Somebody soon is going to produce a distro that will be "the crossover distro" that will propel Linux into the mainstream. When this happens, and the illusion of windows is shattered, then there will be an avalanche of development for Linux.
Games development will eventually flourish on Linux; its development is logical and organinc rather than driven by the need to release sucessive versions of boxed software on time. This will probably mean that the stability, refinement and quality of the of the games will be unprecedented.
All of this can happen, but not without the basic need of a usable, inclusive, non threatening distribution, which probably could only be produced by someone like AOL. They have the money, the deep experience in usability and intimate familiarity with "joe sixpack" that is crucial to the development and mass acceptance of Linux.
Games are the icing on the cake; got to turn the oven on first, decide on the flavour and mix the batter before we try and eat it.
Which country has the best mix of sensible copyright law and robust internet access?
That is where you want to locate a Napster/Kazaa/Morpheus/$whatever; a place where the legislators have better things to do than "fix" imaginary problems, and where everyone from everytwhere can connect fast, every time, 24/7/365.
How long will it be before countries face sanctions for allowing unfettered file sharing from thier soil?
The lobbying pressure will be strong for sanctions, because investors are still putting money into pay for stream/download business plans like Peter Gabriel's OD2
Just b/c our understanding of physics breaks down at the singularity doesn't mean it does not exist (remember we can't describe in physical terms just what the first few picoseconds of the big bang where like - the physics just can't cope with the amount of matter/energy involved).
But in the same way, just because our understanding of physics breaks down at the singularity / start of the big bang level, we cant be sure that the "laws" of thermodynaics are "violated" at the scale and energies involved at this theoretical gravastar state.
TO do so the matter woudl have to exceed the speed of light. Right.
Why not? how many times does everyone have to be surprised by physics before its finally conceded that there are no "LAWS" of physics.
As far as we are concerned, there is only our theoretical understanding and our observations, and thats all. Anything else that exists iin the universe (whatever that is), continues to exist whether we observe it and theorize about it or not.
If you approach science in this way, it becomes an open persuit instead of a closed one, which makes it ultimately more fruitful.
Acrobat Pro allows you to edit PDFs, and with Ghostscript, you can edit PDFs and strip the "security" from encrypted PDFs leaving you with the original, 100% editable file.
What we have to be worried about now is just Sony learning from its lessons and coming back with an implementation that doesn't totally suck. Then we're all in trouble.
The Magic Gate that SONY has been trying to foist on the public is a gate that locks out MP3s and freedom and which locks you in to their proprietary system. No one is going to buy these devices while gigabyte carrying Ipods and other devices that allow you to do what you want are on the market.
If SONY really learned its lesson, it would DROP ATRAC completely, finance OOG and use it to as the basis of the next gerneration of Mini Disc recorders.
It would release its next generation portable players with the ability to play OOGs and MP3s by default and any other format through third party plugins. It would release an SDK so that this could be done easily, and it would not sue people who hack SONY software as in the ABIO case.
They actually believed that people whould be bewitched by the design, buy the players and then use the software bundled with them to convert thier whole collecions to ATRAC. Only the most stupid of people would buy into having to rip thier music twice just to play it on a pretty piece of metal.
What is also amazing is how SONY tries to appropriate the language of software movements. "OpenMG copyright protection technology" There is nothing "open" about "OpenMG". In any case, they are not fooling anyone: as it says here
The real problem is that the SONY of today is not the SONY of the mid 70's when the original Walkman was released, which is a shame, because they have some fantastic engineers and designers.
Before anyone cries "Sell Out" put yourself in Shawns shoes; he has 70 million users, the most famous brand on the net, a once in a lifetime amount of momentum.
What do you do?
Shut it down and die, or change it and try and make a buck?
We were one of the first labels to support Napster in public. And whatever they decide to do in the future, they have unleashed an idea that has changed everything, and for that, we as a label and as artists say "thank you".
Its up to anyone who does not like the new Napster to take the many free tools that are out there and create something new that is exactly what the public wants.
Be prepared however, to be vilified, persecuted draged through the courts or worst of all ignored, but whatever you do, dont complain.
But even they can't (as of 2 weeks ago) get hold of FreeBSD or Slack.
One day, all bookstores will download ISOs and burn CDs for your particular book on demand. Its crazy that they should not be able to give you a CD with the latest Slackware on it, when anyone with ADSL can get it with ease.
Dont wait for this to happen in Foyles of Charing Cross Road, where they only recently have cash registers at every counter.
Previously, you had to get the total of your purchase from the shop assistant in your section, take this "chit" to the cash desk, pay your money, get the chit stamped (twice), and then take it BACK to where you left your books with the shop assistant who would exchange your stampted chit for your books!
not some hopeless mail order system John Winters company is not hopeless, its actually excellent. I have never had a problem of any kind with them, and in fact, they have even posted me CDs when I forgot to add the postage; "no problem pay it back on your next order" was the response.
And you can hardly blame a shop because the Royal Mail sucks.
Distributing boxed software from the USA is both difficult and inneficient; you know what shops are like in the UK, and it should come as no surprise that you cant walk into Micro Anvika in Tottenham Court road and buy FreeBSD.
Its only recently that they have started selling SuSE and Mandrake, which is a small miracle on its own.
I beg of the programmers and techs out there try to move beyond it.
First, let all the people who write apps swear an oath that they will forevermore document what they create to a high standard. If this is a start, then the cooler boxes may follow, perhaps in the next generation.
That new internet coputer based on Mozilla is a glimpse of what this "next generation" could look like.
No one is compelled to put up with "bland boxes" and "difficult" software like the notorius Mplayer, or any of the other "break it to find out how it works" stuff. There are other options. If you have the time/brains/cash.
Undocumented software, wires everywhere, bespoke systems. This is part of the culture. If one cant live with this, then one can to go to the places where everything is made beautifuly and beautifully easy.
I loved the part of the article about Gateway being on the ropes. The solution for them is clear; get a world class deigner in house to revamp and vitalize the product range, and then customize one of the advanced Linux distributions, brand it, and ship every product with it without exception.
They would then have something to offer the public, something to fire the imagination... and it might even be cheaper in the stores since they dont have to pay royalties for the OS.
There are two systems that are sort of working towards this: OpenCola and of course, Mojo Nation
In the case of OpenCola, they ask that after you leech a file from the swarmcloud that you keep your client open so that other people can use your pipe. In other words they expect you to be community minded out of the goodness of your heart or belief in Karma.
A solution would be that everyone eventually gets broadband by default so that there is no reason to stop your client, ever.
This way, it would be possible to contribute your pipe even when you are asleep. In other words, to make it so that it doesnt matter if someone is using some of your bandwidth.
Europeans use the American Cloud when they are asleep, and vice versa.
In the case of file sharing, this is an interesting proposition. How (and why) do you punish someone when the resource is not scarce?
Money, food and other physical resources are scarce by nature, but files and information are infinitely copyable; the exact opposite.
Limewire tries to do something like this, where you can refuse connections from clients that are not sharing a certain minimum number of files. The "punishment" being that you are locked out of the rich parts of network because you are not sharing your files.
Wether making a network smaller by punitive measures is beneficial to the whole community is another question. The dynamics of filesharing are different from physical commodity and financial networks.
There will always be "leeches". When there is nothing to loose by letting them exist and leech, and where the machines they run expand the network simply by being connected to it, its probably better to keep them included and un-punished, rather than decrease the size of the network.
The biggest controller of Digital Rights on Earth
on
Preview the New Napster
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
That is what Napster will become if the new incarnation is widely adopted.
It will act like a massive distributed file converter, changing billions of MP3 files into.nap files, making Napster the number one controller of digital rights on the planet.
SONY made a small attempt at this with thier proprietary format and portable player that would not play MP3s. It came with software to convert your MP3s to thier format. It bombed.
The new Napster a brilliant idea on paper; use everyones bandwidth and existing mp3s to create a billion file pool of locked music upon which royalties must be paid, in a fully automated system.
The record companies save having to host and convert thier catalogues, and have a ready made system for effortlessly controlling billions of files.
Radio stations will then be compelled to play from.nap files so that compliance is 100% in that arena.
Next of course, they will attempt to legislate that all other formats comply with the.nap DRM schema so that the other sharing services can be brought into line.
If we are not careful its "Bye Bye" clean Ogg Vorbis, and any other tool that helps you use and share music the way that you used to.
The next problem after printing is ironed out is the lack of a single, easy to use tool to add, temporarily disable, manage and remove fonts in any Linux setup, that makes one set of fonts (both ttf and Type 1) in a single directory available to all applications system wide, in the way that Adobe Type Manager does.
We then need CMYK capability in The Gimp. After these are in place, it will be possible to assemble a desktop publishing suite that will have mass appeal, because anyone will be able to design and publish to QuarkXpress/Photoshop/Illustrator quality, and print the results, all in a rock solid, free alternative to Windoze and OSX, without any pain.
The British and German govermnents have both realized that Open Source software is the way to go for many reasons, and are now deploying these superior solutions (or planning to) across all departments.
What the makers of Linux distributions must do is concentrate on usability (and by extension consistency) and further refining their installers so that anyone off of the street can choose and then run Linux as painlessly as they have done with all the different windoze generations.
Ximian are the closest to making easy to use tools that even my Aunt Grace (70) can use. A fully blown distribution from Ximian would be "most welcome" to use parliamentary language.
This probably has more to do with IBMs incredible support for Linux and the momemntum that Linux is gathering than any enlightenment on the part of Phillips. Phillips, for example, did a crackdown on all CD pressing plants to make sure that all artwork on CDS carried the "Compact Disc Audio" logo. After this, it was impossible to press CDs at DFI in France, for example, without the CD logo. Thats more like the behaviour of the Phillips that we know.
These discharges sometimes make a sound, especially when there is associated Aurora.
For sure, I will be out with my VLF reciever to see if there are any whistlers. Ideally, one would decamp immediately to northern Sweden or Alaska to be certain of getting under some Aurora. Its quite interesting that the sound of Aurora and solar flare activity arent used in Discovery Channel programmes, news programmes & such like; its sounds MUCH better than the cheezy muzak that they normally use to illustrate the moving pictures.
Slashdot Mirror
Somebody soon is going to produce a distro that will be "the crossover distro" that will propel Linux into the mainstream. When this happens, and the illusion of windows is shattered, then there will be an avalanche of development for Linux.
Games development will eventually flourish on Linux; its development is logical and organinc rather than driven by the need to release sucessive versions of boxed software on time. This will probably mean that the stability, refinement and quality of the of the games will be unprecedented.
All of this can happen, but not without the basic need of a usable, inclusive, non threatening distribution, which probably could only be produced by someone like AOL. They have the money, the deep experience in usability and intimate familiarity with "joe sixpack" that is crucial to the development and mass acceptance of Linux.
Games are the icing on the cake; got to turn the oven on first, decide on the flavour and mix the batter before we try and eat it.
Do it like this.
Open a new topic: Send Your Comments On The M$ Antitrust Trial
Allow the normal Slashdot moderation process to weed out the bullshit.
Deliver all the 3 to 5 comments to the judge "in personam" printed out on paper.
Use the power of this constituency, its literacy, eloquence and intelligence to make a difference.
Which country has the best mix of sensible copyright law and robust internet access?
That is where you want to locate a Napster/Kazaa/Morpheus/$whatever; a place where the legislators have better things to do than "fix" imaginary problems, and where everyone from everytwhere can connect fast, every time, 24/7/365.
How long will it be before countries face sanctions for allowing unfettered file sharing from thier soil?
The lobbying pressure will be strong for sanctions, because investors are still putting money into pay for stream/download business plans like Peter Gabriel's OD2
Just b/c our understanding of physics breaks down at the singularity doesn't mean it does not exist (remember we can't describe in physical terms just what the first few picoseconds of the big bang where like - the physics just can't cope with the amount of matter/energy involved).
But in the same way, just because our understanding of physics breaks down at the singularity / start of the big bang level, we cant be sure that the "laws" of thermodynaics are "violated" at the scale and energies involved at this theoretical gravastar state.
TO do so the matter woudl have to exceed the speed of light. Right.
Why not? how many times does everyone have to be surprised by physics before its finally conceded that there are no "LAWS" of physics.
As far as we are concerned, there is only our theoretical understanding and our observations, and thats all. Anything else that exists iin the universe (whatever that is), continues to exist whether we observe it and theorize about it or not.
If you approach science in this way, it becomes an open persuit instead of a closed one, which makes it ultimately more fruitful.
A "singularity" is a point at which the gravitational force is infinite. This logically doesn't even make sense, so it's no wonder that it's disputed.
It makes as much sense as the idea of "infinite space" in the universe. If you can accept one, then there is no problem accetping the other.
Acrobat Pro allows you to edit PDFs, and with Ghostscript, you can edit PDFs and strip the "security" from encrypted PDFs leaving you with the original, 100% editable file.
PDFs are editable, you just need the right tools.
What we have to be worried about now is just Sony learning from its lessons and coming back with an implementation that doesn't totally suck. Then we're all in trouble.
The Magic Gate that SONY has been trying to foist on the public is a gate that locks out MP3s and freedom and which locks you in to their proprietary system. No one is going to buy these devices while gigabyte carrying Ipods and other devices that allow you to do what you want are on the market.
If SONY really learned its lesson, it would DROP ATRAC completely, finance OOG and use it to as the basis of the next gerneration of Mini Disc recorders.
It would release its next generation portable players with the ability to play OOGs and MP3s by default and any other format through third party plugins. It would release an SDK so that this could be done easily, and it would not sue people who hack SONY software as in the ABIO case.
They actually believed that people whould be bewitched by the design, buy the players and then use the software bundled with them to convert thier whole collecions to ATRAC. Only the most stupid of people would buy into having to rip thier music twice just to play it on a pretty piece of metal.
What is also amazing is how SONY tries to appropriate the language of software movements. "OpenMG copyright protection technology" There is nothing "open" about "OpenMG". In any case, they are not fooling anyone: as it says here
The real problem is that the SONY of today is not the SONY of the mid 70's when the original Walkman was released, which is a shame, because they have some fantastic engineers and designers.
Before anyone cries "Sell Out" put yourself in Shawns shoes; he has 70 million users, the most famous brand on the net, a once in a lifetime amount of momentum.
What do you do?
Shut it down and die, or change it and try and make a buck?
We were one of the first labels to support Napster in public. And whatever they decide to do in the future, they have unleashed an idea that has changed everything, and for that, we as a label and as artists say "thank you".
Its up to anyone who does not like the new Napster to take the many free tools that are out there and create something new that is exactly what the public wants.
Be prepared however, to be vilified, persecuted draged through the courts or worst of all ignored, but whatever you do, dont complain.
But even they can't (as of 2 weeks ago) get hold of FreeBSD or Slack.
One day, all bookstores will download ISOs and burn CDs for your particular book on demand. Its crazy that they should not be able to give you a CD with the latest Slackware on it, when anyone with ADSL can get it with ease.
Dont wait for this to happen in Foyles of Charing Cross Road, where they only recently have cash registers at every counter.
Previously, you had to get the total of your purchase from the shop assistant in your section, take this "chit" to the cash desk, pay your money, get the chit stamped (twice), and then take it BACK to where you left your books with the shop assistant who would exchange your stampted chit for your books!
not some hopeless mail order system
John Winters company is not hopeless, its actually excellent. I have never had a problem of any kind with them, and in fact, they have even posted me CDs when I forgot to add the postage; "no problem pay it back on your next order" was the response.
And you can hardly blame a shop because the Royal Mail sucks.
Distributing boxed software from the USA is both difficult and inneficient; you know what shops are like in the UK, and it should come as no surprise that you cant walk into Micro Anvika in Tottenham Court road and buy FreeBSD.
Its only recently that they have started selling SuSE and Mandrake, which is a small miracle on its own.
You can get FreeBSD rather easily in the UK actually:r eeBSD
http://www.linuxemporium.co.uk/bsd.html#CompleteF
I beg of the programmers and techs out there try to move beyond it.
First, let all the people who write apps swear an oath that they will forevermore document what they create to a high standard. If this is a start, then the cooler boxes may follow, perhaps in the next generation.
That new internet coputer based on Mozilla is a glimpse of what this "next generation" could look like.
No one is compelled to put up with "bland boxes" and "difficult" software like the notorius Mplayer, or any of the other "break it to find out how it works" stuff. There are other options. If you have the time/brains/cash.
Undocumented software, wires everywhere, bespoke systems. This is part of the culture. If one cant live with this, then one can to go to the places where everything is made beautifuly and beautifully easy.
I loved the part of the article about Gateway being on the ropes. The solution for them is clear; get a world class deigner in house to revamp and vitalize the product range, and then customize one of the advanced Linux distributions, brand it, and ship every product with it without exception.
They would then have something to offer the public, something to fire the imagination... and it might even be cheaper in the stores since they dont have to pay royalties for the OS.
There are two systems that are sort of working towards this: OpenCola and of course, Mojo Nation
In the case of OpenCola, they ask that after you leech a file from the swarmcloud that you keep your client open so that other people can use your pipe. In other words they expect you to be community minded out of the goodness of your heart or belief in Karma.
A solution would be that everyone eventually gets broadband by default so that there is no reason to stop your client, ever.
This way, it would be possible to contribute your pipe even when you are asleep. In other words, to make it so that it doesnt matter if someone is using some of your bandwidth.
Europeans use the American Cloud when they are asleep, and vice versa.
In the case of file sharing, this is an interesting proposition. How (and why) do you punish someone when the resource is not scarce?
Money, food and other physical resources are scarce by nature, but files and information are infinitely copyable; the exact opposite.
Limewire tries to do something like this, where you can refuse connections from clients that are not sharing a certain minimum number of files. The "punishment" being that you are locked out of the rich parts of network because you are not sharing your files.
Wether making a network smaller by punitive measures is beneficial to the whole community is another question. The dynamics of filesharing are different from physical commodity and financial networks.
There will always be "leeches". When there is nothing to loose by letting them exist and leech, and where the machines they run expand the network simply by being connected to it, its probably better to keep them included and un-punished, rather than decrease the size of the network.
That is what Napster will become if the new incarnation is widely adopted.
.nap files, making Napster the number one controller of digital rights on the planet.
.nap files so that compliance is 100% in that arena.
.nap DRM schema so that the other sharing services can be brought into line.
It will act like a massive distributed file converter, changing billions of MP3 files into
SONY made a small attempt at this with thier proprietary format and portable player that would not play MP3s. It came with software to convert your MP3s to thier format. It bombed.
The new Napster a brilliant idea on paper; use everyones bandwidth and existing mp3s to create a billion file pool of locked music upon which royalties must be paid, in a fully automated system.
The record companies save having to host and convert thier catalogues, and have a ready made system for effortlessly controlling billions of files.
Radio stations will then be compelled to play from
Next of course, they will attempt to legislate that all other formats comply with the
If we are not careful its "Bye Bye" clean Ogg Vorbis, and any other tool that helps you use and share music the way that you used to.
Lets see who signs up for it. What a story.
The next problem after printing is ironed out is the lack of a single, easy to use tool to add, temporarily disable, manage and remove fonts in any Linux setup, that makes one set of fonts (both ttf and Type 1) in a single directory available to all applications system wide, in the way that Adobe Type Manager does.
We then need CMYK capability in The Gimp. After these are in place, it will be possible to assemble a desktop publishing suite that will have mass appeal, because anyone will be able to design and publish to QuarkXpress/Photoshop/Illustrator quality, and print the results, all in a rock solid, free alternative to Windoze and OSX, without any pain.
The UK government has published the first draft of its proposed policy on the use of open source software and is seeking comments from the public.
The policy essentially seeks to increase the use of open source software at all levels of government and public sector IT provision.
Quote taken from: The Register!
What the makers of Linux distributions must do is concentrate on usability (and by extension consistency) and further refining their installers so that anyone off of the street can choose and then run Linux as painlessly as they have done with all the different windoze generations.
Ximian are the closest to making easy to use tools that even my Aunt Grace (70) can use. A fully blown distribution from Ximian would be "most welcome" to use parliamentary language.
This probably has more to do with IBMs incredible support for Linux and the momemntum that Linux is gathering than any enlightenment on the part of Phillips. Phillips, for example, did a crackdown on all CD pressing plants to make sure that all artwork on CDS carried the "Compact Disc Audio" logo. After this, it was impossible to press CDs at DFI in France, for example, without the CD logo. Thats more like the behaviour of the Phillips that we know.
For sure, I will be out with my VLF reciever to see if there are any whistlers. Ideally, one would decamp immediately to northern Sweden or Alaska to be certain of getting under some Aurora. Its quite interesting that the sound of Aurora and solar flare activity arent used in Discovery Channel programmes, news programmes & such like; its sounds MUCH better than the cheezy muzak that they normally use to illustrate the moving pictures.