Well, technically you're refering to the lack of a license, not a "non-liberal" license.
In any case, only the layout is unlicensed. Ripping the CD as an ISO and reburning it is something you're not given permission to do, so you can't do it. However, copying the files, which are all licensed under Free Software and Open Source compliant licenses, is perfectly legal.
And even if this wasn't true, and once receiving the CD you aren't allowed to redistribute the content, which you are, because Theo doesn't have any say in the matter (he wouldn't be able to distribute any of the copylefted content if that were the case), you can obtain the same software from the same source anyway in Free Software form.
So it's a great example. Someone's selling free software. The only aspects that are "unfree" are largely cosmetic and irrelevent to the discussion of whether you can, usefully, sell free software or not.
Stallman explicitly states that he things that open source should be sold for money.
Well, two nit-picks. One is that RMS probably wouldn't use the word "should". ie there's no obligation to sell free software, he just believes people should have the right, legally and morally, to do so.
The second is that RMS doesn't use the term "open source" to describe "free software". Both are, in practice, loaded terms. Free Software is associated with an ideology RMS himself identifies (and is identified) with strongly. It has baggage in terms of being associated with the right to modify and/or redistribute software you've been given. By comparison, Open Source has baggage too - it's generally associated with the superiority of a development model where anyone can contribute, and the movement to sell this development model to businesses and other professional software developers in the hope it'll encourage the creation of free software. You may feel (and a lot of people would agree with you) that this is a trivial distinction when both, ultimately, refer to software that can be freely modified and redistributed, but RMS is as interested in the baggage as he is the destination, and as such he would distance himself from any comment implying any view of "open source" and what it should be.
What would stop me from purchasing a copy of the software for sale, change a byte or two, call it derivate work, and sell it for a lower price?
Nothing. In fact, you wouldn't even need to modify it. And some people actually fund the development of their Free Software projects by selling copies of their programs with licenses even more liberal than RMS proposes, and do so successfully. OpenBSD uses CD sales as one of a range of funding sources, with grants and gifts from concerned parties who want OpenBSD to provide them with the features they need to be developed. This is actually something the Free Software Foundation used to do with GNU, they'd sell tapes for several hundred dollars containing the latest versions. With the Internet, that became less useful (and not worth several hundred dollars to most people), but for a time it was a good source of funding.
I had a bunch of problems related to the iTunes 4 -> iTunes 5 -> iTunes 6 "upgrade". iTunes no longer sent half my music to my iPod (actually, a little more than that), and I found I couldn't play stuff in one room that played fine on the other. The thing kept coming up with requesters announcing I needed to register that particular machine and log in to iTunes. I had. It asked me again. Infinite loop. Why? Well, one machine had iTunes 5, and the other 6, and I originally had iTunes 4.
At no point did it actually say something sane along the lines of "This music file that you downloaded needs iTunes 6 or later", or "The reason why I can't copy this music to your iPod is you ripped it with iTunes 5 but I want you to upgrade the firmware on your iPod before I'll let you transfer this music because, like, it will not work or something."
There's a combination of problems there, related to at least the upgrade of the FairTunes crap (which I didn't know about until I Googled for it), to something else that presumably changed otherwise it'd have been quite happy to at least copy ripped music across to the iPod. For all Apple's supposed skills at UI management, their inability to come up with a meaningful explanation for why something went wrong and how to fix it is something I find all too frequent. Why is it protesting that I haven't logged in with my Apple ID when I just did, and when iTunes seems quite happy to acknowledge that fact? Why doesn't it tell me why I can't copy music to my iPod? Why do I get the feeling that the iPod firmware upgrade was 90% about fucking Real and their customers, rather than providing features I want? (It might be because of the way Software Update would ignore my requests to have it ignore the iPod update that included the "Screw Real" hack until the next iPod update came out.)
And why does my second generation iPod suddenly have a crappy battery life and an extra level of menus (Playlists is no longer the first option on the main menu, though I can "customise it" but if I do so and want the Music menu, the Music menu ends up being the first option. Great job Apple!) now I've done the firmware upgrade?
I don't think Apple is a great implementor of DRM. I think they suck less than Microsoft, and they theoretically have given users some freedom in the sense that we can burn a CD, but they're constantly playing a game of updates and upgrades to spoil the ability of competitors to interoperate with their technologies, and they're incompetent - utterly incompetent - when it comes to "managing the user experience" for anyone who is doing anything but the crudest "Always run the latest version of everything on one machine" drone.
I made a mistake recently thinking I might have been over the top in rejecting iTMS some time ago, the results of buying three songs (and upgrading iTunes to play them) were a lot of pain in the arse debugging and software management. Not again.
Depends on whether the discussion revolves around what ICANN does, or whether an unaccountable US corporation should have this power instead of, say, the ITU.
If the former, then yeah, the cries are usually of "They're useless! Get rid of them!"
If the latter, then it's suddenly "How dare they attack a great American institution! This is clearly a communist plot! I've been on hte intraweb now for 60 years, and I've never heard anyone suggest ICANN does anything but an excellent job!"
Disclaimer: I think ICANN's removal of the "At Large" constituent put the final nail in its coffin as far as legitimacy and legality goes. It's wrong. It should have been disbanded a long time ago. I really don't give a crap whether it thinks someone should be able to register "a.com".
Something friends with PVRs have told me is they ended up watching a lot less TV once they started using one, so it doesn't quite work the way you're describing. A real anti-TV advocate could probably take advantage of the situation and slowly reduce the number of programmes it records, reducing the addict's dependency upon TV, until eventually it starts ordering books via Amazon.com, playing classical music, and generally improving the welfare and outlook of the user.
TV addiction is a fairly serious problem in modern society, and I suspect it has much to do with the dumbing down of much of what we take for granted today. Like nicotine, it's addictive to the vast majority of people who take it. Like alcohol, the addicts have a tendency to justify their usage by claiming they're leading a relatively normal, oftentimes "successful", life and that they could turn off the TV at any time if they wished. But just as alcohol kills braincells, TV has a direct affect on the brain, by atrophying those parts that involve creativity. The stereotypical "couch potato" is no myth, a non-interactive medium that promotes consumption and eliminates free thought inevitably results in viewers with li[tt]le incentive to move from their seats.
I suspect when politicians talk about fast-tracking the move towards HDTV, much of this has to do with trying to make a few clean breaks. By making television more expensive to possess, and content more expensive to produce, television may start to be priced out of existance. Meanwhile, the content industry is moving towards pay-per-view models, starting with DVD compilations of TV shows. This suggests they "get it" - they're seeing the anti-tobacco/anti-gun lawsuits, and getting the solutions in now, while there's still time. Simply saying "We're doing this for your own good" isn't going to cut it - it opens the entertainment industry up for lawsuits, and politicians get criticised for being patronising and "anti-TV", in much the same way as your original comment was flamed by at least one clearly hooked TV addict.
PVRs are certainly a move in the right direction. And, y'know, we don't have to get rid of TV. We just need to control it. Alcohol in moderation isn't harmful. Neither should TV be the same. Getting people to the state where they watch, say, an hour of TV a couple of times a week, is certainly a reasonable goal. TV doesn't have to be abolished altogether.
The average American watches 3,000 ads per day on TV
Given an average 30 seconds per ad, that's, what, 25 hours a day of advertising? How the hell are they achieving that? Especially if they're only watching 28 hours of TV a week. I note the phrasing is "watching", but it's hard to believe even if the word is changed to "looking" (eg including print media, billboards, etc.)
Yeah, I know, PBS says it. But you can't believe everything you watch on TV.
Superman is a Candian CARICATURE of "truth, justice and the American way". Representing him as anything else is intellectually dishonest.
Oh, come on. Even if we take this at face value (and it's nonsense as is, Superman has been implemented by a variety of artists over time, few of whom were Canadian), it's intellectually dishonest to pretend that because the primary source was Canadian, that doesn't mean Superman isn't seen the world over as a representation of "Truth, Justice, and the American Way". Only the most insular American would argue that Superman isn't an icon of America on that basis. Superman is as much a symbol of America as the (French) Statue of Liberty.
No. This is completely wrong, and displays a serious misunderstanding of Superman as a character.
He does not do "what's determined to be good by the establishment" and in fact, his personal convictions clashing with the establishment is often used as a major plot device.
That's completely irrelevent to anything I was saying. I wasn't talking about the fictional establishment, hell, with Lex Luthor being the "establishment" - the most powerful business leader, the most corrupt politician, etc - in much of the material, it would be hard for him not to clash with the fictional establishment. Superman is, however, recurringly (at least, in popular culture) an embodiment of the values of the actual establishment. I gave examples.
You're clearly not a fan, or else you'd realize how far from the truth your observations are.
You're clearly not looking at the broader picture. The central issue, the one the GGP was taking issue with, was the notion that Superman is an embodiment of American imperialism. It doesn't frankly matter, in that context, that in Superman Comics Issue No 47 Superman fights an evil corporation that's trying to bust a union, forcably converting it into a worker's cooperative, elevating the leader of Local 399 to Mayorial candidate. The popular media, the cartoons, the TV shows and movies, the way Superman is exposed to the majority of people, as opposed to a bunch of geeks, is of an embodiment of America. Superman is America, just as MacDonalds, Coca-Cola, and the Statue of Liberty is America. The latter is an embodiment of the good in America, of Freedom for all, of what America sees itself as. But don't assume that Superman is also seen the world over like that. He's been used too often as a propaganda vehicle, and even outside of that is too much of a clean cut, do-no-wrong, type of character to be seen purely in terms of what's actually good.
I'm sorry, but I don't understand your comment. Why do you think I don't know what side the Japanese were on? And what does the fact the US killed a ton of Japanese soldiers have to do with anything?
I've a gut feeling your knee jerked at something you thought I wrote or implied, and I'd be curious to know what you think I was saying, as I can't respond to your comment in any useful way as is.
I'm not sure the fact his creator was Canadian is much of an issue when Superman stands for "Truth, Justice, and the American Way".
I've seen the original films, plus one or two of the cartoons, and some of the recent Lois and Clark TV series. I don't think there's a consistancy beyond a few basic axioms such as generally doing what's determined to be good by the establishment of the day. In a cartoon I saw on one of those "compilation of PD cartoons" you can get for a dollar at Big Lots (my SO and I are big Loony Tunes fans, this had a bunch of them, Popeye, and a bunch of deservedly obscurer pieces), he was killing (yeah, you heard that right) Japanese soldiers to help with the war effort. In the movie series, it was a general fight against crime, as it seemed to be, for the most part, with the TV programmes.
Is he a manifestation of American imperialism? In the sense that his image and values are tied to the US establishment, yes. The GP is right in saying that America's appearance of imperialism is especially unpopular right now. It'd be interesting to see if the new movie emphasises that aspect of him, and if so how it fares.
While I generally agree that you'd end up with something more practical (faster, less likely to break - or at least, less likely for it to be a problem if the binary breaks, on a CPU upgrade) if you write it in C, it's a bit of an exaggeration to say it'd take months vs half a day doing it in assembler vs doing it in C. As long as you think in a high level, and attempt to program with elegance coming before clock-cycle counting, assembler programming can be tremendously quick, once you're in the mindset.
The big issue is that assembler code doesn't have a lot going for it, so most people who program it these days do it for the extremes where nothing else will do - the glue to start a C program, that kind of thing. Worse still, a lot of it is device driver code designed by people who really aren't programmers. It's hard to find good assembler code in the 2000s. Those of us who were programming Motorola 68xxx code in the 1980s though know elegant, readable, maintainable, well structured, assembler code, generated no more slowly than stuff in C isn't impossible. As it's not as maintainable as the equivalent in C, nor as portable, nor as fast, it's just not worth doing any more.
With a commercial, Free Software, distribution, at worse you can support yourself too.
With a commercial, proprietary, distribution, at worse you can... erm, jump ship. You don't have the option of supporting yourself. So if you can't jump ship because you're tied to whatever platform it is, you're screwed.
As long as the OS is under the GPL, or some other Free Software license, there's absolutely NO REASON to avoid one-person outfits. If the maintainer bows out, at worst you can support yourself, and in practice there will always be a sizable community ready to join in for all but the most obscure systems. The nearest thing there is to a problem amongst free software enthusiasts is that many have an aversion to forking, but there's no reason for that, especially when a distribution no longer has a maintainer.
While there are a lot of vanity distributions, it's also true that most of the innovation has started with individuals saying "This just doesn't work for me, how can I do this in a better way?" Slackware, for instance, had the first "packages" as we'd recognize them today (ironically, because of the work Debian and RedHat did to fix the flaws in Slackware's original model, there's a lot of people now who think it doesn't have packages at all. However, the concept of breaking up the install into packages of specific applications and bundles of tools and related files, with the user installing by saying "I want this, this, this, not that, this, this..." (etc) was something that originated with Slackware); Libranet is clearly popular (as this thread shows) with people who've used it who saw it as the first time someone had actually come up with a GNU/Linux distribution easy enough for them to understand.
I agree with you about proprietary operating systems. That's why I wouldn't touch, say, SkyOS with a ten foot pole. But GNU licensed Free Software? Why the hell not? What do I have to lose?
1. People like wireless. They're doing networking now and do not want to be dragging cables around their homes.
2. 802.11a does not use the same frequencies as b and g, and has more spectrum. Unfortunately, the wireless manufacturers aren't promoting it, but even if the complaint above - that there are only three distinct bands and therefore you can't have more than three networks in one place - was actually true, it is an actual solution.
3. The complaint noted by the article is false. While it is true that there are only three distinct, non-overlapping, slices of spectrum allocated for 802.11b and g, you can have more than one network using the same slice of spectrum, at the cost of efficiency and speed. It is not the case that having a network on, say, bands 1-4 suddenly means that no other networks can use that spectrum, either theoretically or practically. The more networks run on those bands, the poorer performance will be, that's all. In reality, the chances of the performance decrease being so bad that it actually makes more of a difference than your DSL's bandwidth is relatively low, especially in the US where 1.5Mbps is considered a really good connection.
So, to recap. Wireless works. It could be more efficient, but as sold, currently, it's more than up to the task. The proof of the pudding is that people are actually going out there and setting up their own wireless networks, and keeping them. We're not facing any real problems yet.
Off-topic, but to rescue my karma before I'm accused of siding with the studios here:
You know, there's nothing particularly wrong with siding with them when they're right. As the most obvious example, most of us side with any studio that comes out with a good movie on whether or not they should be able to create a good movie.
Even on the more controvertial issue of copyright infringement, and content producer's attempts to control it: the studios trying to stamp out piracy isn't a bad thing by itself, piracy reduces revenues which means either less movies get created and/or those of us who actually buy movies pay more. It only becomes wrong when the systems promoted are unacceptable. CSS encoding is evil. Hollywood asking Bram Cohen to do what he can reasonably do to prevent a portal under his control being used to redistribute their content without authorization most certainly isn't unacceptable.
I often get the feeling that many on Slashdot feel you must take one side or another in terms of the people, not the issues. The issues are what matter.
In the early days, Altavista used to be exactly that. Then came the spammers, the abusers, the people who deliberately formatted and worded their websites in order to get irrelevent hits on Altavista.
Kind of like Google. Google today feels like Altavista did when everyone switched to Google. Oh, sure, for many types of search, Google comes up with good, relevent, answers. The same's true of AV though.
How? I mean, for a time their results were slightly better than everyone else's, but even that changed over time as the search engine "optimizers" ceased optimizing for Altavista/Yahoo/et-al, and switched to Google. Nine times out of ten, when I do a search, unless it's VERY obscure and has perfect keywords, I get misleading advertising sites as the vast majority of early entries.
Google didn't revolutionise searching. They had a temporary advantage, as all new search engines do, of using an algorithm that was new and hence not exploited yet. They also had a lot of good-will from the community because of their choices of technologies, public "No evil" stance, and sane commitment to remove clutter from their front page. Since then, most of the tools they've introduced have been rehashes of services everyone else have already done, only with a little more thought and the benefit of hindsight. About the only exception I can think of is Google Groups, and that's only because they bought it.
I like Google, but they're hardly the greatest, most innovative, company that ever walked the Earth. They owe their success to the experiences of Yahoo and Altavista, with a little recognition that hitting people over the head with advertising all the time is not a good idea.
I recall reading somewhere that iTunes actually uses QuickTime, there's no WebKit/HTML in iTunes.
On occasion, I've been bored enough to comb through my Squid proxy logs for precisely this kind of thing, and curl'd URLs to see exactly what it uses. It's some sort of XML system, but it's not HTML, and I don't see them rendering it with an HTML renderer.
It's possible the rest of your comment is true, though I'd assume this would make the hack more of a QuickTime-in-general issue rather than something limited to iTunes.
I'm not sure your "Supply and Demand" thing actually countered his point (which, I assume, was based upon the notion that greed - asking for far more than what you need - is generally considered immoral.) Supply and Demand is a set of economic laws (frequently misunderstood, I might add.)
It's a little like saying "How is it immoral to shoot someone? It's basic physics, the bullet will be displaced and have its velocity vector altered by the explosion of gunpowder."
This is veering off-topic. I'm not saying I agree or disagree with the GP, but I didn't like your counterpoint.
I would assume the point is to provide quality radio stations that would otherwise be unavailable to consumers without XM/Sirius receivers. Remember - FM radio in America sucks. It's not difficult to better it. If the price is low enough, people will sign up.
The real question is not "What's the point?" but "Is this a viable package?", and everything I've read on this deal has essentially had so much missing it's impossible to say. IF Cingular doesn't plan to charge people 3c/kilobyte or at their absurd mMode/MediaNET rates (which pretty much precludes listening to a 64kbps stream - supposedly MP3Pro is "FM quality" at that rate - for more than a few minutes), and IF cellphones are provided with easy stereo-out (which might just mean an adapter for the headset socket), then it's almost a reasonable idea. People currently considering XM/Sirius may be tempted, as theoretically the form factor is more practical.
Until Cingular does more than waffle about it in press-releases, it's hard to tell what they're actually selling.
My guess is that Apple will initiate a full blown holocaust of the streaming music function, locking the entire feature in a shower room and turning on the gas. It'll probably fly two hijacked airliners into the twin-towers of MP3 and streaming technologies, effectively acting as if it had dropped two nuclear devices, one on the city of MP3s, the other on streaming technologies just to prove the point it can make more than one in an effort to make streaming radio surrender. It'll be devastating - once the levees have been breached by Hurricane Apple, MP3 and streaming technologies will, essentially, be trapped in their attics, unable to escape the rising waters.
Patents are inherently unfair, worse, in many ways, than a lottery. In a lottery, the "winner" walks off without major damage to the losers, who all knew that someone would walk off with the cash before they got involved. In patents, the winner actively harms the losers by far more than a dollar, preventing them from producing and selling products if the winner desires, and without the losers ever realising they were playing a game to begin with.
Remember: the key feature of a patent, the thing that sets it apart from copyrights, is that it's possible to infringe even though you were never aware of the patent, never aware of the patent holder's development or design before you designed yours, even you you, yourself, without help from anyone, developed the product that ended up infringing. You do not have to copy something to infringe. You can independently invent something, and because it turns out to be a similar design to a patented design you had never heard of, you will be infringing.
That's why they're unfair. Why do we have them? Because sometimes the "race" is necessary to spur invention. But in the midst of implementing that principle, we forgot why we were implementing them and thought, wrongly, that they're fair after all, that it's legitimate to apply them to practically anything. We made a mistake in letting patents be universal across inventions, rather than restricting them to specific inventions society had deemed, through elected representatives or otherwise, especially important and urgent. We made a huge mistake in letting patents transcend inventions and go into programming and business practices coupled with that universality.
Patents need to be thrown out. If we want to reward inventors using a "First to invent" scheme, let's do it fairly, and introduce competitions and bonuses for specific, named, inventions that are generally wanted. The X-Prize was a reasonable idea. An eighteen-year monopoly on space wouldn't be. Those who promote patents think the latter would be more legitimate, reasonable, and required, than the former.
For a portable handheld device? Yes, wireless is everything. The moment you wire it to something, the moment it loses the ability to be a portable handheld device.
Why buy it otherwise? It's not a good desktop PC. It's not a good laptop. It's cheap, but if it's going to be chained to a keyboard, mouse, or mass storage device, then there are cheaper, more powerful, alternatives.
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I understand that, but you didn't talk about the 770 as being a device that needs lots of peripherals, but as the phone being a peripheral. If it's only the phone, why are master-USB ports on the 770 needed?
If your point is that the 770 is a hub that would use various devices, that didn't come across in your original comment. Moreover, I disagree with that. The 770 is a portable tablet device. There's a limit to the types of device you'd want to interact with it when it's on the move (right now, a cellphone is the only thing I can think of.) This is not a device that it would be sane or rational to plug a keyboard or mouse into, or a storage box, or anything similar. Once you do any of these things, you lose the portability. Once you lose the portability, you're looking at an underpowered PC that competes unfavourably with a $200 Wal*Mart box.
Why would it need USB master ports if it can communicate with the phone via Bluetooth?
I've used Bluetooth to go online using my Motorola V635, Apple PowerBook, and a T-Mobile account. It's just another form of dial-up networking (albeit with some wierd looking scripts if you want to use GPRS/EDGE) The cool aspect is they (the phone and book) only need to be in range of one another after the first time the thing has been set up. The phone can sit in my pocket as usual.
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In any case, only the layout is unlicensed. Ripping the CD as an ISO and reburning it is something you're not given permission to do, so you can't do it. However, copying the files, which are all licensed under Free Software and Open Source compliant licenses, is perfectly legal.
And even if this wasn't true, and once receiving the CD you aren't allowed to redistribute the content, which you are, because Theo doesn't have any say in the matter (he wouldn't be able to distribute any of the copylefted content if that were the case), you can obtain the same software from the same source anyway in Free Software form.
So it's a great example. Someone's selling free software. The only aspects that are "unfree" are largely cosmetic and irrelevent to the discussion of whether you can, usefully, sell free software or not.
The second is that RMS doesn't use the term "open source" to describe "free software". Both are, in practice, loaded terms. Free Software is associated with an ideology RMS himself identifies (and is identified) with strongly. It has baggage in terms of being associated with the right to modify and/or redistribute software you've been given. By comparison, Open Source has baggage too - it's generally associated with the superiority of a development model where anyone can contribute, and the movement to sell this development model to businesses and other professional software developers in the hope it'll encourage the creation of free software. You may feel (and a lot of people would agree with you) that this is a trivial distinction when both, ultimately, refer to software that can be freely modified and redistributed, but RMS is as interested in the baggage as he is the destination, and as such he would distance himself from any comment implying any view of "open source" and what it should be.
Nothing. In fact, you wouldn't even need to modify it. And some people actually fund the development of their Free Software projects by selling copies of their programs with licenses even more liberal than RMS proposes, and do so successfully. OpenBSD uses CD sales as one of a range of funding sources, with grants and gifts from concerned parties who want OpenBSD to provide them with the features they need to be developed. This is actually something the Free Software Foundation used to do with GNU, they'd sell tapes for several hundred dollars containing the latest versions. With the Internet, that became less useful (and not worth several hundred dollars to most people), but for a time it was a good source of funding.At no point did it actually say something sane along the lines of "This music file that you downloaded needs iTunes 6 or later", or "The reason why I can't copy this music to your iPod is you ripped it with iTunes 5 but I want you to upgrade the firmware on your iPod before I'll let you transfer this music because, like, it will not work or something."
There's a combination of problems there, related to at least the upgrade of the FairTunes crap (which I didn't know about until I Googled for it), to something else that presumably changed otherwise it'd have been quite happy to at least copy ripped music across to the iPod. For all Apple's supposed skills at UI management, their inability to come up with a meaningful explanation for why something went wrong and how to fix it is something I find all too frequent. Why is it protesting that I haven't logged in with my Apple ID when I just did, and when iTunes seems quite happy to acknowledge that fact? Why doesn't it tell me why I can't copy music to my iPod? Why do I get the feeling that the iPod firmware upgrade was 90% about fucking Real and their customers, rather than providing features I want? (It might be because of the way Software Update would ignore my requests to have it ignore the iPod update that included the "Screw Real" hack until the next iPod update came out.)
And why does my second generation iPod suddenly have a crappy battery life and an extra level of menus (Playlists is no longer the first option on the main menu, though I can "customise it" but if I do so and want the Music menu, the Music menu ends up being the first option. Great job Apple!) now I've done the firmware upgrade?
I don't think Apple is a great implementor of DRM. I think they suck less than Microsoft, and they theoretically have given users some freedom in the sense that we can burn a CD, but they're constantly playing a game of updates and upgrades to spoil the ability of competitors to interoperate with their technologies, and they're incompetent - utterly incompetent - when it comes to "managing the user experience" for anyone who is doing anything but the crudest "Always run the latest version of everything on one machine" drone.
I made a mistake recently thinking I might have been over the top in rejecting iTMS some time ago, the results of buying three songs (and upgrading iTunes to play them) were a lot of pain in the arse debugging and software management. Not again.
If the former, then yeah, the cries are usually of "They're useless! Get rid of them!"
If the latter, then it's suddenly "How dare they attack a great American institution! This is clearly a communist plot! I've been on hte intraweb now for 60 years, and I've never heard anyone suggest ICANN does anything but an excellent job!"
Disclaimer: I think ICANN's removal of the "At Large" constituent put the final nail in its coffin as far as legitimacy and legality goes. It's wrong. It should have been disbanded a long time ago. I really don't give a crap whether it thinks someone should be able to register "a.com".
TV addiction is a fairly serious problem in modern society, and I suspect it has much to do with the dumbing down of much of what we take for granted today. Like nicotine, it's addictive to the vast majority of people who take it. Like alcohol, the addicts have a tendency to justify their usage by claiming they're leading a relatively normal, oftentimes "successful", life and that they could turn off the TV at any time if they wished. But just as alcohol kills braincells, TV has a direct affect on the brain, by atrophying those parts that involve creativity. The stereotypical "couch potato" is no myth, a non-interactive medium that promotes consumption and eliminates free thought inevitably results in viewers with li[tt]le incentive to move from their seats.
I suspect when politicians talk about fast-tracking the move towards HDTV, much of this has to do with trying to make a few clean breaks. By making television more expensive to possess, and content more expensive to produce, television may start to be priced out of existance. Meanwhile, the content industry is moving towards pay-per-view models, starting with DVD compilations of TV shows. This suggests they "get it" - they're seeing the anti-tobacco/anti-gun lawsuits, and getting the solutions in now, while there's still time. Simply saying "We're doing this for your own good" isn't going to cut it - it opens the entertainment industry up for lawsuits, and politicians get criticised for being patronising and "anti-TV", in much the same way as your original comment was flamed by at least one clearly hooked TV addict.
PVRs are certainly a move in the right direction. And, y'know, we don't have to get rid of TV. We just need to control it. Alcohol in moderation isn't harmful. Neither should TV be the same. Getting people to the state where they watch, say, an hour of TV a couple of times a week, is certainly a reasonable goal. TV doesn't have to be abolished altogether.
Yeah, I know, PBS says it. But you can't believe everything you watch on TV.
I've a gut feeling your knee jerked at something you thought I wrote or implied, and I'd be curious to know what you think I was saying, as I can't respond to your comment in any useful way as is.
I've seen the original films, plus one or two of the cartoons, and some of the recent Lois and Clark TV series. I don't think there's a consistancy beyond a few basic axioms such as generally doing what's determined to be good by the establishment of the day. In a cartoon I saw on one of those "compilation of PD cartoons" you can get for a dollar at Big Lots (my SO and I are big Loony Tunes fans, this had a bunch of them, Popeye, and a bunch of deservedly obscurer pieces), he was killing (yeah, you heard that right) Japanese soldiers to help with the war effort. In the movie series, it was a general fight against crime, as it seemed to be, for the most part, with the TV programmes.
Is he a manifestation of American imperialism? In the sense that his image and values are tied to the US establishment, yes. The GP is right in saying that America's appearance of imperialism is especially unpopular right now. It'd be interesting to see if the new movie emphasises that aspect of him, and if so how it fares.
The big issue is that assembler code doesn't have a lot going for it, so most people who program it these days do it for the extremes where nothing else will do - the glue to start a C program, that kind of thing. Worse still, a lot of it is device driver code designed by people who really aren't programmers. It's hard to find good assembler code in the 2000s. Those of us who were programming Motorola 68xxx code in the 1980s though know elegant, readable, maintainable, well structured, assembler code, generated no more slowly than stuff in C isn't impossible. As it's not as maintainable as the equivalent in C, nor as portable, nor as fast, it's just not worth doing any more.
With a commercial, Free Software, distribution, at worse you can support yourself too.
With a commercial, proprietary, distribution, at worse you can... erm, jump ship. You don't have the option of supporting yourself. So if you can't jump ship because you're tied to whatever platform it is, you're screwed.
While there are a lot of vanity distributions, it's also true that most of the innovation has started with individuals saying "This just doesn't work for me, how can I do this in a better way?" Slackware, for instance, had the first "packages" as we'd recognize them today (ironically, because of the work Debian and RedHat did to fix the flaws in Slackware's original model, there's a lot of people now who think it doesn't have packages at all. However, the concept of breaking up the install into packages of specific applications and bundles of tools and related files, with the user installing by saying "I want this, this, this, not that, this, this..." (etc) was something that originated with Slackware); Libranet is clearly popular (as this thread shows) with people who've used it who saw it as the first time someone had actually come up with a GNU/Linux distribution easy enough for them to understand.
I agree with you about proprietary operating systems. That's why I wouldn't touch, say, SkyOS with a ten foot pole. But GNU licensed Free Software? Why the hell not? What do I have to lose?
2. 802.11a does not use the same frequencies as b and g, and has more spectrum. Unfortunately, the wireless manufacturers aren't promoting it, but even if the complaint above - that there are only three distinct bands and therefore you can't have more than three networks in one place - was actually true, it is an actual solution.
3. The complaint noted by the article is false. While it is true that there are only three distinct, non-overlapping, slices of spectrum allocated for 802.11b and g, you can have more than one network using the same slice of spectrum, at the cost of efficiency and speed. It is not the case that having a network on, say, bands 1-4 suddenly means that no other networks can use that spectrum, either theoretically or practically. The more networks run on those bands, the poorer performance will be, that's all. In reality, the chances of the performance decrease being so bad that it actually makes more of a difference than your DSL's bandwidth is relatively low, especially in the US where 1.5Mbps is considered a really good connection.
So, to recap. Wireless works. It could be more efficient, but as sold, currently, it's more than up to the task. The proof of the pudding is that people are actually going out there and setting up their own wireless networks, and keeping them. We're not facing any real problems yet.
Even on the more controvertial issue of copyright infringement, and content producer's attempts to control it: the studios trying to stamp out piracy isn't a bad thing by itself, piracy reduces revenues which means either less movies get created and/or those of us who actually buy movies pay more. It only becomes wrong when the systems promoted are unacceptable. CSS encoding is evil. Hollywood asking Bram Cohen to do what he can reasonably do to prevent a portal under his control being used to redistribute their content without authorization most certainly isn't unacceptable.
I often get the feeling that many on Slashdot feel you must take one side or another in terms of the people, not the issues. The issues are what matter.
Kind of like Google. Google today feels like Altavista did when everyone switched to Google. Oh, sure, for many types of search, Google comes up with good, relevent, answers. The same's true of AV though.
Google didn't revolutionise searching. They had a temporary advantage, as all new search engines do, of using an algorithm that was new and hence not exploited yet. They also had a lot of good-will from the community because of their choices of technologies, public "No evil" stance, and sane commitment to remove clutter from their front page. Since then, most of the tools they've introduced have been rehashes of services everyone else have already done, only with a little more thought and the benefit of hindsight. About the only exception I can think of is Google Groups, and that's only because they bought it.
I like Google, but they're hardly the greatest, most innovative, company that ever walked the Earth. They owe their success to the experiences of Yahoo and Altavista, with a little recognition that hitting people over the head with advertising all the time is not a good idea.
On occasion, I've been bored enough to comb through my Squid proxy logs for precisely this kind of thing, and curl'd URLs to see exactly what it uses. It's some sort of XML system, but it's not HTML, and I don't see them rendering it with an HTML renderer.
It's possible the rest of your comment is true, though I'd assume this would make the hack more of a QuickTime-in-general issue rather than something limited to iTunes.
Moreover, given the patents would have had to be registered a long time ago (in that galaxy far, far, away), they've probably expired by now.
It's a little like saying "How is it immoral to shoot someone? It's basic physics, the bullet will be displaced and have its velocity vector altered by the explosion of gunpowder."
This is veering off-topic. I'm not saying I agree or disagree with the GP, but I didn't like your counterpoint.
The real question is not "What's the point?" but "Is this a viable package?", and everything I've read on this deal has essentially had so much missing it's impossible to say. IF Cingular doesn't plan to charge people 3c/kilobyte or at their absurd mMode/MediaNET rates (which pretty much precludes listening to a 64kbps stream - supposedly MP3Pro is "FM quality" at that rate - for more than a few minutes), and IF cellphones are provided with easy stereo-out (which might just mean an adapter for the headset socket), then it's almost a reasonable idea. People currently considering XM/Sirius may be tempted, as theoretically the form factor is more practical.
Until Cingular does more than waffle about it in press-releases, it's hard to tell what they're actually selling.
My guess is that Apple will initiate a full blown holocaust of the streaming music function, locking the entire feature in a shower room and turning on the gas. It'll probably fly two hijacked airliners into the twin-towers of MP3 and streaming technologies, effectively acting as if it had dropped two nuclear devices, one on the city of MP3s, the other on streaming technologies just to prove the point it can make more than one in an effort to make streaming radio surrender. It'll be devastating - once the levees have been breached by Hurricane Apple, MP3 and streaming technologies will, essentially, be trapped in their attics, unable to escape the rising waters.
Remember: the key feature of a patent, the thing that sets it apart from copyrights, is that it's possible to infringe even though you were never aware of the patent, never aware of the patent holder's development or design before you designed yours, even you you, yourself, without help from anyone, developed the product that ended up infringing. You do not have to copy something to infringe. You can independently invent something, and because it turns out to be a similar design to a patented design you had never heard of, you will be infringing.
That's why they're unfair. Why do we have them? Because sometimes the "race" is necessary to spur invention. But in the midst of implementing that principle, we forgot why we were implementing them and thought, wrongly, that they're fair after all, that it's legitimate to apply them to practically anything. We made a mistake in letting patents be universal across inventions, rather than restricting them to specific inventions society had deemed, through elected representatives or otherwise, especially important and urgent. We made a huge mistake in letting patents transcend inventions and go into programming and business practices coupled with that universality.
Patents need to be thrown out. If we want to reward inventors using a "First to invent" scheme, let's do it fairly, and introduce competitions and bonuses for specific, named, inventions that are generally wanted. The X-Prize was a reasonable idea. An eighteen-year monopoly on space wouldn't be. Those who promote patents think the latter would be more legitimate, reasonable, and required, than the former.
For a portable handheld device? Yes, wireless is everything. The moment you wire it to something, the moment it loses the ability to be a portable handheld device.
Why buy it otherwise? It's not a good desktop PC. It's not a good laptop. It's cheap, but if it's going to be chained to a keyboard, mouse, or mass storage device, then there are cheaper, more powerful, alternatives.
Slow Down Cowboy! Slashdot requires you to wait between each successful posting of a comment to allow everyone a fair chance at posting a comment. It's been 48 seconds since you last successfully posted a comment Chances are, you're behind a firewall or proxy, or clicked the Back button to accidentally reuse a form. Please try again. If the problem persists, and all other options have been tried, contact the site administrator. Slow Down Cowboy! Slashdot requires you to wait between each successful posting of a comment to allow everyone a fair chance at posting a comment. It's been 1 minute since you last successfully posted a comment Chances are, you're behind a firewall or proxy, or clicked the Back button to accidentally reuse a form. Please try again. If the problem persists, and all other options have been tried, contact the site administrator.If your point is that the 770 is a hub that would use various devices, that didn't come across in your original comment. Moreover, I disagree with that. The 770 is a portable tablet device. There's a limit to the types of device you'd want to interact with it when it's on the move (right now, a cellphone is the only thing I can think of.) This is not a device that it would be sane or rational to plug a keyboard or mouse into, or a storage box, or anything similar. Once you do any of these things, you lose the portability. Once you lose the portability, you're looking at an underpowered PC that competes unfavourably with a $200 Wal*Mart box.
I've used Bluetooth to go online using my Motorola V635, Apple PowerBook, and a T-Mobile account. It's just another form of dial-up networking (albeit with some wierd looking scripts if you want to use GPRS/EDGE) The cool aspect is they (the phone and book) only need to be in range of one another after the first time the thing has been set up. The phone can sit in my pocket as usual.