It's also worth noting that when Apple sought to create a computer with a radically different user interface, they studied (and eventually paid for) the philosophy and designs set forth by Xerox's PARC.
That's not to say Apple hasn't had its own things to say about the subject. They used a simplified version of the interface for the Lisa (we remember how that did), and continued developing it in-house since then to try to perfect the Macintosh.
(Come to think of it, given how Apple chewed through CEOs and how many different design shifts there were in those years, it's amazing that the Mac's interface didn't get shuffled around more than it did.)
(Well, if you don't count Gil Amelio, Steve Jobs, Rhapsody, and X.)
In 1984 they did publish the Apple Human Interface Guidelines, which some people still look to, but PARC is where the GUI fun started.
This morning, after finding a junk fax on the office's voice mail system, I called the removal number (in little text at the bottom of the fax) and reached an automated voice system that would either 1) remove an inputted number, 2) add a new number, or 3) talk to a representative about their service.
Well, I didn't trust (1), and (3) just got me a voice mail box instead of a person I could chew out, which I didn't use. That left (2), and I had a wicked idea:
I hit 2, and input the number that I should call if I was interested in the fax (which appeared in BIG text right above the little text). Their own response number should start eventually getting faxes from them or, as I tend to experience, hangups.
Cute story, I know, but what does this have to do with defeating spambots?
I went to the page indicated...
I was just checking out one of the email harvesting products and saw
this [getyoursoftware.com]
And I scrolled to the bottom, and looked at the source code, and noted two faaaaaascinating things:
First, the HTML on that page is rather clean; I can see no evidence of anti-spambot code on their page.
And second, the "Contact Us" link at the bottom is a mailto:.
By all appearances, their page is vulnerable to their own spambot.
So I had the thought... what if those generated-random-email-address pages were geared to produce not-so-random email addresses? What if the email addresses on those generated-page traps were geared to generate random email addresses at the domains of the various spambot-- (err, I mean) harvester producing companies? Let them see what it's like when less than discerning spammers use their software for evil. Hundreds of Viagra-substitutes! Thousands of hangover cures! Tens of thousands of opportunities to refinance their home mortgage!
This is just an off-the-top-of-my-head idea. Opinions?
Technology firms did not want to testify in the hearing, did not offer input while the bill was being drafted, and have offered plenty of criticism but little helpful suggestions since, a Hollings aide said.
Can you blame them? The CBDTPA is really just like a gigantic unfunded mandate laid at the doorstep of the tech community with a note tied around it reading "Fix this for us and we'll let you live."
Bear in mind how much effort it would take to DRM-safe all the computer equipment sold in the country, if not world. Proposed DRM standards would spring up from the ground like swarms of rabid fruitbats, and whenever equipment designed for these DRM systems barfed on legally purchased media, it would be the *tech* sector that gets stuck with the blame, not the *media* sector.
The media sector tried to save itself money by drafting a bill to prevent piracy and whatnot, and save their income. No surprise there.
Faced with the expense of all of this new DRM R&D, implementation, and fielding of complaints, the tech sector chose to fight it rather than allow it to pass, and save their income.
This is probably one of the *few* things that defeated the bill: that all large corporations, not just the media hegemony, are typically greedy and lazy, in that order; I don't believe that grassroots action had anything to do with it.
The bill will come back. It was the SSS-whatever, it became the CBDTPA, and it will metamorph into something else as long as the Senator From Disney is in office. In the meantime, the best thing we can do to the media companies' war chests is not fill them.
With no competition, there is little incentive to actually innovate, and the prices for the consoles will go sky high as your monopoly spends more and more money muscleing out any possible competition from the field.
The console makes relatively little money for the manufacturer (and none for the people that produce games for it) compared to what they rake in on the games they sell for it. As far as I know, this is true for every manufacturer who has ever produced a console, or a game for said console. (I wouldn't mind seeing counter-examples, if anyone has any.)
Pick a game theme on one of those consoles, and consider how many different versions of it there are. Two or three of each type of sports game (football, basketball, baseball), four or five different racing games (some brand name like Nascar, others with different exotic twists), and some genres occur almost spontaneously, and breed like rabbits -- for a while on the PSX you couldn't spit without hitting some variant of a skateboarding game.
Even games which have no other manufacturers' prior art to sell their offbeat concepts, still have to compete with the quality of the staid classic games for the consumer's limited cash, and that means they have to innovate like nobody's business. (Mmmmmm... Incredible Crisis)
On any given single console, there is still a great deal of competition: Each and every development company is looking to take that console that someone's produced, and squeeze every bit of fun, action, adrenaline, and pulse-pumping excitement onto a CD or cartridge using the SDK the developer has shipped them.
And they have to do this knowing that everyone else has received pretty much the same kit -- the ultimate in leveled playing fields. The only thing they can do is compete.
The system can be nothing but bells and whistles, or it can be plain. Developers will still try to wring the technotes for every pixel of power they can get. This means innovation, ladies and gentlemen, even if there's only one platform worth noting on the market.
In some ways, this competition between software producers is more important than the competition between hardware manufacturers. One of the biggest selling points of any hardware is the software that runs on it. It may also be worthwhile noting some aspects of the strategies of the hardware manufacturers:
Sony, when developing the PS2, tried to innovate their asses off. They did things no sane person would want to do to graphic hardware in order to get the maximum 'polygon-pushing power'. Consequently, as has been mentioned many times around here, the thing is something of a beast to program, but theoretically, when someone hits the mark and programs it right, watch out. This will end up, they hope, producing truly eye-popping games which will better sell their system.
Microsoft wanted to give X-Box developer and SDK primarily only to those developers who wanted to play by Microsoft's rules (read: bend over and smile like a shark. R.I.P. Bungie) -- get the creme de la creme of producers producing the biggest, brightest, most innovative games on your system, and the consumers will flock (n. a collective of sheep) to it, even if it's a dog turd with joystick ports.
And Nintendo is going with brand recognition and their successful merchandising lines (like the Pokemon phenomenon which, although the bottom is dropping out of the trading card market, still seems strong) to sell their next-gen console. Sure, it's a merchandising angle rather than a software angle, but guess what? The software that ties into that giant marketing machine will only run on their system. They're also promising a very easy to program system, to attract those developers that get frustrated with Sony's beast or Microsoft's attitude. ---
I started out thinking that Big Business of America and Dubya The Corporate Lapdog would make an unstoppable combination, acting together to steamroller constitutional rights, reducing this to a nation of consumers (which some say it already is, depending where you look). I had some second thoughts when I looked up one of my references, but then I realized that the reference didn't apply in this case and the situation is as bleak as I thought it was at first.
I remembered a book called The Suicidal Corporation which I read a long time ago. It reviewed American history from the Indstrial Revolution through to today, noting how in an effort to get their way, large companies would often throw money at the government in an attempt to make their problems go away, and perhaps throw blockades up in front of their competition.
When I found that page (link above), at first I thought, This is exactly what's happening... the government wants to crack down on the types of media that get produced, that means cracking down on the media producers that just tossed all that money at Bush's campaign...
But then I thought about it and said, "No, not exactly..." I don't think Paul Weaver (the author of that book) ever anticipated a situation like this arising:
The media companies seem to be working more or less together on this; they're not trying to block competition from each other, but protecting their interestes (both copyrights on their material, and seemingly the right to produce media) from the consumers. Side note: if the corporation is an abomination for its ability to divorce individual profit from individual responsibility, a cartel is doubly so.
I don't think there's ever been a government more responsive to the needs of corporations. The government bailed out Chrysler, and they were on the ropes before they asked for help. Imagine what hoops the unholy alliance of MPAA/RIAA/ETC companies can make the government jump through (or kiss).
When Paul Weaver wrote his book, he might not have considered the myriad ways that government could interfere with the political process on all levels. Consider the Honorabl(y paid for) Judge Jackson, who previously worked for the MPAA. Or just how stupid some politicians can get when a steady stream of big wealth goes to their heads.
Between the two of them -- Bush and Industry -- I believe they will probably do more damage to the government and peoples' rights than anyone can predict. Pardon me if I sound like a hippie, but man -- corporate greed's gonna bring everyone down.
Otherwise, life goes on -- people will continue buying DVDs, for example, because they can get movies on disc and view them at home. I think my next one's going to be Fight Club. ---
And the reason it gets tricky is that your second in command might not want your job. And you can't exactly coerce him into taking it... see also "irony."
Or there's the alternative alternative approach, which is more like a slippery slope -- help your #2 man hire an alternate #3 man, who swaps with him before he swaps with you. Of course, if he doesn't want the job, he'll want to hire a #4 to trade with...
Three months later, down in the mail room... "Hey buddy! Yeah, you! Get over to mailstop 12 pronto! You're our new IT manager. Yeah, I know you've only been here a few days, but..." ---
Absolutely we must! When they grow up, they might want to look at this stuff too!! ---
Re:What caused the Renaissance
on
The Renaissance
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· Score: 2
First, I'd like to say I agree a great deal with what DeanC above wrote. And then I'd like to kick in a few more things to put a brand new spin on what he said.
The simultaneous Reconquista of Spain from the Muslims allowed muslim texts and knowledge to flow into Europe while the fall of Constantinople send fleeing intellectuals from the Byzantine Empire into the much more intellectually backwards Western Europe.
For these to happen, cultures had to be willing to deal with new ideas, either in sending them to other parts of the world, or receiving them. If Western Europe didn't receive either the Muslim texts, or the talent from the Byzantine Empire, then there might have been no spark, and the Renaissance might not have happened.
Keep in mind those factors: available information, available talent, and let me add in a third element -- willingness to try new things.
Today, if there's a renaissance going on, I dare say it's not in the United States. There may have been a small one which resulted in the Internet becoming a Big Thing, but it didn't go anywhere. Most companies can't think of it as anything more than a business tool or threat to intellectual property.
The US and many advanced nations are contributing to a potential renaissance by posting information over sources like the Internet. But that's not where the most growth is happening.
Consider India, for instance, which boasts the first companies to successfully implement the CMM Level 5 (a yawner of an accomplishment if you're not big on software process improvement, but who knows what they could grow into?). Consider numerous backwater nations, using information on the web to implement new (to them) techniques for doing things and improving the quality of life.
And consider that a 'renaissance' doesn't have to be artistic, scientific, or technical. New ideas can fit into any sphere. The social, for instance: striking new policies in human rights and/or sexuality, anyone?
Before the Italians had all the tools they needed to build their own renaissance, they probably didn't think anything so historically striking would ever happen to them. Likewise, we can't be sure when or where the next Big Thing will spark a reformation. Or which area of life it will affect. Only history can tell that for sure.
...already have such a tax on them. For just the reasons previously cited: that they could be used to make comparatively flawless reproductions of recorded music. ---
It's been suggested by other sources that a college degree may or may not be all it's cracked up to be. After all, you spend 4 years in college, you come out the other end with a piece of paper that certifies you've received an education that is now up to 4 years old.
Physical education: This degree can age gracefully. Nobody comes out with upgrades for kneecaps every six months. Nor has any stretching exercise gotten extensive venture capital attention. Aging doesn't seem to hurt this degree significantly.
Computer sciences: Whoa, has this stuff changed. Blink and you miss it. New manufacturing techniques, new technological breakthroughs, new things to keep track of... spending a day in a classroom filling your head with the old stuff actually robs you of the time you need to learn the new stuff.
Physical Education: good to go through college to get a degree in. The information will be useful.
Computer and electrical sciences: bad to go through college to get. Things change before you finish. And while it counts as some experience, the companies that are making the breakthroughs have to educate their workers because the stuff is too new to find anyone experienced in.
Conclusion: fewer technical degrees are being handed out because the students are looking elsewhere for their knowledge.
Side note: For those of you who pity the Phys Ed degree holder for not having a more technical position, consider those people who sit behind a desk typing away at a computer all day. Sooner or later they'll get enough out of shape that they need to join a gym or hire a trainer...
Long ago, I mused on how everyone wanted to eliminate their own piece of the Internet (albeit not on here):
"Americans want to outlaw pornography, Germans want to outlaw racism, the French want to outlaw any advertising that isn't written in French..."
Back then, I had no idea it could get this bad -- I miss my naivete. I really hope this doesn't become precedent. Imagine a world where the communications medium is governed by a combination of the most restrictive codes of law instead of the least restrictive. (China, anyone?)
And then imagine those restrictions slowly leaking off of the communications media into other facets of life.
Some people say the Internet will bring the world together. Assuming the world doesn't tear the Internet apart first, I'm not sure the world is ready to become a single entity yet. At least not until they get their ground rules straight.
And no, this is not just a knock at France. (So 50 years ago you got burned in a war. We appreciate your sacrifices and all you went through. But get over it! It was half a century ago! Get some therapy or something! I mean, look what we're going through in politics now! We plan to survive that...)
If it's a barb at anybody, it's at those countries and companies that think they can use the Internet (or any other media) to either:
a) publish one more form of useless, insincere propaganda -- a single-page of prechewed and committee-approved irrefutable bullshit where everyone else is trying to post vividly interactive and frequently updated encyclopedias, or
b) surf the world and try to put the kibosh on any information they don't like -- browsing everyone else's vividly interactive and frequently updated encyclopedias and trying to black-pen them by judicial order, advertiser protest, or out-and-out cracking.
No, this isn't aimed specifically at France. But if France wants to be that way about it, then welcome to the party, we feel your pain, now take a seat on the front porch and wait until we've had our fun in here.
Could you ever find any obscure bands? Occasionally. Could you always find forty copies of N'Sync's latest POS? Always.
And this is Napster's fault how, exactly?
Napster doesn't tell people what to make available over their service. The idea from the beginning was to provide a way for people to share what they had and wanted to share. In its own way, it was democratic, in that the more popular artists were going to be found on the service more frequently.
Ironically, this made obscure bands obscure because they were obscure. You could fill your personal share-space with the highest quality recordings of the best garage-band indy music you ever heard. People who you play it for would instantly fall in love with it. But very few on Napster would know about it because, of course, they wouldn't know to look for it in the first place.
In that way, I consider Napster a failure because of its fans. mp3.com at least makes an effort to point people at new kinds of music.
"Sanitized", you say? If that means the new Napster won't have mp3s with all the skips and blips we've come to hate, then by all means!
Yes, a fully corporate Napster might have better quality recordings. But then you might end up with other controls too, like prohibiting songs with 'obscene' lyrics and 'unwholesome' ideals. You'll end up with an online music service that's almost Disneyworldesque -- high quality, happy, bright, shiny, and totally intolerant to anything that falls outside the narrow scope of its preferences. What If Woodstock Were Held In Singapore.
This further corporate involvement in an already corporate enterprise can only improve the quality of the service.
As a corporate enterprise, Old Napster was almost anarchic, and willing to let users do as they please. They could post music from any source (not counting those pesky copyright problems), and download music from any user who had what they wanted. And they could do it for *free*.
New Napster will be reorganized, regimented, and improved so that it actually makes money. Guess who it's going to make it from? If not the users paying fees to listen to the music, then from the artists paying fees to make their music available on the networks' play lists. And maybe both, if they're both willing to pay.
I will agree on one particular point: Napster's time has come. And gone. I look forward to the Next Thing, especially if it's antithetical to big corporate involvement. ---
Consider for a moment the record companies' dilemma.
On the one hand, they have their existing business model which, though not merely morally questionable but actually despicable, they are in full control of it, and they are using it to make money hand over fist.
On the other hand, there is the Internet. They don't have control of it. They don't know how to make money off of it. They certainly don't know how to make the kind of money off the Internet that they're making now.
And if they see what we see in the business dailies, I can't blame them. Companies putting off IPOs. Venture capital drying up. Replacing hundreds of dedicated technicians and staff with two web designers and a rhesus monkey. These are documented and documented in a variety of sources.
These days, people reread business models containing the word 'internet' twice, because there is not yet a set formula for success online.
This is why they're not switching; they'd have to be fools to switch away from the model they have now, which is extremely profitable. Even if it is despicable.
The only way they'll even consider changing given the above is to untrench them -- use legal means to make their current way of doing business so unprofitable that they'll grab for another way. The first (and least practical) way that comes to mind is rehabilitating a nation of music junkies. That, or popularize a new form of music that the Old Guard doesn't have any control of. (I hear there aren't many commercial techno mixes. Perhaps something could be done there?) ---
[On Microsoft...] JonKatz needs to write an article or something.
You're joking, right?
What do you think would happen if Jon Katz wrote an article slamming Microsoft, and posted it on Slashdot?
"Grrrr... I hate Microsoft. I have to agree with the article! But wait... I hate JonKatz! I have to disagree! But disagreeing with JonKatz would mean siding with Microsoft!"
Users' brains would melt down, the entire post series following it would turn into a syrupy, heavy mass of vitriolic, incoherent ramblings as people struggle to reconcile both their gut-level dislike of Microsoft and their gut-level dislike of Slashdot's only known essayist.
In attempting to do so, some would come to like Jon Katz. (Which isn't so bad.) But then some would develop a taste for Microsoft...
---
The memes (lowercase) are bad enough!
on
Candle
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· Score: 4
In Candle, Memes have jumped the sentience gap from hardware to wetware, allowing them to run within the human brain, placing beliefs directly and absolutely in the mind, incontrovertible except by the destruction or replacement of the meme itself.
Who needs Memes/the-escaped-computer-software for that? We already have memes/regular-old-ideas for that, and they can cause enough chaos as is.
The part about software jumping the computer and landing in peoples' heads like a virus? That is science fantasy (or paranoid delusion if you look beyond Bill Gates' plans for.NET).
But people getting wrong ideas into their heads and acting on them as if they were true? That's entirely too hard to believe.
We live in an age where a lie, told sincerely enough, takes on a life no truth can hope to match. That high-pitched whirring sound is Mark Twain, in his grave, spinning like a dentist's drill.
It doesn't have to be some sort of mutant freak of programming to be absorbed -- if people like the tune coming from the bandwagon, they'll jump on even if it's being drawn by a jackass.
I'd like to blame television for this, but deep down, I know the problem is just people being lazy. They don't understand the news, they don't read the news, they hardly even skim it. Someone reads it to them on the radio in the morning, or they hear appetizing bits around the water cooler, do a little half-assed research, and decide, "Well, that's good enough for me!"
Those memes also use their hosts as armor; try to attack a meme like that, and the person holding it will take it as an assault, and fight back.
And memes mutate quickly. To follow up the bandwagon metaphor above, once people jump on, they'll start belting out the theme they think they hear. Ever play 'Telephone'? You whisper something to one person, then watch as it gets sent around, and when it comes back, it's been mangled beyond recognition. Memes (uppercase) are I assume perfectly self-replicating, but memes (lowercase) rely on peoples' powers to emote, speak, hear, and comprehend. They change en route not because they want to, but because the transmission vector is faulty.
The book gives the phrase "How do you fight an idea?" a sinister twist, but doesn't provide a solution to handling the real-world problem of bad memes.
From their About page, I find this line to be so misleading as to be a 1984ism:
The Open Directory is a self-regulating republic where experts can collect their recommendations, without including noise and misinformation.
Uhhhh, yeah. With this new change, it's self-regulating except where other people regulate it, or it regulates itself to avoid controversy. And experts can't collect their recommendations in certain categories because they're deemed inappropriate.
As someone pointed out, censorship is damage, and the Internet tries to route around it.
This has given me a new metaphor for it: censorship is a form of noise, which actively seeks to drown out content with silence, and tries to keep people from finding out things they would otherwise want to know.
Let's take a look at the sensitive issue of "suicide."
Blocking "suicide," for instance, keeps people from learning about ways people can kill themselves. It also keeps people from learning ways NOT to kill themselves. I once saw a Suicide FAQ that described the various means people have tried, and the circumstances under which the people were left as vegetables. If a successful suicide is painful, try an unsuccessful one.
Blocking that category also makes it harder for people to recognize suicidal impulses, or what to do to prevent suicide. They may be found under some other Mental Health category, but which I couldn't tell you because the server just bowed under the/. Effect.
A proper "suicide" section might also include information for people trying to recover from the suicides of others. That might also be under mental health, but "mental health" is rarely the first keyword that pops into your mind when you think "suicide," is it?
So they remove the knowledge. That won't stop people from trying it. It may keep a few from succeeding, but those people won't be any better off. And then the people they leave behind will wonder what to do about it...
...and they have the audacity to start the first chunk of the 'About' text with The Internet Brain. They view the Internet as a repository of knowledge, and then start selectively ignoring parts they don't like... I don't need to tell you what this reminds me of.
(It's not until they actively try to excise those parts they don't like that it becomes a form of lobotomy.) ---
It's the same tired old melody that everyone keeps cranking out about Napster, but with a new bridge.
Some "artists" in the corp-rock arena are extremely well established and earn money from their music. They probably don't earn as much when people get the one or two songs they like from file swapping and don't have to buy a disk full of the stuff they don't want. (Of course, it could be argued that it's their own damn fault for sticking one or two good songs on a disk with nine steaming dog-rockets.)
Those artists that aren't at all well established, especially those with undiscovered talent, are grateful for file swapping and its ability to get their music distributed farther than any record company executive would even think of distributing it.
And then there's TMBG, the original Rhythm Section Want Ad (see also)... they started as an off-beat group (not even a proper band since they didn't have a rhythm section to start with), displayed quality and some innovation even if they did sometimes sing like Olive Oyl (grin), and made it to, well, the relative heights of the heap.
John Flansburg's attitude against Napster smacks of the 'bigger' bands' attitudes, but for different reasons. They already have a web presence, wherein you can download some interesting snippets of music and video, including the Dr. Evil theme which didn't make the Austin Powers 2 music CD.
(On the other hand, their vaunted website is a Flash-tarted advertisement for motion-sickness medication with a rather obfuscatory and difficult interface to navigate. They don't have any of the old music on there which put them on the charts to begin with, and some of their old CDs may be hard to find -- the only way to relive that nostalgia is to find friends who collected them, scrounge the back rooms of your local record shop, check eBay, or, naturally, fire up the file-swapping software.)
I like TMBG a lot myself, and I liked Factory Showroom for brazenly venturing into new sounds while friends derided them for not sounding like their old familiar selves. (So I'm not riding them. Just their site design.)
Copyright issues aside (and please note those words before hitting the reply link), obviously file swapping = publicity for the good bands, whether they've been discovered already or not. The untalented will not be traded, unless they're so execrable that they make Spinal Tap look like Richard Strauss, and people share their music just to prove to their friends how bad it is.
And file swapping = lost revenue for the big bands, whether they've got talent or not. More talented bands lose less because people are more willing to go out and get the CD. (Or perhaps download the rest of the music, but that could take time too -- easier to get the CD and rip from that.
The rest is economics: There comes a point where the publicity earned from file swapping isn't worth the loss of revenue. If there's no revenue, then the publicity is essentially free, and there's no reason not to use it. If they actually make money on their music, there's not so much reason to allow sharing, because they already have all the publicity they need.
By the way, congratulations to TMBG for passing the line into the upper half of the pay-play spectrum. ---
Military makes scientific breakthrough cheap enough for businesses and consumers to afford and play with.
Someone finds a good real-world application for said breakthrough.
The world suddenly turns on its ear because of Some Bright New Shiny Thing.
This is how I recall we got many technical advances: rayon, nylon, teflon, the Internet (back then it was Arpanet)... But then this happens.
The military had simulators long before the 3D FPS, but this particular application of 3D modeling technology didn't come directly from the military. It came from the gaming industry.
The armed forces have long had to acquire maximum resources for minimum capital and squeeze them into minimum space. That's why they conduct scientific research to create the ideal blend of Good, Fast, and Cheap to satisfy various cryptic requirements.
In that regard, the armed forces are nothing compared to the commercial software industry, which isn't working under contract to produce their goods, and consequently may lose their collective shirts if the consumers don't buy it!
So put the military on the back burner. Sure, they'll still innovate when they absolutely need to, or when a subcontractor has a nifty idea, but that's not where this particular nifty idea came from. More will come from there before it's done.
And by the way... there's another reason for people not to ban 'violent' video games. Do you think a game like Hello Kitty's Pie-Throwing Splatmatch would need a robust 3D renderer and realistic particle effects? Well, maybe, but what bugger would buy and play it?
If you prevent the industry from writing software up to the tastes of the adult player, then they won't bother writing software up to the standards of the adult player. Goodbye action, 3D graphics, any need for processor speed, or technological advancements. What use does a video-game written for a four-year-old have for any of those?
The innovations will come faster from those industries more dependent on them for their survival. And will come slower from those that don't need to use them. Legislating morality in this case will do the latter.
But I've been wrong before...
---
Normally I respect Every...
on
Is UNIX An OS?
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· Score: 3
Before job conditions forced him to more or less abandon his personal site, I went to it daily to see what bits of wisdom he'd cough up. Often he made sense, sometimes he was merely entertaining. Sometimes scathing (It should be pointed out before you click away that he's a staunch Mac-user; devout/.ers will probably feel the urge to vomit).
In this case, I fear he's trying to squash bugs so small as to be theological.
The fundamental question in this whole debate is, "Where does the operating system end and the user interface begin?" or "How much of the UI can you scrape off before the OS underneath becomes useless or breaks?"
Microsoft's assertion all through its monopoly trial was that anything that made changes to the operating system (or DLLs that it relied upon) BECAME part of the operating system, or as they called it, 'integration.' I can see the reasoning behind it, but I don't necessarily agree with it. (The ham sandwich is a different matter -- can InstallShield remove mayonnaise?)
I can also see the reasoning behind Every's statement, though I can't quite agree with it. An OS without any sort of interoperability ceases to be the central authority of the computer and instead becomes 'that thing what makes the disk go around.' You might as well shut off at that point, because the system isn't going to do anything but make whirry noises.
The line between OS and the cruft that makes it more like a 'computer' is somewhere in the middle, and depending on how you like your semantics, it could end up being anywhere in the middle. It could include file-copying services, file browsers, multimedia services, or not.
The question much on my mind now is, "Is this really important??" The answer I come up with is "No!", but obviously others feel it's worth arguing. I'm a little stunned that Every said it because of the wiggly nature of the argument. But then Joe Casad just had to respond, and I expect there will be much Mac-bashing before this thread is expired.
1. The quality of the information,
2. The veracity of the person who posts the information, and
3. The ability of people to find that information.
People will go to those areas where they find what quality they need. If a site doesn't provide information in a timely fashion, or it's impossible to locate, it will be ignored and eventually (probably) taken down. That's attrition.
The viability of a site depends on all three. People will stop looking for The Ultimate Page if they stumble across one that's Good Enough.
If it's convincing, a talented liar can post utter nonsense and get traffic, but sooner or later, he'll be caught. (In an ideal world, anyway.)
---
Re:Anyone remember "Toys"?
on
Trigger Happy
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· Score: 2
I remember the movie:
"What are you shooting at?"
"Buildings, cars, people..."
I think that was meant to be the biggest chiller of that scene: that any person could be semantically reduced to the status of 'target,' like inanimate objects.
While I strongly oppose out-and-out censorship of video games on First Amendment grounds, the honorable Mr. Katz does bring up (or rehash) a point: while the combat simulator can turn a person into a technically capable soldier, it will do nothing to ensure that soldier remains a person.
Theoretically, that's what *books* are for. (But wait, many of the people who oppose improper videogames also oppose improper books...)
Yes, the video game could be used as an educational forum, of practical and ethical knowledge, but who'd pay for it? Television networks all over can barely *give* it away.
Remember in the 50s when it was suggested that television would be a way to bring culture to the masses? Plays televised and brought into peoples' homes? Now what do we have? Pamela Anderson's breast implants on eBay, but that's a story for another time.
You want to talk about the decay of a nation? Let's not look at the perverting effects of either television or video games, but the decay caused by a lack of meaningful content. Perhaps I should stop now, before I get too preachy. (Too late?)
Not knowing much about E*Trade's operations, I might just be blowing smoke out my ass. But if I were to suspect a company of a stock scam of some sort here, here's what I would think was going on behind the scenes:
1. offers the IPO publicly, to test the waters.
2. sees who is interested in the IPO. If it's enough people, then...
3. rejects all but a select few to buy stock in the new IPO, and picks up a huge chunk of it for themselves.
4. Meanwhile, they hang onto the money of those people who wanted to opt in on the IPO in order to pocket the interest.
In other words, they hold the carrot out in front of everybody, and if enough people want to nibble, they pull it back and act on it themselves. Basically, they use it to gauge the popularity of the IPO, and if it looks like it'll take off, they shut people out and keep more of it for themselves.
The Internet can be used for polls. Why not turn a stock offering into a poll to see if a stock will take off, and then use that as a sort of 'outsider information'? Okay, I mean beside the fact that it's contractually illegal and ethically reprehensible?
I'm not saying that's what E*Trade did (though reading on in the article in another window, it looks like a good guess). Suffice it to say, that E*Trade did some jiggery-pokery with the stock, the IPO's inital cost, and other peoples' money.
But whatever happened, E*Trade tried it.
And they got caught.
That works for me.
With any luck, the finding against them will keep them from doing it again. But maybe not.
I blame the pornographers for the state of the Internet, but not for putting morally questionable material out there. I blame them for creating the banner advertisement, the 468x60 splash of garish color, choppy animation, and oversized text featuring the words CLICK HERE... and then showing that people can make money that way.
After all, it's the love of *money* that is the root of all evil, not the love of enormous hooters.
A whole economy has sprung up around banner links, and not a pleasant economy either. Sure, banners can advertise legitimate services, and some of them are quite attractive doing so too. But I've seen bad banners too. Things that don't lead where they expect, or promise things they don't deliver. I've even seen samples of banners made to look like part of the website that they're being hosted on!
The Internet itself loses value under these circumstances. Information wants to be free, but it doesn't necessarily want to make itself known to everybody, and it can be awfully hard to pick out when the noise is intentionally disguising itself as signal.
(Side note: the advantage to using either a Mac or Linux box is the user interface -- I get to laugh myself silly at every banner advertisement that's dolled up to look like a dialog box which, if you're on the aforementioned, is appearing on the wrong OS.)
Then this happens. This beautifully apocryphal event that tells the world, "Banner adverts aren't all they're cracked up to be! Servers might not get rich off of them!" Business models shift. Sites either negotiate better contracts with the people they're shilling for, or work up alternative business models that don't require banner advertising for revenue. Or people start using their own servers.
Contracts get looked at a little more carefully, too. It'd be nice if the unscrupulous ones were left out in the cold by their own legal trickery, but that'd be too much to hope. All they have to do is latch onto the suckers. Then again, I'd like to think that suckers are an exhaustable resource, that if they're suckered enough, they start thinking.
It might not happen the way I'm hoping it will... what I'm hoping is that the banner advertising companies thin out and become more reputable. Who knows? They may even point to more interesting content...
If OpenSecrets has the facts, then Time-Warner is the one doing all the lobbying, right behind Seagrams which, if memory serves me correctly, is fairly active in the music business, is it not?
It wouldn't take a competitor to leak such a story, just a really disgruntled ISP that Time-Warner is trying to strong-arm. How many of the 40 would you think are disgruntled enough to call the press on this?
The "deal" isn't the only sad thing... I'm also bothered that Time-Warner could get this far, try to dismiss it in such contradictory terms and even hope to be believed, and that consumers could be so Internet-hungry that they motivate such behaviors on the part of big companies like Time-Warner.
I'm also bothered by a government that either doesn't see campaign contributions as a way of currying favor for a significant merger, or who doesn't consider it significant.
Slashdot Mirror
That's not to say Apple hasn't had its own things to say about the subject. They used a simplified version of the interface for the Lisa (we remember how that did), and continued developing it in-house since then to try to perfect the Macintosh.
(Come to think of it, given how Apple chewed through CEOs and how many different design shifts there were in those years, it's amazing that the Mac's interface didn't get shuffled around more than it did.)
(Well, if you don't count Gil Amelio, Steve Jobs, Rhapsody, and X.)
In 1984 they did publish the Apple Human Interface Guidelines, which some people still look to, but PARC is where the GUI fun started.
Well, I didn't trust (1), and (3) just got me a voice mail box instead of a person I could chew out, which I didn't use. That left (2), and I had a wicked idea:
I hit 2, and input the number that I should call if I was interested in the fax (which appeared in BIG text right above the little text). Their own response number should start eventually getting faxes from them or, as I tend to experience, hangups.
Cute story, I know, but what does this have to do with defeating spambots?
I went to the page indicated...
And I scrolled to the bottom, and looked at the source code, and noted two faaaaaascinating things:
First, the HTML on that page is rather clean; I can see no evidence of anti-spambot code on their page.
And second, the "Contact Us" link at the bottom is a mailto:.
By all appearances, their page is vulnerable to their own spambot.
So I had the thought... what if those generated-random-email-address pages were geared to produce not-so-random email addresses? What if the email addresses on those generated-page traps were geared to generate random email addresses at the domains of the various spambot-- (err, I mean) harvester producing companies? Let them see what it's like when less than discerning spammers use their software for evil. Hundreds of Viagra-substitutes! Thousands of hangover cures! Tens of thousands of opportunities to refinance their home mortgage!
This is just an off-the-top-of-my-head idea. Opinions?
Can you blame them? The CBDTPA is really just like a gigantic unfunded mandate laid at the doorstep of the tech community with a note tied around it reading "Fix this for us and we'll let you live."
Bear in mind how much effort it would take to DRM-safe all the computer equipment sold in the country, if not world. Proposed DRM standards would spring up from the ground like swarms of rabid fruitbats, and whenever equipment designed for these DRM systems barfed on legally purchased media, it would be the *tech* sector that gets stuck with the blame, not the *media* sector.
The media sector tried to save itself money by drafting a bill to prevent piracy and whatnot, and save their income. No surprise there.
Faced with the expense of all of this new DRM R&D, implementation, and fielding of complaints, the tech sector chose to fight it rather than allow it to pass, and save their income.
This is probably one of the *few* things that defeated the bill: that all large corporations, not just the media hegemony, are typically greedy and lazy, in that order; I don't believe that grassroots action had anything to do with it.
The bill will come back. It was the SSS-whatever, it became the CBDTPA, and it will metamorph into something else as long as the Senator From Disney is in office. In the meantime, the best thing we can do to the media companies' war chests is not fill them.
With no competition, there is little incentive to actually innovate, and the prices for the consoles will go sky high as your monopoly spends more and more money muscleing out any possible competition from the field.
The console makes relatively little money for the manufacturer (and none for the people that produce games for it) compared to what they rake in on the games they sell for it. As far as I know, this is true for every manufacturer who has ever produced a console, or a game for said console. (I wouldn't mind seeing counter-examples, if anyone has any.)
Pick a game theme on one of those consoles, and consider how many different versions of it there are. Two or three of each type of sports game (football, basketball, baseball), four or five different racing games (some brand name like Nascar, others with different exotic twists), and some genres occur almost spontaneously, and breed like rabbits -- for a while on the PSX you couldn't spit without hitting some variant of a skateboarding game.
Even games which have no other manufacturers' prior art to sell their offbeat concepts, still have to compete with the quality of the staid classic games for the consumer's limited cash, and that means they have to innovate like nobody's business. (Mmmmmm... Incredible Crisis)
On any given single console, there is still a great deal of competition: Each and every development company is looking to take that console that someone's produced, and squeeze every bit of fun, action, adrenaline, and pulse-pumping excitement onto a CD or cartridge using the SDK the developer has shipped them.
And they have to do this knowing that everyone else has received pretty much the same kit -- the ultimate in leveled playing fields. The only thing they can do is compete.
The system can be nothing but bells and whistles, or it can be plain. Developers will still try to wring the technotes for every pixel of power they can get. This means innovation, ladies and gentlemen, even if there's only one platform worth noting on the market.
In some ways, this competition between software producers is more important than the competition between hardware manufacturers. One of the biggest selling points of any hardware is the software that runs on it. It may also be worthwhile noting some aspects of the strategies of the hardware manufacturers:
Sony , when developing the PS2, tried to innovate their asses off. They did things no sane person would want to do to graphic hardware in order to get the maximum 'polygon-pushing power'. Consequently, as has been mentioned many times around here, the thing is something of a beast to program, but theoretically, when someone hits the mark and programs it right, watch out. This will end up, they hope, producing truly eye-popping games which will better sell their system.
Microsoft wanted to give X-Box developer and SDK primarily only to those developers who wanted to play by Microsoft's rules (read: bend over and smile like a shark. R.I.P. Bungie) -- get the creme de la creme of producers producing the biggest, brightest, most innovative games on your system, and the consumers will flock (n. a collective of sheep) to it, even if it's a dog turd with joystick ports.
And Nintendo is going with brand recognition and their successful merchandising lines (like the Pokemon phenomenon which, although the bottom is dropping out of the trading card market, still seems strong) to sell their next-gen console. Sure, it's a merchandising angle rather than a software angle, but guess what? The software that ties into that giant marketing machine will only run on their system. They're also promising a very easy to program system, to attract those developers that get frustrated with Sony's beast or Microsoft's attitude.
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I remembered a book called The Suicidal Corporation which I read a long time ago. It reviewed American history from the Indstrial Revolution through to today, noting how in an effort to get their way, large companies would often throw money at the government in an attempt to make their problems go away, and perhaps throw blockades up in front of their competition.
When I found that page (link above), at first I thought, This is exactly what's happening... the government wants to crack down on the types of media that get produced, that means cracking down on the media producers that just tossed all that money at Bush's campaign...
But then I thought about it and said, "No, not exactly..." I don't think Paul Weaver (the author of that book) ever anticipated a situation like this arising:
Between the two of them -- Bush and Industry -- I believe they will probably do more damage to the government and peoples' rights than anyone can predict. Pardon me if I sound like a hippie, but man -- corporate greed's gonna bring everyone down.
Otherwise, life goes on -- people will continue buying DVDs, for example, because they can get movies on disc and view them at home. I think my next one's going to be Fight Club.
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And the reason it gets tricky is that your second in command might not want your job. And you can't exactly coerce him into taking it... see also "irony."
Or there's the alternative alternative approach, which is more like a slippery slope -- help your #2 man hire an alternate #3 man, who swaps with him before he swaps with you. Of course, if he doesn't want the job, he'll want to hire a #4 to trade with...
Three months later, down in the mail room... "Hey buddy! Yeah, you! Get over to mailstop 12 pronto! You're our new IT manager. Yeah, I know you've only been here a few days, but..."
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Absolutely we must! When they grow up, they might want to look at this stuff too!!
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First, I'd like to say I agree a great deal with what DeanC above wrote. And then I'd like to kick in a few more things to put a brand new spin on what he said.
The simultaneous Reconquista of Spain from the Muslims allowed muslim texts and knowledge to flow into Europe while the fall of Constantinople send fleeing intellectuals from the Byzantine Empire into the much more intellectually backwards Western Europe.
For these to happen, cultures had to be willing to deal with new ideas, either in sending them to other parts of the world, or receiving them. If Western Europe didn't receive either the Muslim texts, or the talent from the Byzantine Empire, then there might have been no spark, and the Renaissance might not have happened.
Keep in mind those factors: available information, available talent, and let me add in a third element -- willingness to try new things.
Today, if there's a renaissance going on, I dare say it's not in the United States. There may have been a small one which resulted in the Internet becoming a Big Thing, but it didn't go anywhere. Most companies can't think of it as anything more than a business tool or threat to intellectual property.
The US and many advanced nations are contributing to a potential renaissance by posting information over sources like the Internet. But that's not where the most growth is happening.
Consider India, for instance, which boasts the first companies to successfully implement the CMM Level 5 (a yawner of an accomplishment if you're not big on software process improvement, but who knows what they could grow into?). Consider numerous backwater nations, using information on the web to implement new (to them) techniques for doing things and improving the quality of life.
And consider that a 'renaissance' doesn't have to be artistic, scientific, or technical. New ideas can fit into any sphere. The social, for instance: striking new policies in human rights and/or sexuality, anyone?
Before the Italians had all the tools they needed to build their own renaissance, they probably didn't think anything so historically striking would ever happen to them. Likewise, we can't be sure when or where the next Big Thing will spark a reformation. Or which area of life it will affect. Only history can tell that for sure.
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Three simple words:
"Linux on Xbox."
I can practically hear the screams from Redmond now.
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...already have such a tax on them. For just the reasons previously cited: that they could be used to make comparatively flawless reproductions of recorded music.
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It's been suggested by other sources that a college degree may or may not be all it's cracked up to be. After all, you spend 4 years in college, you come out the other end with a piece of paper that certifies you've received an education that is now up to 4 years old.
Physical education: This degree can age gracefully. Nobody comes out with upgrades for kneecaps every six months. Nor has any stretching exercise gotten extensive venture capital attention. Aging doesn't seem to hurt this degree significantly.
Computer sciences: Whoa, has this stuff changed. Blink and you miss it. New manufacturing techniques, new technological breakthroughs, new things to keep track of... spending a day in a classroom filling your head with the old stuff actually robs you of the time you need to learn the new stuff.
Physical Education: good to go through college to get a degree in. The information will be useful.
Computer and electrical sciences: bad to go through college to get. Things change before you finish. And while it counts as some experience, the companies that are making the breakthroughs have to educate their workers because the stuff is too new to find anyone experienced in.
Conclusion: fewer technical degrees are being handed out because the students are looking elsewhere for their knowledge.
Side note: For those of you who pity the Phys Ed degree holder for not having a more technical position, consider those people who sit behind a desk typing away at a computer all day. Sooner or later they'll get enough out of shape that they need to join a gym or hire a trainer...
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Gawds, I hope not!
Long ago, I mused on how everyone wanted to eliminate their own piece of the Internet (albeit not on here):
"Americans want to outlaw pornography, Germans want to outlaw racism, the French want to outlaw any advertising that isn't written in French..."
Back then, I had no idea it could get this bad -- I miss my naivete. I really hope this doesn't become precedent. Imagine a world where the communications medium is governed by a combination of the most restrictive codes of law instead of the least restrictive. (China, anyone?)
And then imagine those restrictions slowly leaking off of the communications media into other facets of life.
Some people say the Internet will bring the world together. Assuming the world doesn't tear the Internet apart first, I'm not sure the world is ready to become a single entity yet. At least not until they get their ground rules straight.
And no, this is not just a knock at France. (So 50 years ago you got burned in a war. We appreciate your sacrifices and all you went through. But get over it! It was half a century ago! Get some therapy or something! I mean, look what we're going through in politics now! We plan to survive that...)
If it's a barb at anybody, it's at those countries and companies that think they can use the Internet (or any other media) to either:
a) publish one more form of useless, insincere propaganda -- a single-page of prechewed and committee-approved irrefutable bullshit where everyone else is trying to post vividly interactive and frequently updated encyclopedias, or
b) surf the world and try to put the kibosh on any information they don't like -- browsing everyone else's vividly interactive and frequently updated encyclopedias and trying to black-pen them by judicial order, advertiser protest, or out-and-out cracking.
No, this isn't aimed specifically at France. But if France wants to be that way about it, then welcome to the party, we feel your pain, now take a seat on the front porch and wait until we've had our fun in here.
(Feeling vinegary today, what can I say?)
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Could you ever find any obscure bands? Occasionally. Could you always find forty copies of N'Sync's latest POS? Always.
And this is Napster's fault how, exactly?
Napster doesn't tell people what to make available over their service. The idea from the beginning was to provide a way for people to share what they had and wanted to share. In its own way, it was democratic, in that the more popular artists were going to be found on the service more frequently.
Ironically, this made obscure bands obscure because they were obscure. You could fill your personal share-space with the highest quality recordings of the best garage-band indy music you ever heard. People who you play it for would instantly fall in love with it. But very few on Napster would know about it because, of course, they wouldn't know to look for it in the first place.
In that way, I consider Napster a failure because of its fans. mp3.com at least makes an effort to point people at new kinds of music.
"Sanitized", you say? If that means the new Napster won't have mp3s with all the skips and blips we've come to hate, then by all means!
Yes, a fully corporate Napster might have better quality recordings. But then you might end up with other controls too, like prohibiting songs with 'obscene' lyrics and 'unwholesome' ideals. You'll end up with an online music service that's almost Disneyworldesque -- high quality, happy, bright, shiny, and totally intolerant to anything that falls outside the narrow scope of its preferences. What If Woodstock Were Held In Singapore.
This further corporate involvement in an already corporate enterprise can only improve the quality of the service.
As a corporate enterprise, Old Napster was almost anarchic, and willing to let users do as they please. They could post music from any source (not counting those pesky copyright problems), and download music from any user who had what they wanted. And they could do it for *free*.
New Napster will be reorganized, regimented, and improved so that it actually makes money. Guess who it's going to make it from? If not the users paying fees to listen to the music, then from the artists paying fees to make their music available on the networks' play lists. And maybe both, if they're both willing to pay.
I will agree on one particular point: Napster's time has come. And gone. I look forward to the Next Thing, especially if it's antithetical to big corporate involvement.
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Consider for a moment the record companies' dilemma.
On the one hand, they have their existing business model which, though not merely morally questionable but actually despicable, they are in full control of it, and they are using it to make money hand over fist.
On the other hand, there is the Internet. They don't have control of it. They don't know how to make money off of it. They certainly don't know how to make the kind of money off the Internet that they're making now.
And if they see what we see in the business dailies, I can't blame them. Companies putting off IPOs. Venture capital drying up. Replacing hundreds of dedicated technicians and staff with two web designers and a rhesus monkey. These are documented and documented in a variety of sources.
These days, people reread business models containing the word 'internet' twice, because there is not yet a set formula for success online.
This is why they're not switching; they'd have to be fools to switch away from the model they have now, which is extremely profitable. Even if it is despicable.
The only way they'll even consider changing given the above is to untrench them -- use legal means to make their current way of doing business so unprofitable that they'll grab for another way. The first (and least practical) way that comes to mind is rehabilitating a nation of music junkies. That, or popularize a new form of music that the Old Guard doesn't have any control of. (I hear there aren't many commercial techno mixes. Perhaps something could be done there?)
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[On Microsoft...] JonKatz needs to write an article or something.
You're joking, right?
What do you think would happen if Jon Katz wrote an article slamming Microsoft, and posted it on Slashdot?
"Grrrr... I hate Microsoft. I have to agree with the article! But wait... I hate JonKatz! I have to disagree! But disagreeing with JonKatz would mean siding with Microsoft!"
Users' brains would melt down, the entire post series following it would turn into a syrupy, heavy mass of vitriolic, incoherent ramblings as people struggle to reconcile both their gut-level dislike of Microsoft and their gut-level dislike of Slashdot's only known essayist.
In attempting to do so, some would come to like Jon Katz. (Which isn't so bad.) But then some would develop a taste for Microsoft...
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In Candle, Memes have jumped the sentience gap from hardware to wetware, allowing them to run within the human brain, placing beliefs directly and absolutely in the mind, incontrovertible except by the destruction or replacement of the meme itself.
.NET).
Who needs Memes/the-escaped-computer-software for that? We already have memes/regular-old-ideas for that, and they can cause enough chaos as is.
The part about software jumping the computer and landing in peoples' heads like a virus? That is science fantasy (or paranoid delusion if you look beyond Bill Gates' plans for
But people getting wrong ideas into their heads and acting on them as if they were true? That's entirely too hard to believe.
We live in an age where a lie, told sincerely enough, takes on a life no truth can hope to match. That high-pitched whirring sound is Mark Twain, in his grave, spinning like a dentist's drill.
It doesn't have to be some sort of mutant freak of programming to be absorbed -- if people like the tune coming from the bandwagon, they'll jump on even if it's being drawn by a jackass.
I'd like to blame television for this, but deep down, I know the problem is just people being lazy. They don't understand the news, they don't read the news, they hardly even skim it. Someone reads it to them on the radio in the morning, or they hear appetizing bits around the water cooler, do a little half-assed research, and decide, "Well, that's good enough for me!"
Those memes also use their hosts as armor; try to attack a meme like that, and the person holding it will take it as an assault, and fight back.
And memes mutate quickly. To follow up the bandwagon metaphor above, once people jump on, they'll start belting out the theme they think they hear. Ever play 'Telephone'? You whisper something to one person, then watch as it gets sent around, and when it comes back, it's been mangled beyond recognition. Memes (uppercase) are I assume perfectly self-replicating, but memes (lowercase) rely on peoples' powers to emote, speak, hear, and comprehend. They change en route not because they want to, but because the transmission vector is faulty.
The book gives the phrase "How do you fight an idea?" a sinister twist, but doesn't provide a solution to handling the real-world problem of bad memes.
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From their About page, I find this line to be so misleading as to be a 1984ism:
/. Effect.
The Open Directory is a self-regulating republic where experts can collect their recommendations, without including noise and misinformation.
Uhhhh, yeah. With this new change, it's self-regulating except where other people regulate it, or it regulates itself to avoid controversy. And experts can't collect their recommendations in certain categories because they're deemed inappropriate.
As someone pointed out, censorship is damage, and the Internet tries to route around it.
This has given me a new metaphor for it: censorship is a form of noise, which actively seeks to drown out content with silence, and tries to keep people from finding out things they would otherwise want to know.
Let's take a look at the sensitive issue of "suicide."
Blocking "suicide," for instance, keeps people from learning about ways people can kill themselves. It also keeps people from learning ways NOT to kill themselves. I once saw a Suicide FAQ that described the various means people have tried, and the circumstances under which the people were left as vegetables. If a successful suicide is painful, try an unsuccessful one.
Blocking that category also makes it harder for people to recognize suicidal impulses, or what to do to prevent suicide. They may be found under some other Mental Health category, but which I couldn't tell you because the server just bowed under the
A proper "suicide" section might also include information for people trying to recover from the suicides of others. That might also be under mental health, but "mental health" is rarely the first keyword that pops into your mind when you think "suicide," is it?
So they remove the knowledge. That won't stop people from trying it. It may keep a few from succeeding, but those people won't be any better off. And then the people they leave behind will wonder what to do about it...
...and they have the audacity to start the first chunk of the 'About' text with The Internet Brain. They view the Internet as a repository of knowledge, and then start selectively ignoring parts they don't like... I don't need to tell you what this reminds me of.
(It's not until they actively try to excise those parts they don't like that it becomes a form of lobotomy.)
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It's the same tired old melody that everyone keeps cranking out about Napster, but with a new bridge.
Some "artists" in the corp-rock arena are extremely well established and earn money from their music. They probably don't earn as much when people get the one or two songs they like from file swapping and don't have to buy a disk full of the stuff they don't want. (Of course, it could be argued that it's their own damn fault for sticking one or two good songs on a disk with nine steaming dog-rockets.)
Those artists that aren't at all well established, especially those with undiscovered talent, are grateful for file swapping and its ability to get their music distributed farther than any record company executive would even think of distributing it.
And then there's TMBG, the original Rhythm Section Want Ad (see also)... they started as an off-beat group (not even a proper band since they didn't have a rhythm section to start with), displayed quality and some innovation even if they did sometimes sing like Olive Oyl (grin), and made it to, well, the relative heights of the heap.
John Flansburg's attitude against Napster smacks of the 'bigger' bands' attitudes, but for different reasons. They already have a web presence, wherein you can download some interesting snippets of music and video, including the Dr. Evil theme which didn't make the Austin Powers 2 music CD.
(On the other hand, their vaunted website is a Flash-tarted advertisement for motion-sickness medication with a rather obfuscatory and difficult interface to navigate. They don't have any of the old music on there which put them on the charts to begin with, and some of their old CDs may be hard to find -- the only way to relive that nostalgia is to find friends who collected them, scrounge the back rooms of your local record shop, check eBay, or, naturally, fire up the file-swapping software.)
I like TMBG a lot myself, and I liked Factory Showroom for brazenly venturing into new sounds while friends derided them for not sounding like their old familiar selves. (So I'm not riding them. Just their site design.)
Copyright issues aside (and please note those words before hitting the reply link), obviously file swapping = publicity for the good bands, whether they've been discovered already or not. The untalented will not be traded, unless they're so execrable that they make Spinal Tap look like Richard Strauss, and people share their music just to prove to their friends how bad it is.
And file swapping = lost revenue for the big bands, whether they've got talent or not. More talented bands lose less because people are more willing to go out and get the CD. (Or perhaps download the rest of the music, but that could take time too -- easier to get the CD and rip from that.
The rest is economics: There comes a point where the publicity earned from file swapping isn't worth the loss of revenue. If there's no revenue, then the publicity is essentially free, and there's no reason not to use it. If they actually make money on their music, there's not so much reason to allow sharing, because they already have all the publicity they need.
By the way, congratulations to TMBG for passing the line into the upper half of the pay-play spectrum.
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This is how I recall we got many technical advances: rayon, nylon, teflon, the Internet (back then it was Arpanet)... But then this happens.
The military had simulators long before the 3D FPS, but this particular application of 3D modeling technology didn't come directly from the military. It came from the gaming industry.
The armed forces have long had to acquire maximum resources for minimum capital and squeeze them into minimum space. That's why they conduct scientific research to create the ideal blend of Good, Fast, and Cheap to satisfy various cryptic requirements.
In that regard, the armed forces are nothing compared to the commercial software industry, which isn't working under contract to produce their goods, and consequently may lose their collective shirts if the consumers don't buy it!
So put the military on the back burner. Sure, they'll still innovate when they absolutely need to, or when a subcontractor has a nifty idea, but that's not where this particular nifty idea came from. More will come from there before it's done.
And by the way... there's another reason for people not to ban 'violent' video games. Do you think a game like Hello Kitty's Pie-Throwing Splatmatch would need a robust 3D renderer and realistic particle effects? Well, maybe, but what bugger would buy and play it?
If you prevent the industry from writing software up to the tastes of the adult player, then they won't bother writing software up to the standards of the adult player. Goodbye action, 3D graphics, any need for processor speed, or technological advancements. What use does a video-game written for a four-year-old have for any of those?
The innovations will come faster from those industries more dependent on them for their survival. And will come slower from those that don't need to use them. Legislating morality in this case will do the latter.
But I've been wrong before...
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Before job conditions forced him to more or less abandon his personal site, I went to it daily to see what bits of wisdom he'd cough up. Often he made sense, sometimes he was merely entertaining. Sometimes scathing (It should be pointed out before you click away that he's a staunch Mac-user; devout /.ers will probably feel the urge to vomit).
In this case, I fear he's trying to squash bugs so small as to be theological.
The fundamental question in this whole debate is, "Where does the operating system end and the user interface begin?" or "How much of the UI can you scrape off before the OS underneath becomes useless or breaks?"
Microsoft's assertion all through its monopoly trial was that anything that made changes to the operating system (or DLLs that it relied upon) BECAME part of the operating system, or as they called it, 'integration.' I can see the reasoning behind it, but I don't necessarily agree with it. (The ham sandwich is a different matter -- can InstallShield remove mayonnaise?)
I can also see the reasoning behind Every's statement, though I can't quite agree with it. An OS without any sort of interoperability ceases to be the central authority of the computer and instead becomes 'that thing what makes the disk go around.' You might as well shut off at that point, because the system isn't going to do anything but make whirry noises.
The line between OS and the cruft that makes it more like a 'computer' is somewhere in the middle, and depending on how you like your semantics, it could end up being anywhere in the middle. It could include file-copying services, file browsers, multimedia services, or not.
The question much on my mind now is, "Is this really important??" The answer I come up with is "No!" , but obviously others feel it's worth arguing. I'm a little stunned that Every said it because of the wiggly nature of the argument. But then Joe Casad just had to respond, and I expect there will be much Mac-bashing before this thread is expired.
Sigh.
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Quality on the Internet relies on three things:
1. The quality of the information,
2. The veracity of the person who posts the information, and
3. The ability of people to find that information.
People will go to those areas where they find what quality they need. If a site doesn't provide information in a timely fashion, or it's impossible to locate, it will be ignored and eventually (probably) taken down. That's attrition.
The viability of a site depends on all three. People will stop looking for The Ultimate Page if they stumble across one that's Good Enough.
If it's convincing, a talented liar can post utter nonsense and get traffic, but sooner or later, he'll be caught. (In an ideal world, anyway.)
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I remember the movie:
"What are you shooting at?"
"Buildings, cars, people..."
I think that was meant to be the biggest chiller of that scene: that any person could be semantically reduced to the status of 'target,' like inanimate objects.
While I strongly oppose out-and-out censorship of video games on First Amendment grounds, the honorable Mr. Katz does bring up (or rehash) a point: while the combat simulator can turn a person into a technically capable soldier, it will do nothing to ensure that soldier remains a person.
Theoretically, that's what *books* are for. (But wait, many of the people who oppose improper videogames also oppose improper books...)
Yes, the video game could be used as an educational forum, of practical and ethical knowledge, but who'd pay for it? Television networks all over can barely *give* it away.
Remember in the 50s when it was suggested that television would be a way to bring culture to the masses? Plays televised and brought into peoples' homes? Now what do we have? Pamela Anderson's breast implants on eBay, but that's a story for another time.
You want to talk about the decay of a nation? Let's not look at the perverting effects of either television or video games, but the decay caused by a lack of meaningful content. Perhaps I should stop now, before I get too preachy. (Too late?)
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Not knowing much about E*Trade's operations, I might just be blowing smoke out my ass. But if I were to suspect a company of a stock scam of some sort here, here's what I would think was going on behind the scenes:
1. offers the IPO publicly, to test the waters.
2. sees who is interested in the IPO. If it's enough people, then...
3. rejects all but a select few to buy stock in the new IPO, and picks up a huge chunk of it for themselves.
4. Meanwhile, they hang onto the money of those people who wanted to opt in on the IPO in order to pocket the interest.
In other words, they hold the carrot out in front of everybody, and if enough people want to nibble, they pull it back and act on it themselves. Basically, they use it to gauge the popularity of the IPO, and if it looks like it'll take off, they shut people out and keep more of it for themselves.
The Internet can be used for polls. Why not turn a stock offering into a poll to see if a stock will take off, and then use that as a sort of 'outsider information'? Okay, I mean beside the fact that it's contractually illegal and ethically reprehensible?
I'm not saying that's what E*Trade did (though reading on in the article in another window, it looks like a good guess). Suffice it to say, that E*Trade did some jiggery-pokery with the stock, the IPO's inital cost, and other peoples' money.
But whatever happened, E*Trade tried it.
And they got caught.
That works for me.
With any luck, the finding against them will keep them from doing it again. But maybe not.
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I blame the pornographers for the state of the Internet, but not for putting morally questionable material out there. I blame them for creating the banner advertisement, the 468x60 splash of garish color, choppy animation, and oversized text featuring the words CLICK HERE... and then showing that people can make money that way.
After all, it's the love of *money* that is the root of all evil, not the love of enormous hooters.
A whole economy has sprung up around banner links, and not a pleasant economy either. Sure, banners can advertise legitimate services, and some of them are quite attractive doing so too. But I've seen bad banners too. Things that don't lead where they expect, or promise things they don't deliver. I've even seen samples of banners made to look like part of the website that they're being hosted on!
The Internet itself loses value under these circumstances. Information wants to be free, but it doesn't necessarily want to make itself known to everybody, and it can be awfully hard to pick out when the noise is intentionally disguising itself as signal.
(Side note: the advantage to using either a Mac or Linux box is the user interface -- I get to laugh myself silly at every banner advertisement that's dolled up to look like a dialog box which, if you're on the aforementioned, is appearing on the wrong OS.)
Then this happens. This beautifully apocryphal event that tells the world, "Banner adverts aren't all they're cracked up to be! Servers might not get rich off of them!" Business models shift. Sites either negotiate better contracts with the people they're shilling for, or work up alternative business models that don't require banner advertising for revenue. Or people start using their own servers.
Contracts get looked at a little more carefully, too. It'd be nice if the unscrupulous ones were left out in the cold by their own legal trickery, but that'd be too much to hope. All they have to do is latch onto the suckers. Then again, I'd like to think that suckers are an exhaustable resource, that if they're suckered enough, they start thinking.
It might not happen the way I'm hoping it will... what I'm hoping is that the banner advertising companies thin out and become more reputable. Who knows? They may even point to more interesting content...
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Hah. You want "applied lobbying"?
If OpenSecrets has the facts, then Time-Warner is the one doing all the lobbying, right behind Seagrams which, if memory serves me correctly, is fairly active in the music business, is it not?
It wouldn't take a competitor to leak such a story, just a really disgruntled ISP that Time-Warner is trying to strong-arm. How many of the 40 would you think are disgruntled enough to call the press on this?
The "deal" isn't the only sad thing... I'm also bothered that Time-Warner could get this far, try to dismiss it in such contradictory terms and even hope to be believed, and that consumers could be so Internet-hungry that they motivate such behaviors on the part of big companies like Time-Warner.
I'm also bothered by a government that either doesn't see campaign contributions as a way of currying favor for a significant merger, or who doesn't consider it significant.
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