: http://dvd.picketwyre.com/~hthor eau/css.html#history. Copyright was first established as a right of publishers over the authors and public. It didn't work. Copyright was established in the US to be a bargain between author and public, not between publisher and public.
Online distribution of music will completely homogenize music...
Like having 4 record companies and 5 radio station chains hasn't?
because it is so expensive to deliver music...
The typical "big label deal" costs about 250k-1m to produce. 19 times out of 20 the deal ends up with the artist in debt to the label - the album must sell more the 2m copies! Basically musicians are forced into indentured servitude for two or more albums more by the legalize in their contracts at that point. Ever wonder why the 2nd album sucks? It's because the artist is broke and still has to fill his contract.
The odds of success and profits are much better at the indies. An album might cost 50k to produce, and is manufactured in small quantities. A working musician like Christine Lavin can tour, fill small halls, sell a few dozen CDs a day, and make an honest living. With the decline in price of a good home studio (you can build a good 24 track home studio for less than 10k these days), it is perfectly feasible to self produce your own albums. MP3 cuts the labels and distributors and radio stations out of the distribution problem entirely - with MP3 there is no dependence on airplay, bribes, distribution, at all!! And I for one, and every last musician I know that has had the music industry suck on their tit - say - "Good Riddance, Music Industry. Don't let technology's revolving door hit you on the way out. Have a nice day. Don't call us, we'll call you."
I think with the advent of MP3s homogenized music such as the Backstreet Boys and Nine Inch Nails will go the way of the dodo. Instead of a few dozen mega-stars we will see tens of thousands of musicians finally able to make a modest living in music.
As for the delivery costs of radio stations... who cares? They can go the way of the dodo, too....
Say goodbye to creative and innovative acts...
The creative and innovative acts will always get produced. An artist is not driven by money but by the need to creat art. Further, widespread MP3 availability will make it possible for these acts to be heard and to get gigs.
Say goodbye to creativity...
We've already said goodbye to creativity. Albums using sampled music are so dangerous to produce due to various claims to copyright on "licks" that it's amazing any new music is being produced at all in the United States. This is a case where music as property has been taken too far. Can you imagine a world where every time you play a lick from Professor Longhair or Eric Clapton you have to pay a royalty?
Usher in a new era of commoditized downloads... I admit that I'm bugged by the sites that destroy or cut various Mp3s that they are distributing in the name of advertising. This is destroying art. This is treating art as property. I have to point out that LONG before mp3s existed there was the informal concert taping community (DAT-Heads) - who've been trading tapes for a long time and many bands support our efforts!!
It is the labels that are against concert taping and MP3s because they believe in a law of artificial scarcity, that somehow there being one and only one copy of "Sensitive New Age Guy" somehow increases its value, which is dead wrong. Music evolves. Every live performance is different.
As for your last point about the future of recorded classical music, do you have any idea how much money recordings net most orchestras? Zip. Nada. Nothing. Zilch. I think high quality MP3s of classical music will do more to open up peoples ears to classical and into attending classical concerts than any number of snooty PBS shows.
A future where good music is distributed commercial free via MP3s, where an artist can make a decent living playing live and from selling albums at shows - that is the world I want to live in.
(I buy CDs at every show I go to - why? because I can get them autographed, I always find CDs I had never heard of, and I'm supporting the artist)
I, Rhysling
I mean, do you ever expect a group of special interests to publish something along the lines of: "Number of shrinks exceeds demand, other careers suggested"? Can you imagine a group of lawyers publishing something like that?
But I want to touch on some larger issues involving mental illness here. OK, it's a bit of a rant.
Do we want a world where children can be medicated by the state without the consent of their parents? And thus made "normal"?
Do we want a world where mental health professionals are called in to consult on the innocence or guilt of 1/5 the crimes committed - "he was just on the down side of his cycle your honor, we've upped his dosage, he won't be murdering grannies anymore."
And do we want a world where everyone just a little bit different is diagnosed and medicated so that they become "normal"? Oh brave new world that has such creatures in it!
Why can't johnny read? Well, he can't focus and is disruptive in class! Drug him! At least if he still doesn't learn to read he won't bother anyone, sitting there, drooling in the back.
If in school today I probably would have been diagnosed with ADD and given ritalin. I would have spent my days drooling in the back of a classroom, instead of asleep, and my nights asleep, instead of hacking on a computer. I probably would have grown up to be a perfectly malleable consumer type. Just the sort of citizen this government wants. (oh, no, he's showing signs of paranoia, better prescribe navane!)
The declaration of independence gives Americans the right to "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness". Note the word "pursuit". Happiness comes in part from the pursuit thereof. Great art, literature, culture, & invention have sprung largely from the minds of the disturbed and the unhappy. No doubt many of these individuals would have benefited from "treatment". And yet... Our culture would suffer with the loss of our more extreme elements. A world without Van Gogh and Van Morrison would be a much sadder place for "the rest of us" to live in.
I'm totally against compulsory treatment for mental illness.
I'm all in favor of making it easier for our citizens to seek out treatment. I'm against the state drugging anyone without their consent. The question of the insanity defense in the case of a crime remains a difficult one.