If Zeosync is gone, where did the technology go? (Into a black hole?) I suppose it was sold to some other company, who perhaps is sitting on it like Palm is sitting on the desktop BeOS, but couldn't that be considered "stifling innovation"?
I sure as hell don't want 180 degree coffee.. I hardly ever get coffee at McSchmonald's because it's too damn hot to drink! (even if you sip it through the little stirrer..)
I used to be of the opinion that the coffee-settlement was a stupid too.. But I didn't know that 700 cases had already happened, and McDonald's did nothing about it (even as simple as printing "Caution: Hot!" on the cup.
As for people communuting and drinking it later, what about people who don't? I would bet that at least 30% of coffee purchased at breakfast is consumed in-store, probably more so for coffee purchased with lunches (does anyone drink coffee with lunch?)
> and the email unhitches me from whatever > broadband pipe I've got running into the
I don't know about most of the coountry, but here in Monroe County, IN, the library will provide free email (POP, don't know about IMAP, no web access - I think it's a 1 or 2ML limit) and free personal web-hosting (5MB I think) with free CGI (Perl through cgiwrap) if you ask for it. Of course, the email there can change too (if you move out of the county), but the same could be said of mac.com or anything else for that matter (they start charging too much, change services to crumbs, etc, you move to something else..)
There's a discussion of this here on Superstringtheory.com I would put this as an update to the original story, but I don't know how to update..
Original poster,
Jim
Well, the graviton is a spin-2 particle if I remember correctly (my standard disclaimer in case of ignorance). I don't know near enough about the various ways quantum theory and GR are hypothesized to interact - I have a layman's "read-Brian-Greene's-book" knowledge of string theory - but there must be other quantum gravity theories out there - to know if spin-2 particles would be expected to behave differently with regard to their "speed" than photons (spin-1?), or indeed, what exactly speed means in the quantum domain when waves are concernted.
I think the standard explaination is that the speed is calculated using the peak of the wave, but then there was that experiement where physicists did apparently sent a signal faster than light using quantum tunneling through a gas I believe the experiment was - enough of a signal to be able to hear a recognizable copy of Mozart on the other end of the tube..
There was the report in 1996 about the crating of antigravity using spinning superconducting disks, also reported in SciAm (a followup report can be found here. It basically debunks the original claim, saying that the original paper has been withdrawn by it's authors, and oter physicists are very skeptical. But I wonder if this might have something to do with it (probably not).
Re:Completely wrong - AI programming, ViaVoice
on
OGRE GPL'ed 3D Engine
·
· Score: 1
The original poster's passage in question is:
the engine and game logic are seperate codebases: Id Software releases the game logic seperately from the engine code, and usually years before, so that mod authors can play with it. And of course, the GPL does not "infect" anything but code: your textures, skins, models and levels remain your own no matter what.
The art, music, textures, levels, models, etc are not "infected" by the GPL. But I would say that "game logic" includes such things as the code that reads the level files (other than the engine code, any OpenGL wizardry you added to give it that added "whiz-bang" factor, any AI programming you did for command recognition or enemy reaction, etc. And as far as I know (never having used the Quake engine), the engine is static-linked into the rest of this "game logic", so it must also be GPL.
Another problem that might come up is this: what if I want to integrate the program with ViaVoice (or any other closed-source voice rec program), or with a closed source 3D game controller? Can I do that if it requires that closed source glue code be statically linked into the binary? This problem comes up with regards to Newton development as well - specifically with using the C++ tools, which require closed glue to be linked - more generally becasue the main development program, Newton Toolkit, is not open-source, and no clone has been made (yet, one of these days I'll get around to it..)
Jim
But what if I'm making a shareware game and only expect to make $1000 of it if I'm lucky (let's say I'm just getting started, okay). Then I'm screwed, if I want to keep it closed, unless I make my own version of the Quake engine that will dynamic link with my program so I can close the program source, although I'm not sure what the consensus on that is. (or court tests).
Besides, I think it would be more clever to releases this under the LGPL as well, the author himself states that he plans on licensing for commercial use as well.
Quesa, the open-source clone of Apple's Quickdraw 3D, is LGPL, just for this reason - to encourage people to use it who would otherise be scared off by the GPL.
Uh, no, completely right. See section 2b of the GPL: You must cause any work that you distribute or publish, that in whole or in part contains or is derived from the Program or any part thereof, to be licensed as a whole at no charge to all third parties under the terms of this License. I don't see any way around that. Of course, there is the possibility of dynamic linking with the library to get around the GPL, which was debated here a number of months ago, but without the library, the program would effectively be unusable, so I don't know if that would work.
I'll probably get modded way down for this, but hell, my karma is only 14 anyway.. I generally agree with the idea of the FSF, just not all of the means. The idea that "By releasing libraries that are limited to free software only, we can help each other's free software packages outdo the proprietary alternatives. The whole free software movement will have more popularity, because free software as a whole will stack up better against the competition." [http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/why-not-lgpl.html] is a good one, but I think it partly fails in that there will always be commerical software, or ever shareware. The GPL is basically incompatible with the idea of making money off of personal work. True, maybe programmer's should just program for the fun of it, for the joy of it, for the intellectual curiosity of it, yadda, yadda, yadda. But some also want (and need) to do it to eat.
Requireing all GPL software to be released in source form basically nullifies the idea of making any kind of income off of software, unless either (1) your clients are very generous, or (2) the software is very good. Hell, it might be that the better the software is, the fewer people will pay for it (but the people who do pay may pay more, I don't know if that would balance - has anyone done any economic/psycholofical studies of payment and the GPL?) That statement in favor of the GPL over the LGPL also presupposes that there is a large base of easy to use, compelling free software out there already. As I see it, there isn't. Oh, there is if you want to go that way phiposophically, but not otherwise. To make a very bad real-world analogy: the combustion engine I don't believe that the internal combusion engine would have achieved the dominence it did if it were GPL'd immidiately after being invented. (bad analogy for one becasue the ICM is a physical product). Oh, it would have, someone else would have just "reinvented" it. The GPL offers a "freedom" of sorts with respect to knowledge, but it also places very severe restrictions on anyone trying to make a guaranteed income-stream of of something (the counter-argument, of course, is that the software will be pirated anyway if it's any good). The restrictions of the GPL are stict enough, that I believe it will drive away perhaps as many people as it attracts.
One might say, well, you could always ask the person to dual-license, but (1) the author may be unwilling to do that, not becasue it doesn't make sense (economically or in a real-world sense) but on philosophical grounds alone, and (2) it's not clear how this works if the original work is itself a derived work from other GPL code. The FSF has gathered an enourmous amount of steam in the computing community ("psychohistorical inertia" as Prof. Seldon might put it;-), and that steam will work to deflect certain economic realities from entering consideration, which, which while perhaps being "unpleasent" are nonetheless real in the world we live (just as was and is true with communism and capitalism as social systems)
Paul Guyot, who has worked for over a year on a Apple Newton ATA driver (which was been mentioned on Slashdot at one point), refuses to work on GPL projects. I don't know all his reasons, but one main one is that GPL software tends to be hard to compile, hard to use, hard to configure, and generally you have to be a gear-head to get anything done with it (okay, that last reason was my little flourish, but you get the idea). There are some notable exceptions: GIMP for one, and it's offspring MacGIMP. But then, I haven't installed or used MacGIMP yet. How do I know that somewhere in it I won't get an inscrutable error having to do with the Fink under-structure? In addition to working for a year on this driver with a basically undocumented operating system, he has killed two development units. Do you think that someone who has invested that kind of time, energy, and money is going to release under a license that forces him to give up any propect of making money off of it? I don't, and neither does he.
To the end of his objection the lack of good documentation of GPL software that he sees, he has drafted a license that seeks to address this, the Kallisys Reflexive License which requires that all modifications have documentation of source code changes, but does not require source code to be released. It is incompatible with the GPL, becasue the GPL requires strictures on the code beyond the KRL. This is the GPL's "freedom". (of course, the same could be said of communism, and some have described the FSF as neo-communist)
One very interesting thing I note about the GPL is this: in section 3b, it states: [distirbute in executable code if you] Accompany it with a written offer, valid for at least three years, to give any third party, for a charge no more than your cost of physically performing source distribution, a complete machine-readable copy [...] This seems backward to me. The idea whould be that you can charge money for it (or "force people to pay" if you prefer) for a specified period of time, after which it must become open-source. This would prevent abandon-ware. If this sane alternative had been adopted by the major computer companies back in the seventies and eighties, Paul wouldn't have had to work for a year on his driver, becasue the Newton source would be out by now!
I agree with the FSF's intentions, and their opposition to software patents, DRM, etc, etc. But in my mind, it goes to far. Freedom should also be about choice. People should not be forced into releasing source, and large corporations are not going to be in the near future (as one other Slashdotter said, "the GPL gives Apple layers hives"). As a way to prevent abandonware like the Newton, Quickdraw 3D (now basically, but not completely, a moot point), OpenDoc, etc, etc (I'm sure that companies other than Apple also have some very interesting stuff buried in their vaults, never again to see the light of day..)
Putting together a "compromise" organization like this would not be easy - witness now Rosetta - the printing recognizer for the Newton - will finally see the light of day in MacOS X "Jaguar" as InkWell. If my idea of a standard "abandonware clause" had been adopted with a three year limit, this would be impossible, and Apple would be in the same trap I accuse the GPL of foisting on programmers. I think the FSF has taken the easy way out, opting for an extremem communist-style "solution". But real-life, and the real-world (even the ones we create ourselves) are messy, and not ammenable to easy but extreme solutions, like pure social communism (Soviet Union), or pure social capitalism (the US in many ways), or, I fear, the FSF.
My original thought when reading this was: "Okay, so they think that John Q. is going to buy a video for $35-45, instead of a $17 DVD at Best Buy; and a $2000+ player instead of a crappy (but still decent for John Q.) DVD player for under $100 (also at Best Buy). For a movie that might stretch out and fade in unspecified way after a few viewings.. And one you can't skip through real fast like a DVD, or copy (What? Did I say copy? John Q.'ll have to give it to his 10-year old son whose a DeCSS expert to do that.)
But then it dawned on me: what they want to happen is that the format will be used by a select few for movies now (I have no idea which select few this is, but I'm sure it exists - there are a lot of bored hundred-thousand-aires out there I think) Add the benefit that they (as well as John Q.) will be able to record HDTV at full quality, for 2006 when everything has to go digital (Yeah, RIGHT!!) And it'll be copyright protected. (oops, John Q. missed that. Or he doesn't care.)
But the prices will come down, if only becasue the production of the custom ASICs that are in it will get ramped up, or more people start making them.
People here say that for a movie, they'd much rather watch a DVD, and for recording, they'd much rather use Tivo. Yes, they would. They're parents might even prefer a DVD for movies. Depending on who they're parents are, they might prefer a Tivo to tapes (the advantage is very high, but until you have seen it, the percieved entry-barrier to techno-phobes is also high) But do you think you're grand-mother will prefer DVD or Tivo? I know mine won't. She won't even touch a VCR, and didn't tough a microwave oven for the longest time (until we bought her one;-) That is there audience methinks. Now I don't know if they think that the 80-somethings of the world will go convincing the 40-somethings of the world that D-VHS is so much better than that "new-fangled-Tivo-thingee", but I think that's what they're strategy is, as much as there is a strategy.
I also think that at some point they want to get rid of the VCR completely - not that that would be easy - not only would they piss off consumer groups, electronics makers, computer makers, civil libertarians, real conservatives (the ones for smaller and less-intrusive government), and some artists groups [RAC for one], they would go on to alienate the entire video rental industry - although it seems to be transitioning to DVD pretty well..
The industry (or at least some powerful people in it) think that Sony-Betamax was a mistake. They don't want to overturn it per se, they just want to make it obsolete. By introducing D-VHS, which includes copyright-protection, and the overbroad-DMCA which enforces it, and armies of layers to play whack-a-mole with the P2P operators, and.. and armies of cloned cryogenically-frozen G-Men from Nazi Germany to go after the entire Napster Generation! (Well, we're not quite there yet..)
Some say the Betaxmax base should still hold. And I agree, it should. But that's another court case, for another day, in a different age than it was in the '70s (or whever Betamax was decided), I think a narrower Supreme Court (though I really have no idea on this one), and a Conngress that was less monetary-influenced and "pro-active" (in the wrong way) on these matters. And a public that was less apathetic than it was today (of course, I was born in 1978 - maybe politics really has always been going to hell in a handbasket!)
there is nothing in Napster's technology that couldn't be replicated in a matter of weeks by a competent programmer) or that they have a LOT of money to throw arond
I would bet it's the latter, and I'd say that there isn't anything in Napster that could be replicated in a matter of weeks by an INcompetent programmer either! A competent programmer would have improved the protocol (fewer droppouts, parallel downloads from multiple hosts, Kazaa-type quasi-decentralization, etc)
An idea I came up with a while ago was this: the main problem with the music industry IMO is that there is no competition. Yes, we all know that the Big-5 have a 80-95% lock on the physical distribution market, but they have no competition by virtue of the fact that they have absolute control over the content on which they have copyright, which MOCA would not (will not?) completely solve. MOCA would still rely on a "compulsory lisence fee" which someone would have to set. As an editorial in the Wall Street Journal a while back opposing MOCA said (I'm paraphrasing here), "Why require a compulsory license if the people doing the licensing still have a de-facto monopoly?" The only true solution would be to ammend copyright law to make everything enter the public domain after 10 years or so. But then the effective cost is 0, and no one gets paid, even if the performer or songwriter who wrote it might morally be entitled to something.
But what if there was competition? The Big-5 spend at leasat $100,000 on an album, but if you get together two or three people who can sing decently (or not so, in the case of boy bands), a MIDI person with decent hardware, and $500-1500 of recording equipment (remember that thread about Home-Brew Recording here many many moons ago?), I'd bet you could come up with something that sounded at least as good as the product the Bug-5 put out, if not better.
Then you figure out a way to license use of the music legally, from ASCAP or whoever holds the rights the music itself - not the mechanical rights to the recordings (if these are indeed different). Then we could have a truely competitive market place, with different players (litterally) creating slightly different products, all competing for the same end users. This is how a competitive marketplace is supposed to work - if I remember my Econ 101 correctly.
The only truely big if here is whether you could license the music legally - if you couldn't there would be absolutely no point in trying to do this illegally as the start-up costs are relatively hight.
> like the final length of a virus reflects its complexity or difficulty at all.
Or the 4-line perl script that does DeCSS for that matter (of course, I don't know the specifics of how that script works - for all I know that may be easy,,)
Someone said this about piracy further down in the comment-swamp: They run a business, by their terms, not yours. If they want to charge $900, they can. But, people won't buy it, and they will in turn, lower their prices.
If you pirate it, you are proving the point it is worth its value.
The problem is, if they don't lower their prices first, Adobe will never know how much their sales might have gone up (yes, they probabably have done focus groups along the lines of "How much would you pay for Photoshop"). The devil's advocate (to the above view) is that by pirating, you are actually showing that it is worth less. The thing is that there is no way to tell how much less, because there is no where you can say, "I pirated Photoshop, but would have paid x dollars for it if it were available at that price.
Everyone has their price point. For a professional digital photography shop that sells 8x10 retouched photos or montages for $200 a piece to very wealthy people, Photoshop is probably worth about $1000. For the 12-year old, who wants to mess around, but have the potential of using more of the power than is included in Photoshop Elements, it's worth $50-$100. For a college art major, it's worth $300. The only other "segregated market segment" in the pricing equation is the academic market, which hits the $300 price point. But even that doesn't work, because to a non-art-major, PS may only be worth $150.
So people pirate, partially because the market does not give them the price point they want. The problem of course, is that as they say, it is hard to beat free. You (the vendor) wants to charge up to the point each particular customer will pay, but not less than that.
I think the music market is much the same, but perhaps even more so, as there is also the variable of how old the song in question is, quality, whether it has the original studio backing tracks and MIDI sequences separated out so you can do your own remix (I do hope they start offering this with SACD - whether I will be willing to pay $30 for it is another matter).
Piracy is the beginning of a question, but it is an answer to nothing at all. The true answer to the question (a market that will better seve all people's price points, hasn't been thought of yet, though I'd love to know if any economists are thinking along these lines.
They run a business, by their terms, not yours. If they want to charge $900, they can. But, people won't buy it, and they will in turn, lower their prices.
If you pirate it, you are proving the point it is worth its value.
The problem is, if they don't lower their prices first, Adobe will never know how much their sales might have gone up (yes, they probabably have done focus groups along the lines of "How much would you pay for Photoshop"). The devil's advocate (to the above view) is that by pirating, you are actually showing that it is worth less. The thing is that there is no way to tell how much less, because there is no where you can say, "I pirated Photoshop, but would have paid x dollars for it if it were available at that price.
Everyone has their price point. For a professional digital photography shop that sells 8x10 retouched photos or montages for $200 a piece to very wealthy people, Photoshop is probably worth about $1000. For the 12-year old, who wants to mess around, but have the potential of using more of the power than is included in Photoshop Elements, it's worth $50-$100. For a college art major, it's worth $300. The only other "segregated market segment" in the pricing equation is the academic market, which hits the $300 price point. But even that doesn't work, because to a non-art-major, PS may only be worth $150.
So people pirate, partially because the market does not give them the price point they want. The problem of course, is that as they say, it is hard to beat free. You (the vendor) wants to charge up to the point each particular customer will pay, but not less than that.
I think the music market is much the same, but perhaps even more so, as there is also the variable of how old the song in question is, quality, whether it has the original studio backing tracks and MIDI sequences separated out so you can do your own remix (I do hope they start offering this with SACD - whether I will be willing to pay $30 for it is another matter).
Piracy is the beginning of a question, but it is an answer to nothing at all. The true answer to the question (a market that will better seve all people's price points, hasn't been thought of yet, though I'd love to know if any economists are thinking along these lines.
you don't see miss hoshi scoring with some guy on every single planet that they land on, eh?
No, not on every planet, but she did seem to get rather intimate with that one guy on Risa (however it is spelled). And anyway, perhaps she doesn't because she doesn't want to. "Modesty is a virtue" as many people have said, but then, she probably wouldn't use the (to my mind) semi-derogatory term "score". But then, I'm biased - I like Asians..
With stuff this egregious, where are organizations such as the IEEE or ACM?
Well, the ACM has said publicly that it is opposed to the CBDTPA I am corresponding with the faculty advisor of the Indiana University Bloomington Student Chapter of the ACM as well as Tom Murphy (the infamous "font pirate") proposing the formation of a grassroots student movement to oppose legislation such as this. Information can be found at http://www.bloomington.in.us/~jswitte/ADFI.html . I would ask whoever AB3A is to respond to me concerning this.
Gee, between the DMCA, CBDTPA, the Content Protection Status Report, a Congress that's bought and paid for (not by us the people), and the *AA's, perhaps it's time to move to Europe..
This is OT for the FBI scandel, but perhaps of interest to geeks everywhere anyway. Did anyone else notice that the page rendering for the NTYTimes login page takes forever? I'm using Netscape 4.77 on a dual processor 533MHz G4 Power Macintosh with 256 MB of RAM (no slouch processor wise) running System 9.1, and when I scroll the page down, it takes about 20 seconds to render. Netscape doesn't cache stuff either (it is 4.77 of course). A look at the code reveals that these people really need to learn about the ROWSPAN attribute for tables, as well as design their popup menus better (50+ items in one isn't a good thing).
This has got to really, really piss of Sony (or whomever they bought/licensed the "copy protection" (sic) technology from). Just imagine, now the probably several tens of millions of dollars (at least) invested in creating this piece of crap are mostly wasted..
Slashdot Mirror
If Zeosync is gone, where did the technology go? (Into a black hole?) I suppose it was sold to some other company, who perhaps is sitting on it like Palm is sitting on the desktop BeOS, but couldn't that be considered "stifling innovation"?
I sure as hell don't want 180 degree coffee.. I hardly ever get coffee at McSchmonald's because it's too damn hot to drink! (even if you sip it through the little stirrer..)
I used to be of the opinion that the coffee-settlement was a stupid too.. But I didn't know that 700 cases had already happened, and McDonald's did nothing about it (even as simple as printing "Caution: Hot!" on the cup.
As for people communuting and drinking it later, what about people who don't? I would bet that at least 30% of coffee purchased at breakfast is consumed in-store, probably more so for coffee purchased with lunches (does anyone drink coffee with lunch?)
> Half of the cost is Mcaffee. [..] which last time I checked was around 50$ a year
$50 a year retail. Apple surely has a deal with Macaffee where they probably pay them only about $20 (or less) per subscriber.
Jim
$10 for all that!? Geez, how do they do it?
> and the email unhitches me from whatever
> broadband pipe I've got running into the
I don't know about most of the coountry, but here in Monroe County, IN, the library will provide free email (POP, don't know about IMAP, no web access - I think it's a 1 or 2ML limit) and free personal web-hosting (5MB I think) with free CGI (Perl through cgiwrap) if you ask for it. Of course, the email there can change too (if you move out of the county), but the same could be said of mac.com or anything else for that matter (they start charging too much, change services to crumbs, etc, you move to something else..)
Aren't taxes great?
Jim
jswitte@bloomington.in.us
There's a discussion of this here on Superstringtheory.com I would put this as an update to the original story, but I don't know how to update.. Original poster, Jim
But then why doesn't all gravitation collapse to infinity? (Silly question, I know almost no QM)
There is no Alias.
Well, the graviton is a spin-2 particle if I remember correctly (my standard disclaimer in case of ignorance). I don't know near enough about the various ways quantum theory and GR are hypothesized to interact - I have a layman's "read-Brian-Greene's-book" knowledge of string theory - but there must be other quantum gravity theories out there - to know if spin-2 particles would be expected to behave differently with regard to their "speed" than photons (spin-1?), or indeed, what exactly speed means in the quantum domain when waves are concernted.
I think the standard explaination is that the speed is calculated using the peak of the wave, but then there was that experiement where physicists did apparently sent a signal faster than light using quantum tunneling through a gas I believe the experiment was - enough of a signal to be able to hear a recognizable copy of Mozart on the other end of the tube..
There was the report in 1996 about the crating of antigravity using spinning superconducting disks, also reported in SciAm (a followup report can be found here. It basically debunks the original claim, saying that the original paper has been withdrawn by it's authors, and oter physicists are very skeptical. But I wonder if this might have something to do with it (probably not).
The original poster's passage in question is:
the engine and game logic are seperate codebases: Id Software releases the game logic seperately from the engine code, and usually years before, so that mod authors can play with it. And of course, the GPL does not "infect" anything but code: your textures, skins, models and levels remain your own no matter what.
The art, music, textures, levels, models, etc are not "infected" by the GPL. But I would say that "game logic" includes such things as the code that reads the level files (other than the engine code, any OpenGL wizardry you added to give it that added "whiz-bang" factor, any AI programming you did for command recognition or enemy reaction, etc. And as far as I know (never having used the Quake engine), the engine is static-linked into the rest of this "game logic", so it must also be GPL.
Another problem that might come up is this: what if I want to integrate the program with ViaVoice (or any other closed-source voice rec program), or with a closed source 3D game controller? Can I do that if it requires that closed source glue code be statically linked into the binary? This problem comes up with regards to Newton development as well - specifically with using the C++ tools, which require closed glue to be linked - more generally becasue the main development program, Newton Toolkit, is not open-source, and no clone has been made (yet, one of these days I'll get around to it..) Jim
But what if I'm making a shareware game and only expect to make $1000 of it if I'm lucky (let's say I'm just getting started, okay). Then I'm screwed, if I want to keep it closed, unless I make my own version of the Quake engine that will dynamic link with my program so I can close the program source, although I'm not sure what the consensus on that is. (or court tests).
Besides, I think it would be more clever to releases this under the LGPL as well, the author himself states that he plans on licensing for commercial use as well.
Quesa, the open-source clone of Apple's Quickdraw 3D, is LGPL, just for this reason - to encourage people to use it who would otherise be scared off by the GPL.
Uh, no, completely right. See section 2b of the GPL: You must cause any work that you distribute or publish, that in whole or in part contains or is derived from the Program or any part thereof, to be licensed as a whole at no charge to all third parties under the terms of this License. I don't see any way around that. Of course, there is the possibility of dynamic linking with the library to get around the GPL, which was debated here a number of months ago, but without the library, the program would effectively be unusable, so I don't know if that would work.
;-), and that steam will work to deflect certain economic realities from entering consideration, which, which while perhaps being "unpleasent" are nonetheless real in the world we live (just as was and is true with communism and capitalism as social systems)
Paul Guyot, who has worked for over a year on a Apple Newton ATA driver (which was been mentioned on Slashdot at one point), refuses to work on GPL projects. I don't know all his reasons, but one main one is that GPL software tends to be hard to compile, hard to use, hard to configure, and generally you have to be a gear-head to get anything done with it (okay, that last reason was my little flourish, but you get the idea). There are some notable exceptions: GIMP for one, and it's offspring MacGIMP. But then, I haven't installed or used MacGIMP yet. How do I know that somewhere in it I won't get an inscrutable error having to do with the Fink under-structure? In addition to working for a year on this driver with a basically undocumented operating system, he has killed two development units. Do you think that someone who has invested that kind of time, energy, and money is going to release under a license that forces him to give up any propect of making money off of it? I don't, and neither does he.
I'll probably get modded way down for this, but hell, my karma is only 14 anyway.. I generally agree with the idea of the FSF, just not all of the means. The idea that "By releasing libraries that are limited to free software only, we can help each other's free software packages outdo the proprietary alternatives. The whole free software movement will have more popularity, because free software as a whole will stack up better against the competition." [http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/why-not-lgpl.html] is a good one, but I think it partly fails in that there will always be commerical software, or ever shareware. The GPL is basically incompatible with the idea of making money off of personal work. True, maybe programmer's should just program for the fun of it, for the joy of it, for the intellectual curiosity of it, yadda, yadda, yadda. But some also want (and need) to do it to eat.
Requireing all GPL software to be released in source form basically nullifies the idea of making any kind of income off of software, unless either (1) your clients are very generous, or (2) the software is very good. Hell, it might be that the better the software is, the fewer people will pay for it (but the people who do pay may pay more, I don't know if that would balance - has anyone done any economic/psycholofical studies of payment and the GPL?) That statement in favor of the GPL over the LGPL also presupposes that there is a large base of easy to use, compelling free software out there already. As I see it, there isn't. Oh, there is if you want to go that way phiposophically, but not otherwise. To make a very bad real-world analogy: the combustion engine I don't believe that the internal combusion engine would have achieved the dominence it did if it were GPL'd immidiately after being invented. (bad analogy for one becasue the ICM is a physical product). Oh, it would have, someone else would have just "reinvented" it. The GPL offers a "freedom" of sorts with respect to knowledge, but it also places very severe restrictions on anyone trying to make a guaranteed income-stream of of something (the counter-argument, of course, is that the software will be pirated anyway if it's any good). The restrictions of the GPL are stict enough, that I believe it will drive away perhaps as many people as it attracts.
One might say, well, you could always ask the person to dual-license, but (1) the author may be unwilling to do that, not becasue it doesn't make sense (economically or in a real-world sense) but on philosophical grounds alone, and (2) it's not clear how this works if the original work is itself a derived work from other GPL code. The FSF has gathered an enourmous amount of steam in the computing community ("psychohistorical inertia" as Prof. Seldon might put it
To the end of his objection the lack of good documentation of GPL software that he sees, he has drafted a license that seeks to address this, the Kallisys Reflexive License which requires that all modifications have documentation of source code changes, but does not require source code to be released. It is incompatible with the GPL, becasue the GPL requires strictures on the code beyond the KRL. This is the GPL's "freedom". (of course, the same could be said of communism, and some have described the FSF as neo-communist)
One very interesting thing I note about the GPL is this: in section 3b, it states: [distirbute in executable code if you] Accompany it with a written offer, valid for at least three years, to give any third party, for a charge no more than your cost of physically performing source distribution, a complete machine-readable copy [...] This seems backward to me. The idea whould be that you can charge money for it (or "force people to pay" if you prefer) for a specified period of time, after which it must become open-source. This would prevent abandon-ware. If this sane alternative had been adopted by the major computer companies back in the seventies and eighties, Paul wouldn't have had to work for a year on his driver, becasue the Newton source would be out by now!
I agree with the FSF's intentions, and their opposition to software patents, DRM, etc, etc. But in my mind, it goes to far. Freedom should also be about choice. People should not be forced into releasing source, and large corporations are not going to be in the near future (as one other Slashdotter said, "the GPL gives Apple layers hives"). As a way to prevent abandonware like the Newton, Quickdraw 3D (now basically, but not completely, a moot point), OpenDoc, etc, etc (I'm sure that companies other than Apple also have some very interesting stuff buried in their vaults, never again to see the light of day..)
Putting together a "compromise" organization like this would not be easy - witness now Rosetta - the printing recognizer for the Newton - will finally see the light of day in MacOS X "Jaguar" as InkWell. If my idea of a standard "abandonware clause" had been adopted with a three year limit, this would be impossible, and Apple would be in the same trap I accuse the GPL of foisting on programmers. I think the FSF has taken the easy way out, opting for an extremem communist-style "solution". But real-life, and the real-world (even the ones we create ourselves) are messy, and not ammenable to easy but extreme solutions, like pure social communism (Soviet Union), or pure social capitalism (the US in many ways), or, I fear, the FSF.
My original thought when reading this was: "Okay, so they think that John Q. is going to buy a video for $35-45, instead of a $17 DVD at Best Buy; and a $2000+ player instead of a crappy (but still decent for John Q.) DVD player for under $100 (also at Best Buy). For a movie that might stretch out and fade in unspecified way after a few viewings.. And one you can't skip through real fast like a DVD, or copy (What? Did I say copy? John Q.'ll have to give it to his 10-year old son whose a DeCSS expert to do that.)
But then it dawned on me: what they want to happen is that the format will be used by a select few for movies now (I have no idea which select few this is, but I'm sure it exists - there are a lot of bored hundred-thousand-aires out there I think) Add the benefit that they (as well as John Q.) will be able to record HDTV at full quality, for 2006 when everything has to go digital (Yeah, RIGHT!!) And it'll be copyright protected. (oops, John Q. missed that. Or he doesn't care.)
But the prices will come down, if only becasue the production of the custom ASICs that are in it will get ramped up, or more people start making them.
People here say that for a movie, they'd much rather watch a DVD, and for recording, they'd much rather use Tivo. Yes, they would. They're parents might even prefer a DVD for movies. Depending on who they're parents are, they might prefer a Tivo to tapes (the advantage is very high, but until you have seen it, the percieved entry-barrier to techno-phobes is also high) But do you think you're grand-mother will prefer DVD or Tivo? I know mine won't. She won't even touch a VCR, and didn't tough a microwave oven for the longest time (until we bought her one
I also think that at some point they want to get rid of the VCR completely - not that that would be easy - not only would they piss off consumer groups, electronics makers, computer makers, civil libertarians, real conservatives (the ones for smaller and less-intrusive government), and some artists groups [RAC for one], they would go on to alienate the entire video rental industry - although it seems to be transitioning to DVD pretty well..
The industry (or at least some powerful people in it) think that Sony-Betamax was a mistake. They don't want to overturn it per se, they just want to make it obsolete. By introducing D-VHS, which includes copyright-protection, and the overbroad-DMCA which enforces it, and armies of layers to play whack-a-mole with the P2P operators, and.. and armies of cloned cryogenically-frozen G-Men from Nazi Germany to go after the entire Napster Generation! (Well, we're not quite there yet..)
Some say the Betaxmax base should still hold. And I agree, it should. But that's another court case, for another day, in a different age than it was in the '70s (or whever Betamax was decided), I think a narrower Supreme Court (though I really have no idea on this one), and a Conngress that was less monetary-influenced and "pro-active" (in the wrong way) on these matters. And a public that was less apathetic than it was today (of course, I was born in 1978 - maybe politics really has always been going to hell in a handbasket!)
there is nothing in Napster's technology that couldn't be replicated in a matter of weeks by a competent programmer) or that they have a LOT of money to throw arond
I would bet it's the latter, and I'd say that there isn't anything in Napster that could be replicated in a matter of weeks by an INcompetent programmer either! A competent programmer would have improved the protocol (fewer droppouts, parallel downloads from multiple hosts, Kazaa-type quasi-decentralization, etc)
An idea I came up with a while ago was this: the main problem with the music industry IMO is that there is no competition. Yes, we all know that the Big-5 have a 80-95% lock on the physical distribution market, but they have no competition by virtue of the fact that they have absolute control over the content on which they have copyright, which MOCA would not (will not?) completely solve. MOCA would still rely on a "compulsory lisence fee" which someone would have to set. As an editorial in the Wall Street Journal a while back opposing MOCA said (I'm paraphrasing here), "Why require a compulsory license if the people doing the licensing still have a de-facto monopoly?" The only true solution would be to ammend copyright law to make everything enter the public domain after 10 years or so. But then the effective cost is 0, and no one gets paid, even if the performer or songwriter who wrote it might morally be entitled to something.
But what if there was competition? The Big-5 spend at leasat $100,000 on an album, but if you get together two or three people who can sing decently (or not so, in the case of boy bands), a MIDI person with decent hardware, and $500-1500 of recording equipment (remember that thread about Home-Brew Recording here many many moons ago?), I'd bet you could come up with something that sounded at least as good as the product the Bug-5 put out, if not better.
Then you figure out a way to license use of the music legally, from ASCAP or whoever holds the rights the music itself - not the mechanical rights to the recordings (if these are indeed different). Then we could have a truely competitive market place, with different players (litterally) creating slightly different products, all competing for the same end users. This is how a competitive marketplace is supposed to work - if I remember my Econ 101 correctly.
The only truely big if here is whether you could license the music legally - if you couldn't there would be absolutely no point in trying to do this illegally as the start-up costs are relatively hight.
> like the final length of a virus reflects its complexity or difficulty at all.
Or the 4-line perl script that does DeCSS for that matter (of course, I don't know the specifics of how that script works - for all I know that may be easy,,)
Someone said this about piracy further down in the comment-swamp:
They run a business, by their terms, not yours. If they want to charge $900, they can. But, people won't buy it, and they will in turn, lower their prices. If you pirate it, you are proving the point it is worth its value.
The problem is, if they don't lower their prices first, Adobe will never know how much their sales might have gone up (yes, they probabably have done focus groups along the lines of "How much would you pay for Photoshop"). The devil's advocate (to the above view) is that by pirating, you are actually showing that it is worth less. The thing is that there is no way to tell how much less, because there is no where you can say, "I pirated Photoshop, but would have paid x dollars for it if it were available at that price.
Everyone has their price point. For a professional digital photography shop that sells 8x10 retouched photos or montages for $200 a piece to very wealthy people, Photoshop is probably worth about $1000. For the 12-year old, who wants to mess around, but have the potential of using more of the power than is included in Photoshop Elements, it's worth $50-$100. For a college art major, it's worth $300. The only other "segregated market segment" in the pricing equation is the academic market, which hits the $300 price point. But even that doesn't work, because to a non-art-major, PS may only be worth $150.
So people pirate, partially because the market does not give them the price point they want. The problem of course, is that as they say, it is hard to beat free. You (the vendor) wants to charge up to the point each particular customer will pay, but not less than that.
I think the music market is much the same, but perhaps even more so, as there is also the variable of how old the song in question is, quality, whether it has the original studio backing tracks and MIDI sequences separated out so you can do your own remix (I do hope they start offering this with SACD - whether I will be willing to pay $30 for it is another matter).
Piracy is the beginning of a question, but it is an answer to nothing at all. The true answer to the question (a market that will better seve all people's price points, hasn't been thought of yet, though I'd love to know if any economists are thinking along these lines.
They run a business, by their terms, not yours. If they want to charge $900, they can. But, people won't buy it, and they will in turn, lower their prices. If you pirate it, you are proving the point it is worth its value.
The problem is, if they don't lower their prices first, Adobe will never know how much their sales might have gone up (yes, they probabably have done focus groups along the lines of "How much would you pay for Photoshop"). The devil's advocate (to the above view) is that by pirating, you are actually showing that it is worth less. The thing is that there is no way to tell how much less, because there is no where you can say, "I pirated Photoshop, but would have paid x dollars for it if it were available at that price.
Everyone has their price point. For a professional digital photography shop that sells 8x10 retouched photos or montages for $200 a piece to very wealthy people, Photoshop is probably worth about $1000. For the 12-year old, who wants to mess around, but have the potential of using more of the power than is included in Photoshop Elements, it's worth $50-$100. For a college art major, it's worth $300. The only other "segregated market segment" in the pricing equation is the academic market, which hits the $300 price point. But even that doesn't work, because to a non-art-major, PS may only be worth $150.
So people pirate, partially because the market does not give them the price point they want. The problem of course, is that as they say, it is hard to beat free. You (the vendor) wants to charge up to the point each particular customer will pay, but not less than that.
I think the music market is much the same, but perhaps even more so, as there is also the variable of how old the song in question is, quality, whether it has the original studio backing tracks and MIDI sequences separated out so you can do your own remix (I do hope they start offering this with SACD - whether I will be willing to pay $30 for it is another matter).
Piracy is the beginning of a question, but it is an answer to nothing at all. The true answer to the question (a market that will better seve all people's price points, hasn't been thought of yet, though I'd love to know if any economists are thinking along these lines.
you don't see miss hoshi scoring with some guy on every single planet that they land on, eh?
No, not on every planet, but she did seem to get rather intimate with that one guy on Risa (however it is spelled). And anyway, perhaps she doesn't because she doesn't want to. "Modesty is a virtue" as many people have said, but then, she probably wouldn't use the (to my mind) semi-derogatory term "score". But then, I'm biased - I like Asians..
With stuff this egregious, where are organizations such as the IEEE or ACM?
Well, the ACM has said publicly that it is opposed to the CBDTPA I am corresponding with the faculty advisor of the Indiana University Bloomington Student Chapter of the ACM as well as Tom Murphy (the infamous "font pirate") proposing the formation of a grassroots student movement to oppose legislation such as this. Information can be found at http://www.bloomington.in.us/~jswitte/ADFI.html . I would ask whoever AB3A is to respond to me concerning this.
Gee, between the DMCA, CBDTPA, the Content Protection Status Report, a Congress that's bought and paid for (not by us the people), and the *AA's, perhaps it's time to move to Europe..
This is OT for the FBI scandel, but perhaps of interest to geeks everywhere anyway. Did anyone else notice that the page rendering for the NTYTimes login page takes forever? I'm using Netscape 4.77 on a dual processor 533MHz G4 Power Macintosh with 256 MB of RAM (no slouch processor wise) running System 9.1, and when I scroll the page down, it takes about 20 seconds to render. Netscape doesn't cache stuff either (it is 4.77 of course). A look at the code reveals that these people really need to learn about the ROWSPAN attribute for tables, as well as design their popup menus better (50+ items in one isn't a good thing).
Dammit, what webmaster do I complain to?
This has got to really, really piss of Sony (or whomever they bought/licensed the "copy protection" (sic) technology from). Just imagine, now the probably several tens of millions of dollars (at least) invested in creating this piece of crap are mostly wasted..