"Isn't it striking that people who claim to be members of a group advocating free thought and speech would be so anal and vitrolic about everyone who doesn't call Linux GNU/Linux?"
I get your point, BUT, its not that simple
For many years RMS was, if not the sole keeper of the "Open Software" (avoiding all the cliche and predefined terms) the "Atlas" upon whose shoulders the burden of making the case for open software and systems against ALL of IBM and the "BUNCH" (IBM and Burroughs, Univac, NCR, Control Data, Honeywell) all of whom would have done just about anything to keep their intellectual fiefdoms as closed as possible ***FOREVER***!
In those many years of intellectual and philosophical isloation, Stallman became a "Gadfly", as this is one way to further your case in the face of overwhelming opposition and resistance.
RMS could have cashed in at any point, and there is little doubt that had he done so, he could well be a billionaire today. Instead, he stuck with his passion and beliefs.
So, now a new generation comes along, with a new perspective on open software and systems.
RMS looks at us and must think "If only they knew how hard it was to keep the FSF idea alive. and they're "selling it out" for a few dollars!"
Yes, he can be autocratic, elitist and intolerant, and occasionally manipulative and Machiavellian, but he's like those Japanese soldiers from WWII, found in the jungles of the Phillipines and other South Pacific islands, who emerge in their 80's and 90's still fighting for Imperial Japan....
Their early experiences have so imprinted them, that they have become captives of conflicts fought and battles long over.
Let's give him our respect and compassion for all that he's accomplished in the past, (we wouldn't be here without him) and fight our own contemporary battles for the advancement of open software and systems, and leave him to his memories.
Let us not be distracted by distracting and nonproductive tautological discussions from another time and place.
Re:$1200 is.....MS omnipotent, Don't Think So
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$1200 Cheap!
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· Score: 5, Informative
"MS is the type of company who as of right now probably knows within +/- 5% what the demand is, what the poor/average/rich person will pay for it, what the average 'early' adopter will pay for it, and what the average late adopter will pay for it."
WHOA! Duude...here are some "ad hoc" "nonofficial" numbers according to a # of my friends up in Rancho Redmond...BEWARE: YMMV...
1. MS' projected demand for W2K is off by around 30%, much/most of this NOT accounted for by the demand inversion
2. MS' projected demand for W/ME was supposedly off by between 30%-40%, and a large factor that (along with a record number of non-projected support problems) led to its being pulled as part of the Official "Upgrade Path"
3. Deployment of AD is ***OVER*** 50% off projection, and is particularly poor with some of MS' historical "early adopters" and "key partners"
4. Demand for the new WinCe is also reportedly well below projection, though no one's mentioned to me a credible sounding number
5. And let's not forget O2K, where demand is alleged 30%-40% below Worst Case, and by rumour, His Billness and His Steveness got "down and dirty" on the O2K marketing team????
While I have no way of certifying the above numbers, the fact is that MS spokesgeeks have acknowledged the above statements without having provided quantities.
you seem to belong to the "MS is God!" School.
MS has historically (like ALL Tech Companies) always overstated intial demand....Windows95 was the one exception to that, and MS ***HASN'T HAD*** a hit like that since, God, what year was W ***95*** again???...though i've had senior Softies tell me that "for sure" W2K was gonna be...it wasn't, it's been the most disappointing Office release in some time..
"I don't expect MS to make the same low-supply mistakes as Sony"
BONUS ROUND: many industry insiders speculated that the PS2 shortage could have been planned/intentional "market manipulation" by Sony trying to enhance both mid-term PS2 demand and beat the amazing amount of media buzz that "Dreamcast" rec'd...some think it could have also been a way to "Pump Prime" the marker in America and freeze Nintendo/Dreamcast sales for a few months????...
Re:sigh...The REAL secret of ASCI White, DONT TELL
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ASCI's Debutante Debut
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· Score: 4, Funny
"Don't they have anything better to do with all that power?"
Yeah! Brother, i know what you mean...what an astonishing waste of computer productivity!
can you imagine ***ANYONE*** take cutting-edge start of the art h+s/w and using it to create and develop a wide variety of different and imagined scenarios where a large assortment of weapons of differing powers of destructiveness are used on imaginary foes, hour after hour after...., day after day after...????
and futher imagine that simlarly creative people on the background had to create the deployment scenarios (call them the maps or levels?) and use their powers of imagination to create fantatically unlikely foes and enemies that could never exist in the real world. Yeah Verily, a horrible waste of precious talent and ability
BUT, i understand that they're just biding their time with that awful "nuclear contingency" stuff at LLNL, until the Q3Team(EntireUniverse) port to ASCI White is finished and then they'll productively game all day instead....
1. Have the various and sundry GNU/orgs start a "Paypal" account.
2. use every fear and paranoia-based marketing device known to man to scare as many GNU/OSPF devotees deposit as much money as possible to the Paypal account
3. use the money to create a major lobbying effort to have GNU recognized as a major donor to both wings of Republi-crat Party
4. threaten to withdraw your financial support from the Repuli-crat Party if the election doesn't turn out the way you want it to, selectively donate to critical races across the country to both wings of the Republi-crat Party, punishing them when they ignore you, rewarding them when you get legislation "your way"..
5. DONE!
worked for JFK, worked for "W", works for most of the Fortune 500 corporations
MITNICK'S LAW (sorry, kev): "Social Engineering beats physical and digital security 90+% of the time."
"With hundreds of thousands of copies of an OS that won't do Java, that will have a very deep impact on developers.."
sure will, ***EXACTLY*** the effect (and affect)that M$ intends for it to have....
"everything old is new again"...in the late 50's and 60's Blue pursued every "platform specific" and "marketshare differentiation" strategy they could....it resulted in the rapid rise of DEC and HP sales of minis....which inevitably cannabilized MVS sales and resulting the "Great AS400 Giveaway" in order to retain some customers
M$, strategically, knows nothing that IBM doesn't know/hasn't done, as M$ is Blue's Love Child
M$ intends to force a platform split with Java, and then offer its Java-like, decade-plus old toad, C# as a "Better Java Than Java" and it will "make FULL use of your Microsoft technolgies"
the only difference between a cell and a room is whether you have the key to get out....MS will be finding this out in the next decade...
"what was the RIAA's real intent? Did they simply retract their threat to sue for the sake of PR, or what it something deeper?"
The RIAA has NO real power, other than the (considerable) power to coerce through the use of "Legal Intimidation", i.e.(NOT IE!) "We can afford to spend millions of dollars sueing you and we will continue to sue you until you have; no job, no house, no car, no food, no porn..."
In Felten's case, as with Adobe and KIllustrator and Dr. Kai-Uwe, the Public Relations and Legal downside of the attack was starting to overwhelm any potential upside.
The RIAA, just like Adobe, cannot afford to piss off mainstream academics, who hold tremendous clout, as expert witnesses in both legislatures and courts, in quasi-democratic systems like the US and Germany.
Post-MS Trial, Felten is a "celebrity" academic and Adobe has just made Dr. Kai-Uwe one, while Dmitri Sklyarov is rapidly becoming the "New Mitnick"...
IFF the RIAA took Felten to court and lost, and with most of the academic compsci crowd supporting Dr. Felten, the RIAA could easily lose, the damage to the DMCA's ability to restrict research could be FATAL
much easier to pick on H4X0R-types like Fanning/Napster than peeps like Felten with "juice" (gotta have it).
COMPLETE THE SENTENCE: it ain't what you know, it who you....
Cray went on to form his own computer company, which basically had two classes of (non-educational) clients, American Intelligence Agencies and "Big Cycle Burners" (oil companies, chemcial companies, US Gov Other)
so, BFD, Seymour NEVER did make either the Perfect Sailboat OR the Perfect Supercomputer,
and though i will always have a spot in my heart for the XMP-1A (Big Word Mod, my fave) by today's standards it's still every bit are relevant as my very first "Personal" (to me) computer the the 360/Mod 18
...which is to say that about as relevant as my Z80 or TI/100 or CommodeDoor64
it CAN'T be the destination, because that's just wormfood (alt. incompletely combusted HC's)
it had damn well better be the process, or 99.9999_% of the world is screwed, blued and tattooed....
(which, here in LA, is pretty much literally true anyway)
"Well that just proves my point. If you go and re-read my post you will see that I said the supreme court acted in a irrational and partisan matter. Apparently you agree with me on this one."
guess so, since i originally responded with "YEP, sure have."
"But it's time we woke up to the fact that there is a civil war going on in this country."
NOPE, (that's in the "I Want What You're Smoking" Category) and nothing like it, mass media propaganda..war has big numbers of people shooting at big numbers of other people, lots of blowed up/burnt out buildings, check out coverage of Tel Aviv, Jerusalem, Beirut, Chechnya, etc
they have wars going on...
what we really have here is; unexcusable poverty in the richest nation in history of mankind, a big-city public school system that would embarass Albania; prisons full of non-violent "criminals" because their mind altering substance is not alcohol or tobacco, a health care system that gives enormous amounts of health care ***FREE*** to the most affluent demographic in America, while ignoring the poorest, the foreign and the most needy AND corporate robber barons who find that if they just give enough money to the Democratic and Republican Parties, both Parties will respond by providing a sideshow that takes everyone's mind off of all the stuff that's REALLY WRONG AND ISN'T ABOUT TO GET FIXED, EVER
we have talking heads on the TV/radio, pontificating morons like Limbaugh, Koppel, Press, Matthews, King, O'Reilly, et al
who crank up the delusional faithful (which would seem to include you) into believing that there really is some kind of political dialogue of some seriousness going on here, when its all just verbal masturbation...
there has been no substantial change in American foreign policy since Eisenhower and no substantial change in American domestic policy since Johnson
nor will their be anytime soon, as it might just get in the way of corporate profits
NARCOLEPSY IS "WHAT'S GOING ON HERE..", Left/Right Wing inspired, media fueled and driven, corporate funded NARCOLEPSY
cheered on and encouraged by the lowest voter participation in a major "democracy" in modern history, bolstered by an even bigger epidemic of NIMBYISM (ala McNealy and Ellison on powerplant construction in Silly Valley) and "only morons do jury duty" middle-class sensibilities (OJ Who?)
if you can't get 'em out to vote, you sure ain't gonna get 'em out for your "Civil War"
well, as Alex "The Frogman" deTocqueville observed, "People get the government they deserve"
"The society that is created by the mob allows software to not have to be written more than once."
the problem with allegory is that most people don't get it....
a payroll system that works for Mom and Dad's eBay-based, used photographic equip business will NOT work for General Motors...
a payroll system that works for GM will NOT work for VW (vastly diff regulatory systems)
"It allows the wisdom gained in each of the writings of each of those pieces of software to be shared."
wisdom is in the eye of the beholder, which is proven (over and over and....) on/.
EVERY day, as we quibble about Java v C#, C v C++, SmallTalk v Effiel, LINUX v *NIX, MS v EVERY OTHER F*****g thing in the world, ad nauseam
i like redheads, you like blonds, bob likes brunettes and bill likes sheep, susie likes cheryl, cheryl likes her vibrator, cheryl's vibrator likes the toaster oven....
software is like sex, is like cars, is like ice cream...
THERE IS NO ONE RIGHT WAY
and most of the ways that are labeled "Bad" or "Evil" are done so through the a priori application of usually outdated and irrelevant, and frequently irrational standards...
see also, "The Grand Inquistion" and "Tail Gunner Joe (McCarthy)"
"Talented people know when they are running out of good ideas and can do something else with their lives."
once upon a time there was a mythical guy, mythically named "Seymour Cray",
Seymour had a very tough day job as Big Designer Guy of a very BIGG computer company.
Seymour designed a reasonably successful computer and then left to do his heart's desire....
as a way of embracing change and rejecting orthodoxy...this Seymour guy used to design and build hi-performance sailboats, when he was finished building a boat, he would sail it for a while and then....
....SET IT ON FIRE, BURN IT TO THE GROUND (SEA, actually)....
and START ALL OVER AGAIN...
maybe Cray, Brethed and Watterson know something the rest of us don't????
"Yeah, but there still is a role for a "gatekeeper" in the popular music industry."
Absolutely, BUT, that is NOT the role that radio/retail are currently serving.
IF it was, the labels wouldn't be so afraid of MP3 and digital distribution.
for just one example. The Los Angeles radio market is owned lock, stock and playlist by the giants including Disney and ClearChannel. it offers no opportunity for new artists to get airplay. the stations as the exact of opposite of a "gatekeeper" and have become a "market lockout" mechanism instead.
There are only 3 playlists that you can hear in ALL of the huge LA market; "All Oldies, All the Time" - the "Stairway to Heaven" stuff, "Top 3 Pop, All The Time" - All Mariah/Christina/Brittany/N'Sync and the "Top 40 Pop" playlist, BNL, Brian McKnight, Dave Matthews, and occasionally some Blink, old Korn and softer Kid Rock
NONE of these programs have any room for new artists that aren't backed by label buying airplay or aren't already in the Billboard 50 (or headed there)...
It's like this in ALL the ***MAJOR*** markets, New York, DC, SanFran, etc. the best radio in America, is in the mid-size markets, where the playlists aren't 100% bought and paid for by the labels; KOMP in Vegas, the Frog in San Jose, other rock stations in Michigan, Illinois, Ohio and the rest of the mid-west.
The MP3 Battle isn't about "gatekeeping" it's about keeping the price for a CD at the $15.00 retail level and killing off the "Fair Use" legal doctrine, once and for all.
A completed CD, including ALL artwork, production costs, artist/songwriter royalties, etc costs between $1 - $4, with the moving avergage being between $2 - $3, this is then sold to a distributor/retail for $6 - $10, who then sells it for $14 - $18...
"There does need to be a bit of a shake-up in the music industry."
...and there won't be, the Anti-"Shake Up" HAS already occurred, in the last decade the 5 major labels have combined to now own the catalogs of over ***1400**** earlier record companies, all of the 5 labels have HUGE corporate parents with globe spanning, major e-media other interests
The whole point of SDMI and the RIAA's positioning is to keep the complete, total control of any/all music IP under the thumb of the 5 major labels and to keep the obscene profit levels that currently exist...
..in NO rational price structure, would the value of promotion and distribution (what the label does) be worth 2-3 times what the artist earns....that could only occur when some very few entities had complete control over the promotion/distribution chain...HMMMMM, starting to sound familiar?
but, that's what we have now, and their will be considerably MORE legal bloodletting before digital alternatives swamp the attempts to control ALL music IP by the labels
I'll make this as short as possible, it's a worthy, but complex question. (Lameness Filter here i come.)
I have done a bit of work in/around the major labels (IT consulting/web design, incl over 50 signed artists websites) and plenty of independent labels have been started very sincerely with the "artist" mind, and in the last few years a number of them have been started as "digital-distribution centric", prob the best known of these is "Atomic Pop"....
here's the problems, Spinster Aunt Maude dies, she leaves $10M, you decide to take half of that money and start an independent label, you have good ears, you know how to club, how to rap the artist, and you figure out how to get studio time and replication...
...that leaves you with 2 Big Problems; Promotion and Distribution....
let's say that you find a hot band, get them a good first EP/LP, solid producer, nice mix, good master...
how do you PROMOTE the band?
radio airplay???...yeah, sure...the Program Directors of radio stations derive their airplay list from who they are paid to play (***legally***, through marketing flacks "registered" as "influencers"), these influencers pay "consultant" fees to the PD's....
BUT, let's say that you spend $25K (1 station, 1 mid-sized city) of your own money on promoing the band, a station's PD puts the band on their "Fresh Cuts" program, assuming that the PD DOESN'T set you up and put your artist against the brand new B182 song (therefore never to be heard again) and assuming that you can "arrange" a grass roots "call-in" campaign...BTW, what did you think the band's "Fan Club" is for????
...and now this radio station is getting a lot of demand for your artist, the station's competitors are programming your artist in morning and/or afternoon "drive time"..you've now won the "Promotion" game...now how do you sell your CD's?????
the station WON'T be giving out your website's URL, and most fans wouldn't think about going there anyway, so you have to put your CD in Blockbuster/Virgin/Camelot/KMart/etc (call em BVC)..how does it get there??????
...IT DOESN'T, let's say that somehow your artist makes into the "Top Ten" airplay list in a mid-sized market (Cleveland, St Louis, Twin Cities, yada-yada)
BVC won't even talk to unless you can sell (nationwide) a half-million, and if you do, one of the major labels will come along, offer your artist 5X-10X more than you can afford to pay...the artist WILL jump ship, you probably won't even make a breakeven...
if you can do this with 3-5 artists, the labels will come along and buy your catalog for more money than you ever dreamed of (rem? Interscope/DeathRow Records)...and if you don't take their offer, you will find that every marketable artist will be taken from you and if somehow that doesn't work, you won't ever get decent distribution deals for your remaining artists through the major retailers...
This ***EXACTLY*** how Coca-Cola marketed up until, say 2012, it worked well for Coke and it works for the major labels
THAT'S WHY the RIAA is SO FREAKED about digital distribution..it can bust the labels promotion/distribution lockout wide open, the retailers and radio stations are the "lock", MP3 is is the "key"..the labels are SCARED and fighting back
Re:Can the internet community sue microsoft?
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Code Red III
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· Score: 1
"...but don't you technically pay for the license to use the software.."
IANAL (but i act like one on/.), BUT that is ***CORRECT***, with M$ and most shrinkwrapped s/w, you are buying the license to USE the s/w, LEGALLY ***you DO NOT own the s/w***, there are a zillion reasons why this is done, but not least is the fact (and directly relevant here) the owner of thing has many many more legal rights than the leasor/borrower/stealer/renter of the same thing
further, many products that have substantial liability and/or danger attached; car batteries, firearms, knives, nunchucks, network news, yada... have NO requirement to provide you an external warning. it is presumed that when you open the package, RTFM and assess the potential hazards that if you don't accept them, you'll return them. unless it's changed MS', agreement with its resellers forces the resellers to buy back any product not installed due to customer failure to accept the license....
it may be more useful to think of s/w as similar to things that can affect large bodies of people, weather, war, famine, disease, religion, weapons of mass destruction, and other post-national affectors.....
the only way that the use/adoption/deployment of any thing not deemed useful or in the common interest or outright dangerous, can be affected is by large #'s of responsible individuals who can coordinate together to stop/correct it...
the Big Stuff (as always) must be handled by the adminstration of personal and civic responsibility...
the Court system (any Court System, anywhere/everywhere) is at best simply a bunch of guys in one of grandma's old outfits, routinely applying predetermined logic blocks to roughly analogous situations..it was never meant to handle the Big Stuff and/or replace the aforementioned personal/civic responsibility...
Re:Can the internet community sue microsoft?
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Code Red III
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· Score: 1, Insightful
Read the MS EULA (End User License Agreement)
for example, if you load MS/NT/W2K on a PC that controls your companies Fire Alarms and because of a virus/worm/???? your Fire Alarms are down when a fire starts and burns your business to the ground (including physical injury to staff)....
MS is NOT liable for one red cent of any kind of damagaes....
MS was certainly not the first S/W company to immunize themselves from product liability through licensing....
BUT, the MS license agreement is one way non-negotiable (Take it or Don't Load It), not subject (by the user) to any modification under any circumstances (if a consultant GUARANTEES anything about Windows performance that's not binding on MS) and best of all....
the mere fact that you install the s/w is COMPLETELY BINDING ON YOU AND ALL YOUR COWORKERS...
SO, if over your loud objections, your IS/IT dept installs W2K in your department and it crashes another app (say an Oracle8 database on Solaris) and destroys it completely, well, the mere act of installation binds you completely, even if you didn't want it, didn't need and told everyone that if ruin your existing applications...
"The SCO(t)US has shown itself to be extremely irrational and partisan."
YEP, sure have.
Both this Rehnquist Court and the prior Brennan and Douglas Courts. Lots and lots of controversial decisions. EG, Brown v Board of Education in 1954..only took 90 years for the Supremes to decide that maybe Lincoln was right.
"When the election was on the line the same justices who had for years voted to further states rights went against states rights. The same justices who had rejected numerous equal protection arguments when it came to criminal punishment suddenly embraced equal protection."
YEP, of course conversely, the current "liberal" Justices who have always been true blue on equal protection and Federal Control over the States also suddenly decided to vote against the positions that they've always taken before.
"Unless you can prove definatively that Bill Gates is a democrat or that he gives more money to democrats then republicans there is no way he will lose in the supreme court."
of all the massively ignorant/stupid things you've said this takes the cake
Judge Jackson who found that MS was a monopoly and ordred the MS Breakup is (drum roll, please)..a proven anti-antitrust, pro business country club Republican.
the CCA panel judges who upheld about 90-95% of Jackson's Findings are all.....conservative Republicans (all appointed by Ronnie RayGunz, BTW)...
The current Supremes, theoretically "Conservative" have UPHELD Roe vs Wade (perhaps the biggest "hot button" issue there is for alleged "conservatives") TWENTY-TWO times.
BTW, do you have any clue who appointed the US Supreme Court Judges who voted ***AGAINST*** the majority Florida Decision? "Scooter Souter" for example? Have you a clue???
you might not be stupid, but you sure don't know what you're talking about....
if you want to criticize the Florida Presidential Decision fine, there's a lot there to criticize and i sure have done so, BUT,
...masquerading your political idealogy as "fact" is both intellectually dishonest and reduces real problems to "Us versus Them"...which is a big reason things don't change very quickly or very effectively here in the USA
BONUS ROUND: Guess what political party the Gates Family as a whole have been registered to for the last 3 or 4 decades???? Incl BOTH of Bill's parents..HINT, doesn't start with an "R"
"What they are trying to do is create enough delays that the other side will be willing to negotiate the degree of the applicable penalties."
Yes, M$ does want the ability to extend settlement negotiations while they release XP w/o any delay due to additional legal wrangling, BUT, that's only half the story....It's also about being "hard core" (as BillG sees it) and as shown by a # of books about MS/DOJ.
From the original Apple "look and feel" lawsuit through the Go lawsuit to the Netscape action, M$ will always charge you hard to see if you blink....
There's a new team in charge of the M$ lawsuit at the Dept of Just-ice and M$ is playing them, like M$played their predecessors.
so, for example, last week/so we have all sorts of announcements loudly trumpted about M$ "loosening up" control of the Desktop, and then M$ "leaks" info about XP doing this or that,
then an "offical" M$ spokesgeek will then deny the rumours they want to kill and ignore the rumours they want to spread....
ALL this is psych out material to FUD their opponents and jerk around the mainstream media, who at this point, they hate even worse than they hate Klein/Jackson...
somewhere at Rancho Redmond, in Bldg 8, somebody is deriving great enjoyment from all of this attention and speculation (SA, "Henry Ford".
on the "Geek Lameness" scale of 1-10, that vest is about a 25.......
tumi ( http://www.tumi.com ) makes a line of decent men's/unisex bags (i have the "large european tote" and i also use a coach and a prada, they allow me to take; my Rio MP3, cell phone, credit cards/id,2-way pager, alpha pager, Soul Player, 35 CD Holder, camel's, zippo, LiON AA's, earphones and Palm Vx/Compaq Color Companion (i know - i'm behind in PDA's)..in a pinch i can throw in a my kodak dc290 and a spare CF card..........
i can keep all that crap out of my pants/jacket, and the only negative effect is that i list slighty to the side i'm carrying it on....and in the midwest hicks make jokes about guys with "purses" (not too many, i'm 6'2" and 265#)
...for those times that cargo pants and fishing vests don't quite make it...
PS (if you want the "Ultimate Vest" check Porter's Camera's "21 Pocket Photographer's Vest", (very inexpensive)i used to be a photog and you wouldn't believe how much these things can hold, pretty much standard issue for many major media/national geo/wireservice photogs....Porter's is at
i once spoke to the God Head Geek who authored many of the biggest selling books on the ST serie(s) and we discussed the "Voyager" phoenomenon...
BOTTOM LINE: The Voyager crew, most esp Janeway (I want to have her babies, NOW!) and the interplay between the crew, in particular Chakotay and Janeway brought a humanity to ST that had been missing since the original.
sure, DS9 was largely better written and TNG was largely better acted, but DS9 never (despite some amazing work from the cast, esp Avery Brooks and Nana Visitor) quite grabbed me...
...TNG hit a forumula very very early and relied on Picard's strong jaw, Riker's engaging smile and Data's antics episode after episode after....(with some help from John de Lancie and the Borg)
There has been a quality of reality and compassion and caring and simple humanity that transcended the normal "costume drama" of most TV
Sci-Fi....
the original ST had it ("Damn it, Jim! You're KILLING him!"), and at their best TNG and DS9 got there occasionally, but Voyager has a simple sweetness and hopefulness about it that i find engaging
Voyager has been nearly as good as B5, and B5, at it's best, has blown away every S/F show ever made, from F/X to writing to acting B5 has extended the metaphor...
now, let's see what Bakkula can do (another winner of the "David Caruso Career Managment Award"....Bakkula (and Stockwell) quite often hit homeruns with Leap, despite high lameness scripts and really bad historical accuracy...maybe Scott has one good show left in him????
MOD THIS DOWN!!!! RECONDITE INFORMATION IS NOT ACCEPTABLE TO/.
Vanderbuilt, Carnegie, Rockefeller, Perry, Watson Sr, Watson Jr, Murdoch, Trump, Perot, the Burean of Indian Affairs, JP Morgan, the FBI, Tammany Hall, US Grant, the CIA, Huey Long, the Bureau of Narcotics, Gore/Bush, Gray Davis, the Republican Party, the Democratic Party, David Duke, Thomas Jefferson
you're so RIGHT, it's NOT like all of those individuals and institutions have ever been able to profit from the well-documented and accepted lying, cheating, stealing and worse law-breaking that they all did, it's not like the individuals named aboved have largely solid reputations and/or large fortunes or died with such.
or that the institutions like the Bureau of Indian Affairs which nearly brought about the wholesale destruction of American Indian Culture (OH, not to mention those pesky American Indians) didn't pay for their crimes....
OH, wait a minute, All of the individuals mentioned above, proven cheaters all, live now or died fabulously wealthy and/or powerful...
OH, and all the contemporary institutions mentioned above, despite documented behaviors ranging from murder to kidnapping to extortion to drug peddling have great power and influence....
If you're waiting for the moral outrage of the American public to effect change (other than the channel or the bottle) take up a hobby that requires plenty of time....you're in for a long, dark, lonely time...
..and if you find anything in my earlier post that you thought construed any moral or ethical endorsement of Ballmer or MS, read it again....it don't, it ain't, it won't
though this would appear to be seriously off the topic of Little Linux....
what you're seeing this is the unadulterated exhilaration and joy of a guy who is;
1. one of the richest men in the world
2. one of the most powerful men in the computer industry
and
3. a sheer WINNER, defined as many Americans/Westerners like to define it (the vanquishment/banishment/obliteration of foes and competitors)
Steve's at the very top of his game, things are mostly going according to his/their plans and there are few/none short-to-midterm threats to their business model.
Wouldn't you be happy too?
FACE IT MY BROTHERS AND SISTERS; until others show the same focus, enthusiasm and energy that Ballmer and Krewe do...competing with them is an uphill battle with dim short term prospects..you don't win a contest by being less than your opponents...but by being more and better (mo' better?)
"However, I believe language and JVM specifications were available at that time, and MS' changes were violations of these specifications."
You're almost certainly 100% correct, but i don't know that for fact.
NOT MY POINT HOWEVER, my point IS that "Java the Technology" was quickly overwhelmed by strategic corporate decisions by both Sun and MS and that BOTH their strategic behaviours have damaged the viability of the Java Platform (as it was originally promised by Sun).
Actually, when Sun's compliance s/w came out, MS' Java engine originally scored a higher compliance rating than Sun's Java engine.
And we all probably owe however "open" Java is today more to IBM and HP than anybody else, as both have fought strenously against Sun's ongoing attempts to retain complete control over the Java platform (this despite Sun's oft stated promises of making Java "completely open")
Dan Gillmor's very valid concerns about WinXP reflect that NO product from ANY major s/w company comes with signficant "strategic considerations" built in, and as technologists we should all be very careful about what "comes with" the platform we are deploying/developing for...
Insightful?
Well, OK, but maybe a little simplistic.
Sun started criticizing MS for "failure to adhere" to the Java Agreement before the Java compliance tools and rules were even publicly available.
BOTH Sun and MS had their own agendas here, and BOTH Sun and MS achieved their design goals.
Sun wanted MS OUT of the Kingdom of Java by "any means necessary". However, Sun wanted the onus of that placed on MS.
MS wanted either a proprietary spin on the Java standard, or out of the Java Kingdom. However, MS didn't want to appear to be ignoring a highly, popular and viable new standard.
SO, add lawsuit, tassle-loafered predators, Stir till everyone can posture about "innovation" until the average user's head explodes and......Voila', Everyone Wins...MS can now say "We tried but those Bastards at Sun wouldn't accept reasonable platform-based evolution." and Sun can now say, "See, we TOLD you that MS wouldn't play nice, no matter how much slack we gave them!"
WELL, maybe not everyone wins, because now we have YetAnotherTechnologyFork, and LessPlatformCompatibility, but......REALLY, Who cares?, well, other than the trivial classes of developers and users, who obviously don't have much of an impact on Sun's and MS' "genitalia size"-based corporate feuding? and all of this for "great justice"...ALGOL's looking better by the day!
the question at heart is..."Will various Slime Molds seeking public office need additional regulatory or equal opportunity help to run for public office under current law?" or is their "de facto" qualification demonstrated by the fact that the vast majority of our elected and appointed officials act as though they equal to or lesser than Slime Molds. I see the potential for Great Confusion here, the Supreme Court may have to review and revise the definition of who (or what) qualifies for citizenship. Also, can fungi and algae be far behind this new liberation movement?
when reading the comments, besides making me sad at reading that people think that PC Desktop OS's were early OS's, (primitive, Yes. early, NO!).......or that UNIX was the "first OS"...
i was really baffled at how all over the map the answers were.
Disregarding historical ignorance, the answers are still widely variant, and i couldn't quite figure out why, then it came to me that it was simple(istic)....(or that i am).......the definition of an "Operating System" is dependent on the machine and software paradigm.
setting aside Bletchley Park and Von Neumann's Mk II (as essentially just multi-kilowatt digital calculators)....
the earliest commercial computers delivered in America were the Univacs made by Sperry-Rand and delivered to (who else?) the US government in the early- and mid-fifties....
since then we've had 3 or 4 major h/w and s/w paradigms;
1. STAND-ALONE MAINFRAMES -- these were the room size boxes delivered by Burroughs, Univac, Control Data, Honeywell and IBM...attended by rooms of specialists and the programming was largely done at the "bare metal", usu by math or physics grad students...the "control code" was embedded in each and every program run, every program was completely hierarchical and ran singly in a "first-to-last" manner with no interprocess communication and whatever embedded code existed in the machine was at the hardwired level and mostly served to let the "operators" know that the program bombed.
2. HOST/ED-COMPUTING -- characterized by a "Big Iron" mainframe or mini and connected by some flavor (usu proprietary) network topology to a "dumb" (no or limited local processing ability) terminal. you can start fistfights still over what qualifies as the "first" successful Host Computer, but the GIANT of this category was the IBM 360 running MVS and JCL (if you haven't read Freddy Brooks "The Mythical Man Month", RUN, DON'T WALK, and order it from FatBrain (or whoever). A strong argument can be made that all the follow-on IBM OS's/370,/390, etc were just evolutionary implementations of OS/360.
Many, many people, including most of the "BUNCH" above, made hosted-computer systems, but this category was ruled, in the early days, by DEC, opps!, Digital Equipment Corporation and IBM, this paradigm lasted from the mid-to-late sixties until, well, TODAY.
Sun, HP, and Apollo emerged during this period with the RISC computer running some UNIX variant, which dominates this paradigm today.
Host-computing was the first to bring the computer to the people, instead of having the people go to the "Computer Center". The emergence of HLL's (High Level Languages), such as FORTRAN, COBOL, ALGOL, LISP and BASIC that were routinely used on these machines made the necessity of having some type of 'abstraction layer". UNIX emerged as the (technologically) dominant OS in this period, and the first "portable" (kinda-sorta, hold the laughter) OS.
3. DESKTOP COMPUTING -- oh come on, we should all know this one. starting with Ed Robert's "Altair" (QUICK, where did they name come from? see the end of this if you aren't sure or don't know) and IBM's 5XXX series, including, but not limited to the original 5150 (the first Intel-based PC, IBM had earlier desktops with their own h/w and s/w) and ending up (today) with the G4/500MHZ i'm writing this on, or the Gig Athalon sitting next to it.
The majority of PC's produced to this date are used as "stand-alone" boxes with their own resources, and even if they are networked, they are not, unless acting a servers, contributors to the "Great Pool of Available Cycles", essentially, "Every PC Is An Island".
4. CLIENT-SERVER/DISTRIBUTED/CLUSTERED COMPUTING -- i'm really going to take some liberties here, as you can argue that all three of these are separate paradigms. my counter-argument is that even though they evolved as separate entities, they are all headed in the same direction, down the same road, going towards the same destination. take "Host Computing" divide it by "Desktop Computing" throw in a multi-tasking, multi-process, multi-processor OS and have it enforce a "division of labor" between the high-powered "server" computer and the high-speed networked "clients" (thin or fat, depending on who's stock you own) and have a "load-balancing" schema that offloads latency to local boxes, we're just Getting To The Goods in this paradigm now, and technology like Beowulf (Beowulf.org) will be providing the "clustering" abilities necessary to make this approach ubiquitous.
client-server can potentially provide the affirmative answer to the Biblical Question "Am I not My Brother's Processor?"...
SO WHAT THE HELL DOES THIS ALL HAVE TO DO WITH THE QUESTION OF WHAT IS THE FIRST OS?????????
Each and every one of these OS paradigms have features that are not present in the others, and each are missing things that are present in the others.
The Mainframes and the Mini's have no kernel-level embedded GUI.
The Desktops have no sophisticated Batch capability, and conflict/error/memory/exception handling on the Desktop is non-existent (or worse, harmful) by Mainframe and Mini standards. Desktops File Systems are stone-age by comparison to them as well, and
The Terminals in the Host-Computing have no sophisticated graphical capability (w/o some s/w layer like X-Windows, and which would explain why the recent thin-clients by Sun, et al had some amount of GUI ability built into the box), the Terminals have no independent existence of their own, unlike PC's and Mainframes and Minis, when the network is down, Terminals turn into low-wattage space heaters.
SO, without some additional definition of the term "Operating System", the question of "Which is the First OS?", becomes a version of "Which came First, the Chicken or the Egg?".
hal van rikxoord
***have completely run out of clever sig's, SORRY! positronic matrix in dis-array***
MY FIRST COMPUTER: IBM 360
MY FIRST OS: OS/360 w/MVS and JCL
MY FIRST HLL: FORTRAN 69 (WATFOR)
MY FIRST PROGRAMMING LANGUAGE: OS/360 BAL (BASIC ASSEMBLER LANGUAGE)
MY FAVORITE LANGUAGE: interpreted=APL, compiled="Imperial" VC++
MY FAVORITE COMPUTER: THE year 2015 DELL with a bio-molecular processor array and terabyte speed optical I/O, other than that either a Cray XMP-1A with the Big Word Mod or a NEXTTurbo
MY FAVORITE OS: NEXTStep
THE ALTAIR QUESTION: "Altair" is from Star Trek (the Original, w/the red-faced drunk guy from those really, really bad Priceline dot com commercials who screams all his lines)
Slashdot Mirror
"Isn't it striking that people who claim to be members of a group advocating free thought and speech would be so anal and vitrolic about everyone who doesn't call Linux GNU/Linux?"
I get your point, BUT, its not that simple
For many years RMS was, if not the sole keeper of the "Open Software" (avoiding all the cliche and predefined terms) the "Atlas" upon whose shoulders the burden of making the case for open software and systems against ALL of IBM and the "BUNCH" (IBM and Burroughs, Univac, NCR, Control Data, Honeywell) all of whom would have done just about anything to keep their intellectual fiefdoms as closed as possible ***FOREVER***!
In those many years of intellectual and philosophical isloation, Stallman became a "Gadfly", as this is one way to further your case in the face of overwhelming opposition and resistance.
RMS could have cashed in at any point, and there is little doubt that had he done so, he could well be a billionaire today. Instead, he stuck with his passion and beliefs.
So, now a new generation comes along, with a new perspective on open software and systems.
RMS looks at us and must think "If only they knew how hard it was to keep the FSF idea alive. and they're "selling it out" for a few dollars!"
Yes, he can be autocratic, elitist and intolerant, and occasionally manipulative and Machiavellian, but he's like those Japanese soldiers from WWII, found in the jungles of the Phillipines and other South Pacific islands, who emerge in their 80's and 90's still fighting for Imperial Japan....
Their early experiences have so imprinted them, that they have become captives of conflicts fought and battles long over.
Let's give him our respect and compassion for all that he's accomplished in the past, (we wouldn't be here without him) and fight our own contemporary battles for the advancement of open software and systems, and leave him to his memories.
Let us not be distracted by distracting and nonproductive tautological discussions from another time and place.
"MS is the type of company who as of right now probably knows within +/- 5% what the demand is, what the poor/average/rich person will pay for it, what the average 'early' adopter will pay for it, and what the average late adopter will pay for it."
WHOA! Duude...here are some "ad hoc" "nonofficial" numbers according to a # of my friends up in Rancho Redmond...BEWARE: YMMV...
1. MS' projected demand for W2K is off by around 30%, much/most of this NOT accounted for by the demand inversion
2. MS' projected demand for W/ME was supposedly off by between 30%-40%, and a large factor that (along with a record number of non-projected support problems) led to its being pulled as part of the Official "Upgrade Path"
3. Deployment of AD is ***OVER*** 50% off projection, and is particularly poor with some of MS' historical "early adopters" and "key partners"
4. Demand for the new WinCe is also reportedly well below projection, though no one's mentioned to me a credible sounding number
5. And let's not forget O2K, where demand is alleged 30%-40% below Worst Case, and by rumour, His Billness and His Steveness got "down and dirty" on the O2K marketing team????
While I have no way of certifying the above numbers, the fact is that MS spokesgeeks have acknowledged the above statements without having provided quantities.
you seem to belong to the "MS is God!" School.
MS has historically (like ALL Tech Companies) always overstated intial demand....Windows95 was the one exception to that, and MS ***HASN'T HAD*** a hit like that since, God, what year was W ***95*** again???...though i've had senior Softies tell me that "for sure" W2K was gonna be...it wasn't, it's been the most disappointing Office release in some time..
"I don't expect MS to make the same low-supply mistakes as Sony"
BONUS ROUND: many industry insiders speculated that the PS2 shortage could have been planned/intentional "market manipulation" by Sony trying to enhance both mid-term PS2 demand and beat the amazing amount of media buzz that "Dreamcast" rec'd...some think it could have also been a way to "Pump Prime" the marker in America and freeze Nintendo/Dreamcast sales for a few months????...
"Don't they have anything better to do with all that power?"
Yeah! Brother, i know what you mean...what an astonishing waste of computer productivity!
can you imagine ***ANYONE*** take cutting-edge start of the art h+s/w and using it to create and develop a wide variety of different and imagined scenarios where a large assortment of weapons of differing powers of destructiveness are used on imaginary foes, hour after hour after...., day after day after...????
and futher imagine that simlarly creative people on the background had to create the deployment scenarios (call them the maps or levels?) and use their powers of imagination to create fantatically unlikely foes and enemies that could never exist in the real world. Yeah Verily, a horrible waste of precious talent and ability
BUT, i understand that they're just biding their time with that awful "nuclear contingency" stuff at LLNL, until the Q3Team(EntireUniverse) port to ASCI White is finished and then they'll productively game all day instead....
this one's easy...
1. Have the various and sundry GNU/orgs start a "Paypal" account.
2. use every fear and paranoia-based marketing device known to man to scare as many GNU/OSPF devotees deposit as much money as possible to the Paypal account
3. use the money to create a major lobbying effort to have GNU recognized as a major donor to both wings of Republi-crat Party
4. threaten to withdraw your financial support from the Repuli-crat Party if the election doesn't turn out the way you want it to, selectively donate to critical races across the country to both wings of the Republi-crat Party, punishing them when they ignore you, rewarding them when you get legislation "your way"..
5. DONE!
worked for JFK, worked for "W", works for most of the Fortune 500 corporations
MITNICK'S LAW (sorry, kev): "Social Engineering beats physical and digital security 90+% of the time."
"With hundreds of thousands of copies of an OS that won't do Java, that will have a very deep impact on developers.."
sure will, ***EXACTLY*** the effect (and affect)that M$ intends for it to have....
"everything old is new again"...in the late 50's and 60's Blue pursued every "platform specific" and "marketshare differentiation" strategy they could....it resulted in the rapid rise of DEC and HP sales of minis....which inevitably cannabilized MVS sales and resulting the "Great AS400 Giveaway" in order to retain some customers
M$, strategically, knows nothing that IBM doesn't know/hasn't done, as M$ is Blue's Love Child
M$ intends to force a platform split with Java, and then offer its Java-like, decade-plus old toad, C# as a "Better Java Than Java" and it will "make FULL use of your Microsoft technolgies"
the only difference between a cell and a room is whether you have the key to get out....MS will be finding this out in the next decade...
"what was the RIAA's real intent? Did they simply retract their threat to sue for the sake of PR, or what it something deeper?"
The RIAA has NO real power, other than the (considerable) power to coerce through the use of "Legal Intimidation", i.e.(NOT IE!) "We can afford to spend millions of dollars sueing you and we will continue to sue you until you have; no job, no house, no car, no food, no porn..."
In Felten's case, as with Adobe and KIllustrator and Dr. Kai-Uwe, the Public Relations and Legal downside of the attack was starting to overwhelm any potential upside.
The RIAA, just like Adobe, cannot afford to piss off mainstream academics, who hold tremendous clout, as expert witnesses in both legislatures and courts, in quasi-democratic systems like the US and Germany.
Post-MS Trial, Felten is a "celebrity" academic and Adobe has just made Dr. Kai-Uwe one, while Dmitri Sklyarov is rapidly becoming the "New Mitnick"...
IFF the RIAA took Felten to court and lost, and with most of the academic compsci crowd supporting Dr. Felten, the RIAA could easily lose, the damage to the DMCA's ability to restrict research could be FATAL
much easier to pick on H4X0R-types like Fanning/Napster than peeps like Felten with "juice" (gotta have it).
COMPLETE THE SENTENCE: it ain't what you know, it who you....
MOD #138 UP
Bravo
Cray went on to form his own computer company, which basically had two classes of (non-educational) clients, American Intelligence Agencies and "Big Cycle Burners" (oil companies, chemcial companies, US Gov Other)
so, BFD, Seymour NEVER did make either the Perfect Sailboat OR the Perfect Supercomputer,
and though i will always have a spot in my heart for the XMP-1A (Big Word Mod, my fave) by today's standards it's still every bit are relevant as my very first "Personal" (to me) computer the the 360/Mod 18
...which is to say that about as relevant as my Z80 or TI/100 or CommodeDoor64
it CAN'T be the destination, because that's just wormfood (alt. incompletely combusted HC's)
it had damn well better be the process, or 99.9999_% of the world is screwed, blued and tattooed....
(which, here in LA, is pretty much literally true anyway)
"Well that just proves my point. If you go and re-read my post you will see that I said the supreme court acted in a irrational and partisan matter. Apparently you agree with me on this one."
guess so, since i originally responded with "YEP, sure have."
"But it's time we woke up to the fact that there is a civil war going on in this country."
NOPE, (that's in the "I Want What You're Smoking" Category) and nothing like it, mass media propaganda..war has big numbers of people shooting at big numbers of other people, lots of blowed up/burnt out buildings, check out coverage of Tel Aviv, Jerusalem, Beirut, Chechnya, etc
they have wars going on...
what we really have here is; unexcusable poverty in the richest nation in history of mankind, a big-city public school system that would embarass Albania; prisons full of non-violent "criminals" because their mind altering substance is not alcohol or tobacco, a health care system that gives enormous amounts of health care ***FREE*** to the most affluent demographic in America, while ignoring the poorest, the foreign and the most needy AND corporate robber barons who find that if they just give enough money to the Democratic and Republican Parties, both Parties will respond by providing a sideshow that takes everyone's mind off of all the stuff that's REALLY WRONG AND ISN'T ABOUT TO GET FIXED, EVER
we have talking heads on the TV/radio, pontificating morons like Limbaugh, Koppel, Press, Matthews, King, O'Reilly, et al
who crank up the delusional faithful (which would seem to include you) into believing that there really is some kind of political dialogue of some seriousness going on here, when its all just verbal masturbation...
there has been no substantial change in American foreign policy since Eisenhower and no substantial change in American domestic policy since Johnson
nor will their be anytime soon, as it might just get in the way of corporate profits
NARCOLEPSY IS "WHAT'S GOING ON HERE..", Left/Right Wing inspired, media fueled and driven, corporate funded NARCOLEPSY
cheered on and encouraged by the lowest voter participation in a major "democracy" in modern history, bolstered by an even bigger epidemic of NIMBYISM (ala McNealy and Ellison on powerplant construction in Silly Valley) and "only morons do jury duty" middle-class sensibilities (OJ Who?)
if you can't get 'em out to vote, you sure ain't gonna get 'em out for your "Civil War"
well, as Alex "The Frogman" deTocqueville observed, "People get the government they deserve"
and we sure have
"The society that is created by the mob allows software to not have to be written more than once."
....) on /.
the problem with allegory is that most people don't get it....
a payroll system that works for Mom and Dad's eBay-based, used photographic equip business will NOT work for General Motors...
a payroll system that works for GM will NOT work for VW (vastly diff regulatory systems)
"It allows the wisdom gained in each of the writings of each of those pieces of software to be shared."
wisdom is in the eye of the beholder, which is proven (over and over and
EVERY day, as we quibble about Java v C#, C v C++, SmallTalk v Effiel, LINUX v *NIX, MS v EVERY OTHER F*****g thing in the world, ad nauseam
i like redheads, you like blonds, bob likes brunettes and bill likes sheep, susie likes cheryl, cheryl likes her vibrator, cheryl's vibrator likes the toaster oven....
software is like sex, is like cars, is like ice cream...
THERE IS NO ONE RIGHT WAY
and most of the ways that are labeled "Bad" or "Evil" are done so through the a priori application of usually outdated and irrelevant, and frequently irrational standards...
see also, "The Grand Inquistion" and "Tail Gunner Joe (McCarthy)"
"Talented people know when they are running out of good ideas and can do something else with their lives."
once upon a time there was a mythical guy, mythically named "Seymour Cray",
Seymour had a very tough day job as Big Designer Guy of a very BIGG computer company.
Seymour designed a reasonably successful computer and then left to do his heart's desire....
as a way of embracing change and rejecting orthodoxy...this Seymour guy used to design and build hi-performance sailboats, when he was finished building a boat, he would sail it for a while and then....
....SET IT ON FIRE, BURN IT TO THE GROUND (SEA, actually)....
and START ALL OVER AGAIN...
maybe Cray, Brethed and Watterson know something the rest of us don't????
"Yeah, but there still is a role for a "gatekeeper" in the popular music industry."
Absolutely, BUT, that is NOT the role that radio/retail are currently serving.
IF it was, the labels wouldn't be so afraid of MP3 and digital distribution.
for just one example. The Los Angeles radio market is owned lock, stock and playlist by the giants including Disney and ClearChannel. it offers no opportunity for new artists to get airplay. the stations as the exact of opposite of a "gatekeeper" and have become a "market lockout" mechanism instead.
There are only 3 playlists that you can hear in ALL of the huge LA market; "All Oldies, All the Time" - the "Stairway to Heaven" stuff, "Top 3 Pop, All The Time" - All Mariah/Christina/Brittany/N'Sync and the "Top 40 Pop" playlist, BNL, Brian McKnight, Dave Matthews, and occasionally some Blink, old Korn and softer Kid Rock
NONE of these programs have any room for new artists that aren't backed by label buying airplay or aren't already in the Billboard 50 (or headed there)...
It's like this in ALL the ***MAJOR*** markets, New York, DC, SanFran, etc. the best radio in America, is in the mid-size markets, where the playlists aren't 100% bought and paid for by the labels; KOMP in Vegas, the Frog in San Jose, other rock stations in Michigan, Illinois, Ohio and the rest of the mid-west.
The MP3 Battle isn't about "gatekeeping" it's about keeping the price for a CD at the $15.00 retail level and killing off the "Fair Use" legal doctrine, once and for all.
A completed CD, including ALL artwork, production costs, artist/songwriter royalties, etc costs between $1 - $4, with the moving avergage being between $2 - $3, this is then sold to a distributor/retail for $6 - $10, who then sells it for $14 - $18...
"There does need to be a bit of a shake-up in the music industry."
...and there won't be, the Anti-"Shake Up" HAS already occurred, in the last decade the 5 major labels have combined to now own the catalogs of over ***1400**** earlier record companies, all of the 5 labels have HUGE corporate parents with globe spanning, major e-media other interests
The whole point of SDMI and the RIAA's positioning is to keep the complete, total control of any/all music IP under the thumb of the 5 major labels and to keep the obscene profit levels that currently exist...
..in NO rational price structure, would the value of promotion and distribution (what the label does) be worth 2-3 times what the artist earns....that could only occur when some very few entities had complete control over the promotion/distribution chain...HMMMMM, starting to sound familiar?
but, that's what we have now, and their will be considerably MORE legal bloodletting before digital alternatives swamp the attempts to control ALL music IP by the labels
"Or what about a "minimum profit" record label ?"
I'll make this as short as possible, it's a worthy, but complex question. (Lameness Filter here i come.)
I have done a bit of work in/around the major labels (IT consulting/web design, incl over 50 signed artists websites) and plenty of independent labels have been started very sincerely with the "artist" mind, and in the last few years a number of them have been started as "digital-distribution centric", prob the best known of these is "Atomic Pop"....
here's the problems, Spinster Aunt Maude dies, she leaves $10M, you decide to take half of that money and start an independent label, you have good ears, you know how to club, how to rap the artist, and you figure out how to get studio time and replication...
...that leaves you with 2 Big Problems; Promotion and Distribution....
let's say that you find a hot band, get them a good first EP/LP, solid producer, nice mix, good master...
how do you PROMOTE the band?
radio airplay???...yeah, sure...the Program Directors of radio stations derive their airplay list from who they are paid to play (***legally***, through marketing flacks "registered" as "influencers"), these influencers pay "consultant" fees to the PD's....
BUT, let's say that you spend $25K (1 station, 1 mid-sized city) of your own money on promoing the band, a station's PD puts the band on their "Fresh Cuts" program, assuming that the PD DOESN'T set you up and put your artist against the brand new B182 song (therefore never to be heard again) and assuming that you can "arrange" a grass roots "call-in" campaign...BTW, what did you think the band's "Fan Club" is for????
...and now this radio station is getting a lot of demand for your artist, the station's competitors are programming your artist in morning and/or afternoon "drive time"..you've now won the "Promotion" game...now how do you sell your CD's?????
the station WON'T be giving out your website's URL, and most fans wouldn't think about going there anyway, so you have to put your CD in Blockbuster/Virgin/Camelot/KMart/etc (call em BVC)..how does it get there??????
...IT DOESN'T, let's say that somehow your artist makes into the "Top Ten" airplay list in a mid-sized market (Cleveland, St Louis, Twin Cities, yada-yada)
BVC won't even talk to unless you can sell (nationwide) a half-million, and if you do, one of the major labels will come along, offer your artist 5X-10X more than you can afford to pay...the artist WILL jump ship, you probably won't even make a breakeven...
if you can do this with 3-5 artists, the labels will come along and buy your catalog for more money than you ever dreamed of (rem? Interscope/DeathRow Records)...and if you don't take their offer, you will find that every marketable artist will be taken from you and if somehow that doesn't work, you won't ever get decent distribution deals for your remaining artists through the major retailers...
This ***EXACTLY*** how Coca-Cola marketed up until, say 2012, it worked well for Coke and it works for the major labels
THAT'S WHY the RIAA is SO FREAKED about digital distribution..it can bust the labels promotion/distribution lockout wide open, the retailers and radio stations are the "lock", MP3 is is the "key"..the labels are SCARED and fighting back
"...but don't you technically pay for the license to use the software.."
/.), BUT that is ***CORRECT***, with M$ and most shrinkwrapped s/w, you are buying the license to USE the s/w, LEGALLY ***you DO NOT own the s/w***, there are a zillion reasons why this is done, but not least is the fact (and directly relevant here) the owner of thing has many many more legal rights than the leasor/borrower/stealer/renter of the same thing
IANAL (but i act like one on
further, many products that have substantial liability and/or danger attached; car batteries, firearms, knives, nunchucks, network news, yada... have NO requirement to provide you an external warning. it is presumed that when you open the package, RTFM and assess the potential hazards that if you don't accept them, you'll return them. unless it's changed MS', agreement with its resellers forces the resellers to buy back any product not installed due to customer failure to accept the license....
it may be more useful to think of s/w as similar to things that can affect large bodies of people, weather, war, famine, disease, religion, weapons of mass destruction, and other post-national affectors.....
the only way that the use/adoption/deployment of any thing not deemed useful or in the common interest or outright dangerous, can be affected is by large #'s of responsible individuals who can coordinate together to stop/correct it...
the Big Stuff (as always) must be handled by the adminstration of personal and civic responsibility...
the Court system (any Court System, anywhere/everywhere) is at best simply a bunch of guys in one of grandma's old outfits, routinely applying predetermined logic blocks to roughly analogous situations..it was never meant to handle the Big Stuff and/or replace the aforementioned personal/civic responsibility...
Read the MS EULA (End User License Agreement)
for example, if you load MS/NT/W2K on a PC that controls your companies Fire Alarms and because of a virus/worm/???? your Fire Alarms are down when a fire starts and burns your business to the ground (including physical injury to staff)....
MS is NOT liable for one red cent of any kind of damagaes....
MS was certainly not the first S/W company to immunize themselves from product liability through licensing....
BUT, the MS license agreement is one way non-negotiable (Take it or Don't Load It), not subject (by the user) to any modification under any circumstances (if a consultant GUARANTEES anything about Windows performance that's not binding on MS) and best of all....
the mere fact that you install the s/w is COMPLETELY BINDING ON YOU AND ALL YOUR COWORKERS...
SO, if over your loud objections, your IS/IT dept installs W2K in your department and it crashes another app (say an Oracle8 database on Solaris) and destroys it completely, well, the mere act of installation binds you completely, even if you didn't want it, didn't need and told everyone that if ruin your existing applications...
NOW THAT'S ***INNOVATION***
"The SCO(t)US has shown itself to be extremely irrational and partisan."
..a proven anti-antitrust, pro business country club Republican.
YEP, sure have.
Both this Rehnquist Court and the prior Brennan and Douglas Courts. Lots and lots of controversial decisions. EG, Brown v Board of Education in 1954..only took 90 years for the Supremes to decide that maybe Lincoln was right.
"When the election was on the line the same justices who had for years voted to further states rights went against states rights. The same justices who had rejected numerous equal protection arguments when it came to criminal punishment suddenly embraced equal protection."
YEP, of course conversely, the current "liberal" Justices who have always been true blue on equal protection and Federal Control over the States also suddenly decided to vote against the positions that they've always taken before.
"Unless you can prove definatively that Bill Gates is a democrat or that he gives more money to democrats then republicans there is no way he will lose in the supreme court."
of all the massively ignorant/stupid things you've said this takes the cake
Judge Jackson who found that MS was a monopoly and ordred the MS Breakup is (drum roll, please)
the CCA panel judges who upheld about 90-95% of Jackson's Findings are all.....conservative Republicans (all appointed by Ronnie RayGunz, BTW)...
The current Supremes, theoretically "Conservative" have UPHELD Roe vs Wade (perhaps the biggest "hot button" issue there is for alleged "conservatives") TWENTY-TWO times.
BTW, do you have any clue who appointed the US Supreme Court Judges who voted ***AGAINST*** the majority Florida Decision? "Scooter Souter" for example? Have you a clue???
you might not be stupid, but you sure don't know what you're talking about....
if you want to criticize the Florida Presidential Decision fine, there's a lot there to criticize and i sure have done so, BUT,
...masquerading your political idealogy as "fact" is both intellectually dishonest and reduces real problems to "Us versus Them"...which is a big reason things don't change very quickly or very effectively here in the USA
BONUS ROUND: Guess what political party the Gates Family as a whole have been registered to for the last 3 or 4 decades???? Incl BOTH of Bill's parents..HINT, doesn't start with an "R"
"What they are trying to do is create enough delays that the other side will be willing to negotiate the degree of the applicable penalties."
Yes, M$ does want the ability to extend settlement negotiations while they release XP w/o any delay due to additional legal wrangling, BUT, that's only half the story....It's also about being "hard core" (as BillG sees it) and as shown by a # of books about MS/DOJ.
From the original Apple "look and feel" lawsuit through the Go lawsuit to the Netscape action, M$ will always charge you hard to see if you blink....
There's a new team in charge of the M$ lawsuit at the Dept of Just-ice and M$ is playing them, like M$played their predecessors.
so, for example, last week/so we have all sorts of announcements loudly trumpted about M$ "loosening up" control of the Desktop, and then M$ "leaks" info about XP doing this or that,
then an "offical" M$ spokesgeek will then deny the rumours they want to kill and ignore the rumours they want to spread....
ALL this is psych out material to FUD their opponents and jerk around the mainstream media, who at this point, they hate even worse than they hate Klein/Jackson...
somewhere at Rancho Redmond, in Bldg 8, somebody is deriving great enjoyment from all of this attention and speculation (SA, "Henry Ford".
The Supremes ARE NOThave to be limited to reviewing the issues that MS has requsted
on the "Geek Lameness" scale of 1-10, that vest is about a 25.......
tumi ( http://www.tumi.com ) makes a line of decent men's/unisex bags (i have the "large european tote" and i also use a coach and a prada, they allow me to take; my Rio MP3, cell phone, credit cards/id,2-way pager, alpha pager, Soul Player, 35 CD Holder, camel's, zippo, LiON AA's, earphones and Palm Vx/Compaq Color Companion (i know - i'm behind in PDA's)..in a pinch i can throw in a my kodak dc290 and a spare CF card..........
i can keep all that crap out of my pants/jacket, and the only negative effect is that i list slighty to the side i'm carrying it on....and in the midwest hicks make jokes about guys with "purses" (not too many, i'm 6'2" and 265#)
...for those times that cargo pants and fishing vests don't quite make it...
PS (if you want the "Ultimate Vest" check Porter's Camera's "21 Pocket Photographer's Vest", (very inexpensive)i used to be a photog and you wouldn't believe how much these things can hold, pretty much standard issue for many major media/national geo/wireservice photogs....Porter's is at
http://www.porters.com
i once spoke to the God Head Geek who authored many of the biggest selling books on the ST serie(s) and we discussed the "Voyager" phoenomenon...
/.
BOTTOM LINE: The Voyager crew, most esp Janeway (I want to have her babies, NOW!) and the interplay between the crew, in particular Chakotay and Janeway brought a humanity to ST that had been missing since the original.
sure, DS9 was largely better written and TNG was largely better acted, but DS9 never (despite some amazing work from the cast, esp Avery Brooks and Nana Visitor) quite grabbed me...
...TNG hit a forumula very very early and relied on Picard's strong jaw, Riker's engaging smile and Data's antics episode after episode after....(with some help from John de Lancie and the Borg)
There has been a quality of reality and compassion and caring and simple humanity that transcended the normal "costume drama" of most TV
Sci-Fi....
the original ST had it ("Damn it, Jim! You're KILLING him!"), and at their best TNG and DS9 got there occasionally, but Voyager has a simple sweetness and hopefulness about it that i find engaging
Voyager has been nearly as good as B5, and B5, at it's best, has blown away every S/F show ever made, from F/X to writing to acting B5 has extended the metaphor...
now, let's see what Bakkula can do (another winner of the "David Caruso Career Managment Award"....Bakkula (and Stockwell) quite often hit homeruns with Leap, despite high lameness scripts and really bad historical accuracy...maybe Scott has one good show left in him????
MOD THIS DOWN!!!! RECONDITE INFORMATION IS NOT ACCEPTABLE TO
"Americans differentiate WINNERS from CHEATERS."
whoa, i almost forgot that.
Vanderbuilt, Carnegie, Rockefeller, Perry, Watson Sr, Watson Jr, Murdoch, Trump, Perot, the Burean of Indian Affairs, JP Morgan, the FBI, Tammany Hall, US Grant, the CIA, Huey Long, the Bureau of Narcotics, Gore/Bush, Gray Davis, the Republican Party, the Democratic Party, David Duke, Thomas Jefferson
you're so RIGHT, it's NOT like all of those individuals and institutions have ever been able to profit from the well-documented and accepted lying, cheating, stealing and worse law-breaking that they all did, it's not like the individuals named aboved have largely solid reputations and/or large fortunes or died with such.
or that the institutions like the Bureau of Indian Affairs which nearly brought about the wholesale destruction of American Indian Culture (OH, not to mention those pesky American Indians) didn't pay for their crimes....
OH, wait a minute, All of the individuals mentioned above, proven cheaters all, live now or died fabulously wealthy and/or powerful...
OH, and all the contemporary institutions mentioned above, despite documented behaviors ranging from murder to kidnapping to extortion to drug peddling have great power and influence....
If you're waiting for the moral outrage of the American public to effect change (other than the channel or the bottle) take up a hobby that requires plenty of time....you're in for a long, dark, lonely time...
..and if you find anything in my earlier post that you thought construed any moral or ethical endorsement of Ballmer or MS, read it again....it don't, it ain't, it won't
though this would appear to be seriously off the topic of Little Linux....
what you're seeing this is the unadulterated exhilaration and joy of a guy who is;
1. one of the richest men in the world
2. one of the most powerful men in the computer industry
and
3. a sheer WINNER, defined as many Americans/Westerners like to define it (the vanquishment/banishment/obliteration of foes and competitors)
Steve's at the very top of his game, things are mostly going according to his/their plans and there are few/none short-to-midterm threats to their business model.
Wouldn't you be happy too?
FACE IT MY BROTHERS AND SISTERS; until others show the same focus, enthusiasm and energy that Ballmer and Krewe do...competing with them is an uphill battle with dim short term prospects..you don't win a contest by being less than your opponents...but by being more and better (mo' better?)
You're almost certainly 100% correct, but i don't know that for fact.
NOT MY POINT HOWEVER, my point IS that "Java the Technology" was quickly overwhelmed by strategic corporate decisions by both Sun and MS and that BOTH their strategic behaviours have damaged the viability of the Java Platform (as it was originally promised by Sun).
Actually, when Sun's compliance s/w came out, MS' Java engine originally scored a higher compliance rating than Sun's Java engine.
And we all probably owe however "open" Java is today more to IBM and HP than anybody else, as both have fought strenously against Sun's ongoing attempts to retain complete control over the Java platform (this despite Sun's oft stated promises of making Java "completely open")
Dan Gillmor's very valid concerns about WinXP reflect that NO product from ANY major s/w company comes with signficant "strategic considerations" built in, and as technologists we should all be very careful about what "comes with" the platform we are deploying/developing for...
Insightful? Well, OK, but maybe a little simplistic. Sun started criticizing MS for "failure to adhere" to the Java Agreement before the Java compliance tools and rules were even publicly available. BOTH Sun and MS had their own agendas here, and BOTH Sun and MS achieved their design goals. Sun wanted MS OUT of the Kingdom of Java by "any means necessary". However, Sun wanted the onus of that placed on MS. MS wanted either a proprietary spin on the Java standard, or out of the Java Kingdom. However, MS didn't want to appear to be ignoring a highly, popular and viable new standard. SO, add lawsuit, tassle-loafered predators, Stir till everyone can posture about "innovation" until the average user's head explodes and... ...Voila', Everyone Wins...MS can now say "We tried but those Bastards at Sun wouldn't accept reasonable platform-based evolution." and Sun can now say, "See, we TOLD you that MS wouldn't play nice, no matter how much slack we gave them!"
WELL, maybe not everyone wins, because now we have YetAnotherTechnologyFork, and LessPlatformCompatibility, but... ...REALLY, Who cares?, well, other than the trivial classes of developers and users, who obviously don't have much of an impact on Sun's and MS' "genitalia size"-based corporate feuding? and all of this for "great justice"...ALGOL's looking better by the day!
the question at heart is..."Will various Slime Molds seeking public office need additional regulatory or equal opportunity help to run for public office under current law?" or is their "de facto" qualification demonstrated by the fact that the vast majority of our elected and appointed officials act as though they equal to or lesser than Slime Molds. I see the potential for Great Confusion here, the Supreme Court may have to review and revise the definition of who (or what) qualifies for citizenship. Also, can fungi and algae be far behind this new liberation movement?
when reading the comments, besides making me sad at reading that people think that PC Desktop OS's were early OS's, (primitive, Yes. early, NO!).... ...or that UNIX was the "first OS"...
i was really baffled at how all over the map the answers were.
Disregarding historical ignorance, the answers are still widely variant, and i couldn't quite figure out why, then it came to me that it was simple(istic)....(or that i am).... ...the definition of an "Operating System" is dependent on the machine and software paradigm.
setting aside Bletchley Park and Von Neumann's Mk II (as essentially just multi-kilowatt digital calculators)....
the earliest commercial computers delivered in America were the Univacs made by Sperry-Rand and delivered to (who else?) the US government in the early- and mid-fifties....
since then we've had 3 or 4 major h/w and s/w paradigms;
1. STAND-ALONE MAINFRAMES -- these were the room size boxes delivered by Burroughs, Univac, Control Data, Honeywell and IBM...attended by rooms of specialists and the programming was largely done at the "bare metal", usu by math or physics grad students...the "control code" was embedded in each and every program run, every program was completely hierarchical and ran singly in a "first-to-last" manner with no interprocess communication and whatever embedded code existed in the machine was at the hardwired level and mostly served to let the "operators" know that the program bombed.
2. HOST/ED-COMPUTING -- characterized by a "Big Iron" mainframe or mini and connected by some flavor (usu proprietary) network topology to a "dumb" (no or limited local processing ability) terminal. you can start fistfights still over what qualifies as the "first" successful Host Computer, but the GIANT of this category was the IBM 360 running MVS and JCL (if you haven't read Freddy Brooks "The Mythical Man Month", RUN, DON'T WALK, and order it from FatBrain (or whoever). A strong argument can be made that all the follow-on IBM OS's /370, /390, etc were just evolutionary implementations of OS/360.
Many, many people, including most of the "BUNCH" above, made hosted-computer systems, but this category was ruled, in the early days, by DEC, opps!, Digital Equipment Corporation and IBM, this paradigm lasted from the mid-to-late sixties until, well, TODAY.
Sun, HP, and Apollo emerged during this period with the RISC computer running some UNIX variant, which dominates this paradigm today.
Host-computing was the first to bring the computer to the people, instead of having the people go to the "Computer Center". The emergence of HLL's (High Level Languages), such as FORTRAN, COBOL, ALGOL, LISP and BASIC that were routinely used on these machines made the necessity of having some type of 'abstraction layer". UNIX emerged as the (technologically) dominant OS in this period, and the first "portable" (kinda-sorta, hold the laughter) OS.
3. DESKTOP COMPUTING -- oh come on, we should all know this one. starting with Ed Robert's "Altair" (QUICK, where did they name come from? see the end of this if you aren't sure or don't know) and IBM's 5XXX series, including, but not limited to the original 5150 (the first Intel-based PC, IBM had earlier desktops with their own h/w and s/w) and ending up (today) with the G4/500MHZ i'm writing this on, or the Gig Athalon sitting next to it.
The majority of PC's produced to this date are used as "stand-alone" boxes with their own resources, and even if they are networked, they are not, unless acting a servers, contributors to the "Great Pool of Available Cycles", essentially, "Every PC Is An Island".
4. CLIENT-SERVER/DISTRIBUTED/CLUSTERED COMPUTING -- i'm really going to take some liberties here, as you can argue that all three of these are separate paradigms. my counter-argument is that even though they evolved as separate entities, they are all headed in the same direction, down the same road, going towards the same destination. take "Host Computing" divide it by "Desktop Computing" throw in a multi-tasking, multi-process, multi-processor OS and have it enforce a "division of labor" between the high-powered "server" computer and the high-speed networked "clients" (thin or fat, depending on who's stock you own) and have a "load-balancing" schema that offloads latency to local boxes, we're just Getting To The Goods in this paradigm now, and technology like Beowulf (Beowulf.org) will be providing the "clustering" abilities necessary to make this approach ubiquitous.
client-server can potentially provide the affirmative answer to the Biblical Question "Am I not My Brother's Processor?"...
SO WHAT THE HELL DOES THIS ALL HAVE TO DO WITH THE QUESTION OF WHAT IS THE FIRST OS?????????
Each and every one of these OS paradigms have features that are not present in the others, and each are missing things that are present in the others.
The Mainframes and the Mini's have no kernel-level embedded GUI.
The Desktops have no sophisticated Batch capability, and conflict/error/memory/exception handling on the Desktop is non-existent (or worse, harmful) by Mainframe and Mini standards. Desktops File Systems are stone-age by comparison to them as well, and
The Terminals in the Host-Computing have no sophisticated graphical capability (w/o some s/w layer like X-Windows, and which would explain why the recent thin-clients by Sun, et al had some amount of GUI ability built into the box), the Terminals have no independent existence of their own, unlike PC's and Mainframes and Minis, when the network is down, Terminals turn into low-wattage space heaters.
SO, without some additional definition of the term "Operating System", the question of "Which is the First OS?", becomes a version of "Which came First, the Chicken or the Egg?".
hal van rikxoord
***have completely run out of clever sig's, SORRY! positronic matrix in dis-array***
MY FIRST COMPUTER: IBM 360
MY FIRST OS: OS/360 w/MVS and JCL
MY FIRST HLL: FORTRAN 69 (WATFOR)
MY FIRST PROGRAMMING LANGUAGE: OS/360 BAL (BASIC ASSEMBLER LANGUAGE)
MY FAVORITE LANGUAGE: interpreted=APL, compiled="Imperial" VC++
MY FAVORITE COMPUTER: THE year 2015 DELL with a bio-molecular processor array and terabyte speed optical I/O, other than that either a Cray XMP-1A with the Big Word Mod or a NEXTTurbo
MY FAVORITE OS: NEXTStep
THE ALTAIR QUESTION: "Altair" is from Star Trek (the Original, w/the red-faced drunk guy from those really, really bad Priceline dot com commercials who screams all his lines)