I remember that before that time NT was busted in the press because is was too slow.
Microsoft made the guess that the small decrease in stability was less important than the comfort of the increase in speed. They were right: NT 4.0 was the first real popular NT and it still was generally eveluated as stable.
Of course this is not the theoretical ideal. But hey!, we live in a real world - not a theoretical one.
On the long term you may be right: copyright may become difficult to enforce when everyone has a 100mb connection to the internet.
But why should we bother too much about tomorrows problems when we have todays to solve. Napster is just as the player pianos a new service that gives a big improvement over what was available. The legislator should interfere as it is obvious that leaving it to the industry and the judges may take many years before a final agreement is reached.
The real unknown is how many people will choose for the legal version and how many will stick with the illegal file exchanges. Nobody knows. But if you find a solution where most people choose a legal exchange you have will have the moral clout to pursue the illegal minority.
I think it will take some time for the music industry to find the right formula (pricing; how to deal with rare recordings; international aspects; other languages). But let's start with putting them on the right track and stop them from their senseless obstructive policies.
Outlook is such a mess that every beginning VB programmer with a bit of fantasy can write a virus. Usually that kind of people is very astonished when they get worldwide headlines and are said to have caused many millions of dollars damage.
You can't frighten this kind of people. They see themselves as kids playing a bit around and they think that writing virusses is something done by nerds who know all Windows API's and protocols(including the secret ones).
Somehow someday Microsoft will become stricter too. Only then is there a chance that we can stop virusses (or at least make them rare).
At the moment we get every other day a new story about Al Qaeda plans. Just think up some new story and you will find yourself on the headlines of all big newspapers. The next story will probably be that Bin Laden has his men in the US Army and the CIA.
Lets just ignore those stories until they go away!
The marginal cost of reproducing software is zero. So one should expect that the cost of software will come down to zero. It is just a basic economic law.
The only way that software companies can prevent this is by constant improvements (=new versions). The moment they stop innovating they are roadkill.
The reasons why people make opensource software actually don't matter very much. IBM does it because it is cheaper in the long run than buying Microsoft software. Some companies give their software as open source because that makes it cheaper to maintain. For some individuals (systemadministrators and programmers) it is part of their job. Some people do it just for the fun. And if you look at complicated software that runs in the background (as the researchers do) you may find many academics.
They had a similar thing in Spain (150 km south of Madrid) between 1982 and 1989. It had had some funding problems and for that reason was built on the cheap. As a consequence it collapsed in 1989 in a storm. It had a capacity of 50KW.
The idea is that:
- you have a big greenhouse that collects the sun and generates hot air.
- you send that air into a very high chimney because the air at a high altitude is colder so you can get more energy
- closed water basins in the greenhouses store the heat for the night so that you can generate electricity at night too
The biggest problem seems to me that the technology has not been tested very much. Scaling from 50KW to 200MW is quite a big step. And the quoted prices seem to have a lot of variation depending on the article that you read.
Dublin, when I hear you rambling I would guess that your dad is a patent lawyer. I will try some correction:
Software is a great example that patents are not necessary to create a great industry. Sofware had it fastest growth before software patents became the fashion of the day. Both Microsoft and Oracle had until recently very few patents. And even now they seem to use their software patents only defensively.
There exist some studies about the effects of patents on the speed of innovation. In industries where inventions are not related (for example drugs) they have a positive effect on innovation. But in industries where inventions are accumulative (for example software) they have a negative effect on innovation.
Some other examples where patents had negative effects:
- WAP: it blocked further innovations that would have been more appreciated by the market.
- digital and internet TV: only a very select group of companies is active of this market. Most companies prefer to leave this legal minefield to others.
This isn't about punishment. It is about intimidating the rest of the Arab world. Somalia is just the perfect scapegoat: uncle Sam had some scores to settle there anyway.
If you read the US Government info you will see:
"-- Al Barakaat's founder, Shaykh Ahme Nur Jimale, is closely linked to Usama bin Laden. He has used Al Barakaat's 60 offices in Somalia and 127 offices abroad to transmit funds, intelligence and instructions to terrorist cells.".
Sounds to be me like ATT and the Western Union are guilty too: they did the same thing.
There is a lot of support for Bin Laden in the Islamic world so I would be surprised if there weren't some homepages that supported Bin Laden. Similarly there is a lot of money collection by radical groups: so the biggest money transfer company will handle some of that money.
The real message from Bush is to all the other Arabic countries: if you allow any supporter of Bin Laden to speak out or to collect money we will get at your throat.
BTW: you are wrong with "the terrorists taking a cut of all transfers". The government report doesn't say anything like that.
Really. I just remember that the US government gave some american companies a part of the spectrum and when they wanted to take it away they couldn't.
We live in a civilization full of laws that protect the weak against arbitrary decisions from the strong. So you can not take it away unless you place them outside the law.
From what we know from Bush we can easily predict what he would do if he was in the position of the leaders of Somalia: he would ask Al Quaida to destroy MAE East in Virgina. Problem is that someone else might get the same idea.
Can someone please explain to this egocentric man that if you treat others badly it will come back to haunt you sooner or later?
You can only build a "new world order" if countries start to treat each other in a civilized way. As long as the US thinks that it can do what it wants there will be lots of frustrated people who turn into terrorists.
There are a lot of reasons why people don't use manuals and FAQs. Think of: lazyness, not being able to understand it, difficult to find your way, no manual can answer all questions. "What is the smartest way to do this" is a typical question where a manual usually doesn't help.
If you have a newsgroup users can exchange experiences and the maintainer of the software needs only to jump in when the users can't help each other.
Unfortunately Fink doesn't have a newsgroup. It only has a mailing list. This has a much higher threshold. Many people are prepared to share their knowledge. But they want it at their time and speed. The don't like to be spammed by a mailing list when they are busy with something else.
In such way Pfisterer could have kept the users at a bigger distance and spent more time programming.
Please read a book about how business competition was going a century ago in the US. If you like the Borg on StarTrek you will like it. Big companies used every trick they could think of to subdue the small companies and usually to buy them. Think of bribing their suppliers no longer to supply them, selling to their customers at a loss and filing phony lawsuits.
If this is the kind of civilization you want to live in please go to the Antarctic. Most people in the rest of the world don't want it.
Re:Sourceforge has yet to compete with Bugzilla
on
SourceForge Drifting
·
· Score: 1
Seems you are out of luck with the Glimse license. See here:
http://www.arco.de/~kj/harvest/glimpse-license-s ta tus
- record companies are be obliged to put digital ID tags on their CD's. New CD's have no claim on digital copyright when they don't carry this kind of ID.
- the RIAA is forced to offer a kind of Gracenote like service. Music not covered under this service is free of digital copyright.
The RIAA or some other organisation starts a digital service where you can register the mp3's and other music you download or burn on a CD. This is then charged on a monthly bill.
We get software to register our mp3s. Both when we only download them and when we burn them on a CD. Of course such software is optional. You don't want to pay for bad downloads or for CDs that have to be reburned because the first version was not good enough.
Now honest people have a workable system with which they can pay their copyright.
Let's do this first and lets see what happens. Dealing with dishonest people can always be done at a later time...
I miss any figures. It is difficult to talk about money when Commander Taco only talks about it in general terms. Would it be possible to be a bit more specific? For example: how many people have a job at Slashdot?
The big square advertisings that Taco wants to add puzzle me. The homepage has a format where such adds would destroy the layout. And the pages with the comments are simply too big for such advertisement to have much effect.
Sure, creating public domain music has become very difficult:
- each song has at least 3 rightsholders: the performer, the songwriter and the composer of the music. Often a record company is the fourth.
- IP right laws have been modified so that it will take decades before some music will become public domain.
However: there are hunderds of thousands of music groups in the world. Most of them perform do it for the fun. They perform a few times a year and they may have a self-published CD - but they don't make money on it. A lot of these groups would love to make some of there music freely available.
There has been a website that devoted itself to publishing free music (I can't remember the name) but they had to shut down. However, as internet becomes cheaper at some day free music will become a factor.
All this nice stuff (fingerprint, DNA, retinal scan, heat signature, photo recognition) is still so immature high tech that even high security military sites don't use them.
For patents you have a system where you pay each year the patent is valid and as the years pass you pay more and more pro year. (at least that's how it works here in Holland)
I would like to see a similar system for copy rights. That would at least bring the big majority of it into public domain.
The advantage of war is that the governments finally put state interests above private interests. No longer can thousands of patent holders retard the development of technology.
If you look around you will see the same happening as in the thirties: there is a lot of promising technology around but it is either too big for private enterprise, they have conflicting interests or patents make that it is only for a few companies interesting to develop for this technology.
See for example:
- interactive TV: 100s of patents make that only a few companies invest in this area any more (Microsoft/TiVo is one of them).
- broadband internet: telecom companies aren't very interested to develop this. Cable has a bit more interest. But both are united in their resistance against "fiber to the home" and other initiatives that completely overhaul technology.
- biotech. It has been restarted recently by the free technology of the Human Genome Project. But it will only take some time before patents start to slow it down again.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't agree.
I remember that before that time NT was busted in the press because is was too slow.
Microsoft made the guess that the small decrease in stability was less important than the comfort of the increase in speed. They were right: NT 4.0 was the first real popular NT and it still was generally eveluated as stable.
Of course this is not the theoretical ideal. But hey!, we live in a real world - not a theoretical one.
I think it works fine as long as it stays in the US military. You can always see it as one big organisation that has the source somewhere.
Problems may arise when you want to export a submarine to Saudi Arabia (or whereever). GPL requires you to give them the source...
They are wrong:
Napster and its clones are the most important reason to choose broadband.
So fighting them obstructs broadband.
Are you listening, mr Hollings?
I agree with Lessig.
On the long term you may be right: copyright may become difficult to enforce when everyone has a 100mb connection to the internet.
But why should we bother too much about tomorrows problems when we have todays to solve. Napster is just as the player pianos a new service that gives a big improvement over what was available. The legislator should interfere as it is obvious that leaving it to the industry and the judges may take many years before a final agreement is reached.
The real unknown is how many people will choose for the legal version and how many will stick with the illegal file exchanges. Nobody knows. But if you find a solution where most people choose a legal exchange you have will have the moral clout to pursue the illegal minority.
I think it will take some time for the music industry to find the right formula (pricing; how to deal with rare recordings; international aspects; other languages). But let's start with putting them on the right track and stop them from their senseless obstructive policies.
Outlook is such a mess that every beginning VB programmer with a bit of fantasy can write a virus. Usually that kind of people is very astonished when they get worldwide headlines and are said to have caused many millions of dollars damage.
You can't frighten this kind of people. They see themselves as kids playing a bit around and they think that writing virusses is something done by nerds who know all Windows API's and protocols(including the secret ones).
Somehow someday Microsoft will become stricter too. Only then is there a chance that we can stop virusses (or at least make them rare).
At the moment we get every other day a new story about Al Qaeda plans. Just think up some new story and you will find yourself on the headlines of all big newspapers. The next story will probably be that Bin Laden has his men in the US Army and the CIA.
Lets just ignore those stories until they go away!
See http://www.mp3newswire.net/stories/2001/panasonicm p3.html
The marginal cost of reproducing software is zero. So one should expect that the cost of software will come down to zero. It is just a basic economic law.
The only way that software companies can prevent this is by constant improvements (=new versions). The moment they stop innovating they are roadkill.
The reasons why people make opensource software actually don't matter very much. IBM does it because it is cheaper in the long run than buying Microsoft software. Some companies give their software as open source because that makes it cheaper to maintain. For some individuals (systemadministrators and programmers) it is part of their job. Some people do it just for the fun. And if you look at complicated software that runs in the background (as the researchers do) you may find many academics.
Just for those who didn't read the text:
They had a similar thing in Spain (150 km south of Madrid) between 1982 and 1989. It had had some funding problems and for that reason was built on the cheap. As a consequence it collapsed in 1989 in a storm. It had a capacity of 50KW.
The idea is that:
- you have a big greenhouse that collects the sun and generates hot air.
- you send that air into a very high chimney because the air at a high altitude is colder so you can get more energy
- closed water basins in the greenhouses store the heat for the night so that you can generate electricity at night too
The biggest problem seems to me that the technology has not been tested very much. Scaling from 50KW to 200MW is quite a big step. And the quoted prices seem to have a lot of variation depending on the article that you read.
Dublin, when I hear you rambling I would guess that your dad is a patent lawyer. I will try some correction:
Software is a great example that patents are not necessary to create a great industry. Sofware had it fastest growth before software patents became the fashion of the day. Both Microsoft and Oracle had until recently very few patents. And even now they seem to use their software patents only defensively.
There exist some studies about the effects of patents on the speed of innovation. In industries where inventions are not related (for example drugs) they have a positive effect on innovation. But in industries where inventions are accumulative (for example software) they have a negative effect on innovation.
Some other examples where patents had negative effects:
- WAP: it blocked further innovations that would have been more appreciated by the market.
- digital and internet TV: only a very select group of companies is active of this market. Most companies prefer to leave this legal minefield to others.
This isn't about punishment. It is about intimidating the rest of the Arab world. Somalia is just the perfect scapegoat: uncle Sam had some scores to settle there anyway.
If you read the US Government info you will see:
"-- Al Barakaat's founder, Shaykh Ahme Nur Jimale, is closely linked to Usama bin Laden. He has used Al Barakaat's 60 offices in Somalia and 127 offices abroad to transmit funds, intelligence and instructions to terrorist cells.".
Sounds to be me like ATT and the Western Union are guilty too: they did the same thing.
There is a lot of support for Bin Laden in the Islamic world so I would be surprised if there weren't some homepages that supported Bin Laden. Similarly there is a lot of money collection by radical groups: so the biggest money transfer company will handle some of that money.
The real message from Bush is to all the other Arabic countries: if you allow any supporter of Bin Laden to speak out or to collect money we will get at your throat.
BTW: you are wrong with "the terrorists taking a cut of all transfers". The government report doesn't say anything like that.
Really. I just remember that the US government gave some american companies a part of the spectrum and when they wanted to take it away they couldn't.
We live in a civilization full of laws that protect the weak against arbitrary decisions from the strong. So you can not take it away unless you place them outside the law.
From what we know from Bush we can easily predict what he would do if he was in the position of the leaders of Somalia: he would ask Al Quaida to destroy MAE East in Virgina. Problem is that someone else might get the same idea.
Can someone please explain to this egocentric man that if you treat others badly it will come back to haunt you sooner or later?
You can only build a "new world order" if countries start to treat each other in a civilized way. As long as the US thinks that it can do what it wants there will be lots of frustrated people who turn into terrorists.
The Sourceforge unmaintained page that ebbe mentioned is also know as unmaintained-free-software.
There are a lot of reasons why people don't use manuals and FAQs. Think of: lazyness, not being able to understand it, difficult to find your way, no manual can answer all questions. "What is the smartest way to do this" is a typical question where a manual usually doesn't help.
If you have a newsgroup users can exchange experiences and the maintainer of the software needs only to jump in when the users can't help each other.
Unfortunately Fink doesn't have a newsgroup. It only has a mailing list. This has a much higher threshold. Many people are prepared to share their knowledge. But they want it at their time and speed. The don't like to be spammed by a mailing list when they are busy with something else.
In such way Pfisterer could have kept the users at a bigger distance and spent more time programming.
They have done more than add 128 bits WEP. 128 bits WEP is still easy to crack.
But Apple has added Radius and a firewall too. See their FAQ at http://www.apple.com/airport/faq/.
Please read a book about how business competition was going a century ago in the US. If you like the Borg on StarTrek you will like it. Big companies used every trick they could think of to subdue the small companies and usually to buy them. Think of bribing their suppliers no longer to supply them, selling to their customers at a loss and filing phony lawsuits.
If this is the kind of civilization you want to live in please go to the Antarctic. Most people in the rest of the world don't want it.
Seems you are out of luck with the Glimse license. See here:s ta tus
http://www.arco.de/~kj/harvest/glimpse-license-
My favourite system would be:
- record companies are be obliged to put digital ID tags on their CD's. New CD's have no claim on digital copyright when they don't carry this kind of ID.
- the RIAA is forced to offer a kind of Gracenote like service. Music not covered under this service is free of digital copyright.
The RIAA or some other organisation starts a digital service where you can register the mp3's and other music you download or burn on a CD. This is then charged on a monthly bill.
We get software to register our mp3s. Both when we only download them and when we burn them on a CD. Of course such software is optional. You don't want to pay for bad downloads or for CDs that have to be reburned because the first version was not good enough.
Now honest people have a workable system with which they can pay their copyright.
Let's do this first and lets see what happens. Dealing with dishonest people can always be done at a later time...
Instead of www.eurorights.org you can better look at uk.eurorights.org. The site of the UK branch is much more developped as the central site.
I miss any figures. It is difficult to talk about money when Commander Taco only talks about it in general terms. Would it be possible to be a bit more specific? For example: how many people have a job at Slashdot?
The big square advertisings that Taco wants to add puzzle me. The homepage has a format where such adds would destroy the layout. And the pages with the comments are simply too big for such advertisement to have much effect.
Sure, creating public domain music has become very difficult:
- each song has at least 3 rightsholders: the performer, the songwriter and the composer of the music. Often a record company is the fourth.
- IP right laws have been modified so that it will take decades before some music will become public domain.
However: there are hunderds of thousands of music groups in the world. Most of them perform do it for the fun. They perform a few times a year and they may have a self-published CD - but they don't make money on it. A lot of these groups would love to make some of there music freely available.
There has been a website that devoted itself to publishing free music (I can't remember the name) but they had to shut down. However, as internet becomes cheaper at some day free music will become a factor.
Dream on boy!
All this nice stuff (fingerprint, DNA, retinal scan, heat signature, photo recognition) is still so immature high tech that even high security military sites don't use them.
I would like to see a similar system for copy rights. That would at least bring the big majority of it into public domain.
If you look around you will see the same happening as in the thirties: there is a lot of promising technology around but it is either too big for private enterprise, they have conflicting interests or patents make that it is only for a few companies interesting to develop for this technology.
See for example:
- interactive TV: 100s of patents make that only a few companies invest in this area any more (Microsoft/TiVo is one of them).
- broadband internet: telecom companies aren't very interested to develop this. Cable has a bit more interest. But both are united in their resistance against "fiber to the home" and other initiatives that completely overhaul technology.
- biotech. It has been restarted recently by the free technology of the Human Genome Project. But it will only take some time before patents start to slow it down again.